On 23 November, Peter celebrated Menshikov’s nameday, then went on from the prince’s palace to the house of an English shipbuilder. There Peter suddenly turned on his friend: ‘Well, Alexander, today I saw signs of your disloyalty. I raised you from nothing, but you’re raising yourself above me. I knew well you were robbing me and I permitted it, but now I’m well informed you’ve stolen millions.’ Catherine tried to intercede, but Peter retorted: ‘Madame, this isn’t your business.’
‘Father,’ the prince wept. ‘Everything is yours!’
‘You’re getting rich,’ answered Peter. ‘I’m getting poor. You’re a thief.’
Two days later, Peter arrested Menshikov’s henchmen, senators, governors and the secretary of the Admiralty Alexander Kikin, and appointed Dolgoruky, who had served so well at Poltava and the Pruth, to torture them and indict the prince. Apraxin and Golovkin admitted their corruption but were forgiven. On 6 April 1715, three of Menshikov’s associates were executed. Menshikov himself was colossally fined. Dolgoruky and the aristocrats now dominated government. Just when it seemed that his favourite could lose his head, the tsar was distracted by the tragedy of his own son.4
Alexei was no better a husband to his wife Charlotte than Peter had been to Eudoxia. But this was partly Peter’s fault: he demanded Alexei accompany him to war, leaving Charlotte behind alone and miserable. Peter ordered her back to Petersburg, but the teenager, terrified of the tsar, panicked and ran back to her parental home, where Peter himself came to find her. ‘We would never have thwarted your wish to see your family,’ he soothed her, ‘if only you’d informed us beforehand.’ Peter settled the couple in Petersburg where Alexei indulged in furious drunken bouts then abandoned Charlotte so that he could recover in Carlsbad. When she gave birth to his daughter, he never wrote to her. ‘No one knows where he is,’ Charlotte wept. On his return, Alexei fell in love with a teenaged Finnish serfgirl, Afrosina Fyodorova, captured in the war, and moved the buxom redhead into his marital palace. Yet, despite Alexei’s alcoholic collapses, Charlotte became pregnant again. She was not the only one: Peter’s wife Catherine was also expecting a child. If she gave birth to a son, that would make Peter less dependent on the tsarevich.
As Peter waited for the births,* he fell ill and brooded over Alexei, suspecting that his son was opposed to his entire vision for Russia. In Petersburg, on 11 October, he wrote a letter to Alexei commanding him to mend his ‘obstinacy and ill-nature’ or ‘I will deprive you of the succession as one cuts off a useless member.’ Peter would have preferred to leave Russia to a ‘worthy stranger than to my own unworthy son’. On 12 October in Petersburg, Charlotte gave birth to Alexei’s son, whom she named Peter – but she fell ill with fever. Sick himself, Peter visited her in his wheelchair – just before she died. On the 27th, the day of Charlotte’s funeral, Peter delivered his ultimatum to Alexei, and the very next day Catherine gave birth to a son who was also named Peter, known as Petrushka – finally, an heir to replace Alexei. ‘God grant we may see him grow up,’ Peter wrote to Catherine, ‘rewarding us for our former grief about his brothers.’ In a matter of days, Peter had gone from having one unsatisfactory heir to three.
Peter ordered artillery salvoes and placed casks of beer on the streets where tsar and people got ‘inhumanly drunk’ for days. Alexei consulted Dolgoruky about how to react to his father’s ultimatum. Peter was feeling old (he was forty-four) – Catherine sent him spectacles ‘to help me with my old age’ – and suffered from fevers and fits so grave that he was given the Last Sacraments. ‘I am a man,’ Peter warned Alexei, ‘and I must die.’ Peter’s favourites resented his tyranny but even more they feared that, when he died, the ferocious Menshikov would rule as regent. They insured themselves by cultivating the heir.
Dolgoruky interceded with Peter to let the boy retire to an estate and afterwards boasted to Alexei, ‘I’ve saved you from the block by speaking to your father.’ But Alexei’s chief adviser was Alexander Kikin, who had managed the navy and was so close to the tsar that he called him ‘Dedushka’ – grandpa – until he was temporarily dismissed for corruption. Positioning himself to be Alexei’s future minister, Kikin advised him to flee to Germany: ‘I’ll find you somewhere to hide.’ Alexei started to boast to his mistress Afrosina that a revolt against Peter would break out soon, supported by much of the Senate and by others who backed him or hated Menshikov.
Father and son brooded. At a party, Peter opened up to the Danish ambassador: if a monarch had risked his life to create a respected state, should he leave it to ‘a fool who would begin the destruction’ of all his achievements? ‘If gangrene starts in his finger,’ said Peter, offering his thumb to the ambassador, ‘would I not be obliged to have it cut off?’
Alexei, the gangrenous thumb, wrote back asking to be disinherited. ‘You rather hate my tasks which I perform for my people,’ Peter replied bitterly on 19 January 1716, ‘and you will be the destroyer of them . . . Either change your ways or be a monk. Give immediately your decision . . . And if you don’t, I will treat you as a malefactor.’
Peter departed for his second tour of Europe to form a coalition to destroy Sweden* and plan the ultimate dream – to marry his daughter to the greatest monarch in Europe.
Peter was away for more than year, but the demands of his ever more ambitious wars placed yet more pressure on the Senate to raise supplies at home. Finally Menshikov, who had been left in charge of Peter’s daughters and baby son, tore a shred off the senators and, displaying the energy that made him Peter’s indispensable servitor, himself supplied the army.
On 26 August, Peter told Alexei to either join him at war or enter a monastery, an order that forced the boy into a secret decision to defy his father, seek foreign help and escape the monastery. He must flee – but where?
On 26 September, Alexei, telling Menshikov that he was joining his father, borrowed cash and then left in disguise, adopting the incognito of ‘Kokhansky’, an officer, with just four retainers – one of whom was his mistress Afrosina in disguise as a pageboy. On the road near Libau, he bumped into his aunt, Peter’s half-sister Maria, to whom he tearfully admitted he was going to escape. ‘Your father will find you no matter where,’ she said – but she did not inform the tsar.
At Libau, the tsarevich met Kikin, who suggested that he flee to Vienna, where Emperor Karl VI, married to his late wife Charlotte’s sister, would help him. But in throwing himself on to the mercy of strangers, Alexei betrayed Peter. As they parted, Kikin warned: ‘Remember, if your father sends someone to persuade you to return, don’t do it. He’ll have you publicly beheaded.’
As Alexei escaped, Peter was in Copenhagen organizing his most ambitious campaign so far: he assumed command of an Anglo-Danish-Russian fleet to storm mainland Sweden, but the coalition fell apart and Peter travelled towards Amsterdam on his way to Paris.
In October, Peter realized that his heir had vanished. He tried to trace Alexei, fearing that he was lurking among the Russian armies where he could plan a coup. But no one had seen him.
On 10 November, the imperial vice-chancellor in Vienna was awoken in the middle of the night by the arrival of a visitor who claimed to be Tsarevich Alexei. When the lachrymose traveller turned out to be the real thing, Emperor Karl found himself in possession of a useful but dangerous diplomatic pawn which, played clumsily, could lead to war with Peter. In conversations with the Austrian ministers and in private with his ‘pageboy’ Afrosina, Alexei expressed the hope that the Russian army in Mecklenburg would revolt and march into Russia, and that, once he had seized the throne, he would move the capital back to Moscow, abandon the fleet and launch no more wars. He bragged that the emperor would back him. Meanwhile the Austrians secretly moved Alexei to Ehrenberg Castle, in the Tyrol, a few days away from Vienna.
*
In December 1716, Peter, who was in Amsterdam confined to bed with a fever, learned that Alexei was in Vienna; he wrote to the emperor to demand his return and ordered his ambassador to find h
im. Catherine, pregnant again, had stopped near the Dutch border. On 2 January 1717, Peter celebrated the birth of a son: ‘God has blessed us by giving us another recruit.’ Sons were always ‘recruits’ for the military tsar. ‘As soon as possible I’ll come to you,’ but the next day Peter heard that the baby had died. ‘How suddenly our joy has changed to grief . . . What answer can I give you except that of the long-suffering Job? The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away.’
In May, Peter, accompanied by Dolgoruky and his blackamoor Hannibal, arrived in Paris, where a regent, Philippe duc d’Orléans, ruled on behalf of the seven-year-old Louis XV. Peter offered an alliance sealed by the marriage of his seven-year-old daughter Elizaveta to the king. The French were respectful but privately untempted by a child born out of wedlock to a peasant girl. When the tsar met the little king (‘who is only a finger or two taller than our Luke [a dwarf],’ he told Catherine), he lifted him up and threw him in the air, shocking the French courtiers. He stayed at Versailles – where he was underwhelmed by the palace but overwhelmed by the fountains which he would soon emulate. But his entourage entertained him by inviting a troupe of whores for an orgiastic rout. Catherine teased him about the girls. ‘I got your letter full of jokes,’ Peter replied with heavy-footed humour. ‘You say I’ll be looking about for a lady but that wouldn’t be at all becoming to my old age.’
‘I think Your Worship is distracted by a multitude of fountains and other amusements and forgets us,’ she joked in a cascade of double entendres. ‘Though I think you have found new laundresses, your old laundress hasn’t forgotten you!’
‘As for laundresses,’ he replied, ‘I’m not that type and besides I’m old.’
In June, Peter departed France, leaving Hannibal to study artillery and mathematics, and took the waters at Spa, but he was ‘already bored drinking just water and a bit of wine’ though he was accompanied by a French courtesan who may have been responsible for the fact that the tsar was suffering from venereal disease. ‘The doctors ban domestic fun,’ complained Peter to his wife. ‘I’ve sent my mistress back for I wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation if I kept her here.’ Catherine reminded him that he had sent away his mistress because she had venereal disease: ‘I hope the mistress’s admirer [that is, Peter] will not arrive in the same state of health as she did! From which God preserve us!’ Catherine missed him: ‘If the old man was here, we’d soon have another kid!’ she wrote. ‘How lonely I am without you,’ he replied – and soon after they were reunited she fell pregnant again.*
All this time, the humiliating treachery of his son gnawed at Peter. He had despatched a tough officer of giant stature Alexander Rumiantsev to hunt down Alexei and bring him home. As the Austrians moved Alexei towards Naples, Rumiantsev followed. Soon Peter heard the news that Alexei was now hidden in the Castle of St Elmo in Naples.
In July he sent his trusted factotum Peter Tolstoy to join Rumiantsev and secure Alexei, whatever it took. Tolstoy, now seventy-two, a vulpine master of the black arts of politics, had been ambassador in Constantinople, but in 1682, as a young man, he had served the Miloslavskys raising the musketeers against Peter’s family. When Tolstoy redeemed himself by enrolling as the oldest student of shipbuilding, Peter forgave but never forgot, taking Tolstoy’s head in his hands: ‘Oh head, head!’ he teased menacingly. ‘You wouldn’t be on your shoulders if you were not so wise.’
In Vienna, Tolstoy convinced Emperor Karl to encourage a family reconciliation.
On 26 September 1717, at the Neapolitan viceroy’s palace, Alexei was horrified to meet the cadaverous Tolstoy and the lugubrious Rumiantsev, who handed him a letter: ‘Your disobedience and contempt are known throughout the world,’ Peter wrote. If Alexei returned, ‘I assure you and promise to God I won’t punish you . . . If you refuse, I as a father give my everlasting curse and, as a sovereign, declare you traitor.’
Alexei hesitated. Tolstoy understood that Alexei’s fragile confidence rested on his love for Afrosina. The viceroy placed the redhead in Tolstoy’s clutches. He suborned her with promises and presents until she agreed to advise Alexei to return. On 3 October, Alexei consented, providing he could retire to a country estate and marry her.
Peter, back in Petersburg, accepted these terms, but he was alarmed to find that his baby son Petrushka was sickly. While he waited for Alexei to arrive, Peter investigated his corrupt magnates Menshikov and Sheremetev. To show that no one was above the law, he had a Guards officer and prince executed in public. Meanwhile, scrapping the old Muscovite offices and copying the Swedish administration, he reorganized the government into ‘collegia’,* but, without a local system beneath them, his Senate and collegia continued to host pugilistic squabbles between his magnates. Infuriated, Peter compared them to ‘fishwives’. The courtiers were amazed that Alexei was returning: ‘Did you hear that the fool tsarevich is coming home and they’re bringing Afrosina?’ muttered Dolgoruky. ‘He’ll get a coffin not a wedding!’
On 21 January 1718, Alexei, guarded by Tolstoy and Rumiantsev, crossed the Russian border. Furious father and anxious son converged on Moscow for their grim showdown.5
On 3 February 1718, Peter and his grandees, guarded by three battalions of loyal Preobrazhensky Guards, muskets armed, watched as the prisoner Alexei was escorted by Tolstoy into the Kremlin’s Grand Dining Hall. The son fell to his knees, confessed his guilt and begged for mercy. Peter offered it – if he renounced the throne and named traitors. Father and son retired to a side room where the latter denounced his associates and renounced the succession. Then Peter declared his baby Petrushka as the heir, while Shafirov read out Alexei’s pardon.
The next day, appointing Tolstoy as chief of a new Secret Chancellery of Investigations, Peter launched a case against his son whom he surely saw as an existential threat. But he must also have personally hated him. Questioned by Tolstoy, Alexei named Kikin and Dolgoruky as his supporters. Only Afrosina knew nothing. Peter launched a purge of his disloyal retainers. In Petersburg, Menshikov arrested Kikin and Dolgoruky. Kikin and Alexei’s servants were tortured by Tolstoy and his assistant Andrei Ushakov while Peter watched.
The tsar struggled to understand how Kikin had betrayed him: ‘How could a clever man like you go against me?’ he asked during the torture session.
‘The mind needs space if you restrict it,’ answered Kikin.
Dolgoruky’s betrayal must have stung Peter: this hero of Poltava and Pruth, godfather of his daughter Elizaveta, resented the tsar’s despotism. ‘If it weren’t for the tsarina’s [Catherine’s] influence on the sovereign’s cruel character,’ he had told Alexei, ‘our life would be impossible.’ Dolgoruky confessed to sympathy for the tsarevich without torture. Here we get a hint of just how much Peter’s Jolly Company of henchmen secretly resented his tyranny. Yet even within the sanctum of ruling families, the price of betraying the tsar was death.
Peter suspected that his ex-wife Eudoxia had known of her son’s plans. Now forty-four, she had been a nun for nineteen years – or so Peter thought. When she was investigated, he discovered that Dosifei, bishop of Rostov, had told her that when Alexei was tsar she would be tsarina again. Eudoxia had stopped wearing the veil long before and had taken a lover, an officer named Stepan Glebov who, under torture, refused to admit treason. The bishop of Rostov was arrested and accused of wishing for the tsar’s death. Once again, Eudoxia’s Lopukhin family was at the centre of the opposition: her brother Avraam was implicated.
On 14 March, before a vast crowd in Red Square, the bishop and three of the servants were broken with hammers and left to die on the wheel. Two noblewomen, including one of Catherine’s ladies, Princess Anastasia Golitsyna, were flogged. Glebov, Eudoxia’s lover, was knouted, burned with red-hot irons and nailed on to a spiked plank for two days. Kikin was shattered on the wheel, revived, broken again and left to suffer until the second day when Peter arrived to inspect his victims. Kikin begged Peter for mercy. The tsar had him put out of his misery by beheading, but Glebov r
efused to confess and Peter allowed the next stage of his punishment to go ahead: impalement with a sharpened stake up his anus. Peter ordered that he be dressed in furs to make sure he lived longer and suffered more. Avraam Lopukhin was executed too; Dolgoruky escaped the axe but, exiled to Kazan, his downfall was absolute. In fact he would return, only to fall again, enjoying one of the most dramatic careers of this rollercoaster century.
On 19 March, Peter, travelling with his son and Tolstoy, returned to Petersburg where Alexei was confined to the next-door mansion, guarded twenty-four hours a day by soldiers with lit fuses over loaded cannon.
Alexei begged Catherine to persuade Peter to let him marry Afrosina. Instead she was arrested. Alexei and the girl were separately interrogated by Peter. Afrosina damned her lover with revelations of his hopes for an army rebellion, his plans to overturn all of Peter’s achievements and his letters to the emperor denouncing his father. Struggling now for his life, Alexei admitted writing letters while drunk but insisted that, though he expected Peter to die within two years, he would not have rebelled in his lifetime. But on 16 May Alexei broke, naming Sheremetev and even the prince-caesar as sympathizers. Peter took both Afrosina and Alexei out to his cottage, Mon Plaisir, on his new estate Peterhof, outside Petersburg, and interrogated them again. Peter focused on whether Alexei was planning to rebel while his father was still alive: if the army had mutinied, Alexei admitted, ‘and if they’d called me, even in your lifetime, I would have joined the rebels’.
The Romanovs Page 16