Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  While at Spa, the Tsar sat for the Dutch painter, Karl Moor, and this painting and the one Kneller had done almost two decades before became the Tsar's favorite portraits of himself.

  On July 25, Peter began an eight-day boat journey down the Meuse (in Holland, the Maas), and finally, on August 2, he was reunited with Catherine in Amsterdam. He remained in Holland for a month and on September 2, he departed Amsterdam and Holland for the last time, traveling up the Rhine to Nimwegen, Cleves and Wesel and then on to Berlin. Along the way, he left Catherine behind to follow him. They often separated on the road like this, because it was difficult to find enough horses to service both their suites and also simply because she did not like to travel as rapidly as her husband.

  Two days after Peter's arrival, Catherine caught up with him in Berlin. It was her first visit to the Prussian capital, and although by now Peter was familiar, his wife was an object of much curiosity. But Catherine was well received and dinners and balls were given in her honor, so that she and Peter departed for Russia in good spirits. By October, the Tsar was back in St. Petersburg. There, Peter had to face the climax of a personal and political tragedy which ran deeper than any other in his reign.

  51

  THE EDUCATION OF AN HEIR

  On October 11, 1717, Peter returned to St. Petersburg. "The two princesses, his daughters [Anne and Elizabeth, then nine and eight], waited for him in front of the palace, dressed in Spanish costumes," Monsieur de La Vie, the French envoy, reported to Paris, "and his son, the young Prince Peter Petrovich, greeted him in his room where he was riding a tiny Icelandic pony." But his joy at seeing his children quickly faded. While he was away, the government of Russia had functioned badly. Maladministration, jealousies and corruption everywhere had all but swamped the governmental system he had tried to erect; men who were supposed to be the leaders of the state were quarreling like children, frantically accusing one another of political and financial misdeeds. Peter plunged into this confusion and tried to straighten it out. Every morning, at six a.m., he convened the Senate and sat in person to hear the accusations and defenses of the contending parties. Finally, realizing that the complaints were too widespread and the corruption too deep, he created a special court of justice with separate investigating commissions, each consisting of a major, a captian and a lieutenant of the Guards, who were to examine the cases and render judgement according to "common sense and equity." "And so it came to pass in Russia," wrote Weber, "that members of the venerable Senate, composed of the heads of the greatest families in the Tsar's dominions, were obliged to appear before a lieutenant as their judge and be called to account for their conduct."

  But these trials were only a preliminary to something far more serious, something that threatened the whole future of Peter's Russia. For it was at this time that Peter was forced to make a final decision in the case of his son, the Tsarevich Alexis.

  Alexis was born in February 1690, not long after the eighteen-year-old Tsar's marriage to the meek, sad, reclusive Eudoxia. At Alexis' birth, Peter was enormously proud, giving court banquets and fireworks displays in honor of the new Prince. Yet, as the years went by, the Tsar saw little of his son. Absorbed by shipbuilding, by Lefort and Anna Mons, by the Azov campaigns and the Great Embassy, Peter left Alexis in the company of Eudoxia. Visiting his son meant seeing the boy's mother, toward whom he was openly contemptuous, and Peter preferred to avoid them both. Naturally, Alexis sensed the breach between his parents and understood that in his father's mind he was identified with his mother. Thus, in his earliest, formative years, Alexis saw Peter as disapproving, perhaps even a threat, an enemy. Growing up in his mother's care, he took her part and adopted her ways.

  Then, suddenly, when Alexis was a thin eight-year-old boy with a high forehead and dark, serious eyes, Peter wrenched his little world apart. In 1698, when the Tsar returned from the West to suppress the Streltsy, he send Eudoxia to a convent. Alexis was installed in his own house in Preobrazhenskoe and confided to the general supervision of his aunt, Peter's sister Natalya. His education, which until that time had consisted mainly of readings from the Bible and other religious lessons, was placed in the hands of Martin Neugebauer of Danzig, who had been recommended by Augustus of Saxony. Neugebauer had a Germanic character—he was orderly and prompt—and he soon came into conflict with the Russian temperament. There is a story of a meal which the twelve-year-old Tsarevich was sharing with Neugebauer, his earlier teacher Nikifor Viazemsky and Alexis Naryshkin. They were eating chicken, and the Tsarevich having finished his piece, took another. Naryshkin instructed him first to empty his plate by putting his bones back into the serving dish. Neugebauer, shocked, declared that this was ill-bred. Alexis looked at Neugebauer and whispered to Naryshkin; Neugebauer declared that whispering also was ill-bred. The two men began to argue, and Neugebauer exploded: "None of you understand anything! When I get the Tsarevich abroad, then I shall know what to do!" Russians, he shouted, were all barbarians, dogs and pigs, and he would demand the dismissal of all of Alexis' Russian household. Throwing down his knife and fork, he stormed out of the room. It was Neugebauer, however, who was dismissed. Unable to find any work in Russia, he returned to Germany, became a secretary to King Charles XII of Sweden and functioned for many years as Charles' advisor and expert on Russian affairs.

  Meanwhile, to replace Neugebauer, Peter had followed Patkul's advice and chosen a German doctor of laws, Heinrich von Huyssen, who submitted a plan for the education of a future tsar which Peter approved. Alexis was to study French, German, Latin, mathematics, history and geography. He was to read foreign newspapers and to continue intensive study of the Bible. In his spare time, he was to look at atlases and globes, train with mathematical instruments and exercise by fencing, dancing, riding and playing games involving throwing or kicking balls. Alexis was intelligent and made good progress. In a letter to Leibniz, Huyssen reported,

  The Prince lacks neither capacity nor quickness of mind. His ambition is moderated by reason, by sound judgement, and by a great desire to distinguish himself and to gain everything which is fitting for a great prince. He is of a studious and pliant nature, and wishes by assiduity to supply what has been neglected in his education. I notice in him a great inclination to piety, justice, uprightness and purity of morals. He loves mathematics and foreign languages and shows a great desire to visit foreign countries. He wishes to acquire thoroughly the French and German languages and has already begun to receive instruction in dancing and military exercises, which give him great pleasure. The Tsar has allowed him not to be strict in the observance of fasts, for fear of harming his health and bodily development, but out of piety he refuses any indulgence in this respect.

  Alexis was also influenced during these adolescent years by Menshikov, who was appointed the official governor to the Tsarevich in 1705. Menshikov's duties were a general supervision of the education, finances and the overall training of the heir to the throne. To many, the largely illiterate confidant of Peter's loves and wars seemed a strange trustee for the guidance and preparation of the heir. But it was precisely because of their intimacy that Peter chose his friend. He disliked the results of the years his son had spent with his mother, and he was suspicious of the foreign tutors who still surrounded the boy. He wanted one of his own men, the comrade who was closest to him, who thought as he did and whom he trusted completely, to oversee the training of the boy who would be tsar. But Menshikov, like Peter, was away with the army for most of the years of Alexis' youth, and the Serene Prince mainly exercised his duties from afar. There were stories of rough treatment when ward and governor met; Pleyer, the Austrian minister, reports an episode (which he did not witness) in which Menshikov dragged Alexis across the ground by the hair while Peter looked on unprotestingly. Whitworth recorded a more dignified scene, with Menshikov giving a dinner for the heir who, the ambassador informed London, was "a tall, handsome prince about sixteen years old who speaks pretty good High Dutch."

  Mostly, as we kno
w from Alexis' letters to Menshikov, it was with a mixture of awe and distaste that the boy regarded the rough figure whom his father had set over him, and later Alexis blamed Menshikov for many of his failings. In his final break with Peter, when he appealed for asylum in Vienna, the Tsarevich claimed that Menshikov had made him a drunkard and was even trying to poison him.

  The root of the problem, of course, was not Menshikov but Peter; as always, Menshikov was only reflecting the attitude and will of his master. And Peter's attitude was strangely inconsistent. A moment of pride in the Tsarevich would be followed by a long period of indifference. Then would come a sudden demand that his son join him immediately to experience some event important for a future tsar. In 1702, when Peter left for Archangle with five battalions of the Guards to defend the port from a rumored Swedish attack, he took Alexis, then twelve, with him. The boy was a thirteen-year-old bombardier in an artillery regiment at the siege of Nyenskans which broke the Swedish grip on the Neva delta. A year later, at fourteen, Alexis was present at the storming of Narva.

  Like many a strong father whose strength and qualities have made him respected, successful and admired by the world, Peter was trying to force his son to follow in his footsteps. Unfortunately, a father like Peter with a strong sense of duty or mission, desiring to inculate the same sense of purpose in his son, may instead become a crushing weight on the fledgling personality.

  Alexis' presence at Archangel, Nyenskans and Narva suggests the extent to which the boy's education was interrupted by war. Then, in 1705 his tutor Huyssen was sent abroad on diplomatic missions which kept him away from Russia for three years. During this period, when father, governor and tutor were all away, no one took much notice of the Tsarevich.

  It was extraordinary that the heir to Peter's throne was brought up this way. The Tsar was keenly aware of the defects in his own early education and had struggled all his life to catch up, and one would have expected him to devote extra attention to his son's training in order to make sure that he had groomed a successor who would complete his work. In fact, over the course of Alexis' youth and young manhood, Peter was primarily interested in schooling his son for war. After taking the young Alexis along to participate in campaigns and sieges, he assigned him independent military tasks to carry out as heir to the throne. At sixteen, in 1706, Alexis was sent for five months to Smolensk with orders to gather provisions and recruits for the army. Returning to Moscow, he was next commanded to see to the defense of the city. The seventeen-year-old Tsarevich was slow and defeatist in carrying out this order. To his confessor, the priest Ignatiev, he expressed his doubt as to the value of fortifying Moscow at all. "If the Tsar's army cannot hold back the Swedes," he sighed, "Moscow will not stop them." Peter heard of the remark and was furious, although when he learned that the defenses actually had been substantially strengthened, his anger subsided.

  Unfortunately, try as he would, Peter never succeeded in interesting his son in war. Assigned military tasks, Alexis usually showed himself to be unwilling or incapable. Eventually, discouraged and disgusted, as well as caught up in the ever increasing tempo of the war, Peter turned his attention away from his son, leaving the youth to himself in Moscow and Preobrazhenskoe. This respite delighted the Tsarevich. He loved Moscow. The quiet, religiously passionate youth and the old city with its innumerable cathedrals, churches and monasteries, adorned with gold and jewels and filled with history and legend, perfectly suited each other. In the old capital, now increasingly abandoned in favor of St. Petersburg, Alexis was thrown into the company of those who preferred the old order and feared the reforms and innovations of the Tsar. There were Miloslavskys who still sympathized with their sister Sophia, who had died in her cell in 1704, and their sister Martha, who died in a convent in 1707. There were the Lopukhins, the brothers and family of Alexis' mother, the repudiated Eudoxia, who regarded Alexis as the vehicle for their eventual return to power. There were the old aristocratic families, indignant that they had been passed over in favor of Westerners and upstart Russians. Most of all, there were members of the old Orthodox clergy, who regarded Peter's works as those of Antichrist, and saw in Alexis, the heir, the last chance for saving the true religion in Russia.

  The leader of this intimate clerical circle around the Tsarevich was Alexis' confessor, Jacob Ignatiev. Ignatiev came from Suzdal, where the Tsaritsa Eudoxia was incarcerated in a convent. The priest was in contact with the former Tsaritsa, and in 1706, when Alexis was sixteen, he took the boy to see his mother. Peter, learning of this visit from his sister Natalya, was furious with Alexis and warned him never to go there again.

  Although Ignatiev encouraged Alexis' interest in the Orthodox religion, he also encouraged him in different ceremonies as well. For although Alexis was very different from Peter in many ways, he resembled his father in one: He liked to drink. Together with Ignatiev and certain monks and priests and others, the Tsarevich formed a "company" like the intimate circle of Peter's youth, with different political ideas but the same love of drinking and carousing. Like Peter's, Alexis' company was a special society: Each member had a name such as Hell, Benefactor, Satan, Moloch, the Cow, Judas or the Dove. The group even had a secret code for private correspondence.

  As the climax of the war approached, the Tsarevich was once more summoned to the army. In the autumn of 1708, Peter ordered his son to recruit five regiments in the Moscow region and bring them to the Ukraine as soon as possible. Alexis complied and delivered the troops to Peter and Sheremetev in mid-January 1709. This was during the fiercest days of the coldest winter within memory and, having completed his mission, the Tsarevich became ill. His condition was serious, and Peter, who had planned to go to Voronezh, remained for ten days until his son was out of danger. When Alexis was better, he joined Peter in Voronezh and then returned to Moscow. He missed the Battle of Poltava, but when news of the great victory was received, Alexis arranged the triumphal program and served as host in the celebrations.

  After Poltava, Peter made two decisions regarding his son: The Tsarevich should have a Western education and he should have a Western wife. Both would help pull him away from the old Muscovite orbit into which he had been falling. Earlier, the old Hapsburg Empress, who remembered Peter favorably from his visit to Vienna, had urged that Alexis be sent to her to be educated there; the Tsarevich, she promised, would be treated by the Emperor and herself as one of their own children. This project never materialized, but another early promise did bear fruit. Twelve years before, on Peter's first meeting with Augustus of Saxony, the Elector had pledged to look after the education of Peter's heir. Now that Alexis was nineteen, Peter remembered and sent his son to the beautiful Saxon capital Dresden to study under the protection of Augustus' family.

  The Tsarevich's marriage was also to have a Saxon connection. Long before, Peter had decided to ally himself with a powerful German family by marrying his son to a German princess, and the one chosen for Alexis, after long negotiations, was Charlotte of Wolfenbuttel. The family was excellently connected, being a branch of the House of Hanover. In addition, Charlotte's sister Elizabeth was married to the Archduke Charles of Austria, at that moment a claimant to the throne of Spain, but subsequently the Emperor Charles. As Charlotte was living at the Saxon court under the watchful eye of her aunt the Queen of Poland, both projects—Alexis' education and his marriage—centered on Dresden. Charlotte was sixteen years old, tall and plain but with a fresh, sweet-natured charm, and bred to the manners and customs of a Western court. This was what Peter was seeking for his son. He hoped that by putting Alexis into an intimate relationship with a princess of refinement, he could counteract and rub away the primitive edges of the company the Tsarevich had been keeping.

  Alexis was aware that these negotiations were going on and that it was his father's wish that he marry a foreigner. In the winter of 1710, at Peter's command, the Tsarevich went to Dresden, then moved to the spa at Carlsbad, and, in a village nearby, he met for the first time his intended bride, Pri
ncess Charlotte. The meeting went well. Both Alexis and Charlotte understood the purpose of their meeting and, given the circumstances of that time of arranged marriages, neither was desperately unhappy with the other. Alexis, in a letter to his confessor Ignatiev soon after the meeting, wrote that Peter had asked his reaction to Charlotte.

  So now I know that he wishes to marry me not to a Russian, but to one of these people according to my choice. I wrote to him that if it is his will that I should marry a foreigner, I will marry this princess whom I have seen and who pleases me and who is a good person and better than whom I cannot find. I beg you to pray for me if it is the will of God that this be accomplished; if not, that it be hindered, for my hope is in Him. What He wishes will happen. Write to me how your heart feels about this matter.

  Charlotte, for her part, liked the Tsarevich, telling her mother that he seemed intelligent and courteous and that she felt honored that the Tsar had chosen her for his son. In the end, the courtship bore fruit when Alexis went twice to Torgau and the second time formally asked the Queen of Poland for Charlotte's hand.

  The marriage was deferred until Peter could be present. Meanwhile, Alexis passed the time with his studies in Dresden and his education there was as Western as his father could have wished. He took dancing lessons and fencing lessons, he developed a talent for drawing and he improved his German and French. He shopped for books in old bookstalls and bought old engravings and medallions to take back to Russia. The Tsar would have been less happy, however, to know that his son was spending a great deal of time reading books on church history, studying the relationship between temporal and spiritual powers and the history of disputes between the church and state. In fact, throughout this period of Western schooling, despite his Western dance steps and work with the epee, Alexis was deeply concerned that he had no contact with any Orthodox priest. Writing to Ignatiev, he asked his confessor to send him a priest capable of keeping a secret. He must be young, unmarried, and unknown to everyone. Tell him to come to me in great secrecy, to lay aside all marks of his condition, to shave his beard and his hair, ' and to wear a wig and German clothes. He should come as a courier and for that he should be able to write. Let him not bring anything incumbent on a priest, or a missal, only a few bits of communion bread. I have all the books necessary. Have pity on my soul and do not let me die without confession. I shall tell no one that he is a priest. He will appear to be one of my servants. Do not let him have any doubt about shaving his beard. It is better to commit a small sin than to ruin my soul without repentance.