rebellious; and, as inflation increased, dismay and anger infected the cities. A crowd from Moscow reached the tsar at his summer palace at Kolomenskoye. The rising was ruthlessly suppressed, but in 1663 the copper coinage was withdrawn, though other financial demands were to be made of the people.
Alexei was never to solve the fiscal problem, although he did adopt some positive economic policies. He improved productivity on his own estates; encouraged peasants to take profitable initiatives; sponsored trading expeditions to farthest Siberia, China, and India; protected the profitable trade with Persia; established a glass factory, encouraged prospectors, and brought in Western manufacturers as well as experts in military technology; and in 1667 introduced a new trade statute designed to protect Russian merchants from foreign competitors and from intrusive officialdom. Yet he also encouraged transit trade within Russia, helping develop a common Russian market.
The year 1667, which saw the condemnation of Nikon, also saw the conclusion, at Andrusovo, of the long war with Poland. Under its terms Russia kept all Ukraine east of the Dnieper River and temporary control of Kiev (which soon became permanent). This was a huge accretion of territory, providing a launching pad for future expansion both westward and to the south. The cost had been heavy, but Poland had suffered more. Broken as a great power, it ceased to be a threat to Russia. Alexei had ensured that neither the hereditary nobility nor the church would impede the free exercise of autocratic, centralizing power.
Both strategic policy and church reform directed Moscow’s attention westward. Alexei became interested in acquiring the crown of Catholic Poland and his eldest surviving son, Tsarevich Alexei, was taught Polish and Latin. The boy’s tutor, Simeon Polotsky, who was also the court poet, had been brought to Moscow with other bearers of Western learning and culture from occupied Belarus and Ukraine. Insulated from the mass of Russians, their influence was confined to court. Similarly, foreign servicemen and experts were confined to Moscow’s Foreign Suburb when off duty. Nevertheless they were the basis of Russia’s Westernization; and the tsar chose his second wife, Natalia Naryshkina, from the suburb. Their child, Peter, was to be reviled as the son of Nikon. But as Wuchter’s portrait of Alexei demonstrates, he was clearly Peter’s father, and in spirit as well as genetically.
Through his policies of modernization, his church reforms, his introduction of Ukrainian learning (and hence elements of Catholic learning), Alexei had, wittingly and unwittingly, pierced Russia’s isolationism. But he was not to see all the fruits of this work. Worn down by three decades of political and military crises for which as autocrat he bore sole responsibility, Alexei died of renal and heart disease on January 29, 1676. See also: IVAN IV; LAW CODE OF 1649; MILITARY, IMPERIAL ERA; MOROZOV, BORIS IVANONVICH; NIKON, PATRIARCH; PETER I; ROMANOV DYNASTY; RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH; THIRTEEN YEARS’ WAR; TIME OF TROUBLES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Longworth, Philip. (1984). Alexis, Tsar of All the Russias. New York: Franklin Watts. Longworth, Philip. (1990). “The Emergence of Absolutism in Russia.” In Absolutism in Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. John Miller. London: Macmillan. Palmer, W. (1871-1876). The Patriarch and the Tsar, 6 vols. London: Trubner.
(1904-1918), last of the Romanov dynasty of Russia.
Alexei Nikolayevich Romanov was the only son of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra and the youngest member of Russia’s last royal family. The Romanovs’ elation over the birth of an heir to the throne quickly turned to worry, when doctors diagnosed Alexei with hemophilia, a hereditary disorder preventing the proper clotting of blood. Despite bouts of severe physical pain, Alexei was a happy and mischievous boy. Nonetheless, the unpredictable ebbs and flows in his condition dictated the mood of the tightly knit royal family. When Alexei was not well, melancholy reigned in the Romanov home.
ALEXEI NIKOLAYEVICH
Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich, age 11, and his mother, Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
After the doctors admitted that they could find no way to ease the boy’s suffering, Empress Alexandra turned to a Siberian peasant and self-styled holy man, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin. Rasputin somehow managed to temporarily stop Alexei’s hemorrhaging, thus gaining the trust of the tsar’s family. Believing Rasputin to be their son’s benefactor and clinging to hope for Alexei’s recovery, Nicholas and Alexandra rejected rumors of the mysterious peasant’s debauched lifestyle. Their patronage of Rasputin caused outrage in court circles and educated society, which contributed to the declining authority of the monarchy and its eventual collapse in 1917.
In July 1918, just days before his fourteenth birthday, Alexei was murdered, along with his parents, four sisters, and several royal servants, by a Bolshevik firing squad. In 1981, the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad canonized Alexei, along with the rest of the royal family, for accepting
ALEXEI PETROVICH
death with faith in God and humility. The Moscow Patriarchate canonized the royal family in 2000. See also: ALEXANDRA FEDOROVNA; NICHOLAS II; RASPUTIN, GRIGORY YEFIMOVICH; ROMANOVA, ANASTASIA NIKO- LAYEVNA; ROMANOV DYNASTY sons of state. Soviet historians dismissed Alexei as a traitor, but he has been viewed more sympathetically since the 1990s. See also: PETER I; PETER II
Massie, Robert K. (2000). Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bushkovitch, Paul. (2001). Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671-1725. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hughes, Lindsey. (1998). Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
(1690-1718), tsarevich, son of Emperor Peter I of Russia and his first wife Yevdokia Lopukhina.
Peter raised Alexei as his heir, making him study a modern curriculum with foreign tutors and taking him to visit battlefields and naval displays to teach him to “love everything that contributes to the glory and honor of the fatherland.” When Alexei was in his twenties, Peter entrusted him with important duties on the home front in the war against Sweden. Peter’s correspondence reveals little affection for Alexei, who in turn felt intimidated by his demanding and unconciliatory father (Peter had banished Alexei’s mother in 1699). Alexei was intelligent, devout, often sick, and indifferent to military affairs. In 1712 Peter married him off to the German princess Charlotte of Wolf-fenb?ttel, whom he quickly abandoned for a peasant mistress. After the birth of Alexei’s son Peter (the future Peter II) in 1715, Peter accused Alexei of neglecting the common good and threatened to disinherit him: “Better a worthy stranger [on the throne] than my own unworthy son.” Under increasing pressure, in 1716 Alexei fled and took refuge with the Habsburg emperor, but in 1718 Peter lured him back home with the promise of a pardon, then disinherited him and demanded that he reveal all his “accomplices” in a plot to assassinate his father and seize the throne. Evidence emerged that Alexei hated Peter’s cherished projects and that some Russians from elite circles viewed him as an alternative. Tried by a special tribunal, Alexei confessed to treason under torture and was condemned to death, dying two days later following further torture. His fate and the witch hunt unleashed by his trial have disturbed even ardent admirers of Peter, who was willing to sacrifice his son for reaALEXEYEV, MIKHAIL VASILIEVICH (1857-1918), Imperial Russian general staff officer, commander, Stavka chief of staff and White Army leader.
General-Adjutant Mikhail Alexeyev was born in Vyazma, the son of a noncommissioned officer who had fought at Sevastopol in the Crimean War, then attained officer rank. Alexeyev completed the Moscow Junker School (1876) and the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff (1890). He taught at the latter between 1898 and the Russo- Japanese War, in which he served at Sandepu and Mukden as chief of staff for the Third Manchurian Army. A believer in limited monarchy, Alexeyev rose in 1908 to become acting quartermaster general of the General Staff, then served from 1908 to 1912 as chief of staff of the Kiev Military District. Until 1911, Alexeyev continued to advise War Minister Vladimir Aleksandrovich Sukhomlinov on war planning. Alexeyev’s General Plan of Actions subsequently became a precursor for Mobilization Schedule 19A, the foundation for Russia’s entry into World War I. Alexeyev
