Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  But as the coming conflict was to prove, Charles XII was “the most daring and aggressive soldier of the age.” One historian writes that he was “anxious for battle, at any time and at any odds.” In other words, no one was prepared, or could have foreseen, that the teenage king whose youth and inexperience was supposed to open the doors of his empire to foreign aggressors would prove to be nothing less than a military genius. When Charles received news that the Polish king had attacked Livonia, he addressed the Swedish Parliament, declaring that, because Augustus had broken his word to honor existing treaties between Poland and Sweden, Sweden occupied the moral high ground. This was an important distinction to the deeply religious Charles, and to his subjects, because it meant that God was on their side and would uphold the justice of their cause.

  Charles attacked the Danes first, leaving the defense of Livonia to the garrison in Riga. He was supported by Holland and England, as William of Orange wanted the conflict in the north ended quickly, so that Europe would not grow distracted while Louis XIV threatened to annex Spain. The Danish had attacked the Swedes in Holstein-Gottorp, but the Swedish, Dutch, and English coalition struck directly at Copenhagen, on the island of Zealand. Frederick IV was entirely unprepared for an assault against his capital; Copenhagen surrendered under siege, and Denmark was forced to sign a peace treaty with Sweden and withdraw its soldiers from Holstein. The entire campaign lasted only two weeks. Now Charles, who made a firm policy of only fighting wars in one place at one time, was free to turn his attention north.

  The Polish siege of Riga had not been immediately successful, and by the time Charles had won his swift, decisive victory in Denmark, Augustus was ready to retreat for the winter. Peter, meanwhile, was two weeks into the siege of Narva, a coastal city close to the Estonian border with Ingria. Charles was spoiling for a fight, and since Augustus had forsaken the field of battle, his sights landed on Narva. This was more than mere belligerence; if the Russians took Narva, then Estonia, Ingria, and Livonia would fall to them in short order. Even if Charles had not been determined to fight someone, the Swedish regiment at Narva was badly in need of relief.

  When Peter received word that the Swedish army was approaching, he was prepared for a long wait before any fighting broke out. The Swedish forces were outnumbered by the Russians four to one, and they had just finished an exhausting march over hundreds of miles of territory. They would need time, he thought, to build encampments and regain their strength. Anticipating weeks of inaction, Peter left for the Russian city of Novgorod to confer with Augustus of Poland, whose retreat from Riga had come as an irritation and a disappointment.

  He was due for an astonishing surprise and unwelcome surprise, however. The very next day, in the middle of a snowstorm, Charles ordered his beleaguered forces to charge the Russian siege line. Panic broke out amongst the untested, undisciplined Russian soldiers, who, in the words of one observer, “fell like grass.”. Surrender followed, but there were so many more defeated Russian soldiers than there were victorious Swedes that the Swedish officers were nervous that the Russians would notice their numerical advantage and mount a counter-attack. Instead, the Russians departed east for Russia, leaving most of their officers behind as prisoners of war.

  Years later, after Peter’s great victory against the Swedish at Poltava, he wrote of the aftermath of his defeat at Narva:

  “Our army was vanquished by the Swedes—that is incontestable. But one should remember what sort of army it was. The Lefort regiment was the only old one. The two regiments of Guards…had never seen any field fighting, especially with regular troops. The other regiments consisted—even to some of the colonels—of raw recruits, both officers and soldiers. Besides that, there was the great famine… In brief, it was like child’s play [for the Swedes]. One cannot, then, be surprised that against such an old, disciplined, and experienced army, these untried pupils got the worst of it. The victory then was indeed a sad and severe blow to us. It seemed to rob us of all hope for the future, and to come from the wrath of God. But now, when we think of it rightly, we ascribe it rather to the goodness of God than his anger; for if we had conquered then, when we knew as little of war as of government, this piece of luck might have had unfortunate consequences… That we lived through this disaster, or rather this good fortune, forced us to be industrious, laborious, and experienced.”

  In the wake of his victory, Charles had a choice: either to follow the retreating soldiers and invade Russia itself, or to invade Poland and redress his grievance against Augustus. At this juncture, it becomes evident why Peter later considered his defeat at Narva to be a blessing. Russia was now the laughingstock of Europe. There could be little glory for Charles in winning additional victories against the Russians; he stood to gain nothing except Peter’s humiliation, which he had already achieved. The Saxon army of the Polish king, on the other hand, was technically undefeated, which made it a more tempting challenge for a soldier like Charles. Furthermore, the political climate in Poland was auspicious for an invasion. Augustus’s relationship with his Polish subjects was growing uneasy. He had not won the promised victory over Livonia; instead, he had angered the Swedes and risked their retaliation. The Primate of Poland, Cardinal Radiejowski, had written to Charles, declaring that Augustus had made war against Sweden without the consent of the Polish people, who wanted only peace with his country. Charles replied by asking the Poles to convene the Diet, dethrone Augustus, and choose another king.

  When this request met with no definitive response, Charles decided to invade Poland, with the intent of forcing a new election. This was the best possible outcome for Peter. Had Charles not been diverted by Poland, he would have found the road to Moscow virtually unobstructed—Peter’s armies were in no condition to repel an invasion. Though he was deliberately choosing to invade the stronger of his two enemies, Charles believed he was on the path to another rapid victory. Instead, he became embroiled in a war that would last for six years—six years of reprieve for Russia that Peter would put to excellent use.

  St. Petersburg

  In 1702, while Charles was distracted by Poland, Russian forces seized the Swedish fortress of Nöteberg; this gave them undisputed possession of the Neva river, and, through it, a permanent foothold on the Baltic Sea. Conquest of Ingria followed in 1703. Anticipating that the Swedish would soon try to wrest these possessions from his grasp, Peter set about making his claim on them in as permanent a fashion as can be imagined—by building a fortress at the mouth of the Neva, and, around the fortress, a city, which he named St. Petersburg. More convenient than Archangel, blessed with slightly warmer winters, Peter’s city was the Russian answer to Amsterdam, to London, to Venice. Some part of him had loathed Moscow and the Kremlin since the Streltsy revolt in his childhood. A new capital, named for his patron saint, with its face turned to the sea, was Peter’s attempt to remake Russia in his image.

  Construction of St. Petersburg began on May 16, 1703. The work was done by men with shovels and pickaxes. Wheelbarrows were unknown in Russia, so the workers had to clear the worksite of dirt with their hands. According to legend, Peter marked the exact spot where they were to begin working with a cross, where he buried a box containing the bones of St. Andrew, Russia’s patron saint. As he did this, an eagle, the emblem of the house of Romanov, came to rest in a tree over Peter’s head, presumably to bless the enterprise. The Swedish army returned to the region that summer, and every summer thereafter, to try to drive the Russians out, but they were too firmly encamped. The new shipyards at Lake Ladoga, south of Karelia, was providing Peter with ships—not enough of them to break the Swedish blockade on the river, but enough to enable them to hold their ground until the winter ice forced the Swedish to retreat.

  Once there was enough city to live in, Peter used his autocratic privilege to populate it, mostly by forcing people to relocate from their homes in Moscow. Furthermore, the wealthiest families were required to build beautiful, elaborate homes “in the English st
yle” along the left bank of the Neva. The number of serfs the family owned determined how large the house had to be. All of this had to be undertaken at their own expense. It was similar to the tactic Peter had used to get the Azov fleet built, and it was a tactic that probably only would have worked in Russia, where the nobility were accustomed to bowing to the tsar’s whims, however eccentric.

  St. Petersburg was reckoned a miserable place to live for the first decade or so of its existence, despite the fact that Peter considered it his “Eden.” It was prone both to flooding and fires; crops were not grown there, so nobles and peasants alike had to pay ruinous mark up on most kinds of food. And there was little to do by way of entertainment. The tsar might derive endless amusement from proximity to the water, but not one of his subjects would set foot on a boat unless it was under direct orders. Even the Swedish found it impossible to understand why Peter clung so tenaciously to such a marshy, inhospitable plot of land. They assumed that the city would eventually fail. Only a few people—Peter himself, his close friend Alexander Menshikov—understood that one day St. Petersburg would rank among the greatest, most beautiful cities in the world.

  Martha Scavronskaya

  “After this advantage, the Russian general marched onwards, laid the whole country under contributions, and took the little town of Marienburg, on the confines of Ingria and Livonia. There are several towns of this name in the north of Europe; but this, though it no longer exists, is more celebrated in history than all the others, by the adventure of the empress Catherine.

  “Among the prisoners [taken from Marienburg] was a young woman, a native of Livonia, who had been brought up in the house of a Lutheran minister of that place, named Gluck, and who afterwards became the sovereign of those who had taken her captive, and who governed Russia by the name of the empress Catherine.

  “There had been many instances before this, of private women being raised to the throne; nothing was more common in Russia, and in all Asiatic kingdoms, than for crowned heads to marry their own subjects; but that a poor stranger, who had been taken prisoner in the storming of a town, should become the absolute sovereign of that very empire, whither she was led captive, is an instance which fortune never produced before nor since in the annals of the world.”

  Voltaire, The History of Peter the Great

  As Voltaire indicates in this excerpt, it was customary in Russia for the tsar to marry beneath himself socially, always to a daughter of one of the less powerful boyar families. This practice ended with Peter himself. Peter’s victory in the Great Northern War established Russia as a force to be reckoned with on the European stage, and a direct consequence of this was that the marriage-market of European nobility was opened to the Romanovs for the first time. Peter’s son, Alexei, would be married to a foreign princess, as would all of Peter’s successors. For a time, Peter even dreamed of marrying his daughter Elizaveta to the French king, a scheme which proved unsuccessful but which could not even have been dreamed of by his predecessors.

  As the newly styled emperor of Russia, the unwed Peter might potentially have made a bargain for the hand of a foreign princess of his very own. But as it happened, his choice for Russia’s first empress was made much closer to home. He looked no further than his own bedchamber.

  One of Peter’s oldest friends was Alexander Menshikov, a piroshky vendor who was introduced to him by Francis Lefort when Peter was a young man wandering the suburbs of Moscow in search of adventure. Menshikov had risen high in Peter’s service, proving his loyalty by working alongside him as a shipbuilder in Amsterdam. After Lefort’s death, Menshikov had become Peter’s most trusted advisor. He played important roles in the battle of Azov and had helped to conquer the Swedish fortress of Nöteberg; Peter rewarded him for this service by appointing Menshikov its governor. They were best friends for many years; Peter addressed him as “Alexashka”.

  After his victory against the Swedish, Peter paid a visit to Menshikov’s household in Moscow, where he met a nineteen-year-old peasant girl named Martha Scavronskaya. Not much is known of her background, save that she was of Livonian-Lithuanian stock and had been taken into the home of a Lutheran minister named Gluck as a child after her parents died of the plague. She was not brought up as a daughter of the Gluck family; rather, she earned her keep by working for the family as a laundrywoman and scullery maid.

  By the time Martha was seventeen, her guardians were eager to marry her off, lest their son, whom they intended for greater things, fall in love with her. Martha was accordingly married to a Swedish dragoon whose name has been recorded as Johann Abbe or Johan Cruse. Whether this marriage was agreeable to Martha or not is unknown; in either case, she was with her husband for only eight days, as they became separated when Marienburg surrendered to the Russians. Martha was left to make her own living. She began doing laundry for Russian soldiers, and at some point thereafter she entered Menshikov’s service. Menshikov was notorious for keeping a large number of female servants, mostly serfs, who performed both domestic and sexual duties for him and for any guests he might be entertaining. Menshikov was not a pleasant individual, but Martha apparently found something to like in him, because they were close for the rest of their lives. According to some versions of the story, she was Menshikov’s mistress when she caught Peter’s eye. Whether he was her lover or merely her master, Menshikov immediately ceded his claims on Martha in favor of the tsar.

  Martha’s rapport with Peter was instant. Though she was illiterate, he prized her for more than her beauty. She was clever, cheerful, fun-loving, patient with his foibles, tolerant of his roving eye, and capable of keeping up with Peter and his friends in their drunken revels. Crucially, she was an able nurse when Peter had one of his “fits”, the stress-induced spasms of his face and limbs that sometimes made him painfully self-conscious in the company of strangers. Peter made her his mistress immediately after their first meeting in 1703, though she continued to live in Menshikov’s house for several years. Together, Peter, Catherine (as she became known after her conversion to the Orthodox faith), Menshikov, and Menshikov’s mistress Darya, were often seen around Moscow. Within nine months, Catherine, gave birth to the first of the twelve children her union with Peter would ultimately produce.

  A German diplomat who met Catherine in 1717 described her thus:

  “The Tsaritsa was in the prime of life and showed no signs of having possessed beauty. She was tall and strong, exceedingly dark, and would have seemed darker but for the rouge and whitening with which she covered her face. There was nothing unpleasant about her manners, and anyone who remembered the Princess’s origins would have been disposed to think them good… She had a great desire to do well… It might be fairly said that if this Princess had not all the charms of her sex, she had all its gentleness… During her visit to Berlin, she showed the Queen the greatest deference, and let it be understood that her own extraordinary fortune did not make her forget the difference between that Princess and herself.”

  Voltaire writes that “nothing was more common in Russia…than for crowned heads to marry their own subjects”, but in fact, it was not at all usual for a tsar to marry a woman whose origins were as obscure as Catherine’s. The tsar married boyars, not peasants. More importantly, Catherine was not even Russian. Her elevation was as shocking and distressing to Peter’s more traditional subjects as the cutting of their beards. But their objections fell on deaf ears. Peter could not do without her. The only serious hesitation he had in marrying her lay in the fact that Eudoxia still lived. Though she was a nun now, the insult to her family might be more than his subjects would tolerate. Nonetheless, they were married in a private ceremony in the new city of St. Petersburg in 1708. The marriage remained secret until four years later, in 1712, when Peter and Catherine were married again in a lavish public ceremony. Altogether, they had twelve children, six girls and six boys, though only two of their offspring, both daughters, survived to adulthood.

  Chapter Four: Poltava and
Alexei

  “In the early years of war—indeed, throughout his reign—Peter was constantly on the move… During this time, the Tsar was never more than three months in a single place. Now in Moscow, now in St. Petersburg, now in Voronezh; then on to Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia, Peter traveled incessantly, everywhere inspecting, organizing, encouraging, criticizing, commanding… Traveling back and forth over the immense distances of his empire, the Tsar broke every precedent before the eyes of his astonished people. The time-honored image of a distant sovereign, crowned, enthroned and immobile in the white-walled Kremlin, bore no resemblance to this black-eyed beardless giant dressed in a green German coat, black three-cornered hat and high, mud-spattered boots, stepping down from his carriage into the muddy streets of a Russian town, demanding beer for his thirst, a bed for the night and fresh horses for the morning.”

  Robert Massie, Peter the Great

  Abdication of Augustus of Poland

  In 1705, after years of indecisive conflict between the Swedish army of Charles XII and the Saxon army in Poland, the Polish Diet bowed to pressure and elected a new king, Charles’s hand-picked protégé, Stanislaus I. But the election was considered illegitimate by many Poles—not only had it been transparently manipulated by Charles, but Stanislaus was crowned in Warsaw, rather than the traditional coronation seat of Krakow, with a new crown and scepter ordered and paid for by Charles. Furthermore, Augustus refused to abdicate, which meant that Charles was obliged to leave some ten thousand Swedish troops in Poland when he turned his sights back on Peter—who, in 1704, had reversed his disastrous defeat at Narva and seized the fortress. Swedish troops advanced on Grodno, a fortress town in Lithuania, some four hundred miles away from Moscow. But Peter, wishing to preserve his army, abandoned Grodno rather than engaging the Swedish in open battle. When Charles attempted to follow their retreat, the bridge over the river Neman collapsed. By the time the Swedish had navigated around it, the Russians had made a clean escape.