Peter the Great

He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?

“This monarch has brought our country to a level with others. He taught us to recognize that we are a people. In brief, everything that we look upon in Russia has its origin in him, and everything which is done in the future will be derived from this source.”

For those few months in the summer of 1727, Menshikov stood alone at the summit; “Not even Peter the Great,” declared the Saxon ambassador, “was so feared or so obeyed.” He was the unchallenged ruler of Russia and the prospective father-in-law of the Emperor; all future Russian monarchs would carry his blood in their veins. Assured of his preeminence, Menshikov’s manner became insupportable; he issued orders in a lordly fashion even to the Emperor—he intercepted a sum of money Peter had been given and chastised the Emperor for accepting it, then he took away a silver plate which Peter had presented to his sister Natalya. Stung, the boy said ominously to Menshikov, “We shall see who is emperor, you or I.”

“O men of Russia,” he asked, “what do we see? What do we do? This is Peter the Great whom we are committing to the earth!”

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.

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.

procession consisted of sixty sledges, each constructed to appear as a boat. On the first of these boat-sledges rode Bacchus—appropriately portrayed, as the player representing him had been kept drunk for three days and three nights. Then came a sledge drawn by six bear cubs, a sledge drawn by four hogs and a sledge drawn by ten dogs. The College of Cardinals came next, fully robed, but mounted on oxen. After them followed the great sledge of the Mock-Pope, surrounded by his archbishops, making signs of blessing right and left. Next, the Mock-Tsar, accompanied by two bears. The triumph of the procession was a miniature two-decked, three-masted frigate under full sail, thirty feet long, with thirty-two guns; standing on her deck, maneuvering the sails, was the Emperor dressed as a navy captain.

In 1732, Empress Anne, tired of the constant drain on her resources by these Caspian provinces (up to 15,000 Russian soldiers were dying every year of disease in the unfamiliar climate) and restored them to Persia. It was not until the reign of Catherine the Great that the northern Caucasus was designated a Russian province, and not until 1813, in the time of Catherine’s grandson Alexander I, that Persia permanently ceded to Russia the coastal territories along the Caspian through which Peter the Great had marched on his final campaign.

The Porte had always been particularly interested in the Transcaucasus—that is, the Persian provinces of Georgia and Armenia, lying south of the mighty Caucasus mountain range. The Turks coveted them not because they were Christian, but because they were on the Turkish frontier and because they lay on the Black Sea.

cope with the sweltering heat, Peter had his head shaved and during the day wore a wide-brimmed hat over his naked skull. In the cool of the evening, he covered himself with a wig made from his own shorn hair. The Empress copied her husband, shaving off her own hair, while at night covering her head with the cap of a grenadier.