When did the Cyrillic Alphabet come into the picture. It just might be Ivan the Terrible? Peter the Great brought many changes to Russia, his son was later killed because he refused to become Czar, he ran off to Poland and sought sanctuary there and later was returned to Russia where he was killed. His son from Catherine became the new Czar after Catherine died a natural death. The oddity is Catherine was not a royal, she was a peasant girl that got Peters attention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine brothers,[5] Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible
In one such outburst, he killed his groomed and chosen heir Ivan Ivanovich. This left the Tsardom to be passed to Ivan’s younger son, the weak and intellectually disabled[6] Feodor Ivanovich. Ivan’s legacy is complex: he was an able diplomat, a patron of arts and trade, founder of Russia’s first Print Yard, a leader highly popular among the common people of Russia, but he is also remembered for his paranoia and arguably harsh treatment of the nobility. The Massacre of Novgorod is regarded as one of the demonstrations of his mental instability and brutality.