The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  SCENE 2

  The Young Monk

  CAST

  ALEXEI Mikhailovich, tsar 1645–76, ‘Young Monk’

  Maria Miloslavskaya, tsarina, his first wife

  Sophia, their daughter, later sovereign lady

  Alexei Alexeievich, their eldest surviving son and heir

  FYODOR III, their third son, tsar 1676–82

  IVAN V, their fifth son, tsar 1682–96

  Natalya Naryshkina, tsarina, Alexei’s second wife

  PETER I (THE GREAT), their son, tsar 1682–1725

  Irina Mikhailovna, tsarevna, sister of Tsar Alexei

  Nikita Ivanovich Romanov, the tsar’s cousin, son of Ivan Romanov

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  Boris Morozov, Alexei’s tutor and chief minister

  Ilya Miloslavsky, his father-in-law and minister

  Nikon, patriarch

  Bogdan Khitrovo, courtier, ‘Whispering Favourite’

  Afanasy Ordyn-Nashchokin, minister

  Arteem Matveev, Alexei’s childhood friend and chief minister

  Prince Ivan Khovansky, general, ‘Windbag’

  Tsars were buried simply and quickly. The next day, 14 July 1645, Alexei, clad in black as he received condolences around the open coffin, led the simple procession from the Terem Palace to the Archangel Michael Cathedral where tsars were laid to rest, before eating the honeyed porridge of the funeral banquet. Moscow was tense: there had not been a peaceful handover of power for sixty years. The coronation must be arranged urgently. The Tatar khan was attacking in the south and the Polish king harboured one of the three new pretenders on the loose. Even thirty years after the Troubles, no one could ignore Russia’s so-called ‘three plagues – typhus, Tatars and Poles’.

  On 18 August, the tsar’s mother Eudoxia died – the teenager had lost both parents within five weeks. Alexei went on pilgrimage to Zagorsk, then fasted and prayed to purify himself. On 28 September, wearing the blessed red, gold and white robes, the tsar processed down lines of musketeers to be crowned in the Dormition Cathedral, and afterwards his cousin Nikita Romanov threw the coins.

  The new tsar looked the part and lived it too: six feet tall, burly, energetic and healthy, with a lustrous red beard, he enjoyed falconry and hunting. At first, it was said he passed much of his time with the women in the terem, where he had spent his childhood, yet he swiftly imposed himself on his court in a way his father had never managed.1

  Alexei was the one of the best-prepared heirs. His personal papers reveal an intelligent, restless and sharp-tongued reformer who did not suffer fools gladly. He wrote poems, made sketches and constantly wrote down ideas on every possible subject; he always sought foreign technology to improve his army and palaces – foreshadowing the approach of his son Peter the Great.* His rages were dangerous and he was quite capable of thumping a minister in the middle of a Council meeting. When the steward of his monasteries got drunk, he wrote him a letter calling him ‘a God-hater, Christ-seller, singleminded little Satan, damned scoffing enemy, wicked sly evildoer’; but, typically, the man’s punishment was merely to have this read out in public and to atone sincerely.

  He could be as tender as he was cruel. After his top boyar Prince Nikita Odoevsky lost his son, Alexei comforted him: ‘Don’t grieve too much. Of course you must grieve and shed tears but not too much . . .’ But he was always the God-blessed autocrat, a playful tormentor of his courtiers. When he felt better after being bled, he forced all his courtiers to be bled too, even his old uncle who protested he was too weak. ‘Perhaps you think your blood more precious than mine?’ said Alexei, who then struck him and watched as he was bled.

  Alexei awoke at 4 a.m. each day, prayed in his private chapel for twenty minutes, before receiving those retainers privileged to see ‘the bright eyes’, until at 9 a.m. he heard a two-hour mass. At Easter, he would pray standing for six hours, prostrating himself more than a thousand times.

  At dinner at noon, he ate alone while the boyars ate at nearby tables: sometimes to reward a victory, he invited one of them to join him or sent them one of his dishes. Formal banquets were marathons of gourmandizing – seventy dishes of bear meat, beef, pigeon, sturgeon, accompanied by vodka, beer or kvass, a traditional Slavic drink of low alcoholic content.

  After a siesta, Alexei was back in church for vespers before more meetings, games of chess and backgammon and further prayers. He was known as the ‘Young Monk’, and his religiosity was so all-consuming that even visiting churchmen were physically exhausted by a few days in the Kremlin. A coterie of Zealots of Piety, protégés of the tsar’s confessor, encouraged him to launch a campaign of puritanical moral regeneration to reform the vices of Muscovites. Adam Olearius, a German visitor, noted voluptuous dances, bare-bottomed mooning, drunken naked women splayed outside taverns and of course ‘lusts of the flesh’, and added that Muscovites were ‘addicted to sodomy, not only with boys but with horses’. It is unlikely that equine sodomy was really popular in the backstreets of Moscow, but binge-drinking women were then as now a sign of a rotten society. Alexei enforced the ban on musical instruments, smoking, swearing and drinking, denounced sexual immorality and pensioned off his dwarfs and replaced them with an irreproachably respectable retinue of cripples and monks. Diabolical mandolins were burned in a bonfire of the instruments in Red Square. ‘Take care that nowhere should there be shameful spectacles and games,’ he ordered, ‘and no wandering minstrels with tambourines and flutes.’ He noted his own act of charity: ‘Gave six roubles, ten kopeks each, to sixty people.’2

  Straight after the coronation, he retired his father’s minister Sheremetev, now aged sixty-nine, and promoted his ex-tutor Boris Morozov, whom he called his ‘father-substitute’, to be chief minister with a constellation of offices – Treasury, Musketeers and Pharmacy – and a luxurious palace within the Kremlin. In one of his first decisions, Morozov organized a brideshow.3

  Six maidens reached the final to be viewed by the tsar. On 4 February 1647, he selected Efemia Vsevolozhskaya. The wedding was quickly scheduled for the 14th to avoid poisoning or maleficence but at a public ceremony the girl fainted as the crown was set on her head, sparking fears of witchcraft or epilepsy. Whether she had been poisoned or was just unlucky, Morozov, who had favoured another candidate, exploited her misfortune. She was given the fine linens prepared for her wedding as a parting present, expelled from the terem and exiled with her family. Alexei found consolation in bear-hunting.

  When the bride-search was resumed, Morozov favoured the two daughters of a protégé. They were ideal because, if the tsar married one sister, Morozov could marry the other. Morozov had probably placed one of the girls among the final six beauties – but at the viewing the tsar had foiled his plan by choosing Vsevolozhskaya, who then conveniently fainted. Now Morozov arranged for the tsar to encounter the intended girl in his sister’s apartments.

  She was Maria, daughter of Ilya Miloslavsky, nephew of the long-serving secretary of the Foreign Office. Well-travelled by Muscovite standards, Miloslavsky had started as a wine-server to an English merchant and had travelled to Holland to hire Western experts.

  On 16 January 1647, Alexei rode through a frozen Moscow alongside the sleigh bearing his fiancée Maria. Prince Yakov Cherkassky, the third richest boyar, was best man. Afterwards, the couple held court, sharing a throne in the Hall of Facets. Alexei banqueted on swan stuffed with saffron, she on goose, suckling pig and chicken. The tsar’s Zealots persuaded the groom to ban any dancing or carousing. They drank just kvass, no vodka, and observed none of the traditional pagan fertility rituals. Nonetheless Maria swiftly fell pregnant and their partnership lasted twenty-one years, producing five sons and eight daughters. Maria would be the quintessential Muscovite wife, a paragon of pious modesty closeted in the terem.

  Ten days later, Morozov, fifty-seven, married the teenaged Anna Miloslavskaya, making him the tsar’s brother-in-law. While her sister Maria was marrying a strapping young monarch, it must have been a
miserable match for Anna. According to the tsar’s English doctor, Anna was a ‘succulent black young lass’ who preferred young flirtations rather than her old husband, ‘so that, instead of children, jealousies were got’. The marriage soon proved its value to Morozov: it saved his life.

  Morozov had raised the salt tax four times yet, while he promoted austerity, his own nose was deep in the trough. Within a couple of years, though he had inherited just 100 serf households, he was the second richest boyar, while his cousin, the chief of investigations Ivan Morozov, was the fifth richest. Soon he was the most hated man in Moscow, where the discontent reflected a concurrence of war, revolution and famine across Europe.4

  On 1 June 1648, when Alexei was returning from one of his many pilgrimages, he suddenly found himself surrounded by an angry crowd, who seized his bridle but also offered him the welcoming gifts of blood and salt: the mob denounced the bloodsuckers of Alexei’s own government, particularly Morozov’s ally Leonid Pleshcheev who ran Moscow. Alexei promised to investigate and rode on. The protesters closed more menacingly on Pleshcheev’s retainers, who galloped their horses into the crowd, striking out with their whips and arresting ringleaders. As Alexei came down the Red Staircase next morning on his way to church, a crowd demanded the release of the prisoners. When they saw Morozov, they chanted: ‘Yes and we’ll have you too!’ The crowd beat up boyars and demanded the head of Pleshcheev.

  The mob rampaged towards Morozov’s palace, beat his steward to death, threw one of his servants out of a window, pillaged his treasures and raided his wine cellars, drinking so manically that they literally bathed in alcohol. They caught his terrified young wife Anna but let her go with the consolation: ‘Were you not the sister of the Grand Princess, we’d hack you to bits!’ They also raided the palaces of the loathed ministers. The tax collector Chisyi was sick in bed but managed to hide under a birch broom until a servant betrayed him by pointing at it. They beat him, dragged him outside ‘like a dog’ and, stripping him naked, finished him off on a dungheap: ‘That’s for the salt [tax], you traitor!’ The mob then surrounded the Terem Palace.

  Morozov and his ally Peter Trakhaniotov secretly escaped from the Kremlin. The popular Nikita Romanov, the tsar’s cousin, came out to promise the crowd that abuses would be punished; in response they blessed the tsar but demanded Morozov and his henchmen at once. Nikita swore that Morozov had fled; only Pleshcheev remained. They bayed for blood. Alexei reluctantly gave him up. As Pleshcheev appeared, they cudgelled him to ‘such a pulp that his brains splattered over his face, his clothing torn off and the naked body dragged through the dirt around the marketplace. Finally a monk came and chopped the remnants of the head off the trunk.’ In the chaos, Morozov, unable to get out of the city, slipped back into the Kremlin. Alexei announced that he was dismissing Morozov and instead appointed Nikita Romanov and Prince Yakov Cherkassky.

  Gangs got drunk on barrels of looted liquor, quaffing out of shoes, hats and boots, and lighting fires until, suddenly, the whole wooden city caught alight. The crowd found Pleshcheev’s head, trampled on it, soaked it in vodka and lit it before throwing his mangled torso into the flames along with the disinterred bodies of his allies. Trakhaniotov, who had taken refuge at the Trinity Monastery, was brought back and beheaded on Red Square.

  When a smouldering calm finally descended upon Moscow, Alexei, accompanied by Nikita Romanov, addressed the crowd in Red Square, apologized for the crimes of his ministers and promised lower prices, but then, speaking with dignity, he added: ‘I’ve sworn to give Morozov to you and I cannot completely justify him but I cannot give him up. This person is dear to me, the husband of the tsarina’s sister. It would be hard to hand him over to death.’ Tears ran down his face. ‘Long live the tsar,’ cried the crowd. On 12 June, guarded by musketeers, Morozov left for imprisonment in a monastery on the White Sea in the Arctic north – though Alexei wrote by hand to the abbot: ‘Believe this letter. See to it you protect him from harm . . . and I shall reward you.’

  On 12 July, Alexei made another concession, calling an Assembly of the Land to draft a new law code that was meant to protect the people and reassure the nobles. ‘The time of confusion is receding,’ wrote Alexei to Morozov’s keepers on the White Sea, ordering them to send his ‘father-substitute’ southwards in stages for his discreet return to Moscow. On 1 September, as the Assembly gathered in the Kremlin, Prince Nikita Odoevsky presented the new Code that promised ‘justice equal for all from greatest to least’, but at a time when the English Parliament was about to try an anointed king for his life, there was nothing populist about Alexei’s laws. During a period of instability and fear, the tsar consolidated his legitimacy by agreeing an alliance with the nobles that would be the foundation of Romanov rule until 1861. He confirmed noble grants of land which were gradually being transformed into permanent holdings. Justice would be dispensed by landowners to their peasants, who were now serfs totally owned by their masters and prohibited from leaving the estates. If they escaped, they could be hunted down.*

  The death penalty, including new delicacies such as burying alive and burning, was imposed for sixty-three crimes. The punishments were savage – but probably no more so than those in England. The essential tool was the knout, mentioned 141 times in Alexei’s Code: a rawhide whip, often with metal rings or wires attached like a cat-o’-nine-tails, that ripped off the skin and cut to the bone. Ten strokes could kill and anything over forty was close to a death sentence. In return for Romanov autocracy and military mobilization at the top, Alexei granted noble tyranny over the peasantry, 90 per cent of the population. Nobility would be defined by the privilege of owning other human beings, setting a Russian pattern of behaviour: servility to those above, tyranny to those below.

  Alexei felt confident enough to sack his new ministers and promote his father-in-law Miloslavsky, a coarse rapscallion with ‘limbs and muscles like Hercules’ who was ‘covetous, unjust and immoral’, a sex pest and peculator who soon built himself a Kremlin mansion on the spoils of office. Alexei was so irritated by him that he actually slapped him during a Council meeting. When he grumbled about a minister ‘with every sort of evil, sly Muscovite trait’, he was surely thinking of his father-in-law. But he granted real power to an altogether more impressive character.5

  Nikon, who resembled a biblical prophet, was the son of a peasant. After the death of his three children, he had persuaded his wife to take the veil so that he could become a monk in the freezing far north. Six feet six, brawny, wild-eyed, haughty with an abrasive and dogmatic style, he performed a thousand genuflections a day and his fasts were so stringent that he saw visions. As a member of the Zealots, he encouraged the austerities of Alexei, who appointed him metropolitan of Novgorod where he proved himself by suppressing the 1648 riots.

  Alexei called Nikon ‘my special friend’ and ‘the Great Shining Son’, and they shared a worldview of sacred monarchy. When Charles I of England was beheaded, Alexei was disgusted: he expelled the English from Russia. Meanwhile the Polish borderlands of Ukraine were degenerating into ferocious civil war as the Orthodox people rebelled against the Polish Catholic nobility. If the world was tilting in a dangerous way, Nikon preached that the Orthodox mission of the Russian tsar must be purified, ready for a crusade against the Catholic Poles and the Islamic Tatars.

  Patriarch Paisos of Jerusalem, visiting Moscow, encouraged this imperial-sacred mission by hailing Alexei as ‘King David and Constantine the Great, the new Moses’. Nikon took up the mission as Alexei prepared his army for the crusade. On 25 July 1652, Nikon was enthroned as patriarch, processing around the Kremlin walls with Alexei himself holding his bridle, one of the rituals of his installation. ‘In you,’ wrote Alexei, ‘I’ve found someone to lead the Church and advise me in governing the realm.’ Nikon started to sign most of the tsar’s decrees.

  Nikon, obsessed with Moscow’s role as the New Jerusalem,* believed that the corruption of the realm was equalled only by the deviations of the Church: he
first turned on foreigners, forbidding them to wear Russian dress and confining them to a so-called Foreigners’ or German Quarter where they could pray in their infidel Protestant churches, smoke their tobacco and party with their whores. Despite this, Russia continued to hire ever more foreign military experts. As for the church, its pure Byzantine services had been tainted with innovations sanctioned under Ivan the Terrible that must be purged: henceforth the sign of the cross must be made only with three fingers instead of two. Nikon claimed that he was returning to the correct Byzantine usage, but traditionalists known as the Old Believers were prepared to die unspeakable deaths rather than make a cross with three fingers. As Nikon repressed these dissidents, a dystopic hell was descending on Ukraine – and the Orthodox rebels appealed to the tsar, offering him an irresistible opportunity to expand his empire and redeem the lost lands of Kievan Rus.6

  The Orthodox leader in Ukraine was Bogdan Khmelnitsky, a Cossack officer who had served the Ottoman sultans and Polish kings, learning Turkish and French before retiring to farm – until his ten-year-old son was murdered by a Catholic nobleman. Khmelnitsky launched a Great Revolt, fired by Cossack hatred for Polish Catholic lords. But he and his rebels also resented the Jews who often served as the agents for Polish magnates. They exercised this loathing on the large communities of Jews who had found refuge in tolerant Poland after the persecutions that had expelled them from Spain and much of western Europe. Elected hetman of the Zaparozhian Cossacks, Khmelnitsky unleashed his apocalyptic horsemen in a savage purge of Catholics and Jews. Somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 Jews were massacred in such gleefully ingenious atrocities – disembowelled, dismembered, decapitated; children were cutleted, roasted and eaten in front of raped mothers – that nothing like this would be seen in the bloodlands of eastern Europe until the Holocaust of the twentieth century.