Why did Peter the Great drag Russia toward the West?

Because he came to believe, after seeing Western Europe with his own eyes, that Russia had to catch up in ships, soldiers and customs, and he forced the change from above. Peter was tsar of all Russia from 1682 to 1721 and became its first emperor in 1721. He was ten when the Boyar Duma, a council of nobles, chose him to be tsar, with his mother as regent. A hole was cut in the back of the throne so that she, literally behind the scenes, could whisper to the two boys. At 16 he found an English boat on his estate, had it restored and learned to sail.

In March 1697 he travelled "incognito" to Western Europe on an 18-month journey called the Grand Embassy, the first tsar to leave Russia for more than 100 years. In the Netherlands he worked in a shipyard, and he judged that Dutch carpenters worked too much by eye and lacked accurate drawings.

At home, he ordered his courtiers and officials to wear European clothes and cut off their long beards, which gravely upset the boyars and the Old Believers. Boyars who wanted to keep their beards paid an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles. And he moved the start of the year to 1 January and counted years from the birth of Christ.

The biggest project was a new capital. Russia's main port, Arkhangelsk, was in the far north on the White Sea and closed to shipping in winter, so Peter wanted a seaport to trade with Europe. In 1703, during the Great Northern War, he laid down the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island. In 1712 Saint Petersburg, famously a "window to the West," replaced Moscow as capital. It was built by conscripted serfs, and tens of thousands of them died.