8
SOPHIA OVERTHROWN
The crisis exploded on August 17, 1689. Earlier that summer, while Golitsyn was still in the south, Sophia had developed the habit of making pilgrimages on foot to churches and monasteries in the vicinity of Moscow. On the afternoon of the 17th, she asked Shaklovity to provide an escort of Streltsy to accompany her the following morning to the Donskoy Monastery about two miles from the Kremlin. Because a murder had recently occurred near the monastery, the company of Streltsy which Shaklovity ordered into the Kremlin was larger and better armed than usual. The march through the streets of this column of heavily armed musketeers did not go unnoticed. Then, as the detachment was making its bivouac inside the Kremlin, an anonymous letter began to circulate in the palace warning that on that very night Peter’s Preobrazhenskoe play soldiers would attack the Kremlin and attempt to kill Tsar Ivan and the Regent Sophia. No one took time to investigate the authenticity of the letter; it may even have been contrived by Shaklovity. Understandably, Sophia became extremely upset. To calm her, Shaklovity ordered the great Kremlin gates closed and summoned more Streltsy to garrison the citadel. Scouts were posted along the road to Preobrazhenskoe to report any sign of soldiers moving from Peter’s camp in the direction of Moscow. Inside the Kremlin, a long rope was attached to the alarm bell of the cathedral so that it could be pulled from within the palace; a man running out to pull it might be cut down by pre-assigned assassins.
The people of Moscow watched the mobilization of the Streltsy with alarm and dread. They remembered the bloodbath seven years before, and now a new upheaval seemed very near. Even the Streltsy were uneasy. They assumed that they would be ordered to march on the Naryshkin court at Preobrazhenskoe, and, for many, the prospect was troubling. Peter, after all, was an anointed tsar whom they were sworn to defend, just as they were sworn to defend Tsar Ivan and the Regent Sophia. It was an unhappy business of mixed and hesitating loyalties. And, most important, no one wanted to be on the losing side.
Meanwhile, at Preobrazhenskoe, news of the tumult in Moscow caused excitement but no special precautions. During the evening, one of Peter’s chamberlains rode into the city carrying a routine dispatch from the Tsar to the Kremlin. His arrival, however, was misinterpreted by some of the nervous and overexcited Streltsy. Knowing that he was from Peter, they pulled the chamberlain from his horse, beat him and dragged him into the palace to see Shaklovity.
This bit of violence had immediate and unexpected repercussions. During the preceding weeks, the older and more experienced of Peter’s adherents, his uncle Lev Naryshkin and Prince Boris Golitsyn, a cousin of Sophia’s favorite, Vasily Golitsyn, aware that a confrontation with Sophia and Shaklovity was coming, had been working quietly to gain informers among the Streltsy. Seven men had been won over, the chief of whom was Lieutenant Colonel Larion Elizarov, and their standing orders were to report any decisive move made by Shaklovity. Alerted by the mobilization of the Streltsy, Elizarov was watching closely for a sign that the soldiers would be ordered to march on the Naryshkin camp at Preobrazhenskoe. On learning that Peter’s messenger had been dragged from his horse, beaten and taken to Shaklovity, he assumed that the attack on Peter was beginning. Two horses had been saddled, and two of Elizarov’s fellow conspirators were ordered to ride urgently to warn the Tsar.
At Preobrazhenskoe, all was quiet when, a little after midnight, the two messengers galloped into the courtyard. Peter was asleep, but an attendant burst into his room and shouted that he must run for his life, the Streltsy were on the march, coming for him. Peter leaped from his bed and, still in his nightgown and with bare feet, ran to the stables, mounted a horse and galloped to a temporary hiding place in a nearby grove of trees where he waited while his companions brought his clothes. Then he dressed quickly, remounted and, accompanied by a small band, set off on the road to the Troitsky Monastery, forty-five miles northeast of Moscow. The trip took the rest of the night. When Peter arrived at six in the morning, he was so tired that he had to be lifted from his horse.
To those who saw him, it was apparent that the terror of the night had taken a toll on the highly strung seventeen-year-old. For seven years, the nightmare of the Streltsy hunting down Naryshkins had been a part of Peter’s dreams. To be startled awake with the news that they were actually coming was to mingle nightmare with reality. At Troitsky, he was carried to bed, but he was so exhausted and overwrought that he burst into tears and sobbed convulsively, telling the abbot between sobs that his sister had planned to kill him with all his family. Gradually, as weariness overcame him, he dropped into a deep sleep. While Peter slept, there were other arrivals at Troitsky. Within two hours, Natalya and Eudoxia reached the monastery, both aroused and hurried away from Preobrazhenskoe, and accompanied by the soldiers of Peter’s play regiments. Later that day, the entire Sukharev Regiment of Streltsy arrived from Moscow to rally to the younger Tsar.
The nature of what had happened—Peter pulled from his bed and fleeing—suggests that the decision to seek sanctuary was taken in panic. This was not the case; indeed, the decision to go was not Peter’s. As part of their overall plan for confronting Sophia, Lev Naryshkin and Boris Golitsyn had worked out in advance an escape route for Peter and all the court at Preobrazhenskoe: If and when an emergency made it necessary, the entire party would flee to Troitsky. Thus, Peter’s arrival and the rapid assembly of his forces inside the powerful walls of the fortified monastery had been carefully prearranged. Peter, however, had not been told about this plan and, when he was awakened in the middle of the night and told to run for his life, he was terrified. Later, the story that an anointed tsar had had to flee in his nightshirt from the approach of his enemies lent weight to the charges against Sophia. Unwittingly, Peter had played his role perfectly.
In fact, he had not been in any danger at all, because the Streltsy had never been ordered to march against Preobrazhenskoe and, when news of Peter’s flight to Troitsky reached the Kremlin, no one knew what to make of it. Sophia, hearing the report as she emerged from matins, was convinced that Peter’s behavior implied some threat to her. “Except for my precautions, they would have murdered all of us,” she said to the Streltsy around her. Shaklovity was contemptuous. “Let him run,” he said. “He has plainly gone mad.”
As she studied the new situation, however, Sophia became uneasy. More clearly than Shaklovity, she realized the significance of what had happened. Spurred by a false danger, Peter had taken a decisive step. The Troitsky Monastery was more than an impregnable fortress; it was perhaps the holiest place in Russia, a traditional sanctuary for the royal family in time of greatest danger. Now, if Peter’s adherents were able to paint a picture of the Tsar fleeing to Troitsky to rally all Russians against a usurper, they would gain an enormous advantage. It would be impossible to persuade the Streltsy to march against the Troitsky Monastery, and to the people Peter’s flight would signify that the Tsar’s life was in danger. Her position, Sophia realized, was seriously threatened, and unless she moved very carefully, she could lose everything.
The famous monastery of Troitskaya-Sergeeva, or, to use its full name, the Laurel of St. Sergius under the Blessing of the Holy Trinity, was about forty-five miles northeast of Moscow on the Great Russian Road that leads from the capital to Great Rostov and then to Yaroslavl on the Volga. The origins of this hallowed and historic place lay in the fourteenth century, when it became the site of a small wooden church and monastery founded by a monk named Sergius who blessed Russian arms before the great Battle of Kulikovo against the Tatars. When the Russians won, the monastery became a national shrine. In the sixteenth century, Troitsky became rich and powerful: dying tsars and noblemen in hope of salvation bequeathed their wealth to the monastery, and its treasure vaults were choked with gold, silver, pearls and jewels. Huge white walls, from thirty to fifty feet high and twenty feet thick, circled the monastery for a mile in circumference, making it impregnable. From the ramparts and from the immense round towers which stood at the corners, the muzzles of scores of brass cannon looked out on the countryside. In 1608–1609, during the Time of Troubles, Troitsky withstood a siege by 30,000 Poles, whose cannonballs simply bounded off the monastery’s massive walls.*
Safe within this mighty bastion, the huge ramparts garrisoned by play soldiers and loyal Streltsy, Peter and his party planned their counterattack. Their first move was to send a messenger to Sophia asking why so many Streltsy had gathered the previous day in the Kremlin. It was a difficult question for Sophia to answer. With the two sides still outwardly observing all formal courtesies, Sophia could not reply that she had mobilized the Streltsy because she expected an attack by her brother Peter. The answer she gave—that she had summoned the soldiers to escort her on her walk to the Donskoy Monastery—seemed flimsy; thousands of armed men were unnecessary for this purpose, and Peter’s supporters were further convinced of her bad faith.
Peter’s next move was to order the colonel of the elite Stremyani Regiment, Ivan Tsykler, to come to Troitsky with fifty of his men. To Sophia, this summons seemed ominous; Tsykler had been one of the leaders of the 1682 Streltsy revolt and thereafter one of her most loyal officers. If he was allowed to go, and if under torture he told what he knew about Shaklovity’s schemes for suppressing the Naryshkins, the breach with Peter would be irreparable. Yet, again, she had no choice. Peter was tsar, it was a royal command, to defy it meant an open challenge. When Tsykler arrived, he told everything he knew without torture. Observing Peter’s star ascending, he had offered to come to Peter’s side if only the Tsar would protect him by issuing a royal command.
From the beginning, Sophia understood the weakness of her position. If it came to a fight, Peter would surely overwhelm her; her only chance of survival lay in reconciliation. However, if she could persuade Peter to leave Troitsky and return to Moscow, stripping him of the sanctity and protection of those powerful walls, then she could deal with his advisors, Peter himself could be sent back to play with his soldiers and boats, and her authority as regent would be reestablished. Accordingly, she dispatched Prince Ivan Troekurov, whose son was an intimate friend of Peter’s, to persuade Peter to return. Troekurov’s mission failed. Peter clearly understood the advantage of remaining at Troitsky, and he sent Troekurov back with the message that he would no longer consent to be governed by a woman.
It was Peter’s move. In his own hand, he wrote letters to the colonels of all the Streltsy regiments, commanding them to come to Troitsky with ten men from each regiment. When this news reached the Kremlin, Sophia reacted violently. She summoned the Streltsy colonels and warned them not to become involved in the dispute between her brother and herself. When the colonels hesitated, telling her that they had orders from the Tsar himself which they dared not disobey, Sophia declared passionately that any man attempting to leave for Troitsky would be beheaded. Vasily Golitsyn, still commander of the army, ordered that no foreign officer leave Moscow for any reason. Under these threats, the Streltsy colonels and the foreign officers remained in Moscow.
The following day, Peter increased the pressure by sending official notice to Tsar Ivan and Sophia that he had commanded the Streltsy colonels to come to Troitsky. He asked that Sophia, as regent, see that his orders were obeyed. In reply, Sophia sent Ivan’s tutor and Peter’s confessor to Troitsky to explain that the soldiers were delayed and to beg for reconciliation. These two returned to Moscow two days later, empty-handed. Meanwhile, Shaklovity sent spies to Troitsky to observe the activity there and count the numbers of Peter’s adherents. They came back with fresh reports of Peter’s growing strength and confidence, and, in fact, Shaklovity had only to muster his own men every morning to realize that growing numbers were deserting at night and taking the road to Troitsky.
Sophia appealed to the Patriarch Joachim to go to Troitsky and use the great weight of his office to attempt a reconciliation with Peter. The Patriarch agreed, and promptly, on arriving, cast in his lot with Peter. Subsequently, when new defectors from Moscow arrived at Troitsky, they were received by Peter and Joachim, the Tsar and the Patriarch, standing side by side.
Joachim’s act was not, as he saw it, a betrayal. Although he had submitted to Sophia as regent, he was from a boyar family that opposed her government. Personally, he disliked Sophia and Golitsyn for their Western manners, and he had resisted her ambition to be crowned. More important, he detested the monk Sylvester Medvedev for trespassing on church matters which he insisted lay within the province of the Patriarach. Until this moment of crisis, he had supported the Regent, not out of sympathy, but in recognition of her authority; his change of allegiance was a clear sign that power and authority were being transferred.
The defection of the Patriarch was a massive blow to Sophia. His departure encouraged others to follow. But still the mass of the Streltsy and the leading citizens of Moscow remained in the city, uncertain what to do, awaiting some further indication as to who was likely to win.
On August 27, Peter moved again. He sent stern letters repeating his command that all the Streltsy colonels and ten soldiers from each regiment report immediately to Troitsky. A similar order summoned numerous representatives of the people of Moscow. This time, all who failed to obey were threatened with death. These letters, threatening explicit punishment, had a great impact, and a disorganized mass of Streltsy led by five colonels immediately set out to submit to the Tsar.
Sophia, sitting in the Kremlin, powerless to halt the continuing exodus to Troitsky, was becoming desperate. In a final effort to resolve the crisis by conciliation, she decided to go to Troitsky herself and confront Peter personally. Accompanied by Vasily Golitsyn, Shaklovity and a guard of Streltsy, she set out along the Great Russian Road. At the village of Vozdvizhenskoe, about eight miles from the great monastery, she was met by Peter’s friend Ivan Buturlin and a company of soldiers with loaded muskets. Aligning his men across the road, Buturlin ordered the Regent to halt. He told her that Peter refused to see her, forbade her coming to Troitsky and commanded that she return immediately to Moscow. Insulted and angry, Sophia declared, “I shall certainly go to Troitsky!” and ordered Buturlin and his men out of her path. At this moment, another of Peter’s supporters, the younger Prince Troekurov, arrived with the Tsar’s command that his sister must definitely be prevented from coming, if necessary by force.
Frustrated and humiliated, Sophia retreated. Returning to the Kremlin before dawn on September 11, she sent for the dwindling circle of her supporters. Her tone was near hysterical: “They almost shot me at Vozdvizhenskoe. Many people rode out after me with muskets and bows. It was with difficulty I got away and hastened to Moscow in five hours. The Naryshkins and Lopukhins are making a plot to kill the Tsar Ivan Alexeevich, and are even aiming at my head. I will collect the regiments and talk to them myself. Obey us and do not go to Troitsky. I trust in you. In whom should I trust rather than you, O faithful supporters? Will you also run away? Kiss the cross first”—and Sophia held out the cross for each one to kiss. “Now if you try to run away, the cross will not let you go. When letters come from Troitsky, do not read them. Bring them to the palace.”
Having gained the initiative, Peter and his advisors were not to give it up. Within a few hours of Sophia’s return to Moscow, Colonel Ivan Nechaev arrived from Troitsky with official letters addressed to Tsar Ivan and the Regent Sophia. These letters formally announced the existence of a plot against the life of Tsar Peter and declared the leading plotters to be Shaklovity and Medvedev—traitors who were to be arrested immediately and sent to Peter at Troitsky for judgment.
These letters, delivered first to a palace clerk at the foot of the Red Staircase, produced a shock wave which rolled through the palace. Officials and officers who had stood by Sophia expecting either that she would win or that there would be a compromise understood now that they faced ruin or death. Those Streltsy still partially loyal to the Regent began to grumble that they would not protect traitors and that the plotters must be surrendered. Sophia ordered that Colonel Nechaev, the bearer of these unwelcome letters, be brought to her, and he received the full force of her seething emotions. Raging, trembling, she asked him, “How dare you take upon yourself such a duty?” Nechaev answered that he did not dare to disobey the Tsar. In a fury, Sophia ordered his head cut off. Luckily for Nechaev, no executioner could be found at that moment, and in the ensuing uproar he was forgotten.
Sophia, alone and at bay, tried one final time to rally her supporters. Going out to the top of the Red Staircase, she addressed a crowd of Streltsy and citizens in the palace square. Her head high, she hurled defiance at the Naryshkins and begged her audience not to desert her:
“Evil-minded people … have used all means to make me and the Tsar Ivan quarrel with my younger brother. They have sown discord, jealousy and trouble. They have hired people to talk of a plot against the life of the younger Tsar and of other people. Out of jealousy of the great services of Fedor Shaklovity and of his constant care, day and night, for the safety and prosperity of the empire, they have given him out to be the chief of the conspiracy, as if one existed. To settle the matter and to find out the reason for this accusation, I went myself to Troitsky, but was kept back by the advice of the evil counselors whom my brother has about him and was not allowed to go farther. After being insulted in this way, I was obliged to come home. You all well know how I have managed these seven years; how I took on myself the regency in the most unquiet times; how I have concluded a famous and true peace with the Christian rulers, our neighbors, and how the enemies of the Christian religion have been brought by my arms into terror and confusion. For your services you have received great reward and I have always shown you my favor. I cannot believe that you will betray me and will believe the inventions of enemies of the general peace and prosperity. It is not the life of Fedor Shaklovity that they want, but my life and that of my brother.”
Three times that day, Sophia made this speech, first to the Streltsy, then to the leading citizens of Moscow, finally to a large crowd which included a number of foreign officers summoned from the German Suburb. Her exhortations had an effect: “It was a long and fine speech,” said Gordon, and the mood of the crowd seemed much improved. At his sister’s command, Tsar Ivan descended into the crowd to hand cups of vodka to the boyars, officials and Streltsy. Sophia was pleased. In a generous mood, she sent for Colonel Nechaev, forgave him and handed him a cup of vodka.
In this interim, Prince Boris Golitsyn, one of the dominant leaders in Peter’s party at Troitsky, tried to win the support of his cousin Vasily. Boris sent a messenger asking Vasily to come to Troitsky to seek the Tsar’s favor. Vasily replied by asking Boris to help him mediate between the two parties. Boris refused and suggested again that Vasily come to Troitsky, promising that he would be favorably received by Peter. Honorably, Vasily refused, saying that duty required him to remain at Sophia’s side.
It was again Peter’s move, and again he increased the pressure on Sophia. On September 14, a written order from Peter arrived in the German Suburb. Addressed to all the generals, colonels and other officers residing there, it restated the existence of a plot, named Shaklovity and Medvedev as the chief conspirators and commanded that all foreign officers come to Troitsky, fully armed and on horseback. For these foreign soldiers, this order posed a dangerous dilemma. They had contracted to serve the government, but, in this chaotic situation, who was the government? Already, in an effort to avoid taking sides in a family quarrel between brother and sister, General Gordon, the leader of the foreign officers, had declared that without an order from both Tsars none of his officers would stir. Now Peter’s command forced the issue for Gordon. Personally, aside from all threats, Gordon was embarrassed by the need to choose a side: He was fond of Peter and had often helped him in his games with artillery and fireworks, and he was even closer to Golitsyn, with whom he had worked for years to reform the Russian army and whom he had followed on the two disastrous campaigns to the Crimea. Thus, when Peter’s letter was opened and read in the presence of all the senior foreign officers, Gordon’s reaction was to report Peter’s command to Golitsyn and ask his advice. Golitsyn was distressed and said that he would discuss the matter immediately with Sophia and Ivan. Gordon reminded Golitsyn that all the foreigners, through no fault of their own, risked their heads if they made the wrong move. Golitsyn understood and said that he would give them an answer by evening. He asked that Gordon send his son-in-law to the palace to receive the Regent’s answer.
Gordon, however, made his own decision as soon as he saw Golitsyn’s hesitation. If the Regent’s favorite, the Keeper of the Great Seal, the commander-in-chief of the army, could not issue a command, then the regime in Moscow was obviously near collapse. Gordon saddled his horse and told his officers that, no matter what orders came from the Kremlin, he meant to leave for Troitsky. That night, a long cavalcade of foreign officers rode out of the capital and reached the monastery at dawn. Peter arose to greet them and give them his hands to kiss.
The departure of the foreign officers was, as Gordon himself noted in his diary, “the decisive break.” The Streltsy remaining in Moscow realized that Peter had won. To save themselves, they crowded in front of the palace demanding that Shaklovity be surrendered to them so that they could take him to Troitsky and hand him over to Peter. Sophia refused, whereupon the Streltsy began to shout, “You had better finish this matter at once! If you do not give him up, we shall sound the alarm bell!” Sophia understood what this meant: another riot, with soldiers running wild, slaughtering whoever they decided was a traitor. In this violence, anyone—even she—might die. She was beaten. She sent for Shaklovity, who, like Ivan Naryshkin seven years before, had been hiding in the palace chapel. Tearfully, she gave him up, and that night he was taken in chains to Troitsky.
The struggle was over, the regency was concluded, Peter had won. After victory came vengeance. The first blows fell swiftly on Shaklovity. Upon his arrival at Troitsky, he was interrogated under the knout. After fifteen blows, he admitted that he had considered the murder of Peter and his mother, Natalya, but he denied making any specific plans. In the course of his confession, he completely exonerated Vasily Golitsyn from any knowledge of, or participation in, his activities. Golitsyn himself was now also at Troitsky. On the morning of Shaklovity’s arrival, Golitsyn had voluntarily appeared outside the monastery walls, asking permission to enter and pay homage to Tsar Peter. His request to enter was denied and he was commanded to wait in the village until a decision about him had been made. How to handle him was a difficult problem for Peter and his supporters. On the one hand, he had been Sophia’s principal minister, general and lover for the seven years of the regency and therefore must be degraded along with the Regent’s other intimate advisors. On the other hand, it was widely recognized that the intent of Golitsyn’s service had been honorable even when he failed in execution. Shaklovity had stated that Golitsyn had had no part in any plot. Most important, Golitsyn was a member of one of Russia’s preeminent families, and his cousin Prince Boris Golitsyn was anxious to spare the family the disgrace of a charge of treason.
In trying to spare Vasily, Boris Golitsyn risked the anger of the Tsaritsa Natalya and others of Peter’s advisors. At one point, they even threatened to implicate him along with his cousin. This moment came after Shaklovity had written a nine-page confession in the presence of Boris Golitsyn. It was after midnight when Shaklovity finished, and Peter had gone to bed, so Boris took the confession to his own room, intending to hand it to Peter in the morning. But someone rushed to the Tsar, awakened him and reported that Boris Golitsyn had taken Shaklovity’s confession to his room so that he could remove anything in it detrimental to his cousin. Peter immediately sent a messenger to ask Shaklovity whether he had written a confession and, if so, where it was. Shaklovity replied that he had given it to Prince Boris Golitsyn. Golitsyn, luckily, was warned by a friend that Peter was awake and hurried to present the confession to the Tsar. Sternly, Peter asked why he had not been given the papers immediately. When Golitsyn replied that it was late and he had not wished to wake the Tsar, Peter accepted the explanation and, on the basis of Shaklovity’s exoneration, decided to spare Vasily Golitsyn’s life.
At nine that evening, Vasily Golitsyn was summoned. Expecting to see Peter in person, he had prepared a statement reciting his services to the state as a preface to asking for pardon. But no audience was granted. Golitsyn was left to stand in the middle of a crowded anteroom while a clerk appeared on a staircase and read his sentence aloud. He was charged with reporting only to the Regent and not to the Tsars in person, with writing Sophia’s name on official documents in equality with those of the Tsars, and with causing harm and burdens to the government and people by his bad generalship of the two Crimean campaigns. Although his life was spared, his sentence was harsh: He was deprived of the rank of boyar, stripped of all property and exiled with his family to a village in the Arctic. He set out, miserable and newly impoverished. Along the way, he was cheered by a courier from Sophia who brought him a packet of money and her promise to procure his release through the intercession of Tsar Ivan. It was perhaps the last good news Golitsyn ever received. Soon, Sophia was unable to help anyone, not even herself, and the handsome, urbane Golitsyn began twenty-five years of exile. He was forty-six in that summer of 1689 when Sophia was overthrown, and he lived a wretched existence in the Arctic until he died in 1714 at the age of seventy-one.
It is ironic that a man so advanced for the Russia of his day, one who might have been so useful to Peter in the Tsar’s effort to modernize the state, should have found himself in the party opposing Peter, should have lost everything in the shift of power and thus been condemned to sit out most of the Great Reformer’s reign in an Arctic hut. And it was equally ironic that the Muscovite boyars should have rallied to Peter in opposition to Golitsyn. By helping Peter overthrow Sophia and Golitsyn, they believed they were rejecting the dangerous intrusion of Western culture. In fact, they had cleared away the major obstacles to the rise of the greatest Westernizer in Russia’s history.
Golitsyn’s end seems wretched, but it was mild in comparison to the fate of other members of Sophia’s inner circle. Although, according to Gordon, Peter was reluctant to impose the ultimate penalty upon his opponents, the older leaders of his party, and especially the Patriarch, insisted on it. Shaklovity was condemned to death, and four days after his arrival at Troitsky he was beheaded outside the great wall of the monastery. Two others died with him. Three Streltsy were knouted, their tongues were torn out and they were exiled to Siberia. Sylvester Medvedev had fled from Moscow, hoping to find asylum in Poland, but he was intercepted, brought to Troitsky and interrogated under torture. He admitted that he had heard vague talk against the lives of some of Peter’s adherents and that he had written the damningly complimentary verses inscribed beneath Sophia’s portrait, but he denied that he had been involved in any conspiracy against either Peter or the Patriarch. He was held, then denounced again, severely tortured with fire and hot irons, and finally, two years later, he was executed.
With Sophia’s supporters annihilated, there still remained the central problem of what to do with Sophia herself. Alone and friendless, she waited in the Kremlin to learn her fate. None of the testimony given under torture by Shaklovity had implicated her in a conspiracy to remove Peter from the throne, much less to murder him. The most that could be said was that she was aware of designs against certain members of Peter’s party and that she had been ambitious to share power with her brothers by right as autocrat rather than by delegation as regent. This, however, was enough for Peter. From Troitsky, he wrote to Ivan declaring his grievances against Sophia and proposing that henceforth the two of them alone should rule the state. He pointed out that in their coronation God had given the crown to two, not three, persons; the presence of their sister Sophia and her claims to equality with the two anointed by God were a trespass on God’s will and their rights. He proposed that they govern jointly, without the disagreeable interference of “this shameful third person.” He asked Ivan’s permission to appoint new officials without Ivan’s specific consent to each one, and concluded that Ivan should still be the senior Tsar—“I shall be ready to honor you as I would my father.”
Powerless to disagree, Ivan agreed. An order was given that Sophia’s name be excluded from all official documents. Soon afterward, Peter’s emissary, Prince Ivan Troekurov, arrived in the Kremlin to ask Tsar Ivan to request Sophia to leave the Kremlin for the Novodevichy Convent on the city’s outskirts. She was not required to take the veil as a nun, and a suite of comfortable, well-furnished apartments was assigned to her; a large number of servants was to accompany her, and she was to live a comfortable life, restricted only in the fact that she could not leave the convent and could be visited only by her aunts and sisters. But Sophia immediately understood that this kind of confinement, however luxurious, meant the end of everything in life that held meaning for her. Power, action, excitement, intellect and love were to be stripped away. She resisted, refusing for more than a week to leave the Kremlin palace, but the pressure became too great and she was escorted ceremonially to the convent, within the walls of which she would pass the remaining fifteen years of her life.
Peter refused to return to Moscow until Sophia had left the Kremlin. Once his sister was safely incarcerated, he rode south from Troitsky, but delayed for a week en route, passing the time with General Gordon, who exercised his infantry and cavalry under the eye of the Tsar. Finally, on October 16, Peter reentered the capital, riding along a road lined with Streltsy regiments kneeling to ask his pardon. Entering the Kremlin, he went to the Uspensky Cathedral to embrace his brother, Ivan; then, dressed in robes of state, he presented himself at the top of the Red Staircase. For the first time, the young man who stood there, very tall, with round face and dark eyes, was the master of the Russian state.
Thus fell Sophia, the first woman to rule in Moscow. Her achievements as a ruler have been exaggerated. Prince Boris Kurakin strained the truth when he said, “Never had there been such wise government in the Russian state. During the seven years of her rule, the whole state did come to a flower of great wealth.” On the other hand, she was not, as some admirers of Peter have depicted her, simply the last ruler of the old order, a final reactionary stumbling block before the path of Russian history smoothed and broadened into the new modern avenue of the Petrine era. The truth is that Sophia was competent and, on the whole, ruled well. During the years she guided the state, Russia was in transition. Two tsars, Alexis and Fedor, had instituted mild changes and reforms in Russian policies. Sophia neither slowed nor hurried this pace, but she did allow it to continue and, in so doing, helped prepare the way for Peter. In the light of what had begun under Alexis and continued under Fedor and Sophia, even the striking changes made by Peter take on more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary character.
It was not as a Russian ruler but as a Russian woman that Sophia was remarkable. Over the centuries, Russian women had been degraded into domestic chattels hidden away in the dark chambers of the terem. Sophia stepped into the light of day and seized control of the state. Regardless of how well she exercised power once she had it, the simple fact of taking power in that era was enough to make of her a historic figure. Unfortunately, Sophia’s womanhood was not only her distinction, it was also her undoing. When the crisis came, Muscovites were still unwilling to follow a woman in opposition to a crowned tsar.
Peter put Sophia in Novodevichy, and the gates of the convent closed permanently behind her. But in the century that followed, the role of royal women in Russia changed. Four female sovereigns succeeded Peter on the throne. An immense distance lay between the secluded creatures of the seventeenth-century terem and these spirited eighteenth-century empresses. And the greater part of the journey was made by a single woman, the Regent Sophia. Cut from the same cloth as these empresses, with the same determination and drive to rule, it was she who showed the way.
Peter himself, long after her deposing, described Sophia to a foreigner as “a princess endowed with all the accomplishments of body and mind to perfection, had it not been for her boundless ambition and insatiable desire for governing.” In the forty-two years of his reign, only one Russian stood up to challenge his right to the throne: Sophia. Twice, in 1682 and 1689, she pitted her strength against his. In the third and final domestic challenge to Peter’s omnipotence, the Streltsy uprising in 1698, the one opponent whom Peter feared was Sophia. She had then been locked in a convent for nine years, but Peter instantly assumed that she was behind the uprising. In his mind, she was the only person strong enough to dream of overthrowing him.
That Sophia possessed such qualities—that she could frighten Peter, that she had the audacity to challenge him and the strength of personality to worry him even from inside convent walls—should not be surprising. She was, after all, his sister.
* Today, the monastery is commonly called Zagorsk after the industrial town which now spreads beneath its walls. An oasis of religious life in Soviet Russia, it is, as it has been for centuries, an attraction for pilgrims from all over Russia. As one of the richest assemblages of religious architecture to be found in the Soviet Union, it has also become a regular stop for most foreign tourists who visit Moscow. Happily, even now, Troitsky still exudes something of the beauty, the grandeur and the holiness of its past.