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When Peter I Was Forced to Settle for Less: Coerced Labor and Resistance in a Failed Russian Colony (1695–1711)*

Azov was the site of the first military victory of the reign of tsar Peter I (aka Peter the Great) and the object of his earliest endeavors as an empire-builder. This fortified seaside stronghold, equidistant from Moscow and Istanbul, was also the site of his greatest failures as a ruler. The ill-planned logistics of sending settlers to a territory in which little grain could be grown, the construction of a port on what was essentially an Ottoman lake, the high human cost in deaths due to disease and attrition, and the astounding rates of evasion and desertion all portended a troubled existence for the Azov colony. But the tsar’s military blunders in 1711 forced him to make a move that was virtually unprecedented in the history of Russian expansion: to relinquish a territory and order the systematic destruction of nearly everything that fifteen years of hard labor had achieved. Historians have consistently overlooked this significant, but ignominious, episode in a reign that generations of observers have categorized as “Great.”1 The neglect of Azov can only partly be explained by the loss of its archives.2