Peter the Rather Special
I've actually been reading Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great for MONTHS now, but only during part of our recent vacation did I get to read it continuously. The rest of the time it has been bathroom reading, or read in waiting rooms and the like. Finally, however, I've finished it.
The good news is that this is the kind of book that can be read that way, without one losing the thread. Just like the other three of his histories that I've read (Nicholas and Alexandra [haven't read the updated version, The Romanovs], Dreadnought, Castles of Steel), this one consists of a great number of small stories-within-the-story, connected seamlessly into one grand narration. It's packed with interesting details, loaded with context, almost overburdened with characterization. The pages are memorable, and the subject is both big and interesting.
Peter the Great ("the Great" was an official title) is just a fascinating historical figure, one of those characters of history that would stretch credulity in a fictional setting. A Tsar who taught himself, from childhood, to be a soldier and a sailor, and finally a commander. A Tsar who also became a shipwright, an ironworker, a carpenter and half a dozen other trades which he found fascinating. This guy literally built ships for his own navy.
There is no exaggeration to the story that he single-handedly tried to bring Oriental Russia into the culture and economy of Europe, and despite enormous internal resistance, he succeeded in great measure. He fought a tenacious 20-year war against Charles XII of Sweden, one of the most gifted military commanders of all time, and won it. He survived a fatal military defeat by the Turks. The list goes on.
The book would be worth reading just for the tale of the Great Embassy, when the fairly young Tsar visited much of Northern Europe amid a huge retinue of companions and diplomats, while all the time travelling "incognito" and spending weeks and months working in shipyards as a common laborer and ship's carpenter, living in small houses, and then slipping off to the local palace to attend formal functions in disguise. It's both bizarre and striking, silly and rather clever. While it could easily have been seen as madness, in Peter it worked.
My favorite passage of the whole book, which had many great sections, is the description of how his childish war play slowly turned into the founding of the two oldest regiments of the Imperial Guard. I quote a bit of it:
Here, in the fields and woods of Preobrazhenskoe and along the banks of the Yauza, Peter could ignore the classroom and do nothing but play. His favorite game, as it had been from earliest childhood, was war. During Fedor's reign, a small parade ground had been laid out for Peter in the Kremlin where he could drill the boys who were his playmates. Now, with the open world of Preobrazhenskoe around him, there was infinite space for these fascinating games. And, unlike most boys who play at war, Peter could draw on a government arsenal to supply his equipment. The arsenal records show that his requests were frequent. In January 1683, he ordered uniforms, banners and two wooden cannon, their barrels lined with iron, mounted on wheels to allow them to be pulled by horses--all to be furnished immediately. On his eleventh birthday, in June 1683, Peter abandoned wooden cannon for real cannon with which, under the supervision of artillerymen, he was allowed to fire salutes. He enjoyed this so much that messengers came almost daily to the arsenal for more gunpowder. In May 1685, Peter, nearing thirteen, ordered sixteen pairs of pistols, sixteen carbines with slings and brass mountings and, shortly afterward, twenty-three more carbines and sixteen muskets.
By the time Peter was fourteen and he and his mother had settled permanently at Preobrazhenskoe, his martial games had transformed the summer estate into an adolescent military encampment. Peter's first "soldiers" were the small group of playmates who had been appointed to his service when he reached the age of five. They had been selected from the families of boyars to provide the Prince with a personal retinue of young noblemen who acted the roles of equerry, valet and butler; in fact they were his friends. Peter also filled his ranks by drawing from the enormous, now largely useless group of attendants of his father, Alexis, and his brother, Fedor. Swarms of retainers, especially those involved in the falconry establishment of Tsar Alexis, remained in the royal service with nothing to do. Fedor's health had prevented him from hunting, Ivan was even less able to enjoy the sport, and Peter disliked it. Nevertheless, all these people continued to receive salaries from the state and be fed at the Tsar's expense, and Peter decided to employ some of them in his sport.
The ranks were further swelled by other young noblemen presenting themselves for enrollment, either on their own impulse or on the urging of fathers anxious to gain the young Tsar's favor. Boys from other classes were allowed to enroll, and the sons of clerks, equerries, stable grooms and even serfs in the service of noblemen were set beside the sons of boyars. Among these young volunteers of obscure origin was a boy one year younger than the Tsar, named Alexander Danilovich Menshikov. Eventually, 300 of these boys and young men had mustered on the Preobrazhenskoe estate. They lived in barracks, trained like soldiers, used soldiers' talk and received soldiers' pay. Peter held them as his special comrades, and from this collection of young noblemen and stableboys he eventually created the proud Preobrazhensky Regiment. Until the fall of the Russian monarchy in 1917, this was the first regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard, whose colonel was always the Tsar himself and whose proudest claim was that it had been founded by Peter the Great.
Soon, all the quarters available in the little village of Preobrazhenskoe were filled, but Peter's boy army kept expanding. New barracks were built in the nearby village of Semyonovskoe; in time, this company developed into the Semyonovsky Regiment, and it became the second regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard...
CBsIP: student manuscripts
House Where a Woman, Lori Wilson
The Chess Garden, Brooks Hansen
Dancing Naked, William Tenn
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed.
The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China, Ralph D. Sawyer
The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, Denys Johnson-Davies, ed.