Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  In 1660, the new Stuart king, Charles II, was restored to the throne of England, and Gordon was ready to go home. Before he sailed, however, a Russian diplomat in Europe made him a glittering offer: three years' service in the Russian army, beginning with a commission as a major. Gordon accepted, only to find, on reaching Moscow, that the time clause of his contract was meaningless; as a useful soldier, he would not be allowed to leave. When he applied, he was threatened with denunciation as a Polish spy and a Roman Catholic and menaced with Siberia. Temporarily accepting his fate, he settled into Moscow life. Learning quickly that his best chance of promotion lay in marrying a Russian woman, he found one, and together they produced a family. The years went by and Gordon served Tsar Alexis, Tsar Fedor and the Regent Sophia, fighting against Poles, Turks, Tatars and Bashkirs. He became a general and twice returned to England and Scotland, although the Muscovites made sure that this enormously valuable personage would come back to them by keeping his wife and children in Russia. In 1686, James II personally asked Sophia to release Gordon from Russian service so that he might return home; this royal request was refused, and for a while the Regent and Vasily Golitsyn were so angry with the General that there was more talk of ruin and Siberia. Then King James wrote again declaring that he wished to appoint Gordon as his ambassador in Moscow; the appointment was also refused by the Regent, who declared that General Gordon could not serve as ambassador because he was still on service with the Russian army and, indeed, was about to leave on a campaign against the Tatars. Thus, in 1689, Gordon, at fifty-four, was respected by all, enormously rich (his salary was a thousand roubles a year, whereas the Lutheran pastor was paid only sixty) and the preeminent foreign soldier in the German Suburb. When, as head of the foreign-affairs corps, he mounted his horse and rode to Troitsky to join Peter, it was the final blow to Sophia's hopes.

  It is not surprising that Gordon—courageous, widely traveled, battle-seasoned, loyal and canny—would appeal to Peter. What is surprising is that eighteen-year-old Peter appealed to Gordon. Peter was tsar, to be sure, but Gordon had served other tsars without any special feelings of friendship. In Peter, however, the old soldier found an adept and admiring pupil, and, acting as a kind of unofficial military tutor, he instructed Peter in all aspects of warfare. During the five years after Sophia's fall, Gordon became not only Peter's hired general, but a friend.

  For Gordon, as it turned out, Peter's friendship was decisive. Now the intimate friend and counselor of the youthful monarch, he gave up his dream of going back to pass his final years in the Highlands. He accepted the fact that he would die in Russia, and indeed, in 1699, when the old soldier finally died, Peter stood by his bed and closed his eyes.

  In 1690, soon after Sophia's overthrow, Peter became friendly with another foreigner of a quite different kind, the gay and gregarious Swiss soldier of fortune Francis Lefort. Over the next decade, Lefort was to become Peter's boon companion and friend of the heart. In 1690, when Peter was eighteen, Francis Lefort was thirty-four, almost as tall as Peter, but huskier than the narrow-shouldered Tsar. He was handsome with a large, sharp nose and expressive and intelligent eyes. A portrait made of him a few years later shows him against a background of Peter's ships; he is clean-shaven, with a lace scarf around his neck, and his full, curled wig falls onto the shoulders of a finely wrought armor breastplate which bears the crested insignia of Peter's double-headed eagle.

  Francis Lefort was born in Geneva in 1656, the son of a prosperous merchant, and through his charm and wit he soon became a member of its amiable society. His taste for the merry life quickly snuffed out any desire to become a merchant like his father, and an enforced term as a clerk to another merchant in Marseilles made him so unhappy that he fled to Holland to join the Protestant armies fighting Louis XIV. There, still only nineteen, the young adventurer heard tales of opportunity in Russia, and he embarked for Archangel. Arriving in Russia in 1675, he found no office available and lived for two years without work in the German Suburb. He was never dull—people liked his irrepressible gaiety, and eventually his career picked up. He became a captain in the Russian army, married a cousin of General Gordon and was noticed by Prince Vasily Golitsyn. He served in Golitsyn's two campaigns against the Crimea, but when Gordon led the foreign officers away from Sophia to join Peter at Troitsky, Lefort was in the van. Soon after the Regent's fall, the thirty-four-year-old Lefort was important enough to be promoted to major general.

  Peter was captivated by this formidably charming man of the world. Here was someone who sparkled in precisely the way to catch Peter's youthful eye. Lefort was not profound, but his mind worked quickly and he loved to talk. His speech was filled .with the West, its life, manners and technology. As a drinking companion and ballroom cavalier, Lefort had no equal. He excelled at organizing banquets, suppers and balls, with music, drink and female dancing partners. From 1690 on, Lefort was constantly in Peter's company; they dined together two or three times a week and saw each other daily, increasingly, Lefort endeared himself by his frankness, openness and generosity. Where Gordon gave Peter seasoned advice and sensible counsel, Lefort gave gaiety, friendship, sympathy and understanding. Peter relaxed in Lefort's affection, and when the Tsar became suddenly inflamed at someone or something, lashing out physically at all around him, oniy Lefort was able to approach and seize the young monarch, gripping Peter in his powerful arms and holding him until he calmed.

  In considerable part, Lefort's success was due to his unselfishness. Although he loved luxury and its trappings, he was never grasping and took no steps to ensure that he would not be impoverished on the following day—a quality that endeared him even more to Peter, who saw to it that all Lefort's needs were amply cared for. Lefort's debts were paid, he was presented with a palace and funds to run it, and he was promoted rapidly to full general, admiral and ambassador. Most important to Peter, Lefort genuinely loved his life in Russia. He returned as a visitor to his native Geneva, bearing many titles and the Tsar's personal testimony to the city fathers of the esteem in which he held this Genevois. But, unlike Gordon, Lefort never dreamed of returning permanently to his birthplace. "My heart," he told his fellow Swiss, "is wholly in Moscow."

  For Peter, walking into Lefort's house was like stepping onto a different planet. Here were wit, charm, hospitality, entertainment, relaxation and usually the exciting presence of women. Sometimes, they were the respectable wives and pretty daughters of the foreign merchants and soldiers, dressed in the latest Western gowns. More often, they were rollicking, unshockable wenches whose role was to see that no man was gloomy; buxom, sturdy women who did not take offense at barracks language or the admiring touch of rough male hands. Peter, knowing only the stiffly wooden female creatures produced by the terem, entered this world with delight. Guided by Lefort, he soon found himself contentedly sitting in a haze of tobacco smoke, a tankard of beer on the table, a pipe in his mouth and his arm around the waist of a giggling girl. His mother's remonstrances, the Patriarch's censure, his wife's tears were all forgotten.

  Before long, Peter's eye fell on a particular one of these young women. She was a flaxen-haired German girl named Anna Mons, the daughter of a Westphalian wine merchant. Her reputation was blemished; she had already been conquered by Lefort. Alexander Gordon, the general's son, described her as "exceedingly beautiful" and when Peter revealed his interest in her blond hair, bold laugh and flashing eyes, Lefort readily ceded his conquest to the Tsar. The easy-mannered beauty was exactly what Peter wanted: She could match him drink for drink and joke for joke. Anna Mons became his mistress.

  There was little substance behind Anna's spontaneous laughter, and her fondness for Peter was powerfully stimulated by her ambition. She used her favors to obtain his favors, and Peter showered her with gems, a country palace and an estate. Blinded to protocol, he appeared with her in the company of Russian boyars and foreign diplomats. Naturally, Anna began to hope for more. She knew that Peter could not bear the sight of his wife, and with the
passage of time she grew to believe that she might one day replace the Tsaritsa on the throne. Peter thought of it, but saw no need for marriage. The liaison was enough; as it was, it lasted twelve years.

  Most of Peter's companions, of course, were not foreigners but Russians. Some were friends of his childhood who had stayed at his side through the long exile at Preobrazhenskoe. Others were older men with distinguished service and ancient names, attracted to Peter despite his wild behavior and foreign friends because he was the anointed Tsar. Prince Michael Cherkassky, an elderly, bearded man devoted to the old ways, sought Peter out of a sense of patriotism, unwilling to watch from a distance while the youthful autocrat flung himself about with foreigners. A similar spirit motivated Prince Peter Prozorovsky, another austere and elderly sage, and Fedor Golovin, Russia's most experienced diplomat, who had negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China. When Prince Fedor Romodanovsky attached himself to the youthful Tsar, it was with a sense of devotion which would know no limit. He hated the Streltsy, who had murdered his father in the bloodbath of 1682. Later, as Governor of Moscow and as Chief of Police, he would rule with an iron hand. And when the Streltsy rose again in 1698, Romodanovsky would descend on them like a pitiless avenging angel.

  It was a strange assortment at first, this motley collection of distinguished gray beards, youthful roisterers and foreign adventurers. But time shaped them into a cohesive group that called itself the Jolly Company and went everywhere with Peter. It was a vagabond, itinerant sort of life, roaming the countryside, dropping in unannounced to eat and sleep with a surprised nobleman. In Peter's wake were anywhere from 80 to 200 followers.

  An average banquet for the Jolly Company began at noon and ended at dawn. The meals were gargantuan, but there were intervals between courses for smoking, for games of bowls and ninepins, for archery matches and shooting at targets with muskets. Speeches and toasts were accompanied not only by cheers and shouts but by blasts of trumpets and salvos of artillery. When a band was present, Peter played the drums. In the evenings, there was dancing and, often, an exhibition of fireworks. When sleep overcame a reveler, he simply rolled off his bench onto the floor and snored away. Half the company might sleep while the rest roared. Sometimes these parties extended into a second or third day, with guests sleeping side by side on the floor, rising to consume further prodigious quantities of food and drink and then sinking back again into lazy slumber.

  An obvious requisite for membership in Peter's Jolly Company was a capacity for drink, but there was nothing new or abnormal about this intemperance in Peter's friends. Since time immemorial, drink had been—in the words of the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev in the tenth century—"the joy of the Russes." Successive generations of Western travelers and residents had found drunkenness almost universal in Russia. Peasants, priests, boyars, tsar: all were participants. According to Adam Olearius, who visited Muscovy in the time of Peter's grandfather Tsar Michael, no Russian ever willfully missed a chance to take a drink. To be durnk was an essential feature of Russian hospitality. Proposing toasts that no one dare refuse, host and guests gulped down cup after cup, turning their beakers upside down on their heads to prove that they were empty. Unless the guests were sent home dead drunk, the evening was considered a failure.

  Peter's father, Tsar Alexis, his piety notwithstanding, was as Russian as the next man. Dr. Collins, Alexis' physician, noted how pleased his employer was to see his boyars "handsomely fuddled." The boyars, in turn, were always eager to see foreign ambassadors as drunk as possible. Common people drank also, less to be sociable than to forget. Their goal was to reach a stupor of unconsciousness, putting the unhappy world around them out of mind as rapidly as possible. In grimy taverns, men and women alike pawned their valuables and even their clothes to keep the vodka mugs coming. "Women," reported another Westerner, "are often the first to become raving mad with immoderate draughts of brandy and are to be seen, half-naked and shameless, in almost all the streets."

  Alexis' roistering son and his Jolly Company fully upheld these Russian traditions. Although much of the alcohol consumed at their revels was in the milder form of beer or kvas, the intake was vast and continuous—Gordon in his diary speaks often of the amount Peter has drunk and of the difficulties that he, a middle-aged man, is having in keeping up. But it was Lefort who taught Peter to drink really heavily. Of Lefort, the German philosopher Leibniz, who observed the Swiss when he traveled to the West with Peter on the Great Embassy, was to write, "[Alcohol] never overcomes him, but he always continues master of his reason ... no one can rival him ... he does not leave his pipe and glass till three hours after sunrise." Eventually, this drinking took its toll. Lefort died a relatively young man of forty-three;

  Peter died at fifty-two. When he was young, though, these wild bacchanalia did not leave Peter exhausted and debauched, but actually seemed to refresh him for the next day's work. He could drink all night with his comrades and then, while they snored in drunken slumber, rise at dawn and leave them to begin work as a carpenter or shipbuilder. Few could match his pace.

  In time, Peter decided not to leave the arrangements for these banquets to chance. He enjoyed dining two or three times a week at Lefort's house, but it was impossible for Lefort with his limited income to arrange the complicated and expensive entertainment which the Tsar expected, so Peter built for him a larger hall to accommodate several hundred guests. Eventually, even this became too small, and the Tsar therefore erected a handsome stone mansion, magnificently furnished with tapestries, wine cellars and a banquet hall large enough for 1,500 people. Lefort was the nominal owner, but in fact the mansion became a kind of clubhouse for the Jolly Company. When Peter was absent, and even when Lefort was absent, those members of the Jolly Company remaining in Moscow gathered at this house to dine, drink and pass the night, their expenses defrayed by the Tsar.

  Gradually, from spontaneous drinking bouts and banquets, the Company proceeded to more organized buffoonery and masquerades. To most of his comrades Peter had, in sportive moments, given nicknames, and these nicknames were gradually elevated into masquerade titles. The boyar Ivan Buturlin was given the title "The Polish King" because in one of the military maneuvers at Preobrazhenskoe he was the commander of the "enemy" army. Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the other commander and defender of the play fortress town of Pressburg, was promoted to "King of Pressburg" and then to "Prince-Caesar." Peter addressed him as "Your Majesty" and "My Lord King" and signed his letters to Romodanovsky, "Your bondsman and eternal slave, Peter." This charade, in which Peter mocked his own autocratic rank and title, continued throughout the reign. After the Battle of Poltava, the defeated Swedish officers were led into the presence of the "Tsar"—who was in fact Romodanovsky. Only a few of the Swedes, none of whom had ever seen the real Peter, wondered who was the extremely tall Russian officer standing behind the Mock-Prince-Caesar.

  But Peter's parody of temporal power was mild compared to the bizarre mockery he and his comrades appeared to make of the church. The Jolly Company was organized into "The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters," with a Mock- “Prince-Pope," a college of cardinals and a suite of bishops, archimandrites, priests and deacons. Peter himself, although only a deacon, took charge of drawing up the rules and instructions for this strange assembly. With the same enthusiasm with which he was later to draw up laws for the Russian empire, he carefully defined the rituals and ceremonies of the Drunken Synod. The first commandment was that "Bacchus be worshipped with strong and honorable drinking and receive his just dues." In practical terms, this meant that "all goblets were to be emptied promptly and that members were to get drunk every day and never go to bed sober." At these riotous "services," the Prince-Pope, who was Peter's old tutor, Nikita Zotov, drank everyone's health and then blessed the kneeling congregation by making the sign of the cross over them with two long Dutch pipes.

  On church holidays, the games became more elaborate. At Christmas, more than 200 men, singing and whistling, would
travel around Moscow leaning out of overcrowded sleighs. At their head, riding in a sleigh drawn by twelve bald men, rode the Mock-Prince-Pope. His costume was sewn with playing cards, he wore a tin hat and he was perched atop a barrel. Choosing the richer noblemen and merchants to honor with their caroling, they swarmed into their houses, expecting food and drink as thanks for their uninvited songs. During the first week of Lent, ajpother procession, this time of "penitents," followed the Prince-Pope through the city. The Company, wearing outlandish costumes inside out, rode on the backs of donkeys and bullocks or sat in sleighs pulled by goats, pigs or even bears.

  A marriage in Peter's circle stirred the Jolly Company to special efforts. In 1695, when Peter's favorite jester, Jacob Turgenev, married a sexton's daughter, the feasts and celebrations lasted three days. The wedding took place in a field outside Preobrazhenskoe, and Turgenev and his bride arrived for the ceremony in the Tsar's finest court carriage. Behind them came a procession of leading boyars wearing fantastic costumes—hats of birchbark, boots of straw, gloves made of mouse skins, coats covered with squirrel tails and cats' paws; some were on foot and others rode in carts drawn by oxen, goats or pigs. The celebrations ended with a triumphal entry into Moscow with the newly married couple mounted together on the back of a camel. "The procession," Gordon comments, "was extraordinary fine," but the joke may have been carried too far because a few days later the bridegroom, Turgenev, suddenly died in the night.

  The Drunken Synod, created when Peter was eighteen, continued its tipsy existence until the end of the Tsar's reign, with the mature man who had become an emperor continuing to engage in the same coarse buffoonery begun by an unbridled adolescent. This behavior, which foreign diplomats found vulgar and scandalous, seemed blasphemous to many of Peter's subjects. It added substance to the growing belief of the conservative Orthodox faithful that Peter was himself the Antichrist, and they waited eagerly for the bolt from heaven which would strike down the blasphemer. In fact, it was partially in order to provoke, dismay and degrade the hierarchy of the church, and especially the new Patriarch Adrian, that Peter had originally instituted the Drunken Synod. His mother and the conservative boyars had had their victory over his own candidate, the more enlightened Marcellus of Pskov—so be it!—but Peter retaliated by appointing his own Mock-Patriarch. The parody of the church heirarchy not only gave vent to his own resentment, but, as the years went by, reflected his continuing impatience with the whole institution of the church in Russia.