# House of Romanov

**Author:** Russians with Attitude (RWA)

*The Romanov series*

> **Note:** This text is a transcript of the original *Russians with Attitude* podcast audio. The audio was automatically converted to text using Whisper (speech-to-text), and the transcript was then cleaned up, punctuated, divided into chapters and corrected using Claude (Anthropic). Some errors from the automated conversion may remain.
>
> **Source:** The Romanov Series – 11 Free Episodes, <https://rwasamizdat.substack.com/p/the-romanov-series-11-free-episodes>

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# Chapter 1: Ivan IV

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast. This is a prelude to our upcoming Romanov series, where we will review every single Romanov ruler of Russia. Here we need to set the stage for it. We will look at pre-Romanov Russia: a quick glance at the Mongol yoke, the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the tail end of the Rurikid dynasty, the Time of Troubles, the Polish intervention, Boris Godunov, and the many waves of pretenders to the throne.

Let's begin with a quick summary of Russia since the times of the Mongol yoke.

Fast-forwarding through Russian history leading up to Ivan IV: Ivan, of course, was a descendant of the first ruling dynasty of Russia, the Rurikids, descended from Rurik, a most likely mythical prince, either Scandinavian, Baltic, or Slavic (there is a lot of debate about this), who was supposedly invited by the Slavic tribes to rule over them and founded the first Russian dynasty. 130 years later, Vladimir the Great, the Grand Prince of the Rus, which is what the country was called, converted to Christianity. This loose confederation of principalities governed by Russian princes, known as Kievan Rus, united only by its formal allegiance to the Rurik dynasty, would eventually become one of the largest states in medieval Europe.

Then a thing that very often happened in history happened. When a civilization that occupies forests or flatlands or hills or mountains lives next to a steppe, then inevitably, sooner or later, the people who live in the steppe, the pastoralists, will unite. Sometimes for a long time, sometimes for only a short time, but they will unite, and they will come and loot and subject other countries. Which is exactly what happened in Russia in the 13th century, when it was attacked by the Mongol armies, who for two centuries kept the Russian principalities as tributaries, or even direct vassals.

Gradually, the Russian principalities managed to put aside their quarrels, unite, and push back against the Mongols. This started under Dmitry Donskoi, who united the Russian princes to defeat the Mongol army in the Battle of Kulikovo Pole, and found its culmination in the grandfather of Ivan IV, Ivan III, called the Great, Grand Prince of Moscow, who is known as the gatherer of the Russian lands. He reunited them, particularly Novgorod and Tver, under the crown of Moscow, and ended up decisively confronting the Mongols in 1480. During that same time period, the Eastern Roman Empire had fallen to the Ottomans completely, and Ivan III took up the mantle of being the leader of Orthodox Christianity.

He married the last Byzantine emperor's niece, Sophia Palaiologina, which allowed him to derive legitimacy for his claim of being the head of Orthodox Christianity, and of course, Roman legitimacy. Ivan the Great started to style himself as Caesar, which was translated into Russian as Tsar.

And his new status led him to assert an ideology for Russia, namely that he was regathering the ancient territories of Rus, similar to how, in the western part of Europe, the Holy Roman Empire laid claim to the empire of Charles the Great.

And so it was his grandson, Ivan the Fourth, who succeeded to the throne while he was still a small child. He had a very troubled childhood. His mother may have been poisoned, and the court was a very violent place during the years of his growing up, which probably contributed to him becoming, well, not only volatile and unpredictable, but also cunning, intelligent, knowing people well, dynamic, and having a very rich imagination.

Ivan IV, nicknamed Grozny, is commonly remembered as a madman, a bloodthirsty lunatic who killed his heir for no reason, poisoned his wives, lost the Livonian War, and created the oprichniki, a bodyguard corps that rode around with brooms and severed dogs' heads strapped to their saddles, terrorizing the boyars.

Or maybe Ivan IV was a Europe-oriented reformer, a deeply religious man who modernized the army, introduced a new code of law, and expanded the Russian living space twofold. Let's find out.

The general trajectory of Ivan Grozny's reign was set in motion by Ivan III, the unifier of Russian lands. Ivan Grozny was fighting with the Swedes and the Livonian Order for access to the Baltic Sea. He fought against the Crimean Khanate to the south, and successfully conquered the Kazan Khanate.

The city of Kazan opened up a door for us into the far-ranging expanse of the Urals and Siberia. And, of course, he defeated and captured the Astrakhan Khanate, gaining access to the Caspian Sea. I think Ivan III would have been proud of his grandson. What do you think?

Yes, I think so too. If you put away all the drama, the literary drama that has been constructed around Ivan's personality, then in the end you have a ruler who greatly expanded the territory of Russia, who broke the back of the Horde in the east. Of course, the conflict on the western steppe in Novorossiya would still take several centuries to be concluded in Russia's favor. But it was also Ivan IV who laid the foundation for that, by greatly diminishing the power of the Crimean Khanate and dealing them a series of blows that would eventually end up crippling their power, and by building the outposts that allowed Russia to break the Crimean Khanate that dominated that whole area.

And in the end, geopolitically, it was Ivan who laid the groundwork for the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the whole Azov Sea and Black Sea area.

Right. Let's look at his early life. Ivan Grozny had to grind since he was a toddler. He was born in 1530. He was a grandson of the Byzantine princess Sophia and Ivan the Great, Ivan III, and a son of Vasily III and Yelena Glinskaya. His grandparents were long dead when he was born, and his parents were eager to follow them. Vasily died from sepsis when Ivan was three, and Yelena died when he was eight. Possibly she got poisoned.

A group of advisors appeared, called by some historians the Chosen Council, made up of the boyar aristocratic families and some Orthodox Christian clergy. They united over the figure of Ivan IV, and they saw a possibility to influence the young Tsar.

There was a weird thing with the Tsar title, right? Because some are calling Ivan IV the first ever Russian Tsar.

Yes, the point is that Ivan IV is the first Tsar in the sense that he was immediately crowned Tsar. Ivan the Great started calling himself Tsar, the Russian word for Caesar, which was then Slavicized into Tsar. And it was the result of a political decision. It was when he tried to create some sort of ideological framework for his rule, which is the ideology that guided Vasily III when he was gathering the Russian lands and so on. And Ivan IV was the first Russian ruler to be immediately crowned Tsar, and did not just claim the title for himself sometime into his rule as Grand Duke of Moscow.

Was the Tatar title Khan the equivalent of the Tsar, or the Caesar, at the time?

Hmm, that's a very complicated question. Funnily enough, there are a lot of etymological questions about Khan and Kagan and so on. And apparently the title of Kagan was used in the Middle Ages by Russian rulers. "Russkiy Kaganat" is used for the pre-Rus state that existed. It is named such in, for example, the Annals of St. Bertin, where the Russian Khaganate is mentioned.

And there is a lot of folk history that is very popular, especially in liberal circles, that the Russian monarchy is styled after the Mongol ruling style and so on. I don't think the Russian monarchy was very different from other European monarchies at the time, except, of course, for the more ritualistic aspects that it took into itself through the Byzantine heritage. But the title of Tsar is different, because it did eventually come to mean something like king. And it is basically the Russian word similar to korol.

God is also a Tsar.

Yes, because originally Tsar, of course, is derived from Caesar, the title of the Roman emperors. And it is a claim to Roman legitimacy. And the Romanizing aspects started quite early through, as you mentioned, the marriage of Ivan III to the last Byzantine emperor's niece, Sophia Palaiologina. And then the Third Rome theory.

And Ivan IV also did some very creative genealogical work by deriving his ancestry from a supposed nephew of Octavian Augustus named Prus, after whom the land of Prussia is named. And as such, Ivan IV would be a descendant both of Rurik and of the Roman emperors, and would as such have a claim to the universal monarchy, which is what the term emperor really means. It is not a universal term for someone who rules a large country. It is a claim to total and universal rule over the known world, basically.

And, of course, in real politics, it's more complicated than that. You can't just start calling yourself ruler of the world. That doesn't actually bring you any closer to ruling the world. But it is a very particular title that has been much fought over, and many centuries passed until it was accepted that there can be more than one emperor at a time in Europe.

Right. So he became a divine leader, appointed to enact God's will on this earth. So we know about the Byzantine connection. Well, he was a direct descendant of the Byzantine princess, the last one. Also, he was one of the first Russian rulers who invited a lot of foreigners into his court. And in general, he seems to be a somewhat Europe-oriented fellow.

This is true. This is true. It is in stark contrast to his usual image as an Asiatic despot who introduced Mongol-style rule in Russia. Ivan was actually quite the westernizer in many aspects. There are also some peculiar things: there is a third aspect to his imagined ancestry, namely that in correspondence he sometimes claimed to be of Saxon descent or Bavarian descent, and so would also claim some sort of Germanic heritage.

And I think there was a letter to some German prince where he even said that Russians and Germans come from the same stock, or something like that. And it is quite interesting. He was very creative in building the ideology. But yes, he was the first Russian ruler to invite a lot of Western specialists to build up the city of Moscow, to build his army: engineers, scientists, scholars, and so on. He was kind of a proto-version of Peter.

Yeah. Do you think he knew many languages?

I think he knew Greek.

Makes sense, yes.

Yeah, because the study of Latin was not very common at that time in Russia. Greek learning, of course, was very popular in Russia due to the Byzantine and Orthodox connections.

Well, of course, he knew Church Slavonic. That is obvious. And I'm pretty sure he knew some Polish as well, although, of course, back then the differences between Russian and Polish were less pronounced than they are now. So I would say Greek, Church Slavonic, and Polish.

The biggest problem with the whole idea of a crazy ruler is that, well, if you look at modern rulers, I don't think there are any crazy people among them, because in general crazy people cannot lord over even their own lives, much less rule a state, even with the modern ways of automation and all that. And back then, to be a ruler who rules for decades and is not easily assassinated or poisoned by his boyars, the aristocrats, you need to be very competent and very much sane to hold your position.

Yes, absolutely. The concept of a crazy ruler is usually a post-hoc explanation for when a ruler gets assassinated, and then his enemies start spreading around that he was insane and cruel. There aren't many different ways of discrediting a ruler. There are maybe two, three, four schemes that are usually used. Either he was insane and cruel, or he was detached and didn't give a damn about anything, or he was a huge man, or he spent all his time hunting and drinking. These are always the same. A fun example of that from more modern times: if you look at what was said about the French king Louis XVI and Nikolai II, it is almost exactly the same.

Even some of the same phrases. And their diaries, for example, which I believe are forgeries, are written in the exact same tone and the exact same style, like, "Hey, I don't care about the government, I went out torturing cats today." This is always the same. And as such, the accounts about a ruler written after his death are always colored by whether he was succeeded by loyalists, or by his enemies, or by opportunists.

And as such, especially in that time period, the further down the line you go, the more and more outrageous the accusations become. And it's very true in the case of Ivan Grozny.

So, as I said, he was influenced by the Chosen Council of top Orthodox Christian clergymen and the boyars. They wanted to reform Russia, and he himself cared a lot about the code of law, because as I understand it, the first ever code of law in the Russian state was introduced by his grandpa Ivan the Great, the Sudebnik.

Well, you could go back to Yaroslav's Russkaya Pravda, I guess, but yes, in less mystified times, it's that.

So he reworked his grandpa's Sudebnik, and he really strengthened the role of the state judicial bodies, let's say that. And also the first printing press: the establishment of the Moscow Print Yard was in 1553.

We know that he was crowned at 16, but de facto he was the Russian ruler, the Russian gosudar, since he was three years old. His mother was regent, but then she died. So from eight years to 16, can we say that this ambiguous Chosen Council was his regent?

In general, there have not been many monarchs in history who really had the power and the ability to rule on their own. It's always elite groups or influence groups, people who influence the monarch with a lot of power. And of course this is doubly the case for minors, and especially when someone starts sitting on the throne as a toddler, like even the Fourth did.

So as a young man, apart from the important domestic changes that were probably influenced by the learned men in the Chosen Council (but he was also a learned man himself), he of course dabbled in conquests.

It was not the case that Ivan IV really started a new war. All the wars were already ongoing, basically.

Yes, of course. Russia was surrounded on all sides by steppe nomads, by the splinters of the Mongol Empire and other nomadic peoples. And it's sort of a law of history that settled civilizations living next to nomadic civilizations leads to perpetual frontier wars. The most interesting of which, and the most influential, I believe, for the future of Russia, was his fight against Kazan.

Yes, at the age of 22. Nonetheless, a lot of the people that lived in the Khanate had not been contacted by Russians prior to that, people like the Udmurts, for example.

Yes, yes, it is quite interesting. The Kazan Khanate, a fragment of the Golden Horde, appeared in the middle of the 15th century in the form in which we know it from history, and it existed for only slightly more than a century. It was larger than the present-day Republic of Tatarstan and extended to lands that were, or still are, inhabited by Chuvash, Mordvins, Bashkirs, Mari, and Udmurts. And the latter, by the way, were quite unhappy about living next to the Kazan Khanate and quite willingly signed up with the Russian side to fight against the Tatars.

Moscow and Kazan were at war throughout their history, ever since the independent Kazan Khanate emerged. It originally occupied a very favorable territory geographically, at the confluence of two large rivers, the Volga and the Kama. And even then, the most important trade road, which built the most reliable trade connection between Eastern Europe and Asia through the Volga and the Caspian Sea, ran there. The main exports were fur and slaves. The Tatars, like the other splinters of the Horde, were always slave traders and slave raiders. They obtained slaves by raiding Russian lands. Some were enslaved in the Kazan Khanate, some were sent to the south, to the slave markets. In addition, around Kazan itself there was some very fertile chernozem, so agriculture was also very efficient in the Kazan Khanate.

The relations between the Kazan Khanate and the Grand Duchy of Moscow were always uneasy. From time to time the Tatars organized raids on the Russian lands, as I mentioned, to capture slaves, and the Russians in turn, not being able to attack the Tatars on their own soil, tried to influence the political structures within the city of Kazan and push through their own proxies there. There always was a pro-Moscow party in Kazan who were in favor of good relations with Moscow, although there were hundreds of Russian slaves inside Kazan. So the pro-Russian party, I mean, it was like the business party, I guess, and not really pro-Russian as such.

In Kazan there was a constant internal struggle between the court factions. The most influential faction were usually the supporters of the Crimean Tatars. They would from time to time purge their rivals and then cooperate with the Crimean Tatars, who were very strong at that time, against Moscow. So it was very difficult to establish a protectorate over Kazan, which, however, was crucial for geographical and political reasons. Aside from being an important node for controlling the Volga, it's also the doorstep to many other territories.

Another purge at the top, which killed off large parts of the pro-Moscow party in Kazan, coincided with the coronation of Ivan the Fourth. Very soon he began his first campaign against Kazan, which proved unsuccessful, mostly due to unforeseen circumstances. Because of the weather, the Russian troops were forced to lift the siege and leave.

For the next campaign, the fortress of Sviyazhsk was built by... I forgot the name, it's a funny name. Vyrodkov. So Sviyazhsk was built by Vyrodkov. It was a stronghold very close to Kazan, and basically the outpost from which the whole Russian army besieged Kazan. Kazan was well defended with strong walls, and it was not directly assaulted. Ivan even tried to solve the problem peacefully. At the same time, the pro-Moscow party was not strong enough; there was no political will to be fully incorporated under the Russian sovereign.

And then Ivan planned a major campaign to take Kazan. It was prepared in an exemplary manner militarily. The base in Sviyazhsk allowed them to provide supplies to the troops and, what's important, to continue the siege even through winter, if it should last that long, which is a very difficult thing to do in medieval conditions. Very great attention was paid to the engineering part of the siege. Vyrodkov was a brilliant engineer; he also built a huge siege tower.

The situation of the Tatars was worsened by the fact that a very large part of the non-ethnically Tatar population of the Kazan Khanate defected to the side of Moscow, and even some Tatars did. Ivan the Fourth personally took part in the campaign. In addition, the Don Cossacks, who at that point were not yet fully incorporated, a frontier polity with a large degree of independence, heard of the big march on Kazan and offered their services.

On October 2nd, 1552, the Russian forces attacked Kazan, and the result was successful. They stormed the city, and the Kazan Khanate fell. Some of the Tatar elite, mostly the aforementioned pro-Moscow party, embraced the Orthodox faith and were even introduced into the ranks of the Russian aristocracy, keeping their elite positions. Later on they turned into the Turgenevs and the Nabokovs, in particular. The last Khan of Kazan was baptized and allowed to rule Zvenigorod.

So the capture of Kazan was one of the great turning points in Russian history. St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, now one of the most recognizable symbols of Russia, was built in honor of this victory.

It's one thing to conquer a city or a territory, but it's harder to control this territory. So a series of Cheremis wars followed, the Russo-Cheremis wars.

And who are the Cheremis?

Well, they are a part of the modern-day Mari people. The Finno-Ugric Mari people were for some reason very displeased about the Russian conquest, and they fought against the Russian army. Which just goes to show that the vast majority of the Kazan Khanate's population was mostly Finno-Ugric in origin, although some other Finno-Ugric tribes, like the Udmurts, mostly joined the Russian side.

Yes, exactly. The conquest of Kazan was such a turning point in Russian history, of course for the obvious geographical reasons, but also because Ivan IV was still very young at that point and not very far into his rule, and he proved the legitimacy of his title, showed the power of the Russian army, and basically dealt the first significant blow to the splinter states of the Golden Horde. Only a few years later the Astrakhan Khanate would also fall, then the Siberian Khanate, and it was the first step in the wave of Russian eastward expansion that would end up stopping only on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Right. And then the Russo-Turkish War. Unlike many other khanates to the east, the Crimean Khanate seemed to be the sturdiest out of them all, probably because they were directly connected with the Turks, the Ottoman Empire, and that gave them funding. And also, well, just like the other khanates, they dealt in slave trading. Basically, the Crimean Khanate was a slave economy. It was completely dependent on the slave trade, even more so than the other khanates, because, yeah, they could easily sell slaves to the Ottoman Empire.

Yes. The relationship between the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire was always interesting. At times it was a direct client state of the Ottoman Empire, at times they had more independent policies, but they were almost always military allies.

And the war, the Russo-Ottoman War, began with the conquest of Astrakhan. The Ottomans wanted to establish control, via their proxy in Crimea, over the Volga region, and the Astrakhan Khanate controlled the southern Volga completely. The goal of the Ottomans was basically to cut off the trade between Russia and Persia and take the Volga trade for themselves.

What's often left out is the political skill which Ivan showed, because it was not just a pure conquest. Just as in Kazan, Moscow tried to rely on the Moscow-oriented factions within the local government, and they did the same thing in Astrakhan. In 1556 Ivan conquered Astrakhan and decreed that a new Kremlin should be built in Astrakhan to stand guard over the Volga. You have to look at river maps and trade maps and stuff to understand the geopolitical logic here.

As a result of the strengthening of the Russian state on the borders of the Urals and near the Black Sea, near the Don and Volga rivers, the northern trade roads, and also the Muslim pilgrimage roads that connected the Central Asian khanates with Crimea and Anatolia, passing north of the Caspian Sea, were disrupted. This was the first big step towards the loss of Ottoman influence in this strategic region. And in this the Ottoman rulers, rightly, as they would be proven completely right about this later, saw a big threat to their territories and influence in the Caucasian and Crimean lands which they controlled. The Russian presence also weakened the influence of the Ottomans in the Caucasus. It was still a frontier region for Russia at this point, sparsely populated by Terek Cossacks, as all the Russian frontiers were.

And basically the Ottomans were rightly afraid of what was happening to their possessions in the whole Volga-Caucasus region, and together with the Crimean Khanate and the Nogai Horde they attacked Russia in 1568. They brought a lot of troops, a lot of nomadic riders, the Nogais and the Crimeans, and a bunch of Janissaries, and so on and so on. They had the task of capturing Astrakhan, but they failed.

So yeah, the Ottoman fleet was also decimated in their attempts to capture Azov, the town of Azov in Rostov Oblast. In the end Russia won the war, and out of the thousands that attacked, only very few managed to get back to their own lands. It ended with a peace treaty and a non-aggression treaty between the Sublime Porte and Moscow, but it did not really end the threat. As I said, the threat of the Crimean Khanate was only really resolved by Catherine the Great, 200 years later.

There is one war that we missed out. It was in between the Astrakhan campaign and the Russo-Turkish War: the Livonian War, which lasted for 25 years. So, as we have seen, in Russian wars, Russian campaigns against our southern or eastern enemies, Russia has been very good at using various tribes, enticing them to our side, as we have seen with the Finno-Ugrics and Turks. Most of our wars against khanates and Turks were successful. It was different during the Russian campaigns against our western neighbors. So this war, the Livonian War, was not just against the Livonian Order. It was basically the equivalent of the unified West against Russia. Would it be correct to say this?

The eastern part of the European world, let's say that. So Sweden, Denmark-Norway, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Yes, and also some Hungarians and Transylvanians and whoever else.

Yes, it was a very big war, actually. It was kind of a proto-world war in a way. On the Russian side there was the proxy state, the client state, of the Kingdom of Livonia, and also the Qasim Khanate, which was also a Russian protectorate at that time, the northernmost of the Finno-Ugric and Turkic khanates. The war lasted for 25 years and really ended with a Danish-Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish victory. Russia had to retreat in northern Europe for quite some time. For over 100 years Russia would not return to its rightful place on the Baltic. And of course it weighed heavily on Russian finances. And after their crushing defeat, especially at Molodi, which we'll talk about a bit later, the Ottomans supported the Polish.

So it was a kind of continuation, a proxy war in a way?

You could definitely put it like that.

So what was the cause, other than, well, gaining access to the Baltic Sea? In modern-day Estonia and Latvia, in Riga, Kolyvan, and Yuryev, which is Tartu now, there were Russians, and there were also Russian churches and Russian merchants. Well, there were a lot of crimes committed against them. It was one of the official causes of the war. Ivan Grozny wanted to defend the Russian population, let's say that.

Not just the Russian population, the local Balts too. So a few years before the start of the Livonian War, the Livonian Confederation had signed a treaty with Ivan the Fourth, a truce in which Livonia agreed to a neutral status and to not enter any military blocs, specifically not to enter an alliance with Poland-Lithuania. And they did that anyway. The Treaty of Pozvol in '57 basically made Livonia a protectorate of the Polish.

So Livonia does seem like a kind of buffer zone between the Poles and the Swedes and Russia.

It has always been one of the hottest European PvP zones. Yeah, and every couple of centuries, or even more often, some army invades the Baltics, kills a lot of Balts, and then leaves again. And yeah, for the longest time the native population of the Baltic region was mostly a mute spectator to these events, whether it's the Swedes, the Poles, the Germans, the Russians. They were kind of like the local flora and fauna, mostly.

And funnily enough, it's really similar to the Ukrainian war right now, because there was also a propaganda campaign about Russian butchery and Russian atrocities. There are a lot of images. Especially the Germans, who had a lot of access to the printing press, started printing out those pamphlets about the Russian atrocities. The following quote: "Very vile, terrible, and unheard-of atrocities the Muscovites commit with Christian prisoners from Livonia, men and women, virgins and children, and what harm they cause daily in their country. Along the way it is shown the great danger and need of the Livlanders, to all Christians as a warning and for improving their sinful life. It is written from Livonia and printed." And so on.

And also, the local peasantry in many parts welcomed the Russian forces as liberators from the German oppressors. Several fortresses surrendered without resistance, and at first the war went pretty well. There were sieges where we managed to conquer most of today's Estonia. And that's how we created the client state of Livonskoye Korolevstvo, the Livonian Kingdom.

The first battles were fought similarly to the earlier conquests and built on Ivan's military reforms, because the musketmen played a key role and the artillery was at a very high level. And so yeah, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Aside from that, in the meantime, the Russian forces also destroyed the Livonian Order at the Battle of Ermes in 1560, where it was effectively wiped out, and it was dissolved after the battle. Most or all of the Livonian knights were killed. Then of course the Scandinavians entered the game. There was an ideological or geopolitical concept in Scandinavia named Dominion over the Baltic Sea, which was a geopolitical goal for the Poles and the Scandinavians, the Danish and the Swedes. It became kind of a free-for-all, and everyone was interested in keeping Russia out of the Baltic. Lithuania and Poland entered the war, Sweden entered the war.

Then for several years, basically for almost a decade, Russia actually had dominion over Livonia and managed to hold its new territories. However, things took a turn for the worse when the Swedes allied with the Polish and the Lithuanians after the Transylvanian prince Stephen Báthory became King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.

Yeah, he recruited a lot of mercenaries, a lot of Hungarians, Czechs, Germans, who fought against Russia in Livonia. Things took a turn for the worse, and in the end Russia ended up defeated by the combined power of Sweden, Poland, and basically all of Eastern and Northern Europe. The first NAFO victory ever recorded in history.

Yeah. We lost Narva, then Ivangorod, Yam, Koporye. Sweden was happy enough having taken what they got in Livonia, and in the end the Truce of Yam-Zapolsky was signed, a very humiliating treaty for Russia. It ended with Russia surrendering all of Livonia and the city of Tartu. Polotsk remained in Polish hands. However, at least we managed to keep Velikiye Luki; the Swedes gave it back.

So this defeat led Russia to the Smuta, to the Time of Troubles, later on.

Yes. And a bit later also came the truce, the Treaty of Plussa, which was the actual end of the Livonian War, the treaty with Sweden. Russia had to give up Ingria, which would not be retaken until Peter the Great. It also showed that Sweden remained a powerful threat to Russia and would stay one until being crushed by Peter. If you look at what the Swedes actually demanded in the peace treaty, they demanded a lot of northern Russia, even including Veliky Novgorod. Thankfully, they were not able to enforce their demands, but it showed that they had very big ambitions.

Well, the main weakness of the Russian state in this war was probably the lack of a fleet in the Baltic Sea, and that's what made the Swedish forces so powerful.

Yes. The Livonian War ended up causing a whole bunch of treaties and wars. The status of Riga changed a lot; it stopped being an independent city. The Swedish-Polish alliance fell apart a few years later, when Sigismund tried to incorporate the Swedish-controlled parts of Estonia into Livonia. Charles expelled the Polish forces from Estonia, and the Polish-Swedish War of 1600 to 1611 began and kind of ended inconclusively, and it led to a whole series of Polish-Swedish wars which lasted for 30 years.

At the same time, of course, we had the Time of Troubles, the Smuta, in Russia, which also became intertwined with the renewed Livonian wars, because the Swedes and the Poles intervened in the Russian civil war, this time with the Swedes kind of on our side against the Poles. It's all very complicated. It also led again into the Ingrian War of 1610 to 1617, during which the Swedes were against us again, and we had to cede the rest of Ingria and Kexholm. And yeah, basically very complicated. As I said, the Baltics were always one of the most active PvP zones, and in the end it is what also led to the struggle between the Scandinavians themselves, with the Danish-Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian war, one of the fronts of the Thirty Years' War, which led to the Treaty of Copenhagen and such. And then the situation remained calm for half a century, until the Great Northern War. But we will talk about that in the episode on Peter the Great. So, very complicated.

Right. So usually the reign of Ivan IV is divided into two parts. The first one, which was beneficial to Russia: the conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan. The second part, which was the Oprichnina, Ivan IV presumably going insane.

Yes. Usually in mainstream historiography these developments are connected to his private life. In 1553 Ivan fell ill, and his wife's brother Nikita Romanovich tried to persuade the court to swear allegiance to the Tsar's baby son, but they refused, because they favored his adult cousin, Prince Vladimir of Staritsa. The Tsar recovered and did not die as many had expected, and when he came back to full health he was pretty obsessed with punishing the treachery of his nobles, and especially the independent allegiances of Prince Vladimir and other princes.

Seven years later his wife Anastasia died at the age of 29, and Ivan came to the conclusion that she had been poisoned, and spiraled ever more into paranoia and violence. The constant intrigue at court led to him kick-starting the process of monarchical centralization that was so typical for this period in all of Europe. Basically, similar processes also happened in England and in Spain and in France: the overcoming of feudalism, the reduction of the power of the local nobles, and the centralization of political power into the hands of the monarch.

Ivan withdrew from Moscow to a provincial castle, and he divided the realm between his private fief, named the Oprichnina, and the rest of the country. He gathered a corps of some lower nobles, some soldiers, some volunteers, the oprichniki, who were supposed to purge the country of treason on behalf of the Tsar. They rode black horses, and they decorated their horses with brooms and dogs' heads, to symbolize cleaning the country and loyalty. They launched a reign of terror against the rebellious nobles, and they spent most of their time either killing or praying.

It's also interesting that half of Moscow was under the Oprichnina and the other half was not.

Yes, I think it was mostly the central part, the area around the Arbat. In general, the Oprichnina lands were to the north of Moscow, basically in the former Novgorod Republic, and also in Kazan, well, the most turbulent areas that were ripe with treason. And the other part was mostly controlled by the boyar council, the Zemshchina.

Just compare him to what happened in other countries at the same time. Almost concurrent with Ivan's massacres in Novgorod, for example, was when the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre happened in France, and the death toll comparison is probably in favor of Ivan. More people were killed by Catherine de' Medici.

It's always relative. It's very hard to really quantify such things. Like I said, these political processes that happened, while they were of course also influenced by the personality of Ivan, were objective. The centralization of power in Russia was an objective and a progressive process that would have happened one way or another.

All right. So let's focus on the Novgorod pogrom. As we outlined, the state was basically divided in two: the Oprichnina territories directly controlled by Grozny, and the boyar-controlled Zemshchina territories. And there was a split between them, and it was getting worse. And the Oprichnina treated the Novgorodian nobility with growing concern, because, well, the Novgorod Zemshchina army numbered a whopping 3,000 deti boyarskiye, boyar children, which outnumbered any other county by the size of its army.

Yeah, yeah. Even Moscow. The problem was also that even the Novgorod militia was twice as large as the whole Oprichnina militia. Moscow couldn't just, well, push its will against Novgorod. And there were constant conflicts between these two cities.

Then, of course, Novgorod was also hit by famine and the plague, which led to popular opinion turning rebellious. Later, the boyars in Pskov surrendered Izborsk to the Lithuanians, and Pskov was, of course, deeply connected to Novgorod and subject to Novgorod. After the liberation of Izborsk, the oprichniki killed a few Pskovians and Novgorodians, and Ivan the Fourth even issued an order to evict all rebellious families from Pskov and Novgorod, and eventually up to 600 families were displaced. There was an idea of the unreliability of these cities.

And then the oprichniki also discovered a conspiracy by Vladimir Staritsky, who was then killed by Ivan IV. Ivan started searching for accomplices of this prince among the Novgorodians and Pskovites. And all this also happened against the backdrop of the trial of the boyar Fyodorov and of Metropolitan Philip Kolychev, during the investigation of the surrender of Izborsk. Basically, they uncovered a plot, a supposed plot, by Novgorod and Pskov to separate from Russia and become a Lithuanian province governed by Prince Staritsky.

There is also a religious backdrop to this, because just 60 years earlier the heresy of the Judaizers, the zhidovstvuyushchiye, had become quite influential in Novgorod. I think I talked about this on the Radio Dessa episode about Russian cults. It all combined, basically, into a perfect storm, and in the end Staritsky was killed, and Ivan came to the conclusion that the nobles of Novgorod wanted to swear allegiance to Sigismund II. And Ivan decided to punish them, moved his troops to Novgorod, and started killing a lot of people. The aforementioned Metropolitan Philip was personally killed by Malyuta Skuratov for refusing to bless the campaign against Novgorod.

No one knows exactly how many people were killed. There was a trial, during which I think around 400 people were sentenced to death, and of course a lot of extralegal killing. The proposed numbers of victims of Ivan's attack on Novgorod vary a lot. The accounts range from 2,000 to 30,000, basically. The latter is very unlikely, because 30,000 is larger than the population of Novgorod at the time. The historian Skrynnikov, a Soviet and Russian historian, gives the lower number; his main argument is that there are church documents recording how many people were killed in Novgorod, and that number is around 2,000. So basically, that is the floor of how many people were killed.

Then, of course, he also continued killing in Pskov, but not that many. It was around 30 or 40 nobles, I think. There is an anecdote about this. As the legend goes, Ivan visited a holy fool in Pskov, a certain Nikola Salos. At the table, Nikola handed a piece of raw meat to Ivan, saying, "Here, eat that, because you eat human meat anyway." And he said that Ivan would meet many troubles if he did not spare the inhabitants of Pskov. Ivan at first didn't listen to him and ordered the bells removed from a monastery in Pskov. But at the same time his best horse collapsed underneath him, which made him think about the words of the holy fool again, and he left Pskov without instigating a massacre.

Yeah. So let's talk about Ivan IV as a man. There are a lot of conflicting accounts about him personally. Some claim that he was a poet and a great composer. He also had a very interesting life in his marriages, because there were six confirmed marriages, and also some unconfirmed ones, and nine children. No good heir after all those attempts. Perhaps Ivan Grozny was the type of man who liked the process itself, and not the result. Who knows?

In general, I don't like the fixation on the personal lives of monarchs like that, especially in a time period that is so rife with mythologization and very primitive propaganda, when there were very few reliable historical sources. I much prefer to look at the rule of monarchs through the logic of politics and geography. Obviously, as such, much of it is very deterministic. As we said, the Oprichnina made perfect sense. It was a natural, very natural process of centralization that happened everywhere.

With regards to the wives, of course, there were some... Although even that was not really specific to Ivan. What was specific to Ivan was that he was actually pretty smart about choosing wives.

So when he was 16, when he was crowned, he called a bride show. The point of the bride show was that, basically, when choosing a wife for the monarch, she is of course always chosen from among the aristocracy. And choosing from the high aristocracy is always problematic, because it brings someone to power and removes someone else from power, and it can cause a lot of discord among the aristocracy and cause political instability. And as such, Ivan IV did not line up 500 virgins from all of Russia because he had a fetish for...

To try them out.

Yes. He did not do that because he had a fetish for beauty contests. He did that because he consciously and deliberately made the decision to marry a girl from the middle gentry. So in the end he chose Anastasia Romanovna Zakharyina-Yuryeva, the great-aunt of the later Mikhail Romanov.

She was the daughter of a very minor boyar clan that was already at court, but not influential. Ivan already knew her. He knew her uncle, who played a role in his education and upbringing. She was descended from Andrei Kobyla, a very old boyar family, but her branch was a very insignificant branch, from like the fourth or fifth son of Fyodor Koshka.

As such, it was a very smart political decision to marry Anastasia. It was definitely not some kind of personal thing for him. He did take her death very heavily, but then again, it was not just because he was too weak to deal with the grief of losing his wife. It was because he was convinced that Anastasia was poisoned by his enemies among the aristocracy, which is not really that paranoid of a conclusion to reach. There were a lot of factions and intrigues at the court in Moscow. It was like Game of Thrones on steroids.

He needed to marry again, and his obsession with choosing wives was also not personal whimsy. It was not part of his personality that he was so obsessed with women. It was of crucial importance for the stability of his reign and of his dynasty, because of his children at that point only his son Ivan even seemed likely to survive to adulthood at all. Fyodor was a very weak and sickly child, and he needed more heirs, more sons.

And he was very similar to his contemporary Henry VIII in that. He sought foreign brides, a princess from Sweden and from Poland, in the hope of laying claim to the Polish throne. So again, it's geopolitical ambition and not personal whimsy. He even, which is not completely proven, but supposedly, proposed to the English queen Elizabeth I too. Which also was not some kind of weird obsession; it was because the English were actively trading in northern Russia at that time, and there was hope for Russian-English cooperation, because the English, of course, were interested in expanding their influence in the Baltic and the northern trade routes, and they could have been allies against the Polish and the Swedes. And as such, this was also dictated by geopolitical logic.

And what was it called, the trading company? The Muscovy Company was actually chartered in 1555.

So actually, the Muscovy Company was the first major chartered joint-stock company. They had a monopoly on the trade between England and Russia until the time of Peter the Great, and they remained a trading company until the Russian Revolution. But actually, a fun fact is that it still exists as a charity in Russia. So yeah, very interesting. It's one of those topics that we should really look into in a separate episode. The Muscovy Company grew out of the so-called Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, founded by Richard Chancellor, Sebastian Cabot, and Hugh Willoughby. Very interesting stuff.

And he also married a Tatar princess in between, which was also important to cement his conquests in Tatar lands and to assimilate the Tatar aristocracy into the Russian state. So I am really not a fan at all of looking at Ivan through the lens of him being crazy or a sadist or whatever else. Most of what he did can be explained by very simple political logic.

It's very sad that Anastasia not being from a noble family still did not save her from being poisoned. There was an English fellow, an envoy to the English court and an agent for this trading company, who gave an eyewitness account of many things. He wrote in his memoirs about the relationship between Anastasia and Ivan IV: he was young and riotous, and she ruled him with admirable affability and wisdom.

So it has been the subject of many debates who poisoned her, or whether she was ever poisoned at all. The examination of Anastasia's remains a couple of decades ago seemed to prove it, because there was acute mercury poisoning in her remains.

I'm not sure that is actually proof, though, because mercury was widely used as medicine as well at the time.

Maybe so. Well, maybe she overdosed on the medicine and fell ill.

It's possible, it's possible. We don't really know for sure. In any case, she died when she was 30. In her short lifespan she managed to bring six children into this world. One of them would be the successor of Ivan Grozny, Fyodor I of Russia, the last of the Rurikids.

Yes, Fyodor. And the baby Dmitry, of course, who would become, or at least his name would become, very important.

Yeah, who died in infancy, basically. He was eight months old when he died. And during the early 17th century there were at least a dozen False Dmitrys going around. It was a giant circus.

Yes. So in any case, Anastasia, even though she had died decades before, her marriage to Ivan still proved important for the eventual ascension of the Romanovs. Her brother, Nikita Romanovich, was very involved at court, and when Ivan IV died in 1584, it was he who ensured that Fyodor I would secure his succession and actually take over the throne. Nikita died very soon afterwards, but his influence and cause were inherited by his son, Fyodor Nikitich Romanov, who in turn was the father of Mikhail Romanov, the first Romanov ruler.

So there is a surviving account of Ivan Grozny's death by the English commercial agent that I mentioned earlier, Jerome Horsey.

Can you really trust anything an Englishman would write about Russia?

Maybe not. Still, this account includes an enigmatic description of the moment of his death. In the meantime, the Englishman said, he was "strangled and stark dead." That is the description of his death by Jerome Horsey, that he was strangled. So how did Ivan die? Was he murdered in a regime-change operation? What happened? No one really knows for sure how Ivan Grozny died.

So the eyewitness account by Jerome Horsey starts with the following. Ivan suffered from multiple ailments. According to Jerome, he believed in all kinds of weird medicine, alternative medicine. In the last hours of his life, he ordered precious stones to be brought to his private chamber. He placed them on his chest, yeah, and he waited. Then, with the help of his doctor, he took a bath, and he called in the skomorokhi that he loved so much.

The skomorokhi, the Russian jesters. And the word...

There is actually a theory that the word is derived from the Italian scaramuccia. So, like Scaramouche in English.

Interesting. Would make sense, I guess. There was a lot of Italian influence in Russia at the time.

Oh yeah, you can see it in the architecture.

So there is some chaotic element in the life of Ivan Grozny, pretty much the same as what we know of Peter the Great, for example, and their love for the low culture of the jesters.

So after that, he called the two rivals to his bed, and there was a chessboard at his side. There were two men: Boris Godunov, who would later become Tsar during the Time of Troubles, and who was not part of any dynastic family, and Bogdan Belsky, an old boyar ally of the Tsar.

Yes, and an important oprichnik.

No one really knew who would be the successor. There was Fyodor. Why do you think no one really believed in Fyodor as a competent successor?

Well, because he was very weak and sickly and also, by most accounts, possibly mentally retarded, but at the very least not very intelligent. And I think that is exactly why Nikita Romanovich was so interested in having Fyodor on the throne, because it would mean that the Romanovs would basically control the Tsar like a puppet.

However, Fyodor left most of the actual ruling to Boris Godunov, who was a minister, who had also risen to power from among the oprichniki, and who wanted to consolidate his power. He is one of the prime suspects, of course, in the possible assassination of Ivan IV. He married his sister to the Tsar.

As such, the last Rurikid heir was Ivan's youngest son, the eight-year-old Dmitry, who vanished. The official account of his death is that he stabbed himself in the throat during an epileptic fit. And then there is the disappeared Dmitry. There is, of course, the theory that it was very likely he was assassinated by Godunov, who regarded him as a threat to his rise to power.

During Fyodor's rule, Godunov cemented his power, and when Fyodor died without children in 1598, the royal line of the Rurikids was extinct: with Ivan, who could have become the Fifth, dying by Ivan IV's hand, Dmitry possibly dying by Godunov's hand, and then Fyodor dying as well. And this leads us directly into the topic of the next episode, the Time of Troubles. Because the throne was vacant, the dynasty was extinct, and the prime candidates for the throne at that point were Boris Godunov, who had not only been de facto ruler for a long time but was also the brother-in-law of the late Tsar, and Fyodor Romanov, the eldest nephew of the late Anastasia, son of Nikita Romanovich, who was also very important at court and had secured Fyodor's succession in the first place.

Godunov was eventually elected Tsar by an assembly and was thought of as the nearest thing to a legitimate ruler that existed at the time, and initially he was also backed by Fyodor Romanov. But we will talk about this in more detail in the next episode, which will be completely devoted to the Smuta, the Time of Troubles that brought a lot of ruin, war, famine, disease, and death to Russia, until it was ended by the accession to the throne of the first ruler of the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail Romanov.

The next episode will be about the Time of Troubles and about Mikhail Romanov, and it will be the actual first episode in this series, after this one, which is a prequel and which will be titled Episode 0 in our series on the Romanov rulers of Russia.

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# Chapter 2: Smuta – The Time of Troubles

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast. This is the second part of the Romanov series, where we will try to figure out the messiest chapter of Russian history, the Time of Troubles, and the birth of the Romanov dynasty that saved Russia from inevitable death. In the first episode of the Romanov series, episode number zero, we covered Ivan Grozny's reign. We tried to be as objective as possible in our treatment of Ivan. He was successful in pacifying the khanates, devouring their territories and peoples, and growing the Russian Tsardom.

He forever changed the trajectory of the Russian state. It was no longer a loosely connected bunch of Slavic principalities, but something much greater, an eclectic proto-empire that could assimilate dozens of peoples and unite them under one flag and one God. Grozny's reforms whipped Russia into shape. His streltsy rifleman units were an absolute necessity in our never-ending wars. Yet by that point, by the late 16th century, we had not yet achieved parity with other European militaries. Ivan Grozny's war against a unified Eastern Europe, the Livonian War, proved to be not very successful, and we lost the northwestern territories and all access to the Baltic Sea. This defeat aside, there was a bigger problem that faced the Rurikid dynasty, a lack of strong heirs, and it led us to the Time of Troubles.

Let's remember Grozny's children.

He and his first wife Anastasia Romanovna produced six children. The first two were girls who died in infancy, then there was the Tsarevich Dmitry, who drowned at eight months old. Apparently, after Ivan's victorious conquest of Kazan, he fell gravely ill, at age 22 no less, and he demanded that all the boyars swear fealty to the baby boy, baby Dmitry, in case Ivan died. In Ivan's inner circle there were a lot of relatives from his wife's side, the Zakharyin-Koshkins, who later on became the Romanov dynasty.

So all his wife's relatives were happy to take an oath because, well, baby Dmitry was their kin.

But most of the other boyar families, such as the Shuiskys and others, refused to do this. They correctly saw this premature ascension of baby Dmitry as the complete domination of the Zakharyin clan. So instead, they cursed the baby boy, Ivan's first son. When Ivan Grozny recovered from his illness, he was dissatisfied with the disobedience of his boyars, and he went to the monastery to pray with his family. And on their way to the Kirillov monastery, somehow the baby boy drowned in a river, to the much jubilation of the boyars. But it's not the Dmitry that you all know from the False Dmitrys. Yeah, there was another Dmitry, Dmitry of Uglich.

All right, three children out of the way. Next up, he had another boy two years later. Ivan Ivanovich actually turned out all right. He lived a pretty normal life, he married, and, well, he waited for his father's eventual death, and everyone believed that he would be the successor of Ivan Grozny. But he also died, at 27 years of age. Historians argue about it constantly, because there is a pop culture idea that he was bludgeoned to death by his crazy old father. Supposedly, Grozny was aggrieved by the wife of Ivan.

Somehow she disrespected him, or they were not following his orders. So he beat her to the point of miscarriage, and then he killed his 27-year-old son with a staff. But other historians actually think that he just fell ill and died of some illness. Then there was another baby, Evdokia, a girl, who died in infancy. And the last child of Anastasia Romanovna was Feodor, who would become the last Rurikid ruler of Russia.

A success, finally. Nicknamed Feodor I Blazhenny, or the Blessed. Really, he was a holy fool who was completely under the boot of his regent, Boris Godunov. And there were a few more children of Ivan Grozny: Vasily, born from his second marriage, who died in infancy, and the last one, the last child of Ivan Grozny. Because all the others were either dead, or girls, or Feodor the blessed fool, people were still hoping that maybe the last son would prove to be of some worth: Dmitry of Uglich. He was born in 1582 from Grozny's last wife, Maria Nagaya. And this boy was basically, yeah, as I said, the last hope for a normal heir.

So he was relatively healthy, as in he did not die in infancy. When Dmitry was two years of age, Ivan Grozny died and went straight to heaven. The line of succession prevented Dmitry from becoming a little Tsar at two years of age, because there was an older bro, Feodor, the mental defect. And who cares if he's out to lunch, because there is always a handyman, Boris Godunov, the regent of this blessed fool, who became the de facto ruler of Russia. And of course, he immediately exiled Dmitry Ivanovich, the last son of Ivan Grozny, together with his mother and all the family, to Uglich.

That's why he is now known as Dmitry of Uglich. It's a city in Yaroslavl Oblast now, a very powerful one. So anyway, Dmitry and the family were relocated to Uglich. And as it always happened in pre-Romanov Russia, his life was cut short in a very bloody fashion. Yes, officially little Dmitry died during an epileptic fit, where he fell on either a knife or a pair of scissors and cut his own throat accidentally.

Yeah, that happens. I mean, it is such a freak accident that it may actually have happened, but most people believed that he had been assassinated by Boris Godunov, so he could...

On his orders, yes.

Yes, so that he could take over the throne after blessed Fyodor. The image of Fyodor as a holy fool or an idiot is also controversial, I think. I have not researched that, actually. He was widely regarded as, yeah, not a very intelligent person, but there's also the point of view that he was not so much an idiot as he was just not interested in worldly things, that he was incredibly religious and spent all his time in prayer and did not care much for ruling and other mundane things. That's actually more the case than a mental defect. He is a canonized saint of the Orthodox Church.

But his rule was widely regarded as quite a blessed time, regardless of whether it was because of his constant praying for Russia or because of the abilities of his regent, or minister, Boris Godunov. And his reign was quite successful. It lasted for 15 years. It included, among other things, the last successful raid by the Crimean Tatars into Russian land, the last time they actually managed to reach Moscow. This happened in 1591. The Khan Gazi Giray of the Crimean Horde, well, as had happened many times before, sent a huge army to Moscow. It was, however, soundly defeated. After the defeat near Moscow, the Khan wrote a letter to Fyodor Ivanovich promising to renew the friendship with him and stating that he intended to declare full independence from the Ottomans and also to move his country to the Dnieper, so he could serve the Russian Tsar and become a barrier against the Ottomans.

This was all a lie. He never had any intention of doing any of that. It was supposed to, well, basically calm the Russians while the Khan was preparing another raid, even though he had lost two-thirds of his army in the battle near Moscow. Taking advantage of the absence of Russian troops, because at the same time there was another war going on, which I'll talk about in a second, with the Swedes, the Crimean army suddenly attacked the Ryazan region, leaving with a bunch of slaves and loot. After that, the Khan became aggressive again and even started planning another attack on Moscow, but the Ottomans forced him to help them in the ongoing Austro-Turkish War. Two years later, the Khan signed a peace treaty with the Russian state, with the permission of the Ottoman Sultan, and this was the very last time a Crimean Tatar army ever reached central Russia.

So aside from that, the Russian state also managed to take revenge for previous misfortunes against the Swedes, namely in the Russo-Swedish War of 1590 to 1595. Godunov himself and Fyodor of Russia marched towards Novgorod, crossed the Narva River and laid siege to the Swedish castle of Narva, captured it, and they also captured Revel and even ravaged Finnish lands up to Helsinki, or Helsingfors as it was called back then. The Swedish governor was forced to sign a peace treaty, a treaty that reversed the Truce of Plussa, which we talked about in the last episode, surrendering territory again. But the King of Sweden, John III, did not agree with that and decided to continue the war. So the main theaters of the war were Estonia, Finland and Eastern Karelia. The Swedes deployed quite gruesome raiding tactics, especially using their Finnish peasant mercenaries, whom they used as, well, death squads basically. They destroyed the Pechenga Monastery, killing all the monks. They tried to do the same at the Solovetsky Monastery, but that didn't work. Godunov's government managed to reverse the war and return some of the lands that were lost due to the Livonian War.

Yes. So yeah, Godunov was a very competent regent and ruler. The war with the Swedes ended, for Russia, indecisively in the end, kind of a draw. Russia got back all the territory it had ceded in the Truce of Plussa, except the city of Narva. But Russia also had to renounce all claims on Estonia, including Narva.

And these lands would not become Russian again for many, many decades, almost a century. Aside from the war, this was also a time of great city building. A whole bunch of cities were founded in what used to be the borderlands of the Dikoye Pole, the Wild Field, the lands in the Russian southwest which were habitually raided by nomads, be it the Pechenegs in the Middle Ages or later the Crimean Tatars or any other nomadic riders who were in the vicinity. And also, of course, Russian Cossacks, who also did the same.

So among the cities that were founded during Fyodor's reign are, well, all the biggest cities, really, of the Russian south: Voronezh, Belgorod, Kursk, Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn.

And not just the south saw a lot of city building. Following in the footsteps of Yermak, the Tsar's voivodes also founded a bunch of fortresses that would become cities in Siberia, the most important of which are Tyumen and Tobolsk. This, however, also contributed to one of the main problems that had a real influence on the Time of Troubles and the systemic crisis that was plaguing Russia, namely the overextension of the Russian state. The overextension was not only a military and bureaucratic problem, it was also a demographic problem. Since the middle of the 16th century, the central Russian lands began to become depopulated, not only due to famine and epidemics but also due to colonization, because many, many of the poor peasants of central Russia moved either to the chernozem of the south, with much more fertile lands, or to the east, where they were looking for, well, the eastern frontier, the Siberian frontier. And this led to a whole bunch of demographic and economic problems which greatly contributed to the crisis that shook Russia to its foundations and led to the apocalyptic events of the Time of Troubles.

One of the other most important events of Fyodor's rule was the creation of the Russian Patriarchate. In 1589, Metropolitan Job was declared Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias, and with that began, well, the story of the Russian Church completely independent from Constantinople.

Let's return for a bit to Dmitry of Uglich, because he's quite a key figure in the upcoming Time of Troubles in Russia. So the main investigator of this case was a boyar, Vasily Shuisky. Remember that name, because he will be quite an important figure soon enough. Vasily Shuisky is actually also from the house of Rurikids, from a different branch. So Shuisky concluded that, yeah, nothing to see here, it was just an epileptic fit. There was a funny episode, well, there was a gruesome episode. The locals of Uglich were roused by Maria Nagaya, the mother of the deceased kid, or the murdered kid. And people went nuts and started killing Godunov's men, whom they deemed to be Dmitry's killers. The National Guard came in and beat up the rioters. Some of them were exiled to Siberia. Maria Nagaya was also exiled.

It's one of the ways they started populating Siberia with Russians. And they even decided to punish the bell that the rioters were banging on to announce their riot against Godunov's men. The church bell was whipped, its clapper was removed, and the bell was sent to Siberia, and it stayed there for three centuries.

Out of all wars, famines and disasters, civil wars are almost always the most devastating ones, and the Time of Troubles was not caused just by the end of the Rurikid line, because, well, Feodor had no children, right?

Yes, that is correct. He was childless, and as such the Moscow line of the Rurikid dynasty was extinct. There are of course many other lines of the Rurikids. It's a huge house, really, and most of the ancient Russian aristocratic houses are somehow related to the Rurikids.

After Tsar Fyodor died, there were two candidates for the throne. The first, of course, was Boris Godunov, Fyodor's minister, regent perhaps, and brother-in-law. And also Fyodor Romanov, the eldest nephew of the late Tsaritsa Anastasia, Ivan Grozny's first wife, who was also the son of Nikita Romanovich, whom you may remember from the last episode. Fyodor Romanov was married to Ksenia Shestova, but of all their six children, only two survived, and only one son: the future Tsar Mikhail, who was born in 1596.

In the end, Godunov was elected by an assembly of boyars.

The Zemsky Sobor, yes.

Yes, the Zemsky Sobor. He was the nearest thing to a legitimate ruler after the extinction of the Moscow Rurikids, and he was initially backed by Fyodor Romanov. Godunov was quite gifted, as he had shown during the reign of Fyodor I, but he was quite unlucky. He was probably the best choice at the moment to become Tsar of Russia, but yeah, it was problematic.

Well, because he was not a Rurikid, and the Tsar was not just a CEO but almost a divine being. Then the problems arose, cataclysms and all that, famine four years into Godunov's reign.

Yes, the Little Ice Age.

Yeah, which also in roundabout ways contributed to the Thirty Years' War in Europe. So the Little Ice Age coincided with Godunov's reign. Fyodor Romanov, however, kept plotting against Boris Godunov, because he wanted the throne for the Romanovs. He was the first one who started spreading rumors about the survival of, yes, of the Tsarevich Dmitry. This was also used by the Poles, namely by the Polish embassy in Moscow under Lew Sapieha, who started plotting at the court and trying to incite the boyars against Godunov. It ended up with a showdown between Godunov and the Romanovs.

The Romanovs brought their military retinues to Moscow, and when Mikhail Romanov, the future Tsar, was only five years old, well, there was a dynastic cataclysm. In 1600, Godunov attacked Fyodor Romanov and the whole Romanov gang. They were accused of treason, they were accused of sorcery. Some of their servants and household members were tortured into admitting that the Romanovs practiced witchcraft and brewed poisons. Godunov burned down one of their palaces and exiled them to the far north.

To ensure that Fyodor Romanov could never take the throne, he was forced to become a monk under the name Filaret, and his wife was forced to become a nun. Mikhail was sent to live with distant relatives in Beloozero. He remained there for one and a half years, until he was allowed to move to a Romanov estate near Moscow again. Three of the five Romanov brothers were killed or died under very mysterious circumstances. Godunov did not touch Filaret and Ivan Romanov.

If they had a special connection to the previous Tsar, it would have been a bad look. And the disappearance of royal children at the hands of power-hungry relatives has a way of coming back to haunt you. The whispers spread throughout the land that Tsarevich Dmitry had survived, that he had been raised in Poland, and that he would come back to take his throne.

I wonder who was spreading that? The Poles? The Polish media? Why Poland? Why would common Russian people believe that? Why not, I don't know, Siberia?

Well, they were starving. A lot of people were actually starving four years into Godunov's reign, not because of his mismanagement or anything, but because of the series of cataclysms that destroyed crops. It was found that only 10% of all arable land was actually used in Russia at the time, and the population started to dwindle. During the Smuta it decreased by two times or three times. Yeah, it was a bunch of problems all coming together, and they started believing this conspiracy theory that Dmitry of Uglich was alive and in Poland.

Yes. It cannot be overemphasized how religious Russian society was at that time. It was extremely religious, and Orthodoxy was the beginning and the end of all political ideology, so to speak, and of all culture in general. So when Boris Godunov was elected not by the will of God but by the boyars, that led to a very serious political crisis, as the authority of the monarch rested on, well, just a bunch of aristocrats and not on God himself. And this was one of the main contributing factors to the fact that Boris Godunov's reign was so problematic. And on top of that came, of course, the economic troubles that, well, seemed to the people just a confirmation of what they believed. There were three really bad harvests in a row, in three years, until 1603, which caused a 20-fold increase in the price of bread and other foodstuffs.

And some contemporaries even mentioned a 100-fold increase in prices. This caused unprecedented famine in Moscow and in all of central Russia. And, of course, the weakened, exhausted and immunodeficient, as we now say, population was exposed to epidemics. Tsinga. How is it called in English?

The most popular disease of the time.

Scurvy.

Everyone had it. Almost. Cholera, and even the king of diseases, the Black Plague, had returned. In Moscow alone, tens of thousands of people were buried in mass graves outside the city limits. The Tsar fought with all his power against the disasters and ordered the distribution of free bread in Moscow, which led to Moscow being flooded with beggars and the destitute. Godunov imported a whole underclass. People with nothing to lose came to Moscow for the free bread, which is not a very good situation for anyone, as a few centuries later we could see in Paris with the sans-culottes, who became the main meat of the revolution and so on.

At the same time, Godunov made another huge mistake. He allowed the boyars to dissolve their standing armies if they were not able to pay them. And of course, most boyars during this time of crisis were not able to feed and pay their retainers, which led to the emergence of an incredible number of bandits roaming the lands. Many of these gangs were literally just armies, just the boyar retainers staying together and becoming armies of robbers, against whom the regular army had to be used. It was especially bad in the south, in the southwest, on the borders with the Wild Field and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And not by chance, of course, it was there that the fire of the Troubles really broke out. The people of course started believing in all kinds of apocalyptic prophecies and whatever myths were spread, and especially that all the disasters that were befalling Russia were God's punishment for the sins of Tsar Boris Godunov.

And it was then that people really started believing in the miraculous rescue of the last of Ivan IV's sons, Tsarevich Dmitry. It is not an accident, and not a rare belief, that in a time of troubles a glorious monarch will return. The king asleep in the mountain is a very common motif. Most European countries have a kind of myth like that, be it, I don't know, Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, be it King Harold, who supposedly survived the Battle of Hastings and would one day come to liberate the English from the Norman yoke. Of course you have Sebastianism in Portugal, the messianic belief that Sebastian of Portugal, who disappeared in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco, would one day return to save Portugal in its most difficult hour.

And then of course you have the modern versions of that, QAnon, with Donald Trump rising up and coming with sealed indictments that will save the country. It is a very common belief among peoples who live through troubled periods of time that it is God's punishment, and that in the last, most difficult hour a hero would appear to save everyone. And for the people of Russia during that time, it was the False Dmitry.

Okay, Grishka Otrepyev. Grishka, I think, was his moniker later on. Because according to one of the eyewitness accounts, by the German traveler Conrad Bussow, False Dmitry I was actually a former monk of the Chudov Monastery who fled to the Dnieper River, as it was controlled by the Poles. He became part of the Polish court and was raised there as a pretender.

Rasstriga means a former monk, so a monk who was deprived of his spiritual dignity by a decree. The first pretender came out of the woodwork. He befriended the Polish nobleman Jerzy Mniszech and promised to marry his daughter, Marina Mniszech, and make her the queen of Russia if he succeeded in taking the throne of the Russian Tsardom. So he needed an army, of course, to do that. And Jerzy Mniszech provided an army of mercenaries to the False Dmitry to invade Russia. He thought it was a good idea: if this pretender succeeds, his daughter Marina becomes the queen of Russia.

Yes, we left out a part that will become very important later on. The Polish magnates were very interested in this project of putting a false Tsar on the throne in Moscow, and especially Sigismund III was interested in this. He was a very pious Catholic. The plan was basically to create a church union similar to the Union of Brest that had been created in Ukraine, of what we know nowadays as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. And the Jesuits, who at that point were already present in Russia, of course joined the plan. In the spring of 1604, the impostor converted to Catholicism and gave Sigismund the promise that, in the event of his victory and his ascension to the throne, he would convert Russia to Catholicism.

Was his conversion officially recorded in 1604? I think so. I am not sure about the sources here, but I have read it everywhere.

Well, it makes sense, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, of course we don't exactly know even if... But yeah, it was believed, it is the most common theory, but he could have been anyone else. There was a theory that he was the illegitimate son of Stefan Batory, that he was some sort of Italian monk.

That would be weird.

Yes. That he was the real Dmitry, and that theory still exists. That he was the son of some minor Moscow nobleman, a boyar. And I think it was Pavlov, Nikolay Pavlov, a Russian historian, who came up with the theory that there were actually two False Dmitrys, two False Dmitry the Firsts.

The first, yeah.

And the first one was actually Grigory Otrepyev, and the second one, who took over for Grigory Otrepyev when the army crossed the Russian border, was an unknown Polish man who was trained by the Jesuits to become the False Dmitry.

Let's entertain this, but what would be the purpose of the first False Dmitry I, the Grishka Otrepyev one, who remained in Poland?

Basically, they believed that he wouldn't be a convincing actor, that he lacked the refinement, that he lacked the knowledge of court life and so on, and that the second one was specifically trained. So he stole his identity.

And rolled with it.

Yes. So there are a bunch of theories about this, but clearly the Poles wanted to convert the Orthodox heretics, and they're still doing it now. So in autumn 1604, False Dmitry I invaded Russia, and many of the cities on his path opened their gates for the pretender's army. For example, Chernigov, Putivl and Kursk did exactly that. In December 1604, there was the first battle between the pretender's army and Godunov's streltsy, not far from Sevsk, where the Tsar's army was crushed. It's an interesting battle for sure. The commander of the streltsy was Fyodor Mstislavsky.

Yes, remember that name. He will become important later.

Yeah. One of Ivan Grozny's top soldiers, who was always loyal to the crown, and then to Godunov. And in 1604 he was a voivode of Godunov. The streltsy relied, of course, on what are now antique muskets and cannons. The firepower was pretty devastating, but the reload time, I would think, was not quick enough. At the onset, they dealt a bunch of heavy blows to the pretender's army. But, as I said, there were a lot of Polish mercenaries, in particular many hussars, maybe winged ones, I'm not sure. So those hussars recklessly charged a retreating streltsy unit, and by accident they managed to gallop their way right into the command post of Fyodor Mstislavsky. Although most of the hussars were captured, they still managed to disrupt all order in the rear of Godunov's army. And eventually the pretender's army won this battle, although they suffered some casualties.

Yes, but only a month later, near the village of Dobrynichi, the pretender's army was crushed by the Tsar's army, and the False Dmitry had to flee. He barely escaped capture, and it seemed as if his invasion had failed. But then another twist of fate, another stroke of bad luck for Boris Godunov, sealed the deal, so to speak. Boris Godunov suddenly and unexpectedly died of a brain hemorrhage in April 1605. And at that point, most of the Tsar's armies went over to the side of the False Dmitry. The heir, the young Fyodor Borisovich, had his throat cut before Dmitry entered Moscow.

Yeah, so about the Dobrynichi battle, where the False Dmitry was crushed: the commander of Godunov's army there was Mikhail Shein, a very important man also, who will play a large part in the Russian defense against the Polish intervention.

Yes, and of course Mstislavsky and Shuisky were also a little bit...

Yeah, Mstislavsky, Shein. So one of the reasons why the False Dmitry was finally crushed at Dobrynichi was because the Polish mercs started to become restless, and they demanded that the False Dmitry pay up. And the thing is, the False Dmitry understood the importance of public relations. He wanted to remain popular with the people, with the locals, so he did not allow the Poles to loot and pillage Russian farms and cities on their path. That's how he lost a sizable number of the mercs along the way. They just returned to Poland. That's why they lacked the manpower at Dobrynichi.

It's weird, really, the False Dmitry's religion. Was he a Catholic?

He had a miraculous icon of the Theotokos brought from Kursk, and he prayed extensively. But it doesn't mean anything, because Catholics, we know about their deep respect for Mary.

Yes. And also he brought a monk to Putivl, and this monk was actually Grishka Otrepyev, to counter the rumors that he was not in fact Tsarevich Dmitry. Yeah, if the Russian people had found out that he was a Catholic, for example, or a fraud in general, not Dmitry, they would not have supported him.

But in any case, Boris Godunov died aged 52, and his 15-year-old son Fyodor Borisovich... There are too many Fyodors, I think, in this time. It's probably impossible for you guys to understand what we are saying. So Godunov's son inherited the throne. Godunov's army that was besieging the False Dmitry's castle in Kromy was demoralized, and Pyotr Basmanov and many other voivodes switched sides and joined the pretender's army. And together they marched on Moscow without any fight, I don't think.

Yes. After negotiations with the boyars, he spent three days in front of the gates of Moscow and then entered the city in a celebration, with bells ringing and songs being sung and everything else.

So it was a weird situation, because many people knew perfectly well that he was not the Tsarevich but some runaway monk. But everyone, the boyars, the clergy, the troops, and even Maria Nagaya, the mother of the deceased or murdered Dmitry of Uglich, had to play out a little spectacle and pretend that, yeah, she recognized her son. "Oh, you're so big now, and you speak Polish, and you're a Catholic, no way."

Yeah, the only dissident was the Patriarch, Job, the first Russian Patriarch. He was adamant. He pronounced anathema upon the impostor, but it was in vain. He was arrested and exiled to a very distant monastery.

Tsar Dmitry Ioannovich was crowned in two Kremlin cathedrals, not just in one, not just in the Assumption Cathedral, but also in the Archangel Cathedral, at the tomb of Ivan IV, whose son he claimed to be.

And he killed Godunov's son, and most of the Godunov clan was also murdered, so the Godunov dynasty was no more. And in June 1605, the False Dmitry became the ruler of the Russian Tsardom. And there are conflicting sources, actually. Some say that he immediately betrayed his Polish masters, because he refused to give them any land that he had apparently promised. Not sure about that.

But in any case, his reign was not a long one. He had, of course, to reconcile his different backers somehow: the Polish and the Russian aristocrats, the Orthodox and Catholic churches, boyars and Cossacks. He had a lot of Cossack mercenaries with him. He summoned back the Romanov brothers and appointed Filaret Metropolitan of Rostov, a promotion that was, well, mostly serving to keep him out of Moscow. And Mikhail, now 10 years old, moved to Rostov together with Filaret. And of course, the Tsar married Marina Mniszech and crowned her Tsaritsa of Russia. And the fact that she was a Catholic Pole basically shattered all of his mystique, because he was not the miraculous, real Orthodox Tsar anymore. He was just a filthy Jesuit who had brought popery to Moscow.

And as I said, it is incredibly important to consider the question of religion, and the anti-Catholic sentiment was extremely strong.

During their wedding ceremony, apparently, Marina Mniszech and the False Dmitry refused to accept communion from the hands of an Orthodox priest. Yeah, their whole story was uncovered by the common people. And also he had written a letter to the father of his soon-to-be wife, Jerzy Mniszech, saying, please send more Polish mercs for the wedding ceremony or whatever. And 2,000 Polish guests, mercenaries, arrived in Moscow, and they started drinking, harassing locals, robbing their houses. People were extremely mad about all this, and then they started realizing that he was a Catholic and that the queen of Russia was also a Catholic.

And at the same time, he was also losing the support of the Polish throne, because not only did he refuse to grant the territorial concessions he had promised, but he was also in a conspiracy with the Polish opposition to Sigismund and offered himself as the new monarch on the Polish throne, basically a personal union between Russia and the Polish Commonwealth. The False Dmitry became entangled in lies and conflicting interests. And that's when Vasily Shuisky comes into play. Remember Shuisky, the Rurikid boyar who investigated the murder of baby Dmitry of Uglich?

Yes, who knew for sure that Dmitry was dead, because, yeah, figures. He saw that. And well, early in the morning on the 17th of May 1606, he entered Moscow with his personal army, and the local Muscovites, who were sick and tired of the shit show happening in their city and country in general, supported him and started beating up the Polish mercs, the False Dmitry's guards and turncoats. He was Dmitry no longer. He became forever Grishka Otrepyev, a despised man, a pretender, a thief. He was tortured, killed and burned, and his ashes were loaded into a cannon and shot in the direction of Poland. And that's how Shuisky became the new ruler of the Russian Tsardom in 1606.

Tsar Vasily IV, indeed.

Yeah, and he's kind of a Rurikid himself, because he's from a different branch, the Suzdal Rurikids. Well, it doesn't stop there, of course, because not all of the people outside of Moscow believed that the False Dmitry was dead, or that the true Dmitry was still dead, and they genuinely liked this Dmitry story. There were like a dozen False Dmitrys stalking the land with various degrees of support and power.

Yeah, so they still thought that there was a true heir, a son of Ivan Grozny, and true madness ensued. A dozen or so False Dmitrys appeared, but most of them were crushed by Shuisky. False Dmitry number two also appeared, in Poland. The thing is, it's not enough to just declare yourself to be the true Dmitry of Uglich. You need serious backup, and only the Poles could provide that. So False Dmitry number two, he was some Belarusian teacher.

It's also very American.

Yes. A former teacher, fluent in both Polish and Russian, possibly a converted Jew. He advanced to Tushino, in Moscow, in Moscow Oblast, right?

Yes, yes. The Tushinsky Vor, the Thief of Tushino, some people who were skeptical of the conspiracy theory started calling him.

So he invaded Russia. He took control over, well, quite a large chunk of the Russian Tsardom, and his HQ was Tushino. He even started minting his own coins and basically created an alternative government structure to Shuisky. Shuisky was sitting in Moscow, and he simply lacked the manpower to do anything about it. So he wrote a letter to the Swedes, to the Swedish king Karl IX, and he offered Sweden the territories regained by Godunov to occupy. He offered the Swedes to take Karelia again.

Before that there was another False Dmitry. Not quite, but in any case, there was a former serf by the name of Ivan Bolotnikov, and he was supporting a man called Ileyka Muromets, who was, well, not a False Dmitry. He was a completely made-up Tsarevich, Pyotr Fyodorovich, and also supposedly a son of Ivan Grozny that never existed. But there was no internet back in the day.

Yes. He had a very heterogeneous army of peasants, serfs and provincial nobles, and they crushed Shuisky's guards, plundered the countryside and moved towards Moscow. They began a siege of Moscow which lasted five weeks. These rebels were defeated at Moscow, but they held on in Tula for many months more, really. Just as the government had managed to put down Bolotnikov's rebellion, a new impostor appeared, claiming to be... False Dmitry II. False Dmitry II had neither the intelligence nor the personal charm of the first False Dmitry, and he looked nothing like him.

There are recorded words of a Polish aristocrat, Jan Sapieha, who supposedly said: "We Poles have brought here for a second time a sovereign who shall be called Dmitry, even if the Russians go insane." The Time of Troubles was in full swing and basically running on its own laws, on inertia. And all those who did not get along with Vasily Shuisky for whatever reason clustered around the impostor, whoever this impostor was. The concept of the state and service and loyalty and whatever was replaced by complete arbitrariness. By the summer of 1608, the detachments of False Dmitry II, led by the Polish generals Sapieha and Lisowski, reached Moscow but failed to take it.

However, the False Dmitry made camp in the village of Tushino, as we have already said, and was known as the Thief of Tushino, or the Tushino Bandit.

And by the end of the year, he managed to almost completely blockade Moscow. Several cities flocked to his side, including Astrakhan and Pskov, and there were even raids deeper into Russian territory. The position of False Dmitry II was strengthened by Marina Mniszech, the widow of the first False Dmitry, who agreed to recognize him as her husband. However...

Yes, which was very complicated, because they married, but in secrecy, because if he had been the real False Dmitry, they would already have been married, basically. False Dmitry II appointed Filaret Patriarch when the Cossacks had captured Rostov.

Interesting. Why would he do that? Just to counteract the Shuisky clan?

Yes, I guess so, and possibly the Romanovs were involved in this conspiracy as well. Who knows? In any case, yes, Vasily Shuisky made a deal with the Swedes that in exchange for the Russian fortress of Korela, the Swedes would send a mercenary army to Russia to help put down False Dmitry II. And they sent quite a lot of people. Up to 12,000 mercs arrived in Novgorod.

Yes, the disintegration of Russia was really an irresistible opportunity, both for the Poles and for the Swedes, who were rivals for rule over the Baltic Sea, as we talked about in the last episode, and both had close ties to certain segments of the Russian aristocracy. The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had more or less recently merged into the new Commonwealth, and both Sweden and Poland were, well, very tempted to feast on the corpse of Russia. The Swedes only created more problems. By helping the thieves in Tushino to be dispersed, they gave the Polish king Sigismund III, who had once occupied the Swedish throne and was a stubborn enemy of Sweden, a reason, a casus belli, to declare open war against Russia. And he had himself almost been overthrown by a rebellion of the szlachta, and Sigismund saw a war against Russia as an excellent way to divert attention from internal problems to, well, war.

And one other aspect is that the Polish king never supported the second False Dmitry. That was kind of a private project by Polish aristocrats. In 1609, the Polish army invaded Russia, and they attacked Smolensk, a huge castle city in western Russia that was defended by Mikhail Shein, a hero of many Smuta wars, of the Dobrynichi battle. Up to 15,000 Polish and foreign mercenaries besieged Smolensk, and the battle for Smolensk, or the defense of Smolensk, was a pretty hardcore chapter of this war, because it lasted for a few years. During the blockade of Smolensk there was no way to supply the city, which was completely encircled by the Poles.

Yes, so the Poles had intervened, as the Swedes swallowed Novgorod. The Thief of Tushino fled to the south, while Vasily IV, so Shuisky, was overthrown.

Aside from the war that was going on, there was an internal struggle for power in Moscow. Shuisky was deposed by a group of Russian nobles, the Seven Boyars. Shuisky had lost all credibility and divine aura, especially after the Poles crushed the Russian army, which was supported by Swedish mercenaries, at Klushino. It was a disastrous defeat, and on hearing this news the False Dmitry tried attacking Moscow again. And Shuisky had completely lost all authority. He turned out to be a loser who brought more and more misfortune, so the boyars formed another conspiracy and decided to overthrow him. He was seized and forcibly tonsured as a monk, but Patriarch Hermogenes besought the boyars not to kill him, because that would be extremely bad luck.

He died as a prisoner some years later. But yeah, there is a public conception of what followed next, and I personally do not believe it is entirely fair, really.

So what followed was the reign of the Seven Boyars, the Semiboyarshchina. It is widely regarded in popular history as some kind of deeply unpatriotic period of traitors and oligarchs, so to speak, who accepted the Polish Władysław as the Tsar of Russia. Yes, even now the Semiboyarshchina is often singled out as something prohibitively vile and traitorous.

Just as the Semibankirshchina.

Yes, that was what the rule of the seven oligarchs under President Yeltsin was called, in analogy to the Semiboyarshchina. If you assess the situation objectively, however, it's clear that the choice of the boyars was logical. By 1610, when the boyars invited the Polish prince Władysław to the throne, plague, madness, famine and war had been sweeping the country for a decade. Over 10 years, the Russians had experienced three years of crop failure in a row, which caused a very serious famine, a six-year war with the Poles, the rebellion of Ivan Bolotnikov, an invasion by the Nogai and Crimean Tatars, and the accession of False Dmitry and False Dmitry II. Gangs of bandits were prowling around the country robbing everyone, and they were more numerous and better armed than the government army.

Foreign troops also roamed the country. On the side of the Poles, they had Lithuanians and Hungarians. On the Russian side, they had Swedes and German mercenaries, who later defected to the Poles. So you had a bunch of foreigners also robbing and looting and raping their way through the countryside. Despite the fact that Russia had a relatively newly elected Tsar, more or less fairly elected too, Vasily Shuisky, his popularity steadily declined with each setback he suffered in the battles with the Poles. And after Klushino, the situation became really bad. On the one hand, Russia was losing the war against the Poles.

And on the other hand, near Moscow there was still the camp of the Tushino Thief, False Dmitry II, packed with Poles and Cossacks. When we say Cossacks, you have to imagine something different from the Cossacks of later times. They were mostly independent. They were something like pirates, except on land, and if they served anyone, then only those who paid. The historian Solovyov, for example, points out that those who looted and rampaged the most in Tushino were the Cossacks, not even the Poles. The Cossacks liked killing and raping and burning and all that stuff, and they were the worst among the bunch, so very different from the later Cossacks. At the time, it was the Tushino Thief who was perceived as the main threat. The war with the Poles was sluggish, and the Poles could be disposed of by giving them a couple of border towns, some fortresses, but False Dmitry II laid claim to the entire country. Several cities had sworn allegiance to him, a lot of boyars switched to his side, and he even created an alternative Boyar Duma, and in addition he even had an alternative patriarch. This is not usually emphasized, but as I mentioned before, the False Dmitry's patriarch was Filaret, who would later go on to be known as the father of the first Tsar of the Romanov dynasty.

However, Filaret didn't really do anything, and at every opportunity he hinted at the fact that he had been forcibly put into the patriarchate by the Thief of Tushino.

In any case, the core of the Tushino camp consisted of Poles and Cossacks, and mostly peasants on whom the False Dmitry had bestowed titles of nobility and promised rich estates after he won. Shuisky was forced to conclude a treaty with the Swedes, who at the time had been nursing a grudge against the Polish king Sigismund, who, as I mentioned before, used to be the Swedish king for a time as well. The Poles became enraged and stepped up hostilities. However, this played into Moscow's hands, because a large part of the Poles left the Tushino camp and joined the Polish forces, and the impostor was forced to flee to Kaluga. Here a new problem arose.

The Poles decided to persevere in the previously sluggish war and began to win victory after victory, and Shuisky's authority was melting like ice in the sun. Crowds of Muscovites began to gather under the windows of the palace cursing Shuisky, and the boyars proclaimed themselves the Zemsky Sobor, deposed Shuisky and made him a monk. They did it quite humanely by the standards of the time. And they had to decide what to do next. On one hand, the Polish army stood outside of Moscow, and on the other hand they still had to deal with False Dmitry II. Despite the fact that he had lost a large part of his army, he still had a lot of supporters, and in addition, having lost the support of the Poles, he began to actively campaign on Orthodox Christianity, and a number of cities that had turned away from him after he fled Tushino swore allegiance to him again. So all in all, a very difficult situation. There were almost no candidates for the role of Tsar. It was decided by the boyars that the candidate should be of royal lineage, and even Shuisky was from a side branch of the Rurikids. And the boyars were divided into several factions, each of which supported a different candidate. Patriarch Hermogenes was a supporter of Shuisky and was against overthrowing him.

Each of the groups bet on a person from their own clan mostly, but there were exceptions.

I forgot the name, but one of the boyars was simultaneously a member of the Boyar Duma in Moscow and the one in Tushino, and he was basically a lobbyist for the False Dmitry in Moscow. As for Filaret, who had also joined the boyars after the Tushino Thief had fled, he was not against inviting a Polish king, but he insisted on the condition that he must become Orthodox. And as it became clear that it would not be possible for the boyars to agree on someone from within their own circles, there were basically only two serious candidates, namely False Dmitry II, which was really beyond the bounds, it was unthinkable...

And the son of the Polish king. Yeah, and Poland is waging a war against you at the same time.

Yes, so it would also solve the war problem at the same time. The boyars chose Prince Władysław of Poland, under the condition that he would embrace Orthodoxy. This is widely regarded in mainstream Russian historiography as a betrayal, but in fact it wasn't really a betrayal. I mean, under the realities of the time there was not really a strong ethnic identity, and the main substitute for ethnic identity, especially in that area of Eastern Europe, was religion. And monarchs themselves were supranational figures, really. Like Sigismund III himself was a member of the Swedish dynasty, the son of a Swedish king and a Polish daughter, and he was the Swedish king before he became the Polish king.

So it's not really, well, not really something unusual for a foreigner to become Tsar. Thus the boyars agreed that Władysław, son of Sigismund, would become the new king.

It was stipulated that he would adopt Orthodoxy, that the Russian Tsardom would not be united with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and that the powers of the boyars would be preserved. It was quite a normal agreement, really. Judging by the concepts and traditions of the times, it was all okay. But it was then that things started falling apart. Some swore allegiance to the new Tsar, others supported the False Dmitry, and the Thief of Tushino began to gain strength again. The problem was that, well, basically the boyars reasoned that they should choose the lesser of two evils and let the Polish detachments near Moscow into the city under these conditions, thinking that the impostor would not risk assaulting Moscow, which is what happened, of course. The False Dmitry retreated to Voronezh, making it his capital, and near the Cossack frontier he planned to replenish his troops, but the Cossacks refused. In the camp of the False Dmitry there was a certain Uraz-Muhammed, who had been made Khan of Kasimov by Boris Godunov. Two years before, he had defected from Shuisky to the False Dmitry, and now he planned to do the same again and go over to the Poles.

Yes, as it is recorded in one of the chronicles of the time, he said, quote, "I'm about to Pokémon Go to the Poles."

But his family had remained in the camp of the impostor, and he decided to return and kill False Dmitry II, together with Prince Urusov, who was a Tatar who had converted to Orthodoxy. But Uraz's son betrayed his father to the False Dmitry, and the latter ordered the traitor to be executed. Urusov was imprisoned but then released, and when he was released he finally managed to kill the second False Dmitry. So this was the saga of the second False Dmitry. The inglorious end of the Tushino Thief, however, did not mean the end of problems for the Russian Tsardom. The Poles were occupying Moscow and had no intention of leaving.

There was an official agreement that Władysław would take the Russian throne, and Polish troops were in Moscow. They were at the height of their power, and nothing seemed to be able to stop them. But, funnily enough, the force that ruined all the Polish plans was not the people's militia, but the arrogance of King Sigismund. He had decided that once the enemy is defeated, it is necessary to finish him off.

He changed his mind about making his son king on the previously agreed terms. Instead, Sigismund proposed that he himself would become regent, and he forbade Władysław from converting to Orthodoxy. If Sigismund had stayed within the bounds of the agreement, history could have gone a very, very different way. His son would have become Tsar of Russia, and after Sigismund's death, Władysław would have had a very good chance to rule both Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in personal union. And that would have been, of course, a mega-state, and probably the prime force in Europe, if it could have been stabilized.

But instead, Sigismund turned even his son's supporters against him. He took the deposed Tsar Shuisky to Poland, where he forced him to take an oath of allegiance. This was a moment of great triumph for the Poles, even though Shuisky had long since been, well, a monk, and had no rights to the throne or anything. The Polish court painters loved this episode of the deposed Russian Tsar bowing to the Polish king. However, the Polish king Sigismund did not take into account one thing: he had turned the entire population of Russia against himself, because Russians were ready to tolerate an Orthodox Pole, but they were not ready to tolerate a Catholic.

And Polish arrogance became their own undoing, as many times before and after.

Yes. The Patriarch, who had previously supported Prince Władysław, immediately began sending out proclamations to everyone to rise up in support of the Orthodox faith, and released everyone from all the oaths they had given to Władysław.

He was later imprisoned by the Poles and died of starvation. His appeals were answered in Ryazan, where the governor Lyapunov began to assemble a militia, which was joined by Cossacks from the Tushino camp, by a former adventurer who had supported both False Dmitrys and also participated in the Bolotnikov Rebellion, so a veteran of the Time of Troubles, really. The Poles attacked Ryazan on a punitive expedition, but they did not succeed. The militia, the first people's militia, actually managed to reach Moscow, and it was defeated, however, by the Poles and German mercenaries. The surviving detachments made camp near Moscow and created their own Zemsky Sobor, after which there was a split in the militia.

The nobles quarreled with the Cossacks, the Cossacks killed Lyapunov, and all the nobles left the militia. By that time, the Swedes had had enough of being allies and decided to seize the northern cities for themselves, and the Poles finally managed to break the siege of Smolensk and capture the city. In addition, the Crimean Tatars also appeared again and managed to reach even Ryazan. And it was then that the second militia began to form in Nizhny Novgorod, the same militia that went down in history as the one that liberated Russia from the Poles.

Yeah, Kuzma Minin and Count Dmitry Pozharsky. Two different men representing different strata of Russian society at the time. I guess Pozharsky was an aristocrat, and Minin was the son of a salt producer. The second uprising was organized in Nizhny Novgorod, so quite a way from Moscow to the east. And in those times, well, Nizhny Novgorod was probably unreachable for the Poles, and it was unnecessary for them to go there, but it was one of the biggest easternmost Russian cities of the time. They assembled a 1,200-man army and made their way from the city of Nizhny Novgorod to free Moscow from the Polish invaders. I'm not sure if 1,200 is enough.

Or they were joined along the way by the Russians surviving from the famine and all the battles. Pozharsky was the commander, basically, of this militia.

Yes. And he demonstrated his skills in combat. With the help of the local population of Moscow, who blocked the city streets and also attacked Polish soldiers, the militia became a real threat to the Poles. So the Poles decided to burn the city to the ground, and it was quite easy to do, because most of Moscow was completely wooden, except for the Kremlin wall.

Yes, I think aside from the White City, which had been built under Fyodor I.

So they burned Moscow to the ground. Even such extreme measures couldn't really stop the people's fight for independence. Yes, the national liberation army of Pozharsky and Minin defeated the Poles, cut off their supply lines and besieged the Kremlin.

The boyars and the Poles began to starve. It's said that the Poles even resorted to cannibalism. In any case, finally, on October 26, both surrendered. Most were slaughtered, or basically, those who surrendered to Pozharsky survived, and those who surrendered to the Cossacks were cut down where they stood. This meant that, aside from the brigands in the south, the civil war was over. The patriots immediately called an assembly of the land, a Zemsky Sobor, to elect a new Tsar to save the motherland. The boyars, who had only very narrowly escaped being butchered by the Cossacks, were warned that as punishment for their treason, they were not to appear at the Zemsky Sobor. This included the Romanovs, actually.

And very lucky to be alive, Mikhail Romanov and his mother vanished into the countryside, seeking sanctuary at the Ipatiev Monastery. No one knew where they had gone, and no one cared at the beginning.

The Romanovs, tainted as collaborators, were finished forever, everyone was sure. But, well, it ended differently. 800 delegates arrived at the semi-destroyed Kremlin in January of 1613. They camped in halls that had no roofs and sometimes met in the Dormition Cathedral. They fasted in the hope of receiving divine guidance, but still could not, well, really agree on a candidate.

So there were a lot of candidates for the throne. The Swedish prince Karl Philipp was one of the candidates, who was supported by magnates. Władysław was another candidate. Some even supported Maximilian, the son of the Holy Roman Emperor. So a lot of candidates.

Were they aware that they were the candidates in Moscow?

That's a good question. And I think there was even a party that supported the English king, James.

Fascinating.

Yes. But the magnates, they supported Karl Philipp, the brother of the Swedish king. But the gentry and the Cossacks insisted on a Russian Tsar.

The birth of ethno-nationalism in Russia.

Yeah, the birth of ethno-nationalism. Pozharsky was the hero of the hour, really, but he was not a boyar, and his family was not rich, not eminent, and he had no real legitimacy aside from his military leadership. The Cossacks proposed Prince Dmitry Trubetskoy, who was a scion of Lithuanian royalty, and of course of the Trubetskoy dynasty, an eminent Russian dynasty, and a successful bandit, or freebooter, mercenary. But he was tainted by his closeness to the Tushino Thief.

When these had all been rejected, the ataman of the Don Cossacks finally proposed Mikhail Romanov. There were a lot of voices saying that he was way too young.

Sixteen.

Yes, I think he was sixteen at that time, and the Sobor voted him down at first. Then another petition was submitted proposing Mikhail, who had gained supporters basically as the everyman candidate. He appealed to conservative boyars as the cousin of the last rightful Tsars. The Cossacks supported him because his father had been the patriarch of the second False Dmitry. And his youth was really an advantage here, because he was too young to have any personal enemies, and he was too young to be blamed for the collaboration of his uncle. And the absence of his father meant that there was no, like, éminence grise behind him. He was found to be the perfect pawn for the boyars. Eventually the Cossacks won the vote for Mikhail, but some of the boyars still favored the Swede, and the Cossacks surrounded the palaces of the boyars, accusing them of selling the country to foreigners. And everyone in Russia at that point had had enough of those Poles and Swedes, and the crowds backed Mikhail Romanov. The boyars eventually put up Ivan Romanov as basically an anti-Mikhail candidate, but he himself proposed the grandest and richest of the boyars, Prince Dmitry Mstislavsky, who refused the throne, however.

Mikhail's cousins, Fyodor Sheremetev and Dmitry Cherkassky, were trying to gather support for him. But Mikhail was not really a very good candidate at that point. Due to all the troubles, he did not receive the education he should have gotten. He was sickly. The Cossacks in the end managed to win the vote, and after two weeks of fasting, they voted for Mikhail. Outside of the Kremlin, in Red Square, the crowd was already waiting, until the Metropolitan of Ryazan went outside and yelled, "Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov!" And thus, by popular acclaim and by election, similar to a Cossack chieftain really, Mikhail was chosen to be the Tsar.

And that was a good decision, because the boy was talented. The problem at that point was that no one knew where he was, because he was still hiding in the countryside. As soon as the Poles heard about the election of Mikhail, they dispatched Cossacks to kill him. At that time he was somewhere around Kostroma, and that's when Ivan Susanin comes in.

Yes, yes. They scoured the area and learned that a peasant by the name of Ivan Susanin knew where he was. And while the Tsar was in Kostroma, the Poles and the Lithuanians came into the region, and Susanin misled them and led them away from the Tsar to save him. He was tortured to death without ever betraying the Tsar's location. However, when all of this happened, Mikhail still didn't know that he had been elected Tsar. Check out Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar, which was written about this very national hero, Ivan Susanin.

Yeah. What followed was basically a delegation from Moscow looking for the Tsar. His mother was against him becoming Tsar, and of course his relatives were very worried. However, his mother was promised that no one would betray Mikhail Romanov, because he was the heir of the last true Tsar, Fyodor, whose mother had been a Romanov. All the ranks of the Zemsky Sobor had unanimously elected him, and they promised to arrange to free his father, Filaret. This convinced the Romanovs, and Mikhail accepted. It was almost a matrilineal succession with the Romanovs.

Quite. So he resurfaced, and I hope it was not a False Mikhail. Who knows? Spoke with a Polish accent.

But yeah, he was crowned on the 21st of July 1613, on his 17th birthday, actually. He was crowned on his birthday, and what happened next we will tell you in the next episode.

Yes, yes, I think so too, because we've already been talking for quite some time. I think in the next episode we can talk about both Mikhail and Alexei, probably, if we can manage.

We will see, we'll see. In any case, this is how Mikhail Fyodorovich, from a disgraced boyar family tainted as traitors and collaborators, finally became Mikhail I, Tsar of all Russia.

True greatness awaits us very soon, in a few more episodes. But under Mikhail, Russia saw probably its greatest territorial expansion, and many more interesting things happened during his reign. For the end of this episode, which is mostly devoted to the Time of Troubles and not to Mikhail, of course: the Time of Troubles, the Smuta, was a result of a crisis in the elite and among the people, which caused a crisis of monarchical consciousness as a result of the dynastic crisis. The elected Tsars were not really respected by anyone, and many aristocrats believed that if Godunov had managed to become Tsar, then they could do that too.

And as such, all the impostors, all the lies, all the intrigues really undermined the sacral, the religious aspect of the power on which the Russian Tsardom had been based in previous centuries. In the absence of an unquestionable Tsarist authority, the contradictions which the Tsar had had to reconcile, between the peasants, the nobles, the servicemen, the Cossacks, all these contradictions were laid bare, and group and personal interests rose above the interests of the state. Russia really devolved into a state of universal sedition, a war of all against all, in which of course the foreigners were quick to intervene, seeking to bite off a piece of Russia while Russia was at its lowest. And the lowest of the lows, the fall of Russian statehood, was the open treason of its own government, which led the invaders into the Kremlin. However, the spiritual and national forces, the patriotic forces of the Russian people, were very strong. The threat of foreign invasion, the loss of statehood and the threat of the imposition of Catholicism rallied the people to the call of the Patriarch and of the national liberation army of Minin and Pozharsky. And through the efforts of the militias and the Zemsky Sobor, royal power was restored in Russia, and Russia was able to begin the very long and difficult road to recovery and to the return of the lands seized by its predatory neighbors during the Time of Troubles. The beginning of Romanov rule was a time of prosperity, really, and of new achievements of the Russian state, and we'll be happy to tell you all about them in the next episode.

It seems that often in Russian history only God's direct intervention could save us. In spite of it all, we are still here, breathing and talking. Russia is the biggest country on this planet, and in many aspects we are a biblical nation, clearly beloved by the Creator. But it also means that we get extremely harshly punished for our sins, as we see time and time again. Thank you for listening to the Romanov series. Spread the word, share the free segment on YouTube, and see you very soon.

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# Chapter 3: Tsar Mikhail – The First Romanov

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast and to the Romanov series. Today we will finally tell you all you need to know about the first Russian Tsar from the Romanov dynasty, Mikhail Romanov. He ruled Russia for 32 years, from 1613 to 1645. As we talked about in the previous episodes, the Romanov family was unlikely to ascend to the throne. After the end of the Rurikid dynasty, the Romanovs were harshly persecuted by Boris Godunov during the Smuta times.

The remaining Romanovs were hiding in Kostroma from Polish-Lithuanian death squads roaming the land. The legendary Ivan Susanin is believed to have saved the young Mikhail from the Poles who were looking for him. The Time of Troubles in general was a formative period for the Russian nation. Before that, there was no real unity between different classes of people. Cossacks, streltsy riflemen, and other low-class people had no real say in anything.

And during the Smuta, a group of well-armed men gained a voice, in political matters as well. It's partly why, during the Zemsky Sobor election of 1613, the Cossacks pressured the boyars to elect Mikhail, a young 16-year-old Romanov boy who was hiding in Kostroma. A lot of the boyars thought that it's not a big deal if they were ruled by a foreign ruler. They were ready to bow to the Polish Sigismund or even to James of England. And the Cossacks were afraid that a foreign ruler would have no vested interest in paying them salaries or giving them bread.

Do you believe in this theory that the Cossacks were instrumental in pressuring the boyars into electing an ethnic Russian ruler?

That's an interesting point of view. I'm not sure that ethnicity was really the main thing here. I mean, if anything, it was about religion, not ethnicity, although the concepts were, of course, very tightly linked.

I mean, was there a term for Russian ethnicity also?

No, of course, there was an understanding of what an ethnic Russian is, of course. I think it strengthened during the Time of Troubles. But, I mean, it was defined in contrast to the enemies, who were either Muslim Tatars or Catholic Poles. I think it's hard, for that period of time, to differentiate between ethnic and religious identity in Russia.

But yes, of course, the Cossacks had an interest in making sure that it's not a representative of one of the powerful boyar clans, but some kind of a compromise person, someone who would be able to make everyone happy. And he was elected in absentia, so he was not present during the election. He and his mom traveled from their hideout in Kostroma to Moscow, stopping in all the major cities along the way. And in July 1613, he was crowned to rule all of the Russias.

Yes, they entered the city with bells ringing from all the churches, but of course it was a sad sight at that moment. There was rubble everywhere; everything was destroyed. Chairs and beds and desks had been used for firewood. Many of the palaces had been used as morgues, full of bodies that had piled up during the sieges. All of it was being hastily repaired.

The Time of Troubles, as we spoke about in the previous episode, was, among many other things, a spiritual crisis, a spiritual crisis that led to the institution of the monarchy completely dissolving. Moscow, of course, was the center of religious and royal authority. Mikhail was not a very charismatic person himself, he was not a very strong person himself. He didn't have a captivating personality or anything. He was just a scared 16-year-old boy. And he had to acquire the vibes necessary to be a monarch.

And the only way to do this was through the ritual of coronation. The monarchy had disappeared for a time, and as such, this grand ritual, the coronation, had to become an event where Mikhail would become the incarnation of the monarchy and of the restoration of the monarchy. The coronation was meticulously planned. Just before his 17th birthday, he met with the boyars.

There was a lot of discussion about who would be carrying the crown for him, who would be carrying the scepter. He entered one of the Kremlin palaces wearing a Byzantine golden robe that had been blessed by Metropolitan Ephraim, who was, of course, the most senior clergyman in Moscow, because Patriarch Filaret was not available. He was still in Polish captivity and would remain there for six more years. The boyars, the feudal rulers of Russia, prostrated themselves before the teenager. All the Kremlin bells started ringing.

They did all the stuff with the scepter and the crown. He was anointed with holy oil. Basically, this ritual then remained unchanged for all of the rule of the Romanovs, until the last Romanov coronation in 1896. Prince Mstislavsky threw coins over the Tsar to celebrate the prosperity of Russia. Such was the coronation, which was to restore the glory of the Russian monarchy.

Of course, the situation was still terrible. He was still surrounded by plotting aristocrats, many of whom wanted to kill him and become Tsar themselves. The wars with the Swedes and the Poles were still going on. The Tatars were raping and looting the south of the country. Another false grandson of Ivan IV still held court in Astrakhan.

The whole country was in ruins. The economy was in tatters. People were still starving and dropping from epidemics. There was little hope, actually. But whatever hope there was in Russia, it was all laser-focused on the person of Mikhail, who himself was obviously very inexperienced politically.

Basically, the only attribute he had that was expected of a Russian Tsar was that he was very pious and very religious. Aside from that, Mikhail also liked technology. He collected clocks, so he was not just an obscurantist. Aside from that, of course, Mikhail was forced to share his power with the boyars. And for the first six years of his rule, he was, as you said, learning the trade of being a Tsar from the back.

And his mom, Marfa, was actually running things. He was not a stupid man, although his temperament was kind and a bit melancholic, perhaps. The Nazi Mommy quickly usurped most of the actual power while his dad, Filaret, was still in Polish captivity.

In 1616, Mikhail turned 20, and his mom and the boyars ran a bride show. Young women from all over were flocking to Moscow, and his mom had already picked a perfect candidate in her mind, a girl from the Saltykov family, distant relatives of the Romanovs.

But then Mikhail decided to follow his heart and stop following his mom's commands, and he picked a girl that he actually liked, Maria. Of course, the Tsar's wishes must be respected, but his mom decided to employ underhanded tactics. The girl suddenly fell ill after gorging herself on all the food at the early festivities, and his mom started spreading the rumor that she was on her deathbed, and agitated the boyars to also protest against her becoming Mikhail's wife, even though it was nothing major. After a while, Mikhail surrendered, and Maria was exiled to Tobolsk, in Siberia. But he still remained... was he a virgin? Extramarital sex, was it a thing for the Tsars?

For Grozny, it probably was, but I'm not sure about Mikhail.

Yeah, I'm not sure about Mikhail either. Let's say he remained a virgin. And then Mikhail's dad, Filaret, was suddenly freed from Polish captivity.

Yeah, about that, I think we should talk a bit more about how the wars were ended. Because first came the treaty with the Swedes.

Eternal peace.

Yes, the eternal peace, right. Yes, the Treaty of Stolbovo. Basically, the Swedes could not really afford to continue the war either. It had gotten very heavy on them, and so they agreed to meet in the village of Stolbovo near Lake Ladoga in early 1617, the Swedes of course having been very successful so far, but having taken a bloody nose recently.

Basically, the Kremlin at the time was run by the assembly of the boyars, among them, of course, Minin and Pozharsky, the heroes of the uprising, and they were dispatched in every direction to fight Russia's enemies. In that sense, Mikhail had to provide military leadership from the very beginning, or at least his clan, the Romanovs, did. His generals defeated the false pretenders and had them killed on Red Square and so on, because this was a violent time and it was not really the time to take chances, so they had them impaled and hanged.

As for the treaty with Sweden, the Swedes had extremely big ambitions. They wanted their vision of a Baltic empire, and they demanded extremely large territories from Russia in the beginning, including Arkhangelsk, which was the most important northern port of Russia.

The Swedes were a bit too ambitious and provoked other Western powers into interfering, which came to Russia's help. It was the Dutch and the English who supported Russia during these negotiations, because James I, King James of England, had sent a diplomatic delegation to mediate between the Russians and the Swedes. It was in his interest that Arkhangelsk did not become Swedish, as that would have granted the Swedes a complete monopoly over the Baltic trade, and this was very much not in the interest of either the English or the Dutch.

The outcome of the negotiations was still pretty bad for Russia, but not as bad as it could have been. Some of the Swedish territorial gains were returned to Russia, including Novgorod. They, however, took control of Ingria, and Russia renounced its claims to Livonia and all the Baltic territories, basically. But at the same time, Sweden recognized Mikhail as the rightful ruler of Russia, there were to be no claims from Sweden on the Russian throne, and also trade relations were normalized. Sweden did not impose any tariffs on Russia or whatever, and at the same time, there was a trade agreement where Russia established trade posts in the Baltic and Sweden established trade posts in Novgorod and Pskov and the important Russian Baltic ports.

So, in a sense, here Gustavus Adolphus laid the foundation of the Swedish empire, and this was the beginning of the greatest period in Swedish history, known as the Age of Greatness, which would last until Peter, 80 years later, or 100 years later, would take his revenge on the Swedes, and Swedish dreams of being a great power would be gone. In any case, the overambitiousness of the Swedish negotiators played into Russia's hands, as the English were quite invested in having Russia as a counterbalance against Sweden. So that was very good for Russia.

After a year, there was another treaty, a treaty with the Poles that concluded the Polish-Russian war that started during the Time of Troubles.

Yes, this treaty was quite a bit worse. In 1617, Władysław, who was still obsessed with gaining the Russian throne for himself, advanced deeper into Russia again. He reached Vyazma and stayed there, basically. Then the next year, the Poles attacked Moscow again, and they even reached the Arbat Gates. But they did not manage to capture Moscow this time. And when winter began, the Polish army was broken by famine and disease in what was basically the last battle of the Time of Troubles.

In February 1619, Mikhail agreed to the truce, the 14-year Truce of Deulino, which was quite humiliating. It granted the Poles control over Smolensk and Chernigov. The Truce of Deulino was the single largest territorial expansion of Poland that happened at one time. So yeah, they took a lot of territory, basically a huge strip of Russian land from Chernigov to Smolensk, almost up to Tver, really. And yeah, they took a lot of land.

Probably the average citizen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time was a Russian speaker and an Orthodox believer.

Yeah, yeah. The truce was set to last 14 and a half years. What's also important is that there was a prisoner exchange. And Mikhail finally got his father back, Filaret, a man who was Patriarch of Moscow.

Right, so when Filaret was freed and he returned back home, well, he discovered that his son was the Russian Tsar now. Well, he probably knew that already. But what he did is that he significantly reduced the influence of Marfa, the kooky mommy, on Mikhail. But also, he started insisting that Mikhail should marry a foreign princess. They tried that with a Lithuanian one, then a Danish one, and all those prospects failed for some reason. In the end, Marfa, almost on her deathbed, did succeed in picking a wife for her son.

So, he married Princess Maria Dolgorukova. They married in 1624, but a few days later the young queen fell ill, and she died five months later. The chronicle calls the death of Maria Dolgorukova God's punishment for insulting the innocent Maria who was sent away to Siberia seven years prior to that.

By 1626, Romanov was 30, and he was a childless widower. There was another bride show. There were 60 beauties from noble families, yet he liked one of the servants. He married this servant girl in 1626. They were married by his father, Filaret.

Well, servant girl... she was still of...

Still noble, yeah.

Yeah, she was still a noblewoman, sure. But it was like poor gentry. And he was thereby basically continuing the tradition of Ivan IV, both with the bride shows, which he introduced, as you may remember from the first episode in this series, and also by not marrying into any of the most powerful clans, to keep the balance.

Yeah, so together they produced a lot of children. Yeah, ten, I think.

Yeah, ten children. And the first, the oldest boy, was Alexei Mikhailovich, Alexei Romanov, who would succeed to the throne. No surprises this time, no tricky deaths, no assassinations, nothing like that, really. A happy ending in the end.

More or less. I mean, let's say the traditions in the Russian high aristocracy were not as joyful at that point as they would become later. It was all still very Domostroy, puritanical. The royal women were secluded from society. They always wore veils. It was basically made sure that they could not be seen by other people, and they spent most of their day sewing and praying in the icon room. They wore long and concealing clothes, and they were not allowed perfume or makeup, and, if I remember rightly, they weren't even allowed to own mirrors. So the moral rules for the aristocracy were much, much, much stricter than for anyone further down the social hierarchy, really. That was before the Western influence took hold in Russia.

And it actually started during Mikhail's reign, because it was Mikhail who created the Nemetskaya Sloboda.

The German town, basically.

Yeah, the German town, on the outskirts of Moscow. And all the foreigners from Europe, mostly German speakers and Dutch speakers, started to move there. Yes, at that point, it was mostly engineers and military specialists. But they did not yet have as much influence. Mikhail did reorganize the army somewhat, but these military reforms were very slow and small in scale. And basically the German town, funnily enough, was kind of a Chekhov's gun hanging on the wall, and it would become extremely important a hundred years later, under the reign of Peter, during his reforms.

Also under Mikhail, the first ever Russian handwritten newspaper was created, Kuranty, or Vesti. And also it was under Mikhail's reign that the first Russian factory was built, the ironworks in Tula. So his rule sowed the seeds for much of what was to come in the next 100, 150 years, but it did not yet really bear fruit during his time.

An important aspect of that, I think, is that Filaret was very old. He was, I think, 70 when he was released from Polish captivity. And he was, of course, an experienced plotter and a shadow force at the court. He had survived through half a century of intrigues and, I don't know, assassinations, coups and whatever. And Filaret quickly established himself as the strongman in the Kremlin, and he was the real power behind the throne.

The Kremlin's grandpa. Why do you think he insisted so much on Mikhail marrying a foreign princess?

I think Filaret was extremely obsessed with getting revenge on Poland, and I think he saw a foreign alliance as the best way to achieve that. Filaret was, of course, the Patriarch, a clergyman. He was equally obsessed with ceremony and ritual and the spiritual life. He had a lot of stuff built in Moscow, he had a lot of ceremonies organized, and he ruled through a very small circle, really, of friends, mostly his brother Ivan, his cousins, and Sheremetev, and Cherkassky, I think, and Lykov, Lykov-Obolensky.

He was constantly having to fight the boyars. The aristocracy was extremely powerful, and Filaret did all the work, basically, to centralize the power of the monarch, who was kind of mostly a symbolic figure at that time, when real power was in the hands of the boyars. But Filaret was very skillful at exploiting the feuds between the boyars. There were a lot of fights between the boyars that ended with violence, and Filaret always managed to get some sort of advantage out of it. And of course, many of the older boyars remembered that Filaret was once one of them and nothing special.

So yeah, Filaret's purpose, and in general the mission of Russia at that time, was to get Russia ready for a new war with Poland. That was the raison d'être, really, of the whole court at the time, of everything. And all the reforms were aimed at getting Russia ready for the next war. The tax collecting was reformed. The crown took a lot of land from the church to fill the royal coffers. The boyars were given greater control over the serfs in exchange for promising to provide more soldiers.

Oh, and of course, a mercenary army was hired, with English and Scottish officers, because at that time Russian-English relations were quite amicable, and both sides were very interested in all things commerce with each other. And, of course, in Europe at that time the Thirty Years' War was raging, and there were more than enough mercenaries going around that were available to be hired.

But still, despite everything, the Polish war was kind of a disaster. Very few boyars actually felt that Russia was ready, but a short while before the truce actually ran out, King Sigismund died, in the spring of 1632, and Filaret immediately started making preparations for war.

Poland-Lithuania at the time was kind of a proto-superpower. It was a huge country stretching from sea to sea, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But at the same time, it was not a very stable realm. It had a sort of awkward constitution, with several governments and one parliament where every member of parliament had a veto right, the same. And it was a very archaic system that very often left the country in a sort of indecisiveness. And, of course, after everything the Poles had done to Russia, they were the big ancestral enemy.

Filaret had built a huge army of 50,000 men, including almost 8,000 Western mercenaries, commanded by the Scotsman Leslie and the Englishman Sanderson. But sadly, only these mercenaries were really up to date in terms of military equipment and tactics, and the rest of the Russian army was very outdated. The streltsy and so on were not ready to fight a modern war. And of course, big wars are always a time of military innovation, and the Thirty Years' War had modernized all the European armies, and this kind of just passed the Russian army by. So, yeah.

The goal of this war was to recapture Smolensk, of course. This was, however, not achieved. So basically the new commanders of the Russian army, Shein and Izmailov, started besieging Smolensk, and it was not a very successful siege. The fortress was reinforced by Władysław, who had been elected King of Poland by the Sejm in the meantime, and who still claimed the Russian throne for himself. So the siege camp was ravaged by famine, food shortages, and constant attacks by the Poles.

Then there was the problem that Filaret's mercenary commanders, Leslie and Sanderson, hated each other. And it escalated into Leslie shooting Sanderson, which, of course, struck a huge blow to the only really high-quality troops that the Romanovs had at their disposal. So Shein was eventually forced to surrender, and yeah, it was all not very good.

And besides, the Poles had Zaporozhian Cossacks on their side, who helped them to defend Smolensk against the Russians.

Yes, and there was another problem, namely that the Tatars invaded the Russian South again, and many of the boyars simply deserted the war camps to go back home and defend their homes. In the end, Shein had to retreat from the siege camp, and he was surrounded by Polish-Lithuanian troops, or Commonwealth troops, so this was not very good. And Shein had to surrender. Under the surrender terms, the Russians had to leave all of their artillery to the Poles, but were allowed to keep their banners after laying them at the feet of King Władysław. And they also had to promise not to fight the Poles anymore.

As the Poles kept advancing, Shein and Izmailov were eventually arrested and tried for treason for kissing the Catholic cross. And the Boyar Duma had both Shein and Izmailov beheaded for high treason. The Polish advance into Russia would probably have led to an even more significant Russian defeat. But luckily for Russia, the Polish advance was stopped, because suddenly the news broke that the Ottomans had invaded Poland.

So that was very good.

The Polish-Ottoman War of 1633–34, when Murad IV suddenly decided to invade Poland and wanted to take Moldova and Kamenets-Podolsky and so on from the Poles. But that war does not concern us very much right now, aside from the fact that it led to the Poles urgently asking Russia for negotiations.

Could have been worse. It could have been much, much worse. Basically, the Treaty of Polyanovka just restored the status quo ante. So all things returned to how they were before the war, which was really the best outcome Russia could have hoped for in that situation, aside from Russia having to pay large war reparations. But in exchange, Władysław finally surrendered his claim to the Russian throne.

There was another ace up Władysław's sleeve that he wanted to use in the negotiations: if he couldn't have Russia for himself, he would at least take on the Swedes. He was trying, basically, to enlist Russia as a junior partner in a war against Sweden, but this was sabotaged by the rest of the Polish elite, who did not want to fight the Swedes again. As such, this was never achieved. But there was also a prisoner exchange, and the treaty, the Perpetual Peace, ended what was basically 30 years of constant warfare between Russia and Poland, for a while at least. So in the end, Władysław still kept Smolensk, but finally stopped being a pretender to the Russian throne.

The 17th century was not only the golden century, the golden age, for the Swedes, but also probably the best time for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So Russia was surrounded by very fearsome enemies on our northwestern and straight western fronts. In the East, though, it was surprisingly easy from that point on, because under Mikhail we were colonizing Siberia at such a rate that it's hard to really follow. Is this right, that we reached the Pacific Ocean under Mikhail Romanov?

Yes, yes, that is true. We did actually reach the Pacific coast for the first time.

Like a hot knife through butter.

Yeah. So that's something that probably gave us a lot of resources to then defeat both the Poles and the Swedes in the future. And the economy stabilized. Well, anything would be an improvement compared to the Time of Troubles. But it was not that bad. By the 1630s, people stopped dying like flies, and agriculture started growing and all that.

Although the running theme of the time still remained the technological and scientific gap between Russia and Europe. I mentioned the creation of the Russian newspaper, and it's a funny story, actually, because the literate class of Russia was obsessed with reading newspapers, and most of them were written in Dutch and German. Yet because they were delivered via Vilnius and Riga, traveling a pretty long way, they were often extremely outdated, which resulted in hilarious things such as Tsar Mikhail sending condolences for deceased European leaders who had died months ago.

And so that was the main reason why the first Russian newspaper, Kuranty or Vesti, was introduced. It focused mostly on external events, to keep up-to-date information about what's going on abroad. And I guess with the creation of the German town, it became way easier. Under Mikhail, a lot of things started improving or were basically created from scratch, such as the first schools for painters, and the foreign-style Russian military, the New Order regiments.

Yes, I think we did mention that in one of the last episodes.

Yes, basically this is a project that started under Shuisky, the polki novogo stroya, or polki inozemnogo stroya, the New Order regiments. Basically, Moscow hired a bunch of mercenaries from Sweden, Scotland and other European countries to build modern military forces: infantry regiments, soldatsky polk; dragoon regiments, dragunsky polk, with dragoons, of course, being the motorized infantry of the 17th and 18th centuries; and the Reiters, which are known to everyone who played Europa Universalis 4 as the Schwarze Reiter, the Black Riders, a type of cavalry that was very common in Central Europe at the time, basically heavy cavalry armed with pistols and swords. These were mostly Germans where they fought, and as such they were often known by their German name, Reiter, of course meaning rider.

And so, yeah, all these imitation regiments were formed from the Moscow militia, Cossacks, boyar cavalrymen, and free volunteers. The new regiments were equipped and salaried at treasury expense, which was different from the traditional troops, which were basically privately financed. At first, the equipment was imported from the West. It was not produced locally. Only in 1654, under Alexei, did the Russians start to manufacture our own Western-style armor and all that in Tula.

Yes, in the aforementioned ironworks, the first factory in Russia, which I mentioned before.

Yes, exactly. After the next Polish war, Russia finally started producing military equipment at home, modern military equipment. You see, nothing ever really changes in Russian history. It's all circles and cycles.

Yeah, exactly. Like under early Putin, we used to import everything. And now, well, we have to produce something of our own again. But technologically speaking, were there any interesting new developments, such as, I'm not well versed in that, like heavy cavalry pistols or the muskets, anything about that?

Yes, of course, firearms were playing a bigger and bigger role on the battlefield, and the Reiters were probably the coolest troops in pure terms, because they were like late heavy cavalry, but armed with carbines and pistols and sabers and so on, very effective shock troops. Dragoons, of course, were basically just meant to ride onto the battlefield and then dismount and serve as normal infantry, but they were very mobile.

It is funny, because the dragoons appeared in, let's say, the late 16th century, in the Italian Wars probably, but came into common use, let's say, in the 17th century. But dragoons were a throwback to how horses were initially used in warfare, when they were used for the first time, because it was not obvious. We're talking about the early Bronze Age. Cavalry did not really exist for a long time in the sense that we understand it, but horses were used the very same way as dragoons were 2,000, 3,000 years later. Namely, at first horses were used in warfare only to bring warriors onto the battlefield, or to whatever position on the battlefield they needed to be, and then they dismounted and fought on foot. And I always thought it's funny how there is also this cycle: 3,000 years of military evolution, and we go back to horses just bringing infantrymen onto the battlefield to dismount.

This was around when... a bit later, I think, that was not under Mikhail but under Alexei, Russia also introduced the first hussar regiments. And hussars, of course, in the way they were used in Russia, were a copy of the Polish winged hussars, basically, so they were engaged in mounted warfare.

Yes, they did, however, evolve in Russian, or in everyone's armies really. Hussars evolved from heavy shock cavalry into, later, light cavalry for harassment and so on, on the flanks.

Yeah, yeah, because the hussar shock cavalry was really a Polish thing, and everyone else used hussars differently. But yeah, also very interesting, hussars also carried lances and pistols.

The New Order regiments: quite a good idea, not that good an execution. But as with basically everything that we're mentioning in this episode, all the innovations and new things and foundations that were laid under the reign of Mikhail and later Alexei only bore fruit during the reign of Peter the Great. But, you know, as they always say, Russians are slow to saddle up, but quick to ride. And yeah, finally, it took almost 100 years, but by the early 18th century, Russia finally had a very fine modern army that was absolutely able to beat Westerners on the field in equal conditions.

So yeah, Mikhail. I guess we have looked at most of his reign, but then we should probably look at the end. In 1633, Filaret died. That was shortly before the Perpetual Peace with the Poles, and Marfa also died shortly thereafter. And Mikhail was left alone, 35 at this point. He still had Cherkassky and Sheremetev to help him, and Alexei was his heir, the eldest son.

We mentioned the pretender that still controlled Astrakhan when Mikhail was crowned. So did he defeat him?

Oh yeah, that was very early in the reign. That was very early in the reign, yes. They crushed the Tsarevich Ivan Voryonok, son of False Dmitry II, the second False Dmitry, and Marina the Witch. As I mentioned, they were crushed and they were all killed. Marina the Witch married a Cossack, Ivan Zarutsky, after the False Dmitry died. And she had a child, who was called Ivan Dmitriyevich by his supporters, and Ivan Voryonok, the little thief, by his enemies.

And they were still camping in Astrakhan, but very early in Mikhail's reign, they were defeated, and then they were all executed. Marina was... I don't remember what they did to her. I think she was drowned. Ivan Zarutsky, her husband, was impaled, and the child pretender was hanged. So yeah, as I said, it was not a time to take chances or play games. So they had to be destroyed.

Funnily enough, the story didn't even end with that, because after the child pretender was hanged in Moscow, a false Ivan appeared in Poland, known as False Ivan the First. And then there was also, later, False Ivan the Second. But neither of them really managed to replicate the successes of the earlier pretenders.

But I think it's very interesting that there is a line of, like, four or five pretender rulers. I think we talked about pretenders... I think it was on Caribbean Rhythms, when we visited there, that we talked about the Russian tradition of bizarre pretenders. We will talk about this in the next episode, when we cover the uprising of Stepan Razin. There were also some pretenders in that, or in the Pugachev uprising, in a later episode.

So yeah, it is kind of... well, it's only fitting, considering Russia is in many ways a pretend nation. Just some guy who sprays himself with perfume and memorizes a few sentences in French and then goes on to conquer California and space.

Back to the end of Mikhail's rule. When Alexei, his heir, was five, Mikhail appointed a nobleman, a boyar, to be his educator: Boris Morozov. Boris Morozov had a huge impact on young Alexei, because up to that point, princes were not really given a very wide education, not a very, like, Renaissance humanistic education, but mostly a hands-on practical education.

But Morozov taught Alexei a lot about modern technology, about Western innovations. He taught him Latin, Greek, and Polish, and he bought him a lot of books. Mikhail, of course, also loved all kinds of gadgets and stuff like that, but Morozov introduced this to Alexei too. Basically, they shared a taste for entertainment, or something like, you know, mechanical clocks and cuckoo clocks and stuff like that. They liked that very much. Morozov had almost become part of the family, really. So he played a very important role in Alexei's life.

Later, when Alexei was 11, I think, two of Mikhail's sons died, one after being born, one aged five. And a few years later, Mikhail became very sick. He had fallen into depression and was also suffering from other ailments. At one point he fainted in church, and then, well, he died. He died in 1645.

And of course, as always, the matter of the transition of power is the stress test for any monarchy. It is the ultimate stress test, really. But the problem was that until the late 18th century, the law of succession was not very formalized in Russia. So the deathbed of a Tsar was always a political crisis being born. In a very Russian tradition, what was usually regarded as the defining word on succession and all such things was the dying words of the ruler, because the last words of a Tsar were regarded as sacred. But of course, it's very easy to conceal the last words of a person and lie about what he said. So yeah, you know, it is what it is.

As such, Alexei was blessed by Mikhail shortly before he died. As soon as Mikhail died, a lot of people came to immediately take an oath of loyalty. At this point, basically, we can tell that the Romanov dynasty was really and firmly entrenched and had consolidated its power as the ruling dynasty, because there was no boyar assembly to confirm the succession, because the Romanovs at this point no longer needed one. Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov was Tsar of all the Russias by God's will and no one else's.

An interesting parallel is that he was also 16 when he was crowned.

Yes. So his educator, Morozov, is also an interesting figure, and his wife will later play a big part in the schism of the Russian church. And in general, all the hot stuff in Russian history immediately fell down on Alexei's head: the Salt Riot, the schism.

Yeah, it's much more interesting. Very many crucial and important historical events fell into Alexei's rule. And while there has not historically been a lot of emphasis on the character of Alexei himself, it's still something that we'll look at, but it's impossible not to focus on the events that happened during his reign, because they would determine Russian history for the centuries to come.

Although he was the Quietest, the events under his rule were the loudest.

And we will talk about it, about Alexei of Russia, in the next episode. Thank you for listening, and see you soon.

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# Chapter 4: Tsar Alexey – The Quietest

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast, Romanov series part 3. In this episode we will tell you all you wanted to learn about Russia in the middle of the 17th century, and specifically the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov. Even though he was called the Quietest, the events that happened during his reign, from 1645 to 1676, proved to be groundbreaking. Russia finally learned how to defeat our pesky western neighbors, who by that point controlled about half of the Russian Orthodox world. The father of Peter the Great, Alexei Mikhailovich, was at the crossroads in many regards.

Should Russia westernize, or should we remain true to our own roots? Shall the church be reformed to keep in line with the Greek customs? How do we reintegrate Russian lands that were occupied by Lithuanians and Poles for centuries? And of course the eternal question: what do we do with the Ukrainians?

Alexei was born in 1629. He was the eldest son of the first Romanov ruler, Mikhail Romanov, who began the process of restoration of Russia after the devastating Time of Troubles. Little Alexei was educated by Boris Morozov, a powerful and influential boyar with an inquisitive mind. Morozov was interested in technology and literature, and therefore young Alexei was fully literate at five years old, and by 16 had received the best education that was available. He was also the first Tsar who started wearing foreign German garb at home.

The education in that time was peculiar. For example, instead of modern sociology and geography, there was a discipline, cosmography, which combined the two. Cosmographic books had handwritten maps, and on the back side of each map there was a description of a particular land and its people. Let's take a glimpse into one of the cosmographic books. This one was published in 1670. Sardinia:

"The air is heavy on that island. The inhabitants themselves say that the land is fertile, and there is plenty of grain seeds, grapes, vegetables of all kinds. A lot of horned cattle, even more than countless herds of horses. The inhabitants are strong in body, hardworking. Their food and drink are simple. They eat meat and dairy. They drink water. They wear a simple cloth made of sheep's wool. Many people keep books at home and they like to look at them, but do not want to read them."

It's really a bit different from the modern, lifeless description of any given country in economic and legalistic terms. And there is another page that we will take a short glimpse into, which is similar to what young Alexei was probably reading. A page, a map, and a description of the Great Moscow Tsardom:

"The Moscow state covers a great space. It borders the frozen Midnight Sea from the north, the Tatars from the east, the Turkish and Polish states from the south, the Livonian and Swedish states from the west. In the Moscow state, the fields are fertile. They are endowed with every kind of fertility from God: wheat, rye, barley, millet, oats, buckwheat, and all sorts of seeds which are needed by men. Not only are they themselves satisfied, but bread goes to other states from Russia. The forests are great and terrible. There are unspeakable multitudes of all kinds of animals in them. There are no smarter and more skilled animal and bird hunters anywhere outside the Moscow state. Falcons, hawks, and all kinds of hunting birds are plentiful. In all kinds of contentment and coolness, the Moscow state abounds."

This description is rather limited, but really it stands the test of time. Really, Russia has the best hunters there are, and, well, we export bread to other countries. So yeah, it's pretty much true. We also border the same Poles and the Swedes. But the thing that is missing is probably the Tatars from the east. Maybe we should count the Americans as the new Tatar yoke on this world. So they are technically in the east.

So, much like his dad, Alexei grew up to be a good-natured and calm man. Unless seriously provoked, he never became randomly enraged. He was advanced in his studies and he knew the Western ways from a young age. Yet he remained true to the Orthodox Church and was very religious. He was constantly reading the foreign press at the same time, and even wrote articles about it that he would read aloud to the boyars.

I would generally, in his temperament, like to compare Alexei to Dmitry Medvedev of today. They seem almost identical. Both are kind and soft-spoken. Both are westernized outliers, yet they remain fiercely loyal to Russian ways at the same time. And both are smart and well-liked by the people in general, but a bit awkward and not overly charismatic. They lack this infernal fire that Russians like to see in their rulers so much.

So, back to his biography. In 1645 his dad Mikhail died, and Alexei was crowned as the new Tsar of all Russia. He was 16 at the time and was heavily under the influence of Boris Morozov. He was looking for a wife, and the bride show arrived, featuring the best Mashas, Dashas and Natashas the Russian lands had to offer. And as per usual, his de facto regent Morozov was meddling in the process of bride selection. He advised Alexei to marry Maria Miloslavskaya, who was five years older than Alexei.

The Miloslavsky clan hailed from Poland, and it was a turbo mix of Western Slavs. And this particular girl, Maria, was also partially Tatar on her mother's side. All of them, both the Polish-Lithuanians and the Tatars, were of course Orthodox converts and were considered fully Russian. So it's possible that the reason why Morozov picked this older Maria was because he fancied her sister Anna, whom he immediately married, to secure his position in the royal hierarchy, because now he's no longer just a tutor of the Tsar, but also a proper relative.

Morozov was responsible for many laws at the time, and there was a moment when he seriously slipped. In 1646 he increased the salt tax, and it was such a high tax that it led to an open rebellion.

Yes, we will talk about this later in more detail, because this was a time of a lot of uprisings, because the economic, judicial and political systems in Russia were transformed quite heavily. Like we said in the last episode, the reign of Mikhail was kind of a sign of things to come. And the same goes for Alexei, because the era of great reforms followed by great uprisings and upheaval is a pattern that we will see repeat many times, under Peter the Great, under Catherine, a repeating pattern in Russian history.

So what should we talk about first? If you remember the first episode in the Romanov series, I said that the whole reign of the Romanov dynasty exists within a sort of geopolitical imperative. There is a grand overarching strategy to what the Romanovs were doing, and everything that happened is kind of happening against the backdrop of this geopolitical imperative: reunification of the Russian lands, first and foremost. In the 17th century, the greatest part of this was the fighting in the West. The fighting against Poland, Lithuania, and the fight for Ukraine, more or less. The fight for what is nowadays Eastern Ukraine was the grand narrative that was looming over all of Russian history, that led to the Time of Troubles, that led to all the worst of the 17th century, that led to the restructuring of the Russian state.

And it is impossible to look at any one ruler or any one political event in Russia really without considering this, and it found its culmination really in the middle of the 17th century, during Alexei's reign. You remember we talked about the wars against the Poles, how they took Smolensk, how we failed to take back Smolensk, and Alexei's reign was a preparation for the revenge against the Poles.

This is especially interesting. I know I tend to do this a lot, but you have to go really far back to look at things. It goes back to the great turning point in the history of Russia and Eastern Europe, namely the great Western campaign of the Mongols under Batu and Subutai. Some of the most beautiful cities in Eastern Europe, Vladimir, Kiev, Krakow, were razed to the ground. Russian, Hungarian, Polish and German armies suffered defeats at the hands of the Mongols. And these events were the beginning of one of the darkest periods of Russian history, the subjugation of Russian lands to the Golden Horde.

And besides the damage to the economy and culture of Russia, the Mongol yoke led to the disintegration of the Old Russian nation, which was once united. The lands of northeastern Russia, which would in a few centuries give rise to the small Moscow principality, which would grow and subsume Russia into itself, fell into dependence on the then still united Mongol Empire. But the western Russian lands had a different fate, and this separation was caused by how far the Mongol armies got. Weakened by the devastation and by internal conflicts, the Western Russian principalities came under Lithuanian rule.

And the Lithuanians are kind of the underdog of the late medieval and early modern period in Eastern Europe, because they were regarded as savage pagans. As the author of the Tale of the Destruction of the Russian Land put it, they came from the swamp into the world. And these Lithuanians managed to subdue many Western Russian cities: Polotsk, Minsk, Vitebsk. And this was followed by Volhynia, Podolia, Chernigov. The incorporation of these old Russian territories into Lithuania occurred in very different ways, and often it took a very long time.

And the interesting thing about this is that you can see kind of the beginning of a sort of alternate Russian history here, because the Lithuanian princes saw the basis of the stability of their political position in protecting the economic and cultural rights of the Russian population, and in a kind of unity of Lithuanian and Russian elites. And a kind of Russian-Lithuanian synthesis could very well have become the base for a kind of rapprochement between northeastern Russia and the western Russian lands, especially if the Lithuanians had adopted Orthodoxy.

In any case, the population of western Russia, even being part of different states, continued to preserve the idea of a common Russian origin. And in many ways the Ruthenian lands, as they called them, under Lithuanian rule were dominated by the Russian tradition, including the legal tradition. Many of their laws were based on the Russkaya Pravda of Yaroslav the Wise, and in general the whole system of political and church power was kind of modeled on the Old Russian one. The entire Russian population of the Western principalities continued to speak a single West Russian dialect, which was clearly very close to the Old Russian dialect and the Eastern dialects.

This situation, however, started to change when Lithuania and Poland began to converge, despite the long war for the Galician and Volhynian inheritance, as a result of which Galicia would be taken out of the Russian world for many centuries. By the late 14th century, one of the most important events in the medieval history of Eastern Europe took place, the Union of Krewo, when the Lithuanian duke married the Polish queen. And what this also meant was that the Lithuanian Grand Duke, Jogaila, was baptized into Catholicism.

And this was kind of the turning point, because the result was the process of incorporation of Lithuania into the Polish kingdom. And what this meant for the Russian lands was that the Russian population came under ethnic and religious discrimination, and the Orthodox elite was gradually ousted from their key positions. The structure of Lithuania and the Lithuanian lands came to be Polonized. The Lithuanians, until the 15th century, used the Russian term boyar, which was replaced by the Polish barons and szlachta and nobili, and the right to hold public office and own land became increasingly linked to being Catholic.

The 15th and 16th centuries were basically a time of a gradual increase of the oppression of the Orthodox. The Orthodox church was oppressed, they were forbidden to ring church bells from time to time, and so on, and all this of course did not really delight either the urban or the peasant population of the Western Russian lands, and especially the Orthodox nobility. In the late 15th century, there was the so-called border war, a war involving basically Russian lords in the eastern part of the Polish-Lithuanian territories who joined the service of the Moscow prince and asked him to secure the Russian lands from the Tatars and protect them against Catholic discrimination.

During all this time the power and influence of Moscow was growing, and the Moscow princes began to see themselves as all-Russian rulers. You remember we talked about this when we talked about Ivan the Great and so on, and these ambitions were formalized into an ideology, the Roman-Russian ideology. And at the same time there was another development. You know, we are talking about a period where there weren't really nation states yet, and power was often held by a patchwork of different groups, some of them closer, some of them further away from what we understand as a state.

And one of these groups was the Cossacks. The Cossacks of the Dnieper were a bit different in their genesis from the Don or the Terek Cossacks, but in any case these were a group of free men who started settling on the Dnieper. They grew powerful, they were good warriors, they were raiders, they were bandits, and they were mercenaries, and as such they started playing an important role. By the late 16th century, the Cossacks of the Dnieper, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, were starting to become a notable factor in the international relations between Russia, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottomans, and the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Both processes continued. The Cossacks became more powerful, and the situation of the Western Russian population was becoming increasingly harsh. One of the key points was the Union of Lublin, the final unification of Lithuania and Poland into the Rzeczpospolita, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And this again increased the process of Polonization and Catholicization of the Lithuanian and Russian aristocracy. For the Cossacks, this meant, above all, a lot of attention from the king of the Commonwealth, in this case Sigismund Augustus, whom you might also remember from previous episodes.

In one of his decrees, he prescribed the compilation of the so-called register. This was a list of Cossacks who were officially regarded as Cossacks by the Polish-Lithuanian state and accepted as basically members of the royal service. And in the future it was always about this register, because it conferred privileges and duties. This register, and the size of it, the number of Cossacks included in it, would become the main reason for the many, many uprisings and wars between the Cossacks and the royal administration of the Commonwealth. The Polish kings promised to increase the register every time they needed Cossacks to participate in military action.

It is always a question of historiography, and a kind of nationalist distortion of historiography, and this is especially the case with the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Modern Ukrainian historiography, and increasingly the Western one, which is just copying Ukrainian narratives, regards the Cossacks as some sort of proto-Ukrainian group. We have a register surviving from 1581. It's the oldest one that we actually have as a document. It records the composition of 373 Cossacks. Of those, 184 were Little Russians, 140 came from the territory of what is Belarus today, and 20 more came from the Moscow Principality. There were also Poles, Germans, Tatars, and others. Most of them were Orthodox Russians, but they did have quite a diverse ethnic and religious composition. So the Zaporozhian Sich was really not a nation state in any shape or form. It was kind of a formalized, I don't know, if you imagine the pirate island of Tortuga, a more formalized version of that, and on the mainland. That's what the Zaporozhian Sich was like.

In any case, by the end of the 16th century, a very significant part of the Dnieper lands had become the property of Polish-Lithuanian magnates. On the left bank were the Wiśniowiecki princes, on the right bank you had the Ostrogskis and others. But together with the oppression of the Cossacks, including registered Cossacks, this further destabilized the situation in Polish Ukraine. There were a bunch of riots in the late 16th century, which forced the Polish Sejm to adopt a special decree according to which only Polish noblemen could become leaders of registered Cossacks and hold high military ranks commanding registered Cossacks. And at the same time, the register was increased. All this, however, did not help the administration of Sigismund III to pacify the Little Russian lands. And the whole first half of the 17th century would be spent fighting Cossack and peasant uprisings all the time, who were protesting their economic oppression, their ethnic oppression, and their religious oppression.

The discrimination, especially the religious discrimination against the Orthodox in the first half of the 17th century, often took literally absurd forms. It became commonplace that the Orthodox were banned from burying their dead. Orthodox priests were beaten in the streets. We have documents showing a lot of complaints about religious discrimination. The aggressive Catholicization policies of the Polish state caused a lot of protests by Russians, who had some sort of inherent resistance against the faith of the Lyakhs, the "Lyatskaya vera", the Polish faith. In 1623, the Greek Catholic Archbishop in Vitebsk was murdered. And 10 years later, in Polotsk, there was also an attempt on the local archbishop. So the violence went both ways.

And the Cossacks could not stay aside. Their own struggle with the Polish nobility, which was the deciding political and economic factor for them, often took on the character of religious confrontation, and especially after the Union, after the creation of the Greek Catholic Church, hatred of Catholics became a significant component of the Cossack identity, really. Another peculiar instrument was that the Poles and Lithuanians very cynically exploited these ethno-religious questions to avoid becoming the object of hatred for their Orthodox serfs.

One thing that also has to be mentioned is that serfdom in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a lot harsher than in Russia, and it was formalized 200 years earlier. Even Western European sources mention how harsh the oppression of Russian Orthodox peasants was in the Polish lands compared to other European lands. In any case, the Poles often used the sizable Jewish population of the Commonwealth as middlemen. Polish magnates would own a lot of land and have Orthodox Russian serfs work themselves to death in their latifundia, but the lands themselves would be administered by Jews whom the Polish nobles would hire to oversee the work. And as the serfs, of course, didn't see their Polish magnates often, but they saw their Jewish administrators and managers every day, their hatred was focused on those. And this led to some of the worst pogroms in European history before the 20th century, with all this rage that was unleashed upon the Jewish population, who of course often had nothing to do at all with the actual institutional serfdom and the oppression of the Russians.

But there were a bunch of Cossack uprisings. Most of them had little success. Most of them were very similar: they rapidly gained strength because they had a lot of public support. They had a lot of support from the surviving Orthodox elites, but the Cossack rebels always faced the same problem. They lacked a clear goal, because they would ask the Polish kings to increase the register, to ease some tax burdens, to guarantee some privilege, and these would always be temporary concessions and half measures. Having won their first victories, sooner or later the Cossack armies would be defeated by the Crown Army. Then the participants of the uprising were massacred, giving the Polish nobility a few more years of peace, and this would simply repeat every couple of years.

Another important reason was the unwillingness of the Cossack elders, who were against the induction of Little Russian peasants into the Cossack estate, which would dilute their power and threaten their privileged status. All taken together, this led only to one logical conclusion. The Cossacks were not able to have their own state. They were not a government, they were not a state; they were a highly autonomous estate, really. And as such, the Cossacks of Malorossia, of Little Russia, could only save themselves by completely leaving the subordination of the Polish king and passing under the hand of another monarch. And such a change could be achieved only by a leader who was very charismatic and at the same time had the ability to compromise. Such a leader appeared in the end. It was, of course, Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was born in 1595 and quickly became a famous Cossack, a good warrior. He actually participated in the Time of Troubles on the Polish side, because of course the Cossacks were in Polish service. He participated in Władysław's last attempt to attack Moscow. Then he spent a lot of time fighting the Turks. He had good learning: he knew Greek, Polish and Latin, and he also learned some Turkish and Tatar while he was in Turkey. He was made part of the register. He took part in several campaigns into Turkish and Tatar lands, and participated in the Russian attempt to seize Smolensk back in 1632 to 1634, on the Polish side of course.

But the interesting thing is that, well, you know, rebellions and revolutions often become a career boom. Chaos is a ladder and so on, and they open previously closed roads. In 1637, during one of the many, many Cossack rebellions, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was appointed chief secretary to the rebels, and it was he himself who signed the letter of the Zaporozhian Cossacks in which they made their peace with the Polish king. Then he participated again in politics. He traveled to Warsaw with the registered Cossacks to petition the king to restore their privileges. Then he disappeared for a long time from the historical chronicles, and we don't really know what he was doing.

What is relevant for our narrative is that at this time the Polish nobility enjoyed what is called by historians the Golden Decade. The Cossack uprisings were suppressed for the time being. The so-called Ordinance had sharply limited the independence and privileges of the Cossack regiments. And this is when King Władysław decided to use the Cossacks in his own interest. In 1645, the Republic of Venice had been defeated by the Ottomans, and they asked other European Catholic countries for help. Only Poland reacted to that and agreed to provide military support in exchange for money.

With the help of Venetian gold, Władysław was going to increase the Crown Army and attract more registered Cossacks. You are probably familiar with the fact that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was quite anarchic in its structure. The Polish army depended a lot on the quite unreliable troops that the nobles would bring, the noble banners. The Cossacks, in his genius plan, had the unenviable role of being the instigators of a war, the beginning of which would force the nobility to obey the royal commanders. His plan came to fruition: in exchange for the war with the Tatars, the Cossacks were promised the restoration of their former liberties, as so often happens.

In this moment, the preparations of the registered Cossacks to go to war alarmed the Polish magnates, who gathered in the Sejm and demanded that King Władysław stop the military build-up, which led to a political split in the region that interests us, in Malorossia, Little Russia. Most of the Cossack elders, having learned about the decision of the Polish Sejm, refused to continue building up the regiments. And Khmelnytsky, who did not want to obey the demands of the Polish magnates, actually found himself alone. That is quite interesting. He came into conflict with the other Cossacks.

All right, it is kind of interesting, but I'm gonna speed it up. Khmelnytsky's story continues with him going to Warsaw again and complaining about another man, Chaplinsky, and Khmelnytsky wanted to meet with the king. This was observed with great interest and distrust by the Russian state, of course. Alexei had sent the boyar Kunakov to Warsaw as an ambassador, who was well aware of the circumstances of this meeting. And of course, the Russian Tsar in Moscow, Alexei, was following what was happening to the Orthodox Russian subjects of Poland, because, of course, only a decade prior the Poles had inflicted another painful defeat on Russia, and the whole country was itching for revenge.

Khmelnytsky realized that the only way out for him, really, after being pushed out by Chaplinsky and his other rivals among the Cossacks, was to fight against the arbitrary rule of the Polish nobles. Near Chigirin, there was a gathering of Cossack petty officers, and Khmelnytsky urged them to rebel against the Polish crown. He presented one of the royal decrees he had received, confirming that the king planned to send the Cossacks to the Tatar lands for slaughter, really. However, the rebels needed help from outside.

Here, Khmelnytsky made a very large mistake that he could have avoided very easily. The choice of the Cossacks for an ally fell on Khan Islam Giray, the ruler of the Crimean Tatars. Khmelnytsky went to Crimea and met with the Tatar delegation. The Cossack Rada unanimously voted for war with Poland and elected Khmelnytsky as their Ataman, and the Cossack-Tatar army went to fight. The war was going well, and there were some very painful defeats Khmelnytsky managed to inflict on the Poles. Then something happened that Khmelnytsky did not expect. Namely, the Tatars stabbed him in the back.

Whoa, this is crazy, man.

The Tatars switched sides. They left Khmelnytsky alone.

So, did Alexei help Khmelnytsky by sending little green men?

Not at this point yet.

Yeah, he was too busy reforming the army.

Yes, he was too busy reforming the army. I'm going to get to that in a moment. We'll talk about what was happening in Moscow at that time. I'm sorry for ranting so long, but it's really quite important to have all the context here to understand what was going on, because it's very complicated history. It's a very complicated region.

The treachery of the Tatars forced Khmelnytsky's hand, and he managed to negotiate a very good treaty with the Poles, actually. The register was increased to 40,000, which was twice as large as it had ever been. However, the most important provisions of the treaty concerned the equalization of the Orthodox Christians, especially the clergy, in rights with the Catholics. The Cossack nobility received a kind of autonomy within the Rzeczpospolita and guarantees that they would retain their positions in the Hetmanate. But at the same time, hundreds of thousands of Orthodox peasants still remained under the rule of the Catholic nobility, and Little Russia as a whole missed the chance to get out from under Polish rule. It was obvious to both sides that the Peace of Zboriv, as this treaty was called, was impossible to fulfill.

The contradictions between the Catholics and the Orthodox were just too great. This became especially obvious in Warsaw, during a meeting of the Sejm, the Polish Parliament, where the peace treaty and the equality of Catholics and the Orthodox were confirmed: the Catholics actually did not allow the Kiev metropolitan, Sylvester Kossov, to attend the Sejm. So it was immediately proven that this would never work. And Khmelnytsky, of course, also realized that a new war was inevitable. He spent the next year and a half reorganizing the Cossack regiments and, of course, establishing diplomatic relations.

All this time, the Polish army was also continuing to be reformed. And he started this new uprising and kept fighting until, again, the Treaty of Bila Tserkva, which again put a pause on the conflict for two years, with the provision that Khmelnytsky was not allowed to have international relations, really. At the same time, in Moscow, there was a gathering of the boyars which was discussing the Cossack question and how to save the Orthodox Russians from the Poles. There was no decision made at that point in 1651, but it had been made clear to the Poles that Moscow was acting as a very attentive observer of these events and would not be an outsider, really.

What then happened is that the same year a Cossack delegation came to Moscow, and another visited Moscow in 1652. This happened after the rise of Patriarch Nikon, who himself was a very adamant supporter of the annexation of Little Russia. And the fighting had resumed a bit earlier, because the Cossacks had invaded Moldavia. Khmelnytsky massacred a bunch of Polish and Tatar prisoners, and basically he burned all his bridges with this. He massacred around 8,000 Polish soldiers and a bunch of Tatars, basically to make it impossible for the conflict to go back to the frozen phase, which had happened many times before.

The fighting continued, and by early November 1653 there came news from Moscow. Namely, that on October 1st, on the day of the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Alexei Mikhailovich came to the Zemsky Sobor directly from church, and in an atmosphere of basically universal enthusiasm, it was decided to wage war upon the Polish king and to accept into Russian service the Zaporozhian army, the Hetmanate, with all their towns and villages. To discuss the terms with Hetman Khmelnytsky himself, and of course the Cossack Rada, a representative embassy was gathered. The crème de la crème of the Russian political elite: the boyars Buturlin, Alferyev, Deacon Lopukhin, the head of the Moscow streltsy Matveyev, and many other important boyars and clergymen. They went to Little Russia.

For the Crimean Tatars, the decision of the council meant that Khmelnytsky had a very important ally and friend. Basically, there was a second treachery by the Tatars. Islam Giray made peace with the Poles, and Khmelnytsky gathered his army and headed towards Pereyaslavl, where they waited for the arrival of Buturlin's delegation. On the way there, the Cossacks defeated part of the Tatar army and managed to free many of the enslaved inhabitants of Little Russia. Because the treaties with the Crimean Tatars, the alliances, were always a deal with the devil, because the whole Crimean Tatar economy was based on abducting Little Russians and selling them into slavery. So a lasting peace with them was not really something that was possible anyway.

In any case, Khmelnytsky, during a lull in the war, settled in Pereyaslavl, and on December 31st the Russian delegation arrived. It was met by crowds of local residents and solemn firing from cannons and guns. There was a prayer service in the Assumption Cathedral. The Hetman himself came and officially visited the delegation a week later. And the next day, on January 8th, there were a lot of drums in the city, and the convocation of the Rada between Khmelnytsky and Buturlin was announced. Before the assembly, Khmelnytsky himself presented, and he spoke words that would become very important. I will quote some of it:

"For this reason, we have now assembled a Rada, which is manifest to all the people, that you may choose for yourselves with us the sovereign from among the four you desire. The first is the king of the Turks, who many times through his ambassadors has called us under his domain. The second is the Khan of Crimea. The third is the king of Poland, who, if we want him, would still accept us into his former favor. The fourth is the Orthodox sovereign of Great Russia, Tsar and Grand Duke Alexei Mikhailovich, the sovereign of all Russia, whom we have been asking for six years with our unceasing prayers."

Then Khmelnytsky sent one of his military leaders to walk around and ask everyone their opinions. And there was a little conflict, actually, in Pereyaslavl, a dispute between the Russian ambassadors and the Cossacks. Khmelnytsky had demanded that the representatives of the Moscow Tsar take an oath to preserve the privileges of the Cossacks. Buturlin and his companions refused this, because they were not authorized to make a decision for the sovereign. And of course, Khmelnytsky did not want to swear allegiance without a reciprocal oath on Cossack liberties, appealing to the traditions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where the king swore an oath to his subjects upon ascension to the throne. Buturlin rejected the comparison of the Polish king with the Russian Tsar and reproached the hetman for their fickleness. After all, the embassy had arrived on their repeated requests.

Khmelnytsky could do nothing but rely on Alexei Mikhailovich's grace and faith and take the oath, and this dispute is actually very revealing. For the Cossacks, who were accustomed to the Polish-Lithuanian state, where the king's power was severely limited by the arbitrariness of the magnates, the szlachta, and the decisions of the Sejm, the political model where the Tsar had, after decades of bloody struggle, managed to centralize political power and acquire full power over his subjects was something completely new. So he simply didn't understand how that was possible, that political power could be centralized.

In any case, in addition to the traditional hetman symbols of power, he was given a boyar's hat, which in the eyes of Alexei Mikhailovich made him a royal servant. After the ceremony, Buturlin, on behalf of the sovereign, on behalf of Alexei Mikhailovich, guaranteed to the Cossacks an increase of the register to 60,000, the retention of all their posts and positions, as well as the release of the Cossacks from the tax burden, because they were men of war who would do their service in blood and not money.

The circumstances of the conclusion of the Treaty of Pereyaslavl and the subsequent annexation of left-bank Ukraine to Russia gave rise to a controversy that has not subsided to this day, and of course is now more talked about than ever, really. In Russian imperial and Soviet historiography, these events were usually interpreted as the reunification of two fraternal East Slavic peoples. In the framework of the Ukrainian nationalist concept, the Russian Tsardom and the Hetmanate were regarded as basically equal participants in international relations, and the treaty itself was just a temporary personal union, which did not entail the permanent annexation of Little Russia. Ukrainian ultranationalists declared Khmelnytsky and all those who swore an oath to the Tsar to be traitors.

This is, of course, extremely ridiculous. Any thoughts about the Hetmanate as a sort of large and independent Ukrainian nationalist state in Eastern Europe are a ridiculous contradiction of what was obviously happening: their self-identification as Orthodox and Russian, and their lack of political independence. The Hetmanate had never been more than an autonomy within the Rzeczpospolita. Khmelnytsky himself, through letters, decrees, and diplomatic missions to Moscow, for many, many years sought opportunities to become a subject of the Russian Tsar.

As a result, the hetman, the officers, and representatives of almost 200 towns and cities in Little Russia who were present in Pereyaslavl swore an oath to Alexei Mikhailovich and pledged to be eternal subjects of his majesty of all Russia and his heirs. I think that is quite exhaustive wording. And in essence, the legal status of the Little Russian Cossacks differed little from that of the Don Cossacks, who also sent embassies to Moscow. And as for the sentiments of normal Little Russians, who, it has to be remembered, made up the majority of the population of Little Russia, not the Cossacks: 122,000 people swore an oath to the Russian Tsar.

After this, two higher-ups of the Hetmanate went to the Tsar. The ambassadors brought to Moscow a letter from Khmelnytsky with a list of Cossack liberties that needed to be agreed to by the Tsar. Alexei Mikhailovich did not argue with them and guaranteed their preservation. An exception was made only with regard to two particular articles. The hetman of the Cossacks was forbidden to have full diplomatic relations with foreign sovereigns, and he had to report about all foreign embassies and the purpose of their visits, and specifically the hetman of the Cossacks was banned from any communications with the Polish king and the Turkish sultan.

And the second was the clause that concerned the pay of the Cossack troops, which it was decided to pay not from the central treasury, but from the revenues that were generated in Little Russia. Thus appeared the so-called March Articles, which gave the Cossacks a pretty wide self-government and sort of equalized them with the Moscow boyars and bureaucrats. And that was it. The Hetmanate had joined Russia. Little Russia had expressed its desire to rejoin the Russian motherland. Left-bank Ukraine was ripe to become part of Russia again, and the Cossacks, with all their liberties and privileges, had become subjects of Alexei Mikhailovich. There was only one little thing left to do: win a war against Poland. And that's how the Russian-Polish war of 1654 began.

Yes, the Russian government was well aware that the Poles would have to be fought. Alexei Mikhailovich and his inner circle had spent the time after the disastrous Smolensk War modernizing the Russian military machine and reorganizing the financial system of the Moscow Tsardom. Although after the defeat of Shein's army at Smolensk the so-called New Order regiments were disbanded, the Tsar's administration did not abandon the pursuit of military reforms.

Yeah, it was the Thirty Years' War that helped Alexei to actually finish the reforms, because after the Thirty Years' War between the Protestants and Catholics, there were thousands of military specialists roaming the land with nothing to do, and Alexei offered them a juicy deal to settle in Russia and train the new reformed regiments.

Absolutely, yes. A lot of Swedish, Dutch and other military experts and mercenaries came to Russia. The military reforms were quite substantial; more reiter and dragoon regiments were created. The new Russian army was essentially modeled on the Swedish army, because Gustavus Adolphus had revolutionized his own military, the Swedish military, during the Thirty Years' War. And it was really superior to its opponents on a tactical and technical level. They had no equal on the battlefield at that time. And as such, it was a good idea to get as many Swedish experts as possible into Russia to have them build a new army for Alexei Mikhailovich.

To help us beat the invincible winged hussars.

Yeah, but we are really jumping forward here.

Yes, yes. I was just going to take a step back, really.

Yeah, we will take a step back and talk about the Russian-Polish war in 10 years, chronologically speaking. In 1648, I believe, that was roughly the time when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's uprising began, but in Russia... Russia was not yet helping Bohdan, and he was making deals with the Turks, with the Crimean Tatars. Meanwhile, Alexei was reforming the army, but there was another problem, a new problem to deal with, thanks to Boris Morozov, who increased that salt tax. In 1648, because of the increased tax, the Russian artisans and serfs were unable to pay this increased price, and some of the sneaky boyars developed ways to evade taxation, thus placing an even higher burden on those less fortunate who were not able to cheat the system. So yeah, they decided to riot in Moscow and basically in all the major cities.

Yeah, I think the worst one was in Pskov.

Oh yeah. This was also a result of the military reforms, because building a new army, building all those factories, producing guns and so on, putting thousands of men in uniforms required a huge amount of money, and Alexei Mikhailovich had to find this money somewhere. They did try to do the same things which the Swedes had done to build their army, namely introducing copper coins, which created its own economic problems. I'm not an economist, so I will be very superficial on this, but basically the problem was that copper money is not secured, because the face value is many times higher than the market value of the material of which the coin is made. So it was very insecure money. You know, before that coins were always gold or silver, and now you had these copper coins that were basically worth whatever the Tsar said they were worth and not what the market rate was. Extraordinary fees were levied, so special taxes, really.

It has to be said that although the tightening of the tax oppression had provoked the Copper and Salt Riots, it allowed the government to maintain its armies throughout the very protracted Russo-Polish war. But in any case, the Salt Riot was quite severe. The group of the population that had risen up was basically the same that produced the heroes of 1612: the so-called chernye, the black estates, those who paid taxes, the urban middle class, so to speak, or whatever passed for the urban middle class at the time. A lot of boyars also participated in it. It was, of course, presented as popular will, which it kind of was. It was really the greatest uprising, the greatest internal problem the Russian state had to face since the Time of Troubles.

The Tsar actually had to take a step back here. Morozov resigned, and there was a special decree cancelling the tax. Morozov never played a big role in the government again after this. This indirectly, or directly really, also led to a quite significant event. Namely, a Zemsky Sobor was convened, at which the so-called Sobornoye Ulozheniye was adopted, the Council Code, the legal code that was the first major judicial and legal reform in Russia since the Sudebnik under Ivan IV, the Terrible. So the first major legal reform in a hundred years. And the code basically existed in a more or less preserved form for 200 years, up until the reforms of Speransky.

The Russian legal system at the time was basically hundreds of separate decrees and edicts made by the Tsar, which were produced by various parts of the government and which very often contradicted each other. So no one knew what the actual law was, and so on and so on, and there were just more and more decrees. And for a whole year the Zemsky Sobor was working on the new legal code, and it did change a lot of things. It codified Russian serfdom for the first time, it obligated the Russian nobility to serve in the army, and it codified really a lot of administrative and penal law. The aspect of religious crimes was codified. Various things were codified. 60 different crimes were to be punished by death.

There were also wide-ranging reforms to civil law: the development of codified commodity-money relations, the regulation of civil law transactions, the regulation of international trade and so on. I think for the first time you had something like corporate law in Russian history, law that was not just for physical persons, but also for, well, groups of people, for example peasant communities or trade unions, or not trade unions, but like guilds. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye also established the age of legal capacity to range between 15 and 20. And the legal capacity of women was also confirmed, granting widows a certain set of legal powers to conduct economic transactions and so on. It was quite interesting, and it became the legal foundation of Russia for centuries, really. In a way, the urban middle classes had achieved what they wanted: that Russia now had to live by laws, which Russia, for some reason, never really liked to do and still doesn't like.

Right. So I guess we need to talk about the Raskol, the schism. The salt tax was cancelled, and this whole situation, the Salt Riots, worsened his relationship with Morozov. He was simply not needed anymore. But Alexei still craved a kind of mentor, an older, wiser friend. So he became close with Nikon. At that time Nikon was a metropolitan bishop of the church. In 1652, Nikon would become the new patriarch of the church and start a religious reform that would lead to the schism, confusion, and bloodshed.

A few words about Nikon, the man. He was Nikita from a village near Nizhny Novgorod. Some speculate that his dad was a Mari, but that's not terribly important in his portrait. He became a priest and adopted the name Nikon, and as any proper Orthodox priest he had to have many children, because unlike Catholic priests, Orthodox priests are super dads, and it didn't work out. All the children died in infancy, so Nikon said screw it, became a monk, and forced his wife to also become a nun. In Orthodox parlance it's called leaving the world, and he left the world.

When he became a monk, he was not the quiet type. He was pretty argumentative and had many conflicts with the higher-ups. And being well-educated, when he was a priest he had joined an informal secret society inside the church that was called the Zealots of Piety. They didn't have a single coherent ideology, but most of them were displeased with the direction of the church for many personal reasons, and almost all of them covertly agitated for reforms. The thing was that they all had different reforms in mind.

So Nikon wanted to bring the Russian church in line with the Greek and Middle Eastern churches. As he said himself, "I am Russian, but I want our church to be Greek." Other members of the club, such as Avvakum Petrov, argued that Constantinople fell to the Turks because the Greeks were heretics, and we don't need to bet on the half-dead horse of the Greek Orthodox Church and be more like them, because the Russian Church is the true one, and we need to purify it from within.

So an important aside here is that the clergy of the church in Russia, and probably in Europe as well, were the most educated people there were, on the cutting edge in most scientific fields. They wrote poetry and literature. They painted, of course, icons, and were architects. So they did not fit at all the stereotype of a backwards medieval zealot. Although this secret society was called the Zealots of Piety, they were the smartest men there were.

Of course, this society was destined to disband the moment one of them became patriarch. And because of his friendly relationship with the Tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich, it was Nikon who became patriarch, and polite disagreements with other members of this club turned into an all-out religious war. For example, Avvakum Petrov was burned in a log house for opposing Nikon's reforms.

So he became patriarch in 1652. When Nikon was appointed, the ecclesiastical reform was already in the air. Everyone expected it, but people did not think that the reforms would be so bold and harsh. Nikon consulted the most learned of the Greek prelates abroad and invited them to Moscow. The scholars of Constantinople and Kiev convinced Nikon that the Muscovite service books were heterodox.

Yes, there is another geopolitical aspect here that goes back to our main narrative, namely that Kiev was kind of the center of Russian Orthodoxy, at least the intellectual center, and produced the most learned Russian clerics. And in general, Little Russian Orthodoxy under Polish rule had preserved more of, or was more in line with, the Greek traditions, and as such the southern Russian tradition was kind of closer to the Greek one. Although it's weird, because, well, there were a lot of Jesuit schools there, right? One of the reasons for the reforms, not the main reason maybe, but definitely one of the reasons, was to get Muscovite Orthodoxy in line with the religion practiced in Kiev, the intellectual center of Russian Orthodoxy, and also of the southern Russian lands which were about to be incorporated into the Russian state.

It's weird that with the new lands, they couldn't impose their customs on the land that they conquered.

The inclusion of Little Russia had serious effects, and one of them was the series of religious reforms.

So yeah, they thought that the Moscow service books and icons and practices differed widely from the ancient Constantinople models. And Nikon's soldiers and servants were charged to gouge out the eyes of the icons of those who owned heterodox icons at home or produced them. He also issued an ukase threatening the severest penalties on all who dared to make or use such icons in the future. The silly thing that everyone remembers of the reform: Orthodox Russians for centuries were crossing themselves with two fingers, and Nikon banned that, because the Greeks cross themselves with three fingers. But it was also a huge debate at that time, for sure, and a lot of blood was spilled just because of one additional finger.

Yeah, a lot of priests, monks, and just regular believers refused to adopt all those reforms.

Also, the architectural style. Nikon realized that we built our churches in the wrong way, in the heretical way, and we needed to demolish the uncanonical churches and make way for new ones designed in the old Byzantine style. So this ruthlessness that Nikon had goes far to explain the hatred with which the Old Believers, as the opposition to the reforms now began to be called, regarded Nikon. The Greek party in the Russian church was in favor of bringing the Russian church in line. There was a Latin party who was against it, on the grounds that Nikon's reforms would make it impossible to Latinize the Russian church in the future. And the third party was the Old Believers, supporters of the unreformed Russian Orthodoxy.

And yeah, as you said, Nikon's reforms were directly tied to geopolitics, because of Malorossia, Little Russia, that we took from the Poles. And yeah, they acted standoffish, and they went to Moscow and said that we are heretics and we stink, and it hurt the Moscow clergy's feelings, and Nikon decided to fall for the Ukrainian bullying and become more like them.

I mean, they were more powerful. They were more intellectually and culturally powerful, and they were kind of the pinnacle of Russian Orthodoxy at that time, and it kind of made sense really, because Kiev was the spiritual and intellectual center for Russian religion. So yeah, it does kind of make sense. It's not like Alexei Mikhailovich ordered the reforms because he wanted to please peasants in Luhansk Oblast.

In any case, the atrocities that were done in the name of the reforms, in order to break the wrong customs, burn the wrong priests and demolish their own churches, I think were not that pleasing to God. So 10 years after that, Nikon would be purged himself from his position, stripped of his rank and thrown into a monastery as a prisoner. And he would be gone, but the reforms, of course, stayed.

The brightest moments of Alexei Mikhailovich's reign are that we started winning, winning so much. We beat the Poles and we beat the Swedes. I'm spoiling a little bit, but it is what happened, and we really couldn't do it before Alexei Mikhailovich in any meaningful sense. So maybe we need to talk about the war with the Poles.

Yes, I was just about to say that we should go back to the war preparations, which is, of course, the most important and interesting part of history. Alexei Mikhailovich kept preparing the army for the inevitable conflict, but he still sought to avoid the need to wage this war alone. He wanted allies. And between 1653 and 1654, the Zemsky Sobor sent embassies to Europe. Russian diplomats reached out to the court of the emperor in Germany, to France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Moldavian and Wallachian principalities. And apart from their obvious purpose, which was to announce that the Hetmanate had become a part of the Russian Tsardom, the emissaries of Alexei Mikhailovich also probed the ground for possible allies in the war with Poland. And even though most countries took a neutral and even favorable position, no one was in a hurry to join Russia.

Poland-Lithuania was still one of the strongest European powers, possibly the strongest. It was not possible to conclude a military alliance with Sweden, who were an enemy of Poland, but also an enemy of Russia, really. Queen Christina met the Russian ambassadors, but in her reply letter to Alexei Mikhailovich, she did not include the title of Tsar of Little Russia. And basically all the European countries signaled to Alexei Mikhailovich that they didn't mind his expansionism. They didn't mind him cutting the Poles down to size, but without a decisive military victory, they would not recognize the Pereyaslavl Treaty. And all this meant that in the coming war Russia could only rely on its own forces, really. This would be a good old-fashioned showdown.

The war on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was officially declared on October 23rd, 1654. All the traditional military preparations began in Moscow: the formation of regiments, the appointment of voivodes and so on. And in February, during the birthday celebrations of the Tsarevich Alexei, it was announced that the men would go to war, and on the 27th of February the heavy siege artillery left Moscow, headed for the obvious first target, Smolensk.

Three armies had been prepared for the invasion. The first, headed by Odoevsky and Cherkassky, was to take Smolensk. To the northwest, Prince Sheremetev was sent to Vitebsk and Polotsk. Prince Trubetskoy was sent to the southwest, to Malorossia. In total it was three armies of up to 70,000 people. An important place in the plans of the Russian military command was of course occupied by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who, joining together with Buturlin, was supposed to support the army of Prince Trubetskoy, which was going to Little Russia proper. But also, remembering the attack of the Crimean Tatars during the last war against Poland, the government had left a sizable force of up to 7,000 men on the frontier in Belgorod. Alexei Mikhailovich himself also left Moscow to join the war effort.

The key goal, the first key goal of the war, was of course Smolensk, the cornerstone of the entire defense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on its eastern border. The city was protected by a significant fortress wall, which was built at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries by Fyodor Kon, a Russian architect. During the Time of Troubles, Smolensk only fell after an epic two-year siege. And 20 years later, in the Smolensk War, Shein's army was never able to overcome the fortifications and had to retreat empty-handed.

However, over the next two decades the fortress fell into a really deplorable state. I think the attitude of the royal administration to the eastern parts of the state, the neglect, was taking its toll. The fortress had 40 towers, which were built under Fyodor Kon, but by 1654 only 10 of them were suitable for any kind of defense, and the others were falling apart and rotting. Some parts of the walls which were destroyed during the last siege were never restored, and the garrison was not really composed of especially good troops either. There's also, of course, the question of the population of Smolensk, whose loyalty to the Polish crown remained a big question.

The siege was being prepared. In early June, the Russian forces had attacked Dorogobuzh, which became the springboard for the siege. A bit later, Sheremetev captured Polotsk, which had been abandoned by the Polish garrison, and the Russian troops were joyfully welcomed by the Orthodox population. In the meantime, Trubetskoy had also captured Roslavl and Mstislavl. Prince Cherkassky had crushed Radziwiłł near Shklov. The Cossacks were also successful. They captured Gomel, and Mogilev opened its gates to the Russian army. There was no fighting there.

Around Smolensk, the siege was tightening and the Russian camp was preparing for an assault. The first attacks were unsuccessful. The Russian troops managed to capture one of the towers, but the Poles were quite tricky. They managed to roll a bunch of barrels full of gunpowder into the tower and blew it up together with the Russian soldiers. The garrison was in a very desperate position, really. The defeat of Radziwiłł had deprived the garrison of any hope of relief. There was no one to come help them from the outside. And the Russians managed to capture a messenger who was carrying a letter from the commander of the Smolensk garrison. This letter included a very detailed list of all the weaknesses of the garrison, begging for immediate help. And it was quite good to intercept this guy.

On September 10th, Obuchowicz, the commander of the Smolensk garrison, met with Matveyev at the city walls to negotiate the terms for the surrender of Smolensk. The Russian voivodes guaranteed compliance with the main requirement of the Poles, which was an unimpeded passage out of the city for the pro-Polish nobles and townspeople. The rest would stay and swear an oath to the Russian Tsar. On September 23rd, Alexei Mikhailovich, after many, many long decades, entered Smolensk in a solemn ceremony. The Polish nobles knelt before the Russian Tsar, the captured Polish banners were thrown at his feet, and after that the garrison was allowed to leave. But basically all of the townspeople, who were still Russian and Orthodox, remained in Smolensk, and a significant part of the Orthodox nobility remained as well.

The final part of the 1654 campaign was the capture of Vitebsk in the late autumn. Detachments of cavalry and Cossacks raided deep into enemy territory, reaching as far as Vilnius. The Lithuanian army was completely defeated. The government in Warsaw saw an urgent need to mobilize all possible military resources. Meanwhile, there were more military reforms happening in the Russian military. In the spring of the next year, it was decided to disband the noble cavalry troops and to create new streltsy and soldier regiments, who were forming garrisons in the captured fortresses. And the Poles and Lithuanians tried to take advantage of this temporary weakening of the Russian army.

The Polish army invaded Little Russia in alliance with the Crimean Tatars, led by Mehmed Giray, who was the son of Islam Giray. And yes, they besieged Uman and Bila Tserkva. There was a battle between the Polish-Tatar troops and the Russian-Cossack troops. It was the middle of winter, which is not usually a time when armies would fight in this period. And the Polish cavalry attacked the fortified camp many times. In the end, the Tatars managed to not do anything really, and instead of joining the fight they did what they would usually do in situations when the fighting was not going the way they liked it: they just stopped fighting the war and started raiding, looting and abducting people to sell into slavery. There wasn't really a victor in this battle, the Battle of Drizhypole, as it was later called, I think.

It was kind of a stalemate, but strategically it was better for the Russian side. The army of Potocki, the Polish hetman, took severe casualties and, losing the support of the Tatars, had to retreat to the west. And the threat to the Hetmanate was stopped for the time being. However, the price for that was really harsh. The Tatars burned, looted, stole, robbed so much. And I don't know if these numbers are inflated, I think they probably are, but according to contemporary chronicles, in this period the Tatars abducted 200,000 Little Russians to sell into slavery.

Yeah, and an interesting statistical tidbit is that the population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Tsardom was roughly the same. It was around 9 million people in each country. So 200,000, it's a lot.

It's a lot. The war would end up being very long. The war would end up taking 13 years, and a lot happened, and we're not going to cover everything in that much depth, I think. That would not make much sense. But what makes sense, I think, is to cover the Swedish involvement, because that was also kind of a separate war.

As early as 1654, the Swedes began to closely observe the success of the new Russian army. And of course, after the reforms of Gustavus Adolphus and the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia, the Swedish kingdom had become one of the strongest players on the European stage. It was their golden age. As I mentioned in the last episode, they had complete domination of the Baltic, and the concept of being leaders of the Baltic was kind of a mania of Swedish diplomacy. There were also close dynastic ties between Poland and Sweden. The Polish king Jan Casimir belonged to the Swedish Vasa dynasty. His father Sigismund had reigned in Sweden but was overthrown by his uncle Charles IX, and so on, a lot of Game of Thrones stuff. But in any case, after Queen Christina had abdicated, the bellicose Charles X took the Swedish throne, and it became clear that Sweden was not going to just stand aside during the Russian conquests in what they considered Polish Livonia.

In December 1654, the Royal Council started supporting the king's plans, and initially the Swedes planned to obtain territorial concessions from Poland in exchange for a military alliance. But they encountered strong opposition from Jan Casimir, the king. However, many of the richest magnates, including Radziwiłł, who had been so humiliated on the battlefield, were increasingly in favor of an alliance with the powerful Swedes, at the cost of literally any territorial concessions. Taking advantage of the split in Polish society, the Swedish army did what was known as the Deluge, the Potop Szwedzki, and attacked the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, the hostilities in the east had resumed. Velizh was captured, Minsk was captured, Grodno and Kovno and Vilnius were also captured, and yeah, the war went quite well in that period. It gets a bit complicated with the Swedes, really. Radziwiłł had concluded with the Swedish king an agreement recognizing the authority of the Swedish king over Lithuania; this was the Swedish demand. And King Jan Casimir, through the mediation of the Holy Roman Emperor, appealed to Alexei Mikhailovich with a proposal of a truce to begin negotiations on a new peace.

But in order to avoid strengthening the Swedes too much at the expense of Polish-Lithuanian territories, which would eventually lead to Swedish armies stepping on Russian soil, really, the Russian Tsardom was forced to suspend all hostilities against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for a while, in the so-called Truce of Vilna. In return for ceasing hostilities and fighting against Sweden on the side of Poland-Lithuania, the treaty promised to put Alexei of Russia on the Polish throne after Jan Casimir's death. It made sense at the time, because a Swedish victory would not have been in the interest of Russia, really, because it would just make Sweden way too powerful. And this then led directly to the Russo-Swedish war.

Despite initial successes, really, the Russian army struck into Karelia and took some fortresses, but Russia of course had no full-fledged navy at the time. We will actually talk about the creation of the Russian navy in the next episode. They could not really intercept the powerful Swedish navy bringing reinforcements everywhere, so it was very hard for Russia to solidify its victories. And in the end Denmark was not part of the Northern Wars, and the Cossacks also left the war, because after Khmelnytsky died, Vyhovsky, whom I've talked about in detail in one of the episodes, I think it was the petty nationalism episode, became the new leader of the Zaporozhian Host, and he betrayed the Tsar and switched to the Polish side.

This, of course, changed the situation dramatically and forced Alexei Mikhailovich to resume the war against Poland as soon as possible. And under such conditions, they had to end the war with Sweden, and they signed a treaty that was really kind of a nothing-burger, more or less a status quo antebellum. Some cities were ceded to Russia for a period of years and so on. And it led to 40 years of peace with the Swedes, until the Great Northern War, when the Treaty of Stolbovo could finally be reconsidered, so to speak.

In any case, then the war continued, and it was very bloody. Vyhovsky signed the Treaty of Hadiach, which basically put the Cossacks back into Poland, increasing their status by creating the Grand Principality of Rus, a Russian kingdom inside the Commonwealth as an equal part along with Poland and Lithuania. The Russian forces had to retreat back to the Dnieper again. And there were Cossack uprisings against Vyhovsky, because most of the Cossacks did not like this Polish puppet. And even many of the Cossacks who initially followed Vyhovsky switched sides and joined the Tsar again.

Then, in 1660, the war started going pretty meh for the Russian Tsardom. Not really that much happened. Some Russian defeats, some Polish defeats. And the war was kind of a slow burn until the 1663 campaign of Jan Casimir. It was kind of the last big operation of the war. It was an invasion of left-bank Ukraine by Crimean Tatars and Poles. This was quite a big movement, but he was beaten soundly by Romodanovsky at Pirogovka. And yeah, this was basically a Hail Mary by Jan Casimir, the big campaign, and after it failed, military activity in Malorossia was continued by the Poles, and they also had to strike down a rebellion on the right bank and fight the Russians on the left bank, and so on and so on.

The final stage of the war was really characterized by a complete exhaustion of both the material and human resources of the parties. There were small skirmishes and battles of local importance, but nothing really big anymore. The exhaustion of both sides was, of course, taken advantage of by the Ottomans and the Tatars, who started raiding more. The Cossack hetman on the right bank, Doroshenko, rebelled against the Polish king and declared himself a vassal of the Turkish sultan, which started the Polish-Cossack-Tatar war. It saw a lot of chaos, as usual. In any case, the threat of Crimean and Turkish raids kind of forced both sides to go into negotiations.

These negotiations eventually ended with the Truce of Andrusovo. It was a 13-and-a-half-year truce between Russia and Poland. And the terms were basically a truce that would create the conditions for an eternal peace. But the treaty guaranteed the territories of left-bank Ukraine and Smolensk to Russia, and Kiev was also handed over to Russia. And the Zaporozhian Sich was kind of recognized as a condominium of both states. And both sides agreed to create a common defense against the Ottoman threat.

This was more or less it, at least for the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, with regards to the Poles. He had achieved his main goal, to take Smolensk and left-bank Ukraine. The Swedish problem had been put in the back drawer and would remain there until 40 years later. But overall, yes, Alexei had set very clear military goals for the next decades and centuries: cutting the Swedes down to size, solving the Polish problem for good, and creating a lasting and working defense against the Ottomans, while also solving the Crimean problem for good. And achieving all of this would take, what, 150 to 160 years overall, or let's say 120 years. But all goals of the special geopolitical operation were achieved in the end. But this we will talk about in the next two or three episodes.

Well, that was some history lesson, wasn't it? I really hope that you haven't lost the train of Russian history in the middle of the 17th century. But as you can tell, the Russian Tsardom is really picking up. It's going into nuclear overdrive here, and it's about to blow up for real. So in the next episode, expect us to tie up all the loose ends. We will talk about the late years of Alexei Mikhailovich, his reign, his death, and all the troubles with the successors, because the next Tsar will be of poor quality, Feodor III. We will really set the stage for the golden platinum moment of Russian history, the real successor of Alexei, Peter the Great.

I hope that you have enjoyed our episode, and see you very soon. If you have any suggestions, feel free to comment, I will appreciate it a lot. Thank you, guys!

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# Chapter 5: Young Peter – Game of Thrones

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast and to part 4 of the Romanov series. In this episode we will discuss the last quarter of the 17th century in the Russian Tsardom. The end of Alexei Mikhailovich's reign, which overall proved to be successful, as we have soundly defeated the Poles and achieved military parity with the Swedes. Under Alexei we have taken back Western Russian lands, Smolensk and Left Bank Ukraine. We started producing our own modern weaponry and artillery in Tula.

But alas, there were two major problems. One of them is a structural issue with the monarchy itself. It can be highly functional when there is a competent ruler on the throne, but when the sovereign dies, the transition period is always risky and might lead the whole country to ruin. And a seamless succession was a rare sight in late medieval Russia. The second problem was that Alexei was a cunning politician and a unifier of Russian lands, and he needed a lot of resources for doing it.

So he made Russia a turbo-centralized state and increased the taxes. The forever war in the West demanded more troops, more levies, more money to be extracted from the population. Increased taxation and feudal subjugation of the people led to riots. Russia is a country where you can always run away from the central government, and tens of thousands of peasants, of serfs, packed their bags and ran away to the Don River, to the Don Cossacks. In the previous episode, Kirill extensively talked about the Zaporozhian Cossack host, which is universally regarded as some sort of proto-Ukraine, which is irrelevant now.

But, of course, there was another subset of Cossacks, the Don Cossacks, the unruly libertarians of the Russian land, people who were glad to cause a ruckus and embark on armed mutinies with the boys. Historically, the Don Cossacks were the main provider of rebel leaders. We will talk about a specific rebellion by Stepan Razin that happened in 1667. But before we do that, can you please, Kirill, brief our audience on the difference between the two, the Zaporozhian and the Don Cossacks?

Well, all Cossack hosts really have something in common, namely that they mainly settled frontier regions, regions where the Russian state was bordering some other state. And as frontier populations usually are, they have more self-government, they are more martial, they are more autonomous. In the case of the Don Cossacks, they are one of the oldest Cossack hosts. They mostly came from the so-called Ryazan Cossacks, which can probably be regarded as the oldest Cossack formations in Russia, the oldest group to be called Cossacks, the Ryazan Cossacks. They were basically people who lived on the frontier with Tatar territories, and they had to militarize to protect against raids, and so on and so on. There is a lot of mythology trying to make the Cossacks older than they are, giving them other ethnic roots, especially in the...

Yeah, the Iranian. Yeah, that they are Scythians, that they are descendants of the ushkuiniki, basically Russia's domestic version of Vikings, Novgorod pirates who raided all across Russia, really. But mostly they descend from the so-called Brodniki and the Ryazan Cossacks.

So, the Brodniki. There have been attempts to give them some kind of ethnic meaning, but mostly it comes from the word brodit, to wander. Basically semi-nomadic populations: peasants who had been living on land that was ruined, that didn't bring in any money anymore, soil that was depleted, or serfs who couldn't bear the taxes and working for the lords anymore and who just ran away and became wanderers. Some kept working, some resorted to banditry, and especially the Don Cossacks, they were big fans of raiding.

I have read that in the late 17th century, the Don Cossacks were mostly domesticated, and they actually settled on plots of land.

Yes, that's true. They offered their services to the Russian Tsars from time to time. After the Truce of Deulino, part of the Seversk Cossacks also settled on the Don. So it was always kind of a mixed deal, and it's not just one specific group. It was always very fluid, but ethnically mostly homogenous. Ethnic Russians with a dash of Poles and, I guess, some Kalmyks.

Yeah, they're probably a bit more diverse, because they moved with the border and they had to settle completely new lands. Some of them were not populated by Russians, some of them were wastelands, so of course they needed to find some women, some local women there.

And did the Cossacks skew male in their composition? It seems...

Well, yes, of course. The kind of mindset you need to just leave everything behind and run away and become a roving bandit... It's mostly... They didn't bring their women and children very often. But regarding what you said about the Don Cossacks being domesticated: well, basically, the Razin uprising was the final act of domestication, because it was after the Razin uprising that the Don Cossacks swore an oath of fealty to Alexei Mikhailovich and then also kept renewing their oath of fealty to the other Russian Tsars. Of course, there were still uprisings later, but we'll get into that afterwards.

In any case, the process of peasants running away increased in the late 17th century because of what you said, the centralization of the Russian state, specifically what we talked about in the last episode, the legal code that unified a lot of the laws regarding debt and taxes and things like that. As such, it made things more difficult for the people.

Yeah, it established an indefinite search for fugitive serfs.

Yes. And the Don region had an ancient principle: there is no extradition from the Don. That means serfs who ran away to the Don region were never returned to their lords, and they became free men. And these fugitive serfs, they became Cossacks. Separate from the Cossacks who owned land, who had been living there for decades or centuries, these new Cossacks were very poor. They didn't own anything. And of course, these new Cossacks were always the first to agree to participate in raids.

The original Wagner PMC.

And as such, these really increased, and thousands of people went to the Don, thousands of serfs. What sparked the rebellion, actually, was the so-called march for coats, pokhod za zipunami. That was a bit before the actual uprising. The pokhod za zipunami was basically just raiding for loot. It started like three years before what we understand as the actual Razin uprising.

So in 1667, a Cossack leader named Stepan Razin started raiding. He started raiding in the Volga region, in part blocking trade on the Volga River, which was really the most important trade artery in Russia. And the Russians, the Cossacks, were very actively robbing Russian and Persian merchant ships that were floating on the river. They also robbed other Cossacks. For example, they looted and burned to the ground the Cossack town of Yaitsky, nowadays Uralsk, nowadays located in Kazakhstan for reasons we will not get into right now. But it was the capital of the Ural Cossacks. And they also raided the Persian colonies on the Caspian Sea. So, yeah, for three years they just went around looting, robbing, burning. But at that point, they did not really have any political program. And as you said, it was just pokhod za zipunami, basically a march for loot. They just wanted to rob and, well, make money and get stuff.

But in the spring of 1670, the second period of the uprising began, which was actually a war against the government. It is a bit difficult to ascertain what really sparked it, what really changed Razin's bandit movement into an uprising against the government, but at some point he surrounded Tsaritsyn. It turned out that a lot of the poor people in the places Razin looted expressed a desire to join him, and so, yeah, they did join him, and his army grew. It started with a small band of Cossacks of like 500 people in 1667 when they left the Don to loot, and by late 1670 it had grown to over 50,000 people, most of them just poor, city poor, poor peasants who joined the army in the hope of some kind of better fate than the one they were experiencing.

He did not destroy Tsaritsyn or Astrakhan. Both of these cities turned out to, well, give his army a lot of soldiers. As to the political goals, it's complicated, as always. It's very complicated, and there is a lot of theater. Razin at no point positioned himself against the Tsar. As happens so often in Russian history, the Tsar was a sacral figure, and Razin never wanted to topple the Tsar. Razin never wanted to abolish the monarchy, and at least he didn't express the desire to become Tsar himself. The stated goals of Stepan Razin and his army were to fight the traitorous boyars who were having a negative effect on the Tsar.

What did he actually mean by that? The boyars made Alexei more westernized, or what?

Or they just made him raise the taxes. The evil boyars forced the innocent Tsar to raise the taxes, and as such, we are going to Moscow and killing all the boyars so the holy Tsar can lower the taxes again.

Russian libertarianism.

There was also a conspiracy theory. In that same year, in 1670, the first wife of Alexei Mikhailovich, Maria Miloslavskaya, died, and it of course sparked a lot of theories on the matter, especially when two of her sons died shortly after her death, the 16-year-old Tsarevich Alexei and the 4-year-old Tsarevich Simeon. And of course there were rumors among the people that they were poisoned by the same traitorous boyars who tried to seize power into their own hands.

And also, yeah, funnily enough, we have a very contradictory thing happening here, namely that, as you're saying, one of the goals that Stepan Razin publicly stated was that he wanted to avenge the murder of Tsarevich Alexei, the 16-year-old son of Maria Miloslavskaya. But at the same time, in his army was one of the archetypes we learned to love in previous episodes: False Alexei.

Yeah, who's actually alive. Somewhere in the Volga region, where you need to go and loot the place and find Tsarevich Alexei, who is alive because he escaped the traitorous boyars.

Yes, he had an Alexei with him, some guy who claimed to be the miraculously surviving son of the Tsar, and yeah, it was very weird. And as I'm reading from this book: "in addition, the leader of the uprising promised to give the black people freedom from the dominance of boyars and nobles." Did I read that right? Black people?

I mean, I've explained that in the Time of Troubles episode. Black people were the population of the cities, what passed as a middle class back then, basically the people who lived in cities and were not peasants.

The townsfolk, yes.

The black classes were those who paid taxes into the treasury.

Oh, yeah.

So not Cossacks, not peasants who paid in work to the lords, but merchants, craftsmen and so on.

It may be a thing, this whole similarity, right? It's identical to Russia today, with the conspiracy theories, with the evil boyars and all that, and the sacred sovereign. But before the Romanovs, or before even the Mongol Horde invasion, do we actually see in early Russian history this conspiratorial mindset and the fake pretenders to the throne of the early Rurikids?

If not, nothing comes to mind.

I think this is made up. Then it's not Russian history, because it's an essential part of Russian history and you can easily recognize it.

Yeah. So, yeah, basically at the same time, Stepan Razin was marching on Moscow to avenge the death of the heir, and at the same time he made people in the territories he entered swear fealty to the False Alexei. As usual, very contradictory, very theatrical. And you have this in every large uprising in Russian history, really. I think Pugachev also had some false pretenders with him. It's just the mainstay of Russian history, really. It always happens.

In any case, it was a pro-government uprising, a march for justice. After he captured Astrakhan, much of the local population, the poor, entered his army, and also some of the ethnic minorities who were living in the area: Chuvash, Mari, Tatars, Mordvins, and so on. When he reached Samara, Razin changed his tune and said that Patriarch Nikon and Tsarevich Alexei were with his army. They, however, did not march on Moscow. They marched in the other direction. They went to Simbirsk. The garrison of Simbirsk was actually commanded by Ivan Miloslavsky of the Miloslavsky boyar family. So Moscow, of course, sent a large army to crush Razin. And in the Battle of Simbirsk, he fought Ivan Miloslavsky and Yuri Baryatinsky.

And it was an absolutely crushing defeat, because the Cossacks of the time were not yet the disciplined elite military force we see in the 19th century. They were just a bunch of poor people with farming instruments. And the mob of 20,000 under Razin's command was slaughtered by the 5,000 soldiers sent by Moscow. The army was just completely slaughtered. Like 15,000 out of 20,000 died.

And, yeah, all the prisoners were hanged immediately. And the Tsar's army lost only, like, 40 people dead. So it was a complete curb stomp. Razin was captured, but all the other leaders were immediately killed in comically brutal ways. Razin himself was quartered in Moscow. The False Alexei was also killed. It's not specified how he was killed, but I guess he was quartered as well. I think that was the usual punishment for uprisings, although many were hanged. Most of the Cossack leaders who were captured were hanged, I think, and not quartered.

But the law against unusual punishments was not in place in the Russian code of law yet, right?

Yeah, that came a bit later. I think it was after Sophia, actually. At least, I think, cutting off hands for theft was banned under Sophia, if I remember correctly.

So, yeah. After Razin's death, there were still small groups of rebels who roamed the country, but they did not really have any successes. And in late 1671, Astrakhan, the last stronghold of the Razinites, was captured. And that was it. The executions were massive, so it was really harshly suppressed. A British sailor who watched the executions of the rebels on the Volga wrote: "The place was a horrible sight and looked like the antechamber of hell. Gallows had been erected all around, and on each of them hung 40 or even 50 men. In another place there were decapitated bodies covered with blood. Here and there were stakes with rebels on them, of whom a considerable number were still alive on the third day, and their groans could still be heard."

So they were very creative. Some were decapitated, a lot were hanged, some were impaled, others were quartered. It was kind of the tradition of the time all over Europe to be very creative when dealing with such things. Very brutal, but it seemed to do the job.

So I guess it is time for discussing what Alexei achieved, in extremely short form, and there are a few things that we haven't mentioned in the previous episode. You know the gist of it, and you know all the major wars and all that. I'm not sure if we have mentioned it, but the first Russian frigate was built under Alexei in 1668, the Russian frigate Oryol. So he basically created the Russian navy. And also he revoked the law of his dad, Mikhail. Mikhail had a law imposing the death penalty for possession of tobacco, and the code of law from 1649 revoked this law, and it was legal to smoke and have some tobacco.

Yes, it is funny, because a few decades later it was basically illegal not to smoke.

I wonder why the death penalty?

That was a very common theme in Europe at the time. Tobacco, when it was first introduced, was widely regarded as a very evil, devilish thing, the devilish seed, something like that, although the Bible doesn't have anything against tobacco. In the West, you had Jean Nicot, after whom nicotine is named. He introduced it to France and made it fashionable. And it just took several decades, almost a century, for the fashion to reach Russia as well. But in very large parts of Europe, even where it was introduced and became popular, like even during a time when everyone in Spain was already smoking tobacco, it was officially banned and there were harsh penalties for contraband. So tobacco was very controversial.

So, the colonization of Siberia continued, and the following cities were built during the reign of Alexei: Penza, although Penza is not Siberia, but in any case Penza, the march to the east, let's call it that; Simbirsk, modern-day Ulyanovsk; Nerchinsk; Selenginsk, which is in Buryatia; and Irkutsk.

Yeah, a couple of years forward, and Alexei Mikhailovich died in 1676, aged 46, actually. He was young, although he managed to do a lot. And then the second problem, the problem of succession. That's what Russia was facing, although he had a lot of kids. Alexei had two wives total, right? The first one, the turbo-Slavic Tatar woman Miloslavskaya, who was a few years older than Alexei, gave Alexei a lot of kids, 13 to be exact, and then she died. Out of all 13, only two boys could be regarded as successors. One of them was sickly and smart, relatively smart, Fyodor Alekseyevich. The other was sickly and dumb, Ivan Alekseyevich.

Yes, but Fyodor was the older one, and after the death of Alexei he was officially declared the heir apparent. So, yeah, it seemed seamless at the time. He became the ruler of Russia in '76. He was very, very sick, Fyodor III, as he would go down in history. When Alexei Romanov was buried in the Archangel Cathedral, Fyodor had to be carried behind the coffin. He couldn't even walk on his own. He was carried on a stretcher. He was chronically ill. He was so weak, and just some time before Alexei's death he had fallen off a horse and broken his legs. But at the same time, he was very smart. He had received a very good education. He was fluent in Polish and Latin, in addition to Russian. And he was a very, well, let's call it enlightened ruler when his health allowed it, which was not often the case. And this was a great weakness, of course.

A lot of court intrigue immediately began, as is so often the case in Russian history. With the death of a Tsar, the court immediately exploded in a bunch of vendettas and backstabbing and intrigue and conspiracies. Everyone immediately turned on a person who had become very important in the later years of Alexei's rule, namely Artamon Matveev. Artamon Matveev was one of the first real westernizers in Russian history. He was always very pro-Western, he was a smart and resourceful man, and he was a very close advisor to Alexei, and in the end kind of his mentor as well, I guess. In any case, he had a lot of influence at the court, but everyone immediately turned on him. The Miloslavskys, who had lost a lot of their influence when Alexei's wife died, came back.

One faction that has to be explained before we go on is the streltsy. The streltsy were basically riflemen, translated, but I guess for a better comparison to other European things, you could call them musketeers, the Moscow musketeers. They were a special military unit that was created by Ivan the Terrible, and they were the first to have firearms. The streltsy were kind of their own caste. Service in the musketeer units was lifelong and hereditary, so they were kind of their own caste, sort of like a military aristocracy. Many of them were concentrated in Moscow; like half of the overall number was always in Moscow to guard the Kremlin and the city. And because they were, well, hereditary and closed off to the rest of society, really, and of course a formidable military force in their own right, they became an important power player in Russian politics. They were problematic. There were several, well, uprisings of the streltsy, and they were kind of like the Roman Praetorians, in the sense that they used their position of being armed and close to the Kremlin to influence court politics.

And the commander of the streltsy, who was a relative of Maria Miloslavskaya, Prince Yuri Dolgorukov, not to be mistaken for the other, medieval Yuri Dolgoruky, allied with the Miloslavskys, and they attacked Matveev. They accused him of corruption. Matveev was dismissed, and the streltsy were backing the more conservative elements of the Russian court. They reintroduced some of the old Russian laws, they banned theater and ballet and stuff like that. And there was a feud between the Naryshkins and the Miloslavskys.

So, two wives. Yeah, the first wife was Miloslavskaya, and the second wife of Alexei was Naryshkina. And Naryshkina gave Alexei only three kids. But contrary to the popular belief that the quality of kids deteriorates with the age of the father, these kids from Naryshkina were of better quality overall. Two out of three kids survived. And Naryshkina's only boy was Pyotr Alekseyevich, who would become Peter the Great in the future.

Yes. But as for the rule of Fyodor: he was very weak due to his poor health, but he had a strong mind, he was determined, and he didn't trust any of the people around him, so he was not easily manipulated. Under Fyodor, there were no regents, no parallel government. There was not even a first minister. So he did everything himself, and he kept the seals to himself and never let anyone stamp anything in his name. So he concentrated power. He tried to concentrate power in his own hands as much as he could.

Before we go on, a bit on the foreign policy. The truce with Poland was prolonged in 1678, and in 1681 they also managed to have a peace treaty with Turkey and the Crimean Tatars. So in that period, Fyodor basically put a stop to the constant wars for a time and went on to reform the army again and expand it greatly. Fyodor was very interested in European politics. He was basically the first to introduce, in the Posolsky Prikaz, which was sort of the foreign ministry of the Russian state at the time, the practice that they had to buy Western journals and newspapers and translate them for him to read. So he was always up to date on European politics and stuff like that, and he tried to assert himself against the boyars and everyone else. Also, I guess it has to be mentioned that under his rule he continued repressions against the Old Believers.

But before that, there is his personal life. In 1680 he made a public appearance, basically to show himself. He didn't do that very often; he mostly stayed inside the Kremlin working. But he tried to assert himself more against the boyars, and during this public procession on Palm Sunday in 1680 he met a girl, Agafya Grushetskaya, a Polish girl.

Yes, she was half Polish, I think. In general, I would say the Miloslavsky clan were huge Polonophiles and were partly Polish themselves. I mean Polish in the sense that they were like some szlachta from Smolensk who were very Russified. But yeah, the name is Polish, of course.

And Agafya was very well educated, the daughter of a nobleman. She spoke four languages and played music, and Fyodor fell in love with her and announced to the court that he would marry her. But this did not really work out. He could not assert himself against the Miloslavskys. The Miloslavskys bullied Fyodor into doing it the traditional Romanov way, a bride show. And in the end Fyodor chose none of the girls from the bride show, none of the young noblewomen who had been presented to him. And fearing that Fyodor would go against their wishes and marry Agafya anyway, the Miloslavskys framed Agafya and her mother for prostitution. They accused them of being prostitutes, and there was a lot of legal stuff and conspiracies, but in the end Fyodor married her anyway in a very small and private wedding, which is very untypical for a Tsar.

But yeah, soon after, Agafya gave birth to a boy, Ilya Fyodorovich, but three days later both she and Ilya died. This was the point at which Fyodor's health really completely collapsed, and he could not really bear what had happened. But Fyodor was still determined to produce an heir and to keep the dynasty stable. He held a new bride show, and he chose Marfa Apraksina, a goddaughter of Matveev, and he married her. And, yeah, he did not get to enjoy this second marriage for very long. His health was failing.

And then happened an event that would become, well, quite important. In the spring of 1682, one of the streltsy regiments in Moscow protested that their wages were not being paid, that their wages were being stolen by their commander, and they complained to Dolgorukov, who was the head of the streltsy at the time. And instead of addressing their problem, he ordered them to be flogged, the whole regiment. But instead of letting themselves be flogged, the regiment mutinied and started an uprising. But what they did not know was that at the same time Tsar Fyodor had just died, at the age of 21. So this created a complicated situation. The boyars were meeting and discussing which of the two Tsareviches should become the next ruler. It was very chaotic, because at the same time the streltsy were, well, rushing outside.

The two candidates, of course, were Ivan V, Ivan Alekseyevich, and Pyotr Alekseyevich, the two younger brothers of Fyodor. The boyars chose Pyotr to become the Tsar, and the Naryshkin clan supported Pyotr as their candidate. But here comes onto the scene a woman who has not really made an appearance yet in the politics of Russia, namely the sister of Pyotr, Sophia. Sophia protested that it was unfair to make Pyotr Tsar, because Ivan should actually become Tsar. And at Fyodor's funeral she did something very daring and brave. She appeared without a veil, without the moving screens that should protect the princess from being seen by the common people, and she publicly suggested that Tsar Fyodor had been poisoned.

Soon after, the streltsy poured into the Kremlin and demanded the punishment of their commanders. The authorities, the boyars, did not want to deal with 25,000 angry streltsy on top of a succession crisis, so they gave in. They had the commanders of the streltsy publicly whipped and forced them to pay the wages. And at the same time, Sophia and the Miloslavskys, whom she supported, spread the story, the rumor, at court and in Moscow that Tsarevich Ivan was in danger from the Naryshkins, who wanted to poison him. And this rumor spread among the streltsy, who were against the Naryshkins and for the Miloslavskys at this point. There was a lot of intrigue, and a bit later the streltsy, enraged by the rumors, massed beneath the Kremlin walls and demanded to see Tsarevich Ivan, because they feared that he had been killed.

So what began as a small mutiny over wages not being paid ended up with the streltsy becoming a deciding factor in the succession crisis, simply because there were thousands of them, they were armed, and they were determined to play a role in this. Tsaritsa Natalia, supported by the Patriarch, brought Ivan and Peter out onto the porch so the streltsy could see them. The leaders of the streltsy came up to examine the Tsareviches, and they then decided that they wanted Ivan to be Tsar, and they also decided that they wanted to see all the Naryshkins dead. So, yeah, Matveev tried to calm the situation down and suggested to the streltsy that they should apologize to the little Tsareviches and then leave.

Well, then Mikhail Dolgorukov, the son of the streltsy commander, did a very unwise thing. He threatened the streltsy. It is never a smart idea to threaten 3,000 armed men who want your head, and the streltsy started storming the Kremlin and started their very bloody mutiny. They threw Dolgorukov off the balcony and impaled him on their pikes, and then they started cutting him into little pieces. They did the same to Matveev. And all this happened right in front of Peter. And Peter never forgot this episode, where people were literally hacked into pieces right in front of him.

How old was he?

He was nine. Yeah, he was nine years old, and this was happening right in front of him. The people he knew, people he trusted, were just cut into pieces and impaled on pikes, and it was very gruesome. And there is a theory, a modern theory, that the PTSD from this event might have been what triggered Peter's epilepsy later in life.

Fun fact: one of the instigators during the streltsy riot was Pyotr Tolstoy, a diplomat and a future ally of Peter the Great, and an ancestor of the Tolstoy clan.

And of Leo Tolstoy the writer, right?

Yes. One of the later Tolstoys was a personal driver for Stalin. So, yeah. The streltsy kept walking through the Kremlin, building by building, room by room. They had a list of people they wanted to kill. It included all the Naryshkins, but also some other of Fyodor's favorites. Everyone they found was brought to Red Square, where they were slaughtered. They were completely slaughtered.

Yeah. And of course, when we talk of the Miloslavsky and Naryshkin clans in regard to the royal family, it's not really the case, because although Peter's mother was from the Naryshkin clan, he himself was from the Romanov dynasty. Of course, it was his kin, the Naryshkins, that got slaughtered.

Right. The streltsy meanwhile had come up with the theory that a bunch of Jews had poisoned Tsar Fyodor on the orders of the Naryshkins, and that the same Jews were also about to poison Tsarevich Ivan on behalf of the Naryshkins. And this was the justification for the massacre. They killed all the Jews in the Kremlin. There were not a lot of Jews in the Kremlin, not many, like two or three, I think. One was a servant, one was a doctor or something like that. Well, basically they killed all the Jews they could find, or people they accused of being Jews.

Yeah, and they killed all the Naryshkins they could find, but they really wanted Ivan Naryshkin. He was hiding in the nursery of Peter's little sister. And the only person at this point who could somehow de-escalate the situation, who had the nerve, who had the influence and the rhetorical ability to reason with the streltsy, was Sophia Alekseyevna. She had her own direct line to the streltsy through Khovansky, and she had nerves of steel to negotiate with them really directly. She was giving orders, she was sending people, she was sending messages around, and she was coordinating a response to all the chaos. And she came out with Natalia and Marfa, the Tsaritsas, to beg for Ivan Naryshkin's life.

But in the end, Sophia convinced Natalia to give up Ivan Naryshkin, Natalia's brother, and they did. And Peter watched this as well: his own mother and his uncle being handed over to the streltsy. Ivan Naryshkin was tortured for hours, very brutally tortured, but he never admitted to attempting to murder the Tsar. Finally, he was impaled and then dismembered, and then the streltsy, well, stomped on the pieces left of him until there was nothing left but bloody pulp.

And Ivan Naryshkin looked exactly like Peter the Great.

Yes, this is true. And it was at this point that Sophia really emerged as a power player. She was just 25 at the time.

And a woman.

And a woman. And in the tradition of the Romanovs, she had basically spent her whole life secluded in the Kremlin, and now she had to deal with this huge mass of scheming boyar conspiracies, this Game of Thrones type stuff, and streltsy covered in blood and entrails holding their pikes. She had to deal with all of that, so she really had nerves of steel and huge balls to even attempt to enter this situation.

She was very beautiful. She was very intelligent. Basically, the Romanov girls at that time did not really get an education. It was not a tradition. They were just taught how to read and write, some prayers, some religious education, but nothing further than that. Sophia, however, was extremely intelligent already as a kid, and because of her apparent intelligence she was allowed to receive the same education as her brothers, and as such she was very well educated. Of course, it would be a mistake to paint her as some sort of moral or ethical person. She was just as much a schemer as everyone else, but she was extremely talented, and even Peter, who had a lot of reason to hate her, agreed with this, that she was a very formidable opponent.

In any case, the streltsy declared their leader, Khovansky, to be commander of the streltsy forces overall, and Sophia managed to negotiate them into not massacring the other Naryshkins, and the streltsy basically declared Sophia to be the one who should decide who should become Tsar. She had a strange title, basically Great Sovereign Lady Tsarevna, Velikaya Gosudarynya Tsarevna, and basically she was made regent. And she decided to put both brothers on the throne as Tsars, so Ivan and Peter.

Khovansky, the leader of the streltsy, was not a personal supporter of Sophia. He just thought that she would make a good puppet, and he had political ambitions himself. And also, he was an Old Believer. Like many of the streltsy: as I said, they represented some of the most conservative, reactionary elements in Moscow, and a lot of the streltsy were Old Believers. And they demanded of Sophia that she reverse the anti-Old Believer reforms, and Sophia actually agreed at that point. But first she had to deal with a very new thing that had never happened in Russian history before: a double coronation.

Technically, Ivan was old enough to become Tsar in his own right. He was 16, wasn't he? But the main reason why a regent was needed is that everyone understood that Ivan was not fit to be Tsar.

It's interesting, why wasn't he declared Tsar outright?

Well, I guess because he was too stupid.

Was that an official reason? Is there anything written against stupidity?

Oh, I actually made a mistake earlier, I apologize. I said that Avvakum was burned under Fyodor's rule, but that's not true. That's actually part of the story we're telling right now. Namely, Khovansky and the other Old Believer streltsy tried to force Sophia, when she was already regent... Well, she had agreed to reverse the reforms to get the streltsy to calm down, but now she went back on that promise, logically, because that was unthinkable. She was very fierce with Khovansky, considering that she had witnessed him and the streltsy and the bloody massacre they staged in the Kremlin. But she looked him straight in the eyes and yelled at him that she would not reverse the reforms, and insisted on the Tsar's will being inviolable. The streltsy threatened that they would send her to a monastery, but she kept her cool, she stared them down, and she had enough loyal people around her. And, well, she had the streltsy executed, and Avvakum burned at the stake, and 20,000 other Old Believers were killed. So Sophia had made her position quite clear.

Yeah. As the Russian historian Lev Gumilev thought, she issued a certain order, the 12 articles of Tsarevna Sophia against the Old Believers. She really doubled down on the persecution of the Old Believers. It happened in the same year as Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Religious intolerance was trendy in 1682. And as Gumilev thinks, in both cases, in Louis XIV's and in Sophia's case of religious intolerance, the Jesuits were the secret instigators. And it kind of rings true, because the tutor of Sophia was Simeon Polotsky, a learned man from modern-day Belarus, and in those lands, the previously Polish-occupied lands, there were a lot of Jesuit schools.

I completely forgot that Avvakum Petrov was actually burned by Sophia.

Yeah, me too. I was sure that it was under Fyodor for some reason, but no, that was actually part of her making a point to the streltsy.

Actually, Sophia was quite popular in Europe as well. Voltaire liked her. Voltaire said about her that she had much intelligence, composed poetry, wrote and spoke well, and combined many talents with a pleasant exterior; they were only marred by her ambition.

So, yes, she was very ambitious, and to be able to rule, to really rule, she had to get rid of Khovansky and the streltsy as a political force. She went on a tour of the country together with the two Tsars and left Khovansky basically as the ruler in Moscow, or at least she made him believe that she did that. Sophia tried to find a way to get rid of him. She demanded that he send a royal bodyguard out of the city, out of Moscow. Khovansky, however, did not do that. He didn't want to give her any troops. Sophia, however, launched her own coup against Khovansky. She had a proclamation nailed to the gates of Kolomenskoye, which declared Khovansky a traitor. Khovansky was summoned there and arrested. Sophia and the boyars loyal to her denounced Khovansky for attempting to take over the state, and he was beheaded in front of Sophia. The other streltsy took the hint, bent the knee to her, and begged her for forgiveness. Sophia had basically managed to neutralize the streltsy politically and returned to the status quo of the boyars and the court being the center of political power.

The rest of Sophia's rule was in large part dominated by foreign policy problems. She tried to solve the disputes with Poland. The truce had been prolonged, and there was a whole commission working on a lasting peace. And in the end, in 1686, she managed to negotiate the so-called Eternal Peace between Russia and the Commonwealth. It confirmed the Truce of Andrusovo, and basically it secured Russia's possession of Left Bank Ukraine and Kiev. There was some money that would be paid to Poland as compensation for the loss of the Left Bank, and basically the Zaporozhian Sich, Chernigov, Starodub, Smolensk and so on were also confirmed to be Russian possessions forever, while Poland retained Right Bank Ukraine. And both parties also agreed not to sign a separate peace with the Ottomans, because the war against the Turks, the Great Turkish War, was the backdrop for all of this. And basically it turned Russia and Poland into military allies. And the treaty and the borders defined by the treaty remained in place for over 100 years. So in terms of 17th-century diplomacy, it really was an eternal peace.

In any case, by signing this treaty, Russia also more or less became a member of the Holy League. The Holy League, so basically the Polish Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire and the Venetian Republic, were fighting back in the Great Turkish War. The Ottomans were threatening Vienna until the Poles intervened, and when the Ottomans retreated from Vienna, Sophia agreed to join the Holy League's war on the Sultan, and this included an attack on the Crimean Tatars.

Interesting events. Russia joining the Holy League, the Catholic Holy League, is quite interesting if you look at it this way.

It kind of fell apart. Well, basically the Holy League was formed with the sense that it would end when the war with the Ottomans was over. The Holy League has been called the 14th Crusade by some, so it was a very interesting alliance if you look at it, really, basically for the first time ever putting Russia and Poland together as allies against a greater enemy. The Holy League was officially dissolved years later, in 1699, when the Treaty of Karlowitz was signed. Russia did not sign the treaty and continued to fight the Ottomans for another year.

As I said, Sophia was quite popular in Europe. There were also other things that she achieved in terms of international politics. Under Sophia, the Treaty of Nerchinsk was signed, which was the very first diplomatic document between the Tsardom of Russia and Qing China. It was a consequence of a mini-war between the Cossacks and the Chinese on the Amur River, actually an incredible series of sieges by the Chinese of Russian forts, namely the fort of Albazin. A reminder for me to read up on that and record a segment later.

Fun fact, going back to the Jesuit conspiracy: the language used in the negotiations between Russia and China was Latin. For the Russian side it was done by a Pole named Andrei Belobotsky, and on the Chinese side it was two Jesuits, one French Jesuit and one Portuguese Jesuit. And since none of the diplomatic envoys spoke any Latin, the Russians didn't know Chinese, the Chinese didn't know Russian, and there were no other languages they both knew, they had to rely on the Jesuits, who conducted the whole diplomacy in Latin, and the treaty was also in Latin. It's quite interesting, I find.

And of course, was it better than the Swedish treaty?

Yeah, of course. Who knows what those Jesuits agreed among each other.

Yeah, yeah. So, Albazin. Did we lose any land?

Yes, we basically gave up, for the time being, everything north of the Amur. But we kept the area between the Argun and Baikal, so that was okay. And this border basically lasted for like 70 years, until, well, until we annexed the Amur territories. But at that point, pressuring China was not really a priority, so it was as good as was possible. It was, I guess, fair. The area was completely indefensible for us at that time. Russian Far East colonization simply wasn't advanced enough at that point. And until the Treaty of Kyakhta, and the Treaty of Aigun after the Amur annexation, and the Convention of Peking, the borders remained unchanged. But as soon as Russia had enough power in the area, they took whatever territories they thought were useful. So that was the very first Russian-Chinese treaty.

The campaigns against the Crimean Tatars were not super successful, if we're being honest, but they had a political effect, namely they raised the prestige and authority of Russia in the eyes of its Holy League allies, and Russia was recognized by the Holy Roman Empire and the Venetians and the Poles as a major European power player as well. Sophia sent a Russian embassy to Paris, suggesting that Louis XIV should also join the Holy League, but at that time, of course, the French were allied to the Turks. In any case, quite skillful foreign policy cemented Russia's place as a major European power, including against the big enemy of the time, the Turks.

Sophia did not want to get crowned herself. She thought that would be quite dangerous, a precedent, and it would be a while before Russia would have an official female ruler and not just a regent.

In any case, a bit later, Peter was growing up. Even as a child he had always been quite the extraordinary person. He was very tall, he was very strong. He had started suffering from epileptic fits. He had lost his father at a very young age, and at a very young age he also watched trusted family friends being butchered in the most gruesome ways. It made a very big impression on him. He was very strong and very intelligent, but as a child, at least, he did not have a lot of interest in formal education. He had a tutor, but basically he became friends with his tutor, who did not teach him what he was supposed to teach him but just told him stories about war. And he became obsessed with the military, and he took a special interest in military technology such as artillery. And his tutor also taught Peter to drink, so, yeah, they would be fast friends for the rest of his life. However, Peter learned what he was supposed to learn, a bit of it at least. He knew some German, some Greek, some Latin, but he was never good with foreign languages, really. And he was never interested in philosophy.

Or even the Russian language.

Yeah. And from when he was 10, he started forming a miniature army called the poteshnye voiska, the toy army of Peter the Great.

Was he the inventor of such a toy army structure?

It's a bit complicated. The poteshnye voiska, the parade or toy army or fun army of Peter, was initially formed as a regiment under Alexei Mikhailovich, which would get the newest stuff and test it out, and there were very few of them. But it was Peter who turned them into a real army. Even as a 14-year-old, very fascinated with artillery, he created an artillery unit in his toy army. So, yeah, it was really funny, actually.

What were they shooting at?

Well, he had the training fields at his disposal, and it's really very funny: everything he learned from his tutor about carpentry, military engineering and so on, he had his toy army exercise. So it was very funny, and no one really cared about this. They just thought it was a kid having fun. And I find it really interesting. He also trained sieges and stuff like that, defending and attacking, so they were very well trained and well equipped. It was not a toy army, despite its name. It was an elite.

Was it made up only of kids, by kids, his friends, or adults as well?

No, no, no. His very first play unit was like 300 people. These were friends, of course, but also foreigners at court, servants and so on. These were the very first. But later, this toy army would turn into one of the most glorious military units of the Russian military in all its history, namely the Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment. Preobrazhenskoye was a village where Peter created his toy army and had them encamped. And right next to it was another village, Semyonovskoye, where he created the second toy regiment, the Semyonovsky Regiment, which is also one of the most famous and glorious guards regiments in Russian military history. So, yeah, it was very interesting.

One of the first friends of Peter to join his toy army was Aleksashka Menshikov, a stable boy. He was a good friend of Peter, they drank together and so on, and they remained friends for a good long time.

Yeah. So both the Semyonovsky and Preobrazhensky Regiments were disbanded in 1917, but the Semyonovsky Regiment was actually resurrected in 2013, so it's still active right now.

So is the Preobrazhensky. It's a parade regiment, the 154th.

Both are parade units, right?

Yes, yes, they are both.

So they're not fighting in Ukraine?

No, they are parade units.

And this Sasha Menshikov, he would become quite important later on, but we will talk more about him in another episode. He would outlive Peter. They would remain friends all his life, but in the end the stable boy would become the most powerful person in Russia. Crazy how that happens.

But back to Ivan Romanov.

Ivan Romanov, right, his brother.

Yeah, the co-ruler of Russia. Both were underage when Sophia became their regent. Ivan was 16. And while Sophia was regent and she was making all those truces and all those deals, and Peter was playing with his toy army, what was Ivan doing?

He wasn't doing much of anything, really.

Ivan the Fifth.

Yes, Ivan the Fifth. He wasn't doing much of anything, really. Sophia liked him. She liked him, she was very considerate of his needs and so on, and she was very careful that everyone would treat him with respect. But she never asked or consulted him on any important things, so he never had the slightest say in what was happening with the country or in Moscow. And basically, Sophia treating Ivan with so much respect... She did love him, she did like him personally, but it was not about him that she was so nice to him. It was more that she tried to... it was kind of divide and conquer, right?

She was trying to undermine Peter and his influence, of course.

Yeah, because she could of course sense that Ivan was not dangerous to her at all. He was probably mentally retarded, and he was not actively involved in anything at all. So basically the only reason why Ivan played a role and people had to defer to him was because Sophia didn't want Peter to consolidate power.

Right. But he made some children, and...

Right, yeah. And one of the children...

His daughter would become Russian Empress.

Yes. Some 40 years after that. So, well, as to mental retardation and all that, there are also claims, for example by Vasily Tatishchev, that he was smart enough, whatever that means. But, yeah, we can't know for sure, of course. We need to check if there are any material sources, some letters. Did he write any letters? It's very interesting.

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty sure he was described by foreign ambassadors as very stupid and almost blind and paralytic and so on.

Oh yeah, being blind was not that good in that day and age.

So, yeah. And he died in 1696.

Yes. But when did Sophia stop being regent? When was she deposed from her role, basically?

Yes. Peter was very much obsessed with technology, whiskey and girls. And the thing is that his friends, the mercenaries he was hanging around with, were also the best soldiers that existed in Russia. They were much older than him, but he was so smart and impressive that that was no issue. And Peter was learning the art of war. He was training 10,000 soldiers. And, yeah, he created Pressburg, a small fortress that he also used in his war games and maneuvers. And he had his own little army to serve as his Praetorian Guard, who were very loyal to him. And Sophia felt threatened by this, not so much by the army itself, because she had 25,000 streltsy at her disposal, but by Peter's personality, really, because he was very forceful and so on.

In any case, Sophia understood that Peter was becoming a problem for her and that soon he would demand power, and she started looking for solutions to this. One of the solutions she thought would make sense was to have Ivan married, as you mentioned before. And she also considered becoming Tsaritsa in her own right, but it soon became clear that this was impossible. The streltsy would not go for that. It was quite an interesting time. There was a lot of pressure and tension at court.

Yeah, it was kind of a cold war.

Yeah, that's a very good description, really. Peter had a residence in Preobrazhenskoye, this village, and Sophia was in the Kremlin. And each party suspected the other of intending to start an open confrontation by force, in a bloody fashion. So there were a lot of conspiracies, in Peter's court in his village and in Sophia's court.

Right. So basically it escalated when General Golitsyn returned from an unsuccessful campaign against the Tatars, the Crimean Tatars, and Golitsyn staged a triumphal march for himself, pretending that he had achieved something. And Peter did not turn up, and he said that this was all a shameful display, that it was actually a defeat and Golitsyn didn't deserve a triumph, and he refused to receive him. And this was when the cold war escalated. In some sense, this is what kicked it off. Both Sophia and Peter were convinced that one would try to assassinate the other.

Peter ordered the arrest of the head of the streltsy, Shaklovity. Sophia summoned Shaklovity; of course, he was not arrested. And she convinced him that Peter was trying to have everyone killed, and she mobilized the streltsy. And Peter got the message from one of his supporters that the streltsy were coming to kill him in Preobrazhenskoye. He jumped on a horse, left Preobrazhenskoye and hid in the Trinity Monastery, and his toy regiments joined him there. And for a moment it was basically, well, a stalemate, right?

Soon after, Peter ordered the streltsy to come to the monastery and report to him. And, of course, the streltsy could not refuse an order from a crowned Tsar, and they had to come. Sophia originally wanted to go with the streltsy, but Peter refused to, well, talk to her, really. And Sophia banned the streltsy from leaving Moscow under pain of death, but some of the streltsy started leaving Moscow anyway. They came to the Trinity Monastery. More and more boyars and streltsy came there to pledge fealty to Peter, as their conflict had become very public at this point. But neither of them wanted a civil war, because militarily the streltsy would possibly, probably beat the toy army of Peter, but they didn't want to do that either, because he was a Tsar.

So, yeah. And the interesting thing in Peter's biography, which we will focus on way more in the next episode, is that Peter was really a shape-shifter. He is described entirely differently, even in his appearance and his behavior as well. Because, as you said, he was hiding in the Trinity Monastery, and there it's written that he behaved like a different man.

Yes, yes, yes. So he was like a Moscow Tsar.

Exactly. He was known to be a carouser. He was always out drinking, chasing skirts, playing cards...

Among the German youth, yes.

Yes, hanging out with foreigners. So, your basic European decadent aristocrat, really. But when he was at the Trinity Monastery and had to appear like a true Russian Tsar, he basically lived exactly like Mikhail had lived. He was praying all day, he was going to all the services for liturgy, he was wearing plain clothes and not the fashionable things he usually wore. So he behaved exactly like you would expect from a medieval Russian boyar, and this had a great effect on the streltsy and on the other aristocrats in Russia.

When in Rome. He was a total actor.

Yeah, exactly. Soon after, Peter sent a messenger to Sophia demanding the arrest of Shaklovity, the head of the streltsy, and he insisted that General Golitsyn must be exiled. Sophia started losing her nerve at this point. She ordered Peter's messenger to be killed, but she couldn't find anyone willing to do it, which was a sign that her authority was slipping away from her. More and more streltsy and courtiers went to the monastery. She tried to stop it, but it didn't work. It really didn't work. Soon thereafter, Peter also summoned his foreign mercenary friends, and they all marched to Peter's side. And the streltsy, who were very much afraid of finding themselves on the losing side, themselves demanded the arrest of Shaklovity, and in the end she had to give him up. He was carted to Peter at the monastery, where he was tortured until he confessed that he was a participant in a conspiracy to kill Peter and crown Sophia as Tsaritsa.

Shaklovity was killed, Golitsyn surrendered, and Sophia was arrested. Peter started more maneuvers with his play regiments and told his brother that Sophia was finished and that they would continue ruling together. And they did, formally, until Ivan's death six years later. So he didn't break his promise to Ivan. Sophia was held at the Novodevichy Convent. Golitsyn, well, was spared a death sentence, but he was sent to the far north. And, yeah, it was very interesting. Peter had cemented his power. He had the play regiments, which turned out to be not toy armies at all but formidable military forces that basically decided the course of a palace coup.

So, yeah, Sophia was in the monastery. It was not that bad for her at first. She lived a quiet life in the monastery. She had a nurse and maids. She was sent food from the royal kitchen. She was allowed to have visitors whenever she wanted. And she had a guard who protected her. But this changed. I'm going a bit forward just to finish the story of Sophia, but we'll talk more about this in the next episode. There was another streltsy uprising in 1698, and Peter perceived this as a conspiracy to topple him and bring Sophia back to the throne. And thus Peter had the streltsy brought to the windows under Sophia's room at the monastery, and he had them all executed right there so she could look, because he was convinced that it was her. And they were hanging there in front of her window for some time. And her rights were significantly reduced. She had not been forced to become a nun at this point, so she was just living as a guest, or a prisoner, in the monastery, but after this, on the Tsar's orders, on Peter's orders, she was tonsured as a nun. And, yeah, she spent the rest of her life, six years or so, without all the comforts she had before.

Was she really responsible for this last streltsy riot of 1698?

I don't think it's really known. I think it might have been just paranoia on Peter's part, but we'll talk more about this when we get there.

But as to the streltsy, it was certainly a swan song for the streltsy as a force, because shortly after this last riot they were disbanded by Peter. And that was the tale of the streltsy and the end of this Praetorian Guard, which was very unruly. They rioted every time they didn't get enough money or resources. Their goal was to improve their economic and social situation.

Yes. But did they actually want Sophia on the throne?

I think, as usual with Russian uprisings, they had very particular interests, which they masked with the backdrop of a dynastic crisis, a succession crisis. It was taboo to just go against the Tsar, right? So it had to be either a fake Tsar, or the evil boyars who forced the Tsar to do things. And in this case the streltsy kind of took the position that Peter was a fake Tsar, and thus Sophia should become the Tsaritsa, and that this would solve all the problems. But I don't think that Sophia was involved in that at all. I think she was just a symbol for them.

Yeah. And one of the reasons why the streltsy were so mad is that a lot of foreign officers appeared in the military, and all of them enjoyed quite prestigious positions in the new military of Peter. The streltsy were basically an obsolete military force that tried to save their privileges, and the Russian army was being modernized by Peter with, as you said, the help of foreigners, of Western mercenaries. Peter was rapidly modernizing the army, making it more meritocratic and abolishing many of the hereditary preferences that the streltsy enjoyed. And they were objectively not an elite military force by the early 18th century. They were like an obsolete gang, a caste of their own that had outlived its own usefulness. They tried to save their position, but it didn't work. They faced the reckoning. After the 2,000-strong rebellion was crushed, for weeks in Moscow they were tortured publicly. And that was that.

So, yes, I think that's it for this episode. In the next one we can focus more on Peter and talk more about his youth, more about his upbringing, more about the early period of his rule, all the reforms. This was the last episode dedicated to the Russian Tsardom.

Yes, right. Peter the Great declared himself Emperor of Russia, Imperator, and the next episode will be about the birth of the Russian Empire.

Right. Well, thank you for listening. I hope it was interesting, educational, entertaining, informative, and see you very soon.

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# Chapter 6: Was Peter I All That Great?

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast, the Romanov series, part 5. In this episode we will tell you all you need to know about Peter the Great. Pyotr Alekseyevich Romanov wasn't always great, and according to some sources he wasn't great at all. We will try to make sense of his role in Russian history using different lenses. And no matter what your personal view on the matter is, we can all agree that the reign of Pyotr changed world history.

Under Peter, Russia stopped being just a strong regional power, or, as some said, the sprawling Great Tartaria to the east with a lot of catching up to do. No, Russia became a great European empire that was contending for hegemony over the known world, and no one can really argue about that. In general, Russians are a zero-to-a-hundred kind of nation, in the sense that we can quickly adapt to new things, new regimes, ideologies and customs. I mean, in the sense that we were conditioned by ever-changing social rules to be like that. And hence any notion of moderation is alien to us, because the changes in Russian society are never gradual and never gentle.

They happen brutally fast. We can be devout Orthodox men who fast and go to get our communion every week, listening to nothing but Znamenny chant in each ear. And the next day we stand relatively idle while our churches are being blown up into the air and priests are getting killed. Then we pride ourselves on being men of science and nuclear engineers and factory workers. And bam, the next day we wake up as sleazy vodka salesmen who believe in nothing but a pack of Marlboro, a pair of blue jeans and a foreign car.

Sorry for that digression, but it is what happened to us in the 20th century. And it was just like that at the turn of the 18th century as well. A deeply religious country full of Orthodox scholars and ragged holy men got a new ruler, Pyotr Alekseyevich. Him and his dim-witted brother from another mother, Ivan Alekseyevich. But their co-rulership was just on paper, and it was extremely brief.

So, since Peter defeated his actual opponent, Sophia Romanova, in the Game of Thrones and the streltsy uprisings, all power belonged to an 18-year-old Peter in the year 1690.

Yes, before we start, I wanted to read a quote by the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, who, for a period in the 19th century after the death of Karamzin, was the most dominant historian in Russia. He wrote a little paragraph which I think serves very well to really encapsulate the role of Peter in Russian history:

"We wake up. What day is it today? January 1st, 1842. Peter the Great ordered us to count the years from the birth of Christ. Peter the Great ordered us to count the months from January. It's time to get dressed. Our dress is tailored to the fashion set by Peter I. The uniform is of his design. The cloth is woven at the factory he established. The wool is sheared from the sheep he bred. A book catches your eye. Peter the Great introduced this typeface and carved the letters himself. You begin to read it. Under Peter I, this language became written, literary, replacing the previous ecclesiastical one. Newspapers are brought to you. Peter the Great started them. You need to buy various things. Everything from a silk handkerchief to a shoe sole will remind you of Peter the Great."

Well, that's a nice quote. I wonder if the Russian peasants actually felt Peter's direct involvement in their lives to this level. But yeah, the all-penetrating vision of Peter was deeply felt when he got into power and when he got to enact all those reforms.

Yes, and I think before we start talking about specific details, one of the most important things is to understand what is meant by westernization. Because in Russia, for a long time, there has been a tradition of so-called Westernizers who had, in my opinion, a very, very wrong approach to what it means to copy what is happening in Europe or the Western world.

In modern Russia, we really don't have proper Westernizers, or very few, in the spirit of Peter I, who went to study the West from its very basics, starting with simple stuff like carpentry, which we'll talk about later, and trying to understand how Western society functions at all levels. But what Russian Westernizers have failed to understand for the last two centuries is that Peter did not want to understand the West for the sake of worshipping it, or to have a reason to whine about how good the West is and how bad we are. The reason why Peter wanted to study the West was actually very simple. His goal from the beginning was to defeat the best army in Europe at the time, the Swedish army, and to destroy the Swedish Empire. And that was the main reason why Peter was even interested in modernizing or westernizing Russia.

I think this is most perfectly encapsulated by Peter after the Swedish defeat at Poltava, which we will also talk about, but in a later episode, I think. Peter held a banquet with captured Swedish officers, and he raised a wonderful toast. After crushing the best army in Europe on the field, Peter raised his glass and drank to "our Swedish teachers."

So I think this should be the backdrop to all the westernization efforts of Peter, and not trying to put a lot of, like, civilizational philosophy into it that simply wasn't there. It was about technology, but not only that.

He saw that some of the European customs were superior and led to better results. Not only customs, but the structure and organization of things. As we know, Russians used to venerate the Tsar above all else, even when they disagreed with his policies or even rioted against the state. But the new Tsar, Peter, was different from all of his predecessors. None of the previous Romanovs or Rurikids ventured as far as Peter in their mission, because most of them were too preoccupied dealing with internal strife, feuds and civil wars, or spent half of their day praying in the chapel.

Peter, though, was Faustian. He was demonic in more ways than one. And he stood out physically as well. Let's reiterate what he looked like. Peter's dad, Alexei, was actually a tall man. We forgot to mention it, but Alexei stood at six feet, which was pretty gigantic for that time. And Alexei's love child with Naryshkina turned out to be a total genetic freak, 203 centimeters tall, or 6 foot 8 inches. And despite that, he reportedly had narrow shoulders and small feet, American size 8, or European size 38, or Russian size 39. What else do we know about his appearance that stood out?

Well, he was not just tall, kind of freakishly tall for his time really, but also very strong. He was very physically strong and fit. He had some medical problems, which we'll get into a bit later, but overall he was a very healthy and strong man. He liked physical labor, he was good at it, he was good with his hands. I think in terms of physical appearance he stood out from the rest of the Russian monarchs a bit. I guess maybe Alexander III was a bit similar to Peter in terms of appearance, by being as tall and strong. Peter basically was kind of like an ancient warlord, in that he was not just the king because he was the king, but he was the king because he was actually the biggest and strongest guy.

It kind of contradicts the fact that he had narrow shoulders and extremely small feet, but I'm not sure, maybe it is all about height. In the end, the first looksmaxxed Russian monarch.

We have already discussed his early childhood.

Yes, yes, I think we discussed everything up to when he took power. So immediately upon starting his reign, after the mostly bloodless coup against Sophia, Peter really didn't waste any time.

As I said, he appeared like an ancient warlord, and I think that's what he saw himself as too. Immediately upon ascending to the throne properly, not just in name, he started preparing the war against the Ottomans. He left his brother Ivan to deal with all the rituals of the Moscow court, and he left his uncle, Ivan Naryshkin, to run the government, at least formally. The real, actual power in Russia, which also reminds one of ancient or medieval rulers, was always where Peter was. His retainers, really, his traveling court, this was always the center of power.

And usually Peter at this time was at Preobrazhenskoye, where he drilled his toy army, which would turn out to be more real than any real army, and created a sort of mock court, which would later evolve into what we know as the All-Drunken Synod, but more on that a bit later. Peter was very, and this also differentiates him, I guess, from earlier monarchs, he did not really care much about ritual, and he did not care much about social pedigree, really. The people he surrounded himself with were of all kinds, it didn't matter to him. They could be foreign mercenaries, they could be the sons of pie sellers or stable boys, or they could be hereditary Rurikid princes.

It really didn't matter. So he wanted to create a Männerbund, and via his personal relations with his closest friends he established loyalty, and not with the formal hierarchy.

Yes, yes, he was a very meritocratic ruler, so to speak. Yeah, I wonder what life was like in the German village then, because it sounds very interesting. He was a neighbor; he lived in Preobrazhenskoye, and the neighboring place was the German village. It's all within the borders of modern Moscow now. And the German village had a few generations already of Germans who were born in Moscow, basically, so they were locals, such as his early lover Anna Mons.

Yes, yes. I figure that those people spoke in a weird pidgin Russian, Germanized Russian, probably.

Yes. In any case, Peter was a big fan of the relaxed expat life, and he started assimilating in the German village. He started smoking German pipes, going to German parties, and he started hanging out with other foreigners, chief of which were a French and German mercenary, Franz Lefort and Patrick Gordon. Both of these would become very important later on.

And yes, this is when he started his affair with Anna Mons, who was the daughter of, I think, a jeweler from the German village, the Nemetskaya Sloboda. And this is actually what his mother, Natalia Naryshkina, or Romanova but born Naryshkina, really didn't like very much. And this is why she decided to get him married as soon as possible to Eudoxia Lopukhina. Quite an unhappy marriage, but yeah.

Very uncool surname, Lopukhina.

That's true. The most important person, however, despite all this, was a Russian and an aristocrat, Fyodor Romodanovsky. He would remain basically the second most powerful person in Russia for all of Peter's rule. He became the head of the Preobrazhensky Prikaz, which at first was basically Peter's personal intelligence service, which informed him of events at the court and so on. It was possibly the first Russian intelligence agency, and later it would also become the country's secret police and arrest and torture and disappear people. Fyodor Romodanovsky was a boyar from an ancient family. The Romodanovskys are Rurikids, a very ancient, very noble pedigree, but he was a great friend to Peter.

And basically, whenever Peter was not in the capital, it was Romodanovsky who ran things, especially suppressing any kind of dissent against Peter. If you've seen The Godfather, then Romodanovsky was kind of like Peter's Luca Brasi, the enforcer everyone was afraid of. Peter even made up a special title for Romodanovsky, Knyaz-Kesar, which is probably something like Prince Caesar. So a surrogate Tsar for when the real Tsar was not there. Peter really hated formal rituals and all that stuff, and that's why he always got other people to attend those for him, either his brother or Romodanovsky.

He ruled through this group, this Männerbund, which mostly consisted of his friends from the Nemetskaya Sloboda, random people he met who impressed him, and a couple of relatives, mostly the relatives of his wives and other relatives, like the Dolgorukovs, the Saltykovs, the Naryshkins, the Apraksins and so on. But also Ivan Musin-Pushkin, who was Tsar Alexei's illegitimate son.

Peter immediately went on to reform things. He put an emphasis on the military especially. The first years were basically Peter just trying to whip his toy army into shape and see what lessons he could take for the Russian army proper. By the end of the second year of his reign, he staged a series of military exercises, maneuvers, pitting basically his toy army against the elite streltsy regiments. The toy army would later go on to become, as we mentioned in the last episode, Russia's Life Guard regiments, like the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky regiments. Peter himself participated in these maneuvers as well, at a very low rank, as a common artilleryman.

These maneuvers basically proved to Peter that the existing Russian army kind of sucks, and that his regular regiments, as they were called at the time, were vastly superior. And over the next years the old regiments were all gradually abolished, leaving only the Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, Lefortovsky and Butyrsky regiments. Peter's personal army, which had also helped him seize power, became kind of the foundation of the new Russian army. The guards performed very well. And after these maneuvers, Peter convened something like the ruling body of his reign, the so-called All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters.

This was a very strange organization, sort of a mix between, like, you'd imagine, an American college fraternity, a fancy British aristocratic club, and a Masonic lodge. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

Yeah, it was also analogous to the British Hellfire Clubs. Maybe not analogous, but probably similar. So basically it started as a dining society, but in a way this was the government of Russia. It had started when he was much younger, as a teenager, I think, the Jolly Company, but it became ever more elaborate. It could have between 100 and 300 guests, and he would always bring various attractions: foreign jesters, Africans, dwarves and all kinds, and of course a bunch of prostitutes. And he invented a bunch of titles for his friends, such as Buturlin, who was the King of Poland, and Nikita Zotov, who was the Patriarch Bacchus.

Yeah, there are some quite weird names that they made up for themselves in this organization. Wasn't Peter the Great called Pakhom Pikhai-Khuy?

Something like that. Many of the titles contain the word khuy. So basically, Pakhom Shove-Dick. Yeah, the archdeacons Shove-the-Dick, Go-to-the-Dick and Fuck-Off. And a bunch of cooks who would bring penis-shaped sausages on cushions. And the Prince-Pope, Zotov, the Patriarch Bacchus, was intended to be a parody of the Orthodox Patriarch, but Peter then decided against that and instead made him a parody of the Roman Pope. The Pope Zotov would start the dinners completely naked, except for some papal attributes, blessing the guests with a pair of crossed Dutch pipes instead of a cross. This was all very crazy. It was ridiculing the Catholic Church more than the Orthodox Church.

Yes, yes. Because, after all, Peter was still kind of... He did not like the elaborate ritual and formality, but he was still a religious man, really. Peter liked giving random people the highest ranks at these gatherings and himself just being some random minor person. But what's interesting is that it was not really all fun and games. It was supposed to be fun, but it had a purpose. The All-Drunken Synod was the governing body of Russia in the sense that Peter just brought together all the influential people and forced them to do stuff. It was not really voluntary. It was not really fun for some people, I guess, because they would be punished for not drinking fast enough or not drinking enough.

Peter himself could drink completely godless amounts of alcohol and then still rise at dawn to work.

Yeah, many people could not keep up with Peter in drinking. And Anna Mons, actually, whom we mentioned before, before she became Peter's mistress, was the mistress of one of his friends, the aforementioned Franz Lefort. Peter was very tolerant. He was not an envious man when it came to mistresses or girlfriends. Anna, for a time, became his chief mistress, really.

This was not just a teenage thing for Peter. He kept doing this basically all his life. It's really hard to imagine what these gatherings looked like. He must have been like some sort of horror-movie circus master presiding over, I don't know, something like backstage when the Rolling Stones were on tour. But at the same time, there wasn't really this sort of division between fun and decadence on one side and work on the other. All these Prince-Popes and archdeacons Shove-the-Cock and so on, these were influential appointments at his court. Half of his court really was an insane drunken carnival, but the other half was the military headquarters and governing body of the country. There was a great deal of overlap between Peter's top generals, bureaucrats and admirals and, well, his drinking buddies.

I wonder, when they decided to get serious, was there a signal for it? Or did they just stop in the middle of the violent, bloody orgy and suddenly discuss serious state affairs? This is nuts.

I think it was never intended to be pure fun. Maybe when Peter was 15 or something. But overall, it did certainly reflect Peter's sense of humor. What's also important to consider is that this was, I believe, a reaction to growing up in the Game of Thrones we described in the last episode, constantly seeing intrigues and conspiracies, coup attempts and stuff like that. Peter was a born monarch. He was very industrious. He worked every day. It was certainly a way for him to relieve stress, the stress of governing. And maybe it was done also to desecrate the boyars.

Yes, yes, certainly. I think it was something like the concept of the Roman Saturnalia, where slaves and nobles would switch roles for a day. Or maybe like what Bakhtin described in Rabelais and His World, his study on the grotesque and the carnival: the idea of collectivity and everyone being equal, creating a special form of contact and conversation where you could basically make connections and gather information in an atmosphere very different from everyday life. As such, I think the All-Drunken Synod had several purposes, one of these being to basically underline Peter's personal authority, because he was, after all, the God-given Tsar of all the Russias. And that meant he had the power to remake everything exactly as he saw fit, without anyone being able to put restraints on it, so he could do whatever he wanted.

And breaking taboos and stuff was just a way to emphasize that no one can stop his authority. It is limitless. Another point, I think, is that he used these events to balance his court. At these events he could try to make people become friends, or the opposite, try to make people enemies, play people off against each other. He could police their behavior in whatever way he saw fit, with prizes and punishments. There was a lot of hazing, basically making people submit to him. And people would submit to Peter in the All-Drunken Synod, doing various humiliating things in view of all the powerful people in the country. It created a sort of social pressure.

Well, for the time, it was a very smart idea. We can still see such organizations, especially in the Anglosphere, in many of the universities. It's similar to the fraternities and some secret societies at universities. It's weird, though, that it was the monarch who was organizing this. But still, it was macabre, but an interesting move. I wonder, does modern Russia have anything of this nature? Are the elite clubs into something like this?

No, I think it's very boring nowadays. They just sit in the banya and listen to Leps, and it's all very tasteless and boring.

Yeah, drink vodka and cry.

But there are two periods in the All-Drunken Synod. He established this club of fools and jesters in 1692, when he was 20. And in 1698 he ventured on his Grand Embassy to Western Europe, and after he was done with Europe, the club also changed. The first period was reminiscent of the jester, skomorokh, culture that was already present in Russia. That's where Peter got the idea from, basically. Even under Ivan Grozny, Ivan the Terrible, something similar was happening with all the fools, the holy fools, although it was not formally instituted under Ivan. After he came back from Western Europe, he had seen the carnivals, and he employed some of the European carnival aesthetics.

I mean, there have been various things like this in history before, like the Byzantine emperor Michael III, also known as Michael the Drunkard. He had his own thing similar to the All-Drunken Synod, with jesters and dressing up and doing disgusting things and so on. So yeah, I think it is a very archetypal thing, like the carnival, the Saturnalia. You always had things like that. In Britain, a bit later, you had what was called the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. In Poland you had the Babin Republic, which was also a sort of carnival court and literary society that functioned similarly. So it is not without precedent.

Yeah, I guess the actual Russian Duma is a bit of a carnival in itself. Combines the two. Very smart.

But in general, all the famous reforms and taxes that Peter instituted and implemented were done after his Grand Embassy, like the tax on beards, and forcing all the nobles to wear Western clothing.

I wanted to mention that Peter very obviously combined being a workaholic with being an alcoholic at the same time. This all was, of course, very taxing on family life. His wife, Eudoxia, was very neglected, because Peter was just hanging out with his drinking buddies and his mistresses all the time. Her brothers actually became kind of the focal point of opposition to Peter, and this had some unpleasant side effects. Peter had Romodanovsky torture one of his wife's uncles to death, and basically it was only his mother, Natalia Naryshkina, who convinced Peter to calm down a bit and not just wipe out all of his wife's family. His wife and all her family probably thought that he was the Antichrist incarnate.

Well, many people in Russia thought that.

Yeah, but did they do anything about it?

Well, they would later, yes. They would try. In any case, the first priority for Peter was to continue the war against the Ottomans. He started that by trying to march on Azov. The first Azov campaign actually ended quite badly, and only emphasized to Peter that it was very important for Russia to build a fleet. In the spring of 1695 he started the march on the Ottoman fortress of Azov, but was very unsuccessful, and by September he had to turn back, basically lifting the siege. Peter's Scottish mercenary friend, Patrick Gordon, convinced Peter in the end that he needed to reform the army, that he needed to put it under a single command, that he desperately needed a fleet, and that he needed siege artillery.

So Peter lifted the siege and went back to Moscow, but soon after he moved to Voronezh. And in Voronezh he would start preparing the next Azov campaign. He slept in a simple wooden house next to his shipyard. He woke up every day at dawn together with the carpenters and shipwrights to work on building Russia's first fleet. While Peter was preparing the next Azov campaign, his brother Ivan died. Peter briefly returned to Moscow to give him a funeral. The death of Ivan was the death of the old Muscovite tradition at court, I guess.

A few months later, Peter returned to Azov. He had started building the fleet half a year before, and to build the fleet he had a Dutch ship brought to Russia, a 32-oared galley. And the command of the troops was completely reorganized. The army was put under the command of a person you might remember from previous episodes, Alexei Shein. This time he was more successful. They managed to capture the city of Azov. It was basically a sea blockade of Azov. The Turkish fleet tried attacking through the mouth of the Don River, and left after they began losing ships to bombardment by the Russian fleet. And after massive artillery fire, the fortress of Azov surrendered, and Russia had acquired its first sea position, on the Sea of Azov, which would become very important later on.

And soon after, Taganrog was founded, nowadays in Rostov Oblast, and this was the very first military base of the Russian navy. Of course, the Azov campaigns were a great success for young Peter and his reign. And the same year, the Boyar Duma decreed the creation of the regular Russian navy. October 20th is still today considered the birthday of the Russian navy.

Peter organized in Moscow a sort of Roman triumph, a parade, and he had ancient statues brought along. He was basically acting as a Roman imperator during this parade. They had a six-horse carriage. But the procession was led by Patrick Gordon and Franz Lefort, actually, who had been promoted to full generals in the course of this campaign. Peter kind of hung back, chilling out with the naval captains, wearing very simple black clothes, and the people in Moscow, of course, found this very weird. So that was it for his first military campaign, which would later of course lead to a continuation of the war, but that is for another time, really.

Russia strengthened its positions greatly at the Karlowitz Congress, the Treaty of Karlowitz, generally considered the end of the Great Turkish War. It established the Austrians as the dominant power in their region, really. This also led into the Treaty of Constantinople a bit later, where the Ottomans formally ceded the Azov region to Russia.

A few weeks later, actually, the next great and important episode in Peter's rule already began, namely, I think two weeks after the parade, actually, Peter instructed the Foreign Office that he would send great ambassadors to the European countries. Formally, the expedition was led by Franz Lefort, Fyodor Golovin, who would later become the first chancellor of the Russian Empire, really kind of the last of the great boyars, and Prokopy Voznitsyn.

But, unbeknownst to most, or I guess not as unbeknownst as legend later made it, basically it was not announced that Peter himself would be traveling with them, sort of trying to be anonymous as Peter Mikhailov. Whenever Peter left Moscow, he would basically give all his power to several people, to make sure that none of them became too powerful and too important, and basically leave them in a constant state of conflict.

Yeah, he learned his lessons from his father and grandfather. But it's interesting that in the All-Drunken Synod he was also called Mikhailov, as if his father was Mikhail and not Alexei. I'm not sure what that means. But in general, he embarked on this diplomatic mission to strengthen the Holy League alliance that Russia had entered under Sophia. The Holy League really ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz after the Azov campaign. So I wouldn't say that the main purpose was diplomatic.

There are a lot of legends about the Grand Embassy, really. Maybe he tried to save the Holy League, this alliance of Germans, Poles, Venetians and Russians against a common foe. And everyone had a lot to gain from this alliance, right?

Yes. Of course, Peter did not want to stop at taking Azov. He wanted to have all of the northern coast of the Black Sea for Russia.

That would probably be bad for the Poles.

Yes. But with the Poles he would later have other common interests. Peter also really wanted to learn the trade of shipbuilding. This was extremely important to him. He was obsessed with giving Russia a strong fleet. And in general, he wanted to study the West, especially the Dutch and the Germans, to study the technology, study the societies. Peter's father was also very fascinated by technology, as we mentioned before, and was very interested in technological progress. But Peter decided to do something that really no Russian monarch had ever done before.

I think Peter was the first Russian Tsar to ever leave Russia at all. He left everything behind, his court, his country, because he wanted to catch up on his education. I think it was kind of unparalleled, really, that a person in such a position of absolute political power would leave everything behind for such a long time just to educate himself and learn about the world and technology and everything else. It shows either extreme humility or...

Yeah, yeah, because it's hard to do, even when you acknowledge that your country is lacking in something such as a fleet. You could just invite some Dutch shipbuilders and be done with it. Why go yourself? That's the weirdest thing, right? It's like going to study democracy in the United States and going back to your country. But unlike democracy, ships were a very serious thing back in the day. Where did he go first?

Well, first, before he left, there was an incident. The All-Drunken Synod was toasting the upcoming embassy at Lefort's personal residence when they got news of what was called treason against his majesty. An officer of the streltsy and several boyars had been denounced to Romodanovsky and his secret police for publicly criticizing Peter's lifestyle and the way he conducted the affairs of the realm. Peter had to make an example, a very symbolic example. And of course it would have been very dangerous to leave tens of thousands of streltsy behind without putting the fear of God in them and showing them that any kind of dissent would bring forth immediate punishment. There was probably some personal trauma in this as well. It was not that long ago, what, 10 years, that Peter had watched the streltsy cut his relatives and friends into pieces before his eyes.

Peter had the coffin of Miloslavsky, the streltsy commander, dug up. He had it placed on a cart pulled by pigs, and it was placed underneath the gallows where the so-called traitors were to be hanged. They opened the coffin, they had the traitors hanged and then also beheaded and dismembered, so that all their blood and guts and everything else would drip into Miloslavsky's open coffin and mix with the rotten corpse and stuff. So it must have been very gruesome. But I think it made for quite the show for the streltsy. And for the time being, they got the message.

Soon afterwards, the embassy left. It was a really grand embassy of over 200 people.

Yeah, not a small entourage, really a grand embassy.

The first stop was Riga in Livonia, where actually Peter was not immediately recognized, because he sat down somewhere to draw the walls and towers of the city fortifications of Riga. And he was ordered to stop by Swedish soldiers because, well, they thought he was a spy or something. Then he traveled through Germany and visited a bunch of German principalities. He met with Sophia of Hanover, the mother of the man who would later become King George I of England. Sophia of Hanover found Peter very interesting, and she wrote in her journal that he was a very extraordinary man, at the same time very good and very bad.

That's a great summary, actually.

After traveling through Germany, he finally reached the Netherlands. He spent time in Amsterdam and learned the trade of shipbuilding. He enrolled as a shipwright. He also visited the States General there to gain support for his war against the Ottomans, but the Dutch were not in any hurry to support him. He met with a bunch of interesting people, like Jacob de Wilde, the collector general of Amsterdam and one of the greatest collectors of coins and gems and medals and scientific instruments and things like that. He built one of the first and greatest museums in Europe, and Peter found this very interesting. There is also an engraving: the daughter of Jacob de Wilde made an engraving of Peter and her father meeting.

He also met with William III in Utrecht, I think. So William of Orange, of course, who at the time was ruling both the Netherlands and England. They became kind of friends. Peter was actually about to enter the Nine Years' War, or the War of the League of Augsburg, on behalf of William, but the peace treaty was signed before Peter could make any preparations for that. Peter, however, failed to really expand his anti-Ottoman alliance, so in that sense the Grand Embassy had kind of failed, but he did learn a lot about all kinds of science and culture and whatever else.

He also became interested in medicine at the time. He liked to visit anatomists and study corpses and so on. And whenever one of the people in his embassy needed some kind of medical procedure, Peter insisted on doing it himself, pulling teeth and so on. After the Netherlands, Peter went to England and spent some time in London, where he visited William again. And he also picked up a 16-year-old actress, Letitia Cross, who would become his lover for the time he spent in London.

It is said that after visiting the Palace of Westminster, where Peter saw lawyers, that is, barristers in their robes and wigs, he asked, "What kind of people are they and what are they doing here?" And he was answered, "These are all lawyers, your majesty." "Lawyers?" Peter was surprised. "What are they for? There are only two lawyers in my entire kingdom, and even then I think I will hang one of them when I get home." However, after visiting the English Parliament incognito, where the speeches of the deputies before King William III were translated to him, the Tsar said, "It's fun to hear when the subjects of the king are clearly telling him the truth. This is something we should learn from the English."

Yeah, the visit to England was actually more successful, politically at least, than his visits to the Netherlands or Germany. Of course, England did not join the war against the Ottomans, but Alexei Mikhailovich had cut all ties with England after the execution of King Charles I, because he found that to be a very offensive event. And for the Muscovy Company, the English trading company, it was of course very bad to be cut off from Russia suddenly, because they specialized in the Russian trade. Under Peter they reinstated trade ties, and trade actually exploded between Russia and England. This was very lucky for both parties, really. Peter also brought back a bunch of Englishmen with him, all kinds of different specialists. They were sent on a ship to Arkhangelsk.

On the way back there was a very important meeting, namely Peter met with the King of Poland, Augustus, Augustus the Strong. He was also a large, strongly built playboy. He was an even worse playboy than Peter. He was legendary for his sexual exploits. They became drinking buddies, kind of friends, and they sat together looking at maps and planned together the destruction of the Swedish Empire, setting the stage for the Great Northern War, which would become the quintessential event in that area of the world. And Russia and Poland, for a change, were allies in that war. This was probably Peter's greatest diplomatic success on the Grand Embassy. At the same time there was also a streltsy rebellion, which was put down in a very, very, very bloody way. Basically, he had 2,000 streltsy executed.

We were allies for a year in the Northern War, do you mean? Because it was a 20-year-long war, and for most of this war Poland was against us.

For like five out of 20 years, I think, they were fighting against us. Of course, there was the Warsaw Confederation, but that was the anti-Augustus people in Poland. But yeah, really, especially in the last 10 years. And in the beginning, Poland was on our side.

Yeah, it's funny how, like half a year ago, Putin clearly was reading too much about the Northern War, and he went to one of his typical meetings with some school in some city and started lecturing everyone about the Northern War and how it's relevant, because we were fighting for 20 years and this and the other. And we will do just that in the next episode. So be prepared. But are we done with the Grand Embassy?

There are a bunch of anecdotes, but I think most of them are mostly the stuff of legends. I mean, except that they trashed the house where they stayed in London very, very badly. They were probably drinking a lot, and it was kind of treated like the All-Drunken Synod clubhouse, and yeah, it was just completely demolished. They used the paintings for target practice with pistols, and then they broke all the windows.

The frat party to end all frat parties. Yeah. So the biggest theories about the man, about Peter the Great, Peter the First, are theories about impostors, that Peter was replaced by someone else. And it's not just about the Grand Embassy either. It started earlier. There were theories that Peter was replaced as an infant. So let's look at some of them. Not everyone had any connection or contact with the German Sloboda, the German village. It was weird for most Russians, and since they clearly saw that he was so interested in this German settlement, they thought he was probably replaced as an infant and his real dad was not Alexei, but some German.

What are the proofs of that?

There are some material sources from the year 1700. It's just a claim that the Germans replaced the infant with one of theirs. This theory was quite popular back in the day, but the major legends began when he embarked on his Grand Embassy, of course, because he was not present in Russia for two years, and that's quite a long time for a monarch to not be in his kingdom.

Yeah, I'm looking at those so-called theories or claims. One of them is that Peter was kidnapped during his Grand Embassy, put in a barrel, and this barrel was thrown into the sea. Have you heard about the prisoner in the iron mask?

Ah, the Man in the Iron Mask. Yes, yes.

The Man in the Iron Mask was actually Peter the Great.

And did he visit France? How did he end up in the Bastille?

I don't remember if he went to France on his first embassy. He certainly went there on his second embassy, but I think that was after the Man in the Iron Mask had already died. A lot of people in Russia thought that he was either a German who was pretending to be Russian, or that he was kidnapped and put in an iron mask.

Oh, this theory is actually not acknowledged by Wikipedia, because Peter is not mentioned in the list of candidates for the Man in the Iron Mask.

Well, they're hiding something.

Now you know the truth. So Peter the Great was tortured to death by Louis XIV and some other fellow returned home. It's weird, though, that he was still partial to the Protestants.

But still, in the previous episode we told you about the great Schism under Tsar Alexei. There were Patriarch Nikon's major religious reforms that changed the Russian Orthodox Church. They led to the Schism, a series of bloody religious infighting between the Nikonians and the Old Believers. And the Old Believers were big on all the theories. Of course, they didn't like Nikon's reforms, and they didn't like what Peter was doing either. They didn't like that synod of his, the All-Drunken Synod. Of course, they thought that he was the Antichrist. But because Old Believers are also Russians, and they would never dare to blaspheme against the Tsar, they invented a cop-out.

So their theory is that the real Peter actually became an Old Believer and traveled to some remote Old Believer monastery, a skete. And in his stead, Lefort invited the Antichrist himself to rule Russia. There is a quote that is still making the rounds on the Russian internet, actually, and it is usually attributed to this Antichrist fake Peter: "With other European peoples you can achieve goals in humane ways, but not with Russians. I'm not dealing with people, but with animals that I want to transform into people." People thought that he said that. Have you heard that quote?

Yeah, I think I have.

Do you think it's legit?

No, it doesn't sound like something he would say. It's not his style, really.

Yeah, I think it's fake. It's very modern sounding.

Yeah, of course. When Peter returned from the Grand Embassy, he started his reforms and transformations. Of course, after putting down... Well, the streltsy uprising was already put down when he returned, as I mentioned.

Yeah, he started punishing a few people and so on.

The first thing Peter did, actually, was start discussing education with the patriarch, because the church was still in charge of education at that point. Peter discussed the matter with Patriarch Adrian. The patriarch agreed with Peter's assessment that there was a necessity for education reforms in Russia, and he fully supported these reforms, and basically over the next decades these reforms created a completely new education system and finally led to the creation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

The second thing he did was the matter of the beards, the tax on beards, 50 rubles a year. And I'm not sure, actually, what a ruble was worth back then. I think it was a lot, right? I think one ruble was probably an average salary.

Yes. So the first thing Peter did, even before the ukase, when he returned to Moscow, was gallop straight to his army playground in Preobrazhenskoye and spend the night with Anna Mons. The next day the boyars came to greet him and kneel before their sovereign. He was disgusted with their beards. Peter was clean-shaven, wearing only his famous mustache, and wearing Western-style clothes, and he told them all to get up and then pulled out a razor and started shaving their beards. Everyone submitted to this. Peter started turning his boyars into Western-style nobles.

Then there was the famous ukase on the wearing of German dress, the shaving of beards, and the requirement for dissenters to wear designated clothes. Three things. The abolishment of beards, so only mustaches now and not the old Russian-style flowing beards, which were kind of a symbol of Orthodox piety, a very strong visual symbol of the old Muscovite traditions.

Yeah, the same thing actually happened in the Soviet Union. The aim of this tax was against the Old Believers, the ones they called dissenters, because they especially did not want to shave their beards. It was not a matter of fashion for them. And what's up with this trend, and why did Europeans start cutting their beards? What is this connected to?

I'm not sure, I'd have to read up on that. This was, as you said, just as much to bring the Old Believers to heel as it was to actually visually change the boyars. He had the streltsy tortured to death. And he continued the military reforms that were started by his dad, Alexei. So that was already going on.

There was a very dramatic event shortly after: the death of Lefort. It was very dramatic for Peter, because Lefort had been his best friend. He gave the Swiss mercenary a great state funeral. He cried, actually, when he was kissing the corpse. And he said of him, "I can only give him a handful of herbs. He gave me Azov."

Well, I think now we would have to go into the preparations for the Northern War. He kept working on the army all the time. In 1699, I think, the general recruitment began. Everyone who was recruited or conscripted into the army was now being trained, and all new military units were formed according to the model of the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky regiments. Also, Peter started recruiting a large number of mercenaries as officers. Peter was very impatient about this. There was not really enough time for everything, but Peter still forced everyone to do it.

Before that, of course, came the Treaty of Constantinople, because he had to make peace with the Ottomans first before declaring war on Sweden. He did this, and there was a truce for 30 years. A fun fact, actually, that I always thought was very funny: the official reason for the declaration of war against Sweden was the episode I mentioned earlier, which happened three years before, at the beginning of the Grand Embassy, namely the fact that he was banned from drawing the fortifications in Riga. To avenge the royal insult, that was the casus belli for the declaration of war.

But he was actually planning an attack.

Yes, of course. He had been planning the war against Sweden for years. It was a crucial part of his strategy. I think we will talk about the beginning of the Great Northern War in the next episode.

Yeah, and also some of Peter's overall views on geopolitics and grand strategy, which are always very interesting to me. Anything else to add before that?

Well, maybe some other reforms that he did before.

Oh yeah, I like the ukase on New Year's. It's very nicely written. So basically, in Russia the years were counted according to the Russian Byzantine calendar, a very ancient calendar that was used by the Byzantines, but also in Serbia and Bulgaria and in medieval Russian chronicles and so on, according to which the world was created in the year 5508 before Christ. And as such, the year 1700 would have been the year 7208 in the Russian Byzantine calendar. But Peter changed it to conform to the Julian calendar that was used in Europe.

Funny that the Julian calendar is now almost exclusively used by the Orthodox Church, while the rest of the world uses the Gregorian calendar. But anyway, Peter also introduced celebrating New Year's on January 1st, not on the autumn equinox day, which it usually was, so around the harvest. Peter issued a ukase, a decree, that said the following: "Since in Russia the new year is celebrated in different ways, from this day on you will stop confusing the people and celebrate the new year universally from the 1st of January. And as a sign of a good beginning and joy, congratulate each other on the new year, wishing prosperity in all affairs and well-being in the families. In honor of the new year, make decorations from fir trees, entertain the children and sled down hills, and for adults, do not engage in drunkenness and brawling. There are enough other days for that."

So yeah, Peter the Great also gave us Novy God. Thank you, Peter, for Novy God. But it also fell in the period of the Great Fast, the Great Lent, so this ukase was talking about not getting too drunk.

Yeah, of course. It was all very outrageous for the people, because they were not supposed to drink at all on the 1st of January, before the 7th of January, before Christmas. In general, all those reforms were made for Russia to resemble Europe, not only in the technological and military sense, which of course is useful, but also aesthetically. Even the calendar should be the same and all that. Do you think that he was simping a little bit too much? He disrespected the Russian ways, the Russian customs?

I mean, yes, he did of course disrespect the customs, but I think we should judge by results. I think it is very hard to argue that Peter didn't create the Russian Empire. It was Peter's reforms that turned Russia from just another Bulgaria with grand ambitions into a country that was actually capable of fulfilling these ambitions. Of course, all of the last 300 years of Russian history have been full of discussions about Peter the Great. I'm probably more in the camp of the admirers. Of course, he was a brutal man, a very brutal man, a tyrant in some ways. But the results, I think, speak for themselves.

What results? That he built St. Petersburg on the bogs? Do you like the city of St. Petersburg? Do you think it was a great idea to build a city there?

I think it was a very strange idea to build a city in that place. I do like the city of St. Petersburg very much. It's a very beautiful city. It goes against all odds.

Well, we will talk about the construction of St. Petersburg and the Northern War in the next episode. And you will be the judge of whether Peter disrespected the Russian ways and is the Antichrist and the impostor, or whether he is a great Russian ruler. Thank you for listening, and see you very soon.

Thank you.

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# Chapter 7: Peter I – Birth of an Empire

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast and to the Romanov series. In this episode we will tell you all you need to know about the creation of the Russian Empire, the foundation of the city of Saint Petersburg, and the start of the Northern War.

And let me try to build a bridge between modern Russia and Peter's times. There is a problem in modern Russia which I believe was partly caused by Peter the Great. A great number of Russians, especially in our intellectual or ruling classes, do not associate themselves with Russia. Instead, they believe that they are men of the world. Of course, this cosmopolitan tendency can be seen in any developed nation, but it's also clear that Russia is a bizarre outlier. The moment something goes against their wishes, they drop their Russian identity as if it's just a nuisance. And I believe that this faulty brick in our country's foundation was laid by none other than Peter the Great himself.

While many of Peter's military and civil reforms were necessary in order to keep up with and destroy the European Joneses, the denigration of old Russian culture was not a prerequisite for it. What Peter did was separate the Russians into two classes, two castes, two biological variants. The common muzhik remained more or less traditionally Russian. But the dvoryane, the nobility, lost most of their living connection to their land, faith, or culture. The old Russian nobility was erased. No more boyars, only ministers. No more Duma, but a Senate. Noble women left their terem houses, where they had been hidden from the male gaze for centuries. No more streltsy and voevodas, but lieutenants and generals. And a lot of those changes, especially the stylistic ones, didn't seem to be necessary.

And, of course, all the reforms were done in great haste. That allowed him to artificially accelerate the country at extreme speed, but it also created a rift between the Russian nobility and the common people. Moreover, Peter became the head of the church. He constructed a new capital on the very edge of northwestern Russia, which is a brilliant geopolitical position, but not a place where the capital would naturally be and where people would naturally tend to live.

I think that is a common, somewhat common, view of Peter the Great, but I think it is, in the end, misguided, for several reasons. The first one being that Russia has never undergone changes in a different way. They say Russians are slow to saddle up but quick to ride. And whenever we change, it's always in some kind of cataclysmic and quick way that destroys almost as much as it creates. As such, Peter is no aberration here. The reforms of Ivan IV were no less disruptive to the country's life, and he was a very traditional ruler, so to speak. But tradition is always a living tradition that is created, and not just mindlessly keeping what is old. And specifically in the case of breaking the cycle of the Muscovite court intrigues, I don't see anything bad there.

And in particular, I don't think that Peter destroyed the Russian aristocracy. I think he revitalized it, by turning it from a caste that had become, in effect, a very dead caste of just hereditary people who for some random reason had immense political power. Just a bunch of clans who disrupt anything the central government and the monarchy want to do. Instead, what Peter did to the aristocracy was basically a return to tradition, namely turning it back into an aristocracy of the sort that had to prove its worth, either on the battlefield or in service to the government. And as such, that is what an aristocracy is supposed to be. It's not just a random percentage of the population whom you give a lot of money and land. It's a very specific caste with a very specific role, and their material comfort is supposed to be an equal exchange, namely that they are freed from material considerations and in return they give their complete lives to the empire. And as such, I believe that Peter mainly made the aristocracy into what it was supposed to be.

And regarding the separation of certain elites from traditional Russian culture, I don't think that was something new either. You had Zapadniki who wanted to make Russia Catholic back in the early 17th century, or even in the late 16th century.

And especially, I wouldn't blame this on Peter, because Peter was not like this at all.

What Peter did to separate the classes is, as I said, his stylistic and aesthetic choices. Because before his reforms, the boyars resembled Russian commoners. Of course, the garb was richer, but they were unmistakably Russian in their appearance. In Peter's times, they became German-looking aliens. And it was not just their clothing either, but their whole identity. It was not Russian anymore.

There are very different views on the matter of whether Peter improved or worsened the nobility. But in general, in the previous episode, we described the formative years of Peter the Great, his early steps on his Faustian path to greatness, his voyage to Europe, and his attempts to reshape the royal court. And now we are at the year 1699, which is marked by his preparation for the Northern Campaign.

Yeah, he wished to gain control over the Baltics, to surpass the Swedish masters. And to do that, he needed a much bigger army, and way more money and production than what he had at his disposal.

What I wanted to talk about, before we start on the Northern War proper, is what was Peter even trying to do? There is a famous expression that describes St. Petersburg, an expression made famous by Pushkin, who described St. Petersburg as Peter's attempt to make a window to Europe. Now, what does that mean? It means that there was a wall between Europe and Russia, and life on both sides of it flowed kind of independently from each other, in parallel, not intersecting. And then the carpenter tsar came, took an axe and made a huge hole in that wall. But for Peter himself there was no such wall between Russia and Europe, neither in his personal life, growing up around Germans and the Grand Embassy and so on, nor in his strategic view. For Peter, Russia was an integral, organic and important part of Europe, free access to which was temporarily hindered by local geopolitical circumstances, namely the Swedish hegemony in the Baltic Sea.

You know, it kind of sounds like the rhetoric of the Euromaidan, that Ukraine is an integral part of Europe and only the Russian Tamozhenny Soyuz, the Customs Union, is what prevents them from joining it.

Yeah. Well, if they win the war, it's going to be correct. So it's all about who wins the big wars. That is what makes a country European. Winning big wars. Nothing else matters.

In Peter's mind, he wasn't making a hole in the wall, but he was restoring the blood flow that was disrupted by the filthy Swedes. And the long-term goal was not just something like the free circulation of goods, that was just an intermediate task, and certainly not to catch up or whatever, or to make Russia more like Europe. The end goal was to enable Russia to actively participate in the great politics of the continent and make Russia a major player. In fact, this participation began immediately with the decision to confront Sweden. In opposition to what you just said, Nikolai, Peter didn't think about how to integrate Russia into the existing world order or how to cooperate with our dear Swedish partners. Peter decided straight away to reshape the entire geopolitical balance of power in Northern Europe in Russia's favor. And that's just for starters.

At the same time, he never imagined this war as some kind of isolated act on the outskirts of the continent, and he didn't imagine it as some kind of civilizational confrontation between holy Russia and the evil West either. As soon as Peter concluded that Russia's long-term interests required the elimination of Swedish control over the Baltics, he began looking for allies who could assist in achieving this goal. So it was very simple geopolitical and historical calculation. The Swedes, of course, had managed to make many enemies during their golden age that began at the end of the Thirty Years' War, and the choice of allies was quite clear. An anti-Swedish alliance in the Baltic region had almost formed already by that time, and it was kind of natural.

Our first ally was Denmark, the main naval competitor of Sweden, whose strategic interests clashed with the Swedish ones in the most radical way. The Danes controlled the exit from the Baltic Sea, and the Baltic Sea at those times was often referred to as the Swedish lake, so complete was Swedish power over it. So Denmark, of course, was the logical next target for any ambitious Swedish monarch, and they were aware of this.

The second important power in the region that had been seriously aggrieved by the Swedes was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It's worth remembering that it was the Swedish aggression, what the Poles call the Potop, the Deluge, that had put an end to Poland's aspirations of establishing dominion over Eastern Europe, leading to the loss of valuable territories, financial ruin, and political destabilization. In some ways, it was the Swedes who ended the Polish golden age and, yeah, started Poland on the road to ruin.

By the beginning of the 18th century, this natural alliance had begun to turn into something more real. And in terms of establishing Russia as a great power that participates in the truly grand politics that reshaped the entire European continent, yeah, Peter was very successful. Of course, Peter had hoped for more significant support from his allies, but things turned out a little differently. Denmark was taken out right at the beginning of the war, really.

But Peter had underestimated his enemy a little bit: Charles XII. Charles XII, of course, was a very interesting character himself, almost as interesting as Peter, I would say. A teenager at the time, I think he was 18 when the war began. Tall, kind of ascetic, obsessed with war. He had no interest in women at all, which led some biographers to believe that he was a homosexual, but I believe he was just in Volosovo, who was committed to the military. As he said of himself, Charles said that he was married to the army. He was very religious, and he drilled his army into a very powerful machine that at that time was by far the best army in Europe. His intuitions as a general matched those of Peter, really. And in the end, they would go on to fight a duel that would last for 18 years.

So, of course, Charles knew what was coming for him. He wasn't stupid. He was very smart himself. And while Russia was about to begin the war, the Swedes took out one of the alliance's really main figures.

So before the formal declaration of war, the Saxons, who were under Augustus the Strong, were already besieging Riga. And afterwards, Frederick IV, who had brought his troops to Friedrichstadt in Schleswig, also declared war. And Peter had to wait a little bit to declare war, because he first needed to conclude a truce with the Ottomans, as we talked about in the last episode, the Treaty of Constantinople. As soon as Peter got the message that the treaty with the Ottomans was concluded, he declared war on Sweden as well. As you remember, the formal casus belli for the declaration of war was that the Swedes had been rude to him three years before that.

The Saxon siege of Riga went pretty badly because, well, they didn't have any siege artillery and so on. And in the end, they had to lift the siege and just leave. In March 1700, so five months before the Russian entry into the war, Frederick IV invaded the Duchy of Holstein in the north of Germany. What he did not expect, however, was that Charles XII would do a very daring thing and simply invade Denmark itself in a huge naval invasion, and put 10,000 troops right next to Copenhagen. And in the end, in August, the Danes had to conclude the peace. So basically, Denmark was knocked out a week before Russia declared war on Sweden, which, however, Peter didn't know at that time. So we basically started the war with one ally less than we could have had.

It's also important to mention how Peter was preparing for this war, because there were not enough men in the army. So a year prior to the events that you're discussing now, Peter instituted the rekrutskaya povinnost, a.k.a. mandatory military recruitment. And get this, people were recruited to serve in the army for life. Their contract was eternal at the time. And by doing this simple trick, he increased the army from 40,000 to 100,000.

Another big hurdle to Peter's ambitions was the lack of manufacturing and ironworks. There was an important region in Russia that was barely active in terms of production: the Ural Mountains, which had been conquered a long time ago by previous tsars and contained a great amount of resources. It was under Peter the Great that the Urals became the biggest factory area in all of Russia, and the city of Nevyansk was built. The Demidov clan and all that.

Right.

So the war begins. Denmark is already knocked out. The Great Northern War marked the entry of Russia into continental grand politics. The Russian army of old, the pre-Petrine, streltsy model, had proved to be quite capable against the Swedes in the Little Northern War half a century before. And the Swedes, realizing this, started their new military reform and, yeah, created basically the best army in Europe in preparation for the next war with Russia.

And not just that, the entirety of Europe really was looking at Sweden at this time, because another war in a very different part of Europe was looming at that time, namely the War of the Spanish Succession. Charles II of Habsburg, the last representative of the Spanish Habsburgs, was dying without any heirs, without any children, and his only lawful heirs were the grandsons and great-grandsons, so basically the offspring from the marriage of Louis XIV to Maria Theresa. And of course, the consequences of a personal union between France and Spain would have been unimaginable. That would have been a super empire that covered all of Spain, all of France, parts of Italy, America and so on. That would have been a global superpower, and of course the rest of the European powers did not want that to happen: England, the Netherlands, Austria and so on.

However, the French had an ace up their sleeve, namely Sweden, the Swedish army. Sweden was a historical ally of France, and at the time, as I said, it was led by Charles XII, a young boy completely obsessed with war, to the point that he cared little about anything else in the world. And the Europeans were quite afraid of that because, as I said, the Swedish army was the best in Europe, and it would have been very bad for Austria, Bavaria and the Netherlands if a Swedish army descended on their rear. Therefore, when Peter appeared in the Netherlands and in England asking for support against the Turks, he was given some hints that perhaps if he shifted his focus somewhat northward, then that would be, well, more amicable to the Europeans.

And so, yeah, a new Northern alliance was formed, and the Anglo-Dutch realms were quite interested in this alliance attacking Sweden, but of course not really in its success. So when Denmark entered the war, the English and the Dutch assisted Charles XII by transporting his troops to Copenhagen, and then also ferrying his soldiers to Narva, where he would inflict the first serious defeat on Peter. So in any case, by the time the Spanish king had died and the War of the Spanish Succession began, Sweden was very busy fighting Russia, and regardless of whoever would win the Great Northern War, there was no reserve army for the French. So, some background here as well.

In any case, the war began with Peter marching into Ingermanland, which at that time was called Swedish Ingria. So basically the Swedish possessions in what is nowadays Leningrad Oblast. On the border between Ingermanland and Estland, as the provinces were called back then, there was a large city and the largest Swedish fortress in the region, namely Narva.

The assault on Narva was not especially well prepared. The army was only ready by autumn, when the weather and the condition of the roads were quite bad, which was bad for logistics, of course. And yeah, Peter gathered 60,000 soldiers at Narva, but it all took very long, much longer than Peter had anticipated. The artillery was also not prepared well enough, because they only had light field artillery and not the heavy siege artillery that would have been necessary to crack the fortress. And they only had enough ammunition for two weeks. Also, Narva in the tactical sense created kind of a twin fortress together with Ivangorod, so Peter had to stretch his forces way too much to encircle both fortresses at the same time. And basically this unlucky order of battle, the positioning of the Russian troops, subsequently had a very negative impact on their fighting ability during the actual battle of Narva.

At the same time, Augustus II, who had learned of Denmark's withdrawal from the war, lifted the siege of Riga, as I said, and retreated to Courland, which allowed Charles XII to move part of his army over to the Russian theater. He landed in Pärnu, or Pernau, and immediately started marching on Narva.

Peter left the army, together with Field Marshal Golovin, and left a trusted French mercenary commander, the Duc de Croÿ, as overall commander of the troops. The Battle of Narva, well, this turned out to be quite a mistake. First of all, the Swedish army performed extremely well. Of course, Charles only had about 10,000 troops with him, and he defeated a Russian army that was three or four times larger. The Duc de Croÿ and his staff, who were also all foreign mercenaries, surrendered even before the battle was really decided. It is possible that they could have eked out maybe a Pyrrhic victory if they had tried, but they didn't try. The bulk of the Russian army capitulated on honorable terms, and the only regiments that performed well were Peter's new model regiments, specifically the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky regiments. They not only avoided getting captured, but they also covered the withdrawal of the rest of the Russian army as the rearguard and saved it from complete defeat.

But overall, it was really a catastrophic defeat for Russia. A quarter of Peter's army was lost, which convinced everyone in Europe that Peter's army, the Russian army, was incapable, that it's not a serious threat, which was actually very useful for us in the end. We also lost all the artillery, and 10 generals were taken prisoner. That's quite a lot.

What were the reasons for the defeat? Well, it was poorly prepared. The Russian army was in the middle of being reorganized, and Peter just had to hurry. The modern tactics and doctrines were not yet implemented outside of the new regiments. Recon was very bad, the artillery was outdated, and most importantly, the commanders were not very well integrated into the army, because, I mean, they all spoke different languages.

Because after this defeat at Narva, Peter reduced, limited the number of foreign officers.

Yes, yes. This was very important. After the defeat at Narva, Peter prepared a decree that limited the number of foreign officers. They could be no more than one-third of the total number of officers in a military unit. The rest had to be Russians.

After the defeat at Narva, public opinion in Europe was, of course, established as to the complete inefficiency of the Russian army. Charles XII was nicknamed the Swedish Alexander. And yeah, overall, of course, as happened so often, the defeat at Narva turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It played a very important role in developing the Russian army and the country overall. But since we had lost most of the cannons, Peter had to make new ones, and although he had just established the new factory cities in the Urals, it was not enough. So that's probably where the melting down of the bells from the Orthodox churches to make cannons comes from. Also, the defeat at Narva really inspired the creation of St. Petersburg. So it had quite a big impact on the country.

Peter himself did not really take the defeat at Narva too badly. He didn't panic. He didn't lose his optimism. But realizing that Charles XII was a very formidable enemy and really a military genius, Peter himself took supreme command and would always take supreme command in the war. And yeah, he referred to his army that got defeated at Narva as untried students, and he really admired the Swedish army. He learned his lesson in terms of commanding, and would not create this divided command between his Russian and his mercenary officers again.

He was quite lucky in that Charles gave him some time to prepare the army, because at this point Charles had to choose whether he would invade Russia or Poland first. And he decided to march into Poland to depose Augustus the Strong and put his own puppet king on the throne, while Peter was mostly skirmishing around the Baltics. The first thing that Peter did was create the factory at Petrozavodsk, and he made 300 new pieces of artillery.

Some historians think that the defeat at Narva made Peter consider peacing out of the war, really. But I don't think that really happened. And even if Peter had tried to do that, Charles was not the kind of person who would have accepted peace when he could have a good war. So, afraid that Charles might invade Russia first, Peter took measures to build fortifications at Pskov, Novgorod, Moscow, and so on. And really, the defeat at Narva played into Peter's hands again, because at the grand Swedish military council where they decided whether to march into Poland or Russia, Charles XII, well, his hubris got the best of him, and he felt that the Russian army was too weak to threaten Sweden. And so he would attack Poland first, which is what he did.

The Polish campaign of Charles XII took, well, half a decade, really. It was a major front. And yeah, I must say I am not a super expert on that front of the war. What happened was that basically the Swedes invaded Saxony and Poland, and after five years the Poles had to peace out of the war, really. At this time, the geopolitical backdrop started to matter more, and other European powers began to get involved, and Charles's reputation as an undefeated military genius spread. Prussia allied itself with Sweden after the Polish defeat, and Louis actually asked Charles at this time to join the War of the Spanish Succession. The Holy Roman Empire also signed a treaty with Sweden, and so on.

So during the main battles in Poland, there was not all that much happening on the Baltic front. The first Russian victory occurred in late 1701, the Battle of Erastfer, at which Boris Sheremetev defeated the Swedish army. So that was the first Russian victory. And Peter himself considered it the great turning point, the first Russian victory against the Swedes in a pitched battle on the field, and he made Sheremetev a field marshal. Peter at this time was basically trying to get his army up to speed: organizing supplies, reforming, reorganizing the army, and also rolling up Swedish fortresses in the Baltics.

Another half a year later, or almost a year later, came the second big victory of Russia, namely Hummelshof in present-day Estonia, in which Sheremetev again defeated the Swedish army. And this was basically it for Swedish Livonia. They also took the fortress of Nöteborg a few months after Hummelshof, one of the first great sieges of the war, in which Peter and Sheremetev again defeated the Swedes and took a strategically important fortress. Nöteborg would later be known as Shlisselburg, and Menshikov was appointed its governor. Then, in 1704–1705, came the Swedish attacks on the island of Kotlin, which nowadays houses the city of Kronstadt, so basically the area around St. Petersburg.

Also, when the Russians were victorious in Livonia and took the Swedish fortress of Marienburg, Peter met his new love, who would eventually become his wife, Marta Skavronskaya.

Skavronskaya, yes.

So, a little side note on Peter's personal life. As we mentioned in the previous episode, 16-year-old Peter was forced by his mother to marry a good Russian noblewoman, Evdokia Lopukhina. And in 1690 they had a child, Alexei Petrovich Romanov, the heir of Peter the Great. But there was a problem: Peter and Evdokia more or less hated each other. And in the last streltsy riot of 1698, she wanted to use the situation, or at least she was accused of wanting to use the situation, the riot, to put her son on the throne, while the streltsy would apparently take care of her deranged giant of a husband. But it was not to be. Peter crushed the rebellion and sent Evdokia away to a monastery.

And since 1698 he was a bachelor once again, with a knack for exotic women. And he found the one right there and then, in the first few victories of the Russian army: 19-year-old Marta Skavronskaya, a mysterious Lithuanian woman who was already married to a Swedish dragoon who served in this very same fortress. Peter's army took her as one of the trophies when the Russians successfully stormed the fortress. And after being with the soldiers and then with Menshikov, I believe, she was presented to Peter, and he took Marta and married her. She would convert and take a Russian name, Ekaterina, Catherine I.

Her superpower was the ability to calm the epileptic psycho Peter down. She would caress his head and he would fall asleep within minutes, no matter what enraged state he was in. She would sit motionless for hours with his head on her chest, and Pyotr would wake up completely refreshed and eager to go win the war with the Swedes. That was their special relationship. And no one else could quite do it. He was really dangerous to himself and others when he was angry or had an epileptic fit. One time he cut a Russian soldier to pieces when he was angry. So to have a wife as this comfort pillow was pretty useful.

And yes, but he still had Alexei Petrovich from Lopukhina, his heir, and about his fate we will talk a little bit later, at the end of this episode. But yeah, with Ekaterina they had a few daughters: Anna Petrovna, the mother of the future emperor Peter III, and Elizabeth Petrovna, a future empress in her own right. And little Pyotr Petrovich, who Peter hoped would be his actual heir, and not Alexei from Lopukhina, right? But Pyotr Petrovich was a sickly infant with arrested development who died at four years of age. Peter thought initially that it was normal, as he had also been a late bloomer and all that, but it was not. And at the little boy's burial, one of the members of the Lopukhin family, a relative of his first, scorned wife Evdokia, was so ecstatic that he was exiled to Siberia along with his family for expressing joy at the death of Peter's new male heir.

His only heir at the time of the start of the Northern War was Alexei Petrovich, but more on that later.

So, right, we had a few wins, victories in Livonia, and the bulk of the Swedish army was in Poland.

Yes, but we also lost our second ally. By the time Charles was done with Poland, Russia was more or less alone. That's where the Cossacks come into play.

Yes, but before we get into that, a few words on the Swedish army. There is a kind of opinion that all Peter did was just copy the army of Charles XII and do everything the same way he did, but bigger. But that's not really true. Charles created a very unique kind of army. He did not care much for logistics. He did not have supply trains following his army. Charles XII's army was very quick on its feet because he depended solely on requisitions and plundering of the population. Charles had instructed his generals to basically take whatever they needed from the locals and kill them if they didn't want to give it. So a very ruthless approach, but it gave his army a lot of speed for maneuver, because supply was kind of the bottleneck for the movement speed of armies at the time.

Also, Charles did not really like artillery, and he had no great respect for firefights. His infantry and cavalry would attack the enemy's center in tight formation with melee weapons and simply overwhelm the opponent until his lines broke. That was his tactic, and he was extremely good at it. Peter once said, "My brother Charles fancies himself an Alexander, but he won't find a Darius in me."

The Russian army that Peter constructed was really the complete opposite of Charles's army, and if you want to compare it to a Swedish army, it was more similar to that of Gustavus Adolphus, I guess. Charles despised artillery, while Peter, with the help of the genius engineer Vasily Korchmin, created the best artillery in Europe at the time: very powerful, firing very rapidly, well organized. He also introduced mounted artillery, horse artillery, that could very quickly change its position on the battlefield. And he also started using light field infantry in the first ranks. Peter was a very good artilleryman.

Charles also systematically reduced the role of gunfire in battle. He emphasized the importance of bayonet charges, which you might think reminds one of a famous Russian general, perhaps the most famous Russian general, Suvorov. But that's really a misleading comparison, because Suvorov was also a very big fan of shooting and of drilling in shooting. He believed that bayonets should be used only against the Turks, to break their ranks, because that caused panic in them, whereas fighting against the French, he considered marksmanship most vital. Just as Peter did. Peter trained his army, drilled his army in musketry. Both his infantry and his cavalry were trained to shoot, but of course they were also skilled in hand-to-hand combat.

So with this Swedish army, Charles deployed in January 1708. After having crushed Denmark and Poland and Saxony, all of Russia's allies, Charles finally decided to invade Russia. He assembled an army of almost 50,000 of Europe's best troops and attacked. Peter said that he wouldn't give up any territory to the Swedes, regardless of whether he lost 10 or 20 battles. He was focused on winning.

And at this time, a very important person also appeared on the stage, one that is relevant even today in the modern discourse: the national hero of Ukraine, Ivan Mazepa. Ivan Mazepa was the hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, and basically the head of Left-bank Ukraine, who ruled over all of Left-bank Ukraine, and for a time Right-bank Ukraine as well, during the Paliy uprising. But no matter. Ivan Mazepa was a great ally to Peter. He was his man in Left-bank Ukraine, in Belarus, and a personal friend as well. Ivan Mazepa held a very important position in Russia. He had huge personal autonomy to do whatever he wanted in Left-bank Ukraine. However, in 1708, he suddenly decided to switch sides, joined the Swedes, and offered his services and his Cossacks to Charles XII. This decision is really hard to understand, because what was the point?

Actually, they were very similar in their military doctrines, as the Cossacks were all horseback warriors.

Yeah, that's true. And probably they also despised cannons and firepower. But yeah, Ukrainians were big fans of Mazepa at the time, and even afterwards. So much so that they created an expression: "From Bohdan to Ivan there was no hetman."

Well, it's about the Ruin, this period after Khmelnytsky's uprising, when his rule ended and the Cossacks were not doing their best. But why did they love Mazepa so much? Because he betrayed the Russian tsar. That's the only reason. And that's the only reason why Mazepa plays an important role in Ukrainian national mythology.

But did all the Cossacks go over with Mazepa? No, actually, only a minority did. Most Cossacks stayed loyal. When he fled, he only had about 1,500 Cossacks with him, because he was afraid of being captured after news of his betrayal had broken. So he only had 1,500 Cossacks with him when he joined the Swedes. And he started sending messages to the rest of the Cossacks, hoping that they would join, but most didn't, really. An overwhelming majority remained loyal. And in the end, at Poltava, there were only 3,000 or so Zaporozhian Cossacks in the Swedish ranks. So really, only a minority.

In any case, the betrayal of Mazepa had been coming for quite some time. There were signs. Even back in 1689, it was reported to Peter for the first time that Mazepa may not be as loyal as he pretended. But Peter did not want to believe these reports, and his trust in the hetman only grew. In 1700, Mazepa received the highest government award that existed in Russia at the time, the Order of St. Andrew, and aside from Peter, he was only the second person to receive this award.

Mazepa probably assumed that Peter would lose against Charles, and thought that to preserve his powerful position in Ukraine he would need to ally with the Swedes. But, oh well, it did not work out. There was a formal treaty between the Zaporozhian Sich, represented by Mazepa, and the Swedes, while in Russia Mazepa was anathematized by the Russian Church. It ended with Mazepa fleeing into Ottoman territory and dying as a nobody.

Fun fact: Mazepa's favorite book was The Prince by Machiavelli. He also engaged in a kind of spiritual incest, because at the age of 65 he fell in love with his goddaughter. Yeah, an interesting character.

Right. In any case, Peter also introduced a new award for Mazepa, the Order of Judas. That's how personally he took this. There was only one made of it, and it shows Judas hanging from a tree, and there was a text on it that says, "Judas, the son of perdition, crushed for his covetousness." So Peter sent a message to Mazepa that he would like to give the Order of Judas to him and get the Order of St. Andrew back.

And he was also excommunicated from the Orthodox Church. Well, not just excommunicated, he was anathematized, which is much worse.

And there is a text of the anathema to Mazepa, yes. And it's part of the modern discourse of this inter-religious conflict between the Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and various Ukrainian patriarchates as well.

Yeah, the anathema is still political in the modern church, because Ukrainians are trying to lift it with the help of the Greek patriarch, the Ecumenical Patriarch.

All right. So, Mazepa. And what happened with Charles XII and the Swedish invasion of Russia, let's call it that? So, he invaded Russia. The Russian army did not want to give Charles the battle he wanted at that time. Instead, they were harassing the Swedes, drawing them deeper into the country. And Peter was very happy with the Russian army at that time. He said that he had never seen such orderly conduct in his troops before. He described what they were doing as a fine dance right under the nose of Charles.

So he invaded in January, and by September his army was on the verge of starvation and out of supplies, and winter was about to come, and Charles had to decide whether he should push for Moscow or go south to Ukraine. And he waited for the other part of his army to march down from Livonia. Basically, the army of Adam Lewenhaupt was supposed to unite with Charles to strike a knockout blow to Ukraine, to the Ukrainian territories of Russia. But the army of Lewenhaupt was intercepted by Peter and Menshikov at Lesnaya, the river. And, well, they destroyed the army, destroyed all of the supplies he was bringing, and killed half of the men. So Charles basically received 6,000 additional starving men whom he, well, couldn't feed. But then in October he received the news from Menshikov that Mazepa had switched sides, which was pretty bad.

Charles XII had certain goals in his campaign. They read as follows. The complete destruction of the Russian state in its independent form. A vassal should sit on the Russian throne, and this vassal can either be the Polish king, King Jan III, or perhaps Tsarevich Alexei, Peter's son by Lopukhina, "if he deserves it," I quote. Then Pskov and Novgorod should become Swedish, and Ukraine should be annexed as well, and Smolensk. So Ukraine, Smolensk, and various western Russian territories should become vassals of Poland. And this Poland, of course, needs to be puppeteered by the Swedes. But there is a problem, isn't there?

No, there's not a problem, because King Jan III was a puppet of Sweden, right?

Yes, yes. And the division of the rest of Russia into separate principalities. So quite heavy.

But there is a certain trope with Western invasions of Russia, namely there is a cope that they all use: it's the weather. It's the weather, General Winter was on the Russian side, so it's not fair. And this was no exception. So by 1709, yeah, they were frozen to death. And there apparently was an exceptional freeze, some exceptionally cold weather, by the end of the Russian campaign. But we will get to that later. So they wanted to draw a lot of arrows on the map. And they also attacked from Livonia, and even the Ladoga region and all that.

Yes, it all didn't help. The winter was very harsh on the Swedish army. Of course, before that there was the fight for Baturyn, the capital of Mazepa, which was destroyed by Menshikov to deny it to Charles. And winter was very harsh on the Swedish army. Charles had to decide whether he wanted to fight or retreat. Peter at the time was running around the country, reforming his government and micromanaging the army.

And by April 1709, Charles laid siege to a small town that would either serve him as a base to regroup or finally give him the big knockout battle he was hoping for. That town was Poltava.

The battle occurred on the 27th of June, and before that there was a month of preparations, really. Peter grabbed Sheremetev and Menshikov, along with Repnin, and also, funnily enough, his favorite mascot, a certain Hannibal, who was of course the grandfather of the famous poet. Peter said that he was very confident. He said that with God's help, by the end of the month, they would do the main business with the Swedes. He assumed supreme command over all military matters, as a complete, real supreme commander. He put his army half a mile from Poltava, made camp, and built fortifications. They left a gap in the fortifications, a corridor, to lure the Swedes in, which, however, also had fortified positions, six redoubts garrisoned by 4,000 men, to stop any Swedish advance.

Charles called a war council, as he usually did before big battles, and he decided on a preemptive attack while the Russians were still building up their camp. Shortly before dawn on June 27th, the Swedes, about 10,000 infantry and just as much cavalry, took up their positions and started advancing. The Russians spotted them early and immediately opened artillery fire on them. The Swedish plans, well, never materialized. They just started a frontal assault on the Russian center. The Swedish army was divided. Half of it was stuck at the redoubts, where it was then attacked by Menshikov's cavalry and ground up, really. One Swedish column was lost and never arrived at the battlefield, and the infantry was also separated and basically faced the Russian camp completely on their own. And when Charles arrived at the main infantry thrust, he realized that half of his army was already lost.

Peter was standing on the ramparts of the camp, observing the battlefield. He spotted a gap between the Swedish formations and sent his quickest messenger to Menshikov to move his cavalry around and attack the Swedish center. These Swedish troops were very quickly surrounded, crushed and destroyed, and had to surrender. Charles couldn't find these troops for several hours and was looking for them all over the battlefield.

Peter gave the order to attack at that turn. The Swedish lines had already started to form up for retreat, but it was too late. The Russian army stepped out to attack the Swedes, and the entire army just marched on the Swedes, who were confused and beaten and about to retreat. Peter on the left, Sheremetev in the center. Peter gave a speech that all the men were fighting for Russian glory, a very inspiring speech. The Swedes hesitated for a moment, stopped their retreat, and gave the order to form for battle as well. The Swedes were very well trained. They were weary at that point, but drilled to perfection, and they formed perfect battle ranks in the shortest amount of time possible. They started marching forward, never breaking step, even as the Russian artillery was completely grinding them to dust. As I said before, the Russian artillery at the time was the best in Europe, and they were just laying down salvo after salvo right into the Swedish lines, but the Swedes didn't break.

However, the Swedish right smashed into the Russian army and even had some successes in the melee, but the Swedish left had been completely decimated by the Russian artillery. A musket ball knocked off Peter's hat at that point. That was probably a very interesting experience for him. In any case, the Russian infantry advanced into the gap that had opened up in the Swedish center. Peter was hit several more times. A bullet hit his saddle, and another bullet actually hit him right in the chest, but it ricocheted off an icon he wore around his neck. So, yeah, Peter definitely had some divine protection on that day.

The Royal Guards of Charles fought to the last man and never surrendered, but the bulk of the army started breaking. Charles himself very narrowly escaped being captured. At the end of the day, 7,000 or more, up to 10,000 Swedes were dead, and 3,000 were captured. Pretty bad. A complete defeat. Russian losses were negligible, around 1,500 dead.

As to the initial manpower, Charles XII had up to 37,000 soldiers, of which 8,000 were infantry, about 10,000 were Mazepa's Cossacks, another 8,000 were cavalry, and some thousands were Wallachians and all that. On the Russian side, 32,000 infantrymen participated in the Battle of Poltava. The cavalry was 20,000, and in addition we were joined by 10,000 to 15,000 Cossacks of Hetman Skoropadsky, as well as Don and Ural Cossacks, Kalmyks, Tatars, and Wallachians. So, of course, we outnumbered the Swedes, but in any case, it's pretty much, yes.

Well, that's the point of a battle, to have more troops than the enemy.

So, yeah, after the battle there was a great celebration. Peter was riding around the army, hugging his generals, hugging soldiers. They erected a field chapel for the fallen, and then Peter showed himself the gallant gentleman. A very fancy Persian tent was erected for a banquet, and there were artillery salutes after every toast, and his prisoners were also brought: Count Piper, Field Marshal Rehnskiöld, and the Swedish generals. Peter made a toast to his teachers, as he called the Swedish generals, and he also inquired, "Where is my brother Charles?"

What I wouldn't give to participate in this party. I think it was pretty fun.

Yeah, I think so too.

At the same time, Peter wrote a bunch of letters, one to Catherine, in which he said that "the all-merciful God has this day granted us an unprecedented victory over the enemy." So yeah, it was the first major victory, the general victory against a Western army, the best army in Europe at the time.

The best army in Europe, yeah. So it's a pretty remarkable date, of course.

Right, of course, of course. The war would go on for 12 more years until its conclusion, but it was Poltava that really broke Sweden.

One year before the Battle of Poltava, there was a smaller skirmish at Golovchin, in modern-day Belarus. The Swedes won this battle. Although it was not that small, actually, because all the same forces participated in it: there were about 37,000 Swedish forces and about 40,000 Russian forces, and the Russians were mostly on the defensive. And again, just like the Battle of Narva and the Russian loss there, it led the Swedes to think that the next battle would be a piece of cake. Because in the battle at Golovchin, the Russians were mostly defending, and we lost this battle.

Right. Poltava became the birthday of Russia as a great power and the death day of Sweden as a great power. Sweden would never become a major European power again after Poltava. And really, everything went well on that day, even the fact that Charles escaped and wasn't captured. Because if Charles had been captured or killed, then the Swedes would have made peace with Russia, and at that point Peter had very moderate terms. He really only wanted Ingria and Narva and nothing else. But Charles, who spent another nine years really running around, allowed Russia to also annex the Baltics and build a powerful fleet that even the British had to reckon with, and also to become overlord over Poland and northern Germany. So it went perfectly, so to speak.

Yeah. I guess we will finish this episode with Saint Petersburg, because in the meantime, in internal affairs, the biggest of Peter's visions was a new capital for Russia. And of course it's directly tied to this war, because Moscow was too far away from the point of interest.

Yes. And Peter himself said that the Battle of Poltava was the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg.

Right. So Saint Petersburg was founded on the 16th of May 1703, and that was the birth of Saint Petersburg. Why did Peter pick this place? Just for military convenience? Why wasn't Shlisselburg turned into a capital? What do you think?

Well, yeah, kind of not only military. The territory where Petersburg is located is modern-day Leningrad Oblast, formerly Izhora, or Ingria. At the mouth of the Okhta River you had Nyenschantz, the fortress, at the mouth of the Neva River. And originally St. Petersburg was a fortress, a port city, and the base for the Baltic Fleet. It was strategically vital because it provided maritime access to Europe, of course, so Russia wouldn't have to wait for Arkhangelsk to thaw in the spring and so on. And the construction of St. Petersburg had two primary objectives, really: establishing Russian dominion on the Baltic, of course, and the government reforms, building the new city to really become a new capital and a new form.

But as to why this specific place, well, it started with the Peter and Paul Fortress on Hare Island, Zayachy Island. This was, I think, the first stone that was laid of St. Petersburg. And then it just kind of organically grew around everything. There are countless islands in this place. And while he was on his Grand Embassy in Europe, in the Netherlands, he was amazed by the bridges. So in Holland he saw the raising bridges, and he desperately wanted to replicate them in Russia.

Also, this place, Ingria, was not foreign for Russians, or even for the ancient Slavs, because there is a lot of data about various Slavic tribes living in the area in the 7th century, and it also might have been a part of the route from the Varangians to the Greeks, the trade route.

I think one of the reasons why Peter built a completely new city and did not use one of the existing fortresses or ports was that, aside from practical considerations, it was also kind of ideological, in the sense that he wouldn't have wanted to use a place that had been changing hands for a thousand years, but something completely new, something that has no history, something that would be completely his creation. So I think that also played a role.

Yeah, and to distance himself from these Moscow noble families, who still had a lot of sway, and just to torture them with bad weather, perhaps, because all the statesmen had to live in the capital, right? And they had to relocate to this new artificial city. I wonder what it looked like at the start of the 18th century, like in 1710. Was it completely fake, like those Chinese Paris knockoffs? Now it's a lively city, right? But back then, it's very interesting. There are countless myths about how many people were killed during the construction of this city, the death toll. What's up with that? Did the bogs swallow the construction workers, or was Peter inhumane in his terms?

Yeah, well, it is a very widespread myth that, like, tens of thousands died, a large number of the laborers. But first, most of these come from testimonies of foreigners who had little understanding of the situation and no affection towards what was happening. I mean, such a massive loss of life couldn't have gone unnoticed, the whole city would be a mass grave or something. Actually, the Soviets did excavations there. I think in the 50s the Soviets sent a whole archaeology team to find the victims of tsarism, but there were no mass graves whatsoever. No human bones, no anything, really.

It is hard to tell what the real death toll of the workforce is, but the available data really records, if I remember correctly, for the year 1716 or something, I don't remember which it was, I read a book about that a while ago, something like 26 or 27 people out of the whole workforce dying over a whole year. So that's a very negligible amount, actually. The most significant loss of life did not occur in St. Petersburg itself, but in Oranienbaum, because during one of the work seasons there was a very bad epidemic, I think in 1716 particularly. In the summer there was an epidemic that killed about a thousand people in the workers' camps. So perhaps that was the foundation of the myth that 100,000 people were worked to death.

Who knows? As to the name of the city, of course it was named after Saint Peter, the patron saint, not Peter the Great himself.

Yes, but maybe, I'm not sure. Now, of course, people completely think that it was named after the man himself.

And one of the first buildings was the Admiralty.

Yes. And yeah, it's connected to his childhood dream of building a powerful fleet for Russia. And of course he did that, he created a powerful fleet. It's debatable whether we were really on par with the other maritime powers and all that, and the fate of Peter's fleet after his death is also not the prettiest one, but we will talk about that later.

So what else? I very much like the painting by Brailovsky that shows Peter standing on the shore in that filthy swamp with the dead trees around, and he's just looking to the horizon and dreaming of a huge marble city. And it's kind of crazy that he actually made it a reality.

Should we blame Peter the Great for the bloody blockade during the Great Patriotic War? Because it's such a fringe city, it's, well, relatively easy to blockade, and that's what happened. And since it was such a populous city, well, millions of people died because of that.

I don't think that Peter is to blame for that. I think the people who actually did the blockade are to blame for that, and also the failure of the Rzhev operation.

We will get to that in 100 episodes.

All right. The fate of Alexei Petrovich, we will also talk about it more in the next episode, but still, he was accused of being a traitor and conspiring with the Swedes. And as we see in those documents, Charles XII had some hopes for the boy. Do you think Alexei Petrovich was a traitor? He was about 20, well, 19, when the Battle of Poltava happened.

Oh, that's very hard to say. I don't think we have a lot of good primary sources that can really tell us one way or another.

In any case, the only male heir that Peter had was Alexei, who might or might not have conspired with the Swedes.

Oh, all right, it was a fine episode. And you decide whether Peter the Great's method of joining Europe is better than the Ukrainian bid of joining the EU. But do you think modeling Saint Petersburg after some of his random memories from the Netherlands is based?

Well, I think it is definitely based to walk into a desolate swamp and simply decide that you want to build a huge, fantastic, beautiful city there, and then just do that through pure willpower. It is very Faustian, to build a city in a place that is absolutely not a good place to build a city, and still do it and be successful.

Yeah. I was in Piter just once, and it was February, so yeah, I found out that minus five Celsius is way worse in Piter than it is in the Urals.

Oh yeah, of course, that's true.

But yeah, I want to go to Piter next spring. I mean, it has a shitty climate, no way around that.

This is absolutely true. You probably wouldn't be able to live there.

In the next episode we will tell you all you need to know about Peter's reign from the Battle of Poltava up to his death and succession. I hope that it was interesting, and see you soon, guys. Thank you.

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# Chapter 8: The Empresses – Palace Wars

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast, Romanov series, episode number seven. In this episode we will cover the main events that transpired in the time period between 1709 and 1762 in the Russian Empire: the last decade of Peter the Great's reign, the succession by his wife, the Baltic woman, Catherine I, the short reign of an unfortunate Peter II, the quite terrible rule of the fat, German-loving Anna I, the gallant twenty-year reign of the childless yet stunning Elizabeth of Russia, and finally, the reign of a hilariously out-of-place Germanoid freak, Peter III, the husband of Catherine II, Catherine the Great, that we will talk about in the next episode. So, the entire first half of the 18th century in Russia, from 1709 to 1762.

And before we analyze the first half of the 18th century, let me warn you that we are not experts on Russian history of this time period. Personally, I am much more well-read on the 19th and 20th centuries, whereas the 18th century remains quite a mystery land to me. So don't treat this episode as some kind of professional foray into the matter. It's more like two guys trying to analyze the most important bits and pieces and vibe check it, you know.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We left off in the sixth episode at the end of the Poltava battle, the glorious victory of the Russians against the Swedes in Ukrainian Poltava, and we were quick to declare Russia to be the Russian Empire there and then. Well, technically it's not quite true, because for 12 more years, from the glorious Poltava victory in 1709 to 1721, Russia technically remained a measly Russian Tsardom, and only in 1721 did it officially become the Russian Empire. So let's start with that, and with the last decade of Peter the Great's rule.

Yes, overall, this all began with the victory over the Swedish army at Poltava, which we talked about in the last episode.

Sweden at the time was considered the foremost military power in Europe, and Poltava changed Russia's status. While it would remain, as you say, a measly Tsardom for another 10 years or so, after Poltava its status in the eyes of the rest of Europe completely changed. From that day on, Russia was an actual great power and directly involved in the power struggles of Europe. Where it used to be some kind of long-bearded, comically large Bulgaria populated by barbarians on the borderlands of Europe, Poltava changed the calculation completely within one day, and Russia had joined the big boy league from 1709, actually.

And it was just a formality that the Russian Empire was formed in 1721. Yes, after that the war would of course go on for another 10 years, so we kind of skimmed over that, and some other interesting things happened during that period as well. Especially one of the greatest things that Peter did, actually: namely, he developed the Table of Ranks. The Table of Ranks, I think, was formally introduced after the proclamation of the empire, in 1722, but it was worked on for a long time. What the Table of Ranks was, was basically a formal list of ranks that covered the military, the government and the court system, and the church as well, actually.

It was a formal list of ranks, you know, like in a video game where you can level up and join the bronze league, silver league and so on, and increase your rank. Peter introduced a system that gamified the aristocracy to break the power of the old boyar nobility. He basically created a new nobility that would be based on service, and what the system meant was that people who did not come from aristocratic families could still receive nobility upon achieving certain ranks. Personal nobility was granted, which means the person who achieved that rank would become a noble, but their children wouldn't be. The higher ranks also conferred hereditary nobility: the eighth grade, which was later raised to the fifth rank, so state councillor, or brigadier general in the military.

So this system was very interesting in that it kind of defused the power struggles that were to cause a lot of damage in the rest of Europe in the 18th century, with the French Revolution of course being the most significant of these events.

And actually, the French philosopher, the counter-revolutionary French philosopher Joseph de Maistre, who did not like Peter the Great very much, considered Peter to be basically a borderline liberal who had destroyed Russia's old traditions. You know, we talked about this point of view in our previous Peter episodes. But he praised the system of the Table of Ranks, saying that it solved the question of the embittered middle classes, which had brought France to its knees in the revolution, by simply making it possible for talented members of the middle class, or even the lower classes, to rise through the ranks and reach basically the highest levels of society. If you look at it, there are quite a few examples of this. I think General Skobelev, his grandfather was a serf, a simple peasant, a serf tied to the land, almost a slave.

And Skobelev himself was, of course, a great hero of Russia and a general. And if I remember correctly, his daughter went on to marry into the high nobility and so on. So yeah, the social lifts actually worked, and they worked really well. And this took out a lot of the social pressure that was ravaging Europe at the time, with the entrenched aristocracy becoming a completely useless parasite class, and with Russia formalizing what an aristocracy is actually for. An aristocracy is basically an exchange, a social contract, where certain people gain certain privileges in exchange for rendering certain services.

Well, it's a great story that Skobelev achieved all that. But did you know that the father of Lenin actually progressed within the Table of Ranks to the fourth grade? And he achieved hereditary nobility.

Yeah. Technically, Lenin was a nobleman, yes.

Yeah, a hereditary one. That's true. In Peter's time, the only nobility class was the old nobility, the old boyars, who were very angry that nobodies were rising through the ranks. Although it saved us from a French-style revolution, it didn't help in the end.

Of course, there are some exceptions, such as Skobelev, but did people actually progress through the ranks? And who decided that? I mean, in practice, it was still a bit restricted. For example, there was that meme about being the "vechny titulyarny sovetnik", the eternal titular councillor, which was the rank just below where one would be granted nobility, and so many people remained at that rank for many years. Forever, basically. So was there some kind of a court? Who decided who was progressing and who stayed a councillor?

Well, there was a list of formalities which you had to achieve, and basically it's, like I said, like a video game progression system. You have to do certain things. You begin at the bottom of the table and you need to qualify for the next rank, which would be determined by your superiors and so on. For the highest ranks, it needed to be personally confirmed by the Tsar. But yeah, some promotions were automatic after a certain number of years spent in the service. Basically, if you do a good enough job to not get fired, you get promoted. Education, achievement and so on.

Was the Table of Ranks also inspired by his time in the Netherlands? They had... I think Sweden had some system similar to that.

Sweden and Denmark, I think, had systems, and France in some way too, but they were still different. It was an evolution of these meritocratic systems. It was the only truly meritocratic system, basically. Of course, it still had its flaws and so on, but overall it was, I think, pretty successful.

Other than that, shortly after, like two years after Poltava, Saint Petersburg was made the capital of Russia. Did we talk about the church reforms?

Not in depth, no.

So Peter became the official head of the church. Basically, what Peter did is that he abolished the Patriarchate, the Patriarchate of Moscow, and introduced the Most Holy Synod, which was the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, a government organ that would make the church not so personally dependent on the patriarch and more aligned with the government, not as personalized. Officially, yes, the Tsar was the head of the church, similar to how it is in the English church as well. There is that famous anecdote of Peter at a meeting with the church hierarchs who were protesting against the abolition of the Patriarchate. He threw his sword on the table because he was getting annoyed, and he exclaimed that this was his iron patriarch.

Peter the Great created an entirely new country on the basis of the Russian Tsardom. And this country existed for two more centuries, from roughly the victory at Poltava...

Until 1917, yes. For a little more than two centuries. Yes, and of course he did many other things. I think we mentioned the founding of the Academy of Sciences, which would make St. Petersburg the scientific center of Russia, also for two centuries.

Yeah. I think I traveled to Saint Petersburg two years after the anniversary, the 300th anniversary, the first time and actually the only time, and it was everywhere: 300 years of Saint Petersburg. And I envy it, because Yekaterinburg was younger by 20 years, as it was founded in 1723, and was named in honor of the wife of Peter the Great, Yekaterina, who would become his successor, because, as often happens, he didn't have any normal male heirs, and Yekaterina had to become the first empress for a couple of years.

So we all know that Peter was kind of raised in the German village near Moscow, and he was surrounded by his very foreign friends. And what was it like in his later years? Did the number of Russians in his inner circle increase?

To an extent, simply because his oldest friends died off, and he had to, so to speak, make new friends. Well, if you remember, while the Northern War was going on, there was also a war against the Turks, the Ottomans, going on as well. And the end of this was negotiated by one of those new... He was not ethnically Russian, he was a Polish Jew. Pyotr Shafirov became quite important later on. He knew many languages. He was the chief translator in the Russian Foreign Office for many years, and he accompanied Peter on many of his travels. He negotiated the Peace of the Prut between the Ottomans and Russia in 1711. For a while, he was very influential. He was the first baron in Russia. And the title of baron did not exist in the Russian system of nobility. It was granted to people who were completely outside of the Russian system, so usually foreigners. Similar to how the Rothschilds were made barons in France, for example. So most Jewish statesmen who were made nobles in Russia were also made barons. And Shafirov also reached the rank of vice chancellor. He did, however, end pretty badly after a feud with Alexander Menshikov.

The first result of the Northern War and the victorious Russian part in the war effort is that we achieved the window to Europe in the form of the Baltic coastline. Quite a lot of territory was ceded to Russia after the war. There was St. Petersburg, of course, but not only that. Also Vyborg, which was built, I believe, by the Swedes. So initially it was a Swedish city, and a few more Swedish castles and Swedish cities. The whole area, so-called Ingria or Ingermanland, which was actually called this way initially: the Ingermanlandskaya guberniya, it was called in the beginning of the war. Then it was renamed the Peterburgskaya guberniya, which was separated into various provinces: Kotlin Island, Shlisselburg.

And who was populating those lands? It was almost unpopulated, but let's take Vyborg, for example. I wonder who was living in Vyborg when it became part of Russia.

That's a good question, actually. I guess a mix of Swedes and Finns, like a Finnic underclass, as is typical for Finland. There were a lot of wild Swedes, and swamps as well, near Peterburg.

And it remained this way up until the revolution. Actually, ironically enough, it was Russified after the revolution. And I believe I saw some kind of statistic for not Peterburg the city, but its surroundings, and it was like 30% Finnic or something like that, or 50% Finnic.

The Karelians, probably, yeah. I mean, they are kind of a bit different from normal Finns, I guess.

Yeah. A sub-ethnicity, I guess. Although, actually, Vyborg, in some of the old chronicles, has been noted to have had a Slavic population as well, so basically mixed Karelian and Russian.

Interesting. But yeah, the Karelians were probably on their way to becoming Russified already.

Of course, the influx of foreigners increased. Right at the moment when Peter became the Tsar, even in the late 17th century, and from the victory over the Swedes, the number increased. And throughout most of the 18th century, there were waves of various Germans and foreigners coming to Russia to serve the emperor.

Foreign specialists were few and far between, but what about the huge waves? Like under Catherine II, there were tens of thousands of Germans who flocked to Russia and were given an entire area around the Volga to live on and own the land. I guess it was not yet happening under Peter, and it was mostly some merchants and specialists, etc., right?

Yeah, the German peasants came later.

Another important reform of the time, almost simultaneous with the establishment of the Holy Synod for the Church, is that Peter basically did the same thing for the government as well. He created the Governing Senate. He abolished the Boyar Duma, which, well, we've mentioned many times over the course of this series, of course, but it was finally abolished and replaced with the Governing Senate, which was then the highest political body, basically: legislative, judicial and executive, and subordinate only to the emperor, with a chief procurator, a minister of justice and so on. It also existed until 1917, basically. As we've said before, everyone who lived in the Russian Empire basically lived in the creation of Peter the Great in many ways.

So after the end of the Northern War, Peter had some new military ambitions, and a year after that, in 1722, he switched his attention to Persia.

Oh yes, the Russo-Persian War. It was a rather short war. Well, it lasted for one year, and we gained most of the current Caspian shores: Derbent, even Baku.

Yes, so Dagestan and Azerbaijan, modern day.

Yeah, Dagestan and Azerbaijan, pretty much. And even some currently Iranian provinces.

Did we control the entire coast of the Caspian Sea then, including northern Iran?

No, not completely. I think, well, we did control Mazandaran and Gilan, which are on the north of the Caspian Sea. But I mean, our control over the eastern side was not as firm then. Basically, what is Kazakhstan nowadays, it was still not... you know, the area around, what was it called in the before times? I forgot. Ah, Guryev. Guryev, of course. It was only taken like 50 years after the First Persian War, so not the complete Caspian coast was controlled by Russia. And by that time, I think, we were not in control of Mazandaran and so on anymore.

Yeah, and we lost the northern Persian lands, the coast of the Caspian Sea, which makes sense. All right, so I'm not sure if Azeris as a separate ethnicity or whatever existed back then. But even considering that we controlled modern-day Azerbaijan, those provinces such as Gilan were not even Azeri in origin. So it was probably harder to control a Persian population.

Yeah, basically the goal of the war was... well, after opening the window into Europe, he decided to open the gate to Asia. The official reasoning was to safeguard the interests of Russian merchants. So yeah, it was a relatively short war and quite successful. The invading force was actually quite small. It was only like 25,000. I mean, it was not a walk in the park. Like half the army died to "sanitary losses", and so on. Something like half the army died to disease, so yeah, it sucked pretty badly. But this was the curse of every incursion into that area since time immemorial, basically.

Yeah, it's a very dangerous area.

Yeah, I've said before that if Alexander the Great or the Romans had had hand sanitizer, they would have easily conquered the whole world.

Yeah. For the purposes of this war, Peter created the Caspian Flotilla, the Caspian Fleet, at Astrakhan.

Yes, which still exists and is currently thriving. What are they doing? They fire Kalibr missiles at Ukraine.

Oh, yeah. And in Syria as well. There is some use to them. Peter did that.

He died in 1725, so he had three more years to live as an emperor. He wasn't perfectly healthy. I think we mentioned all the problems with Peter's heirs already, and the kids from his previous marriage with Lopukhina. By the time of his death, the only legal heir that he had was Yekaterina I, or Marta Skavronskaya.

Well, Peter liked her very much. She was very, how to put it, stoic, and would always calm Peter down when something bad happened. She herself was not super ambitious, really. She had really no hunger for power, so to speak, and as such, did not have a firm grasp. I mean, she did learn a lot from Peter, of course. They actually lost most of their children.

Catherine, how to put it, continued the family tradition of being a party girl. She would drink a lot and get drunk with her coterie a lot, basically continuing the Petrine traditions. But she did not have the discipline of Peter, really. Because, as we've said, Peter, despite all his drinking and whoring and so on, was extremely disciplined and would rise super early in the morning. But Catherine did not like sitting at the desk and going through papers and so on, and as such she created the small Privy Council that would do all the boring stuff for her, and it feuded with Menshikov, who was, well, very ambitious, so to speak.

Catherine was supported by basically all those who were empowered by Peter. So basically, Peter had changed the inheritance law and abolished the old order of succession, which would be only direct male descendants, and Peter changed it so that it would be by personal appointment of the reigning monarch. According to Peter's decree, basically any person deemed worthy by the ruler could become the successor. He did not, however, manage to name a successor before he died.

And so most immediately supported, of course, Peter Alexeyevich, Peter's grandson, the son of Alexei. The noble families especially considered him the only legitimate heir, because he was the only male born into the Tsar's family. But while the Senate was deliberating on these matters, officers of the Preobrazhensky Regiment, well, Peter's favorite former toy soldiers, basically barged into the Senate meeting and said that they would kill anyone who went against Catherine. So yeah, that's how she became empress in the end. After this proclamation by the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the Senate unanimously voted for her.

Yeah, she was very unlike Sophia, the sister of Peter, who was actually apt at ruling the country and had a lot of ambitions and was an all-around girlboss, but was imprisoned in the monastery where she passed away, because of her feud with young Peter. Catherine did not really fit the Russian throne. If Sophia kind of deserved the throne but it was illegal for females to inherit it, then Yekaterina was the complete opposite. And as to Peter II, the grandson, the son of Alexei Petrovich from Peter's first marriage with Lopukhina, I mean, he was only 10 years old when Peter the Great died.

So yeah, Catherine did not rule for very long, and I mean, she did not really rule. Basically, Menshikov was ruling during that time, along with the new Privy Council that she created, and she was quite happy to hang out in Tsarskoye Selo and basically just chill out. The only thing that she was really interested in was the navy that she inherited from her husband. She was very interested personally in the navy. Other than that, she did not really fight in any wars. There was only basically a prince doing stuff in Persia, but other than that, we did not do much in terms of foreign policy at that time. Well, other than, of course, negotiating the Treaty of Vienna that made Russia and Austria allies.

It was one of the longest alliances in modern European history. I think the only longer alliance was the one between England and Portugal. But basically, Russia and Austria were allies for something like 130 years, between 1726 and the Crimean War, when the Austrians betrayed us and stabbed us in the back.

So yeah, she almost ended up in a war with Britain, though. That was pretty bad, because basically the British were very reliant on timber from the Baltic. They were not happy that Russia had become the sole power in the Baltic after crushing Sweden, and Russia was also increasing its influence in Germany. As such, George I tried to create a coalition against Russia, but thankfully that did not work out and did not come to actual war. But yes, other than that, not really much happened during her reign, I would say.

So she died in 1727, at the age of 43, maybe. It was because of all this drinking.

Oh, yeah, definitely. She had quite poor health.

And the 13-year-old Peter II inherited the throne, the grandson of Peter. He was the son of Alexei Petrovich and a German princess, Sophia Charlotte of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. So Charlotte, let's call her that, really did not want to be married to Alexei Petrovich. She wrote in letters that she hoped she would never be married to the barbarian Muscovite. But alas, she was. And she gave birth to Peter II, who actually resembled Peter I quite a bit in his appearance.

Still, the country was basically ruled by Alexander Menshikov.

He died in three years from smallpox. Well, Catherine wanted to appoint her daughter, either Elizabeth or Anna, as heiress, but this was not very popular, and Menshikov switched to the camp of Peter II. He even managed to talk the sick and dying Catherine... She wasn't really herself, but she signed. Basically, she agreed that Pyotr Alexeyevich would marry Menshikov's daughter, Maria Menshikova, who was to become his first wife. So yeah, a few hours before she died, she also signed a decree against Menshikov's enemies, Count Tolstoy, for example.

So Menshikov was ruling Russia at the time, and he issued a lot of decrees. Of course, they were not publicly decrees from Menshikov himself, but he was actually the ghostwriter. In one of them, for example, there was the issue of electing a new Hetman in Little Russia. There was a decree from 1727 which says that the new Hetman should live according to the treaties of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. And in the secret paragraph, he added: except for the Jews. Jews could not become Hetmans anymore.

Well, yeah. Now they can again.

Nowadays they can again. Yeah. So Peter the Great was philo-Semitic and Menshikov was anti-Semitic, I guess.

So, to sum up the role of Peter the Great overall, who died in pretty severe pain in 1725. He was suffering from a bunch of health issues, kidney stones and so on. He died in great pain after going to Staraya Russa, where he went to inspect the Ladoga Canal, which was being built at the time, even though his doctors told him not to do it and to stay in bed. But he insisted, as usual, and yeah, he was very sick and died in great pain. But to summarize his rule, I think you can probably quote Voltaire, who said that the Russians under his rule achieved in 50 years what other nations do not achieve in 500 years.

And I would probably quote the Russian arch-historian Klyuchevsky, in summary: "The reforms of Peter themselves arose from the pressing needs of the state and the people, instinctively felt by a powerful person with a sensitive mind and a strong character with many talents. The reforms carried out by Peter the Great did not have as their direct goal to rebuild either the political, social, or moral order established in this state. It was not aimed at the task of placing Russian life on unfamiliar Western European foundations, introducing new borrowed principles into it, but was limited to the desire to arm the Russian state and people with ready-made Western European intellectual and material means, thereby elevating the state to the level of the position it had conquered in Europe. Initiated and led by the supreme authority, the customary guide of the people, it took on the character and methods of a violent overthrow, a kind of revolution. It was a revolution not in its goals and results, but only in its methods and the impression it made on the minds and the nerves of contemporaries."

Yes. So in the end, what should we advise our listeners to read, maybe historical works or fiction?

Fiction? I'm not really familiar with any fiction. Well, can we consider Pushkin's Poltava fiction? I don't know. Or maybe Byron's Mazeppa.

Yeah, well, it is fiction, isn't it? Yeah, of course. Poltava is a great poem. I wonder if there is a translation, actually.

I mean, there probably is. Here, I have a translation. I sent you the link.

Okay. "A hundred years have passed, but both remains of these proud, powerful men, imbued with all their willful passions... Their generation passed, and with them every bloody trace of effort, of failure, of victory vanished. Of all the northern citizens throughout the nation's war-torn fate, only you, hero of Poltava, have built yourself a monument, where horned buffalo roam free about the graves of warriors. Commemorate the Swedish king! From there the daring hero sheared, alone among his household servants, the loud assault of Turkish forces, and cast his sword beneath the staff. In vain the somber foreigner would seek the hetman's grave nearby."

"Mazeppa had been long forgotten, only in a solemn, hallowed site each year unto this day, in wrath, a cathedral peals anathema on him. Yet two graves still endure, where the dust of the two martyrs rests. The church preserves their halcyon respite among the righteous ancient graves; a row of oaks, now ancient groves, which friends had planted in Dikanka, and to this day they testify to sons about their murdered fathers. As for the daughter who transgressed, the legends do not speak of her. Her suffering, her fate, her end are hidden by a veil of darkness. And yet sometimes an old and blind Ukrainian rhapsodist, before the people of a village, strums the Hetman's songs about a sinful maiden, and afterward the Cossack youth will listen as he tells her tale."

So, the founder of the Russian Empire, Peter, is dead. That leads us to the reign of Catherine I.

So, a short recap. Back in 1704, during Peter's campaign in Livonia, he met a beautiful peasant, Marta Skavronskaya. Or not so beautiful, but she enjoyed drinking and was fun all around. They secretly married, and Marta converted to Orthodoxy and received the name of Yekaterina Alexeyevna. Peter and Catherine had two surviving daughters, Anna and Elisabetta, so Anna and Elizabeth.

With the help of Prince Alexander Menshikov, one of Peter's personal friends, and thanks to his various maneuvers, Yekaterina I was appointed as the new empress. So Menshikov sought to rule Russia on her behalf as head of the newly created Supreme Privy Council, and his plans succeeded. He retained his important post throughout the reign of Catherine, which allowed him to continue doing his various deals and corrupt businesses.

And one of Catherine's personal policies was to reduce military spending, which was probably astronomical during Peter's times. This reduction led to lower taxes, and this, of course, brought the first female empress some degree of popularity. Catherine is also remembered for the Catherine Palace, which was built in her name on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in Tsarskoye Selo. She died quite early, three years into her reign, in 1727, and the throne passed to Peter the Great's only male grandson, Peter Alexeyevich, who became Emperor Peter II.

Menshikov hoped to maintain his influence, his position. Menshikov was still not very old at the time. He was in his early 50s. And he dominated all the court and all the magnates. Well, he continued exerting dominance over all his peers while pressing Catherine for additional wealth and land and titles all the time. He really had an insatiable thirst for power and wealth, and he was also extremely arrogant and neglectful of his friends and family, which led to the simultaneous process of him becoming the wealthiest nobleman of the time, but also slowly isolating himself.

For example, he had like 3,000 villages or so and 300,000 serfs, and that is 10 times more than the second wealthiest nobleman in Russia owned at the time, Prince Mikhail Cherkassky. But Menshikov was still never satisfied, and he always sought more influence. He convinced Catherine to grant him the title of Generalissimo, which is a rank that was only held by very few figures in Russian history, including Shein, Suvorov and Stalin.

Menshikov's survival strategy was kind of like, you know, a predator animal. He had to constantly feed. Getting more power and more wealth was the only way he could protect what he already had, because he had so many enemies who were trying to get him. He was basically convinced that if he took a short break in gaining more power and more wealth, he would be immediately devoured, and this led to basically quite a general hatred of him.

Yeah, makes sense. And he tried to marry his daughter to Peter II.

Yes. So Catherine, as we've already said, died from partying too hard, and also killed one of her lovers by partying too hard, Count Reinhold von Löwenwolde, who is rumored to have died from sexual exhaustion.

So yeah, I mentioned already the crisis with Britain that Catherine got herself into. And Menshikov in this time became even more influential. He took charge of the whole Baltic region, and he wanted to make himself the Duke of Courland, basically to have a huge hereditary estate to his name. But he was quite brutal in Courland, to such a degree that Catherine was afraid his behavior in the Baltic would cause a revolt, so she did not make him overlord of the Baltic.

So yeah, Catherine died, and the grandson, Peter, son of Alexei, was the only one made heir. And Menshikov was quite out of favor. The question was how to safeguard the inheritance and so on. Osterman, one of Menshikov's rivals, proposed that Peter should marry his aunt, Yelizaveta. Which would probably have been politically sound, but aside from the creepiness of it all, the church forbade incest to that degree, and as such, this marriage could not happen.

Menshikov suggested that his own daughter Maria should marry Peter. Maria was already betrothed to some Lithuanian prince, but they broke the betrothal, and in the end, the granddaughter of a pie seller was marrying the grandson of an emperor, and Menshikov would become the father-in-law and basically the controller of the next Tsar. Tolstoy tried to counteract by backing Anna for succession, so Peter the Great's daughter. Catherine ended up backing Menshikov while she was dying and not really understanding what was going on. Menshikov took control of the palace while she was dying.

Yes, and as I already said, Menshikov struck a big coup against his enemies. He had Tolstoy, Ushakov and others arrested by a decree that he himself had drafted and made the dying empress sign. There was no succession crisis when Catherine died. Menshikov had managed to cow all opposition, and Peter II, at the time 10, or already 11, was declared emperor of Russia. The child emperor was talented, he was tall and healthy, and his best friend was Prince Dolgorukov, and he was probably very scared of Menshikov, who was quite an unpleasant person.

So Menshikov had decided that Peter II should marry Maria Menshikova, and moved Peter into his own palace. The child emperor tried balancing the factions against each other. So what happened was basically that when Peter fell ill, Yelizaveta rushed to him and nursed him, and Osterman and Dolgorukov convinced him to act against Menshikov. Peter sent Yelizaveta a bunch of money, and Menshikov intercepted the courier and stole the money. When Peter II learned of this, he summoned Menshikov and started yelling at him. But later Menshikov fell ill, and kept giving orders to Peter and basically told him who to listen to and so on. And then Peter and his advisors seized this moment, stripped Menshikov of his ranks and exiled him to Siberia, where he would die two years later.

Yes. So the clan of the Dolgorukovs basically secured their top position at the court. Of course, no one would imagine that Peter II would die at the age of 14 and not actually marry anyone. He was supposed to marry Yekaterina Dolgorukova. It was not to be, because he would die pretty soon. But what he did was move the capital back to Moscow after his coronation in 1728.

I wouldn't put it like that. I wouldn't say that he returned the capital to Moscow, because there was no capital during Peter II's reign, and there was no government, basically. Peter II, probably traumatized by his experience with Menshikov, decided that he would rule completely by himself and have no ministers and so on, and the government basically fell apart. It was in a total state of chaos. No one was paid, everyone stole as much as they could, the diplomacy was completely paralyzed, and basically nothing happened in the government. And so after Peter had been crowned in Moscow, he did not return to Petersburg.

Well, the Tsars were always crowned in Moscow right until the very end, but basically Peter II was very resentful of his grandfather. He did a bunch of stuff to reverse what Peter the Great had done, such as having a disdain for St. Petersburg, and also he was basically just hunting all the time. He was very obsessed with hunting, and the hunting grounds around Moscow were much better. He pardoned a bunch of people Peter the Great had sent into exile, he neglected the navy completely, and he abolished the Preobrazhensky Office. And he was basically completely passive in all government affairs. Absolutely nothing happened.

And what was the Preobrazhensky Office about? Was it the first intelligence service of Russia?

Yes, sort of. It was kind of a mix between, like, a foreign ministry, an intelligence agency, military intelligence and so on. Kind of the CIA of Peter the Great. But it also did a bunch of other stuff, like guarding government objects and even criminal investigations, the most important ones.

So yeah, considering that Peter II was so disdainful of all those reforms, if he had lived, not died at 14 but lived a normal, healthy life, maybe we could expect a total regression and reversion to the old boyar Russia of pre-Peter I, or something to this effect, without all the new innovations such as the Secret Service and the Navy and St. Petersburg as the capital. But I guess God intervened.

Yeah. So basically, the center of all governance in Russia at the time was the Dolgorukov hunting grounds around Moscow. And other than that, nothing was happening. Alexei Dolgorukov, who was the father of Peter's friend Ivan Dolgorukov, wanted the Tsar to marry Yekaterina Dolgorukova. But other members of the Dolgorukov clan, for example Marshal Vasily Dolgorukov, were against basically tying themselves too closely to the Tsar's family, because, knowing Russian history, this was a good way of getting the entire clan killed. Yekaterina also did not want this. She had an affair with some Austrian playboy diplomat, an aristocrat. But Peter actually agreed to marry her. And the Dolgorukovs also tried to marry Ivan Dolgorukov to Yelizaveta, but she refused, because Ivan Dolgorukov was also kind of, well, not a very good husband for such an illustrious princess.

So wasn't it weird that Peter II died the same day he was supposed to marry Yelizaveta Dolgorukova?

Yeah, the marriage was set for January 18th, 1730, and suddenly he had a headache during some kind of troop inspection, and, well, they basically discovered that he was suffering from smallpox, and he died half a day before he was supposed to get married. So, yeah.

And that leads us to Empress Anna.

Yes, but before that, there was a bunch of Game of Thrones going on, as usual. Basically, directly after Peter II had died, Ivan Dolgorukov came out of the room where Peter had died, drew his sword and shouted, "Long live Empress Yekaterina!", by which he meant his sister, Yekaterina Dolgorukova. No one understood what he was talking about, because no one had heard of the scheme before. But the Dolgorukov clan actually fabricated a false will to have the fiancée declared empress. So basically launching a coup to replace the Romanovs with the Dolgorukovs.

Osterman claimed to be sick and disappeared. And the remaining members of the Supreme Privy Council gathered to decide on the new monarch. Peter was the last of the male Romanovs, which created kind of an opportunity, because for the first time since 1613, they had a chance to actually completely change the nature of the Russian monarchy. Dolgorukov, of course, started swinging around the forged will that left the throne to his own daughter. But even the aforementioned Marshal Vasily Dolgorukov refused to entertain these ridiculous claims.

And Prince Golitsyn also said that the new heir must be chosen from the Romanov family. All the candidates were, however, female, as there were no male heirs. Theoretically, the rightful empress by Catherine's will was Elisabetta, but she was born illegitimate, so that complicated things, and she did not want any part of that anyway. Peter's first wife actually also appeared on the scene again, Eudoxia. But no one really reacted to her proposal, and as such, only the daughters of Peter's brother were left.

It's easy to confuse the two. There is Anna who is a daughter of Peter the Great, who never became empress, and there is also a half-niece of Peter the Great, the daughter of Tsar Ivan V, who actually became empress after Peter II.

Yes, exactly. Anna, the widow of Courland, born to a Russian mother, no upstart like Catherine, and she had really no views and didn't belong to any faction and so on. And Golitsyn actually suggested making the Privy Council stronger and the monarchy weaker, and basically having Anna be a simple figurehead who would only have very limited powers. This plan would basically have created an aristocratic oligarchy in Russia, and it was sort of a Dolgorukov power grab. But for this they had to get to Anna before she realized that it was really just a scheme of like half a dozen old men, and not what things were supposed to be like. So they closed the gates of Moscow and dispatched people from their clans, the Golitsyns and the Dolgorukovs, to basically have Anna accept the conditions that the autocrat would not be allowed to choose a spouse, appoint an heir, declare war or introduce new taxes without the permission of the council.

So, basically, introducing a constitutional monarchy in Russia. This would have been the greatest change in Russian government in all of the Romanov era.

Other people dispatched couriers to arrive at her first. The Dolgorukovs were actually beaten by a former lover. I forgot his name. It was some German name, I think. Ernst Johann Biron?

No, no, no, that was another of her lovers. Löwenwolde. Löwenwolde, right. He was faster than the Dolgorukovs and Golitsyns, and basically she already knew the score when things happened. She would have accepted basically any conditions to get out of her exile in Courland. So she ostensibly agreed and went to Moscow, where she also reunited with her former lover, Ernst Biron, who would have a very profound influence during her rule.

So in February 1730, Anna entered Moscow to the boom of cannons. There was a lot of spy stuff going on. Osterman had basically arranged that the ladies, the servants, the handmaidens of the empress, would be the wives of enemies of the Privy Council faction, enemies of the Dolgorukovs. So they transmitted hidden messages from Osterman, like sewn into clothes and so on, to be in contact with the empress and to tell her that it was all kind of a bluff and the Privy Council didn't actually have any supporters.

Of course, the traditional Russian view has always been that the aristocrats are bad and the Tsar is good. And especially, many of the power structures at the time had been created by the absolute monarchy, and no one was interested in old boyars taking power from the rightful Tsar. And as such, Anna improved her relationship with the Preobrazhensky Guards. She declared herself colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, drank with them and basically became good friends with them.

So yeah, she reinstituted the secret police and moved the capital back, so to speak, to St. Petersburg. And also, it could be argued that she was the first German ruler, well, culturally and otherwise, because under her reign the influence of ethnic Germans at the imperial court increased exponentially. She brought a lot of people, Germans, from the Duchy of Courland, including lovers such as Biron and others.

Yes, I think Biron was, well, the de facto ruler of Russia. He was extremely influential over her, and she never refused anything he asked. And he was at the same time a count of the Holy Roman Empire.

But before she assumed the throne, there was an interesting dramatic scene playing out in the Kremlin. When Anna received the Golitsyns and the Dolgorukovs, there also came Prince Alexei Cherkassky, who was, as I said, the richest man in Russia after the late Menshikov, and a figurehead for the army faction, the military faction. He presented her with a petition signed by many allies that asked Anna to rule as an absolute monarch and basically reverse the conditions she had agreed to that would have limited her powers. So Cherkassky formally asked her to become an absolute monarch. The guards, the Preobrazhensky Guards who were present, offered to basically murder all the Dolgorukovs and Golitsyns present on the spot.

And so Anna pretended that she didn't know what this was about. They had this little theater play where Anna basically asked, "Oh, are you saying that the conditions I signed weren't the wish of the people?" And then all the guards started shouting, "No, we want you to be absolute monarch, and you've been lied to," and so on. So a very charming little theater scene, but it was actually Anna taking power.

Yeah. Whenever Western historians, historiographers, speak of Anna Ioannovna, they write articles with names like "Unhinged Facts About Anna of Russia". I hate this word, "Tsarina".

Yeah. This word doesn't even exist in Russian.

Yeah, I think it's Serbian or something like that.

Yeah, it's some Slavic thing. She was nicknamed Ivana the Terrible.

Ivana. Oh, man. This is great.

But yeah, she did exile some people, and she executed more than a thousand people, which is probably nothing in comparison to many other mad rulers. She was not really mad, but there was some mean streak about her. In her 10 years of reign, from 1730 to 1740, I mean, she and Biron were compensating a lot, because Anna had spent all her life as a poor relative in the middle of nowhere, and Biron was some provincial hedge knight, basically. And now they had absolute power in Russia. So yeah, they spent a lot of money on very frivolous things.

Yeah. And other aristocrats remarked that they were kind of tasteless about it.

So, in 1733, Russia was drawn into the War of the Polish Succession, supporting the claims of Elector Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Shall we talk about it, or does it not terribly concern us?

Yeah, I do not think it terribly concerns us, really. I mean, yeah, we quickly captured Warsaw together with the Saxon army, but most of the fighting actually happened in Germany. And in the end, Frederick Augustus II won and became King Augustus III of Poland.

And there was another conflict, the Russo-Turkish War of 1735, which was a response to the Crimean raids on Little Russia. And by the way, the Crimean Khanate still existed, right?

Yeah, the Crimean Khanate was only abolished by Catherine the Great.

Oh yeah, it proved very resilient, the last of the khanates, probably.

Yeah. So the Russo-Turkish War of 1735 to 1739 was interesting. Russia had a treaty with the Persians, who were at war with the Ottomans on their own. And this was still during the time of the Austro-Russian alliance. And yes, as you said, the official casus belli was the Crimean Tatars and the raids into Russian territory. And actually, they wanted to seize Azov and Crimea back then. So we still did not control Novorossiya and Crimea. Also, the Austrians lost their part of the war to the Turks and basically had to give up Serbia and other land in the Balkans. It was really kind of an insane defeat for the Austrians. But yeah, we kind of won our part of the war. We had heavy losses, but in the end we won, and Russia managed to sign the Treaty of Niš. We gave up our claims on Crimea, but in exchange we were allowed to build a port at Azov. So basically we got our Black Sea port, and that would be kind of the beginning of Russia's expansion into the area of what is now Novorossiya.

Yes, so it was a four-year-long war, with about a 100,000-strong army on the Crimean Tatar side, with huge help, of course, from the Ottomans and their military leadership. Initially the manpower on the Russian side was lower, about 50,000, and by the end of it, it was double the Crimean Tatar manpower, so about 200,000. And of course, the Zaporozhian Cossacks and various Kalmyks were pretty instrumental in our victory. And I guess the Austrians and various Germans distracting them on the other fronts.

So yes, internally, Anna, as you said, was probably no more cruel than any other Tsar, although she did have some questionable hobbies. She was very fond of dwarf tossing.

A lost art, really.

Yeah, a lost art. And I mean, most of the stuff where she was kind of cruel or bullied the nobility, it had a political sense. It made sense politically. Peter the Great did the same. I don't think she did anything that Peter the Great didn't do. She crushed the Dolgorukovs and Golitsyns.

And so, when it came to ensuring the succession, Anna did not want Yelizaveta to become empress. Yelizaveta was quite popular. Well, people loved her, really. She was regularly described as the most beautiful woman in Russia. Her nickname was the Russian Venus, and really everyone loved her. However, Anna was probably a little jealous of her, or maybe not a little, very jealous. She had some of Elizabeth's friends executed, exiled and so on.

And so instead of Elizabeth, Anna nominated her niece as heir, Anna Leopoldovna, the daughter of her sister Yekaterina and the Duke of Mecklenburg. She was supposedly ugly and stupid, so not very popular. And she tried to marry Anna Leopoldovna to a German prince, I forgot which one, and then there was some scandal around that. And when Anna had decided that she had solved the succession question, she basically kind of retired to enjoying her dwarf tossing and so on.

The power struggles were becoming more intense again, and Anna became ever more suspicious and paranoid. Biron was at the height of his power at the time. He was also extremely paranoid, and he was afraid that when Anna died, he would lose his position. And so, just like Menshikov, he wanted to become Duke of Courland. The old dynasty there had just become completely extinct, and he asked Anna to make him Duke. And so she actually had him elected as the duke.

But in St. Petersburg, Biron spotted an opportunity to rise even higher. Anna Leopoldovna was super opposed to marrying the German prince, Anton was his name, I think, Prince Anton. Biron offered his own son, which quite irritated the empress. Finally, the heiress declared that she would still prefer to marry Anton, whom she hated, than the son of a lowborn like Biron. So yeah, the marriage happened.

They actually had a funny novelty at the wedding which was popular at the time. Namely, they had Africans at the wedding ceremony who were dressed in black clothing that was very tight-fitting, which made them appear naked. This was a very popular thing at the time.

Other than that, there was much more plotting against Biron, including by Anna's new favorite, Volynsky. Soon after, Anna of Brunswick delivered the empress a male heir, named Ivan after the empress's father. The empress basically kidnapped the baby, but fell ill, at least starting her health problems. Biron tried to convince her to make him regent for while the baby was ruling. She did not really want to, but she still did it.

Oh yeah. The baby ruled for more than a year, actually, from 1740 to 1741, and he was three months old when he became emperor.

Yeah, I believe so. That's interesting. So he was mostly German. Ivan VI. His mother was Anna Leopoldovna, his father was the German Anton Ulrich of Brunswick.

Yes, and Anna Leopoldovna quickly tossed aside Biron and declared herself regent. Biron was imprisoned at Shlisselburg.

Yeah, there was a coup against Biron.

Yes, there was a coup against Biron. He had extracted a lot of resources for his beloved Courland, or modern-day Latvia, where, for example, he built Rundāle Palace, which stands to this day, a Baroque palace, the main palace in all of Latvia.

All this time, Yelizaveta was quietly plotting behind the scenes.

The charming young girl had a very scary mind to her, and she was plotting to take the throne for herself all this time.

Yelizaveta is Elizabeth in English, yes?

Yes, Elizabeth. And I think the final thing that pushed her to decide on the coup is when the Shah of Persia sent a big embassy to St. Petersburg, with a bunch of jewels and so on, and elephants and whatnot, and he asked for the hand of Princess Elizabeth. And Anna Leopoldovna actually wanted to send her to the harem of the Shah. As such, Elizabeth told other people that they should not forget that she was the daughter of Peter the Great. And she started her coup. On November 25th, 1741, she put on armor herself and rode through a snowstorm to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards, where she rallied her supporters. Well, she held a speech, she held a pike in her hand, and asked the soldiers to serve her like they had served her father.

I think the most beautiful woman in Russia wearing armor and carrying weapons and holding a stirring speech was a very impressive sight. And the Preobrazhensky Guards erupted into chanting that they would die for her. And so the guards picked her up and carried her on their shoulders and marched to the palace, and the palace guards also immediately joined her. Osterman was arrested.

Yeah, Anna was also arrested. The guards, however, were supposed to arrest the baby, too. But, well, this era of palace coups was less bloody than before. So the guards actually waited until the baby woke up. They didn't even wake up the baby, and brought the baby to Elisabetta.

The gallant age.

Yeah, much more so. Of course, 100 years earlier, they would have just impaled the baby on a pike and thrown it into the trash. But yeah, Yelizaveta proclaimed that the baby was not guilty of anything, and of course nothing bad happened to the baby.

So Yelizaveta, the youngest daughter of Peter the Great and Yekaterina I, was much more Russian in her appearance and culture as well, and she was an actual Orthodox. And when she became Empress in 1741, and she had a long reign, more than 20 years, she kind of balanced out the German influence. With Osterman gone, with Biron gone, there were more ethnic Russians professing the Orthodox faith in leadership positions, thanks to Empress Elizabeth. And that was endearing to the Preobrazhensky forces and to Russians in general. And the fact that she was beautiful, and she kind of looked like her father as well. She did love high society, the balls, and she loved to cross-dress as a man and stuff like that.

Yeah, she made one very crucial mistake, about which I am extremely bitter: namely, that she had her nephew, the Duke of Holstein, summoned, who was a grandson of Peter the Great and a grand-nephew of Charles XII, so basically a potential heir to both Russia and Sweden. And she had him declared heir and Grand Duke, and he would eventually succeed her in a very unpleasant plot twist.

So yeah, Yelizaveta rode into Moscow, and she also crowned herself. She crowned herself like Peter the Great had done. Yeah, there was a smaller war against Sweden going on at the time. We conquered Finland at the time, but that was not the crucial thing that was happening. There was a much more crucial war later on. So at this time, Russia was still deeply in the alliance with Austria and was becoming more and more estranged from Britain and Prussia, actually.

Overall, Yelizaveta's rule was remarkably free of any terrible events, and it was a relatively peaceful reign, aside from a few wars, and she was a patron of culture and art, which flourished at the time. But yeah, Peter III, as he would later be known, was already making himself very unpopular. He began to be educated as a Russian at the age of 13, so too late.

You mean Peter III?

Yes, Peter III.

Yeah, he looks like a total freak.

Yeah, Yelizaveta understood this at some point. In a letter to Razumovsky, she calls him a monster. So yeah, it is interesting. Razumovsky was Yelizaveta's lover. They were very close to one another.

But the good things that she did include the construction of many new churches in the style of Elizabethan Baroque. Also, she is remembered for promising not to use the death penalty during her reign, and she actually kept her word, although there was some punishment and torture still. But it was a very humane era, or maybe too humane, and that's why the likes of Peter III ascended the throne after her. She also continued the de-Germanization policies. She sent home the German friends of Peter III. And she tried to get Catherine pregnant, really.

But her problem... although she was a patron of arts and architecture, she had a beautiful singing voice and all that, for some reason Elizabeth never officially married, and she left no heirs. Although she had many lovers and probably a lot of kids out of wedlock. I'm not sure about that, but still.

And the Razumovsky fellow was a Cossack, right?

And she actually founded the Lomonosov University, so the Moscow State University nowadays, and the Academy of Arts. So yeah, she was very interested in that. She also corresponded with Voltaire. She built a huge library and art collection, which would later become the Hermitage Museum. And yeah, the problem is that Elisabetta's reputation always suffers from the comparison to Catherine the Great. Because Elisabetta's reign was pretty good. She was a very competent monarch. She did many good things, but she was not as brilliant as Catherine the Great, and as such she's always overshadowed by Catherine.

Lomonosov was probably one of the first and most famous Russian scientists of the 18th century, and his career was under Elizabethan rule, more or less. So there is a legend, probably, but he was born in a village which is now called Lomonosovo, in the north, and despite coming from a peasant fisherman family, he managed to teach himself many things and go to St. Petersburg and become one of the main Russian scientists of the century. What were his main contributions, actually, to the scientific world?

Lomonosov? Yeah. Well, he was kind of a Renaissance man. There is everything: astronomy, physics. He was very important in chemistry. He was also a poet. He created the term physical chemistry and basically gave the definition to the science of physical chemistry. Aside from that, he was into physics and chemistry. I am not a physicist myself, but he invented some kind of theory of gases that was very important. He was also an astronomer: he discovered the fact that Venus had an atmosphere. He invented a bunch of stuff, a bunch of trinkets and scientific instruments, and made some important contributions to geology, and to history especially. And of course to the science of teaching science, so basically pedagogy. It was him who designed Moscow University, and he was basically the founder of the Slavic school of Russian historiography. So really a Renaissance man. And he was also a writer, a prolific writer, and he played a crucial role in establishing the norms of literary Russian, together with Karamzin and Pushkin.

Yeah, because before Lomonosov, there was not that much Russian literature. There were, of course, some church writings in Old Church Slavonic, but there was not a modern Russian, really. And from the middle of the 18th century, we can see actual modern Russian being born in that very time, during Elizabeth's reign.

Yes. At the same time, other things were happening on the diplomatic front, namely, the next European war was looming. The British tried to convince Yelizaveta to join an alliance against France and Prussia, a policy that was supported by many at the time. Basically, the British tried to convince Russia to go into an alliance because Prussia was being aggressive and expansionist. But then suddenly, Frederick of Prussia pulled off his own alliance with Britain. And so this would have led to a very confusing mess of things. Basically, the British, as usual, tried to play everyone against each other.

And so the Anglo-Prussian alliance also convinced the French to bury their century-old rivalry with the Austrians. Like I said in one of the episodes of the Romanov series, you basically have 200 years of history which are mostly defined by the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Valois. But this time the British managed it, and the French-Austrian-Saxon-Russian alliance was formed, which led to the Treaty of Versailles. And this conflict would come to be known as the Seven Years' War.

It was kind of a world war. It had a lot of theaters, not just Silesia: Western Europe, Portugal, North America, West Africa, India. It really was kind of a world war. We're not going to cover all of it, because the French and Indian War was part of it, and a lot of things happened, but that is all not very important to us. What is important to us is that Russia was quite successful in the war. The Prussians had just been beaten at Kunersdorf, where we had a decisive victory over the Prussians and basically destroyed most of the Prussian army. Only something like 3,000 out of 50,000 survived, and it was the worst defeat that Frederick the Great ever suffered in his military career. So, total victory. The Russian army crossed the Oder and started marching on Berlin.

And then Elizabeth suddenly died. This sucked very badly, because Peter III took over the throne, and the very first thing he did was to make peace with Prussia, because he was himself a German. This came to be known as the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. The Treaty of St. Petersburg was made. It was a separate peace, really. Peter III was a total fanboy of Frederick the Great. So yes, we could have taken Berlin back then, so that really sucked for Russia, and Russia would enter an alliance with Prussia two years later. All very sad, actually, because we had a chance to capture Berlin early enough. Oh well, whatever. It was a large return to German rule.

So what was he about? How old was he when he became the emperor?

He was 33 or so.

Yes. Well, he did not really have a political program, really, but he planned a bunch of reforms, and well, really everyone hated him, kind of for his extreme Germanophilia. And he also reversed some of the crucial changes that Peter the Great had initiated. Namely, he produced the Manifesto on the Freedom of the Nobility and basically made them a very privileged caste.

And so during Peter the Great's reign, basically all nobles were forced to serve the government all their lives, right? And after the manifesto of Peter III, they didn't have to serve at all. They were completely liberated from all of their responsibilities to the state. And this kind of sucked.

Very progressive, though.

Yeah. Peter III also reformed serfdom and made it more strict. This was basically the time when serfdom became the strictest it had ever been in Russia. So yeah, all very sad. But luckily, the patriots turned out to be in control.

He also wanted to attack Denmark to help Prussia seize Schleswig, which was extremely unpopular, because Denmark had been a traditional ally of Russia, and Russia had never had any problems with Denmark. And Peter III basically wanted Russia to start a war against a traditional friendly ally for no other reason than to help the Prussians seize a bunch of land, so this was extremely unpopular. And he also moved against the church, which was also an extremely unpopular move. He basically expropriated land ownership from the monasteries and planned some reforms of the church, which, thank God, never came to fruition. He wanted to ban icons and stuff like that.

So basically, a literally German-occupied government.

Yeah, a Protestant one. Yeah, the patriots were in control this time around and removed him from the government.

How did they do that?

So Peter III was very confused at seeing that everyone hated him and was plotting against him. And the officers of the Preobrazhensky Guard and so on supported Catherine II, and also the Horse Guards and so on, and they started moving against Peter III in the coup. His advisors urged him to go to Kronstadt and basically lead the army units that were loyal to him, but he decided against that. But then he still changed his mind again and went to Kronstadt with his whole court and the ladies and so on. Basically, he was supposed to go join the East Prussian army, which was loyal to him, but he did not, and he lost heart and signed the abdication.

He was then murdered under circumstances that were not quite clear, which led to a lot of pretenders and fakes. Officially, he died from hemorrhoids, as Catherine said, but he was most likely strangled. So it's a bit unclear what really happened to Peter III, but he was killed and removed, and the army brought Catherine to the throne. And now the real fun stuff begins.

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# Chapter 9: Catherine II – The Beginning

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast. We are officially resurrecting our historical series on the Romanov dynasty. There are seven episodes under our belt, and if you haven't listened to them yet, you're up for a 10-hour-plus-long deep dive into Russian history from the 16th century up to the middle of the 18th century. In this episode, we are going to tell you all you need to know about Catherine II. We will try to look at her reign from all angles: production, military, diplomacy, as well as her personal traits. How did she affect Russia in the long run, and what was she actually like?

It's probably important to point out that she was the first fully Western European person to rule Russia, without a single drop of Russian blood in her. Of course, Catherine I was also some kind of a Lithuanian, but it's not Western Europe. So Catherine II was the first one, and she wasn't even supposed to become Empress of Russia, as she was brought to Russia from the Kingdom of Prussia for a different role: to bear children to Peter III, whose reign we already discussed at the end of the previous episode.

But long story short, he was a complete weirdo, a Prussian nationalist, and was widely disliked by the people. And his cunning wife used this to her advantage. At the very least, she didn't try to stop Count Alexei Orlov from orchestrating the assassination of Peter III.

And because we really want you to understand what was going on in the middle of the 18th century in Russia, let's go a little bit back and remember Empress Elizabeth and her coup d'état of 1741, which set the precedent and the good tradition of physically removing unpopular emperors. Elizabeth, on November 25th, 1741, well, basically she grabbed 300 of her friends. It was already deep winter in Petersburg, there was a snowstorm, and they walked through the snowstorm to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Life Guard Regiment. And she must have made a visual impression. She was wearing armor, a breastplate, and she held a speech invoking the guardsmen's loyalty. And then they advanced to the Winter Palace. They arrested Anna, her husband, and the baby, Ivan VI. So Elizaveta took over from the baby and basically declared herself the ruler of the Russian Empire.

She was a pretty good empress, I would say. She was quite involved in the ruling itself, although she had her taste for spending a lot of money on courtly things, but that was just the fashion of the time. In terms of foreign policy, she leaned towards Austria against Prussia and was not on very good terms with France either.

She had a girl brought to Russia, a girl named Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, daughter of Prince Christian August von Anhalt-Zerbst, a scion of the ancient German dynasty of Ascania. And this girl, well, she would later become known as Catherine. She was supposed to marry the nephew of Elizaveta, Peter. During Elizabeth's rule, the Seven Years' War broke out, in which Russia joined forces with Austria and France against Prussia. She died, however. She suffered a stroke and died on Christmas, 1761. And upon her death, her nephew Peter ascended the throne.

Peter did something immediately upon gaining power that made him quite unpopular. As you already said, he was a Prussian nationalist, and as such, he overturned the entirety of Elizaveta's foreign policy. He betrayed Austria and France and made peace with Prussia. And this was literally while the Russian army was marching on Berlin. So without Peter's shenanigans, history would have been quite different, I guess. Peter III was a huge fanboy of Frederick II, and yeah, he tried to Germanize Russia as much as he could.

He was, however, somewhat popular among the peasantry, because he had promised to abolish serfdom in part. Well, it was a bit complicated. It was mostly rumors and things that were said about Peter, and nothing he really did. But in any case, his death caused a lot of unrest among the peasants, including Pugachev's Rebellion, which was one of the most dangerous uprisings in Russian history. In any case, his rule wasn't very long. He was, what, half a year? From January until July he was tsar of Russia, emperor of Russia, and after he was removed from power, he was replaced by Catherine. And Catherine, of course, is one of the most interesting characters of Romanov history, of Russian imperial history.

Catherine was born in 1729, as I said, as Sophie Auguste Friederike von Anhalt-Zerbst, in Stettin in Germany. She spent most of her childhood in Stettin at the castle, and Elizaveta invited her to Russia on the advice of Frederick of Prussia to marry Peter Fyodorovich. With Peter III, the dynasty in some sense changed from the Romanovs to the Holstein-Gottorp-Romanovs, after the husband of Anna Petrovna. This was, in a way, already a change. And yeah, Catherine was, of course, completely German-born. She had no relation to Russia at all.

She traveled to Russia in early 1744. She was 14 years old at that time. She was a smart girl. She was very eager to learn Russian and to integrate into the court. And also, much to her father's disappointment, she started studying Russian Orthodoxy, because she considered it imperative to convert. Her father was a very pious Lutheran, and he was heavily against this. Already after four months or so in Russia, Sophie converted to Orthodoxy, and she was christened Ekaterina Alexeyevna. The name was chosen by Elizaveta after her mother, Catherine I. And on the same day, she was officially declared Grand Princess.

She married Peter III soon after. She was not very happy with her husband. Even on the wedding day, well, she waited up for him in their bedroom, and Peter came home very late at night, drunk, and just fell asleep immediately. So not a great beginning to a marriage, and it wouldn't really get better. Actually, it's a miracle that they managed to produce a child of their own. Considering the very loose moral fabric of the society of the time at the royal court, it was very normal for them to have lovers and whatnot, so the child could have been from somebody else. But as we clearly see, little boy Pavel looks almost exactly like Peter III, so there is no mistaking that he is his father's son. But yeah, I guess she really tried to invite him to bed, and she succeeded at least once.

Yes. Catherine was not very happy. She tried her best, she really tried her best, but she was quite unhappy. She felt isolated. She made friends with other girls at the court, and she was, I guess, acting out a bit. She was always told by Elizaveta that basically the only reason for her existence was to produce an heir, and other than that, nothing. She was quite lonely, and she spent much of her youth reading. She loved reading. She read novels, she read philosophy, history. She suffered from depression, I guess, in that time when she was a teenager. Well, which teenager doesn't, but not all are in the same conditions. She also loved riding. She would ride her horse up to 12 hours a day just to get away from the court.

Yeah, and as to her reading, I think that in those days, in the 1740s, there was already some Russian literature, not only the religious kind. Lomonosov probably started writing at the time, right? And Russian proto-philosophy, Russian scientific papers started appearing, so she was not exclusively reading Western European stuff, as was probably the case before her, before the 1740s.

So later in Elizabeth's reign, Catherine started, well, making moves and befriending people. And of course, she lost her husband. Just like everyone else, pretty much, many nobles and officers of the guards conspired against Peter and removed him from power. The first Catherine heard of the actual coup was when Orlov, one of her later favorites, woke her up at night and told her, basically. It is not really known how involved she was in the coup itself against her husband.

Before that, Catherine had already given birth, shortly before the coup. Catherine had given birth secretly to a son by Grigory Orlov, who was, of course, one of her favorites, as I just said: Alexei Bobrinsky. This was, well, secret, basically. Peter sent a letter to Frederick asking him for advice, and he wanted to deport Catherine to Germany. So Alexei and Grigory Orlov convinced the guards to move against Peter, and they forced him to abdicate, and then he died. It's not clear how and why and who did that. There are a lot of rumors, and we don't really know how Peter III died, and if it was murder or an accident, and we don't know how involved Catherine was and all that.

But in any case, they proclaimed Catherine empress. She dressed in her guards uniform, was holding a saber, and went into the square in front of the Winter Palace, and basically had the guards assembled. The guards were all screaming "Vivat Catherine II!" and so on, and at that point it was pretty much over. So she was totally cosplaying Empress Elizabeth in her coup 20 years ago.

Yes, pretty much. And yeah, it's very important, actually, that Peter III was from the Holstein-Gottorp dynasty. From that point on, the dynasty ruling Russia became the Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov dynasty, the triple name. And it's due to the fact that Elizabeth of Russia had no children, so they had to pick Peter III, who was from another dynasty already. And he was killed half a year into his reign.

Yes, so Catherine did not lose any time. In September, she grabbed her son Paul, who was eight at the moment, the Orlovs, Panin, and had herself crowned empress in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. Right after, she elevated Grigory Orlov to the rank of adjutant general, main advisor. All of the Orlov brothers and Panin were raised to noble titles, to the rank of count. So yeah, her position was still sort of fragile, and she was anxious, because Paul was ill, and he was pretty much the only legitimate heir that existed. So she had to secure her rule, and of course save Paul. And save Paul she did; he pulled through.

She was very good at, how to put it, I guess, self-promotion and crafting an image for herself. She was really extremely good at that, as a self-made empress, pretty much. She immediately started working on that. She immediately started projecting this image of confidence and reassuring everyone. And she was also a workaholic, like Peter, which you would not assume, I guess. And she immediately struck down a conspiracy by guardsmen to put Ivan VI on the throne, but that was very quickly dealt with.

She was at this point in her mid-30s. And yeah, she wrote a lot. She wrote a lot. She described herself as suffering from graphomania, so she was writing letters all the time. And she wrote a bunch of rules for the court. She was quite similar in her approach to ruling to Peter the Great. She was very realistic about the limits of her power. And one of her aphorisms that became quite famous was that one must do things in such a way that people think they themselves wanted it done this way. So she was very charismatic. She was very good at convincing people that something was their idea in the first place.

Her rule was, well, very long. She ruled for 34 years. So what should we cover? Her political program, I guess?

Yeah. Well, one of the first things she did when she became Empress was solving the Polish question. She started working on solving the Polish question by trying to get her former lover, Stanisław Poniatowski, on the Polish throne, and Frederick of Prussia supported Catherine in that, which led to a formal alliance between Russia and Prussia.

And she also stated some goals. It is necessary to educate the nation and ensure that it's governed properly. It is important to introduce good order in the state, support society, and enforce laws. Establishing a strong and effective police force is essential for maintaining order. And that's the interesting part, because as far as I remember, there was some variant of the secret police, and it was destroyed under Elizabeth, and Catherine II resurrected the secret police. Then she stated other goals, such as promoting the prosperity of the state, leading to abundance, and making the state strong and inspiring respect from the neighbors.

Yes, I think the most important thing that Catherine did, aside from all the domestic and cultural things, is the sheer expansion of Russia. And not just expansion, but also reorganization. Catherine did the administrative reform that basically decided the territorial-administrative structure of Russia until the Soviet reform in 1929. Russia also grew a lot under Catherine's reign, although I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, that every Romanov left a larger country to his heir than he had inherited. So under every single monarch, Russia grew in territory.

Even Anna?

Yeah, I think so.

But wasn't it Anna Ioannovna who gifted Derbent to Persia?

Yes, that is true, but there were other acquisitions. Oh yeah, I don't have a complete list right now, and I don't have them memorized, but under most of them, Russia grew.

Yeah. Catherine added to Russia Crimea, Novorossiya, and a significant part of Poland. The population of Russia under her rule almost doubled in size, and it was under Catherine that Russia became the most populous country in Europe. 20% of the population of Europe lived in Russia as a result of her reign. She created 20 to 29 new governorates and founded almost 150 cities. Novorossiya was not acquired by Russia, but was constructed, because there was nothing on the steppe. There was nothing.

So one of the first problems Catherine had to deal with was Pugachev's Rebellion. I feel like we've talked about that before.

Yeah, me too. I have a very strong feeling that we talked about Pugachev's Rebellion before. In any case, Pugachev was a Don Cossack who declared himself Peter III, the legitimate monarch. And the Ural Cossacks rose up as well. The uprising was quite severe, and Pugachev managed to also convince various ethnic minorities to join him: the Bashkirs, the Kalmyks, the Chuvash, and so on. In any case, Pugachev's uprising lasted for two years; it's also known as the Pugachev Peasant War.

And in the end, of course, it was defeated, and Pugachev was executed, and not just Pugachev, many other people as well. In the end, 30,000 or so of his peasant army were captured, and the Cossacks were given some privileges, and the peasants as well. And yeah, that was about it with Pugachev's uprising. The suppression was quite brutal. General Panin was leading the Russian forces that defeated the rebellion. And so, yeah, that was about it.

There is actually a historical monograph about Pugachev written by Pushkin. I don't mean The Captain's Daughter; it's called Istoriya Pugachyovskogo bunta, The History of Pugachev's Rebellion. I'm not sure if it's translated, but yeah. This topic greatly interested the greatest Russian poet, and he always referenced Pugachev's riot, Pugachev's Rebellion, in many of his works.

Then for a time Catherine was free to, well, focus on domestic politics, because it was a whole, what, five or six years until the next war, and she had time. As I mentioned before, Catherine in her youth was a very devoted reader of French philosophy, and she was a big fan of Enlightenment philosophy, which led to the application of the term "enlightened absolutism" to her rule. She liked Montesquieu very much. She was in contact, of course, with Voltaire and Diderot. She wrote letters to them and exchanged letters with them. And she had basically this idea, based on Montesquieu's writings, that because Russia was so big and the climate was so severe, Russia needed to be an autocracy. And as such, Catherine worked on strengthening the monarchy and strengthening the central bureaucracy, unifying the system of government through her reforms.

And this was all quite important to her. This was also the goal of the territorial reforms she did: to create new institutions, to modernize, basically, social relations in the country, and so on. It is, of course, all relative. In the end, Catherine was not that much of a liberal. Well, for all the good she did, one of the main results of Catherine's rule domestically was that the peak of serfdom basically arrived under her rule. She expanded the institution of serfdom, and she entrenched the rights of nobles, because her rule was based on, well, basically the nobility. And she distributed almost a million serfs from the territorial acquisitions.

She did, however, continue one thing which Peter III had begun, which is disowning the church serfs. So over two million peasants who had been serfs to monasteries and churches became owned by the government.

Yeah, and she also took a lot of land from the church. So it's an interesting paradox that she was so interested in French philosophy, Enlightenment philosophy, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau probably, and at the same time she did the opposite in her rule, the absolute opposite. Because I don't think that any of the French philosophers of the 18th century were advocating for the institution of serfdom to be expanded. It's an interesting double thing that can also be seen throughout Russian history. Also in Putin himself: when he became president, he was very much a liberal democrat, and he professed his love of elections and freedom of speech, and he studied in some American course how to be a democratic leader. And then he became the Putin that we all know and love. It's the same.

And actually, I don't think that it's even her fault, because it's the nature of things in Russia. You cannot be a successful emperor for decades and be implementing any sort of enlightened ideas. It doesn't really work. If you try to do that, you get assassinated like Peter III. Because could it actually have been the case that he was assassinated not because of his love of Prussia, but because he tried to get rid of serfdom, and the nobility didn't really like it?

It's possible. The nobility was basically a choice for every Romanov monarch, whether they would appease the nobles or fight them. And usually the ones who did fight them did not end up...

Except Peter I.

Except Peter. Peter was very successful in fighting the nobility. Paul I, too; we'll talk about him in the next episode. Fighting the nobility is a death sentence for most of them.

But despite that, I agree with the idea that the serfs should have been liberated. I just don't think that it could technically be done in any meaningful way, because even a century later, when it was implemented, it was such a hard task for the government, and they didn't really know what to do with it until Stolypin in the early 20th century. So yeah, I don't think that in the 18th century it could have worked at all.

I would like to add that the usual image of Catherine as this super pro-nobility person who didn't give a shit about the peasants and enslaved them even worse than they'd ever been, it's not entirely true. It's ambivalent, as everything is. Yes, she did enhance serfdom and entrench the rules that existed for serfdom, codify them, but it's also true that twice as many peasants became free under her rule as became serfs.

Another thing that is often cited in all Russian textbooks, you'll hear about it, you'll read about it in school, is that Catherine banned peasants from complaining about their landlords. This ban, however, is a bit more complicated than it sounds. Basically, she banned the peasants from writing letters to the court to complain about their barin, and she compelled the peasants to send their complaints to the appropriate local authorities. You know, there is this medieval image of a peasant petitioning the monarch and complaining about how the barin is evil and so on. But like 90% of these complaints, in fact, did not complain about anything illegal, so there was really no point in that. And yeah, it was a bit complicated. At the same time, Catherine was trying to build a court system which would have been responsible for that. This was basically the logic of how she was acting.

And she also punished the infamous Saltychikha, Darya Saltykova, who was a serial killer of serfs and a torturer of serfs, similar to Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary.

Yes. Despite the ban she introduced on sending complaints to her, Catherine herself violated this ban many times. She looked at these complaints despite banning them, and people would still send her letters and so on. And yes, the most famous case of this was the case of Saltychikha, the insane lady who tortured many peasants to death. Especially only female peasants, which was interesting.

Yes, and she was punished with, well, basically life imprisonment. She was put in chains in a dark basement without any human contact. And before that, she was put on a scaffold on Red Square in Moscow and tied to a pole, and there was a sign put next to her, I don't know how to translate it, "This woman has tortured and murdered." And it was Catherine herself who came up with the punishment.

Interesting that capital punishment was barely ever seen in all of Russian history, especially under the Romanovs. It was extremely rare, at least under the later Romanovs.

Peter had a lot of people killed.

Yeah, but I think the last real... still less than in Western Europe at the time.

Way less, true. That's true.

That's true. I think what happened in the course of the suppression of Pugachev's uprising was pretty much the last of these massacres in Russian history.

So another thing that Catherine introduced was that landlords were given the right to exile their serfs to Siberia.

She created the Gulag.

Yeah, the katorga. This was also in line with the logic in which she was moving the country, where the judiciary was not separated into its own branch, where even governors had judicial powers. And under Catherine, the court system became class-based, and basically everyone was judged by their peers. Nobles were judged by nobles, burghers were judged by burghers, peasants by peasants, and serfs were judged by their landlords.

The landlords could also send their serfs to Siberia for settlement, so kind of similar to Stolypin's program 150 years later. In this case, the serf became a state serf, so owned by the government, and legally he was counted the same as if he had been recruited into the army. This also caused a problem, however, because, well, the landlords were compensated for that, and they figured out a loophole: they began sending old and sick peasants to Siberia, which caused a ruckus in the capital, and yeah, this was soon banned.

The large landlords who owned hundreds of thousands of serfs were, well, physically unable to be petty tyrants to their serfs, and they compiled their own criminal codes, basically. This was a parallel legal system. For example, on the estates of Count Sheremetev, the punishment for serfs who got drunk and started making trouble was to be reprimanded verbally the first time, fined the second time, and the third time they would be imprisoned for three days. And if even that didn't help, they were flogged in public. Rumyantsev had some fine, basically, for pretty much everything, and Suvorov had as the main punishment for his serfs verbal reprimand and repentance in church, or the harshest was to be kept on bread and water for a few days. Which is still much more humane than what we are seeing in our days in the Russian and Ukrainian armies.

That's true, I guess, yeah.

So, yeah, the question of serfdom under Catherine is more complicated than is usually presented. And while it is true that Catherine did enhance the institution of serfdom, she also started building orphanages. For example, serfs, and not just serfs, all peasants, often took children they could not afford to these orphanages, which were financed by the government. And everyone who came to such an orphanage was automatically a free man, no matter who he was by birth. So it was encouraged, basically.

At the start of her reign in 1762, in her own memoirs, Catherine described the situation in Russia as follows. The country's finances were depleted. The army had not been receiving payments for three months. Trade had declined due to the monopolization of several industries. A proper system for managing the state economy was lacking. It led to the decay of the military and the neglect of the Navy. The church was unhappy about the seizure of its lands, although she continued to do it, I guess. Justice was decided through haggling, and laws were followed only if they benefited a powerful individual.

So it's interesting what actually changed throughout the 30 years of her reign. A lot of things changed. As you mentioned, the population doubled, the army also doubled, the industry and the finances grew a lot. But as to the church and the fairness of the courts and several other things, I'm not sure that Catherine actually improved them greatly. But we will get to that a little bit later.

Yeah, one important thing we mentioned is Ivan VI. Ivan VI, kind of a tragic figure, I guess. Ivan Antonovich, the son of Anna Leopoldovna. He was imprisoned in Shlisselburg and kept basically anonymously, as a certain prisoner, or prisoner number one. He was imprisoned back in the day by Elizaveta, and he was kept in the prison all this time. And of course, no one knew his identity, not even the guards at the fortress. They had, however, the order to kill him if anyone attempted to free him.

Catherine was very much in love with Orlov, and she was thinking about marrying him. In 1763, while Catherine was in Moscow, there was a conspiracy at the court to kill the Orlovs and have Catherine marry Ivan VI. And after this conspiracy, it became politically impossible for Catherine to marry Orlov. The next year, there was another conspiracy to free Ivan VI, led by an officer, Vasily Mirovich. He and his friends attacked Shlisselburg. They were beaten, but they managed to reach the cell in which Ivan VI was held, and the guards, of course, followed their orders and killed Ivan VI to prevent him from being freed. And Catherine, as soon as she heard, rushed back to the capital. Mirovich was beheaded. And so, yeah, where were we before that?

Yeah, it's interesting that Catherine was a turbo fan of Voltaire, who in his novel Candide, or The Optimist, wrote the following. The main character meets a masked man during the Venetian carnival, and he says: "My name is Ivan. I was the emperor of all Russia, and even in the cradle I was deprived of the throne, and my father and my mother were imprisoned. I was raised in prison, but sometimes I am allowed to travel under the supervision of the guards." It was written in 1759, five years before his assassination by the guards. Well, maybe he actually survived and moved to Venice.

It's possible, sure. Catherine could be very ruthless when needed.

Yeah, when someone started being a threat to her or her lovers.

Yes. So her big project, her biggest project, was the Legislative Commission, which she started working on a few years into her reign. The Legislative Commission was kind of an advertisement of her philosophy and of the Enlightenment and so on. Its goal was basically to... So we actually discussed the predecessor to that in one of the earlier episodes, the Sobornoye Ulozheniye, which was compiled under Alexei I Romanov. The Sobornoye Ulozheniye was a way to, well, compile the laws of Russia into one legal code, and it stayed in force basically until the Legislative Commission started by Catherine. And this was a very long and arduous process. In the end, it did not do all that much, I guess, and the work was finished later by Speransky. But at least she started it.

Yeah. She also introduced paper money. Before her, it was only copper coins, gold coins, I guess, silver coins.

Yes. Shortly after all this stuff, when she had just started basically working on domestic politics, she had the next war on her hands in 1768. It was one of the key wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. What happened was basically, in June 1768, there was an uprising in Poland against the king whom Catherine had installed. Russian Cossacks started fighting these rebels, and they pursued them and entered Ottoman territory while pursuing these rebels. And they kind of started a massacre and massacred a bunch of Jews and Tatars, which the Ottomans did not like very much. The Ottoman Sultan Mustafa III threw the Russian ambassador into prison, which was taken as a declaration of war by Russia.

Catherine sent two armies down the Dniester River, commanded by Alexander Golitsyn and Pyotr Rumyantsev, with the goal of basically fighting their way around the Black Sea and attacking Crimea, while crossing the Danube into what is nowadays Bulgaria to threaten Constantinople itself. The army at this point was not in the best shape it had ever been. It was slow. The gains came slowly. Alexei Orlov suggested sending the Baltic Fleet to attack the Ottomans through the Mediterranean and incite Arab rebellions and so on. And this actually turned out quite interesting. Orlov sailed fireships into the Ottoman fleet at Chesma harbor. The Sultan's fleet was destroyed, and over 10,000 Ottoman sailors drowned. Orlov was awarded the new name Chesmensky, and Russia for a time became basically the master of the Eastern Mediterranean. And for the first time, we ventured into the Middle East, bombarding ports in Syria and Lebanon.

On the same day as the Turkish fleet was decimated at Chesma, Rumyantsev led 25,000 soldiers to defeat 150,000 Turks at the river Larga, in what is today Romania. Rumyantsev, of course, had learned the art of war from fighting Frederick in the Seven Years' War. The war went on for another few years, and it ended in a quite resounding Russian victory, the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. The concessions granted to Russia were quite big. Russia annexed Kerch and Yenikale, so a large part of Crimea. De facto, the Crimean Khanate became a Russian protectorate, and part of the Azov coast became part of Russia. Russia was granted the right to keep military and merchant fleets in the Azov and Black Seas. Russian ships gained the right to cross the Turkish Straits, and territories of Romania and Crimea were ceded. And also, a very important thing was a part of this treaty that would become crucial for Russian-Ottoman relations in the coming century, namely that Russia gained the right to build an Orthodox church in Istanbul and also to be the official protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. So basically, Russia gained a permanent right to interfere in internal Ottoman affairs.

Yeah, it's interesting how resounding the victory was and how outnumbered the Russian forces were in a lot of the battles. One of the battles was in modern-day Bulgaria, the Battle of Kozludzha. And despite the Turks having 40,000 troops in the area and the Russians only having 8,000 troops, we managed to easily beat them. And now this place is called Suvorovo to this day, in northeast Bulgaria. Well, you know who led the Russian forces at Kozludzha.

Yeah, Suvorov.

Suvorov, of course. So what's the genius of Suvorov? And was he the first military commander of this stature, of this brilliance, in the new times?

Well, it's complicated. I mean, Kozludzha was quite early in his career. He became more important in the next Russian-Ottoman war.

Yeah, there were two more wars involving Suvorov with the Turks, at least.

Yeah, then we'll talk about Suvorov later, I would guess. But yeah, the Battle of Kozludzha was pretty great, and Suvorov was a military genius, of course. And so it's not about the technical advantage or anything like that, but the strategic and tactical side. Well, the Turks were pretty well developed at this time. I don't think that there were some huge deficiencies on their part.

Yeah, I mean, the Ottomans were starting to decline already. I mean, they had been declining since the Treaty of Karlowitz, which had been signed like 70 years earlier. The Russian-Ottoman war of '68 to '74 opened basically an era that is often called the Eastern Question. The Eastern Question is basically the question of what would happen if the Ottomans, well, stopped existing, or stopped being a threat, stopped being a big player. At this point, this was mainly a discussion in Russia, and it only became important to the other European powers some 40, 50 years later, after another Russian-Turkish war, when Nicholas I coined the term "sick man of Europe," when the decline of the Ottomans became obvious to everyone. So, yeah, in any case, this was a resounding victory, not the only one.

And yeah, what else do we have in Catherine's reign that is worth noting? Well, basically, after the war, there was the Russian policy towards Crimea, which was still ruled by the Khanate, the Tatars. It had been an Ottoman protectorate, but after the war, one of Russia's conditions was that the Khanate became independent and not a Turkish protectorate anymore. But de facto it became a Russian protectorate. Şahin Giray was elected Khan. They tried to rebel a bit against it, but Suvorov suppressed the uprising. And yeah, the Ottomans recognized the new Khan. And then there was another uprising in 1782, some 10 years later, which was also suppressed. And after that uprising was suppressed, Crimea was officially annexed by Russia.

One of the first things that she did, in '62 to '64, was issue two manifestos. The first was on allowing all foreigners to enter Russia and to settle in the provinces they wished, and on the rights granted to them. It called on mostly Europeans to resettle in Russia. There was another such manifesto. And as a result, the first German settlements began to appear in the Volga region. The influx of German colonists was pretty grand, and in 1766 it was necessary to temporarily suspend the admission of settlers because there were too many of them. By 1769, there were 6,500 families living in 105 colonies on the Volga River. It amounted to about 25,000 people. And in the future, the German community would play a significant role in Russian history, as we know.

It's not like she was the first who invited foreigners. It was done way before that by Alexei Romanov, I would imagine, by Peter's father, who created a lot of the German villages near Moscow. But this time around, there were way more people, and a lot of them were simple people, peasants and such, who moved to the Volga, pretty far away from Moscow or St. Petersburg, which was the capital back then. So what actually drove all those Germans to resettle? The lack of land in the Holy Roman Empire?

The same reason why you can find Germans everywhere in the world, basically, in the Americas: lack of land, lack of arable land, poverty, famines, and so on. Religious persecution was also a big factor, because many of the Germans who left for Russia and America were members of religious minorities, Baptists and so on.

Yeah, it's interesting that they picked the Volga. Well, it's logical. And even nowadays, you can see the trend that modern Canadian or American migrants to Russia who come from rural areas are picking the same areas near the Volga, because it's only logical to settle next to this great river and not in Moscow or wherever, because there's plenty of arable, excellent soil near the Volga.

Yes, exactly. And oh, we actually forgot something important that also happened early in Catherine's reign, something that one might be inclined to consider a big mistake, I guess: namely, Catherine's support of America, of American independence. Russia was officially neutral in the American Revolution, but it did very much support the Americans unofficially, simply to spite the British. There is a letter, an important letter for this, written by Lizakevich, who was the Russian envoy in London at the time. He wrote to Count Panin. He praised the leaders of the American Revolution. Catherine the Great basically said that it was the British's own fault, that they mismanaged the colonies, and that the separation of the colonies might be advantageous to Russia and did not in any way conflict with Russian interests.

Yeah, it was quite interesting how much Russia supported it. Catherine played a role in the American Revolutionary War by creating the League of Armed Neutrality. The British were ready to grant concessions to Russia. They asked Catherine to send 20,000 Russian troops to North America and wanted to enter a military alliance with Russia. And Catherine refused this.

Why would Russia do it? Why would Russia send 20,000 troops to America?

It's even worse. Yeah. So with the League of Armed Neutrality, basically, the British were attacking French and other ships, not just French, but also other European ships, which carried cargo to the Americans. The French especially supplied the Americans, the moderate rebels of America.

Yes, the moderate rebels. And so Catherine came up with the idea of armed neutrality, which basically meant the right of neutral countries to trade with belligerent countries. Basically, the blockade of America that Britain had announced was to be ignored by neutral countries. They did not have to accept it. Because of it, the Royal Navy, the British Navy, had captured dozens of foreign ships, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Prussian, and they were all quite mad at this. And as such, the League of Armed Neutrality was Catherine's way of influencing this, lifting the blockade, and mediating all of this.

Oh yeah, you asked why we would support the British. The British offered us the island of Menorca, off the coast of Spain. Actually not a bad deal.

Yeah, that would have been quite funny.

Yes. Well, yeah, maybe Catherine was in the wrong here. When she rejected this offer, she went public about it, and this made Britain look weak in the eyes of the other European countries. But by doing this, we established some relations with the U.S., and trade with the U.S. also greatly increased. It was, well, non-existent before that.

Yeah, so it was interesting. Catherine was the main mediator between Europe and the Americans, and they established relations, basically, with the Americans. Benjamin Franklin was made an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Interesting that she wasn't scared by the American Revolution and its implications for Russia as well. But I guess it was nowhere near as brutal as the French Revolution, which hadn't yet happened.

And it was not a revolution, it was a revolt.

Yeah, I mean, it caused some ideological ripples in Russia. Radishchev was influenced by the Americans and so on, and the Decembrists would later also cite the Americans as inspiration.

Yeah, as inspiration.

So we need one more major topic, and it's going to be enough for the first episode, because we will do a second episode on Catherine the Great, on the latter half of her reign. I think we should leave the second Turkish war for the next episode, I guess.

One thing we can talk about is the Treaty of Georgievsk, by which Georgia became a protectorate of Russia. So basically, under the reign of, what was his name, Erekle II, I think, Georgia, or Kartli-Kakheti as it was called, was quite strong. They expelled the Turks. There was a sort of cultural revival, a golden age of Georgian culture. They approached Russia for help against Persia and Turkey, and this was during the first Russian-Turkish war. Catherine sent a general, Totleben, to Georgia, and afterwards, yeah, basically the Treaty of Georgievsk was signed, which established the Russian protectorate over the kingdom. It basically granted Russia the right... Basically, Georgia surrendered its foreign policy to Russia. They could do what they wanted domestically, but they were not allowed to engage in... so Russia took over Georgian diplomacy. Also, of course, open borders, trade and so on, and everything else.

Yeah. Yeah. It was the Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, and Georgia was very much different, with Tbilisi being the center of this kingdom, without access to the sea. It was just a mountainous area of modern Georgia, but also of modern northern Iran and some parts of modern Russia as well, like, I guess, Ossetia. But it didn't have access to the Black Sea, and it was a very much different state back then, and they had to rely on a powerful northern Christian neighbor, of course.

Actually, what was happening with the Armenians back then? The Armenians, well, they became part of Russia later.

Yeah, back then they were still subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

Yes. I mean, basically the Armenians lived in many different places at the time. Eastern Armenia was ceded to Russia after the Persian wars in the early 19th century, and yeah, that's when Armenia became part of Russia. That's a bit later, I guess, but we'll talk about that. During that time, they were basically either under Ottoman or Persian rule.

Right, so maybe let's talk about the court intrigue and Potemkin, and basically the history of Catherine's relationships, because it's pretty complicated. I'm sure that all women know of it way more than we do, and it was televised many times, and there are many books about it. But yeah, so it's known that Catherine's first favorite man from the court was Orlov, Grigory Orlov, right? What happened with them, that Potemkin took his place?

Oh, that's a long and complicated story. Maybe we should leave it for the next episode and finish up with foreign relations instead right now, because the court stuff is really the most complicated, and I think I need to read up to remember some of the details on Potemkin.

Yeah, it's going to be the favorite episode of the female part of the audience.

Yeah, absolutely. There is this TV show about Catherine the Great, of course, from five years ago, the HBO show.

Ah, the HBO one. There's a Russian show; it was a pretty popular one. What about the HBO show, is it good?

I have not seen it, actually. I'm not sure. In any case, Catherine the Great, I think, will be in general a favorite of our female listeners. I mentioned in the beginning of the episode that she could be a bit rowdy as a child and act out a bit, and I mentioned in the episode on duels in Russia that Catherine also once fought a sword duel with one of her friends at the court when she was a teenager. So yeah, a very active girl she was.

All right, so then let's expand on the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of '74. So we got access to, and not only access, but we started controlling Kerch. And yes, we did return Wallachia and Moldavia to Ottoman control. There was basically the clause that gave Russia the right to protect Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and it also basically granted Russia the right to intervene in Wallachia and Moldavia if the Ottomans misbehaved there.

So, yeah. So we gained control over two cities in eastern Crimea, Kerch and Yenikale, and the port of Azov.

Yeah, and Kinburn, which is very prominent in the news to this day, the Kinburn Spit. So basically we began control of the right bank of the Dnieper, of the southern part of the right bank of the Dnieper River, the same place where the battles with the Ukrainians are going on right now. But yeah, it was pretty deep, up to Wallachia, basically.

Another interesting thing is the religious extraterritoriality. So basically, the Ottoman sultan was recognized as having some say in the affairs of Muslims, being the caliph. For example, Crimean Tatars were allowed to keep praying publicly for the sultan. In exchange, of course, the tsar could interfere on behalf of the sultan's Christian subjects. Russia gained the right to build the church in Constantinople, which gave Russia a permanent foothold in the Ottoman Empire on behalf of Christians. It was kind of a dual thing, because the Ottomans from then on had to address the Russian tsar as padishah, which was a title that they had only ever used for the Ottoman sultan. So it forced the sultan to acknowledge that he was not the king of the world, but that the tsar was at least his equal.

Also, she started dismantling the Zaporozhian Sich.

Oh, yes, of course. Right at the start of her reign. And she successfully did it. Many Cossacks were dismayed. Some of them even ventured to the Ottoman territories and established their Sich there. But most of them, well, had to agree with it. So there was a little problem with the autonomy of the Sich: they had basically their own laws, and they were not really answering to the Russian authorities up to the 1760s. The Cossacks, as always, were a frontier phenomenon, and after the Crimean Tatars were not a danger anymore, there was no reason to keep the Cossacks around with their autonomy.

Yeah. Also, they were electing their atamans and koshevoys and whatever. And those guys were all different, and they had different goals. And one of them went to St. Petersburg to raise the issue of the legitimate Zaporozhian lands. The emperors didn't really like it, that some Cossacks were writing and dictating their own rules to St. Petersburg and to the crown itself.

So there was a draft reform of what to do with the Sich. However, at the time, in the '60s and '70s, Catherine did not yet take harsh measures against the Cossacks, because a new war with Turkey was approaching and they were still useful. Many Zaporozhian Cossacks also took part in the war.

Yeah, it was about 10,000 Cossacks who participated in the war. After the peace treaty, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had previously served as defenders, as you said, lost their significance. And in 1775, General Peter Tekeli and his corps were moved to the Sich. It was basically a military operation, but it was bloodless, as the Cossacks realized that resistance was futile. They pacified the Cossacks and established the iron fist of Catherine. And then, by decree, the Zaporozhian Sich was abolished, and ordinary Cossacks were not persecuted, but a lot of them were actually moved to Kuban, for example. It is why, to this day, in Kuban there are a lot of Surzhyk-speaking people.

Well, there were three Cossack hosts that were created from the Zaporozhians: the Azov Cossacks, the Black Sea Cossacks, and the Kuban Cossacks.

Yeah. So most of them were moved to the east, where they were still useful against the nomads and the Persians.

Personally, I find the story of the Zaporozhians who left for the Ottoman Empire quite interesting. Part of them left first for Crimean Tatar and then Ottoman territory, and they were allowed to settle on the Danube.

Yeah, the Trans-Danubian Sich.

Yes, the Danubian Sich, yeah. It is quite interesting. Most of them were, of course, Orthodox. During the various wars, they went over to the other side. They created a so-called Slavic Legion out of the descendants of these Cossacks, which fought in the Crimean War.

These are not actually the only Cossacks who lived in the Ottoman Empire. I think I've mentioned them sometime before, but the Nekrasovtsy were quite interesting. They actually fought against us.

Yeah, very much, the Nekrasovtsy. They were Old Believers. Under Peter the Great, there was an uprising on the Don, and it was bloodily suppressed, and some of those Cossacks fled to the Kuban region, which at that time was ruled by the Crimean Tatars. These people were led by Ignat Nekrasov, hence their name, the Nekrasovites, or Nekrasovtsy. They kept raiding Russian lands, including the Don itself. They were resettled in the Ottoman Empire.

It is quite an interesting story. I read about the Cossacks after the Russian Civil War. The White Army first evacuated to Turkish territory, and there they actually sent delegates to the Nekrasovtsy asking them to help the Russian refugees and so on. And the Nekrasovtsy actually declined. They refused to have any dealings with the White émigrés. So it's a really interesting story. In World War II, some of the Nekrasovtsy also fought in the German army.

Well, there were a few of them in the 20th century, I guess, not many left. But yeah, they were very angry at Russia for persecuting them on the basis of the Old Believer stuff. And I guess it's really interesting, and I'm not sure why the persecution was this harsh and what exactly the goal was here, because it created a lot of enemies in the ranks of the Old Believers, and that's why they fought against us. And they were instrumental in the Red Revolution, and to this day they're active inside and outside of Russia, although nowadays there are few of them. But still, so there is a legitimate reason, I guess, but it's also weird that Russian-speaking Orthodox people lived in the Ottoman Empire and fought against Russia all the time.

Yeah. It's a bit like the Russian Nazis fighting for Ukraine.

I guess so, yes. But yeah, there were many waves of those Cossacks who went to the Danube, and most of them returned and were pardoned. There were numerous waves of them returning, and during the next war with Turkey, Suvorov organized the army of loyal Cossacks, and it later became the Black Sea Cossack Host in 1790. It was also given the territory of the left bank of the Kuban River. And so, yeah, they also played an active role in the Caucasian War later on. The history of the Cossacks is very interesting, and I guess it's still relevant to this day.

So, right, I guess that's it for today. In the second episode, we will talk about, I guess, Catherine's personal life, the court, life at court, her relationships with Orlov and Potemkin, the creation of Novorossiya, the new war with Turkey that actually granted us most of the Black Sea possessions that we still have and the entirety of Crimea, also the cultural impact, I guess, and what she left behind in St. Petersburg, and how she transformed Russia from within, because it's quite clear that she had the greatest impact on Russia since Peter the Great. The next episode, I believe, will be a little bit longer. So stay tuned, and see you very, very soon. We'll be right back.

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# Chapter 10: Catherine II – Thunder of Victory

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast. In this episode, we continue our exploration of the reign of Catherine the Great. Today, we focus on the most significant aspects of her rule: the liberation of the Black Sea coast, which was incorporated into the Russian Empire and built from the ground up, becoming known as Novorossiya, or New Russia. We will explore late 18th-century Russian culture, including the works of Radishchev and other emerging writers and voices of the opposition that was forming inside Russia, as well as the various Masonic lodges that were spreading throughout the empire. But, of course, the main target will be the military one: Catherine's triumph over the Turks, leading to the permanent destruction of the Crimean Khanate.

In general, this episode promises to be even more fascinating than the last one, and I hope that after listening to it in full, you will emerge as an expert on this period of Russian history. We will discuss the many controversies surrounding Catherine as a person. There are many myths about her, and some are partially true, while others are false. Was she a promiscuous German hag who had sexual relations with horses? Or was she an Enlightenment-era proto-feminist? Or was she just a typical Russian authoritarian ruler who ruled with an iron fist and enslaved the peasants? Oh, and we also promised to talk about her complicated love life as well. And that's where we will start, because war and love are very closely intertwined.

I think in the previous episode, we left off in the middle of the 1770s, right after the first Turkish war and the dissolution of the Zaporozhian Sich.

Right. The war was ended by Rumyantsev crossing the Danube, and then Pugachev had risen up again, and the war was ended with the Peace of Kuchuk-Kainarji, which we talked about in the last episode. Catherine was very happy. She called it the happiest day of her life, because she had won a foothold on the Black Sea, part of what would soon become Novorossiya. Yes, she had severed Crimea from the Ottomans. She was able to build a Black Sea Fleet, and, which would become important later on, she was officially recognized in her role as protector of Christians in the Ottoman Empire by the Ottomans themselves.

So a month later, Pugachev was defeated. He was quartered and beheaded. Well, he was sentenced to be quartered and beheaded, but Catherine, in her infinite humanism and liberalism, decided that he should be beheaded first before being quartered. So, yeah. Very humane.

Yes, yes, very humane. She was truly progressive. Rumyantsev, for his attack across the Danube, received the honorific name Zadunaisky, the Trans-Danubian, basically. Catherine held a brilliant parade in Moscow, not in Petersburg, actually. At the time, she was with Potemkin.

Potemkin was probably the most intense relationship that she ever had with a man. The stereotypical pop history image of Catherine is a sort of nymphomaniac who slept with any man that caught her fancy at any given moment, basically neglecting everything else to sleep around all the time. That's completely false. She was a workaholic. She was working 12 to 16 hours a day, and her love affairs were basically just, how to put it... I don't want to psychologize Catherine the Great too much, but I would say that her relationships were just a way to tether her to her humanity, to bring her down to earth and to remind her that she's a human being and not just a biorobot at the head of an empire.

But Potemkin, well, he loved her very much. He loved Catherine very much, but he was also very jealous. I mean, that's normal and expected, I think, because after all, he was an 18th-century Russian nobleman, and he had to accept the fact that the woman is not only not married to him, but that she is not even his equal: she is superior to him in all aspects, she can do whatever she wants, and he has no recourse at all. The only thing he can do is trust her. And she had bouts of jealousy too, and, as I said, Catherine was not some sort of unfeeling nymphomaniac who didn't care.

It weighed very heavily on her that she hurt Potemkin, and she wrote a letter to him that is probably a very unique letter, a confession, unlike anything ever written by a powerful monarch. Potemkin, of course, also knew all the rumors about how bad Catherine was and how she was sleeping with horses and whatnot. That hurt him, and he started threatening basically to kill every man that Catherine liked, and he accused her of having had, what, 15 or 16 lovers before him. In response to that, Catherine wrote him this very sincere and heartfelt letter in which she admitted that she had four lovers before him, and she explained to him that she was not a slave to her sexual appetites or whatever, but that, how did she put it, I think she said that her heart can't be without love and she always needs a man at her side who adores her, and so on.

And how come a 40-year-old guy was without a wife and kids? I think there was a sort of problem that whenever he was close to some other woman, Catherine would remove this woman from the court altogether. So it was intense jealousy on both sides.

Yes, of course. They were both very jealous. I mean, Catherine knew him from quite an early age. I think he was like 22 when she met him, because, well, I think we mentioned that actually, he caught her attention during her coup when she came to power. And I think it's assumed by historians as well that they went through some sort of ceremony, not an official marriage, of course, but something similar, because after this letter, and after they made up and so on, she sometimes referred to him as her husband and to herself as his wife in letters. So yeah, but it was not official.

No, it was not official. I think what really drove their relationship was that they were both kind of monsters of emotion, so to speak. They were both extremely emotional, and they both were somewhat insecure, in the sense that they required intense amounts of being praised, being loved, and getting attention and glory and recognition and so on. And they had these gigantic emotional appetites, which is what made their relationship very productive, because they did propel Russia forward together and they achieved great things. But it was also very painful for both of them. Catherine herself said that the essence of their disagreements was always the question of power and never of love.

Yeah, well, I guess they could have married even officially, but not publicly, and it would be a sort of morganatic marriage.

Yeah, and that was impossible. She could not have done that publicly; that would have thrown the realm into chaos.

Well, of course, yeah, it would jeopardize the... I mean, what's an official marriage? There was no stamp in whatever government office back then. It was a ceremony in the church, and if you do it in secret, it is also true in the eyes of God.

Yeah. It's quite possible that they did that in the end. And morganatic marriages were pretty popular, especially in the German-speaking realms of the time.

Yeah, and in a way Russia was one, although Catherine spoke perfect Russian, or almost perfect Russian.

But still, true. And basically, over the years they worked out a sort of relationship in which they remained loyal to each other, in the sense of being attached to each other and remaining partners in matters of state, but also leaving each other enough breathing room to have relationships with others as well. So basically an open marriage.

Yeah, very progressive.

Kind of, I guess you could call it that. Although that term makes me think of obese Redditors and not of Potemkin and Catherine.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's just a general rule of all human history that there are different rules for people who are at the very top of society, because they are under such amounts of pressure and responsibility that it would just hold them down if they had to follow the rules that other people have. And especially a monarch is kind of outside of society anyway.

What I don't quite get about Catherine, given how seemingly competent she was and how successful many parts of her reign were, is the question of her being a woman. Of course, it was a big deal for some, but it was easy to dismiss. Look, she defeated the Turks. She did this and that. And now in modern times, it seems like there are barely any, if any, competent female rulers. Why do you think it's a bigger issue now than it was back then?

Hmm, it's a good question, actually. I think in part it's because of what I said, that monarchs are kind of outside of society and outside of the usual rules.

Yeah, right. They don't have a sex.

Yes, yes. At the very top of European aristocracy, they did not really have a sex or an ethnicity or even a religion in many cases, in the sense that other people do, because they were basically aliens. And that's why she tried to reconnect with her human side through the epistolary romance with Potemkin and others.

I think a good example of the way that Catherine did things is that she had a relationship for a while with a Serbian hussar. She had an affair with him, and they presumably slept together, and she gave him expensive gifts. And the Serb was super mad all the time, because it was very obvious that Catherine still loved Potemkin. Zorich was his name, I think. Zorich had to bring Catherine's love letters to Potemkin, and obviously that was humiliating. So yeah, it was very weird, probably, to outsiders.

Yeah. And basically Potemkin didn't like Zorich, and Catherine broke up with him because Potemkin didn't like him. But then she very quickly switched to Rimsky-Korsakov and started a relationship with him. She even talked to Potemkin about this and things like that. She fully trusted him with everything, and they told each other everything. So kind of a strange relationship, but, as I said, very powerful people live by different rules.

Yeah. And also, one thing that I would like to emphasize again is that this was not super easy at all for Catherine. She was depressed about disappointing and hurting the Serb that way, and she was frustrated that her relationship with Zorich strained her relationship with Potemkin. So it's not like she just slept around with whoever she liked and didn't care. This was all very stressful for her, but she couldn't live any other way, really.

So yeah, in any case, Potemkin at this time was spending much of his time in Novorossiya. He was planning new cities, reforming the Cossacks, and building the Black Sea Fleet, really, and thinking of ways to capture Crimea. And he basically came up with this thing, Potemkin did, especially after 1779, when Paul's wife, Maria Feodorovna, gave birth to Konstantin Pavlovich. Potemkin came up with the name, actually, and Catherine chose the name Konstantin, and for a very specific reason: Potemkin had this idea of restoring the Byzantine Empire. Potemkin told Catherine that Russia's future was bound to the Black Sea, because he considered the great work that Peter had started around the Baltic to be finished.

Poland had been partitioned into a Russian puppet state, but Novorossiya was still a wild wasteland with nothing there, just waiting to be filled with cities and ports and fields and whatnot. Potemkin was already drawing up plans to build cities and universities and invite foreign colonists there. He built Kherson in 1778, named after Chersonesus, and there he started building the Black Sea Fleet. This all came to be known as the so-called Greek plan or Greek Project, the Grecheskiy Proekt.

The main idea of this was an alliance with the Austrians, to basically split the European possessions of the Ottoman Empire with the Austrians. Catherine and Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire exchanged letters about this, and they formalized an alliance with the end goal of dissolving the Ottoman Empire and restoring the Byzantine Empire. And this little boy, Paul's second son, was supposed to become the new Byzantine emperor. That's why they chose the name Constantine. And this Byzantine LARP is also the reason why so many Novorossiyan cities have Greek names: Kherson, after Chersonesus, Yevpatoria, Mariupol, Sevastopol, Simferopol, Odessa, Tiraspol, Stavropol, and so on and so on. All these cities have Greek names as part of the Greek Project.

Yeah. The restoration of the Byzantine Empire, or independent Greece in general: was it the first plan of the sort, before it actually happened in the 19th century? I think that Russia pioneered it, the idea of liberating the Greeks.

Yes, that's true. Of course, the very first modern large-scale Greek revolt happened during the previous Russian-Turkish war, in 1768 to '74: the Orlov revolt, sponsored, of course, by Admiral Alexei Orlov, who was the commander of the Russian Navy. And they also invited Greeks to settle in Russia, like, you know, Ioannis Varvakis and all that stuff. We talked about that, I think, in both the last episode and the Russian volunteers episode as well, the first one.

Well, yeah, partly it worked. Crimea became Russian, with all those Greek-sounding cities. But the Greek independence and the Byzantine, the Greek plan, did not work fully. Why do you think that was? Because the Greeks were not ready to actually fight for their independence, and the Ottoman Empire was a bit more powerful and could not crumble just that easily?

Yes, of course. The Eastern Question, as they call it, had only just begun, and the Ottoman Empire was not yet in serious decline. It was starting, I guess, to come into a decline, but had not been yet. So, to sum up, the Greek Project basically consisted of creating a bunch of new monarchies. The Neo-Byzantine Empire would cover most of what is nowadays Greece and Bulgaria and all the European possessions of Turkey up to the Bosporus. And then the Kingdom of Dacia, that would be Moldavia and parts of Romania, Wallachia; that would become the personal fiefdom of Potemkin. Then Hungary, Transylvania, the Balkans and so on would all go to Austria. And Venice would also grab a bunch of islands.

Well, if I'm not mistaken, it didn't include Athens.

Well, there was no Athens back then, basically. Athens is a modern city built around the Acropolis. But the entire peninsula where Athens is located would go to the Venetians.

Yes, yes, that's true. So there would be a completely different Greece. And the Greek Project is very interesting. Modern Greece seems very artificial in a lot of ways.

I mean, it is. When they got independence, they basically started playing it like Hearts of Iron or something, just choosing which things to do and which not. I remember reading that they very seriously considered basically forcing everyone to learn ancient Greek and have ancient Greek be the modern Greek language, similar to what the Jews did when they revived Hebrew, which no one spoke.

Yeah, Greece seems in a lot of ways similar to Israel. And modern-day Greece is also connected directly to the British. But yeah, the Russians couldn't really capture the minds of the Greek populace. And what were the Greeks actually like back then? Of course, they were similar. They were Christian. They survived.

It's interesting that they did not really have that much of a strong Greek identity. The Greek identity was created during the revolts, basically. There were parts of Greece where if you asked the locals who they were, they would answer "Romaioi" and call themselves Romans. And the Sultan, the head of the Ottoman Empire, would also call himself an emperor of Rome. So it kind of worked, in a way, as this synthetic pseudo-Byzantine empire.

Yeah, well, what the British did was offer the Greek population a new identity, and Potemkin failed to do it, I guess. It was a bit too early for that. But very interesting stuff.

But of course, all that stuff is just LARP, and the actual important thing, as always, is the Straits: the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. That's what truly matters for Russia: to have access to the Straits, mastery over the Black Sea, and access to the Mediterranean. That was what really mattered.

And I have a book recommendation at this point. I may have recommended it before, but it's just really good for grasping the strategic geography and how it underlies really everything about what the Romanovs did. The book is called The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831, by John P. LeDonne. The author doesn't like Russia very much, or Russians. I find it weird to specialize in a topic which you don't like, but the book is still very good. From an objective point of view, as a treatise on geopolitics and geostrategy, it's very good. But don't buy the ebook on Amazon. Not only is it super expensive, the formatting is also all fucked up. So look for a physical copy of it, but it's really very good.

So that's what the Greek Project was all about, really. But the first step to anything like that would of course be Crimea. Potemkin was given more and more leeway, basically, in terms of foreign policy. Britain and France were kind of busy with the American Revolution at the time, and the only European power that mattered for Catherine's and Potemkin's plans was Austria.

Yeah. Potemkin, of course, came into conflict with Panin because of this. Panin was the architect of the Northern System, which was based on an alliance between Russia and Prussia. He had been very successful, because it was his Northern System that gave Russia Poland, but it had become obsolete. Maria Theresa hated Catherine, but Joseph II warmed up to her. So they met in 1780, and the next year they signed the secret alliance, which a few years later would become important.

We are glossing over some of the more intimate family relations, but there's a reason for that: they are mostly about Paul, and we will cover that in the episode that is about Paul.

But Potemkin kept pressuring Catherine to go for Crimea, and Catherine was definitely interested in that. A bit later, in 1783, the Georgians also asked to come under Catherine's protection, and Potemkin wrote a letter to Catherine congratulating her on being the most illuminated sovereign of the age and on having acquired territories that the Romans and the Greeks had just glanced at. And he again told her that it's important to get Crimea, because that's where St. Vladimir had converted to Orthodoxy. Crimea is the source of our Christianity and thus our humanity.

Catherine promoted Potemkin to field marshal and president of the War Collegium, and she added Crimea to his Viceroyalty of Novorossiya, giving him the honorific name Tavrichesky, so Prince of Taurida, which is the ancient name of Crimea. In his first act as now ruler of Crimea as well, Potemkin founded a naval base, a naval base that he described as the best harbor in the world. It would come to be known as Sevastopol, so obviously still a very important naval base and still at the heart of global geopolitical perturbations.

A few years later, in 1787, she embarked on a grand tour. It took half a year, and she traveled with a great entourage. The journey is known as the Tavrida voyage, the Crimean journey. It was a great inspection of the newly acquired lands in Novorossiya, and she met again with Joseph II during that trip. It was all organized by Potemkin. The trip is actually where the expression "Potemkin village" comes from. It's a myth, an urban legend, that supposedly Potemkin put up fake villages along Catherine's route on her Crimean journey to impress her. But that's not a real thing; that never happened.

Well, yeah, considering how close they were, it would be pretty hard to... It's typical for all bureaucrats and chinovniks to do this sort of prep to impress the governor or the emperor. But, yeah, that's interesting, but I'm a bit lost on the timeline. So after the first Russian-Turkish war under Catherine, we only gained Kerch, right? And how did the rest of Crimea fall into Russian hands?

That was in 1783. So basically, after the last war, in 1774... Before that, the Crimean Khanate was a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire. And after the war, with the peace treaty, it became completely independent and basically had no protection from the Ottomans. Potemkin took a trip to Crimea in 1783 and told her that everyone in Crimea wants her to rule, and so on and so on. And there were revolts in Crimea, clashes between the Greeks and the Tatars. In the end, basically, the Greeks of the peninsula wrote a letter to Catherine asking her to annex Crimea.

So it was annexed illegally.

Yes, yes, yes.

I see. 1783.

1783. And from that point on, the Crimean Khanate was gone.

Yes, it was completely gone. It was the Taurida Oblast, and Potemkin was its governor. So, between that and the Crimean journey, four years passed, three and a half years, which was mostly Potemkin laying the groundwork for future annexations and the coming war, and diplomacy.

Yeah, so during Catherine's tour... let's talk a bit more about the Potemkin villages myth and who created it. Of course, there was not enough time to construct lots of cities and stuff like that in four years. Was the myth of Potemkin villages actually directed at Crimea, or at some other place Catherine was traveling through from St. Petersburg to Crimea?

I think it was along the Dnieper River. So basically, Kherson.

Yes. So he decorated the existing city of Kherson.

Yes. The myth was that he just built villages that weren't real, that were just facades, and that it was all fake, really. But the truth is much more simple. Yes, he did decorate villages that lay on her path. They put up flowers and stuff, so Catherine would think it's pretty to look at. But it was no secret that this was a decoration put up for the empress. You're supposed to put up decorations when your empress comes to visit. That's just what you do. And I don't actually know where the myth originates from. Maybe someone who was mad that Crimea became Russian.

Actually, I found who was responsible for the myth of Potemkin villages. It was a Saxon secretary of the Saxon embassy in St. Petersburg, who arrived in Russia in '87 and stayed in the Russian Empire for eight years. And during that time... although he was not actually with her at all, he didn't see it.

You know, that makes sense, actually. I thought it was probably Paul who was to blame for that.

Oh.

Because Paul hated Potemkin.

Paul hated Potemkin, yeah. And he didn't like Catherine much either, really. So he tried to convince himself and others that it was all fake.

Yeah. And the name of this irrelevant dude was Georg von Helbig. He was basically spying a little bit, gathering information, rumors and gossip at the court. He was basically a Saxon Arestovych kind of figure. And when his actions were revealed, he was expelled from Russia by Catherine II. And she actually wrote about him: "An insignificant secretary from the Saxon court who has been in St. Petersburg for a long time, by the name of Helbig, says and writes about my reign all the bad things that can ever be imagined." So he was expelled, and the offended Helbig published a biographical essay about Prince Grigory Potemkin in one of the German magazines, Minerva. There he criticized the Empress's trip and publicized all the fake rumors about it. And the idea of mobile fake villages was born.

There was a particularly nice episode. Catherine and Joseph II together laid the foundation stone for Yekaterinoslav. Yekaterinoslav is a city that went through a surprising amount of name changes. It was founded as Yekaterinoslav, which it remained until 1926, other than being called Novorossiysk for six years. But then it was Dnipropetrovsk for 90 years, and nowadays it is called Dnipro. But yeah, it was originally founded as Yekaterinoslav, the glory of Catherine.

And then they traveled to Kherson. Potemkin built an arch at the port of Kherson that read "The road to Byzantium." So, yeah, very funny. Catherine and Joseph were escorted by a special guard of Tatar horsemen, and then they showed Joseph the Black Sea Fleet. They did that in a very theatrical way. Catherine and Joseph were at dinner in one of the newly built palaces, and then Potemkin gave a sign and the curtains were opened, with a direct line of sight onto 24 brand-new ships of the line in the natural harbor of Sevastopol. Joseph was totally ecstatic. He was astonished at how great it was; he couldn't believe how great that fleet was, and how great the harbors were, and so on. So all very cool, right?

And after this great, glorious event came the next challenge, because just as Catherine and Potemkin were resting after returning from the big journey, the Ottomans, who of course had learned about Catherine's triumphal procession through Novorossiya and Crimea, and knew that Joseph was with her, and had also heard rumors about the Greek Project, declared war on Russia. They also had backing from the British and the French, who did not openly involve themselves in the war but promised help to the Ottomans. So yeah, the Ottomans sent an ultimatum to Russia to evacuate Crimea, because they saw the annexation of Crimea as a breach of the treaty, as the Crimean Khanate was supposed to be independent. So the Ottomans imprisoned the Russian ambassador, sent an ultimatum, and declared war.

Yeah, I just thought of a stupid joke. When Potemkin devised his Greek plan and showed it to Catherine, she looked at it and said, "I don't know, it all seems Greek to me."

All right, let's go to the next Turkish war. Before we start with the Turks, there was a short intermezzo, really. Well, first the opening salvo; the war started slowly. The Ottomans attacked Kinburn, you know, the Kinburn Spit, which several people have tried to attack in recent times again, unsuccessfully. Suvorov held off two naval landings by the Ottomans and thus secured Crimea. In Moldavia, or the Danubian Principalities, Potemkin was advancing, and he captured Ochakov, nowadays in Mykolaiv Oblast. So the Ottomans suffered a series of defeats against the Russians, but they did, however, have some success against the Austrians, who of course joined the war because they had formed an alliance with Russia for the precise reason of defeating the Ottomans.

So there was a short intermezzo, namely in June 1788, when the Swedes entered an alliance with the Ottoman Empire and decided to attack St. Petersburg and depose Empress Catherine. They just sailed their fleet over, and there were several naval battles, Öland, Svensksund, and finally the Battle of Reval. Reval was a big Russian victory. And really, the war was very stupid, and it ended in nothing. St. Petersburg was under siege for a time. It wasn't really part of the Russo-Turkish war. I mean, it was, because the Swedes were in a formal alliance with the Ottomans, and the Swedes wouldn't have attacked if Russia hadn't started the war, really. And basically this was just a domestic thing for King Gustav III. He wanted to improve his public standing, but he soon found that his government was broke, and Catherine didn't feel like conquering Sweden or whatever. So they just made peace the next year, or two years after. It was a very stupid war. Like 5,000 people died or so, and in the end the status quo ante bellum was restored. So a white peace, really. No one really gained, no one lost anything. Very stupid war. And it didn't even help Gustav III, because he was assassinated like two years after the war.

So yeah, carrying on with the Ottoman war. The first two years were kind of slow, and things really kicked off with the Battle of Focșani. Focșani is in Moldavia, and it saw a combined army of like 25,000 Austrians and Russians, under the command of, respectively, Prince Josias of Coburg and Alexander Suvorov, facing off against Koca Yusuf Pasha, the Grand Vizier. He wanted, of course, to protect the Ottoman possessions in the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, and he led an army to Focșani, which was a trade center, a logistics hub, basically, on the border between Moldavia and Wallachia.

Suvorov and Coburg marched there, and the innovation they made, basically, was this. The Ottoman army was pretty good at attacking European armies, given the way they usually formed up in long, thin lines, and the Ottoman way of war, which used lots of cavalry and light infantry, was very good at piercing thin lines and breaking them into fragments. So Suvorov came up with this battle order where he would use squares. Infantry squares, of course, are a well-known tactic that had been used for a while, most famously probably by the British at Waterloo, where Napoleon's Old Guard found their death on the British squares. But Suvorov was also very good at using them. They formed up squares in a checkerboard pattern, where each square was made up of an individual infantry battalion, so they were still easy to coordinate and move, but they could also easily withstand the Ottoman cavalry charges and the light infantry. The Austrians learned from the Russians and adopted these tactics as well, and so yeah, that worked really well.

Russian and Austrian artillery opened fire on the Turkish lines at Focșani on August 1st, 1789. The Ottomans were very good at building field fortifications. In the Balkans, the battlefields kind of predisposed you to use field fortifications: ditches, palisades, towers, whatever. Suvorov then attacked the right flank, the Austrians attacked on the left flank, and basically, being defeated on both sides, the Ottomans started retreating. However, the Russian and Austrian forces were a bit exhausted, and the logistics were not super good, so they could not really pursue deeper into Ottoman territory. So this was not a decisive battle, but it was a big humiliation for Koca Yusuf Pasha, who had lost like 10,000 of his 70,000 soldiers, while the Russians and the Austrians had only lost about 1,000 people.

But this provoked the Ottomans. After the defeat at Focșani, the Ottomans were really mad, and they raised a new army of 100,000 men, and 100,000 is a lot. By late September of 1789, the new Ottoman Grand Vizier, Hasan Pasha, marched his army to the small river Rymnik, in what is now Moldavia. And the goal was basically to bring about a decisive battle and destroy the Russian-Austrian forces. Opposing them was the same army, really, led by the Austrian friend Josias of Coburg and Alexander Suvorov. Their forces numbered around 25,000, so about a quarter of what the Ottomans had. But, of course, Suvorov was not your ordinary general. Suvorov, at this point, was well known for his eccentric but highly effective leadership.

He was a firm believer in the power of rapid, aggressive assaults and maximum flexibility in battle. The three core principles he always taught his troops were speed, decisiveness, and audacity. His most famous quotation is probably "The bullet is a fool, the bayonet is wise." He believed that close combat and morale were often more decisive than sheer firepower. And Suvorov's most successful tactic, it sounds stupid when you break it down like this, was just to close the gap between you and the enemy as quickly as possible and then stab them with bayonets before they can shoot at you.

So when Suvorov arrived at Coburg's camp on the eve of the battle, it was immediately obvious to him that a conventional defense would be suicidal, because the Ottomans would just surround them and break them from all sides. So instead of waiting for the Ottomans to attack, Suvorov proposed an attack of their own. His plan involved splitting his already outnumbered forces into several highly mobile detachments that would strike at the Ottoman flanks and rear simultaneously, basically fragmenting their massive army and disorienting them. His strategy was based on exploiting the weakness of a large and much less mobile force like the Ottoman army. The Ottomans were actually well equipped, even better equipped than the Russian-Austrian forces. They had more artillery. But their organization and coordination were slower and less disciplined compared to the Allied forces.

So, at the Battle of Rymnik, he basically had three main principles. The first was preemptive strikes. Suvorov ordered his men to cross the Rymnik River at night, under the cover of darkness. This alone was a very daring move, because, well, the Ottomans were standing on the river. And he brought his men into very close proximity to the Ottomans before they knew what was happening. The second was that he utilized multiple axes of attack. Instead of concentrating his forces for a single overwhelming push that would break through the Ottoman lines, Suvorov split the troops into four columns, and each of those had a specific role. Two were to strike at each of the Ottoman flanks. One was to attack the center. And the final one was held in reserve, to basically observe and see where the Ottomans would falter and then strike into the gap. These divisions moved very quickly to maintain the element of surprise and prevent the Ottomans from being able to regroup or form any sort of coherent defense. Suvorov knew that speed and shock would be more valuable than engaging in prolonged artillery exchanges with the Ottomans, who had more firepower, more guns. So his goal was to disorient the Ottoman ranks with his rapid advances, forcing them into close combat, where the discipline and, well, ferocity of his troops would outmatch the less organized Ottoman soldiers.

At dawn on September 22nd, 1789, Suvorov's forces surged forward. The Ottoman right flank was completely overwhelmed just by the speed of the Russian advance, and it very quickly began to crumble. Suvorov himself led the charge in several engagements and rallied his men. On the left flank, the Austrian forces under Prince Coburg also struck and pinned down the Ottoman cavalry, which prevented them from doing any maneuvers or relieving anywhere else on the Ottoman line. At the same time, the center of the Ottoman army, which was really being overwhelmed by the attacks on both sides, collapsed as well, when Suvorov's reserve column just charged straight ahead into where the most chaos was and started stabbing everyone with bayonets.

As the Ottoman lines began to collapse, this time Suvorov ordered his men to press their advantage. What started as a rout, similar to the Battle of Focșani, turned into a complete massacre. The Ottoman army was disorganized at this point, unable to regroup. They just started chaotically fleeing in all directions, and thousands were cut down by Russian and Austrian cavalry. By the end of the day, the Ottoman army was completely destroyed. Out of 100,000 men, a quarter were dead, and the survivors had completely disintegrated, fleeing in complete disarray. The Russian-Austrian forces, despite being vastly outnumbered, and despite being on the offensive against field fortifications and superior artillery for the whole of the battle, only suffered around 500 dead. And this was really one of the greatest tactical successes in the history of military science. Suvorov's ability to outthink and outmaneuver a numerically superior force with superior firepower cemented his reputation as one of the greatest military minds of his time. The Battle of Rymnik was a crushing blow to the Ottoman Empire. It basically broke their back, and their hearts weren't really in it anymore after that.

For his extraordinary achievement, Suvorov was awarded the title of Count Rymniksky by the Russian Empress, and he was also made a count of the Holy Roman Empire by the Austrians in recognition of what he did at Rymnik. So yeah, a very rare honor that really symbolized the significance of his triumph. The Battle of Rymnik really stands as a monument to Suvorov's belief that in war, speed and decisiveness can overcome even the most significant material disadvantage.

Yeah, it's remarkable how similar General Suvorov and Admiral Ushakov were. What Suvorov achieved on land, Ushakov managed to do on the high seas. Probably Ushakov was a student, in a way, of Suvorov, but he also revolutionized naval combat, especially for the Russian side. Because on the ground we were outnumbered, but on the sea it was even more extreme, because the Ottoman Empire was a very old naval superpower, while Russia had only emerged, well, what was it? It's like a century of fleet traditions. And, of course, we had some resounding victories in the Baltic. But we had literally just built the Black Sea Fleet.

Yeah, it was fresh, and it was not very large or very experienced, and we were outnumbered, outgunned, and of course the quality of the Ottoman ships was also better.

So let me say a little bit about Ushakov's biography, because I was actually in the museum dedicated to the man in Yaroslavl Oblast. He was born in the village of Burnakovo, near the city of Rybinsk, in the Yaroslavl region. He came from a family of minor nobility, and he was born in 1745. His father was a sergeant in the Life Guards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. Despite that, actually, his early story is a bit mysterious because, for example, there was not a single portrait made of him while he was alive. And his family story is another matter of debate. But nevertheless, he was accepted into the Naval Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg at the age of 16. It was very trendy when he was young to join the Navy, following Peter the Great's traditions. And after graduating, he sailed on the Baltic Sea. But his first moment of glory was during the first Russian-Turkish war of 1768, when he received his first command and his first ship, a 16-gun vessel that successfully repelled a Turkish landing at Balaklava.

Following this, the young naval officer received perhaps the most prestigious appointment in the Russian Navy: he became the captain of the Imperial Yacht. He was recognized at court, but he was eager to join the battle fleet, not be a chauffeur for the court. And then he was transferred to the freshly created Black Sea Fleet in 1783 and became commander of the St. Paul, a 66-gun warship. Upon arriving in Kherson, he faced an outbreak of plague in the city. And I guess most of the casualties in those wars were due to diseases, actually.

Yeah, that's true. You were highly likely to die just from being sick all the time.

So he isolated his crew, and none of his sailors fell ill. In 1787, the Russo-Turkish war broke out, the new one that we are talking about right now. And at the Battle of Fidonisi, of Fidonisi Island...

Snake Island.

Oh, yeah. Well, the same. Zmeiny Island, Fidonisi. Admiral Ushakov skillfully maneuvered his fleet, supported by three frigates, and defeated the enemy, causing them significant damage. In '89, he defeated the Turks once again, the Turkish squadron at Cape Takil in the Kerch Strait, which prevented them from landing troops on the Crimean coast. And what's interesting about his tactics is that he broke all the rules of classical naval engagement, much like Suvorov on land. For example, Ushakov didn't line up his ships, and he would often attack against the wind, which was a bit of a revolution in naval warfare at the time.

Also, there was an interesting training regimen for his sailors. They would mount a gun on a wooden platform and simulate a lot of naval battles. And as a result, Ushakov's teams were at the top of their game, and they were known for their deadly accuracy, because they were training all the time when they weren't engaged in an actual fight. And also, because the size of the Russian fleet was generally inferior, you could create an artificial numerical advantage at some point, especially when you're playing dirty, unfair. For example, when the Turks do not expect you to attack them, or by targeting the flagship of the enemy and depriving the Turkish fleet of leadership. That was also one of the tactics that he used.

In '91, at Cape Kaliakra in northern Bulgaria, Ushakov won a legendary battle, and he rapidly defeated the Turkish fleet, which was significantly superior in numbers. This defeat opened up a sea route to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. And then the Sultan was forced to sign the Treaty of Jassy on Russian favorable terms.

Well, for that reason, and Suvorov destroying their army as well.

And in recognition, Ushakov was awarded the Order of St. George and the Order of Alexander Nevsky. Yeah, that was the crowning moment of his career, because his losses were negligible and the damage that he inflicted on the Turks was colossal. Later he would be appointed commander in the Second Anti-French Coalition, which actually, ironically, included Russia and Turkey on the same side against the French. And then, along with his former enemies the Turks, Ushakov had to clear the Mediterranean islands of the French on behalf of Emperor Paul I. We are going to talk about it in the next episode, but long story short, he was instrumental in the capture of Corfu, which was a French fortress at the time, had a large garrison, and was well defended. And I was actually in this fortress like two weeks ago. So yeah, under the Russian-Turkish protectorate, the island of Corfu was cleansed of the French.

Another crowning achievement of his career, for sure. But then, under the next emperor, Alexander I, who didn't like Ushakov for some reason, he was removed from his beloved Black Sea Fleet and sent to some lesser position in the Baltic. Then he retired and led a peaceful life, visiting all the Greek monasteries on the islands. He was living near a monastery in Temnikov, in the town of Temnikov. The monastery was founded by his grandpa. And yeah, that's the story of Ushakov.

As you said, Ushakov and Suvorov are kind of twins of that period, in that they were both revolutionary, brilliant military commanders who broke all the rules and made up their own rules and were extremely successful. And I think they are the only military leaders in Russian history who never lost a battle.

Yeah, it seems that way, and it's very interesting. I think it's the long-awaited effect of Peter's reforms, basically, and all the military schools. In like three generations after they were founded, they started producing brilliant military thinkers in, well, pretty serious numbers. Really lacking this nowadays, I would say. Shall we continue with the war?

Yeah, sure. So after Rymnik, the Ottomans suffered even more defeats, when the Austrians successfully repelled an Ottoman offensive in Croatia, and the Austrians counterattacked and took Belgrade. However, Joseph II died, and the Ottomans had to deal with the Greek revolt in the rear, the Serbian war...

Yeah.

And they successfully sued for peace with the Austrians, and basically the Austrians backed out of the war. From then on, it was just Russia versus the Ottomans.

So, of course, we had to cross the finish line by ourselves.

In the meantime, Suvorov continued his advance, and it was actually Ushakov's victory at Tendra, or Hadjibey, which enabled Suvorov to attack Izmail. Like I said, Rymnik broke the back of the Ottomans, and Izmail was then the nail in the coffin, really. After Ushakov beat back the Ottoman fleet, stopping them from resupplying Izmail and landing troops in Suvorov's rear, Suvorov could advance.

So, Izmail. The fortress of Izmail, situated on the banks of the Danube River, which, for some reason, is nowadays considered part of a country called Ukraine, was one of the Ottoman Empire's strongest fortresses. It was literally among the biggest and strongest strongholds they had. It had walls over 25 feet high and 30 feet thick, it had moats, and it was garrisoned by 35,000 elite Ottoman troops, including the Janissary Corps. It had as much artillery as a field army. It had incredible stockpiles of food and ammunition. Izmail had never been taken by storm. It had never even been seriously threatened. And the Ottomans had good reason to believe that it was completely impregnable and invincible.

For Russia, however, capturing Izmail was crucial. The fortress controlled strategic key points along the Danube and prevented any Russian advance into Ottoman-held territories. Several previous Russian attempts to capture the fortress had ended in failure. And Catherine the Great was also eager to end the war, because the Austrians had peaced out, and Russia was concerned about Prussia also making an alliance with the Ottomans and entering the war on the Turkish side. So Catherine was eager to end the war, and they needed one more crushing defeat to really force the Ottomans to surrender.

So, Suvorov arrived at Izmail in December of 1790. He took command of an army of about 30,000 soldiers. Of course, Suvorov recognized the immense difficulty of taking such a well-defended fortress. All previous attacks had been repelled with ease, and its defenses seemed completely unassailable. But of course, Suvorov was undeterred. He immediately began drawing up a plan for a full-scale assault, employing the principles that he always used: speed, surprise, and ferocity. Suvorov knew that a siege would take forever and bleed his forces dry, so he chose a swift, decisive assault on the fortress.

Before launching this assault, Suvorov issued an ultimatum to the Ottoman commander of Izmail. His message was very simple. It said: "Surrender. I give you 24 hours. After that, I will come. I take no prisoners." The Ottoman commander scoffed at the message and was supremely confident that Suvorov was just bluffing, that these were empty threats. Izmail had stood strong against all previous attacks, and the Ottomans were completely confident in their belief that they would simply outlast this new Russian effort as well.

Suvorov spent the next six days basically not sleeping and meticulously preparing his troops for the attack. His plan involved a three-pronged assault, with attacks on the fortress from both the river and the land. And to ensure that his men could breach the walls, Suvorov ordered them to build assault ladders and fascines to fill the moats. He had his soldiers drilling day and night, training them in scaling walls, crossing trenches, and fighting in close-quarters combat, where even a bayonet is too much and you'd have to use swords and clubs and so on. The Russians knew that the assault would be very bloody. But Suvorov inspired his troops with his unshakable confidence. As he always liked to say: "We are Russians, God is with us." My Russkie, s nami Bog. And he, of course, as always, was personally involved in all the preparations. He led from the front. He was inspecting the men during the drills. He encouraged them, and he instilled in them an unshakable belief in victory.

And finally, on December 22nd, 1790, Suvorov launched his assault under the cover of darkness and fog. His plan was to attack simultaneously from six different directions, overwhelming the Ottoman defenders with speed and ferocity, as he always did. The Russian forces moved quickly and silently and advanced towards the walls of Izmail under heavy fire from the Ottoman artillery. The first part was the attack on the flanks. Two of Suvorov's columns attacked the fortress from the Danube, using boats to ferry across the river and launch an assault on the Ottoman flanks. These forces, under incredible amounts of Ottoman artillery fire, reached the walls and began scaling them using ladders, and very quickly gained footholds on the ramparts of Izmail. Meanwhile, the main Russian force, which had been divided into four columns, attacked from the land. The first wave faced a brutal barrage of musket fire and artillery as they crossed the moats and trenches that surrounded the fortress. The casualties were high, and most of the casualties that Suvorov took happened here, really.

But Suvorov's men pressed on anyway. They filled the trenches, they used ladders to climb the walls, and once inside the fortress, the battle turned into a brutal, savage melee. Suvorov's soldiers fought their way through the streets of Izmail, they engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and Suvorov's strategy was to just keep pushing forward, never allowing the Ottomans even a minute to regroup or establish a defensive line. The fighting was savage, with both sides suffering heavy losses, but the superior discipline and determination of the Russian forces very soon brought results. Suvorov himself moved through the ranks. He directed the battle, he spurred the soldiers onward, and his mere presence on the battlefield was enough to galvanize his men. And despite the heavy losses, they continued to advance deeper into the fortress.

After hours of intense fighting, Suvorov's troops managed to break through the main defensive lines of the fortress. The Ottoman resistance had been shattered, and as the day wore on, the Ottoman garrison began to crumble. By midday, Russian troops had captured the gates of the fortress, and most of the remaining Ottoman soldiers, including their commander, were killed. The fortress of Izmail, once considered impregnable, had fallen.

The battle had been ferocious, with thousands of dead on both sides, but Suvorov had triumphed. And if you look at the numbers, it's actually really insane. The garrison of Izmail was 35,000 men, up to 40,000. Suvorov's forces numbered around 30,000. And usually at this time, the rule is that if you assault a fortress, you need three times as many soldiers in the attacking force as in the defending force to go in. And the forces were equal. Actually, Suvorov was slightly outnumbered while attacking Izmail. And basically all of the Ottomans were casualties. All of them were either dead, wounded, or captured, so the losses were 40,000 out of 40,000.

One of the cousins of the last Crimean Khan was present, and a lot of the relatives, descendants of Giray, I think was his name...

Yes, all descendants of Genghis Khan, as they like to say. And they were all killed in the Izmail fortress.

Yes. So Russian losses were also quite severe, but if you compare it, they lost 4,000 men. That's insane. That's really... I don't know, no one but Suvorov could have done that. The capture of Izmail was a massive blow to the Ottoman Empire, and it again demonstrated the genius of Suvorov and his mastery of siege warfare in addition to field warfare. For the Ottomans, the fall of Izmail was a gigantic humiliation that weakened their control over the entire Danube region. And Catherine the Great, upon getting the message of Suvorov's victory, rose up and yelled, "Ura! Izmail is ours!"

Yeah. And out of 4,000 casualties on the Russian side, only 1,800 were killed. Others succumbed to diseases.

Yeah, so extraordinary, really. To this day, the capture of Izmail is one of the most celebrated victories in Russian military history. In pure skill and achievement, it's probably even greater than Rymnik, to be honest, because that was just insane. That's invigorating.

In any case, yeah, the war would soon be over. The last battle was actually fought a bit later, after the fall of Izmail, namely at the Romanian town of Măcin. Suvorov was not there, actually. That was Nikolai Repnin. And a young Mikhail Kutuzov was also engaged at the Battle of Măcin. The Battle of Măcin was a bit of a slower battle. There was not really much to it. Prince Golitsyn just took over the trenches. The Ottomans were broken at the time. Kutuzov destroyed the right flank of the Ottomans, and it was over very quickly, really. It was 30,000 Russians against 80,000 Ottomans. The Russian army only lost 140 men killed; the Ottomans lost 4,000 killed. So, yeah, that was pretty much it for, what, I think it was the seventh Russian-Ottoman war.

Yeah, there was also a siege of Anapa, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire back then.

Yes, of course, there were more battles.

Oh, yeah, and in the background, there was also another conflict going on in the Russian rear: the Islamist revolt in the Caucasus, actually, the revolt of Sheikh Mansur.

Sheikh Mansur, yes, that was also one of the reasons why Catherine was eager to end the war quickly.

Yeah, he was an Islamist who was funded by the Turks. It was one of the first revolts in the Caucasus on this scale, I guess.

Yes, it was the beginning of the 60-year Russian war in the Caucasus, really. But, yeah, let's talk about the conclusion of the Russian-Turkish war and the peace treaty.

Yes. So the peace treaty was signed on January 9, 1792: the Treaty of Jassy. Jassy, in Moldavia, nowadays Romania. The negotiations were actually headed by Prince Bezborodko, because Potemkin had died a few months earlier, which was also a heavy blow to Catherine, of course. The Treaty of Jassy basically just confirmed what Russia had achieved. It was not the triumphant treaty that it could have been. I mean, the Ottomans started the war, and they did not achieve the goal of retaking Crimea, of course. But yeah, Odessa and Ochakov and that whole region were ceded to Russia. The Ottomans accepted Russian sovereignty over Crimea, and the Dniester River became the new Russian-Turkish border, leaving the other side, the Kuban River, mostly intact. But yeah, the Ottomans also acknowledged Georgia as a Russian protectorate.

But for Catherine, as you said, it was bittersweet, because she was still overcoming her grief over Potemkin's death. As she told her secretary, Khrapovitsky, after Potemkin had died: "Who can replace such a person? I and all of us are like snails. We are afraid to show our heads." And: "Yesterday I was struck on the head by the news that my friend, my idol, my pupil, Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky, has died. Oh my God, I'm truly alone now. I have to train people again."

Yes, yes, it was a huge blow to Catherine, losing Potemkin.

Shall we talk about the Sheikh Mansur movement against Russia?

Sure, briefly we can talk about it. Actually, it started even before Catherine's second Turkish war. It started in '85, and it lasted for six years, and, well, I'm going to spoil it for you, but it ended in the capture of Sheikh Mansur and Russian victory. But it was one of the first Islamist movements in the area that was explicitly anti-Russian. And the guy himself, Sheikh Mansur, was a Chechen. He was born, well, in modern-day Chechnya. But there was also the Circassian issue, which was instrumental in that, because of the modern-day Kuban region, which was once populated by Circassians. And there were a lot of Circassian independence movements and stuff like that.

Yes, the Circassians... I mean, technically, I guess you could say that the Circassian War lasted for 100 years.

Yeah. Even longer, maybe. It's crazy. They were a very weird group of people, actually, because they were, like everyone else, pagans, but then they became Orthodox Christians around the same time that the Russians were converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. But they stopped being Orthodox Christians in the 17th century and became Sunni Muslims.

Yeah, a very strange group of people. And to this day there are some attempts... and they're widespread everywhere but their supposed homeland, especially in Turkey. They were also in Egypt and God knows where else.

But yeah, so Sheikh Mansur was a Chechen himself, but he led a big-tent anti-Russian movement, trying to unite all the North Caucasian peoples in the struggle for independence.

Yes, and they were quite successful for a time. They did beat us at the Battle of Aldy, which is Grozny nowadays, really, at the Sunzha River, and we took quite heavy casualties, and we had to abandon Vladikavkaz for like 20 years.

And what's interesting is that it's directly connected; the two go hand in hand. Because the Chechens were really an isolated people, like all the mountain peoples, and for that reason they remained pagan for a lot longer than other people. There were some pagans left in the 18th century in Chechnya. And Sheikh Mansur became one of the biggest imams, and he was fighting the pagan traditions in the area. So it was perhaps the final and the most serious wave of Islamization of Chechnya, which was very recent, in the late 18th century. And, yeah, attempts to bring about Islamic unity and the Russian Empire really have a hard time coexisting. So, as an Orthodox European power that was in partial control of the Caucasus, Russia became the most deadly enemy of the Chechen teips that had recently converted to Islam.

But yeah, of course. So at the Battle of Aldy, who was commanding the Russian forces, at the same time as we were beating the Turks?

Potemkin actually led an expedition against them at some point, but I think that was earlier, before the most recent Russian-Turkish war.

Yeah, but I guess they were trying to use the Cossacks and other contractors to solve this issue, not the entire army, nothing like that. The strength of the Russian forces was not that huge. It was 30,000 people in the area, against around 40,000 of the various Caucasians, Chechens and Circassians and Nogais, and the Ottoman help as well. So combined it was a lot bigger.

Yes. There were a couple of names that we see that would become very important later on. Like I mentioned, Kutuzov fought against the Turks. And in the fighting against Sheikh Mansur, one of those who survived the Battle of Aldy was Prince Pyotr Bagration, who would become quite important, so we were very lucky that he survived that one.

For sure. But for the Caucasus, Sheikh Mansur became a very important figure, a religious figure, not only an imam but somewhat of a prophet, especially after he was captured. The locals believed that Mansur could appear anywhere and disappear whenever he wanted, and that he was riding a magic horse across the sea, and that he could heal the sick by laying his hands on them. So he was their god, basically, more on par with Allah, or Muhammad at least. And the trend remained: Shamil, who would appear a century later, was basically the same kind of figure.

Actually, a translation recently appeared of a very good book on the topic. A few months ago, half a year ago, Antelope Hill Publishing published a translation of Rostislav Fadeyev's The Sixty Years' Caucasian War. It's a very good book, and it's a comprehensive analysis, really, of what happened in this decisive episode of Russia and the Caucasus. So definitely read that book, check it out and get it, The Sixty Years' Caucasian War. It's on Amazon, so go get it.

But in general, it was much more of a low-intensity conflict.

Yes, of course, that's why it took so long, really. It was not really the place for decisive battles.

But in any case, after the victory against the Turks, Potemkin commissioned the prime Russian poet of the time, Gavrila Derzhavin, who was also a great statesman, by the way, to compose a song to commemorate these events. And this song, "Let the Thunder of Victory Rumble," is a very great song, and it was de facto the national anthem of Russia for 20 or 30 years, until "God Save the Tsar" was officially adopted. So yeah, let me read it, actually. I'm not sure about the translation, but still.

Yeah, the translation on Wikipedia is all right.

"Triumph's thunder, louder, higher! Russian pride is running high! Russia's glory sparkles brighter, we have humbled Muslim might. Hail to you for this, O Catherine, gentle mother to us all! The Danube's swiftly flowing waters are at last in our firm hands. Caucasus respects our prowess, Russia rules Crimean lands. Turkish, Tatar hordes no longer may disturb our calm domain. Proud Selim won't be the stronger; evermore his crescent wanes. Groans by Izmail repeated round the world are heard perforce. Envy, enmity, defeated, turn to poison at the source. Make the most of every triumph, for our foes it's time to see: Russia reaches farther, higher, over mountain peaks and seas. Brilliant Empress, gaze at visions and behold a woman great. In your thoughts and your decisions, as one soul we all partake. Look at grand cathedral splendor, contemplate our strength and grace. See your subjects' hearts surrender to rejoice before your face."

Yes, beautiful, beautiful. It's more like a love song than a national anthem.

But yeah, well, concerning poetry and literature, I would say that under Catherine there was the first wave of, great or not so great, but this kind of Russian literature emerged. And there was Radishchev. Or is it pronounced Radishchev?

Radishchev, yeah. At the time, all the aspiring poets and writers would also hold some actual serious positions within the state. They were not just poets and writers. It was a hobby for them.

Was Radishchev the most famous author of that time, because of his arrest and being exiled by Catherine?

I'm not sure if he was the most famous. Probably among the most famous. But it was a big scandal.

I mean, Derzhavin and Fonvizin and Novikov.

Well, yeah, Fonvizin was also huge, of course. Lomonosov, of course, and he even started before Catherine, I think. Lomonosov was the OG.

Actually, a fact that is often neglected is that Catherine herself was also a writer. She wrote a bunch of librettos, and she was very much into opera. She liked writing. She wrote a bunch of operas, she wrote fairy tales, and she had some of the most famous Russian musicians write the music for her librettos, for example.

Was Glinka already active as a Russian composer?

No, no, no. He came later. So, for example, Fevey is probably the most famous opera.

Fevey? Never heard of it.

It was a libretto that Catherine wrote, with music by Vasily Pashkevich. It was the first fairytale opera in Russia. So Catherine herself was not just a patron of the arts, but also kind of an artist herself.

Yes. Yeah, interesting. Again, it's pretty crazy to consider that she wrote like 15 operas, all while being empress and conquering Novorossiya and all that stuff. The woman was just working like 30 hours a day. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's kind of cemented that Glinka became the godfather of Russian classical music, but he was born in 1804. And I honestly don't really remember any composers that came before him. But there were some, of course. And I would say that they were less original, and they would often mimic the Italian and French operas, especially the Italian, of course. There was Fomin, Yevstigney Fomin, Alyabyev, Skorodumov.

Yeah, Alyabyev, but he would start writing and composing a bit later. So for music, it was a bit too early to say anything interesting.

All right. And yeah, I was talking about Radishchev and his most famous work, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. It became kind of a tradition for the Russian internal opposition. It became the Russian Uncle Tom's Cabin. I haven't actually read it in full, and I'm not sure if it's a great piece of literature, but it's about him taking an imaginary journey between the biggest Russian cities, and each step along the way reveals a particular problem to the traveler. Have you read it, actually?

A very long time ago, not the whole thing. Like 15 years ago, I guess.

Well, Pushkin didn't like Radishchev's prose, but he did praise his philosophical ideas.

It's kind of, I don't know, like he tried to be the Russian Voltaire, I guess, and to write his own Candide or something similar to that. And it's very naive and superficial, because it was among the first things like that published in Russia. It's basically a retelling of the ideas of the contemporary fashionable French philosophers. And Radishchev also liked the Americans; he was inspired by the American Revolution.

Yeah, it's basically Jean-Jacques Rousseau taking an unpleasant stroll surrounded by the poor and stinky proles that he wants to liberate and save from Catherine's oppression. And, well, there were some legitimate arguments against serfdom, which Catherine did strengthen, as we told you in the first episode. And there was a bit of a deadlock on the serfdom question that would haunt the Russian Empire for some decades after her death. The book starts with an epigraph about the monster that is enormous, disgusting, hundred-mouthed and barking, meaning the Russian Empire. The book was immediately banned, and Radishchev was sentenced first to death, then to banishment in eastern Siberia. So, again, showing great liberalism, because he was just sent to live in Siberia for a bunch of years.

Oh, well. Personally, Catherine was very much interested in Enlightenment philosophy as well. She was pen pals with Voltaire, Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and so on. So why was she mad at this same style of literature? Because it was criticizing her?

Yes, of course.

Well, not very enlightened. Very hypocritical.

Yeah, but it was very dangerous, actually, politically and otherwise, because all the proto-socialists and all the proto-revolutionaries of course agreed with this message, and their only solution was to dismantle it all. And that actually happened a century and a half later. So even though the arguments were legitimate, no solution was provided other than violent revolution.

It's actually interesting that the book was kind of forgotten for a long time. Belinsky hadn't read it, and Herzen only read it in like 1858. So it resurfaced a century later, with all the revolutionary cells already in place.

Yeah, it was not a great piece of literature, but interesting nonetheless. So I wanted to quote what Pushkin said about the book: "The Journey to Moscow, the cause of his misfortune and fame," meaning Radishchev's, "is, as we have already said, a very mediocre work, not even to mention the barbarous style. The lamentations on the unhappy state of the people, on the violence of the nobles, etc., are exaggerated and vulgar. The impulses of sensibility, affected and puffed up, are sometimes extremely ridiculous. We could confirm this judgment with many extracts." So yeah, Pushkin was not a huge fan.

Oh, certainly not. No, yeah. Because in the book, Radishchev credits Lomonosov with the creation of literary Russian. But as we know, Pushkin perfected it to such a degree that it was unattainable for poor Radishchev; he was at a different level. And Dostoevsky said that the book is basically just a collection of loosely translated stuff from French philosophers, unoriginal to a terrifying degree.

Yeah, that was the problem with 18th-century Russia: it was unoriginal. The center of cultural life was somewhere in Paris, probably, and certainly not in St. Petersburg yet. And that's why almost all members of Catherine's entourage were very interested in Freemasonry, because it was cool and hip in France at the time, and they were all members of some organizations. And I think the first Masonic lodges were opened under her rule. She herself viewed it with a sort of condescension. Because she was so busy, it would be weird for her to go to some lodge gathering, and it seemed to her a pointless waste of time. But still, for the others in her entourage, it was pretty important to join this quasi-religious organization and political force. So naturally, it was a threat to her, and at a later point, she started fighting against the Masonic organizations.

Oh, yeah, but that would become more important under Alexander.

For sure, yeah. They would blossom then, but they emerged under her. And actually, as you mentioned, a famous writer of the time, Nikolai Novikov, was also a Freemason and became one of the victims of that struggle.

We have arrived, I think, mostly at the end of Catherine's reign. The absolute end we'll talk about in the next episode, because it basically includes how the succession played out with Paul, Pavel. And we'll harken back to Paul's youth and talk some more about Catherine during that, because that's important for Paul's upbringing.

So overall, I think the song is pretty fitting, because Catherine was, in a way, Russia's mother. She ruled for 30 years. Under her reign, much of the cultural life of Russia was created, like so many institutions that existed until the end of the empire or even still exist. Like Lomonosov University; although it was founded before Catherine, it grew under her reign. The Smolny Institute for women, which was really the first women's educational institution in Russia. It really created the foundation for all of women's education in Russia for the next 150 years, or for the next 200 years. The Smolny Institute actually existed until 1932. After the revolution, it existed in exile in Serbia, so it actually survived the Russian Empire.

Yeah, and lots of parks and castles and all sorts of palaces were built under her reign, and half of historical St. Petersburg is there as it was envisioned by her. And, of course, on the geopolitical side, there's the acquisition of Crimea and Novorossiya. Catherine really moved Russia's borders west and south in very significant ways. And for the first time, the Russian fleet penetrated the Bosporus Strait and started trading and sailing the Mediterranean freely and in good numbers.

Yes, she was a huge patron of the arts, of literature, opera, theater, education, which all blossomed under her rule. She basically introduced the principles of religious freedom in Russia, no doubt in part because she brought a bunch of Protestants into the country.

Yeah. And I think we should do a separate episode on the history of Novorossiya as a region, because it's really an exciting story. It's, I guess, somewhat similar to the rise of the American frontier in some ways, because much of the region was known as Dikoye Pole, the Wild Field, because there was nothing there. And, well, over the years it turned into the most industrialized area in Russia. So, yeah, I think we should definitely do a separate episode on that, on the idea and history of Novorossiya.

And then in the next episode, we'll talk about Paul I, the eccentric emperor, actually one of my favorite emperors, really, and a very tragically misunderstood ruler, with a very difficult upbringing under Catherine.

And so, yeah, a few words on the economy. Catherine's predecessors, like Elizabeth, Elizaveta, were protectionists in foreign trade. But Catherine changed that, and she liberalized a lot of exports and imports. It was a trendy idea, so she was kind of libertarian in a way. For example, the ban on grain exports was abolished, and lots of various restrictions were lifted. And it led to rapid growth in trade overall in the late 18th century, or even the second half of the 18th century. Also, the Free Economic Society was established, and tariffs were reduced. So it was very much not protectionist, but it did some good for the Russian economy overall. Agriculture, I think, also changed, in that there were more and more souls tilling the land. I'm not sure about the productivity of their work.

But domestically it was a bit different. As I said, the tariffs were lifted and protectionism was amended, but internally, for the serfs and peasants, the situation didn't really improve all that much. And as we said about the Pugachev uprising, why was it successful? Well, because a lot of peasants were not in the greatest shape, and they would easily join any movement of the sort, any rebel who was against the government, because, yeah, famines. You know, famine reached a particular scale in the 1780s, and food prices rose significantly. So it was not all great at all. Russia strengthened itself on the international scene like never before since Peter, but domestically there were lots of problems, and some of them were exacerbated by Catherine's rule.

And a few short words on Paul. What was he doing in her late years, do you know?

Well, I was going to talk about it in the next episode, but yeah, I'm just going to tease a bit what kind of person he was. When he learned reading as a child, he learned Russian and French at the same time. And he had toy soldiers, in Russian and in French uniforms. And he learned the alphabet and reading that way: he had the Cyrillic letters written on the Russian soldiers and the Latin letters on the French soldiers. And that is how he learned how to read.

Yeah, he would have a killer Twitter account these days, probably. A military analyst.

He also took a grand tour through Europe for one and a half years, similar to the one Peter took.

So how did Catherine die?

She outlived her greatest love, Potemkin, by five years. He died in '91, and she died in '96, on the 17th of November, 1796. She died, well, very unglamorously, I guess. She got up, had a coffee, and then just kind of died. She fell and hit her head. She had a stroke, a pretty bad stroke, and then she died without ever regaining consciousness. And she was buried together with Peter III: Paul had the grave opened and put a crown on his father's head, and then he buried them together at the Peter and Paul Cathedral. A great woman, the original Russian girlboss.

So yeah, I hope that you now know everything there is to know about Catherine II and her reign and Russia. We could have covered her affairs more in depth, I guess, but people talk so much about that, and it's really not the most important part by far, and it's always super exaggerated, just because people love hearing about that. So I did not want to focus on that.

What about the best ones? There are a lot of dramatizations of her life and rule. Let's see, what are the best ones?

Not sure myself, because they're so focused on the personal affairs. There are no battle scenes, so it's hard for me to watch.

Yes, she was portrayed by Elle Fanning in the Hulu television series The Great, right?

Oh yeah, there's a TV show. I saw an episode or so of that. There is a Russian TV show from 2015, but I haven't seen that one. It's called Velikaya.

Yeah, it's pretty good and very popular with Russian women, and it's huge, too. It's high budget and has like five seasons, so if you have a lot of spare time, go and watch that.

All right, next up: Paul I. Thank you for listening, and see you very soon.

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# Chapter 11: Paul I – Russian Hamlet

Hello and welcome to the Russians with Attitude podcast, the Romanov series, episode number ten. Tonight we are going to talk about the short but insanely interesting reign of Paul I, or Pavel I in Russian. He was perhaps the most mysterious and underrated emperor. He was a divisive character. The noble families and the aristocratic circles hated him, and in the end it cost him his life. But what if the boyars were bad and the tsar was actually good? What if Paul I was the emperor who could have completely changed the trajectory of the Russian Empire? This is exactly what we're going to discuss in great detail in this episode with a classically trained historian, Kirill Kaminiz.

Hello.

So yeah, Pavel, or Paul, is one of my favorite emperors. Ever since I started reading about the Romanovs, I've had a certain fascination with him, just because he was so different from everyone else, and because the pop history perception of him is very conclusive. So basically, in Soviet and Russian historiography, there is a whole set of clichés that are taken as axioms that require no further proof. And there are especially many of these clichés in the evaluations of the activities of Russian tsars and emperors. For example, Peter I is seen as an exclusively positive figure. Anna Ioannovna is exclusively negative. Catherine II is positive, and so on and so on. At the same time, the reign of Emperor Paul I is painted entirely in a negative light. All descriptions of his reign basically boil down to two main theses, namely that he was a tyrant and a psychopath, and that we are so lucky that Russian patriots killed him. And I personally heavily disagree with this assessment of Pavel. So I was looking forward to this episode for quite a while, actually.

Yeah. And previously in the Romanov series, we talked about his mother, Catherine II, whom the nobles loved very much. And she's beloved in Russian history universally. And some people in our chat, after we dropped our previous episodes, posted something weird about gooning to mommy Catherine, which I believe is supremely weird, but this is more or less the mood that she had at the Russian court as well.

Yeah, and I mean, she did a lot of great stuff that we talked about. If you haven't listened to it, please do. She defeated the Turks, created Novorossiya, destroyed the Crimean Khanate, and also helped the Americans in their Revolutionary War. And at the same time, she turned many millions of peasants into serfs.

The divide between the social classes was widened, and the nobles were pleased with this arrangement, more or less. Thanks to her policies, they started accumulating wealth like never before, and the number of serfs on their lands was increasing. And the kicker is, the aristocrats, the nobles, didn't have to serve in the military anymore. They were pardoned by Catherine the Great. So it was an excellent time for them. They were enjoying the greatest feats of Suvorov and Ushakov from the comforts of their homes. And when Catherine the Great died, they had a lot of rights and not many responsibilities.

But there was a man, Catherine's son, who would soon try to change all that. And that's what we're going to talk about. Forget about the femdom mommy absolutism. The era of a man-led tsar with great aspirations has begun. The Sigma Emperor.

Let's talk about his childhood and whether he was a bastard or not.

Yes, right when he was born, rumors surfaced that he was not actually Peter III's son biologically, and that instead he was the son of Sergei Saltykov, who was Catherine's lover and favorite at the time. There are several reasons why people believe so. Well, first of all, because he was Catherine's favorite at the time. She spent a lot of time with him. And Pavel was born after ten years of marriage, after ten years of childless marriage, when everyone was already convinced that the marriage between Peter and Catherine would remain barren. There is, however, a resolution to this, namely that Peter had certain anatomical difficulties in conceiving, and those were fixed by some surgery that he had, without going into too much detail. And after that, he was finally able to properly conceive.

Yeah, I really doubt that they had such technologies back then.

I mean, well, okay, it's actually taken from Catherine's diary, namely that Peter had severe phimosis, which prevented him from properly having sexual intercourse and properly ejaculating. And I guess the surgery is a circumcision that cures phimosis. So apparently he had that done, and after that he was finally able to have proper sex with Catherine.

It's crazy.

Yeah, this stuff, I mean, I wasn't going to emphasize this, but if you cast doubt on the skills of Russian surgeons, I have to go into detail here.

The imperial Jews at the court.

Yeah, right. So basically, a lot of people believe that Sergei Saltykov was his actual father, which would also mean, by the way, that the ruling dynasty after Catherine's death were the Saltykovs and not the Romanovs, right up until the revolution. Catherine herself was convinced that he was Saltykov's son. That was one of the reasons, I guess, why she was so malicious towards Paul. In her private writings, she insisted that he was Saltykov's son.

And it's really impossible to know, but, I mean, people usually overestimate the amount of bastards and illegitimate children. Even in the 18th century, most babies were the children of their official parents. And Paul was not very attractive. He physically looked much more like his father, while Saltykov was a pretty boy and a very handsome man, and Paul looked nothing like him. And Catherine coped with this by comparing Paul instead to Saltykov's brother, who was indeed ugly and was more similar in appearance to Paul, I guess.

Look, we can evaluate whether he was the son of Peter III, the official husband of Catherine II, by the height of both parents. Catherine II was pretty short. Well, it was all right for the time; she was 157 centimeters, whereas Peter III was 170 centimeters. And their supposed son, Paul I, was 166 centimeters, so shorter than his dad by four centimeters.

Yeah, well, his mom was tiny.

Yeah, but I don't have any science to back it up, but I don't really believe it.

I mean, okay, all right, then we can just rename it to the Saltykov series, I guess.

Okay, yeah. And you said that Paul I was not a pretty boy, unlike Saltykov.

Yeah, he looks a bit worse, but he looks pretty much like him. There are two portraits, and you can decide for yourself. I will insert them in the description, but they do look similar.

I assume, I'm pretty sure, that in the official portraits of Paul, they smoothed over some of the edges in his appearance, which was universally described as really ugly. And Saltykov was universally described as very handsome. So the lack of contrast between the portraits has more to do with politics, I think.

But if we consider that he was actually a bastard of Saltykov, then he would be much more Russian than perceived, right? He would be half Russian. But we don't really know how tall Saltykov was. He doesn't look tall at all, actually. Judging by the portraits, he has narrow shoulders. And basically Paul I looks like an uglier, much uglier version of Saltykov: snub nose and weird eyes, like an uglified version. But yeah, it is believable. But what do we know about the romance between Catherine II and Saltykov? Because we didn't really mention it in the previous episodes.

Yes, I mean, it would take like two full episodes to talk about all of her relationships.

Was she cheating with Saltykov?

Yeah, yeah, of course she was cheating, and she was not completely loyal to Potemkin either.

Yeah, basically.

Saltykov was the chamberlain of Peter III. He was very social, very handsome, and everyone liked him at court. I mean, the only reason why people, I guess, believe the official theory is because Peter III was ugly and Paul I is ugly. But they are ugly in very different ways, because Peter III looked like a Habsburg monarch, with a receding jaw and a very long face, whereas Paul I looks like a bulldog, a very different kind of ugly, I would say. The skull is very different, that's for sure.

All right, so that aside, I don't think it's super important really, but we don't know for sure either way. Okay, so in any case, Catherine did not really have a say in the early education of Paul, because Elizabeth, Elizabeth Petrovna, immediately took him away from Catherine, and she raised him until her death, so until the age of six or so. Paul had basically no contact with his mother. Not that she wanted it very much. They had a very strange relationship afterwards, and I think the early separation is one reason for that. So Paul kind of grew up without real parental affection, and Elizabeth gave herself the task of grooming Paul into the perfect emperor, so basically giving him the best education possible. And he did receive probably one of the best educations any Russian emperor had received before then.

His first teacher was the diplomat and polymath Fyodor Dmitrievich Bekhteev, a very smart man. He was the master of ceremonies at the court. He taught him to read. As I mentioned in the previous episode, he learned the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets at the same time, because he started learning French and Russian at the same time, basically. And Bekhteev used little toy soldiers that were shaped like letters to teach him. So yeah, the militarism was instilled in him from very early on.

He had a wide array of teachers and tutors: the diplomat Nikita Panin, who played a big role during Catherine's reign, and we mentioned him a few times in the last episode; Archimandrite Platon, who taught him the basics of the Orthodox faith; the physicist Aepinus; the Italian composer Manfredini; and the historian Semyon Poroshin.

So Paul was very smart. He was highly intelligent. He had a great talent for languages. He knew French and German and Latin very well. And one of his early passions was mathematics. He really excelled at mathematics, and actually that also proves something, because his dad was not very smart, right? Peter III was pretty dumb. But he was also a militarist.

Yeah, it was the fashion of the time. Peter III also was playing with tin soldiers until he was, like, his age, I guess. And that's the only thing that really makes them similar. But other than that, the intelligence is very different, and the attitude to small things, like the attitude to pets, because Peter III famously hated pets and animals and tortured them, and Paul I was a lover of cats and dogs. So yeah, very different as well.

In general, Paul was quite the Renaissance man from a very young age. In addition to the languages and theology, philosophy, the natural sciences, mathematics, he also received a great physical education in athletics and dancing. He had a great dancing teacher. I forgot his name, something with G, but he had a very good dancing teacher. So yeah, in 1766, when Johann Korff, the president of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, died, Catherine took over his private library, a gigantic library of 36,000 books, and gave it to Paul, and it became the foundation for Paul's future private library. He was a voracious reader, really a well-rounded Renaissance man who was good at pretty much everything, at least academically.

Back when he was a child, he was gripped by a particular obsession, namely knights, medieval knights and chivalry and the chivalric orders of the Middle Ages, particularly the Crusades. And the Order of Malta was a particular obsession of his since childhood, which would play a role later on, actually. He was also a great painter, supposedly. The Academy of Arts liked his stuff, but obviously he did not have much time for painting.

In general, this obsession with knights and knighthood is a very Catholic thing, right?

That's true. Protestants didn't really care for it, neither did the Orthodox, because Russia doesn't really have a history of knights in the same manner.

That's true. But Paul was a romantic.

He was very much a romantic, in opposition to the fashion of the time, which was all about Enlightenment and rationalism, which was one of the reasons why he came into conflict with everyone else later on.

One important thing about Paul that really shows you how he was a very serious person: as you remember, under Catherine there were a lot of aristocratic excesses. You had children from noble families being inducted into the army from birth, so when they actually came of age, they already had like twenty years of service and were given high ranks and so on. And under this practice, Paul was also given, at the age of eight, the highest rank in the navy. He became admiral general and president of the Admiralty Collegium, and from his childhood he underwent training with the fleet and became quite a good naval officer in his own right.

Yeah, he was like Adam Kadyrov, I guess.

Yeah. Three years later, when he was eleven, in 1763, Empress Catherine gave her son Kamenny Island, so Stone Island, and a residence was built for him there when he was grand duke. And Paul took his duties and his responsibilities as a grand duke very seriously. On Kamenny Island, he built a shelter for elderly veterans of the Russian fleet who were sick, a home for disabled veteran sailors, right next to his own personal residence. And his entire salary as general admiral of the Russian fleet was donated to the upkeep of the home for veterans, and throughout his life he was very devoted to this particular charity. And mind you, he was eleven when he started doing that. So yeah, a very serious person. He had a great respect for the offices of the state, particularly the highest office, of course.

So yeah, he turned eighteen in 1772, which kind of became a problem. When Catherine became empress after overthrowing her husband, Paul's father, the army swore an oath of allegiance not only to her as empress but also to her son, because in theory Catherine shouldn't even have been empress. She should have been regent until Paul came of age. But of course, Catherine didn't want to be just regent. She wanted to be empress. We talked about all of that in the Catherine episode. And supposedly Catherine had written up a letter to transfer power to Paul when he came of age, and she later burned that letter. Catherine fully intended to retain full imperial power and never shared any authority with Paul, and she forced Paul to relinquish his ancestral claims in Schleswig-Holstein to the Danish king, just so he wouldn't have a power base later on. So yeah, she was not a huge fan of Paul, and not a huge fan of Paul becoming emperor.

Even when he was eighteen, she introduced a girl to him, a woman actually, to introduce him into manhood, a young Polish widow, and basically made her his lover. And he actually had an illegitimate son with her.

Paul kind of became a rallying point for everyone who was unhappy with Catherine. This worried Catherine very much, of course. And it became very apparent during the rebellion by Moritz Benyovszky, a Hungarian-Polish officer. Basically, he had fought with the Poles against Russia and had been exiled, and they started an armed uprising and proclaimed Paul emperor in Siberia. But of course that didn't really amount to anything. It was actually an interesting story: they escaped from Kamchatka and landed on the Kuril Islands and then traveled around Japan and so on. A very interesting story. But that's not the important part. The important part is that they proclaimed Paul emperor.

And the same thing happened in the same year, when the plague hit Moscow and there was a very bad epidemic. The people who were dying of the plague basically saw the plague as punishment for Catherine's decadent rule, and they also invoked Paul's name.

And Yemelyan Pugachev, who we of course talked about, the Pugachev uprising.

The actual father of Paul I, actually.

Who of course was impersonating Peter III, and he frequently referred to Paul as his legitimate heir, and his troops even carried portraits of Paul on campaign and so on. So he was a big danger for Catherine, really.

Yeah. But despite that, she didn't really try to eliminate him or get rid of him completely, because she had some opportunities. And we missed this, actually: when he was a teenager, there were serious health problems that he was facing, and they were actually responsible for his appearance gradually becoming worse and worse. He was seriously ill when he was eleven, but the court doctor, a British scientist, Thomas Dimsdale, cured Pavel of a throat sickness, and he also vaccinated him against smallpox.

Also, we didn't really mention it, but Catherine the Great was a big fan of vaccination. She introduced smallpox vaccinations in Russia.

Yeah, but still, at the age of sixteen, Pavel became ill again. Maybe the vax didn't work, I'm not sure. Because of the series of illnesses when he was growing up, he acquired this look. And as you can clearly see, Catherine the Great didn't really try to get rid of him. She needed an heir, obviously. She couldn't have killed her only heir. That would have been disastrous. That would have gotten her couped by the aristocracy, I think, because we just didn't do things like that anymore at that point.

He came of age, and that meant he needed a wife. He was married to Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt, who was renamed Natalia Alexeyevna upon joining the Russian Orthodox Church. But she died in childbirth, and the child died as well. So quite a tragic end to Paul's first marriage, after only two and a half years. And Paul quite liked Wilhelmina, so he was pretty shaken by her death, and he didn't really want to remarry. However, since the first marriage hadn't produced a child... if you remember, we mentioned that it was kind of a problem that the Romanovs had so few children. There were just not many Romanovs going around, and they desperately needed more.

So in 1776, Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia, suggested a new candidate to Catherine, the then sixteen-year-old Princess Sophie Dorothea of Württemberg. The first time around, she had been passed over because she had been too young. And so Paul traveled to Berlin to meet her, and she was like, yeah, okay. She was very beautiful, and actually she was born in the same place as Catherine the Great.

Yeah, at Stettin Castle.

Yes. So Paul married her, and he actually loved her very much. They had a very close marriage. She was his closest friend and ally, and they produced ten children together, securing the line of succession forever: four sons and six daughters.

Yeah, and the oldest one is Alexander I.

Yes. Two of his sons would go on to become emperors, well, three if you count Constantine as well, but we're going to talk about that later, in a later episode.

Yeah. And speaking about the height question, it's also interesting that Alexander I was 185 centimeters tall, whereas his dad was 166. So the height of Paul also could have been produced by the illnesses when he was growing up, the stunted growth, and is not really an indication of him being a bastard per se. So yeah, it's deeper than that, and you be the judge who was his actual father.

But yeah, ten children is quite a feat for the Romanovs at the time.

Absolutely. So the line of succession was absolutely secure at that point. And that's when Alexander started growing up, and that's when Catherine started plotting against Paul, actually. She liked Alexander much better than Paul, and she really wanted Alexander to be her heir when she died, and not Paul, basically skipping over Paul in the line of succession. There were some reports that when Catherine died, she had declared Alexander her successor, and that the letter was actually destroyed by her secretary and never saw the light of day. So yeah, she talked about Alexander's future coronation in letters and so on, and she really loved Alexander.

So is it just a personal attitude to Alexander, or what are the reasons for this dislike of her own son? Just because he was stolen by Elizabeth and was educated by another woman?

Well, I guess so. And because she assumed... maybe she was pissed at Saltykov later on as well and didn't want to be reminded of her relationship with him, because she believed Paul to be his son. And of course, I mean, she basically met Paul when he was six years old, so I think that had a big influence on things as well. And of course, during her coup, she had his father murdered and deposed, so I think Paul was quite wary of her as well.

Yeah, for sure. But we skipped over this: Paul only became emperor at a very advanced age. I think 44... no, 42. He was 42 when he became emperor, because Catherine, as we all know, never relinquished her rights as empress when he came of age, which she was supposed to do, actually.

Yeah, she had banished Paul to Gatchina. We'll talk about that a bit later. First, Paul and his new wife Maria, whom again he truly loved very much, by the way. Of their ten children, as I said, three became emperors, well, one of them only for a few days, but still. And two of his daughters became queens, of Württemberg and the Netherlands, and one became the wife of the Archduke and Viceroy of Hungary. So yeah, the Russian imperial house, thanks to Paul, was never again at risk of disappearing.

A few years after they married, in 1781, they went on a grand tour of Europe, which was the fashion at the time; all young aristocrats were supposed to do such a grand tour of Europe. And of course, it was in the tradition of Peter the Great. Catherine was especially interested in sending Paul to Europe to show how cultured and sophisticated Russia had become. She organized a lot of meetings for Paul in Europe. But overall, he went anonymously, and he used the title Conte del Nord, so Count of the North, to allow for more informal and flexible interactions with the people he met.

So yeah, they started in Poland. That was the first diplomatic stop. Then they went to Vienna, to the Austrian emperor. They spent quite a bit of time in Italy. They met the composer Galuppi, who wrote some music for them. They spent time in Venice, they spent time in France touring France, and they basically ended the tour by visiting Maria's family in Württemberg, where they stayed at Etupes castle. So probably quite the enjoyable tour for both. They traveled extensively, saw a lot of Europe, interacted with a lot of nobles everywhere. And yeah, it must have been pretty cool.

The tour had some influence on Paul. He liked Joseph II and his ideas of government. And he was quite influenced by the architecture. Paul fell in love with French classicism and then had that built all over St. Petersburg when he became emperor. And of course, it generally deepened their connection to the European aristocracy and gave them a broader view of Europe, and they met with all the luminaries of European science and society and arts.

So yeah, when they came back, Catherine granted Paul the Gatchina estate, where he was, well, banished to, more or less. Gatchina is nowadays the capital city of Leningrad Oblast.

Yes, it is the capital of Leningrad Oblast.

No.

Yes.

I had no idea. It does not make a lot of sense, but it is what it is.

Yeah, only for a few years, actually. I think they put the administration... Yeah, since last year, actually. Gatchina is the capital city of Leningrad Oblast.

So Gatchina is just south of St. Petersburg, and basically Paul was given a big estate there, and he created there his own private court and his ideal fantasy military base. He led a very secluded life there, isolated from the center of Russian politics and surrounded only by his friends and loyal soldiers. Gatchina is where Paul first implemented his ideas of military reform based on Prussian standards. Paul was a big Prussophile. Not as bad as his father, but still. So he had the soldiers he brought there practicing formations and drills, he made special uniforms for them, and that's where he worked on his future military reforms, really.

If you have paid attention in the Romanov series, this will immediately remind you of another Romanov, namely Peter, who also had his toy soldiers, who later formed the backbone of the Russian army. And Paul obviously took inspiration from Peter I in trying out being a little emperor on his secluded estate.

Paul, as I said before, had a great passion for mathematics. He was a good artilleryman. He was very interested in artillery, and he became BFFs with the commander of his Gatchina artillery, Alexei Arakcheyev, who would become very important later on, because he went on to carry out a great reform of the entire Russian artillery and the entire Russian army, which led to Russian artillery routinely outperforming even Napoleon's artillery in the Patriotic War and becoming the trump card of the Russian army for a long time. And Napoleon, of course, was an artilleryman himself.

Yeah, Paul had his little fiefdom in Gatchina and basically passed the time reading, making children, and holding exercises with his little army while he waited for his mother to die.

Yeah, and the situation was also similar in that young Peter I was also fighting the regency of Sophia. But there was a difference, because Sophia was not actually an empress or a tsarina or whatever; she was a regent. And the mother of Paul neglected this and, through the coup, completely usurped power. But yeah, it's really similar. And I guess around that time he was also starting to get interested in favorites and lovers. Not sure if it's very relevant, but there were a number of them.

Yes, that's true. So let's see, the first one was Ekaterina Nelidova. Five years into Pavel's marriage, the successful marriage that produced ten kids, he started to become attracted to his wife's lady-in-waiting, Ekaterina Nelidova, who was an ugly little brunette, according to contemporaries, with a lively mind and a cheerful character.

How does that really jive with the Orthodox faith? I mean, having concubines, favorites, was it legal, or was no one big enough to judge that?

I mean, we talked about this last episode. The rules are different for the upper echelon of the aristocracy. But yeah, of course he was not perfect. And I think especially in the case of Ekaterina... so, his wife, again, he loved his wife very much, but his wife was a German, and she was very German in her character, while Ekaterina Nelidova was more of a romantic Russian girl, and that just fit better with Paul's romantic worldview. And so, I mean, we don't really know much about whether they even slept together, because from the letters and so on, it was more of a very, very close friendship, of course a very intimate friendship. I'm not sure if they actually slept together, but in their letters they talked more about mystical and religious things. And his wife actually also became close friends with Ekaterina Nelidova, because she saw how good she was for Paul. So I personally think that, despite what people love to talk about, the various sexual escapades, there's quite a good chance that his relationship with Ekaterina was actually quite chaste. I'm not sure.

Well, do you have a close female friend who is not a relative or your wife? People don't usually do that.

That's true, that's true. Yeah, I mean, we don't know for sure.

Yeah. And after fifteen years of close friendship with Pavel, it ended, fifteen years later, when she turned 40. I guess she stopped being as intellectually stimulating for Pavel when she turned 40. And there was another one with a very similar surname, Lopukhina, Anna Lopukhina.

So it's a woman from the same clan?

Anna Lopukhina was the daughter of Pyotr Lopukhin, who was quite high up in the Russian government. He was president of the Council of Ministers later on.

Yeah, but it was later, around the time when Paul became emperor, because when he was secluded in Gatchina, he was friends, platonic friends, with Ekaterina Nelidova. But then it all changed. Because even though the official capital was St. Petersburg and all the political power was concentrated there, Moscow still played a huge role, and the Lopukhin clan was present in Moscow, especially in the Moscow offices of the Senate and whatnot. So when he started visiting Moscow and other places, his life changed.

I think one of the reasons for his relationship with Anna was that after the tenth child, the doctors had forbidden Maria from getting pregnant again, because it was too much of a health risk. And of course, since contraception was difficult, that basically meant celibacy.

Yeah, and they didn't know about the secret methods.

They were basically not allowed to sleep together anymore. And historians also describe the relationship as platonic. Paul, like any knight, needed a lady of the heart to worship. So basically, it's not really a concubine in the Ivan Grozny style, I guess. Times had changed, and Paul was too much of a romantic to treat women like that. He was larping as a knight. And also, when Anna fell in love with another guy, he did not do anything to stop her, didn't even ask her to stop, and she married Pavel Gagarin, and everything was fine, more or less.

Yeah. All right, let's get back to the political affairs, when he was at Gatchina.

Right. So, as I said, Gatchina was, well... late '80s, I guess. Late 1780s. Yeah, he spent the next years basically doing what I already said, training his Gatchina army and making children and so on. And there's not much else to say, I guess, until the death of Catherine. When Catherine was dying, she kind of tried to make sure that Paul would not become emperor. She did not succeed in that. Catherine the Great died quite unexpectedly, of course.

And Paul, I think, developed part of his worldview in response to his mother. His mother was, of course, kind of a libtard, very much into Western ideas, all that stuff. And basically, in response to that, Paul became a conservative, militaristic super-absolutist who was obsessed with the Middle Ages and knighthood and chivalric values.

Paul inherits a government that he is really not quite ready for at all, and he immediately starts on his reforms. He had quite contradictory feelings. He was very enthusiastic, because he had trained his entire life for this, really. But at the same time, he was quite alienated from the Russian elites and the political circles, because he had spent so much time in Gatchina. One of the first things was reversing many of his mother's policies and instituting his own personal style of governance, emphasizing more the tradition of sacred Russian autocracy and Orthodoxy. Also, one of the first things Paul did was order the exhumation of his father and have him reburied next to Catherine with full imperial honors. So basically, a kind of symbolic revenge against Catherine and a declaration of loyalty to his father's memory.

One of his earliest political quotes was the following one: "For me, there are no personal interests or parties other than the interests of the state. It's hard for me not to recognize when things are going wrong, and the reason for that is negligence or personal biases. I would rather be hated for doing what I believe is right than loved for doing something wrong."

Yes, absolutely. And that was his style of government, really. That was exactly his style of government. He would rather be hated for doing what's right than loved for doing what's wrong. And yeah, that's what did him in, in the end.

During the first year of his rule, he introduced three very significant reforms. The first one: he finally established a law of succession. Before that, you had women inheriting the throne, or monarchs appointing their heirs, which muddied the waters and led to various intrigues, assassinations, palace wars, and so on. And Paul finally introduced strict agnatic primogeniture for the Russian throne, which meant that the oldest son of the ruling emperor would inherit the throne. And that solved succession disputes for the next 120 years.

The second one was also extremely significant. As you remember, Catherine greatly expanded the institution of serfdom in Russia to placate the nobility. She gave out serfs like candy. She gave a lot of privileges to the nobles. And Paul introduced the Manifesto on the Three-Day Corvée, basically the very first reform in all of Russian history that curbed the rights of landlords and protected the rights of serfs. He banned landlords from making their serfs work on Sundays at all, and of the other six days, he decreed that they could be made to work for their landlords on only three, and the other three days they could work for themselves. So this laid the foundation for the later, quite liberal institution of serfdom in Russia, where serfs would regularly run side businesses, make enough money to buy themselves out of serfdom, and so on. And this would have been completely impossible if not for Paul's reforms. It's really hard to overestimate how important this reform was, and also how much it made the nobility hate Paul.

And it was quite early, too, because at that time, in 1797, there was a lot of serfdom going around in Europe as well, especially in Central Europe. The reform of Paul even preceded, more or less, the abolition of serfdom in most of Western Europe. It was at the same time as it happened in Schleswig, which I think was the first German state to abolish serfdom. And so yeah, of course, Paul probably would have liked to abolish it altogether, but that was impossible.

Yeah. And that's why no one in the Western world really knows about this Manifesto on the Three-Day Corvée, because it's very uncomfortable that Russia was doing the right thing very early on, in the late 18th century.

Yes. And even before he became emperor, Paul really did a lot for the serfs. On his own private estates in Gatchina and Pavlovsk, he very early on introduced a two-day duty. So basically, the serfs only worked for him two days out of the week. They were allowed to engage in any kind of trade, business, or work they wanted in their free time. He liberally gave out interest-free loans to peasants. He built new roads. He opened two hospitals for his serfs that were completely free, and he also built schools for the children of peasants. And, quite unusual for the time, he built a free school for disabled peasant children, as well as, of course, several new churches and so on.

Paul was a friend of the peasantry. He was not a friend of radical reform, but he did his best to improve the lot of the serfs. In part, it was influenced by the work of Ivan Pososhkov, who wrote "The Book of Poverty and Wealth," which was very much anti-serfdom, and this book became really popular. It was actually quite an old book, written in the first part of the 18th century, and it was widely discussed among the Peter I circles.

Right. So again, this was the very first attempt ever by the monarchy to limit the growth of serfdom, to suppress landlord abuses, and to protect peasant interests. As well as an act of economic prudence and humanism, it was also an act of centralization, because the Russian monarch had de facto taken the serfs under his protection and made it a clear legal fact that they are not the absolute property of their landlords. So yeah, basically he laid the foundation for later reforms and for the abolition of serfdom under Alexander II.

So this was a very important reform. But what's also interesting, which I forgot to mention, is that the author of the book that argued in favor of restricting serfdom, Ivan Pososhkov, was imprisoned in 1725, and he died in prison in the Petropavlovskaya krepost, the Peter and Paul Fortress.

So yeah, reformers in Russia don't die of natural causes. Unless they're the emperor. But even then.

Even then. Yeah. Unless you're Gorbachev, I guess. But that's another story.

And another very significant reform. Well, it was more a lot of reforms, but Pavel began a fight that eventually he kind of lost, but still, a fight against the caste of super-privileged aristocrats that Catherine had created. He imposed restrictions on the nobility. He banned them from unauthorized travel abroad. He banned them from serving in foreign armies. He banned the practice, as I said, of them being given ranks and government positions when they were born. And basically, it was not that revolutionary, because he only enforced the ideas that Peter the Great had planted, namely that the nobility should be a meritocracy. But of course, the nobles who had grown accustomed to their complete aristocratic freedom under Catherine didn't like that at all. They absolutely despised Paul for his reforms that curtailed the rights of the nobility.

Yeah, he also started directly fighting those who were responsible for the coup against his father, Peter III, and he exiled the closest friend of Catherine II, his mother, Yekaterina Dashkova, and various accomplices in the coup and the murder of Peter III.

Despite being opposed to many of his mother's policies, he was very much like her in the way that he worked. He was also a workaholic. His working day would often last up to sixteen hours, and he was very conscientious in fulfilling his official duties. He didn't really like the balls and hunting and walks and idle pastimes that were popular, and he preferred reading, theater, and music. But mostly, his daily routine was the morning two-hour inspection of guards and patrols, and being present at various parades. And that was the way he relaxed, I guess. And there were many parades, a lot of stuff like that.

Yes, that's true. One of the most significant reforms, and the one I personally find most impressive, is his very wide-ranging military reform. Paul's military reforms became the foundation of how the Russian military functioned in the 19th century, and beyond in some cases. Paul began to fight the decay of the army that had started occurring in the latter years of Catherine's reign, after the last great victory against the Turks. It was also an application of the principle that the nobles should not be all-powerful. He took inspiration from the Prussian army, but he also introduced many of his own reforms. He introduced criminal responsibility of officers for the lives and health of their soldiers, so if officers needlessly caused the deaths of soldiers under their command, they were held criminally liable. It was under Paul that noblemen who were listed as members of certain regiments but were on long vacations, like twenty-year vacations, were dismissed, as well as a large number of generals and officers who, when examined, could not answer elementary questions on military affairs.

Paul, of course, was himself a huge military nerd and knew everything there was to know, and basically he created a real officer corps by purging all those layabout nobles who had joined the army just because it was prestigious but had no interest in actually being military officers. He introduced the reform that new officers for the army could only be recruited from graduates of military schools, or from experienced non-commissioned officers from the nobility who passed examinations in literacy, knowledge of the statutes, and military science.

Paul introduced 28 days of vacation per year for the enlisted ranks, which did not exist before. Soldiers had no vacation before Paul's reforms. And he was the first ruler in Europe to establish a military award for non-officers, for ordinary soldiers, the St. Anna medal, which was the only military decoration for privates until the introduction of the St. George Cross. He also introduced measures which today we would call anti-corruption: for stealing soldiers' allowances, officers would be sent into exile, and for non-payment of wages, so for wage theft, they could be sentenced to death as well. The fate of the common soldier improved considerably under Paul. Corporal punishment was largely abolished and was only allowed in extreme cases, because, as Paul himself wrote, corporal punishment serves to correct negligent soldiers and not to maim them.

It is often portrayed exactly the other way around, that Paul was a petty tyrant who introduced thousands of rules that everyone had to follow and everyone hated, but that's not true. That's how the nobility saw it, because he forced responsibility on them. Paul was not afraid of being hands-on about the little things. He personally worked on the introduction of a universal winter uniform that was issued as part of the general uniform. There were fur coats in every guardhouse, and so many felt boots that each new shift of guards could always wear fresh ones. And some of these rules are still enforced to this day, like the one about the boots.

Yeah. But speaking hypothetically, do you think that the Russian army would have been victorious against Napoleon fifteen years later if it weren't for Paul's military reforms?

I'm doubtful about that, particularly because, as I said, Paul was especially interested in artillery. And artillery, the supremacy of the Russian field artillery, is what won us the Patriotic War.

Yeah, and not Suvorov's shtick.

That time had passed, and it's very sad, actually. But Suvorov was one of those who thought that these reforms were all tyrannical and bureaucratic and pointless, and he got into a huge conflict with Paul over this, and Paul dismissed him from the army. But we'll talk more about that in our dedicated Suvorov episode.

Paul protected soldiers not only from beatings and frost; by personal decree he also forbade the use of soldiers for labor on officers' and generals' estates. And the part that actually offended the nobility, that actually made them so goddamn mad, was that these laws did not just exist on paper. The greatest unpleasantness for the nobility was that all these decrees and laws were subject to the strictest enforcement and were backed up by the threat of arrest, exile, dismissal, and in some cases the death penalty.

Which is very anti-Russian.

That's true. But such rigorism on the part of the emperor, which we would nowadays call the rule of law, caused almost universal antipathy to him among the elites and made his overthrow and assassination that much easier.

Yeah, I mean, of course the nobles were mad and whatnot, but who cemented this view of Pavel I as the madman, as the petty tyrant? I mean, why were the Soviet historians mad at Pavel, considering that he did a lot of good things for the common man? Who is to blame for this view?

Well, that's an interesting question, and I would give the Galkovsky-brain answer: that he was anti-British, and that explains it.

Yeah, because it's a mystery. I get that the nobles were mad, but they lost all power in the last century.

All right. And then, as I mentioned before, the next big step... So basically, the geopolitical backdrop of Paul's entire reign, of course, was the French Revolutionary Wars, the War of the Second Coalition in particular. Paul joined the Second Coalition against revolutionary France alongside Great Britain and Austria, and he sent troops under General Suvorov on the famous Swiss and Italian campaigns.

I'm always astonished that even in this campaign Suvorov managed to not lose a single battle. That is completely insane.

So basically, the campaign was planned by British and Russian elites, and the idea was that Russia would send troops, the Brits would pay for it, and the Austrians would supply everything and also provide manpower. So that was how the coalition was supposed to work: the Russian army supplied and fed by the Austrians, with Austrian troops, and all paid for by the British. And Suvorov had already been dismissed from the army, but it was actually the Austrians who specifically asked for him to lead the expedition, despite the fact that he was already 70 years old.

So, the Italian campaign: he entered Austrian territory, he marched to northern Italy, to the Alps, and he defeated the French in several battles. He defeated, actually quite astonishingly, Jean Moreau. Jean Moreau was a French general who was instrumental in accompanying Napoleon on his rise to power, and he was one of the best French generals, but in the end he fell out with Napoleon and had to flee to the United States. He was a really great general, and Suvorov just savagely beat him at the Battle of Cassano, Cassano d'Adda, the so-called Battle of the Adda River. It is mentioned in the march of the 12th Dragoon Regiment, actually. So quite the astonishing feat, the forcing of the Adda River, in which the cavalry especially showed itself really great under Suvorov, and Prince Pyotr Bagration was wounded in that battle. So he went on, he entered Milan. He entered Turin as well, after defeating Moreau again at the Battle of Marengo. So yeah, astonishingly, even in those really weird constellations, Suvorov managed to not be defeated. He simply refused to be defeated.

The King of Sardinia welcomed Suvorov into Milan, I think that was, and he granted Suvorov the rank of a prince of the House of Savoy. General MacDonald, despite his name also a French general, Étienne Macdonald, a Marshal of the Empire and, in my opinion, one of Napoleon's best marshals, an absolutely great officer, faced Suvorov in northern Italy at the Battle of the Trebbia, where Suvorov was also completely victorious, despite the French having a significant numerical advantage.

So yeah, there were a lot of Poles, a lot of members of the Polish Legion, at the Battle of the Trebbia, actually, and a lot of them died there. There is a specific mention of the Trebbia at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw.

So yeah, on the side of...

On the side of Napoleon, of course, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. The Polish legions of Napoleon, yeah.

And just like the French soldiers, I imagine, loved Napoleon, or at least respected him, the biggest constituency of Pavel, his greatest lovers, were the ordinary soldiers. And there are many quotes about that from the contemporaries who witnessed it, such as from Count Bennigsen: "The emperor never did injustice to a soldier and was always fair to them. Everyone respected the emperor or was terrified of him, but only the soldiers truly loved him, because the soldiers' allowances were always paid accurately and on time, and the colonels no longer appropriated what belonged to the soldiers."

Crazy.

It's basically Suvorov's last achievement. After kicking the French out of Italy, he swung north into Switzerland, because another corps of Russian soldiers had been given to General Rimsky-Korsakov, who fought the French in Switzerland. And so Suvorov was supposed to unite his soldiers with those of Korsakov. So he crossed the St. Gotthard Pass and marched against General Masséna in Switzerland.

I mean, he did crazy things in Switzerland. He took the St. Gotthard and crossed the Alps with an army, constantly fighting, and still won every single engagement. However, Korsakov kind of fucked it all up, because he lost the Second Battle of Zurich against Masséna, with huge losses. And so yeah, that was basically it, because the plan was for Suvorov to arrive and encircle Masséna, but that was no longer possible, because Korsakov's army was beaten. So Suvorov had no choice after that but to retreat back to the east, and it was a really difficult march, because again they were surrounded by the French on all sides. They had almost no supplies left, they were moving through high mountain passes, and they lost all of their artillery. Famous is the crossing of the Devil's Bridge. At the Devil's Bridge there is a monument to Suvorov, actually.

Carl von Clausewitz, the same one who wrote the famous book On War, called Suvorov's successful retreat out of Switzerland a miracle. Friedrich Engels called it the greatest military undertaking ever fought in the Alps. So yeah, he had to leave the Alps again, but that was about it for the expedition. So basically, a Russian victory in Italy because Suvorov was in command, and a French victory in Switzerland because Suvorov was not in command.

At the same time, there was actually another front in the War of the Second Coalition, namely the invasion of the Netherlands, the Holland invasion, in which a British-Russian army invaded the Netherlands. It also did not really work out, and they had to retreat and capitulate. And that was about it. The capitulation, in the end, was quite gentlemanly. The troops could be extracted unharmed. But as such, it did not really work out well.

But another interesting thing happened during the War of the Second Coalition, as a result of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, because on his way to Egypt, Napoleon conquered an island in the Mediterranean, namely Malta. Malta, of course, had been the stronghold of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Knights of Malta, and the Grand Master did not expect this invasion, and so they did not really have anything anymore, and the greater part of the Knights of Malta went to Russia and ended up in St. Petersburg. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Paul was a little bit obsessed with the Order of Malta, and especially their medieval history. So he was super excited that they ended up in St. Petersburg, and due to the protection he had granted them, they even chose Emperor Paul as their new Grand Master.

Yeah, the first non-Catholic Grand Master of the Maltese Order. Technically, that shouldn't have been possible, since it's a Catholic order.

But yeah, this was even approved by the Pope in Rome. The Brits didn't like this very much, because they expected Paul to try and seize Malta and have it become a Russian protectorate, or even a Russian possession. So yeah, they didn't like this at all.

Funnily enough, the history between Russia and the Knights of Malta started much earlier. It started a hundred years earlier, when Peter the Great sent Sheremetev to Malta to study their fleet and look at whether it was possible to establish a Russian naval base. And Sheremetev was actually granted honorary knighthood in the order. So yeah, the special relationship continued, because Catherine the Great sent many Russian naval officers to train with the Knights of Malta. So yeah, quite interesting.

The order kept existing, actually, and it was not recognized the way the actual Knights of Malta currently are, you know, the ones who have their seat in Rome and have observer status at the United Nations. Those are different. That's technically a different organization from the Russian tradition of the Knights of Malta. So most countries in the world were of the opinion that those are different organizations and completely separate.

Yeah. And he was also welcoming to the Jesuits, actually. Many Jesuits moved to Russia, and he was accepting them. And there was a quote by Paul I: "I am deeply convinced that it is necessary to unite the efforts of all good forces against the growing atheism. The unity of religions is the strongest protection against the spread of the universal evil." By universal evil, I guess he meant the French revolutionary forces.

Yes, and the new philosophy that was born...

Yes, exactly, in France. And that's why he fought against them in Switzerland and Italy, not only because it was a political and military gambit, but because there was an ideological rift between the very much anti-Catholic French revolutionaries and the Catholic-leaning Paul I.

Well, would it be a fair statement to call him that?

It was more that he was a bit ecumenical in his aspirations.

Yeah, I guess so. And that leads us to the next big reform, an important law that he introduced, namely, and I'm going to quote the whole name of the law: on free religion, on not converting people from the Greek-Russian faith to the Catholic faith in the provinces annexed from Poland, and on not restricting the freedom of those from other confessions who themselves wish to join the Orthodox Church. It was the first real institutional guarantee of religious freedom in Russia.

Of course, it addressed the point that basically, in Poland, many of them were forcibly converting people to Catholicism, especially to Uniatism, to Greek Catholicism. And this practice was curtailed and balanced out, basically, by giving Catholics more rights and oppressing them less.

And an important achievement of Paul is also that he more or less mended the schism between the Old Believers and the Orthodox Church. He wrote up a personal decree that allowed certain strains of the Old Believers to rejoin the Russian Church while preserving their rites.

Yeah, and in studying Russian history, to me it always stuck like a thorn, this stupid schism between the Old Believers and the Nikonians and whatever, because the severity and ferocity with which they were persecuted was really unfounded, and it was really unneeded. I think in the eyes of God it's not a good thing at all, this squabble. But almost every single emperor was against the Old Believers, and then later on it was actually founded on something, because the Old Believers started being actively anti-Russian. So yeah, they actually became the enemy, but they were conditioned by the Russian crown to become enemies.

The Jesuits, yes. Paul was on good terms with the Jesuits. So basically, the head of the Jesuits in Russia, an Austrian named Gabriel Gruber, came up with this weird project to unify the Orthodox and Catholic churches, and he called Paul the guardian angel of the Society of Jesus. And Paul actually signed off on this project, which again, I think, shows his medieval Christian mindset, right? That he actually cared about mending the schism and things like that.

That's fantastical, really. Maybe it was too much for a sitting Russian emperor at the time to be this idealistic, or to have these pet projects that are not really helpful, I guess, in times of greater divide between the Orthodox and the Catholics and the Protestants.

And yeah, this guy Gruber died in a house fire in 1805 in St. Petersburg. It was probably an accident, not sure. But yeah, are we done with the Jesuits? You wanted to talk about financial policy.

Yeah. So there were a lot of expenses on the palace and the court life and the balls and stuff like that, and those expenses were cut tenfold under Paul I. For example, many silver tableware sets from the palace were melted down to further the issue of silver coins into circulation. And he famously said, "I will eat on tin, and not silver, until universal prosperity comes to Russia."

That reminds me of a monarch that Paul reminds me of a bit, actually: the French king Henri IV, and his famous quote about a chicken in every pot.

Yeah, no wonder he was popular among the common people. The issue of silver coins was very important back then. So all that silver tableware was melted down, basically. Then more than five million rubles were withdrawn from circulation in the form of Catherine's paper rubles, because they were not backed by gold or silver and so caused inflation, and Paul literally just had them burned.

Yeah, indeed. Now that is effective deflationary policy.

Yeah, and people, especially rulers, who are pro gold standard seem to be dropping like flies, historically.

Also, Paul's chervonets was issued in 1797. A chervonets is basically ten rubles in gold.

Okay, and also the...

But yeah, it was all introduced in 1797, and not a lot of it really stuck, because his reign was short-lived. And even Paul, at the end of his reign, had to return to issuing paper banknotes. So it really didn't work as he planned, unfortunately. But yeah, the silver ruble was the biggest thing here, because Russia switched to a stable coin, the silver ruble, with the weight and the standards established by a special decree. And this standard of the silver ruble remained in force until 1915. So yeah, this one was a success of Paul's monetary reforms.

So now we get to the interesting part, namely Paul's break with the Second Coalition and Paul's break with Britain. There were several reasons for that, several precursors. I think the first big thing was that during the invasion of the Netherlands that I mentioned, a bunch of Russian troops ended up stranded on the Isle of Wight in the Channel, and the British did not let them into Britain, so they were stuck on the island until they could be evacuated. That was an absolutely asshole thing to do in a military alliance, and it really pissed Paul off. Then, in the unsuccessful fighting in Switzerland and so on, the French had captured a bunch of Russian troops, and the British had refused to pay the ransom for them so they could be freed, and Napoleon released all the Russian captives on his own. Paul, of course, ever the appreciator of chivalric gestures, liked that very much.

So we have to go back a bit. I mentioned how one of the early tutors of Paul was Panin, and Panin, already during Catherine's reign, was the author of the geopolitical doctrine of the turn to the north, namely being friendly with Prussia and the Scandinavian countries. And Paul had grown quite close to Denmark-Norway and Sweden. They were insistent on neutral shipping during the War of the Coalition, and the Brits did not like that at all. So for the second time in history, Russia created a League of Armed Neutrality. You remember, in the Catherine episode, we talked about how the first League of Armed Neutrality was instrumental for the Americans in winning the War of Independence against Britain. And this was the Second League of Armed Neutrality, also called the League of the North. It was an alliance between Denmark-Norway, Prussia, Sweden, and Russia, so basically northern Europe, the North Sea, and so on. And it had the exact same goal as the first League of Armed Neutrality, namely to free shipping in northern Europe and protect shipping from the Royal Navy, which had a wartime policy of unlimited interception against whatever they wanted. And this was kind of the final break. In the end, it was the withdrawal of Russia from the Second Coalition.

And another big thing was that Admiral Nelson refused to hand Malta back to the order when the British captured it from the French. Paul was really pissed at this, and in response he seized every British ship that was in Russian ports, took all the crews to detention camps, and also took British traders hostage. So yeah, he was quite drastic in his turn. In response, Britain sent a fleet to Denmark, started bombarding Copenhagen, and so on. And Nelson turned towards St. Petersburg. However, he would never reach St. Petersburg with hostile intentions, because Pavel would be murdered before that.

This leads us to two topics. The first, again, is Paul's preoccupation with knighthood and chivalry. Three months before his death, Paul did a really weird thing. He wrote a letter, an open letter, basically, to all the rulers of Europe. He stated that international conflicts come from the ambition of sovereigns and the intrigues of their retinues, and that it is unjust to force subjects to waste their blood and their wealth in wars in which they have nothing to gain. He challenged every ruler in Europe who had a problem with Russia to a duel.

Based.

Yes. He challenged every European ruler who was dissatisfied with Russia to a duel. And he invited the German writer August von Kotzebue and commissioned him to write the text of the challenge, translate it into all the major European languages, and have it published in European newspapers. He repeated that no subjects should shed blood because their rulers can't get along, and he invited all those who had any claims against him to discuss the time and place of a personal duel. It was a very short letter, only twenty lines, and it was published on the front pages of many European newspapers, the London Gazette, the Lower Rhine Gazette, and so on. Funnily enough, in Russia itself, newspaper editors did not publish it, because most of them didn't believe that it was real. They thought it was a prank by someone.

Yeah, well, this idea is very popular to this day, right? But actually, back then it made more sense, because it was a duel with, I guess, pistols or some kind of firearms. But right now it's some childish idea that presidents should fight it out with bare knuckles or something like that.

Yeah. Before that, he had previously challenged Napoleon to a duel, to end the War of the Second Coalition.

Did anyone accept?

No one. No one even responded to him. Napoleon himself was quite impressed by Paul. He called him the Russian Don Quixote.

So yeah, maybe he was not really fit to be an emperor, because it's hard to be such a humanitarian and care about ordinary men's lives when you are ordering them...

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't really work nowadays, right? No one cares about the ordinary man.

That's true, sadly. So basically, he had made up with Napoleon. He had written a very short letter to Napoleon. He basically just messaged: "Highly esteemed First Consul, those to whom God has given the power to govern nations must think and care for their welfare." And that letter was basically the end of Paul's war against Napoleon.

So yeah, at the same time, Paul had started conspiring with Napoleon against the British, and it was a very grand undertaking that they had come up with together. They kind of became friends. So basically, they sat together and thought about how to destroy the British Empire. The plan was to have a joint Russian and French expedition go to Astrakhan, then cross the Caspian Sea, land in Astrabad, nowadays Gorgan in Iran, and then enter Afghanistan and then conquer India, because obviously India was the crown jewel of the British, and depriving them of it would have broken their economy.

The Russian force had been assembled already. They had a 20,000-strong cavalry army of Cossacks under the Ataman of the Don Cossacks, Vasily Orlov, who was a hero of the Turkish wars and one of the main heroes of the assault on Izmail that we talked about in the last episode. At the head of a 20,000-strong Cossack force, he moved out towards Central Asia. And in January, when they reached the Aral Sea, a messenger caught up with them, and that messenger brought news of the assassination of Paul. And that ended all enmity between Russia and Britain. Alexander I took over immediately and had negotiations with the British, the British fleet under Nelson moved away from St. Petersburg, the Don Cossack army turned back, and the assault on India never happened.

So yeah, so the British killed Paul.

Well, yeah, it is what it is. I guess he was the first one who laid the groundwork for the Great Game later on, for India and the control of India. This idea was haunting Russia for a long time, and probably still does, but to a lesser extent, I guess.

The plot to kill Paul was orchestrated by a group of high-ranking officials and noblemen. Many of them were very close to Catherine or held extremely privileged positions under her rule. One of the main ones was Count Peter von der Pahlen, who was a Baltic German, and at that time he was the governor of St. Petersburg, and General Levin Bennigsen. They got the approval from Alexander to, well, kill Paul. He basically agreed to it. Nikita Panin, sadly, was also involved in the assassination, and Admiral de Ribas, you know, the guy who built much of Odessa. So yeah, the assassination was also supported by Sir Charles Whitworth, the British ambassador in Russia. He had close connections with most of the higher-ups of the conspiracy. There is no concrete proof tying Whitworth to the assassination itself, but there are some sources that suggest that British agents provided funds or facilitated the conspiracy to eliminate Paul. And again, many of the conspirators were involved with the British. Levin Bennigsen was a Hanoverian, and so on.

So they charged into Paul's bedroom. They told him, basically, to sign an abdication. And Paul gave a very based response, namely, he refused to abdicate, and he told the assassins that he would die as their emperor. So yeah, they then stabbed him, and then they strangled and trampled him to death, according to one version. Another version was that he had his skull cracked with a snuffbox. The tabakerka is kind of a meme in Russian history.

Yeah. So yeah, either a scarf or a snuffbox.

So yeah, let's talk about his later years before the assassination. I mean, later years, he only ruled for five years.

Yeah, well, the last years. And considering the program that he started out with, this humanitarianism and the liberation of the serfs and improving the lives of ordinary soldiers, even though he started with a lot of restrictions against the nobles, I think his last year was a bit different, in that the paranoia increased and there were many, many more restrictions in domestic policy. So he felt that something could be done against him, so he increased the censorship. Let's talk about this period and how it didn't really save him in the end. But what was he trying to do, and why was he so paranoid?

Well, I think he had very good reasons to be paranoid.

Yeah, I thought he was just crazy.

Yeah. So basically, despite his later alliance with Napoleon, Pavel very much hated the French Revolution and its ideas.

Yeah.

And especially the execution of the French king, and the abuse of the son of Louis XVI, who was the same age as Elena, Paul's favorite daughter. That hit very close for Paul. It hit very close for Paul, and he was extremely anxious about this. And also, the lands of his wife's family were annexed by revolutionary France. The father, so Paul's father-in-law, was basically so shook by the events, by the loss of his possessions, that he just died. And then his mother-in-law died as well, and his wife was grieving and taking it very hard as well. So basically, the French Revolution was very personal for Paul, right? He absolutely hated it.

Fearing a spread of the same thing to Russia, in 1800 he banned the importation of foreign books into Russia, and he also banned educating young Russian noblemen abroad. All three printing houses in the country were closed. And he banned some French items, like clothing and so on, that had come into fashion in revolutionary France. He gave shelter on his estates to many of the high-ranking French émigrés, the Comte de Lille and the Prince de Condé. And so he was very close with the French enemies of the French Revolution. The censorship was a mixture of hatred and fear. That was his reaction to it.

In his first years, he banned the waltz, but due to his new favorite, Anna Lopukhina, he lifted the ban and started dancing the waltz himself. Also, there were many, many slanders of Pavel in regard to censorship. The prohibition of white skirts was attributed to him.

I mean, it sounds so capricious when you put it like that, that he banned the waltz. It was a bit different, actually, because the waltz was not really established at that time. There was a fashion for folk dances, and the waltz evolved out of an Austrian folk dance, and many countries banned it, actually, just because it was, well, how to put it, a low-status thing. It was degenerate for aristocrats to dance like some farmer in the mountains. You don't do that as an aristocrat. And so yeah, it was later legalized in Austria during the social reforms under Joseph II, you know, Josephinism. He relaxed many strict rules. And then, yes, his wife, no, not his wife, Anna Lopukhina, convinced him to follow the Austrian emperor in legalizing it again.

The thing about the skirts is also... it always sounds like he's some weird 20th-century Caribbean island dictator who said, "I don't like Tuesdays, so we are renaming Tuesday something else." No, the white skirt thing was that he forbade white skirts to be worn with blue coats and red collars, which was a fashion in revolutionary France, because those were of course the colors of the French revolutionary flag, and it was worn as a political statement by ladies in France. And that's what Paul banned in Russia. So it was not as arbitrary as it sounds.

Yeah, of course. You can demonize any kind of ruler by doing this bit. And of course, he wasn't paranoid enough, considering that he was killed in this fashion.

Summing up his achievements during his five-year reign, not perhaps the military achievements... of course, he didn't achieve all the things that he could have if he hadn't been assassinated. He was killed when he was just 46 years old, on the 12th of March 1801, in St. Petersburg. And what happened later, the coronation of Alexander I, his eldest son, we will discuss in great detail in the next episode.

But as to Alaska, wasn't Alaska colonized by Russian traders and hunters a bit earlier than that?

Yes, it had been colonized a while before that, but what Paul did was sign into law the existence of the Russian-American Company, which had existed for a few years before. He granted it official government support.

Do we know anything about Russo-American relations under Pavel at all, other than the formal colonization of Alaska?

I think the Americans turned up a bit later, not under Paul. At that time they were preoccupied with their internal affairs, I guess.

To summarize, Paul was a very special emperor, both in the good and, I guess, in the bad sense. He had a temperament that was like 400 years out of fashion by the time he came to rule. He was a romantic medieval man, with aspirations of reuniting Christendom, obsessed with instilling chivalric virtues, preoccupied with the health and wealth of the common man, and especially the common soldier, whom he never enjoyed seeing bleed on the battlefield. But he did not really fit into his time. The world had moved on for half a millennium since those medieval virtues had been in fashion, and as such, Paul's attempts to return to tradition were, I guess, predestined to fail in the end. And of course, Paul did not like seeing Russia fight for British interests, which heavily contributed to the conspiracy against him, and that would lead to another decade of Russia fighting on behalf of Britain in wars that were not really necessary.

Yeah, it is what it is. Pushkin was born under Pavel I. The reactions to the death of Paul I, of course, varied, because the nobles were overjoyed. They hoped that they would not have to abide by all those restrictions anymore. But as to the common people, they were not really informed that he was killed, right? And they didn't know it for the longest time.

Yeah, I mean, people didn't know that he was murdered for over 100 years. It was part of the official censorship until the revolution of 1905 that you were not allowed to say that he was assassinated.

So what did they believe, that he died of a stroke?

Ah, of course. That was the official version, that he died of a stroke. And there was really heavy censorship because of Alexander I's involvement in the conspiracy, and it would throw shade on the whole dynasty, really.

Yeah, of course. Napoleon was furious at the death of Paul I, and he said, regarding the assassination attempt by the British, "They missed me in Paris on January 3rd, but they didn't miss me in St. Petersburg."

Yes, yeah, yeah. A great man, and I guess the only emperor who resembles Napoleon in many ways. Pushkin, whom you mentioned before, called Pavel a romantic emperor, and he also called him an enemy of deceit and ignorance.

Yeah, and actually, you can tell that he was educated by Elizabeth. In many ways their reigns are similar, although his short-lived reign was much more spectacular than Elizabeth's.

Actually, Nicholas II was personally, how to put it, a fan, a devotee of Paul. And it was, of course, under Nicholas's reign that, for the first time, memoirs were published, the memoirs of General Bennigsen, the British subject who murdered their emperor. Nicholas II had a private devotion to Paul, and shortly before the revolution, there was actually a project going on to make Paul a saint.

Well, I think he would really fit this description, and he's probably in heaven. He didn't really even cheat with his favorites. But unfortunately, idealism doesn't really work when you are an emperor, and the fate of such a man is always tragic. In the 19th century, Paul's grave in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg was considered the only miraculous grave, one that would grant miracles and so on.

Yeah, and as to his son's involvement in the assassination...

Yeah, we'll talk about that in the next episode. It's really unfair, really, that he never... Because his successor was involved in the conspiracy, he was really unfairly maligned all the time. And it took over a century until people even started rehabilitating him.

Yeah. Oh well, such is the fate of a romantic in our world. I hope that this episode was informative. Thank you for listening, and see you very soon.