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Oct 31, 1998, 3:00:00 AM10/31/98

New York Times

CHAPTER ONE

Russia in the Age of Peter the Great

By LINDSEY HUGHES
Yale University Press

Read the Review

Beginnings

I. RUSSIA IN 1672

Russian Bethlehem, Kolomenskoe,
You delivered Peter to the light!
You the start and source of all our joy,
Where Russia's greatness first burned clear and bright.

Peter Alekseevich Romanov was born in or near Moscow at around
one
in the morning on Thursday 30 May 1672. A patron saint's
`measuring'
icon of the apostle Peter made shortly after his birth showed
the infant to
be nineteen and a quarter inches long. The future emperor's
exceptional
height was clearly prefigured, but the time and place of his
birth, like much
else in his life, have been the subject of controversy. For
want of concrete
evidence locating it elsewhere, the event may be placed in the
Kremlin in
Moscow, but legends persist, as in the verse by the poet
Sumarokov
above, that Peter was born in the village of Kolomenskoe to
the south of
Moscow, where his father had built a wooden palace, or even in

Preobrazhenskoe, which later became Peter's favourite retreat
and the
base for his new guards regiments, formed from the `play'
troops of his
boyhood. As for the date, most sources accept 30 May, as did
Peter
himself by honouring St Isaac of Dalmatia, whose feast falls
on that day.
But at least one record gives 29 May, following the old
Russian practice
of starting the new day not at midnight but at dawn.4 In those
countries
which had adopted the Gregorian calendar (which Russia did
only in
1918) the date was ten days ahead of those which still
followed the older,
Julian calendar, and 30 May fell on 9 June. Contemporary
Russian
chroniclers (using not arabic numerals but Cyrillic letters
with numerical
equivalents) recorded the year of Peter's birth as not 1672
but 7180,
following the Byzantine practice of numbering years from the
notional
creation of the world in 5509 BC. The year 7181 began on 1
September
1672, which, following the usage of Constantinople, marked the
start of
the Muscovite new year.

These peculiarities of time and record keeping provide a
foretaste of
the different customs observed in the Russia where Peter was
born and
the West into which he was later to forge a `window'. On the
eve of the
new century, in December 1699, Peter himself decreed that
official
records would henceforth adopt calendar years from the birth
of Christ in
the manner of `many European Christian nations'. When he died
on 28
January 1725, there were no arguments about how the date
should be
recorded. It is appropriate that questions of time and
chronology should
arise at the outset of Peter's life, for he was to be obsessed
with time and
its passing, believing that `wasted time, like death, cannot
be reversed'.
Traditionalists denounced the tsar for tampering with `God's
time' by
changing the calendar. There were even rumours that the Peter
who was
to adopt the title `emperor' in 1721 was not the Peter who had
been born
in 1672. We shall return to these matters later, but let us
take a closer
look at the Russia into which Peter was born.

Peter's parents had been married for less than eighteen
months when he
arrived. On 22 January 1671 nineteen-year-old Natalia
Kirillovna
Naryshkina married forty-two-year-old Tsar Alexis (Aleksei)
Mikhailovich, whose first wife Maria Miloslavskaia had died in
1669 at
the age of forty-three after giving birth to her thirteenth
child, a girl who
did not survive. Given a more robust set of male
half-siblings, Peter might
never have come to the throne at all. His father's first
marriage produced
five sons, but in 1672 only two were still alive. The heir
apparent, Fedor,
born in 1661, had delicate health, while Ivan, born in 1666,
was mentally
and physically handicapped. There were six surviving
half-sisters:
Evdokia, Marfa, Sophia, Ekaterina, Maria, and Feodosia,
ranging in age
from twenty-two to ten. They were not regarded as direct
contenders for
power: no woman had ever occupied the Muscovite throne in her
own
right, and the policy of keeping the royal princesses
unmarried minimized
the complications of power-seeking in-laws and inconvenient
offspring
through the female line. The practice of keeping well-born
women in
virtual seclusion also meant that they were unknown to the
public.

When Tsar Alexis died at the age of forty-seven in January
1676,
Fedor succeeded him without the formal appointment of a
regent, even
though he was only fourteen. (Rumours of attempts to place
three-year-old Peter on the throne in his stead may be
discounted.) Twice
in the next six years Peter narrowly escaped being pushed
further down
the ladder of succession. Fedor's first wife, Agafia
Grushetskaia, and her
newborn son Il'ia died in July 1681. His second wife, Marfa
Matveevna
Apraksina, was left a widow after only two months of marriage,
by
Fedor's death in April 1682. Rumours that she might be
pregnant proved
unfounded. But this is to leap ahead. In 1672 there was every
prospect of
Tsar Alexis continuing to rule for many years, and a fair
chance, given
infant mortality rates, that Peter would not survive for long.
Modern
readers will treat with scepticism the intriguing story
recorded by one of
Peter's early biographers to the effect that the royal tutor
and court poet
Simeon Polotsky predicted Peter's rule and future greatness by
the stars
on the supposed day of his conception, 11 August 1671.

Many pages of print have been devoted to Peter's childhood
and
adolescence. His first two decades will be considered here
only briefly, in
order to give a context for the changes which he later forced
upon
Russia--the main subject of this book. I will begin by
dispelling a few
misconceptions, such as that Peter's early environment was
closed and
stultifying, dominated solely by Orthodox ritual and concepts.
In fact,
seventeenth-century Romanov childrearing practices did not
exclude
`modern' elements. For example, Peter's interest in military
affairs was
stimulated in the nursery, where he, like his elder brothers
before him,
played with toy soldiers, cannon, bows and arrows, and drums.
Military
affairs were the right and proper concern of a tsar almost
from the cradle.
His father had gone to war with his troops, as Peter was well
aware and
was proud to recall in later life. On the other hand, Peter's
prowess as a
soldier, virtually from the cradle (a contemporary compared
him to the
young Hercules, who strangled serpents), has been greatly
exaggerated.
The myth that Peter was already a cadet at the age of three
has been
refuted: in fact, at that age, Peter still had a wet-nurse.
Toy weapons were
supplemented by spades, hammers, and masons' tools, which no
doubt
fostered Peter's love of mechanical crafts. The fiercest of
Peter's boyhood
passions--his love of ships and the sea--is at first sight
harder to explain.
Why should a boy raised in a virtually land-locked country
with no
tradition of seafaring have developed such a passion? It is
even said that
as a boy Peter had a dread of water. But Russia's naval
inexperience
should not be exaggerated. Most major Russian towns were
situated on
rivers, which small craft plied. Russians may not have been
expert sailors
on the high seas, but they knew how to navigate inland waters,
and
Russian peasant navigators had long sailed the northern
coastline. Peter
did not see the open sea until he was twenty-one, but there
was no lack
of stimuli to the imagination closer to hand: toy boats, maps
and
engravings, and, what he himself identified as the spark which
lit the flame,
the old English sailing dinghy, the `grandfather of the
Russian fleet', which
he discovered in the outhouse of a country estate. The fact
that it should
have found its way to Moscow is not so surprising when one
considers
that English sea-going vessels had been docking on the White
Sea since
the 1550s, and that Tsar Alexis had commissioned Dutch
shipwrights to
build a small fleet on the Caspian Sea in the 1660s.

In some respects, however, Peter's introduction to the
wider world
actually lagged behind that of his half-siblings. His brothers
Fedor and
Alexis (who died in 1670), and even his half-sister Sophia,
were taught by
the Polish-educated monk Simeon Polotsky, who gave instruction
in
Latin, Polish, versification, and other elements of the
classical syllabus.
Polotsky died in 1680, before he had the chance, had it been
offered, to
tutor Peter. His protege, Silvester Medvedev, was at daggers
drawn with
the conservative patriarch, Joachim, who, as adviser to
Peter's mother,
would scarcely have recommended a suspect `Latinizer' as the
tsarevich's
tutor. Peter thus received indifferent tuition from Russians
seconded from
government chancelleries; they included Nikita Zotov and
Afanasy
Nesterov, an official in the Armoury, whose names first appear
in records
as teachers round about 1683. Not only did Peter's education
lack
scholarly content; it also seems to have been deficient in
basic discipline.
His prose style, spelling, and handwriting bore signs of lax
methods for the
rest of his life. It should be added that there was no
question of Peter
receiving his education from a Muscovite university graduate
or even from
the product of a local grammar school or its equivalent. There
were no
universities in Muscovite Russia and no public schools, apart
from some
training establishments for chancellery staff in the Kremlin.
In fact, clerks
(d'iaki and pod'iachie) and clerics were the only two orders
of
Muscovite society who were normally literate, many parish
priests being
only barely so.

The inadequacies of Peter's primary education were later
offset by
practical skills learned from foreigners, whom he was able to
encounter in
Moscow thanks to the policies of his predecessors.
Foreigner-specialists
first started arriving in Muscovy in significant numbers
during the reign of
Ivan IV (1533-84). Their numbers increased when Peter's
grandfather,
Tsar Michael (1613-45), reorganized certain Russian infantry
regiments
along foreign lines. In 1652 Tsar Alexis set aside a separate
area of
Moscow called the `New Foreign' or `German' Quarter to
accommodate
military, commercial, and diplomatic personnel. It was here
that Peter
encountered officers such as Patrick Gordon, Franz Lefort, and
Franz
Timmerman, his teachers and companions in the 1680s and 1690s.

Residents of the Foreign Quarter also made their mark on
Russian elite
culture. From the 1650s several foreign painters were employed
in the
royal Armoury workshops. Alexis is the first Russian ruler of
whom we
have a reliable likeness, his daughter Sophia the first
Russian woman to be
the subject of secular portraiture. It was the Foreign Quarter
which in
1672 supplied the director and actors for Russia's first
theatrical
performance. Unlike portraiture, however, which quickly became
more
widespread, theatricals were discontinued after Alexis's
death. During
Sophia's regency (1682-9) Huguenots were offered sanctuary in
Russia,
Jesuits were admitted to serve Moscow's foreign Catholic
parish, and
invitations were issued to foreign industrialists and
craftsmen. In the 1670s
and 1680s foreigners were no longer a rarity on the streets of
Moscow,
and were also well represented in commercial towns on the
route from the
White Sea port of Archangel.

Of course, Moscow was not the whole of Russia, any more
than a few
relatively outward-looking individuals in the Kremlin were
representative
of Moscow society as a whole. Most Muscovites, from the
conservative
boyars who rubbed shoulders with them to the peasants who
rarely
encountered one, regarded foreigners as dangerous heretics,
and viewed
foreign `novelties' and fashions with intense suspicion and
even terror.
During the reign of Peter's immediate predecessors, foreigners
were still in
Russia on sufferance, tolerated as a necessary evil. The
building of the
new Foreign Quarter in 1652 was actually an attempt to
concentrate
foreigners and their churches in a restricted locality, away
from the city
centre, where they had lived previously. Patriarch Joachim
urged that
mercenaries, the most indispensable of foreign personnel, be
expelled,
and non-Orthodox churches demolished. Russian culture was
prevented
from falling further under foreign influence by strict
controls. For example,
publishing and printing remained firmly in the hands of the
Church. It is a
striking statistic that in the whole of the seventeenth
century fewer than ten
secular titles came off Muscovite presses, which were devoted
mainly to
the production of liturgical and devotional texts. There were
no Russian
printed news-sheets, journals or almanacs; no plays, poetry or
philosophy
in print, although this lack was partly compensated by popular
literature in
manuscript, a flourishing oral tradition, news-sheets from
abroad (albeit
restricted to the use of personnel in the Foreign Office), and
foreign
books in the libraries of a few leading nobles and clerics.
Presses in Kiev,
Chernigov, Vilna, and other centres of Orthodoxy supplemented
the
meagre output of Moscow printers. Russians were still clearly
differentiated from Western Europeans by their dress, although
a number
were tempted by Polish influence to don Western fashions in
private.
According to Tsar Alexis's decree of 1675, `Courtiers are
forbidden to
adopt foreign, German (inozemskikh i nemetskikh) and other
customs,
to cut the hair on their heads and to wear robes, tunics and
hats of foreign
design, and they are to forbid their servants to do so.'

The `courtiers' to whom this warning was addressed formed
the upper
echelons of Russia's service class. Sometimes loosely referred
to as
`boyars', roughly the equivalent of the Western aristocracy,
they belonged
to noble clans residing in and around Moscow. The upper crust
were the
`men of the council' (dumnye liudi), the so-called boyar duma,
which in
the seventeenth century varied in number from 28 to 153
members. Those
in the top rank were the boyars proper (boiare), next the
`lords in
waiting' (okol'nichie), followed by a smaller group dubbed
`gentlemen of
the council' (dumnye dvoriane), and a handful of `clerks of
the council'
(dumnye d'iaki). All enjoyed the privilege of attending and
advising the
tsar. Membership of the two top groups was largely hereditary.
Unless
there were contrary indicators (e.g., serious incapacity or
disgrace) men
from leading families generally became boyars in order of
seniority within
their clan. Their numbers were swelled by royal in-laws
(marrying a
daughter to the tsar or one of his sons usually boosted a
family's fortunes)
and by a handful of men of lower status who were raised by
royal favour.
The council's participation in decision making is indicated by
the formula
for ratifying edicts: `the tsar has decreed and the boyars
have affirmed'
(tsar' ukazal i boiare prigovorili). Nobles immediately below
the `men
of the council' (often younger aspirants to the grade) bore
the title `table
attendant' (stol'nik), a reference to duties which they had
once performed
and in some cases still did. Below them were `attendants'
(striapchie),
Moscow nobles (dvoriane moskovskie), and `junior attendants'
(zhil'tsy). In peacetime Moscow nobles performed a variety of
chancellery and ceremonial duties. In wartime they went on
campaign as
cavalry officers. On duty, be it military or civil, they bore
their court ranks:
boiarin, okol'nichii, stol'nik and so on; there was no
differentiation by
office.

In 1672 commissions, appointments, and other placings,
such as
seating at important banquets, were still in theory governed
by the code of
precedence, or `place' system (mestnichestvo), which
determined an
individual's position in the hierarchy of command by
calculations based on
his own and his clan's service record and his seniority within
his clan. It
was considered a great dishonour to be placed below someone
who,
regardless of ability, was deemed to merit a lower `place'.
Such an insult
gave grounds for an appeal to the tsar. Increasingly,
mestnichestvo was
suspended in order to allow the Crown a freer hand in
appointing officers.
For some campaigns it was ordered that military rolls be drawn
up
`without places' (bez mest).

With the exception of members of the elite sent to serve
as provincial
governors (voevody), outside Moscow the ruler relied on a
larger group
of the `middle servicemen', provincial gentry (gorodovye
dvoriane), and
`junior servicemen' (deti boairskie, literally and
misleadingly `children of
boyars') to perform policing duties and swell the ranks of the
army in
wartime. All the categories described above, it should be
repeated, were
counted among the elite and enjoyed certain privileges, the
first of which
was exemption from tax and labour burdens (tiaglo). The second
was the
right to land and serfs. Most of the Moscow elite owned both
inherited
estates (votchiny) and service lands (pomest'ia), the latter,
in theory,
granted and held on condition of service, but increasingly
passed from
generation to generation. The peasants living on both votchina
and
pomest'e holdings were serfs, the property of their landlords,
who could
freely exploit their labour (in the form of agricultural work
and other
duties) and collect dues (in money and kind). It should be
noted,
however, that nobles were not automatically supplied with
serfs. Some of
the top families owned tens of thousands of peasants
distributed over
dozens of estates, whereas many in the provincial deti
boiarskie category
owned only one or two peasant households, and in some cases
worked
their own plots. The Muscovite Crown also deployed non-noble
servicemen (sluzhilye liudi po priboru). Men in this category
were
subject to a service, not a tax requirement, but they could
not own serfs.
They included the strel'tsy (`musketeers'), who formed army
units in
wartime and did escort and guard duty in peacetime, carrying
on small
businesses and trades when off duty; artillerymen (pushkari),
and postal
drivers (iamshchiki). Civilian personnel in the non-noble
service category
included secretaries and clerks (d'iaki, pod'iachie), the
backbone
personnel of the government chancelleries.

Most of the non-noble residents of Russia's towns were
bound to their
communities by tax obligations, apart from a handful of chief
merchants
(gosti), who dealt in foreign trade. Including merchants of
the second and
third grades (gostinnye and sukonnye sotni) and the mass of
clerks,
artisans, and traders, or `men of the posad' (posadskie
liudi), the total
registered male urban population in the 1670s has been
estimated at
185,000. In addition, substantial numbers of peasants resided
temporarily
in towns, which also had shifting populations of foreigners
and vagrants,
but lacked many of the native professional
categories--bankers, scholars,
scientists, doctors, schoolteachers, lawyers, and actors--to
be found in
most contemporary Western European towns of any size.

If townspeople were less numerous and played a less
prominent role in
Muscovy than they did in Western European countries, the
opposite was
probably true of church personnel. The Russian clerical estate
was
divided into `white' (secular) and `black' (monastic) clergy,
the former
group, consisting of parish priests and deacons, who were
obliged to
marry. The prelates--the patriarch, metropolitans, bishops,
and abbots of
monasteries--were drawn from the celibate black clergy, who
also
formed the monastic rank and file. The ecclesiastical estate
enjoyed
considerable privileges. Apart from the royal family and the
nobles, only
they could own serfs (although, strictly speaking, peasants
were attached
to monasteries and churches, not individuals). They were
exempt from
taxation. They had access to church courts. But the rural
clergy, like the
lesser rural gentry, were often barely differentiated in
wealth and
education from the mass of the population.

This brings us to the masses themselves: rural dwellers
engaged in
working the land--pashennye liudi. Roughly 50 per cent were
serfs or
bonded peasants, living on lands owned by the royal family
(dvortsovye),
nobles (pomeshchichie), or the Church (tserkovnye). The rest
were
`State' peasants (gosudarsvennye), not bound to any one
landlord, but
obliged to pay taxes to the State and perform labour duties as

required--for example, by providing transport and carrying out
forestry
and road work. All were eligible for military service, which
freed them
from obligations to their former owners. Another group of
`unfree'
persons were slaves, who entered into contracts of bondage
with richer
people (usually, but not invariably, nobles) in return for
loans and support.
It has been calculated that as much as 10 per cent of the
population may
have fallen into this category.

Thus, in 1672, it was possible to divide the great
majority of people in
Muscovy into those who performed service (sluzhilye liudi),
those who
paid taxes (tiaglye liudi), and those who served the Church
(tserkovnye
liudi). They included the tsar's non-Russian subjects: various
tribespeople
who rendered taxes in the form of tribute (iasak, often in
furs) or did
occasional military service. Some of the tsar's subjects fell
outside these
estates: these included socalled wandering people (guliashchie
liudi)
unattached to any locality or category, who were either
incapable of
performing service or paying taxes--for example, cripples and
`fools in
Christ'--or who wilfully escaped obligations--runaway serfs,
deserters,
and religious dissidents, of which the biggest category were
the Old
Believers, protesters against Nikon's church reform of the
1650s. A
number set up communities in remote localities out of reach of
the
government. Cossack communities, consisting originally of
refugees from
the long arm of government, maintained a variety of links with
Moscow,
being either bound in service, like the registered Cossacks of
Ukraine,
intermittently loyal, like the Cossacks of the Don, or
persistently hostile,
like the Host of the Zaporozhian Sich.

This, then, was the Russia into which Peter was born, a
country, on the
one hand, deeply rooted in tradition and in many ways very
distinct from
Western Europe, where Russia was still regarded as a `rude and

barbarous' kingdom, on the other, increasingly open to the
influence of
Western people and ideas. In the year 1672 the birth of a
Russian prince
went more or less unnoticed in the rest of Europe, of which
Russia was at
best a fringe member. There would have been scarcely any
speculation
about the new prince's eligibility as a marriage partner,
since the
Muscovite royal family was known to be uninterested in such
foreign
involvements, although this had not always been the case. The
concept of
the European community as `a single, integral system of
mutually
interdependent states', which came into being after the 1648
Treaty of
Westphalia, rested on a Protestant-Catholic balance of power
in which
Orthodox countries barely figured. But Russia was poised to
play an
increasingly active role in world affairs. In the reign of
Alexis, during the
socalled First Northern War (1654-60), it entered the wider
sphere of
international relations when it was pitted against its old
enemies Poland
and Sweden. War with Poland began in 1654, as a result of
Moscow's
provocative acceptance of the allegiance of Ukrainian (Little
Russian)
Cossacks under their leader Bogdan Khmel'nitsky, who were
formerly
Polish subjects, and ended in 1667 to Russia's advantage, with
Left Bank
Ukraine (to the east of the River Dnieper) and Kiev brought
under the
tsar's rule. But there was no progress during the shorter
conflict of
1656-61 with Sweden, which had blocked the way to the Baltic
since the
1617 Treaty of Stolbovo removed Moscow's narrow foothold on
that
sea. At the time Sweden's King Gustav Adolph boasted that
Russia could
not even launch a rowing boat on to the sea without Sweden's
permission.
When Peter was born, Russia's only seaport was Archangel, on
the White
Sea. In the south, Russia and Poland vied for possession and
domination
of the steppes with the Turks and the Crimean Tatars, who
barred Russia
from the Black Sea. Direct conflict was usually with the
Tatars, who
exacted a heavy toll of prisoners and livestock, as well as
demanding and
receiving annual tribute, known as `gifts'. In 1672 the Turks
and the
Tatars seized parts of Polish (Right Bank) Ukraine, and
threatened
incursions across the Dnieper into Muscovite territory. It was
this crisis
which prompted Tsar Alexis to send envoys all over Europe
seeking aid
for an anti-Turkish league. In 1676 his son Fedor found
himself at war
with the Turks and the Tatars. After losing the fort at
Chigirin on the
Dnieper, and fearing a Turkish attack on Kiev, Moscow made an
uneasy
twenty-year truce with the Tatars at Bakhchisarai, in January
1681.

II. SOPHIA: THE 1680s

On 27 April 1682 Fedor died childless. The same day, Peter, a
month
short of his tenth birthday, was declared tsar, on the grounds
that his elder
half-brother Ivan was `weak-minded'. Matters might have rested
there.
Ivan's afflictions evidently precluded him from taking an
active role in civil
or military affairs. There was no written law of succession to
rule out the
accession of a younger brother under these circumstances.
Observance of
primogeniture was a matter of custom rather than constitution.
Peter's
accession had the support of the patriarch, who intervened in
such matters
in the absence of mature royal males. But Peter's maternal
relatives, the
Naryshkins, and their hangers-on, who could expect to enjoy
considerable power in Peter's minority and to retain key
government
posts when he came of age, had not reckoned on a lethal
combination of
unrest among Moscow's armed guard, the strel'tsy, and the fury
of the
affronted Miloslavskys, kinsmen of Tsar Alexis's first wife,
led by Ivan's
sister Sophia, that `ambitious and power-hungry princess', as
a
contemporary described her.

The Miloslavskys succeeded in harnessing the strel'tsy,
who were
ultrasensitive to rumours of abuses in high places as a result
of a series of
disputes over management, pay, and conditions dating from
Fedor's reign.
After two weeks of negotiations, during which the new
Naryshkin
government made concessions, to the extent of handing over
unpopular
officers to strel'tsy mobs, a rumour that Tsarevich Ivan had
been strangled
by his `ill-wishers' brought rebel regiments to the Kremlin.
There on
15-17 May, the strel'tsy settled personal grudges by
butchering
commanding officers and unpopular officials, and, at the
instigation of the
Naryshkins' rivals, singled out members of the Naryshkin clan
and their
associates as `traitors', and slaughtered them. The victims
included Peter's
uncle, Ivan Naryshkin (who was accused of trying on the
crown), and his
mother's guardian, the former foreign minister Artamon
Matveev, who
was accused of plotting to murder Ivan. In all, about forty
persons fell
victim to axe and pike. The role in all this of Sophia,
Peter's
twenty-five-year-old half-sister, has been widely debated.
Although there
is little hard evidence that she had the `Machiavellian'
tendencies
attributed to her by some writers, still less that she plotted
to kill Peter and
his mother (who remained unharmed, despite being the easiest
of targets),
the events of April-May 1682 undoubtedly allowed her to
champion the
legitimate claim to the throne of her brother Ivan and to
emerge as regent
over a joint tsardom, with Ivan as senior tsar and Peter as
junior.

No attempt will be made here to chart the further
outbreaks of strel'tsy
unrest after the dynastic question had apparently been
settled, or to
examine the role of Prince Ivan Khovansky in the events of
May-September 1682, sometimes referred to as the
`Khovanshchina',
which were complicated by the activities of Old Believers, who
enjoyed
some support from the strel'tsy. We shall be concerned only
with those
events and features of Sophia's regency which had relevance
for Peter's
future policies and reforms. The most immediate consequence of
the
seven-year regency on Peter's own circumstances was that he
was by and
large relieved of ceremonial duties, which Sophia was happy to
have
performed at first by Ivan, who was thus given a prominent,
active role in
the public eye, and later by herself. It is difficult to
overestimate the
significance of these seven years for Peter's development.
They may be
regarded as a sort of `sabbatical' from the routine burdens of
rulership,
which allowed him to pursue his own interests (military games
and sailing)
and to build up a circle of friends and assistants at a slight
distance from
traditional clan networks. Members of the boyar elite
predominated in
Peter's circle, but foreigners and men of lower rank appeared
in greater
numbers than in the past. Ivan's role as Orthodox figure-head
meant that
Peter had less contact with the church hierarchy. It should be
emphasized
that Peter was neither banished nor persecuted. As for the
charge that
Sophia `stifled Peter's natural light', rather the opposite
was true, although
some contemporaries believed that lax supervision and too much
contact
with foreigners and `low' types ruined the tsar's character.
On occasion he
was still required to do ceremonial duty--for example, at
ambassadorial
receptions and important family anniversaries--but by and
large his being
out of Moscow suited him as much as it did Sophia. If it had
one
unfortunate effect, it is that it further alienated Peter from
Sophia's chief
minister and reputed lover, Prince Vasily Vasil'evich Golitsyn

(1643-1714), a man with the sort of talent and vision that
Peter could
have used, had not hostility towards his sister made it
impossible later to
employ someone so close to her. Under Golitsyn's direction,
the Foreign
Office pursued policies which provided both foundations and
lessons for
Peter's future programme. The major achievement was the 1686
treaty of
permanent peace with Poland, which ratified the secession of
Kiev and its
Right Bank hinterland to Moscow (which had been in dispute
since the
1667 Treaty of Andrusovo), and Russian rule over Smolensk,
Dorogobuzh, Roslavl', and Zaporozh'e. In return, Russia was to
pay the
Poles 146,000 roubles indemnity `out of friendship', to sever
relations
with Turkey and Crimea `on account of the many wrongs
committed by
the Muslims, in the name of Christianity and to save many
Christians held
in servitude', and to wage war on Crimea. Other clauses
included a ban
on the persecution of Orthodox Christians in Poland by
Catholics and
Uniates (thus allowing the tsar a pretext for intervention),
permission for
Catholics in Russia to hold divine worship (but only in
private houses),
recognition of royal titles, encouragement of trade, and a
pledge to seek
the aid of `other Christian monarchs'. Russian suspicion of
Catholics was
exploited by Prussian envoys in Moscow, who induced Golitsyn
and
Sophia to offer sanctuary to Protestant exiles from France. In
1689
commercial treaties were signed allowing Prussia trading
rights in
Archangel, Smolensk, and Pskov, thereby laying the foundations
for
future Russo-Prussian co-operation during the 1710s.

Thus Russia joined the Holy League against the Turks,
formed in 1684
with papal backing, between Austria and Poland, both of which
had lands
bordering on the Ottoman Empire, and Venice, Russia's rival at
sea,
following the relief of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
Russian
ambassadors were dispatched all over Europe with appeals for
assistance
and closer alliance--to Holland, England, Sweden, Denmark,
Prussia,
France, Spain, Florence, Austria, and Venice. In 1687 and 1689
Vasily
Golitsyn led huge armies south to Crimea. On both occasions
logistical
problems forced the Russian armies to withdraw, on the second
occasion
with huge losses of men and horses, from thirst and epidemics.
Golitsyn's
return to Moscow in the summer of 1689, where he was feted as
a hero
on Sophia's instructions, gave his opponents an opportunity to
undermine
both him and Sophia, whose public appearances Peter (prompted
by his
maternal relatives) had begun to criticize. Peter was well
into his majority
(Fedor, it will be recalled, was tsar without a regent at the
age of
fourteen); he was married (in January 1689), and his wife,
Evdokia
Lopukhina, was pregnant; he had troops at his disposal,
notably his own
`play' regiments and foreign officers; and he had the support
of the
patriarch. In fact, Sophia's rule was doomed from the start,
because it
could be perpetuated indefinitely only by disposing of Peter.
This she
seems never seriously to have contemplated, despite ample
opportunities.
Even the crisis of August 1689, when Peter believed that the
strel'tsy
were coming to kill him and fled to the Trinity monastery, may
have been
engineered by Peter's own supporters in order to force a
confrontation
between Peter and Sophia which they knew she was unlikely to
win,
given dissatisfaction with the Crimean campaigns, and which
Peter, too
wrapped up in his own interests, could not be relied upon to
precipitate.
August-September saw a stand-off between Sophia and her
fast-dwindling forces in the Kremlin and Peter's supporters,
massed at the
Trinity-St Sergius monastery. The brief clash ended in late
September,
when Vasily Golitsyn was exiled to the north of Russia, and
Sophia was
locked up in the Novodevichy convent, were she remained until
her death
in 1704.

For the rest of his life Peter associated Sophia with the
dark forces of
opposition, even if he blamed most of the active wickedness on
her male
supporters. The perpetrators of the so-called Tsykler plot to
kill Peter in
1696-7 were executed over the exhumed coffin of Ivan
Miloslavsky,
identified by several contemporaries as the master-mind behind
the 1682
rebellion. `The seed of Ivan Miloslavsky is sprouting,' wrote
Peter, when
called back to Russia to deal with another strel'tsy revolt in
1698. He
apparently recognized Sophia's `great intelligence', but
thought it was
overshadowed by `great malice and cunning'. Engraved portraits
depicting
her wearing a crown and carrying royal regalia were sought out
and
destroyed, but many copies survived, along with painted
portraits set
against the background of the double-headed eagle bearing the
seven
Virtues on its wings, eloquent testimony both to Sophia's
political
aspirations and to the new cultural trends which she
encouraged. At least
one of Peter's successors did not share his view. Catherine
the Great
wrote of Sophia: `Much has been said about this princess, but
I believe
that she has not been given the credit she deserves ... she
conducted the
affairs of the Empire for a number of years with all the
sagacity one could
hope for. When one considers the business that passed through
her
hands, one cannot but concede that she was capable of ruling.'

III. THE MAKING OF A SOVEREIGN: THE 1690s

There are good reasons for devoting some space to the period
between
the overthrow of Sophia and Golitsyn and the declaration of
war against
Sweden in August 1700. The fact that these years have
generally been
regarded as merely a `prelude' to reform has condemned the
1690s to
neglect in general histories, which tend to confine themselves
to such
selected highlights as the Grand Embassy and the Azov
campaigns. Yet
this decade is vital for understanding both the man and his
Russia, the
moulding of Peter's priorities and the clarification of the
options open to
him, both at home and abroad. For a start, a closer
examination of the
early 1690s reveals the error of assuming an unbroken line of
developing
`Westernization' from the 1680s into the new century. The
1690s were
not merely a bridge between the cautious modernization of the
Sophia-Golitsyn regime and Peter's full-blooded post-1700
variant. Some
new trends--in art and architecture, for example--continued
and
flourished, while others were suspended. The 1690s saw a
continuing
struggle, to use a cliche, between the `old' and the `new',
personified in
the figures of the two ruling monarchs: `pious' Ivan making
stately
progress in his heavy brocade robes and `impious' Peter clad
in German
dress dashing from shipyard to military parade.

In a letter to Tsar Ivan, written between 8 and 12
September 1689,
Peter wrote: `And now, brother sovereign, the time has come
for us to
rule the realm entrusted to us by God, since we are of age and
we must
not allow that third shameful personage, our sister the
Tsarevna S.A., to
share the titles and government with us two male persons.' In
fact, Peter
showed little inclination to `rule the realm'. His
preoccupation with his own
interests for the first few years, then his prolonged
absences, first at Azov,
then in the West, ceded the centre to others, to the extent
that some of the
first actions of the new regime appeared to turn back the
clock, taking
advantage of the removal of Vasily Golitsyn, the `friend of
foreigners', to
annul concessions made during Sophia's regency and to adopt
closer
supervision of foreigners in general, in order to stem the
spread of heresy
from across the borders. Patriarch Joachim was the prime
mover. On 2
October 1689 the Jesuit fathers Georgius David and Tobias
Tichavsky
were expelled. Sanctions were imposed against Jesuits in
particular, not
Catholics in general, probably because there were some
influential foreign
Catholics close to Peter, and Russia was still allied to
Catholic powers. A
decree of 1690 allowed two priests to serve the foreign
Catholic
community, but the authorities were to take precautions to
ensure that
they did not try to convert Russians, visit them in their
homes, carry on
foreign correspondence or turn out to be Jesuits in disguise.
In October
1689 the Protestant mystic Quirinus Kuhlman was burned on Red
Square
together with his works. P.I. Prozorovsky, governor of
Novgorod, was
warned to take care that `such criminals should not enter the
country and
that foreigners who in future arrive from abroad from various
countries at
the border and in Novgorod the Great and claim that they have
come to
enter service or to visit relatives or for some other business
in Moscow,
should be questioned at the border and in Novgorod and
detained and
not allowed to proceed to Moscow until you receive our royal
instructions'. All foreign travellers were to be interrogated
and asked to
provide certificates and passes, and transcripts of such
interrogations
were to be made. Just before his death in 1690, Patriarch
Joachim called
a church council to consider the recantation of the monk
Silvester
Medvedev, who was accused, among other things, of propagating
a
Catholic view of transubstantiation. Copies of Medvedev's book
Manna
were seized and burnt, and its author was defrocked and
beheaded in
1691. Another whiff of Old Russia comes from a report of the
uncovering
in 1689 of a sorcerers' conspiracy, master-minded by Andrei
Bezobrazov, who allegedly attempted to undermine the health of
Peter
and his mother by casting spells `on bones, on money and on
water'. The
ring-leaders were beheaded or burnt, other `conspirators'
flogged and
banished. For a few months after Sophia's overthrow the
atmosphere was
so oppressive that Peter's friend, the Scottish mercenary
General Patrick
Gordon, contemplated leaving Russia.

But in the midst of this resurgence of the old, the new
was asserting
itself with unprecedented vigour. Despite the Church's dire
warnings
about the dangers of contamination by heretics, Peter himself
was
spending more and more time in the company of foreigners. The
Foreign
Quarter was only a few miles from the Preobrazhenskoe palace,
where
Peter spent much of Sophia's regency. Peter became a frequent
visitor at
the homes of Lefort and Gordon, and soon got to know other
foreign
soldiers and merchants, attending banquets, weddings, and
funerals.
Lefort's palace, with a splendidly appointed ballroom added,
was turned
into a semi-official residence for the sort of reception which
it was still
difficult to hold in the Kremlin, accompanied by `debauchery
and
drunkenness so great that it is impossible to describe it'. At
about this time
Peter probably learned Dutch (from Andrei Vinius, a government
official
of Dutch descent), and also took lessons in dancing, fencing,
and riding.
In February 1690 the birth of Peter's first child, Alexis, was
celebrated
not only with the customary church services and bells but also
with
cannon-fire and drum-beats. Foreign-led infantry regiments
were drawn
up in the Kremlin, presented with gifts and vodka to mark the
occasion,
and ordered to fire off rounds of shot, `disturbing the peace
of the saints
and ancient tsars of Moscow'. Over the next few days there
were
firework displays, more gun salutes, banquets, and feasts.
Conservatives
took retaliatory action. On the patriarch's orders, a banquet
on 28
February was held without the now customary foreign guests,
who were
banned; but the next day the tsar dined with Patrick Gordon.
Then in
March Joachim died. His `Testament', which denounced the
policy of
hiring foreigners and deplored toleration of other faiths, has
been
described as the `last gasp' of Old Russia:

May our sovereigns never allow any Orthodox Christians in

their realm to entertain any close friendly relations
with
heretics and dissenters--with the Latins, Lutherans,
Calvinists and godless Tatars (whom our Lord abominates
and the church of God damns for their God-abhorred
guile); but let them be avoided as enemies of God and
defamers of the Church.

Joachim's successor was Adrian, consecrated on 24 August 1690.
He
was to be Russia's last patriarch, his office left vacant
after his death in
1700, and abolished altogether in 1721.

As long as Tsar Ivan was alive, the old guard still
retained a figure-head
in the Kremlin. After the overthrow of Sophia and Golitsyn,
the old
Muscovite court life, with its liturgical emphasis, was
resumed with a
vengeance, cleansed of the `unseemly' female variants
introduced by
Sophia. Festivals gave special prominence to the history of
the Russian
Orthodox Church, celebrating earlier hierarchs who had assumed
a
strong political role, such as Metropolitans Philip and
Alexis, and paying
homage to the ruling dynasty with requiems for departed
royalty (such as
Tsarevich Alexis Alekseevich, whose death had not been marked
in
previous years). Old palace protocols persisted, on paper at
least; for
example, the practice of listing in order of rank all the
nobles `in
attendance' (za nimi Velikimi Gosudariami) on the tsars at
such
occasions as summer outings (pokhody) to country residences
and
monasteries. The Church continued to make its contribution to
the
business of warfare and government: in April 1695 General
Avtamon
Golovin was issued with icons of the Saviour, the Mother of
God, and St
Sergius and ten pounds of incense to carry in the campaign to
Azov. In
September 1697 Prince M. Ia. Cherkassky, the new governor of
Tobol'sk, received a set of instructions, the first of which
was to go to the
Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom and hear prayers for the tsar and
his family
read by Metropolitan Ignaty of Siberia. A few months later
Patriarch
Adrian issued a long instruction to churches and monasteries
on priorities
and procedures.

Despite the apparent vigour of tradition, the keepers of
the palace
records could not conceal the fact that one of the tsars was
opting out of
the usual rituals. Nowhere is the spirit of the new better
illustrated than in
an entry recorded shortly after Joachim's death. On 27 April
1690 (April
was traditionally the start of the royal pilgrimage season)
`the Great
Sovereign Peter Alekseevich deigned to visit Kolomenskoe'. For
his trip a
rowing boat was got up to look like a sailing ship; the boyars
followed in
two boats and strel'tsy went in front in seven, and `as they
sailed along the
water there was firing from cannon and hand guns'. The `play'
regiments,
Peter's private troops, went along in smaller craft. Tsar Ivan
travelled by
land. Thus we see two tsars, one firmly rooted in old Russia,
the other
looking to new horizons. (Thirty-four years later, in 1724,
Peter again
travelled to Kolomenskoe along the river, in a small flotilla
with Russian
and foreign guests who had gathered in Moscow for the
coronation of his
second wife, Catherine. The interior of the old wooden palace,
it seems,
had been preserved exactly as it was in the tsar's youth.) In
May 1690 we
find Peter making a tour of monasteries, but more often than
not Ivan
carried out such duties alone. This turn of events was noted
by
contemporaries. Boris Kurakin records: `First the ceremonial
processions
to the cathedral were abandoned and Tsar Ivan Alekseevich
started to go
alone; also the royal robes were abandoned and Peter wore
simple dress.
Public audiences were mostly abandoned (such as were given to
visiting
prelates and envoys from the hetman, for which there were
public
processions,); now there were simple receptions.'

Many of Peter's unofficial activities are recorded in the
diary of Patrick
Gordon, which provides a secular alternative to the old
records which
were so deeply rooted in the religious calendar. We learn that
on 30 May
1690 Peter spent his birthday at Preobrazhenskoe enjoying gun
salutes
and target practice. On 19 January 1691 Peter visited P. V.
Sheremetev,
and the next day Gordon had such a dreadful hangover that he
could not
get out of bed until the evening. A dinner at Boris Golitysn's
on 16 May
had similar consequences. And so on. Royal account books for
1690-1
show numerous entries for orders for `German dress' in the
royal
workshops, made from materials bought from foreign merchants
and
intended for Peter and members of his play regiments. Peter's
enthusiasm
for things foreign is indicated by the motley collection of
foreign goods
shipped to Archangel in 1692: mathematical instruments, two
globes, a
large organ, four large clocks, five barrels of Rhine wine,
and a barrel of
olive oil.

The new was taking its place alongside the old. After the
traditional
blessing of the waters at Preobrazhenskoe on 1 August, for
example,
there was firing from guns. Tsaritsa Natalia's name-day
celebrations on 27
August 1691 combined the usual church services, visits from
churchmen
and receipt and dispensing of gifts on the tsaritsa's behalf,
with a reception
of visitors by the tsaritsa herself (from which, however,
foreigners were
excluded), followed by gun salutes and fireworks. We must also
look to
the beginning of the 1690s for the origins of one of Peter's
most
controversial `institutions', the All-Drunken, All-Jesting
Assembly or
`Synod'. Sometimes dismissed as an adolescent aberration, in
fact the
Drunken Assembly flourished throughout Peter's reign. The new
trends
seemed to be growing inexorably, yet how easily it might all
have
changed. In November 1692 Peter fell ill, and for ten days was
at death's
door. There were rumours that many of his supporters were
preparing to
flee. His recovery signalled the resumption of the new life
with a
vengeance. In July 1693 Peter set off for Archangel to see the
sea. This
was an `outing' (pokhod) for which the record-keepers lacked
the
vocabulary. The clerks compromised by listing the courtiers in
attendance
on Peter in the usual manner, but without reference to their
destination.
Yet this historic journey had much in common with the royal
outings of
old. The accompanying retinue was listed according to rank,
from boyars
to secretaries. Peter travelled with a priest, eight
choristers, two dwarfs
and forty strel'tsy. During Peter's travels Tsar Ivan's
activities were
solemnly chronicled, and Peter's absences were sometimes
noted--for
example, at the requiem mass for the late Tsarevna Anna
Mikhailovna on
24 July. Moscow was depleted of courtiers. More than ever, the
life-style
of the two courts diverged. For example, the Russian New Year
on 1
September 1693 was celebrated in Archangel with gun salutes
from both
foreign and Russian ships in the harbour, while back in
Moscow, Tsar
Ivan, clad in robes of red velvet, `deigned to go from his
royal chambers
to the cathedral' to hear the patriarch celebrate the liturgy
`according to
the usual rites'. On occasion, Peter assumed a traditional
role, visiting his
father's favourite place of pilgrimage, the St Sabbas
monastery at
Zvenigorod, in May 1693; but after Tsar Ivan's death in
January 1696,
more and more rituals were enacted without any tsar at all. An
old
formula was adopted to cover for Peter's absence, be it on
campaign or
abroad, i.e., the appointment of a small group of deputies to
attend
services and ceremonials in his stead. An order to this effect
was issued:
from 2 April to 1 September 1697 `the tsarevichy, boyars,
okol'nichie
and gentlemen of the duma shall follow behind the holy icons
in parades
and services', although entries in the palace records reveal
that the escort
usually comprised only token representatives of these ranks.
So, for
example, the 1697 Epiphany ceremony was attended by Tsarevich
Vasily
of Siberia, boyar Prince P. I. Khovansky, okol'nichii S. F.
Tolochanov,
and Secretary Avatamon Ivanov.

If the early 1690s were a time of exploration and game
playing, they
also saw the beginnings of serious activity. Peter's first
chance to try out
his strength came in 1694 when his mother died. The demise of
Natalia
Naryshkina, a useful figure-head for the leading men, whose
power rested
upon their relationship to the royal mother, threatened a new
configuration
of forces which could have worked to Peter's disadvantage. But
any
thoughts of, for example, using the strel'tsy again against
Peter were
discouraged by Peter's own forces, based upon the `play'
(poteshnye)
troops. The two regiments took their names from the adjacent
royal
villages at Preobrazhenskoe and Semenovskoe to the north of
Moscow.
Their organization--foreign ranks, training, uniforms--was
modelled on the
new-formation infantry regiments introduced in the 1630s. The
story goes
that in the 1680s Peter discovered about 300 men idle at a
former royal
hunting-lodge, and signed them up to play military games.
Others were
requisitioned from regular units: for example, a drummer and
fifteen
troopers from the Butyrsky infantry regiment in 1687. Young
nobles who
might once have served as gentlemen of the bedchamber and in
other
junior court posts were recruited alongside local lads from a
variety of
backgrounds. The Semenovsky regiment was formed from the
overflow
from the Preobrazhensky regiment. Officers and men were all
said to be
known to the tsar personally. By 1685 the embryonic guards had
a
scaled-down wooden fortress which Peter named Presburg, with
barracks and stables adjacent to the Preobrazhenskoe palace.
In
deference to foreign expertise, Russians, including the tsar
himself, served
in the ranks or as non-commissioned officers. A list of
officers
(nachal'nye liudi) of both regiments for 1695 shows that they
were all
foreigners, although Russian names appear in the next year or
so, mostly
in the lower officer ranks.

In September 1694 Peter staged the so-called Kozhukhovo
manoeuvres, mock exercises which were `partly political in
nature', in
which some 30,000 men participated. The `campaign' presented
Muscovites with a show of strength, as armies commanded by
Fedor
Romodanovsky, the `king of Presburg', and Ivan Buturlin, the
`king of
Poland', paraded through the city. The mock battle included an
assault
with explosives on a specially constructed fortress, which
left twenty-four
dead and fifteen wounded. Members of both the Lopukhin and the

Naryshkin families were placed on the losing side, perhaps to
make the
point that Peter did not intend to be beholden to any of his
relatives unless
they proved their worth.

Soon there were to be opportunities for real service. In
the wake of the
disastrous Crimean campaigns of 1687 and 1689, which attracted
little
allied support, Russia began to lose confidence in the Holy
League,
fearing exclusion from any future peace negotiations with the
Turks. Even
so, Peter was determined to continue the war in the hope of
real gain and
in 1695 he reopened hostilities in a campaign against the
Turkish coastal
fort of Azov at the mouth of the River Don, in an attempt to
recover
Russian prestige, gain a stronger bargaining position with his
allies and
ward off Turkish attacks on Ukraine. It was widely believed in
1694-5
that Peter was planning to make another assault on the Crimea,
`march
with a mighty army against the Crim Tartar, having an
Artillery of 80 great
guns and 150 Mortars', to bring relief to hard-pressed Poland,
rumours
which Peter was happy to encourage. In the event, he marched
not to
Perekop, but to Azov, a plan which may have been suggested by
Patrick
Gordon. Two armies were dispatched: the joint force of B. P.
Sheremetev and the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa to the
Dnieper, to
deflect the Tatars from the mouth of the Don, and a smaller
unit consisting
of the Preobrazhensky and Semenovsky guards and strel'tsy on
river craft
down the Don.

Peter wrote to Fedor Apraksin: `In the autumn we were
engaged in
martial games at Kozhukhovo. They weren't intended to be
anything more
than games. But that play was the herald of real activity.' In
this, as in
some subsequent campaigns, Peter ceded nominal command to
others.
The commander-in-chief was A. S. Shein, while the tsar marched
as a
bombardier in the Preobrazhensky regiment. The first Azov
campaign was
a failure, and the fortress remained in Turkish hands. Peter
blamed this on
multiple command, tactical errors, and technical deficiencies.
Foreign
engineering specialists were hired for the next campaign, in
an effort to
avoid such fiascos as mines planted on ramparts far away from
the enemy
blowing up 130 Russians without doing any damage to the Turks.
The
Turks, meanwhile, were able to replenish supplies from the
sea, with no
Russian ships to hinder them.

This set-back has often been identified as the real
beginning of Peter's
career, when he was forced to `grow up' and discover
`astonishing
reserves of energy'. Such formulae should not simply be
dismissed as part
of a Petrine myth propagated by both tsarist and Soviet
writers. Failure
did indeed stimulate the implementation of a number of
measures,
characterized by what was to become the typically `Petrine'
use of speed,
mass recruitment, and command from above. The prime example
was the
preparation of galleys at Voronezh on the Don for a renewed
campaign in
1696, a huge effort in which thousands of the tsar's subjects
were
expected to do their bit, from the leading churchmen and
merchants, who
reluctantly supplied the cash, to the hapless labourers
drafted in to hack
wood in terrible conditions. Both river craft and seagoing
vessels were to
support an army of some 46,000 Russian troops, 15,000
Ukrainian
Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks, and 3,000 Kalmyks. At the end of
May
1696, Peter's land and sea forces laid siege to Azov. By 7
June a Russian
flotilla was able to take to the sea and cut off access to
Turkish
reinforcements.82 Apart from the use of sea power, Russian
success was
aided by General Gordon's plan of a rolling rampart ('the
throwing up a
wall of earth and driveing it on the Towne wall') and the
services of
Austrian engineers. On 18 July the fortress surrendered.

This victory prompted some striking manifestations of the
new culture.
In the past, military triumphs had been largely religious
affairs, celebrated
by parades of crosses and icons headed by chanting priests.
Such
displays of thanksgiving continued right to the end of Peter's
reign--in
Russia, as in every other European country, military victory
and defeat
were interpreted as inextricably linked with God's will--but
from now on
the religious processions were supplemented, and usually
eclipsed, by
secular parades bristling with `pagan' symbols. After Azov,
triumphal
gates of Classical design bearing the legend in Russian `I
came. I saw. I
conquered' gave a preview of the imperial Roman references and
imagery
which culminated in the festivities of 1721, when Russia
became an
empire. There were references to Christian Rome, too, and
comparisons
of Peter to the Emperor Constantine. In addition to the
customary
prayers, verses were chanted through a megaphone by State
Secretary
Andrei Vinius. Peter, wearing German uniform, marched in the
parade
behind the official heroes Admiral Lefort and General Shein,
while the
religious authority was parodied by `prince-pope' Nikita Zotov
in a
carriage. It is said that Peter had in mind not only Roman
precedents but
also the example of Ivan IV, who organized a similar parade
after the
conquest of Kazan in 1552. This was the first public display
of the new
manners, which until then had by and large been confined to
semi-private
indulgence at Preobrazhenskoe or in the Foreign Quarter. This
new
openness fanned growing popular disapproval of Peter's foreign
ways,
which expressed itself in full force in 1698, when the
strel'tsy revolted.

The 1690s saw interesting developments in art and culture.
The
semi-Westernized Moscow baroque style of the 1680s matured and

spread beyond the capital, where masonry churches and civic
buildings
displayed decorative features such as Classical columns and
carved stone
and brick ornament inspired by Western Renaissance and baroque

originals. Peter's maternal relatives commissioned so many
churches in this
style that it is often referred to as `Naryshkin baroque'. One
of the finest
examples, the Church of the Intercession at Fili, built for
Lev Naryshkin
in 1690-3, had icons which reflected family history--images of
SS Peter
and Paul, John the Baptist, Alexis Man of God, and St Stephen,
the latter
bearing a striking resemblance to the young Peter, who often
visited the
church. An even more remarkable church, commissioned by Prince

Boris Golitsyn on his estate at Dubrovitsy in 1690, dispensed
with the
traditional cupolas (the tower is capped by an open-work
crown) and
had statues of saints over the parapets and Latin inscriptions
inside.

The painting of the 1690s also exhibits interesting
`transitional' features.
In January 1692 the Armoury received an order for eleven large
pictures
for Peter's residence at Pereiaslavl'-Zalessky (where he was
experimenting with sailing), the subjects of which were the
Saviour, the
Mother of God, the martyr Natalia, Alexis Man of God,
Alexander
Nevsky, Peter and the martyr Evdokia. The family references
(Alexander
Nevsky, for example, was the patron saint of Peter's second
son
Alexander, born in October 1691) were almost certainly chosen
by
Peter's mother rather than Peter himself. But the commission
reflected
`modern' trends in so far as these were not traditional icon
panels but
paintings on canvas in frames. There are even more revealing
indications
of Peter's emerging individual taste: for example, his order
in July 1691 for
twelve German portraits (person nemetskikh) in gilt frames, to
be taken
to his apartments from the confiscated property of Prince
Vasily Golitsyn.
In August 1694 a team of painters in the Armoury received
orders for
twenty-three battle paintings for Peter's apartments, `after
the German
model', with frames also of German design. Four painters were
to take
four subjects each, and the rest were to be done by
apprentices, `painting
different subjects, making use of German pictures [as
models]'. In June
1697, when Peter was abroad, the same team of Armoury painters
was
instructed to paint eight pictures on canvas depicting `troops
going by sea,
making use of foreign German pictures or engravings, employing
the best
workmanship'. Again, these were large canvases, evidently
executed in
some haste, given that the same painters were all dispatched
to work in
Voronezh in July, and the frames were ordered in August.
Painters were
called upon to do other jobs to meet new demands: for example,
to
decorate the new ships built at Voronezh in 1696-7. These few
examples
indicate clearly the emergence of a distinct secular culture
from within the
walls of the Moscow Armoury, that early `academy of arts'
which housed
a secular painting studio separate from the icon-painting
workshops only
since the 1680s.

It is very difficult to assess the art of the 1690s
because, like the 1696
triumphal gates, so few examples have survived. Accurate
likenesses of
Peter pre-dating the Grand Embassy are notable by their
absence. Earlier
engravings, such as Larmessen's double portrait of Peter and
Ivan (ca.
1687), are mostly imaginative reconstructions. Evidently
others existed
but have disappeared; thus, in July 1695 an order was given
for a printed
`persona' of Peter to be stuck on to canvas and framed.
Perhaps Peter's
restless activity in the 1690s precluded sitting for
portraits. Yet it is with
portraits that we shall conclude our examination of the 1690s.
The first is
the most famous (once thought to be the only) image of the
young tsar,
painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller in London in 1698, now hanging
in
Kensington Palace in London. The startling contrast between
this wholly
Western depiction of a monarch and the few surviving images of
Peter's
father has often been pointed out, but is worth drawing
attention to here:
the bearded Orthodox tsar of the 1660s with traditional robes
and
pectoral and crown crosses gives way to the warrior in armour
with a
warship in the background. For Kneller, Peter was just another
European
monarch. All traces of Russian `exoticism' were expunged.
Indeed,
Kneller used the same set formula--column and crown to the
left, warship
in the background to the right, royal ermine, and armour--as
in his 1680s
portrait of James II. Yet there are other portraits of Peter
from this period
which remind us that the break with Old Russia was far from
complete.
One by the Dutch artist Pieter Van der Werff shows Peter
dressed in the
Polish style, while in an anonymous portrait now in the
Rijksmuseum he
wears Russian dress. A similar contrast may be observed in two
much
smaller images, produced a year later in an entirely different
medium. In
1699 two experimental half-roubles were minted. The first, by
Vasily
Andreev of the Armoury, shows Peter full face, in icon style,
wearing the
Crown of Monomach. The second is wholly Western, showing the
tsar as
a Roman emperor in profile, with laurel wreath and mantle. On
the
reverse is a collar of St Andrew and a coat of arms. On the
eve of the
new century and the outbreak of the Northern War, the
designers had,
albeit unconsciously, expressed the contrast between old and
new. Which
of the two would prevail? In Peter's mind, at least, the
contest was
already decided, as were the means for augmenting national
prestige and
prosperity. The focus would shift from the Black Sea to the
Baltic and the
country which barred Russia's way, Sweden.

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