9

GORDON, LEFORT AND THE JOLLY COMPANY

By traditional counting, the reign of Peter the Great lasted for forty-two years, beginning in 1682, when he was crowned as a boy of ten, and continuing until his death in 1725 at the age of fifty-two. Nevertheless, as we have seen, during the first seven of these years the two boy Tsars, Peter and Ivan, were removed from all practical state affairs while the real power of government resided with their sister Sophia. One might assume, therefore, that Peter’s reign could more truly be reckoned as beginning in the summer of 1689 when he and his partisans seized power from the Regent and the tall young Tsar rode in triumph into Moscow with his title secure and his people on their knees before him. But, surprisingly, the triumphant young autocrat still did not begin to rule. For five more years, the Tsar turned his back on governing Russia, blithely returning to the adolescent life he had made for himself before the flight to Troitsky—of Preobrazhenskoe and Lake Pleschev, of soldiers and boats, of informality and lack of responsibility. All he wanted was to be left alone to enjoy his freedom. He was completely indifferent to government and affairs of state; later, he confessed that he had nothing on his mind during these years except his own amusement. In this sense, then, the true beginning of Peter’s reign can be said to have been not in 1682, when he was ten, or in 1689, when he was seventeen, but in 1694, when he was twenty-two.

In the meantime, the government was administered by the small group which had supported and guided Peter in the confrontation with the Regent. His mother, Natalya, now forty, was the nominal leader, but she was not as independent as Sophia and she was easily swayed by the men around her. The Patriarch Joachim, a conservative churchman unrelenting in his hostility to all foreigners, stood at her elbow, determined to expunge the Western viruses which had crept into Russia under Sophia and Vasily Golitsyn. The Tsar’s uncle, Natalya’s brother Lev Naryshkin, received the vital office of Director of Foreign Affairs; in effect, he was the new prime minister. He was an amiable man of unexceptional intelligence whose joy was his new authority to give dazzling receptions and glorious banquets, served on gold and silver plates, for the foreign ambassadors. In actual negotiations with these ambassadors and in the practical running of his office, he was greatly and necessarily assisted by one of Russia’s few professional diplomats, Emilian Ukraintsev. The boyar Tikhon Streshnev, an old friend of Tsar Alexis and Peter’s formal guardian, was entrusted with the conduct of all home affairs. The third of the governing trio was Boris Golitsyn, who had successfully survived the lingering suspicion hanging over him for his effort to brake the fall of his cousin Vasily. Other famous names appeared in government: Urusov, Romodanovsky, Troekurov, Prozorovsky, Golovkin, Dolgoruky. Some who had been prominent under Sophia—Repnin and Vinius—kept their posts. Boris Sheremetev remained as commander of the southern army facing the Tatars. In addition, more than thirty Lopukhins of both sexes, the relatives of Peter’s young wife, Eudoxia, arrived at court ready to pluck what advantage they could from their relative’s position.

For Russia, the change in government was for the worse. The new administrators lacked both the skill and the energy of their predecessors. Not a single important law was made in these five years. Nothing was done to defend the Ukraine against the devastating raids of the Tatars. There was brawling at court and corruption in government. Law and order decayed in the countryside. There was an outburst of popular hatred against all foreigners: One decree, influenced by the Patriarch, ordered all Jesuits to leave the country within two weeks. Another commanded that all foreigners be halted at the frontier and thoroughly questioned as to their origins and their reasons for visiting Russia. Their answers were to be sent to Moscow and the foreigners held at the frontier until permission for them to enter was granted by the central government. Simultaneously, the Director of the Posts, Andrew Vinius, was instructed to have his officials open and read all letters which crossed the frontier. The Patriarch even wanted to have all the Protestant churches in the German Suburb destroyed and was forestalled only when its inhabitants produced a document from Tsar Alexis containing written permission for the existence of these churches. At the height of this xenophobia, a foreigner was seized by a mob on a Moscow street and burned alive.

Nevertheless, for all his effort, there was one Russian whose habits the Patriarch could not change. Joachim’s despair was Peter himself, who passed so much of his time in the German Suburb among those very foreigners whom the Patriarch feared. Still, while Joachim lived, Peter kept his behavior under control. On March 10, 1690, the Tsar invited General Gordon to dine at court in honor of the birth of his son, the Tsarevich Alexis. Gordon accepted, but the Patriarch intervened, protesting vehemently at the inclusion of a foreigner at a celebration honoring the heir to the Russian throne. Furious, Peter deferred and the invitation was withdrawn, but the following day he invited Gordon to his country house, dined with him there and then rode back to Moscow with the Scot, conversing publicly throughout the ride.

The problem resolved itself a week later, on March 17, when Joachim suddenly died. He left a testament urging the Tsar to avoid contact with all heretics, Protestant or Catholic, to drive them out of Russia and to eschew personally all foreign clothes and customs. Above all, he demanded that Peter appoint no foreigners to official positions in the state or army where they would be in a position to give orders to the Orthodox faithful. Peter’s response, once Joachim was buried, was to order himself a new set of German clothes and, a week later, go for the first time to dine as Gordon’s guest in the German Suburb.

The choice of a new patriarch turned on the same issues that Joachim himself had provoked: liberalism versus conservatism, toleration of foreigners versus a fierce defense of traditional Orthodoxy. Some of the more educated clergy, supported by Peter, favored Marcellus, Metropolitan of Pskov, a scholarly churchman who had traveled abroad and spoke several languages, but the Tsaritsa Natalya, the ruling group of boyars, the monks and most of the lower clergy preferred the more conservative Adrian, Metropolitan of Kazan. The contest within the church was heated, with the partisans of Adrian charging that Marcellus had too much learning, would favor Catholics and had already trod on the fringes of heresy. After five months of debate, Adrian was chosen, because, said a disappointed Patrick Gordon, of the new patriarch’s “ignorance and simplicity.”

Peter was stung by this rebuff. Seven years later, he described the election of Adrian with bitter disgust to a foreign host. “The Tsar told us,” said the foreigner, “that when the Patriarch in Moscow was dead, he designed to fill that place with a learned man who had traveled, who spoke Latin, Italian and French. [But] the Russians petitioned him in a tumultuous manner not to set such a man over them, alleging three reasons: first, because he spoke barbarous languages; second, because his beard was not big enough for a patriarch; and third, because his coachman sat upon the coach seat and not upon the horses as was usual.”

In fact, despite the wish or decree of any patriarch, the West was already firmly installed only three miles from the Kremlin. Outside Moscow, on the road between the city and Preobrazhenskoe, stood a remarkable, self-contained Western European town known as the German Suburb.^*Visitors strolling along its broad, tree-lined avenues, past its two- and three-story brick houses with large European-style windows, or through its stately squares with splashing fountains, could scarcely believe that they were in the heart of Russia. Behind the stately mansions decorated with columns and cornices lay precisely arranged European gardens studded with pavilions and reflecting pools. Along the streets rolled carriages made in Paris or London. Only the onion domes of Moscow’s churches rising across the fields in the distance reminded visitors that they were a thousand miles from home.

In Peter’s day, this prosperous foreign island was relatively new. A previous settlement for foreigners founded by Ivan the Terrible inside the city had been dispersed during the Time of Troubles. After the advent of the first Romanov in 1613, foreigners settled wherever they could throughout the city. This development angered Muscovite conservatives who believed that their holy Orthodox city was being profaned, and in the uprising of 1648 bands of Streltsy made random attacks on foreign dwellings. In 1652, Tsar Alexis decreed that foreigners were forbidden to live or have churches within the walls of Holy Moscow, but he permitted a new foreign settlement, the German Suburb, to be laid out on the banks of the Yauza with plots of ground allotted on the basis of rank to all foreign officers, engineers, artists, doctors, apothecaries, merchants, schoolmasters and others in Russian service.

Originally, the colony had been made up predominantly of Protestant Germans, but by the middle of the seventeenth century there were numerous Dutchmen, Englishmen and Scots. The Scots, mostly royalists and Catholics in flight from Oliver Cromwell, were assured a refuge despite their religion because of Tsar Alexis’ violent anger at the beheading of King Charles I. Among the Scottish Jacobite names prominent in the German Suburb were Gordon, Drummond, Hamilton, Dalziel, Crawford, Graham and Leslie. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending France’s official toleration of Protestantism. The Regent and Vasily Golitsyn permitted a number of French Huguenot refugees, fleeing the new persecution in France, to come to Russia. By Peter’s adolescence, accordingly, the German Suburb had become an international colony of 3,000 West Europeans, where royalists mingled with republicans and Protestants with Catholics, their national, political and religious differences softened by distance and exile.

Enclosure in a separate suburb made it easy for them to maintain the habits and traditions of the West. The inhabitants wore foreign clothing, read foreign books, had their own Lutheran and Calvinist churches (Catholics were not permitted a church, but priests could say mass in a private home), spoke their own languages and educated their children. They kept up a constant correspondence with their native countries. One of the most respected foreigners, the Dutch resident Van Keller, sent and received news from The Hague every eight days, keeping the Suburb closely informed of all that was happening beyond Russia’s frontiers. General Patrick Gordon waited eagerly for the scientific reports of London’s Royal Society. English wives received volumes of poetry along with their fine china and scented soap. Then, too, the Suburb contained a seasoning of actors, musicians and adventurers who helped produce the repertory theater, the concerts, balls, picnics, as well as the love affairs and duels which kept the Suburb distracted and amused.

Obviously, this foreign island, a nucleus of a more advanced civilization, did not remain untouched by the Russian sea around it. The houses and gardens of the German Suburb bordered the royal lands at Sokolniki and Preobrazhenskoe, and eventually, despite the Patriarch’s ban, bolder Russians, thirsty for knowledge and intelligent conversation, began to mingle socially with the foreigners who lived only a few hundred yards away. Through them, foreign habits began to permeate Russian life. Soon, Russians who had laughed at foreigners for eating “grass” were also eating salads. The habit of smoking tobacco and taking snuff, anathematized by the Patriarch, began to spread. Some Russians like Vasily Golitsyn even began to trim their hair and beards and converse with Jesuits.

Contact rubbed both ways, and many foreigners adopted Russian qualities. Lacking foreign women to marry, they took Russian wives, learned the Russian language and allowed their children to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, as a result of their enforced residency in the German Suburb, most maintained their own Western style of life, language and religion. A marriage in the opposite direction was still rare, as few Western women were willing to marry a Russian and accept the inferior status of Russian women. But this was changing. Mary Hamilton had married Artemon Matveev and presided over the household in which Tsar Alexis had met Natalya Naryshkina. As Russian gentlemen became more Westernized, they had no trouble finding Western wives, a practice which flourished happily until the very end of imperial Russia in 1917. Peter’s son Alexis married a Western wife, and every tsar thereafter who reached the age to marry chose or had selected for him a princess from Western Europe.

From childhood Peter had been curious about the German Suburb. As he passed along the road, he had seen its handsome brick houses and shaded gardens. He had come to know Timmerman and Brandt, and the foreign officers who supervised the building of his play forts and the firing of his artillery, but until the death of the Patriarch Joachim in 1690 his contacts with the foreign suburb were restricted. After the old churchman’s death, Peter’s visits became so frequent that he seemed almost to live there.

In the German Suburb, the young Tsar found a heady combination of good wine, good talk and fellowship. When Russians spent an evening together, they simply drank until everyone was asleep or there was nothing more to drink. The foreigners also drank deeply, but amidst the haze of tobacco smoke and over the clank of beer tankards there was also conversation about the world, its monarchs and statesmen, scientists and warriors. Peter was excited by these discussions. When news reached the German Suburb of the victory of the English fleet over the French at La Hogue in 1694, he was enthusiastic. He asked for the original message, had it translated immediately and then, leaping up and shouting for joy, ordered an artillery salute to King William III of England. In these long evenings, he also listened to a wealth of advice about Russia: to institute more frequent drill for his army, to give his soldiers sterner discipline and regular pay, to capture the Orient trade by diverting it from the Ottoman-dominated Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and the Volga River.

Once the inhabitants of the Suburb understood that this tall young monarch liked them, they invited him everywhere and competed for his company. He was asked to participate in weddings, baptisms and other family celebrations. No merchant married a daughter or baptized a son without asking the Tsar to join the feast. Peter often served as a godfather, holding Lutheran and Catholic children at the font. He was best man at numerous foreign marriages, and in the dancing afterward he became an enthusiastic participant in the rollicking country dance known as the Grossvater.

In a society which mingled Scottish soldiers, Dutch merchants and German engineers, Peter naturally found many whose ideas fascinated him. One was Andrew Vinius, a middle-aged Russian-Dutchman who had one foot in each of the two cultures. Vinius’ father was a Dutch engineer-merchant who had established an ironworks in Tula south of Moscow in the time of Tsar Michael and become wealthy. His mother, a Russian woman, had brought up her son in the Orthodox religion. Speaking both Russian and Dutch, Vinius had served first in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then been given charge of the Post Office. He had written a book on geography, spoke Latin and was a student of Roman mythology. From him, Peter began to learn Dutch and a smattering of Latin. In writing to Vinius, the Tsar signed himself Petrus and he referred to his “games of Neptune and Mars” and to the celebrations he held “in honor of Bacchus.”

It was in the German Suburb also that Peter met two other foreigners, widely divergent in background and style, who became even more important to him. These were the stern old Scottish mercenary soldier General Patrick Gordon and the charming Swiss adventurer Francis Lefort.

Patrick Gordon was born in 1635 on his family estate of Auchleuchries near Aberdeen in the Scottish Highlands. His family was illustrious and fiercely Catholic, being connected with the first Duke of Gordon and the Earls of Errol and Aberdeen. The English Civil War had disrupted Gordon’s youth. His family was staunchly royalist, and when Oliver Cromwell severed King Charles I’s head, he also laid low the fortunes of all devoted Stuart followers; thereafter, a Scottish Catholic boy had no chance of entering a university or finding a useful career in military or public service, and, at sixteen, Patrick went abroad to seek his fortune. After two years in a Jesuit college in Brandenburg, he ran away to Hamburg and joined a group of Scottish officers recruited by the Swedish army. Gordon served the King of Sweden with distinction, but when he was captured by the Poles, he had no qualms about switching sides. It was the normal procedure for mercenary soldiers of fortune—changing masters from time to time was not considered disgraceful either by them or by the governments who hired them. A few months later, Gordon was recaptured and was persuaded to rejoin the Swedes. Later still, he was re-recaptured, and once again he joined the Poles. Before the age of twenty-five, Patrick Gordon had changed sides four times.

In 1660, the new Stuart king, Charles II, was restored to the throne of England, and Gordon was ready to go home. Before he sailed, however, a Russian diplomat in Europe made him a glittering offer: three years’ service in the Russian army, beginning with a commission as a major. Gordon accepted, only to find, on reaching Moscow, that the time clause of his contract was meaningless; as a useful soldier, he would not be allowed to leave. When he applied, he was threatened with denunciation as a Polish spy and a Roman Catholic and menaced with Siberia. Temporarily accepting his fate, he settled into Moscow life. Learning quickly that his best chance of promotion lay in marrying a Russian woman, he found one, and together they produced a family. The years went by and Gordon served Tsar Alexis, Tsar Fedor and the Regent Sophia, fighting against Poles, Turks, Tatars and Bashkirs. He became a general and twice returned to England and Scotland, although the Muscovites made sure that this enormously valuable personage would come back to them by keeping his wife and children in Russia. In 1686, James II personally asked Sophia to release Gordon from Russian service so that he might return home; this royal request was refused, and for a while the Regent and Vasily Golitsyn were so angry with the General that there was more talk of ruin and Siberia. Then King James wrote again declaring that he wished to appoint Gordon as his ambassador in Moscow; the appointment was also refused by the Regent, who declared that General Gordon could not serve as ambassador because he was still on service with the Russian army and, indeed, was about to leave on a campaign against the Tatars. Thus, in 1689, Gordon, at fifty-four, was respected by all, enormously rich (his salary was a thousand roubles a year, whereas the Lutheran pastor was paid only sixty) and the preeminent foreign soldier in the German Suburb. When, as head of the foreign-officer corps, he mounted his horse and rode to Troitsky to join Peter, it was the final blow to Sophia’s hopes.

It is not surprising that Gordon—courageous, widely traveled, battle-seasoned, loyal and canny—would appeal to Peter. What is surprising is that eighteen-year-old Peter appealed to Gordon. Peter was tsar, to be sure, but Gordon had served other tsars without any special feelings of friendship. In Peter, however, the old soldier found an adept and admiring pupil, and, acting as a kind of unofficial military tutor, he instructed Peter in all aspects of warfare. During the five years after Sophia’s fall, Gordon became not only Peter’s hired general, but a friend.

For Gordon, as it turned out, Peter’s friendship was decisive. Now the intimate friend and counselor of the youthful monarch, he gave up his dream of going back to pass his final years in the Highlands. He accepted the fact that he would die in Russia, and indeed, in 1699, when the old soldier finally died, Peter stood by his bed and closed his eyes.

In 1690, soon after Sophia’s overthrow, Peter became friendly with another foreigner of a quite different kind, the gay and gregarious Swiss soldier of fortune Francis Lefort. Over the next decade, Lefort was to become Peter’s boon companion and friend of the heart. In 1690, when Peter was eighteen, Francis Lefort was thirty-four, almost as tall as Peter, but huskier than the narrow-shouldered Tsar. He was handsome with a large, sharp nose and expressive and intelligent eyes. A portrait made of him a few years later shows him against a background of Peter’s ships; he is clean-shaven, with a lace scarf around his neck, and his full, curled wig falls onto the shoulders of a finely wrought armor breastplate which bears the crested insignia of Peter’s double-headed eagle.

Francis Lefort was born in Geneva in 1656, the son of a prosperous merchant, and through his charm and wit he soon became a member of its amiable society. His taste for the merry life quickly snuffed out any desire to become a merchant like his father, and an enforced term as a clerk to another merchant in Marseilles made him so unhappy that he fled to Holland to join the Protestant armies fighting Louis XIV. There, still only nineteen, the young adventurer heard tales of opportunity in Russia, and he embarked for Archangel. Arriving in Russia in 1675, he found no office available and lived for two years without work in the German Suburb. He was never dull—people liked his irrepressible gaiety, and eventually his career picked up. He became a captain in the Russian army, married a cousin of General Gordon and was noticed by Prince Vasily Golitsyn. He served in Golitsyn’s two campaigns against the Crimea, but when Gordon led the foreign officers away from Sophia to join Peter at Troitsky, Lefort was in the van. Soon after the Regent’s fall, the thirty-four-year-old Lefort was important enough to be promoted to major general.

Peter was captivated by this formidably charming man of the world. Here was someone who sparkled in precisely the way to catch Peter’s youthful eye. Lefort was not profound, but his mind worked quickly and he loved to talk. His speech was filled with the West, its life, manners and technology. As a drinking companion and ballroom cavalier, Lefort had no equal. He excelled at organizing banquets, suppers and balls, with music, drink and female dancing partners. From 1690 on, Lefort was constantly in Peter’s company; they dined together two or three times a week and saw each other daily. Increasingly, Lefort endeared himself by his frankness, openness and generosity. Where Gordon gave Peter seasoned advice and sensible counsel, Lefort gave gaiety, friendship, sympathy and understanding. Peter relaxed in Lefort’s affection, and when the Tsar became suddenly inflamed at someone or something, lashing out physically at all around him, only Lefort was able to approach and seize the young monarch, gripping Peter in his powerful arms and holding him until he calmed.

In considerable part, Lefort’s success was due to his unselfishness. Although he loved luxury and its trappings, he was never grasping and took no steps to ensure that he would not be impoverished on the following day—a quality that endeared him even more to Peter, who saw to it that all Lefort’s needs were amply cared for. Lefort’s debts were paid, he was presented with a palace and funds to run it, and he was promoted rapidly to full general, admiral and ambassador. Most important to Peter, Lefort genuinely loved his life in Russia. He returned as a visitor to his native Geneva, bearing many titles and the Tsar’s personal testimony to the city fathers of the esteem in which he held this Genevois. But, unlike Gordon, Lefort never dreamed of returning permanently to his birthplace. “My heart,” he told his fellow Swiss, “is wholly in Moscow.”

For Peter, walking into Lefort’s house was like stepping onto a different planet. Here were wit, charm, hospitality, entertainment, relaxation and usually the exciting presence of women. Sometimes, they were the respectable wives and pretty daughters of the foreign merchants and soldiers, dressed in the latest Western gowns. More often, they were rollicking, unshockable wenches whose role was to see that no man was gloomy; buxom, sturdy women who did not take offense at barracks language or the admiring touch of rough male hands. Peter, knowing only the stiffly wooden female creatures produced by the terem, entered this world with delight. Guided by Lefort, he soon found himself contentedly sitting in a haze of tobacco smoke, a tankard of beer on the table, a pipe in his mouth and his arm around the waist of a giggling girl. His mother’s remonstrances, the Patriarch’s censure, his wife’s tears were all forgotten.

Before long, Peter’s eye fell on a particular one of these young women. She was a flaxen-haired German girl named Anna Mons, the daughter of a Westphalian wine merchant. Her reputation was blemished; she had already been conquered by Lefort. Alexander Gordon, the general’s son, described her as “exceedingly beautiful” and when Peter revealed his interest in her blond hair, bold laugh and flashing eyes, Lefort readily ceded his conquest to the Tsar. The easy-mannered beauty was exactly what Peter wanted: She could match him drink for drink and joke for joke. Anna Mons became his mistress.

There was little substance behind Anna’s spontaneous laughter, and her fondness for Peter was powerfully stimulated by her ambition. She used her favors to obtain his favors, and Peter showered her with gems, a country palace and an estate. Blinded to protocol, he appeared with her in the company of Russian boyars and foreign diplomats. Naturally, Anna began to hope for more. She knew that Peter could not bear the sight of his wife, and with the passage of time she grew to believe that she might one day replace the Tsaritsa on the throne. Peter thought of it, but saw no need for marriage. The liaison was enough; as it was, it lasted twelve years.

Most of Peter’s companions, of course, were not foreigners but Russians. Some were friends of his childhood who had stayed at his side through the long exile at Preobrazhenskoe. Others were older men with distinguished service and ancient names, attracted to Peter despite his wild behavior and foreign friends because he was the anointed Tsar. Prince Michael Cherkassky, an elderly, bearded man devoted to the old ways, sought Peter out of a sense of patriotism, unwilling to watch from a distance while the youthful autocrat flung himself about with foreigners. A similar spirit motivated Prince Peter Prozorovsky, another austere and elderly sage, and Fedor Golovin, Russia’s most experienced diplomat, who had negotiated the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China. When Prince Fedor Romodanovsky attached himself to the youthful Tsar, it was with a sense of devotion which would know no limit. He hated the Streltsy, who had murdered his father in the bloodbath of 1682. Later, as Governor of Moscow and as Chief of Police, he would rule with an iron hand. And when the Streltsy rose again in 1698, Romodanovsky would descend on them like a pitiless avenging angel.

It was a strange assortment at first, this motley collection of distinguished graybeards, youthful roisterers and foreign adventurers. But time shaped them into a cohesive group that called itself the Jolly Company and went everywhere with Peter. It was a vagabond, itinerant sort of life, roaming the countryside, dropping in unannounced to eat and sleep with a surprised nobleman. In Peter’s wake were anywhere from 80 to 200 followers.

An average banquet for the Jolly Company began at noon and ended at dawn. The meals were gargantuan, but there were intervals between courses for smoking, for games of bowls and ninepins, for archery matches and shooting at targets with muskets. Speeches and toasts were accompanied not only by cheers and shouts but by blasts of trumpets and salvos of artillery. When a band was present, Peter played the drums. In the evenings, there was dancing and, often, an exhibition of fireworks. When sleep overcame a reveler, he simply rolled off his bench onto the floor and snored away. Half the company might sleep while the rest roared. Sometimes, these parties extended into a second or third day, with guests sleeping side by side on the floor, rising to consume further prodigious quantities of food and drink and then sinking back again into lazy slumber.

An obvious requisite for membership in Peter’s Jolly Company was a capacity for drink, but there was nothing new or abnormal about this intemperance in Peter’s friends. Since time immemorial, drink had been—in the words of the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev in the tenth century—“the joy of the Russes.” Successive generations of Western travelers and residents had found drunkenness almost universal in Russia. Peasants, priests, boyars, tsar: all were participants. According to Adam Olearius, who visited Muscovy in the time of Peter’s grandfather Tsar Michael, no Russian ever willingly missed a chance to take a drink. To be drunk was an essential feature of Russian hospitality. Proposing toasts that no one dare refuse, host and guests gulped down cup after cup, turning their beakers upside down on their heads to prove that they were empty. Unless the guests were sent home dead drunk, the evening was considered a failure.

Peter’s father, Tsar Alexis, his piety notwithstanding, was as Russian as the next man. Dr. Collins, Alexis’ physician, noted how pleased his employer was to see his boyars “handsomely fuddled.” The boyars, in turn, were always eager to see foreign ambassadors as drunk as possible. Common people drank also, less to be sociable than to forget. Their goal was to reach a stupor of unconsciousness, putting the unhappy world around them out of mind as rapidly as possible. In grimy taverns, men and women alike pawned their valuables and even their clothes to keep the vodka mugs coming. “Women,” reported another Westerner, “are often the first to become raving mad with immoderate draughts of brandy and are to be seen, half-naked and shameless, in almost all the streets.”

Alexis’ roistering son and his Jolly Company fully upheld these Russian traditions. Although much of the alcohol consumed at their revels was in the milder form of beer or kvas, the intake was vast and continuous—Gordon in his diary speaks often of the amount Peter has drunk and of the difficulties that he, a middle-aged man, is having in keeping up. But it was Lefort who taught Peter to drink really heavily. Of Lefort, the German philosopher Leibniz, who observed the Swiss when he traveled to the West with Peter on the Great Embassy, was to write, “[Alcohol] never overcomes him, but he always continues master of his reason … no one can rival him … he does not leave his pipe and glass till three hours after sunrise.” Eventually, this drinking took its toll. Lefort died a relatively young man of forty-three; Peter died at fifty-two. When he was young, though, these wild bacchanalia did not leave Peter exhausted and debauched, but actually seemed to refresh him for the next day’s work. He could drink all night with his comrades and then, while they snored in drunken slumber, rise at dawn and leave them to begin work as a carpenter or shipbuilder. Few could match his pace.

In time, Peter decided not to leave the arrangements for these banquets to chance. He enjoyed dining two or three times a week at Lefort’s house, but it was impossible for Lefort with his limited income to arrange the complicated and expensive entertainment which the Tsar expected, so Peter built for him a larger hall to accommodate several hundred guests. Eventually, even this became too small, and the Tsar therefore erected a handsome stone mansion, magnificently furnished with tapestries, wine cellars and a banqueting hall large enough for 1,500 people. Lefort was the nominal owner, but in fact the mansion became a kind of clubhouse for the Jolly Company. When Peter was absent, and even when Lefort was absent, those members of the Jolly Company remaining in Moscow gathered at this house to dine, drink and pass the night, their expenses defrayed by the Tsar.

Gradually, from spontaneous drinking bouts and banquets, the Company proceeded to more organized buffoonery and masquerades. To most of his comrades Peter had, in sportive moments, given nicknames, and these nicknames were gradually elevated into masquerade titles. The boyar Ivan Buturlin was given the title “The Polish King” because in one of the military maneuvers at Preobrazhenskoe he was commander of the “enemy” army. Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the other commander and defender of the play fortress town of Pressburg, was promoted to “King of Pressburg” and then to “Prince-Caesar.” Peter addressed him as “Your Majesty” and “My Lord King” and signed his letters to Romodanovsky, “Your bondsman and eternal slave, Peter.” This charade, in which Peter mocked his own autocratic rank and title, continued throughout the reign. After the Battle of Poltava, the defeated Swedish officers were led into the presence of the “Tsar”—who was in fact Romodanovsky. Only a few of the Swedes, none of whom had ever seen the real Peter, wondered who was the extremely tall Russian officer standing behind the Mock-Prince-Caesar.

But Peter’s parody of temporal power was mild compared to the bizarre mockery he and his comrades appeared to make of the church. The Jolly Company was organized into “The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters,” with a Mock–“Prince-Pope,” a college of cardinals and a suite of bishops, archimandrites, priests and deacons. Peter himself, although only a deacon, took charge of drawing up the rules and instructions for this strange assembly. With the same enthusiasm with which he was later to draw up laws for the Russian empire, he carefully defined the rituals and ceremonies of the Drunken Synod. The first commandment was that “Bacchus be worshipped with strong and honorable drinking and receive his just dues.” In practical terms, this meant that “all goblets were to be emptied promptly and that members were to get drunk everyday and never go to bed sober.” At these riotous “services,” the Prince-Pope, who was Peter’s old tutor, Nikita Zotov, drank everyone’s health and then blessed the kneeling congregation by making the sign of the cross over them with two long Dutch pipes.

On church holidays, the games become more elaborate. At Christmas, more than 200 men, singing and whistling, would travel around Moscow leaning out of overcrowded sleighs. At their head, riding in a sleigh drawn by twelve bald men, rode the Mock–Prince-Pope. His costume was sewn with playing cards, he wore a tin hat and he was perched atop a barrel. Choosing the richer noblemen and merchants to honor with their caroling, they swarmed into their houses, expecting food and drink as thanks for their uninvited songs. During the first week of Lent, another procession, this time of “penitents,” followed the Prince-Pope through the city. The Company, wearing outlandish costumes inside out, rode on the backs of donkeys and bullocks or sat in sleighs pulled by goats, pigs or even bears.

A marriage in Peter’s circle stirred the Jolly Company to special efforts. In 1695, when Peter’s favorite jester, Jacob Turgenev, married a sexton’s daughter, the feasts and celebrations lasted three days. The wedding took place in a field outside Preobrazhenskoe, and Turgenev and his bride arrived for the ceremony in the Tsar’s finest court carriage. Behind them came a procession of leading boyars wearing fantastic costumes—hats of birchbark, boots of straw, gloves made of mouse skins, coats covered with squirrel tails and cats’ paws; some were on foot and others rode in carts drawn by oxen, goats or pigs. The celebrations ended with a triumphal entry into Moscow with the newly married couple mounted together on the back of a camel. “The procession,” Gordon comments, “was extraordinary fine,” but the joke may have been carried too far because a few days later the bridegroom, Turgenev, suddenly died in the night.

The Drunken Synod, created when Peter was eighteen, continued its tipsy existence until the end of the Tsar’s reign, with the mature man who had become an emperor continuing to engage in the same coarse buffoonery begun by an unbridled adolescent. This behavior, which foreign diplomats found vulgar and scandalous, seemed blasphemous to many of Peter’s subjects. It added substance to the growing belief of the conservative Orthodox faithful that Peter was himself the Antichrist, and they waited eagerly for the bolt from heaven which would strike down the blasphemer. In fact, it was partially in order to provoke, dismay and degrade the hierarchy of the church, and especially the new Patriarch Adrian, that Peter had originally instituted the Drunken Synod. His mother and the conservative boyars had had their victory over his own candidate, the more enlightened Marcellus of Pskov—so be it!—but Peter retaliated by appointing his own Mock-Patriarch. The parody of the church hierarchy not only gave vent to his own resentment, but, as the years went by, reflected his continuing impatience with the whole institution of the church in Russia.

Nevertheless, Peter learned to be careful. The Drunken Synod did not directly insult the Russian Orthodox Church because Peter quickly steered the parody to a safer mimicry of the Roman Catholic Church. The original leader of the masquerade, the Prince-Patriarch, became the Prince-Pope, he was surrounded by a College of Cardinals, and the ceremonies and language of the charade were borrowed not from the Russian liturgy but from the Roman. To this game, of course, fewer Russians objected.

In Peter’s own eyes, the buffoonery of the Mock-Synod was not blasphemous. Certainly, God was too majestic a being to be offended by his little parodies and games. Ultimately, that was what the revels of the Mock-Synod were: games. They were a form of relaxation—clownish perhaps, ridiculous, even gross—but for the most part, the Company were not men of refined sensibilities. They were men of action, engaged in building and governing a state. Their hands were stained with blood, mortar and dust, and they needed to relax. Their pleasures were true to their character: They drank, they laughed, they shouted, they dressed in costumes, danced, played practical jokes, made fun of one another and of whatever passed beneath their eyes—especially the church, which resisted everything they were trying to do.

To contemporary Russians, it was not only Peter’s soul that seemed in danger during these years, but his body as well. He experimented continually with ever more elaborate and dangerous fireworks. During the Shrovetide celebrations of 1690, when Peter was also honoring the birth of his son Alexis, a display lasted five hours. One five-pound rocket, instead of bursting in the air, fell back to earth, landing on the head of a boyar and killing him. As Peter became more proficient, these pyrotechnical displays became more spectacular. In 1693, following a long salute from fifty-six cannon, there appeared the image of a flag of white flame bearing on it in Dutch letters the monogram of Prince Romodanovsky, followed by a tableau of a fiery Hercules tearing open the jaws of a lion.

And there was the game of war. During the winter of 1689–1690, Peter waited impatiently for spring to begin maneuvers with his play regiments. The Tsar’s suppers with General Gordon were filled with discussions of new European drills and tactics to be taught to the troops. The test came in the summer, in an exercise during which the Preobrazhensky Regiment attacked the fortified camp of the Semyonovsky Regiment. Hand grenades and fire pots were used which, though they were made of pasteboard and clay, still were dangerous when tossed into a group of men. Peter himself was hurt when, during the storming of an earthwork, a clay pot filled with gunpowder burst near him, burning his face.

Through the summer of 1691, the regiments prepared for a large-scale sham battle to be waged in the autumn. Romodanovsky, the mock King of Pressburg, commanded an army which consisted of the two play regiments and other troops and was pitted against a Streltsy army commanded by Prince Ivan Buturlin, the mock King of Poland. The battle, which began at dawn on October 6, was fought bitterly two days, and ended in victory of the “Russian” army commanded by Romodanovsky. But Peter, not satisfied, ordered a second round, which took place in high wind, rain and mud on October 9. Romodanovsky’s army was again victorious, but there were real casualties. Prince Ivan Dolgoruky was shot in the right arm, the wound became infected and nine days later he died. Gordon himself was wounded in the thigh and his face so severely burned that he spent a week in bed.

During this period, Peter did not forget his boats. To speed the work at Pereslavl, twenty Dutch shipwrights from the famous shipyard at Zaandam in Holland had been contracted early in 1691 to come to Russia. When Peter returned to Lake Pleschev, he found these men working with Karsten Brandt on two small thirty-gun frigates and three yachts. Peter stayed with them only three weeks, but the following year he visited the lake four times, twice remaining for more than a month. Equipped with an “imperial decree” from Prince-Caesar Romodanovsky to build a warship from the keel up, Peter worked from dawn to dusk, eating in the boatyard and sleeping only when he was too tired to work. Oblivious to everything else, he refused to go to Moscow to receive the visit of an ambassador from Persia. Only when two senior members of his government, his uncle Lev Naryshkin and Boris Golitsyn, traveled to the lake to persuade him of the importance of the event did Peter reluctantly consent to lay down his tools and go with them to Moscow. Within a week, he was back at the lake.

In August, he persuaded his mother and sister Natalya to visit his boatyard and fleet. His wife, Eudoxia, came with the other ladies, and during the month they were there Peter enthusiastically maneuvered his little flotilla of twelve ships before their eyes. Sitting on the small hill that rises from the shore, the ladies could see the Tsar, dressed in a crimson coat, standing on deck, waving his arms, pointing and shouting orders—all thoroughly mysterious and disquieting to women not far removed from the terem.

Peter remained at the lake that year until November. When he did finally return to Moscow, an attack of dysentery kept him in bed for six weeks. He became so feeble that there were fears for his life. His comrades and followers were alarmed: If Peter died, nothing could prevent the return of Sophia and exile or even death for themselves. But the Tsar was only twenty-one, his constitution was strong, and toward Christmas he began to recover. By late January he was once again spending his evenings in the German Suburb. Near the end of February, Lefort gave a banquet in Peter’s honor, and at dawn the next day, without having slept, Peter rode off to Pereslavl to work on his boats through the whole of Lent.

His visits that year, 1693, were to be Peter’s last extended periods at Lake Pleschev. Twice, in subsequent years, he passed by the lake on his way to the White Sea, and still later he went there to check on artillery materials for the Azov campaign. But after 1697 he did not return until he was en route to Persia in 1722. After a quarter of a century, he found boats and buildings neglected and rotted. He gave orders that what remained should be carefully preserved, and for a while an effort was made by the local nobility. In the nineteenth century, every spring, all the clergy of Pereslavl would board a barge and, attended by a crowd of people in many boats, sail to the middle of the lake to bless the water in memory of Peter.

* The German Suburb—in Russian “Nemetskaya Sloboda”—derived its name from the Russian word for “German,” which is “Nemets.” To most Russians, unable to distinguish between different foreign tongues, all foreigners were “Germans”—“Nemtsy.”