Peter the Great

Outside Moscow, on the road between the city and Preobrazhenskoe, stood a remarkable, self-contained Western European town known as the German Suburb.* Visitors strolling along its broad, tree-lined avenues, past its two- and three-story brick houses with large European-style windows, or through its stately squares with splashing fountains, could scarcely believe that they were in the heart of Russia. Behind the stately mansions decorated with columns and cornices lay precisely arranged European gardens studded with pavilions and reflecting pools. Along the streets rolled carriages made in Paris or London. Only the onion domes of Moscow’s churches rising across the fields in the distance reminded visitors that they were a thousand miles from home.

“The Tsar told us,” said the foreigner, “that when the Patriarch in Moscow was dead, he designed to fill that place with a learned man who had traveled, who spoke Latin, Italian and French. [But] the Russians petitioned him in a tumultuous manner not to set such a man over them, alleging three reasons: first, because he spoke barbarous languages; second, because his beard was not big enough for a patriarch; and third, because his coachman sat upon the coach seat and not upon the horses as was usual.”

During the evening, one of Peter’s chamberlains rode into the city carrying a routine dispatch from the Tsar to the Kremlin. His arrival, however, was misinterpreted by some of the nervous and overexcited Streltsy. Knowing that he was from Peter, they pulled the chamberlain from his horse, beat him and dragged him into the palace to see Shaklovity.
This bit of violence had immediate and unexpected repercussions.

But Tsar Nicholas I approved, proclaiming, “Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it must never be lowered.”

The negotiations took place in the Russian frontier post of Nerchinsk on the upper Amur River. Golovin was at a disadvantage; not only had Sophia ordered him to make peace, but the Chinese brought up a large fleet of heavily armed junks and surrounded the fort with 17,000 soldiers. In the end, Golovin signed a paper which gave the whole of the Amur basin to China.

Nevertheless, the idea was kept alive by the appearance of an astonishing portrait of Sophia. Drawn by a Polish artist, it depicted the Regent seated alone, wearing the crown of Monomakh on her head and holding the orb and scepter in her hands, exactly as crowned male autocrats were usually painted.

Sophia had agreed to declare war on the Ottoman Empire and launch an attack on the Sultan’s vassal, the Khan of the Crimea. For the first time in Russian history, Muscovy would join a coalition of European powers in fighting a common enemy.

Poland formally ceded Kiev to Russia, giving up forever her claim to the great city. For Russia, for Sophia, for Golitsyn, this was the greatest triumph of the Tsarevna’s regency

In Moscow, in his great stone palace roofed with heavy brass sheets, Golitsyn lived like a grand seigneur on the Western model. Visitors, expecting the usual primitive Muscovite furnishings, were astonished at its splendor: carved ceilings, marble statues, crystal, precious stones and silver plate, painted glass, musical instruments, mathematical and astronomical devices, gilded chairs and ebony tables inlaid with ivory. On the walls were Gobelin tapestries, tall Venetian mirrors, German maps in gilt frames. The house boasted a library of books in Latin, Polish and German, and a gallery of portraits of all Russia’s tsars and many reigning monarchs of Western Europe.

In one of the most ungallant descriptions of a lady ever offered by a man—certainly by a Frenchman—he wrote of Sophia:
Her mind and her great ability bear no relation to the deformity of her person, as she is immensely fat, with a head as large as a bushel, hairs on her face, and tumors on her legs, and at least forty years old. But in the same degree that her stature is broad, short and coarse, her mind is shrewd, subtle, unprejudiced and full of policy.