Preobrazhenskoe – the Tsar had taken the name of his little village and given it to one of his new household regiments: the Preobrazhensky Guards. Procopy was an officer in it now. How she despised them, with their foreign uniforms! And Peter’s childish games, his endless playing at soldiers – they had developed into real wars now.
And to think she had supposed that nothing could be worse than the rule of Sophia and that terrible Golitsyn: the Pole, as she called him.
Their foreign wars had been their downfall. That Golitsyn with his foreign ways – he was the one who wanted to be friends with the Poles. In return for another peace treaty with them, he had foolishly promised to help them against the Turks and their vassal the Crimean Khan.
A war against the Tatars on the steppe. It had been a disaster, and a costly one. The great men of the state had turned to Peter and in 1689 Sophia and her favourite had fallen from power: she was sent to a convent, Golitsyn into exile.
Peter was seventeen. Though technically he was still co-ruler with poor Ivan, it was time for him to assume control.
‘But does he rule? Does he behave like a man?’ Eudokia would furiously demand. ‘No. He plays his games like an evil child, which is exactly what he still is.’
Briefly, she had been hopeful. The old Patriarch, having at last got rid of Golitsyn, was determined to rid Holy Russia of all these foreign influences. But then he had died, and Peter’s strange regime began.
And strange it certainly was. While a small council, including his mother and some of the Naryshkins, acted as an informal regency, the hulking boy refused to take any interest in his empire at all. Often, he stayed at Preobrazhenskoe. But even worse, he spent more and more time in the German quarter, amongst the foreigners. And it was not long before his behaviour became scandalous.
‘The German suburb! What kind of people does one meet there?’ Eudokia would comment contemptuously. ‘And see what kind of games these heretics like to play.’
It cannot be denied that the behaviour of Peter and his friends, some of whom were old enough to be his grandfather, was totally outrageous; and while historians have tended to gloss over this as either the high-spirited buffoonery of an adolescent, or else a calculated political message, it is very hard to see why they should have acted so.
At the heart of it all was the so-called Jolly Company – a group of friends who might at any given moment number a dozen or two hundred. Some were Russian, but many were foreigners. They included a brilliant Swiss adventurer, Lefort, and an otherwise sensible old Scottish general, Gordon.
It was not the drunken parties, which might go on for days at a time. That was perfectly Russian. It was not even that they might, if you were a merchant or nobleman, visit your house and smash all the furniture. Russians were rather proud of Tsars, like Ivan the Terrible, who wreaked havoc at the slightest whim. Russians could even forgive, when he was sober, Peter’s fascination with foreign crafts, and his learning the rudiments of mathematics and navigation – though these interests were certainly eccentric.
But what could anyone make of his open and insulting mockery of religion?
For in these years, the young Tsar formed what he called his Drunken Synod – the All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters. One of his drinking companions – his old tutor – became Prince-Patriarch, though this was changed to Prince-Pope. Dressed up in ecclesiastical regalia, he would appoint a drunken synod of cardinals, bishops, abbots and other priests. And then, mocking the liturgy, making lewd benedictions over the company continually, the Prince-Pope under Peter’s direction would lead the Drunken Synod in its all-night drunken revels. They were not just held indoors, out of sight in the German quarter. The young Tsar and his friends used to take to the streets of Moscow, even in Lent, taking good care to outrage every religious sensibility of the people he was to govern. So that the foreign ambassadors from the west – who were themselves entirely used to the high-jinks of young aristocrats, or the occasional calculated outrages of the students in their ancient university towns – could only conclude that the young Tsar had little interest in his people and that, ingenious or not, he was vulgar without being amusing.
For several years, this extraordinary regime had gone on. No one could control the wayward youth, it seemed. His mother, as Eudokia had done with Procopy, found him a wife. But Peter seldom even visited her. Then his mother died, but still his strange adolescence continued.
What was the young Tsar thinking of?
As time passed, it seemed to Eudokia that when he was sober, young Tsar Peter thought only of two things. One was war.
‘And the other is boats. Boats – everything with this man is boats!’ she would complain. And when Procopy laughingly reminded her that Russia was a land of rivers she would brush him aside irritably. ‘You know very well what I mean. It’s these accursed boats that go to sea. No Russian has ever needed to go to sea.’
‘Not so. The ancient Rus went to sea. They went across the Black Sea to Constantinople. And that’s what we’ll do now.’
‘First it’s the Crimean Khan and his Tatars, now it’s the Turkish Sultan himself you want to attack,’ she said drily.
‘Precisely.’
For though Peter’s conduct might be odd, there was no doubt that he had, from the first, dreams of conquest. They were very natural dreams.
Who, after all, were Russia’s heroes? Were they not great men like St Vladimir, Yaroslav the Wise, and mighty Monomakh in the days of ancient Kiev? And in those times, had not the state of Rus traded freely from the Baltic to the warm Black Sea? Did it not crush the tribesmen of the southern steppe? Had not the ancient Rus kept a settlement by the mouth of the Don in old Tmutarakan? Was there not a colony of Rus in the imperial city of Constantinople herself? Yet now, Russia possessed only a miserable little toehold, at the frozen northern end of the Baltic Sea, while the rich Baltic ports were still in the hands of the Swedes and Germans. In the south, the mouth of the Don was closed to Russians, guarded by the Turkish port of Azov, and the Turkish fleet entirely controlled the warm Black Sea. Finally, most insulting of all, and centuries after Moscow had thrown off the Tatar yoke, the Tatar Khan of the Crimea still sent huge raiding parties across the steppe, stealing Slavs by the thousands from the villages of the Ukraine and sending them to the slave markets of the Middle East. He even had the impertinence to claim tribute from the Tsar; and though his claim was ignored, the Russian government – humiliatingly – still found it wise to send him handsome gifts.
So if Peter, like Ivan the Terrible before him, wanted to break out to north and south, it was not so surprising.
Boats: they were the answer. Young Peter had discovered boats – real boats – from the foreigners in the German suburbs. He had built a boat of his own. He had seen, up in the north, the foreign vessels that came to distant Archangel or plied the Baltic Sea.
That was what he needed – a fleet to go down the mighty Don and break through, past Azov, to the warm Black Sea. It was time to turn his war games into the real thing. They would build galleys first, for the Don; then real ships for the sea.
Strangely, if Procopy Bobrov had been excited by this adventure, his father was equally so. For though he was not required on the campaign, the sixty-five-year-old former official had now acquired a new lease of life. The young Tsar needed timber for his fleet. Above all, he needed ash trees for masts.