Robert K. Massie's Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the man who brought Russia from darkness into light remains the essential portrait of this great man and his era. Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia unfolds the magnificent story of Peter the Great, crowned at the age of 10.
A barbarous, volatile feudal tsar with a taste for torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government and science; a statesman of vision and colossal significance: Peter the Great embodied the greatest strengths and weaknesses of Russia while being at the very forefront of her development.
Impetuous and stubborn, generous and cruel, a man of enormous energy and complexity, Peter the Great is brought fully to life.
