Peter then set his sights on land along the Baltic Sea. He declared war onSweden in 1700 and ultimately won his warm-water port. He built St. Petersburgon the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic, and moved the capital there fromMoscow. His new city was as grand as any capital in western Europe. It is calledPeter’s “Window on the West,” not only because it was a port that allowed Peter totrade with the west year-round, but also because the city was built in the Europeanstyle, with canals and stately palaces like the ones Peter had seen on his trips towestern Europe. Peter encouraged western Europeans to come to Petersburg andrequired many Russians nobles to build houses in his new capital.

Ever since Peter the Great, Russians have often found themselves dividedbetween two groups. One group, the so-called “westernizers,” has argued, in thetradition of Peter the Great, that Russia needs to be more like the countries ofwestern Europe. On the other side are the “Slavophiles,” who think Russia is bet-ter than western Europe and should stick to its traditional Slavic ways. For themost part, the westernizers have gravitated to St. Petersburg, with its Europeanstyle, while Slavophiles have preferred Moscow, built in the old Russian style.

Catherine the GreatCatherine the Great was actually not Russian, but German. She was chosen to

marry Peter, Duke of Holstein, a grandson of Peter the Great. As Czar Peter III, theDuke initiated a series of policies that angered powerful nobles. He entered into analliance with Prussia, a long-time rival, expanded religious freedom, and closeddown the secret police. Catherine and the czar were not well suited for each otherand theirs was an unhappy marriage. Catherine—who had become thoroughlyRussian after almost twenty years in Russia—joined in a plot against Peter. The con-spirators removed him from the throne and made Catherine sole ruler.

Catherine greatly expanded Russian territory, adding more of the Balticregion and Ukraine. She also warred against the Ottoman Turks and seized por-tions of their empire. When European powers partitioned Poland in 1772, 1793,and 1795, she gained the largest part for Russia. It was during her reign thatRussian exploration and colonization of Alaska began.

Like Peter the Great, Catherine was interested in the west. When she beganher reign, she intended to make a number of reforms to ease the life of serfs (peas-ants), promote education, and limit land acquisitions by nobles. However, thepeasant revolt led by Pugachev [POO-ga-chov] between 1773 and 1775 and theFrench Revolution soon caused Catherine to become as autocratic as earlier czars.The peasant uprising was a bloody and brutal revolt that resulted in the death ofthousands of wealthy Russian landowners, priests of the Russian OrthodoxChurch, and merchants. Not wishing to antagonize the nobility, Catherineincreased the privileges of the nobility and decreased the freedom of peasants.

Reforms of Peter and Catherine and the PeasantsThe reforms of Peter and Catherine had little effect on the peasants—except

to bind them to the land as serfs. By the time of Peter, many peasants already hadno personal freedom of movement. A peasant family could not decide to movefrom one landed estate to another because the second landowner offered betterworking terms.

Teaching Idea

Compare the lives of peasants inRussia, slaves in the colonies, andserfs in the Middle Ages. What madeserfdom in Russia different?

History and Geography: World 213

Catherine the Great

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VI. Russia: Early Growth and Expansion

214 Grade 5 Handbook

Teaching Idea

Create an overhead of InstructionalMaster 26, Russia, and use it to orientstudents to the physical features andcities discussed in this section. Havestudents use the distance scale to com-pute distances (for example, the lengthand width of Siberia, or the distancefrom Moscow to St. Petersburg).

During Peter’s reign, peasants became chattel, the property of the landhold-ers on whose estate they worked. They could, therefore, be bought and sold. Afterthe peasant uprising during Catherine’s reign, she allowed the nobles to continuethe process of turning peasants into serfs. The word serf is from the Latin wordfor slave; however, the status of the serf was somewhere in between that of a slaveand a free person. Serfs were the property of nobles, yet they had certain rights.They were required to give certain payments to and perform specific services fortheir owner. On the other hand, a serf was usually given a house, a plot of landon which to grow crops, and some animals. Serfs were required to give some ofwhat they grew to their noblemen masters. In addition, serfs were required towork the noble’s land.

Serfdom—the agricultural system based on the ownership of serfs—hadexisted in Russia for centuries. In western Europe, the actual bonding of the peas-ant to the soil had largely ended by the 1400s and 1500s. By contrast, in Russia,serfdom was gaining strength. In the 1700s, during the reign of Peter andCatherine, while the Industrial Revolution was getting underway in Great Britain,the restrictive powers of serfdom reached their height. Serfdom was not abolishedin Russia until 1861—four years before the United States abolished slavery.

B. GeographyBackground

Russia stretches across two continents, Europe and Asia. Much of the earlyhistory of Russia occurred in the European section as people there traded withthe Vikings, Byzantines, and later western Europeans.

Cities

Moscow Moscow is located in west central Russia—European Russia—on the Moscow

River and is the capital of modern Russia. Ivan IV made it the capital of Russia in the1400s, and it also became the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church. Peter the Greattransferred the capital from Moscow to the new city of St. Petersburg in 1712. Thecapital was returned to Moscow in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.

Today, Moscow is the largest city in Russia (with a metropolitan area popula-tion of over 13 million), an important inland port, and the seat of Russia’s gov-ernment. The Kremlin, meaning walled center of a city, is the heart of Moscow.Here the czars built their palaces, Communist leaders reviewed thousands of sol-diers marching through Red Square, and today, the national government uses aformer palace for the legislature. The Kremlin is also the site of St. Basil’sCathedral, once the center of the Russian Orthodox Church and now a nationalmuseum. St. Basil’s is built in the traditional Russian style, with several oniondomes reaching up to the sky. From the Kremlin, wide boulevards extend throughthe city in all directions. A person from Moscow is called a Muscovite.

St. PetersburgSt. Petersburg is Russia’s second-largest city (population 5 million) and is

located in northwestern European Russia on the Gulf of Finland. Peter the Greatbuilt it in the western European style, with canals and glittering palaces, after

Use Instructional Master 26.

Study the map. Use it to answer the questions below.

Russia

Master 26 Grade 5: History & Geography

Cop

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Cor

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Name Date

Purpose: To read and interpret a map of Russia

1. What is the distance between Moscow and St. Petersburg?

2. What is the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok?

about 4,000 miles

about 400 miles

Trans-SiberianRailroadUU

RA

L M

OU

NT

AI N

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KYRGYZSTANKYRGYZSTAN

RUSSIARUSSIALAT.LAT.

LITH.LITH.

BELARUSBELARUS

UKRAINEUKRAINE

ARM.ARM.AZER.AZER.

GA.GA.

NORTHNORTHKOREAKOREA

EUROPEEUROPEMoscowMoscow

OdessaOdessa

St. PetersburgSt. Petersburg

YekaterinburgYekaterinburgDon

IrkutskIrkutskKhabarovskKhabarovsk

UR

AL

MO

UN

TA

I NS

S i b er

ia

A R C T I C O C E A N

BLACK SEA

CASPI

AN

SE

A

Don

Riv

er

Volga River

BALTIC SEA

MoscowOdessa

St. Petersburg

Yekaterinburg

Novosibirsk

IrkutskKhabarovsk

Vladivostok

RUSSIA

KAZAKHSTAN

KYRGYZSTAN

IRAN

AFGHANISTAN

NORWAY

EST.

RUSSIALAT.

LITH.

BELARUS

UKRAINE

ARM.AZER.

GA.

MONGOLIA

CHINA NORTHKOREA

SOUTHKOREA JAPAN

U.S.A.

ASIA

EUROPE

UZB

EKIS

TAN

TURKM

ENISTAN

SWEDEN

FINLAND

0

0 300 600 kilometers

600 miles300W E

N

S

Teaching Idea

Moscow and St. Petersburg are verydifferent cities. To give students a feel-ing for the differences, share picturesof key buildings and streets in eachcity (e.g., the Kremlin and St. Basil’s inMoscow, and the Hermitage and otherpalaces in St. Petersburg).

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