As a serious artistic activity, Russian painting really dates only from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok put it, Russian culture is a combination of cultures, we are a new country. Blok’s new country was actually synthetic and coldly calculated created at the beginning of the eighteenth century with Peter the Great¹s westernization of Old Russia. This had often been carried out with great brutality. And in some ways so too had Peter¹s introduction of western culture, art and architecture. Russian society was originally tribal and backward; its art was either primitive and decorative or religious. This episode presents numerous examples of paintings from this unique period in Russian history.