Peter the Great (15 page)
Peter accepted his mother's wish without argument—not because he had suddenly become a dutiful son, but because the whole matter was of minimal interest to him. He agreed that the traditional collection of eligible young women be assembled at the Kremlin; he agreed that his mother should sort them out and choose the likeliest. Once this was done, he looked at the prospect, made no complaint and thereby ratified his mother's choice. Thus, painlessly, Peter acquired a wife and Russia a new tsaritsa.
Her name was Eudoxia Lopukhina. She was twenty—three years older than Peter—and was said to be pretty, although no portrait of Eudoxia at this age has survived. She was shy and totally deferential, which recommended her to her new mother-in-law. She was well born, being the daughter of an old, strongly conservative Muscovite family which traced its origins to the fifteenth century and was now linked by marriage with the Golitsyns, Kurakins and Romodanovskys. She was devoutly Orthodox, almost completely uneducated, shuddered at all things foreign and believed that, to please her husband, she had only to become his principal slave. Pink, hopeful and helpless, she stood beside her tall, young bridegroom and became h
is wife on January 27, 1689.
Even for a time when all marriages were arranged, the match
was a disaster. Peter, whatever his physical readiness for fatherhood, was still bursting with the excitement of his new discoveries, still caring more about how things work than how people behave. Not many seventeen-year-old boys of any epoch, even if forced to marry, can be expected to abandon all they love and tamely settle into domesticity. And, certainly, Eudoxia was ill-equipped to perform such a miracle with Peter. Modest, conventional, scarcely more than a shy child, overwhelmingly aware of her husband's rank, eager to please but uncertain how to do it, she might have made a model tsaritsa for a conventional Muscovite tsar. She was prepared to give what she could, but her husband's wild, impetuous spark of genius left her confused, and his boisterous masculine world frightened her. She was prepared to assist at great ceremonies of state, but not at boat building. Her dislike of foreigners increased. She had been taught that they were evil; now they were stealing her husband from her. She could not talk to Peter; she knew nothing of carpentry or rigging. From the beginning, her conversation bore
d him; soon, so did her lovemak
ing; before long, he could barely stand the sight of her. Yet, they were married and they slept together, and within two years two sons were born. The eldest was the Tsarevich Alexis, whose tragic life would torment Peter. The second, an infant named Alexander, died after seven months. When this happened, scarcely three years after his marriage, Peter was so estranged from his wife and so unfeeling that he did not bother to attend the infant's funeral.
Even the honeymoon was brief. In early spring, only a few weeks after his marriage, Peter was restlessly watching the ice beginning to break on the Yauza at Preobrazhenskoe. Knowing that soon it would be melting on Lake Pleschev, he strained to get away from his wife, his mother and his responsibilities. At the beginning of April 1689, he burst free and hurried to the lake, anxious to see how Brandt and Kort had progressed. He found the lake ice breaking, most of the boats finished, ready to be launched and needing only some coils of good rope for rigging the sails. On the same day, he wrote exuberantly to his mother, asking for ropes, slyly stressing that the sooner the ropes arrived, the sooner he would be able to come home to her:
To my beloved little mother, Lady Tsaritsa and Grand Duchess Natalya Kyrilovna: Your little son, Pctrushka, now here at work, asks your blessing and desires to hear about your health. We, through your prayers, are well. The lake is all clear of ice today, and all the boats except the big ship are finished, only we are waiting for ropes. Therefore, I beg your kindness that these ropes, seven hundred fathoms long [about 4,200 feet], be sent from the Artillery Department without delay, for the work is being held up waiting for them and our stay here is prolonged. I ask your blessing.
Natalya understood and was angry. She replied not by sending ropes, but by ordering Peter to return immediately to Moscow to attend a memorial service for Tsar Fedor; his absence would be considered a shocking disrespect to his brother's memory. Miserable at the idea of leaving his boats, Peter again tried to resist his mother's command. His next letter to her was a mixture of forced cheerfulness and bland evasion:
To my most beloved mother. Lady Tsaritsa Natalya Kyrilovna: Your unworthy son, Petrushka, desires greatly to know about your health. As to your orders to me to return to Moscow, I am ready, only there is work to do here and the man you sent me has seen it himself, and will explain more clearly. We through your prayers are in perfect health. About my coming
I
have written to Lev Kyrilovich [Peter's uncle and the Tsaritsa's brother] and he will report to you. Therefore, I must humbly surrender myself to your will. Amen!
But Natalya was adamant: Peter had to come. He arrived in Moscow only the day before the memorial service, and a month passed before he could again escape; this time, when he returned to Lake Pleschev, he found that Kort had died. Working beside Brandt and the other shipbuilders, Peter helped finish the boats. Soon after, he wrote again to his mother, using as his courier the boyar Tikhon Streshnev, whom Natalya had sent to Pereslavl to see what was going on. "Hey!" Peter saluted his mother:
i
wish to hear about your health, and beg your blessing. We are all well. As to the boats, I say again that they are very good about which Tikhon Nikitich will tell you himself. Thy unworthy Petrus.
The signature "Petrus" is revealing. The rest of this letter was in Peter's uncertain Russian, but he wrote his name in Latin, using the unfamiliar, and to him exotically appealing, Western alphabet. In addition, along with Latin, Peter was learning Dutch from his fellow workers.
In these spring months at Pereslavl just after his marriage, Peter wrote five letters to his mother but none to his wife. Nor did he mention her at all when he wrote to Natalya. This failure of attention was readily accepted by Natalya. In the small court at Preobrazhenskoe, where both wife and mother-in-law were living, tensions already existed. Natalya, who had chosen this girl for
Peter, quickly saw her limitations, disdained her and accepted Peter's negative evaluation. Eudoxia, installed in this friendless place, pathetically hoped that Peter would come home and create harmony, and wrote him begging him to remember her, pleading for some sign of love and tenderness:
I salute my lord, the Tsar Peter Alexeevich. May you be safe, my light, for many years. We beg your mercy. Come home to us, O Lord, without delay. I, thanks to your mother's kindness, am safe and well. Your little wife, Dunka, bows low before you.
Then, once again, Peter was commanded to return for a public ceremony in Moscow. Once again, he reluctantly abandoned his boats, but this time, when he appeared in the capital, his mother insisted that he stay. A crisis was coming: Members of the boyar aristocratic party gathered around Peter and his mother were preparing to challenge the government of the Regent Sophia. After seven years of unassailably competent rule, Sophia's administration was foundering. There had been two disastrous military campaigns. Now, the Regent, carried away by her passion for Vasily Golitsyn, commander of the beaten armies, was trying to persuade Muscovites to treat her lover as a conquering hero. It was too much to swallow, and Peter's adherents believed that the end was near. But they needed the symbol of their cause close at hand. Clothed in majesty, he might step easily into the full omnipotence of being tsar. Clothed in knickers, sitting on a log in a shipyard two days' journey from Moscow, he remained the boy Sophia knew: an outlandish lad whose exotic tastes she regarded with a blend of indulgent amusement and contempt.
7
THE REGENCY OF SOPHIA
Sophia was twenty-five when she became regent and only thirty-two when her title and office were stripped away. A portrait shows a brown-eyed girl with a round face, pink cheeks, ash-blond hair, a long chin and a cupid-bow mouth. She is plump but not unattractive. On her head she wears a small crown with an orb cross; around her shoulders she wears a red, fur-trimmed robe. The features in this portrait have never been challenged; the painting is generally used by both Western and Soviet scholars to depict Sophia. Nevertheless, the picture is inadequate. This is a portrait of any pleasant, modestly pretty young woman; it reveals none of the fierce energy and determination that enabled Sophia to ride the whirlwind of the Streltsy revolt and then to rule Russia for seven years.
A quite different, thoroughly grotesque account of her physical appearance was supplied by a French diplomatic agent named De Neuville who was sent to Moscow by the Marquis de B6thune, French ambassador to Poland, in 1689. In one of the most ungallant descriptions of a lady ever offered by a man—certainly by a Frenchman—he wrote of Sophia:
Her mind and her great ability bear no relation to the deformity of her person, as she is immensely fat, with a head as large as a bushel, hairs on her face, and tumors on her legs, and at least forty years old. But in the same degree that her stature is broad, short and coarse, her mind is shrewd, subtle, unprejudiced and full of policy. And though she has never read Machiavelli, nor learned anything about him, all his maxims come naturally to her.
Had Sophia truly been this hideous, however, others would certainly have mentioned it. And De Neuville was in Moscow at the end of Sophia's regency, when her policy was to align Russia on the side of France's enemy, Austria, in a war against France's secret friend, the Ottoman Empire. He was seriously wrong about Sophia's age—he added eight years; but this may have been part of his insult. Surely, at least one item in his dreadful catalogue sprang entirely from imagination, for De Neuville was certainly never an observer of Sophia's legs. Nevertheless, whatever his motive, this Frenchman has had his effect. His description will continue to afflict Sophia for as long as her history is written.
When Sophia became regent in 1682, she quickly installed her own lieutenants in office. Her uncle Ivan Miloslavsky remained a leading advisor until his death. Fedor Shaklovity, the new commander of the Streltsy, who won the respect of the restless soldiers and reinstilled firm discipline in the Moscow regiments, was another supporter. He was a man from the Ukraine, of peasant stock and barely literate, but he was dedicated to Sophia and ready to see that any order of hers was carried out. As the regency progressed, he became even closer to Sophia, eventually rising to be secretary of the boyar council, whose members hated him fiercely because of his low origins. To balance Shaklovity, Sophia also took counsel from a learned young monk, Sylvester Medvedev, whom she had known while still a girl in the terem. A zealous disciple of Sophia's tutor, Simeon Polotsky, Medvedev was considered to be the most learned theologian in Russia.
Miloslavsky, Shaklovity and Medvedev were important, but the greatest figure of Sophia's regency—her advisor, her principal minister, her strong right arm, her comforter and eventually her lover—was Prince Vasily Vasilievich Golitsyn. A scion of one of the oldest aristocratic houses of Russia, Golitsyn in his tastes and ideas was even more Western and revolutionary than Artemon Matveev. An experienced statesman and soldier, an urbane lover of the arts and a cosmopolitan political visionary, Golitsyn was perhaps the most civilized man Russia had yet produced. Born in 1643, he was educated far beyond the custom of the Russian nobility. As a boy, he studied theology and history and learned to speak and write Latin, Greek and Polish.
In Moscow, in his great stone palace roofed with heavy brass sheets, Golitsyn lived like a grand seigneur on the Western model. Visitors, expecting the usual primitive Muscovite furnishings, were astonished at its splendor: carved ceilings, marble statues, crystal, precious stones and silver plate, painted glass, musical instruments, mathematical and astronomical devices, gilded chairs and ebony tables inlaid with ivory. On the walls were Gobelin tapestries, tall Venetian mirrors, German maps in gilt frames. The house boasted a library of books in Latin, Polish and German, and a gallery of portraits of all Russia's tsars and many reigning monarchs of Western Europe.
Golitsyn found great stimulus in the company of foreigners. He was a constant visitor in the German Suburb, dining there regularly with General Patrick Gordon, the Scottish soldier who had been an advisor and collaborator in his efforts to reform the army. Golitsyn's house in Moscow became a gathering place for foreign travelers, diplomats and merchants. Even Jesuits, whom most Russians rigorously avoided, found a welcome. A French visitor was struck by the sensitive manner in which Golitsyn, instead of heartily urging him to drink the glass of vodka presented on arrival in the manner of most Muscovite hosts, gently advised him not to take it as it was usually not pleasant for foreigners. During the leisurely after-dinner discussions in Latin, topics ranged from the merits of new firearms and projectiles to European politics.
Golitsyn passionately admired France and Louis XIV; he insisted that his son constantly wear a miniature portrait of the Sun King. To the French agent in Moscow, De Neuville, he revealed his hopes and dreams. He talked of further reforms in the army, of trading across Siberia, of establishing permanent relations with the West, of sending young Russians to study in Western cities, of stabilizing money, proclaiming freedom of worship and even emancipating the serfs. As Golitsyn talked, his vision expanded: He dreamed of "peopling the deserts, of enriching the beggars, turning savages into men and cowards into heroes and shepherds' huts into palaces of stone."