PETER “THE GREAT” who is credited with having created the history of Russia did little for Moscow, a town he, after his travels abroad, always despised and constantly distrusted. He evicted the last private owners from the Kremlin, and spoiled its palaces and treasures, but took no measures to enhance its beauty or increase its wealth. It is customary to date progress and civilisation from his reign; an anonymous Russian poet has even written:

but, so far as Moscow is concerned, his coming would be more truthfully regarded as of the nature of an eclipse than as the harbinger of light. Probably his reputation is due to the prominence of his person in western Europe—where it is customary to mistake renown for greatness—rather than his achievements.

Peter forsook Moscow, left her to the Church, which he served badly—and to her citizens, whom he treated even worse. Benevolence was foreign to his character; he could not mould Moscow to his ideal—if a passing whim can be so termed—but before he realised his impotence in this, he became brutal and fierce. He quarrelled with the Church, cruelly ill used his wife—whom he forsook eventually, shamefully treated his blood-relations—even torturing his half-sisters himself, and was to his subjects such a father as he proved to his own unfortunate son Alexis, who was done to death at his hands; in all these things behaving so savagely that even the strongest were awed into hypocrisy. The citizens of Moscow considered themselves the children of the Father of the people—the Tsar who lived in the Kremlin—who cared for them and never ceased to be anxious for their welfare. He alone was responsible for their direction, with him was the Church, they knew not how to act independently. The streltsi, the fighting men, the armed citizens, were first of the Moscow townsmen to act of their own initiative, but they were disciplined men who trusted their leaders—even when betrayed.

Peter exterminated the streltsi, the men who first of all his subjects had supported his claims and protected his rights; it is in connection with the streltsi that Peter is most enduringly associated with Moscow. The scenes of that long struggle were, for the most part, enacted outside the Kremlin; in the Kitai-Gorod of the merchants, in the Bielo-Gorod of the freemen, in the sloboda of the foreign settlers, and the Preobrajenski quarter where Peter was reared. It is this Moscow that has suffered most from the invader and from fire; its memorials of antiquity are few, those appertaining to Peter the Great and his time may be counted on the fingers of one mutilated hand. The most conspicuous marks are those of the Church. Continuing by that route indicated in the last chapter, on issuing by the Valdimirski Gate from the Kitai-Gorod, the road north is the Big Lubianka, running along the crest of the hill towards the old village of

SRIETENKA—SDKHAREV BASHNIA
SRIETENKA—SDKHAREV BASHNIA

Kuchko, long since incorporated with the town; on the right hand is the palace of that Count Rostopchin who ordered the destruction of Moscow in 1812; on the left at the corner of the Kuznetski Most is the old church, set apart from time immemorial for the benediction of fruit. As an old writer states, “the Mahommedans would as soon eat pork as a Russian unconsecrated apples.” Further on, also on the left is the old monastery of the Srietenka (Meeting), founded by Vasili Dmitrivich in gratitude of the deliverance of Moscow threatened by the Tartars under Tamerlane in 1397; rebuilt by Theodore II. and containing a chapel to the Patriarch Joachim, constructed by Peter I. in 1706. It has two other old churches, one dedicated to St Nicholas, and the other to the Egyptian Virgin Mary, neither of particular interest. This is a part of Moscow longest inhabited by the peasant class, and continuing on past the boulevard, which marks the old wall of the Bielo-Gorod, the Srietenka traverses the Zemliaa Gorod, or earthen town, until the Sadovia is reached, where was once the by no means formidable rampart of the outer wall; beyond this the Miaschanska continues the road to the Kammer College earth rampart at the Krestovski-Zastava. Beyond that is the highway to Ostankina, the Marina Roshcha, and the village of Mordva. The eighteenth church passed after leaving the Grand Square is dedicated to the Trinity and is remarkable for a number of small shops within its walls, the windows but a couple of feet high and the ceiling so near the pavement that buyers have to stoop or kneel to bargain. An old order forbids that shops be within a church, and a more recent one, any without it. These being neither within nor without continue unmolested. In this district the Streltsi were living at the close of the seventeenth century, and a little further on is the Sukharev Bashnia, Peter’s memorial to the fidelity of a regiment of the force he exterminated. It is a curious pile: an octagonal tower rises 200 feet above the roadway over high archways and a large two-storeyed gallery above them. The beholder who is told that this is like a ship will possess the credulity of Polonius if he assent; but actually Peter modelled it as a ship to serve for the elementary instructions of his future sailors. As all know, Peter derived his idea of ships from the Dutch, but even that explains little and leaves much to the imagination. As remote is the connection of Sukharev with ships and the sea, so if not exactly a suitable monument for an officer of Moscow’s soldiery it was what Peter thought would serve his purpose better than any other design. Its closest connection with ships is at present; as a water tower it is not wholly useless still. Its architecture is not remarkable, a mixture of Lombard with Gothic that might have resulted from copying the Vosskresenski Gate and substituting a tall straight tower for the ornate Gothic spires then the fashion in Moscow. Considered a ship—the tower is the mast, the rooms below are supposed to resemble the poop-deck and quarter-galleries of an old man-of-war. The entrance is by a flight of steps from the Srietenka; in the large room a number of Moscow youths were instructed in arithmetic by a Scotch schoolmaster named Farquharson, and two Christ Church scholars, Gwynne and Graves, whom Peter held practically as prisoners there. Sometimes these pupils were taken to St Petersburgh to drive piles for foundations of the new town, at others they were exercised in elocution and deportment that they might the better represent comedies for the diversion of the Court.

The teachers of the school knew nothing of Russian and the scholars only their native tongue—such was Peter’s way. Unhappy the scholars

It is said a lodge of Freemasons used once to meet in a room of the tower, and there not only were “black arts” practised but Peter convened secret meetings of the State Council, a sort of Star Chamber. The society of “Neptune” really consisted of Lefort the Swiss General, Archbishop Theofan, Admiral Apraxin, Farquharson, Bruce, and Princes Cherkassky, Galitzin, Menshikov, and Sheremetiev. Those in fact who were for westernising Russia.

The real cause of the later conflict arose from a deeper trouble, the struggle for the throne between the children of Alexis by his first wife, and Peter the eldest of those by his second. Ivan was weak, but his sister Sophia, with her lover Galitzin and a court following opposed to the innovations to be expected of Naryshkins’ friends, supported him most loyally. The Streltsi insisted that Peter should reign conjointly with Ivan and carried their point, but Sophia, as regent, was entrusted with certain powers. Both princes were crowned in 1682, but, owing to intrigues, the court was divided into two factions—the supporters of Ivan and Sophia, of Peter and the Matvievs. The Khovanskis were accused of compassing the death of Theodore, and beheaded. Doubts as to Peter’s parentage were expressed; the trouble made previous to the marriage of Natalia was remembered; others declared that Peter was a changeling, really the son of Dr Van Gaden. Peter himself, according to the picture of his patron saint painted on a board his exact size on the day of birth, was then some twenty inches long by five and a half broad. Moreover, there was a doggerel song of the period:

Peter is said once to have met his reputed father, a rough haunter of taverns in the foreign suburb. Throwing him roughly to the ground Peter determined to learn whether or not he was his father. “Batuch ka! How should I know—I was not the only one,” the fellow is reported to have answered; but it was only a stale and salacious witticism of the sort Peter loved—certainly not evidence. The struggle was further complicated by camps of orthodox and dissenters. It was fought to the bitter end by Sophia on behalf of her mother’s children, against Peter who was only her father’s son; on behalf of herself too, for she had a lover, and no liking for the seclusion of the cloisters to which the daughters of the orthodox Tsars were relegated because they were of too high birth to wed with their father’s subjects, and their faith—which they were not allowed to relinquish—an effectual barrier to matrimony with a foreign prince. At first the revolt of the Streltsi had little political significance beyond the fact that it was the forcible demand of a part of the citizens for common justice.

For seven years Sophia directed the affairs of state with more or less success; Ivan was simply her tool, with Peter she had greater trouble, and in 1689, after a quarrel with her, he withdrew from Moscow and went to Troitsa. A large party followed him. Sophia feared revolt and appealed to the people in an eloquent address of three hours’ duration.

Sophia thought she had won over the crowd; instead this speech lost her the support of influential leaders. When Galitzin left Moscow there was a general rush of the people to Peter; then her friends were seized by his order and she tried to escape to Poland, but was captured and imprisoned in the Novo Devichi Convent where she was forced to take the veil as Susannah, and lived in strict confinement until 1704. Ivan was thrust aside; Peter usurped the throne, his weakly half-brother surviving until 1696. Then Peter married Eudoxia Lapukhin, daughter of a boyard. Trouble next arose when Peter, against the advice of nobles and clergy, went abroad and worked like a slave under foreign rulers; it was considered sacrilege of God’s anointed so to do, and of its impolicy there were soon signs, and Peter hurriedly returned to stamp out discontent. He had found a new love, one Anna Mons, a German in Moscow, and would have married her but she slighted him and took one of her own countrymen; his wife he refused to see, accusing her of “certain thwartings and suspicions.” He wished also for proof of Sophia’s connection with the discontent amongst the Streltsi and people; in this, notwithstanding all his energy and cruelty, he was unsuccessful.

Peter’s cruelties, like those of Ivan Groznoi, did not pass unnoticed by the Church. His treatment of the Streltsi called forth a fierce denunciation from the Patriarch Adrian, who “beseeched him in the name of the Mother of God to desist.” “Get thee home!” answered Peter, “I know that I reverence God and his most Holy Mother; more, perhaps, than thou dost thyself. It is the duty of my sovereign office, and a duty I owe to God, to punish with the utmost severity crimes that threaten the general welfare.” Unfortunately the Church had been deprived of its privilege of intercession for the life of one accused, and Peter cared nought for the spiritual power of the Church, as already stated. He even with his own hand killed two priests, but afterwards expressed contrition. The Church regarded him almost as anti-christ; the citizens dreaded him and kept out of his way. “The nearer the Tsar the greater the danger,” a proverb of that time was believed in by all. Peter had his proverb also, “the knout is no angel but teaches men to speak the truth,” and even as Ivan did, he went constantly in fear of conspiracies, chiefly dreading his own relations. Eudoxia, now the nun Helena in a convent at Suzdal, was believed to have corresponded with Dositheus an Archimandrite who had predicted, or prayed for, Peter’s death. Glebov was the intermediary in the matter; he was impaled; the prelate was broken on the wheel; a brother of the ex-tsaritsa was tortured and beheaded; thirty others were executed or exiled, and Eudoxia herself flogged and confined in an isolated convent at New Ladoga. Peter, when there were no more conspirators, or accused, offered a bribe of six roubles to all who made secret accusations, and threatened with severe penalties any who held back information. The better to protect his informers from reprisals by the people, they went through the streets with their faces veiled, in order to search for those whose names they did not know, but whom they had overheard in indiscreet speech. The people hid away when “the tongue,” as the masked informer was called, was abroad in the streets, and for days the city would appear to be quite deserted.

It was an unequal struggle: a powerful autocrat attempting to force a proud, stubborn people from the habits they had been taught to revere, from practices that had made their city great and beautiful. The more successful Peter became the greater was the opposition. His courtiers wore wigs at court, as commanded, but even in the throne room removed them immediately Peter was out of sight. After ten years Peter knew that he could not conquer the Muscovites though he might kill them. As late as 1722, when he had ordered all ladies above ten years of age to appear at a reception, only seventy of the hundreds qualified did as commanded. At St Petersburg it was different. There, no feeling of shame, no loss of dignity followed the, to Moscow citizens, most ridiculous behaviour of westerns. Peter’s son Alexis, the Tsarevich, preferred Moscow and Muscovite customs: in him Moscow trusted, and for this Peter hated him. His friends wished him to enter a monastery until his father’s death and then “as they cannot nail the cowl to one’s head,” throw it off and assume the crown. He did not, and his boast to forsake St Petersburg and reinstate Moscow enraged Peter who, from that time, never ceased to search for conspiracies, prompted by, or on behalf of Alexis, and persecuted his son unmercifully. As all knew the young man was lured to St Petersburg by his mistress, who was lavishly rewarded for her perfidy by Peter, and that there he was repeatedly put to the torture, more than once with Peter himself as executioner, and that he died mysteriously one day after being “put to the question,” i.e. tortured, earlier in the day by a party of whom his father was one.

The Matviev’s lived in that part of the city just outside the Kitai-gorod, where Alexis had settled a number of little Russians from the newly-acquired territory, the Ukraine. The Marosseika preserves the name of this settlement, and passing up it from the Lubianski Ploshchad, leaving All Saints’ church on the right, Armianski, a street on the left, will soon be reached. There, a couple of hundred yards along, on the left is the old parish church of St Nicholas, built by Mikhail Theodorovich, contiguous to the house of the Matviev’s and the Tsarista Natalia, where is now the tomb of the old voievode—a mean mausoleum, in the classic style. The church shows but few traces of western influence: it is of two storeys like most of the churches of the seventeenth century and is surrounded with a gallery, formerly open, but now glazed between the pillars. Near by is the Lazarev Institute, for the study of eastern languages, and peeping over the trees will be seen the green domes and pink belfry of the Monastery of St John Chrysostom, with five churches of which the oldest was founded by Ivan Vasilievich in 1479; the entrance is from the Zlato-ustinski pereulok. Opposite the Armianski is the Kosmo-Damianski pereulok, with the Lutheran Church founded in 1582 by the Englishman Horsey for the foreign colony.

Continuing along the Marosseika, past the Church of the Assumption (p. 89), an interesting church will be found on the right, that of the Pokrovka (Protection), and further along the same street, where it changes its name to the Basmannia, the church of Vasili Ivanovich built in 1517 and reconstructed in 1751, to which latter date its architecture belongs. Turning into the Sadovia on the left, in the Furmanni pereulok, the second on the left, will be found the oldest large house in Moscow, the residence of Prince Usupov, quite in the style of the early seventeenth century. The entrance is from the Charitonievski Boulevard, the next turning on the left. The whole of this district suffered much from the fires of past centuries and only such buildings as these isolated churches and houses in their own courtyards escaped the general conflagration. A little further along the Sadovia is the “Krasnoe Vorot” or Red Gate to mark the old tower on the outer wall. It was built as a triumphal arch for the Empress Elizabeth on her coronation, when tables spread with viands for the people reached from there to the Kremlin wall. The French made it a butt for musketry practice, using sacred ikons for a bull’s eye.

Architecture of a different type is to be found in that residential quarter of the city between the Kremlin and the Prechistenka Boulevard. Behind the Riding School is the Mokhovaia, a street to which front both Universities and the Dom Pachkov, an old mansion in which is stored the Rumiantsev art collection and museum of antiquities. The entrance is in the Vogankovski pereulok, near the Znamenka.[G] It contains:—

The Russian school is seen to better advantage on the south side of the Moskva river, in the Tretiakov Galleries (Lavrushenski pereulok; open daily, 10 to 4, except Mondays; admission free, catalogue in French, 20 kopeeks), a collection made by the brothers Paul and Sergius Tretiakov, and now the property of the town. Most of the pictures are modern by native artists; views of Moscow and of the historical and interesting buildings in the town are by no means numerous. Apparently Russian artists have not yet discovered that the Kremlin, as seen from across the river, is as good a subject as is the Piazza San Marco at Venice, or any other hackneyed city scene in Europe.

In the streets Znamenka and Vozdvigenka are some characteristic Russian mansions of the eighteenth century, for it was then that this quarter, which had formerly been inhabited by palace servants and craftsmen, began to take a more aristocratic character. That of Prince Sheremetiev is the most bizarre; there also is the old

DOM CHUKINA
DOM CHUKINA

town hall and the Foreign Archives. In various parts of the town, even on the south side in the Kaloujskaya, will be found modern mansions, that is, erected or rebuilt since the great fire, in the style of the Moscow of the golden age. One of the best is the Dom Chukina near the Tverskaya Triumfalnia—a monument no visitor can escape seeing. But there is no long street without one or more buildings which attract the attention of the stranger by some idiosyncracy of form or colour. No matter in which direction one may go—in the bustling Kitai-Gorod, the quiet and aristocratic Ostogenka, or the bourgeois Zamoskvoretski—soon will be seen some interesting fane reaching above the buildings that flank the street, and a portal distinguished by its cross and ikon indicate the entrance to the sacred enclosure of some monastery, where, amidst leafy foliage and bright verdure, is quiet and seclusion like that of the oasis of the Temple amidst the dreary turmoil of London’s vastness. Take that very ordinary street, the Nikitskaya for example; it is wholly common place, wedged in between districts devoted to ordinary commerce, and the chilling respectability of moderate affluence, and leads nowhere in particular. Yet even its name is interesting; did it obtain it from the worthy founder of the Romanof dynasty? or from the religious fanatic who argued points of ritual with Sophia and the Patriarch? or from St Nikita, the saint who shut up Satan in a jar and released him only on stipulated and agreed conditions?

It starts from the Alexander Gardens, the old western bank of the stream Neglinnaia that once strengthened the defences of the Kremlin; passes the entrance to the riding school, one of the great things Moscow has produced since the fire of 1812. The length of this building is 360 feet, breadth 168, and its wooden roof, unsupported by perpendicular stanchions, was considered a wonder of the world, when Alexander first manoeuvered 2000 infantry, and 1000 cavalry beneath it. Then come the Universities, the old and the new, one on each hand; beyond, on the left, is the Nikitsky Monastery, enclosing four churches, one dating from the founding of the monastery in 1682, at the end of the “golden age.” On the opposite side is the Academy of Science, on this the Conservatorium, facing it a quaint old church of primitive architecture and diminutive size; above its lowly belfry rears the square brick-built tower of an English Church. The house of a boyard here, of a prince there, bear names of note in Moscow’s history, as Gagarin, Galitzin, Chernichev, designate the owners of the houses on either side, and of the side streets to right and left. The further from the Kremlin, the centre, the more frequent and greater the inducement to turn aside to inspect more closely the glittering and gaudy domes of churches, old and new, which are thickly sprinkled over the whole district. Nor can the stranger easily do amiss whichever way he turns. If towards the left, a curious lofty belfry of open masonry will repay careful scrutiny, and reveal close by other domed and pinnacled temples, lost amidst this multitude of white walls and luxuriant verdure. If to the right, two churches in close proximity, of unique design and, probably, oppressive colouring, will encourage to further explorations in the same direction.

The oldest churches in the neighbourhood of the Arbat are, Boris and Gleb, 1527; Tikhon, the wonder-worker, 1689; but the Church of the Transfiguration is one of the most beautiful. In the Povarskaya, is that of St Simon Stylite, 1676, and near, another interesting church—Rojdestvenka.

Probably Moscow does not charm so strongly by reason of any particular building or style as by the great diversity of its houses and churches, both in design and colouring. More especially in those quarters where the wooden log-houses still linger in their gardens, and where the frame-houses are all made gay with white, cream, blue-gray, yellow and pink body colour, and the roofs of dark green or still darker crimson; there Moscow seems to belong to another world. It is, alas, disappearing fast, and the spacious courtyards, with their trees and the gardens gay with giant lilacs and golden-chain, are being built on, and houses that stand shoulder to shoulder in plain and hideous uniformity level up the largest village to the standard of a modern town made in Germany.

There is another aspect of Moscow which the summer visitor can never know. That comes when the thermometer falls from its summer average of 64.9° F. to its winter average of 14° F. This difference of 50° explains much that appears wanton in the architecture of buildings great and small; accounts for the galleries round the outside of the churches, for the extensive vestibules; for thick walls, still thicker roofs, and great spouts; for the plain surfaces and lack of projecting decorations, gargoyles and angular mouldings; for the distempered walls, which alone successfully stand the biting frosts of winter and the blistering summer sun.

With the change to winter temperature a great quiet comes over the town, wheeled traffic is stopped, sledges glide over the frozen roads, and from the windless sky the great snowflakes can ever be seen idly and slowly floating in their long and leisurely descent to earth. A reddened sun appears for a short time each day in a leaden sky, and Moscow lives, is more active, more itself, than when the light of summer decks its walls and pinnacles in holiday garb. But at whatever season studied, Moscow will reveal traces of the past; will show that she has long smiled under the summer sun of good fortune and been wrinkled by the winter of adversity; scorched, too, by the volcanic fire of her own excesses, but now staid, hoary, strenuous, and of surprising vitality in all—??? ??????? ??????.