520

The apprenticeship of Peter

[1689-95

One-half of his

earth foundations, with walls, ditches and bastions. band of lads would then defend "Preshpur" (Pressburg) as he called it, against the other half headed by Peter himself. About the same time, he learnt the rudiments of geometry and fortification from the Dutchman Franz Timmerman. In his fourteenth year, Peter began to take an absorbing interest in boats and ships, the final result of which was to be the creation of the Russian Navy. After preliminary experiments with small craft, he practised sailing on a larger scale at the Lake of Pereyaslavl, eighty miles from Preobrazhenskoe, where the German shipmaster Brandt built larger boats for the indefatigable young navigator. To wean him from these dangerous pursuits and accustom him to domesticity, his mother, in January, 1689, compelled him to marry Eudoxia Lopukhina. The match was most unfortunate. The tempers of the spouses were quite incompatible. The bride, brought up in the strict old school, though beautiful and pious, had no attraction for the young groom of seventeen. Three months after the wedding, Peterbroke away from her and returned to Pereyaslavl. The revolution of 1689, which overthrew Sophia and placed the government of Muscovy in the hands of Peter's kinsfolk, made no difference in his mode of life. Most probably at the beginning of 1690, he had found a new friend in the Swiss adventurer François Lefort, a reckless soldier of fortune, infinitely good-natured and amusing. We are told that "things impossible to describe" went on in the large hall, added at Peter's expense, to Lefort's house in the German settlement. But he was a shrewd as well as a pleasant scoundrel. For his own sake, he felt bound to divert Peter from mere amusement to serious enterprises which would place both the Tsar and his "jolly companions" in a more favourable light. It was this drunken, disreputable mentor who first persuaded Peter to undertake the expedition against Azoff, and then to go abroad to complete his education - in a word it was Lefort who put "Peter the bombardier ” in the way of becoming "Peter the Great."

By this time Peter had tired of the Lake of Pereyaslavl and even of the White Sea, which he had already visited twice, on the second occasion launching the first vessel built by "skipper Peter" which he christened St Paul (May, 1695). But the White Sea, frozen nine months out of the twelve, had become too narrow for him, and he was looking about him for more hospitable waters. All sorts of projects were forming in his head. At first he thought of seeking a passage to India or China by way of the Arctic Ocean. Next he turned his eyes in the direction of the Baltic; but the Baltic was closed to Muscovy, and the key to it was held by Sweden, still the strongest military monarchy of the North. The Caspian remained; and it had long been a common saying with foreign merchants that the best way of tapping the riches of the Orient was to secure possession of this vast inland lake. But, so long as Turk, Tartar, and Cossack nomads made the Volgan steppe

1695-6]

The Azoff expeditions

521

uninhabitable, the Caspian was a possession of very doubtful value. The first step towards security was to build a fleet strong enough to overawe those parts, for the anarchy of which the presence of the hordes of the Khan of Crimea was mainly responsible. But the Khan, to whom Muscovy actually paid tribute, was himself the tributary of the Grand Turk-it was therefore necessary for the Muscovite authorities to attack the Turks direct. War against the Ottoman Porte was therefore resolved upon; and, the experience of Vasili Galitsin, in 1687 and 1689, having demonstrated the unpromising character of a Crimean campaign, the Turkish fortress of Azoff, which could be approached by water from Moscow, became the Russian objective. Early in 1695 the army of the new order, and the Strieltzy, or arquebusiers, 31,000 strong, proceeded partly by land and partly by the rivers Moscova, Oka and Volga, to the Cossack town of Panshino on Don, reaching Azoff by the beginning of July. The bombardier regiment was led by "bombardier Peter." The Russian batteries were opened on July 19, bombardier Peter directing the guns himself for the first fortnight; but no impression could be made on the fortress.

In the beginning of J.O.

August, the Turks surprised the Muscovite camp during its mid-day siesta, captured five guns and ruined the Russian siege artillery. After two subsequent fruitless attempts to storm Azoff, the siege was abandoned (September 27), and on November 22 the young Tsar reentered Moscow.

Peter's first military expedition had ended in unmitigated disaster; yet from this disaster is to be dated the reign of "Peter the Great." Fully accepting his failure, he determined to repair it by a second campaign. On his return from Azoff we hear no more of revels in the German settlement, or of sham fights at Preobrazhenskoe. Immediately after his arrival, Peter sent to Austria and Prussia for as many engineers, sappers, miners, and carpenters as money could procure. He meant to build a fleet strong enough to prevent the Turkish fleet from relieving Azoff. A model galley was ordered from Holland. All the workmen procurable were driven together in bands to Voronezh and other places among the forests of the Don, to fell timber. In the course of the next few months, 26,000 labourers, working night and day, turned out hundreds of barks and smaller vessels. Difficulties multiplied at every step. Thousands of workmen deserted; other thousands dawdled on the road; many of them never appeared at all. Forest fires destroyed the shipping sheds; severe frosts at the end of March, heavy snowstorms in the beginning of April, were fresh impediments. Yet, by dint of working all through Lent and Holy Week, a fleet of two warships, twenty-three galleys, four fire-ships, and numerous smaller craft, were safely launched in the middle of April. "We have finished our task, because, like our father Adam, we ate our bread in the sweat of our brows," wrote Peter to his uncle, Peter Stryeshneff. His own portion of

522

Unpopularity of the novelties

[1696-7

this bread of labour had been eaten in a small two-roomed wooden hut at Voronezh, where he lived among his workmen, himself the most strenuous of them all.

On May 14, the "sea-caravan" sailed from Voronezh, Peter, now captain, and commanding eight galleys of the flotilla from the galley Principium, built by his own hand. Nor was all this labour in vain. The new Russian fleet prevented the Turks from relieving Azoff by water; and in the daily fighting, the advantage was always with the besiegers. On July 29 the fortress surrendered. Its capture was one of those triumphs which strongly appeal to the popular imagination. It was the first victory ever won by the Muscovites over the terrible Turks. On October 11 the Muscovite army made its triumphal entry into the capital. The procession was headed by Admiral Lefort and Generalissimo Shein; and behind their gilded sledges marched Captain Peter, with a pike across his shoulder.

Peter now felt able to advance along the path of progress with quicker and a firmer step. At two councils held on October 31 and November 15, 1696, it was resolved to consolidate the victory by converting Azoff into a fortress, by establishing a new naval station at the head of the Sea of Azoff, to which the name of Taganrog was given, and by building a national fleet under the supervision of foreign shipbuilders at the national expense. But it was necessary to guarantee the future as well as to provide for the present. It was therefore resolved to send a grand embassy to the principal Western Powers, to solicit their co-operation against the Turk. At the same council it was decided that fifty young Muscovites of the best families should be sent to England, Holland and Venice, to learn the arts and sciences of the West, especially shipbuilding, fortification, and foreign languages, so as to make Russia independent of foreigners in the future. The experiment had already been tried, on a smaller scale, by Tsar Boris Godunoff (1598-1605). It failed, because the young Muscovites refused to return from civilisation to barbarism. Peter proposed to obviate this by being the pioneer as well as the ruler of his people. He would, first of all, be a learner himself, that he might be able to teach his people afterwards. But Peter's ideas, just because they were so much in advance of his age, scandalised the respectable classes of Muscovy. Their sense of dignity was shocked by the spectacle of the Gosudar (“Sovereign”) walking behind the sledge of a drunken Swiss adventurer; and they disliked the notion of sending their sons abroad to learn new-fangled practices from foreign heretics. Amongst the Strieltzy too, we notice the first symptoms of discontent which, a year later, was to burst forth in open rebellion. All these causes together led (March 16, 1697) to a secret conspiracy against Peter's life. It was repressed with the ferocity of panic fear. Six of the ringleaders were executed. Under torture they had confessed that the Tsar's uncle, Ivan Milaslovski, had counselled Sophia to murder

P

1697-8]

The grand embassy to the west

523

Peter. Ivan was beyond Peter's vengeance; but his corpse was dug up, dragged by swine to the foot of the block at Preobrazhenskoe, and defiled by the warm blood of the decapitated traitors. This is the earliest instance of the would-be regenerator's frequent relapses into savagery, under the overpowering stress of terror or hatred.

On March 21, 1697, the grand embassy, under the leadership of Lefort and Golovin, set out on its travels. Peter attached himself to it as a volunteer sailor, "Peter Mikhailoff," so as to find greater facilities for learning shipbuilding and other technical sciences. The details of this adventure are so familiar, that there is no need to recapitulate them here. Though Peter completed his technical education in the dockyards of Deptford and Saardam, and so far was the gainer by his expedition, the embassy itself failed, as it was bound to fail, in its main object of obtaining the help of the Western Powers against the Turk. All Europe, divided into two hostile camps, was anxiously awaiting the death of the childless Charles II of Spain; and neither France nor the Grand Alliance pitted against her by William III was willing to plunge into the distant eastern War, with an armed conflict as to the Spanish Succession at their very doors. So far, indeed, were the allies from intervening in the Turkish War, that it was their earnest desire to bring about a peace between the Emperor and the Porte, in order that the forces of the Empire might be exclusively employed against France. For the same reason, the prospect of the prolongation of the Russo-Turkish War was by no means disagreeable to England and Holland, as thereby the Porte would be prevented from giving assistance to Louis XIV.

Peter was about to go on to Venice to persuade the Seigniory to cleave firmly to the fast dissolving Holy League, when he was suddenly recalled to Russia by tidings of the revolt of the Strieltzy. Analysed into its ultimate elements, the dissatisfaction of the Strieltzy with Peter's administration was the protest of indolent, incapable, ultraorthodox, and excessively privileged troops against a new system which demanded from them more work and greater efficiency. When then, on June 6, 1698, a letter, supposed to have been written by the Tsarevna Sophia, urging them to join her in force at the Dyevichesky monastery, was read to them, the Strieltzy, 2200 strong, resolved to march forthwith against Moscow, and to begin by destroying the German settlement there as the source of the new heretical ideas and projects. The importance of this rising has been much exaggerated. Three volleys from Peter's foreign mercenaries under Shein and Patrick Gordon sufficed to scatter the Strieltzy on the banks of the Iskra (June 17, 1698). In an hour's time all the rebels were in the hands of the Tsar's troops, of whom only one man was mortally wounded. It was only after the battle that the carnage began. Peter had ordered the authorities to deal "severely" with the rebels, as nothing but "severity" could extinguish this fire.

524

The abolition of the beards

[1698

In Muscovy "severity" meant cruel severity; "severe" capital punishment pronounced against rebels meant breaking on the wheel, or impalement. Peter himself arrived secretly at Moscow on August 26, and, after spending a riotous evening at Lefort's house in the German settlement, had slept in his little wooden hut at Preobrazhenskoe. That very night he had determined to drown all contradictions in torrents of blood. The new era of enlightenment was to be inaugurated by a reign of

terror.

Peter was well aware that behind the Strieltzy stood the sympa thising masses of the Muscovite people, whom it was his mission to reform against their will. His foreign tour had more than ever convinced him of the inherent superiority of the foreigner; and, this superiority once admitted, imitation of the foreigner was, to his mind, inevitable. Any such imitation had, necessarily, to begin with externals; and Peter, with characteristic insight and thoroughness, at once fell foul of the long beards and Oriental costumes which symbolised the archconservatism of Old Russia. Other enlightened Princes, Boris, Theodore III, and the first pseudo-Demetrius for instance, had, in some respects, anticipated him. But all their more or less tentative efforts had foundered against the tyranny of ancient custom, and the strong opposition of the clergy. The famous protopope Avvakum had refused to bless the son of the boiar Sheremetieff, because he presented himself in indecent guise-in other words with a shorn head, after the Polish fashion. Beardless officials had small chance of promotion. More than one Patriarch had excommunicated members of their flocks who shaved. Against this powerful superstition Peter struck with all his might on the day after his return. On August 27, 1698, the chief men of the Tsardom were assembled round his wooden hut at Preobrazhenskoe; and Peter, emerging with a large pair of shears in his hand, deliberately clipped off the beards and moustaches of his chief boiars. After thus vindicating the claims of common-sense, he prudently condescended to a compromise. He decreed that after September 1 (the Old Russian New Year's Day), 1698, beards might still be worn, but a graduated tax was imposed upon their wearers. Thus the beard ceased to be an object of worship in Muscovy; but the people were not provoked too far, and a new source of revenue had been found for the Treasury.

And now, without giving the reactionaries time to recover from this rude shock, the Tsar proceeded to horrify them by a strange and awful series of bacchanalia. From the middle of September to the end of October, 1698, banquets and orgies alternated with torturings and executions, in which the Tsar and his favourites played the parts of inquisitors and headsmen. During these six weeks, no fewer than a thousand of the captive Strieltzy were done to death with every refinement of cruelty. At the same time, Peter seized his opportunity of breaking definitely with the past. The death of his half-brother Ivan V, in 1696, had left