In the summer of 1698 he had news from Moscow that the musketeers had revolted once again, demanding better conditions, and apparently they were in some sort of contact with the imprisoned Sofia. Peter rushed home, only to find that the boyars had already executed the leaders over the advice of the generals. Peter was furious, and ordered a relentless and gruesome interrogation of the prisoners under torture. Hundreds were eventually executed with the participation of the tsar and the boyars. Peter never got to the bottom of the musketeers’ motives, and he suspected the boyars, even those to whom he had entrusted the government, of concealing evidence or worse. As the interrogation drew to a close, Peter decided that he could no longer work with the boyars because they were too quarrelsome among themselves and unreliable. Henceforth he would rely on his favorites.
Peter had returned from Europe with two new favorites, Golovin and a junior officer of bombardiers, Alexander Menshikov. Gordon and LeFort wanted Peter to maintain his alliance with Austria and prepare for another Turkish war, but he had other plans, and in any case both Gordon and LeFort died about this time. Golovin came from an old boyar family and was well educated. He had negotiated the treaty of Nerchinsk that delimited their mutual border with China, and had succeeded in part because he could speak to the Jesuits at the Chinese court in Latin. Menshikov was the exact opposite, the son of a falconer at the court who had served in Peter’s play regiments, which became his guards. Menshikov had little education, though he had acquired enough “soldier’s German” to speak to foreigners who lacked Russian. Menshikov was also LeFort’s replacement at the drinking parties and Peter’s close personal friend. They also both supported Peter’s divorce from his wife Evdokiia, the mother of his son Aleksei. Most important, they both supported Peter’s new project, the war with Sweden.
The war with Sweden would occupy most of the rest of Peter’s reign. On its eve Peter decreed the first of his reforms, mandating that men of the upper classes must shave their beards, and that both sexes of the gentry must henceforth wear Western clothing in place of traditional Russian dress. He also ordered the year to be dated from the birth of Christ, not the creation of the world so that Russia would be in keeping with the educated world as he saw it. These decrees aroused a certain amount of discontent, especially the new dress. Boyar women in particular did not like the new clothing, as it meant that their hair was not covered (and thus their new dress was immodest) and they could not manage the stockings and high heels. Many of them wore the new clothes only at court, switching back to traditional dress at home.
Peter also began to reorder the state. The collecting of taxes from townspeople was taken from the provincial governors and put in the hands of the urban elites, and he imposed a stamp duty on official papers. These were experiments, eventually abandoned, but a more basic change was silent. Peter ceased to create boyars and call the boyar duma. Similarly, when the patriarch of the church died in 1701, Peter allowed no new patriarch to be chosen and appointed the Ukrainian abbot Stefan Iavorskii as “conservator of the patriarchal throne.” Thus the traditional and canonical head of the Orthodox church in Russia simply disappeared. To make matters worse, Peter also took control of the revenues of the monastic estates, keeping most of them and doling out a stipend for the use of the monks. Peter wanted to ensure revenue for his war, and did not want any interference from the aristocracy or the church.
The war with Sweden was a response to Peter’s disappointment in the outcome of the Azov campaigns. He had taken the fort to be sure, and gained an outlet to the Black Sea, more or less, but the Turks would not permit the Russians to trade on the Black Sea much less pass the Bosporus into the Mediterranean. Russia had reentered the war too late to derive much benefit from its victory. As Peter was returning from Vienna in 1698 to deal with the musketeer revolt, he had a long meeting with the new king of Poland, Augustus of Saxony. Augustus had large ambitions and considered himself a great military commander. He wanted to seize Sweden’s Baltic provinces, an old demand of the Polish nobility, but he also wanted to use them to strengthen his very shaky position in Poland. His natural allies against Sweden, the hegemonic power of northern Europe, were Denmark and Russia, and he was able to recruit Peter to his cause.
As is so often the case in war, all the initial calculations were wrong. Augustus’ small army tried to take Riga in 1700, but failed ignominiously. The young king of Sweden Charles XII, a born battlefield commander, knocked Denmark out of the war in a matter of weeks, and then shipped his army to the Baltic provinces. Peter had moved his newly trained European-style army to besiege the town of Narva in Swedish Estonia. Charles marched swiftly to the attack, landed on the unprepared Russians in the middle of a snowstorm and routed them. Only Peter’s guards regiments were able to withdraw in order, and most of the foreign and Russian officers were captured. Peter had to begin all over again. Fortunately, Charles had other plans. Contemptuous of Russian capabilities, he turned his attention to Poland, spending the next eight years dethroning Augustus and setting up a Swedish puppet in his place. Peter had a breathing space and he used it well.
What was Peter trying to accomplish in going to war against Sweden, a power that everyone thought virtually invincible? Officially he announced that he was recovering the territory lost at the end of the Time of Troubles, that is, the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland where St. Petersburg now stands. This was ancient Russian territory (that was true) and thus his patrimony. At the same time Peter wanted a port for Russia more convenient for trade and communication than distant Archangel. Azov had not worked out, and the only other option was the Baltic shore. Indeed Narva had been the object of Ivan the Terrible’s wars a century and a half earlier. Peter had no way of knowing that the war would turn into an epic duel that would change the face of northern and eastern Europe, and it seems that his initial aims were modest. Again like so many wars, the conflict acquired a logic of its own and ended in ways that no one could have imagined.
For the time being, the war absorbed all his energies and those of the state. Administration was concentrated in the hands of Peter’s favorites Golovin and Menshikov, but this arrangement meant that government was essentially improvised. During this period Peter had no court, for he spent most of his time with the army or in his small houses around Moscow, especially the residence in Preobrazhenskoe. His style of life at this time and ever after was unique for a Russian or European monarch. He went about the country and the army with no guards and no suite, but he took his lathe and woodworking tools with him everywhere. The absence of a court suited him perfectly, as he hated any sort of ceremonial and the court amusements that were usual in most of Europe. His idea of a good time was to arrange a great drunken celebration with his officers or Dutch sea captains and end the evening with fireworks.
The scene of these amusements, and of the government as well, was increasingly in his new city, St. Petersburg. The city was the result of his persistence after the defeat at Narva. Peter rebuilt his army and sent it into the Baltic provinces, in effect training it under fire in many small engagements with the enemy. In 1702 he felt confident enough to move against a larger objective, the Swedish fort on the Neva River, Nöteborg. He took it after a short siege and renamed it, ignoring the previous Russian name and calling it Schlüsselburg, in German the “Key Castle.” The next year he moved down the Neva and quickly seized the small Swedish town at its mouth, where he immediately began to build a new fortress, the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, to defend the area from sea and land. Around the fortress he began to build a new city as a naval base and a potential commercial port for Russia on the Baltic. He was not waiting for the war to end, and through the years to come in the darkest moments of the war, it was St. Petersburg that was his one unshakeable demand.