There seems to be little doubt that Sophia had fomented the spirit of revolt and attempted to direct it in her interest. All the Russian world was scandalised at the Tsar’s conduct, and she had from her convent watched the spread of the discontent. At last, while Peter was in England, some representatives of the streltsui had come to Moscow to complain of their treatment. After the taking of Azoff Peter had brought his favourite regiments to share his triumph and pleasure at Moscow, and had left the streltsui to rebuild the shattered fortifications in the distant south. With something of their old independence they had sent a few men to Moscow to lay their grievances before the Tsar. There they were astounded and further angered to hear that the Tsar had left Russia months before, and no man knew where he was. There could be no redress for grievances when the Tsar turned his back upon his people and wasted his life amongst the detested foreigners. Sophia’s friends and servants pressed the lesson deep. Was it not advisable to think of a new ruler, one who would be considerate to the streltsui?

The men probably saw the great strength of the garrison at Moscow, and they returned to Azoff only with a sullen report of their helplessness. The military authorities then ordered part of the streltsui to the Polish frontier, and this drove the men to fury. They set out on the long march to Moscow, in full mutiny, with the intention, apparently, of exterminating Peter’s supporters. But the Tsar had left his best generals, Shein and Patrick Gordon, in command of the troops, and they met the mutineers outside Moscow. After a futile parley the cannon and the cavalry were turned upon the helpless foot-soldiers, hundreds were slain and thousands captured. The revolt was thoroughly suppressed long before Peter reached Vienna.

But the young Tsar was in one of his moods of deliberate ruthlessness. The streltsui had deluged his mother’s palace with blood when he was a child; they had commemorated his departure by a plot and had taken advantage of his absence to rebel. These paid servants, these antiquated soldiers, presumed to criticise his plans and fancy themselves as masters of the Russian throne! And behind all their revolts he saw always, barely concealed in the gloom, the figure of his masterful half-sister. He resolved once for all to remove this source of irritation from his Empire.

Immediately after his return fourteen torture-chambers were fitted up in the village of Preobrajenshote, and the captured streltsui were soon suffering all the agonies that Byzantine and Moscovite ingenuity could devise and the fiendish temper of the Tsar could augment. Peter himself hovered round while his victims writhed on human grid-irons or had their flesh torn from the bones by the knout. Many of their womenfolk were included in the ghastly torture, which went on night and day for three days. But Peter got no confession of the guilt of his sister, and he decided to act without it. On September 30th a first batch of two hundred of the unhappy rebels, part of them scarred and drawn with torture, were brought up for execution. It is credibly reported that Peter wielded the axe himself and severed five heads. His companions were told to follow his example, and few dared draw back. His infamous servant, Menshikoff, is said to have cut off twenty heads, and the horror of incompetent bungling by amateurs in such matters may be seen in other pages of mediæval history.

In brief, the slaughter extended over several months, and thousands of the streltsui were executed. The ancient corporation was entirely broken and the fragments were included in the new army. In the Red Square at Moscow the heads of the rebels remained on the points of pikes until they rotted into grinning skulls. The wives and children were driven from Moscow. It was decreed that none should give them bread, and they disappeared silently into the plains and forests beyond. How many escaped famine or the wolves no man knows. Russia learned that it had an autocrat: Peter the Great.

And this meant the end of the career of the masculine Sophia. As she shuddered in her convent two hundred of the rebels were brought up and hanged within sight of her windows. Some of them held in their dead hands copies of a petition to her to see their grievances remedied. Then Peter turned upon her. She must lose her rank, have her hair shorn, and pass the rest of her life in strict seclusion as a nun. With the name of “Sister Susanna” the forceful and unscrupulous woman passes out of sight. Although there was no evidence of her guilt, and it is indeed unlikely that she was involved, Peter’s wife, Eudokia Lapukhin, was condemned to the same fate. She was at least guilty of refusing to share Peter’s tastes, and he had lived little with her. He was free; and from the horrible shambles he turned to the revels of the carnival of 1698 and the more congenial company of the women of his favourite district.

CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT PETER

The Tsar Peter was near the end of his third decade of life when he broke the power of the streltsui and definitely expelled his sister from the sphere of public life. The fortune and destiny of Russia now lay in his hands, and the heavy discontent of his people, coerced as it was by the appalling punishment of the rebels, invited him to take up the serious duties of kingship. It would be, even if we admitted that the intelligence of a genius was allied with his strange character, too much to expect that such a man would settle down to the study of the constructive problems that confronted him. He was at all times incapable of sustained intellectual concentration, of patiently working out into detailed plans the large ideas which arose in his feverish imagination. Congenital nervous disease might have been corrected by the hard labour in the open air in which he delighted, but the debauch which regularly closed his labour undid its effect. He returned, even after his recent ghastly experience and his tour of Europe, to his disordered ways.

It will be enough to illustrate the kind of life which he and his companions led by a short account of one of their pastimes. I have said that the expedition to Holland and England, which had in part the object of seeking grave alliances for the Empire in the west, was preceded by the revels of the carnival. These took the form of such pageantry and rioting as one found in most countries of Europe at the time, but there was an incident of the Moscow procession which introduces us to a startling feature of the life of Peter’s circle. One of the leading figures of the procession was a drunken old man who was dressed in ludicrous imitation of the Patriarch, the head of the Russian Church, riding on an ox, and accompanied by his spiritual court, an equally drunken and dissolute crowd, on the backs of hogs, bears, and goats. These were Peter’s intimate friends, and the entire masquerade was designed by him.

The mock Patriarch was Zotoff, the tutor whom Natalia had given her son in his youth and who had suffered Peter to contract at an early date a love of every kind of dissoluteness. Some time before this year Peter, who led the revels in the foreign quarter and outdid all in boisterous practical jokes, had dubbed the old man—he was now nearly seventy, though he took his wine and brandy with the youngest—“Archbishop of Presburg and Patriarch of the banks of the Iaouza [the neighbouring stream], and the whole of the Kaukaui