The article analyses phraseological and paremiological borrowings in the Russian language of the era of Peter the Great. The end of the 18^th - the first half of the 19^th centuries was a time of intensive political, economic and linguistic transformations in Russia. From the “window to Europe”, which was opened at that time, a powerful stream of innovations, primarily lexical ones, poured into Russian life and the Russian language. This borrowed vocabulary has been fundamentally studied by both domestic and foreign linguists, and has become an object of lexicographic description. The process of borrowing phraseological units and proverbs of the Petrine era has been studied much less than borrowed vocabulary. The reason for this is the different way of borrowing such linguistic units: if the borrowed vocabulary is easily recognized by a foreign language root words, then phraseological units and proverbs perceive European innovations mainly by the literal translation of components, i.e. tracing, which makes them “their own” in the composition of lexical components. The article analyses the phraseological units and proverbs that were mastered in the time of Peter the Great in the form of half-calks and calks, characterizes the common and different features in the adaptation of these types of units to the Russian language, emphasizes the methodological difficulties in their identification as Europeanisms. Special attention is paid to phraseological and paremiological borrowings from the Dutch and German languages, something typical for the era of Peter the Great.