Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  In 1706, Charles forced Augustus’s hand by invading Saxony, where he met with little resistance, as the Saxons were tired of Augustus’s long war on foreign soil and were not willing to see the electorate pillaged by Swedish soldiers for the sake of their erratic Elector. Without the support of the Saxon army, Augustus was no longer a useful ally to Peter. He traveled to meet Charles in person, promising to abdicate from the Polish throne in exchange for mercy towards Saxony. To Peter, this meant one thing. Charles was well-known for fighting only one war at a time. His attempted attack against Grodno had been unsuccessful in part because his heart was not in it, not while matters with Augustus in Poland remained unsettled. When Peter received word of Augustus’s abdication, however, he knew that Charles’s next move would be an attempted invasion of Russia—of Moscow itself.

  The Great Northern War had begun with a coalition of Russia, Poland, and Denmark arrayed in opposition against the Swedish empire. Now, only Russia remained. Peter was without allies. Charles was inclined towards single-minded vendettas; any nation that attacked him must be prepared to fight to the bitter finish, because Charles would end the war on no other terms. Now, with the Swedish army positioned in Saxony, near the heart of western Europe, no European monarch would dare risk angering him by coming to Russia’s assistance, even if they wished to. The Protestant powers, England, Holland, and the German states, were particularly concerned that Charles might make an alliance with France, which would radically unbalance the distribution of power in Europe. It was in their best interests for Charles to engage distant Russia, and leave the French to them. And though Peter made tentative overtures of peace towards Charles, they had little common ground from which to negotiate. Peter would not surrender St. Petersburg upon any persuasion, and St. Petersburg’s position at the mouth of the Neva effectively cut Sweden’s Baltic possessions in half, disrupting communications and lines of supply. Charles could make no concession on this point.

  Besides all of this, Charles was eager to face the Russian army in open battle once more. He had heard rumors of the extraordinary reformation of the Russian army that had taken place since the first battle of Narva, and he looked forward to the opportunity to face them in open battle. There was a certain strain of fanaticism in his character; not only would a negotiated peace fail to satisfy him, but so would a victory that consisted only in restoring the Baltic states to the Swedish empire. These were the two options that lay before him—either a Baltic offensive, or an arduous campaign to the heart of Russia, crossing thousands of miles overland. He opted for the latter, over the concerns of his generals, for reasons that were more mystical and personal than pragmatic. Peter must be utterly and decisively ruined; God had chosen Charles for that mission. Moscow itself must be seized, and a puppet tsar of Charles’s choosing installed in the Kremlin.

  Invasion

  Though Charles attempted to confuse Peter regarding his chosen route by ordering military actions in the Baltic, Peter was not taken by surprise. He had been anticipating and preparing for a Swedish invasion of Moscow for years; indeed, he had feared that it would follow swiftly after his defeat at Narva. Since 1707, Peter had left standing orders with the Don Cossacks of the steppes to utterly destroy the countryside frontier bordering Poland as soon as Swedish troops were spotted. Advancing armies could not carry enough food and supplies with them to sustain a march of so many miles; they depended on being able to raid farms and ransack villages as they passed. Peter’s goal was to leave them with no source of sustenance. In case this was not sufficient, he likewise ordered new fortifications for the city of Moscow itself.

  Advancing through Poland, the Swedish made their first strike in Grodno, the fortress that commanded the Neman river. Russian troops were on their way to secure Grodno, but the Swedish beat them to it; it was so deserted that once they had taken the bridge, they allowed the few Russian soldiers present to retreat to the town unmolested. Unbeknownst to Charles, Peter himself was in residence at the fortress, conferring with Menshikov, his most capable native Russian commander. It was a near-miss with disastrous potential consequences. If Peter’s person fell into Swedish hands, the war would effectively be over. Charles remained in Lithuania near Minsk throughout the winter, which was reckoned the be “the worst winter within memory”; many of his soldiers, inadequately sheltered and supplied, died of disease and cold. Though the Swedish army was famous for its hardiness in extreme winter weather, it would not be able to move again until the grasses began to thaw in June of 1708.

  Poltava

  “Soldiers: the hour has struck when the fate of the whole motherland lies in your hands. Either Russia will perish or she will be reborn in a nobler shape. The soldiers must not think of themselves as armed and drawn up to fight for Peter, but for tsardom, entrusted to Peter by his birth and by the people… Of Peter it should be known that he does not value his own life, but only that Russia should live in piety, glory, and prosperity.”

  Peter the Great, to the Russian army before the Battle of Poltava

  When decisive victory came in the Great Northern War, it came not to Charles, but to Peter, in Poltava, a small commercial town in Ukraine, some two hundred miles from Kiev. The Swedish invasion had been advancing steadily since Grodno, aided by an unexpected alliance the Cossack Hetman, Mazeppa. Hoping that an allegiance with Sweden would lead to independence for the Cossacks in Ukraine, Mazeppa had suddenly deserted Peter’s cause and forced him to divide his focus between two enemies. But Charles too had met with setbacks. He had attempted to form an alliance with the Turks, encouraging them to seize the opportunity of reclaiming Azov, which Peter would be forced to defend. But this alliance was refused; Constantinople had already agreed to a thirty-year peace with Russia. By the spring of 1709, the Swedish army numbered less than twenty-thousand. Charles ordered Polish and Swedish reinforcements from Poland and moved into position at Poltava to await them.

  Poltava’s original defenses were crude earthworks, but these had been reinforced since the beginning of the war with 91 cannon and a regiment of four thousand Russian soldiers. Beginning on May 1, 1709, the Swedish army began a six-week bombardment which, on Charles’ personal orders, was so meager—limited to a mere five cannon shots a day—that the Swedish officers were baffled as to its purpose. A sustained bombardment might bring the city to its feet in a matter of hours; Charles was letting it drag on for weeks. Bit by bit the Swedish trenches were drawing closer to Poltava, but Swedish soldiers were dying every day as they crept towards the Russian defenses. Charles explained to his officers that he wished to wait for reinforcements before the walls of the city fell and open battle commenced, but this explanation did not satisfy them completely.

  Across the river, the Russian army was rallying to Menshikov, who observed the Swedes weakening. Their wounds were more susceptible to infection in the warmer weather, their food was running out, and they were low on powder and ammunition, to the point that they were scavenging in the grass for musket balls fired at them by the Russians, which they might reuse. They were also making progress, however. The commander of the garrison at Poltava, Colonel Kelin, sent word to Menshikov that he did not expect the city’s defenses to last four more weeks. Menshikov watched nervously, awaiting the arrival of the tsar, who reached Poltava at the beginning of June. For the first time, Peter did not defer to a more experienced general, but took personal charge of the battle.

  Unlike Charles, whose signature in war was to defy the odds and risk everything on a single charge, Peter was cautious of his army. Charles had, in part, inherited his military strength; Peter had, in a very real sense, built his army up from the ground, starting when he was ten years old. But the Russian army outnumbered the Swedes two to one. And if Poltava fell, there would be little standing in the way of their long march to Moscow. Peter was therefore prepared to take risks.

  On the night of June 14 and 15, the first forward divisions of the Russian army began to cross the river. Charles knew the adv
ance was coming and intended to repel it, but before he had the chance, he was wounded by fire from a Russian musket. The ball struck his foot at the back of the heel and exited near the big toe. Charles, knowing that his soldiers sustained themselves on the belief that he was God’s invincible servant, pretended that nothing had happened for another three hours before he allowed his doctors to treat him. The wound quickly became infected, and Charles became delirious with fever.

  When Peter heard what had happened, he instantly took advantage of the confusion in the Swedish lines. The entirety of the Russian army crossed to the river’s far shore. Meanwhile, as Charles lay on his sickbed, hovering between life and death, he learned that the long-awaited reinforcements from Poland were not coming. His advisors immediately recommended that he either retreat, or entertain a peace agreement with the Russians, but Charles was unwilling to do either. He pushed for battle. Peter was not eager for a fight, but he had prepared for one. All along the road leading to Poltava from the Swedish encampment, he had ordered the construction of six redoubts (essentially, mounds of earth that provide cover for soldiers firing from the depression below), spaced about three hundred feet apart, measuring a hundred square feet apiece. When the Swedish advanced, the earthworks would force them out of formation.

  When the day of the battle arrived, June 27, 1709, Charles was well enough to join his men, though he had to be carried in a stretcher guarded by twenty-four soldiers. He was so weakened that he was forced to delegate command, a necessary move that nonetheless proved the undoing of the Swedish forces. His seconds, Rehnskjold and Lewenhaupt, disliked one another; both were fearful that the other would try to take the credit for his accomplishments, so neither fully articulated his objectives to the other. The redoubts worked just as Peter had hoped; though the Swedish infantry easily swarmed over the first two, the third and fourth redoubts held six infantry battalions at bay. Before the Swedish forces even reached the city, it had lost a third of its men.

  Almost as soon as the Swedish were in reach of Russian cannon, it became evident that they would not survive long without reinforcements, but no reinforcements were coming. Six battalions were still desperately attempting to conquer the third redoubt, and their commander did not realize that they were needed elsewhere, because Rehnskjold had not told him. Messengers were detached to the reserve battalion at the Swedish encampment, but they were shot down before they reached their destination. Just as Rehnskjold was preparing to retreat and regroup, the Russian army emerged from the city and its fortifications and began lining up for open battle. Never before had Peter risked his army in this fashion. The Swedish, fearing that the Russians would slaughter them from the back if they continued to retreat, wheeled about to face them. Under Charles’s leadership, the Swedish had been victorious in the face of steep odds before, but Charles’s leadership was the indispensable factor. The Swedish line broke quickly. Discipline broke down, the soldiers panicked, and a disorderly retreat ensued. Charles, lying prone on his stretcher, actually attempted to rally his panicking soldiers to the sound of his voice, but he could not be heard over the cannon fire.

  Lewenhaupt surrendered on behalf of the Swedish three days later, on July 1, 1709. Charles, king of Sweden, had fled to Moldavia, a possession of the Ottoman empire; he would remain in exile with the Turks for the next five years. The Russians took 17,000 Swedish prisoners. The power of the supposedly invincible Swedish army was permanently broken. It was an outcome which no one in Europe had expected. From the beginning of the war, Charles’s victory had been a foregone conclusion. It was with no little astonishment that the powers of the west came to understand that Russia was now the dominant power in the north. Always before, Russians had been laughed at; now, Russia would have to be watched carefully, its decisions and reactions taken into account. Peter was now an emperor. His word carried weight.

  Alexei

  After Poltava, Russia’s status in the world changed abruptly. Among other things, the noble families of Europe were now considering the prospect of marrying their daughters to the House of Romanov in a new light. In the past, the tsars of Russia had been no more interested in marrying heretical foreign princesses than the princesses were interested in traveling to their savage country and being married to them. But Peter was now the head of an empire, and empires made alliances through marriage.

  Peter’s son, the tsarevitch Alexei, was nineteen years old—unusually old to still be unmarried, at least by the standards of his forebears. Peter had been trying to negotiate a marriage between Alexei and Charlotte von Brunswick-Lüneberg-Wolfenbüttel since 1707, but his overtures, though they were not rebuffed outright, had met with a lukewarm reception. Naturally, this changed after Poltava. Not only was the Duke of Wolfenbüttel suddenly eager to marry his daughter to the heir to the Russian throne; the emperor of Austria was also making inquiries regarding a marriage between Alexei and his youngest sister, Magdalena. After Poltava, Peter sent Alexei to Dresden for a year, to give a final bit of European polish to his education. There, he and Charlotte met face to face, and the final arrangements for the marriage were made.

  Peter had another young relation of marriageable age to dispose of at this time: his niece Anna Ivanovna, daughter of his deceased brother and co-tsar. It was useful to be able to attract foreign princesses to Russia, but being able to make alliances by marrying Russian princesses to foreigners was more useful still. When Peter arranged a match for Anna to Frederick Wilhelm of Courland, it was the first time in Russian history that a tsarevna had been married at all, let alone to a foreigner. Unfortunately, Anna was not to prove happy in her marriage. Her husband died during the journey back to his homeland, reportedly from over-indulging during the wedding celebration. Anna begged Peter’s permission to return to Russia, but Peter would not allow it; he needed her in Courland to guarantee its neutrality in case of any future conflict in the Baltic. Anna remained there in misery and near poverty for the next twenty years. But when she did at last return to St. Petersburg, it was as Russia’s second sovereign empress, Anna I.

  Peter could trust Anna, however unhappy she was, to do as she was told. But he had less trust in his own son and heir. Throughout Alexei’s life, Peter had alternately neglected him and made great demands of him. Alexei had been the favorite of his neglected, isolated mother Eudoxia, and when Peter returned from Europe only to banish Eudoxia to a convent and place Alexei in the care of his aunt, the boy’s world had been turned upside down. Alexei did not share Peter’s obsessive fascination with armies and wars; he was fond of reading and study, and probably would have made a fine priest if he had not been tsarevitch. Peter had put so much pressure on him in an effort to mold him in his own warlike image that Alexei had, at one point, tried to shoot off his own right hand with a pistol, though he only succeeded in giving himself a mild powder burn. He had suffered from depression and contemplated suicide over the years, and he coped with intolerable anxiety by drinking heavily.

  Alexei’s wife Charlotte died in 1715 after giving birth to a son, the future emperor Peter II. Alexei had neglected Charlotte throughout their marriage, refusing to speak to her or acknowledge her when she was in the room with him. Peter found this infuriating, both because he was fond of Charlotte, and because this behavior threatened the future of foreign marriage alliances between Russia and Europe.

  The day of Charlotte’s funeral, Peter wrote a letter to Alexei, outlining his disappointment in his son’s character, his expectations for the future, and an ultimatum to be carried out if Alexei did not mend his ways. It has been partially reproduced below:

  “You cannot be ignorant of what is known to all the world, to what degree our people groaned under the oppression of the Swedes before the beginning of the present war.

  “…We submitted to this with a resignation to the will of God, making no doubt that it was He who put us to that trial till He might lead us into the right way and we might render ourselves worthy to experience that the same enemy who a
t first made others tremble, now in his turn trembles before us, perhaps in a much greater degree. These are the fruits which, next to the assistance of God, we owe to our own toil and to the labor of our faithful and affectionate children, our Russian subjects.

  “But at the time when I am viewing the prosperity which God has heaped on our native country, if I cast an eye upon the posterity which is to succeed me, my heart is much more penetrated with grief on account of what is to happen, seeing that you, my son, reject all means of making yourself capable of governing well after me. I say your incapacity is voluntary because you cannot excuse yourself with want of natural parts and strength of body, as if God had not given you a sufficient share of either; and though your constitution is none of the strongest, yet it cannot be said that it is altogether weak.