Peter the Great's major legacy, visible in all its splendour today, is the city of St Petersburg. He wanted to found a new capital city, named after St Peter the Apostle. He chose an inhospitable northern marshy bank of the River Neva, and raised up a formidable showpiece of architecture and city-planning.

St Petersburg became a grand statement loaded with symbolic resonance of renewal and adventure. It would inspire future generations, including the greatest of all Russian writers, Alexander Pushkin. His epic poem The Bronze Horseman opens with an elegant love letter to the European face of St Petersburg and her ousting of the old, Asiatic leaning Moscow.

From the city's streets Martin Sixsmith describes the "never-ending boulevards and even vaster squares; the surreal White Nights when darkness is banished and the city takes on its magical aura of ethereal beauty." Peter himself talked of a 'great leap from darkness into light' and the city became known as a 'window on Europe' and the defining metaphor of Peter's reign. But, the first clues that Peter's reforms might not be all they seem come in the very way he set about building this place. While the city rose gleaming and splendid, its foundations - laid on gigantic crates of stones sunk by slave labourers into the boggy mire - were literally full of the dead.

Just as at the end of Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman, praise for Peter is tinged with horror, Martin Sixsmith asks how European Peter really was in terms of democracy, justice and the rule of law. He knew change was vital because of the tensions in society - the peasant revolts were a symptom of a system straining at the seams - but he wanted to control that change, and certainly didn't want reforms that would weaken the autocratic power he himself wielded.

Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4. Show less