Peter and Alexis

I haven't really looked into how Peter the Great treated the Russian public, but I think that his treatment is best represented through the letters between Peter and his son Alexis. As a son, Alexis should be extremely close with and loved by his father, Peter, however, as the letters between Alexis and Peter reveal, their relationship was broken by Peter's devotion to the progression of the Russian state. While Peter is torn between his love for his son and that for his country, as demonstrated by him saying "my heart is much more penetrated with grief...seeing that you, my son, reject all means of making yourself capable of well-governing after me" his love for his country is ultimately more important. 

When Peter articulates specifically what bothers him about Alexis' manner of rule, Peter articulates what is most important to him in terms of modernizing and bettering a country. Peter emphasizes the necessity "to learn the art" of war and the appropriate time to use warfare, and Alexis' reluctance to enter warfare is entirely unbearable for Peter. Peter also references "the late King of France" in order to inspire Alexis to have an open mind when it comes to warfare which indirectly demonstrates Peter's love for Western ways. Finally, Peter also admits to his own mortality through his constant references to God, however, it appears to me that some of his references to God are a little insincere (which might just be the way in which I am reading this letter) and used as tools to manipulate Alexis into changing his opinion. An example of this is when Peter says: "I am a man and consequently I must die. To whom shall I leave after me to finish what by the grace of God I have begun, and to preserve what I have partly recovered? To a man, who like the slothful servant hides his talent in the earth, that is to say, who neglects making the best of what God has entrusted to him?" In this question, Peter essentially says that he doesn't want his works to be unfinished, that he doesn't want the progress that he has paved for the Russian state to digress with his death.

In his letter to Alexis, Peter demonstrates how important Russia is to him. Obviously, these letters were privately shared between the father and son, and thus, one can assume that they are very accurate depictions of Peter's priorities, which evidently don't include his own family. Peter's roughness with his own family is representative of how Peter would treat the public--with the interest of the state, not the people, always in mind (EXAMPLE: Peter forced families to move to St. Petersburg when the city was established).