Though they were in the heart of Moscow, the afternoon seemed to be completely silent. Hardly anyone was passing in the street outside. In the courtyard, a single mulberry tree gave shade in one corner – which shade was scarcely needed on such a pleasant autumn day. The horse in the shafts, sensing that he was at journey’s end, had dropped his head and was twitching his lips thoughtfully, while the flies settled on him.
And so, like old friends, the rich landlord and these poor artisans talked gently together in low tones, exchanging a little news. For even Nikita, now that he was getting old, found the presence of these simple people from the country strangely comforting.
It was while they were conversing like this, and just as Daniel was thinking it was time to unharness the horse from the little cart, that he suddenly saw Eudokia stiffen and a curious look of awkwardness pass over Nikita’s face.
At that moment, he also became aware that someone was coming through the gateway behind him; and at the same time he heard Nikita Bobrov say, in a voice whose heartiness was not quite naturaclass="underline" ‘Ah! Here is my son Procopy.’
And then, as Daniel turned to look, his mouth fell open in horror.
Procopy was charming, Peter had always found him so, and intelligent.
The young Tsar’s friends at the village of Preobrazhenskoe had included all kinds of people. There were men of the old princely and boyar families; there were sons of the nobility, like Procopy; there were lesser gentry, and there were even lowborn men like his favourite Menshikov who was said to have sold pastries in the street as a boy.
One thing united them alclass="underline" they were devoted to Peter.
And then, of course, there were the foreigners in the German quarter.
Procopy was lucky that, with his ready wit, he was included by Peter not only in the military company he kept at the village, but in the frequent parties in the German quarter. Not only did it bring him closer to the boy-Tsar, but it had also opened up for him another world.
For the German quarter was utterly unlike the rest of Moscow. Its broad streets were neatly laid out; its houses were frequently of Dutch brick or stone with pleasant little formal gardens. Its little Protestant churches seemed light and open compared to the dark Muscovite churches that glimmered with gold. In short, it was a small oasis of Europe, of bourgeois order and culture, cleanliness and discipline, fenced off in its compound across the fields from the huge, untidy and exotic, Asiatic jumble of Moscow.
Some of the several thousand merchants and soldiers who lived there were second or third generation immigrants. But to the Russians – unless they had converted to Orthodoxy and made the effort to Russianize themselves entirely – they were contemptible: dumb foreigners. In the slang of the day, the German suburb was often called the kokuy – which was the name of the brothel quarter in the city proper.
Yet here lived Englishmen who understood the weaponry and tactics of modern war; here could be found Germans who, far from being ‘dumb’, as their Russian name implied, spoke many languages. Here were Dutchmen who understood how to build sea-going ships and how to navigate.
These were wonders about which the Russians were not only ignorant, they were not even curious. Procopy himself had been present when one day a faithful general, thinking to please the boy-Tsar, proudly brought back an astrolabe from abroad, by which means, he explained, the cunning foreigners could navigate by the sun and stars. Peter had been delighted. No one had ever seen such a thing before. ‘How does it work?’ he had asked. ‘How?’ The general was nonplussed. ‘I never thought of asking,’ he replied.
That the astrolabe had at that time been in use for nearly two thousand years they did not know.
But nothing had impressed Procopy more than the way that the young Tsar had found not only a Dutchman who could explain it to him but had sat down with an exercise book day after day, week after week, until he had slowly mastered the unfamiliar mathematics of the thing.
‘I tell you,’ he explained to his father, ‘I admire him as a Tsar, for behind his wildness is something formidable. But I love him as a man. It’s not just his curiosity, which is past anything I’ve ever seen. But he struggles so hard! I watched him with his mathematics. It didn’t come easily to him at all, but he wouldn’t give up. That’s what I like. He makes mistakes, but he just won’t give up.’
Procopy had got to know the German suburb very well; and though he had not the driving passion for knowledge that Peter had, he began to have some understanding of the wealth that it represented. Indeed, he even began to think of himself as rather advanced, a man ahead of his time.
Until he went on the great embassy abroad.
The great embassy of Peter of Russia to western Europe has become such a part of the folklore of world history that its true nature is often forgotten.
The folklore is that Peter, thirsty for western civilization, visited Europe and then returned to civilize his own country and make it as much like the rest of Europe as he could.
This is not true.
Firstly, as to Peter’s reason for going, the latter must certainly leave no shadow of doubt. It was to prepare for war – as a start, against Turkey. Diplomatically, the embassy was to persuade western countries to join an anti-Turkish alliance. The practical side of the tour of Europe was to learn shipbuilding so that Russia could build a proper, sea-going fleet.
Already in 1696, soon after his victory at Azov, Peter had sent fifty horrified Russians, without their families, to western Europe to learn navigation and shipbuilding. Amongst them, amazingly, was the fifty-two-year-old Tolstoy who had somehow, despite his close links to Peter’s Miloslavsky enemies, managed to get into Peter’s favour.
His own embassy, therefore, followed soon after.
But why did Peter himself go; and why did he go incognito – officially only as a junior member of the party led by his ambassadors?
We do not know for certain. But it was probably to give himself more freedom to roam unofficially in the dockyards of the west. Certainly he spent months working as a ship’s carpenter and learning the whole business very thoroughly.
It also perhaps gave this devotee of the Mock Synod and the Jolly Company more opportunity to play the fool. This he and his friends also did. In London, they were installed, near the docks, in the house of the distinguished diarist John Evelyn, and so effectively wrecked both house and garden that the great Sir Christopher Wren, who inspected the place afterwards, estimated the damage at the then astounding sum of three hundred and fifty pounds. Amongst other items, the floor had to be renewed; the tiles from the Dutch stoves had been pulled off; the brass door locks broken; the feather beds ripped open; all the lawns and a four-hundred-foot-long, nine-foot-high holly hedge – one of the horticultural prizes of London – completely destroyed.
In this manner, in 1697–8, Tsar Peter came to learn about the civilization of Europe.
The Baltic; the port of Riga; the German states of Brandenburg and Hanover; Holland; England; Hapsburg Vienna; Poland.
It was not, Procopy would say in later years, that he had entered other lands. He had entered another century.
He never really understood how great the difference was. This was not lack of intelligence on his part. The huge, two-thousand-year-old tradition of philosophical enquiry, from Socrates to Descartes; the splendours of the Renaissance; the beginnings of modern science; and, most of all, the complex and flexible western societies with their ancient institutions, professions, legal and moral codes and brilliant culture – all these things, despite some imported books and furniture at the Tsar’s court, were simply not comprehended by more than a handful of Russians. None of Peter’s entourage really understood what they were seeing. Peter himself certainly did not, nor could he have.