Peter the Great

main blow. Divided into two divisions, the infantry would assault the earthworks at a point near the center of the line. Once over the wall, the two divisions were to separate, one turning north, the other south, rolling up the Russian line from within and driving the Russians at each end toward the river. The Swedish cavalry would remain outside the earthworks, controlling the ground there, covering the flanks of the infantry as it advanced and dealing with any Russian sortie or escape which might be attempted. Rehnskjold would command the northern (left) wing of the Swedish infantry attack, Count Otto Vellinck would command the right. Charles himself was to command a small separate force on the far left in the company of Colonel Magnus Stenbock and Arvid Horn. As soon as the guns were unlimbered and served, the

Swedish artillery opened a bombardment along the middle of the Russian line while the infantry assembled in the center and the cavalry squadrons trotted out to the wings. Thus, in a calm and orderly way, 10,000 Swedes prepared to advance on 40,000 strongly entrenched Russians.

From his position on the Russian rampart, Du Croy watched this activity with growing alarm. He had expected that, according to the rules of war, the Swedes would begin digging ditches and laying out their own fortified camps. His confusion grew when he saw that some of the Swedish soldiers were carrying fascines to use in crossing the ditch dug in front of his earthen rampart. It began to dawn on Peter's commander that, incredible as it might seem, the Swedish army was about to storm his position.

Through the morning and into the afternoon, the Swedes calmly continued their preparations. By two p.m., when they were ready, the rain had stopped, it had grown colder and a new storm was gathering in the darkened sky. Then, just as signal rockets soared up, setting the army in motion, a blizzard roared in from behind, sweeping snow horizontally toward the Russian lines. Some of the Swedish officers hesitated, thinking it would be better to postpone the attack until the storm was over. "No," cried Charles. "The snow is at our backs, but it is full in the enemy's face."

The King was right. The Russians, with the swirling flakes biting into their eyes, fired their muskets and cannon, but most of their shots, aimed into a white void, went high and did no damage. Silently, swiftly, the Swedes advanced, suddenly looming before them out of the snow. Thirty paces in front of the earthworks, the Swedish line suddenly halted, muskets swung up to the shoulders, a single volley rang out and, on the parapet, Russians "fell like grass." Throwing their fascines into the ditch, the Swedes swarmed across on top of them. Waving swords and bayonets, they climbed over the earthworks and threw themselves on the foe. Within fifteen minutes, a fierce hand-to-hand battle was taking place inside the works. "We charged directly sword in hand and so entered. We slew all who came at us and it was a terrible massacre," a Swedish officer wrote afterward.

At first, the Russians fought stubbornly—"They returned a heavy fire and killed many fine fellows"—but a breach had been made through which fresh Swedish infantry now poured. Precisely according to plan, the two Swedish divisions separated and began to drive the Russians back along the inside of the earthworks in opposite directions. The southern Swedish column, pressing along the left side of the Russian lines, first engaged the Streltsy regiments under Trubetskoy. These they easily routed, thus sadly confirming Peter's opinion of the value of the Streltsy in fighting a modern enemy. Farther down the Russian line, they encountered Golovin's division, which, although without its commander, put up a strong initial resistance. Then, as one regiment after another of the inexperienced Russians began to crumble, the rest fell into confusion and retreated. Sheremetev's cavalry, stationed on this wing behind the lines, should have been able to intervene, riding down on the advancing Swedish infantry, slowing or even scattering the advance by the weight of men and horses. But the Russian cavalry, made up mostly of mounted noblemen and undisciplined Cossacks, was seized with panic even before it was attacked. Seeing the determined Swedes approach, the cavalrymen wheeled their horses and galloped headlong into the river, trying to escape. Thousands of horses and a thousand men were lost in the small cataracts.

In the north, on the Russian right, the story was much the same. Attacked from behind their earthworks, the Russians attempted a stand, at first defending themselves bravely. Then, as their officers fell, panic set in and they began to flee, crying, "The Germans have betrayed us." As the Swedish advance continued northward, rolling up bastion after bastion, the mass of fleeing Russians grew to huge proportions. So many ran toward the river that soon a dense herd of terrified soldiers, artillerymen and wagoners was stampeding to escape over the single bridge. Suddenly, the bridge cracked and sagged under their weight, sending scores of men sliding and tumbling into the river.

At only one point did the Russian line hold. At the northern end, near the collapsed Kamperholm Bridge, six Russian battalions, including the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guard regiments, under Buturlin, held their ground and refused to break. Hastily creating a new strongpoint by barricading themselves behind hundreds of artillery and supply wagons, they fought back vigorously, firing with muskets and artillery at the Swedes who now swarmed around them.

Except for this single stand, the Russian army on the northern end of the line and on most of the southern end as well had been reduced to a confused, fleeing rabble. Hundreds of Russian soldiers jumped over the earthworks, trying to escape the blades of the Swedish infantry, only to be ridden down and driven back by the Swedish cavalry. The foreign officers commanding the Russians found the situation impossible. "They ran about like a herd of cattle," said the Saxon Hallart of his men. "One regiment was mixed up with another so that hardly twenty men could be got into line." Once the Russians began to cry out against their foreign officers, there was no chance of making them obey. Seeing what was happening and hearing the threatening shouts of his own men, the Due du Croy declared, "The Devil could not fight with such soldiers," and, along with Hallart and Langen, made his way toward the Swedish line and surrendered to Stenbock. He felt safer under Swedish guard than in command of his own undisciplined and terrified troops. Stenbock received them politely and took them to the King.

Charles' role in the action, once the attack on the earthworks had been launched, had mostly been to enjoy himself. He spent the greater part of the afternoon outside the earthworks, deliberately exposing himself to personal danger. Once, while trying to get around a mound of wounded and dying men, he fell with his horse into the ditch; he was extricated, but had to leave the animal, his sword and one of his boots behind. He mounted another horse, which was immediately killed under him, while he himself was hit by a spent ball which he found in his necktie after the battle. Seeing the King without a horse, a Swedish horseman leaped from his own mount and offered it to the King. Scrambling into the saddle, Charles said smilingly, "I see that the enemy want me to practice riding."

As darkness fell, the King appeared inside the earthworks, covered with mud and still lacking a boot. He found that although Du Croy and most of the foreign officers had surrendered and many regiments of the Russian army had disintegrated, victory was not secure. In spite of the Russian losses, there still were 25,000 Russians under arms on the scene and scarcely more than 8,000 Swedes. The native Russian generals, Prince Dolgoruky, Prince Alexander of Imeritia, Avtemon Golovin and Ivan Buturlin, had not given up so quickly as Du Croy, Hallart and Langen. They had retreated to the wagon-train barricade at the northern end of the camp, and here, around this improvised bastion, the fiercest fighting of the day was taking place. Meanwhile, on the Russian left, General Weide's division was still largely intact, having taken little part in the battle. If suddenly Weide's troops had begun to attack toward the north and the regiments inside the ring of wagons had come pouring out to attack toward the south, the thin ranks of Charles' soldiers would have been caught in between.

It seemed imperative, therefore, for Charles to capture the wagons. He brought up artillery and trained it on them, but this proved unnecessary: The spirit of the Russians inside was finally broken. Convinced that further resistance was hopeless, the Russian generals sent to make terms. Charles was secretly delighted. In the gathering darkness, his soldiers, who now completely surrounded the wagon train, had been unable to distinguish between friend and foe and accidentally were firing at each other. The Russian surrender stopped this, and near eight

o'clock the King gave the order to cease firing. But the Russian capitulation was less than total. At first, the Russians insisted on marching out of the redoubt with full military honors. Eventually, they settled for an arrangement which allowed the private soldiers to keep their muskets and small arms, while the officers became prisoners of war. Charles also took possession of the regimental standards and all of the artillery.

Even then, with this mass of Russians on their hands, the situation remained dangerous for the Swedes. Most of their foot regiments were totally exhausted. Some of the men had found supplies of alcohol in the Russian camp and, drinking on empty stomachs, soon became drunk. Further, Charles was afraid that at dawn the Russians would be able to count the small number of

men who had conquered and were guarding them. It was essential to get rid of the beaten Russians quickly, and to usher them off the field expeditiously. Charles ordered the Russian prisoners to get to work immediately repairing the sagging Kamperholm Bridge.

There remained also the potential danger of Weide's division, still undefeated farther down the former Russian line. Wrote one Swedish officer, "If Weide had had the courage to attack us, he would certainly have beaten us, for we were extremely tired, having scarcely eaten or slept for several days, and besides this, all our men were drunk with brandy that they had found in the Muscovite tents, so that it was impossible for the few officers that remained to keep them in order." But the Weide threat quickly evaporated. Although his troops had not been heavily engaged, Weide himself had been wounded. When he learned of the surrender of the northern wing, he had no stomach to continue alone. At daybreak, seeing himself alone and encircled by Swedish cavalry, he too capitulated. Through the rest of the morning, scattered troops across the battlefield surrendered to the Swedes.

By daybreak, the bridge had been repaired, and the beaten Russians began to cross it. Charles stood by the bridge and watched the long lines of enemy soldiers as they removed their hats, laid their banners at his feet and trudged off to the east, back to Russia. When muster was taken in the Swedish ranks, the losses were found to be 31 officers and 646 men killed, 1,205 wounded. Losses on the other side could only be estimated, even by the Russians themselves. Eight thousand at least had been killed or wounded, and the wounded stood little chance of getting home across the now freezing countryside. Ten Russian generals, including the Due du Croy, ten colonels and thirty-three other senior officers were held as prisoners, along with Dr. Carbonari, the Tsar's personal physician, and Peter Lefort, nephew of the Tsar's dead favorite. The prisoners were sent to Reval for the winter, and in the spring, when the ice freed the Baltic, they went to internment in Sweden. Most of them remained there many years.*

*The Due du Croy suffered a more curious fate. Allowed to remain at Reval after the defeat, he wrote from there to the Tsar asking for money to pay his expenses. Peter promptly sent him 6,000 roubles. In the spring of 1702, he died and was mourned by his former Russian employer. "I am sincerely sorry about the fine old man," said Peter when he heard the news. "He was in truth an able and experienced military commander. Had I entrusted the command to him fourteen days earlier. I would not have suffered defeat at Narva."

When the Duke died, he was once again insolvent. Peter was informed and intended to pay the debt, but never got around to it. Whereupon the Duke's creditors in Reval invoked an ancient law which stated that those who died in debt could not be buried. The body was placed in a church vault, where in the dry atmosphere it did not decay but mummified. Eventually, it was taken out and placed under glass. For almost 200 years, visitors to Reval were taken to see the Duke lying before them still in his wig and uniform. A few years before the revolution, (the imperial government decided that the spectacle was unseemly and the Duke was finally buried.

The principal Swedish booty was the Russian artillery: 145 cannon, 32 mortars, 4 howitzers, 10,000 cannonballs and 397 barrels of powder. Peter's army was effectively stripped of the Tsar's favorite weapon. Seeing the mass of beaten Russians marching away, and contemplating the prisoners and the booty, Magnus Stenbock was moved to say, "It is God's work alone, but if there is anything human in it, it is the firm, immovable resolution of His Majesty and the ripe dispositions of General Rehnskjold."

News of the Battle of Narva made a sensational impression throughout Europe. Accounts of the brilliant victory and glowing praise of Sweden's youthful monarch rippled westward. There was satisfaction in some quarters at Peter's humiliation and much snickering at the Tsar's "flight" on the eve of battle. A medallion struck by Charles showing a man with Peter's face running away caused much amusement. Leibniz, who earlier had shown interest in Russia, now expressed his sympathy with Sweden and expressed his wish that its "young king reign in Moscow and as far as the River Amur."

Although Rehnskjold's "ripe dispositions" and seasoned command had played an indispensable part in the successful outcome, it is also true that without the King's "firm, immovable resolution" to attack there would have been no victory at Narva. Certainly, Charles himself fully accepted the popular estimate of himself as an invincible warrior. He was exuberant—almost intoxicated with victory—when he rode over the battlefield with Axel Sparre, chattering excitedly like an adolescent boy. "But there is no pleasure in fighting with the Russians," he said disdainfully, "for they will not stand like other men but run away at once. If the river had been frozen, we should hardly have killed one of them. The best joke was when the Russians got upon the bridge and it broke under them. It was just like Pharaoh in the Red Sea. Everywhere you could see men's heads and horses' heads and legs sticking up out of the water, and our soldiers shot at them like wild ducks."

From that moment on, war became the great object of Charles' life. And in this sense, while Narva was the King's first great victory, it was also the first step toward his doom. A victory so easily won helped persuade Charles that he was unconquerable. Narva, added to the dramatic success of the descent on Zealand, began the legend of Charles XII—which he himself accepted— that with a handful of men he could rout vast armies. Narva also instilled in Charles a dangerous contempt for Peter and for Russia. The ease with which he had overwhelmed Peter's army convinced him that Russians were worthless as soldiers and that he could afford to turn his back on them for as long as he liked. Years later, in the summer dust of the Ukraine, the King of Sweden would pay dearly for these moments, of exaltation on the snow-covered battlefield of Narva.

26

"WE MUST NOT LOSE OUR HEADS'

Peter had not gone many miles from Narva when news of the battle overtook him. Stunned by the swiftness and magnitude of the disaster, he also understood that a far greater danger lay ahead: If Charles decided to follow up his victory and march all the way to Moscow, nothing could prevent him.

One of Peter's qualities was that when confronted with disaster he did not despair. Failure only spurred him forward; obstacles served as challenges to stimulate new effort. Whether his resilience, perseverance and determination were grounded in stubbornness, arrogance, patriotism or wisdom did not matter—he had suffered a crushing, humiliating defeat, but there were no recriminations. He kept his composure and vowed to continue. Two weeks after the battle, he wrote to Boris Sheremetev, "We must not lose our heads in misfortune. I order the work we have undertaken to go on. We do not lack men; the rivers and marshes are frozen. I will hear no excuses."

The nine years between Narva and Poltava were desperate years for Peter. He never knew how much time he had remaining. Often sick and stretched on his bed with fever, plagued by revolts among the Bashkirs and Don Cossacks behind his back, he nevertheless hurled his colossal energy into preparing Russia. He played recklessly, staking everything, impoverishing his Treasury and his people, distributing huge subsidies to keep Augustus, his one remaining ally, in the field. And always he was haunted by the knowledge that Charles might rise one morning and decide to turn his shining, invincible bayonets against Russia.

Years later, after Poltava, Peter was able to see all this in perspective. His calm, Olympian tone is that of a man looking back from the pinnacle of victory. But there is in his words an accurate assessment of the influence of Narva on himself, on the development of the Russian army and on Russia itself:

Our army was vanquished by the Swedes—that is incontestable. But one should remember what sort of army it was. The Lefort regiment was the only old one. The two regiments of Guards had been present' at the two assaults of Azov, but they had never seen any field fighting, especially with regular troops. The other regiments consisted—even to some of the colonels—of raw recruits, both officers and soldiers. Besides that, there was the great famine because, on account of the late season of the year, the roads were so muddy that the transport of provisions had to be stopped. In brief, it was like child's play [for the Swedes). One cannot, then, be surprised that against such an old, disciplined and experienced army, these untried pupils got the worst of it. The victory, then, was indeed a sad and severe blow to us. It seemed to rob us of all hope for the future, and to come from the wrath of God. But now, when we think of it rightly, we ascribe it rather to the goodness of God than to his anger; for if we had conquered then, when we knew as little of war as of government, this piece of luck might have had unfortunate consequences. . . . That we lived through this disaster, or rather this good fortune, forced us to be industrious, laborious and experienced.

The defeated Russian army which had retreated from Narva under the gaze of the victorious King of Sweden straggled into Novgorod. Lacking cannon, powder, tents, baggage and, in many cases, muskets, the men were little more than a disorganized mob. Fortunately, one division of the army, that which Prince Nikita Repnin had mustered along the Volga, had not reached Narva in time to participate in the debacle, and Peter ordered Repnin to march to Novgorod and use his troops as a cadre to discipline the beaten regiments streaming into the city. Three weeks later, when the stragglers had been counted, Repnin reported to Peter that 22,967 of them had been formed into fresh regiments. Adding Repnin's own force of 10,834 men, this gave Peter an army of nearly 34,000 men. In addition, 10,000 Cossacks were on the way from the Ukraine. Peter's Own first command on reaching Moscow was to instruct Prince Boris Golitsyn to raise ten new regiments of dragoons of 1,000 men each.

As commander-in-chief of the rebuilding army, Peter appointed Boyar Boris Sheremetev, who represented an unusual mixture of old and new in Peter's Russia. Twenty years older than the Tsar and a descendant of one of the nation's oldest families, Sheremetev had nevertheless been a youthful rebel against traditional Muscovite ways; once, as a young man, he was denied his father's blessing because he appeared before him with a shaven chin. Unlike most Russian noblemen, Sheremetev had traveled abroad and enjoyed the experience. In 1686, Sophia sent him on missions to King Jan Sobieski of Poland and to the Emperor Leopold in Vienna. In 1697, at forty-five, he went abroad again, this time as a private traveler on a kind of twenty-month sabbatical from his army duties. He traveled to Vienna, Rome, Venice and Malta, and called on the Emperor, the Pope, the Doge and the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, who made him a Knight and awarded him a Maltese Cross. Returning to Russia, Sheremetev wore his Cross so proudly that other, envious Russians took to asking snidely whether the boyar had become "the envoy of Malta." Sheremetev bore such comments serenely; Whitworth, the new English ambassador, called him "the politest man in the country."

Peter was pleased by Sheremetev's interest in Europe, but it was as a soldier rather than a diplomat that he used the boyar. Sheremetev's uncle had been commander-in-chief of the Russian army under Tsar Alexis until he was captured by the Tatars and forced to spend thirty years in captivity in the Crimea. Sheremetev himself had fought against both Poles and Tatars. In 1695 and 1696, when Peter attacked Azov, he conducted diversionary campaigns farther west that resulted in the capture of Tatar fortresses along the lower Dnieper. As a commander, Sheremetev was competent but cautious. He could be trusted to obey Peter's standing orders never to risk the army unless the odds were heavily in his favor.

While Sheremetev's new army was being assembled and re-equipped, Peter ordered the immediate construction of fortifications at Novgorod, Pskov and the Pechersk Monastery near Pskov. Women and children were harnessed along with men. Church services were halted so that the priests and monks could join the common people in moving earth. Houses and churches were pulled down to make way for the new ramparts. To set an example, Peter himself labored on the first entrenchments at Novgorod. When he left, he entrusted the effort to Lieutenant Colonel Shenshin, but Shenshin, thinking the Tsar had gone for good, quickly stopped his own manual labor. Peter returned and, discovering this, had him whipped in front of the rampart and sent him to Smolensk as a common soldier.

But Peter realized that, over the longer run, his army needed to be completely reformed as a permanent, professional body, based on a standard conscription term of twenty-five years. Even so, the first appearance of the new army in the field brought faint praise from a Russian observer in 1701:

A great number are called to serve and if they are examined closely the only result is a feeling of shame. The infantry are armed with bad muskets and do not know how to use them. They fight with their sidearms, with lances, and halberds and even these are blunt. For every foreigner killed there are three, four and even more Russians killed. As for the cavalry, we are ashamed to look at them ourselves, let alone show them to the foreigner. [They consist of] sickly, ancient horses, blunt sabers, puny, badly dressed men who do not know how to wield their weapons. There are some noblemen who do not know how to charge an arquebus, let alone hit their target. They care nothing about killing the enemy, but think only how to return to their homes. They pray that God will send them a light wound so as not to suffer much, for which they will receive a reward from the sovereign. In battle they hide in thickets; whole companies take cover in a forest or a valley and I have even heard noblemen say, "Pray God we may serve our sovereign without drawing our swords from their scabbards."

To remedy these conditions, Peter ordered a complete overhaul in army training, with new standards of discipline and new tactics based on European models. The effort had to start from the very beginning with the creation of new training manuals, the only infantry manuals previously available in Russia being dated 1647—and these had been copied from a German manual of 1615! Peter wanted emphasis placed on training for battle; he had no use for splendidly precise parade-ground formations with soldiers who "play fencing master with their muskets and march as if they were dancing." Neither did he care for the elaborate uniforms of Western soldiers, who looked like "dressed-up dolls." His new army would be dressed in simple green cloth as fast as Russian mills could turn it out. Where possible, his soldiers would wear boots and belts and three-cornered hats. Most important, however, was that they be equipped with modern weapons. Fortunately, while in England, Peter had bought between 30,000 and 40,000 modem flintlocks with new ring bayonets, which were distributed and were used as models for a homemade version. Production at first was low—6,000 in 1701—but by 1706 Russia was producing 30,000 flintlocks a year, and by 1711, 40,000.

Modem tactics were emphasized. The men were taught to fire on command by platoons and how to use the new bayonets. The cavalry was trained to move only on command, to wheel by squadron, to attack with swords and withdraw in an orderly fashion rather than abandon the field like a fleeing herd. Finally, Peter labored to infuse a new spirit into the army: It was to fight not in "the interests of His Tsarish Majesty" but—as Peter wrote the order in his own hand—in "the interests of the Russian state."

Slowly, despite innumerable difficulties, frequent desertions, much jealousy and quarreling among officers, the new army was forged. The most serious problem in terms of equipment lay with the artillery. Almost all the cannon of the Russian army, both heavy siege mortars and field artillery, had been lost at Narva and it was necessary to start from zero. Vinius, the director of the Post Office, was placed in charge, with the title Inspector of Artillery, and given sweeping powers. All Peter cared about was action. "For God's sake," he wrote to Vinius, "speed the artillery." The old man found that there was no time to mine and refine new metals; the new cannon would have to be cast from some more readily available materials. Peter gave the command: "From the whole of Tsardom, in leading towns, from churches and monasteries, a proportion of the bells are to be collected for guns and mortars." It was near-sacrilege, for the bells were almost as holy as the churches themselves and each played a familiar, timeworn part in people's lives. Nevertheless, by June 1701 one quarter of all the church bells in Russia were lowered from their towers, melted down and recast as cannon. Vinius had trouble with the iron founders who cast the guns, glowing red hot in the fires. They drank too much and even the knout could not force them to hurry. But behind Vinius loomed the wrath of the Tsar. "Tell the burgomasters and show them this letter," Peter wrote to Vinius, "that if through their delays the gun carriages are not ready, they will pay not only with money but with their heads."

In spite of the difficulty in finding workmen and suitable alloys for his iron, Vinius performed miracles. In May 1701, he sent twenty new cannon to the army at Novgorod, seventy-six following soon after. By the end of the year, he had produced more than 300 new guns as well as founding a school where 250 boys were learning to become cannon makers and artillerymen. Peter was pleased. "It is good work," he wrote, "and necessary, for time is like death." In 1702, despite the old man's age, Peter sent Vinius to Siberia to seek out new sources of iron and copper. Between 1701 and 1704, seven new ironworks were developed beyond the Urals, producing an ore which the English ambassador reported to be "admirably good, better than that of Sweden." The Russian artillery continued to grow, and cannon cast in the Urals began to fire at the Swedes. By 1705, the English ambassador

declared that the Russian artillery was "at present extremely well served."

Peter's attempt to protect Russia included discreet requests in two capitals, The Hague and Vienna, for help in mediating between Sweden and Russia. Both came to nothing. Andrei Matveev, the son of the statesman Matveev, had been sent to Holland as Peter's representative. There, he found William III and the States General wholly consumed by another issue. In the same month as the Battle of Narva, the event which all Europe dreaded had finally happened: Carlos II of Spain had died, leaving his throne to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV. The Sun King had accepted on behalf of his grandson, and Europe was girding for war. In addition, Holland had no wish to take sides between Sweden, to which the Dutch were bound by treaty, and Russia, which provided them with the lucrative Archangel trade. Matveev could manage only to buy 15,000 muskets through Witsen and send them along to Russia.

In Vienna, Prince Peter Golitsyn appeared incognito and appealed for an audience with the Emperor. He was kept waiting for seven weeks, meanwhile negotiating through the Russian-speaking Jesuit priest Father Woolf with anyone who would speak to him. Few were willing. "They all avoid me and do not want to talk to me," he reported helplessly to Golovin in Russia. So low was Russian prestige as a result of Narva that Count Kaunitz, the imperial Vice Chancellor, laughed in Golitsyn's face, and the French and Swedish ambassadors made fun of him in public. When Golitsyn finally saw the Emperor, Leopold was polite, but as he too was preparing for the great War of the Spanish Succession, he offered nothing concrete. "It is necessary to try every possible way to get a victory over the enemy," Golitsyn wrote pleadingly to Golovin. "God forbid that the present summer should pass away with nothing. ... It is absolutely necessary for our sovereign to get even a small victory by which his name may become famous in Europe as before. Then we can conclude a peace, while now people only laugh at our troops and at our conduct of the war."

Rebuffed in his tentative diplomatic approaches, Peter made .

sure of the constancy of his one ally. He arranged to meet with

Augustus, whom he had not seen since their first meeting in Rawa

two and a half years earlier when the King-Elector first proposed

this war against Sweden. Now, Augustus was nervous. Although

he had not been defeated, he had seen both his allies, Denmark

and Russia, swiftly and ruthlessly struck down by the young Swedish King. He had to consider whether to continue the war or come to terms with Sweden.

Peter met the King-Elector in February 1701 at Birze in an area of Livonia controlled by Saxon troops. In ten days of meetings, punctuated with banquets and celebrations, the two monarchs reconfirmed their alliance. Peter informed Augustus that, despite the defeat at Narva, Russia meant to continue the war. Augustus, as the one undefeated member of the coalition, was able to impose stiff terms on Peter. The Tsar agreed that when the spoils were divided, Livonia and Estonia should go to Poland; Ingria alone was reserved for Russia. Peter also promised 15,000 to 20,000 Russian infantrymen—to be paid, equipped and supplied by Russia—to operate under Saxon command in Livonia. Further, he agreed to pay Augustus a war subsidy of 100,000 roubles a year for three years. It was a heavy price, and once again the monasteries and merchants of Muscovy were painfully squeezed. But it was essential to Peter that Russia have an ally against the Swedes.

There were light moments during this diplomatic summit. One day the Tsar and the King-Elector held a personal artillery competition, each firing cannonballs at a mark in an open field. To Peter's chagrin, Augustus, who had no experience with artillery, hit the mark twice, while Peter himself never hit it at all. The next day, there was a banquet which lasted all night. In the morning, Augustus was fast asleep, but Peter arose alone to go to Catholic mass. His interest in the service prompted his Catholic hosts to propose a union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, but Peter replied, "Sovereigns have rights only over the bodies of their people. Christ is the sovereign of their souls. For such a union, a general consent of the people is necessary and that is in the power of God alone."

In the exhilarating weeks immediately following the Battle of Narva, Charles was preparing to do just what Peter feared: follow up his victory by invading Russia. Some of the King's counselors advised that he could easily occupy the Kremlin, unthrone Peter, proclaim Sophia and sign a new peace treaty which would add new territories to Sweden's Baltic empire. The prospect glittered before Charles' eyes. "The King thinks now about nothing except war," wrote Magnus Stenbock a few weeks after the battle. "He no longer troubles himself about the advice of other people and he seems to believe that God communicated directly to him what he ought to do. Count Piper [the King's chief minister] is much troubled about it because the weightiest things are resolved without any preparation and in general things go on in a way that I do not dare commit to paper." And in December, Karl Magnus Posse, an officer of the Guards, wrote back to Sweden, "In spite of the cold and scarcity and although water is standing in huts, the King will not let us go into winter quarters. I believe that if he had only eight hundred men left, he would invade Russia with them, without the slightest thought as to what they would live on. And if one of our men is shot, he cares no more about it than he would for a louse and never troubles himself about such a loss."

Despite Charles' impatience, large-scale pursuit into Russia at this time proved impossible. The Swedish army, victorious over its human enemies, was soon beset by more dangerous foes: hunger and disease. Livonia had been devastated by the Russians; what food there was had been eaten by Peter's soldiers. No replenishments could come from Sweden before spring, and the Swedish cavalry horses soon were gnawing bark from trees. Weakened by hunger, Charles' regiments were also ravaged by disease. Fever and dysentery ("the bloody flux") spread through the camp, and the men began to die: 400 from the Vestmanland Regiment, 270 from the Delcarlian Regiment. By spring, less than half the army was still fit for action. Reluctantly, Charles bowed to necessity and sent his regiments into winter quarters. The King himself occupied the ancient castle of Lais, near Dorpat. There, he remained for five months, passing the time with amateur theatricals, masquerades, suppers and violent snowball fights. Magnus Stenbock organized an orchestra and played for the King music which he had composed himself.

As spring arrived in 1701, Charles still was considering the idea of invading Russia, but with less enthusiasm. His contempt for the Russians as soldiers had grown and he thought them scarcely worth fighting against. Another victory over Peter would only make Europe laugh, he felt, whereas a victory over Augustus' disciplined Saxon troops would set the continent to nodding appreciatively. More practically, Charles decided that he could not march on Russia while an undefeated Saxon army was operating in his rear.

By June, 10,000 fresh recruits had arrived from Sweden, swelling Charles' army to 24,000. Leaving a detachment to face the Russians, Charles and the main army of 18,000 marched south, intending to cross the Dvina River near Riga and destroy the army of 9,000 Saxons and 4,000 Russians commanded by the Saxon General Steinau. The river was 650 yards wide, and the Swedish crossing was practically an amphibious landing. With the help of a smokescreen created by burning damp hay and manure to protect the boatloads of Swedish soldiers, and with the support of heavy guns mounted on Swedish ships anchored in the river, the assault was successful. Charles himself led the first wave of infantry, brushing aside the fears of his worried officers with the declaration that he would die only at the moment chosen by God, not before. Unfortunately for Charles, the Swedish cavalry could not cross, and the Saxon army, although badly battered, got away. The behavior of the troops which Peter had sent to aid Augustus was not auspicious. Four Russian regiments, held in Steinau's reserve, panicked and fled before even entering the battle. Charles' regard for Peter's army sank lower.

Soon after this inconclusive victory in July 1701, Charles, then nineteen years old, made a strategic decision which was to profoundly affect his own life, and Peter's: He decided to concentrate on the total defeat of Augustus before invading Russia. At the time, this decision seemed reasonable. To attack both his enemies simultaneously was impossible, and of the two, Saxony was active while Russia was inert. In addition, Saxony and even Poland were finite entities; the Elector and his armies could be pinned down and destroyed, whereas Russia was so vast that the Swedish spear might penetrate deeply and still not find the heart of the huge organism.

And there was Charles' outraged morality. Augustus, his cousin, a cultured European ruler, was a treacherous scoundrel, far worse than the Tsar. Peter at least had declared war before attacking, but Augustus had simply marched into Livonia without warning. How could Charles know that even if he made peace with Augustus, the King-Elector would not break his word and attack him again the moment the Swedes invaded Russia? In sum, Charles told a friend that he considered it "derogatory to myself and my honor to have the slightest dealings with a man who had acted in such a dishonorable and shameful way."

Finally, Charles was baffled and worried about Augustus' relationship with the vast commonwealth of Poland, over which the Elector exercised an uneasy kingship. So far, Augustus had conducted his war against Sweden only in his capacity as Elector of Saxony. Now, the Saxon army had retreated into what was in effect the sanctuary of Poland, and Charles' army could not follow. Cardinal Radiejowski, the Primate of Poland, had insisted that the Polish commonwealth had nothing to do with the war against Sweden which King Augustus had made without its consent, and that therefore Charles must not set foot on Polish soil. In a letter to the Cardinal on July 30, 1701, Charles replied that Augustus had forfeited the Polish crown by making war without the consent of the Polish nobility and commonwealth, and the only way for Poland to ensure peace was to summon a Diet, dethrone Augustus and elect a new king. He promised that until he received the Cardinal's answer, the Swedish army would not violate the Polish frontier by pursuing Augustus onto Polish soil.

Charles had hoped that the answer would be quick, and he did not wish to press the Cardinal or the Diet. But weeks passed, summer faded into autumn and still no answer came. When the reply at last arrived, in mid-October, it was negative: the Diet requested Charles to stay away and leave Poland to manage its own affairs; no assurance was given that Poland would not allow Augustus' Saxon army to use the country as a base the following year. Charles was furious, but it was too late in the year to take action. He moved the army once again into winter quarters, this time in the neutral Duchy of Courland, which was forced to house and feed the unwelcome army at its own expense. In January, the army shifted farther south into Lithuania.

It was to this second Swedish winter camp, at Bielowice, that an unusual emissary came from Augustus, hoping to use her exceptional powers of persuasion to induce King Charles XII to peace. The lady was Countess Aurora von Konigsmark, the most beautiful and most famous of Augustus' many mistresses. Aurora had golden hair, lovely eyes, a rosebud mouth, a high bosom and a slender waist; she was witty, good-natured and talented. Augustus' reasoning is not difficult to discern: If this celebrated Swedish-born beauty could spend some time with the shy, awkward King of Sweden, he might be tamed and taught to soften his rough, warlike air. The fact that Charles was nineteen and Aurora nearly thirty-nine was an advantage, not a hindrance; what was needed for a mission of this kind was beauty but also tact, maturity and experience.

The ostensible reason for Aurora's trip was to visit her many relatives among the Swedish officers in the camp. Upon arrival, she sent a flattering letter to the youthful King, asking the honor of kissing his royal hand. Charles absolutely refused to see her. Not despairing, serenely confident of the effect of her appearance, the Countess directed her carriage to a spot on the road which the King passed on his daily rides. As Charles approached, Aurora descended from her carriage and knelt before the horseman in the muddy road. Charles, astonished, raised his hat and bowed low in the saddle, then spurred his horse and galloped away. Aurora had failed; Augustus would have to find another means of distracting or deterring Charles.

A few months later, in the spring of 1702, Charles invaded Poland, marching on Warsaw and Cracow, determined to do for himself what the Poles had refused to do: remove Augustus from the Polish throne. On July 9, 1702, at the head of 12,000 Swedish troops, Charlesi brought 16,000 Saxons under King Augustus to battle near Klissow. Nine hundred Swedes were wounded or killed—including Charles' brother-in-law, Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp—in exchange for 2,000 Saxon casualties and 2,000 Saxon prisoners. Patkul, the Tsar's representative at Saxon headquarters, was forced to flee in a peasant cart. But Charles' victory at Klissow was incomplete; once again, Augustus' army had retreated to fight another day. And thus Charles' Polish adventure, which was becoming an obsession, continued—and was to extend itself for six more years. Despite the petitions of the Baltic Provinces, the pleas of the Swedish Parliament and even the advice of his own senior officers, Charles refused to turn on Russia until his vengeance against Augustus was total. According to one of his generals, "He believes that he is an agent of God on earth, sent to punish every act of faithlessness."

During this breathing space while Charles turned his back on Peter to chase Augustus through the forests and marshes of Poland, Russia began to enjoy some small military successes. The first was the stand-off of a Swedish naval expedition against Archangel; then three small but significant victories won by Sheremetev in Livonia. When the Swedish King marched south against Augustus, Sheremetev initiated from his base at Pskov a series of small offensive actions against the Swedish Colonel Anton von Schlippenbach, who had been left to defend Livonia with a force of 7,000 men. On receiving the assignment, Schlippenbach had also been promoted to major general, but in surveying his mission, which was to hold off the whole of Russia for an unknown period, he wistfully told the King that rather than the promotion he would have preferred an additional 7,000 men. "It cannot be," Charles loftily replied.

In January 1702, Sheremetev won an important victory over the unfortunate Schlippenbach near Dorpat at Erestfer in Livonia. The Swedish army of 7,000 had already gone into winter quarters when Sheremetev appeared with 8,000 Russian infantry and dragoons in winter clothing, supported by fifteen cannon mounted on sledges. In a four-hour battle, the Russians not only succeeded in driving the Swedes out of their winter camp, but inflicted over 1,000 casualties by Swedish admission (the Russians claimed 3,000, and admitted losing 1,000 of their own men). More important in a symbolic sense, the Russians took 350 Swedish prisoners and sent them to Moscow. Peter was overjoyed when he heard the news, declaring, "Thank God! We can at last beat the Swedes." He promoted Sheremetev to field marshal and sent him the blue-ribboned Order of St. Andrew and his own portrait set in diamonds. Sheremetev's officers were promoted, and each of the common soldiers received one rouble of the Tsar's newly coined money. In Moscow, church bells rang, cannon fired and a Te Deum was sung. Peter gave a great banquet in Red Square and ordered fireworks. When the Swedish prisoners arrived, Peter made a triumphal entry into the capital with the captives marching in his train. Russian spirits, depressed since Narva, began to rise.

The following summer, in July 1702, Sheremetev again attacked Schlippenbach in Livonia, this time at Hummelshof, and this time the Swedish force of 5,000 men was almost annihilated. Twenty-five hundred were killed or wounded and 300 captured, along with all the artillery and standards. The Russian losses were 800.

After Hummelshof, Schlippenbach's mobile army ceased to exist and Livonia was left undefended except for the static garrisons at Riga, Pernau and Dorpat. Sheremetev's army and especially his savage Kalmuck and Cossack horsemen were able to move at will through the province, burning farms, villages and towns, taking thousands of civilian prisoners. Thus did Patkul's war for the liberation of Livonia wreak devastation on his homeland. So many civilians were crowded into Russian camps that they were being bought and sold as serfs. Sheremetev, writing to Peter, asked for instructions:

I send Cossacks and Kalmucks to different estates for the confusion of the enemy. But what am I to do with the people I have captured? The prisons are full of them, besides all those that the officers have. There is danger besides because these people are so sullen and angry. . . Considerable money is necessary for their support, and one regiment would be too little to conduct them to Moscow. I have selected a hundred families of the best of the natives who are good carpenters, or are skilled in some other branch of industry— about four hundred souls in all—to send to Azov."

Among the prisoners was an illiterate seventeen-year-old girl whom Sheremetev did not send to Azov but kept in his own house. In time, this girl would rise. Martha Skavronskaya, as she was born, would join the household of the great Prince Menshikov, become the mistress of the Tsar, Peter's wife, and, finally, sovereign in her own right, Catherine I, Empress of Russia.

Along with his land victories, Peter, whose thoughts were never far from the sea, imaginatively devised a new means of attacking Swedish power fn the Baltic provinces: by the use of small boats on the lakes and rivers. If Sweden had incontestable supremacy in larger, conventional ships of war, Peter would build swarms of smaller ships which could overwhelm the enemy squadrons by sheer weight of numbers. He began by building small naval craft, propelled by oars and a single sail, on Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest lake, where Sweden maintained a naval squadron of brigantines and galleys. On June 20, 1702, at the southern end of the lake, 400 Russian soldiers in eighteen small boats attacked a Swedish squadron of three brigantines and three galleys. The Swedes were caught at a disadvantage; their ships were anchored and most of the crews were ashore pillaging a village when the Russian boats arrived. In the ensuing fracas, the Swedish flagship, a twelve-gun brigantine, was damaged, and the Swedes had to retreat. On September 7, the same Swedish squadron was again attacked near Kexholm, this time by thirty Russian boats. With the Russians harrying his ships like jackals, the Swedish Admiral Nummers found his position untenable and decided to evacuate the whole of Lake Ladoga. The withdrawal of his fleet down the Neva opened the lake to unchallenged Russian movement and made possible an important Russian victory that autumn at Noteborg.

Meanwhile, Peter's men were employing the same tactics on Lake Peipus, south of Narva. On May 31 that year, four larger Swedish vessels were attacked by nearly a hundred Russian boats. The Swedes beat them off and sank three, but had to withdraw to the northern half of the lake. On June 20 and July 21, two individual Swedish ships, running supplies and ammunition across the lake, were attacked by the Russian flotillas. One went aground and was abandoned after the captain threw his guns over the side. The other was boarded and then blew up. As a result, the Swedes withdrew completely from Lake Peipus in 1702. The following year, they returned in strength, sank twenty of the Russian boats and recaptured mastery of the lake. But in 1704, the Russians turned the tables once and for all. Catching the Swedish flotilla moored up the River Embach at Dorpat, the Russians threw a boom across the mouth of the river and placed artillery on the shore. Beyond the boom, 200 Russian boats waited for any Swedish ship which might break through. When the thirteen Swedish ships came down the river, the current carried them helplessly against the boom, where the Russian shore batteries began blowing them to pieces. The Swedish crews landed, desperately stormed one of the batteries and finally fought their way back to Dorpat. But one by one the ships were destroyed and the Swedish naval presence on Lake Peipus was annihilated. Later that year, both Narva and Dorpat were captured by the Russian army.

In the spring of 1702, Andrei Matveev picked up intelligence in Holland that the Swedes were planning a larger attack on Archangel that summer. To make sure that his country's only port remained in Russian hands, Peter resolved to go there himself. He set out with the twelve-year-old Tsarevich Alexis at the end of April on the thirty-day trip to the north, accompanied by five battalions of the Guard, 4,000 men in all. When he arrived, the defenses were put in order and the wait began. Almost three months passed while Peter occupied himself with shipbuilding, launching the Holy Spirit and the Courier and laying the keel of a new twenty-six gun warship, the St. Elijah.

In August, the annual fleet of Dutch and English merchantmen arrived, far more numerous than usual, for all the trade which had previously come into Russia through the Swedish Baltic ports was now diverted to Archangel. Along with their goods, the thirty-five English and fifty-two Dutch ships brought news that the Swedes had abandoned any thought of an attack on Archangel that summer. Peter immediately departed for the south. Upon reaching the northern shore of Lake Ladoga, he signaled Sheremetev, who had just won his victory at Hummelshof in Livonia, and Peter Apraxin, who was harassing the Swedes in Ingria, to rendezvous with him and the Guards in order to seize absolute control of the lake by capturing the Swedish fortress of Noteborg at the point where Lake Ladoga empties into the Neva River.

Noteborg was a powerful fortress originally built by the city of Novgorod in the fourteenth century. The small island on which it was situated, just at the point where the Neva flows out of the lake and begins its forty-five-mile course to the sea, was shaped like a hazelnut; thus its Russian name, Oreshka, and its Swedish name, Noteborg. By dominating the mouth of the river at this vital juncture, the citadel controlled all the trade which passed from the Baltic up to Lake Ladoga and through the Russian river network to the interior. Whoever controlled Oreshka controlled trade as far as the Orient. In Russian hands, it served as a barrier to shield the Russian heartland from the Swedes. When the Swedes took it in 1611, it served them as a barrier to keep the Russians away from the Baltic. Now, its thick walls and galleries of brick and stone, its six great round white towers, were studded with 142 cannon. The Swedish garrison was small, only 450 men, but the swift current of the river made an enemy's approach by boat difficult, even without being subjected to the additional hazard of flying cannonballs. |

Peter was enthusiastic about the prospect of seizing the fortress.

"God gives time not to be wasted," he wrote to Sheremetev, instructing him to come in a hurry. Once the Russian soldiers and siege guns were in place, the isolated fortress, which had no hope of help from a relieving army, was doomed. The lake was covered with flotillas of small Russian boats poised to carry troops into an assault. The riverbanks—the south bank was 300 yards away— were lined with heavy siege mortars planted behind earthworks. A premature Russian assault with boats and scaling ladders was beaten off, but the mortars then began a steady devastating bombardment, methodically shattering the fortress walls. On the third day of the bombardment, the wife of the Swedish commandant sent a letter to the Russian camp asking that she and the wives of the Swedish officers be allowed to depart. Peter himself replied, explaining in an ironically gallant tone that he disliked the thought of separating the Swedish ladies from their husbands; of course they could leave, he said, on condition that they took their husbands with them. A week later, after ten days of bombardment, the survivors in the fortress surrendered.

Peter was ecstatic at this capture of the first important fortress to be taken from Sweden by his new army and his new guns made from the melted-down church bells of Russia. Writing that night to Vinius, he said, "In truth, this nut was very hard, but, thank God, it has been happily cracked. Our artillery did its work magnificently." As a symbol of its importance as the key to the Neva and thus the Baltic, he fixed the key to the fort surrendered to him by the Swedish commandant to the Western bastion of the fortress and renamed the fortress Schlusselburg, from the word "schliis-sel" (key) in German. The Tsar celebrated the triumph with another entry into Moscow, three new triumphal arches and a laurel wreath laid on his own head. Meanwhile, he ordered the damage to the citadel repaired and the defenses enlarged and strengthened with outerworks and quarters for up to 4,000 men. Alexander Menshikov was named governor of the rechristened fortress. Thereafter, Peter always had a special place in his heart for Schlusselburg. Whenever he was in the vicinity on October 22, the anniversary of its capture, he took visitors, or even his entire court, to the site for celebrations and a banquet.

The fall of Noteborg-Schltisselburg was a blow to Sweden. It had shielded the Neva and the whole of Ingria against Russian advance from the east. Charles, at the time far away in Poland, recognized the significance when the news was brought to him by an unhappy Count Piper. "Console yourself, my dear Piper," the King said calmly. "The enemy will not be able to drag the place away with them." Nevertheless, on other occasions the King said grimly that the Russians would pay dearly for Noteborg.

In the spring of the following year, 1703, with Charles still in Poland, Peter determined "not to lose the time granted by God" and to strike directly at establishing a Russian coastline on the Baltic. An army of 20,000 men under Sheremetev's command marched from Schlusselburg down through the forest on the north bank of the river toward the sea. Peter followed by water with sixty boats brought from Lake Ladoga. The Neva is only forty-five miles long and is less a river than a broad, fast-flowing chute from the lake to the Gulf of Finland. Along the way, there were no serious Swedish defenses. A single Swedish settlement, Nyenskans, lay several miles upriver from the gulf. Although it was prosperous, with numerous busy mills, its fortifications were unfinished. Russian siege guns began their bombardment on May 11, 1703, and the following day the small garrison capitulated.

On the evening Nyenskans surrendered, word reached the Russian camp that a Swedish fleet was sailing up the gulf. Nine ships commanded by Admiral Nummers appeared off the mouth of the Neva and announced their arrival to their countrymen at Nyenskans by firing two signal guns. In order to deceive the Swedish seamen, the signal was answered immediately. Uncertain, Nummers sent a boat up the river to investigate. The boat was captured. Three days later, still more puzzled, Nummers ordered two of his smaller ships, a three-masted brigantine and a galley, to enter the river and find out what was happening. The two vessels moved upstream through the treacherous, fast-moving water as far as Vasilevsky Island, where they anchored for the night. Meanwhile, Peter and Menshikov had embarked two regiments of Guards in thirty large boats. Slipping down the Neva, they concealed themselves in the marshy waters among the numerous islands. At dawn on May 18, they suddenly appeared, rowing to attack the Swedish ships from all sides. The battle was fierce, with the Swedes firing their cannon to smash the Russian boats crowding around them, and the Russians replying with grenades and musket fire. Eventually, Peter and his men succeeded in boarding the two ships and capturing the few Swedes left alive. The ships and prisoners were brought up to Nyenskans, now renamed Sloteburg. Peter was elated at this first naval action in which he personally had participated, and, in consequence, both he and Menshikov were awarded the Order of St. Andrew.

With this victory, Peter gained—temporarily at least—the object for which he had declared war. He had occupied the length of the Neva River and regained access to the Baltic Sea. The province of Ingria was restored to Russia. In another triumphal entry into Moscow, one of the banners in the procession showed the map of Ingria with the inscription: "We have not taken the land of others, but the inheritance of our fathers."

What Peter had won, he set about immediately to consolidate. It was his dream to build a city on the sea, a port from which Russian ships and Russian commerce would sail out onto the world's oceans. Thus, no sooner had he won his foothold on the Baltic than he began to build his city. To some, it seemed foolish, premature, a waste of energy. He had really only a toehold and an uncertain one at that—Charles was far away, but he had never been beaten in battle. One day, he would surely come to wrest away what Peter had taken behind his back. Then this city, so laboriously built, would be only another Swedish town on the Baltic.

Peter was right. The Swedes did return—but again and again they were beaten off. Through the centuries, none of the conquerors who subsequently entered Russia with great armies— Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler—was able to capture Peter's Baltic port, although Nazi armies besieged the city for 900 days in World War II. From the day that Peter the Great first set foot on the mouth of the Neva, the land and the city which arose there have always remained Russian.

27

THE FOUNDING OF ST. PETERSBURG

Perhaps it was chance. Peter, at first, had no thought of building a city, much less a new capital, on the Neva. He wanted first a fort to guard the mouth of the river and then a port so that ships trading with Russia could avoid the long journey to Archangel. Perhaps if he had captured Riga first, St. Petersburg would never have been built—Riga was a flourishing port, already a great center for Russian trade, and it was free of ice for six weeks longer than the mouth of the Neva—but Riga did not fall into Peter's hands until 1710. The site of St. Petersburg was the first spot where Peter set his foot on the Baltic coast. He did not wait; who knew what the future would bring? Seizing the moment, as he always did, he began to build.

Many things about St. Petersburg are unique. Other nations, in the flush of youth or a frenzy of reform, have created new national capitals on previously empty ground: Washington, Ankara and Brasilia are examples. But no other people has created a new capital city in time of war, on land still technically belonging to a powerful, undefeated enemy. Moreover, 1703 was late in the history of Europe for the founding of a major city. By then, large towns and cities had sprung up even in Europe's American colonies: New York was already seventy-seven years old, Boston seventy-three, Philadelphia sixty. And St. Petersburg, for 200 years the capital of the Russian empire, now the second-largest city of the Soviet Union, is the northernmost of all the great metropolises of the world. Placing it at the same latitude on the North American continent would mean planting a city of three and a half million on the upper shores of Hudson Bay.

When Peter came down through the forests and emerged where the Neva meets the sea, he found himself in a wild, flat, empty marsh. At the mouth of the Neva, the broad river loops north in a backward S and then flows westward into the sea. In the last five miles, it divides into four branches which intersect with numerous streams flowing through the marshland to create more than a dozen islands overgrown with thickets and law forests. In 1703, the whole place was a bog, soggy with water. In the spring, thick mists from melting snow and ice hung over it. When strong southwest winds blew in from the Gulf of Finland, the river backed up and many of the islands simply disappeared underwater. Even traders who for centuries had used the Neva to reach the Russian interior had never built any kind of settlement there: It was too wild, too wet, too unhealthy, simply not a place for human habitation. In Finnish, the word "neva" means "swamp."

The fort at Nyenskans was five miles upriver. Nearer the sea, on the left bank, a Finnish landowner had a small farm with a country house. On Hare Island in the center of the river were crude mud huts which a few Finnish fishermen used in the summer months; whenever the water rose, the fishermen abandoned them and retreated to higher ground. But in Peter's eyes the river sweeping past in a swift and silent flood broader than the Thames at London was magnificent. It was here that Peter decided to build a new and larger fortification to defend the newly seized mouth of the river. The first digging began on May 16, 1703, the date of the foundation of the city of St. Petersburg.*

*There is a legend that Peter borrowed the musket of one of his soldiers and with the bayonet cut two strips of sod from the ground of Hare Island. Laying them in the form of across, he said, "Here shall be a town." His soldiers dug a trench in which Peter placed a box containing relics of the apostle Andrew, Russia's patron saint. At this moment, so the story goes, an eagle dipped in flight over Peter's head and alighted on top of two birch trees which had been tied together to form an arch. This arch became the position of the formal East or Peter Gateway of the future fortress.

The fortress, named after St. Peter and St. Paul, was to be large, covering the entire island, so that on all sides it would be surrounded by the Neva or its tributaries. The southern side was protected by the fast-flowing river, while the northern, eastern and western approaches were morass, crisscrossed with streams. As the island itself was low and marshy and sometimes covered by flood, the first stage of work was to bring in earth to raise the level of the island above the water's reach. The Russian workers had no tools except crude pickaxes and shovels. Lacking wheelbarrows, they scraped dirt into their shirts or into rough bags and carried it with their hands to the site of the rising ramparts.

In spite of everything, within five months the fortress began to take shape. It was in the form of an oblong hexagon, with six great bastions, each constructed under the personal supervision of one of the Tsar's closest friends and each named for its builder: the Menshikov, the Golovin, the Zotov, the Trubetskoy and the (Kyril) Naryshkin. The sixth bastion was supervised by Peter himself and named after him. The fortress was built of earth and timber; later, Peter ordered the ramparts rebuilt with higher, thicker walls of stone. They rose grim, brown, implacable, jutting up thirty feet from the Neva waves, commanded by rows of cannon. Near the end of Peter's reign, Friedrich Weber, the Hanoverian ambassador, noted that, "On one of the bastions they hoist every day after the Dutch manner the great flag of the fortress on a great mast. . . . On festival days they display another huge yellow flag which represents the Russian eagle grasping with his claws the four seas which touch Russia's borders, the White, the Black, the Caspian and the Baltic."

Just outside the fortress was the small one-story log house in which Peter lived while the work progressed. Constructed by army carpenters between May 24 and 26, 1703, it was fifty-five feet long and twenty feet wide and had three rooms: a bedroom, a dining room and a study. There were no stoves or chimneys, as Peter meant to occupy it only in the summer months. Its most interesting feature is the effort that the Tsar made to hide the fact that it was a log cabin: the mica windows were large and latticed in the style of Holland, the shingles on the high-angled roof were laid and painted to imitate tiles, and the log walls were planed flat and painted with a grid of white lines to give the impression of brick. (The house, the oldest building in the city, has been surrounded by a series of outer shells for preservation. There it remains to this day.)

Work on the fortress was intensive because in those early years Peter never knew when the Swedes would return. In fact, they returned every summer. In 1703, within a month of Peter's occupation of the delta, a Swedish army of 4,000 approached from the north and camped on the north bank of the Neva. On July 7, Peter personally led six Russian regiments, four dragoon and two infantry—in all, a force of 7,000—against the Swedes, defeated them and forced them to retreat. The Tsar was constantly under fire, and Patkul, who was present, was forced to remind his tall patron that "he was also mortal like all men and that the bullet of a musketeer could upset the whole army and place the country in serious danger." Throughout that first summer, too, the Swedish Admiral Nummers kept nine ships lying at anchor in the mouth of the Neva, blocking Russian access to the gulf and awaiting a chance to move against the growing Russian entrenchments upriver. Peter, meanwhile, had returned to the shipyards above Lake Ladoga to spur construction, and eventually a number of vessels, including the frigate Standard, arrived off the new fortress on the Neva. Unable to challenge Nummers' stronger force, the ships waited here until the approach of cold weather forced him to withdraw. Then, Peter sailed the Standard out into the Gulf of Finland.

It was an historic moment, the first voyage of a Russian tsar on a Russian ship on the Baltic Sea. Although skim ice was already forming over the gray waves, Peter was eager to explore. On his right, as he sailed westward away from the Neva, he could see the rocky promontories of the coast of Karelia fading away northward toward Vyborg. On his left were the low, gently rolling hills of Ingria, stretching westward to Narva, beyond the horizon. Dead ahead, just over fifteen miles from the Neva delta, he saw the island which came to be called Kotlin by the Russians and which was to be the site of the fortress and naval base Kronstadt. Sailing around the island and measuring the depth of the water with a lead line in his own hand, Peter found that the water north of the island was too shallow for navigation. But south of the island was a channel which led all the way to the mouth of the river. To protect this passage and to install an outpost fortification for the larger work he was building on Kotlin Island, Peter ordered that a fort be constructed in the middle of the water at the edge of the channel. It was difficult work: Boxes filled with stones had to be dragged across the ice and then sunk beneath the waves to form a foundation. But by spring a small fort with fourteen cannon rose directly from the sea.

From the beginning, Peter had intended that his foothold on the Baltic would become a commercial port as well as a base for naval operations. At his instruction, Golovin wrote to Matveev in London to encourage commercial vessels to call on the new port. The first ship, a Dutch merchantman, arrived in November 1703, when the new port had been in Russian hands for only six months. Hearing of the ship's arrival at the mouth of the river, Peter went to greet her and to pilot her upstream himself. The captain's surprise at discovering the identity of his royal pilot was matched by Peter's pleasure on learning that the cargo of wine and salt belonged to his old friend Cornelius Calf of Zaandam. Menshikov gave a banquet for the captain, who was also rewarded with 500 ducats. To further honor the occasion, the ship itself was renamed St. Petersburg, and was granted a permanent exclusion from all Russian tolls and customs duties. Similar rewards were promised to the next two vessels to arrive in the new port, and before long a Dutchman and an Englishman anchored to claim their prizes. Thereafter, Peter did everything possible to encourage use of St. Petersburg by foreign merchantmen. He reduced the tolls to less than half what the Swedes levied in the Baltic ports they controlled. He promised to send Russian products to England at very low prices, provided the English would pick them up in St. Petersburg rather than Archangel. Later he was to use his power as tsar to divert vast portions of all Russian trade away from its traditional path to the Arctic and toward the new ports on the Baltic.

To strengthen his grip on his new possession, Peter also made great efforts to build new ships in the Lake Ladoga yards. On September 23, 1704, he wrote to Menshikov, "Here, thanks be to God, all goes fairly well. Tomorrow and the day after, three frigates, four snows, a packet-boat and a galliot will be launched." But the Ladoga waters were stormy and treacherous, and too many of these ships were foundering or going aground on the southern shore as they approached the Schlusselburg fortress at the Ladoga end of the Neva River. The remedy, Peter decided, was to move the main shipyard to St. Petersburg so that the Ladoga voyage could be avoided. In November 1704, he laid the foundation of a new construction yard on the left bank of the Neva, across the river and just downstream from the Peter and Paul Fortress. Originally, the Admiralty was only a simple shipyard. A large, open rectangle was established beside the river with one side on the water and the other three made up of rows of wooden sheds which served as workshops, forges, living quarters for the workmen and storehouses for ropes, sails, cannon and timber. From the central section, which was used for offices and eventually became the headquarters of the Russian fleet, rose a tall, thin wooden spire, surmounted by a weathervane in the form of a ship.* Beneath this spire, in the open space surrounded by the sheds, Peter's ships were built. The sizable hulls were constructed beside the Neva, then slid into the river and towed to wharves for fitting out. Soon after its founding, Peter became concerned that the Admiralty was too exposed to possible Swedish attack and the three land sides were fortified with high stone ramparts, glissaded slopes and moats, giving the city a second bastion almost as powerful as the Peter and Paul Fortress.

In the years that followed, Swedish probing attacks and harassment of the new city continued, both by land and by sea. In 1795, the Russians drove tall stakes into the waters of the channel off Kotlin Island and tied ropes between them to keep Swedish craft from penetrating up toward St. Petersburg. An approaching Swedish squadron, seeing from a distance the mass of tall stakes and ropes, took them for masts of a sizable Russian fleet and withdrew after an ineffectual long-range bombardment. In 1706, Peter himself, sailing far out in the gulf, sighted a Swedish squadron headed in his direction and returned immediately to report the news by agreed-on cannon signals to Vice Admiral Cruys, the Dutch officer in command of the Russian fleet. Cruys, however, refused to believe the Tsar's report and was convinced only when he saw the Swedish ships with his own eyes. Some time after that, Peter touched on the episode with ironic humor. Cruys, reporting on naval matters, complained to Peter of the general ignorance and insubordination of his fleet officers, saying "His Majesty, with his skill, knows the importance of perfect 'subordination.'" Peter responded warmly, "The Vice Admiral [Cruys] is himself to blame for the want of skill of the naval officers as he himself engaged nearly all of them. ... As concerns my skill, this compliment is not on a very firm footing. Not long ago, when I went to sea and saw the enemy's ships from my yacht and signaled according to custom the number of ships, it was thought only to be amusement or the salute for a toast, and even when I myself came on board to the Vice Admiral, he was unwilling to believe until his sailors had seen them from the masthead. I must therefore beg him either to omit my name from the list of those whom he judges skillful, or in future cease from such raillery."

With the passage of time, Peter's vision of St. Petersburg grew broader. He began to see it as more than a fortress guarding the

*When the Admiralty was completely rebuilt of masonry and stone at the beginning of the nineteenth century, its rectangular shape, the central spire and the ship weathervane were retained as salient features. Today, as in the earliest days of St. Petersburg, the twin spires of the Admiralty and the fortress cathedral, facing each other across the Neva, dominate the city's skyline.

mouth of the Neva, or even a wharf and shipyard for commercial and naval vessels on the Baltic. He began to see it as a city. An Italian architect, Domenico Trezzini, who had built a handsome palace for King Frederick IV of Denmark, arrived in Russia at exactly this moment. His style, like that of most architects practicing then in Northern Europe, was heavily influenced by Holland, and it was this Dutch, Protestant, northern-baroque design which Trezzini brought to Russia. He had signed a contract on April 1, 1703, to become the Tsar's Master of Building, Construction and Fortification, and Peter quickly brought him to the Neva to supervise all construction there. For nine years, as the first buildings were converted from simple log structures to brick and stone, Trezzini put his stamp on the city. While laborers were still toiling on the earth foundations of the fortress, Trezzini began to build a small and functional church within its walls. Lacking elegant materials to decorate its interior, Trezzini covered the walls with yellow stucco in imitation of marble. In 1713, Trezzini began construction of the baroque Peter and Paul Cathedral, which, with numerous modifications, still stands on the site today, its Germanic golden spire soaring 400 feet into the air.

The ceaseless building operations required an appalling amount of human labor. To drive the piles into the marshes, hew and haul the timbers, drag the stones, clear the forests, level the hills, lay out the streets, build docks and wharves, erect the fortress, houses and shipyards, dig the canals, soaked up human effort. To supply this manpower, Peter issued edicts year after year, summoning carpenters, stonecutters, masons and, above all, raw, unskilled peasant laborers to work in St. Petersburg. From all parts of his empire an unhappy stream of humanity—Cossacks, Siberians, Tatars, Finns—flowed into St. Petersburg. They were furnished with a traveling allowance and subsistence for six months, after which they were permitted, if they survived, to return home, their places to be taken by a new draft the following summer. Local officials and noblemen charged by Peter with recruiting and sending along these human levies protested to the Tsar that hundreds of villages were being ruined by the loss of their best men, but Peter would not listen.

The hardships were frightful. Workers lived on damp ground in rough, crowded, filthy huts. Scurvy, dysentery, malaria and other diseases scythed them down in droves. Wages were not paid regularly and desertion was chronic. The actual number who died building the city will never be known; in Peter's day, it was estimated at 100,000. Later figures are much lower, perhaps 25,000 or 30,000, but no one disputes the grim saying that St. Petersburg was "a city built on bones."

Along with human labor, the materials with which to build the city had to be imported. The flat, marshy country around the Neva delta had few large trees to supply wood and was almost devoid of rock. The first stones for the new city came from demolishing the Swedish fort and town of Nyenskans upriver and bringing its materials downstream. For years, every cart, every carriage and every Russian vessel coming into the city was required to bring a quota of stones along with its normal cargo. A special office was set up at the town wharves and gates to receive these stones, without which the vehicle was not allowed to enter the city. Sometimes, when these rocks were greatly in demand, it required a senior official to decide the fate of every stone. To conserve wood for building, it was forbidden to cut trees on the islands, and no one was allowed to heat his bath house more than once a week. Timbers were brought from the forests of Lake Ladoga and Novgorod, and newly constructed sawmills, turned by wind and water power, reduced the trunks to beams and planks. In 1714, when it developed that building in St. Petersburg was being delayed by a shortage of stonemasons, Peter decreed that until further notice, no stone house could be built in Moscow under "pain of confiscation of goods and exile." Soon after, he extended this decree to the entire empire. Inevitably, stone and brick masons throughout Russia picked up their tools and headed for St. Petersburg in search of work.

The city needed a population. Few people chose voluntarily to live there; therefore, in this matter, too, Peter employed force. In March 1708, the Tsar "invited" his sister Natalya, his two half-sisters, the Tsarevnas Maria and Feodosia Alexeevna, the two Dowager Tsaritsas, Martha and Praskovaya, along with hundreds of noblemen, high officials and wealthy merchants, to join him in St. Petersburg during the spring and no one, according to Whitworth, "was allowed to excuse themselves by age, business, or indisposition." They came unwillingly. Accustomed to an easy life in the countryside of Moscow where they had large houses and where all their provisions were brought from their own neighboring estates or bought cheaply in the flourishing Moscow markets, they were now obliged to build new houses at great expense in a Baltic marsh. They had to pay exorbitant prices for food imported from hundreds of miles away, and many calculated that they had lost two thirds of their wealth. As for amusements, they hated the water on which the Tsar doted, and none set foot in a boat except by compulsion. Nevertheless, having no choice, they came. The merchants and shopkeepers came with them and found solace in the fact that they could charge outrageous prices for their goods. Many laborers—Russian, Cossack and Kalmuck—having served the required time in building public works, stayed on, being unwilling or unable to walk the long distance home, and were engaged by noblemen in building the private houses commanded by the Tsar. Eventually, thousands of these laborers settled and built homes for themselves in Petersburg. Peter encouraged these efforts by coming, whenever invited, to lay the first stone of any new building and to drink a glass to the success of the owner.

Neither the location nor the design of these houses was left to free will or chance. Noble families were required to build houses with beams, lath and plaster "in the English style" along the left bank of the Neva (noblemen owning more than 500 peasants were required to build two-storied houses); a thousand merchants and traders were instructed to build wooden houses on the opposite side of the river. Built in haste by unwilling labor for unhappy owners, the new houses were often flawed by leaky roofs, cracking walls and sagging floors. Nevertheless, to add to the grandeur of the city, Peter ordered that all substantial citizens whose houses were only one story high must add a second story. To aid them, he instructed Trezzini to make available free plans of different-sized houses of suitable design.

Most of the new city was built of wood, and fires broke out almost every week. Attempting to contain the damage, the Tsar organized a system of constant surveillance. At night, while the city slept, watchmen sat in church towers looking out over the silent rooftops. At the first sign of fire, the watchman who spotted it rang a bell whose signal was immediately picked up and passed along by other watchmen throughout the city. The bells woke drummers, who turned out of bed and beat their drums. Soon the streets were filled with men, hatchets in hand, running to the fire. Soldiers who happened to be in the city also were expected to hurry to the scene. Eventually, every officer, civil or military, stationed in St. Petersburg was given a special fire-fighting assignment for which he was paid an extra monthly allowance; failure to appear brought swift punishment. Peter himself had such an assignment and received a salary along with the rest. "It is a common thing," said a foreign observer "to see the Tsar among the workmen with a hatchet in his hand, climbing to the top of the houses that are all in flames, with such danger to him that the spectators tremble at the sight of it." In the winter when water was frozen, hatchets and axes were the only tools that could be used to fight fires. If the houses standing next to the house in flames could be chopped apart and dragged away quickly enough, the fire could

be isolated. Peter's presence always had great effect. According to Just Juel, the Danish ambassador, "As his intelligence is extraordinarily quick, he sees at once what must be done to extinguish the fire; he goes up to the roof; he goes to all the worst danger points; he incites nobles as well as common people to help in the struggle and does not pause until the fire is put out. But when the sovereign is absent, things are very different. Then the people watch the fires with indifference and do nothing to help extinguish them. It is vain to lecture them or even offer them money; they merely wait for a chance to steal something."

The other looming natural danger was flood. Petersburg was built at sea level, and whenever the Neva River rose more than a few feet, the city was inundated. Peter wrote to Menshikov in 1706:

The day before yesterday the wind from west-southwest blew up such waters as, they say, have never been before. In my house, the water rose twenty-one inches above the floor; and in the garden and on the other side along the streets people went about freely in boats. However, the waters did not remain long—less than three hours. Here it was entertaining to watch how the people, not only the peasants but their women, too, sat on the roofs and in trees during the flood. Although the waters rose to a great height, they did not cause bad damage.

"On the 9th at midnight, there came out of the sea from the southwest so strong a wind that the town was completely under water," wrote an English resident in January 1711. "Many people would have been surprised and drowned if the bells had not been rung to wake them and make them go up to the roofs of their houses. The greater part of their houses and livestock were destroyed." Nearly every autumn, the Neva overflowed, cellars were swamped and provisions destroyed. So many building planks and beams drifted away that it became a capital crime to take such floating objects from the water before the owner could retrieve them. In November 1721, another tremendous southwest wind backed up the river again, carrying a two-masted schooner through the streets and leaving it stranded against the side of a house. "The damage is beyond words," the French ambassador reported to Paris. "Not a single house is left that has not had its share. Losses are reckoned at two or three million roubles. (But] the Tsar, like Philip of Spain [after the loss of the Armada], made the greatness of his soul clear by his tranquility."

Even fifteen years after its founding, as tall, windowed palaces were rising along the Neva embankments, and French gardeners were laying out formal, geometric flowerbeds, daily life in St. Petersburg remained, in one foreigner's description, a "hazardous hand-to-mouth bivouacking." One problem was that the region could not feed itself. The Neva delta, with its great stretches of water, forest and swamp, seldom produced good harvests, and sometimes, in wet years, crops rotted before they ripened. Wild nature was helpful; there were strawberries, blackberries and an abundance of mushrooms, which Russians ate as a great delicacy with only salt and vinegar. There were small hares, whose gray fur turned white in winter, which provided dry, tough meat, and wild geese and ducks. The rivers and lakes teemed with fish, but foreigners were chagrined to find that they could not buy it fresh; Russians preferred fish salted or pickled. But despite what could be gleaned from soil, forest and waters, St. Petersburg would have starved without provisions sent from outside. Thousands of carts traveled from Novgorod and even from Moscow during the warmer months bringing food to the city; in winter, the lifeline was maintained on a stream of sleds. If these supplies were even slightly delayed along the way, prices immediately soared in St. Petersburg and in the villages nearby, for, in reverse of the normal process, the town supplied its satellites with food.

In the forest around St. Petersburg, an endless horizon of scraggly birches, thin pines, bushes and swamps, the traveler who ventured off the road was quickly lost. The few farms in the region lay in clearings reached by unmarked paths. And in these thickets and groves roamed bears and wolves. The bears were less dangerous, for in summer they found enough to eat and in winter they slept. But wolves were plentiful in all seasons, and in winter they appeared in aggressive packs of thirty or forty. This was when hunger drove them to enter farmyards to catch dogs and even attack horses and men. In 1714, two soldiers standing guard in front of the central foundry in St. Petersburg were attacked by wolves; one was torn to pieces and eaten on the spot, the second crawled away but died soon after. In 1715, a woman was devoured in broad daylight on Vasilevsky Island, not far from Prince Menshikov's palace.

Not surprisingly, few Russians chose to live in this wet, desolate and dangerous region. For a while, it was empty, as war and plague swept away most of the original Finnish-speaking inhabitants. Peter gave land to his noblemen and officers, and they brought families and even whole villages of peasants from the interior of Russia to settle here. These simple people, uprooted from the pleasant hills and meadows around Moscow, suffered

greatly but did riot complain. "It is surprising to see with what resignation and patience those people both high and low submit to such hardships," wrote Weber. "The common sort say that life is but a burden to them. A Lutheran minister related to me that on occasion when he examined some simple Russian peasants about their belief and asked whether they knew what they ought to do in order to obtain eternal salvation, they answered that it was very uncertain even whether they should go to heaven at all, for they believed that everlasting happiness was reserved for the Tsar and his great boyars."

It was not just the common people who hated St. Petersburg. Russian noblemen and foreign ambassadors grumbled and wondered how long the city would survive its founder. Tsarevna Maria declared, "Petersburg will not endure after our time. May it remain a desert." Only a few saw more clearly. It was Menshikov who said that St. Petersburg would become another Venice, and that the day would come when foreigners would travel there purely out of curiosity and to enjoy its beauty.

The Swedes never understood Peter's fierce attachment to this marshy site. The Tsar's determination to keep the new city became the chief obstacle to making peace. When Russian fortunes in the war were low, Peter was willing to give up all he had conquered in Livonia and Estonia, but he would never agree to yield St. Petersburg and the mouth of the Neva. Few in Sweden understood that the Tsar had split the Swedish Baltic empire permanendy, that the wedge driven between Sweden's northern and southern Baltic provinces, interrupting the lines of communication across the Neva delta, presaged their eventual total loss. Most Swedes considered the loss to be relatively minor and only temporary and thought Peter a fool. Knowing how the winds driving up the gulf piled water into the Neva delta and flooded many of the marshy islands, they assumed that wind and water would quickly destroy the fledgling town. The new settlement became the butt of jokes. The attitude of Sweden was that of its supremely confident King: "Let the Tsar tire himself with founding new towns. We will keep for ourselves the honor of taking them."

Peter called the new city St. Petersburg after his patron saint, and it became the glory of his reign, his "paradise," his "Eden," his "darling." In April 1706, he began a letter to Menshikov, "I cannot help writing you from this paradise; truly we live here in heaven." The city came to represent in brick and stone everything important in his life: his escape from the shadowy intrigue, the tiny windows and vaulted chambers of Moscow; his arrival on the sea; the opening to the technology and culture of Western Europe. Peter loved his new creation. He found endless pleasure in the great river flowing out to the Gulf, in the waves lapping under the fortress walls, in the salty breeze that filled the sails of his new ships. Construction of the city became his passion. No obstacle was great enough to prevent his carrying out his design. On it he lavished his energy, millions of roubles and thousands of lives. At first, fortification and defense were his highest considerations, but within less than a year he was writing to Tikhon Streshnev in Moscow asking for flowers to be sent from Ismailovo near Moscow, "especially those with scent. The peony plants have arrived in very good condition, but no balsam or mint. Send them." By 1708, he had built an aviary and sent to Moscow for "8,000 singing birds of various sorts."

After Peter, a succession of empresses and emperors would transform the early settlement of logs and mud into a dazzling city, its architecture more European than Russian, its culture and thought a blend of Russia and the West. A long line of majestic palaces and public buildings, yellow, light blue, pale green and red, would rise along the three-mile granite quay which fronted the south bank of the Neva. With its merging of wind and water and cloud, its 150 arching bridges linking the nineteen islands, its golden spires and domes, its granite columns and marble obelisks, St. Petersburg would be called the Babylon of the Snows and the Venice of the North. It would become a fountainhead of Russian literature, music and art, the home of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky, of Borodin, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov, of Petipa, Diaghilev, Pavlova and Nijinsky. For two centuries, the city would also be the stage on which the political destinies of Russia were enacted as Russia's sovereigns struggled to rule the empire from the city Peter had created. And in this city was played the final act of the drama in which Peter's dynasty was overthrown. Even the name of the city would change as the new regime, seeking to honor its founder, decided to give Lenin "the best we had." The new name, however, still sticks in the throats of many of the city's citizens. To them, it remains simply "Peter."

28

MENSHIKOV AND CATHERINE

During these early years of war, two people emerged who were to become the closest companions of Peter's life, Alexander Menshikov and Martha Skavronskaya. There were remarkable parallels between them: Both rose from obscurity; they met each other before she met Peter; they rose together, he from stable boy to mighty prince, she from orphaned peasant girl to be crowned as empress, Peter's heir and successor as Russia's sovereign. Both survived the giant Tsar who had created them, but not for long. After Peter died, the Empress Catherine quickly followed, and then the ambitious stable boy who had scaled the heights toppled dizzyingly back to earth.

The great Prince Menshikov, the empire's mightiest satrap, Peter's "Herzenkind" (child of the heart), the human whom after Catherine he loved most, the one man who could absolutely "speak for the Tsar," who became a field marshal, First Senator, a "Serene Highness" and a Prince of Russia, as well as a Prince of the Holy "Roman Empire! The best-known portrait of Menshikov shows a man with a high-domed forehead, intelligent blue-green eyes, a strong nose and a pencil-thin brown mustache. His smile is as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's. At first, it appears blandly open and pleasant; on second glance, it seems cooler, more distant. As one considers the mouth and eyes, the smile and the general visage become decidedly calculating and unpleasant. Menshikov is dressed as the Westernized "almost sovereign potentate" which Pushkin called him. He wears a curled white wig like a grandee of Louis XIV; an armored breastplate is covered with a white robe edged in gilt, with golden tassels. Around his neck is a red silk scarf, and across his chest the wide blue ribbon of the Order of St. Andrew. The star of the order, along with the stars of the Polish Order of the White Eagle and another order, are pinned to the robe. One can tell, looking at this painting, that here is an exceedingly clever, enormously powerful, unforgiving man.

The name and career of Alexander Danilovich Menshikov are inextricably entwined with the life of Peter the Great, yet the origins of Peter's famous lieutenant are shrouded in legend. Some have said that his father was a Lithuanian peasant who sent his son as an apprentice to a pastry cook in Moscow, where young Alexashka sold small cakes and pirozhki. In the city streets one day, so the story goes, the clever lad's perky cries as he hawked his wares attracted the attention of Lefort, who stopped to talk to him, was charmed and immediately took the boy into his personal service. Thereafter, although Menshikov could barely write his name, his wit and bold repartee sparkled so brightly that he soon was noticed by Peter. The Tsar, too, was intrigued by the intelligent, good-humored boy so near his own age, and, persuading Lefort to part with him, made Alexashka his own private servant. From this position, low in rank but at the elbow of the autocrat, Menshikov employed his great charm and his variety of useful talents to make himself one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in eighteenth-century Europe. His saucy boldness never deserted him. It led him to steal exorbitantly from the state funds entrusted to him, and then helped to shield him from the wrath of an outraged sovereign. Eventually, it is said, Peter threatened to send the mighty Prince back to selling pies in the Moscow streets. That same evening, Menshikov appeared before Peter dressed in an apron with a tray of pirozhki attached to his shoulders, calling out, "Hot pies! Hot pies! I sell fresh-baked pirozhki!" Peter shook his head in disbelief, burst out laughing and once again forgave his erring favorite.

The likelier story of the beginnings of Alexander Menshikov is only a shade less colorful. It is almost certain that Menshikov's father was a soldier who served under Tsar Alexis and became a corporal-clerk stationed at Preobrazhenskoe. Probably, the family's origins were Lithuanian: The diploma creating Menshikov a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire declared that the new Prince was descended from an ancient and noble Lithuanian family. "Ancient" and "noble" may have been added to make it easier for the rigidly conservative Hapsburg Emperor to bestow the title, but there is evidence that relatives of Menshikov were landed proprietors in the neighborhood of Minsk, at that time a part of Lithuania.

Whatever his antecedents, Menshikov was born in November 1673, a year and a half after Peter himself, and spent his childhood as a stable boy on the imperial estate of Proebrazhenskoe. From his earliest youth, he understood the value of proximity to Peter. He was one of the first boys to enroll as a play soldier in Peter's youthful military company. By 1693, he was listed as a bombardier—Peter's favorite branch of the army—in the Preobrazhensky Guards. As a sergeant, he stood next to the Tsar under the walls of Azov, and when Peter was making up his Great Embassy to Western Europe, Menshikov was one of the first to volunteer and be chosen. By this time he had been appointed as a dentchik, one of the young men assigned as personal orderlies to the Tsar. A dentchik's duty was to attend the sovereign day and night, taking his turn sleeping in the next room or, when the Tsar was traveling, sleeping on the floor at the foot of the royal bed. At Peter's side, Menshikov worked in the shipyards of Amsterdam and Deptford. He was almost Peter's equal in ship's carpentry and the only Russian besides the Tsar who showed real aptitude for the trade. In Peter's company, Menshikov visited Western workshops and laboratories, learned to speak a smattering of Dutch and German and acquired a surface polish of polite society. Adaptable and quick to learn, he still remained a thorough Russian and, as such, was almost a prototype of the kind of man Peter wanted to create in Russia. Here was at least one subject who tried to grasp Peter's new ideas, who was willing to break with old Russian customs and who was not only intelligent enough and talented enough but actually eager to help.

On returning from Europe, Menshikov was included in the revels of Peter's Jolly Company. Six feet tall, robust, agile and good at the sports Peter liked, he became a prominent figure at Preobrazhenskoe, where he was known by his nickname, Alexashka, or his patronymic, Danilovich. He appeared in the "great company of singers who sang carols over Christmas at General Gordon's house," and he played an enthusiastic part in the execution of the Streltsy. Peter gave him a house, and on February 2, 1699, in the presence of the Tsar, it was consecrated according to the "rites of Bacchus."

Inevitably, the young man's rapid rise stirred sneers behind his back at his obscure origins and lack of education. "By birth," said Prince Boris Kurakin, "Menshikov is lower than a Pole." Korb wrote disparagingly of "that Alexander who is so conspicuous at court through the Tsar's graces" and reported that the young favorite already was selling his influence to merchants and others in need of help -with various branches of the government. Whitworth, the English minister, reported in 1706, "I am credibly informed that Menshikov can neither read nor write," a charge that was only partially true. Menshikov had learned to read, but always wrote through a secretary, signing his own name in a labored and shaky hand.

Yet, despite his detractors, Menshikov continued to ascend. His tact, his optimism, his uncanny way of understanding and almost anticipating all of Peter's commands and personal moods, his acceptance and endurance of the Tsar's anger and even violent blows, made him unique. When Peter, on returning from Europe, accused General Shein of selling army commissions and at a banquet drew his sword to strike the offender, it was Lefort who deflected the blow and saved Shein's life, but it was Menshikov who grappled with and calmed the Tsar. Not long after, at a christening party for the son of the Danish ambassador, Peter saw Menshikov wearing a sword on the dance floor. Appalled at this breach of etiquette committed in the presence of foreigners, Peter struck the offender in the face with his fist, bringing blood spurting from Menshikov's nose. The following spring in Voronezh, Menshikov bent forward to whisper something in Peter's ear and was rewarded with a burst of anger and another blow in the face, this one so powerful that it stretched the victim on the ground. Menshikov accepted this abuse not simply with resignation but with unfailing good humor. In time, his understanding of Peter's moods and his willingness to accept whatever Peter offered, be it favor or blow, made him indispensable to the Tsar. He had ceased to be a servant and become a friend.

In 1700, at the outbreak of the war, Menshikov was still attached to Peter's private household—a letter to him from Peter in that year indicates that he had special charge of the Tsar's wardrobe. But when the war began, Menshikov plunged into it, displaying a talent for military command as great as his talent for everything else. He was with Peter at Narva and left with the Tsar before the disastrous battle began. During the operations in Ingria in 1701, which Peter conducted personally, Menshikov distinguished himself as Peter's lieutenant. After the siege and capture of Noteborg (now Schlusselburg), Menshikov was named governor of the fortress. He participated in the advance down the Neva, the taking of Nyenskans and the ambush and capture of the Swedish flotilla at the mouth of the river. With the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 and the building of the Peter and Paul Fortress, Menshikov was assigned responsibility for construction of the one of the six great bastions which subsequently bore his name. That same year, he became Governor General of Karelia, Ingria and Estonia. In 1703, to please the Tsar, Peter Golitsyn, envoy to the imperial court at Vienna, arranged to have Menshikov named a Count of Hungary. In 1705, the Emperor Joseph created Alexashka a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Two years later, after Menshikov's victory over the Swedes at Kalisz in Poland, Peter gave him the Russian title of Prince of Izhora, with large estates. Significantly, only two weeks after receiving these lands, the new Prince wrote to ascertain the number of parishes and people therein, what revenue could be collected from them, and to command that in religious services in churches in the district his name be mentioned with that of the Tsar.

Infinitely more important than titles or wealth—for both titles and wealth wholly depended on it—was Peter's friendship. The death of Lefort in 1699 left the Tsar with no close friend to whom he could reveal both his greatness and his pettiness, his visions, his hopes and his despair. Menshikov assumed this role, and during the early years of war Peter's friendship grew into deep affection. Alexashka would follow Peter anywhere and turn his hand to any enterprise the Tsar commanded. He could be the companion of Peter's drunken orgies, the confidant of his amours, the commander of his cavalry and a minister of his government— all with equal devotion and skill. As their personal relationship grew more intimate, Peter's form of addressing Menshikov changed. In 1703, the Tsar still called him "Mein Herz" and "Mein Herzenchen." In 1704, it became "Mein Liebster Kamerad" and "Mein Liebster Freund." After that, it was "Mein Brudder." Peter ended his letters to Menshikov with the lines, "All is well. Only God grant to see you in joy again. You yourself know."*

As Menshikov's life progressed, honors and rewards continued to shower on him—and his enemies proliferated. To them he appeared obsequious, ambitious and, when he had power, despotic. He could be harsh and cruel and never forget a disservice done to him. His greatest flaw, several times his near-undoing, was avarice. Born with nothing and then surrounded by opportunities for acquiring wealth, he grabbed whatever he could. As he grew older, this trait became more pronounced—or at least less easy to hide. Peter, aware that his old friend was using his offices to amass wealth and often was stealing directly from the state, tried several times to stop him. Menshikov was hauled before the courts of justice, stripped of his powers, fined, even beaten by the infuriated Tsar. But always the comradeship of thirty years intervened, Peter's anger abated and Menshikov was reinstated.

In fact, Menshikov was far more than a clever, greedy sycophant. Although he rode to the heights on Peter's back, he was indispensable to Peter as a friend. He became, as much as any man could, Peter's alter ego; he knew so well how the Tsar would react to any situation that his commands were accepted as if they

*Was there anything else? Whitworth wrote that "some have thought their intimacy rather resembled love than friendship, they having frequent jars and constant reconcilements." But there is, in fact, no evidence of any homosexual relationship between Peter and Menshikov.

were Peter's. "He does what he likes without asking my opinion," Peter once said of him. "But I for my part never decide anything without asking him his." For better or for worse, Menshikov helped Peter create a new Russia.

The origins of Martha Skavronskaya are even more obscure than those of Menshikov. Her life before her meeting with the Tsar in 1703, when she was nineteen, is only conjecture. The likeliest story is that she was one of four children of a Lithuanian peasant, possibly a Catholic, named Samuel Skavronsky. Skavronsky had moved from Lithuania and settled in the Swedish province of Livonia, where, in 1684, in the village of Ringen near Dorpat, Martha was born. When she was still an infant, her father died of plague, followed soon after by her mother. The destitute children were scattered, and Martha was taken into the family of Pastor Ernst Gluck, a Lutheran minister of Marienburg. Although not exactly a servant, she was expected to make herself useful in the household, doing laundry, sewing, baking bread and looking after the other children. That she was not considered a full member of the family seems likely since, in this relatively well-educated household, no effort was made to educate her and she left the Gluck family unable to read or write.

In adolescence, Martha grew into a comely, sturdy girl whose warm, dark eyes and full figure attracted attention. One story is that Frau Gluck grew wary, fearing the effect of the blossoming girl on her growing sons or even on the Pastor. Martha, accordingly, was encouraged to accept the suit of a Swedish dragoon whose regiment was quartered in the neighborhood. She was betrothed to him and, according to some accounts, was actually married to him for a brief span of eight days in the summer of 1702. At this point, the rapid successes of the invading Russians suddenly compelled his regiment to evacuate Marienburg. Martha never saw her fiancé/husband again.

With the Swedish withdrawal, the district of Dorpat fell into the hands of Sheremetev's Russian army, and along with the entire population, Pastor Gluck and his family were taken prisoner. Sheremetev, a sophisticated man, received the Lutheran clergyman with kindness and accepted Gluck's offer to go to Moscow to serve the Tsar as a translator. The attractive foundling Martha, however, did not go to Moscow, but remained for six months in the domestic service of Sheremetev himself. (One tale presents the vivid picture of the girl being brought into the Field Marshal's camp wrapped only in a soldier's cloak to cover her nakedness.) Some assume that the girl became his mistress, which would not have been impossible, although nothing indicates that such a relationship actually existed between the illiterate seventeen-year-old girl and the cultivated, middle-aged Field Marshal. Later, as Peter's wife, she bore Sheremetev no ill-will, nor, on the other hand, did she especially favor him. In short, nothing except proximity suggests intimacy between them, and the likelihood is that the future Empress was a serving woman in Sheremetev's household and nothing more.

Martha's relations with her next protector, Menshikov, were closer and more complex. He was already emerging as the Tsar's favorite when, visiting Sheremetev, he spotted her. Her comeliness had increased; her hands, once red with work, had become whiter and less coarse with her new, less arduous role. She had accepted the Orthodox faith and taken the Russian name of Ekaterina (Catherine). No one knows how Menshikov persuaded Sheremetev to transfer the Lithuanian girl to his own household— some say that he simply bought her. In any case, in the autumn of 1703 he took her to Moscow.

There is the possibility that during these months the eighteen-year-old woman shared the bed of the thirty-two-year-old favorite. True or not, the bond formed at this time between them became unbreakable and lifelong. They were to be the two most powerful people in the Russian empire after the Tsar himself, yet because of their mutually humble origins, both were totally dependent on Peter. Aside from the Tsar's protection, the only separate strength either the wife or the favorite possessed was the support and alliance of the other.

In fact, there is no proof that Catherine was Menshikov's mistress, and, indeed, there is circumstantial evidence that she was not. During these years, Menshikov was strongly attached to one of a group of girls who carried the title of Boyar Maidens and whose duties consisted only of being companions to the royal ladies. In 1694, after the death of Peter's mother, the Tsar's lively younger sister, Natalya, moved in to live with him in his masculine world at Preobrazhenskoe, bringing with her a small group of such maidens, including two sisters, Darya and Barbara Arseneeva, the daughters of an official in Siberia. Menshikov, as Peter's friend, was welcomed at the feminine court around Natalya, and there soon developed an attachment between him and the beautiful Darya Arseneeva. Through his secretary, he wrote to her regularly from wherever he was and sent her rings and jewels. She wrote back and sent him dressing gowns, bed linen and shirts. In 1703, when Menshikov returned to Moscow in triumph from his military victories in Ingria, the Arseneev sisters came to live in the household which his own two sisters kept for him. It was to this same household that Menshikov brought Catherine. Although it is possible that he may, while courting a lady of higher birth, have amused himself with a Lithuanian serving girl, he was much in love with Darya, who later became his wife.

When Peter met Catherine in the autumn of 1703, she was a member of Menshikov's household with a status which, if uncertain to us, must have been quite clear to him. She was important enough to have access to the Tsar and to speak to him, although he was thirty-one and she was only nineteen, and Peter admired her. His own twelve-year relationship with Anna Mons was breaking apart.* Here before him was a sturdy, healthy, appealing girl in the full bloom of youth. She was far from a classic beauty, but her velvet black eyes, her thick blond hair (which she later dyed black to lighten the appearance of her suntanned skin) and her full, womanly bosom already had caught the eye of a field marshal and a future prince; the Tsar was no less observant.

Whatever her previous arrangements, from that time on Catherine was Peter's mistress. For convenience, she continued to live in Menshikov's house in Moscow, a dwelling which by this time was filled with women. At first, it had been kept for him by his own two sisters, Maria and Anna, but in December 1703 Anna greatly advanced the Menshikov family fortunes by marrying an aristocrat, Alexis Golovin, the younger brother of Fedor Golovin, head of the Foreign Ministry. Now it also included the two Arseneev sisters, Barbara and Darya, their aunt, Anisya Tolstoy, and Catherine.

In October 1703, Peter came to Moscow to spend five weeks with this unusual Menshikov "family"; then he departed, but returned in December to stay until March. Soon Darya and Catherine were traveling together to join Menshikov and Peter in towns near where the army was camped. For several years, this quartet was so close that whichever male was apart from the others was sad and lonely. Peter and Menshikov were often separated; Menshikov, as an increasingly successful commander of cavalry and dragoons, was constantly away in Lithuania or Poland. The two women, always traveling together for propriety's sake, could

*Anna, feeling that Peter was straying, had attempted to re-stimulate his interest by flirting with the Prussian envoy Keyserling. The envoy over-responded by falling in love and proposing marriage. Peter's reaction was to expel Anna from her estate and his favor, reclaim his portrait set in diamonds and place her and her mother and sister under house arrest. Later, he relented, the marriage to Keyserling took place and Anna lived as the ambassador's wife, then widow, until her own death in the German Suburb in 1715.

not be with both men at once; in consequence, either Peter or Menshikov was often reduced to writing mournful letters to the other three. In the winter of 1704, a son named Peter was born to Catherine, and in March 1705 Peter wrote to Catherine and Darya: "I am rarely merry here. O mothers! Do not abandon my little Petrushka. Have some clothes made for him and go as you will, but order that he shall have enough to eat and drink. And give my regards, ladies, to Alexander Danilovich. And you have shown me great unkindness in being unwilling to write to me about your health." In October 1705, a second son, Paul, was born, and in December 1706 a daughter whom they called Catherine.

Then, in the spring of 1706, a lonely Menshikov, off in the field, sent Darya a present of five lemons, all he could gather, suggesting that she share them with the Tsar. Peter wrote to thank Menshikov for the lemons, but also to summon him to Kiev. "It is very necessary for you to come by Assumption Day in order to accomplish what we have already sufficiently talked about before I go." The matter on which Peter now was sternly insisting was Menshikov's marriage to Darya, which had been on his mind for some time. He had written Menshikov from St. Petersburg, giving him a push: "As you know, we are living in Paradise, but one idea never leaves me about which you yourself know, that I place my confidence not in human will, but in divine will and mercy." Repeatedly, Menshikov had promised, but repeatedly the wedding was postponed.

Peter's insistence on this marriage stemmed from his desire to regularize the situation in which the two couples were living. It would calm the talk about the quartet—including two unmarried women—roaming shamelessly around Russia. Not that it would end such talk completely; only a marriage to Catherine, who was regularly bearing him children, would do that, but about this he hesitated while Eudoxia still lived. Nevertheless, Menshikov's marriage would be a first step—Darya would become a respectable matron with whom Catherine could properly travel. Finally, in August 1706, Menshikov bowed, and Darya became a wife who shared his thoughts and his burdens, looked after his comforts and accompanied him whenever she could on his travels and campaigns.

Once Menshikov was married, Peter began to think of taking the same step himself. In many ways, it seemed to offer more hazards than advantages. Traditional Russians would find it an act of madness for the Tsar to marry an illiterate foreign peasant. In a time of national crisis, when Peter was forcing Russians to sacrifice heavily for the state, could he inflict this outrage on them without serious disruptions? Eventually, these arguments, strong though they were, were shouldered aside by Peter's need for this extraordinary woman, and fifteen months later, in November 1707, Peter followed Menshikov's wedding with his own. The ceremony was privately performed in St. Petersburg without any of the fanfare which had surrounded the marriage of the Prince. For a while, even though Catherine had borne him three, then four, then five children, he continued to keep the marriage secret from his people and even from his ministers and some members of his family.

Catherine was content with her new status (never at any stage of her astonishing ascent did she push to go higher), but as she continued to bear his children and attach herself more deeply in his affections, Peter continued to worry about her. In March 1711, before leaving with Catherine on the Pruth campaign against the Turks, the Tsar summoned his sister Natalya, his sister-in-law, Praskovaya, and two of Praskovaya's daughters. Presenting them to Catherine, he told them that she was his wife and should be considered the Russian Tsaritsa. He planned to marry her in public as soon as he could, but if he were to die first, they were to accept Catherine as his legal widow.

In February 1712, Peter kept his word and married Catherine again—this time with drums and trumpets playing, with the diplomatic corps in attendance, with a magnificent banquet and a show of fireworks in celebration. Before the ceremony, Catherine had been publicly received and baptized into the Russian church with her stepson, the Tsarevich Alexis, acting as her godfather. Thereafter, the publicly proclaimed Tsaritsa was called Catherine Alexeevna.

His new wife had qualities which Peter had never found in another woman. She was warm, merry, compassionate, kind-hearted, generous, adaptable, comfortable, robustly healthy and possessed of great vitality. Among all of Peter's followers, she and Menshikov came closest to keeping up with the Tsar's phenomenal energy and compulsive drive. Catherine had an earthy common sense which immediately saw through flattery and deceit. The language she spoke, like Peter's own, was simple, direct and honest. In private, she alone could indulge her playful humor and treat Peter like an overgrown boy; in public, she had the tact to remain in the background. She had enough intelligence and sympathy to understand Peter's burdens as well as his character. With her own good nature, she did not take offense, no matter how gloomy his mood or outrageous his behavior. Alexander Gordon, son-in-law of Patrick Gordon, explained that "the great reason why the Tsar was so fond of her was her exceeding good temper; she was never seen peevish or out of humor; obliging and civil to all and never forgetful of her former condition."

Better than anyone else, Catherine could deal with Peter's convulsive fits. When the first symptoms of these attacks appeared, the Tsar's attendants would run for Catherine, who would come at once and firmly lay him down, take his head in her lap and gently stroke his hair and temples until the convulsions abated and he fell asleep. While he slept, she would sit silently for hours, cradling his head, soothingly stroking it when he stirred. Peter always awakened refreshed. But his need for her went far deeper than mere nursing. Her qualities of mind and heart were such that she was able not only to soothe him, play with him, love him, but also to take part in his inner life, to talk to him about serious things, to discuss his views and projects, to encourage his hopes and aspirations. Not only did her presence comfort him, but her conversation cheered him and gave him balance.

Peter was never greatly interested in women for their special and mysterious female elixir. He had no time for dallying with delicious, witty ladies in a context of court life, like Louis XIV, and he was far too busy with war and government to undertake epic campaigns of sheer physical conquest similar to those which occupied Augustus of Saxony-Poland. After his marriage to Catherine, Peter had occasional mistresses, but they barely entered his thoughts and counted for nothing. In his life, Peter cared deeply for only four women: his mother, his sister Natalya, Anna Mons and Catherine. Of these, his mother and Catherine ranked highest, and Catherine achieved this in part by becoming his second mother. The total, uncritical love she gave to Peter was similar to a mother's, constant even when the child is behaving horribly. Because of this, he trusted her completely. She—like Natalya Naryshkina or, to a lesser extent, Lefort, who also loved him without question—could approach him even in moments of ungovernable rage to quiet and soothe him. In her arms, he was able to pass peaceful nights. Often, especially in their early years, she appears in his letters as "Moder" or "Moeder." Later, she becomes his Katerinushka. Thus, gradually, Catherine filled a larger and larger place in Peter's life and heart. There might be an occasional infidelity with some young beauty, but Catherine, quiet and secure in the knowledge that she was indispensable, only smiled.

Their comradeship and love, as well as Catherine's strength and endurance, were manifested by the birth of twelve children, six sons and six daughters. Ten of these died in infancy or after only a few years of life. There is pathos in reading the names and dates, for Peter and Catherine used the same names several times, hoping that the new little Peter or Paul or Natalya would be luckier than the buried namesake.* The two of their children who lived to adulthood were Anne, born in 1708, who became the Duchess of Holstein and mother of Emperor Peter III, and Elizabeth, born in 1709, who ruled as empress from 1740 to 1762. Although infant deaths were all too normal for the age, it did not lighten the burden of grief for a mother who so often endured pregnancy, labor, early hope and then a funeral.

In every arena of life, Catherine was the opposite of a terem or boudoir princess. Merging the physical stamina of a hardy peasant woman with her keen desire to stay close to her lord, she traveled constantly with Peter through Russia, to Poland, Germany, Copenhagen and Amsterdam. Twice—first against the Turks on the Pruth and then against the Persians along the Caspian—she accompanied Peter on military campaigns, enduring without complaint the hardships of the march and the noisy violence of battle. Riding two or three days on horseback, sleeping in a tent on bare ground close to the thunder of artillery, even seeing a bullet strike one of the men attending her, left Catherine unperturbed.

She was neither prudish nor delicate but a man's companion whom Peter wanted at his side even in the middle of his drunken revels. Catherine amiably obliged, although when she could do so without angering her husband, she exercised an influence for moderation. During one such orgy of excessive drinking, Catherine knocked on the door of the room in which Peter was locked with a few of his inebriated cronies. "It is time to come home," she said. The door opened and the obedient Tsar followed her home.

But Catherine was not so hardy and mannish as to lack all feminine interests. She learned to dance and executed the most complicated steps with precision and grace, a talent which she passed along to her daughter Elizabeth. Catherine loved clothes and ornamental pomp. She could be Peter's soldier-wife and sleep in a tent, but once the campaign was over, she liked to wear jewels and magnificent gowns and to live in palaces. Peter's own tastes were simple; the smaller his house and the lower the ceiling, the happier he was. But for Catherine he built palaces and gardens in St. Petersburg, at Peterhof and in Reval. Here, at her court, the cloth tunics trimmed with simple braid which served for Peter were insufficient. Catherine's courtiers wore silk, velvet and

*Here is the melancholy list:

Peter (b. 1704, d. 1707);

Paul (b. 1705, d. 1707);

Catherine (b. 1707, d. 1708);

Anne (b. 1708, d. 1728);

Elizabeth (b. 1709, d. 1762);

Natalya (b. 1713, d. 1715);

Margarita (b. 1714, d. 1715);

Peter (b. 1715, d. 1719);

Paul (b. and d. 1717);

Natalya (b. 1718, d. 1725);

Peter (b. and d. 1723);

Paul (b. and d. 1724).

brocade embroidered in gold and silver with delicate lace ruffles at the sleeves and diamond and pearl buttons. Most portraits of her painted after she was thirty and had been publicly acknowledged as tsaritsa show a robust, white-bosomed lady with jet-black hair, dark, almond-shaped eyes, heavy eyebrows and a winsome, well-shaped mouth. Usually, she is wearing a diadem of pearls and rubies, a brocade dress edged with lace, a lavish, ermine-tailed cape casually slipping off her right shoulder and the red sash of the Order of St. Catherine, which Peter created in her honor.

Yet, despite her love of pomp, Catherine never pretended that her origins were anything but lowly, and even as Peter's wife and tsaritsa, she always deferred to foreign royalty. A German diplomat, describing Catherine in 1717, touches on both her appearance and her manner:

The Tsaritsa was in the prime of life and showed no signs of having possessed beauty. She was tall and strong, exceedingly dark, and would have seemed darker but for the rouge and whitening with which she covered her face. There was nothing unpleasant about her manners, and anyone who remembered the Princess's origins would have been disposed to think them good. . . . She had a great desire to do well. ... It might fairly be said that if this Princess had not all the charms of her sex, she had all its gentleness. . . . During her visit to Berlin, she showed the Queen the greatest deference, and let it be understood that her own extraordinary fortune did not make her forget the difference between that Princess and herself.

The most graphic embodiment of the attachment between Peter and Catherine and its deepening strength as the years went by appears in their letters. Whenever they were apart, Peter wrote to her every third or fourth day, describing his loneliness, worrying about her health and reassuring her about his, sharing his anxiety when the news is bad and his elation when it is good. His only grumble is that she does not reply as often or as quickly as he would like. Catherine's answers, which had to be dictated through

a secretary and therefore were not as effortlessly composed as his, are filled with cheerful affection, concern for his health, and news of their children. She never complains and never offers advice either on policies or personalities. The tone on both sides is good-natured, concerned and tender, with private mischievous jokes, amused chiding about other romances and amorous promises between themselves. ("If you were here," Catherine writes to her husband, "there soon would be another little Shishenka [a

nickname for one of their small sons]." Almost always, the letters on both sides were accompanied by small parcels of fruit, salted fish, new shirts or dressing gowns for Peter, or oysters, which she loved, for Catherine.

Peter from Lublin, August 31, 1709

Moeder: Since I left you I have no news of what I want to know, especially how soon you will be in Vilna. 1 am bored without you and you, I think, are the same. King Augustus has come. . . . The Poles are constantly in conference about the affairs of Ivashka Khmelnitsky [i.e., they are drinking].

—Warsaw, September 24, 1709

. . . Thanks for your package. I send you some fresh lemons. You jest about amusements [with other women]; we have none, for we are old and not that kind of people. Give my regards to Aunty [Darya]. Her bridegroom [Menshikov] had an interview day before yesterday with Ivashka [i.e., got drunk], and had a bad fall on the boat and now lies powerless; which break gently to Aunty that she does not go to pieces. . . .

—Marienwerder, October 16, 1709

. . . Give my regards to Aunty. That she has fallen in love with a monk I have already told her bridegroom, about which he is very sad, and from grief wishes to commit some follies himself.

—Carlsbad, September 19, 1711

We, thank God, are well, only our bellies are swelled up with water, because we drink like horses, and we have nothing else to do. . . . You write that on account of the cure I should not hurry to you. It is quite evident that you have found somebody better than me. Kindly write about it. Is it one of ours or a man of Thorn? I rather think a man of Thorn, and that you want to be avenged for what I did two years ago. That is the way you daughters of Eve act with us old fellows.

—Greifswald, August 8, 1712

I hear that you are bored and I am not without being bored, but you can judge that business does not leave me much time for boredom. I don't think I can get away from here to you quickly, and if the horses have arrived, come on with the three battalions that are ordered to go to Anclam. But, for God's sake, take care not to go a hundred yards from the battalions, for there are many enemy ships in the Haff and the men constantly go into the woods in great numbers and through those woods you must pass.

—Berlin, October 2, 1712

Yesterday I arrived here and I went to see the King. Yesterday morning, he came to me and last night I went to the Queen. I send you as many oysters as I could find. I couldn't get any more because they say the plague has broken out in Hamburg and it is forbidden to bring anything from there.

—Leipzig, October 6, 1712

I this moment start for Carlsbad and hope to arrive tomorrow. Your clothes and other things were brought, but I couldn't get any oysters. With this I confide you to God's keeping.

In 1716, Peter received a pair of spectacles from her. He wrote back:

Katerinushka, my heart's friend, how are you? Thanks for the present. In the same way I send you something from here in return. Really on both sides the presents are suitable. You sent me wherewithal to help my old age and I send you with which to adom your youth.

—Pyrmont, June 5, 1716

I received your letter with the present, and I think you have a prophetic spirit that you sent only one bottle, for I am not allowed to drink more than one glass a day, so that this store is quite enough for me. You write that you don't admit my being old. In that way you try to cover up your first present [the spectacles] so that people should not guess. But it is easy to discover that young people don't look through spectacles. I shall see you soon. The water is acting well, but it has become very tiresome here.

—Altona, November 23, 1716

Petrushka has cut his fourth tooth; God grant he cut all so well, and that we may see him grow up, thus rewarding us for our former grief over his brothers.

Two years later, Catherine writes to Peter about this same son.

—July 24, 1718

I and the children, thank God, are in good health. Although on my way back to Petersburg, Petrushka was a little weak with his last teeth, yet now with God's help he is quite well and has cut three back teeth. I beg you. little father, for protection against Petrushka, for he has no little quarrel with me about you; namely, because 394 when I tell him that Papa has gone away he does not like it, but he likes it better and becomes glad when I say that Papa is here.

—Reval, August 1, 1718

Thanks, my friend, for the figs, which came safely. I have had myself shorn here and send you my shorn locks, though I know they will not be received.

In July, 1723, only eighteen months before he died, Peter wrote again from Reval, where he had built himself a small white stucco house and Catherine an ornate pink palace.

The garden planted only two years ago has grown beyond belief, for the only big trees which you saw have in some places stretched their branches across the walk. . . . The chestnuts all have fine crowns. The house is being plastered outside, but is ready within and, in one word, we have hardly anywhere such a handsome house. I send you some strawberries which ripened before our arrival, as well as cherries. I am quite astonished that things are so early here, when it is in the same latitude as Petersburg.

It is reassuring to read these letters. Not many parts of Peter's life were as unblemished and happy as his relationship with Catherine. Through these letters, we have the satisfaction of knowing that a man whose childhood was stained with horror, whose public life was filled with struggle, and whose family life saw the appalling tragedy of the Tsarevich Alexis, did at least have some moments of felicity. In Catherine, Peter found an island amidst the storms.

29

THE HAND OF THE AUTOCRAT

In the early years of war—indeed, throughout his reign—Peter was constantly on the move. Nine years passed between the battles of Narva and Poltava; during this time, the Tsar was never more than three months in a single place. Now in Moscow, now in St. Petersburg, now in Voronezh; then on to Poland, Lithuania and Livonia, Peter traveled incessantly, everywhere inspecting, organizing, encouraging, criticizing, commanding. Even in his beloved Petersburg, he hurried back and forth between houses in different parts of the city. If he stayed under one roof for more than a week, be became restless. He ordered his carriage—he would go to see how a ship was building, how a canal was proceeding, what was being accomplished with the new harbor at Petersburg or Kronstadt. Traveling back and forth over the immense distances of his empire, the Tsar broke every precedent before the eyes of his astonished people. The time-honored image of a distant sovereign, crowned, enthroned and immobile in the white-walled Kremlin, bore no resemblance to this black-eyed, beardless giant dressed in a green German coat, black three-cornered hat and high, mud spattered boots, stepping down from his carriage into the muddy streets of a Russian town, demanding beer for his thirst, a bed for the night and fresh horses for the morning.

Overland travel in this time was a trial for the spirit and a torment for the body. Russian roads were little more than rutted tracks across meadows or through forests. Rivers were crossed by dilapidated bridges, crude ferries or shallow fords. The human beings one encountered were impoverished, frightened and sometimes hostile. In winter, wolves prowled nearby. Because of mud and potholes, carriages moved slowly and often broke down; over some stretches, five miles was all that could be covered in a day. Inns were rare and travelers looked for beds in private houses. Horses—even when the driver carried an official order that they must be provided—were difficult to find, and usually could be used over a distance of no more than ten miles, after which they had to be unharnessed and returned to their owner while the traveler and his driver searched for fresh animals. Under such conditions, a journey was often interrupted by long, unexpected delays. When St. Petersburg was rising, Peter ordered a new road, 500 miles long, between the new city and the old capital of Moscow. The trip between the two cities took four to five weeks. Later in his reign, the Tsar demanded a straighter road, along the line of the present railroad, which would have shortened the distance by 100 miles. Eighty miles of this new highway had been completed with the project was abandoned. The lakes, swamps and forests in the area of Novgorod made an impenetrable barrier.

In fairness, the condition of Russian roads was not unique in the early eighteenth century. In 1703, it took fourteen hours to travel from London to Windsor, a distance of twenty-five miles. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1724, declared of his country's highways, "It is a prostitution of the language to call them turnpikes." One was "vile, a narrow causeway cut into ruts"; others were "execrably broke into holes . . . sufficient to dislocate one's bones." Although stagecoaches were being introduced into Western

Europe and larger cities had famous and comfortable travelers' inns like the Golden Bull in Vienna, land journeys still were difficult. To cross the Alps'from Vienna to Venice during the winter, passengers had to descend from their carriages and go part of the way on foot across the snow.

The difference between Russia and Western Europe lay less in the frightful, pocked surface of the roads than in the wildness and vastness of the surrounding country. Early in April 1718, Friedrich Weber, the Hanoverian minister to Russia, set out from Moscow to St. Petersburg: "We had over twenty open rivers to pass, where there were neither bridges nor ferries," he wrote. "We were obliged to make floats for ourselves as well as we were able, the country people who were not accustomed to see travelers that way, being fled, upon our coming, with their children and horses into the woods. In all my lifetime I never had a more troublesome journey, and even some of our company who had traveled over a great part of the world protested that they never underwent the like fatigues before."

Because of the difficulty of traveling by road, Russians looked forward eagerly to the alternatives of travel by water or across the snow. The great rivers of Russia were always primary avenues of internal trade. Boats and barges carried grain, timber and flax on the broad waters of the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper, the Dvina and, later, the Neva. Travelers to and from Europe often elected to journey by sea. Before the Baltic was opened to them, Russian ambassadors sailed for Western Europe from Archangel, preferring the icebergs and storms of the Arctic Ocean to the discomforts of overland travel.

But in Peter's Russia, the most popular means of travel was by sled in winter. First, the frost froze the autumn mud and hardened the roads; then the falling snow covered everything with a smooth, slippery surface over which a horse could pull a sled at twice the speed of a carriage in summer. Rivers and lakes, frozen hard as steel, made easy highways between the towns and villages. "Travel by sled is certainly the most commodious and swiftest traveling in the world either for passengers or for goods," wrote John Perry. "The sleds, being light and conveniently made, and with little labor to the horses, slide smooth and easy over the snow and ice." It cost only one quarter as much to move goods on runners as on wheels. Therefore, through the autumn Russian merchants piled up their goods, awaiting the coming of winter to transport them to market. Once the blanket of snow had fallen, the sleds were loaded and every day several thousands arrived in Moscow, both horses and drivers wreathed in steaming breath, the mingle with the city's crowds.

Out in the country, the main roads were marked by high posts painted red and long avenues of trees planted on both sides of the road. "These posts and trees are useful," observed a Dutch traveler, "because in winter it would be difficult to find the way without them, all being covered with snow." Every twelve or fifteen miles, an inn had been built, at Peter's command, to provide shelter for travelers.

Noblemen and important persons traveled in closed sleds which were in fact small carriages painted red, green and gold, mounted on runners rather than wheels, and drawn by two, four or six horses. If the journey was long, the carriage-sleigh became a moving cocoon from which the traveler emerged only at the journey's end. As Weber described such travel:

It would be impossible for a traveler to bear the immense cold in Russia, were it not for the convenient contrivance of their sleds. The upper part of the sled is so closely shut and covered that not the least air can enter. On both- sides are small windows and two shelves to hold provisions and books taken along for pastime. Overhead hangs a lantem with wax candles to be lighted when night comes. In the lower part of the sled lies the bedding with which the traveler is covered night and day, having at his feet warm stones, or a pewter case filled with warm water to keep the sled warm and to preserve the adjoining box in which wine and brandy are kept against the frost. Notwithstanding all such precautions, the strongest liquors very often freeze and are spoiled. In this movable apartment a man is carried along night and day without stepping out, except in case of necessity.

In this kind of sled, Peter, by frequent changing of horses, sometimes covered as much as one hundred miles a day.

Carriage, horseback, sled, river barge and boat—these were the means by which Peter traveled across Russia. "He has," wrote Perry, "traveled twenty times more than ever any prince in the world did before him." Despite his restlessness, he did not travel for the love of travel; instead, it was his method of governing. Always, he wanted to see what was happening and whether his orders were being carried out. Accordingly, he came, inspected, issued new orders and moved on. Riding in carriages—bouncing on inadequate springs—across roads filled with holes and ruts, his body never at ease, his backbone constantly swaying against the seat, his head bumping the leather walls when he dozed, his arms and elbows jostling against his companions, the grating noise of the wheels, the shouts of the coachmen—this was Peter's life, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. No wonder he traveled by water whenever he could. What a relief it must have been to glide along by barge or yacht, standing quietly on deck and watching villages, fields and forests slip past.

* * *

Peter's constant movement made administration of his government confused and difficult. The Tsar was rarely in his capital. Many of the laws of Russia were decrees written by his hand on brown paper either in his carriage or in the inn or house in which he passed the night. Whenever he set himself to work seriously at civic administration, either the war or an urgent desire to see his ships pulled him away. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the nominal seat of government until Poltava, the bureaucracy of the central government lumbered along, and gradually a number of changes in the structure of government were made. The old official hierarchy of boyars and lesser nobles was fading in importance; the men closest to Peter—Menshikov, for example—had not been made boyars at all. Menshikov was a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and bore that title in Russia. Peter's other companions were given the Western titles of Count and Baron; indeed, boyars like Sheremetev and Golovin now preferred to be called Count Sheremetev and Count Golovin. Government officials received new Western bureaucratic titles, such as chancellor, vice chancellor and privy councilor.

Along with the titles, the men who held them were changing. When Fedor Golovin, who had succeeded Lefort as General-Admiral and also served as Chancellor (Foreign Minister), died of fever in 1706 at the age of fifty-five, the Tsar divided his titles and duties among three men: Fedor Apraxin who became General-Admiral, Gavril Golovkin who took over the foreign ministry and was appointed Chancellor after Poltava, and Peter Shafirov who became Vice Chancellor. Apraxin was well connected: he was descended from an old boyar family and he was also the brother of the Tsaritsa Martha, Tsar Fedor's wife. He was a bluff, hearty, blue-eyed man, enormously proud, who accepted insults from no one, not even the Tsar. Apraxin served Peter in many ways: as a general, a governor, a senator, but his real love—rare among Peter's subjects—was the navy. He became the first Russian admiral and commanded the new fleet at its first major victory, the Battle of Hango.

Golovkin was a more prudent, calculating man, but he too served Peter faithfully all his life. The son of a high official of Tsar Alexis, he was a page at court and became, at seventeen, one of five-year-old Peter's gentlemen of the bedchamber. At the Battle of Narva, Golovkin displayed great bravery and was awarded the Order of St. Andrew. Most correspondence to and from Russian diplomats abroad was addressed to him and signed by him (although Peter often read and corrected the outgoing instructions.) Golovkin's portrait shows a handsome, intelligent face, encased in an elegant wig; it cannot show the personal stinginess for which he was widely famous.

The most interesting of these three senior lieutenants was Peter Shafirov, raised from obscurity to become, in 1710, Russia's first baron. Shafirov was from a Jewish family that lived in the Polish frontier region around Smolensk, but his father had converted to Orthodoxy and found work as a translator in the Russian foreign office.* Peter Shafirov followed the same path, serving as a translator for Fedor Golovin whom he accompanied on the Great Embassy. His knowledge of Western languages included Latin and his skill at drafting diplomatic documents brought him promotion to private secretary in 1704, director of the foreign office under Golovkin in 1706, the Vice Chancellorship in 1709, then a barony, and the Order of St. Andrew in 1719. Shafirov was a large, double-chinned man with a contented smile and wise and watchful eyes. Over the years, Shafirov's relationship with Golovkin degenerated into mutual hatred, although Peter, needing both men, forced each to remain at his post. Foreign diplomats respected Shafirov. "It is true, he had a very hot temper," said one, "but one could always rely fully upon his word."

In addition, the names of the offices themselves were changing. There was a new Department of the Navy, a Department of Artillery and a Department of Mines. The heads of these departments, now called ministers, managed the routine business of government. Most petitions formerly addressed to the Tsar, were now addressed to the specific department or minister concerned. Peter discovered that when he was away from Moscow, the members of the old boyar council, now called the Privy Council, frequently failed to attend meetings. If, later, the Tsar criticized council decisions, these men avoided blame by saying that they had not been present. Thus, Peter demanded punctual attendance at all meetings and decreed that all decisions be signed by every member present. These papers, along with minutes of all meetings and other important papers, were sent by courier to Peter wherever he might be.

To handle these documents, Peter kept with him at all times a mobile personal chancery headed by his Cabinet Secretary, Alexis Makarov. A talented and modest man from the north, Makarov had risen on merit from a minor post in the provincial civil service to this key position in Peter's government. It was his duty not to offer advice but to see that all matters were brought to the Tsar's attention in the right sequence and at the most appropriate time.

*Ivan the Terrible had banned all Jews from Russia. However, Jews who renounced their religion were free to rise in society and government in Imperial Russia.

In this role, which required enormous tact and afforded enormous power, Makarov was assisted by a young German, Andrew Osterman. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Osterman was employed to translate correspondence between the Tsar and foreign courts. With the passing of time, Osterman's role was to become far greater.

Most of the business of Peter's government in those years concerned the war and taxes. Peter's decrees, like his constant traveling through the country, almost invariably dealt with the enrollment of recruits or the collection of revenues. The Tsar's demands for money were insatiable. In one attempt to uncover new sources of income, Peter in 1708 created a service of revenue officers, men whose duty it was to devise new ways of taxing the people. Called by the foreign name "fiscals," they were commanded "to sit and make income for the Sovereign Lord." The leader and most successful was Alexis Kurbatov, a former serf of Boris Sheremetev who had already attracted Peter's attention with his proposal for requiring that government-stamped paper be used for all legal documents. Under Kurbatov and his ingenious, fervently hated colleagues, new taxes were levied on a wide range of human activities. There was a tax on births, on marriages, on funerals and on the registration of wills. There was a tax on wheat and tallow. Horses were taxed, and horse hides and horse collars. There was a hat tax and a tax on the wearing of leather boots. The beard tax was systematized and enforced, and a tax on mustaches was added. Ten percent was collected from all cab fares. Houses in Moscow were taxed, and beehives throughout Russia. There was a bed tax, a bath tax, an inn tax, a tax on kitchen chimneys and on the firewood that burned in them. Nuts, melons, cucumbers, were taxed. There was even a tax on drinking water.

Money also came from an increasing number of state monopolies. This arrangement, whereby the state took control of the production and sale of a commodity, setting any price it wished, was applied to alcohol, resin, tar, fish, oil, chalk, potash, rhubarb, dice, chessmen, playing cards, and the skins of Siberian foxes, ermines and sables. The flax monopoly granted to English merchants was taken back by the Russian government. The tobacco monopoly given by Peter to Lord Carmarthen in England in 1698 was abolished. The solid-oak coffins in which wealthy Muscovites elegantly spent eternity were taken over by the state and then sold at four times the original price. Of all the monopolies, however, the one most profitable to the government and most oppressive to the people was the monopoly on salt. Established by% decree in 1705, it fixed the price at twice the cost to the government. Peasants who could not afford the higher price often sickened and died.

To tighten administrative control and increase the efficiency of tax collectors across the sprawling mass of the empire, Peter in 1708 divided Russia into eight giant governorships, assigning these eight provinces to his closest friends. Thus, the Moscow governorship was assigned to Boyar Tikhon Streshnev, St Petersburg went to Menshikov, Kiev to Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, Archangel to Prince Peter Golitsyn, Kazan to Boyar Peter Apraxin, Azov to Admiral Fedor Apraxin, Smolensk to Boyar Peter Saltykov and Siberia to Prince Matthew Gagarin. Each governor was responsible for all military and civil affairs in the region, especially the production of revenue. Unfortunately, as some of the "governors" resided in the capital far from their provinces, and others had conflicting duties (Menshikov was usually with the army), their authority left much to be desired.

Nevertheless, the effort continued. The governors commanded, the fiscals schemed, the tax collectors strained and the people labored, but only so much money could be squeezed from the Russian land. More could come only from the development of commerce and industry. Peter, observing the successful practices of English and Dutch trading companies in Russia, ordered Moscow merchants to form similar associations. At first, the Dutch were worried that their own efficient trade machinery would be jeopardized, but they soon realized that these fears were groundless. "As concerns the trading business," the Dutch minister wrote reassuringly to Holland, "the matter has fallen through of itself. The Russians do not know how to set about and begin such a complex and difficult business."

No matter how much the people struggled, Peter's taxes and monopolies still did not bring in enough. The first Treasury balance sheet, published in 1710, showed a revenue of 3,026,128 roubles and expenses of 3,834,418 roubles, leaving a deficit of over 808,000 roubles. This money went overwhelmingly for war. The army took 2,161,176 roubles; the fleet, 444,288 roubles; artillery and ammunition, 221,799 roubles; recruits, 30,000 roubles; armament, 84,104 roubles; embassies, 148,031 roubles, and the court, medical department, support of prisoners and miscellaneous, 745,020 roubles.

The extraordinary demand for taxes was matched by an extraordinary demand for men. In the nine years from Narva to Poltava, Peter drafted over 300,000 men into the army. Some were killed or wounded, others died of disease, but the overwhelming proportion of the losses came from desertion. Additional drafts of peasant labor were conscripted to work on Peter's ambitious construction projects. Thirty thousand laborers a year were needed for work on the fortifications at Azov and the building of the naval base at Tagonrog. The shipyards at Voronezh and work on a never completed Don-Volga canal required more thousands. And well before Poltava, the effort to build St. Petersburg was consuming more men than anything else. In the summer of 1707, Peter ordered Steshnev to send 30,000 laborers to St. Petersburg from the Moscow region alone.

These unprecedented demands for money and men drew groans from all classes. Discontent and complaint were not new in Russia, but always the people had blamed the boyars when things went wrong, not the tsar. It was Peter himself who had shattered this image. Now, the people understood that the Tsar was the government, that this tall man dressed in foreign clothes was giving the orders which made their lives so hard. "Since God has sent him to be the Tsar, we have no happy days," grumbled a peasant. "The village is weighed down with furnishing roubles and half-roubles and horses' carts, and there is no rest for us peasants." A nobleman's son agreed. "What sort of tsar is he?" he asked. "He has forced us all into service, he has seized upon our people and peasants for recruits. Nowhere can you escape^ him. Everyone is lost. He even goes into the service himself and yet no one kills him. If they only killed him, the service would stop and it would be easier for the people."

Talk of this kind did not go far. The new Secret Office of Preobrazhenskoe had agents everywhere, watching and listening for "violent and unseemly speech." These special police were successors to the Streltsy, who had acted as preservers of public order until their dissolution, and then to the soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, who had replaced the Streltsy as street-corner gendarmes. When the Guardsmen were called away to war, Peter created a new organization, the Secret Office. Formalized by ukase in 1702, it was given jurisdiction over all crimes and especially treason "by word or deed." Not surprisingly, the chief of this new office was Peter's comrade, the Mock-Tsar, Fedor Romodanovsky. A savage, brutal man, totally devoted to Peter, Romodanovsky dealt mercilessly with any suggestion of treason or rebellion. Through a network of pervasive eavesdropping and denunciation, followed by torture and execution, Romodanovsky and the Secret Office did their grim work well: Even under extreme oppression from tax collectors and labor conscriptors, cases of treason "by word and deed" never threatened the throne.

But the record of these years is not all cruel. In various ways, Peter made serious efforts to improve the customs and conditions of Russian life. He acted to raise the status of women, declaring that they must not remain secluded in the terem, but should be present with men at dinners and on other social occasions. He banned the old Muscovite system of arranged marriages in which bride and groom had no choice in the matter and did not even meet each other until the marriage service was being performed. In April 1702, to, the immense joy of young people, Peter decreed that all marriage decisions should be voluntary, that the prospective partners should meet at least six weeks before their engagement, that each should be entirely free to reject the other, and that the bridgegroom's symbolic wielding of the whip at wedding ceremonies by replaced with a kiss.

Peter forbade the killing of newborn infants who were deformed—the custom in Moscow had been to quietly smother such children immediately after delivery—and ordered that all such births be recorded so that the authorities might oversee the continued existence of these children. He prohibited the unrestricted sale of herbs and drugs by street vendors, ordering that they be sold only at apothecary shops. In 1706, he established the first large public hospital in Moscow on the banks of the Yauza River. To make the streets safer, he forbade the wearing of daggers or pointed knives which turned drunken brawls into bloody "massacres. Dueling, largely a foreign custom, was banned. To cope with the hordes of professional beggars who besieged travelers on every street, he required beggars to go to an almshouse to do their soliciting. Later, he attacked the problem from another side by declaring that anyone caught giving alms to a beggar in the streets should himself be fined.

To encourage foreigners to serve in Russia, Peter decreed that all previous laws which had restricted the rights of foreign citizens to come and go across the frontiers as they pleased were now repealed. All foreigners in Russian service were placed under the Tsar's protection, and any legal dispute affecting them was to be judged not by Russian law and Russian courts, but by a special tribunal composed of foreigners following the procedure of Roman civil law. Further, all foreigners were promised absolute religious freedom while in Russia. "We shall exercise no compulsion over the consciences of men, and shall gladly allow every Christian to care for his own salvation at his own risk," announced the Tsar.

Despite the distractions of war, Peter maintained his interest in broadening the educational horizons of his subjects. The School of Mathematics and Navigation established by Henry Farquharson and two other Scots in Moscow in 1701 flourished with 200 Russian students. These valuable investments in the future became the object of a tussle between the recruiting sergeants and Kurbatov, who stepped in to save them from conscription into the army, complaining that it was a waste of money to educate them if, after they j were trained, they were to be drafted as simple soldiers. A School of Ancient and Modern Languages had been founded by Pastor Gluck, Catherine's Lutheran guardian, who had arrived in Moscow with his family in 1703; Gluck was to train future Russian diplomats in Latin, Modern Languages, Geography, Politics, Riding and Dancing. The Tsar ordered that the ancient chronicles of Russian history, especially those in the monasteries of Kiev and Novgorod, be sent to Moscow for safekeeping. He directed that the foreign books being translated into Russian and printed in Russian by the Tessing brothers of Amsterdam be exact translations, even if portions of the texts were unfavorable to Russia. The purpose, he said, "is not to flatter my subjects, but rather to educate them by showing them the opinion entertained of them by foreign nations." In 1707, when a typefounder and two printers arrived in Moscow, Peter approved a newly revised Cyrillic type in which new books printed in Russia began to appear. The first was a manual of geometry, the second a handbook guide to the writing of letters, with instructions on how to offer compliments, issue invitations and make a proposal of marriage. Most of the volumes that followed were technical, but Peter also ordered 2,000 calendars, and histories of the Trojan War, the life of Alexander the Great and of Russia itself. The Tsar not only commissioned the books, but edited and annotated them. "We have read the book on fortifications which you translated," he wrote to one translator. "The conversations are good and clearly rendered, but in the sections teaching how to carry out fortifications, it is darkly and unintelligibly translated."

To keep his subjects abreast of the world, Peter decreed that a journal, Vedomosti, should be published in Moscow. All government offices were ordered to contribute news, and thus, early in 1703, the first Russian newspaper appeared under the heading Gazette of military and other matters, meriting attention and remembrance, that have happened in the Muscovite state and in neighboring countries. As a further means of educating and civilizing his people, Peter attempted to establish an open public theater which would stage plays in a wooden building on Red Square. A German theatrical manager and his wife arrived in Moscow with seven actors to present plays and train Russian actors. Several comedies and tragedies were produced, including Moliere's Le Midecin malgri lui (The Physician in Spite of Himself).

Throughout these years, Peter attempted to change the Russian concept of the deference due a tsar. Late in 1701, he decreed that men should no longer fall on their knees or prostrate themselves on the ground in the presence of the sovereign. He abolished the requirement that Muscovites remove their hats in winter as a sign of respect when they passed the palace, whether the tsar was inside or not. "What difference is there between God and the tsar when the same respect is given to both?" asked Peter. "Less servility, more zeal in service and more loyalty to me and to the state—this is the respect which should be paid to the tsar."

For some, the burden was too heavy and the only solution to the demands of the tax collector and the work gang was escape. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants simply ran away. Some faded into the forests or traveled to the north, where prosperous settlements of Old Believers already existed. Most went south to the Ukrainian and Volga steppes, the land of the Cossacks, the traditional refuge for Russian runaways. Behind, they left deserted villages and nervous governors and landlords anxiously trying to explain why they could not fulfill the Tsar's demands for manpower. When, to check this dangerous outflow, the Tsar ordered that the runaways be returned, the response of the Cossacks was hesitation, evasion and, ultimately, defiance.

Until this century, it was in the south that the great popular rebellions of Russian history have broken out: Stenka Razin's rising against Tsar Alexis and Pugachev's revolt against Catherine the Great have passed from history into legend. In Peter's time, during the most dangerous years of the war with Charles XII, three rebellions exploded, all in the south: the revolt at Astrachan, the uprising of the Bashkirs and—most threatening to Peter's rule—the rebellion of the Don Cossacks under Bulavin.

Astrachan, which stands where the mighty Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea, seethed with disobedience and sedition. It was a place of exile for remnants of the disbanded Streltsy, and bitter memories of the executions of 1698 still burned in the hearts of Streltsy widows, sons and brothers. The Volga merchants grumbled about the new taxes, the peasants complained about the tolls on bridges, the fishermen protested the restrictions on their catch and no one liked Peter's foreign innovations. Into this flammable tinder poured incendiary rumors: The Tsar was dead, the foreigners had nailed him up in a barrel and thrown him into the sea; an imposter, perhaps even the Antichrist, now sat upon the throne of Russia.

In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day,

July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. Many of the wine-flushed participants and onlookers rushed from the celebration to attack the local government offices, condemned and beheaded the governor and renounced the Tsar's authority by electing a new government. The new "government's" first proclamation announced that "the governor and other officers practiced all kinds of idol worship and wished to compel us to it. But we have not allowed this to happen. We have taken the idols out of the houses of the officials." In fact, these "idols" were the domed wig blocks on which Peter's Westernized officers kept their wigs. The rebels sent emissaries to other Volga towns and especially to the Don Cossacks, inviting all true Christians to join them.

Word of the uprising caused alarm in Moscow. Peter was in Courland besieging Mitau when he received the news, and, realizing the need to contain the conflagration before it spread, he dispatched Sheremetev and several regiments of cavalry and dragoons to Astrachan. As a further precaution, he ordered Streshnev to hide the state treasure and to halt temporarily all letters leaving Moscow so that news of the rebellion would not reach Charles. To the rebels, Peter offered leniency. He invited the rebellious "government" to send deputies to Moscow, where Golovin would listen to their grievances. The deputies came, and their earnest pleading of complaints against the murdered governor made a deep impression on Golovin. "I have talked for some time with them and they seem faithful and honest people," Golovin wrote to Peter. "Deign, sir, even to force yourself to show them mercy. Even we are not without rascals." Peter agreed, and the deputies returned to Astrachan, each man with fifty roubles in his pocket for expenses, and with the promise that if the city would submit, every citizen should have amnesty. In the future, it was added, officials would collect the taxes more discreetly. Orders were sent to Sheremetev's advancing regiments to avoid bloodshed in the region.

But in these times, leniency was often seen as weakness, and the return of the deputies bearing Peter's offering of peace did not quell the revolt but rather gave encouragement to it. The citizens of Astrachan congratulated themselves: They had defied the Tsar and won. When Sheremetev sent a messenger to the city saying that his troops were about to enter and that he refused to include the leaders of the revolt in the general amnesty, rebellion flared again. The Field Marshal's messenger was roughly treated and sent back with insults to Peter and the boast that in the spring they would march to Moscow and burn the German Suburb.

But the rebels had overestimated their own strength, and no help was forthcoming. The Don Cossacks replied that they themselves had not been oppressed by the tsars and still observed all Orthodox habits. How could they wear foreign clothes, they asked, when there was not a tailor among them who knew these fashions? Astrachan was alone. Nevertheless, Sheremetev's troops were attacked when they arrived. The regular soldiers quickly defeated the rebels and entered the town. As the Russian horsemen rode by, thousands of people lay on their faces along the streets, begging for mercy. Sheremetev interrogated the leaders. "I have never seen such a tremendously crazy rabble," he wrote to Golovin. "They are puffed up with malice and believe that we have fallen away from Orthodoxy." The general amnesty was withdrawn, and hundreds of rebels were sent to Moscow or broken on the wheel. Peter, enormously relieved, rewarded Sheremetev with an increase in salary and the gift of large estates.

That same year, 1705, disturbances began among the Bashkirs, a semi-Oriental Moslem people living on the open steppe between the Volga and the Urals. They were partially nomadic, herding cattle, sheep, goats and occasionally camels, while themselves riding small but powerful horses and wearing bows and quivers of arrows across their backs. Through the seventeenth century, Russian colonists moving east had been establishing towns and farming plots on their meadowlands. And along with the pressure of Russian population came the demands of Russian tax collectors. By early 1708, the Bashkirs were in open revolt. They burned a number of new Russian villages along the Kama and Ufa rivers and advanced to within twenty miles of the large city of Kazan. Although Charles XII was approaching the Russian frontier in the west, Peter dispatched three regiments to deal with the threat. The western Bashkirs submitted peacefully and, with the exception of their leader, received amnesty, while the eastern Bashkirs continued to burn and ravage, especially when Peter recalled his regular troops to face the Swedes. But the Tsar succeeded in summoning 10,000 Buddhist Kalmucks to confront and ultimately subdue the Bashkirs.

Luck and the presence of Sheremetev's dragoons had snuffed out the Astrachan flame. The Bashkirs had lacked unity and leadership and, ultimately, they too had been put down. But the most serious upheaval of Peter's reign, coming at a time when he and his army were fully engaged with Sweden, was the revolt of the Don Cossacks under Kondraty Bulavin.

The immediate cause of the Cossack revolt was Peter's attempt to round up deserters from the army and serfs who had fled to join the Cossacks. Like the American West, the underpopulated and in many places largely empty Ukraine was a magnet for restless souls who wished to escape the restrictions and oppressions of conventional society. In Russia, many of these pioneers were escaping the law: They were either serfs, legally bound to the soil by laws first made in the time of Ivan the Terrible and reinforced by Tsar Alexis, or soldiers forcibly enlisted into Peter's army to serve for twenty-five years, or laborers drafted to work in the shipyards at Voronezh or on the fortifications of Azov and Tagonrog. In the south, the Cossacks welcomed them, and demands that the fugitives be returned were generally ignored. Finally, in September 1707, Prince Yury Dolgoruky arrived on the Don with 1,200 soldiers to enforce the Tsar's decrees.

Dolgoruky's appearance frightened the Cossack elders and people. One ataman, Lukyan Maximov, received Dolgoruky respectfully and offered to help him track down the fugitives. But Kondraty Bulavin, the fiery Ataman of Bakhmut, reacted differently. On the night of October 9, 1707, his Cossacks attacked Dolgoruky's encampment on the bank of the River Aidar and slaughtered the Russians to the last man. As usual with such peasant revolts, Bulavin had no positive political program. His rising, he said, was not against the Tsar, but against all "princes and magnates, profiteers and foreigners." He called on all Cossacks "to defend the house of God's Holy Mother and the Christian Church against the heathen and Hellenic teachings which the boyars and Germans wish to introduce." Invoking the name of Stenka Razin, he declared that he would free the conscripts of Azov and Tagonrog and would, the next spring, march on Voronezh and Moscow.

Meanwhile, however, the Ataman Maximov, fearing Peter's retribution for Dolgoruky's massacre, mustered a force of loyal Cossacks and defeated Bulavin's rebels. Maximov wrote to Peter that he exacted vengeance by cutting off the prisoners' noses, hanging them up by their feet, whipping them and executing them by firing squads. Relieved, Peter wrote to Menshikov on November 16, 1707, that "this business, by the grace of God, is now finished." But Peter had relaxed too quickly. Bulavin himself had escaped from Maximov, gathered a new band and, in the spring of 1708, was once again roaming the Don steppe. Again, Maximov marched against the rebels, reinforced by a detachment of regular Russian troops, but this time a number of Cossacks deserted to Bulavin and the remainder were defeated in a battle on April 9, 1708.

The spreading of Bulavin's rebellion now posed a major threat. Villages as far north as Tula were burned, and Voronezh and the whole of the upper Don lay under threat. Fearing that the upheaval might reach even farther north, Peter ordered his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, to mount more cannon on the walls of the

Moscow Kremlin. The Tsar also took offensive action. A force of 10,000 regular infantrymen and dragoons was placed under the command of Guards Major Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, brother of Prince Yury Dolgoruky, murdered by Bulavin the previous autumn. Dolgoruky's orders were "to extinguish this fire once and for all. This rabble cannot be treated other than with cruelty." In fact, the danger of Bulavin seizing Azov and Tagonrog so worried Peter that at one point he was about to depart for the Don himself to take command. Fortunately for Peter, Charles XII chose to rest his army in camp near Minsk for precisely the three months of greatest danger from Bulavin.

For a while, Bulavin swept all before him. He defeated Maximov again and executed him. His troops attacked Azov and captured one suburb of the town before being repulsed by the loyal garrison. Then, flushed with success, Bulavin imprudently divided his army into three divisions. On May 12, one division was defeated, and on July 1 a second division was routed by Dolgoruky's advancing regulars. Sensing the change in the wind, most of the Cossacks, even those who had supported Bulavin, drew up a petition to the Tsar promising allegiance if he would forgive them. After still another defeat of Bulavin's dwindling force, the elders decided to arrest the leader and put him to death to please the Tsar. Bulavin resisted, killing two of the Cossacks sent to arrest him, but then, seeing that all was lost, he killed himself. Gradually the flames on the steppe died down and flickered out. In November, the remaining force of rebels was cornered by Dolgoruky, and 3,000 Cossacks died in battle. The rebellion was over. Peter commanded Dolgoruky to "execute the worst rebel leaders and send the other leaders to penal servitude; return all the remaining Cossacks to their old places, and burn the new settlements as ordered before." Two hundred rebels were hanged on gallows erected on rafts and sent floating down the Don. All who saw them drifting silently past the river towns and villages were warned that the iron hand of the autocrat reached through the breadth of his realm.

30

POLISH QUAGMIRE

Charles XII and the Great Northern War were Peter's main concern during these years. Having founded his new city on the Neva delta the year before, Peter moved in 1704 to control the two key Estonian towns, Dorpat and Narva, which would seal the Russian grip on Ingria and block any Swedish advance from the west against St. Petersburg. Both towns were strongly garrisoned (Narva's defenders alone numbered 4,500), but with Charles and the main Swedish army in Poland, once the cities were besieged, neither had hope of relief.

In May 1704, Russian troops appeared before Narva, occupying the same long lines of circumvallation from which they had been routed four .years before. Peter himself supervised the transport of the Russian siege artillery in barges from St. Petersburg, the boats hugging the southern shoreline of the gulf so closely that cruising Swedish warships could not reach them in the shallow water. In the Russian camp at Narva, the Tsar found Field Marshal George Ogilvie, a sixty-year-old Scot who had served for forty years in the Hapsburg imperial army and now had been hired by Patkul for service in Russia. Peter was so impressed with Ogilvie's credentials that he immediately placed him in command of the Russian army before Narva. As the siege commenced, the Russians suffered losses, both from the cannon of the fortress and from Swedish sorties, but the defenders recognized the new determination of their enemies. "They seemed resolved to carry on their works, however great their loss might be," said an officer of the garrison.

Leaving Ogilvie to conduct affairs at Narva, Peter rode south to Dorpat, which Sheremetev had been besieging since June with 23,000 men and forty-six cannon. He found Sheremetev's dispositions faulty—the Russian cannon were firing at the town's strongest bastions, which meant that all their shells were wasted. Peter quickly switched the artillery to the most vulnerable wall, and a breach was made. Russian troops entered the town, and on July 13 the Swedish garrison surrendered, five weeks after the

siege began, but only ten days after the Tsar had arrived to take command.

The fall of Dorpat sealed Narva's doom. Peter hurried back with Sheremetev's troops to make a combined Russian force of 45,000 men and 150 cannon. On July 30, a heavy bombardment began, continuing for ten days and lashing the fortress with more than 4,600 shells. When the wall of one of the bastions crumbled, Peter offered generous terms to Arvid Horn, the Swedish commander, as prescribed by the protocol of war. Foolishly, Horn refused, making matters worse by using insulting language about the Tsar. The assault began on August 9, and although the Swedes fought fiercely, within an hour soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Guards had entered and seized a major bastion. Immediately afterward, waves of Russian infrantry poured over the walls and swept through the town. Now, too late, Horn saw that resistance was futile and tried to capitulate by beating a drum for parley with his own hands. No one listened. Russian soldiers filled the streets, slaughtering men, women and children in a mindless torrent of violence. Two hours later, when Peter rode into Narva with Ogilvie, he found the streets slippery with blood and Swedish soldiers "butchered in heaps"; of a garrison of 4,500, only 1,800 were still alive. The Tsar ordered a trumpeter to ride through the town sounding the cease-fire in every street, but many Russians still would not stop. Angrily, Peter himself slashed down one Russian soldier who refused to obey orders. Stalking into the town hall to confront the frightened town councilors, Peter threw his bloody sword on the table before them and said disdainfully, "Do not be afraid. This is Russian, not Swedish blood." But the Tsar was furious with Horn. When the enemy commander, whose wife had been killed in the assault, was brought before him, Peter demanded to know why he had not surrendered according to the rules once the first bastion had been crumbled and thus prevented all this unnecessary slaughter.

The victory at Narva had great psychological as well as strategic importance. Not only did it secure St. Petersburg from the west, but it vindicated the Russian disgrace on the same site four years before. It proved that Peter's army was no longer merely a mass of half-trained peasants. Ogilvie said that he considered the infantry better than any German infantry, and told Charles Whitworth, the English minister, that "he never saw any nation go better to work with their cannon and mortars." Peter wrote happily about the victory to Augustus, to Romodanovsky and to Apraxin. Four months later, when the Tsar returned to Moscow, the streets reverberated to the tramp of another Russian victory parade. Peter passed under seven triumphal arches at the head of his troops, while fifty-four enemy battle flags and 160 Swedish officer prisoners followed in his train.

Peter's Baltic victories meant little to Charles. He fully expected that when the time came he would scatter Peter's army easily and retake all former Swedish territory now in Russian hands. Far more disturbing to him was the fact that his own victories in Poland had not yet proved politically decisive. Augustus continued unwilling to concede defeat and give up the Polish throne, and the Polish Diet was still not prepared to force him to this action. Instead of an end, the victory over Augustus at Klissow was only the beginning of years of warfare in Poland, with the Swedish-Saxon struggle seesawing back and forth across the immensity of the Polish plain. The huge country with its eight million inhabitants was simply too vast for the Swedish or the Saxon army, neither of which ever numbered much more than 20,000 men, to exercise control over more than that region in which it happened to be at the moment.

Despite the political frustrations for Charles, the years in Poland, 1702-1706, were a time of great military glory, of heroic exploits, of enhancing the legend. In the autumn of 1702, for example, following the Battle of Klissow, Charles with only 300 Swedes rode up to the gates of Cracow and, from his horse, shouted loudly, "Open the gate!" The commander of the garrison opened the gate slightly and stuck out his head to see who was shouting. Charles instantly struck him in the face with his riding crop, the Swedes behind him pushed open the gate and the cowed defenders surrendered without firing a shot.

Inevitably, the war in Poland was hard on the Poles. On entering the country, Charles had promised to demand only those contributions absolutely essential to his army, but he kept this promise for merely three months. After Polish troops fought with King Augustus at Klissow, Charles resolved to take revenge by seeing that the Swedish army was wholly supported by the land. From Cracow, the Swedes extracted 130,000 thalers, 10,000 pairs of shoes, 10,000 pounds of tobacco. 160,000 pounds of meat and 60,000 pounds of bread within three weeks. As the war dragged on, Charles' instructions to his generals became more implacable: "The Poles must either be annihilated or forced to join us."

Near Cracow, Charles suffered an accident that left him with a limp for the rest of his life. He was observing cavalry exercises when his horse stumbled over a tent rope and fell on top of its rider, breaking the King's left leg above the knee. The thigh bone did not set perfectly, and one leg became slightly shorter than the other. It was several months before the King could ride again, and when the army moved north from Cracow in October, Charles was carried on a stretcher.

Year after year, the battles and victories piled up, yet final victory never seemed closer. Meanwhile came news of other victories, Russian victories, along the Baltic: the siege and fall of Schliisselburg, the capture of the length of the Neva River, the founding of a new city and port on the Gulf of Finland, the destruction of the Swedish flotillas on Lake Ladoga and Lake Peipus, terrible devastation of the Swedish granary province of Livonia and the seizure of whole populations of Swedish subjects, the fall of Dorpat and Narva. This grim sequence was accompanied by a stream of desperate pleas from Charles' subjects: the despairing cries of the people of the Baltic provinces, the advice and pleas of the Swedish Parliament, the unanimous request of the army generals, even the appeal of his sister Hedwig Sophia. All begged the King to give up his campaign in Poland and march north to rescue the Baltic provinces. "For Sweden, these events have a much more important significance than who occupies the Polish throne," said Piper.

Charles' reaction was the same to everyone: "Even if I should have to remain here fifty years, 1 would not leave this country until Augustus is dethroned." "Believe that I would give Augustus peace immediately if I could trust his word," he said to Piper. "But as soon as peace is made and we are on our march toward Muscovy, he would accept Russian money and attack us in the back and then our task would be even more difficult than it is now."

In 1704, events in Poland began to turn in Charles' favor. He seized the fortress town of Thorn with 5,000 Saxon soldiers inside it. With Augustus greatly weakened, the Polish Diet accepted Charles' thesis that Poland would be a battlefield as long as Augustus remained on the Polish throne, and in February 1704 it formally deposed him. Charles' original candidate for the throne, James Sobieski, son of the famous Polish King Jan Sobieski, had foresightedly been kidnapped by Augustus' agents and imprisoned in a castle in Saxony, so Charles chose instead a twenty-seven-year-old Polish nobleman, Stanislaus Leszczynski, whose qualifications included a modest intelligence and a sturdy allegiance to King Charles XII.

Stanislaus' election was shamelessly rigged. A rump session of the Polish Diet was rounded up by Swedish soldiery and convened on July 2, 1704, in a field near Warsaw. During the proceedings, 100 Swedish soldiers were stationed at a musket shot's distance to "protect" the electors and "to teach them to speak the right language." Charles' candidate was proclaimed King Stanislaus I of Poland.

Now that Augustus was displaced—Charles' sole objective in invading Poland—Swedes and Poles alike hoped that the King would at last turn his attention toward Russia. But Charles was not ready to leave Poland. Because the Pope had opposed Stanislaus, threatening to excommunicate anyone who participated in the election of this protege1 of a Protestant monarch, and because so few of the great Polish magnates had been present at the election, the new king had at best a shaky grip on his realm. Charles resolved to remain at the side of his puppet monarch until Stanislaus was properly crowned. More than a year later, on September 24, 1705, Stanislaus was crowned in a manner which, like the Diet's proclamation of his election, provided arguments to those who said that his sovereignty was illegitimate. The new king was crowned not in Cracow, the traditional coronation site of Polish kings, but in Warsaw, because that was where Charles and his Swedish army were. The crown placed on Stanislaus' head was not the historic crown of Poland—still in the possession of Augustus, who had not accepted his dethronement—but a new one which, along with a new scepter and new regalia, had been paid for by Charles. The Swedish King was present at the ceremony incognito, so as not to detract from the attention to be paid his new ally. But the coronation of this puppet sovereign fooled no one. Stanislaus' wife, now Queen of Poland, felt so insecure in her husband's turbulent kingdom that she chose to live in Swedish Pomerania.

Nevertheless, with a new king friendly to Sweden on the Polish throne, Charles believed that he had achieved his second objective. Soon after the coronation, he and Stanislaus signed an anti-Russian alliance between Sweden and Poland. Then, as if to release his long-pent-up feelings about Russia and relieve the huge weight of guilt which had fallen on him for failing to heed his subjects' appeals, Charles suddenly struck. On December 29, 1705, the King broke his camp in the open fields near Warsaw and marched rapidly eastward over the frozen bogs and rivers toward Grodno, where Peter's main army was massed behind the River Neman. This lunge at Grodno was not the long-awaited Swedish invasion of Russia. Charles had not done the planning or assembled the equipment and provisions for an epic march to Moscow. Nor, with Augustus still in the field and unwilling to accept his own dethronement, was Poland completely secure at Charles' rear. Thus, Charles did not take the entire army with him; Rehnskjold was left behind with 10,000 men to watch the Saxons. But with the 20,000 men who marched behind him, Charles meant to provoke a winter battle. At long last, the Tsar was to see the glint of Swedish bayonets and his soldiers were to feel the bite of Swedish steel.

* * *

After the capture of Dorpat and Narva in the summer of 1704, Peter had spent the winter in Moscow and then gone to Voronezh in March to work in the shipyards. In May 1705, he set out to join the army, but was stricken by illness and recuperated for a month at Fedor Golovin's house. In June, he reached the army at Polotsk on the Dvina, where it could be moved into Livonia, Lithuania or Poland as events required—an army which was developing into a formidable fighting force. There were 40,000 infantrymen, properly uniformed and well equipped with muskets and grenades. The cavalry and dragoons, 20,000 strong, were plentifully equipped with muskets, pistols and swords. The artillery was standardized and numerous. Like the Swedes, the Russian army had developed a form of highly mobile gun firing a three-pound shell which would accompany infantry and cavalry to give immediate artillery support.

The problem with the army now was at the top, in the structure of command, where there was friction and jealousy between the Russian and foreign generals. The army's excellent training and overall discipline were due to Ogilvie who had taken command at the second siege of Narva and had been made the second field marshal (Sheremetev was the first) in the Russian army. Ogilvie's concern for the soldiers had made him popular with the men, but he was not well liked by the Russian officers; he did not speak Russian and was forced to deal with them through an interpreter. He had particular trouble with Sheremetev, Menshikov and Repnin. The last two were his subordinates and served under him, but Sheremetev, technically his equal in rank, was often offended. Peter, seeking a solution, first tried putting all the cavalry under Sheremetev and the infantry under Ogilvie. Sheremetev felt humiliated and complained to Peter. "I have received your letter," the Tsar replied, "and from it see how distressed you are, for which I am indeed sorry, because it is unnecessary; this was done not in any way to cause you humiliation, but to provide more effective organization. . . . However, because of your distress I have called a halt to this reorganization and ordered the old arrangement to stand until I arrive."

Peter next tried to solve the problem by splitting up the army, sending Sheremetev with eight regiments of dragoons and three of infantry—10,000 men in all—to operate in the Baltic region while Ogilvie remained in command of the main army in Lithuania. Only July 16, Sheremetev attacked Lewenhaupt, the commander of Swedish forces in Livonia, and the Russians were badly defeated. Peter wrote angrily to Sheremetev, blaming the defeat on the "inadequate training of the dragoons about which I have spoken many times." Three days later, remorseful for the harsh tone of his earlier letter, he wrote again to cheer Sheremetev up: "Do not be sad about the misfortune you have had, for constant success has brought many people to ruin. Forget it and try to encourage your men."

As it happened, just at this time came news of the trouble in Astrachan, and Sheremetev and his mounted regiment were dispatched a thousand miles across Russia to deal with the revolt. With the overall strength of the army thus weakened, Peter canceled further operations and ordered the main army into winter quarters at Grodno, on the east bank of the River Neman. Nothing was expected from Charles XII until spring.

Unfortunately, even with Sheremetev gone, the friction between Peter's generals continued. Nominally, Ogilvie, as field marshal, was commander-in-chief and Menshikov and Repnin were his subordinates. Although Menshikov already possessed a growing military reputation because of his successes on the Neva, it was not his military experience but his personal relationship to the Tsar which made him ostreperous and insubordinate. Because he was Peter's closest friend, he refused to accept the lesser military role. Often he invoked, his special relationship with the Tsar to overrule the more experienced Ogilvie, saying simply, "His Majesty would not like that. He would prefer to do it this way. I know that." Further, Menshikov arranged that all of Ogilvie's letters to the Tsar should pass through his hands. Some of these he simply pocketed, later explaining to Peter that the Field Marshal was reporting news which the Tsar already knew from Menshikov himself.

This command structure, already complicated, was further confused in November 1705 when Augustus joined the Russian army. The King-Elector's fortunes were at a low ebb. Poland was now completely occupied by the troops of Charles and the newly crowned Stanislaus, and the deposed Augustus had had to make his way by a lengthy circuitous route through Hungary, using a false name and a disguise. Nevertheless, Peter still considered him King of Poland and, in deference to this rank, granted him overall command of the army at Grodno. Ogilvie kept the senior military command. Menshikov commanded the cavalry, and both Repnin and Carl Evald Ronne, an experienced German cavalry officer, were present as subordinate commanders. It was a situation ripe for disaster.

Charles' march to the east was rapid. The distance from the Vistula to the Neman was 180 miles. Charles covered this ground over frozen roads and rivers in only two weeks and appeared with his vanguard before Grodno on January 15, 1706. The King crossed the river with 600 grenadiers, but, seeing that the fortress was too strong for a sudden assault, he turned and made a temporary camp four miles away. When the main Swedish army of 20,000 men arrived, Charles moved fifty miles above Grodno where he could find better provisions and forage. There he made a permanent camp, waiting to see what the Russians would do. As Charles saw it, either they could come out and fight or they could wait inside their fortress and eventually starve.

With Charles nearby, the Russian commanders held a council of war presided over by Augustus. There was no question of simply marching out to attack. Although they outnumbered the Swedes by almost two to one, Peter still was far from ready to risk his carefully constructed army even at these odds and had flatly forbidden Ogilvie to offer battle in the open field. Nevertheless, Ogilvie thought his force strong enough to remain and accept a siege, and this was the course he urged. The others disagreed: if the Swedes surrounded the fortress of Grodno, the army would be cut off from Russia and nullified as a protector of the Russian frontier; and although the fortifications were strong and the artillery numerous, they had not provisioned for a long siege. They urged retreat. Ogilvie was aghast, pointing to the size of the army and the superiority of the artillery. If they retreated, they would have to sacrifice the cannon, which could not be hauled without horses across the snow. They would leave the houses and barracks of a town for the bitter cold of open roads where many would perish. The Swedes would certainly pursue, and the field battle which Peter had forbidden would take place. Worse for Ogilvie would be the disgrace. A professional soldier commanding an army twice as strong as an enemy, he would abandon a strong fortress with a tremendous superiority in artillery. What would Europe say?

Augustus, caught between these opposing viewpoints and unwilling to take ultimate responsibility, dispatched an urgent messenger to Peter pleading for "an immediate, categoric and definite decision" from the Tsar. Before that decision could come, however, Augustus himself slipped out of Grodno. With Charles' departure from Warsaw, he glimpsed a chance to reoccupy the Polish capital. Taking four regiments of dragoons, he departed hastily, promising Ogilvie that he would return in three weeks bringing the entire Saxon army. Then, with a combined Russian-Polish-Saxon force of 60,000 men, they would deal with Charles' 20,000 Swedes.

Peter was in Moscow when he heard that Charles was moving toward Grodno. Skeptical of the reports, he wrote to Menshikov,

"From whom did you receive this news? And can it be believed? How many reports of this kind have we had in the past?" Nevertheless, he was uneasy and declared that he would set out from Moscow on January 24. He complained of the "indescribable cold" and that his "right cheek was badly swollen," and grumbled further that

I am mightily sorry to leave here because I am occupied with collecting taxes and other necessary things for the operations on the Volga. Therefore I beg you, if there is any change, to send someone to me, so that I may not drag myself along without reason (alas! I can scarcely do it). And if affairs do not change, I should like you to send me news every day, so that I can, if possible, hasten my journey.