The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Even years later, they still flirted. ‘If you were here,’ she wrote in one letter, ‘there’d soon be another little Shishenka [child],’ and joshed about his new mistresses, while he in turn teased her about her admirers: ‘It’s quite evident you’ve found someone better than me,’ and joked that it was revenge for his own infidelities. Since she never learned to write, her letters were dictated. Peter usually called her ‘Mother’ or ‘Katerinushka my friend’ and missed her when they were apart: ‘Mother, I am bored without you and you I think are the same.’ He shared tales of his escapades – ‘we drink like horses’. Unlike the traditional Muscovite royal brides, Catherine did not come to court with a lineage and a faction of ambitious relatives who would change the balance of power. Instead she made her own alliances, particularly with Menshikov – and created her own persona with such aplomb that ultimately she became a plausible candidate for the throne in her own right. ‘The chief reason why the tsar was so fond of her’, recalled Alexander Gordon, son of the Scottish general, ‘was her exceeding good temper.’ She always cheerfully told him that while he might find other ‘laundresses’, he should not forget his old one.

  In July 1706, Peter’s minister-marshal-admiral, Golovin, died aged fifty-six of alcoholic excess. After Lefort, Peter realized he had ‘lost two admirals’ to ‘that disease’. This loss increased the power of Menshikov,* whom Peter promoted to the Russian title of prince of Ingria – the first princely title ever awarded by a tsar. His enemies nicknamed him ‘the Prince from the Dirt’.7

  In January 1708, Charles, deploying 44,000 of Europe’s finest troops, invaded Russia. Peter said that he would not give up any territory even if he lost ten or twenty battles – but the war concentrated his mind on his mortality. In November, he secretly married Catherine. The stress frayed his tolerance of any failure. ‘I am surprised at you,’ he wrote to his half-brother Musin-Pushkin when he failed in a task during the war, ‘as I thought you had a brain but now I see you’re stupider than a dumb beast.’ When the news came that Charles was advancing, he wrote to tell Catherine that ‘The enemy is coming and we don’t know where he’s going next,’ adding that he was sending presents for her (‘Mama’) and their new baby. As he anxiously rode between Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev, adjudicating rows between his commanders and allocating resources, Peter watched and waited. He had ordered a scorched-earth policy across Poland and Lithuania where Charles was wintering with his army, but he told Catherine that he had ‘so little time, don’t expect regular letters’.

  Charles advanced, but the Russians would not give him the setpiece battle he craved that would allow him to deliver a knockout blow. Shadowing, harassing and drawing in the Swedes, Sheremetev commanded the main army, Menshikov the cavalry, while the Russian ally, the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazeppa, covered the south. Peter was exhilarated by Russian successes: ‘I’ve never seen such orderly conduct in our troops!’ Catherine shared in good news and bad. ‘We did a fine dance right under the nose of the fiery Charles,’ he told her in August. By September, low on supplies, Charles faced the big decision, whether to push for Moscow or swerve southwards to the fecund steppes of Ukraine. He waited for his general Adam Löwenhaupt to march down from Livonia with 12,000 men, but finally, on 15 September 1708, Charles turned south into Ukraine, confident that Löwenhaupt, just ninety miles away, would catch up. But Peter and Menshikov saw their chance. On 28 September, they pounced on Löwenhaupt at the Lesnaya River. ‘All day it was impossible to see where victory would lie,’ wrote Peter, but by morning Löwenhaupt had lost his supplies and half his men. Charles received 6,000 men and nothing to feed them with. ‘This victory’, wrote Peter, ‘may be called our first.’

  Then, on 27 October, Peter received desperate news from Menshikov: his Cossack ally Mazeppa had switched sides and betrayed Ukraine to Charles. Now sixty-three years old, Mazeppa had ruled his hetmanate for over twenty years, skilfully playing off Tatars, Ottomans, Russians and Poles, but the Swedish advance placed him in a dilemma.* Charles offered him an independent Ukraine. Mazeppa had backed Peter against his sister in 1682 but the hetman sensed the tsar would reduce his independence and that Menshikov wanted to be hetman himself. Staying with Peter he could end with nothing. Waiting at his capital, he secretly negotiated with Charles.

  Now, as Charles approached, Mazeppa ignored Peter’s summons. The tsar despatched Menshikov – and Mazeppa made his decision and galloped north with his Cossack host to join Charles. Menshikov found Mazeppa had gone. ‘We received your letter of the hetman’s totally unexpected and evil treason’, wrote Peter, ‘with great astonishment.’

  Charles and Peter realized simultaneously that the hetman’s capital Baturin was the key to Ukraine. Swedish king and Russian favourite raced towards the Cossack capital. Menshikov won. He stormed Baturin but, unable to fortify it, burned it and slaughtered its 10,000 inhabitants. Even today, archaeologists in Baturin continue to unearth skeletons.8

  Winter withered the Swedish army, now down to 24,000 men. Charles must either fight or retreat. Peter, building ships in Azov and reforming his government to ease his mobilization of troops and supplies,* waited; Sheremetev and Menshikov watched. Then, in April 1709, Charles laid siege to the small town of Poltava to win a base – or provoke a battle.

  ‘As regards Poltava, it would be best to attack the enemy,’ Peter wrote to Menshikov. ‘We need the field marshal [Sheremetev] too. It is clear this is of prime importance but I leave everything to your good judgement.’ On 27 May, Menshikov summoned him. ‘I’ll travel as fast as I can.’ He galloped up from Azov. On 4 June, Peter joined Sheremetev and Menshikov, along with Catherine, his favourite blackamoor Hannibal† and his dwarf Iakim Volkov.

  ‘With God’s help,’ he felt sure, ‘by the end of this month, we shall do the main business with them.’ Assuming supreme command, the unsurpassed incarnation of autocratic warlord, Peter ordered the advance, halting half a mile from Poltava and consolidating a rectangular camp for his 40,000 men, bounded on one side by the steep banks of the river and defended on the other three by ramparts and spikes. Cossacks guarded a camp for baggage in the rear where Catherine waited. The Russians fortified their position, which was accessible only by a corridor through the woods which Peter ordered to be blocked by six redoubts crossed by another four, garrisoned by 4,000 men: an obstacle that would break any Swedish advance.

  As Charles observed the Russian works, he was wounded in the foot. On Sunday 26 June, lying on his bed in his headquarters in a nearby monastery, his foot seeping blood, he called a council of war. True to form, he decided on a pre-emptive attack to counter Peter’s overwhelming superiority. At dawn the Swedes would creep through the redoubts, then surprise the Russians by storming the camp. It was a risky scheme, with many possibilities for confusion in the darkness. For speed and surprise, the artillery was left behind. The wounded king could not command himself. Yet co-ordination was essential – and the Swedish generals loathed each other.

  On 27 June, in the greyness before dawn, the Swedish army, 8,000 infantry and 9,000 cavalry took up their positions while Charles, borne into battle slung on a camp bed suspended between two horses, surrounded by a chosen guard of body-blockers, plus his minister Count Piper, joined the commander Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld on the left while Löwenhaupt commanded the right. At 4 a.m., as the sun rose over the horizon, the Swedes advanced, but the necessary surprise was swiftly blown as the Russian redoubts opened fire. Almost immediately the Swedish plan went awry. Instead of bypassing the Russian redoubts, the Swedish centre stopped to assault them repeatedly, an irrelevant but bloody mini-battle, never arriving at the rendezvous to fight the real battle on the other side. Instead they were attacked by Menshikov’s cavalry until Peter ordered him to withdraw and divide his men into two units on either flank. One Swedish column was lost in the gloom and never arrived, while Löwenhaupt’s infantry on the right became separated, emerging from the woods to face the Russian camp on their own. When Rehnskiöld and Charles final
ly arrived to join him, they found half their small army missing.

  At 9 p.m., Peter, standing on the ramparts of his camp, wearing a black tricorn hat, high boots, the green coat with red sleeves of a Preobrazhensky colonel and the cordon bleu of St Andrei across his chest, spotted the gap between the Swedish formations and sent Menshikov, flashily wearing white, and his cavalry to attack the corps adrift in the centre. Lost and isolated, the Swedish troops surrendered. Rehnskiöld and Charles waited for two hours, looking for their missing forces.

  It was a momentous opportunity: Peter held a council of war in his tent and then emerged to order the army to position itself for battle – just as Rehnskiöld decided to withdraw. The Swedish lines turned and formed up to retreat, but it was too late. To Rehnskiöld’s horror, the gates of the Russian camp were opened and out marched the entire army to form a crescent, with Peter directing the left and Sheremetev the centre. Peter reminded the men that they fought ‘for the state . . . not for Peter’, who ‘sets no value on his own life if only Russia and Russian piety and glory may live!’ In this address, the monarch shared his majestic dream of Russian greatness that made him for all his coarseness and violence such an inspiring leader for his long-suffering nobility.

  Rehnskiöld hesitated, then halted his retreat and gave the order for the Swedes to wheel around and form up for battle: the weary but superbly trained Swedes wheeled perfectly under fire, then waited for the order to advance. They marched slowly forward, not breaking step as Russian cannonades scythed them down. Their right smashed into the Russians, forcing them back, but their left had been decimated by the Russian salvoes. Given the Russian superiority, the very momentum of Swedish success on the right rendered the shattered left ever more vulnerable. A musketball knocked off Peter’s hat. He ordered his infantry to advance into the gap opening up between the Swedish left and right. Peter’s saddle was hit and a bullet was deflected from his chest by an icon he wore round his neck. As Charles’s Royal Guards fought to the last man, the Swedes broke. Charles himself was almost captured. Twenty-one of his twenty-four bearers were killed, and he had to be lifted on to a horse, pouring blood. Now he had to ride for his life.

  Some 6,900 Swedes lay dead or wounded, while 2,700 were prisoners. Peter was exhilarated, riding through his men, embracing his generals. A field chapel was erected for a Te Deum, then the tsar awaited his prisoners. Menshikov shepherded them in to kneel and hand over their swords to their victor. After this ritual obeisance, Peter moved to a resplendent Persian tent for a banquet. Every toast was greeted with the thunder of a cannonade. After Marshal Rehnskiöld and Count Piper had been brought in, Peter toasted them before asking, ‘Where is my brother Charles?’ But the king was making his escape to the south.* Peter returned Rehnskiöld’s sword and toasted his ‘teachers’ in the art of war.

  ‘Who are your teachers?’ asked Rehnskiöld.

  ‘You are, gentlemen,’ replied Peter.

  ‘Well then, the pupils have returned their thanks to their teachers,’ said the defeated marshal.

  That evening, Peter wrote fourteen notes ‘from the camp at Poltava’, including this one to the nearby Catherine:

  Matushka, good day. All-merciful God has this day granted us an unprecedented victory over the enemy.

  Peter

  PS Come here and congratulate us!

  Peter reported playfully to Romodanovsky in Moscow: ‘The whole enemy army has ended up like Phaeton.* I congratulate Your Majesty,’ he added, jokingly raising the prince-caesar to a new mock-title: emperor. Two days later, Peter promoted Menshikov to marshal, Golovkin to the new post of chancellor and rained serfs on Sheremetev. Colonel Peter thanked the prince-caesar for his own promotion to lieutenant-general and rear admiral, though ‘I haven’t deserved so much, Your Majesty.’

  Peter was convinced that the victory had won the Baltic – ‘Now, with God’s help, the final stone in the foundation of St Petersburg has been laid’ – and marked the end of the Swedish empire and the resurgence of Russia. Writing to Catherine, he called it ‘our Russian resurrection’.

  Yet the war was far from over. As Sheremetev marched north to seize the Baltic and Menshikov galloped to secure Poland, Peter and Catherine headed to Kiev where, ‘for my sins, I’ve been struck down by bouts of chills and heat nausea and fatigue’. When he recovered, he renewed his alliance with Augustus the Strong and restored him to the throne of Poland. ‘I’m bored without you,’ he told Catherine. ‘The Poles are constantly in conference about Ivashka Khmelnitsky [alcohol]. You joke about my flirtations; we have none; for we are old and not that sort of people. The bridegroom [Menshikov had just married Daria] had an interview the day before yesterday with Ivashka and had a bad fall and still lies powerless.’

  ‘Please come soon,’ replied Catherine. ‘Oh my dear, I miss you . . . It seems like a year since we saw each other.’ On 14 November, Peter joined Sheremetev at the siege of Riga: ‘I launched the first three bombs with my own hands – vengeance on that accursed place.’

  On 18 December, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Elizaveta. Peter visited mother and child. Two days later, flanked by two favourites, Menshikov and Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, he rode through seven arches into Moscow with thousands of Swedish prisoners. After a Te Deum at the Dormition Cathedral, he climbed the Red Staircase, where he had seen such atrocities as a boy, and entered the Palace of Facets, where Rehnskiöld and Piper were presented to the tsar on his throne. But when they made their obeisance before him, they were puzzled to see not the giant they had met at Poltava but the beetle-browed prince-caesar, enthroned on a dais and served dinner by Menshikov, Sheremetev and the real tsar.

  During the summer and winter of 1710, the Russians took the Baltic ports of Riga, Reval and Vyborg. ‘Good news,’ Peter exulted to Catherine. ‘We win a strong cushion for St Petersburg.’

  Yet Charles, recuperating on Ottoman territory, was encouraging the sultan to join the war. When Peter forcefully demanded that Charles be handed over, he offended Ottoman pride. As the sultan plotted war, Peter planned two weddings – one for the royals, one for the dwarfs.9

  * Among an ever-changing cast of freaks, he always sought giants: his French giant (known in Russian as Nikolai Zhigant, who was later displayed – first alive and then dead and stuffed – in Peter’s Cabinet of Curiosities) and Finnish giantess were usually dressed as babies while dwarfs often appeared made-up as old men – or totally naked jumping out of pies. He was very fond of his favourite dwarfs who travelled in his entourage.

  * A German ‘sword of justice’, designed to be displayed at judicial sittings as well as to remove heads, was said to be the weapon used by Peter to behead musketeers. It is impossible to prove this, but the sword can be seen today in the Kremlin Armoury. When a musketeer named Orlov kicked away the head of the victim before him and stepped forward to die, Peter acclaimed his courage and freed him. He was the grandfather of Catherine the Great’s lover, Grigory Orlov.

  * As he travelled through Russia, Peter ruled through a tiny chancellery made up of Fyodor Golovin, the calm, overworked, omnicompetent minister who was field marshal, admiral-general and foreign secretary; a couple of trusted chefs de cabinet including Prince-Pope Zotov; and the indispensable, half-literate Menshikov whom he now appointed to his first post: governor to the Tsarevich Alexei. Peter’s last decree of the old century was to change the Byzantine calendar which dated the world from the creation. At the end of Byzantine year 7208, Peter adopted the Western style of dating from the birth of Christ: it was now 1 January 1700.

  * Russian tsars, unlike most other monarchs in Europe, did not by tradition award titles. The Holy Roman Emperor, a title usually held by the Habsburg archduke of Austria, could create princes and counts of the Holy Roman Empire and happily would provide them at the tsar’s request.

  * No one inherited all of Golovin’s power. The punctilious and stingy Gavril Golovkin, a relative of Peter’s mother who had accompanied him t
o the Dutch shipyards, took over the Foreign Office while the jovial and able Fyodor Apraxin, brother-in-law of Fyodor III who had joined the play regiments as a boy, became general-admiral of the fleet. Meanwhile Marshal Sheremetev was rewarded for crushing a Cossack revolt in Astrakhan with the title count, the first ever given by a tsar. Golovkin and Apraxin were soon counts too.

  * A highly educated nobleman, Mazeppa had studied in the West and served at the Polish court until he had a rash love affair with the wife of a Polish grandee. The cuckolded husband had him seized, stripped naked and tied to a wild horse, and then unleashed into the steppes where – it was said – he happened to be rescued by the Zaparozhian Cossacks. It was not the last time his love life almost destroyed him. Months earlier in mid-1708, the old seducer had fallen in love with Matrena Kochubey, aged twenty, whose father, a Cossack judge, denounced his treason to Peter. But the tsar did not believe him, handing over Kochubey to Mazeppa, who swiftly beheaded him. The minister of Alexander I and Nicholas I, Prince Kochubey, was the judge’s great-grandson.

  * Between 1707 and 1709, Peter divided Russia into nine gubernii – governorships – with Menshikov as governor of St Petersburg, his surrogate ‘father’ Streshnev in Moscow and all the other posts held by the tsar’s relatives. The governors were responsible directly to Peter, bypassing the formal central government, the old administrative offices (prikazy) still based on Moscow.

  † In 1703, Gavril Golovkin had ordered the purchase in Constantinople of a black slaveboy, ‘Abram the blackamoor’, probably seized by slave traders from Chad or Ethiopia. Peter stood godfather at the christening of this Muslim boy – who was henceforth Abram Petrovich Hannibal. He served as one of Peter’s black pages, known as Nubians, Arabs or Abyssinians who became an exotic feature of the Romanov court up until 1917. Hannibal was exceptionally talented. Spotting that the boy had a gift for languages and mathematics, Peter had him educated in France. He rose to become the first black general in Europe and grandfather of the poet Pushkin, who wrote his life-story as The Negro of Peter the Great.