2 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
First Tsar of All Russia who conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, created the Oprichnina terror apparatus, and oscillated between brilliant statecraft and catastrophic paranoid violence — founding the pattern of Russian autocracy that would persist through the Romanovs and beyond.
Russian Tsar who forcibly modernized Russia — traveling incognito through Western Europe to learn shipbuilding, founding St. Petersburg on swamp as a 'window to the West,' defeating Sweden at Poltava to make Russia a Baltic power, and transforming Russia from a medieval Muscovite tsardom into a European-style empire.