Lindsey Hughes - Peter the Great: A Biography

Copyright 2002 by Lindsey Hughes

First published in paperback 2004

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Set in Garamond by Fakenham Photosetting, Norfolk

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Bath

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hughes, Lindsey, 1949

Peter the Great: a biography / Lindsey Hughes.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-300-09426-8 (hbk.)

ISBN 978-0-300-10300-7 (pbk.)

1. Peter I, Emperor of Russia, 16721725. 2. RussiaKings and rulersBiography. 3. RussiaHistoryPeter I, 16891725. I. Title.

DK131.H838 2002

947'.05'092dc21

2001007276

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my father, George Ernest James Hughes

A tsar is born Russia in 1672 Childhood The strel'tsy revolt of 1682

Sophia and the Khovanshchina A portrait of Ivan and Peter

The regency War and naval games. Preobrazhenskoe Marriage

The Crimean campaigns. Sophia and Golitsyn overthrown

The Naryshkins Foreign friends Prince-Pope and Prince-Caesar

The death of Natalia Naryshkina The Kozhukhovo manoeuvres

Menshikov The Azov campaigns

Peter Mikhailov The insult at Riga. Prussia The little house at Zaandam

The Dutch Republic England Kneller Impressions of foggy Albion

The strel'tsy revolt of 1698 Wielding the razor Punishing the strel'tsy

Ring out the old, ring in the new Peter's army Narva 1700

Of marriages and mathematics The founding of St Petersburg

Martha Skavronska Makarov and the Cabinet

War in Poland and the Baltic. The Astrakhan revolt

Waiting for Charles Bulavin Charles turns south. Mazepa

Poltava Turk of the North Paradise regained. The growth of St Petersburg

Two weddings War with Turkey The Senate

The true and lawful sovereign lady Battle on the Pruth

Alexis and Charlotte

Peter and Catherine wed German affairs Finland Victory at Hang

The Prince-Pope's wedding The birth of two Peters

A new grand tour of Europe Paris Return to St Petersburg The Colleges

Peter and Alexis Witch hunt Freaks and monsters Alexis's trial

The death of Alexis Assemblies and The Honourable Mirror of Youth

The chief of police The death of Peter Petrovich A passion for the fleet

Statutes and regulations Pastimes

Yuletide visits The Holy Synod Celebrations and executions

Anna and Karl Summer in St Petersburg Nikitin's portrait

The peace of Nystad The Russian Versailles

The Table of Ranks The succession to the throne More legislation

The procurator-general Procurators, inquisitors and police chiefs

The Persian campaign Carnivals and a funeral

The grandfather of the navy The Persian war ends

Death of Tsaritsa Praskovia Pulling uphill.Bribery, corruption and red tape

A year of peace The Academy of Sciences Taking the waters

Catherine's coronation Family, sheep and other matters

Reflections The William Mons affair Death Leave all to

Deathbed portraits Castrum doloris Burial

The emperor is dead. Long live the empress

The balance sheet of domestic reform

World power Window on the West

Reformer or revolutionary? Views of Peter from the 1720s to the 1980s

Paintings and statues: 17251917 Peter's places Peter's possessions

Petrine anniversaries Soviet Peter Post-Soviet, post-modern Peter

The back dust jacket of my Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, published by Yale University Press in 1998, has an image taken from the side of Carlo Rastrelli's bronze bust of Peter, which shows him as Pygmalion, putting the finishing touches to a statue of a woman. The subject of that book was Peter's New Russia (the sculpture) as much as Peter himself (the sculptor) and its structure reflected this emphasis, with a central core of thematic chapters on war and diplomacy, army and navy, government, economy, society, culture, the court, education and religion sandwiched between an introductory section on Peter's background and youth and a conclusion on his personality, his family and associates and the Petrine legacy. The chronologically arranged chapter on foreign policy provided a framework into which the rest of the reign could be placed, but otherwise the grand narrative and the chronological interconnectedness of life, war and reform were abandoned. This approach had the advantage of allowing detailed analysis of individual topics spread over the whole reign, but it lost something of the dynamics of Peter's personal development, his interaction with other people over time and the evolution of his reforms, even if Peter was a looming presence throughout. I did not set out to write a life of Peter, but apparently this was by no means evident to some of the reviewers, who insisted on calling the book a biography, in some cases praising it as a good one, in others finding it somewhat lacking with respect to narrative flow and/or psychological depth. I am therefore grateful to Yale University Press for allowing me a second bite at the cherry in order to write Peter the Little, as this smaller book has informally been known while I was writing it, with a different readership in mind. In particular, I hope that this slimmed-down Peter will prove useful to students and other readers who are interested in Peter and his Russia but could not face ploughing through more than 600 densely footnoted pages.

Anyone writing Peter's life and there have been many attempts encounters the usual biographer's dilemma of striking a balance between the public man and the real, private Peter. The first Russian publications on the topic in the eighteenth century were modelled on Western exemplary lives of monarchs, statesmen and soldiers, which were biographical to the extent that they provided a chronological narrative about the life of a single individual, but concentrated on public rather than private activities, in fact, on the sort of topics Peter himself advocated in 1722 to the compilers of an official history of his reign, whom he instructed to write about

what was done during this past war and what regulations were made on civil and military order, statutes for both branches of the services and the ecclesiastical regulation; also about the building of fortresses, harbours, fleets of ships and galleys and various manufactures, and about construction work in St Petersburg, on Kotlin island and in other places.

It was widely held that private life was irrelevant to the chronicles of great men. Voltaire, for example, insisted that his own history of Peter's reign was the transactions of his public life, not the secrets of his cabinet, his bed, or his table. This approach may work with those world figures (few, surely) who single-mindedly dedicated themselves to pursuing public goals to the exclusion of everything else; but this was patently not the case with Peter, whose life was filled with personal drama and bizarre incident. The hero of Poltava and founder of the Russian navy, the absolute ruler of one of the biggest countries in the world, married an illiterate peasant woman and deferred to a mock sovereign known as Prince-Caesar, signing himself in letters as simple Peter Mikhailov or Piter. His love of inversion and parody, of the world turned upside down, was clearly a key element in his style of rulership, not just relaxation or aberration. The man credited with bringing civilisation to Russia numbered among his hobbies extracting teeth, performing autopsies, wood-turning and fire-fighting. The Father of the Fatherland condemned his eldest son to death. The founder of St Petersburg preferred to live in small wooden houses with low ceilings. All this and much more alcoholic binges, sexual excesses, crudity and violence co-existed with a life dedicated to duty and crowned with achievements which formed the basis of official biographies of Peter, in both Tsarist and Soviet times. In this book I have tried to show both the private and the public Peter, with the assumption that most readers will find the private Peter interesting primarily