Introduction Russia is generally credited with the benefit of having introduced a political phenomenon that fundamentally provided an alternative to capitalism; Communism. Since this concept was only implemented at the turn of the 20th century, we can therefore infer that, to a large extent, Russia is, for most people, synonymous with leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev. This supposition is based entirely on the assumption that the Russian Revolution of 1914 inherently altered the sociocultural and sociopolitical orientation of the nation, giving rise to a never before imagined era, where Russia was not ruled by tsars, but by simple men. ; men who spoke and expressed the needs of the masses. To this extent, communism is therefore widely mistakenly seen as the linchpin of Russian civilization. Much of this misconception, as previously noted, is based on the growth and progression of Russian society in the years following the revolution until 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell, bringing with it decades of Soviet tradition based on communism. , to believe that communism, a relatively new concept even in Marx's eyes, is responsible for the modernization of Russia is to attribute ignorance to history as a whole. According to Abbott (2007), the title of founder of Russian civilization is largely attributed to Peter the Great; the man who, according to MacLean (n.d.), introduced significant reforms in the practice and politics of all aspects of Russian society. The aim of this article is therefore to examine why and how Peter the Great changed modern Russian, and whether or not he was