A marriage in Peter's circle stirred the Jolly Company to special efforts. In 1695, when Peter's favorite jester, Jacob Turgenev, married a sexton's daughter, the feasts and celebrations lasted three days. The wedding took place in a field outside Preobrazhenskoe, and Turgenev and his bride arrived for the ceremony in the Tsar's finest court carriage. Behind them came a procession of leading boyars wearing fantastic costumes—hats of birchbark, boots of straw, gloves made of mouse skins, coats covered with squirrel tails and cats' paws; some were on foot and others rode in carts drawn by oxen, goats or pigs. The celebrations ended with a triumphal entry into Moscow with the newly married couple mounted together on the back of a camel. 'The procession,' Gordon comments, 'was extraordinary fine,' but the joke may have been carried too far because a few days later the bridegroom, Turgenev, suddenly died in the night.
The Drunken Synod, created when Peter was eighteen, continued its tipsy existence until the end of the Tsar's reign, with the mature man who had become an emperor continuing to engage in the same coarse buffoonery begun by an unbridled adolescent. This behavior, which foreign diplomats found vulgar and scandalous, seemed blasphemous to many of Peter's subjects. It added substance to the growing belief of the conservative Orthodox faithful that Peter was himself the Antichrist, and they waited eagerly for the bolt from heaven which would strike down the blasphemer. In fact, it was partially in order to provoke, dismay and degrade the hierarchy of the church, and especially the new Patriarch Adrian, that Peter had originally instituted the Drunken Synod. His mother and the conservative boyars had had their victory over his own candidate, the more enlightened Marcellus of Pskov—so be it!—but Peter retaliated by appointing his own Mock-Patriarch. The parody of the church heirarchy not only gave vent to his own resentment, but, as the years went by, reflected his continuing impatience with the whole institution of the church in Russia.
Nevertheless, Peter learned to be careful. The Drunken Synod did not directly insult the Russian Orthodox Church because Peter quickly steered the parody to a safer mimicry of the Roman Catholic Church. The original leader of the masquerade, the Prince-Patriarch, became the Prince-Pope, he was surrounded by a College of Cardinals, and the ceremonies and language of the charade were borrowed not from the Russian liturgy but from the Roman. To this game, of course, fewer Russians objected.
In Peter's own eyes, the buffoonery of the Mock-Synod was not blasphemous. Certainly, God was too majestic a being to be offended by his little parodies and games. Ultimately, that was what the revels of the Mock- Synod were: games. They were a form of relaxation—clownish perhaps, ridiculous, even gross— but for the most part, the Company were not men of refined sensibilities. They were men of action, engaged in building and governing a state. Their hands were stained with blood, mortar and dust, and they needed to relax. Their pleasures were true to their character: They drank, they laughed, they shouted, they dressed in costumes, danced, played practical jokes, made fun of one another and of whatever passed beneath their eyes— especially the church, which resisted everything they were trying to do.
To contemporary Russians, it was not only Peter's soul that seemed in danger these years, but his body as well. He experimented continually with ever more elaborate and dangerous fireworks. During the Shrovetide celebration of 1690, when Peter was also honoring the birth of his son Alexis, a display lasted five hours. One five- pound rocket, instead of bursting in the air, fell back to earth, landing on the head of a boyar and killing him. As Peter became more proficient, these pyrotechnical displays became more spectacular. In 1693, following a long salute from fifty-six cannon, there appeared the image of a flag of white flame bearing on it in Dutch letters the monogram of Prince Romoda-novsky, followed by a tableau of a fiery Hercules tearing open the jaws of a lion.
And there was the game of war. During the winter of 1689-1690, Peter waited impatiently for the spring to begin maneuvers with his play regiments. The Tsar's suppers with General Gordon were filled with discussions of new European drills to be taught to the troops. The test came in the summer, in an exercise during which the Preobrazhensky Regiment attacked the fortified camp of the Semyonovsky Regiment. Hand grenades and fire pots were used which, though they were made of pasteboard and clay, still were dangerous when tossed into a group of men. Peter himself was hurt when, during the storming or an earthwork, a clay pot filled with gunpowder burst near him, burning his face.
Through the summer of 1691, the regiments prepared for a large-scale sham battle to be waged in the autumn. Romodanovsky, the mock King of Pressburg, commanded an army which consisted of the two play regiments and other troops and was pitted against a Streltsy army commanded by Prince Ivan Buturlin, the mock King of Poland. The battle, which began at dawn on October 6, was fought bitterly two days, and ended in victory of the 'Russian' army commanded by Romodanovsky. But Peter, not satisfied, ordered a second round, which took place in high wind, rain and mud on October 9. Romodanovsky's army was again victorious, but there were real casualties. Prince Ivan Dolgoruky was shot in the right arm, the wound became infected and nine days later he died. Gordon himself was wounded in the thigh and his face so severely burned that he spent a week in bed.
During this period, Peter did not forget his boats. To speed the work at Pereslavl, twenty Dutch shipwrights from the famous shipyard at Zaandam in Holland had been contracted early in 1691 to come to Russia. When Peter returned to Lake Pleschev, he found these men working with Karsten Brandt on two small thirty-gun frigates and three yachts. Peter stayed with them only three weeks, but the following year he visited the lake four times, twice remaining for more than a month. Equipped with an 'imperial decree' from Prince-Caeser Romodanovsky to build a warship from the keel up, Peter worked from dawn to dusk, eating in the boatyard and sleeping only when he was too tired to work. Oblivious to everything else, he refused to go to Moscow to receive the visit of an ambassador from Persia. Only when two senior members of his government, his uncle Lev Naryshkin and
Boris Golitsyn, traveled to the lake to persuade him of the importance of the event did Peter reluctantly consent to lay down his tools and go with them to Moscow. Within a week, he was back at the lake.
In August, he persuaded his mother and sister Nayalya to visit his boatyard and fleet. His wife, Eudoxia, came with the other ladies, and during the month they were there Peter enthusiastically maneuvered his little flotilla of twelve ships before their eyes. Sitting on the small hill that rises from the shore, the ladies could see the Tsar, dressed in a crimson coat, standing on deck, waving his arms, pointing and shouting orders—all thoroughly mysterious and disquieting to women not far removed from the terem.
Peter remained at the lake that year until November. When he did finally return to Moscow, an attack of dysentery kept him in bed for six weeks. He became so feeble that there were fears for his life. His comrades and followers were alarmed: If Peter died, nothing could prevent the return of Sophia and exile or even death for themselves. But the Tsar was only twenty-one, his constitution was strong, and toward Christmas he began to recover. By late January he was once again spending his evenings in the German Suburb. Near the end of February, Lefort gave a banquet in Peter's honor, and at dawn the next day, without having slept, Peter rode off to Pereslavl to work on his boats through the whole of Lent.
His visits that year, 1693, were to be Peter's last extended periods at Lake Pleschev. Twice, in subsequent years, he passed by the lake on his way to the White Sea, and still later he went there to check on artillery materials for the Azov campaign. But after 1697 he did not return until he was en route to Persia in 1722. After a quarter of a century, he found boats and buildings neglected and rotted. He gave orders that what remained should be carefully preserved, and for a while an effort was made by the local nobility. In the nineteenth century, every spring, all the clergy of Pereslavl would board a barge and, attended by a crowd of people in many boats, sail to the middle of the lake to bless the water in memory of Peter.
10
ARCHANGEL
Like a giant closed up in a cave with only a pinhole for light and air, the great land mass of the Muscovite empire possessed but a single seaport: Archangel, on the White Sea. This unique harbor, remote from the Russian heartland, is only 130 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Six months of the year, it is frozen in ice. Yet, despite its drawbacks, Archangel was Russian. It was the one place in the entire realm where a young monarch intoxicated by the idea of ships and oceans could actually see great ships and breathe salt air. No tsar had even been to Archangel, but no tsar had ever been interested in ships. Peter himself explained it in his preface to the
For some years I had the fill of my desires on Lake Pleschev, but finally it got too narrow for me. ... I then decided to see the open sea, and began often to beg the permission of my mother to go to Archangel. She forbade me such a dangerous journey, but, seeing my great desire and unchangeable longing, allowed it in spite of herself.
Before Natalya bowed to his pleas, however, she extracted from her son—'my life and my hope'—a promise that he would not sail on the ocean.
