TIMES OF TROUBLES AND GRANDEUR, 1584–1725
With the death of Ivan IV, Russia entered a period of unprecedented turbulence. For a few years it seemed as though the country, rife with discontent, would disintegrate and split into numerous independent regions governed by usurpers or adventurers. In the words of Giles Fletcher, an English visitor to Russia in 1588, the tsar’s ‘wicked policy and tyrannous practice (though now it be ceased) hath so troubled the country and filled it so full of grudge and mortal hatred ever since, that it will not be quenched (as it seemeth now) till it burn again into a civil flame’. Fedor, Ivan’s son, who assumed the throne in 1584, was utterly incapable of exercising leadership, let alone coping with a state in disarray. In his childhood Fedor had been an ‘undersized white-faced stripling who was disposed to dropsy and possessed an unsteady, quasi-senile gait’. He grew up to be a feeble-minded adult far more interested in spiritual matters than in affairs of state. When he received foreign dignitaries, he could not refrain from ‘smiling, nor from gazing first upon his scepter, and then upon his orb’. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to run from one church to another ringing the bells and having mass celebrated. As Ivan himself sadly noted, Fedor behaved more like a sexton than the son of a tsar.
Immediately after his father’s death the boyar dignitaries began a struggle for influence over the imbecile tsar that lasted four years and was at times accompanied by bloody rioting in the streets. Finally, in 1588, the thirty-four-year-old Boris Godunov, a boyar allegedly of Tatar origin and the subject of Moussorgsky’s famous Russian opera, emerged as the tsar’s principal counselor. Although barely literate, Godunov was an intelligent and uncommonly sensible man who administered the country virtually unopposed for some ten years. English visitors to Moscow considered Boris so powerful that they referred to him as ‘lieutenant of the empire’ and ‘lord protector of Russia’. His astute and moderate policies succeeded in producing a measure of calm throughout the realm. He eschewed risky foreign adventures, made serious efforts to help the destitute, and tried to lighten the burden borne by the peasants. Through a series of shrewd, if not altogether honorable, maneuvers he succeeded in elevating the Moscow metropolitanate to a patriarchate. This change added measurably to the prestige of the Muscovite church and also to that of the tsar and Godunov himself. Above all, the years from 1588 to 1598 were a period of internal calm, a welcome change after the tumult of Ivan’s reign.
The calm ended in 1598, when Fedor died without leaving a single relative who could advance a legitimate claim to the throne. The metropolitan took it upon himself to summon a zemskii sobor, or national assembly, to elect a new tsar. Boris was naturally the leading candidate, but to everyone’s surprise he stubbornly turned down every suggestion that he campaign for the position. The crafty boyar actually longed to be tsar of Muscovy, but he did not want to be beholden to the zemskii sobor for his election, nor did he want the election to serve as a precedent. If he was to be tsar, he intended to found a new dynasty, thus permitting his children to succeed him. Unable to agree on another candidate, the assembly turned to Godunov anyway and acceded to all of his stipulations. But as ruler in his own right, Boris did not fare as well as he had previously. To be sure, he continued many of his enlightened policies, which in some respects anticipated the innovative work of Peter the Great later in the seventeenth century. He recognized the need for Russians to master Western technology and technical skills, for example, and therefore attempted to found a university in Moscow. But the clergy, who feared the introduction of heretical ideas from non-Orthodox countries, blocked the plan. Instead, Godunov sent eighteen young men to the West to study, a bold move that had no impact on Russia, for not one of the students returned.
Godunov’s reform program, however, was dealt a more serious blow by nature. In the fall of 1601, large areas of Russia were blanketed by a very early frost that destroyed much of the crop. Many people went hungry, and in order to provide work for the needy, Godunov introduced the equivalent of a public works program: the building of a conduit for water from the Moscow river to the Kremlin. This well-intentioned measure, however, only worsened the situation in the capital, for as soon as people heard of the relief project they streamed into the city. The weather did not improve during the following two years, and food shortages became even more acute. Between 1601 and 1603, 100,000 people are believed to have died of starvation in Moscow; several hundred thousand more perished in other parts of the country.
The people held Godunov responsible for their suffering and readily believed the horrendous stories that his boyar opponents hastened to circulate. They charged him with ruthless ambition, corruption, and such misdeeds as having Moscow raided by a foreign power in order to divert attention from domestic difficulties. He was even accused of poisoning Tsar Fedor. But the most startling charge of all was that he had engineered the murder of Ivan the Terrible’s last child, the nine-year-old Dmitrii, in order to pave the way for his own accession. The events surrounding the death of Dmitrii in 1591 are actually so bizarre and the accounts of them so contradictory that they may justly be considered one of Russia’s most intriguing detective stories.
Dmitrii was born in 1582 to Ivan’s fourth wife, Maria Nagaia, but, since the church normally permitted a man no more than three marriages (an exception had been made to allow Ivan to take a fourth wife), the youngster was canonically ineligible for the crown. Fiercely ambitious, Dmitrii’s mother would not relinquish her son’s claim to what she considered his patrimony. In order that Maria be prevented from plotting against Tsar Fedor, she and her entire family were exiled to Uglich, a town that Ivan had bequeathed to Dmitrii as an appanage. There Maria and her relatives plied the boy with hatred for Fedor and Godunov, so much so that Dmitrii used to direct his playmates to make snow statues of the despised leaders, whose heads, arms, and legs he would then chop off. Godunov no doubt heard of these games through his informers, just as he heard of the frequent visits Maria paid to soothsayers to find out how long Tsar Fedor and the tsaritsa would live. Godunov probably also learned that by 1590 Maria’s clan had organized an elaborate conspiracy designed to wrest power for her son.
A few months later, in 1591, Dmitrii suddenly died from mysterious knife wounds. The boy’s family lost no time in charging that government agents had murdered the boy, and once this story spread, the people of Uglich staged a violent rebellion against the tsar’s officials. At the same time, fires set by arsonists in the employ of the Nagois broke out in Moscow. The plan was to discredit the government and foment a national uprising, but Tsar Fedor’s troops quelled the disorder within a few days. Maria was forced to take the veil, and many members of her family were exiled to remote provincial towns.
Godunov then appointed a commission to investigate the death of Dmitrii, which it eventually determined to have been accidental. But when the charge of murder was revived twelve years after the accident, many people chose to believe that Godunov had in fact arranged to have the child killed. In the face of these slanders and intrigues, Boris lost his composure and instituted a terroristic regime bound to horrify everyone who recalled the barbarities of Ivan the Terrible. Inevitably, Godunov’s opponents attracted growing support, but they still could not dislodge him. The intriguers, who apparently included members of the Romanov family, therefore dreamed up another scheme. In a sudden reversal, they claimed that the assassination attempt had failed and that Dmitrii, the ‘legitimate claimant’ to the throne, was alive and eager to assume his rightful position. In 1604, a pretender known as the False Dmitrii appeared in Poland and was received in semi-private audience by King Sigismund, who recognized the potential usefulness of the impostor in subduing Muscovy. The pope and the Jesuits also supported the pretender, who had converted to Catholicism, in the hope that he would deliver the Muscovites over to the Roman Catholic Church.
In October 1604, the pretender led a motley army of three thousand Poles, Ukrainians, and Don Cossacks into Muscovy. The army met with little success until April 1605, when Boris died suddenly, perhaps as a result of poisoning. His son Fedor succeeded to the throne, only to be deposed a few weeks later. Both boyars and commoners went over to the False Dmitrii in large numbers, and in June 1605 the impostor triumphantly entered the Kremlin and butchered the Godunovs. The invaders spared Ksenia, Boris’s daughter, but only because the pretender wanted her as his mistress. A few boyars then summoned Maria Nagaia, the real Dmitrii’s mother, from her convent to the Kremlin, and in an incredible scene she pronounced the impostor her long-lost son. She later admitted that she had lied because she feared for her life.
The next eight years, from 1605 to 1613, are known as the Time of Troubles, a period when the country was literally plunged into anarchy. The pretender quickly alienated his new subjects by inviting numerous Poles to Moscow and barring Russian peasants from the Kremlin grounds. The boyars, ever inventive when their interests were at stake, claimed that the new tsar was not the real tsar after all and organized a Russian army, led by Prince Vasilii Shuisky, to rout the Poles in the citadel. The False Dmitrii tried to escape by jumping out of the palace window, but he injured himself as he landed, was apprehended by Shuisky’s men, and was immediately killed. In May 1606, a crowd of nobles and commoners gathered in Red Square to proclaim Shuisky the Tsar of Russia.
By this time, conditions in the country had deteriorated to such an extent that the new ruler found it impossible to maintain order. Violent class warfare raged in several regions of the state, brigandage was rampant, and both the Poles and the Swedes intervened in Russian affairs. During the next two years a score of new pretenders appeared, all of whom rallied some support among disaffected Muscovites of various social classes.
In 1607, the cause of the second pretender, the most successful of the lot, presented the Polish Catholic clergy with an amusing moral dilemma. The clergy sought to bolster his claim to the Muscovite throne by arranging for Marina Mniszech, wife of the False Dmitrii, to acknowledge him as her husband, but this second impostor was so physically unappealing that when Marina saw him she purportedly shuddered. Nevertheless, she was eventually persuaded to overcome her revulsion, a change of heart occasioned in part by her ambition to be tsaritsa and in part by her father’s desire to be close to the seat of power. Although the priests and her father seemed not the slightest bit disturbed by her lying about the pretender’s identity, they could not suffer Marina to commit the sin of cohabiting with a man they knew was not her husband. A public marriage would have exposed the entire scheme as a fraud, and the dilemma could only be resolved by means of a secret marriage ceremony.
Recognized by his ‘wife’, the new pretender marched into Muscovy in June 1608 and encamped in Tushino, nine miles from the capital. There the ‘Brigand of Tushino’, as he was nicknamed, set up a government and laid siege to Moscow. Two tsars now vied for supremacy, and many nobles who nurtured a grievance against Shuisky moved to the ‘second capital’ to support the Brigand. At this time there emerged a sizable group of boyars, known as the perelety, who regularly shuttled back and forth between the two centers; the allegiance of the perelety at any particular moment depended on the attractiveness of the promises and privileges and land grants made by the ‘rulers’. But the Brigand did not remain in Tushino for long. His relentless plundering of the countryside turned the people against him, and in December 1609 they drove him from the town. A few months later, a Tatar officer killed him in revenge for his alleged murder of the ruler of Kasimov.
To add to the confusion, a rebellious force deposed Shuisky in 1610 and offered the crown to Wladyslaw, son of King Sigismund of Poland, on the understanding that he would convert to Orthodoxy. According to the Russian Chronicles, Wladyslaw ‘was to be reborn to a new life, like a blind man who has recovered his eyesight’. The only difficulty was that Sigismund wanted the crown for himself. He dispatched an army against Muscovy, captured Smolensk, and then entrenched himself in the Kremlin after burning much of Moscow. At the same time, the Swedes occupied Novgorod and offered one of their princes as a candidate for the throne. As one historian put it, by 1611 the Muscovite state was in ‘universal and complete disruption’.1
Salvation came from an unexpected source. In Nizhni Novgorod, a well-to-do butcher and merchant named Kuzma Minin took it upon himself to form a national movement to oust the enemy. An efficient organizer and public-spirited citizen, he convinced the city commune to impose new taxes for the creation of an army of liberation. Other cities joined in the effort, and many lesser nobles who had suffered from the chaos rushed to his support. Minin also had the good sense to call on the able Prince Dmitrii Pozharsky to lead the army.
After four months of preparation, Minin and Pozharsky joined with a Cossack force headed by Prince Trubetskoi and advanced on the capital. Their army of ten thousand men faced Polish forces numbering fifteen thousand, but the Russians cleverly invested the city for three months before launching an attack in October 1612. That assault gave them control of every part of the city except the Kremlin, where the Poles continued to hold out. Cut off from supplies, the defenders could not hope to resist for long, and when the food shortage among the Poles became acute they reportedly resorted to cannibalism. After five days they surrendered, and the critical stage of the struggle for liberation was over. The heroic efforts of Minin and Pozharsky are memorialized by a statue of the two men that stands at the edge of Red Square.
To reestablish authority in the country a man had to be found whom the people would accept as sovereign. Early in 1613 a zemskii sobor was convened, and after much wrangling the delegates settled on sixteen-year-old Michael Romanov, who was distantly related to the old dynasty. The family tie endowed Michael with the mantle of legitimacy, but the boyars who supported the election were also motivated by another consideration. Fedor Sheremetev, member of an old and distinguished family, revealed it in a private letter written at the time: ‘Let us elect Misha [Michael] Romanov, he is young and still not wise, he’ll be agreeable to us.’ Even though the assembly unanimously elected him tsar, Michael initially refused the honor because his mother felt he was too young to cope with the turbulent conditions in the country. Only after a delegation from the zemskii sobor assured her that the nation stood ready to obey Michael and to end the civil strife did he agree to serve. On 11 July 1613, Michael was formally crowned in the Uspenskii Sobor, thus initiating a dynasty that was to rule Russia for three hundred years.
Although none of the three Romanovs who reigned through most of the seventeenth century – Michael (1613–45), Alexis (1645–76), and Fedor (1676–82) – was an inspired leader, the country, exhausted from the chaos of the Time of Troubles, regained its unity and a measure of stability. This is not to say that Russia remained free of fundamental changes and profound conflicts. Without doubt, the most significant change occurred in the legal status of peasants, who comprised at least eighty percent of the population. At roughly the time when serfdom in Western Europe was in decline, that institution became firmly entrenched in Russia. This development not only epitomized the differences between Russia and the West but deeply affected the course of Russian history for the next three centuries.
In the course of the sixteenth century, the Muscovite peasants’ right of free movement and the freedom from obligatory service to the landlords were gradually undermined, though precisely how that happened is still unclear. We do know that with the growth of national expenditure on the numerous wars the government increased the tax burden on peasants and sought to prevent them from moving freely to distant regions where they could escape detection by tax collectors. We also know that peasants tended to obtain a loan (ssuda) from landlords to enable them to cultivate their lands, and, since they had to pay off their debts (usually over many years), they were not free to move to other parts of the country. At the same time, nobles with pomestie became more dependent on a reliable workforce, since constant wars imposed a growing burden of military service upon the nobles, causing their absence from their estates. The less affluent noble landowners faced the additional problem of having their agricultural laborers attracted to the estates of richer landowners. The labor shortage became so severe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century that it was not uncommon for landlords to engage in ‘peasant abductions’. A landlord would pay off a peasant’s debt to another landlord and then triumphantly secure the services of that peasant. These ‘abductions’ provoked considerable controversy between landlords, and to prevent them communal authorities and small landowners would go to such extreme measures as placing the peasants in chains, imposing excessive quit-rents on them, or using force to prevent their departure. Not infrequently, riots broke out over the issue of transferring peasants from one landlord to another.
These were the general circumstances in the countryside at the time that serfdom took hold, but unfortunately we have virtually no documents on how the institution evolved. One school of historians2 contends that the critical event was the issuance by Tsar Fedor (1584–98) of a ukase prohibiting peasants from leaving the land they occupied. Other historians3 reject this theory because it places too much weight on one decree, which has never been located, in explaining a development that took many decades. It seems most likely that serfdom evolved gradually in response to economic pressures on state authorities and nobles, who were intent upon maintaining a steady supply of agrarian labor in the countryside. What we do know is that in 1649, when the General Law Code (Ulozhenie) was published, the institution of serfdom was firmly established and the legal conditions under which a majority of Russians lived were spelled out in some detail. Before describing those conditions, it is worth noting that about twenty percent of the peasants belonged to the category of ‘state peasants’, who were also tied to the land but were economically and in other respects better off than the serfs. Their number increased steadily and by the mid nineteenth century there were more state peasants than landlords’ peasants in Russia.
Russian serfdom is not easy to define, because it both resembled its Western counterpart and yet contained features characteristic of slavery, under which some human beings were the property, pure and simple, of their masters. Russian peasants were serfs in that they could not move from one location to another without formal permission. In return for a plot of land, serfs in Russia had to pay either a quit-rent (obrok) or work for the landlord for a specified number of days – normally two or three – each week (barshchina, comparable to the corvée). Unlike a slave, however, the Russian serf retained a measure of civic individuality. He was a taxpayer, he was entitled to a plot of land, he could not be arbitrarily converted into a household worker, and he could not be deprived of his personal belongings ‘by violence’. Under certain circumstances, the serf was legally entitled to lodge a complaint with the authorities about levies or labor that landlords sought to impose on him.
But the Code of 1649 contained some provisions that gave the landlord the right to treat his serfs as property. For example, if a nobleman or any of his relatives or servants killed a peasant of another noble, the master of the guilty party had to hand over as compensation the ‘best peasant’ under his authority together with the peasant’s wife, children, and property. More important, landlords eventually secured the right to sell their serfs to another landlord with or without land and without keeping intact the serf’s family. The landlord also decided on whether or not his serfs might marry and served as a judge in his domain with the power to order serfs to be flogged, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia. Serfdom in Russia was a harsh institution and came close to slavery.
The economic and social life of many peasants was dominated by the commune (mir), an institution unique to Russia and obscure in its origins. Apparently founded in the fourteenth century by groups of peasants who believed that cooperative farming would be most efficient, the commune in time came to regulate the local affairs of the villages. Its officials, elected by peasant householders, maintained order, regulated the use of arable land, and assumed responsibility for the collection of taxes imposed by the state. About eighty percent of the communes periodically redivided the land among villagers to maintain an equality of allotments assigned to peasant families, whose size would naturally vary over the years.4 Thus, there was no tradition of private landownership among the bulk of the country’s population, and as long as the peasants did not own the land they worked, they lacked the incentive to improve efficiency. This factor as well as the vagaries of Russia’s climate help explain the low level of productivity and low standard of living of the vast majority of the population.
Not surprisingly, peasant unrest was a frequent occurrence. One of the more dramatic eruptions of violence took place in 1670 in the south-eastern regions of the Volga, when Stenka Razin, who hailed from an old, established Cossack family, succeeded in rousing a large number of poor peasants to follow him in a campaign against the boyars and rich landlords in general. A charismatic leader, Razin raised an army of some six thousand men that inflicted several defeats on government troops and within a year captured the city of Astrakhan, where the rebels looted at will and slaughtered many landlords. Razin’s army then marched along the Volga, where several towns (Saratov, Samara), having heard of the atrocities the rebels had committed in Astrakhan, surrendered without putting up any resistance. By the summer of 1670 it seemed as though Razin would march all the way to Moscow. Only now did the government take the uprising seriously. It dispatched a large army, well equipped with artillery, to the war zone, and after some initial setbacks the government’s forces defeated Razin in a major battle near Simbirsk. Razin managed to escape and continued the struggle in what had now turned into a virtual civil war, but in the spring of 1671 he was captured. Government troops brought him to Moscow, apparently with his neck chained to a scaffold mounted on the rear of a wagon. The tsar himself questioned him and then ordered officials to torture him. According to the historian Paul Avrich, Razin was ‘beaten with the knout, his limbs were pulled out of joint, a hot iron was passed over his body, and the crown of his head was shaved and cold water poured on it drop by drop, “which they say causeth very great pain” ’. The government also dealt harshly with the rebels, killing, according to one contemporary estimate, about 100,000 of them. The official brutality was meant to teach the peasants a lesson, but it did not prevent future peasant uprisings, some of them as vast and bloody as Razin’s.
The peasants were not the only social group whose rights were legally defined and constricted by the Ulozhenie of 1649. The premise of the Code, a thoroughly conservative document, was to subordinate all subjects to the state. Concerned, above all, to ensure the army had a steady supply of recruits and the treasury an adequate supply of funds, the government divided the population into hereditary groups, each of which was assigned a specific status and obligations. The burghers were legally bound to remain in the towns where they lived and were granted a monopoly over commerce and industry. The nobility (dvorianstvo) were the only social group granted the right to own estates worked by servile labor, a prized privilege that had the effect of limiting the number of people who could obtain a pomestie. The purpose of this regulation was to reduce the competition for land, which was in short supply. At the same time, the nobles, many of whom were far from affluent, were prohibited from selling themselves into servitude. The purpose of this measure was to ensure an adequate supply of soldiers and state servants. In effect, Muscovy was now a state in which, as the reformer Michael Speransky noted early in the nineteenth century, there were only two estates: ‘slaves of the sovereign, and slaves of the landlords. The former are called free only in regard to the latter.’
It was also a state stubbornly resistant to the very idea of reform. In 1653, when Patriarch Nikon, then a favorite of Tsar Alexis, sought to introduce minor changes in religious ritual and texts, a social convulsion erupted that led to permanent discord within Russian Orthodoxy. Nikon’s purpose was as much political as spiritual: he hoped to bring the Russian liturgy and customs into conformity with those of Constantinople in order to facilitate the planned rapprochement between Muscovy and the Ukraine, where the church had remained faithful to Greek practices. Thus, for example, he proposed that the spelling of ‘Jesus’, incorrectly inscribed in Muscovite texts, be amended; that in making the cross, three rather than two fingers be used; that the ‘Alleluia’ be chanted thrice instead of twice during services; and that religious processions move in the direction of the sun rather than counter to it.
Because of the low educational level of the Russian people and clergy, religious ritual mattered far more to them than dogma. In their eyes the slightest deviation from established practices, such as the reforms advanced by Nikon, amounted to heresy. The archpriest Avvakum, who led the opposition to the changes, recalled his initial reaction to them: ‘We [the zealots of the church] gathered together to think it over. We saw that winter was about to overcome us. Our hearts became cold, and our legs trembled.’
The opposition mounted a campaign against the reforms, to which the patriarch and the government responded with a ruthless campaign of their own. Some of the zealots, including Avvakum, were exiled to Siberia, while others were anathematized, and a feverish hunt was launched for icons that in any way differed from the Byzantine model. Homes were searched for the offending images, which were then publicly destroyed, sometimes by the patriarch himself. By the 1660s the Raskol, or Great Schism, had torn the church asunder and left in its wake a group of dissenters who came to be known as Raskolniki, or Old Believers.
In the meantime, personal differences terminated the relationship between Patriarch Nikon and Tsar Alexis. The arrogant and impetuous manner of the patriarch, and his belief that ecclesiastical supersedes temporal power, thoroughly alienated the tsar. At a church council that Alexis held in his Kremlin palace in 1666–7, he denounced Nikon for innumerable transgressions of Muscovite law and for offenses against the sovereign and the boyars. In a move that officially affirmed the supremacy of the secular ruler over the church, the council deposed Nikon and banished him from Moscow. Yet the campaign for reform continued and was even intensified. The council formally cursed and anathematized all dissenters, and the tsar ordered that the tongues of two recalcitrants be cut out, a punishment then considered fitting for blasphemy. Such interference by the state in essentially ecclesiastical matters accelerated the process of subjugating the Russian Orthodox Church to temporal authorities.
The Old Believers felt that the state hampered the road to eternal salvation, a conviction that bred fanaticism in their ranks. Many dissenters sank into such despair over the state of affairs that they became convinced that the end of the world was imminent. They proclaimed that the apocalypse would occur in 1666 or in 1669, and when both years passed without catastrophe they forecast that the end would come in 1698. They even claimed to know precisely how the ultimate calamity would take place: ‘The sun would be eclipsed, the stars fall from the sky, the earth would be burned up, and on the Day of Judgement the last trumpet blown by the Archangel would summon together the righteous and the unrighteous.’ Confident about the accuracy of their prophesy, many thought it senseless to remain on earth and risk being contaminated by heresy. Above all, they would not recant despite intense government pressure to do so. As a result, between 1672 and 1691 there were thirty-seven horrifying mass immolations in which more than twenty thousand dissenters voluntarily burned themselves to death. In addition, the government burned many Old Believers at the stake, among them the archpriest Avvakum.
Far from unifying Russian Orthodoxy, Nikon’s reforms generated irreconcilable conflicts among the people. It has been estimated that in 1889 there were some thirteen million dissenters, among them Orthodoxy’s most devout followers, out of a total population of about ninety million. Moreover, the religious schism of the 1660s reinforced the practice of governmental persecution of religious minorities, a practice that remained more or less a permanent feature of Russian state policy until the late twentieth century.
The seventeenth century, which had witnessed an array of unprecedented disasters, ended with the reign of a person who was in many ways the most impressive and innovative tsar in Russian history. Peter the Great, as he came to be known, contended that if Russia was to develop into a powerful and enlightened nation, many ancient customs and traditions would have to be abandoned and extensive reforms of the country’s institutions on the Western European model would have to be implemented. It was a worthy and even noble vision of modernization and Westernization, but unfortunately for Russia, Peter had little understanding of human nature, and it never occurred to him that he might be able to persuade his people, many of them, to be sure, ignorant and superstitious, of the desirability of rapid change by means other than raw compulsion. In the end, his attempt to ‘civilize Russia with the Knout’ failed and he did not succeed in ‘binding together a nation lacking in cohesion’. Nonetheless, it must be said that hardly an institution of national significance remained unaffected by his initiatives. He laid the foundations of modern Russia.
Peter was physically and otherwise a gargantuan figure. Almost seven feet tall, he had great physical strength and remarkable manual dexterity, and his interests were astonishingly broad. He claimed to have mastered fourteen trades as well as surgery and dentistry. When courtiers and servants took sick they tried to conceal it from Peter, for if he thought that medical attention was needed he would gather his instruments and offer his services. Among his personal belongings Peter left a sackful of teeth, testimony to his thriving dental practice. Peter was also a man with a strong sadistic streak. He delighted, for example, in forcing all his guests, including the ladies, to drink vodka straight – the way he liked it – and in large quantities. Johann Korb, the secretary of the Austrian embassy in Moscow from 1698 to 1699, described a particularly gruesome incident at one of these festive occasions: ‘Boyar Golowin has, from his cradle, a natural horror of salad and vinegar; so the Czar directing Colonel Chambers to hold him tight, forced salad and vinegar into his mouth and nostrils, until the blood flowing from his nose succeeded his violent coughing.’
Peter’s personality, like that of Ivan the Terrible (whom he greatly admired), was molded largely by traumatic childhood experiences. His mother, Natalia Naryshkin, was the second wife of Tsar Alexis, the second Romanov ruler. From the moment she moved into the Kremlin early in 1671, Natalia had been obliged to contend with the animosity of the Miloslavskys, relatives of Alexis’s first wife, who had died in 1669. As a result, Peter, who was born in 1672, spent his first four years in a tense atmosphere. The situation was compounded in 1676 when Alexis died; Fedor, Peter’s half-brother, succeeded to the throne and the Miloslavskys took control of the Kremlin.
The new ruler, however, was sickly and his death in 1682 stirred a serious crisis over the succession. Peter’s other half-brother, Ivan, was entitled to the throne, but everyone knew that he could not possibly govern. Aside from being mentally deficient, he was virtually blind and suffered from a speech defect and epilepsy. The nobles therefore ignored his claim and proclaimed the ten-year-old Peter tsar on the understanding that his mother would act as regent during his minority. But the Miloslavskys refused to be shunted aside and appealed to the streltsy (specially trained musketeers), who staged a three-day riot in their support. Some of the most dramatic scenes took place on the Porch of Honor in the Kremlin, the striking entrance to the royal palace that was covered with scarlet carpets on festive occasions. In the hope of calming the streltsy, Natalia courageously appeared at the top of the stairs together with Peter and Ivan. But the soldiers refused to end their rebellion; they demanded that the tsaritsa hand over to them her foster father, the aged Artamon Matveiev. When she complied, they hurled him into the square, where he was cut to pieces in full view of Peter, who watched the gory proceedings without betraying a trace of emotion. The streltsy continued their rampage, brutally murdering more than a dozen people. The ghastly disorders came to an end only when it was agreed to make Sofia Miloslavsky, Peter’s half-sister, regent and both Peter and Ivan co-tsars, a novel arrangement that Sofia claimed was divinely inspired. After this triumph by the Miloslavskys, Natalia and Peter moved to the village of Preobrazhensk, some three miles from the center of Moscow. The horrors of 1682 remained indelibly inscribed in Peter’s mind and seem to have bred within him a moral callousness that became ever more pronounced as he matured.
At Preobrazhensk, Peter received a formal education of only the most rudimentary kind, but he was highly intelligent, had a fine memory and remarkable curiosity, especially in regard to things mechanical, and therefore educated himself in those fields that appealed to him. Gifted with his hands, he quickly acquired a certain proficiency in carpentry, masonry, and metalwork. Sailing and boatbuilding also intrigued him, but his greatest passion was to ‘play’ with live soldiers. At the age of eleven he procured guns, lead, powder, and shot for his soldiers and within a few years built his own six-hundred-man army, the nucleus of the future imperial guards.
One night during the summer of 1689 Peter received the alarming news that Sofia planned to have herself crowned tsaritsa and that she had dispatched several companies of streltsy to arrest him. Without bothering to get dressed, Peter leaped on a horse and raced off to the monastery-fortress of Holy Trinity, forty miles from Preobrazhensk. Sofia, who had in fact lost popularity among the musketeers, found herself unable to mobilize them in support of her seizure of power. Consequently, Peter and a group of loyal soldiers managed to crush the plot without firing a shot. He sent Sofia to a convent, exiled some of her advisers, and had one of them hanged, but for about seven years he allowed his mother to run the government and only in 1696 did Peter assume the burdens of power.
In the interim he was a regular visitor to the so-called ‘German suburb’ that lay between Preobrazhensk and the Kremlin. Between 1689 and 1694 he spent much of his time there with Dutch and English merchants, whom he pumped for information about the latest mechanical devices and political developments in Europe. It was there that his interest in the West was first seriously aroused.
As a sovereign, Peter’s most distinctive trait was his activism; in foreign as well as domestic affairs he continually initiated new policies. Although not a profound thinker, he had the capacity to grasp difficult problems and devise solutions. His prodigious energy and drive are perhaps best exemplified by the fact that he rarely stayed in any one place more than three months; he insisted on being at the center of the action, whether it was the battlefield, the negotiating table, the torture chamber, or a shipyard. He made heavy demands on himself and his people, but not primarily for reasons of personal glorification. Unlike his predecessors, he did not identify himself with the state but considered himself its first servant, and he justified his exacting policies on the grounds that they promoted the interests of Russia. In view of these extraordinary exertions, as well his frequent debaucheries, it is not surprising that he developed a nervous twitch on the left side of his face that sometimes distorted into a grimace.
Peter was also highly eccentric, a trait he demonstrated most dramatically in 1697 when he visited the West, an unprecedented undertaking for a Muscovite monarch. One of his purposes was to seek allies among European kings for a military crusade against Turkey, but his major reason was to study Western industrial techniques, especially shipbuilding, and to engage skilled craftsmen and naval officers to send back to Russia. Because the tsar wanted to feel free to work in the industrial establishments he visited, he traveled under the name of Peter Mikhailov, an alias that deceived almost no one.
Peter’s five months in Holland were filled with diverse activities: he inspected factories, workshops, hospitals, schools, military installations, and an observatory. In each place he asked detailed questions, and whenever possible he took part in the work, at least for a short while. He even attended lectures by famous anatomists and insisted on watching them dissect cadavers.
Early in 1698 he moved on to England, where, after a cordial welcome by King William III, he again made the rounds, including a visit to the House of Lords. On hearing the interpreter’s report on the debates, he declared, ‘When subjects thus do speak the truth unto the Sovereign, it is goodly hearing. Let us learn in this of the English.’ This was mere talk, of course, but Peter was serious about studying English methods of shipbuilding, and for this purpose he settled for a few weeks in Deptford, which was close to a government dockyard. In the spring Peter returned to the Continent, arriving in Vienna in May 1698. He intended to proceed to Venice, but news of another conspiracy fomented by his half-sister and a new rebellion led by four streltsy regiments caused him to change his plans. By this time he had been abroad for fifteen months, and he rightly feared that if he prolonged his absence he might lose power. In any case, he had every reason to be satisfied with his accomplishments, for in addition to improving substantially his technical knowledge, he had recruited 750 specialists in naval affairs, engineering, and medicine and had purchased an impressive array of military supplies.
Within a day of his return Peter shocked his Muscovite subjects by personally cutting off the beards of leading nobles as well as the long sleeves of their surcoats. Somewhat later he issued decrees requiring everyone except peasants and clergymen to appear clean-shaven and wear Hungarian or German dress on pain of having to pay an annual tax. Another measure that disturbed the people was the Westernization of the Russian calendar: the New Year was to be celebrated on 1 January instead of 1 September, and beginning with the new century the years would be counted not from the presumed date of the world’s creation but from that of Christ’s birth. Thus, the year 7208 became 1700. Peter reasoned that only by means of these seemingly trivial innovations could the Russian people rid themselves of their backward ‘Asiatic’ customs and become energetic, enterprising citizens.
The people, especially the lower classes, did not take kindly to Peter’s reforms. The beard in particular contributed significantly to preserving the ‘image of God’ in which they believed man to be made. They thought that by shaving it off they would be reduced to the level of cats and dogs and would court eternal damnation. The depth of feeling on the subject is amusingly illustrated by the following incident. In 1705, two young men approached the Metropolitan of Rostov for advice, complaining that they would sooner lose their heads than their beards. The prelate countered with a rhetorical question: ‘Which of the twain, I pray you, would grow again the more easily?’
A further cause for dismay among Peter’s subjects was his brutal treatment of the rebellious streltsy. Peter lost no time in initiating extensive investigations, but no one seemed able or willing to answer all the questions to his satisfaction. Consequently, he began to doubt everyone’s loyalty and decided to massacre subjects indiscriminately in Red Square. According to some accounts, the tsar himself participated in the executions. On one occasion, he is said to have cut off eighty-four rebel heads with a sword. In all, over twelve hundred streltsy were exterminated, and many of their heads were left in the streets of Moscow over winter in order to terrorize the population. Peter was unquestionably a tyrant, who early in his reign resolved to make it clear that he would insist on absolute obedience to his word. Local rebellions, some quite massive, from time to time raised doubts about the loyalty of some of his subjects, but after 1698 his authority was sufficiently secure to allow him to concentrate on military affairs and domestic reform, his chief interests.
Russia waged war, usually at Peter’s instigation, during most of his thirty-six-year reign. In the period from 1689 to 1725, the country enjoyed only one full year and thirteen isolated months of peace. Determined to bring about the political unification of all the Russian people and to rectify his nation’s exposed frontiers in the south and west, Peter became entangled in military conflicts with Sweden, Turkey, and finally Persia. Occasionally, he suffered painful defeats, but on balance Russia emerged from the encounters a far stronger nation.
His most costly and most rewarding war, the one with Sweden, lasted from 1700 to 1721 and is known as the Great Northern War. Sweden was then one of the leading European powers, and until 1718 her armies were commanded by the brilliant and daring strategist King Charles XII. When Peter defeated the Swedes in 1709 in the famous Battle of Poltava, he not only saved Russia from conquest but propelled the country into the forefront of European diplomacy. At the war’s end, twelve years later, when the Treaty of Nystad was signed, Sweden was thoroughly humbled. Russia gained control of the Baltic coast from Riga to Vyborg, having confirmed possession of the provinces of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, and a part of Karelia. Thus consolidated, Russia’s position as a major European power has survived to the present day.
Peter fêted the victory in grand style. For seven days and nights, he compelled the leading nobles to remain in the senate building to celebrate. He himself, ‘half-demented with joy at having brought the struggle to a successful issue, and forgetful alike of years and gout . . . danced upon the tables [and] sang songs’. Then, allegedly in response to the urgent pleas of the senate, he agreed to accept the titles of emperor and ‘Father of the Country’. This marked the official birth of the Russian empire.
These festivities took place not in the Kremlin, but in Peter’s new capital, St. Petersburg, which he called his ‘paradise’ and ‘darling’. Three considerations prompted him to build a city in the swamps at the head of the Gulf of Finland near the mouth of the Neva river: his love for the sea, a desire to perpetuate his memory, and hatred for the Kremlin. For twenty years beginning in 1703 the royal coffers were ransacked to create this ‘great window for Russia to look out at Europe’ or, as some have called it, Russia’s ‘window to the West’. The conquests ratified by the Treaty of Nystad gave Peter the territorial security for his capital that he had so persistently sought.
Because of the cold, damp climate around St. Petersburg, Peter had to rely heavily on forced labor to complete the grueling task of erecting the new capital. There was much grumbling among the workers, who suffered from various illnesses, especially dysentery, but Peter would not be deterred. The historian Kliuchevsky did not exaggerate when he wrote: ‘It would be difficult to find in the annals of military history any battle that claimed more lives than the number of workers who died in [the building of] St. Petersburg.’ And the financial cost ran into millions of rubles. Peter engaged the distinguished French architect Jean-Baptiste Leblond and other Western experts to design the city and its palaces, and paid them all extraordinarily large sums of money. Leblond’s chief work was the tsar’s country residence at Peterhof. With its formal gardens, terraces, fountains, and cascades it resembles the palace gardens at Versailles. St. Petersburg became the official capital of Russia in 1718 and remains to this day one of the world’s most beautiful cities.
Peter took rather novel measures to bolster the country’s military strength. He built a sizable navy, a significant innovation, since Russia had never before aspired to being a naval power. The eight-hundred-ship fleet contributed substantially to Sweden’s defeat, though it should be noted that the navy did not long survive Peter as an effective force. More lasting was his creation of a standing army that by 1725 consisted of roughly 200,000 troops. Its effectiveness was enhanced by Peter’s insistence on rigorous, up-to-date training, the use of the most modern weapons, and the hiring of foreign officers.
None of Peter’s ambitious projects could be implemented without money, which was always in short supply. From 1705 to 1707, for example, the government’s expenditure exceeded its income by twenty percent. To cope with this problem, Peter repeatedly overhauled the system of taxation, constantly increasing the burden on the common people, and in 1724 he imposed a soul tax on all males of the non-privileged classes. This tax, which in effect extended serfdom by abolishing the legal distinctions between serfs and other groups of bondsmen, was a fiscal triumph: direct taxes now brought in 4.5 million rubles instead of 1.8 million. By granting various exemptions and privileges Peter also stimulated the development of industry during the first decades of the eighteenth century, but despite initial gains, many of these enterprises went out of business by mid century owing to the inferior grade of their products.
One of Peter’s most enduring reforms was the establishment in 1722 of the Table of Ranks, a key feature of Peter’s determination to promote the idea that service to the state was a subject’s highest calling and paramount obligation and to encourage efficiency. According to the Table of Ranks, there were to be fourteen ranks in three areas of service – the military, the civil, and the court – and theoretically at least, and often in practice, the criteria for advancement were to be merit and length of service. All who entered state service were to start their careers at the bottom, at rank 14, and commoners who reached rank 8 would be accorded the honor of hereditary nobility, which meant that their children would be nobles. In stipulating a gradual rise in status and regular salary for state servants, Peter sought to encourage lifelong service for all officials. The same concern prompted Peter to prohibit nobles who took public posts from returning periodically to their estates to manage them.
Finally, Peter reorganized the administrative structure of the state. He granted urban communities a degree of self-government, replaced the sluggish central departments with Swedish-style ‘colleges’, and established a senate that served as the highest judicial and administrative organ and was to govern when the tsar was away from the capital. To promote greater efficiency, he also divided the country into provinces, which in turn were divided into districts. In 1721 he completed the process of subjugating the church to the state by substituting for the patriarchate the ‘Most Holy Governing Synod’, a body of ten clergymen appointed by the tsar. The chief procurator, a layman whose job it was to supervise the work of the synod, was also appointed by the monarch. It is noteworthy that in formulating many of these reforms Peter relied on the advice of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, the German mathematician and philosopher who supplied the tsar with numerous concrete suggestions in return for a handsome annual retainer.
Although they were by no means fully successful, and although many left their mark primarily on the privileged class, the Petrine reforms are generally considered to have raised the quality of government in Russia. Their very durability – some lasted as long as two centuries – supports this conclusion. In addition, it was Peter who placed the idea of Westernization on the agenda of Russian historical development. Henceforth the merit of this idea, as much as any other, would be debated by those Russians who speculated about their country’s future.
Much as he prided himself on his accomplishments, Peter was constantly anguished by one question that he was never able to answer to his own satisfaction: would he be succeeded by a man capable of carrying on his work? His rightful heir, Alexis, born to his first wife, Eudoxia, in 1690, turned out to be lazy and totally indifferent to affairs of state. In any case, the relationship between Peter and Alexis deteriorated into open and bitter antagonism. In 1718, Peter charged his son with having conspired to overthrow him in a coup d’état. The evidence in support of the charge was far from conclusive, but that did not prevent Peter from investigating and torturing numerous suspects. Alexis himself was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by a special council of 127 officials summoned by the tsar. But before the sentence could be carried out Alexis died in the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, apparently from wounds inflicted by his torturers. The government announced that he had succumbed to apoplexy, but it was widely believed he had been murdered.
Alexis’s demise only compounded the problem of succession. In May 1719, Peter’s surviving son died at the age of three, and the tsar was again left to ponder the future of his realm. In 1722, Peter abolished the existing rules of succession and decreed that henceforth the incumbent could appoint his heir. For some reason Peter himself failed to do so, and the upshot was that after his death early in 1725 the succession became a subject of precisely the sort of passionate controversy that he had hoped to forestall.