Russia's Giant

By John Skow

PETER THE GREAT: HIS LIFE AND WORLD

by Robert K. Massie Knopf; 909 pages; $17.95

In 1698, when Peter the Great returned to Moscow from a voyage to Europe, the 26-year-old Tsar horrified his male subjects with a stern proclamation: they were to cut off their beards immediately. No matter that to the elders of the Orthodox Church, beardlessness was godlessness. Most of the up-to-date Westerners Peter had seen had been clean-shaven, so off came the beards in his own land -- first among the courtiers at the Kremlin, sometimes with Peter's good-humored but rough-handed assistance, and then, as the grumbling spread, across Russia. One old man was permitted to keep his beard, and so was the Patriarch of the church. Anyone else who insisted on a hairy chin had to pay a stiff tax.

That done. Peter attacked the long, saggy-sleeved robes worn by all Russian men above the rank of serf. It was impossible to walk briskly in these droopy Oriental rigs, and Peter was a brisk walker, a man of endless physical and intellectual energy. A marvelous painting by the 20th century Russian artist Valentin Serov shows him, skinny, determined, 6 ft. 7 in. tall, footing it at top speed along a quay in St. Petersburg, followed by three breathless flunkies. That was Peter. To make certain that his subjects kept pace, he stationed soldiers with swords at the gates of Moscow. All travelers wearing robes were forced to kneel: whack! The garments were sliced off where they touched the ground. Most men quickly switched to European stockings and knee breeches.

Any biography of Peter would be a superb story, and Robert K. Massie's flawed but vigorous work adds the dimensions of intelligence and perspective. The massiveness of the biography is to some extent a result of tact. The author of Nicholas and Alexandra assumes that not all of his readers will be up on William of Orange or the War of the Spanish Succession, and he interrupts Peter's chronicle every few chapters to supply cram courses. Unfortunately his prose is often humorless and disconcertingly bland for a character as fiery as Peter. Still, the occasional tries at vividness seem just as inappropriate. Speaking of Louis XIV's sturdy sexuality, Massie writes that the Sun King had a great many unofficial liaisons, so that his three acknowledged mistresses were only "the tip of the iceberg." His final sentences on Peter have the uneasy grandiloquence of a stockbroker wearing a sword to a costume party: "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?"

These are minor complaints about a well-constructed and lavishly illustrated book. Peter carries his own story, and Massie lets him do it. Bloody violence swirled around the Russian throne from the beginning. At ten, Peter stood by, rigid, as the Streltsy, imperial guards, stormed through the Kremlin butchering his mother's relatives. At 17 he won out in a grim power struggle with his half sister Sophia. A few years later, the Streltsy revolted again; this time Peter put them to torture and gruesome death. His own son by a failed first marriage, Tsarevich Alexis, was a weak youth whose hysterical defiance of Peter resulted in his death at 28, after 40 blows of the knout. And always there was war, with the Crimean Tatars, with Sweden, with Persia.

Yet Peter, although he was considered to be the Antichrist by some conservative religionists in his own land, is a strangely appealing figure who in many ways became the benevolent despot of 18th century theory. His powerful tropism toward the West was precisely what his backward country needed. At a time when the only vessels in Russia were sluggish river barges, he conceived a great love of sailing boats. He built a navy and fought a 20-year war with Charles XII of Sweden to give Russia access to the Baltic. He founded the great port city of St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) to shift his nation's focus toward the Western seas.

His eccentric journeys to the West were unlike those ever made by another monarch. He traveled incognito to avoid the stupefying hours of ceremony that customarily attended a royal progress. He worked for several weeks as "Carpenter Peter" in a shipyard in Amsterdam, and rode or sailed happily about the harbor in his spare time. Generally he chatted amiably with passers-by when crowds were not oppressive, but when boats came too close to his own, he would roar in anger and throw empty bottles or blows in their direction. He learned the elements of anatomy, iron work and dentistry, and peered in delight through the world's first microscope.

Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia's first no table scientist, described Peter in those days: "I see him everywhere, now enveloped in a cloud of dust, of smoke, of flame, now bathed in sweat at the end of strenuous toil. I refuse to believe that there was but one Peter and not several." When the Tsar met a capable man, whether he was a juggler, a ship wright or a general, he offered him riches and high position to practice his trade in Russia. Most of the candidates accepted, and they and the insatiably curious genius who employed them brought Russia into the 18th century.

Peter was a historical necessity for his suspicious and isolated nation. But he was not an inevitability. Events did not cause him; he created them; and a reflective reader may well wonder what Russia's course would have been had the pallid Romanov line continued without its giant.

-- By John Skow

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