Peter the Great (21 page)

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 deterrnination 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.

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 goverment. 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 home, 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. "That 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 barbaric language; 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."
I

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 Preobrazhen
skoe, 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

*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."

and 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 private homes), 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 Russians as 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.