He told the story himself, many years later. In an old barn Peter happened to notice a small boat, one that was constructed differently from Russian boats. Peter was already studying mathematics, probably for military purposes, with Frans Timmerman, a Dutch merchant and amateur astronomer, and he asked Timmerman why the boat did not look like typical Russian boats. The answer was that it was built to sail against the wind. Peter was amazed by the answer, and Timmerman found a Dutch sailor who put the boat in order and showed the young tsar how to tack into the wind. Peter was captivated immediately, and took the boat to a nearby lake to practice. He also asked the young Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, who was about to leave for France on a diplomatic mission, to bring him back navigational instruments. Dolgorukii returned in 1688 with an astrolabe, and thus began Peter’s love affair with boats and navigation – an affair that would last his whole life.
In the mean time Sofia had committed Russia to a new foreign policy. She wanted to continue the policy of confronting the Ottomans, in this respect following Matveev, but unlike him she decided to do it in close alliance with Poland. The opportunity had come with the foundation of the Holy League in 1682 by Austria, the Papacy, Venice, and Poland, with the aim of a united struggle against the Turks. After long and tiresome negotiations, Sofia joined the League in 1685–6 and entered into military collaboration with Jan III Sobieski, the King of Poland and the victor at the great siege of Vienna of 1683. Russia’s part in the coalition was to defeat Crimea. Thus, in 1687 Golitsyn took a large Russian army south from the Ukrainian hetmanate across the steppe to Crimea. The Tatars burned the waterless steppe, depriving his horses of fodder and he had to retreat. His only accomplishment was to replace Hetman Samoilovych, a Naryshkin ally and an opponent of the war, with the compliant Ivan Mazepa, a name that would return. A repeat of the campaign in 1689 brought the same result, and rumors even circulated that Golitsyn had made a secret deal with the enemy. On his return, Sofia tried to portray the campaign as a success, rewarding the troops and ordering triumphal liturgies, but Peter would have none of it.
Peter was now seventeen, and he stayed away from the Kremlin in Preobrazhenskoe. Suddenly on August 7, 1689, one of his chamberlains was arrested in Moscow and the rumor swept the city that Sofia was going to have Peter killed. One of the musketeers rode out to warn Peter, who got out of bed in his shirt and jumped on a horse. With his closest servants and courtiers he rode through the night to the Trinity Monastery, soon to be joined by his mother and her boyar allies. The next weeks were a standoff, but by the end of the month it was clear that most of the boyars, Tsar Ivan’s household, the patriarch, and the foreign mercenary officers were on Peter’s side. Even the musketeers would not back Sofia. Peter returned to Moscow in triumph and sent Sofia to the Novodevichii Convent on the southwest side of Moscow. Peter, with his Naryshkin relatives, was now securely in power, for Ivan presented no challenge and died in 1696. No one could have then predicted it, but Russia was poised for a fundamental transformation.
5 Peter the Great
The reign of Peter the Great saw the greatest transformation in Russia until the revolution of 1917. Unlike the Soviet revolution, Peter’s transformation of Russia had little impact on the social order, for serfdom remained and the nobility remained their masters. What Peter changed was the structure and form of the state, turning the traditional Russian tsardom into a variant of European monarchy. At the same time he profoundly transformed Russian culture, a contribution that along with his new capital of St. Petersburg has lasted to the present day.
The first few years of Peter’s rule gave little indication that such great events were coming. The removal of Sofia in 1689 gave control to Peter’s mother and her Naryshkin relatives and their allies, who seem to have gotten along poorly with one another once in power. A son Aleksei was born in 1692 to Peter’s wife Evdokiia, so the succession seemed assured. Peter himself remained in the background training his soldiers, drinking with the foreign officers in the German suburbs, and sailing his boats. Peter had many eccentricities, and they appeared early. He was nearly seven feet tall, but was thin-boned with narrow shoulders and rather fine features. He shaved his beard early but left a thin moustache. His capacity for alcohol was gigantic and this perhaps had some relationship to the endless “colics” and other stomach disorders that plagued him all his life. He sometimes flew into tremendous hysterical rages that only his wife (his second, Catherine) was able to calm. His relations with women were surprisingly restrained. His greatest recreation was anything that involved boats, leading him to go north to Archangel in 1693 to see the ocean for the first time. His mother Natalia sent him a letter ordering him not to go out to the dangerous open sea and he obeyed. Then in February 1694, she died. Right away Peter ceased to appear at any of the Kremlin ceremonies, and the whole ritual of the Russian court, now over two centuries old, came to an end. Then Peter went to Archangel again, and this time he went out to sea on a Dutch ship.
During these years Peter made two acquaintances in the German suburb who were to shape his policy for the next few years. One was Patrick Gordon, then in his fifties, a Catholic Scot who had served in the Russian army since 1661, primarily as a specialist in fortification and artillery. Gordon was a firm proponent of the Turkish war and played a crucial role in training the new European style regiments of the army. The other was Francois LeFort, a Geneva Swiss who was also a mercenary officer, but whose relationship with Peter was more personal than Gordon’s. LeFort was the ringleader of many of the drunken parties, and it was LeFort who introduced Peter to Anna Mons, the daughter of a German tavern keeper. These relations were not just friendships, as Gordon and LeFort were the young tsar’s favorites and informal political advisors, and Anna cemented the influence of LeFort.
When Peter returned to Moscow from his first brief sea voyage in the fall of 1694, he decided to renew Russia’s efforts against the Turks, largely in abeyance since he came to power. The boyars were not happy with this decision, but he simply ignored them, and moved an army south down the Volga and Don rivers to Azov, the Turkish fort at the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. The siege was unsuccessful, largely because the Turks could resupply the fort from the sea; so Peter built a navy. He built it at Voronezh on the Don, far inland, with Dutch carpenters and ship builders. He brought officers from the Netherlands, Venice, and France, and in the spring of 1696 his fleet sailed down the Don and with its help he took the fort, which was his first victory. He celebrated his victory not just with the traditional prayers, but also with a triumphal procession into Moscow in full Baroque style, with arches bearing images of Hercules and one with Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” in Church Slavic. So that the public would understand these strange gods, he had a pamphlet printed to explain it all.
Peter then prepared for an action far more strange than his Baroque triumph – a journey to Western Europe. He quickly settled the affairs of the new territories and the navy and appointed a small committee of boyars to govern in his absence, only to find that there was a conspiracy to replace him afoot among other aristocrats. The conspirators were few in number but Peter saw them as growing from the seed of the old factions that had opposed his mother in the 1680s. The conspirators were mainly concerned about their own positions in the hierarchy of offices, but some were also shocked at his trip abroad and even more at his plans to send young boyars to Holland and Venice to learn foreign languages and the art of navigation. The conspirators were executed, and Peter left Moscow, stopping at Riga and Berlin before he arrived in Amsterdam, which was his chief goal.
Peter traveled incognito as a member of the Russian embassy headed by the boyar Fyodor Golovin and Lefort, an embassy with the charge of strengthening the coalition against the Ottomans. While Golovin and LeFort negotiated, Peter took instruction in carpentry and ship building in the shipyards of Zaandam. There the Dutch told him that in England they built ships differently, relying on mathematics and not just their eyes to shape the h
ull. Peter quickly set off for London, where he visited the shipyards but also spoke to astronomers at the Greenwich observatory, attended a Quaker meeting, inspected the Royal mint, and talked to Anglican clergymen. Then he began the journey home, reaching Vienna by spring. As he rode through Central Europe, however, the political horizon was changing rapidly. Austria had reconquered huge parts of Hungary and was low on resources, as were the other allies. They wanted peace, and Peter learned this in Vienna. He had to now extricate Russia from the war with the Ottomans, and he eventually succeeded after two years of hard negotiation. Peter was disappointed, but the end of the war was actually a relief, for more pressing concerns had arisen.
In the summer of 1698 he had news from Moscow that the musketeers had revolted once again, demanding better conditions, and apparently they were in some sort of contact with the imprisoned Sofia. Peter rushed home, only to find that the boyars had already executed the leaders over the advice of the generals. Peter was furious, and ordered a relentless and gruesome interrogation of the prisoners under torture. Hundreds were eventually executed with the participation of the tsar and the boyars. Peter never got to the bottom of the musketeers’ motives, and he suspected the boyars, even those to whom he had entrusted the government, of concealing evidence or worse. As the interrogation drew to a close, Peter decided that he could no longer work with the boyars because they were too quarrelsome among themselves and unreliable. Henceforth he would rely on his favorites.
Peter had returned from Europe with two new favorites, Golovin and a junior officer of bombardiers, Alexander Menshikov. Gordon and LeFort wanted Peter to maintain his alliance with Austria and prepare for another Turkish war, but he had other plans, and in any case both Gordon and LeFort died about this time. Golovin came from an old boyar family and was well educated. He had negotiated the treaty of Nerchinsk that delimited their mutual border with China, and had succeeded in part because he could speak to the Jesuits at the Chinese court in Latin. Menshikov was the exact opposite, the son of a falconer at the court who had served in Peter’s play regiments, which became his guards. Menshikov had little education, though he had acquired enough “soldier’s German” to speak to foreigners who lacked Russian. Menshikov was also LeFort’s replacement at the drinking parties and Peter’s close personal friend. They also both supported Peter’s divorce from his wife Evdokiia, the mother of his son Aleksei. Most important, they both supported Peter’s new project, the war with Sweden.
The war with Sweden would occupy most of the rest of Peter’s reign. On its eve Peter decreed the first of his reforms, mandating that men of the upper classes must shave their beards, and that both sexes of the gentry must henceforth wear Western clothing in place of traditional Russian dress. He also ordered the year to be dated from the birth of Christ, not the creation of the world so that Russia would be in keeping with the educated world as he saw it. These decrees aroused a certain amount of discontent, especially the new dress. Boyar women in particular did not like the new clothing, as it meant that their hair was not covered (and thus their new dress was immodest) and they could not manage the stockings and high heels. Many of them wore the new clothes only at court, switching back to traditional dress at home.
Peter also began to reorder the state. The collecting of taxes from townspeople was taken from the provincial governors and put in the hands of the urban elites, and he imposed a stamp duty on official papers. These were experiments, eventually abandoned, but a more basic change was silent. Peter ceased to create boyars and call the boyar duma. Similarly, when the patriarch of the church died in 1701, Peter allowed no new patriarch to be chosen and appointed the Ukrainian abbot Stefan Iavorskii as “conservator of the patriarchal throne.” Thus the traditional and canonical head of the Orthodox church in Russia simply disappeared. To make matters worse, Peter also took control of the revenues of the monastic estates, keeping most of them and doling out a stipend for the use of the monks. Peter wanted to ensure revenue for his war, and did not want any interference from the aristocracy or the church.
The war with Sweden was a response to Peter’s disappointment in the outcome of the Azov campaigns. He had taken the fort to be sure, and gained an outlet to the Black Sea, more or less, but the Turks would not permit the Russians to trade on the Black Sea much less pass the Bosporus into the Mediterranean. Russia had reentered the war too late to derive much benefit from its victory. As Peter was returning from Vienna in 1698 to deal with the musketeer revolt, he had a long meeting with the new king of Poland, Augustus of Saxony. Augustus had large ambitions and considered himself a great military commander. He wanted to seize Sweden’s Baltic provinces, an old demand of the Polish nobility, but he also wanted to use them to strengthen his very shaky position in Poland. His natural allies against Sweden, the hegemonic power of northern Europe, were Denmark and Russia, and he was able to recruit Peter to his cause.
As is so often the case in war, all the initial calculations were wrong. Augustus’ small army tried to take Riga in 1700, but failed ignominiously. The young king of Sweden Charles XII, a born battlefield commander, knocked Denmark out of the war in a matter of weeks, and then shipped his army to the Baltic provinces. Peter had moved his newly trained European-style army to besiege the town of Narva in Swedish Estonia. Charles marched swiftly to the attack, landed on the unprepared Russians in the middle of a snowstorm and routed them. Only Peter’s guards regiments were able to withdraw in order, and most of the foreign and Russian officers were captured. Peter had to begin all over again. Fortunately, Charles had other plans. Contemptuous of Russian capabilities, he turned his attention to Poland, spending the next eight years dethroning Augustus and setting up a Swedish puppet in his place. Peter had a breathing space and he used it well.
What was Peter trying to accomplish in going to war against Sweden, a power that everyone thought virtually invincible? Officially he announced that he was recovering the territory lost at the end of the Time of Troubles, that is, the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland where St. Petersburg now stands. This was ancient Russian territory (that was true) and thus his patrimony. At the same time Peter wanted a port for Russia more convenient for trade and communication than distant Archangel. Azov had not worked out, and the only other option was the Baltic shore. Indeed Narva had been the object of Ivan the Terrible’s wars a century and a half earlier. Peter had no way of knowing that the war would turn into an epic duel that would change the face of northern and eastern Europe, and it seems that his initial aims were modest. Again like so many wars, the conflict acquired a logic of its own and ended in ways that no one could have imagined.
For the time being, the war absorbed all his energies and those of the state. Administration was concentrated in the hands of Peter’s favorites Golovin and Menshikov, but this arrangement meant that government was essentially improvised. During this period Peter had no court, for he spent most of his time with the army or in his small houses around Moscow, especially the residence in Preobrazhenskoe. His style of life at this time and ever after was unique for a Russian or European monarch. He went about the country and the army with no guards and no suite, but he took his lathe and woodworking tools with him everywhere. The absence of a court suited him perfectly, as he hated any sort of ceremonial and the court amusements that were usual in most of Europe. His idea of a good time was to arrange a great drunken celebration with his officers or Dutch sea captains and end the evening with fireworks.
The scene of these amusements, and of the government as well, was increasingly in his new city, St. Petersburg. The city was the result of his persistence after the defeat at Narva. Peter rebuilt his army and sent it into the Baltic provinces, in effect training it under fire in many small engagements with the enemy. In 1702 he felt confident enough to move against a larger objective, the Swedish fort on the Neva River, Nöteborg. He took it after a short siege and renamed it, ignoring the previous Russian name and calling it Schlüsselburg, in German the “Key Castle.” The
next year he moved down the Neva and quickly seized the small Swedish town at its mouth, where he immediately began to build a new fortress, the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, to defend the area from sea and land. Around the fortress he began to build a new city as a naval base and a potential commercial port for Russia on the Baltic. He was not waiting for the war to end, and through the years to come in the darkest moments of the war, it was St. Petersburg that was his one unshakeable demand.
There were plenty of dark moments. By 1706 Charles had managed to force Augustus to abdicate the Polish throne and in the next two years the Swedish king gradually moved east through Poland to expel Augustus’s remaining supporters and the Russian army. Charles was fresh from a long series of victories and hailed in Europe as one of the world’s great commanders, so it is not surprising that he had far-reaching plans to rely on boyar and popular dissent to overthrow Peter and establish a weak and compliant government in Moscow. His assumption was that Peter’s army could not effectively oppose him. As the Swedes moved toward the Russian border, however, their situation rapidly deteriorated. The Russians had stripped most of the land of food and fodder and Charles’s army was low on supplies. To make things worse, each encounter with the Russian army revealed that Peter’s officers were learning their profession, and Swedish successes came harder each time. Then Charles reached the Russian border and stopped to rest, hoping that his manifestos had caused discontent to boil over among the Russian boyars and people, but nothing happened. Russia was quiet, and winter was coming on. Charles decided to turn south into the Ukrainian Hetmanate, but first he hoped to join up with a Swedish relief army coming from Riga that had fresh supplies. At Lesnaia Peter struck. Moving his dragoons rapidly through the forest he fell on the relief army, driving it from the field and seizing its supplies. Charles now had more men but no fresh supplies.
A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories) Page 11