Dolgoruky respectfully and offered to help him track down the fugitives. But Kondraty Bulavin, the fiery Ataman of Bakhmut, reacted differently. On the night of October 9, 1707, his Cossacks attacked Dolgoruky's encampment on the bank of the River Aidar and slaughtered the Russians to the last man. As usual with such peasant revolts, Bulavin had no positive political program. His rising, he said, was not against the Tsar, but against all 'princes and magnates, profiteers and foreigners.' He called on all Cossacks 'to defend the house of God's Holy Mother and the Christian Church against the heathen and Hellenic teachings which the boyars and Germans wish to introduce.' Invoking the name of Stenka Razin, he declared that he would free the conscripts of Azov and Tagonrog and would, the next spring, march on Voronezh and Moscow.
Meanwhile, however, the Ataman Maximov, fearing Peter's retribution for Dolgoruky's massacre, mustered a force of loyal Cossacks and defeated Bulavin's rebels. Maximov wrote to Peter that he exacted vengeance by cutting off the prisoners' noses, hanging them up by their feet, whipping them and executing them by firing squads. Relieved, Peter wrote to Menshikov on November 16, 1707, that 'this business, by the grace of God, is now finished.' But Peter had relaxed too quickly. Bulavin himself had escaped from Maximov, gathered a new band and, in the spring of 1708, was once again roaming the Don steppe. Again, Maximov marched against the rebels, reinforced by a detachment of regular Russian troops, but this time a number of Cossacks deserted to Bulavin and the remainder were defeated in a battle on April 9, 1708.
The spreading of Bulavin's rebellion now posed a major threat. Villages as far north as Tula were burned, and Voronezh and the whole of the upper Don lay under threat. Fearing that the upheaval might reach even farther north, Peter ordered his son, the Tsarevich Alexis, to mount more cannon on the walls of the
Moscow Kremlin. The Tsar also took offensive action. A force of 10,000 regular infantrymen and dragoons was placed under the command of Guards Major Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, brother of Prince Yury Dolgoruky, murdered by Bulavin the previous autumn. Dolgoruky's orders were 'to extinguish this fire once and for all. This rabble cannot be treated other than with cruelty.' In fact, the danger of Bulavin seizing Azov and Tagonrog so worried Peter that at one point he was about to depart for the Don himself to take command. Fortunately for Peter, Charles XII chose to rest his army in camp near Minsk for precisely the three months of greatest danger from Bulavin.
For a while, Bulavin swept all before him. He defeated Maximov again and executed him. His troops attacked Azov and captured one suburb of the town before being repulsed by the loyal garrison. Then, flushed with success, Bulavin imprudently divided his army into three divisions. On May 12, one division was defeated, and on July 1 a second division was routed by Dolgoruky's advancing regulars. Sensing the change in the wind, most of the Cossacks, even those who had supported Bulavin, drew up a petition to the Tsar promising allegiance if he would forgive them. After still another defeat of Bulavin's dwindling force, the elders decided to arrest the leader and put him to death to please the Tsar. Bulavin resisted, killing two of the Cossacks sent to arrest him, but then, seeing that all was lost, he killed himself. Gradually the flames on the steppe died down and flickered out. In November, the remaining force of rebels was cornered by Dolgoruky, and 3,000 Cossacks died in battle. The rebellion was over. Peter commanded Dolgoruky to 'execute the worst rebel leaders and send the other leaders to penal servitude; return all the remaining Cossacks to their old places, and burn the new settlements as ordered before.' Two hundred rebels were hanged on gallows erected on rafts and sent floating down the Don. All who saw them drifting silently past the river towns and villages were warned that the iron hand of the autocrat reached through the breadth of his realm.
30
POLISH QUAGMIRE
Charles XII and the Great Northern War were Peter's main concern during these years. Having founded his new city on the Neva delta the year before, Peter moved in 1704 to control the two key Estonian towns, Dorpat and Narva, which would seal the Russian grip on Ingria and block any Swedish advance from the west against St. Petersburg. Both towns were strongly garrisoned (Narva's defenders alone numbered 4,500), but with Charles and the main Swedish army in Poland, once the cities were besieged, neither had hope of relief.
In May 1704, Russian troops appeared before Narva, occupying the same long lines of circumvallation from which they had been routed four .years before. Peter himself supervised the transport of the Russian siege artillery in barges from St. Petersburg, the boats hugging the southern shoreline of the gulf so closely that cruising Swedish warships could not reach them in the shallow water. In the Russian camp at Narva, the Tsar found Field Marshal George Ogilvie, a sixty-year-old Scot who had served for forty years in the Hapsburg imperial army and now had been hired by Patkul for service in Russia. Peter was so impressed with Ogilvie's credentials that he immediately placed him in command of the Russian army before Narva. As the siege commenced, the Russians suffered losses, both from the cannon of the fortress and from Swedish sorties, but the defenders recognized the new determination of their enemies. 'They seemed resolved to carry on their works, however great their loss might be,' said an officer of the garrison.
Leaving Ogilvie to conduct affairs at Narva, Peter rode south to Dorpat, which Sheremetev had been besieging since June with 23,000 men and forty-six cannon. He found Sheremetev's dispositions faulty—the Russian cannon were firing at the town's strongest bastions, which meant that all their shells were wasted. Peter quickly switched the artillery to the most vulnerable wall, and a breach was made. Russian troops entered the town, and on July 13 the Swedish garrison surrendered, five weeks after the
siege began, but only ten days after the Tsar had arrived to take command.
The fall of Dorpat sealed Narva's doom. Peter hurried back with Sheremetev's troops to make a combined Russian force of 45,000 men and 150 cannon. On July 30, a heavy bombardment began, continuing for ten days and lashing the fortress with more than 4,600 shells. When the wall of one of the bastions crumbled, Peter offered generous terms to Arvid Horn, the Swedish commander, as prescribed by the protocol of war. Foolishly, Horn refused, making matters worse by using insulting language about the Tsar. The assault began on August 9, and although the Swedes fought fiercely, within an hour soldiers of the Preobrazhensky Guards had entered and seized a major bastion. Immediately afterward, waves of Russian infrantry poured over the walls and swept through the town. Now, too late, Horn saw that resistance was futile and tried to capitulate by beating a drum for parley with his own hands. No one listened. Russian soldiers filled the streets, slaughtering men, women and children in a mindless torrent of violence. Two hours later, when Peter rode into Narva with Ogilvie, he found the streets slippery with blood and Swedish soldiers 'butchered in heaps'; of a garrison of 4,500, only 1,800 were still alive. The Tsar ordered a trumpeter to ride through the town sounding the cease-fire in every street, but many Russians still would not stop. Angrily, Peter himself slashed down one Russian soldier who refused to obey orders. Stalking into the town hall to confront the frightened town councilors, Peter threw his bloody sword on the table before them and said disdainfully, 'Do not be afraid. This is Russian, not Swedish blood.' But the Tsar was furious with Horn. When the enemy commander, whose wife had been killed in the assault, was brought before him, Peter demanded to know why he had not surrendered according to the rules once the first bastion had been crumbled and thus prevented all this unnecessary slaughter.
The victory at Narva had great psychological as well as strategic importance. Not only did it secure St. Petersburg from the west, but it vindicated the Russian disgrace on the same site four years before. It proved that Peter's army was no longer merely a mass of half-trained peasants. Ogilvie said that he considered the infantry better than any German infantry, and told Charles Whitworth, the English minister, that 'he never saw any nation go better to work with their cannon and mortars.' Peter wrote happily about the victory to Augustus, to Romodanovsky and to Apraxin. Four months later, when the Tsar returned to Moscow, the streets reverberated to the tramp of another Russian victory parade. Peter passed under seven triumphal arches at the head of his troops, while fifty- four enemy battle flags and 160 Swedish officer prisoners followed in his train.
Peter's Baltic victories meant little to Charles. He fully expected that when the time came he would scatter Peter's army easily and retake all former Swedish territory now in Russian hands. Far more disturbing to him was the fact that his own victories in Poland had not yet proved politically decisive. Augustus continued unwilling to concede defeat and give up the Polish throne, and the Polish Diet was still not prepared to force him to this action. Instead of an end, the victory over Augustus at Klissow was only the beginning of years of warfare in Poland, with the Swedish-Saxon struggle seesawing back and forth across the immensity of the Polish plain. The huge country with its eight million inhabitants was simply too vast for the Swedish or the Saxon army, neither of which ever numbered much more than 20,000 men, to exercise control over more than that region in which it happened to be at the moment.
Despite the political frustrations for Charles, the years in Poland, 1702-1706, were a time of great military
