Her future would be decided either in the deserts of Perekop or in the beds of the tsars: both their wives were now pregnant. When Golitsyn’s despatches arrived, she was walking towards the gates of St Sergius Monastery on a pilgrimage. ‘I can’t remember how I entered,’ she replied breathlessly. ‘I read as I walked . . . I can hardly believe I’ll ever see you again. Great indeed will be the day when I have you with me again. If possible, I’d set you before me in a single day . . . I shall tell you all that’s happened.’ Soon everyone learned the real story – and Peter prepared to make his move.
On 8 July as Golitsyn prepared to make his triumphant entry, Sophia and both tsars heard mass in St Basil’s Cathedral. As Sophia accompanied the icons, Peter strode up. ‘It was not fitting that her shameful person should be present at the ceremony,’ he said. She refused to leave. Peter galloped away. Sophia and Tsar Ivan welcomed Golitsyn, but Peter did not turn up. He criticized the bestowal of victory laurels after such a defeat and refused to receive Golitsyn. Both sides were suspicious. Sophia feared that Peter would march on Moscow with his play regiments and kill her; Peter, tormented by the vision of Matveev on a pike, feared that she had commanded Shaklovity to attack with the musketeers. On 4 August Peter ordered his arrest. On the 7th Sophia summoned Shaklovity, saying that she had intelligence that that very night Peter planned to ‘kill all the sovereigns’, Ivan and herself. Shaklovity mustered the musketeers.
Just before midnight, Peter got a message that Shaklovity was on his way to kill him. He leapt on to a horse in his nightgown and galloped into the woods, where his boots and clothes were brought to him. He rode all night to hide in the fortified Trinity Monastery, ‘where he threw himself on a bed weeping bitterly’. The play regiments and his mother and wife joined him there. For a moment, the two sides waited. Then Peter ordered the musketeers to report to him at the monastery. It was hard for them to resist the orders of a crowned tsar.
When Sophia heard of this, Shaklovity waved it aside: ‘Let him go. He’s mad.’ Instead she set out to confront Peter personally, but when she got close, he ordered her not to proceed another step. She returned to the Kremlin.
On 1 September he commanded her to surrender Shaklovity for ‘gathering troops to murder us’ – and insisted that Golitsyn must be exiled. Sophia was so outraged by this that she ordered Peter’s courier to be beheaded, but there was no executioner on duty, itself a sign of her disintegrating authority. Instead she fierely rallied musketeers and courtiers, reminding them that she ‘had taken the government upon her in a very troublesome time’ and won victories, but now their ‘enemies sought not Shaklovity but the life of her and her brother’. Once again, she was playing the card: Tsar Ivan was in danger! But this time it didn’t work.
Three days later, Peter summoned Gordon and his foreign mercenaries. The canny Cock marched to Peter’s side: this was ‘the decisive moment’, he wrote in his diary. The musketeers, afraid of finding themselves on the losing side, demanded the arrest of Shaklovity. Sophia refused, but she had to give him up just as she had forced Natalya to give up her brother. In chains, he was carted off to Peter at the Trinity where he was tortured until he confessed a plot to crown Sophia and murder Peter. Shaklovity was beheaded; Golitsyn surrendered to Peter; and Sophia was arrested.
Peter went on manoeuvres with the play regiments, telling his brother tsar Ivan that the ‘shameful third person, our sister’, was finished and the two brothers would rule on together – as they did, formally at least, until Ivan’s early death six years later. But on 18 February 1690 Tsarina Eudoxia gave birth to a son, whom Peter named after his father – Alexei. The Miloslavskys had lost the biological as well as the political race.
Sophia was confined in luxury in the Novodevichy Monastery. Golitsyn was sentenced to death but was spared because Peter’s chief adviser was his first cousin, Prince Boris Golitsyn. He spent twenty-four years in Arctic exile. At Peter’s court, the tournament of power would be still more vicious. The prizes were glittering, the ascent vertiginous, the descent sudden and the end often lethal.6
* The only written description of her was recorded seven years later by a French visitor who had never met her: ‘She was of monstrous size with a head as big as a bushel with hair on her face, growths on her legs, but although her stature is broad, short and coarse, her mind is subtle, nimble and shrewd.’
† Both crowns (and their double throne) can be seen in the Kremlin Armoury today. Peter I and Ivan V were the last tsars to be crowned with this Mongol headdress, which was becoming too modest.
SCENE 4
The All-Drunken Synod
CAST
PETER I (THE GREAT), tsar and emperor 1682–1725
Natalya Naryshkina, tsarina, his mother, widow of Tsar Alexei
Eudoxia (née Lopukhina), tsarina, his first wife
Alexei Petrovich, his son and heir
IVAN V, tsar 1682–96, Peter’s half-brother
Praskovia (née Saltykova), tsarina, Ivan’s wife
Anna Mons, Peter’s German mistress
Martha Scavronskaya (CATHERINE I), his Livonian mistress, later his second wife and empress of Russia 1725–7
Sophia, ex-sovereign lady, Peter’s half-sister
COURTIERS: ministers etc.
Patrick Gordon, Scottish general and Peter’s adviser, ‘Cock of the East’
Franz Lefort, Peter’s Swiss adviser, field marshal and general-admiral
Prince Fyodor Romodanovsky, prince-caesar, head of the Preobrazhensky Office, chief of the secret police
Nikita Zotov, tutor, prince-pope, secretary, count
Tikhon Streshnev, Peter’s ‘father’, chief of military supplies
Alexander Menshikov, Peter’s courtier and friend, later prince, field marshal, ‘Aleshka’,’Prince from the Dirt’
Prince Boris Golitsyn, Peter’s adviser during the 1690s
Fyodor Golovin, the first chancellor of Russia, general-admiral, field marshal
Gavril Golovkin, ambassador, chancellor, count
Boris Sheremetev, the first Russian count, Peter’s commander, field marshal
ENEMIES
Charles XII, king of Sweden, Peter’s chief enemy, ‘Last of the Vikings’, ‘Ironhead’
Adam Löwenhaupt, Swedish general
Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld, Swedish marshal
Ivan Mazeppa, Cossack hetman
Peter, by temperament and talent, saw himself first as a warlord – and he was already preparing for war against the Ottomans. He left his handicapped brother Ivan to stagger through the interminably solemn rituals of the Muscovite court while his boozy uncle Ivan Naryshkin formally ran the government. Real power was wherever Peter was, and the peripatetic tsar was usually at Preobrazhenskoe where he drilled his army and created a rough mock court. He appointed no more boyars. Only his retainers mattered now, whether they were the Swiss or Scottish mercenaries, the sons of pie-sellers or hereditary princes. The most trusted was the fearsome Fyodor Romodanovsky, chief of a new all-purpose agency, the Preobrazhensky Office, whom Peter now promoted to a new title, ‘prince-caesar’, a surrogate tsar. Peter called him ‘Your Majesty’, signing himself ‘Your eternal slave.’ This freed the tsar from the tedious formality of elaborate rituals ‘which I hate’. Peter ruled mainly through a tiny coterie of relatives, predominantly connected to the wives of his grandfather, father and brother – Dolgorukys, Saltykovs, Naryshkins, Apraxins – but including Ivan Musin-Pushkin, whom he called ‘brother’: he was Tsar Alexei’s illegitimate son. His surrogate ‘father’, old Streshnev, became his indispensable organizer of military supplies.
By the autumn of 1691, Peter was ready to try out his Guards, commanded by the prince-caesar and Lefort with Peter serving as a humble bombardier, in manoeuvres against the musketeers. The Guards performed well and afterwards, the tsar convened his new All-Mad All-Jesting All-Drunken Synod (or Assembly), an inebriated dining society that was, in part, the government of Russia in brutally raucous disguise. It h
ad started as the Jolly Company but Peter made it ever more elaborate. Between 80 and 300 guests, including a circus of dwarfs, giants, foreign jesters, Siberian Kalmyks, black Nubians, obese freaks and louche girls,* started carousing at noon and went on to the following dawn. The prince-caesar headed its secular arm along with Buturlin, the so-called ‘king of Poland’, but Peter could not resist mocking the mummery of the Orthodox church. He appointed his old tutor, Nikita Zotov, as a drunken prelate – Patriarch Bacchus – but in order not to offend his solemnly Orthodox subjects he mocked the Catholics instead. Zotov became the prince-pope. Dressed in a high tin hat and a coat half made of gambling cards and astride a ceremonial beer barrel, the prince-pope presided over a conclave of twelve soused cardinals with Peter as ‘proto-deacon’.
The regulations for these ‘sacred services’ were drawn up by the despotic carouser himself: the first was that ‘Bacchus be worshipped with strong and honourable drinking’. All the officials of the Drunken Synod bore obscene titles (often connected to the Russian word for the male genitalia – khui) – so the prince-pope was attended by Archdeacons Thrust-the-Prick, Go-to-the-Prick, and Fuck-Off, and a hierarchy of penile courtiers bearing phallic sausages on cushions.
Prince-Pope Zotov, often stark naked except for his mitre, started the dinners by blessing the kneeling, berobed guests with a pair of Dutch pipes instead of a cross. Since Peter could never be still, he would jump up and play the drums or order the blowing of trumpets and lead the company outside to fire artillery or light fireworks. Then he would come back to the table to eat yet another course of food before once again leading the party out to jump into a convoy of sleighs.
At Christmas, the prince-pope led 200 of Peter’s ‘Jolly Company’ on sleighs through the streets of Moscow to sing carols outside some of the grander houses; during Lent, Zotov led the cavalcade on a carriage pulled by goats, pigs and bears while his cardinals rode on donkeys and bullocks. Peter always delighted in the reversal of identities. But woe betide anyone who thought this was voluntary fun. ‘All goblets were to be emptied promptly,’ he ordered in his club rules, ‘and members were to get drunk daily and never go to bed sober.’ Any breaking of rules or avoidance of toasts was to be punished by a bumpering of the dreaded and capacious Eagle Goblet brimming with brandy.
A steely capacity for alcohol (which he usually called Ivashka, the Russian version of John Barleycorn) was essential to rise at Peter’s court. Peter was blessed with an iron metabolism for alcohol, rising at dawn to work even after these marathon wassails. Menshikov could keep up, though he often subsided under the tables. The old Cock, Patrick Gordon, spent much of the next day in bed.
Peter’s friend Franz Lefort was a tireless debauchee – ‘Alcohol never overcomes him.’ Since Peter was bored by etiquette, he built Lefort a stone palace with an enormous banqueting hall which became Jolly Company clubhouse and royal reception-room. Peter dined with Lefort two or three times a week, and it was the Swiss who introduced him to the open-thighed nuns of the Synod’s female branch whose enthusiastic brassiness was such a contrast to his joyless marriage.
Anna Mons, aged seventeen, the ‘exceedingly beautiful’ daughter of a German merchant, was already one of Lefort’s many mistresses when she met Peter. But the tsar was tolerant of the sexual histories of his girlfriends and she became his chief mistress in a circle that was essentially macho and military. His inseparable companion, though, was not Anna but Aleshka Menshikov, now his favourite among the denshchiki, the courtiers who slept at the foot of his bed or outside his door.
When the highly strung Peter suffered insomnia, he called for a denshchik and rested his head on his stomach. Sometimes during this strenuous life, the left side of Peter’s face would start to twitch which could lead to a full eye-rolling fit. Then his aides would summon someone soothing, often his girlfriend, to calm him, saying tactfully, ‘Peter Alexeievich, here’s the person you wanted to talk to.’
This bacchanal was not just an adolescent phase – Peter’s profane parodies continued with enthusiastic frequency right up to his death. He might seem like a terrifying circus master presiding over a seventeenth-century version of a decadent rock band on tour, yet there was no division between business and bacchanalia. However eccentric, prince-popes, prince-caesars and Archdeacon Fuck-Off were influential appointments at his court that was half-military headquarters, half-drunken carnival. While official members of the Synod tended to be older retainers like Zotov, membership of the mock-court, Jolly Company and Synod overlapped haphazardly with his top generals, secretaries, admirals and fools. Nor was it as sacrilegious as it seemed: Peter was a believer in God and his own holy monarchy. In part, these outrageous revels helped exalt his exceptional authority, blessed with sacred grace, to remake his realm as he saw fit, free of any restraints.
The Jolly Company reflected Peter’s personal sense of fun, but it is easy to forget that the young tsar had been raised amid the most savage political strife. Whether organizing a party of naked female dwarfs or planning provisions for an army, Peter was a born autocrat, as visionary as he was meticulous and industrious, compulsively regulating every detail of every enterprise, scrawling orders in numbered lists. This enforced carousing was tyranny by feasting – just the colourful side of Peter’s restless, daily drive, dynamic but grinding, joyful but violent, to modernize Russia, to build up its armed forces, to compel its elites to serve his vision, to find gifted retainers to direct his monumental projects.
The masquerade of the prince-caesar was no joke either: however informal and spontaneous Peter appeared, security always came first. Romodanovsky was his secret police chief, and Peter usually participated in his investigations and tortures. Even his absurd pantomimes served political purposes. Here he was able to balance his henchmen, whether they were parvenus or Rurikid princes; he could play them off against each other to ensure they never plotted against him. Here he policed their corruption in his own rough way while he assigned duties, prizes and punishments. The horseplay was often more like hazing, humiliating his grandees, keeping them close under his paranoid eye, promoting his own power as they competed for favour and for proximity to the tsar. His games of inversion simply underlined his own absolute supremacy. More than that, he had seen young tsars like Fyodor III and Ivan V as pathetic prisoners of rigid religious ritual: his boisterous play-acting, appointing a mock-tsar as well as mock-bishops, while he himself served as a mere bombardier, deacon or sailor, was liberating, giving him a personal and political flexibility never before enjoyed by a Russian monarch. His ability to be both sacred autocrat and plain bombardier somehow added to the dangerous mystique of this life force, and his physical strength and size meant that whatever rank he held he would always exude a terrible power.
At any moment, Peter might switch from jollity to menace. He frequently punched his henchmen, either out of over-exuberance or out of fury. Once when Peter noticed Menshikov dancing while wearing his sword, against the rules of civilized society, he smashed him in the nose and later punched him again so hard that he knocked him out. In February 1692, Boris Golitsyn persuaded a servant to tease his rival Yakov Dolgoruky by ruffling his hair. Dolgoruky stabbed the boy to death with a fork. Both had to appear before Peter the next day and walk to prison on foot, though they were soon forgiven. But the lifestyle was deadly: several of his ministers died of alcoholism.
No wonder Peter’s traditional subjects believed that the tsar might be the anti-Christ. As he capered and drilled his Guards, his wife Eudoxia was neglected and her brothers gradually became the focus of opposition to the tsar. Peter had the prince-caesar torture to death one of his wife’s uncles (hardly the sign of a happy marriage). Only his mother dared restrain him. ‘Why do you trouble yourself about me?’ he teased her benignly. Then, in January 1694, she died. ‘You’ve not idea how sad and bereft I am,’ admitted the tsar – just as he prepared for his first war.1
In spring 1695, Peter, now twenty-three years old, marched south to attac
k the Ottoman fortress of Azov that stood where the Don flowed into the Sea of Azov. Gordon and Lefort, accompanied by Bombardier Peter, sailed down the Volga and Don to start their siege but he divided the command and lacked the correct equipment. After four months, Peter listened to Gordon’s advice: he needed siege artillery, a fleet and a single commander. He called off the siege, losing thousands on the march back to Moscow, but in the spring he moved to Voronezh where, sleeping in a loghouse next to his shipyard, he rose at dawn each day to build a fleet, Russia’s first. While he was working, his brother Ivan died: Peter returned to Moscow and gave him a traditional funeral. The old Muscovite court was buried with him – though he was survived by his formidable wife Praskovia (Saltykova), much liked by Peter despite her old-fashioned style, and by his daughters, who would provide some of Peter’s successors.
In May 1696, Peter was back at Azov with an army of 46,000. Naval Captain Peter shared his tent with Menshikov, whom he called ‘my heart’, to whom he wrote affectionately ‘I really need to see you, I only want to see you.’ A gay aspect to the friendship, however, seems far fetched. The siege was masterminded by Gordon, who devised ‘a moving rampart’ to tighten the encirclement under fire. When it surrendered, Peter thanked the Cock for giving him ‘the whole expanse of Azov’ and promoted him to full general. Peter refortified Azov, but founded the new port of Taganrog, Russia’s first naval base, on the Sea of Azov – the first challenges to Ottoman mastery of the Black Sea.
On 10 October 1696, Peter treated Moscow to a Roman triumph, parading statues of Mars and Hercules: if his technology was German or Dutch, he was lauded as a victorious Roman commander – imperator. The prince-pope, armour-clad in a six-horsed carriage, led the procession followed by Gordon and Lefort, promoted to general-admiral. Much further back, Peter himself strode jovially with the naval captains, wearing a black German coat and breeches. The Muscovites were bewildered.2
The Romanovs Page 12
