Peter the Great

**Weber describes an unusual kind of help which the Khan of Bokhara asked of Peter. The Khan's ambassador in Petersburg, says Weber, "begged of the Tsar a number of Swedish girls to go along with him, or to give him leave to buy some, his master having heard that the Swedes were a very warlike nation, which made him desirous to have some of their race in his dominions." This request met with a repulse; however, he found means to get two Swedish girls, whom he carried along with him.

with Sweden, had been unable to respond to these appeals, but his interest in the desert land had been aroused.

Peter's interest in all the regions to the east and south had also been stimulated by reports of gold. There were pebbles of gold in the rivers of Siberia, veins of gold along the shores of the Caspian, golden sands in the deserts of Central Asia—such stories circulated freely in St. Petersburg. In 1714, 1716 and 1719, Peter sent expeditions into Siberia and Central Asia in search of the precious metal. They ended without gain, although the first expedidon, during its withdrawal, constructed a fort at the juncture of the Irtysh and Om rivers which grew into the town of Omsk.

The 1716 expedidon ended in spectacular tragedy. Hearing stories of gold along the Amu Darya River, which ran through the lands of the Khan of Khiva, Peter resolved to send congratulations to the new Khan on his accession to the throne and an offer of Russian protection if he would accept the Tsar's suzerainty. Along the way, the expedition was also to build a fort at the mouth of the Amu Darya, reconnoiter the length of the river and send merchants and engineers to the head of the river, across the mountains and down into India. Once their reports were in hand and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva had given allegiance, Peter could begin the development of the permanent trade route which was his ultimate objective.

Unfortunately, Peter chose the wrong man to lead this expedition. Prince Alexander Bekovich Cherkassky had been bom a Circassian Moslem prince named Devlet Kisden Mirza. His father's lands in the Caucasus lay within the empire of the Shah of Persia. One day, the Shah happened to see the beautiful wife of Cherkassky's father and ordered his vassal to send to him this exquisite piece of property. The father refused, and fled with his family to Moscow for protection. There, his son converted to Christianity, became a captain of the Guard and served as an officer in Astrachan and along the Caucasus frontier. Peter, thinking Cherkassky's background ideally suited him for dealing with the Moslem khans, summoned him to Riga for final instructions and sent him on his way.

In the summer of 1716, Cherkassky left Astrachan with 4,000 regular soldiers and detachments of Cossacks, engineers and surveyors. He built two forts on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, long considered the territory of the Khan of Khiva. In the spring of 1717, despite reports of the Khan's anger at this action, he began his march toward Khiva, 300 miles across empty, waterless desert. One hundred miles from Khiva, the Khan's army appeared and a three-day battle ensued. Cherkassky was victorious, and the Khan asked for peace, which he and his elders swore on the Koran to uphold. Then, he invited his conqueror to enter Khiva, suggesting that, for greater convenience and ease of provisioning, the Russian force divide itself into five detachments, each to be stationed in a separate town. Cherkassky foolishly agreed, and shortly thereafter the Khan's army marched from one town to another, compelling the surrender of the Russian detachments one by one. Every officer was slaughtered and every soldier sold into slavery. Cherkassky himself was carried into the Khan's tent, where a piece of red cloth, the sign of blood and death, was spread on the ground. Cherkassky refused to kneel on the cloth before the Khan, whereupon the Khan's guards slashed the calves of his legs with their scimitars, pitching him involuntarily on the ground before their master. Afterward, the unfortunate Circassian-Russian was beheaded, his skin was stuffed, and, thus transformed, he was exhibited in a courtyard of the Khan's palace.

Frustrated in his hope of reaching India through Central Asia, Peter pressed ahead with his efforts to open the land route through Persia. He was also anxious to persuade the Shah to divert the lucrative silk trade so that it should pass from Persia north into the Caucasus to Astrachan and thence along the Russian rivers to St. Petersburg, rather than following its traditional route west from Persia through Turkey to the Mediterranean. Peter did not think that this would be difficult; his relations with the incumbent Shah had always been amicable. This monarch was, according to Weber, writing in 1715, "a prince of forty years of age, of a very indolent temper, giving himself wholly up to pleasures, adjusting his difference with the Turks, Indians and other neighbors by the interposition of his governors and by dint of money; that though he called himself the Shah-in-Shah, or Emperor of Emperors, yet he dreaded the Turk . . . and notwithstanding the Turks have in the space of eighty years conquered from the Persians many kingdoms, Viz, Media, Assyria, Babylon and Arabia, yet they [the Persians] always avoided making war against the Porte."

To seek this agreement, Peter appointed one of his most aggressive "fledglings," Artemius Volynsky, a young nobleman who had served as a dragoon in the army and as a diplomatic assistant to Shafirov in negotiations with the Turks. Volynsky's assignment, written in Peter's own hand, was to study the "true state of the Persian empire, its forces, fortresses and limits." He was to try especially to leam "whether there is not some river from India that flows into the Caspian Sea."

Volynsky arrived in Isfahan, the ancient capital of Persia, in* March 1717 and soon found himself under house arrest. This had nothing to do with his own behavior; rather, the Shah and his vizier had learned of Cherkassky's construction of forts on the eastern Caspian and his disastrous campaign against the Khan of Khiva. They accurately saw in Volynsky the first tentative probe against Persia by the outreaching Russian Emperor. Accordingly, to prevent him from observing the general weakness and vulnerability of Persia, Volynsky was confined to his house. But they could not prevent the envoy from making a personal assessment when he was received at court. "Here," reported Volynsky, "there is now such a head that he is not over his subjects but the subject of his subjects, and I am sure that it is rarely one can find such a fool, even among common men, not to say crowned heads. For this reason [the Shah] never does any business himself, but puts everything on his vizier, who is stupider than any cattle, but is still such a favorite that the Shah pays attention to everything that comes out of his mouth and does whatever he bids."

Despite the restrictions placed on his movements, Volynsky managed to conclude a commercial treaty giving Russian merchants the right to trade and buy raw silk throughout Persia, he also saw enough to report to Peter that the state of decay in Persia was so far advanced that the Shah's Caspian provinces must be ripe for plucking. As Volynsky journeyed home, an emissary of the Prince of Georgia visited him secretly, pleading that the Tsar march south to aid the Christian people who lived on the southern side of the snow-capped Caucasian peaks.*

On his return, Volynsky was rewarded by appointment as Governor of Astrachan and Adjutant General of the Tsar. From Astrachan, Volynsky was tireless in urging that Peter seize the opportunity offered by the rumbling of the Persian empire. In addition to describing the prizes available to even a small army, he constantly warned that the Turks were advancing, and that if the Tsar did not take the Caucasus soon, the Sultan surely would do so. Peter delayed until the war with Sweden was over. Then, at almost the moment the Treaty of Nystad was signed, an incident occurred which offered an excuse for intervention. A tribe of Caucasian mountaineers who had already propsed themselves

*The huge, volcanic mountains of the Caucasus are higher than the Alps. Mount Elbrus rises 18.481 feet, Dykh-Yau 17,054 and a number of others are over 16,000. It was to one of these mighty peaks that Prometheus was said to have been chained.

as allies of Russia against the Persians decided not to wait and attacked the Persian trading center of Shemaha. At first, the "Russian merchants in the town were unconcerned, having been promised that they and their shops and warehouses would not be touched. But the mountain tribesmen began looting indiscriminately, killing several Russians and carrying off half a million roubles' worth of goods. Volynsky immediately wrote to Peter that here was a perfect opportunity to move, on the grounds of protecting Russian trade and assisting the Shah to restore order in his dominions. Peter's reply answered Volynsky's prayers:

I have received your letter in which you wrote about the affair of Daud Bek and that now is the very occasion for what you were ordered to prepare. To this opinion of yours I answer that it is very evident we should not let this occasion slip. We have ordered a considerable part of our forces on the Volga to march to winter quarters, whence they will go to Astrachan in the spring.

Volynsky also urged that this was the time to stir up the Christian princes in Georgia and elsewhere in the Caucasus against their Persian overlord. But here Peter was more cautious. He had no wish to repeat his experience of eleven years before with the Christian princes of the Ottoman provinces of Walachia and Moldavia. His objective here was the silk trade, the land route to India and the peaceful control of the western shore of the Caspian Sea to facilitate this project. Thus he declined to issue any religious proclamation or pose as a liberator before embarking on this new campaign. Instead, he wrote to Volynsky, "As to what you write about the Prince of Georgia and other Christians, if any of these should be desirable in this matter, give them hopes, but on account of the habitual fickleness of these people, begin nothing until the arrival of our troops, when we will act according to best counsel."

While Peter waited in Moscow for the coming of spring, further reports from Persia stimulated his anxiety. The Shah had been deposed in the face of an Afghan revolt; the new ruler was the Shah's third son, Tahmasp Mirza, who was struggling against the Afghan leader Mahmud to keep his throne. The danger was that the Turks, who had clearly evident designs on the western Caucasus, might see the collapse of authority in Persia as an opportunity to seize the eastern Caucasus as well—and these provinces along the Caspian were precisely those which Peter had it in mind to pluck.

Peter dispatched the Guards regiments from Moscow on May 3, 1722, and ten days later he followed with Catherine, Admiral Apraxin, Tolstoy and others. At Kolomna on the Oka River, they embarked in galleys, sailing down the Oka and the Volga to Astrachan. The journey, even traveling downstream and with the rivers high because of the melting snows, took a month, because of Peter's insatiable curiosity. He stopped at every town to make an inspection, examine objects of interest, receive petitions and ask questions about local administration and revenues. Nothing escaped his notice, and every day decrees flowed from his pen on subjects from improving the cottages of peasants to changing the design of barges along the Volga. In Kazan, ancient capital of the Tatar kingdom conquered by Ivan the Terrible, Peter was the first tsar since Ivan to visit the city, and he was anxious to see not only its shipbuilding yards, churches and monasteries, but also the sections of the city still inhabited by Tatars. Inspecting a government-owned textile mill, he observed that it was languidly producing shoddy materials while, not far away, a privately owned mill was flourishing. On the spot, Peter simply gave the government mill to the private owner. At Saratov, the Emperor met Ayuk Khan, the seventy-year-old chief of the Kalmucks. On board the Imperial galley, Catherine presented the Khan's wife with a gold watch set with diamonds. The Khan immediately responded by ordering five thousand Kalmuck horsemen to join the Emperor's campaign.

In Astrachan, Peter spent a month making final preparations for the campaign. An army of 61,000 men was assembling: 22,000 Russian infantrymen, 9,000 cavalry and 5,000 sailors, plus auxiliary forces of 20,000 Cossacks and 5,000 Kalmucks. Meanwhile, he observed the fishing for the great eighteen-foot beluga, whose delicious gray caviar the Russians kept for themselves, and the equally large sturgeon whose slightly less tasty black caviar they exported in large quantities to Europe.

On July 18, he embarked with the Russian infantry at Astrachan and sailed 200 miles down the west coast of the Caspian Sea, while the huge mass of cavalry was sent by land across the semi-desert Terek steppe. The sea was rough and the voyage took a week, but eventually a landing was made on a small bay north of the town Derbent. Peter was the first to land on the shallow beach, although he arrived sitting on a board, carried by four sailors. Immediately, he decided that every one of his officers who had not previously bathed in the Caspian should go for a swim. Some of the older officers, unable to swim, complied with reluctance. Peter himself went happily, but, rather than swimming, he had himself let down into the water on his board.

When the Russian cavalry arrived, although both men and horses had suffered from "lack of water and bad grass" on their overland march, the advance on Derbent began. The route lay along the coast down the narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but only once was there any armed resistance. On this occasion, a local chief horribly murdered three Cossacks ("cutting open their breasts while they were yet alive, and taking out their hearts") sent to him with a letter from Peter. Reprisal was swift and the offending village was burned to the ground. Peter was surprised by the individual courage of these mountain people. "When they are together, they do not hold at all, but run away," he said, "while separately each man resists so desperately mat when he has thrown away his musket as if he were going to surrender, he begins to fight with his dagger "

Elsewhere, the Russian Emperor and Empress were received as honored guests. At Tarku, the local Moslem Prince brought his wives and concubines to visit the Russian camp. The Moslem women were seated cross-legged "on cushions of crimson velvet, laid on Persian carpets" in the Empress's tent, whereupon— reported Captain Peter Bruce—Catherine invited all the Russian officers to come into the tent in relays "to gratify their curiosity" as to "these incomparably beautiful, most lovely creatures." Peter and Catherine attended mass at a chapel built by the Preobrazhensky Guards, after which each of them placed a stone on the site, and then every soldier in the army also placed a stone, so that a pyramid was raised to commemorate the mass said on the spot for the Emperor of Russia.

Peter's first important objective was Derbent, a town supposedly founded by Alexander the Great. Derbent's significance was both commercial and military: It was an important trading center, and it also occupied a strategic position on the north-south road along the shore of the Caspian. It was here that the mountains came down closet to the sea; thus, the town situated in this narrow passage controlled all movement, military or commercial, to the north or south, and was called the Eastern Iron Gates. Derbent surrendered without a fight; indeed, as Peter approached, he found the governor waiting to present him "with the golden keys to the town and the citadel on a cushion of rich Persian brocade."

Peter's plan, now that Derbent was occupied, was on a typically grand scale. He meant to continue down the coast and seize Baku, 150 miles to the south. Then, he intended to found a new commercial city still farther south, at the mouth of the Kura River, which would become an important center on his proposed new overland trade route between India, Persia and Russia. That done, he would move up the Kura to the Georgian capital, Tiflis, there to cement the proposed alliance with the Christian Prince Vakhtang. Finally, from Tiflis, he would recross the great Caucasus Mountains to the north, returning to Astrachan through the lands of the Terek Cossacks. "Thus, in these regions," he wrote to the Senate, "we will have gained a foothold."

Unfortunately, events were moving against him. The Persian governor of Baku refused to accept a Russian garrison, which meant that the city could be taken only by a major military effort. Although Peter's army seemed sufficiently large to overcome any military opposition, he was worried about supplies. A provisioning fleet from Astrachan had encountered a disastrous storm on the Caspian and never arrived at Derbent; supplies locally available were vanishing rapidly the longer the army stayed. Further, the August heat along the coast was taking a toll of men and horses. Soldiers had been eating the fruits and melons for which the Caucasus has always been famous, but in such quantities as to become sick, and many of the regiments were decimated. To cope with the sweltering heat, Peter had his head shaved and during the day wore a wide-brimmed hat over his naked skull. In the cool of the evening, he covered himself with a wig made from his own shorn hair. The Empress copied her husband, shaving off her own hair, while at night covering her head with the cap of a grenadier. More concerned than Peter about the suffering of his troops in this oppressive heat, she even dared on one occasion to countermand his military orders. The Emperor had commanded the army to march and then retired to his tent to sleep. When he awoke, he found the soldiers still in camp. What general, he asked angrily, had dared to overrule his orders? "I did it," said Catherine, "because your men would have died of heat and thirst."

As he considered the situation of his army, Peter grew uneasy. He was a long way from the nearest Russian base at Astrachan, his seaborne supply line was not functioning, a number of potentially hostile tribesmen inhabited the mountains along his northern flank and there was always the danger that the Turks—who, unlike the Persians, constituted a serious military opponent—might march to protect their own interests in the Caucasus. Peter did not wish to repeat the experience on the Pruth. Thus, at a council of war, the decision was made to withdraw. A garrison was left behind at Derbent, and the main body of the army retreated north by land and water to Astrachan.

Peter reached the mouth of the Volga and Astrachan on October 4. He remained for a month, looking after the welfare of his troops, arranging for care of the sick and winter quarters for the rest. Part of this time, Peter was severely ill with an attack of strangury and stone, a disease of the urinary tract. Before leaving Astrachan, Peter made it clear that, despite the abandonment of that summer's campaign, he was not abandoning Russian ambitions on the Caspian Sea. In November, he sent a combined naval and military expedition to capture the port of Resht, 500 miles away on the south shore of the Caspian. In July of the following summer, a Russian force captured Baku, thus securing the entire western coast of the great inland sea. Negotiations with the now helpless Shah resulted in Persia ceding Derbent to Russia along with three seaboard provinces of the eastern Caucasus. As Peter explained it to the Persian ambassador, if the Shah did not give up the provinces to Russia, which was his friend, then he would certainly lose them to Turkey, which was his enemy. The Shah was in no position to argue against this Russian logic.

The disintegration of the Persian empire and Peter's military campaign along the Caspian Sea threatened once again to bring Russia into collision with the Ottoman Empire. The Porte had always been particularly interested in the Transcaucasus—that is, the Persian provinces of Georgia and Armenia, lying south of the mighty Caucasus mountain range. The Turks coveted them not because they were Christian, but because they were on the Turkish frontier and because they lay on the Black Sea. The Sultan was quite willing that Peter take the Persian provinces on the Caspian side of the Caucasus, but he must not approach the Black Sea, which, since Azov had been returned to Turkey, was once again the Sultan's private lake. Eventually, the Tsar and the Sultan amicably settled the matter by dividing up the Caucasus provinces of Persia. Inconveniently, the Persians did not accept this settlement, and continued intermittently fighting with both their powerful neighbors. In 1732, Empress Anne, tired of the constant drain on her resources by these Caspian provinces (up to 15,000 Russian soldiers were dying every year of disease in the unfamiliar climate) and restored them to Persia. It was not until the reign of Catherine the Great that the northern Caucasus was designated a Russian province, and not until 1813, in the time of Catherine's grandson Alexander I, that Persia permanently ceded to Russia the coastal territories along the Caspian through which Peter the Great had marched on his final campaign.

63

TWILIGHT

The snow began to fall before Peter and Catherine started for Moscow from Astrachan late in November 1722. Along the way, the cold grew more intense. A hundred miles below Tsaritsyn, the Volga was covered with ice and Peter's boats could go no farther. There was trouble finding sledges suitable for the imperial party, and, as a result, the journey took a month.

Once back in Moscow, Peter plunged into the atmosphere of the season. During the week of Carnival, the procession outdid those of any previous year. The Saxon ambassador reported:

The procession consisted of sixty sledges, each constructed to appear as a boat. On the first of these boat-sledges rode Bacchus— appropriately portrayed, as the player representing him had been kept drunk for three days and three nights. Then came a sledge drawn by six bear cubs, a sledge drawn by four hogs and a sledge drawn by ten dogs. The College of Cardinals came next, fully robed, but mounted on oxen. After them followed the great sledge of the Mock-Pope, surrounded by his archbishops, making signs of blessing right and left. Next, the Mock-Tsar, accompanied by two bears. The triumph of the procession was a miniature two-decked, three-masted frigate under full sail, thirty feet long, with thirty-two guns; standing on her deck, maneuvering the sails, was the Emperor dressed as a navy captain. This astounding sight was followed by a hundred-foot sea serpent with the tail supported on twenty-four small sledges linked together to undulate across the snow. After the serpent came a large gilded barge on which Catherine rode, dressed as a Frisian peasant woman, accompanied by her court made up as blacks. Then in succession came Menshikov dressed as an abbot, General-Admiral Apraxin dressed as the Burgomeister of Hamburg and other notables costumed as Germans, Poles, Chinese, Persians, Circassians and Siberians. The foreign envoys appeared together dressed in domino suits of blue and white, while the Prince of Moldavia was dressed as a Turk.

Before leaving Moscow for St. Petersburg in early March 1723, Peter invited his friends to another astonishing spectacle: the burning of the wooden house at Preobrazhenskoe in which he had first secretly planned the war against Sweden. With his own hand,

the Emperor filled shelves and closets with inflammable colored chemicals and fireworks and then he put the house to the torch. Many small explosions and brilliantly colored flames erupted from the burning structure, and for some time before it collapsed, the heavy log frame of the house stood silhouetted against an incandescent rainbow. Later, when only the blackened, smoking rubble was left, Peter turned to the Duke of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, and said, "This is the image of war: brilliant victories followed by destruction. But with this house in which my first plans against Sweden were worked out, may every thought disappear which can arm my hand against that kingdom, and may it always be the most faithful ally of my empire."

In the warmer months, Peter spent much of his time at Peterhof. On his doctor's recommendation, he drank mineral waters and took exercise, including mowing grass and taking hikes with a knapsack on his back. To be on the water was still his greatest pleasure, and the Prussian minister reported that even his own ministers were unable to reach him. "The Emperor is so occupied with his villas and sailing on the gulf," he reported, "that none had the heart to interrupt him."

In June 1723, the entire court—including even the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, now suffering intensely from her gout—moved with Peter to Reval, where he had constructed an elegant pink palace for Catherine and a small three-room house nearby for himself. Catherine's palace was surrounded by an extensive garden with fountains, pools and statues, but when the Emperor went for a walk on its broad paths, he was surprised to find himself alone. The reason, he quickly discovered, was a locked main gate guarded by a sentry whose standing orders were to keep the public out. Peter immediately reversed the order, explaining that he would never have built so large and expensive a garden only for himself and his wife, and the following day drummers were sent through the town to announce that the garden was open to all.

In July, Peter sailed with his fleet for maneuvers on the Baltic. In August, he returned with the fleet to Kronstadt, where a ceremony had been arranged to honor the little boat which Peter had found rotting at Ismailovo with Karsten Brandt and in which he had taken his first lessons in sailing on the Yauza River. Now known as the "Grandfather of the Russian Navy," the boat had been brought to Kronstadt. There, the Emperor boarded the little vessel, now flying the imperial standard, and with Peter at the tiller and four senior admirals at the oars, the boat passed in front of twenty-two Russian ships-of-the-line, and 200 galleys anchored in columns. On a signal from Peter, cannon aboard all the ships roared out salutes; soon, a heavy smoke hung over the water, and only the topmost spars of the biggest ships could be seen. A feast of ten hours followed and Peter declared that the guest who did not get drunk that day would not permit his friendship. The ladies remained, and the young Princess Anne and Elizabeth stayed to pass around glasses of Hungarian wine. The Duchess of Mecklenburg became drunk, and other distinguished guests were tipsy, weeping, embracing and kissing, then later quarreling and thumping each other. Even Peter, who now drank far less than in his youth, took many glasses.

In the autumn, another public masquerade celebrated the second anniversary of the Peace of Nystad. Peter was costumed first as a Catholic cardinal, then as a Lutheran minister, having borrowed his collar from the Lutheran pastor in St. Petersburg, and finally as an army drummer, beating his drum almosts as well as a professional drummer. This was the last great party for the Tsarita Praskovaya, who died soon after.

To purge his system after these bacchanals, Peter now took his cures drinking the newly discovered "iron waters" at Olonets. The Emperor went often in winter, when he could travel across the lake by sledge, sometimes accompanied by Catherine; he argued that these Russian mineral waters were superior to any he had drunk in Germany. Not everyone agreed with him, and some worried that continued drinking of these heavily ferrous waters would damage rather than aid his health. Peter's unwillingness to obey his doctor's prescriptions was another problem; sometimes he would drink as many as twenty-one glasses of mineral water in a morning. He was forbidden to eat raw fruit, cucumbers, salted lemons or Limburger cheese while taking a cure. Yet, one day, immediately after drinking the waters, he ate a dozen figs and several pounds of cherries. To break the monotony of drinking the waters, Peter worked at his lathe for hours every day, turning objects in wood and ivory. When he felt strong, he visited forges in the neighborhood and hammered out bars and sheets of iron.

Peter's two oldest daughters were reaching marriageable age (Anne was fourteen in 1722 and Elizabeth, thirteen), and, like any sensible monarch, he was looking for matches to bolster his country's diplomacy. From the time of his visit to France, his hope had been to marry one of his daughters, presumably Elizabeth, to the boy King, Louis XV. Not only would immense prestige accrue to Russia from a link with the House of Bourbon, but France would be a useful ally in Western Europe to counterbalance the hostility of England. If marriage to the King was impossible, Peter hoped at least to marry Elizabeth to a French prince of the royal house and make the pair King and Queen of Poland. Immediately after the signing of the Peace of Nystad and his own proclamation as emperor, he had broached the subject to Paris. The French minister in Petersburg, Campredon, added his own enthusiastic endorsement, "To put the Tsaritsa entirely in our interest, it would be desirable to assure a marriage between the younger daughter of the Tsar, who is very amiable and has a pretty figure, and some French prince who could easily and surely, through the power of the Tsar, be made King of Poland."

Phillipe, Due d'Orteans, Regent of France, was tempted. Poland would be a useful ally for France in Austria's rear. If the Emperor were indeed to use his power to put a French prince on the throne of Poland, it might well be worth marrying that prince to the Emperor's daughter. Philippe had certain hesitations: the Empress Catherine's obscure origins and the mystery surrounding the date of her marriage to Peter raised questions as to Elizabeth's legitimacy. But he overcame his doubts and even proposed that the French prince best suited to become the bridegroom—and thus the King of Poland—was his own son, the youthful Due de Chartres. When Peter returned from Persia and heard that de Chartres was being proposed by France, his face broke into a smile. "I know him and esteem him highly," he said to Campredon.

Unfortunately for the negotiating parties, there was an important obstacle over which they had no control: Augustus of Saxony, now fifty-three and ill, still occupied the Polish throne. Although he and Peter were now neither friends nor allies, the Emperor had no intention of actually pushing Augustus off the throne. His proposal was that the Due de Chartres should marry his daughter immediately and then wait for Augustus to die, when the Polish throne would become vacant. The French preferred to wait until the Duke was elected King of Poland before performing the marraige, but Peter refused to wait. What would happen, he asked, if Augustus should live another fifteen years? Campredon insisted that this could not possibly happen. "The King of Poland needs only a new, witty and vivacious mistress to render the event near," he said.*

Eventually, Campredon accepted Peter's view and tried to persuade his government to proceed with the match immediately. He wrote to Paris praising Elizabeth's qualities. "There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth," he said. "It may be said indeed that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she

*In fact, Augustus did live another ten years, dying in 1733 at the age of sixty-three.

is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded."

In the end, the affair was prevented by the objections of Peter's old enemy, George I of England. The Regent of France and his chief minister, the Abbe" Dubois, had made friendship with England the pivot of France's new foreign policy. So close were the two former enemies that, because England now had no diplomatic representation in Russia, Dubois sent Campredon's dispatches from St. Petersburg in the original to King George, who returned them to Paris with marginal comments in his own handwriting. George I had no desire to see Russian influence grow greater. Dubois accomodated him and refused for a while even to answer Campredon's messages. When he did reply, it was to say that England had raised objections and that his envoy was to await instructions. Before the close of 1723, both Dubois and the Regent had died and Louis XV had attained his majority as King of France. The Due de Chartres eventually married a German princess. Peter's daughter Elizabeth never married officially (although it is possible that the secretly married her charming lover Alexis Razhumovsky, whom she raised from a commoner to count); and instead of becoming Queen of Poland, she remained at home to rule as Empress of Russia for twenty-one years.

Peter's plans for his eldest daughter, Princess Anne, bore more immediate fruit. Years before, the fertile mind of Goertz had hatched the idea of marrying his young master, Duke Charles Frederick, to Anne. Goertz had mentioned the plan to Peter, with whom it had taken root. In the intervening years, the youthful Duke's fortunes had soared and plunged. He was the only nephew of the childless King Charles XII, who had kept the young man close to him, and many in Sweden still believed that Charles Frederick should have succeeded to the throne instead of his aunt Ulrika Eleonora and her husband, Frederick of Hesse. In 1721, Charles Frederick traveled secretly to Russia, hoping to win Peter's support for his claim to the Swedish succession and perhaps to seal it by marrying one of the Russian Emperor's daughters. Once in Russia, he nicely served Peter's purposes. Ulrika Eleonora and Frederick saw the young man's presence in St. Petersburg as an implied threat, and this further incentive to peace helped lead to the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, one clause of which was a Russian guarantee not to support the Duke's claims to the Swedish throne. Despite this disappointment, Charles Frederick stayed on in Russia. Catherine liked him, he had a place at all public celebrations and his little refugee court became a rallying point for a number of Swedish officers who had married Russian wives whom they were forbidden to take back to Sweden. Before long, as these homeless souls met every day to expand and refine their taste for vodka, the only nephew of Charles XII, who had fought at his uncle's side and wept at his death, was in danger of being reduced to nothing more than a tame poodle at the Russian court.

Nevertheless, Charles Frederick persisted in his hope of marrying Princess Anne, who was tall, dark-haired and handsome like her mother. She was also intelligent, well mannered and high-spirited, and when she appeared in court dress with her hair dressed in European fashion and set with pearls, foreign envoys were impressed. Charles Frederick's chances improved greatly when a Russian-Swedish defensive alliance was signed in 1724. He was granted the title of Royal Highness and a Swedish pension, and Russia and Sweden agreed to attempt to persuade Denmark to restore lost territory to Holstein. The Duke's position was now thoroughly regularized, and in December 1724 he was pleased to receive a message from Osterman asking him to draw up a marriage contract between himself and Princess Anne. Part of the arrangement, it was understood, was to be the appointment of Charles Frederick as Governor General of Riga.

The betrothal ceremony was grandly celebrated. On the evening before, the Duke's private orchestra serenaded the Empress beneath the windows of the Winter Palace. The following day, after a service at Trinity Church and a dinner with the imperial family, the Duke was betrothed to Anne when Peter himself took rings from each prospective partner and exchanged them. The Emperor shouted "Vivat!" and the betrothal party moved on to a supper, a ball and a display of fireworks. At the ball, Peter, feeling ill, refused to dance, but Catherine, entreated by young Charles Frederick, danced a polonaise with him.

Anne lived only four years after her marriage and died when she was twenty. But fate used her and her husband to continue Peter's line on the Russian throne. They returned to Holstein, where at Kiel, shortly before her death, Anne gave birth to a son whose name became Karl Ulrich Peter. In 1741, when this boy was thirteen, his Aunt Elizabeth became empress. Unmarried and needing to designate an heir, she brought her nephew back to Russia and changed his name to Peter Fedorovich. In 1762, on Elizabeth's death, he succeeded to the throne as Emperor Peter III. Six months later, he was deposed and murdered by supporters of his German wife. This vigorous lady then seized the throne, was crowned Empress Catherine II and became known to the world as Catherine the Great. The son, grandsons and further descendants of Peter III and Catherine the Great occupied the Russian throne until 1917, all of them ultimately tracing their ancestry back through Princess Anne and Charles Frederick of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, to Peter the Great.

Peter's efforts to marry both his daughters to foreign princes suggested that he did not envision either of them as his successor on the Russian throne. Indeed, no woman had ever sat on that throne. But the death of Peter Petrovich in 1719 left only one remaining male in the House of Romanov—Peter Alexeevich, son of the Tsarevich Alexis. Many Russians regarded him now as the legitimate heir, and Peter was well aware that the traditionalists looked upon the young Grand Duke as their future hope. This hope he was determined to thwart.

But if not Peter Alexeevich, who was to succeed? More and more, as he pondered the problem, the emperor's thoughts turned to the person closest to him: Catherine. Over the years, the passion which had first attracted Peter to this simple, robust young woman had ripened into love, trust and mutual contentment. Catherine was a partner of enormous energy and remarkable adaptability; although she loved luxury, she was equally good-humored in primitive circumstances. She traveled with Peter devotedly even when pregnant, and he often told her that her stamina was greater than his. They had bonds of joy in their daughters and shared grief over the numerous infants they had lost. They took pleasure in each other's company and were melancholy when apart. "Praise God, all is merry here," wrote Peter from Revan in 1719, "but when I come to a country house and you are not there, I feel so sad." Again, he wrote, "But when you state that it's miserable walking alone, although the garden is pleasant, I believe you, for it's the same for me; only pray God that this is the last summer we'll spend apart, and that we may always be together in the future."

It was during one of Peter's lengthy wartime absences that Catherine had prepared a surprise which had particularly delighted her husband. Knowing how much pleasure he took in new buildings, she secretly constructed a country palace about fifteen miles southwest of St. Petersburg. The mansion, built of stone, two stories high, and surrounded by gardens and orchards, was situated on a hill which looked back over the immense, flat plain stretching to the Neva and the city. When Peter returned, Catherine mentioned to him that she had found a charming deserted spot "where Your Majesty would not dislike to build a country house, if you would but take the trouble to go and see it." Peter immediately promised to go and "if the place really answers your description," to build any house she wished. The following morning, a large party set out, accompanied by a wagon carrying a tent under which Peter suggested they might eat. At the foot of the hill, the road began to climb and suddenly, at the end of an avenue of linden trees, Peter saw the house. He was still astonished when he arrived at the door and Catherine said to him, "This is the country house I have built for my sovereign." Peter was overjoyed and embraced her tenderly, saying, "I see that you wish to show me that there are beautiful places around Petersburg even though they are not on the water." She led him through the house, finally bringing him into a large dining room where a handsome table had been laid. He toasted her taste in architecture, and then Catherine raised her glass to toast the master of the new house. To his further astonishment and delight, the minute the glass touched Catherine's lips, eleven cannon hidden in the garden thundered a salute. When night fell, Peter said that he could never remember a day as happy as this one. In time, the estate came to be known as Tsarskoe Selo, the Tsar's Village, and Empress Elizabeth commanded Rastrelli to begin a gigantic new palace on the site. The magnificent Catherine Palace, which still stands, was named after her mother, the Empress Catherine I.

Peter's respect and gratitude to Catherine had been deepened by her participation in the military campaigns on the Pruth and in Persia. He had acknowledged these feelings publicly by their remarriage and by establishing the Order of St. Catherine in her honor. She already carried the courtesy title of empress as the wife of the Emperor, but now, as he faced the future without a son, he decided to go further. His first step, taken in February 1722 before he and Catherine departed for the Caucasus, was to issue a general decree concerning the succession. It declared that the ancient, time-honored rule by which the throne of the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had been handed down from " father to son, or occasionally from elder brother to younger brother, was no longer valid. Henceforth, Peter decreed, every reigning sovereign would have absolute power to designate his or her successor. "Thus," he concluded, "children or children's children will not be tempted to fall into the sin of Absalom." The new decree also required all officials and subjects to swear an oath to accept the Emperor's choice.

Revolutionary though it was, the February 1722 ukase was only a preliminary step to a still more sensational act: Peter's declaration that he had decided to formally crown Catherine as empress. A decree of November 15, 1723, declared that whereas

our best beloved Spouse, Consort, and Empress Catherine has been a great support to us, and not only in this, but also in many military operations, putting aside womanly weakness, of her own will she has been present with us and has helped in every way possible ... for these labors of our Spouse we have decided that by virtue of the supreme power given us by God, she shall be crowned, which, God willing, is to take place formally in Moscow in the present winter.

Peter was treading on dangerous ground. Catherine was a Lithuanian servant girl who had come to Russia as a captive. Was she now to wear the imperial crown and sit on the throne of the Russian tsars? Although the manifesto proclaiming the coronation did not specifically name Catherine as heir, on the night before the coronation Peter told several senators and a number of important church dignitaries at the house of an English merchant that Catherine was being crowned in order to give her the right to rule the state. He waited for objections; he heard none.

The coronation ceremony was to be on the grandest scale. Peter, who was always careful about spending money on himself, commanded that no expense be spared. An imperial coronation mantle was ordered from Paris, and a St. Petersburg jeweler was commissioned to make a new imperial crown more magnificent than any previously worn by a Russian sovereign. The ceremony would be held not in Peter's city, the new capital of St. Petersburg, but in Holy Moscow, inside the Kremlin, according to the traditions of the ancient tsars. Stephen Yavorsky, president of the Holy Synod, and the indefatigable Peter Tolstoy were sent to Moscow six months early with orders to make the ceremony glorious. The Senate, the Holy Synod and every official and nobleman of rank was commanded to be present.

Peter was delayed by a bout of strangury at the beginning of March 1724 and went to Olonets to drink the waters and try to improve his health. By March 22, he was sufficiently recovered, and he and Catherine set out together for Moscow. At dawn on May 7, a signal cannon was fired from the Kremlin. The procession outside the Kremlin included 10,000 soldiers of the Imperial Guard and a squadron of booted horse guards whose passage was watched somewhat sourly by certain Moscow merchants whose noblest steeds had been appropriated by Tolstoy for the ceremony. At ten o'clock, as every bell in Moscow pealed and every cannon in the city thundered, Peter and Catherine appeared at the top of the Red Staircase, escorted by all the officials of the realm, the members of the Senate, generals of the army and great officers of state. The Empress was dressed in a purple gown embroidered in gold, and needed five ladies in waiting to carry her train. Peter was wearing a sky-blue tunic embroidered in silver and red silk stockings. Together, the couple stood looking out over the crowd in Cathedral Square from exactly the spot where, forty-two years before, ten-year-old Peter and his mother had looked over the raging Streltsy and their forest of glittering halberds. Then, they descended the Red Staircase, walked across Cathedral Square and entered the Cathedral of the Assumption. In the center, a platform had been constructed, and on it, beneath a canopy of velvet and gold, two chairs encrusted with precious stones waited for Peter and Catherine.

At the door of the cathedral, Yavorsky, Feofan Prokopovich and the other high clergymen, dressed in their clerical robes, met the imperial couple. Yavorsky presented the cross for them to kiss, then conducted them to the thrones. The service began while Peter and Catherine sat side by side in silence. At the climax of the ceremony, Peter rose and Yavorsky presented him with the new imperial crown. Peter took it and, turning to the audience, declared in a loud voice, "It is our intention to crown our beloved consort." Peter himself placed the crown on Catherine's head. He then handed her the orb, but, significantly, he kept the scepter, the emblem of ultimate power, in his own hand. The crown was studded with 2,564 diamonds, pearls and other precious stones, and an enormous ruby as large as a pigeon's egg was set immediately beneath a cross of diamonds at the apex of the crown.

As Peter placed the crown on her head, Catherine, overcome with emotion, tears streaming down her cheeks, knelt before him and tried to kiss his hand. He pulled it away and she tried to embrace him around his knees, but Peter lifted her up. Then, prayers were solemnly chanted, cannon thundered and the bells of Moscow pealed.

After the service, Peter returned to the palace to rest, but Catherine, wearing her crown, walked alone at the head of a procession from the Assumption Cathedral to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael to pray at the tombs of the tsars, according to custom. The imperial mantle, made in France and encrusted with hundreds of golden double-headed eagles, was now on her shoulders, and its great weight, even borne in part by attendants, forced her to stop and rest several times. As she walked, Menshikov followed slightly behind, scattering handfuls of gold and silver among the watching crowd. At the foot of the Red Staircase, the Duke of Holstein waited to conduct her to the Terem Palace, where a magnificent banquet had been prepared. During the banquet, Menshikov distributed medals bearing a portrait of Peter and Catherine on one side and, on the reverse, a depiction of Peter placing the crown on Catherine's head and the words "Crowned in Moscow in 1724." The feasting and celebration went on in the city for days. In Red Square, two huge oxen had been roasted and stuffed with game and poultry, while two fountains, one running with red wine and the other with white, splashed nearby.

Catherine's powers and the Emperor's long-range intent were unspecified. As a sign that she exercised some aspects of sovereignty, Peter allowed her to create old Peter Tolstoy a count, a title which all his descendants, including the great novelist Lev Tolstoy, have worn. By her command, Yaguzhinsky was made a Knight of the Order of St. Andrew, and Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, disgraced and exiled in the affair of the Tsarevich Alexis-, was allowed to return to court. But her powers even in this respect were limited. She pleaded in vain for a pardon for the exiled former Vice Chancellor Shafirov. What Peter actually intended, no one was sure. It is possible that he had not made up his mind even as he lay on his deathbed. But it is certain that he wanted to ensure Catherine's importance—perhaps to act as regent for one of his daughters if not actually to wear the crown. Peter knew that the throne of Russia could not be bestowed simply as a reward for faithful and loving service. The wearer of the crown had to be a person of energy, wisdom and experience. Catherine's qualities were somewhat different. Still, she had been anointed, and Campredon, the French envoy, concluded that Peter wanted her thus to be "recognized as regent and sovereign after the death of her husband."

After her coronation, more than ever the path to favor lay through Catherine. Yet, within a few weeks of this triumph, Catherine found herself teetering on the brink of personal disaster, looking down at the possibility of utter ruin. Among Catherine's attendants was a handsome young man named William Mons, the younger brother of Anna Mons, who had been Peter's mistress twenty-five years earlier. Mons was a foreigner, a German born in Russia with one foot well placed in each world. Elegant, gay, clever, ambitious and opportunistic, he had chosen his patrons shrewdly, worked hard and risen to the rank of chamberlain and the post of secretary and confidant to Catherine. The Empress enjoyed his company, for he was, in the words of a French observer, "One of the best-made and most handsome men that I have ever seen." Mons' sister Matrena had achieved equal success. She was married to a Baltic nobleman named Fedor Balk, a major general who was Governor of Riga, while she herself was a lady in waiting and the closest confidante of the Empress Catherine.

Gradually, between them, on the pretense of assisting the Empress and looking after her interests, brother and sister contrived to gain control of access to Catherine. Through Mons and Matrena Balk, messages, petitions and appeals were most likely to be presented favorably to Catherine; indeed; without their help, such messages were unlikely to reach her at all. And since Catherine's influence over her husband was known to be great, the Mons channel became immensely valuable. Government ministers, foreign ambassadors, even foreign princes and members of the Emperor's family approached the zealous and handsome German with a petition in one hand and a bribe in the other. No personage was too august—the Tsaritsa Praskovaya and her daughters, the Duke of Holstein, Prince Menshikov, Prince Repnin and Count Tolstoy—or too humble—a peasant who was supposed to return to his village bribed Mons to arrange permission to remain in Petersburg. Mons arranged his "fees" according to the importance of the service and the wealth of the petitioner. Besides the wealth gained by these activities, Mons and his sister received estates, serfs and money directly from the Empress. Deferred to by the highest in Russia, with Menshikov calling him "brother," Mons concluded that "William Mons" was too simple a name for such a magnifico, and changed his name to Moens de la Croix. Obligingly, everyone called him by his new name—except Peter, who did not know either of the transformation or of the reason for the new importance of the former William Mons.

Gossip said there were other things that Peter did not know about William Mons. It was whispered in Petersburg, and soon after in Europe, that the Empress had taken the handsome young chamberlain as a lover. Lurid stories circulated, including one that Peter had found his wife with Mons one moonlit night in a compromising position in her garden. No evidence of any kind was cited. The moonlit-garden tale is disposed of by the fact that Peter first learned of Mons' fiscal offenses in November, when the moonlit garden would have been deep in snow. More important, the nature of Catherine's character argues against such a liason. The Empress was generous, warm-hearted and earthy, but she was also intelligent. She knew Peter. Even if her own affection for him had cooled (which is unlikely, especially at the moment when he had just crowned her empress), she certainly understood the impossibility of keeping an intrigue with Mons a secret and the horrible consequences when it was found out. That Mons, following an ancient tradition of bold and successful adventures, may have wished to seal his success by presuming on the Emperor's marital rights is possible; that Catherine would have become involved in such folly is not.

Even without this ultimate insult, it seems strange that Peter should so long have remained ignorant of Mons' corruption. It is a sign of his growing weakness, abetted by illness, that Peter did not know what was an open secret to everyone else in Petersburg. When the Emperor did discover the truth, retribution was swift and deadly. Exactly who told Peter is unknown. Some believe that it was Yaguzhinsky, who had been stung by Mons' pretensions. Others say that the informer was one of Mons' own subordinates. Once he knew, Peter's first move was to forbid anyone to petition him for a pardon on behalf of criminals. Then, while the suspense and alarm stimulated by this decree began to mount, he waited. On the evening of November 8, he returned to the palace without a sign of anger, supped with the Empress and his daughters and had a trivial conversation with William Mons. Then, saying that he felt tired, he asked Catherine the hour. She looked at a Dresden watch which he had given her and replied, "Nine o'clock." Peter nodded and said, "It is time for everyone to go to bed." All rose and went to their rooms. Mons went home, undressed and was smoking his pipe before retiring when General Ushakov entered and arrested him on a charge of receiving bribes. Mons' papers were seized, his room was sealed and he himself was taken away in chains.

The following day, Mons was brought into Peter's presence. According to the official minutes of the inquiry, he was so frightened that he fainted; once revived, he confessed to everything he was accused of. He admitted taking bribes, he admitted taking revenue from the Empress' estates for his own use and he admitted that his sister Matrena Balk was involved. He did not confess to any improper relations with Catherine because he was not asked any such questions—further evidence, it would seem, of the groundlessness of the rumors. Nor did Peter seek to conduct the inquiry in private. On the contrary, he issued a proclamation ordering that everyone who had given a bribe to Mons or knew of such a bribe should step forward. For two days, a town crier walked through the streets of Petersburg calling out this proclamation and threatening dire punishment to those who withheld information.

Mons was doomed—any one of the charges against him was enough to condemn him—and on November 14 he was sentenced to death. Catherine did not believe, however, that he would die. Confident of her power to influence her husband, she first sent word to Matrena Balk not to worry about her brother, and then she went to Peter to ask for pardon for her handsome chamberlain. Here, she misjudged her husband. The avenging fury that had struck down a Gagarin and a Nesterov and humbled a Menshikov and a Shafirov would not rum aside to spare a William Mons. Mons received no reprieve, but the night before his death Peter went to his cell to say that he was sorry to lose such a talented man, but that the crime demanded the punishment.

On November 16, 1724, William Mons and Matrena Balk were taken in sledges to the execution site. Mons behaved courageously, nodding and bowing to friends he saw in the crowd. Mounting the scaffold, he calmly took off his heavy fur coat, listened to the reading of the sentence of death and laid his head on the block. After his death, his sister received eleven blows of the knout, very lightly administered so that not much harm was done, and was exiled for life to Tobolsk in Siberia. Her husband, General Balk, was given permission to marry again if he wished.

Not surprisingly, this ordeal strained the relations between Peter and Catherine. Although her name had never been mentioned either by Mons or his accusers and no one dared charge her with taking bribes herself, it was widely suspected that she had known what Mons was doing and had ignored it. Peter himself seemed to link her with Mons by issuing on the day of the execution a decree addressed to all officers of state. Written in his own hand, it declared that because of abuses which had taken place in the Empress' household without her knowledge, they were forbidden to obey any future order or recommendation she might make. Simultaneously, the conduct of her financial affairs was removed from her control.

Catherine bore these blows with courage. On the day of Mons' execution, she summoned her dancing master and, with her two eldest daughters, practiced the minuet. Knowing now that any expression of interest in Mons could dangerously affect herself, she steeled her emotions. But she did not easily forgive Peter, and a month after the execution an observer noted, "They hardly speak to each other; they no longer eat or sleep together." By mid-January, however, the tension was ebbing away. "The Empress has made a long and ample genuflection before the Tsar to obtain remission of her faults," wrote the same observer. "The conversation lasted three hours and they even supped together."

Whether this reconciliation would have been permanent, we can never know. Throughout the affair of William Mons the Emperor was ill, and he had grown worse. Less than a month after Catherine's genuflection, Peter was dead.

After the Peace of Nystad and the coronation of Catherine, Peter, in the eyes of the world, stood at the summit of his power. Yet to those inside Russia, and especially those close to the Emperor, there were disquieting signs. The harvest was poor two years in a row; grain was bought from abroad, but not enough to make up the deficit. New accusations of corruption had been brought against the highest in the land. Shafirov had been condemned, reprieved and exiled, and now Menshikov was removed as president of the College of War. Nothing seemed to move unless Peter was there personally to make certain that it did. In the palace at Preobrazhenskoe the servants even neglected to bring in wood to burn in the fireplaces in winter until the Emperor commanded them to do it.

This gradual decline in the general condition of the state was paralleled by a deterioration in Peter's health and state of mind. Sometimes, he worked with his customary energy and enthusiasm. One of his last projects was the planning of a large new building to house his project Academy of Science, and he was also thinking of establishing a new university in the capital. But, more often, he was moody and apathetic. In these periods of depression, he would let things slide, sitting and sighing, and refusing to act until the last minute. When the Emperor was so withdrawn and aloof, few of those around him dared speak to him even when matters were pressing. Reflecting this atmosphere, Mardefelt, the Prussian minister, wrote to his master, King Frederick William, "No expressions are strong enough to give Your Majesty a just idea of the unendurable negligence and confusion with which the most important affairs are treated here, so that neither foreign envoys nor Russian ministers are only sighs, and they confess themselves in despair-about the difficulties that they have with regard to every proposition. This is no feint but the real truth. Here nothing is considered important until it stands on the edge of the precipice."

What lay behind all this, only gradually realized even by those who were close to him, was the fact that Peter was seriously ill. His previous disorder still afflicted him, the tremors still shook his giant but weakening frame, and only Catherine, taking his head in her lap, could bring him peace. In recent years, he had suffered from a new, troublesome malady. As Jefferyes described it to London:

His Majesty has for some time had a weakness in his left arm which was occasioned at first by his being let blood by an unskilled surgeon, who, missing the vein, made an incision in the nerve that lies by it. This accident has obliged him ever since to wear a furred glove on his left hand, in which, as well as in the arm, he is often troubled with pains, and sometimes loses feeling in it.

And the years had taken their toll. In 1724, Peter was only fifty-two, but his huge exertions, his ceaseless motion, the violent excesses of drink in which he had indulged in his youth, had severely undermined his once magnificent constitution. At fifty-two, the Emperor was an old man.

Beyond these afflictions, he had a new illness, the one which eventually was to kill him. For some years, he had suffered from an infection of the urinary tract, and in 1722, during the summer heat of the Persian campaign, the symptoms reappeared. His doctors diagnosed strangury and stone, a blockage in the uretha and bladder caused by muscle spasms or infection. During the winter of 1-722-1723, the pain in the uretha returned. At first, Peter mentioned it to no one except his valet, and continued to drink and carouse in his normal way but soon the pain grew stronger and he had to consult his doctors. For the next two years, he was constantly in and out of pain. He followed the doctors' advice, swallowing their drugs and limiting his drinking to a little kvas and a very occasional glass of brandy. Some days he suffered and could scarcely attend to business; then for a while he would enjoy a period of respite when he could resume his normal activity.

Near the end of the summer in 1724, the disease reappeared and this time the symptoms were much worse. Unable to pass urine, Peter was in agony. His personal physician, Dr. Blumentrost, summoned a consulting physician, Dr. Horn, an English surgeon. To facilitate a passage, Horn inserted a catheter, repeatedly attempting to penetrate the bladder but obtaining only blood and pus. Eventually, with great difficulty, he managed to extract about a half a glass of urine. During this probing, unattended by anesthesia, Peter lay on a table, holding the hand of one doctor on each side of him. He was trying to be still, but so great was his pain that the two hands he held were almost crushed. Eventually, a giant stone was passed and the pain abated. Within a week, his urine began to pass in an almost normal way. He remained in bed for many more weeks, however, and not until the end of September was he beginning to walk around his room and impatiently awaiting the moment when he could resume his normal life.

At the beginning of October, the sky outside Peter's window was blue and the air was crisp, and he ordered his yacht to be moored in the Neva where he could see it. A few days later, despite his doctors' warning that he should not exert himself, he went out of doors. He went first to Peterhof to see the new fountains which had been installed in the park. Then, while the doctors protested even more loudly, he set off on a long and arduous tour of inspection. He began at Schulusselburg to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of that key fortress twenty-two years before. Then he proceeded to the ironworks at Olonets, where he was already strong enough to hammer out with his own hands a sheet of iron weighing more than a hundred pounds. From there, he went to observe the work on the Ladoga Canal, now proceeding rapidly under the direction of the German Munnich.

The tour lasted almost the whole month of October, and during it Peter felt twinges of pain and other symptoms of the disease, but they did not slow his progress. On November 5, he returned to Petersburg, but decided almost immediately to travel by boat to visit another ironworks and armament factory at Systerbeck on the Gulf of Finland. The weather was typical of early winter in the North: gray skies, high winds and rough, icy seas. Beyond the mouth of the Neva, Peter's yacht was approaching the fishing village of Lakhta when in the distance he saw a boat carrying twenty soldiers swept out of control by the wind and waves. As Peter watched, the boat was driven aground on a shoal. There, its keel stuck in the sand and the waves pounding its side, the little vessel began rolling back and forth, threatening to capsize. Those inside, obviously unable to swim, seemed incapable of doing anything to save themselves. Peter sent a skiff from his own yacht to assist, but his sailors were unable to refloat the grounded boat; the men inside, meanwhile, did little to help, being almost paralyzed by fear of drowning. Watching impatiently, the Emperor ordered his own skiff to take him alongside the grounded boat. Unable to come close because of the waves, the Emperor suddenly jumped into the sea, plunging into the shallow icy water up to his waist and wading to the stranded boat. His arrival and presence galvanized the desperate men. Responding to his shouts, they caught lines thrown from the other boat, and, with the help of other sailors now in the water beside the Emperor, the stranded boat was pulled and dragged off the shoal. Blessing themselves for their salvation, the survivors were taken ashore to recover in the houses of the local fishermen.

Peter returned to his yacht to strip off his wet clothes and dress in something warm before anchoring at Lakhta. At first, although he had been immersed in the icy water for a considerable time, it did not appear that this exposure had affected him. Enormously pleased at his exploit in saving lives and refloating the boat, he went to sleep at Lakhta. During the night, however, he came down with chills and fever, and within a few hours the pain in his intestine reappeared. He canceled his trip to Systerbeck and sailed back to St. Petersburg, where he went to bed. From that moment on, the disease never relinquished its fatal grip.

For a while, it seemed that Peter was once again recovering. At Christmas, he was well enough to make his traditional tour of the major houses of St. Petersburg in the company of his band of carolers and musicians. On New Year's Day, he was present at the customary fireworks, and on Epiphany he went out onto the ice of the Neva River for the traditional Blessing of the Waters, catching another cold during the ceremony. During these weeks, he also participated one final time in the celebration of the Drunken Synod, which assembled to elect a successor to the recently deceased "Mock-Pope" Buturlin. The election of a new "Pope" demanded the summoning of a conclave of "cardinals" to a hall presided over by Bacchus seated on a cask. Peter himself sealed up the "cardinals" in a separate room, forbidding them to emerge until they had chosen a new "Pope." To aid their deliberations, each "cardinal" was required to swallow a large spoonful of whiskey every fifteen minutes. The process took all night, and when the conclave stumbled out the following moming, an obscure officer had been chosen. That evening, this newly elevated dignitary celebrated at a banquet at which the guests were served the flesh of bears, wolves, foxes, cats and rats.

By mid-January, the coolness which had developed between Peter and Catherine because of the Mons affair appeared to have vanished. The Emperor and his wife went together to a harlequin wedding of a servant of one of his dentchiks. Later in the month, Peter attended assemblies at the houses of Peter Tolstoy and Admiral Cruys. But on January 16, the disease returned and compelled him to take his bed. Dr. Blumentrdst again called other doctors, including Horn. Probing gently, they found that Peter had an inflammation of the bladder and intestine so severe that they believed gangrene was present. Knowing no treatment which could arrest an inflammation so advanced, Blumentrdst and his colleagues sent urgent couriers to two famous European specialists, Dr. Boerhaave in Leyden and Dr. Stahl in Berlin, describing Peter's symptoms and appealing desperately for advice.

At first, resting in bed, Peter seemed to rally. He continued to work, summoning Osterman and other ministers to his bedsided, where they remained in discussions an entire night. On January 22, he spoke to the Duke of Holstein and promised to accompany him to Riga as soon as he was well. The following day, he suffered a relapse and, calling a priest, received the Last Rites. Tolstoy, Apraxin and Golovkin were admitted to his bedside, and in their presence Peter ordered the pardoning and release of all state prisoners except murderers, and granted an amnesty to young noblemen being punished for not presenting themselves for service. He also commanded Apraxin, who was weeping, and the other ministers to protect all foreigners in St. Petersburg in case he should die. Finally, still typically attentive to detail, he signed decrees regulating fishing and the sale of glue.

By evening on the 26th, the Emperor seemed a little stronger and the doctors began to talk of letting him get up and walk about the room. Encouraged, Peter sat up and ate a little oatmeal gruel. Immediately, he was striken with such violent convulsions that those in the room thought the end had come. The ministers, the members of the Senate, the senior officers of the Guard and other officials were hastily summoned to the palace to begin a vigil. Soon, the surges of pain through Peter's body became so great that Osterman begged him to think only of himself and forget all matters of business. In agony, crying out loudly from the intensity of the pain, Peter repeatedly expressed contrition for his sins. Twice more, he received the Last Rites and begged for absolution. On the 27th, the priest was Feofan Prokopovich, in whose presence Peter said fervently, "Lord, I believe. I hope." Soon after, he said, as if speaking to himself, "I hope God will forgive me my many sins because of the good I have tried to do for my people."

Through his ordeal, Catherine never left her husband's bedside, day or night. At one point, telling him that it would help him make his peace with God, she begged Peter to forgive Menshikov, still in disgrace. Peter consented, and the Prince entered the room to be pardoned for the last time by his dying master. At two o'clock on the afternoon of the 27th, perhaps thinking of the succession, the Emperor asked for a writing tablet. One was given to him, and he wrote, "Give all to . . ." Then the pen dropped from his hand. Unable to continue, meaning to dictate, he sent for his daughter Anne, but before the Princess arrived, he had become delirious.

He never recovered consciousness, but sank into a coma, moving only to groan. Catherine knelt beside him hour after hour, praying incessantiy that he might be released from his torment by death. At last, at six o'clock in the moming of January 28, 1725, just as she was pleading, "O Lord, I pray Thee, open Thy paradise to receive unto Thyself this great soul," Peter the Great, in the fifty-third year of his life and the forty-third year of his reign, entered eternity.

EPILOGUE

The cause of Peter's death has never been fully described in medical terms. Professor Hermann Boerhaave, the eminent physician in Leyden, received the urgent communication of the Emperor's symptoms sent by Horn and Blumentrdst, but before he could write out his prescripion, a second courier arrived with the news that the patient was dead. Boerhaave was stunned. "My God! Is it possible?" he exclaimed. "What a pity that so great a man should have died when a pennyworth of medicine might have saved his life!" Later, talking to other court physicians, Boerhaave expressed his belief that if the disease had not been concealed for so long and if he had been consulted earlier, he might have cured Peter's illness and allowed the Emperor to live for many years. But Boerhaave never told his nephew, who later became a physician to Peter's daughter Empress Elizabeth and who was responsible for passing this account along, what medicines he would have prescribed or what illness he would have been treating. Some doubt may be cast on the Professor's optimism by the facts that he never saw the patient and that, on autopsy, the area around Peter's bladder was found already to be gangrenous and his sphincter muscle so swollen and so hard that only with difficulty could it be cut with a knife.

The succession was quickly settled in favor of Catherine. While Peter still drew his last breaths, a group from the Emperor's inner circle of favorites, among them Menshikov, Yaguzhinsky and Tolstoy—all of them "new men" created by Peter, all with much to lose if the old nobility came back to power—had moved decisively to support Catherine. Guessing rightly that the Guards regiment would make the ultimate decision on the succession, they summoned these troops into the capital and massed them near the palace. There, the soldiers were reminded that Catherine had accompanied them and her husband on military campaigns. All arrears in military pay were swiftly paid in the name of the Empress. The Guards regiments were devoted to the Emperor, and Catherine was already popular with both officers and men; with these new inducements, they readily pledged their support.

Even with these precautions, the succession of the Lithuanian peasant girl, mistress and eventually wife and consort of the autocrat, was far from certain. The other serious candidate was the nine-year-old Grand Duke Peter, son of the Tsarevich Alexis. According to Russian tradition, as grandson of the dead Emperor he was the direct male heir, and the vast majority of the aristocracy, the clergy and the nation at large regarded him as the rightful successor. Through the young Grand Duke, old noble families such as the Dolgorukys and the Golitsyns hoped to restore themselves to power and reverse Peter's reforms.

The confrontation came on the night of January 27, a few hours before the Emperor's death, when the Senate and leading men of state assembled to decide the succession. Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, a member of the old nobility who had spent many years abroad and advocated a sharing of monarchical power with the aristocracy, proposed a compromise: young Peter Alexeevich should become emperor, but Catherine should be regent, assisted by the Senate. Peter Tolstoy, whose name was prominently linked with the prosecution and death of the Tsarevich Alexis and who therefore greatly feared the accession of Alexis' son, objected that rule by a minor was dangerous; the state needed a strong, experienced ruler, he insisted, and it was for this reason that the Emperor had trained and crowned his wife. When Tolstoy spoke, a number of officers of the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards who had filtered into the room shouted their agreement. At the same time, a roll of drums in the courtyard below brought the statesmen to the window. Looking out into the darkness, they made out the thick ranks of the Guard drawn up around the palace. Prince Repnin, commander of the Petersburg garrison and a member of the aristocratic party, flew into a rage and demanded to know why the soldiers were there without his orders. "What I have done, Your Excellency," stonily replied the commander of the Guard, "was by the express command of our sovereign lady, the Empress Catherine, whom you and I and every faithful subject are bound to obey immediate and unconditionally." The soldiers themselves, many of them in tears, cried out, "Our father is dead, but our mother still lives!" Under the circumstances, Apraxin's proposal "that Her Majesty be proclaimed Autocrat with all the perogatives of her late consort" was quickly accepted.

The following morning, the forty-two-year-old widow came into the room weeping and leaning on the arm of the Duke of Holstein. She had just sobbed that she was now "a widow and an orphan" when Apraxin knelt before her and declared the decision of the Senate. Those in the room cheered, and the acclamation was taken up by the Guardsmen outside. A manifesto issued that day announced to the empire and the world that the new Russian autocrat was a woman, the Empress Catherine I.

Peter's body was embalmed and placed on a bier in a room hung with French tapestries presented to the Emperor on his visit to Paris. For over a month, the public was allowed to file past and pay their respects. Then, on March 8, in the middle of a snowstorm, the coffin was carried to the cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Catherine walked at the head of the cortege, followed by 150 court ladies and a huge procession of courtiers, government officials, foreign envoys and military officers, all bareheaded under the snow. In the cathedral, Feofan Prokopovich preached the funeral sermon. Comparing Peter to Moses, Solomon, Samson, David and Constantine, he articulated the general disbelief that the familiar towering figure was really gone forever. "O men of Russia," he asked, "what do we see? What do we do? This is Peter the Great whom we are committing to the earth!"

Catherine's reign was brief. On taking the throne, she declared that she would adhere faithfully to Peter's policies and reforms. Ever practical, she quickly consolidated her rule in the quarter where it counted most by abolishing army labor on the Ladoga Canal, keeping the soldiers paid on time, issuing new uniforms and holding numerous military reviews. She remained friendly, open and generous, so much so that court expenses quickly tripled. She put on no airs about her sudden elevation to the pinnacle of power. She spoke frequently about her common origin and extended her own good fortune to all members of her family. She found her brother, Carl Skavronsky, serving as a groom in a post station in Courland, brought him to St. Petersburg, educated him, and then created him Count Skavronsky. Her two sisters and their families were also summoned to the capital. The elder sister had married a Lithuanian peasant named Simon Heinrich, the younger, a Polish peasant, named Michael Yefim. The families were established in St. Petersburg and their names changed to Hendrikov and Yefimovsky. Catherine's generous daughter, Empress Elizabeth, created die two former peasants, her uncles, Count Hendrikov and Count Yefimovsky.

The real ruler of the state during Catherine's reign was Menshikov. On February 8, 1726, a year after her accession, a new governing body, the Supreme Privy Council, was created "to lighten the heavy burden of government for Her Majesty." Collectively, the six original members—Menshikov, Apraxin, Golovkin, Osterman, Tolstoy and Prince Dmitry Golitsyn— exercised near-sovereign power, including the issuing of decrees.

Menshikov dominated this body as he did the Senate, now reduced in function. He met opposition in either forum simply by rising and declaring that the views he expressed were those of the Empress.

Menshikov's policies contained elements of prudence. He understood that the weight of taxation was crushing the peasantry, and he told the Empress, "The peasants and the army are like soul and body; you cannot have one without the other." Accordingly, Catherine agreed to a reduction of the soul tax by one third, along with a concomitant reduction by one third in the size of the army. In addition, all arrears in the tax were canceled. Nor did Menshikov wield wholly unrestricted power. Catherine's favorite, Charles Frederick of Holstein, married the Empress' daughter Anne on May 21, 1725, and the following February, over Menshikov's opposition, he was appointed to the Supreme Privy Council.

Catherine's death, brought about by a series of chills and fevers, came only two years and three months after her accession. In November 1726, a storm backed up the Neva, forcing the Empress to flee her palace in her nightdress "in water up to her knees." On January 21, 1727, she participated in the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters on the Neva ice. Afterward, with a white plume in her hat and holding a marshal's baton, she remained in the winter air for many hours to review 20,000 troops. This outing put her in bed for two months with fever and prolonged bleeding from the nose. She railed and relapsed. Near the end, she named the young Grand Duke Alexeevich as her successor, with the entire Supreme Privy Council to act as regents. Her two daughters, Anne, seventeen, now Duchess of Holstein, and Elizabeth, sixteen, were named to the council as regents.

Ironically, the accession of Peter II, the hope of the old nobility and the traditionalists, was engineered by Menshikov, the supreme example of the commoner raised from the ranks. His motives, of course, were self-preservation and further advancement. While Catherine was alive, Menshikov calculated the chances of her two daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, against those of Peter and concluded that the young Grand Duke was the stronger candidate. Accordingly, he switched sides and used his formidable powers to urge the Empress along the path which eventually she took: that is, naming Peter as heir, with her daughters joining the regency council. Nor had Menshikov forgotten his own family. Before persuading Catherine to make Peter emperor, he obtained her consent to marry the eleven-year-old boy to his sixteen-year-old daughter Maria.

Menshikov's sudden reversal of loyalty startled and frightened other members of the old circle of favorites, most notably Tolstoy. The grizzled fox, now eighty-two, understood clearly that a new Emperor Peter II would inevitably reach out to settle the score with the man who had lured his father back from Italy to death. Tolstoy appealed to other members of the circle, but found limited support. Osterman had joined Menshikov, Yaguzhinsky was in Poland, the others preferred to wait and see. Only Anthony Devier, Menshikov's brother-in-law, and General Ivan Buturlin of the Guards resisted Menshikov. It was too late. Catherine was dying, and Menshikov had taken care to surround her with his own people and make it possible for others to approach. Invulnerable to attack, he now lashed out. Devier, against whom Menshikov had vowed vengeance for marrying the Serene Prince's sister, was arrested, knouted and sent to Siberia. Tolstoy was banished to an inland of whale fisheries in the White Sea, where he died in 1729 at the age of eighty-four.

Once Catherine was dead and Peter II proclaimed as emperor, Menshikov moved swiftly to reap his rewards. Within a week of his accession, the boy Emperor was bodily transferred from the Winter Palace to Menshikov's palace on Vasilevsky Island. Two weeks later, young Peter's engagement to Maria Menshikova was celebrated. The Supreme Privy Council was filled with Menshikov's new aristocratic allies, the Dolgoruks and Golitsyns. As a further gesture, Menshikov had the aging Tsaritsa Eudoxia, Peter the Great's first wife and grandmother of the new Emperor, transfered from the lonely fortress of Schlusselburg to Novodevichy convent near Moscow where she would be more comfortable,

The Duke of Holstein, whom Catherine had installed on the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov's wishes, saw the handwriting on the wall and applied for permission to leave Russia with his wife, Princess Anne. Menshikov gladly saw them return to Kiel, the ducal seat, and sweetened the Duke's departure with a generous Russian pension. It was in Kiel, on May 28, 1728, that Princess Anne died, shortly after giving birth to a son, the future Emperor Peter III. A ball given in her honor to celebrate the birth had been followed by a display of fireworks. Although the Baltic weather was cold and damp, the happy young mother insisted upon standing on an open balcony to get a better view. When her ladies worried, she laughed and said, "I am Russian, remember, and used to a much worse climate than this." Within ten days, this eldest daughter of Peter the Great was dead. Now, only one child of Peter and Catherine, the Princess Elizabeth, remained.

The new Emperor was handsome, physically robust and tall for his age. Osterman, who had taken virtually sole charge of Russian foreign policy, now took on additional duties as young Peter's tutor. His high-spirited pupil was not much interested in books; he preferred to ride and hunt, and when Osterman remonstrated with him for his lack of application, the eleven-year-old sovereign replied, "My dear Andrei Ivanovich, I like you, and as my Minister of Foreign Affairs, you are indispensable, but I must request you not to interfere in future with my pastimes." Peter's closest companions were his sister Natalya, only a year older than himself, his blonde eighteen-year-old aunt, Princess Elizabeth, who was not interested in government but cared only about riding, hunting and dancing, and nineteen-year-old Prince Ivan Dolgoruky.

For those few months in the summer of 1727, Menshikov stood alone at the summit; "Not even Peter the Great," declared the Saxon ambassador, "was so feared or so obeyed." He was the unchallenged ruler of Russia and the prospective father-in-law of the Emperor; all future Russian monarchs would carry his blood in their veins. Assured of his pre-eminence, Menshikov's manner became insupportable; he issued orders in a lordly fashion even to the Emperor—he intercepted a sum of money Peter had been given and chastised the Emperor for accepting it, then he took away a silver plate which Peter had presented to his sister Natalya. Stung, the boy said ominously to Menshikov, "We shall see who is emperor, you or I."

In July 1727, Menshikov had the misfortune to fall ill. While his grip on the reins of power was briefly relaxed, Peter, Natalya and Elizabeth moved to Peterhof. People at court began to comment that affairs of state seemed to progress satisfactorily even without the presence of Prince Menshikov. When he recovered, Menshikov appeared at Peterhof, but, to his amazement, Peter turned his back on him. To his equally astonished companions, the Emperor said, "You see, I am at least learning how to keep him in order." Menshikov's fall came a month later, in September 1727. Arrested, deprived of his offices and stripped of his decorations, he and his family—including his daughter Maria—were exiled to an estate in the Ukraine. This stage of his fall was cushioned: He left St. Petersburg with four six-horse carriages and sixty wagons of baggage.

Peter II now passed into the hands of the Dolgorukys. Prince Alexis Dolgoruky, father of the Emperor's friend Ivan, and Prince Vasily Dolgoruky were appointed to the Supreme Privy Council, and late in 1729 the Emperor's betrothal to Prince Alexis' seventeen-year-old daughter Catherine was announced. The Dolgorukys completed the destruction of Menshikov. In April 1728, the great Prince was accused of treasonable contacts with Sweden, his huge wealth was confiscated and he was exiled with his family to Berezov, a tiny village above the tundra line in northern Siberia. In this place, in November 1729, he died at the age of fifty-six, followed to the grave a few weeks later by his daughter Maria.

Increasingly, under Peter II, Moscow began to resume its ancient role as the center of Russian life. After his coronation in January 1728, Peter refused to go back to St. Petersburg, complaining "What am I to do in a place where there's nothing but salt water?" Naturally, the court remained with him, and as the months passed, a number of government offices began to move back to the older city. But the reign of Peter II was destined to be only a few months longer than the reign of Catherine I. Early in January 1730, the fourteen-year-old Emperor became ill. His condition was diagnosed as smallpox, he worsened rapidly and on January 11, 1730, the day fixed for his wedding, he died.

Death came too quickly and unexpectedly for Peter II to follow the procedure established by his grandfather and nominate a successor. Accordingly, it devolved upon the Supreme Privy Council, now dominated by Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to choose a sovereign. The pleasure-loving Princess Elizabeth, last child of Peter the Great, was considered too frivolous, and Catherine of Mecklenburg, the eldest daughter of Tsar Ivan V (Peter the Great's afflicted half-brother and co-Tsar) and Tsaritsa Praskovaya, was thought to be too much under the influence of her husband, the Duke of Mecklenburg. The choice therefore fell on the second daughter of Ivan V: Anne, Duchess of Courland, who had been a widow since a few months after her marriage in 1711. The offer made to Anne carried many restrictive conditions. She was not to marry and not to appoint her successor. The council would retain approval over war and peace, the levying of taxes and expenditure of money, the granting of estates and the appointment of all officers above the rank of colonel. Anne accepted the conditions, arrived in Russia and, with the support of the Guards regiments and the service gentry, immediately tore up the conditions, abolished the Supreme Privy Council and re-established the power of the autocracy. Having lived in Courland for most of eighteen years, the new Empress had Western inclinations, and the court moved back to St. Petersburg. Her government was dominated by a trio of Germans: Ernst Biron, her First Minister in Courland, now made a Russian count; Osterman, who continued to manage foreign policy; and Munnich, the builder of the Ladoga Canal, who took command of the army and became a field marshal.

Empress Anne died in 1740, leaving the throne to the grandson of her elder sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg. This child, Ivan VI, scarcely knew he was emperor; he inherited the throne at the age of two months and was dethroned at the age of fifteen months to be held as a secret state prisoner for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. His successor was Elizabeth, now thirty-one, still pleasure-loving and beloved by the Guards Regiment with whose help she seized the throne, primarily because she feared she was to be sent to a convent by the adherents of Ivan VI. Elizabeth's reign lasted twenty-one years (1741-1762), then followed the brief reign of Peter III and the thirty-four-year reign of Catherine the Great.

Thus, Peter the Great's overturning of the laws of succession and his proclamation that every sovereign should have the right to designate the heir led to an anomaly in Russian history: Since the distant days of the Kievan state, no woman had reigned in Russia; after his death in 1725, four empresses reigned almost continuously for the next seventy-one years. They were Peter's wife (Catherine I), his niece (Anne), his daughter (Elizabeth) and his grandson's wife (Catherine the Great). The reigns of three pitiable males (Peter the Great's grandson Peter II and Peter III and his brother's great-grandson Ivan VI) were interspersed among these women, but their three reigns encompassed only forty months. Upon the death of Catherine the Great, her son Paul, who hated his mother, became emperor. On the day of his coronation, he upset Peter the Great's decree on the succession and established hereditary primogeniture in the male line. Thereafter, Russia's sovereigns were again all male: Paul's sons Alexander I and Nicholas I, his grandson Alexander II, his great-grandson Alexander III and his great-great-grandson Nicholas II.

The body of Peter the Great had been committed to earth, but his spirit continued to bestride the land. Immediately after his death, Russians diligently began to collect every object connected with his life and put them on display: his formal court coats, the blue-green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Reigment which he had worn at Poltava, his hat, his enormous black boots, pairs of shoes worn out but newly soled, his sword, his ivory-headed cane, his nightcap, his stockings mended in several places, his desk, his surgical, dental, and navigational instruments, his turning lathe, his saddle and his stirrups. His little dog Lisette and the horse he had ridden at Poltava were stuffed and exhibited. A life-size wax figure of a seated Peter was molded by the elder Rastrelli; the figure was dressed in the clothes which the Emperor had worn at Catherine's coronation, and in the wig of Peter's own hair which had been cut off during the campaign along the Caspian Sea. All of these mementoes have been carefully preserved and can still be seen at the Hermitage or in other Russian museums.

To those who had been close to Peter, his loss seemed irreparable. Andrei Nartov, the young lathe turner with whom Peter had worked almost every day in his last years, declared, "Although Peter the Great is no longer with us, his spirit lives in our souls and we who have had the honor to be near the monarch will die true to him and our warm love for him will be buried with us." Neplyuev, the young naval officer whom Petere had sent as ambassador to Constantinople, wrote, "This monarch has brought our country to a level with others. He taught us to recognize that we are a people. In brief, everything that we look upon in Russia has its origin in him, and everything which is done in the future will be derived from this source."

As the century progressed, veneration of Peter became almost a cult. Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia's first notable scientist, described Peter as "a God-like man" and wrote, "I see him everywhere, now enveloped in a cloud of dust, of smoke, of flame, now bathed in sweat at the end of strenuous toil. I refuse to believe that there was but one Peter and not several." Gavril Derzhavin, Russia's finest eighteenth-century poet, wondered, "Was it not God who in his person came down to earth?" The clever German Empress Catherine the Great, desiring to identify herself more closely with her giant Russian predecessor, commissioned a heroic bronze statue by the French sculptor Falconet. A miniature cliff of 1,6000 tons of granite was dragged to the bank of the Neva to form a pedestal. The Emperor, wearing a cape and crowned with laurel, sits firmly astride a fiery, rearing stallion which is trampling a snake beneath its hooves; Peter's right arm is flung out, pointing imperiously across the river to the Peter and Paul Fortress—and to the future. The figure, which captures Peter's exuberance, vitality and absolute authority, immediately became the most famous statue in Russia. When Alexander Pushkin wrote his immortal poem "The Bronze Horseman," the statue found a permanent place in literature.

There were, of course, dissenting views. The hope of the common people that Peter's death would mean a lifting of their heavy burdens of service and taxation expressed itself in a popular lithograph titled "The Mice Bury the Cat." This sly work depicts an enormous whiskered cat with a recognizable face, now trussed on a sledge with its paws in the air, being dragged away by a band of celebrating mice. In the nineteenth century, traditionalists who believed in the inherent values of Muscovite culture blamed Peter as the first to open the door to Western ideas and innovations. "We began [in Peter's reign] to be citizens of the world," said the conservative historian Nikolai Karamzin, "but we ceased in some measure to be citizens of Russia." A grand-scale historical and philosophical debate evolved between two schools: the "Slavophiles" who deplored the contamination and destruction of old Russian culture and institutions, and the "Westeraizers" who admired and praised Peter for suppressing the past and forcing Russia onto the road of progress and enlightenment. The arguments often became heated, as when the influential literary critic Vassarion Belinsky described Peter as "the most extraordinary phenomenon not only in our history but in the history of mankind ... a deity who has called us into being and who has breathed the breath of life into the body of ancient Russia, colossal, but prostrate in deadly slumber."

Soviet historians have not had an easy time coping with the figure of Peter the Great. Required to write history within the framework not only of general Marxist theory and terminology but also of the current party line, they sway back and forth between portraying Peter as irrelevant (individuals play no part in historical evolution), as an exploitative autocrat building "a national state of landowners and merchants," and as a national hero defending Russia against external enemies. A small but graphic example of this ambivalence is the treatment of Peter at the Poltava Battlefield Museum. A large statue of the Emperor stands in front of the museum, and the visual exhibits inside all emphasize the presence and role of Peter. But the written material in captions and booklets obediently ascribes the victory to the efforts of "the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples."

Peter himself was realistic and philosophical about the way he was seen and would be remembered. Osterman recalled a conversation with a foreign ambassador in which Peter asked what the opinion was of him abroad.

"Sire," replied the ambassador, "everyone has the highest and best opinion of Your Majesty. The world is astonished above all at the wisdom and genius you display in the execution of the vast designs which you have conceived and which have spread the glory of your name to the most distant regions."

"Very well, very well, that may be," said Peter impatiently, "but flattery says as much of every king when he is present. My object is not to see the fair side of things, but to know what judgment is formed of me on the opposite side of the question. I beg you to tell it to me, whatever it may be."

The ambassador bowed low. "Sire," he said, "since you order me, I will tell you all the ill I have heard. You pass for an imperious and severe master who treats his subjects rigorously, who is always ready to punish and incapable of forgiving a fault."

"No, my friend," said Peter, smiling and shaking his head, "this is not all. I am represented as a cruel tyrant; this is the opinion foreign nations have formed of me. But how can they judge? They do not know the circumstances I was in at the beginning of my reign, how many people opposed my designs, counteracted my most useful projects and obliged me to be severe. But I never treated anyone cruelly or gave proofs of tyranny. On the contrary, I have always asked the assistance of such of my subjects as have shown marks of intelligence and patriotism, and who, doing justice to the rectitude of my intentions, have been disposed to second them. Nor have I ever failed to testify my gratitude by loading them with favors."

The arguments about Peter and the controversies over his reforms have never ended. He has been idealized, condemned, analyzed again and again, and still, like the broader issues of the nature and future of Russia itself, he remains essentially mysterious. One quality which no one disputes is his phenomenal energy. "Eternal toiler upon the throne of Russia," Pushkin described him. "It is an age of gold in which we are living," Peter himself wrote to Menshikov. "Without loss of a single instant, we devote all our energies to work." He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?