The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  On 5 March 1723, back in Petersburg, Peter inspected his buildings, launched ships and organized his Drunken Synod, now calling himself ‘Archdeacon Pachomius Crams-with-his-Prick’. When he travelled down the coast to check his new Reval palace he missed Catherine: ‘All’s merry here but when I come to the country house and you’re not there, I feel so sad!’. Plagued by his bladder, Peter needed to name his successor. Grandson, daughters, nieces? Who was it to be?

  A young prince, Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, arrived in Petersburg hoping to win Russian help against Denmark – and to marry one of the emperor’s daughters. Peter designated Annushka, then vacillated about an actual betrothal. Holstein stayed for more than two years in Petersburg, becoming one of the family almost by osmosis.

  Meanwhile Peter was irked by his two nieces, the morose Anna of Courland and the frivolous Ekaterina of Mecklenburg, who both had excellent claims to the throne since they were the daughters of Tsar Ivan V. Their mother Tsarina Praskovia loved the attractive Ekaterina, nicknamed the ‘Wild Duchess’, and persuaded Peter to let her leave the violent Leopold of Mecklenburg and come home with her newborn daughter. When diplomats visited mother and daughter, tsarina and duchess resided in a filthy bedroom with a ‘half-blind dirty mandora-player reeking of garlic and sweat’, who sang filthy songs, and ‘an old dirty blind wretched stupid woman who wandered wearing nothing more than a blouse’. They made ‘this hag dance and she would immediately lift her stinking old rags in front and back and show all she had beneath’.

  Yet Tsarina Praskovia was disgusted by the conduct of her sulky daughter Anna, the widowed duchess of Courland. Peter had made Anna stay in the Courlandian capital. Lonely, poor and desperate to marry again, she wrote over thirty letters begging Peter for help. When he ignored them, Anna beseeched Catherine ‘my dear Sovereign to ask our dear uncle to have mercy on me to settle the matter of my marriage’ and to ask also for money: ‘I have nothing more than the damask you ordered and I have neither suitable diamonds nor laces nor linens nor a fine dress and I can hardly maintain my home and put food on the table.’

  Peter despatched a courtier, Peter Bestuzhev-Riumin, to run Courland – and Anna, whom he soon seduced. He was nineteen years her senior. This appalled Tsarina Praskovia, who appealed to Peter. But ‘I am entirely pleased with Bestuzhev,’ Anna told Catherine, ‘and he conducts my business here very well.’ As for her mother, she stole her daughter’s paltry allowance. ‘I shan’t live in the misery and suffering caused by this feud with my mother,’ declared Anna. Praskovia cursed her daughter.

  Mother and daughter both appealed to Catherine, who managed to impose peace. ‘I’ve heard from our Sovereign Catherine that you consider yourself under my curse,’ Praskovia wrote grudgingly to Anna. ‘I forgive you everything for the sake of Her Majesty and I absolve you of every sin committed before me.’

  When Praskovia, last link to old Muscovy, died, Peter gave her a magnificent funeral, but her daughters would not succeed him. Suddenly he announced that ‘since Our best beloved Spouse Consort and Empress Catherine has been a great support to us, we have decided she shall be crowned’.12

  *

  On 7 May 1724, Peter, in a blue tunic with red stockings, and Catherine, wearing a crimson dress sewn with gold, with five ladies to bear her train, flanked by pageboys in green outfits and white wigs and Guardsmen in bright green with gold braid, boots and spurs, emerged from the Kremlin’s Terem Palace, nodded thrice at the crowd and then came down the Red Staircase, processing to the Dormition Cathedral.* In this new-model ceremony, Peter, not the clergy, was the source of all power. He placed the crown on Catherine’s head, handing her the orb – but keeping the sceptre. As she knelt, tears streamed down her face, but when she tried to kiss his hand, Peter raised her.

  When Peter returned to Petersburg in June, his bladder infection, known as stone and strangury, flared up again. He could no longer pass urine. Surgery was the only answer. Peter had to lie on a table holding his doctor’s hands as his Dutch surgeon passed a catheter into his bladder to relieve the pressure of the urine. Blood and pus seeped out, which suggests there was already a raging infection. Finally he was able to pass a stone. Yet his illness did not stop Peter sailing on the Gulf of Finland and even plunging into the sea to rescue some sailors. Catherine kept an eye on his health: when he was partying on a new frigate, she sailed past on her own boat and called in through the porthole: ‘Time to go home, old man.’

  Then on 8 November, he swooped on Catherine’s court.13

  * Menshikov showed the way by ordering the Italian architect Giovanni Fontana to build the city’s first stone palace on Vasilevsky Island, which became the tsar’s own headquarters. Meanwhile a Swiss-Italian, Domenico Trezzini, was building the Peter and Paul Cathedral beside the fortress, while across the Neva he created Peter’s Summer Palace, a small, two-storey villa in Dutch baroque style. Not far from his cabin, Peter built a two-storey wooden Winter Palace.

  * Peter the Great had not been keen to attract Jews to Russia – ‘I’d rather see the best Mahommedans than Jews, rascals and cheats’ – yet he was happy to promote converted Jews such as Baron Shafirov and General Devier, later police chief of Petersburg.

  † Shafirov, left behind as a hostage, negotiated the Treaty of Adrianople in Constantinople, which now made it impossible for Charles XII to remain in the Ottoman empire. In a swashbuckling ride across Europe, Ironhead took just thirteen days to travel from Wallachia to Stralsund, the last Swedish stronghold on the Baltic, without changing boots or clothes. On arrival, his boots had to be cut from his feet. But he made sure: the war went on.

  * Strikingly handsome, sternly efficient in war, government and diplomacy, unusually incorruptible and an invincible carouser, Iaguzhinsky, the Polish-born son of a church organist, had started as the tsar’s denshchik, been promoted to a new rank in the tsarist entourage, adjutant-general, for his courage at Pruth and now accompanied Peter everywhere, usually riding in his carriage on his trips. He was appointed master of ceremonies at the Jolly Company. In some ways, he was a new, more honest Menshikov.

  † As a result, Apraxin proposed that the tsar should be promoted to full general, which delighted Peter. ‘As the general’s mistress you should congratulate me!’ he told Catherine. ‘As general and general’s wife, let’s congratulate each other mutually,’ she teased. ‘But I don’t recognize this rank until I can see you personally here. I wish you’d at least been a full admiral!’

  * In January 1715, Peter presided over the wedding in Moscow of the eighty-four-year-old Prince-Pope Zotov to a woman fifty years younger, the ultimate topsy-turvy spectacular of the Drunken Synod. The bridegroom arrived in a carriage pulled by bears; the heralds were the ‘greatest stammerers in all Russia’, the stewards and waiters ‘were old decrepit men’, the running footmen were ‘so fat and bulky they had to be led’ and the couple were married by a centenarian priest who had ‘lost eyesight and memory’.

  * In another strategic marriage, on 8 April 1716, Peter married his niece, Ekaterina Ivanov na, eldest daughter of his late brother Tsar Ivan V and Tsarina Praskovia, to Karl Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who allowed his duchy to be garrisoned with a Russian army. Later the outrages perpetrated by this alcoholic and sadistic clod would lose him his duchy – but this marriage matters because the Mecklenburgs’ daughter, Princess Elizabeth, born in December 1718, later converted to Orthodoxy as Anna Leopoldovna and ruled Russia as regent for her infant son.

  * Peter had recently learned of the disaster that had befallen his forces in Central Asia, which was ruled by several independent khanates and emirates. Hearing reports of the wealth in the khanate of Khiva (in today’s Uzbekistan), he commissioned a converted Circassian princeling, Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky, to lead a small expedition to persuade Khiva to accept Russian suzerainty. Bekovich managed to defeat the khan, who then tricked and captured him. Bekovich was beheaded, his body stuffed and displayed in the khan’s palace.


  * These new departments (initially eight then nine) took the place of the old offices (prikazy). The collegia presidents initially were also senators. Golovkin was president of the Foreign Collegium; Menshikov of the Collegium of War. The whole point of the collegia was that they were not ministries, being (in theory at least) under collective boards rather than individual control as part of an attempt to limit corruption.

  * Afrosina escaped punishment: she later married and lived for many years in Petersburg; Eudoxia returned to her monastery. Meanwhile the older generation of Peter’s retainers was dying out: Prince-Caesar Romodanovsky died in 1717. Peter mourned the old monster to Romodanovsky’s son Ivan: ‘There goes everyone one way or another by God’s will. Bear this in mind and don’t give in to grief. And please don’t imagine I have abandoned you or forgotten your father’s good deeds.’ Peter appointed Ivan Romodanovsky as new prince-caesar and chief of the Preobrazhensky Office, even though he more often used Tolstoy’s Secret Chancellery for sensitive matters. Prince-Pope Zotov died in December 1717: Peter oversaw the election of a new prince-pope in a ritual involving the kissing of the bare breasts of the arch-abbess of the Female Synod, Daria Rzhevskaya, and voting with coloured eggs. Peter Buturlin, a veteran crony (‘Peter-Prick’ in Synod jargon) was chosen just before Alexei’s return.

  † The parvenu loathes no one so much as another upstart. Hence Menshikov’s hatred for both Devier and Shafirov was visceral. When Devier fell in love with his unmarried sister Anna Menshikova, the prince rejected his suit. But Anna fell pregnant. Devier asked Menshikov to allow the marriage to legitimize the child, only for the prince to kick him downstairs. Devier appealed to Peter, who ordered the marriage. Later Menshikov got his revenge.

  * He had Trezzini create new buildings for the collegia on Vasilevsky Island near where his German architect Georg Johann Mattarnovi designed the Kunstkammer to house his collection of curiosities and live exhibits including a hermaphrodite who later escaped. Dwarfs and giants appeared alive (and later embalmed) along with the genitalia of a hermaphrodite, Siamese twins and two-headed babies and (soon) the preserved heads of ill-fated courtiers. His new French architect-general Alexandre LeBlond laid out Nevsky Prospect, the main boulevard of the city that ran for two and a half miles from the Winter Palace and Admiralty out to Trezzini’s St Alexander Nevsky Monastery – it remains the artery of today’s city.

  * His favourite was Peterhof, nineteen miles west of Petersburg. Set on the seaside, he first built a one-storey villa, Mon Plaisir, where he could enjoy views of his Kronstadt naval base. He designed it in Dutch Colonial style with a study devoted to his naval hobbies and a Chinese lacquer room. Then after his Parisian visit, he decided to emulate Versailles and the Château de Marly with their fountains. LeBlond built a palace and the sculptor Carlo Rastrelli helped design the first waterworks. When the tsar and tsarina were there, Peter stayed in Mon Plaisir and Catherine in the big palace whence she would come down and cook for him in the Dutch-tiled pantry. They also developed another suburban palace. Much earlier Peter had given Catherine an estate fifteen miles south of the city that they named Tsarskoe Selo (Tsar Village). She surprised him by commissioning the German architect Johann Friedrich Braunstein to build her a palace there which was later vastly explanded by her daughter Elizaveta into the baroque wedding cake that we see today.

  * His most beautiful mistress was Princess Maria Cherkasskaya, but his favourite was said to be the well-educated Maria Matveeva. She was the granddaughter of Tsar Alexei’s minister Matveev, who had been thrown on to the musketeers’ pikes in 1682. Peter married her off to Rumiantsev as a reward for his delivering Tsarevich Alexei. Maria outlived her husband and everyone else to become the doyenne of the courts of the Empresses Elizaveta and Catherine the Great; raised to countess, she dined out (with much innuendo) on her memories of Peter. Her son Peter, born in 1720 and said to be the tsar’s son, became one of Catherine the Great’s best generals. Peter started an affair with a true child of his carnival-court, Princess Avdotia Rzhevskaya, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Daria, the arch-abbess of the female branch of the Drunken Synod, which went on for many years. She was notoriously wanton and untameable – Peter nicknamed her Virago. Even after he had married her off to General Grigory Chernyshev, she was said to have given the tsar VD, for which he told her husband to whip her. Her son Zakhar, who later ran Catherine the Great’s army, may have been Peter’s.

  * A new jester had recently joined his court and he quickly became a favourite: he was a Portuguese Jew called Jan la Costa. He was an intelligent, multilingual failed merchant who combined coruscating wit with biblical learning. Peter liked to debate religion with him. When the Samoyeds, a tribe of Siberian reindeer herders, arrived to put on shows in Petersburg, Peter declared La Costa their king and made them swear allegiance to him and gave him an island as his realm. Peter’s doctor Lestocq tried to seduce La Costa’s daughter, at which the jester appealed to the tsar. Lestocq was reprimanded. Costa long outlived Peter, still a fixture at court in the 1730s.

  * Nystadt was negotiated by two of Peter’s most talented aides: Count James – Yakov – Bruce, a Scotsman, superb organizer and chief of artillery who was a bibliophile, alchemist, astronomer and magus known as the Russian Faust for his esoteric experiments. Andrei Osterman was the multilingual son of a Westphalian pastor who had become one of Peter’s secretaries and senior diplomats. ‘Osterman never makes a mistake,’ said Peter, who now raised Bruce to count and Osterman first to baron then to vice-president of the Foreign Collegium. Peter married Osterman brilliantly to his own relative, Martha Streshneva.

  † Peter appointed Prokopovich as procurator of the Holy Synod in charge of the Church, a role that evolved into the post of ober-procurator, always held by a layman, effectively the tsar’s church minister. There would be no more patriarchs under the Romanovs. After the February 1917 Revolution a patriarch was appointed, but the post was abolished by the Bolsheviks. It took a militant atheist-Marxist, trained as a boy for the priesthood, to restore the patriarchate in 1943 to rally nationalist spirit in the Great Patriotic War: Stalin.

  * Henceforth nobility was a reward for service, and the state in the person of the tsar would decide a man’s position, helping to ensure that the Russian nobility was so interlinked with the autocracy that it never developed the independence truly to challenge the throne (except for spasms of regicidal strangling), but it was a circular dependence as the Romanovs never developed an alternative support either. Peter divided his servitors into three services – military, civil and court – each divided into fourteen classes. All officers became nobles, while a man reaching Grade 8 in the civil service automatically became a hereditary nobleman. But Peter still looked to his traditional nobles, Saltykovs and Golitsyns, to fill the top grades. A tiny web of families, around 5,000 individuals, continued to dominate army, court and countryside: about 8 per cent of the population owned 58.9 per cent. This was their privilege in return for serving in the army and government. But the nobles hated this enforced service and as soon as Peter was gone, they undermined his rules, with noble children joining the Guards at the age of seven. Soon nobles were allowed to avoid service altogether. Yet the Table of Ranks, symbol of the militarization of Russia, endured until 1917.

  * In Islamic Daghestan, Peter ordered women to be unveiled, and Catherine invited the soldiers to file through her tent so the men could admire them: no wonder she was so popular with the troops. In Derbent, Peter built a domik, a cottage, to live in.

  * The retinue was a snapshot of who was in favour: Peter was attended by Menshikov, Catherine by the Duke of Holstein and Apraxin with Chancellor Golovkin and his deputy Osterman bearing her train. At Catherine’s request, Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, who had been close to execution six years earlier, was pardoned and invited to carry the orb. Bruce bore the new imperial crown with a ruby ‘as large as a pigeon’s egg’ – and 2,562 diamonds. Tolstoy, who carried the mace, was afterwards promoted to count. Menshikov scat
tered the coins. Soon afterwards, more of his crimes were exposed. Peter lost patience and refused even to see Menshikov.

  SCENE 2

  The Empresses

  CAST

  PETER THE GREAT, tsar and emperor 1682–1725

  CATHERINE I (née Scavronskaya), empress 1725–7, widow of Peter the Great

  Alexander Menshikov, prince, her former lover, generalissimus

  Peter Tolstoy, count, chief of the Secret Chancellery

  Andrei Ushakov, chief of the Secret Chancellery, baron

  Andrei Osterman, count, vice-chancellor, general-admiral, ‘Oracle’

  PETER II, emperor 1727–30, son of Tsarevich Alexei, grandson of Peter the Great

  Prince Ivan Dolgoruky, Peter II’s grand chamberlain and best friend

  Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, Peter II’s fiancée

  Prince Alexei Lukich Dolgoruky, father of Ivan and Ekaterina

  Prince Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky, uncle of Ivan and Ekaterina, brother of Alexei

  Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, member of Supreme Privy Council and architect of offer of throne to Anna

  Prince Vasily Vladimirovich Dolgoruky, Peter the Great’s favourite, veteran of battles of Poltava and Pruth, exiled in the Alexei case, pardoned 1724, promoted by Peter II to field marshal, member of Supreme Privy Council

  ANNA, empress 1730–40, daughter of Tsar Ivan V and Tsarina Praskovia (née Saltykova), duchess of Courland,

  Ekaterina, Anna’s elder sister, duchess of Mecklenburg, married Karl Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg, ‘Wild Duchess’

  Ernst Biron, ex-groom, Anna’s lover and later duke of Courland, briefly regent

  Prince Alexei Cherkassky, member of the Council, later chancellor

  Semyon Saltykov, Anna’s first cousin, governor of Moscow