History of the Swamps: How Muscovy Became Russia

November 27, 2017November 14, 2025

Understanding how Muscovy became Russia requires a closer look at Peter’s decision. In the 13th century, when the Golden Horde arrived, it was a more advanced force. It encountered local tribes that were amorphous and backward. Several hundred years passed. The West moved forward in its development, while the Muscovites did not. Over time they became a semi-Horde society and fell behind in everything: science, technology, art, and more.

Peter’s European Revelation

Only Peter Romanov’s trip to Europe slightly shifted the point of reference for Muscovy. He saw the depth of the abyss separating his backward country from Europe, which had moved forward. This demanded radical changes, and Peter dared to make them. He changed the name from Muscovy to Russia and rewrote history to detach from the Horde once and for all.

A friendly team of specialists worked in Moscow, with imaginations no worse than the Strugatsky brothers or the Wachowskis. They wrote history in the form of a fantastic detective story with invented heroes, battles, and glorious feats. As a result, Peter approved one version of history written by German scholars.

But, paraphrasing a well-known saying, one can say: “Muscovy can leave the Horde, but the Horde will never leave Muscovy.” The Horde essence of the newly created state, although it underwent total rebranding, could not exist without new conquests. Peter changed the vector of conquests, and now expansion went to the fertile lands of Ukraine (which had access to the Black Sea) and to the Baltic Sea.

The Sea Trade Paradox

Obviously, Peter saw how tiny Holland prospered, successfully exploiting its advantageous location on the seashore. And all the European states known to him prospered through maritime trade and production of goods that became the basis of this trade. Characteristically, at that time Muscovy already stretched to the eastern seas. It could increase trade not with Europe but with Eastern countries, but nothing of the sort happened. The English and Dutch successfully traded there, and later the French joined them, who had to travel to China through half the world.

But Muscovy, having access to the seas that wash China’s coast and being able to provide overland trade routes, did nothing of the sort. In this sense, no one asked the simple question: why was it necessary to capture the Far East, Alaska, Kamchatka, and Sakhalin if there was not even an idea of what to do there and how to use these lands?

Peter’s Failed Industrial Revolution

For all his ambiguity, Peter understood the essence of what could be done with his country. He understood that trade needed development at all costs, and for this, one needed something to trade. Therefore, it was necessary to create industry, which was rapidly developing in Europe. But at the first attempts to deploy something similar at home, Peter almost immediately came to the same conclusion that all his successors reached: nothing good can be created with this population.

The first batches of descendants of boyar children sent to study in Europe showed the essence of their people — inert and blinkered. Instead of knowledge and desire to create, the nobles’ children brought masses of impressions about taverns and prostitutes.

If things moved with instilling some knowledge and skills, albeit slowly, then with the second component, which today is called healthy entrepreneurship, things were very bad. The Muscovites didn’t want to work or seek wealth. For hundreds of years, the Horde raised them in a regime of complete obedience and service to masters.

The few who didn’t have this quality couldn’t influence the general situation and were more the exception than the rule. Eventually, Peter understood that with this sycophantic people, you can’t build a modern state, so he invited foreign specialists to all key areas. As a result of Peter’s choices, many modern Russian maritime routes carry the names of foreigners like the Dutchman Willem Barentsz and the Dane Vitus Bering.

From Muscovy to Russia: The Rebranding

On September 10, 1721, Peter I changed the name “Muscovy Tsardom” to “Tsardom of Russia”.

Generally, much was done during Peter’s lifetime, but the turning point never came. Even an army of foreign specialists couldn’t launch true industrial progress. A country built on serfdom simply wasn’t interested in any initiative that could push it in the right direction.

Peter’s heirs also couldn’t develop Russia, so they had to return to the primordial — Horde traditions. And the Horde earned through robbery and racketeering. This was the only thing Russia could offer for sale, and it turned out that this product was in demand.

Russia as Europe’s Enforcer

Starting in the 1770s, Russian empresses and emperors began renting out their army. It soon became clear why: the tenant wanted the Russian army to crush the new French Republic, and later the Empire. France was developing too fast — both as an industrial power and as a source of ideas that threatened Europe’s outdated imperial order.
England saw both waves of French innovation as dangerous. As a result, it began hiring the Russian army to suppress the new trends that spread across Europe with Napoleon.

Here russia found itself, as they say, “in its element.” It had already done this work under Horde banners, and now — on England’s order. In short, at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, russia formalized itself as European gendarme and retrograde strangler of everything new. Thus, russia settled into the role of thug-for-hire and became a kind of enforcer from the bandit 1990s of the 20th century.

The transformation of how Muscovy became Russia wasn’t progress — it was merely rebranding the same Horde mentality with European makeup.