Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  the Emperor filled shelves and closets with inflammable colored chemicals and fireworks and then he put the house to the torch. Many small explosions and brilliantly colored flames erupted from the burning structure, and for some time before it collapsed, the heavy log frame of the house stood silhouetted against an incandescent rainbow. Later, when only the blackened, smoking rubble was left, Peter turned to the Duke of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, and said, "This is the image of war: brilliant victories followed by destruction. But with this house in which my first plans against Sweden were worked out, may every thought disappear which can arm my hand against that kingdom, and may it always be the most faithful ally of my empire."

  In the warmer months, Peter spent much of his time at Peterhof. On his doctor's recommendation, he drank mineral waters and took exercise, including mowing grass and taking hikes with a knapsack on his back. To be on the water was still his greatest pleasure, and the Prussian minister reported that even his own ministers were unable to reach him. "The Emperor is so occupied with his villas and sailing on the gulf," he reported, "that none had the heart to interrupt him."

  In June 1723, the entire court—including even the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, now suffering intensely from her gout—moved with Peter to Reval, where he had constructed an elegant pink palace for Catherine and a small three-room house nearby for himself. Catherine's palace was surrounded by an extensive garden with fountains, pools and statues, but when the Emperor went for a walk on its broad paths, he was surprised to find himself alone. The reason, he quickly discovered, was a locked main gate guarded by a sentry whose standing orders were to keep the public out. Peter immediately reversed the order, explaining that he would never have built so large and expensive a garden only for himself and his wife, and the following day drummers were sent through the town to announce that the garden was open to all.

  In July, Peter sailed with his fleet for maneuvers on the Baltic. In August, he returned with the fleet to Kronstadt, where a ceremony had been arranged to honor the little boat which Peter had found rotting at Ismailovo with Karsten Brandt and in which he had taken his first lessons in sailing on the Yauza River. Now known as the "Grandfather of the Russian Navy," the boat had been brought to Kronstadt. There, the Emperor boarded the little vessel, now flying the imperial standard, and with Peter at the tiller and four senior admirals at the oars, the boat passed in front of twenty-two Russian ships-of-the-line, and 200 galleys anchored in columns. On a signal from Peter, cannon aboard all the ships roared out salutes; soon, a heavy smoke hung over the water, and only the topmost spars of the biggest ships could be seen. A feast of ten hours followed and Peter declared that the guest who did not get drunk that day would not permit his friendship. The ladies remained, and the young Princess Anne and Elizabeth stayed to pass around glasses of Hungarian wine. The Duchess of Mecklenburg became drunk, and other distinguished guests were tipsy, weeping, embracing and kissing, then later quarreling and thumping each other. Even Peter, who now drank far less than in his youth, took many glasses.

  In the autumn, another public masquerade celebrated the second anniversary of the Peace of Nystad. Peter was costumed first as a Catholic cardinal, then as a Lutheran minister, having borrowed his collar from the Lutheran pastor in St. Petersburg, and finally as an army drummer, beating his drum almosts as well as a professional drummer. This was the last great party for the Tsarita Praskovaya, who died soon after.

  To purge his system after these bacchanals, Peter now took his cures drinking the newly discovered "iron waters" at Olonets. The Emperor went often in winter, when he could travel across the lake by sledge, sometimes accompanied by Catherine; he argued that these Russian mineral waters were superior to any he had drunk in Germany. Not everyone agreed with him, and some worried that continued drinking of these heavily ferrous waters would damage rather than aid his health. Peter's unwillingness to obey his doctor's prescriptions was another problem; sometimes he would drink as many as twenty-one glasses of mineral water in a morning. He was forbidden to eat raw fruit, cucumbers, salted lemons or Limburger cheese while taking a cure. Yet, one day, immediately after drinking the waters, he ate a dozen figs and several pounds of cherries. To break the monotony of drinking the waters, Peter worked at his lathe for hours every day, turning objects in wood and ivory. When he felt strong, he visited forges in the neighborhood and hammered out bars and sheets of iron.

  Peter's two oldest daughters were reaching marriageable age (Anne was fourteen in 1722 and Elizabeth, thirteen), and, like any sensible monarch, he was looking for matches to bolster his country's diplomacy. From the time of his visit to France, his hope had been to marry one of his daughters, presumably Elizabeth, to the boy King, Louis XV. Not only would immense prestige accrue to Russia from a link with the House of Bourbon, but France would be a useful ally in Western Europe to counterbalance the hostility of England. If marriage to the King was impossible, Peter hoped at least to marry Elizabeth to a French prince of the royal house and make the pair King and Queen of Poland. Immediately after the signing of the Peace of Nystad and his own proclamation as emperor, he had broached the subject to Paris. The French minister in Petersburg, Campredon, added his own enthusiastic endorsement, "To put the Tsaritsa entirely in our interest, it would be desirable to assure a marriage between the younger daughter of the Tsar, who is very amiable and has a pretty figure, and some French prince who could easily and surely, through the power of the Tsar, be made King of Poland."

  Phillipe, Due d'Orteans, Regent of France, was tempted. Poland would be a useful ally for France in Austria's rear. If the Emperor were indeed to use his power to put a French prince on the throne of Poland, it might well be worth marrying that prince to the Emperor's daughter. Philippe had certain hesitations: the Empress Catherine's obscure origins and the mystery surrounding the date of her marriage to Peter raised questions as to Elizabeth's legitimacy. But he overcame his doubts and even proposed that the French prince best suited to become the bridegroom—and thus the King of Poland—was his own son, the youthful Due de Chartres. When Peter returned from Persia and heard that de Chartres was being proposed by France, his face broke into a smile. "I know him and esteem him highly," he said to Campredon.

  Unfortunately for the negotiating parties, there was an important obstacle over which they had no control: Augustus of Saxony, now fifty-three and ill, still occupied the Polish throne. Although he and Peter were now neither friends nor allies, the Emperor had no intention of actually pushing Augustus off the throne. His proposal was that the Due de Chartres should marry his daughter immediately and then wait for Augustus to die, when the Polish throne would become vacant. The French preferred to wait until the Duke was elected King of Poland before performing the marraige, but Peter refused to wait. What would happen, he asked, if Augustus should live another fifteen years? Campredon insisted that this could not possibly happen. "The King of Poland needs only a new, witty and vivacious mistress to render the event near," he said.*

  Eventually, Campredon accepted Peter's view and tried to persuade his government to proceed with the match immediately. He wrote to Paris praising Elizabeth's qualities. "There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth," he said. "It may be said indeed that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she

  *In fact, Augustus did live another ten years, dying in 1733 at the age of sixty-three.

  is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded."

  In the end, the affair was prevented by the objections of Peter's old enemy, George I of England. The Regent of France and his chief minister, the Abbe" Dubois, had made friendship with England the pivot of France's new foreign policy. So close were the two former enemies that, because England now had no diplomatic represen
tation in Russia, Dubois sent Campredon's dispatches from St. Petersburg in the original to King George, who returned them to Paris with marginal comments in his own handwriting. George I had no desire to see Russian influence grow greater. Dubois accomodated him and refused for a while even to answer Campredon's messages. When he did reply, it was to say that England had raised objections and that his envoy was to await instructions. Before the close of 1723, both Dubois and the Regent had died and Louis XV had attained his majority as King of France. The Due de Chartres eventually married a German princess. Peter's daughter Elizabeth never married officially (although it is possible that the secretly married her charming lover Alexis Razhumovsky, whom she raised from a commoner to count); and instead of becoming Queen of Poland, she remained at home to rule as Empress of Russia for twenty-one years.

  Peter's plans for his eldest daughter, Princess Anne, bore more immediate fruit. Years before, the fertile mind of Goertz had hatched the idea of marrying his young master, Duke Charles Frederick, to Anne. Goertz had mentioned the plan to Peter, with whom it had taken root. In the intervening years, the youthful Duke's fortunes had soared and plunged. He was the only nephew of the childless King Charles XII, who had kept the young man close to him, and many in Sweden still believed that Charles Frederick should have succeeded to the throne instead of his aunt Ulrika Eleonora and her husband, Frederick of Hesse. In 1721, Charles Frederick traveled secretly to Russia, hoping to win Peter's support for his claim to the Swedish succession and perhaps to seal it by marrying one of the Russian Emperor's daughters. Once in Russia, he nicely served Peter's purposes. Ulrika Eleonora and Frederick saw the young man's presence in St. Petersburg as an implied threat, and this further incentive to peace helped lead to the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, one clause of which was a Russian guarantee not to support the Duke's claims to the Swedish throne. Despite this disappointment, Charles Frederick stayed on in Russia. Catherine liked him, he had a place at all public celebrations and his little refugee court became a rallying point for a number of Swedish officers who had married Russian wives whom they were forbidden to take back to Sweden. Before long, as these homeless souls met every day to expand and refine their taste for vodka, the only nephew of Charles XII, who had fought at his uncle's side and wept at his death, was in danger of being reduced to nothing more than a tame poodle at the Russian court.

  Nevertheless, Charles Frederick persisted in his hope of marrying Princess Anne, who was tall, dark-haired and handsome like her mother. She was also intelligent, well mannered and high-spirited, and when she appeared in court dress with her hair dressed in European fashion and set with pearls, foreign envoys were impressed. Charles Frederick's chances improved greatly when a Russian-Swedish defensive alliance was signed in 1724. He was granted the title of Royal Highness and a Swedish pension, and Russia and Sweden agreed to attempt to persuade Denmark to restore lost territory to Holstein. The Duke's position was now thoroughly regularized, and in December 1724 he was pleased to receive a message from Osterman asking him to draw up a marriage contract between himself and Princess Anne. Part of the arrangement, it was understood, was to be the appointment of Charles Frederick as Governor General of Riga.

  The betrothal ceremony was grandly celebrated. On the evening before, the Duke's private orchestra serenaded the Empress beneath the windows of the Winter Palace. The following day, after a service at Trinity Church and a dinner with the imperial family, the Duke was betrothed to Anne when Peter himself took rings from each prospective partner and exchanged them. The Emperor shouted "Vivat!" and the betrothal party moved on to a supper, a ball and a display of fireworks. At the ball, Peter, feeling ill, refused to dance, but Catherine, entreated by young Charles Frederick, danced a polonaise with him.

  Anne lived only four years after her marriage and died when she was twenty. But fate used her and her husband to continue Peter's line on the Russian throne. They returned to Holstein, where at Kiel, shortly before her death, Anne gave birth to a son whose name became Karl Ulrich Peter. In 1741, when this boy was thirteen, his Aunt Elizabeth became empress. Unmarried and needing to designate an heir, she brought her nephew back to Russia and changed his name to Peter Fedorovich. In 1762, on Elizabeth's death, he succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III. Six months later, he was deposed and murdered by supporters of his German wife. This vigorous lady then seized the throne, was crowned Empress Catherine II and became known to the world as Catherine the Great. The son, grandsons and further descendants of Peter III and Catherine the Great occupied the Russian throne until 1917, all of them ultimately tracing their ancestry back through Princess Anne and Charles Frederick of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, to Peter the Great.

  Peter's efforts to marry both his daughters to foreign princes suggested that he did not envision either of them as his successor on the Russian throne. Indeed, no woman had ever sat on that throne. But the death of Peter Petrovich in 1719 left only one remaining male in the House of Romanov—Peter Alexeevich, son of the Tsarevich Alexis. Many Russians regarded him now as the legitimate heir, and Peter was well aware that the traditionalists looked upon the young Grand Duke as their future hope. This hope he was determined to thwart.

  But if not Peter Alexeevich, who was to succeed? More and more, as he pondered the problem, the emperor's thoughts turned to the person closest to him: Catherine. Over the years, the passion which had first attracted Peter to this simple, robust young woman had ripened into love, trust and mutual contentment. Catherine was a partner of enormous energy and remarkable adaptability; although she loved luxury, she was equally good-humored in primitive circumstances. She traveled with Peter devotedly even when pregnant, and he often told her that her stamina was greater than his. They had bonds of joy in their daughters and shared grief over the numerous infants they had lost. They took pleasure in each other's company and were melancholy when apart. "Praise God, all is merry here," wrote Peter from Revan in 1719, "but when I come to a country house and you are not there, I feel so sad." Again, he wrote, "But when you state that it's miserable walking alone, although the garden is pleasant, I believe you, for it's the same for me; only pray God that this is the last summer we'll spend apart, and that we may always be together in the future."

  It was during one of Peter's lengthy wartime absences that Catherine had prepared a surprise which had particularly delighted her husband. Knowing how much pleasure he took in new buildings, she secretly constructed a country palace about fifteen miles southwest of St. Petersburg. The mansion, built of stone, two stories high, and surrounded by gardens and orchards, was situated on a hill which looked back over the immense, flat plain stretching to the Neva and the city. When Peter returned, Catherine mentioned to him that she had found a charming deserted spot "where Your Majesty would not dislike to build a country house, if you would but take the trouble to go and see it." Peter immediately promised to go and "if the place really answers your description," to build any house she wished. The following morning, a large party set out, accompanied by a wagon carrying a tent under which Peter suggested they might eat. At the foot of the hill, the road began to climb and suddenly, at the end of an avenue of linden trees, Peter saw the house. He was still astonished when he arrived at the door and Catherine said to him, "This is the country house I have built for my sovereign." Peter was overjoyed and embraced her tenderly, saying, "I see that you wish to show me that there are beautiful places around Petersburg even though they are not on the water." She led him through the house, finally bringing him into a large dining room where a handsome table had been laid. He toasted her taste in architecture, and then Catherine raised her glass to toast the master of the new house. To his further astonishment and delight, the minute the glass touched Catherine's lips, eleven cannon hidden in the garden thundered a salute. When night fell, Peter said that he could never remember a day as happy as this one. In time, the estate came to be known as Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar's Village, and Empress Elizabeth commanded Rastrelli to begin a gigantic n
ew palace on the site. The magnificent Catherine Palace, which still stands, was named after her mother, the Empress Catherine I.

  Peter's respect and gratitude to Catherine had been deepened by her participation in the military campaigns on the Pruth and in Persia. He had acknowledged these feelings publicly by their remarriage and by establishing the Order of St. Catherine in her honor. She already carried the courtesy title of empress as the wife of the Emperor, but now, as he faced the future without a son, he decided to go further. His first step, taken in February 1722 before he and Catherine departed for the Caucasus, was to issue a general decree concerning the succession. It declared that the ancient, time-honored rule by which the throne of the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had been handed down from " father to son, or occasionally from elder brother to younger brother, was no longer valid. Henceforth, Peter decreed, every reigning sovereign would have absolute power to designate his or her successor. "Thus," he concluded, "children or children's children will not be tempted to fall into the sin of Absalom." The new decree also required all officials and subjects to swear an oath to accept the Emperor's choice.

  Revolutionary though it was, the February 1722 ukase was only a preliminary step to a still more sensational act: Peter's declaration that he had decided to formally crown Catherine as empress. A decree of November 15, 1723, declared that whereas

  our best beloved Spouse, Consort, and Empress Catherine has been a great support to us, and not only in this, but also in many military operations, putting aside womanly weakness, of her own will she has been present with us and has helped in every way possible ... for these labors of our Spouse we have decided that by virtue of the supreme power given us by God, she shall be crowned, which, God willing, is to take place formally in Moscow in the present winter.