Foreseeing prolonged conflict, Peter and his commanders had decided in December 1706 on ‘scorched earth’ tactics to sap the Swedes’ strength and mobility while exploring a negotiated settlement. Peter fell ill several times amidst the constant tension. ‘Severe fever’ laid him low in Warsaw in July 1707, ‘five feet from death’ in delirium; another fever and mercurial medications confined him to bed in St Petersburg in May 1708, dissuading him from rushing to Azov against Bulavin. At Azov in April and May 1709, just before the climactic confrontation at Poltava, the tsar again took ‘strong medicines’ but after his chills and fever broke in August, still felt depressed and weak. A month later he boasted to Catherine of drinking bouts with his Polish allies.
The murderously frigid winter of 1708–9, together with epidemic disease, inadequate clothing, and short rations, conspired to divert the Swedes from Moscow, where earthworks had been thrown up around the Kremlin, and to await supplies and link up with Mazepa in Ukraine. This detour allowed Peter’s flying column to intercept the Swedish relief force at Lesnaia on 28 September 1708: day-long fighting ended in shattering defeat for the Swedes. By the end of the year several thousand Swedes had died from exposure.
The general engagement that Peter had so long postponed and Charles XII had so pursued came at Poltava on 27 June 1709. By then the Swedish army was no match, outnumbered almost two to one and outgunned seventy cannon to four. The predicament was symbolized by the king himself being shot in the foot ten days before (on his twenty-seventh birthday) so that he had to be carried about the field on a litter. He barely escaped capture after his army’s demise. Although Sheremetev was the commander-in-chief, Peter took the field, his hat and saddle shot through. Within two hours the Swedish forces crumbled before the hail of Russian cannonfire, musketry, and Menshikov’s slashing cavalry. The ensuing rout left some 9,000 Swedish dead on the field; 16,000 more surrendered three days later at nearby Perevolochna. Poltava placed a ‘firm stone’ in the foundation of St Petersburg, as the tsar expostulated in relief. Paintings and other artistic media quickly produced portrayals of Peter at Poltava, a favourite theme thenceforth.
The triumph was consolidated within eighteen months. The northern alliance was reconstituted with the addition of Prussia and the dethronement of Leszczyńnski in Poland. Sweden was offered peace on generous terms, but when the absent Charles XII refused to negotiate, Russian forces conquered the Baltic region in 1710 from Vyborg in the north to Reval and Riga in the west and south (despite a widespread plague epidemic that devastated Sweden but largely spared Russian territory). Incorporation of these non-Slavic territories led directly to the proclamation of Russia as a European-type empire. Indeed, Peter began using the designation imperator vserossiiskii (‘emperor of all the Russias’) as early as 31 May 1712 in a charter to his consul in Genoa while Sheremetev styled him ‘Your Imperial Highness’ in a petition of 1 August 1711 as did the merchants of Riga in a petition of 4 September 1712. Notifying Menshikov of his election as honorary fellow of the Royal Society in October 1714, Isaac Newton termed Peter ‘your Emperor, His Caesarian Majesty’.
Peter’s broadening political horizons also led him to arrange marriages of several relatives to foreign rulers. His niece Anna Ivanovna married the duke of Courland in late 1710 and his niece Ekaterina Ivanovna the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in April 1716 in the presence of Peter, Catherine, and Augustus II. Neither marriage proved successful in personal terms; Anna was widowed almost immediately and Ekaterina returned to Russia with her young daughter in 1722. Tsarevich Alexis’s marriage to Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel in October 1711 proved equally painful for the spouses although it did produce a granddaughter and grandson, the future Peter II. All these matches accented Russia’s rising international stature and resolute entry into the European dynastic marriage market.
Cutural Revolution and Europeanizing Reforms
After 1711 Peter could devote more attention and longer consideration to a broader array of affairs. He pursued a number of initiatives that amounted to a ‘Cultural Revolution’ and accelerated the process of Europeanization by introducing the fruits of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and the Scientific Revolution. Renaissance elements may be discerned in the new emphases on education, book-learning, and publishing. The number of presses, for instance, increased from three to ten by 1725, all under state control. Peter endorsed a simplified civil orthography in 1707, but presses and fonts remained so scarce that one-third of the secular titles before 1725 appeared in the old script. The annual number of titles rose from six or seven in the last decades of the seventeenth century to as many as forty-five per year in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The content of printed material also changed, with government pronouncements, laws, and military writings constituting almost two-thirds of all publications in the period 1700–25. Many were translations from foreign publications; slightly less than one-quarter treated religion, Muscovy’s traditional staple. Still, devotional writings were reprinted so frequently they comprised about 40 per cent of all books published in the Petrine era.
Russia’s first periodical, Vedomosti, began appearing in late 1702 and offered an official selection of ‘news’, celebrating governmental authority and military victories more than general information or commercial reports. The number of issues per year varied wildly, dropping from fourteen annually in 1708–12 to seven in 1713–17 and only one in 1718. Print runs also oscillated oddly—from a high of 875 in 1709 (the year of Poltava) to only 205 in 1712. Readership was obviously small, perhaps declining, and minuscule compared to England or Holland.
Peter personally collected a library of 1,663 titles in manuscript and printed books in Russian and foreign languages. He also purchased the private collections of Dr Robert Erskine and others, which laid the basis for the Library of the Academy of Sciences and, by 1725, comprised some 11,000 volumes. Assisted by Erskine, Jacob Bruce, and other scholars, Peter founded the first public museum, the Kunst-Kamera in St Petersburg, and collected European paintings, chiefly of the Dutch and Flemish schools. Indeed, his picture gallery at Mon Plaisir in Peterhof was the first of its kind in Russia, with about 200 paintings by 1725. To encourage visitation, the Kunst-Kamera charged no entry fee and had a budget of 400 roubles for free refreshments (coffee, wine, vodka, and the like). Renaissance notions likewise stimulated Petrine interest in secular history and the idea of Russia ‘entering a new era’. Peter himself led the way, with a concern to document military affairs and travels, an interest that eventually supported the compilation of an official history of the Swedish War, not complete before his death and published only in 1770–2.
In another exhibition of Renaissance spirit Peter encouraged the liberation of élite women, his own female relatives in the first instance, and their attendance at public receptions called ‘assemblies’. He authorized the first secular public theatre on Red Square in 1701. Opened in 1702 with elaborate sets and stage machinery, this ‘comedy chamber’ presented plays in German staged by a German company from Danzig. An abject failure crippled by a lack of Russian plays, a suitable literary language, and an audience, the theatre disbanded in 1706. Its sets, costumes, and scripts were handed over to Peter’s sister Natalia, who established a court theatre at Preobrazhenskoe in 1707 that was soon transferred to St Petersburg and lasted until her death in 1716. It pioneered the presentation of European plays of chivalry and romance. In Kiev meanwhile Feofan Prokopovich, Ukrainian born and partly educated in Rome, composed the tragicomedy Vladimir while teaching at the Mohyla Academy. A historical drama focusing on Russia’s conversion to Christianity and with many topical politico-cultural overtones, Vladimir was dedicated to Mazepa, who attended the first performance. This dedication had to be dropped after Mazepa’s defection in 1708. Other plays were staged at Dr Bidloo’s surgical school in Moscow including two by Fedor Zhurovskii, Slava Rossiiskaia (Russia’s Glory) and Slava pechal′naia (Grieving Glory), which respectively commemorated Catherine I’s
coronation in 1724 and Peter’s death in 1725.
The Reformation informed Petrine efforts to transform the Orthodox Church. In 1694 Peter discontinued the Palm Sunday practice of the tsar on foot leading the patriarch on horseback across Moscow’s Red Square. In 1698 he criticized monks and monasticism, in 1700 reproved Patriarch Adrian for the Church’s failure to educate the young, and in 1701 re-established the Monastery Bureau to manage church lands. Most striking was his radical decision to replace the Patriarchate with a council of hierarchs, the Holy Synod. He personally favoured Bible-reading; his library contained several copies of the New Testament but only one of the Old. Although Peter believed in justification by faith alone, he scorned superstition and discouraged the veneration of icons.
Peter’s penchant for travel celebrated the Age of Discovery as did his absorption in naval and maritime affairs. The Persian Campaign of 1722–3 exemplified an urge for Oriental expansion, also revealed in an abortive secret mission to Madagascar in 1723–4. Themes of exploration and expansion stayed with Peter until the end of his life, when he commissioned the first Bering Expedition to investigate north-east Asia and North America for possible colonization.
The Scientific Revolution had enthralled Peter even before his first journey abroad, and his early acquaintance with foreign and native scholars reinforced ventures in the sciences, arts, and technology. Peter corresponded for more than twenty years with G. W. von Leibniz, whom he put on the payroll in 1711 and ultimately in 1724, founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St Petersburg as the centre of state-organized research in the new Russian Empire. This multi-purpose institution combined research, teaching, and museum functions; it utilized a broad definition of ‘sciences’ encompassing secular knowledge that included arts and crafts, history and literature.
St Petersburg as the New Capital and Renewed Dynastic Disarray
As befitted a new European sovereign, Peter spent much time outside Muscovy’s old borders: a total of almost nineteen months in the years 1711–13 that spanned the disastrous Pruth campaign, two extended visits to Carlsbad for water cures and to witness Alexis’s wedding, and meetings with Leibniz at Torgau, Teplitz, and Carlsbad in 1711. The tsar’s ‘Paradise’ at St Petersburg became the new capital in about 1713 with the transfer of the court and higher government.
In microcosm the city advertised many Petrine ideals. It was European in concept, name, and style—the style synonymous with the newly popular term arkhitektura. Its name and layout, the fortress and cathedral of Peter and Paul and the city crest all pointed to parallels with imperial Rome. Planned for commercial and economic efficiency (Peter even contemplated centring the city on the island of Kotlin in the Gulf of Finland!), security from fire (but not flood), and impressive splendour, the ‘Residenz-Stadt’ grew rapidly thanks to forced labour and forced resettlement in combination with vigorous state patronage and flourishing foreign trade carried in foreign vessels. With the arrival of the court and many state agencies, the state’s presence in the guise of the huge Admiralty establishment, armoury facilities at nearby Sestroretsk, and the army and guards regiments fuelled a boom in local construction. Following the formation of the collegiate system of central administration after 1715, the city’s chief architect, Domenico Trezzini, began in 1722 a huge unitary corpus for the eleven administrative colleges on Vasilevskii Island, a grandiose project only completed ten years later. By 1725 St Petersburg had a population of about 50,000 (with large seasonal fluctuations, as peasant labourers congregated during the spring-to-autumn shipping season), and featured several impressive palaces (Menshikov’s in particular) with even more opulent estates flanking the approaches. The Summer Garden boasted abundant statuary and Peter’s small Summer Palace, but his attempt to organize a zoo complete with elephant and polar bears faltered when the animals died.
Moscow remained the old capital and largest city, but after 1710 Peter visited it sparingly. Much of 1713–14 he passed on board ship co-ordinating the land and sea conquest of Finland, highlighted by the naval victory of Hangö—a nautical Poltava—on 27 July 1714. The European sojourns and campaigns culminated in a second triumphal tour, this time accompanied by Catherine except to France, for twenty months in 1716–17. Off Copenhagen in October 1716 Peter was named honorary admiral of the combined Danish, Dutch, English, and Russian fleets—pleasing recognition of Russia’s new maritime might. Yet the ageing tsar was often mentally distraught, as hinted by twelve nocturnal dreams he recorded in 1714–16. Seriously ill in Holland for a month in early 1717, he later took the waters at Pyrmont and Spa. Both consorts grieved for the baby boy lost four hours after birth at Wesel in Holland on 2 January 1717.
Dynastic distress ensued even earlier with the death of Alexis’s wife in October 1715 shortly after having borne a son (and first grandson), Peter Alekseevich, followed soon by Catherine’s delivery of a son, Peter Petrovich. Peter and Catherine had been privately married in Moscow in March 1711, a ceremony repeated publicly in St Petersburg on 19 February 1712, the tsar joking that ‘it was a fruitful wedding, for they had already had five children’. This tardy marriage to a foreign commoner struck the English envoy as ‘one of the surprising events of this wonderfull age’. Catherine quickly became the focus of a European-type court largely Germanic in cultural terms. At Moscow in February 1722 and St Petersburg the next year Catherine and her ladies donned Amazon costumes to celebrate Shrovetide.
Peter’s relationship with Alexis, never close, became strained as his deteriorating health raised the succession issue. Alexis vowed to renounce the throne and enter a monastery, but did neither and suddenly fled abroad clandestinely—an acute embarrassment to his father. Enticed to return by the wily diplomat Peter Tolstoy, Alexis underwent intensive secret investigation that came to involve dozens of people, including Alexander Kikin (a former confidant of the tsar in disrepute for financial malfeasance), his mother, and Archpriest Iakov Ignatev (the tsarevich’s father-confessor). Kikin was accused of inspiring Alexis’s flight abroad and the others of fostering hatred for his father. All were tortured; Kikin, the archpriest, and several others—including Elena’s acknowledged lover—were all executed. After prolonged interrogation and torture Alexis himself was sentenced to death for treason in June 1718, perishing in prison in disputed circumstances. Although the investigation disclosed close contacts between the tsarevich and many prominent noblemen, the official version blamed Alexis’s treasonous conspiracy on ‘the long beards’, that is, supposedly reactionary churchmen. In fact, many potential sympathizers did not wish to return to old Muscovy but disliked Peter’s capricious despotism on behalf of breakneck change.
Alexis’s demise complicated the succession: Peter Petrovich—the tsar’s son by Catherine, not yet four but already three feet four inches tall—died on 25 April 1719, dealing another dynastic blow. ‘The Czar took the loss of his only son so much at heart, that he run his head against the wall of the chamber and was seized with two convulsion fits’, remarked the English envoy, who speculated that Catherine had passed childbearing age. She had one more daughter, Natalia, born in 1718 who died a month after her father in March 1725, and possibly two more still births. The Alexis affair, reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible’s murder of his son, may have exacerbated Peter’s tendency towards paranoia and alienation from former intimates such as Menshikov and, ultimately, Catherine herself. It also coincided with the formation of a hypercentralized and militarized police regime bent on resolute action dictated by an ageing autocrat disinclined to accept any counsel.
Outwardly the Petrine government went from triumph to triumph with the Peace of Nystadt ending the Great Northern War in 1721 and Peter proclaimed emperor of all the Russias and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’. Prussia and Holland recognized the new title the very next year, Sweden and Denmark in 1723 and 1724, but Austria delayed until the early 1740s and Poland only conceded in 1764. Peter captained the triumphal Persian campaign in 1722 that added new territories alon
g the Caspian Sea in emulation of Alexander the Great. A new succession law, announced in 1722, gave the reigning ruler the right to name whomever he chose to succeed him, and Catherine I was proclaimed empress and crowned in Moscow in May 1724.
Peter’s death on 28 January 1725 happened so suddenly that he could not designate an heir. His health had long been in doubt despite visits to the mineral springs at Olonets. He travelled there in January 1719, for example, contracting ‘a violent cold on the road’. He was also tormented by ‘a weakness in his left arm, which was occasioned at first by his being let blood by an unskilful surgeon, who, missing the vein, made an incision in the nerve that lies by it’. Such pains led Peter to take the waters twice in 1724 in February and June. To Catherine he praised the curative qualities of the waters but complained of urinary difficulty and diminished appetite. In St Petersburg later that summer he was bedridden twice for almost two weeks between 16 August and 12 September 1724. He was one of those driven persons who cannot slow down, no matter what the doctors advise.
The condition that caused his death sparked controversy then and now, primarily whether it was venereal-related or not. Recent Russian scholars are split between gonorrhoea or uraemia. Considering the length and incredible tempo of his life, the cause of death may be less significant than the superhuman achievements of the ‘body’ and ‘soul’ involved. After the traditional forty days of mourning Peter’s body was interred in a magnificent casket in a small temporary wooden church amid the still uncompleted Peter and Paul Cathedral—the first Russian ruler to be buried outside Moscow. Feofan Prokopovich pronounced a brief grandiloquent funeral oration that was widely distributed and translated and that compared the late tsar to biblical prophets and kings—Samson, Japhet, Moses, David, Solomon, and Constantine.
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