Pod Insights The Rest Is History 567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4) About this episode What were the consequences of Peter the Great’s mighty victory over Sweden at the Battle of Poltova in 1707? How great was the impact of his reign upon Russia overall, and was he responsible for turning it into one of Europe’s greatest powers? What occurred during the later years of his life? And, what is the story behind his bloody, terrible and tragic treatment of his son, Alexis…?
Join Dominic and Tom for the mighty conclusion of their series on one of history’s most remarkable characters: Peter the Great. The ramifications of his reign for Russia, his ghastly dealings with his own family, and the end of his colourful life.
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Transcript 12,438 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Dominic Sandbrook? This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.
0:12 Tom Holland? Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee, you make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more. Except...
0:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino, you can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.
0:39 Tom Holland? And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder, what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing, and find yourself somewhere completely different.
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1:45 Tom Holland? This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.
1:56 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he- Realises, or rather everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there. And it is, of course, the Americas. So you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions. And it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure for the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?
2:27 Tom Holland? So they asked over a hundred thousand people, and what came back wasn't just fear. There was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.
2:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Ask yours at claude.ai slash rest is history and keep thinking.
2:58 Tom Holland? Dinner was prepared in a spacious hall. Several small tables were placed in the middle of the hall for the new married couple and the rest of the dwarfs, who were all splendidly dressed after the German fashion. After dinner, the dwarfs began to dance after the Russian way, which lasted till eleven at night. It is easy to imagine how much the Tsar and the rest of the company were delighted at the comical capers, strange grimaces and odd postures of that medley of pygmies, most of whom were so short that their eyes alone had people in fits of laughter.
3:39 Tom Holland? One had a high hunch on his back and very short legs. Another was remarkable by a monstrous big belly. A third came waddling along on a little pair of crooked legs like a badger. A fourth had a head of prodigious size. Some had rye mouths and long ears, little pig eyes and chubby cheeks. And there were many more such comical figures. When these diversions were ended, the newly married couple were carried to the Tsar's house and bedded in his own bedchamber.
4:16 Tom Holland? So that was Friedrich Christian Weber, who was the ambassador of Hanover, the German state to the court of Peter the Great. And he is struggling to cope, I guess, Dominic, with the fondness for grotesquerie that has been a marker of Peter's court right from the very beginning.
4:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
4:41 Tom Holland? And Weber there is describing a wedding feast that was held in St Petersburg in November seventeen ten, where the couple and all the attendees were dwarves. And it's very expressive of Peter's kind of dark sense of humour, his fondness for, I suppose, making a show of people who aren't of normal size. I mean, he's obsessed by giants as well as dwarves, isn't he?
5:09 Dominic Sandbrook? He is.
5:10 Tom Holland? And there are German princes who are obsessed by giants, for instance. But Peter's obsession with that kind of grotesquerie seems exceptional, even by the standards of the time.
5:19 Dominic Sandbrook? I think that's right, Tom, and we'll be unpacking that a little bit in the first half of today's episode. So people who've been with us since the very beginning of this Peter the Great epic will know that we've had lots of war, lots of diplomacy and battles. We had the Great Northern War, we had Charles the Twelfth's rise and fall, we had the Battle of Poltava and Russia's ascent to join the ranks of the great powers. And in this final episode, we'll look at the last years of Peter's life and, above all, the terrible and tragic story of what happens to his son Alexis. And there will, yes, be some misconduct with dwarves to come. But the reason we started with that guy Friedrich Christian Weber and his reaction to the wedding feast
6:01 Dominic Sandbrook? is because he's a nice guide to what St Petersburg, what Russia would have felt like to a visitor from the West.
6:09 Tom Holland? And he hadn't actually seen that wedding, had he?
6:11 Dominic Sandbrook? No.
6:12 Tom Holland? So clearly, it is something that is circulating among ambassadors in St Petersburg as an example of the kind of the madness of the SARS court.
6:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Because that wedding was at the end of seventeen ten. And four years later, when he arrived in seventeen fourteen. The diplomatic corps are still talking about it as a sign of how weird and outlandish and extravagant Peter's court is. So when he actually arrived, Faber in St Petersburg, he finds it still a building site. So we talked in a previous episode about how the land was captured from the Swedes in 1703. Peter began work on the fortress and they had these gigantic teams of conscript labourers who were all being carried off by scurvy or malaria and whatnot. What did you call it, Tom? A city built on bones?
6:55 Tom Holland? Yeah, that's the famous description of it.
6:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. But by the 1710s, so moving forward 10 years or so, Peter's sort of, if you went into his papers, they are full of kind of specs and plans for churches and palaces and offices and canals and things. By 1712, he's effectively moved the capital to St Petersburg, even though it's not finished. The census claims there are tens of thousands of buildings. I think that might be a bit exaggerated. But by 1716 or so, he's got an Italian guy called Dominico Tretzino, who's building up a grid of canals. And he's got a guy called, a Frenchman, called Jean Baptiste Alexandre Leblanc, who draws up a street network on a very Enlightenment rationalist, ordered plan.
7:37 Tom Holland? Because there are a network of canals. And so St Petersburg is one of the many cities that have been described as the Venice of the North. I think much more reasonably than, say, Birmingham, with no disrespect to my father's native city.
7:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
7:54 Tom Holland? But the setting of St Petersburg, which when it is begun seems mad. It's a marsh, it's a bog, there are kind of vast waters. Once Peter has succeeded in imposing his order on it, raised up on the bones of all the labourers, but this sense of a kind of Augustan order emerging amid what had been bogs, the result is one of the most spectacular cityscapes of all time. I mean, St Petersburg is a stunningly beautiful city.
8:25 Tom Holland? In large part because of the combination of these 18th century buildings with the vastness of the river.
8:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
8:33 Tom Holland? I mean, it's an amazing place to visit.
8:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I agree with you completely. It is a remarkable place, there's nowhere quite like it in the world. And yeah, the interesting thing is, it's meant to be the window on the west, it's meant to be a model of European modernity, of rationalism, you know, it's sort of anticipating so many of the themes of the Enlightenment. And yet, this guy Weber.
8:52 Tom Holland? Yeah.
8:53 Dominic Sandbrook? The guy who you began with that reading. What struck him when he arrived in St Petersburg was not how European it was, it was actually how non-European. So at the very first public function he went to, he commented on what he called the foul language and the rudeness of the guards. And he was really struck by the fact that he was dressed quite modestly. He realised that everybody else was dressed in what he called trimmed with gold and silver. In other words, what Russians wanted, what they rewarded and valued was not modesty and humility, but bling, basically.
9:29 Tom Holland? So when he turns up, the guards refuse to accept that he's an ambassador, don't they? And he says, well, I'm from Hanover. And they say, I've never heard of it.
9:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
9:36 Tom Holland? They're ostentatiously rude to him.
9:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. And that combination of suspicion of the West, but also the obsession with extravagance and bling as a marker of status. I mean, that would be very familiar to anybody who's visited Russia since the 1990s. I mean, that's effectively the vibe in Moscow or St Petersburg now. Also, a constant of Russian history is the drinking. So Weber couldn't believe how much people drank. He said, I drank a dozen glasses of Hungarian wine at this function. And then Fedor Romanovski, the mock czar, came up and said to him, I want you to drink a full quart of brandy. Of course, Romanovski has a history of getting a bear to strip you if you don't drink all this.
10:15 Tom Holland? Yeah.
10:16 Dominic Sandbrook? And Weber said, you know, I lost my senses, although I had the comfort to observe that the rest of the guests lying asleep on the floor were in no condition to make reflections at my little skill in drinking. Which kind of gives you a sense of exactly what is expected of you if you turn up as a diplomat. You basically have to put on gold robes and just start drinking brandy. A couple of other things that caught his eye. He noticed that people were wearing the latest fashions, so French hooped petticoats, he said, so that a visitor might think he was in London or Paris. So Peter has won that battle with the elite to get them to wear the latest Western fashions.
10:51 Tom Holland? But it's interesting, he name checks petticoats because the women, as we said, are much more enthusiastic about Western fashions than the men tend to be, perhaps because the men are required to, you know, bear stocking calves. And it's chillier, isn't it, in the dead of winter?
11:07 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I guess that's probably true. But what also really strikes him, you know, this is not an ordinary European court. His description is a little bit like a man who's gone to a kind of a gathering of the intergalactic federation or something, and there are kind of aliens there, because he's really astonished by the sight of Uzbeks or Kalmyks with turbans and long robes, their envoys from the courts further east, or people bringing gifts of Chinese silk and Persian cloth. In other words, his description is a perfect example of that common cliche of Russia as the crossroads of kind of Europe and Asia, east and west.
11:39 Tom Holland? But also as a kind of showcase for exoticism.
11:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
11:43 Tom Holland? And this is an age when Europeans in the West are increasingly alert to the exotic nature of the Orient. And so it's amazing for them to find it on the shores of the Baltic.
11:54 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And this, so the fascination with exoticism, this is kind of where the dwarves come in. Now, dwarves are part of the formula of any European court in the late 17th, early 18th century. So most European monarchs will have dwarves on hand. If you think of Diego Bellatgues's great painting Las Meninas.
12:11 Tom Holland? Yeah.
12:12 Dominic Sandbrook? Painted about 50 years before this. Obviously, that's all about the dwarves at the Spanish court.
12:17 Tom Holland? And Dominic, also, just to reiterate, that it is also about giants.
12:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:20 Tom Holland? The king of Russia with his regiments of giants. And Peter has a giant, doesn't he, a Frenchman called Nicolas Bourgeois.
12:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
12:27 Tom Holland? Who's seven foot, two inches, who he'd picked up in Calais. And he's so keen on this, he marries bourgeois to a Finnish giantess that he's found in the hope that they will breed a race of giants. But unfortunately, they don't have children.
12:42 Dominic Sandbrook? But there is something unusual about Peter. He has an absolute fixation on this. He would go to church with an escort of dwarves. He always had dwarf acrobats and jesters on hand, and he was very keen on having dwarves hiding inside pies.
12:55 Tom Holland? Yes, of course, they're always kind of bursting out of pies, aren't they?
12:58 Dominic Sandbrook? So we were talking about this en famille yesterday. You presumably can't bake the pie with the dwarf already inside, but how do you then insert the dwarf into the pie without making a hole in the crust?
13:07 Tom Holland? You make the the content of the pie.
13:09 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
13:10 Tom Holland? On a huge scale, in a pie dish, vast pie dish.
13:13 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
13:14 Tom Holland? And then you have raised pastry. So the dwarf crouches down and you raise the pastry over the dwarf, and then he bursts out.
13:21 Dominic Sandbrook? But surely the pie is hot, or these cold pies, this is more like a quiche?
13:24 Tom Holland? Yeah, it's like quiche, I guess.
13:25 Dominic Sandbrook? Okay, Theo says you put the top on last, so he agrees with you.
13:28 Tom Holland? Yeah.
13:28 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, anyway, I think there's a slight political meaning to this, though. All his life, Peter has liked undermining the seriousness and piety of Orthodox Moscow, going right back to the days with the revolt of the Strelsi and all that stuff. And that dwarf wedding that we opened with came two days after his niece Anne had married the Duke of Corland. And I think the dwarf wedding was clearly a self-conscious parody of the wedding that had happened two days earlier. And apparently Peter was sobbing with laughter throughout this dwarf wedding. He has a sort of, I don't know whether it's unconscious, whether he's reflective about it, but he has a kind of fascination with mimicking the rituals of Russian kind of elite life. He's always engaged in this kind of game
14:13 Dominic Sandbrook? of parody and play acting.
14:15 Tom Holland? And also subverting his own preeminence as a symbol of Russia with all that kind of stuff of dressing up as a common soldier and marching in his own triumphs.
14:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe there's an argument that some of the Roman emperors, like the Julio Claudians, like Caligula or Nero, they were testing taboos all the time, aren't they? That's part of their so-called depravity, is that they're kicking against the conventions of Roman life. But there's something more obviously ludicrous and parodic about what. Peter is doing, I think.
14:43 Tom Holland? It's very strange. It enshrines a sense of the grotesque at the absolute heart of his of his court.
14:49 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, here's a really good example. So this Weber was on hand to see. It's in January seventeen fifteen. His old tutor, his childhood tutor, who was called Nikita Zotov, he'd made the mock Pope of the all drunken synod, as he called it. Zotov was eighty four and he got married to a thirty four year old woman. And to give you a flavour, this is how Weber described the marriage ceremony. The four persons appointed to invite the guests were the greatest stammerers that could be found in all Russia. Old decrepit men who were not able to walk or stand had been picked out to serve for bridesmaids, stewards and waiters. There were four running footmen, the most unwieldy fellows, who had been troubled with gout most of their lifetime and were so fat and bulky they needed others to lead them.
15:33 Dominic Sandbrook? The mock Tsar was brought into this ceremony in a float carried by bears.
15:38 Tom Holland? I was wondering if bears would appear.
15:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Of course.
15:40 Tom Holland? Because that's been another running theme of the series.
15:43 Dominic Sandbrook? The priest, Peter organised the priest, he said, I'll sort this out. And they found a man who was a hundred years old and had lost his eyesight and his memory.
15:51 Dominic Sandbrook? The whole thing just seems like a tremendous lark and a spoof. And yet it is a real wedding. And it's an example, I think, for us of how hard it is to get into the mindset of Peter's world. I mean, it does feel like a like if you were dropped in there through a time machine, you would find it very hard to work out exactly what's going on. And actually, maybe people themselves find it hard to work out.
16:12 Tom Holland? I think Weber does, doesn't he?
16:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, absolutely. Now, this makes it sound like it's all just sort of madness and bellows and bears and stuff. But obviously, there is a seriousness to Peter. So there's a brilliant book by Lindsay Hughes, which is all about Peter the Great and his times, where she talks a lot about Peter's reforms, if you're interested in that. You know, because of the Great Northern War, that turbocharged his efforts to modernise Russia. It's not quite a total war, but it's not far off. So he had to put loads of money into new factories and textiles and iron and copper works and new canals to basically mobilise Russia's natural resources and its manpower for the war. He has a new tax system, a bit like a pole tax called the soul tax. He has a new senate to replace the council of boyars.
16:56 Dominic Sandbrook? He has a system of new government ministries, which are called colleges, which are modelled ironically on the colleges system in Sweden. And the presidents are always Russian, but he brings in foreign vice presidents to run this, to basically run the machinery of government. And above all, I think there's a general ethos that had not really been the case before in Russia. It's not quite a meritocracy, but it's approaching that. And it's symbolized by something called the table of ranks. So there are three ladders, one military, one civilian, and one for the court, with loads of rungs, and you basically move up this. And this is an obsession in all Russian literature, isn't it?
17:34 Tom Holland? Yeah. So Dostoevsky, say Crime and Punishment, for instance, which is set in St Petersburg.
17:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
17:39 Tom Holland? Absolute obsession with getting ranks and the humiliation of not attaining the rank that you're aspiring to.
17:44 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So if you read any story by Chekhov or something, people are always like, what rank are you? Can I move up and can I move down? All of this stuff. It's not a complete meritocracy, of course, and it's not a complete temple to Enlightenment values. Russia is still very corrupt and very authoritarian. The classic example of this is Peter's great drinking pal, Alexander Menschikov, who was at Poltava, who was the guy who'd introduced him to his wife Catherine. Menschikov is, you know, he would fit right into Putin's Russia. He's incredibly corrupt. He's incredibly ambitious. He's sort of accumulating palaces and jewels and bling. He's always getting government contracts and stealing government money, and Peter always forgives him. Peter was furious about all this corruption in the abstract.
18:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And at one point, he dictated an order one day to his chamberlain Pavel Yaguzhinsky, who was actually famously not corrupt. And Peter said, right, I want the death penalty for anyone in my government who so much as steals a piece of rope. And Yaguzhinsky said to him, does your majesty wish to live alone in his empire with no subjects? Because we all steal. Some take a little, some take a great deal, but all of us take something.
18:53 Tom Holland? Do you think that Peter's fascination with parody and grotesquerie perhaps is a way of dealing with the tension between the aspiration of his ideals?
19:07 Tom Holland? And the evident fact that they can't entirely be realised. So he spends some of his time kind of drawing up plans and playing the enlightened despot and all that kind of thing. And the other time, he kind of wallows in drunkenness and dwarf weddings and bears and all that kind of stuff. So it's kind of like the ego and the id to go all Freudian.
19:29 Dominic Sandbrook? I think so. You know, Peter is a very serious person. He has great ambitions for Russia, but of course, his ambitions are colliding with reality, I guess.
19:36 Tom Holland? He needs to let off steam, perhaps.
19:37 Dominic Sandbrook? He needs to let off steam. We're not unfamiliar with it now, of course, that there are politicians whose appeal is partly based on making fun of the established rituals. You know, they're sort of having their cake and eating it. And actually, two really good examples of that are Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. They're sometimes self mocking. They sometimes make fun of the conventions and the expectations that other politicians have adhered to.
20:02 Tom Holland? But I suppose the difference is that they are democratic politicians who have to appeal to an electorate to get into power. Peter doesn't need to worry about any of that.
20:10 Dominic Sandbrook? No, he can do what he likes, can't he? I mean, that's the thing. And he just thinks, you know, when he went on his grand tour, he didn't want to be constrained by protocol, which is why he went in disguise. And I think there is a kind of restlessness to him. You can't imagine Peter, knowing what we do of him, just knuckling down and obeying the rules and the conventions. He has a kind of, is it a way of coping with the terrible traumas of his first 10 years or so?
20:35 Tom Holland? But also for his courtiers, I mean, it must be tricky because you're being encouraged to mock the conventions that uphold life in the palace. But if you go too far, Peter's not gonna like that at all.
20:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, Peter will behead you personally and whip you.
20:51 Tom Holland? Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute tightrope.
20:52 Dominic Sandbrook? It is. So an interesting question about Peter is how much he's an enlightened despot. You know, it's a classic kind of A level question. And I think there are lots of ways in which he does anticipate them. So you could see him as part of a tradition that reaches its kind of most obvious flowering with people like Frederick the Great and Joseph the Second of Austria. The suspicion of organised religion, the dislike of obscurantism, fascination with science and job. Enthusiasm for kind of top down modernisation and whatnot. If you sort of stretch the definition of enlightened despotism, you can see him as the start of a line that leads all the way to Napoleon, I would say. Yeah. There is a comparison to be made between Peter and Napoleon, an autocrat, a modernising autocrat.
21:35 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, Napoleon obviously isn't messing around with dwarves and pies and bears and whatnot in the same way. Well, no, he's not. And so that's why I think Peter is kind of a little bit sui generis. I mean, clearly there is a rationalist element to him. He's a great one for a plan and all of that. But at the same time, he's clearly very interested in the darkness that is the other side of of reason. Yes, there's a lot of darkness to come in this episode when we get to his son. The one thing he does definitely have in common with Napoleon, though, is he's a genuine celebrity, a continental celebrity. There's a wonderful description of him. He made a second tour of Western Europe in seventeen sixteen seventeen, when the war was largely won, and he went to France this time. He stayed at the Louvre, he visited Louis the fifteenth at the Tuileries.
22:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Louis the fifteenth then was only a little boy, seven years old, and Peter made a great fuss of him, hugging him and kissing him. And there were wonderful sort of descriptions of him going to meet scientists and going to talk to Catholic theologians. He's drinking a lot. There's a wonderful description by the Duke of Saint-Simon, the great memoirist of eighteenth century France. You know, he's always asking questions about everything from the tax system to the police, just like he was, you know, almost twenty years earlier when he went to Amsterdam in London. Yeah, we've mentioned a few times Robert K. Mas's book, which is about, what, twenty thousand pages long or something, just this enormous biography. And he gives some lovely sort of portraits of Peter in his prime, and you can see why people found him such a an infectious character.
23:03 Dominic Sandbrook? He would get up at four o'clock in the morning and he carries a notebook and he's always writing stuff down. He loves playing chess, he loves messing around with his lathe, he likes sailing, all of this. He's got some very peculiar quirks. So he has an obsession with cockroaches. Whenever he goes to stay in a room, it has to be fully checked and swept for cockroaches. And of course, the the thing that a lot of people will know about Peter the Great, because we've referred to it in Previous episodes of The Rest Is History about other things. Is this whole thing about curiosities? You mentioned that the giants. So in seventeen eighteen, he sent out a demand. He said, I would like people to send me, and I quote, freaks and monsters. That was his, his words. And Lindsay Hughes in her book says, this produced, and I quote, a three legged baby, a two headed baby,
23:47 Dominic Sandbrook? a baby with its eyes under its nose and its ears below its neck. Siamese twins joined at the chest, a baby with a fish's tail, two dogs born to a sixty year old virgin. I think that's not plausible, frankly. And a baby with two heads, four arms and three legs. And then she says, but the response was not as good as Peter hoped. What was he after?
24:07 Tom Holland? That sounds a pretty good haul to me.
24:08 Dominic Sandbrook? And he would exhibit these in his kunstkamera, his cabinets of curiosities.
24:13 Tom Holland? Which is still there.
24:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
24:14 Tom Holland? I think it was Saint Petersburg's first museum to open up. It's kind of on the opposite side of, of the river from the Hermitage and from that massive equestrian statue of Peter on the far side. And it's an incredible place to visit. It goes back to, you know, that first visit to Amsterdam where he was fascinated by the ability of Dutch scientists to preserve human flesh within bottles. And those bottles are still there and you can see all these kind of deformed children, babies, whatever.
24:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
24:48 Tom Holland? In the bottles. And also there's the skeleton of his giant, Nicolas Bourgeois.
24:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Oh yeah, of course.
24:54 Tom Holland? It's there and it's got his heart. And the heart is absolutely huge. It was one of the most memorable things I remember from visiting Saint Petersburg.
25:02 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, this sort of stuff is quite unsettling, I think.
25:05 Tom Holland? Very unsettling.
25:05 Dominic Sandbrook? And actually, there is a very, very unsettling and dark side to Peter's character. Peter is not just hot tempered, he is unbelievably violent. So, you know, you go in and you report the taxes from such and such a province are not great this year. And he would, he would like beat you with a stick or something. He would often at feasts, when the doors are leaping out of pies and, you know, there's great japes. He will punch his friends in the face if they say the wrong thing. There's occasions where he would draw his sword and attack them and have to be physically restrained. It's sort of like Alexander the Great and Cletus the Black.
25:39 Tom Holland? Which must make him an alarming father. Guess.
25:43 Dominic Sandbrook? I would say he's one of the worst fathers you could wish to have, actually. And this brings us to the sort of meat of this story, which is such a sad, sad business. So. His son Alexis, or Alexis, as he's usually called, was born in February 1690, when Peter was only 18 years old and he was married to Udokia. If you remember Udokia, he was very conservative, the boring one, yes, who he packed off to a nunnery. So he was forced off to a nunnery when Alexis was eight. So Alexis lost his mother when he was eight, and he had a succession of German tutors. And he studied all, you know, the things that you would expect, maths and foreign languages. He's taught how to ride and to fence and whatnot.
26:24 Dominic Sandbrook? This is so tragic because all the reports of him as a young boy are that he's very bright, studious, eager to please, all of this.
26:32 Tom Holland? Do you think that he thinks that he is associated by Peter with his mother?
26:37 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, undoubtedly. Peter despised his wife, Udokia, and I think as a young man was just simply not interested in Alexis at all. And Alexis always had the taint, I think, of his mother. And indeed grows up and ends up living up to that, doesn't he?
26:54 Tom Holland? Yeah. So he's very conscious of the fact that his father kind of despises him for being a mummy's boy?
26:59 Dominic Sandbrook? I think so. I think so. And I think what's a terrible sign is that Peter seems to have given his pal Alexander Menschikov, the very blingy, hard-drinking friend of his, special responsibility for Alexis and says, oh, why don't you take my son under your wing? And there are stories of Menschikov punching Alexis or dragging him by his hair along the floor in front of Peter.
27:21 Tom Holland? Bloody good laugh. Make a man of him.
27:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Making a man of him. When the war breaks out, Peter would sometimes summon him to sort of set piece moments like the storming of Narva. But then he would just forget about him for long stretches, like months or years at a time. So that leaves Alexis in Moscow. And unlike his father, he loves Moscow.
27:40 Tom Holland? So he loves all the icons, the chanting and the candles and all of that?
27:45 Dominic Sandbrook? He does. He's a sort of dreamy teenager and he's very close to his mother's family and they're more conservative. And he falls in with lots of priests and stuff. And I think they encourage this because they see him a champion of the old ways and orthodoxy. And one day he will succeed and they will be able to turn the clock back on all Peter's reforms.
28:02 Tom Holland? And so that's not boosting his profile with Peter, is it?
28:05 Dominic Sandbrook? No, not at all. But also temperamentally, they're so different. Peter, as we've discussed, is so physical, he's so energetic, he's so self-confident and gregarious.
28:15 Tom Holland? And not bookish. His education had been with the lathe.
28:20 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And Alexis is very bookish and he's very anxious and melancholy. He's clearly terrified of his father. So when Peter would summon him, he would often make himself ill by necking medicine, you know, to try to get out of meeting him.
28:32 Tom Holland? Like getting out of PE.
28:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And there's a brilliant example of this. He went off to study in Dresden. And Peter sent him a message and said, I look forward to seeing your geometrical drawings. You can draw me a fort. Classic Peter. And Alexis was so terrified that he wouldn't be able to do it, that he tried to shoot himself in the hand. But he missed, he was shaking so much, he ended up really badly burning himself with the sort of the pistol. Anyway.
28:57 Dominic Sandbrook? In seventeen ten, so when Alexis was turning twenty, Peter arranged for him to marry a German princess called Charlotte of Wolfenbeutel. And at first, everything seemed fine. Alexis said, well, she's quite nice. Yeah, we get on all right. They got married in Saxony, but they didn't see each other much for the first couple of years. They married in seventeen eleven. They sort of see each other off and on. And then by seventeen thirteen, when they're reunited in St Petersburg, Alexis has started drinking a lot. And he starts to be very rude to her and to abuse her in front of the servants. And he says, I wish I'd never married you. I actually don't like you at all. But they are still sleeping together because in early seventeen fourteen, she's heavily pregnant with their daughter.
29:40 Dominic Sandbrook? And Alexis walks out of the house with the words, goodbye, I'm going to Carlsbad. It's Bar town. And he goes off to Carlsbad and he doesn't write to her for the next six months.
29:53 Tom Holland? So actually, this is kind of behaviour like Peter's, isn't it? Ironically, to his mum.
29:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And she writes to him, oh, I've had a daughter, blah, blah, blah. And he returns her letters unread. Then in December seventeen fourteen, he returns to Charlotte, but things are worse than ever. He's now drinking loads of brandy a day. He's also got this girl, this Finnish girl, who was a prisoner of war from the Great Northern War, who he met at a friend's house. This girl is called Aphra Senia. And he moves Afra Senior, she's a teenager, he moves her into a wing of his house and he spends all his time with Afra Senior. Charlotte, who's living in the other bit of the house, he doesn't talk to her at all. She has a terrible leak in her pet room and water is pouring in and he's, he won't even pay to repair the leak.
30:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And yet, once a week, he will still pad along the corridors to Charlotte's room, as Robert K Massey puts it, "coming grimly to make love in hopes of fathering a son to secure his own succession to the throne." So Charlotte is very miserable. She's had a terrible time. She gives birth to a second child in seventeen fifteen, who's going to end up becoming Peter the Second. But nine days later, she dies of postpartum fever. And that's the end of her. It's a tragic story. Now, on the day of her funeral, Peter hands Alexis her letter. And he says, I mean, imagine getting this letter from your dad. It says, "Look at me, I'm absolutely brilliant. I've done all these things for, for Russia. I'm a tremendous man. You, you know, you're an absolute shower of a man. You're a terrible person. And it's not because of your treatment."
31:24 Dominic Sandbrook? He doesn't even mention Alexis's treatment of his wife, who's dead. "You have no inclination to learn war, you don't apply yourself to it." Again, Peter's obsession with the fate of Constantinople. "We don't want to follow the Greeks with whom we are united by the same profession of faith. Idleness and repose weaken them and brought them to that slavery to which they are now so long since reduced. And if you don't mend your ways," says Peter, "I will deprive you of the succession as one may cut off a useless member."
31:55 Tom Holland? So that must have helped him with his lack of self-confidence.
31:57 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, with his mental health. Well, Alexis goes straight to his friends and says, "What do you think about this?" And they unanimously say to him, "Do you know what? You should just walk away. You are not suited to be the Tsar. Tell your father you just don't want it." So Alexis writes back to Peter and he says, "I don't want it. The strength of my mind and of my body is much decayed by sicknesses. I do not think myself fit for government. Please exclude me from the succession. Just let me go in peace to be a private citizen." Peter is livid. A month later, he's been brooding for a month, and then he writes back to Alexis and he says, "You're going to throw away everything I've done for Russia. I cannot resolve to let you live on according to your free will like an amphibious creature,
32:40 Dominic Sandbrook? neither fish nor flesh. Change therefore your conduct and either strive to render yourself worthy of the succession or become a monk." And he says, when you get this letter, answer me straight away. If you fail to do it, I shall treat you as a criminal.
32:59 Tom Holland? God, no wonder he was drinking.
33:01 Dominic Sandbrook? So Alexis says, I will become a monk, actually. Now you mention it. And Peter is shocked by this because Alexis has called his bluff.
33:08 Tom Holland? Well, because he gets surprised by a friend, doesn't he? That, you know, you can become a monk, but you can stop being a monk as well.
33:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. At any point. This is win win. And Peter says, oh, well, actually, becoming a monk is not easy for a young man. Think about it a little more. I will wait six more months. So six more months pass. Peter's off on campaign in the West, in Germany. Alexis is in St Petersburg, holed up miserably with Afra senior, his sort of teenage mistress.
33:36 Tom Holland? Drinking like a fish.
33:36 Dominic Sandbrook? Drinking like a fish, not like an amphibious creature.
33:39 Tom Holland? No.
33:40 Dominic Sandbrook? Denuinely like a fish. And then on the 26th of August, 1716, Peter writes to him from Copenhagen. And he says, I need your final answer. Monk or crown prince? Make your mind up. And he waits, waits, and there's no reply. And then he hears reports that Alexis has left St Petersburg and he is coming west to Pomerania. And he thinks, well, fine, he's coming to tell me his answer in person. Great. I look forward to it. And the weeks pass and Alexis, there's nowhere to be seen. And then comes, not for the first time in this series, bombshell news.
34:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Alexis has got as far as Danzig, Gdansk. But nobody has seen him since and nobody knows where he is. Tom, he has vanished into thin air.
34:35 Tom Holland? Dominic, this is a stunning development, an incredible twist. And I think it is so shocking that we should take a break and draw our breath. And then we will come back for the final part of this epic series and find out what has happened to Alexis.
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36:55 Tom Holland? Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. And Dominic, you left us on the edge of our seats. The crown prince of Russia has vanished. Where's he gone?
37:03 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. Tom, the date is the 10th of November, 1716. And we're in Vienna.
37:10 Dominic Sandbrook? And with a guy called Count Schonborn, who's the Vice Chancellor of the Habsburg Imperial Court, and he's just retired to bed, surely after a day stuffing himself with schnitzel cake and listening to nice classical music or some such Austrian behaviour. And a servant comes in and says, you know, my lord, there's a, there's a man at the door. He says he's Grand Duke Alexis, son of Peter the Great. And Schonborn kind of gets back out of bed and he starts putting his clothes back on. And suddenly the door swings open and this man bursts in. He's hysterical, he's sobbing, he's pacing the room like a madman. He is Alexis. He has fled Russia in terror for his life and arrived in Vienna.
37:51 Tom Holland? So this is great news for the Austrian Emperor.
37:54 Dominic Sandbrook? So the Austrian Emperor is called Charles VI, and he's now in a very difficult position.
37:58 Tom Holland? Nightmare.
37:59 Dominic Sandbrook? What the hell am I going to do now? Do I house him? Do I send him back to his father? What do I do? I mean, I can't think of many examples in history where something like this has happened. And he says, well, we'll just keep the whole thing top secret. And he sends Alexis to a remote castle in the northern Tyrol called Erenberg. And so for the next few months, Alexis is housed in this Austrian castle in the strictest secrecy. He's travelled with four Russian servants. He's travelled with loads of books, because we said he's very bookish, and this girlfriend of his, Afra Senior, this Finnish girl, who's disguised as a boy.
38:34 Tom Holland? I mean, it is very like a kind of 18th century melodrama on the stage, isn't it?
38:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Right. Mozart would make an opera out of this.
38:40 Tom Holland? They love a girlfriend who's disguised as a page.
38:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So he's treated very generously. He wants for nothing, but no one is allowed near the castle and the grounds are patrolled by Austrian bodyguards. Now, Peter has gone absolutely ballistic that his son has vanished. And he has sent Russian agents and diplomats across Central Europe to search for him. And one of these men who's been told to look for him is the ambassador to Vienna, is a man called Vezelovsky, and he personally tries to retrace Alexis's steps. He goes up to Danzig and he asks questions. Have you seen this man? And eventually he finds that a man who was calling himself Kokanski, clearly spoke with a heavy Russian accent, had stayed at various post houses on the road down south towards Austria.
39:27 Dominic Sandbrook? And Vezelovsky enlists a Russian guard captain called Rumyansov, who's a huge giant of a man, another giant,
39:33 Tom Holland? Yeah.
39:34 Dominic Sandbrook? to look into this. And Rumyansov manages to bribe a man in the Imperial Chancery in Vienna, who says to him, I think you should look in the Tyrell. Rumyansov goes to the Tyrell and he asks around, and he hears rumours of this stranger at Ehrenberg Castle. And he goes as close as he can to the castle, and he catches a glimpse of somebody who looks suspiciously like he might be Alexis. The Russian ambassador, armed with this news, goes to see the Habsburg Emperor Charles and gives him a letter from Peter. Very polite letter, not an ultimatum, saying, could you please send back my son? And the Emperor sends a secretary to the castle to break this news to Alexis. Alexis bursts into floods of tears and says, I will not go, I will not go back to my father.
40:18 Dominic Sandbrook? And so the Emperor says, okay, well, I will move you in secret to the opposite end of my empire, which is Naples. And so in this bonkers scene, Austrian Imperial agents load Alexis and Afressina and their servants onto a coach, and they send them off towards Naples.
40:36 Tom Holland? And Afressina is still disguised as a boy, right?
40:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Still disguised as a boy, but...
40:41 Tom Holland? Is pregnant.
40:41 Dominic Sandbrook? But is pregnant by Alexis, exactly. And what is worse, they're meant to be travelling incognito, but they're drinking like fish again on the coach, generally drawing attention to themselves. Anyway, they get to Naples in May seventeen seventeen.
40:56 Dominic Sandbrook? And they are put up in the Castel Sant'Elmo, which overlooks the city. By this point, Africena is clearly very heavily pregnant. The months go by and it actually, they breathe a sigh of relief and they think, great, we've got away. We've pulled this off. But in fact, they had been spotted on the ride south, of course, because they've drawn attention to themselves. This giant, Rum Yansov, and his agents have been tracking them the whole time. And when they're certain that they're in Naples and they've got them, they send a message to Peter and they say this is where they are. So Peter now sends another representative to Vienna, and this is his very best man. This is a guy called Piotr Tolstoy, Count Tolstoy, from the great novel-writing dynasty.
41:39 Dominic Sandbrook? And Tolstoy is your dictionary definition of a wily old fox.
41:43 Tom Holland? Because he'd been Russia's first ambassador to Constantinople, hadn't he?
41:47 Dominic Sandbrook? He had, and he'd played it very well.
41:49 Tom Holland? He'd also, when the Ottomans went to war, he'd been locked up.
41:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes.
41:52 Tom Holland? Because there was no kind of Geneva Convention that stopped that happening.
41:56 Dominic Sandbrook? And he's also, for people who've been listening to the rest of history for a long time, he is the guy who had procured the services of that man, Hannibal.
42:04 Tom Holland? Yes, of course.
42:05 Dominic Sandbrook? The Cameroonian slave general of Peter the Great, I think the title of that episode was.
42:09 Tom Holland? Of course, yeah.
42:10 Dominic Sandbrook? So it was Tolstoy who had got him.
42:12 Tom Holland? Yes, he found him in the slave markets of Constantinople.
42:14 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. Well, Tolstoy went straight to the Habsburg emperor. You know, and he said, look, as a sovereign and as a father, Peter really insists that you should give his son back. And the emperor says, listen, I can't force him, Alexis is a grown man. But you have my permission to go to Naples and talk to him yourself. So Count Tolstoy goes down to Naples. And on the 26th of September, 1717, Alexis is invited to the Viceroy's Palace. And when he gets there, listeners who enjoy this kind of thing, it is like the moment in The Empire Strikes Back, when Lando Calrissian betrays Han and Leia and Co. to Darth Vader. Because the door opens and Alexis sees to his horror that Count Tolstoy is there. And Tolstoy's brought a letter from his father.
42:59 Dominic Sandbrook? From Peter. And Peter says to him, if you come back, I will pardon and I will love you better than ever. If you refuse, then I curse you forever and I will declare you a traitor and find a way to treat you as such, meaning I will send men with Novichok or something to bump you off. That this is the threat. Alexis is clearly terrified. He asks for time to make up his mind and then he decides, I can't do it. I just can't face my father. I don't want to go back to Russia. And Tolstoy now turns the knife. He says, well, actually, if you don't go, your father has decided to march on Italy at the head of an army to bring you back. But crucially, Tolstoy bribes Afressina to persuade her lover to go back home.
43:43 Tom Holland? He is a wily old fox, isn't he?
43:45 Dominic Sandbrook? He is a wily old fox and Afressina, I don't think is overburdened with moral scruples. I think it's fair to say. So Alexis breaks down in tears and he says, all right, I'll go back on two conditions. One, that I can live quietly in the country and two, that I can live with Afressina because I love her so much and she's so important to me. And Peter says, yeah, fine, whatever, as long as you come. So off they go, north from Naples. They get to Venice and there Tolstoy persuades him to leave Afressina behind. He says, she's heavily pregnant. She doesn't want to be crossing the Alps. So they leave her behind. By January seventeen eighteen, they've reached Riga, of course, now occupied by Russian troops. And Alexis is immediately kind of loaded into a carriage and sent to Tver, which is
44:30 Dominic Sandbrook? near Moscow, to await his father. And when Alexis's old friends hear that he's coming back to Russia, they are horrified. One of his friends, Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, said, what a mug Alexis is. He will have a coffin rather than a wedding. So, third of February seventeen eighteen, all the bigwigs of Russia assemble in the great audience hall of the Kremlin. Clergy, noblemen, public officials, the place is surrounded by battalions of guardsmen. Peter comes in and he takes his place on the throne. And then Alexis is escorted in by Count Tolstoy and he falls to his knees and begs his father for pardon. Peter denounces him and then he says, I will pardon you.
45:16 Dominic Sandbrook? But there is one condition which Peter hasn't actually mentioned till now. He says, "You must reveal the truth of your flight and the names of all your fellow conspirators."
45:25 Tom Holland? And so Peter is assuming that Alexis hasn't just been operating on his own, but is part of a much broader plot to perhaps overthrow Peter, to destabilise his throne, whatever.
45:38 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So here I think we come to the nub of this story, which is a kind of a link between the very first episode we did, which is about the feud between Peter and Sophia and the Streltsi and that kind of paranoia and stuff.
45:50 Tom Holland? And which ended up in a violent kind of wave of torture, didn't he? When the Streltsi do their final rebellion. And he's convinced that there's a conspiracy there that wasn't actually there.
45:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. And now I think this, it looks back to that, but also so many of the themes of this anticipate frankly 20th century Russian history. Show trials, suspicion, paranoia, an obsessive search for enemies within. Because Peter is clearly, I guess for understandable reasons, given his boyhood, he is obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy against him. And if there isn't one, he almost feels the need to invent it because there must be one. So a few days after this great sort of assembly, he says to Alexis, "I need you to list for me everybody you've ever spoken to about our relationship." And Alexis, who is completely gullible,
46:44 Dominic Sandbrook? produces this huge list of relatives and courtiers and friends and tutors. And as soon as Peter has the list in his hands, he sends orders to Alexander Menschikov in St Petersburg. "Close the gates and seal off the city. And now send your agents out to round up every single person on this list." So that's aristocrats, it's bishops, it's officers, all Alexis's former servants. "We're going to interrogate them all and get to the bottom of this conspiracy." Now, one of the people on this list... It's Alexis's mother, Peter's ex-wife, Eudokia.
47:17 Tom Holland? So she's still around?
47:18 Dominic Sandbrook? She's been in the monastery in Suzdal for the last nineteen years, but she has been writing to Alexis. And there is worse. Peter had just forgotten about her, but when his agents arrive, they find she's given up being a nun.
47:32 Tom Holland? Oh, so she's grown her hair back?
47:33 Dominic Sandbrook? Her hair has returned, and what is more, she has been living in a relationship with the captain of her guards, the man who's meant to be guarding her, who's a man called Stepan Glebov. And so Peter says, what? And he has Glebov arrested, as well as the head of the convent and some of the nuns.
47:51 Tom Holland? Dominic, I would not want to be in Glebov's boots.
47:53 Dominic Sandbrook? You absolutely would not, for reasons that will now become apparent. So now, they begin the show trials. These are held in the Great Hall of the Kremlin. Peter himself acts as chief prosecutor, and he makes the case against all of the names on this list. To give the example of Eudokia in the convent, the nuns, who have done nothing, are sentenced to be publicly flogged. Eudokia is sent to a really remote convent up in the north. But some of the other prisoners are sentenced to death, or beaten with a knout, or exiled.
48:28 Tom Holland? Because what judge can resist the appeal of the prosecutor if the prosecutor is the Tsar?
48:32 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. So a lot of the sentences were carried out in Red Square. I mean, it's the classic, you know, Peter the Great carry-on of people being broken with hammers on the wheel, people having their noses sliced off, having their tongues ripped out. But the worst fate of all is reserved for this bloke, Stepan Glebov, the captain of the guards guarding Eudokia. And remember, he has done nothing wrong.
48:54 Tom Holland? Well, he has slept with Peter's ex-wife.
48:55 Dominic Sandbrook? But she's his ex-wife.
48:57 Tom Holland? I wouldn't sleep with Peter the Great's ex-wife.
48:59 Dominic Sandbrook? No, fair enough. Well, I mean, you don't want to end up like this. So Glebov is lashed with a knout, and he's burned with red-hot irons. He's stretched out on a plank with spikes driven into his flesh and left there for three days. And they keep saying to him, confess! And he says, confess what? Like, I was never part of any conspiracy. And finally, they take Glebov and they impale him on a wooden stake, which some accounts say was so artfully inserted that it missed all his vital organs. And then he's left on the stake to sort of slowly descend, I suppose. I don't know what happens to you if you're piled on a stake. It took him 14 hours to die. Oh, God. I mean, there may well be grimmer ways to die, but I can't think of many. No. And even
49:42 Dominic Sandbrook? though he's found no evidence of the conspiracy, Peter, it never occurs to him that there isn't one, and none of his henchmen ever argue with him about it.
49:50 Tom Holland? Then they would come under suspicion.
49:52 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. It feels very much reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. Because how can you prove your innocence of a conspiracy that never actually existed? Now, as for Alexis, the best that he can probably hope for at this point is to be exiled to a monastery. But of course, if Peter believes he was really the centre of a conspiracy, then the implication is that the conspiracy would continue, that even if he's in a monastery, he will be the focus for plots and opposition. So for the time being, Peter keeps him under house arrest in St Petersburg. And all the time Alexis, poor Alexis, who is such a tragic figure, and is so, is so much his own worst advocate. He's begging and begging, please, can I see
50:34 Dominic Sandbrook? Afra Senior? You promised me that I could live with her. I love her so much. And finally, she is brought to the capital and questioned. And it all goes horribly wrong for Alexis.
50:46 Tom Holland? Does she stand by him?
50:49 Dominic Sandbrook? She does not, Tom. She does not. She does not stand by her man.
50:52 Tom Holland? No.
50:53 Dominic Sandbrook? So in her luggage, Peter's agents find drafts of letters that Alexis had written to various kind of bigwigs in Russia complaining about his treatment. And Peter has Afra Senior, he questions her personally. He has her brought to see him, and he sits down and questions. It must have been terrifying for her. And she cracked straight away. She said, I never wanted to go. Alexis forced me. I only slept with him under duress. He was always whining about you, always complaining. He was always criticizing you to the Habsburg emperor. Whenever he heard of a mutiny or rumours of mutinies in the Russian army, Alexis was delighted. He often talked about what he would do when he became Tsar. He said he'd scrap all your reforms. He would abandon St Petersburg. He'd give power back to the church.
51:37 Tom Holland? He hates lathes. He hates ships.
51:39 Dominic Sandbrook? He'd give away all your foreign conquests. And Peter says, well, this is the proof. Here we go. He has Alexis brought in.
51:47 Tom Holland? What happens to Afressinia?
51:49 Dominic Sandbrook? She's not punished at all, not punished at all. And when Alexis is brought in, he collapses. He has a kind of nervous breakdown. He says to his father, yes, I did write to the Habsburg emperor about you. I did speak ill of you, but only when I was drunk. Yes, I did talk about what I would do when I rule Russia, but I never plotted against you or meant to kill you. And then Peter says, well, what about this business about you rejoicing when you heard reports of mutinies and rebellions? And now Alexis gives a dementedly self-destructive answer. He says, um, I was excited at the talk of mutinies, but I believe they would only call for me when you were dead because they planned to kill you. I didn't believe they would dethrone you and let you live. But if they'd called me in your lifetime, probably I would have gone if they had been strong enough.
52:33 Tom Holland? Yeah, that is mad.
52:34 Dominic Sandbrook? It's a rambling but incredibly self-incriminating answer. So Alexis is arrested and he's imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which, as you said, Tom, is the sort of foundation stone of St Petersburg. And his show trial begins in June, 14th of June. And again, Peter acts as the prosecutor himself. He says, Alexis, he fled to Austria as part of a plot. He was plotting with the Habsburg emperor. He was intending to seize the throne with Russian mutineers and rebels and with foreign military aid, and he's been lying about it ever since. And when Peter's made the case, Alexis doesn't deny it. He confesses. He confesses to a conspiracy that I don't believe, and I don't think any historian believes, existed.
53:19 Tom Holland? So why is he doing that?
53:19 Dominic Sandbrook? Why did people do it in the 1930s? They're broken and they hope this is the only way to get clemency because it's very clear that the court will not accept his claim that he's not guilty. So maybe the best thing to do is to pretend that he is guilty and beg for forgiveness. But Peter doesn't forgive him. At Peter's request, the court orders further interrogation. And what this means is the darkest chapter of all in many ways in Peter's story, I think. So on the 19th of June, Alexis was given 25 lashes of the knout. That will often be enough to kill you. You know, you're beaten with this giant leather whip.
53:57 Tom Holland? Chunks of flesh off your back.
53:59 Dominic Sandbrook? Five days later, he's given another fifteen lashes and his back has now been completely destroyed. It's just a sort of mass of bleeding flesh. And now he's confessing to anything. He tells Count Tolstoy, yes, I wanted my father dead. I would have paid the Austrians to intervene militarily against him. And so that evening, armed with that, the court sentences him to death. He is guilty, they say, of a horrid double patricide, first against the father of his country and next against his father by nature. And all of Peter's cronies and henchmen sign their names on this sentence. So the question is, will Peter order the sentence against his own son, who really deep down has done nothing wrong, to be carried out? And everyone's waiting to find out the answer.
54:44 Dominic Sandbrook? And then on Tuesday, the twenty sixth of June, the rumours sweep Saint Petersburg that Alexis has dropped dead of a stroke of some kind. And the story is given out that he had this stroke. Peter rushed to his bedside in the prison. Alexis made a full confession. He repented. Father and son embraced. Alexis was given the last rites and that was the end of that. But actually, this isn't what happened. We know what happened from the logbook of the fortress. Actually, earlier that morning, Peter and his closest cronies, including Count Tolstoy and including Alexander Menschikov, gathered in the torture chamber and had Alexis brought to them. And they worked on him for three hours.
55:28 Dominic Sandbrook? And a few hours later, Alexis died, effectively having been tortured to death by his own father. So it's just an unbelievably horrifying story. And in his biography, Peter the Great, Robert K Massey compares it with Ivan the Terrible killing his own son, which is a very famous scene in Russian history. It's a very famous painting by Ilya Repin. And the difference is that Ivan the Terrible killed his own son by lashing out against him in a fit of rage. And then was full of remorse that he had killed his son.
56:00 Tom Holland? But the torture is kind of premeditated.
56:02 Dominic Sandbrook? I mean, if you think about the torture, the interrogations, the public humiliation, that had gone on for weeks. And arguably was part of a pattern that had gone on for years.
56:10 Tom Holland? But now they're turning up, the poor man has his back lashed to pieces. And they're inflicting God knows what further tortures on him.
56:16 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah. Hard to imagine, I think, any father doing that to their own child. But. Peter often behaves in ways that rather stretch the imagination, I guess.
56:26 Tom Holland? Yeah.
56:27 Dominic Sandbrook? Alexis was given a state funeral and reports that Peter wept at it. But we know that he also that week went to loads of banquets and balls to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Paltava. And afterwards, he had a medal struck as if he was celebrating a victory with the image of the sun breaking through clouds. And the inscription read, the horizon has cleared. I mean, imagine doing that about the death of your own child.
56:49 Tom Holland? I guess the issue is that Alexis was the obvious heir. So what now about the succession?
56:54 Dominic Sandbrook? He's got a couple of daughters, teenage daughters, Anna and Elizabeth. And he's got Alexis's son, Peter, who's only three. But actually, none of them are quite right. And so he has Catherine, his wife, the former Marta Skavronskaya.
57:10 Tom Holland? The jolly one.
57:10 Dominic Sandbrook? Yes, he has her crowned as empress. He has a big coronation for her. This is in seventeen twenty four. This is clearly a marker that she is going to be his successor, which is an amazing thing. I mean, she's an illiterate Lithuanian peasant girl who had come to Russia as a prisoner. But it's a sign of Peter's dominance, his autocratic sway.
57:30 Tom Holland? Yeah.
57:30 Dominic Sandbrook? You know, something unthinkable in the sixteen eighties when he was growing up.
57:35 Tom Holland? A measure of just how much he's transformed Russia, I guess, over the course of his life. And how old is he by this point?
57:41 Dominic Sandbrook? So he's now fifty two. He's not an old man. He's younger than you, Tom.
57:47 Tom Holland? He's old.
57:47 Dominic Sandbrook? But I think it's fair to say he's not a lean, fit, honed figure as you are. He's a very moody, depressed figure. And there's endless corruption scandals, which are really getting him down. So there's a very famous one, Catherine Chamberlain, who's called William Mons, who is the brother of Peter's old mistress, Anna. He's been in a huge bribery scandal. Peter has him beheaded and he gives Catherine Mons's head in a jar.
58:11 Tom Holland? Preserved, like all the babies in the museum.
58:15 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, preserved. Odd thing to do to your wife, but there you go. Peter at this stage is really not a well man. So he's been boozing constantly for decades and that has taken its toll. And he has also, we promised sort of spa related action. He's been drinking colossal amounts of ferrus mineral water. So he would drink 21 glasses of ferrus mineral water every morning.
58:37 Tom Holland? And would he do this for his health?
58:39 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, but I don't think it does do you any good. I think even the most enthusiastic habitué of a German spa would say, come on, that's a bit much.
58:46 Tom Holland? And does it have any malign consequences?
58:48 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, now we're going to get into the thorny issue of Peter's bladder. Peter has a long running urinary infection, which probably left him in agony for two years. And by the late summer of 1724, he's in unbelievable agony. He can't go to the toilet at all. And they finally get a surgeon from England who inserts a catheter up him and manages to extract a huge amount of blood and pus from Peter's bladder.
59:16 Tom Holland? I mean, you would not want to be the doctor that has to do that to Peter, would you?
59:20 Dominic Sandbrook? But nor would you want to be at the other end of the doctor's catheter, I think.
59:23 Tom Holland? No, you wouldn't.
59:24 Dominic Sandbrook? So eventually he passes this huge stone and things seem to improve. But then in January 1725, he collapses. The doctors investigate, there's more catheter action. And they find out something has gone terribly wrong with his bladder and they managed to remove two litres of putrid urine.
59:43 Tom Holland? Oh, God. I think that's the the first appearance of putrid urine on the rest is history.
59:48 Dominic Sandbrook? In more than 700 episodes.
59:50 Tom Holland? So an exciting moment in the history of this podcast.
59:53 Dominic Sandbrook? Well, Peter seems to recover a little bit, but then he goes into massive convulsions. And on the afternoon of the 27th of January 1725, he asks for a writing tablet. And on the writing tablet, he writes the words, leave everything to.
1:00:07 Tom Holland? Then he falls down.
1:00:08 Dominic Sandbrook? Hollywood timing. He passes out, drops the pen and never wakes up again. And he died at six o'clock the next morning with Catherine at his bedside. And a last nice detail for you. When he was dead, the doctors cut him open and they found his bladder had been infected with gangrene. And I quote from Robert K. Massey, "His sphincter muscle was so swollen and so hard that only with difficulty could it be cut by a knife."
1:00:34 Tom Holland? Oh, God.
1:00:35 Dominic Sandbrook? So just as he wanted, Catherine succeeded him. But Menshikov was the real ruler of Russia.
1:00:40 Tom Holland? So he's the bling oligarch guy.
1:00:41 Dominic Sandbrook? The bling oligarch. That continued for another, what, two years? And then she died of TB. Then Alexis's son, Peter, became a boy emperor. He didn't last long either. He died of smallpox when he was 14. Then Peter's niece Anna became empress for ten years. And then her baby son Ivan became emperor for a year. And then finally, Peter's daughter Elizabeth became empress.
1:01:06 Tom Holland? There's a lot of babies and women there.
1:01:07 Dominic Sandbrook? So four decades after Peter's death, Russia, which had never been ruled by a woman before, was ruled by a woman, a small boy, a woman, a baby, and then a woman.
1:01:19 Tom Holland? And it's Sophia dead by this point.
1:01:21 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, Sophia is gone.
1:01:22 Tom Holland? But I mean, if she weren't, she would have a wry smile on her lips.
1:01:25 Dominic Sandbrook? A wry smile, but also a sense of frustration because she would have probably done a better job than any of them.
1:01:29 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:01:29 Dominic Sandbrook? But the thing is, I suppose this is testament to Peter's extraordinary achievements. That if you'd said this to a Russian in the 1680s or something, this will be the succession. They've said, what? Oh, that'll be terrible for Russia. We'll fall apart completely. But of course, even though the faces at the top keep changing and none of them are quite right, Russia's status is now so established as a great power that it endures.
1:01:52 Tom Holland? And presumably also the institution of the of the Sodom.
1:01:55 Dominic Sandbrook? Exactly. The empire, the emperor, the empress, the autocracy is firmly established.
1:02:01 Tom Holland? And that's the paradox of Peter's life, isn't it? That he westernises, but the effect of the westernisation is to consolidate the autocracy that had always been traditional in Russia.
1:02:11 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it, actually. That the very process of modernisation, which is so top-down, entrenches the power of the autocrats and the kind of centralisation of Russia and concentrates power even more in the in the capital. And maybe also because he was succeeded by such obviously lesser figures, figures it was easy to dismiss, I guess, that meant that his star even posthumously burned even more brightly. So that even, you know, 100, 150 years later, people still look to Peter as the exemplar, as indeed they still do today to some degree. So in her brilliant book about Peter the Great, Lindsay Hughes quotes a Pan Slav historian
1:02:56 Dominic Sandbrook? called Mikhail Pogodin in 1841, one of the great 19th century historians of Russia. And he said, wherever we look, everywhere we encounter that colossal figure, a figure which is still stretching, as it were, his arms over us and which it seems will never disappear from sight, no matter how far we advance in the future. And people did subsequently try to downplay him a bit. So if you were really enthusiastic kind of Slavophile, you know, and admire of orthodoxy and the old ways and stuff, you might distrust Peter as a pro-Western modernizer. The first communist historians tried to downgrade kind of great men and said, oh, he's just a sort of a vehicle for mercantile gentry capitalism.
1:03:38 Dominic Sandbrook? But Stalin invoked him and Vladimir Putin has invoked him. We discussed how Putin has explicitly compared the war in Ukraine with the Great Northern War and compared himself with Peter recapturing what was always Russia's and all of this kind of business. What do you make of him, Tom?
1:03:57 Tom Holland? Well, I mean, he is clearly a Titanic figure in the consequences that his reign has for geopolitics enduring into the present day. He clearly plays a key role in setting up that tension in Russia, which again endures to this day between its kind of westernizing tendencies and its more traditional tendencies. But also, he's the embodiment of why the hope that the process of westernization, whether it's introducing the Enlightenment back in the 18th century or democracy in the wake of the fall of communism, why it never leads to the kind of establishment of state that people in Western Europe and
1:04:41 Tom Holland? beyond tend to hope for.
1:04:43 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah.
1:04:43 Tom Holland? Because I guess that he serves as an embodiment of everything that makes Russia seem stupendous, but also terrifying.
1:04:51 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I mean, I think in many ways, there are greatly attractive parts of his character. The curiosity, the energy, the enthusiasm for novelty, you know, the sailing and the love of going to lectures in Holland or in London and stuff. And yet, especially when we've done that final episode.
1:05:09 Tom Holland? Yeah.
1:05:10 Dominic Sandbrook? The cruelty, the paranoia, the autocracy, they seem so obviously to anticipate the cruelties of Russian history that follow.
1:05:19 Tom Holland? Well, there are two great bouts of cruelty, aren't there? So there's Astralcy as well.
1:05:23 Dominic Sandbrook? Yeah, Astralcy as well. And the truth of the matter is, he is a very violent, often angry man. I mean, for me personally, a father who tortures his son to death. I think that's inexcusable.
1:05:39 Tom Holland? I mean, also, I'm very much team Charles the 12th.
1:05:42 Dominic Sandbrook? Are you?
1:05:43 Tom Holland? I wish that he'd won the battle of Poltava.
1:05:45 Dominic Sandbrook? Tom, I don't disagree with you at all. You know, I love a Swedish empire. Anyway, I've quoted a lot, a brilliant book on which I've relied very heavily, which is Robert K. Massey's biography of Peter the Great, which is one of the most capacious. And it's incredibly readable, swashbuckling story. It's as much about Charles the 12th as it is about Peter, and I really recommend it. So it seems only fair to end with his very last lines, which I think are beautifully judged. He says of Peter, "He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason, no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?"
1:06:20 Tom Holland? Fabulous, Dominic. Thank you so much, and thank you, everyone, for listening to this Titanic series. We will be back next week with another Titanic figure, Hannibal. So we will see you then. Goodbye.
1:06:35 Dominic Sandbrook? Goodbye.
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