Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The Polish army operated on a similar basis. Its cavalry was always superbly brave and gorgeously equipped: diamonds flashed on the breast-plates and swords of the gallant horsemen. But discipline was nonexistent. At any moment, a Polish army in the field might be swollen or diminished by the arrival or departure of a great nobleman and his armed retainers. It was up to these gentlemen alone to decide whether and when they should participate in a campaign. If they wearied or were irked, they simply withdrew, no matter what the perils of their action to the other troops of the Polish army. At times, also, the Polish king would be at war, but the Polish republic, as represented by the Diet, would be at peace. It was in this kind of kaleidoscopic confusion with an ornamental king, a hamstrung parliament, an individualistic feudal army, that the vast, tumultuous Polish nation stumbled and lurched in the general direction of anarchy.

  With such a system, Poland's sole hope of unity and order lay in a strong monarch somehow superimposing himself on the chaos. The choice, however, was not simply up to the Polish nobility. By this time, the election of a new Polish king who would hold even limited power over the vast nation was a European concern. Every monarch in Europe yearned to win the Polish crown for his own house, or at least for a prince favorable to his house. Peter of Russia, as Poland's eastern neighbor, was especially concerned. Fearing that a French candidate might win the throne, Peter had been prepared if necessary to invade Poland. To influence the election or be ready if the Frenchman won, Peter moved Russian troops to the Polish frontier. (It was a command to regiments of Streltsy to shift from Azov to the Polish border which had precipitated their revolt and thus recalled the Tsar from Vienna.) And on the other side of the continent, the Sun King desired to see the creation of a Poland friendly to France rising up behind the Hapsburg Emperor's back. Louis' candidate was Francois Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, a French Prince of the Blood, whose battlefield exploits, powerful charm and sexual ambivalence had made him the darling of the French court. Conti was not enthusiastic about accepting the royal title, hating to leave his friends and the delights of Versailles for the barbarian wastes of Eastern Europe. But the King was determined and opened his purse, sending three million gold pounds to buy the votes of as many members of the Diet as were necessary. The effort was successful, and with the support of most of the Polish nobility, including the Sapieha family of Lithuania, Conti was elected and sailed for Danzig with a powerful French naval squadron commanded by the famous admiral Jean Bart.

  Conti arrived in Poland to find that the election had been overturned. The disappointed candidate, Augustus of Saxony, supported by the Tsar and the Emperor, had simply refused to accept the Diet's decision and had marched into Poland at the head of a Saxon army. Arriving in Warsaw before Conti, Augustus converted his personal religion to Catholicism, persuaded the Diet to change its mind and had himself crowned King of Poland on September 15, 1697. Conti quite happily returned to Versailles, and Augustus began a reign which lasted for thirty-six years.

  Thus, Augustus had been on the Polish throne for less than a year when Peter passed through the country on his way back to Moscow. Augustus was also Elector of Saxony, although the union of Saxony and Poland was only through his own person. The two states lacked even a common frontier, being separated by the Hapsburg province of Silesia and the territories of Brandenburg on the Oder River. Saxony was Lutheran, Poland was predominantly Catholic. Augustus' power, like that of all Polish kings, was limited, but already he was eagerly seeking ways to improve this situation.

  When Peter arrived at Rawa, where the new King was staying, he found in Augustus a young man physically exceptional like himself. Augustus was tall (except in the presence of Peter, whose height was abnormal) and powerfully built; he was called Augustus the Strong, and it was said that he could bend a horseshoe with his bare hands. At twenty-eight, he was bluff and hearty, and had red cheeks, blue eyes, a strong nose, a full mouth and exceptionally heavy and bushy black eyebrows. His wife, a Hohenzollern, had left him when he became a Catholic, but this mattered little to Augustus, whose sensuality and philandering were on a gargantuan scale. Even in a time when he had many competitors, Augustus' efforts were remarkable; he collected women, and from his enjoyment of his collection Augustus was reported to have left 354 bastards. One of his favorite mistresses was the beautiful Countess Aurora von Konigsmark, whom Peter had already met in Dresden; another, years later, would be the Countess Orzelska, who happened also to be his daughter.

  Enjoying the flesh, Augustus also loved practical jokes which celebrated this taste. He gave Peter a gold box with a secret spring, ornamented by two portraits of another mistress. The portrait on the cover showed the lady in rich and formal dress, wearing an expression of proper dignity. The second picture, revealed when the spring was touched and the lid popped open, showed the same lady in a state of voluptuous, passionate disorder after she had yielded to the advances of her lover.*

  *On another occasion, indulging this same humor, Augustus was escorting Frederick William of Prussia and his sixteen-year-old son. the future Frederick the Great, on a tour of his palace in Dresden. They entered a bedchamber and were admiring the ceiling when suddenly a curtain around the bed was lifted, revealing a naked woman on the bed. Horrified, the stern and prudish Frederick William rushed from the room, dragging his son after him. Augustus, roaring with laughter, apologized, but later during the visit he sent the same woman to the youthful Frederick to enjoy. Out of politeness, the young man took her, although his own preference was not for women.

  In the bluff, hearty, fun-loving young Augustus, Peter recognized a kindred spirit. They spent four days at Rawa, dining, reviewing the Saxon infantry and cavalry, and drinking together in the evenings. Peter showed his affection by frequently embracing and kissing his new friend. "I cannot begin to describe to you the tenderness between the two sovereigns," wrote a member of Peter's suits. The impression made on Peter by Augustus was deep and lasting, and he proudly wore the royal arms of Poland, which Augustus had presented to him. On returning to Moscow, when receiving his own welcoming boyars and friends on the day after his return, he flaunted his new friendship before them. "I prize him [Augustus] more than the whole of you together," he announced, "and that not because of his royal pre-eminence over you, but merely because I like him."

  The days at Rawa and Peter's new friendship had momentous results for Russia. It was during these days that Augustus, who had already profited from Peter's support in winning his crown, used the Tsar's enthusiastic friendship to press another of his own ambitious projects: a joint attack on Sweden. The Swedish King, Charles XI, had died, leaving the throne to his fifteen-year-old son. The moment seemed ripe for an attempt to wrest away the Baltic provinces which Sweden used to block Polish and Russian access to the Baltic Sea. Augustus was shrewd and deceitful; in time-, he was to earn a reputation for double-dealing second to none among European rulers, it was like him to propose that, to better ensure success, the attack be planned in secret and delivered by surprise.

  Peter listened sympathetically to his boisterous and conniving new friend. He had his own reasons for being attracted to the scheme: in Vienna, he had been made to realize that the war in the south against Turkey was coming to an end. The door to the Black Sea was closing just as his own appetite for maritime adventure was growing. He had returned from Holland and England imbued with the spirit of ships, navies, trade and the sea. So it is not surprising that a proposal to break through to the Baltic, opening a direct maritime route to the West, appealed to him. Further, the Swedish provinces which would be attacked had once been Russian. They had fallen once as plums in one direction; so be it: Let them now be plucked by another hand. Peter nodded when Augustus spoke. Twenty-five years later, writing an introduction to the official Russian history of the Great Northern War, the Tsar confirmed that at this meeting at Rawa the initial agreement for an attack on Sweden had been made.

  * * *

  The Great Embassy was over.
The first peacetime journey out of Russia by a Russian tsar had taken eighteen months, cost two and a half million roubles, introduced the carpenter Peter Mikhailov to electors, princes, kings and an emperor, and proved to Western Europe that Russians did not eat raw meat and wear only bearskins. What were the substantive results? In terms of its avowed, overt purpose, the reinvigoration and enlargement of the alliance against the Turks, the Embassy failed. Peace was coming in the East as Europe prepared for new and different wars. Wherever he went for help, in The Hague, in London, in Vienna, Peter found the looming shadow of Louis XIV. It was the Sun King and not the Sultan who frightened Europe. European diplomacy, money, ships and armies were being mobilized for the impending crisis when the throne of Spain would become vacant. Russia, left to make peace or fight the Turks alone, had no choice but to make peace.

  In terms of practical, useful results, however, the Embassy was a considerable success. Peter and his ambassadors had succeeded in recruiting more than 800 technically skilled Europeans for Russian service, the bulk of them Dutchmen, but also Englishmen, Scots, Venetians, Germans and Greeks. Many of these men remained in Russia for years, made significant contributions to the modernization of the nation and left their names permanently inscribed in the history of Peter's reign.

  More important was the profound and enduring impression that Western Europe made on Peter himself. He had traveled to the West in order to learn how to build ships, and this he had accomplished. But his curiosity had carried him into a wide range of new fields. He had probed into everything that caught his eye— had studied microscopes, barometers, wind dials, coins, cadavers and dental pliers, as well as ship construction and artillery. What he saw in the thriving cities and harbors of the West, what he learned from the scientists, inventors, merchants, tradesmen, engineers, printers, soldiers and sailors, confirmed his early belief, formed in the German Suburb, that his Russians were technologically backward—decades, perhaps centuries, behind the West.

  Asking himself how this had happened and what could be done about it, Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men's minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish. He knew that these bonds of religious orthodoxy still existed in Russia, reinforced by peasant folkways and traditions which had endured for centuries. Grimly, Peter resolved to break these bonds on his return.

  But, curiously, Peter did not grasp—perhaps he did not wish to grasp—the political implications of this new view of man. He had not gone to the West to study "the art of government." Although in Protestant Europe he was surrounded by evidence of the new civil and political rights of individual men embodied in constitutions, bills of rights and parliaments, he did not return to Russia determined to share power with his people. On the contrary, he returned not only determined to change his country but also convinced that if Russia was to be transformed, it was he who must provide both the direction and the motive force. He would try to lead; but where education and persuasion were not enough, he would drive—and if necessary flog—the backward nation forward.

  18

  "THESE THINGS ARE IN YOUR WAY7

  At first light on the morning of September 5, 1698, Moscow awoke to learn that the Tsar had returned. Peter had arrived the night before with Lefort and Golovin, made a brief visit to the Kremlin, stopped at the houses of several friends and then gone to spend the night in his wooden house at Preobrazhenskoe with Anna Mons. As the news spread quickly across the city, a crowd of boyars and officials flocked to Peter's door to welcome him home, hoping, says an observer, "to prove by the promptitude of their obsequiousness, the constancy of their loyalty." Peter received them all with enthusiastic pleasure. Those who threw themselves on the ground at his feet in the old Muscovite fashion, he "lifted up graciously from their groveling posture and embraced with a kiss, such as is due only among private friends."

  That very day, even as one grandee was elbowing the next aside to come closer to the Tsar, the warmth of their welcome was put to an extraordinary test. After passing among them and exchanging embraces, Peter suddenly produced a long, sharp barber's razor and with his own hands began shaving off their beards. He began with Shein, the commander of the army, who was too astonished to resist. Next came Romodanovsky, whose deep loyalty to Peter surmounted even this affront to his Muscovite sensibility. The others were forced, one by one, to submit until every boyar present was beardless and none could laugh and point a shocked finger at the others. Only three were spared: the Patriarch, watching the proceedings with horror, in respect for his office; Prince Michael Cherkassky, because of his advanced age; and Tikhon Streshnev, in deference to his role as guardian of the Tsaritsa.

  The scene was remarkable: at a stroke the political, military and social leaders of Russia were bodily transformed. Faces known and recognized for a lifetime suddenly vanished. New faces appeared. Chins, jaws, cheeks, mouths, lips, all hidden for years, emerged, giving their owners a wholly new look. It was comical, but the humor of it was mixed with nervousness and dread. For most Orthodox Russians, the beard was a fundamental symbol of religious belief and self-respect. It was an ornament given by God, worn by the prophets, the apostles and by Jesus himself. Ivan the Terrible expressed the traditional Muscovite feeling when he declared, "To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by "God." Priests generally refused to bless men without beards; they were considered shameful and beyond the pale of Christendom. Yet, as more beardless foreign merchants, soldiers and engineers arrived in Moscow in the mid-seventeenth century, Peter's father, Tsar Alexis, had relaxed the rule, declaring that Russians might shave if they wished. Few did so, and even those drove the Patriarch Adrian to fresh condemnation: "God did not create men beardless, only cats and dogs. Shaving is not only foolishness and dishonor; it is a mortal sin." Such sentiments rang in the boyars' ears even as they obeyed the Tsar's command.

  Peter, beardless himself, regarded beards as unnecessary, uncivilized and ridiculous. They made his country a subject of mirth and mockery in the West. They were a visible symbol of all he meant to change, and, typically, he attacked, wielding the razor himself. Thereafter, whenever Peter attended a banquet or ceremony, those who arrived with beards departed without them. Within a week of his return, he went to a banquet given by Shein and sent his court fool, Jacob Turgenev, around the room in the role of barber. The process was often uncomfortable; shaving long, thick beards with a dry razor left many gouges and cuts where the sharp blade came too close. But no one dared object; Peter was there Jo box the ears of any who showed reluctance.

  Although the cutting of beards began in Peter's intimate circle to ridicule the old Russian way and to show that those who wished the Tsar's favor would thereafter appear beardless in his presence, the ban against beards soon became serious and general. By decree, all Russians except the clergy and the peasants were ordered to shave. To ensure that the order was carried out, officials were given the power to cut the beard off any man, no matter how important, whom they encountered. At first, horrified and desperate Russians bribed these officials to let them go, but as soon as they did, they would fall into the hands of another official. Before long, wearing a beard became too expensive a luxury.

  Eventually those who insisted on keeping their beards were permitted to do so on paying an annual tax. Payment entitled the owner to a small bronze medallion with a picture of a beard on it and the words TAX PAID, which was worn on a chain around the neck to prove to any challengers that his beard was legal. The tax was graduated; peasants paid only two kopeks a year, wealthy merchants paid as much as a hundred roubles. Many were willing to pay this tax to keep their beards, but few who came near Peter were willing to ri
sk his wrath with a chin that was not hairless. Finding men in his presence still bearded, Peter sometimes, "in a merry humor, pulled out their beards by the roots or took it off so roughly [with a razor] that some of the skin went with it."

  Although Peter was merry about it, most Russians considered beard-cutting an act of aggression and humiliation. Some would rather give up anything than lose the beards which they had worn through life, expected to carry to the grave and thus arrive, proudly wearing them, in the next world. They could not resist; Peter's will was too strong. But they tried pathetically to atone for what they had been taught was a mortal sin. John Perry, the English engineer whom Peter signed up for service during his trip to London, described an aged Russian carpenter whom he met on the wharves of Voronezh.

  About this time the Tsar came down to Voronezh where I was on service, and a great many of my men who had worn their beards all their lives were now obliged to part with them, amongst whom, just coming from the hands of the barber, was an old Russ carpenter ... a very good workman with his hatchet and whom I always had a friendship for. I jested a little with him . . . telling him that he was become a young man and asked him what he had done with his beard. ... He put his hand in his bosom and pulled it out and showed it to me; further telling me that when he came home, he would lay it up to have it put in his coffin and buried along with him, that he might be able to give an account of it to St. Nicholas, when he carpe to the other world, and that all his brothers [fellow workers] had taken the same care.*

  Peter's mood on his return was cheerful and enthusiastic. He was happy to be back in the company of his friends and so eager to start making changes that he scarcely knew where to begin. Impulsively, he went one place, then rushed off to another. On his second day in Moscow, he reviewed his troops—and was immediately displeased. "Seeing at a glance how backward they were as compared with other soldiers," said Johann Korb, an Austrian diplomat,