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Competition
with the advanced countries of the West has become one of the key
factors in Russian history over the past three centuries. Ever since
the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1721), Russian history has been
punctuated by reforms induced by the Russian government’s efforts
to catch up with and overtake its Western rivals. Peter’s
transformation inaugurates the first great cycle of modernization,
which lasted till the middle of the nineteenth century (from the
1690s to the 1850s). Its aim was to make Russia the equal of the
other great European absolute monarchies that dominated the
continent in the eighteenth century.
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Peter’s Reform
was launched in the period of early modern history. This was the
dawn of what we now call “globalization”, when new geographical
discoveries, more efficient means of travel and communication, the
development of economic relations based on the market were beginning
to bind the world into a single civilization. The elements of this
new civilization – countries and continents – now actively
interacted with one another as parts of a system.
In this new
epoch, a nation’s economic or social backwardness and its inability
to set up an effective system of government posed a real threat to
the very sovereignty of the state. Increasingly, the government
systems of more advanced countries provided models to be imitated
and offered examples of desirable restructuring for their less
developed neighbors.
The attempt to
“catch up” with more developed countries is usually described as
modernization. Since early modern history, the advanced countries of
Western Europe and of the West in general have been the models for
modernization. For this reason, the “catching up” phase of
development is also referred to as Europeanization or
westernization. Peter’s reform movement represents an important new
departure in modern world history: it pioneered the process of
modernization that was later to develop on a worldwide scale.
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