The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Tsar of All Russia. Holiness and Splendour of Power Audio Tour Script

Portrait of Tsarevich Peter Alekseyevich

Several portraits of Tsarevich Peter as a child were painted in the last quarter of the

17th century. Commissioned by members of his entourage, these works were based on a purely nominal image of the tsarevich, lacking any true likeness, taken from the dynastic portraits of the royal family in the Book of Titles of 1672 (when Peter was, in reality, still a baby).

Peter the Great was the son of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his second wife, Natalia

Naryshkina. He was born in Moscow on 30 May 1672. Peter I was crowned co-tsar on

25 June 1682, along with his half-brother Ivan, with their elder sister Sophia as regent.

He secured his power by incarcerating Sophia in a nunnery and suppressing the Streltsy revolt in 1689. After the death of Tsar Ivan V in 1696, Peter became the sole ruler.

He was an active reformer who westernised Russian society. He defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War in 1700 to 1721 and founded the city of St Petersburg at the mouth of the River Neva in 1703. He made St Petersburg the capital of Russia in 1712 and adopted the title of emperor on 22 October 1721. Peter was married twice. He divorced his first wife, Evdokia Fyodorovna Lopukhina, who was the mother of his son,

Tsarevich Aleksei (the tsarevich died on 26 June 1718 after being found guilty of state treason). Peter’s second wife was a Livonian servant girl called Marta Skowrońska. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy as Catherine Alekseevna and was crowned empress on 7 May 1724. Catherine gave birth to his daughters Anna and the future Empress

Elizabeth (all his other children from both marriages died in infancy). Peter the Great died in St Petersburg on 28 January 1725 and was buried there in the Cathedral of St

Peter and St Paul.

Peter spent most of his childhood in villages outside Moscow, such as Vorobyovo and

Preobrazhenskoe, where the future emperor trained in warfare with the help of regiments of boy soldiers. A small fort was built at Vorobyovo and the ‘toy’ regiments practised storming it with artillery. In 1691, they were formally transformed into two infantry regiments — the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky. These two regiments were the precursors of the Imperial Guard (the elite sections of the regular army) and later the mainstay of the Imperial Russian Army.