Fall Asleep to the ENTIRE Story of Peter the Great — The Tsar Who Transformed Russia

You can now find me on Spotify 🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0JZW8iO... This video tells the story of Peter the Great — the tsar who disguised himself as a carpenter, crossed Europe to learn how ships were built, and came home to tear apart everything Russia had been and replace it with something that could survive the modern world. Born in 1672 into a court still organized around medieval hierarchies and Orthodox tradition, Peter grew up watching political violence at close range, building toy armies in the countryside, and teaching himself to sail on a forgotten English boat in a barn. By the time he was sole ruler at twenty-four, he had already decided that Russia's isolation from the maritime, commercial, and scientific world of Western Europe was not a fact to be accepted — it was a problem to be solved by force if necessary. What followed was one of history's most relentless programs of imposed transformation. Peter studied shipbuilding in Dutch and English yards, hired hundreds of foreign experts, abolished the old boyar robes and beards by decree, replaced the Patriarchate with a state-controlled church council, built an entirely new capital on a swamp at the edge of empire, and forged from scratch a professional standing army that would ultimately destroy the finest military force in Europe. The path ran through the catastrophic defeat at Narva in 1700, the grinding rebuilding that followed, and finally to Poltava in 1709, where eighty thousand Russian soldiers and more than eighty cannon shattered Charles XII's exhausted, frozen army in two hours. After Poltava, Russia was a different kind of country. After the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, it was an empire. This gentle bedtime history explores Peter the Great as a story of ambition, transformation, cost, and the impossible city built on a marsh. #HistoryForSleep #DriftThroughHistory #PeterTheGreat #RussianHistory #RomanovDynasty