September 1689
In 1664, a Russian diplomat named Grigory Kotoshikhin fled Moscow, first heading for Poland and then continuing on to Sweden (he had been selling the Swedes information for years, so he was welcomed there with open arms). Kotoshikhin understood that he was expected to share the latest news, so he wrote a book in Stockholm that described contemporary Russian life in great detail. Naturally, he started from the top and described the life of the tsar and those around him. The fugitive also described what life was like for certain members of the court who were virtually never seen—the tsar’s daughters and sisters.
The royal sisters as well as daughters, the tsarevnas, have a variety of private quarters and they live like hermits, see hardly any people, and people hardly ever see them; they are constantly engaged in prayer and fasting, and their faces are bathed in tears, because, although they have every royal pleasure, they do no have the pleasure that is given by Almighty God to people, that they might copulate and bear children. It is not the custom to marry them to the princes and boyars of their own state, since princes and boyars are their kholopy [servants], and it is not the custom to give them in marriage to the princes of other states, because such men are of a different faith, and tsarevnas cannot renounce their own faith, and furthermore, they know neither the language nor the politics of other states, and it would be shameful for them to live there.
Kotoshikhin was a well-established court insider, but there is no doubt that he had never seen the royal sisters and daughters with his own eyes. Indeed, there is no doubt that the tsarevnas of the Moscow court were kept in strict isolation. It is also a fact that they were never married. Only one tsar attempted to violate this custom. Boris Godunov tried to arrange a marriage between his daughter Ksenia and a Danish prince, but the prince refused to convert to Orthodoxy and the marriage never took place.
The pious and devout Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, who ruled during the mid-17th century, the period described by Kotoshikhin, could not have conceived of the possibility of marrying his daughters to foreigners, that much is clear. What is less clear is whether or not the faces of these girls really were “bathed in tears.” In any event, when their father died, all six tsarevnas immediately adopted “Polish dress” and took lovers. They clearly had no intention of confining themselves to convents and spending their lives in prayer and fasting.
Furthermore, Kotoshikhin was wrong when he asserted that the tsarevnas knew “neither the language nor the politics of other states.” In any event, this clearly did not apply to Alexei’s eldest daughter, Sofia. It is hard to say what gave the God-fearing Alexei Mikhailovich the highly unusual idea of allowing Sofia to share in her brothers’ education. Perhaps he noticed the girl’s intellect and inquisitiveness, or perhaps it was the winds of change that were blowing in from Europe, winds that had caught the tsar’s attention.
Whatever the case may have been, Sofia, along with the tsar’s sons, was educated by the outstanding poet and scholar Simeon Polotsky. Polotsky’s name was expressive of the influences of Polish culture that had shaped him—he was born in the town of Polotsk, where these influences were strongly felt. He brought his knowledge of European life to Moscow and passed it on to his pupils. Sofia’s excellent education taught her Polish and Latin and equipped her with a well-developed mind and a strong will.
When Sofia’s father died, she was 22, which in those days made her a full-fledged adult, and not a particularly young one. She despised her stepmother and was clearly planning to arrange her life as she saw fit. Sofia needed power and freedom. Her 16-year-old brother, Fyodor, had assumed the throne, and now there was no one to order her about or stop her from doing as she pleased. She found herself a lover, a man who was a perfect match for her in terms of intellect and character: Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn. One of the most prominent magnates of the time, he enjoyed tremendous influence at court; he had a house that was run in accordance with Western manners and was filled with paintings, mirrors, and a huge library; he knew several foreign languages and was every bit as ambitious as Sofia.
Six years later, the sickly and weak Tsar Fyodor died. Another of Sofia’s brothers, Ivan, was to be the next tsar, a weak-willed boy who was considered feebleminded. What a marvelous opportunity—he would be her puppet. However the Naryshkin clan, relatives of her stepmother (Alexei’s second wife, Natalya Naryshkina), lobbied for Sophia’s ten-year-old stepbrother Peter to sit on the throne. Little did anyone know at the time that posterity would know young Peter as “the Great.” What was important was that this Peter and his Naryshkin allies were a threat to the position and very person of Sofia, not to mention her entire family (the Miloslavsky clan). A brutal struggle broke out. Sofia turned the streltsy, the royal guard, loose on the Naryshkins, which resulted in a compromise: both boys would assume the throne and Sofia would govern as regent until they came of age.
Sophia’s furious stepmother took little Peter away to the suburban village of Preobrazhenskoye, which he left only to attend official functions in Moscow. Sofia and her lover Golitsyn now had a free hand. They ruled for just seven years (1682-1689), but in this short time they achieved a great deal. They signed the Eternal Peace Treaty with Poland, which was intended to pave the way to contact with the West. Increasing numbers of foreigners were invited to Moscow—doctors, craftsmen, military officers. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with China gave Russia a foothold on the Pacific Ocean. In Moscow, by Sofia’s order, an absolutely new educational institution was founded, whose very name attests to a break with tradition: the Slavic Greek Latin Academy, which educated generations of intellectuals. Two military campaigns attempted to capture land from the Crimean Khanate, to give Russia access to the Black Sea, although both ended in failure.
In essence, Sofia and Golitsyn did everything that Peter would later do using more ruthless methods—they accelerated contact with Europe, developed education, and tried to give Russia greater access to the world’s oceans. True, it did not occur to them to build a new city on the uninhabitable swamps of the Baltic coast and make it their capital, but should we really reproach them for this? Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that Golitsyn, like Peter, dreamed of transforming the Russian army, although in his case he dreamed of an army not of serfs, but of free men. For this he planned to abolish serfdom, an institution that was only made more oppressive under Peter.
But Sofia and Golitsyn ruled on shaky ground. Young Peter was growing up, and the Naryshkins did not tire of reminding the Miloslavskys that soon the reins of power would need to be transferred to him.
As the ironies of history would have it, the only force that Sofia could rely on in her fateful struggle was the streltsy, to whom all Western influences were repugnant and the notion of an unmarried woman on the throne was completely alien. “It’s time for you to go to the convent, little mother,” they would yell at her with increasing frequency. Had they known what Peter had in store for them in a few years, their choice between the male heir and a baba and her lover might have gone the other way.
In 1689, Peter was 17 and married—a grown up, independent young man. Golitsyn had just returned empty-handed from his campaign against the Crimean Khanate. Something had to be done.
It is not clear whether Sofia truly intended to kill her stepbrother or if this was just a rumor spread by the Naryshkins, but the result was that panic broke out in Preobrazhenskoye in the fall of 1689. Abandoning his mother and young wife to the whims of fate, Peter, dressed in nothing but a shirt, came galloping to the revered Trinity St. Sergius Lavra Monastery. Once he arrived there, he did not even have to do anything. The title “tsar” and the prospect of a male ruler was enough to gain pledges of allegiance from the majority of troops and courtiers.
There was nothing Sofia could do. Golitsyn was sent into distant northern exile, where for several decades until his death, he was forced to observe from afar how Peter I did everything that he and Sofia had wanted to do. Sofia did indeed wind up in a convent, but one just outside Moscow, the Novodevichy Convent. There, she was allowed to receive visitors and was given everything she needed—everything, that is, except freedom, love, and power.
She could not reconcile herself to her situation and her only recourse was to turn to the very same streltsy, who themselves had quickly realized that Peter was not kindly disposed toward them. In 1698, when Peter was in Europe, the streltsy launched a revolt that was put down with dreadful brutality. The tsar came racing home and tortured the rebels with his own hands before they were sent to the executioner. In the process, he exacted testimony about correspondence between streltsy commanders and an intractable tsarevna. That was all Peter needed.
Sofia was forced to take her vows. She was deprived of contact with the outside world and all amenities. On the wall outside her cell were hung several dozen streltsy, whose corpses would long serve as a gloomy reminder and a sign of the tsar’s vindictive mockery. Sofia, now the nun Susanna, lived in her cell another six years, until her death in 1704 at the age of 58, an old woman by the standards of the time.
There were claims by Old Believers, whom Peter detested no less than he did Sofia, that the tsarevna somehow managed to escape from the convent with the help of 12 streltsy. They pointed to the grave of a nun named Pelageya, in an Old Believer village outside Nizhny Novgorod, a grave they claimed belonged to the escaped tsarevna. The myth transformed the westernizing Sofia into a defender of the old religion.
So here we have a sad irony of history. Sofia and Peter should have been like-minded collaborators, but instead they became mortal enemies. After Peter, four women would occupy the Russian throne—his widow, his niece, his daughter, and finally, the widow of his grandson. Without a doubt, Sofia was smarter and better educated than the first three put together. Had she been born a half century later, her fate might have been quite different.
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