Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  The bishop seems not entirely disappointed to discover that Peter was not a candidate for conversion, as though his “furious” nature made up for his spiritual heterodoxy. As other high churchmen of Europe were to discover, Peter was interested in different sects of Christianity, not because he wished to abandon Orthodoxy, but because he was interested in comparing the moral philosophies of different religions. The Quaker sect interested him more than the Church of England; he attended a few services at Quaker meeting houses, and declared that “whoever could live by such a doctrine would be happy.” The implication, of course, was that he was not such a person. He was desirous of loosening the stranglehold of Orthodox xenophobia over the Russian people. It had become evident to him that a major reason for Amsterdam’s prosperity was the religious tolerance practiced by the Dutch; a port city that hosted visitors from all over the world, Amsterdam became a haven for Huguenots fleeing France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and foreigners of all faiths met with similar tolerance there. No matter how many warm water ports Orthodox Russia might one day control, they would never thrive as Amsterdam did unless a similar welcome was extended to persons of all cultures and faiths.

  Peter had intended only a short visit to England before returning to Holland and making his way thence to Vienna. But he kept finding reasons to prolong his stay. He toured Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, and Hampton Court; he visited the Greenwich Observatory, Woolwich Arsenal, and the Tower of London, where Peter made an exhaustive study of the Royal Mint. Recently, the Mint had begun to produce coins with striations around the edges, to prevent them from being trimmed and the metal melted down into new coins. Peter would adopt this innovation when he began to reform Russian coinage a few years after his return from Europe. In addition to all this, William gave Peter complete access to the English fleet and allowed him to inspect it in a special review. Afterwards, Peter was invited to observe a session of Parliament, during which he concluded that, although he could never tolerate such limitations on a monarch’s power, “it is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king. This is what we must learn from the English!”

  Vienna

  Peter departed from England at last on May 2, 1698, aboard the Royal Transport, the yacht William had given to him that promised to be the fastest ever built. After slight detours along the river to visit yet more magnificent English ships, he set sail for Amsterdam, where the majority of his Embassy was still waiting for him. They had not been idle; they had recruited almost seven hundred Dutch naval officers, engineers, technicians, doctors, and similar to resettle in Russian, to ply their trades and train young Russians in them. Two weeks later, the entire Embassy was en route to Vienna.

  Vienna was the heart of both the Holy Roman Empire—a loose assembly of German and Italian states dating back to the reign of Charlemagne in the ninth century—and the Habsburg Empire. The two empires were united in the person of Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia, and King of Hungary. Leopold was in his late fifties, more akin to William of Orange in his melancholy, dour temperament than the energetic Peter of Muscovy. His holy destiny, Leopold believed, was to uphold the Catholic church; minor matters, such as the governing of the states over which he nominally ruled, were best left to minor persons. Leopold’s court was principally concerned in upholding protocol. All men, all kings and princes of the earth, were inferior to the Emperor, save for the Pope; tsar Peter, however vast his remote eastern kingdom, was not his equal. Leopold’s courtiers had heard rumors of Peter’s rough, unpolished manners from their envoys to other European states; it took them days to come to an agreement with Francis Lefort on the exact manner in which the incognito tsar would be received by the emperor, and they were in mortal dread lest the irrepressible youth run roughshod over all their protocol.

  True to their predictions, Peter did not abide strictly by the instructions passed on to him by his ambassadors, but his manners had acquired a little more polish during his travels than rumors indicated, and he managed to make himself agreeable to Leopold, especially when he accepted only half the sum the Austrians offered to defray the Embassy’s expenses while in Vienna. Peter spent little time alone with the emperor, though he met with other princes of the Catholic church while he was there. It was well known that Peter’s next destination was Italy; first Venice, to study their famous boats and canals, then Rome, to visit the tomb of St. Peter. As had happened in England, rumors began to circulate that Peter might be persuaded to turn his back on the Orthodox church. It was even whispered that he intended to visit Rome for the express purpose of being received by the Pope as a convert. Accordingly, Peter was visited by Cardinal Kollonitz, Primate of Hungary, who found that none of these rumors were true. He wrote an interesting description of Peter, however, which enlarges our picture of him during his European sojourns:

  “The Tsar is a tall young man from twenty-eight to thirty years of age, with a dark complexion, proud and grave, and with an expressive countenance. His left eye, his left arm and left leg were injured by the poison given him during the life of his brother [NB: the Cardinal is referring to the rumors, spread by Sophia, that Ivan was the victim of an assassination attempt by the Naryshkins]; but there remains of this now only a fixed look in his eye and a constant movement of his arm and leg. To hide this, he accompanies this involuntary motion with continual movements of his entire body, which by many people, in the countries which he has visited, have been attributed to natural causes, but really they are artificial. His wit is alert and quick; his manners, closer to civil than savage. The journey he has made has improved him greatly, and the difference from the beginning of his present travels and the present time is obvious, although his native coarseness still appears; chiefly in his relations with his followers, whom he holds in check with great severity. He has a knowledge of history and geography and he desires to know more about these subjects; but his strongest interest is in the sea and ships, on which he himself works manually.”

  Peter’s principle purpose in visiting Vienna was to rally the Austrians against the Turks. Traditionally, the Habsburgs considered themselves the defenders of the east-west border separating the Muslim Ottomans from Christian lands. But Austria’s proximity to the Ottomans sometimes resulted in a more complex diplomatic relationship between the two empires. Perpetual hostility and warfare simply wasn’t practical. At present, Austria was on the verge of entering peace talks with the Turks, a peace which would not benefit Russia but which would leave Austria free to conserve its resources in the event of war with France, which, during the reign of Louis XIV, was never far from the horizon. The best Leopold could do for Peter was suggest that he return to Russia as soon as possible, make his war against the Turks, and win Kerch. Treaty negotiations would not begin for some time, but once they were concluded, each monarch would have to be content with the territory they already held.

  Peter was dissatisfied, but it was the best he could hope for under the circumstances. In July of 1698, he began making preparations to leave for Venice. Just as he was on the point of leaving, however, he received an urgent warning from Moscow: the Streltsy were in revolt once more. There were no further details, and Peter, fearing the Streltsy as he did, instantly imagined the worst. He and his retinue instantly reversed course, leaving the road to Venice behind and making for Poland. Along the way, he received a second letter, this one indicating that the rebellion had been put down. Peter was relieved, but he decided to continue in the direction he was heading. His attitude towards government had been immature and apathetic when he left Moscow the previous year, but he heard learned a great deal since then. He had seen the world, spoken with and observed other rulers in their own courts and countries, and the inner workings of his own state had become more interesting to him in the process. It would have been horribly ironic if, just as he was making preparations to drag Russia into the eighteenth century by the long beards of its boyars, a second
Streltsy revolt had destroyed his court and put Sophia back on the throne in his place. Peter decided it was time to go home; on the way, however, he would have to go through Poland.

  Poland

  Augustus, King of Poland, (also called Augustus the Strong) was the Elector of the German state of Saxony. Electors were roughly equal to princes, so titled because they possessed the right to vote in the election the Holy Roman Emperor—although, since the title of Emperor always went to the next Habsburg heir, electors were more traditional than functional in their duties.

  Poland itself was technically a republic. It was ruled by kings who were elected by a parliament of Polish nobles, called the Diet. Traditionally, only foreigners were elected, because this prevented any of the ruling families of the Polish nobility from establishing a dynasty. Polish elections were therefore an irresistible opportunity for foreign powers to meddle in Polish politics. In the late 17th century, Poland rivaled Russia in size, but its population was disunited; it included a slim majority of Catholic Poles, but also large numbers of Orthodox Lithuanians and Russians, Protestant Germans, and a substantial number of Jews. This disunity prevented Poland from building a grand army or playing a significant role in European politics. Nonetheless, as Russia’s nearest neighbor, Poland was worth Russian attention. Augustus, who had been king for less than a year, was the candidate Peter had favored in the most recent election, and now Peter was going to be a guest at his court.

  Unlike Leopold or William, Augustus was a man after Peter’s own heart: tall, strong, good humored, and fun loving, with a penchant for hard drink and ribald jokes. And they had something even more important in common: the newly-elected king had his sites fixed on war with Sweden, whose king had just died, leaving the fifteen-year-old Charles XII on the throne. Since Sweden held sway over much of the Baltic, this aligned with Peter’s own ambitions to secure access to warm water sea ports. By the time Peter left Poland, bringing to an end the eighteen-month sojourn of the Great Assembly, he had secured the Polish alliance that would make the greatest military enterprise of his reign possible.

  Chapter Three: The Great Northern War

  Return to Moscow

  Historian Robert Massie summarizes the accomplishments of the Great Assembly in Europe thus:

  “Peter and his ambassadors had succeeded in recruiting more than 800 technically skilled Europeans for Russian service, the bulk of them Dutchmen, but also Englishmen, Scots, Venetians, Germans, and Greeks. Many of these men remained in Russia for years, made significant contributions to the modernization of the nation and left their names permanently inscribed in the history of Peter’s reign.

  “More important was the profound and enduring impression that Western Europe made on Peter himself. He had traveled to the West in order to learn how to build ships, and this he had accomplished. But his curiosity had carried him into a wide range of new fields. He had probed into everything that caught his eye—had studied microscopes, barometers, wind dials, coins, cadaver and dental pliers, as well as ship construction and artillery. What he saw in the thriving cities and harbors of the West, what he learned from the scientists, inventors, merchants, tradesmen, engineers, printers, soldiers and sailors, confirmed his early belief, formed in the German Suburb, that his Russians were technologically backward—decades, perhaps centuries, behind the West.

  “Asking himself how this had happened and what could be done about it, Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men’s minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish. He knew that these bonds of religious orthodoxy still existed in Russia, reinforced by peasant folkways and traditions which had endured for centuries. Grimly, Peter resolved to break these bonds on his return.”

  Peter and his followers returned to Moscow on September 5, 1698. He was in high spirits, eager to begin implementing the reforms he had devised on his travels. The first of these reforms came as a sudden and terrible shock to his ministers and nobles: as they came to greet the tsar on his arrival, Peter embraced them heartily, then produced a knife and began to cut off their beards. To Russian men of the late seventeenth century, this was more than an aesthetic alteration. Until recently, it had been a crime. Ivan the Terrible had outlawed the cutting of beards, and the law had only changed during the reign of tsar Alexei, Peter’s father. Furthermore, the Patriarch of the Orthodox church had declared the cutting of beards to be a mortal sin. To Peter, this was foolishness. He intended to break the bonds of ancient, stultifying tradition across all levels of Russian society, and naturally those closest to him must set the first example. He had never worn a beard, and in Europe he had observed that long flowing beards were a stereotype attributed to Russians, an amusing symbol of their backwardness and isolation from European culture. Peter would not be laughed at anymore. Those who insisted on keeping their beards were permitted to pay a tax, which gained them a token with the image of a beard engraved upon it, above the words “tax paid”, but even this would not save a boyar from Peter’s displeasure if he came into the tsar’s presence without being clean-shaven. At first, the rule regarding beards applied only to nobles, but eventually peasants were required to shave as well. Since the Orthodox church did not alter its position on shaving being a sin despite Peter’s new rule, many peasants kept their beards after cutting them off, tied up in string, so that they could be buried with them and present them to the apostles in the afterlife, to prove they had once been faithful.

  No sooner had Peter done away with Russian beards than he turned his interdiction onto Russian clothing. Traditional Russian apparel for men included loose embroidered shirts and pants tucked into boots with pointed, curling toes, underneath embroidered caftans with extremely long sleeves and fur-lined robes with sleeves that dragged the ground for outdoor wear. For women, clothing was much the same, including embroidered blouses and sarafans, similar to a modern pinafore dress or jumper, embroidered caftans, and long flowing veils to cover the hair and the face when outdoors. Such voluminous clothing served an eminently practical purpose during the severe Russian winter, which was far colder than anywhere in Europe, but indoors they were clumsy and ungainly. Sometimes the robes were so long that one could not walk in them without tripping; sleeves were liable to catch on goblets of wine or fall into food dishes.

  Peter attacked the Russian caftan as he had attacked the Russian beard: with a knife. Nobles who came into his presence in traditional dress were likely to have their sleeves cut off by the tsar. By 1700, men were required to wear the waistcoat and breeches of their European counterparts; women were to wear bonnets, dresses, and petticoats. (Interestingly, the corset, the indispensable foundation garment of European women until the early twentieth century, was unknown in Russia at this time. When Peter danced with the Electress of Hanover, he felt the corset under her dress when he grasped her waist, which led him to remark innocently that German women had devilishly hard bones, to the great merriment of the other guests. Peter’s new laws for female dress in Russia did not extend to requiring corsets, possibly because there were very few corset-makers in Russia at the time.) Peter’s subjects were not as resistant to changing their clothing as they had been to cutting their beards—women in particular found European garments pleasant and freeing in comparison to what they had been used to—but the first few winters after Peter’s return to Moscow must have been difficult for them, as men struggled to keep warm with their calves shielded only by stockings.

  There was one last change Peter was determined to carry out immediately after his return to Moscow. His marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina had resulted in the birth of his heir, the tsarevitch Alexei, who was now eight years old. But it had also resulted in a complete alienation of Peter’s affection fo
r his simple, traditional wife, who neither liked nor understood his foreign habits or foreign friends. Peter had mingled with German and Dutch women as a boy in the German Quarter, but they were mostly prostitutes, barmaids, or the wives of carpenters and workmen. During his travels, however, he had made the acquaintance of many Western women of his own rank, women who were well-educated, politically sophisticated, and accustomed to social freedoms that made them the intellectual equals of men.

  Eudoxia, through no real fault of her own, had always bored Peter. He had married her only at his mother’s insistence, and his mother had chosen Eudoxia for the very qualities that made her loathsome to Peter—her piousness, her traditional Russian femininity. Unfortunately for the luckless girl, Natalya had come to dislike Eudoxia as well when she failed to secure Peter’s affections and divert him from foreign influences. Eudoxia had her son, but she had no other support at court, since Peter’s sister Natalya and Ivan’s widow Praskovia were enthusiastic supporters of his Western reforms.