Near the end of the summer in 1724, the disease reappeared and this time the symptoms were much worse. Unable to pass urine, Peter was in agony. His personal physician, Dr. Blumentrost, summoned a consulting physician, Dr. Horn, an English surgeon. To facilitate a passage, Horn inserted a catheter, repeatedly attempting to penetrate the bladder but obtaining only blood and pus. Eventually, with great difficulty, he managed to extract about a half a glass of urine. During this probing, unattended by anesthesia, Peter lay on a table, holding the hand of one doctor on each side of him. He was trying to be still, but so great was his pain that the two hands he held were almost crushed. Eventually, a giant stone was passed and the pain abated. Within a week, his urine began to pass in an almost normal way. He remained in bed for many more weeks, however, and not until the end of September was he beginning to walk around his room and impatiently awaiting the moment when he could resume his normal life.
At the beginning of October, the sky outside Peter's window was blue and the air was crisp, and he ordered his yacht to be moored in the Neva where he could see it. A few days later, despite his doctors' warning that he should not exert himself, he went out of doors. He went first to Peterhof to see the new fountains which had been installed in the park. Then, while the doctors protested even more loudly, he set off on a long and arduous tour of inspection. He began at Schulusselburg to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of that key fortress twenty-two years before. Then he proceeded to the ironworks at Olonets, where he was already strong enough to hammer out with his own hands a sheet of iron weighing more than a hundred pounds. From there, he went to observe the work on the Ladoga Canal, now proceeding rapidly under the direction of the German Munnich.
The tour lasted almost the whole month of October, and during it Peter felt twinges of pain and other symptoms of the disease, but they did not slow his progress. On November 5, he returned to Petersburg, but decided almost immediately to travel by boat to visit another ironworks and armament factory at Systerbeck on the Gulf of Finland. The weather was typical of early winter in the North: gray skies, high winds and rough, icy seas. Beyond the mouth of the Neva, Peter's yacht was approaching the fishing village of Lakhta when in the distance he saw a boat carrying twenty soldiers swept out of control by the wind and waves. As Peter watched, the boat was driven aground on a shoal. There, its keel stuck in the sand and the waves pounding its side, the little vessel began rolling back and forth, threatening to capsize. Those inside, obviously unable to swim, seemed incapable of doing anything to save themselves. Peter sent a skiff from his own yacht to assist, but his sailors were unable to refloat the grounded boat; the men inside, meanwhile, did little to help, being almost paralyzed by fear of drowning. Watching impatiently, the Emperor ordered his own skiff to take him alongside the grounded boat. Unable to come close because of the waves, the Emperor suddenly jumped into the sea, plunging into the shallow icy water up to his waist and wading to the stranded boat. His arrival and presence galvanized the desperate men. Responding to his shouts, they caught lines thrown from the other boat, and, with the help of other sailors now in the water beside the Emperor, the stranded boat was pulled and dragged off the shoal. Blessing themselves for their salvation, the survivors were taken ashore to recover in the houses of the local fishermen.
Peter returned to his yacht to strip off his wet clothes and dress in something warm before anchoring at Lakhta. At first, although he had been immersed in the icy water for a considerable time, it did not appear that this exposure had affected him. Enormously pleased at his exploit in saving lives and refloating the boat, he went to sleep at Lakhta. During the night, however, he came down with chills and fever, and within a few hours the pain in his intestine reappeared. He canceled his trip to Systerbeck and sailed back to St. Petersburg, where he went to bed. From that moment on, the disease never relinquished its fatal grip.
For a while, it seemed that Peter was once again recovering. At Christmas, he was well enough to make his traditional tour of the major houses of St. Petersburg in the company of his band of carolers and musicians. On New Year's Day, he was present at the customary fireworks, and on Epiphany he went out onto the ice of the Neva River for the traditional Blessing of the Waters, catching another cold during the ceremony. During these weeks, he also participated one final time in the celebration of the Drunken Synod, which assembled to elect a successor to the recently deceased 'Mock-Pope' Buturlin. The election of a new 'Pope' demanded the summoning of a conclave of 'cardinals' to a hall presided over by Bacchus seated on a cask. Peter himself sealed up the 'cardinals' in a separate room, forbidding them to emerge until they had chosen a new 'Pope.' To aid their deliberations, each 'cardinal' was required to swallow a large spoonful of whiskey every fifteen minutes. The process took all night, and when the conclave stumbled out the following moming, an obscure officer had been chosen. That evening, this newly elevated dignitary celebrated at a banquet at which the guests were served the flesh of bears, wolves, foxes, cats and rats.
By mid-January, the coolness which had developed between Peter and Catherine because of the Mons affair appeared to have vanished. The Emperor and his wife went together to a harlequin wedding of a servant of one of his dentchiks. Later in the month, Peter attended assemblies at the houses of Peter Tolstoy and Admiral Cruys. But on January 16, the disease returned and compelled him to take his bed. Dr. Blumentrdst again called other doctors, including Horn. Probing gently, they found that Peter had an inflammation of the bladder and intestine so severe that they believed gangrene was present. Knowing no treatment which could arrest an inflammation so advanced, Blumentrdst and his colleagues sent urgent couriers to two famous European specialists, Dr. Boerhaave in Leyden and Dr. Stahl in Berlin, describing Peter's symptoms and appealing desperately for advice.
At first, resting in bed, Peter seemed to rally. He continued to work, summoning Osterman and other ministers to his bedsided, where they remained in discussions an entire night. On January 22, he spoke to the Duke of Holstein and promised to accompany him to Riga as soon as he was well. The following day, he suffered a relapse and, calling a priest, received the Last Rites. Tolstoy, Apraxin and Golovkin were admitted to his bedside, and in their presence Peter ordered the pardoning and release of all state prisoners except murderers, and granted an amnesty to young noblemen being punished for not presenting themselves for service. He also commanded Apraxin, who was weeping, and the other ministers to protect all foreigners in St. Petersburg in case he should die. Finally, still typically attentive to detail, he signed decrees regulating fishing and the sale of glue.
By evening on the 26th, the Emperor seemed a little stronger and the doctors began to talk of letting him get up and walk about the room. Encouraged, Peter sat up and ate a little oatmeal gruel. Immediately, he was striken with such violent convulsions that those in the room thought the end had come. The ministers, the members of the Senate, the senior officers of the Guard and other officials were hastily summoned to the palace to begin a vigil. Soon, the surges of pain through Peter's body became so great that Osterman begged him to think only of himself and forget all matters of business. In agony, crying out loudly from the intensity of the pain, Peter repeatedly expressed contrition for his sins. Twice more, he received the Last Rites and begged for absolution. On the 27th, the priest was Feofan Prokopovich, in whose presence Peter said fervently, 'Lord, I believe. I hope.' Soon after, he said, as if speaking to himself, 'I hope God will forgive me my many sins because of the good I have tried to do for my people.'
Through his ordeal, Catherine never left her husband's bedside, day or night. At one point, telling him that it would help him make his peace with God, she begged Peter to forgive Menshikov, still in disgrace. Peter consented, and the Prince entered the room to be pardoned for the last time by his dying master. At two o'clock on the afternoon of the 27th, perhaps thinking of the succession, the Emperor asked for a writing tablet. One was given to him, and he wrote, 'Give all to . . .' Then the pen dropped from his hand. Unable to continue, meaning to dictate, he sent for his daughter Anne, but before the Princess arrived, he had become delirious.
He never recovered consciousness, but sank into a coma, moving only to groan. Catherine knelt beside him hour after hour, praying incessantiy that he might be released from his torment by death. At last, at six o'clock in the moming of January 28, 1725, just as she was pleading, 'O Lord, I pray Thee, open Thy paradise to receive unto Thyself this great soul,' Peter the Great, in the fifty-third year of his life and the forty-third year of his reign, entered eternity.
EPILOGUE
The cause of Peter's death has never been fully described in medical terms. Professor Hermann Boerhaave, the eminent physician in Leyden, received the urgent communication of the Emperor's symptoms sent by Horn and Blumentrdst, but before he could write out his prescripion, a second courier arrived with the news that the patient was dead. Boerhaave was stunned. 'My God! Is it possible?' he exclaimed. 'What a pity that so great a man should have died when a pennyworth of medicine might have saved his life!' Later, talking to other court physicians, Boerhaave expressed his belief that if the disease had not been concealed for so long and if he had been consulted earlier, he might have cured Peter's illness and allowed the Emperor to live for many years. But Boerhaave never told his nephew, who later became a physician to Peter's daughter Empress Elizabeth and who was responsible for passing this account along, what medicines he would have prescribed or what illness he would have been treating.
