* Pursued by Menshikov, Charles, accompanied by Mazeppa, his Cossacks (who as traitors could not surrender) and a small retinue, just made it to the Bug River where he abandoned his army and escaped to Ottoman territory, whence he continued to direct the war against Peter.
* In Greek mythology, Phaeton drove his chariot so fast and high that it exploded in flames – a metaphor for the dangers of excessive ambition.
SCENE 1
The Emperor
CAST
PETER THE GREAT, tsar and emperor 1682–1725
Eudoxia (née Lopukhina), tsarina, his first wife, now a nun
Alexei, tsarevich, his eldest son by Eudoxia
Charlotte, princess of Brunswick, Alexei’s wife
PETER II, son of Alexei and Charlotte, Peter the Great’s grandson, tsar 1727–30
CATHERINE I (formerly Martha Scavronskaya), tsarina, Peter the Great’s second wife, empress of Russia 1725–7
Anna, their daughter, later wife of Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, ‘Annushka’
ELIZAVETA, their daughter, empress of Russia 1741–62
Peter Petrovich, their baby son, ‘Petrushka’
Praskovia (née Saltykova), tsarina, widow of Tsar Ivan V
Ekaterina, daughter of Ivan V and Praskovia, married Karl Leopold, duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, ‘Wild Duchess’
ANNA, daughter of Ivan V and Praskovia, married Friedrich Wilhelm, duke of Courland, empress of Russia 1730–40
Afrosina Fyodorova, Alexei’s Finnish mistress
COURTIERS: ministers etc.
Prince Fyodor Romodanovsky, prince-caesar, head of Preobrazhensky Office
Prince Ivan Romodanovsky, his son, prince-caesar, head of the Preobrazhensky Office
Alexander Menshikov, first prince, field marshal and Peter’s best friend, ‘Aleshka’, ‘Prince from the Dirt’
Boris Sheremetev, field marshal, count
Gavril Golovkin, chancellor, count
Fyodor Apraxin, general-admiral, count, brother of Tsarina Martha, Fyodor III’s wife
Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, commander of the Preobrazhensky Guards
Peter Tolstoy, henchman of Miloslavskys, secret police chief
Peter Shafirov, vice chancellor, first baron
Anton Devier, police chief of Petersburg
Pavel Iaguzhinsky, procurator-general
ENEMIES
Charles XII, King of Sweden, ‘Last of the Vikings’, ‘Ironhead’
Baltacı Mehmet Pasha, Ottoman grand vizier
Poltava changed Russia’s status in Europe. From now on, it was a great power and the Romanovs were no longer Muscovite barbarians
from the borderlands of Europe. Tsars Michael and Alexei had aspired to marry into European royalty but had always been snubbed; now it was different, and Peter moved swiftly to marry Romanovs to European princes. He negotiated the marriage of his niece, Anna, to Friedrich Wilhelm, duke of Courland, a small Baltic principality in today’s Latvia. The first Russian royal wedding to a foreigner for 200 years was to be held not in Moscow but in Petersburg, where Peter decided to lay on a royal-and-dwarf spectacular to launch the city as his new capital.
Its embellishment had already started. Grandees had been ordered to build stone palaces in the city; government departments were moved there; and Peter hired Italian and German architects to design a great European metropolis.*
When Anna’s bridegroom arrived, Peter proudly showed him around the city himself. The duke was distinguished only by his appetite for drink. Peter was bored by the bovine Friedrich and found the bride Anna, daughter of Tsar Ivan V, charmless. She was broad-shouldered and sour-faced, regularly bullied by her mother, Tsarina Praskovia, whom she hated. Praskovia was a dragon who ruled her court at the Izmailovo Palace outside Moscow with capricious ferocity. When a sacked servant tried to denounce her to Peter for criticizing his reforms, Praskovia had him arrested, then beat him with a cane in his cell and, dousing him in vodka, set him alight. With such a mother, no wonder Anna was a gloomy bride.
On 31 October 1710, at Menshikov’s palace, Peter, unusually sporting a majestic Frenchified costume, a red cloak lined in sable with a white perruque, and brandishing a ribboned baton, held the crown over the groom, while Menshikov did the same over the bride. But the tsar got restless, asked someone else to take over and ordered the priest to shorten the service, impatient to begin his firework display.
After three days of feasting, Anna and Friedrich were the star guests at the marriage of Peter’s favourite dwarf, Iakim Volkov. Peter had specified to the prince-caesar that ‘dwarfs male and female residing in boyar homes in Moscow are to be collected and sent to St Petersburg.’ When they arrived they were cooped up ‘like cattle’ before being distributed to grandees who were to dress them for the weddings.
First a dwarfish master of ceremonies, struggling to hold his full-sized staff of office, led a procession of seventy-two dwarfs, tsar and court that ended at the Peter and Paul Cathedral where Peter held the crown over the bride’s head as the congregation and even the priest tried without success to stifle giggles. At the wedding banquet in Menshikov’s palace, Peter and Catherine, accompanied by the duke and duchess of Courland, sniggered as the dwarfs feasted at a table overseen by the dwarf-marshal and bumpered full-sized goblets of vodka. When the music began, the drunken dwarfs started to dance and fall over, to the amusement of the tsar and the foreign ambassadors who now roared with laughter at ‘the comical capers, strange grimaces and odd postures of this medley of pygmies’, some of whom ‘had huge hunchbacks and little legs, others big bellies and short crooked legs like a badger’s’. Afterwards Peter put the dwarf couple to bed in his room in the palace. The bacchanalia ended only when Anna and her husband departed for Courland, but the duke had drunk so much that he died soon after leaving.
The teenaged widow Anna returned to her uncle, who forbade her to remarry and despatched her back to rule Courland. In its capital, Mitau, Anna was neglected, disdained and always starved of funds by the tsar, who nonetheless dictated her every move to ensure that the duchy remained a Russian satellite.
Peter was sobered by Sultan Ahmet III’s declaration of war, and rushed southwards to raise troops and head off the Ottoman invasion. Peter may have expected an easy victory. In fact, he was marching into a trap.1
On 25 February 1711, Peter held a religious-military parade in Cathedral Square in the Kremlin to bless his crusade to liberate the Orthodox under Ottoman rule, in alliance with the Moldavian hospodar, Dmitri Cantemir, and destroy the ‘enemies of Christ’. He emblazoned his banners with Constantine the Great’s motto: ‘By this sign shall you conquer!’
However, Peter was surprised by the swift Ottoman advance towards Ukraine and Poland. He had to get to the Danube first. He urged Sheremetev to move faster. ‘I’m not an angel,’ grumbled the marshal, ‘but I’m ordered to do the work of an angel rather than a human being.’ Short of men and munitions, Peter blamed his officials who acted ‘without regard for the troubles and grief in which your leader finds himself’. He threatened to prosecute them as ‘traitors of the fatherland’. Peter felt alone in his mission. ‘It’s hard to live,’ he later told Catherine, ‘because I have to keep both sword and pen in my hand – and you know yourself I’ve no helpers.’
Peter aspired to be the first servant of a rational state, which he tried to create in a series of administrative and hierarchical reforms. Now he founded a new institution, the Senate, a nine-member cabinet, filled with his trusted relatives and including Menshikov of course, to run the country in his absence. Yet Peter distrusted his own nobles and officials, knowing that many opposed his aggressive reforms: in turn he called them ‘dogs’. Whenever he was distracted, chaos reigned as his henchmen, unrestrained by the decorum of his new Senate, wrestled (often literally) for money and power. While state-building with his new institutions, he undermined his own rational ideas with his tyrannical, idiosyncratic style. He dictated everything, soon grousing that th
e senators were incapable of decision-making. This is the complaint of autocrats, from Peter to Stalin and Putin, who concentrate fearsome power in one man and then reprimand their assistants for not thinking for themselves. ‘They imitate the crab in the course of their work,’ wrote Peter, ‘so I’ll deal with them not with words but with my fists.’ Peter warned that if they did not get to work ‘It will be the worse for you!’ Only fear worked. He frequently punched or beat his grandees with his cane. Many understandably resented his menacing hyperactivity.
Now he was starting to realize that Menshikov was avaricious and brutal as his depredations ravaged allied Poland. ‘Mend your ways,’ Peter warned him, ‘or you’ll answer with your head.’ Peter began to transfer his favour to the fearless, haughty Vasily Dolgoruky, who frequently denounced Menshikov’s corruption and violent extortions. ‘Inform me where the money’s gone . . . I know nothing of your province,’ Peter warned Menshikov, ‘as if it’s another country.’ Autocrats have assistants, advisers and interests, but they do not have – or should not have – friends. Peter loved his ‘heart’s child’ Menshikov, but he promoted and protected him because he was the most effective and the most committed in carrying out his projects, to which most of the aristocrats were indifferent.
Now, knowing that he might never return from ‘this hazardous journey’, he left both Menshikov and the rival Fyodor Apraxin in charge, telling both that ‘All the country is entrusted to you,’ thereby once more ensuring plenipotentiary paralysis. Worrying about his illegitimate daughters, he decided he should marry Catherine formally so that, he explained to Menshikov, if ‘they were left orphans they will be more protected’. He married her privately, announcing that she was the ‘true and lawful Sovereign Lady’.
On 6 March, he and Catherine went off to war in a race ‘to reach the Danube before the Turks’. As they headed south, Peter again fell ill, suffering ‘two weeks of paroxysms so severe I didn’t expect to survive but sweats and urination began to relieve me’. Catherine soothed her epileptic husband, while trying to protect her ally Menshikov. ‘I beg Your Highness not to be troubled by believing any stupid gossip from here,’ she wrote to the Prince from the Dirt, ‘for the Rear Admiral [Peter] keeps you in love.’
The Ottomans under Grand Vizier Baltacı Mehmet Pasha easily beat Peter to the Danube. ‘I’m amazed at your slow progress,’ he reprimanded Marshal Sheremetev, advancing with the main army. ‘Ten days are lost. Had you done as ordered, you’d have reached the Danube before the Turks,’ and now he wondered, ‘Will there be anything to eat?’ He was running out of supplies. He should have called off the campaign. On 24 June, Peter rendezvoused with Sheremetev. Their 38,000 men were systematically enveloped by the vizier’s 150,000 plus 50,000 horsemen under the Crimean Khan Devlet Giray. Suddenly, in ‘burning heat day and night’, lacking provisions, Peter found himself in extreme jeopardy. ‘Never since I started to serve’, he wrote, ‘have I been in such a deep position.’ He ordered the building of a fortified camp – just in time. On 9 July, Baltacı surrounded Peter, who built a deep pit protected by a circle of carts to shelter Catherine and her ladies from sun and missiles: there the tsarina waited serenely as the battle raged and her ladies sobbed loudly. The elite Ottoman janissaries attacked; Peter’s Moldavian allies were useless but his artillery proved its worth. ‘Lord God emboldened our men to the extent that though they outnumbered us by 100,000 they were constantly beaten back’ until they were in a stand-off. Peter called this ‘a banquet of death’. He faced death or capture: he is said to have written to the Senate to say that, if he was indeed seized, they should ‘cease to regard me as your tsar’ and should choose ‘the most worthy’ successor.
Peter offered to negotiate, but Baltacı thought he had him like ‘a bird in the hand’ as the tsar later put it; annihilation was imminent. Catherine won Peter’s undying admiration by keeping her nerve, facing danger ‘not as a woman but as a man’ and advising that he should again approach Baltacı.
Her instincts were sound. The janissaries had been mauled by Peter’s artillery and wanted peace. In the lull, Peter sent one of his brilliant new men to negotiate: Peter Shafirov, son of a Polish Jew with a gift for languages, had started as the tsar’s diplomatic translator but he had made himself so indispensable that Peter promoted him to vice-chancellor and the first Russian baron.* Peter offered Baltacı 150,000 roubles, and Catherine was said to have added all her jewellery to the bribe. ‘I deduce that the Turks are disposed to peace,’ Peter wrote to Shafirov on 11 July, revealing his desperation, ‘but are slow to get there. If they genuinely want peace, agree with them on everything they want except enslavement and let us know by the end of the day so we can begin our desperate march.’
Shafirov negotiated superbly from a position of ignominious weakness, surrendering Peter’s first prize, Azov, and its flotilla – but otherwise Peter got off lightly. In his sanctuary across the Ottoman border, Charles of Sweden, hearing of Peter’s predicament, tried to get the sultan to stop the treaty that would save Peter. Finally he galloped for Baltacı’s camp, but on 12 July Peter and Baltacı signed. Next day Charles arrived to watch his nemesis escape.†
‘My good fortune’, mused Peter, ‘consisted in receiving only fifty lashes when I was condemned to receive a hundred.’2
Peter, weary and sickening, travelled with Catherine through Poland to rally his Polish and Danish allies in the Swedish war – and to marry off his eldest son Alexei. He left Catherine at Thorn while he took the waters at Carlsbad, though the wholesomeness of spas bored him. ‘Katerinushka, my friend, how are you?’ he wrote to Catherine. ‘Tomorrow we begin our cure. The place is so merry you might call it an honourable dungeon . . . Worst of all there is no good beer!’ When she told him to relax, he joshed that she wanted revenge for one of his infidelities: ‘It is quite evident you’ve found someone better than me . . . Is it one of ours or a man of Thorn? I rather think . . . you want to be avenged for what I did two years ago. That’s the way you daughters of Eve act with us old fellows!’
In October, the purified tsar arrived at Torgau castle in Saxony to marry Alexei to Charlotte, daughter of the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg-Wolfenbüttel, one of those German principalities that would become Russia’s marriage-agency and link the dynasty into the wider royal family of Europe. But Peter was already worried about and displeased by Alexei.
At the age of eight, Alexei had been forcibly removed from his mother when she was confined to a monastery, surely a trauma for any child. Worse, Peter had placed him under the governorship of the harsh Menshikov, who had both bullied the boy and taught him to drink heavily. Half ignored, half intimidated, Alexei grew up fearing Peter’s implacable energy, his pursuit of Western culture and expertise, of Dutch ships and of German uniforms, his brutal wars and his menacing reforms: he cleaved to his mother’s Muscovite Orthodoxy. Now twenty-two, dark, long faced and sad eyed, all he had in common with his father was his height and his taste for drink, but he lacked his iron constitution.
Peter tried to train Alexei in war. When in March 1708 Alexei had grumbled that he had not been summoned to Petersburg – ‘I’m very sad to be left here’ – Peter replied, ‘You write that you’re sad and bored . . . but you should be able to work out for yourself that time requires it thus.’ The traditionalist Alexei did not approve of Russian marriages to foreigners. ‘So now I know he wishes to marry me not to a Russian but to one of these people [Westerners],’ he complained to his confessor. ‘What he wishes will happen.’ Peter arranged for him to meet Charlotte but Alexei found her poxy and made no comment. ‘Why,’ asked Peter, ‘haven’t you written to tell me what you think of her?’
On 14 October 1711, Peter watched Alexei marry Charlotte, who remained Lutheran though any children would be Orthodox. ‘I congratulate you on a new daughter-in-law,’ he told Catherine. ‘Please announce it to the All-Joking Prince-Pope!’ Peter knew that Alexei was dangerous. Charles XII had planned to replace Peter with his son. To protect his new
family and father a new heir, the tsar arranged another marriage: his own.3
At 7 a.m. on 19 February 1712, Peter, dressed as a rear admiral with one of his Dutch sailors, Admiral Cruys, as best man, formally married Catherine in Petersburg at the Church of St Isaac of Dalmatia. Peter had promised to Menshikov that if he survived the Turkish war, ‘We’ll complete this in St Petersburg,’ and he had kept his word.
Peter and Catherine’s two surviving daughters were bridesmaids along with their aunts and cousins, including the widowed duchess of Courland – so that the chapel contained three future empresses of Russia: Catherine, Elizaveta and Anna. Only Tsarevich Alexei was not there, apparently sulking in honour of his mother. Peter’s attendant at the wedding was a new upstart favourite, Pavel Iaguzhinsky, who now emerged for the first time as his inseparable companion.*
After the naval wedding, the couple rode in sleighs through rows of trumpeters and drummers to the Winter Palace where in the dining hall he hung his own present to his wife – an ebony and ivory candelabra he had crafted himself – suspended over the guests for the banquet. At the hard-drinking party, Peter joked to the ambassadors that it was ‘a fecund marriage for they already had five children’.
The Swedish war was far from over. Charles was defiant, convinced that he would prevail, so that even after Poltava, Petersburg was not yet secure. The tsar methodically rolled up the Swedish empire, fighting on several fronts simultaneously, by land and sea, an effort, driven by his merciless acumen, that stretched Russian resources to their limit. He conquered enemy territory around the Baltic then marched into Swedish Pomerania in Germany. Catherine accompanied him during the German campaign, before he left Menshikov in command and returned to Petersburg. That year, Peter and General-Admiral Apraxin managed to conquer Finland, and on 27 July 1714 they defeated the Swedish navy† – but the tsar’s pleasure was blighted by revelations of Menshikov’s greed and insubordination, gleefully reported by Dolgoruky.