Peter the Great
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Peter the Great became Russian Tsar in 1682, at age 10. For the first seven years of his reign his half-sister Sophia Alekseyevna ruled as regent, until he forced her out and took power for himself. (His older brother Ivan V shared the throne until his 1696 death, but he was handicapped and weak and produced no sons to challenge Peter's right to rule.) Streltsy soldiers rebelled against his rule three times, leading to a brutal final suppression in 1698. (His reign faced several rebellions, most notoriously the Bulavin Rebellion by Don Cossacks in 1707, all of which were crushed.)
As Tsar, Peter started the Russian Empire's long process of Western-style modernization. In 1697 he started an 18-month journey to western Europe, and what he saw inspired many of his reforms. He forced his whole court to dress in Western fashion, famously cutting boyar beards himself. He changed the Byzantine calendar system to the Julian calendar and converted the smaller monasteries into churches or schools. He suppressed arranged marriages. He introduced manufacturing. He reformed Russia's Cyrillic script and published the first Russian-language newspaper. And he created the Russian Navy to strengthen the Empire's presence around the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea.
His imperial ambitions led to the long Northern War with Sweden, which then dominated the Baltic. After taking the Black Sea port of Azov from the Crimean Tartars, he declared war on the Swedes, led by Charles XII. Though routed at Narva in 1700, his forces ultimately won a decisive 1709 victory at Poltava and gained the Baltic province Livonia. As part of this vision, he started construction on the city of St. Petersburg, a "window on the West" on the Neva River not far from Swedish Finland. He hired western architects like Domenico Trezzini and Jean-Baptiste Le Blond to design it, and used Russian peasants and Swedish prisoners as forced labour, killing thousands. In 1713 he officially moved his capital there from Moscow.
Peter the Great died in 1725. He's always been a controversial figure among Russians, seen both as a far-sighted builder and as a ruthless divider.
For background reading, you can try Lindsey Hughes' Peter the Great: A Biography.
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