Introduction Russia is generally credited with having introduced a political phenomenon that essentially provided an alternative to capitalism; Communism. Since this concept was only set in motion in the early 20th century, we can deduce that, to a large extent, Russia is, for most people, synonymous with leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev. This assumption is based entirely on the premise that the Russian Revolution of 1914 intrinsically altered the socio-cultural and socio-political direction of the nation, giving rise to a never-before-imagined era in which Russia was ruled not by tsars, but by simple men . ; men who spoke and articulated the needs of the masses. In this sense, then, communism is widely misconceived as the core of Russian civilization. Much of this misunderstanding, as noted above, is based on the growth and progress of Russian society in the years following the revolution until 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell, taking with it decades of the Soviet Union's tradition of communism. . , to believe that communism, a relatively new concept even in Marx's consideration, 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 every aspect of Russian society. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to examine why and how Peter the Great changed modern Russian, and whether or not he did so.