Figure 5. Peter the Great. Engraving after the equestrian statue of Peter by Etienne-Maurice Falconet erected at the order of Catherine the Great in 1782.
Peter built his new city and court with a new wife at his side. This was Catherine, and her story was perhaps the strangest of the whole era. When the Russian armies began to move into the Baltic provinces, one of the local Lutheran pastors had a maid named Marta, and she with the rest of the family was taken off to Moscow as part of the policy of harrying the area. There her master set up a school. Marta came to the attention of Peter around 1704, and she became his mistress in place of Anna Mons. When Marta accepted Orthodoxy and took the name Catherine, Peter married her in 1712. By this time they already had several children, all girls, one of them, born in 1709, who would be the future empress Elizabeth. Catherine was a strong and important figure in the court, generally allied with Menshikov but also working to keep harmony when crises threatened, and to moderate Peter’s anger when it overflowed.
In this new city Peter set about once more to reorder the structure of church and state. In 1715 he sent one Heinrich Fick, a German jurist, as a spy to Sweden, whose mission was to study the Swedish administrative system. Fick returned with detailed knowledge, and on this basis Peter began the process of recreating a central government to be headed by Colleges, each run by a committee consisting of Russian officials and foreign experts. Peter was also increasingly discontented with Stefan Iavorskii, who had strong notions of episcopal power and believed that Russia needed to exterminate heretics. Iavorskii came into conflict with both the tsar and the Senate over the case of an obscure religious dissident in Moscow, and though Peter partially conceded to Iavorskii’s demands for executions, he decided to place the church under a new system. Another Ukrainian bishop, Feofan Prokopovich, recently arrived in Petersburg, had the task of finding a suitable arrangement.
These were major changes and they took time to elaborate, especially with the continuing war with Sweden. Other concerns were equally prominent in the tsar’s mind. In the autumn of 1714 Peter discovered the extent of corruption on the part of Menshikov and many other major officials. The building of St. Petersburg was a particular gold mine for corruption, as thousands of peasants were conscripted every year to work; feeding and paying them was an obvious area for padding the work rolls and underpaying the workmen. The guilty officials were whipped and sent into exile, and Menshikov was sentenced to return literally millions of rubles to the treasury. He kept his position as governor of St. Petersburg, but lost the tsar’s favor. At court the Dolgorukiis and their allies were triumphant. Menshikov was not the only problem. Peter’s son by his first wife, Aleksei Petrovich, was now in his twenties, and had proved a serious disappointment to his father. Peter had given him a Western education, had him taught German and French, history and geography, but he did not take to it very well. A German wife (sister to the Emperor Karl VI’s wife) did not help either, as Aleksei treated her with coldness and contempt and found a mistress among his servants. Aleksei was lazy, uninterested in learning, politics, or warfare and preferred drinking with his circle of servants and clergy. Stefan Iavorskii began to see him as a future advocate of church interests, perhaps wrongly, but he let his views be known. Relations between father and son worsened, and the existence of Peter’s second wife Catherine meant that other heirs to the throne might be born. Finally, in 1715, both Catherine and Aleksei’s wife gave birth to sons almost simultaneously. There were now two possible heirs if Peter chose to bypass his eldest son. The tsar wrote to Aleksei chiding him for his indifference to the qualities needed for a future ruler, and Aleksei responded by offering to enter a monastery. Peter gave him another warning, and then went off to Western Europe to look after the continuing war and to do more traveling, this time to France.
While Peter was away a crisis arose in the supply of the Russian army in Finland, and the Senate, with its aristocratic supporters, dragged their feet. Peter was furious and sent order after order, but nothing happened. Menshikov stepped in to commandeer ships and send the supplies, thus instantly restoring himself to favor. His crimes were forgiven. A few weeks later, Aleksei Petrovich, the heir to the Russian throne, disappeared from Petersburg. For several weeks, no one knew where he was. Finally Peter’s emissaries found him in Vienna, where he had gone to take refuge with Emperor Karl, Aleksei’s brother-in-law, a man seriously unhappy with Peter’s rise to power and his potential influence in Germany. The Emperor gave him shelter, and Aleksei proposed to Karl’s ministers that he be given an army to overthrow his father. This was a tall order, and the Austrians feared Peter’s reaction, so they hid the tsarevich, first in the Tirol and then in Naples. There Peter sent one of his diplomats, Peter Tolstoi, to bring him back, and Tolstoi succeeded, in the process laying the foundation of the fortunes of the Tolstoi family for two centuries.
Aleksei returned to Moscow in January 1718. Thus began a long interrogation during which the extent of Aleksei’s support among the aristocracy and church became evident, not least because the tsarevich himself informed on them all. His sympathizers included the other favorite, Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii, Stefan Iavorskii, and many great aristocrats. As far as Peter could tell, they had not planned anything specific, but they also had known of Aleksei’s flight to Vienna. Peter faced a dilemma: either he could punish them all in imitation of Ivan the Terrible, or he could minimize the whole affair by punishing a few and thus cover it up. With some persuasion from his wife, he chose the second alternative. A dozen or so persons of low rank were executed. Prince Vasilii Dolgorukii and others were exiled, and Aleksei brought before the assembled Senate, ministers, generals, and high clergy for trial. The laymen voted for the death penalty, with dozens of men named by Aleksei as his supporters signing the document. Before Peter made a final decision about execution, the tsarevich died, probably from the aftereffects of judicial torture, but no information that is reliable exists about the cause of death.
Be that as it may, Peter’s problem was solved. He decreed that henceforth the tsar could choose his successor at will. He then proceeded to implement the new form of government, the Colleges, and to place over the church a new institution, the Holy Synod, a committee of clergy and laymen with a lay “Ober-procuror” as its head. This structure came from Prokopovich’s reading of Swedish legislation for the Lutheran church, and was a sharp break with Orthodox tradition. In the new arrangement the tsar became the “protector” of the church, and in practice he appointed the members of the Synod. The church would no longer be able to play a role in politics and oppose his reforms.
The seven years from the death of Aleksei to the death of Peter himself in January 1725 saw the culmination of Peter’s reordering of government, culture, and his foreign policy. The end of the Swedish war was a great relief, but he did not rest on his laurels. He immediately set off to use the momentary political confusion in Iran to seize some of its northern provinces, a scheme abandoned after his death but revealing of Peter’s thinking. The motivations here were purely commerciaclass="underline" control of the silk-producing areas of Iran, greater access to the Iranian market, and further on to the markets of the Near East and India. Utterly impractical, the plans show the extent to which Peter wanted to graft commercial appendages onto his agrarian empire.