Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  When Sophia became regent in 1682, she quickly installed her own lieutenants in office. Her uncle Ivan Miloslavsky remained a leading advisor until his death. Fedor Shaklovity, the new commander of the Streltsy, who won the respect of the restless soldiers and reinstilled firm discipline in the Moscow regiments, was another supporter. He was a man from the Ukraine, of peasant stock and barely literate, but he was dedicated to Sophia and ready to see that any order of hers was carried out. As the regency progressed, he became even closer to Sophia, eventually rising to be secretary of the boyar council, whose members hated him fiercely because of his low origins. To balance Shaklovity, Sophia also took counsel from a learned young monk, Sylvester Medvedev, whom she had known while still a girl in the terem. A zealous disciple of Sophia's tutor, Simeon Polotsky, Medvedev was considered to be the most learned theologian in Russia.

  Miloslavsky, Shaklovity and Medvedev were important, but the greatest figure of Sophia's regency—her advisor, her principal minister, her strong right arm, her comforter and eventually her lover—was Prince Vasily Vasilievich Golitsyn. A scion of one of the oldest aristocratic houses of Russia, Golitsyn in his tastes and ideas was even more Western and revolutionary than Artemon Matveev. An experienced statesman and soldier, an urbane lover of the arts and a cosmopolitan political visionary, Golitsyn was perhaps the most civilized man Russia had yet produced. Born in 1643, he was educated far beyond the custom of the Russian nobility. As a boy, he studied theology and history and learned to speak and write Latin, Greek and Polish.

  In Moscow, in his great stone palace roofed with heavy brass sheets, Golitsyn lived like a grand seigneur on the Western model. Visitors, expecting the usual primitive Muscovite furnishings, were astonished at its splendor: carved ceilings, marble statues, crystal, precious stones and silver plate, painted glass, musical instruments, mathematical and astronomical devices, gilded chairs and ebony tables inlaid with ivory. On the walls were Gobelin tapestries, tall Venetian mirrors, German maps in gilt frames. The house boasted a library of books in Latin, Polish and German, and a gallery of portraits of all Russia's tsars and many reigning monarchs of Western Europe.

  Golitsyn found great stimulus in the company of foreigners. He was a constant visitor in the German Suburb, dining there regularly with General Patrick Gordon, the Scottish soldier who had been an advisor and collaborator in his efforts to reform the army. Golitsyn's house in Moscow became a gathering place for foreign travelers, diplomats and merchants. Even Jesuits, whom most Russians rigorously avoided, found a welcome. A French visitor was struck by the sensitive manner in which Golitsyn, instead of heartily urging him to drink the glass of vodka presented on arrival in the manner of most Muscovite hosts, gently advised him not to take it as it was usually not pleasant for foreigners. During the leisurely after-dinner discussions in Latin, topics ranged from the merits of new firearms and projectiles to European politics.

  Golitsyn passionately admired France and Louis XIV; he insisted that his son constantly wear a miniature portrait of the Sun King. To the French agent in Moscow, De Neuville, he revealed his hopes and dreams. He talked of further reforms in the army, of trading across Siberia, of establishing permanent relations with the West, of sending young Russians to study in Western cities, of stabilizing money, proclaiming freedom of worship and even emancipating the serfs. As Golitsyn talked, his vision expanded: He dreamed of "peopling the deserts, of enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes and shepherds' huts into palaces of stone."

  Sophia met this unusual man when she was twenty-four, in the full bloom of her rebellion against the terem. Golitsyn was thirty-nine, blue-eyed, wore a small mustache, a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard and, over his shoulders, an elegant fur-lined cape. Among a crowd of conventional Muscovite boyars in their heavy caftans and bushy beards, he looked like a dashing earl just arrived from England. With her intelligence, her taste for learning and her ambition, it was natural that Sophia should see in Golitsyn the personification of an ideal and the attraction was inevitable.

  Golitsyn had a wife and grown children, but it did not matter. Strong-minded and passionate, now plunging into life with abandon, Sophia had cast caution to the winds in her move for power. She would do no less for love. What is more, she would combine the two. With Golitsyn she would share power and love, and together they would rule: He, with his vision, would propose ideas and policies; she, with her authority, would see that they were executed. On her proclamation as regent, she named Golitsyn head of the Foreign Office. Two years later, she conferred on him the rare distinction of Keeper of the Great Seal; in effect, prime minister.

  In her early years as regent, Sophia's role was difficult. In private she ruled the state, but in public she shielded her person and her activities behind the ceremonial figures of the two boy Tsars and the administrative offices of Golitsyn. People rarely saw her. Her name appeared on public documents only as "The Most Orthodox Princess, the Sister of Their Majesties." When she did appear in public, it was separately from her brothers and in a manner which made her appear at least co-equal with them. An example was the farewell for departing Swedish ambassadors taking home from Moscow a reconfirmation of the treaty of peace between Russia and Sweden. In the morning, the ambassadors were summoned to watch the formal ceremony in which the boy Tsars pledged their oath on the Holy Gospel to keep the terms of the treaty. The ambassadors arrived in royal carriages to be greeted by Prince Golitsyn, who escorted them between lines of red-coated Streltsy up the Red Staircase into the banqueting hall, where Peter and Ivan sat on their double throne. Benches along the walls of the room were lined with boyars and state officials. The Tsars and the ambassadors exchanged formal greetings, and both sides pledged to keep the peace. Then Peter and Ivan rose, removed the crowns from their heads, walked to a table holding the Holy Gospels and a document containing the text of the treaty, and there, invoking God as a witness, promised that Russia would never break the treaty and attack Sweden. The Tsars kissed the Gospels, and Golitsyn handed the treaty document to the ambassadors.

  The official ceremony was thus concluded. The real farewell audience for the ambassadors came later the same day. Once again, the ambassadors were conducted through lines of Streltsy armed with gleaming halberds. At the entrance to the Golden Hall, two chamberlains announced that the great lady, the Noble Tsarevna, the Grand Duchess Sophia Alexeevna, Imperial Highness of all Great and Little and White Russia, was prepared to receive them. The ambassadors bowed and entered the hall. Sophia sat on the Diamond Throne presented to her father by the Shah of Persia. She wore a robe of silver cloth embroidered with gold, lined with sables and covered with mantles of fine lace. On her head was a crown of pearls. Her attendants—the wives of boyars and two female dwarfs—stood nearby. Before the throne stood Vasily Golitsyn and Ivan Miloslavsky. When the ambassadors had saluted her, Sophia beckoned them forward and spoke to them for a few minutes. They kissed her hand, she dismissed them, and subsequently, in the gesture of a Russian autocrat, sent them dinner from her own table.

  Under Sophia's regency, Golitsyn prided himself on administering "a reign based on justice and general consent." The people of Moscow seemed content; on holidays, crowds strolled through the public gardens and along the banks of the river. Among the nobility, a strong Polish influence was felt; Polish gloves, fur caps and soap were in demand. Russians became fond of tracing genealogies and creating family coats of arms. Sophia herself continued her intellectual life, writing verses in Russian and even plays, some of which were performed in the Kremlin.

  The appearance as well as the manners of Moscow began to change. Golitsyn was interested in architecture, and the number of devastating fires in Moscow cleared wide areas for him to exercise his influence. In the autumn of 1688, the Treasury was temporarily unable to pay the salaries of foreign officers, for every rouble had been advanced in loans to help citizens rebuild houses destroyed by flames. To combat fire, a decree ordered that wooden roofs be cover
ed with earth to reduce burnable surface. Golitsyn urged Muscovites to build of stone, and during his administration all new public buildings and a bridge across the Moscow River were erected of stone.

  But Kremlin theatricals, Polish gloves and even new stone buildings in Moscow did not mean a real reform of Russian society. As the years, went by, the regime increasingly was forced to content itself with keeping order at home, and Golitsyn's larger dreams remained unrealized. The army seemed to improve under the leadership of foreign officers, but it was to fail miserably when put to the test of war. The colonization of distant Siberian provinces was halted as all the state's military resources were thrown into war against the Tatars. Russia's trade remained in foreign hands, and amelioration of the lot of the serfs was never mentioned outside Golitsyn's elegant salon. "Peopling the deserts, enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes" remained the stuff of fantasy.

  The one great achievement of the regency lay in the realm of foreign policy. From the beginning, Sophia and Golitsyn had resolved on a policy of peace with all of Russia's neighbors. Large pieces of formerly Russian territory were still in foreign hands: The Swedes held the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, the Poles occupied White Russia and Lithuania. But Sophia and Golitsyn decided not to contest these conquests. Thus, as soon as her government was firmly established, Sophia sent embassies to Stockholm, Warsaw, Copenhagen and Vienna, declaring Russia's willingness to accept the status quo by confirming all existing treaties.

  In Stockholm, King Charles XI was pleased to hear that Tsars Ivan and Peter would make no attempt to recover the Russian Baltic provinces surrendered to Sweden in 1661 by Tsar Alexis in the Treaty of Kardis. In Warsaw, Sophia's embassy confronted a more complicated situation. Poles and Russians were traditional enemies. For two centuries they had warred, with Poland generally having the upper hand. Polish armies had penetrated deep into Russia, Polish troops had occupied the Kremlin, a Polish tsar had even been placed on the Russian throne. The most recent war had ended, after twelve years of fighting, with a truce signed in 1667. By its terms, Tsar Alexis established Russia's western frontier at Smolensk and won title to all the Ukraine east of the Dnieper River. He was also permitted to keep, for two years only, the ancient city of Kiev; at the end of two years, it was to be returned to Poland.

  It was a promise impossible to keep. Years passed, the truce was maintained, but Alexis and, after him, his son Fedor found themselves unable to give up Kiev. Kiev meant too much: it was one of the oldest of Russian cities, it was the capital of the Ukraine, it was; Orthodox. To surrender it back to Catholic Poland was difficult, painful and, finally, unthinkable. Therefore, in negotiations Moscow hedged, argued and delayed, while the Poles stubbornly refused to give up their claim. It was here that matters stood when Sophia's peace proposals arrived.

  In the meantime, however, a new crisis had arisen to confront the Poles. Poland and Austria were at war with the Ottoman Empire. In 1683, the year after Peter's accession, the Ottoman tide reached its high-water mark in Europe as Turkish armies besieged Vienna. It was the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, who led the Christian armies to victory under the city's walls. The Turks retreated down the Danube, but the war continued, and both Poland and Austria were eager for Russian help. In 1685, the Poles were severely defeated by the Turks, and the following spring a splendid Polish embassy with 1,000 men and 1,500 horses arrived in Moscow to seek a Russo-Polish alliance. Golitsyn received them royally; they were escorted through the streets by special detachments of Streltsy and feasted by the highest Russian nobility. After prolonged negotiations, both sides achieved their objectives. Both sides also paid a heavy price.

  Poland formally ceded Kiev to Russia, giving up forever her claim to the great city. For Russia, for Sophia, for Golitsyn, this was the greatest triumph of the Tsarevna's regency. The Russian negotiators, led by Golitsyn, were lavishly rewarded with praise, gifts, serfs and estates; the two Tsars themselves handed them goblets from which to drink. In Warsaw, King Jan Sobieski was desolate at losing Kiev; when he agreed to the treaty, tears flowed from his eyes. Nevertheless, Russia paid for this triumph: Sophia had agreed to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and launch an attack on the Sultan's vassal, the Khan of the Crimea. For the first time in Russian history, Muscovy would join a coalition of European powers in fighting a common enemy.*

  War with the Turks meant an abrupt change in Russian foreign policy. Up to this time, there had never been hostilities between

  *It is important to note that this first Russian war with Turkey was not inspired by either of the objectives generally attributed to Russian aggression in this area. It was not motivated by a drive for a warm-water port, and it was not a holy crusade to free Constantinople from the infidels. Rather, it was a war that Russia entered unwillingly as an unwelcome obligation of a treaty with Poland. In fact, Russia first attacked Turkey not to acquire Constantinople, but to gain unimpeachable title to Kiev.

  One consequence of Sophia's decision to make war in the south still affects the modern world. Remote in time though it may seem, her decision to attack the Tatars had an important bearing on, and even helped to originate, the Far Eastern boundary dispute between the Soviet Union and China. Having decided to make a maximum effort against the Tatars, Sophia and Golitsyn suspended all other Russian territorial ambitions. The momentum of the advance to the Pacific was abruptly halted. By the mid-seventeenth century, Russian soldiers traders, hunters and pioneers had reached and conquered the basin of the Amur River, which makes a vast looping circle around the territory now known as Manchuria. For years, under increasing Chinese pressure, frontier soldiers had been sending desperate appeals to Moscow for reinforcements. But Sophia, reducing her commitments, sent not reinforcements, but a diplomatic mission headed by Fedor Golovin to work out a peace with the Manchu Dynasty. The negotiations took place in the Russian frontier post of Nerchinsk on the upper Amur River. Golovin was at a disadvantage; not only had Sophia ordered him to make peace, but the Chinese brought up a large fleet of heavily armed junks and surrounded the fort with 17,000 soldiers. In the end, Golovin signed a paper which gave the whole of the Amur basin to China.

  Subsequently, the Russians claimed that the treaty had been based not on justice, but on the presence of so much menacing Chinese military force. In 1858 and 1860, the tables were turned, and Russia took back 380,000 square miles of territory from an impotent China. Not all Russians approved this claim. After all, the Treaty of Nerchinsk had been honored for 180 years; all that time, the territory had been Chinese. But Tsar Nicholas I approved, proclaiming, "Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it must never be lowered."

  This is the essence of the Soviet-Chinese dispute: The Russians argue that the vast region was taken from them unfairly during Sophia's regency and that, as Izvestia put it in 1972, "this provided the grounds for Russian diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century to review the treaty by peaceful means and to establish the final Russian-Chinese border in the Far East." In reply, the Chinese argue that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was the legitimate treaty and that the Russians simply stole the territory from them in the nineteenth century. Today, the territory is Russian. But on Chinese maps it is Chinese. Today, along the Amur River, several million Russian and Chinese soldiers face each other across this disputed border.

  sultan and tsar. Relations between Moscow and Constantinople were so friendly that Russian ambassadors at the Sublime Porte (the palatial building in which the Sultan's chief minister, the Grand Vizier, had his offices) had always been treated with greater respect than the embassies of other powers. And the Ottoman Empire was still a dynamic force in the world. The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, had been hurled back from Vienna, and the Janissaries had retreated down the Danube, but the Sultan's empire was so vast and his army so large that Sophia was reluctant to challenge him. Before she and Golitsyn agreed to sign the treaty, they summoned General Gordon repeatedly to ask his opinion about the state of the army and
the size of the military risk. Solemnly, the experienced Scottish soldier declared that he thought the time was favorable for war.

  It was not the Turks whom Sophia and Golitsyn were asked to attack, but their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. Russian fear of these Moslem descendants of the Mongols was deep-rooted. Year after year, Tatar horsemen rode north out of their Crimean stronghold across the grazing lands of the Ukrainian steppe and, in small bands or large armies, swooped down on Cossack settlements or Russian towns to ravage and plunder. In 1662, Tatars captured the town of Putivl and carried off all the 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Russian slaves thronged Ottoman slave markets. Russian men were seen chained to the oars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean; young Russian boys made a welcome gift from the Crimean Khan to the Sultan. So numerous, in fact, were the Russian slaves in the East that it was asked mockingly whether any inhabitants still remained in Russia.

  There seemed no way to stop these devastating Tatar raids. The frontier was too broad, the Russian defenses too scanty; the Tatars' objectives could not be known in advance, and their mobility could not be equaled. The Tsar was reduced to paying an annual sum to the Khan, protection money which the Khan called a tribute and the Russians preferred to describe as a gift. But this did not stop the raids.

  Although Moscow was far away and in the capital the raids were considered as harassment rather than aggression, nevertheless they were an affront to the national honor. In carrying out the terms of the treaty with Poland, Moscow would attempt to snuff out the Tatar raids at their source. But, despite Gordon's optimism, the campaign would not be easy. Bakhchisarai, the Khan's capital in the mountains of the Crimea, was a thousand miles from Moscow. To get there, the army would have to march south across the breadth of the Ukrainian steppe, force the Perekop Isthmus at the entrance to the Crimea, then advance across the wasteland of the northern Crimea. Many of the boyars who would serve as officers in the army reacted unenthusiastically to this prospect. Some were suspicious of the treaty with Poland, preferring, if there was to be war, to fight against, rather than support, the Poles. Others feared the long, hazardous march. And many opposed the campaign simply because Golitsyn had proposed it. Prince Boris Dolgoruky and Prince Yury Shcherbatov threatened to present themselves and their retainers for military service dressed in black, as a protest against the treaty, the campaign and Golitsyn himself.