Vodka Politics (12 page)

Other delegates, such as the high chamberlain from Holstein, Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholz, were so taken aback by the drunkenness that virtually every page of his memoirs describes the tsar’s parties, where Peter forced the duke, foreign dignitaries, and even the ladies of the court to indulge in alcoholic excess. Realizing that escape was not an option, like so many others Bergholz devised familiar strategies to stay sober: drinking slowly and pleading with the servants to water down his portions of wine.
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While it would be easy to dismiss such playful parties, frequently it was under the influence of alcohol that Peter’s cruelty was on display for all to see.

During a dinner following the
streltsy
uprising, the Prussian ambassador M. Printz described how a drunken Peter had twenty prisoners brought into the court and, with each of the twenty rounds of alcohol he drank, happily lopped off the head of a condemned prisoner before proposing to the horrified ambassador that he try to match his feat. When even the tsar’s more “civilized” European confidants, such as Franz Lefort, begged not to participate in such brutality, they received a stern reply: there is “no sacrifice more agreeable to the Deity than the blood of a criminal.”
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Just as Stalin had his Beria, and Ivan had his Skuratov, it was the “prince-caesar” Romodanovsky who stoked Peter’s brutality. Between the tsar and his inebriate grand inquisitor, many prisoners—both guilty and innocent—were
tortured, hanged, or beheaded without trial. They saved their cruelest devices for nobles and commoners accused of blasphemous utterances against the tsar while stupefied by drink. Many an innocent drunkard was arrested on nothing more than rumor and hearsay. When asked—as often happened—why any particular wretch should be so tortured, Peter answered: “he must needs be guilty, or he would not have been imprisoned.”
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Perhaps it should come as little surprise that Peter inflicted his greatest cruelty when he was with Romodanovsky—a man who kept a bear in his palace. that he allegedly trained to perform a very interesting trick: the bear would present to any visitor who wanted to meet with his master a large glass of peppered vodka. Those who downed the awful-tasting liquor without flinching were allowed to pass; those who did not were mauled. Such incivility and drunken atrocities have confused generations of historians: “What kind of civilsation could that be which was inaugurated under such auspices as these, and by so brutal a reformer? Truly did Peter once observe, that ‘he wished to reform others, yet was unable to reform himself’.”
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The list of Peter’s modernizing reforms was indeed impressive. He taught the mannerisms of the European nobility and did away with such medieval practices as growing long beards. He outlawed arranged marriages and introduced the Julian calendar. He instituted a new tax code to pay for his new capital of St. Petersburg and to maintain the military that helped to secure it. He abolished the old boyar class, instituted noble ranks based on merit and service, and even instituted compulsory education as necessary for a competent and well-functioning government bureaucracy.
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Yet for all of his accomplishments, Peter’s vivid memories of the
streltsy
uprisings and the almost fatal dynastic rivalries of his childhood kept the issue of succession at the forefront of his thoughts.

In his youth, Peter’s mother arranged his marriage to Evdokiya Lopukhina, the daughter of an influential boyar. The marriage was an unhappy one. Of their three children, only one—the tsarevich Alexei Petrovich—survived infancy. Banished to a monastery so that Peter could marry his mistress Catherine, Evdokiya raised Alexei to loathe both Peter and his reforms, which made the pair a natural rallying point for the reactionary opposition. Alexei evaded his father, often pretending to be sick or hungover, thereby stoking the tsar’s suspicions.
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Swirling rumors of discord and conspiracy seemed all the more valid when the tsarevich suddenly fled his father’s court for the safety of European exile.

Amid such familial tension, in 1715 Peter and his second wife, Catherine, celebrated the birth of “junior”—Peter Petrovich. The announcement of another potential heir to the throne was met in classic Petrine fashion: military garrisons were given gifts and vodka as they saluted the news with cannon salvos. Peter, Menshikov, and Apraksin set out casks of free vodka and beer for their subjects, who got “inhumanly drunk.” In Peter’s raucous court, great pies were presented,
out of which jumped naked dwarfs who danced for the courtesans’ pleasure: a female dwarf for the men’s table, a male for the ladies’. According to Otto Pleyer, the consul from the Holy Roman Empire, “the joy at this birth among the great and persons of the lesser or low estate is indescribable, they just sleep it off to drink again and drink to sleep it off. Anyone who is sober pretends to be drunk among the drunk and in all houses the tables are always covered full of food. The tsar calls this prince his real crown prince.”
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When the prodigal tsarevich Alexei returned from self-imposed exile in 1718, an enraged Peter conducted an official “inquiry” into his son’s scandalous flight. Tortured by his father’s own order, Alexei implicated his closest friends—ensuring that the tsar would impale or break them on the wheel—before publicly renouncing the throne in favor of Peter’s “real” crown prince, Peter Petrovich. Alexei was condemned to death for treason and died in the island fortress of Saints Peter and Paul from repeated lashes by the knout. His son’s death weighed heavily on the great tsar, but at least the imperial succession was secure. That is, until the three-year-old heir to the throne Peter Petrovich, died unexpectedly, threatening another Time of Troubles.
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With the end of the Romanov bloodline in sight, the increasingly frail Peter instituted a new law on succession that allowed royal power to be appointed rather than inherited. Following bladder infections that left him bedridden in the summer of 1724, the ailing tsar had his beloved wife—a former Latvian peasant—officially crowned Empress Catherine I. As a fitting bookend to his early reign as co-tsar with his brother Ivan, Peter, now at the end of his life, would rule with Catherine. Improving somewhat, Peter even returned for one last conclave of his Drunken Synod—imbibing massive quantities of alcohol that almost certainly aggravated his gangrenous bladder and hastened his demise.
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On the evening of February 6, 1725, the bedridden emperor finally decided who would inherit his empire and throne. Calling for his slate, he scrawled only “I give all…” before the quill pen dropped from his hand. The great tsar slipped into a coma, never to awaken.

With the death of Peter the Great, Russia came full circle. Just as fifty years earlier the death of his father, Tsar Alexei, set off years of uncertainty, courtly intrigues, and dynastic struggles, so too the death of Peter without a son meant that the leadership of Russia would depend on the competing loyalties of courtiers. Just like Ivan the Terrible a hundred years earlier, Peter the Great was complicit in the death of his son, the sole heir to the throne. Also, in both cases, Russia again seemed poised for another Time of Troubles.

5

Russia’s Empresses: Power, Conspiracy, and Vodka

Perhaps Peter the Great’s proudest legacy was the founding of his European capital of St. Petersburg among the low swamps of the Neva River delta. Thanks in part to his wrenching reforms and the firm financial footing provided by alcohol, Russia and its capital flourished. By the late eighteenth century, the city unveiled a new tribute to its founder in the shape of the massive statue of the Bronze Horseman: Peter seated heroically on a magnificent steed, his right hand leading Russia majestically forward. The base of this iconic symbol of St. Petersburg is inscribed in Russian and Latin: “To Peter the Great from Catherine II, 1782”—a gift from one “great” to another.

Catherine the Great led Russia’s encroachments into Europe: in the south seizing Moldova, Ukraine, Crimea, and the shores of the Black Sea; in the north absorbing the Baltic states and partitioning Poland. At home, her reforms modernized Russia’s administrative bureaucracy. She was an enlightened despot who patronized the arts and education. Catherine corresponded personally with European scholars and philosophers from Voltaire to Diderot. With them she articulated such enlightenment values of liberty and democracy yet refused to permit them in her own dominions. For all of her accomplishments, Catherine nonetheless needed grandiose symbols, such as the Bronze Horseman, to secure her place in the line of “great” Romanov leaders, perhaps because the woman who was crowned Catherine II, “Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias,” had not an ounce of Russian blood and—assuming power through a palace coup—no legitimate claim to the Russian throne. As was the case with every empress crowned during the eighteenth century, Russia’s heavily paternal society and patrilineal dynasty stacked the cards heavily against the young tsarina. Also like her female predecessors, Catherine relied heavily on vodka politics to solidify her rule.

Elizabeth’s Disappointment

Two of the most influential figures in eighteenth-century Russia were not Russian at all. From Stettin in the Baltic arose Sophia Augusta Frederica, the French-educated daughter of a Prussian prince who, through cunning and good fortune, led Russia as Catherine the Great. Meanwhile, in the German port city of Kiel was born Peter of Holstein-Gottorp. On his father’s side, Peter was grand-nephew of Swedish king Charles XII; on his mother’s side, he was grandson of Charles’s adversary in the Northern War—Peter the Great of Russia. With this lineage, the young Holstinean was a potential heir to both thrones.

The dunderheaded Peter compensated for his high pedigree by lacking woefully in virtually every other characteristic imaginable. Orphaned young, his education was left to a drunk and ignorant courtier who beat and humiliated the cowed lad. At the age of fourteen, in 1742, Peter’s aunt—the recently crowned Tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna—summoned her young nephew to St. Petersburg and named him heir to the Russian throne. Expecting the arrival of an astute and refined aristocrat, Elizabeth was horrified to learn that she had instead anointed a drunken, ignorant, immature, irritable, royal pain in her backside. According to the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, Peter “viewed serious things childishly and approached childish enterprises with the seriousness of a grown man. He resembled a child who imagined himself an adult; in fact, he was an adult who always remained a child.”
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Hoping to solidify an alliance with Prussia, Tsarina Elizabeth arranged for Peter to marry the prominent Pomeranian princess Sophia Augusta Frederica. In 1744, the princess arrived in Russia. Well-mannered and well-educated, Sophia was everything Peter wasn’t. She ingratiated herself with the empress—fastidiously mastering the Russian language and (unlike Peter) eagerly converting from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Sophia even chose to be baptized with the Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna—Catherine—in honor of Elizabeth’s mother and wife of Peter the Great: Catherine I.

The brooding Peter did not share the empress’s enthusiasm for his new bride. While the festivities following their wedding on August 21, 1745, lasted ten days—with free meats roasted in the public squares and fountains running with wine so that even the common folk could join in the celebration—the two were soon conjoined in a cold, distant, and loveless marriage. It was nine full years before Peter and Catherine finally consummated their marriage—but even that was more the result of pressures to produce a royal heir than any expression of mutual fondness. In the meantime, they both carried on love affairs—encouraged by the tsarina, who hoped the two would eventually warm to each other.
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Catherine’s memoirs paint an unflattering picture of the young Peter: writing that from the age of ten Peter was prone to drink. Even years before arriving
in Russia, the young princess met him at a family gathering (they were second cousins, after all), where she heard that Peter was restive, hot-headed, and that not even his attendants could keep him from getting drunk.
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After their wedding Peter’s alcoholic antics continued, now on display before the entire court. Obsessed with all things Prussian, Peter smoked and drank beer to excess, believing it would make him “a real manly officer.” According to Catherine, he got so drunk at royal feasts that he “no longer knew what he was saying or doing, slurred his words, and made for such an unpleasant sight that tears came to my eyes, for I hid or disguised as much as possible what was reprehensible in him.”
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When he tired of the world of grown-ups, Peter retired to the couple’s imperial residence at Oranienbaum to take refuge in games and alcohol. Oftentimes Peter would drink through the night with his besotted lackeys who plied him with wine and liquor. Other times he retreated to his room to drink and play with his toys. In her memoirs, Catherine recalled once finding Peter in the middle of a military-style execution of a rat that had eaten two of his papier-mâché toy soldiers. Thinking it was all a joke, Catherine burst into laughter. Peter’s gaze turned cold. This was deathly serious—she just couldn’t understand.
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Scornful of his haughty wife, Peter turned his gaze toward someone who appreciated his crudeness instead of being embarrassed by it—Countess Elizabeth Vorontsova. Sallow and shallow, Elizabeth was dirty, rude, squint-eyed, and covered with smallpox scars. Her ability to drink, curse, and sprawl on the bed for his pleasure fascinated Peter—and in turn perplexed the entire royal court. One night, Catherine recalled