Peter the Great (145 page)

Yavorsky joined this attack until Peter asked for evidence; unable to document his charge, the Exarch was obliged to retract it.

As the war with Sweden drew to a close, Peter's thoughts turned toward a permanent structure for governing the church. Repeatedly and urgently, the bishops begged the Tsar to name a new patriach. At last Peter responded, but in a manner very different from that which they expected. In the years since the last patriarch had died, Peter had traveled abroad and seen much of other religions in both Catholic and Protestant countries. The Roman church, of course, was administered by a single man, but in Protestant lands the churches were administered by a synod or assembly or board of administrators, and this idea appealed to Peter. Having already reformed his civil administration by putting government in the lands of ministries or colleges, he was ready to impose a comparable structure on the church. In the latter part of 1718, Peter entrusted to Prokopovich the drafting of a church charter called the Ecclesiastical Regulation, which was to promulgate a new administrative structure for the Russian Orthodox Church. Prokopovich worked for many months, and the document is his most important achievement, but every section was read, revised and sometimes rewritten by Peter himself.

In 1721, the Ecclesiastical Regulation was enacted by decree. It struck hard at those features of the old Muscovite church which so angered Peter. Ignorance and superstition were to be rooted out, not only among the parishioners but among the clergy. "When the light of learning is lacking," read the Regulation, "it is impossible that the church should be well run." Bishops were ordered to establish training schools for priests; forty-six such schools opened their doors within four years. Priests were to learn theology; "he who would teach theology must be learned in Holy Scripture and be able to corroborate all the dogmas with scriptural evidence," declared the Ec
clesiastical Regulation. On Pro
kopovich's insistence, priests also had to study history, politics, geography, arithmetic, geometry and physics. Parishioners were required to attend church, and those who failed to appear or who talked in church were fined.

The mosts notable feature of the new Regulation was the abolition of the Patriarchate as the governing body of the church, and its replacement with a bureaucratic institution called the Holy Governing Synod. In effect, the Synod was organized on the same model as the colleges of the civil government; it had a president, a vice president and eight members. In fact, Peter wished it to be apart from and superior to the colleges, equal to the Senate. Like the Senate, the Synod had a civilian watchdog administrative officer, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, whose job it was to oversee church administration, settle quarrels and deal with negligence and absenteeism. In effect, the Holy Synod, which was responsible for all spiritual as well as temporal affairs of the church, became a Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Chief Procurator, the Minister of Religion.

In a lengthy preamble, Prokopovich (and, through him, Peter) explained the decision to abolish the one-man rule of the Patriarchate and replace it with collective administration:

From collegiate government in the church there is much less danger to the country of sedition and disorder than may proceed from rule by a single spiritual ruler. For the common people do not understand the difference between the spiritual power and that of the autocrat. Instead, dazzled by the splendor and glory of the highest clergyman, they think that he is a second sovereign equal to or even greater than the autocrat, and that the spiritual power is of another and better realm. If then there should be any dispute between the patriarch and the tsar, they might take the part of the patriarch in the belief that they were fighting for God's cause.

For the next two centuries, until 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church was governed by the principles set down in the Ecclesiastical Regulation. The church ceased to be an institution independent of government; its administration, through the office of the Holy Synod, became a function of the state. The rule of the autocrat in all matters except doctrine was supreme and absolute; ordained priests were required to swear an oath pledging themselves "to defend unsparingly all the powers, rights and prerogatives belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty." In return, the state guaranteed to Orthodoxy the role of state religion within the Russian empire.

Although Yavorsky was strongly opposed to the new institution, Peter installed him in the leading post as president of the Holy Synod, deciding that he would be far less dangerous enmeshed in the new machinery than in opposition to it. Yavorsky tried to decline, asking to be allowed to finish his days in a monastery, but, over his objections, he was appointed and remained in the post a year until his death in 1722.

Prokopovich, despite his relative youth (he was forty-one in 1721) and junior position in the church hierarchy, was appointed to the third-ranking position in the Holy Synod, second vice president. From this office, he effectively administered the church along the lines he himself had drawn, surviving Peter by ten years and continuing to dominate the Holy Synod under the Emperor's successors until eventually he was appointed to the prestigious post of Archbishop of Novgorod.

By abolishing the Patriarchate and transforming the administration of the church into a branch of the secular government, Peter had achieved his goal. There was no further danger from a second competitve focus of power in the land; how could there be when the church bureaucracy was actually administered by his own lieutenants? Some improvement in the education and discipline of priests resulted, although Russian village priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never became paragons of learning. The most striking feature of the Ecclesiastical Regulation was that it met no opposition, either within the church or among the people. In large part, this was because Peter had not tampered with the elements which mattered most in the Russian church, the sacred ritual and dogma. Who administered the church was of overriding concern to Peter; the form of the liturgy and sacraments did not interest him, and so he did not touch it.

In time, however, the assumption of state control over the church had an injurious effect on Russia. Individual parishioners could seek salvation and find solace from life's burdens in the glory of the Orthodox service and its choral liturgy, and in the warm communality of human suffering found in a church community. But a tame church which occupied itself with private spiritual matters and failed to stand up against successive governments on behalf of Christian values in questions of social justice soon lost the allegiance of the most dynamic elements of Russian society. The most fervent peasants and simple people seeking true religion gravitated toward the Old Believers and other sects. Students, educated people and the middle classes disdained the church for its conservative anti-intellectualism and slavish support of the regime. The church, which might have led, simply followed, and ultimately the entire religious bureaucracy established by Peter followed the imperial government over the cliff; the Holy Synod was abolished in 1918 along with all the other governing institutions of the imperial regime. Lenin re
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established the Patriarchate, but it was a puppet Patriarchate, more controlled by the state than the Holy Synod ever was. Not once in its existence has this new Patriarchate uttered a word of criticism against the regime it serves. It was the continuing passivity and servitude of the Russian church which Alexander Solzhenitsyn was regretting when he declared that the history of Russia would have been "in comparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries if the church had not surrendered its independence and had continued to make its voice heard among the people, as it does, for example, in Poland."

61

THE EMPEROR IN ST PETERSBURG

The
Emperor, noted one foreigner, "could dispatch more affairs in a morning than a household of senators could do in a month." Even in winter, when the sun in St. Petersburg does not rise until nine in the morning, Peter awoke at four and immediately, still wearing his nightcap and a billowing old Chinese dressing gown, received reports or held conferences with his ministers. After a light breakfast, he went to the Admiralty at six, worked there for at least an hour, sometimes two, then went to the Senate. He returned home at ten to work for an hour at his lathe before dinner at eleven. After dinner, he lay down for his regular two-hour nap, which he took wherever he was. At three, Peter made a tour around the city or worked in his office with Makarov, his private secretary. He carried a tablet or notebook in his pocket to write down ideas or suggestions which struck him during the day and if he had no tablet, he scribbled notes in the margin of the first piece of paper he could lay his hands on. In the evening, he visited friends in their houses or attended one of the new public assemblies which he had instituted after his return from France.

The schedule varied, of course. There were times when he was rarely indoors and other times when he scarcely went out—the winter of 1720, for example, when he worked by himself in his office fourteen hours a day, for five months, writing and revising drafts of his new
Maritime Regulations.
At such times, the Emperor stood at a walnut writing desk made specifically for him in England. Its writing surface was five feet six inches above the floor.

When he sat down to dinner, Peter brought a sailor's appetite. He preferred hearty, simple fare. His favorite dishes were cabbage soup, stew, pork with sour-cream sauce, cold roast meat with pickled cucumbers or salted lemons, lampreys, ham and vegetables. For dessert, he avoided sweets and ate fruit and cheese, being especially partial to Limburger cheese. He never ate fish, believing that it disagreed with him. On fast days, he lived on whole-meal bread and fruit. Before dinner, he took a little aniseed

water, and after the meal he drank kvas or Hungarian wine. Whenever he went out in his carriage, he always carried some cold provisions with him, as he was likely to get hungry at any time. When he dined out, an orderly always brought his wooden spoon mounted with ivory and his knife and fork with green bone handles, for Peter never used any table implements other than his own.

No ceremony attended Peter's private meals. He and Catherine often dined alone, with Peter in shirt sleeves and only a young page and a favorite maid of honor to wait on them. When he had several ministers or generals at his table, he was attended only by his chef and maitre d'hotel, an orderly and two pages, and they had strict orders to retire as soon as dessert was put on the table and a bottle of wine had been set before each guest. "I don't want them to observe me when I am speaking freely," Peter explained to the Prussian ambassador. "Not only do they spy on me, but they understand everything erroneously." There were never more than sixteen places set at Peter's table, which were filled at random by those who sat down first. Once he and the Empress had taken their chairs, he said, "Gentlemen, please take your places as far as. the table will hold. The rest will go home and dine with their wives."

In public, the Emperor liked to listen to music while he ate. When he dined at the Admiralty on naval rations of smoked beef and small beer, a fife-and-drum band played from the central tower. When he ate in his palace with his generals and ministers, army musicians played military music on trumpets, oboes, French horns, bassoons and drums.

Peter's cook was a Saxon named Johann Velten, who had come to Russia to serve the Danish ambassador. Peter tasted his cooking in 1704 and persuaded Velten to come to him, first as one of his cooks, then as chief cook and finally as maitre d'h6tel. Velten was gay and cheerful, and Peter was enormously fond of him, although the cook was often chastised. ("His cane," Velten said later, "often danced on my back.") One such episode occurred when Velten served Peter a Limburger cheese which the Tsar found especially tasty. He ate a piece and then took out his compass, carefully measured the amount remaining and wrote down the dimensions on his note pad. Then he summoned Velten and said, "Put this cheese away and don't let anyone else taste it because I wish to finish it myself." The following day, when the cheese reappeared, it seemed much smaller. To verify this impression, Peter took out his compass and measured it, comparing his calculations with the note in his pocket. The cheese was smaller. Peter called for Velten, displayed his notes, pointed out the discrepancy, stroked the cook with his cane and then sat down and finished the cheese with a bottle of wine.

Peter had an aversion to pomp and lived simply and frugally. He preferred old clothes, well-worn shoes and boots, and stockings which had been darned and mended in several places by his wife and daughters. He rarely wore a wig until near the end of his life, when he had his head shaved in summer for coolness and had a wig made from his own hair. In summer, he never wore a hat. In the colder months, he wore the black three-cornered hat of the Preobrazhensky Regiment and an old greatcoat into the commodious pockets of which he habitually stuffed state papers and other documents. He owned elegant long Western coats with wide sleeves and wide lapels—green with silver thread, light blue with silver thread, brown velvet with gold thread, gray with red thread, red with gold thread—but he rarely put them on. To please Catherine, at her coronation he wore a coat which she had embroidered with her own hands in gold and silver, although he protested that the expense of the garment might have gone to better use in the support of several soldiers.

Peter's preference for simplicity was evident also in the size and upkeep of his personal court. He had no chamberlain or footman; his personal attendants were only two valets and six dentchiks, or orderlies, who waited on him, two by two, in relays. The dentchiks were young men, usually from the petty nobility or merchant class, who served the Emperor in countless ways, acting as messengers, waiting on his table, riding behind his carriage and guarding him while he slept. When Peter was traveling, he took his midday nap lying upon straw, using a dentchik's stomach as a pillow. The dentchik, according to one who had served in this capacity, was "obliged to wait patiently in this posture and not to make the least motion for fear of waking him, for he was as good-humored when he had slept well as he was gloomy and ill-tempered when his slumber had been disturbed." Becoming a dentchik could be the first rung on a ladder to success; both Menshikov and Yaguzhinsky had been dentchiks. Usually, Peter kept a dentchik near him for about ten years and then assigned him an office in either the civil or military administration. Some had no higher ambitions. One young dentchik, Vasily Pospelov, was "a poor young fellow in the Tsar's choir, and as the Tsar himself is a singer and every feast day stands in the same row with the common choristers and sings with them in church, he [Peter] took such a great liking to him [Pospelov] that he can scarcely live an instant without him. He seizes him by the head perhaps a hundred times a day and kisses him, and even lets the highest ministers stand and wait while he goes and talks to him."