Emperor Leopold considered making peace with the Turks. Eventually, they agreed to continue the war only if Russia would meet its obligations and renew its attack on the Crimea.
Sophia and Golitsyn would have been happy to end the war at once, had they been allowed to keep Kiev. What they could not face was the withdrawal of Russia's allies, leaving Muscovy alone to face the whole might of the Ottoman Empire. Reluctantly, therefore, they faced the necessity of organizing another expedition to the Crimea. In the spring of 1688, the Tatar Khan provided a further stimulus to action. Launching a campaign of his own, he ravaged the Ukraine, threatening the cities of Poltava and Kiev and advancing almost to the Carpathians. When he retired to the Crimea in the autumn, 60,000 prisoners stumbled behind his horsemen.
Forced to continue the war, Golitsyn proclaimed a second campaign against the Crimea, declaring that he would make peace only when all the Black Sea coast was ceded to Russia and the Tatars were entirely removed from the Crimea and resettled on the opposite side of the Black Sea in Turkish Anatolia. This declaration, extravagant to the point of nonsense, indicated the increasingly desperate personal position of Golitsyn. By now, it was essential that he defeat the Tatars in order to repulse the domestic criticism from his political and personal enemies in Moscow. Before he left for the campaign, he was attacked by an unsuccessful assassin; on the very eve of his departure, he found a coffin left outside his door with a note warning that if this second campaign were not more successful than the first, the coffin would be his home.
The new campaign was to be launched earlier that the last: 'before the ice broke.' Troops began assembling in December, and in early March Golitsyn started to the south with 112,000 men and 450 cannon. A month later, he was reporting to Sophia that his progress was impeded by snow and extreme cold, then by swollen rivers, broken bridges and thick mud. At the Samara River, Mazeppa, Hetman of the Cossacks, joined the army with 16,000 horsemen. Once again, the advance was slowed by steppe fires, but this time they were less serious. Golitsyn had already sent his own men ahead to burn the steppe so that when the main army arrived they would find new shoots of tender grass springing up.
In mid-May, as the army approached the Perekop Isthmus, a mass of 10,000 Tatar cavalry suddenly appeared from nowhere and attacked the Kazan Regiment commanded by Boris Sheremetev, the future field marshal. Overwhelmed, the Russians broke and ran. The Tatars galloped toward the baggage train, but Golitsyn was able to align his artillery and halt the charge with cannon fire. The following day, May 16, during a drenching rainstorm, another Tatar charge swirled in on Golitsyn's rear. Once again, artillery managed to beat off the attackers. Thereafter, the Russian army was never without a menacing Tatar escort on the horizon.
On May 30, the Russians arrived before the dirt wall which stretched four miles across the Isthmus of Perekop. Behind a deep ditch stood a rampart lined with cannon and Tatar warriors; beyond that, a fortified citadel contained the rest of the Khan's army. Golitsyn was in no mood to launch an assault. His men were tired, his water was short, he lacked the necessary siege equipment. Instead, while his exhausted men camped beneath the wall, he tried his diplomatic skill in negotiations. His terms were much lighter than those proclaimed in Moscow. Now, he asked only that the Tatars promise not to attack the Ukraine and Poland, give up their demand for Russian tribute and release Russian prisoners. The Khan, feeling his strength, refused the first two demands and replied to the third by saying that many of the prisoners were already free but 'had accepted the Mohammedan faith.' Golitsyn, unable to make an agreement and unwilling to attack, decided once again to retreat.
Again, reports of brilliant victories were sent to Moscow, again Sophia accepted them and hailed the returning general as a conqueror. And not only as a conqueror of Tatars, but of herself. Her letters are less those of a queen welcoming one of her generals than of a woman crying out to her lover to hurry home:
Oh, my joy, light of my eyes, how can I believe my heart that I am going to see you again, my love. That day will be great to me when you, my soul, shall come to me. If it were only possible for me, I would place you before me in a single day. Your letters, confided to God's care, have all reached me in safety. I was going on foot and had just arrived at the Monastery of St. Sergius, at the holy gates themselves, when your letter about the battles came. I do not know how I went in. I read as I walked. What you have written, little father, about sending to the monasteries, that I have fulfilled. I have myself made pilgrimages to all the monasteries on foot.
Meanwhile, the army was struggling homeward. Francis Lefort, a Swiss officer in Russian service, wrote to his family in Geneva that the campaign cost 35,000 men: '20,000 killed and 15,000 taken prisoners. Besides that, seventy cannon were abandoned, and all the war material.'
Despite these losses, Sophia again welcomed her lover as a hero. When Golitsyn arrived in Moscow on July 8, Sophia broke protocol by greeting him not in the Kremlin palace, but at the gates of the city. Together, they rode to the Kremlin, where Golitsyn was received and publicly thanked by Tsar Ivan and the Patriarch. By Sophia's command, special thanksgiving services were held in all Moscow churches to celebrate the safe and victorious return of the Russian army. Two weeks later, the rewards for the campaign were announced: Golitsyn was to receive an estate in Suzdal, a large sum of money, a gold cup and a caftan of cloth of gold lined with sables. Other officers, Russian and foreign, were given silver cups, extra wages, sables and gold medals.
The joy of these celebrations was marred by only one thing: Peter's disapproval. From the beginning, he refused to accept the charade of 'victory.' He declined to greet the returning 'hero' in the Kremlin with Ivan and the Patriarch. For a week, he withheld his consent to the rewards. Finally prevailed upon to acquiesce, he was bitter. Etiquette prescribed that Golitsyn go to Preobrazhenskoe to thank the Tsar for his generosity. When Golitsyn arrived, Peter refused to see him. It was not only an affront, it was a challenge.
In his diary, Gordon described the growing tension:
Everyone saw plainly and knew that the consent of the younger Tsar had not been extorted without the greatest difficulty and that this merely made him more excited against the generalissimo and the most prominent members of the other party at court; for it was now seen that an open breach was imminent. . . . Meanwhile everything was, as far as possible, held secret in the great houses, but yet not with such silence and skill but that everyone knew what was going on.
The proclamation of a second campaign against the Tatars had sent a new wave of resentment through the growing number of people opposed to Sophia's rule. Already, there was discontent over Sophia's administration, and her favorite, Golitsyn—unpopular as the man who had abolished precedence and who preferred Western ways to traditional Russian customs—was now marked as an unsuccessful general about to set out on another unpopular campaign. Victory, of course, would lay much of this antagonism to rest, but not all of it. For, simply with the passage of time, a new element was coming into play: Peter was growing up.
Judging that it would not be long before this active young Tsar would be ready to take some more important role in the government, the party of boyars gathered around Peter and Natalya at Preobrazhenskoe began to measure its strength. It counted some of the greatest names in Russia: Urusov, Dolgoruky, Sheremetev, Romodanovsky, Troekurov, Streshnev, Prozorovsky, Golovkin and Lvov, not to mention the families of Peter's mother and wife, Naryshkin and Lopukhin. It was this aristocratic party, as it was called, which insisted that Golitsyn, having made the treaty with Poland, be the one to lead the armies on the second campaign.
In defending himself against these waiting foes, Golitsyn had a single ally, Fedor Shaklovity. The most decisive and ruthless of Sophia's advisors, his feelings toward the opposition aristocratic party, and indeed toward all boyars, were clear: He hated them as they hated him. Beginning in 1687, when he told a group of Streltsy disdainfully that the boyars were like a lot of 'withered, fallen apples,' he had done his best to rouse the soldiers against the noblemen. He, more clearly than anyone else in Sophia's party, saw that once Peter was grown, the aristocrats would be too strong. The time to destroy them completely, he insisted, was now.
Once Golitsyn left for the south, he had no one but Shaklovity to guard his interests; and the boyars began to move. A Naryshkin was promoted to boyar; Golitsyn's old enemy Prince Michael Cherkassky was nominated for important office. Plaintively, Golitsyn wrote from the steppe to Shaklovity, begging for help:
We always have sorrow and little joy, not like those who are always joyful and have their own way. In all my affairs, my only hope is in thee. Write me, pray, whether there are not any devilish obstacles coming from those people [the boyars]. For God's sake, keep a sleepless eye on Cherkassky, arid don't let him have that office, even if you have to use the influence of the Patriarch or the Princess [Sophia] against him.
Peter's public rebuff of Sophia's lover shocked, angered and worried the Regent. It was the first direct challenge to her position, the first clear signal that the young Naryshkin Tsar would not automatically do whatever he was told to do. The truth that Peter was no longer a boy, that he was growing up and would one day be of age and that then the regency would become superfluous, was evident to everyone. Sophia scoffed at Peter's adolescent war games and boat building, but foreign observers, whose governments wanted an objective forecast of Russia's future, watched carefully what happened at Preobrazhenskoe. Baron Van Keller, the Dutch ambassador,
