A childhood massacre shaped Peter's lifelong distrust of the Kremlin establishment

Massie opens with the 1682 revolt of the Streltsy, the Kremlin's musketeer guard, during which young Peter, only ten years old, witnessed relatives and allies slaughtered in a violent power struggle following the death of his half-brother the tsar. This trauma, occurring at an age when Peter had little power to intervene, left him with a lasting association between the traditional Kremlin court and mortal danger.

Massie argues this early experience partly explains Peter's later preference for spending time away from Moscow's formal court, favoring instead the informal German Suburb where foreign merchants and soldiers lived, and where he absorbed European habits and technical knowledge far from Muscovite ceremony. His half-sister Sophia's subsequent regency, ruling in Peter's name while he was sidelined, deepened his sense that authority in old Muscovy was something to be seized rather than trusted to unfold naturally.

Massie treats this formative period as essential context for understanding why Peter later dismantled so many traditional Muscovite institutions with so little apparent sentimentality toward them. Takeaway: the institutions a future leader distrusts as a child often become the very ones he dismantles as an adult.