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What are we doing? We are burying Peter the Great. Surely this must be a dream, an apparition? (Feofan Prokopovich's funeral sermon, 10 March 1725)
A year of peace
At 10 p.m. on 1 January 1724 fireworks celebrated the start of the only complete year of Peter's reign when Russia was not officially at war with a foreign power. There was ‘the usual gunfire’ from the Peter-Paul and Admiralty fortresses, after which Peter, Catherine, the duke of Holstein and other dignitaries dined in the Senate house. Several days of carousing followed, with visitations by the tsar's ‘merry company’ to the homes of leading officials. On 6 January after matins in St Isaac's Cathedral, the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards (Bergholz estimated almost 10,000 troops) were drawn up and marched across the frozen Neva to Trinity Quay, with Peter at the head of the Preobrazhenskys in his colonel's uniform. Catherine watched from a window in the Winter Palace. As the journal records, after mass in the Trinity Cathedral, there was a procession of the Cross to a spot on the Neva in front of the Winter Palace chosen to represent the River Jordan. ‘When the divine service at the Jordan was over the standards of all the battalions were taken to the Jordan and sprinkled with holy water and there was a gun salute from the fortress, then the soldiers fired a round of rifle shot.’1 Peter was in a good mood. On 7 January he visited Strel'na, Peterhof and Oranienbaum on his way to Kronstadt. The weather was unusually mild. An entry in the journal recorded that from 3 to 18 January it was warm and rainy, that the roads were churned up and people drove in carriages rather than sledges. The holes and weak spots in the ice on the Neva made it dangerous to walk or ride on the river. On 9 January Peter wrote to Catherine: ‘Another marvel to tell you: yesterday in Peterhof the fountain was working, which is something you wouldn't see even in France [at this time of year].’ On the night of 13 January he attended and helped to extinguish a house fire, a favourite recreation since childhood. To Boris Kurakin and other ambassadors in Russian missions abroad he wrote: ‘I think that now is a good time, seeing that there is no war anywhere … to send tapestries by sea. … Our affairs in Persia, praise God, are going splendidly.’2
The Swedish, Turkish and Persian wars may have been behind him (in February Russia and Sweden signed a defensive alliance, heralding a new phase in their relations), but Peter had no intention of relaxing the pressure on his colleagues. An entry in the journal for 19 January 1724 reads: ‘In the morning it froze over and there was a hard frost all day. In the morning His Majesty attended the Foreign College, then heard mass in the Trinity church, after which he was pleased to visit the coffee house, and those present who had not attended Prince Prozorovsky's funeral on the previous day were made to drink an eagle cup of wine as a penalty.’3 In February, when all courtiers and officials were required to take part in a masquerade, senators and government officials were ordered to remain in their costumes even during the morning session of the Senate and Colleges, which struck Bergholz as ‘rather inappropriate, especially as many of them were fitted out in a manner most unbecoming to elderly men, judges and councillors; but in this case everything was done in accordance with the old Russian saying: may the tsar's will be done.’4 These and similar incidents confirm the impression that Peter's masquerades were not true carnival at all, in the sense of hierarchies being suspended and people being liberated from authority. On the contrary, they seemed to be motivated more by the need to impose and reinforce his own authority, at the same time allowing him to indulge his enthusiasm (not shared by all his associates) for organising and participating in parades and parties with a full supporting cast.
There was always a hint of menace in Peter's play. In January he had an exchange of correspondence with Prince-Caesar in Moscow. Romodanovsky wrote to complain that Major-General Chernyshev had conscripted some of his household servants into the army and navy. In his reply Peter maintained his usual mock-deferential mode of address, calling Romodanovsky ‘Sire’ and signing off ‘With my most humble subject's respect I remain Your Majesty's servant, Peter.’ Peter then informed Chernyshev that ‘our sovereign’ Prince-Caesar was very angry with him and ordered him to release the servants immediately. Neither man was left in any doubt about who the real monarch was.5
For some offenders Peter's disapproval went beyond mere banter and joke penalties. On 24 January 1724 Bergholz and Bassewitz witnessed a public execution, when the chief fiscal A. Ia. Nesterov was broken alive on the wheel for accepting bribes and robbing the treasury of 300,000 roubles, and a dozen or so lesser officials were beheaded or flogged with the knout and exiled to the galleys with their nostrils clipped. The system of fiscal officers, instituted in 1711 to root out bribery and corruption, had proven a failure, like so many of Peter's measures to improve the integrity of public servants. As we know, Peter was particularly unforgiving of crimes against the ‘common good’ and, as was usual on such occasions, all officials ‘from presidents down to scribes’ were obliged to attend the execution and take due warning.6
The Academy of Sciences
Capital and corporal punishment remained the norm even in those countries of Europe deemed most civilised, where cruel punishment was not thought incompatible with cultural refinement. On the contrary, those who offended against society's norms must expect stern retribution. In Peter's mind, too, there was no contradiction in inflicting harsh penalties on those who strayed at the same time as he encouraged the importation of Western arts and learning. In 1721 Peter sent his librarian J. D. Schumacher on a tour of Europe to recruit personnel for the creation of a ‘society of sciences’, like the ones he had seen in Paris, London, Berlin and other places. Late in January 1724 he published an edited version of the recommendations of Schumacher and Dr Lavrenty Blumentrost for a Russian Academy of Sciences, which opens with the words: ‘For the spread of arts and sciences two types of establishment are generally used: the first type is called a university, the second an academy or society of arts and sciences.’ Nine points followed. The Academy was to combine scholarship with teaching in a university (faculties of law, medicine and philosophy, but not theology) and a high school. The initial cost was estimated at 20,000 roubles, to be gathered from customs and licence fees in several Baltic towns.7
Peter saw practical reasons for founding an academy – existing schools had failed to produce civilian specialists in sufficient numbers – but by the end of his reign he had also come to appreciate the wider appeal of science and learning and to covet the acclaim enjoyed by their patrons. He was influenced by Leibniz's idea of Russia as a ‘blank sheet’ in terms of civilisation, ripe to be opened up for scientific research: first to geographical exploration, which in turn would stimulate the training of home-grown specialists. Peter expressed the idea of the national ‘glory’ to be won by scientific endeavour in a famous speech (recorded only by Weber) in which he imagined the ‘transmigration of sciences’ from ancient Greece, via England, France and Germany to Russia, which had the potential to ‘put other civilised nations to the blush, and to carry the glory of the Russian name to the highest pitch’.8 This sounds like a secular variation on the old theme that after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Moscow had become the final destination of world (i.e. Christian) history, known loosely as the doctrine of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. In the eighteenth century, the baton of civilisation was to pass to a different Rome, the new city of St Peter, an ambitious notion given the low level of even the most elementary education in Russia. The Academy of Sciences did not open until after Peter's death, in August 1725, with an all-foreign faculty, mostly Germans, despite Peter's initial recommendation that at least two members should be from ‘the Slav nation’ in order to teach Russians. In fact, the Academy conducted all its proceedings in Latin and German. Not until Mikhail Lomonosov, who himself had received most of his higher education in Germany, joined it in 1741 did the Academy acquire its first Russian member. Even so, its significance for Russia's intellectual and scientific life was enormous and it proved to be one of Peter's most long-lasting institutions.
Taking the waters
Peter was a man of his time in combining scientific curiosity with love of the bizarre and exotic. The Kunstkamera collection continued to grow and Peter continued to take pleasure in entertainments which today would be regarded as being in dubious taste. The live ‘exhibits’ at his court included Kalmyks, Samoyeds from Siberia (in 1717 he placed an order for ‘two young Samoyeds, between 15–18 years old, with the ugliest and funniest mugs you can find, dressed in their usual costume and ornaments’9) and, of course, dwarfs. The first day of February 1724 saw the funeral of the dwarf Frol Sidorov, to which all the male and female dwarfs resident in St Petersburg were summoned to follow the coffin in pairs all dressed in black, the smallest at the front, the tallest bringing up the rear. Six tiny horses pulled the coffin and the smallest priest in the city was enlisted to officiate. The procession included giants and the tallest guardsmen, among them the emperor himself, who paid for the wake.10
The funeral provided a suitable curtain-raiser for the carnival season. On 3 February Peter held an assembly for his daughter Anna's name day, culminating at 11 p.m. in fireworks forming the letter A. On 10–16 February the masquerade was held (on the 15th there was another funeral, this time for one of Peter's cooks) and on the 17th, the first day of Lent, Peter departed for some peace and quiet at the Martsial'nye springs, not forgetting to leave detailed handwritten instructions about ‘what work to do on the ship while I am away’.11 He arrived at Petrozavodsk on 19 February, the anniversary of his wedding to Catherine, who joined him there three days later. The next day Peter attended matins, then, without stopping for breakfast, set off for the spa, where the royal party began to take the waters on 24 February and continued until 7 March. There on the lathe which always accompanied him Peter worked on a model of Kronstadt and made a bone candelabra with five candleholders for the church of SS Peter and Paul, inserting a scroll into the round central section inscribed: ‘This object was brought here as a sign of gratitude to the Lord God for the healing waters and made there. 14 March 1724. Peter.’12 In 1733 Empress Anna transferred the candelabra to the Peter-Paul Cathedral, where she opened the round compartment and read the slip of paper.
A document which Peter wrote during this visit shows how he liked to maintain an orderly regime even when on leave:
On the duties of the marshal while people are taking the waters
1. When the morning comes [the marshal] must immediately assemble the waking-up brigade in the reception room by the table and then go around the sleeping quarters with music.
2. When people start to drink the water everything must be in order and every ten minutes [the marshal will] give a shake of the rattle.
3. When two and a half or three hours have passed after the [first] drinking session, [he will] give another signal on the rattle that it's time to drink more water.
4. When another hour or one and a half hours have passed, then the marshal again will assemble the waking-up brigade and go to the kitchen and order them to bring the food, walking in front of it with the brigade.
5. While people are here taking the waters, the marshal must take care that the heating of the rooms, candles at night and other things are all in order, in the reception room and in the sleeping quarters.13
Peter's preoccupation with health matters is reflected in his correspondence. In a letter to his daughter Anna postmarked ‘From the iron factories’, he writes: ‘Your mother has this minute arrived, thank God in good health, and you too travel safely, in the meantime we commend you to the protection of God.’ On the same day he wrote to Fedor Apraksin, who had been ill: ‘I heard that you intend to travel to Moscow. Of course you must not. You'll do yourself an injury. Your phlegm has been diluted by the medicine so when you go out in the wind you'll catch a sudden chill and will be worse off than you were before, and death will very likely soon follow as a result, so give yourself a rest and travel only when the doctor says it's quite safe.’ Perhaps it was the tedious routine of drinking foul-tasting mineral water thick with iron deposits which reminded Peter to write to Boris Kurakin on 13 March and ask him to buy 200 bottles of good Hermitage wine and send them to St Petersburg that spring.14 He also took the time to make arrangements for a local character: ‘A peasant from these parts called Faddei is old and seems simple-minded, lives in the forest and comes into the village, where they regard him as a marvel. There are no reports of malice or dissidence, so in order to prevent any temptation, I have ordered him to be brought to the factory and fed there until his death.’15 On 15 March he presented his candelabra to the church and on the 16th departed for Moscow. They stopped off at Vologda and on the 20th crossed the now thawing Volga at Iaroslavl', where they transferred from sledges to carriages. On the 22nd Peter called in at the Trinity monastery for matins, arriving in Moscow later that evening.
Catherine's coronation
Papers from Peter's time in Moscow reveal the usual eclectic mix of business: he reiterated the requirement that able-bodied officers and soldiers retired to monasteries must be made to work for their living; ordered architectural books from England; made arrangements for housing the library of the Holy Synod; visited the house of the late Fedor Golovin to inspect work on the new garden which Dr Bidloo was directing. On 25 March he attended matins in the Kremlin Annunciation Cathedral, perhaps as part of a preliminary reconnaissance visit for planning Catherine's coronation, which was held in the Cathedral of the Dormition on 7 May. Regimental music mingled with church bells as Peter and Catherine entered the cathedral, escorted by the newly formed cavalier guards and page boys in green velvet tunics, white wigs and hats with feathers. Catherine's gown, crimson velvet embroidered in silver with crown and floral devices, survives in the Kremlin Armoury museum, the only extant example of early eighteenth-century female dress. Her crown, made by a St Petersburg jeweller, differed from the traditional Cap of Monomach and other Muscovite crowns worn by male rulers, being more like an imperial crown in design and set with a ruby ‘bigger than a pigeon's egg’ and other gems. Peter was attended by Menshikov and Anikita Repnin, Catherine by Fedor Apraksin and Ivan Buturlin. Prince Dmitry Golitsyn and Andrei Osterman held her train, Prince Vasily Dolgoruky the orb, Ivan Musin-Pushkin the sceptre, James Bruce the crown and Peter Tolstoy the mace of state. The duke of Holstein, duchess of Mecklenburg and duchess of Courland, all seated on thrones for the ceremony, testified to Russia's expanding international connections.
Archbishops Feodosy and Feofan officiated during the ceremony, but it was Peter who placed the gem-encrusted state mantle on his wife's shoulders and the crown on her head and handed her the orb, after which she was anointed and received communion from the clergy. Feofan then delivered a sermon, describing Catherine as a heroine and comparing her with famous women of history and mythology. Links were made with the past in a second ceremony held in the Archangel Cathedral where the Muscovite princes and tsars were buried and which the Muscovite tsars used to visit after their coronation in order to emphasise dynastic continuity. Catherine honoured her female predecessors by paying a visit to the tombs of tsaritsy in the Kremlin convent of the Ascension.
The coronation was a public event, announced by heralds all over Moscow two days beforehand, although viewing of the ceremonies was restricted: guests required tickets to get into the cathedral, where they were seated in specially constructed stands. Crowds duly turned up outside to catch the gold and silver medals, traditional good luck tokens, scattered by Gavrila Golovkin, and to eat roast ox and drink the wine which flowed from two fountains, one spouting red the other white, pumped through pipes from the bell tower of Ivan the Great. They could also enjoy the magnificent firework display held on Tsaritsyn Meadow two days later. On 10 May an official edict ordered prayers of thanksgiving and three gun salutes to be fired ‘as an announcement to the people’ that Catherine had been crowned.16 Despite the publicity, the people were passive onlookers at a thoroughly Westernised display of imperial power. The finer points of the ceremonies and decorations, detailed in descriptions of the coronation published in St Petersburg and Moscow, were intended for the élite, as was a print by the court engraver Ivan Zubov, which recorded the event with portraits of the emperor and empress based on true likenesses, dressed in the fashion of the period, mingling with antique gods and goddesses, including Neptune, Hercules and Pallas-Athene, allegorical figures of Glory, Truth, Piety and Foresight and putti in clouds. Peter points to a globe, as if to confirm Russia's new role in the world order. The inscriptions, in Russian and Latin, expatiated on the God-given joy of the occasion.17
On the face of it, a great deal of expense and effort was invested in a superfluous event. There was no precedent in Russia for the coronation of a tsaritsa, except the unwelcome one of False Dmitry's bride, the Catholic Pole Marina Mniszek, in 1606. Peter had declared Catherine his ‘true and lawful sovereign lady’ in 1711 and married her in 1712. She received the title empress (imperatritsa) by a decree of December 1721 which upgraded the titles of all the royal family in line with Peter's new ones. The main ‘services’ for which Catherine was commended in the manifesto of November 1723 and in Feofan's sermon occurred more than eleven years previously. So was Peter signalling his desire for Catherine to succeed him, as some historians believe? Bassewitz claims that Peter communicated this wish to a small group of people on the eve of the coronation, although no other records of this conversation survive and it seems possible that Bassewitz (whose master was soon to be officially betrothed to Anna Petrovna) included this detail retrospectively. 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. As Bergholz remarked, ‘One could not help but marvel at Divine Providence which has raised the empress from the lowly station in which she was born and which she previously occupied to the pinnacle of human honours.’18 Officials were required to demonstrate their loyalty to the empress by expressions of joy. They were uprooted from St Petersburg at considerable expense to attend the coronation, the exact date of which was a matter of speculation for weeks, then peremptorily ordered to return to the new capital in time for the tsar's name day on 29 June. Like other ceremonies of his own invention, it also gave Peter the chance to enjoy himself by drawing up guest lists, ordering costumes and working out details. There are many hand-written drafts among his papers from winter 1723. As events a few months later were soon to show, however, this time the joke may have been on Peter.
Family, sheep and other matters
While Peter and Catherine were in Moscow, an imperial presence in St Petersburg was maintained by Peter's two grandchildren and by his youngest daughter Natalia, whose attendance at church was recorded in the journals. On 30 May, for example, Peter Alekseevich attended a service in St Isaac's for his grandfather's birthday. Given that Peter was only eight years old and the two Natalias just nine and five respectively, their presence in church, supported by attendants, may be interpreted as a token of royal power in the absence of the main players. Peter was very fond of his youngest daughter, often referring to her in letters as ‘our big girl’ (velikaia devitsa). A portrait of her painted by Louis Caravaque at about this time shows her as a miniature adult dressed in the latest Western fashion, with an ermine trimmed train, dark-haired and dark-eyed like her sister Anna. In a note dated 10 May 1724 Peter asked ‘Natal'iushka’ to pass on his greetings to his grandchildren (her niece and nephew) and tells her about her mother's coronation, adding, ‘God willing, we hope to be with you soon. PS. Today there will be fireworks.’19
Peter spent the rest of May in Moscow. On the 11th, thirty-four years after his first such excursion, he again travelled to Kolomenskoe along the river with a small flotilla. The interior of his father's old wooden palace had been preserved exactly as it was in the tsar's youth. There are hints of continuing ill health. On 18 May Peter had blood let from a vein in his left leg and in June he visited mineral springs near Kaluga, writing to Catherine that he was feeling better, thanks to the waters and God's help.20 He also visited Miller's iron factories, where he did some work.
Peter allowed himself little respite. He was constantly monitoring his own legislation – checking on illegal trading out of Archangel, which was supposed to have ceded most of its business to St Petersburg; reminding members of the Synod to refer to him as ‘emperor’, not ‘tsar’; moving people from one place to another and clamping down on attempts to evade resettlement. Nobles removed to St Petersburg, it seems, were breaking the rules by leaving their wives and children behind in Moscow. Officials' reaction to this breach of the regulations was over-zealous even by Peter's standards. In July he scolded the Moscow chief of police for forcing some very sick people and women who were about to give birth to pack up and leave. The police chief was ordered to give them time to recover before they left for St Petersburg, but not too much! 21
New enterprises were on the agenda, such as sheep rearing in Ukraine. In orders dated 15 June 1724 Peter wrote: ‘For the good of our whole state we have set up cloth factories … since God has blessed Little Russia with better air for the breeding of sheep than other regions of our state.’ Sheep farmers were required (1) to build warm barns to keep the sheep warm even in summer at night; (2) to give them hay and water and salt in winter: ‘And they should be given plenty of salt to make their wool grow better and keep the ewes healthy; and when there are wet snowstorms in winter and rains in summer, give them extra’; (3) to shear them twice a year, in March and September, and sell the wool to the state cloth factory; (4) to learn recipes for making medicines for sick sheep; (5) to keep black and grey sheep separate from the others; (6) to put the rams to the ewes on 26 October.22 As usual, Peter's instructions left little to chance.
Peter arrived back in St Petersburg on 25 June, Coronation Day, where the festivities focused on the Summer Palace, which Peter sailed right up to in his yacht after attending mass in the Trinity Cathedral on the opposite bank of the river. The next day he wrote to Catherine, who had stayed on in Moscow, that all was well. The ‘big lady in charge’ (bol'shaia khoziaka), his daughter Natalia, was fit and growing up fast. But he was missing Catherine. ‘When I go into the palace, I feel like running away – it's empty without you. If it weren't for the various holidays, I'd go to Kronstadt and Peterhof. PS. There are 100 foreign ships in port.’ On 27 June, Poltava Day, writing to ‘the friend of my heart’, Peter sent a boat to meet her, laden with gifts of wine, beer, pomegranates, lemons and cucumbers.23 The victory day festivities culminated in a party in the Summer Gardens which lasted until midnight, with cannon fire and fireworks on the river. His name day was marked with more cannon fire and entertainments until midnight. The next day he finally man-aged to get away to Peterhof. He welcomed Catherine back to St Petersburg on 8 July with a whole flotilla which sailed up the Neva to meet her yacht. The gunfire from various vantage points, church bells, religious services, partying and fireworks well into the small hours marked this out as an extraordinary reception to honour Peter's crowned consort.
Reflections
A note dated 16 August 1724 survives among Peter's papers, evidently intended as guidelines for a sermon for the forthcoming Nystad ceremonies. In it he comes closer than usual to reflecting on his reign:
In the first line you must mention the victories, then make the following points in the rest of the sermon:
(i) Our lack of knowledge in all matters. (ii) Especially at the start of the war which, not understanding the opposing forces and our own situation, we began like blind men. (iii) Mention how many domestic problems there were, also the affair of our son and the attack by the Turks. (iv) All other nations maintain the policy of keeping a balance of forces with their neighbour and were especially reluctant to admit us to the light of reason in all matters and especially military affairs, but they did not succeed in this. It is in truth a divine miracle that all human minds are nothing against the will of God and this must be emphasised.24
The tone of these jottings hints at the chip on Peter's shoulder: his resentment of other countries' marginalisation of Russia (keeping it from ‘the light of reason’), a policy which Peter was not convinced had been ended by his victory over the Swedes. The same offended tone can be found in a message to the Synod dated 16 October 1724 for translators of books on economics: ‘Since the Germans tend to fill their books with many useless stories, just in order to make them seem bigger, don't translate these passages but stick to the matter in hand.’25
Although he deplored Muscovite xenophobia and superstitious notions of ‘contamination’ from contacts with foreigners, Peter's own attitude remained ambivalent. Hired foreigners were obliged to train Russians, which they did with varying degrees of success. It was recognised that ‘when the years of apprenticeship [of Russian pupils of tapestry weaving] are completed, it will be possible to send the foreigners back home and use His Majesty's subjects for this work, as a result of which this craft will remain in the Russian empire’.26 Relations between foreign teachers and their pupils were often poor. Foreigners' inability to speak Russian could lead to misunderstandings, while their clothing, lifestyle and manners had more in common with those of Russian nobles than with the craftsman who worked under them. No doubt many of the latter shared the distrust of foreigners expressed by the peasant entrepreneur Ivan Pososhkov, who in the 1720s wrote that ‘if any such foreigner wastes his time in idleness (as is the long-standing habit of foreigners), neglecting to teach his pupils – since he has come here merely to wheedle money out of us and then to make off home again – let him be sent home with dishonour…’27
Received wisdom notwithstanding, comparatively few non-Orthodox foreigners held positions of influence in civilian government. Indeed, it was Peter's policy to reduce their numbers still further on the grounds that foreign personnel were costly to employ and less effective than anticipated in mentoring their Russian colleagues. Foreign personnel were more numerous in the army and dominated the upper echelons of the navy, although here too Peter tried to restrict their numbers. The Naval Statute, for example, specified that the skippers of Russian merchant ships should recruit sailors ‘of the Russian (Rossiiskoi) nation’. No more than a quarter of the crew should be foreigners.28 In the matter of shipbuilding, too, Peter acknowledged Russia's growing expertise. In 1713 he wrote to Fedor Apraksin criticising some of the new ships purchased in France, England and Hamburg which he had just inspected in St Petersburg: ‘They are truly deserving of the name of foster children because they are as remote from our ships as a foster father from a real one, for they are much smaller than ours, and even though there are just as many guns, there is not so much space in them.’29
Self-sufficiency was his stated aim. ‘This paper was made here in a mill,’ states an edict of 1723, ‘and we can make as much of it as we need in this country and not only order it from France.’30 An anecdote (much quoted in Soviet works) makes the point less delicately: ‘It's good to borrow sciences and arts from the French, I would like to see all that in my own country; all the same, Paris still stinks.’31 On a similar note, the much-travelled Ivan Nepliuev recorded a visit to a Russian carpenter's house where Peter urged him to accept a slice of the carrot pie which the simple folk offered, because it was ‘our own native food, not Italian’.32 Peter was sensitive to outside opinion and aware of the need to balance flattery through emulation against national pride or even narrow-mindedness. The French minister in St Petersburg, Jacques de Campredon, reported a visit to Peterhof in summer 1723 in a dispatch to Louis XV:
The tsar did me the honour of saying that as I had seen so many beautiful things in France he doubted whether I would find anything of much interest at Peterhof, adding that he hoped that Your Majesty had such a beautiful view at Versailles as here at Peterhof from where one has a view of the sea and of Kronstadt on one side and St Petersburg on the other. I told this Prince that I had good reason to admire the fact that during such a long war and in such a harsh climate he had been able to perfect these beautiful things and that I deemed them very worthy of Your Majesty's curiosity.33
Campredon's condescending tone (elsewhere he assured the king that Peter's Marly pavilion at Peterhof was nothing like the original at Versailles) was precisely the sort of attitude which Peter half expected and hated.
Peter did not blindly adulate the more advanced (as he himself acknowledged) countries and was sensitive about Russia's image abroad and about its acceptance as a full member of the ‘political’ nations, to which, in his view, its history entitled it. That Russia had not always been an underdog was illustrated by the life of Prince Alexander of Novgorod (1220–63), who beat the Swedes in 1240 on the Neva river and in 1242 defeated the Teutonic knights in the famous battle on the ice on Lake Peipus. Peter inaugurated the revival and enhancement of Alexander's cult in 1704 by planting wooden crosses at the spot not far from the Neva river where Alexander was supposed to have won his victory. (In fact, the battle took place farther off.) In July 1710 the Alexander Nevsky monastery was founded and Alexander's cult was encouraged as that of a local saint with strong links with Peter, his ‘living reflection’. In a sermon delivered on 23 November 1718 (Alexander's feast day) Feofan Prokopovich described how the prince ‘held firm the stern of his fatherland in those difficult times’. Russia was like ‘a ship in distress’, buffeted by Mongol storms on one side and Swedish on the other, its hull holed and cracked by Russia's dynastic struggles and disputes. But helmsman Alexander saved his ship and ‘to this day the Neva is a Russian river’.34
To stress Alexander's association with Russia's recent victories, his main feast day was moved from 23 November (the date of his burial) to 30 August, the anniversary of the Treaty of Nystad. Peter had Alexander's relics transferred from the town of Vladimir and on 30 August 1724 took the gilded silver casket along the Neva in a barge to its new resting place in the monastery. The ‘grandfather’ of the navy was also brought out, flying the flag of St Andrew, a potent coming together of three of Peter's new or revived symbols of his St Petersburg-oriented empire. An estimated 6,000 spectators turned up to witness the procession and to enjoy bonfires, gun salutes and illuminations later that evening. The political motivation is clear; the analogies drawn between Alexander's and Peter's victories over the Swedes, the confirmation of the right to the land on the Neva which Peter's ancestors had fought to preserve, not to mention a reference to translatio imperii as St Petersburg received the baton from its illustrious predecessors were calculated to please churchmen as well as the lay public. Two hundred years later Alexander Nevsky was to prove equally acceptable to the political and ideological leaders of the USSR.
The William Mons affair
The festive atmosphere of summer and early autumn as recorded in the journals conceals a darker mood. The run of poor harvests which began in 1721 continued into 1724, bringing famine to some areas. Officials' salaries were reduced or left unpaid. The poll tax was collected for the first time, bringing protests. By 1724 so many people were defecting, especially into Poland, that manned pickets were set up. Any fugitives apprehended were interrogated, flogged and sent home, or shot if they resisted arrest. Russia, it was said, was being emptied by illegal emigration. ‘Everything is going wrong,’ wrote the Saxon envoy in September 1724. ‘Trade is coming to an end, there is neither navy nor paid troops, and everyone is dissatisfied and discontented.’35
Peter also had a run of ill health. According to the later testimony of one of his physicians, Dr Paulson, a disease of the urinary tract and bladder, which first came to light in the winter of 1723, recurred in summer 1724, when Drs Blumentrost, Bidloo and Horn performed an operation. Only a few hints of his indisposition can be gleaned from Peter's letters and papers. Writing to Menshikov on 29 August about the forthcoming Alexander Nevsky ceremony he mentioned being sick. In a letter to General Münnich, who was in charge of work on the Ladoga canal which he was planning to visit, Peter asked for water transport to be prepared as travelling overland ‘will be somewhat difficult after my illness’.36
This did not deter him from setting off on a fairly gruelling journey, first to Schlüsselburg, where he celebrated the local ‘victory day’ on 11 October, then along the Ladoga canal to Staraia Russa. He returned to St Petersburg on 27 October. Around this time – on 2 November, for example, the journals record a visit to Dubki on the northern shore of the Finnish gulf – an incident is said to have occurred which came to be popularly associated with Peter's death some three months later. While visiting Lakhta on the gulf, the emperor (‘that hero’) waded into the sea to save the lives of a boatload of soldiers and sailors in peril in a storm, an event commemorated in histories, paintings, films and statues.37 In fact, Stählin is the sole source for the incident, which is not mentioned in the court journals or by writers such as Prokopovich, who surely would not have wasted the chance to make the moral point that Peter refused to spare himself and ultimately sacrificed his life for the good of Russia, especially given the biblical associations of the incident. The lack of hard evidence may, of course, be due to Peter's modesty, which prevented him from publicising a brave act performed in the course of duty.
Whether he saved any soldiers or not, Peter returned to the capital fit enough to have an ‘uncommonly good time’ at the wedding of a German baker on 5 November. Then on Sunday, 8 November thirty-year-old William Mons, brother of Peter's former mistress Anna and Catherine's chamberlain and head of her estates office, was arrested, charged with abusing the empress's trust by taking bribes in cash and kind from petitioners and shielding wrongdoers from the law. His papers were confiscated and he and his associates were interrogated by torture. Rumours abounded that the real reason for Mons's arrest was that he had been having an affair with Catherine, which, according to some accounts, sent Peter into a mad rage and convulsions and made him slam a door (or in other versions strike an expensive Venetian mirror) so hard that it broke.38 The affair caused consternation in the palace, where many people, male and female, had connections with Mons. The unseasonably cold weather, signalling the end of the navigation season – on 14 November it snowed and the Neva began to freeze over – exacerbated the gloomy atmosphere.
On 16 November, another freezing day, Mons was executed. The court journal records: ‘On this day there was an execution on Trinity Square of the following: the former chamberlain William Mons was beheaded, and the wife of Major-General Balk and the scribe Stoletov were flogged with the knout and the footman Balakirev was beaten with sticks.’39 Matrena Balk, Mons's sister and Catherine's chief lady-in-waiting, who confessed to accepting a long list of bribes, which included not only money but also several sacks of coffee, twenty bales of hay and rolls of fabric and ribbons, was exiled to Siberia; Stoletov and Balakirev to hard labour in the Estonian port of Rogervik. Bergholz speaks of the calm with which his friend and fellow German Mons met his death and of his good qualities in general, although opinions differ about Mons's moral fibre. Five days after the execution, Bergholz notes, his body was still lying on the scaffold (standard practice in such cases).40 Peter apparently had Mons's head preserved in a jar and presented to Catherine. Many years later Catherine the Great's friend Princess Catherine Dashkova discovered the jar together with another one containing the head of Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting who was executed by Peter for infanticide, and whose dead lips he was reputed to have kissed, which confirmed Dashkova's view that Peter was a despot who treated people like slaves. She had them buried.41
Was Catherine Mons's mistress? The short time between Mons's arrest and execution fuelled rumours of an affair, as did Catherine's attempt to intercede on his behalf. The French minister Campredon remarked: ‘Her relations with M. Mons were public knowledge and although she conceals her grief it is possible to see it painted on her face and in her behaviour.’42 Other writers have thought it improbable that Catherine, who knew her husband's violent character, would take such a risk. It was one thing for her to joke about Peter's affairs (and for him to have them) and for him to joke about her ‘meeting someone younger’; quite another for Catherine, who was dependent on Peter for everything, to take a lover. The fact that she did not bury Mons's head even after Peter's death, but apparently kept the jar, has also been taken as evidence that this was not a man she loved. Whatever the case, Catherine's household had been disrupted and she had no choice but to put on a brave face. The day after Mons's execution Peter ordered James Bruce to draw up a contract and a plan of ceremonies for the exchange of rings between their daughter Anna and the duke of Holstein, after a two-and-a-half-year courtship. On 22 November the court celebrated the betrothal with a grand ball, followed by a firework display featuring Venus in a carriage drawn by swans with the legend HAPPY CONCORD.43 On 23 November the duke turned up at the Winter Palace with a band of musicians (that day people went out on the frozen river in sledges for the first time) and on the 24th Catherine's name day was celebrated in the usual manner.
As for Peter, he got back to work as his mind turned to practical matters – he drew up a long memorandum listing Russian fortresses, their functions and the state of their defences – and to the forthcoming Yuletide. Christmas and New Year were celebrated in St Petersburg (the usual services in the Trinity Cathedral) and on 6 January 1725 Peter led his Preobrazhensky guards in the Epiphany ceremony of the blessing of the waters of the Neva, just as he had done a year previously. On the 9th he and Catherine attended the wedding of Mishka, the manservant of Peter's orderly, Vasily Pospelov, to the musician Nastasia. In the days that followed the imperial couple attended assemblies at the homes of Peter Tolstoy, Cornelius Cruys and Ivan Siniavin and Peter also dealt with such routine matters as letters to army commanders and arrangements for winter billets. A letter to Fedor Saltykov dated 3 January shows that he was as impatient as ever to get things done: ‘I've no idea whether you are alive or dead or have forsaken your duty and turned to crime, only since we left Moscow I have seen no reports from you. If you have not finished your business and arrived here by 10 February, you will be the cause of your own ruin.’44
Death
The threat was not to be carried out. Preparations were in hand for the forthcoming carnival, when, on 17 January, the keeper of the court journal recorded: ‘His Imperial Majesty was ill and did not deign to go anywhere.’ A week later he wrote: ‘Since the 17th his Imperial Majesty has been ill and lying in his Winter residence in the upper apartment.’45 Had Peter been superstitious he would have been wary of the last week of January. His mother died on 25 January and both his father and his half-brother Tsar Ivan on the 29th. This January was also to be Peter's last. The old bladder problem recurred – no doubt exacerbated by the customary Yuletide binges and the chilly ceremony on the ice on 6 January – and he suffered days of agony as a result of inability to pass urine, with brief periods of remission. Peter's foreign doctors, in the unenviable position of having a really sick emperor on their hands, had no idea what to do. On 25 January they drew off about a litre of putrid, foulsmelling urine, a procedure which precipitated another fever. On the same day they dispatched a letter to the king of Prussia, written as if by Peter in the first person but signed by Chancellor Gavrila Golovkin, asking the king to send his personal physician: ‘Following a slight chill, I have been suffering from a severe indisposition.’ A German translation accompanied it.46 Infection set in. Non-medical remedies – an order for the release of prisoners ‘for the sovereign's health’ and round-the-clock prayers – proved as ineffective as medical ones. After enduring several more days of pain so agonising that it made him cry out and having received the last rites, Peter expired, according to Feofan Prokopovich's memorable account, in the sanctity of piety, between four and five in the morning of 28 January 1725 in his study, a room to one side of the Grand Hall on the first floor of the Winter Palace. He was, as official accounts meticulously recorded, fifty-two years, seven months and twenty-nine days old in the forty-second year, seventh month and third day of his reign.
Contemporary sources agree that Peter was killed by inflammation of the urinary tract which resulted in retention of urine, a condition sometimes known as gravel. The terms ‘retention or blockage of water/urine’ (vodianoi zapor, uriny zapor) and ‘difficulty in passing water’ (trudnost' v nepriazhenii vody) recur. The causes of this illness are unclear. A modern diagnosis might point to prostate trouble and Peter, with his insistence on operating on his own body, may have exacerbated the condition by using silver catheters to probe the urethra. Foreign observers tended to focus on the accumulated effects of half a century of tireless activity, both public and private. Campredon, for example, attributed the tsar's condition to ‘the recurrence of an old case of venereal disease’.47 Bassewitz writes: ‘His activity allowed him no rest and he held in contempt all types of bad weather, and the sacrifices to Venus and Bacchus exhausted his strength and led to the development of gravel.’48 Inevitably there were rumours of poisoning (at one point Peter apparently complained of a ‘burning sensation’ in his stomach), with Catherine and/or Menshikov as the main suspects, but the gravel mentioned by Bassewitz, a disease easily cured with today's treatments, seems the most likely. Even then the famous Professor Boerhaave in Leiden, whom Peter's doctors consulted, is said to have exclaimed that Peter could have been cured with medicine costing five kopecks if treatment had started in time. It is generally agreed that Peter hastened his own death by ignoring his symptoms and refusing to slow the pace of his activities.
‘Leave all to …’
Peter died leaving much business unfinished. Shortly before losing consciousness, he is said to have scrawled a note: ‘Leave all to …’ and summoned his daughter Anna. Voltaire mentioned the incident in his History of Peter the Great and it was used in many later histories. In fact, the story appears in only one contemporary source, not Prokopovich, but the memoir of Bassewitz, whose aim may have been to persuade readers that Anna, his master's fiancée, was Peter's intended heir. Supposing the piece of paper really did exist, whose name did Peter want to write on it? Some historians believe that he could not seriously contemplate the possibility of dying, so failed to make a decision about his successor. His hand wavered even when he was so close to death because he did not know whom to choose. The principle behind the 1722 manifesto was that the ruling monarch should choose an heir ‘with regard to worthiness’ rather than with reference to seniority. But who was a worthy successor? Peter knew that traditionalists, still outraged by Alexis's death, backed his grandson Peter as the rightful heir, so he was reluctant to risk the reversal of his reforms by nominating him. The possibility of his ex-wife Evdokia acting as the boy's regent made this solution even more unpalatable. One of his three daughters, perhaps, as there was no restriction on gender? Anna was the eldest and the cleverest, but Peter may have preferred not to subject her to the burden of rulership. Some people believed that he was grooming Anna's fiancé the duke of Holstein as a candidate (as a German married to a Westernised Russian woman he could be trusted not to turn the clock back) and hoping that sons from the marriage would create a new male line. There is no reason to believe that Peter saw any advantages in female rule per se. If anything happened to Anna, Elizabeth could play out a similar scenario, although her marriage had not yet been arranged, and after her there was sixyear-old Natalia (who in fact died a couple of weeks after Peter). Purely in terms of seniority and legitimacy, Peter's three nieces Ekaterina, Anna and Praskovia had a better claim than his own daughter, but none had a claim on grounds of merit. That left Catherine, in many ways an unlikely choice, but one favoured by a number of powerful men at court.
Deathbed portraits
The room in the old Winter Palace in which Peter died did not survive the many rebuildings on the site, but part of the ground floor immediately beneath it was preserved to form the basement of the Hermitage Theatre, built in the 1770s. A fragment of window surround and stucco from the old building can still be seen today if you look across to the eastern embankment of the Zimnaia Kanavka canal a few yards from where it enters the River Neva. Inside, a vestibule and a few rooms have been converted into a ‘Peter I's Palace’ museum, among the exhibits in which are a profile study of Peter on his deathbed, taken from the tsar's right side and attributed to the court painter, Johann Gottfried Dannhauer. A more famous head and shoulders portrait of the dead emperor, depicting him full-face from the left, hangs in the Russian Museum. Supposedly painted from nature, it shows Peter's features in repose, the slightly puffy, thickened visage familiar from the round portrait attributed to Ivan Nikitin. The impression of rest after a long battle perhaps provides a metaphor for Peter's lifelong struggle to drag Russia into the modern world. The ermine drape (surely not an accessory of the real sickbed) signifies the subject's regal status, while the lighting effects on the sheets suggest the flickering of the candles which must have surrounded the bed.
Although this is undoubtedly a modern painting, oil on canvas, from the hand of a Western-trained master, it has iconic features as an image of the last scene of an earthly life which was filled with secular feats of courage and, in a way, miracles. In modern art histories and catalogues the painting is usually attributed to Ivan Nikitin, on the grounds, as Soviet art historians insisted, that the portrait displayed a ‘patriotic, purely Russian understanding of the image, a grief of loss which could be conveyed only by a Russian artist’, while Dannhauer's lacked ‘personal feeling’ and was a cold, straightforward ‘imitation of nature’.49 Documentary confirmation of authorship is lacking, as is any official reference to painters coming to the palace in the hours after Peter's death. Differences in the clothing and pillows in the two paintings may suggest that Nikitin did his in the study right after Peter's death, Dannhauer after the transfer of body to the palace chapel. This debate illustrates the strong emotions which continue to be aroused by the whole question of cultural borrowing in eighteenth-century Russia.
There are no such doubts about the authorship of another striking relic of the dead Peter, which today sits in a glass cabinet in the basement of the old Winter Palace not far from Dannhauer's painting. Shortly after Peter's death the court sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli, a native of Florence, where wax effigies for funeral parades were a speciality, made death masks and casts of the emperor's hands and feet. These were then incorporated into the famous wax model, which had a wooden body made to the tsar's measurements and a wig made from his own hair cut during his Persian campaign. Stories about the model being fitted with a mechanism which allowed it to stand up to its full height have been discounted.
Peter may have seen similar effigies of French kings and queens in Saint-Denis in 1717, for example, the standing figure of Henri IV, complete with natural hair. Perhaps he also knew about the wooden facsimiles of English kings and queens, the faces based on death masks, which were displayed on top of their closed coffins during funeral parades, then stored in Westminster Abbey. Rastrelli himself referred to the figure (in a request for reimbursement of the cost of materials) as a ‘model for the tomb’,50 which suggests that it may have been intended to be carried at Peter's funeral parade, perhaps even as an emergency substitute for the body, given the long period of lying in state. Apparently it was not used as such, either during the lying in state or during the funeral procession, or it would surely have been mentioned in accounts. We know that churchmen later objected to some aspects of Peter's funeral (the Holy Synod refused permission for the publication of a detailed description of the decorations on the grounds that they were ‘pagan’) and the wax figure's uncanny imitation of life probably proved too much for Orthodox tradition.
Castrum doloris
In paying so much attention to the artistic activity around Peter's corpse in the last days of January 1725 we also touch upon important political issues, for these acts of visual commemoration sprang from the political and psychological needs of the people Peter had left behind. Peter had been in all senses a dominating and domineering presence. His family and favourites needed time to decide what to do. In the meantime, physical memorials of the tsar himself could bridge the gap between life with Peter and life without him. Dressing Rastrelli's wax model in the clothes he wore at Catherine's coronation provided a visible reminder of Peter's honouring of his spouse, who almost immediately emerged as the favoured candidate to succeed him. Piling up images of Peter's deeds underlined the need to preserve his heritage, to which there was much popular opposition. If the treatment of Peter's corpse could also appeal to Orthodox sentiments, for example, in a hint of saintliness as manifested in the incorruptibility of the body, so much the better. The fact that it was possible to record the dead tsar realistically in paint and wax owed much to his own clinical and unsqueamish attitude towards death and the human body, learned at dissecting tables in Amsterdam and Leiden. He often delayed funerals for autopsies to be performed, commissioned death masks, and had corpses embalmed, all in contravention of Orthodox custom. In France in 1717 Peter bought the Dutch anatomist Ruysch's secret recipe for preserving corpses, refusing to reveal it to French anatomists who were working on models of human organs. This was reflected in Prokopovich's Short Account of Peter's death: ‘He was apprehensive of his approaching fate,’ but noted ‘philosophically’ that from his own example ‘you can see what a wretched creature is mortal man.’ Such pronouncements were in keeping with Western accounts of ‘good’ or ‘tame’ deaths, but Peter's premonition of death has a modern update: he sensed the progress of his illness and despaired, ‘for he was knowledgeable about anatomy’.51
And so Peter was not placed in his tomb, as were his Muscovite predecessors, within twenty-four hours or at most a couple of days of death in a ceremony attended only by the inner circle of courtiers and churchmen. This would have been, to put it crudely, a waste of a valuable asset. From early February to 10 March he lay on public display in a hall of mourning (referred to in contemporary accounts as castrum doloris) in the Winter Palace. The designer of this room was the French artist Nicholas Pineau, assisted by a team of mainly foreign artists and craftsmen. Beneath a canopy draped with the imperial mantle and skeleton devices, Peter's body lay clad in breeches and a shirt of silver brocade with lace cuffs and cravat, boots with spurs, a sword and his Order of St Andrew. The coffin was surrounded by nine tables holding Peter's regalia and other military and knightly orders and four ‘bronze’ statues (plaster with bronze paint effects) depicting Russia weeping, Europe, Mars and Hercules. Four pyramids of white marble on pedestals, draped with genies in mournful poses and allegorical representations of Death, Time, Glory and Victory, bore the legends SOLICITUDE FOR THE CHURCH, REFORM OF THE CITIZENRY, INSTRUCTION OF THE MILITARY and BUILDING OF THE FLEET, inscribed with verses extolling Peter's feats. A drape spread between the pyramids exhorted Russia ‘to grieve and weep, your father PETER THE GREAT has left you’. Other pedestals bore statues of virtues: Wisdom, Bravery, Piety, Mercy, Peace, Love of the Fatherland and Justice. The whole room, illuminated by candles, was swathed in black, with festoons of black and white flowers and funereal drapes scattered with tears made out of silver satin. The spectacle was calculated to appeal both to the uneducated folk, who swarmed into the palace through a specially cut door from the Neva embankment, and to the more sophisticated public, including representatives of foreign courts, who would know how to interpret the Christian and classical imagery which extolled the monarch's feats in life, as well as grieving for his end.
Burial
By the day of the burial, 10 March 1725, the motionless tableau of Peter's body and its accoutrements had conveyed a number of important messages about the autocrat-reformer which could now be consolidated by a more dynamic spectacle. The sudden death of Peter's youngest daughter, six-year-old Natalia, on 4 March turned it into a double funeral, but few adjustments had to be made to accommodate her small casket. The length and route of the funeral procession were determined by the spatial configuration of St Petersburg. In Moscow the royal residence and the royal mausoleum (the Archangel Cathedral) were within a few dozen yards of each other within the walled space of the Kremlin, so that the transfer of the coffin from one to the other could be achieved in front of a selected audience and relatively quickly. In St Petersburg the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul Cathedral, which Peter had built as a mausoleum, were on opposite sides of the wide frozen Neva river, and the path marked across the ice to link one to the other could be viewed from various vantage points on the embankments. Had Peter died when the river was ice-free, the transfer would have been accomplished by barge, which would arguably have been more in keeping with his tastes. We know about the parade in remarkable detail not only from published descriptions, but also from an image in watercolour and ink painted by an unknown artist on a scroll 10 metres long.52 The parade was markedly military in character, with 10,638 troops from various regiments lining the route, but with ample provision for civilian and ecclesiastical participation. Cannon fire from the fortress at one-minute intervals mingled with church bells. The procession was led by drummers and trumpeters in black cloaks, merchants (including foreigners), deputies from the towns and the nobility of Estonia and Livonia. Thirty-two horses, among them Peter's favourite clad in black drapery and wearing plumes, carried the coats of arms of the Russian towns and provinces. Thus the empire, new and old, was represented. There was also a substantial priestly component, with choristers, deacons, priests, archimandrites and the members of the Holy Synod preceding the two coffins on their sledges. Peter's was draped in a black cloth and placed under a red velvet canopy topped with a large gilded crown. Peter's associates formed the centrepiece, some holding the ends of the coffin cloth, others, including the British ship's master Joseph Noye, holding the strings of the canopy, followed by Catherine supported by Menshikov, now the most powerful man in Russia, then Peter's daughters Anna and Elizabeth, Peter's nieces Ekaterina and Praskovia, his future son-in-law the duke of Holstein and his grandson Peter Alekseevich.
The arrangements clearly displayed the Petrine order of things in other respects, too. Inside the cathedral, men and women from the top six grades of the Table of Ranks were seated inside the temporary wooden chapel which had to be constructed for the occasion, with ranks 4–6 standing at a lower level, while ranks 7–8 stood outside in the main body of the church. There was, of course, no patriarch to officiate, as there had been in the seventeenth century. The cleric in the limelight was the man who delivered the funeral sermon, a relative novelty in the Russian Orthodox church. Feofan Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov and Narva and vice-president of the Holy Synod, specialised in rhetorical compositions based on foreign prototypes, in this case very likely a Lutheran model, and drew on stock comparisons with biblical figures to laud the earthly achievements of the departed (his ‘great talents, deeds, and actions’). He elaborated on the discourse that the dead monarch ‘gave birth’ to Russia and named him Samson (strong defender of the fatherland), Japhet (creator of the fleet), Moses (law-giver), Solomon (bringer of reason and wisdom) and David and Constantine (reformers of the Church). The gods of antiquity were tactfully omitted. The oration ended with a eulogy to Peter's successor and his creation, Catherine I, ‘mother of all Russians’, the embodiment of her husband's ‘spirit’.
The last farewells before the coffin lid was closed were accompanied by ‘indescribably sad wailing’, especially from Catherine, who was mourning both a husband and a daughter. Thereafter there followed what amounted to a second forty-day vigil by the coffin. In fact, Peter was not actually buried (that is, lowered into a vault in the ground) at the time. His coffin stood in the centre of the church in the temporary structure for six years, where it was joined in May 1727 by Catherine's. The coffins stood together until May 1731 when both were lowered into the crypt on the order of Empress Anna. The St Petersburg News for 31 May reported that on Saturday in the eleventh hour of the morning, a service was conducted by Archimandrite Petr Smelich in the presence of members of the service élite and admiralty and many college officials. There was a 51-gun salute as the coffins were lowered.53 An undecorated granite sarcophagus was placed over the spot with an inscription giving Peter's dates in the old and new styles: ‘Autocrat of All Russia, Emperor Peter the Great, born in 1672, ascended the throne in 1682, left the earthly realm and migrated to the heavenly one in the year of the creation of the world 7233, the year of our Lord 1725, aged 52, in the forty-second year of his reign, on 28 January.’54