Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  If desired, the knout could be applied in an even more terrible way. The victim's hands were tied behind his back and a long rope was tied to his wrists and then passed over the branch of a tree or an overhead beam. Pulling down on the rope meant hoisting the victim into the air with his arms revolving backward the wrong way in their shoulder sockets. To make sure that the arms were pulled completely out of joint, a heavy log or other weight was sometimes tied to the victim's feet. With the victim already in agony, the knoutmaster then flailed the distended back with the designated number of strokes, whereupon the victim was lowered to the ground and his arms were wrenched back into joint again. In some cases, this torture would be repeated on a weekly basis until the victim confessed.

  Torture by fire was common—sometimes alone, sometimes in combination with other tortures. In its simplest form, interrogation by fire meant that the victim's "hands and feet are tied and he is fixed on a long pole, as upon a spit, and he has his raw back roasted over the fire and he is examined and called upon to confess." In some cases, a man who had just been knouted was taken down and tied to this kind of pole, so that the back being roasted was already raw and bleeding from the whip. Or a man still suspended in the air after receiving the knout would have his bleeding back touched and probed with a red-hot iron.

  In general, executions in Russia were similar to those in other countries. Offenders were burned to death, hanged or beheaded. Victims were burned in the middle of a pile of logs filled with straw. Beheading required the victim to place his head on a block and submit to the blow of an axe or sword. This easy, instant death was sometimes made harder by first lopping off the hands and feet. Executions of this kind were so common, wrote one Dutch traveler, "that if one is performed at one end of town, in the other they seldom know anything of it." Counterfeiters were punished by taking their false coins, melting them down and pouring the molten metal down their throats. Rapists were castrated.

  Although public torture and execution were no novelty to any seventeenth-century European, what struck most visitors to Russia was the stoicism, "the unconquerable stubbornness" with which most Russians accepted these terrible agonies. They steadfastly resisted hideous pain, refusing to betray friends, and when condemned to death they went meekly and calmly to the gallows or block. An observer in Astrachan saw thirty rebels beheaded in less than half an hour. There was no noise or clamor. The condemned men simply went to the block and laid their heads in the pools of blood left by their predecessors. None even had his hands tied behind him.

  This incredible hardiness and unconquerable endurance of pain astonished not only foreigners but also Peter himself. Once, after a man had been tortured four times by knout and fire, Peter approached him in sheer wonder and asked how he could stand such great pain. The man was happy to talk about it and revealed to Peter the existence of a torture society of which he was a member. He explained that nobody was admitted without first being tortured, and that thereafter promotion within the society rested on being able to accept higher grades of torture. To this bizarre group, the knout was nothing. "The sharpest pain of all," he explained to Peter, "is when a burning coal is placed in the ear; nor is it less painful when the head is shaved and extremely cold water is let fall slowly drop by drop upon it from a height."

  More astonishing and even touching was the fact that sometimes the same Russians who could withstand the knout and fire and remain mute until death would break if handled with kindness. This happened with the man who told Peter of the torture society. He had refused to utter a word of confession although he had been tortured four times. Peter, seeing that he was invulnerable to pain, walked up to him and kissed him, saying, "it's no secret to me that you know about the plot against me. You have been punished enough. Now confess of your own accord out of the love you owe me as your sovereign. And I swear, by the God who has made me tsar, not only to completely pardon you, but in addition, as a special mark of my clemency, to make you a colonel." This unorthodox approach so unnerved and moved the prisoner that he took the Tsar in his arms and said, "For me, this is the greatest torture of all. There is no other way you could have made me speak." He told Peter everything, and the Tsar, true to the bargain, pardoned him and promoted him to colonel.

  The seventeenth century, like all the centuries before and since, was a time of hideous cruelty. Torture was practiced in all countries and for a variety of crimes, particularly those against the sovereign or the state. Usually, since the sovereign was the state, any form of opposition from assassination down to the mildest grumbling against him was classified as treason and punished accordingly. But a man could also be tortured and killed for attending the .wrong church or for picking a pocket.

  Throughout Europe, those who touched the person or the dignity of the king suffered the full fury of the law. In France, in 1613, the assassin of Henri IV was torn to pieces by four horses in the Place de 1'Hotel de Ville in front of a huge crowd of Parisians who brought their children and their picnic lunches. A sixty-year-old Frenchman had his tongue torn out and was sent to the galleys for insulting the Sun King. Ordinary criminals in France were beheaded, burned or broken alive on the wheel. In Italy, travelers complained of the public gallows: "We see so much human flesh along the highways that trips are disagreeable." In England, the "peine forte et dur" was applied to criminals: A board was placed on the victim's chest and, one by one, weights were added until breath and life were crushed out. The penalty for treason in England was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. In 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, "I went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered, which was done there, he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people at which there were great shouts of joy."

  Nor was cruel retribution restricted to political crimes. Witches were burned in England during Peter's lifetime and still were being hanged a century later. In 1692, six years before the Streltsy revolt, twenty young women and two dogs were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Through most of the eighteenth century, Englishmen were executed for stealing five shillings, and women were hanged for stealing a handkerchief. In the Royal Navy, infractions of discipline were commonly punished with a cat-o'-nine-tails. These floggings, which often resulted in death, were not abolished until 1881.

  All this is told to provide perspective. Few of us in in the twentieth century will wish to be hypocritically surprised at the barbarism of earlier times. Nations still execute traitors. Torture and mass executions still take place, both in war and in peace, made more efficient and more indiscriminate now by the instruments of modern technology. In our own time, the authorities of more than sixty nations, among them Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, Britons, Americans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Hungarians, Spaniards, Turks, Greeks, Brazilians, Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans. Iranians, Iraqis, Ugandans and Indonesians, have tortured on behalf of the state. Few centuries can claim a more hellish achievement than Auschwitz. Today, in psychiatric hospitals, Soviet political dissidents are tortured with destructive drugs designed not only to break down resistance but to subvert personality. And only modern technology can provide a spectacle such as the hanging of fourteen Jews in Bagdad's Liberation Square before a crowd of half a million . . . and, for those who couldn't be present, hours of television close-ups of the dangling bodies.

  In Peter's time, as in ours, torture was carried out to gather information, and public execution to deter further crimes. The fact that innocent men have confessed to escape further pain has never stopped torture, nor has the execution of criminals ever stopped crime. Undeniably, the state has a right to defend itself against people who break its laws, and perhaps even a duty to try to deter future infringements, but how far into repression and cruelty can a state or society descend before the means no longer justify the end? It is a question as old as political theory, and it will not be answered here. But it should be borne in mind
when we read what Peter did.

  At the Tsar's command, Prince Romodanovsky brought all the captured traitors to Preobrazhenskoe and constructed fourteen torture chambers to receive them. Six days a week (Sunday was a

  day of rest), week after week, in what became an assembly line of torture, all the surviving prisoners, 1,714 men, were examined. Half of September and most of October were spent in lashing and burning the Streltsy with knout and flame. Those who had already confessed to one charge were re-interrogated on another. As soon as one rebel had revealed some new bit of information, all those who had already been questioned were dragged back in for re-examination on this point. Those who had lost their strength and almost their minds under torture were handed over to doctors to be restored by treatment so that they might be questioned further under new, excruciating tortures.

  Major Karpakov, deeply implicated as one of the leaders of the rebellion, after being knouted and having his back roasted by fire, lost the power to speak and fainted. Worried that he might die prematurely, Romodanovsky put him in the care of Peter's personal physician, Dr. Carbonari. As soon as he was restored, he was again subjected to torture. A second officer who had also lost the power to speak was handed over to Dr. Carbonari for rehabilitation. By mistake, the doctor left his knife behind in the cell after working over the prisoner. The officer, unwilling that his life, which he knew was almost ended, be restored so that he could suffer more tortures, seized the knife and tried to cut his own throat. But he was already too weak and could not cut deeply enough. Before he could do himself fatal damage, his hand went limp and he fainted. He was discovered, partially cured and returned to torture.

  All of Peter's principal friends and lieutenants were involved in the carnage. Men such as Romodanovsky, Boris Golitsyn, Shein, Streshnev, Peter Prozorovsky, Michael Cherkassky, Vladimir Dolgoruky, Ivan Troekurov, Fedor Shcherbatov and Peter's old tutor and Prince-Pope, Zotov, were chosen to participate, as a special mark of the Tsar's confidence. If the plot had spread and boyars were involved, Peter counted on these comrades to discover and faithfully report it. Peter himself, plagued by suspicion and fierce with anger, was often present and,-sometimes wielding his big, ivory-handled cane, personally questioned those who seemed most guilty.

  But the Streltsy did not break easily, and their sheer endurance sometimes drove the Tsar to rage. "While one accomplice or rebel was being tied to a rack," wrote Korb,

  his lamentations gave rise to a hope that truth might be pressed from him by torments; but no, for as soon as his body began to be stretched with the rope, besides the horrible cracking of his members which were being torn from their natural sockets, he remained mute, even when twenty strokes of the knout were superadded, as if the accumulation of his pain were too great to afflict the senses. All believed that the man must be crushed with excess of calamity to such a degree that he must have lost the power of moaning and of speech. So he was loosed from the infamous rack and rope, and then asked if he knew the persons present in the torture chamber. To the astonishment of all, he enumerated every one of them. But when they put a fresh question about the treason, once more he became utterly dumb, and did not break silence during a whole quarter of an hour, while he was roasted by a fire by the Tsar's command. The Tsar, tired at last of this exceedingly wicked stubbornness, furiously raised the stick which he happened to have in his hand, and thrust it so violently into his jaws— clenched in obstinate silence—to break mem open, and make him give tongue and speak. And these words too that fell from the raging man, "Confess, beast, confess!" loudly proclaimed how great was his wrath.

  Although the interrogations were supposedly conducted in secret, all Moscow knew that something terrible was happening. Yet, Peter was anxious to hide the savage work, especially from foreigners; aware of the reaction that this wave of terror would produce in the Western courts he had just visited, he attempted to seal off his torture chambers from Western eyes and ears. Nevertheless, rumors provoked enormous curiosity. One group of Western diplomats ventured out to Preobrazhenskoe on horseback to see what they could learn. Passing three houses from which came appalling howls and groans, they stopped and dismounted in front of a fourth which emitted even more atrocious shrieks. Entering, they were startled to see the Tsar, Lev Naryshkin and Romodanovsky. As they retreated, Naryshkin asked them who they were and why they had come. Angrily, he ordered them to go to Romodanovsky's house so that the matter could be looked into. Mounting their horses, the diplomats refused, telling Naryshkin that if he had anything to say to them, he could come to their embassy and say it there. Russian soldiers appeared and a Guards officer attempted to drag one of the-diplomats out of his saddle. Desperately, the unwelcome visitors spurred their horses and galloped to safety past the soldiers running to block their way.

  Eventually, reports of the horror reached such magnitude that the Patriarch took it upon himself to go to Peter to beg for mercy. He went carrying an image of the Blessed Virgin, reminding Peter of the humanity of all men and asking for the exercise of mercy. Peter, resenting the intrusion of spiritual authority on temporal matters, replied to the churchman with great feeling: "What are you doing with that image and what business is it of yours to come here? Leave immediately and put that image in a place where it may be venerated. Know that I reverence God and His Most Holy Mother more earnestly, perhaps, than you do. But it is the duty of my sovereign office, and a duty that I owe to God, to save my people from harm and to prosecute with public vengeance crimes that lead to the common ruin." In this case, Peter continued, justice and harshness were linked, the gangrene ran deep in the body politic and could be cut out only with iron and fire. Moscow, he said, would be saved not by pity but by cruelty.

  Everyone fell within the sweep of the Tsar's wrath. Priests discovered to have prayed for the success of the rebellion were condemned to execution. The wife of a minor official, passing in front of a gibbet erected before the Kremlin, said of the men hanging there, "Alas! Who knows whether you were innocent or guilty?" She was overheard and denounced as one who expressed sympathy for condemned traitors, and she and her husband were arrested and examined. Able to prove that she was only expressing compassion for all humans who suffered, the couple escaped death, but was nevertheless exiled from Moscow.

  Despite the wretched forced confessions, gasped between screams or torn from groaning, half-conscious men, Peter learned little more than Shein had already learned: that the Streltsy had meant to seize the capital, burn the German Suburb, kill the boyars and ask Sophia to rule them. If she refused, they would ask the eight-year-old Tsarevich Alexis and, as a last resort, Sophia's former lover, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, "for he had always been merciful to us." Peter did learn that no boyar or important member of the government or the nobility had been involved, but the most important questions were unanswered: Had there been a plot by important persons against his life and throne? And, most importantly, had Sophia known about or encouraged the uprising in advance?

  Peter was deeply suspicious of his sister and could not believe that she was not always intriguing against him. To confirm his suspicions, a number of women, including wives of the Streltsy and all of Sophia's female attendants, were examined. Two chambermaids were brought to the torture rooms and stripped naked to the waist. One had already received several blows of the knout when Peter entered. He noticed that she was pregnant and for this reason absolved her from further torture, but both women were condemned to death.

  Under torture, a Strelets, Vaska Alexeev, declared that two letters purporting to be from Sophia had been sent to the Streltsy camp and been read aloud to the soldiers. These letters supposedly urged the Streltsy to march on Moscow, seize the Kremlin and summon the Tsarevna to the throne. According to one account, the letters were smuggled out of Sophia's rooms inside loaves of bread given by Sophia to old beggar women. Other letters, less inflammatory, had been written by Sophia's sister Martha, informing Sophia that the Streltsy were marching on Moscow.

  Peter wen
t to Novodevichy himself to interrogate Sophia. There was no question of torture; according to one account, he alternated between weeping with her over the fate that had made them antagonists, and threatening her with death, using the example of Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Sophia denied that she had ever written to the Streltsy. When he suggested that she might have reminded them that she could be called back to rule, she told him straightforwardly that on this matter they needed no letter from her; they would certainly remember that she had ruled the state for seven years. In the end, Peter learned nothing from her. He spared his sister's life, but decided that she must be more closely restricted. She was forced to shave her head and take religious vows, as the nun Susanna. He confined her permanently to Novodevichy, where she was guarded by one hundred soldiers and permitted to have no visitors. She lived in this fashion for another six years and died at forty-seven in 1704. Her sisters Martha and Catherine Miloslavskaya (also Peter's half-sisters) were politically exonerated, but Martha, too, was sent to a convent for the rest of her days.

  The first executions of the condemned Streltsy took place on October 10 at Preobrazhenskoe. Behind the barracks, a bare field rose into a steep hill, and at the top the gallows were placed. A regiment of Guards was drawn up between the execution site and the large crowd of spectators, pushing and shoving, craning their necks to see. The Streltsy, many of whom could no longer walk, arrived in a procession of small carts, each containing two men seated back to back, each holding a lighted candle. Almost without exception, the condemned men were silent, but their wives and children, running beside the carts, filled the air with shrieks and calamitous sobbing. As the carts rumbled across the brook that separated the gallows from the crowd, the individual cries rose into a loud, collective wail.