Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  Now that Peter had a broader experience of female company, he was determined to end his marriage in the only way that an Orthodox husband could—by persuading Eudoxia to become a nun. It is evident that he had made up his mind on this subject long before his return to Russia. In Vienna, Peter had requested that no toasts be made to the tsarina’s health, and he had written to his advisors that they should begin to speak to Eudoxia of retiring to a convent, a delicate task they were reluctant to undertake. Peter was not pleased to find Eudoxia still in the palace upon his return. When he attempted to persuade her to become a nun, she resisted, saying that she could not abandon her responsibilities towards Alexei. In the end, Peter simply removed Alexei from Eudoxia’s household, sending him to live with Natalya, and had Eudoxia sent to a convent over her own protests. After a couple of years, she gave up hope of a reconciliation, and took holy orders as the nun Helen.

  The Downfall of the Streltsy

  During Sophia’s reign, the Streltsy had been the elite of the Russian army. They had a certain style of living to which they were accustomed: quartered in Moscow during peacetime to safeguard the Kremlin and the tsar, they had so little to do in their official capacity that they mostly lived at home with their wives and families, running small businesses on the side. After Sophia was deposed to a convent, however, Peter revoked most of their traditional privileges. This was what had led to the revolt that brought Peter hastily back to Moscow. Peter had sent the Streltsy to hold Azov after it was conquered, bestowing upon his own Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, who had proven far more effective fighters, the honors and rewards the Streltsy felt they had earned.

  The Streltsy continued to regard themselves as the guardians of all that was holy, Orthodox, and authentically Russia. This was the attitude which had emboldened them to lay siege to the Kremlin sixteen years before, and it led them to regard Peter with suspicion. He didn’t act like a real tsar. A real tsar was more a living icon than a human being, a remote figure who kept to his palace and appeared to the public only on solemn occasions, dressed in his glittering robes like an emissary from heaven. Ivan, Peter’s brother, had been such a tsar. Now Ivan was dead, Peter was in Europe doing who knows what, and they were being ordered to garrison remote outposts far away from their rightful place in the heart of Moscow, near their families.

  On June 9, a Streltsy regiment of two thousand men began to march toward the city, striking terror in the hearts of all those who remembered or had heard of the bloody chaos of the last revolt. While ordinary people prepared to flee Moscow, the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, under the command of General Patrick Gordon, rode out to face them. The Streltsy were outnumbered; Gordon recommended that they desist before their actions carried them beyond the possibility of mercy or pardon. Fighting broke out, but it was over in under an hour, as the loyal troops lay waste to the Streltsy with cannon fire. Those who survived were bound in chains and interrogated under torture under they confessed that they had intended to sack Moscow, burn the German Quarter, depose the absent Peter, and make Sophia Alekseyevna regent again, this time for the tsarevitch Alexis.

  The plot had been unsophisticated, and unconnected to machinations on the part of any high-ranking official, but Peter, whose fury against the Streltsy was unbridled, feared that some deeper scheme was afoot, probably instigated by Sophia, whom he still feared as the only person in Russia capable of challenging him. When he returned to Moscow, the arrested Streltsy were subjected to hideous torture. Johann-Georg Korb, secretary to the newly established Austrian embassy in Moscow, wrote an account of this second Streltsy revolt. It is partly derived from secondhand accounts, but it portrays vividly the intensity of Peter’s feelings:

  “How sharp was the pain, how great the indignation, to which the tsar's Majesty was mightily moved, when he knew of the rebellion of the Streltsi, betraying openly a mind panting for vengeance! He was still tarrying at Vienna, quite full of the desire of setting out for Italy; but, fervid as was his curiosity of rambling abroad, it was, nevertheless, speedily extinguished on the announcement of the troubles that had broken out in the bowels of his realm. Going immediately to Lefort (almost the only person that he condescended to treat with intimate familiarity), he thus indignantly broken out: ‘Tell me, Francis, son of James, how I can reach Moscow by the shortest way, in a brief space, so that I may wreak vengeance on this great perfidy of my people, with punishments worthy of their abominable crime. Not one of them shall escape with impunity. Around my royal city, which, with their impious efforts, they planned to destroy, I will have gibbets and gallows set upon the walls and ramparts, and each and every one of them will I put to a direful death.’ Nor did he long delay the plan for his justly excited wrath; he took the quick post, as his ambassador suggested, and in four weeks’ time he had got over about three hundred miles without accident, and arrived the 4th of September, 1698—a monarch for the well disposed, but an avenger for the wicked.

  “His first anxiety after his arrival was about the rebellion—in what it consisted, what the insurgents meant, who dared to instigate such a crime. And as nobody could answer accurately upon all points, and some pleaded their own ignorance, others the obstinacy of the Streltsi, he began to have suspicions of everybody's loyalty… No day, holy or profane, were the inquisitors idle; every day was deemed fit and lawful for torturing. There were as many scourges as there were accused, and every inquisitor was a butcher. ...The whole month of October was spent in lacerating the backs of culprits with the knout and with flames; no day were those that were left alive exempt from scourging or scorching; or else they were broken upon the wheel, or driven to the gibbet, or slain with the axe…

  “To prove to all people how holy and inviolable are those walls of the city which the Streltsi rashly meditated scaling in a sudden assault, beams were run out from all the embrasures in the walls near the gates, in each of which two rebels were hanged. This day beheld about two hundred and fifty die that death. There are few cities fortified with as many palisades as Moscow has given gibbets to her guardian Streltsi. (In front of the nunnery where Sophia was confined) there were thirty gibbets erected in a quadrangle shape, from which there hung two hundred and thirty Streltsi; the three principal ringleaders, who tendered a petition to Sophia touching the administration of the realm, were hanged close to the windows of that princess, presenting, as it were, the petitions that were placed in their hands, so near that Sophia might with ease touch them.”

  When Korb published his memoirs of his life in Russia, from which the above is excerpted, Peter was furious. He had attempted to keep any foreigners in Moscow from learning what happened deep in the bowels of his fourteen torture chambers. To Peter, it was necessary to inflict such hideous tortures in order to safeguard his realm and secure his throne, but he was aware that, even though western monarchs also resorted to torture to punish those convicted of treason, the sheer scale of the suffering inflicted on the Streltsy would make him seem monstrous in European eyes. He could not prevent rumors of what was happening from getting abroad—after all, any person walking down the street could hear the screams and cries of the victims. But Korb’s account was damning, and Peter demanded that the Habsburg emperor suppress its publication in Vienna.

  In the end, all 1,714 of the Streltsy who had been arrested were tortured daily (except for Sundays) for a month and a half. There was no relief from the pain; men who confessed to one offense were re-interrogated the next day regarding different charges. Those who came close to death were nursed back to health so that they could be tortured for longer. Peter also ordered the interrogation and torture of the chambermaids who attended Sophia at the Novodevichy Convent, hoping to find evidence that the Streltsy had been acting on her orders. Under these tortures, one person indicated that Sophia had written secret letters to the Streltsy, urging their revolt. Peter went to see Sophia in person to question her about her involvement. She told him that she played no part in recent events, and it seems th
at Peter believed her. Nonetheless, he forced her to take vows and become a nun, in order to keep her movements more restricted in the future. She died at Novodevichy six years later.

  When the interrogations were finished, there were so many prisoners to execute that they had to be killed in batches throughout the fall and winter. Twelve hundred men were executed, their families exiled. A few hundred were spared due to their youth, but had their faces branded or their noses cut off to mark them as traitors permanently. By 1708, all of the Streltsy, including the sixteen regiments that had no involvement in the revolt, had been permanently disbanded, scattered, exiled, and forbidden from ever bearing arms again. Once they had prided themselves on being the guardians of the tsar himself; now that place was supplied by the Preobrazhensky Guards, the regiment Peter had formed with his childhood friends and playmates.

  Francis Lefort died of a sudden, unidentified illness in March of 1699, at the age of forty-three. He had been Peter’s constant companion since Peter was a boy; it was Lefort who had infused Peter’s play regiments with real military discipline. It had been Lefort’s idea for Peter to travel to Europe, and he himself had been the chief ambassador of the Great Embassy. More importantly, out of all his retainers, Lefort was the man Peter trusted most. He had been near Peter at every important stage of his life since the regency of Sophia. Peter ordered a state funeral and commanded all his boyars to attend. Then, in November of the same year, Peter suffered the death of Patrick Gordon, the Scottish general who had, like Lefort, been Peter’s loyal companion since he was a child. Gordon had served three tsars, and though he had not always lived in Russia willingly, he had become the most capable officer in its army. When Gordon died, Peter was present, and he himself shut the dead man’s eyes after the Catholic priest attending him performed last rites. The deaths of these two men combined with the end of Peter’s European sojourn and the turn of the eighteenth century to draw a line of demarcation between the tsar’s youth and his maturity.

  The Great Northern War

  The fleet of ships which Peter had ordered to be built (and helped to build himself) at Voronezh were never used for their intended purpose, which was to wrest Kerch away from the Ottoman empire. Instead, as peace was being negotiated between the Turks and the Western powers in Vienna, Peter dispatched Emilian Ukraintsev, his chief foreign minister, to approach Constantinople with a request to establish a permanent Russian embassy there, and to enter negotiations for Russian interests along the Black Sea. To suggest what the consequences might be if they refused, Ukraintsev made his journey to Constantinople in a brand new forty-six-gun frigate named The Fortress, escorted by twelve other Russian ships. This was Russia’s first display of might at sea. The Turks were astonished. Ukraintsev was accepted as a diplomatic envoy, and negotiations began after three months. Peter requested that Russian merchant ships be allowed to sail through the strait from Azov to the Black Sea. This, the Turks were adamant they could not do, but they agreed to the permanent embassy, the cancellation of Russian tribute payments to the Khan of Crimea, which Peter had been paying to keep the Tatars from raiding Ukraine, and to allow Orthodox clergy access to the tomb of the Holy Sepulcher in the Holy Land, which was then under Ottoman control.

  This was not what Peter had hoped for as little as two years ago, but it was of less significance to him now, as he approached the dawn of the eighteenth century with new hopes. His conversations with Augustus, king of Poland, had enkindled new ideas for how Russia might gain access to the Baltic.

  Charles XII

  In the late seventeenth century, Sweden was an empire, comprising the Baltic states of Finland, Karelia, Estonia, Ingria, and Livonia, and German ports such as Pomerania, Stettin, Stralsund, and Wismar. Sweden’s authority over the Baltic sea was absolute, and its German territories gave it potential access to anywhere in western Europe. It was ruled by Charles XII, who had inherited the throne at the age of fifteen after the sudden death of his father from stomach cancer. Charles XII is now a legendary figure in Swedish history, and is considered second only to Peter himself in the list of century’s greatest rulers. The following description of Charles from his childhood is taken from a biography written by the French philosopher Voltaire after Charles’ death:

  “[Charles XI] married, in 1680, Ulrica Eleanora, daughter of Ferdinand, King of Denmark, a virtuous princess worthy of more confidence than her husband gave her; the offspring of this marriage was Charles XII, perhaps the most extraordinary man ever born, a hero who summed up in his personality all the great qualities of his ancestors, and whose only fault and only misfortune was that he carried them all to excess. It is of him, and all that is related of his actions and person, that we now purpose writing. As soon as he had some knowledge of Latin they made him translate Quintus Curtius; he took a liking to the book rather for the subject than the style. The tutor who explained this author to him asked him what he thought of [Alexander the Great]. "I think," said the Prince, "that I would like to be like him." "But," was the answer, "he only lived thirty-two years." "Ah!" replied the Prince, "and is not that long enough when one has subdued kingdoms?" These answers were reported to the King his father, who exclaimed, "That child will excel me and he will even excel Gustavus the Great.’

  “[After Charles became king at age fifteen] three strong princes, taking advantage of his extreme youth, made simultaneous plans for his ruin. The first was Ferdinand IV, King of Denmark, his cousin; the second Augustus, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland; the third, and most dangerous, was Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia.”

  It would be unfair to accuse Peter of any personal animosity against the young Charles, but he happened to rule an empire which had long disputed with Russia over possession of Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia, all of which bordered Russia, and Karelia, which also bordered Finland. The Swedish had been the enemies of the Muscovites since the thirteenth century, when Moscow was only a sovereign city-state. Russia’s landlocked status was due to the fact that the entire northern coast of the continent above Moscow was under Swedish dominion. Peter’s father, tsar Alexis, had attempted to drive the Swedish back west into the Scandinavian peninsula, but he had been forced to give up the enterprise when a second war broke out between Russia and Poland. Peter, like Alexis, regarded the Baltic states as rightfully Russian, and now, having been forced to give up on his Black Sea enterprise, he was ready to take possession of them again.

  The Coalition

  Even so, the enterprise that was to become known as the Great Northern War was not entirely Peter’s own idea. Frederick IV of Denmark was eager to recapture Scania, the southernmost province of the Swedish peninsula, which had once been a Danish possession. And Augustus of Poland, the third member of the coalition, had an even more complex scheme in hand. Having been elected king of Poland, he wished to convert the republic into an absolute monarchy, with himself as the founder of a new hereditary dynasty. Augustus had been approached by a Livonian noble by the name of Johann von Patkul with an offer that might make this wish a reality. Patkul had been condemned for treason by the Swedish king for speaking out against the seizure of Livonian estates by the Swedish crown. He had come to the decision that if the Polish were to take Livonia, they would allow Livonian nobles a greater degree of freedom than they had enjoyed under their Swedish masters. Patkul’s argument was that, if Augustus, who was Elector of Saxony in addition to being king of Poland, used his Saxon soldiers to conquer Livonia, he could then present Livonia to the Polish Diet as a sort of gift, in exchange for being made hereditary king.

  Between them, so the plan went, Augustus and Frederick of Denmark would engage the Swedish forces on three fronts. Denmark would attack Scania and drive Swedish troops out of the German principality of Holstein-Gottorp to the south; Augustus would attack Livonia. Peter, tsar of Russia, was invited into the enterprise almost as an afterthought, and not without some hesitation. There was always the chance that Peter would seize Livonia for himself, if they were not c
areful.

  Peter agreed that he would join Denmark and Poland in the offense against Sweden, but the date was left unspecified, and there was a catch: the Russian ambassador in Constantinople was in the process of negotiating a thirty-year temporary peace treaty between Russia and the Ottoman empire, and until it was formalized, he could spare no troops to fight the Swedish, lest negotiation prove unsuccessful and war break out with the Turks. Confident of their success, Frederick and Augustus did not wait for Russian assistance before Saxony attacked Livonia (without going through the formality of declaring war first, an insult that Augustus’s cousin, Charles XII, would not forget) and Denmark attacked Holstein-Gottorp. On August 8, 1700, Peter received word from his ambassador that the peace had been secured in Constantinople. He had spent the past six months preparing Russia for war, and now at last he knew who he was going to war with.

  When the formal declaration of war against Sweden was read out in Moscow, the casus bellum was phrased in simple terms that simple Russians could understand. The tsar was going to reclaim Ingria and Karelia, which had belonged to Russia before the Romanov dynasty was founded. And he was going to attack Livonia, because it was there, in the city of Riga, that Peter had been treated with such churlish inhospitality at the beginning of his Great Embassy to Europe three years before.

  War

  All three members of the coalition, Peter, Augustus, and Frederick, had been in agreement on at least one point: now was the opportune moment to break the might of the Swedish empire, because Charles XII was still only eighteen, and it was assumed that he would be flustered and over-awed by the sudden assault.