The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The marauders searched the Kremlin, building by building. They had a death list of twenty targets – not just Naryshkins but also Fyodor’s favourites. One of the Naryshkin brothers hid in a church but was betrayed by a dwarf: he was tossed off the Red Staircase on to the pikes. They bore each victim to Red Square, which they converted into an alfresco abattoir where pieces of Matveev were already on display. Their chief prize of the day was the haughty Yuri Dolgoruky. A delegation of musketeers visited him at home to apologize for tossing his son on to the pikes. The father gave them vodka but, just as they were leaving, his son’s widow emerged in tears. ‘Don’t cry, daughter,’ he consoled her. ‘My son is dead but his teeth live on!’ Hearing this threat of vengeance, the musketeers hacked the general into pieces, which joined the giblets heaped up in Red Square where the crowds, brandishing arms, guts or heads, cried, ‘Here’s Boyar Matveev! Make way for him!’ Later Matveev’s manservant was allowed to collect his body parts on a pillow and take them for burial.

  By morning, the musketeers were convinced that Tsarevich Ivan was in danger of poisoning from a doctors’ plot by converted Jews who had supposedly poisoned Tsar Fyodor. The musketeers killed the suspect Jews – but so far they had culled only one Naryshkin and they really wanted Ivan Naryshkin. Massing at the Red Staircase, they demanded his head: ‘We know you’ve got him in there.’ Inside the palace, the huddled but divided family faced unbearable decisions. The Naryshkins hid in the nursery of Peter’s little sister. Only Sophia, who had her own direct line to the musketeers through Khovansky, kept her head. She was already giving orders. She came out with Tsarinas Natalya and Martha to beg for Ivan Naryshkin’s life on their knees, but the musketeers threatened, ‘Hand him over or we’ll search – then things will turn out badly!’

  ‘Your brother won’t escape the musketeers,’ Sophia told Natalya. ‘Don’t let us all be murdered on his account. You have to give up your brother.’ Ivan Naryshkin agreed. Peter, aged ten, must have seen his weeping mother and the departure of his uncle: Natalya and her brother prayed in the Church of the Saviour and then, holding an icon, Ivan went bravely out to the baying musketeers. The young man was tortured for hours but never admitted trying to murder the tsar even when his joints were snapped. Finally, his legs and arms hanging wrongwise, he was impaled on pikes then dismembered, before the musketeers stomped him to pulp.

  Sophia now emerged from the shadows. This fierce girl was just twenty-five, yet after a life spent in seclusion she had the confidence to deal with an all-male cast of gore-stained musketeers and scheming boyars. She is usually depicted as dark, round-faced and plain but this may just be the fruit of chauvinism and political malice.* Perhaps the best description is by someone who really knew her well. She was ‘a princess endowed with all the accomplishments of body and mind to perfection, had it not been for her boundless ambition and insatiable desire for governing’, wrote her half-brother Peter, who would have every reason to loathe her but admitted she was talented. She was certainly opportunistic, articulate and politically supple, a deadly opponent. For now, she too was trying to survive amid an unpredictable orgy of bloodletting.

  Overnight on 16/17 May, the musketeers approved their champion Khovansky as their commander and forced the execution of Iazykov and Likhachev, but Sophia, accompanied by Natalya, persuaded them to spare the other Naryshkins. Khovansky, speaking as the ‘father’ of the musketeers, hailed Sophia as ‘Sovereign Lady Tsarevna’ and asked her to place both tsars on the throne. On 26 May, Ivan and Peter were declared co-tsars with Sophia as ‘the Great Sovereign Lady’ – Russia’s first female ruler.2

  Khovansky disdained his young puppet Sophia, believing that he should rule Russia. He and many of the musketeers were Old Believers. Now he demanded that Sophia hold a public meeting to reverse her father’s reforms. Sophia agreed. First she had to arrange a novelty: a double coronation. New crowns and jewels had to be crafted.

  On 25 June, the two boys were crowned as ‘double tsars’, Ivan wearing the original Cap of Monomakh while Peter, as the younger, wore a copy.† As a woman, the sovereign lady could not take part, watching through a grille as Vasily Golitsyn, now chief of the Foreign Office, carried the sceptre.

  Golitsyn, thirty-nine years old, a scion of that numerous clan descended from Grand Duke Gedimin of Lithuania, and married with children to a Streshneva, the family of Tsar Michael’s second wife, was an urbane grandee whose blue eyes, pointed moustaches, trimmed beard and ‘Polish clothes’ make him look more like a French marquis than a Russian boyar. His palace was well known for its gallery of Gobelin tapestries, Venetian china, German engravings, Dutch carriages, Persian rugs. Now Sophia came to depend on him. In her coded letters, she calls him ‘my lord, my light, my dear, my joy, my soul’. She longed to tell him ‘what’s been happening’ and could scarcely wait ‘until I see you in my embrace’. She had found not just a lover but a statesman – and she was going to need him.

  On 5 July 1682, in the Palace of Facets, Sophia, accompanied by her old aunts as well as by Tsarinas Natalya and Martha but without either tsar, faced Khovansky’s Old Believer musketeers. Khovansky tried to bully her into agreeing to Old Believer’s demands, but she leapt to her feet and warned them that it was unthinkable that she should reverse her father’s reforms, for then ‘tsars wouldn’t be tsars’. She threatened that ‘We shall leave the country.’

  ‘It’s high time you went to a convent, lady,’ muttered the musketeers. ‘We can do without you.’ But she faced them down, denouncing the ‘rebellious blockheads’ who had brought ‘rebellion and chaos’ to Moscow. To make herself quite clear, she had them executed and Avvakum burned at the stake along with 20,000 other Old Believers.

  She had to escape Khovansky and the suffocating Kremlin. Accompanied by the two tsars, Sophia set off on a three-month tour of the country palaces and monasteries, leaving Khovansky in charge of the government – or so he thought.

  Sophia probed his weakness, demanding that he send the royal bodyguard out to Kolomenskoe, but Khovansky prevaricated, trying to avoid giving her any troops. Sophia launched her own counter-coup. On 2 September, a denunciation of his treason appeared on the gates of Kolomenskoe, and Khovansky was summoned and then surprised and arrested. Sophia and the boyars condemned Windbag for his ‘attempt to take over the Muscovite state’. Khovansky was beheaded in front of Sophia. The musketeers begged her forgiveness. Sophia had for the moment restored the court as the broker of balanced power and merited prizes. The tsars and tsarevna returned to the Kremlin.3

  In July 1683, the Ottomans launched a bid to conquer the West: they besieged Vienna. The city was close to falling until rescued by King John Sobieski of Poland. As the Ottomans retreated, Sophia agreed with Poland to join Christendom’s Holy League and attack the sultan’s ally, the Crimean khan – in return for perpetual ownership of Kiev and much of Ukraine.

  The Russians had long been terrorized by the Tatar khans; now for the first time, they were going to take the war to Islam. Planning this challenging expedition, Golitsyn, promoted by Sophia to ‘Guardian of the Great Royal Seal and the State’s Great Ambassadorial Affairs’, consulted his chief mercenary, Patrick Gordon. Nicknamed the ‘Cock of the East’, this rambunctious forty-nine-year-old Scottish nobleman, a Catholic refugee from Calvinism, had fought for Poland and Sweden, been wounded four times, captured six times, escaped twice. Hired by Alexei, he almost returned to serve Charles II of England but could not resist his lucrative Russian adventure. The Cock believed that the Russians could take Crimea, that lush peninsula hanging like a jewel over the Black Sea, which no tsar had so far attempted.

  On 26 April 1684, Sophia received her new Polish allies as she sat sable-clad on her throne while the treaty was read to the two tsars. Their double throne had a curtained window in the back so that Golitsyn could whisper instructions. Tsar Ivan was now seventeen, old enough to rule, but he ‘babbled when he spoke’. He was half blind and his eyes flickered and darted so unnervingly that he ha
d to wear a green taffeta blindfold so as not to alarm visitors. He was also mentally handicapped. On the other side of the double throne was his half-brother Peter, so ‘nimble and eager to ask questions and to stand up that he had to be restrained by his attendant until the older tsar was ready’. As Sophia and Golitsyn prepared for their Crimean war, Peter was almost twelve, and soon it would be hard for Sophia to deny him a role in government.4

  Peter was already extraordinary. He was a peculiar but striking physical specimen: though most of his portraits give the impression of a gigantic solidity, he was freakishly tall – he would soon reach six feet eight – and jerky in his movements. His face twitched in a constant flicker of strange tics and he was beginning to suffer from epileptic fits. He had lost his father at four, and seen trusted ministers tossed on to the lances of the musketeers, uncles given up for slaughter, at the age of ten. His beloved cousin, Tikhon Streshnev, related to Tsar Michael’s wife, stood in as a paternal figure: Peter always called him ‘father’. Although he impressed everyone with his intelligence and strength, he had shown little interest in formal education. Tsar Fyodor and his mother had appointed as tutor a courtier named Nikita Zotov, who proved unable to persuade the young tsar to study books. Instead the jovial Zotov told him stories of his father’s wars, stimulated his interest in artillery – and taught him to drink. Peter adored him as the butt of jokes – and later as his trusted secretary – for the rest of his life. While he learned some German and enjoyed Greek mythology and Roman history, he never mastered languages, grammar or philosophy. Instead Zotov let him learn carpentry, tinker with cannons, and parade soldiers.

  As soon as he was old enough, Peter absented himself from the ceremonies of court. The boy swiftly made himself chief of the staff of stableboys and falconers of Preobrazhenskoe, the palace to which his mother had been banished. First he asked for carpentry tools, chisels and hammers, then for a lathe, and throughout his life he found relaxation in crafting ivory and wood. In January 1683, he demanded uniforms and a couple of horse-drawn wooden cannon for his games, and by the summer he was ordering real cannon and real gunpowder. He was starting his lifelong affair with explosives, proud to assume the lowly rank of ‘bombardier’. Playing the drums, lighting the fuses of his cannons and drilling his pals, he formed his first play unit out of 300 friends, foreigners and servants which became the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment. He turned Preobrazhenskoe into his own military encampment and when it was full he commandeered the next village, Semyonovskoe, where he based a second regiment, the Semyonovsky.

  One of the first to enrol in the play regiments was Alexander ‘Aleshka’ Menshikov, a stableboy of obscure origins – his father was variously described as a pie-seller, a worker on barges or a non-commissioned officer. Almost the same age as Peter, he enrolled in the artillery, ensuring that he was close to Bombardier Peter. He was lean and tough, and in his intelligent pragmatism, vaulting ambition and vicious temper he resembled Peter himself. He also matched the tsar in his love of the bottle. Years later, he mocked his own origins by hosting a party in his palace wearing an apron and pretending to sell pies. Yet this was done to please Peter: woe betide anyone except the tsar who derided his low birth. This vindictive hater beat up anyone who insulted him and pursued his enemies to the gallows with untiring malignity. He would outlive Peter – and rule Russia.

  Peter’s other early retainer was Menshikov’s opposite: Prince Fyodor Romodanovsky, was a saturnine soldier-courtier who was already fifty years old, ‘with the appearance of a monster and character of a wicked tyrant, drunk day in day out but more faithful to His Majesty than anyone’. He was devoted to Peter, who appointed him the first commander of his play regiment. Later he became Peter’s secret policeman and arch-torturer, regarded by foreigners as the second man of the regime. These two would be Peter’s chief lieutenants for the next twenty years. But it was technology, not men, that changed Peter’s life.

  In 1688 a boyar, Prince Yakov Dolgoruky, brought Peter a present from Paris: a sextant, an instrument for navigation. Peter was fascinated. No Russian knew how to use it until he showed it to a middle-aged Dutch trader named Franz Timmerman from the German Quarter. Together they explored the outhouses on his father’s estate at Izmailovo outside Moscow, where they found an old boat that the Dutchman recognized as English. Learning about ships from Timmerman, Peter recruited more foreigners with whom he repaired and relaunched the boat.

  Timmerman showed him round the redbrick Dutch houses and plain Lutheran churches of the German Quarter near Preobrazhenskoe where Russia’s foreign mercenaries and experts had been confined since 1652. After the dour rituals of the Kremlin, Peter fell in love with this new world of Dutch technology, Scotch whisky and German girls – and it mattered because his new friends were also Russia’s best soldiers. Patrick Gordon became Peter’s ‘loyal and brave’ mentor while a younger foreigner, Franz Lefort, a Swiss mercenary, became his ‘heart-friend’. Lefort, married to a cousin of Gordon’s, taught his young friend about Western artillery and tactics. He introduced him to Western girls and they shared the taste and the constitution for long nights of drinking in Lefort’s house. Their drunken coterie became known as his Jolly Company. Age never figured in Peter’s friendships: Lefort was thirty-four, but Peter was maturing fast.

  Peter’s carousing with Lefort worried his mother: it was time for him to marry. While she (advised by Streshnev) looked for a modest Russian girl to save him from the German wenches, Peter was learning the Western art of war, training 10,000 soldiers, decked out in German-style uniforms, green for the Preobrazhensky, sky-blue for the Semyonovsky. In 1685, he himself helped dig Pressburg, a small fortress for his war games on Moscow’s River Iauza. In his manoeuvres, he appointed General Ivan Buturlin as ‘King of Poland’ and Romodanovsky as ‘King of Pressburg’.

  If Peter’s regiments appeared playful, that was an illusion. Now he had his own little army to serve as his praetorians. Sophia was threatened not so much by the numbers – she herself commanded 25,000 musketeers – as by Peter’s vigorous maturity. Soon he was bound to demand power for himself.5

  On 22 February 1687, the two tsars saw off Field Marshal Golitsyn and his army after a mass in the Dormition Cathedral. Sophia watched her lover from the tsarina’s throne and accompanied him to the gates of the Kremlin. Golitsyn was ‘a greater statesman than soldier’ and was reluctant to leave Moscow – but, pressed by Peter’s allies, he had to accept the poisoned chalice of this Tatar expedition.

  Accompanied by Gordon and Lefort, Golitsyn marched south, meeting up with 50,000 Cossacks, but the path to Crimea passed through a wilderness. When he was 130 miles from Perekop, the narrow isthmus into Crimea, Golitsyn found himself in ‘a dreadful predicament’, as General Gordon put it, horses dying, soldiers sick. Golitsyn ‘was beside himself’, wrote Lefort, ‘and he wept most bitterly’. Golitsyn retreated. No sooner had he left than the Tatar cavalry reappeared to raid Poland. Golitsyn returned to Moscow, knowing that he would have to go back to Tatary.

  Peter was a problem and Sophia started to look for solutions. One was to find a wife for the other tsar, Ivan – but who would marry this babbling invalid with the flitting eyes? Could he actually father a child? In January 1684, Sophia and Miloslavsky the Scorpion held a brideshow that was merely a cloak for the selection of their candidate: Praskovia Saltykova, the runner-up in Tsar Fyodor’s last brideshow. But understandably this outspoken girl was not keen: she said she would rather die than marry Tsar Ivan, but that very month she did marry him. No one was surprised when there was no sign of children.

  A better idea was for Sophia to become tsarina in her own right. She asked her most loyal henchman, Fyodor Shaklovity, to canvass support. Rising from peasant stock to become a secretary in Alexei’s Secret Office, she promoted him to chief of the Musketeers Office. But the musketeers were not keen to crown a woman.

  During 1688, as Golitsyn prepared his second expedition, Peter approached his sixteenth birthday and started
to show his power: he had his Naryshkin uncles promoted, attended the Council and borrowed foreign troops for his regiments. He started to build a small play fleet on a nearby lake.

  Meanwhile the two tsars were in a fecundity race, encouraged by their backers. After five years, Ivan V and Praskovia had produced no children. Peter’s mother Natalya held the traditional but now obsolete brideshow for him to ‘select’ the bride of her choice, Eudoxia Lopukhina, daughter of a family close to the Naryshkins. On 27 January 1689, Peter and Eudoxia were married. On 21 March, to general amazement, Tsar Ivan’s first child, a girl, was born. Three daughters survived to adulthood – and the middle one, Anna, would become empress of Russia. Sometimes necessity is the father of invention: cynics assigned this late harvest of children to Praskovia’s lover Vasily Yushkov.

  If Ivan V produced a boy, Sophia might be able to hold off Peter. In the meantime, a victory would justify her rule. In May, when Golitsyn and his army reached Perekop, he was constantly harassed by the mounted Tatar archers whom he was unable to bring to battle. Some 20,000 men died of disease and starvation. Forced to retreat, he fought off the Tatar cavalry in skirmishes that he claimed as victories – to the delight of his mistress. ‘My joy, my light,’ she praised him.