VIII

The Year of Nystad: 1721

He has brought us out of the darkness of ignorance onto the stage of glory before the eyes of the whole world and, as it were, transformed us from non-existence into being, bringing us into the society of political nations. (Gavrila Golovkin's speech conferring new imperial titles on Peter I at the celebration of the peace of Nystad, 22 October 1721.)

Yuletide visits

Peter celebrated the New Year of 1721 in good spirits in the company of his daughters, grandchildren, senators and ministers. The evening ended with ‘a great number of rockets’, the first of several spectacular firework displays in what turned out to be a year of victory. The customary Yuletide ‘carol-singing’ visitations with members of the Drunken Assembly followed. On 3 January Peter went to the homes of Peter Tolstoy, Mikhail Matiushkin, Ivan Golovin and Ivan Musin-Pushkin, on the 6th it was the turn of Admiralty colleagues Fedor Apraksin, Cornelius Cruys, Grigory Chernyshev and Fedor Skliaev and on the 8th A. M. Sheremetev, Anikita Repnin and Prince Trubetskoy.

Peter took great delight in devising bawdy rules and regulations for these occasions. A declaration to prospective hosts reads:

Our intemperance means that we are sometimes so incapacitated that we cannot move from the spot and it may happen that we are unable to visit all the houses that we have promised to visit on a given day, and the hosts may be out of pocket as a result of the preparations they have made. Therefore we declare and firmly pronounce, on threat of punishment with the Great Eagle Cup, that nobody should prepare any food. And if we should deign to have a meal from someone, we shall communicate our orders in advance, and for confirmation we have signed this edict with our own hand and ordered it sealed with the great seal of Gabriel.

The rule about catering was apparently inconsistently applied, for another of Peter's memoranda states:

Announcement of what each should have at home when we arrive: bread, salt, rolls, caviare, hams, dried chicken or hares, cheese if there is any, butter, sausages, tongues, cucumbers, cabbage, eggs and tobacco. What we like best of all are wines, beer and mead. The more there is, the more pleased we shall be….¹

Sometimes the revellers demanded money for their songs, in the manner of modern carol-singers. For the well-to-do people they visited (common folk were let off the hook), this was tantamount to having to pay a New Year tax. Peter did not invent the idea of Yuletide customs, although he put his own peculiar stamp on them. As Boris Kurakin wrote: ‘There is an old custom among the Russian people before Christmas and after to play at sviatki, that is, friends gather together at someone's house in the evening and dress up in masquerade costume and the servants of distinguished people act out all sorts of funny stories. According to this custom His Majesty the tsar in his court also played at sviatki with his courtiers.’² For Peter such activities were rooted in personal relationships and private jokes and seemed more often than not to satisfy a need for letting off steam rather than to teach the Russian people a lesson about the evils of over-powerful organised religion. As Weber put it, ‘the Czar among all the heavy Cares of Government knows how to set apart some Days for the Relaxation of his Mind, and how ingenious he is in the Contrivance of those Diversions.’³ Peter, for example, was responsible for making a list of the Prince-Pope's ‘servitors’ in which all including Peter himself were given rude names based on the Russian for ‘prick’ (khui).⁴ The iron hand of the autocrat was never very effectively disguised. The Prince-Pope was expected to discipline his subordinates. A document dated 23 April 1723 lists those members who had been ‘disobedient’ and were living ‘in unruly fashion’ in Moscow. The fact that it was drawn up and annotated by the tsar indicates that ‘Archdeacon Peter’ kept a firm hold on proceedings.

On 9 January Peter set off for a three-day trip which took him along the south shore of the gulf to Strel'na, Peterhof, Oranienbaum and Kronstadt. Then there were christenings, assemblies and weddings to attend, and he found time in between to work at his lathe, where on 28 January he made some small boxes, no doubt as gifts for friends. On 27 January Anna Petrovna celebrated her thirteenth birthday and on 3 February her name day, which was marked by the launch of the ship Apostle Andrew and a firework display at the Post Office. On 12 February Peter held a rehearsal with about fifty sleds for the forthcoming wedding of the recently widowed Prince Pope, Peter Buturlin, and on the 19th there was a ball at the Post Office to mark Peter and Catherine's ninth wedding anniversary, which from now on was included in the official court calendar. At the inevitable firework display a panel appeared lighting up the word VIVAT and the monogram of P. and C. in Latin letters under a crown.

The Holy Synod

The year began in a mood of celebration and relaxation; but the keeper of the appointments journal in the Cabinet office also recorded weightier business. On 14 February Peter attended mass in the Trinity Cathedral, where he heard an address from Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich on the creation of a new body called the Spiritual College, ‘then the tsar went to the Spiritual College where all the hierarchs of the church and the ministers were gathered’, and then went off for a spot of work on his lathe en route for assemblies at the homes of Aleksei Rumiantsev and the French minister Jean-Jacques Campredon. The new statute of the Russian Orthodox church, the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi Reglament ili Ustav), which was published on 25 January 1721, had been several years in the making. In November 1718 Peter had written: ‘For better administration [of the church] henceforth I think it would be convenient to have a spiritual college. …’⁵ Clearly, this remark was made with the new government colleges in mind and the new Synod board, like the colleges, comprised a president, two vice-presidents, four councillors, four assessors – all priests – plus one ‘honest, right-thinking person of secular rank’. At its first session, however, the new body changed its name to ‘Most Holy Governing Synod’, echoing the title of the Senate. The Spiritual Regulation made clear that the Synod was interlocked with the state apparatus and, like it, subordinate to the tsar himself. Its members were ‘individuals assembled for the general welfare by the command of the Autocrat and under his scrutiny, jointly with others’ and they could not amend the Regulation without the tsar's consent. The president (Stefan Iavorsky, until his death in November 1722) was a mere chairman, with an equal voice with other members. Devout oppositionists were in no doubt that the tsar had usurped patriarchal authority, a view which seemed to be confirmed by, for example, the placing of a royal throne in the former patriarchal palace in Moscow. His was the decisive voice in the appointment of bishops and he interfered in church business as he saw fit. Long gone were the days when a Russian patriarch could assert, as had Nikon, that ‘the tsar must be lower than the prelate and obedient to him’.⁶

A central concern of the Regulation and a supplement published in May 1722 was education: ‘When the light of learning is extinguished there cannot be good order in the Church; there cannot be but disorder and superstitions deserving of much ridicule, in addition to dissension and most senseless heresies. … Learning is beneficial and basic for every good, as of the fatherland, so also of the Church, just like the root and the seed and the foundation.’⁷ The Regulation envisaged a new academy in St Petersburg, which would offer a course of study based on grammar, geography and history, arithmetic and geometry, logic and dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, physics and metaphysics, the Politia brevis of Pufendorf and theology, with Latin as the language of instruction, for laymen alongside intending higher clergy. Students would go on excursions to places of interest, including the royal palaces, and would play games, sail and construct forts (all strongly reminiscent of Peter's own favourite pastimes as a youth), as well as engage in amateur drama and debates; accounts of the lives of great men and passages from history would be read aloud to them at mealtimes. This new academy did not open during Peter's lifetime, but several of the seminaries envisaged in the Regulation did, notably in the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Forty-five diocesan clerical schools also opened between 1721 and 1724, and after Peter's death these and other religious establishments prepared most of the staff and students for secular higher schools, including the Academy of Sciences gymnasium and university.

Monasteries also featured in the new legislation. There were now so many restrictions on taking monastic vows that it became almost impossible for a young, fit person to become a monk or a nun. Even older men retiring from public life were discouraged from taking vows. An anecdote pithily summarises Peter's attitude:

Monasteries must use the revenue from their lands for deeds pleasing to God and for the good of the state, not for parasites. A monk needs to be fed and clothed and a prelate needs enough to maintain himself decently as befits his rank. But our monks have grown fat. The gates to heaven are faith, fasting and prayer. I'll clear them a path to paradise with bread and water, not with sturgeon and wine.⁸

The Spiritual Regulation was a key element in Peter's reforms. The official view was the one pronounced by Feofan Prokopovich at Peter's funeral in 1725 – that Peter strove ‘to promote the improvement of the priesthood and true religion among the people’.⁹ Jacob Stählin wrote: ‘From his earliest years this sovereign had a sincere reverence of God, which he preserved inviolate throughout his life and expressed at every opportunity, especially by a deep reverence for the name of God and the divine laws and respect for the essentials of the Christian religion.’¹⁰ Prokopovich and Stählin, of course, were among Peter's greatest admirers, whereas some of his critics doubted whether he was a Christian at all, a view encouraged by the blasphemous antics of the Drunken Assembly. Traditionalists denied that Peter was the Orthodox tsar. He consorted with foreigners, married one, looked like one (being beardless and dressed in foreign clothes), perhaps even was one. As early as 1700 the copyist Grigory Talitsky, who was later quartered for his crimes, denounced the behaviour of Peter and his circle and calculated that ‘now is the last time come and the Antichrist has been born and by their reckoning Antichrist is the eighth tsar Peter Alekseevich’.¹¹ Later dissidents found the number of the Beast (666) in Peter's titles (computed from the numerical values of the letters in IMPERATOR, with the M removed) and in other Petrine words, such as senators (senatri) and Holstein. Portraits of Peter with Minerva were identifed as the icons of Antichrist, the 70 kopeck poll tax as the seven-headed serpent and Peter was said sometimes to take the shape of an animal, his German boots being identified with the ‘cow's feet’ of Antichrist. All this speculation was fully consistent with popular beliefs about the devil and demons, who were thought to be capable of changing their shape at will and appearing in various disguises.

By and large, even modern historians, while not accepting the Antichrist arguments, have tended to assume that Peter, the impious tsar, had no sympathy for traditional Orthodox piety. But there is evidence to the contrary. Peter imbibed his religious beliefs in childhood, through the Orthodox liturgy, prayers, catechism, Psalms and selected passages from the Bible, ‘the wisest of all books’, as he called it.¹² His personal library, like all Russian private collections at the time, contained a substantial number of religious texts. He went to church regularly, evensong on Saturday and mass on Sunday, usually in the Trinity Cathedral if he was in St Petersburg, and during Easter week he attended daily and took communion. He enjoyed singing in church and kept his own choir of church singers. Like his fellow Christian rulers, Peter never questioned the notion that Divine Providence played a part in determining human affairs. In July 1696 in letters to announce the surrender of Azov he wrote: ‘Now with St Paul rejoice in the Lord, and again I say, rejoice! Now our joy has been fulfilled as the Lord God has rewarded our labours of these past two years and the blood that was spilt by bestowing his grace.’¹³ Such sentiments did not diminish as he grew older. In July 1709 he wrote to the British merchant Andrew Styles, thanking him for his congratulations on the victory at Poltava but reminding him that ‘to God alone belong the glory and honour (for this is a divine deed: he raises up the humble and subdues the mighty)’.¹⁴ This view was reiterated in 1724 when Peter was planning the anniversary celebrations. The Poltava victory was indeed ‘a divine miracle; it reveals that all human minds are as nothing against the will of God’.¹⁵ He believed that ‘we have a path laid before us which is unknown to us but known only to God’, and that all people wished to go to heaven, ‘when our time comes’. (Peter was in no hurry to go.¹⁶) He saw divine purpose in nature. Looking through a microscope, for example, revealed ‘a book of God's marvels … clearly showing the Creator's great wisdom’.¹⁷ Examples could be multiplied: Peter's letters are peppered with references to ‘God's grace’ and ‘the will of the Almighty’, as were those of his fellow monarchs, Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox. Atheism was not an option.

Peter's army, navy and civil service all had a use for religion in its proper place, with chaplains appointed to all service units. The Naval Statute, for example, stipulated that chaplains were to conduct services on board ship on Sundays and feast days (‘if bad weather does not prevent it’), preach sermons, administer to the sick and dying (to ensure that no one died ‘without fulfilling his Christian duty') and generally supervise moral standards.¹⁸ All state officials took an oath of loyalty on assuming office, in which they swore to serve the sovereign, his family and heirs by kissing the gospels and the cross.

At the same time, Peter was a bitter opponent of superstition and asceticism. His attitude towards icons is particularly instructive. Icons were part of his environment, as they were of every Orthodox Christian's. He venerated an image of the Saviour, which he carried with him on his campaigns and demanded on his sickbed shortly before his death. But he cracked down hard on hoaxes associated with icons, as in the case of a priest who tricked people out of their money with a ‘miraculous’ image, who was challenged to make the icon perform miracles in Peter's presence and defrocked when he confessed to fraud.¹⁹ Naval chaplains were instructed to set up just two or three icons, not large folding iconostases, and not to light superfluous candles, ‘in order to protect the ship from damage’. In general, they were not to do anything which might cause interruption and hindrance to the general ship's business.²⁰ True religion was supposed to make people more, not less, rational. When Peter admonished the Synod to do battle with the popular rituals associated with the pagan summer festival of Kupalo, he reminded them that in olden times people had still not totally accepted Christianity. Now, however, ‘by God's grace the people shines in piety’, so there was no excuse for tolerating rituals (people were drenched with water and thrown into rivers and ponds) which were ‘repulsive to God’ and which also (a characteristic touch of good sense) ‘posed a threat to human life’.²¹

Although Peter appreciated the need for prayers – all his campaigns were preceded by prayers and victory parades accompanied by thanksgiving – he had little understanding of the contemplative life. Priests were needed to officiate at church services, baptise babies, bury the dead and perform other necessary duties, including many for the state, such as reading edicts in church, but he could not see the necessity for thousands of monks and nuns ‘merely’ to pray. Monks were supported by peasant labour, the fruits of which were thus diverted from more pressing public needs. The solution was to cut down on the precious resources used up by monks (by reducing the number of monks and/or their rations) and to increase the useful labour of the remaining monks (and other ‘superfluous’ church people), by diverting their efforts into aiding the sick and destitute, teaching and other useful occupations.

Peter trusted in empirical knowledge and humankind's ability to forge its own destiny and achieve happiness on earth in preparation for heaven within the general framework of God's laws and plans. ‘Reasoning is the highest of all virtues,’ he wrote, ‘for any virtue without reason is hollow.’²² Religious customs could be suspended if they conflicted with the common good, hence although Peter opposed work on Sundays in principle, the rule could be suspended ‘in extreme emergencies’, as could fasts. ‘The inhabitants of St Petersburg daily have cause to wonder when they compare the present time with the past,’ wrote the Prussian minister Mardefeld in 1722.

At the beginning of this reign fasts were observed so religiously that anyone breaking or rejecting them was burnt. Now they write and preach publicly that fasts are nothing more than rituals established by men. All those surrounding the emperor, wishing to distinguish themselves from the common folk, hardly keep any fasts, apart from a few stubborn old men who refuse to renounce the faith of their fathers.

He pointed out that even assemblies and balls carried on during fast periods.²³ Peter's religion was quite free of all ideas of the unquestioned superiority of Orthodoxy and the heresy of other faiths, although he seems to have been prejudiced against Jews and Jesuits. Even so, recognition of the validity of other Christian denominations, and willingness to borrow elements from them, did not shake his conviction that for historical reasons Orthodoxy was the proper faith of the Russian people and it was the Russian tsar's duty not only to defend and preserve Orthodoxy but also to reform and improve it, without touching its essential doctrines or basic rituals. The church was there to serve the state, not vice versa. As for Peter's own belief, it has been described as a ‘simple soldier's faith’,²⁴ although a ‘simple sailor's’ would be even more appropriate.

Celebrations and executions

As a settlement with Sweden drew nearer, there was a mood of celebratory anticipation in St Petersburg. On 5 March 1721 Campredon attended a banquet to celebrate the launch of the significantly named 86-gun vessel Friedmacher (Peacemaker). The tables set out in the cabins included one for the Prince-Pope and his cardinals, who indulged in prodigious drinking, singing and smoking. Guards prevented the guests from leaving early. Campredon commented that he had never had such a terrible experience, but at least he managed to snatch a conversation with the tsar, who was generally difficult to pin down.²⁵ (Foreign envoys frequently complained of the lack of a regular timetable of diplomatic reception days.) Campredon records many social horrors. At a party a week earlier Menshikov handed round enormous glasses of Hungarian wine ‘without mercy’ and commanded all to drink to the health of the fleet (‘the tsar's principal delight’). The Frenchman, on the point of ‘expiring’, was saved by the start of the fireworks which allowed him to sneak away unobserved.²⁶

Festivities were punctuated by more sombre occasions. In late February Peter wrote to Prince-Caesar Ivan Romodanovsky in Moscow regarding the execution of the commandant Volkhov, convicted of robbery. ‘Have him executed, as a criminal … and do not bury his body in the ground but let it lie on top of the ground for all to see until the spring, as long as the weather is not too warm.’ He instructed Romodanovsky to intensify his pursuit of all such thieves.²⁷ On 16 March Prince Matvei Petrovich Gagarin, the former governor of Siberia, was executed. Investigation showed that he had ruled Siberia as his own personal domain and had embezzled vast amounts of state funds. When his property was inventoried after his death, a search of his Italianate Moscow palace on Tverskaia Street, built in 1707 by the architect Giovanni Fontana, revealed not only the usual rich man's silver and gold dinner services and cutlery, rich carpets and icons studded with diamonds but also carriages with silver wheels and horses shod in gold and silver. The precious metals may well have been obtained from some of the ‘gold and silver objects found in the earth’ which Peter ordered Gagarin to collect in Siberia in 1717. Despite the extravagant scale of Gagarin's crimes, Peter was reluctant to execute him because of his family's close connections with the upper echelons of the court. One of his daughters was married to a son of Chancellor Gavrila Golovkin and his son to Peter Shafirov's daughter. Gagarin was held in prison for two years but refused to confess so in the end Peter had no choice. The gallows was set up in front of the Senate house and all officials were forced to attend (a grim warning!), then had to dine and drink with the tsar.

The extent of Gagarin's crimes demonstrates just how far Peter's Russia was from being a ‘totalitarian’ state, in the sense of everything being controlled efficiently from the centre according to a unified ideology. Siberia provides an instructive, if extreme, case study of lack of co-operation, and of resistance from the bottom to the top. It has been calculated, for example, that the population of Siberia was some 30–40 per cent higher than the figure indicated by Peter's censuses; in other words taxes were spectacularly underpaid. Cultural reform also met with resistance. In 1705–6 inhabitants of Siberia petitioned to be allowed to keep their old clothes and saddles because they could not afford the prescribed Western replacements, and the government had little choice but to withdraw its order.²⁸ There was no serfdom in Siberia, which was far from the main points where the armies were mobilised, hence few nobles. This was Russia's ‘Wild East’, where even a towering figure like Peter had little influence.

Anna and Karl

Peter did not let the execution of Gagarin put him off his favourite pastimes. The same day he launched the 66-gun St Catherine and the following morning left for Riga, where he spent all of April and the best part of May. The main purpose of this trip was to arrange the marriage of his eldest daughter Anna to Karl Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, who was invited to Riga to be inspected by his prospective parents-in-law, but not by his thirteen-year-old prospective bride, who remained in St Petersburg with her sisters. Anna Petrovna was regarded as beautiful and intelligent. The best-known image of her is a portrait painted in 1717 by Louis Caravaque, in which dark-haired Anna and her blonde younger sister Elizabeth appear as nymphs with sprigs and baskets of flowers, wafting draperies and a hint of breast, suggestive of fresh, fruitful marriageability, although they were aged just nine and eight when it was painted. Was a version of this painting shown to Duke Karl? Or was it something more conventional, along the lines of Ivan Nikitin's portrait which, although painted even earlier (1716), makes her look older, with grown-up décolleté and piled-up hair. Both the French envoy La Vie and Frederick Bergholz thought Anna the spitting image of her father, as did Duke Karl's secretary Bassewitz, who declared her to be a beauty, with regular features, a gracious smile, pink and white complexion and bright eyes.²⁹

In the question of his children's marriages Peter, like his fellow European monarchs, was motivated more by reasons of state than by considerations of conjugal happiness. Karl Frederick's status as heir to the Swedish throne made him an eligible bachelor despite the fact that he was apparently short, plain, indifferent to all intellectual interests and a heavy drinker. Peter was opposed to forced marriages – Bassewitz noted on several occasions that Peter ‘although he was [Anna's] father, deemed her consent essential’³⁰ – and he loved his daughter, but arranged marriages were the order of the day. Even the non-consent of a prospective spouse could be used as a bargaining counter in diplomatic negotiations and in general children were expected to put duty before personal desires, answering yes or no as their parents dictated.

The Riga journals and letters for March–May 1721 show that Peter was as much concerned with matters navigational as matrimonial. Even when he fell ill, he recovered resting on board ship, regarding the sea air and motion of the waves as beneficial. As always, he eagerly awaited the start of the navigation season, anticipating the first reports of the breaking up of the ice in the Finnish gulf. On 22 March Peter reminded Admiral Apraksin to dispatch ships to Reval as soon as the ice began to break, ‘by the first wind, for you are well aware of [the conditions in] this channel [he uses the Dutch farvater], if you miss the wind then much is lost’. A letter to Menshikov written on the same day was all about the weather. Journal entries for late March to mid May in Peter's own hand were entirely devoted to the topic.³¹ On 1 April he went out on the Dvina in a skiff and the next day reported to Apraksin that the ice on the Dvina had started breaking up. The weather was really spring-like, warm with showers and you could see whole expanses of earth in the fields. It was a good time to plant trees.³² He told Menshikov that the ice had broken and ships were on the move and with the same letter sent some willow branches from Riga and asked his friend to send branches cut on Palm Sunday to find out which town, Riga or St Petersburg, had an earlier spring. A week or so later he asked Menshikov to send him buds and leaves from trees in the palaces at Peterhof and Dubki every week, marked with the date when they were picked.³³ Menshikov also sent him a parcel of St Petersburg vegetables.

Peter still found time to write to Anna, asking her to kiss Elizabeth (Lizetka) for him and the ‘big noisy girl Natalia and my grandchildren’. He reported that he had had a visit from the duke, ‘a nice-looking young chap’, who especially asked to send Anna his regards. On 1 May he thanked his daughters for sending him some pencils in a case, ‘which I needed as you can't get them here, for which God's grace be with you’. Perhaps he used them to sketch the ship which is mentioned in his notes.³⁴ (His agents, it seems, were seeking a match for eleven-year-old Elizabeth, as mentioned in several letters.³⁵) There were further receptions and dinners for Tsaritsa Catherine, who arrived on 24 March to be greeted by a parade of townspeople, and for the duchess of Courland, Anna Ivanovna, who was temporarily resident in Riga. Easter fell in early April that year, which meant a week of daily attendance at church and communion on Sunday. Later in April there were boat trips almost daily. On 22 May Peter left for a change of scene on a visit to Reval, where he celebrated his forty-ninth birthday. (The journal gets it wrong again, recording his fiftieth.) Here, too, the highlight of the visit was sailing, aboard the ships Elephant and Samson (named for the battle of Poltava, which took place on the feast of St Samson), and a trip on the Ingermanland to Rogervik, before he returned to Reval to set off for home.³⁶

Peter regarded his new acquisitions on the Baltic coast as extensions of St Petersburg, watery mini-Paradises where he could mess about in boats to his heart's content. They were also Russia's own little bit of the West, with a well-educated German-speaking élite and hard-working peasants, who could supply various kinds of expertise, from legal procedures to more efficient ways of tanning leather and harvesting grain. On 11 May 1722 Peter wrote to Prince D. M. Golitsyn, president of the College of State Revenues:

Have scythes and rakes made on the model of the samples, as many as possible, and see to it that next summer everyone in the grain-growing regions harvests in this manner, for [and in a first rough draft Peter underlined the following words] you yourself know that, even if a thing is good and necessary, if it is new our people will not do it unless they are forced to.³⁷

The edict combined example (actual scythes were sent to provincial governors) and compulsion. The governor of Riga was ordered to select and dispatch suitably trained peasants to Russian grain-growing regions, accompanied by armed guards. There is no evidence, however, that this measure made any impact on Russian farming practices.

Old statutes and privileges of the Baltic provinces were maintained or restored in order to encourage trade and enterprise on the basis of laws and structures which had proved effective in the past. But there was no ambiguity about who was in charge. In February 1720 the magistrates and councillors of Riga had been rebuked for failing to keep up with repairs of the fortifications and maintenance of the garrison and munitions stores and for irregularities in the election of magistrates and in court procedures. The visit of the tsar and some of his family in 1721 served the useful purpose of reminding the locals of political realities, a message which was underpinned by the celebration of Easter with full Orthodox rites. Peter marked out his territory further by measuring a plot for a garden and a palace in Riga.

Summer in St Petersburg

Peter arrived back in St Petersburg on 19 June where, as was usual when he returned from an extended journey or campaign, he reported to ‘King’ Ivan Romodanovsky. Thereafter there was a round of anniversaries in quick succession – coronation day on 25 June, followed by Poltava and then Peter's name day on the 29th, with the usual balls, fireworks and gun salutes. In the Summer Gardens on the 25th Frederick Bergholz, who was awaiting the arrival of his master the duke of Holstein from Riga, witnessed the entry of grenadier guardsmen with buckets of raw alcohol which they forced the guests, even ladies, to drink from wooden scoops. Informers were on hand to tell on anyone who tried to escape the ‘bitter cup’ and there were sentries at the gates to stop people leaving. Only around midnight when Peter, dressed in a simple sailor suit of green fabric, gave the signal were people allowed to go, crowding out through the one exit. On 3 July the royal party sailed to Peterhof on the yacht Natalia. Peter, as always, stayed in Monplaisir, but he held a banquet in the Grand Palace. On 8 July after dinner they started up a new fountain in the lower park. Throughout July the royal party travelled back and forth between various estates – Dubki, Ekaterinhof, Strel'na, Kotlin – where palaces were being built and gardens laid out or extended. This was a time of frenetic building activity and Peter's letters and papers are full of correspondence and notes about the finer points of his various projects.

As always, there was lots of drinking. On 27 July Bergholz and the duke went to the Admiralty for the launch of a ship named after St Panteleimon whose feast fell on that day, the anniversary of the naval victories at Hangö and Grengham, over which Peter presided in person, welcoming the guests on board where tables were laid with cold snacks. The duke brought his own wine in the hope of avoiding the rough vintage which Peter served, but Peter insisted that his wine was ‘healthier’ than the duke's. When Menshikov was caught with a glass of Rhine wine (Peter had ordered that only Hungarian would be drunk) he had to drink a penalty of two bottles of the strong wine, after which he collapsed in a drunken stupor and had to be carried home. Admiral Apraksin was so drunk he wept like a baby. As in the Summer Gardens, armed guards stopped the guests from leaving until Peter was ready to release them.³⁸ In early August there were fleet manoeuvres, which Peter attended on board the Ingermanland. On 8 August they let water into the Peterhof canal, a short channel linking the Grand Palace with the sea shore, and rowed along it. On 24 August the journals record a walk by the great fountain and cascade, strolls around the avenues and the ponds and dinners in the Grand Palace. The anticipated news of peace added to the holiday mood.

Nikitin's portrait

Throughout August Peter awaited news from the Finnish town of Nystad, where peace talks with Sweden, begun in April, were nearing a successful conclusion. On 29 August he asked Menshikov to make preparations for a public announcement (he had heard that some monarchs sent out cuirassiers with white sashes and trumpets to announce important treaties), but warned him to take care that news did not leak out prematurely ‘to avoid any shame if peace is not signed’.³⁹ On 1 September Peter visited the hospital for sick soldiers and sailors on Kotlin Island, where, the court journal records, two days later ‘the artist Ivan Nikitin painted his majesty's portrait (persona) and then His Majesty was pleased to attend mass’.⁴⁰ The fate of this portrait of Peter, painted on the eve of the most important celebrations of his career, is uncertain. There is documentary evidence that Nikitin, whom Peter had sent to study in Italy, painted Peter at least three times from life, in 1715, 1720 and – our reference – 1721, but not one painting of Peter with Nikitin's signature survives and it has proved impossible to match these references conclusively with canvases which have been attributed to the Russian artist. Traditionally, the Kotlin portrait is identified with the small head and shoulders study of Peter on a circular canvas which now hangs in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. This portrait shows the older Peter and, unusually for contemporary studies, it eliminates nearly all extraneous details, such as regalia and orders, not to mention allegorical figures, and sets the subject against a dark, neutral background, thereby concentrating all attention on the face. The portrait's psychological depth, its portrayal of what one writer termed the ‘tragic loneliness’ of Peter's last years, led Soviet historians to attribute it to Nikitin, the only Western-trained Russian artist active at the time, on the grounds that no foreign painter could possibly have captured Peter's essence so successfully. Even Nikitin's most recent biographer Androsov is reluctant to concede the round portrait to a foreigner's brush, because in his view it could only have been painted by someone who knew the tsar well and sympathised with him, in other words by a ‘Russian person, patriot and citizen’. But he is doubtful whether this was the painting which Nikitin did on 3 September 1721, when Peter should have looked joyful and optimistic in response to the good news from Nystad, as opposed to weary and regretful, perhaps even sick. For that reason he hazards a guess that the round picture was painted six months later at Martsial'nye mineral springs, when Peter was again taking a cure.

The peace of Nystad

In fact, Peter had not yet received official confirmation of the peace when Nikitin painted him on 3 September. The news reached him while he was on his way from Kotlin to Dubki later that day, when two couriers overtook him hotfoot from the congress at Nystad. ‘And with that news His Majesty took the two men with him and set off in all haste for St Petersburg.’⁴¹ The twenty-four clauses of the Treaty of Nystad, signed on 30 August (10 September), established ‘eternal peace’ on land and sea. Sweden ceded Livonia, Estonia, Ingermanland, part of Karelia with Viborg and its district, with the towns of Riga, Dünamünde, Pernau, Reval, Dorpat, Narva, Kexholm, and the islands of Oesel, Dagö and Meno. Russia agreed to evacuate Finland and to pay Sweden two million reichsthaler as compensation. There were also clauses on trade, the rights of the former Swedish provinces, religion, landed estates, Russian troops, prisoners of war, ambassadors and envoys and extradition.⁴² The treaty set the seal on Russia's new status as a European power.

On 4 September St Petersburg celebrated with a service in the Trinity Cathedral, followed by short speeches (Peter officially reported the peace to Prince-Caesar) and gun salutes from the fortress. Heralds with a white banner depicting an olive branch and a laurel wreath went round the streets and beer and wine were supplied for the public. More lavish plans were soon in hand. On the 9th Peter wrote to the governor of Riga:

We wish to report that the all-merciful God has been pleased to bless this cruel and dangerous war of twenty-one years' duration with a good and desirable peace, which was concluded on 30 August at Nystad and with which we congratulate you. For such divine mercy we must give threefold thanks: the first as soon as this news is received, the second on 22 October, the third on 28 January, the latter two [celebrations] to be carried out simultaneously all over the realm. All three are to be marked with three rounds of cannon fire.⁴³

The festive mood continued on 10 September when about a thousand masked revellers turned out to celebrate the Prince-Pope's wedding. If Zotov's wedding in 1715 was a ‘rite of passage’ to mark St Petersburg's ascendancy over Moscow, Buturlin's (his second marriage) celebrated St Petersburg's triumph over Stockholm. The tsar attended in his favourite disguise of a ship's drummer, as did Menshikov, with Catherine as a Friesian peasant. They mingled with Neptune, Bacchus in a tiger skin draped with vine leaves, giants dressed as babies and assorted Romans, Turks, Indians, abbots, monks and nuns, shepherdesses, nymphs and satyrs, artisans and peasants. The fattest, least mobile courtiers were chosen as runners to announce the wedding. Bears, dogs and pigs, trained to walk very obediently in harness, pulled carts.⁴⁴ The bride and groom drank toasts from cups shaped liked male and female genitalia (of a large size, according to Bergholz who witnessed the occasion) and after the feast they were led to Trinity Square to an improvised bedchamber inside a wooden pyramid, which had been set up in 1720 for the reception of captured Swedish ships, with holes drilled in the walls for prurient spectators. Day two of the wedding feast included a ceremonial crossing of the river by the Prince-Pope and his ‘cardinals’ on a bridge of linked barrels led by Neptune riding a sea monster. The Prince-Pope floated in a wooden bowl in a great vat of beer into which he was tipped when he reached the other side. The wedding feast combined well-tried elements of Peter's ‘world turned upside down’ with novel variations on ‘shaming’ ritual (comic voyeurism) and drunken revelry (the outsized beer barrel).

The ratification of the treaty on 23 September was followed by another masquerade on 3 October, this time with a naval flavour when the Nevsky fleet sailed to Kronstadt and back, with everyone in fancy dress. On 11 October there was a 21-gun salute to mark the anniversary of the capture of Schlüsselburg. As Peter had ordained, St Petersburg officially celebrated peace on 22 October (the anniversary of the liberation of Moscow from the Poles in 1612), starting with a service in the cathedral, followed by a sermon from Prokopovich and a speech from Chancellor Golovkin, who asked Peter to accept the imperial titles: Father of the Fatherland (Roman pater patriae), Emperor (imperator) of All Russia, Peter the Great (Maximus):

We thought it right … in the manner of the ancients, especially the Roman and Greek people … also as was the custom of the Roman Senate in recognition of their emperors' famous deeds to pronounce such titles publicly as a gift and to inscribe them on statues for the memory of posterity.⁴⁵

This was not the first time that Peter had been equated with a Roman imperator or military commander, a commonplace motif in major European states at the time. (British readers may know the statue of King James II as Roman emperor which stands in front of the National Gallery in London.) In Russia Roman imagery was first seen at the Azov triumphs in 1696, and from 1700 the tsar's profile portrait on the new rouble coins was consistently Roman. The new titles outraged traditionalists, however, who believed (wrongly) that the term ‘Father of the Fatherland’ usurped the spiritual authority of the now defunct patriarch-father. Even the designation ‘First’, which Peter had used regularly long before 1721, reflected an alien tradition. Muscovite tsars were called by their name and patronymic (hence Aleksei Mikhailovich), never by a number. In fact, some regarded the title ‘Great’, in imitation of military commanders of antiquity, as less immodest than ‘First’.

Such doubts were not reflected in the official accounts of the celebrations, which continue:

Then from all the people both inside the church and outside there went up three great joyful cries of Vivat, accompanied by a simultaneous thunderous blast of noise from trumpets and cymbals and drums and a round of fire from numerous cannons and guns from the guards and a hundred and twenty five galleys and thirty-three field regiments.

Peter then made a speech, translations of which were distributed to foreign diplomats:

(1) I very much desire that all our people should be fully aware what the Lord God has done for us in the past war and by making this peace. (2) We must give thanks to God with all our strength, but while hoping for peace we must not weaken our military efforts, in order to avoid suffering the same fate as the Greeks [i.e. Byzantines] and the Greek monarchy. (3) We must strive for the common good and profit, which God sets before our eyes both in internal and external affairs, which will bring relief to the nation.

There followed gun salutes and more prayers of thanksgiving, during which the tsar ‘with great devotion and genuflections offered up prayers to the Almighty’.⁴⁶

During a feast for a thousand people in the Senate house the tsar gave orders that no guest should leave while he retired to his yacht for a nap. Bassewitz regretted that he had forgotten to take some cards along to ease the tedium but Bergholz managed to escape to the Four Frigates coffee house for a breath of air. That evening the city was illuminated by candles in windows and braziers of tar and firewood on the streets. The centrepiece was a temple of Janus (the double-faced god who looks to the past and future), with open gates, revealing Janus illuminated in blue, with a laurel wreath in his right hand and an olive branch in his left. This marvellous edifice was designed by the Frenchman Nicholas Pineau (later the designer of Peter's funeral) and constructed by an Englishman for the sum of 570 roubles. Peter lit the illuminations by setting off an eagle motif which flew along a rope from the Senate building. Screens depicted Justice fighting two Furies, a boat coming into harbour and pyramids that gave out a bright white light. The doors of the temple were closed by two warriors representing Russia and Sweden, who joined hands in a sign of peace, then from the fortress and boats in the harbour about a thousand guns fired simultaneously, ‘and from this great round of gunfire it seemed as if the whole fortress and the River Neva were covered in flame’.⁴⁷

An even bigger Janus temple than the one in St Petersburg was erected for the Nystad celebrations held in Moscow at Yuletide 1721–22. Lavish triumphal gates were built for Peter's arrival on 18 December, when he was greeted by the president of the Holy Synod, Stefan Iavorsky, and by teachers from the Moscow Academy. The duke of Holstein, still in Russia, sent his musicians, and tables with food and drink were set up. Feofilakt Lopatinsky and Feofan Prokopovich delivered victory sermons in the Cathedral of the Dormition on 1 and 28 January 1722 respectively. Thereafter, Peter ordered that the peace be celebrated every year ‘both in religious and civil manner’ on 30 August, the anniversary of the signing, which coincided with the feast of St Alexander Nevsky.

The Russian Versailles

Moscow was not neglected – in 1722 it received its own chief of police – but St Petersburg commanded most of Peter's attention. Bergholz, who had visited Russia with his parents in 1709–14, found that by 1721 ‘the city has changed so much that I simply did not recognise it’. He was especially impressed by Nevsky Prospekt, which linked the Admiralty with the Alexander Nevsky monastery. ‘Despite the fact that the trees planted on both sides in rows of three or four are still small,’ he wrote, ‘the street is unusually fine with its great length and the clean state in which it is kept … It makes a splendid sight such as I have encountered nowhere else.’⁴⁸

Peter did not complete his city, but his architectural legacy survives in the grid plan of the numbered ‘line’ streets on Vasil'evsky Island, the straight course of Nevsky Prospekt, the spires of the Peter-Paul Cathedral and Admiralty, in white classical pilasters and window surrounds against the coloured stuccoed walls of the Kunstkamera, Alexander Nevsky monastery, and the other few surviving early eighteenth-century buildings. The focus of many celebrations, as we have seen, was the Summer Palace, the chief attraction of which was its riverside site. The palace itself is comparatively small, just fourteen modest rooms. Only a few couples could have lined up in the ballroom on the first floor, Catherine's territory and the most lavishly decorated part of the palace, while the ground floor, its entrance decorated with Dutch tiles, housed Peter's quarters, including two kitchens. One room accommodated his wind measuring instrument, with huge clock-faces and allegorical designs referring to Russian naval power, made in Germany in 1714, another his lathes and tools. The ceiling of the nursery, on the first floor, was decorated with a scene of ‘Peace and Tranquillity’, featuring flying cherubs and horns of plenty. In the green room oval panels depicted allegorical studies of Europe, Asia, America and Africa and glass cabinets displayed curiosities. Mirrors were hung high up on the walls as decorative items, along with portraits of the tsar's family and associates and maritime subjects: the whole décor of the palace reflected the interests of Peter and his family, but at the same time indicated the international cultural context in which they now operated. Well lit by large windows and easily visible from several vantage points, the palace could not have been more different from the old royal apartments in Moscow, with their religious frescos and linked chapels, hidden behind the Kremlin walls.

The Summer Palace was not quite as modest as is looks today. A whole complex of buildings once stood in the grounds, with stables, storerooms, servants' and guest quarters. There was a grotto, hothouses and glasshouses. The gardens were splendid, the setting for Peter and Catherine's outdoor summer parties. Zubov's 1717 engraving, taken as from an aerial view looking south towards the gardens over the Neva, shows the river frontage, the palace itself built right on the riverbank in the north-east corner, with a canal to one side for direct access to boats to sail across the river to the fortress and Trinity Square. The embankment walls are lined with galleries in the shape of triumphal arches; canals and trees in serried ranks like troops create the main lines of an orderly and rational plan; garden plots are divided by diagonals reminiscent of the St Andrew's cross; the gardens are dotted with fountains and statues, including the famous ‘Tauride’ Venus, purchased in Italy, and characters from Aesop's fables, each with a plaque bearing a short explanation of the tale.

Menshikov's palace on Vasil'evsky Island, started in 1710, was much grander than Peter's, with several wings and courtyards. To Weber the main façade appeared to be ‘after the Italian Manner’,⁴⁹ stuccoed and painted in the two-tone favoured in a climate more often gloomy than sunny and topped with a steep Dutch roofline. Behind was a formal garden with trees in the Dutch style. Inside the palace the blue and white Delft tiles which Peter liked so much covered not only the walls of living apartments but also some of the ceilings. The Menshikovs were nouveaux riches and the illustrious prince was not too proud to flaunt his royal connections: the entwined letters P and M (Peter and Menshikov) in the metal banisters of the main staircase, ceilings decorated with the cross of St Andrew, the fresco of a warrior bearing the tsar's features. The Grand Hall, which Peter often ‘borrowed’ for receptions, was decorated with mirrors, classical statues alluding to military victories and pilaster capitals bearing reliefs of Menshikov's knightly orders and coronets. These political touches contrast sharply with the homeliness of his sister-in-law Varvara's apartments, the wall tiles featuring cupids and household objects such as cups, brushes and chairs. The chapel of the Resurrection was a basilical design with spire, reminiscent of the Peter-Paul Cathedral. Like the Summer Palace, Menshikov's residence was built right on the water's edge, its main entrance immediately opposite a landing stage. In Zubov's engraving of 1717 it appears to float on the water.

Not far from the palace one of the grandest buildings in St Petersburg, the Twelve Colleges (now part of St Petersburg University), was at the planning stage. Begun in 1722, it consisted of twelve units housing the audience chamber, Senate, the Colleges and the Holy Synod. The building's design – a long façade with twelve individual but uniform entrances – reflected Peter's intention that the staff of each college should bear individual responsibility for their college's business whilst offering a unified façade to the public gaze. The architect Trezzini expressed anxiety that the colleges were to be built ‘all in a row’ but that construction was to be handled by individual offices, and warned of delays if each college was responsible for its own construction. Peter relented by allowing all the materials to come from one place, but insisted that the principle of individual administration of buildings be retained.⁵⁰

Out of town, Peterhof was the main focus of Peter's attention in the remaining years of his life. Bergholz described it in August 1721:

The main building consists of two storeys, of which the ground floor is only for servants, the first floor for the tsar's family. Down below there are splendid galleries with fine columns, upstairs a magnificent hall with a wonderful view of the sea. … From the main façade of the palace a splendid cascade flows down into the lower gardens over three terraces, which stretch the whole width of the palace, made from unhewn rock and decorated with iron and gilded relief figures on a green background. It is a splendid sight. The lower garden, through which there runs a wide stonelined canal right opposite the palace, is full of flower beds and beautiful fountains.⁵¹

Peter took a personal interest in hydraulics and had a hand in designing a number of the fountains: both the grand palaces at Peterhof and Strel'na were built on bluffs and linked to natural water systems which allowed impressive complexes of fountains and cascades to be operated from the accumulated waters flowing downhill from a reservoir. The grounds were laid out by the German architect Johann Friedrich Braunstein (in Russia from 1714 to 1728) who also designed Monplaisir and the Marly (1721–23) and Hermitage (1721–24) pavilions. The whole complex was, as Bergholz later wrote, a ‘new Versailles’, which to some extent reflected Peter's intention. In France in 1717 he had acquired an album of views of the palace and gardens at Versailles which he always kept in his study.⁵² Strel'na palace a few miles further east along the gulf was also intended to vie with Versailles. The garden would be ‘of a vast Extent’ and a ‘noble and costly Palace’ was to be built on the hill, but Peter's death brought work to an end and the site did not attract the support of his daughter Elizabeth as Peterhof did in the 1740s, when the famous architect Bartolommeo Rastrelli extended it.⁵³ Today the palace is still a virtual shell and hardly features in guidebooks, although plans for converting it into a presidential residence were reported in 2000.

After Nystad, the Petrine cult, centred on St Petersburg, grew inexorably. But the city, like Peter, had its detractors. In November 1721 a severe flood damaged many buildings, including the Temple of Janus built for the Nystad celebrations the previous month. ‘If, without being superstitious, one can give any credence to a certain prophecy, this city is at risk of being destroyed by water one day,’ wrote the French envoy La Vie, who saw the water level in his apartment rise to a height of three feet.⁵⁴ Despite all the positive evidence of new buildings, flourishing gardens and growing population, many people shared La Vie's view. There was still something façade-like, insubstantial about St Petersburg, not to mention (in the eyes of religious conservatives) something diabolical. Members of the ‘God's people’ cult, later known as flagellants, declared that the Antichrist was living in St Petersburg and that the city would be destroyed ‘like Sodom and Gomorrah’.⁵⁵ Even the less fanatical wondered how long it would survive its founder, who had created it, like so much else, ‘from nothing’.