7
THE REGENCY OF SOPHIA
Sophia was twenty-five when she became regent and only thirty-two when her title and office were stripped away. A portrait shows a brown-eyed girl with a round face, pink cheeks, ash-blond hair, a long chin and a cupid-bow mouth. She is plump but not unattractive. On her head she wears a small crown with an orb cross; around her shoulders she wears a red, fur-trimmed robe. The features in this portrait have never been challenged; the painting is generally used by both Western and Soviet scholars to depict Sophia. Nevertheless, the picture is inadequate. This is a portrait of any pleasant, modestly pretty young woman; it reveals none of the fierce energy and determination that enabled Sophia to ride the whirlwind of the Streltsy revolt and then to rule Russia for seven years.
A quite different, thoroughly grotesque account of her physical appearance was supplied by a French diplomatic agent named De Neuville who was sent to Moscow by the Marquis de Béthune, French ambassador to Poland, in 1689. In one of the most ungallant descriptions of a lady ever offered by a man—certainly by a Frenchman—he wrote of Sophia:
Her mind and her great ability bear no relation to the deformity of her person, as she is immensely fat, with a head as large as a bushel, hairs on her face, and tumors on her legs, and at least forty years old. But in the same degree that her stature is broad, short and coarse, her mind is shrewd, subtle, unprejudiced and full of policy. And though she has never read Machiavelli, nor learned anything about him, all his maxims come naturally to her.
Had Sophia truly been this hideous, however, others would certainly have mentioned it. And De Neuville was in Moscow at the end of Sophia’s regency, when her policy was to align Russia on the side of France’s enemy, Austria, in a war against France’s secret friend, the Ottoman Empire. He was seriously wrong about Sophia’s age—he added eight years; but this may have been part of his insult. Surely, at least one item in his dreadful catalogue sprang entirely from imagination, for De Neuville was certainly never an observer of Sophia’s legs. Nevertheless, whatever his motive, this Frenchman has had his effect. His description will continue to afflict Sophia for as long as her history is written.
When Sophia became regent in 1682, she quickly installed her own lieutenants in office. Her uncle Ivan Miloslavsky remained a leading advisor until his death. Fedor Shaklovity, the new commander of the Streltsy, who won the respect of the restless soldiers and reinstilled firm discipline in the Moscow regiments, was another supporter. He was a man from the Ukraine, of peasant stock and barely literate, but he was dedicated to Sophia and ready to see that any order of hers was carried out. As the regency progressed, he became even closer to Sophia, eventually rising to be secretary of the boyar council, whose members hated him fiercely because of his low origins. To balance Shaklovity, Sophia also took counsel from the learned young monk, Sylvester Medvedev, whom she had known while still a girl in the terem. A zealous disciple of Sophia’s tutor, Simeon Polotsky, Medvedev was considered to be the most learned theologian in Russia.
Miloslavsky, Shaklovity and Medvedev were important, but the greatest figure of Sophia’s regency—her advisor, her principal minister, her strong right arm, her comforter and eventually her lover—was Prince Vasily Vasilievich Golitsyn. A scion of one of the oldest aristocratic houses of Russia, Golitsyn in his tastes and ideas was even more Western and revolutionary than Artemon Matveev. An experienced statesman and soldier, an urbane lover of the arts and a cosmopolitan political visionary, Golitsyn was perhaps the most civilized man Russia had yet produced. Born in 1643, he was educated far beyond the custom of the Russian nobility. As a boy, he studied theology and history and learned to speak and write Latin, Greek and Polish.
In Moscow, in his great stone palace roofed with heavy brass sheets, Golitsyn lived like a grand seigneur on the Western model. Visitors, expecting the usual primitive Muscovite furnishings, were astonished at its splendor: carved ceilings, marble statues, crystal, precious stones and silver plate, painted glass, musical instruments, mathematical and astronomical devices, gilded chairs and ebony tables inlaid with ivory. On the walls were Gobelin tapestries, tall Venetian mirrors, German maps in gilt frames. The house boasted a library of books in Latin, Polish and German, and a gallery of portraits of all Russia’s tsars and many reigning monarchs of Western Europe.
Golitsyn found great stimulus in the company of foreigners. He was a constant visitor in the German Suburb, dining there regularly with General Patrick Gordon, the Scottish soldier who had been an advisor and collaborator in his efforts to reform the army. Golitsyn’s house in Moscow became a gathering place for foreign travelers, diplomats and merchants. Even Jesuits, whom most Russians rigorously avoided, found a welcome. A French visitor was struck by the sensitive manner in which Golitsyn, instead of heartily urging him to drink the glass of vodka presented on arrival in the manner of most Muscovite hosts, gently advised him not to take it as it was usually not pleasant for foreigners. During the leisurely after-dinner discussions in Latin, topics ranged from the merits of new firearms and projectiles to European politics.
Golitsyn passionately admired France and Louis XIV; he insisted that his son constantly wear a miniature portrait of the Sun King. To the French agent in Moscow, De Neuville, he revealed his hopes and dreams. He talked of further reforms in the army, of trading across Siberia, of establishing permanent relations with the West, of sending young Russians to study in Western cities, of stabilizing money, proclaiming freedom of worship and even emancipating the serfs. As Golitsyn talked, his vision expanded: He dreamed of “peopling the deserts, of enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes and shepherds’ huts into palaces of stone.”
Sophia met this unusual man when she was twenty-four, in the full bloom of her rebellion against the terem. Golitsyn was thirty-nine, blue-eyed, wore a small mustache, a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard and, over his shoulders, an elegant fur-lined cape. Among a crowd of conventional Muscovite boyars in their heavy caftans and bushy beards, he looked like a dashing earl just arrived from England. With her intelligence, her taste for learning and her ambition, it was natural that Sophia should see in Golitsyn the personification of an ideal and the attraction was inevitable.
Golitsyn had a wife and grown children, but it did not matter. Strong-minded and passionate, now plunging into life with abandon, Sophia had cast caution to the winds in her move for power. She would do no less for love. What is more, she would combine the two. With Golitsyn she would share power and love, and together they would rule: He, with his vision, would propose ideas and policies; she, with her authority, would see that they were executed. On her proclamation as regent, she named Golitsyn head of the Foreign Office. Two years later, she conferred on him the rare distinction of Keeper of the Great Seal; in effect, prime minister.
In her early years as regent, Sophia’s role was difficult. In private she ruled the state, but in public she shielded her person and her activities behind the ceremonial figures of the two boy Tsars and the administrative offices of Golitsyn. People rarely saw her. Her name appeared on public documents only as “The Most Orthodox Princess, the Sister of Their Majesties.” When she did appear in public, it was separately from her brothers and in a manner which made her appear at least co-equal with them. An example was the farewell for departing Swedish ambassadors taking home from Moscow a reconfirmation of the treaty of peace between Russia and Sweden. In the morning, the ambassadors were summoned to watch the formal ceremony in which the boy Tsars pledged their oath on the Holy Gospel to keep the terms of the treaty. The ambassadors arrived in royal carriages to be greeted by Prince Golitsyn, who escorted them between lines of red-coated Streltsy up the Red Staircase into the banqueting hall, where Peter and Ivan sat on their double throne. Benches along the walls of the room were lined with boyars and state officials. The Tsars and the ambassadors exchanged formal greetings, and both sides pledged to keep the peace. Then Peter and Ivan rose, removed the crowns from their heads, walked to a table holding the Holy Gospels and a document containing the text of the treaty, and there, invoking God as a witness, promised that Russia would never break the treaty and attack Sweden. The Tsars kissed the Gospels, and Golitsyn handed the treaty document to the ambassadors.
The official ceremony was thus concluded. The real farewell audience for the ambassadors came later the same day. Once again, the ambassadors were conducted through lines of Streltsy armed with gleaming halberds. At the entrance to the Golden Hall, two chamberlains announced that the great lady, the Noble Tsarevna, the Grand Duchess Sophia Alexeevna, Imperial Highness of all Great and Little and White Russia, was prepared to receive them. The ambassadors bowed and entered the hall. Sophia sat on the Diamond Throne presented to her father by the Shah of Persia. She wore a robe of silver cloth embroidered with gold, lined with sables and covered with mantles of fine lace. On her head was a crown of pearls. Her attendants—the wives of boyars and two female dwarfs—stood nearby. Before the throne stood Vasily Golitsyn and Ivan Miloslavsky. When the ambassadors had saluted her, Sophia beckoned them forward and spoke to them for a few minutes. They kissed her hand, she dismissed them, and subsequently, in the gesture of a Russian autocrat, sent them dinner from her own table.
Under Sophia’s regency, Golitsyn prided himself on administering “a reign based on justice and general consent.” The people of Moscow seemed content; on holidays, crowds strolled through the public gardens and along the banks of the river. Among the nobility, a strong Polish influence was felt; Polish gloves, fur caps and soap were in demand. Russians became fond of tracing genealogies and creating family coats of arms. Sophia herself continued her intellectual life, writing verses in Russian and even plays, some of which were performed in the Kremlin.
The appearance as well as the manners of Moscow began to change. Golitsyn was interested in architecture, and the number of devastating fires in Moscow cleared wide areas for him to exercise his influence. In the autumn of 1688, the Treasury was temporarily unable to pay the salaries of foreign officers, for every rouble had been advanced in loans to help citizens rebuild houses destroyed by flames. To combat fire, a decree ordered that wooden roofs be covered with earth to reduce burnable surface. Golitsyn urged Muscovites to build of stone, and during his administration all new public buildings and a bridge across the Moscow River were erected of stone.
But Kremlin theatricals, Polish gloves and even new stone buildings in Moscow did not mean a real reform of Russian society. As the years went by, the regime increasingly was forced to content itself with keeping order at home, and Golitsyn’s larger dreams remained unrealized. The army seemed to improve under the leadership of foreign officers, but it was to fail miserably when put to the test of war. The colonization of distant Siberian provinces was halted as all the state’s military resources were thrown into war against the Tatars. Russia’s trade remained in foreign hands, and amelioration of the lot of the serfs was never mentioned outside Golitsyn’s elegant salon. “Peopling the deserts, enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes” remained the stuff of fantasy.
The one great achievement of the regency lay in the realm of foreign policy. From the beginning, Sophia and Golitsyn had resolved on a policy of peace with all of Russia’s neighbors. Large pieces of formerly Russian territory were still in foreign hands: The Swedes held the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, the Poles occupied White Russia and Lithuania. But Sophia and Golitsyn decided not to contest these conquests. Thus, as soon as her government was firmly established, Sophia sent embassies to Stockholm, Warsaw, Copenhagen and Vienna, declaring Russia’s willingness to accept the status quo by confirming all existing treaties.
In Stockholm, King Charles XI was pleased to hear that Tsars Ivan and Peter would make no attempt to recover the Russian Baltic provinces surrendered to Sweden in 1661 by Tsar Alexis in the Treaty of Kardis. In Warsaw, Sophia’s embassy confronted a more complicated situation. Poles and Russians were traditional enemies. For two centuries they had warred, with Poland generally having the upper hand. Polish armies had penetrated deep into Russia, Polish troops had occupied the Kremlin, a Polish tsar had even been placed on the Russian throne. The most recent war had ended, after twelve years of fighting, with a truce signed in 1667. By its terms, Tsar Alexis established Russia’s western frontier at Smolensk and won title to all the Ukraine east of the Dnieper River. He was also permitted to keep, for two years only, the ancient city of Kiev; at the end of two years, it was to be returned to Poland.
It was a promise impossible to keep. Years passed, the truce was maintained, but Alexis and, after him, his son Fedor found themselves unable to give up Kiev. Kiev meant too much: it was one of the oldest of Russian cities, it was the capital of the Ukraine, it was Orthodox. To surrender itback to Catholic Poland was difficult, painful and, finally, unthinkable. Therefore, in negotiations Moscow hedged, argued and delayed, while the Poles stubbornly refused to give up their claim. It was here that matters stood when Sophia’s peace proposals arrived.
In the meantime, however, a new crisis had arisen to confront the Poles. Poland and Austria were at war with the Ottoman Empire. In 1683, the year after Peter’s accession, the Ottoman tide reached its high-water mark in Europe as Turkish armies besieged Vienna. It was the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, who led the Christian armies to victory under the city’s walls. The Turks retreated down the Danube, but the war continued, and both Poland and Austria were eager for Russian help. In 1685, the Poles were severely defeated by the Turks, and the following spring a splendid Polish embassy with 1,000 men and 1,500 horses arrived in Moscow to seek a Russo-Polish alliance. Golitsyn received them royally; they were escorted through the streets by special detachments of Streltsy and feasted by the highest Russian nobility. After prolonged negotiations, both sides achieved their objectives. Both sides also paid a heavy price.
Poland formally ceded Kiev to Russia, giving up forever her claim to the great city. For Russia, for Sophia, for Golitsyn, this was the greatest triumph of the Tsarevna’s regency. The Russian negotiators, led by Golitsyn, were lavishly rewarded with praise, gifts, serfs and estates; the two Tsars themselves handed them goblets from which to drink. In Warsaw, King Jan Sobieski was desolate at losing Kiev; when he agreed to the treaty, tears flowed from his eyes. Nevertheless, Russia paid for this triumph: Sophia had agreed to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and launch an attack on the Sultan’s vassal, the Khan of the Crimea. For the first time in Russian history, Muscovy would join a coalition of European powers in fighting a common enemy.*
War with the Turks meant an abrupt change in Russian foreign policy.† Up to this time, there had never been hostilities between sultan and tsar. Relations between Moscow and Constantinople were so friendly that Russian ambassadors at the Sublime Porte (the palatial building in which the Sultan’s chief minister, the Grand Vizier, had his offices) had always been treated with greater respect than the embassies of other powers. And the Ottoman Empire was still a dynamic force in the world. The Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, had been hurled back from Vienna, and the Janissaries had retreated down the Danube, but the Sultan’s empire was so vast and his army so large that Sophia was reluctant to challenge him. Before she and Golitsyn agreed to sign the treaty, they summoned General Gordon repeatedly to ask his opinion about the state of the army and the size of the military risk. Solemnly, the experienced Scottish soldier declared that he thought the time was favorable for war.
It was not the Turks whom Sophia and Golitsyn were asked to attack, but their vassals, the Crimean Tatars. Russian fear of these Moslem descendants of the Mongols was deep-rooted. Year after year, Tatar horsemen rode north out of their Crimean stronghold across the grazing lands of the Ukrainian steppe and, in small bands or large armies, swooped down on Cossack settlements or Russian towns to ravage and plunder. In 1662, Tatars captured the town of Putivl and carried off all the 20,000 inhabitants into slavery. By the end of the seventeenth century, Russian slaves thronged Ottoman slave markets. Russian men were seen chained to the oars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean; young Russian boys made a welcome gift from the Crimean Khan to the Sultan. So numerous, in fact, were the Russian slaves in the East that it was asked mockingly whether any inhabitants still remained in Russia.
There seemed no way to stop these devastating Tatar raids. The frontier was too broad, the Russian defenses too scanty; the Tatars’ objectives could not be known in advance, and their mobility could not be equaled. The Tsar was reduced to paying an annual sum to the Khan, protection money which the Khan called a tribute and the Russians preferred to describe as a gift. But this did not stop the raids.
Although Moscow was far away and in the capital the raids were considered as harassment rather than aggression, nevertheless they were an affront to the national honor. In carrying out the terms of the treaty with Poland, Moscow would attempt to snuff out the Tatar raids at their source. But, despite Gordon’s optimism, the campaign would not be easy. Bakhchisarai, the Khan’s capital in the mountains of the Crimea, was a thousand miles from Moscow. To get there, the army would have to march south across the breadth of the Ukrainian steppe, force the Perekop Isthmus at the entrance to the Crimea, then advance across the wasteland of the northern Crimea. Many of the boyars who would serve as officers in the army reacted unenthusiastically to this prospect. Some were suspicious of the treaty with Poland, preferring, if there was to be war, to fight against, rather than support, the Poles. Others feared the long, hazardous march. And many opposed the campaign simply because Golitsyn had proposed it. Prince Boris Dolgoruky and Prince Yury Shcherbatov threatened to present themselves and their retainers for military service dressed in black, as a protest against the treaty, the campaign and Golitsyn himself.
Nevertheless, through the autumn and winter, Russia mobilized an army. Recruits were mustered, special taxes collected, thousands of horses, oxen and wagons assembled, and in early spring a commander was chosen. To his own dismay, the generalissimo of this expedition was none other than Vasily Golitsyn. Golitsyn had some military experience, but essentially he considered himself a statesman rather than a military commander. He would have preferred to remain in Moscow, to keep control of the government and a close eye on his numerous enemies. But his opponents argued loudly that the minister who had made the commitment to attack the Tatars should be required to lead the expedition. Golitsyn was caught; there was nothing he could do but accept.
In May 1687, a Russian army of 100,000 men began marching southward along the road to Orel and Poltava. Golitsyn moved cautiously, afraid that the mobile Tatar cavalry would ride around his columns and strike him in the rear. On June 13, he was camped on the lower Dnieper, 150 miles above Perekop, and there was still no Tatar opposition, not even a sign of the Khan’s scouts. But Golitsyn’s men saw something worse: smoke along the horizon. The Tatars were burning the steppe to deny forage to the horses and oxen of the Russians. As the lines of fire advanced through the tall grass, they left behind a landscape of blackened, smoldering stubble. Sometimes, the flames approached the army itself, engulfing men and animals in smoke and threatening to burn the cumbersome baggage train. Thus afflicted, the Russian army stumbled forward until, at a point sixty miles above Perekop, Golitsyn decided to go no farther. The army began to retreat. In the heat and dust of July and August, unable to find food or forage, the army staggered homeward. In his reports to Moscow, however, Golitsyn described the campaign as a success. The Khan, he declared, had been so terrified by the advance of the Muscovite army that he had fled into hiding in the remote mountain fastnesses of the Crimea.
Golitsyn returned to Moscow late in the evening of September 14 to be hailed as a hero. The next morning, he was admitted to kiss the hands of the Regent and the two Tsars. Sophia issued a proclamation announcing a victory and heaping her favorite with praise and rewards. New estates and monies were lavished on him, and smaller gold medals bearing the likenesses of Sophia, Peter and Ivan were given to his officers. In fact Golitsyn had marched for four months, lost 45,000 men and returned to Moscow without ever sighting, much less engaging, the main Tatar army.
It did not take long for the true facts to be perceived in the capitals of Russia’s allies. The reaction was disgust and anger. As it happened, that year, 1687, the Poles had had little success, but the Austrians and Venetians had been more fortunate, dislodging the Turks from important towns and fortresses in Hungary and on the Aegean. The following year, 1688, Russia mounted no campaign at all against the common enemy, and the situation worsened for her allies. Large Turkish armies concentrated to attack Poland, while, in Germany, Louis XIV of France attacked the Hapsburg empire in the rear. In the face of these new threats, both King Jan Sobieski and Emperor Leopold considered making peace with the Turks. Eventually, they agreed to continue the war only if Russia would meet its obligations and renew its attack on the Crimea.
Sophia and Golitsyn would have been happy to end the war at once, had they been allowed to keep Kiev. What they could not face was the withdrawal of Russia’s allies, leaving Muscovy alone to face the whole might of the Ottoman Empire. Reluctantly, therefore, they faced the necessity of organizing another expedition to the Crimea. In the spring of 1688, the Tatar Khan provided a further stimulus to action. Launching a campaign of his own, he ravaged the Ukraine, threatening the cities of Poltava and Kiev and advancing almost to the Carpathians. When he retired to the Crimea in the autumn, 60,000 prisoners stumbled behind his horsemen.
Forced to continue the war, Golitsyn proclaimed a second campaign against the Crimea, declaring that he would make peace only when all the Black Sea coast was ceded to Russia and the Tatars were entirely removed from the Crimea and resettled on the opposite side of the Black Sea in Turkish Anatolia. This declaration, extravagant to the point of nonsense, indicated the increasingly desperate personal position of Golitsyn. By now, it was essential that he defeat the Tatars in order to repulse the domestic criticism from his political and personal enemies in Moscow. Before he left for the campaign, he was attacked by an unsuccessful assassin; on the very eve of his departure, he found a coffin left outside his door with a note warning that if this second campaign were not more successful than the first, the coffin would be his home.
The new campaign was to be launched earlier than the last: “before the ice broke.” Troops began assembling in December, and in early March Golitsyn started to the south with 112,000 men and 450 cannon. A month later, he was reporting to Sophia that his progress was impeded by snow and extreme cold, then by swollen rivers, broken bridges and thick mud. At the Samara River, Mazeppa, Hetman of the Cossacks, joined the army with 16,000 horsemen. Once again, the advance was slowed by steppe fires, but this time they were less serious. Golitsyn had already sent his own men ahead to burn the steppe so that when the main army arrived they would find new shoots of tender grass springing up.
In mid-May, as the army approached the Perekop Isthmus, a mass of 10,000 Tatar cavalry suddenly appeared from nowhere and attacked the Kazan Regiment commanded by Boris Sheremetev, the future field marshal. Overwhelmed, the Russians broke and ran. The Tatars galloped toward the baggage train, but Golitsyn was able to align his artillery and halt the charge with cannon fire. The following day, May 16, during a drenching rainstorm, another Tatar charge swirled in on Golitsyn’s rear. Once again, artillery managed to beat off the attackers. Thereafter, the Russian army was never without a menacing Tatar escort on the horizon.
On May 30, the Russians arrived before the dirt wall which stretched four miles across the Isthmus of Perekop. Behind a deep ditch stood a rampart lined with cannon and Tatar warriors; beyond that, a fortified citadel contained the rest of the Khan’s army. Golitsyn was in no mood to launch an assault. His men were tired, his water was short, he lacked the necessary siege equipment. Instead, while his exhausted men camped beneath the wall, he tried his diplomatic skill in negotiations. His terms were much lighter than those proclaimed in Moscow. Now, he asked only that the Tatars promise not to attack the Ukraine and Poland, give up their demand for Russian tribute and release Russian prisoners. The Khan, feeling his strength, refused the first two demands and replied to the third by saying that many of the prisoners were already free but “had accepted the Mohammedan faith.” Golitsyn, unable to make an agreement and unwilling to attack, decided once again to retreat.
Again, reports of brilliant victories were sent to Moscow, again Sophia accepted them and hailed the returning general as a conqueror. And not only as a conqueror of Tatars, but of herself. Her letters are less those of a queen welcoming one of her generals than of a woman crying out to her lover to hurry home:
Oh, my joy, light of my eyes, how can I believe my heart that I am going to see you again, my love. That day will be great to me when you, my soul, shall come to me. If it were only possible for me, I would place you before me in a single day. Your letters, confided to God’s care, have all reached me in safety. I was going on foot and had just arrived at the Monastery of St. Sergius, at the holy gates themselves, when your letter about the battles came. I do not know how I went in. I read as I walked. What you have written, little father, about sending to the monasteries, that I have fulfilled. I have myself made pilgrimages to all the monasteries on foot.
Meanwhile, the army was struggling homeward. Francis Lefort, a Swiss officer in Russian service, wrote to his family in Geneva that the campaign cost 35,000 men: “20,000 killed and 15,000 taken prisoners. Besides that, seventy cannon were abandoned, and all the war material.”
Despite these losses, Sophia again welcomed her lover as a hero. When Golitsyn arrived in Moscow on July 8, Sophia broke protocol by greeting him not in the Kremlin palace, but at the gates of the city. Together, they rode to the Kremlin, where Golitsyn was received and publicly thanked by Tsar Ivan and the Patriarch. By Sophia’s command, special thanksgiving services were held in all Moscow churches to celebrate the safe and victorious return of the Russian army. Two weeks later, the rewards for the campaign were announced: Golitsyn was to receive an estate in Suzdal, a large sum of money, a gold cup and a caftan of cloth of gold lined with sables. Other officers, Russian and foreign, were given silver cups, extra wages, sables and gold medals.
The joy of these celebrations was marred by only one thing: Peter’s disapproval. From the beginning, he refused to accept the charade of “victory.” He declined to greet the returning “hero” in the Kremlin with Ivan and the Patriarch. For a week, he withheld his consent to the rewards. Finally prevailed upon to acquiesce, he was bitter. Etiquette prescribed that Golitsyn go to Preobrazhenskoe to thank the Tsar for his generosity. When Golitsyn arrived, Peter refused to see him. It was not only an affront, it was a challenge.
In his diary, Gordon described the growing tension:
Everyone saw plainly and knew that the consent of the younger Tsar had not been extorted without the greatest difficulty and that this merely made him more excited against the generalissimo and the most prominent members of the other party at court; for it was now seen that an open breach was imminent.… Meanwhile everything was, as far as possible, held secret in the great houses, but yet not with such silence and skill but that everyone knew what was going on.
The proclamation of a second campaign against the Tatars had sent a new wave of resentment through the growing number of people opposed to Sophia’s rule. Already, there was discontent over Sophia’s administration, and her favorite, Golitsyn—unpopular as the man who had abolished precedence and who preferred Western ways to traditional Russian customs—was now marked as an unsuccessful general about to set out on another unpopular campaign. Victory, of course, would lay much of this antagonism to rest, but not all of it. For, simply with the passage of time, a new element was coming into play: Peter was growing up.
Judging that it would not be long before this active young Tsar would be ready to take some more important role in the government, the party of boyars gathered around Peter and Natalya at Preobrazhenskoe began to measure its strength. It counted some of the greatest names in Russia: Urusov, Dolgoruky, Sheremetev, Romodanovsky, Troekurov, Streshnev, Prozorovsky, Golovkin and Lvov, not to mention the families of Peter’s mother and wife, Naryshkin and Lopukhin. It was this aristocratic party, as it was called, which insisted that Golitsyn, having made the treaty with Poland, be the one to lead the armies on the second campaign.
In defending himself against these waiting foes, Golitsyn had a single ally, Fedor Shaklovity. The most decisive and ruthless of Sophia’s advisors, his feelings toward the opposition aristocratic party, and indeed toward all boyars, were clear: He hated them as they hated him. Beginning in 1687, when he told a group of Streltsy disdainfully that the boyars were like a lot of “withered, fallen apples,” he had done his best to rouse the soldiers against the noblemen. He, more clearly than anyone else in Sophia’s party, saw that once Peter was grown, the aristocrats would be too strong. The time to destroy them completely, he insisted, was now.
Once Golitsyn left for the south, he had no one but Shaklovity to guard his interests; and the boyars began to move. A Naryshkin was promoted to boyar; Golitsyn’s old enemy Prince Michael Cherkassky was nominated for important office. Plaintively, Golitsyn wrote from the steppe to Shaklovity, begging for help:
We always have sorrow and little joy, not like those who are always joyful and have their own way. In all my affairs, my only hope is in thee. Write me, pray, whether there are not any devilish obstacles coming from those people [the boyars]. For God’s sake, keep a sleepless eye on Cherkassky, and don’t let him have that office, even if you have to use the influence of the Patriarch or the Princess [Sophia] against him.
Peter’s public rebuff of Sophia’s lover shocked, angered and worried the Regent. It was the first direct challenge to her position, the first clear signal that the young Naryshkin Tsar would not automatically do whatever he was told to do. The truth that Peter was no longer a boy, that he was growing up and would one day be of age and that then the regency would become superfluous, was evident to everyone. Sophia scoffed at Peter’s adolescent war games and boat building, but foreign observers, whose governments wanted an objective forecast of Russia’s future, watched carefully what happened at Preobrazhenskoe. Baron Van Keller, the Dutch ambassador, had written The Hague praising Peter’s demeanor, intellectual capacity and enormous popularity: “Taller than his courtiers, the young Peter attracts everyone’s attention. They praise his intelligence, the breadth of his ideas, his physical development. It is said that he will soon be admitted to sovereign power, and affairs cannot then but take a very different turn.”
Sophia did nothing to restrain or suppress her half-brother. Busy with state affairs, finding the boy and his mother no threat to her government, she simply left them alone. When Peter was twelve, she presented him with a collection of stars, buttons and diamond clasps. As he grew older, she put no restrictions on his demands for real muskets and cannon to be sent from the armory for use in his violently realistic war games. The flow of weapons was constant, but Sophia ignored it. In January 1689, he was allowed to sit for the first time at a meeting of the Council of Boyars. He found the discussion boring and did not often return. Beneath the surface, however, Sophia felt a growing sense of insecurity and anxiety. After seven years of wielding power, she had not only grown accustomed to it, she could not imagine giving it up. Yet she was well aware that she was a woman, and that the role of regent was a temporary one. Unless, somehow, her own position was formally changed, she would have to step aside when her brothers came of age. Now, that moment was close at hand. Ivan was married, with daughters, but he, of course, was not the problem. He was not only content but anxious that someone should lift from him the burden of rule. But Peter was entering manhood, as his marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina had given strong evidence. It was a painful situation for Sophia; unless something was done, a crisis resulting in her own repudiation was inevitable.
In fact, Sophia had already taken some steps to improve her position, and had tried and been rebuffed in an attempt to take others. Three years before, in 1686, on the conclusion of the treaty of peace with Poland, Sophia had taken advantage of the general approval of her policies to begin to use the title of autocrat, normally reserved for tsars. Thereafter, this title was applied to her name in all official documents and at all public ceremonies, placing her on an equal status with her brothers, Ivan and Peter. Everyone knew, however, that Sophia was not equal because, unlike her brothers, she had not been crowned. Sophia hoped that this, too, would be possible. In the summer of 1687, she instructed Shaklovity to determine whether, in the event Golitsyn won a great victory over the Crimean Khan, she would have the support of the Streltsy if she had herself crowned. Shaklovity did as he was told; he urged the Streltsy to petition the two Tsars to allow the coronation of their sister. But the Streltsy, conservative in outlook, were opposed, and the project was temporarily laid aside. Nevertheless, the idea was kept alive by the appearance of an astonishing portrait of Sophia. Drawn by a Polish artist, it depicted the Regent seated alone, wearing the crown of Monomakh on her head and holding the orb and scepter in her hands, exactly as crowned male autocrats were usually painted. Her title was given as Grand Duchess and Autocrat. Beneath the picture was a twenty-four-line verse, composed by the monk Sylvester Medvedev, lauding the regal qualities of the lady portrayed and comparing her favorably to Semiramis of Assyria, the Empress Pulcheria of Byzantium and Queen Elizabeth I of England. Copies of the picture, printed on satin, silk and paper, circulated in Moscow, while others went to Holland with the request that the verses be translated into Latin and German and distributed throughout Europe.
To the boyars gathered around Peter and his mother, Sophia’s assumption of the title was intolerable and her distribution of her portrait clothed in the Russian state regalia was menacing. They surmised that she meant to have herself crowned, marry her favorite, Vasily Golitsyn, and then either dethrone the two Tsars or dispose of Peter by whatever means were necessary. Whether in fact this was in Sophia’s mind, no one can say. She had already achieved so much that perhaps she did indeed dream of formal, unchallenged rule with her loved one sitting at her side. There is no evidence, however, that she was prepared to depose Peter, and Golitsyn, for his part, was extremely circumspect on the matter of marriage: There was still a Princess Golitsyn.
The one member of Sophia’s party who was not shy about his hopes or intentions was Fedor Shaklovity. Repeatedly, he pressed upon her the necessity of crushing the Naryshkin party before Peter came of age. More than once, he urged groups of Streltsy to kill the leaders of Peter’s party and perhaps even the Tsaritsa Natalya. He failed; Sophia was unwilling to take such drastic steps, and Golitsyn shrank from any violence. Yet, Shaklovity’s devotion stirred Sophia. During the long weeks when Golitsyn was far away on his second fruitless campaign against the Crimea, even as she was writing her passionate letters to her “Little Father,” Sophia may temporarily have taken Shaklovity as her lover.
Inevitably, time would have changed the relations between Peter and Sophia, but their confrontation was precipitated by the disastrous outcome of the second Crimean campaign. As long as Sophia’s government was successful, it was difficult to challenge her, but Golitsyn’s two campaigns revealed more than military failures: By calling attention to the relationship between the Regent and the army commander, they gave Sophia’s enemies something specific to attack.
Peter himself had taken no part in either the peace treaty with Poland or the military campaigns against the Tatars, but he was keenly interested in military affairs and was as anxious as any other Russian to put an end to the Tatar raids into the Ukraine. Accordingly, he had followed with excitement the course of Golitsyn’s military campaigns. When, in June 1689, Golitsyn returned from his second disastrous campaign, Peter was angry and contemptuous. On July 18, an incident brought this growing antagonism to public attention. At the festival celebrating the miraculous appearance of the icon of Our Lady of Kazan, Sophia appeared with her two brothers in the Assumption Cathedral, just as she had done in preceding years. When the service was over, Peter, after a whispered remark from one of his companions, walked over to Sophia and asked her to step out of the procession. This was an open challenge: to prevent the Regent from walking with the Tsars was to strip away her authority. Sophia understood the implication and refused to obey. Instead, she personally took the icon from the Metropolitan and, carrying it, defiantly continued to walk in the procession. Incensed and frustrated, Peter immediately left the procession and returned to fume and sulk in the country.
The tension between the two parties was mounting; rumors filled the air, each side feared a sudden move by the other and each was convinced that its own best strategy was to remain on the defensive. Neither party wished to forfeit the moral advantage by striking the first blow. Outwardly, Peter had no good reason to attack his half-sister and half-brother in the Kremlin. They were ruling according to the agreement of the 1682 coronation of the two Tsars; they had not in any way repudiated that agreement or infringed his prerogative. Similarly, Sophia could find no public excuse to attack Peter at Preobrazhenskoe; he was an anointed tsar. Although the Streltsy, on Shaklovity’s urging, might support her against an attack by the Naryshkins and Peter’s play troops, persuading them to march on Preobrazhenskoe to attack the Lord’s anointed would be far more difficult.
These same considerations made both sides unsure of their actual strength. In numbers, Sophia held a great advantage; she had most of the Streltsy behind her, along with the foreign officers in the German Suburb. Peter’s numerical strength was small: He had only his family, his companions, his play troops, who numbered about 600, and the probable support of the Sukharev Regiment of the Streltsy. Yet, though her physical strength was greater, it was based on weakness; Sophia could never be sure how deeply the loyalty of the Streltsy ran, and she had an exaggerated fear of even the small number of armed men gathered around Peter. That summer, wherever the Regent went, she was always surrounded by a strong guard of her own Streltsy. She lavished on them gifts of money and plied them with pleas and exhortations: “Do not abandon us. May we depend on you? If we are unnecessary, my brother and I will take refuge in a monastery.”
As Sophia struggled to maintain her influence, Vasily Golitsyn, the returning “hero” of Perekop, remained silent, unwilling to become involved in any attack or open opposition to Peter and the boyars around him. Sophia’s other admirer and lieutenant, Shaklovity, was more determined. Frequently, he went among the Streltsy and openly denounced the members of Peter’s party; he did not mention Peter’s name, but talked of eliminating his leading supporters and sending the Tsaritsa Natalya to a convent.
July ended and August began, the tension in Moscow rising with the heat. On July 31, Gordon noted in his diary: “The heat and bitterness are ever greater and greater and it appears that they must break out soon.” A few days later, he referred to “rumors unsafe to be uttered.” Both sides waited nervously through the midsummer days and nights. The situation was layered with powdery, dry tinder. Any rumor could become the spark.
* It is important to note that this first Russian war with Turkey was not inspired by either of the objectives generally attributed to Russian aggression in this area. It was not motivated by a drive for a warm-water port, and it was not a holy crusade to free Constantinople from the infidels. Rather, it was a war that Russia entered unwillingly as an unwelcome obligation of a treaty with Poland. In fact, Russia first attacked Turkey not to acquire Constantinople, but to gain unimpeachable title to Kiev.
† One consequence of Sophia’s decision to make war in the south still affects the modern world. Remote in time though it may seem, her decision to attack the Tatars had an important bearing on, and even helped to originate, the Far Eastern boundary dispute between the Soviet Union and China. Having decided to make a maximum effort against the Tatars, Sophia and Golitsyn suspended all other Russian territorial ambitions. The momentum of the advance to the Pacific was abruptly halted. By the mid-seventeenth century, Russian soldiers traders, hunters and pioneers had reached and conquered the basin of the Amur River, which makes a vast looping circle around the territory now known as Manchuria. For years, under increasing Chinese pressure, frontier soldiers had been sending desperate appeals to Moscow for reinforcements. But Sophia, reducing her commitments, sent, not reinforcements, but a diplomatic mission headed by Fedor Golovin to work out a peace with the Manchu Dynasty. The negotiations took place in the Russian frontier post of Nerchinsk on the upper Amur River. Golovin was at a disadvantage; not only had Sophia ordered him to make peace, but the Chinese brought up a large fleet of heavily armed junks and surrounded the fort with 17,000 soldiers. In the end, Golovin signed a paper which gave the whole of the Amur basin to China.
Subsequently, the Russians claimed that the treaty had been based not on justice, but on the presence of so much menacing Chinese military force. In 1858 and 1860, the tables were turned, and Russia took back 380,000 square miles of territory from an impotent China. Not all Russians approved this claim. After all, the Treaty of Nerchinsk had been honored for 180 years; all that time, the territory had been Chinese. But Tsar Nicholas I approved, proclaiming, “Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it must never be lowered.”
This is the essence of the Soviet-Chinese dispute: The Russians argue that the vast region was taken from them unfairly during Sophia’s regency and that, as Izvestia put it in 1972, “this provided the grounds for Russian diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century to review the treaty by peaceful means and to establish the final Russian-Chinese border in the Far East.” In reply, the Chinese argue that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was the legitimate treaty and that the Russians simply stole the territory from them in the nineteenth century. Today, the territory is Russian. But on Chinese maps it is Chinese. Today, along the Amur River, several million Russian and Chinese soldiers face each other across this disputed border.