Matveev was not only in favor through his connections with the Naryshkins. He managed the complicated relations with the Ukrainian Cossacks, Poland, and Russia’s other neighbors, and appointed his clients to almost all the major offices of the Russian state. He faithfully executed the tsar’s wishes, if disagreeing with him on occasion, and arguing his and the tsar’s views in the duma. Aleksei did not give him a monopoly of power: the palace administration and the tsar’s household remained under the aegis of Bogdan Khitrovo, the tsar’s other major favorite in his later years, though Khitrovo seems to have avoided major political issues. In the words of the Danish ambassador, Matveev was Russia’s “kinglet.” Such a rise to power could not fail to provoke the jealousy of the boyars, but as long as the tsar lived, Matveev remained supreme. Then, in January 1676, Tsar Aleksei died suddenly at the age of forty-seven.
The accession of Tsar Fyodor, only fifteen years old and sickly, put power back into the hands of the senior boyars. Within weeks they ousted Matveev’s clients from the main offices and engineered the exile of Matveev himself. Prince Dolgorukii and Ivan Miloslavskii, the cousin of the tsar on his mother’s side, were the most influential, and behind the scenes Tsarevna Irina, the young tsar’s aunt, was the most powerful of all. As Matveev slowly moved toward Siberian exile, his enemies lodged a charge of sorcery against him. The accusation was a wild combination of dramatic charges from former servants that came down to his reading of a book borrowed from the Apothecary’s Office, probably containing chapters on medicinal astrology. Then some of Tsaritsa Natalia’s Naryshkin brothers were accused of attempting to kill the tsar several years before during a session of archery practice. Gruesome torture of the Naryshkin servants and clients yielded extensive testimony but confirmed nothing substantial. At the widowed Tsaritsa Natalia’s intervention Tsarevna Irina put a halt to the proceedings. Matveev went back to an even more remote exile and several of the Naryshkins were exiled to their estates. For the next few years Matveev’s enemies at court reigned supreme, forming a sort of boyar regency over the young tsar. Tsaritsa Natalia remained in the background, raising her son and looking to the future.
Fyodor was physically weak but surprisingly strong-willed. On Irina’s death in 1680 he married for the first time and began to emancipate himself from the tutelage of the boyars. His new wife even appeared in Polish dress, and Fyodor’s health seemed to revive. When she died during childbirth a year later, all seemed to be lost, but instead Fyodor moved on, reforming court dress and then at the end of 1681 moving to reform the army and abolish the precedence system that in theory had ruled the court, administration, and army for two centuries. He had his own favorites and relied in his military reforms on Prince V. V. Golitsyn, one of Russia’s greatest aristocrats. Fyodor allowed Matveev to return to his estates near Moscow and lifted the exile of the Naryshkins. In February he married Marfa Apraksina, a young girl from provincial gentry, a marriage that brought to the court her younger borothers Petr and Fyodor, still boys now on the way to greater things. The tsar’s health worsened and on April 2, 1682, he died, plunging Russia into a crisis.
The crisis again arose from the problem of succession. Fyodor had no children, and his eldest brother, Ivan, was fifteen years old, but weak and unhealthy. None of the boyars seem to have considered him fit to rule, nor did Patriarch Ioakim. The alternative was Peter, then nine years old. The choice of Peter would mean that the Miloslavskii clan, the maternal relatives of Ivan, would lose their chance for power, for Peter’s mother was a Naryshkin and an ally of Matveev, who had recently returned from bitter exile.
The death of Tsar Fyodor coincided with murmurs of discontent among the musketeers – the soldiers who guarded the Kremlin and had provided the core of the infantry army before the advent of European style regiments. Their discontent was aimed at the oppressive practices of their colonels, but someone convinced them that their real enemy was the Naryshkins and Matveev. The musketeers stormed into the Kremlin and demanded that their enemies be turned over to them. Terrified, the boyars advised surrender, and Matveev was hurled from the stairs onto the upturned pikes of the musketeers. Several of the Naryshkins were hunted down and killed, though Natalia was able to save her father and eldest brother. The soldiers rampaged through the city, killing two of the Princes Dolgorukii and others who were suspected of favoring Peter and his family. After a few days the clergy and boyars met together and proclaimed Ivan and Peter co-tsars. The disturbances ceased, but two new stars had risen on the horizon, Prince Ivan Khovanskii and Tsarevna Sofia.
Khovanskii made himself the darling of the soldiers, and for a tense summer he seemed to be poised to assert supreme power behind the façade of the two boy tsars. Khovanskii, however, was outmaneuvered, and it was Sofia, Ivan’s sister and Peter’s half-sister, who assumed power. In September, when the musketeers had quieted down, she had Khovanskii arrested and executed, and for the next seven years she ruled as regent of Russia. Her favorite and, effectively, her prime minister was Prince V. V. Golitsyn, who had recently come to prominence under Tsar Fyodor.
From the very beginning Sofia presided over a court riven by faction. Early on she managed to sideline her Miloslavskii relatives and rule with Golitsyn alone, though in the mind of Peter, then and later, it was the Miloslavskii clan that was his and his mother’s enemy. For Natalia did not cease to aspire to claim full power for her son. As he grew up, she acquired allies among the boyars, Prince Boris Golitsyn (the cousin of V. V. Golitsyn) and the more exotic Prince Mikhail Alegukovich Cherkasskii, a boyar but by origin a Circassian from the north Caucasus serving the Russian tsars. Relations were tense, and Cherkasskii even brought out a knife during a dispute with V. V. Golitsyn – in the yard of the Trinity Monastery no less.
Peter was still too young to participate in the intrigues and the arguments, and he spent these years outside of Moscow at Preobrazhenskoe, a village to the east of Moscow where his father had built a small wooden house for the summer. There Peter began to “play” soldiers, forming his servants and courtiers into European style infantry regiments and having them drilled by European officers. Peter was fascinated by artillery and he learned how to use it in these years as well. Soon he had a trained force of several hundred men, his own personal regiment. Even more significant was his encounter with boats.
He told the story himself, many years later. In an old barn Peter happened to notice a small boat, one that was constructed differently from Russian boats. Peter was already studying mathematics, probably for military purposes, with Frans Timmerman, a Dutch merchant and amateur astronomer, and he asked Timmerman why the boat did not look like typical Russian boats. The answer was that it was built to sail against the wind. Peter was amazed by the answer, and Timmerman found a Dutch sailor who put the boat in order and showed the young tsar how to tack into the wind. Peter was captivated immediately, and took the boat to a nearby lake to practice. He also asked the young Prince Iakov Dolgorukii, who was about to leave for France on a diplomatic mission, to bring him back navigational instruments. Dolgorukii returned in 1688 with an astrolabe, and thus began Peter’s love affair with boats and navigation – an affair that would last his whole life.