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.
Russian Primary Chronicle
The historical period covered in the "Tale of Bygone Years" begins with biblical times, in the introductory portion of the text, and concludes with the year 1117 in the "Chronicle's" third edition. Russian philologist and founder of the science of textology, Aleksey Shakhmatov, was the first one to discover early on that the chronology of the "Russian Primary Chronicle" opens with an error. The "Chronicle" has it that “In the year 6360 (852), the fifteenth of the indiction, at the accession of the Emperor Michael, the land of Rus’ was first named.” However, John Skylitzes' accounts of the Byzantine history show that Emperor Michael III did not begin his reign in 852 but rather a decade earlier, on January 20, 842. Because of the work's several identified chronological issues and numerous logical incongruities that have been pointed out by historians over the years, the "Chronicle's" value as a reliable historical source has been placed under strict scrutiny by the contemporary experts in the field (see “”).