Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Despite much evidence to the contrary, Peter wasn’t a complete animal while visiting Europe. When the occasion called for it, he did manage to behave himself: “The Tsar surpassed himself during all this time,” wrote a member of the Prussian court. “He neither belched, nor farted, nor picked his teeth—at least I neither saw nor heard him do so.” And he absolutely enchanted Sophia, Electress of Hanover (mother of Britain’s future king George I), who recorded her impressions of the tsar after spending an evening with him:

  “He has a great vivacity of mind, and a ready and just repartee. But, with all the advantages with which nature has endowed him, it could be wished that his manners were a little less rustic.… We stayed in truth a very long time at table, but we would gladly have remained there longer still without feeling a moment of boredom, for the Tsar was in very good humor, and never ceased talking to us.… He told us that he worked himself in building ships, showed us his hands, and made us touch the callous places that had been caused by work.… He is a very extraordinary man. It is impossible to describe him, or even to give an idea of him, unless you have seen him. He has a very good heart, and remarkably noble sentiments. I must tell you also, that he did not get drunk in our presence, but we had hardly left when the people of his suite began to make ample amends.”

  The tsar returned from his nearly yearlong European sojourn filled with dreams of breaking Russia free from its backward isolation and transforming it into an evolved, enlightened kingdom worthy of the civilized world’s respect. He started with the beards, which Russian men had worn with pride for generations as symbols of their faith and ancient values. To Peter, these bushy totems were nothing short of barbaric—the most outward reflection of crippling superstition and complacency. He ordered them off, but, of course, he couldn’t just leave that to the barbers. No, the tsar attacked with a razor the hairy faces of his courtiers, many of whom lost a fair amount of skin in the process. For those who could not bear to part with their beards, a special tax was instituted. Those who opted to pay were issued a bronze medallion to be worn around the neck, which (sometimes) protected them from the government’s roving enforcers.

  The forced shearing led some to believe that Peter was actually the Antichrist, come to destroy the venerable Orthodox faith. “Look often at the icons of the Second Coming of Christ,” one treatise warned, “and observe the righteous standing at the right side of Christ, all with beards. At the left stand the Muselmen and heretics. Lutherans and Poles and other shavers of their ilk, with just whiskers, such as cats and dogs have. Take heed whom to imitate and which side you will be on.”

  Driven as he was to win wars and reform Russia, Peter never neglected the booze—prodigious amounts of it, enough to poison most men, which was in fact a distinct possibility many of the tsar’s drinking companions confronted as he demanded their full participation in his alcoholic excesses. As one commentator later wrote, “above all the apparent jollity and revelry of life there reigned the iron will of the head pedagogue, which knew no bounds—everyone made merry by decree and even to the sound of drumbeats, they got drunk and made merry under compulsion.”

  Alcohol was one of Peter the Great’s ultimate pleasures—his fondness for it established as a young man during his frequent visits to Moscow’s German Suburb (the neighborhood set aside for non-Russians), where he would spend the day learning about the West from the foreigners who resided there and the night indulging in what Prince Boris Kurakin called “debauchery and drunkenness so great that it is impossible to describe it.” Peter gradually organized these bacchanals into a formal club, “the Most Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters,” whose members, the tsar and his drinking buddies, seemed to take special delight in mocking organized religion—particularly Roman Catholicism, with a dash of contempt toward traditional Russian Orthodoxy tossed in as well.

  The hierarchy of the Drunken Synod mimicked that of the church, with a “Prince-Pope” at the top, gradually descending from bishops down to lowly deacons. As he was wont to do in other arenas, like the military, the tsar took a lesser ecclesiastical title—but there was no question who really headed the motley bunch.

  “Peter seems to have expended as much energy and imagination on [the Synod] as he did on many of his more serious projects,” wrote historian Russell Zguta. “He was constantly adding to or changing its statutes, drawing up elaborate procedures for the induction of new members, or … singlehandedly working out the details for the election and installation of a new Prince-Pope.”

  The primary rule of membership was that “Bacchus be worshiped with strong and honorable drinking and receive his just dues.” To help facilitate this, the tsar had built a massive palace of “worship,” where drinking and orgies were treated as sacraments. Often, though, the Synod would spill out to the streets in gaudy pseudoreligious processions, like on one Palm Sunday when the Prince-Pope and a retinue of twelve cardinals—“each carefully chosen from among the most physically deformed stutterers,” as one described the red-capped drunks—rode on oxen and asses, or in sleighs pulled by pigs, bears, and goats.

  One of the Synod’s early Prince-Popes was the tsar’s former tutor, Nikita Zotov, who was an eighty-four-year-old widower when Peter decided to marry him off to a widow a mere half century his junior. The wedding was a spectacle, showcasing the tsar’s warped sense of fun. Perhaps in honor of the octogenarian groom, ancient and decrepit was the wedding theme. Old men were appointed as attendants, waiters, and stewards, with four fat runners selected because of their obesity and disabling gout. At the cathedral, the couple was “joined in Matrimony by a priest a hundred years old,” one witness recounted, “who had lost his eyesight and memory, to supply which defect a pair of spectacles were put on his nose, two candles held before his eyes, and the words sounded in his ears, which he was to pronounce.”

  When old Zotov died several years later, it was time to elect a new Prince-Pope in a ritual proscribed by Peter that seemed to parody papal elections in Rome. Nearly two hundred members of the Synod were sealed into their pleasure palace to ensure secrecy in the balloting. Next, the candidates for office were seated in specially designed stools to have their sex verified—a pseudo-precaution apparently inspired by the widespread belief that a female pontiff, “Pope Joan,” had once been elected by the College of Cardinals. With the candidates’ appropriate genitalia confirmed, it was time for the election. The eligible voters approached the “Arch-Abbess” present at the proceedings, kissed her breasts, and then dropped an egg (colored to indicate “yes” or “no”) into a chalice before each candidate. When Peter Buturlin emerged the victor, Peter decided it was only appropriate that the new Prince-Pope marry his predecessor’s widow. Their wedding bed was then placed on public display at Senate Square.

  Though it was clearly his favorite pastime, drinking wasn’t the tsar’s only diversion. There were dwarfs as well. While many royal courts of the era had their complement of little people to amuse them, Peter found them especially hilarious and kept scores of them near him. He loved to surprise his guests by having a naked dwarf pop out of a gigantic pie, or have them participate in the mock ceremonials he so frequently staged. On one memorable occasion, as part of the wedding celebration of his niece Anna (future empress and daughter of Peter’s late co-tsar, Ivan V), a contingent of dwarfs was brought in to replicate the royal nuptials. Friedrich Christian Weber, the Hanoverian envoy, recorded the scene:

  “A very little dwarf marched to the head of the procession, as being the marshal … conductor and master of the ceremony. He was followed by the bride and bridegroom neatly dressed. Then came the Tsar attended by his ministers, princes, boyars, officers and others; next marched all the dwarfs of both sexes in couples. They were in all seventy-two.… The Tsar, in token of his favor, was pleased to hold the garland over the bride’s head according to the Russian custom. The ceremony being over, the company went … to the Prince Menshikov’s palace.… Several small tables were placed in the middle of the hall for
the new-married couple and the rest of the dwarfs, who were all splendidly dressed after the German fashion.… After dinner the dwarfs began to dance after the Russian way, which lasted till eleven at night. It is very easy to imagine how much the Tsar and the rest of the company were delighted at the comical capers, strange grimaces, and odd postures of that medley of pygmies, most of whom were of a size the mere sight of which was enough to produce laughter. One had a high hunch on his back, and very short legs, another was remarkable by a monstrous big belly; a third came waddling along on a little pair of crooked legs like a badger; a fourth had a head of prodigious size; some had wry mouths and long ears, little pig eyes, and chubby cheeks and many such comical figures more. When these diversions were ended, the newly married couple were carried to the Tsar’s house and bedded in his own bedchamber.”

  It should perhaps be noted that Peter’s interest in dwarfs extended beyond mere amusement. He was fascinated by “oddities” of all kinds, human and animal, and among the numerous objects he collected for his cabinet of curiosities—displayed beside such items as the neat rows of teeth he had extracted from his subjects and the severed head of Mary Hamilton pickled in alcohol—were the remains of deformed infants he encouraged his subjects to send him, dead dwarfs, and the skeleton of a giant who stood nearly eight feet tall.

  Entertainment for Peter sometimes took on a menacing quality. “In the winter he has large holes cut in the ice and makes the fattest lords pass over them in sleds,” reported Foy de la Neuville (a possible pseudonym for an unknown diarist). “The weakness of the new ice often causes them to fall in and drown.” Prince Boris Kurakin reported that on some occasions people’s clothes were torn off them and they were made to sit on ice, their bare behinds exposed, then violated with candles, with air blown up them with bellows. There was at least one fatality from this unique form of fun, but Peter at play was still far less dangerous than when his wrath was stirred.

  This was especially evident in 1698, after an abortive uprising by four regiments of the streltsy—those “begetters of evil,” as Peter called them, whose vicious rampage sixteen years earlier had left the young tsar in mute terror as they slaughtered his family in front of him. Now the nightmares that had haunted him ever since became real again. Only this time, he was no longer a helpless little boy. And though otherwise progressive in his thinking, Peter the Great delivered a retribution that was utterly medieval in its barbarity.

  The tsar had already done much to humble the unruly and arrogant streltsy in the years following their first revolt, essentially reducing them to common foot soldiers deprived of all the privileges and prestige they had once enjoyed. Thus sparked the second revolt, which erupted while Peter was away on his extended tour of Europe. The uprising had been quickly crushed and a number of participants already tortured and executed, but not nearly enough to satisfy Peter. He canceled the rest of his planned itinerary in the West and immediately sped home to deal with the treasonous streltsy himself.

  After hacking off the beards of his subjects, the tsar started hacking off heads. But first he was determined to discover if there had been a larger conspiracy behind the streltsy revolt, and, if so, how high among his boyars it went. Two thousand or so rebels still languished in prison, and Peter wanted answers from them. To that end, what author Robert K. Massie termed as “an assembly line of torture” was set up outside the tsar’s country estate of Preobrazhenskoe. Bones were broken, flesh seared, and backs lashed and shredded—with Peter presiding over the interrogations, which lasted for weeks—but many of the streltsy remained stubbornly mum about any greater plot.

  The Austrian envoy Johannes Korb left a vivid account of the revolt and its aftermath, including the tsar’s frustration when it became apparent that being racked and roasted was not enough to elicit the answers he was seeking from one poor soul. “The Tsar, tired at last of this exceedingly wicked stubbornness, furiously raised the stick which he happened to have in his hand, and thrust it so violently into his jaws—clenched in obstinate silence—to break them open, and make him give tongue to speak. And these words too that fell from the raging man, ‘Confess, beast, confess!’ loudly proclaimed how great was his wrath.”

  As numerous historians have pointed out, cruel torture was hardly unusual in the seventeenth century, but rare was the monarch who personally conducted such bloody business like the Russian tsar did, week after week, without a trace of mercy. “Peter never hesitated to be a participant in the enterprises he commanded, whether on the battlefield, on ship-board or in the torture chamber,” Massie noted. “He had decreed the interrogation and destruction of the Streltsy; he would not sit back and wait for someone to bring him news that his command had been obeyed.”

  Gradually the tsar gleaned that the streltsy had planned to march on Moscow, kill the foreigners there, and restore the old order under the potential leadership of their old ally Sophia. But Peter found no conspiracy among the ranks of the boyars, and even after personally interrogating his once fearsome half-sister in her convent, he could find no hard evidence against Sophia, either. Still, the woman who had loomed so large in his youth did not entirely escape his vengeance. After nine years of relatively luxurious confinement in the convent, where she never actually became a nun, Sophia’s head was shaved and she was forced to take the veil as Sister Susanna. And just to remind her of the streltsy’s treachery, three of their rotting corpses were hung outside the window of her cell—close enough to touch, and smell.

  After endless rounds of torture, the executions began in batches, and would continue over the next year. The first group was hauled to the gibbet outside Preobrazhenskoe in carts, two doomed men in each, holding lighted tapers as their weeping relatives ran beside them. Many were too broken by their interrogations to make it up the scaffold without help, but all died stoically. During another round of retribution, the tsar ordered some of his associates to lop off streltsy heads themselves. Some went about the task eagerly, like Peter’s friend Alexander Menshikov, who bragged of completing twenty decapitations without getting a single drop of blood on himself. Others, however, were more reticent. Indeed, one wielded the axe so limply that he succeeded only in striking a blow to his victim’s back. Peter himself set an example by rolling up his sleeves and beheading at least five men, perhaps more, as accounts vary.

  The heads and bodies of the hated streltsy were put on gruesome display throughout Moscow; some corpses were even left hanging from the Kremlin walls. “What strange sentries!” Korb exclaimed in his diary. Those who survived the massacre spent the rest of their lives without ears and noses, which had been lopped off, while the remaining streltsy regiments were forever disbanded.

  Peter the Great had demonstrated in the most vivid way possible the fate of those who would dare threaten the realm or interfere with his reforms. But the lesson seems to have been lost on one of those closest to the tsar: his very own son, Alexis.

  Peter had never been much of a father to the young tsarevitch, possibly due to his distaste for the boy’s mother, Eudoxia Lopukhina, a colorless, ultra-Orthodox woman he had married in 1689 only because his mother willed it.* He was seventeen at the time, bursting with vigor, and far from ready to settle down with the dull, clingy spouse imposed upon him. Peter soon abandoned Eudoxia, and, with her, the son she had delivered a year after the couple wed.

  But as Alexis grew up, the tsar began to take more notice, and he was bitterly disappointed by what he saw. While Peter was relentlessly energetic in the pursuit of his grand designs, his heir was a lazy intellectual, content to let the world pass him by as he dallied with his mistress and drank himself stupid. Certainly the sovereign shared his son’s fondness for drink, but he was appalled by Alexis’s indolence, as well as his apparent affinity with those conservative factions resistant to the tsar’s efforts to westernize Russia. Peter was determined to reconstitute the tsarevitch into a man more like himself—an effort that would have devastating consequences in the end.

 
It began with constant cajoling, which served to frighten the young man rather than improve him. After Alexis returned from a year of study in Germany, for example, he completely panicked when his father asked him what he had learned about geometry and fortifications; Alexis was terrified that the tsar might require him to execute drawings on the subject about which he was entirely incompetent. It was too horrible to contemplate, and rather than face such an ordeal, he returned to his home, picked up a pistol, and tried to shoot himself in the hand. The shot missed, but his hands were badly burned by the powder flash.

  In the face of what he viewed as his son’s complete dereliction of duty as heir to the Russian throne—particularly in learning the martial arts the tsar deemed essential in a future monarch—Peter sent Alexis a letter in 1715 expressing his deep dissatisfaction and frustration:

  “Remember your obstinacy and ill-nature, how often I reproached you for it and for how many years I almost have not spoken to you. But all this has availed nothing, has affected nothing. It was but losing my time, it was striking the air. You do not make the least endeavors, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy at home. Things of which you ought to be ashamed (forasmuch as they make you miserable) seem to make up your dearest delight, nor do you foresee the dangerous consequences for yourself and for the whole state.”