An Empire in Russia Trivia Quiz

Answer: Moscow

Peter I's dreams of Russia becoming a modern European power wouldn't materialize if he had to rely on the mostly frozen port of Arkhangelsk, so he quickly devised a way to secure northern ports on the Baltic Sea. This ambition was being blocked by the then-powerful king of Sweden. Peter secretly forged alliances with surrounding nations and declared war on the northern power in what came to be known as the Great Northern War.

Having achieved great success during the war, Peter dedicated most of his country's resources to the western, European-facing side of his empire, relocating the political and cultural center of his nation from Moscow to St. Petersburg. With his new Baltic ports and a capital city closer to other European powers, he was ready to shape Russia's future in the way he saw fit. In 1721, near the end of his rule (which lasted from 1682 to 1725), he declared Russia an empire, the completion of his life's work.

Answer: boyars

The boyars of Russia had consolidated significant power prior to Peter the Great's rule, and they had their own duma to help guide the tsar. Peter abolished the duma, replacing it with a senate under his control. In the process, the boyars were stripped of much of their decision-making power.

Peter knew that the process of dealing with the boyars couldn't simply stop there. His Table of Ranks gave the Russian nobility something to strive for within this new autocratic system. They could rise through a 14-tier system, with each level providing higher social status as well as particular benefits. Advancement was based on service in the military, civil administration, or court, and the highest ranks depended heavily on imperial approval. Peter wanted his new nobility to be a match for those in other European powers, and he considered this more meritocratic system a driving means to achieve his perceived modernization of the former Russian boyars. Succeeding tsars and tsarinas would eventually weaken Peter's rank-based system in later decades, or allow select nobles to bypass some of the obstacles within it.

Answer: patriarch

Adrian, who held the highest church position of Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, often butted heads with Peter during his rule as tsar, irritated by Peter's consolidation of power under the monarchy and weakening of the Russian Orthodox Church's own influence. When Peter instituted his social reforms across Russia, Adrian was quick to criticize them. One example was Peter's beard tax, under which Russian men had to pay to keep their beards; otherwise, they were forced to shave them. Adrian denounced the reform, citing the longstanding tradition of Russian men, including Russian clergy, growing long beards.

When Adrian died in 1700, Peter took the opportunity to block the Russian Orthodox Church from electing a new patriarch, who might become a new thorn in his side. Instead, he would later create the Most Holy Synod, a governing body consisting largely of clergy that would report directly to the tsar.

Answer: Three empresses, a grandson who died of smallpox, and two deposed emperors who were later killed

Though Peter I had a total of fifteen children by two different wives, only three survived to adulthood. Four sons named Pavel and three named Peter died in infancy. The one son, Alexei Petrovich, who did make it to adulthood was born to his first wife, Eudoxia, whom Peter hated, divorced, and forced into a convent. Peter had Alexei locked up on charges of attempting to overthrow him. True evidence of this crime is scant, and a confession was extracted under torture. Peter waffled over whether or not he should execute his only surviving son, but Alexei's death in prison made the point moot.

Catherine I, Peter's second wife, ruled for about two years after his death until Peter II, Peter the Great's grandson, came to the throne in 1727. He died of smallpox at the age of 14 before ever really accomplishing anything. Next to rule was Empress Anna, Peter's niece. After a ten-year rule, she named the infant Ivan VI, her great-nephew, as her heir. He was overthrown and imprisoned after about fifteen months. (Much later, when he was in his twenties, Ivan was murdered in the chaos that followed Catherine II's accession to the throne, as plotters had planned to use him to oust Catherine.)

After the infant Ivan was removed, Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the Great himself, ruled for about 20 years. She was a popular ruler who continued some of her father's reforms and helped foster the Russian Enlightenment. After her death, Peter III, another of Peter the Great's grandsons, became emperor, with his wife Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste of Anhalt-Zerbst at his side. After converting to Russian Orthodoxy, she had taken the name Catherine. Peter III's reign lasted only six months before he died under mysterious circumstances. Catherine II (Catherine the Great), whom many considered responsible for Peter III's death, ascended to the throne to take his place.

Answer: English

Born to a German royal family, Catherine came to Russia as the intended bride of the future Peter III, who was also German. He became emperor of Russia when his maternal aunt, Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth, died in 1762. He was deeply unpopular with the Russian people, who saw him as too foreign and disrespectful of their culture. When he was overthrown by Catherine herself, with help from Russian nobles close to her, she took power, quickly eliminating other threats to her claim to the throne. Equal parts brilliant and cunning, she soon established herself as both competent and politically skilled, ushering in Russia's Enlightenment.

Her native language was, of course, German, though from a young age she had put in the effort to study Russian, believing it would be useful in her future as a potential empress. Her Russian was said to have a heavy German accent, and she often preferred not to use it while surrounded by her courtiers. French, the typical court language and one that had been drilled into her from her youth, was used instead.

Though she did have some contact with British figures, their conversations took place in French. It is also said that Catherine received documents sent by Benjamin Franklin in connection with Russia's neutrality during the American Revolution, but it is unclear whether she read those documents in English herself.

Answer: Yemelyan Pugachev

Catherine had long expressed interest in improving the condition of Russia's serfs, at times stating that they were equal as people to the nobility. This went over about as well within the nobility's ranks as you might think. When the Russian nobles started to cause her political headaches, she had to offer them something to get them on her side.

Some of these offerings of appeasement included land, while others involved rolling back earlier laws from Peter the Great that the nobles disliked. But another offer was increased noble control over the serfs. Along with other pressures, including war weariness and weather disasters, the serfs' dispositions were ripe for rebellion.

Along came Yemelyan Pugachev, a Cossack fugitive and leader. After gaining the support of the Cossacks, who had their own dissatisfaction with Catherine, Pugachev turned his sights on Russia's peasants to help drive his rebellion. Claiming, somewhat ridiculously, to be Peter III himself (Catherine's dead emperor husband whom she had helped overthrow), he gathered a mass of disaffected serfs and marched as far as he could take his army of rebels. They even took much of the city of Kazan before being defeated by Ivan Michelson and the Russian military. Catherine would end up backing off from her earlier interest in serf emancipation as a result.

Answer: He was assassinated by his own nobles and officers.

Catherine the Great had never really developed much of a personal relationship with her son Paul. Perhaps it was his connection to her late husband, Peter III, or perhaps she simply didn't take to the idea of being a mother. In his youth, Paul spent much of his time in Empress Elizabeth's care, as was tradition, or in the hands of other courtiers.

This led to Paul openly disavowing many of his mother's political positions while she was empress. Whereas Catherine was an expansionist who wanted to see her empire grow, Paul felt that defensive military measures were best. At one point, it was believed that Catherine had made preparations to pass over her son in the line of succession and give the crown to Paul's son Alexander instead, whom she had taken under her own supervision.

When Catherine suffered a stroke, Paul moved quickly to destroy any possible evidence that Catherine may have composed for skipping him. He was obsessed with proving his own legitimacy, digging up his father and providing a posthumous coronation for his body. After introducing numerous unpopular reforms, such as mirroring the Prussian military reforms his father would have preferred, Russian military leaders and nobles had had enough. They confronted him directly in an attempt to force an abdication, and Paul was killed during the attempt.

Answer: Napoleon Bonaparte

After a stretch of westernizing emperors, Alexander I favored ambitious reforms early in his reign, but many of the proposals set forth during his rule fizzled out, with little coming from them. Plans to set up a constitutional monarchy and change the system of serfdom never came to fruition, and some reforms that he had supported earlier in his reign were later curtailed due to his various whims and bouts of paranoia.

This scattered approach could also be said to have applied to his foreign policy. As the leader of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander navigated French aggression through a series of diplomatic backpedals and an uneasy alliance. Yet in the end, Napoleon's disastrous foray into Russia, weakened by Russian resistance, distance, supply problems, and winter weather, proved a victory for the emperor. Perhaps jaded by Alexander's fluctuating alliances, Napoleon once called him a "shifty Byzantine."

Answer: Alexander II

Alexander II was a strong proponent of the autocratic rule of Russia's emperor, disliking the idea of a parliamentary system prodding at the emperor's will. However, unlike his father, Alexander used his autocratic rule to enact major social reforms early in his reign. He pulled away from the military disaster that had become the Crimean War, outlawed some forms of corporal punishment, relaxed some laws against Jewish citizens, and perhaps most impactfully, abolished Russian serfdom through his Emancipation Manifesto. This last action impacted over 23 million serfs, earning him the moniker "the Liberator."

However, as Alexander got older and became the target of failed assassination attempts, his ambitious agenda for social reform began to slow. Though he wasn't as expansionist as some of his predecessors, he wasn't afraid to take land. Nonetheless, ever a realist, he sold Alaska to the United States, knowing that it couldn't be protected from the British. Alexander was killed in a final assassination attempt by members of a revolutionary group, one of whom threw a bomb near him. Though some events, such as the Circassian genocide, have tarnished Alexander II's legacy, he is generally seen as one of the most accomplished emperors of the period.

Answer: False

In the February Revolution (sometimes also called the March Revolution), mass protests over food shortages, war weariness, and discontent with the monarchy ultimately led to Nicholas II's abdication and the start of the Russian Provisional Government. The first minister-chairman was a Russian aristocrat named Prince Georgy Lvov. However, as the new government struggled to handle the crises facing Russia, Lvov resigned after only a few months and ceded control of the seat to a minister and lawyer named Alexander Kerensky.

Kerensky's continued insistence on remaining in World War I, along with his government's crackdown on dissent among those unhappy with Russia's continued participation in the war, helped lead to the October Revolution. This is where the Bolsheviks finally took full control of the Russian government. Both Lvov and Kerensky eventually fled Russia. It was at this time that Vladimir Lenin took power as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars on November 8, 1917.