Ancient Manners.—Peter the Great.—Eudoxia.—Empress Catharine, her dissolute Conduct and Death.—Peter’s Libertinism.—Anne.—Elizabeth.—Catharine II., infamous Career and Death.—Paul.—Alexander I.—Countess Narishkin.—Nicholas.—Court Morality.—Serfage.—Prostitution in St. Petersburg.—Excess of Males over Females.—Marriage Customs.—Brides’ Fair.—Conjugal Relations among the Russian Nobility.—Foundling Hospital of St. Petersburg.—Illegitimacy.
The brutality, drunkenness, and debauchery which accompany semi-barbarism, and of which the old Russian manners had more than a due proportion, continued to be characteristic of the people of that country until a very recent period; while their amiability, their plastic disposition, their highly imitative faculty in the arts, and their capabilities of improvement, are noted by many writers. Just emerged from savage life as a nation, they have been moulded and welded as one mass by the steady and undeviating policy of their sovereigns, among whom we have examples of vast mental powers and towering ambition, combined with the lowest depravity and the most shameless profligacy, exemplifying in the same individual the extremes of human nature.
Previous to Peter the Great, Russia was comparatively unknown, and in the Elizabethan age of England the Czar of Muscovy was considered only as a barbarian, whose subjects were far inferior in civilization to the Tartars of the Crimea. Indeed, it was not till the eighteenth century that the Russians were admitted within the pale of European politics, or their power reckoned as an element in the calculations of statesmen.
The most important, we might almost say the only lawgiver previous to Peter the Great, was Ivan III., who reigned in the early part of the sixteenth century. Among the laws of that period, which were all sanguinary, was one fixing the value of a female life, in case of death by misadventure, at half the life of a man. Slavery was the institution of the state, each child being the absolute property of its parent. The women were more enslaved than among the Asiatics, no law protecting them against their husband’s violence. A wife who killed her husband was to be buried alive up to the neck, and a guard was set around her to see that no one supplied her with food or the means of ending her sufferings.[271] Females lived in the strictest seclusion, and had no weight nor authority in the household. Their duties were to spin, to sew, and to do menial work.
Peter I. came to the throne, as most Russian sovereigns have done, either through intrigue or usurpation. Both before and after Peter, the will and caprice of the ruling power was paramount. He might appoint his successor, either during life or by will, and such appointment was often set aside by a more powerful competitor. In Peter’s public life, in his aspirations for the general welfare, in his self-devotion, in his conceptions of all that was wanting to his country’s elevation and greatness, and in his iron will and supernatural energy, he was a hero; in his private life, in his passions, his tastes and habits, he was on a level with the lowest of mankind.
Our object is the delineation of national characteristics, and individual propensities or delinquencies are unimportant except so far as they illustrate national character. It has been well observed that a people’s virtue or vice does not consist in the arithmetical increase or decrease of immoral actions, but in the prevailing sentiment of an age or people, which condemns or approves them. It is in this respect that the conduct of monarchs and courtiers becomes of importance in the estimate of national manners, especially in a despotism. The Czar of Russia is at once the religious and political leader of his people, and his personal conduct becomes the standard of their moral relations, offering encouragement and support to the good, or sanction and justification to the depraved.
Peter’s first wife, Eudoxia, was a woman of virtue and merit. Neither her youth nor beauty secured the affections of her husband. She did not escape the voice of slander. Gleboff, her alleged lover, was impaled by Peter, who went to see him writhing in his death agonies, when the wretched man avenged himself in the only way left him: he spat in the Czar’s face. Eudoxia was subsequently sent to a nunnery at Moscow by Peter’s orders, and at last took the veil under the name of Helena.
Scarcely had Peter attained the crown when he formed a connection with Catharine. The romantic history of her origin and elevation is too well known to repeat here. Her husband, a Swedish dragoon, was living; and she was the mistress first of Marshal Sheremeloff, then of Mentchikoff, in whose house Peter saw her, and whence he took her. She acquired great influence over the Czar’s untamed ferocity, and, to her infinite credit, this influence was always used to mitigate the fearful rigor of his punishments, and to soothe his otherwise implacably revengeful spirit. During the lifetime of her husband and of his first wife, Peter married her.
The pleasing traits of Catharine’s character were obscured by the irregularity of her life. Raised, by the affection of Peter, to the imperial throne, she set an example of dissoluteness to her subjects. There is ample reason for believing that she had several intrigues during Peter’s lifetime, but the case of Moens de la Croix is beyond question, and the discovery of her infidelity in this instance led to her separation from Peter and the death of her lover.
In 1724, after the campaign against the Turks, in which Catharine had accompanied the Czar, and had, by her spirit and example, kept up the courage of the army amid great difficulties and reverses, Peter determined on publicly crowning her; a ceremony very unusual in Russia, and almost tantamount to declaring her his successor.