Empires Apart

by Brian Landers

  The First Romanovs

  Ivan the Terrible and his grandfather Ivan the Great started this gigantic imperial adventure, but it could easily have stalled on Ivan IV’s death. In the Times of Troubles Russian imperial ambitions could have been snuffed out by the two regional superpowers, Sweden and Poland, but in the Romanovs Russia stumbled upon a dynasty that would not merely protect the empire but bring it to undreamt-of glories. The reigns of the first two Romanov tsars, Michael and Alexis, were crucial in reestablishing the power and character of Rus and Muscovy.

  When sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov ascended the throne Russia’s imperial glories must have been the last thing on his mind. His first priority was survival, and his initial position was incredibly weak. He did not even have the power to select his own wife: when he chose the beautiful Maria Khlopfa, members of a rival family had her drugged and dispatched with her family into Siberian exile. Michael did, however, have a loving patron, his father. Filaret had not been considered for tsar himself for two reasons: he was already head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and at the time he was a captive of the Poles. Michael and Filaret were soon powerful enough to dispense with the national assembly (unlike the head of state in England, Charles I, who tried the same thing eight years later and ended up with neither state nor head).

  Around them Europe was in flux. In 1683 western civilisation was yet again saved from the barbarous east when the Polish leader Jan Sobieski defeated the Ottoman Turks outside Vienna. Michael, Filaret and Michael’s successor Alexis not only flexed Russia’s military might but played a skilful diplomatic game, which resulted in Sweden selling back Novgorod and, of immense psychological importance, Poland being forced to give up Kiev. Alexis started a tradition to be followed assiduously later by America and Russia alike: funding opposition groups in exile in the hope that one day they would return home as grateful allies. In the case of Alexis that meant bankrolling Charles II of England in exile in Holland after the execution of his father.

  Alexis was followed first by his sickly son Fyodor, who soon died, and then by one of the towering figures in Russian history, Peter the Great. The succession was not a smooth one, illustrating once again the fragile threads of autocracy. Any one of three half-siblings could have come out on top, and the transition was characteristically violent, pitting the family of Alexis’s first wife, the Miloslavskys, against the family of his second wife, the Naryshkins. The Miloslavskys wanted Alexis’s retarded son Ivan on the throne or, failing that, his sister Sophia, but the ten-year-old Peter was acknowledged tsar by the Moscow mob. His mother Natalya Naryshkin was appointed regent, but the Miloslavskys had Peter’s chief advisor hacked to death in the young tsar’s presence and had the head of the Naryshkin family tortured and thrown to the mob. Sophia then became regent to Peter and Ivan as joint tsars (Ivan V being unkindly known to history as Ivan the Fool, although being a fool did not stop him fathering two daughters, one of whom would ascend the imperial throne). Sophia effectively ruled as Russia’s first empress until Peter, at the age of seventeen, managed to enlist the support of the Scottish mercenary commanding the Moscow guards and had Sophia banished to a monastery. When Ivan died Peter became undisputed autocrat and started to change the face of Russia for ever.

  Peter the Great was the first famous Romanov. Many European and American texts suggest that his greatness arose from his willingness to take on the most important task they appear to consider any Russian leader can perform: he ‘opened Russia to the west’. Peter was the first great westerniser, the tsar who cast off the blinkers of prejudice and superstition and took Russia into the modern world. He toured the capitals of western Europe and immersed himself in the traditions, culture and values of the west. Whether working as a humble apprentice in the shipyards of Holland or studying the arts of civilisation at Woolwich Arsenal, Peter supposedly typified the hands-on, real world leadership style more characteristic of new world entrepreneurs than old world autocrats.

  Peter’s famous visit to the west is frequently pictured as one of the great turning points of world history. Certainly he returned home inspired to change the course of Russian history, but not necessarily in the directions his admirers claim. This visit was not a Victorian Grand Tour peregrinating around the wonders of ancient Rome and Greece; Peter’s primary objective was not cultural but imperial. He wanted to learn the military secrets of the western powers in order to strengthen his empire, if necessary at their expense. His choice of England was influenced less by an interest in the workings of a nascent constitutional monarchy than in the lessons to be learnt from the brutal English colonisation of Ireland (his visit came just eight years after the battle of the Boyne, where the military power of Irish Catholicism had been annihilated). He was accompanied not by scholars and artists but by two hundred largely boorish and often drunken hangers-on, and he returned to Russia not when he was satisfied that he had learnt all there was to learn but when summoned home by news of a military revolt (news sent to him by the gloriously entitled Minister of Flogging and Torture). His reaction to the revolt showed nothing of western liberalism and everything of Ivan the Terrible. Peter had hundreds of his opponents roasted alive, broken on the wheel or flogged to death, with their bodies left to rot on street corner displays throughout Moscow.

  In terms of geographical size Russia’s days of breakneck expansion were over by 1700. But much of the vast new empire was sparsely populated Siberian tundra whose rich natural resources could only be exploited with enormous difficulty. Like Ivan the Terrible before him, Peter’s covetous eyes turned west.

  At the time Sweden was one of the greatest military powers in Europe. Although it had lost its fledgling American colony half a century earlier, it still dominated northern Europe, and its new king Charles XII, just eighteen when war commenced, was to prove himself a military genius. In launching the twenty-two year long Great Northern War against Sweden Peter set himself on a course that would, if successful, change the balance of power for ever. But to reach that point Peter had to defeat a man whose tactical brilliance and personal courage would soon be the talk of the continent.

  Peter moved first, seizing Swedish territory on the eastern side of the Baltic and laying siege to the coastal city of Narva. Charles, after defeating Peter’s Danish allies in a stunningly swift campaign, landed 150 miles away with a force just a quarter of Peter’s. There was no chance that Charles would attack the Russian troops, especially as the weather was ghastly, so Peter left the siege to confer with his other allies, the Poles. While he was away Charles achieved the impossible. He force-marched his troops through raging blizzards and then launched a frontal attack against all the odds. The Swedish king had horses shot from under him and after the battle found a musket ball caught in his clothing. Part of the Russian army was routed and the rest, itself larger than the total Swedish force, capitulated. The Russians lost 8,000 troops; ten generals, including the commander in chief, were captured.

  Narva was a disaster for Peter but he was determined not to make the same mistakes again. The Russian army was rebuilt, re-equipped and drilled in the precepts of modern warfare. Charles, on the other hand, made many of the mistakes Napoleon and Hitler went on to make: he divided his forces, couldn’t decide which were his strategic objectives and fell foul of the Russians’ scorched earth policies. In 1709 the story of Narva was repeated in reverse. Charles was besieging the militarily insignificant town of Poltava when Peter appeared with an army more than twice the size of the Swedes’ and dug in. Charles, although wounded himself, ordered his troops into another full frontal attack, and they were massacred. Swedish military power was smashed for ever.

  Charles himself was fortunate to escape to Turkey, from where he encouraged the Ottomans in their own campaigns against the encroaching Russian empire. Those campaigns could have been successful, for in 1711 the Turks almost captured Peter – but he was able to escape using a classic Muscovite weapon; he bribed the Turkish vizier.

  Peter then seize
d the region round Baku on which Soviet Russia would later depend for its oil supplies, but it was in the west that he made his most far-reaching gains.

  After Poltava the Swedes were in no position to withstand Russian demands, but the war dragged on; Charles simply refused to give way. Finally the Swedish king took one risk too many: in an obscure engagement with Danish forces in Norway Charles made the classic mistake of putting his head above the parapet, thus presenting a perfect target for an enemy sniper. Peter reportedly wept at the news of his gallant opponent’s demise, and then grabbed control of most of the eastern Baltic coastline from the demoralised Swedes in the Treaty of Nystadt. Among the territory seized was a malaria-riven swamp at the mouth of the Neva river, where Peter began the construction of what was to be his most lasting legacy. On 16 May 1703 he ordered the building of a fortress named after St Peter and St Paul on the delta’s Hare Island. Because of the swampy ground the construction of the fortress was a massive operation, requiring the movement of millions of tons of earth and the sinking of large wooden piles into the soil. Once the fortress was complete Peter started on the city around it.

  St Petersburg could only have been built in a dictatorship; it was the product of the imagination of a single autocrat. Nobody but Peter wanted it. He was obsessed by a desire to escape from a Moscow dominated in his mind by memories of childhood abuse and treason. He had no interest in the luxurious trappings of Moscow life so valued by his courtiers, and he wanted a port, a maritime gateway to the world, when most of his compatriots had no idea what an ocean was and no desire to find out. He had played with toy navies as a child in a country that had no navy. As soon as he gained access to the Baltic he built himself a real navy and pushed it to a series of victories in the Great Northern War.

  Peter determined every aspect of the city’s design and construction, using the Italian architect Domenico Trezzini to create a city of broad open streets, canals, cathedrals and palaces with art galleries, libraries and even a zoo, but it was only the institutions of tsardom that made the enterprise possible at all. Hundreds of thousands of people were mobilised and compelled to move to the inhospitable marshes. Over 30,000 (perhaps as many as 100,000) conscripts, prisoners and others died of disease, malnutrition and what today might be called industrial injuries, except that such injuries were often deliberately inflicted. Punishments for trying to escape or simply under performing ranged from whipping through mutilation to, in some cases, execution. (This barbaric cruelty was not unique: in the year St Petersburg was founded the settlers of Carolina launched their infamous slave raids on the Spanish missions in Florida, wreaking a hurricane of murder, torture and rape across hundreds of miles.)

  Dysentery and malaria were rife. Whole forests were cut down for timber, hills were levelled and lakes filled. Entire communities were uprooted and shipped west. When his builders ran out of stone Peter simply forbade the construction of stone buildings elsewhere in the empire. There were so few tools that workers were often forced to shovel soil with their hands, an example repeated again 230 years later when Stalin’s forced labour built the White Sea canal. The way the whole of society was mobilised has no parallel in the west. This was not slave labour of the sort characterising the new colonies across the Atlantic. Those transported to the new capital were not only serfs grabbed from the land but great lords and their families. When Peter wanted a navy he simply commanded some of his generals to become admirals. When he wanted to populate his new capital leading families were ordered to build houses there at their own expense, with each design determined by the tsar and each location specified on Trezzini’s plan.

  There was no question of Peter needing to win the nobility’s support to carry out these grand designs; as supreme autocrat he had only to command. The nature of the Russian class system not only explains how Peter was able to accomplish such a massive piece of civil engineering but also, some would say, exemplifies how Russian society has operated from the Mongols to the present. One of the most misunderstood aspects of Russian history is the role of the nobility. Westerners whose pictures of Imperial Russia are based on the novels and plays of the nineteenth century filter their understanding through the sieve of their preconceptions, preconceptions based on the ‘equivalents’ at home. Russian nobles are seen lolling in luxury on enormous estates, surrounded by thousands of serfs over whom they have untrammelled authority – lords of all they can see. They resemble nothing as much as the planter aristocracy of Barbados, Virginia and the Carolinas, with serfs replacing slaves and snowy steppe replacing green fields. Going further back, the court of the early tsars is sometimes pictured in terms of medieval England or France, with mighty local lords competing for influence. Such perceptions are totally unreal.

  Central to any understanding of Russia is the concept of autocracy. All power was concentrated in the tsar. There were no local fiefdoms immune from the autocrat’s control. The function of every Russian was to serve the tsar, and that was especially true of the aristocracy, the dvorianstvo, which started life in the struggles among the Russian princes to inherit the authority of the Mongols. When the grand princes of Muscovy came out on top the other clan leaders became, quite literally, their servants. Richard Pipes emphasises the supreme importance of this development:

  The Muscovite service class, from which in direct line of succession, descend the dvorianstvo of Imperial Russia and the communist apparatus of Soviet Russia, represent a unique phenomenon in the history of social institutions. No term borrowed from western history, such as ‘nobility’ or ‘gentry’, satisfactorily defines it. It was a pool of skilled manpower used by the state to perform any and all functions which it required: soldiering, administration, legislation, justice, diplomacy, commerce and manufacture. The fact that its living derived almost exclusively from the exploitation of land and (after the 1590s) bonded labour, was an accident of Russian history, namely the shortage of cash.… The roots of this class were not in the land, as was the case with nobilities the world over, but in the royal service. In some respects, the Russian service class was a very modern institution, a kind of proto-meritocracy. Its members enjoyed superior status but by virtue of their usefulness to their employer. Whatever their advantages vis-à-vis the rest of the population, with regard to the crown their position was utterly precarious.

  Pipes describes Russia as a ‘patrimonial society’. He means that Russia has been governed the way a traditional father governs his family, not only as the supreme autocrat but as owner of the family assets. The concept of private property has never been fully developed in Russia. All land belonged to the tsar, although he might farm some of it out in return for taxes and tribute. There was no concept of individual rights or the rule of law; the tsar was the only authority. Everyone else was not a ‘citizen’ but a ‘servitor’. Peter, and Russian society, took it as axiomatic that he could do with his property as he wished, and if that meant moving the country’s centre of gravity from quasi-oriental Moscow to westward-looking St Petersburg so be it.

  Although they happened at about the same time the Russian colonisation of the Baltic littoral was very different to the English colonisation of the Atlantic littoral. Peter’s designs on the Neva delta can be contrasted with events less than half a century earlier when, in 1670, three ships from Barbados landed at the mouth of the Ashley river to found a city named after their king. Charles Towne, or Charleston as it became, was founded by a group of eight absentee landowners, the lord proprietors. Their project had none of the urgency or scale of Peter the Great’s. They had been granted a charter to found a colony in Carolina, after extensive lobbying, and it had then taken seven years before the first colonists set out. The lord proprietors had none of the tsar’s powers of coercion. To encourage settlers from England they offered massive land grants (150 acres per head), allowed a considerable degree of self-government and promised religious freedom. Even with this encouragement the city had a population of just 396 after two years, around 1,000 after ten years and
thirty years later the city had reached a population of only 6,600, of whom 2,800 were black slaves. Contrast this with St Petersburg, made the nation’s capital in 1712 just nine years after the first fortress was started, and which thirty years later had a population of 150,000.

  Charleston and St Petersburg also illustrate the way history is written to reflect contemporary values. Colonisation is something Europeans do to others, and even though in colonising Livonia (the region now dominated by greater St Petersburg) Peter was being as imperialist as the British in America, different words are used. Virginia was ‘colonised’ or ‘settled’; Livonia was ‘conquered’. Charleston was attacked and partly destroyed in ‘raids’ led by native ‘chiefs’; when the same thing happened to St Petersburg history speaks of a ‘campaign’ by a Swedish ‘colonel’.

  Peter the Great is seen as a warrior and statesman in the tradition of the great European monarchs. He has been praised by many western historians, and condemned by many Russian conservatives, as the champion of progress, liberalism and western civilisation. Fundamentally, however, he was a warlord. His reign can be summed up in two numbers: when Peter reached the throne there were around 16 million Russians; after thirty-six years of almost constant conflict and mounting megalomania there were just 13 million. He was a tsar in the mainstream of the Russian autocratic tradition. In the way he reached the throne, in his casual massacring of his opponents and above all in his imperialism, Peter was part of a long line running from the Muscovite princes who preceded Ivan the Terrible to Stalin and perhaps beyond.

  When Peter the Great died in 1725 the transfer of power, usually so smooth in America, was particularly fraught. Peter and his son Alexis could have provided an even better study for psychoanalysts than Ivan the Terrible. Peter wanted a red-blooded warrior for a son; he got Alexis, who was anything but. Bullied, belittled and beleaguered by his father, Alexis eventually fled Russia to seek asylum at the Habsburg court in Vienna. Peter was affronted and had his son kidnapped, smuggled back to Russia and thrown into the dungeons of his new fortress in St Petersburg; he was then tried for treason and sentenced to death. Before the sentence could be carried out Alexis died of the injuries he had received in captivity. Peter’s other son then died of natural causes, so when the tsar himself died there was no obvious successor. How power vacuums were filled in such circumstances depended not just on the ‘legitimacy’ of hereditary claims but on the balance of political and military power among the candidates. This was not a particularly Russian phenomenon: in 1714 Britain reached out to an obscure but ‘suitable’ German prince who happened to be the great-grandson of James I, and made him George I. For Russia’s powerbrokers there was no immediate need to look very far. Despite Russia never having had a female monarch the throne was passed to Peter’s wife, Catherine I. When she died two years later the throne passed to Peter’s fourteen-year-old grandson, who ruled for just three years before succumbing to smallpox.