Peter the Great-Emperor of Russia

  Peter the Great-Emperor of Russia (Part-1)

Peter the Great

   Peter the Great was a clever despot. His full name was Peter Alekseyevich Romanov. He had fits of manic-depression in which he would indulge in the worst kinds of brutalities and take delight in them. Typically of his horribly cruel behavior was the way he treated hundreds of men and women who, he alleged, were plotting to overthrow him. They were mercilessly whipped which tore their flesh, their bones were broken on the wheel and then grilled on slow fire. Could the Devil be more ruthless than him?

   Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich’s fourteenth child was Peter (total sixteen, but two of them died in childhood). Nathalie Naryshkina’s was Tsar Alexis’s second wife and Peter was her first child, Peter was merely three years old at the time of the Tsar’s death in 1676. Tsar Alexis was succeeded by his eldest son, Fedor, a boy of 14, from his first wife Maria Miloslavskaya. Fedor was sickly and he died childless at 20. He left a brother, Ivan - a half-blind and mentally deficient boy of 15.

   Immediately after the death of Fedor (April 27, 1682) Peter’s mother succeeded in nominating Peter as his, successor. This was resented by Sophia Alexseyevna Romanov, the eldest of the six daughters of Peter’s father by his first wife. Sophia organized a military revolt which began on March 15 and resulted in the brutal murder of Peter’s maternal uncles and other supporters. She took control of the government in her hands on May 17. On May 26, she announced Ivan the first and Peter the second Tsar and herself became the regent for the duration of the minority of her brothers. She first refused regency, as a comic act on her part, and then accepted it on May 29, 1682. Thus she became Russia’s first woman ruler since the rule of Princess Olga in the tenth century. Sophia was not beautiful by any count. She was madly in love with Prince Vasili Golitsin, one of her father’s advisers, and he became Sophia’s most trusted counselor.
   Sophia tried to change her little from Regent to “Autocrat” but her military generals resisted. Finally, she decided to do away with her brothers, Ivan and Peter-the two Tsars-and assembled her faithful soldiers in the Kremlin palace. Peter had advance information about her intentions; so he fled by night to the monastery, some 40 miles from the capital. Her coup failed and she was locked up in a convent in 1691, with her chief counselor and paramour coup Vasili Golitsin having been deported.

Sophia Alexseyevna Romanov

The Play Boy:

   Peter married Eudoxia Lopukhina when he was 16 but never remained true to her. He took to make love and met foreign beautiful ladies whose venal charms mage him forget his duties as a husband. He took to drinking and became a hot-tempered man. Bishop Burnet, who came into contact with him, has recorded his impressions of the Tsar in the following words:

“He was a man of very hot-temper, soon inflamed, and very brutal in his passion; he raises his natural heat by drinking much brandy, which he rectifies himself with great application..... a want of judgment, with instability of temper, appear, in him too often and too evidently.....”

“God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. I could not but adore the depth of the providence of God that had raised up such a furious man to so absolute an authority over so great a part of the world.... man seems a very contemptible thing in the sight of God, while such a person as the Tsar has such multitudes out as it were under his feet, exposed to his restless jealousy and savage temper.”

   Peter organized orgies of debauchery and drunkenness as greatly as cannot be described. For three days, shut up in the house, Peter and his friends were drunk and many of them died therefore. He consorted with foreign ladies, and his first affair was with a merchant’s daughter, Anna Ivanova Mons.

   The conclave of Peter’s friends was named as “The Most Drunken Sobor of Fools and Jesters” around 1690. Besides Peter, it had two other special members- Peter’s former tutor, Nikita Zotov, who was nick-named as “Pope” and chief of Peter’s security police and master of the torture chamber, and Prince Fedor Romodanovsky, who was given the title, “King of Presbury”. The club was dedicated to the two deities, Eremka (Venus) and Ivashka (Bacchus). Peter occupied the humble rank of a deacon. The club organized public functions, participation in which was compulsory under the threat of heavy penalties. Public processions and masquerades continued for several days and these were attended by the royal family, court and state officials and the diplomatic corps in fancy dresses and playing strange musical instruments, with Peter attired in a Dutch sailor’s suit, vigorously beating a drum. The club’s activities included strange wedding ceremonies. The Tsar’s jesters, Turgenev and Shansky, and “Pope” Nikita Zotov were wedded when they were in their seventies. When Nikita Zotov died two years later, Peter Buturlin was named the “Pope” as his successor and three years later he was wedded to Zotov’s aged widow. These weddings were celebrated with great ceremony. Zotov’s marriage ceremonies continued for four months personally supervised by Peter.




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