The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Alexei was thrown into the Trubetskoi Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Next he was tried for treason. Faced with reams of Alexei’s confessions, the bishops showed caution, recommending Old Testament severity and New Testament mercy, but the senators, their minds concentrated by the knowledge that many had been implicated by Alexei, agreed to any ‘necessary examination’: torture.

  On 19 June, Alexei received twenty-five blows of the knout which failed to generate any more revelations. On the 24th, he received fifteen more, then another twenty-five lashes and then a further nine. Peter had all Alexei’s courtiers tortured and his confessor’s testimony was as damning as that of Afrosina. Alexei admitted, ‘I wished for my father’s death.’ Now convinced that Alexei had planned his assassination, Peter was satisfied. After so many blows, Alexei was broken. Just to be sure, Peter sent Tolstoy with a last couple of questions. Alexei confessed that he would have paid the emperor to raise an army against the tsar.

  That night, Menshikov, Golovkin, Apraxin, Tolstoy and others, sitting as a tribunal, sentenced Alexei to death for ‘horrid double parricide, against the Father of his country and his Father by nature’. The next day, Peter sent an official to tell Alexei of the sentence – but he was dying anyway.

  At 8 a.m. on 26 June, Peter and his entourage visited Alexei ‘for a session in the torture chamber’. Menshikov’s schedule records that he himself stayed half an hour, but the fortress log reveals that some of them stayed for three hours, leaving Alexei at 11 a.m. utterly broken. ‘At 6 p.m.,’ reads the log, ‘Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich died.’ Did Peter kill him personally, did he send over Rumiantsev to strangle him or did he expire of apoplexy? Most likely he died of shock, blood loss or infection after knouting, which would have flayed and shredded his back to the bone. Forty lashes of the knout could kill a strong man and Alexei suffered many more. (An expert executioner could kill a man with a few lashes by breaking the backbone or keep him alive for weeks.) The body lay in the Holy Trinity Church for four days but on 27 and 29 June Peter held parties to celebrate Poltava and his nameday. On the 30th, Peter wept at the funeral as Alexei was buried in the family’s new Peter and Paul tomb. On 9 December Alexei’s confessor and servants were beheaded while others had their tongues cut out and nostrils clipped. Peter’s real view was expressed in the inscription on a medal he had struck at the end of the year: ‘The horizon has cleared’.

  Peter had thickened with age; he was burly and husky now but also wearier and more distrustful. The inquisition into corruption cost more heads. Menshikov survived. ‘Menshikov will always be Menshikov,’ Peter told Catherine, but ‘unless he reforms he will lose his head’.* Yet none of this restrained Peter’s driving ambition to change Russia and build Petersburg.6

  During summer, Peter lived simply in his small Summer Palace, waking up at 4 a.m. and starting work still wearing a nightshirt and a Chinese dressing-gown, standing at an upright desk to scrawl out his orders. The palace, on the mainland, had just fourteen rooms; he lived upstairs, Catherine downstairs. When he was relaxing, he worked on his lathe in the Turning Room or in his Laboratory where he experimented with fireworks. Then in his plain green coat of the Preobrazhensky Guards, high black boots (in the Kremlin Armoury, remarkable for their size – and the smallness of the feet) and brandishing his cane, he headed off early to meetings at the Admiralty and Senate – the government had been moved to Petersburg in 1713. Unlike Menshikov, who proceeded through the city in a fan-shaped carriage with postilions and outriders, Peter often toured the city at mid-afternoon in a plain two-wheeled two-seater carriage with the city’s police commissioner (a post that resembled a modern mayor), Anton Devier, born Antonio de Vieira, a Portuguese Jew whom he had hired as a cabinboy in Holland. In the evenings, he relaxed at the Four Frigates tavern, smoking Dutch pipes and drinking German beer or pepper vodka with Dutch sailors.

  Assisted by Menshikov and Devier,† Peter drove the creation of Petersburg by sheer will. No detail, from public buildings to road grids, was too small for him. ‘No one defecates except in the appointed places,’ he specified in his decree creating the Admiralty. ‘If anyone defecates in other than the appointed places, he is to be beaten with a cat-o’-ninetails and ordered to clean it up.’ The city was expanding from its original buildings on Petrograd Island and around the fortress. Even while he was destroying his son, Peter was directing a multinational team of architects on a variety of projects.*

  Social life still revolved around the frequent meetings of the Drunken Synod and raucous revels at Menshikov’s palace and sailors’ taverns, but Peter wanted to foster civilization of the sort he had admired in Paris and Amsterdam. He ordered Devier to hold polite tea-and-drinks parties for both sexes, drafting his Regulations for Holding Assemblies to lay down the rules. The girls must dress in Western fashions, with French rouge and no more blackened teeth; the men in German or Dutch coats. Dancing, card games and pipe-smoking had to be conducted with decorum – no vomiting or fighting! No one should be forced to drink or do anything ‘on pain of emptying the Great Eagle’ goblet of brandy. Those who did not attend were fined – and no one could leave early because Peter placed soldiers at the door. He also drafted The Honourable Mirror of Youth – his guide to civilized behaviour – and anyone who spat, talked with their mouth full or vomited was likely to receive a whack from the tsarist cane.

  Peter’s creativity came at a terrible price: his new city was effectively built by slave workers, criminals sentenced to suffer his new punishment, forced hard labour – known as katorga, meaning ‘galley’, and indeed many of these convicts rowed his Baltic fleet while others extracted gold and silver in the Far Eastern mines of Altai and Nerchinsk. Untold numbers toiled in the icy waters of the Neva building Petersburg and nameless legions of them perished to create Peter’s dream.7

  ‘Our people are like children who never get down to learning their alphabet unless their master forces them’ was how Peter justified his pursuit of progress by terror. ‘How compulsion is needed in our country,’ he exclaimed on another occasion, ‘where the people are novices at everything.’ He regularly beat his beloved Saxon chef with his cane and when he noticed a broken bridge on one of his inspections of the city with Devier, he smacked him with his cane and then invited him back into the carriage: ‘Get in, brother.’ His 1716 Military Code was draconian, applying the death penalty to 122 charges (double that of the previous Code of 1649) and specifying barbarous new delicacies such as breaking on the wheel and quartering, borrowed like many of his new ideas from the West. He knew that ‘they call me a savage ruler and tyrant’, but he did not apologize for it. ‘Who says this? People who don’t know . . . that many of my subjects placed most foul hindrances to carrying out my best plans for the benefit of the fatherland and therefore it was essential to treat them with great severity.’

  His menacing hyperactivity was always for the ‘common good’, and though he was happiest living in his small villas, wearing plain clothes and disdaining court ritual, after visiting Versailles he realized that a European potentate needed the panoply as well as the plenitude of power.8 Catherine, the peasant-tsarina who now dyed her hair black to downplay her tanned skin and brassy blondeness, was happy to enjoy the splendour and provide the court that an empire required. Peter knocked down the first wooden Winter Palace and had Mattarnovi build a slightly larger version with a hall for receptions while he created a galaxy of rural palaces around the city.*

  Soon after Alexei’s death, in August 1718, Catherine gave birth to a daughter, Natalya. Peter loved his daughters, often asking after ‘Annushka’, ‘Lizetta’ (Elizaveta, after whom he named one of his ships) and ‘our big girl Natalya’. Elizaveta recalled that her father ‘often required an account of what I learned in the course of the day. When he was satisfied he gave recommendations accompanied by a kiss and sometimes a present.’ Nonetheless Peter hoped to exploit them to make useful marriages in Europe. Meanwhile his only surviving son Petrushka had barely teethed before h
e started to display military prowess. ‘He’s drilling his soldiers and firing cannon,’ reported Catherine to Peter about the three-year-old ‘recruit’, who missed his father: ‘He has a bone to pick with you: when I remind him Papa’s away, he doesn’t like it. He likes it better when Papa’s here.’

  After her pregnancy, Catherine returned to her own boisterous coterie, made up of the same ladies as fifteen years before, whom she ruled with the same despotic whim as her husband. After being flogged publicly for sympathizing with Alexei, Anastasia Golitsyna was welcomed back as Catherine’s mistress of revels. After the death of Daria Rzhevskaya, Peter appointed her princess-abbess of the Drunken Female Synod, once rewarding her for her canine ‘howling’. Matrena Balk, Catherine’s mistress of robes, was the sister of Anna Mons, Peter’s original mistress; Catherine’s chamberlain was their flashy brother, Willem.

  Catherine shared Peter’s iron party endurance which exhausted her courtiers. ‘Sire, the Tsarina is never willing to go to sleep before 3 a.m.,’ complained Golitsyna to Peter, ‘and I have to be constantly by her.’ Whenever the other ladies-in-waiting fell asleep, ‘The Lady Tsarina deigns to say, “Auntie are you dozing?” while Mary Hamilton walks around the room with a mattress which she spreads on the floor and Matrena Balk strides around reprimanding everyone. With your presence I shall get freedom from bedroom service.’

  Peter casually and impulsively chose mistresses from Catherine’s retinue.* ‘I hear you also have a mistress?’ Frederick IV of Denmark once asked Peter. ‘My brother,’ replied Peter, unsmiling, ‘my harlots don’t cost me much but yours cost you thousands which could be better spent.’ His ‘harlots’ received no privileges – and a few rolls with the tsar were not enough to save a girl’s head, however beautiful.9

  In the autumn of 1718, Peter launched an investigation into one of Catherine’s maids-of-honour who was his ex-mistress: Mary Hamilton, descendant of Scottish royalists. ‘Much addicted to gallantry’, she managed to become pregnant three times by her lover Ivan Orlov, one of Peter’s adjutants who, summoned urgently by the tsar, was so terrified that he fell to his knees and accidentally blurted out a confession of his affair with Mary – and how she had aborted three babies. In the debauched round of court promiscuity, her lover was also sleeping with Peter’s mistress Avdotia Rzevskaya. Mary tried to win Orlov back by stealing Catherine’s jewellery and giving it to him. Fearing her infidelity to the tsar would be exposed and she too would be tortured, Avdotia accused Mary of claiming that Catherine lightened her skin using beeswax. In this bonfire of the mistresses, Catherine furiously searched Mary’s room and found her jewels, and Peter recalled that a dead baby had been found near the palace. Hamilton was arrested, tortured in front of Peter, and confessed to killing three babies. Peter had her sentenced to death. Two tsarinas, Catherine and Praskovia, begged for mercy. He refused to ‘be either Saul or Ahab nor violate divine law by excess of kindness.’ On 14 March 1719, Mary appeared gorgeous on the scaffold in a white silk dress with black ribbons, but she expected a pardon, particularly when Peter mounted the gibbet. He kissed her but then said quietly: ‘I can’t violate the law to save your life. Endure your punishment courageously and address your prayers to God with a heart full of faith.’ She fainted, and he nodded at the executioner, who brought down his sword. Peter lifted up the beautiful head and began to lecture the crowd on anatomy, pointing out the sliced vertebrae, open windpipe and dripping arteries, before kissing the bloody lips and dropping the head. He crossed himself and strode off. Peter, that connoisseur of decapitation who had found the beheadings of his musketeers so curious, had the head embalmed and placed in his Cabinet of Curiosities, where an English visitor inspecting it ‘in a crystal vessel’ noted that ‘The face is the most beautifulest my eyes ever beheld.’

  Soon afterwards, Peter learned of a more welcome death. Charles XII was inspecting his siege of a Danish fortress when his aides heard a sound like ‘a stone thrown into mud’. A bullet had hit Ironhead in one temple and passed out of the other.

  A third death delivered a cruel blow. On 25 April 1719, Menshikov visited the bedside of little Petrushka. Peter had arranged the marriage of his French giant, Nicholai Zhigant, to a giantess.* He and Catherine were celebrating at the gigantist wedding when they heard the news that Petrushka had died. Catherine was heartbroken: her court records show that she kept the baby’s toys with her until her own death. As for Peter, he suffered an epileptic fit and locked himself in his room for days until his henchmen begged him to end his ‘useless and excessive sorrow’. The child’s death ruined his plan for the succession. But before solving it in his own eccentric way, he had to end the war with Sweden.

  Peter launched an assault on the coasts of Sweden, even raiding Stock-holm itself, persisting until the new king sued for peace, agreeing a treaty at Nystadt. On 4 September 1721, five days after the peace had been signed,* a euphoric Peter disembarked at the Peter and Paul Fortress, prayed in church, reported to Prince-Caesar Ivan Romodanovsky and then, mounting a dais, toasted the weeping and cheering crowd, who were offered pails of free alcohol as his cannon fired salvoes. ‘Rejoice and thank God!’ he shouted. This was the start of two months of partying. At the wild wedding of the new prince-pope, ‘Peter-Prick’ Buturlin, to the young widow of the old one, toasts were drunk out of giant goblets shaped like male and female genitalia, the groom was tipped into a vat of beer and their wedding night was spent in an al fresco bed on Senate Square.

  On 22 October, to the blare of trumpets and the thunder of cannonades, Petersburg celebrated a Roman triumph. After a sermon by Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich,† Chancellor Golovkin hailed the tsar as ‘Father of the Fatherland’, an epithet awarded to Roman Caesars, and ‘Peter the Great, Emperor of all Russia’, effectively making an offer that had been agreed by the Senate a few days earlier – and which was accepted by the tsar with a nod. From now on, Muscovy became Russia and the tsar was also an emperor (Peter simply adopted the Roman word imperator) while any sons would be ‘caesarovichi’ – sons of Caesar. Then the real party started, with giants dressed as babies, the prince-pope’s and cardinals’ carriages pulled by pigs, bears and dogs.

  Yet ‘time is death’, said Peter, who did not rest. Now that Russia was finally at peace in Europe, the overthrow of the Shah of Persia and Persian persecution of Christians in the eastern Caucasus offered the opportunity to fight Muslims and expand the empire along the coastline of the Caspian Sea. Peter could not resist a new exotic war which accelerated a frenzy of reforms and concentrated his mind on the succession.

  In January 1722, Peter, inspired by his belief that universal state service should be the only condition for eminence in society, created the Table of Ranks, a hierarchy to encourage competition for honours and attract new talent. Articulating the militarization of the high nobility, Peter declared that the military were superior to civilians. He ordered the nobility to serve as officers or administrators for life, but at the same time rising men, even the sons of peasants, could achieve nobility just by reaching a certain rank.* But war and splendour are expensive: Peter funded the Russian court and war machine by creating a new head tax to be paid by each male peasant instead of each household, increasing the strain on the serfs, some 93 per cent of the population, who already had to serve almost a lifetime – twenty-five years – in the army. Knowing he might die in the south, Peter declared, ‘It will always be for the ruling monarch to appoint whom he wishes to the succession.’ As he set off, he promoted his forceful favourite Pavel Iaguzhinsky, to the new post of procurator-general of the Senate. ‘He knows my intentions,’ he told the senators. ‘What he deems necessary, that do!’ The procurator-general was meant to supervise the government. ‘Here is my eye,’ Peter said to the senators, ‘with which I shall see everything.’10

  In May 1722 Peter and 60,000 troops, accompanied by Catherine (as well as his current mistress, a pretty Greek, Princess Maria Cantemir), marched down the Caspian coast, which was then the territory of Per
sia. Defeating Persian troops, he managed to take the ancient port of Derbent,* but disease, lack of provisions and destruction of ships in a storm paralysed the expedition. The heat was so punishing that Peter and the ever game Catherine shaved their heads, he sporting a wide-brimmed fedora, she a bombardier’s cap. Peter, suffering from a bladder infection possibly caused by VD, retreated to Astrakhan, but his troops later took the key port of Baku.

  Peter, exhausted, returned to Moscow where he found Menshikov at war with Shafirov, brawling at senatorial meetings. Menshikov’s protégé Prince Matvei Gagarin had embezzled large sums while he governed Siberia (it was said he was so rich that he shod his horses in gold). When Peter had Gagarin hanged outside the Senate, he forced his grandees to watch.

  ‘Heads will fly,’ Peter warned. ‘I don’t know who I can trust. I have only traitors around me.’ He had all of them investigated, but the charges stuck to both Menshikov and Shafirov, whom he sentenced to death. As Shafirov laid his head on the block, the axe was raised and at the last minute, Peter’s adjutant announced the sentence was commuted to Siberian exile. Menshikov was seriously rattled. ‘I recognize my guilt and realize I can’t justify my actions,’ he told Peter. ‘I tearfully and in utter humility beseech Your Majesty’s forgiveness.’ Peter beat him with his cane. When Catherine interceded, Peter warned her: ‘Menshikov was conceived in lawlessness and he’ll end his life in knavery. If he doesn’t mend his ways, he’ll end up shorter by a head.’ Menshikov was fined and sacked from the War Collegium. Peter sentenced more officials to death, insisting ‘Don’t bury the body – let it stay on top of the ground for all to see,’ and told Iaguzhinsky to hang anyone who stole so much as a rope. Iaguzhinsky advised against such severity, ‘unless Your Majesty wishes to be left alone without servitors or subjects. We all steal, only some more and more visibly than others.’11