Russka

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Yet here lived Englishmen who understood the weaponry and tactics of modern war; here could be found Germans who, far from being ‘dumb’, as their Russian name implied, spoke many languages. Here were Dutchmen who understood how to build sea-going ships and how to navigate.

  These were wonders about which the Russians were not only ignorant, they were not even curious. Procopy himself had been present when one day a faithful general, thinking to please the boy-Tsar, proudly brought back an astrolabe from abroad, by which means, he explained, the cunning foreigners could navigate by the sun and stars. Peter had been delighted. No one had ever seen such a thing before. ‘How does it work?’ he had asked. ‘How?’ The general was nonplussed. ‘I never thought of asking,’ he replied.

  That the astrolabe had at that time been in use for nearly two thousand years they did not know.

  But nothing had impressed Procopy more than the way that the young Tsar had found not only a Dutchman who could explain it to him but had sat down with an exercise book day after day, week after week, until he had slowly mastered the unfamiliar mathematics of the thing.

  ‘I tell you,’ he explained to his father, ‘I admire him as a Tsar, for behind his wildness is something formidable. But I love him as a man. It’s not just his curiosity, which is past anything I’ve ever seen. But he struggles so hard! I watched him with his mathematics. It didn’t come easily to him at all, but he wouldn’t give up. That’s what I like. He makes mistakes, but he just won’t give up.’

  Procopy had got to know the German suburb very well; and though he had not the driving passion for knowledge that Peter had, he began to have some understanding of the wealth that it represented. Indeed, he even began to think of himself as rather advanced, a man ahead of his time.

  Until he went on the great embassy abroad.

  The great embassy of Peter of Russia to western Europe has become such a part of the folklore of world history that its true nature is often forgotten.

  The folklore is that Peter, thirsty for western civilization, visited Europe and then returned to civilize his own country and make it as much like the rest of Europe as he could.

  This is not true.

  Firstly, as to Peter’s reason for going, the latter must certainly leave no shadow of doubt. It was to prepare for war – as a start, against Turkey. Diplomatically, the embassy was to persuade western countries to join an anti-Turkish alliance. The practical side of the tour of Europe was to learn shipbuilding so that Russia could build a proper, sea-going fleet.

  Already in 1696, soon after his victory at Azov, Peter had sent fifty horrified Russians, without their families, to western Europe to learn navigation and shipbuilding. Amongst them, amazingly, was the fifty-two-year-old Tolstoy who had somehow, despite his close links to Peter’s Miloslavsky enemies, managed to get into Peter’s favour.

  His own embassy, therefore, followed soon after.

  But why did Peter himself go; and why did he go incognito – officially only as a junior member of the party led by his ambassadors?

  We do not know for certain. But it was probably to give himself more freedom to roam unofficially in the dockyards of the west. Certainly he spent months working as a ship’s carpenter and learning the whole business very thoroughly.

  It also perhaps gave this devotee of the Mock Synod and the Jolly Company more opportunity to play the fool. This he and his friends also did. In London, they were installed, near the docks, in the house of the distinguished diarist John Evelyn, and so effectively wrecked both house and garden that the great Sir Christopher Wren, who inspected the place afterwards, estimated the damage at the then astounding sum of three hundred and fifty pounds. Amongst other items, the floor had to be renewed; the tiles from the Dutch stoves had been pulled off; the brass door locks broken; the feather beds ripped open; all the lawns and a four-hundred-foot-long, nine-foot-high holly hedge – one of the horticultural prizes of London – completely destroyed.

  In this manner, in 1697–8, Tsar Peter came to learn about the civilization of Europe.

  The Baltic; the port of Riga; the German states of Brandenburg and Hanover; Holland; England; Hapsburg Vienna; Poland.

  It was not, Procopy would say in later years, that he had entered other lands. He had entered another century.

  He never really understood how great the difference was. This was not lack of intelligence on his part. The huge, two-thousand-year-old tradition of philosophical enquiry, from Socrates to Descartes; the splendours of the Renaissance; the beginnings of modern science; and, most of all, the complex and flexible western societies with their ancient institutions, professions, legal and moral codes and brilliant culture – all these things, despite some imported books and furniture at the Tsar’s court, were simply not comprehended by more than a handful of Russians. None of Peter’s entourage really understood what they were seeing. Peter himself certainly did not, nor could he have.

  But if Procopy did not understand what he saw, it still made a profound impression on him, and he intuited much that he did not fully comprehend.

  With Peter, he had been impressed by the ships and the huge ports. The cannon he had seen on board the ships had hugely excited him and, with Peter, too, he had been delighted to discover that one could obtain greatly superior gunpowder in the west.

  But when his father had questioned him upon his return and asked him which country he admired most, he replied: ‘I think it was Holland.’

  ‘Why?’ Nikita enquired. ‘Is it their ships, their trade?’

  Procopy shook his head.

  ‘No. It is …’ he searched for a word ‘ … it is their order.’ And seeing Nikita look puzzled, he went on: ‘They have even tamed the sea. I saw great walls – not like our wooden walls across the steppe to keep out the Tatars, but huge walls of stone to keep out the sea itself. They call them dykes. They have taken land back from the sea and laid out fields – thousands of them, all so neatly arranged in squares and rectangles, within their dykes. You can scarcely credit that men could accomplish such a thing. And they have canals, straight as arrows, that stretch to the horizon.’

  Nikita looked unimpressed.

  ‘We do not need such things in Russia. We have land without end.’

  ‘I know. But don’t you see,’ Procopy went on excitedly, ‘that’s not the point.’ It was something he had been brooding about ever since he first saw these wonders. ‘The point, Father, is that they have conquered nature. They have imposed a pattern, an order, on the land, even the sea itself.’ He paused and then added with a sudden flash of insight, ‘It’s as if, in their own hearts and minds, they ordered themselves.’

  Nikita laughed.

  ‘I can’t see us Russians ordering ourselves. Can you?’

  Procopy agreed.

  ‘No, I can’t. But we can impose order from above. That’s the only way to do it, as the Tsar himself has said to me many times.’

  Nikita sighed.

  ‘So do you mean that you and the Tsar have come back meaning to impose your will upon Mother Nature?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘My poor Procopy, nature in Russia is mightier than any Tsar. You cannot impose anything upon her. The land,’ he suggested, ‘is endless.’

  But now it was Procopy’s turn to smile.

  ‘Wait until you’ve seen Tsar Peter try,’ he remarked drily.

  If these comments depressed Nikita, because he thought them impractical, it was nothing to the effect they had on Eudokia.

  ‘God made nature,’ she warned him, ‘and if you seek to impose your order upon nature too, then I say that this is nothing but pride. You and your Tsar are evil.’

  And to Procopy’s great sorrow, he found his mother estranged from him.

  Strangely enough, all three parties to this argument were profoundly and equally Russian: Eudokia in her religious conservatism; Nikita in his fatalism; and perhaps most of all young Procopy in his optimism. For, having seen the outside world and its order, even if remaining unaware of its
complex underpinnings, Procopy had assumed that, just as the villagers in Russia can build a house in a day, so with a strong leader and a titanic effort, a new order can be imposed from above. This belief is the perennial tragedy of Russia.

  What, then, had the embassy really accomplished?

  In fact, a great deal. Peter had wanted to study shipbuilding: he and others had done so quite thoroughly. He wanted new armaments, gunpowder that did not continually misfire, and knowledge of modern fighting methods, especially at sea. He obtained all of these. He also opened up new avenues for trade.

  The Russians’ diplomacy failed. No one wanted to fight the Sultan of Turkey at that time. But if his drive to the warm seas of the south might be stalled, Peter had discovered in his travels that there could be other alliances he could make that would get him access to the other trade route he needed: the Baltic Sea in the north.

  Above all, it was the long-term consequences of the embassy which were the most important. Men like cunning old Peter Tolstoy might not have learned a great deal about shipbuilding, as they had been told to do, but they came back with a wealth of observations, a knowledge of foreign languages, and some insight, at least, into European education and culture. These were the early Europeanized Russians, the group of which Sophia’s counsellor Golitsyn had been the forerunner. These were the men who, in the long run, would open Russia’s windows on the west.

  Was Procopy Bobrov such a man? Not quite. But though he lacked the desire to educate himself profoundly, he had still taken in enough to see that his homeland was centuries out of date.

  This had one sad consequence. For while her sense of religious propriety had separated Eudokia and her son, Procopy now found a subtler barrier between himself and his father. Nor could he help it.

  For to Nikita, his son had become a stranger. It was not his western style of dress, nor his travels as such. But Nikita could sense, in that faint but unmistakable reserve in Procopy’s manner, by the distant look in his eye, that his son no longer warmed to the same things; he knew something his own people did not. Nikita had seen German and English officers look at their Russian troops that way.

  He’s not really a Russian any more, he thought. And, hardest of all to bear for a man who had always thought himself more educated than his fellow nobles: He secretly despises me.

  This, then, was the young man who had just walked into the courtyard, and at whom Daniel was staring in disbelief.

  For Procopy was wearing a smart green uniform, close-fitting, with buttons down the front in the German manner. His legs were encased in breeches and stockings. And apart from a neat moustache, he was cleanshaven.

  Of course, in the old Cossack days in the Ukraine, when men still called him Ox, Daniel had been used to cleanshaven men. But here in the north – that the son of Nikita Bobrov should do such a thing! – he could only stare in wonder.

  Nikita, following his gaze, smiled a little apologetically.

  ‘The Tsar’s friends came back from their journey cleanshaven,’ he remarked.

  ‘The Tsar himself has shaved the beards of the boyars at court,’ Procopy reminded him. ‘He says he won’t tolerate people at his court looking so primitive. He told me so today.’

  Primitive! Daniel winced at the word. He saw Eudokia start as if she had been slapped, and then look away from them. It was a calculated insult.

  Yet Nikita Bobrov appeared to ignore this rudeness. It seemed he had something else on his mind. He turned to his son with a look of enquiry.

  ‘You came from Preobrazhenskoe?’

  Procopy nodded.

  ‘Well?’ Nikita asked.

  ‘It’s decided. We have some confessions. We begin the executions tomorrow.’ He took his father by the arm. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell you about it.’ And he led him into the house.

  Only now did Eudokia turn to face Daniel and his little family again. He saw there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Thank God,’ she cried softly. ‘Thank God that you have come.’

  Only gradually did Daniel realize the full horror of what was going on. Only during the course of that winter did he come to understand why the Lady Eudokia had felt so in need of his presence. And he himself was not sure how he could comfort her.

  As Procopy had announced, the executions of the mutinous streltsy had begun the day after Daniel’s arrival.

  Indeed, they might have started sooner if the interrogations – which had been going on down at Preobrazhenskoe – had not been so difficult. For very few of the mutinous soldiers were prepared to talk, despite some extensive persuasion.

  It was at that time in Russia normal procedure in all cases of this kind to give prisoners the knout to elicit a confession. The use of torture in interrogation was normal in most countries at that time, whereas it is used in far fewer countries today, but a word of explanation may be needed about the Russian method.

  For it is sometimes thought that the famous Russian knout was just a kind of whip, or a flail like the English cat o’ nine tails. But whereas the English navy, in the last century, would give a man a thousand lashes with the cat and reckon he might live, a twentieth of that ration with the knout would have killed him. And though, say, a Bobrov might have thrashed a peasant on his estate for some misdemeanour, he would probably have used the rods called batogs, not a knout.

  The knout was three and a half feet long and made of leather. Much thicker than batogs, it was also very heavy. As a result, when a blow was struck, which the knout-master did by leaping forward and swinging with all his force, it actually sunk a wound, like a bar, into the victim’s back for the depth of half an inch or so. The skin was completely pulverized. Blood and tissue flew with every stroke. If the knout-master worked down your back, by the second time round he would be at the bone.

  In order to appreciate how thorough the Russians were in this matter, however, it should further be explained that the more severe method was first to tie the victim’s hands behind his back and then haul him up by the hands with a rope over a beam. This meant not just that he hung before the knout-master but that his arms were actually dislocated from their sockets while the knouting went on. When lowered, the arms could then be forced back into their sockets again.

  This was the Russian knout, with which most prisoners were interrogated.

  Tsar Peter was very concerned about the mutiny of the streltsy. He had seen his own uncle hacked to pieces by them when he was a boy and he knew they were capable of overturning him and putting Sophia back in his place. The questioning was urgent, therefore. Not only the streltsy but two of Sophia’s maids were stripped and knouted – although Peter leniently allowed one of these a simple execution when he discovered she was pregnant.

  As well as the knout, Peter in person supervised the putting of some prisoners to the rack and also had them roasted on a fire in front of him. Yet the streltsy were still so obstinate in their silence that on at least one occasion Peter tried to cure a mutineer’s silence by breaking open his clenched jaws with a stick.

  Procopy Bobrov was present at a number of these interrogations.

  He was there for a particular reason. As soon as they arrived back, Peter had joined the young man to his newly formed government department. It was called the Preobrazhensky Prikaz – in effect, a secret police bureau. And right from the start, it would make itself feared.

  ‘The streltsy aren’t talking much, even under torture,’ Procopy told his father. ‘But we do know they planned to replace Peter and they were going to kill every foreigner in Russia too. We’ll deal with them, though.’

  The executions that autumn went on for three weeks, from the last day of September to October 18.

  On October 12, there was a sudden dense fall of snow, plunging Moscow directly into winter, but the daily public executions went on.

  Daniel witnessed several. The victims died in various ways, though usually they were beheaded or hanged. Peter also demanded that his boyars and friends should take a hand i
n the executions, and Daniel heard Procopy say to his father one evening: ‘The Tsar’s curious to see some people beheaded in the European way, with a sword instead of an axe tomorrow. Have you a good heavy sword you could lend me?’

  Daniel saw Procopy at work the next day. Someone else in the crowd told the old man that he had seen the Tsar himself behead several men.

  All these events Daniel witnessed with sorrow, but not with horror. The knouting, the executions: the streltsy had rebelled and it was only to be expected that they would be punished.

  His horror began one morning when they brought out the regimental priests.

  It was in Red Square. There, before the great, exotic towers of St Basil’s Cathedral, Peter’s men had erected a huge scaffold – but not just an ordinary scaffold: this one was in the shape of a cross. They led out the priests to the scaffold. Daniel braced himself to witness a monstrosity.

  But what happened next took his breath away entirely. For now, to perform the hanging, came the court jester. He was dressed as a priest.

  The same day, in the gardens of the Novodevichy Convent, a hundred and ninety-five more of the streltsy were hung on gibbets, near Sophia’s window.

  All these corpses were to be left dangling – strange, frozen spectres, for five long months through the winter.

  And what was Daniel to make of all this? He thought he knew. As the months passed, he became increasingly certain. Yet even then, he did not wish to form the thought himself.

  Why had Eudokia summoned him? For comfort. Because, Daniel soon realized, there was no one else she felt she could trust.

  Her son was godless. Her husband, wanting success for his family, said nothing.

  ‘You see for yourself, all around, what has come to pass,’ she told him privately. ‘Help me, good Daniel, to know what to do.’

  Ostensibly he was there as a carpenter. And, indeed, he did some beautiful joinery in their house, so that Nikita himself soon forgot his irritation at his wife’s unexpectedly sending for the fellow. The landowner would proudly show Daniel’s workmanship to visitors, and had he not refused to work for anyone else, Daniel could have had many commissions.