History of Russia
The war ended in 1721 when an exhausted Sweden sued for peace with Russia. Peter acquired four provinces situated south and east of the Gulf of Finland, thus securing his coveted access to the sea. There, in 1703, he had already founded the city that was to become Russia's new capital, Saint Petersburg, as a "window opened upon Europe" to replace Moscow, long Russia's cultural center. Russian intervention in the Commonwealth marked, with the Silent Sejm, the beginning of a 200-year domination of that region by the Russian Empire. In celebration of his conquests, Peter assumed the title of emperor, and the Russian Tsardom officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.
Censorship in the Russian Empire
The history of censorship in the Russia began long before the emergence of the empire. The first book containing an index of prohibited works dates to the year 1073, in Kievan Rus. For several centuries these were mere translations of censorship lists from other languages; the first authentic old Russian censorship index was created only in the fourteenth century. The number of indices (as well as illegal publications) increased steadily until the beginning of the sixteenth century. Censorship first attained a kind of official status in the period of the Tsardom (1547–1721): it was encoded in law in the "Stoglav" and was directed against heresies, schisms, and other alleged deviations from religious dogmas and sacred texts.