Peter II of Russia Peter II of Russia Peter II Alexeyevich (Russian: Пётр II Алексеевич, "Pyotr II Alekseyevich") ( – ) reigned as Emperor of Russia from 1727 until his death. He was the only son of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich (son of Peter the Great by his first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina) and of Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Peter was born in Saint Petersburg on 23 (O.S. 12) October 1715. His mother died when he was only ten days old. His father, Prince Alexis, accused of treason by his own father, Peter the Great, died in prison in 1718. So three-year-old Peter and his four-year-old
Church reform of Peter the Great a committee of churchmen headed by a lay appointee of the Emperor. Monasteries lost territory and were more closely regulated, resulting in a reduction in the number of monks and nuns in Russia from roughly 25,000 in 1734 to around 14,000 in 1738. The Church — particularly monasteries — lost landed wealth gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but under Empress Catherine II ("Catherine the Great", ruled 1762–1796) monastic lands were effectively nationalised, with some one million peasants on monastery land becoming state serfs practically overnight. A new ecclesiastic educational system was begun under Peter the Great and expanded