Peter the Great by Henri Troyat; translated by Joan Pinkham (Dutton: $22.50; 377 pp., illustrated)

Ever since England’s Richard Chancellor piloted the first European ship into the mouth of the Dvina River in Russia’s Far North in 1553, Westerners have been perplexed by the unique manner in which the Russians have amalgamated the politics and culture of Europe and Asia. Chancellor and the 16th- and 17th-Century Europeans who followed him thought that Russia was a “rude and barbarous kingdom,” more Asiatic than Western, whose political and economic backwardness made her super-abundant natural resources fair game for commercial exploitation. Eagerly, they followed that path and, during the next century, adventurous Englishmen spread a broad commercial network across Russia’s Far North to bring Russian raw materials into England’s workshops.

At the same time, England’s Dutch rivals built a cannon foundry at Tula, in which Russian workers shaped Russian metal into cannon for Holland’s army and navy. Russian grain and saltpeter helped to support the coalition against the Habsburgs during the Thirty Years’ War, and an ongoing procession of important European diplomatic and trade missions made Moscow’s Kremlin their destination throughout the 17th Century. By the 1670s, some historians have claimed, such foreign enterprises had placed Russia in serious danger of becoming a colony of Europe in which she would face a future of economic and political subservience to nations whose technology had become more advanced and whose political systems made them better able to respond to the modern world that was emerging around them.

After he drove his half-sister, the Regent Sophia, from the Kremlin in 1689, the teen-age Czar, Peter Romanov, changed Russia’s relationship with the West quickly and decisively. Within a decade, Russia was well embarked upon an energetic campaign to borrow European technology and to follow the path to modernization that Europe’s nations had taken before her. In less than a quarter-century after Sophia’s fall, Peter forced Western nations to admit Russia to their community of Great Powers by decisively defeating the armies of Sweden, then one of Europe’s leading military powers, at the battle of Poltava. By 1725, what Europeans so condescendingly had called the Kingdom of Muscovy during the 16th and 17th centuries had become the Russian Empire with a larger army than any nation in the West. Lest Europeans forget the basis for their claim to membership among the Great Powers, Russia’s rulers reminded them of their nation’s strength by sending Cossack squadrons into the suburbs of Berlin in 1761 and by marching divisions of Imperial Guards down the Champs Elysees in 1814.

Russia’s armed might was the accomplishment of Peter the Great. But Peter did much more than build an army. During the 35 years in which he reigned, he presided over Russia’s entrance into the modern world. Peter in those years turned xenophobic Russia outward, tied its destiny firmly to that of the West, created new forms of taxation and administration, forced the nobility into lifelong government service, tightened the bonds of serfdom, and laid the foundations for the Westernized culture that, in the following century, would produce Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

Although historians have long recognized the greatness of these accomplishments, the definitive biography of Russia’s legendary czar-transformer has yet to be written. Neither in Russia nor in the West has anyone succeeded in chronicling the magnitude of Peter the Great’s achievement or in capturing the turbulent atmosphere of upheaval--of revolution, in fact--that he brought to Russia.

Although “Peter the Great” qualifies neither as sound history nor as seriously researched biography, Henri Troyat has been far more successful than many of his predecessors in evoking a sense of the revolutionary turmoil that Peter the Great brought to Russia. A gifted novelist whose talent for painting vivid portraits of the past has impressed European and American readers for more than three decades, Troyat has written close to a score of historical novels and biographies that have brought Russia’s past to life in a manner that writers of serious history and biography too often find difficult to accomplish. This present volume is no exception.

To be sure, factual accuracy suffers in the process. Unless readers remember that Troyat’s greatest talent lies in his verbal evocations of the past, not in his ability to report and analyze historical events, they will be surprised to learn that Peter the Great’s father, Czar Alexis Mikhailovich, was “pious, indecisive, indolent, cautious (and) peaceable,” even though he led Russia to victory in a decade-long war against the Poles, crushed the largest peasant uprising that any czar had yet faced, drove the Patriarch Nikon from office when he tried to seize too much power, and presided over the most revolutionary reforms to strike the Russian Church before the 19th Century. Troyat’s description of Nikon as an unrepentant womanizer who may have fathered Peter the Great will make little sense to anyone who remembers that he was incarcerated in a distant northern monastery four years before Czar Alexei Mikhailovich married Peter’s mother, and remained there until nine years after Peter’s birth. And, few readers will be able to understand the form and content of Peter’s many reforms from Troyat’s copiously anecdotal account.

As he has done in some of his best fiction--”The Red and the White” and “La Lumiere des justes” (of which only the first two parts have been translated into English) are works that quickly come to mind--Troyat has captured the atmosphere of the world in which the subject of his biography lived and worked. Readers will need to look elsewhere to find out exactly what Peter the Great did to the Russians and precisely how he did it. But Troyat provides a memorable portrait of Peter’s personality and times, and one that projects a vivid sense of the urgency with which he drove Russia and the Russians into the center of European politics. As such, “Peter the Great” is a book worth reading.