Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  “But you even will not so much as hear warlike exercises mentioned; though it is by them that we broke through that obscurity in which we were involved, and that we made ourselves known to nations whose esteem we share at present.

  “…You mistake if you think it is enough for a prince to have good generals to act under his orders. Everyone looks upon the head; they study his inclinations and conform themselves to them. All the world knows this.

  “You have no inclination to learn war, you do not apply yourself to it and consequently you will never learn it. And how then can you command others, and judge of the reward which those deserve who do their duty, or punish others who fail of it? You will do nothing, nor judge of anything, but by the eyes and help of others, like a young bird that holds up its bill to be fed.

  “…I am a man and consequently I must die. To whom shall I leave after me to finish what I have partly recovered? To a man who like the slothful servant hides his talent in the earth—that is to say, who neglects making the best of what God has entrusted to him?

  “…After having considered all those great inconveniences and reflected upon them, and seeing I cannot bring you to good by any inducement, I have thought fit to give you in writing this act of my last will with this resolution, however: to wait still a little longer before I put it in execution to see if you will mend. If not, I will have you know that I will deprive you of the succession, as one may cut off a useless member.

  “Do not fancy that, because I have no other child but you, I only write this to terrify you. I will certainly put it in execution if it please God; for whereas I do not spare my own life for my country and the welfare of my people, why should I spare you who do not render yourself worthy of either? I would rather choose to transmit them to a worthy stranger than to my own unworthy son.”

  If Alexei was afraid of being cut out of the succession, he was much more afraid of exciting Peter’s wrath by failing at the impossible task of transforming himself into the hearty, bluff, warlike heir his father required. Terrified and desperate, he turned to his father’s advisors for advice; they, in turn, told him that it would be best if he gave his immediate assent to being disinherited. “You should renounce the succession. You are not fit for it,” said one of them.

  Three days after Peter’s letter reached him, Alexei replied:

  “I have nothing to reply [to your letter] but that if Your Majesty will deprive me of the succession to the crown of Russia by reason of my incapacity, your will be done. I even most urgently beg it of you because I do not think myself fit for government. My memory is very much weakened and yet it is necessary in affairs. The strength of my mind and of my body is much decayed by sicknesses which I have undergone and which have rendered me incapable of governing so many nations.

  “…Therefore I do not aspire after you (whom God preserve many years) to the succession…even if I had no brothers as I have one at present whom I pray God preserve.

  “…I put my children into your hands, and as for myself, I desire nothing of you but a bare maintenance during my life, leaving the whole to your consideration and your will.”

  This letter, with its tone of defeated humility, did not please Peter in the least. Like most overbearing parents who resort to threats, he had wanted to scare Alexei into doing his duty, not lose him altogether. Besides, it did not seem possible to Peter that the heir to so great a throne could really be serious in casting off all claims to the power he was born for. And even if Alexei thought himself serious, someone might persuade him to change his mind in the future. During his reign, Peter had deprived the Orthodox church of much of its former power, and he knew that his scholarly son was regarded by the leaders of the church as a potential savior. What if some “greats beards”, as Peter called the Orthodox leadership, persuaded Alexei that it was his duty to strive for the succession, even after he had renounced it? Alexei might destroy everything Peter had worked for since he became tsar.

  In January of 1716, Peter wrote Alexei a second letter. He upbraided his son again for failing to make himself fit for the throne, and issued a second ultimatum: either Alexei must change his ways and prepare to become a tsar in Peter’s image, or he must renounce the world and become a monk. Failure to comply would result in his being branded as a traitor and a criminal.

  Alexei again sought the advice of his confessor, who advised him to do as Peter commanded and become a monk. After all, he said, “they do not nail a cowl to a man’s head”—meaning that Alexei could always renounce holy orders after Peter’s death. Bearing this resolution in mind, Alexei informed Peter of his decision in a face to face meeting. Either out of compassion for his son or a lingering hope that he would change his mind, Peter told him not to take any drastic steps yet. He was on the verge of making a second trip to Europe, and he was too busy making preparations to think seriously about the implications or logistics of cutting Alexei out of the succession. Peter gave Alexei six months to think over his options; at the end of that period, Peter would write again, asking his final answer.

  In August of 1716, Peter wrote Alexei for the third time. Either Alexei should join a monastery, or immediately leave Russia and join Peter in Copenhagen to begin his training for the throne. Alexei was to send his answer by the same courier who had delivered this final demand. With no time left in which to deliberate, Alexei chose a third option: flight. Informing his father’s ministers that he was leaving for Copenhagen, he instead went to Vienna. The emperor of Austria, Charles VI, was married to the sister of Alexis’s dead wife, Charlotte, and Alexei hoped that he would shield him from Peter for the sake of the family connection. The last person Alexei saw before he left was his advisor, Alexander Kikin, who warned him: “If your father sends somebody to persuade you to return, do not do it. He will have you publicly beheaded.”

  Alexei had by now changed his mind about renouncing the succession. “I am weak, but I have sense enough to rule,” he told the Austrian vice-chancellor. Charles VI, uncertain whether it was wisest to serve the interests of the tsar or his heir, agreed to protect him for the present, and sent him to live secretly under the guard of a garrison in a remote castle. All his needs were provided for, but he was not allowed to leave and no one was allowed to see him; all his mail was opened and read. The Austrians began to gather their own intelligence regarding the situation in Russia. They received reports that in the absence of both Peter and Alexei, “everything here is ripe for rebellion.” This was not precisely true; there was a widespread feeling of resentment against Peter’s reforms, but it not reached a revolutionary pitch. Nonetheless, this report was given to Alexei, who kept it.

  It was winter and Peter had reached Amsterdam before he realized that Alexei was missing. At first, it was unclear whether he had met with an accident on his way to Copenhagen; the last report anyone had of his whereabouts put his location in Danzig. But Peter soon figured out that Alexei had made an escape, a bitter humiliation for Peter as both a sovereign and a father. Eventually, his investigations traced Alexei to the castle where Charles had hidden him. The emperor was presented with a letter from the emperor requesting that Alexei be sent directly to him, with an armed guard. Charles broke the news to Alexei, who promptly became hysterical; Peter would kill him, he insisted, if the emperor did not protect him. Sympathetic to his plight, Charles sent Alexei to Naples, which was then part of the Habsburg empire, to continue in hiding and exile. The secrecy was in vain, however. Peter’s agents had found tracked him to his hiding place, and when Alexei went to Italy, they followed.

  Peter dispatched his minister Peter Tolstoy to see the emperor in Vienna, armed with a demand, a request, and a promise: if Charles did not surrender Peter’s wayward heir, there would be consequences. But if Alexei would return, all would be forgiven. “If you are afraid of me, I assure you and I promise to God and His judgment that I will not punish you,” read the letter Peter had entrusted to Tolstoy, promising reconciliation. “If you submit to my will b
y obeying me and if you return, I will love you better than ever. But if you refuse, then I as a father, by virtue of the power I have received from God, give you my everlasting curse; and as your sovereign, I declare you traitor and I assure you I will find the means to use you as such, in which I hope God will assist me and take my just cause into his hands.”

  Alexei was terrified when Tolstoy appeared to give him the letter, but once he read it, he grew calmer. He needed time to reflect. But Tolstoy, who was exceptionally sly and subtle, had realized that the key to persuading Alexei to do anything lay in first persuading his mistress, Afrosina, a serf who had accompanied Alexei to Europe in disguise as a pageboy. Tolstoy, with the cooperation of the Austrians, arrested Afrosina, then won her trust by giving her presents and promises that she would be looked after if she could convince Alexei to return to Russia. The alternative was that Tolstoy would take Alexei back by force, and what would happen to Afrosina then?

  Once Tolstoy had seized Afrosina, Alexei was too shaken to do anything but agree to his father’s demands. He had two conditions for his return: “that I may be allowed to live quietly in a country house and that Afrosina will not be taken away from me.” Peter agreed to this. He even indicated that Alexei might marry Afrosina—so long as the ceremony took place on Russian soil.

  Alexei reached Russia, under the close supervision of Tolstoy and his armed enforcers, in February of 1718. On February 3, an official ceremony took place at the Kremlin to disinherit Alexei and instate Peter’s two-year-old son by Catherine, Peter Petrovich, as the new heir. The forms of the ceremony involved Alexei reading out a written confession, and Peter granting a formal, but conditional, pardon: Alexei would only be permitted to retire to his quiet country house once a thorough investigation into his flight from Russia and his actions abroad had taken place.

  This was the loophole which would hang the unfortunate Alexei. It seemed to be outside the limits of Peter’s imagination that his son, the heir to the throne of Russia, could have gone to such lengths merely because he was overwhelmed by the demands being made of him. Who would reject such power, when all he had to do was behave in a way that was pleasing to his father in order to retain all the privileges of a royal heir? There must be some conspiracy afoot; someone must have planted the idea in his mind, someone with larger ambitions to depose Peter and make Alexei the figurehead of a movement to reverse all the progress of Peter’s reign. Alexei was asked to reveal the names of all who had assisted him in his flight. There were only two—Alexander Kikin, and his valet. Peter found this impossible to believe. In an apparent effort to make himself fully understood to his father, Alexei named seven more people, not as partners in a conspiracy, but as confidantes to whom he had related his worries about his relationship with Peter. All of these people were arrested, followed by more “conspirators”, including high churchmen and Alexei’s mother, Eudoxia.

  Eudoxia, it was discovered, had abandoned her life as a nun a few years into her incarceration in the convent, and taken a lover. She explained that this was only because being a nun had not suited her, but Peter suspected her of having some reason to hope that she would one day be restored to her former life in the palace—if, for instance, he were deposed and Alexei made tsar. All of the accused were interrogated, and most were tortured, including nuns at Eudoxia’s convent. The man who had been her lover was broken on the wheel and died after spitting in the tsar’s face. Kikin and others were condemned to die lingering painful deaths, and others were condemned to simple execution or exile. As he had done when the Streltsy were interrogated, Peter attended the interrogations and participated in the torture. Such was his paranoia that many who were arrested were charged with nothing more than a vague and general feeling of sympathy for Alexei or his mother. It was an ugly, brutal affair, but the worst was yet to come.

  A foreign observer in Russia wrote of the problem that Alexei still posed for Peter:

  “Now comes the question: What shall be done further with the Tsarevitch? It is said that he is going to be sent to a very distant monastery. This does not seem probable to me, for the further the Tsar removes him, the greater opportunity does he give to the restless mob for liberating him. I think that he will be brought here again and kept in the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. I will not decide here whether the Tsar is right or wrong to exclude him from the succession and give him his paternal curse. This is sure: the clergy, the nobility, and the common people respect the Tsarevitch like a god.”

  During the interrogations and trials, and for a short time afterwards, Alexei lived near his stepmother and was seen with Peter in public. The rift between them seemed to be mended. Alexei was resigned to live in obscurity. The only requests he made were regarding Afrosina; he had not seen her since he left Naples, and he wished to be married to her as soon as possible. Afrosina, however, had been arrested as soon as she set foot in Russia, and when her belongings were searched, suggestive and incriminating documents were found. One of them was the letter Alexei had received in Austria indicating that Russia was ripe for rebellion. The others included two letters Alexei himself had written but never sent, one addressing the archbishops of the Orthodox church, the other addressing the Russian Senate:

  “I believe you will be no less surprised than all the world at my going out of the country and at my residing in a place unknown at present. The continued ill-usage and the disorders have obliged me to quit my dear native country. They designed to shut me up in a convent in the beginning of the year 1716, though I had committed nothing that deserved it. None of you can be ignorant of it. But God, full of mercy, saved me by presenting to me last autumn an opportunity of absenting myself from my dear country and you, whom I could not have resolved to leave had I not been in the case where I found myself.

  “At present I am well and in good health, under the protection of a certain High Person, till the time when God who preserved me shall call me to return to my dear native country.

  “I desire you not to forsake me then, and as for the present, to give no credit to the news that may be spread of my death, or otherwise out of the desire they have to blot me out of the memory of mankind, for God keeps me in His guard and my benefactors will not forsake me. They have promised me not to forsake me, even not for the future, in case of need. I am alive and I shall always be full of good wishes for Your Excellencies and for the whole country.”

  To Peter, these were not the words of a man who had decided to give up his rights to the succession. They were not even the words of a son who had made up his own mind to live quietly abroad until his father died before returning to Russia to take up his inheritance. Rather, they seemed to open the door to conspiracy, to hint broadly that if Peter was deposed, Alexei would be happy to take his place. But Alexei had not actually mailed the letter, so there was room for doubt.

  Peter decided to interrogate Afrosina, who, either because she was too unsophisticated to realize what she was doing, or because she was too (understandably) frightened of Peter to hold anything back from him, proceeded to reveal Alexei’s every secret. Robert Massie describes the damning tale which Afrosina told to Peter: “When he became tsar, he would abandon St. Petersburg and all of Peter’s foreign conquests and make Moscow his capital. He would dismiss Peter’s courtiers and appoint his own. He would ignore the navy and allow the ships to rot. He would reduce the army to a few regiments. There would be no more wars… The ancient rights of the church would be restored and respected.”

  Armed with Afrosina’s information, Peter confronted Alexei again. This was to be the interview which sealed the tsarevitch’s fate. Alexei claimed that the Austrians had forced him to write letters to the Senate and the Archbishops. Peter asked whether, if there had been a revolt in Moscow, as the rumors claimed, Alexei would have returned to Russia and let them make him tsar. Somewhat confusedly, Alexei said that he would have done so if Peter had been killed; because of Peter’s epilepsy, he expected that Peter would die soon in any case, a
nd if there was a coup, Peter probably would not have survived it, so it would have been Alexei’s duty to return and become tsar.

  This rambling answer did nothing to alleviate Peter’s fears. He wrote to Charles IV in Austria and asked him why Alexei had been required to write to the Senate and the archbishops; the reply came that Alexei had not been forced, that he had written the letters himself and asked that they be forwarded to Russia through back channels, but that the Austrian vice-chancellor had thought it more prudent not to mail them. Peter questioned Alexei again, and again Alexei admitted that it was true. This was all the evidence Peter needed. The pardon Peter had granted him upon his return to Russia was invalidated by the information that had come to light since. Alexei was arrested, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and tried for treason. All of the accusations Afrosina had made to Peter, Peter related to the courts. Alexei himself “confessed to his father and his lord, in the presence of the whole assembly of the states ecclesiastical and secular, that he was guilty of everything described.”

  Alexei’s ordeal was not over yet. Peter could not be certain of the right course of action when his own feelings were so deeply involved. He cast Alexei’s fate upon the courts, ecclesiastical and civil, assuring them that, no matter what their verdict, they need not fear Peter’s displeasure or retribution. Nonetheless, no one was in any hurry to condemn the son of the tsar to the usual fate of traitors. The church court explained that, according to Scripture, Peter would be within his rights either to have Alexei executed, since he was in violation of Old Testament law, or to show him mercy, as Christ had urged in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Dissatisfied with this answer, Peter turned to the civil court and explained that they were to treat Alexei as though he were any other Russian subject accused of treason. This meant interrogation under torture.