Russka (76 page)

With January and February came the traditional celebration of Epiphany and the Pre-Lent Carnival; the public executions also began again. On February 3, Peter insisted that all foreigners in the Moscow area attend to witness the execution of three hundred more of the
streltsy
who had wanted to murder them.

It was also at this time that Peter began in earnest his campaign to force his court into western clothes by personally cutting the long kaftans of the boyars at a feast, just as he had cut off their beards a few months before.

To complete his political and personal innovations, Peter now made Sophia formally take the veil as a nun; and sent his own wife who so bored him, despite her miserable protests, into a convent at Suzdal. Their son, whom Peter had not much bothered with, was now sent to his sister and given a German tutor.

It was not, however, until the carnival week just before the start of Lent that Daniel finally saw the horror of Peter’s Drunken Synod.

The revellers were on their way to the sumptuous house of Lefort; at their head, as usual, was Peter’s old tutor dressed as the Patriarch. Beside him went another, representing Bacchus, god of wine. He, too, wore a bishop’s mitre: but that was all he wore, since he was otherwise stark naked. Some of the party carried wine and mead, others huge dishes of the offensive, the ungodly tobacco weed, which they had lit. Others yet were swinging censers which Daniel realized were also smoking not with incense but tobacco. He had heard from young Procopy that the Tsar, when he was in England, had given Lord Carmarthen a monopoly to import the evil plant into Russia. Now here were the Tsar’s companions putting tobacco in church censers!

When, soon afterwards, he heard that the Tsar’s friend Lefort had suddenly died, he could only say: ‘It is God’s judgement.’

In April, as if as a further punishment from God, food shortages began in Moscow and prices soared.

Yet all these things, Daniel soon realized, were only the advance signals of the great evil that was to come.

So far, the Tsar’s attention had been directed only upon his own court and the
streltsy
. Now, in the months that followed, he was to turn his fearsome gaze upon his people. And Daniel was brought from shock and misery to despair.

It began one evening when Procopy strode into the courtyard and, seeing Daniel, casually remarked: ‘Well, Daniel, you’ll be shaving your beard off tomorrow.’ And seeing the carpenter’s look of amazement: ‘You haven’t heard? Yes, you’re going to look just like me. The Tsar is issuing a
ukaz
tomorrow morning.’

The
ukaz
: the edict. All Tsars had used them, but from Peter they would flow in a torrent. And the
ukaz
he issued in 1699 was devastating. All the people – not just the boyars, but simple men like Daniel, even peasants – were to shave their beards!

‘It’s all right,’ Procopy added with a grin, ‘you can pay a fine instead.’

The
ukaz
was very simple: all except priests must shave. Anyone who refused must pay a fine and wear a bronze medallion round his neck on a chain. The scale of fines was carefully calculated. For the enserfed peasants it was a modest half
kopek
. But for a free man, an artisan or even a coachman, it was a stiff thirty roubles; for a tradesman, a punishing sixty; for a noble like Bobrov, a hundred.

There was no way that Daniel could afford to pay.

Though he had been shocked by the sight of Procopy, the doings of the court nobles had always belonged in a world apart. This however was different. ‘I do not know how it is for nobles,’ he declared to Arina, ‘but for ordinary men there is no question – to shave one’s beard is a mortal sin. I cannot do this thing.’

‘You must not,’ Arina agreed, while little Maryushka gazed at him in astonishment. She could not imagine the revered figure of her father without his grey beard.

Within the Bobrov family the
ukaz
also created a storm.

‘Never,’ cried Eudokia. ‘The idea is unthinkable.’ And when Nikita muttered irritably about the expense, she stormed: ‘I’d rather give all that I have than allow such a thing.’

The next day, looking triumphant yet rather sheepish, Nikita suddenly appeared before her with only a moustache. She turned on her heel, and would not allow him near her for a month. And when he complained, she only replied coldly: ‘You can beat me, if you’re enough of a man, but you’ll get nothing else from me.’

Meanwhile, she secretly went and bought a bronze disc for Daniel, and insisted that he accept it from her. ‘At least we shall have someone who looks like a God-fearing man in the house,’ she said firmly.

And so the terrible year went on until, at its end, came the events which were, at last, to take Daniel to the edge of the abyss.

Procopy was cheerful. He was busy too. The
streltsy
had been utterly crushed and Peter’s power was unassailable.

His own position was good: the Tsar was his friend.

‘And if he trusts you,’ he told his father, ‘he’s the kindest fellow in the world.’

For it had to be admitted that, for all his brutality, Peter could be tolerant of human weakness.

‘He’ll forgive you almost anything as long as you never lie to him,’ Procopy said. ‘Once, when I was late on parade, he looked so angry I thought he was going to have me knouted, but when I told him I’d been drunk the night before and had only just woken up, he laughed and told me not to do it again.’

Above all, Procopy was cheerful because he knew that Peter was preparing for a great adventure – he was going to seize the Baltic ports.

It was a secret. The Swedes were strong and it would be necessary to take them by surprise. Brandenburg, Denmark, Saxony, all wanted to attack the Swedes and share out the rich Baltic lands of the Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians amongst themselves. But Peter could not strike north until he was sure that he, in turn, would not be attacked by the Ottoman Turks in the south. All that year, therefore, he assured the Swedish envoys to Moscow that he was their friend, while his own envoy in Constantinople tried to conclude a satisfactory treaty with the Sultan.

Meanwhile, Russia was arming.

The new English flintlocks were a huge improvement on the old muskets of the
streltsy
, which had been completely unreliable. Equally impressive were the new bayonets from France.

‘See how neatly it’s done,’ Procopy explained to his father and Daniel one day. ‘Instead of firing and then fitting the bayonet into the barrel, and then removing it if you want to fire again, these cunning Frenchmen have thought of fitting the bayonet on to the outside of the barrel, so you can actually fire with the bayonet fixed!’

Neither man had ever seen such a weapon and even Daniel, the former Cossack, agreed that the thing was well done.

Above all, the state would need money.

‘We’re going to tax everything we can get our hands on,’ Procopy declared. ‘Even people’s beards,’ he laughed. ‘And since trade will improve when we’ve got our Baltic ports, we’ll make the merchants cough up too.’

‘How will you do that?’ Nikita asked.

‘Simple,’ his son replied. ‘Administrative reforms.’

And he explained how Peter was now going to allow all local tradesmen to be completely free of the control of the provincial governors and let them elect their own officials. ‘That will please them, I should think,’ Nikita said. For though he himself had once hoped to be a governor, he knew very well how corrupt their administration was.

‘Not really,’ Procopy grinned. ‘You see, we’re doubling their taxes!’

Indeed, though many of Peter’s reforms were for the ultimate good of Russia, it is certainly true that most were actually thought of originally as ways of raising revenue more efficiently.

Not only money, but men were pouring in. Procopy insisted that Nikita send a good complement from his estates, including Russka. ‘And make sure they’re all shaved,’ he remarked. When his father observed that, for his part, he couldn’t see why it mattered whether the peasant recruits were shaved or not, Procopy quickly cut in: ‘Of course it does. That way we can spot deserters at once.’

There was another way of getting men as well as applying to landlords. ‘We’re going to make sure the peasants who’ve been freed by their masters don’t get off,’ Procopy explained. ‘They’re to report to the recruiting officers or lose their freedom.’

‘So their freedom will be the army?’

‘That’s right.’

And Nikita could only shake his head at such ruthless efficiency.

But what, in the long run, did all these changes mean? This was what puzzled Nikita.

He was not shocked, as Eudokia and Daniel were. And though he found Procopy’s air of superiority hurtful, he tried to be humble and to interest himself. He saw whole regiments dressed like Germans. He saw his son lead his wife out in a new German dress, in which she looked rather bashful. He saw the Church mocked and the Tsar’s only son taken from his mother and given into the care of foreigners.

‘And all I want to know,’ he burst out to Procopy, when they were alone one day before Christmas, ‘all I want you to tell me is, where are we going? Are we to stop being Russians altogether? Is that the idea? I even heard someone say the Tsar would prefer us all to speak Dutch.’

On this subject, to his surprise, his son reassured him.

‘For while I dare say the Tsar would be delighted if we did speak Dutch, he won’t attempt such a thing,’ Procopy laughed. ‘But you see, Father,’ he went on, ‘to understand what’s going on you have to look not to Russia, but outside.’

‘What for?’

‘Because no one in Russia realizes how backward we have become. If you went to London or Amsterdam, you’d see at once. Didn’t Tsar Alexis import foreign officers and methods in your day? Yet wasn’t he a good Russian?’

‘He was,’ said Nikita piously.

‘We Russians must use whatever seems good to us, then, and reject the rest,’ Procopy continued.

‘But why does the Tsar hate religion?’

‘He doesn’t. But the Church is so backward, so superstitious, so opposed to any change, that he cannot work with it.’ He paused. ‘Tsar Peter, Father, is like a giant dragging a great army up a hill. Only the army is all facing the wrong way and pulling downwards. He has to be strong. He has to be firm. He has to act, if you like, like Ivan the Terrible to achieve anything at all. Only in this way can he make Russia strong.’

‘Then we are not to become westerners? We can still be Russians once we have caught up?’

Procopy put his hand on his father’s arm.

‘Of course. I will tell you what the Tsar said to me only last
week. He said: “Procopy Nikitevich – we need Europe for twenty years. Then we can turn our backs on her.”’

Then came the blow.

Old Russia ended.

To many of the population, it was a cataclysm, as though the firmament of heaven had been riven. By this terrible sign, Daniel knew, as he had long suspected, that the end of days was indeed at hand. And gathering together Eudokia, Arina and little Maryushka, he told them gravely: ‘The Apocalypse has begun. The Antichrist is here.’

It was, indeed, the dawn of a new era.

For in December 1699, Tsar Peter had decided to change the calendar.

To understand the significance of this event, it must be remembered that in Russia, as yet, it was not the year 1699 at all. It was the year 7207 from the Creation, which system of counting, in all the centuries since the times of ancient Kiev, the Russians had never given up.

It must also be remembered that the year began not in January, but in September.

This, too, as any Russian could have explained, was logical. For did not the story of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis speak of the apple on the tree? Clearly, then, when the world began, it must have been the autumn season!

The fact that the rest of the world used a different system was only further proof of how wicked other countries were.

This was the calendar which Peter in December 1699 decided to change. He issued a
ukaz
that the very next month, the new system, a new year, and a new century were to begin. Thus, in January, it became the year 1700.

He made only one concession to Russian sensibilities. The Catholic countries of Europe had by now adopted the modern, Gregorian calendar. The English, being Protestant, were then still using the older, Julian calendar. The small difference between the allocation of solar days to the year meant that as each
century passed, the small gap between the two calendars grew larger. By this time, the Julian was already eleven days behind the Gregorian. But it was better to be a little late than to agree with the Pope! Peter therefore decided to use the Julian calendar and as a result, until 1918, the Russians would continue to be nearly two weeks behind the west.

This, then, was the new age which Peter brought to Russia. He decreed that in the first week of January, a branch of pine or juniper should be hung over every door, in celebration.

And to Daniel, and many like him, this was the final confirmation of all that they had feared.

The idea that the world was approaching its end, though not new, had been growing enormously in Daniel’s lifetime. It was not only the
Raskolniki
who thought so. The collection of Ukrainian tracts predicting the end, called the
Book of Cyril
, had been widely read long before the Schism. The followers of Kapiton, whom Daniel had known on the Volga, had been urging the peasants there to prepare for the Apocalypse since Daniel was a young man. Indeed, it had been a regular monk who had remarked to him one day: ‘You know, after the Church council, Nikon himself began to think the end was coming.’

The end was near. The question was: when exactly would it come? By the time of Daniel’s arrival in Moscow, it was widely believed that it already had.

Endless calculations of the date were made, especially by the
Raskolniki
. About a thousand tracts on the subject have survived. All took as their premise that the number of the Antichrist was 666, and while some made their calculations from the split between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and others argued that the Antichrist lay bound for a thousand years and then waited for his number, nearly all the calculations pointed to a year between 1666 and 1691.