The Romance of the Romanoffs

by Joseph McCabe

In 1701 he, after a mighty drinking bout with Augustus, made a fresh treaty with Poland and renewed the war with Sweden. The war went on with varying success until, in 1703, Peter took the marshy region which included the mouth of the river Neva. For some reason—it may have been because it was believed that here Rurik and his brothers had entered Russia—the Tsar fell into the wildest rejoicing, and began almost immediately to form a wooden settlement on the bank of the river. This was the humble foundation of St. Petersburg. It seems to have been at a later date that he conceived the idea of making it the new capital of Russia, and his choice has been very severely criticised. For a metropolis it was too near Sweden, the great hostile power of the time, and not easy of defence. For commercial purposes it was inferior to Riga or Libau, which he afterwards took, and could only with great difficulty and sacrifice be converted at all into a centre of commerce. But Peter loathed Moscow, with its musty air of conservatism and its gilded palaces and churches. He must have a new capital, and a centre of the northern region he was gaining. His genius was energy, not insight or foresight. With the labours of—it is said—hundreds of thousands of Swedish prisoners, whose lives were recklessly squandered, he raised the primitive St. Petersburg and embodied in it, as he thought, the new spirit of progress.

He was now creating, with dim large vision of a great future, and his wild Dionysiac nature rejoiced in the labour and in the rewarding feast. In the next year, 1704, he took Narva, after a long and bloody siege; and in his morbid nervous way, with his wretched lack of self-control and chivalrous feeling, he struck the brave Swedish commander across the mouth, for resisting so long, when that general was brought before him, and, with pitiful spite, had the body of the man’s wife dug up and thrown into the river. Still he had to fight on for years, with varying fortune. All the time he wrung money out of his country and urged his generally incompetent and despised envoys abroad to get for him money and allies. Poland deserted him and made peace with Sweden; and just at that time trouble arose in the south, among the Cossacks, to divert his attention.

Ivan Mazeppa, the hetman of the Cossacks of Little Russia, or the Ukraine, disliked finding taxes for Peter, and entered into negotiations with the Swedes. The Ukraine was, like most of Russia, full of bitter discontent. There seemed some hope of securing independence. A Cossack chief whose daughter was seduced by Mazeppa fled to Peter and warned him; but Peter’s insight failed, as it often did, and he handed the informer to Mazeppa for punishment. Mazeppa continued to correspond with the Swedes and promise co-operation if they invaded Russia. It was the early summer of 1708 before Charles of Sweden entered Russia, and Peter decided to baffle him as Napoleon would be baffled at a later date. The Russians fell back, laying waste the provinces as they retired, and drew the Swedes on to spend a winter in the frozen plains. The details do not concern us. Charles in time found himself threatened with famine. Mazeppa found, when he was at length stung into action, that only two thousand of his Cossacks would follow his adventurous banner; and he packed his gold in two barrels and set out on his hopeless enterprise. And Peter, reaping at last the reward of all his toil, fell upon the Swedes at Poltava and defeated them.

It is true that King Charles was wounded and the Swedish army worn and demoralised; and it is true that Peter, eager to celebrate his victory in the usual way, allowed the Swedes to retire more cheaply than a great commander would have done. But he had redeemed his failures, and had dealt a great blow at Sweden. Incidentally he had done much to recover, or gain, his personal repute, so badly shaken since he had fled at Narva. In the battle of Poltava he faced the bullets, and got one through his hat and another—rather a disputable one this—on the breast, which broke its force miraculously on his jewelled cross. He was soon back in Moscow arranging a pageant. He posed, as Hercules in the procession.

The next few years were spent in feverish dreams of larger armies and imperial expansion, checked periodically by bad diplomacy and poor economics. His generals took Riga for him, however, and overran the Baltic provinces. Then the wily Swede roused on his flank a more terrible enemy than the Cossack. At the beginning of 1711 he heard that the Turks and Tatars were afield, and he hurried south with 45,000 men: also many thousand women and camp-followers, for, when the Tsar would take his Catherine, other officers would have their wives or some equivalent. The result was that the large and unwieldy body soon found itself in a worse situation than that into which the Russians had drawn Charles. An army of Turks and Tatars, four or five times as numerous as the Russians, closed round them on the river Pruth. There was no escape.

From the many accounts of Peter’s behaviour on that occasion one seems bound to conclude that he lost his new courage, and fell into a state of maudlin despair. It seems also to be a myth that his Catherine roused and saved him. His generals fortunately knew the venality of Turkish commanders, and a very heavy bribe—including, apparently, Catherine’s jewels—passed to the Grand Vizier’s camp. The terms, one would think, were hardly worth so large a bribe. Peter was to evacuate Azoff and all the territory in the south that he had taken from the Turk: he was to give up the Baltic provinces to Sweden, except the district at the mouth of the Neva, for which he passionately pleaded; and he was to pay a very large indemnity. He swaggered back to Moscow and endeavoured to brazen it out.

Again he settled down to stern exertions, to prepare an army and navy and seek allies. In 1717 he went to Paris in search of aid, carefully leaving Catherine behind, though (as we shall see) he had now married her. His conduct was more sober than on the earlier journey, though it was eccentric enough and gave Paris food for talk for many years. When they had at length found Peter a lodging more or less to his taste, he declared that the young king, Louis XV, must come to see him; and, eager as he was to see the sights of Paris, he kept his hotel three days and nights in the hope of forcing the visit. But we need not again enlarge upon his eccentricities. He came away without hope of alliance, and France played with him to the end of his life. Two years later he proposed to marry his daughter Elizabeth to Louis XV, having failed to get the grandson of George I. When that project was at last very firmly declined, he asked at least for a prince of the blood, and he was humoured with negotiations until he died. As we shall see, Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter (legitimised by later marriage) of Peter and a peasant-woman who had been for a time almost common camp-property.

In brief, to make an end of wars, Peter took Finland and beat the Swedes on the Baltic, but he brought the terrible English fleet upon his new vessels. A peace was arranged at Nystadt in 1721, and, for a payment of two million crowns, Peter was suffered to keep his gains on the Baltic. There was a stupendous flow of beer and wine and brandy at St. Petersburg. Peter lit the fireworks with his own hand, and, although the Senate now gravely nominated him “Father of his Country” and “Emperor of all the Russias,” he mingled with the crowd, wore a fancy dress, and danced and sang and leaped on to tables like a school-boy.

Peter had, therefore, as a result of twenty years of costly warfare, which embittered his subjects, been permitted to buy the fringe of territory which brought his Empire to the shores of the Baltic: the Cossacks of the Don and the Ukraine were, of course, already subject to Russia, and were merely prevented from breaking away. This, and the creation of an army and navy and lowering of the prestige of Sweden, were his accomplishments on that side. His other ventures in the way of expansion were crude and unsuccessful. Several times he made fruitless efforts to reach India and Persia, but was always defeated. In 1721 the governor of Astrakhan sent word that the Turks would forestall his design upon Persia, and in the following May, having peace with Sweden, he led 100,000 men south from Astrakhan. The expedition was poorly organised, and had to return in some disgrace.

In the following year, 1723, he made his last and wildest effort. Two frigates set sail, secretly and hastily, from the port of the capital, and were presently driven back by storms. These two vessels, of poor capacity, had actually been ordered by Peter, in the prime of his age, to take the island of Madagascar, and possibly sail on from there to India! Peter had heard that the Swedes were about to do this, and he had written a letter to “the king of Madagascar,” urging him to see that a Russian was better than a Swedish protectorate. Such was the value of the Tsar’s famous training in ship-building that he insisted that a few useless alterations should be made and the boats should start again, and he fell furiously upon his officers when they pointed out the impossibility.