The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Two weeks later, the Foreign Office announced: ‘The Sovereign had directed for his great affairs of state that to the neighbouring nations . . . shall be sent his great ambassadors,’ led by General-Admiral Lefort and his minister Fyodor Golovin, also general-admiral. It did not announce that Peter himself, travelling incognito (which meant without diplomatic formality – but everyone knew who he was) as ‘Peter Mikhailov’, would be with them. Whenever Peter left Moscow, he would confer all power upon several men, leaving them in a state of paralysing rivalry; in this case he left the prince-caesar, the Cock, his uncle Ivan Naryshkin and Boris Golitsyn to vie for power. He was determined to learn the trade of shipbuilding and to return with the technologies of the West – ‘I am a pupil and need to be taught,’ he declared. His father had been fascinated by technology, but Peter had decided to do something utterly extraordinary: to leave his realm and his court behind and, in order to catch up on his own lacklustre education, to force-feed himself with a crash course in Western technology, an act of autodidactic will unparalleled in world history, let alone in Russia’s. It was a mix of hedonistic junket, diplomatic offensive, military reconnaissance and educational sabbatical. No other tsar had ever left Russia. It was too risky and his absence would end in carnage.

  The Jolly Company were toasting the trip at Lefort’s palace when, as General Gordon wrote, ‘a merry night’ was ruined by ‘the accident of discovering treason against His Majesty’. A musketeer officer and two boyars had been denounced for criticizing Peter’s lifestyle and policies, and the tsar reacted with macabre ingenuity: he could not afford to leave the 50,000 musketeers in any doubt that treason would not be tolerated – but naturally the case channelled the trauma of his childhood. He ordered the coffin of the long-dead Miloslavsky, whom he had called Scorpion, to be exhumed and placed on a cart pulled by swine until it stood beneath the gallows and its lid removed. The victims were dismembered and beheaded so that their fresh blood spattered Miloslavsky’s putrefied carcass.

  On 20 March 1697, Lefort and Golovin set off with their embassy of 250 ministers, friends, priests, trumpeters, cooks, soldiers, dwarfs, Menshikov – and ‘Peter Mikhailov’. Wherever he went, Peter was dazzled by the technical sophistication of the West, while the West was horrified by his uncouth ebullience and barbaric rages: few royal trips have had so many diplomatic incidents. The first stop was Riga in the Swedish province of Livonia, where he sketched the fortifications. When the Swedes ordered him to stop, Peter was enraged by their insolence and at once conceived a loathing for this ‘accursed place’. Travelling through the Holy Roman Empire, the patchwork of German principalities, he met Sophia, electress of Hanover, the mother of the future George I of England. Faced with a crowd of elegant German women, Peter, who had no small talk, became bashful: ‘I don’t know what to say!’ Sophia admired his ‘great vivacity of mind, he was very gay, very talkative and he told us he was working himself building ships and showed us his hands and made us touch the callouses’. Afterwards he danced with dwarfs and ladies, amazed to feel the latter’s whalebone corsets: ‘These German women have devilish hard bones!’ he cried. The electress recognized ‘a very extraordinary man . . . at once very good and very bad’.

  On 18 August 1697, Peter reached the Zaandam shipyard in Holland where he enrolled as ‘shipwright Mikhailov’. ‘And so that the monarch might not be shamefully behind his subjects in that trade,’ he later explained in the royal third person, ‘he himself undertook a journey to Holland and in Amsterdam giving himself up with other volunteers to the learning of naval architecture.’ He hired Dutch and Venetian shipwrights and ordered each of his grandees to fund a ship in his new navy. But he soon realized that Russia needed its own know-how and he later despatched fifty noblemen to train in the Dutch shipyards. Here, among sailors, merchants and fixers, he sought and recruited gifted men, regardless of class, age or nationality. Holland formed his tastes, sartorial, architectural and necrophilic. In Amsterdam Peter loved attending the post-mortems of a famous anatomist. When one of his courtiers was repulsed by the bodies, Peter made him lean over and bite a mouthful of flesh. Fascinated by the deconstruction of the human body, he bought a set of surgical instruments that always travelled with him. If his retainers needed an operation or a tooth pulled, he insisted on doing it himself. Fearing his probings, his staff kept their toothaches to themselves.

  On 11 January 1698, Peter arrived in London where he visited King William III at Kensington Palace, watched Parliament in session and picked up an English actress, Laetitia Cross, who became his courtesan for the rest of the trip. Renting Sayes Court, John Evelyn’s immaculate house in Deptford, he treated it like a Jolly Company clubhouse. He had never seen a wheelbarrow, so he organized wheelbarrow races that soon destroyed the garden’s trimmed topiary, while indoors the Russians used the paintings for target practice, the furniture for firewood and the curtains as lavatory paper. Feather beds and sheets ‘were ripped apart as if by wild animals’.

  The ‘wild animals’ moved on to meet the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, where Peter received news from Romodanovsky that the musketeers in Azov had mutinied and marched on Moscow until defeated by General Gordon. ‘I have received your letter in which your grace writes that seed of Ivan Mikhailovich [Miloslavsky] is sprouting,’ he replied to the prince-caesar. ‘I beg you to be severe . . .’ The rebels were knouted and tortured. A total of 130 were executed, and 2,000 prisoners awaited Peter’s return.

  On 19 July, the tsar met up with the newly elected king of Poland, Augustus the Strong, who was also elector of Saxony. Blue-eyed, brawny and priapic, Augustus, then aged twenty-eight, would father 354 bastards and, as he got older, his erotomania became so incontinent that he supposedly seduced his own daughter without realizing it. He specialized in shocking uptight visitors by opening the curtains around a bed to reveal a nude beauty as a gift but nothing surprised Peter. The monarchs drank, reviewed armies and planned the seminal project of Peter’s reign: the demolition of the Swedish empire, vulnerable after the death of its king had left the throne to a fifteen-year-old boy, Charles XII. Here was an opportunity to avenge the Troubles and open a window on to the Baltic.

  Peter ordered the 2,000 rebel muskeeters imprisoned at Preobrazhenskoe, where Romodanovsky built fourteen bespoke torture chambers.3

  On the night of 4 September 1698, Peter arrived back in Moscow with Lefort and Golovin but galloped straight on to Preobrazhenskoe where he was reunited with Anna Mons. In the morning, the boyars flocked to greet and prostrate themselves before their returned sovereign. But Peter, clean-shaven except for a moustache and wearing Western clothes, raised them and embraced them before producing a barber’s razor to shave off their Muscovite beards, symbols of Orthodox sanctity and respect. Romodanovsky and the others submitted to their sovereign-barber. At a banquet, Peter sent his fool, Jacob Turgenev, round the tables shaving boyars, while at Lefort’s home he sheared off the long sleeves of boyars’ robes. As he resculpted his boyars into Western nobles, he created the Order of St Andrei, the blue ribbon, and awarded it to his minister Golovin and his trusted general Boris Sheremetev, a descendant of Tsar Michael’s minister. Everything was done fast. ‘You need to work and have everything prepared ahead of time,’ he once wrote, ‘because wasted time, like death, cannot be reversed.’

  Then he turned to dark matters. ‘Around my royal city I shall have gibbets and gallows set up on walls and ramparts, and each and every one of the rebels I will put to direful death.’

  First, there was the problem of Tsarina Eudoxia: during a four-hour confrontation, he demanded that she become a nun but she refused. She said it was her duty to raise their eight-year-old son Alexei. Peter simply kidnapped Alexei, and his mother was put in a monastery and tonsured. One of Eudoxia’s uncles must have protested because he was tortured to death by Romodanovsky (as his brother had been). The fourteen torture chambers were working day and night, except Sundays, to force his musketeer prisoners to reveal their plot to depose Pe
ter and restore Sophia. The musketeers showed astonishing fortitude. When prisoners passed out, the tsar’s doctor revived them to be tortured anew. Peter attended many of the tortures and insisted that all his entourage join in. When one of them survived first the ‘horrible cracking’ as his limbs were dislocated on the rack and then twenty lashes of the knout without uttering a word, Peter, ‘tired at last, raised the stick in his hand and thrust it so violently into his jaws as to break them open’, growling: ‘Confess, beast, confess.’

  After a month of this, Peter ordered the executions to start. Two hundred musketeers were hanged from the walls in Moscow, six at each gate, 144 in Red Square. Beheading hundreds more at Preobrazhenskoe, Peter ordered his magnates to wield the axes themselves, implicating them – and checking their loyalty though some were inept headsmen. One boyar hit his victim so low that he almost sliced him in half while Romodanovsky beheaded four and Menshikov, who had much to prove, claimed to have done twenty. Our source for this, Johann-Georg Korb, an Austrian diplomat, claimed that Peter himself beheaded five musketeers, but he did not see it personally.* Peter was transfixed by decapitation as biological experiment and regularly recounted how one of the victims remained sitting up for some time after his head had been removed.

  The executions were accompanied by drunken dinners at Lefort’s palace which often ended in government ministers brawling with each other to the amazement of foreigners. When one diplomat criticized conditions in Moscow, Peter told him, ‘If you were a subject of mine, I’d add you as a companion to the those hanging from the gibbet.’ His suspicion that a boyar was selling commissions sent the intoxicated Peter berserk: he drew his sword and tried to kill the man until Romodanovsky and Zotov defended his innocence, which only provoked him to cut Zotov on the head and Romodanovsky on the finger. Lefort disarmed him but was tossed on to his back; then Menshikov, throwing himself into the path of the rampaging giant, tackled him. When on another occasion Naryshkin and Golitsyn got into a fight, Peter threatened to behead whoever was in the wrong.

  The musketeers were finished but their confessions almost incriminated Sophia. Peter had 196 rebels hanged just outside her windows, their bodies left to rot all winter. When Peter travelled down to Voronezh to toil on his new fleet, he received terrible news. His best friend Lefort had died of a fever. ‘Now I’m alone without a trusted man,’ he said. ‘He alone was faithful to me.’ Peter rushed back and forced his boyars, always jealous of Lefort, to mourn the Swiss adventurer at a state funeral. He wept as he kissed the corpse. Soon afterwards, Gordon also died. Peter was there to close his eyes and acclaim the ‘loyal and brave’ Cock: ‘I can only give him a handful of earth; he gave me Azov.’ It was a long time – and high praise – before Peter could say after a party at Menshikov’s: ‘This is the first time I’ve really enjoyed myself since Lefort’s death.’

  Peter started the new century with a new foreign policy and a new government:* fortifying Azov, he turned his beloved cannons northwards.4

  On 19 August 1700, Peter, backed by allies Poland and Denmark, attacked Sweden. But the young King Charles XII repelled the Poles and then knocked Denmark out of the war. On 1 October just as the Russians besieged Narva, Charles XII amazed everyone by landing in Estonia and leading his small army of 10,000 towards the 40,000 Russians.

  On 17 November, outside Narva, Peter appointed a French mercenary, the duc de Croy, as commander before himself departing. Peter did not expect the Swedes to attack, but the next day Charles XII stormed his fortified camp. Three horses were shot from beneath the Swedish king. ‘I see the enemy want me to practise riding,’ he joked. The Russians were routed, Croy and 145 cannon captured. Peter did not panic and never lost his buoyant optimism, but the genius of Charles demanded that he himself take supreme command and create a standing army, with modern artillery. The Romanovs had come to power to lead resistance to foreign invaders; now Peter intensified the militarization of the state, mobilizing his nobility for twenty years of warfare and sacrifice. He was not surprised that ‘our untried pupils got the worst of it against such a disciplined army – it was child’s play’ for the Swedes. ‘We mustn’t lose our heads in misfortune,’ he told Sheremetev. He learned his lesson to avoid divided command and appointed Sheremetev his commander-in-chief. Twenty years older than him, this super-rich boyar who was related to the Romanovs had served as a page to Tsar Alexei, but he straddled old and new worlds having travelled in the West and cut off his own beard as a young man. This cautious if safe general, never a drinking crony, had a touchy relationship with Peter.

  The Swedish king had to choose whether to hit Russia or Poland first. Ten years younger than Peter, Charles was just eighteen, tall, round-faced, blue-eyed, already balding. He had tempered himself with relentless riding to be a Spartan warrior-king: he could pick up a glove from the ground at a gallop. Possibly homosexual, he disdained any interest in women (‘I am married to the army’) and preferred to read his Bible – and drill his infantry until they were the best in Europe. They worshipped him as ‘the Last of the Vikings’. An impetuous practitioner of attack at all times, he possessed a grim messianic self-belief: when he later faced setbacks, he struck a coin inscribed: ‘What worries you? God and I still live!’ Charles, known to some as ‘Ironhead’, would pursue his war to the end: ‘I resolved never to start an unjust war but never to end a just one.’ His acumen as warlord matched Peter’s – and their duel to the death would last eighteen years.5

  Luckily for Peter, who needed time to mobilize and rebuild after the debacle of Narva, Charles first marched into Poland, deposing Augustus the Strong in favour of his own puppet king, while Peter attacked Swedish garrisons around the Baltic. On 30 December 1701, Sheremetev defeated a Swedish army. Elated, Peter sent Menshikov to present Sheremetev with his field marshal’s baton and the cordon bleu of his new Order of St Andrei. Spending much of his time with the armies or organizing supplies, Peter started to roll up Swedish strongholds in Livonia, a campaign eased by the outbreak of a European conflict, the War of the Spanish Succession, which complicated Charles’s position. On 14 October 1702, advancing in Ingria (the south-eastern shore of the Gulf of Finland), the Russians took the Swedish fortress of Nöteborg. Peter renamed it Shlisselburg (‘Key-Fortress’) – because it was the ‘key’ to the River Neva – and appointed Menshikov as its governor.

  On 1 May 1703, Peter and Menshikov captured Nyenskans. On the 16th, on the nearby Hare Island the foundations were laid for a fortress that Peter was to call St Peter and Paul – but it is possible he was not himself present for this moment, which was later mythologized with the tsar choosing the place with the aid of an eagle. Yet within a year, when this stronghold was finished, Peter had started to see it as the foundation of a new city that would be both symbol and catalyst of his ambitions for Russia – a monument to his victories over the Swedes, a port for a naval tsar, and a Western metropolis for a modernized Russia: he named it St Petersburg. Opposite the fortress (and close to the future Winter Palace), he built a little domik, a three-room cabin in Dutch baroque style, his home for the next five years while he created a shipyard and admiralty. Petersburg became ‘my Eden . . . my darling’, shared above all with Menshikov: ‘I can’t help writing to you from this paradise; truly here we live in heaven.’6

  Peter rushed back to Moscow where he celebrated a Roman triumph and awarded both Menshikov and himself the cordon bleu. On 23 November, 1703, he threw a revel on the nameday of Menshikov, whom he now awarded the title of count of Hungary, procured from the Holy Roman Emperor.* Peter’s itinerant court was joined by Menshikov’s new gaggle of female admirers.

  Menshikov was courting a teenaged girl of noble family, Daria Arseneva, who served as a maid-of-honour to Peter’s sister. Daria and her sister joined Menshikov’s household. It was there, in October 1703, that Peter, now aged thirty-one, met a girl who had already led a turbulent life. She was to be as formidable in her way as Peter himself and her rise was the most meteoric of any individu
al in the eighteenth century.

  Martha Scavronskaya, nineteen years old, black-eyed, voluptuous, fair-haired, was the daughter of a peasant, probably Lithuanian or Scandinavian by nationality, who was orphaned and adopted by a Lutheran pastor who in turn married her off to a Swedish soldier. On her husband’s death, she was captured and marched into a Russian camp naked but for a blanket. After an affair with a Russian cavalryman, she was passed on to Sheremetev, who employed her as laundrywoman (and probably mistress), before presenting her to Menshikov, who likewise employed her as a laundress (and probably mistress).

  Peter and Anna Mons had drifted apart after he discovered that she was romancing two foreign ambassadors simultaneously. Peter merely confiscated her mansion and jewels – and her family remained at court. Now he became fond of Martha the Lithuanian laundress, converting her to Orthodoxy and giving her the name ‘Catherine’. ‘Hello mister captain,’ Catherine wrote in one of her first letters to him. ‘Your rowing-boat is ready: should it be sent to Your Worship?’ She knew that the way to his heart was through his boats.

  Just over nine months later, Catherine gave birth to the first of their children, a daughter. ‘Congratulations on your new-born,’ she wrote. She would spend most of the next twenty years pregnant. But the child soon died, the first of many. Of their twelve children, only two grew to adulthood and he ascribed their loss to God’s will – though he treasured boys (whom he called his ‘recruits’) more than girls. ‘Thank God the mother’s healthy’ was how he consoled himself. As he and Menshikov, now commanding the cavalry, mopped up Swedish forces in Livonia, capturing Narva, they travelled in a foursome with Catherine and Daria.

  Peter’s relationship with Catherine was based not only on her physical attractions and their shared parenthood and grief but also on her irrepressible cheerfulness, and on the unflappable serenity that allowed her to handle Peter deftly. When he was struck by one of his fits, she would cradle his head on her knee and soothe him. She could carry her drink and was physically strong, once raising a sceptre that Peter himself struggled to lift: she liked to dress as an Amazon at sittings of the All-Drunken Synod.