Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Tormented by these questions, Peter decided to get to the bottom of what had happened. The first investigation began immediately at Preobrazhenskoe. Holding Alexis to his promise to reveal everything, Peter drew up in his own hand a list of seven questions which Tolstoy presented to the Tsarevich, along with the Tsar's warning that a single omission or evasion in his answers could cost him his pardon. In reply, Alexis wrote a long, rambling narrative of the events of his life during the preceding four years. Although he insisted that only Kikin and Afanasiev had possessed foreknowledge of his flight, he also mentioned a number of other people with whom he had spoken about himself and his relations with his father. Among those named were Peter's half-sister, the Tsarevna Maria Alexeevna; Abraham Lopukhin, who was the brother of Peter's first wife, Eudoxia, and thereby Alexis' uncle; Senator Peter Apraxin, brother of the General-Admiral; Senator Samarin; Semyon Naryshkin; Prince Vasily Dolgoruky; Prince Yury Trubetskoy; the Prince of Siberia; the Tsarevich's tutor, Viazemsky; and his confessor, Ignatiev.

  The only person whom Alexis attempted to exempt from all blame was Afrosina. "She carried [my] letters in a box, but she had not the least knowledge of them," he declared. As to advance knowledge of his flight, he explained, "I carried her along with me by a strategem when I had taken the resolution to fly. I told her that I would only take her as far as Riga, and from thence I carried her further, making her as well as those of my retinue believe that I had orders to go to Vienna to make an alliance against the Ottoman Porte and that I was obliged to travel in private that the Turks might not get notice of it. That is all [she and] my servants knew of it."

  With the names supplied by Alexis before him, Peter wrote urgent orders to Menshikov in St. Petersburg, where most of the accused lived. As soon as the couriers arrived, the city gates were closed and no one was allowed to leave for any reason. Peasants bringing food into market were searched on leaving to prevent anyone from escaping concealed in a simple sledge. Apothecaries were forbidden to sell arsenic or other poisons lest some of the accused attempt that form of escape.

  Once the city was sealed off, Peter's agents struck. At midnight, Kikin's house was quietly surrounded by fifty soldiers of the Guards. An officer entered, found him in bed, took him in his dressing gown and slippers, fettered him in chains and an iron collar and carried him away before he could say more than a word to his beautiful wife. In fact, Kikin had almost escaped. Realizing that he was in danger, he had bribed one of Peter's confidential orderlies to warn him of any move the Tsar might make against him. When Peter was writing his orders to Menshikov, the orderly was standing behind the Tsar and read the message over Peter's shoulder. The orderly left the house immediately and sent a messenger riding to Kikin in St. Petersburg. His message arrived only minutes after Kikin had been arrested.

  Menshikov also received orders to arrest Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, a lieutenant general, a Knight of the Danish Order of the Elephant and the director general of the commission established by Peter to look into the mismanagement of state revenues. Supposedly, he was still high in Peter's favor, for he had only just returned with the Tsar from Peter's eighteen-month journey to Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. Menshikov surrounded Dolgoruky's house with soldiers, then entered and announced his orders to the Prince. Dolgoruky handed over his sword, declaring, "I have a good conscience but one head to lose." He was fettered and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress. That same evening, Menshikov visited and arrested Senator Peter Apraxin, Abraham Lopukhin, Senator Michael Samarin and the Prince of Siberia. In addition, all of Alexis' servants and nine others were chained and made ready to travel as prisoners to Moscow.

  Through February, the net continued to widen. Both in Moscow and St. Petersburg, new persons were arrested daily. Dositheus, the Bishop of Rostov, one of the most famous and powerful churchmen in Russia, was arrested and accused of having publicly prayed in his church for Eudoxia and of having prophesied the death of Peter. Eudoxia herself and Peter's only surviving half-sister, Maria, were arrested and brought to Moscow for questioning. Peter was deeply suspicious of his former wife. She had been in communication with Alexis, and she had much to gain if her son were to sit on the throne. On the day Alexis was removed from the succession, Peter sent Guards Captain Gregory Pisarev to the convent in Suzdal where Eudoxia had been living for nineteen years. Arriving there, Pisarev found that Eudoxia had long before laid aside the veil of a nun and put on the robes of a royal lady. He found on the convent altar a tablet which contained "A Prayer for the Tsar and Tsaritsa," citing the names of Peter and Eudoxia as if the Tsar had not divorced his wife. Finally, Pisarev discovered that the former wife and former nun had taken a lover. Major Stephen Glebov, the captain of her guards.

  Eudoxia, now forty-four years old, trembled to imagine how the giant man who had been her husband would react to all this. As she was being taken to Moscow, she wrote a letter and sent it ahead so that it should reach Peter before she did. "Most Gracious Soverign," she pleaded,

  Many years ago, which year I do not remember, I went to Suzdal Convent, taking the vows as I had promised, and was given the name of Helen. After becoming a nun, I wore monastic dress for half a year. But not greatly desiring to be a nun, I gave it up and abandoned the dress, staying on quietly at the convent as a lay person in disguise. My secret has been revealed by Gregory Pisarev. Now I rely on the humane generosity of Your Majesty. Falling at your feet, I beg mercy for my crime, and forgiveness, that I may not die a useless death. And I promise to go back to the life of a nun and remain in it till my death, and will pray to God for you, Sovereign. Your most humble slave, your past wife, Eudoxia.

  Although the original charge against Eudoxia seemed to have little weight—communications between Alexis and his mother were rare and harmless—Peter was now aroused by his former wife's behavior and determined to ferret out the details of the situation in Suzdal. Glebov was arrested, along with Father Andrew, the chief priest of the convent, and a number of nuns. It was difficult to believe that Eudoxia's way of life had gone completely unnoticed and unreported to Moscow for twenty years, of that Peter's anger now directed solely at the offense against his honor. Rather, what stimulated his rage was his belief that a conspiracy existed, and the possibility that its threads ran through the convent in Suzdal.

  As prisoners flowed into Moscow from St. Petersburg, Suzdal and other parts of the country, huge crowds stood at the Kremlin gates to see what they could and to catch the latest rumor. The heads of the clergy, the members of Peter's court, his generals and administrative officers and most of the nobility of Russia had been summoned, and the daily processions of coaches carrying great noblemen and churchmen accompanied by their servants made a rich spectacle.

  The churchmen were there to attend the trial of their colleague Dositheus, Bishop of Rostov. Judged guilty, he was stripped of his ecclesiastical robes and delivered to the secular authorities for interrogation under torture. While being disrobed, he turned and shouted to his fellow bishops who had judged him, "Am I then the only one guilty in this matter? Look into your own hearts, all of you. What do you find there? Go to the people. Listen to them.

  What do they say? Whose name do you hear? Put to torture, Dositheus admitted nothing except a general sympathy for Alexis and Eudoxia; no act of defiance or rebellious words could be extracted or proved. And yet, just as with the Streltsy two decades before, the very vagueness of these replies tended to anger Peter and spur his determination to dig deeper.

  The dominant figure in the inquisition was Peter himself, dashing from the palace through the city, accompanied only by two or three servants. Contrary to the custom of all previous Muscovite tsars, he appeared not only as judge, dressed in jewels and ancestral robes, seated in honor and wisdom on his throne, but as chief prosecutor, in Western dress—breeches, frockcoat, stockings and buckled shoes—demanding judgment from the dignitaries of the realm, temporal and spiritual. Standing in the Great Kremlin Hall, lifting his voice in anger, he argued the dang
er to which his government had been exposed and the horrors of the crime of treason against the state. It was Peter who presented the case against Dositheus, and when the Tsar was finished, the Bishop of Rostov was doomed.

  Late in March, the Moscow phase of the inquisition came to an end when the Council of Ministers, sitting as a temporal High Court of Justice, handed down its verdict. Kikin, Glebov and the Bishop of Rostov were condemned to die a lingering, painful death; others were condemned to die more simply. Many more were publicly knouted and sent into exile. The lesser of the women, including some nuns of the Suzdal convent, were publicly whipped and transferred to convents on the White Sea. The Tsaritsa Eudoxia was not touched physically, but she was moved to a remote convent on Lake Ladoga, where she remained under strick supervision for ten years until the accession of her grandson, Peter II. She then returned to court and lived there until 1731, when she died in the time of Empress Anne. The Tsarevna Maria, Peter's half-sister, was judged to have encouraged opposition to the Tsar and was imprisoned in Schlusselburg fortress for three years. In 1721, she was released and returned to St. Petersburg, where she died in 1723.

  A number of the accused were completely exonerated or dealt with mildly. The Prince of Siberia was exiled to Archangel; Senator Samarin was acquitted. The charge against Senator Peter Apraxin was that he had advanced 3,000 roubles to the Tsarevich upon his departure from St. Petersburg for Germany. When it developed in the investigation that Apraxin had assumed Alexis was going to join the Tsar and had had no means of knowing that the Tsarevich intended to flee, he was completely exonerated.

  Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, who admitted sympathy for the Tsarevich, was saved from execution by the pleas of his relatives, especially his older brother, Prince Jacob, who reminded the Tsar of the Dolgoruky family's long record of faithful service. Nevertheless, Vasily was stripped of his rank of general, his Danish Order of the Elephant was sent back to Copenhagen, and he was exiled to Kazan. Leaving St. Petersburg with a long beard and a shabby black coat, he obtained permission to say goodbye to the Tsaritsa Catherine. Once in her presence, he delivered a long speech justifying his behavior and at the same time complaining that he possessed nothing in the world except the clothes on his back. Catherine, soft-hearted as usual, sent him a present of 200 ducats.

  The executions of those condemned to a cruel death took place on March 26 in Red Square under the Kremlin walls before a huge crowd of spectators which foreigners estimated at 200,000 to 300,000. The Bishop of Rostov and three others were broken with hammers and left to die slowly on the wheel. A worse fate was reserved for Glebov, Eudoxia's lover. He was first beaten with the knout and burned with red-hot irons and glowing coals. Then he was stretched on a plank with spikes puncturing his flesh and left there for three days. Still he refused to confess treason. Finally, he was impaled. There is a story that as he suffered his excruciating final agonies with the sharp wooden stake in his rectum slowly gouging him to death, Peter approached. If Glebov would confess, the Tsar offered to release him from this torture and have him killed at once. Glebov, according to the story, spat in Peter's face, and the Tsar coolly walked away.

  Similarly, Kikin, who had admitted advising the Tsarevich to seek refuge with the Emperor, was slowly tortured to death, being revived and rested at intervals so that he might suffer more. On the second day of his agony, Peter came up to him also. Kikin, still alive on the wheel, begged the Tsar to pardon him and allow him to become a monk. Peter refused that, but with a kind of mercy, ordered him beheaded at once.

  Nine months later, the second phase of this grim retribution took place in Red Square. Prince Shcherbatov, who had been friendly to the Tsarevich, was publicly knouted and then his tongue was cut out and his nose sliced off. Three others were knouted, including a Pole who had served as Alexis' interpreter. Unlike the Russians, who submitted to their fate with great resignation, the Pole underwent his punishment with great reluctance, refusing to undress and face the knout; his clothes were pulled off him by force. These men all lived, but then five more were brought forward to die. They were Abraham Lopukhin, Eudoxia's brother; Ignatiev, Alexis' confessor; Afanasiev, his valet; and two men of Alexis' household. All were condemned to be broken on the wheel, but at the last minute the sentence was mitigated to simple beheading. The priest died first, then Lopukhin, then the others, with the last being obliged to lay their heads on the block in the blood of those who had died before.

  While all this blood was flowing, Peter waited, still unconvinced that all the opposition had been identified, but certain that what he had done so far was right and necessary. Congratulated by a foreign diplomat on having discovered a conspiracy and beaten down his enemies, the Tsar nodded in agreement. "If a fire meets with straw and other light stuff, it soon spreads," he said. "But if it finds iron and stone in its way, it is extinguished of itself."

  After the trials and the bloody executions in Moscow, it was generally hoped that the affair of the Tsarevich was over. The major threads of the conspiracy, if such there may have been, had now been identified and rooted out. When Peter left Moscow for St. Petersburg in March 1718, he took Alexis with him. Traveling together, father and son led observers to believe that the breach between them was repaired. Yet, Peter's mind still seethed with suspicions and fears and the nation sensed his irresolution. "The more I consider the confused state of affairs in Russia," de la Vie wrote to Paris, "the less I see how these disorders will be brought to an end." Most people, he continued, "still wait and hope only for the end of his [Peter's] life to plunge into the slough of sloth and ignorance." The Tsar's immediate dilemma was that no real conspiracy had been found, but neither had the Tsarevich been proved a faithful son, nor had all those close to the throne revealed themselves as loyal subjects. Above all, nothing had been done to solve the problem that troubled Peter most. A dispatch from Weber enlarged on this dilemma:

  Now comes the question: What shall be done further with the Tsarevich? It is said that he is going to be sent to a very distant monastery. This does not seem probable to me, for the further the Tsar removes him, the greater opportunity does he give to the restless mob for liberating him. I think that he will be brought here again and kept in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. I will not decide here whether the Tsar is right or wrong to exclude him from the succession and give him his paternal curse. This is sure: the clergy, the nobility, and the common people respect the Tsarevich like a god.

  Weber's guess was accurate. Although nominally free, Alexis was required to live in a house next to Catherine's palace and scarcely allowed out of Peter's sight. The Tsarevich, meanwhile, was cowed and seemingly uncaring. Without protesting, he had watched his mother, his tutor, his confessor and all his friends and adherents arrested. As they were interrogated, tortured, exiled, flogged and executed, he meekly stood by, greatful that he himself was not being punished. His only thought seemed to be to marry Afrosina. At the Easter service, Alexis formally congratulated Catherine in the traditional manner, then fell on his knees before her and begged her to influence his father to allow him to marry Afrosina soon.

  The young woman arrived in St. Petersburg on April 15, but instead of being received into the waiting arms of her impatient lover, she was immediately arrested and taken to the Fortress of Peter and Paul.* Among her belongings were found drafts of two letters from Naples written in Alexis' hand, one to the Russian Senate, the other to the archbishops of the Russian Orthodox Church. To the Senate, he had written:

  Gentlemen Most Excellent Senators:

  I believe you will be no less surprised than all the world at my going out of the country and at my residing in a place unknown at present. The continued ill-usage and the disorders have obliged me to quit my dear native country. They designed to shut me up in a convent in the beginning of the year 1716. though I had committed nothing that had deserved it. None of you can be ignorant of it. But God, full of mercy, saved me by presenting to me last autumn an opportunity of absenting myself from my d
ear country and you, whom I could not have resolved to leave had I not been in the case where I found myself.

  At present I am well and in good health, under the protection of a certain High Person [the Emperor], till the time when God who preserved me shall call me to return to my dear native country.

  I desire you not to forsake me then, and as for the present, to give no credit to the news that may be spread of my death, or otherwise out of the desire they have to blot me out of the memory of mankind, for God keeps me in His guard and my benefactors will not forsake me. They have promised me not to forsake me, even not for the future, in case of need. I am alive and 1 shall always be full of good wishes for Your Excellencies and for the whole country.

  The letter to the archbishops was very similar, except that Alexis added that the idea of shutting him up in a convent

  *The fate of her child by the Tsarevich is unknown. According to some accounts, the child was born in Riga as Afrosina traveled home. Other stories say that she delivered the infant in the fortress. In any case, the child disappeared from history.

  "proceeded from the same persons who used my mother in like manner."

  Four weeks passed before the next act of drama took place. In the middle of May, Peter decided to question the two lovers separately and then confront them with each other. He took Alexis with him to Peterhof, and two days later Afrosina was brought across the gulf from the fortress in an enclosed boat. In Mon Plaisir, Peter questioned them both, first the girl, then his son.