Peter the Great

King Frederick William of Prussia was highly uncomfortable about the English proposition, as he considered himself a friend of the Tsar and had only recently—in August 1718—signed a new alliance with Peter. But he was strongly, and in the end decisively, tempted by the promise of permanent cession of the port of Stettin, which gave his kingdom access to the sea, plus a piece of Swedish Pomerania. As a salve to his conscience, Frederick William kept the negotiations completely aboveboard. He informed the Russians of every detail of his discussions with the English, and endeavored to convince Golovkin and, later, Tolstoy, whom Peter sent especially to Berlin, that the new treaty would not be harmful to Russia. Even after a treaty of peace was finally signed between Prussia and Sweden on January 21, 1720, the King signed a declaration that he would never act against the interest or territory of his friend Peter.*

Denmark was cajoled into peace with Sweden by the combined influence of English money and the Royal Navy. An armistice was signed on October 19, 1719, and a Swedish-Danish peace treaty

*Frederick William's distress at the role he found himself playing is displayed in an emotional memorandum he wrote before the treaty was signed: "Would to God that I had not promised to conclude the treaty. It is an evil spirit which has moved me. Now we shall be ruined, which is what my false friends wish. May God take me from this evil world before 1 sign it, for here on earth there is nothing but falsehood and deceit. I will explain to Golovkin that I must wear the cloak on both shoulders. To have the Tsar at my hand is my interest and if I give him money I can have as many troops as I wish. The Tsar will make just such a treaty with me. With the English everything is deceit, just as the most rascally way they deceive me in 1715. I pray God to stand by me if I must play an odd part, but I play it unwillingly for it is not one for an honest man." The King concluded that his predicament should "teach my successors to guard against accepting such friends, and not to follow my wicked. Godless maxims in this treaty, but to stick to friends that one once has, and to turn away from false friends. Therefore, I exhort my posterity to keep a still stronger army than I have; on this I shall live and die."

on July 3, 1720. Sweden agreed henceforth to pay tolls for Swedish ships passing through the sound and to give up all support for the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Then, King Augustus, who had helped instigate the Great Northern War and whose persuasion had turned the Tsar against Sweden, signed a treaty of peace with Sweden on December 27, 1719. No territory changed hands, but by its terms Augustus was confirmed in his title of King of Poland, while Stanislaus, the other candidate for that title, was allowed to wander about Europe calling himself King Stanislaus.

To Russia, King George I and his English ministers explained all these changes as merely the results of a British effort to mediate peace in the North. The Russians understood better. In the summer of 1719, Fedor Veselovsky, the Tsar's ambassador in London, called on General Lord James Stanhope, who conducted the foreign policy of the British government. Speaking bluntly, Veselovsky warned Stanhope that any alliance, even defensive in nature, between England and Sweden would be regarded as an English declaration of war against Russia. Stanhope protested that Russia should show more appreciation for the important services which England had rendered to the Tsar during the war.

"What services has England rendered to Russia in the present war?" retorted Veselovsky.

"England," said Stanhope, "has allowed the Tsar to make great conquests and establish himself on the Baltic and besides has sent her fleet and assisted his undertakings."

"England," replied Veselovsky, "allowed His Majesty to make conquests because she had no means of preventing him, though she had no wish to aid him and from circumstances was obliged to remain neutral. She sent her fleet to the Baltic for the protection of her own trade and to defend the King of Denmark in consequences of treaty obligations to him."

The primary means of executing England's new anti-Russian policy was to be the presence of a strong British fleet in the Baltic. The commander of the fleet would be the same Admiral Sir John Norris who for four years had commanded the Britsh squadron in those waters. Now Norris' orders were to reverse course and switch friendships. The Admiral's secret instructions frora Stanhope were to offer the mediation of Great Britian between the warring parties, Russia and Sweden.

In July 1719, Admiral Norris' great ships sailed through the sound into the Baltic, steering northeast for Stockholm, entering the Skargard and anchoring off the Swedish capital. Norris went ashore with letters for the Queen, and on July 14 Queen Ulrika dined abroad Norris' flagship. On this occasion she informed the Admiral that Sweden accepted the British offer.

The Russian, naturally, viewed the arrival of this British fleet with suspicion and apprehension. When it appeared in the Baltic, Peter inquired as to its purpose and demanded that Norris assure him he had no hostile intentions, otherwise British ships would not be permitted to approach the Russian coastline. The English purpose became clearer when letters from Norris and Lord Carteret, the English ambassador in Stockholm, addressed to the Tsar, were delivered. These English letters all but commanded the Tsar to make peace with Sweden, announcing that the British fleet was in the Baltic not only to protect trade but to "support mediation." Bruce and Osterman, finding the language of the English Minister and Admiral "unusual and insolent," refused to forward the letters to the Tsar, suggesting that in a matter of such importance King George should write to Peter was indignant. He had no intention of accepting the mediation of a monarch who, as Elector of Hanover, was now an active ally of Sweden. To manifest his displeasure, the Tsar ordered both James Jefferyes, now English ambassador to Russia, and Weber, the Hanoverian representative, to leave St. Petersburg.

While the complicated diplomatic maneuvers of George I and his English ministers were taking place behind his back, Peter proceeded straight-forwardly to try to beat the Swedes on the field of battle. Charles XII was dead and the Aland Islands negotiations had borne no fruit; Sweden, therefore, needed to be reminded that the war was not yet over. The main effort of the 1719 campaign was to be a powerful amphibious attack on the homeland coast of Sweden along the Gulf of Bothnia. The weapons were to be the same as those which had been so effective in the conquest of Finland: fleets of galleys carrying thousands of soldiers into shallow waters where big ships could not go. In May, 50,000 Russian troops marched from their winter quarters to assembly points at St. Petersburg and Reval to be moved by sea to western Finland, from where the attacks would be launched. Apraxin was to be in overall command of the Russian fleet of 180 galleys and 300 flat-bottom boats, convoyed by twenty-eight ships-of-the-line. On June 2, Peter himself left. St. Petersburg for Peterhof and Kronstadt, commanding a flotilla of thirty galleys carrying 5,000 men.

Already that summer, Peter's fleet had had a success. On June 4, a squadron of seven Russian men-of-war sailing from Reval had intercepted three smaller Swedish ships in the open sea. Outnumbered and heavily outgunned, the Swedish ships tried running for the Stockholm Skargard, the archipelago of islands and islets which screen the Swedish capital from the sea. The Russian ships overtook them, however, and after an eight-hour fight all three Swedish ships, including the fifty-two-gun Wachtmeister, were captured. The return of this squadron with its prizes to Reval was deeply satisfying to Peter. Here was a deepwater victory, unlike the galley action at Hango.

On June 30, Peter and the Kronstadt squadron arrived at Reval with the largest Russian men-of-war, including the ninety-gun Gangut, the seventy-gun ships St. Alexander, Neptunus and Reval and the sixty-four-gun Moscow. Meanwhile, Admiral Norris had entered the Baltic with a squadron of sixteen ships-of-the-line. Despite the potentially menacing presence of this English fleet, Peter's men-of-war sailed toward Sweden on July 13, followed a few days later by 130 galleys filled with soldiers. On the 18th, the entire Russian naval force anchored at Lemland in the Aland Islands, and on the evening of the 21st they put to sea. Fog and calm seas forced the big ships to anchor, but the galleys proceeded under oars and, with Apraxin in command, reached the first islands of the Stockholm Skargard on the afternoon of the 22nd.

For the next five weeks, Apraxin ships and the 30,000 men they carried wreaked havoc on the eastern coast of Sweden. Finding himself unopposed at sea, Apraxin divided his force, sending Major General Lacy with twenty-one galleys and twelve sloops north up the coast, while moving the main body south. He landed a force of Cossacks to raid Stockholm, but their assault was repulsed—the Skargard was difficult, its narrow channels well defended, and a force of four men-of-war and nine frigates in the Stockholm harbor kept the Russian galleys at bay. Moving south, Apraxin again divided his ships into smaller squadrons to work along the coasts, burning small towns, industries and ironworks and capturing coast shipping. On August 4, the southernmost Russian ships reached Nykoping, and on the 10th they were at Norrkoping, where a number of Swedish merchant ships were catured, some of them loaded with copper ore taken from the nearby mines. These were sent back to Russia. In one cannon foundry, 300 cannon still undelivered to the Swedish army were seized and hauled away. On August 14, Apraxin's fleet turned north, stopping to pick up other landing detachments along the coast. Arriving again off the Stockholm Skargard, he attempted another assault on the capital, but again was beaten off. On August 21, twenty-one Russian sloops and twenty-one galleys forced one channel in the face of heavy fire from Swedish forts and ships, but then fell back.

Meanwhile, to the north, Lacy's force had been moving with similar devastating effect along the upper coast. He had destroyed factories and ironworks, storehouses and mills, and had burned three towns. The troops had fought three small battles, winning two and being repulsed in a third, at which point he turned back.

A large quantity of iron, forage and provisions was seized, some taken aboard, and that which could not be carried away was thrown into the sea or burned. By August 29 Lacy and Apraxin were both back in the Aland Islands, and on the 31st they departed for home, the galley fleet heading for Kronstadt and the men-of-war for Reval.

That autumn, hoping that the lesson of the summer attacks had made itself felt, Peter sent Osterman to Stockholm under a flag of truce to see whether the Swedes were now any more ready for peace: Osterman returned to the Tsar with a letter in which Queen Ulrika offered to cede Narva, Reval and Estonia, but still demanded the returned of all of Finland and Livonia. In Stockholm, Osterman reported, the Swedes were embittered by the Russian raids, unwilling to talk peace while Cossacks rode within a few miles of their capital. Nevertheless, an extraordinary shift in power had been made plain that summer. Ten years before, Charles XII had been fighting one thousand miles away in the heat and dust of the Ukraine. Now, Peter's Cossack horsemen rode within sight of the steeples of the capital of Sweden.

57

VICTORY

Outwardly at least, the spring of 1720 seemed to bring a grave deterioration in Peter's position relative to Sweden. All of Russia's allies had been stripped1 away by the efforts of King George I, Formidable squadrons of the British navy were entering the Baltic to hinder and overawe the Tsar. In March of that year, after a reign of only seventeen months, Queen Ulrika Eleonora of Sweden abdicated her crown in favor of her husband, Frederick of Hesse, who was vigorously anti-Russian and determined to prosecute the war.

In May 1720, Sir John Norris appeared in the Baltic with a more powerful British fleet than ever before, twenty-one ships-of-the-line and ten frigates. His orders this year were clearly hostile. On April 6 in London, Stanhope had once again offered Veselovsky England's services as a "mediator" between Russia and Sweden, and Veselovsky had curtly refused. In any case, Stanhope had continued magisterially, when Norris arrived in the

Baltic, it would be up to the Russians to decide how they would treat him: They could recognize him as a friend by making peace with Sweden, or as an enemy by continuing the war.

Norris arrived in Stockholm on May 23 and went ashore to receive further written orders from young Lord Carteret, then on a special mission to Copenhagen and the Swedish capital. Carteret's instructions were fervent:

Sir John Norris: It is now in your power by the help of God to do the most signal piece of service to your country that any man has done in this age. The scales of the North are in your hand. ... If the Tsar refuses the King's mediation, as he probably will, a mark of which will be his continuing hostility against Sweden, I hope you will by force of arms bring him to reason and destroy that fleet which will disturb the world. . . . God bless you, Sir John Norris. All honest and good men will give you just applause. Many persons will envy you and nobody will dare say a word against you. Every Englishman will be obliged to you if you can destroy the Tsar's fleet, which I don't doubt you will do.

While Norris was in Stockholm, he also paid his respects to the new King, Frederick I, who asked the Admiral to cruise in the sea area between the Hango peninsula and the Aland Islands to prevent the passage of Russian galleys into the Gulf of Bothnia and a repetition of the preceding summer's devastating raids against the Coast of Sweden. But Norris had no more desire to clash with Peter's galleys in these dangerous waters than the Swedish admirals had displayed. There were myriad rocks, ledges, fogs, fickle winds, poor charts and no pilots. An admiral who took big, ocean-going ships into such a maze would have half his bottoms ripped out by granite and lose the rest when the wind died and his becalmed behemoths faced a legion of Russian galleys rowing to the attack. Accordingly, Norris suggested firmly that he take his ships in a different direction to see whether an attack might be made on Reval, now, like Kronstadt, a main base of the Russian Baltic fleet. With a combined fleet of twenty English and eleven Swedish men-of-war, Norris cruised off Reval, making an impressive naval demonstration, and sent a letter ashore addressed to the Tsar, again offering England's mediation. The letter was returned unopened; Peter understanding that Britain was now siding openly with his enemy, had left instructions not to accept any further communications from Norris or Carteret. Apraxin further warned the British Admiral to keep his ships out of range of the guns of Russian coastal fortresses. Faced with this rebuff, and deciding that the defenses of Reval were too strong, Norris disappeared over the horizon.

Meanwhile, as Norris was parading off Reval, Apraxin's galleys had already outmaneuvered him and descended once again on the Swedish coast. Eight thousand men, including Cossacks, moved down the coast without opposition and penetrated as far as thirty miles inland, leaving behind towers of smoke from burning towns, villages and farmhouses. Summoned by a desperate appeal from Frederick I, Norris hurried from Reval to intercept the Russian galleys, but they were already gone, slipping through the rocky islands and along the inshore waters of Finland where Norris dared not follow. The one exception had just the result Norris had feared. A Swedish flotilla of two ships-of-the-line and four frigates caught up with a force of sixty-one Russian galleys. Pursuing the galleys, trying to bring them within range before the smaller ships could reach the safety of the coast, all four Swedish frigates ran aground and were captured. The Tsar was delighted by this sea victory and rejoiced in the impotence of the British fleet. Writing to Yaguzhinsky, he said, "Our force under the command of Brigadier von Mengden has invaded Sweden and has safely returned to our shores. It is true that no very great loss was inflicted on the enemy, yet thank God it was done under the eyes of their allies, who could do nothing to prevent it."

In retrospect, there seems something strange about the operations of Norris' fleet. Although his ships in the Baltic were in a state of armed hostility, no British ship ever fired at a Russian ship. If Norris' powerful men-of-war had ever caught Peter's galley flotillas in the open sea, the British ships with their greater speed and overwhelming gun power would have massacred the Russians. But the English, despite Norris' orders from his civilian masters, were content to support Sweden merely by their presence, showing the flag in Swedish harbors and cruising in the central Baltic. It is hard to believe that an aggressive British admiral leading the finest seamen in the world could not have drawn some blood if he had wished to. It leaves a suspicion that Norris preferred not to engage the ships of the Tsar, whose admiration and generosity he had personally enjoyed when they had met five years before. For George I, Norris' failure was a serious embarrassment. Despite his maneuvers in isolating Russia and plucking away her allies, despite his employment of the British navy in the Baltic, neither his diplomacy nor his fleet had succeeded in helping Sweden or harming Russia. While British ships-of-the-line cruised the Baltic or lay in Swedish harbors, Russian galley flotillas roved up and down the Swedish coastline, supporting landing parties which burned and ravaged where they chose. In England, the King's opponents laughed at the fleet which was sent to defend Sweden but which somehow never managed to be present at the right time or place.

By the middle of the summer of 1720, George I's anti-Russian policy was on the verge of failure. Most people in England realized that Peter and Russia could not be defeated without a far greater effort than they were willing to consider making. Veselovsky reported from London that eight out of every ten Members of Parliament, both Whig and Tory, believed that war with Russia would be contrary to the best interests of England. Peter, wisely, had always made it abundantly clear that his quarrel was not with the English people or English merchants but only with the King. Thus, although the Tsar had broken off diplomatic relations and expelled both the English and Hanoverian ministers from St. Petersburg, he had never allowed any break in commericial relations. Before his departure, Jefferyes had attempted to order home English shipwrights and naval officers in the service of the Tsar, but most were Peter's favorites who enjoyed many privileges in Russia, and few heeded Jefferyes' demand. Similarly, the Tsar personally told English merchants in Russia that they were welcome to stay under his protection. Veselovsky passed the same message to those trading companies in London which traded with Russia. Soon afterward, Peter lifted his blockade of Swedish ports in the Baltic, allowing free passage of Dutch and English commerical shipping. In every way, the Tsar emphasized that his quarrel was not with England but with the King's policy of using England to advance the interests of Hanover.

Finally, in September 1720, the likelihood of any serious British military involvement in the Baltic was terminated by an event in Britain which distracted attention from everything else, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. Shares in the South Sea Company, chartered to trade with South America and the Pacific and enjoying the governorship of the King, had stood at 128.5 in January 1720, rose to 330 in March, 550 in April, 890 in June and 1,000 in July. In September, the bubble burst and shares plummeted to 175. Speculators from all levels of society were ruined, there was a rash of suicides, and an angry roar of indignation rose up against the company, the government and the King.

In this crisis, Sir Robert Walpole emerged to save the King and secure his own position for the next twenty years. Walpole was the living embodiment of the educated eighteenth-century English country squire; his private language was that of the barnyard, and his rhetoric in the House of Commons was superb. Short, weighing 280 pounds, with a heavy head, a double chin and strong black eyebrows, he had the habit of munching little red Norfolk apples during a debate. Walpole had invested in the company and had suffered losses, but had retired both from the company and from the government before it was too late. Summoned back, he worked out a scheme to restore confidence by transferring large blocks of South Sea stock to the Bank of England and the East India Company. In parliament, he vigorously defended the government and the crown from charges of scandal. By so doing, he earned the gratitude not only of George I but also of George II, both of whom passed into his hands more responsibility for administering the realm that any king had previously given up to one of his ministers. It is for this reason that Walpole is often called "the first Prime Minister."

Having steered the King to safety, Walpole took charge of British policy. A Whig to his eyebrows, Walpole believed in avoidance of war and encouragement of trade. This teasing, dangerous semi-war with Russia had no part in his view of the future prosperity of England. The subsidies paid to Sweden and the costs of sending the fleet could be better spent elsewhere. With Walpole at the helm, it became British policy to end the war as speedily as possible. The King was chagrined, but even the King could see that his plan to roll Peter back from the Baltic coast was not succeeding.

It did not take Frederick of Sweden long to realize where matters stood. Disillusioned by the impotence of George I's support, and aware that continuation of the struggle meant further Russian attacks along his coasts, Frederick decided to face the fact that the war was lost. This decision was spurred by the arrival in St. Petersburg of Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp seeking asylum. Reports reached Stockholm that the Duke had been magnificently received by the Tsar, and that Peter proposed to marry him to one of his own daughters. This attention to Charles Frederick, implying Russian support to the Holstein faction in the struggle for the Swedish throne, was a well-aimed stroke by Peter. It clearly implied that only by signing a peace treaty with the Tsar which incorporated Russian acquiescence in Frederick I's possession of the Swedish throne would the new King ever be easy in his new title.

Frederick informed Peter that he was ready to reopen negotiations, and a second peace conference was convened on April 28, 1721, in the town of Nystad on the Finnish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. Again, the Russian representatives were Bruce, now a count, and Osterman, now a baron. In the opening sessions, the Russians were astonished to find that the Swedes expected easier terms than those they had been offered at Aland. The Swedes in turn were dismayed to learn that Peter now demanded permanent cession of Livonia, whereas previously he had been content with a "temporary" occupation of forty years. "I know my interest," the Tsar now declared. "If I leave Sweden in Livonia, I would harbor a serpent in my bosom."

Great Britain's new desire for peace in the North did not entail a total abandonment of its Swedish ally. In April 1721, King George I wrote to King Frederick I that, in accordance with treaty obligations, a British fleet would enter the Baltic that summer. But George begged that Sweden attempt to conclude a peace with Russia. The cost of sending a fleet every summer was prohibitive, George explained; the sum expanded on the present squadron came to 600,000 pounds. A few weeks later, Norris' twenty-two ships-of-the-line appeared, but throughout the summer the British squadron lay anchored in Stockholm Skargard, completely idle.

Meanwhile, with the negotiations at Nystad deadlocked over Livonia and no military truce arranged, Peter once again launched his galley fleet against the Swedish coast. Five thousand soldiers under Major General Lacy landed one hundred miles north of Stockholm and attacked the fortified town of Gefle, but the town was too strong for Lacy's strength and the Russian troops moved south, leaving a swath of destruction. Sundeval and two other towns were burned, along with nineteen parishes and 506 villages. Lacy defeated the Swedish force sent against him, while his galleys burned six Swedish galleys. On June 24, having ravaged 400 miles of Swedish coastline, Lacy was ordered to withdraw.

Lacy's raid, although oh a smaller scale than those of the preceding summers, appeared to be the last straw for Sweden. Frederick I finally yielded Livonia. The main articles of the peace treaty granted Peter the territories he had so long desired. Livonia, Ingria and Estonia were ceded "in perpetuity" to Russia, along with Karelia as far as Vyborg. The remainder of Finland was to be restored to Sweden. As compensation for Livonia, Russia agreed to pay two million thalers over four years, and Sweden was granted the right to purchase Livonian grain without paying duty. All prisoners of war on both sides were to be freed. The Tsar pledged that he would not interfere in Swedish domestic politics, thus confirming Frederick I's right to the throne.

It was on September 14, 1721, when Peter had left St. Petersburg for Vyborg to inspect the new frontier which would be drawn by the treaty, that a courier arrived from Nystad with the news that the treaty had actually been signed on September 10. The Tsar was exuberant. When a copy of the treaty was placed in his hands, he wrote joyfully, "All scholars in arts usually finish their course in seven years. Our school has lasted three times that long. However, thank God, it is so well finished that better would have been impossible."

News that peace had come after twenty-one years of war was received with jubilation in Russia. Peter was beside himself with excitement, and the celebrations which took place were prolonged and prodigious. St. Petersburg first realized that something extraordinary had happened when on September 15, the Tsar's yacht was unexpectedly seen sailing back up the Neva, returning from his visit to Vyborg far sooner than expected. That the news was good was signaled by repeated firing of salutes from the three small canon on board the yacht and, as the vessel grew nearer, by the sound of trumpeters and drummers on deck. A crowd quickly gathered at the wharf on Trinity Square, swelled every minute by the arrival of more government officials, for there could only be one reason for this behavior on the approaching ship. When Peter stepped ashore and confirmed the news, people in the crowd wept and cheered. Peter walked from the wharf to Trinity Church to pray and give thanks. After the service, General-Admiral Apraxin and the other senior officers and ministers present, knowing what reward would most please their master, asked him to accept promotion to admiral.

Meanwhile, tubs of beer and wine were being set in the middle of streets packed with excited people. Peter mounted a small, makeshift platform in the square outside the church and shouted to the crowd, "Rejoice and thank God, you Orthodox people, that Almighty God has put an end to this long war lasting twenty-one years, and given us a happy and eternal peace with Sweden!" Taking a cup of wine, Peter toasted the Russian nation while the ranks of soldiers fired their muskets in the air and the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress thundered a salute.

A month later, Peter gave a masquerade party that continued for days. Forgetting his age and his various ailments, he danced on tabletops and sang at the top of his lungs. Tiring suddenly in the middle of a banquet, he rose from the table, ordered his guests not to go home and went to sleep on his yacht anchored in the Neva. When he returned, the celebration continued, with rivers of wine and prodigious noise. For an entire week, thousands of people remained masked and in fancy dress, dining, dancing, walking in the streets, rowing on the Neva, going to sleep and rising to begin again.

The celebration reached a peak on October 31 when Peter appeared in the Senate to declare that, in gratitude for God's mercy in giving Russia victory, he would pardon all imprisoned criminals except murderers, and that he would annul all debts to the government and arrears of taxes accumulated over eighteen years from the war's beginning to 1718. In that same session, the Senate resolved to offer Peter the titles of Peter the Great, Emperor and Father of His Country. This resolve, in which the Holy Synod joined, was put in the form of a written petition and taken to the Tsar by Menshikov and a delegati6n of two senators and the Archbishops of Pskov and Novgorod. Peter promised to consider the petition.

A few days before, Campredon, the French ambassador, who had helped urge the Swedes toward peace, had arrived at Kronstadt aboard a Swedish frigate. Breaking all the laws of protocol the happy Tsar himself went on board the frigate, embraced the envoy on deck and took him to visit the six large Russian men-of-war then anchored in the port. Returning to the capital, and walking through the streets, Peter kept the astonished Campredon with him throughout the festive week. In the Trinity Church, Peter placed Campredon in a position of honor, abruptly shoving aside a nobleman who obscured the Frenchman's view. During the service,. Peter himself directed the liturgy, sang with the priests and helped beat time. At the end of the regular service, the terms of the treaty and its ratification were read to the congregation. Peter's favorite churchman, Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, delivered an oration praising the Tsar and was followed by Chancellor Golovkin, who addressed Peter directly:

"By your tireless labors and leadership alone, we your loyal subjects have stepped from the darkness of ignorance into the theater of fame of the whole world, and, so to speak, have moved from non-existence to existence, and have joined in the society of political peoples. For that and for winning a peace so renowned and so rewarding, how can we render our proper gratitude? And so that we may not be with shame before the whole world, we take it upon ourselves in the name of the Russian nation and of all ranks of the subjects of Your Majesty, humbly to pray you to be gracious to us and agree, as a small mark of our acknowledgement of the great blessings that you have brought to us and to the whole nation, to take the title: Father of the Fatherland, Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia."

With a brief nod of his head, Peter indicated that he would accept the titles.* "Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!'* shouted the senators.

*The idea of awarding the title of emperor to the Tsar was not, of course, wholly spontaneous on the part of the Senate. Four years earlier, in 1717, when Michael Shafirov, brother of the Vice Chancellor, was rummaging among old records and papers in the archives, he found a letter written in 1514 by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian to Tsar Vasily Ivanovich (father of Ivan the Terrible). In the letter, Maximilian, urging Vasily to join him in an alliance against the King of Poland and Grand Prince of Lithuania, addressed the Tsar as "Great Lord, Vasily, Emperor and Dominator of All the Russians." When Shafirov showed Peter the letter, which was written in German, the Tsar immediately had it translated into all languages and gave copies to all foreign ambassadors in St. Petersburg. Simultaneously, through Russian diplomats and agents, he had the letter published in newspapers throughout Western Europe along with the notice, "This letter will serve to maintain without contestation the said title to the monarchs of all Russia, which high title was given them many years past and ought to be valued so much the more because it was written by an emperor who by his rank was one of the first monarchs of the world."

In Europe, acceptance of the Russian title came only in stages. Holland and Prussia immediately recognized Peter as Emperor of Russia. Other states delayed, chiefly because they were unwilling to antagonize the Holy Roman Emperor, who was jealous of the uniqueness of his ancient title. Sweden, however, recognized Peter as emperor in 1723, and the Ottoman Empire recognized Empress Anne in 1739. King George I always refused to give his old enemy Peter the imperial title, and English recognition waited until 1742, fifteen years after the King's death. In this same year, the Hapsburg Emperor recognized his Russian counterpart as an equal. France and Spain accepted the imperial title in 1745 and Poland in 1764.

The imperial title remained in use from Peter's proclamation in 1721 until the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II in 1917.

Inside and outside the church, the crowd roared, trumpets sounded and drums beat, echoed by the clanging and thundering of all the church bells and cannon in St. Petersburg. When the tumult subsided, Peter responded, "By our deeds in war we have emerged from darkness into the light of the world, and those whom we did not know in the light now respect us. I wish our entire nation to recognize the direct hand of God in our favor during the last war and in the conclusion of this peace. It becomes us to thank God with all our might, but while hoping for peace, we must not grow weaker in military matters, so as not to have the fate of the Greek monarchy [the Eastern empire of Constantinople]. We must make efforts for the general good and profit which may God grant us at home and abroad and from which the nation will receive advantage."

Leaving the church, Peter led a procession to the Senate palace, where tables for a thousand guests were set in a large hall. There he was congratulated by Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp and the foreign ambassadors. A banquet was followed by another ball and by fireworks which Peter himself had designed. Again the cannon boomed and the ships on the river were illuminated. In the hall, an enormous basin of wine—"a true cup of grief," one participant called it—was passed among the guests, carried on the shoulders of two soldiers. Outside, fountains of wine burbled at the street corners and whole oxen were roasted on a platform. Peter came out and carved the first pieces with his own hands, distributing them among the crowd. He ate some himself and then lifted his cup to drink the health of the Russian people.

Part Five

RUSSIA

IN THE SERVICE OF THE STATE

Peter had been sitting at dinner one night in 1717 surrounded by friends and lieutenants when the talk turned to Tsar Alexis and the achievements and disappointments of his reign. Peter had mentioned his father's wars against Poland and his struggle with the Patriarch Nikon, when Count Ivan Musin-Pushkin suddenly declared that none of Tsar Alexis' accomplishments had measured up to Peter's and that most of Alexis' successes had actually been due to the work of his ministers. Peter's reaction was icy. "Your disparagement of my father's achievements and your praise of mine are more than I can listen to," he said. The Tsar got up and walked over to the seventy-eight-year-old Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, sometimes called the Russian Cato. "You criticize me more than anybody else and plague me with your arguments until I sometimes feel I could lose my temper with you," said Peter. "But I know that you are sincerely devoted to me and to the state and that you always speak the truth, for which I am deeply grateful. Now, tell me how you estimate my father's achievements and what you think of mine."

Dolgoruky looked up and said, "Pray be seated, Sire, while I think a moment." Peter sat down and Dolgoruky was quiet for a while, stroking his long mustache. Then he replied, "It is impossible to give a short answer to your question since you and your father were occupied with different matters. A tsar has three" main duties to perform. The most important is the administration of the country and the dispensation of justice. Your father had enough time to attend to this, while you have had none, which is why your father accomplished more than you. It is impossible that when you do give some thought to this matter—and it is time you did—you will do more than your father.

"A tsar's second duty is to the organization of the army. Here again, your father is to be praised because he laid the foundations of a regular army, thereby showing you the way. Unfortunately, certain misguided men undid all his work, so that you had to start all over again, and I must admit that you have done very well.

Even so, I still do not know which of you has done better; we will only know that when the war is over.

"And, finally, we come to a tsar's third duty, which is building a fleet, making treaties and determining our relationship with foreign countries. Here, and I hope you will agree with me, you have served the country well and have achieved more than your father. For this, you deserve much praise. Somebody tonight said that a tsar's work depends on his ministers. I disagree and think the opposite, since a wise monarch will choose wise counselors who know their worth. Therefore, a wise monarch will not tolerate stupid counselors because he will know their quality and be able to distinguish good advice from bad."

When Dolgoruky finished, Peter stood up and said, "Faithful, honest friend," and embraced Dolgoruky.

The "administration of the country and the dispensation of justice" were much on Peter's mind during these later years. Victory at Poltava had given him more time and freedom to consider domestic matters; his actions were no longer hasty improvisations made under the threat of imminent invasion. In the years after Poltava, Peter turned his attention from organizing armies and building fleets to a basic remodeling of the structure of civil and church administration, to modernizing and changing the economic and social patterns of the nation, and even to rechanneling the age-old trade routes of the Russia he had inherited. It was in the second half of the reign, the years between 1711 and 1725, that the fundamental Petrine reforms were fashioned. Alexander. Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, compared the later fundamental reforms with the early wartime decrees: "The permanent laws were created by a broad mind, full of wisdom and kindness; the earlier decrees were mostly cruel and self-willed and seemed to have been written with a knout."

The nature and sequence of Peter's early reforms were dictated by war and the need for money to pay for it. For a while, as Pushkin wrote, the state was ruled primarily on the basis of Peter's decrees, hastily scribbled on pieces of paper. Traditionally in Russia, the tsar had ruled with the advice of an ancient, consultive council of boyars, and beneath it, the administration of the laws was carried out by a number of government offices, or prikazi. For the first two decades of Peter's reign, 1689-1708, there had been no change in this structure. The youthful Tsar attended meetings when he was in Moscow and delegated power when he was absent—thus, when Peter went abroad in 1697-1698, he made Prince Fedor Romodanovsky president of the council and ordered other members to accept his leadership. As Peter grew older and grasped the reins of government more firmly, he used the council little, and his opinion of it became openly contemptuous. In 1707, he ordered the council to keep minutes of its meetings, which were to be signed by all members. "No resolution shall be taken without this," he instructed, "so that the stupidity of each shall be evident."

In 1708, when Charles XII was marching on Russia, the central government had seemed unable to cope with the crisis. To raise money and find recruits, both desperately needed, Peter ordered a sweeping decentralization of government administration. The nation was divided into eight huge provinces or governments— Moscow, Ingermanland (later called St. Petersburg), Keiv, Smolensk, Archangel, Kazan, Azov and Siberia—endowed with wide powers, especially in the areas of revenue collection and army recruiting. To underline the importance of these new regional governments, Peter had assigned his most senior lieutenants as governors. But this new system did not work. Most of the governors lived in St. Petersburg, too far from the regions they supposedly governed to control them effectively. Some of the governors, such as Menshikov and Apraxin, had more pressing duties with the army or the fleet. In February 1711, Peter was ready to admit defeat. He wrote to Menshikov, "Up to now, God knows in what grief I am, for the Governors follow the example of crabs in transacting their business. Therefore, I shall not deal with them with words, but with hands." Menshikov himself was criticized. "Inform me what merchandise you have, how much has been sold, when and where the money had gone," commanded the anguished Tsar, "for we know no more about your government than about a foreign country."

The failure of the provincial governments left only Peter at the center of government along with the crumbling boyar council and the increasingly ineffective, overlapping administrative offices. Although Peter attempted to overcome inefficiency and inertia by his own enormous energy, often even he had not enough. In frustration and despair, he wrote to Catherine, "I can't manage with my left hand, so with my right hand alone I have to wield both the sword and the pen. How many there are to help me you know yourself."

In time, Peter realized that he himself was part of the problem. All power was concentrated in his person, which, as he was so often on the move, made administration difficult. Further, he was completely absorbed by military affairs and foreign policy and had no time for domestic matters. To discover what laws were necessary, to formulate the legislation, to administer the laws and government and to judge violations, Peter needed a new institution more powerful and more efficient than the boyar council.

The Senate was created in February 1711, on the eve of Peter's departure for the disastrous campaign on the Pruth, and was intended as a temporary institution to govern during the months he was away. The short decree establishing the Senate was specific on this point: "We appoint the governing Senate to administer in our absence." Because the new body of nine senators would rule in place of the Tsar, it was granted wide powers: It was to oversee the provincial governments, act as the highest court of justice, take charge of all state expenditures and, above all, "to collect money as much as possible, for money is the artery of war." Another decree proclaimed that all officials, civil and clerical, and all institutions were under pain of death to obey the Senate as they would the Tsar.

When Peter returned from the Pruth, the Senate did not disappear but gradually became the chief executive and legislative organ of the central government of Russia. Nothing could be done without the command or consent of the Senate; in the absence of the Tsar, it was the government of Russia. Yet, for all Peter's effort to enchance its power, no one was fooled. The Senate's power was mostly hollow, its grandeur mostly facade. In fact, the Senate remained a body for transmitting and administering the will of the autocrat and had no independent will of its own. It was an instrument, its powers were those of an agent, its jurisdiction touched only on domestic matters—all questions of foreign policy and peace or war were reserved to the Tsar. The Senate helped Peter by interpreting and clarifying his hastily, cryptically written instructions and transforming them into legislation. But in the eyes of the people and in its own mind, the Senate knew it was the creature and servant of an unchallengeable master.

The subordinate status was made plainer by the fact that none of Peter's principal lieutenants—Menshikov, Apraxin, Golovkin, Sheremetev—was included in the Senate. These "Supreme Lords" or "Principals," as they were called, could send the Senate instructions "by order of His Majesty." And yet, at the same time, Peter instructed Menshikov that he and the others must obey the Senate. In fact, Peter wanted both the assistance of his powerful, loyal lieutenants and the aid of a powerful, central administrative body. He would not choose one definitely over the other, and therefore he left the situation confused, with opposing methods and systems of government functioning in contradiction to each other. Inevitably, the "Supreme Lords" and "Principals" bridled and refused to accept the authority of this fledgling body.

Nor was Peter himself always pleased with the Senate's behavior. He wrote regularly to the senators, scolding them as if they were thoughtless children, telling them that they had made themselves a laughingstock, which he said was doubly infamous "for the Senate represents the person of His Majesty." He ordered them not to waste time in meetings talking about matters unrelated to business, and not to chatter and joke, because "loss of time is like death, as hard to return as a life that has ended." He ordered them to transact no business at home or in private, and commanded that every discussion must be written down. Yet, the Senate still moved too slowly for Peter. On one occasion, he summoned it to tell him "what has been done and what has not been done and the reason for it." Repeatedly, he threatened the senators with punishment. "You have nothing else to do except to govern," he declared, "and if you do not do this conscientiously, you wijl answer to God and also will not escape justice here below." "You have acted in a contemptible way, accepting bribes according to ancient and stupid customs," he thundered on another occasion. "When you come before me, you will be called to account in a different way."

In November 1715, attempting to discipline the Senate and make it more effective, Peter created the supervisory post of Inspector General of Decrees to sit "in the same place as the Senate, to take note of the Senate's decrees, to see that they are enforced, and to denounce and fine negligent senators." Vasily Zotov, the foreign-educated son of his old tutor, was the first Inspector General, but he had little success, and soon it was he who was complaining to Peter that the Senate paid no attention to his wishes, failed to hold the required sessions three days a week, and had left one and a half million roubles of state revenue uncollected.

In 1720, detailed new rules of Senate procedure were promulgated. Meetings were to be conducted "without shouting and other manifestations. . . . The business is to be stated and is to be thought about and discussed for half an hour, If, however, it be complicated and more time is asked for, then it is to be postponed until the following day. If the business is urgent, extra time up to three hours will be granted for further deliberations, but as soon as the hourglass shows that time has run out, paper and ink are to be handed out and every senator is to note down his opinion and sign it. If a senator fails to do this, business is to be stopped while somebody runs to tell the Tsar, wherever he may be."

Eventually, when it became clear that even the Inspector General could not keep order in the Senate, officers of the Guards were assigned for a month at a time to police the senators. If a senator misbehaved, he was to be arrested and confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress until the fact could be reported to the Tsar.

As it was, the Senate functioned as well as it did only because of Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, the First Senator, who had served in many capacities over many decades. He 'was the first Russian ambassador to the court of Louis XIV, and it was on this mission in 1687 that he purchased an astrolabe to bring back to the fifteen-year-old Peter. At the age of sixty-two, he was present at the Battle of Narva, was captured and spent eleven years in a Swedish prison. In 1712, at seventy-three, he escaped and made his way back to Russia, where he was appointed First Senator. A portrait of Dolgoruky shows a powerful man with a double chin and a shaggy mustache, a man who looks unkempt, shrewd and fierce. He was also brave, obstinate, strong-willed and liked to have his way; when he could not impose his wishes by force of logic or force of character, he simply shouted at his opponent at the top of his lungs. Only Menshikov, permanently armored in the Tsar's favor, could stand up to him.

Dolgoruky always dared to tell Peter the truth. Once, late in the reign, Dolgoruky actually tore up a decree because he believed that the Emperor had not reflected on it. The decree had commanded all landowners in the governments of St. Petersburg and Novgorod to send serfs to dig the Ladoga Canal. Dolgoruky had been absent on the day the decree was signed, and the following moming, when he read it, he protested loudly. The other senators looked uncomfortable, but warned that it was too late to object, as the Emperor had already signed it. Whereupon, in a spasm of disgust, Dolgoruky ripped the edict in half. Stunned, the other senators stood up, demanding to know if he realized what he had done. "Yes," said Dolgoruky passionately, "and I will answer for it before God, the Emperor and my country."

At this moment, Peter walked into the room. Surprised to see the entire Senate standing, he asked what had happened. In a trembling voice, one member told him. His expression grim, Peter turned to the eighty-three-year-old Dolgoruky and demanded an explanation. "It is my zeal for your honor and the good of your subjects," Dolgoruky replied. "Do not be angry, Peter Alexeevich, that I have too much confidence in your wisdom to think you wish, like Charles XII, to desolate your country. You have not reflected on the situation of the two governments your decree regards. Do you not know that they have suffered more in the war than all the provinces of your empire together, that many of their inhabitants have perished, and are you unacquainted with the present miserable state of the people? What is there to hinder you from taking a small number of men from each province to dig this canal, which is certainly necessary? The other provinces are more populous than the two in question and can easily furnish you with laborers. Besides, have you not Swedish prisoners enough to employ without oppressing your subjects with works like these?"

Peter listened to Dolgoruky's appeal and then turned calmly to the other senators. "Let the decree be suspended," he said. "I will consider this matter further and let you know my intentions." Soon after, several thousand Swedish prisoners were transferred to work on the Ladoga Canal.

Nevertheless, despite the presence of Dolgoruky, Zotov and the Guards officers, the Senate failed to perform as Peter wished. In time, he came to realize that force or the threat of force exercised from above was insufficient and often counterproductive. The Senate could not be disciplined roughly and peremptorily, as the Tsar was accustomed to doing, and still maintain its dignity and authority in the eyes of the public. In addition, it was overloaded with work. Inefficiency, quarrels among its members and unwillingness to take responsibility caused a huge and growing backlog of work which at one point reached 16,000 unresolved cases and decisions.

Thus, in 1722, Peter resolved to create a new managerial office, that of the Procurator General, who was to be the Emperor's personal representative in the Senate. "Here is my eye through whom I will see everything," Peter declared when he presented his Procurator General to the senators. "He knows my intentions and wishes. What he considers to be for the general good, you are to do. Although it may seem to you that what he does is contrary to the advantage of me and of the state, you should nevertheless carry it out and, having notified me, await my orders." The Procurator General's duty was to direct the Senate and superintend it work. Although he was not a member of the body and could not vote, he was in fact President of the Senate, responsible for maintaining order during sessions, for initiating legislation and bringing it to a vote (using an hourglass to limit discussion), and for seeing that, once passed, new legislation was sent to the Emperor for approval. When administrative offices were unable to understand the language or meaning of a Senate decree or discovered difficulty in administering one, they were to notify the Procurator General, who would ask the Senate to rewrite the decree to clearer language.

Peter's choice for his important role was Pavel Yaguzhinsky, one of his low-bom "fledglings." Yaguzhinsky was eleven years younger than the Emperor, bom of Lithuanian parents in Moscow, where his father was the organist in a Lutheran church. Peter liked him from the first, enrolled him in the Guards, and, charmed by the good humor and intelligence of the stalwart young man, made him a field orderly to his own people. Yaguzhinsky was promoted rapidly. Peter used him on diplomatic missions and took him along to Paris, where the French described him as Peter's "favorite." Yaguzhinsky was excitable, he enjoyed drinking, and he made and forgot new enemies every week. But he was unquestioningly loyal, he was almost completely honest and he was decisive, qualities which Peter found lacking in many senators.

Even before the appointment of Yaguzhinsky, Peter had altered the Senate's role. From 1711 to 1718, the Senate had been responsible for administration as well as for legislation, but Peter realized that the state needed a new executive machinery, separate from the Senate, which would permit the Senate to concentrate on legislative matters. It was this realization which led him to begin his experiment with a new government institution imported from Europe, the system of colleges or ministries.

From his own travels and from reports of foreign ambassadors and his agents, the Tsar had learned that colleges were the basic working institutions of governments in Denmark, Prussia, Austria and Sweden. Even in England, the semi-autonomous, college-like Board of the Admiralty was charged with administering all the affairs of the Royal Navy. Leibniz, whom Peter had consulted, reported: "There cannot be good administration except with colleges. Their mechanism is like that of watches whose wheels mutually keep each other in movement." The college system in Sweden had the highest reputation in Europe; it functioned so well that the Swedish government continued to administer the country smoothly despite the absence of its sovereign for fifteen years, the loss of armies, the conquest of its empire and a devastating plague. Peter, admiring both Charles and Swedish efficiency and, having no qualms about borrowing from his enemy, decided to use the Swedish colleges as models for his own.

By 1718, his new system was ready. The old-fashioned prikazi, or government offices, now thirty-five in number, were superseded by nine new colleges: Foreign Affairs, Revenue Collection, Justice, Expenditure, Financial Control, War, Admiralty, Commerce, and Mining and Manufacturing. The presidents of these colleges were to be Russians (in fact, they were all Peter's close friends and chief lieutenants) and the vice presidents foreigners. Two exceptions were the College of Mining and Manufacturing, of which General Bruce, a Scot, was appointed president, and the College of Foreign Affairs, whose president, Golovkin, and vice president, Shafirov, were both Russians. All nine college presidents simultaneously became members of the Senate, which had the effect of transforming that body into a council of ministers.

To help make these foreign institutions work, Peter imported foreign experts. Russian agents circulated through Europe inviting foreigners to come to the new Russian colleges. Even Swedish prisoners of war who had learned Russian were invited to the colleges. (Weber thought that some would not accept, "considering that they are apprehensive of a troublesome inquiry at home into their behavior.") In the end, enough foreigners were found, and Weber was to describe the humming activity at the College of Foreign Affairs in glowing terms: "Hardly any foreign office in the world issues dispatches in so many languages. They have sixteen interpreters and secretaries: Russian, Latin, Polish, High Dutch, Low Dutch, English, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Tatar, Kalmuck and Mongolian."

Yet, even with foreigners working at several levels in the new machinery, the college system began jerkily. The foreign lawyers, administrators and other experts had difficulty explaining the new system to their Russian colleagues, and the translators brought in to help were tongue-tied by their own ignorance of Swedish terminology and administrative affairs. Explanation of the new system and procedures to local officials in the provinces was even more difficult, and uncomprehending provincial clerks sent reports to the capital which could not be categorized, understood or even read in the new offices in St. Petersburg.

In addition, several of the college presidents treated their new assignments lackadaisically, and Peter once again was forced to lecture them like children. They must appear at their colleges every Tuesday and Thursday, he commanded, and while there and in the Senate must act with decorum. "There should be no unnecessary talking or chatter, but only talk of the matter in hand. Moreover, it someone begins to speak, another shall not interrupt, but shall allow him to finish, behaving like orderly people and not like market women."

Peter had hoped that including the new college presidents as members of the Senate would enhance the efficency of that body, but there were such antagonisms and jealousies among these potentates that putting them all in the same room without the Tsar to enforce order led to violent quarrels and even brawls. The aristocratic senators Dolgoruky and Golitsyn disdained the low-bom Menshikov, Shafirov and Yaguzhinsky. Golovkin, president of the College of Foreign Affairs, and Shafirov, its vice president, hated each other. The quarrels became more strident, senators openly accused one another of being thieves, and while Peter was away on the Caspian Sea, a resolution was passed reporting Shafirov to the Emperor for outrageous, illegal behavior in the Senate. On Peter's return, a special high court composed of senators and generals was summoned to Preobrazhenskoe and, on hearing the evidence, sentenced Shafirov to death. On February 16, 1723, Shafirov was brought into the Kremlin in a common sledge. The sentence was read to him, his wig and tattered sheepskin coat were taken away and he mounted the scaffold. Crossing himself repeatedly, he knelt and placed his head on the block. The executioner lifted the axe—and at this moment Peter's Cabinet Secretary, Makarov, stepped forward and announced that, in consideration of Shafirov's long record of service, the Emperor had granted him life and sentenced him instead to exile in Siberia. Shafirov got to his feet and climbed down from the scaffold, his eyes filled with tears. He was taken to the Senate, where his former colleagues, shaken by the experience, congratulated him on his reprieve. To calm his nerves, the doctors bled him, and Shafirov, contemplating his dismal future, said to them, "You had better open my largest vein and thus relieve me of my torments." His exile to Siberia was further commuted to confinement with his family in Novgorod. Two years later, on Peter's death, Catherine pardoned Shafirov, and under Empress Anne he returned to the Senate.

Peter's hopes for his new administrative machinery often went unfulfilled. The institutions were alien to Russian practice, the new administrators were insufficiently trained and motivated, and the looming, mercurial presence of the Tsar himself did not contribute to initiative and decisiveness on the part of his subordinates. On the one hand, Peter commanded them to assume responsibility and act boldly; on the other, he punished them if the move they made was the wrong one. Naturally, this made them excessively cautious, "as if a servant, seeing his master drowning, would not save him until he had satisfied himself as to whether it was written down in his contract that he should pull him out of the water."

As Peter grew older, he seemed to grasp this problem. He began to understand the importance of government by laws and institutions rather than by the arbitrary power of individuals, including himself. Instead of being commanded from above, the people were to be taught, guided and persuaded. "It is necessary to explain just what are the interests of the state," he said, "and to make them comprehensible to the people." After 1716, his major decrees usually were prefaced by pedagogical explanations of the need for this legislation, citation of historical parallels, appeals to logic and promises of utility.

On balance, Peter's new governmental system was an improvement. Russia was changing, and the Senate and the colleges administered this new state and society more efficiently than would have been possible under the old boyar council and government prikazi. Both Senate and colleges endured until the end of the dynasty, although the colleges were changed into ministries and the Senate was renamed the Council of the Empire. In 1720, the architect Trezzini set to work on an immensely long red-brick building on the Neva embankment on Vasilevsky Island to house the colleges and the Senate. This building, which now houses Leningard University, is the largest surviving edifice of Peter's St. Petersburg.

Peter's reforms affected individuals as powerfully as institutions. Russian society, like that of medieval Europe, was based on obligations of service. The serf owed service to the landowner, the landowner owed service to the tsar. Far from breaking or even loosening these bonds of service, Peter twisted them tight to extract every last degree of service from every level of society. There were no exceptions and no mitigations. Service was the motive force of Peter's life, and the Tsar thrust his energy and power into making sure that every Russian served as efficiently as possible. Noblemen serving as officers in the new Russian army or navy must know how to fight with modern weapons and tactics; those entering the growing Westernized central administration must have the training and skills necessary to manage their new assignments. The concept of service was broadened to include the duty of becoming educated.

Peter began this program pragmatically with his first impulsive dispatch of young Russians to the West in 1696, on the eve of the Great Embassy. After Poltava, the effort became more serious, more inclusive and more institutionally structured. In 1712, a decree ordered all sons of landowners to report to the Senate. They were divided into age groups; the youngest were sent to Reval to study seamanship, the middle group went to Holland for naval training and the eldest marched directly into the army. In 1714, the dragnet was extended: All young noblemen between ten and thirty not already registered or in service were commanded to report to the Senate for service during the winter.

Peter intended the army to be wholly officered by professionally trained Russian noblemen who had begun their twenty-five years of service at the age of fifteen when they entered the Guards or a line regiment as private soldiers. From that lowest rank, each nobleman was to work his way up on the basis of merit. In February 1714, Peter categorically prohibited the commissioning of any officer, no matter what his title, who had not come up through the ranks. At one point, 300 princes of the noblest families of Russia were serving as private soldiers, receiving the minimum in pay, food and comfort. According to Prince Kurakin, it was not uncommon for Petersburgers to see a Prince Golitsyn or Prince Gagarin with a musket on his shoulder doing sentry duty in front of his barracks.

Instruction for these young men, however, went far beyond how to handle firearms and conduct military drill. As more and more of them passed through these training years, the regiments became not only nurseries for officers but academies for service to the state in a variety of fields. Some young men would learn gunnery, some engineering, some navigation, some languages— one was sent to Astrachan to learn about salt mining. In time, the officers of Peter's Guards became a pool from which Peter could draw for almost any service. The watchdogs whom the Tsar set on his Senate were Guards officers; these same officers made up the majority of the civil tribunal which condemned the Tsarevich Alexis.

Although most of the young noblemen went into the army, this was not the preferred avenue of state service; the civil service was growing rapidly, and its entry doors were always crowded as work in government offices was less dangerous, less arduous and potentially far more lucrative. To narrow the stream of candidates flowing in this direction, Peter decreed that no more than one third of the members of a family could serve in civil government; two thirds must serve in the army or the navy.

The navy, a body wholly alien and repugnant to most Russians, was even more intensely and universally unpopular than the army. When a son had to go into service, the father struggled to enter him anywhere other than in the navy. Nevertheless, in 1715, when the School of Mathematics and Navigation was transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, its classrooms were filled. "This summer the Naval Academy was opened," wrote Weber in 1715. "I daresay that there was not one noble family within the boundaries of the vast Russian empire but what was obliged to send thither one or more sons above ten and under eighteen. We saw swarms of these young plants arriving from all parts of Russia at St. Petersburg. So that this academy at present contains the flower of the Russian nobility who for these four years past have been instructed in all the sciences belonging to navigation, besides which they are taught languages, fencing and other bodily exercises."

Russian nobles did not bow easily to Peter's disposition of their sons or themselves. Although Peter's first decree in 1712 was simply an effort to bring the lists of noblemen up to date and register them for future service, the Tsar knew he could not easily uproot these young men from their comfortable lives in the provinces. Accordingly, he accompanied the order with the threat that failure to report would be punished by fines, corporal punishment and confiscation of property. He added that anyone accurately identifying a nobleman who failed to report would receive all of that nobleman's wealth, even if the informer was "a runaway serf."

This threat often failed. Noblemen dreamed up endless deceptions and explanations, business and travels, visits abroad and to monasteries, to avoid registering for service. Some simply disappeared into the vast emptiness of the Russian land. A clerk or soldier would arrive to investigate and find a deserted house; oddly, no one in the village would know where the master had gone. Some escaped service by pretending illness or feigning holy foolishness: "He jumped into the lake and stood there with the water lapping at his beard." When one group of young noblemen enrolled in a Moscow theological seminary to evade service, Peter swiftly drafted all these novice monks into the navy, packed them off to the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg and, as further punishment, sent them to drive piles along the Moika Canal. General-Admiral Apraxin, offended by this humiliation of the honor of old Russian families, went to the Moika, stripped off his admiral's uniform with its blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew and hung it on a pole, and began to drive piles beside the young men. Peter came up and asked with astonishment, "How is it, Fedor Matveevich, that you, a general-admiral, are driving piles?" Forthrightly, Apraxin replied, "Sire, these laborers are my nephews and grandchildren. Who am I then and by what right should I be privileged?"

In time, Peter was forced to decree that all noblemen who failed to report for service were outlaws. This meant that they could be robbed or killed with impunity, and that anyone bringing in such an outlaw would receive half of the outlaw's property. Finally, in 1721, also to limit evasion, Peter established the office of Herald, whose duty was to keep up-to-date lists of the nobility, recording the names of all male children and the place and capacity in which these sons were meeting their obligation of state service.

Education, in Peter's mind, was simply the first rung on the ladder of state service, and he tried to place every child on that ladder at a tender age. In 1714, along with his plan for compulsory enrollment of all noblemen into the army at fifteen, he decreed that their younger brothers must enroll in secular schools at the age of ten. For five years, until they were ready for the army, they were to leam to read and write and do elementary arithmetic and geometry; until a young man had a certificate stating that he had finished this course, he was forbidden to marry. Landowners deeply resented this disruption of their traditions, and two years later, in 1716, Peter admitted defeat and revoked his decree. His effort to insist on compulsory education for children of the middle class also met with such widespread resistance and evasion that Peter was forced to give it up.

Once noblemen or others were enrolled in the service of the state, whether in military, naval or civil administration, their promotion supposedly was based on merit. A different and potentially far-reaching reform incorporating the principle of meritocracy was the Tsar's overthrowing of the time-honored Muscovite law of inheritance. Traditionally, when a father died, his landed estate and other immovable property was equally divided among his sons. The result of this continual subdivision into smaller and smaller plots was the impoverishment of the gentry and the drying up of sources of tax revenue. Peter's decree of March 14, 1714, declared that a father must pass his undivided estate to only one son—and that this son need not be the eldest. (If there were no sons, the same rules should be applied to daughters.) In England, Peter had been impressed by the system in which the eldest son inherited both title and land and the younger sons were expected to go into the army, the navy or some form of commerce. But Peter rejected primogeniture and chose inheritance by merit, which he thought would be even more productive than the English system: The ablest son would inherit, the land would be kept whole, thus preserving the wealth and distinction of the family (and facilitating the collection of taxes), the serfs would be better cared for, and the disinherited sons would be free to find some useful occupation in the service of the state. Unfortunately, no decree of Peter the Great was more unpopular; it produced family quarrels and violent feuds, and in 1730, five years after Peter's death, it was repealed.

Throughout his life, merit, loyalty and dedication to service were the only criteria by which Peter chose, judged and promoted men. Nobleman or "pie seller," Russian, Swiss, Scot or German, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant or Jew, the Tsar heaped titles, wealth, affection and responsibility on anyone who was willing and competent to serve. Sheremetev, Dolgoruky, Golitsyn and Kurakin were illustrious names long before their bearers devoted themselves to Peter's service, but they owed their success not to blood but to merit. Menshikov's father, on the other hand, was a clerk, Yaguzhinsky's a Lutheran organist, Shafirov's a converted Jew and Kurbatov's a serf. Osterman and Makarov began as secretaries; Anthony Devier, the first Police Commissioner of St. Petersburg, began as a Portuguese Jewish cabin boy whom Peter found in Holland and brought back to Russia. Nikita Demidov was a hard-working illiterate metalworker in Tula until Peter, admiring his energy and his success, gave him huge land grants to develop mines in the Urals. Abraham (or Ibrahim) Hannibal was a black Abyssinian prince brought as a slave to Constantinople where he was bought and sent as a present to Peter. The Tsar set him free and made him his godson, sent him to Paris to be educated, and eventually promoted him to General of the Artillery.* These men—Peter's eagles and eaglets, in Pushkin's phrase—began with nothing, but when they died, they were princes, counts and barons, and their names were inseparably entwined with Peter's in the history of Russia.

There is no better example of Peter's promotion by merit than the career of Ivan Neplyuev, one of Peter's most famous "fledglings." Neplyuev, the son of a small landowner in the Novgorod region, was summoned into service in 1715, when he was already twenty-two years old and the father of two children. He was sent to school in Novgorod to learn mathematics, then to the navigation school in Narva, then to the Naval Academy in St. Petersburg. In 1716, he was one of thirty midshipmen serving with the Russian fleet in Copenhagen. From there, Neplyuev followed the Tsar to Amsterdam, whence Peter sent him to Venice to train abroad Venetian galleys. After two years fighting the Turks in the Adriatic and Aegean seas, Neplyuev went on to Genoa, Toulon, Marseilles and Cadiz, where he served six months in the Spanish navy. When he returned to St. Petersburg in June 1720, he was ordered to come to the Admiralty for examination by the Tsar. "I do not know how my comrades received this news," wrote Neplyuev in his memoirs, "but I did not sleep the whole night and prepared myself as for the Day of Judgment."

When his turn came, Peter was kindly and, extending his hand to be kissed, said, "You see, brother, that I am tsar, yet there are callous places on my hands, because I wished to give you an example." As Neplyuev knelt, Peter said, "Stand up, brother, and answer the questions. Do not be afraid. If you know, say so. If you do not know, say so, too." Neplyuev survived the examination and was given command of a galley.

Almost immediately, however, he was transferred and placed in charge of ship construction in St. Petersburg. Upon taking the assignment, Neplyuev had been advised, "Always speak the truth and never lie. Even though things may be bad for you, the Tsar will be much angrier if you lie." It was not long before the young

*After his death, Hannibal gained immortality when he became the maternal grandfather of Alexander Pushkin and the central figure in Pushkin's novel (only a forty-page fragment of which was completed) The Negro of Peter the Great.

shipbuilder had occasion to test this advice. Arriving late at work one morning, he found Peter already there. He considered running home and sending word that he was sick, but then he remembered the advice and walked directly up to Peter. "You see, my friend, that I am here before you," said Peter, looking up. "I am to blame, Sire," replied Neplyuev. "Last night, I was with people and 1 stayed up very late and I was late getting up." Peter seized him by the shoulder and squeezed it hard. Neplyuev was convinced that he was doomed. "Thanks, my boy, for telling the truth," said the Tsar. "God will forgive you. All of us are human."

But Neplyuev was not long in this assignment either. Because of his language skills, he was frequently used as a translator, and in January 1721, still only twenty-eight, he was sent as Russian ambassador to Constantinople, returning home in 1734 to enjoy the estates which Peter had granted him in his absence. Eventually he became a senator. In 1774, during the reign of Catherine the Great, he died at the age of eighty.

Near the end of his reign, in 1722, Peter embodied his passionate belief in meritocracy in a permanent institutional framework, the famous Table of Ranks of the Russian Empire, which set before all young men entering service three parallel ladders of official ranks in the three branches of state service— military, civil and court. Each ladder had fourteen ranks, and each rank had a corresponding rank in the other two. Everyone was to begin his service on the bottom rung, and promotion was to depend not on birth or social status, but strictly on merit and length of service. Thereafter, at least in theory, nobility was of no importance in Russia, and honors and office were open to everyone. The noble titles of Old Russia were not abolished, but they carried no special privileges or distinctions. Commoners and foreigners were encouraged to apply for higher service, and soldiers, sailors, secretaries and clerks who merited notice were given appropriate positions on the Table of Ranks, where, once included, they competed, supposedly on equal terms, with Russian noblemen. Commoners who reached the lowest rank— i.e., the fourteenth on the military table, or the eighth on the civil or court ladder—were granted the status of "hereditary nobleman," with the right to own serfs and to pass along to their sons the right to enter state service at the bottom rank.

Thus, Peter, who had always given more weight to ability than to birth and who himself had worked his way up through the ranks in the army and the navy, passed his belief along to succeeding generations. This reform endured, and, despite subsequent alterations and inevitable corrosion by special favors and promotions won by bribes, it remained the basis of class structure in the Russian empire. Position on the Table of Ranks largely displaced birth as the measure of a man's worth, new blood was constantly brought into the army and the bureaucracy, and a man whose father had been a poor landowner or even a serf-soldier from the faraway Volga might find himself rubbing elbows with men who bore the oldest names in Russian history.*

On paper, as written in the decrees which flowed from Peter's pen, the reforms in administration might conceivably have made the Russian government function like the wheels of a watch. That it did not function this way was due not only to slowness to grasp or unwillingness to change, but also to many layers of corruption in government. Corruption affected not only the finances of the state but its basic efficiency. It made the imported administrative systems, already awkward to understand, almost impossible to operate.

Bribery and embezzlement were traditional in Russian public life, and public service was routinely looked upon as a means of gaining private profit. This practice was so accepted that Russian officials were paid little or no salary; it was taken for granted that they would make their living by accepting bribes. In Peter's time, only a handful of men in government were said to be honest and imbued with the idea of conscientious service to the state— Sheremetev, Repnin, Rumyantsov, Makarov, Osterman and Yaguzhinsky. The others were loyal to Peter personally, but regarded the state as a cow to be milked.

As a result, the majority of administrators were motivated less by a sense of service to the state than by desire for private gain, mingled with the effort to escape detection and punishment. Thus, two powerful negative motives, greed and fear, became the predominant features of Peter's bureaucrats. There were chances

*Ironically, under the Table of Ranks, Lenin, born Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, was an hereditary Russian nobleman. This title was inherited from his father, Ilya, the son of a serf, who had gone to Kazan University and become an educator. Taking over responsibility for primary education in Simbirsk province on the Volga in 1874, he raised the number of primary schools in the province from 20 to 434 in fourteen years. For this achievement, he was promoted to the rank of Actual State Councillor in the civil service, the fourth rank from the top and the equivalent of a major general in the army. When Lenin's elder brother Alexander Ulyanov was executed in 1887 for attempting to assassinate Tsar Alexander HI, the title passed automatically to the future founder of the Soviet state. In 1892, when Lenin, at twenty-one, applied to St. Petersburg for permission to take examinations in law, he signed himself "Nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov."

for immense riches—the vast wealth of Menshikov was an example; there was also a very good chance of torture, the scaffold or the wheel. Yet, whatever Peter did—urge, persuade, cajole, threaten, punish-—seemed to make little difference. He realized that force was not enough. "I can turn dice not too badly with my chisel," he said sadly, "but I cannot turn mules with my cudgel."

Disappointment followed disappointment, not only at the highest levels. Once, Peter elevated an honest lawyer to a judgeship. In this new position, where his decision could become an object of bribery, the new judge became corrupt. When Peter found out, he not only absolved the judge, but doubled his salary to prevent further temptation. At the same time, however, the Tsar promised that if the judge ever again betrayed his trust, he would surely hang. The judge fervently promised that Peter's faith was justified—and soon afterward accepted another bribe. Peter hanged him.

The Tsar accepted that he could not enforce complete honesty at every level of government, but he was determined to suppress all forms of corruption which drained the national Treasury. In 1713, a decree called on all citizens to report to the Tsar himself any case of government corruption. The reward of the informer was to be the property of the accused, providing the informer's charge turned out to be accurate. This seemed too dangerous for most people, and what resulted was a torrent of anonymous letters, many of them maliciously inspired by a wish to pay off personal scores. Peter promulgated another decree, condemning anonymous letters by those who "beneath a show of virtue put out their venom." He promised his protection to accurate informers, saying, "Any subject who is a true Christian and an honorable servant of his sovereign and his fatherland may without any misgiving report orally or by letter to the Tsar himself." Eventually, an anonymous letter arrived which accused some of the highest officials of government of corruption on a grand scale. The writer was persuaded to stand up, and a dramatic trial ensued.

Over the years, the system by which villages were required to raise provisions for the army and deliver them to St. Petersburg and other towns through the newly conquered territories created a heavy burden because of transportation difficulties. To deal with these problems, middlemen stepped forward who agreed to make the required deliveries in return for the right to charge a higher price. This practice became a source of innumerable frauds. A number of key figures in the government were involved, conspiring with the deliverers and sometimes taking delivery of the provisions themselves under borrowed names. Although the scandal was widely known, nobody dared to challenge the noblemen and high officials involved by breaking the matter to Peter. Finally, so great was the misery of the people who were being taxed twice to pay for the stolen provisions that one man decided he must inform the Tsar. At the same time, he attempted to save his own neck by remaining anonymous and leaving unsigned letters of accusation in places where Peter went. Peter read one and offered the author not only his protection but a large reward if he would make himself known and could prove what he had charged. The informer appeared and provided the Tsar with unimpeachable evidence that his chief lieutenants were engaged in fraud.

A great investigation commenced early in 1715. Those involved included Prince Menshikov; General-Admiral Apraxin; Prince Matthew Gagarin; Master of the Artillery General Bruce; Vice Governor of St. Petersburg Korsakov; First Lord of the Admiralty Kikin; First Commissioner of the Artillery Sinavin; Senators Opukhtin and Volkonsky, and a large number of civil servants of lesser ranks. The investigation was thorough and turned up much evidence. Apraxin and Bruce, brought before a commission, defended themselves by saying that they had rarely been in St. Petersburg, being mostly at sea or with the army in the field; accordingly, they had been unaware of actions taken behind their backs by their servants. Menshikov, who also had been away for many months commanding the army in Pomerania, was accused of financial dishonesty in his administration of that assignment, of making unlawful profits on government contracts and of wasting over one million roubles of government money and property.

Because Menshikov was so generally hated and because the commission of inquiry was headed by his bitter enemy, Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, the accusations were brought in an exaggerated, vengeful form which made them easier for Menshikov to moderate and partially disprove. Under scrutiny, what turned up was not sheer avarice; a considerable portion of bad management and confusion was blended in and there were many instances of irregularity in which there had been no intention of cheating. Menshikov's lawful income from his various estates was very large. Frequently, his own revenues had been applied to government uses and, also frequently, he had used public money for his own needs. Much of the irregularity consisted of diverting funds from one purpose to another without keeping proper accounts. Menshikov, for example, had been Governor of St. Petersburg since its founding, a period of more than ten years. During this time, he had received no salary and had repeatedly used his own money for government affairs. Because Peter disliked large palaces and huge receptions, Menshikov. had built his grand palace and acted as host at innumerable public and diplomatic functions costing huge sums. Often he was not reimbursed for these expenses, yet Peter expected him to continue in this role. In addition, he had sometimes taken money from his own pocket to deal with state emergencies. In July 1714, Admiral Apraxin had written urgently from Finland that his troops were starving. As Peter was away, Menshikov demanded action by the Senate, but the senators refused to accept any responsibility, whereupon Menshikov boldly requisitioned 200,000 roubles' worth of supplies on his own account, loaded them aboard ship and sent them to succor Apraxin's forces.

Nevertheless, there were irregularities which could not be explained away. He was found to owe 144,788 roubles on one account and 202,283 roubles on another. These sums were assessed against him as fines. Menshikov paid the fines in part, but, on petitioning the Tsar, part was forgiven.

Apraxin and Bruce also escaped with heavy fines in recognition of their past services to the nation. But for the others involved, the punishments were grim. The two convicted senators, Volkonsky and Opukhtin, who had incriminated not only themselves but tarnished the reputation of the newly formed Senate, were publicly knouted and had their tongues seared with hot iron for breaking their oaths. Korsakov, the Vice Governor of St. Petersburg, was publicly knouted. Three others had their noses slit after a knouting and men went to the gallows, while eight others, conviced of lesser offenses, were stretched on the ground to be beaten with batogs by soldiers. When Peter ordered them to stop, the soldiers shouted, "Father, let us beat them a little more, for the thieves have stolen our bread!" Some were exiled to Siberia. Kikin, who had been a special favorite of Peter's, was condemned to exile and his property was confiscated, but Catherine interceded for him, and both his office and his porperty was restored to him. Four years later, Kikin was tried again, this time for his role in the affair of the Tsarevich Alexis, and this time he lost his head.

Anonymous letters and public denunciations were a haphazard means of rooting out corruption, and in March 1711 Peter created a bureau of official informers called fiscals. They were to be headed by a chief, the Ober-Fiscal, whose assignment was to track down and report to the Senate all offenders, no matter what their rank. This kind of systematic, official informing was new to Russia. Previously, Russian law had permitted arrest and trial on the basis of a private accusation, but accusation was a double-edged weapon. The accuser had to present himself and prove his charges, and if the charges turned out to be false, the accuser rather than the accused was tortured and punished. Now, however, the accusers were permanent officers of the law, safe from revenge. Naturally, accusations multiplied, and soon the 500 fiscals were the most hated men in Russia. Even the members of the Senate, their nominal employers, feared these diligent spies. In April 1712, three senior fiscals complained to Peter that Senators deliberately ignored their submitted reports, that Senators Jacob Dolgoruky and Gregory Plemyannikov had described them as "Antichrists and rogues" and that they dared not even physically approach most senators. Later in 1712, the Metropolitan, Stephen Yavorsky, denounced the fiscals in a sermon, declaring that they held everyone at their mercy while they themselves were above the law. Yet, Peter did not intercede, and the fiscals continued their hated work.

The most dedicated of the fisclas was Alexis Nesterov, who eventually became the Ober-Fiscal. This zealot labored with a fury, poking into every aspect of government, denouncing his victims with fanatical malice and at one point even bringing his own son to judgment. Nesterov's most prominent prey was Prince Matthew Gagarin, who since 1708 had been the Governor of Siberia. Because of the great distance of his province from the capital, Gagarin ruled almost as a monarch beyond the Urals. Among his responsibilities was supervision of the China trade which passed through Nerchinsk and which was now a government monopoly. Nesterov, through his network of spies, discovered that Gagarin was cheating the government of revenue by allowing private merchants to trade illegally and by trading illegally himself. By this means, he had amassed an enormous fortune; his table was set every day for dozens of guests, and near his bed hung an icon of the Virgin decorated with diamonds worth 130,000 roubles. The record was not all black; on the contrary, Gagarin had made a substantial contribution to the development of Siberia by promoting industry and trade and opening up the mineral resources of the vast region. In addition, Gargarin was highly popular throughout the province for the mildness of his rule. When he was arrested, 7,000 Swedish prisoners working in Siberia petitioned the Tsar to pardon him.

Nesterov's first report on Gagarin's dishonesty was submitted to Peter in 1714, but the Tsar refused to pursue the matter. In 1717, Nesterov presented a more incriminating dossier, and Peter appointed a commission of Guards officers to investigate. Gagarin was arrested and confessed to irregularities and even illegalities, begging pardon and permission to end his days doing penance in a monastery. Everybody believed that Peter would pardon the Governor in recognition of his influence and services. But the Tsar, furious that his repeated decrees about honesty had been flouted, determined to make an example. Gagarin was condemned and publicly hanged in St. Petersburg in September 1718.

Nesterov wielded his power for almost ten years. Then the Ober-Fiscal himself was caught receiving presents which, although almost inconsequential in size, attracted the eye of his many ill-wishers. Quickly, the accumulated weight of enmity crushed him. He was tried, convicted and condemned to be broken alive on the wheel. The sentence was carried out in the square opposite Trezzini's new building for the colleges on Vasilevsky Island. By then, Nesterov was an old man with white hair. As he lay on the wheel, still alive, Peter, who happened to be visiting the colleges, went to the window and looked out. Seeing Nesterov and pitying him, the Tsar ordered the Ober-Fiscal's head to be cut off immediately so that he would not suffer longer.

The worst offender, whom even Nesterov had never dared to accuse, was Menshikov. Again and again, the Prince presumed on the indulgence of his long-suffering master. He knew that Peter needed him; for any man who occupies the lonely pinnacle of power, such a friend is essential. He was Peter's confidant, the interpreter of his thoughts and executor of his decisions, his closest companion for drinking, the governor of Peter's son, his cavalry commander, his right arm. In public, he was careful to treat the Tsar with exaggerated respect; in private, he knew exactly how near the line he could go. If he passed it unwittingly, he received a blow from Peter's fist or cudgel. He accepted these with good humor and never sulked, which further endeared him. Yet, behind Peter's back, Menshikov showed a different face. To inferiors, he was domineering; to rivals, insolent. He had boundless ambition, his manners were coarse, he was an implacable enemy and he was bitterly hated as well as widely feared.

As Peter's reign progressed, the power of his royal favorite steadily grew, and after Poltava it knew few bounds. Menshikov was Governor General of St. Petersburg, First Senator, knight of the Order of St. Andrew, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and bore tides from the Kings of Poland, Denmark and Prussia. It was commonly said that he could travel across the empire from Riga on the Baltic to Derbent on the Caspian and always sleep on one of his own estates. His palace on the Neva housed a glittering court of gentlemen, chamberlains, pages and Parisian cooks who prepared dinners of 200 dishes served on golden plates. Making his way through the streets in a fan-shaped carriage with his coat of arms emblazoned in gold on the door and a golden crown on the roof, drawn by six horses caparisoned in red and gold, he was always accompanied by liveried servants, musicians and an escort of dragoons to clear a way through the crowds. Yet, although Peter in affection and gratitude had endowed Menshikov with enormous wealth, it was never enough. Like many other man raised from nothing to vast power, he cared greatly for the trappings which would display that power. When not enough came in as bribes and gifts, he stole rapaciously. Despite the huge fines fixed on him by Peter, he was always rich and, after a brief period of disgrace, always returned to renewed favor. To the foreign ambassadors, expecting that each successive scandal would be Menshikov's last, then seeing him rise again, radiant and awesome, the Prince seemed a phoenix.

Often, Peter simply overlooked Menshikov's behavior. At one point, the Senate found evidence of irregularity in Menshikov's purchases of ammunition. They asked the Prince for an explanation, but Menshikov arrogantly brushed them aside, refusing to answer in writing or sign his name to anything, sending instead a junior officer with an oral reply. The senators then drew up a list of the principal charges and evidence against Menshikov and placed the paper on a table in front of the Tsar's chair. When Peter came in, he picked up the paper, ran his eye quickly over it and put it back on the table without a word. Finally, Tolstoy dared to ask what his reaction was. "Nothing," replied Peter. "Menshikov will always be Menshikov."

Nevertheless, Peter's indulgence had limits. Once, when he had deprived Menshikov temporarily of his immense estates in the Ukraine and compelled him to pay a fine of 200,000 roubles, Menshikov retaliated by taking down all the brocade and satin hangings and removing all the elegant furniture from his palace on the Neva. A few days later, when Peter came to visit, he was surprised to find the house almost empty. "What does this mean?" he asked. "Alas, Your Majesty, I was obliged to sell everything in order to settle with the Treasury," said Menshikov. Peter stared at him for a minute. "I know better," he roared. "None of these games with me. If when I come back in twenty-four hours your house is not furnished as becomes a Serene Prince and Governor of St. Petersburg, the fine will be doubled!" On Peter's return, the palace was furnished more magnificently than before.

Peter's first warning to Menshikov came in 1711 after the Prince was accused of extortion during his command of the army in Poland. (Menshikov excused himself by arguing that he had taken only from the Poles.) "Mend your ways or you will answer to me with your head," Peter threatened, and for a while Menshikov obeyed. In 1715, he was charged again, and again he escaped by paying a fine. Nevertheless, after the 1715 trial Peter exhibited a new coolness toward his old friend. He continued to go to Menshikov's house and wrote him amiable, even affectionate letters, but never fully trusted him again. Menshikov circumspectly adjusted to this new relationship. In his own letters, he dropped the familiar forms of address he had always used to Peter and switched to a more formal, respectful style as became a subject addressing an autocrat. He was abjectly apologetic, invoking Peter's old friendship and his own past services whenever the Tsar's mood darkened. The Prince had a powerful protector in Catherine, who was always ready to intercede on his behalf. On one of these occasions, Peter acceded to his wife's pleas, but warned her for the future: "Menshikov was conceived in iniquity, brought into the world in sin and will end his life in deceit. Unless he reforms, he will surely lose his head."

Menshikov was not out of trouble for long. At the beginning of January 1719, new charges were brought against him. He was summoned before a military court-martial, along with General-Admiral Apraxin and Senator Jacob Dolgoruky, and charged with maladministration of Ingria and embezzlement of 21,000 roubles meant for the purchase of cavalry horses. Menshikov admitted taking the money, but explained in his defense that the government still owed him 29,000 roubles which he had never been able to collect; therefore, when this money came into his hands, he had pocketed it in partial repayment. The court accepted the extenuating circumstances, but still condemned him for violating military laws. Both he and Apraxin were sentenced to the loss of all their estates and honors, and ordered to give up their swords and confine themselves in their homes until confirmation of the sentences by the Tsar. Both men went home to await the blow. Peter first confirmed the sentences and then, a day later, to everyone's surprise, canceled them in recognition of former services. Both men were restored to full rank. They paid severe fines, but nothing more. Peter simply could not afford to lose them.

For the time, it seemed, Menshikov was subdued. Soon after, the Prussian minister wrote, "The good Prince Menshikov has been well plucked. The Tsar asked him how many peasants he possessed in Ingria. He confessed to seven thousand, but His Majesty, who was much better informed, told him he was welcome to keep his seven thousand but he must give up all above that figure—in other words, eight thousand more. Menshikov, from anxiety and wondering what will happen to him next, has grown quite ill and as lean as a dog, but he has saved his neck once more and been pardoned till Satan tempts him again."

Nevertheless, true to Peter's prediction that "Menshikov will always be Menshikov," the Prince continued to swindle his master. In 1723, he was caught again and brought before an investigatory commission. He had been granted Mazeppa's estates near Baturin, and in 1724, he was accused of having concealed there over 30,000 serfs who had either fled the obligation of military service or run away from their landowners. Menshikov relied again on the advocacy of the good-natured Tsaritsa and presented a petition to Catherine at her coronation in which he laid the blame on Mazeppa, saying that the concealment of serfs had been done before he inherited the estates. Again, he was forgiven in greater part, but investigations were still continuing when Peter died, after which they were quashed by Catherine.

Peter, a man of simple tastes, was distressed and disgusted by the shameless rapacity of his. lieutenants clutching at every opportunity to rob the state. On all sides, he saw bribery, embezzlement and extortion, and the Treasury's money "flowing from everybody's sleeves." Once, after hearing a Senate report listing further corruption, he summoned Yaguzhinsky in a rage and ordered the immediate execution of any official who robbed the state of even enough to pay for a piece of rope. Yaguzhinsky, writing down Peter's command, lifted his pen and asked, "Has Your Majesty reflected on the consequences of this decree?" "Go ahead and write," said Peter furiously. "Does Your Majesty wish to live alone in the empire without any subjects?" persevered Yaguzhinsky. "For we all steal. Some take a little, some take a great deal, but all of us take something." Peter laughed, shook his head sadly and went no further.

Yet he persevered to the end. Now and then, as with Gagarin, he made an example of a prominent delinquent, hoping to deter the smaller ones. Once when Nesterov asked, "Are only the branches to be cut off or are the roots to be cut out?" Peter replied, "Destroy everything, roots and branches alike." It was a hopeless task; Peter could not compel honesty. In this sense, the Tsar's admiring contemporary Ivan Pososhkov was right when he wrote, "The great monarch works hard and accomplishes nothing. The Tsar pulls uphill alone with the strength of ten, but millions pull downhill."

59

COMMERCE BY DECREE

In Russia, before Peter's time, there was little that could be called industry. Scattered through the towns were small factories and workshops for household implements, handicrafts and tools which met the needs of tsar, boyars and merchants. In the villages, the peasants made everything for themselves.

Upon his return from the West in 1698, Peter determined to change this and for the remainder of his life he labored to make Russia richer and its economy more efficient and productive. At first, with his country plunged into a major war, Peter's attempt to build industry related entirely to the needs of war. He developed cannon foundries, powder mills, factories to make muskets, leatherworks for saddles and harness, textile mills to weave woolen cloth for uniforms and make sails for the fleet. By 1705, the state-owned textile factories in Moscow and Voronezh were doing so well that Peter wrote to Menshikov: "They are making cloth and God gives excellent results, so that I have made a caftan for myself for the holidays."

After Poltava, the emphasis changed. As the demands of war diminished, Peter became more interested in other kinds of manufacturing, those designed to raise Russian life to the level of the West and at the same time to make Russia less dependent on imports from abroad. Aware that large sums were being drained out of the country to pay for imports of silk, velvet ribbon, china, and crystal, he established factories to make these products in Russia. To protect the fledgling industries, he placed high import duties on foreign silk and cloth which doubled their price for Russian buyers. Basically, his policy was similar to that of other European states at the time, which can generally be described as mercantilism: to increase exports in order to earn foreign currency, and decrease imports in order to stem the flow of Russian wealth abroad.

Peter's industrialization policy had a second purpose, equally important. His tax collectors were already wringing the Russian people lifeless to finance the war. The only long-term way to extract more revenue from his people, Peter realized, was to

increase the production of national wealth, thus increasing the tax base. To achieve this goal, the Tsar hurled himself and the power of the state into every aspect of developing the national economy. Peter viewed himself as personally responsible for the strengthening of the national economy, but at the same time he understood that private enterprise and initiative were the true sources of national wealth. His goal was to create a class of Russian entrepreneurs who would assist and eventually replace the sovereign and the state as producers of this wealth. It was not an easy task. By tradition, Russian noblemen looked disdainfully on any involvement in trade and industry and were determined not to invest their capital in commercial enterprises. Peter employed a combination of persuasion and force, preaching the dignity and usefulness of commerce and making trade and industry an honorable form of state service—like service in the army, navy or civilian bureaucracy. The government, through the College of Mining and Manufacturing, provided initial capital in the form of loans and subsidies, granted monopolies and tax exemptions, and sometimes simply erected factories at Treasury expense and leased them to private individuals or companies. These arrangements often were compulsory. In 1712, the state constructed a group of cloth factories to be managed by private merchants. "If they do not wish to do this of their own free will," declared the order, "then they must be forced. Grant them facilities to defray the cost of the factory so that they may take pleasure in trading."

Not all of the new enterprises flourished. A silk company formed by Menshikov, Shafirov and Peter Tolstoy was granted generous privileges and subsidies and still managed to fail. Menshikov quarreled with his partners and resigned, to be replaced by Admiral Apraxin. Eventually, having swallowed all of its original capital, the company was sold to private merchants for 20,000 roubles. Menshikov had better luck with a company formed to fish for walrus and cod in the White Sea.

The most productive partnership between state and private industry was in mining and heavy industry. When Peter came to the throne, Russia possessed some twenty small state and private iron foundries around Moscow, in Tula and at Olonets on Lake Onega. Declaring that "our Russian state abounds in riches more than many other lands and is blessed with metals and minerals," Peter began early in his reign to develop these natural resources. Among the foreigners employed by the Great Embassy for service in Russia were numerous mining engineers. Once the war began, the ironworks at Tula, founded by the Dutch father of Andrew Vinius and owned in part by the crown and in part by the ironmaster Nikita Demidov, were expanded to provide muskets and cannon for the entire army. The city of Tula became an immense arsenal, its various suburbs populated by different categories of armorers and smiths. After Poltava, Peter sent prospectors throughout the Urals looking for new deposits. In 1718, he established a College of Mining and Manufacturing, to encourage location and development of new mineral sites. In December 1719, a decree threatened with the knout any landowner who concealed mineral deposits on his lands or who obstructed prospecting by others. The rolling hills of the Urals, especially in Perm province, revealed themselves to be astonishingly rich in high-grade ores: the ore taken from the ground produced almost half its weight in pure iron. To help develop these rich veins, Peter turned again to Nikita Demidov. By the end of Peter's reign, a vast industrial and mining complex consisting of twenty-one iron and copper foundries had risen in the Urals, centering on the town of Ekaterinburg, named in honor of Peter's wife.* Nine of these works were owned by the state and twelve by private individuals, including Demidov, who owned five. Their production constantly increased, and by the end of the reign more than forty percent of all Russian iron was coming from the Urals. Within Peter's lifetime, Russian output of pig iron equaled that of England, and in the reign of Catherine the Great, Russia supplanted Sweden as the largest producer of iron in Europe. These flourishing mines and foundries made the state strong (16,000 cannon were in the arsenals at Peter's death) and Demidov enormously rich. On the birth of the Tsarevich Peter Petrovich, Demidov presented the infant with 100,000 roubles as "tooth-cutting money." In 1720, the infant's proud father made Demidov a count, a title which lasted until the end of the dynasty.

To facilitate trade, Russia needed more circulating currency. New Russian coins had been minted since Peter's return from the West with the Great Embassy, but coins were so scarce that merchants in Petersburg, Moscow and Archangel borrowed them at fifteen percent interest simply to keep their business operating. One reason for this scarcity was the ingrained habit of all Russians, from peasant to noble, of quickly hiding any money on which they could lay their hands. As a foreign visitor explained, "Among the peasants, if by chance one happens to gain a small sum, he hides it under a dunghill, where it lies dead to him and to the nation. The nobility, being afraid of making themselves noticed and obnoxious to the court by the show of their wealth, commonly lock it up in coffers to molder there, or those more sophisticated send it to banks in London, Venice or Amsterdam.

*In 1918. Ekaterinburg was the site of the murder of the family of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II. Today, the city is named Sverdlovsk.

Consequently, with all the money thus concealed by nobility and peasants, it has no circulation and the country reaps no benefit from it." At the beginning of the war, a decree declared that "the hoarding of money is forbidden. Informers who discover a cache are to be rewarded with one third of the money, the remainder to go to the state."

Another reason for the scarcity of coinage was an insufficiency of precious metals. Gold- and silversmiths who came to Russia became discouraged and went home, and many freshly coined roubles were defective as to both alloy and weight of metal. Peter knew this and it worried him, but as the mines simply were not producing enough gold and silver, he was forced to allow the debasement to continue. In 1714, to preserve the nation's economy, Peter forbade the export of silver, In 1718, merchants leaving Russia were searched and any gold, silver or copper coins found were confiscated. On the least suspicion, customs officers would dismantle the carriages or sledges in which merchants were traveling. In 1723, this regulation was strengthened by adding the death penalty for anyone caught exporting silver. On the other hand, the import of gold and silver was vigorously encouraged; there was no duty on these metals. And when Russians sold their goods to foreigners, they were not permitted to accept Russian money in payment, but had always to receive foreign money.*

Peter's commands, issued impatiently from above, often were received without the slightest understanding of what was wanted or why. This compelled the Tsar not only to supervise everything closely himself, but also to employ force to get things done. Traditionally conservative, Russians balked at innovations, and Peter told his ministers, "You know yourselves that anything that is new, even if it is good and necessary, our people will not do without being compelled." He never apologized for using force. In a decree in 1723, he explained that "our people are like children who never want to begin the alphabet unless they are compelled to by the teacher. It seems very hard to them at first, but when they have learned it, they are thankful. So in manufacturing affairs, we must not be satisfied with the proposing of the idea only, but we must act and even compel."

Commerce is a delicate mechanism, and state decrees are not usually the best way to make it work. In Peter's case, it was not simply the element of compulsion that detracted from the success of his efforts—he himself was not always sure what he wanted. When his attention wandered or he was distracted, those below

*All this has a familiar ring to foreigners who live or travel in the Soviet Union today.

him, uncertain as to his desires, did nothing and all activity stopped. Peter's methods were strictly empirical. He tried this or that, ordering and countermanding, seeking a system that worked, sometimes without thoroughly understanding what was needed or the nature of the obstacles confronting him. His constant changes in direction, his minute regulations leaving no scope for local adjustment, confused and drained initiative from Russian merchants and manufacturers. Once, when the Dutch ambassador was pressing for Russian approval of a new commercial treaty and had been frustrated by repeated delays, he was told by Osterman, "Between ourselves, I will tell you the truth. We have not a single man who understands commercial affairs at all."

There were occasions when enterprises foundered simply because Peter was not present to give instructions. His temper could be so fierce and unpredictable that, in the absence of specific orders, people were unwilling to take initiative and simply did nothing. In Novgorod, for example, a large number of leather saddles and harnesses had been stored for the army. The local authorities knew that they were there, but because no order to distribute them had come down from above, they were left until "eventually, moldy and rotten, they had to be dug up with spades." Similarly, in 1717, many oak trunks brought from central Russia through the canals to Lake Ladoga for use in building the Baltic fleet were left to wash up on the shores and bury themselves in mud, simply because Peter was away in Germany and France and had not left specific instructions for their use.

To bridge the gap between the innovative Tsar who, despite his consuming interest, was often occupied with other matters, and the uncomprehending, unwilling nation, there were the foreigners. None of Peter's work in developing the national economy would have been possible without the foreign experts and craftsmen who poured into Russia between the time of Peter's return from the West in 1698 and his death in 1725. The Tsar engaged more than a thousand foreigners during his first visit to Amsterdam and London, and thereafter Russian envoys and agents at foreign courts were urgently commissioned to search out and persuade local artisans and technicians to enter Russian service.

Foreign craftsmen, foreign ideas and foreign machines and materials were at work in every sphere of industrial, commercial and agricultural activity. Vines, brought from France, were planted near Astrachan to produce wine which a Dutch traveler pronounced as "red and pleasant enough." Twenty shepherds, arriving from Silesia, were sent to Kazan to shear the sheep and

teach the Russians there how to make wool so that it would no longer be necessary to buy English wool to clothe the army. Peter saw better horses in Prussia and Silesia and ordered the Senate to establish stud farms and import stallions and mares. He observed Western peasants reaping grain with a long-handled scythe rather than the short-handled sickle which Russian peasants had always bent to use, and decreed that his people must adopt the scythe. Near Petersburg was a factory which turned Russian flax into a linen as fine in every respect as linen from Holland. The flax was spun in a workhouse where an old Dutch woman was teaching eighty Russian women how to use the spinning wheels, which were little known in Russia. Not far off was a paper mill run by a German specialist. Throughout the land, foreigners were teaching Russians how to build and operate glass factories, brick kilns, powder mills, saltpeter works, ironworks and paper mills. Once in Russia, foreign workers enjoyed numerous special privileges, including free houses and exemption from taxes for ten years. Surrounded by suspicious and xenophobic Russians, they lived under the Tsar's personal protection, and Peter sternly warned his people not to harm or take advantage of them. Even when a foreigner failed, Peter usually treated him with kindness and sent him home with a sum of money.

Behind this policy was not a frivoulous love of everything foreign. Instead, Peter had a single, firm purpose: to use foreign technicians to help build a modem Russia. Foreigners were invited and privileges granted to them on a single condition which was part of every contract: "that they instruct our Russian people properly and conceal nothing." Occasionally, foreign experts did attempt to conceal trade secrets. In one such case, English tobacco curers, departing from Russia, used violent means to prevent their special technology from falling into Russian hands. Astonishingly, Charles Whitworth, the English ambassador, not only countenanced this violence, but committed it himself:

The great secret which the Muscovites desire to know is the liquor for preparing and coloring the tobacco. . . . The Russian laborers were dismissed and the same evening I went to the workhouse together with Mr. Parsons, my secretary, and four of my servants. We spent the best part of the night in destroying the several instruments and materials, some of which were so strong that they obliged us to make a great noise in pulling them to pieces. There were cloven barrels about a quarter full of the tobacco liquor which I caused to be let out. ... I likewise broke the great spinning wheel, and above three score reels for rolling; I then destroyed three engines already set up for cutting tobacco and took away the plates and cranes for two more; several engines for pressing the tobacco into form have been pulled to pieces, their screws split, the wooden moles broken, the copper carried away, and about 20 fine sieves cut to pieces. . . . The next day my servants returned and burned all that remained of wood.

Had Peter discovered the ambassador's role in this violent, nocturnal episode, Whitworth's stay in Russia would certainly have been cut short.

On another occasion, however, a Russian outwitted a secretive foreigner. Peter had established a ribbon factory near Petersburg, staffing it with young Russian apprentices; the master was a foreigner. At the end of a year, Peter found that one young man, the most skilled of the young Russians, could make any kind of ribbon once the materials were set upon the loom, but that neither he nor his companions could begin unaided because the master always placed the work upon the loom himself and forbade anyone to watch during this operation. Peter instructed the Russian apprentice to discover this secret and promised a reward if he succeeded. Accordingly, the apprentice bored a small hole in the ceiling of the workshop and lay quietly on his stomach, observing the master as he set the looms. Having learned the technique, he informed the Tsar, who had set up a loom in his presence in the palace. When the apprentice succeeded, Peter kissed him, gave him money and made him the new master.

Having constructed a new capital on the Neva, Peter was determined that it should be more than an administrative hive for his bureaucrats and a parade ground for his Guards regiments; he meant St. Petersburg to be a great port and commercial center. To endow it with importance and build it into a major commercial center, he took steps to divert trade to the Neva from other ports, in particular from the lengthy, circuitous Archangel route. This arbitrary commercial upheaval was achieved only by overriding the pleas and cries of many—Russians and foreigners alike—who had invested heavily in that route. Nevertheless, Peter gradually increased the pressure. The struggle continued until 1722, when he finally forbade the shipping of any goods from Archangel other than those actually produced in that province or along the banks of the Dvina. That year, St. Petersburg finally prevailed over Archangel and became the leading port on Russian soil, although its trade was still not as large as Riga's. By the end of Peter's reign, the volume of Russia's foreign trade exceeded the wildest of Peter's early dreams. Overall seaborne commerce had quadrupled in value. In 1724, 240 Western merchant ships arrived in St. Petersburg, while 303 visited Riga. In 1725, 914 foreign ships called at Russian Baltic ports.

But Peter failed in another objective: the creation of a Russian merchant marine. He had hoped that Russian goods could be carried to the West in Russian merchant ships, but this effort ran into an old prejudice, long inflicted by Western maritime nations. In the time of Novgorod, when Russian merchants had desired to export their produce in their own ships, the merchants of the Hanseatic League had joined against them to insist that they would buy Russian goods only in Novgorod and then be responsible for shipping them themselves. At a later time, an enterprising merchant of Yaroslavl took a cargo of furs to sell in Amsterdam, but, by concerted arrangement among Dutch buyers, he was unable to sell a single fur and had to carry them back to Archangel. There, they were bought immediately at a good price by the Dutch merchant who owned the vessel which had carried the furs back to Russia.

Early in his reign, Peter resolved to change this pattern and instructed Apraxin, as Governor of Archangel, to build two small Russian ships which would sail to the West carrying Russian cargoes under the Russian flag. Knowing that their arrival would provoke opposition, he pondered where to send them. Dutch and English merchants would be vigorously opposed, while in France, the Tsar felt, the Russian flag might not be respected. At last the ships were dispatched to France, but already Peter had retreated: They sailed under the Dutch rather than the Russian flag. One of the ships was confiscated by the French, and its return became the subject of a lengthy argument. In general, Peter never succeeded in this effort, and in shipping—and even in the handling of foreign commerce in Russian ports—Dutch and English merchants retained their virtual monopoly.

Despite this failure, Peter bore no grudge against foreign captains or seamen. On the contrary, he was delighted when foreign merchant ships arrived in Russian ports, welcoming them grandly and treating the captains as brother mariners. As soon as a foreign ship appeared in the harbor of Kronstadt or St. Petersburg, Peter arrived on board to walk its decks, examine its structure and rigging and look for new developments in its construction. His visits were so common, especially among the Duth captains who came annually to St. Petersburg, that they looked forward to sitting down with the Tsar in their cabins with brandy, wine, cheese and biscuits to answer his questions about their voyages. In return, Peter invited them ashore to attend his court and all its celebrations; it was seldom that they returned sober to their ships. As one observer noted: "It is easy to conceive how much this reception was to the taste of people in that line of life and with how much pleasure they steered their course for St. Petersburg."

Nothing was allowed to spoil this relationship. In 1719, when new customs regulations were drawn up for the port of St. Petersburg, the first draft presented to Peter for approval declared that ships that carried contraband or concealed dutiable goods should be confiscated. Peter struck out this article, explaining that it was much too early in the life of the port for such drastic action; he had no desire to frighten ship captains and merchants away.

The Emperor allowed visiting captains to speak to him on terms of familiarity which shocked his Russian favorites. When one Dutch captain said he still preferred Archangel to St. Petersburg and the Tsar asked why, the captain cheekily replied that there were no pancakes in St. Petersburg. "Come to court tomorrow," Peter replied, "and you will have your fill of pancakes."

When foreign seamen became embroiled in disputes with Russians, Peter hurried to the defense. Once, a Dutch merchant vessel, maneuvering into the crowded harbor of Kronstadt, accidentally rammed a Russian frigate, breaking its accommodation ladder. The Russian captain was furious, although the apologetic Dutch captain offered to pay for the damage. Un-appeased, the Russian sent a guard of Russian soldiers and sailors on board the merchantman and demanded ten times the appropriate sum. Peter was at Kronstadt and, hearing of the commotion, rowed out to the frigate to inspect the damage. Seeing that no harm had been done except to the ladder, which could be repaired in a few hours, he became enraged at his frigate captain. "In three hours," he said, "I will return and I expect to see the ladder of your ship repaired." Three hours later, the Tsar returned to find the ladder repaired but unpainted. "Paint the ladder red," he commanded, "and in the future, let foreigners receive nothing at your hands but marks of politeness and friendship."

It was typical of Peter's character that in the middle of a war, with a new army, a new navy, a new capital and a new national economy all under construction, he should also begin to dig a new system of canals at different points in Russia. It was not that they were unneeded. The distances in Russia were so vast and the roads so poor that commercial goods as well as individual travelers faced almost insurmountable obstacles in moving from place to place. This problem had always bedeviled the effort to bring products from deep inside the giant nation to the seaports for export; now, it presented itself even more acutely in the form of transporting the quantities of grain and other foodstuffs which were needed to feed St. Petersburg. The solution had been provided in large part by nature, which had equipped Russia with a magnificent network of rivers—the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga and the Dvina. Although all these rivers except the Dvina flowed south, it still remained possible to haul goods northward, upstream, by the sheer brute force of human and animal labor. What remained was to connect this far-flung tracery of natural water routes with a system of canals which linked the rivers at vital points.

Peter's first herculean effort was to try to link the Volga with the Don and thus, by his possession of Azov at the mouth of the Don, give most of the Russian heartland access to the Black Sea. For more than ten years, thousands of men labored to dig a canal and build stone locks, but the project was abandoned when Peter was forced to return Azov to the Turks. The growth of St. Petersburg inspired a second vision: linking the whole of Russia to the Baltic by connecting the Volga to the Neva. By extensive surveying, Peter located in the region of Tver and Novgorod a tributary of the Volga which ran within less than a mile of another stream which flowed, through many lakes and rivers, into Lake Ladoga, which emptied into the Neva. The key was a small canal at Vyshny-Volochok. It took 20,000 men four years to dig the canal with the necessary locks, but when it was finished, the Caspian Sea was linked by water with St. Petersburg, the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean. Thereafter, a stream of flat-bottomed barges loaded with grain, oak timbers and other products of southern and central Russia, along with the goods of Persia and the East, moved slowly but continuously across the face of Russia.

Naturally, there were difficulties and opposition. Prince Boris Golitsyn, assigned to oversee the first of these projects, grumbled that "God made the rivers go one way and it was presumption in man to think to turn them another." The flow of river traffic was sometimes impeded when the stone locks of Vyshny-Volochok canal silted up and had to be redredged. But this was a minor obstacle compared to the hazards faced on Lake Ladoga. The surface of this mighty inland lake, the largest in Europe, was sometimes whipped by wind into a violence worthy of an ocean, and often the waves overwhelmed the unwieldy, flat-bottomed river barges which had to have an exceptionally shallow draft to pass through the Vyshny-Volochok canal. When storm winds howling down from the north caught these clumsy river craft on the open lake, the boats either capsized or were driven onto the southern shore of the lake and broken in pieces. Every year, gale winds sank or drove ashore hundreds of barges, with the loss of their cargoes. Peter ordered the construction of a special fleet of lake boats with hulls and keels deeper than the shallow barges, to be used for the passage across Lake Ladoga. But this required unloading and reloading which were far too expensive and time-consuming with cargoes such as grain, hay and timber. His next move was to look for a way of avoiding the lake passage. In 1718, he decided to cut a canal through the swampy land along the southern shore of the lake from the River Volkhov to the mouth of the Neva at Schlusselburg. The total distance would be sixty-six miles.

The project was first entrusted to Menshikov, who knew nothing of engineering, but was anxious to accept any assignment which might win him favor with Peter. Menshikov spent more than two million roubles and squandered the lives of 7,000 workmen, who died of hunger and disease because of bad administration. A great deal of needless work was done even before the basic decision had been made whether it was better to dig the canal in the earth behind the shoreline or to try to wall off part of the lake with dikes. The Tsar was on the point of abandoning the work when he encountered a German engineer, Burkhard Christopher von Munnich, who had extensive experience building dikes and canals in North Germany and Denmark. Once Munnich took over, the work proceeded more efficiently, and in 1720 Weber wrote: "I am credibly informed that this work is in such an advanced state as to be ready next summer and that consequently the trade between the Baltic and the Caspian Sea, or between all Russia and Persia will be upon a sure foot, though still with the inconvenience that ships coming from Kazan might be near two years on their way." Weber was badly misinformed, and by 1725, when Peter died, the Emperor had seen only twenty miles of the great canal (it was seventy feet wide and sixteen feet deep) actually dug. After Peter's death, Menshikov frowned on the engineer, and it was not until 1732, in the reign of Empress Anne, that the canal was finished and Munnich triumphantly escorted the Empress in a procession of state barges along the entire length of the prodigious waterway.

Today, the great canal system of Russia initiated by Peter forms a giant artery of commerce for the Soviet Union. The canals permit large ships to pass to and fro, up and down the rivers of Russia from the Black Sea and the Caspian to the White Sea and the Baltic. During the White Nights in Leningrad, one can sit on the Neva embankment and, after midnight, when the city's bridges have gone up, watch a long procession of ocean-sized cargo ships pass like silent mammoths up the river, bound for the interior of Russia a thousand miles away.

Everything had to be paid for. Relentlessly and remorselessly, the war and the great construction projects sucked up the lifeblood and treasure of Russia. Although Peter repeatedly emphasized to his officials that taxes should be levied "without unduly burdening the people," his own constant demand for funds overruled this sentiment. Taxes crushed every article and activity of daily life, yet the state never collected enough money to pay its mounting expenses. In 1701, the army and navy swallowed up three quarters of the revenues; in 1710, four fifths; and in 1724, even though the war was over, two thirds. When money was short, Peter slashed the salaries of all officials, temporal and spiritual, excepting only those most necessary to the realm: "foreign artisans, soldiers and sailors." In 1723, there was so little cash that some government officials were paid in furs.

The only solution, until growing commercial and industrial activity could expand the tax base, was to lay still heavier taxes on the burdened nation. Hitherto, the basic tax had been the old household tax, determined by a census taken in 1678 during the reign of Tsar Fedor. This tax was laid on every village and landowner according to the number of houses and farms possessed (and made for crowded living because, to avoid taxation, as many families and people as possible crowded under one roof). In 1710, believing that the population must have increased, Peter ordered a new census. To his astonishment, the new census showed that in thirty years the number of households had decreased by from one fifth to one quarter. There was some real justification for this: Peter had drained off hundreds of thousands of men into the army, the shipyards at Voronezh, the work on the canals and the building of St. Petersburg, while thousands more had fled into the forest or to the frontier. But the new low figures also represented the helplessness of the government to overcome the stratagems of both nobility and peasants who were determined to evade taxes. Bribing the commissioners who counted the houses was a preliminary gambit. If this failed, the peasants simply removed their houses from the commissioners' sight. Russian peasant houses were largely made of logs or timbers notched at four corners. Thus, they could be un-notched in a few hours and either removed to the forest or scattered about. The census takers and tax collectors knew the trick, but there was little they could do about it.

Upon his return from France, Peter decided to approach the problem differently, replacing the household tax with a version of the individual head tax he had observed in France. The tax-paying unit of this new poll tax was to be the "soul": that is, every male from infant to grandfather in every village, town or peasant commune. But before the new tax could be levied, a new census was required. On November 26, 1718, a decree ordered that every Russian male except noblemen, churchmen and certain privileged merchants (all of whom were taxed differently) be inscribed Again, opposition was intense but by 1722, a census had been compiled, listing 5,794,928 male "souls" and in 1724 the soul tax was collected for the first time. Peasants were assessed at 74 kopeks or 114 kopeks per year, depending on whether they worked on private or state land. In terms of revenue, the tax was an enormous success, producing half of the state income that year and continuing in use through most of the nineteenth century until 1887, when it was abolished, by Alexander III.

The soul tax solved Peter's problem of revenue, but at the cost of placing an even heavier burden on the peasants and strengthening the bonds of the serfdom that tethered them to the land. In earlier times, Russian peasants had been free to move where they wished, a right that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for landowners to meet their needs for labor. This crisis intensified in the middle of the sixteenth century when Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan and Astrachan, opening to Russian colonization vast regions of virgin black earth previously inhabited by nomads. By the thousands and hundreds of thousands, Russian peasants abandoned the forest to the north and poured into this flat, rich country. Farms and villages in central Russia were left uninhabited; whole provinces were semi-deserted. Landowners, threatened with ruin, appealed to the state, and the state, unable to collect taxes from empty villages, reacted. Beginning in the 1550's, decrees forbidding peasants to leave the land were issued. Runaway peasants were pursued, and in 1649 it was declared that any person who harbored them was liable to their landlord for his losses. In Peter's time, over ninety-five percent of the people were serfs; some were state peasants and some belonged to private landlords, but all were bound for life to the land they worked.

Peter's new soul tax placed the peasants even more firmly in the hands of the landowners. Once the population of a district had been counted by the census, the landowners and local authorities were responsible to the state for producing the tax revenue based on that population; actual collection of the money was left up to them. To assist landowners in keeping track of their peasants and extracting these taxes, Peter decreed in 1722 that serfs could not leave a landowner's estate without his written permission. This was the origin of the internal-passport system which continues in use in the Soviet Union today. Eventually, the power placed in the hands of the landowners—to collect taxes, to control movement, to dictate work, to punish infractions—made each landowner a little government unto himself. Where his ability to enforce was threatened, he was supported by the intervention of army regiments permanently billeted throughout the countryside. In time, to increase the controls on peasant movement, any serf wanting to leave the land was required to get not only the landowner's written permission, but written permission from the army as well. The result was a hereditary, all-embracing system of permanent servitude.

Most Russian serfs were bonded to the land, but not all. One great obstacle to persuading Russian noblemen and merchants to open new factories had been the difficulty of finding labor. To overcome this, Peter decreed in January 1721 that factory and mine owners could have factory serfs—that is, laborers permanently attached to the factory or mine in which their labor took place. Underscoring the key importance of building new industry, the Tsar also waived the strict rules about returning runaway serfs. Those serfs, he declared, who had fled their landowners to find work in factories should not be returned, but should remain where they were as permanent industrial serfs.

In the end, Peter's tax policies were a success for the state and a massive burden for the people. When the Emperor died, the state did not owe a kopek. Peter had fought twenty-one years of war, constructed a fleet, a new capital, new harbors and canals without the aid of a single foreign loan or subsidy (indeed, it was he who paid subsidies to his allies, especially Augustus of Poland). Every kopek was raised by the toil and sacrifice of the Russian people within a single generation. He did not float internal loans so that future generations could help to pay for his projects, nor did he devalue the currency by issuing paper money as Goertz had done on behalf of Charles XII of Sweden. Instead, he laid the entire burden on his contemporary Russians. They strained, they struggled, they opposed, they cursed. But they obeyed.

60

SUPREME UNDER GOD

In matters of religion, Peter was an eighteenth- rather than a seventeenth-century man, secular and rationalist rather than devout and mystical. He cared more about trade and national prosperity than about dogma or interpretations of Scripture; none of his wars was fought over religion. Yet, personally, Peter believed in God. He accepted God's omnipotence and saw His hand in everything: life and death, victory and defeat. His letters are studded with the phrase "Thanks be to God"; every victory was promptly celebrated with a Te Deum. He believed that tsars were more responsible to God than commoners were, as tsars were entrusted with the duty to rule, but he did not enshrine the role of monarchy in anything so theoretical or philosophical as the Divine Right of Kings. Peter simply approached religion as he approached everything else: What seemed reasonable? What was practical? What worked best? The best way to serve God, he believed, was to work for the strength and prosperity of Russia.

Peter enjoyed going to church. As a child, he was thoroughly drilled in the Bible and the liturgy, and as tsar he made an effort to spread accurately written Bibles throughout his realm. He loved choral singing, the only music of the Orthodox Church, and it was his lifelong habit to push his way forward through the standing crowd and take his place to sing .with the choir. Orthodox congregations are less disciplined than those of other faiths: People stand through the service and move about, coming and going, signaling, whispering and smiling among themselves. Peter accepted this, but he would not tolerate people talking openly during a service. When he heard such an offender, he immediately collected a fine of one rouble. Later, he erected a pillory in front of a church in St. Petersburg for those who spoke during the service.

Respect for the service was more important to Peter than the form of the service. To the despair of many of his countrymen— especially the leaders of the Russian church—Peter's tolerance of other Christian sects was greater than ever experienced before in Holy Orthodox Russia. Peter had early understood that if he was to recruit foreigners in sufficient numbers, he would have to permit them to worship according to their own traditions. This view was reinforced in 1697 by his first visit to Amsterdam, which allowed people of all nations to practice any form of religion as long as they did not disturb the established church or the churches of other foreigners. "It is our belief that the religious ceremonies of those who have come to reside among us are of little consequence to the state, providing that they contain nothing contrary to our law," Witsen had explained. This toleration, Peter noted later, "contributed greatly to the influx of foreigners and consequently increased public revenues," adding, "I intend to imitate Amsterdam in my city of St. Petersburg."

As much as possible, he did so. Foreigners in Russia were permitted to have their own councils to rule on marriages and other eccelesiastical matters without being subject to Russian laws or the control of the Russian church. Late in his reign, Peter issued decrees recognizing the validity of Protestant and Catholic baptisms and permitting marriages between Russian Orthodox believers and members of other faiths, providing the children were brought up as Orthodox. Both these laws eased the path of

Swedish prisoners now settled in Russia who desired to marry Russian women. Toleration was also state policy toward members of other religions, Christian or non-Christian, in other parts of the Russian empire. In the Baltic provinces conquered from Sweden, Peter agreed that the Lutheran religion should be preserved as the state church, and this guarantee became an article in the Treaty of Nystad. In the vast khanate of Kazan and other regions where the majority of the people were Moslem, Peter made no effort to convert them to Christianity; he knew that such an effort would probably fail and might provoke rebellion.

To a considerable degree, Peter was even tolerant of Old Believers, whom the church vociferously condemned and persecuted. For Peter, the crucial point was whether their religious beliefs helped or harmed the state; their desire to cross themselves with two fingers instead of three mattered little to him. Thousands of Old Believers, fleeing persecution, had formed new settlements in the forests of northern Russia. In 1702, when Peter was traveling south from Archangel with five battalions of the Guard, he was to pass through this region, and the Old Believers, assuming that they were to be attacked, gathered in their wooden churches, locked the doors and prepared to burn themselves to death rather than recant. But Peter had no such intention. "Let them live as they like," he said, and moved south to fight the Swedes. Subsequently, when iron ore was discovered nearby in the vicinity of Olonets, a number of Old Believers went to work in the mines and forges and proved to be a good workmen. This was even more to Peter's liking; it was a useful fruit of toleration. "Let them believe what they like, for if reason cannot turn them from their superstitions, neither fire nor sword can do it. It is foolish to make them martyrs. They are unworthy of the honor and would not in this way be of use to the state."

Granted this latitude, the Old Believers continued to live quietly in remote regions, refusing to submit to church authority, but paying taxes and living irreproachable lives. In time, however, as the war made huge demands on Russian labor, Peter began to see their withdrawal into the forests not just as religious conservatism but also as political opposition. In February 1716, he decreed that a census of Old Believers be taken, that they be subjected to a double tax and that, in order to encourage public derision and shame them back into the arms of the established church, they be required to wear a bit of yellow cloth on their backs. Inevitably, the result was that the Old Believers exhibited the badge proudly, their numbers increased and, to escape taxes, they fled even farther from the reach of government control. Toward the end of his life, Peter's tolerance of them had largely faded. In an exasperated effort to diminish their numbers, he began sending them to Siberia, then rescinded that order because "there are enough of them there already." In 1724, all Old Believers except peasants who wished to keep their beards were required to wear a copper medallion that depicted a beard—and for this medallion they paid handsomely.

Although Peter tolerated a wide variety of religious worship in Russia, there was one Christian order which he disliked: the Jesuits. (Other brotherhoods of Catholic priests and monks were welcome in Russia; the Franciscans and the Capuchins even possessed small monasteries.) Originally, the Jesuits also had been free to hold services in Moscow and to travel freely through Russia on their way to the court of the great Manchu Emperor of China, K'ang-hsi. In time, however, Peter began to suspect that their religious zeal was largely a facade behind which they were reaching for political power. Confirmation of Jesuit worldliness, in Peter's view, came from the close relationship between the order and the Imperial government in Vienna, and eventually he decreed that "all Jesuits are earnestly commanded by virtue of these Letters Patent to quit the Russian dominions within four days after notice having given them, the world being sufficiently apprised of their dangerous machinations, and how common it is for them to meddle with politic affairs." Yet, Peter did not demand the closing of the Catholic church in St. Petersburg. He permitted the parish to send for replacement priests, insisting only that they not be Jesuits and that they not claim protection from the court of Austria.

In other countries, Peter's well-known tolerance inspired in the heads of other churches the hope that, through him, their own faith might gain a foothold or even predominance in Russia. There was no possibility of this. Peter's interest in other Christian faiths was a matter of curiosity about the service and the institutions of administration. He never considered any form of religious conversion. Nevertheless, in 1717, while Peter was in Paris, a group of divines at the Faculty of Divinity at the Sorbonne proposed uniting the churches of Rome and Moscow by "observing a certain moderation of doctrine on both sides." The project worried some of the Protestant envoys in St. Petersburg because of the political implications of any such unity. Thus, it was with satisfaction that Weber reported that the proposal stood little chance. "Neither is it probable that the Tsar, after having suppressed the Patriarchal Authority in Russia, will subject himself and his dominions to a far greater dependency on the Pope. ... It is needless to mention that difficulty concerning the marriage of priests which is looked upon in Russia as sacred, and other controverted points, about which both churches are never likely to agree."

In preserving the predominance of Orthodoxy in Russia, Peter demanded of the church that it make itself useful to society. In his view, the most useful thing that Russian priests could do, besides saving souls, was to teach. There were no schools, and priests were the only channel by which enlightenment could come to the Russian peasantry scattered across the immense land. But, for this purpose, the clergy seemed a woefully inadequate instrument. Many priests were hopelessly ignorant and unshakably lazy. Some were as superstitious as their parishioners. Few had any knowledge of how to preach, and therefore such education and morality as they did possess could not be transmitted. Attempting to overcome this deficiency, Peter sent a number of country priests to Kiev and other theological schools to learn not just theology, but how to speak in public.

Beyond what might be called the innocent ignorance of the Russian clergy, there was another failing which drove the Tsar into a rage. This was the widespread superstition of the Russian people and the playing on this trait by certain unscrupulous people, including members of the clergy. The common people believed in everyday miracles—believed that by the intercession of a specific icon of Christ, the Virgin Mary or one of the special Russian saints, a miraculous personal advantage might be obtained. Unquestioning belief made fertile ground for charlatans. When Peter came upon this kind of unscrupulous priest, his anger flared. One priest in St. Petersburg, for example, persuaded the people that a picture of the Virgin Mary which he kept in his house could work miracles, but only those who could pay were allowed access. "Though he carried on this trade with great circumspection in the night-time and took all imaginable care in recommending secrecy to his customers, yet the Tsar got information of it," said Weber. "The priest's house was searched and the miraculous image fetched away, which the Tsar caused to be brought to him in order to see whether it could perform miracles in His Majesty's presence. But the priest, at the sight of it, threw himself at the Tsar's feet and confessed his imposture, for which he was carried to the fortress and suffered heavy corporal punishment, and was afterward degraded from his office in order to be made an example to his brethren."

Not surprisingly, the impostures which angered Peter most were those which challenged or threatened his own will. On one occasion, a peasant who disliked being forced to live in St. Petersburg prophesied that the following September the Neva would flood so high that it would cover an ancient and lofty ash tree which stood near a church. People immediately began to move themselves and their belongings to higher ground. Peter, furious at this interruption of his plans for the city, ordered the tree cut down and the peasant imprisoned until September. At the end of that month, when no sign of the threatened inundation had appeared, the population was summoned to the site of the tree stump, on which a scaffold had been built. The rustic seer was brought, lifted onto the scaffold and given fifty lashes with the knout while the crowd was lectured on the foolhardiness of listening to false prophets.

A more sophisticated religous hoax simultaneously provoked Peter's wrath and stimulated his curiosity. In 1720, an icon of the Virgin Mary in a church in St. Petersburg was said to be shedding tears because she was obliged to live in so dismal a part of the world. Chancellor Golovkin heard the report and went to the church, forcing his way through a dense crowd which had gathered to marvel at the phenomenon. Golovkin immediately sent for Peter, who was a day's journey away, inspecting the Ladoga Canal. Peter came at once, traveling all night, and went directly to the church. The priests took him to the miraculous icon, which at that moment was dry-eyed, although numerous spectators assured him that they had seen tears. Peter stared up at the icon, which was covered with paint and thick varnish, and decided that something about it looked suspicious. He ordered it lifted down from its elevated position and brought to his palace, where in the presence of the Chancellor, many noblemen, the leaders of the clergy and the priests who had been present when the icon was taken down, he proceeded to examine it. He soon found several tiny holes in the corners of the eyes which the shadows created by the curve of the eyes made invisible from below. Turning the icon around, he stripped away the cloth that covered it behind. A little cavity had been hollowed out of the wooden plank, and in it was a small residue of congealed oil. "Here is the source of the miraculous tears," Peter declared, summoning everyone present to come close and see for themselves. The congealed oil remained solid as long as the icon was in a cold place, he explained, but during a service, when the surrounding air was heated by the burning candles placed before the icon, the oil became fluid and the Virgin "wept." Peter was delighted with the ingenuity of the mechanism and kept the icon for his Cabinet of Curiosities. But he was extremely angry at the charlatan who had invoked supersition to threaten his new city. The perpetrator was found "and so severely chastised that no one afterward thought proper to attempt anything of a similar nature."

Along with tightening discipline among the priesthood and stamping out charlatanism and superstition, Peter set himself to bring piety and utility to Russian monasteries. The Tsar himself was not opposed to the monastic ideal of poverty, scholarship and devotion to God. As a young man, he had paid a respectful visit to the great Solovetsky Monastery on the White Sea, and in 1712 he had founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg. What distressed him was the extent to which Russian monasteries had strayed from their ideal. There were more than 557 monasteries and convents in Russia in Peter's day, housing more than 14,000 monks and 10,000 nuns, and some of these institutions possessed great wealth. In 1723, the 151 monasteries in the vicinity of Moscow owned 242,198 male serfs—Troitskaya Sergeeva, the richest of them, owned 20,394 peasant houses—and the number was constantly growing, as Russian noblemen and wealthy merchants competed to give money and land to monasteries in order to assist their own salvation.

For all their wealth, little that Peter found useful emerged from these retreats. No notable scholarship or learning was being produced in monasteries in Peter's time, and the charity dispensed under their walls simply attracted swarms of army deserters, runaway serfs, "hale and lazy beggars, enemies to God and useless hands," in Peter's scornful words. The Tsar considered many of the monks to be parasites, sunk in sloth and superstition, whose growth in number and decline in holiness threatened the state.

Peter began to restrict the role of Russian monasteries soon after the death of the Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Administration of these institutions was turned over to a new state office, the Monastery Office, headed by a layman, Boyar Ivan Musin-Pushkin. All money and property belonging to the monasteries were to be managed by this office "in order to enable the monks and nuns to better fulfill their religious duties." The number of new monks was drastically limited by forbidding the taking of holy vows by noblemen, officials of the government, minors and anyone who could not read or write. In time, any person desiring to take holy orders had to receive permission from the Tsar. Simultaneously, all monasteries containing fewer than thirty monks were closed and converted into parish churches or schools. The monks from these small institutions were transferred to larger houses.

As ruler of the state, Peter was basically concerned with the structure and role of the church as an institution and the relation of that institution to the state. Despite the blow at church independence struck by Tsar Alexis when he removed the Patriarch Nikon, the Patriarchy still wielded considerable autonomous power when Peter came to the throne. It possessed its own administrative, judicial and fiscal offices. It taxed the inhabitants of its immense landholdings. It judged all questions of marriage, adultery, divorce, wills and inheritance, as well as disputes between husbands and wives, parents and children, laity and clergy. The Patriarch Adrian, who took office when Peter was eighteen, was not as strong a personality as Nikon, but as an arch-conservative he was constantly interfering in Peter's personal life: protesting the time he spent with foreigners, demanding that Peter change the Western clothes he preferred, insisting that he spend more time with Eudoxia. Not surprisingly, the young Tsar wished that he might somehow be rid of both the personal irritation and the conservative policies which the Patriarch embodied.

As it happened, Adrian died suddenly in October 1700 while Peter was with the army besieging Narva. The Tsar had given no thought to the choice of a successor; he knew only that he wanted a man who could not challenge his own supreme power and who would support the changes he might wish to make in the structure and authority of the church. No such candidate seemed available, and he lacked time to make a search. Rather than appoint the wrong man, and unwilling to risk confusing and dividing the country by doing away with the office, Peter compromised. He preserved the office of Patriarch, but declared the throne "temporarily vacant." To provide the church with interim leadership, he appointed a "temporary" guardian whose indefinite status would not permit him to become a true focus of power. Then, satisfied with this arrangement, he simply let the matter drift. Whenever the clergy urged, as it did strongly and repeatedly, that a new Patriarch be appointed, Peter replied that he was too busy with the war to give the choice the deep thought necessary.

Peter had chosen as temporary Guardian Exarch the forty-two-year-old Metropolitan of Ryazan, Stephen Yavorksy, a Ukrainian monk trained in the Jesuit-inspired Orthodox academy in Kiev, where the level of church scholarship and general culture was higher than among the purely Muscovite Orthodox clergy. As professor of theolgoy at the academy and a frequent orator in the city's great Santa Sophia Cathedral, Yavorsky made an impressive figure. His deep, sonorous voice, his dramatic gestures, his skillful blend of scholarship and anecdote moved his large audiences easily from laughter to tears. Peter had never heard such oratory in a Russian church, and whenever possible—at church ceremonies, public dedications or military triumphs—he asked that Yavorsky preach. But in giving office to Yavorsky, Peter did not equip him even temporarily with all the authority formerly held by the Patriarch. The actual administration of church properties, as well as the taxing of all inhabitants of ecclesiastical lands, was turned over to the new Monastery Office headed by Musin-Pushkin. Thereafter, most church income went directly into the state Treasury, which, in turn, paid the salaries of church officials.

Yavorsky was never really happy in his office. He was not ambitious, and soon he was looking back wistfully on the calmer, more reclusive life he had led in Kiev. In 1712, he begged Peter to release him from his assignment. "Where shall I go from your spirit and how shall I flee from your face?" he wrote despairingly to the Tsar. "I will not go to a foreign realm, for your power is given to you by God. In Moscow or in Ryazan—everywhere your sovereign power reigns over me. It is impossible to hide from it." Peter, having no one to replace him with, always refused Yavorsky's appeals until, with the passage of time, Yavorsky began to grow stronger in his office; he began to support his fellow churchmen in their confrontation with civilian authorities; he began to protest the extent to which church revenues were being diverted from religious purposes to support the army and the war. Even his sermons began to take a turn which Peter did not like: He preached against husbands who had persuaded their wives to enter a convent so that the husbands could remarry—a thrust whose most prominent target was obvious to all. In 1712, Yavorsky used the occasion of the Feast of St. Alexis to speak of the Tsarevich Alexis as "our only hope." Peter was not present, but a copy of the sermon was brought to him. He read it carefully, annotating it with his pen. Unwilling to make Yavorsky a martyr, he did not retaliate, but sent word to the churchman that he should not admonish in public before doing so in private. Yavorsky apologized, "writing with tears, not with ink," and remained in office, although for a while Peter forbade him to preach.

Thereafter, Peter found a new instrument with which to reform the church. This was another Ukrainian monk from Kiev, much younger than Yavorsky, more sophisticated, more practical and infinitely more forceful. Feofan Prokopovich was a modern eighteenth-century man who happened to be a cleric. He was an administrator, a reformer, a polemicist, even a propagandist, and he concurred completely in Peter's desire to modernize and secularize the Russian church. For a Russian churchman, Prokopovich was a man of extraordinary learning—he had read Erasmus, Luther, Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke. An orphan in childhood, Prokopovich was educated by his uncle, a learned monk and rector of the academy in Kiev, and went on to Jesuit colleges in Poland and then to a special college in Rome. There, he studied theology, took Catholic orders and, in 1700 at the age of twenty-two, witnesses the coronation of Pope Clement XI. The effect of his three years in Rome, however, was to instill in Prokopovich a permanent dislike of the Papacy and the Roman church. Returning to the Kiev academy, he taught philosophy, rhetoric, poetics and literature, lecturing to his students in Latin. He pioneered in introducing arithmetic, geometry and physics into the curriculum. While still in his twenties, he wrote a five-act play in verse, dramatizing the theme of the bringing of Christianity to Russia in the tenth century by Vladimir, Prince of Kiev. In 1706, Peter visited Kiev and heard Prokopovich preach in Santa Sophia. In the crisis of 1708, when Mazeppa betrayed the Tsar in favor of Charles XII, Prokopovich quickly took Peter's side. Prince Golitsyn, Governor of Kiev, responded to Peter's question about the loyalty of the higher clergy in the city by saying, "All the monks avoid us. In all of Kiev I have found only one man, the prefect of the academy [Prokopovich], who is well disposed toward us." In 1709, following the Russian victory at Poltava, the Tsar returned to Kiev, where Prokovich welcomed him as "His Most Sacred Majesty, the Tsar of All the Russias" and preached a sermon filled with superlatives. In 1711, Prokopovich accompanied Peter on the disastrous campaign on the Pruth, and later that year, at the age of thirty-one, he was appointed rector of the Kiev academy. In 1716, the Tsar summoned him to St. Petersburg, and Prokopovich left Kiev, never to return.

Unlike Yavorsky, Prokopovich firmly supported Peter's attempts to subordinate the church to the state. Vockerodt, secretary to the Prussian minister Mardefelt, commented that he found in Prokopovich, apart from wide learning, "an ardent concern for the good of the country, even at the expense of the clergy's interests." Prokopovich's antagonism toward the "beards of the church" was further stimulated by their support of the Tsarevich Alexis, and on Palm Sunday, April 6, 1718, as the leaders of the church were being asked to judge the Tsarevich, Prokopovich thundered from the pulpit on the power and glory of the tsar and the holy duty of all subjects to obey the temporal power. "The supreme authority is established and armed with the sword of God, and to oppose it is a sin against God himself," he cried. He dealt harshly with the idea that the clergy was exempt from loyalty and service to the sovereign: "The clergy, like the army, the civil administration, doctors and artisans, is subject to the state. The clergy is another order of rank of the people and not a separate state." Naturally enough, the rest of the clergy accused Prokopovich of sycophancy, opportunism, hypocrisy and ambition. When Peter nominated him as Archbishop of Pskov and Narva, the Moscow clergy accused him of heretical Protestant leanings.

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 Ecclesiastical Regulation. On Prokopovich'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-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."

It was Peter's belief that magnificence of ornament and display had nothing to do with greatness. He always remembered the simplicity of the royal palaces in England and Holland and the restraint and modesty shown by William III, who was the ruler of two of the wealthiest nations in Europe. Nor did Peter care for bombastic flattery. When two Dutchmen toasted him overlavishly, Peter laughed. "Bravo, my friends. Thank you," he said, shaking his head. In his relations with people of all ranks, Peter's manners were free and easy. He rarely observed protocol. He hated long, ceremonial banquets; such occasions, he said, had been invented "to punish the great and rich for their sins." At official banquets, he always gave the place of honor to Romodanovsky or Menshikov and seated himself near the end of the table in order to be able to escape. When he rode through the streets, it was in a small, open, two-wheeled carriage, like a Victorian loveseat on wheels, with room only for himself and one other passenger (one foreigner declared scornfully that no respectable Moscow merchant would set foot in so petty a vehicle). In winter, he used a simple one-horse sledge with a single attendant, who sat beside him. Peter still preferred walking to riding—on foot, he could see more and could stop to take a second look. He spoke to everyone he met.

Peter's habit of walking freely among his people carried personal danger. There were reasons enough for an assassin to strike; indeed, many believed he was the Antichrist. One summer when Peter was attending a meeting in his Summer Palace on the Fontanka, a stranger quietly stole into the palace antechamber. In his hand, he carried a small colored bag similar to those in which secretaries and clerks brought papers for the Tsar to sign. The man waited quietly, attracting no attention, until Peter walked into the room, escorting his ministers to the door. At this point, the stranger stood up, drew something from his bag, wrapped the bag around it to conceal it and moved toward Peter. The Tsar's attendants did not block him, assuming that he was an orderly or servant of one of the ministers. At the last minute, however, a dentchik stepped forward and took the stranger's arm. A scuffle followed and, as Peter turned, a knife with a six-inch blade fell to the floor. Peter asked the man what he had meant to do. "To assassinate you," the stranger replied. "But why? Have I done you any harm?" Peter asked. "No, but you have done harm to my brethren and religion," said the man, declaring that he was an Old Believer.

Assassins did not frighten Peter, but there were creatures before which he trembled: cockroaches. When he traveled, he never entered a house until he had been-assured that no cockroaches were present and his own room had been carefully swept by his own servants. This followed an episode in which Peter, as a guest at dinner in a country house, asked if his host ever had cockroaches. "Not many," the host replied, "and to chase them away, I have pinned a living one to the wall." He pointed to the place where the insect was pinned, still squirming, not far from the Tsar. With a roar, Peter leaped from the table, gave his host a tremendous blow and rushed out of the house.

Peter's hasty temper and his habit of disciplining subordinates with a stick or his fists never left him. No one close to the Tsar was immune, although usually, once the blows had been delivered, calm quickly returned. A typical incident occurred one day in St. Petersburg when Peter was driving in his small gig with Lieutenant General Anthony Devier, the Commissioner of Police in St. Petersburg, in which capacity he was responsible for the condition of roads and bridges in the capital. On this day, Peter's carriage was crossing a small bridge over the Moika Canal when the Tsar noticed that several planks were missing and others loose. Stopping the carriage, Peter jumped out and ordered the dentchik accompanying him to repair the bridge at once. While the planks were being fastened in place, Peter took his cane to Devier's back. "This is a punishment for negligence," he said. "It will teach you to make the rounds and be sure that everything is safe and in good condition." Once the bridge was repaired, Peter turned to Devier and said in a pleasant tone, "Get in, brother. Sit down," and the two drove off as if nothing had happened.

Peter's blows fell equally on great and small. Once, when his yacht was becalmed for an entire day between Kronstadt and St. Petersburg, the Tsar went down to his cabin to sleep after midday dinner. Before his two hours were up, he was awakened by noises on deck. Furious, he went topside and found the deck deserted except for a small black page sitting quietly on the stair ladder. Peter grabbed the boy and caned him, saying, "Learn to be more quiet and not wake me when I sleep." But the boy had not been guilty; the noise had been made by the Tsar's doctor, an engineer and two naval officers, who had fled and hid when they heard Peter mounting the ladder. After the canning, they crept back and warned the boy against telling the truth, on pain of another beating. An hour later, Peter reappeared on deck, now cheeful from his rest. Astonished to see the boy still weeping, he asked him why. "Because you have chastised me cruelly and unjustly," the boy replied, naming those who had actually been responsible for the noise. "Well," said Peter, "since I have punished you this time undeservedly, the next folly you commit shall be pardoned." A few days later, when Peter was about to cane the boy again, the page reminded him of his statement. "True," said the Tsar. "I remember and forgive you this time, as you have been punished by anticipation."

His outbursts could be terrifying. One day, Peter was working in the Turning Room of the Summer Palace, making a large ivory chandelier in the company of his chief turner Andrei Nartov and a young apprentice whom Peter liked for his gaiety and forth-rightness. The apprentice had orders to quietly remove the Emperor's hat whenever Peter sat down without taking it off. This time, grabbing the hat in haste, the apprentice pulled a lock of hair. Roaring with anger, Peter leaped to his feet and chased the young man, threatening to kill him. The apprentice escaped by hiding, and the next day Peter, his anger forgotten, returned to the lathe. "That cursed boy had no mercy on me," he laughed, "but he hurt me more than he intended, and I am very glad that his flight was quicker than my pursuit." Several more days passed and Peter noticed that the apprentice still had not returned to work. He told Nartov to look for him and assure him that he could return without fear, but the young man still could not be found, even by the police. In fact, he had fled St. Petersburg, first to a little village on Lake Ladoga and then to Vologda on the Dvina River, where he pretended to be an orphan and was taken in by a glazier, who taught him his trade. Ten years later, on Peter's death, the young man dared to reveal his real name and return to St. Petersburg. Nartov told him of the Tsar's pardon and rehired him, and he worked at court through the reigns of Empresses Anne and Elizabeth.

With the passage of time, Peter tried to correct his temper, and although he never fully succeeded, he was aware of it as a flaw. "I am sensible that I have my faults," he said, "and that I easily lose my temper. For which reason I am not offended with those who are on familiar terms with me when they tell me of it and remonstrate with me, as does my Catherine."

Indeed, it was Catherine who could best—and sometimes only—deal with Peter's temper. She was not afraid of him, and he knew that. Once, when she persisted in mentioning a subject which irritated him, he flew into a rage and smashed a handsome Venetian mirror, shouting ominously, "Thus can I destroy the most beautiful object in my palace!" Catherine understood the threat, but looked him in the eye and replied calmly, "And have you made the palace more beautiful by doing so?" Wisely, she never opposed her husband directly, but searched for a way to make him look at matters from a new angle. On one occasion, she used his favorite dog, Lisette, to mollify his anger. Wherever he went at home, this small duncolored Italian greyhound followed, and during his afternoon nap she always lay at his feet. It happened that Peter was furious at a member of the court whom he thought guilty of corruption and who was in grave danger of the knout. Everyone at court, including Catherine, was convinced of the unhappy courtier's innocence, but all appeals to the Tsar had only made him angrier. Finally, to obtain peace around him, Peter had forbidden everyone, including the Tsaritsa, to present any petition or speak to him on the subject. Catherine did not give up. Instead, she composed a short, pathetic petition in the name of Lisette, presenting strong evidence of the innocence of the accused and begging, on the ground of Lisette's total fidelity to her master, for a pardon. Then she tied the petition to Lisette's collar. On Peter's return from the Senate, the faithful Lisette leaped joyfully about him as usual. Peter saw the petition, read it, smiled wearily and said, "Well, Lisette, as this is the first time you have asked, I grant your prayer."

Although he hated formality, there were some ceremonies which Peter enjoyed hugely, and others which he accepted dutifully as obligations of the ruler of the state. Above all, he loved the launching of a new ship; generally frugal, he did not mind spending large sums to celebrate this kind of event, and crowds flocked to the Admiralty to share in his largess. The occasion always demanded an enormous banquet on the decks of the new vessel, and the Tsar, his face shining, his voice excited, could be found at the center of all activity, accompanied by his family, including his daughters and even the aging Tsaritsa Praskovaya, who never missed a launching and its attendant rivers of alcohol. These parties inevitably ended with General-Admiral Apraxin bursting into tears and moaning that he was a lonely old man and with the mighty Prince Menshikov drunk and inert under the table, whereupon his servants would send for his wife, Princess Darya, and her sister, who came to revive him with smelling salts, massage and cold water, "and then would get permission from the Tsar to take him home."

Life in St. Petersburg revolved around weddings, baptisms, christenings and funerals. Peter and the members of his family were always willing to appear as witnesses at a wedding, and he was frequently a godfather, often holding over the baptismal font the children of common soldiers, artisans, and lower-ranking officials. Peter did this cheerfully, but the family could not expect a lavish present; all that was given was a kiss for the mother and a rouble slipped under the baptismal pillow in the old Russian fashion. After the ceremony, if the weather was warm, Peter would take off his caftan and sit down in the first empty seat. When he served as Marshal of Ceremonies at a wedding, he fulfilled his duties rigorously, then put down his marshal's rod, moved to the table, took a hot roast of meat in his hands and began to eat.

Winter scarcely slowed Peter's incessant activity. On days when Jefferyes was writing to London that "one can hardly put one's nose out of doors without running the risk of losing it in the cold," Peter, Catherine and members of the court drove forty miles to the village of Dudderoff, where—reported the startled ambassador— they enjoyed "the diversion of what they call the catat, or the driving in sledges full speed down a steep mountain." Another winter sport, ice-boating, attracted the Tsar even more. "In winter when both the river Neva and . . . [the Gulf] are frozen over, then he has his boats . . . ingeniously fixed for sailing upon the ice," wrote Perry. "Every day when there is a gale of wind, he sails and plies to windward upon the ice, with Jack-Ensign and Pennant flying in the same manner as upon the water."

During the summer months, Peter delighted in opening the Summer Garden for receptions and celebrations. The anniversary of the Battle of Poltava on June 28 was always memorable: the Preobrazhensky Guards in their bottle-green uniforms and the Semyonovsky Guards in dark blue were massed in ranks in an adjacent field, and Peter himself handed wooden breakers of wine and beer to his soldiers to toast the victory. Catherine and then-daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, dressed in elegant gowns, with jewels and pearls in their hair, stood in the center of the garden receiving guests, surrounded by the court and by LeBlond's bubbling fountains and cascades. Nearby, like two stiff little wax dolls, stood Peter's two grandchildren, Peter and Natalya, the orphaned son and daughter of the Tsarevich Alexis. Having paid their respects, the guests sat down around wooden tables placed among the groves, none of them happier than the bearded bishops and other clergy devotedly drinking their fill.

On one of these occasions, gaiety turned to alarm, especially among the foreigners and some of the ladies, when they observed six brawny Guardsmen advancing toward them carrying huge buckets of corn brandy to be consumed in serious toasting. Guards having been posted at all the gates to prevent anyone from leaving, a stampede began in the direction of the river, where several galleys had been moored. The bishops, however, made no attempt to flee, but sat at their tables, smelling of radishes and onions, their faces wreathed in smiles, drinking toast after toast. Later, the Tsaritsa and the Princesses led the company in dancing on the decks of the galleys, and fireworks lit up the sky over the river. Some continued dancing and drinking into morning, but many simply sank down where they were in the garden and drifted into sleep.

Members of the imperial family as well as those who had faithfully served the Emperor were buried with pomp. A number of Peter's older lieutenants had fallen. Romodanovsky died in 1717, and his offices passed to his son. Sheremetve followed in 1719 at sixty-seven, a few years after marrying a cultured young widow who had lived in England. Jacob Dolgoruky died in 1720 at eighty-one. To old and loyal foreigners who had spent many years—in some cases, most of their adult lives—in his service, Peter responded with special generosity. While still in service, they received estates; when they retired, they received pensions, which were continued for their widows or orphaned children. Nor would Peter permit the reduction of an official's income when he went into retirement. When one aging foreigner retired after thirty years' service, the College of Financial Control proposed a pension equal to half his salary. Peter was distressed. "What?" he asked. "Shall a man who has spent his youth in my service be exposed to poverty in his old age? No, give him the whole of his pay as long as he lives, without requiring anything from him, since he is unable to serve. But take his advice in whatever relates to his profession and profit from his experience. Who would sacrifice the most valuable years of his life if he knew that he was doomed to poverty in his old age and that he to whom his youth was devoted would neglect him when he was worn out?"

For a man as impatient and charged with energy as Peter, relaxation was difficult. "What do you do at home?" he once asked those around him. "I don't know how to stay at home with nothing to do." He eschewed the favorite sport of many monarchs by refusing to hunt. Although his father had spent every free moment hunting with falcons, and the royalty of France reveled in the pursuit of stags through forests, Peter disliked such sports. "Hunt, gentlemen," he said one day in reply to an invitation to join a hunting party near Moscow, "hunt as much as you please, and make war on wild beasts. For my part, I cannot amuse myself that way while I have enemies to encounter abroad and constant and refractory subjects to deal with at home." Peter's favorite game was chess and, so that he could play at any time or place with anyone, he carried with him a folding leather chessboard with black and white squares. He did not object to gambling and played a Dutch card game for money, but mainly to enjoy the comradeship and conversation of the sea captains and shipbuilders who were his fellow players. Among his soldiers or the sailors of his fleet, he made a strict rule: No man's loss could amount to more than a rouble. As Peter saw it, serious gamblers had no taste for anything really useful and thought of nothing but devising ways of fleecing each other.