VII
Everyone is well aware of the wickedness, just like that of Absalom, with which our son Alexis was filled and of how his schemes were foiled not by repentence but by God's mercy towards our country. (The Law on the Succession, 5 February 1722).
Peter and Alexis
In 1871, in the first exhibition staged by the group of Russian artists known as the Wanderers, Nikolai Ge contributed what was to become one of the most famous of Russian historical paintings. Peter, dressed in the dark green, red-cuffed uniform of the Preobrazhensky guards, sits on a chair with his legs crossed and stares sternly at his son Alexis, who stands to his right, thin and pale, with head bowed, his black clothes hinting at impending death. Ge borrowed Alexis's visage from the portrait by Dannhauer described earlier. Sheets of paper (a confession awaiting Alexis's signature?) are strewn on a table and one has fallen to the floor. On the walls some of Peter's paintings acquired abroad (the Dutch maritime artist Adam Silo was his favourite) can be picked out in the gloom. Although the background is authentic and still recognisable today – Ge set the scene in the Monplaisir pavilion at Peterhof, which Peter preferred to the grand palace on the hill because it stood right on the sea shore – the subject is invented, for there is no record of Peter and Alexis meeting at Monplaisir in 1718. But psychologically it rings true. Critics still fail to agree whether Ge intended to condemn Peter as an unnatural father and evoke pity for Alexis, or to arouse sympathy for the reformer's dilemma in dealing with a recalcitrant son, who, like Russia (for which Alexis provides a metaphor in either version), had to be chastised for his own good. As in many paintings of the period, the exploration of a historical theme was intended to throw light on the present. The painting also has religious allusions. In later works, for example What is Truth?, Ge dealt with the arrest and interrogation of Christ. Whatever Ge's intentions, he captures the drama of one of the most disturbing episodes in Peter's career.
In 1717 Peter had written to inform Alexis that although he had acted ‘like a traitor’ in seeking refuge abroad and inflicted insult and grief upon his father and shame upon his native land, he would not be punished if he returned to Russia. But if he refused he would be eternally damned.1 Armed with this letter, Peter's agents Aleksei Rumiantsev and Peter Tolstoy tracked Alexis down to his refuge near Naples and persuaded him of the weakness of Austrian promises and the inevitability of his being intercepted, possibly (a terrifying thought!) by Peter in person. Alexis agreed to return to Russia on condition that he be allowed to marry his pregnant mistress Afrosinia and live quietly away from the capital. He gave his consent in a letter to Peter dated 4 October 1717, which he signed ‘your most humble and worthless slave, unworthy of the name of son’.2
At the end of January 1718 Alexis arrived back in Moscow, where he learned that there were conditions attached to the unconditional pardon promised earlier: firstly, he must renounce the throne, and secondly, name the ‘accomplices’ who helped him to flee Russia. Fulfilling the first requirement was relatively easy as Alexis had indicated his willingness earlier to abandon his claim to the throne. On 3 February Peter issued a manifesto setting out the reasons for removing Alexis from the succession, which is addressed to the tsar's ‘loyal servitors’, who are, he assumes, all well aware of the efforts he took as a good father to educate Alexis to become a ‘worthy heir’ and of his unfailing ‘parental anxiety and concern’, which Alexis repaid with the stubborn refusal to heed his tutors (‘the seed of learning fell upon stony ground’), seeking bad company instead. He had lived in discord with his lawful wife and brought shame upon himself by taking up with ‘an idle, common serving wench’, driving Charlotte to her death. ‘Loyal servitors’ were left in no doubt that Peter was acting in the interests of Russia: ‘We could not keep an heir who would lose everything that with God's help his father had obtained and who would overturn the glory and honour of the Russian people, for which I spent my health, in some cases not even sparing my life.’ The manifesto set out in detail Peter's efforts to bring Alexis back to Russia. It declared two-year-old Peter Petrovich as the new heir, sternly condemning as a traitor anyone who continued to regard Alexis as the successor, although Peter unambiguously ‘forgives him for his crime and frees him from all punishment’.3 Alexis duly signed a letter acknowledging ‘my transgression before you, as a parent and a sovereign’. He took the oath of renunciation and swore allegiance to his younger brother.4
Witch hunt
It was the second condition about revealing all accomplices (‘if anything is hidden, you will lose your life’) which proved impossible to fulfil, for it depended on Peter's being satisfied that nothing had been concealed. The intensity of the investigation which followed was occasioned by Peter's own deep suspicions about the existence of a plot against him – that Alexis had asked the Austrian emperor to raise a military force against Peter and was contemplating the ‘repulsive act and crime’ of patricide – and had the support of some members of Peter's inner circle, not least Menshikov, who feared the consequences if Peter were to die and Alexis become tsar. A witch hunt began. On 4 February Alexis received a set of questions, his replies to which seriously implicated Alexander Kikin, a former ‘play’ soldier and volunteer on the Grand Embassy, later director of the St Petersburg wharf, whose career had been briefly interrupted by charges of embezzlement and corruption. Kikin, it was claimed, had advised Alexis to enter a monastery, for ‘the monk's cap is not nailed to your head’, then helped him to flee abroad. Kikin gave a clue to the reasons for his change of allegiance while he was being tortured later in 1718, when Peter asked: ‘How could a clever man like you go against me?’ and Kikin replied: ‘The mind needs space, but you restrict it.’5
These and other answers from interrogations indicated that Alexis enjoyed the sympathy of many members of the old nobility and suggested rumblings of discontent at the very heart of Peter's circle. Kikin's correspondents included Fedor Apraksin and Boris Sheremetev, although nothing incriminating was found against them. During his trial Alexis recalled conversations between himself and Pavel Iaguzhinsky, the future procurator-general and Peter's protégé, and with Aleksei Makarov, Peter's secretary, who warned him to take care lest Peter pass the throne to his younger brother.6 Makarov's advice, like Sheremetev's suggestion that Alexis ought to cultivate more friends in Peter's court, was hardly subversive, but such was the atmosphere that anyone could fall under suspicion. Other alleged remarks by leading servitors came closer to home. In Stettin in 1713 Vasily Vladimirovich Dolgoruky, suppressor of the Bulavin rebellion and godfather of Elizabeth Petrovna, told Alexis: ‘If it were not for the tsaritsa's influence on the sovereign's cruel character, our life would be impossible.’7 Iakov Dolgoruky liked Alexis and discussed ‘the people's burdens’ with him, although he was cautious about being seen with him. Prince Dmitry Mikhailovich Golitsyn, governor of Kiev, sent Alexis books and he counted Prince Dmitry's brother Mikhail and their cousin Prince Peter Alekseevich Golitsyn among his friends. And, as if in final confirmation of the justice of his position, he insisted that ‘many people have told me that the common folk love me’.8
Prior to Alexis's defection in 1716 leading men naturally thought it prudent to maintain at least discreet good relations with the heir to the throne. But many such men, by no means die-hard traditionalists, lived in fear of Peter and were weary of the unrelieved burdens of the war, which looked set to drag on for ever, with all the associated impositions of forced relocation to St Petersburg, compulsory service for young nobles in the ranks and orders out of the blue to go on errands. There is no evidence of a conspiracy to restore Muscovite traditions; on the contrary, a few of Peter's associates may well have wished to extend the process of Westernisation to the political sphere, while reducing some of the pressures of war and reform. In this scenario, Alexis, so much less energetic and demanding than his father, begins to look like a suitable candidate as a constitutional monarch.
The prelude to Alexis's trial was the investigation of his mother Evdokia (now the nun Elena in the Intercession convent in Suzdal’, it will be recalled) and her friends. Despite the lack of any hard evidence of links between Evdokia's ‘party’ and Alexis's ‘plot’, many of the ex-tsaritsa's people fell victim to flimsy charges only indirectly linked to Alexis's flight abroad. Evdokia herself was accused of abandoning her nun's habit and living a life of luxury and debauchery. In a public spectacle in March 1718 the guards officer Stepan Glebov was executed by impalement after prolonged torture sessions, having been convicted of committing adultery with Evdokia and writing suspicious coded letters (which were never shown to contain anything incriminating). Alexander Kikin was broken on the wheel, as was Bishop Dosifei of Rostov, who allegedly told Evdokia that she would be tsaritsa again and foretold Peter's death. The abbess of the Intercession convent and the nun Kaptelina, Evdokia's confidante, were knouted and banished. Evdokia's brother Avraamy Lopukhin was executed later in the year.
The investigation extended to Alexis's middle-aged aunts, the half-sisters whom Peter had never really trusted because of their closeness to Sophia. Tsarevna Martha Alekseevna was charged with querying Peter's choice of his younger son over the elder and Tsarevna Maria Alekseevna was locked up in Schlüsselburg fortress on the grounds that she acted as a go-between for Alexis and his mother, meeting Alexis in Germany in October 1716 and sending Evdokia news of Alexis's escape abroad. As for Evdokia, she was banished to an isolated convent near Lake Ladoga with just one female dwarf for company. She proved a tough nut to crack, however, outliving her husband and making a brief return to court in 1728 during the short reign of her grandson Peter II. She died in 1731.
Freaks and monsters
On 13 February 1718, as the investigation of Alexis got under way and fear and suspicion spread, Peter issued another famous manifesto: ‘It is well known that in the human species, as in that of animals and birds, monsters are born, that is freaks [the original uses both the borrowed word monstry and the Russian urody], which are collected in all countries as objects of wonder.’ Ignorant people regarded such freaks as works of the devil, the decree explained, whereas in fact they are products of nature. People were commanded to deliver specimens (preserved in spirits if dead, or, in case of necessity, in double-distilled wine) to commandants in towns for a scale of payments: for dead items, the reward was 10 roubles for humans, five for animals, and three for birds, and for live exhibits (the most sought-after) 100, 15 and seven roubles respectively. ‘Very weird’ freaks attracted a bonus payment, ‘slightly deformed’ ones a lesser reward. Anyone caught concealing specimens was to be fined and the sum given to informers.9
The impulse behind this decree was patriotic as well as scientific. Peter believed that the Russian empire could yield up exhibits just as curious as those which Western collectors went to the ends of the earth to find. In 1714 he had founded his own cabinet of curiosities, the Kunstkamera (borrowed from the German Kunstkammer), based on a collection started in 1697–98 in the Netherlands and Germany. It was to grow significantly after Peter's visit to Europe in 1716–17, when he purchased Dr Ruysch's anatomical cabinet, the zoological specimens of the apothecary Albert Seba and the cabinet of the physician Gottwald of Danzig, which included minerals, shells and rare stones. Peter's taste for the bizarre and exotic was in keeping with the spirit of the so-called age of the Baroque. No doubt he was also encouraged by Leibniz's recommendation ‘Concerning the Museum and the cabinets and Kunstkammern … [which] should serve not only as objects of general curiosity, but also as a means to the perfection of the arts and sciences.’ The collector in his cabinet was a sort of icon of the age of reason, his specimens, scientific instruments, books, paintings and engravings all evidence of his enquiring mind and broad vision. Peter regarded collecting as a mark of civilisation in his own associates, several of whom, including Menshikov, James Bruce, Robert Erskine and Andrei Vinnius, amassed their own cabinets.
Peter did not intend to enjoy his specimens alone. His idea was to establish a public museum which Russians would visit to look and learn, lured in by free coffee, wine or vodka. In 1718–19, under the direction of Dr Lavrenty Blumentrost and the librarian Johann Schumacher, a new building (still known today as the Kunstkamera) was started on Vasil'evsky Island, according to legend on the spot where a misshapen pine tree grew.10 Peter's appeal for home-grown ‘monsters’ produced, among other things, an eight-legged lamb, a three-legged baby, a two-headed baby, a baby with its eyes under its nose and ears below its neck, Siamese twins joined at the chest (‘arms, legs and heads normal’), a baby with a fish's tail, two dogs born to a sixty-year-old virgin and a baby with two heads, four arms and three legs, although the response was not as good as Peter hoped.11 A special attraction of Peter's museum was the inclusion of live freaks among the exhibits. In May 1722, for example, Peter ordered a payment of 30 roubles to one Semen Shikov, peasant of the village of Senikov, for declaring a live female monster by the name of Natalia Antonova, and to the peasant Mikhail Piskurin, ‘from whom that monster was taken’, 20 roubles.’12 A catalogue of the Kunstkamera compiled in the 1740s included two (sadly non-extant) paintings of the bearded peasant woman Aksinia Ivanova, one of them in the nude. In 1724, however, Dr Blumentrost refused to accept another live monster on the grounds that ‘in the Kunstkamera we keep only dead freaks’, no doubt because of the expense involved in clothing and feeding living exhibits even though some earned their keep as cleaners and janitors.13
‘I have ordered the governors to collect monsters and send them to you,’ Peter is said to have told his British physician Robert Erskine. ‘Have showcases made. If I wished to send you humans who are monsters not on account of the deformity of their bodies but because of their freakish manners, you would not have space to put them all.’14 Peter waged a battle both with Russians and with himself to overcome their ‘freakish manners’ and to transform them into ‘modern, civilised’ persons. In this sense, Alexis was a test of Peter's powers of transformation. His failure to turn his own son into a new model citizen, as he saw it, was particularly regrettable and in the end required nothing less than the destruction of the failed experimental material. The irony is that Peter himself, with his great height and facial tics, was a physical oddity, whose own waxwork and personal belongings joined the Kunstkamera collection after his death, to sit among the pickled babies in preserving jars and the stuffed effigies of his horse from Poltava and his favourite dogs.
Alexis's trial
Alexis was tried by a special tribunal known as the Chancellery for Secret Inquisitorial Affairs. It made its initial investigations in Moscow, then in June 1718 moved to St Petersburg, where Alexis was locked up in the Peter-Paul fortress. Peter intended this to be a show trial, conducted with every semblance of openness by the standards of the day. Both church and lay officials were consulted and accounts of the proceedings were published in Russia and later abroad. The main charge against Alexis was high treason: he had sought Austrian aid to overthrow and assassinate Peter, ‘hoping for his father's death with expressions of joy’, as he allegedly confided to his confessor Father Ignat'ev. Nearly all the evidence for a plot was based on confession and hearsay, on flimsy written evidence in two letters sent by Alexis to the Senate from Naples, and a report from the imperial envoy Otto von Pleyer of a plot to kill Peter and proclaim Alexis, without any indication, however, that Alexis was the instigator. Much attention during the investigation focused on Alexis's moral and physical failings – his laziness, drunkenness, shirking, attempts to escape the succession – while his motive for wishing to kill his father was said to be his antipathy towards Peter's reforms. ‘I shall bring back the old people and choose myself new ones according to my will,’ he said, according to his mistress Afrosinia's testimony. ‘When I become sovereign I shall live in Moscow, and leave St Petersburg simply to be like any other town; I won't launch any ships; I shall maintain troops only for defence, and won't wage war against anyone; I shall be content with the old domains. In winter I shall live in Moscow, in summer in Iaroslavl’.15 Afrosinia was later released for her co-operation. The fate of the child she was carrying is unknown. It emerged that Alexis loathed Peter's entertainments, hated watching the launching of ships, and disapproved of reforms relating to dress and church property. In short, by preferring Moscow, hating naval matters and wishing to limit Russia's military conquests Alexis as good as threatened to destroy everything that Peter held dear. Once Peter believed in these mental acts of treachery, proving that Alexis had planned his father's physical annihilation was a mere technicality.
Interrogation under torture (the standard Russian trial procedure) began on the morning of 19 June, when Alexis was questioned on twelve points, accompanied by twenty-five blows from the knout. The procedure was repeated that evening, this time in the presence of Father Ignat'ev, who also received twenty-five blows. A further torture session took place on 24 June, this time with only fifteen blows, probably because of Alexis's deteriorating condition. Usually sufficient time was allowed between sessions for prisoners' wounds to heal, the aim being to extract confessions rather than to cause death. Peter invited leading churchmen to give their opinion on the case. Even they denounced Alexis for confiding in people who loved the ‘ancient customs’ and for speaking with distaste of the novelties which his father had introduced, but they declined to reach a decision on the grounds that this was a civil case and subject to the tsar's absolute power. Although they were inclined towards punishment for an errant son (which they illustrated with copious biblical texts), they did not reject the option of mercy, for ‘the heart of the tsar is in the hands of God’.16 The 126 senators and civil officials who constituted the court duly delivered a guilty verdict and a sentence of death at noon on 24 June, but the interrogation by torture continued into the afternoon, for Peter was desperate to extract more information. The next day Alexis was confronted with letters found in his house. On the 26th he was tortured again. That same evening he was dead.
The death of Alexis
An entry in the record book of the Peter-Paul fortress garrison states:
On June 26 [1718] at 8 a.m. there gathered in the garrison his majesty, the illustrious prince [Menshikov], Prince Iakov Fedorovich Dolgoruky, Gavrila Ivanovich Golovkin, Fedor Matveevich Apraksin, Ivan Alekseevich Musin-Pushkin, Tikhon Nikitich Streshnev, Peter Andreevich Tolstoy, Peter Shafirov and General Buturlin for a session in the torture chamber, after which, having been in the garrison until 11 am., they dispersed. On the same day at six in the evening, being under guard in the Trubetskoy bastion of the garrison, Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich expired.17
In official reports Alexis's death was attributed to a seizure. As Weber recorded: ‘The next Day … early in the Morning the News was brought to the Czar, that the violent Passions of the Mind, and the Terrors of Death, had thrown the Czarewitz into an apoplectick Fit.’18 Unofficial versions included death by poison and the rumour that Peter had strangled Alexis with his bare hands. A story attributed to Rumiantsev, one of Alexis's escorts back to Russia, dated a month after the tsarevich's death but thought to be a later forgery, claims that Alexis was suffocated in his sleep on Peter's instructions in order to avoid the shame of a public execution. The most likely cause of death is the most obvious: Alexis, already weakened by imprisonment and illness (tuberculosis), was subjected to a series of savage beatings, the final two sessions, on 24 and 26 June, following each other rather too closely. The authorities tried to quash rumours and speculation. A letter written by the Dutch ambassador Jacob de Bie containing gossip about Alexis's death was apprehended and the rumours traced to the mother-in-law of Van Boles, a Dutch engineer working on the steeple of the Peter-Paul Cathedral. He admitted that ‘while working on the new tower in the fortress, on the eve of the tsarevich's death, I remained there for the night unobserved and in the evening saw from up there the heads of some people in the torture chamber.’19 Even this vague sighting was sufficient to lead to the arrest of the builder and his family.
Peter's reaction to his son's death can only be guessed at. According to Weber, Peter had a tearful last meeting with Alexis on the morning of his death and forgave and blessed him, but this is not confirmed elsewhere. We know only that Peter was present from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. for the last and fatal torture session. Peter's attendance at vespers in the Trinity Cathedral that same evening has been explained by his need to pray for forgiveness, but this, too, is speculation, as Peter routinely attended the evening service. At Alexis's funeral on 30 June guests reported that the tsar was ‘bathed in tears’. The priest chose the text from David: ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom’, a reference which later reappeared in the new Law of Succession in 1722.20 The tsar's own choristers sang at the service. Three days before the funeral, however, Peter celebrated the anniversary of Poltava, one of the liveliest events in the court calendar, on 29 June held the usual party for his name day, and the day after the funeral he toasted the launch of a man-of-war in the company of his new Prince-Caesar, Ivan Romodanovsky, and some English shipwrights. No trace of personal heart-searching or grief is to be found in his letters, which deal with the usual routine matters of state and diplomacy.
Peter's relations with Alexis have provided dramatic inspiration for historians, novelists, playwrights and painters. In his novel Peter and Alexis (1905), one of the most powerful fictional treatments of the topic, Dmitry Merezhkovsky constantly returns to the impossibility of penetrating Peter's feelings and getting to the real man. ‘You look and your eyes seem to deceive you, you can't tell the tsar from the jester. He surrounded himself with masks. Wasn't the “tsar carpenter” also a mask, just another “masquerade in the Dutch manner?”’ Merezhkovsky presents Peter and Alexis not as irreconcilable opposites, but as two sides of the same person, Peter all purposeful energy and action, but also brute force and hyperactivity, Alexis thoughtful and spiritual, but also a hopeless dreamer.21 Peter may have claimed that he was driven by ‘fatherly affection’, but his understanding of fatherhood was far from modern-day child-centred concepts and he echoed the beliefs of his day when he wrote that ‘private parents and with much more reason those who are beside invested with a sovereign authority, as we are, have an unlimited power over their children, independently of any other judge’.22 Peter was first and foremost a monarch, a father only second. And he was a monarch with a mission, which his son failed to support in the worst possible way: by defecting. There was a sort of dreadful consistency in Peter's treatment of Alexis, which flowed from his insistence that no one, not even a son, was entitled to privilege and preferment which he had not earned, and from the belief that those born to high office were under a special obligation to serve. Yet we know that Peter could be forgiving of all sorts of shortcomings and weaknesses in those he loved, for example, tolerating Menshikov's illiteracy and even his crimes, or making a joke of ‘Baas’ Ivan Golovin's failure to master the art of shipbuilding. Peter's affectionate and indulgent treatment of his daughters by Catherine, to whom he never failed to write when he was away, show that he could be a good father, too, although perhaps he found girls, of whom less was expected, easier to love than boys. Probably at the heart of the Alexis affair lay the fact that Peter had never loved the child of his unwanted first marriage and Alexis found it impossible to love the father who had banished his mother when he was only eight years old.
We can only speculate on the impact that the terrible events of 1718 had upon Peter's second family. In the later stages of Alexis's trial Catherine was heavily pregnant with their last daughter, another Natalia, who was born on 19/20 August. If she did try to mediate on Alexis's behalf (he was, after all, her godfather as well as her stepson), no records survive. The trial poisoned the atmosphere at court, where fears of being implicated as one of Alexis's ‘accomplices’ must have lingered for months if not years. The Chancellery for Secret Inquisitorial Affairs continued to function after Alexis's death. Between 1718 and 1725 it investigated 370 ‘grave matters’, including expressions of sympathy for Alexis, complaints against Catherine and further revelations about Evdokia's ‘scandalous' activities in Suzdal’, which led to the arrest of over 150 people. Even so, memorial services for Alexis were conducted for a year after his death. Even a traitor was not cut off from prayers for the souls of the dead, which were a vital feature of Orthodoxy, although his tomb was hidden away beneath the staircase of the bell tower of the Peter-Paul Cathedral next to his wife Charlotte and Tsarevna Maria Alekseevna (died 1723), rather than in the main body of the cathedral. In 1906, almost two centuries later, cracks were discovered in the floor and the three tombs had to be reconstructed. Three horizontal slabs and three vertical slabs of white marble, with crosses and inscriptions, were set up. In 1911 the commandant of the fortress reported that no lamps were lit over the graves. Only recently has the door to the recess been opened to allow visitors to the cathedral access to the long-neglected tombs, which are now regularly decorated with flowers.
Assemblies and The Honourable Mirror of Youth
The Alexis affair overshadowed 1718, but the war carried on as usual, more bogged down than ever in diplomatic complexities. In May 1718 a Russo-Swedish peace congress opened in the Åland islands. The Russian ministers Peter Shafirov, James Bruce and Heinrich (Andrei) Osterman went armed with General Conditions for Peace, which stipulated that Ingria, Karelia, Estonia and Livonia, including Reval and Viborg, were to remain Russian in perpetuity but that Finland could be returned to Sweden. Various plans were discussed, including a Russo-Swedish alliance, but they failed to reach an agreement. Then on 30 November (11 December) Charles XII was killed at Frederiksten in Norway while campaigning against Denmark, officially the victim of a stray bullet, although there were rumours that he was murdered. Peter is said to have wept at the news, perhaps as much in the realisation that this could be a setback to peace as out of grief for his old adversary. While Western powers were making their own arrangements with the new Swedish regime and carving up territories and spheres of influence in north Germany, Russia found itself isolated. But Peter's programme to make Russia part of Europe continued.
On 26 November 1718, he issued a decree on assemblies, prompted by his further observations of polite society during his foreign tour the previous year. It explained that ‘assembly (assemblei) is a French word, which cannot be expressed in Russian in one word, but means a free meeting or gathering in someone's house not only for amusement but also for business’.23 The first party under the new regulations was held in the house of the reigning Prince-Pope Peter Buturlin in St Petersburg on 27 November, making a firm association with Peter's mock court, which was often required to act out new rituals. So ‘free’ were the social gatherings envisaged by Peter that not only were they open to decently (i.e. Western) clad persons of either sex from nobles to craftsmen (servants and peasants were excluded), but the host was not obliged to greet or entertain his guests, not even the tsar, or even to be at home, in marked contrast to traditional Russian hospitality which involved elaborate rituals of meeting and farewell. (In early eighteenth-century England, it is worth noting, any member of the ‘respectable classes’ could gain access to the public rooms of the royal palaces on assembly or ‘drawing room’ days.) In Russia assemblies were intended to transcend the barriers of service class and family circle and also endorsed the sexual desegregation which Peter had championed since the 1690s. A gentleman could invite any lady to dance, even the empress. Guests were positively encouraged to indulge in activities once denounced by the church (and still abhorred by traditionalists) as ‘foreign devilishness’ – smoking, dancing, cards, chess and draughts and instrumental music and games such as forfeits, ‘questions and commands’ and ‘cross-purposes’.24 Bergholz records a Moscow assembly at which ‘in the room where the ladies sit and dancing is held people were smoking and playing draughts, which caused a stink and clatter which was inappropriate in the presence of ladies and music’.25 Even the higher clergy held assemblies, the first of which took place in December 1723 in the Donskoy monastery in Moscow.
Despite their alleged ‘freedom’, Peter's assemblies involved a characteristic degree of compulsion, both in the manner of their introduction and in their subsequent supervision. The police visited homes to check that everything was in order (the 1718 edict was issued in the name of Anton Devier, the St Petersburg chief of police) and the authorities sometimes demanded lists of guests. The perceived need to spell out the details by edict underlined just how recent and weakly rooted was Russia's adopted Western-style etiquette. A year earlier Russia's first behaviour book or etiquette manual had been published, The Honourable Mirror of Youth, or a Guide to Good Manners, incorporating charts of the Cyrillic alphabet in old (Church) and new (Civic) typescripts, followed by moral teachings: ‘Love God and the Tsar, and oppose neither one of them’; ‘Honour priests, respect your elders’ and so on. One section comprised advice for young men, beginning with the command that ‘Before all else children must hold their father and mother in great respect.’ There were warnings against nose picking and sneezing in people's faces and instructions on the treatment of servants, deportment, dancing, conversation and ‘how a young man should behave when sitting in the company of others’:
Do not eat like pigs and do not blow into the bowl so it splashes everywhere. Do not be the first to drink; hold back and avoid drunkenness; drink and eat only as much as you need; be the last one to finish eating … when you drink, do not wipe your lips with your hand but use a napkin, and do not drink until you have swallowed your food. Do not lick your fingers and do not gnaw bones but rather take the meat off with a knife. Do not pick your teeth with a knife but use a toothpick and cover your mouth with one hand when picking.
This advice was not devised specifically with ‘barbaric’ Russians in mind, as some commentators have suggested. It derives from Erasmus's De civilitate morum puerilium (1530), which retained its popularity all over Europe right up to the end of the eighteenth century. Instruction in the use of napkins, cutlery and toothpicks was part of the civilising process to distinguish gentlemen from the lower orders, which had occurred in polite Western society a century or more earlier. For all his desire for informality, Peter's foreign travels had taught him much about the standards of public behaviour required to earn the reputation of being civilised, even if in many of the households he visited this civilisation was the thinnest of veneers, especially in some of the minor courts of northern Europe. Russia did not have a monopoly on drinking, carousing and lewdness, but Peter learned that such behaviour was more acceptable if indulged in by men and women wearing the latest French fashions and with the proper accoutrements. So Peter imported such refinements as table napkins, individual table settings of plates (in Muscovy even boyars tended to dip straight into communal bowls), proper cutlery (although he carried around a spoon in his pocket for personal use) and glasses rather than metal beakers. Many foreign words to do with food and cooking appeared in the Russian vocabulary: kofe (coffee), desert, frukt (fruit), ananas (pineapple), sous (sauce), anchous (anchovies) and so on. The basic Muscovite joint of roast meat was supplemented by cuts of bifshteks, entrekot, file and shnitsel, prepared by a kukhmeister hired from abroad.
What is not usually observed is that the last 41 pages of the Mirror are devoted to advice for young women, under the headings ‘The Crown of Maidenly Honour and Virtue’, ‘Maidenly Chastity’ and ‘Maidenly Humility’, the first of which lists and describes twenty virtues, of which about half are related to piety and religious observance. Far from displaying the supposed new open ideals of Peter's reformed society, as encouraged by the mixed-sex assemblies, the texts for young women reinforced older codes. The Mirror echoed the sixteenth-century Russian Book of Household Management (Domostroi), which was read in noble households well into the nineteenth century, in its admonition to women to ‘avoid all inclinations to lack of decorum and all evil temptations such as wicked conversations, unclean habits and actions, rude language, casual and lascivious clothing, seductive letters, lecherous songs, rude fables, stories, songs, histories, riddles, silly proverbs and abusive jokes and pranks, for these are an abomination before God’.
Peter's ‘democratic’ assemblies did not last long after his death, when they were replaced by gatherings of the nobility with strictly limited access. As far as élite women were concerned, there was to be no return to the seclusion of the terem, but those who read the Mirror were warned that they must attempt to combine the new socialising with the old proprieties. Neither fathers nor husbands appreciated spoiled goods. Assemblies and the new etiquette are yet another example of Peter's insistence on intervening in areas where previously the state did not venture much. In the words of a later Slavophile commentator, ‘above all the apparent jollity and revelry of life there reigned the iron will of the head pedagogue, which knew no bounds – everyone made merry by decree and even to the sound of drumbeats, they got drunk and made merry under compulsion’.26 Nothing was left to chance.
The chief of police
St Petersburg was always in Peter's thoughts, especially now that he was able to spend more time there. The focus on fine buildings to embellish the water-fronts now widened to include measures to improve the environment. This was the first Russian city to be under ‘police’ administration (politsiia), in the eighteenth-century sense of provisions for order, cleanliness and welfare, as well as crime prevention. Peter picked up some ideas in Paris, which had its own lieutenant-general of police. St Petersburg's first chief of police was Anton Devier (Antonio De Vieira), a man of Portuguese descent whom Peter hired in Holland.
With admirable resourcefulness, Devier supplemented the small workforce allocated to him with the efforts of the city population at large. On 20 March 1720, for example, St Petersburg inhabitants of all ranks who owned horses were ordered to bring a cartload of manure from each horse to a designated place on Vasil'evsky Island; ‘if people fail to carry out this order they will be fined the sum of one rouble for each [undelivered] cartload. Let this be announced in St Petersburg to the beat of drums.’27 In October 1721 Devier received an order for the construction of abattoirs at the mouth of the Moika ‘to be built to resemble residences with false windows, and to improve their appearance painted with paints obtained from the State Revenues College, since when His Majesty was travelling along that river past the paper mills he had a good look at the abattoirs which the butchers have built and found them to be very poor, scattered all over the place, and the surrounding area was dirty.’28 In April 1722 he received another order for distribution: ‘Anyone who has to construct wooden buildings should boil moss well in boiling water before using it [for stuffing cracks], because cockroaches hatch out in raw moss, which contains flies and other vermin and they will subsequently grow and multiply.’29 (Peter was terrified of cockroaches.) Other public hygiene measures involved setting up model stalls made of canvas to replace the ramshackle premises used by street food traders, ‘for better appearance and cleanliness’. Apparently, people had been making tents from dirty, smelly rags, ‘disgusting to the human sight’.30 In April 1721 there was an attempt to set up a regular refuse collection service with teams of horses and drivers and vagrants to collect rubbish from outside houses.31 Live detritus was not allowed to clog up the streets, either. Beggars were banned, especially any who were on the streets ‘out of laziness and young people who are not being employed in work and for hire, from whom no good can come, only robbery’. There was a five-rouble fine for anyone caught giving alms to beggars. They were advised to dispense charity by giving their money to the hospitals or other such institutions.32
Residents were expected to improve the environment at their own expense. An edict of 17 August 1721 states:
All St Petersburg residents who were required by edict to plant maples on the streets and have already planted some are ordered by the end of this month in order to protect them from passers-by and to guard them from cattle to fence them off with boxes of the type which has been made on Admiralty Island opposite the newly built stone market. Also, anyone who in the future plants maples along the streets must be sure to make boxes as described above. Anyone contravening this order will be fined, and a notice to this effect is to be published in St Petersburg.33
Residents with property on the river were required to build their own portion of embankment, but regular repetitions of the order indicate that the response was poor.34 In general, exhortation was supplemented with a system of harsh penalties – knout, exile and hard labour – for offences such as polluting the waterways, selling rotten meat and building double walls between adjoining properties (a waste of brick!).35 According to an anecdote, Devier himself felt the tsar's cudgel on his back when during an inspection tour of the city Peter noticed that planks were missing from a bridge across one of the canals.36
Weber wrote in 1719: ‘The new Regulations of Police, a thing unheard-of in Russia before, has already produced a very good Effect, particularly as to the Safety of the publick Streets.’37 Street lanterns were installed in the better parts of town, which along with swing-beam barriers to close off main streets at night were as much to do with law and order as aesthetics, to ensure that the life of citizens was constantly under the authorities’ spotlight.38 The laying of drainage pipes and street paving ‘according to the prescribed models’ was an attempt to prevent St Petersburg turning into the muddy quagmire which Moscow became each spring and autumn.39
The comparative ease with which Peter created his model capital (even if it too seemed little more than a façade at times) emphasised the terrible difficulties of creating a model Russia. In 1718–19 he attempted yet another reorganisation of local government. A project published in November 1718 instructed the Senate: ‘In the provinces all personnel in all offices are to be appointed and given instructions and other procedures after the Swedish model.’ The new system was to be implemented by 1720, with a pilot project in St Petersburg province. Peter appended a list of Swedish terms for various posts, such as lantsgevding (from Swedish landshövding) in his own hand to the original decree.40 In January 1719 sets of instructions were issued to new provincial officials. The new-style voevoda's job description, set out in 46 articles, for example, included unmasking spies, protecting Orthodoxy, overseeing judges, maintaining military installations and defences, supervising factories, rounding up vagrants and runaways, taking inventories, conducting censuses (in preparation for the poll tax), keeping order, promoting businesses and crafts, supervising tax collections and fiscal staff, and monitoring the inheritance of estates.41 In May 1719 fifty provinces were created by dividing up the old provinces (gubernii) into sections.42 As we shall see, much of this proposal remained on paper, as did Peter's scheme (also of 1719) for the separation of justice from administration by subordinating judicial districts to the Justice College. By and large, however hard he tried, in the provinces older arrangements based on local strong men, clientele networks, custom and common law resurfaced and the new decrees remained unread and unenforceable.
The death of Peter Petrovich
The New Year of 1719 began with the usual programme of fireworks and the Epiphany ceremony on 6 January.43 Peter's positive mood is reflected in the plans which he devised in the first week of January to send an expedition to Kamchatka and beyond in order to ‘describe those regions and to ascertain whether America is joined with Asia, which must be done with the greatest of care, not only south and north, but also east and west and all to be put on a map’.44 Although much of his attention was still focused on the Baltic, he never lost sight of the wider opportunities offered by an expanding empire. Nearer to home, Peter was preparing for the planting season, assembling a team of workers to collect trees for his gardens and ordering the parks supervisor at Peterhof to get flower beds ready for planting in spring, one in the ‘Italian manner’, the other in the French.45 In late January he and Catherine visited the Martsial'nye springs near Olonets and the Petrovskie ironworks, from where he wrote to Menshikov declaring that he had never seen such fine factories and congratulating him as their ‘founder’. He raised a glass to the name-day girl, Menshikov's daughter Maria.46 Later he reported to Golovkin that they would soon stop taking the waters as ‘I can't drink any more because of the strength of them, twice as strong as the waters as Spa.’ (In the same letter he asked Golovkin to send one or more spies into Sweden via Danzig in order to ascertain what the Swedes would be doing with their fleet that spring.47) Catherine wrote to her daughter Elizabeth, ‘Your dear father has started to take the waters, which are doing His Majesty a lot of good.’48
Peter's faith in the Olonets springs, which were discovered in 1716 by the German inspector of mines Wilhelm Henning, was increased by a ‘miraculous event’ which he reported to Menshikov a week later, after he learned that Menshikov had been ill. One of his musicians had been suffering for a year with a chest infection, coughing up blood. The doctors advised him against drinking the strong mineral water, but he drank some secretly and the next day he was better, and had since grown fat. The doctors ‘were amazed’.49 This incident prompted a public announcement ‘On the action of the waters’. The illnesses reputedly cured included scurvy, jaundice, vomiting, diarrhoea and constipation, gravel (the disease which probably eventually killed Peter) and hypochondria.50 Dr Blumentrost explained the water's curative properties by a chemical analysis, providing a secular slant on the miracle cures attributed by common folk to various ‘holy’ springs. Peter's new spa was modelled on several which Peter had visited abroad – Baden in 1698 and 1708, Carlsbad in 1711–12, Bad Piermont in 1716, and Spa in 1717. After Peter's death the ‘native’ spa of which he was so proud, far from St Petersburg and with no local interest, more or less ceased to function, although memories lingered into the nineteenth century in the shape of two old birches known locally as Peter and Catherine. It was revived in Soviet times, as we shall see.
Back in St Petersburg in late March Peter dispatched a series of missives on revenue collecting to provincial governors. By now he knew better than to put his trust only in the written word. He instructed Peter Boriatinsky, a Preobrazhensky guardsman, to deliver a letter to the governor of Moscow and his assistants in person and then ‘to pester him ceaselessly to make sure that he carries out the instructions without delay’. If they failed to comply, Boriatinsky was instructed to fetter them by the legs and neck, put them in chains and not release them until they had done so.51 On 1 April 1719 Peter invited an audience to watch a performance by Samson the strongman, only to dismiss them with an inscription let down from the scenery bearing the words APRIL FOOL. The year before Peter had staged a mock fire and summoned the brigade, who were then rewarded with beer and brandy.52
A few weeks later the mood changed dramatically. Since the proclamation of Peter Petrovich as Peter's heir, his development and upbringing had been closely monitored. Catherine's letters to Peter offer glimpses of their pride and concern. In July 1718 she wrote that their son had been ailing because of teething, but now, with God's help, was in good health and had cut three teeth. ‘And please take care, Dad, because he has a bone to pick with you; when I remind him that his Papa has gone away he doesn't like it; he likes it much better and is pleased when you tell him that Papa is here.’ In August she reported that young Peter was always amusing himself drilling his soldiers and firing toy cannon, just like his father.53 The boy's likeness was captured by various artists, for example, in a much-reproduced portrait by Peter's French court artist Louis Caravaque of Peter as Cupid with his bow kneeling on a cushion, which holds a crown and the Order of St Andrew, predicting a glorious rule to come, or in Johann Dannhauer's 1719 miniature on the inside lid of a gold snuffbox, in which the small boy in a plumed head-dress sits on a pile of velvet and points to Dannhauer's own profile portrait of his father to his left.
In view of all this tender concern and expectation, the laconic report of the boy's death, on 25 April 1719, in the daily journal kept in Alexander Menshikov's household, makes painful reading:
His Excellency [Menshikov] visited the palace and spent about an hour in the apartments of His Royal Highness the tsarevich, then left for his home. At four in the afternoon General Apraksin sent an orderly with the news that the tsarevich had died, at which His Excellency left at once for the palace, went to the apartments and made the necessary arrangements for the funeral.
The scribe adds the information that at the time of his death Peter Petrovich was 3 feet 4 inches tall.54 The loss was not entirely unexpected – it turns out that the boy had always been ‘weak and puny’, lagging far behind his cousin, Peter Alekseevich, just a couple of weeks his senior55 – but this did not make it any easier to bear. Catherine was too distraught to attend the funeral and Peter is said to have locked himself in his room for several days.56 But their letters for April and May do not mention their bereavement and reference to it is oddly missing from diplomatic correspondence, as though Peter was reluctant to advertise his loss too widely, for Peter Petrovich's death once again left him without any male issue except his grandson, whom most people, following the old dispensation, must now regard as the heir presumptive. There was no official declaration either to confirm or deny it. Tsar Peter was alive and well and for the time being the question of the succession remained dormant.
A passion for the fleet
There was little time for grieving. The navigation season was under way and as ever Peter found comfort in ships and sailing, especially now that real action was once again in store. In May the Russian fleet captured Swedish ships off the Oesel islands and in July bombarded the Swedish mainland. The journals for June and July are full of navigational entries – weather charts, signals, battle formations – as Peter sailed aboard the ship Ingermanland to Hangö. He took a personal interest in every new vessel. On 22 June he wrote to the English shipwright Richard Cozens:
I am writing about the ships which you built. The Neptune is a very fine ship and so fast that it's probably the best in the fleet. The Hangö also goes very well and is very obedient to the wheel, only for its height not terribly stable and as we so far have not had a strong wind for sailing and it bends from a lightest breeze more than the others, we'll let you know what happens when we have some better weather.57
The activities of shipbuilders like Cozens and his friends Noye and Browne in Russia were beginning to arouse the anxiety of the British authorities, who passed an Act of Parliament to prevent British craftsmen working ‘in foreign parts’. But, as the British envoy in Russia James Jefferyes pointed out, men such as Cozens would be hard to tempt back to England, ‘for they are the most carressed by the Czar and consequently by all the great men of the kingdom; they partake of his diversions, and on festival-days sit at his own table when persons of the best quality are bound to stand and wait …’. Only the offer of a much bigger salary might entice them to return home. In the past few years the Russian fleet had grown by some twenty-seven or twenty-eight ships of the line, of which a considerable number were built in St Petersburg and were said ‘to be ships as good and as well built as any Europe can afford’, with ten more under construction in the yards. Russian seamen ‘grow better every day’ and ‘the Czar's fondness for the fleet is his predominant and favourite passion, which doubtless will prompt and push him on to advance and bring it in as great a reputation as possibly he can’.58 Britain had good cause for concern.
On 13 July Peter sent a number of identical letters, including one to ‘Sire’ Romodanovsky, to report that the galley and the deep-water fleet had arrived, but ‘we have not seen the enemy either on the water or in the entrance to the skerries; may God grant a good ending, but the beginning has been very propitious’.59 A week later the men on the ships heard gunfire in the distance, which turned out to be Colonel Lacy's troops attacking the ironworks at Lesta Bruck. As the war dragged on (in September the Åland congress broke up), so did the need to raise money resurface, centring on the question of how to provision the standing army inside Russia now that action abroad was sporadic. Censuses were conducted as a preliminary to the introduction of a poll or soul tax, which was imposed on each male head or ‘soul’ rather than on households, as in the past. Counts or revisions identified some 5.5 million male souls liable to pay the tax (women were not counted), which was collected for the first time in 1724 at a rate of 74 kopecks per head. It was reckoned that it took 47 peasants to maintain one infantryman at a cost of 28.5 roubles per year and 57 to maintain one cavalryman. Crown and state peasants paid an additional 40 kopecks in quitrent and urban tax-payers paid 1.2 roubles. The new tax had considerable administrative and social implications. It clarified or changed the status of certain groups by turning them into taxpayers, for example, the single householders (odnodvortsy), who were once classified among the non-taxpaying servitors. Some old social groups such as slaves disappeared as distinct categories and became liable to the tax on the same basis as peasants. Poll tax produced an increase in government revenues but economic historians continue to argue about whether it increased the burden on the individual peasant. Its introduction coincided with famine years, the period of harsh winters sometimes referred to as the ‘Little Ice Age’ which affected Russia most drastically in 1721–24, and a temporary decline in money supply as a result of the payment of compensation to Sweden after peace was made in 1721. Sums were fixed regardless of ability to work or pay, with minors and the aged included among the taxpayers. Warnings of the ‘ruin’ of the peasantry were sounded after Peter's death and the basic tax was reduced to 70 kopecks, but the poll tax itself turned out to be one of Peter's most enduring legacies, abolished only in 1887.
In December 1719 the College of Mines and Manufacture was established (in 1722 a separate manufaktur-kollegiia was created) and its functions were set out in a charter, the Berg-privilegii, which includes some interesting reflections on Russian enterprise:
Compared with many other lands, our Russian state is blessed with large quantities of useful metals and minerals, which have not till now been mined with much diligence; since they have not been exploited as they should have been, much benefit and many profits, which could have been obtained for us and our subjects, have been lost. We acknowledge that the main reason for this has been partly that our subjects have not understood mining and what can be done with it for the good of the state and the people and partly also they have been unwilling to take the risk and invest money and labour for fear that once these mining works are established and making good profits they will be taken away from their owners. … [Therefore] all are allowed and each and every one is permitted, whatever his rank or dignity, in all places, both on his own land and on that of others to excavate, smelt, found and refine all types of metals….60
The charter made clear that mines belonged to the crown and that a tenth of the profits must come back to the state. It also underlined the weakness of landed property rights. Owners of land on which another person excavated ores had no redress if damage was caused, but could claim a share of the profits. Not surprisingly, there were frequent clashes between landowners and their stewards and prospectors. Exploiting the enormous potential of Russian mineral wealth was to remain on the agenda for Peter's successors.
Statutes and regulations
Peter spent the first two months of 1720 in St Petersburg in a frenetic round of Yuletide visitations and assemblies – Dolgoruky's on 14 January, Golitsyn's on the 19th, Tolstoy's on the 21st, the Prince-Pope's on the 24th, a party on board ship on the 27th. February, before the start of Lent, was the time for weddings. The tsar attended at least five between 5 and 21 February, and on the 22nd he was the chief guest at the wedding of the giant Nicolas Bourgeois (Nikolai Zhigant) and a Finnish giantess. Giants were in shorter supply than dwarfs and Peter gave his permission for the couple to marry only when the bride-to-be was pregnant, in the hope of obtaining additional tall recruits for his guards. Bourgeois, it seemed, had no duties apart from being on view as his obesity made him incapable of doing much else. For this he was paid the considerable salary of 300 roubles per year.61 After his death from a stroke in 1724 a stuffed effigy in his skin went on show in the Kunstkamera, where it was painted by the Swiss artist Georg Gsell. The ample skeleton is still displayed there today. Other entertainments recorded in the court journal for February included rides on bulls, dogs, bears and goats and a procession of the Prince-Pope in a giant jug ‘at the tavern’.
As always, Peter had no difficulty in combining work with play. He visited the Admiralty on several occasions to put the finishing touches to the Naval Statute, ‘on all which pertains to the good organisation while the fleet is at sea … selected from five maritime regulations [French, British, Danish, Swedish and Dutch], with a substantial part added’.62 The introduction declared that ‘a potentate who has only land forces has but a single arm; he who also has a fleet has two arms’,63 and explained that the word ‘fleet’ was French: ‘By this word is meant a number of water-going vessels travelling along together, or standing, both military and merchant’. The work illustrates two of Peter's approaches to the edification of his subjects. On the one hand, he was adept, with a little help from Feofan Prokopovich, at making his own myths. The preface to the Statute relates the history of Russia's naval exploits, culminating in the uplifting tale of Peter's little boat, the ‘grandfather’ of the Russian navy. To underline the point, the 1720 edition had an engraving of a sailing ship without a steering wheel and a naked boy sitting in it to signify inexperienced Russia. The text is highly allusive, transforming Peter's search for ever greater expanses of water to sail his ships into a sort of pilgrimage. On the other hand, the main body of the Statute illustrates Peter's blunt, practical side, his mania for written rules and regulations to specify precisely what each person's duties were, ‘from the first to the last’. Book 3, for example, includes among the tasks of the shipboard janitor the responsibility for ensuring that people relieve themselves in the authorised places.64 There are templates for ships' logs, provisions allocation, complete lists of tackle, and several pages on flag and lantern signals.
The end of February saw the publication of one of the most important pieces of legislation of Peter's reign, the General Regulation (General'nyi reglament, both words of foreign origin) for the administration of the Colleges, which went through twelve separate drafts before it appeared in print. Following the example of other Christian monarchs, the decree explains, Peter had founded the Colleges,
for the sake of the orderly running of … state affairs and the correct allocation and calculation of his revenues and the improvement of useful justice (iustitsiia) and police (politsiia) … also for the sake of the utmost preservation of the safety of his loyal subjects and the maintenance of his naval and land forces in good condition as well as commerce, arts and manufacture and the good establishment of his sea and land taxes and for the increase and spread of mining works and other state needs.65
The Regulation's 56 clauses are imbued with concern for public accountability and the good order of the collegiate offices. No detail was neglected. Audience chambers were to be equipped with good-quality carpets and chairs (but no throne was provided for the tsar), the collegiate table must be covered with a decent cloth and draped with a canopy and there must be a good clock on the wall, an essential feature for someone as obsessed with time-keeping as Peter. In 1724 it was specified further that the General Regulation must be adhered to strictly and read aloud to officials in the same way as the Military Statute was read out to soldiers and sailors ‘… for the proper understanding of soldierly duty’.66 No one must be given an excuse to plead ignorance as a justification for his mistakes.
Each college had its own regulation, based on appropriately adapted Swedish models. The 1720 law was thus a ‘regulation of regulations’, the proliferation of which accorded with Peter's belief that the common good was best served by a large body of well-drafted legislation.67 But how to make officials implement the regulations and ‘loyal subjects’ obey them? As Peter had written in the revised duties of the Senate in 1718: ‘How can a state be governed when edicts are not implemented, for contempt for edicts is in no respect different from treason?’68 This is a problem which Peter never solved.
Pastimes
On 29 February 1720 Peter set off by way of Schlüsselburg for a return visit to the Martsial'nye medicinal springs, where he stayed until the end of March. The springs, too, had their regulations: here games such as chess, spillikins (biriulki), billiards and a kind of shove-ha'penny called trukt-tafel were interspersed with taking the waters, working on the lathe and visits to the ironworks, where on 3 March Peter cast a large iron bar. There were dinners (on 12 March sixty persons ‘of all ranks’ dined with the tsar) and regular church services, during some of which Peter sang with the choristers. Back in St Petersburg he started a round of visits to estates and settlements around the gulf of Finland – Dubki and Kotlin on 29 March, Peterhof on the 30th. That day he also attended the funeral of Daria Gavrilovna Rzhevskaia: in 1717 she had been promoted to the office of ‘Arch-Abbess’ of the Drunken Assembly by the newly elected Prince-Pope Peter Buturlin, who wrote that he had lauded her ‘exploits’ (in drinking) before the Assembly, which had given its consent.69 Her place was taken by Princess Anastasia Petrovna Golitsyna, who also performed the role of ‘jester’ in Tsaritsa Catherine's household. There followed a round of assemblies (Musin-Pushkin's on 31 March, Ivan Golovin's on 3 April), inspections of ships and visits to the Admiralty, Foreign Affairs and War colleges and the Senate. Easter week involved daily attendance at the liturgy and on Easter Sunday Peter took communion together with his daughters Anna and Elizabeth. On 16 April 1720 he attended mass, then had a walk around town and launched two boats. The following day after mass he visited Prince-Caesar and Golovin.
Throughout April, May and June the Polish ambassador was in St Petersburg and many of the court's excursions were for his benefit: for example, on 8 May there was a boat trip with sixteen barges and twenty-two skiffs. On 10 May they visited the Kunstkamera and the next day took a trip on a yacht. On 15 May they set off on a four-day trip which took them to Kronstadt, where they dined with the admiral and naval officers and visited the harbours and the fortress, then moved to Menshikov's palace at Oranienbaum. On 30 May they celebrated Peter's forty-eighth birthday (for some reason the journal keeper noted it as the start of his fiftieth year) with fireworks and two days later mourned the death of the Prince-Pope's wife at her funeral in the church of St Samson. On 9 June the Nevsky fleet set off on another expedition to Kronstadt, where the royal party inspected work on the harbour and canal. Peter and the Polish ambassador dined aboard the Hangö and visited the captured Swedish vessel Wachtmeister, thence to Oranienbaum on 13–14 June, where they ‘walked in the grove by the ponds’, then to Peterhof and Monplaisir, seven miles to the east, on the 15th. At nearby Strel'na they laid the foundations of a pavilion and at Peterhof drove in carriages along the avenues. Most days there were boat trips around the Finnish gulf, to Kotlin, Dubki, Sestraretsk. By now Peter must have known the gulf, which once seemed so vast, like the back of his hand. June the 25th saw the thirty-eighth anniversary of Peter's coronation, the funeral of Iakov Dolgoruky and the death of General Adam Weide, who was buried with full military honours at the Alexander Nevsky monastery on 30 June. Others who died that summer included Peter's chess partner, Father Bitka, and A. M. Golovin.
The journals for the summer of 1720 give the impression of a carefree, almost aimless existence – boat trips, launches of ships, garden walks, parties. On 30 July, having spent the last week or so cruising the gulf as far as Viborg, Peter sailed from Kotlin to Peterhof with Admiral Apraksin, Ivan Golovin and an assortment of naval officers and shipwrights. After Peter docked near Monplaisir palace, Catherine, who had travelled by land from neighbouring Strel'na, joined him by the statue of Adam amidst fountains, where wine was served. (Eve stood at the opposite end of the park.) That evening the company took a turn round the gardens and dined in Monplaisir. The next day Peter acted as godfather at the christening of the son of Major Khotiantsov. After lunch they walked around in the garden again and towards evening, having crossed the canal by the new bridge which had just been finished, they drank wine and from there went to the groves, where they stacked newly-mown hay into ricks. ‘At dusk His Majesty paid a visit to the major in his quarters. They spent the night at Monplaisir.’ On 1 August they drove out to inspect the reservoir for the cascades and fountains and that evening ‘made merry with various invented games’.70
Life was not quite so idyllic as these accounts of rural romps suggest. Peace remained elusive and in the latter half of 1720 Peter was occupied with naval operations. In one of the last major encounters of the war, on 27 July 1720 the Russian galley fleet under the command of Prince M. M. Golitsyn (the Younger) beat the Swedes off Grengham in the Åland islands, which had served as a useful base since the Russians snatched them from Sweden in 1714. The four Swedish frigates captured in the encounter were among the last trophies of the war. They were taken first to Kronstadt, then to St Petersburg, where Peter viewed them on 6 September. Aleksei Zubov commemorated the occasion in his engraving of a line of captured ships and Russian galleys sailing in front of Trinity Square with gun salutes from the fortress in the background.71 On 8 September there was a triumphal ceremony with fireworks in the evening. Feofan Prokopovich used the occasion to muse on Peter's first boat: ‘Who will not say that this small dinghy was to the fleet as the seed is to the tree?’72 Training the future generation of naval men remained a priority. Ivan Nepliuev recorded one of Peter's most famous utterances in 1720 at an examination of naval trainees recently returned from abroad: ‘You see, lad, even though I'm the tsar I have callouses on my hands, all in order to show you an example so that I may see fitting helpers and servants of the father-land, even if I have to wait until I am old.’73
In autumn the fun resumed. Several entries in the journals contained the formula ‘dovol'no veselilis’ (a good time was had by all), which was especially true for Peter when ships were involved. On 2 October the 66-gun ship Astrakhan, built by Joseph Noye, was launched; on 5 October it was the turn of Richard Cozens's ship St Peter and on 8–11 October the yacht fleet had an excursion to Schlüsselburg. Peter arrived in his yacht on the 10th, when he visited Menshikov's new residence and attended vespers in the fortress church before retiring for the night to his cabin. (Peter loved to sleep on board ship.) The next day – the sixteenth anniversary of the capture of Schlüsselburg – there was a procession of the cross for thanksgiving, followed by a dinner where, again, ‘a good time was had by all’ to the sound of a series of gun salutes.74 Winter drew on. On 29 October the tsarevny and the grand duke and grand duchess transferred from their summer quarters to the Winter Palace and Peter travelled by sledge for the first time that autumn. After hearing vespers in the Summer Palace he played chess and spillikins all evening. The next day there was a trip on a wherry across to the Trinity Cathedral for the liturgy, then back to the Winter Palace. On 24 November, for Catherine's name day, the liturgy in the cathedral was followed by a grand dinner with ministers, fireworks and illuminations. The year ended with renewed hopes of peace.