Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  This was the first time Peter had publically challenged Sophia’s authority as regent. He was old enough by now that such behavior could not be seen as anything but an opening gambit in a campaign to end the regency. The Russian court, sensing that a shift in power was rapidly approaching, began to pay greater attention to the young tsar and his mother at their estate in Preobrazhenskoe. The atmosphere was tense. Unconfirmed rumors were circulating that Sophia intended to have herself crowned as tsarina, setting her brothers aside, after which she would marry Golitsyn and make him tsar. There was no evidence that she was planning such a move, save that a portrait had been painted of her wearing the traditional regalia of Russian autocrats, including the cap of Monomakh, with which all tsars of Russia were crowned. But it is certain that, having tasted the freedom, power, and independence of being regent, she was fearful of being relegated to terem life once again. If she suspected the fate that awaited her after Peter gained his majority, perhaps she would have done something to deserve the charges that were being leveled against her.

  In June of 1689, tensions erupted between Sophia and the Miloslavsky faction in the Kremlin and Peter, Natalya, and the Naryshkins in Preobrazhenskoe. Peter was beginning to resent Sophia’s customary practice of appearing in royal processions on equal footing with her brothers; Sophia, feeling that she was only exercising the rights bestowed upon her at her brothers’ coronation, refused to take a lower place. Neither Peter nor Sophia could launch an open attack against the other without a good reason. Sophia was afraid that Peter would send the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky regiments to attack her. Peter, having witnessed the savagery of the Streltsy attack against his relatives as a boy, worried that if Sophia ordered them to attack him, they would obey. In August of that year, Peter’s worst fears seemed to be confirmed when Streltsy guards attacked a messenger Peter had sent to Kremlin. When Peter’s retainers heard of it, they woke him in the middle of the night, telling him that the Streltsy were coming to murder him; such was his terror that he fled forty-five miles on horseback to reach his supporters who were gathered at the fortified Troitsky Monastery. There was no need for such panicked flight; Sophia had not ordered any attack against Peter. But it was difficult to explain what had really happened, and in any case, Peter had decided that he was no longer content to be ruled by a regent.

  At Troitsky Monastery, Peter was not only surrounded by his own supporters, but by the walls of an impregnable fortress, which also happened to be one of the holiest sites in Russia. Even if the Streltsy attacked, they could not reach him there. But the Streltsy were not likely to launch such an attack. They were conservative, traditional, and blindly loyal to the tsar. Lacking anything like political sophistication, they were uncertain how to choose between the duly appointed regent Sophia and the anointed sovereign tsar Ivan on the one side, and the anointed sovereign tsar Peter on the other. Peter decided to test his authority and find out which way the Streltsy would fall by ordering Ivan Tsykler, colonel of the Stremyani Regiment, to join him at Troitsky, along with fifty of his men. Once Tsykler was actually in Peter’s presence, he became obedient and humble, promising to do whatever Peter wished, so long as he would protect them against any reprisals from his sister. Peter then wrote to the colonels of all the other Streltsy regiments, ordering them to leave the Kremlin and come to Troitsky, but they were as overwhelmed by Sophia’s proximity as Tsykler had been by Peter’s—she threatened to behead any of the Streltsy that tried to leave Moscow, and the colonels, at least, listened to her. Day by day, ordinary soldiers were deserting their posts near the Kremlin to travel to Preobrazhenskoe and present themselves as faithful subjects of the younger tsar.

  Sophia did not wish to attack, depose, imprison, or kill Peter; throughout the summer, she attempted to reconcile with him. But reconciliation meant that Peter would remain under Sophia’s authority, something he was no longer willing to do. In truth, once Peter realized that his greatest strength lay in the legitimacy of his position as tsar, there was nothing Sophia could do to stop him from taking power.

  Since neither Sophia nor Peter was willing to fight, everything depended on the loyalty of the Streltsy and foreign officers in Moscow, like Patrick Gordon, who held key positions in the Russian army. The Streltsy, though they were 20,000 strong and capable of terrible destruction, were almost childlike in their deference to whoever they perceived as having rightful authority over them. The trouble lay in controlling this perception, because they were liable to being influenced. Peter, it turned out, was enormously influential. And many of the foreign officers had helped train Peter’s play regiments when he was a boy. They knew his character well enough to understand which way the wind was blowing.

  On August 4, 1689, Peter sent a message to the Kremlin declaring that Fyodor Shaklovity, Sophia’s chief lieutenant besides Golitsyn, had conspired against his life; he ordered that Shaklovity be arrested and sent to Troitsky to face justice. The news came as a shattering blow to Sophia. The Streltsy remaining in Moscow had come to realize that they were now on the losing side of the power contest between the regent and the tsar, and they demanded that she turn Shaklovity over to them so that they might take him to Troitsky as a sign of their obedience. Sophia refused, until they threatened to rise up against her, storming the Kremlin as they had done seven years ago in their purge of the Naryshkins. The Streltsy had brought her to power, and now they would bring her low again. One by one, Peter ordered the arrest, torture, and death or exile of each member of Sophia’s inner circle. Golitsyn was banished to Siberia. Shaklovity was executed. Tsar Ivan, at Peter’s request, asked Sophia to leave the Kremlin and take up residence at Novodevichy Convent; she was not required to become a nun, and was given a large suite with luxurious furnishings and a complement of servants. But she could be visited there by no one except her female relatives. She was, in effect, being returned to the terem, a devastating fate for the first woman ever to rule Russia.

  Peter was so intimidated by Sophia that he refused to leave Troitsky and take up his seat in Moscow until she was safely behind the walls of the convent. Later in life, he described his sister as “a princess endowed with all the accomplishments of body and mind to perfection, had it not been for her boundless ambition and insatiable desire for governing.” It was, of course, characteristic of the time and place where Sophia lived that ambition and the will to govern were perceived as flaws in her character. But in her regency, Sophia Alekseyevna had thrown open a door that would not be shut again for more than a hundred years. Peter himself would be succeeded by a woman, Catherine I. She would be followed, with only brief interruptions by short-lived male rulers, by Anna, daughter of Ivan; her own daughter, Elizaveta; and finally, Catherine the Great, the last of Russia’s great autocrats.

  Chapter Two: The Tsar in Europe

  The All-Drunken Synod

  For the first five years after Sophia’s regency ended, from 1689 to 1694, Peter’s day to day life was not remarkably different than it had been when his sister was running the government. He was less interested in governing Russia than he was in being able to do whatever he liked without Sophia or his mother Natalya or his wife Eudoxia interfering. To his brother and co-tsar Ivan, Peter delegated all the ceremonies and formalities the tsar was required to participate in. Affairs of government were left to his uncle Lev Naryshkin, who was made chief foreign minister, Tikhon Streshnev, who was in charge of domestic policy, and Boris Golitsyn, cousin of Sophia’s advisor Vasily Golitsyn. Natalya Naryshkina also wielded influence over government affairs, though she lacked Sophia’s energy and ability. Patriarch Joachim of the Orthodox church was her chief personal advisor. The government of Sophia Alekseyevna and Vasily Golitsyn was seen as having been corrupted by foreign influence, and the Naryshkin party was reactionary and xenophobic by way of contrast. Ironically, the tsar in whose name they served continued to spend all of his time mingling with foreigners from the German Quarter. Peter’s chief interests were what they had always been—sh
ipbuilding, European technology, and military strategy—and there was nowhere else in Moscow he could pursue them.

  The German Quarter had been established by tsar Alexei, who decreed that foreigners should not live within the boundaries of the Orthodox city of Moscow. (It was occupied by English, French, and Dutch persons, as well as by Germans; the Russian word for “German” was applied broadly to all foreigners.) The borders of Russia had long been closed to outsiders, but when the English king Charles I was beheaded by Cromwell, Alexei was so incensed that he opened the borders of Russia to royalist refugees from England and Scotland—which was how the Scottish Catholic Mary Hamilton had arrived in Moscow to become the patroness of Natalya Naryshkina. The sophisticated Vasily Golitsyn, whose tastes inclined to the European, had also opened the foreign suburb to Huguenots fleeing France after the Edict of Nantes, which permitted Protestants to live peacefully alongside Catholics, was revoked by Louis XIV. Skilled foreigners, such as doctors and schoolmasters and engineers, were also permitted to live in the foreign suburb, since Russia was in dire need of their skills.

  Russian suspicion of foreigners was directly responsible for the fact that so few Russians had this kind of skilled training. Russia was as isolated by the Orthodox religion as it was by landlocked geography. Europeans were anathema because Protestants and Catholics alike were heretics; their languages, learning, culture, and technology were similarly suspicious because they derived from heretical teachings. Peter’s attachment to foreigners was highly distressing to his subjects, even to his mother, though Natalya Naryshkina was more influenced by European culture than any previous tsarina. It was to separate Peter from foreign influences that his mother had tried to limit the amount of time he spent studying ship building at Lake Pleschev with his Dutch mentors.

  Now that Peter was tsar, however, no one could prevent him from keeping company with foreigners, and since he took no interest in governing his country, he had no other claims on his time. In the German Quarter, European expats lived in much the same style they had lived at home—they had their own theaters, restaurants, bookshops, and a steady influx of information from their connections in Europe. Peter had frequented this oasis of modern civilization since he first met the Dutch engineer Timmerman as a boy. Now that he was tsar, he more or less took up permanent residence there. Drinking in pubs, hearing news of the west, keeping company with women who were not confined to the terem, whetted Peter’s appetite for first-hand knowledge of distant lands. The foreigners he kept company with all had opinions about Russia and how it compared their homelands. The tsar of Russia was deeply interested in this outside perspective.

  This was not to say that all of Peter’s companions were foreigners. He still kept company with the motley band of peasants, serfs, and boyars that had formed the nucleus of the Preobrazhensky Guards back when it was merely the unusually well-equipped nursery-yard of a child who liked to play at war. These included boys and young men close to Peter’s own age, and mature men with a long history of state service who took it upon themselves to earn Peter’s trust, recognizing that the young tsar would need the guidance of experienced statesmen when he chose to take up the responsibility of governing. All together, this group of about two hundred men and boys from a diverse array of backgrounds came to be known as the All-Mad, All-Jesting, All-Drunken Synod, or the Jolly Company for short. One scholar has referred this company as “the government of Russia in brutally drunken disguise.” They followed Peter wherever he went, and because all power in an autocracy derives from proximity to the autocrat, this band of hard-drinking revelers functioned as a combination of advisory cabinet and peripatetic military headquarters. Peter invented joke-ranks to bestow on members of the Company, such as “the Polish King” and “Prince-Caesar”, but because the ranks indicated that the bearer stood high in the tsar’s favor, they translated to real power.

  Peter’s pious Orthodox subjects were scandalized by the Company’s openly blasphemous sense of humor. Some concluded that Peter was under evil influence; others decided that he was simply the anti-Christ. The adolescent appeal of a 24/7 partying lifestyle is probably obvious, but it is also understandable why Peter was most comfortable when he was surrounded by experienced soldiers in his pay and retainers who were intensely loyal to him personally. Even his boyhood military games make sense when one considers the effect that the Streltsy revolt must have had on him as a child. The fact that he was tsar had not shielded him when the Streltsy stormed the Kremlin and slaughtered his relatives. From childhood, he knew that he could never be supremely powerful so long as he was dependent on ignorant, suggestible soldiers whose loyalty to the tsar only made them more dangerous in the hands of sophisticated politicians who knew how to manipulate them. Peter would be a soldier himself—no honorary commander, but one who had worked his way through the ranks and come to understand the lives, struggles, and dangers his men were subjected to. And during the earliest, most vulnerable years of his reign, he would live amongst the men who knew him best and were loyal, not so much to the tsar of Russia, as to the man Peter, their companion and drinking partner.

  Archangel

  “For some years I had the fill of my desires on Lake Pleschev, but finally it got too narrow for me… I then decided to see the open sea, and began often to beg the permission of my mother to go to Archangel. She forbade me such a dangerous journey, but, seeing my great desire and unchangeable longing, allowed it in spite of herself.”

  Peter the Great, preface to Maritime Regulations

  Peter’s time with the Jolly Company was not devoted exclusively to fast living and hard drinking. He still visited Lake Pleschev to work in his boatyard, but what had been a fine hobby for a boy felt like amateurism and playacting to the adult tsar. Peter dreamed of sailing the open sea much the way a young person today might dream of being an astronaut—the ocean was just as vast and unknowable as deep space, just as full of peril. There was only one port in all of Russia that communicated with the sea: Archangel, in the far Arctic north, choked with impenetrable ice for eight months of the year. During the summer months, it stood harbor to ships from England, Holland, the German states—none of the ships at Archangel were Russian. The city traded fur, wheat, caviar, and other goods of Russian origin for English wool, German lace and wine, and other European luxuries.

  Because the journey from Moscow to Archangel was over a thousand miles long, no tsar had ever visited the port city in person, but Peter was determined to go. His mother Natalya was equally determined he should not—Peter scarcely seemed to have a hobby that didn’t make his subjects fear for his life, and the prospect of the tsar undertaking a sea voyage was unthinkable. What if he should be lost at sea? How could he be reached in case of some disaster at home? Peter promised her that he only wanted to sail the harbor, and that he would not venture beyond the mouth of the bay into the vastness of the Arctic ocean.

  But then, in February of 1694, tsarina Natalya Naryshkina died, at the age of forty-two. Peter was so devastated by his grief that he could not bring himself to attend the lavish state funeral he arranged for her. “I dumbly tell my grief and my last sorrow,” he wrote to friends in Archangel, “about which neither my hand nor my heart can write in detail, without remembering what the Apostle Paul says about not grieving for such things, and the voice of Edras, ‘Call me again the day that is past.’ I forget all this as much as possible, as being above my reasoning and mind, for thus it has pleased the Almighty God, and all things are according to the will of their Creator. Amen. Therefore, like Noah, resting awhile from my grief, and leaving aside that which can never return, I write about the living.” The living, Peter’s letter went on, should continue work on the ship Peter had begun building in Archangel the previous summer, the keel of which he had fashioned with his own hands. Natalya had been the only person, inside the family or out of it, with enough influence over Peter to persuade him to what he did not wish to do. Now that she was dead, he had no one left to please excep
t himself. By April, he was in Archangel again, sailing his newly-completed ship St. Paul in the frigid waters. The maiden voyage of the St. Paul nearly ended in the capsizing of the ship and the drowning of the tsar, but he managed to steer the ship safely to port in the Unskaya Gulf.

  Azov

  On February 9, 1696, Peter’s brother and co-tsar Ivan died at the age of twenty-nine. Peter was fond of his brother and had always treated him with the respect due to the senior of the two tsars. Nonetheless, his death made little difference to Peter, save that there was no more danger of Sophia or her allies attempting to depose him to rule in Ivan’s name as regent. He was now the sole supreme ruler of Russia.