Vladimir putin is a keen reader of history. In long months of isolation during the covid-19 pandemic, say some, Russia’s president lingered in the Kremlin archives brooding over his country’s past as a great power and dreaming of restoring it. He admires the early Romanovs, who cemented their rule at the turn of the 17th century following a dynastic crisis marked by violence and lawlessness in Russia and then set off conquering their way to the Pacific Ocean. In particular he has compared himself to Peter the Great, the tsar who seized land from Sweden and turned Russia into the dominant power in the Baltic region.