Russka: The Novel of Russia

  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.

  ‘They’re getting some from Tula, but we have plenty on our estates,’ he had declared happily, and immediately made the Tsar a present of one of his woods.

  When the news came, in 1696, that the Turkish fort of Azov had fallen, he was ecstatic.

  ‘Can’t you feel it?’ he cried to Eudokia. ‘I can. I feel a warm wind blowing into our northern forests – a warm wind from the south.’

  One other development had taken place during the Azov campaign: Peter’s invalid half-brother Ivan had died. It was not an important event in itself but it meant that now, as he returned to Moscow i
n triumph, Tsar Peter at the age of twenty-four sat alone upon the throne.

  ‘He may be wild,’ Nikita had assured his wife, ‘but now we shall see great things.’

  Even he however had been thunderstruck by what happened next: Peter’s triumphal entry into the capital.

  It took place on a sunny October day in 1696. By the Moscow river a triumphal arch had been erected in the Roman manner, with huge statues, one of Mars, the other of Hercules, on each side. Below it was a model of the Turkish Pasha in chains.

  When the procession came, it was headed by Peter’s tutor – the man who played Prince-Pope in the infamous Drunken Synod – dressed up in armour. Then in a gilded carriage came the Swiss Lefort. Then more carriages. Then came a cart containing a traitor who had foolishly helped the Turks during the campaign. The instruments of the torture and execution he was to suffer were displayed beside him.

  And at last, towards the rear of a procession that went on for miles, came Peter.

  To many who had never got a good look at him before, he was an astounding sight. He was built like an athlete. He had a mop of dark hair, a moustache like a Cossack, and piercing, staring eyes. He stood no less than six foot seven inches high.

  Yet this young Russian giant was not wearing Russian dress. He wore a German uniform, a black coat and a huge black three-cornered hat in which he had jauntily stuck a long white feather.

  And there was not a priest in sight.

  No icons came before the procession; no priests with banners. No welcoming speech from the Patriarch; no church bells rang. A Roman Caesar had come, wearing a German uniform; a pagan procession was entering the capital of Holy Russia.

  ‘Yet even the Romans had their gods,’ Nikita murmured. ‘And even Genghis Khan, pagan that he was, did not despise the Church.’ And as he gazed at the procession he thought he saw a new, harsh sun that would burn away all the shadows.

  As for Eudokia, she stared with furious disgust.

  ‘When his mother died, and he would not even stay at her bedside, I said he was unnatural,’ she remarked. ‘Now I have seen the face of evil itself.’

  Yet even this horror had been as nothing to what was happening now.

  For in 1698, Peter had, once more, done something that no ruler of Russia had ever done.

  He had travelled abroad. And he had taken Procopy with him.

  While they were away, Eudokia had scarcely even visited Moscow. The place had become hateful to her. Instead she had spent most of her time alone, down at Russka, where she continued to pass long hours in the company of the priest Silas, and Daniel and his family.

  But now Peter and her son were back. And in Moscow, all hell had broken loose.

  Daniel approached the capital with a mixture of curiosity and dread.

  Could the rumours he had heard since Tsar Peter’s sudden return from abroad really be true? It was many years since he had been to the capital, but when he received the summons from that godly woman Eudokia Mikhailovna, he had not hesitated but had come, bringing with him his wife and little daughter.

  For – and it often puzzled Daniel that God should have granted such a gift in these evil days – he and Arina, after nearly fifteen years, and long after they had given up hope, had unexpectedly been blessed with a daughter. She had been born in 1693 when Arina was thirty-nine and he was in his sixties. And now here he was, aged seventy, with a wife and a six-year-old girl.

  At first, when he and Arina had gazed at the little baby who had so wondrously appeared, they had been astonished by one thing: she did not in the least seem to resemble either of them.

  It was old Elena who, with a smile of delight, solved the mystery.

  ‘To think that, in my last days, I should have been granted such a thing,’ she muttered. ‘The child is my Maryushka, to the life.’

  So that was what they called her: Maryushka. And old Elena, in the last three years of her life, would sit with the child every day with as much pride as if it had been her own.

  Yet if little Maryushka had come into their lives like a ray of sunshine, what dark years they were into which she had been born. All over Russia, but especially in the north, the government had continued to persecute the Raskolniki. Some sought martyrdom by challenging the authorities. Others continued to worship in secret.

  The early years, after the terrible edict, had been especially difficult. No one had been sure what to do. But Silas and Daniel had consulted the friends of Avvakum and with them had reached a wise conclusion.

  ‘There is no merit in challenging the government and calling down its wrath,’ Daniel would tell his little family. ‘The edict is wrong, but perhaps in future it will be changed. We shall continue to pray, in secret, as we have been taught. We shall not seek trouble, but if persecution comes, we must suffer it as best we may, secure in God’s protection.’ It was a course that hundreds, even thousands of little congregations had followed in that vast land. No one, neither the government nor the congregations themselves, knew how many.

  Daniel was cautious as he approached Moscow, it was understandable. The capital was not only the seat of persecution. It had also become a place of danger. For that very summer, while the strange young Tsar had still been abroad, the streltsy had revolted again.

  Had Sophia, still in furious exile in her convent, put them up to it? No one knew. Fortunately for Peter, his counsellors had managed to smash the rebellion very quickly. But the Tsar had hurried home anyway and now, a month after his arrival, all Russia was waiting to see what their young ruler would do.

  As Daniel entered the suburbs, however, the huge city seemed to be quiet. His little cart made its way slowly towards the city’s outer wall, passed through and came eventually to the kitaygorod where the Bobrovs had their substantial house. And there at last, with the late afternoon sun pleasantly on his back, he led his wife and daughter into the large, dusty courtyard.

  It was a big, wooden house on two floors, with a massive outside staircase. Around the courtyard were a number of lesser buildings, in which he would be given lodgings.

  He placed his hand on his heart and bowed low as the grey-bearded figure of Nikita himself appeared and gave him a courteous greeting. A moment later, from the upper floor, Eudokia came out, smiling; before her walked a serving girl, with a pleasant face, carrying bread and salt in welcome.

  ‘Welcome, faithful Patriarch,’ she said.

  How the old man’s heart warmed. His face, usually rather solemn, creased into a smile. That little word ‘faithful’ meant so much to them both. It meant that, despite their different stations in life, they were friends. It meant that she relied upon him for emotional support. He knew it. And lastly it meant something else, which was never spoken of before her husband.

  ‘My Lady Eudokia Mikhailovna,’ he said fervently, bowing low in greeting. He had only seen her in Russka before, never in Moscow. In Russka she dressed simply. But here in the capital she was magnificently attired in rich red brocade and a headdress studded with pearls. Though he despised all the trappings of worldly wealth, old Daniel could not help thinking that she looked very well in her finery.

  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.
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  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 natural: ‘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 all: 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.