View of Destroyed Tower of Nicholas, Arsenal, etc., in the Kremlin, A.D. 1812 From a Contemporary DrawingHence when Sophia would prepare a triumphal return for her lover, and grant honours to the defeated soldiers, Peter refused his imperial consent. When Gallitzin thought it prudent to visit Preobrajenshote, after Sophia had acted on her own account, Peter refused to see him. The two camps began to glower at each other; and men began to pass from the Kreml to the village.During the night of August 7th, a few weeks after Gallitzin’s return, Peter was roused from sleep with the news that his half-sister was gathering troops at the Kreml which were to come and destroy him. It transpired afterwards that there was a troop assembled at the Kreml that night. Sophia declared that the soldiers were to accompany her on a pilgrimage on the morrow, but it seems to be proved that Sophia and her friends discussed the idea of dispatching Peter, and it was, apparently, some of the soldiers themselves who brought the news. Peter was not a youth of courage. He jumped out of bed, got a horse from the stables, and rode hard, in his shirt, for the forest. A few officers and soldiers took his clothes and joined him, and they galloped to the famous monastery at Troitsa. They arrived at six in the morning, and Peter, shuddering with fright, the tears streaming down his blanched cheeks, implored the archimandrite (abbot) to protect him.During the day Natalia joined her son, bringing the young wife, Eudoxia, whom she had driven him to wed, but whom he had promptly discarded for coarser pleasures. A few regiments of soldiers came, and the monastery-fortress was put into shape for a fight. The majority of the troops had not yet made up their minds which of the royal autocrats they would support, and a period of uncertainty and parleying followed. With Peter there were able nobles like Boris Gallitzin, cousin of Vassili, and they urged him to be bold. He ordered detachments of the various regiments at Moscow to appear before him at Troitsa. Sophia’s servants intercepted the orders, and she bade the troops, under penalty of death, to keep to their barracks. But the balance of confidence was on the side of Peter, and as time went on furtive streams of soldiers and nobles passed to Troitsa. A formidable army grew up there.On the other hand, Moscow was very far from united in favour of Sophia. Her troops melted away. The dissenters, whom she had heavily punished, gathered boldly about the Kreml and noisily advised her to go into a convent. Vassili Gallitzin wanted to go to Poland, to borrow an army. Whether or no Sophia distrusted her nervous associate, she refused to consent, and Vassili deserted her and retired to his country seat. She sent the Patriarch to Troitsa, and presently learned that the prelate had decided to remain there, a supporter of her detested half-brother. Then she boldly set out for a personal discussion with Peter—she had twice as much courage as he and, at that time, three times as much energy—but troops barred her way and sent her back to Moscow. She threw herself upon the gratitude of the streltsui, and they loudly swore that they would die for her. But in a few days they came to demand that her second favourite, Shakloviti, be surrendered, as a scapegoat, to Troitsa, and, after a frantic and tearful resistance, she was compelled to yield.She had, for the moment, lost the struggle. Shakloviti was knouted until he confessed that there was a plot against Peter, and he was then beheaded. Vassili Gallitzin, the man of many accomplishments and few capabilities, crawled to the feet of Peter’s rude throne and begged forgiveness. He was banished to the frozen north. Other nobles were executed or exiled, and Sophia was at her brother’s mercy. She would foresee the hated sentence. Peter permitted her to choose her own convent, and she chose the convent of the Virgin, near Moscow. She may have smiled at his leniency.But Peter had wanted merely security for his wild life, not the heavy duties and responsibilities of reigning. His simple half-brother Ivan he did not notice, and it is much to his credit—one of the very few things to the credit of his personal character—that as long as the weak-witted man lived Peter left him untouched. It was not the Moscovite way. He let Boris Gallitzin and his mother’s relatives squabble for power, as was the custom, and he returned to the almost useless, and partly disgraceful, life he led on the outskirts of Moscow.Peter was now a well-formed and handsome young giant, more than six feet high, with intelligence enough to know his duty and strength enough to achieve it. To say, as is said, that he was slowly preparing himself for a great task is mendacious flattery. He was enjoying himself, and he cared for naught else. What there is in his later life to entitle this flower of the Romanoff shoot to be called “great” we will consider in the next chapter, but well into his manhood he was merely vicious, impulsive, and selfish. He disliked the pomp and conventions of the court, and avoided them, mainly because he had the taste of a boor, and was happier in squalid rooms where he could spit, and slop brandy, and riot as he willed. His days, especially in the summer, were spent in hard work, because he loved it. He worked at ship-building—there was a large lake at hand—with just the same zest and motive that a boy does, not from any far-sighted vision of a need to cleave a path for Russia to the sea. He drilled and drilled, and gradually formed regiments which would one day be famous, because he had a passion for soldiering and, as I said, a vague imperial idea of one day commanding armies and gaining great victories. And when the work was over, or when the fierce grip of winter arrested all work, he sat down to orgies which few could endure long.Between the village where he lived and Moscow lay the foreign settlement to which I have occasionally referred, and here Peter got some education. The neat brick villas did not impress his imagination, for he had not even an elementary taste, but he had a mechanical, inquiring mind, and the instruments these foreigners brought into the heart of Russia piqued and stimulated him. Somehow these people beyond the plains could do everything better than the Russians. They could make clocks, watches, astronomical instruments, elaborate tools, superb weapons, magnificent fire-arms. He heard that they could make ships compared with which his boats on the lake were like children’s toys. He must get these secrets for Russia. One secret he learned—the making of fireworks—and the whole country reeked and stank with his constant displays.And they could drink, these English and Scots and Germans of the foreign quarter. Caravans of wine and brandy poured into the quarter, and Peter would come along, black with the smoke of his fireworks or streaming with perspiration from drill or shipbuilding, and sit down to a glorious carouse. His great friend was a Swiss named Lefort, whose capacity for drink was phenomenal. Peter built a small palace, with a huge ballroom, for Lefort, and made it the headquarters of their debauches. It was a general rule that everybody was drunk every night. If a woman refused a pot of brandy Peter would fetch her a clap on the side of the head to which drunkenness was preferable. Decent women kept far away from the two colonies. Peter sober had little self-restraint, but Peter drunk . . .The shipping idea grew upon him until, in 1693—he had wasted four years since the retirement of Sophia—he decided to visit Archangel. It is curious to read of such a man asking, like a boy, his mother’s permission, and promising not to go upon the water. He, of course, took no notice of his promise when he got there and saw the ocean. A ship he had ordered from Amsterdam was out in the roads and he impulsively started off in a totally unsuitable boat to visit it. He was nearly drowned. When he trod the deck, dressed as a Dutch captain, and saw the great sails belly in the wind above him, he went into transports. He sat for hours drinking hard with the Dutch sailors and listening to stories of their voyages round the world. There was no country like Holland, and he there and then adopted for Russia the Dutch red, white and blue flag, reversing the order of the colours. In January he was summoned back to Moscow with the news that his mother was dying. She died so slowly, and kept him so long from the sea, that he cursed volubly. But he shed copious tears, boy as he was, when she died; and he fled like the wind back to Archangel.That there was any large profit in this minute study of ships and sailors may be confidently denied. Monarchs and statesmen have built fleets without knowing the difference between port and starboard. Peter was enjoying himself. But in his wild mind there was inevitably growing a recognition of his position and opportunities. He was now more than twenty years old, and intelligent. It was quite time that he recollected that the destiny of Russia was entrusted to him. Of its internal condition he does not seem to have had the glimmer of an idea, but it suited his passion to believe that Russia needed a fleet, and must first have a sea to put the fleet on. The powerful Swedes dominated the Baltic, so he turned south and decided to take Azoff, on the Black Sea, from the Tatars. He may have known that the country was disgusted and scandalised at his idleness, and that Sophia watched eagerly from her convent.His expedition against Azoff was crudely conceived and a total failure. He saw at least that he and his amateur foreign friends were inadequate, and on his return to Moscow, he sent abroad for skilled men: sailors and shipwrights from Holland and England, soldiers and engineers from Austria and Prussia. Some came, and many of these, when they saw the crowds and the country, returned. All drank copiously. But Peter’s mighty energy was roused, and in a remarkably short time he had a sea-going fleet built on the Don, ready to co-operate with his land-attack upon Azoff. He took it, and returned in triumph to Moscow.The one vague imperial idea in his wild and much-abused brain fed on his success and grew larger. Russia must have a mighty fleet, like Holland and England, and must learn this western art of doing things. He sent fifty officers abroad for education. But he must see these wonderful lands himself—he must know everything himself—and he began the preparations for the famous melodramatic journey which shocked Russia, and scandalised Europe, and undoubtedly brought great profit to him and his country. Boyish in all things, he would go incognito. Russian historians have invented a score of interpretations of every weird action of the hero. He hated pomp and ceremony, it is said; but the truth is that he sulked heavily when he was not recognised. The simple fact is that he had a boyish, impulsive, muddled mind, its great strength and originality marred by a wicked education and by debauch. He would pretend that it was a deputation of Russian envoys, and he made a sort of prince of his friend Lefort, giving him a suite of forty-four gentlemen and servants. He would hide his own figure—he was six feet eight inches in height, and wore disguises that would attract attention at a hundred yards—in the crowd under the modest title of Peter Mikhailoff, a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment.The journey was to start in February, after the carnival revels, about which a word may be said later. But a plot against his life was discovered at the last moment, and he delayed to punish it. A former servant of Sophia, named Tsikler, and some of the streltsui were implicated in it. The implication of the Miloslavskis brought on one of those blind rages in which he behaved as one demented. He had the body of Ivan Miloslavski, which had rotted in the grave for twelve years, dug up and brought on a sledge, drawn by twelve hogs, to Preobrajenshote. There it was placed, in an open coffin, under the scaffold on which Tsikler and his chief accomplice were hacked to pieces, so that the blood of the traitors might splash upon what was left of the mouldering remains of Sophia’s relative.Leaving a large army to overawe Moscow, he set out in March, 1697. The journey has been described so often that only a few details concerning his behaviour need be noted here. From Sweden, where his incognito was respected with a cynical correctness which infuriated him, he passed to Germany, where the Elector of Brandenburg was eager to conciliate him. His conduct was rather worse than that of an undergraduate on a holiday, as he did not even know the elements of polite behaviour. The Elector sent his Master of Ceremonies, a grave and learned gentleman, to greet Peter at his lodging, since he refused to be recognised on the ship by the prince sent to receive him. Peter snatched Johann von Besser’s powdered wig and flung it away. “Who is this?” he demanded sullenly; and, when the old gentleman’s functions were explained to him, he broke out: “Let him bring me a wench, then.” Later, when a noble came to announce that the Elector could not call upon him, Peter, drinking heavily and slobbering over his friend Lefort, started angrily to his feet, grasped the noble by the throat, and almost suffocated him. In the street he met a lady of the court and startled her with a gruff “Halt”; then he curiously examined the watch at her wrist and let her go. One night, when he supped with the Elector, a servant dropped a plate. Peter sprang up, sword in hand, livid with excitement; and he was not pacified until the servant was flogged. They had, in the city, a wheel on which criminals were broken, but they protested, in answer to Peter’s wish to see it work, that they were without a criminal. “Let them have one of my men,” he said coolly.His adventures at Koenigsberg would precede him, and he made his way loutishly from court to court until he reached Holland. Every one knows the idyllic picture of Peter the Great serving a long apprenticeship to shipbuilding in the village of Saardam. It is another exploded myth of our childhood. Peter remained there only a week, staying at the village inn (where he seduced the maid), smoking large pipes and drinking large pots with the boatmen. That he used an adze is certain, but there was little romance. His tall, slovenly form, very untidily dressed in Dutch fashion, attracted the stones of the little boys, and he moved on. He appeared in more polite quarters in a brown overcoat with horn buttons, coarse darned socks, and dirty shoes.Some one suggested that he would see better shipbuilding at London, and he crossed, and bewildered London. He had a fine brown skin and large handsome eyes and thick hair, but, apart from his habitual untidiness of dress, he had a nervous malady which caused a twitching of the limbs and a remarkable habit of grimacing. He constantly took for it a powder made of the flesh and wings of the magpie. At table his habits were atrocious. In fact, he and his servant Menshikoff discovered a little tavern on Tower Hill where he could smoke his pipe and drink peppered brandy as if he were at home. At Deptford, where he lived in Evelyn’s house while he studied shipping, he made such filth and damage that Evelyn estimated the repairs at 1,750 dollars. Here, as elsewhere, his morals were notorious. Professor Morfill politely observes in his “History of Russia”: “The great monarch was somewhat irregular in these matters, it must be confessed.” The phrase would have sent the great monarch into convulsions of horse-laughter. There is grave reason to believe that such irregularities were not his worst vices.The redeeming feature of his journey was that he learned a vast amount in those few months. Much of his learning was a result of sheer nervous instability and did more harm than good. He studied dentistry—the dentistry of the seventeenth century—and took implements home with him, to the terror of his friends. When his valet one day complained to him that his wife refused to discharge her conjugal duty on the ground of tooth-ache, the Tsar had the woman brought to him, and he extracted a tooth. He gathered also a box of surgical instruments, and often used them. On one occasion he tapped a poor woman of Moscow, who suffered from dropsy, and caused her death. He pried into everything, rushing from place to place and working with prodigious energy; though it is said that he ended every day of his life intoxicated. What came of it all for the development of Russia we shall see in the next chapter.The voyage came to an abrupt end at Vienna in the late summer. There had, he heard, been a new revolt of the streltsui. General Shein had put it down, and severely punished the rebels, but Peter decided to return to Moscow. On the day after his return the nobles came respectfully to Preobrajenshote to do homage and share a banquet. Peter, half drunk, called for scissors, and soon the beards of his nobles—the beards which an almost sacred tradition imposed in Russia—were falling upon the floor. Was it a drunken man’s joke? Peter did far worse things in liquor. He cut right and left with his sword: he caned an offending servant until he died; he ran his sword through an abbot who offended him; he even one day knocked down and trampled on his intimate friend Lefort. But this was not a jest. The ukase went forth that in future Russians must shave. He was going to westernise Russia.Some Russian historians, seeking to palliate the horror of what is to follow, apply to it in some measure the idea of reform. The streltsui were in the way of the reform of the army. They were undisciplined, obsolete, incompetent. Their last revolt had given him the right to destroy them, and he would. But there was much more than this. He was convinced that Sophia was at the bottom of the revolt, and he would make a terrible inquiry.There seems to be little doubt that Sophia had fomented the spirit of revolt and attempted to direct it in her interest. All the Russian world was scandalised at the Tsar’s conduct, and she had from her convent watched the spread of the discontent. At last, while Peter was in England, some representatives of the streltsui had come to Moscow to complain of their treatment. After the taking of Azoff Peter had brought his favourite regiments to share his triumph and pleasure at Moscow, and had left the streltsui to rebuild the shattered fortifications in the distant south. With something of their old independence they had sent a few men to Moscow to lay their grievances before the Tsar. There they were astounded and further angered to hear that the Tsar had left Russia months before, and no man knew where he was. There could be no redress for grievances when the Tsar turned his back upon his people and wasted his life amongst the detested foreigners. Sophia’s friends and servants pressed the lesson deep. Was it not advisable to think of a new ruler, one who would be considerate to the streltsui?The men probably saw the great strength of the garrison at Moscow, and they returned to Azoff only with a sullen report of their helplessness. The military authorities then ordered part of the streltsui to the Polish frontier, and this drove the men to fury. They set out on the long march to Moscow, in full mutiny, with the intention, apparently, of exterminating Peter’s supporters. But the Tsar had left his best generals, Shein and Patrick Gordon, in command of the troops, and they met the mutineers outside Moscow. After a futile parley the cannon and the cavalry were turned upon the helpless foot-soldiers, hundreds were slain and thousands captured. The revolt was thoroughly suppressed long before Peter reached Vienna.But the young Tsar was in one of his moods of deliberate ruthlessness. The streltsui had deluged his mother’s palace with blood when he was a child; they had commemorated his departure by a plot and had taken advantage of his absence to rebel. These paid servants, these antiquated soldiers, presumed to criticise his plans and fancy themselves as masters of the Russian throne! And behind all their revolts he saw always, barely concealed in the gloom, the figure of his masterful half-sister. He resolved once for all to remove this source of irritation from his Empire.Immediately after his return fourteen torture-chambers were fitted up in the village of Preobrajenshote, and the captured streltsui were soon suffering all the agonies that Byzantine and Moscovite ingenuity could devise and the fiendish temper of the Tsar could augment. Peter himself hovered round while his victims writhed on human grid-irons or had their flesh torn from the bones by the knout. Many of their womenfolk were included in the ghastly torture, which went on night and day for three days. But Peter got no confession of the guilt of his sister, and he decided to act without it. On September 30th a first batch of two hundred of the unhappy rebels, part of them scarred and drawn with torture, were brought up for execution. It is credibly reported that Peter wielded the axe himself and severed five heads. His companions were told to follow his example, and few dared draw back. His infamous servant, Menshikoff, is said to have cut off twenty heads, and the horror of incompetent bungling by amateurs in such matters may be seen in other pages of mediæval history.In brief, the slaughter extended over several months, and thousands of the streltsui were executed. The ancient corporation was entirely broken and the fragments were included in the new army. In the Red Square at Moscow the heads of the rebels remained on the points of pikes until they rotted into grinning skulls. The wives and children were driven from Moscow. It was decreed that none should give them bread, and they disappeared silently into the plains and forests beyond. How many escaped famine or the wolves no man knows. Russia learned that it had an autocrat: Peter the Great.And this meant the end of the career of the masculine Sophia. As she shuddered in her convent two hundred of the rebels were brought up and hanged within sight of her windows. Some of them held in their dead hands copies of a petition to her to see their grievances remedied. Then Peter turned upon her. She must lose her rank, have her hair shorn, and pass the rest of her life in strict seclusion as a nun. With the name of “Sister Susanna” the forceful and unscrupulous woman passes out of sight. Although there was no evidence of her guilt, and it is indeed unlikely that she was involved, Peter’s wife, Eudokia Lapukhin, was condemned to the same fate. She was at least guilty of refusing to share Peter’s tastes, and he had lived little with her. He was free; and from the horrible shambles he turned to the revels of the carnival of 1698 and the more congenial company of the women of his favourite district.CHAPTER VIITHE GREAT PETERTheTsar Peter was near the end of his third decade of life when he broke the power of the streltsui and definitely expelled his sister from the sphere of public life. The fortune and destiny of Russia now lay in his hands, and the heavy discontent of his people, coerced as it was by the appalling punishment of the rebels, invited him to take up the serious duties of kingship. It would be, even if we admitted that the intelligence of a genius was allied with his strange character, too much to expect that such a man would settle down to the study of the constructive problems that confronted him. He was at all times incapable of sustained intellectual concentration, of patiently working out into detailed plans the large ideas which arose in his feverish imagination. Congenital nervous disease might have been corrected by the hard labour in the open air in which he delighted, but the debauch which regularly closed his labour undid its effect. He returned, even after his recent ghastly experience and his tour of Europe, to his disordered ways.It will be enough to illustrate the kind of life which he and his companions led by a short account of one of their pastimes. I have said that the expedition to Holland and England, which had in part the object of seeking grave alliances for the Empire in the west, was preceded by the revels of the carnival. These took the form of such pageantry and rioting as one found in most countries of Europe at the time, but there was an incident of the Moscow procession which introduces us to a startling feature of the life of Peter’s circle. One of the leading figures of the procession was a drunken old man who was dressed in ludicrous imitation of the Patriarch, the head of the Russian Church, riding on an ox, and accompanied by his spiritual court, an equally drunken and dissolute crowd, on the backs of hogs, bears, and goats. These were Peter’s intimate friends, and the entire masquerade was designed by him.The mock Patriarch was Zotoff, the tutor whom Natalia had given her son in his youth and who had suffered Peter to contract at an early date a love of every kind of dissoluteness. Some time before this year Peter, who led the revels in the foreign quarter and outdid all in boisterous practical jokes, had dubbed the old man—he was now nearly seventy, though he took his wine and brandy with the youngest—“Archbishop of Presburg and Patriarch of the banks of the Iaouza [the neighbouring stream], and the whole of the Kaukaui [a slang name of the wild foreign quarter].” The joke grew upon the heavy taste of the Tsar. He declared himself the Patriarch’s “deacon,” and his friends were formed into a group of “cardinals,” who must hold occasional “conclaves.” The ridicule of the Papal Court was doubtless appreciated at Moscow, but even the most thoughtless may have been sobered by the equal burlesque of the head of the Russian Church. Historians again break into a dozen different explanations. Some hold that he was preparing the way for his destruction of the power of the Russian clergy: which is to credit him with a large foresight and deliberateness of action that one finds it impossible to accept. It is more likely that he acted from sheer mockery of religion, adding the Papal details so as partially to disarm or perplex his Russian pietists. We need not suppose that Peter had definite sceptical convictions. There were few definite convictions of any kind in his sodden mind.Earlier Tsars had humbly walked beside the Patriarch, holding the bridle of his mule, in the great procession on Palm Sunday. Peter substituted for this the procession of his mock Patriarch, an aged toper who must have made a pretty Silenus, and his court. The “cardinals” were, as I said, the hardest drinkers and most dissolute adventurers of Peter’s intimate circle. The Frenchman (or Genevan) Lefort and the Scot Patrick Gordon were prominent amongst them; and there were other foreigners. They sprang from the lowest ranks of the people or from the highest nobility. Race, religion, or rank counted for nothing in “The Council of the Mad Ones,” as the society was (amongst other titles) known. From cunning and policy, and out of his constant itching to test his authority, Peter included also men of high taste and character. When men were forced to take quarts of wine and brandy they were apt to speak their thoughts, and Peter always kept a sober ear.This was the detail of the carnival-procession of 1697. It was repeated in 1698, at the conclusion of the red horror of the streltsui. A mitre crowned the white locks of the intoxicated Zotoff, who was otherwise dressed as Bacchus, and a crowd of Bacchantes (probably the lady-friends of the cardinals from the foreign quarter) performed the well-known lascivious dance around him. With that freakishness which often gave something akin to the license of insanity to Peter’s imagination, he ordered his Bacchantes to bear burning tobacco-leaves. In England he had disposed of the tobacco-monopoly, and he was determined—in spite of the frowns of the clergy—to make his subjects smoke. The “Mad Ones” followed on their fantastic steeds.It is necessary, if one would pass a comprehensive verdict upon Peter “the great,” to tell that this was something far more than a carnival-jest. He maintained the institution all his life, and was ever inventing fresh enormities for it. When a man was, willingly or unwillingly, appointed to the “council,” he had to go to the house of the Patriarch, where four stutterers belonging to the large troupe of entertainers in the Tsar’s household introduced him. He received his red cardinalitial robes, and went to the “Consistory,” or meeting of the cardinals. There they sat on casks before the throne of Zotoff, were served with much wine by men dressed as Roman monks, and went in procession to the “Conclave,” which was held in a house prepared as a parody of the Sistine Chapel at Rome during an election of a Pope. They were confined there for three days and nights, and plied constantly with drink by Peter’s servants; and Peter himself listened in secret for any hint of treasonable inclination. The kind of language used, and the things done, may be gathered from the extant letters of Peter to his Patriarch. At their normal meetings various women, of whom we will see something presently, were present.Two incidents will show how Peter sustained to the end of his life the frame of mind which he shows in these things; for it was he who laboriously invented every detail of the riot. In 1714, in the midst of his heavy struggle with Sweden, he decided that he would marry Zotoff, who was then eighty-four years old, to a lady of noble birth sixty years old. The most elaborate and costly preparations were made for months, and a brilliant pageant was put upon the streets of St. Petersburg. All the nobles, sober or dissolute, had to take part, dressed as savages or bishops, making a hideous discord with every instrument of noise that could be invented. A banquet and mighty drinking bout, prolonged for several days, closed the ceremony.Zotoff died a few years later, and it was necessary to proceed to the election of an “Archbishop of St. Petersburg in the diocese of drunkards, gluttons, and madmen.” The Conclave was held in a mock nunnery, presided over by a lady of noble birth and dissolute habits; and the “cardinals” kissed her breasts as they took the ballot-balls (eggs) from her hands. Later still, within a few years of his death, Peter decided that his new Patriarch must marry Zotoff’s widow. After ceremonies which could only partly be described the couple were married, thoroughly intoxicated, and put to bed in a monument in the public square where the populace could enjoy the spectacle in its own indelicate way. In fine, only two years before the Tsar’s death, the Patriarch died, and it was necessary to elect another. Peter’s idea on this occasion, which was carried out, was to enclose the “cardinals” for twenty-four hours, saturating them all the time with wine and brandy, and then let them choose a spiritual head.It is not “history” delicately to suppress these things, or merely hint that Peter sought relief from his colossal labours in somewhat boisterous jokes, and then enumerate the deeds by which he earned the title of “the great.” These, and his ferocious bursts of rage—his brutal attacks on a man or woman who offended, and his truculent torture and murder of graver offenders—are part of his normal character. He had no feeling of decency or morals; indeed his whole life was a mockery of it. He was wholly devoid of any kind of fine or tender sentiment. Occasionally, with a dull air of generosity, he pardoned an offender; and he set up many philanthropic institutions at Moscow and St. Petersburg. Habitually he was coarse and unrestrained in the last degree. He would in public play with the breasts of noble ladies of the court, and many of his private acts and expressions cannot be described. I am not stressing the fact that Peter was immoral, which is not inconsistent with greatness, even of character. He was, in these and a thousand other things, little, petty, shallow, uncivilised.It would, however, be not less unjust to dwell upon these matters to the exclusion of those services to his country which have, it is generally understood, made Peter the one great monarch of the Romanoff dynasty. These must be duly considered. They fall naturally into two categories: the reforms by which he at least broke some of the ice which locked Russia in its rigid mediævalism, and the wars by which he lessened the power of its hereditary enemies and profitably extended its boundaries.The habit of writing history from a dynastic point of view is so deep-rooted that many a reputation lingers in our democratic age after the sentiments on which it was originally based have disappeared. This applies in part to Peter’s fame as a conqueror. He created an army and a navy, he weakened and thrust back the Swedes, and he regained a large part of southern Russia. These were large and needed services, but—without passing minutely from battlefield to battlefield, which is not the purpose of this study—we must see how far these aims were plainly conceived in a mastermind and with what ability they were achieved.Peter had spent ten precious years playing at soldiers and making boats in the vicinity of Moscow. The shallowness of the plea that he was seriously preparing for a great task is seen the moment he sets out on his first military adventure. He decided to attack Sweden. Some historians would have us picture the young genius brooding over a map of Russia and considering in which direction he may cut a channel for its commerce (which hardly existed) to the sea and the broad world beyond. That was not his way. His one imperial idea was, as I said, that he would create an army and a navy, and would use them. It was fairly obvious that they must be used against Sweden, but his journey had, in any case, lodged this idea in his mind. It had begun in Sweden, where the King had treated the young boor with the disdain he felt for his person and his power. It ended in Poland, which had succumbed to Sweden and hated it. From Vienna, at the end of his trip, Peter had gone to Rawa and spent a few days with Augustus II of Poland. Augustus was a man after his own heart: a tall, strong man, a great hunter and hard drinker and loose liver. They talked much about Sweden and, with the fervour of intoxicated youth, decided to smite that formidable power.Sweden was still at the top of the wave which lifted up and cast down one European nation after another, and many powers were jealous of it. Peter and Augustus entered upon a crude diplomatic campaign for the formation of a league against it. The Prussians were too cool and cynical to promise to do more than share the spoils of any victory, but the Danes and Dutch consented. In 1700 Peter secured peace with the Turks in the south and joyously led his grand new army, of 40,000 men, to the siege of Narva. He would, he said, avenge the insults put upon his imperial majesty in Sweden: to which he had gone as a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment. His artillery made little impression upon the town, and his long carouses left him imperfectly informed on the larger situation. In point of fact the King of Sweden had patched up a peace with Denmark and was hurrying to Narva. On November 17th the Tsar heard that King Charles and his seasoned soldiers were a day’s march away from his camp, and—he fled. It is suggested that his officers prevailed upon him not to expose his valuable life to danger. It is claimed that he hurried off to spur on his lagging reinforcements. It is said—by himself—that he did not know of the nearness of the Swedish King. From all which the majority of soldiers and historians conclude that Peter fell into a panic at the first smell of real gunpowder, and fled. His grand new army could do no better, and a Swedish force not one-fourth as large sent the Russians scurrying back to their frontier.Peter the GreatIt seems to have been the laughter of Europe which roused the Tsar from the half-hysterical condition into which he fell, and it may be said that from that time forward he became a more vigorous and skilful, and generally courageous, commander. That he ever became a great soldier is emphatically denied by many competent authorities. But he had, we saw, two qualities of value: a colossal nervous energy, and a great promptness to seek teachers in the more advanced west. He entered upon terrific preparations for a more promising campaign. Brushing aside the clergy, he melted down their bells to make cannon, and he, swinging from place to place with giant strides, spurred his subjects to throw all their energy into the task. That he had a clear and statesmanlike idea of opening “a window upon Europe” may very well be questioned. It is more in accord with his psychology to suppose that his mind did not go much beyond a fierce resolve to beat Sweden. But out of his very need to create an army for this purpose he began to develop his Empire. He needed money, and his merchants must earn more money. He needed metal, and it must be found. He was stung by the opinion of the world that Russia was still barbaric, and he struck fiercely at cherished old traditions. He saw the Church, especially on its monastic side, as a great fat pale fungus sucking the national sap, and he attacked it.Many of his internal reforms belong to this period. In 1698, we saw, he had fallen, scissors in hand, upon the Russian beard, and desecrated it. A ukase ordered all Russians to shave the chin, and even this change cost a mighty struggle. Ancient texts of Scripture plainly sanctioned the beard: sacred ikons showed that the saints, and even Christ, had always worn beards: and, in fine, it was not comfortable to have to face the piercing Russian winds in the winter with a clean-shaven face. Peter fought for years against this symbol of the power of antiquity. Soldiers were put at the doors of churches and instructed topull outthe beards of rebels. Heavy fines were imposed.With this went a reform of the clothing. Long, skirted coats were traditional, and had become sacred; and they were considered warmer in a Russian winter. Peter ordered shorter and more workman-like coats, and patterns were exhibited in the streets to the outraged people. The nobles were, as a rule, not unwilling to dress in western fashion. The poor were allowed a few years in which to wear out their long coats. But it was a long and futile struggle, as pictures of Russian peasants show to-day. Even women were ordered to trail less cloth and, to the boisterous amusement of the crowd, the skirts of the recalcitrant were lifted up in the street by officials and torn or sheared.The position of woman was a more direct religious concern. The customs which made the Russian woman, especially of the middle and better class, a slave of her menfolk and easy victim of the clergy, had been elaborated and codified by the clergy themselves, though in substance the zealous enclosure of women was, we saw, borrowed alike from Tatars and Greeks. A girl lived in terror behind locked doors, growing fat for the marriage-mart. The way out from her quarters was through the father’s room, and, whenever she was suffered to go out, she was heavily veiled. Marriages were arranged by deputies. Even during the ceremony bride and bridegroom were separated by a curtain. The bride went to bed while her new husband was thoroughly intoxicated below—the worse the bargain his relatives had made for him the more carefully he was stupefied with drink—and when he at length reeled into the room, she showed her face for the first time. Usually he did not examine her face closely. If he were sober enough to find that he had a pock-marked, cross-eyed, lean and skinny spouse, he might there and then bully her into a promise to enter a nunnery and leave him free. The marriage was generally consummated before he came to dislike her, but the resource was still open to a resourceful man. The stick was a powerful instrument of persuasion, and it was used generally and brutally. Women drank heavily in their miserable quarters, and remained in the last degree of ignorance and superstition.Peter’s mother, and the example of Sophia, had already raised some defiance of this tradition. Peter himself loathed it and violently assailed it: partly because it was one of the antique practices which made Russia ridiculous and kept it unprogressive, partly because he genuinely wanted the women, morals or no morals, to enjoy life as his gay women-friends of the foreign quarter, and later of his court, did. He kicked over the barriers and encouraged women to come out. He ordered a six weeks’ interval between betrothal and marriage, and wanted girls to see men before they married them. He gave his daughters a French governess, and urged his nobles to do the same, or send their daughters abroad to be educated. In 1704 he startled and outraged Moscow by having a procession of young ladies on the street, scattering flowers and showing their fresh faces to the world.Toward the close of his reign (in 1718) he desperately ordered his people to hold periodical receptions, or “drawing-room” entertainments, in their houses from four in the afternoon until ten. It is understood that his recent visit to Paris gave him the idea. Chess and smoking and dancing and drinking—but no cards or dice—were to be provided, and men and women were to mix socially. But social intercourse enforced by the knout is not apt to be genial. They were, as far as the law was obeyed, melancholy entertainments.To all these reforms the clergy and monks were opposed, and he quickly attacked their power and wealth. In the December of 1699 he flouted the Church-calendar and decreed that henceforward, as in the rest of the civilised world, the year would begin on the First of January. An entire reform of the calendar was beyond even his audacity, and Russia still lingered behind the world. In 1700 he ordered the opening of apothecaries’ shops in Moscow, and, although the bulk of the messes sold in such places at the time were not much more efficacious than charms or the prayers of the monks, it was a healthy assault on tradition and the trade of the priests. In the same year he began his direct assault upon the ecclesiastical authorities.The Patriarch of Moscow died in October, and Peter boldly refused to appoint a successor. It could not be pretended that such an institution was an essential part of the Russian tradition, as the patriarchate of Moscow had been founded only by Boris Godunoff, but the murmurs of the clergy may be imagined. Peter appointed instead a “Superintendent of the Patriarchal Throne,” and through this man he got control of the wealth and affairs of the Church. A separate department took control of the monasteries, and the Tsar made a bold attack upon this economic evil. Monasteries and convents were full of men and women who were religious only in name and dress. Frequently they took no vows, and their sole intention was to enjoy the immunities, the well-fed idleness, and the frequent dissoluteness of the religious institutions. As in other lands, centuries of ignorant piety had showered wealth upon an institution which at first had won sympathy by its austerity and now retained it by hypocrisy. Such a condition, when Peter sought for war-purposes every rouble he could get, stirred his wrath, and he had little piety to restrain him. He “regulated” the incomes of the monasteries and convents in such fashion that they became less attractive to economic parasites and sensual hypocrites. As time went on he increased the restrictions of monastic life, and tried to compel the monks to teach or work.To the dissenters he was, naturally, more lenient than his predecessors, though he took advantage of their nonconformity to secure heavy fines for his treasury; and to foreign heretics he gave complete liberty. Clergy, monks, and dissenters roared their discontent, openly calling him “Antichrist,” but Peter was content with an occasional execution or application of the knout to some monk’s broad shoulders. In 1721 he at length conceived a plan of Church-government, and created the “Ecclesiastical College,” as the supreme clerical authority, which became in time the Holy Synod. His futile efforts to educate Russia out of its morass of superstition and conservatism will be noticed later. For the moment I would recall only how the mighty problems raised by the appalling condition of the country forced themselves upon him in the course of his one clearly conceived design: the destruction of the Swede. When he thus saw an abuse he smote it, angrily and unscientifically. He had not the mood or mind to sit down to the elaboration of a constructive programme. He probably devoted more time, and more cheerfully, to creating the rules and orgies of his “Mad Ones” than to the conception of a system of education.In 1701 he, after a mighty drinking bout with Augustus, made a fresh treaty with Poland and renewed the war with Sweden. The war went on with varying success until, in 1703, Peter took the marshy region which included the mouth of the river Neva. For some reason—it may have been because it was believed that here Rurik and his brothers had entered Russia—the Tsar fell into the wildest rejoicing, and began almost immediately to form a wooden settlement on the bank of the river. This was the humble foundation of St. Petersburg. It seems to have been at a later date that he conceived the idea of making it the new capital of Russia, and his choice has been very severely criticised. For a metropolis it was too near Sweden, the great hostile power of the time, and not easy of defence. For commercial purposes it was inferior to Riga or Libau, which he afterwards took, and could only with great difficulty and sacrifice be converted at all into a centre of commerce. But Peter loathed Moscow, with its musty air of conservatism and its gilded palaces and churches. He must have a new capital, and a centre of the northern region he was gaining. His genius was energy, not insight or foresight. With the labours of—it is said—hundreds of thousands of Swedish prisoners, whose lives were recklessly squandered, he raised the primitive St. Petersburg and embodied in it, as he thought, the new spirit of progress.He was now creating, with dim large vision of a great future, and his wild Dionysiac nature rejoiced in the labour and in the rewarding feast. In the next year, 1704, he took Narva, after a long and bloody siege; and in his morbid nervous way, with his wretched lack of self-control and chivalrous feeling, he struck the brave Swedish commander across the mouth, for resisting so long, when that general was brought before him, and, with pitiful spite, had the body of the man’s wife dug up and thrown into the river. Still he had to fight on for years, with varying fortune. All the time he wrung money out of his country and urged his generally incompetent and despised envoys abroad to get for him money and allies. Poland deserted him and made peace with Sweden; and just at that time trouble arose in the south, among the Cossacks, to divert his attention.Ivan Mazeppa, the hetman of the Cossacks of Little Russia, or the Ukraine, disliked finding taxes for Peter, and entered into negotiations with the Swedes. The Ukraine was, like most of Russia, full of bitter discontent. There seemed some hope of securing independence. A Cossack chief whose daughter was seduced by Mazeppa fled to Peter and warned him; but Peter’s insight failed, as it often did, and he handed the informer to Mazeppa for punishment. Mazeppa continued to correspond with the Swedes and promise co-operation if they invaded Russia. It was the early summer of 1708 before Charles of Sweden entered Russia, and Peter decided to baffle him as Napoleon would be baffled at a later date. The Russians fell back, laying waste the provinces as they retired, and drew the Swedes on to spend a winter in the frozen plains. The details do not concern us. Charles in time found himself threatened with famine. Mazeppa found, when he was at length stung into action, that only two thousand of his Cossacks would follow his adventurous banner; and he packed his gold in two barrels and set out on his hopeless enterprise. And Peter, reaping at last the reward of all his toil, fell upon the Swedes at Poltava and defeated them.It is true that King Charles was wounded and the Swedish army worn and demoralised; and it is true that Peter, eager to celebrate his victory in the usual way, allowed the Swedes to retire more cheaply than a great commander would have done. But he had redeemed his failures, and had dealt a great blow at Sweden. Incidentally he had done much to recover, or gain, his personal repute, so badly shaken since he had fled at Narva. In the battle of Poltava he faced the bullets, and got one through his hat and another—rather a disputable one this—on the breast, which broke its force miraculously on his jewelled cross. He was soon back in Moscow arranging a pageant. He posed, as Hercules in the procession.The next few years were spent in feverish dreams of larger armies and imperial expansion, checked periodically by bad diplomacy and poor economics. His generals took Riga for him, however, and overran the Baltic provinces. Then the wily Swede roused on his flank a more terrible enemy than the Cossack. At the beginning of 1711 he heard that the Turks and Tatars were afield, and he hurried south with 45,000 men: also many thousand women and camp-followers, for, when the Tsar would take his Catherine, other officers would have their wives or some equivalent. The result was that the large and unwieldy body soon found itself in a worse situation than that into which the Russians had drawn Charles. An army of Turks and Tatars, four or five times as numerous as the Russians, closed round them on the river Pruth. There was no escape.From the many accounts of Peter’s behaviour on that occasion one seems bound to conclude that he lost his new courage, and fell into a state of maudlin despair. It seems also to be a myth that his Catherine roused and saved him. His generals fortunately knew the venality of Turkish commanders, and a very heavy bribe—including, apparently, Catherine’s jewels—passed to the Grand Vizier’s camp. The terms, one would think, were hardly worth so large a bribe. Peter was to evacuate Azoff and all the territory in the south that he had taken from the Turk: he was to give up the Baltic provinces to Sweden, except the district at the mouth of the Neva, for which he passionately pleaded; and he was to pay a very large indemnity. He swaggered back to Moscow and endeavoured to brazen it out.Again he settled down to stern exertions, to prepare an army and navy and seek allies. In 1717 he went to Paris in search of aid, carefully leaving Catherine behind, though (as we shall see) he had now married her. His conduct was more sober than on the earlier journey, though it was eccentric enough and gave Paris food for talk for many years. When they had at length found Peter a lodging more or less to his taste, he declared that the young king, Louis XV, must come to see him; and, eager as he was to see the sights of Paris, he kept his hotel three days and nights in the hope of forcing the visit. But we need not again enlarge upon his eccentricities. He came away without hope of alliance, and France played with him to the end of his life. Two years later he proposed to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV, having failed to get the grandson of George I. When that project was at last very firmly declined, he asked at least for a prince of the blood, and he was humoured with negotiations until he died. As we shall see, Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter (legitimised by later marriage) of Peter and a peasant-woman who had been for a time almost common camp-property.In brief, to make an end of wars, Peter took Finland and beat the Swedes on the Baltic, but he brought the terrible English fleet upon his new vessels. A peace was arranged at Nystadt in 1721, and, for a payment of two million crowns, Peter was suffered to keep his gains on the Baltic. There was a stupendous flow of beer and wine and brandy at St. Petersburg. Peter lit the fireworks with his own hand, and, although the Senate now gravely nominated him “Father of his Country” and “Emperor of all the Russias,” he mingled with the crowd, wore a fancy dress, and danced and sang and leaped on to tables like a school-boy.Peter had, therefore, as a result of twenty years of costly warfare, which embittered his subjects, been permitted tobuythe fringe of territory which brought his Empire to the shores of the Baltic: the Cossacks of the Don and the Ukraine were, of course, already subject to Russia, and were merely prevented from breaking away. This, and the creation of an army and navy and lowering of the prestige of Sweden, were his accomplishments on that side. His other ventures in the way of expansion were crude and unsuccessful. Several times he made fruitless efforts to reach India and Persia, but was always defeated. In 1721 the governor of Astrakhan sent word that the Turks would forestall his design upon Persia, and in the following May, having peace with Sweden, he led 100,000 men south from Astrakhan. The expedition was poorly organised, and had to return in some disgrace.In the following year, 1723, he made his last and wildest effort. Two frigates set sail, secretly and hastily, from the port of the capital, and were presently driven back by storms. These two vessels, of poor capacity, had actually been ordered by Peter, in the prime of his age, to take the island of Madagascar, and possibly sail on from there to India! Peter had heard that the Swedes were about to do this, and he had written a letter to “the king of Madagascar,” urging him to see that a Russian was better than a Swedish protectorate. Such was the value of the Tsar’s famous training in ship-building that he insisted that a few useless alterations should be made and the boats should start again, and he fell furiously upon his officers when they pointed out the impossibility.The internal reforms which he effected were of that large, violent, and unsystematic character which one would expect from his nature. I have described some of these, and shown how they were, in great measure, angry and impulsive thrusts at evils which thwarted his plans. Brigandage was still very common, on a large scale, in Russia, and interfered with the industry which was to supply his sinews of war, so Peter attacked it vigorously. Mendicancy had, as everywhere in the Middle Ages, become an opportunity of virtue and a wicked leak of the nation’s energy. The lash of Peter’s knout fell upon the beggars. Men still killed each other instead of killing Swedes and Turks, and Peter forbade them to carry knives. He fostered and protected home-industries, and sent young men to Holland and Italy to learn trades. He spurred the native production of iron and copper, sent expeditions in search of gold, dug miles of canals, and tried by heavy punishments to break Russian traders of their notorious dishonesty. He pressed reform in agriculture, introduced breeding studs, and slightly alleviated the lot of the serfs, who were now sold like cattle or negroes. He regulated municipal life, dividing the country into administrative areas and created a Senate. Nothing was done thoroughly, and all was done for the purpose of extracting (by a crude fiscal system and thoroughly dishonest officials) more money for the army and navy. Yet these were all valuable innovations, and they entitled Peter, as far as they went, to a name only a little less than “great.”His most beneficent design, and his chief failure, was in the matter of education; general illiteracy was still the rule in Europe. Russia was merely a few degrees worse than other countries in that respect. But social visionaries were appearing here and there, pointing out the connection between ignorance and crime and poverty, and some of them found the ear of Peter. Impulsively, as usual, he declared that he would have universal, compulsory education in Russia. A Ukase of February 28th, 1714, ordered the opening of provincial schools, and Peter rushed to other tasks. Five years later he learned from an official report that one such school had been opened, and it had twenty-six pupils. He returned again and again to the subject, and failed as much from his own lack of patient study as from the general hostility of his subjects. His ideas of schooling were extremely crude, and they stultified themselves in practice. All that we can say is that, as in the case of most of the other reforms, he did bring a few rays of light into the mediæval darkness of Russia, and is for that entitled to grateful recognition.Had these reforms been associated with a different type of character they might very well, in spite of their grave incompleteness, dispose us to grant the title of “Peter the Great.” But if that epithet is to measure the stature of the whole man we must strenuously refuse it. The Tsar was energetic, persevering in congenial tasks, even highly endowed in intellect; but his gifts and, accomplishments were marred by deep, habitual vices and weaknesses which make it ludicrous to call him a great man. To this aspect we turn again before we consider the closing tragedies of his reign.I have sufficiently introduced the kind of men who were the intimate friends and coworkers of the Tsar in his youth. Lefort and Gordon both died in 1699, and new favourites arose. Some of these were, like General Sheremetieff, fine and loyal servants of proved worth. Some were, like Romodanovski, nobles of high birth and ability who, in spite of their insufferable haughtiness and despotism, served the Tsar and the State well. But a large number were mere adventurers whom a glib tongue, a large capacity for liquor, or a contemptible obsequiousness commended to the Tsar, and who then plundered the Empire with utter unscrupulousness. Of these Menshikoff was the most prominent, most successful, and most infamous.Legends grew like mushrooms in the dank soil of Peter’s reign, and Menshikoff’s origin is, like that of many of his colleagues, very obscure. It seems certain that, either as a boy or a young man, he sold meat-pies on the streets of Moscow; and Peter lets us know that he was an illegitimate child. The wit with which he plied his trade attracted Lefort, who made a valet of him, and then attracted Peter, who appropriated him. Peter gave him a license which many historians interpret in accordance with the morals of the time. He went everywhere with the Tsar and became rich. In 1706, for no public merit, he became a Prince; in 1711 he bought the Duchy of Courland. He was the most corrupt and venal of Peter’s corrupt ministers, and was, on various occasions, compelled to disgorge a total sum of two and a half million dollars, yet remained fabulously rich, and as haughty and brutal to his serfs and servants as he was rich. Count Golovin, in later years, found a similar type of man, a boot-black, and pushed him at court as a rival of Menshikoff. He did become Public Prosecutor, but he never dislodged Menshikoff.After 1700 this man was Peter’s chief associate and private minister. The young Tsar, as we saw in the last chapter, built a palace for him in the foreign quarter, and made it the chief scene of his rollicking. Menshikoff had two sisters, Marie and Anne, who, with Daria and Barbara Arsenieff and Anisia Tolstoi, formed the nucleus of the loose young women of the colony. Peter had, at his mother’s instance, married Eudoxia Lapukhin, who bore him two children, Alexander (who died young) and Alexis. She was a typical Russian, of a type as different as possible from that of the Menshikoffs and Arsenieffs. When his mother, Natalia, died, he scattered Eudoxia’s relatives and practically deserted her. He is said to have soaked her brother in spirits of wine and set fire to him. Some historians have a light way of marking these stories “incredible,” but very little was incredible in Peter’s world. His pious sister-in-law, Prascovia, widow of the Tsar Feodor, one day poured her bottle of brandy over an offending servant, set fire to it, and beat him with her cane on the sore spot.To finish for the moment with Eudoxia, Peter’s first and, apparently, only legitimate wife. In 1698, as we saw, he condemned her to enter a convent, though there was not the least evidence that she was involved in the conspiracy. She struggled hard, but a coach bore her away to Suzdal, where we will resume her strange adventures later.Lefort had been intimate with a young woman named Anna Mons, the daughter of a German wineseller (or, according to others, jeweller) of the colony. Peter, as in other cases, took over his friend’s relict, and set her up, as chief favourite, in a handsome house. In 1703, however, the Saxon envoy was drowned near Moscow, and tender letters from Anna were found in his pocket, it is said. At all events Anna went to prison for ingratitude, but she found the way out and joined the establishment of the Prussian envoy: who, when he presumed to ask of Peter some favour on the ground of his new position, heard her described in terms which may not be translated.But the list of Peter’s amours, curious and interesting as it is, would unduly swell the dimensions of this volume. It is enough to note here that his mistresses, of an hour or a year, were almost all of the most common fleshy type: buxom, sensual, and coarse. One must say seriously, in connection with Peter’s character, that it was as much a matter of economy as of taste. And this is the simple key to his association with the woman whom he eventually, legally or illegally, married and made his Tsarina.The Empress Catherine shall have a chapter to herself, in which we will tell her early story. From orphan-maid in a Lutheran pastor’s house at Marienburg she had, in 1702, passed to the Russian camp and been successively promoted until she shared the tent of the General, and then entered the harem of Menshikoff. There Peter had discovered her and annexed her. She was then eighteen and, by all accounts, not a beauty. But she had the large hips and full bosom, the round red lips and cheeks, the rolling sensual eyes, which Peter loved. Candid observers speak of the eyes as insipid and staring, and describe the nose as turned up; but she must have had qualities. Probably she was shrewd, pliant, simple-minded, and rather motherly in his hours of rage and illness. She settled with him in his humble cottage at St. Petersburg and washed his shirts. She bore him two sons, and went with him on his campaigns; and in 1712 he went through the form of marriage with her.Catherine bore Peter in all eleven children, but the heir to the throne was Prince Alexis, son of his first wife. Eudoxia had had two sons. Alexander had died, and Alexis was, when his mother was enclosed in a convent in 1699, entrusted to the egregious care of Menshikoff for education. One of Menshikoff’s first tasks was to teach him to drink brandy, and he acquired a truly Russian capacity for drink. As he matured, he was similarly educated in license of conduct. He was, like his father, nervous and unstable, and he became irritable, moody, and coarse. But there was a singular difference between father and son. Alexis was very pious. Piety, in Russia, was apt to lodge in a special part of the brain, and did not exclude drunken and dissolute habits. Alexis loved Moscow and its churches and rich ritual and legends of the saints. And, naturally, the spreading discontent at Peter’s “reforms” and blasphemies found something in the nature of a focus in the court of Alexis. As he grew up, he intensely disliked his father’s policy.Peter roughly summoned him to quit Moscow and prepare, by a military education, for the throne. He quailed and protested that he did not want to be a soldier. Peter sent him to Dresden, and, hearing that his lady-friends were too numerous and notorious, married him to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel: a gentle, religious, pock-marked young lady, who could not compete with the livelier dames. She died in childbirth, and Alexis continued to drink and riot and admire the religious art of Dresden. Peter again sharply scolded him, and gave him the alternative of becoming either a soldier (and Tsar) or a monk, Alexis whined that he would rather be a monk than a rough and bloody soldier; though he shuddered at the ascetic prospect, and, apparently, intended to escape at his father’s death on the ground that he had taken the vows under compulsion. He still dallied.In 1716, Alexis being now twenty-six years old, the Tsar peremptorily bade him enter the monastery at Tver or join the army. He replied that he was coming to Russia, and he begged to be allowed to bring his latest passion, a young lady named Euphrosyne. After a short delay Peter heard that Alexis and Euphrosyne had fled, and in a terrible rage he sent his agents over Europe in search of his son. They traced him and his lady to an ancient castle in Austria. Alexis had fled to Vienna and hysterically begged the Emperor’s protection, and the Emperor had sent him to the obscure castle until he could bring about a reconciliation. When it was known that Russian spies watched the castle, the Emperor ordered the Prince to leave behind all his Russian comrades, who encouraged him in deep drinking, and fly to Naples; and Alexis, taking only one page for whom he passionately pleaded—it was Euphrosyne, in male dress—fled to the south. Naples was then under the Empire.The Russian agents at the court of Vienna demanded the surrender of Alexis. Dreading the anger of the Tsar, the Emperor sent them on to Naples, and directed his Viceroy that theymusthave an interview with the Prince. The doors were thrown open, and the agents persuaded Alexis, by lying representations, that Peter would forgive him. Their last argument was that Euphrosyne would be taken away from him unless he complied, and the girl—a lusty, thick-lipped peasant-girl, like Catherine, it seems—tearfully begged her royal lover to go. The jade had been bribed by Peter’s agents. She was pregnant and was left in Italy, where the price of her treason was quickly spent. Alexis, full of the promise that he had only to ask forgiveness and he could retire to his country-seat and wed his dear Euphrosyne, hurried joyfully to Moscow.He arrived on the last day of January (1718), and Moscow, ignorant of the arts by which he had been entrapped, beheld him with tragic astonishment. The Tsar was in one of his worst moods. Three days later a court of clerical and lay dignitaries was formed, and father and son met before them. Peter showered invectives on his miserable son, and then, as Alexis flung himself to the ground and asked pardon, promised to forgive him if he would renounce his right to the throne and betray the accomplices of his supposed plot. Every man or woman to whom Alexis had disparaged his father was named, and Peter shuddered with rage. There had been no conspiracy, Alexis said: nothing but vague murmurs. But the torture-chambers soon rang with shrieks, and Russian blood streamed again upon the stones of Moscow.In his bloodshot fury Peter conceived, or affected, a suspicion that his first wife, Eudoxia, had been in the plot, and a gang of “questioners” went to the convent at Suzdal. Fifty nuns were flogged and questioned, but the innocence of Eudoxia could not be brought under suspicion. Unhappily a curious page of Eudoxia’s conventual life, which had ended years before, was brought to light. She had had a lover in the convent. A noble named Gleboff had befriended her, and from friendship they passed to intimacy. Her impassioned love-letters of eight years before were put before the Tsar, and he saw red. Gleboff was horribly tortured and—wrapped in furs, as it was cold, to preserve his vitality and torture a little longer—impaled. It is said, but of this we cannot be sure, that Eudoxia was scourged, naked, by two monks. She was, at all events, confined more strictly from that time.Alexis had complied with the conditions, but Peter “the Great” had not done with his son. The vile Euphrosyne was brought to Moscow, and she supplied fresh “evidence.” A new court was convoked, and it shrank from the murder that the Tsar plainly contemplated. Alexis was confronted with his faithless lover: he was knouted: and he held to his simple story that he could not be a soldier, and had done no more than criticise. A third court was set up, and it issued sentence of death; and a few days later the Prince’s body was exposed to the public gaze, with a story that God had spared the father the blood of his son by visiting Alexis with apoplexy. How the Prince really died no man knows, but few, now or then, would believe the story of natural death. . . . It was June 26th; and on June 29th, we read, a new ship was launched, and Peter joined with his usual robustness in the merrymaking.In 1719 Catherine’s son Peter died, and, on the hereditary principle, the crown should pass to little Peter, son of the dead Alexis and Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The Tsar was worried, but took no effective steps to settle the very grave matter of the succession. Catherine, too, was worried, for Peter had a new mistress, a woman of far greater charm than she, and it was well within the sphere of his ingenuity to secure a divorce and wed again. But the romance of Peter Mikhailoff has already, in spite of condensation, run to such length, and the new romance so largely concerns Catherine, that we may open a new chapter and present that lady properly to the reader before describing the last phase.CHAPTER VIIICATHERINE THE LITTLEThewhims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian Empire.At the beginning of the Swedish war, in 1702, General Sheremetieff and the Russian forces besieged Marienburg. The Swedish commander threatened to blow up the fort rather than surrender, and the inhabitants fled to the Russian lines. Amongst them, brandishing his credentials (his Bible), was the Lutheran pastor of the town, with his wife and children and maid. He was suffered to proceed to Russia, but the maid remained in the camp. She was then seventeen years old, a lusty and vigorous peasant-girl such as soldiers covet. The pastor had eked out his slender income by taking lodgers, and it may or may not be true that Catherine, or Martha, as she is believed to have been named at the time, was too intimate with them, and had been married by the pastor for the protection of her morals. She had no more morals than Peter. In the camp she now gained rapid promotion. At first she washed the shirts and shared the bed and board of a non-commissioned officer; then she had the favour of General Sheremetieff; then the florid taste of Menshikoff was attracted to her, and she was drafted to his household, and harem, at Moscow. There Peter saw and appropriated her.There is, as I said, little reason to seek some secret of her success. She was of the robust sensual type that Peter preferred. But she must have been at once shrewd and amiable to have kept his affection as long as she did. His letters to her show, besides the link of common coarseness and frank sensuality, a good deal of affection on both sides. Peter took her to the cottage which he built on the banks of the Neva, where her second boy was born. It was a small two-roomed cottage, of rough-hewn trunks of trees, only about fifty feet in frontage and less in depth. In one of the plain rooms, the walls of which were covered with canvas, Peter planned and received visitors. In the other Catherine and he dined, with an occasional intimate friend, and slept. In 1708 he built a larger and rather finer cottage, more neatly furnished, but, as in earlier days, he preferred to let Menshikoff keep a palace in which, with all splendour of gold plate and powdered lackeys and an army of cooks, he could give his banquets. In the cottage with Catherine he ate his large coarse meals, drank his tea and gin and brandy, and smoked great quantities of tobacco. He carried about with him his wooden spoon and bone-handled knife and fork. Catherine darned his woollen socks and washed his shirts—fine clean linen was almost the one luxury he liked—and babies appeared with great regularity. Often when the tramp of his heavy boots told that he was in a mood of fury, when servants and friends fled, for he would hit out with fist or cane or even sword at such times, Catherine took his blood-congested head in her plump hands and ran her fingers through his thick hair; and he gradually sank to sleep on her breast.She was good to him, he felt, and he must provide for her and the children. But he was now a great monarch, corresponding with all the courts of Europe and visiting many of them. The idea of marrying her must be given long consideration. There were Eudoxia’s sons, and there were Catherine’s sons. It was a puzzling business, and Peter did not attack a puzzling business when it could wait. In 1706 he seemed to make up his mind. He took the whole company of “the girls”—Catherine, and Anisia Tolstoi, and the two Menshikoffs and two Arsenieffs—to Kieff, summoned Menshikoff, and told him that he must marry Daria Arsenieff and become respectable. Menshikoff was not the man to be restricted by vows of marriage, and he obeyed. But Peter did not, as Catherine expected, follow his friend’s example. He was content to make a will in which he assigned her and her four children an imperial legacy of 1,500 dollars!By 1711 he let it be understood that Catherine was his wife, and he publicly went through the form of marriage with her. Whether there was a valid marriage or no is not clear. Catherine is said to have been married at Marienburg, and Peter’s first marriage does not seem to have been annulled by the proper authorities. Russia and Europe would not inquire too closely. Catherine went with him everywhere, except to Paris, and shared his long rides on horseback and his rough camp-life. She never attempted to interfere in affairs of State; but she secretly made large sums of money by getting favours or pardon for offenders. She remained very friendly with Menshikoff, who taught her the security of foreign investments.Peter discovered her trickery, and a cloud came over their relations, but the question of the succession worried him. The new complication was that he was intimate with the charming daughter of Prince Kantemir of Wallachia. The Prince had lost his little principality after Peter’s defeat on the Pruth, and had come to St. Petersburg to seek compensation. He knew the relation of the Tsar to his daughter Maria and expected him to divorce Catherine and wed her. It was a very anxious time for all. Alexis died, or was executed, in 1718; Catherine’s second son died in 1719; and in 1722 Maria Kantemir, who was then at Astrakhan, expected a child. To the relief of Catherine and her party, and the violent anger of Peter, Maria had a miscarriage and nearly died.Catherine now got the title of Empress, and in 1724 she was crowned. Still Peter, although his health gave great concern, evaded the problem of the succession, but he allowed Catherine a superb coronation. When she showed him her magnificent robe, which cost 2,000 dollars, he impatiently pushed it aside, but he let her have a crown made which cost nearly a million dollars. And within little over six months she, by her reckless and ungrateful conduct, forfeited whatever right she may have had and barely escaped with her life.We remember the giddy Anna Mons, Peter’s mistress for a time in the foreign settlement at Moscow. Anna’s brother William was one of Catherine’s chamberlains, and the whole court believed that they were intimate. At length a letter which is said to have proved it fell into Peter’s hands. He seems to have felt bitterly the ignominy of publicly discrowning his new Empress, and for a long time he did nothing, beyond torturing a witness or two to extract proof. They thought that he had decided to overlook it, and both Catherine and Mons were at supper with him one night in November. “What time is it?” he suddenly asked, and Catherine replied that it was nine. He grimly took her watch, put it on three hours, and said that, as it was midnight, everybody would go to bed. Mons was arrested and tortured, and, after a few days, beheaded on the ground of corrupt practices. His sister Matrena was knouted and sent to Siberia. Catherine’s personal fortune was taken out of her hands for administration, and officials were forbidden in future to take any orders from her.
View of Destroyed Tower of Nicholas, Arsenal, etc., in the Kremlin, A.D. 1812 From a Contemporary Drawing
Hence when Sophia would prepare a triumphal return for her lover, and grant honours to the defeated soldiers, Peter refused his imperial consent. When Gallitzin thought it prudent to visit Preobrajenshote, after Sophia had acted on her own account, Peter refused to see him. The two camps began to glower at each other; and men began to pass from the Kreml to the village.
During the night of August 7th, a few weeks after Gallitzin’s return, Peter was roused from sleep with the news that his half-sister was gathering troops at the Kreml which were to come and destroy him. It transpired afterwards that there was a troop assembled at the Kreml that night. Sophia declared that the soldiers were to accompany her on a pilgrimage on the morrow, but it seems to be proved that Sophia and her friends discussed the idea of dispatching Peter, and it was, apparently, some of the soldiers themselves who brought the news. Peter was not a youth of courage. He jumped out of bed, got a horse from the stables, and rode hard, in his shirt, for the forest. A few officers and soldiers took his clothes and joined him, and they galloped to the famous monastery at Troitsa. They arrived at six in the morning, and Peter, shuddering with fright, the tears streaming down his blanched cheeks, implored the archimandrite (abbot) to protect him.
During the day Natalia joined her son, bringing the young wife, Eudoxia, whom she had driven him to wed, but whom he had promptly discarded for coarser pleasures. A few regiments of soldiers came, and the monastery-fortress was put into shape for a fight. The majority of the troops had not yet made up their minds which of the royal autocrats they would support, and a period of uncertainty and parleying followed. With Peter there were able nobles like Boris Gallitzin, cousin of Vassili, and they urged him to be bold. He ordered detachments of the various regiments at Moscow to appear before him at Troitsa. Sophia’s servants intercepted the orders, and she bade the troops, under penalty of death, to keep to their barracks. But the balance of confidence was on the side of Peter, and as time went on furtive streams of soldiers and nobles passed to Troitsa. A formidable army grew up there.
On the other hand, Moscow was very far from united in favour of Sophia. Her troops melted away. The dissenters, whom she had heavily punished, gathered boldly about the Kreml and noisily advised her to go into a convent. Vassili Gallitzin wanted to go to Poland, to borrow an army. Whether or no Sophia distrusted her nervous associate, she refused to consent, and Vassili deserted her and retired to his country seat. She sent the Patriarch to Troitsa, and presently learned that the prelate had decided to remain there, a supporter of her detested half-brother. Then she boldly set out for a personal discussion with Peter—she had twice as much courage as he and, at that time, three times as much energy—but troops barred her way and sent her back to Moscow. She threw herself upon the gratitude of the streltsui, and they loudly swore that they would die for her. But in a few days they came to demand that her second favourite, Shakloviti, be surrendered, as a scapegoat, to Troitsa, and, after a frantic and tearful resistance, she was compelled to yield.
She had, for the moment, lost the struggle. Shakloviti was knouted until he confessed that there was a plot against Peter, and he was then beheaded. Vassili Gallitzin, the man of many accomplishments and few capabilities, crawled to the feet of Peter’s rude throne and begged forgiveness. He was banished to the frozen north. Other nobles were executed or exiled, and Sophia was at her brother’s mercy. She would foresee the hated sentence. Peter permitted her to choose her own convent, and she chose the convent of the Virgin, near Moscow. She may have smiled at his leniency.
But Peter had wanted merely security for his wild life, not the heavy duties and responsibilities of reigning. His simple half-brother Ivan he did not notice, and it is much to his credit—one of the very few things to the credit of his personal character—that as long as the weak-witted man lived Peter left him untouched. It was not the Moscovite way. He let Boris Gallitzin and his mother’s relatives squabble for power, as was the custom, and he returned to the almost useless, and partly disgraceful, life he led on the outskirts of Moscow.
Peter was now a well-formed and handsome young giant, more than six feet high, with intelligence enough to know his duty and strength enough to achieve it. To say, as is said, that he was slowly preparing himself for a great task is mendacious flattery. He was enjoying himself, and he cared for naught else. What there is in his later life to entitle this flower of the Romanoff shoot to be called “great” we will consider in the next chapter, but well into his manhood he was merely vicious, impulsive, and selfish. He disliked the pomp and conventions of the court, and avoided them, mainly because he had the taste of a boor, and was happier in squalid rooms where he could spit, and slop brandy, and riot as he willed. His days, especially in the summer, were spent in hard work, because he loved it. He worked at ship-building—there was a large lake at hand—with just the same zest and motive that a boy does, not from any far-sighted vision of a need to cleave a path for Russia to the sea. He drilled and drilled, and gradually formed regiments which would one day be famous, because he had a passion for soldiering and, as I said, a vague imperial idea of one day commanding armies and gaining great victories. And when the work was over, or when the fierce grip of winter arrested all work, he sat down to orgies which few could endure long.
Between the village where he lived and Moscow lay the foreign settlement to which I have occasionally referred, and here Peter got some education. The neat brick villas did not impress his imagination, for he had not even an elementary taste, but he had a mechanical, inquiring mind, and the instruments these foreigners brought into the heart of Russia piqued and stimulated him. Somehow these people beyond the plains could do everything better than the Russians. They could make clocks, watches, astronomical instruments, elaborate tools, superb weapons, magnificent fire-arms. He heard that they could make ships compared with which his boats on the lake were like children’s toys. He must get these secrets for Russia. One secret he learned—the making of fireworks—and the whole country reeked and stank with his constant displays.
And they could drink, these English and Scots and Germans of the foreign quarter. Caravans of wine and brandy poured into the quarter, and Peter would come along, black with the smoke of his fireworks or streaming with perspiration from drill or shipbuilding, and sit down to a glorious carouse. His great friend was a Swiss named Lefort, whose capacity for drink was phenomenal. Peter built a small palace, with a huge ballroom, for Lefort, and made it the headquarters of their debauches. It was a general rule that everybody was drunk every night. If a woman refused a pot of brandy Peter would fetch her a clap on the side of the head to which drunkenness was preferable. Decent women kept far away from the two colonies. Peter sober had little self-restraint, but Peter drunk . . .
The shipping idea grew upon him until, in 1693—he had wasted four years since the retirement of Sophia—he decided to visit Archangel. It is curious to read of such a man asking, like a boy, his mother’s permission, and promising not to go upon the water. He, of course, took no notice of his promise when he got there and saw the ocean. A ship he had ordered from Amsterdam was out in the roads and he impulsively started off in a totally unsuitable boat to visit it. He was nearly drowned. When he trod the deck, dressed as a Dutch captain, and saw the great sails belly in the wind above him, he went into transports. He sat for hours drinking hard with the Dutch sailors and listening to stories of their voyages round the world. There was no country like Holland, and he there and then adopted for Russia the Dutch red, white and blue flag, reversing the order of the colours. In January he was summoned back to Moscow with the news that his mother was dying. She died so slowly, and kept him so long from the sea, that he cursed volubly. But he shed copious tears, boy as he was, when she died; and he fled like the wind back to Archangel.
That there was any large profit in this minute study of ships and sailors may be confidently denied. Monarchs and statesmen have built fleets without knowing the difference between port and starboard. Peter was enjoying himself. But in his wild mind there was inevitably growing a recognition of his position and opportunities. He was now more than twenty years old, and intelligent. It was quite time that he recollected that the destiny of Russia was entrusted to him. Of its internal condition he does not seem to have had the glimmer of an idea, but it suited his passion to believe that Russia needed a fleet, and must first have a sea to put the fleet on. The powerful Swedes dominated the Baltic, so he turned south and decided to take Azoff, on the Black Sea, from the Tatars. He may have known that the country was disgusted and scandalised at his idleness, and that Sophia watched eagerly from her convent.
His expedition against Azoff was crudely conceived and a total failure. He saw at least that he and his amateur foreign friends were inadequate, and on his return to Moscow, he sent abroad for skilled men: sailors and shipwrights from Holland and England, soldiers and engineers from Austria and Prussia. Some came, and many of these, when they saw the crowds and the country, returned. All drank copiously. But Peter’s mighty energy was roused, and in a remarkably short time he had a sea-going fleet built on the Don, ready to co-operate with his land-attack upon Azoff. He took it, and returned in triumph to Moscow.
The one vague imperial idea in his wild and much-abused brain fed on his success and grew larger. Russia must have a mighty fleet, like Holland and England, and must learn this western art of doing things. He sent fifty officers abroad for education. But he must see these wonderful lands himself—he must know everything himself—and he began the preparations for the famous melodramatic journey which shocked Russia, and scandalised Europe, and undoubtedly brought great profit to him and his country. Boyish in all things, he would go incognito. Russian historians have invented a score of interpretations of every weird action of the hero. He hated pomp and ceremony, it is said; but the truth is that he sulked heavily when he was not recognised. The simple fact is that he had a boyish, impulsive, muddled mind, its great strength and originality marred by a wicked education and by debauch. He would pretend that it was a deputation of Russian envoys, and he made a sort of prince of his friend Lefort, giving him a suite of forty-four gentlemen and servants. He would hide his own figure—he was six feet eight inches in height, and wore disguises that would attract attention at a hundred yards—in the crowd under the modest title of Peter Mikhailoff, a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment.
The journey was to start in February, after the carnival revels, about which a word may be said later. But a plot against his life was discovered at the last moment, and he delayed to punish it. A former servant of Sophia, named Tsikler, and some of the streltsui were implicated in it. The implication of the Miloslavskis brought on one of those blind rages in which he behaved as one demented. He had the body of Ivan Miloslavski, which had rotted in the grave for twelve years, dug up and brought on a sledge, drawn by twelve hogs, to Preobrajenshote. There it was placed, in an open coffin, under the scaffold on which Tsikler and his chief accomplice were hacked to pieces, so that the blood of the traitors might splash upon what was left of the mouldering remains of Sophia’s relative.
Leaving a large army to overawe Moscow, he set out in March, 1697. The journey has been described so often that only a few details concerning his behaviour need be noted here. From Sweden, where his incognito was respected with a cynical correctness which infuriated him, he passed to Germany, where the Elector of Brandenburg was eager to conciliate him. His conduct was rather worse than that of an undergraduate on a holiday, as he did not even know the elements of polite behaviour. The Elector sent his Master of Ceremonies, a grave and learned gentleman, to greet Peter at his lodging, since he refused to be recognised on the ship by the prince sent to receive him. Peter snatched Johann von Besser’s powdered wig and flung it away. “Who is this?” he demanded sullenly; and, when the old gentleman’s functions were explained to him, he broke out: “Let him bring me a wench, then.” Later, when a noble came to announce that the Elector could not call upon him, Peter, drinking heavily and slobbering over his friend Lefort, started angrily to his feet, grasped the noble by the throat, and almost suffocated him. In the street he met a lady of the court and startled her with a gruff “Halt”; then he curiously examined the watch at her wrist and let her go. One night, when he supped with the Elector, a servant dropped a plate. Peter sprang up, sword in hand, livid with excitement; and he was not pacified until the servant was flogged. They had, in the city, a wheel on which criminals were broken, but they protested, in answer to Peter’s wish to see it work, that they were without a criminal. “Let them have one of my men,” he said coolly.
His adventures at Koenigsberg would precede him, and he made his way loutishly from court to court until he reached Holland. Every one knows the idyllic picture of Peter the Great serving a long apprenticeship to shipbuilding in the village of Saardam. It is another exploded myth of our childhood. Peter remained there only a week, staying at the village inn (where he seduced the maid), smoking large pipes and drinking large pots with the boatmen. That he used an adze is certain, but there was little romance. His tall, slovenly form, very untidily dressed in Dutch fashion, attracted the stones of the little boys, and he moved on. He appeared in more polite quarters in a brown overcoat with horn buttons, coarse darned socks, and dirty shoes.
Some one suggested that he would see better shipbuilding at London, and he crossed, and bewildered London. He had a fine brown skin and large handsome eyes and thick hair, but, apart from his habitual untidiness of dress, he had a nervous malady which caused a twitching of the limbs and a remarkable habit of grimacing. He constantly took for it a powder made of the flesh and wings of the magpie. At table his habits were atrocious. In fact, he and his servant Menshikoff discovered a little tavern on Tower Hill where he could smoke his pipe and drink peppered brandy as if he were at home. At Deptford, where he lived in Evelyn’s house while he studied shipping, he made such filth and damage that Evelyn estimated the repairs at 1,750 dollars. Here, as elsewhere, his morals were notorious. Professor Morfill politely observes in his “History of Russia”: “The great monarch was somewhat irregular in these matters, it must be confessed.” The phrase would have sent the great monarch into convulsions of horse-laughter. There is grave reason to believe that such irregularities were not his worst vices.
The redeeming feature of his journey was that he learned a vast amount in those few months. Much of his learning was a result of sheer nervous instability and did more harm than good. He studied dentistry—the dentistry of the seventeenth century—and took implements home with him, to the terror of his friends. When his valet one day complained to him that his wife refused to discharge her conjugal duty on the ground of tooth-ache, the Tsar had the woman brought to him, and he extracted a tooth. He gathered also a box of surgical instruments, and often used them. On one occasion he tapped a poor woman of Moscow, who suffered from dropsy, and caused her death. He pried into everything, rushing from place to place and working with prodigious energy; though it is said that he ended every day of his life intoxicated. What came of it all for the development of Russia we shall see in the next chapter.
The voyage came to an abrupt end at Vienna in the late summer. There had, he heard, been a new revolt of the streltsui. General Shein had put it down, and severely punished the rebels, but Peter decided to return to Moscow. On the day after his return the nobles came respectfully to Preobrajenshote to do homage and share a banquet. Peter, half drunk, called for scissors, and soon the beards of his nobles—the beards which an almost sacred tradition imposed in Russia—were falling upon the floor. Was it a drunken man’s joke? Peter did far worse things in liquor. He cut right and left with his sword: he caned an offending servant until he died; he ran his sword through an abbot who offended him; he even one day knocked down and trampled on his intimate friend Lefort. But this was not a jest. The ukase went forth that in future Russians must shave. He was going to westernise Russia.
Some Russian historians, seeking to palliate the horror of what is to follow, apply to it in some measure the idea of reform. The streltsui were in the way of the reform of the army. They were undisciplined, obsolete, incompetent. Their last revolt had given him the right to destroy them, and he would. But there was much more than this. He was convinced that Sophia was at the bottom of the revolt, and he would make a terrible inquiry.
There seems to be little doubt that Sophia had fomented the spirit of revolt and attempted to direct it in her interest. All the Russian world was scandalised at the Tsar’s conduct, and she had from her convent watched the spread of the discontent. At last, while Peter was in England, some representatives of the streltsui had come to Moscow to complain of their treatment. After the taking of Azoff Peter had brought his favourite regiments to share his triumph and pleasure at Moscow, and had left the streltsui to rebuild the shattered fortifications in the distant south. With something of their old independence they had sent a few men to Moscow to lay their grievances before the Tsar. There they were astounded and further angered to hear that the Tsar had left Russia months before, and no man knew where he was. There could be no redress for grievances when the Tsar turned his back upon his people and wasted his life amongst the detested foreigners. Sophia’s friends and servants pressed the lesson deep. Was it not advisable to think of a new ruler, one who would be considerate to the streltsui?
The men probably saw the great strength of the garrison at Moscow, and they returned to Azoff only with a sullen report of their helplessness. The military authorities then ordered part of the streltsui to the Polish frontier, and this drove the men to fury. They set out on the long march to Moscow, in full mutiny, with the intention, apparently, of exterminating Peter’s supporters. But the Tsar had left his best generals, Shein and Patrick Gordon, in command of the troops, and they met the mutineers outside Moscow. After a futile parley the cannon and the cavalry were turned upon the helpless foot-soldiers, hundreds were slain and thousands captured. The revolt was thoroughly suppressed long before Peter reached Vienna.
But the young Tsar was in one of his moods of deliberate ruthlessness. The streltsui had deluged his mother’s palace with blood when he was a child; they had commemorated his departure by a plot and had taken advantage of his absence to rebel. These paid servants, these antiquated soldiers, presumed to criticise his plans and fancy themselves as masters of the Russian throne! And behind all their revolts he saw always, barely concealed in the gloom, the figure of his masterful half-sister. He resolved once for all to remove this source of irritation from his Empire.
Immediately after his return fourteen torture-chambers were fitted up in the village of Preobrajenshote, and the captured streltsui were soon suffering all the agonies that Byzantine and Moscovite ingenuity could devise and the fiendish temper of the Tsar could augment. Peter himself hovered round while his victims writhed on human grid-irons or had their flesh torn from the bones by the knout. Many of their womenfolk were included in the ghastly torture, which went on night and day for three days. But Peter got no confession of the guilt of his sister, and he decided to act without it. On September 30th a first batch of two hundred of the unhappy rebels, part of them scarred and drawn with torture, were brought up for execution. It is credibly reported that Peter wielded the axe himself and severed five heads. His companions were told to follow his example, and few dared draw back. His infamous servant, Menshikoff, is said to have cut off twenty heads, and the horror of incompetent bungling by amateurs in such matters may be seen in other pages of mediæval history.
In brief, the slaughter extended over several months, and thousands of the streltsui were executed. The ancient corporation was entirely broken and the fragments were included in the new army. In the Red Square at Moscow the heads of the rebels remained on the points of pikes until they rotted into grinning skulls. The wives and children were driven from Moscow. It was decreed that none should give them bread, and they disappeared silently into the plains and forests beyond. How many escaped famine or the wolves no man knows. Russia learned that it had an autocrat: Peter the Great.
And this meant the end of the career of the masculine Sophia. As she shuddered in her convent two hundred of the rebels were brought up and hanged within sight of her windows. Some of them held in their dead hands copies of a petition to her to see their grievances remedied. Then Peter turned upon her. She must lose her rank, have her hair shorn, and pass the rest of her life in strict seclusion as a nun. With the name of “Sister Susanna” the forceful and unscrupulous woman passes out of sight. Although there was no evidence of her guilt, and it is indeed unlikely that she was involved, Peter’s wife, Eudokia Lapukhin, was condemned to the same fate. She was at least guilty of refusing to share Peter’s tastes, and he had lived little with her. He was free; and from the horrible shambles he turned to the revels of the carnival of 1698 and the more congenial company of the women of his favourite district.
TheTsar Peter was near the end of his third decade of life when he broke the power of the streltsui and definitely expelled his sister from the sphere of public life. The fortune and destiny of Russia now lay in his hands, and the heavy discontent of his people, coerced as it was by the appalling punishment of the rebels, invited him to take up the serious duties of kingship. It would be, even if we admitted that the intelligence of a genius was allied with his strange character, too much to expect that such a man would settle down to the study of the constructive problems that confronted him. He was at all times incapable of sustained intellectual concentration, of patiently working out into detailed plans the large ideas which arose in his feverish imagination. Congenital nervous disease might have been corrected by the hard labour in the open air in which he delighted, but the debauch which regularly closed his labour undid its effect. He returned, even after his recent ghastly experience and his tour of Europe, to his disordered ways.
It will be enough to illustrate the kind of life which he and his companions led by a short account of one of their pastimes. I have said that the expedition to Holland and England, which had in part the object of seeking grave alliances for the Empire in the west, was preceded by the revels of the carnival. These took the form of such pageantry and rioting as one found in most countries of Europe at the time, but there was an incident of the Moscow procession which introduces us to a startling feature of the life of Peter’s circle. One of the leading figures of the procession was a drunken old man who was dressed in ludicrous imitation of the Patriarch, the head of the Russian Church, riding on an ox, and accompanied by his spiritual court, an equally drunken and dissolute crowd, on the backs of hogs, bears, and goats. These were Peter’s intimate friends, and the entire masquerade was designed by him.
The mock Patriarch was Zotoff, the tutor whom Natalia had given her son in his youth and who had suffered Peter to contract at an early date a love of every kind of dissoluteness. Some time before this year Peter, who led the revels in the foreign quarter and outdid all in boisterous practical jokes, had dubbed the old man—he was now nearly seventy, though he took his wine and brandy with the youngest—“Archbishop of Presburg and Patriarch of the banks of the Iaouza [the neighbouring stream], and the whole of the Kaukaui [a slang name of the wild foreign quarter].” The joke grew upon the heavy taste of the Tsar. He declared himself the Patriarch’s “deacon,” and his friends were formed into a group of “cardinals,” who must hold occasional “conclaves.” The ridicule of the Papal Court was doubtless appreciated at Moscow, but even the most thoughtless may have been sobered by the equal burlesque of the head of the Russian Church. Historians again break into a dozen different explanations. Some hold that he was preparing the way for his destruction of the power of the Russian clergy: which is to credit him with a large foresight and deliberateness of action that one finds it impossible to accept. It is more likely that he acted from sheer mockery of religion, adding the Papal details so as partially to disarm or perplex his Russian pietists. We need not suppose that Peter had definite sceptical convictions. There were few definite convictions of any kind in his sodden mind.
Earlier Tsars had humbly walked beside the Patriarch, holding the bridle of his mule, in the great procession on Palm Sunday. Peter substituted for this the procession of his mock Patriarch, an aged toper who must have made a pretty Silenus, and his court. The “cardinals” were, as I said, the hardest drinkers and most dissolute adventurers of Peter’s intimate circle. The Frenchman (or Genevan) Lefort and the Scot Patrick Gordon were prominent amongst them; and there were other foreigners. They sprang from the lowest ranks of the people or from the highest nobility. Race, religion, or rank counted for nothing in “The Council of the Mad Ones,” as the society was (amongst other titles) known. From cunning and policy, and out of his constant itching to test his authority, Peter included also men of high taste and character. When men were forced to take quarts of wine and brandy they were apt to speak their thoughts, and Peter always kept a sober ear.
This was the detail of the carnival-procession of 1697. It was repeated in 1698, at the conclusion of the red horror of the streltsui. A mitre crowned the white locks of the intoxicated Zotoff, who was otherwise dressed as Bacchus, and a crowd of Bacchantes (probably the lady-friends of the cardinals from the foreign quarter) performed the well-known lascivious dance around him. With that freakishness which often gave something akin to the license of insanity to Peter’s imagination, he ordered his Bacchantes to bear burning tobacco-leaves. In England he had disposed of the tobacco-monopoly, and he was determined—in spite of the frowns of the clergy—to make his subjects smoke. The “Mad Ones” followed on their fantastic steeds.
It is necessary, if one would pass a comprehensive verdict upon Peter “the great,” to tell that this was something far more than a carnival-jest. He maintained the institution all his life, and was ever inventing fresh enormities for it. When a man was, willingly or unwillingly, appointed to the “council,” he had to go to the house of the Patriarch, where four stutterers belonging to the large troupe of entertainers in the Tsar’s household introduced him. He received his red cardinalitial robes, and went to the “Consistory,” or meeting of the cardinals. There they sat on casks before the throne of Zotoff, were served with much wine by men dressed as Roman monks, and went in procession to the “Conclave,” which was held in a house prepared as a parody of the Sistine Chapel at Rome during an election of a Pope. They were confined there for three days and nights, and plied constantly with drink by Peter’s servants; and Peter himself listened in secret for any hint of treasonable inclination. The kind of language used, and the things done, may be gathered from the extant letters of Peter to his Patriarch. At their normal meetings various women, of whom we will see something presently, were present.
Two incidents will show how Peter sustained to the end of his life the frame of mind which he shows in these things; for it was he who laboriously invented every detail of the riot. In 1714, in the midst of his heavy struggle with Sweden, he decided that he would marry Zotoff, who was then eighty-four years old, to a lady of noble birth sixty years old. The most elaborate and costly preparations were made for months, and a brilliant pageant was put upon the streets of St. Petersburg. All the nobles, sober or dissolute, had to take part, dressed as savages or bishops, making a hideous discord with every instrument of noise that could be invented. A banquet and mighty drinking bout, prolonged for several days, closed the ceremony.
Zotoff died a few years later, and it was necessary to proceed to the election of an “Archbishop of St. Petersburg in the diocese of drunkards, gluttons, and madmen.” The Conclave was held in a mock nunnery, presided over by a lady of noble birth and dissolute habits; and the “cardinals” kissed her breasts as they took the ballot-balls (eggs) from her hands. Later still, within a few years of his death, Peter decided that his new Patriarch must marry Zotoff’s widow. After ceremonies which could only partly be described the couple were married, thoroughly intoxicated, and put to bed in a monument in the public square where the populace could enjoy the spectacle in its own indelicate way. In fine, only two years before the Tsar’s death, the Patriarch died, and it was necessary to elect another. Peter’s idea on this occasion, which was carried out, was to enclose the “cardinals” for twenty-four hours, saturating them all the time with wine and brandy, and then let them choose a spiritual head.
It is not “history” delicately to suppress these things, or merely hint that Peter sought relief from his colossal labours in somewhat boisterous jokes, and then enumerate the deeds by which he earned the title of “the great.” These, and his ferocious bursts of rage—his brutal attacks on a man or woman who offended, and his truculent torture and murder of graver offenders—are part of his normal character. He had no feeling of decency or morals; indeed his whole life was a mockery of it. He was wholly devoid of any kind of fine or tender sentiment. Occasionally, with a dull air of generosity, he pardoned an offender; and he set up many philanthropic institutions at Moscow and St. Petersburg. Habitually he was coarse and unrestrained in the last degree. He would in public play with the breasts of noble ladies of the court, and many of his private acts and expressions cannot be described. I am not stressing the fact that Peter was immoral, which is not inconsistent with greatness, even of character. He was, in these and a thousand other things, little, petty, shallow, uncivilised.
It would, however, be not less unjust to dwell upon these matters to the exclusion of those services to his country which have, it is generally understood, made Peter the one great monarch of the Romanoff dynasty. These must be duly considered. They fall naturally into two categories: the reforms by which he at least broke some of the ice which locked Russia in its rigid mediævalism, and the wars by which he lessened the power of its hereditary enemies and profitably extended its boundaries.
The habit of writing history from a dynastic point of view is so deep-rooted that many a reputation lingers in our democratic age after the sentiments on which it was originally based have disappeared. This applies in part to Peter’s fame as a conqueror. He created an army and a navy, he weakened and thrust back the Swedes, and he regained a large part of southern Russia. These were large and needed services, but—without passing minutely from battlefield to battlefield, which is not the purpose of this study—we must see how far these aims were plainly conceived in a mastermind and with what ability they were achieved.
Peter had spent ten precious years playing at soldiers and making boats in the vicinity of Moscow. The shallowness of the plea that he was seriously preparing for a great task is seen the moment he sets out on his first military adventure. He decided to attack Sweden. Some historians would have us picture the young genius brooding over a map of Russia and considering in which direction he may cut a channel for its commerce (which hardly existed) to the sea and the broad world beyond. That was not his way. His one imperial idea was, as I said, that he would create an army and a navy, and would use them. It was fairly obvious that they must be used against Sweden, but his journey had, in any case, lodged this idea in his mind. It had begun in Sweden, where the King had treated the young boor with the disdain he felt for his person and his power. It ended in Poland, which had succumbed to Sweden and hated it. From Vienna, at the end of his trip, Peter had gone to Rawa and spent a few days with Augustus II of Poland. Augustus was a man after his own heart: a tall, strong man, a great hunter and hard drinker and loose liver. They talked much about Sweden and, with the fervour of intoxicated youth, decided to smite that formidable power.
Sweden was still at the top of the wave which lifted up and cast down one European nation after another, and many powers were jealous of it. Peter and Augustus entered upon a crude diplomatic campaign for the formation of a league against it. The Prussians were too cool and cynical to promise to do more than share the spoils of any victory, but the Danes and Dutch consented. In 1700 Peter secured peace with the Turks in the south and joyously led his grand new army, of 40,000 men, to the siege of Narva. He would, he said, avenge the insults put upon his imperial majesty in Sweden: to which he had gone as a non-commissioned officer of the Preobrajenshote regiment. His artillery made little impression upon the town, and his long carouses left him imperfectly informed on the larger situation. In point of fact the King of Sweden had patched up a peace with Denmark and was hurrying to Narva. On November 17th the Tsar heard that King Charles and his seasoned soldiers were a day’s march away from his camp, and—he fled. It is suggested that his officers prevailed upon him not to expose his valuable life to danger. It is claimed that he hurried off to spur on his lagging reinforcements. It is said—by himself—that he did not know of the nearness of the Swedish King. From all which the majority of soldiers and historians conclude that Peter fell into a panic at the first smell of real gunpowder, and fled. His grand new army could do no better, and a Swedish force not one-fourth as large sent the Russians scurrying back to their frontier.
Peter the Great
It seems to have been the laughter of Europe which roused the Tsar from the half-hysterical condition into which he fell, and it may be said that from that time forward he became a more vigorous and skilful, and generally courageous, commander. That he ever became a great soldier is emphatically denied by many competent authorities. But he had, we saw, two qualities of value: a colossal nervous energy, and a great promptness to seek teachers in the more advanced west. He entered upon terrific preparations for a more promising campaign. Brushing aside the clergy, he melted down their bells to make cannon, and he, swinging from place to place with giant strides, spurred his subjects to throw all their energy into the task. That he had a clear and statesmanlike idea of opening “a window upon Europe” may very well be questioned. It is more in accord with his psychology to suppose that his mind did not go much beyond a fierce resolve to beat Sweden. But out of his very need to create an army for this purpose he began to develop his Empire. He needed money, and his merchants must earn more money. He needed metal, and it must be found. He was stung by the opinion of the world that Russia was still barbaric, and he struck fiercely at cherished old traditions. He saw the Church, especially on its monastic side, as a great fat pale fungus sucking the national sap, and he attacked it.
Many of his internal reforms belong to this period. In 1698, we saw, he had fallen, scissors in hand, upon the Russian beard, and desecrated it. A ukase ordered all Russians to shave the chin, and even this change cost a mighty struggle. Ancient texts of Scripture plainly sanctioned the beard: sacred ikons showed that the saints, and even Christ, had always worn beards: and, in fine, it was not comfortable to have to face the piercing Russian winds in the winter with a clean-shaven face. Peter fought for years against this symbol of the power of antiquity. Soldiers were put at the doors of churches and instructed topull outthe beards of rebels. Heavy fines were imposed.
With this went a reform of the clothing. Long, skirted coats were traditional, and had become sacred; and they were considered warmer in a Russian winter. Peter ordered shorter and more workman-like coats, and patterns were exhibited in the streets to the outraged people. The nobles were, as a rule, not unwilling to dress in western fashion. The poor were allowed a few years in which to wear out their long coats. But it was a long and futile struggle, as pictures of Russian peasants show to-day. Even women were ordered to trail less cloth and, to the boisterous amusement of the crowd, the skirts of the recalcitrant were lifted up in the street by officials and torn or sheared.
The position of woman was a more direct religious concern. The customs which made the Russian woman, especially of the middle and better class, a slave of her menfolk and easy victim of the clergy, had been elaborated and codified by the clergy themselves, though in substance the zealous enclosure of women was, we saw, borrowed alike from Tatars and Greeks. A girl lived in terror behind locked doors, growing fat for the marriage-mart. The way out from her quarters was through the father’s room, and, whenever she was suffered to go out, she was heavily veiled. Marriages were arranged by deputies. Even during the ceremony bride and bridegroom were separated by a curtain. The bride went to bed while her new husband was thoroughly intoxicated below—the worse the bargain his relatives had made for him the more carefully he was stupefied with drink—and when he at length reeled into the room, she showed her face for the first time. Usually he did not examine her face closely. If he were sober enough to find that he had a pock-marked, cross-eyed, lean and skinny spouse, he might there and then bully her into a promise to enter a nunnery and leave him free. The marriage was generally consummated before he came to dislike her, but the resource was still open to a resourceful man. The stick was a powerful instrument of persuasion, and it was used generally and brutally. Women drank heavily in their miserable quarters, and remained in the last degree of ignorance and superstition.
Peter’s mother, and the example of Sophia, had already raised some defiance of this tradition. Peter himself loathed it and violently assailed it: partly because it was one of the antique practices which made Russia ridiculous and kept it unprogressive, partly because he genuinely wanted the women, morals or no morals, to enjoy life as his gay women-friends of the foreign quarter, and later of his court, did. He kicked over the barriers and encouraged women to come out. He ordered a six weeks’ interval between betrothal and marriage, and wanted girls to see men before they married them. He gave his daughters a French governess, and urged his nobles to do the same, or send their daughters abroad to be educated. In 1704 he startled and outraged Moscow by having a procession of young ladies on the street, scattering flowers and showing their fresh faces to the world.
Toward the close of his reign (in 1718) he desperately ordered his people to hold periodical receptions, or “drawing-room” entertainments, in their houses from four in the afternoon until ten. It is understood that his recent visit to Paris gave him the idea. Chess and smoking and dancing and drinking—but no cards or dice—were to be provided, and men and women were to mix socially. But social intercourse enforced by the knout is not apt to be genial. They were, as far as the law was obeyed, melancholy entertainments.
To all these reforms the clergy and monks were opposed, and he quickly attacked their power and wealth. In the December of 1699 he flouted the Church-calendar and decreed that henceforward, as in the rest of the civilised world, the year would begin on the First of January. An entire reform of the calendar was beyond even his audacity, and Russia still lingered behind the world. In 1700 he ordered the opening of apothecaries’ shops in Moscow, and, although the bulk of the messes sold in such places at the time were not much more efficacious than charms or the prayers of the monks, it was a healthy assault on tradition and the trade of the priests. In the same year he began his direct assault upon the ecclesiastical authorities.
The Patriarch of Moscow died in October, and Peter boldly refused to appoint a successor. It could not be pretended that such an institution was an essential part of the Russian tradition, as the patriarchate of Moscow had been founded only by Boris Godunoff, but the murmurs of the clergy may be imagined. Peter appointed instead a “Superintendent of the Patriarchal Throne,” and through this man he got control of the wealth and affairs of the Church. A separate department took control of the monasteries, and the Tsar made a bold attack upon this economic evil. Monasteries and convents were full of men and women who were religious only in name and dress. Frequently they took no vows, and their sole intention was to enjoy the immunities, the well-fed idleness, and the frequent dissoluteness of the religious institutions. As in other lands, centuries of ignorant piety had showered wealth upon an institution which at first had won sympathy by its austerity and now retained it by hypocrisy. Such a condition, when Peter sought for war-purposes every rouble he could get, stirred his wrath, and he had little piety to restrain him. He “regulated” the incomes of the monasteries and convents in such fashion that they became less attractive to economic parasites and sensual hypocrites. As time went on he increased the restrictions of monastic life, and tried to compel the monks to teach or work.
To the dissenters he was, naturally, more lenient than his predecessors, though he took advantage of their nonconformity to secure heavy fines for his treasury; and to foreign heretics he gave complete liberty. Clergy, monks, and dissenters roared their discontent, openly calling him “Antichrist,” but Peter was content with an occasional execution or application of the knout to some monk’s broad shoulders. In 1721 he at length conceived a plan of Church-government, and created the “Ecclesiastical College,” as the supreme clerical authority, which became in time the Holy Synod. His futile efforts to educate Russia out of its morass of superstition and conservatism will be noticed later. For the moment I would recall only how the mighty problems raised by the appalling condition of the country forced themselves upon him in the course of his one clearly conceived design: the destruction of the Swede. When he thus saw an abuse he smote it, angrily and unscientifically. He had not the mood or mind to sit down to the elaboration of a constructive programme. He probably devoted more time, and more cheerfully, to creating the rules and orgies of his “Mad Ones” than to the conception of a system of education.
In 1701 he, after a mighty drinking bout with Augustus, made a fresh treaty with Poland and renewed the war with Sweden. The war went on with varying success until, in 1703, Peter took the marshy region which included the mouth of the river Neva. For some reason—it may have been because it was believed that here Rurik and his brothers had entered Russia—the Tsar fell into the wildest rejoicing, and began almost immediately to form a wooden settlement on the bank of the river. This was the humble foundation of St. Petersburg. It seems to have been at a later date that he conceived the idea of making it the new capital of Russia, and his choice has been very severely criticised. For a metropolis it was too near Sweden, the great hostile power of the time, and not easy of defence. For commercial purposes it was inferior to Riga or Libau, which he afterwards took, and could only with great difficulty and sacrifice be converted at all into a centre of commerce. But Peter loathed Moscow, with its musty air of conservatism and its gilded palaces and churches. He must have a new capital, and a centre of the northern region he was gaining. His genius was energy, not insight or foresight. With the labours of—it is said—hundreds of thousands of Swedish prisoners, whose lives were recklessly squandered, he raised the primitive St. Petersburg and embodied in it, as he thought, the new spirit of progress.
He was now creating, with dim large vision of a great future, and his wild Dionysiac nature rejoiced in the labour and in the rewarding feast. In the next year, 1704, he took Narva, after a long and bloody siege; and in his morbid nervous way, with his wretched lack of self-control and chivalrous feeling, he struck the brave Swedish commander across the mouth, for resisting so long, when that general was brought before him, and, with pitiful spite, had the body of the man’s wife dug up and thrown into the river. Still he had to fight on for years, with varying fortune. All the time he wrung money out of his country and urged his generally incompetent and despised envoys abroad to get for him money and allies. Poland deserted him and made peace with Sweden; and just at that time trouble arose in the south, among the Cossacks, to divert his attention.
Ivan Mazeppa, the hetman of the Cossacks of Little Russia, or the Ukraine, disliked finding taxes for Peter, and entered into negotiations with the Swedes. The Ukraine was, like most of Russia, full of bitter discontent. There seemed some hope of securing independence. A Cossack chief whose daughter was seduced by Mazeppa fled to Peter and warned him; but Peter’s insight failed, as it often did, and he handed the informer to Mazeppa for punishment. Mazeppa continued to correspond with the Swedes and promise co-operation if they invaded Russia. It was the early summer of 1708 before Charles of Sweden entered Russia, and Peter decided to baffle him as Napoleon would be baffled at a later date. The Russians fell back, laying waste the provinces as they retired, and drew the Swedes on to spend a winter in the frozen plains. The details do not concern us. Charles in time found himself threatened with famine. Mazeppa found, when he was at length stung into action, that only two thousand of his Cossacks would follow his adventurous banner; and he packed his gold in two barrels and set out on his hopeless enterprise. And Peter, reaping at last the reward of all his toil, fell upon the Swedes at Poltava and defeated them.
It is true that King Charles was wounded and the Swedish army worn and demoralised; and it is true that Peter, eager to celebrate his victory in the usual way, allowed the Swedes to retire more cheaply than a great commander would have done. But he had redeemed his failures, and had dealt a great blow at Sweden. Incidentally he had done much to recover, or gain, his personal repute, so badly shaken since he had fled at Narva. In the battle of Poltava he faced the bullets, and got one through his hat and another—rather a disputable one this—on the breast, which broke its force miraculously on his jewelled cross. He was soon back in Moscow arranging a pageant. He posed, as Hercules in the procession.
The next few years were spent in feverish dreams of larger armies and imperial expansion, checked periodically by bad diplomacy and poor economics. His generals took Riga for him, however, and overran the Baltic provinces. Then the wily Swede roused on his flank a more terrible enemy than the Cossack. At the beginning of 1711 he heard that the Turks and Tatars were afield, and he hurried south with 45,000 men: also many thousand women and camp-followers, for, when the Tsar would take his Catherine, other officers would have their wives or some equivalent. The result was that the large and unwieldy body soon found itself in a worse situation than that into which the Russians had drawn Charles. An army of Turks and Tatars, four or five times as numerous as the Russians, closed round them on the river Pruth. There was no escape.
From the many accounts of Peter’s behaviour on that occasion one seems bound to conclude that he lost his new courage, and fell into a state of maudlin despair. It seems also to be a myth that his Catherine roused and saved him. His generals fortunately knew the venality of Turkish commanders, and a very heavy bribe—including, apparently, Catherine’s jewels—passed to the Grand Vizier’s camp. The terms, one would think, were hardly worth so large a bribe. Peter was to evacuate Azoff and all the territory in the south that he had taken from the Turk: he was to give up the Baltic provinces to Sweden, except the district at the mouth of the Neva, for which he passionately pleaded; and he was to pay a very large indemnity. He swaggered back to Moscow and endeavoured to brazen it out.
Again he settled down to stern exertions, to prepare an army and navy and seek allies. In 1717 he went to Paris in search of aid, carefully leaving Catherine behind, though (as we shall see) he had now married her. His conduct was more sober than on the earlier journey, though it was eccentric enough and gave Paris food for talk for many years. When they had at length found Peter a lodging more or less to his taste, he declared that the young king, Louis XV, must come to see him; and, eager as he was to see the sights of Paris, he kept his hotel three days and nights in the hope of forcing the visit. But we need not again enlarge upon his eccentricities. He came away without hope of alliance, and France played with him to the end of his life. Two years later he proposed to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV, having failed to get the grandson of George I. When that project was at last very firmly declined, he asked at least for a prince of the blood, and he was humoured with negotiations until he died. As we shall see, Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter (legitimised by later marriage) of Peter and a peasant-woman who had been for a time almost common camp-property.
In brief, to make an end of wars, Peter took Finland and beat the Swedes on the Baltic, but he brought the terrible English fleet upon his new vessels. A peace was arranged at Nystadt in 1721, and, for a payment of two million crowns, Peter was suffered to keep his gains on the Baltic. There was a stupendous flow of beer and wine and brandy at St. Petersburg. Peter lit the fireworks with his own hand, and, although the Senate now gravely nominated him “Father of his Country” and “Emperor of all the Russias,” he mingled with the crowd, wore a fancy dress, and danced and sang and leaped on to tables like a school-boy.
Peter had, therefore, as a result of twenty years of costly warfare, which embittered his subjects, been permitted tobuythe fringe of territory which brought his Empire to the shores of the Baltic: the Cossacks of the Don and the Ukraine were, of course, already subject to Russia, and were merely prevented from breaking away. This, and the creation of an army and navy and lowering of the prestige of Sweden, were his accomplishments on that side. His other ventures in the way of expansion were crude and unsuccessful. Several times he made fruitless efforts to reach India and Persia, but was always defeated. In 1721 the governor of Astrakhan sent word that the Turks would forestall his design upon Persia, and in the following May, having peace with Sweden, he led 100,000 men south from Astrakhan. The expedition was poorly organised, and had to return in some disgrace.
In the following year, 1723, he made his last and wildest effort. Two frigates set sail, secretly and hastily, from the port of the capital, and were presently driven back by storms. These two vessels, of poor capacity, had actually been ordered by Peter, in the prime of his age, to take the island of Madagascar, and possibly sail on from there to India! Peter had heard that the Swedes were about to do this, and he had written a letter to “the king of Madagascar,” urging him to see that a Russian was better than a Swedish protectorate. Such was the value of the Tsar’s famous training in ship-building that he insisted that a few useless alterations should be made and the boats should start again, and he fell furiously upon his officers when they pointed out the impossibility.
The internal reforms which he effected were of that large, violent, and unsystematic character which one would expect from his nature. I have described some of these, and shown how they were, in great measure, angry and impulsive thrusts at evils which thwarted his plans. Brigandage was still very common, on a large scale, in Russia, and interfered with the industry which was to supply his sinews of war, so Peter attacked it vigorously. Mendicancy had, as everywhere in the Middle Ages, become an opportunity of virtue and a wicked leak of the nation’s energy. The lash of Peter’s knout fell upon the beggars. Men still killed each other instead of killing Swedes and Turks, and Peter forbade them to carry knives. He fostered and protected home-industries, and sent young men to Holland and Italy to learn trades. He spurred the native production of iron and copper, sent expeditions in search of gold, dug miles of canals, and tried by heavy punishments to break Russian traders of their notorious dishonesty. He pressed reform in agriculture, introduced breeding studs, and slightly alleviated the lot of the serfs, who were now sold like cattle or negroes. He regulated municipal life, dividing the country into administrative areas and created a Senate. Nothing was done thoroughly, and all was done for the purpose of extracting (by a crude fiscal system and thoroughly dishonest officials) more money for the army and navy. Yet these were all valuable innovations, and they entitled Peter, as far as they went, to a name only a little less than “great.”
His most beneficent design, and his chief failure, was in the matter of education; general illiteracy was still the rule in Europe. Russia was merely a few degrees worse than other countries in that respect. But social visionaries were appearing here and there, pointing out the connection between ignorance and crime and poverty, and some of them found the ear of Peter. Impulsively, as usual, he declared that he would have universal, compulsory education in Russia. A Ukase of February 28th, 1714, ordered the opening of provincial schools, and Peter rushed to other tasks. Five years later he learned from an official report that one such school had been opened, and it had twenty-six pupils. He returned again and again to the subject, and failed as much from his own lack of patient study as from the general hostility of his subjects. His ideas of schooling were extremely crude, and they stultified themselves in practice. All that we can say is that, as in the case of most of the other reforms, he did bring a few rays of light into the mediæval darkness of Russia, and is for that entitled to grateful recognition.
Had these reforms been associated with a different type of character they might very well, in spite of their grave incompleteness, dispose us to grant the title of “Peter the Great.” But if that epithet is to measure the stature of the whole man we must strenuously refuse it. The Tsar was energetic, persevering in congenial tasks, even highly endowed in intellect; but his gifts and, accomplishments were marred by deep, habitual vices and weaknesses which make it ludicrous to call him a great man. To this aspect we turn again before we consider the closing tragedies of his reign.
I have sufficiently introduced the kind of men who were the intimate friends and coworkers of the Tsar in his youth. Lefort and Gordon both died in 1699, and new favourites arose. Some of these were, like General Sheremetieff, fine and loyal servants of proved worth. Some were, like Romodanovski, nobles of high birth and ability who, in spite of their insufferable haughtiness and despotism, served the Tsar and the State well. But a large number were mere adventurers whom a glib tongue, a large capacity for liquor, or a contemptible obsequiousness commended to the Tsar, and who then plundered the Empire with utter unscrupulousness. Of these Menshikoff was the most prominent, most successful, and most infamous.
Legends grew like mushrooms in the dank soil of Peter’s reign, and Menshikoff’s origin is, like that of many of his colleagues, very obscure. It seems certain that, either as a boy or a young man, he sold meat-pies on the streets of Moscow; and Peter lets us know that he was an illegitimate child. The wit with which he plied his trade attracted Lefort, who made a valet of him, and then attracted Peter, who appropriated him. Peter gave him a license which many historians interpret in accordance with the morals of the time. He went everywhere with the Tsar and became rich. In 1706, for no public merit, he became a Prince; in 1711 he bought the Duchy of Courland. He was the most corrupt and venal of Peter’s corrupt ministers, and was, on various occasions, compelled to disgorge a total sum of two and a half million dollars, yet remained fabulously rich, and as haughty and brutal to his serfs and servants as he was rich. Count Golovin, in later years, found a similar type of man, a boot-black, and pushed him at court as a rival of Menshikoff. He did become Public Prosecutor, but he never dislodged Menshikoff.
After 1700 this man was Peter’s chief associate and private minister. The young Tsar, as we saw in the last chapter, built a palace for him in the foreign quarter, and made it the chief scene of his rollicking. Menshikoff had two sisters, Marie and Anne, who, with Daria and Barbara Arsenieff and Anisia Tolstoi, formed the nucleus of the loose young women of the colony. Peter had, at his mother’s instance, married Eudoxia Lapukhin, who bore him two children, Alexander (who died young) and Alexis. She was a typical Russian, of a type as different as possible from that of the Menshikoffs and Arsenieffs. When his mother, Natalia, died, he scattered Eudoxia’s relatives and practically deserted her. He is said to have soaked her brother in spirits of wine and set fire to him. Some historians have a light way of marking these stories “incredible,” but very little was incredible in Peter’s world. His pious sister-in-law, Prascovia, widow of the Tsar Feodor, one day poured her bottle of brandy over an offending servant, set fire to it, and beat him with her cane on the sore spot.
To finish for the moment with Eudoxia, Peter’s first and, apparently, only legitimate wife. In 1698, as we saw, he condemned her to enter a convent, though there was not the least evidence that she was involved in the conspiracy. She struggled hard, but a coach bore her away to Suzdal, where we will resume her strange adventures later.
Lefort had been intimate with a young woman named Anna Mons, the daughter of a German wineseller (or, according to others, jeweller) of the colony. Peter, as in other cases, took over his friend’s relict, and set her up, as chief favourite, in a handsome house. In 1703, however, the Saxon envoy was drowned near Moscow, and tender letters from Anna were found in his pocket, it is said. At all events Anna went to prison for ingratitude, but she found the way out and joined the establishment of the Prussian envoy: who, when he presumed to ask of Peter some favour on the ground of his new position, heard her described in terms which may not be translated.
But the list of Peter’s amours, curious and interesting as it is, would unduly swell the dimensions of this volume. It is enough to note here that his mistresses, of an hour or a year, were almost all of the most common fleshy type: buxom, sensual, and coarse. One must say seriously, in connection with Peter’s character, that it was as much a matter of economy as of taste. And this is the simple key to his association with the woman whom he eventually, legally or illegally, married and made his Tsarina.
The Empress Catherine shall have a chapter to herself, in which we will tell her early story. From orphan-maid in a Lutheran pastor’s house at Marienburg she had, in 1702, passed to the Russian camp and been successively promoted until she shared the tent of the General, and then entered the harem of Menshikoff. There Peter had discovered her and annexed her. She was then eighteen and, by all accounts, not a beauty. But she had the large hips and full bosom, the round red lips and cheeks, the rolling sensual eyes, which Peter loved. Candid observers speak of the eyes as insipid and staring, and describe the nose as turned up; but she must have had qualities. Probably she was shrewd, pliant, simple-minded, and rather motherly in his hours of rage and illness. She settled with him in his humble cottage at St. Petersburg and washed his shirts. She bore him two sons, and went with him on his campaigns; and in 1712 he went through the form of marriage with her.
Catherine bore Peter in all eleven children, but the heir to the throne was Prince Alexis, son of his first wife. Eudoxia had had two sons. Alexander had died, and Alexis was, when his mother was enclosed in a convent in 1699, entrusted to the egregious care of Menshikoff for education. One of Menshikoff’s first tasks was to teach him to drink brandy, and he acquired a truly Russian capacity for drink. As he matured, he was similarly educated in license of conduct. He was, like his father, nervous and unstable, and he became irritable, moody, and coarse. But there was a singular difference between father and son. Alexis was very pious. Piety, in Russia, was apt to lodge in a special part of the brain, and did not exclude drunken and dissolute habits. Alexis loved Moscow and its churches and rich ritual and legends of the saints. And, naturally, the spreading discontent at Peter’s “reforms” and blasphemies found something in the nature of a focus in the court of Alexis. As he grew up, he intensely disliked his father’s policy.
Peter roughly summoned him to quit Moscow and prepare, by a military education, for the throne. He quailed and protested that he did not want to be a soldier. Peter sent him to Dresden, and, hearing that his lady-friends were too numerous and notorious, married him to Princess Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel: a gentle, religious, pock-marked young lady, who could not compete with the livelier dames. She died in childbirth, and Alexis continued to drink and riot and admire the religious art of Dresden. Peter again sharply scolded him, and gave him the alternative of becoming either a soldier (and Tsar) or a monk, Alexis whined that he would rather be a monk than a rough and bloody soldier; though he shuddered at the ascetic prospect, and, apparently, intended to escape at his father’s death on the ground that he had taken the vows under compulsion. He still dallied.
In 1716, Alexis being now twenty-six years old, the Tsar peremptorily bade him enter the monastery at Tver or join the army. He replied that he was coming to Russia, and he begged to be allowed to bring his latest passion, a young lady named Euphrosyne. After a short delay Peter heard that Alexis and Euphrosyne had fled, and in a terrible rage he sent his agents over Europe in search of his son. They traced him and his lady to an ancient castle in Austria. Alexis had fled to Vienna and hysterically begged the Emperor’s protection, and the Emperor had sent him to the obscure castle until he could bring about a reconciliation. When it was known that Russian spies watched the castle, the Emperor ordered the Prince to leave behind all his Russian comrades, who encouraged him in deep drinking, and fly to Naples; and Alexis, taking only one page for whom he passionately pleaded—it was Euphrosyne, in male dress—fled to the south. Naples was then under the Empire.
The Russian agents at the court of Vienna demanded the surrender of Alexis. Dreading the anger of the Tsar, the Emperor sent them on to Naples, and directed his Viceroy that theymusthave an interview with the Prince. The doors were thrown open, and the agents persuaded Alexis, by lying representations, that Peter would forgive him. Their last argument was that Euphrosyne would be taken away from him unless he complied, and the girl—a lusty, thick-lipped peasant-girl, like Catherine, it seems—tearfully begged her royal lover to go. The jade had been bribed by Peter’s agents. She was pregnant and was left in Italy, where the price of her treason was quickly spent. Alexis, full of the promise that he had only to ask forgiveness and he could retire to his country-seat and wed his dear Euphrosyne, hurried joyfully to Moscow.
He arrived on the last day of January (1718), and Moscow, ignorant of the arts by which he had been entrapped, beheld him with tragic astonishment. The Tsar was in one of his worst moods. Three days later a court of clerical and lay dignitaries was formed, and father and son met before them. Peter showered invectives on his miserable son, and then, as Alexis flung himself to the ground and asked pardon, promised to forgive him if he would renounce his right to the throne and betray the accomplices of his supposed plot. Every man or woman to whom Alexis had disparaged his father was named, and Peter shuddered with rage. There had been no conspiracy, Alexis said: nothing but vague murmurs. But the torture-chambers soon rang with shrieks, and Russian blood streamed again upon the stones of Moscow.
In his bloodshot fury Peter conceived, or affected, a suspicion that his first wife, Eudoxia, had been in the plot, and a gang of “questioners” went to the convent at Suzdal. Fifty nuns were flogged and questioned, but the innocence of Eudoxia could not be brought under suspicion. Unhappily a curious page of Eudoxia’s conventual life, which had ended years before, was brought to light. She had had a lover in the convent. A noble named Gleboff had befriended her, and from friendship they passed to intimacy. Her impassioned love-letters of eight years before were put before the Tsar, and he saw red. Gleboff was horribly tortured and—wrapped in furs, as it was cold, to preserve his vitality and torture a little longer—impaled. It is said, but of this we cannot be sure, that Eudoxia was scourged, naked, by two monks. She was, at all events, confined more strictly from that time.
Alexis had complied with the conditions, but Peter “the Great” had not done with his son. The vile Euphrosyne was brought to Moscow, and she supplied fresh “evidence.” A new court was convoked, and it shrank from the murder that the Tsar plainly contemplated. Alexis was confronted with his faithless lover: he was knouted: and he held to his simple story that he could not be a soldier, and had done no more than criticise. A third court was set up, and it issued sentence of death; and a few days later the Prince’s body was exposed to the public gaze, with a story that God had spared the father the blood of his son by visiting Alexis with apoplexy. How the Prince really died no man knows, but few, now or then, would believe the story of natural death. . . . It was June 26th; and on June 29th, we read, a new ship was launched, and Peter joined with his usual robustness in the merrymaking.
In 1719 Catherine’s son Peter died, and, on the hereditary principle, the crown should pass to little Peter, son of the dead Alexis and Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. The Tsar was worried, but took no effective steps to settle the very grave matter of the succession. Catherine, too, was worried, for Peter had a new mistress, a woman of far greater charm than she, and it was well within the sphere of his ingenuity to secure a divorce and wed again. But the romance of Peter Mikhailoff has already, in spite of condensation, run to such length, and the new romance so largely concerns Catherine, that we may open a new chapter and present that lady properly to the reader before describing the last phase.
Thewhims of monarchs have created more romances in the history of women than the fancy of the novelist has ever invented, and the story of Peter’s wife and successor is one of the most piquant of these real adventures. Although in the years of her prosperity she did not shrink from the mention of her humble origin, the details of her childhood were never confidently known and are a matter of endless speculation. It is generally believed that she was the daughter of a Livonian peasant, but she makes her first certain appearance as maid-of-all-work in the house of a poor German pastor. Profoundly ignorant, plain of feature, coarse in taste, this woman became in time the sole mistress of the Russian Empire.
At the beginning of the Swedish war, in 1702, General Sheremetieff and the Russian forces besieged Marienburg. The Swedish commander threatened to blow up the fort rather than surrender, and the inhabitants fled to the Russian lines. Amongst them, brandishing his credentials (his Bible), was the Lutheran pastor of the town, with his wife and children and maid. He was suffered to proceed to Russia, but the maid remained in the camp. She was then seventeen years old, a lusty and vigorous peasant-girl such as soldiers covet. The pastor had eked out his slender income by taking lodgers, and it may or may not be true that Catherine, or Martha, as she is believed to have been named at the time, was too intimate with them, and had been married by the pastor for the protection of her morals. She had no more morals than Peter. In the camp she now gained rapid promotion. At first she washed the shirts and shared the bed and board of a non-commissioned officer; then she had the favour of General Sheremetieff; then the florid taste of Menshikoff was attracted to her, and she was drafted to his household, and harem, at Moscow. There Peter saw and appropriated her.
There is, as I said, little reason to seek some secret of her success. She was of the robust sensual type that Peter preferred. But she must have been at once shrewd and amiable to have kept his affection as long as she did. His letters to her show, besides the link of common coarseness and frank sensuality, a good deal of affection on both sides. Peter took her to the cottage which he built on the banks of the Neva, where her second boy was born. It was a small two-roomed cottage, of rough-hewn trunks of trees, only about fifty feet in frontage and less in depth. In one of the plain rooms, the walls of which were covered with canvas, Peter planned and received visitors. In the other Catherine and he dined, with an occasional intimate friend, and slept. In 1708 he built a larger and rather finer cottage, more neatly furnished, but, as in earlier days, he preferred to let Menshikoff keep a palace in which, with all splendour of gold plate and powdered lackeys and an army of cooks, he could give his banquets. In the cottage with Catherine he ate his large coarse meals, drank his tea and gin and brandy, and smoked great quantities of tobacco. He carried about with him his wooden spoon and bone-handled knife and fork. Catherine darned his woollen socks and washed his shirts—fine clean linen was almost the one luxury he liked—and babies appeared with great regularity. Often when the tramp of his heavy boots told that he was in a mood of fury, when servants and friends fled, for he would hit out with fist or cane or even sword at such times, Catherine took his blood-congested head in her plump hands and ran her fingers through his thick hair; and he gradually sank to sleep on her breast.
She was good to him, he felt, and he must provide for her and the children. But he was now a great monarch, corresponding with all the courts of Europe and visiting many of them. The idea of marrying her must be given long consideration. There were Eudoxia’s sons, and there were Catherine’s sons. It was a puzzling business, and Peter did not attack a puzzling business when it could wait. In 1706 he seemed to make up his mind. He took the whole company of “the girls”—Catherine, and Anisia Tolstoi, and the two Menshikoffs and two Arsenieffs—to Kieff, summoned Menshikoff, and told him that he must marry Daria Arsenieff and become respectable. Menshikoff was not the man to be restricted by vows of marriage, and he obeyed. But Peter did not, as Catherine expected, follow his friend’s example. He was content to make a will in which he assigned her and her four children an imperial legacy of 1,500 dollars!
By 1711 he let it be understood that Catherine was his wife, and he publicly went through the form of marriage with her. Whether there was a valid marriage or no is not clear. Catherine is said to have been married at Marienburg, and Peter’s first marriage does not seem to have been annulled by the proper authorities. Russia and Europe would not inquire too closely. Catherine went with him everywhere, except to Paris, and shared his long rides on horseback and his rough camp-life. She never attempted to interfere in affairs of State; but she secretly made large sums of money by getting favours or pardon for offenders. She remained very friendly with Menshikoff, who taught her the security of foreign investments.
Peter discovered her trickery, and a cloud came over their relations, but the question of the succession worried him. The new complication was that he was intimate with the charming daughter of Prince Kantemir of Wallachia. The Prince had lost his little principality after Peter’s defeat on the Pruth, and had come to St. Petersburg to seek compensation. He knew the relation of the Tsar to his daughter Maria and expected him to divorce Catherine and wed her. It was a very anxious time for all. Alexis died, or was executed, in 1718; Catherine’s second son died in 1719; and in 1722 Maria Kantemir, who was then at Astrakhan, expected a child. To the relief of Catherine and her party, and the violent anger of Peter, Maria had a miscarriage and nearly died.
Catherine now got the title of Empress, and in 1724 she was crowned. Still Peter, although his health gave great concern, evaded the problem of the succession, but he allowed Catherine a superb coronation. When she showed him her magnificent robe, which cost 2,000 dollars, he impatiently pushed it aside, but he let her have a crown made which cost nearly a million dollars. And within little over six months she, by her reckless and ungrateful conduct, forfeited whatever right she may have had and barely escaped with her life.
We remember the giddy Anna Mons, Peter’s mistress for a time in the foreign settlement at Moscow. Anna’s brother William was one of Catherine’s chamberlains, and the whole court believed that they were intimate. At length a letter which is said to have proved it fell into Peter’s hands. He seems to have felt bitterly the ignominy of publicly discrowning his new Empress, and for a long time he did nothing, beyond torturing a witness or two to extract proof. They thought that he had decided to overlook it, and both Catherine and Mons were at supper with him one night in November. “What time is it?” he suddenly asked, and Catherine replied that it was nine. He grimly took her watch, put it on three hours, and said that, as it was midnight, everybody would go to bed. Mons was arrested and tortured, and, after a few days, beheaded on the ground of corrupt practices. His sister Matrena was knouted and sent to Siberia. Catherine’s personal fortune was taken out of her hands for administration, and officials were forbidden in future to take any orders from her.