The feeble Michael had, we saw, provided an heir to the golden throne, and, owing to the comparative length of his reign, his son Alexis had reached a mature age when his turn came to rule. The portraits of all the Tsars have been so thickly overlaid with rhetorical paint that we have some difficulty in discerning their true historical features. Alexis seems to have been a ruler of generally excellent intentions and very moderate ability. He was at the time of his accession a youth of sixteen: a tall, handsome youth, physically stronger than his father and fond of hunting, but nervous and irritable. It needed no keenness of vision to see that Russia was in a deplorable condition. The nobles and officials were as corrupt as ever; the fiscal system and administration of justice were atrocious; the merchants struggled feebly against foreign competition, and the serfs were crushed to the ground under their burdens. Alexis assuredly resented this corruption and incompetence, and sustained the small efforts of his father and grandfather to improve the country.

The Tsar’s mother died soon after his accession, and the customary place of chief favourite and virtual ruler fell to Boris Ivanovitch Morozoff, who had for the preceding three years had charge of the prince’s education. Morozoff had the ambition and moral indelicacy which were common to his time and class, and he and his friends grew rich. But there was one cloud on the horizon of their prosperity. Alexis must soon marry, and behind the bride, whoever she might be, Morozoff and his friends saw the usual crowd of greedy relatives hastening to Moscow and clamouring for wealth and power. Morozoff cleverly conceived his plans to avoid this danger.

In the early part of the year 1647 the thrilling message went through the Empire that the young Tsar would choose a bride, and every noble or commoner who had, or thought that he had, a youthful daughter with the required degree of health, beauty, and virtue, made application to the officials. A swarm of officers spread over the Empire and conducted the preliminary examination. Then some two hundred picked beauties, rotund and blushing, were drafted to the imperial palace and packed into what might seem to be a large harem. At night, when the palpitating maids had retired to bed, the Tsar and his medical attendant went from bed to bed and inspected the very wakeful beauties. The golden rose fell on this occasion to Euphemia Voievolojski, the daughter of a noble who was in poor circumstances. But the unexpected honour was too much for the obscure provincial girl. She fainted from joy and agitation, and the party of Morozoff, who were apprehensive of the coming of rivals, put a grave interpretation upon her weakness. She must be epileptic, and entirely unfit to rear a brood of little Romanoffs; and poor Euphemia and her relatives, who for a moment had had golden visions, were dispatched to Siberia.

Morozoff had another plan for marrying the Tsar. An obscure man of the boyar class named Miloslavski had two pretty daughters, and Morozoff designed to wed one and make a Tsarina of the other. Whether he was already in love with Anna Miloslavski, or whether he merely felt it prudent to annex her and her relatives when the Tsar married her sister, is not apparent. It is enough that Alexis married Maria, and ten days afterwards Morozoff wedded her sister Anna, and neatly secured the linking of the ambition of Miloslavski with his own. Legend afterwards said that the two girls had, not long before, sold mushrooms in the public market at Moscow. Certainly their father had been poor and insignificant, and just as certainly he and his relatives at once began to heap up wealth by every corrupt device known in the tradition of the Moscovite court. Other Miloslavskis came to court, and a fresh brood of parasites fastened upon the veins of the country.

The Tsar was a good-humoured, indulgent man. Good-humour, which really meant an indolent and short-sighted habit of extracting whatever pleasure the actual circumstances afforded, was at that time, and remained until the present crisis, the chief characteristic of Russia. The democratic peasant of the primitive tribe had relieved his labours with the song and the dance. The serf now had little joy in life, but, while the song and dance were banned, a new and potent element of gaiety had been introduced: brandy. Everybody drank, and nearly everybody drank copiously. Alexis himself was sober in habit, though even he liked to intoxicate others at his table, but drunkenness was the daily rule. The Patriarch of Moscow got drunk, the priests and monks got drunk, and the people—as far as their means went—followed the example of their lords and pastors. Vast quantities of wine, hydromel, and especially brandy were consumed, and pepper was mixed with the brandy to improve its sting. Babies drank neat brandy. Wives lay drunk, side by side with their husbands, in a state of alarming deshabille, in the sleighs and coaches which ran noisily along the street. The few who resisted were, as a jest, compelled to drink. Even nuns and delicate young girls had more than once the option of emptying a flagon of brandy or enduring a whipping. Women at times prostituted themselves, and men sold their clothes, in order to get the precious vodka.

Russian life generally did not rise much above this level. The people were, as I said, so illiterate and ignorant that scarcely one in a thousand could read. Superstition throve in proportion to the ignorance, and vice and brutality were not far behind. Women were atrociously treated. The women of the richer class contrived, as we shall see, to creep through the restrictions imposed upon them and share the license of their lords, but in the great mass of the people the mother had a generally deplorable position. Wives were often whipped or beaten until the blood flowed, and many a brutal husband rubbed salt into the wounds. At times a frantic wife killed her husband, and in such cases the law exacted an awful penalty. In other cases bloodshed was too common an event to be severely punished. Moscow was distinguished among European cities for violence and bloodshed.

Vice and coarseness were still common enough all over Europe, but it is the almost unanimous opinion of the foreign visitors to Russia at the time, who wrote their impressions, that vice was particularly free at Moscow. Unnatural vice was a matter of jest. When the theatre became popular, as it presently did, the vice was coarsely suggested on the stage. Word and gesture everywhere were licentious. As the immense majority of the Russian families, which were usually large, huddled over the stove in one room, day and night, during the six months’ winter, the atmosphere that the children breathed may be left to the imagination. Except amongst the wealthier nobles, who were being modified at this time by foreign culture and refinement, manners were indescribably gross. On all this the mass of the clergy had, and purported to have, no influence. The greater part of the monks were as gross as the monks of Europe had been generally before the Reformation, and the false standards of the better monks—who laid a fierce anathema upon chess or the dance or Sunday-work and a blessing upon ignorance—made their influence small and ineffective. Kiss the ikons and be docile, was the general philosophy they recommended.
Ivan the Terrible, by Antokolsky

That the early Romanoffs made a few improvements in this chaotic and half-barbarous world is not saying very much to their credit. But beyond a vague perception that more foreign light must be imported they had no plan or statesmanship, and they proceeded piece-meal, under pressure. The foreign merchants who were introduced or permitted to enter kept industry and trade in their own hands, and did little for the native development of Russia. The avarice and corruption of the court and officials thought only of extortion, never of wise development. The people, even of Moscow, sank under taxation and injustice, and a certain measure of independence grew out of their very misery.

One day in the summer of 1648 the Tsar and the Patriarch were returning to the palace from some ceremony when a frantic group of the people approached with cries of grievances. They were, as usual, driven off; but the distress was acute and soon an angry and dangerous throng of soldiers, artisans, and small merchants and shop-keepers besieged the Kreml and demanded the justice of the Tsar upon the bloodsuckers. Either in fear or in anger—for Alexis was apt to boil over when the misdeeds of some noble “son of a bitch” (as the Emperor put it) were brought to his notice—the Tsar handed over to the mob two of the most hated officials, and they were savagely murdered. The Clerk of the Council, who was held particularly responsible for the salt-tax, which restricted the supply of salt-fish, was assassinated on a dung-hill. The whetted appetite then turned against Morozoff’s palace, but it was ingeniously protected from destruction by the Tsar’s sending to the mob an assurance that it was his own property. Morozoff himself was hidden in a monastery until the fury of the storm spent itself, but the Tsar had to promise to punish him, and to appoint a reform-commission. The autocrat shed a flood of facile Moscovite tears as he protested that the people’s grievances should be remedied; and his servants discreetly scattered money amongst the soldiers, who formed the more dangerous part of the mob. The fires which now threatened the entire city were extinguished, and the people slowly and sullenly returned to discipline.

The insurrection had spread to the provinces, and the former republics of Pskoff and Novgorod showed that their spirit of independence was not extinct. Pskoff, in fact, inaugurated a genuine rebellion and had to be reduced by the imperial troops, after a siege. Novgorod plundered the stores of its foreign merchants and murdered more than one supporter of the corrupt autocracy. When the Archbishop Nikon (of whom we shall see more) attempted to defend the cause of the Tsar (as he was careful to write to that monarch), his palace was invaded and he sank under a rain of stones which nearly ended his life. Only the sworn promise of a reform of the Empire put an end to the bloody insurrection.

It was under these circumstances, and with the added evil of an economic system which failed yearly and a constant danger from the Poles, that the second Romanoff began the reform of his kingdom. Morozoff was condemned to a luxurious internment in a monastery, from which he contrived for a long time to watch his interests and influence the Tsar, and the sturdy Archbishop of Novgorod began to enjoy favour. A commission of inquiry was appointed, and many reforms of the taxes, the administration of justice, and the court were brought about.

In 1652 the Patriarch of Moscow died, and Nikon, who had steadily advanced, was appointed to fill his place. For the next six years Nikon was chief favourite and councillor, and his story is so characteristic of the time that it must be briefly told. He was the son of a provincial peasant: a man of robust constitution and conscience, and of no small ambition. His success as a ruler of monks had won for him the archbishopric of Novgorod, and he knew how to capture the nervous and superstitious monarch. He claimed visions, and his shrewdness was at least supported by a vigorous will. Before long the Tsar was little more than an instrument of his will, and an abject spiritual pupil. He would protest with tears that he was unworthy to wear the crown, and it was only by reliance upon the Patriarch’s strong counsel that he was dissuaded from abdicating.

The Tsar, like his predecessors, loved the elaborate ritual of the Church, and Nikon interested him in the work of ecclesiastical reform. The Slav translation of the Bible was very corrupt, and the corrupt texts and ancient superstitious usages were to be rooted out. While Poles and Swedes and Turks threatened—while the country rotted in ignorance and economic folly—an immense zeal was concentrated upon the purification of the text of the Scriptures and upon such grave issues as the shaving of the beard, and the number of fingers that one must use in making the sign of the cross. The court was purified of “heretics” and the forces of the Empire were put at the Patriarch’s disposal for the purification of the entire country. Easy-going Russia had as yet not recognised its many heresies. Provided that one repudiated the Pope one was esteemed orthodox; and indeed most of the priests and monks were too densely ignorant to examine a man’s orthodoxy.

It was now seen that a vast amount of heresy existed in Russia, and every weird phase of dissent was truculently persecuted. Whole colonies of monks were infected, and in places their monasteries sustained for several years the attacks of imperial troops. Nikon was astute as well as ambitious. He would invite some ragged popular fanatic of Moscow to drink wine at his table, and would make great nobles tremble before his power. He acquired enormous wealth, made an impressive display of pomp and luxury, and contrived to indulge the heavy sensuality which then belonged to all classes. Russia had become an autocracy. Nikon would make it a theocracy.

But in such a court a man must have the truculence of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great to hold such a power, and the undercurrents of intrigue began in 1657 to weaken the Patriarch’s position. Old believers, dissenters, and discontented nobles concentrated their hatred upon him. It was in the summer of 1658 that he began to perceive the effect. A foreign prince was to be entertained, and Nikon was not invited to the banquet. He complained, and was insulted; and he next perceived that Alexis was absent from his functions. He resolved to try a desperate remedy. Summoning his clergy and the people, he solemnly and tearfully laid his sacred vestments upon the altar and declared that enemies compelled him to abandon his high office. He retired to the New Jerusalem monastery near Moscow to await the summons of the Tsar to return to office, but no summons came.

For several years Nikon fiercely fought his clerical and lay opponents from the monastery. “Brigand, pagan, stinking dog,” he howled at his enemies; and they retorted that he was a “mad wolf.” In 1664 two high oriental prelates, the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, visited Moscow, and it was felt that they might be induced to end the scandal by condemning Nikon’s reforms. But Nikon was undoubtedly right, and the Tsar had to end it in his own way. The Patriarch was degraded and imprisoned for life in a distant monastery. The issue is a sad page of ecclesiastical history. The ageing Nikon lit up the monastery with debauch. Not only did his large consumption of brandy immoderately increase, but he loved to have women, especially young women, brought into the monastery and stupefied with drink. At night his cell took on a Rabelaisian aspect; and he died in an odour of sulphur, and was solemnly buried with all the honours of a patriarch, in the year 1681.

By this time another interesting revolution had taken place at the court. Power had passed to the Miloslavskis, the family of the Tsarina, and they followed the familiar tradition. It may at least be said that under their lead, and that of the boyar Nastchokin, a measure of reform was carried out, and the country was strengthened against its enemies. The Cossacks of the south were still under the dominion of Poland, and, after many years of oppression and revolt, they appealed to Moscow for help and protection. In 1654 the Tsar declared war upon Poland and wrested a good deal of Russian territory from it. The Swedes also were at war with Poland, and in the north the ambition of Russia clashed with that of Sweden. Alexis made peace with Poland and entered upon an unsuccessful war with Sweden. It ended indecisively, and the Poles returned to the attack and inflicted severe defeats upon the Russians. The war later ended in a costly compromise.

The economic condition of the country was such that the new drain caused frightful distress, and the people of Moscow stirred once more. Copper roubles had had to be coined, and poverty became deeper. One summer day in 1662 the Tsar was at chapel in his country mansion, a few miles from Moscow, when he was told that a crowd from Moscow beset the palace and clamoured to be heard. His officers had dared to tear down a placard on which they had exposed their grievances. The pious Tsar vigorously refused to leave his devotions for so profane a cause, but he was overruled, and he confronted the mob. He would, he said, proceed to Moscow at the close of the service and make an inquiry. He must come at once, with them, they answered; and a few of the bolder climbed the balcony and pulled at his cloak. He was, however, permitted to return and finish his devotions after he had taken a solemn oath to inquire into their grievances. When he came down to carry out his promise, he found that a larger and more violent crowd surrounded the palace. Two regiments of the militia were summoned and, as the vast crowd still jeered and flourished weapons, the order was given, and thousands of the people were shot. Hundreds of others were afterwards exiled, and the growing spirit of popular independence was, apparently, stifled.

Favourite succeeded favourite at court. Nastchokin and the Miloslavskis gave way to a new and remarkable noble named Artaman Matveeff. Nikon had, as I said, disposed the Tsar in favour of progress, of a kind, and Matveeff was for still larger and more comprehensive progress. The industrious and gifted son of a small official, he had become one of the most accomplished and refined of the progressive party. His wife was a Scottish woman of the Hamilton family. Like so many other foreigners, many of the Scots who were driven from their country by Cromwell found their way to Moscow and settled in trade there. The foreign colony outside the walls grew, and its comparative refinement and culture impressed the imagination of many of the Russians. Matveeff married the refugee, and his home had a western complexion. The Scottish lady would not be confined behind curtains. The furniture was of the more elegant western kind. A library, and even a chemical laboratory, formed part of the establishment.

Matveeff seems to have won the attention of the Tsar in the course of some employment about the court, and he went on to secure his friendship. He was promoted to the office of chief minister, and the Tsar liked to visit him in his stimulating home. We may presume that it was in the foreign quarter, where the neat brick villas, surrounded by flower-gardens and shrubs, were in vivid contrast to the dull and slovenly aspect of the clusters of wooden Russian houses. A new romance of the court was born of this intercourse.

Matveeff adopted a beautiful orphan girl named Natalia Naryshkin, whose father had been a captain of the militia. The Tsar, whose wife had died in 1667, without (as we shall see) leaving a very promising heir to the throne amongst her numerous children, was much struck with the charm of Natalia, as she waited at table. Legend says that he at once offered to “find her a husband.” He at all events decided to marry her, and told Matveeff. But the courtier was too prudent to provide a wife for the Tsar in this personal fashion. He persuaded Alexis to issue the customary summons to a competition of health and beauty, and some hundreds were lodged in the palace and gravely inspected. There seems to have been some danger of Natalia losing her fortune, or else the comedy was carried out very thoroughly. Another maiden was selected, and the opponents of Matveeff pressed her charms. But it was decided that her hands were too thin for a model of Russian beauty, and the intrigue was defeated. The Tsar duly discovered the grace and gifts of the pretty brunette Natalia—which he was not supposed to have seen in any respectable Russian house—and in January, 1671, she was raised to the throne.

The young girl had no conception of the opposition which her entrance into the court would cause. Not only were the brother and other relatives of the late Tsarina entrenched in lucrative positions, but several of her children survived, and a grim silent struggle for the succession grew up about the ageing monarch. Every act of the new mistress was invidiously discussed. She declined to be secluded in women’s quarters; she refused to have closed curtains to her litter when she went abroad; she despised paint and the tawdry display which Russian women usually made. A Russian envoy who had visited Italy brought news of a magical form of entertainment known as a theatre, in which painted scenes of castles and landscapes were put together and disappeared, and life was remarkably imitated. Natalia and Matveeff set up a theatre, and, although they did not venture beyond biblical plays, the monks and reactionaries and envious made a great outcry. She brought into the world, on May 20th, 1672, a wonderfully vigorous boy—the future Peter the Great—and malicious tongues whispered that such a child was assuredly not the son of Tsar Alexis, whose earlier sons had been feeble. Two daughters followed in the next three years, and the silent struggle became more tragic. Which of the two families—that of the first or the second Tsarina—would secure the succession? The Tsar himself brooded over the difficult problem; and in the midst of his brooding, in 1676, he died, and left the settlement to the court.

Maria Miloslavski had had thirteen children, and of these two sons and six daughters were alive when the Tsar died. The younger son, Ivan, was a weak-witted boy whom none could seriously regard as a future ruler of Russia. The two eldest sons had died. There remained Prince Feodor, and the Miloslavskis had little trouble in securing his accession. A charge of magic and other evil practices was trumped up against Matveeff, and he was flogged and sent to Siberia. Natalia and her three children were still at court, and she made a spirited stand against the grown-up daughters of her predecessor and the three aunts who lived at court with them. Her brother Ivan was banished, and she seemed to be in danger of losing all hope, when a fresh court-revolution modified and complicated the struggle.

The young Tsar, Feodor, was an invalid. Few expected him to live long, and the prospect gave edge to the keen rivalry for power. But a former tutor of Feodor’s elder brother now crept into favour and cut out the Miloslavskis. This man and his brother were admirers of Poland, and, in order to prepare the way for Polish influence, they induced the sickly Tsar to wed a young and undistinguished woman of Polish extraction named Agatha Grouchstska. Polish nobles and officers flocked to the court, and an entirely new prospect was opened when, in July, 1681, a child was born. Natalia and her children were now living in a village not far from Moscow. The Miloslavskis had been disposed to make a nun of her, but they were now fighting desperately for their own power. Agatha, to their relief, died in childbirth, and the baby died a few weeks later. The resolute friends of Poland made a last effort. They induced the dying Tsar to wed a relative of his dead wife. But death made an end of the mockery. Feodor died, in his twenty-first year, a few weeks after his marriage, and the intriguing Poles were swept out of court.

Before the Miloslavskis had time to marshal their forces, the friends and relatives of Natalia, the Naryshkin, got together the boyars and persuaded them that the boy Peter was now the only possible heir to the throne. The elder prince, Ivan, son of the first wife of Alexis, was, as I said, an obvious imbecile. Peter, on the other hand, was a sturdy and intelligent boy who promised to become a vigorous man. Before the day was out on which Feodor died Natalia was summoned to Moscow by the news that her son was Tsar, and she herself soon rejoiced in the titles of Tsaritsa and Regent. Her brother was recalled, and a speedy messenger was sent to bring back her friend and patron, Matveeff, from Siberia. It was on April 27th, 1682, that Feodor died and Natalia returned to power. On May 11th Matveeff arrived from Siberia, and received the respect of the troops. The new regime seemed to be solidly established. And four days later Moscow was shaken by one of the most sanguinary revolutions that we find in its chronicles, and the Miloslavskis returned to power. The story of that revolution introduces us to one of the strangest princesses of the Romanoff house, who was to rule Russia for the next seven years.