Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  The tsar concluded his missive with a threat. If Alexis persisted in his waywardness, “I will have you know that I will deprive you of the succession, as one may cut off a gangrenous limb.” Rather than heed the warning and improve himself, though, the tsarevitch simply waived his rights as heir. Such easy capitulation unsettled Peter, as did Alexis’s apparent willingness to become a monk when confronted with that dire fate. Then the tsarevitch did the unthinkable. He ran away from home and sought asylum with the Austrian emperor.

  Peter was livid when he learned of Alexis’s ignominious flight. Not only had his heir shamed him in front of the world, but his escape would undoubtedly give those dissident elements in Russia encouragement to revolt in support of Alexis. The tsar sent his agents in pursuit of his son, but the Austrian emperor was reluctant to hand him over to an uncertain fate. Ultimately, though, Peter managed to lure the young man back to Russia with false promises of indemnity and even permission to marry Alexis’s peasant mistress, Afrosinia. In responding to his father’s siren song, Alexis sealed his doom.

  “Have you heard that that fool of a Tsarevitch is coming here because his father has allowed him to marry Afrosinia?” wrote Prince Vasili Dolgoruky to Prince Gagarin. “He will have a coffin instead of a wedding!”

  The tsar appeared conciliatory, at first, but as his suspicions of a conspiracy became inflamed, scores of people associated with the tsarevitch and his infamous escape were tortured to get to the truth. Soon enough, it was Alexis’s turn. With Peter’s permission, the young man was subjected to the uniquely Russian form of “interrogation” known as the knout—a thick leather strap that would slice into a man’s back with every blow. Fifteen to twenty-five lashes were considered standard; anything over that could easily prove lethal. On the first day of questioning, Alexis received twenty-five blows but made no additional confessions. Five days later, with his back already in shreds, he was subjected to fifteen more lashes. In this state of extreme agony, the tsarevitch admitted to telling his confessor that he wished for his father’s death and that he would have willingly paid the emperor for a supply of foreign troops to seize Peter’s throne. It was enough.

  A secular convocation of 127 senators, ministers, governors, generals, and officers of the Imperial Guard unanimously condemned Alexis to death, but it was up to the tsar to sign the warrant. Even for a monarch as ruthless in the face of treason as Peter the Great, signing his son’s life away would be a staggering act of retribution. Fortunately, Alexis spared him this burden by conveniently expiring two days after last being knouted. The cause of death was surrounded by much speculation and remains a mystery to this day. Some said the tsarevitch had been secretly done away with, although some historians believe the torture Alexis endured was sufficient to kill him.

  Whatever the cause of death, Peter made no false demonstrations of grief. In fact, the next day he attended a banquet and ball in celebration of Russia’s victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltava nine years earlier. As far as the tsar was concerned, the death of his son, though tragic, was also necessary. Alexis had proven himself an enemy of progress and, had he lived, would have destroyed everything his father had built. To commemorate Russia’s deliverance from such a calamity, Peter had a medal struck. It featured a crown lit by the sun with its rays piercing the clouds and included an inscription that read: “The horizon has cleared.”

  * * *

  * Prince Boris Kurakin wrote of Eudoxia: She was “fair of face, but mediocre of mind, and no match for her husband.”

  Catherine I (1725–1727): The Peasant Empress

  One cannot help wondering at God’s Providence whereby the empress has been elevated from the lowly position into which she was born and in which she lived to the pinnacle of human honors.

  —FRIEDRICH WILHELM VON BERGHOLTZ

  Upon his death in 1725, Peter the Great was succeeded by his second wife, Catherine, in what was surely one of the most stunning elevations in the history of monarchy. Indeed, the rise of the former peasant woman to Russia’s throne might well have been a fairy tale had it not been absolutely true.

  Death did not come easy to Peter the Great. The colossus who had dragged Russia out of its medieval malaise and built an empire by the sheer force of his will now lay convulsing in agony, his eyes filled with fear, as the vital life force that once infused him inexorably drained away. To save his soul, the doomed autocrat acknowledged his sins and repeatedly cried out for absolution. As for the succession, though, Peter was silent.*1 And so he remained through the early morning hours of February 8, 1725, when he finally breathed his last. It was thus that the mighty emperor’s wishes were buried with him and an heir chosen without his express authority. Perhaps Peter never intended that an uneducated former peasant would come to occupy his throne. On the other hand, he had made this once-lowly creature his wife, then his empress. Certainly that had some significance. Yet again, so did sending her the head of her reputed lover in a jar, just a few weeks earlier.

  Only the barest details are known about the early life of the woman who came to rule Russia as Empress Catherine I. She was born Martha Skavronskaya, probably in 1684, to peasant parents in what was then the Swedish province of Livonia.*2 Orphaned as a young girl, she was taken into the household of a Lutheran pastor named Gluck and there served as a maid.*3 With few prospects, Martha’s obscurity seemed assured in the small town of Marienburg—until a Russian force swept through during the Great Northern War with Sweden and took her captive in 1702. It was then that the total transformation of Martha Skavronskaya’s life began.

  The teenage girl was passed around as a spoil of war—wearing nothing but a soldier’s cloak to cover her nakedness—until she was finally presented to the fifty-year-old Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev. While serving as the field marshal’s laundress, or his mistress—perhaps both—she was noticed by Tsar Peter’s closest companion and confidant, Alexander Menshikov,*4 who commandeered the girl for himself (and who would come to play an integral role in her eventual accession to the throne).

  Though not beautiful in any conventional way, Martha was nevertheless robust and vivacious, with an engaging, generous spirit that immediately attracted the tsar when he first met her at Menshikov’s home late in 1703. “He found her clever and ended his badinage with her by saying that when he went to bed she must bring the torch to his room,” recalled Peter’s aide-de-camp, Captain de Villebois. “This was a decision from which there was no appeal, although it was delivered with a laugh. Menshikov subscribed to it. And the fair one, with the consent of her master, spent the night in the Tsar’s room.”

  Peter the Great’s numerous mistresses meant nothing to him—most were mere sexual diversions, easily cast aside (and, in the case of at least one, a source of his gonorrhea). Martha (or Catherine, as she was renamed after her conversion to Orthodoxy) was different, however. She managed to amuse the tsar, sharing his bawdy humor and certainly his fondness for drink, while also encouraging him with her bountiful good sense and eternal optimism. She knew his burdens, and, unlike anyone else, could still his blind rages and convulsive fits.

  “The sound of her voice instantly calmed him,” observed Count Henning Friedrich von Bassewitz, secretary to the Duke of Holstein, “then she would seat him and hold his head gently stroking it and running her fingers through his hair. This had a magical effect on him and he would fall asleep in just a few minutes. In order not to disturb his rest she would hold his head on her breast and sit motionless for two or three hours. After this he would awake completely refreshed and in good spirits.”

  But, as biographer Robert K. Massie noted, the tsar’s need for her went deeper than simply being nursed: “Her qualities of mind and heart were such that she was able not only to soothe him, play with him, love him, but also to take part in his inner life, to talk to him about serious things, to discuss his views and projects, to encourage his hopes and aspirations. Not only did her presence comfort him, but her conversation cheered him and gave hi
m balance.”

  Catherine was, simply stated, everything Peter’s first wife, Eudoxia (now a nun), was not, and by 1707 the tsar was ready to marry her. It was a secret ceremony, for even a tsar as powerful as Peter the Great would find it difficult to impose a Livonian peasant on the Russian people—at least for the time being. Less than five years later, though, in 1711, that all changed after Catherine played a remarkable role during the Pruth River campaign against the Ottoman Turks.

  Peter was in dire circumstances that July, surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force poised to annihilate him. Total and unconditional surrender seemed to be the tsar’s only option, but with it came the possibility of losing vast territories not only to the Turks, but to their ally, Russia’s most despised foe, the Swedes. Catherine, who accompanied her husband on the campaign and bravely endured the enemy assault by his side, urged the tsar to negotiate with the Turkish grand vizier, Mehemet Baltadji—even if Baltadji’s position was so superior that he had to concede nothing. Astonishingly enough, the grand vizier allowed Peter to avoid total destruction with some painful though by no means ruinous concessions.

  Legend has it that Catherine had secretly sent her most valuable possessions to the grand vizier as a bribe, which resulted in his relative leniency. Whether or not this was true, the tsar later honored his wife with the new Order of St. Catherine, “instituted to commemorate Her Majesty’s participation in the battle with the Turks on the Pruth River, where, in such dangerous circumstances she had proven herself to everyone not as a weak woman, but as a brave man.”

  Then, seven months after escaping the Pruth River fiasco, Peter married Catherine—again—this time in a splendid ceremony for all the world to witness. “Thus, Cinderella became queen,” wrote the Russian historian Evgenii V. Anisimov. “No one had the right any longer to address her in any way other than ‘Your Royal Majesty,’ and all subjects, regardless of distinction, were considered her slaves and required to bow their heads in her presence.”

  Although Russians were now required to honor Catherine as tsarina (one monk who failed to do this had his bones broken on a wheel), others were not so obliged. Margravine Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, sister of Frederick the Great, was decidedly unimpressed when Catherine visited Berlin in 1718, and she recorded this most unflattering description:

  “The tsaritsa is a small, stumpy, very dark-complexioned, unimpressive and ungraceful woman. It’s enough to look at her to see her humble origins. Her tasteless dress seems to have been bought at a junk dealer’s: it is old-fashioned, covered with silver and dirt. A dozen orders are pinned on her and the same number of small icons and medallions with relics; all these jingle when she walks so that you have the impression that you are being approached by a pack mule.”

  For Peter, though, Catherine was perfect. She remained earthy and unpretentious, an oasis of serenity in the tsar’s otherwise chaotic life, the mother of eleven of his children (only two of whom survived into adulthood),*5 and the only true source of comfort and support he had. The numerous letters that passed between the couple when they were apart reflect their mutual tenderness, humor, and understanding.

  Though Catherine was Peter’s one true love, he remained casually unfaithful to her while she good-naturedly indulged his meaningless affairs. She knew she held the tsar’s heart (if not his fly) and was wise enough to recognize that challenging him was a sure way to lose it. This unique facet of their relationship was reflected in an exchange from June 1717, while Peter was undergoing mineral water treatments in Spa:

  “There is nothing to write to you about, only that we arrived here yesterday safely, and as doctors prohibit domestic fun [that is, sex] while drinking the water, I have sent my mistress back to you, for I would not have been able to resist the temptation if I had kept her here.” In her response, Catherine wryly noted that the mistress was not sent away because of doctor’s orders but because she had a venereal disease, “and I have no desire (and heaven forbid!) to have this mistress’s lover [Peter] come home in the same condition as she.”

  Catherine’s tolerance of the tsar’s infidelities was a simple result of her inferior position, but her indulgence may also have been informed by her own reputed extramarital dalliances—one of which would explode into a spectacular scandal. But not before Peter paid Catherine the ultimate tribute and had her crowned as his tsarina.

  It was a magnificent event, infused with all the pomp and ceremony Peter normally abhorred. He even dressed for the occasion, replacing the utilitarian work clothes he preferred with a sky-blue caftan embroidered in silver, red silk stockings, and a hat with a white feather. Catherine was even more spectacularly arrayed in a purple gown trimmed with gold, with an ermine-lined brocade mantle around her shoulders, and diamonds shimmering in her hair.

  As the bells of Moscow tolled amid thundering cannon fire, the royal couple appeared atop the Kremlin’s Red Staircase—sight of the horrors Peter witnessed as a young boy—and proceeded across Cathedral Square to the Cathedral of the Assumption, where Ivan the Terrible was first crowned in 1547. There, in the light of hundreds of candles, they took their places upon two jewel-encrusted thrones. As the elaborate ceremony reached its climax, Peter took the crown—constructed specially for the occasion and consisting of thousands of diamonds, pearls, and other precious stones, including an enormous ruby as large as a dove’s egg—and turned to the gathered audience, proclaiming, “It is Our intention to crown Our beloved consort.” He then placed the crown upon Catherine’s head and handed her the orb. Symbolically, though, he refrained from giving his wife the scepter, the ultimate symbol of royal power.

  “One cannot help wondering at God’s Providence whereby the empress*6 has been elevated from the lowly position into which she was born and in which she lived to the pinnacle of human honors,” noted Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholtz, a courtier and guest from Holstein.

  Peter had indeed raised his stalwart companion high, but what did it signify? Some historians have suggested that he was officially designating Catherine as his heir. All his sons, including the ill-fated Alexis, were dead, and he had already decreed several years before that the traditional rules of succession would no longer apply; that henceforth the tsar would have the absolute power to determine who would rule after him. But, problematically, Peter never explicitly named Catherine as his heir. It was this omission that left biographer Lindsey Hughes to conclude:

  In the absence of direct evidence of Peter’s intentions on the succession in May, 1724, the coronation should perhaps be taken at face value as what Peter said it was: a ceremony to honour Catherine. In terms of public recognition, it went hand in hand with Peter’s creation of a Western-style court for his wife. It was a rebuke to those who muttered about Catherine’s unsuitability as an empress and yet another demonstration of Peter’s will.

  Viewed from another angle, this crowning of a foreign peasant woman as empress was an example of Peter’s upside down world, the “mock” universe of his own devising which he used to exert his authority and disorientate people.*7

  Whatever Peter’s motive in crowning Catherine, he may well have come to regret it, for just weeks later emerged unseemly revelations about the empress’s secretary and confidant William Mons—described by the Danish envoy Hans Georg von Westphalen as “among the most handsome and elegant people whom I have ever seen.” He was also believed to be Catherine’s lover. Mons certainly had a lucrative business selling his influence with the empress, who in turn had the tsar’s ear. But was he really sleeping with her? Peter seemed to think so, for after having Mons executed for corruption, he ordered his head preserved in a jar and sent to Catherine—apparently as some kind of perverse keepsake.

  Tensions ran high between the royal couple in the wake of the Mons affair. “They almost never talk to each other,” reported Jean Lefort in a dispatch to the elector of Saxony; “they no longer eat together, they no longer sleep together.” Peter was said to have been so enraged that he smashed a valuable vase.
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  “Thus will I do to you and yours!” he roared at Catherine, who reportedly replied, “You have just destroyed one of the most beautiful ornaments of your house. Does that give it any more charm?”

  The empress herself was devastated by the death of her confidant and possible lover. “Her relations with Mons were common knowledge,” reported the French envoy, “and although she tries hard to hide her grief, it is nevertheless evident on her face and in her manner of behavior. All of society tensely awaits what will become of her.”

  What became of Catherine was entirely unexpected. Instead of falling into disgrace, or worse, she emerged as Russia’s next monarch—an empress in her own right, wielding all the power of an autocrat—for shortly after the Mons affair was exposed Peter the Great lay dying.

  A great power vacuum loomed and two mighty factions struggled to fill it. On one side were the “new men,” many of whom Peter had raised high from the humblest origins. Led by the tsar’s close companion Alexander Menshikov (in whose household Peter had found Catherine shortly after her capture), they aimed to maintain power by placing Catherine on the throne. Opposing them were members of the nobility and others who had seen their ancient rights and privileges eroded under Peter’s radical regime. Bound by tradition, these men believed the dying tsar’s grandson, Peter, son of the doomed Alexis, was the legitimate heir.

  Ultimately the decision rested with the Russian Imperial Guard, with whom Peter had replaced the rebellious streltsy. “The decision of the Guards is law here,” the French envoy accurately reported. And the Guards were with Catherine (the first of a parade of sovereigns they would install—or depose—according to their will). She had accompanied them on many a military campaign, struggling by their side, and in the process earned their loyalty and affection. Now, called by Menshikov and other members of his party, they surrounded the palace where the debate over the succession raged.