29
THE HAND OF THE AUTOCRAT
In the early years of war—indeed, throughout his reign—Peter was constantly on the move. Nine years passed between the battles of Narva and Poltava; during this time, the Tsar was never more than three months in a single place. Now in Moscow, now in St. Petersburg, now in Voronezh; then on to Poland, Lithuania and Livonia, Peter traveled incessantly, everywhere inspecting, organizing, encouraging, criticizing, commanding. Even in his beloved Petersburg, he hurried back and forth between houses in different parts of the city. If he stayed under one roof for more than a week, he became restless. He ordered his carriage—he would go to see how a ship was building, how a canal was proceeding, what was being accomplished with the new harbor at Petersburg or Kronstadt. Traveling back and forth over the immense distances of his empire, the Tsar broke every precedent before the eyes of his astonished people. The time-honored image of a distant sovereign, crowned, enthroned and immobile in the white-walled Kremlin, bore no resemblance to this black-eyed, beardless giant dressed in a green German coat, black three-cornered hat and high, mud-spattered boots, stepping down from his carriage into the muddy streets of a Russian town, demanding beer for his thirst, a bed for the night and fresh horses for the morning.
Overland travel in this time was a trial for the spirit and a torment for the body. Russian roads were little more than rutted tracks across meadows or through forests. Rivers were crossed by dilapidated bridges, crude ferries or shallow fords. The human beings one encountered were impoverished, frightened and sometimes hostile. In winter, wolves prowled nearby. Because of mud and potholes, carriages moved slowly and often broke down; over some stretches, five miles was all that could be covered in a day. Inns were rare and travelers looked for beds in private houses. Horses—even when the driver carried an official order that they must be provided—were difficult to find, and usually could be used over a distance of no more than ten miles, after which they had to be unharnessed and returned to their owner while the traveler and his driver searched for fresh animals. Under such conditions, a journey was often interrupted by long, unexpected delays. When St. Petersburg was rising, Peter ordered a new road, 500 miles long, between the new city and the old capital of Moscow. The trip between the two cities took four to five weeks. Later in his reign, the Tsar demanded a straighter road, along the line of the present railroad, which would have shortened the distance by 100 miles. Eighty miles of this new highway had been completed when the project was abandoned. The lakes, swamps and forests in the area of Novgorod made an impenetrable barrier.
In fairness, the condition of Russian roads was not unique in the early eighteenth century. In 1703, it took fourteen hours to travel from London to Windsor, a distance of twenty-five miles. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, declared of his country’s highways, “It is a prostitution of the language to call them turnpikes.” One was “vile, a narrow causeway cut into ruts”; others were “execrably broke into holes … sufficient to dislocate one’s bones.” Although stagecoaches were being introduced into Western Europe and larger cities had famous and comfortable travelers’ inns like the Golden Bull in Vienna, land journeys still were difficult. To cross the Alps from Vienna to Venice during the winter, passengers had to descend from their carriages and go part of the way on foot across the snow.
The difference between Russia and Western Europe lay less in the frightful, pocked surface of the roads than in the wildness and vastness of the surrounding country. Early in April 1718, Friedrich Weber, the Hanoverian minister to Russia, set out from Moscow to St. Petersburg: “We had over twenty open rivers to pass, where there were neither bridges nor ferries,” he wrote. “We were obliged to make floats for ourselves as well as we were able, the country people who were not accustomed to see travelers that way, being fled, upon our coming, with their children and horses into the woods. In all my lifetime I never had a more troublesome journey, and even some of our company who had traveled over a great part of the world protested that they never underwent the like fatigues before.”
Because of the difficulty of traveling by road, Russians looked forward eagerly to the alternatives of travel by water or across the snow. The great rivers of Russia were always primary avenues of internal trade. Boats and barges carried grain, timber and flax on the broad waters of the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dvina and, later, the Neva. Travelers to and from Europe often elected to journey by sea. Before the Baltic was opened to them, Russian ambassadors sailed for Western Europe from Archangel, preferring the icebergs and storms of the Arctic Ocean to the discomforts of overland travel.
But in Peter’s Russia, the most popular means of travel was by sled in winter. First, the frost froze the autumn mud and hardened the roads; then the falling snow covered everything with a smooth, slippery surface over which a horse could pull a sled at twice the speed of a carriage in summer. Rivers and lakes, frozen hard as steel, made easy highways between the towns and villages. “Travel by sleds is certainly the most commodious and swiftest traveling in the world either for passengers or for goods,” wrote John Perry. “The sleds, being light and conveniently made, and with little labor to the horses, slide smooth and easy over the snow and ice.” It cost only one quarter as much to move goods on runners as on wheels. Therefore, through the autumn Russian merchants piled up their goods, awaiting the coming of winter to transport them to market. Once the blanket of snow had fallen, the sleds were loaded and every day several thousands arrived in Moscow, both horses and drivers wreathed in steaming breath, to mingle with the city’s crowds.
Out in the country, the main roads were marked by high posts painted red and long avenues of trees planted on both sides of the road. “These posts and trees are useful,” observed a Dutch traveler, “because in winter it would be difficult to find the way without them, all being covered with snow.” Every twelve or fifteen miles, an inn had been built, at Peter’s command, to provide shelter for travelers.
Noblemen and important persons traveled in closed sleds which were in fact small carriages painted red, green and gold, mounted on runners rather than wheels, and drawn by two, four or six horses. If the journey was long, the carriage-sleigh became a moving cocoon from which the traveler emerged only at the journey’s end. As Weber described such travel:
It would be impossible for a traveler to bear the immense cold in Russia, were it not for the convenient contrivance of their sleds. The upper part of the sled is so closely shut and covered that not the least air can enter. On both sides are small windows and two shelves to hold provisions and books taken along for pastime. Overhead hangs a lantern with wax candles to be lighted when night comes. In the lower part of the sled lies the bedding with which the traveler is covered night and day, having at his feet warm stones, or a pewter case filled with warm water to keep the sled warm and to preserve the adjoining box in which wine and brandy are kept against the frost. Notwithstanding all such precautions, the strongest liquors very often freeze and are spoiled. In this movable apartment a man is carried along night and day without stepping out, except in case of necessity.
In this kind of sled, Peter, by frequent changing of horses, sometimes covered as much as one hundred miles a day.
Carriage, horseback, sled, river barge and boat—these were the means by which Peter traveled across Russia. “He has,” wrote Perry, “traveled twenty times more than ever any prince in the world did before him.” Despite his restlessness, he did not travel for the love of travel; instead, itwas his method of governing. Always, he wanted to see what was happening and whether his orders were being carried out. Accordingly, he came, inspected, issued new orders and moved on. Riding in carriages—bouncing on inadequate springs—across roads filled with holes and ruts, his body never at ease, his backbone constantly swaying against the seat, his head bumping the leather walls when he dozed, his arms and elbows jostling against his companions, the grating noise of the wheels, the shouts of the coachmen—this was Peter’s life, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. No wonder he traveled by water whenever he could. What a relief it must have been to glide along by barge or yacht, standing quietly on deck and watching villages, fields and forests slip past.
Peter’s constant movement made administration of his government confused and difficult. The Tsar was rarely in his capital. Many of the laws of Russia were decrees written by his hand on brown paper either in his carriage or in the inn or house in which he passed the night. Whenever he set himself to work seriously at civic administration, either the war or an urgent desire to see his ships pulled him away. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the nominal seat of government until Poltava, the bureaucracy of the central government lumbered along, and gradually a number of changes in the structure of government were made. The old official hierarchy of boyars and lesser nobles was fading in importance; the men closest to Peter—Menshikov, for example—had not been made boyars at all. Menshikov was a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and bore that title in Russia. Peter’s other companions were given the Western titles of Count and Baron; indeed, boyars like Sheremetev and Golovin now preferred to be called Count Sheremetev and Count Golovin. Government officials received new Western bureaucratic titles, such as chancellor, vice chancellor and privy councilor.
Along with the titles, the men who held them were changing. When Fedor Golovin, who had succeeded Lefort as General-Admiral and also served as Chancellor (Foreign Minister), died of fever in 1706 at the age of fifty-five, the Tsar divided his titles and duties among three men: Fedor Apraxin who became General-Admiral, Gavril Golovkin who took over the foreign ministry and was appointed Chancellor after Poltava, and Peter Shafirov who became Vice Chancellor. Apraxin was well connected: he was descended from an old boyar family and he was also the brother of the Tsaritsa Martha, Tsar Fedor’s wife. He was a bluff, hearty, blue-eyed man, enormously proud, who accepted insults from no one, not even the Tsar. Apraxin served Peter in many ways: as a general, a governor, a senator, but his real love—rare among Peter’s subjects—was the navy. He became the first Russian admiral and commanded the new fleet at its first major victory, the Battle of Hangö.
Golovkin was a more prudent, calculating man, but he too served Peter faithfully all his life. The son of a high official of Tsar Alexis, he was a page at court and became, at seventeen, one of five-year-old Peter’s gentlemen of the bedchamber. At the Battle of Narva, Golovkin displayed great bravery and was awarded the Order of St. Andrew. Most correspondence to and from Russian diplomats abroad was addressed to him and signed by him (although Peter often read and corrected the outgoing instructions). Golovkin’s portrait shows a handsome, intelligent face, encased in an elegant wig; it cannot show the personal stinginess for which he was widely famous.
The most interesting of these three senior lieutenants was Peter Shafirov, raised from obscurity to become, in 1710, Russia’s first baron. Shafirov was from a Jewish family that lived in the Polish frontier region around Smolensk, but his father had converted to Orthodoxy and found work as a translator in the Russian foreign office.* Peter Shafirov followed the same path, serving as a translator for Fedor Golovin whom he accompanied on the Great Embassy. His knowledge of Western languages including Latin and his skill at drafting diplomatic documents brought him promotion to private secretary in 1704, director of the foreign office under Golovkin in 1706, the Vice Chancellorship in 1709, then a barony, and the Order of St. Andrew in 1719. Shafirov was a large, double-chinned man with a contented smile and wise and watchful eyes. Over the years, Shafirov’s relationship with Golovkin degenerated into mutual hatred, although Peter, needing both men, forced each to remain at his post. Foreign diplomats respected Shafirov. “It is true, he had a very hot temper,” said one, “but one could always rely fully upon his word.”
In addition, the names of the offices themselves were changing. There was a new Department of the Navy, a Department of Artillery and a Department of Mines. The heads of these departments, now called ministers, managed the routine business of government. Most petitions formerly addressed to the Tsar, were now addressed to the specific department or minister concerned. Peter discovered that when he was away from Moscow, the members of the old boyar council, now called the Privy Council, frequently failed to attend meetings. If, later, the Tsar criticized council decisions, these men avoided blame by saying that they had not been present. Thus, Peter demanded punctual attendance at all meetings and decreed that all decisions be signed by every member present. These papers, along with minutes of all meetings and other important papers, were sent by courier to Peter wherever he might be.
To handle these documents, Peter kept with him at all times a mobile personal chancery headed by his Cabinet Secretary, Alexis Makarov. A talented and modest man from the north, Makarov had risen on merit from a minor post in the provincial civil service to this key position in Peter’s government. It was his duty not to offer advice but to see that all matters were brought to the Tsar’s attention in the right sequence and at the most appropriate time. In this role, which required enormous tact and afforded enormous power, Makarov was assisted by a young German, Andrew Osterman. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Osterman was employed to translate correspondence between the Tsar and foreign courts. With the passing of time, Osterman’s role was to become far greater.
Most of the business of Peter’s government in those years concerned war and taxes. Peter’s decrees, like his constant traveling through the country, almost invariably dealt with the enrollment of recruits or the collection of revenues. The Tsar’s demands for money were insatiable. In one attempt to uncover new sources of income, Peter in 1708 created a service of revenue officers, men whose duty it was to devise new means of taxing the people. Called by the foreign name “fiscals,” they were commanded “to sit and make income for the Sovereign Lord.” The leader and most successful was Alexis Kurbatov, a former serf of Boris Sheremetev who had already attracted Peter’s attention with his proposal for requiring that government-stamped paper be used for all legal documents. Under Kurbatov and his ingenious, fervently hated colleagues, new taxes were levied on a wide range of human activities. There was a tax on births, on marriages, on funerals and on the registration of wills. There was a tax on wheat and tallow. Horses were taxed, and horse hides and horse collars. There was a hat tax and a tax on the wearing of leather boots. The beard tax was systematized and enforced, and a tax on mustaches was added. Ten percent was collected from all cab fares. Houses in Moscow were taxed, and beehives throughout Russia. There was a bed tax, a bath tax, an inn tax, a tax on kitchen chimneys and on the firewood that burned in them. Nuts, melons, cucumbers, were taxed. There was even a tax on drinking water.
Money also came from an increasing number of state monopolies. This arrangement, whereby the state took total control of the production and sale of a commodity, setting any price it wished, was applied to alcohol, resin, tar, fish oil, chalk, potash, rhubarb, dice, chessmen, playing cards, and the skins of Siberian foxes, ermines and sables. The flax monopoly granted to English merchants was taken back by the Russian government. The tobacco monopoly given by Peter to Lord Carmarthen in England in 1698 was abolished. The solid-oak coffins in which wealthy Muscovites elegantly spent eternity were taken over by the state and then sold at four times the original price. Of all the monopolies, however, the one most profitable to the government and most oppressive to the people was the monopoly on salt. Established by decree in 1705, it fixed the price at twice the cost to the government. Peasants who could not afford the higher price often sickened and died.
To tighten administrative control and increase the efficiency of tax collectors across the sprawling mass of the empire, Peter in 1708 divided Russia into eight giant governorships, assigning these eight provinces to his closest friends. Thus, the Moscow governorship was assigned to Boyar Tikhon Streshnev, St. Petersburg went to Menshikov, Kiev to Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, Archangel to Prince Peter Golitsyn, Kazan to Boyar Peter Apraxin, Azov to Admiral Fedor Apraxin, Smolensk to Boyar Peter Saltykov and Siberia to Prince Matthew Gagarin. Each governor was responsible for all military and civil affairs in the region, especially the production of revenue. Unfortunately, as some of the “governors” resided in the capital far from their provinces, and others had conflicting duties (Menshikov was usually with the army), their authority left much to be desired.
Nevertheless, the effort continued. The governors commanded, the fiscals schemed, the tax collectors strained and the people labored, but only so much money could be squeezed from the Russian land. More could come only from the development of commerce and industry. Peter, observing the successful practices of English and Dutch trading companies in Russia, ordered Moscow merchants to form similar associations. At first, the Dutch were worried that their own efficient trade machinery would be jeopardized, but they soon realized that these fears were groundless. “As concerns the trading business,” the Dutch minister wrote reassuringly to Holland, “the matter has fallen through of itself. The Russians do not know how to set about and begin such a complex and difficult business.”
No matter how much the people struggled, Peter’s taxes and monopolies still did not bring in enough. The first Treasury balance sheet, published in 1710, showed a revenue of 3,026,128 roubles and expenses of 3,834,418 roubles, leaving a deficit of over 808,000 roubles. This money went overwhelmingly for war. The army took 2,161,176 roubles; the fleet, 444,288 roubles; artillery and ammunition, 221,799 roubles; recruits, 30,000 roubles; armament, 84,104 roubles; embassies, 148,031 roubles; and the court, medical department, support of prisoners and miscellaneous, 745,020 roubles.
The extraordinary demand for taxes was matched by an extraordinary demand for men. In the nine years from Narva to Poltava, Peter drafted over 300,000 men into the army. Some were killed or wounded, others died of disease, but the overwhelming proportion of the losses came from desertion. Additional drafts of peasant labor were conscripted to work on Peter’s ambitious construction projects. Thirty thousand laborers a year were needed for work on the fortifications at Azov and the building of the naval base at Tagonrog. The shipyards at Voronezh and work on a never completed Don-Volga canal required more thousands. And well before Poltava, the effort to build St. Petersburg was consuming more men than anything else. In the summer of 1707, Peter ordered Streshnev to send 30,000 laborers to St. Petersburg from the Moscow region alone.
These unprecedented demands for money and men drew groans from all classes. Discontent and complaint were not new in Russia, but always the people had blamed the boyars when things went wrong, not the tsar. It was Peter himself who had shattered this image. Now, the people understood that the Tsar was the government, that this tall man dressed in foreign clothes was giving the orders which made their lives so hard. “Since God has sent him to be the Tsar, we have no happy days,” grumbled a peasant. “The village is weighed down with furnishing roubles and half-roubles and horses’ carts, and there is no rest for us peasants.” A nobleman’s son agreed. “What sort of tsar is he?” he asked. “He has forced us all into service, he has seized upon our people and peasants for recruits. Nowhere can you escape him. Everyone is lost. He even goes into the service himself and yet no one kills him. If they only killed him, the service would stop and it would be easier for the people.”
Talk of this kind did not go far. The new Secret Office of Preobrazhenskoe had agents everywhere, watching and listening for “violent and unseemly speech.” These special police were successors first to the Streltsy, who had acted as preservers of public order until their dissolution, and then to the soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who had replaced the Streltsy as street-corner gendarmes. When the Guardsmen were called away to war, Peter created a new organization, the Secret Office. Formalized by ukase in 1702, it was given jurisdiction over all crimes and especially treason “by word or deed.” Not surprisingly, the chief of this new office was Peter’s comrade, the Mock-Tsar, Fedor Romodanovsky. A savage, brutal man, totally devoted to Peter, Romodanovsky dealt mercilessly with any suggestion of treason or rebellion. Through a network of pervasive eavesdropping and denunciation, followed by torture and execution, Romodanovsky and the Secret Office did their grim work well: Even under extreme oppression from tax collectors and labor conscriptors, cases of treason “by word and deed” never threatened the throne.
But the record of these years is not all cruel. In various ways, Peter made serious efforts to improve the customs and conditions of Russian life. He acted to raise the status of women, declaring that they must not remain secluded in the terem, but should be present with men at dinners and on other social occasions. He banned the old Muscovite system of arranged marriages in which bride and groom had no choice in the matter and did not even meet each other until the marriage service was being performed. In April 1702, to the immense joy of young people, Peter decreed that all marriage decisions should be voluntary, that the prospective partners should meet at least six weeks before their engagement, that each should be entirely free to reject the other, and that the bridegroom’s symbolic wielding of the whip at wedding ceremonies be replaced with a kiss.
Peter forbade the killing of newborn infants who were deformed—the custom in Moscow had been to quietly smother such children immediately after delivery—and ordered that all such births be recorded so that the authorities might oversee the continued existence of these children. He prohibited the unrestricted sale of herbs and drugs by street vendors, ordering that they be sold only at apothecary shops. In 1706, he established the first large public hospital in Moscow on the banks of the Yauza River. To make the streets safer, he forbade the wearing of daggers or pointed knives which turned drunken street brawls into bloody massacres. Dueling, largely a foreign custom, was banned. To cope with the hordes of professional beggars who besieged travelers on every street, he required beggars to go to an almshouse to do their soliciting. Later, he attacked the problem from another side by declaring that anyone caught giving alms to a beggar in the streets should himself be fined.
To encourage foreigners to serve in Russia, Peter decreed that all previous laws which had restricted the right of foreign citizens to come and go across the frontiers as they pleased were now repealed. All foreigners in Russian service were placed under the Tsar’s protection, and any legal dispute affecting them was to be judged not by Russian law and Russian courts, but by a special tribunal composed of foreigners following the procedure of Roman civil law. Further, all foreigners were promised absolute religious freedom while in Russia. “We shall exercise no compulsion over the consciences of men, and shall gladly allow every Christian to care for his own salvation at his own risk,” announced the Tsar.
Despite the distractions of war, Peter maintained his interest in broadening the educational horizons of his subjects. The School of Mathematics and Navigation established by Henry Farquharson and two other Scots in Moscow in 1701 flourished with 200 Russian students. These valuable investments in the future became the object of a tussle between the recruiting sergeants and Kurbatov, who stepped in to save them from conscription into the army, complaining that it was a waste of money to educate them if, after they were trained, they were to be drafted as simple soldiers. A School of Ancient and Modern Languages had been founded by Pastor Gluck, Catherine’s Lutheran guardian, who had arrived in Moscow with his family in 1703; Gluck was to train future Russian diplomats in Latin, Modern Languages, Geography, Politics, Riding and Dancing. The Tsar ordered that the ancient chronicles of Russian history, especially those in the monasteries of Kiev and Novgorod, be sent to Moscow for safekeeping. He directed that the foreign books being translated into Russian and printed in Russian by the Tessing brothers of Amsterdam be exact translations, even if portions of the texts were unfavorable to Russia. The purpose, he said, “is not to flatter my subjects, but rather to educate them by showing them the opinion entertained of them by foreign nations.” In 1707, when a typefounder and two printers arrived in Moscow, Peter approved a newly revised Cyrillic type in which new books printed in Russia began to appear. The first was a manual of geometry, the second a handbook guide to the writing of letters, with instructions on how to offer compliments, issue invitations and make a proposal of marriage. Most of the volumes that followed were technical, but Peter also ordered 2,000 calendars, and histories of the Trojan War, the life of Alexander the Great and of Russia itself. The Tsar not only commissioned the books, but edited and annotated them. “We have read the book on fortifications which you translated,” he wrote to one translator. “The conversations are good and clearly rendered, but in the sections teaching how to carry out fortifications, it is darkly and unintelligibly translated.”
To keep his subjects abreast of the world, Peter decreed that a journal, Vedomosti, should be published in Moscow. All government offices were ordered to contribute news, and thus, early in 1703, the first Russian newspaper appeared under the heading Gazette of military and other matters, meriting attention and remembrance, that have happened in the Muscovite state and in neighboring countries. As a further means of educating and civilizing his people, Peter attempted to establish an open public theater which would stage plays in a wooden building on Red Square. A German theatrical manager and his wife arrived in Moscow with seven actors to present plays and train Russian actors. Several comedies and tragedies were produced, including Molière’s Le Médecin malgré lui (The Physician in Spite of Himself).
Throughout these years, Peter attempted to change the Russian concept of the deference due a tsar. Late in 1701, he decreed that men should no longer fall on their knees or prostrate themselves on the ground in the presence of the sovereign. He abolished the requirement that Muscovites remove their hats in winter as a sign of respect when they passed the palace, whether the tsar was inside or not. “What difference is there between God and the tsar when the same respect is given to both?” asked Peter. “Less servility, more zeal in service and more loyalty to me and to the state—this is the respect which should be paid to the tsar.”
For some, the burden was too heavy and the only solution to the demands of the tax collector and the work gang was escape. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants simply ran away. Some faded into the forests or traveled to the north, where prosperous settlements of Old Believers already existed. Most went south to the Ukrainian and Volga steppes, the land of the Cossacks, the traditional refuge for Russian runaways. Behind, they left deserted villages and nervous governors and landlords anxiously trying to explain why they could not fulfill the Tsar’s demands for manpower. When, to check this dangerous outflow, the Tsar ordered that the runaways be returned, the response of the Cossacks was hesitation, evasion and, ultimately, defiance.
Until this century, it was in the south that the great popular rebellions of Russian history have broken out: Stenka Razin’s rising against Tsar Alexis and Pugachev’s revolt against Catherine the Great have passed from history into legend. In Peter’s time, during the most dangerous years of the war with Charles XII, three rebellions exploded, all in the south: the revolt at Astrachan, the uprising of the Bashkirs and—most threatening to Peter’s rule—the rebellion of the Don Cossacks under Bulavin.
Astrachan, which stands where the mighty Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea, seethed with disobedience and sedition. It was a place of exile for remnants of the disbanded Streltsy, and bitter memories of the executions of 1698 still burned in the hearts of Streltsy widows, sons and brothers. The Volga merchants grumbled about the new taxes, the peasants complained about the tolls on bridges, the fishermen protested the restrictions on their catch and no one liked Peter’s foreign innovations. Into this flammable tinder poured incendiary rumors: The Tsar was dead, the foreigners had nailed him up in a barrel and thrown him into the sea; an impostor, perhaps even the Antichrist, now sat on the throne of Russia.
In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day, July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. Many of the wine-flushed participants and onlookers rushed from the celebration to attack the local government offices, condemned and beheaded the governor and renounced the Tsar’s authority by electing a new government. The new “government’s” first proclamation announced that “the governor and other officers practiced all kinds of idol worship and wished to compel us to it. But we have not allowed this to happen. We have taken the idols out of the houses of the officials.” In fact, these “idols” were the domed wig blocks on which Peter’s Westernized officers kept their wigs. The rebels sent emissaries to other Volga towns and especially to the Don Cossacks, inviting all true Christians to join them.
Word of the uprising caused alarm in Moscow. Peter was in Courland besieging Mitau when he received the news, and, realizing the need to contain the conflagration before it spread, he dispatched Sheremetev and several regiments of cavalry and dragoons to Astrachan. As a further precaution, he ordered Streshnev to hide the state treasure and to halt temporarily all letters leaving Moscow so that news of the rebellion would not reach Charles. To the rebels, Peter offered leniency. He invited the rebellious “government” to send deputies to Moscow, where Golovin would listen to their grievances. The deputies came, and their earnest pleading of complaints against the murdered governor made a deep impression on Golovin. “I have talked for some time with them and they seem faithful and honest people,” Golovin wrote to Peter. “Deign, sir, even to force yourself to show them mercy. Even we are not without rascals.” Peter agreed, and the deputies returned to Astrachan, each man with fifty roubles in his pocket for expenses, and with the promise that if the city would submit, every citizen should have amnesty. In the future, it was added, officials would collect the taxes more discreetly. Orders were sent to Sheremetev’s advancing regiments to avoid bloodshed in the region.
But in these times, leniency was often seen as weakness, and the return of the deputies bearing Peter’s offering of peace did not quell the revolt but rather gave encouragement to it. The citizens of Astrachan congratulated themselves: They had defied the Tsar and won. When Sheremetev sent a messenger to the city saying that his troops were about to enter and that he refused to include the leaders of the revolt in the general amnesty, rebellion flared again. The Field Marshal’s messenger was roughly treated and sent back with insults to Peter and the boast that in the spring they would march to Moscow and burn the German Suburb.
But the rebels had overestimated their own strength, and no help was forthcoming. The Don Cossacks replied that they themselves had not been oppressed by the tsars and still observed all Orthodox habits. How could they wear foreign clothes, they asked, when there was not a tailor among them who knew these fashions? Astrachan was alone. Nevertheless, Sheremetev’s troops were attacked when they arrived. The regular soldiers quickly defeated the rebels and entered the town. As the Russian horsemen rode by, thousands of people lay on their faces along the streets, begging for mercy. Sheremetev interrogated the leaders. “I have never seen such a tremendously crazy rabble,” he wrote to Golovin. “They are puffed up with malice and believe that we have fallen away from Orthodoxy.” The general amnesty was withdrawn, and hundreds of rebels were sent to Moscow or broken on the wheel. Peter, enormously relieved, rewarded Sheremetev with an increase in salary and the gift of large estates.
That same year, 1705, disturbances began among the Bashkirs, a semi-Oriental Moslem people living on the open steppe between the Volga and the Urals. They were partially nomadic, herding cattle, sheep, goats and occasionally camels, while themselves riding small but powerful horses and wearing bows and quivers of arrows across their backs. Through the seventeenth century, Russian colonists moving east had been establishing towns and farming plots on their meadowlands. And along with the pressure of Russian population came the demands of Russian tax collectors. By early 1708, the Bashkirs were in open revolt. They burned a number of new Russian villages along the Kama and Ufa rivers and advanced to within twenty miles of the large city of Kazan. Although Charles XII was approaching the Russian frontier in the west, Peter dispatched three regiments to deal with the threat. The western Bashkirs submitted peacefully and, with the exception of their leader, received amnesty, while the eastern Bashkirs continued to burn and ravage, especially when Peter recalled his regular troops to face the Swedes. But the Tsar succeeded in summoning 10,000 Buddhist Kalmucks to confront and ultimately subdue the Bashkirs.
Luck and the presence of Sheremetev’s dragoons had snuffed out the Astrachan flame. The Bashkirs had lacked unity and leadership and, ultimately, they too had been put down. But the most serious upheaval of Peter’s reign, coming at a time when he and his army were fully engaged with Sweden, was the revolt of the Don Cossacks under Kondraty Bulavin.
The immediate cause of the Cossack revolt was Peter’s attempt to round up deserters from the army and serfs who had fled to join the Cossacks. Like the American West, the underpopulated and in many places largely empty Ukraine was a magnet for restless souls who wished to escape the restrictions and oppression of conventional society. In Russia, many of these pioneers were escaping the law: They were either serfs, legally bound to the soil by laws first made in the time of Ivan the Terrible and reinforced by Tsar Alexis, or soldiers forcibly enlisted into Peter’s army to serve for twenty-five years, or laborers drafted to work in the shipyards at Voronezh or on the fortifications of Azov and Tagonrog. In the south, the Cossacks welcomed them, and demands that the fugitives be returned were generally ignored. Finally, in September 1707, Prince Yury Dolgoruky arrived on the Don with 1,200 soldiers to enforce the Tsar’s decrees.
Dolgoruky’s appearance frightened the Cossack elders and people. One ataman, Lukyan Maximov, received Dolgoruky respectfully and offered to help him track down the fugitives. But Kondraty Bulavin, the fiery Ataman of Bakhmut, reacted differently. On the night of October 9, 1707, his Cossacks attacked Dolgoruky’s encampment on the bank of the River Aidar and slaughtered the Russians to the last man. As usual with such peasant revolts, Bulavin had no positive political program. His rising, he said, was not against the Tsar, but against all “princes and magnates, profiteers and foreigners.” He called on all Cossacks “to defend the house of God’s Holy Mother and the Christian Church against the heathen and Hellenic teachings which the boyars and Germans wish to introduce.” Invoking the name of Stenka Razin, he declared that he would free the conscripts at Azov and Tagonrog and would, the next spring, march on Voronezh and Moscow.
Meanwhile, however, the Ataman Maximov, fearing Peter’s retribution for Dolgoruky’s massacre, mustered a force of loyal Cossacks and defeated Bulavin’s rebels. Maximov wrote to Peter that he had exacted vengeance by cutting off the prisoners’ noses, hanging them up by their feet, whipping them and executing them by firing squads. Relieved, Peter wrote to Menshikov on November 16, 1707, that “this business, by the grace of God, is now finished.” But Peter had relaxed too quickly. Bulavin himself had escaped from Maximov, gathered a new band and, in the spring of 1708, was once again roaming the Don steppe. Again, Maximov marched against the rebels, reinforced by a detachment of regular Russian troops, but this time a number of Cossacks deserted to Bulavin and the remainder were defeated in a battle on April 9, 1708.
The spreading of Bulavin’s rebellion now posed a major threat. Villages as far north as Tula were burned, and Voronezh and the whole of the upper Don lay under threat. Fearing that the upheaval might reach even farther north, Peter ordered his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, to mount more cannon on the walls of the Moscow Kremlin. The Tsar also took offensive action. A force of 10,000 regular infantrymen and dragoons was placed under the command of Guards Major Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, brother of Prince Yury Dolgoruky, murdered by Bulavin the previous autumn. Dolgoruky’s orders were “to extinguish this fire once and for all. This rabble cannot be treated other than with cruelty.” In fact, the danger of Bulavin seizing Azov and Tagonrog so worried Peter that at one point he was about to depart for the Don himself to take command. Fortunately for Peter, Charles XII chose to rest his army in camp near Minsk for precisely the three months of greatest danger from Bulavin.
For a while, Bulavin swept all before him. He defeated Maximov again and executed him. His troops attacked Azov and captured one suburb of the town before being repulsed by the loyal garrison. Then, flushed with success, Bulavin imprudently divided his army into three divisions. On May 12, one division was defeated, and on July 1 a second division was routed by Dolgoruky’s advancing regulars. Sensing the change in the wind, most of the Cossacks, even those who had supported Bulavin, drew up a petition to the Tsar promising allegiance if he would forgive them. After still another defeat of Bulavin’s dwindling force, the elders decided to arrest the leader and put him to death to please the Tsar. Bulavin resisted, killing two of the Cossacks sent to arrest him, but then, seeing that all was lost, he killed himself. Gradually, the flames on the steppe died down and flickered out. In November, the remaining force of rebels was cornered by Dolgoruky, and 3,000 Cossacks died in battle. The rebellion was over. Peter commanded Dolgoruky to “execute the worst rebel leaders and send the other leaders to penal servitude; return all the remaining Cossacks to their old places, and burn the new settlements as ordered before.” Two hundred rebels were hanged on gallows erected on rafts and sent floating down the Don. All who saw them drifting silently past the river towns and villages were warned that the iron hand of the autocrat reached through the breadth of his realm.
* Ivan the Terrible had banned all Jews from Russia. However, Jews who renounced their religion were free to rise in society and government in Imperial Russia.