PETER THE GREAT'S WAR WITH SWEDEN AND ITS EFFECTS ON RUSSIA This research paper summarizes the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden (1700-1721), its origins, course and the leadership of Tsar Peter the Great during that war, and analyzes its effects on Russia's position in the world and on internal Russian developments. The principal effects of this long, protracted, bloody and expensive struggle on Russia were: (1) militarily and in geopolitical terms, Russia under Peter's leadership eliminated Sweden as a military threat, gained control of its strategic northern Baltic provinces and coastline, achieved maritime supremacy in the eastern Baltic Sea and emerged for the first time as a great European power; (2) internally and largely in response to the exigencies of that war, major steps were taken through a series of reforms and other measures to modernize in a remarkably short period of time the hitherto backward Russian state. However, those reforms, incomplete as they were, were accomplished at a high price, the expansion of centralized state power based on absolutism and a lopsided economic and social system which retarded Russia's long-term development, deepened divisions within the country and contained the seeds of its own eventual destruction.
Peter I, better known as Peter the Great, (1672-1725) was proclaimed as Tsar, together with his feeble half-brother, Ivan, in 1682 when Peter was ten. He assumed effective control from his half-sister, the Regent Sophia, in 1689 at the age of seventeen. The Romanov throne he inherited was shaky, beset with powerful external and internal enemies. Throughout his thirty-six year reign, he faced serious challenges to his authority and to Russia's territorial integrity. Fuller says that after 1600, "Russia found itself confronted by potential adversaries whose governments, societies and economies were relatively more modern than its own" (xvii).
In 1240 the medieval city-...