Peter I, the greatest of Russian monarchs, was a real disaster for his subjects. The reforms carried out by him, the cities built, the victories won cannot smooth out the negative personality traits of this voluptuous, alcoholic and sadist …
The question of whether Peter I was a congenital psychopath remains open. As a child, he gave the impression of a healthy boy; at least in comparison with his older half-brother Ivan V.
Kukui education
It was the rumors about Ivan's dementia that allowed Peter's mother Natalya Kirillovna (née Naryshkina) to push her offspring to the throne. However, the archers intervened, staging a pogrom, during which several representatives of the Naryshkin clan were brutally killed (1682).
The brothers were proclaimed co-rulers, but the real power went to their sister, Princess Sophia. Seven years later, fleeing from Sophia's people, Peter secretly fled from the Preobrazhensky to the Trinity Lavra. Since then, contemporaries have noted the tsar's fits of fear and anger, when he clearly ceased to control himself.
The Danish ambassador Yust Yul tells about one of these episodes related to the celebrations after the Poltava victory (1709): “We got out of the carriage and saw how the tsar, having driven up to a simple soldier carrying the Swedish banner, began to ruthlessly chop him down with a naked sword and shower with blows, perhaps because he did not go as the king wanted. Then the king stopped his horse, but he continued to do … terrible grimaces, turned his head, twisted his mouth, turned his eyes, twitched his arms and shoulders, and jerked his legs back and forth. All the most important dignitaries who surrounded him at that moment were frightened by this, and no one dared to approach him, since everyone saw that the king was angry and annoyed with something."
If the king behaved like this in the light periods of his life, it is clear what began when things did not go well for him. Peter personally cut off the heads of the rebellious archers, beat those close to him, participated in torturing those accused of high treason.
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Probably, the character of the autocrat could be corrected by a successful marriage. His mother chose Evdokia Lopukhina as his bride - a classic Russian beauty, but too modest and homely. Peter, on the other hand, loved uninhibited, violent fun - such as the one that was arranged in the German settlement inhabited by foreigners, or, as it was called, Kukue.
In general, until the age of 22, the tsar did not deal with state affairs, entrusting them to his mother. Young energy splashed out in the partying. The number of Peter's mistresses could not be counted, although in most cases it was a one-time relationship. For example, he paid the hay girls of his wife and his sister Natalia a penny "for a hug." You could have dinner for a penny, but by "hugs", apparently, something more substantial was meant.
On hikes and travels, he used the services of prostitutes, paying them little, because he believed that it was already a great honor to sleep with the sovereign.
However, sometimes the novels dragged on. At the same time, Peter often shared his beloved with his comrades, but if someone “took without asking,” the consequences could be the most terrible.
Anna Mons, whom he met in Kukui, can be considered a classic example. Most likely, the blond German woman passed to him from a friend, Franz Lefort, and not alone, but with a friend, a certain Elena Fademrech. But he liked Anna more - so much so that he assigned her an annual boarding house of 708 rubles and built a two-story stone house. In addition, together with her mother, she lobbied for bribes in the courts. As the historian Huysen wrote, “in public places it was accepted as a rule: if Madame or Mademoiselle Mons had business and litigation of her own or her friends, then every assistance should be provided to them. They used this indulgence so widely that they began to make petitions in matters of foreign trade and used for this purpose witnesses and solicitors."
So don't get it to anyone
In 1698, having returned from Europe with the Grand Embassy and having dealt with the rebellious archers, Peter began to reorganize his personal life.
He sent his legal wife to a monastery and began to live openly with Anna Mons, who was nicknamed the "Kukui queen." And then a dark story happened.
Anna had an affair with the Saxon envoy Königsek, who allegedly drowned on April 11, 1703 in Shlisselburg during a feast about the launch of the royal yacht. True, some memoirists describe the circumstances of his death in a different way. Allegedly, Peter and Konigsek were walking in the vicinity of Shlisselburg, the Saxon fell from the bridge into the ditch and choked. The fact that the king loved to work as a lifeguard is well known. But for some reason he didn't save Koenigsek from the ditch, from which one can make the assumption that he himself drowned him out of jealousy.
Of course, the death of the allied envoy was attributed to an accident, and they rummaged through his papers and found love letters from Anna. "Monshu", who was already trying on the crown, was put under arrest, but then the regime was softened.
In 1707, the Prussian envoy Kaiserling wanted to marry her, but the tsar expressed various "vile words" to the request for permission to marry her, negatively depicting the moral character of the bride. Since it was impossible to fight the tsar, Kaiserling tried to fill the face of Menshikov, who agreed with him, but he himself got hit in the neck, which led to a major diplomatic scandal.
In 1711, when Anna and Keyserling already had two children, the marriage was allowed, after which the newlyweds went to Prussia and died on the way under suspicious circumstances. After some time, Anna herself also died of consumption, having bequeathed her fortune to her last lover, the captive Swedish captain von Miller.
Still, the king did not like to yield to his former mistresses, especially if he was forced to do so.
Favorites and favorites
The new main favorite was Marta Skavronskaya - the daughter of either a Latvian or a Lithuanian peasant. Having married a certain Swedish dragoon, in 1702, during the capture of the Marienburg fortress, she went to a Russian dragoon.
She was taken from her subordinate by Field Marshal Sheremetev, who conceded the beauty to Tsar Menshikov's orderly. From Aleksashka, a friend of the tsar, she passed to Peter I.
Martha, who was baptized into Ekaterina, shared the role of the main favorite with Avdotya Rzhevskaya, whom the tsar married off to another of his orderly Grigory Chernyshev.
Presumably, it was Avdotya who infected the tsar with syphilis, for which the sovereign ordered her legal husband to flog her. However, it is possible that Avdotya did not infect him with the "bad disease", the aggravation of which, by and large, brought the sovereign to the grave. After all, the Chernyshevs spouses had eight completely healthy children, including two sons who had won the field marshal's favor.
Peter entered into marriage with Catherine in February 1712, after an unsuccessful Prut campaign, where she donated her jewelry to bribe the Grand Vizier, who agreed to release the Russian army from the encirclement. Of course, the tsar did not keep loyalty to her, but demanded loyalty and was very angry when it turned out that his wife was cheating on him with the chamberlain Willim Mons, the brother of his former mistress. Mons was immediately prosecuted for bribery and sentenced to death. The severed head was preserved in alcohol and transferred to the Kunstkamera.
In the first Russian museum, by that time, the head of another Peter's mistress, the Englishwoman Maria Hamilton, had been kept in alcohol for five years. The sovereign did not feel much affection for her.
Soon Maria got along with the tsar's orderly Ivan Orlov. And everything would be fine, but she decided to spread stupid rumors about Catherine. Like, "the queen eats wax, and that's why she has acne on her face." Ekaterina was offended, the investigative flywheel turned. It turned out that Maria Hamilton twice had miscarriages for herself, and strangled the third child. For infanticide there was death. The tsar did not want to mitigate the sentence, especially since it could be about his children.
The tsar also had an affair with the sister of his beloved orderly, Anna Menshikova, and when relations cooled, she entered into a relationship with another orderly, Anton Devier. When he came to woo Menshikov, the future brother-in-law started a fight with him. Devier threw himself at the feet of Peter, and the marriage still took place.
Moreover, the tsar made the newlywed the St. Petersburg chief of police, so that he would look after his relative, who held the post of governor-general.
It was thanks to Devier that Menshikov was twice put on trial on corruption charges, but the tsar did not let things go. The mortal threat over Aleksashka loomed only in 1724-1725, when Peter decided to deal with his patroness, Catherine, who had been caught in adultery. The death of the king was a salvation for their tandem.
As you can see, orderlies were not only a "personnel reserve" for promotion to high positions, but also the tsar's combat "comrades" on love affairs.
At the end of the story about the intimate life of the tsar-reformer, it is worth mentioning the ex-tsarina Evdokia, tonsured as a nun. In the monastery, she entered into contact with the guarding her Major Stepan Glebov. The connection surfaced during the investigation of the case of Tsarevich Alexei, with whose supporters Glebov seemed to be connected. As the memoirist testified: "Major Stepan Glebov, who was terribly tortured in Moscow with a whip, red-hot iron, burning coals, was tied to a post on a board with wooden nails for three days, did not confess to anything."
Most likely, the investigators invented the connection with the conspiracy to sentence Glebov to death. The impaled major died for 14 hours. The king looked at his torment with interest. The ex-queen was simply tightened the conditions of detention, and after the accession to the throne of her grandson, Peter II, she was released, ending her life in honor and respect.
The mockery of the "Most Hearted Cathedral"
But most of all the subjects were embarrassed not by the sexual promiscuity of Peter, but by another idea.
"The most sensational, all-drunk and extravagant council" parodied both Orthodox and Catholic hierarchies and rituals.
It began with drunken entertainment, timed to coincide with Christmastide and Maslenitsa festivities, and existed from the early 1690s until the death of the reformer tsar.
The head of the "cathedral" was considered the prince-dad - this position was taken in turn by the former tutors of the monarch Matvey Naryshkin, Nikita Zotov, Pyotr Buturlin.
So to speak, the secular head of the "cathedral" - the prince-Caesar - was the boyar Fyodor Romodanovsky, and then his son Ivan, also performing the functions of the head of the secret police under Peter. Other members of the council were called “bishops,” “metropolitans,” “deacons,” etc., donning the appropriate parody attire. For example, instead of a panagia, the prince-pope wore a flask, and dragons appeared on his robes.
There was a separate female hierarchy, headed by an alcoholic and spy Daria Rzhevskaya - the mother of the aforementioned Avdotya Chernysheva.
The nature of the fun of the “cathedral” is briefly but accurately described by Alexei Tolstoy in the novel “Peter the First”: “Prince Beloselsky was stripped naked for obstinacy and his eggs were beaten in a tub with his naked goose. Boborykin, laughing at his obesity, was dragged through chairs, where it is impossible for a thin one to crawl through. They hammered a candle into the aisle for Prince Volkonsky and, lighting it, sang irmosi around him (church chants - author's note), until everyone burst out laughing. They smeared them with soot and tar, and put them upside down. The nobleman Ivan Akakievich Myasny was inflated with fur into the anus, from which he soon died …”.
Researchers are inclined to interpret such behavior as a manifestation of "folk laughter culture", although, in essence, it was about the atrocities of the "golden youth". And since not all the people were aware of the intricacies of their laughter culture, it is not surprising that they began to talk about Peter as the Antichrist.
An interesting description of the election of the prince-pope made by contemporaries. The naked Fyodor Romodanovsky was lowered into a huge vat full of wine and beer, and around the naked members of the cathedral - men and women - danced and sang to the tune of church psalms, who periodically applied to this vat.
By the way, the "meetings" of the "cathedral" took place in Moscow. In St. Petersburg, before the eyes of Europe, they were content with so-called assemblies, which at worst ended in banal drinking. But they drank a lot, often for several days, and not everyone could stand it. The young wife of the Tsar's niece Anna Ioannovna, 18-year-old Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Courland, excessive drinking at weddings cost his life. And it was impossible to refuse when the king was treating him.
The tsar ruined his health with such gulbis to a much greater extent than military campaigns, waving an ax in shipyards and piling over diplomatic dispatches. And the untreated "bad disease" became a kind of delayed-action mine, which sooner or later had to bring him to the grave.
Vladislav FIRSOV