hints of his intentions. From London he wrote to his uncle Lev Naryshkin and to Tikhon Streshnev, urging that they persuade his wife to take religious vows and become a nun. Once she took the veil, all earthly relationships, including marriage, were null and void. On returning to Amsterdam, Peter increased the pressure, asking Romodanovsky to intervene and use his influence on the reluctant Tsarita. Even the Patriarch was induced to work on Peter's behalf, although he tried to avoid the unwelcome task. By the time he reached Vienna, Peter had made up his mind. His refusal to offer a toast to the Empress, which would require him to drink the reciprocal toast that would be offered to the Tsarita, was a clear signal of his hardened purpose.
On returning to Moscow, Peter at first refused to see Eudoxia. Instead, he angrily asked Naryshkin and the others why his orders regarding her had not been carried out. They replied that in so delicate a matter the sovereign himself must handle the arrangements. Thus, after he had been in Moscow for several days, Peter summoned Eudoxia to meet him at Vinius' house. For four hours they argued, Peter insisting furiously that she must accept the veil and release him. Eudoxia, finding strength in desperation, steadfastly refused, pleading that her duty as a mother made it impossible for her to leave the world. Once incarcerated in a convent, she predicted (accurately, as it turned out), she would never see her son again. Therefore, she declared that she would never voluntarily abandon either the palace or her marriage.
Peter left the interview determined to have his way. First, Alexis, then eight and a half, was forcibly taken from his mother and put in the care of Peter's younger sister, Natalya, at Preobrazhenskoe. One morning soon after, a simple postal carriage, without ladies-in-waiting or servants, was sent to the palace. Eudoxia was bundled into it and the cart rattled off to the Pokrovsky Monastery in Suzdal. There, ten months later, Eudoxia's head was shaved and she was forced to take a new name as a nun, Helen. Later in Peter's life, she would reappear in a surprising way, but, for the moment, Peter's wish was accomplished: he at last was free.
In the months that followed Peter's return from the West, he imposed other changes on Russian life. Most were superficial and symbolic; like the cutting of beards and the trimming of clothes, they were harbingers of the deeper institutional reforms to come in the decades ahead. These early transformations really changed nothing fundamental in Russian society. Yet, to Russians they seemed very strange, for they had to do with the commonest ingredients of everyday life.
One of these changes had to do with the calendar. Since the earliest times, Russians had calculated the year not from the birth of Christ but from the moment when they believed the world had been created. Accordingly, by their reckoning, Peter returned from the West not in the year 1698 but in the year 7206. Similarly, Russians began the New Year not on January 1, but on September 1. This stemmed from their belief that the world was created in autumn when the grain and other fruits of the earth had ripened to perfection and were ready to pluck, rather than in the middle of winter when the earth was covered with snow. Traditionally, New Year's Day, September 1, was celebrated with great ceremony, with the tsar and the patriarch seated on two thrones in a courtyard of the Kremlin surrounded by crowds of boyars and people. Peter had suspended these rites as obsolete, but September 1 still remained the beginning of the New Year.
Anxious to bring both the year and New Year's Day into line with the West, Peter decreed in December 1699 that the next new year would begin on January 1 and that the coming year would be numbered 1700. In his decree, the Tsar stated frankly that the change was made in order to conform to Western practice.* But to blunt the argument of those who said that God could not have made the earth in the depth of winter, Peter invited them 'to view the map of the globe, and, in a pleasant temper, gave them to understand that Russia was not all the world and that what was winter with them was, at the same time, always summer in those places beyond the equator.' To celebrate the change and impress the new day on the Muscovites, Peter ordered special New Year's services held in all the churches on January 1. Further, he instructed that festive evergreen branches be used to decorate the doorposts in interiors of houses, and he commanded that all citizens of Moscow should 'display their happiness by loudly congratulating' one another on the New Year. All houses were to be illuminated and open for feasting for seven days.
·In choosing to follow the Julian calendar then in use in England. Peter brought Russia into line with the West just before the West itself changed. In 1752, England adopted the Gregorian calendar, but Russia refused to change a second time, with the result that until the Revolution the Russian calendar was behind the West, eleven days in the eighteenth century, twelve in the nineteenth and thirteen in the twentieth. In 1918, the Soviet government finally accepted the Gregorian calendar, which now is standard throughout the world.
Peter also altered Russian money. He had returned ashamed of the haphazard, informal, almost Oriental monetary system in use within his realm. Up to that point, a substantial amount of the currency circulating in Russia consisted of foreign coins, usually German or Dutch, with an M stamped oh them to denote 'Muscovy.' The only Russian coins in general circulation were small oval bits of silver called kopeks, stamped on one side with an image of St. George and on the other with the title of the tsar. The quality of the silver and the size of the coins differed greatly, and to make change, Russians simply sliced them into pieces with a heavy blade. Peter, influenced by his visit to the Royal Mint in England, had come to understand that in order to promote a growth of trade, he must have an adequate supply of official money, issued and protected by the government. He therefore ordered the production of large, handsomely made copper coins which could be used as change for the existing kopeks. Subsequently, he coined gold and silver pieces in higher denominations up to the rouble, which equaled 100 kopeks. Within three years, this new coinage had reached such an impressive scale that nine million roubles' worth of specie had been issued and was circulating.
Another foreign idea was presented to Peter in an anonymous letter found one morning on the floor of a government office. Normally, unsigned missives contained denunciations of high officials, but this letter was a proposal that Russia adopt a system of using stamped paper, that all formal agreements, contracts, petitions and other documents be required to be written on official paper bearing the duty-paid mark of an eagle in the upper left-hand corner. The paper should be sold only by the government; the income would accrue to the state Treasury. Enormously pleased, Peter enacted the measure at once and instituted a search for the anonymous writer. He was found to be a serf named Alexis Kurbatov, who, as steward to Boris Sheremetev, had accompanied his master to Italy, where he had served the use of Italian stamped paper. Peter handsomely rewarded Kurbatov and gave him a new government post, where his duty was to find further ways of increasing government revenues.
It was Peter himself who carried home another Western practice which simultaneously broadened the sophistication of Russian society and saved the state land and money. The traditional Russian manner of rewarding important services to the tsar had been the bestowal of large estates or gifts of money. In the West, Peter discovered the thriftier device of awarding decorations— orders, crosses and stars. Imitating such foreign decorations as England's Order of the Garter and the Hapsburg Order of the
Golden Fleece, Peter created an exclusive order of Russian knighthood, the Order of St. Andrew, named after the patron saint of Russia. The new knights were distinguished by a broad light-blue ribbon worn diagonally across the chest and the cross of St. Andrew in black on white enamel. The first recipient was Fedor Golovin, Peter's faithful companion and ambassador on the Great Embassy and now, to all intents and purposes, the unofficial prime minister. The Tsar also named Mazeppa, Hetman of the Cossacks, and Boris Sheremetev, who was to succeed Shein as commander of the army. Twenty-five years later, at Peter's death, the Order of St. Andrew numbered thirty-eight members, twenty-four of them Russians and fourteen foreigners. This order remained the highest and most coveted of all the honors conferred by a Russian sovereign until the fall of the empire. Thus, for over two centuries, human nature being what it is, these pieces of colored ribbon and bits of silver and enamel became worth as much to Russian generals, admirals, ministers and other officials as thousands of acres of good Russian earth.
FIRE AND KNOUT
Once the beards were shaved and the first reunion toasts drunk, the smile faded from Peter's face. There was grimmer work to be done: it was time for a final reckoning with the Streltsy.
Ever since Sophia's downfall, the former elite troops of the old Muscovite armies had been deliberately humiliated. In Peter's sham battles at Preobrazhenskoe, the Streltsy regiments always made up the 'enemy' whose role was always to lose. More recently, in real combat beneath the walls of Azov, the Streltsy had suffered heavy losses. They resented being made to dig like laborers, piling up earth for the siege works; they disliked being forced to obey the commands of foreign officers, and they grumbled at seeing their young Tsar so eager to follow the advice of these Westerners speaking incomprehensible tongues.
Unfortunately for the Streltsy, the two Azov campaigns had conclusively demonstrated to Peter how inferior
