Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  On returning from Europe, Menshikov was included in the revels of Peter's Jolly Company. Six feet tall, robust, agile and good at the sports Peter liked, he became a prominent figure at Preobrazhenskoe, where he was known by his nickname, Alexashka, or his patronymic, Danilovich. He appeared in the "great company of singers who sang carols over Christmas at General Gordon's house," and he played an enthusiastic part in the execution of the Streltsy. Peter gave him a house, and on February 2, 1699, in the presence of the Tsar, it was consecrated according to the "rites of Bacchus."

  Inevitably, the young man's rapid rise stirred sneers behind his back at his obscure origins and lack of education. "By birth," said Prince Boris Kurakin, "Menshikov is lower than a Pole." Korb wrote disparagingly of "that Alexander who is so conspicuous at court through the Tsar's graces" and reported that the young favorite already was selling his influence to merchants and others in need of help -with various branches of the government. Whitworth, the English minister, reported in 1706, "I am credibly informed that Menshikov can neither read nor write," a charge that was only partially true. Menshikov had learned to read, but always wrote through a secretary, signing his own name in a labored and shaky hand.

  Yet, despite his detractors, Menshikov continued to ascend. His tact, his optimism, his uncanny way of understanding and almost anticipating all of Peter's commands and personal moods, his acceptance and endurance of the Tsar's anger and even violent blows, made him unique. When Peter, on returning from Europe, accused General Shein of selling army commissions and at a banquet drew his sword to strike the offender, it was Lefort who deflected the blow and saved Shein's life, but it was Menshikov who grappled with and calmed the Tsar. Not long after, at a christening party for the son of the Danish ambassador, Peter saw Menshikov wearing a sword on the dance floor. Appalled at this breach of etiquette committed in the presence of foreigners, Peter struck the offender in the face with his fist, bringing blood spurting from Menshikov's nose. The following spring in Voronezh, Menshikov bent forward to whisper something in Peter's ear and was rewarded with a burst of anger and another blow in the face, this one so powerful that it stretched the victim on the ground. Menshikov accepted this abuse not simply with resignation but with unfailing good humor. In time, his understanding of Peter's moods and his willingness to accept whatever Peter offered, be it favor or blow, made him indispensable to the Tsar. He had ceased to be a servant and become a friend.

  In 1700, at the outbreak of the war, Menshikov was still attached to Peter's private household—a letter to him from Peter in that year indicates that he had special charge of the Tsar's wardrobe. But when the war began, Menshikov plunged into it, displaying a talent for military command as great as his talent for everything else. He was with Peter at Narva and left with the Tsar before the disastrous battle began. During the operations in Ingria in 1701, which Peter conducted personally, Menshikov distinguished himself as Peter's lieutenant. After the siege and capture of Noteborg (now Schlusselburg), Menshikov was named governor of the fortress. He participated in the advance down the Neva, the taking of Nyenskans and the ambush and capture of the Swedish flotilla at the mouth of the river. With the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and the building of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Menshikov was assigned responsibility for construction of the one of the six great bastions which subsequently bore his name. That same year, he became Governor General of Karelia, Ingria and Estonia. In 1703, to please the Tsar, Peter Golitsyn, envoy to the imperial court at Vienna, arranged to have Menshikov named a Count of Hungary. In 1705, the Emperor Joseph created Alexashka a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Two years later, after Menshikov's victory over the Swedes at Kalisz in Poland, Peter gave him the Russian title of Prince of Izhora, with large estates. Significantly, only two weeks after receiving these lands, the new Prince wrote to ascertain the number of parishes and people therein, what revenue could be collected from them, and to command that in religious services in churches in the district his name be mentioned with that of the Tsar.

  Infinitely more important than titles or wealth—for both titles and wealth wholly depended on it—was Peter's friendship. The death of Lefort in 1699 left the Tsar with no close friend to whom he could reveal both his greatness and his pettiness, his visions, his hopes and his despair. Menshikov assumed this role, and during the early years of war Peter's friendship grew into deep affection. Alexashka would follow Peter anywhere and turn his hand to any enterprise the Tsar commanded. He could be the companion of Peter's drunken orgies, the confidant of his amours, the commander of his cavalry and a minister of his government— all with equal devotion and skill. As their personal relationship grew more intimate, Peter's form of addressing Menshikov changed. In 1703, the Tsar still called him "Mein Herz" and "Mein Herzenchen." In 1704, it became "Mein Liebster Kamerad" and "Mein Liebster Freund." After that, it was "Mein Brudder." Peter ended his letters to Menshikov with the lines, "All is well. Only God grant to see you in joy again. You yourself know."*

  As Menshikov's life progressed, honors and rewards continued to shower on him—and his enemies proliferated. To them he appeared obsequious, ambitious and, when he had power, despotic. He could be harsh and cruel and never forget a disservice done to him. His greatest flaw, several times his near-undoing, was avarice. Born with nothing and then surrounded by opportunities for acquiring wealth, he grabbed whatever he could. As he grew older, this trait became more pronounced—or at least less easy to hide. Peter, aware that his old friend was using his offices to amass wealth and often was stealing directly from the state, tried several times to stop him. Menshikov was hauled before the courts of justice, stripped of his powers, fined, even beaten by the infuriated Tsar. But always the comradeship of thirty years intervened, Peter's anger abated and Menshikov was reinstated.

  In fact, Menshikov was far more than a clever, greedy sycophant. Although he rode to the heights on Peter's back, he was indispensable to Peter as a friend. He became, as much as any man could, Peter's alter ego; he knew so well how the Tsar would react to any situation that his commands were accepted as if they

  *Was there anything else? Whitworth wrote that "some have thought their intimacy rather resembled love than friendship, they having frequent jars and constant reconcilements." But there is, in fact, no evidence of any homosexual relationship between Peter and Menshikov.

  were Peter's. "He does what he likes without asking my opinion," Peter once said of him. "But I for my part never decide anything without asking him his." For better or for worse, Menshikov helped Peter create a new Russia.

  The origins of Martha Skavronskaya are even more obscure than those of Menshikov. Her life before her meeting with the Tsar in 1703, when she was nineteen, is only conjecture. The likeliest story is that she was one of four children of a Lithuanian peasant, possibly a Catholic, named Samuel Skavronsky. Skavronsky had moved from Lithuania and settled in the Swedish province of Livonia, where, in 1684, in the village of Ringen near Dorpat, Martha was born. When she was still an infant, her father died of plague, followed soon after by her mother. The destitute children were scattered, and Martha was taken into the family of Pastor Ernst Gluck, a Lutheran minister of Marienburg. Although not exactly a servant, she was expected to make herself useful in the household, doing laundry, sewing, baking bread and looking after the other children. That she was not considered a full member of the family seems likely since, in this relatively well-educated household, no effort was made to educate her and she left the Gluck family unable to read or write.

  In adolescence, Martha grew into a comely, sturdy girl whose warm, dark eyes and full figure attracted attention. One story is that Frau Gluck grew wary, fearing the effect of the blossoming girl on her growing sons or even on the Pastor. Martha, accordingly, was encouraged to accept the suit of a Swedish dragoon whose regiment was quartered in the neighborhood. She was betrothed to him and, according to some accounts, was actually married to him for a brief span of eight days in the summer of 1702. At this
point, the rapid successes of the invading Russians suddenly compelled his regiment to evacuate Marienburg. Martha never saw her fiancé/husband again.

  With the Swedish withdrawal, the district of Dorpat fell into the hands of Sheremetev's Russian army, and along with the entire population, Pastor Gluck and his family were taken prisoner. Sheremetev, a sophisticated man, received the Lutheran clergyman with kindness and accepted Gluck's offer to go to Moscow to serve the Tsar as a translator. The attractive foundling Martha, however, did not go to Moscow, but remained for six months in the domestic service of Sheremetev himself. (One tale presents the vivid picture of the girl being brought into the Field Marshal's camp wrapped only in a soldier's cloak to cover her nakedness.) Some assume that the girl became his mistress, which would not have been impossible, although nothing indicates that such a relationship actually existed between the illiterate seventeen-year-old girl and the cultivated, middle-aged Field Marshal. Later, as Peter's wife, she bore Sheremetev no ill-will, nor, on the other hand, did she especially favor him. In short, nothing except proximity suggests intimacy between them, and the likelihood is that the future Empress was a serving woman in Sheremetev's household and nothing more.

  Martha's relations with her next protector, Menshikov, were closer and more complex. He was already emerging as the Tsar's favorite when, visiting Sheremetev, he spotted her. Her comeliness had increased; her hands, once red with work, had become whiter and less coarse with her new, less arduous role. She had accepted the Orthodox faith and taken the Russian name of Ekaterina (Catherine). No one knows how Menshikov persuaded Sheremetev to transfer the Lithuanian girl to his own household— some say that he simply bought her. In any case, in the autumn of 1703 he took her to Moscow.

  There is the possibility that during these months the eighteen-year-old woman shared the bed of the thirty-two-year-old favorite. True or not, the bond formed at this time between them became unbreakable and lifelong. They were to be the two most powerful people in the Russian empire after the Tsar himself, yet because of their mutually humble origins, both were totally dependent on Peter. Aside from the Tsar's protection, the only separate strength either the wife or the favorite possessed was the support and alliance of the other.

  In fact, there is no proof that Catherine was Menshikov's mistress, and, indeed, there is circumstantial evidence that she was not. During these years, Menshikov was strongly attached to one of a group of girls who carried the title of Boyar Maidens and whose duties consisted only of being companions to the royal ladies. In 1694, after the death of Peter's mother, the Tsar's lively younger sister, Natalya, moved in to live with him in his masculine world at Preobrazhenskoe, bringing with her a small group of such maidens, including two sisters, Darya and Barbara Arseneeva, the daughters of an official in Siberia. Menshikov, as Peter's friend, was welcomed at the feminine court around Natalya, and there soon developed an attachment between him and the beautiful Darya Arseneeva. Through his secretary, he wrote to her regularly from wherever he was and sent her rings and jewels. She wrote back and sent him dressing gowns, bed linen and shirts. In 1703, when Menshikov returned to Moscow in triumph from his military victories in Ingria, the Arseneev sisters came to live in the household which his own two sisters kept for him. It was to this same household that Menshikov brought Catherine. Although it is possible that he may, while courting a lady of higher birth, have amused himself with a Lithuanian serving girl, he was much in love with Darya, who later became his wife.

  When Peter met Catherine in the autumn of 1703, she was a member of Menshikov's household with a status which, if uncertain to us, must have been quite clear to him. She was important enough to have access to the Tsar and to speak to him, although he was thirty-one and she was only nineteen, and Peter admired her. His own twelve-year relationship with Anna Mons was breaking apart.* Here before him was a sturdy, healthy, appealing girl in the full bloom of youth. She was far from a classic beauty, but her velvet black eyes, her thick blond hair (which she later dyed black to lighten the appearance of her suntanned skin) and her full, womanly bosom already had caught the eye of a field marshal and a future prince; the Tsar was no less observant.

  Whatever her previous arrangements, from that time on Catherine was Peter's mistress. For convenience, she continued to live in Menshikov's house in Moscow, a dwelling which by this time was filled with women. At first, it had been kept for him by his own two sisters, Maria and Anna, but in December 1703 Anna greatly advanced the Menshikov family fortunes by marrying an aristocrat, Alexis Golovin, the younger brother of Fedor Golovin, head of the Foreign Ministry. Now it also included the two Arseneev sisters, Barbara and Darya, their aunt, Anisya Tolstoy, and Catherine.

  In October 1703, Peter came to Moscow to spend five weeks with this unusual Menshikov "family"; then he departed, but returned in December to stay until March. Soon Darya and Catherine were traveling together to join Menshikov and Peter in towns near where the army was camped. For several years, this quartet was so close that whichever male was apart from the others was sad and lonely. Peter and Menshikov were often separated; Menshikov, as an increasingly successful commander of cavalry and dragoons, was constantly away in Lithuania or Poland. The two women, always traveling together for propriety's sake, could

  *Anna, feeling that Peter was straying, had attempted to re-stimulate his interest by flirting with the Prussian envoy Keyserling. The envoy over-responded by falling in love and proposing marriage. Peter's reaction was to expel Anna from her estate and his favor, reclaim his portrait set in diamonds and place her and her mother and sister under house arrest. Later, he relented, the marriage to Keyserling took place and Anna lived as the ambassador's wife, then widow, until her own death in the German Suburb in 1715.

  not be with both men at once; in consequence, either Peter or Menshikov was often reduced to writing mournful letters to the other three. In the winter of 1704, a son named Peter was born to Catherine, and in March 1705 Peter wrote to Catherine and Darya: "I am rarely merry here. O mothers! Do not abandon my little Petrushka. Have some clothes made for him and go as you will, but order that he shall have enough to eat and drink. And give my regards, ladies, to Alexander Danilovich. And you have shown me great unkindness in being unwilling to write to me about your health." In October 1705, a second son, Paul, was born, and in December 1706 a daughter whom they called Catherine.

  Then, in the spring of 1706, a lonely Menshikov, off in the field, sent Darya a present of five lemons, all he could gather, suggesting that she share them with the Tsar. Peter wrote to thank Menshikov for the lemons, but also to summon him to Kiev. "It is very necessary for you to come by Assumption Day in order to accomplish what we have already sufficiently talked about before I go." The matter on which Peter now was sternly insisting was Menshikov's marriage to Darya, which had been on his mind for some time. He had written Menshikov from St. Petersburg, giving him a push: "As you know, we are living in Paradise, but one idea never leaves me about which you yourself know, that I place my confidence not in human will, but in divine will and mercy." Repeatedly, Menshikov had promised, but repeatedly the wedding was postponed.

  Peter's insistence on this marriage stemmed from his desire to regularize the situation in which the two couples were living. It would calm the talk about the quartet—including two unmarried women—roaming shamelessly around Russia. Not that it would end such talk completely; only a marriage to Catherine, who was regularly bearing him children, would do that, but about this he hesitated while Eudoxia still lived. Nevertheless, Menshikov's marriage would be a first step—Darya would become a respectable matron with whom Catherine could properly travel. Finally, in August 1706, Menshikov bowed, and Darya became a wife who shared his thoughts and his burdens, looked after his comforts and accompanied him whenever she could on his travels and campaigns.

  Once Menshikov was married, Peter began to think of taking the same step himself. In many ways, it seemed to offer more hazards than advantages. Traditional Russ
ians would find it an act of madness for the Tsar to marry an illiterate foreign peasant. In a time of national crisis, when Peter was forcing Russians to sacrifice heavily for the state, could he inflict this outrage on them without serious disruptions? Eventually, these arguments, strong though they were, were shouldered aside by Peter's need for this extraordinary woman, and fifteen months later, in November 1707, Peter followed Menshikov's wedding with his own. The ceremony was privately performed in St. Petersburg without any of the fanfare which had surrounded the marriage of the Prince. For a while, even though Catherine had borne him three, then four, then five children, he continued to keep the marriage secret from his people and even from his ministers and some members of his family.