A ROMANOFF PRINCESS
THE surviving family of Maria Miloslavski and Tsar Alexis consisted of
six sturdy daughters and one purblind, weak-pated boy. On the approved
principles of Russian, especially imperial, education, these daughters
ought to have been reconciled to the modest position to which the
inferiority of their sex condemned them, and, as their brother was
plainly incapable of ruling, they ought to have passed into convents or
been distributed amongst the households of wealthy courtiers. But there
was at least one daughter, Sophia, who had not the least intention of
submitting to the priestly theory. If her fifteen-year old brother could
make no effort for the throne, she would make it for him. She would
fight the hated Anastasia.
Visitors to the court have left us very different impressions of this
remarkable princess, but we have little difficulty in removing the thick
coat of flattery and obtaining a satisfactory glimpse of her. She was
twenty-five years old at the death of Feodor: a short, very stout, and
very vigorous young woman, her face covered to some extent with a fine
hair which gave her an even more masculine appearance. Probably she had
led the usual enclosed life during her father’s reign, but in the time
of her invalid brother she had had more freedom. She especially made the
acquaintance of Vassili Gallitzin, a very clever and accomplished
prince, of European culture, who overlooked her entire lack of personal
charm and--either then or at a later date--became her lover. In her
apartments she formed a literary circle, and through her visitors she
got into touch with remote elements of Moscow society.
One of these sections of the population of Moscow which a conspirator
would naturally explore was the military force known as the _streltsui_:
a privileged corporation of soldiers who handed on the office from
father to son and gave themselves airs of importance. We have no direct
proof that Sophia got into communication with this body, but the
historical facts, and the later action and expressions of Peter the
Great, seem to put it beyond question. The streltsui were mutinous at
the time of the death of Feodor, because their pay was, as usual, in
arrears. They were reduced to silence by the application of the knout,
publicly, to the shoulders of their officers, but they remained sullen
and inflammable. It is said that the agents of Sophia and her uncle went
amongst them distributing money and whispering poisonous libels. The
late Emperor, it was suggested to them, had died of poison.
When Matveeff returned from Siberia they greeted him with apparent
respect, and the court settled to its usual prosperous life. Four days
later, however, the Kreml awoke to find a grave and ominous movement
afoot. Twenty regiments of the streltsui had seized their arms and were
irregularly massed in front of the Kreml. The sleeves of their red
shirts were rolled up, as if for butchery, and a close observer would
have found that they reeked with vodka. Behind them was the rabble of
the town. The bells were calling shrilly from the steeples. Drums were
beaten, and cannon rumbled toward the palace. The servants of the court
learned that some one had spread amongst them a report that Princes Ivan
and Peter had been strangled, and a brother of Natalia had seized the
crown. Natalia hastened to show the princes at the top of the red
staircase, to the crowd, and for a moment it seemed to be baulked.
Matveeff and the Patriarch prudently addressed the men, and they were
about to disperse.
It is said that Prince Dolgoruki, one of the group of courtiers about
the Tsarina, then made offensive and arrogant remarks to the soldiers,
and the whole mass of inflammable material took flame. The prince was
soon flung from the head of the steps and caught on the spears of the
soldiers below. Matveeff was cut to pieces, and the murderers searched
the palace for Natalia’s brother. After murdering one or two wrong
men, they found him in the chapel and dispatched him. Another brother
was torn from Natalia’s arms and cut to pieces. Three younger
brothers escaped from Moscow. For three days the friends and relatives
of the Tsarina were sought and butchered: dragged by the hair through
the streets, knouted to death, flung from windows upon the spears,
roasted with red-hot spears, cut to pieces, and so on. One does not like
to dwell upon the horrors, but there will come presently a page in the
life of Peter the Great that requires explanation. Peter, then nine
years old, trembled by the side of his mother in the Kreml while her
friends and relatives were barbarously slain on every side--by the
streltsui. It is said that Sophia at length interceded and arrested the
butchery; and that she gave ten roubles each to the streltsui.
A week later the emboldened soldiers came again and demanded that the
idiot Ivan should be associated with Peter in the Tsardom. Most of the
boyars were opposed to so ridiculous and unprecedented a change, but the
Patriarch and other ministers were conveniently at hand, and it was
done. In a few more days there was a fresh riot. Ivan, being the elder,
must have precedence of Peter; and so it was appointed. Some historians
find it not unnatural that after this display of zeal for her brother
Sophia should provide a feast for the streltsui, and with her own plump
hand pour out their wine. Perhaps it was just as natural that the
streltsui should next return with a demand that Sophia be appointed
Regent for the young Tsars. The nobles now saw how the wind sat, and
they obeyed. A double throne was ordered of the Dutch merchants and,
when it came, Sophia had a hole, decently veiled, cut into the back, so
that she could listen to the audiences. She occupied the place of the
Tsarina and, with the aid of her lover Gallitzin, ruled the Empire.
Gallitzin was married, but, at Sophia’s suggestion, it is said, he
“persuaded” his wife to enter a convent, which left him free
to marry again. Apparently the virago would wed him and share the throne
with him.
But the streltsui were old-fashioned believers, and were in no mind to
see the traditions of Russian decency thus violated. Their murmurs were
strengthened by those of other malcontents. Sophia was more punctilious
about ritual and doctrine than conduct, and, like Nikon, she laid a
heavy hand upon dissenters. One of their leaders at Moscow was executed.
The rumble in the city grew louder, and Sophia, affecting at least to
believe that the streltsui now threatened her life, fled with her court
to the large and fortified monastery at Troitsa, eighteen miles from
Moscow. She prudently took with her Ivan and Peter, and she issued a
frantic summons to the country to protect her and them. Tens of
thousands of boyars and soldiers streamed to Troitsa, and the streltsui
became apprehensive. Their leader, Khovanski, and his son were invited
to come and confer with Sophia at Troitsa, and they unsuspectingly went.
They were arrested on the way and put to death; and the streltsui, cowed
by her strength, came, with ropes round their necks, to Troitsa, to ask
and obtain forgiveness.
But the discontent was not eased at Moscow, and the policy upon which
Sophia and Gallitzin now concentrated their resources fed the murmurs.
All Europe was alarmed at the continuous menace of the Turks, and in
1686 Gallitzin led south a large army for the purpose of chastising them
and their Tatar allies, and regaining territory for Russia. The costly
army, terribly reduced in the southern wilderness, was forced to return
without having even sighted the Turks, and the complaints and satire of
Moscow were loud. Sophia and Gallitzin endeavoured to cover the disgrace
by sending to Siberia an inoffensive general and loading the soldiers
with honours. It was, however, necessary to redeem the failure, and in
1689 a second grand army was entrusted to Gallitzin. His nerve may have
been shaken when, as he was starting, he found a coffin, placed by
unknown hands, on his doorstep; and he can scarcely have been unaware
that it was generally believed that during his absence Sophia consoled
herself with the attentions of his colleague Shakloviti. He failed once
more, and all Sophia’s pretence of triumph could not hide his
disgrace. She walked in triumphal procession, distributed brandy, and
heaped honours upon the “victors.”
Men now spoke of her with contempt. It was rumoured that she had a
melodramatic plot of marrying Ivan and--since he would have no
children--providing his wife with a lover. When this woman bore a son,
Peter could be thrust aside as not in the line of succession; and, when
Peter was excluded from the situation, the illegitimacy of the child
might be discovered, and Sophia and Gallitzin might rule in peace. The
plot was so ludicrous that she can scarcely have entertained it, but it
served to fan the growing resentment of her rule.
That rule was, however, now threatened by Peter himself. During these
years the boy had grown up sturdily, with his mother, in a village a few
miles from Moscow. On important occasions he would be driven into
Moscow, to sit beside his goggle-eyed half-brother on the golden throne,
but he detested the Kreml and loved the free, open-air life of the
village. His mother, Natalia, seems to have belied entirely the
excellence of her early years and scandalously neglected his education.
He learned to read, and he read a great and confusing assortment of
books of history and adventure. He learned to write, but the lesson
stopped at so rudimentary a stage that he always had great difficulty in
spelling. His days were spent amongst grooms, servants, and any boys
with whom he pleased to associate. He became a creature of impulse, and
in that world in which he grew up the impulses one followed were neither
gentle nor decent. The theory that Peter the Great profited by his rude
education in contact with nature and real human beings, instead of being
reared in the artificial atmosphere of the imperial terem, may point
with some pride to his energy, his promptness, his scorn of conventions;
but it must embrace also those impulsive outbursts of ferocity and those
unchecked debauches which kept his character throughout life little
above the level of a savage.
Peter had lately passed his seventeenth birthday when, in 1689,
Gallitzin returned from his second failure. The one imperial idea which
grew amidst his vices was the thought that he would some day command the
military forces of Russia, and his play constantly turned upon
soldiering. He formed companies out of his servants and associates. He
had a fort built at the village of Preobrajenshote, which he made his
chief centre, and a kind of rough, informal court grew up about him.
Nobles and boyars joined his military games, his mimic regiments; and
they joined also in his nightly revels. He must have heard much
disdainful talk about the campaigns of Prince Gallitzin, and no doubt
there were ambitious men who urged him to act. The city, he would know,
now openly complained. One day a paper was found in one of the squares
telling the finder that a valuable paper was hidden behind a picture of
the Virgin in a certain church. A crowd sought the miraculous
communication, and found a lampoon on the Regent Sophia.
[IMAGE: img108.jpg 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.