Childhood and power

The portrait that opens this chapter was painted in London in 1698 by Sir Godfrey Kneller. It shows a young man already tall, already armoured for display, a crown set beside him as if the painter had been asked to explain a foreign monarch to an English court. It is not a childhood likeness, and it should not be mistaken for one. Peter Alekseyevich was born in Moscow in 1672, the son of Tsar Alexis and of Natalya Naryshkina, the tsar’s second wife. A first family already filled the palace: sons and daughters of Mariya Miloslavskaya, among them the future Fyodor III, Ivan V, and the tsarevna Sofia. The child of a second marriage entered a household whose factions had names before he could speak them. This story does not retell his father’s reign. It follows the son who had to grow up inside its leftover quarrels, in a court that could crown a boy and still not know who would rule.

Alexis died in 1676, when Peter was four, and the crown passed to Fyodor III, a son of the first marriage. Relatives of Fyodor’s mother gathered the government; the Naryshkins were pushed from the rooms that matter. A small boy remained a dynastic fact. He was not yet a ruler.

Fyodor died childless in 1682, and the quarrel that had slept under his reign woke in a week. Ivan, the next brother of the first marriage, was alive, but his health was frail and his fitness to govern was widely doubted; the Naryshkins therefore pressed the healthy ten-year-old. An assembly of ranks in the Kremlin proclaimed Peter as tsar: a victory, on paper, for Natalya’s kin. Sofia, as head of the Miloslavsky family, would not accept a government of Naryshkins. The court had chosen a child. It had not settled who would speak in his name.

She found her instrument in the streltsy, the musketeer household troops of Moscow, already angry over pay, commanders and rumour. They entered the Kremlin. Several of Peter’s party were killed, among them Artamon Matveyev, a pillar of the Naryshkin cause. Later memory would embroider what the boy himself saw; the facts that do not need embroidery are grim enough. The revolt unmade a sole Naryshkin tsardom in days. Ivan, Peter’s elder half-brother, was proclaimed co-tsar, and Sofia took the regency in the early summer of 1682, standing between two crowned children and the men who wanted to speak through them. A double monarchy soothed the musketeers and saved a sister’s kin from exclusion. It also taught Peter, very young, that a crown can be awarded in a hall and rewritten in a courtyard.

The likeness shown here is a formal or later portrait of Sofia Alekseyevna, not a sketch made in the Kremlin while the streltsy still smelled of powder. It can suggest rank, dress and the gravity she claimed as regent. It cannot recover her voice in council, or the fear in a palace that had just learned how quickly guards can become a mob.

Ivan remained the senior name in ceremony, a co-tsar whose poor health made him a partner more easily displayed than obeyed. Peter remained the junior body, alive, awkward and still a child. Between them Sofia ruled. She had been tutored by Simeon Polotsky and given an education unusual for a Muscovite princess; she was not a nun waiting for a convent, whatever later enemies preferred to say. Her chief adviser, and her ally in more than policy, was Prince Vasily Golitsyn. Together they tried to make a regency look like a reign: industry encouraged, foreign craftsmen welcomed, the unreliable streltsy partly posted away from the capital after their commander Ivan Khovansky was broken and executed. Power taken with musketeers had to be secured against musketeers. That paradox sat under every year she governed.

Her government was not empty of deeds. In 1686 it confirmed a lasting peace with Poland that left Kiev and the lands east of the Dnieper in Russian hands, at the price of joining a European struggle against the Ottoman Empire. The bill came due as two campaigns, in 1687 and 1689, against the Crimean Tatars, Ottoman vassals. Golitsyn led both. Both failed in the field, whatever the court proclamations claimed on his return. A useful eastern settlement with Qing China, the Treaty of Nerchinsk, could not repair the political damage of those southern fiascoes. Peasants and religious dissenters found little relief. Rivals among the Naryshkins found a story they could tell: that a tsarevna and a favourite had spent blood and treasure to no purpose. Sofia had taken the state. She had not made it grateful.

Peter, through much of this, was not at the centre of daily Kremlin business. He spent long stretches at Preobrazhenskoye, a village residence east of Moscow that sat near an inherited foreign suburb without being the same place. There he gathered boys and men into play-regiments, drilled them, staged sieges, and treated war as a game that kept demanding better guns and stricter order. The companies hardened into the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky troops, names that would later belong to real guards. A restless adolescent learned command as sport, then as habit. The court could still dismiss him as a boy with drums. The drums were already practising for something less innocent.

The double throne shown here is a surviving ceremonial seat, seen in a later photograph, not a reporter’s drawing from 1682. Silver and a shared bench make co-tsardom visible as furniture. They do not show who actually answered petitions, or how a child learned that a throne can be occupied and still not be his.

By 1689 the regency was brittle. Peter’s mother pressed him towards adult politics and a marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina, a conventional match meant to announce that the junior tsar was no longer a toy. Sofia, watching her support thin after the Crimean failures, tried once more to raise the streltsy against the Naryshkins. Many of the colonels went to Peter instead. He moved, gathered the men who would have him, and overthrew her. In September she was confined to the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow. Fyodor Shaklovity, who had commanded musketeers in her interest, was executed. Golitsyn went into exile. The sister who had governed as a sovereign was reduced to a prisoner with a famous view. She was not yet a nun. That last humiliation would wait for another rising.

Two boys wore the crown; one sister used it; the child who survived both would not share it again.

Overthrowing Sofia did not make Peter a solitary autocrat overnight. Ivan remained co-tsar until his death in 1696, and Natalya still mattered while she lived. Her death in 1694 removed a guardian who had wanted her son conventional as well as safe. After that, and still more after Ivan’s death, government had to run in Peter’s own name, not as a Naryshkin restoration staged around a junior partner. He had seized the palace in 1689. He spent the next years learning what a palace is for.

His first independent war pointed south, not west. The peace with Poland had tied Russia to conflict with the Ottomans; Peter’s chosen lock on that sea road was Azov, the fortress at the Don’s mouth. In 1695 he went against it and failed. The place could be supplied by water, and a land army knocking at walls could not close a harbour it did not own. He came back the next year with a flotilla raised on the Don, and Azov fell in 1696. It was a foothold, not a Black Sea empire: Ottoman power still held the straits beyond. Even so, the campaign mattered as a declaration. A tsar who had once played at sieges had now taken a real one, and he had done it by noticing, unromantically, that a fortress with a sea gate must be starved from the water as well as the steppe.

Azov also showed him the limit of going alone. Russia could not comfortably face the Ottoman world without partners, and partners had to be sought where maps, docks and money already were. In 1697 Peter sent young nobles ahead to study nautical crafts, then left himself with the Grand Embassy, a travelling court of about two hundred and fifty people headed, on paper, by Franz Lefort, Fyodor Golovin and Prokopy Voznitsyn. Its stated work was to read the international weather and to thicken the anti-Turkish coalition. Its other work was to look. He travelled incognito as Sergeant Pyotr Mikhaylov, a disguise that fooled protocol more easily than eyes. The point was not amateur theatricals. It was to stand in a yard and learn, rather than on a dais and be praised.

For months he worked at shipbuilding in the Dutch East India Company’s yard at Saardam, then crossed to England and continued at the Royal Navy’s dockyard at Deptford. He went through factories, arsenals, schools and museums, and he sat through a session of Parliament, gathering the texture of states that built power as a craft. The alliance he wanted did not thicken. Western courts were already turning towards a fight over the Spanish succession; Austria preferred quiet in the east; France had its own Ottoman habits. The southern war would have to wait on partners who were looking elsewhere. Then Moscow pulled him home. While he was still on the road, streltsy rose again in 1698, some of them hoping to restore the confined tsarevna.

He returned in haste and answered the rising with investigations, executions and a public lesson in fear. Sofia, who had not launched the plot, was nevertheless tried and compelled to take the veil in the autumn of 1698. The musketeers who had made her regent in 1682 were broken as a political force in the capital. Kneller’s London portrait, painted that same year as a gift for William III, already showed a monarch dressed for a European eye. It did not show the scaffold yards waiting in Moscow, or the sister now sealed into religion as well as walls. Childhood, if it had ever been gentle, was finished. Power was not yet the Baltic war. It was this: a throne no longer shared, a first fortress taken, a head full of foreign docks, and a household troop taught, at terrible cost, that it did not make tsars any more.

What followed after 1700 belongs to another chapter: a Swedish king and a struggle for a northern sea. Stop here, with the young man of the 1698 portrait, and the story is already complete as an education. Peter had learned that ceremony can lie, that a sister can govern, that play-regiments can become an army, and that a harbour is worth more than a speech. Azov was a southern lock, not a northern window, and the docks he had walked in Holland and England made the missing Baltic coast feel like a fact that could be altered. The embassy had shown him how power was made in yards; the musketeer rising had shown him how it was still taken in Moscow. He had not yet tested those lessons against Charles XII. The Baltic was still other people’s water. He was ready, unwisely or not, to reach for it.