6

PETER’S GAMES

During the years Sophia ruled, there were certain ceremonial functions which only Peter and Ivan could perform. Their signatures were required on important public documents, and their presence was necessary at state banquets, religious festivals and ceremonial receptions of foreign ambassadors. In 1683, when Peter was eleven, the two co-Tsars received the ambassador of King Charles XI of Sweden. The ambassador’s secretary, Engelbert Kampfer, recorded the scene:

Both Their Majesties sat … on a silver throne like a bishop’s chair, somewhat raised and covered with red cloth.… The Tsars wore robes of silver cloth woven with red and white flowers, and, instead of scepters, had long golden staves bent at the end like bishops’ croziers, on which, as on the breastplate of their robes, their breasts and their caps, glittered white, green and other precious stones. The elder drew his cap down over his eyes several times and, with looks cast down on the floor, sat almost immovable. The younger had a frank and open face, and his young blood rose to his cheeks as often as anyone spoke to him. He constantly looked about, and his great beauty and his lively manner—which sometimes brought the Muscovite magnates into confusion—struck all of us so much that had he been an ordinary youth and no imperial personage we would gladly have laughed and talked with him. The elder was seventeen, and the younger sixteen years old.^* When the Swedish ambassador gave his letters of credence, both Tsars rose from their places … but Ivan, the elder, somewhat hindered the proceedings through not understanding what was going on, and gave his hand to be kissed at the wrong time. Peter was so eager that he did not give the secretaries the usual time for raising him and his brother from their seats and touching their heads. He jumped up at once, put his own hand to his hat and began quickly to ask the usual question: “Is His Royal Majesty, Charles of Sweden, in good health?” He had to be pulled back until the elder brother had a chance to speak.

In 1684, when Peter was twelve, a German physician reported:

Then I kissed the right hand of Peter, who with a half-laughing mouth gave me a friendly and gracious look and immediately held out to me his hand; while the hands of the Tsar Ivan had to be supported. He [Peter] is a remarkably good-looking boy, in whom nature has shown her power; and has so many advantages of nature that being the son of a king is the least of his good qualities. He has a beauty which gains the heart of all who see him and a mind which, even in his early years, did not find its like.

Van Keller, the Dutch ambassador, writing in 1685, was effusive:

The young Tsar has now entered his thirteenth year. Nature develops herself with advantage and good fortune in his whole personality; his stature is great and his mien is fine; he grows visibly and advances with as much in intelligence and understanding as he gains the affection and love of all. He has such a strong preference for military pursuits that when he comes of age we may surely expect from him brave actions and heroic deeds.

Ivan made a woeful contrast. In 1684, when Peter was ill with measles, the Austrian ambassador was received only by Ivan, who had to be supported under the arms by two servants and whose responses were in a voice barely audible. When General Patrick Gordon, a Scottish soldier in Russian service, was received in the presence of Sophia and Vasily Golitsyn, Ivan was so sickly and weak that during the interview he did nothing but stare at the ground.

Throughout Sophia’s regency, and although they saw each other only on formal occasions, Peter’s relations with Ivan remained excellent. “The natural love and intelligence between the two Lords is even better than before,” wrote Van Keller in 1683. Naturally, Sophia and the Miloslavskys worried about Ivan. He was the foundation of their power, and from him must come their future. His life might be short, and unless he produced an heir, they would be cut off from the succession. Thus, in spite of Ivan’s infirmities of eyes, tongue and mind, Sophia decided that he must marry and attempt to father a child. Ivan bowed and took as his wife Praskovaya Saltykova, the spirited daughter of a distinguished family. In their initial effort, Ivan and Praskovaya were partially successful: they conceived a daughter; perhaps next time it would be a son.

For the Naryshkins, who found a grim satisfaction in Ivan’s debilities, these developments were cause for gloom. Peter was still too young to marry and compete with Ivan in producing an heir. Their hope lay in Peter’s youth and health; in 1684, when Peter had measles and high fever, they were in despair. They could only wait and endure Sophia’s rule while Natalya’s tall, bright-faced son grew to manhood.

The political exile of the Naryshkins had been Peter’s personal good fortune. Sophia’s coup d’état and the expulsion of his party from power had freed him from all but occasional ceremonial duties. He was at liberty to grow in the free, unrestricted, fresh-air life of the country. For a while after the Streltsy revolt, the Tsaritsa Natalya had remained with her son and daughter in the Kremlin, keeping the same apartments she had occupied since her husband’s death. But increasingly, with Sophia in power, the atmosphere seemed narrow and oppressive. Natalya still resented bitterly the murder of Matveev and her brother Ivan Naryshkin, and she was never certain that Sophia might not take some new action against her and her children. But there was little danger of this; for the most part, Sophia simply ignored her stepmother. Natalya was given a small allowance to live on; it was never enough, and the humbled Tsaritsa was forced to ask the Patriarch or other members of the clergy for more.

To escape the Kremlin, Natalya began to spend more time at Tsar Alexis’ favorite villa and hunting lodge at Preobrazhenskoe on the Yauza River, about three miles northeast of Moscow. In Alexis’ time, it had been part of his huge falconry establishment, and it still included rows of stables and hundreds of coops for the falcons and for the pigeons who were their prey. The house itself, a rambling wooden structure with red curtains at the windows, was small, but it stood in green fields patched with trees. From the crest of a hill, Peter could gaze on rolling meadowlands, fields of barley and oats, a silvery river looping through groves of birch trees, small villages dominated by white-walled churches and a blue or green onion church dome.

Here, in the fields and woods of Preobrazhenskoe and along the banks of the Yauza, Peter could ignore the classroom and do nothing but play. His favorite game, as it had been from earliest childhood, was war. During Fedor’s reign, a small parade ground had been laid out for Peter in the Kremlin where he could drill the boys who were his playmates. Now, with the open world of Preobrazhenskoe around him, there was infinite space for these fascinating games. And, unlike most boys who play at war, Peter could draw on a government arsenal to supply his equipment. The arsenal records show that his requests were frequent. In January 1683, he ordered uniforms, banners and two wooden cannon, their barrels lined with iron, mounted on wheels to allow them to be pulled by horses—all to be furnished immediately. On his eleventh birthday, in June 1683, Peter abandoned wooden cannon for real cannon with which, under the supervision of artillerymen, he was allowed to fire salutes. He enjoyed this so much that messengers came almost daily to the arsenal for more gunpowder. In May 1685, Peter, nearing thirteen, ordered sixteen pairs of pistols, sixteen carbines with slings and brass mountings and, shortly afterward, twenty-three more carbines and sixteen muskets.

By the time Peter was fourteen and he and his mother had settled permanently at Preobrazhenskoe, his martial games had transformed the summer estate into an adolescent military encampment. Peter’s first “soldiers” were the small group of playmates who had been appointed to his service when he reached the age of five. They had been selected from the families of boyars to provide the Prince with a personal retinue of young noblemen who acted the roles of equerry, valet and butler; in fact they were his friends. Peter also filled his ranks by drawing from the enormous, now largely useless group of attendants of his father, Alexis, and his brother Fedor. Swarms of retainers, especially those involved in the falconry establishment of Tsar Alexis, remained in the royal service with nothing to do. Fedor’s health had prevented him from hunting, Ivan was even less able to enjoy the sport and Peter disliked it. Nevertheless, all these people continued to receive salaries from the state and be fed at the Tsar’s expense, and Peter decided to employ some of them in his sport.

The ranks were further swelled by other young noblemen presenting themselves for enrollment, either on their own impulse or on the urging of fathers anxious to gain the young Tsar’s favor. Boys from other classes were allowed to enroll, and the sons of clerks, equerries, stable grooms and even serfs in the service of noblemen were set beside the sons of boyars. Among these young volunteers of obscure origin was a boy one year younger than the Tsar named Alexander Danilovich Menshikov. Eventually, 300 of these boys and young men had mustered on the Preobrazhenskoe estate. They lived in barracks, trained like soldiers, used soldiers’ talk and received soldiers’ pay. Peter held them as his special comrades, and from this collection of young noblemen and stableboys he eventually created the proud Preobrazhensky Regiment. Until the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, this was the first regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard, whose colonel was always the Tsar himself and whose proudest claim was that it had been founded by Peter the Great.

Soon, all the quarters available in the little village of Preobrazhenskoe were filled, but Peter’s boy army kept expanding. New barracks were built in the nearby village of Semyonovskoe; in time, this company developed into the Semyonovsky Regiment, and it became the second regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Each of these embryo regiments numbered 300 and was organized into infantry, cavalry and artillery—just like the regular army. Barracks, staff offices and stables were built, more harnesses and caissons were drawn from the equipment of the regular horse artillery, five fifers and ten drummers were detached from regular regiments to pipe and beat the tempo of Peter’s games. Western-style uniforms were designed and issued: black boots, a black three-cornered hat, breeches and a flaring, broad-cuffed coat which came to the knees, dark bottle green for the Preobrazhensky company and a rich blue for the Semyonovsky. Levels of command were organized, with field officers, subalterns, sergeants, supply and administrative staffs and even a pay department, all drawn from the ranks of boys. Like regular soldiers, they lived under strict military discipline and underwent rigorous military training. Around their barracks they mounted guard and stood watches. As their training advanced, they set off on long marches through the countryside, making camp at night, digging entrenchments and setting out patrols.

Peter plunged enthusiastically into this activity, wanting to participate fully at every level. Rather than taking for himself the rank of colonel, he enlisted in the Preobrazhensky Regiment at the lowest grade, as a drummer boy, where he could play with gusto the instrument he loved. Eventually, he promoted himself to artilleryman or bombardier, so that he could fire the weapon which made the most noise and did the most damage. In barracks or field, he allowed no distinction between himself and others. He performed the same duties, stood his turn at watch day and night, slept in the same tent and ate the same food. When earthworks were built, Peter dug with a shovel. When the regiment went on parade, Peter stood in the ranks, taller than the others but otherwise undistinguished.

Peter’s boyhood refusal to accept senior rank in any Russian military or naval organization became a lifelong characteristic. Later, when he marched with his new Russian army or sailed with his new fleet, it was always as a subordinate commander. He was willing to be promoted from drummer boy to bombardier, from bombardier to sergeant and eventually up to general or, in the fleet, up to rear admiral and eventually vice admiral, but only when he felt that his competence and service merited promotion. In part, at the beginning, he did this because in peacetime exercises drummer boys and artillerymen had more fun and made more noise than majors and colonels. But there was also his continuing belief that he should learn the business of soldiering from the bottom up. And if he, the Tsar, did this, no nobleman would be able to claim command on the basis of title. From the beginning, Peter set this example, degrading the importance of birth, elevating the necessity for competence, instilling in the Russian nobility the concept that rank and prestige had to be earned anew by each generation.

As Peter grew older, his war games became more elaborate. In 1685, in order to practice the building, defense and assault of fortifications, the boy soldiers worked for almost a year to construct a small fort of earth and timber on the bank of the Yauza at Preobrazhenskoe. As soon as it was finished, Peter bombarded it with mortars and cannon to see whether he could knock it down. In time, the rebuilt fort would grow into a little fortified town called Pressburg with its own garrison, administrative offices, court of justice and even a play “King of Pressburg” who was one of Peter’s comrades, and whom Peter himself pretended to obey.

For a military game of this complexity, Peter needed professional advice; even the most eager boys cannot build and bombard fortresses by themselves. The technical knowledge came from foreign officers in the German Suburb. Increasingly, these foreigners, originally summoned to act as temporary instructors, stayed on to act as permanent officers of the boy regiments. By the early 1690’s, when the two companies were formally transformed into the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments, nearly all the colonels, majors and captains were foreigners; only the sergeants and the men were Russians.

It has been suggested that Peter’s motive in developing these youthful companies was to build an armed force which might one day be used to overthrow Sophia. This is unlikely. Sophia was fully aware of what was going on at Preobrazhenskoe and was not seriously concerned. If she had thought that there was danger, Peter’s requests for arms from the Kremlin arsenal would not have been fulfilled. As long as Sophia possessed the loyalty of the 20,000 Streltsy in the capital, Peter’s 600 boys meant nothing. Sophia even loaned Peter regiments of Streltsy to participate in his mock battles. But in 1687, just as Peter was preparing a large-scale field exercise, Sophia embarked on the first campaign against the Crimean Tatars. The Streltsy, the regular soldiers and the foreign officers loaned to Peter were ordered to rejoin the regular army, and Peter’s maneuvers were canceled.

During those years, everything attracted Peter’s curiosity. He asked for a dining-room clock, a statue of Christ, a Kalmuck saddle, a large globe, a performing monkey. He wanted to know how things worked, he loved the sight and the feel of tools in his large hands; he watched craftsmen use these tools, then he copied them and savored the sensation of biting into wood, chipping stone or molding iron. At the age of twelve, he ordered a carpenter’s bench and mastered the use of axes, chisels, hammers and nails. He became a stonemason. He learned the delicate business of turning a lathe and became an excellent turner in wood and later in ivory. He learned how type was set and books were bound. He loved the clang of hammers on glowing red iron in the blacksmith’s shop.

One consequence of this free, open-air boyhood at Preobrazhenskoe was that Peter’s formal education was discontinued. When he left the Kremlin, hating the memories associated with it, he cut himself off from the learned tutors who had trained Fedor and Sophia, and from the customs and traditions of a tsar’s education. Bright and curious, he escaped to the out-of-doors to learn practical rather than theoretical subjects. He dealt with meadows and rivers and forests rather than classrooms; with muskets and cannon rather than paper and pens. The gain was important, but the loss was serious, too. He read few books. His handwriting, spelling and grammar never advanced beyond the abominable level of early childhood. He learned no foreign language except the smattering of Dutch and German he later picked up in the German Suburb and on his travels abroad. He was untouched by theology, his mind was never challenged or expanded by philosophy. Like any willful, intelligent child taken out of school at the age of ten and given seven years of undisciplined freedom, his curiosity led him in many directions; even unguided, he learned much. But he missed the formal, disciplined training of the mind, the steady, sequential advance from the lower to the higher disciplines until one reached what in the Greek view was the highest art, the art of governing men.

Peter’s education, directed by curiosity and whim, a blend of useful and useless, set the man and the monarch on his course. Much that he accomplished might never have happened had Peter been taught in the Kremlin and not at Preobrazhenskoe; formal education can stifle as well as inspire. But later Peter himself felt and lamented the lack of depth and polish in his own formal education.

His experience with a sextant is typical of his enthusiastic, self-guided education. In 1687, when Peter was fifteen, Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, about to leave on a diplomatic mission to France, mentioned to the Tsar that he had once owned a foreign instrument “by which distance and space could be measured without moving from the spot.” Unfortunately, the instrument had been stolen, but Peter asked the Prince to buy him one in France. On Dolgoruky’s return to Moscow in 1688, Peter’s first question was whether he had brought the sextant. A box was produced and a parcel inside unwrapped; it was a sextant, elegantly made of metal and wood, but no one present knew how to use it. The search for an expert began; it led quickly to the German Suburb and soon produced a graying Dutch merchant named Franz Timmerman, who picked up the sextant and quickly calculated the distance to a neighboring house. A servant was sent to pace the distance and came back to report a figure similar to Timmerman’s. Peter eagerly asked to be taught. Timmerman agreed, but declared that his pupil would first need to learn arithmetic and geometry. Peter had once learned basic arithmetic, but the skill had fallen into disuse; he did not even remember how to subtract and divide. Now, spurred by his desire to use the sextant, he plunged into a variety of subjects: arithmetic, geometry and also ballistics. And the further he went, the more paths seemed to open before him. He became interested again in geography, studying on the great globe which had belonged to his father the outlines of Russia, Europe and the New World.

Timmerman was a makeshift tutor; he had spent twenty years in Russia and was out of touch with the latest technology of Western Europe. Yet to Peter he became a counselor and friend, and the Tsar kept the pipe-smoking Dutchman constantly at his side. Timmerman had seen the world, he could describe how things worked, he could answer at least some of the questions constantly posed by this tall, endlessly curious boy. Together, they wandered through the countryside around Moscow, visiting estates and monasteries or poking through small villages. One of these excursions in June 1688 led to a famous episode which was to have momentous consequences for Peter and for Russia. He was wandering with Timmerman through a royal estate near the village of Ismailovo. Among the buildings behind the main house was a storehouse which, Peter was told, was filled with junk and had been locked for years. His curiosity aroused, Peter asked that the doors be opened and, despite the musty smell, he began to look around inside. In the dim light, a large object immediately caught his eye: an old boat, its timbers decaying, turned upside down in a corner of the storehouse. It was twenty feet long and six feet wide, about the size of a lifeboat on a modern ocean liner.

This was not the first boat Peter had ever seen. He knew the cumbersome, shallow-draft vessels which Russians used to transport goods along their wide rivers; he also knew the small craft used for pleasure boating at Preobrazhenskoe. But these Russian boats were essentially river craft: barge-like vessels with flat bottoms and square sterns, propelled by oars or ropes pulled by men or animals on the riverbank, or simply by the current itself. This boat before him now was different. Its deep, rounded hull, heavy keel and pointed bow were not meant for rivers.

“What kind of boat is it?” Peter asked Timmerman.

“It is an English boat,” the Dutchman replied.

“What is it used for? Is it better than our Russian boats?” asked Peter.

“If you had a new mast and sails on it, it would go not only with the wind, but against the wind,” said Timmerman.

“Against the wind?” Peter was astonished. “Can it be possible?”

He wanted to try the boat at once. But Timmerman looked at the rotting timbers and insisted on major repairs; meanwhile, a mast and sails could be made. With Peter constantly pressing him to hurry, Timmerman found another elderly Dutchman, Karsten Brandt, who had arrived from Holland in 1660 to build a ship on the Caspian Sea for Tsar Alexis. Brandt, who lived as a carpenter in the German Suburb, came to Ismailovo and set to work. He replaced the timbers, calked and tarred the bottom, set a mast and rigged sails, halyards and sheets. The boat was taken on rollers down to the Yauza and launched. Before Peter’s eyes, Brandt began to sail on the river, tacking to right and left, using the breeze to sail not only into the wind, but against the lazy current. Overwhelmed with excitement, Peter shouted to Brandt to come to shore and take him aboard. He jumped in, took the tiller and, under Brandt’s instruction, began to beat into the wind. “And mighty pleasant it was to me,” the Tsar wrote years later in the preface to his Maritime Regulations.^*

Thereafter, Peter went sailing every day. He learned to work the sails and use the wind, but the Yauza was narrow, the breeze was often too light to provide maneuverability and the boat constantly went aground. The nearest really large body of water, nine miles across, was Lake Pleschev, near Pereslavl, eighty-five miles northeast of Moscow. Peter might be an irresponsible youth larking about in the fields, but he was also a tsar and he could not travel so far from his capital without some serious purpose. He quickly found one. There was a June festival at the great Troitsky Monastery, and Peter begged his mother’s permission to go there and participate in the religious ceremony. Natalya agreed, and once the service was over, Peter, now beyond the reach of any restrictive authority, simply headed northwest through the forest to Pereslavl. By prearrangement, Timmerman and Brandt were with him.

Standing on the lake bank, with the summer sun beating down on his shoulders and sparkling on the water, Peter looked out across the lake. Only dimly, in the distance, could he make out the farther shore. Here, he could sail for an hour, for two hours, without having to tack. He longed to sail at once, but there were no boats, nor did it seem possible to drag the English boat this far from Ismailovo. He turned to Brandt and asked whether it would be possible to build new boats here on the shores of the lake.

“Yes, we can build boats here,” replied the old carpenter. He looked around at the empty shoreline and the virgin forest. “But we shall need many things.”

“No matter,” said Peter excitedly. “We shall have whatever we need.”

Peter’s intention was to help build the boats at Lake Pleschev. This meant not just another quick, unauthorized visit to the lake, but obtaining permission to live there for an extended period. He returned to Moscow and laid siege to his mother. Natalya resisted, insisting that he remain in Moscow at least until the formal celebration of his name day. Peter stayed, but the day afterward he and Brandt and another old Dutch shipbuilder named Kort hurried back to Lake Pleschev. They chose a site for their boatyard on the eastern shore of the lake, not far from the Moscow-Yaroslavl road, and began building huts and a dock beside which to moor the future boats. Timber was cut, seasoned and shaped. Working from dawn until dark, with Peter and other workmen sawing and hammering vigorously under the direction of the Dutchmen, they laid the keels for five boats—two small frigates and three yachts, all to have rounded bows and sterns in the Dutch style. In September, the skeletons of the boats began to rise, but none was finished when Peter was forced to return to Moscow for the winter. He left unwillingly, asking the Dutch shipwrights to stay behind and work as hard as possible in order to have the boats ready by spring.

The chance discovery of this old boat and Peter’s first sailing lessons on the Yauza were the beginning of two compulsive themes in his personality and his life: his obsession for the sea and his desire to learn from the West. As soon as he was tsar in power as well as name, he turned toward the sea, first south to the Black Sea, then northwest to the Baltic. Impelled by the will of this strange sea-dreamer, the huge landlocked nation stumbled toward the oceans. It was strange and yet it was also partly inevitable. No great nation has survived and flourished without access to the sea. What is remarkable is that the drive sprang from the dreams of an adolescent boy.

As Peter sailed on the Yauza with Brandt beside him at the tiller, his new fascination for the water coincided and intermingled with his admiration for the West. He knew that he was in a foreign boat, taking lessons from a foreign instructor. These Dutchmen who had repaired the boat and were showing him how to use it came from a technically advanced civilization, compared to Muscovy. Holland had hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen; for the moment, Timmerman and Brandt represented all this. They became heroes to Peter. He wanted to be near the two old men so they could teach him. At that moment, they were the West. And, one day, he would be Russia.

By the end of 1688, Peter was sixteen and a half and no longer a boy. Whether wearing a robe of cloth of gold and sitting on the throne or digging trenches, pulling ropes and hammering nails in a sweat-stained green tunic while swapping earthy technical talk with carpenters and soldiers, physically he was a man. In an age when life was short and generations succeeded each other rapidly, men often became fathers at sixteen and a half. This was especially true of princes, for whom the need to provide for the succession was a first great responsibility. Peter’s duty was clear: It was time to marry and beget a son. Peter’s mother felt this keenly, and by this time even Sophia did not object. It was not simply a matter of Naryshkin versus Miloslavsky, it was a question of ensuring the Romanov succession. The Tsarevna could not marry; Tsar Ivan had produced only daughters.

Natalya also had more personal reasons. She was annoyed by her son’s growing interest in foreigners; this preference far surpassed anything she had known in the moderately Westernized atmosphere of Matveev’s house or the increasingly liberalized atmosphere of the court in the last years of Tsar Alexis. Peter was spending all of his time with these Dutchmen, and they treated him as an apprentice, not an autocrat. They had introduced him to drinking, to smoking a pipe and to foreign girls who behaved very differently from the secluded daughters of the Russian nobility. Besides, Natalya was seriously worried about Peter’s safety. His firing of cannon, his sailing in boats was dangerous. He was away for long periods, he was out of her control, he was consorting with unsuitable people, he was endangering his life. A wife would change all this. A beautiful Russian girl, shy, simple and loving, would distract him and give him something more interesting to do than running through the fields and splashing about in rivers and lakes. A good wife could convert Peter from an adolescent into a man. With luck, she could also quickly make the man a father.

Peter accepted his mother’s wish without argument—not because he had suddenly become a dutiful son, but because the whole matter was of minimal interest to him. He agreed that the traditional collection of eligible young women be assembled at the Kremlin; he agreed that his mother should sort them out and choose the likeliest. Once this was done, he looked at the prospect, made no complaint and thereby ratified his mother’s choice. Thus, painlessly, Peter acquired a wife and Russia a new tsaritsa.

Her name was Eudoxia Lopukhina. She was twenty—three years older than Peter—and was said to be pretty, although no portrait of Eudoxia at this age has survived. She was shy and totally deferential, which recommended her to her new mother-in-law. She was well born, being the daughter of an old, strongly conservative Muscovite family which traced its origins to the fifteenth century and was now linked by marriage with the Golitsyns, Kurakins and Romodanovskys. She was devoutly Orthodox, almost completely uneducated, shuddered at all things foreign and believed that, to please her husband, she had only to become his principal slave. Pink, hopeful and helpless, she stood beside her tall, young bridegroom and became his wife on January 27, 1689.

Even for a time when all marriages were arranged, the match was a disaster. Peter, whatever his physical readiness for fatherhood, was still bursting with the excitement of his new discoveries, still caring more about how things work than how people behave. Not many seventeen-year-old boys of any epoch, even if forced to marry, can be expected to abandon all they love and tamely settle into domesticity. And, certainly, Eudoxia was ill-equipped to perform such a miracle with Peter. Modest, conventional, scarcely more than a shy child, overwhelmingly aware of her husband’s rank, eager to please but uncertain how to do it, she might have made a model tsaritsa for a conventional Muscovite tsar. She was prepared to give what she could, but her husband’s wild, impetuous spark of genius left her confused, and his boisterous masculine world frightened her. She was prepared to assist at great ceremonies of state, but not at boat building. Her dislike of foreigners increased. She had been taught that they were evil; now they were stealing her husband from her. She could not talk to Peter; she knew nothing of carpentry or rigging. From the beginning, her conversation bored him; soon, so did her lovemaking; before long, he could barely stand the sight of her. Yet, they were married and they slept together, and within two years two sons were born. The eldest was the Tsarevich Alexis, whose tragic life would torment Peter. The second, an infant named Alexander, died after seven months. When this happened, scarcely three years after his marriage, Peter was so estranged from his wife and so unfeeling that he did not bother to attend the infant’s funeral.

Even the honeymoon was brief. In early spring, only a few weeks after his marriage, Peter was restlessly watching the ice beginning to break on the Yauza at Preobrazhenskoe. Knowing that soon it would be melting on Lake Pleschev, he strained to get away from his wife, his mother and his responsibilities. At the beginning of April 1689, he burst free and hurried to the lake, anxious to see how Brandt and Kort had progressed. He found the lake ice breaking, most of the boats finished, ready to be launched and needing only some coils of good rope for rigging the sails. On the same day, he wrote exuberantly to his mother, asking for ropes, slyly stressing that the sooner the ropes arrived, the sooner he would be able to come home to her:

To my beloved little mother, Lady Tsaritsa and Grand Duchess Natalya Kyrilovna: Your little son, Petrushka, now here at work, asks your blessing and desires to hear about your health. We, through your prayers, are well. The lake is all clear of ice today, and all the boats except the big ship are finished, only we are waiting for ropes. Therefore, I beg your kindness that these ropes, seven hundred fathoms long [about 4,200 feet], be sent from the Artillery Department without delay, for the work is held up waiting for them, and our stay here is prolonged. I ask your blessing.

Natalya understood and was angry. She replied not by sending ropes, but by ordering Peter to return immediately to Moscow to attend a memorial service for Tsar Fedor; his absence would be considered a shocking disrespect to his brother’s memory. Miserable at the idea of leaving his boats, Peter tried again to resist his mother’s command. His next letter to her was a mixture of forced cheerfulness and bland evasion:

To my most beloved mother, Lady Tsaritsa Natalya Kyrilovna, Your unworthy son, Petrushka, desires greatly to know about your health. As to your orders to me to return to Moscow, I am ready, only there is work to do here and the man you sent me has seen it himself, and will explain more clearly. We through your prayers are in perfect health. About my coming I have written at length to Lev Kyrilovich [Peter’s uncle and the Tsaritsa’s brother] and he will report to you. Therefore, I must humbly surrender myself to your will. Amen!

But Natalya was adamant: Peter had to come. He arrived in Moscow only the day before the memorial service, and a month passed before he could again escape; this time, when he returned to Lake Pleschev, he found that Kort had died. Working beside Brandt and the other shipbuilders, Peter helped finish the boats. Soon after, he wrote again to his mother, using as his courier the boyar Tikhon Streshnev, whom Natalya had sent to Pereslavl to see what was going on. “Hey!” Peter saluted his mother:

I wish to hear about your health, and beg your blessing. We are all well. As to the boats, I say again that they are very good about which Tikhon Nikitich will tell you himself. Thy unworthy Petrus.

The signature “Petrus” is revealing. The rest of this letter was in Peter’s uncertain Russian, but he wrote his name in Latin, using the unfamiliar, and to him exotically appealing, Western alphabet. In addition, along with Latin, Peter was learning Dutch from his fellow workers.

In these spring months at Pereslavl just after his marriage, Peter wrote five letters to his mother but none to his wife. Nor did he mention her at all when he wrote to Natalya. This failure of attention was readily accepted by Natalya. In the small court at Preobrazhenskoe, where both wife and mother-in-law were living, tensions already existed. Natalya, who had chosen this girl for Peter, quickly saw her limitations, disdained her and accepted Peter’s negative evaluation. Eudoxia, installed in this friendless place, pathetically hoped that Peter would come home and create harmony, and wrote him begging him to remember her, pleading for some sign of love and tenderness:

I salute my lord, the Tsar Peter Alexeevich. May you be safe, my light, for many years. We beg your mercy. Come home to us, O Lord, without delay. I, thanks to your mother’s kindness, am safe and well. Your little wife, Dunka, bows low before you.

Then, once again, Peter was commanded to return for a public ceremony in Moscow. Once again, he reluctantly abandoned his boats, but this time, when he appeared in the capital, his mother insisted that he stay. A crisis was coming: Members of the boyar aristocratic party gathered around Peter and his mother were preparing to challenge the government of the Regent Sophia. After seven years of unassailably competent rule, Sophia’s administration was foundering. There had been two disastrous military campaigns. Now, the Regent, carried away by her passion for Vasily Golitsyn, commander of the beaten armies, was trying to persuade Muscovites to treat her lover as a conquering hero. It was too much to swallow, and Peter’s adherents believed that the end was near. But they needed the symbol of their cause close at hand. Clothed in majesty, he might step easily into the full omnipotence of being tsar. Clothed in knickers, sitting on a log in a shipyard two days’ journey from Moscow, he remained the boy Sophia knew: an outlandish lad whose exotic tastes she regarded with a blend of indulgent amusement and contempt.

* A measure of Peter’s size and vitality was that, although he was only eleven, the Swedes took him for sixteen.

* The true origin of this famous boat, which Peter called “The Grandfather of the Russian Navy,” is unknown. Peter believed that it was English; one legend says that originally it was sent as a gift to Ivan the Terrible by Queen Elizabeth I. Others think that it was built in Russia by Dutch carpenters during the reign of Tsar Alexis. What is important is that it was a small sailing ship of Western design.

Recognizing its significance in his own life, Peter was determined that the boat be preserved. In 1701, it was taken into the Kremlin and kept in a building near the Ivan Bell Tower. In 1722, when the long war with Sweden was finally over, Peter commanded that the boat be brought from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Weighing a ton and a half, it would have to be dragged partway over log corduroy roads, and Peter’s orders for its care were specific: “Bring the boat to Schlüsselburg. Be careful not to destroy it. For this reason, go only in daytime. Stop at night. When the road is bad, be especially careful.” On May 30, 1723, Peter’s fifty-first birthday, the celebrated boat sailed down the Neva and out into the Gulf of Finland to be met there by its “grandchildren,” the men-of-war of the Russian Baltic Fleet. In August of that year, the boat was placed in a special building inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where it remained for over two centuries. Today, Peter’s boat is the most prized exhibit of the Navy Museum of the U.S.S.R. in the former Stock Exchange building on the point of Leningrad’s Vasilevsky Island.