To keep his subjects abreast of the world, Peter decreed that a journal,
Throughout these years, Peter attempted to change the Russian concept of the deference due a tsar. Late in 1701, he decreed that men should no longer fall on their knees or prostrate themselves on the ground in the presence of the sovereign. He abolished the requirement that Muscovites remove their hats in winter as a sign of respect when they passed the palace, whether the tsar was inside or not. 'What difference is there between God and the tsar when the same respect is given to both?' asked Peter. 'Less servility, more zeal in service and more loyalty to me and to the state—this is the respect which should be paid to the tsar.'
For some, the burden was too heavy and the only solution to the demands of the tax collector and the work gang was escape. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants simply ran away. Some faded into the forests or traveled to the north, where prosperous settlements of Old Believers already existed. Most went south to the Ukrainian and Volga steppes, the land of the Cossacks, the traditional refuge for Russian runaways. Behind, they left deserted villages and nervous governors and landlords anxiously trying to explain why they could not fulfill the Tsar's demands for manpower. When, to check this dangerous outflow, the Tsar ordered that the runaways be returned, the response of the Cossacks was hesitation, evasion and, ultimately, defiance.
Until this century, it was in the south that the great popular rebellions of Russian history have broken out: Stenka Razin's rising against Tsar Alexis and Pugachev's revolt against Catherine the Great have passed from history into legend. In Peter's time, during the most dangerous years of the war with Charles XII, three rebellions exploded, all in the south: the revolt at Astrachan, the uprising of the Bashkirs and—most threatening to Peter's rule—the rebellion of the Don Cossacks under Bulavin.
Astrachan, which stands where the mighty Volga River flows into the Caspian Sea, seethed with disobedience and sedition. It was a place of exile for remnants of the disbanded Streltsy, and bitter memories of the executions of 1698 still burned in the hearts of Streltsy widows, sons and brothers. The Volga merchants grumbled about the new taxes, the peasants complained about the tolls on bridges, the fishermen protested the restrictions on their catch and no one liked Peter's foreign innovations. Into this flammable tinder poured incendiary rumors: The Tsar was dead, the foreigners had nailed him up in a barrel and thrown him into the sea; an imposter, perhaps even the Antichrist, now sat upon the throne of Russia.
In the summer of 1705, an unusually extravagant rumor horrified the citizenry. The Tsar, it was said, had forbidden Russian men to marry for seven years so that Russian women might be married to foreigners being imported by the shipload. To preserve their young women, Astrachaners arranged a mass marriage before the foreigners could arrive, and on a single day,
July 30, 1705, a hundred women were married. Many of the wine-flushed participants and onlookers rushed from the celebration to attack the local government offices, condemned and beheaded the governor and renounced the Tsar's authority by electing a new government. The new 'government's' first proclamation announced that 'the governor and other officers practiced all kinds of idol worship and wished to compel us to it. But we have not allowed this to happen. We have taken the idols out of the houses of the officials.' In fact, these 'idols' were the domed wig blocks on which Peter's Westernized officers kept their wigs. The rebels sent emissaries to other Volga towns and especially to the Don Cossacks, inviting all true Christians to join them.
Word of the uprising caused alarm in Moscow. Peter was in Courland besieging Mitau when he received the news, and, realizing the need to contain the conflagration before it spread, he dispatched Sheremetev and several regiments of cavalry and dragoons to Astrachan. As a further precaution, he ordered Streshnev to hide the state treasure and to halt temporarily all letters leaving Moscow so that news of the rebellion would not reach Charles. To the rebels, Peter offered leniency. He invited the rebellious 'government' to send deputies to Moscow, where Golovin would listen to their grievances. The deputies came, and their earnest pleading of complaints against the murdered governor made a deep impression on Golovin. 'I have talked for some time with them and they seem faithful and honest people,' Golovin wrote to Peter. 'Deign, sir, even to force yourself to show them mercy. Even we are not without rascals.' Peter agreed, and the deputies returned to Astrachan, each man with fifty roubles in his pocket for expenses, and with the promise that if the city would submit, every citizen should have amnesty. In the future, it was added, officials would collect the taxes more discreetly. Orders were sent to Sheremetev's advancing regiments to avoid bloodshed in the region.
But in these times, leniency was often seen as weakness, and the return of the deputies bearing Peter's offering of peace did not quell the revolt but rather gave encouragement to it. The citizens of Astrachan congratulated themselves: They had defied the Tsar and won. When Sheremetev sent a messenger to the city saying that his troops were about to enter and that he refused to include the leaders of the revolt in the general amnesty, rebellion flared again. The Field Marshal's messenger was roughly treated and sent back with insults to Peter and the boast that in the spring they would march to Moscow and burn the German Suburb.
But the rebels had overestimated their own strength, and no help was forthcoming. The Don Cossacks replied that they themselves had not been oppressed by the tsars and still observed all Orthodox habits. How could they wear foreign clothes, they asked, when there was not a tailor among them who knew these fashions? Astrachan was alone. Nevertheless, Sheremetev's troops were attacked when they arrived. The regular soldiers quickly defeated the rebels and entered the town. As the Russian horsemen rode by, thousands of people lay on their faces along the streets, begging for mercy. Sheremetev interrogated the leaders. 'I have never seen such a tremendously crazy rabble,' he wrote to Golovin. 'They are puffed up with malice and believe that we have fallen away from Orthodoxy.' The general amnesty was withdrawn, and hundreds of rebels were sent to Moscow or broken on the wheel. Peter, enormously relieved, rewarded Sheremetev with an increase in salary and the gift of large estates.
That same year, 1705, disturbances began among the Bashkirs, a semi-Oriental Moslem people living on the open steppe between the Volga and the Urals. They were partially nomadic, herding cattle, sheep, goats and occasionally camels, while themselves riding small but powerful horses and wearing bows and quivers of arrows across their backs. Through the seventeenth century, Russian colonists moving east had been establishing towns and farming plots on their meadowlands. And along with the pressure of Russian population came the demands of Russian tax collectors. By early 1708, the Bashkirs were in open revolt. They burned a number of new Russian villages along the Kama and Ufa rivers and advanced to within twenty miles of the large city of Kazan. Although Charles XII was approaching the Russian frontier in the west, Peter dispatched three regiments to deal with the threat. The western Bashkirs submitted peacefully and, with the exception of their leader, received amnesty, while the eastern Bashkirs continued to burn and ravage, especially when Peter recalled his regular troops to face the Swedes. But the Tsar succeeded in summoning 10,000 Buddhist Kalmucks to confront and ultimately subdue the Bashkirs.
Luck and the presence of Sheremetev's dragoons had snuffed out the Astrachan flame. The Bashkirs had lacked unity and leadership and, ultimately, they too had been put down. But the most serious upheaval of Peter's reign, coming at a time when he and his army were fully engaged with Sweden, was the revolt of the Don Cossacks under Kondraty Bulavin.
The immediate cause of the Cossack revolt was Peter's attempt to round up deserters from the army and serfs who had fled to join the Cossacks. Like the American West, the underpopulated and in many places largely empty Ukraine was a magnet for restless souls who wished to escape the restrictions and oppressions of conventional society. In Russia, many of these pioneers were escaping the law: They were either serfs, legally bound to the soil by laws first made in the time of Ivan the Terrible and reinforced by Tsar Alexis, or soldiers forcibly enlisted into Peter's army to serve for twenty-five years, or laborers drafted to work in the shipyards at Voronezh or on the fortifications of Azov and Tagonrog. In the south, the Cossacks welcomed them, and demands that the fugitives be returned were generally ignored. Finally, in September 1707, Prince Yury Dolgoruky arrived on the Don with 1,200 soldiers to enforce the Tsar's decrees.
Dolgoruky's appearance frightened the Cossack elders and people. One ataman, Lukyan Maximov, received
