Peter the Great: His Life and World

by Robert K. Massie

It was under Peter that the huge Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands were claimed by Russia.

Vitus Bering,

Persia ceding Derbent to Russia along with three seaboard provinces of the eastern Caucasus.

The disintegration of the Persian empire and Peter’s military campaign along the Caspian Sea threatened once again to bring Russia into collision with the Ottoman Empire.

Russian settlements reached as far south as San Francisco, where, in 1806, a little over eighty years after Peter’s death, a Russian fur-trading center was established. For more than a century, Alaska—known then as Russian America—was controlled by the state-owned Russian-American Company. In 1867, the vast area which became America’s forty-ninth state was sold by Tsar Alexander II for $7,000,000. Today, the only point on the globe where the frontiers of the United States and the Soviet Union actually meet is across the fifty-three miles of the Bering Strait.

Peter’s daughter Elizabeth never married officially

she remained at home to rule as Empress of Russia for twenty-one years.

Karl Ulrich Peter.

Emperor Peter

III.

Catherine was a Lithuanian servant girl

His doctors diagnosed strangury and stone, a blockage in the urethra and bladder caused by muscle spasms or infection.

Peter had an inflammation of the bladder and intestine so severe that they believed gangrene was present.

Catherine’s reign was brief.

Catherine’s death, brought about by a series of chills and fevers, came only two years and three months after her accession.

the reign of Peter II was destined to be only a few months longer than the reign of Catherine I. Early in January 1730, the fourteen-year-old Emperor became ill.