The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Khmelnitsky won the backing of the khan of the Crimea, whose superb Tatar horsemen enabled him to defeat a series of Polish armies. In December 1648, he rode a white horse into Kiev and declared himself not just the hetman of a new Cossack state but the grand prince of Rus. This astonishing ascendancy did not last long: when his Crimean allies deserted him and the Poles defeated him, he turned in desperation to a new protector. In January 1654, he swore fidelity to Tsar Alexei, who in return recognized Khmelnitsky’s hetmanate. For Russians, this was the moment Ukraine became theirs; for Ukrainians, the occasion when Russia recognized their independence.* In fact, it was just an expedient military alliance in a war sponsored by Alexei to attack Poland and to conquer Ukraine.7

  Once Khmelnitsky had agreed to contribute 20,000 Cossacks against Poland, Alexei declared war. On 23 April 1654, in a state of religious exaltation, thousands of troops assembled in the Kremlin to be blessed by Nikon. ‘When battle commences you and your men must go forward singing on God’s mission. Go into battle joyfully!’ wrote Alexei to his general, Prince Nikita Trubetskoi, sounding like his contemporary Oliver Cromwell. Alexei was going to war too: he therefore bestowed on Nikon the title ‘great sovereign’ that had been held by his grandfather: perhaps their relationship resembled that of Michael and Filaret.

  On 18 May, accompanied by Morozov and Miloslavsky, the tsar, still just twenty-five years old, led his Great Regiment out of Moscow towards Smolensk. Dressed in a pearl-encrusted robe and bearing orb and sceptre, he rode in a gilded carriage lined in crimson satin and drawn by horses with pearl-set hooves, escorted by twenty-four hussars and twenty-five standards, his personal ensign the golden eagle fluttering overhead. He laid siege to Smolensk and started to bombard the fortifications, Alexei directing the guns with a ballistic talent that would be shared by his son Peter the Great. On 16 August, he tried to storm the walls, but the Poles detonated a mine under a tower filled with Russian troops – ‘Don’t grieve about the assault – we gave them a beating,’ Alexei reassured his sisters in Moscow. On 23 September, Smolensk fell, followed by thirty other towns, and his experience allowed the tsar to assess his entourage more rigorously: he still loved Morozov but he despised Miloslavsky. ‘Two spirits are riding with us,’ he complained; ‘one exudes cheer, reliability and hope, the other is sultry, stormy and vile: how can one trust two-faced men?’

  In February 1657, the Muscovites, who had just recovered from an outbreak of plague, welcomed Alexei as he paraded sixty Polish standards – the first tsar since Ivan the Terrible to celebrate such a victory. He now found Nikon ever more domineering, but the patriarch remained as great sovereign when Alexei went back to war and captured Minsk and swathes of today’s Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. He proudly added White Russia to his list of domains. But, alarmed by his victories, Sweden invaded to spoil the party.

  It made sense to negotiate with Poland and turn his guns on Sweden, but, at Nikon’s insistence, Alexei went to war against the Swedes before he had secured peace with the Poles. Sweden was a sophisticated European power, tempered by the Thirty Years War – and Alexei found himself in a quagmire. Then there was the problem of Nikon, who now asserted the superiority of the patriarch over the tsar.

  The glowering priest and the young autocrat openly clashed during a service. ‘You’re a quarrelsome peasant,’ said the tsar.

  ‘Why do you revile me?’ answered the patriarch.

  Alexei had to back Nikon’s suppression of all resistance to his religious reforms, but his entourage must have grumbled to him about the patriarch’s intolerable self-righteousness. Alexei ceased to consult him, half revering, half loathing this ‘son of a bitch’. The military situation was deteriorating. On the death of Khmelnitsky, the Poles offered the Cossacks a better deal than the Russians and they switched sides with disastrous consequences. Yet Nikon, who had promoted the war, now revelled in the plenitude of the great sovereign, lecturing the tsar as if he were a neophyte. He lived magnificently amid his own quasi-royal court, and his 30,000-rouble robes were so jewel-encrusted that he struggled to stand in them. There were rumours of lissom nuns cavorting in his cloisters.8

  The courtier must not only obey the monarch’s orders but anticipate his unspoken wishes, wishes that the monarch may not even recognize himself. Sensing Alexei’s resentment, the boyars suddenly united in hostility to Nikon. Alexei’s mother’s family, the Streshnevs, loathed him – Simon Streshnev named a lolloping mastiff ‘Nikon’ and taught it to make the patriarchal blessing with its paw – a sign of the way the patriarch was regarded in the tsar’s intimate circle.

  On 4 July 1658, Alexei did not invite Nikon to a banquet for the visiting Georgian king Teimuraz.* Nikon sent one of his courtiers, Prince Dmitri Meshchersky, to inquire – surely it was an oversight. Meshchersky found the chief armourer Bogdan Khitrovo, nicknamed the ‘Whispering Favourite’, guarding the Red Staircase, brandishing his jewel-encrusted staff of office to hold back importuning crowds. He punched Meshchersky.

  ‘You shouldn’t strike me – I’m here on duty.’

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Khitrovo, who knew perfectly well.

  ‘The patriarch’s servitor.’

  ‘Don’t make so much of yourself. Why should we respect the patriarch?’ and with that he smashed him on the head with his baton, sending him bleeding back to Nikon. The patriarch was next confronted by the boyar Prince Yuri Romodanovsky who told him, ‘You insult the tsar’s majesty. You call yourself Great Sovereign.’

  ‘The tsar gave me that title . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ retorted Romodanovsky, ‘and now the Tsarish Majesty forbids it.’

  The old showman tried to call the tsar’s bluff in public, a gambit that could have cost him his life. In the middle of his service in the Dormition Cathedral, he declared, ‘I can no longer be your shepherd . . . The Great Sovereign has violated his oath . . . I have to leave this temple and this city.’ Before a scandalized congregation, he then changed into a monk’s cowl and waited for the tsar to change his mind. But Alexei did not. Nikon left for New Jerusalem. But he had one more card to play.9

  Alexei was a different man from the one who had launched the crusade in 1654. He returned a confident warlord who had seen how the Polish lords lived. He commissioned an English agent to buy tapestries, trees, lace, singing parrots and royal carriages to embellish his newly sumptuous palaces and hired mineralogists, alchemists, glassmakers and an English doctor, Samuel Collins, who soon noticed that ‘he begins to make his court and edifices more stately, to furnish his rooms with tapestries and contrive a house of pleasure’. Engaging 2,000 new foreign officers, he reformed the army and studied ballistics technology.

  Rid of Nikon, he realized that every ruler needs a chancellery to enforce his orders, creating a new Office of Secret Affairs. When boyars missed his dawn church services he registered their names and had them collected with hands bound behind their backs and, wearing their robes, tossed into the river where they might easily have drowned or died of the cold. ‘This is your reward’, he laughed, ‘for preferring to sleep with your wives instead of celebrating the lustre of this blessed day.’ He relished this despotic bullying, writing to his friends, ‘I have made it my custom to duck courtiers every morning in a pond. The baptism in the Jordan is well done. I duck four or five, sometimes a dozen, whoever fails to report on time for my inspection.’

  But these games were deadly serious. He put the old boyars in their place. When he had to promote a military bungler like Prince Ivan Khovansky, nicknamed the ‘Windbag’, the tsar did so ‘even though everyone called you a fool’. He indulgently reprimanded the Whispering Favourite Khitrovo for keeping a harem of Polish sex slaves and he was infuriated by the whoremongering of his own father-in-law Miloslavsky: Alexei told him either to give up sex or to marry fast.

  Now the war lurched towards disaster. The Poles and Swedes made peace with each other, so that Poland and its Cossack and Tatar allies could turn on Russia. In June 1659, Alexei’s army was
routed by a Polish– Cossack–Tatar coalition, losing as many as 40,000 men, and his gains in Ukraine and Livonia. But the tsar had found a brilliant new minister to guide him out of this crisis: Afanasy Ordyn-Nashchokin, son of a poor noble from Pskov, secured peace with the Swedes at Kardis. Alexei consulted the Council. There the bovine Miloslavsky suggested that if he were appointed to supreme command he’d bring back the king of Poland in chains.

  ‘What!’ Alexei shouted. ‘You have the effrontery, you boor, to boast of your skills? When have you ever borne arms? Pray tell us the fine actions you have fought! You old fool . . . Or do you presume to mock me impertinently?’ Seizing him by the beard, he slapped him across the face, dragged him out of the Golden Chamber and slammed the doors behind him.

  Nashchokin* recommended not just peace with Poland but a real alliance if not a union under Alexei as king of Poland. But meanwhile his general Prince Grigory Romodanovsky struggled to hold on to eastern Ukraine. When he did well, Alexei praised him, but when he failed he received a furious epistle that must have made his hair stand on end: ‘May the Lord God reward you for your satanic service . . . thricedamned and shameful hater of Christians, true son of Satan and friend of devils, you shall fall into the bottomless pit for failing to send those troops. Remember, traitor, by whom you were promoted and rewarded and on whom you depend! Where can you hide? Where can you flee?’

  The people too were feeling the strain.10

  On 25 July 1662, Alexei and his family were attending church at his favourite Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow when a huge crowd started calling for the head of his father-in-law Miloslavsky, who as Treasury boss was hated for devaluing the coinage with copper. Sending his family to hide in the tsarina’s apartments, Alexei emerged to reason with the crowd while he summoned reinforcements from Moscow, not realizing the capital was in the hands of the rioters and that more protesters were approaching.

  Alexei was on his horse ready to ride back to Moscow when this furious sea of humanity washed over him. He was manhandled, the tsarina insulted, and his retainers were about to draw their swords when his troops charged the crowd from behind. ‘Save me from these dogs!’ cried Alexei and spurred his horse. The mob was driven into the river and many were arrested. Alexei attended the torture chambers and specified the punishments: ‘ten or twenty thieves’ hanged at once, eighteen left to rot on gibbets along the roads into Moscow and a hundred at Kolomenskoe; tongues were ripped out, bodies dismembered.

  When he was riding through Moscow, he wielded the tsar’s traditional steel-pointed staff, the very one with which Ivan the Terrible had murdered his son. When a man rushed through his guards, Alexei killed him with the staff. It turned out that the man had not been paid. ‘I killed an innocent man,’ but the commander who didn’t pay him ‘is guilty of his blood’ and was dismissed.

  The Copper Riot shook the tsar, who suffered palpitations, nosebleeds and indigestion which his doctors Collins and Engelhardt treated with laxatives, opium and hellebore to slow the heart. Yet his boisterous activity shows an astonishingly tough constitution, as his brood of sons proved. His eldest was also named Alexei and now Maria gave birth to another son, Fyodor. When the carefully educated eldest turned thirteen, he was presented as the heir.11

  On the night of 18 December 1664, a convoy of ten sleighs swept into the snow-covered Kremlin, halting outside the Dormition Cathedral. Out stepped Nikon. Alexei ordered his immediate departure, but this mysterious visitation exposed the seething conflicts around the tsar.*

  Alexei ordered that everyone must obey the new rules of Orthodox ritual – or die. He tried conciliating the leader of the Old Believers, Avvakum, but he remained defiant. Two well-connected female courtiers, Feodosia Morozova, sister-in-law of his late minister, and Princess Eudoxia Urusova, were obdurate. They were banned from court, then arrested and offered liberty if they just crossed themselves in the new way, but when Alexei visited them in the dungeons Morozova defiantly gave him the two fingers. Alexei was determined not to create martyrs, so he had them tortured then starved to death. Avvakum had his wife and children buried alive in front of him; he himself was just exiled. But across Russia, Old Believers were burned alive. Many fled to Siberia and to the Cossack badlands; some fortified the Arctic island monastery of Solovki.

  In December 1666, Nikon was tried and found guilty, deposed as patriarch and exiled. The destruction of Nikon removed any rival to the tsar, who became the sacred vicegerent of God on earth, while the Church became simply the religious arm of the monarchy. As this problem was solved, in January 1667, Nashchokin negotiated peace with Poland, winning Smolensk and (for an initial period of two years) Kiev. The Cossack hetmanate was divided between Poland and Russia, and, six centuries after the fall of Kievan Rus, the reconquest of Ukraine had begun. Nashchokin was promoted to chief minister. Just as Alexei added Little Russia to his titles, tragedy swooped on the new-minted ‘tsar of all the Russias’.*12

  On 3 March 1669, the forty-three-year-old Tsarina Maria, after twenty-one years of marriage, gave birth to her thirteenth child, but the child and the mother died soon afterwards. The tsar’s elder sons, Alexei Alexeievich, thirteen, his heir, and the frail Fyodor attended the funeral. There were also two sickly toddlers, Simon and Ivan. In June, Simon died. Alexei had earlier taken a mistress, Ariana, who bore him a son, Ivan Musin-Pushkin. But he needed more legitimate heirs.

  In November, Khitrovo, chief of the Great Court Office, organized a brideshow. Alexei viewed thirteen maidens in small groups of two to eight girls. Then on 17 January 1670, the tsarevich Alexei died of an illness, leaving Fyodor as heir (followed by the handicapped baby Ivan). A new marriage was imperative. An air of panic pervaded the brideshows. In April, the tsar narrowed his choice to Ovdotia Beliaeva and Natalya Naryshkina. Beliaeva was backed by the tsar’s eldest sister, the spinster Irina, now aged forty-two, while Naryshkina was the ward and niece by marriage of Alexei’s boyhood friend and courtier Arteem Matveev.

  Beliaeva was still the front runner, though Khitrovo wondered if her ‘skinny arms’ implied a lack of fecundity. Her uncle tried to persuade the official doctor to attest to her healthiness while accusing Khitrovo of witchcraft. Just as the tsar seemed about to choose Beliaeva, two anonymous letters were found in the Hall of Facets and the Tower Hall of the Kremlin accusing Naryshkina of unknown but diabolical machinations probably involving the bewitchment of the tsar – and alleging she had flirted with a Polish nobleman before she came to Moscow.

  The tsar ordered the arrest of Beliaeva’s uncle and female servants and relatives who were all tortured but revealed nothing. The letter-writer was never discovered, but the perpetrator was surely the tsar’s sister and her two Miloslavsky cousins. Instead of destroying Naryshkina, they destroyed their own candidate. Alexei saw Naryshkina again, possibly at Matveev’s house, where he may have held some of the viewings.

  Matveev, who had been educated with Alexei then had commanded his bodyguard and run his intelligence service, lived differently from the other Muscovites – and his protégée seemed different too. Matveev was married to Mary Hamilton, daughter of a Scottish Catholic refugee from Puritan England, who was not hidden in a terem but was educated, well dressed and free spoken in a house that was a treasure trove of Western sophistication, inhabited by actors and musicians, decorated with paintings, and even mirrors, usually banned in the terem.

  The eighteen-year-old Natalya Naryshkina, who had ‘dark wide eyes, rounded sweet face, high forehead, whole figure beautiful, and limbs well proportioned’, was the daughter of a colonel from Smolensk related to Matveev’s wife. ‘I’ve found a suitable mate in you, Little Pigeon,’ said the tsar. Encouraged by Tsarevna Irina and the Miloslavskys, the families of the other girls now accused Matveev and Khitrovo of enchanting the tsar and bewitching the doctors with sorcery to reject their daughters. Sorcery was often a symptom of political conspiracy. Alexei personally ran the investigation, writing on one of the accusations: ‘Save me Lord from the sly, th
e iniquitous!’ A reference to his sister? If so, she failed again. In spring 1670, as Alexei prepared to marry Natalya, a Cossack freebooter named Stenka Razin led an army of runaway serfs and Old Believers up the Volga towards Moscow.13

  At the tsar’s wedding on 22 January 1671, Natalya Naryshkina was ‘blooming with youth and beauty’, but his eldest daughter was older than the bride. His six surviving daughters were kept in monastic splendour and teeth-gnashing boredom in the Terem Palace, but Alexei had had them educated. The most intelligent of them, the thirteen-year-old Sophia, especially hated the bride and her Naryshkins, who threatened to displace the Miloslavskys as the leading family at court.

  On 16 June, Alexei celebrated the defeat of the Cossack uprising of Stenka Razin in a very different ceremony. Razin was tortured on the platform in Red Square, to Alexei’s gruesome specifications: he was knouted, his limbs were dislocated and forced back into their sockets, he was burned with a red-hot iron and cold water was dripped on to his head, drop by drop, before he was dismembered, quartered alive, beheaded and his innards fed to dogs. But the legend of Razin would long haunt the Romanovs.

  The wedding changed everything. The new tsarina’s patron, Matveev, took over the government* while the two Miloslavskys were despatched to govern distant provinces. On 30 May 1672, Natalya gave birth to a sturdy son, Peter. Alexei celebrated by promoting her father and Matveev to lords-in-waiting. The Ottomans, suddenly resurgent after decades of harem intrigues, invaded Poland where Cossacks acclaimed a new impostor as the tsar’s dead son Simon, a frightening echo of the Troubles. Alexei dreamed of being ‘an all-conquering emperor to drive the Turks out of Christian lands’ and sent troops into Ukraine. The Cossacks surrendered the False Simon, who in September 1674 was tortured by Alexei’s ministers to reveal his backers. In Red Square, his limbs were sliced off and the twitching trunk was impaled up his rectum – a warning to all False Simons.14