*Which, after two hundred fifty years, remains the nation's preeminent intellectual institution.
December 1725, its doors first opened. Seventeen Academicians had been lured from France, Germany, and Switzerland, including philosophers, mathematicians, historians, an astronomer, and doctors of anatomy, law, and chemistry, many of them scholars of first rank. Unfortunately, there were no Russian students qualified for university classes so that eight German students also had to be imported. Even so, audiences for lectures were smaller than the number required by charter so that Academicians occasionally had to atend each others' lectures.
The irony of a learned academy functioning in a country that lacked any significant number of elementary or secondary schools was not lost on contemporaries, but Peter, looking into the future, thrust all objections aside. Using a metaphor, he explained:
I have to harvest big stooks [shocks of grain], but I have no mill; and there is not enough water close by to build a water mill; but there is water enough at a distance; only I shall have no time to make a canal for the length of my life is uncertain. And therefore I am building the mill first and have only given orders for the canal to be begun, which will the better force my successors to bring water to the completed mill.
62
ALONG THE CASPIAN
With the signing of the Treaty of Nystad, Russia was finally at peace. Now, it seemed, the colossal energies which had been poured into military campaigns from Azov to Copenhagen could at last be turned toward Russia itself. Peter did not wish to be remembered in history as a conqueror or a warrior; he saw his place as a reformer. Yet, the celebrations in St. Petersburg hailing the Peace of Nystad were still in progress when Peter ordered his army to prepare for a new campaign. The following spring, the army would march into the Caucasus against Persia. And, once again, the army would be personally led by the Emperor.
Although its announcement came as a surprise, this march to the south was no sudden whim. For most of his life, Peter had heard stories of the East, the empire of Cathay, the wealth of the Great Mogul of India, the richness of the trade which passed over caravan routes through Siberia to China, and from India through Persia to the West. These tales had come from travelers passing through Russia who stopped long enough in the German Suburb to stir the imagination of the youthful Tsar. They came from Nicholas Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam and expert on the geography of the East, who spent many hours in conversation with Peter during the Tsar's first winter in Holland. Now, at last, Peter meant to carry out these youthful dreams.
He had already attempted to reach out toward China by extending the existing trade in tea, furs and silk and by establishing a permanent Russian mission in Peking. But the Chinese were proud and suspicious. The militant Manchu Dynasty was at the peak of its power in Peking. The great Emperor K'ang-hsi, wwho had come to the throne at the age of seven in 1661 and ruled until his death in 1722, had made peace with all his neighbors and embarked on a reign distinguished for its patronage of painting, poetry, procelain and learning; dictionaries and encyclopedias published with his encouragement remained standard for generations. K'ang-hsi tolerated foreigners at his court, but Peter's efforts to improve relations with China made slow progress. In 1715, a Russian priest, the Archimandrite Hilarion, was received at Peking and given the rank of Mandarin, Fifth Class. Finally, in 1719, Peter appointed Captain Lev Ismailov of the Preobrazhensky Guards as his envoy extraordinary to Peking and sent with him as a present for the emperor four ivory telescopes which Peter had made himself. Ismailov was received on a friendly and dignified footing at the Chinese court, but he outreached himself. He asked that all restrictions on trade between Russia and China be lifted, that permission be given for construction of a Russian church in Peking, and that Russian consulates be established in important towns in China to facilitate trade. To this, the Chinese replied loftily, 'Our Emperor does not trade and has no bazaars. You value your merchants very highly. We scorn commerce. Only poor people and servants occupy themselves in that way with us, and there is no profit at all to us from your trade. We have enough of Russian goods even if your people did not bring them.' Ismailov departed, and thereafter Russian caravans were hindered more severely. K'ang-hsi died in 1722, and his son Yung Cheng was even more hostile to Christians in general; thus, the avenue to trade with China was narrowed rather than broadened in Peter's final years.
Far to the north, along the desolate shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and the northern Pacific, there was no one to bar the Russian advance. It was under Peter that the huge Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands were claimed by Russia. In 1724, shortly before he died, Peter summoned a Danish-born captain in his fleet, Vitus Bering, and assigned him the task of leading an expedition to the periphery of the Eurasian continent a thousand miles beyond Kamchatka, to determine whether Eurasia and North America were joined by land. Bering found the strait, fifty-three miles wide and only 144 feet deep, which subsequently was named after him.*
A year before Bering set out, Peter had dispatched two frigates to the opposite end of the earth, to carry his fraternal greetings 'to the illustrious King and Owner of the glorious island of Madagascar.' The inhabitants of that gigantic island had a poor record of hospitality to Western visitors: French traders and colonists were massacred in 1674, and through most of the eighteenth century the only Westerners who set foot on the island were pirates such as Captain Kidd. Peter's motive in sending this expedition was not really to establish a foothold in Madagascar. His ships were ordered to stop there and conclude a treaty if possible, then to sail on to their real destination, India. Peter dreamed of a trade agreement with the Great Mogul and also wanted some teakwood on which he could exercise his talent for carpentry. As it happened, the ships reached neither India nor Madagascar; they never left the Baltic. One of the frigates sprang a leak a few days after sailing, and both ships returned to Reval. Peter was disappointed, but he died before the project could be renewed.
It was not the sea route to India, in any case, but the land routes through Persia and Central Asia which attracted him. The Central Asian caravans came over the Khyber Pass from India, passed through Kabul, crossed the jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush and traversed a thousand miles of desert inhabitd by Kazak's and Kalmucks before reaching Astrachan and the lower Volga. In Peter's time, there was more turbulence than usual among these desert people. Two rival Moslem khans, the rulers of Khiva and Bokhara, were struggling for predominance, and each sometimes turned to the Russians for assistance.** Peter, because of his war
*In the years that followed, Russian explorers and settlers crossed the strait, and a string of Russian forts and trading posts sprang up along the Alaska coast. Eventually these Russian settlements reached as far south as San Francisco, where, in 1806, a little over eighty years after Peter's death, a Russian fur-trading center was established. For more than a century, Alaska— known then as Russian America—was controlled by the state-owned Russian-American Company. In 1867, the vast area which became America's forty-ninth state was sold by Tsar Alexander II for $7,000,000. Today, the only point on the globe where the frontiers of the United States and the Soviet Union actually meet is across the fifty-three miles of the Bering Strait.
**Weber describes an unusual kind of help which the Khan of Bokhara asked of Peter. The Khan's ambassador in Petersburg, says Weber, 'begged of the Tsar a number of Swedish girls to go along with him, or to give him leave to buy some, his master having heard that the Swedes were a very warlike nation, which made him desirous to have some of their race in his dominions.' This request met with a repulse; however, he found means to get two Swedish girls, whom he carried along with him.
with Sweden, had been unable to respond to these appeals, but his interest in the desert land had been aroused.
Peter's interest in all the regions to the east and south had also been stimulated by reports of gold. There were pebbles of gold in the rivers of Siberia, veins of gold along the shores of the Caspian, golden sands in the deserts of Central Asia—such stories circulated freely in St. Petersburg. In 1714, 1716 and 1719, Peter sent expeditions into Siberia and Central Asia in search of the precious metal. They ended without gain, although the first expedidon, during its withdrawal, constructed a fort at the juncture of the Irtysh and Om rivers which grew into the town of Omsk.
The 1716 expedidon ended in spectacular tragedy. Hearing stories of gold along the Amu Darya River, which ran through the lands of the Khan of Khiva, Peter resolved to send congratulations to the new Khan on his accession to the throne and an offer of Russian protection if he would accept the Tsar's suzerainty. Along the way, the expedition was also to build a fort at the mouth of the Amu Darya, reconnoiter the length of the river and send merchants and engineers to the head of the river, across the mountains and down into India. Once their reports were in hand and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva had given allegiance, Peter could begin the development of the
