Peter the Great

PETER THE GREAT
by Diane Stanley
report by Jonathan Hinrichs

Peter the Great was a great man who changed Russia. He really studied and in this paper you will hear how he changed his country.

Peter was the Tsar of Russia when he was only a boy of ten. He really liked war and ships, so as a child he would make war by firing cannons and guns.

When he was a little boy he watched trained monkey’s and bears dance before him. They used dwarves as his servants to honor him.

When he was 15 he discovered a boat that sailed upstream and he had never heard of something like that.

The Europeans wanted to change but not the Russians. The Russians wanted to live like their great-great-great-great grandparents lived. So Peter went to Europe to learn a bunch of things.

Peter learned how to work on boats and figured out about lots of things. The king of England knew he liked ships so much he made a fake battle that Peter could watch.

When Peter returned to Russia, he cut the beards off the men because it was just a custom. If they kept their beards they had to keep a chain around their neck saying “Beards are a ridiculous ornament.”

The men and the women didn’t stay together, they were always in a different room. They would give a daughter to a man with a whip and say that the new husband was in charge of her now. Peter had people give the woman a kiss not a whip. He held great parties to let the men see that the women didn’t need to stay apart and they could have a great time.

The poor were so terrified because their taxes went up and up and up and their sons had to go into the army.

There was this area near the sea that Peter wanted to build into a city. There were barley any shovels so the people had to dig with their hands. That is how St. Petersburg was built. The Russians called it “the city built on bones.”

One day Peter got an infection and doctors came to help him get better. Usually Peter got better, but this time he got worse. He died a few days later. There was a ceremony and some people said “Why did this great man have to die?”