Peter the Great (23 page)

It was a strange assortment at first, this motley collection of distinguished gray beards, youthful roisterers and foreign adventurers. But time shaped them into a cohesive group that called itself the Jolly Company and went everywhere with Peter. It was a vagabond, itinerant sort of life, roaming the countryside, dropping in unannounced to eat and sleep with a surprised nobleman. In Peter's wake were anywhere from 80 to 200 followers.

An average banquet for the Jolly Company began at noon and ended at dawn. The meals were gargantuan, but there were intervals between courses for smoking, for games of bowls and ninepins, for archery matches and shooting at targets with muskets. Speeches and toasts were accompanied not only by cheers and shouts but by blasts of trumpets and salvos of artillery. When a band was present, Peter played the drums. In the evenings, there was dancing and, often, an exhibition of fireworks. When sleep overcame a reveler, he simply rolled off his bench onto the floor and snored away. Half the company might sleep while the rest roared. Sometimes these parties extended into a second or third day, with guests sleeping side by side on the floor, rising to consume further prodigious quantities of food and drink and then sinking back again into lazy slumber.

An obvious requisite for membership in Peter's Jolly Company was a capacity for drink, but there was nothing new or abnormal about this intemperance in Peter's friends. Since time immemorial, drink had been—in the words of the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev in the tenth century—"the joy of the Russes." Successive generations of Western travelers and residents had found drunkenness almost universal in Russia. Peasants, priests, boyars, tsar: all were participants. According to Adam Olearius, who visited Muscovy in the time of Peter's grandfather Tsar Michael, no Russian ever willfully missed a chance to take a drink. To be durnk was an essential feature of Russian hospitality. Proposing toasts that no one dare refuse, host and guests gulped down cup after cup, turning their beakers upside down on their heads to prove that they were empty. Unless the guests were sent home dead drunk, the evening was considered a failure.

Peter's father, Tsar Alexis, his piety notwithstanding, was as Russian as the next man. Dr. Collins, Alexis' physician, noted how pleased his employer was to see his boyars "handsomely fuddled." The boyars, in turn, were always eager to see foreign ambassadors as drunk as possible. Common people drank also, less to be sociable than to forget. Their goal was to reach a stupor of unconsciousness, putting the unhappy world around them out of mind as rapidly as possible. In grimy taverns, men and women alike pawned their valuables and even their clothes to keep the vodka mugs coming. "Women," reported another Westerner, "are often the first to become raving mad with immoderate draughts of brandy and are to be seen, half-naked and shameless, in almost all the streets."

Alexis' roistering son and his Jolly Company fully upheld these Russian traditions. Although much of the alcohol consumed at their revels was in the milder form of beer or kvas, the intake was vast and continuous—Gordon in his diary speaks often of the amount Peter has drunk and of the difficulties that he, a middle-aged man, is having in keeping up. But it was Lefort who taught Peter to drink really heavily. Of Lefort, the German philosopher Leibniz, who observed the Swiss when he traveled to the West with Peter on the Great Embassy, was to write, "[Alcohol] never overcomes him, but he always continues master of his reason
...
no one can rival him
...
he does not leave his pipe and glass till three hours after sunrise." Eventually, this drinking took its toll. Lefort died a relatively young man of forty-three;

Peter died at fifty-two. When he was young, though, these wild bacchanalia did not leave Peter exhausted and debauched, but actu
a
lly seemed to refresh him for the next day's work. He could drink all night with his comrades and then, while they snored in drunken slumber, rise at dawn and leave them to begin work as a carpenter or shipbuilder. Few could match his pace.

In time, Peter decided not to leave the arrangements for these banquets to chance. He enjoyed dining two or three times a week at Lefort's house, but it was impossible for Lefort with his limited income to arrange the complicated and expensive entertainment which the Tsar expected, so Peter built for him a larger hall to accommodate several hundred guests. Eventually, even this became too small, and the Tsar therefore erected a handsome stone mansion, magnificently furnished with tapestries, wine cellars and a banquet hall large enough for 1,500 people. Lefort was the nominal owner, but in fact the mansion became a kind of clubhouse for the Jolly Company. When Peter was absent, and even when Lefort was absent, those members of the Jolly Company remaining in Moscow gathered at this house to dine, drink and pass the night, their expenses defrayed by the Tsar.

Gradually, from spontaneous drinking bouts and banquets, the Company proceeded to more organized buffoonery and masquerades. To most of his comrades Peter had, in sportive moments, given nicknames, and these nicknames were gradually elevated into masquerade titles. The boyar Ivan Buturlin was given the title "The Polish King" because in one of the military maneuvers at Preobrazhenskoe he was the commander of the "enemy" army. Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, the other commander and defender of the play fortress town of Pressburg, was promoted to "King of Pressburg" and then to "Prince-Caesar." Peter addressed him as "Your Majesty" and "My Lord King" and signed his letters to Romodanovsky, "Your bondsman and eternal slave, Peter." This charade, in which Peter mocked his own autocratic rank and title, continued throughout the reign. After the Battle of Poltava, the defeated Swedish officers were led into the presence of the "Tsar"—who was in fact Romodanovsky. Only a few of the Swedes, none of whom had ever seen the real Peter, wondered who was the extremely tall Russian officer standing behind the Mock-Prince-Caesar.

But Peter's parody of temporal power was mild compared to the bizarre mockery he and his comrades appeared to make of the church. The Jolly Company was organized in
to "The All-Joking, All-Drunken
Synod of Fools and Jesters," with a Mock-
“
Prince-Pope," a college of cardinals and a suite of bishops, archimandrites, priests and deacons. Peter himself, although only a deacon, took charge of drawing up the rules and instructions for this strange assembly. With the same enthusiasm with which he was later to draw up laws for the Russian empire, he carefully defined the rituals and ceremonies of the Drunken Synod. The first commandment was that "Bacchus be worshipped with strong and honorable drinking and receive his just dues." In practical terms, this meant that "all goblets were to be emptied promptly and that members were to get drunk every day and never go to bed sober." At these riotous "services," the Prince-Pope, who was Peter's old tutor, Nikita Zotov, drank everyone's health and then blessed the kneeling congregation by making the sign of the cross over them with two long Dutch pipes.

On church holidays, the games became more elaborate. At Christmas, more than 200 men, singing and whistling, would travel around Moscow leaning out of overcrowded sleighs. At their head, riding in a sleigh drawn by twelve bald men, rode the Mock-Prince-Pope. His costume was sewn with playing cards, he wore a tin hat and he was perched atop a barrel. Choosing the richer noblemen and merchants to honor with their caroling, they swarmed into their houses, expecting food and drink as thanks for their uninvited songs. During the first week of Lent, ajpother procession, this time of "penitents," followed the Prince-Pope through the city. The Company, wearing outlandish costumes inside out, rode on the backs of donkeys and bullocks or sat in sleighs pulled by goats, pigs or even bears.

A marriage in Peter's circle stirred the Jolly Company to special efforts. In 1695, when Peter's favorite jester, Jacob Turgenev, married a sexton's daughter, the feasts and celebrations lasted three days. The wedding took place in a field outside Preobrazhenskoe, and Turgenev and his bride arrived for the ceremony in the Tsar's finest court carriage. Behind them came a procession of leading boyars wearing fantastic costumes—hats of birchbark, boots of straw, gloves made of mouse skins, coats covered with squirrel tails and cats' paws; some were on foot and others rode in carts drawn by oxen, goats or pigs. The celebrations ended with a triumphal entry into Moscow with the newly married couple mounted together on the back of a camel. "The procession," Gordon comments, "was extraordinary fine," but the joke may have been carried too far because a few days later the bridegroom, Turgenev, suddenly died in the night.

The Drunken Synod, created when Peter was eighteen, continued its tipsy existence until the end of the Tsar's reign, with the mature man who had become an emperor continuing to engage in the same coarse buffoonery begun by an unbridled adolescent. This behavior, which foreign diplomats found vulgar and scandalous, seemed blasphemous to many of Peter's subjects. It added substance to the growing belief of the conservative Orthodox faithful that Peter was himself the Antichrist, and they waited eagerly for the bolt from heaven which would strike down the blasphemer. In fact, it was partially in order to provoke, dismay and degrade the hierarchy of the church, and especially the new Patriarch Adrian, that Peter had originally instituted the Drunken Synod. His mother and the conservative boyars had had their victory over his own candidate, the more enlightened Marcellus of Pskov—so be it!—but Peter retaliated by appointing his own Mock-Patriarch. The parody of the church heirarchy not only gave vent to his own resentment, but, as the years went by, reflected his continuing impatience with the whole institution of the church in Russia.

Nevertheless, Peter learned to be careful. The Drunken Synod did not directly insult the Russian Orthodox Church because Peter quickly steered the parody to a safer mimicry of the Roman Catholic Church. The original leader of the masquerade, the Prince-Patriarch, became the Prince-Pope, he was surrounded by a College of Cardinals, and the ceremonies and language of the charade were borrowed not from the Russian liturgy but from the Roman. To this game, of course, fewer Russians objected.

In Peter's own eyes, the buffoonery of the Mock-Synod was not blasphemous. Certainly, God was too majestic a being to be offended by his little parodies and games. Ultimately, that was what the revels of the Mock-Synod were: games. They were a form of relaxation—clownish perhaps, ridiculous, even gross— but for the most part, the Company were not men of refined sensibilities. They were men of action, engaged in building and governing a state. Their hands were stained with blood, mortar and dust, and they needed to relax. Their pleasures were true to their character: They drank, they laughed, they shouted, they dressed in costumes, danced, played practical jokes, made fun of one another and of whatever passed beneath their eyes— especially the church, which resisted everything they were trying to do.

To contemporary Russians, it was not only Peter's soul that seemed in danger these years, but his body as well. He experimented continually with ever more elaborate and dangerous fireworks. During the Shrovetide celebration of 1690, when Peter was also honoring the birth of his son Alexis, a display lasted five hours. One five-pound rocket, instead of bursting in the air, fell back to earth, landing on the head of a boyar and killing him. As
Peter became more proficient, these pyrotechnical displays became more spectacular. In 1693, following a long salute from fifty-six cannon, there appeared the image of a flag of white flame bearing on it in Dutch letters the monogram of Prince Romoda-novsky, followed by a tableau of a fiery Hercules tearing open the jaws of a lion.

And there was the game of war. During the winter of 1689-1690, Peter waited impatiently for the spring to begin maneuvers with his play regiments. The Tsar's suppers with General Gordon were filled with discussions of new European drills to be taught to the troops. The test came in the summer, in an exercise during which the Preobrazhensky Regiment attacked the fortified camp of the Semyonovsky Regiment. Hand grenades and fire pots were used which, though they were made of pasteboard and clay, still were dangerous when tossed into a group of men. Peter himself was hurt when, during the storming or an earthwork, a clay pot filled with gunpowder burst near him, burning his face.

Through the summer of 1691, the regiments prepared for a large-scale sham battle to be
waged in the autumn. Romodanov
sky, the mock King of Pressburg, commanded an army which consisted of the two play regiments and other troops and was pitted against a Streltsy army commanded by Prince Ivan Buturlin, the mock King of Poland. The battle, which began at dawn on October 6, was fought bitterly two days, and ended in victory of the "Russian" army commanded by Romodanovsky. But Peter, not satisfied, ordered a second round, which took place in high wind, rain and mud on October 9. Romodanovsky's army was again victorious, but there were real casualties. Prince Ivan Dolgoruky was shot in the right arm, the wound became infected and nine days later he died. Gordon himself was wounded in the thigh and his face so severely burned that he spent a week in bed.

During this period, Peter did not forget his boats. To speed the work at Pereslavl, twenty Dutch shipwrights from the famous shipyard at Zaandam in Holland had been contracted early in 1691 to come to Russia. When Peter returned to Lake Pleschev, he found these men working with Karsten Brandt on two small thirty-gun frigates and three yachts. Peter stayed with them only three weeks, but the following year he visited the lake four times, twice remaining for more than a month. Equipped with an "imperial decree" from Prince-Caeser Romodanovsky to build a warship from the keel up, Peter worked from dawn to dusk, eating in the boatyard and sleeping only when he was too tired to work. Oblivious to everything else, he refused to go to Moscow to receive the visit of an ambassador from Persia. Only when two senior members of his government, his uncle Lev Naryshkin and