ABSTRACT
Long before Peter's birth, his country Russia had become, in mere size, a giant who dwarfed all the states of Europe. This enormous territory was as yet undeveloped or only inadequately developed, and almost everywhere very thinly populated. Even in central Russia, in the area around Moscow whose expansion had produced the huge territorial aggregation which Peter inherited, the population was scanty and the level of economic development low by west-European standards. Great distances and an extreme 'continental' climate, with severe winters, burning summers and a shorter growing season for crops than in Western Europe, were in themselves barriers to economic progress. Seventeenth-century Russia was thus a society in which there was no secular institution able or even willing to challenge the autocracy of the monarch. The economic as well as the diplomatic relations between Russia and the European states were growing in scale and importance in the later seventeenth century.
