52
A PATERNAL ULTIMATUM
In the autumn of 1715, when his son was born and his wife died, the Tsarevich Alexis was no longer a youth. He was twenty-five years old and physically a lesser man than his father. The Prince was six feet tall, an unusual height for that time, but Peter at six feet seven inches towered over him as he did over everyone else. Peter Bruce, a foreign officer in Russian service, described Alexis in these years as being “very slovenly in his dress, tall, well made, of a brown complexion, black hair and eyes, of a stern countenance and strong voice.” His eyes, closer together than Peter’s, often flickered with anxiety and fear.
The two were wholly opposite. Alexis grew up a man of considerable intellectual background and capacity. He was intelligent, fond of reading, curious about theological questions and had an ease with foreign languages. Physically lazy, he loved a quiet, contemplative life and had little inclination to go out into the world and use his education in a practical way. All this was directly contrary to Peter’s character and training. The Tsar had had only limited formal education. At the age when Alexis was reading and reflecting over works like The Divine Manna, The Wonders of God and Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, Peter was drilling soldiers, building boats and firing skyrockets. Most of all, Alexis lacked altogether the titanic energy, the burning curiosity and the compulsive drive which were the sources of Peter’s greatness. He was bookish rather than active, cautious rather than bold, preferred the old to the new. It seemed almost as if the son were of an older generation than the father. As the offspring of another tsar—say, his own grandfather Tsar Alexis, or his uncle Tsar Fedor—Alexis’ character might have been more appropriate and the story of his life might have been different. Whatever he might have been, however, he was spectacularly ill-suited to be the son—and the heir—of Peter the Great.
Although the differences between father and son were always tacit (the Tsarevich never publicly raised his voice to oppose the Tsar), they were always there, and both men felt them keenly. In his younger years, he tried desperately to please Peter, but a sense of inferiority weakened all his efforts. The more Peter upbraided him, the more incompetent he became and the more he grew to loathe and fear his father, his father’s friends and his father’s ways. He retreated and evaded, and the more Peter was enraged by this, the more reticent and frightened Alexis became. There seemed to be no solution.
To overcome his fears and weakness, Alexis drank more heavily. To avoid the responsibilities that he could not face, he pretended that he was sick. When Alexis returned from Germany in 1713, after his year of study in Dresden, Peter asked what he had learned in geometry and fortifications. The question frightened Alexis; he was afraid that his father would ask him to execute a drawing before his eyes and that he would be unable to do it. Returning to his house, the Tsarevich took a pistol and tried to maim himself by firing the ball through his right hand. His hands were shaking and he missed, but the powder flash burned his right hand badly. When Peter asked what had happened, Alexis said that it had been an accident.
This was not an isolated episode. Having no interest in soldiers or ships, new buildings, docks, canals or any of Peter’s projects or reforms, he sometimes took medicines to make himself ill so that he might avoid public appearances or duties. Once when required to be present at the launching of a ship, he said to a friend, “I would rather be a galley slave or have a burning fever than be obliged to go there.” To another, he said, “I am not a stupid fool, but I cannot work.” As his mother-in-law, the Princess of Wolfenbüttel, said, “It is quite useless for his father to force him to attend to military matters, as he would rather have a rosary than a pistol in his hand.”
As Alexis’ dread of his father deepened, he found that he was scarcely able to face the Tsar. Once, he admitted to his confessor that he had frequently wished for his father’s death. Ignatiev replied, “God will forgive you. We all wish for his death because the people have to bear such a heavy burden.”
Involuntarily, but also inevitably, Alexis became the focus of serious opposition to the Tsar. All who opposed Peter looked to Alexis as the hope of the future. The clergy prayed that Alexis as tsar would restore the church to its former power and majesty. The people believed that he would lighten their burdens of labor, service and taxation. The old nobility hoped that when he sat on the throne, Alexis would restore their former privileges and dismiss the upstart newcomers like Menshikov and Shafirov. Even many of the noblemen whom Peter trusted showed their sympathy for the Tsarevich privately. The Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys, Prince Boris Kurakin and even Field Marshal Boris Sheremetev were among these. Senator Prince Jacob Dolgoruky warned Alexis, “Do not say any more, they are watching us.” Prince Vasily Dolgoruky told Alexis, “You are wiser than your father. Your father is wise, but he has no knowledge of men. You will have more knowledge of men.”
Despite these sentiments and a general current of discontent at Peter’s rule, there was no conspiracy. The only policy of Alexis’ adherents was to wait until the son succeeded the father, which, given the precarious state of Peter’s health, seemed unlikely to be long. One of Alexis’ closest advisors, Alexander Kikin—one of Peter’s new men, who had accompanied the Tsar on the Great Embassy and been promoted to head of the Admiralty—secretly counseled the Tsarevich to think of leaving Russia, or, if he happened to be in a foreign country, to remain there. “After your recovery [in Carlsbad],” Kikin had told Alexis before he left, “write to your father that you will be obliged to take medicines again in the spring, and in the meantime you may go to Holland, and afterward to Italy, after the cure in the spring. At this rate, you may make your absence last two or three years.”
As for Peter, his feelings for his son were a blend of frustration and anger. Years before, when he had ignored his infant son, it was because Alexis was Eudoxia’s child and because he himself was scarcely more than an adolescent. Then, as the boy grew older and the flaws in his character became more evident, Peter tried to strengthen him by treating him roughly, with almost Spartan harshness, rather than with warmth and understanding. Repeatedly, through the governorship of Menshikov, through his own letters and talks with his son, and by employing him on various public assignments and governmental missions, Peter tried to instill in Alexis a sense of duty to the state and participation in the reforms he was forcing on Russia. By sending him to the West for schooling, by marrying him to a German princess, Peter hoped to change his son. On Alexis’ return to St. Petersburg in 1713, Peter waited hopefully to observe the results of the Tsarevich’s foreign travel and study. But when the Tsar asked Alexis for a demonstration of his new knowledge, his reward was that the Tsarevich tried to shoot himself in the hand.
More and more, as Peter saw it, his son rejected all the responsibilities of being heir to the throne, preferring to hang back and turn away from every challenge. Rather than taking up his natural role in Peter’s work, Alexis surrounded himself with people who opposed everything Peter stood for. To certain parts of his son’s personal life, Peter did not object: He did not mind Alexis’ drinking, or his charades with his own little “Exotic Company” or his taking a Finnish serf as a mistress—all these traits had parallels in Peter’s own life. What the Tsar could not accept was his son’s continual rejection of what he saw as the Tsarevich’s duty. Peter was willing to be tolerant of all those who tried to carry out his orders, but he was furious when he met resistance. How else could he react when his own son, who at twenty-five should have been the leading exemplar of the Tsar’s concepts of duty and service, refused any part in Peter’s life work except when he was driven to it? In the winter of 1715–1716, Peter decided that he must get things in order; the passive, lazy and frightened man who had no interest in military affairs or ships and the sea, no sympathy for reforms and no wish to build on the foundations laid by his father, must change himself once and for all. What Peter was demanding was a complete re-creation of personality. Unfortunately, the time for this had passed; the son, like the father, now was set in his temperament for life.
On the day of Princess Charlotte’s funeral, the Tsarevich was handed a letter which Peter had written sixteen days earlier, before Charlotte’s death and the births of the two male infants named Peter. This letter reveals the hopes Peter had for Alexis, how desperately he wished the Tsarevich to pick up the mantle and prepare himself, and his growing dismay that Alexis was unable or unwilling to do this:
A Declaration to My Son:
You cannot be ignorant of what is known to all the world, to what degree our people groaned under the oppression of the Swedes before the beginning of the present war.
By the usurpation of so many maritime places so necessary to our state, they had cut us off from all commerce with the rest of the world.… You know what it has cost us in the beginning of this war (in which God alone has led us, as it were, by the hand, and still guides us) to make ourselves experienced in the art of war and to put a stop to those advantages which our implacable enemies obtained over us.
We submitted to this with a resignation to the will of God, making no doubt that it was He who put us to that trial till He might lead us into the right way and we might render ourselves worthy to experience that the same enemy who at first made others tremble, now in his turn trembles before us, perhaps in a much greater degree. These are the fruits which, next to the assistance of God, we owe to our own toil and to the labor of our faithful and affectionate children, our Russian subjects.
But at the time that I am viewing the prosperity which God has heaped on our native country, if I cast an eye upon the posterity that is to succeed me, my heart is much more penetrated with grief on account of what is to happen, seeing that you, my son, reject all means of making yourself capable of governing well after me. I say your incapacity is voluntary because you cannot excuse yourself with want of natural parts and strength of body, as if God had not given you a sufficient share of either; and though your constitution is none of the strongest, yet it cannot be said that it is altogether weak.
But you even will not so much as hear warlike exercises mentioned; though it is by them that we broke through that obscurity in which we were involved, and that we made ourselves known to nations whose esteem we share at present.
I do not exhort you to make war without lawful reasons; I only desire you to apply yourself to learn the art of it. For it is impossible to govern well without knowing the rules and disciplines of it, be it for no other end than for the defense of the country.
I could place before your eyes many instances of what I am proposing to you. I will only mention to you the Greeks [the Byzantine Empire, whose capital, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453], with whom we are united by the same profession of faith. What occasioned their decay but that they neglected arms? Idleness and repose weakened them, made them submit to tyrants and brought them to that slavery to which they are now so long since reduced. You mistake if you think it is enough for a prince to have good generals to act under his orders. Everyone looks upon the head; they study his inclinations and conform themselves to them. All the world knows this. My brother [Fedor] during his reign loved magnificence in dress and great equipages of horses. The nation was not much inclined that way, but the Prince’s delight soon became that of his subjects, for they are inclined to imitate him in liking a thing or disliking it.
If the people so easily break themselves of things which only concern pleasure, will they not forget in time, or will they not more easily give over the practice of arms, the exercise of which is the more painful to them the less they are kept to it?
You have no inclination to learn war, you do not apply yourself to it and consequently you will never learn it. And how then can you command others, and judge of the reward which those deserve who do their duty, or punish others who fail of it? You will do nothing, nor judge of anything, but by the eyes and help of others, like a young bird that holds up his bill to be fed.
You say that the weak state of your health will not permit you to undergo the fatigues of war. This is an excuse which is no better than the rest. I desire no fatigues but only inclination, which even sickness itself cannot hinder. Ask those who remember the time of my brother. He was of a constitution weaker by far than yours. He was not able to manage a horse of the least mettle, nor could he hardly mount it. Yet he loved horses, hence it came that there never was, nor is there actually now in the nation, a finer stable than his was.
By this you see that good success does not always depend on pains, but on the will.
If you think there are some [monarchs] whose affairs are successful though they do not go to war themselves, it is true. But if they do not go themselves, yet they have an inclination for it and understand it.
For instance, the late King of France [Louis XIV] did not always take the field in person, but it is known to what degree he loved war and what glorious exploits he performed in it, which made his campaigns to be called the theater and school of the world. His inclinations were not confined solely to military affairs, he also loved mechanics, manufactures and other establishments, which rendered his kingdom more flourishing than any other whatsoever.
After having made to you all those remonstrances, I return to my former subject which regards you.
I am a man and, consequently, I must die. To whom shall I leave after me to finish what I have partly recovered? To a man who like the slothful servant hides his talent in the earth—that is to say, who neglects making the best of what God has entrusted to him?
Remember your obstinacy and ill-nature, how often I reproached you for it and for how many years I almost have not spoken to you. But all this has availed nothing, has effected nothing. It was but losing my time, it was striking the air. You do not make the least endeavors, and all your pleasure seems to consist in staying idle and lazy at home. Things of which you ought to be ashamed (forasmuch as they make you miserable) seem to make up your dearest delight, nor do you foresee the dangerous consequences of it for yourself and for the whole state. St. Paul has left us a great truth when he wrote: “If a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?”
After having considered all those great inconveniences and reflected upon them, and seeing I cannot bring you to good by any inducement, I have thought fit to give you in writing this act of my last will with this resolution, however: to wait still a little longer before I put it in execution to see if you will mend. If not, I will have you know that I will deprive you of the succession, as one may cut off a useless member.
Do not fancy that, because I have no other child but you, I only write this to terrify you. I will certainly put it in execution if it please God; for whereas I do not spare my own life for my country and the welfare of my people, why should I spare you who do not render yourself worthy of either? I would rather choose to transmit them to a worthy stranger than to my own unworthy son.
Peter
Alexis’ reaction to this letter was the opposite of that his father had hoped for. Terrified by Peter’s summons, he rushed to his most intimate confidants and begged for advice. Kikin advised him to renounce his rights to the throne on the ground of ill-health. “You will at last be able to rest if you cut yourself off from everything. I know that otherwise, with your weakness, you cannot hold out. But it is a pity you did not stay away when you were [in Germany].” Viazemsky, his first teacher, concurred that he should declare himself unfit to bear the heavy burden of the crown. Alexis spoke also to Prince Yury Trubetskoy, who told him, “You do well not to aspire to the succession. You are not proper for it.” The Tsarevich then pleaded with Prince Vasily Dolgoruky to persuade the Tsar to let him resign the succession peacefully and live the rest of his life on an estate in the country. Dolgoruky promised to speak to Peter.
Meanwhile, three days after he received his father’s declaration, Alexis wrote his reply:
Most Clement Lord and Father:
I have read the paper Your Majesty gave me on the 16th of October 1715 after the funeral of my late consort.
I have nothing to reply to it but that if Your Majesty will deprive me of the succession to the crown of Russia by reason of my incapacity, your will be done. I even most urgently beg it of you because I do not think myself fit for government. My memory is very much weakened and yet it is necessary in affairs. The strength of my mind and of my body is much decayed by sicknesses which I have undergone and which have rendered me incapable of governing so many nations. This requires a more vigorous man than I am.
Therefore I do not aspire after you (whom God preserve many years) to the succession of the Russian crown, even if I had no brother as I have one at present whom I pray God preserve. Neither will I pretend for the future to that succession, of which I take God to witness and sear it upon my soul, in testimony whereof I write and sign this present with my own hand.
I put my children into your hands, and as for myself, I desire nothing of you but a bare maintenance during my life, leaving the whole to your consideration and to your will.
Your most humble servant and son, Alexis.
After Peter had received Alexis’ letter, he saw Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, who relayed to Peter his own conversation with Alexis. Peter seemed agreeable, and Dolgoruky told Alexis, “I have spoken to your father about you. I believe he will deprive you of the succession, and he seems content with your letter. I have saved you from the block by speaking to your father.” If Alexis was reassured by the sum of this message, he cannot have been cheerful to hear that there had been talk of the scaffold.
In fact, Peter was far from content. His warning to the Tsarevich had provoked the wrong reaction, and Alexis’ letter of submission and renunciation seemed far too prompt and sweeping. How could a serious man lay aside a throne so easily? Was the renunciation sincere? And even if it were, how could the heir to a great throne simply retire and live in the country? As a farmer or a country squire, would he not remain—perhaps even involuntarily—a rallying point for opposition to his father?
For a month, Peter pondered these questions and did nothing. Then, fate intervened and almost settled the matter. Attending a drinking party at Admiral Apraxin’s, the Tsar suffered a violent convulsion and became dangerously ill. For two days and nights, his chief ministers and the members of the Senate remained in a room just outside his bedchamber, and on December 2 his condition became so critical that the Last Rites were administered. Then Peter rallied and began very slowly to improve. For three weeks, he remained in bed or in his house and finally was able to go to church on Christmas Day, where people saw that he was very thin and pale. During the illness, Alexis remained silent and visited his father only once. Perhaps this was because Kikin had warned Alexis to beware a trick: Peter, he suggested, might be only pretending to be sick, or at least exaggerating his illness by receiving the Last Rites, in order to see how everyone around him—and especially Alexis—would react to his imminent death.
As he recovered, Peter was pondering his next step. Alexis had sworn before God and “seared it on his soul” that he would never seek the succession, but Peter feared the influence on him of “great beards”—that is, the priests—once he himself was gone. Further, Peter still earnestly desired the active help of a son playing a full role as heir to the throne. Thus he decided: Alexis must join him or renounce the world completely by entering a monastery. On January 19, 1716, the Tsarevich received a second letter from his father with a demand for an immediate reply:
My Son:
My last sickness has hindered me until now from explaining myself to you about the resolution I have taken upon your letter which you wrote to me in answer to my first. At present I answer that I observe you talk of nothing in it but of the succession, just as if I needed your consent to do in that affair what in fact depends solely on my will. But whence comes it that in your letter you say nothing of that incapacity wherein you voluntarily put yourself and of that aversion you have for state affairs, which I touched on in mine, and instead stress only the ill state of your health? I also remonstrated with you about the dissatisfaction your conduct has given me for so many years, and you pass all that over in silence, though I strongly insisted upon it. Thence I judge that those paternal exhortations have no weight with you. I have therefore taken a resolution to write to you once more by this letter, which shall be the last. If you reject the advice I give you in my lifetime, how will you value it after my death?
Can one rely on your oaths when one sees you have a hardened heart? King David said, “All men are liars.” But supposing you have at present the intention of being true to your promises, those great beards may turn you as they please and make you break them.
Because at present their debauches and sloth keep them out of posts of honor, they are in hopes that one day or other their condition will mend by you who already show much inclination for them.
I do not see that you are sensible of the obligations you have to your father, to whom you owe your very being. Do you assist him in his cares and pains since you have attained the years of maturity? Certainly in nothing; all the world knows it. Quite contrary, you blame and abhor all the good I do at the hazard and expense of my own health for the sake of my people and for their welfare. And I have all the reasons in the world to believe that you will be the destroyer of it, if you outlive me. And so I cannot resolve to let you live on according to your own free will, like an amphibious creature, neither fish nor flesh. Change therefore your conduct and either strive to render yourself worthy of the succession or turn monk. I cannot be easy on your account, especially now that my health begins to decay. On sight therefore of this letter, answer me upon it, either in writing or by word of mouth. If you fail to do it, I will treat you as a criminal.
Peter
This ultimatum fell on the Tsarevich like a thunderbolt: Transform himself into the son Peter demanded or become a monk! Alexis could not do the former; he had tried for twenty-five years and failed. But to become a monk? It meant giving up everything of the world, including Afrosina. At this point, Kikin stepped in with some cynical advice. “Become a monk as your father commands,” he counseled. “Remember that they do not nail the cowl to a man’s head. One can always slip it off again and throw it away.” Alexis eagerly accepted this solution. “Most Clement Lord andFather,” he wrote to Peter, “I received this morning your letter of the 19th. My indisposition hinders me from writing to you more at length. I will embrace the monastical state and desire your gracious consent to it. Your servant and unworthy son, Alexis.”
Once again, Peter was taken aback by the suddenness and totality of Alexis’ submission. Besides, the Tsar was on the point of leaving Russia on the long journey to the West and the time before his departure was too short to resolve an issue of this importance and complexity. Two days before he left, Peter visited Alexis at the Tsarevich’s house, where he found his son shivering in bed. Again, Peter asked Alexis what he had chosen to do. Alexis swore before God that he wished to become a monk. But at this, Peter stepped back, deciding that perhaps his ultimatum had been too harsh and that he should give his son more time to think. “Becoming a monk is not easy for a young man,” he said gently. “Think about it a little more. Do not hurry. Then write to me what you have decided. It would be better to follow the straight road than to become a monk. Anyway, I will wait another six months.” As soon as Peter left the house, an overjoyed Alexis threw off his bedclothes, got up and went to a party.
When Peter departed St. Petersburg for Danzig and the West, Alexis was enormously relieved—his father was gone and the great shadow over his life had receded. He remained heir to the throne and for six months need not think of any other choice. Six months seemed an eternity. In that time, with a man as mercurial or as subject to illness as his father, everything might change. Meanwhile, the Tsarevich could enjoy himself.
Six months can flash by when one is postponing an unpleasant choice. So it was with Alexis during the spring and summer of 1716. As autumn approached, Peter’s six-month deadline had passed and the Tsarevich still procrastinated. He had written to his father, but his letters mentioned only his health and daily routine. Then, early in October came the letter from Peter which Alexis dreaded. It was written on August 26 from Copenhagen, where preparations for the allied invasion of Scania were reaching a climax. The letter was the final ultimatum from father to son; the Tsarevich was to return his answer by the same courier.
My Son:
I have received your letter of the 29th of June and the other of the 30th of July. Seeing that you talk of nothing in it but only of the state of your health, I write to you now to tell you that I demanded your resolution concerning the succession when I bade you farewell. You answered me then as usually, that you did not judge yourself capable of it by reason of your infirmity and that you had rather retire into a convent. I tell you to think once more seriously upon it, and afterward to write to me what resolution you have taken. I have expected it this seven months past, and you send me no word at all about it; therefore upon the receipt of my letter, choose one or the other. In case you determine for the first, which is to apply yourself in order to be capable of the succession, do not delay above a week to repair hither, where you may arrive in time enough to be present at the operations of the campaign. But if you resolve on the other side, let me know where, what time and even the day you will execute your resolution, that my mind may be at rest and that I may know what I am to expect from you. Send your final answer back to me by the same courier who is to deliver you this letter.
In the first case, mark to me the day when you intend to set out from Petersburg, and in the second when you will put it in execution. I repeat it to you that I absolutely will have you resolve on something, for otherwise I must judge that you only seek to gain time to pass it in your usual idleness.
Peter
Holding this letter in his hand, Alexis at last made up his mind. His decision was to take neither of the two courses Peter offered, but to flee, to find some place where the towering figure of his father could not reach him. Only two months earlier, as Kikin departed to escort Alexis’ aunt the Tsarevna Maria to Carlsbad, he had whispered to the Tsarevich, “I am going to look for some place for you to hide.” Kikin had not returned, and Alexis did not know where to go, but in his mind there burned only a single, overwhelming idea: to escape the iron hand which now reached out for him.
Alexis acted swiftly and with subterfuge. He went immediately to Menshikov in St. Petersburg, declared that he was leaving for Copenhagen to join his father and needed 1,000 ducats to pay for his trip. He visited the Senate, asked his friends there to remain faithful to his interests and received a further 2,000 roubles for his expenses. In Riga, he borrowed 5,000 gold roubles and 2,000 roubles in other coins. When Menshikov asked him what he was going to do about Afrosina while he was gone, Alexis replied that he would take her with him as far as Riga and then send her back to Petersburg. “You will do better to take her with you all the way,” suggested Menshikov.
Before leaving St. Petersburg, Alexis confided his real intentions only to his manservant Afanasiev. But along the road, a few miles outside Libau, he met the carriage of his aunt Tsarevna Maria Alexeevna returning from her cure at Carlsbad. Although sympathetic to Alexis and the old ways, she was too frightened of Peter to offer any spoken opposition. Alexis sat in her carriage, telling her first that he was obeying his father’s command and was on his way to join the Tsar. “Good,” replied the Tsarevna, “it is necessary to obey him. That is pleasing to God.” But then Alexis broke into tears and weepingly told his aunt that he wished to find some place to hide from Peter. “Where could you go?” asked the horrified Tsarevna. “Your father would find you no matter where.” Her advice was to endure, hoping that in the end God would solve his problems. Meanwhile, she said, Kikin was in Libau and perhaps he could give better advice.
In Libau, Kikin advised that Vienna might be safe, as the Emperor was Alexis’ brother-in-law. Alexis seized the suggestion and he continued in his own coach as far as Danzig. There, dressed as a Russian officer and taking the name Kokhansky, accompanied by Afrosina disguised as a boy page, and with three Russian servants, he set off by way of Breslau and Prague for Vienna. Before he left, Kikin had given him urgent parting advice: “Remember, if your father sends somebody to persuade you to return, do not do it. He will have you publicly beheaded.”