Russia has two foundings - first, as an Orthodox Christian civilization in 988 under Prince Vladimir of Kiev; second, as a Westernizing and modernizing nation under Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries. In his superb Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia 
Regarding the first:
“It is hard to overstress the importance of the fact that Russia received its Christianity from Byzantium and not from the West. It was in the spirit of the Byzantine tradition that the Russian Empire came to see itself as a theocracy, a truly Christian realm where Church and state were united. The god-like status of the Tsar was a legacy of this tradition. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, the Russian Church proclaimed Moscow to be the Third Rome – the direct heir to Byzantium and the last remaining seat of the Orthodox religion, with a messianic role to save the Christian world. This Byzantine inheritance was strengthened by the marriage of Ivan III to Sofia Paleologue, the niece of Byzantium’s last Emperor, Constantine, in 1472. The ruling princes of Muscovy adopted the title ‘Tsar’ and invented for themselves a legendary descent from the Byzantine and Roman emperors. ‘Holy Russia’ thus emerged as the providential land of salvation – a messianic consciousness that became reinforced by its isolation from the West.”
Of Peter and the second founding, Figes notes: “As a young man, Peter spent a great deal of his time in the special ‘German’ suburb where, under pressure from the Church, Moscow’s foreigners were forced to live. He dressed in Western clothes, shaved his beard and, unlike the Orthodox, he ate meat during Lent. The young Tsar traveled throughout northern Europe to learn for himself the new technologies which Russia would need to launch itself as a continental military power. In Holland he worked as a shipbuilder. In London he went to the observatory, the arsenal, the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. In Konigsberg he studied artillery. From his travels he picked up what he needed to turn Russia into a modern European state: a navy modeled on the Dutch and the English ones; military schools that were copies of the Swedish and the Prussian; legal systems borrowed from the Germans; and a Table of (civil service) Ranks adapted form the Danes. He commissioned battle scenes and portraits to publicize the prestige of the state; and he purchased sculptures and decorative paintings for his European palaces in Petersburg.”
The Westernizing was so strong that many upper-class Russians lost contact with their historic culture and even their language: “They were so immersed in foreign languages that many found it challenging to speak or write their own. Princess Dashkova, a vocal advocate of Russian culture and the only female president ever of the Russian Academy of Sciences, had the finest European education. ‘We were instructed in four different languages, and spoke French fluently,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘but my Russian was extremely poor.’ Count Karl Nesselrode, a Baltic German and Russia’s foreign minister from 1815 to 1856, could not write or even speak the language of the country he was meant to represent. French was the language of high society, and in high-born families the language of all personal relationships as well. The Volkonskys . . . spoke mainly French among themselves. Madamoiselle Callame, a French governess in the Volkonsky household, recalled that in nearly fifty years of service she never heard the Volkonskys speak a word of Russian, except to give orders to the domestic staff.”
Tolstoy, Turgenev, and other Russian writers started life detached from Russian folk culture: “As a boy in the 1820s, Tolstoy was instructed by the kind of German tutor he portrayed so memorably in Chilhoood (1852). His aunt taught him French. But apart from a few of Pushkin’s poems, Tolstoy had no contact with Russian literature before he went to school at the age of nine. Turgenev was taught by French and German tutors, but he only learned to read and write in Russian thanks to the efforts of his father’s serf valet. He saw his first Russian book at the age of eight, after breaking into a locked room that contained his father’s Russian library.” This continued into the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov, best known for his controversial novel Lolita, said that his Uncle Ruka spoke a “fastidious combination of French, English and Italian, all of which he spoke with vastly more ease than he did his native tongue. When he resorted to Russian, it was invariably to misuse or garble some extremely idiomatic or even folksy expression, as when he would say at table with a sudden sigh: ‘ Je suis triste et seul comme une bylink v pole ’ (as lonesome as a ‘grass blade in the field).’”
Despite Peter’s efforts to modernize, “the old Russia still showed through.” The French writer Benois observed that this “formally perfect life” was “unbearable for the general Russian slovenliness,” and after describing the city as a “machine” he noted that its inhabitants more closely resembled a “disheveled old woman.” The classical perfection and symmetry that Peter aimed for was not quite achieved. The Nevsky Prospekt, the main boulevard through the city, was supposed to be a real prospect, a straight line connecting the Admiralty at one end to the Nevsky monastery at the other, wide and straight enough to look down the whole of the three km from one end to the other. Two work crews began at opposite ends of the Prospekt, and they didn’t quite meet in the middle, so there’s a little “kink” there. The buildings in Saint Petersburg were built with classical facades, but the residents often kept animals in the yards and let them roam the streets. Peter had to issue a number of decrees forbidding cows and pigs from wandering through the city.