Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Menshikov's sudden reversal of loyalty startled and frightened other members of the old circle of favorites, most notably Tolstoy. The grizzled fox, now eighty-two, understood clearly that a new Emperor Peter II would inevitably reach out to settle the score with the man who had lured his father back from Italy to death. Tolstoy appealed to other members of the circle, but found limited support. Osterman had joined Menshikov, Yaguzhinsky was in Poland, the others preferred to wait and see. Only Anthony Devier, Menshikov's brother-in-law, and General Ivan Buturlin of the Guards resisted Menshikov. It was too late. Catherine was dying, and Menshikov had taken care to surround her with his own people and make it possible for others to approach. Invulnerable to attack, he now lashed out. Devier, against whom Menshikov had vowed vengeance for marrying the Serene Prince's sister, was arrested, knouted and sent to Siberia. Tolstoy was banished to an inland of whale fisheries in the White Sea, where he died in 1729 at the age of eighty-four.

  Once Catherine was dead and Peter II proclaimed as emperor, Menshikov moved swiftly to reap his rewards. Within a week of his accession, the boy Emperor was bodily transferred from the Winter Palace to Menshikov's palace on Vasilevsky Island. Two weeks later, young Peter's engagement to Maria Menshikova was celebrated. The Supreme Privy Council was filled with Menshikov's new aristocratic allies, the Dolgoruks and Golitsyns. As a further gesture, Menshikov had the aging Tsaritsa Eudoxia, Peter the Great's first wife and grandmother of the new Emperor, transfered from the lonely fortress of Schlusselburg to Novodevichy convent near Moscow where she would be more comfortable,

  The Duke of Holstein, whom Catherine had installed on the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov's wishes, saw the handwriting on the wall and applied for permission to leave Russia with his wife, Princess Anne. Menshikov gladly saw them return to Kiel, the ducal seat, and sweetened the Duke's departure with a generous Russian pension. It was in Kiel, on May 28, 1728, that Princess Anne died, shortly after giving birth to a son, the future Emperor Peter III. A ball given in her honor to celebrate the birth had been followed by a display of fireworks. Although the Baltic weather was cold and damp, the happy young mother insisted upon standing on an open balcony to get a better view. When her ladies worried, she laughed and said, "I am Russian, remember, and used to a much worse climate than this." Within ten days, this eldest daughter of Peter the Great was dead. Now, only one child of Peter and Catherine, the Princess Elizabeth, remained.

  The new Emperor was handsome, physically robust and tall for his age. Osterman, who had taken virtually sole charge of Russian foreign policy, now took on additional duties as young Peter's tutor. His high-spirited pupil was not much interested in books; he preferred to ride and hunt, and when Osterman remonstrated with him for his lack of application, the eleven-year-old sovereign replied, "My dear Andrei Ivanovich, I like you, and as my Minister of Foreign Affairs, you are indispensable, but I must request you not to interfere in future with my pastimes." Peter's closest companions were his sister Natalya, only a year older than himself, his blonde eighteen-year-old aunt, Princess Elizabeth, who was not interested in government but cared only about riding, hunting and dancing, and nineteen-year-old Prince Ivan Dolgoruky.

  For those few months in the summer of 1727, Menshikov stood alone at the summit; "Not even Peter the Great," declared the Saxon ambassador, "was so feared or so obeyed." He was the unchallenged ruler of Russia and the prospective father-in-law of the Emperor; all future Russian monarchs would carry his blood in their veins. Assured of his pre-eminence, Menshikov's manner became insupportable; he issued orders in a lordly fashion even to the Emperor—he intercepted a sum of money Peter had been given and chastised the Emperor for accepting it, then he took away a silver plate which Peter had presented to his sister Natalya. Stung, the boy said ominously to Menshikov, "We shall see who is emperor, you or I."

  In July 1727, Menshikov had the misfortune to fall ill. While his grip on the reins of power was briefly relaxed, Peter, Natalya and Elizabeth moved to Peterhof. People at court began to comment that affairs of state seemed to progress satisfactorily even without the presence of Prince Menshikov. When he recovered, Menshikov appeared at Peterhof, but, to his amazement, Peter turned his back on him. To his equally astonished companions, the Emperor said, "You see, I am at least learning how to keep him in order." Menshikov's fall came a month later, in September 1727. Arrested, deprived of his offices and stripped of his decorations, he and his family—including his daughter Maria—were exiled to an estate in the Ukraine. This stage of his fall was cushioned: He left St. Petersburg with four six-horse carriages and sixty wagons of baggage.

  Peter II now passed into the hands of the Dolgorukys. Prince Alexis Dolgoruky, father of the Emperor's friend Ivan, and Prince Vasily Dolgoruky were appointed to the Supreme Privy Council, and late in 1729 the Emperor's betrothal to Prince Alexis' seventeen-year-old daughter Catherine was announced. The Dolgorukys completed the destruction of Menshikov. In April 1728, the great Prince was accused of treasonable contacts with Sweden, his huge wealth was confiscated and he was exiled with his family to Berezov, a tiny village above the tundra line in northern Siberia. In this place, in November 1729, he died at the age of fifty-six, followed to the grave a few weeks later by his daughter Maria.

  Increasingly, under Peter II, Moscow began to resume its ancient role as the center of Russian life. After his coronation in January 1728, Peter refused to go back to St. Petersburg, complaining "What am I to do in a place where there's nothing but salt water?" Naturally, the court remained with him, and as the months passed, a number of government offices began to move back to the older city. But the reign of Peter II was destined to be only a few months longer than the reign of Catherine I. Early in January 1730, the fourteen-year-old Emperor became ill. His condition was diagnosed as smallpox, he worsened rapidly and on January 11, 1730, the day fixed for his wedding, he died.

  Death came too quickly and unexpectedly for Peter II to follow the procedure established by his grandfather and nominate a successor. Accordingly, it devolved upon the Supreme Privy Council, now dominated by Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to choose a sovereign. The pleasure-loving Princess Elizabeth, last child of Peter the Great, was considered too frivolous, and Catherine of Mecklenburg, the eldest daughter of Tsar Ivan V (Peter the Great's afflicted half-brother and co-Tsar) and Tsaritsa Praskovaya, was thought to be too much under the influence of her husband, the Duke of Mecklenburg. The choice therefore fell on the second daughter of Ivan V: Anne, Duchess of Courland, who had been a widow since a few months after her marriage in 1711. The offer made to Anne carried many restrictive conditions. She was not to marry and not to appoint her successor. The council would retain approval over war and peace, the levying of taxes and expenditure of money, the granting of estates and the appointment of all officers above the rank of colonel. Anne accepted the conditions, arrived in Russia and, with the support of the Guards regiments and the service gentry, immediately tore up the conditions, abolished the Supreme Privy Council and re-established the power of the autocracy. Having lived in Courland for most of eighteen years, the new Empress had Western inclinations, and the court moved back to St. Petersburg. Her government was dominated by a trio of Germans: Ernst Biron, her First Minister in Courland, now made a Russian count; Osterman, who continued to manage foreign policy; and Munnich, the builder of the Ladoga Canal, who took command of the army and became a field marshal.

  Empress Anne died in 1740, leaving the throne to the grandson of her elder sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg. This child, Ivan VI, scarcely knew he was emperor; he inherited the throne at the age of two months and was dethroned at the age of fifteen months to be held as a secret state prisoner for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. His successor was Elizabeth, now thirty-one, still pleasure-loving and beloved by the Guards Regiment with whose help she seized the throne, primarily because she feared she was to be sent to a convent by the adherents of Ivan VI. Elizabeth's reign lasted twenty-one years (1741-1762),
then followed the brief reign of Peter III and the thirty-four-year reign of Catherine the Great.

  Thus, Peter the Great's overturning of the laws of succession and his proclamation that every sovereign should have the right to designate the heir led to an anomaly in Russian history: Since the distant days of the Kievan state, no woman had reigned in Russia; after his death in 1725, four empresses reigned almost continuously for the next seventy-one years. They were Peter's wife (Catherine I), his niece (Anne), his daughter (Elizabeth) and his grandson's wife (Catherine the Great). The reigns of three pitiable males (Peter the Great's grandson Peter II and Peter III and his brother's great-grandson Ivan VI) were interspersed among these women, but their three reigns encompassed only forty months. Upon the death of Catherine the Great, her son Paul, who hated his mother, became emperor. On the day of his coronation, he upset Peter the Great's decree on the succession and established hereditary primogeniture in the male line. Thereafter, Russia's sovereigns were again all male: Paul's sons Alexander I and Nicholas I, his grandson Alexander II, his great-grandson Alexander III and his great-great-grandson Nicholas II.

  The body of Peter the Great had been committed to earth, but his spirit continued to bestride the land. Immediately after his death, Russians diligently began to collect every object connected with his life and put them on display: his formal court coats, the blue-green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Reigment which he had worn at Poltava, his hat, his enormous black boots, pairs of shoes worn out but newly soled, his sword, his ivory-headed cane, his nightcap, his stockings mended in several places, his desk, his surgical, dental, and navigational instruments, his turning lathe, his saddle and his stirrups. His little dog Lisette and the horse he had ridden at Poltava were stuffed and exhibited. A life-size wax figure of a seated Peter was molded by the elder Rastrelli; the figure was dressed in the clothes which the Emperor had worn at Catherine's coronation, and in the wig of Peter's own hair which had been cut off during the campaign along the Caspian Sea. All of these mementoes have been carefully preserved and can still be seen at the Hermitage or in other Russian museums.

  To those who had been close to Peter, his loss seemed irreparable. Andrei Nartov, the young lathe turner with whom Peter had worked almost every day in his last years, declared, "Although Peter the Great is no longer with us, his spirit lives in our souls and we who have had the honor to be near the monarch will die true to him and our warm love for him will be buried with us." Neplyuev, the young naval officer whom Petere had sent as ambassador to Constantinople, wrote, "This monarch has brought our country to a level with others. He taught us to recognize that we are a people. In brief, everything that we look upon in Russia has its origin in him, and everything which is done in the future will be derived from this source."

  As the century progressed, veneration of Peter became almost a cult. Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia's first notable scientist, described Peter as "a God-like man" and wrote, "I see him everywhere, now enveloped in a cloud of dust, of smoke, of flame, now bathed in sweat at the end of strenuous toil. I refuse to believe that there was but one Peter and not several." Gavril Derzhavin, Russia's finest eighteenth-century poet, wondered, "Was it not God who in his person came down to earth?" The clever German Empress Catherine the Great, desiring to identify herself more closely with her giant Russian predecessor, commissioned a heroic bronze statue by the French sculptor Falconet. A miniature cliff of 1,6000 tons of granite was dragged to the bank of the Neva to form a pedestal. The Emperor, wearing a cape and crowned with laurel, sits firmly astride a fiery, rearing stallion which is trampling a snake beneath its hooves; Peter's right arm is flung out, pointing imperiously across the river to the Peter and Paul Fortress—and to the future. The figure, which captures Peter's exuberance, vitality and absolute authority, immediately became the most famous statue in Russia. When Alexander Pushkin wrote his immortal poem "The Bronze Horseman," the statue found a permanent place in literature.

  There were, of course, dissenting views. The hope of the common people that Peter's death would mean a lifting of their heavy burdens of service and taxation expressed itself in a popular lithograph titled "The Mice Bury the Cat." This sly work depicts an enormous whiskered cat with a recognizable face, now trussed on a sledge with its paws in the air, being dragged away by a band of celebrating mice. In the nineteenth century, traditionalists who believed in the inherent values of Muscovite culture blamed Peter as the first to open the door to Western ideas and innovations. "We began [in Peter's reign] to be citizens of the world," said the conservative historian Nikolai Karamzin, "but we ceased in some measure to be citizens of Russia." A grand-scale historical and philosophical debate evolved between two schools: the "Slavophiles" who deplored the contamination and destruction of old Russian culture and institutions, and the "Westeraizers" who admired and praised Peter for suppressing the past and forcing Russia onto the road of progress and enlightenment. The arguments often became heated, as when the influential literary critic Vassarion Belinsky described Peter as "the most extraordinary phenomenon not only in our history but in the history of mankind ... a deity who has called us into being and who has breathed the breath of life into the body of ancient Russia, colossal, but prostrate in deadly slumber."

  Soviet historians have not had an easy time coping with the figure of Peter the Great. Required to write history within the framework not only of general Marxist theory and terminology but also of the current party line, they sway back and forth between portraying Peter as irrelevant (individuals play no part in historical evolution), as an exploitative autocrat building "a national state of landowners and merchants," and as a national hero defending Russia against external enemies. A small but graphic example of this ambivalence is the treatment of Peter at the Poltava Battlefield Museum. A large statue of the Emperor stands in front of the museum, and the visual exhibits inside all emphasize the presence and role of Peter. But the written material in captions and booklets obediently ascribes the victory to the efforts of "the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples."

  Peter himself was realistic and philosophical about the way he was seen and would be remembered. Osterman recalled a conversation with a foreign ambassador in which Peter asked what the opinion was of him abroad.

  "Sire," replied the ambassador, "everyone has the highest and best opinion of Your Majesty. The world is astonished above all at the wisdom and genius you display in the execution of the vast designs which you have conceived and which have spread the glory of your name to the most distant regions."

  "Very well, very well, that may be," said Peter impatiently, "but flattery says as much of every king when he is present. My object is not to see the fair side of things, but to know what judgment is formed of me on the opposite side of the question. I beg you to tell it to me, whatever it may be."

  The ambassador bowed low. "Sire," he said, "since you order me, I will tell you all the ill I have heard. You pass for an imperious and severe master who treats his subjects rigorously, who is always ready to punish and incapable of forgiving a fault."

  "No, my friend," said Peter, smiling and shaking his head, "this is not all. I am represented as a cruel tyrant; this is the opinion foreign nations have formed of me. But how can they judge? They do not know the circumstances I was in at the beginning of my reign, how many people opposed my designs, counteracted my most useful projects and obliged me to be severe. But I never treated anyone cruelly or gave proofs of tyranny. On the contrary, I have always asked the assistance of such of my subjects as have shown marks of intelligence and patriotism, and who, doing justice to the rectitude of my intentions, have been disposed to second them. Nor have I ever failed to testify my gratitude by loading them with favors."

  The arguments about Peter and the controversies over his reforms have never ended. He has been idealized, condemned, analyzed again and again, and still, like the broader issues of the nature and future of Russia itself, he remains essentially mysterious. One quality which no one disputes is hi
s phenomenal energy. "Eternal toiler upon the throne of Russia," Pushkin described him. "It is an age of gold in which we are living," Peter himself wrote to Menshikov. "Without loss of a single instant, we devote all our energies to work." He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?

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