Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  Sophia’s public accusations soon triggered a revolt amongst the Streltsy, an enormous division of soldiers armed with muskets and pikes created by Ivan the Terrible to guard the tsar in the Kremlin. Numbering 20,000, they were the heart of the Russian army. Most of the Streltsy were unlettered, unsophisticated peasants, under the charge of noble officers. At the time of tsar Fyodor’s death, the Streltsy were already in a state of unrest; their pay was being embezzled by their officers, and when one soldier made an official complaint on behalf of the whole regiment, the Streltsy commander ordered that he be beaten for insubordination. This incited a total of seventeen Streltsy regiments to rebel against their officers, and the rebellion was still ongoing when Natalya Naryshkina took office as regent. The Streltsy were so numerous that they occupied an entire quarter of the city of Moscow; their demands could not be ignored when they acted together. Natalya attempted to placate them by having their colonels arrested and their property confiscated to pay the soldiers their wages. But the Streltsy had already made a connection between the unfair treatment they had received and the accusations Sophia had made against the Naryshkins. They smelled a conspiracy; in order to preserve the live of the tsarevitch Ivan, he must be placed on the throne and the Naryshkin faction purged. They were encouraged in this belief by high ranking members of the Miloslavsky faction, who were probably conspiring with Sophia herself. But it would be difficult to overthrow Peter and replace him with Ivan unless another member of the royal family stood ready to step into Natalya Naryshkina’s place as regent. Sophia, however, possessed the necessary intelligence and daring, and most importantly of all, as tsar Alexei’s daughter, she possessed legitimacy. Without her, the plot to place Ivan on the throne could not have succeeded.

  On May 15, 1682, two members of the Miloslavsky faction appeared in the midst of the Streltsy and claimed that the Naryshkins had killed Ivan and were planning to kill Sophia and all the rest of tsar Alexei’s children. Only the faithful soldiers of the Streltsy could prevent the murders of a dozen Romanovs, most of whom were women and children. At once, the Streltsy began to march on the Kremlin. Panic and confusion ensued; the soldiers were within the walls of the fortress and inside the palace itself before any defense could be mounted against them. Natalya Naryshkina, learning that the Streltsy believed Ivan to be dead, took both Ivan and Peter by the hands and led them to the top of the grand staircase, where the Streltsy were gathered. “Thanks be to God they are well and have not suffered at the hands of traitors,” she told them. “There are no traitors in the palace. You have been deceived.”

  At first it seemed that the tide had been turned and violence would be averted. Arteem Matveev, Natalya Naryshkina’s former guardian, her chief advisor now that she was regent, promised the Streltsy that their actions would be forgiven if they dispersed immediately, since they had acted out of loyalty to the tsar. The soldiers were on the verge of obeying him when Prince Michael Dolgoruky—son of the very commanding officer who had allowed their colonels to embezzle their wages—began to berate them, threatening mass punishments. Instantly, their rage against the nobles and the Naryshkins was rekindled, and slaughter ensued. Dolgoruky and Matveev were both impaled, thrown from the balcony onto the pikes of the soldiers below. Matveev was dragged away before the eyes of Natalya, Peter, and Ivan, and hacked to pieces. The Streltsy went from room to room throughout the Kremlin, hunting for Natalya’s male Naryshkin relatives, forcing servants and passers-by to assist them in their search at sword point.

  No one attempted to harm Peter, Ivan, or Natalya, but all three were forced to stand in the midst of the carnage and watch as the Streltsy went on their rampage, hacking and impaling Peter and Natalya’s family with abandon. Throughout the ordeal, ten-year-old Peter remained silent and watchful, betraying none of the horror he must have felt. But the traumatic effects of witnessing the Streltsy revolt remained with him for the rest of his life; some scholars have speculated that it was the source of the epileptic fits he suffered as an adult. The revolt lasted for three days, with the soldiers returning to their own homes at night and coming back to the palace in the morning on the hunt for more of the “traitors” who had supposedly murdered tsar Fyodor. When the dust settled at last, the Streltsy were very nearly de facto rulers of Moscow; the boyars and royals dared refuse none of their demands. Ivan was named co-tsar with Peter at their petition, and their sister Sophia was likewise appointed regent. Sophia, who undoubtedly played some role in instigating the revolt but probably had not anticipated the full consequences, was in fact the candidate best-suited to rule among those who had survived the violence. She was careful to reward the Streltsy in accordance with their idea of themselves as faithful protectors of the tsar and his government.

  Peter, meanwhile, was irrevocably marked by the violence he had witnessed. It would not be overstating matters to describe the Streltsy revolt as the defining event of his formative years. The entire course of his adolescence and young adulthood can be mapped with respect to the brutal realities Peter learned while watching a poorly organized, poorly led force of traditional Muscovite soldiers slaughter his family before his eyes. One historian describes the effects of the Streltsy revolt upon Peter thus:

  “Peter hated what he had seen: the maddened, undisciplined soldiery of the old medieval Russia running wild through the Kremlin; statesmen and nobles dragged from their private chambers and bloodily massacred; Moscow, the Kremlin, the royal family, the Tsar himself at the mercy of ignorant, rioting soldiers. The revolt helped create in Peter a revulsion against the Kremlin, with its dark rooms and mazes of tiny apartments lit by flickering candles, its population of bearded priests and boyars, its pathetically secluded women. He extended his hatred to Moscow, the capital of the Orthodox tsars, and to the Orthodox Church, with its chanting priests, pomp and ceremony which could call him ‘next to God’ but could not protect him or his mother when the Streltsy turned against them.”

  Peter would spend his adolescence distancing himself as much as possible from the trappings of old Muscovy. For friendship, entertainment, adventure, and romance, he turned to Moscow’s German quarter, where he mingled with foreigners and other disreputables, shunning the trappings and ceremonies of royalty. When Peter came into his maturity, his fascination with the society, technologies, and military traditions of Europe would lead him on a journey west; when he returned to Russia, it was at the head of a cultural revolution. And Moscow itself would be shunned by the tsar in his adulthood, as his vision swung towards the Baltic, where he would build the city of St. Petersburg, a new capital for a new Russia.

  The Regency of Sophia Alekseyevna

  Tsarevna Sophia Alekseyevna became, at the age of twenty-five, the first woman ever to rule Russia—first in a string of female regents and empresses that would dominate the late 17th and 18th centuries. Indeed, Peter the Great was the only significant male monarch to rule Russia until after the death of Catherine the Great more than a hundred years later.

  Those who had conspired to help Sophia become regent were not necessarily eager to make the experiment in female rule, however. Prince Ivan Khovansky, one of the Streltsy commanders who had stirred the soldiers up against the Naryshkins, saw Sophia’s regency as a necessary but troublesome obstacle on the path towards making himself regent. Khovansky was an Old Believer, one of those who had held out against the religious reforms implemented by tsar Alexei to make the doctrines and practices of the Russian Orthodox church consistent with the Greek Orthodox rite. A large number of the Streltsy were also Old Believers. Testing his influence over the new regent, Khovansky presented Sophia with the Streltsy’s demand that she overturn Alexei’s religious reforms. He had good reason to believe that this demand would be honored; the Streltsy received practically everything they asked for in the wake of the revolt, including a monument in Red Square honoring their deeds and listing the names of their victims as traitors to be reviled for all of history. Cannily, Sophia promised Khovansky that she would do al
l that he asked—just as soon as she had discharged her duty in arranging the double coronation of her brothers Ivan and Peter. In Europe, it sometimes happened that husbands and wives were crowned co-rulers, but this was to be the first time in the history of Russia or Europe that two brothers would share the throne of a nation. The coronation took place quickly, within a week of Sophia’s becoming regent.

  As it happened, Sophia had no intention of overturning her father’s church reforms. In July of 1682, she and the other women of the royal family—including her own sisters, tsar Fyodor’s wife Martha, and Peter’s mother Natalya—walked out to meet a mob of Streltsy Old Believers who had come to see their demands fulfilled. Embodying the peremptory spirit of a true Romanov autocrat, Sophia informed them that to reverse her father’s religious edicts would be to call into question the authority the tsar who had decreed them. Khovansky hinted that it was past time for Sophia to retreat to a convent. Sophia responded by executing huge numbers of the Streltsy for their role in the Moscow rebellion. She spared Khovansky in order to test his loyalty, by giving him charge of the government in her absence while she took Ivan and Peter on pilgrimage. There, miles from the palace, she wrote to Khovansky, requesting that he send a large number of the palace guard to meet the young tsars and accompany them on their journey. Khovansky was unwilling to surrender the men and arms under his command, and Sophia took this as evidence that he was planning to mount a coup. She had Khovansky arrested, condemned as a traitor, and publicly executed. No one would suggest that she retreat to a convent again until her brother Peter sent her there seven years later.

  Two years into her regency, in 1684, Sophia was at war. The Ottoman empire had attacked Vienna; Russia joined with other Christian nations, including its hereditary enemy, Catholic Poland, to fight for Christendom. In exchange, Russia would receive rights over Kiev, the historical birthplace of Russian Orthodox Christianity, as well as much of Ukraine. Though Sophia made the decisions, she involved the young tsars in the diplomatic negotiations. Eighteen-year-old Ivan was halting, awkward, participating only when prompted; by contrast, Peter, who was twelve, listened carefully to the ambassadors and asked so many questions that he had to be reminded that as a matter of protocol he was supposed to let Ivan speak first. He had proven too restless to spend long hours in a traditional classroom as he grew older, but he was already eager to exert his authority.

  Peter’s education

  In a way, the decline in the political fortunes of the Naryshkin faction served Peter exceptionally well in his boyhood. As regent, Sophia kept Natalya Naryshkina on an allowance too small to permit any extravagance, so she and Peter lived in the village of Preobrazhenskoe, about three miles outside of Moscow, where Peter grew up in the fresh air, forests, and streams of the countryside. The royal tutors who had provided tsar Alexei’s other children with a classical education were far away in the Kremlin, so Peter’s formal studies fell by the wayside. He was anything but idle, however. Peter was the first in a long line of Romanov tsars who were military-mad as children. Like most royal children, his first friends were assigned to him from amongst the sons of the most powerful families at court, boys his age whose fathers were high-ranking boyars. To this core group of six or seven boys, Peter added dozens, and eventually hundreds of new recruits from every class of society, including boys whose fathers were merchants, servants, or serfs. He organized these followers into a “play” regiment, the Preobrazhensky Guards—though their “play” status was due only to the age of most of the participants. In almost every particular, they were outfitted and disciplined in the style of a legitimate military regiment. They lived in barracks, adhered to a strict schedule of sentry duty, wore uniforms, and drilled with real weapons. Peter requisitioned cannon and gunpowder so that he could practice firing salutes. No doubt many children have dreamed of playing wargames with such toys, but Peter was tsar, and Sophia Alekseyevna allowed the requisitions to be granted, in deference to his status. There was no reason for her to deny his requests. Peter was still too young to be any threat to her, and even if he and all his boy soldiers had marched on the Kremlin, her regency was supported by the Streltsy in Moscow.

  Over time, nearly the entire Preobrazhenskoe village was caught up in Peter’s military games and the nearby village of Semyonovksoe was annexed as well, leading to the creation of the Semyonovsky Guards. Once Peter became tsar in his own right, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky would become the first two regiments in the Russian Imperial Guard; they would play crucial roles in bringing the future empresses Elizaveta and Catherine the Great to the throne, and they would endure until the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917. After Peter, the rank of colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards belonged to the tsar by right, but Peter himself insisted on starting at the bottom ranks of his play army, as a drummer boy, only allowing himself to be promoted when he felt that his experience and abilities were suited to a higher rank. This was partly because drummer boys have more fun than the boy playing the rank of colonel, but even when Peter was older he rarely took supreme command of his armies, though he was always present when the most dangerous battles were fought. Peter’s reign was distinguished by his insistence on merit-based promotions; in this, he often upset the boyars, who were accustomed to the privileges of precedence and did not like to take orders from anyone who was socially beneath them. But it became difficult for a boyar officer to argue when the son of a merchant was promoted over his head, when the tsar himself was abiding by the same standards.

  Peter was anxious that his play regiments have professional instruction from real soldiers and officers. These, he recruited from Moscow’s German suburb. Peter was fascinated by the military tactics practiced by European armies, and these foreign-born soldiers of fortune who had washed up in Moscow’s foreign quarter were well-equipped to teach him. Peter looked for other teachers as well—before the age of fifteen, he learned carpentry, stonemasonry, printing, blacksmithing, and how to operate a wood-lathe. Then, in 1687, he met a Dutch merchant named Franz Timmerman, who, at Peter’s request, introduced the young tsar to the art of shipbuilding. As the story goes, Peter and Timmerman were out walking one day when they came across a storehouse that had been locked for twenty years. Peter asked to look inside, where he discovered the decaying remains of what Timmerman identified as “an English boat”. It was like no boat Peter had ever seen before. Russian riverboats were similar to barges and had to be pushed along by the wind, the current, or by people manning oars or simply hauling the boat downriver with rope. Russia had only one seaport, and therefore Russia had no navy and no merchant fleet. Peter had never seen or even heard of a ship that was designed to sail against the wind in oceanic waters. He asked Timmerman whether the boat could be repaired, and Timmerman agreed to undertake the project. Once the boat was seaworthy again, Peter was on the water daily. Shipbuilding became his new passion. He spent much of 1687 building a boatyard on the shores of Lake Pleschev, where a crew of Dutch shipbuilders began construction on two frigates and three yachts.

  It was with great unwillingness that Peter left this project behind in 1688, returning to Moscow on orders from his mother. He was sixteen years old; it was time, both his mother and his sister Sophia agreed, for Peter to be married. Natalya Naryshkina disapproved of all the time Peter was spending in the company of foreigners. She handpicked his bride, believing that a sweet, pretty, obedient girl from a traditional family would be just the thing to capture her son’s attention and anchor him back in Moscow, where the political climate was becoming unstable. Peter obeyed his mother’s summons and went through with the wedding, but it was a disaster from day one. His wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, had been cloistered in a terem her whole life and had no education at all. She was everything a traditional Muscovite bride was supposed to be, painfully deferential, obedience, over-awed by her husband, but Peter was bored senseless by her. They had two sons. The elder, Alexei, became his heir. The younger, Alexander, died as an infant. Peter was by that tim
e so detached from his wife and his domestic ties that he did not bother attending the child’s funeral.

  End of the regency

  At sixteen, Peter was the same age that his father, tsar Alexei, and his grandfather, the first Romanov tsar, Michael, had been when they came to the throne. He had long since reached his adult height of six feet, eight inches. (Visiting Swedish ministers, meeting the strapping Peter when he was eleven years old, reported home that he was at least sixteen, so impressive did he appear physically.) By comparison, his brother and co-tsar Ivan was weak, shy, and found it distressing when he was required to make decisions.

  The first few years of Sophia Alekseyevna’s regency had been successful, even peaceful. She had successfully negotiated to retain Russian rights over Kiev in exchange for fighting alongside the Polish against the Ottoman empire; this was the greatest triumph of her reign. But by the late 1680’s, Russian was embroiled, through treaty agreements with Poland, in a war against the Crimean Tatars. At the head of this campaign was Sophia’s foreign minister, chief advisor, and lover, Vasily Golitsyn. Russian forces met with heavy losses, and Golitsyn was forced to retreat on unfavorable terms; the Khan of Crimea refused to release Russian prisoners, or cease his attacks against Ukraine and Poland. Nonetheless, Sophia greeted Golitsyn as a hero at the gates of Moscow and ordered thanksgiving services to be held in the city’s churches. In the names of tsar Ivan and tsar Peter, she lavished Golitsyn with rewards in the form of money and a country estate. Peter, however, refused his consent for these honors. He refused to attend the thanksgiving services for Golitsyn’s return, and when Golitsyn traveled to Peter’s home in the country to offer formal thanks for the rewards Sophia had dispensed in Peter’s name, Peter refused to see him. “Everyone saw plainly and knew that the consent of the younger Tsar had not been extorted without the greatest difficulty and that this merely made him more excited against the generalissimo,” wrote Patrick Gordon, a Scottish soldier who had advised Sophia during her preparations for war.