The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  As he negotiated with the West in the face of the new Ottoman threat, Alexei started to remodel his palaces, probably inspired by the magnificence of Louis XIV, the Sun King. He commissioned the first play ever performed for a tsar and at Preobrazhenskoe, one of his constellation of suburban palaces around Moscow, he built the first tsarist theatre and watched a play artfully based on his own romance with Natalya, The Comedy of Artaxerxes (which the tsarina and the children could enjoy through the grilles of a partition). This was such a success that he built a Kremlin theatre and a new Palace of Amusements* on the site of old Miloslavsky’s mansion, and gave Natalya twenty-two more dwarfs.

  The tsarina started to open the curtain of her carriage and show her face to the public, then she went out unveiled in an open carriage and emerged from behind the screen at church, while Alexei held parties at which he ‘drank them all drunk’. Amid the fun, there was a flash of future glory: as Alexei held a diplomatic reception, there was a scuffling outside the hall and the door was kicked open by the irrepressible little Peter who ran in – pursued by his mother.

  While the tsar and his young wife visited their pleasure palaces, Peter followed in a ‘small carriage all encrusted with gold’, while ‘four dwarfs rode alongside and another behind, all riding miniature horses’. But Peter was four and the heir was now the sickly teenager Fyodor. As the Miloslavskys plotted against the Naryshkins, it seemed unlikely Fyodor would outlive the energetic tsar.

  When the tsar enjoyed his young family, he directed a small war against the 500 armed Old Believers who had fortified the Solovki island monastery in the Arctic. On 22 January 1676, he received the news that his troops had stormed it. During a comedy that night in his new theatre, Alexei, still only forty-seven, fell ill, his body swelling up alarmingly. Matveev, head of the Pharmacy, supervised the medicines. The drugs were made up by the doctors, then in front of everyone each potion was tasted first by the doctors, next by Matveev, then by the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and if all showed no signs of poison, the tsar himself drank – and Matveev finished the draught. But nothing could save the tsar from dying of renal and cardiac failure.

  ‘When I ruled the empire,’ he reflected, ‘millions served me as slaves and thought me immortal,’ but now ‘I smell no sweet odours and am overcome by sorrow for I am nailed to my bed by cruel disease . . . Alas I’m a great emperor, yet I hold the smallest worms in dread.’ Fyodor was so ill, he was stretchered into the death chamber, where his father placed the sceptre in his hands and advised him to follow the advice of the Whispering Favourite Khitrovo.

  ‘I’d never have married’, said Alexei to the sobbing Natalya, ‘if I’d known our time was to be so short,’ for he could no longer protect her. The new tsar Fyodor would be a Miloslavsky.

  At night on 29 January, Alexei died. His chaplain Savinov was just preparing his valedictory charter when the patriarch beat him to it and placed his own version in the hands of the still-warm tsar. As widow and children mourned, the tournament for power started over the body. Savinov shouted, ‘I’ll kill the patriarch – I’ve already raised 500 men!’ The daggers were out.15

  * The real Alexei thus bears little resemblance to his reputation as ‘the meek one’, the good, all-Russian saintly nonentity who became fashionable with Slavophiles in the nineteenth century as a contrast to the Westernized military emperors personified by Peter the Great. Alexei became the hero of the last tsar Nicholas II, who identified with his simple Slavic piety and named his son after him.

  * Serfdom, which was common to much of eastern and central Europe, had been tightening its grip on Russia since Ivan the Terrible. Tsar Boris Godunov, keen to win the loyalty of military servitors and provincial gentry, had consolidated the ownership of peasants. Alexei’s laws completed the process. The name is sometimes confusing to Westerners: the serfs were bound to the land and initially it was the land, not the serfs themselves, that was owned. Many were crown serfs owned by the tsar: they could be given as gifts to favourites. But they were different from the black slaves who would later toil in the Caribbean and American plantations: they paid taxes, owned small plots of land and had to serve in the army. Serfs provided both the tsar’s income through taxes and manpower through military service. Wealth was now measured not in acres but in ‘souls’ – and that referred only to male souls or households owned, since female serfs were much less valuable. At this time, the tsar owned the most serfs with 27,000 households, followed by Nikita Romanov with 7,000 and Cherkassky with 5,000, while the two Morozov cousins owned 10,000. As the centuries passed, in return for their support the Romanovs allowed the nobles to tighten their control over the serfs. By the eighteenth century, the serfs were physically owned by masters, who could sell and buy them, punish them at will and decide who they married. In 1861, Alexander II was referring to Alexei and his Code when he said: ‘The Autocracy established serfdom and it’s up to the Autocracy to abolish it.’

  * Nikon was the seventh patriarch, an office only established in 1589 – but as Filaret had shown, a patriarch could challenge the secular power of the tsar. Nikon celebrated his growing power by building a new palace in the Kremlin and promoted this vision of Moscow as Jerusalem by starting his New Jerusalem Monastery in which the cathedral was exactly based on the Holy Sepulchre in the Holy City.

  * It was to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Khmelnitsky’s oath to Alexei that Stalin, just before his death, decided to give Crimea, by then the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet and favourite resort of the Russian elite, to the Soviet republic of Ukraine, a decision upheld by his successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1954. Neither foresaw that the USSR would break up and that Ukraine would become an independent country, alienating Crimea from Russia.

  * Teimuraz was the exiled poet-warrior king of Kakheti and Kartli, two of the principalities that made up Georgia, once a powerful kingdom under the Bagrationi dynasty that had ruled the entire Caucasus in the twelfth century. Georgia was one of the most ancient Christian nations with a strong culture of poetry and honour and its own totally distinctive alphabet, but both its lands and dynasty were now fragmented into fiefdoms, torn between voracious Islamic empires, the Shiite Persians and the Sunni Ottomans – later rivalled by the Russians. When Teimuraz was exiled by Shah Abbas the Great, he came to beg Alexei’s help in vain. Muscovy was not yet powerful enough to intervene but it was the beginning of Georgia’s long, bitter and needy relationship with Russia that continues today.

  * When, at this vital moment, Nashchokin’s son defected to the enemy and the shamed father sent in his resignation, Alexei refused to accept it. His response sounds tolerant and rather modern. ‘We learned your son has absconded, causing you terrible grief. We the Sovereign Tsar were affronted by the bitter affliction, this evil dagger that has pierced your soul . . . we grieve also on account of your wife . . . but you should rise up again, become strong, have trust. As to your son’s treachery we know he acted against your will. He’s a young man and so like a bird he flits here and there, but like a bird he will get tired of flying and return to his nest.’

  * As he left, Nikon surrendered letters from a boyar who claimed that the tsar himself had secretly invited the patriarch. This was probably half-true since Alexei was toying with the options of how to deal with the problems of Nikon and the Old Believers. But the boyar was arrested and, in the presence of Alexei, tortured with red-hot prongs, until he changed his testimony and protected the tsar. But if this was a court provocation to expose the patriarch’s megalomania, it worked. If it was designed to discredit his reforms, it failed.

  * The Romanovs claimed ‘all the Russias’ once ruled by Kievan Rus: Muscovy was Great Russia, Belorussia was White Russia, Ukraine was Little Russia. The territories of the Crimean khanate and Ottoman sultanate in today’s south Ukraine were later called New Russia. Galicia, then ruled by Poland and later by Habsburg Austria, was Red Russia.

  * Matveev headed the Foreign Office and the Royal Pharmacy. Nashchokin, who had
been ‘Keeper of the Great Seal and Protector of the Sovereign’s Great Ambassadorial Affairs’ as well as president of the Foreign and Ukraine Offices, was sacked. ‘You promoted me,’ Nashchokin grumbled to Alexei, ‘so it’s shameful of you not to support me and so give joy to my enemies.’ But this bumptious minister of humble origins had staked his career on the failed alliance with Poland.

  * The Poteshnye Palace has a special place in modern history: Stalin and many of the top Bolsheviks had their apartments there in the late 1920s. In 1932, this was where Stalin’s wife Nadezhda committed suicide. The exquisite pink palace still stands, occupied by Kremlin security agencies. Outside Moscow, Alexei was also rebuilding the Kolomenskoe Palace that he transformed into an eclectic domed, gabled wooden fantasia that combined elements of Ivan the Terrible, Byzantium and Versailles. In the throne room, two copper mechanical lions rolled their eyes and roared just like the ones that had dazzled visitors in Constantinople.

  SCENE 3

  The Musketeers

  CAST

  FYODOR III, tsar 1676–82, son of Tsar Alexei and Maria Miloslavskaya

  Agafia Grushetskaya, tsarina, Fyodor’s first wife

  Martha Apraxina, tsarina, his second wife

  Sophia, sovereign lady, daughter of Tsar Alexei and Maria Miloslavskaya, sister of Fyodor III, Ivan V and half-sister of Peter the Great

  IVAN V, son of Tsar Alexei and Maria Miloslavskaya, tsar 1682–96

  Praskovia Saltykova, tsarina, Ivan V’s wife

  Ekaterina, their daughter, later married Karl Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin

  ANNA, their daughter, later married Friedrich Wilhelm, duke of Courland, empress of Russia 1730–40

  Natalya Naryshkina, tsarina, widow of Tsar Alexei, mother of Peter

  PETER I (THE GREAT), son of Tsar Alexei and Natalya Naryshkina, tsar 1682–1725

  Eudoxia Lopukhina, Peter’s first wife

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  Ivan Iazykov, chief courtier of Fyodor

  Mikhail Likhachev, chief courtier of Fyodor

  Arteem Matveev, Alexei’s chief minister

  Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, old general and head of the Musketeers Office

  Prince Ivan Khovansky, leader of the mutinous Musketeers, ‘Windbag’

  Ivan Miloslavsky, leader of the Miloslavsky faction, ‘Scorpion’

  Prince Vasily Golitsyn, Sophia’s lover, chief minister, field marshal

  Fyodor Shaklovity, Sophia’s henchman, head of the Musketeers Office

  Patrick Gordon, Scottish mercenary, ‘Cock of the East’

  Franz Lefort, Swiss mercenary

  Alexei was buried in the Archangel Cathedral, but his successor Tsar Fyodor III had to be borne behind the coffin on a stretcher. Natalya followed on a sleigh, her sobbing head on the knee of one of her ladies.

  The new tsar, aged fourteen, was breathless, wheezing and beardless, thin as a reed, cadaverously pale and chronically ill with scurvy. He was so weak that he had fallen off a horse and broken his legs. Yet he was intelligent and well educated, fluent in Polish and Latin, and he turned out to be enlightened and determined – when his health allowed.

  As Fyodor lay ill in bed, tended by his aunts and six sisters, he watched helplessly as his courtiers unleashed their vendettas. Everyone turned on Matveev. The Miloslavskys were back. The chief of the Musketeers and a relative of Michael’s first wife, Prince Yuri Dolgoruky, backed by Khitrovo and the Miloslavskys, accused Matveev of embezzlement. Behind them, emerging blinking into the light, came the malevolent Irina, spinster daughter of Tsar Michael, who had schemed to stop the Naryshkin marriage five years earlier. Now they would all have their vengeance.

  On 3 February 1676 Matveev was dismissed. But this was only the start. A new Investigations Office was created to build the case against him, while the old Muscovite ways were reimposed: ‘Plays and ballets will cease for ever.’

  The tsar’s cousin, Ivan Miloslavsky, nicknamed the ‘Scorpion’, assumed the role of inquisitor in alliance with Irina. On 3 July, Matveev was arrested for trying to murder Fyodor through his control of the Pharmacy. One of the doctors claimed that Matveev’s house serfs, Ivashka the Jew and Zakharka the Dwarf, were poisoning – or bewitching – Tsar Fyodor. Ivashka the Jew was tortured to death. Miloslavsky was framing Matveev, but the invalid tsar refused to execute him and he was instead despatched into faraway exile.

  The Scorpion and the spinster turned on the Naryshkins. As they watched, their servants were tortured by the bluff general Yuri Dolgoruky himself with tears in his eyes, asking if this was not enough. When Natalya bravely confronted Miloslavsky as ‘the persecutor of widows and orphans’, Irina halted the torture. The Naryshkins were exiled, Natalya and Peter sent to the estate of Preobrazhenskoe.

  Tsar Fyodor tried to assert himself. On 4 April, Palm Sunday, 1680, the tsar unusually made a public appearance in the Palm Sunday procession where he noticed a girl named Agafia Grushetskaya, who was ‘beautiful as an angel’. He soon discovered that she spoke four languages and played the harpsichord, and he fell in love with her. Fyodor told the court he was going to marry her. But his uncle Miloslavsky bullied the tsar into finding his bride the traditional way: through a brideshow. Eighteen semi-finalists were reduced to six for royal viewing. Fyodor chose none. Miloslavsky then framed Agafia and her mother, accusing them of prostitution. Fyodor was so depressed that he retired to bed and refused to eat, but his two favourites, Ivan Iazykov and Mikhail Likhachev, interrogated mother and daughter to prove their innocence.

  On 18 July, the tsar married Agafia in a small private wedding. Iazykov, who had encouraged and may have orchestrated the entire match, was promoted to lord-in-waiting and armourer. The Scorpion was exiled. On 18 July 1681, Agafia gave birth to a boy. Three days later, she and the baby died. Fyodor’s health collapsed.

  Meanwhile the Ottomans were marching on Kiev. Their first advance was turned back by a rising boyar Prince Vasily Golitsyn, whom Fyodor had appointed commander of the southern armies, but when they returned, a precedence row between generals almost lost the war. On 24 November 1681, Fyodor, advised by Golitsyn, announced to an Assembly that ‘the Devil had implanted the idea of precedence’. The records were burned in a bonfire. Ignoring the Miloslavskys, he rehabilitated the Naryshkins.

  Fyodor was determined to father an heir. At a new brideshow, he chose Martha Apraxina, goddaughter of Matveev and cousin of Iazykov who keenly promoted their candidate. On 15 February 1682, the sovereign married Martha, who persuaded Fyodor to recall Matveev. In the unforgiving sport of royal splicing, the losing candidate, Praskovia Saltykova, and her father were exiled to Siberia.

  Fyodor did not enjoy his bride for long. He was dying. The court was no longer fulfilling its role as intermediary and adjudicator between monarch, factions and military, just as a synchronicity of crises now threatened to tear the state apart. On 23 April 1682, a regiment of musketeers protested that their wages were being stolen by their colonel. When they complained to Dolgoruky, chief of the Musketeers Office, he ordered them knouted. Instead the regiment mutinied – not knowing that in the Terem Palace, Tsar Fyodor, at the age of twenty-one, had just died.1

  Next day, the boyars met in the Golden Chamber to decide between the two tsareviches. ‘Which of the two princes shall be tsar?’ asked the patriarch. Ivan, fifteen, was the mentally and physically handicapped scion of the Miloslavskys. Peter, ten, was the healthy hope of the Naryshkins. The boyars and the swiftly convened Assembly chose Peter, and his five Naryshkin uncles were promoted to high posts. But Sophia, the late tsar’s sister, protested that the interests of Ivan had been overlooked. At Fyodor’s funeral, she appeared in the procession without the usual moving screens and suggested that Tsar Fyodor had been poisoned.

  On 29 April, the muskeeters, a fearsome sight with their pikes, muskets, fur-rimmed hats and long scarlet robes, poured into the Kremlin to demand the whipping of their corrupt colonels. This hereditary corps of infantry had been founded by Ivan the
Terrible to guard tsar and Kremlin with the latest musketry, but over time their weapons had become outdated just as they had become deeply entrenched as praetorian power-players and rich merchants. Faced with 25,000 enraged musketeers, the authorities buckled. Their colonels were whipped, but the covin of Tsarevna Sophia and the Miloslavskys spread the story that Tsarevich Ivan, the rightful elder tsar, was in danger from the Naryshkins. The rumour metastasized through the musketeer ranks.

  On 7 May, the tsar’s twenty-three-year-old uncle Ivan Naryshkin was unwisely over-promoted to boyar and armourer. Rumours spread that this popinjay had sat on the tsar’s throne and tried on the crown. Ivan was in peril. Soon the musketeers came to believe that Ivan had been murdered. Sophia and Miloslavsky sent round their henchman Peter Tolstoy to inflame the musketeers, encouraged by Prince Ivan Khovansky, a brave if blowhard general nicknamed the Windbag, who convinced them that they must rescue Ivan. They rushed to the palace.

  By noon, thousands of them had massed beneath the Red Staircase demanding to see Ivan, alive or dead. Tsarina Natalya, supported by the patriarch, brought the two boys, Ivan and little Peter, out on to the porch. The mass of shaggy musketeers went silent. Windbag Khovansky called for calm as a few soldiers came up to examine the boys. Then the musketeers shouted that they wanted Ivan as tsar – and the heads of all the Naryshkins. The musketeers surrounded the little group, at which the white-bearded Matveev came out and suggested that they ask forgiveness of the little boys and then disperse. They went quiet. Matveev returned inside. Then Mikhail Dolgoruky, son of the general, threatened them for their impertinence. ‘Death to the traitors,’ they screamed, storming up the Red Staircase. They tossed Dolgoruky off the balcony to be impaled on the raised pikes. ‘Cut him to pieces!’ While he was sliced into sections, they burst into the palace, and found Matveev in the banqueting hall talking to Natalya, who was holding the hands of Peter and Ivan. She tried to hold on to Matveev but, as the boys watched, the ruffians impaled him too on the raised pikes below. Peter never forgot these atrocious sights, which may have triggered his epilepsy. ‘The thought of the musketeers made me quake,’ he said later, ‘and kept me from sleeping.’ As Peter and Ivan were escorted back inside, the musketeers ran amok.