Peter the Great

PETER THE GREAT

His Life and World

Robert K. Massie

BALLANTINE BOOKS © NEW YORK

Copyright © 1980 by Robert K. Massie

Cover art property of NBC. © 1985 National Broadcasting

Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number. 80-7635 ISBN 0-345-33619-4

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Trade Edition: October 1981

First Ballantine Books Mass Market Edition: February 1986

For

MARY KIMBALL TODD and JAMES MADISON TODD and in memory of ROBERT KINLOCH MASSIE

CONTENTS

Part One: Old Muscovy

Old Muscovy

Peter's Childhood

"A Maiden of Great Intelligence"

The Revolt of the Streltsy

The Great Schism

Peter's Games

The Regency of Sophia

Sophia Overthrown

Gordon, Lefort and the Jolly Company

Archangel

Azov

Part Two: The Great Embassy

The Great Embassy to Western Europe

"It Is Impossible to Describe Him"

Peter in Holland

The Prince of Orange

Peter in England

Leopold and Augustus

"These Things Are in Your Way"

Fire and Knout

Among Friends

Voronezh and the Southern Fleet

Part Three: The Great Northern War

Mistress of the North

Let the Cannon Decide

Charles XII 323

Narva 335

"We Must Not Lose Our Heads" 351

The Founding of St. Petersburg 367

Menshikov and Catherine 380

The Hand of the Autocrat 395

Polish Quagmire 411

Charles in Saxony 428

The Great Road to Moscow · 443

Golovchin and Lesnaya 455

Mazeppa 472

The Worst Winter Within Memory 484

The Gathering of Forces 496

Poltava 508

Surrender by the River 525

The Fruits of Poltava 534

Part Four: On the European Stage

The Sultan's World 549

Liberator of the Balkan Christians 559

Fifty Blows on the Pruth 572

The German Campaign and Frederick William 587

The Coast of Finland 601

The Kalabalik 611

Venice of the North 622

An Ambassador Reports 633

The Second Journey West 643

"The King Is a Mighty Man . . ." 655

A Visitor in Paris 664

The Education of an Heir 677

A Paternal Ultimatum 688

Flight of the Tsarevich 700

The Future on Trial 711

Charles' Last Offensive 730

King George Enters the Baltic 743

Victory 754

Part Five: The New Russia

In the Service of the State 765

Commerce by Decree 790

Supreme Under God 803

The Emperor in St. Petersburg 816

Along the Caspian 840

Twilight

851 Epilogue 870

MAPS

Russia during the youth of Peter the Great, 1672-1696 15

Moscow 41

The Swedish Empire at the beginning of the

Great Northern War 304

The Battle of Narva I 344

The Battle of Narva II 348

The Swedish invasion of Russia, 1708-1709 457

Poltava I 506

Poltava II 515

Poltava III 518

Poltava IV 523

The Pnith campaign 576

Europe in the time of Peter the Great 936-937

PETER THE GREAT

His Life and World

OLD MUSCOVY

Around Moscow, the country rolls gently up from the rivers winding in silvery loops across the pleasant landscape. Small lakes and patches of woods are sprinkled among the meadow-lands. Here and there, a village appears, topped by the onion dome of its church. People are walking through the fields on dirt paths lined with weeds. Along the riverbanks, they are fishing, swimming and lying in the sun. It is a familiar Russian scene, rooted in centuries.

In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the traveler coming from Western Europe passed through this countryside to arrive at a vantage point known as the Sparrow Hills. Looking down on Moscow from this high ridge, he saw at his feet "the most rich and beautiful city in the world." Hundreds of golden domes topped by a forest of golden crosses rose above the treetops; if the traveler was present at a moment when the sun touched all this gold, the blaze of light forced his eyes to close. The white-walled churches beneath these domes were scattered through a city as large as London. At the center, on a modest hill, stood the citadel of the Kremlin, the glory of Moscow, with its three magnificent cathedrals, its mighty bell tower, its gorgeous palaces, chapels and hundreds of houses. Enclosed by great white walls, it was a city in itself.

In summer, immersed in greenery, the city seemed like an enormous garden. Many of the larger mansions were surrounded by orchards and parks, while swaths of open space left as firebreaks burst out with grasses, bushes and trees. Overflowing its own walls, the city expanded into numerous flourishing suburbs, each with its own orchards, gardens and copses of trees. Beyond, in a wide circle around the city, the manors and estates of great nobles and the white walls and gilded cupolas of monasteries were scattered among meadows and tilled fields to stretch the landscape out to the horizon.

Entering Moscow through its walls of earth and brick, the traveler plunged immediately into the bustling life of a busy commercial city. The streets were crowded with jostling humanity.

Tradespeople, artisans, idlers and ragged holy men walked beside laborers, peasants, black-robed priests and soldiers in bright-colored caftans and yellow boots. Carts and wagons struggled to make headway through this river of people, but the crowds parted for a fat-bellied, bearded boyar, or nobleman, on horseback, his head covered with a fine fur cap and his girth with a rich fur-lined coat of velvet or stiff brocade. At street corners, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and animal handlers with bears and dogs performed their tricks. Outside every church, beggars clustered and wailed for alms. In front of taverns, travelers were sometimes astonished to see naked men who had sold every stitch of clothing for a drink; on feast days, other men, naked and clothed alike, lay in rows in the mud, drunk.

The densest crowds gathered in the commercial districts centered on Red Square. The Red Square of the seventeenth century was very different from the silent, cobbled desert we know today beneath the fantastic, clustered steeples and cupolas of St. Basil's Cathedral and the high Kremlin walls. Then it was a brawling, open-air marketplace, with logs laid down to cover the mud, with lines of log houses and small chapels built against the Kremlin wall where Lenin's tomb now stands, and with rows and rows of shops and stalls, some wood, some covered by tent-like canvas, crammed into every corner of the vast arena. Three hundred years ago. Red Square teemed, swirled and reverberated with life. Merchants standing in front of stalls shouted to customers to step up and inspect their wares. They offered velvet and brocade, Persian and Armenian silk, bronze, brass and copper goods, iron wares, tooled leather, pottery, innumerable objects made of wood, and rows of melons, apples, pears, cherries, plums, carrots, cucumbers, onions, garlic and asparagus as thick as a thumb, laid out in trays and baskets. Peddlers and pushcart men forced their way through the crowds with a combination of threats and pleas. Vendors sold pirozhki (small meat pies) from trays suspended by cords from their shoulders. Tailors and street jewelers, oblivious to all around them, worked at their trades. Barbers clipped hair, which fell to the ground unswept, adding a new layer to a matted carpet decades in the forming. Flea markets offered old clothes, rags, used furniture and junk. Down the hill, nearer the Moscow River, animals were sold, and live fish from tanks. On the riverbank itself, near the new stone bridge, rows of women bent over the water washing clothes. One seventeenth-century German traveler noted that some of the women selling goods in the square might also sell "another commodity."

At noon, all activity came to a halt. The markets would close and the streets empty as people ate dinner, the largest meal of the day. Afterward, everyone napped and shopkeepers and vendors stretched out to sleep in front of their stalls.

With the coming of dusk, swallows began to soar over the Kremlin battlements and the city locked itself up for the night. Shops closed behind heavy shutters, watchmen looked down from the rooftops and bad-tempered dogs paced at the end of long chains. Few honest citizens ventured into the dark streets, which became the habitat of thieves and armed beggars bent on extracting by force in the dark what they had failed to get by pleading during the daylight hours. "These villains," wrote an Austrian visitor, "place themselves at the comers of streets and throw swinging cudgels at the heads of those that pass by, in which practice they are so expert that these mortal blows seldom miss." Several murders a night were common in Moscow, and although the motive for these crimes was seldom more than simple theft, so vicious were the thieves that no one dared respond to cries for help. Often, terrorized citizens were afraid to even look out their own doors or windows to see what was happening. In the morning, the police routinely carried the bodies found lying in the streets to a central field where relatives could come to check for missing persons; eventually, all unidentified corpses were tumbled into a common grave.

Moscow in the 1670's was a city of wood. The houses, mansions and hovels alike, were built of logs, but their unique architecture and the superb carved and painted decoration of their windows, porches and gables gave them a strange beauty unknown to the stolid masonry of European cities. Even the streets were made of wood. Lined with rough timbers and wooden planks, thick with dust in summer or sinking into the mud during spring thaws and September rains, the wood-paved streets of Moscow attempted to provide footing for passage. Often, they failed. "The autumnal rains made the streets impassable for wagons and horses," complained an Orthodox churchman visiting from the Holy Land. "We could not go out of the house to market, the mud and clay being deep enough to sink in overhead. The price of food rose very high, as none could be brought in from the country. All the people, and most of all ourselves, prayed to God that He would cause the earth to freeze."

Not unnaturally in a city built of wood, fire was the scourge of Moscow. In winter when primitive stoves were blazing in every house, and in summer when the heat made wood tinder-dry, a spark could create a holocaust. Caught by the wind, flames leaped from one roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. In 1571, 1611, 1626 and 1671, great fires destroyed whole quarters of Moscow, leaving vast empty spaces in the middle of the city.

These disasters were exceptional, but to Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the, fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was part of daily life.

As Moscow was built of logs, Muscovites always kept spares on hand for repairs or new construction. Logs by the thousand were piled up between houses or sometimes hidden behind them or surrounded by fences as protection from thieves. In one section, a large wood market kept thousands of prefabricated log houses of various sizes ready for sale; a buyer had only to specify the size and number of rooms desired. Almost overnight, the timbers, all clearly numbered and marked, would be carried to his site, assembled, the logs chinked with moss, a roof of thin planks laid on top and the new owner could move in. The largest logs, however, were saved and sold for a different purpose. Cut into six-foot sections, hollowed out with an axe and covered with lids, they became the coffins in which Russians were buried.

Rising from a hill 125 feet above the Moscow River, the towers, cupolas and battlements of the Kremlin dominated the city. In Russian, the word "kreml" means "fortress" and the Moscow Kremlin was a mighty citadel. Two rivers and a deep moat rippled beneath its powerful walls. These walls, twelve to sixteen feet thick and rising sixty-five feet above the water, formed a triangle around the crest of the hill, with a perimeter of a mile and a half and a protected enclosure of sixty-nine acres. Twenty massive towers studded the wall at intervals, each a self-contained fortress, each designed to be impregnable. The Kremlin was not impregnable; archers and pikemen and later musketeers and artillerymen could be made to surrender to hunger if not to assault, but the most recent siege, early in the seventeenth century, had lasted two years. Ironically, the besiegers were Russian and the defenders Poles, supporters of a Polish claimant, the False Dmitry, who temporarily occupied the throne. When the Kremlin finally fell, the Russians executed Dmitry, burned his body, primed a cannon on the Kremlin wall and fired his ashes back toward Poland.

In normal times, the Kremlin had two masters, one temporal, the other spiritual: the tsar and the patriarch. Each lived within the fortress and governed his respective realm from there. Crowding around the Kremlin squares were government offices, lawcourts, barracks, bakeries, laundries and stables; nearby stood other palaces and offices and more than forty churches and chapels of the patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. At the center of the Kremlin,! on the crest of the hill around the edges of a wide square, stood four magnificent buildings—three superb cathedrals and a majestic, soaring bell tower—which, then and now, may be considered the physical heart of Russia. Two of these cathedrals, along with the Kremlin wall and many of its towers, had been designed by Italian architects.

The largest and most historic of these cathedrals was the Assumption Cathedral (Uspensky Sobor), in which every Russian tsar or empress from the fifteenth century to the twentieth was crowned. It had been built in 1479 by Ridolfo Fioravanti of Bologna but reflected many essential Russian features of church design. Before beginning its construction, Fioravanti had visited the old Russian cities of Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Rostov and Novgorod to study their beautiful cathedrals, and then produced a Russian church with far more space inside than any Russian had ever seen. Four huge circular columns supported the onion-shaped central dome and its four smaller satellite domes without the complicated webbing of walls and buttressing previously thought necessary. This gave an airiness to the ceiling and a spaciousness to the nave entirely unique in Russia, where the power as well as the beauty of the Gothic arch were unknown.

Across the square from the Assumption Cathedral stood the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, where the tsars were entombed. Built by Alvesio Novy of Milan, it was considerably more Italianate than either of its two sisters. Inside, amidst its several chapels, the deceased rulers were clustered in groups. In the middle of one small room, three carved stone coffins held Ivan the Terrible and his two sons. Other tsars lay in rows along the walls, their coffins of brass and stone covered with embroidered velvet cloths with inscriptions sewn in pearls around the hems. Tsar Alexis, father of Peter the Great, and two of his sons, Fedor and Ivan VI, also both tsars, would lie in this small room, but they would be the last. Alexis third son, Peter, would build a new cathedral in a new city on the Baltic where he and all the Romanovs who followed would be entombed.*

The smallest of the three cathedrals, the Cathedral of the Annunciation, had nine towers and three porches, and was the only one designed by Russian architects. Its builders came from Pskov, which was famous for its carved stone churches. Used extensively as a private chapel by the tsars and their families, its iconostasis was set with icons by the two most famous painters of this form of religious art in Russia, Theophanes the Greek, who came from Byzantium, and his Russian pupil Andrei Rublev.

On the eastern side of the square, towering above the three

· Except Peter II, whose body is in the Kremlin, and Nicholas II, the last tsar, whose body was destroyed in a pit outside Ekaterinburg in the Urals.

cathedrals, stood the whitewashed brick bell towers of Ivan the Great, the Bono Tower and the Tower of the Patriarch Philaret, now joined into a single structure. Beneath its highest cupola, 270 feet in the air, rows of bells hung in laddered niches. Cast in silver, copper, bronze and iron, in many sizes and timbres (the largest weighed thirty-one tons), they rang with a hundred messages: summoning Muscovites to early mass or vespers, reminding them of fasts and festivals, tolling the sadness of death, chiming the happiness of marriage, jangling warnings of fire or booming the celebration of victory. At times, they rang all night, driving foreigners to consternation. But Russians loved their bells. On holidays, the common people crowded to the belfries to take turns pulling the ropes. The first bells usually sounded from the Kremlin, then the sound was taken up by all the bells of Moscow's "forty times forty" churches. Before long, waves of sound passed over the city and "the earth shook with their vibrations like thunder" according to one awed visitor.

From building cathedrals, the Italian architects turned to building palaces. In 1487, Ivan the Great commissioned the first stone palace of the Kremlin, the Palace of Facets (Granovitaya Palata), so named because its gray stone exterior walls were cut prismatically to resemble the surface of facet-cut jewels. Its most notable architectural feature was a throne room seventy-seven feet on each side, whose roof was supported by a single, massively arched column in the middle. When foreign ambassadors were being received, and on other state occasions, a small curtained window near the ceiling permitted the cloistered women of the tsar's family to peak down and watch.

The Palace of Facets was primarily an official state building, and thus, in 1499, Ivan the Great ordered another palace of brick and stone in which to live. This five-story building, called the Terem Paiace, contained a honeycomb of low-ceilinged, vaulted apartments for himself and the many women—wives, widows, sisters, daughters—of the royal family. The building was badly damaged by fire several times during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but both of the first Romanov tsars, Michael and his son Alexis, lavished great efforts to restore the building. In Alexis' time, the doors, windows, parapets and cornices were made of white stone carved into foliage and figures of birds and animals, then painted bright colors. Alexis devoted special effort to refurbishing the fourth floor as a dwelling for himself. The five principal rooms—anteroom, throne room (known as the Golden Hall), study, bedroom and private chapel— were fitted with wooden walls and floors to prevent the dampness caused by moisture condensing on brick and stone, and the walls

were covered with hangings of embroidered silk, woolen tapestries or tooled leather, depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments. The arches and ceilings were intersected by curving arabesques and Eastern versions of plants and fairy-tale birds, all done in brilliant colors with lavish inlays of silver and gold. The furnishing of the tsar's apartment was partly traditional and partly modern. The old, carved oaken benches and chests and polished wooden tables were there, but so also were upholstered armchairs, elaborate gilded and ebony tables, clocks, mirrors, portraits and bookcases filled with books of theology and history. One window of the tsar's study was known as the Petitioner's Window. Outside was a small box which could be lowered to the ground, stuffed with petitions and complaints, then raised to be read by the sovereign. The tsar's bedroom was upholstered with Venetian velvet and contained an intricately carved four-poster oak bed, curtained and canopied with brocade and silk and heaped with furs, eiderdown and cushions to ward off the ice currents of winter air that blasted against the windows and eddied under the doors. All these rooms were simultaneously heated and decorated by huge stoves of glazed, colored tiles whose radiant warmth also kept Russia's rulers warm.

The major drawback to these splendid chambers was their lack of light. Little sunlight could filter through the narrow windows with their double sheets of mica separated by strips of lead. Not only at night and on the short, gray days of winter, but even in summertime, most of the illumination in the Terem Palace came from the light of flickering candles in the alcoves and along the walls.

In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the royal chambers were occupied by the second tsar of the Romanov dynasty, "the Great Lord, Tsar and Grand Duke, Alexis Mikhailovich, of all Great and Little and White Russia, Autocrat." Remote and inaccessible to his subjects, this august figure was enclosed in an aura of semi-divinity. An embassy of Englishmen, come in 1664 to thank the Tsar for his constant support of their once-exiled monarch, Charles II, was deeply impressed by the sight of Tsar Alexis seated on his throne:

The Tsar like a sparkling sun darted forth most sumptuous rays, being most magnificently placed upon his throne, with his scepter in his hand and having his crown on his head. His throne was of massy silver gilt, wrought curiously on top with several works and pyramids; and being seven or eight steps higher than the floor, it rendered the person of the Prince transcendently majestic. His crown (which he wore upon a cap lined with black sables) was covered quite over with precious stones, terminating toward the top in the form of a pyramid with a golden cross at the spire. The scepter guttered also all over with jewels, his vest was set with the like from the top to the bottom and his collar was answerable to the same.

From infancy, Russians had been taught to regard their ruler as an almost god-like creature. Their proverbs embodied this view: "Only God and the tsar know," "One-sun shines in heaven and the Russian tsar on earth," "Through God and the tsar, Russia is strong," "It is very high up to God; it is a very long way to the tsar."

Another proverb, "The sovereign is the father, the earth the mother," related the Russian's feeling for the tsar to his feeling for the land. The land, the earth, the motherland, "rodina," was feminine. Not the pure maiden, the virgin girl, but the eternal mature woman, the fertile mother. All Russians were her children. In a sense, long before communism, the Russian land was communal. It belonged to the tsar as father, but also to the people, his family. Its disposal belonged to the tsar—he could give away vast tracts to favored noblemen—yet it still remained the joint property of the national family. When it was threatened, all were willing to die for it.

The tsar, in this familial scheme, was the father, "Batushka," of the people. His autocratic rule was patriarchal. He addressed his subjects as his children and had the same unlimited power over them that a father has over his children. The Russian people could not imagine any limitation of the power of the tsar, "for how can a father's authority be limited except by God?" When he commanded, they obeyed for the same reason that when a father commands, the child must obey, without question. At times, obeisance before the tsar took on a slavish, Byzantine quality. Russian noblemen, when greeting or receiving favors from the tsar, prostrated themselves in front of him, touching the ground with their foreheads. When addressing his royal master, Artemon Matveev, who was Tsar Alexis' leading minister and close friend, declared, "We humbly beseech you, we your slave Artemushka Matveev, with the lowly worm, my son Adrushka, before the high throne of Your Royal Majesty, bowing our faces to the earth. . . ." In addressing the tsar, his whole lengthy official title had to be used. In so doing, the accidental omission of a single word could be considered an act of personal disrespect almost equivalent to treason. The tsar's own conversation was sacrosant: " "tis death for anyone to reveal what is spoken in the tsar's palace," declared an English resident.

In fact, the demi-god who bore these titles, who wore a crown braided with "tufts of diamonds as big as peas, resembling bunches of glittering grapes" and the imperial mantle embroidered with emeralds, pearls and gold, was a. relatively unassuming mortal. Tsar Alexis was recognized in his own time as "tishaishy tsar," the quietest, gentlest and most pious of all the tsars, and when he succeeded his father on the throne in 1645 at the age of sixteen, he was already known as "the Young Monk." In manhood, he grew taller than most Russians, about six feet, well built, inclined to fat. His roundish face was framed by light-brown hair, a mustache and a flowing brown beard. His eyes also were brown, their tone ranging from hardness in anger to warmth in affection and religious humility. "His Imperial Majesty is a goodly person, about two months older than King Charles II," reported his English physician, Dr. Samuel Collins, adding that his patron was "severe in his chastisements but very careful of his subjects' love. Being urged by a stranger to make it [punishable by] death for any man to desert his colors, he answered, 'It was a hard case to do that, for God has not given courage to all men alike.'"

Although he was tsar, Alexis' life inside the Kremlin was more like that of a monk. At four a.m., the Tsar threw aside his sable coverlet and stepped from his bed clad in shirt and drawers. He dressed and went immediately to the chapel next to his bedroom for twenty minutes of prayers and readings from devotional books. When he had kissed the icons and been sprinkled with holy water, he emerged and sent a chamberlain to bid the Tsaritsa good morning and ask after her health. A few minutes later, he went to her chamber to escort her to another chapel, where together they heard morning prayer and early mass.

Meanwhile, boyars, government officials and secretaries had gathered in a public anteroom awaiting the arrival of the Tsar from his private chambers. As soon as they saw "the bright eyes of the Tsar," they began to bow to the ground, some as many as thirty times, in gratitude for favors granted. For a while, Alexis listened to reports and petitions; then, at about nine a.m., the entire group went to hear a two-hour mass. During the service, however, the Tsar continued to converse quietly with his boyars, conducting public business and issuing instructions. Alexis never missed any divine service. "If he be well, he goes to it," said Dr. Collins. "If sick, it comes to him in his chamber. On fast days he frequents midnight prayers, standing four, five, or six hours together, prostrating himself on the ground, sometimes a thousand times, and on great festivals, fifteen hundred."

Following morning mass, the Tsar returned to administrative work with his boyars and secretaries until time for dinner at noon.

He ate alone at a high table surrounded by boyars who dined at lower tables along the walls of the room. He was served only by special boyars, who tasted his food and sipped his wine before offering him the cup. Meals were gargantuan; on festival days, as many as seventy dishes might be served at the Tsar's table. Zakuski, or hors d'oeuvres, included raw vegetables, especially cucumbers, salted fish, bacon and innumerable pirozhki, sometimes stuffed with egg, fish, rice or cabbage and herbs instead of meat. Then came soups and roasts of beef, mutton and pork, seasoned with onions, garlic, saffron and pepper. There were dishes of game and fish such as salmon, sturgeon and sterlet. Dessert was cakes, cheeses, preserves, fruits. Russians drank mostly vodka, beer or a milder drink called kvas, made of fermented black bread, variously flavored with raspberry, cherry or other fruits.

But Alexis rarely touched any of the succulent dishes that were presented to him. Instead, he sent them as presents to various boyars to show special favor. His own palate was monastically simple. He only ate plain rye bread and drank light wine or beer, perhaps with a few drops of cinnamon added; cinnamon, Dr. Collins reported, was the "aroma imperiale." During periods of religious fasting, said Dr. Collins, the Tsar "eats but three meals a week; for the rest, he takes a piece of brown bread and salt, a pickled mushroom or cucumber and drinks a cup of small beer. He eats fish but twice in Lent and observes it seven weeks altogether. ... In fine, no monk is more observant of canonical hours than he is of fasts. We may reckon he fasts almost eight months in twelve."

Following dinner, the Tsar slept for three hours until time to return to church for vespers, again with his boyars, again to consult on affairs of state during the religious service. Supper and the end of the day were spent either with his family or with intimate friends playing backgammon or chess. Alexis' special pleasure during these hours was to listen to people read or tell stories. He liked hearing passages from books of church history, or the lives of saints, or the presentation of religious dogma, but he also liked to hear the reports of Russian ambassadors traveling abroad, extracts from foreign newspapers or simple tales told by pilgrims and wanderers who had been brought to the palace to entertain the monarch. In warmer weather, Alexis left the Kremlin to visit his country mansions outside Moscow. One of these at Preobrazhenskoe on the Yauza River was the center of Alexis' favorite sport, falconry. Over the years, the enthusiastic hunstman built up an immense establishment of 200 falconers, 3,000 falcons and 100,000 pigeons.

Most of the time, however, Alexis prayed and worked. He never questioned his own divinely granted right to rule; in his mind, he and all monarchs were chosen by God and responsible only to God.* Beneath the tsar stood the nobility, divided into almost a dozen ranks. The greatest noblemen held the highest rank, that of boyar, and were members of the old princely families who held hereditary landed estates. Below were the lesser aristocracy and gentry who had been given estates in return for service. There was a small middle class of merchants, artisans and other townspeople and then—the huge base of the pyramid—the peasants and serfs who made up the overwhelming mass of Russian society; their conditions of life and methods of farming were roughly similar to those of the serfs of medieval Europe. Most Muscovites used the title "boyar" to include all noblemen and high officials. Meanwhile, the actual daily work of administering the tsar's government was in the hands of between thirty and forty departments known as Prikazy. Generally speaking, they were inefficient, wasteful, overlapping, difficult to control and corrupt—in brief, a bureaucracy which nobody had designed and over which no one had any real control.

From his dimly lit, incense-scented Kremlin rooms and chapels, Tsar Alexis ruled the largest nation on earth. Vast plains, endless tracts of dark forest and boundless expanses of desert and tundra stretched from Poland to the Pacific. Nowhere in this immensity of space was the wide horizon broken by more than shallow mountains and rolling hills. The only natural barriers to movement on the broad plain were the rivers, and from the earliest times these had been converted into a network of watery highways. In the region around Moscow, four great rivers had their tributary headwaters: the Dneiper, the Don and the mighty Volga flowed south to the Black and Caspian seas; the Dyina flowed north to the Baltic and frozen Arctic.

Scattered over this immense landscape was a thin sprinkling of human beings. At the time of Peter's birth—near the end of Tsar Alexis' reign—the population of Russia was roughly eight million people. This was about the same as that of Russia's western neighbor, Poland, although the Russians were dispersed over a far

* When the English Parliamentarians cut off the head of King Charles I, in 1649, Tsar Alexis was so shocked and personally outraged that he expelled all English merchants from the interior of Russia, a move which gave great advantage to Dutch arid German merchants. While King Charles II remained in exile. Alexis sent him money and his tenderest wishes for "the disconsolate widow of that glorious martyr. King Charles 1."

greater area. It was much larger than the population of Sweden (less than two million) or England (slightly more than five million), but less than half that of the most populous and powerful state in Europe, the France of Louis XIV (nineteen million). A fraction of the Russian population lived in the old Russian towns—Nizhni-Novgorod, Moscow, Novgorod, Pskov, Vologda, Archangel, Yaroslavi, Rostov, Vladimir, Suzdal, Tver, Tula—and in the more recently acquired Kiev, Smolensk, Kazan and Astrachan. Most of the people lived on the land, where they wrenched a living from the earth, the forest and the waters.

Enormous though Alexis' tsardom was, Russia's boundaries were fragile and under pressure. In the east, under Ivan the Terrible and his successors, Muscovy had conquered the middle Volga and the khanate of Kazan, extending the Russian empire to Astrachan and the Caspian Sea. The Urals had been crossed and the immense, largely empty spaces of Siberia added to the tsar's domain. Russian pioneers had penetrated to the northern Pacific and established a few bleak settlements there, although a clash with the aggressive Manchu Dynasty of China had forced a withdrawal of Russian outposts along the Amur River.

To the west and the south, Russia was ringed by enemies who struggled to keep the giant landlocked and isolated. Sweden, then reigning as Mistress of the Baltic, stood guard across this seaborne route to the West. Westward lay Catholic Poland, the ancient enemy of Orthodox Russia. Only recently, Tsar Alexis had reconquered Smolensk from Poland, although that Russian fortress town lay a mere 150 miles from Moscow. Late in his reign, Alexis had won back from Poland the shining prize of Kiev, mother of all Russian cities and the birthplace of Russian Christianity. Kiev and the fertile regions both east and west of the Dnieper were the lands of the Cossacks. These were Orthodox people, originally vagabonds, freebooters and runaways who had fled the onerous conditions of life in old Muscovy to form bands of irregular cavalry and then to become pioneers, colonizing farms, villages and towns throughout the upper Ukraine. Gradually, this line of Cossack settlements was spreading southward, but the limits still were 300 or 400 miles above the shores of the Black Sea.

The ground in between, the famous black-earth steppe of the lower Ukraine, was empty. Here, tall grasses grew so high that sometimes only the head and shoulders of a man on horseback could be seen moving along above the grass. In Alexis' day, this steppe was the hunting and grazing ground of the Crimean Tatars, Islamic descendants of the old Mongol conquerors and vassals of the Ottoman sultan, who lived in villages along the slopes and among the| crags of the mountainous Crimean peninsula. Every

spring and summer, they brought their cattle and horses down to feed on the steppe grasslands. Often enough, they strapped on their bows, arrows and scimitars and rode north to raid and plunder among the Russian and Ukrainian villages, sometimes storming the wooden stockade of a town and leading the entire population off into slavery. These massive raids, bringing thousands of Russian slaves annually into the Ottoman slave markets, were a source of embarrassment and anguish to the tsars in the Kremlin. But there was nothing so far that anyone could do. Indeed, twice, in 1382 and 1571, that Tatars had sacked and burned Moscow itself.

Beyond the massive Kremlin battlements, beyond the gilt and blue onion domes and the wooden buildings of Moscow lay the fields and the forest, the true and eternal Russia. For centuries, everything had come from the forest, the deep, rich, virgin forest which stretched as far as an ocean. Amidst its birches and firs, its bushes and berries, its mosses and soft ferns, the Russian found most of what he needed for life. From the forest came the logs for his house and firewood for warmth, moss to chink his walls, bark for his shoes, fur for his clothing, wax for his candles, and meat, sweet honey, wild berries and mushrooms for his dinner. Through most of the year, the forest groves rang with the sound of axes. On lazy summer days, men, women and children searched beneath the dark trunks for mushrooms, or brushed through the high grasses and flowers to pick wild raspberries and red and black currants.

Russians are a communal people. They did not live alone deep in the forest, contesting the primeval weald with wolf and bear. Rather they chose to cluster in tiny villages built in forest clearings, or on the edges of lakes or the banks of slow-moving rivers. Russia was an empire of such villages: lost at the end of a dusty road, surrounded by pasture and meadowland, a collection of simple log houses centered on a church whose onion dome gathered up the prayers of the villagers and passed them along to heaven. Most of the houses had only a single room without a chimney; smoke from the fire burning inside the stove found its way outdoors as best it could, through cracks in the logs. Usually, as a result, everything and everyone inside was black with soot. For this reason, too, public baths were a common institution in Russia. Even the smallest village had its steaming bathhouse where men and women together could scrub themselves clean and then go outside, even in winter, to permit the wind to cool and dry their heated naked bodies.

When the Russian peasant dressed, first combing his beard and hair, he put on a shirt of rough cloth which hung over his waist and was tied with a string. His trousers were loose and were stuffed into boots if he owned them, or, more often, into cloth leggings tied with heavy threads. "Their hair is cropt to their ears and their heads covered summer and winter with a fur cap," wrote a Western visitor. "Their beards remain yet untouched. . . . Their shoes are tied together with a bast. About their neck they wear from the time of their baptism a cross, and next to it their purse, though they commonly keep the small money, if it be not much, a good while in their mouth, for as soon as they receive any, either as a present or as their due, they put it into their mouths and keep it under their tongue."

Few people in the world live in such harmony with nature as the Russians. They live in the North, where winter comes early. In September, the light is fading by four in the afternoon and an icy rain begins. Frost comes quickly, and the first snow falls in October. Before long, everything vanishes beneath a blanket of whiteness: earth, rivers, roads, fields, trees and houses. Nature takes on not only a majesty but a frightening omnipotence. The landscape becomes a broad white sea with mounds and hollows rising and falling. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard, even straining the eye, to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days, when the sky is a gorgeous azure, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light.

After 160 days of winter, spring lasts only for several weeks. First the ice cracks and breaks on rivers, lakes, and the murmuring waters, the dancing waves return. On land, the thaw brings mud, an endless, vast sea of mud through which man and beast must struggle. But every day the dirty snow recedes, and soon the first sprouts of green grass appear. Forest and meadows turn green and come to life. Animals, larks and swallows reappear. In Russia, the return of spring is greeted with a joy inconceivable in more temperate lands. As the warming rays of the sun touch meadow grass and the backs and faces of peasants, as the days rapidly grow longer and the earth everywhere is coming to life, the glad feeling of revival, of deliverance, urges people to sing and celebrate. The 1st of May is an ancient holiday of rebirth and fertility when people dance and wander in the woods. And while youth revels, the older people thank God that they have lived to see this glory again.

Spring races quickly into summer. There is great heat and choking dust, but there is also the loveliness of an immense sky, the calm of the great land rolling gently to the horizon. There is the freshness of early morning, the coolness of shade in groves of birches or along the rivers, the mild air and warm wind of night. In June, the sun dips beneath the horizon for only a few hours and the red of sunset is followed quickly by the delicate rose-and-blue blush of dawn.

Russia is a stern land with a harsh climate, but few travelers can forget its deep appeal, and no Russian ever finds peace in his soul anywhere else on earth.

2

2

PETER'S CHILDHOOD

In March 1669, when Tsar Alexis was forty, his first wife, the Tsaritsa Maria Miloslavskaya, died in the attempted performance of her essential dynastic function: that is, in giving birth to a child. She was greatly mourned, not only by her husband, but also by her numerous Miloslavsky relatives whose power at court had rested on her marriage to the Tsar. Now, all this was over, and through their tears for their departed sister and niece they watched and worried.

Their uneasy situation was worsened by the fact that, despite all her efforts, Maria had not left behind her the certainty of a Miloslavsky heir. During her twenty-one years of marriage to Alexis, Maria, four years older than her husband, had done her best: thirteen children—five sons and eight daughters—were born before the attempt to produce a fourteenth killed her. None of Maria's sons was strong; four survived her, but within six months two of these were gone, including the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, named Alexis after his father. Thus, on the death of his wife, the Tsar was left with only two sons of the Miloslavsky marriage—two sons, unfortunately, whose prospects were poor. Fedor, then ten, was frail, and Ivan, aged three, was half blind and had a speech impediment. If both died before their father, or soon after him, the succession would be open, and no one knew who might lunge for the throne. In short, all Russia except the Miloslavskys hoped that Alexis would find a new wife and do so quickly.

If the Tsar did select a new tsaritsa, it was understood that his choice would be a daughter of the Russian nobility and not one of the available foreign princesses. The intermarriage of dynasties for the advancement or protection of state interests was common in most parts of seventeenth-century Europe, but in Russia the practice was abhorred and avoided. Russian tsars chose Russian consorts, or, more specifically, an Orthodox tsar could choose only an Orthodox tsaritsa. The Russian church, the nobility, the merchants and the mass of simple Russian people would look with horror at a foreign princess bringing in her train Catholic priests or Protestant pastors to corrupt the pure Orthodox faith. This ban helped to isolate Russia from most of the effects of intercourse with foreign nations and ensured the keenest jealousy and competition among those noble Russian families who had among their daughters a potential tsaritsa.

Within a year of Maria Miloslavskaya's death, Alexis had found her successor. Depressed and lonely, he spent frequent evenings at the home of his intimate friend and chief minister, Artemon Matveev, an unusual man for seventeenth-century Muscovy. He was not from the highest boyar class, but had risen to power on merit. He was interested in scholarly subjects and was fascinated by Western culture. At the regular receptions which he held in his house for foreigners living in or visiting Moscow, he questioned them intelligently on the state of politics, art and technology in their homelands. Indeed, it was in the German Suburb, the settlement just outside the city where all foreigners were required to live, that he found his own wife, Mary Hamilton, the daughter of a Scots royalist who had left Britain after the beheading of Charles I and the triumph of Cromwell.

In Moscow, Matveev and his wife lived as much as possible like modern seventeenth-century Europeans. They hung their walls with paintings and mirrors in addition to icons; inlaid cabinets displayed Oriental porcelains and chiming clocks. Matveev studied algebra and dabbled in chemistry experiments in his home laboratory, and concerts, comedies and tragedies were performed in his small private theater. To traditional Muscovites, the behavior of Matveev's wife was shocking. She wore Western dresses and bonnets; she refused to seclude herself on an upper floor of her husband's house like most Moscow wives, but appeared freely among his guests, sitting down with them at dinner and sometimes even joining in the conversation.

It was during one of these unconventional evenings in the presence of the unusual Mary Hamilton that the eye of the widower Tsar Alexis fell on a second remarkable woman in Matveev's household. Natalya Naryshkina was then nineteen years old, a tall, shapely young woman with black eyes and long eyelashes. Her father, Kyril Naryshkin, a relatively obscure landowner of Tatar origins, lived in Tarus province, far from

Moscow. In order to lift his daughter above the life of the rural gentry, Naryshkin had persuaded his friend Matveev to accept Natalya as his ward and raise her in the atmosphere of culture and freedom that characterized the minister's house in Moscow. Natalya had profited from her opportunity. For a Russian girl, she was well educated, and by watching and assisting her foster mother she had learned to receive and entertain male guests.

One evening when the Tsar was present, Natalya came into the room with Mary Hamilton to serve cups of vodka and plates of caviar and smoked fish. Alexis stared at her, noticing her healthy, glowing good looks, her black, almond-shaped eyes and her serene but modest behavior. When she stood before him, he was impressed by the blend of respect and good sense in her brief replies to his questions. Leaving Matveev's house that night, the Tsar was much cheered up, and in saying good night he asked Matveev whether he was looking for a husband for this appealing young woman. Matveev replied that he was, but that, as neither Natalya's father nor he himself was rich, the dowry would be small and suitors doubtless few. Alexis declared that there were still a few men who valued a woman's qualities higher than her fortune, and he promised to help his minister find one.

Not long after, the Tsar asked Matveev whether he had had any success. "Sire," replied Matveev, "young men come every day to see my charming ward, but none seem to think of matrimony."

"Well, well, so much the better," said the Tsar. "Perhaps we shall be able to do without them. I have been more fortunate than you. I have found a gentleman who will probably be agreeable to her. He is a very honorable man with whom I am acquainted, is not destitute of merit and has no need of a dowry. He loves your ward and is inclined to marry her and make her happy. Though he has not yet disclosed his sentiments, she knows him, and if she is consulted, I think she will accept him."

Matveev declared that of course Natalya would accept anyone "proposed by Your Majesty. However, before she gives her consent, she may probably desire to know who he is. And this appears to me no more than what is reasonable."

"Well, then," announced Alexis, "tell her it is me, and that I am determined to marry her."

Matveev, overwhelmed by the implications of this declaration, threw himself at his sovereign's feet. He recognized instantly both the glittering prospects and the unfathomable dangers of Alexis' decision. To have his ward elevated to tsaritsa would seal his own success: her relatives and friends would rise along with her; they and he would replace the Miloslavskys as the ruling power at court. But it also meant dangerously stimulating the antagonism of the Miloslavskys, as well as the jealousy of many of the powerful boyar families who already were suspicious of his role as favorite. If, somehow, the choice was announced and then the match misfired, Matveev would be ruined.

With this in mind, Matveen begged that even if determined on his choice, the Tsar would nevertheless submit to the traditional process of publicly picking his bride from a flock of assembled candidates. The ceremony, which had its antecedents in Byzantium, decreed that women of marriageable age from all parts of Russia should assemble at the Kremlin for the tsar's inspection. In theory, the women were to come from every class of Russian society, including serfs, but in practice this fairy tale never came true. No tsar ever gazed on a beautiful serf maiden and, smitten, led the blushing creature off to become his tsaritsa. However, the assembly did include daughters of the lesser nobility, and Natalya Naryshkina's rank made her perfectly eligible. At court, the frightened young women, pawns in the ambitions of their families, were examined by court officials to certify virginity. Those who survived this scrutiny were summoned to the Kremlin palace to await the smile or nod of the boy or man who could place one of them on the throne.

A game played for the highest stakes also entails high risks. Within that same century, there had been grim examples of the lengths to which ambitious families would go to prevent a girl from another family becoming the new tsaritsa. In 1616, Maria Khlopfa, the known choice of nineteen-year-old Michael Romanov, had so displeased the Saltykov family, men predominant at court, that they drugged the girl, presented her to Michael in this state, told the Tsar that she was incurably ill and then, as punishment for daring to present herself as a potential bride, dispatched Maria and all her family to exile in Siberia. In 1647, Alexis himself, at the age of eighteen, had chosen Euphemia Vsevolozhska to be his first wife. But when she was being dressed, a group of court ladies twisted her hair so tightly that in Alexis' presence she fainted. The court physicians were persuaded to declare that she had epilepsy, and she and her relatives were also dispatched to Siberia. Maria Miloslavskaya had been Alexis' second choice.

Now, for Natalya Naryshkina and for Matveev, who stood behind her, similar dangers loomed. The Miloslavskys knew that if Natalya was chosen, their influence would be undermined. This reversal would affect not only the male Miloslavskys who held high office and wielded power, but the females as well. All of the royal princesses, Tsar Alexis' daughters, were Miloslavskys, and they did not at all like the prospect of a new tsaritsa actually younger than some of them.

Nevertheless, Natalya and Matveev really had no choice: Alexis was determined. Notice had been given that on February 11, 1670, the preliminary inspection of all eligible young women would take place, and Natalya Naryshkina was commanded to be present. A second inspection, by the Tsar himself, was scheduled for April 28. But, soon after the first assembly, rumors spread that Natalya Naryshkina had been chosen. The inevitable counterattack was prepared, and, four days before the second inspection, anonymous letters were found in the Kremlin accusing Matveev of using magic herbs to make the Tsar desire his ward. An investigation was necessary, and the marriage was postponed for nine months. But nothing was proved, and finally, on February 1, 1671, to the joy of most Russians and the chagrin of the Miloslavskys, Tsar Alexis and Natalya Naryshkina were married.

From the day of their marriage, it was clear to everyone that the forty-one-year-bid Tsar was deeply in love with his handsome, black-haired young wife. She brought him freshness, happiness, relaxation and a sense of renewal. He wanted her constantly by his side and took her with him wherever he went. The first spring and summer of their marrigae, the newly weds moved happily from one to another of the Tsar's summer palaces around Moscow, including Preobrazhenskoe, where Alexis rode with his falcons.

At court, the new Tsaritsa quickly became an agent of change. With her semi-Western upbringing in Matveev's house, Natalya loved music and theater. Early in his reign, Alexis had issued an edict sternly forbidding his subjects to dance, to play games or watch them, at wedding feasts either to sing or play in instruments, or to give one's soul to perdition in such pernicious and lawless practices as word play, farces or magic. "Offenders for the first and second offenses are to be beaten with rods; for the third and fourth to be banished to the border towns." But when Alexis married Natalya, an orchestra played at his wedding banquet, mingling its new polyphonic Western harmonies with the strains of a Russian choir chanting in unison. The blend of sounds was far from perfect; Dr. Collins described the cacophony as being like "a flight of screech owls, a nest of jackdaws, a pack of hungry wolves, and seven hogs on a windy day."

Royal sponsorship of the theater soon followed. To please his young bride, the Tsar began to patronize play writing and ordered construction of a stage and a hall in the former house of a boyar inside the Kremlin and another at the summer retreat of Preobrazhenskoe. The Lutheran pastor in the German Suburb, Johannes Gregory, wast asked by Matveev to recruit actors and produce plays. On October 17, 1672, the first production, a Biblical drama, was ready. It was presented in the presence of Tsar and Tsaritsa with a cast of sixty, all of whom were foreigners except a few boys and young men from the court. The play lasted all day and the Tsar watched the performance for ten hours straight without rising from his seat. Four additional plays and two ballets soon followed.

Alexis' delight in his new Tsaritsa increased even more when, in the fall of 1671, he learned that she was pregnant. Both father and mother prayed for a son, and on May 30, 1672, at one o'clock in the morning, she delivered a large, apparently health boy. The child was named Peter after the apostle. Along with good health, his mother's black, vaguely Tatar eyes, and a tuft of auburn hair, the royal infant entered the world at normal size. In accordance with the old Russian custom of "taking the measure," an image of Peter's patron saint was painted on a board of exactly the same dimensions as the infant, and the resultant image of St. Peter with the Holy Trinity measures nineteen and a quarter inches long and five and a quarter inches wide.

Moscow rejoiced when the booming of the great bell in the Tower of Ivan the Great on the Kremlin square announced the birth of this new Tsarevich. Messengers galloped to carry the news to other Russian towns, and special ambassadors were dispatched to Europe. From the white ramparts of the Kremlin, cannon thundered in salute for three days, while the bells of the city's 1,600 churches pealed continuously.

Alexis was overjoyed with his new son, and personally arranged every detail of a service of public thanksgiving in the Assumption Cathedral. Afterward, Alexis raised Kyril Naryshkin, Natalya's father, and Matveev, her foster father, in rank, and then himself handed vodka and wines from trays to his guests.

The baby Peter, four weeks old, was christened on June 29, the holy day of St. Peter in the Orthodox calendar. Wheeled into church in a rolling cradle along a path sprinkled with holy water, the child was held over the font by Fedor Naryshkin, the Tsaritsa's eldest brother, and christened by Alexis' private confessor. The following day, a royal banquet was offered to delegations of boyars, merchants and other citizens of Moscow who thronged to the Kremlin with congratulatory gifts. The tables were decorated with enormous blocks of sugar sculpted into larger-than-life statues of eagles, swans and other birds. There was even an intricate sugar model of the Kremlin, with figures of tiny people coming and going. In her private apartments above the banqueting halls, the Tsaritsa Natalya gave a separate reception to the wives and daughters of the boyars, handing plates of sweets to her guests on their departure.

Soon afterward, the subject of all this celebration, surrounded by his own small, private household staff, was moved into his suite of rooms. He had a governess, a wet nurse—"a good and clean woman with sweet and healthy milk"—and a staff of dwarfs especially trained to act as servants and playmates to the royal children. When Peter was two, he and his retinue, now grown to include fourteen attending gentlewomen, moved into a grander Kremlin apartment—the walls hung with deep red fabrics, the furniture upholstered in crimson and embroidered with threads of gold and bright blue. Peter's clothes—miniature caftans, shirts, vests, stockings and caps—were cut from silk, satin and velvet, embroidered with silver and gold, buttoned and tasseled with sewn clusters of pearls and emeralds.

A doting mother, a proud father and a pleased Matveev competed to lavish gifts on the child, and Peter's nursery soon overflowed with elaborate models and toys. In one corner stood a carved wooden horse with a leather saddle studded with silver nails and a bridle decorated with emeralds. On a table near the window rested an illuminated picture book, painstakingly made for him by six icon painters. Music boxes and a small, elegant clavichord with copper strings were brought from Germany. But Peter's favorite toys and his earliest games were military. He liked to bang on cymbals and drums. Toy soldiers and forts, model pikes, swords, arquebuses and pistols spread across his tables and chairs and floor. Next to his bed, Peter kept his most precious toy, given to him by Matveev, who had bought it from a foreigner: a model of a boat.

Intelligent, active and noisy, Peter grew rapidly. Most children walk at around one year; Peter walked at seven months. His father liked taking this healthy little Tsarevich with him on excursions around Moscow and to the royal villas outside the capital. Sometimes he went to Preobrazhenskoe, the informal retreat where Matveev had built a summer theater; this quiet place on the banks of the Yauza River beyond the German Suburb was Natalya's favorite. But more often he was taken to the architectural marvel of Alexis' reign, the huge palace at Kolomenskoe.

This immense building, constructed entirely of wood, was regarded by Russian contemporaries as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Standing on a bluff overlooking a bend in the Moscow River, it was an exotic jumble of shingled onion domes, tent roofs, steep pyramidal towers, horseshoe arches, vestibules, latticed stairways, balconies and porches, arcades, courtyards and gateways. A separate three-storied building, with two peaked towers, served as the private apartment of Peter and his half-brother Ivan. Although from the outside it seemed a crazy quilt of old Russian architecture, the palace had many modern features. There were baths not only for members of the family, but also for the servants (the palace of Versailles, constructed at roughly the same time, was built without either baths or toilets). The wooden walls of the Kolomenskoe palace were pierced by 3,000 mica-paned windows, and light streamed in on 270 rooms decorated in modern, secular style. Brightly painted scenes decorated the ceilings, mirrors and velvet drapes hung on the walls, interspersed with portraits of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. The silver throne, studded with gems, on which Alexis received his visitors was flanked by two giant bronze lions. When the Tsar pushed a lever, the eyes of these mechanical beasts would roll, their jaws would open, and from their throats came a hoarse, brassy roar.*

Natalya preferred the less formal daily routine in these suburban palaces to that in the Kremlin. Hating the stuffy air of the Tsaritsa's closed carnage, she raised its curtains—in public—and was soon riding to and from the country, and once even in a state procession, in an uncovered carriage with her husband and child. Because it was easier for her to watch, Alexis received foreign ambassadors at Kolomenskoe rather than at the Kremlin. In 1675, the procession of the arriving Austrian ambassador was deliberately slowed as it passed the window where the Tsaritsa sat, so that she might have more time to observe. This same diplomat, waiting to be presented to the Tsar, caught a glimpse of Peter: "The door opened suddenly and Peter, three years old, a curly-headed boy, was seen for a moment holding his mother's hand."

Later that year, Peter was regularly seen in public. Alexis had ordered several of the large, gilded court carriages used by other contemporary European monarchs. Matveev, knowing exactly how to please, thereupon ordered a miniature copy of one of these carriages and presented it to Peter. This tiny coach, "inset with gold ornament, drawn by four dwarf ponies, with four dwarfs riding at the side and another dwarf behind," became a favorite sight on state occasions.

Alexis had five years with Natalya Naryshkina. A second child, named Natalya after her mother, was born and lived; a third child, again a daughter, was born and died. At court, the effect of the marriage had been strongly felt. The austere, painfully religious quality of Alexis' earlier years gave way to a new, more relaxed spirit, a greater readiness to accept Western ideas, entertainments and techniques. But the greatest effect was on the Tsar himself.

*In 1771, exactly 100 years after it was built, the great wooden palace was torn down by Catherine the Great.

Marriage to this young wife revived and delighted him. The last years of his life were the happiest.

Suddenly, when Peter was only three and a half, the serenity of his nursery life was shattered. On Epiphany in January 1676, Tsar Alexis, at forty-seven, healthy and active, took part in the annual ceremony of the blessing of the waters of the Moscow River. Standing in the frozen winter air during the long ceremony, he caught a chill. A few days later, in the middle of the performance of a play, the Tsar left die Kremlin theater and went to bed. At first, the illness did not seem dangerous. Nevertheless, it grew steadily worse, and after ten days, on February 8, Tsar Alexis died.

At a stroke, Peter's world changed. He had been the adored small son of a father who doted on his mother; now he was the potentially troublesome offspring of his dead father's second wife. The successor to the throne was fifteen-year-old Fedor, the semi-invalid eldest surviving son of Maria Miloslavskaya. Although Fedor had never been well, in 1674 Alexis had formally declared him to be of age, recognized him as heir and presented him as such to his subjects and the foreign ambassadors. At that time, it had seemed only a formality; Fedor's health was so delicate and Alexis' so good that few thought the delicate son would live to succeed the robust father.

But now it had happened: Fedor was Tsar, and the great pendulum of power had swung back again from Naryshkin to Miloslavsky. Although his legs were so swollen that he had to be carried to his coronation, Fedor was crowned without opposition. The Miloslavskys came flooding triumphantly back to office. Fedor himself bore no ill-will against his step-mother, Natalya, or his little half-brother, Peter, but he was only fifteen and could not completely resist the power of his Miloslavsky relatives.

At the head of this clan stood his uncle Ivan Miloslavsky, who had hastened back from his post as Governor of Astrachan to replace Matveev as chief minister. That Matveev himself, as effective leader of the Naryshkin party, would in turn be banished to some ceremonial post was expected; it was an accepted accompaniment to the swing of the pendulum; it would balance the sending of Miloslavsky to Astrachan. The Tsaritsa Natalya, therefore, was saddened but resigned when her foster father was ordered to depart for Siberia to become Governor of Verkoture, a province in the northwestern part of that immense territory! But she was shocked and terrified when she learned that, en route to his new post, Matveev had been overtaken by new orders from Ivan Miloslavsky: Matveev was to be arrested, stripped of all his property and conducted as a state prisoner to Pustozersk, a remote town north of the Arctic Circle. (Actually, Ivan Miloslavsky's fear of his powerful rival had driven him even further he had tried to have Matveev condemned to death, charging him with theft from the Treasury, the use of magic and even an attempt to poison Tsar Alexis. Ivan Miloslavsky pressed young Fedor hard, but the Tsar refused the death sentence and Miloslavsky had to settle for Matveev's imprisonment.)

Deprived of their powerful champion, and with their other supporters pushed from office, Natalya and her two children faded from public.view. At first, Natalya feared for her children's physical safety; her son, three-and-a-half-year-old Peter, remained the Naryshkin party's hope for the future. But as time passed, the Tsaritsa relaxed; the life of a royal prince was still considered sacred, and Tsar Fedor never exhibited toward his newly poor relations anything but sympathy and kindness. They remained in the Kremlin, cloistered in their private apartments. There Peter began his education. At that time in Muscovy, most people, even among the gentry and the clergy, were illiterate. In the nobility, education rarely consisted of more than reading, writing and a smattering of history and geography. Instruction in grammar, mathematics and foreign languages was reserved for religious scholars who needed these tools to grapple with theology. There were exceptions: two of Tsar Alexis' children, Fedor and his sister the Tsarevna Sophia, had been placed in the hands of famous theological scholars from Kiev, had received a thorough classical education and could speak the foreign languages of a truly learned seventeenth-century Muscovite, Latin and Polish.

Peter's education began simply. At three, when his father was still alive, he had been given a primer to start learning the alphabet. When he reached five, Tsar Fedor, who was his godfather as well as his half-brother, said to Natalya, "Madam, it is time our godson started his lessons." Nikita Zotov, a clerk who worked in the tax-collection department, was selected as Peter's tutor. Zotov, an amiable, literate man who knew the Bible well but was not a scholar, was overwhelmed at being chosen for his role. Trembling, he was led to the Tsaritsa, who received him with Peter at her side. "You are a good man well versed in the Holy Writ," she said, "and I entrust to you my only son." Whereupon Zotov flung himself on the ground and burst into tears. "Matushka," he cried, "I am not worthy to look after such a treasure!" The Tsaritsa gently raised him up and told him that Peter's lessons would begin the next day. To encourage Zotov, the Tsar gave him a suite of apartments and raised him to the rank of minor nobleman, the Tsaritsa presented him with two complete sets of new clothes and the Patriarch gave him 100 rubles.

On the following morning, with both Tsar and Patriarch present to watch, Zotov gave Peter his first lesson. The new schoolbooks were sprinkled with holy water, Zotov bowed low to his small pupil and the lesson began. Zotov started with the alphabet and, as time passed, went on to the Prayer Book and the Bible. Long passages of Holy Scripture, drilled into Peter's early memory, remained with him permanently; forty years later, he could recite them by heart, He was taught to sing the magnificent Russian choral litany, and he took great pleasure in his talent. In later years, traveling through Russia, Peter often attended services in country churches. His practice on these occasions was to stride straight up to the choir and sing along in a loud voice.

Zotov's assignment had been only to teach Peter to read and write, but he found his pupil eager to go further. Peter constantly urged Zotov to tell him more stories of Russian history, of battles and heroes. When Zotov mentioned the boy's enthusiasm to Natalya, she commissioned master engravers from the Ordnance Office to compose books of colored drawings depicting foreign cities and palaces, sailing ships, weapons and historical events. Zotov placed this collection in Peter's room so that when the boy was bored with his regular lessons, these books could be brought out, looked at and discussed. A giant globe, taller than a man, sent to Tsar Alexis from Western Europe, was brought to the schoolroom for Peter to study. Its depiction of the geography of Europe and Africa was remarkably accurate. The details of the eastern coast of North America were also correct—Chesapeake Bay, Long Island and Cape Cod were all precisely drawn-—but farther west the lines became more inexact. California, for example, was shown as separate from the rest of the continent.

In the schoolroom, Zotov won Peter's deep affection and for as long as the tutor lived, Peter kept him close. Zotov has been criticized for giving his pupil an inferior education, inadequate to the needs of a boy who would be tsar, yet at the time of these lessons Peter stood behind his two half-brothers, Fedor and Ivan, in the succession. His education, though less severely classical than that given to Fedor and Sophia, was far better than that of the average Russian nobleman. Most important, it was perhaps the best education for a mind like Peter's: He was not a scholar, but he was unusually open and curious, and Zotov stimulated this curiosity; it is doubtful that anyone could have done better. Strange though it may seem, when this royal prince who was to become an emperor reached manhood, he was, in large part, a self-taught man. From his earliest years, he himself had chosen what he wished to learn. The mold which created Peter the Great was not made by any parent, tutor or counselor; it was cast by Peter himself.

Between classroom and play in the Kremlin and at Kolomenskoe, Peter's life passed uneventfully during the six years (1676-1682) of Fedor's reign. Fedor seemed very much his father's son—mild-mannered, indulgent and relatively intelligent, having been educated by the leading scholars of the day. Unfortunately, his scurvy-like disease frequently forced him to rule Russia lying on his back.

Nevertheless, Fedor did carry out one great reform, the abolition of the medieval system of precedence, a crushing weight on public administration, which decreed that noblemen could only accept state offices or military commands according to their rank. And to prove his rank, every boyar jealously guarded his family records. There were endless squabbles, and it became impossible to put capable men in key positions because others, citing higher rank, would refuse to serve under them. This system enshrined incompetence, and in the seventeenth century, in order to field an army at all, the tsars had been forced to set the system aside temporarily and declare that wartime commands would be assigned "without precedence."

Fedor wanted to make these temporary waivers permanent. He appointed a commission which recommended the permanent abolition of precedence; then he called a special council of boyars and clergy and personally urged the abolition of the welfare of the state. The Patriarch enthusiastically supported him. The boyars, suspicious and reluctant to give up the hallowed prerogatives of rank, grudgingly agreed. Fedor ordered that all family documents, service books and anything pertaining to previous precedence and rank be surrendered. Before the eyes of the Tsar, the Patriarch and the council, these were wrapped in bundles, carried into a Kremlin courtyard and tossed into the flames of a bonfire. Fedor decreed that thereafter offices and power would be distributed on a basis of merit and not of birth, a principle which Peter would subsequently make the foundation of his own military and civilian admistration. (Ironically, many boyars, seeing their ancient privileges go up in smoke, silently cursed Fedor and the Miloslavskys and thought of the young Peter as a potential savior of the old ways.)

Although he had married twice in his brief life, Fedor died without an heir. His first wife died in childbirth, followed a few days later by her newborn son. The death of this infant and Fedor's declining health increased the uneasiness of the Miloslavskys, who urged Fedor to marry again. He agreed, despite the warnings of doctors that the exertions of marriage would kill him, because he had fallen in love with a beautiful, high-spirited, fourteen-year-old girl. Martha Apraxina was not the choice of the Miloslavskys; rather she was a goddaughter of Matveev, and she asked, as a condition of her marriage, that the imprisoned statesman be pardoned and his property restored. Fedor agreed, but before the godfather could arrive in Moscow to congratulate the bride in person, the Tsar, two and a half months after his wedding, was dead.

Since Michael Romanov's accession in 1613, each tsar had been succeeded by his eldest surviving son: Michael had been succeeded by his eldest surviving son, Alexis, and Alexis by his eldest surviving son, Fedor. In each case, before his own death, the tsar had formally presented this eldest son to the people and officially designated him the heir to the throne. But now Fedor had died without leaving a son or designating an heir.

The two surviving candidates were Fedor's sixteen-year-old brother, Ivan, and his ten-year-old half-brother, Peter. Normally, Ivan, who was-six years older than Peter as well as being the son of Alexis' first wife, would have been the uncontested choice. But Ivan was nearly blind, lame and spoke with difficulty, whereas Peter was active, glowing and big for his age. More important, the boyars knew that, whichever boy ascended the throne, the actual power would be in the hands of a regent. By now, most of them were antagonistic to Ivan Miloslavsky and preferred Matveev, who, under the nominal regency of the Tsaritsa Natalya, would weild power if Peter became tsar.

The decision came immediately after the boyars' final leavetaking of Tsar Fedor. One by one, the boyars passed the bed on which the dead Tsar lay, stopping to kiss the cold white hand. Then the Patriarch Joachim and his bishops entered the crowded room, and Joachim posed the formal question, "Which of the two princes shall be tsar?" Arguments followed; some supported the Miloslavskys, saying that Ivan's claim was strongest; others urged that it was impractical and foolish to continue the rule of the Russian state from a sickbed. The discussion grew hot, and finally, out of the uproar, the cry was heard: "Let the people decide!"

In theory, "the people" meant that the tsar should be elected by a Zemsky Sobor, an Assembly of the Land, a gathering of noblemen, merchants and townspeople from all parts of the Muscovite state. It was an Assembly of the Land which in 1613 had pursuaded the first Romanov, sixteen-year-old Micheal, to accept the throne, and which had ratified the succession of Alexis. But such an assembly could not be gathered for weeks. Thus, at that moment, "the people" meant the Moscow crowd massed outside the palace windows.

The bells of the Ivan the Great bell tower sounded, and the Patriarch, the bishops and the boyars walked to the porch at the top of the Red Staircase overlooking Cathedral Square. Looking out over the crowd, the Patriarch cried, "The Tsar Fedor Alexeevich of blessed memory is dead. He leaves no heirs but his brothers, the Tsarevich Ivan Alexeevich and the Tsarevich Peter Alexeevich. To which of the two princes do you give the rule?" There were loud shouts of "Peter Alexeevich" and a few cries of "Ivan Alexeevich," but the shouts for Peter became louder and drowned out the others. The Patriarch thanked and blessed the crowd. The choice was made.

Inside, the newly elected ten-year-old sovereign waited. His short, curly hair framed his round, tanned face with the large black eyes, the full lips, the wart on the right cheek. He reddened with self-consciousness when the Patriarch approached and began to speak. The churchman formally announced the death of the Tsar, his own election, and concluded, "In the name of the whole people of the orthodox Faith, I beg you to be our tsar." Peter refused at first, saying that he was too young and that his brother would be better able to rule. The Patriarch insisted, saying, "Lord, reject not our petition." Peter was silent, his blush grew deeper. Minutes passed. Gradually, the people in the room understood that Peter's silence meant that he had accepted.

The crisis had passed. Peter was tsar, his mother would be regent and Matveev would rule. This is what everyone present believed at the end of that tumultuous day. But they had reckoned without the Tsarevna Sophia.

3

"A MAIDEN OF GREAT INTELLIGENCE

There was no typical Russian woman; Russian blood was a mixture of Slav, Tatar, Bait and others. Ideally, perhaps, a Russian woman was fair and comely, with light chestnut hair, and her figure, once past girlhood, was generous. In part, this was because Russian men liked strong women with big bosoms, and in part because their shapes, unmolded by stays, were free to expand as nature decreed. Western visitors, accustomed to the corseted waists of Versailles, St. James's, and the Hofburg, found Russian women bulky.

They were not uninterested in appearing beautiful. They dressed in long, flowing bright-colored sarafans embroidered with golden threads. Billowing sleeves flared out from the shoulders and would have covered the hands had they not been held at the wrist by glittering bracelets. The gowns worn over these sarafans were of velvet, taffeta or brocade. Girls wore their hair in a single long braid with a ring of flowers or a ribbon. A married woman was never bareheaded. Indoors, she wore a cloth headress; when she went out, she donned a kerchief or a rich fur hat. They daubed their cheeks with red to enhance their beauty, and wore the handsomest earrings and most valuable rings which their husbands could afford.

Unfortunately, the higher a lady's rank and the more gorgeous her wardrobe, the less likely she was to be seen. The Muscovite idea of women, derived from Byzantium, had nothing of those romantic medieval Western conceptions of gallantry, chivalry and the Court of Love. Instead, a woman was regarded as a silly, helpless child, intellectually void, morally irresponsible and, given the slightest chance, enthusiastically promiscuous. This puritanical idea that an element of evil lurked in all little girls affected their earliest childhood. In good families, children of opposite sexes were never allowed to play together—to preserve the boys from contamination. As they grew older, girls, too, were subject to contamination, and even the most innocent contact between youths and maidens was forbidden. Instead, to preserve their purity while teaching them prayer, obedience and a few useful skills such as embroidery, daughters were kept under lock and key. A song described them "sitting behind thirty locked doors, so that the wind may not ruffle their hair, nor the sun burn their cheeks, nor the handsome young men entice them." Thus they waited, ignorant and undefiled, until the day came to thrust them into the hands of a husband.

Usually, a girl was married in the full bloom of adolescence to a man she had not met until all the major parties to the marriage— her father, the bridegroom and the bridegroom's father—had made the decision final. The negotiations might have been lengthy; they involved critical matters such as the size of the dowry and guarantees of the bride's virginity. If, subsequently, in the not necessarily expert opinion of the young bridegroom, the girl had had previous experience, he could ask that the marriage be voided and the dowry returned. This meant a messy lawsuit; far better to examine carefully in advance and be absolutely sure.

When everything was settled, the young wife-to-be, her face covered with a linen veil, was summoned into her father's presence to be introduced to her future husband. Taking a small whip, the father struck his daughter lightly on the back, saying, "My daughter, this is the last time you shall be admonished by the authority of your father beneath whose rule you have lived. Now you are free of me, but remember that you have not so much escaped from my sway as passed beneath that of another. Should you not behave as you ought to toward your husband, he in my stead will admonish you with this whip." Whereupon the father handed the whip to the bridegroom, who, according to custom, nobly declared that he "believes he will have no need of this whip." Nevertheless, he accepted it as a gift from his father-in-law, and attached it to his belt.

On the wedding eve, the bride was brought by her mother to the bridegroom's house with her trousseau and the nuptial bed. In the morning, heavily veiled, she went through the ceremony, pledging fidelity by exchanging rings and then falling at her husband's feet, touching her forehead to his shoes in a gesture of subjugation. With his wife on the floor beneath him, the bridegroom benevolently covered her with the hem of his coat, acknowledging his obligation to support and protect this humble creature. Then, while the guests began to banquet, the newlyweds went straight to bed. They were given two hours, after which the doors of their room flew open and the guests crowded around, wanting to know whether the husband had found his wife a virgin. If the answer was yes, congratulations were lavished upon them, they were led to a bath of sweet-smelling herbs and then to the banquet hall to join in the feast. If the answer was no, everyone, but most of all the bride, suffered.

Once married, the new wife assumed her place in her husband's home, as an animate domestic chattel, and possessed no rights except through him. Her functions were to look after his house, see to his comfort and bear his children. If she had sufficient talent, she ruled as mistress over the servants; if not, in the master's absence the servants took charge without asking or telling her anything. When her husband had an important guest, she was permitted to appear before dinner, dressed in her best ceremonial robes, bearing a welcoming cup on a silver tray. Standing before the guest, she bowed, handed the cup, offered her cheek for a Christian kiss and then wordlessly withdrew. When she bore a child, those who feared her husband or wanted his patronage came to congratulate him and present a gold piece for the newborn. If the gift was generous, the husband had good reason to be happy with his excellent wife.

If the husband was not happy, there were procedures for improving his situation. In most cases, where only a mild correction was necessary, he could beat her. The Domostroy or Household Management Code, dating from 1556 and attributed to a monk named Sylvester, gave specific advice to the heads of Muscovite families on numerous domestic matters, from preserving mushrooms to disciplining wives. On the latter issue, it recommended that "disobedient wives should be severely whipped, though not in anger." Even a good wife should be taught by her husband "by using the whip to her from time to time, but nicely, in secret, and in a polite fashion, avoiding blows of the fist which cause bruises." In the lower classes, Russian men beat their wives on the slightest pretext. "Some of these barbarians will tie up their wives by the hair of the head, and whip them stark naked," wrote Dr. Collins. Sometimes the beatings were so severe that the woman died; then the husband was free to remarry. Inevitably, a few wives, tormented beyond endurance, struck back and murdered their husbands. The number was small because a new law, published early in Alexis' reign, dealt harshly with such criminals: a wife guilty of murdering her husband was buried alive in the earth with only her head protruding above the ground, and left to die.

In serious cases, where a wife was so hopelessly unsatisfactory that she was not worth beating, or where the husband had found another woman whom he preferred, the solution was divorce. To divorce his wife, an Orthodox husband had simply to thrust her, willing or not, into a convent. There, her hair was sheared off, she was dressed in a long black gown with wide sleeves and enshrouding hood and she became, in the eyes of the world, dead. For the rest of her life, she lived amid the crowds of women in nunneries, some of them young girls forced to abandon life by greedy brothers or relatives who wished to avoid sharing an estate or paying a dowry, others simply wives who had run away and preferred anything to going back to their husbands.

Once his wife was "dead," a husband was free to remarry, but this freedom was not unlimited. The Orthodox Church permitted a man two dead wives or two divorces, but his third wife had to be his last. Thus, a husband who had violently abused his first two wives was likely to handle his third with care; if she died or ran away, he could never marry again.

This isolation of women and disdain for their companionship had a grim effect on seventeenth-century Russian men. Family life was stifled, intellectual life was stagnant, the coarsest qualities prevailed and men, deprived of the society of women, found little else to do but drink. There were exceptions. In some households, intelligent women played a key role, albeit behind the scenes; in a few, strong women even dominated weak husbands. Ironically, the lower a woman stood in the social scale, the greater her chance for equality. In the lower classes, where life was a struggle for simple existence, women could not be pushed aside and treated as useless children; their brains and muscle were needed. They were considered inferior, but they lived side by side with men. They bathed with men, and ran laughing through the snow with men, completely naked. On endless winter evenings, they joined the men in feasting and drinking around the stove, packed together, allowing embraces from whoever was next to them, laughing, crying and finally falling asleep in drunken communion. If a husband was cruel, still he had once been kind; if he beat her, it permitted her to forgive again. "Yes, he beats me, but then he falls on his knees with tears in his eyes and begs my forgiveness. ..."

At the summit of the female social order stood the tsaritsa, the wife of the tsar. Her life, although more comfortable than that of her lesser sisters, was no more independent. She devoted her time to her family, to prayer and to good deeds and charities. Within the palace, she directed the household, seeing to her own wardrobe and watching over that of her husband and children. Usually, the tsaritsa herself was skilled with a needle and embroidered robes and vestments, either for the tsar or the church; in addition, she supervised the labor of many seamstresses. It was her duty to give generously to the poor and to oversee the marriages and ensure the dowries of* the numerous young women of her household. Like her husband, the tsaritsa spent much time in church, but, even with all her duties, there were many empty hours. To pass the time, the tsaritsa played cards, listened to stories, watched the singing and dancing of her maidens and laughed at the clowning of her dwarfs dressed in bright-pink costumes with red leather boots and green cloth caps. At the end of the day, after vespers and when the tsar had finished his work, the tsaritsa might be summoned to visit her husband.

Whether or not marriage was a desirable state for a seventeenth-century Russian was arguable. But there were some women in Russian society who would never know. By rank, they were at the very top, the sisters and daughters of the tsar. By fortune, who can say? None of these princesses, called tsarevnas, would ever meet a man, fall in love, marry and have children. Similarly, none would ever be haggled over, marketed, legally raped, beaten or divorced. The barrier was their rank. They could never marry Russians beneath their own royal rank (although the tsar could choose a wife from the nobility), and they were barred by religion from marrying foreigners—by definition, infidels or heretics. Therefore, from birth they were doomed to live their lives in the narrow gloom of the terem, an apartment, usually at the top of a large Russian house, reserved for women. There, they passed their time in prayer, embroidery, gossip and boredom. They would never know anything of the wider world, and the world would notice their existence only when it was announced that they had been bom or died.

Except for their close male relatives and the patriarch and a few selected priests, no man ever set eyes on the shadowy royal recluses. The terem itself was an exclusively female world. When a tsarevna was ill, the shutters were drawn and the curtains closed to darken the room and hide the patient. If it was necessary to take her pulse or examine her body, it had to be done through a covering of gauze so that no male fingers would touch the naked female skin. Early in the morning or late at night, the tsarevnas went to church, hurrying through closed corridors and secret passageways. In cathedrals or chapels, they stood screened behind red silk curtains in a dark part of the choir to avoid the gaze of male eyes. When they walked in state processionals, it was behind the moving silken walls of closed canopies. When they left the Kremlin on pilgrimage to a convent, it was in specially constructed bright-red carriages or sledges, closed like movable cells, surrounded by maids and men on horseback to clear the roads.

The terem should have been Sophia's world. Born in 1657, she lived there in early childhood, one of a dozen princesses—the sisters, aunts and daughters of Tsar Alexis—all caged behind its tiny windows. There seemed no reason for her rare and extraordinary quality. She was simply the third of Alexis' eight daughters by Maria Miloslavskaya; she was one of six who survived. Like her sisters, she should have been equipped with a rudimentary female education and passed her life in anonymous seclusion.

And yet Sophia was different. That strange alchemy which, for no apparent reason, lifts one child out of a large family and endows it with a special destiny had created Sophia. She had the intelligence, the ambition, the decisiveness which her feeble brothers and anonymous sisters so overwhelmingly lacked. It was almost as if her siblings had been drained of normal health, vitality and purpose in order to magnify these qualities in Sophia.

From an early age, it was apparent that Sophia was exceptional. As a child, she somehow persuaded her father to break the terem tradition and permit her to share the lessons of her brother Fedor, who was four years younger. Her tutor was the eminent scholar

Simeon Polotsky, a monk of Polish ancestry from the famous academy in Kiev. Polotsky found her "a maiden of great intelligence and the most delicate understanding, with an accomplished masculine mind." Together with a younger monk, Sylvester Medvedev, Polotsky taught his pupil theology, Latin, Polish and history. She became acquainted with poetry and drama and even performed in religious plays. Medvedev snared Polotsky's view that the Tsarevna was a student with "marvelous understanding and judgment."

Sophia was nineteen when her father died and her fifteen-year-old brother became Tsar Fedor II. Soon after Fedor's coronation, the Tsarevna began to emerge from the obscurity of the terem. Increasingly throughout his reign, she was seen in circumstances hitherto wholly unknown to women. She attended sessions of the boyar council. Her uncle Ivan Miloslavsky and the leading minister, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, included her in their conversations and decisions, so that her political views matured and she learned to judge the character of men. Gradually, she came to realize that her intellectual attainments and strength of will matched and even surmounted those of the men around her, that there was no reason, except her sex and the unbroken tradition in Muscovy that the autocrat be a man, to bar her from supreme power.

During the last week of Fedor's life, Sophia stayed at his bedside, acting as comforter, confidante and messenger, and became deeply involved in affairs of state. Fedor's death and sudden elevation to the throne of her half-brother, Peter, rather than her full brother, Ivan, were terrible blows to Sophia. She genuinely mourned Fedor, who had been her classmate and friend as well as her brother; further, the promise of a Naryshkin restoration at court meant the end of any special status for her, a Miloslavsky princess. She would certainly have less contact with high officers of state like Prince Vasily Golitsyn, whom she had come to admire. Worse, because she and the new regent, the Tsaritsa Natalya, disliked each other, she might even be sent back to the terem.

Desperately, Sophia sought another solution. She hurried to the Patriarch to complain of Peter's quick election to the throne. "This election is unjust," she protested. "Peter is young and impetuous. Ivan has reached his majority. He must be the tsar." Joachim said that the decision could not be changed. "But at least let them both rule!" begged Sophia. "No," decreed the Patriarch, "joint rule is ruinous. Let there be one tsar. It is thus pleasing to God." For the moment, Sophia had to retreat. A few days later, however, at Fedor's funeral, she made her feelings public. Peter, accompanied by his mother, followed the bier in the procession to the cathedral. Walking along, Natalya heard loud noises behind her and turned to find that Sophia had joined the procession without the moving canopy which traditionally screened a daughter of a tsar from the public. In the open, only partially veiled, Sophia was weeping theatrically and calling on the crowd to witness her grief.

Sophia's act was unprecedented, and at the crowded cathedral Natalya retaliated. During the long burial service, Natalya took Peter by the hand and walked out. Later, she explained that her son was exhausted and hungry and to have remained would have been bad for his health, but the Miloslavskys were scandalized. The situation was made worse by Natalya's arrogant younger brother Ivan Naryshkin, only just recalled to court. "The dead," he said, referring to the entire Miloslavsky clan, "should bury the dead."

On leaving the cathedral, Sophia again gave vent to her grief, now mingled with bitter rage. "You see how our brother Tsar Fedor has suddenly gone from this world. His enemies have poisoned him. Have pity on us orphans. We have no father, nor mother, nor brother. Our elder brother, Ivan, has not been elected tsar, and if we are to blame, let us go live in other lands which are ruled over by Christian kings."

4

THE REVOLT OF THE STRELTSY

Throughout the first half of Peter's life, the key to power in Russia was the Streltsy, the shaggy, bearded pikemen and musketeers who guarded the Kremlin and were Russia's first professional soldiers. They were sworn to protect "the government" in a crisis but often had difficulty deciding where the legitimate government lay. They were a kind of collective dumb animal, never quite sure who was its proper master, but ready to rush and bite anyone who challenged its own privileged position. Ivan the Terrible had formed these regiments to give a permanent professional core to the unwieldy feudal host which previous Muscovite rulers had led into battle. These older armies, consisting of squadrons of mounted noblemen and a horde of armed peasants, were summoned in the spring and sent home in the autumn. Usually, these summer soldiers, untrained and undisciplined, clutching whatever spear or axe lay at hand when they were mustered, fared badly against their better-equipped Western enemies, the Poles or the Swedes.

On guard or on parade, the Streltsy were a colorful sight. Each regiment had its own vivid colors: a caftan or full-length coat of blue, green or cherry, a fur-trimmed hat of the same color, breeches tucked into yellow boots turned up at the toe. Over the caftan, each soldier buckled a black leather belt from which to sling his sword. In one hand, he carried a musket or arquebus, in the other a halberd or pointed battle-axe.

Most of the Streltsy were simple Russians, living by the old ways, revering both tsar and patriarch, hating innovation and opposing reforms. Both officers and men were suspicious and resentful of the foreigners brought in to train the army in new weapons and tactics. They were ignorant of politics, but when they believed the country was veering from proper traditional paths, they easily convinced themselves that duty demanded their interference in affairs of state.

In peacetime, they had not enough to do. A few detachments were stationed on the Polish and Tatar frontiers, but the bulk was concentrated in Moscow, where they lived in special quarters near the Kremlin. By 1682, they numbered 22,000—divided into twenty-two regiments of 1,000 men each—who with their wives and children were an enormous mass of idle soldiery and dependents quartered in the heart of the capital. They were coddled: the tsar provided the handsome log houses in which they lived, the tsar furnished their food, their clothing and their pay. In return they served as sentries in the Kremlin and guards at the city gates. When the tsar traveled in Moscow, the Streltsy lined his route; when he left the city, they provided an escort. They served as policemen, carrying small whips to break up fights. When the city caught fire, the Streltsy became firemen.

Gradually, with so much extra time on their hands, the Streltsy drifted into trade. Individual Strelets opened shops. As members of the army, they paid no taxes on their profits and became rich. Membership in the regiments became desirable and enlistment a privilege passed down on an almost hereditary basis. As soon as a boy was old enough, he was enrolled in his father's regiment. Naturally, the richer the Streltsy became, the more reluctant they were to resume their primary duties as soldiers. A Streltsy with a profitable shop was likely to offer bribes rather than accept some arduous assignment. The Streltsy officers also profited from this large pool of manpower. Some used the idle musketeers as servants, others to build their houses or tend their gardens. Sometimes the officers embezzled the soldiers' pay, and soldiers' formal complaints to the government were usually ignored and the petitioners punished.

This is exactly what happened in May 1682, as the young Tsar Fedor lay on his deathbed. The Griboyedov Regiment presented a formal petition accusing their colonel, Semyon Griboyedov, of withholding half their pay and forcing them to work during Easter Week on a house he was building outside Moscow. The commander of the Streltsy, Prince Yury Dolgoruky, ordered the soldier presenting the petition to be whipped for insubordination. But this time, as the petitioner was being led to the knout, he passed a watching group of his regimental comrades. "Brothers," he cried "why do you give me up? I gave the petition by your orders and for you!" Aroused, the Streltsy fell upon the guards and liberated the prisoner.

This incident inflamed the Streltsy Quarter. Seventeen regiments immediately accused their colonels of cheating or maltreatment and demanded punishment. The Regent Natalya's fledgling government, just taking office, inherited the crisis and floundered badly. Many boyars of the oldest families of Russia—the Dolgorukys, Repnins, Romodanovskys, Sheremetevs, Sheins, Kurakins and Urusovs—had rallied behind Peter and his mother, but none knew how to placate the Streltsy. In the end, desperate to blunt the soldiers' hostility, Natalya sacrificed the colonels. Without investigation, she ordered the colonels arrested and stripped of rank, and their property and wealth divided to meet the soldiers' claims. Two of the colonels, one of them Semyon Griboyedov, were publicly knouted, while twelve others were given the lesser punishment of being beaten with sticks, called batogs, at the direction of the Streltsy themselves. "Beat them harder," they urged, until their officers fainted. Then, the Streltsy grumbled with satisfaction. "They have had enough. Let them go-"

Allowing a mutinous soldiery to beat its officers was a risky way of restoring discipline. For the moment, the Streltsy were appeased, but in fact their new sense of power, their increased assurance that they were entitled and even obligated to purge the state of its enemies, had made them far more dangerous.

The Streltsy thought they knew who these enemies were: the boyars and the Naryshkins. Sinister stories had been passed among them. It was rumored that Fedor had not died naturally, as had been announced, but had been poisoned by foreign doctors with the connivance of the boyars and the Naryshkins. These same enemies had then pushed aside Ivan, the rightful heir, in favor of

Peter. Now that their diabolical schemes had succeeded, foreigners would be given power in the army and government, Orthodoxy would be degraded and trampled, and, worst of all, those faithful defenders of the old values in Muscovy, the Streltsy, would be horribly punished.

These were stories which played on the traditional prejudices of the Streltsy. And other events were described in a manner calculated to arouse the soldiery. On taking office, Natalya had distributed wholesale new promotions in rank to all her Naryshkin relatives, even elevating her arrogant twenty-three-year-old younger brother Ivan to the rank of boyar. Ivan Naryshkin already was an object of dislike for his remark at Fedor's funeral. Now, fresh rumors spread: that he had rudely pushed the Tsarevna Sophia to the ground; that he had taken the crown and placed it on his own head, declaring that it looked better on him than on anyone else.

But the stories had a source, the rumors a purpose. Who was behind this effort to arouse the Streltsy? One instigator was Ivan Miloslavsky, who was keenly anxious to overthow Peter, Natalya and the Naryshkin party. Having already been exiled himself during the previous period of Naryshkin dominance at court, he had retaliated by sending Matveev to six years of harsh internment in the Arctic; now, Matveev was returning to Moscow to act as chief advisor to the new Regent—Tsaritsa Natalya Naryshkina— and Ivan Miloslavsky knew what he could expect in this- latest shift of power. Another plotter was Prince Ivan Khovansky, a vain, incessantly noisy man whose soaring ambitions were constantly thwarted by his own incompetence. Relieved of his post as Governor of Pskov, he was called before Tsar Alexis, who told him, "Everybody calls you a fool." Never willing to accept this valuation, convinced by the Miloslavskys that high office awaited him at their hands, he was an active supporter of then-cause.

Surprisingly, the plot also involved Prince Vasily Golitsyn, a man of Western tastes, caught on the Miloslavsky side because of the enemies he had made. During Fedor's reign, Golitsyn had urged reforms. It was he who drew up the new organization of the. army and proposed the abolition of precedence, and for this the boyars hated him. As the boyars now supported Natalya and the Naryshkins, Golitsyn was thrown among the Miloslavskys.

Ivan Miloslavsky, Ivan Khovansky and Vasily Golitsyn all had motives for inciting the Streltsy, but, should such a revolt succeed, none of them could step forward and rule the Russian state. Only one person was a member of the royal family, had been the confidante of Tsar Fedor and could act as regent if young Ivan mounted the throne. Only one person was now threatened with complete seclusion in a convent or terem and the extinction of all meaningful political or personal existence. Only one person had the intelligence and courage to attempt to overthrow an elected tsar. No one knows the exact extent of her involvement in the plot and the terrible events that followed; some say it was done on her behalf but without her knowledge. But the circumstantial evidence is strong that the chief conspirator was Sophia.

Meanwhile, completely unaware, Natalya waited anxiously m the Kremlin for Matveev's return. On the day of Peter's election as tsar, she had sent messengers urging him to come quickly to Moscow. He started back, but his trip turned into a triumphal progress. Every town through which he passed offered thanksgiving services and a feast for the rehabilitated statesman. Finally, on the evening of May 11, after six years in exile, the old man re-entered Moscow. Natalya greeted him as her savior and presented him to the ten-year-old Tsar, whom he had last seen as a child of four. Matveev's hair was white and his step was slow, but Natalya was certain that, with his experience and wisdom, with the prestige he enjoyed among both boyars and Streltsy, the old man would soon be able to establish order and harmony.

So it seemed for three days. During this time, Matveev's house was crowded with welcoming boyars, merchants and foreign friends from the German Suburb. The Streltsy, remembering him as an honorable former commander, sent delegations from the regiments to pay their respects. Even members of the Miloslavsky family came, with the exception of Ivan Miloslavsky, who sent word that he was ill. Matveev received them all with happy tears streaming down his face, while his house, cellars and courtyard overflowed with welcoming gifts. Peril seemed distant, but Matveev, newly arrived on the scene and still not in full control, underestimated the danger. Sophia and her party never relaxed, and the spark of revolt remained alive among the regiments. Matveev and Natalya, isolated in the Kremlin and enveloped in their happiness, did not feel the mounting tension, but others did. Baron Van Keller, the Dutch ambassador, wrote: "The discontent of the Streltsy continues. All public affairs are at a standstill. Great calamities are feared and not without cause, for the might of the Streltsy is great and no resistance can be opposed to them."

At nine o'clock on the morning of May 15, the smoldering spark burst into flame. Two horsemen, Alexander Miloslavsky and Peter Tolstoy, both members of Sophia's intimate circle, galloped into the Streltsy Quarter, shouting, "The Naryshkins have murdered the Tsarevich Ivan! To the Kremlin! The Naryshkins will kill the whole royal family. To arms! Punish the traitors!"

The Streltsy Quarter erupted. Bells tolled urgently, battle drums began to beat. Men in caftans buckled on their armor and their sword belts, grasped their halberds, spears and muskets and assembled in the streets ready for battle. Some of the musketeers chopped off the handles of their long spears and halberds to make weapons deadlier at close range. Unfurling their broad regimental banners embroidered with pictures of the Virgin, and beating their drums, they began to advance through the streets toward the Kremlin. As they approached, terrified citizens scurried out of their path. "We are going to the Kremlin to kill the traitors and murderers of the Tsar's family!" the soldiers shouted.

Meanwhile, within the offices and palaces of the Kremlin, the day was proceeding normally. No one had the slightest idea of what was happening in the city or of the doom moving toward them. The great gates of the citadel were wide open, with only a scattering of sentries. A meeting of the council of boyars had just ended and the boyars were sitting quietly in their offices and in the public rooms of the palaces, or strolling and talking while waiting for their midday dinner. Matveev was just leaving the council chamber and coming out onto the staircase leading to the bedchamber when he saw Prince Fedor Urusov running toward him, out of breath.

Urusov gasped out the news: The Streltsy had risen! They were marching through the city toward the Kremlin! Matveen, astounded and alarmed, returned to the palace to warn the Tsaritsa Natalya; he ordered the Patriarch to come immediately, the Kremlin gates to be closed, the duty regiment of Streltsy, the Stremyani Regiment, to man the walls and prepare to defend Peter, his family and the government.

Scarcely had Matveev finished speaking when three messengers arrived one after another, each bringing worse news than his predecessor. The first announced that the Streltsy were already nearing the Kremlin walls; the second, that the gates could not be closed so quickly; and the third, that everything was too late, for the Streltsy were already inside the Kremlin. As he spoke, hundreds of rebellious musketeers were surging through the open gates, up the hill and into Cathedral Square in front of the Facets Palace. As they came, the soldiers of the Stremyani Regiment were swept along with them, abandoning their posts and joining their comrades from other regiments.

At the top of the hill, the Streltsy poured into the square surrounded by the three cathedrals and the Ivan Bell Tower. Massed before the Red Staircase, which led from the square into the palace, they shouted, "Where is the Tsarevich Ivan? Give us the Naryshkins and Matveev! Death to the traitors!" Inside, the terrified boyars of the council, still uncertain as to what had provoked this violent assault, collected in the palace banquet hall. Prince Cherkassky, Prince Golitsyn and Prince Sheremetev were chosen to go out and ask the Streltsy what they wanted. They learned from the cries: "We want to punish the traitors! They have killed the Tsarevich and will kill the whole royal family! Give us the Naryshkins and the other traitors!" Understanding that in part the mutiny was due to a mistake, the delegation returned to the banquet hall and told Matveev. He in turn went to Natalya and advised her that the only way to calm the soldiers would be to show them that the Tsarevich Ivan was still alive and the royal family united. He asked that she take both Peter and Ivan to the top of the Red Staircase and show them to the Streltsy.

Natalya trembled. To stand with her ten-year-old son in front of a howling mob of armed men calling for the blood of her family was an appalling assignment. Yet she had no choice. She took Peter by one hand and Ivan by the other and stepped onto the porch at the head of the staircase. Behind her stood the Patriarch and the boyars. When the Steltsy saw the Tsaritsa and the two boys, the shouting died and a confused murmur filled the square. In the hush, Natalya raised her voice and cried out, "Here is the Lord Tsar Peter Alexeevich. And here is the Lord Tsarevich Ivan Alexeevich. Thanks be to God, they are well and have not suffered at the hands of traitors. There are no traitors in the palace. You have been deceived."

A new clamor arose from the Streltsy. This time, the soldiers were arguing among themselves. A few, curious and bold, climbed the staircase or placed ladders against the porch and mounted to get a closer look at the helpless trio standing bravely before them. They wanted to be sure that Ivan was still truly alive. "Are you really Ivan Alexeevich?" they asked the pathetic boy. "Yes," he stammered in an almost inaudible voice. "Are you really Ivan?" they asked again. "Yes, I am Ivan," said the Tsarevich. Peter, standing only a few feet from the Streltsy, their faces and weapons level with his eyes, said nothing. Despite the tremble in his mother's hand, he remained rigid, staring calmly, showing no sign of fear.

Thoroughly bewildered by this confrontation, the Streltsy retreated down the steps. Obviously, they had been deceived— Ivan had not been murdered. There he stood, his hand held protectively by the Naryshkin Tsaritsa, whose family was supposed to have murdered him. There was no need for vengeance; all their glorious patriotic feelings began to seem foolishly out of place. A small group of Streltsy, not to be deterred from private vengeance against certain arrogant boyars, began to shout their names, but most stood silent and confused, staring uncertainly at the three figures on the porch above them.

Natalya stood there for another minute, gazing down at the sea of pikes and halberds before her. Then, having done what she could, she turned and led the two boys back into the palace. As soon as she disappeared, Matveev with his white beard and long robes stepped forward to the head of the staircase. Under Tsar Alexis, he had been a popular commander of the Streltsy, and many still remembered him favorably. He began to speak to them quietly, confidently, in a tone both proprietary and paternal. He reminded them of their loyal service in the past, of their reputation as defenders of the tsar, of their victories in the field. Without condemning them, more in sorrow than in anger, he asked how they could stain their great reputation by this rebellious tumult which was all the more lamentable as it was based on rumor and falsehood. He stressed that there was no need for them to protect the royal family, which, as they had just seen with their own eyes, was unharmed and safe. There was no need to threaten murder or violence to anyone. Quietly, he advised them to disperse, go home and ask pardon for their actions of the day. He promised that such petitions would be accepted and the outburst explained as excessive, misplaced loyalty to the throne.

These confident, friendly words made a deep impression. The soldiers in front, who could hear them best, listened carefully and nodded in approval. In the rear, there still were loud arguments, while some shouted for silence so that they could here Matveev. Gradually, as Matveev's words sank in, the entire mob became quiet.

When Matveev had finished, the Patriarch also spoke briefly, calling the Streltsy his children, admonishing them gently for their behavior, suggesting that they ask pardon and disperse. These words, too, were soothing, and it seemed that the crisis had passed. Matveev, sensing the better mood, saluted the Streltsy, turned and walked back into the palace to bring the good news to the distraught Tsaritsa. His departure was a fatal mistake.

As soon as Matveev disappeared, Prince Michael Dolgoruky, the son of the Streltsy commander, appeared at the top of the Red Staircase. Humiliated by the mutinous behavior of the troops, he was now in a towering rage and foolishly chose this moment to attempt to reestablish military discipline. In the roughest language, he cursed the men and commanded them to return to their homes. Otherwise, he threatened, the knout would fly.

Instantly, the calm created by Matveev dissolved in a roar of anger. The infuriated Streltsy remembered all their reasons for marching on the Kremlin: The Naryshkins were to be punished, hated boyars like Dolgoruky were to be destroyed. A torrent of frenzied Streltsy charged up the Red Staircase toward their commander. They seized him by his robe, lifted him above their heads and threw him over the balustrade onto the pikes of their comrades below. The crowd roared its approval, shouting, "Cut him to pieces!" Within a few seconds, the quivering body was butchered, bespattering everyone with blood.

This first violent act unleashed savagery and madness. Brandishing sharp steel, lusting for more blood, the entire raging mass of the Streltsy stormed up the Red Staircase and into the palace itself. Their next victim was Matveev. He was standing in an anteroom of the banqueting hall talking to Natalya, who still held the hands of Peter and Ivan. Seeing the Streltsy rushing toward her shouting for Matveev, Natalya dropped Peter's hand and instinctively threw her arms around Matveev to protect him. The Streltsy pushed the two boys aside, tore the old man from Natalya and hurled her aside. Prince Cherkassky threw himself into the struggle, trying to pull Matveev free of his captors, but they flung him away. Before the eyes of Peter and Natalya, Matveev was dragged out of the room and across the porch to the balustrade at the head of the Red Staircase. There, with exultant cries, they lifted him high in the air and hurled him down, onto the upraised blades. Within seconds, the closest friend and prime minister of Peter's father, the guardian, confidant and chief support of Peter's mother, was hacked to pieces.

With Matveev dead, there was nothing to stop the Streltsy. They ran unopposed through the state hails, private apartments, churches,.kitchens and even the closets of the Kremlin, clamoring for the blood of Naryshkins and boyars. Fleeing, the terrified boyars hid where they could. The Patriarch escaped into the Cathedral of the Assumption. Only Natalya, Peter and Ivan remained exposed, huddled together in a corner of the banqueting hall.

For most, there was no escape. The Streltsy hammered down locked doors, looked under beds and behind altars, thrusting their pikes into every dark place where a human being might be hiding. Those who were caught were dragged to the Red Staircase and thrown over the balustrade. Their bodies were dragged from the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate into Red Square, where they were tossed onto a growing pyramid of dismembered human parts. With sharp blades at their throats, the court dwarfs were forced to help find the Naryshkins. One of Natalya's brothers, Afanasy Naryshkin, was hidden behind the altar in the Church of the Resurrection. A dwarf leading a pack of Streltsy pointed him out, and the victim was dragged by his hair to the steps of the chancel, where he was cut to pieces. The Privy Councillor and Director of Foreign Affairs, Ivanov, his son Vasily and two colonels were killed on the porch between the banqueting hall and the Cathedral of the Annunciation. The aged boyar Romodanovsky was caught between the Patriarch's palace and the Miracle Monastery, dragged by his beard to the Cathedral Square and there raised and tossed onto spear points.

From the palace square inside the Kremlin, the bodies and pieces of bodies, often with swords and spears still sticking in them, were dragged through the Spassky Gate into Red Square. The passage of these grisly remains was accompanied by jeering cries of "Here comes the Boyar Artemon Sergeevich Matveev! . . . Here comes a Privy Councillor. Make way for him!" As the hideous pile in front of St. Basil's Cathedral grew higher and higher, the Streltsy shouted to the watching crowds, "These boyars loved to exalt themselves! This is their reward!"

By nightfall, even the Streltsy had begun to tire of the butchery. . There was no place for them to sleep in the Kremlin, and most began to stream back through the city to their own houses. Despite the bloodshed, their day had been only a partial success. Only one Naryshkin, Natalya's brother Afanasy, had been found and killed.

The chief object of their hatred, her brother Ivan, was still at large. Accordingly, they posted a heavy guard at all the gates of the Kremlin, sealing off escape, and swore to return to continue the search the following day. Inside the Kremlin, Natalya, Peter and their Naryshkin relatives spent a night of terror. Kyril Naryshkin, the Tsarita's father, her brother Ivan and three younger brothers remained concealed in the room of Peter's eight-year-old sister, Natalya, where they had been hiding all day. They had not been found, but they could not escape.

At dawn, the Streltsy marched again with beating drums into the Kremlin. Still looking for Ivan Naryshkin, the two foreign doctors who supposedly had poisoned Tsar Fedor, and other "traitors," they entered the Patriarch's house on Cathedral Square. Looking through his cellars and under his beds, they threatened his servants with spears and demanded to see the Patriarch himself. Joachim came out, dressed in his most glittering ceremonial robes, to tell them that there were no traitors to be found in his house and that if they wished to kill someone there, they should kill him.

And so the search went on, with the Streltsy continuing to hunt through the palace, and their prey, the Naryshkins, continuing to elude them. After two days spent in the dark closets of Peter's small sister's bedroom, Natalya's father, Kyril Naryshkin, three of his sons and the young son of Matveev moved to the apartments of Tsar Fedor's young widow, the Tsaritsa Martha Apraxina. There, Ivan Naryshkin cropped his long hair, and then the small group followed an old bedchamber woman down into a dark underground storeroom. It was the old woman's idea to bolt the door, but young Matveev said, "No. If you fasten the door, the Streltsy will suspect something, break down the door, find us and kill us." The refugees therefore made the room as dark as possible and crouched in the darkest corner, leaving the door open. "We had scarcely got there," said young Matveev, "before several Streltsy passed and looked quickly around. Some of them peered in through the open door, stuck their spears into the darkness, but left quickly, saying, 'It is plain our men have already been here.'"

On the third day, when the Streltsy came again to the Kremlin, they were determined to wait no longer. Their leaders mounted the Red Staircase and delivered ah ultimatum: Unless Ivan Naryshkin was surrendered immediately, they would kill every boyar in the palace. They made it clear that the royal family itself was in danger.

Sophia took charge. In front of the terrified boyars, she marched up to Natalya and declared in a loud voice, "Your brother will not escape the Streltsy. Nor is it right that we should perish on his account. There is no way out. lb save the lives of all of us, you must give up your brother."

It was a tragic moment for Natalya. She had seen Matveev dragged away and slaughtered. Now she was asked to yield her brother to a frightful death. Terrible though the decision was, Natalya had no real choice. She ordered the servants to bring her brother to her. He came, and she led him into a palace chapel, where he received Holy Communion and the last rites, accepting her decision and his coming death with great bravery. Weeping, Natalya handed him a holy icon of the Mother of God to hold in his hands when he went to meet the Streltsy.

Meanwhile, in the face of growing threats from the impatient Streltsy, the boyars became desperate. Why was Ivan Naryshkin lingering? At any moment, the Streltsy might carry out their threats. The aged Prince Jacob Odoevsky, gentle but frightened, came up to the weeping Natalya and Ivan and said, "How long, my lady, are you keeping your brother? For you must give him up. Go on quickly, Ivan Kyrilovich, and don't let us all be killed on your account."

Following Natalya and holding the icon, Ivan Naryshkin walked to the door where the Streltsy were waiting. As he appeared, the mob uttered a hoarse shout of triumph and surged forward. Before his sister's eyes, they seized their victim and began to beat him. He was dragged by his feet down the Red Staircase, through the palace square and into a torture room, where for a number of hours they kept him in agony, trying to extract a confession that he had murdered Tsar Fedor and plotted to take the throne. Through it ail, Naryshkin clenched his teeth, groaned and said not a word. Then Dr. Van Gaden, the alleged poisoner of Fedor, was brought in. Under torture, he promised to name accomplices, but as his words were being written down, his torturers, realizing the state he was in, cried, "What's the use of listening to him? Tear up the paper," and stopped the farce.

Ivan Naryshkin was now nearly dead; both his wrists and ankles had been snapped, and his hands and feet hung at strange angles. He and Van Gaden were dragged to Red Square and raised on the points of spears for a last presentation to the crowd. Lowered to earth, their hands and feet were chopped off with axes, the rest of their bodies cut into pieces and, in a final orgy of hate, the bloody remains were trampled into the mud.

The slaughter was over. One final time, the Streltsy assembled before the Red Staircase. Satisfied that they had avenged the "poisoning" of Tsar Fedor, stifled the plot of Ivan Naryshkin and killed all the men who they believed were traitors, they wished to proclaim their loyalty. From the courtyard, they cried, "We are now content. Let Your Tsarish Majesty do with the other traitors as may seem good. We are ready to lay down our heads for the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, the Tsarevich and the Tsarevnas."

Calm returned quickly. That same day, permission was given to bury the bodies which had been lying in Red Square since the first day of the massacre. Matveev's faithful servant trudged out carrying a sheet, in which he carefully collected all he could find of the mutilated body of his master. He washed the pieces and carried them on pillows to the parish church of St. Nicholas, where they were buried. The remaining Naryshkins went unharmed and unpursued. Three surviving brothers of Natalya and Ivan had escaped the Kremlin disguised as peasants. The Tsaritsa's father, Kyril Naryshkin, was forced by Streltsy pressure to shave his head and take the vows of a monk, and, as Father Cyprian, was sent to a monastery 400 miles north of Moscow.

As part of the settlement, the Streltsy demanded their back pay, a sum of twenty roubles per man. Although it had no power to resist, the council of boyars could not grant this; there simply was no money. A compromise was reached by granting ten roubles per man. To raise this amount, the property of Matveev, Ivan Naryshkin and other boyars who had been killed was auctioned off, much of the Kremlin palace's sliver plate was melted down and a general tax was placed on the population.

The Streltsy also demanded complete amnesty for their behavior and even a triumphal column in Red Square to honor their recent deeds. Inscribed in the column were to be the names of all their victims who were to be labeled as criminals. Once again, the government dared not refuse, and the column was quickly erected.

Finally, in a move designed not only to conciliate the Streltsy but also to regain control over them, the musketeers were formally designated the Palace Guard. At the rate of two regiments a day, they were summoned to the Kremlin, where they were feasted as heroes in the banqueting hall and corridors of the palace. Sophia appeared among them to praise their loyalty and devotion to the throne. To honor them, she herself walked among the soldiers and handed them cups of vodka.

Thus, Sophia came to power. Now there was no opposition: Matveev was dead, Natalya was overwhelmed by the tragedy that had engulfed her family, Peter was a boy of ten. Yet Peter was still Tsar. As he grew older, he would doubtless assert his power; the Naryshkins would wax in influence, and this Miloslavsky victory would prove only temporary. Accordingly, Sophia's plans required another step. On May 23, prompted by her agents, the Streltsy demanded a change in the occupancy of the Russian throne. In a petition sent to Khavansky, whom Sophia already had appointed as their commander, the Streltsy pointed out that there was a certain illegality to Peter's election as tsar; he was the son of the second wife, while Ivan, the son of the first wife and the older of the two boys, had been shunted aside. It was not proposed that Peter be dethroned; he was the son of a tsar, he had been elected and then proclaimed by the Patriarch. Instead, the Streltsy demanded that Peter and Ivan rule jointly as co-tsars. If the petition was not granted, they threatened to attack the Kremlin again.

The Patriarch, the archbishops and the boyars assembled in the Facets Palace to consider this new demand. In fact, they had no choice: The Streltsy could not be opposed. Besides, it was argued, to have two tsars might even be an advantage: while one went to war, the other could stay home and govern the state. It was formally agreed that the two Tsars should reign jointly. The bells in the Ivan the Great Bell Tower were rung, and in the Assumption Cathedral prayers were sent up for the long life of the two most Orthodox Tsars Ivan Alexeevich and Peter Alexeevich. Ivan's name was mentioned first, as the Streltsy petition had asked that he be considered the senior of the two.

Ivan himself was dismayed by this new development. Handicapped both in speech and in sight, he was reluctant to take any part in government. He argued with Sophia that he much preferred a quiet, peaceful life, but under pressure he agreed that he would appear with his half-brother on state occasions and occasionally in council. Outside the Kremlin, the population, in whose name the Streltsy supposedly put forward the new joint arrangement, was astonished. Some laughed aloud at the idea of Ivan—whose infirmities were well known—being tsar.

There was the final, crucial question: As both boys were young, someone else would actually have to govern the state. Who would this be? Two days later, on May 25, another delegation of Streltsy appeared with a last demand: that because of the youth and inexperience of the two Tsars, the Tsarevna Sophia become the regent. The Patriarch and the boyars quickly consented. That same day, a decree announced that the Tsarevna Sophia Alexeevna had replaced the Tsaritsa Natalya as regent.

Thus, Sophia assumed the leadership of the Russian state. Although she was filling a vacancy which she and her agents had created, Sophia was now in fact the natural choice. No male Romanov had reached sufficient age to master the government, and she surpassed all the other princesses in education, talent, and strength of will. She had shown that she knew how to launch and to ride the whirlwind of the Streltsy revolt. The soldiers, the government, even the people now looked to her. Sophia accepted, and for the next seven years this extraordinary woman governed Russia.

To confirm and entrench her triumph, Sophia moved rapidly to institutionalize the new structure of power. On July 6, only thirteen days after the outbreak of the Streltsy revolt, the double coronation of the two boy Tsars, Ivan and Peter, took place. This hurriedly arranged ceremony was a curiosity unprecendented not only in the history of Russia but in the whole history of European monarchy. Never before had two co-equal male sovereigns been crowned. The day began at five a.m. when Peter and Ivan, dressed in long robes of cloth of gold embroidered with pearls, went to morning prayer in a palace chapel. From there they proceeded to the banqueting hall, where they solemnly promoted in rank a number of Sophia's lieutenants, including Ivan Khovansky and two Miloslavskys. The formal coronation procession moved out onto the porch and down the Red Staircase, two boys walking side by side, ten-year-old Peter already taller than limping sixteen-year-old Ivan. Preceded by priests sprinkling holy water, Peter and Ivan made their way through the vast crowd packed into Cathedral Square to the door of the Assumption Cathedral, where the Patriarch, wearing a dazzling golden robe sewn with pearls, greeted the two Tsars and held out his cross for them to kiss. Inside, the lofty cathedral glowed with light filtering down from the high cupolas, flickering from hundreds of candles, reflected on the surfaces of thousands of jewels.

In the middle of the cathedral, directly under the enormous image of Christ with his hand upraised in blessing, on a raised platform covered with crimson cloth, a double throne awaited Ivan and Peter. It had been impossible in the short time available to create two exactly equal thrones, and so the silver throne of Tsar Alexis had been divided by a bar. Behind the seat on which both boys would sit, a curtain cloaked a small hiding place for their monitor, who, through a hole, could whisper the necessary information and responses during the ceremony.

The ceremony began with the two Tsars approaching the iconostasis and kissing the holiest of the icons. The Patriarch asked them to declare their faith, and each on replied, "I belong to the Holy Orthodox Russian Faith." Then a series of lengthy prayers and hymns prepared for the supreme moment of the ceremony, the placing on the heads of the Tsars the golden crown of Monomakh.

This ancient, sable-fringed cap which supposedly had been given by an Emperor of Constantinople to Vladimir Monomakh, twelfth-century Grand Prince of Kiev, had been used in the coronation ceremonies of all Grand Princes of Moscow and, after Ivan IV took the new title of tsar, all the tsars of Russia.* Ivan was crowned, then Peter, then the cap was returned to Ivan's head and a replica, made especially for Peter, was placed on the brow of the younger Tsar. At the end of the service, the new rulers again kissed the cross, the holy relics and icons, and moved in procession to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael to pay homage at the tombs of previous tsars, then to the Cathedral of the Annunciation and so back to the banqueting hall to feast and receive congratulations.

The upheaval was over. In rapid and bewildering succession, a tsar had died; a ten-year-old boy, the minor child of a second wife, had been elected in his place; a savage military revolt had overthrown this election and spattered the young Tsar and his mother with the blood of their own family; and then, with all the jeweled panoply of state, the boy was crowned jointly with a frail and helpless older half-brother. Through all the horror, although he had been elected tsar, he was powerless to intervene.

The Streltsy revolt marked Peter for life. The calm and security of his boyhood were shattered, his soul was wrenched and seared. And its impact on Peter had, in time, a profound impact on Russia.

Peter hated what he had seen: the maddened, undisciplined soldiery of the old medieval Russia running wild through the Kremlin; statesmen and nobles dragged from their private chambers and bloodily massacred; Moscow, the Kremlin, the royal family, the Tsar himself at the mercy of ignorant, rioting soldiers. The revolt helped create in Peter a revulsion against the Kremlin with its dark rooms and mazes of tiny apartments lit by flickering candles, its population of bearded priests and boyars, its pathetically secluded women. He extended his hatred to Moscow, the

*The dual coronation of Ivan and Peter was the last time the Cap of Monomakh was used to crown a Russian autocrat. Peter's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century successors all took the imperial title as emperors and empresses. Many of them had new, much larger crowns made for themselves, culminating in the Imperial Crown of Russia ordered by Catherine the Great and used to crown the last seven Russian monarchs. Nevertheless, the Cap of Monomakh still carried enormous symbolic power, and although it was never again placed on a sovereign's head, it was carried in every coronation procession to symbolize the unbroken line which traced from the new monarch back to the Eastern Empire of Constantinople.

capita] of the Orthodox tsars, and to the Orthodox Church, with its chanting priests, wafting incense and oppressive conservatism. He hated the ancient Muscovite pomp and ceremony which could call him "next to God" but could not protect him or his mother when the Streltsy turned against them.

While Sophia ruled, Peter left Moscow, growing up in the countryside outside the city. Later, when Peter was master of Russia, his aversions had significant consequences. Years were to pass when the Tsar never set foot in Moscow, and, ultimately, Peter stripped Moscow of its rank; The ancient capital was replaced by a new city created by Peter on the Baltic. In a way, the Streltsy revolt helped to inspire the building of St. Petersburg.*

*A striking parallel to Peter's hatred of Moscow can be found in Louis XIVs abhorrence of Paris. In 1648, when Louis (like Peter in 1682) was ten years old, the revolt of the French parliament and nobility known as the Fronde erupted. Armies were raised to suppress the upheaval and then subsequently turned against the crown. At the height of the tumult, the boy King and his mother were besieged by a Paris mob. At night, with the sound of angry cries and the rattle of muskets in his ears, Louis was spirited out of Paris to Saint-Germain, where the King spent the night on a bed of straw.

Louis' biographers stress the powerful and lasting impression made on the boy by this event. Thereafter, he despised Paris and rarely set foot in the city. He built Versailles, and the great chateau became the capital of France, just as Peter avoided Moscow and built a new capital on the Neva. But as Peter's childhood ordeal was worse, so his reaction to it was far more sweeping. Louis built a great chateau close to Paris from which to rule; Peter built an entire city, far away.

5

THE GREAT SCHISM

Sophia was regent, and her regency began with an immediate test of her talent for rule. The Streltsy, who had brought her to power, now swaggered arrogantly through Moscow, assuming that any demand they might make would be instantly granted. The schismatic members of the Orthodox Church, or Old Believers, assumed that the triumph of the Streltsy over the government would bring a return to the old religion, a revival of the traditional Russian ritual and liturgy which had been condemned two decades before by the church establishment and suppressed by the power of

the state. Sophia, no less than her father, Alexis, and her brother, Fedor, regarded the Old Believers as heretics and rebels. Yet, because many of the Streltsy—including their new commander, Prince Ivan Khovansky—were fervent Old Believers, it seemed likely that these two forces would combine to press their will on the fledgling regime.

Sophia handled the situation with courage and skill. She received the leaders of the Old Believers in the banqueting hall of the Kremlin palace and from her throne argued and shouted them into silence before dismissing them. Then, calling the Streltsy into her presence in detachments of a hundred at a time, she bribed them with money, with promises and with wine and beer which she herself served them from a silver tray. With these blandishments, she weaned the soldiers away from their aggressive support of the schismatic clergy, and once the Streltsy were pacified, Sophia ordered the leaders of the Old Believers seized. One was executed and the others dispersed into exile. Within nine weeks, Prince Khovansky was arrested, charged with insubordination and his head lay on the block.

This time Sophia had triumphed, but the struggle between the Old Believers and the established powers in church and state was not concluded; it persisted not only through her regency and the reign of Peter, but until the end of the imperial dynasty. It was rooted in the deepest religious feelings of the people, and is known in the history of the church and of Russia as the Great Schism.

Christianity, if practiced in the ideal, seems especially suited to the Russian character. Russians are pre-eminently a pious, compassionate and humble people, accepting faith as more powerful than logic and believing that life is controlled by superhuman forces, be they spiritual, autocratic or even occult. Russians feel far less need than most pragmatic Westerners to inquire why things happen, or how they can be made to happen (or not to happen) again. Disasters occur and they accept; orders are issued and they obey. This is something other than brute docility. It stems rather from a sense of the natural rhythms of life. Russians are contemplative, mystical and visionary. From their observations and meditations, they have produced an understanding of suffering and death which gives a meaning to life not unlike that affirmed by Christ.

In Peter's time, the Russian believer exhibited a piety of behavior as complicated and rigorous as his piety of belief was simple and profound. His calendar was filled with saints' days to be observed, and with innumerable rites and fasts. He worshipped with endless signs of the cross and genuflections before altars in churchs and before icons which he hung in a corner of his house. Before sleeping with a woman, a man would remove the crucifix around her neck and cover all the icons in the room. Even in winter, a married couple who made love would not attend church before taking a bath. Thieves on the point of theft bowed to icons and asked forgiveness and protection. There could be no oversight or error on these matters, for what was at stake was far more important than anything that could happen on earth. Punctiliousness in religious observance guaranteed eternal life.

During two centuries of Mongol domination, the church became the nucleus of Russian life and culture. A vigorous religious life flourished in the towns and villages, and numerous monasteries were founded, especially in the remote forests of the north. None of these efforts was impeded by the Mongol khans, who traditionally cared little about the religious practices of their vassal states as long as the required taxes and tribute continued to flow to the Golden Horde. In 1589, the first patriarch of Moscow was created, signaling the final emancipation from the primacy of Constantinople.

Moscow and Russia had achieved independence—and isolation. Confronted on the north by Lutheran Sweden, on the west by Catholic Poland and on the south by Islamic Turks and Tatars, the Russian church adopted a defensive stance of xenophobic conservatism. All change became abhorrent, and huge energies were devoted to the exclusion of foreign influences and heretical thoughts. As Western Europe moved through the Reformation and the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, Russia and her church remained pure—petrified in their medieval past.

By the middle of the seventeenth century—twenty years before the birth of Peter—the weight and strain of this cultural backwardness began to tell on Russian society. Despite the objections of the church, foreigners were coming to Russian, bringing new techniques and ideas in war, commerce, engineering and science. Inevitably, other principles and concepts crept in with them. The Russian church, suspicious and frightened, reacted with such extreme hostility that wary foreigners were forced to seek the protection of the tsar. Yet, the intellectual ferment continued to bubble. It was not long before the Russians themselves, including some within the church, began to look with doubtful eyes on their orthodoxy. Questions were raised: The church challenged the church, and the church challenged the tsar. Separately, each of these struggles was a disaster for the church; together, they led to a catastrophe-the Great Schism—from which the Russian Orthodox Church would never recover.

In personal terms, these struggles took the form of a dramatic three-way confrontation among the Tsar Alexis and two extraordinary churchmen, the overbearing, iron-willed Patriarch Nikon and the fanatical, fundamentalist Archpriest Awakum. Ironically, Tsar Alexis was the most pious of all the tsars; he surrendered more power to a man of the church—Nikon—than any tsar before or since. Yet, before the end of his reign the Russian church was fatally divided and weakened and Nikon was draped m chains in a cold stone cell. Even more ironic was the struggle between Nikon and Avvakum. Both were men of simple origins from the forests of northern Russia. Both rose quickly in the church, came to Moscow in the 1640's and became friends. Both saw as the great goal of their lives the purification of the Russian church. Disagreeing violently as to what constituted purity, each passionately convinced that he alone was correct, the two great antagonists flailed and thundered at each other like mighty prophets. And then, almost simultaneously, both fell before the reasserted power of the state. In exile, each still believed himself the dedicated servant of Christ, had visions and worked miraculous cures. Death found one at the stake and the other by the side of a lonely road.

Nikon was the tall, rough-hewn son of a Russian peasant from the trans-Volga region of the northeast. Originally ordained a secular priest of the "white" clergy, he had married, but later he separated from his wife and became a monk. Shortly after arriving in Moscow as archimandrite or abbot of the New Monastery of the Savior, the six-feet-five-inch monk was introduced to the youthful Tsar Alexis. Awed by Nikon's spiritual intensity as well as his physical presence, Alexis began to meet him regularly every Friday. In 1649, Nikon became Metropolitan of Novgorod, one of the most ancient and powerful sees of Russia. Then, in 1652, when the incumbent Patriarch died, Alexis asked Nikon to accept the patriarchal throne.

Nikon did not accept until the twenty-three-year-old Tsar fell on his knees and begged him tearfully. Nikon agreed on two conditions: He demanded that Alexis follow his leadership "as your first shepherd and father in all that I shall teach on dogma, discipline and custom." And he asked the Tsar's suppoprt in all major attempts to reform the Russian Orthodox Church. Alexis swore, and Nikon took the throne determined on a broad program of reform. He intended to rid the clergy of drunkeness and other vices, establish church supremacy over the state and then, at the head of this pure and powerful Russian church, assert its pre-eminence over the entire Orthodox world. His initial move was to attempt to change the liturgy and ritual by which millions of Russian people worshipped daily, purging all sacred books and printed liturgies of the many deviations, alterations and simple errors that had crept into them over centuries of use, and making them consistent with scholarly Greek doctrine. The old, uncorrected books were to be destroyed.

Changing the ritual and liturgy provoked a storm of controversy. Devout Russians considered crucial such matters as how many hallelujahs were to be shouted at various points in the service, how many consecrated loaves were to be at the offertory or on the altar, the spelling of Jesus' name (from Isus to Iisus) and, most notably, whether, in making the sign of the cross, one extended the newly decreed three fingers (symbolizing the Trinity) or the traditional two fingers (symbolizing the dual nature of Christ). If one was convinced that the world was only a preparation for paradise or the inferno, and that personal salvation depended on the punctilious observance of church ritual, then crossing oneself with two fingers instead of three could mean the difference between spending eternity in heaven or in hellfire. Besides, the fundamentalist clergy argued, why accept the practices and wording of the Greek church over the Russian? Since Moscow had succeeded Constantinople as the Third Rome and Russian Orthodoxy had become the true faith, why bow to the Greeks in matters of ritual, dogma or anything else?

In 1655, Nikon sought and received support from a source outside Russia. He invited Macarius, Patriarch of Antioch, to come to Moscow, and the Syrian churchman made the long journey, bringing with him his son and secretary, Paul of Aleppo. Paul kept a diary of the journey, and from it we have many firsthand views of Nikon and Alexis.* They arrived in January

*Paul of Aleppo's journal, The Travels of Macarius. is an extraordinarily rueful catalogue of lamentations, grumbles, groans, sulks and whines at having to put up with the hardships of life in seventeenth-century Russia.

Worst of all were the length and conditions of the Russian church services which they, as visiting churchmen, were required to attend. "All their churches are void of seats," complained Paul. "There is not one, even for the Bishop. You see the people all through the service standing like rocks, motionless, or incessantly bending with their devotions. God help us for the length of their prayers and chants and masses. . . . Custom has made them insensible of weariness. . . . We never left the church but tottering on our legs after so much standing. ... We remained very weak with pains in our backs and legs for some days. ... We suffered from the severe cold, enough to kill us as we had to stand upon the iron pavement. What surprised us most was to see the boys and little children of the great officers of state standing bareheaded and motionless without betraying the smallest gesture of impatience." In one service all the names of all the soldiers who died fighting

1655 and were greeted by the regal figure of the Russian Patriarch, Nikon, "robed in a green velvet mandya embroidered with figures in red velvet, with cherubim in the center in gold and pearls. On his head was a white latia of damask, surmounted with a gold arch bearing a cross of jewels and pearls. Above his eyes were cherubim in pearls; the edges of the latia were laced with gold and set with pearls."

From the beginning, the travelers were as much impressed by the piety and deferential humility of the young Tsar as by the commanding magnificence of the Russian Patriarch. On his own, Alexis made "a habit of attending on foot the festivals of the principal saints in their own churches, abstaining from the use of his carriage. From the beginning of the mass to the end, he stands with his head uncovered, bowing continually, striking his forehead on the ground in weeping and lamentation before the saint's icon; and this in the presence of the whole assembly." On one occasion, Alexis accompanied Macarius on a visit to a monastery thirty miles from Moscow, and there "the Emperor took our master [Macarius] by the arm and led him to the temporary hospital that he might bless and pray over the paralyzed and sick. On entering the place, some of us were unable to remain there for the disagreeable, putrid smell, nor could we endure to look at the afflicted inmates. But the Emperor's only thought was his wish that our master should pray over and bless them. And as the Patriarch blessed each, the Emperor followed him, and kissed the patient's head, mouth and hands, from the first to the last. Wonderful indeed appear to us such holiness and humility while we thought of nothing but escaping from the place."

On the matter of changing the ritual and liturgy which had so stirred up the Russian church, Macarius stood firmly behind Nikon. At a church synod summoned by Nikon in the fifth week of Lent 1655, Nikon pointed out the errors to his fellow Russian churchmen and repeatedly called upon Macarius to confirm his judgment. Macarius invariably sided with Nikon, and the Russian clergy, whether convinced or not in their hearts, publicly were forced to agree.

Like other lordly monarchs—for such he had become—Nikon was a great builder. As Metropolitan of Novgorod, he founded

*against the Poles over the past two years were read. "The archdeacon read with great slowness and composure while the singers continually chanted 'Everlasting Remembrance' until we were ready to drop with the fatigue of standing, our legs being frozen under us."

In conclusion, Paul decided, "anyone wishing to shorten his life by five or ten years should go to Muscovy and walk there as a religious man."

convents and rebuilt monasteries throughout his vast northern see. In Moscow, using tiles and stones given him by. the Tsar, he constructed a magnificent new patriarchal palace inside the Kremlin. It had seven halls, broad balconies, great windows, comfortable apartments, three private chapels and a rich library of books in Russian, Slavonic, Polish and other languages. In one of these halls, Nikon dined on a raised platform while the other clergy were served at lower tables, exactly as, not far away, the Tsar was dining surround by his boyars.

Nikon's greatest architectural monument was his huge Monastery of the Resurrection, known as "The New Jerusalem," constructed oh the Istra River, thirty miles west of Moscow. The Patriarch meant the parallels to be exact; the monastery was erected on the "Hill of Golgotha," the stretch of river nearby renamed the Jordan and the central cathedral of the monastery was modeled after the Church of the Resurrection which houses the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem itself. On the cathedral, with its dome 187 feet high, its twenty-seven chapels, its bell tower, its high brick walls, gilded gates and dozens of other buildings, Nikon spared no expense, proclaiming in architecture what he was also proclaiming in other ways: that Moscow was the true site of the New Jerusalem.

Nikon was a stern enforcer of discipline on both laity and clergy. Attempting to regulate the daily life of the common people, he banned cursing, card playing, sexual promiscuity and even drinking. Further, he insisted that every faithful Russian spend four hours a day in church. Against the erring clergy, he was relentless. Paul of Aleppo reported: "Nikon's janissaries are perpetually going the rounds of the city, and whenever they find any priest or monk in a state of intoxication, he is taken to prison. We saw his prison full of them in the most wretched condition, galled with heavy chains and with logs of wood on their necks and legs. When any of the higher clergy or a superior of a monastery has committed a crime, he is sentenced to irons and condemned to sift flour for the bakehouse day and night until he has completed his sentence. Whereas formerly the Siberian convents were empty, this Patriarch has filled them with the heads of monasteries and higher clergy and with dissolute and wretched monks. Lately, the Patriarch has gone so far as to deprive the High Steward of the Supreme Convent of Troitsky of his great dignity, although he ranked as the third dignitary of the kingdom after the Emperor and the Patriarch. He has sentenced him to be a com grinder in the convent of Sievsk for the crime of taking bribes from the rich. By his severities, Patriarch Nikon makes all fear him and his word prevails."

For six years, Nikon acted as virtual ruler of Russia. He not only shared with the Tsar the title of "Great Sovereign," but he often exercised purely political power over temporal affairs. When Alexis left Moscow to campaign in Poland, he left Nikon behind as regent, ordering that "no affair great or small should be determined without his advice." Given this authority, Nikon did everything possible to exalt the supremacy of the church at the expense of the state. Within the Kremlin, he behaved more regally than the Tsar; not only churchmen and commoners but the great nobles of Russia came beneath his sway.

Paul or Aleppo described Nikon's imperious treatment of Alexis' ministers of state: "We observed that, when the council met in the council chamber, and when the Patriarch's bell rang for them to come to his palace, those officials who were late were made to wait outside his door in the excessive cold until he should order them to be admitted. When they were allowed to enter, Patriarch Nikon would turn to the icons while all the state officers bowed before him to the ground, bareheaded. They remained uncovered until he left the hall. To each he gave his decision on every affair, commanding them how to act." The truth, Paul concluded, was that "the grandees of the Empire do not entertain much dread of the Tsar; they rather fear the Patriarch and by many more degrees."

For a while, Nikon ruled serenely and it began to seem that the exercise of power gave him the power itself. But this assumption had a fatal weakness: True power still rested with the Tsar. As long as the Patriarch retained the Tsar's devotion and support, no one could stand against him. But his enemies continued to accumulate, like the slow piling up of an avalanche, and they worked to stir up the Tsar's jealousy and distrust.

In time, signs of friction between Nikon and Alexis became more numerous. Even as Macarius and Paul were leaving Moscow to return to Antioch, they were overtaken by a royal courier summoning Macarius to return. On the road back, they met a group of Greek merchants who reported that on Good Friday the Tsar and the Patriarch had had a public argument in church on a point of ceremony. Alexis angrily called the Patriarch a "stupid clown," whereupon Nikon retorted, "I am your spiritual father. Why then do you revile me?" Alexis shot back, "It is not you who are my father but the holy Patriarch of Antioch, and I will send to bring him back." Macarius returned to Moscow and managed to close the breach temporarily.

By the summer of 1658, however, Nikon's position had been severely weakened. When the Tsar began to ignore him, Nikon attempted to force Alexis' hand. Following a service in the Assumption Cathedral, he dressed as a simple monk, left Moscow and retired to the New Jerusalem Monastery, asserting that he would not return until the Tsar reaffirmed confidence in him. But he had miscalculated. The Tsar, now a mature twenty-nine, was not unhappy to be rid of the imperious Patriarch. Not only did he let the surprised Nikon wait in his monastery for two years, but then he called a synod of churchmen to accuse the Patriarch of having "of his own will abandoned the most exalted patriarchal throne of Great Russia and so having abandoned his flock and thus having caused confusion and interminable contention." In October 1660, this synod declared that "by his conduct the Patriarch had absolutely abdicated and thereby ceased to be Patriarch." Nikon rejected the synod's decision, sprinkling his rebuttal with abundant references to the Holy Scriptures. Alexis sent both the accusations and Nikon's replies to the four Orthodox Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, pleading with them to come to Moscow "to review and confirm the case of the ex-Patriarch Nikon, who had ill-administered the stewardship of the patriarchal power." Two of the Patriarchs, Pasius of Alexandria and Macarius of Antioch, agreed to come, although they did not arrive until 1666. In December of that year, the trial of Nikon was convened with the two foreign Patriarchs presiding over a synod of thirteen metropolitans, nine archbishops, five bishops and thirty-two archimandrites.

The trial was held in a hall of the "new patriarchal palace which Nikon had built in the Kremlin. Nikon was charged with exalting the church above the state, illegally deposing bishops and "having left the church to nine years of widowhood caused by his disorderly departure from his chair." Nikon defended himself by arguing that his office was clearly superior to that of the temporal ruler: "Has thou not learned that the highest authority of the priesthood is not received from kings and tsars, but contrariwise it is by the priesthood that rulers are anointed? Therefore it is abundantly plain that the priesthood is a very much greater thing than royalty. For this reason, manifestly, the tsar must be less than the bishop and owe him obedience." The synod, however, rejected this view and reasserted the traditional balance of church-state power: the tsar was supreme over all his subjects, clergy and patriarch included, except in matters of church doctrine. At the same time, the synod confirmed and sustained Nikon's changes in the Russian ritual and liturgy.

Nikon himself was condemned to exile. Until the last days of his life, he lived as a monk in a remote monastery, in a tiny cell at the top of a winding staircase so narrow that a single man could scarcely pass. His bed was a square of granite covered with a blanket of cut rushes. In mortification, he wore a heavy iron plate on his chest and chains attached to his arms and legs.

In time, Alexis' anger faded. He did not overturn the decision of the synod, but he wrote to Nikon to ask his blessing, sent gifts of food and, when Peter was born, a sable coat in the name of his new son. Nikon's final years were spent as a healer; reportedly, he achieved 132 miraculous cures within one three-year period. On Alexis' death, young Tsar Fedor tried to befriend Nikon. When, in 1681, it was reported that the aging monk was dying, Fedor granted him a partial pardon and freed him to return to his New Jerusalem Monastery. Nikon died peacefully on the road home in August 1681. Afterward, Fedor obtained from the four Eastern patriarchs letters of posthumous rehabilitation; and in death Nikon regained the title of patriarch.

Nikon's legacy was the opposite of that he had intended. Never again would a patriarch wield such power; thereafter the Russian church would be clearly subordinate to the state. Nikon's successor, the new Patriarch Joachim, well understood his designated role when he addressed the Tsar saying: "Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the Sovereign orders, I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects."

Nikon had been deposed, but the religious upheaval he brought to Russia was only beginning. The same synod which condemned the Patriarch for attempting to raise church power over royal power had also endorsed the revisions in liturgy and ritual which Nikon had sponsored. Throughout Russia, the lower clergy and the common people cried out in anguish at this decision. People who had cherished the old Russian practices of their fathers, who had been taught that theirs was the only true, uncontaminated faith, refused to accept the changes. For them, the old forms were the key to salvation; any suffering on earth was preferable to damnation of their eternal souls. These new changes in their services in church were the work of foreigners. Had not Nikon himself admitted, even proclaimed, "I am Russian, the son of a Russian, but my faith and religion are Greek"? The foreigners were bringing the Devil's works to Russia: tobacco ("bewitched grass"), representational art and instrumental music* Now, bolder and more wicked than ever, the foreigners were trying to subvert the Russian church from within. It was said that Nikon's New Jerusalem Monastery was filled with Moslems, Catholics

*During the anti-foreign riots of 1649, six carriages of musical instruments had been found and burned by the mob. This prejudice was not new, nor has it changed. The Russian Orthodox Church, believing that God should be praised only by the human voice, still does not permit instrumental music in its services. The result is its superb a cappella choirs.

and Jews busily rewriting the sacred Russian books. It was even said that Nikon (some said it was Alexis) was the Antichrist whose reign presaged the end of the world. In essence, the religion these Russians wanted was that preached by an earlier, fundamentalist priest: "Thou simple, ignorant and humble Russia, stay faithful to the plain, naive gospel wherein eternal life is found." Now under attack, devout Russian believers could only cry out, "Give us back our Christ!"

The result was that Nikon's attempt to reform the church produced—even after Nikon himself was gone—a full-scale religious rebellion. Thousands of people who refused to accept the reforms became known as Old Believers or Schismatics. Because the state was supporting the church reforms, revolt against the church widened into revolt against the state, and the Old Believers refused to obey either authority. Neither persuasion by the church nor repression by the government could move them.

To escape the rule of the Antichrist and the persecution of the state, whole villages of Old Believers fled to the Volga, the Don, and shores of the White Sea and beyond the Urals. Here, deep in the forest or on remote riverbanks, they formed new settlements, enduring the hardships of pioneers to build their communities. Some did not flee far enough. When the soldiers followed, the Old Believers declared themselves ready to be engulfed in purifying flames rather than renounce the ritual and liturgy of their fathers. Children were heard saying, "We shall be burned at the stake. In the next world, we shall have little red boots and shirts embroidered with golden thread. They will serve us as much honey, nuts and apples as we want. We will not bow down to the Antichrist." Some communities, tired of waiting, crowded together—men, women and children—into their wooden churches, barricaded the doors and, singing the old liturgies, burned the buildings down over their own heads. In the far north, the monks of the powerful Solovetsky Monastery won over the garrison of soldiers to fight for the Old Beliefs (in part by stressing the Nikonian ban on drink). Together, monks and soldiers endured an eight-year siege, repelling all the might that the Moscow government could send against them.

The most commanding, incandescent figure among the Old Believers was the Archpriest Avvakum. At once heroic, passionate and fanatical, he possessed a physical courage to match and sustain his puritanical faith. He wrote in his autobiography, "A woman came to confess to me, burdened with many sins, guilty of fornication and of all the sins of the flesh, and, weeping, she began to acquaint me with them all, leaving nothing out, standing before the Gospels. And I, thrice accursed, fell sick myself. I inwardly burned with a lecherous fire, and that hour was bitter to me. I lit three candles and fixed them to the lectern and placed my right hand in the flame, and held it there till the evil passion was burned out, and when I had dismissed the young woman and laid away my vestments, I prayed and went to my house, grievously humbled in spirit."

Avvakum was the most vivid writer and preacher of his day— when he preached in Moscow, people flocked to hear his eloquence—and, among the leading clergymen, the one most outraged by Nikon's reforms. Bitterly, he condemned all change and any compromise and denounced Nikon as a heretic and a tool of Satan. Raging against such changes as the realistic portrayal of the Holy Family in newly made icons, he thundered, "They paint the image of Immanuel the Savior with plump face, red lips, dimpled fingers and large fat legs, and altogether make him look like a German, fat-bellied, corpulent, omitting only to paint the sword at his side. And all this was invented by the dirty cur Nikon."

In 1653, Nikon banished his erstwhile friend Avvakum to Tobolsk in Siberia. Nine years later, with the Patriarch himself in disgrace, Avvakum's powerful friends in Moscow persuaded the Tsar to recall the priest and establish him once again in a Kremlin church. For a while, Alexis was a frequent and respectful member of Avvakum's audience, even referring to the priest as an "Angel of God." But Avvakum's stubborn fundamentalism kept intruding. Defiantly, he announced that newborn babies knew more about God than all the scholars of the Greek church, and declared that, in order to be saved, all who had accepted the heretical Nikonian reforms must be rebaptized. These outbursts led to a second banishment, this time to far-off Pustozersk on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. From.this remote spot, Avvakum managed to remain the leader of the Old Believers. Unable to preach, he wrote eloquently to his followers, urging them to preserve the old faith, not to compromise, to defy their persecutors and to accept suffering and martyrdom gladly in imitation of Christ. "Burning your body," he said, "you commend your soul to God. Run and jump into the flames. Say, 'Here is my body, Devil. Take and eat it; my soul you cannot take."'

Avvakum's final act of defiance assured his fiery destiny. From exile, he wrote to young Tsar Fedor declaring that Christ had appeared to him in a vision and revealed that Fedor's dead father, Tsar Alexis, was in hell, suffering torments because of his approval of Nikonian reforms. Fedor's response was to condemn Avvakum to be burned alive. In April 1682, Avvakum achieved his long-desired martyrdom, bound to a stake in the marketplace of Pustozersk. Crossing himself a last time with two fingers, he shouted joyfully to the crowd, "There is terror in the stake until thou art bound: to it, but, once there, embrace it and all will be forgotten. Thou wilt behold Christ before the heat has laid hold upon thee, and thy soul, released from the dungeon of the body, will fly up to heaven like a happy little bird."

Across Russia, the example of Avvakum's death inspired thousands of his followers. During a six-year period, from 1684 to 1690, 20,000 Old Believers voluntarily followed their leader into the flames, preferring martyrdom to accepting the religion of the Antichrist. Sophia's government seemed to fit this image as well as that of Alexis or Fedor; indeed, she was even harsher on Schismatics than her father or her brother had been. Provincial governors were instructed to provide whatever troops were necessary to help the provincial metropolitan enforce the established religion. Anyone failing to attend church was questioned, and those suspected of heresy were tortured. Those who gave shelter to Schismatics suffered loss of all their property and exile. Yet, despite torture, exile and the stake, the Old Beliefs continued strong.

Not all the Old Believers submitted to persecution or cremated themselves. Those who had fled to refuges in the northern forests organized life there along new lines, not unlike the Protestant religious dissenters who in this same period were leaving Europe to found religious communities in New England. Keeping to themselves, the Old Believers established farming and fishing communities and laid the foundations of a future prosperity. A generation later, in Peter's time, the Old Believers were already recognized as sober, industrious workers. Peter, appreciating these qualities, told his officials, "Leave them alone."

In the long run, it was the established church and therefore Russia itself which suffered most from the Great Schism. The reforms which Nikon had hoped would purify the church and prepare it for leadership of the Orthodox world had shattered it instead. The two antagonists, Nikon and Avvakum, and the two factions, the reformers and the Old Believers, fought each other to exhaustion, draining the energy of the church, alienating its most zealous members and leaving it permanently subordinate to the temporal power. When Peter arrived, he would look upon the church in much the same light Nikon had: as a disorganized, lethargic body whose corruption, ignorance and superstition must be vigorously purged. Setting about this task (and not completing it until near the end of his reign), Peter had two overwhelming advantages over Nikon: He had greater power, and he was dependent oh no one to approve his reforms. Even so, he attempted less. Peter never tampered with ritual, liturgy or doctrine as Nikon had. Peter enforced the authority of the established church against the Schismatics, but he did not broaden the religious schism. Peter's schisms lay in other realms.

6

PETER'S GAMES

During the years Sophia ruled, there were certain ceremonial functions which only Peter and Ivan could perform. Their signatures were required on important public documents, and their presence was necessary at state banquets, religious festivals and ceremonial receptions of foreign ambassadors. In 1683, when Peter was eleven, the two co-Tsars received the ambassador of King Charles XI of Sweden. The ambassador's secretary, Engelbert Kampfer, recorded the scene:

Both their Majesties sat ... on a silver throne like a bishop's chair, somewhat raised and covered with red cloth. . . . The Tsars wore robes of silver cloth woven with red and white flowers and, instead of scepters, had long golden staves bent at the end like bishops' croziers, on which, as on the breastplate of their robes, their breasts and their caps, glittered white, green and other precious stones. The elder drew his cap down over his eyes several times and, with looks cast down on the floor, sat almost immovable. The younger had a frank and open face, and his young blood rose to his cheeks as often as anyone spoke to him. He constantly looked about, and his great beauty and his lively manner—which sometimes brought the Muscovite magnates into confusion—struck all of us so much that had he been an ordinary youth and no imperial personage we would gladly have laughed and talked with him. The elder was seventeen, and the younger sixteen years old.* When the Swedish ambassador gave his letters of credence, both Tsars rose from their places ... but Ivan, the elder, somewhat hindered the proceedings through not understanding what was going on, and gave his hand to be kissed at the wrong time. Peter was so eager that he did not give the secretaries the usual time for raising him and his brother from their seats and touching their heads. He jumped up at once, put his own hand to his

hat and began quickly to ask the usual question: "Is His Royal Majesty, Charles of Sweden, in good health?" He had to be pulled back until the elder brother had a chance to speak.

*A measure of Peter's size and vitality was that, although he was only eleven, the Swedes took him for sixteen.

In 1684, when Peter was twelve, a German physician reported:

Then I kissed the right hand of Peter, who with a half-laughing mouth gave me a friendly and gracious look and immediately held out to me his hand; while the hands of the Tsar Ivan had to be supported. He [Peter] is a remarkably good-looking boy, in whom nature has shown her power; and has so many advantages of nature that being the son of a king is the least of his good qualities. He has a beauty which gains the heart of all who see him and a mind which, even in his early years, did not find its like.

Van Keller, the Dutch ambassador, writing in 1685, was effusive:

The young Tsar has now entered his thirteenth year. Nature develops herself with advantage and good fortune in his whole personality; his stature is great and his mien is fine; he grows visibly and advances with as much in intelligence and understanding as he gains the affection and love of all. He has such a strong preference for military pursuits that when he comes of age we may surely expect from him brave actions and heroic deeds.

Ivan made a woeful contrast. In 1684, when Peter was ill with measles, the Austrian ambassador was received only by Ivan, who had to be supported under the arms by two servants and whose responses were in a voice barely audible. When General Patrick Gordon, a Scottish soldier in Russian service, was received in the presence of Sophia and Vasily Golitsyn, Ivan was so sickly and weak that during the interview he did nothing but stare at the ground.

Throughout Sophia's regency, and although they saw each other only on formal occasions, Peter's relations with Ivan remained excellent. "The natural love and intelligence between the two Lords is "even better than before," wrote Van Keller in 1683. Naturally, Sophia and the Miloslavskys worried about Ivan. He was the foundation of their power, and from him must come their future. His life might be short, and unless he produced an heir, they would be cut off from the succession. Thus, in spite of Ivan's infirmities of eyes, tongue and mind, Sophia decided that he must marry and attempt to father a child. Ivan bowed and took as his wife Praskovaya Saltykova, the spirited daughter of a distinguished family. In their initial effort, Ivan and Praskovaya were partially successful: they conceived a daughter; perhaps next time it would be a son.

For the Naryshkins, who found a grim satisfaction in Ivan's debilities, these developments were cause for gloom. Peter was still too young to marry and compete with Ivan in producing an heir. Their hope lay in Peter's youth and health; in 1684, when Peter had measles and high fever, they were in despair. They could only wait and endure Sophia's rule while Natalya's tall, bright-faced son grew to manhood.

The political exile of the Naryshkins had been Peter's personal good fortune. Sophia's coup d'elat and the expulsion of his party from power had freed him from all but occasional ceremonial duties. He was at liberty to grow in the free, unrestricted, fresh-air life of the country. For a while after the Streltsy revolt, the Tsaritsa Natalya had remained with her son and daughter in the Kremlin, keeping the same apartment she had occupied since her husband's death. But increasingly, with Sophia in power, the atmosphere seemed narrow and oppressive. Natalya still resented bitterly the murder of Matveev and her brother Ivan Naryshkin, and she was never certain that Sophia might not take some new action against her and her children. But there was little danger of this; for the most part, Sophia simply ignored her stepmother. Natalya was given a small allowance to live on; it was never enough, and the humbled Tsaritsa was forced to ask the Patriarch or other members of the clergy for more.

To escape the Kremlin, Natalya began to spend more time at Tsar Alexis' favorite villa and hunting lodge at Preobrazhenskoe on the Yauza River, about three miles northeast of Moscow. In Alexis' time it had been part of his huge falconry establishment, and it still included rows of stables and hundreds of coops for falcons and for the pigeons who were their prey. The house itself, a rambling wooden structure with red curtains at the windows, was small, but it stood in green fields patched with trees. From the crest of a hill, Peter could gaze on rolling meadowlands, fields of barley and oats, a silvery river looping through groves of birch trees, small villages dominated by white walled churches and a blue or green onion church dome.

Here, in the fields and woods of Preobrazhenskoe and along the banks of the Yauza, Peter could ignore the classroom and do nothing but play. His favorite game, as it had been from earliest childhood, was war. During Fedor's reign, a small parade ground had been laid our for Peter in the Kremlin where he could drill the boys who were his playmates. Now, with the open world of Preobrazhenskoe around him, there was infinite space for these fascinating games. And, unlike most boys who play at war, Peter could draw on a government arsenal to supply his equipment. The arsenal records show that his requests were frequent. In January 1683, he ordered uniforms, banners and two wooden cannon, their barrels lined with iron, mounted on wheels to allow them to be pulled by horses—all to be furnished immediately. On his eleventh birthday, in June 1683, Peter abandoned wooden cannon for real cannon with which, under the supervision of artillerymen, he was allowed to fire salutes. He enjoyed this so much that messengers came almost daily to the arsenal for more gunpowder. In May 1685, Peter, nearing thirteen, ordered sixteen pairs of pistols, sixteen carbines with slings and brass mountings and, shortly afterward, twenty-three more carbines and sixteen muskets. i

By the time Peter was fourteen and he and his mother had settled permanently at Preobrazhenskoe, his martial games had transformed the summer estate into an adolescent military encampment. Peter's first "soldiers" were the small group of playmates who had been appointed to his service when he reached the age of five. They had been selected from the families of boyars to provide the Prince with a personal retinue of young noblemen who acted the roles of equerry, valet and butler; in fact they were his friends. Peter also filled his ranks by drawing from the enormous, now largely useless group of attendants of his father, Alexis, and his brother, Fedor. Swarms of retainers, especially those involved in the falconry establishment of Tsar Alexis, remained in the royal service with nothing to do. Fedor's health had prevented him from hunting, Ivan was even less able to enjoy the sport and Peter disliked it. Nevertheless, all these people continued to receive salaries from the state and be fed at the Tsar's expense, and Peter decided to employ some of them in his sport.

The ranks were further swelled by other young noblemen presenting themselves for enrollment, either on their own impulse or on the urging of fathers anxious to gain the young Tsar's favor. Boys from other classes were allowed to enroll, and the sons of clerks, equerries, stable grooms and even serfs in the service of noblemen were set beside the sons of boyars. Among these young volunteers of obscure origin was a boy one year younger than the Tsar named Alexander Danilovich Menshikov. Eventually, 300 of these boys and young men had mustered on the Preobrazhenskoe estate. They lived in barracks, trained like soldiers, used soldiers' talk and received soldiers' pay. Peter held them as his special comrades, and from this collection of young noblemen and stableboys he eventually created the proud Preobrazhensky Regiment. Until the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, this was the first regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard, whose colonel was always the Tsar himself and whose proudest claim was that it had been founded: by Peter the Great.

Soon, all the quarters available in the little village of Preobrazhenskoe were filled, but Peter's boy army kept expanding. New barracks were built in the nearby village of Semyonovskoe; in time, this company developed into the Semyonovsky Regiment, and it became the second regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Each of these embryo regiments numbered 300 and was organized into infantry, cavalry and artillery—just like the regular army. Barracks, staff officers and stables were built, more harnesses and caissons were drawn from the equipment of the regular horse artillery, five fifers and ten drummers were detached from regular regiments to pipe and beat the tempo of Peter's games. Western-style uniforms were designed and issued: black boots, a black three-cornered hat, breeches and a flaring, broad-cuffed coat which came to the knees, dark bottle green for the Preobrazhensky company and a rich blue for the Semyonovsky. Levels of command were organized, with field officers, subalterns, sergeants, supply and administrative staffs and even a pay department, all drawn from the ranks of boys. Like regular soldiers, they lived under strict military discipline and underwent rigorous military training. Around their barracks they mounted guard and stood watches. As their training advanced, they set off on long marches through the countryside, making camp at night, digging entrenchments and setting out patrols.

Peter plunged enthusiastically into this activity, wanting to participate fully at every level. Rather than taking for himself the rank of colonel, he enlisted in the Preobrazhensky Regiment at the lowest grade, as a drummer boy, where he could play with gusto the instrument he loved. Eventually, he promoted himself to artilleryman or bombardier, so that he could fire the weapon which made the most noise and did the most damage. In barracks or field, he allowed no distinction between himself and others. He performed the same duties, stood his turn at watch day and night, slept in the same tent and ate the same food. When earthworks were built, Peter dug with a shovel. When the regiment went on parade, Peter stood in the ranks, taller than the others but otherwise undistinguished.

Peter's boyhood refusal to accept senior rank in any Russian military or naval organization became a lifelong characteristic. Later, when he marched with his new Russian army or sailed with his new fleet, it was always as a subordinate commander. He was willing to be promoted from drummer boy to bombardier, from bombardier to sergeant and eventually up to general or, in the fleet, up to rear admiral and eventually vice admiral, but only when he felt that his competence and service merited the promotion. In part, at the beginning, he did this because in peacetime exercises drummer boys and artillerymen had more fun and made more noise than majors and colonels. But there was also his continuing belief that he should learn the business of soldiering from the bottom up. And if he, the Tsar, did this, no nobleman would be able to claim command on the basis of title. From the beginning, Peter set this example, degrading the importance of birth, elevating the necessity for competence, instilling in the Russian nobility the concept that rank and prestige had to be earned anew by each generation.

As Peter grew older, his war games became more elaborate. In 1685, in order to practice the building, defense and assault of fortifications, the boy soldiers worked for almost a year to construct a small fort of earth and timber on the bank of the Yauza at Preobrazhenskoe. As soon as it was finished, Peter bombarded it with mortars and cannon to see whether he could knock it down. In time, the rebuilt fort would grow into a little fortified town, called Pressburg with its own garrison, administrative offices, court of justice and even a play "King of Pressburg" who was one of Peter's comrades, and whom Peter himself pretended to obey.

For a military game of this complexity, Peter needed professional advice; even the most eager boys cannot build and bombard fortresses by themselves. The technical knowledge came from foreign officers in the German Suburb. Increasingly, these foreigners, originally summoned to act as temporary instructors, stayed on to act as permanent officers of the boy regiments. By the early 1690's, when the two companies were formally transformed into the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments, nearly all the colonels, majors and captains were foreigners; only the sergeants and the men were Russians.

It has been suggested that Peter's motive in developing these youthful companies was to build an armed force which might one day be used to overthrow Sophia. This is unlikely. Sophia was fully aware of what was going on at Preobrazhenskoe and was not seriously concerned. If she had thought that there was danger, Peter's requests for arms from the Kremlin arsenal would not have been fulfilled. As long as Sophia possessed the loyalty of the 20,000 Streltsy in the capital, Peter's 600 boys meant nothing. Sophia even loaned Peter regiments of Streltsy to participate in his mock battles. But in 1687, just as Peter was preparing a large-scale field exercise, Sophia embarked on the first campaign against the Crimean Tatars. The Streltsy, the regular soldiers and the foreign officers loaned to Peter were ordered to rejoin the regular army, and Peter's maneuvers were canceled.

* * *

During those years, everything attracted Peter's curiosity. He asked for a dining-room clock, a statue of Christ, a Kalmuck saddle, a large globe, a performing monkey. He wanted to know how things worked, he loved the sight and feel of tools in his large hands; he watched craftsmen use these tools, then he copied them and savored the sensation of biting into wood, chipping stone or molding iron. At the age of twelve, he ordered a carpenter's bench and mastered the use of axes, chisels, hammers and nails. He became a stonemason. He learned the delicate business of turning a lathe and became an excellent turner in wood and later in ivory. He learned how type was set and books were bound. He loved the clang of hammers on glowing red iron in the blacksmith's shop.

One consequence of this free, open-air boyhood at Preobrazhenskoe was that Peter's formal education was discontinued. When he left the Kremlin, hating the memories associated with it, he cut himself off from the learned tutors who had trained Fedor and Sophia, and from the customs and traditions of a tsar's education. Bright and curious, he escaped to the out-of-doors to learn practical rather than theoretical subjects. He dealt with meadows and rivers and forests rather than classrooms; with muskets and cannons rather than paper and pens. The gain was important, but the loss was serious, too. He read few books. His handwriting, spelling and grammar never advanced beyond the abominable level of early childhood. He learned no foreign language except the smattering of Dutch and German he later picked up in the German Suburb and on his travels abroad. He was untouched by theology, his mind was never challenged or expanded by philosophy. Like any willful, intelligent child taken out of school at the age of ten and given seven years of undisciplined freedom, his curiosity led him in many directions; even unguided, he learned much. But he missed the formal, disciplined training of the mind, the steady, sequential advance from the lower to the higher disciplines until one reached what in the Greek view was the highest art, the art of governing men.

Peter's education, directed by curiosity and whim, a blend of useful and useless, set the man and the monarch on his course. Much that he accomplished might never have happened had Peter been taught in the Kremlin and not at Preobrazhenskoe; formal education can stifle as well as inspire. But later Peter himself felt and lamented the lack of depth and polish in his own formal education.

His experience with a sextant is typical of his enthusiastic, self-guided education. In 1687, when Peter was fifteen, Prince Jacob Dolgoruky, about to leave on a diplomatic mission to France, mentioned to the Tsar that he had once owned a foreign instrument

"by which distance and space could be measured without moving from the spot." Unfortunately, the instrument had been stolen, but Peter asked the Prince to buy him one in France. On Dolgoruky's return in 1688, Peter's first question was whether he had brought the sextant. A box was produced and a parcel inside unwrapped; it was a sextant, elegantly made of metal and wood, but no one present knew how to use it. The search for an expert began; it led quickly to the German Suburb and soon produced a graying Dutch merchant named Franz Timmerman, who picked up the sextant and quickly calculated the distance to a neighboring house. A servant was sent to pace the distance and came back to report a figure similar to Timmerman's. Peter eagerly asked to be taught. Timmerman agreed, but he declared that his pupil would first need to learn arithmetic and geometry. Peter had once learned basic arithmetic, but the skill had fallen into disuse; he did not even remember how to subtract and divide. Now, spurred by his desire to use the sextant, he plunged into a variety of subjects: arithmetic, geometry and also ballistics. And the further he went, the more paths seemed to open before him. He became interested again in geography, studying on the great globe which had belonged to his father the outlines of Russia, Europe and the New World.

Timmerman was a makeshift tutor, he had spent twenty years in Russia and was out of touch with the latest technology of Western Europe. Yet to Peter he became a counselor and friend, and the Tsar kept the pipe-smoking Dutchman constantly at his side. Timmerman had seen the world, he could describe how things worked, he could answer at least some of the questions constantly posed by this tall, endlessly curious boy. Together, they wandered through the countryside around Moscow, visiting estates and monasteries or poking through small villages. One of these excursions in June 1688 led to a famous episode which was to have momentous consequences for Peter and for Russia. He was wandering with Timmerman through a royal estate near the village of Ismailovo. Among the buildings behind the main house was a storehouse which, Peter was told, was filled with junk and had been locked up for years. His curiosity aroused, Peter asked that the doors be opened and, despite the musty smell, he began to look around inside. In the dim light, a large object immediately caught his eye: an old boat, its timbers decaying, turned upside down in a corner of the storehouse. It was twenty feet long and six feet wide, about the size of a lifeboat on a modern ocean liner.

This was not the first boat Peter had ever seen. He knew the cumbersome, shallow-draft vessels which Russians used to transport goods along their wide rivers; he also knew the small craft used for pleasure boating at Preobrazhenskoe. But these Russian boats were essentially river craft: barge-like vessels with flat bottoms and square sterns, propelled by oars or ropes pulled by men or animals on the riverbank, or simply by the current itself. This boat before him was different. Its deep, rounded hull, heavy keel and pointed bow were not meant for rivers.

"What kind of boat is this?" Peter asked Timmerman.

"It is an English boat," the Dutchman replied.

"What is it used for? Is it better than our Russian boats?" asked Peter.

"If you had a new mast and sails on it, it would go not only with the wind, but against the wind," said Timmerman.

"Against the wind?" Peter was astonished. "Can it be possible?"

He wanted to try the boat at once. But Timmerman looked at the rotting timbers and insisted on major repairs; meanwhile, a mast and sails could be made. With Peter constantly pressing him to hurry, Timmerman found another elderly Dutchman, Karsten Brandt, who had arrived from Holland in 1660 to build a ship on the Caspian Sea for Tsar Alexis. Brandt, who lived as a carpenter in the German Suburb, came to Ismailovo and set to work. He replaced the timbers, calked and tarred the bottom, set a mast and rigged sails, halyards and sheets. The boat was taken on rollers down to the Yauza and launched. Before Peter's eyes, Brandt began to sail on the river, tacking to right and left, using the breeze to sail not only into the wind, but against the lazy current. Overwhelmed with excitement, Peter shouted to Brandt to come to shore and take him aboard. He jumped in, took the tiller and, under Brandt's instruction, began to beat into the wind. "And mighty pleasant was it to me," the Tsar wrote years later in the preface to his Maritime Regulations.*

*The true origin of this famous boat, which Peter called "The Grandfather of the Russian Navy," is unknown. Peter believed that it was English; one legend says that originally it was sent as a gift to Ivan the Terrible by Queen Elizabeth I. Others think it was built in Russia by Dutch carpenters during the reign of Tsar Alexis. What is important is that it was a small sailing ship of Western design.

Recognizing the significance in his own life, Peter was determined that the boat be preserved. In 1701, it was taken into the Kremlin and kept in a building near the Ivan Bell Tower. In 1722, when the long war with Sweden was finally over, Peter commanded that the boat be brought from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Weighing a ton and a half, it would have to be dragged partway over log corduroy roads, and Peter's orders for its care were specific: "Bring the boat to Schlusselburg. Be careful not to destroy it. For this reason, go only in daytime. Stop at night. When the road is bad, be especially careful." On May 30, 1723, Peter's fifty-first birthday, the celebrated boat sailed down the Neva and out into the Gulf of Finland to be met there by its "grandchildren," the men-of-war of the Russian Baltic Fleet. In August of that year, the boat was placed in a special building inside the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where it remained for over two centuries. Today, Peter's boat is the most prized exhibit of the Navy Museum of the U.S.S.R. in the former Stock Exchange building on the point of Leningrad's Vasilevsky Island.