IV

War with Sweden: 1700–8

We were avenging the insult dealt to us and our ambassadors in Riga … and also seeking the restoration of the provinces of Ingria and Karelia, which belonged to our ancestors, the great sovereigns of Russia, for many centuries, but which the Swedish crown in truth treacherously snatched by dishonest military means. (Peter on the reasons for the Swedish war (3 February 1709))

Ring out the old, ring in the new

A few years after Sir Godfrey Kneller painted his memorable likeness of Peter, the Dutch artist Godfried Schalken borrowed the face for his own portrait of the tsar, now in the State History Museum, Moscow, to which he added a long, extravagantly curled French wig in a style which Peter almost certainly never wore in real life, preferring to grab a wig off someone else's head when he felt cold. A print by the Dutch etcher Adriaan Schoenebeck from about the same period (1703–5) shows Peter in a similar wig topped by a hat and dressed in a foppish French tunic, rather than in the plain coat which he usually wore. Both portraits, Schalken's and Schoenebeck's, testify to the further Westernisation of Peter's image in the early years of the eighteenth century. The exotic ‘Tatar-like’ Muscovite has disappeared, to be replaced by another Peter of the artists' imagining, Westernised beyond probability.

Russia, too, was to enter the eighteenth century in slightly ill-fitting Western clothes and in step with at least some of its Western neighbours. In the late 1690s most Muscovites were not anticipating a new century at all, since Muscovy counted its years from the notional creation of the world (the birth of Adam) and began each new year on 1 September, on which date in 1699 they marked the start of the year 7208. The Muscovite New Year was a strictly religious occasion, when tsar and patriarch walked in a procession of crosses and icons through the Kremlin. But, like a number of traditional festivals, in the 1690s the New Year was celebrated with increasingly less pomp, especially during Peter's absences. In November 1699, the year after he returned from Europe, where he had celebrated 1 January 1698 in Amsterdam, Peter made his views clear in a brief personal decree: ‘The year is to be written from the birth of Christ in all business matters.’ More detailed edicts dated 19–20 December 1699, evidently anticipating protests from religious traditionalists, noted that not only many European Christian nations but also Orthodox Slavic people followed the new calendar.¹ Peter did not go all the way to modernity, however, by numbering the day of the month according to the more scientifically accurate calendar introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. Instead, he stuck to the Julian system already in use in Russia and in most Protestant countries, including Britain, which by the eighteenth century had fallen eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar.

Peter's prescription for the celebration of this ‘goodly undertaking and the new century' provides an early example of enjoyment by decree, which specified the details, right down to the type of festive greenery to be set up in public places. A firework display on Red Square on 1 January 1700 was to be augmented by better-off citizens setting off rockets and firing celebratory rounds from muskets, while poorer residents were told to pool their resources and provide a few flares and beacons. Protests from traditionalists that the Almighty created the world in autumn when there was an abundance of produce for Adam and Eve to eat were brushed aside.

Conservative feathers were soon ruffled some more. On 4 January 1700 an order was issued to Moscow nobles and to men of ‘all ranks of service and chancellery and trading people, and boyars’ bond slaves, in Moscow and in the provinces' to wear ‘Hungarian’ coats reaching just below the knee over breeches with a shorter under-coat or vest. Those who could were asked to appear in such garments by Epiphany, just two days away, the rest by Shrovetide. This decree must have elicited a poor response, since Peter extended the deadline to 1 December 1700 for men and 1 January 1701 for women to acquire their new wardrobes.² Mannequins wearing examples of ‘French and Hungarian’ dress were displayed at Moscow city gates, a ‘show and tell’ method which Peter frequently employed to ensure that people ‘would not excuse themselves by pleading ignorance’ (a phrase which appears in many of his edicts). In 1701 a further decree specified that all people, even peasants living and working in Moscow, with the exception only of priests and peasants working on the land, must wear German dress, including boots, shoes and hats, and ride on German saddles. Women of all urban classes, even the wives of priests and their children, had to comply. Tailors and cobblers who made or sold banned items faced stiff penalties.

Whether the average Russian town dweller appreciated the nuances of the latest fashions is doubtful. Even foreigners were in two minds about what was required. John Perry believed that Peter ordered Russians ‘to equip themselves with handsome Cloaths made after the English Fashion’ while the Dutch artist Cornelius de Bruyn mentions ‘Polish’ coats.³ But the general contours of what Peter required were clear: for men a topcoat, long undervest (waistcoat) and breeches, in other words the three-piece suit which West European urban dwellers had been wearing since the 1670s. For women the fashion was full skirts and tight bodices, often low-cut, forming a nipped waist outline.

The new dress codes caught on quickly at court, where it was difficult to evade the tsar's eagle eye, and in Moscow generally, where inspectors went around collecting fines and chopping off the hems of robes which exceeded the required length. Gone were the tall-hatted bearded boyars in flowing robes and women in high-necked waistless garments with hair-concealing headdresses. As for beards, the only ones tolerated at court were on priests or false ones for masquerades and theatricals. Away from Moscow, however, there was opposition to the new fashions. In the town of Belev an official attempted to close shops selling Russian clothes, but they were open again the next day. He reported that even the governor and officials were all bearded and dressed in Russian style. In 1708 an informer reported that when the tsar was in Moscow everyone wore German dress but in his absence the wives of some of the tsar's leading officials wore old-fashioned gowns to church, even though they put skirts over them, ‘cursing the sovereign's decree’.⁴ The harsh climate, the high cost and a shortage of suitable tailors, as well as resistance to change per se, continued to hamper the spread of the new fashions in the provinces. The new dress codes, it should be stressed, did not apply to the mass of the peasants, most of whom had little contact with these alien beings in ‘German’ clothes.

Peter's army

At the same time as Peter did battle with his subjects' appearance, he was also preparing for more action on the military front as one war ended and another began. On 3 July 1700 Russia signed a thirty-year truce with Turkey, which ratified Russian possession of Azov and Taganrog, but did not grant control over Kerch (on the strait between the sea of Azov and the Black Sea) or allow free navigation of the Black Sea and the Straits, as Russia had unrealistically demanded. The news was announced in Moscow on 18 August with a splendid firework display and the next day Peter declared war on the Swedes, citing the Swedish crown's failure to give satisfaction for the insult inflicted on the tsar at Riga in 1697 and its ‘illegal’ occupation of the Russian provinces of Ingria and Karelia, which the Swedish crown snatched during the Time of Troubles'.⁵ Later the war was also presented as a defensive one, on the basis of rumours that Sweden had plans to seize Novgorod, Pskov, Olonets, Kargopol and Archangel, ‘thereby entirely to cut off the Russians from the Commerce with Foreigners’.⁶ Opportunism played a part. The accession of the teenage Charles XII to the throne of Sweden in April 1697 and the aspirations of nobles in Livonia, led by Johann von Patkul, to break free of Swedish rule, promised (misleadingly) to ease Peter's task, while diplomacy followed its own momentum in the wake of the Grand Embassy. In July 1699 Russia formally joined an anti-Swedish coalition with Christian V of Denmark and in October with Augustus II of Poland. Both monarchs regarded Peter as a junior partner.

The allies promised more than they delivered. Augustus invaded Livonia in February 1700 but in the absence of the anticipated support from the Livonian nobles he failed to take Riga. He got no help from Poland, of which he was the elected king, but where he had no personal power base, which remained neutral at the beginning of the war in the hope of pressurising Russia into revising the terms of the 1686 Treaty of Moscow. Frederick IV of Denmark, who succeeded his father Christian V in September 1699, was forced to make peace by a Swedish attack on Copenhagen at a time when most of the Danish army was in Holstein. He signed the Treaty of Travendal with the Swedes on the same day as Peter declared war against them.

Peter was taking on a more formidable enemy than he imagined. Far from being a walk-over, Sweden's ‘boy king’ proved to be even more single-mindedly devoted to war than Peter himself, even simpler in his tastes and more indifferent to discomfort. Indeed, from 1700 to his death in 1718 he barely returned to the Swedish mainland. Not for him the relaxation of overseeing the construction of new gardens, planning masquerades, turning a snuffbox on a lathe or the dozens of other jobs which Peter managed to squeeze in while running the war. In comparison with Charles's bleak existence with his troops (he never married), Peter's troubled family life was to seem almost idyllic. Charles's great love, some would say his obsession, was his army, which was regarded as the best in the world, its soldiers credited with almost super-human qualities. In the words of a clergyman who accompanied the Swedish troops later in the war:

The whole world is witness to the fact that nowhere on earth could you see soldiers more easily bearing heat and cold, strain and hunger, who carried out orders with greater ardour, went into battle more readily at the signal, and were more prepared for death.⁷

The Muscovite army, on the other hand, had a poor reputation in the West, which the remote Azov campaign had done little to salvage. ‘None but the Tartars fear the armies of the Czar,’ remarked Johannes Korb in 1699. ‘It is an easy matter for them to call out several thousand men against the enemy; but they are a mere uncouth mob, which, overcome by its own size, loses the victory it had but just gained.’⁸

Dismissing the Russian army as ‘uncouth’ and ‘Tatar-like’ was part of a broader Western discourse about Muscovy. In fact, the general trend in the Muscovite military since the sixteenth century had been modernisation and change. Peter regarded Ivan IV (the Terrible), who took Kazan' in 1552 with 150,000 troops and 150 pieces of artillery, as his ‘forerunner and example’.⁹ In the 1630s part of the Russian army was reorganised into ‘new formation’ regiments, comprising infantry, lancers and dragoon units trained and commanded by foreign officers. These forces were consolidated under Tsar Alexis, as Peter acknowledged: ‘Everyone is well aware of the manner in which our father … in 1650 began to use regular troops and how a Military Statute was issued; and thus the army was established in such good order that glorious deeds were accomplished in Poland [in the war of 1654–67] … and at the same time war was waged against the Swedes.’¹⁰ But during Peter's youth the Russian army suffered some resounding defeats, notably at Chigirin in 1676–78 and on the Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, both of which, significantly, involved steppe warfare against the Tatars in thinly populated terrain, where ‘modern’ Western-style methods of warfare and logistics had little relevance. The war with Sweden, which saw Russian troops deployed in all sorts of situations and in all sorts of terrain, including naval battles and sieges, over a twenty-year period, was to require the utmost versatility and adaptability.

The élite core of a new army was already in place in Peter's two ‘play’ regiments, the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards, members of which initially were distinguished by personal ties and loyalty to Peter and by the requirement to start from the lowest commissioned rank regardless of status. But as their ranks were replenished and other regiments were added to the army (over forty by the end of Peter's reign) Peter could hardly hand-pick every recruit. A system was needed. At the same time, he was dissatisfied with the old recruitment system based upon landowners reporting for duty as cavalrymen with their complement of armed retainers when a campaign was announced. In November 1699 he issued an appeal for volunteers ‘from all free men’ to sign up in the office of the Preobrazhensky regiment for a wage of 11 roubles per year. The annual salary was intended to allow regular troops to be full-time soldiers without having to supplement their income through trade and craft, as the strel'tsy had done. A decree of 1 February 1700 appealed to masters who wished to free their slaves and serfs to issue them with warrants of manumission so that they could be considered for enlistment as infantrymen.¹¹ Given the shortage of eligible free or freed men, however, a volunteer force could not meet Peter's requirements. Army life, anyway, was scarcely an attractive option. Soldiers perceived it as a condition ‘close to the position of the serfs’. There was a saying that ‘it is better to belong to the boyars; if you belong to the sovereign you live worse’.¹² In December 1699 Peter launched a conscription drive on the basis of the supply of one equipped and provisioned recruit from every fifty peasant households owned by landowners already on active service and one from every thirty households belonging to persons not on active military service or a payment of 11 roubles (that is, the yearly salary for one volunteer).¹³ Conscripts and volunteers yielded twenty-nine infantry regiments and two dragoons, a total of 32,000 men. The commanding officers were all foreigners, with junior officers drawn from Moscow nobles of non-boyar rank, although the ratio of Russians to foreigners was to increase as the war progressed.

Narva 1700

There was little time to train the new troops. In November 1700 a Russian army of about 40,000, with a weak artillery, inexperienced and quarrelling commanders, unreliable supply lines and no prospect of allied aid, faced a Swedish force of less than 9, 000 men at Sweden's Baltic port of Narva (which Peter regarded as a Russian town), where the Russians had arrived in September already exhausted and maintained a month-long siege, during which munitions and supplies ran out. In late October King Charles landed at Pernau in the Gulf of Riga, reaching Narva on 19 (30) November, shortly after Peter left his camp to fetch reinforcements from Novgorod. The fact that the Russian troops were thinly stretched out over a great distance in their camp made it easy for the Swedes to break through their ranks. Many Russians, in poor physical and psychological shape, fled. Only the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards stood firm. Eight to ten thousand Russians were killed, and thousands captured. Peter's disappearance from the scene was interpreted as cowardice. The Swedes issued a medal: on one side Peter stood near his cannon from which cannon balls were flying towards Narva, with the biblical quotation: PETER STOOD AND WARMED HIMSELF. The reverse showed Russians fleeing from Narva with Peter at their head, his crown askew and the inscription: HE WENT OUT AND WEPT BITTERLY.¹⁴

The ‘rebirth’ of the Russian armed forces after Narva was one of several legendary turning points in Peter's reign. The loss of some 150 Russian cannon precipitated a major production effort, including initially the symbolic melting down of church bells to provide metal. The death of Patriarch Adrian on 16 October 1700 was fortuitous in view of his mistrust of foreign officers and Peter's desire to divert some of the wealth of the church into state hands to help fund the war effort. Peter chose his own man, the recently consecrated metropolitan of Riazan’, Stefan Iavorsky, a Ukrainian, as a stand-in and used the war with Sweden as an excuse to delay filling the vacant post, which was not formally abolished until 1721. There is an anecdote that Peter, tired of being pestered with requests to fill the vacancy, beat his breast and yelled (according to another version, flinging a dagger on the table): ‘Here's your patriarch.’¹⁵

In January 1701 Peter revived the Monastery department, first established by his father, to supervise ecclesiastical courts and run the church's lands under the direction of a secular official, the tsar's close friend and relation (probably his illegitimate half-brother), Ivan Musin-Pushkin. In the past, a decree noted, monks were ‘industrious and made their bread by their own labour and fed many beggars by their own labour, but the present-day monks not only do not feed beggars with their labours but themselves live off the work of others’.¹⁶ Some historians have argued that in 1701 a complete secularisation of church lands and property was achieved. In fact, Peter stopped short of secularisation (which was started by his daughter Empress Elizabeth, continued by Peter III and implemented by Catherine II in 1764) and sub-sequently restored some of the church's property rights. Legislation issued in 1700–1 also regulated such matters as when and where monks could write (openly, not secretly in their cells). Only monks and nuns were to live in monasteries, to deter ‘shirkers’ from finding refuge; building work was restricted; staffing in bigger establishments was reduced; and the minimum age for women to take the veil was set at forty. Peter continued to observe the necessary religious rites like the good Orthodox Christian that he was and remained, but he was determined that church politics and finances would be conducted on his terms.

As far as the army was concerned, Peter did not achieve a miraculous transformation. The most marked improvement was in the artillery, which from 1704 served under the master of ordnance James Bruce (or Iakov Brius), a second-generation Scottish émigré who had accompanied Peter on the Grand Embassy. Korb's remark that the Muscovites were ‘not skilled in the proper management of artillery’ (1699) gave way to Charles Whitworth's report (25 March 1705) that the Russian artillery was ‘extremely well served’. His informant, the British general George Ogilvie, ‘never saw any Nation go better to work with their cannon and mortars, than the Russians did last year at [the second battle of] Narva’. But Ogilvie, in conversation with Whitworth at Grodno in September 1705, complained that Russians were still ‘unskilled in the general motions of army’ and suffered from a ‘great want of experienced officers’. He admired the guards, but was less enthusiastic about the newer infantry, who were ‘but indifferently provided with habits and firearms, nor can they be looked upon otherwise than as new levies’. The cavalry he thought not equal to the Swedes in pitched battle.¹⁷ Ogilvie's opinions are corroborated in other sources, including Russian ones, which testify to chronic problems with recruitment, discipline, uniforms and supplies. Peter's army was not an overnight success.

Russia's achievements in the first few years of the war had much to do with the fact that it did not have to meet Charles's main army in pitched battle. The ignominy of Peter's defeat at Narva may have persuaded Charles that there was not much more to do in Russia, encouraging his decision to move against Augustus in Poland and Saxony. In July 1701 the Swedes occupied Courland. The following July Charles defeated an army of Saxons and Poles and occupied Cracow. While Swedish attention was focused elsewhere, Russia scored a first victory in the Baltic when Boris Sheremetev's army beat General Schlippenbach's forces at Erestfer in Livonia on 30 December, 1701, securing a further victory at Hummelshof in July 1702. There were more Russian successes in August at Marienburg and on 11 October at the fortress of Nöteborg on Lake Ladoga, captured after a two-week siege with the aid of naval support. Peter renamed it Schlüsselburg, the ‘key’ to the Neva. The outbreak of the long anticipated War of the Spanish Succession in the West in May 1702 lessened the likelihood of intervention by other powers. Peter wrote to Apraksin: ‘Long may it last, God willing.’¹⁸

Of marriages and mathematics

The demands of war did not deflect Peter from his campaign to create new Russian men and women. In January 1702 Moscow witnessed the wedding of one of Peter's jesters, Filat Shansky. The festivities, held in the mansion of the late Franz Lefort, lasted three days, of which the first two were celebrated in Old Russian style, men and women dressed ‘after the ancient manner of the country’ in two separate rooms, one presided over by Prince-Caesar Fedor Romodanovsky and Ivan Buturlin, the ‘junior’ tsar, the other by Prince-Pope Nikita Zotov and ‘Tsaritsa’ Buturlina. Adriaan Schoenebeck engraved three scenes, which were inscribed with captions identifying the guests. John Perry described it: ‘The Victuals and the way of serving it to the Table, was, on purpose for Mirth made irregular and disagreeable … their Liquor also was as unacceptable, the best of which (as in the Days of old) was made of Brandy and Honey.’¹⁹ On the third day they all changed into ‘German’ dress, and the men and the women sat at table together, ‘and there was dancing and skipping about, after the entertainment, to the great satisfaction of the Czar himself, as all his guests’.²⁰ Here was an acting out of transformation, a symbolic discarding of the old ways, dress and manners, presided over by the mock tsars and the mock patriarch, themselves figureheads of the rejected past.

In addition to its general cultural symbolism, Shansky's wedding feast also formed a prelude to a new law on marriage. Russian marriage contracts were made on behalf of the bride and groom, who usually did not set eyes upon each other until the contract had been sealed. In élite society such secrecy could be maintained only under a regime in which young unmarried men and women led separate lives. Once mixed social gatherings started to bring the sexes together before marriage, reform was inevitable, especially as the tsar believed that marriage based on choice rather than force would be conducive to higher birth rates. The new law of 1702 stipulated a six-week period of betrothal before the wedding during which the couple could meet and the betrothal be broken at the request of either party, although in practice parental choice continued to predominate.²¹

Peter pursued both cultural change and technical progress through educational reforms. In 1700–2 he founded the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation, modelled on the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital in London, hiring teachers Henry Farquharson (c. 1675–1739) from Aberdeen and Stephen Gwyn and Richard Grice, both Christ's Hospital graduates. Leonty Magnitsky, a graduate of the Moscow Academy, was appointed to work with the British teachers and to produce a book on mathematics, geometry and navigation in Russian. The Sukharev tower, a modern building erected in the 1690s, was appropriately equipped and teachers and pupils (volunteers and conscripts) were dressed in ‘French outfits’.²² By 1702 the school had 200 students, divided between the preparatory department and the naval division. Senior pupils studied an impressive curriculum of arithmetic, geometry, trigonometry, plane navigation, Mercatorian navigation, diurnals (astrolabe), spherics, celestial navigation, naval cartography and Great Circle navigation. Despite suffering from shortages of basic equipment in the early years, the Mathematical school and its successor, the St Petersburg Naval Academy (founded 1715), had a profound influence on Russian intellectual life, not only by producing the first generation of Russian explorers, surveyors, cartographers, astronomers and the like but also in the area of secondary education. Peter later called on its graduates to staff his new elementary schools.

Reformed printing houses began to cater for a public which Peter expected to be increasingly literate. In 1701 the Monastery department took over the Moscow Printing House and placed all publishing under civil control. Under the direction of F. P. Polikarpov the press began to produce such materials as logarithmic tables and lexicons, as well as government edicts. The Moscow Printing House was also initially responsible for producing Russia's first newspaper, The News (Vedomosti), which was created on 16 December 1702 to carry reports ‘about military and other affairs, which need to be made known to the people of the Muscovite realm and neighbouring states’.²³ The first issue was dated 2 January 1703, and carried news from the Northern War. Vedomosti remained a government organ with a limited circulation. Controls from above and lack of initiative and expertise from below meant that a Russian free press was still in the distant future.

The founding of St Petersburg

In spring 1703 Russian troops made their way from Schlüsselburg down the Neva river towards the Finnish gulf. In May they captured the Swedish fortress of Nyenkans (Nienschantz) on the Okhta river. The story continues in an official history of Peter's reign, compiled some years later:

After the capture of Nyenkans a council of war was sent to determine whether to fortify this spot or to find a more convenient place (since this one was small, far from the sea and not well fortified by nature), and it was decided to look for somewhere else and after a few days' search they found a convenient island, called Lust Eland, where on 16 May (Trinity Day) the foundations of a fortress were laid and named Saint Petersburg.²⁴

There were more elaborate, allegorical versions of the founding story. One recounts how Peter walked to the centre of the island (the present Peter-Paul fortress) and saw an eagle hovering overhead. He grabbed a bayonet, cut two strips of turf, laid one on top of the other in the shape of a cross, then made a cross from some wood, which he erected on the turf, with the words: ‘In the name of Christ Jesus on this place shall be a church in the names of the apostles Peter and Paul.’ The story goes on to recount how later two birch tree trunks were driven into the ground to suggest gates, on one of which the eagle, first mentioned hovering over the island, landed, then hopped on to Peter's arm. The writer records the legends that Constantine the Great was led to Byzantium by an eagle and that the apostle St Andrew, en route from Kiev and Novgorod, planted his staff in a spot not far from St Petersburg and blessed the region. Peter's city was placed firmly in the context of Christian world history.²⁵

In fact, no contemporary first-hand account survives of the founding of St Petersburg – in 1703 it was still just a fort, not a city – and Peter was not even on the spot on the legendary date of its foundation. His first recorded reference to it appears in a letter dated 1 July 1703, reporting that the Russian flag had been planted by the ex-Swedish fortress.²⁶ The dedication of the fortress church took place on 29 June, Peter's name day, and the fortress itself was consecrated on 1 October, the feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God and also the date of the capture of Kazan' by Ivan IV in 1552. The notion that the future city was built on ‘empty’ land is also mistaken, but was used for rhetorical effect by Peter's publicists and soon became part of Petrine mythology, most powerfully in the opening lines of Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman, which pictures the tsar looking out over a wilderness punctuated by an occasional fisherman's hut. In fact, in addition to the fort of Nyenkans, there were populated settlements in the area, including the fairly substantial residences of Swedish officials. The old fort itself was not destroyed until 1709, in a symbolic detonation to mark the victory at Poltava. The rubble was used in the fast-growing new city.

Did Peter in 1703 regard the ‘city’ as anything more than a hastily erected earthwork fortification? It appears that he did, even if we cannot know precisely how his ideas were formulated. Our anonymous chronicler, recording the construction between 24 and 27 May 1703 of Peter's first wooden cabin in St Petersburg, hints at a symbolic as well as a practical agenda. When Menshikov suggested that it would be easier to obtain ready-cut timber by dismantling a house from the nearby fort, Peter refused, saying: ‘I want wood to be felled on the spot and a palace to be built from it in order to remind people what a wilderness this island was.’ The said ‘palace’ was sprinkled with holy water and an icon of the Trinity was placed in it.²⁷ One of the first engravings of the town (by Peter Picart, 1704) features an expanse of water with ships in the middle ground and spires of the fortress and adjoining land in the far distance, a reflection of Peter's priorities. Another early print bears the legend ‘Petropolis 1703’; a few years earlier Peter used the same name to refer to Azov.²⁸ Soon Peter was comparing his own city of St Peter with both Rome and Paradise, to which St Peter holds the keys. In a letter to Menshikov dated 28 September 1704 he wrote: ‘If God grants, we expect to be in the capital (Piterburkh) in three or four days’, and on 7 April 1706 he called it ‘Paradise’, a notion which he was to repeat many times.²⁹

Martha Skavronska

At about this time Peter met the woman who was to become not only his wife but also his successor – the future empress Catherine I. In the summer of 1702 a young woman named Martha Skavronska fell into Russian hands when Field Marshal Sheremetev took the Livonian town of Marienburg, where she was working as a servant in the family of the Lutheran pastor Ernst Glück. Sheremetev is said to have passed her on to Menshikov and Menshikov to Peter, probably at the end of 1703 (when Peter split up with Anna Mons) or the beginning of 1704. In a letter written in 1717 Catherine, as she became known, hinted at 1 March as the anniversary of their first meeting. Menshikov no doubt had his own reasons for giving the tsar such a ‘gift’ and he and Martha/Catherine, both outsiders, were to remain firm allies. In the early period of their relationship Peter addressed her with the rather crude and virtually untranslatable ‘matka’ (old girl) or ‘Muder’. A note dated October 1704 in which Peter sent regards to Menshikov on her behalf, together with greetings from his dog Lizetka and Iakim the dwarf, hints at her status in Peter's odd extended household.³⁰ Towards the end of 1704 she bore Peter a son, the ‘little Peter’ (Petrushka) mentioned by Peter in a letter from Poland to Daria, Menshikov's future wife, and Varvara Arsen'eva, who were looking after the child and its mother.³¹ Another son was born the following year. In October 1705 the women sent Peter congratulations on the capture of Mitau castle in Courland ‘as a result of your labours’, adding, ‘and we too have been amusing ourselves thanks to your labours, and we thank you most graciously for your favour, which we hope to enjoy again, and congratulate you on this new-born boy … Peter and Paul beg your blessing and greet you.’³² Menshikov also congratulated the women on the ‘new arrival’ in a letter dated 27 October 1705 from Lithuania. These boys must have died in infancy. Neither was included in the list of members of the imperial family later buried in the Cathedral of SS Peter and Paul in St Petersburg.³³ The first of the couple's off-spring to be officially acknowledged was born on 27 December 1706. In a letter dated 29 December ‘Mr Colonel’ was informed of the arrival in St Petersburg of the ‘newborn girl Catherine’, and asked not to grieve at the birth of a daughter.³⁴ Young Catherine died from unspecified causes in July 1708, another melancholy statistic in the unhappy history of the couple's estimated ten offspring, of whom only two girls, Anna and Elizabeth, survived to maturity.

The background, nationality and original religious affiliation of Peter's second wife are still subject to debate. Whether she was the illegitimate daughter of a serf or the orphaned daughter of a Swedish officer, her ‘lowly’ origins were notorious. The snobbish Princess Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, who saw her in 1719, remarked that ‘you only had to take one look at her to see that she was low-born. … From her clothes you could have mistaken her for some German strolling player.’³⁵ By 1704–5 she was an established part of Peter's life, but lacked official status and recognition, to the extent that foreign observers, who often discussed the rest of Peter's family, including his banished first wife, did not mention Catherine at all. Catherine and Peter between them had to invent an identity and place for her. This included conversion to Orthodoxy and the new name – Catherine (Ekaterina) Alekseevna – which went with it. The cult of her patron saint, St Catherine of Alexandria, was established at court and in 1714 Peter founded the Order of St Catherine in his wife's honour. Unlike Muscovite royal brides, she lacked an established kinship network (no doubt not having to contend with ambitious, interfering in-laws was an advantage in Peter's eyes) and had to forge alliances of her own, notably with Menshikov, another of Peter's ‘creations’. With the years Catherine acquired a household of her own, but her greatest ally was Peter himself. She travelled with him round the battlefields of Poland and Lithuania, to Poltava in 1709, to the Pruth in 1711 and Persia in 1722, and accompanied him on his journeys to Western Europe.

The first known portraits of her, dating from the 1710s, depict a full-figured, attractive woman, of whom a foreign observer wrote: ‘She has a pleasing plumpness; the colour of her face is very white with traces of natural, quite high colour, her eyes are dark and small, her hair the same colour, long and thick, fine neck and hands, a mild and very pleasant expression.’³⁶ In temperament and tastes Catherine was a match for Peter, over whom she exerted a calming influence. She was strong (a visitor records how she lifted up a heavy mace with one hand after Peter's orderly had failed to budge it) and unshockable, sharing Peter's vulgar sense of humour and his fondness for practical jokes and heavy drinking. Apparently, she was illiterate. That the allpowerful tsar of Russia should choose such a woman as his wife and in 1724 crown her as his empress was no odder than the fact that his best friend was reputed to be the son of a pie seller and that Peter liked to be known as Mr Mikhailov.

Makarov and the Cabinet

In 1704 another of Peter's closest associates enters the scene, when Aleksei Vasil'evich Makarov (1674/5?–1750) was appointed secretary to the tsar's Cabinet office. Rumour has it that Peter first spotted the promising young scribe in 1693 on a visit to Vologda, where Aleksei's father was also a clerk. Makarov became Peter's right-hand man, his virtual ‘shadow’, accompanying him on his campaigns and travels abroad, but always aware of his lowly station. He was the perfect complement to the illiterate Menshikov. The Cabinet functioned wherever Peter happened to be and all sorts of business came under its control in addition to the co-ordination of the domestic and foreign policy which passed through Peter's hands. It administered Russians training abroad and foreign specialists in Russia; the St Petersburg Chancellery of Building; some mines and works; Peter's chamber of curiosities (the Kunstkamera); and his gardening office, which also ran the royal aviaries and menagerie. Cabinet staff kept the tsar's journals (both appointments diaries and records of activities) and supervised the writing of the official ‘History of the Swedish War’. Trials of special interest to the tsar, denunciations involving treason, attempts on the sovereign's life and crimes against the treasury were reported to the Cabinet, as were petitions, anonymous letters and new inventions, which Peter liked to investigate personally. It handled items of petty expenditure, such as wages and clothes for palace servants, goods purchased by agents abroad for Peter and his family, the costs of Peter's lathes and personal boats, and tips and gifts from the royal purse, such as ‘rewards for the declaration of monsters, for mothers and midwives at the birth of children and various other such items’. The Cabinet also paid Peter his military service and labourer's salaries in his various ranks as captain, colonel and ship's carpenter.

Makarov ran the Cabinet with unusual efficiency. His ‘Rules on Procedures for Cabinet Business’ (1721) noted that ‘except in the above-described manner, business cannot be conducted without confusion, therefore these procedures must be observed correctly in all particulars and abided by’.³⁷ He handled much of Peter's correspondence, even on matters of prime importance. Unlike Peter, he had beautiful handwriting and an excellent grasp of spelling and grammar. In their turn, correspondents often applied to Makarov rather than the tsar. One petitioner wrote: ‘Makarov speaks and writes only on behalf of the sovereign, but his influence is felt by everyone.’³⁸ People seeking preferment for a relative, intervention in a lawsuit or a decision on a landed estate relied on him to find the right moment to put their request to the tsar, who was notoriously changeable in his moods. For all his power, Makarov never forgot his modest origins and addressed the magnates with whom he corresponded as ‘your humble servant’. He never enjoyed the same easy familiarity with Peter as did Menshikov, nor did he amass anything like the latter's wealth and titles. His annual salary of 400 roubles compared poorly with the salaries of top army officers and foreign architects and his two grants of landed estates amounted to no more than 130 peasant households. He was, in a word, precisely the sort of honest, efficient specialist which Peter despaired of finding more of to man his expanding administrative machine.

War in Poland and the Baltic. The Astrakhan revolt

In January 1704 Augustus II was deposed by the Swedes and Charles's protégé, Stanislas Leszczynski, was elected king of Poland. The Swedes agreed to help the Poles to regain territory lost to Russia by the treaties of 1667 and 1686. This was a serious blow for Peter, especially now that he faced the prospect of Turkey joining an anti-Russian league. He did not abandon Augustus, however, because he was desperate to keep Poland in the war and he still had some support there. In August 1704 a Russo-Polish treaty recognised Augustus as the rightful king and promised him Livonia. The Baltic campaign continued to go well for Russia. In July 1704 the Russians took Dorpat (Tartu), on 9 August Narva (revenge for 1700) and on 16 August the neighbouring town of Ivangorod.

Throughout 1705–6 Russian units under the commanders Boris Sheremetev, Carl Rönne, George Ogilvie, Nikita Repnin and Fedor Golovin raced all over Lithuania and Courland. Peter himself was constantly on the move. February–April 1705 found him in Voronezh, where he celebrated Easter and launched a ship called The Old Oak, but complained because Menshikov could not join him. ‘Everything here is fine, thank God, there's only one thing that grieves me, as you yourself are aware, especially as I was never apart from you for this holiday before.’³⁹ Arriving back in Moscow at the end of April, he fell ill with a fever. He wrote: ‘This illness has increased the pain of separation from you, which I have suffered many times, but now I can bear it no longer. Come and see me as soon as you can, to cheer me up.’ Menshikov, arriving in Moscow in mid-May, was able to report that ‘through the mercy of Almighty God the tsar has been cured of his sickness’.⁴⁰ On 30 May Peter celebrated his birthday at Preobrazhenskoe and the following day left Moscow for Smolensk en route for Polotsk, where he arrived in early June. Reports came that a Swedish fleet, consisting of twenty-two warships and auxiliary vessels, had attacked Kotlin (Kronstadt) island off St Petersburg, but had been headed off by a much smaller Russian squadron under the command of Vice-Admiral Cruys, causing many Swedish losses. At the same time 10,000 Swedes under Major-General Mengden approached St Petersburg but were forced to retreat. During this war the Swedes were not to get so close to Peter's capital again.

Peter held his name-day party in Polotsk and a few days later departed for Vilna, arriving on 8 July with the main army. Here he remained until early August, then moved on to Mitau in Courland. In mid-September he was back in Poland, in Grodno, where he stayed until 7 December when he left for Moscow. In early September 1705 news had reached Peter of serious disturbances in Astrakhan, where on 30 July strel'tsy, in collusion with rebellious townspeople, ambushed the town guards and began a massacre of officers and government officials. Letters from the rebels to the Don Cossacks and other potential allies declared:

We stood up in Astrakhan for the Christian faith and against shaving and German dress and tobacco and because we and our wives and children were not admitted into God's church in old Russian dress. And those who went to church, of both male and female sex, had their garments chopped up and were pushed out of God's churches and sent packing and the governors and officers hurled all manner of abuse at us, our wives and children, and they, the governors and officers, bowed down to pagan idols and forced us to bow down too … and they, the governors and officers, tried to take away the guns of the servicemen on guard and tried to beat us to death.⁴¹

The fact that the ‘pagan idols’ (which the rebels confiscated as proof of ungodly practices) were in fact wig blocks indicates the cultural gulf between the handful of semi-Westernised officials and the mass of the population. Peter's assault on beards had recently intensified. On 16 January 1705, men ‘of all ranks’, including merchants and artisans (but not priests, deacons and peasants), were ordered to shave. Anyone who wished to keep his beard and whiskers had to pay a fine on a sliding scale according to status: 60 roubles for nobles, military officers and chancellery officials, 100 roubles for merchants of the first guild, and so on. Permits took the form of a beard token disc obtainable from the Police Office. Bearded peasants had to pay a kopeck each time they entered the city gates.⁴² It seems likely that this degree was implemented only patchily outside St Petersburg and Moscow – the revenues raised from the beard tax were insignificant – but Peter's ‘ungodly’ assault on beards, first aimed at the élite in 1698, remained an important element in the traditionalists' case against him.

All sorts of stories circulated. A gunner claimed under interrogation that he had heard rumours in Moscow that the real tsar had gone missing and that the current one was a fake. In other letters the rebels mentioned the antics of the Drunken Assembly, ‘instead of God-respecting carol singing they use masquerades and games, in which one of his courtiers, a jester, was given the title of patriarch and other archbishops’.⁴³ The Astrakhan rebels' plan of action echoed those of the strel'tsy in 1682 and 1698: to go to Moscow and kill any German, male or female, they chanced upon, to find the sovereign and appeal for the old belief to be restored and for permission not to have to wear German dress or to shave. A refusal would mean that Peter was not the real tsar and could be killed.⁴⁴ The rebels had no truck with direct anti-tsarist sentiments, however. Royal letters received in Astrakhan in October were treated with respect and prayers were sung for the tsar's health. Another story claimed that Peter was a prisoner in Sweden, that the boyars had taken over Moscow and that the rebels must march against them for the sake of the Christian faith and the tsar. Others claimed that the tsar was dead.

In the words of Charles Whitworth, ‘the sudden change of Cloathes and Customes added new fuel to their discontent. But the specious pretence for all, was here as in other Countreys the zeal for their Religion.’⁴⁵ But as Whitworth realised, people were also protesting against heavy taxation and monopolies on salt and fish. Astrakhan had long been a place of exile for unreliable elements. Vagrants and fugitives flocked into town to seek work in the fisheries and saltpetre works. Trade duties and indirect taxes and labour burdens had recently been raised and food allowances to servicemen reduced. Cultural changes were symbols of wider discontent

Peter regarded the revolt as a resurgence of strel'tsy intransigence. He wrote to Fedor Apraksin, now Secretary of the Admiralty, on 21 September: ‘I deduce that the all-gracious Lord has not yet finished pouring out his wrath and for twenty-five years now it has pleased him to give those destructive curs their way and solace in innocent blood.’⁴⁶ The spread of the rebellion beyond Astrakhan (the rebels tried but failed to capture Tsaritsyn) forced Peter to transfer Boris Sheremetev from Courland with two squadrons of dragoons and a battalion of infantry. Even so, he hoped that the threat of retaliation and the promise of a pardon would calm the situation and ordered Sheremetev to attack only in the last resort. Sheremetev took the town on 13 March 1706. Trials continued for the next two years. Eventually six men were broken on the wheel, 42 beheaded, 30 executed in Red Square, 242 in other parts of Moscow, and 45 died during interrogation. Peter was determined to root out the evil which had haunted him ever since he witnessed the strel'tsy massacring his relatives in May 1682. In the meantime, he consoled himself in the company of his friends. A letter sent to Menshikov from St Petersburg in March 1706 was signed by Peter's ‘drunken’ companions, the dog Lizetka, who affixed her paw, and the royal dwarf Iakim Volkov, who added that he had been given permission to be drunk for three days. The tsar signed himself ‘Archdeacon Peter’.⁴⁷

Waiting for Charles

In the West things were going worse than ever for Augustus II. In August 1706 the Swedes took Dresden and Leipzig. Under the terms of the Peace of Altranstädt (28 September) Augustus renounced the Polish crown in favour of Leszczynski and broke his alliance with Russia. The Swedes looked poised to turn on Russia, but even now there were signs that Charles's advance might be checked. On 18 October 1706 a joint force of Russian and Saxon troops caused heavy Swedish losses at Kalisz, near Poland's western border. The hero of the hour was Menshikov. Peter's earlier reluctance to make his friend into a public figure evaporated and Alexander was richly rewarded: Peter presented him with a diamond- and emerald-studded cane and verses were composed in his honour, likening him to the faithful servant of Alexander the Great.

Late in 1706, in the town of Žolkiev near Cracow, Peter held a crucial council of war. Orders issued in January 1707 prescribed guerrilla tactics and a scorched earth policy in order to halt the Swedes' eastward march. Peter wished to avoid a pitched battle for as long as possible. He was willing to cede Dorpat, and if the Swedes were still not satisfied, to offer them cash in compensation for Narva or even to cede Narva; but St Petersburg must not be relinquished under any circumstances. Charles, equally stubborn, declared himself ready to fight to the last Swede rather than leave St Petersburg in Russian hands. The king of Prussia's envoy in Altranstädt reported that the Swedes expected ‘to dethrone the Czar, compelling him to discharge all his foreign officers and troops, and to pay several millions as an indemnification’.⁴⁸ This may not have been a true reflection of Swedish policy, but such rumours caused alarm in Moscow. Peter sought mediators, for example, the duke of Marlborough, Britain's negotiator, but the duke politely declined the incentives offered, which included the pick of titles to the principalities of Kiev, Vladimir or Siberia and one of the biggest rubies in Europe.

The spring and summer of 1707 brought renewed fears of a Swedish attack. In March 1707 Peter wrote to Fedor Apraksin from Poland: ‘I can't tell you anything more about what's going on, as all Polish affairs here are fermenting like young ale. The Swedes are advancing, committing unspeakable atrocities in Saxony.’⁴⁹ In the summer Moscow was put on the alert and a decree ordered border areas to prepare for invasion: ‘This war is now directed against us alone,’ Peter wrote.⁵⁰ At the end of 1707 news reached Peter, who spent Christmas and New Year in Moscow, that a Swedish army of 45,000 had crossed the Vistula. He set off for Grodno, departing again in late January in the direction of Vilna just a few hours before Charles entered the town. It was anyone's guess which way Charles would go next: into Livonia or towards Novgorod (threatening St Petersburg); towards Smolensk (thence to Moscow); or into Ukraine. At first he left Grodno in a north-easterly direction, which suggested that Pskov and Novgorod were his destination, but then he moved south-east.

Peter was anxious but he did not succumb to defeatism. He wrote to his son Alexis on 22 January 1708: ‘Give greetings to my sister [Natalia] and the others from me, and tell them not to grieve, for war is war and with God's help all our men are eager to march and ready to fight. Instead of grieving let them pray, which will be more help to us.’ A letter to the acting patriarch Stefan Iavorsky written on the same day stated that they were ready to lay down their lives for the church and the fatherland. Peter asked Stefan to pray for the assistance of the heavenly host who aided St Peter; if a saint needed such help, how much more did mere sinners require it!⁵¹ As always, Peter remained firmly convinced of divine intervention in human affairs while believing that God operated primarily through the agency of men. On 27 January, Catherine gave birth to another daughter, Anna, in Moscow. Tsarevich Alexis and Peter's sister Natalia acted as godparents for the ‘new arrival’.⁵² Peter was to become close to this particular daughter, but it seems unlikely that at the time he regarded the birth of another girl as a good omen.

On 29 January Peter issued a decree on a new typescript, the draft of which was covered with his own amendments, accompanied by a handwritten instruction to publish books in the new print. The so-called Civil script (grazhdanskii shrift), devised in 1707 and developed by a team of printers from Amsterdam, comprised 33 letters in upper, middle and lower case, based upon modern designs for Latin letters, with ‘redundant’ ones from Church script excluded. A new alphabet primer was prepared for press and the first book in the new type (a work on geometry by A-G. Burckhard von Pürkenstein, translated from the German) appeared in March 1708, but Peter was dissatisifed, adding more letters and amending others.⁵³ Civil script did not replace the older, more ornate Church script (kirillitsa). In fact, a third of the titles printed in the old script during Peter's reign were actually secular in content, for example laws and manifestoes, which were often read out in church. Ecclesiastical printing not only continued, notably for the production of liturgical and devotional works, but also considerably increased its output. Religious literature accounted for some 40 per cent of books published and sold more copies than secular works. At the same time, the introduction of the new script underlined the growth of the secular sphere, in the eyes of the state if not the reading public, who were reluctant to spend their money on technical books on fortification, siege warfare and geometry, but were not offered any entertainment in the form of fiction, plays or poetry, which accounted for just 0.2 per cent of titles published.

As for Peter, he took an interest in all aspects of publishing, from checking translations to specifying the size of books and the quality of the binding. His own library was an eclectic mix of almost 2,000 titles, the working section of which covered such topics as fortification, artillery, hydraulics, architecture, geography and history. Books on shipbuilding and navigation (including eighteen copies of ‘General Signals’ for the galley and seagoing fleets) accounted for about 12 per cent of the collection, politics, law and economics less than 3 per cent. Up to 50 per cent of the titles were foreign, but Peter also owned a large number of religious books (about 28 per cent of the collection), ranging from standard liturgical texts in multiple copies to modern theological works by Orthodox clerics.

Peter arrived back in St Petersburg from Poland in March 1708, only to fall seriously ill. On 6 April he wrote to Gavrila Golovkin:

There is a saying that where God builds a church the Devil will find an altar: I was always healthy here in this heavenly place, but now I seem somehow to have brought a fever with me from Poland even though I took good care of myself. … I was plagued with it all Holy Week and missed the feast day services apart from the beginning of matins and the gospel reading. Now, thank God, I am returning to health but I haven't left the house.

On 8 April, he wrote again to Golovkin: ‘I beg you to get on with whatever you can in my absence. When I was well, I neglected nothing, but God alone knows what a state I'm in after this illness, which turned even this place into Poland, and if I don't get better and manage to have a rest, God knows what will happen.’⁵⁴ He had hit a low point. ‘You know that I have never written like this before,’ he wrote to Menshikov, ‘but God sees when you have no strength because without health and strength it's impossible to do your duty.’ He hoped that he would not have to report for duty straight away, but if he did, he asked Menshikov to have transport arranged. The doctors' treatment, which included doses of mercury, had left him as ‘weak as a baby’.⁵⁵ Clearly, Peter's associations of sickness with Poland (hell) and health with St Petersburg (heaven) had symbolic and psychological connotations. Still not knowing what Charles's plans were, he gave orders for his ‘Paradise’ to be fortified. Government bodies did not move to the new capital permanently until 1712–13, but Peter expected his family to spend more and more time there. In 1708 his sister Natalia supervised a visit by the royal women, who at Peter's insistence travelled the last section of their journey in a huge convoy by ship from Schlüsselburg. An anecdote recounts that Peter wished to ‘accustom his family to water so that they were not afraid of the sea and got to like the situation of St Petersburg, adding that “anyone who wishes to live with me must often be on the sea”.’⁵⁶

Bulavin

Ill health struck while Peter was facing the most serious internal disorders of his reign: the revolt led by the Don Cossack commander Kondraty Afanas'evich Bulavin (c. 1660–1708). The rebellion, which had flared up in autumn 1707, was a classic case of friction between ruling centre and Cossack fringe. A census of the Don region in May 1703 specified that fugitives who had arrived there since 1695 must be returned to their former places of residence, an order which posed a challenge to the traditional Cossack welcome for such renegades. The Don Cossacks also resented encroachment by out-siders upon their enterprises. It was the seizure of the Bakhmut salt works by Cossacks on government service in 1704 which first provoked Bulavin to protest. Rumours that the authorities intended to cut off beards, a special affront to Cossack dignity, also caused outrage. The catalyst came in July 1707 when Peter sent Prince Iury Dolgoruky to the Don to enforce the new rules on fugitives. In October Dolgoruky was ambushed and slaughtered by Bulavin, who, defeated in his turn by the Don Cossack commander Lukian Maksimov, escaped to Zaporozhie on the Dnieper, from where he sent out letters appealing for the defence of ‘the True Faith’, reassuring ‘all top officials, good men and all common people who also stand firm with them … we cannot be silent on account of the evil deeds of wicked men and princes and boyars and profit makers and Germans and cannot let them off for leading everyone into the Hellenistic pagan faith and diverting them from the true Christian faith with their signs and cunning tricks’.⁵⁷ Bulavin made common cause with workers in the Voronezh shipyards and labourers in Azov and Taganrog, with Nogai, Kalmyk and Tatar nomads, with peasants and religious dissidents, thereby provoking separate outbreaks of protest all over the region. This was a ‘virtual replica’ of the Stenka Razin rebellion of 1670–71 and a fore-taste of the 1773–75 Pugachev revolt, with the difference that Bulavin did not put forward a pretender. In April 1708 Bulavin defeated Maksimov and on 1 May Don Cossack sympathisers admitted his army to their capital Cherkassk and elected him as their commander.

Early in April 1708 Peter had ordered eighteen-year-old Tsarevich Alexis, who had recently been entrusted with a series of grown-up tasks, to ‘quench the fire [of rebellion] as quickly as possible’.⁵⁸ Fedor Apraksin he instructed to execute Bulavin's ‘thieves’ in Voronezh and ‘hang them along the roads closer to the towns where they lived and thieved’, as a warning to others.⁵⁹ Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, the murdered Prince Iury's brother, was dispatched with a force of 32,000 men and on 7 July Bulavin was killed after a failed attempt at taking Azov. Peter's response was jubilant. ‘So this affair, thank God, had ended happily. … Here, thank God, all is going well and today there was a celebration (triumfovanie) of this good event.’⁶⁰ Even though pockets of resistance continued into 1709, he was able to recall some 15,000 men to the Lithuanian front, where Charles was still poised, according to rumours, to ‘march on Moscow, dethrone the tsar, divide his country into petty prince-doms, summon the boyars and divide the realm between them into provinces’.⁶¹

On 3 July 1708 the Swedes won a victory over A. I. Repnin's troops at Holowczyn and proceeded to Mogilev. But as summer drew on into autumn, the tables were beginning to turn. ‘The land is not so well tilled,’ wrote Whitworth about the region through which the Swedes were passing, ‘the villages few, their wooden houses of little value, and the furniture almost nothing, so that whenever an enemy approaches, the people are warned away with what they can save, and the cozacks set fire to the rest, as they have several times already done in sight of the Swedish army, who find all desolate before them, and as they advance will run further into want and cold.’⁶² To make the terrain even less hospitable in August Peter spelled out his ‘scorched earth’ policy. If the enemy entered Ukraine, troops were to burn all provisions and fodder and corn in the fields and in grain stores or threshing floors in villages (although not in towns) which was superfluous to their own needs, Polish and Russian, not sparing buildings in the vicinity; bridges were to be destroyed, forests cut down. All mills must be burned and all the inhabitants sent out into the fields with their possessions and livestock. No millstones were to be left behind: they were either to be taken away or smashed. If anyone resisted going into the forest, their villages would be burned. This policy was to be broadcast in advance, with the warning: ‘If anyone brings the enemy food, even for cash, that person shall be hanged; also anyone who knows [of such activities] but says nothing [will be executed]. Also those villages from which the food is given will be burned.’⁶³ A desperate situation required desperate measures.

But Peter also found room for the smaller things in life. On 17 August he sent the corpse of his dog Lizetka to Dr Nicholas Bidloo in Moscow, with a note asking the doctor to embalm her, using dry balsam ‘so that she doesn't rot’ (Peter took a keen interest in embalming) and begging the doctor ‘to put his best effort into it’.⁶⁴ (Many years later the stuffed Lizetka was to be displayed alongside Peter's waxwork in the chamber of curiosities.) Lizetka had been Peter's constant companion, often signing or ‘affixing her paw to’ letters and sometimes delivering them. There is an anecdote about how Peter pardoned a man after Catherine attached a petition written in Lizetka's name to the dog's collar.⁶⁵ Food and equipment such as collars and chains for Peter's dogs are often mentioned in account books. Stuck in Vilna in the autumn of the previous year after a tiring and inconclusive campaign, Peter found solace in jotting down classical names for the puppies of another favourite bitch: Pirois, Eois, Aeton, Flegon for the dogs and Pallas, Nymph and Venus for the bitches, which he arranged to have trained to do tricks, such as taking off a hat, jumping over a stick, sitting and begging. In November 1708 he had Pirois and Eois sent to him in Ukraine, together with a list of the skills they had acquired.⁶⁶ Menshikov seems to have shared this passion. In March 1705 he sent Peter a puppy (‘wonderful looking, with a wide jaw, and very stupid’) to replace one which had been killed and compared him with a dog called Tyrant, ‘the main difference between them being that Tyrant runs away from shooting but this one rushes towards the person who is firing’.⁶⁷ No doubt Peter's love for animals, as well as his dislike of hunting, will weigh more heavily on the balance sheet of his good and bad deeds with some readers than with others. Some of history's greatest villains have been dog-lovers. If anything, his relationship with his dogs provides a further illustration of the complexity of Peter's personality, his ability to mix work and play and to switch between the ‘weighty’ and the ‘trivial’ more or less at will.

Charles turns south. Mazepa

In late August Charles moved his troops to Mstislavl' in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It was anticipated that he would next make for Moscow or even St Petersburg. But in mid-September, discouraged from crossing the Russian border by reports of shortages of food and fodder all the way to Smolensk, some 60 miles away, the main Swedish army turned south. This proved to be a serious miscalculation, especially since almost immediately one of the supports on which Charles was relying was eliminated. On 28 September in an engagement near Lesnaia (about 30 miles south-east of Mogilev) General Löwenhaupt, travelling from Riga with 12,500 troops and a baggage train of equipment and provisions consisting of several thousand carts, was cut off from the main army and attacked by Peter's corps-volant. Löwenhaupt escaped to join Charles with only six or seven thousand of his men and had to abandon his wagons. Peter later referred to this as the ‘first day of our good fortune’.⁶⁸ Lesnaia became one of the ‘victory days’ in the new court calendar.

What made Charles turn into Ukraine, rather than continuing eastwards? The main attraction was that he believed the region to be populous, rich in food supplies and lacking in strong garrisons. Moreover, Charles had made a secret agreement with Ivan Mazepa, hetman of Left Bank Ukraine, who pledged to supply the Swedes with 20,000 Cossacks, military bases and provisions. He was also counting on the assistance of Devlet Girei, khan of Crimea. Mazepa's notorious decision to ‘betray’ Peter is unremarkable in the context of Muscovite–Ukrainian relations during the period in question. He suffered the same dilemma as previous commanders of the Little Russian Cossack Host, who wavered between accepting the ‘protection’ of the fellow Orthodox tsar and being forced into service or pledging allegiance to non-Orthodox sovereigns, Polish, Turkish or Swedish, none of whom could be relied upon to observe traditional Cossack liberties. Since his investiture as hetman in 1687 Mazepa, despite governing like a ruling monarch, had remained loyal to Moscow, but now he believed that his obligations to the tsar were at an end: ‘We, having voluntarily acquiesced to the authority of his Tsarist Majesty for the sake of the unified Eastern Faith, now, being a free people, we wish to withdraw, with expressions of our gratitude for the Tsar's protection and not wishing to raise our hands in the shedding of Christian blood.’⁶⁹ In his view, Cossacks had suffered enough deprivations fighting for Russia in the Northern War.

In October 1708 Mazepa fled to Charles's side. On 31 October Menshikov stormed and burned the hetman's headquarters at Baturin, killing, according to one estimate, some 6,000 persons ‘without distinction of age or sex’.⁷⁰ This drastic action proved crucial, for it deprived the Swedes of men and supplies. Peter regarded the defection of his ‘loyal subject’ as a personal insult. He wrote to Menshikov: ‘We received your letter about the totally unexpected wicked event of the hetman's treachery with great amazement.’⁷¹ Mazepa was ‘a new Judas’, for whom Peter even created a mock Order of Judas, a parodic inversion of the Order of St Andrew which Mazepa had received in February 1700. After the hetman's death the medal was presented to Peter's jester, Prince Iury Fedorovich Shakhovskoy.

After Mazepa's defection and escape from Poltava in June 1709, Peter sent countless letters to individuals and groups in Ukraine which emphasised Mazepa's betrayal of Orthodoxy. The Ukrainian people learned how Charles had desecrated Orthodox churches in Lithuania, turning them into Protestant chapels, entered them with dogs, hurled the sacrament on the ground and other such violations, all commonplace elements in descriptions of religious abuse. Mazepa was excommunicated and an effigy of him was stripped of the Order of St Andrew and hanged. The anathematisation was read out in churches in Ukraine on the first Sunday of Lent until 1869. The new hetman, Ivan Skoropadsky, was assured that Cossack rights would be respected, except ‘in cases of conflict with affairs of the state, such as treason’.⁷² In fact, Peter had reason to be grateful for Mazepa's ‘treachery’ insofar as it helped to lure Charles into Ukraine, where, in the words of Captain James Jefferyes, the English envoy at Swedish field headquarters, the Swedes anticipated coming into a country ‘plentifull of all necessaryes’ and ‘flowing with milk and honey’.⁷³ In the event, this turned out to be a mirage. Far from greeting the Swedes with open arms, Ukrainians generally offered passive resistance in the form of guerrilla warfare. The prospect of a restoration of Polish Catholic rule, via Charles's puppet Leszczynski, was no more appealing than the continuation of rule from Moscow.

Russia was now virtually under martial law. A decree of December 1708 announced the formation of eight provinces or gubernii (increased to nine in February 1709), each to be administered by a governor (gubernator) with extensive powers: Prince-Caesar F. Iu. Romodanovsky in Moscow, Menshikov in St Petersburg, D. M. Golitsyn in Kiev; P. S. Saltykov in Smolensk; P. A. Golitsyn in Archangel, P. M. Apraksin in Kazan'; I. A. Tolstoy in Azov, M. P. Gagarin in Siberia and F. M. Apraksin in Voronezh. Designated provinces were to support designated military units, by collecting money and supplies for the army within their own areas. Peter himself spent the final months of 1708 and New Year 1709 far from home, travelling from town to town in Ukraine, one of his least favourite places. He viewed these ‘borderlands’, far from the sea, as the antithesis of St Petersburg, his watery, Western paradise. As he once wrote to Menshikov from near Grodno, a messenger had arrived from his ‘Paradise’, ‘and brought much consolation’, while from Dubrovna in 1706 he wrote to Fedor Golovin as though from ‘hell, where I have not just enough but, alas, more troubles than I can cope with’.⁷⁴ Ukraine was soon to provide the setting of one of the decisive encounters of the war, which, in Peter's words, would lay the final foundation stone of the new capital.