th and early 18th centuries profoundly shape his character and leadership. As we read, in a passage which connects the historical and cultural environments with the political environment, as well as with the internal environment of his personality:
Peter grew (explosively) out of seventeenth-century Muscovy, . . . far removed from seventeenth-century Europe. Most of [his] reforms . . . linked on with the tentative steps . . . made by his predecessors. . . . [His] daemonic element . . . , his violence and cruelty, [his] unrelenting pace . . . , the magnitude of the ubiquitous burdens that he imposed--- these features . . . have given the impression that Peter broke completely with the past. . . . [But] the greatness of Peter lies i
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