19

FIRE AND KNOUT

Once the beards were shaved and the first reunion toasts drunk, the smile faded from Peter’s face. There was grimmer work to be done: it was time for a final reckoning with the Streltsy.

Ever since Sophia’s downfall, the former elite troops of the old Muscovite armies had been deliberately humiliated. In Peter’s sham battles at Preobrazhenskoe, the Streltsy regiments always made up the “enemy” whose role was always to lose. More recently, in real combat beneath the walls of Azov, the Streltsy had suffered heavy losses. They resented being made to dig like laborers, piling up earth for the siege works; they disliked being forced to obey the commands of foreign officers, and they grumbled at seeing their young Tsar so eager to follow the advice of these Westerners speaking incomprehensible tongues.

Unfortunately for the Streltsy, the two Azov campaigns had conclusively demonstrated to Peter how inferior in discipline and fighting quality they were to his own new regiments, and he announced his intention to model his army along Western lines. After the capture of Azov, it was the new regiments which returned to Moscow with the Tsar to make a triumphal entry and be granted honors, while the Streltsy were left behind to rebuild the fortifications and to garrison the conquered town. This violated all precedents; the Streltsy’s traditional place in peacetime was Moscow, where they guarded the Kremlin, kept their wives and families and ran profitable businesses on the side. Now, some of the soldiers had been away from home for almost two years, and this, too, was by design. Peter and his government wanted as few of them as possible in the capital, and the best way to keep them away was to assign them to permanent service on a distant frontier. Thus, wanting at one point to reinforce the Russian army on the Polish border, the government ordered 2,000 Streltsy of the regiments in Azov dispatched there. They were to be replaced in Azov by some of the Streltsy remaining in Moscow, while the Guards and other Western-style troops would remain in the capital to protect the government.

The Streltsy marched, but their discontent mounted. They were furious at having to walk from one distant outpost to another hundreds of miles away, and even angrier that they were not allowed to pass through Moscow to see their families. Along the route, some of the soldiers actually deserted to reappear in Moscow, presenting petitions for back pay and asking permission to remain in the capital. Their petitions were rejected and they were ordered to return to their regiments immediately or face punishment. They returned to their comrades, telling them how badly they had been received. They also brought the latest news and gossip of the Moscow streets, much of it centered on Peter and his long absence in the West. Even before his departure, his preference for foreigners and his elevation of foreign officers to high places in the state and army had angered the Streltsy. Now their anger was fueled by fresh rumors. Peter was said to have become a German, to have given up the Orthodox faith, even to be dead.

As the Streltsy conferred excitedly among themselves, their personal grievances began to expand into a larger, political grievance against the Tsar: their faith and their country were being subverted; the Tsar was no longer a tsar! A true tsar sat enthroned in the Kremlin, remote, appearing only in great processions covered with jewels and robes. This tall Peter who shouted and drank with carpenters and foreigners all night in the German Suburb, who walked in triumphal processions in the wake of foreigners whom he had made generals and admirals, could not be a true tsar. If he was really the son of Alexis—and many doubted it—then he had been bewitched; and they pointed to his epileptic seizures as evidence that he was a child of the Devil. As all this boiled in their minds, the Streltsy realized their duty: to overthrow this changeling tsar, this false tsar, and reestablish the old traditional ways.

Just at this moment, a new decree arrived from Moscow: The companies were to disperse themselves into garrisons in towns between Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian border, and the deserters who had come to Moscow were to be arrested and exiled. This decree was the catalyst. Two thousand Streltsy decided to march on Moscow. On June 9, at a dinner at the Austrian embassy in Moscow, Korb, the newly arrived secretary to the embassy, noted, “Today for the first time a vague rumor of the revolt of the Streltsy struck terror.” People remembered the revolt sixteen years before, and now, fearing a repetition of that slaughter, those who could began leaving the capital.

In this atmosphere of panic, the Tsar’s government met to face the danger. No one knew how many rebels there were, or how close they were to the city. The troops in Moscow were commanded by the boyar Alexis Shein, and at Shein’s elbow, as he had been at Azov, was the old Scot, General Patrick Gordon. Shein agreed to accept the responsibility for suppressing the mutiny, but he asked that all members of the boyar council approve the decision unanimously and signify their approval by signing or setting their seals to the document. The boyars refused, probably in recognition that if the Streltsy should win, their signatures would doom them. Nevertheless, they agreed that it was essential to prevent the Streltsy from entering Moscow and inciting a larger rebellion. Whatever loyal troops could be found would be assembled and marched out to meet the Streltsy before they reached the city.

The two Guards regiments, the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky, were ordered to prepare to march on an hour’s notice. To stamp out any sparks of rebellion that might have spread to them, the order declared that those who refused to march against the traitors would be proclaimed traitors themselves. Gordon went among the troops, exhorting them and assuring them that there was no more glorious and noble combat than that undertaken to save the sovereign and the state against traitors. Four thousand loyal troops mustered and marched westward out of the city, Shein and Gordon riding at their head. Most important, Colonel de Grage, an Austrian artillery officer, was there with twenty-five field cannon.

The confrontation took place thirty miles northwest of Moscow near the Patriarch Nikon’s famous New Jerusalem Monastery. Everything—numbers, leadership, artillery, even timing—favored the loyal forces. Had the Streltsy arrived only an hour earlier, they might have occupied the powerful monastery and been able to withstand a siege long enough to dishearten the loyal soldiers and persuade some of them to join the revolt; and the walled fortress would have been a tactical buttress to their position. As it was, the two sides met in open, rolling countryside.

Near the monastery ran a small stream. Shein and Gordon took up a commanding position on the eastern bank, blocking the road to Moscow. Soon afterward, the long lines of Streltsy carrying their muskets and halberds began to appear, and the vanguard started to ford the river. To discover whether there was any chance of ending the rebellion peaceably, Gordon walked down to the riverbank to talk to the mutineers. As the first of the Streltsy emerged from the water, he advised them, as an old soldier, that night was close and Moscow too far to reach that day; it would be better to camp for the night on the far side of the river, where there was plenty of room. There they could rest and decide what to do on the following day. The Streltsy, exhausted and uncertain, not having expected to have to fight before reaching Moscow but now seeing the government troops drawn up against them, accepted Gordon’s advice and began to make camp. To Gordon the Streltsy spokesman, Sergeant Zorin, handed an unfinished petition which complained:

That they had been ordered to serve in different towns for a year at a time, and that, when they were in front of Azov, by the device of a heretic and foreigner, Fransko Lefort, in order to cause great harm to Orthodoxy, he, Fransko Lefort, had led the Moscow Streltsy under the wall at the wrong time, and by putting them in the most dangerous and bloody places many of them had been killed; that by his device a mine had been made under the trenches, and that by this mine he had also killed three hundred men and more.

The petition continued with other complaints, including “that they had heard that Germans are coming to Moscow to have their beards shaved and publicly smoke tobacco to the discredit of Orthodoxy.” Meanwhile, as Gordon parleyed with the rebels, Shein’s troops had quietly entrenched themselves on the commanding high ground on the eastern bank and De Grage had placed his cannon on the height, their muzzles pointing down across the stream at the Streltsy.

At dawn the following day, satisfied that his own position was as strong as he could make it, Gordon again went down to talk to the Streltsy, who demanded that their petition be read to the loyal army. Gordon refused; the petition was actually a call to arms against Tsar Peter and a condemnation of Peter’s closest friends, especially Lefort. Instead, Gordon spoke of Peter’s clemency. He urged the Streltsy to return peacefully and resume their garrison duties, as no good could come of mutiny. He promised that if they would present their requests peacefully and with proper expressions of loyalty, he would see that they received satisfaction for their grievances and pardon for their disobedience up to that point. Gordon failed. “I used all the rhetoric I was master of, but all in vain,” he wrote. The Streltsy answered only that they would not go back to their posts “until they had been allowed to kiss their wives in Moscow and had received their arrears in pay.”

Gordon reported this to Shein, then returned a third time with a final offer to pay their salaries and grant pardon. By this time, however, the Streltsy were restless and impatient. They warned Gordon, their former commander but also a foreigner, that he must leave immediately or get a bullet for his efforts. They shouted that they recognized no master and would take orders from no one, that they would not go back to their garrisons, that they must be admitted to Moscow, and that if their way was blocked, they would open the road with cold steel. Furious, Gordon returned to Shein, and the loyal troops prepared to fight. On the western bank, the Streltsy troops, too, formed ranks, knelt and asked the blessing of God. On both sides of the stream, countless signs of the cross were made as Russian soldiers prepared for battle against each other.

The first shots came on Shein’s command. With a roar, smoke billowed out from the cannon muzzles, but no harm was done. De Grage’s guns had fired powder but not shot; Shein had hoped that this display of force might awe the Streltsy into submission. Instead, the blank volley had the opposite effect. Hearing the noise, but seeing no damage among their ranks, the Streltsy were emboldened to think that they were the stronger party. Beating their drums and waving their banners, they advanced across the river. At this, Shein and Gordon ordered De Grage to bring his guns into action in earnest. The cannon roared again, this time sending ball and shot whistling into the lines of the Streltsy. Over and over, De Grage’s twenty-five guns fired into the mass of men before them. Cannonballs volleyed into the lines, lopping off heads, arms and legs.

In an hour it was over. While the cannon still boomed, the Streltsy lay down on the ground to escape the fire, begging to surrender. From the loyal side, commands to throw down their arms were shouted. The Streltsy quickly obeyed, but even so, the artillery continued to fire, Gordon reasoning that if he silenced his guns, the Streltsy might gain courage and be persuaded to attack again before they could be properly disarmed. And so the cowed and terrified Streltsy allowed themselves to be fettered and bound until they were truly harmless.

With the rebels in chains, Shein was merciless. On the spot, with the entire body of mutinous Streltsy in chains and under guard on the battlefield, he ordered an investigation of the rebellion. He wanted to know the cause, the instigators, the objectives. To a man, each Strelets whom he questioned admitted his own involvement and agreed that he himself deserved death. But, equally to a man, all refused to give any details as to their goals or to betray any of their fellows as instigators or leaders. Accordingly, in the pleasant countryside near the New Jerusalem Monastery, Shein ordered the Streltsy put to torture. Knout and fire did their work, and at last one soldier was persuaded to speak. Agreeing that he and all his fellows deserved death, he admitted that had the rebellion been successful, they had intended first to sack and burn the entire German Suburb and massacre all its inhabitants, then to enter Moscow, kill all who resisted, seize the leading boyars, kill some and exile others. Following this, they would announce to the people that the Tsar, who had gone abroad on the malicious advice of the foreigners, had died in the West and the Princess Sophia would be called upon to act as regent again until the Tsarevich Alexis, Peter’s son, should reach his majority. To advise and support Sophia, Vasily Golitsyn would be recalled from exile.

Perhaps this was true or perhaps Shein had simply extracted by torture what he wished to hear. In any case, he was satisfied and, on the basis of this confession, ordered the executioners to begin their work. Gordon protested—not to save the lives of the condemned men, but to preserve them for more thorough interrogation in the future. Anticipating Peter’s intense desire to get to the bottom of the matter on his return, he pleaded with Shein. But Shein was the commander and he insisted that immediate executions were necessary to make the proper impression on the rest of the Streltsy—and on the nation—as to how traitors were dealt with. One hundred and thirty were executed in the field and the rest, nearly 1,900, were brought back to Moscow in chains. There they were turned over to Romodanovsky, who distributed them in the cells of various fortresses and monasteries around the countryside to await Peter’s return.

Peter, rushing home from Vienna, had been informed along the way of the easy victory over the Streltsy and been assured that “not one got away.” Yet, despite the quick snuffing out of the revolt which had never seriously threatened his throne, the Tsar was profoundly disturbed. His first thought, after the anxiety and humiliation of having his army rebel while he was traveling abroad, was—exactly as Gordon had known it would be—to wonder how far the roots of the rebellion had spread and what high persons might have been involved. Peter doubted that the Streltsy had acted alone. Their demands and charges against his friends, himself and his way of life seemed too broad for simple soldiers. But who had instigated them? On whose behalf?

None of his boyars or officers could give him a satisfactory answer. They said that the Streltsy had been too strong under torture and that answers could not be forced out of them. Angry and suspicious, Peter ordered the Guards regiments to collect the hundreds of prisoners from cells around Moscow and bring them to Preobranzhenskoe. There, in the interrogation that followed, Peter resolved to discover whether, as he had written to Romodanovsky, “the seed of the Miloslavskys had sprouted again.” And even if this had not been a full-fledged plot to overthrow his government, he was determined to put an end to those “begetters of evil.” Since his childhood, the Streltsy had opposed and threatened him—they had murdered his friends and relations, they had supported the claims of the usurper Sophia and they continued to scheme against him; only two weeks before his departure abroad, the plot of the Streltsy Colonel Tsykler had been discovered. Now, once again they had used violent language against his foreign friends and himself and had marched on Moscow intending to overthrow the state. Peter was weary of it all: the nuisance as well as the danger, the arrogant claims to special privilege and to fight only when and where they wished, the poor performance as soldiers, the fact that they were semi-medieval figures in a modern world. Once and for all, one way or another, he would be rid of them.

Interrogation meant questioning under torture. Torture in Russia in Peter’s day was used for three purposes: to force men to speak; as punishment, even when no information was desired; and as a prelude to or refinement of death by execution. Traditionally, three general methods of torture were used in Russia: the batog, the knout and fire.

A batog was a small rod or stick about the thickness of a man’s finger, commonly used to beat an offender for lesser crimes. The victim was spread on the floor, lying on his stomach, his back bared and his legs and arms extended. Two men applied batogs simultaneously to the bare back, one sitting or kneeling on the victim’s head and arms, the other on his legs and feet. Facing each other, the two punishers wielded their sticks rhythmically in turn, “keeping time as smiths do at an anvil until their rods were broken in pieces and then they took fresh ones until they were ordered to stop.” Laid on indiscriminately over a prolonged time with a weakened victim, the batogs could cause death, although this was not usually the case.

More serious punishment or interrogation called forth the knout, a savage but traditional method of inflicting pain in Russia. The knout was a thick, hard leather whip about three and a half feet long. A blow from the knout tore skin from the bare back of a victim and, when the lash fell repeatedly in the same place, could bite through to the bone. The degree of punishment was determined by the number of strokes inflicted; fifteen to twenty-five was considered standard; more than that often led to death.

Applying the knout was skilled work. The wielder, observed John Perry, applied “so many strokes on the bare back as are appointed by the judges, first making a step back and giving a spring forward at every stroke, which is laid on with such force that the blood flies at every stroke and leaves a weal behind as thick as a man’s finger. And these [knout] masters as the Russians call them, are so exact in their work that they very rarely strike two strokes in the same place, but lay them on the whole length and breadth of a man’s back, by the side of each other with great dexterity from the top of a man’s shoulders down to the waistband of his breeches.”

Normally, to receive the knout, the victim was lifted and spread across the back of another man, frequently some strong fellow selected by the knoutmaster from among the spectators. The victim’s arms were tied over the shoulders of his stationary porter and his legs around the porter’s knees. Then, one of the knoutmaster’s assistants grabbed the victim by the hair, pulling his head out of the way of the rhythmic strokes of the lash that were falling on the outspread, heaving back.

If desired, the knout could be applied in an even more terrible way. The victim’s hands were tied behind his back and a long rope was tied to his wrists and then passed over the branch of a tree or an overhead beam. Pulling down on the rope meant hoisting the victim into the air with his arms revolving backward the wrong way in their shoulder sockets. To make sure that the arms were pulled completely out of joint, a heavy log or other weight was sometimes tied to the victim’s feet. With the victim already in agony, the knoutmaster then flailed the distended back with the designated number of strokes, whereupon the victim was lowered to the ground and his arms were wrenched back into joint again. In some cases, this torture would be repeated on a weekly basis until the victim confessed.

Torture by fire was common—sometimes alone, sometimes in combination with other tortures. In its simplest form, interrogation by fire meant that the victim’s “hands and feet are tied and he is fixed on a long pole, as upon a spit, and he has his raw back roasted over the fire and he is examined and called upon to confess.” In some cases, a man who had just been knouted was taken down and tied to this kind of pole, so that the back being roasted was already raw and bleeding from the whip. Or a man still suspended in the air after receiving the knout would have his bleeding back touched and probed with a red-hot iron.

In general, executions in Russia were similar to those in other countries. Offenders were burned to death, hanged or beheaded. Victims were burned in the middle of a pile of logs filled with straw. Beheading required the victim to place his head on a block and submit to the blow of an axe or sword. This easy, instant death was sometimes made harder by first lopping off the hands and feet. Executions of this kind were so common, wrote one Dutch traveler, “that if one is performed at one end of town, in the other they seldom know anything of it.” Counterfeiters were punished by taking their false coins, melting them down and pouring the molten metal down their throats. Rapists were castrated.

Although public torture and execution were no novelty to any seventeenth-century European, what struck most visitors to Russia was the stoicism, “the unconquerable stubbornness” with which most Russians accepted these terrible agonies. They steadfastly resisted hideous pain, refusing to betray friends, and when condemned to death they went meekly and calmly to the gallows or block. An observer in Astrachan saw thirty rebels beheaded in less than half an hour. There was no noise or clamor. The condemned men simply went to the block and laid their heads in the pools of blood left by their predecessors. None even had his hands tied behind him.

This incredible hardiness and unconquerable endurance of pain astonished not only foreigners but also Peter himself. Once, after a man had been tortured four times by knout and fire, Peter approached him in sheer wonder and asked how he could stand such great pain. The man was happy to talk about it and revealed to Peter the existence of a torture society of which he was a member. He explained that nobody was admitted without first being tortured, and that thereafter promotion within the society rested on being able to accept higher grades of torture. To this bizarre group, the knout was nothing. “The sharpest pain of all,” he explained to Peter, “is when a burning coal is placed in the ear; nor is it less painful when the head is shaved and extremely cold water is let fall slowly drop by drop upon it from a height.”

More astonishing and even touching was the fact that sometimes the same Russians who could withstand the knout and fire and remain mute until death would break if handled with kindness. This happened with the man who told Peter of the torture society. He had refused to utter a word of confession although he had been tortured four times. Peter, seeing that he was invulnerable to pain, walked up to him and kissed him, saying, “It’s no secret to me that you know about the plot against me. You have been punished enough. Now confess of your own accord out of the love you owe me as your sovereign. And I swear, by the God who has made me tsar, not only to completely pardon you, but in addition, as a special mark of my clemency, to make you a colonel.” This unorthodox approach so unnerved and moved the prisoner that he took the Tsar in his arms and said, “For me, this is the greatest torture of all. There is no other way you could have made me speak.” He told Peter everything, and the Tsar, true to the bargain, pardoned him and promoted him to colonel.

The seventeenth century, like all the centuries before and since, was a time of hideous cruelty. Torture was practiced in all countries and for a variety of crimes, particularly those against the sovereign or the state. Usually, since the sovereign was the state, any form of opposition from assassination down to the mildest grumbling against him was classified as treason and punished accordingly. But a man could also be tortured and killed for attending the wrong church or for picking a pocket.

Throughout Europe, those who touched the person or the dignity of the king suffered the full fury of the law. In France, in 1613, the assassin of Henri IV was torn to pieces by four horses in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in front of a huge crowd of Parisians who brought their children and their picnic lunches. A sixty-year-old Frenchman had his tongue torn out and was sent to the galleys for insulting the Sun King. Ordinary criminals in France were beheaded, burned or broken alive on the wheel. In Italy, travelers complained of the public gallows: “We see so much human flesh along the highways that trips are disagreeable.” In England, the “peine forte et dur” was applied to criminals: A board was placed on the victim’s chest and, one by one, weights were added until breath and life were crushed out. The penalty for treason in England was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. In 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary, “I went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered, which was done there, he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people at which there were great shouts of joy.”

Nor was cruel retribution restricted to political crimes. Witches were burned in England during Peter’s lifetime and still were being hanged a century later. In 1692, six years before the Streltsy revolt, twenty young women and two dogs were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Through most of the eighteenth century, Englishmen were executed for stealing five shillings, and women were hanged for stealing a handkerchief. In the Royal Navy, infractions of discipline were commonly punished with a cat-o’-nine-tails. These floggings, which often resulted in death, were not abolished until 1881.

All this is told to provide perspective. Few of us in the twentieth century will wish to be hypocritically surprised at the barbarism of earlier times. Nations still execute traitors. Torture and mass executions still take place, both in war and in peace, made more efficient and more indiscriminate now by the instruments of modern technology. In our own time, the authorities of more than sixty nations, among them Germans, Russians, Frenchmen, Britons, Americans, Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Filipinos, Hungarians, Spaniards, Turks, Greeks, Brazilians, Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Iranians, Iraqis, Ugandans and Indonesians, have tortured on behalf of the state. Few centuries can claim a more hellish achievement than Auschwitz. Today, in psychiatric hospitals, Soviet political dissidents are tortured with destructive drugs designed not only to break down resistance but to subvert personality. And only modern technology can provide a spectacle such as the hanging of fourteen Jews in Bagdad’s Liberation Square before a crowd of half a million … and, for those who couldn’t be present, hours of television close-ups of the dangling bodies.

In Peter’s time, as in ours, torture was carried out to gather information, and public execution to deter further crimes. The fact that innocent men have confessed to escape further pain has never stopped torture, nor has the execution of criminals ever stopped crime. Undeniably, the state has a right to defend itself against people who break its laws, and perhaps even a duty to try to deter future infringements, but how far into repression and cruelty can a state or society descend before the means no longer justify the end? It is a question as old as political theory, and it will not be answered here. But it should be borne in mind when we read what Peter did.

At the Tsar’s command, Prince Romodanovsky brought all the captured traitors to Preobrazhenskoe and constructed fourteen torture chambers to receive them. Six days a week (Sunday was a day of rest), week after week, in what became an assembly line of torture, all the surviving prisoners, 1,714 men, were examined. Half of September and most of October were spent in lashing and burning the Streltsy with knout and flame. Those who had already confessed to one charge were reinterrogated on another. As soon as one rebel had revealed some new bit of information, all those who had already been questioned were dragged back in for reexamination on this point. Those who had lost their strength and almost their minds under torture were handed over to doctors to be restored by treatment so that they might be questioned further under new, excruciating tortures.

Major Karpakov, deeply implicated as one of the leaders of the rebellion, after being knouted and having his back roasted by fire, lost the power to speak and fainted. Worried that he might die prematurely, Romodanovsky put him in the care of Peter’s personal physician, Dr. Carbonari. As soon as he was restored, he was again subjected to torture. A second officer who had also lost the power to speak was handed over to Dr. Carbonari for rehabilitation. By mistake, the doctor left his knife behind in the cell after working over the prisoner. The officer, unwilling that his life, which he knew was almost ended, be restored so that he could suffer more tortures, seized the knife and tried to cut his own throat. But he was already too weak and could not cut deeply enough. Before he could do himself fatal damage, his hand went limp and he fainted. He was discovered, partially cured and returned to torture.

All of Peter’s principal friends and lieutenants were involved in the carnage. Men such as Romodanovsky, Boris Golitsyn, Shein, Streshnev, Peter Prozorovsky, Michael Cherkassky, Vladimir Dolgoruky, Ivan Troekurov, Fedor Shcherbatov and Peter’s old tutor and Prince-Pope, Zotov, were chosen to participate, as a special mark of the Tsar’s confidence. If the plot had spread and boyars were involved, Peter counted on these comrades to discover and faithfully report it. Peter himself, plagued by suspicion and fierce with anger, was often present and, sometimes wielding his big, ivory-handled cane, personally questioned those who seemed most guilty.

But the Streltsy did not break easily, and their sheer endurance sometimes drove the Tsar to rage. “While one accomplice or rebel was being tied to a rack,” wrote Korb,

his lamentations gave rise to a hope that truth might be pressed from him by torments; but no, for as soon as his body began to be stretched with the rope, besides the horrible cracking of his members which were being torn from their natural sockets, he remained mute, even when twenty strokes of the knout were superadded, as if the accumulation of his pain were too great to afflict the senses. All believed that the man must be crushed with excess of calamity to such a degree that he must have lost the power of moaning and of speech. So he was loosed from the infamous rack and rope, and then asked if he knew the persons present in the torture chamber. To the astonishment of all, he enumerated every one of them. But when they put a fresh question about the treason, once more he became utterly dumb, and did not break silence during a whole quarter of an hour, while he was roasted by a fire by the Tsar’s command. The Tsar, tired at last of this exceedingly wicked stubbornness, furiously raised the stick which he happened to have in his hand, and thrust it so violently into his jaws—clenched in obstinate silence—to break them open, and make him give tongue and speak. And these words too that fell from the raging man, “Confess, beast, confess!” loudly proclaimed how great was his wrath.

Although the interrogations were supposedly conducted in secret, all Moscow knew that something terrible was happening. Yet, Peter was anxious to hide the savage work, especially from foreigners; aware of the reaction that this wave of terror would produce in the Western courts he had just visited, he attempted to seal off his torture chambers from Western eyes and ears. Nevertheless, rumors provoked enormous curiosity. One group of Western diplomats ventured out to Preobrazhenskoe on horseback to see what they could learn. Passing three houses from which came appalling howls and groans, they stopped and dismounted in front of a fourth which emitted even more atrocious shrieks. Entering, they were startled to see the Tsar, Lev Naryshkin and Romodanovsky. As they retreated, Naryshkin asked them who they were and why they had come. Angrily, he ordered them to go to Romodanovsky’s house so that the matter could be looked into. Mounting their horses, the diplomats refused, telling Naryshkin that if he had anything to say to them, he could come to their embassy and say it there. Russian soldiers appeared and a Guards officer attempted to drag one of the diplomats out of his saddle. Desperately, the unwelcome visitors spurred their horses and galloped to safety past the soldiers running to block their way.

Eventually, reports of the horror reached such magnitude that the Patriarch took it upon himself to go to Peter to beg for mercy. He went carrying an image of the Blessed Virgin, reminding Peter of the humanity of all men and asking for the exercise of mercy. Peter, resenting the intrusion of spiritual authority on temporal matters, replied to the churchman with great feeling: “What are you doing with that image and what business is it of yours to come here? Leave immediately and put that image in a place where it may be venerated. Know that I reverence God and His Most Holy Mother more earnestly, perhaps, than you do. But it is the duty of my sovereign office, and a duty that I owe to God, to save my people from harm and to prosecute with public vengeance crimes that lead to the common ruin.” In this case, Peter continued, justice and harshness were linked, the gangrene ran deep in the body politic and could be cut out only with iron and fire. Moscow, he said, would be saved not by pity but by cruelty.

Everyone fell within the sweep of the Tsar’s wrath. Priests discovered to have prayed for the success of the rebellion were condemned to execution. The wife of a minor official, passing in front of a gibbet erected before the Kremlin, said of the men hanging there, “Alas! Who knows whether you were innocent or guilty?” She was overheard and denounced as one who expressed sympathy for condemned traitors, and she and her husband were arrested and examined. Able to prove that she was only expressing compassion for all humans who suffered, the couple escaped death, but was nevertheless exiled from Moscow.

Despite the wretched forced confessions, gasped between screams or torn from groaning, half-conscious men, Peter learned little more than Shein had already learned: that the Streltsy had meant to seize the capital, burn the German Suburb, kill the boyars and ask Sophia to rule them. If she refused, they would ask the eight-year-old Tsarevich Alexis and, as a last resort, Sophia’s former lover, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, “for he had always been merciful to us.” Peter did learn that no boyar or important member of the government or the nobility had been involved, but the most important questions went unanswered: Had there been a plot by important persons against his life and throne? And, most importantly, had Sophia known about or encouraged the uprising in advance?

Peter was deeply suspicious of his sister and could not believe that she was not always intriguing against him. To confirm his suspicions, a number of women, including wives of the Streltsy and all of Sophia’s female attendants, were examined. Two chambermaids were brought to the torture rooms and stripped naked to the waist. One had already received several blows of the knout when Peter entered. He noticed that she was pregnant and for this reason absolved her from further torture, but both women were condemned to death.

Under torture, a Strelets, Vaska Alexeev, declared that two letters purporting to be from Sophia had been sent to the Streltsy camp and been read aloud to the soldiers. These letters supposedly urged the Streltsy to march on Moscow, seize the Kremlin and summon the Tsarevna to the throne. According to one account, the letters were smuggled out of Sophia’s rooms inside loaves of bread given by Sophia to old beggar women. Other letters, less inflammatory, had been written by Sophia’s sister Martha, informing Sophia that the Streltsy were marching on Moscow.

Peter went to Novodevichy himself to interrogate Sophia. There was no question of torture; according to one account, he alternated between weeping with her over the fate that had made them antagonists, and threatening her with death, using the example of Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Sophia denied that she had ever written to the Streltsy. When he suggested that she might have reminded them that she could be called back to rule, she told him straightforwardly that on this matter they needed no letter from her; they would certainly remember that she had ruled the state for seven years. In the end, Peter learned nothing from her. He spared his sister’s life, but decided that she must be more closely restricted. She was forced to shave her head and take religious vows, as the nun Susanna. He confined her permanently to Novodevichy, where she was guarded by one hundred soldiers and permitted to have no visitors. She lived in this fashion for another six years and died at forty-seven in 1704. Her sisters Martha and Catherine Miloslavskaya (also Peter’s half-sisters) were politically exonerated, but Martha, too, was sent to a convent for the rest of her days.

The first executions of the condemned Streltsy took place on October 10 at Preobrazhenskoe. Behind the barracks, a bare field rose into a steep hill, and at the top the gallows were placed. A regiment of Guards was drawn up between the execution site and the large crowd of spectators, pushing and shoving, craning their necks to see. The Streltsy, many of whom could no longer walk, arrived in a procession of small carts, each containing two men seated back to back, each holding a lighted candle. Almost without exception, the condemned men were silent, but their wives and children, running beside the carts, filled the air with shrieks and calamitous sobbing. As the carts rumbled across the brook that separated the gallows from the crowd, the individual cries rose into a loud, collective wail.

When all the carts had arrived, Peter, wearing the green Polish coat given him by Augustus, appeared with his boyars near the spot where the ambassadors of the Hapsburg empire, Poland and Denmark were watching from their carriages. As the sentence was being read, Peter shouted to the crowd to listen well. Then the guilty men began walking to the gallows, dragging logs tied to their feet to prevent escape. Each man tried to climb the gallows unaided, but some had to be helped. At the top, each made the sign of the cross in four directions and covered his own face with a piece of linen. Some put their heads in the nooses and jumped from the gallows, hoping to break their necks and find a quick end. In general, the Streltsy met death with great calm, following one another without any great sadness on their faces. Because the regular executioners were unable to handle so many, Peter ordered several military officers to mount the gallows and help with the work. That night, Korb reported, Peter went to supper at General Gordon’s. He sat in gloomy silence, commenting only on the stubborn resistance of the men who had died.

This grim pageant was only the first of many similar scenes that autumn and winter. Every few days, several score or more were executed. Two hundred were hanged from the walls of the city on special beams extended out from the embrasures in the parapet, two Streltsy to each beam. At each gate to the city, six more bodies swung from a gibbet, a reminder to all who entered of the fruits of treason. On October 11, 144 were hanged in Red Square, on beams projecting through the crenellations in the Kremlin wall. One hundred and nine were beheaded by axe and sword over an open trench at Preobrazhenskoe. Three brothers, among the most stubborn of the rebels, were executed in Red Square, two being broken on the wheel and left to die slowly while the third was beheaded before their eyes. The two survivors complained bitterly at the injustice of their brother being permitted to die so quickly and easily.

For some, there were special humiliations. For the regimental priests who had encouraged the Streltsy, a gibbet constructed in the shape of a cross was erected in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The priests were hanged by the court jester, dressed for the occasion in clerical robes. To make the connection between the Streltsy and Sophia crystal clear, 196 were hanged from a huge square gallows erected near Novodevichy Convent, where the Tsarevna was imprisoned. Three, the supposed ringleaders, were strung up directly outside the window of Sophia’s room, with one of the corpses holding a piece of paper representing the Streltsy petition asking her to rule. They remained dangling, near enough for her to touch, for the rest of the winter.

Not all the men of the four rebellious regiments were executed. Peter reduced the sentences of 500 soldiers under twenty years of age from death to branding on the right cheek and exile. Others had their noses or ears lopped off to mark them hideously as participants in treason. Throughout Peter’s reign, noseless, earless, branded men, evidence of both the Tsar’s wrath and his mercy, roamed the edges of his realm.

Korb reported that in his vengeful fury Peter forced a number of his favorites to act as executioners. On October 23, according to Korb, the boyars who constituted the council at which the Streltsy were condemned were summoned to Preobrazhenskoe and ordered to carry out executions themselves. To each boyar a Strelets was brought and an axe was given, with the command that he decapitate the man before him. Some took the axe with trembling hands, aimed poorly and struck without sufficient force. One boyar struck far too low, hitting his victim in the middle of the back and almost cutting him in half. With the creature writhing, screaming and bleeding in front of him, the boyar could not finish his task.

In this grisly work, two apparently distinguished themselves. Prince Romodanovsky, already renowned for his relentless prosecution of the investigation in the torture chambers, beheaded four Streltsy, according to Korb. Romodanovsky’s grim passion, “surpassing all the rest in cruelty,” perhaps had root in the murder of his father by the Streltsy in 1682. Alexander Menshikov, the Tsar’s young favorite, eager to please, later boasted of having cut off twenty heads. Only the foreigners among the Tsar’s intimates refused, saying that it was not the custom of their countries for men of their kind to act as executioners. Peter, Korb says, surveyed the whole proceeding from his saddle, frowning with displeasure when he saw a boyar, pale and trembling, reluctant to accept the axe.

Korb also says that Peter himself beheaded some of the Streltsy. The Austrian secretary declared that on the day of the first public executions at Preobrazhenskoe he was standing with a German major in Peter’s army. Leaving Korb, the major pressed forward through the crowd and eventually returned to tell Korb that he had seen Peter personally decapitate five of the Streltsy. On another day later in the fall, Korb says, “it was reported by a number of persons that today again the Tsar had himself executed public vengeance upon some traitors.” Most historians—Western and Russian, pre-Revolutionary and Soviet—have rejected this hearsay evidence. Those who have already found in Peter an excessive violence and brutality will have no difficulty imagining him personally wielding an executioner’s axe. He did indeed become violent when he was angry, and he was enraged at these mutineers who, once again, had raised their swords against his throne; to him it was treason that was immoral, not its punishment. Those who do not wish to believe that the Tsar became an executioner can take solace in the fact that neither Korb nor his Austrian colleagues actually witnessed the event described; their evidence could not be used in a modern court.

If there is doubt on this point, there is none on the matter of Peter’s responsibility for the mass tortures and death, or on the question of his presence in the torture chambers while flesh was being flayed or burned. To us this seems brutal and degrading; to Peter it seemed necessary. He was indignant, he was angry, and he wanted to hear the truth himself. “So great a distrust of his boyars had taken possession of the Tsar’s mind,” says Korb, “that he was afraid to entrust them with the smallest part of this examination, preferring rather to devise the interrogatories and to examine the accused [himself].” Besides, Peter never hesitated to be a participant in the enterprises he commanded, whether on the battlefield, on shipboard or in the torture chamber. He had decreed the interrogation and destruction of the Streltsy; he would not sit back and wait for someone to bring him news that his command had been obeyed.

Yet, Peter was not a sadist. He did not enjoy seeing people tortured—he did not, for instance, set bears on people merely to see what would happen, as Ivan the Terrible had done. He tortured for practical reasons of state: to extract information. He executed as punishment for treason. To him these were natural, traditional and even moral actions. Few of his seventeenth-century contemporaries, Russian or European, would have argued this principle. In fact, at that moment in Russian history, what counted was not the morality of Peter’s act but its effect. The destruction of the Streltsy inspired in the Russian people a belief in Peter’s harsh, implacable will, and proclaimed his iron determination to tolerate no opposition to his rule. Thereafter, despite his Western clothes and tastes, his people knew that they had no choice except to follow. For beneath the Western clothes beat the heart of a Muscovite tsar.

This was part of Peter’s plan. He did not destroy the Streltsy simply to wreak vengeance, or to expose one specific plot, but to make an example, to terrify, to force submission. The lesson of the Streltsy, burned in blood and fire, was one from which we today recoil, but it cemented Peter’s reign. It gave him the power to work his reforms and—for better or worse—to revolutionize Russian society.

In the West from which Peter had so recently returned and where he hoped to build a new image of his country, the news was shocking. Even the common understanding that a sovereign could not tolerate treason was swept aside by reports of the scale of the Preobrazhenskoe tortures and executions. Everywhere, it seemed to confirm the beliefs of those who had said that Muscovy was an incorrigibly barbarous nation and its ruler a cruel Oriental tyrant. In England, Bishop Burnet recalled his appraisal of Peter: “How long he is to be the scourge of that nation, or of his neighbors, God only knows.”

That Peter was aware of how the West would regard his actions was shown by his desire to conceal the tortures, if not the executions, from the foreign diplomats in Moscow. Subsequently, when Korb’s diary was published in Vienna (it was printed in Latin, but translated into Russian for Peter’s benefit), the Tsar reacted violently. It precipitated a serious diplomatic crisis until the Emperor Leopold I agreed to destroy all unsold copies. Even those copies that had been sold were pursued by the Tsar’s agents, trying to buy back every one they could.

While the four regiments of Streltsy which had rebelled were being punished, the rest of the Streltsy, including the six regiments lately sent from Moscow to garrison Azov, had become dangerously restless and were threatening to join the Don Cossacks and march on Moscow. “There are boyars in Moscow, Germans in Azov, demons in the water and worms in the earth,” was the way they expressed their unhappiness with the world around them. Then came the news of the total destruction of their comrades, and the Streltsy in Azov thought better of their intended subordination and remained at their posts.

Despite this success of his grim policy, Peter decided that he could no longer tolerate the Streltsy at all. Especially after this bloody repression, the hatred of the survivors would only increase and the state might once again be subjected to upheaval. Of the 2,000 Streltsy who had revolted, nearly 1,200 had been executed. Their widows and children were expelled from Moscow and people everywhere were forbidden to give them assistance except to employ them as servants on estates far from the capital. The following spring, Peter disbanded the remaining sixteen Streltsy regiments. Their houses and lands in Moscow were confiscated and they were sent into exile in Siberia and other distant regions to become simple villagers. They were forbidden ever to take up arms again, and the local governors were warned against trying to recruit them for military service. Later, when the Great Northern War against Sweden demanded constant replenishments of manpower, Peter reversed this decision, and several regiments of former Streltsy were formed under close control. In 1708, after a final revolt of the Streltsy stationed in the distant city of Astrachan, the organization was permanently abolished.

Thus, at last Peter was done with the turbulent, domineering Muscovite soldier-tradesmen who had so influenced and terrorized his youth. The Streltsy were swept away, and with them the only serious armed opposition to his policies and the main obstacle to his reorganization of the army. They were replaced with his own creation, the militarily up-to-date and efficient Guards regiments, trained on the Western model and imbued with support for Peter’s policies. Ironically, the Russian Guards officers, recruited almost solely from the families of land-owning gentry, quickly came to play the political role to which the Streltsy had unsuccessfully aspired. As long as the sovereign’s will was as strong as Peter’s, they were submissive and obedient. But when the sovereign was a woman (as happened four times within the century after Peter’s death) or a child (as happened twice), and in moments of interregnum when there was no sovereign and the succession was in doubt, then the Guards themselves helped to choose who would rule. The Streltsy, had they still existed, might have permitted themselves a wry laugh at this turn of events. More likely, however, nervous lest the spirit of Peter might still be watching over them, they would have held their tongues in fearful silence.