The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  His lawless cruelty exceeded the degree in which it might be excused as normal or necessary in his time and land. The Russians were accustomed to cruelty, and were probably less sensitive to pain than persons of a subtler nervous organization; they may have needed a harsh discipline; but Peter’s almost personal massacre of the Streltsi suggests a sadistic pleasure in cruelty, an orgasm of blood; and no need of the state required to have two conspirators sliced to death inch by inch. 8 Peter was immune to pity or sentiment, and lacked the sense of justice that checked the whims of Louis XIV or Frederick the Great. His violations of his solemn word, however, were fully in the manner of the age.

  Like the muzhik, Peter thought intoxication was a reasonable vacation from reality. He had taken upon himself all the burdens of the state, and the far greater task of transforming an Oriental people into Western civilization; festive drinking with his friends seemed a merited relief from these undertakings. He heartily accepted the peasant adage that drinking is the Russian’s joy. The ability to hold liquor was one of his measures of a man. When he was in Paris he wagered that his priest-confessor could drink more and remain stable than the priest-secretary of the French ministry; the contest went on for an hour; when the abbé rolled under the table Peter hugged his priest for having “saved the honor of Russia.” 9 About 1690 Peter and his intimates formed a band called the “Most Drunken Assembly [sobor] of Fools and Jesters.” Prince Feodor Romodanovsky was elected czar of the sobor; Peter accepted a subordinate position (as he did in the army and navy), and often in real life he pretended that Romodanovsky was Czar of Russia. The sobor of drunkards was formally dedicated to the worship of Bacchus and Venus; it had an elaborate ritual, mimicking with grossness and obscenity those of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches; and much of this mock ritual was composed by Peter himself. The sobor took part in many official state celebrations. When its mock patriarch, Nikita Zatov, aged eighty-four, married a bride of sixty, Peter designed and commanded an ornate ribald ceremonial (1715), in which the dignitaries and ladies of the court were to take part along with bears and stags and goats, and ambassadors playing flutes or the hurdy-gurdy, and Peter beating a drum. 10

  His sense of humor was hilarious and unrestrained, often stooping to buffoonery. His court was crowded with jesters and dwarfs, who seemed indispensable to every ceremony. Once the Czar, nearly seven feet tall, playing Gulliver to his Lilliputians, rode in a procession at the head of twenty-four mounted dwarfs. At one time Peter had seventy-two dwarfs at his court, some of whom were served up at table in gigantic pies. There were giants too, but most of these were sent as gifts to Frederick William of Prussia to join his army of obelisks. Several Negroes were presented to Peter. He held them in high esteem, and sent some of them to Paris for an education. One of them became a Russian general, the great-grandfather of the poet Pushkin.

  So far we picture Peter as still very much a barbarian, an Ivan the Terrible but humorous; anxious to be civilized, but envying the West not for its graces and arts but for its armies and navies, its commerce and industry and wealth. His virtues were directed to these ends as the prerequisites of civilization. Hence his insatiable curiosity. Of everything he wanted to know how it worked, and then how it could be made to work better. On his travels he exhausted his aides by running about to see this and that, even through the night. He was swamped with ideas, thereby amazing Leibniz, who had a swamp of his own; but Peter’s ideas were frankly utilitarian. He had an open mind for anything that could make his country catch up to the West. In a nation gloomily religious and fanatically hostile to foreign creeds and ways, he was as unprejudiced as a child or a sage, sampling Catholicism, Protestantism, even free thought. He was rather imitative than original; he transplanted ideas rather than conceived them; but in attempting to raise his nation to a competitive level with the West it was wiser to absorb first the best that the West could teach, and then try to surpass it. Never had imitation been so original.

  His indefatigable devotion to his purpose raised him out of barbarism to greatness. If he conscripted and consumed millions of Russians to his ends, he used himself up, too, in the effort to give Russia a modern army, a more efficient government, more varied and productive industries, wider commerce, and ports that could reach the world. He was economical of everything except human life, which was Russia’s one abundant commodity. Almost his first measures on reaching power were to dismiss the horde of servants and palace officials that had cluttered the royal household; to sell three thousand horses from the royal stables; to sweep away three hundred cooks and kitchen boys; to reduce the royal table, even on feast days, to sixteen places at most; to dispense with formal receptions and balls; and to make over to the state the sums that had heretofore been allotted to these luxuries. His father, Alexis, had left him a personal property of 10,734 dessiatines (28,982 acres) of cultivated land and fifty thousand houses, bringing in a revenue of 200,000 rubles yearly; Peter turned nearly all this over to the state treasury, reserving as his own only the ancient patrimony of the Romanov family—eight hundred “souls” in the province of Novgorod. In effect, and in sharp contrast to Louis XIV, the greatest of the czars reduced his court to a few friends, with an occasional festival, informal and sometimes hilarious, to brighten Moscow’s monotony. Often his economy became parsimony. He underpaid his palace staff, meted out mathematically its daily allowance of food, invited his friends not to dinner but to picnics where each would pay his share; and when the prostitutes who served him bemoaned their modest honorariums he replied that he paid them as much as he paid a grenadier, whose services were far more valuable.

  Women, with one exception, were minor incidents in his life. He was not keenly sensitive to beauty. He had sexual needs, but he dispatched them without ritual. He did not like to sleep alone, but this had nothing to do with sex; usually he had a servant share his bed, probably he wanted someone near him in case he should have a convulsion during the night. At seventeen, to quiet his mother, he married Eudoxia Lopukhina, who was described as “beautiful but stupid”; finding one quality more lasting than the other, he neglected her, and went back to his friends and his ships. He took a succession of transient mistresses, nearly always of lowly origin and condition. When Frederick II of Denmark jested with him about having a mistress, Peter answered, “Brother, my harlots do not cost me much, but yours cost you thousands of crowns, which you could spend in a better way.” 11 Both Lefort and Menshikov served the Czar as procurers, and Menshikov surrendered his own mistress to be Peter’s second wife. There must have been remarkable ability in her to raise her, like Justinian’s Theodora, from strumpet to empress.

  The future Catherine I was born about 1685 in Livonia of humble stock. Left an orphan, she was brought up as a servant by the Lutheran Pastor Glück in Marienburg. He taught her the catechism but not the alphabet; she never learned to read. In 1702 a Russian army under Sheremetiev besieged Marienburg. Despairing of defense, the commander of the garrison decided to blow up his fortress and himself. Pastor Glück, informed of his intention, took his family and his servant and fled to the Russian camp. He was sent on to Moscow, but Catherine was kept as a solace for the soldiers. She graduated through them to Sheremetiev to Menshikov to Peter. In those wars and regions a simple woman had to be complaisant in order to eat. For a time Catherine seems to have served both Menshikov and the Czar. They liked her because she was neat, cheerful, kind, and understanding; for example, she did not insist on being sole mistress. Peter found her a gay relief after the alarums of politics or war and the tantrums of jealous concubines. She accompanied him on campaigns, lived like a soldier, cut her hair, slept on the ground, and did not flinch when she saw men shot down at her side. When a convulsion seized Peter, and all others were afraid to touch him, she would speak to him soothingly, caress him, calm him, and let him sleep with his head on her breast. When they were apart he wrote to his “Katierinoushka” letters of playful and yet sincere tenderness. She became indispensable to him.
By 1710 she was his wife in everything but law. She bore him several children. In 1711 she helped to save him at the Prut. In 1712 he publicly acknowledged her as his wife. In 1722 he crowned her empress.

  Her influence over him was good in many ways. She, the peasant girl, improved the manners of the royal boor. She moderated his drinking; on several occasions she entered the room where he was carousing with friends, and quietly commanded him, “Pora domoï, batioushka” (Come home, little father), and he obeyed. She winked at his postmarital flirtations. She made no attempt to influence politics, but she saw to it that the Czar provided for her future, her relatives, and her friends. She overcame widespread resentment of her elevation by acting as an angel of mercy; in several instances she saved persons from the penalties to which Peter wished to condemn them; and when he insisted on severity he had to conceal it from her. She abused her power over him by selling her intercession; in this way she amassed a secret fortune, part of which she judiciously invested under assumed names at Hamburg or Amsterdam. Shall we blame her for seeking some security at a time when everything depended upon one man’s whim, and all Russia was in flux?

  II. THE PETRINE REVOLUTION

  Peter had inherited absolute power, took it for granted, and never doubted its necessity. Rule by the duma of boyars would restore feudal separatism and national chaos or stagnation; rule by a democratic assembly was impossible in a country still mentally and morally primitive; Peter agreed with Cromwell and Louis XIV that only the concentration of authority and responsibility could organize the human motley into a state strong enough to control the passions of the people and repel the attacks of land-hungry enemies. He thought of himself not as a despot but as a servant of the nation and its future; and in large measure this was an honest belief, at least half true.

  He worked as hard as the simplest peasant in his realm. Normally he rose at five in the morning and labored fourteen hours a day. He slept only six hours at night, but took a siesta after noon. Such a program was not impracticable in the St. Petersburg summers, when daylight began at 3 A.M. and lasted till 10 P.M.; but in winter much of it had to go on during the night, which began about three in the afternoon and continued till nine the next morning.

  St. Petersburg was the symbol and Archimedean fulcrum of his revolution. It was not an ideal site for a capital, being too close to the coast; even so, it was twenty-five miles from the sea, at a point where the River Neva split into two branches; and Peter hoped to protect it by the fortress of Kronstadt that he raised (1710) on an island at the entrance to the bay. The city itself was founded in 1703, on the model of Amsterdam. Since much of the site was marshy (neva is Swedish for mud), St. Petersburg was built upon piles—or, as a sad Russian saying had it, upon the bones of the thousands of laborers who were conscripted to lay those foundations and rear the town. In 1708 some 40,000 men were sent to the task; in 1709 another 40,000; in 1711, 46,000; in 1713, 40,000 more. They were paid half a ruble per month, which they had to supplement with begging and thieving. Swedish prisoners of war employed in the construction died by the thousands. As there were no wheelbarrows, the men transported the materials in their uplifted caftans. Stone too was conscripted; a ukase of 1714 forbade the erection of stone houses anywhere in Russia except in St. Petersburg; but there every nobleman in the land was commanded to raise a dwelling of stone. The nobles did it under protest, hating the climate and not sharing Peter’s love of the sea. For himself Peter had some Dutch artisans put together a cottage like those that he had seen at Zaandam, with log walls, shingle roof, and small rooms. He disliked palaces, but allowed three at Peterhof (now Petrodvorets), on the southern outskirts of the city, for ceremonial occasions; this “Summer Palace” was destroyed in the Second World War. In a nearby suburb, Tsarskoe Selo (now Pushkin), he built a summer cottage for his Katierinoushka.

  He did not at first intend to make St. Petersburg a capital as well as a port; it was too close to hostile Sweden; but after his victory over Charles XII at Poltava he decided to make the change. He longed to get away from the somber ecclesiastical atmosphere of Moscow and its narrow nationalism, and he wanted the conservative nobles to feel progressive winds from the West. So in 1712 he made it his capital. The Muscovites mourned, and predicted that God would soon destroy the half-heathen city. “Before the new capital,” wrote Pushkin, “Moscow bowed her head, as an imperial widow bows before a young tsaritsa.” 12 Peter was so anxious to Westernize Russia that he dragged it, so to speak, to the Baltic and bade it look through his “window on the West.”* To this purpose, and to have a base for his fleet and a port for foreign trade, he sacrificed all other considerations. The port would be icebound five months in the year, but it would face the West and touch the sea. As the Dnieper had made Russia Byzantine and the Volga had made it Asiatic, so now the Neva would invite it to be European. 14

  The next step was to build a navy that would guard the lanes of Russian commerce through the Baltic to the West. Peter achieved this for a time by building in the course of his reign a thousand galleys; but they were hastily and badly constructed, their timbers rotted, their masts broke in the wind; and after his death Russia reconciled herself to being what geography had made it, a landlocked country shut off from the Atlantic, and waiting for the conquest of the air to overleap its barriers into the world. In this sense Moscow was right: Russia’s power and defense had to be on land, through its armies and its space. So, in 1917, Moscow had its revenge, and became the capital again.

  Peter’s most permanent reform was the reorganization of the army. Before him it had depended upon levies of peasants led by their feudal lords, loyal chiefly to them, poorly disciplined, and poorly armed. Peter undermined the boyars by establishing a standing army manned by conscription, equipped with the latest weapons of the West, officered by men who had passed through the ranks, and disciplined in the new ideal of proudly serving Russia rather than a narrow province or a hated lord. It was military necessity that dictated Peter’s revolution. He could not develop Russia without opening a way to the Baltic or the Mediterranean; he could not do this without a modern army; he could not maintain such an army without transforming the Russian economy and government; and he could not transform these without remaking the Russian people in manners, aims, and soul. It was too great a task for one man, or for one generation.

  He began, in his whimsical impulsive way, with the beards and dress of the men around him. In 1698, soon after returning from the West, he had his own sparse beard shaved, and commanded all who wished to keep his favor to do the same, excepting only the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. Soon an edict went throughout Russia that all laymen were to shave their chins; mustaches might remain. The beard had been almost a religious symbol in Russia; it had been worn by the Prophets and the Apostles; and the reigning Patriarch, Adrian, only eight years before, had condemned the shaving of the beard as irreligious and heretical. Peter accepted the challenge: beardlessness was to be a sign of modernity, of willingness to enter into Western civilization. Those laymen who felt a dire need of whiskers might keep them by paying an annual tax rising from one kopek for a peasant to a hundred rubles for a rich merchant. “There were many old Russians,” says an old history, “who, after having their beards shaved off, saved them preciously, in order to have them placed in their coffins, fearing that they would not be allowed to enter heaven without them.” 15

  Next to go was the Russian costume. Here too Peter felt that internal resistance to Westernization would be reduced by wearing Western garb. He himself cut off the long sleeves of the army officers who appeared before him. “See,” he said to one of them, “these things are in your way. You are safe nowhere with them. At one moment you upset a glass, then you forgetfully dip them in the sauce. Get gaiters made of them.” 16 So an order went forth (January, 1700) commanding all courtiers and officials in Russia to adopt Western dress. All persons entering or leaving Moscow had to choose between having their ankle-long caftans cut at the knees or paying a fine. Th
e women were likewise urged to adopt Western costume; they resisted less than the men, for in dress women are annual revolutionists.

  Not so much by decrees as by the example of his family, Peter ended the seclusion of Russia’s women. His father, Alexis, and his mother, Natalia, had led the way; his half-sister Sophia had broadened it; now Peter invited women to social gatherings, encouraged them to remove their veils, to dance, to make music, and to seek education, even if only through tutors. He issued edicts forbidding parents to marry their children against their will, and requiring an interval of six weeks between betrothal and marriage; in that period the engaged couple should be allowed to see each other frequently, and to break off the engagement if they wished. The women were glad to emerge from the terem; they began a race to adopt new fashions; and some increase in illegitimate births gave the clergy a weapon against Peter’s revolution.

  The resistance of religion was his greatest obstacle. The clergy realized that his reforms would lessen their prestige and power. They bemoaned his toleration of Western faiths in Russia, and they suspected that he himself had no religious belief. They heard with horror of the parodies with which he and his intimates mocked the Orthodox ritual. For his part Peter resented the diversion of manpower into the vast and innumerable monasteries, and he coveted the enormous revenues that these institutions enjoyed. When the Patriarch Adrian died (October, 1700), Peter deliberately refrained from appointing a successor; he himself, like Henry VIII in England, became head of the church, and led a Reformation in Russia. For twenty-one years the office of patriarch remained vacant, depriving the Orthodox Church of a leader against the Petrine reforms. In 1721 Peter abolished the office altogether, and replaced it with a “Holy Synod” of ecclesiastics appointed by the Czar and subject to a lay procurator. In 1701 he transferred the administration of ecclesiastical properties to a department of the government. The jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts was curtailed. The appointment of bishops was made subject to governmental approval. Further edicts forbade the ordination of mystics or fanatics, and limited the number of miracle-working centers. Men were not to take monastic vows before the age of thirty; women were not to take final vows as nuns before the age of fifty. 17 Monks were to be compelled to do useful work. A census of monastic properties and revenues was taken by the government; a part of this income was left to the monasteries, the rest was devoted to the establishment of schools and hospitals. 18