In the mean time Sofia had committed Russia to a new foreign policy. She wanted to continue the policy of confronting the Ottomans, in this respect following Matveev, but unlike him she decided to do it in close alliance with Poland. The opportunity had come with the foundation of the Holy League in 1682 by Austria, the Papacy, Venice, and Poland, with the aim of a united struggle against the Turks. After long and tiresome negotiations, Sofia joined the League in 1685–6 and entered into military collaboration with Jan III Sobieski, the King of Poland and the victor at the great siege of Vienna of 1683. Russia’s part in the coalition was to defeat Crimea. Thus, in 1687 Golitsyn took a large Russian army south from the Ukrainian hetmanate across the steppe to Crimea. The Tatars burned the waterless steppe, depriving his horses of fodder and he had to retreat. His only accomplishment was to replace Hetman Samoilovych, a Naryshkin ally and an opponent of the war, with the compliant Ivan Mazepa, a name that would return. A repeat of the campaign in 1689 brought the same result, and rumors even circulated that Golitsyn had made a secret deal with the enemy. On his return, Sofia tried to portray the campaign as a success, rewarding the troops and ordering triumphal liturgies, but Peter would have none of it.
Peter was now seventeen, and he stayed away from the Kremlin in Preobrazhenskoe. Suddenly on August 7, 1689, one of his chamberlains was arrested in Moscow and the rumor swept the city that Sofia was going to have Peter killed. One of the musketeers rode out to warn Peter, who got out of bed in his shirt and jumped on a horse. With his closest servants and courtiers he rode through the night to the Trinity Monastery, soon to be joined by his mother and her boyar allies. The next weeks were a standoff, but by the end of the month it was clear that most of the boyars, Tsar Ivan’s household, the patriarch, and the foreign mercenary officers were on Peter’s side. Even the musketeers would not back Sofia. Peter returned to Moscow in triumph and sent Sofia to the Novodevichii Convent on the southwest side of Moscow. Peter, with his Naryshkin relatives, was now securely in power, for Ivan presented no challenge and died in 1696. No one could have then predicted it, but Russia was poised for a fundamental transformation.
5 Peter the Great
The reign of Peter the Great saw the greatest transformation in Russia until the revolution of 1917. Unlike the Soviet revolution, Peter’s transformation of Russia had little impact on the social order, for serfdom remained and the nobility remained their masters. What Peter changed was the structure and form of the state, turning the traditional Russian tsardom into a variant of European monarchy. At the same time he profoundly transformed Russian culture, a contribution that along with his new capital of St. Petersburg has lasted to the present day.
The first few years of Peter’s rule gave little indication that such great events were coming. The removal of Sofia in 1689 gave control to Peter’s mother and her Naryshkin relatives and their allies, who seem to have gotten along poorly with one another once in power. A son Aleksei was born in 1692 to Peter’s wife Evdokiia, so the succession seemed assured. Peter himself remained in the background training his soldiers, drinking with the foreign officers in the German suburbs, and sailing his boats. Peter had many eccentricities, and they appeared early. He was nearly seven feet tall, but was thin-boned with narrow shoulders and rather fine features. He shaved his beard early but left a thin moustache. His capacity for alcohol was gigantic and this perhaps had some relationship to the endless “colics” and other stomach disorders that plagued him all his life. He sometimes flew into tremendous hysterical rages that only his wife (his second, Catherine) was able to calm. His relations with women were surprisingly restrained. His greatest recreation was anything that involved boats, leading him to go north to Archangel in 1693 to see the ocean for the first time. His mother Natalia sent him a letter ordering him not to go out to the dangerous open sea and he obeyed. Then in February 1694, she died. Right away Peter ceased to appear at any of the Kremlin ceremonies, and the whole ritual of the Russian court, now over two centuries old, came to an end. Then Peter went to Archangel again, and this time he went out to sea on a Dutch ship.
During these years Peter made two acquaintances in the German suburb who were to shape his policy for the next few years. One was Patrick Gordon, then in his fifties, a Catholic Scot who had served in the Russian army since 1661, primarily as a specialist in fortification and artillery. Gordon was a firm proponent of the Turkish war and played a crucial role in training the new European style regiments of the army. The other was Francois LeFort, a Geneva Swiss who was also a mercenary officer, but whose relationship with Peter was more personal than Gordon’s. LeFort was the ringleader of many of the drunken parties, and it was LeFort who introduced Peter to Anna Mons, the daughter of a German tavern keeper. These relations were not just friendships, as Gordon and LeFort were the young tsar’s favorites and informal political advisors, and Anna cemented the influence of LeFort.
When Peter returned to Moscow from his first brief sea voyage in the fall of 1694, he decided to renew Russia’s efforts against the Turks, largely in abeyance since he came to power. The boyars were not happy with this decision, but he simply ignored them, and moved an army south down the Volga and Don rivers to Azov, the Turkish fort at the mouth of the Don on the Sea of Azov. The siege was unsuccessful, largely because the Turks could resupply the fort from the sea; so Peter built a navy. He built it at Voronezh on the Don, far inland, with Dutch carpenters and ship builders. He brought officers from the Netherlands, Venice, and France, and in the spring of 1696 his fleet sailed down the Don and with its help he took the fort, which was his first victory. He celebrated his victory not just with the traditional prayers, but also with a triumphal procession into Moscow in full Baroque style, with arches bearing images of Hercules and one with Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” in Church Slavic. So that the public would understand these strange gods, he had a pamphlet printed to explain it all.
Peter then prepared for an action far more strange than his Baroque triumph – a journey to Western Europe. He quickly settled the affairs of the new territories and the navy and appointed a small committee of boyars to govern in his absence, only to find that there was a conspiracy to replace him afoot among other aristocrats. The conspirators were few in number but Peter saw them as growing from the seed of the old factions that had opposed his mother in the 1680s. The conspirators were mainly concerned about their own positions in the hierarchy of offices, but some were also shocked at his trip abroad and even more at his plans to send young boyars to Holland and Venice to learn foreign languages and the art of navigation. The conspirators were executed, and Peter left Moscow, stopping at Riga and Berlin before he arrived in Amsterdam, which was his chief goal.
Peter traveled incognito as a member of the Russian embassy headed by the boyar Fyodor Golovin and Lefort, an embassy with the charge of strengthening the coalition against the Ottomans. While Golovin and LeFort negotiated, Peter took instruction in carpentry and ship building in the shipyards of Zaandam. There the Dutch told him that in England they built ships differently, relying on mathematics and not just their eyes to shape the hull. Peter quickly set off for London, where he visited the shipyards but also spoke to astronomers at the Greenwich observatory, attended a Quaker meeting, inspected the Royal mint, and talked to Anglican clergymen. Then he began the journey home, reaching Vienna by spring. As he rode through Central Europe, however, the political horizon was changing rapidly. Austria had reconquered huge parts of Hungary and was low on resources, as were the other allies. They wanted peace, and Peter learned this in Vienna. He had to now extricate Russia from the war with the Ottomans, and he eventually succeeded after two years of hard negotiation. Peter was disappointed, but the end of the war was actually a relief, for more pressing concerns had arisen.