THE GREAT PETER
THE Tsar 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.
[IMAGE: img134.jpg 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 to _pull out_ the
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 to _buy_ the 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 they _must_ have 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.