St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  Young Peter, traumatised by the undisciplined behaviour of the streltsy, turned his back on the capital. He didn’t go far to begin with – only a few kilometres along the Yauza River to the hunting lodge at Preobrazhenskoe, where he once again played soldiers, this time using real ordnance and a swelling number of sympathetic noblemen and commoners. If the child is father to the man, then Peter’s delight in building earthworks and fortresses can be seen as the first intimation of his obsession with the construction of what would become St Petersburg. As his military installation grew and his war games became more sophisticated, he began to shape the new Russia by forming the celebrated Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Regiments of the imperial guard. Showing an early inclination to learn matters from the ground up, Peter enlisted as a drummer boy.8 As he rose through the artillery, he shared the humble duties of a foot soldier, revealing his deep-seated understanding that a modest will to learn was more useful than an inherited title.

  Sophia’s regency was finally compromised by two failed military campaigns and her relentless passion for their ill-chosen leader, the married Prince Vasily Golitsyn, who managed to lose 45,000 men in four months without even engaging the enemy in battle. After being mendaciously hailed as a hero in Moscow, the prince was chosen to mis-lead another campaign in which he lost a further 35,000 men to death or capture. Some of the most powerful families – among them the Rodomanovskys, Sheremetevs and Dolgorukys – rallied around Peter and his mother and, when Ivan V died in 1696, Peter became tsar. Ivan had failed to produce a male heir, but Peter – married to Evdokia Lopukhina since he was seventeen – had two sons. One of them, Alexei, survived to become a perpetual source of irritation throughout most of Peter’s reign.

  Prince Golitsyn, with his keen appreciation of Europe and his interest in science, was a key figure in preparing Russia for reform. He owned clocks, Western portraits and Venetian plate. His Moscow house was influenced by European architecture9 He should have been an ally to Peter rather than an enemy, but he was exiled to Siberia for his sympathies and failures. When Sophia attempted to engineer another Streltsy uprising, Peter crushed it – incarcerating her in the Novodivechy Convent and branding, breaking, beheading and hanging the conspirators. The Prussian Ambassador Printz recalled that the tsar ordered twenty prisoners to be brought before him. He took a shot of vodka and then beheaded one. He took another shot, then hacked the next prisoner to death, and continued thus until he had disposed of the traitors. Then he invited the terrified ambassador to match him.10

  Among the foreigners living in Moscow’s ‘German Suburb’ Peter found a good number of people who shared his enthusiasm for soldiery, ships and debauchery. First among these was the hard-drinking Swiss mercenary François Lefort – almost twice Peter’s age and nearly as tall. Lefort’s house hosted an ongoing party where revellers were ‘locked in for three days at a time’.11 In 1692, the married tsar fell for one of Lefort’s mistresses, Anna Mons, the sassy, hard-drinking daughter of a German wine merchant, who would become Peter’s mistress for the next eleven years. Filippo Balatri, the Italian castrato brought to Russia in the autumn of 1698, saw Peter playing chess at Anna’s house and was told, ‘This is the place where Peter Alexeivich can be found when he wants to leave the tsar at court.’12

  Peter’s early enthusiasm for sailing on the lakes and rivers near Moscow persuaded him to travel to Arkhangelsk, Russia’s northern White Sea port, where he was captivated by tales of Dutch shipbuilding. Despite a successful military adventure against the Turkish garrison at Azov, Peter knew he needed to improve Russian naval capability by observing and emulating Western models. So the overgrown boy, driven visionary and calculating buffoon cunningly went off to Europe incognito.

  Despite the presence of foreigners in Moscow, the essential ignorance of Peter’s Embassy concerning foreign modes and manners became apparent early in its progress. At a dance given by the widowed Electress of Hanover, the Russians mistook the whalebones of German corsets for ribs, and Peter himself commented that ‘German ladies had devilish hard bones.’13 For Peter-gauche and in obvious need of being brought up to date – Holland was a useful destination. The Dutch dominated international trade, and their nautical expertise and maritime prowess attracted the tsar. Holland, master of the oceans, was also at war with a sea that threatened to wipe parts of its territory from the face of the earth. Throughout the early seventeenth century there had been frequent and violent flooding, and the Dutch were now skilled in canalisation, sluicing and drainage. As for shipbuilding, Dutch maritime trade was so brisk that between 1625 and 1700, the Republic constructed between 400 and 500 sea-going vessels per year.14 Zaandam alone boasted fifty shipyards.

  Arriving in that port, Peter registered at the Lynst Rogge shipyard and set to work. However, with his impressive height and often unruly manner, his presence began to draw unwanted attention. Crowds began to pursue the tsar and, when he went sailing on the Ij, he angrily flung two bottles at the captain of a mail boat who steered a gaggle of inquisitive ladies too close. The situation in Zaandam became intolerable and, after one hectic week, Peter was forced to flee to cosmopolitan Amsterdam. From September 1697 to early January 1698 Peter laboured in the East India Docks at Ostenberg,15 while other Russian apprentices were scattered around Amsterdam learning different aspects of the shipbuilding art.

  Sited from a combination of hubris and necessity, Amsterdam was testimony to man’s triumph over nature. Houses and commercial properties were constructed along a system of five concentric canals intersected by narrower radial channels. At the height of its power during Peter’s visit, Amsterdam was the wealthiest city in the world, with palatial government buildings and thriving commerce. Its waterways were clogged with boats, ships and barges on which people lived. Its narrow streets offered a veritable cornucopia of raw materials and merchandise. On the Nieuwe Brug Peter found bookshops, sea charts, sextants and ironmongery. On Bickers Island there were chandlers. In the Warmoesstraat there were exotic fabrics, Nuremberg porcelain, Italian majolica and Delft faience. But above all, the ambitious young tsar would find the city itself a particularly instructive model, for he too would wage war on the sea.16

  While the shipyards in the Dutch Republic retained a time-honoured, artisanal approach, the country also embraced the latest scientific learning. Amsterdam alone boasted around a hundred printers and publishers, making it one of the most important centres for book production in Europe. Higher education prospered and a flexible attitude towards learning – coupled with the arrival of exotic natural specimens unearthed by Dutch explorers and traders – resulted in an environment predisposed to scientific investigation. Displayed in cabinets, curiosities attracted many visitors – Peter among them. The tsar met Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek, a barely educated draper whose hobby was to search out the hidden secrets of decay. The first person to observe bacteria through the lenses of a microscope, Leeuwenhoek would pick food from his teeth and examine it, collect his own excrement to study, and monitor the fungal life that grew between his toes when he neglected to change his stockings for a period of weeks. He also examined his own semen and was one of the first people to describe the activity of ‘little animals’ or spermatozoa.17

  The skilled dissector and embalmer Frederik Ruysch invited Peter to his Anatomy Theatre, which presented ‘anatomical revelation’ as a spectacle lit by candlelight and accompanied by music. The tsar, fascinated by disembowelment, shared Ruysch’s particular interest in freaks of nature. He was so taken by Ruysch’s collection of 2,000 embryological and anatomical specimens, assembled over half a century, that he eventually purchased it for 30,000 guilders in 1717.18 When not in the shipyard wielding his axe, or drinking in Dutch musicos where men gambled and whored, Peter was busy searching out the latest Dutch inventions and techniques. He met Jan van der Heyden, the inventor of the pressured fire hose, whom he tried to lure to Russia to assist in the fight against the blazes which frequently raged in Moscow’s congested wooden alleys. The tsar
became interested in paper-making, printing, engraving, architecture and botanical gardens. The modernity of the Dutch Republic stimulated a monarch who would, up to a point, break with old ways.

  Peter found himself in a land where the countryside was flat, and the bodies fat. Like Russians, the Dutch had gargantuan appetites – one contemporary observer described the Dutchman as ‘a lusty, fat, two-legged cheese-worm’. They had ‘so many rules and ceremonies for getting drunk’ that formal dining became a secular religion.19 By contrast, Peter’s self-styled ‘All-Mad, All-Jesting, All-Drunken Assembly’ descended into anarchy and brutality. The tsar reportedly drank thirty to forty glasses of wine a day and still remained sharp. Stories claim that, even in his early teens, Peter drank a pint of vodka and a bottle of sherry over breakfast, followed by about eight more bottles of wine before going out to play20 – exaggerations with some basis in fact. Moscow banquets began around noon and lasted into the next morning. They started with vodka, followed by strong wines and beers served in massive glasses. There were speeches and toasts, heralded by trumpet blasts or artillery salvoes. If anyone found disfavour during these feasts, they were punished with the Great Eagle: a massive, ornate double-handled goblet filled with a litre and a half of vodka – all to be downed in one gulp.

  When England’s King William III invited Peter to dine near Utrecht, the London Post Boy reported that ‘the tsar of Muscovy was so highly pleased with the magnificent dinner . . . he merrily invited himself again’.21 In fact, Peter’s thoughts were already turning towards England, where his study would be serious, his behaviour outrageous. On 7 January 1698, he boarded HMS Yorke and – resolutely remaining on deck to brave a terrific storm – crossed the Channel to England where, in the Pool of London, he hoped to learn more about England’s scientific approach to shipbuilding.

  If Amsterdam was wealthier in 1698, London was larger. Although – only three decades before Peter’s visit – it had suffered a devastating plague and fire, the capital now boasted a population of nigh on half a million. With post-fire reconstruction, the English capital was experiencing a period of tremendous change, fusing its ‘mosaic’ of neighbourhoods into one physical and commercial entity. It was being transformed from a warren of medieval wooden buildings into a modern metropolis of bricks and stone.22 But while the devastation of the Great Fire had made way for wider streets, the opportunity to restructure the layout of the city was largely wasted, and the creation of modern London was evolutionary rather than revolutionary.23 Instead of ‘a convenient regular well built city,’ wrote the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, we have ‘a chaos of dirty rotten sheds, always tumbling’, with ‘lakes of mud and rills of stinking mire running through them’.24 During the 1690s the streets were crowded with beggars, and even those squares which had been laid out for light and airy recreation attracted gamblers, vagabonds and thieves. The diarist John Evelyn – who spent much time ordering his own house and garden at Sayes Court in Deptford – was so worried about the chaotic way in which the capital was developing that he suggested a precautionary green belt to protect the city from a stifling collar of dark satanic mills and factories.25

  Instead of practical strategies for the planning of a modern city – like those drawn up for St Petersburg, Washington DC or Baron Haussmann’s Paris – priorities for London reconstruction centred on church-building. This resulted in a veritable forest of spires: an antiphon to the jungle of masts clogging the River Thames. Dominating this multitude of parish churches was the dome of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral. There is no evidence that Peter met Wren, but the architect’s works lay spread at the tsar’s feet when he climbed the Monument to the Great Fire in early April 1698.26

  Arriving in London, Peter was lodged – at the expense of the Crown – at 21 Norfolk Street in the elegant network of recently built houses south of the Strand. Along with Fleet Street, Cheapside and Cornhill, the Strand was one of the finest commercial centres in London – a shopping thoroughfare outshining anything in Louis XIV’s Paris. So Peter went shopping. His forays were reported in the London gossip sheets in the manner that a star’s spree would be splashed across the tabloids today. From John Carte, a watchmaker in the Strand, the tsar purchased a geographical clock, which told the time in all parts of the world as well as marking the different sunrises and sunsets. It cost £60. Peter also spent £50 on a gold watch, £250 on medical instruments, telescopes, quadrants and compasses.27 He purchased an English coffin – amazed that such a receptacle was swiftly assembled from planks of wood, instead of being laboriously hollowed from an entire tree trunk, as was the custom in Russia.28 The tsar also bought black servants for £21, ‘a negress’ for £30, along with ‘18 pairs of stockings for the blacks’ at a shilling a pair.

  While in London, Peter attended concerts and Temple masquerades – on one occasion disguised as a butcher.29 He was also – in the words of the hydraulic engineer John Perry – ‘prevail’d upon to go once or twice to the play’, which ‘he did not like’.30 However, there was something about the theatre Peter clearly did enjoy. Since the Restoration in 1660, women played women’s roles on the London stage, and Peter was attracted by the young Letitia Cross, who had recently made her name playing ‘Miss Hoyden . . . daughter to Sir Tunbelly Clumsey’ in John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse. The degree of her intimacy with the tsar is a matter for speculation, although Andrei Nartov, Peter’s instrument-maker, claimed that his master ‘became acquainted, through Menshikov, who was drowned in luxury and sensuality, with an actress, named Cross, whom sometimes during his stay in England he took for amorous dalliance’.31 The low-born, semi-literate Menshikov – who worked his way up through the ranks in the Preobrazhensky Regiment to become the tsar’s right-hand man – shared Peter’s ability to drink and party. In 1698, the year that began with Peter’s sojourn in London, a Russian merchant was arrested for suggesting that Peter took Menshikov to his bed ‘like a whore’.32 Giving possible credence to such an accusation, John Perry – describing the debauchery in Moscow – maintained that ‘the horrible sin of sodomy . . . which they are very much addicted to in their drink’ is hardly considered a crime in Russia.33 Rough-hewn Peter, with his Dutch workman’s clothes and consummate lack of etiquette, provoked rumours and outrage wherever he went. At a meeting with King William in Norfolk Street, the tsar’s pet monkey suddenly leapt at the monarch. Visiting Anne, the future Queen of England, Peter refused an armchair and sat on a stool at the feet of the princess. When the Earl of Macclesfield called unexpectedly, the tsar suddenly rose from the table, went upstairs and locked himself in his bedchamber.34 But despite appearing petulant and unruly, Peter agreed to sit to Rembrandt’s pupil, Sir Godfrey Kneller. The resulting portrait of a saucy military commander, whose small head sits a little uneasily on his huge body, now hangs in the King’s Gallery of Kensington Palace. Comparing the image with a 1670s painting of Tsar Alexei, we see how unequivocally Kneller thrust Peter into the Age of Enlightenment. While Alexei is depicted with his traditional crown, the Cap of Monomakh, Peter is firmly placed in a Western context with ermine, armour, classical architecture and an impressive naval presence, which – in terms of Russia in 1698 – was pure fantasy.35

  That was about to change. Peter was lured to England by the gift of the Royal Transport, the first schooner-rigged ship in the British Navy. It was a present that came with a bonus – its designer, Admiral Carmarthen,36 who became the tsar’s London drinking companion, guide and mentor. In between quantities of sherry, Carmarthen counselled Peter on how to set up a Russian navy along English lines. In return for the Russian tobacco monopoly, Admiral Carmarthen also advanced Peter £12,000.37 Despite this windfall, Peter’s entourage left unpaid bills at taverns, inns and guest houses – and there was worse to come. In February, Peter moved to Deptford on the south side of the Thames, where the King’s Dockyard stood beside the splendid house he rented. It was owned by the very man who had expressed concern about the industrial threat to London, the diarist John Eve
lyn. The tenancy proved to be an owner’s nightmare. The occupants left a trail of vomit, a urinous stink in wet beds. As the severe winter gave way to the mild English spring, the ongoing bash sprawled out into the garden. The catalogue of breakages included twenty fine pictures torn and their frames broken, carpets stained with grease, paintwork damaged, chairs ripped apart and windows broken. Evelyn’s flowerbeds and bowling green were devastated, the kitchen garden wasted. His servant wrote to his master describing‘a house full of people, and right nasty’. A government survey concurred, observing that the ‘indoor habits of Peter and his retinue were . . . filthy in the extreme’.38

  In nearby Greenwich, Peter took elementary lessons in navigation. He met the first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, at the Royal Observatory. He also visited the Arsenal at Woolwich, where he shared his interest in fireworks with the Master of Ordnance, Henry Sidney, First Earl of Romney. He toured the Mint several times, and visited the Tower of London and the Royal Society.39 Perry recorded that ‘the King was pleased to send Admiral Mitchell down with him to Portsmouth, to put the fleet that lay at Spithead to Sea, on purpose to show him a sham Engagement’40 Delighted by the sophistication of the manoeuvres in the mock-battle, Peter apparently did not fare so well on the Thames. The small yacht in which he practised sailing collided with the bomb ship Salamander, and, on another occasion, the tsar rammed an eight-gun yacht, the Henrietta.41

  The English found it somewhat odd that Peter should travel to England while there was friction in Moscow and an ongoing ‘Great War against the Turks and Tartars’. In fact, ‘oddness’ seemed to sum up this young giant, who was given to fits and seizures in which his head twitched suddenly and violently towards his right shoulder. He appeared a rattled, chaotic soul in search of order and precision. Painted by Kneller with the accoutrements of a Western king, upon his return to Russia, Peter was represented as a ruler in his father’s mould, wearing the Cap of Monomakh. In yet another image, he was decked with the laurels of a Roman emperor.42 The conflict of these images – the pull between archaic Russia and enlightened Europe, not to mention a dream of imperial grandeur-suggests something of the confusion in the young tsar’s mind. Peter was an expeditionary who, during his drunken roll through Amsterdam and London, acquired sufficient architectural inspiration and engineering skill to return home and decide that it was possible to build a dream city on a reclaimed swamp.