Secret Lives of the Tsars by Michael Farquhar Read Free Book Online Page A

Preobrazhenskoe. Bones were broken, flesh seared, and backs lashed and shredded—with Peter presiding over the interrogations, which lasted for weeks—but many of the streltsy remained stubbornly mum about any greater plot.
    The Austrian envoy Johannes Korb left a vivid account of the revolt and its aftermath, including the tsar’s frustration when it became apparent that being racked and roasted was not enough to elicit the answers he was seeking from one poor soul. “The Tsar, tired at last of this exceedingly wicked stubbornness, furiously raised the stick which he happened to have in his hand, and thrust it so violently into his jaws—clenched in obstinate silence—to break them open, and make him give tongue to speak. And these words too that fell from the raging man, ‘Confess, beast, confess!’ loudly proclaimed how great was his wrath.”
    As numerous historians have pointed out, cruel torture was hardly unusual in the seventeenth century, but rare was the monarch who personally conducted such bloody business like the Russian tsar did, week after week, without a trace of mercy. “Peter never hesitated to be a participant in the enterprises he commanded, whether on the battlefield, on ship-boardor in the torture chamber,” Massie noted. “He had decreed the interrogation and destruction of the Streltsy; he would not sit back and wait for someone to bring him news that his command had been obeyed.”
    Gradually the tsar gleaned that the streltsy had planned to march on Moscow, kill the foreigners there, and restore the old order under the potential leadership of their old ally Sophia. But Peter found no conspiracy among the ranks of the boyars, and even after personally interrogating his once fearsome half-sister in her convent, he could find no hard evidence against Sophia, either. Still, the woman who had loomed so large in his youth did not entirely escape his vengeance. After nine years of relatively luxurious confinement in the convent, where she never actually became a nun, Sophia’s head was shaved and she was forced to take the veil as Sister Susanna. And just to remind her of the streltsy ’s treachery, three of their rotting corpses were hung outside the window of her cell—close enough to touch, and smell.
    After endless rounds of torture, the executions began in batches, and would continue over the next year. The first group was hauled to the gibbet outside Preobrazhenskoe in carts, two doomed men in each, holding lighted tapers as their weeping relatives ran beside them. Many were too broken by their interrogations to make it up the scaffold without help, but all died stoically. During another round of retribution, the tsar ordered some of his associates to lop off streltsy heads themselves. Some went about the task eagerly, like Peter’s friend Alexander Menshikov, who bragged of completing twenty decapitations without getting a single drop of blood on himself. Others, however, were more reticent. Indeed, one wielded the axe so limply that he succeeded only in striking a blow to his victim’s back. Peter himself set an exampleby rolling up his sleeves and beheading at least five men, perhaps more, as accounts vary.
    The heads and bodies of the hated streltsy were put on gruesome display throughout Moscow; some corpses were even left hanging from the Kremlin walls. “What strange sentries!” Korb exclaimed in his diary. Those who survived the massacre spent the rest of their lives without ears and noses, which had been lopped off, while the remaining streltsy regiments were forever disbanded.
    Peter the Great had demonstrated in the most vivid way possible the fate of those who would dare threaten the realm or interfere with his reforms. But the lesson seems to have been lost on one of those closest to the tsar: his very own son, Alexis.
    Peter had never been much of a father to the young tsarevitch, possibly due to his distaste for the boy’s mother, Eudoxia Lopukhina, a colorless,