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It's the early morning of June 26, 1718, and in the basement of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia, lies a young man. His face is covered in bruises, his back is bleeding, and his eyes are sunken holes in their sockets, wreathed in black. The door is flung open, and another man strides into the prison chamber.
In his hand is a hard leather whip, about three and a half feet long, ending in a beak-like hook. He walks over to the prisoner, who closes his eyes and quietly sobs. He knows what's coming. The prisoner is Tsarevich Alexei, heir to the Russian throne. His torturer is his own father, Tsar Peter the Great.
Peter the Great was one of the most bloody and brutal rulers in Russian history, and his son, one of thousands of people who will suffer at his hands during his reign. And yet, he is remembered as one of Russia's greatest ever rulers. His love of science and learning saw him transform his antiquated realm into a European power of the modern age.
But given the high price paid by his people, can he truly be seen as Peter the Great today? Peter the Great is a massive contradiction. You know, on the one hand, he's this great reforming czar who embraces science and technology. But on the other hand, he is a brute. He could behave.
like a complete barbarian. But yet at the same time, this was a man who brought Russia in line with the rest of Europe. As a man, a disaster, appalling. As a ruler, fantastic. The greatest that there's ever been in Russia. You're listening to Forbidden History.
The podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Janine Harony, and this is The Strange Life of Peter the Great.
It's 1682. Tsar Peter I is just 10 years old, and in the Kremlin in Moscow, he is witnessing a massacre. His older half-sister Sophia is stealing the throne from him. She has the palace guard, known as Streltsy, on her side. They throw men, women, and children onto the points of their spears, and murder much of the Russian government.
As he is so young, there's nothing Peter can do but flee with his mother to a village outside the capital. Sophia has won. And yet Peter is not destined to become a footnote in history. In fact, because he will grow up away from the old-fashioned traditions of the Russian court, he will become a very different kind of ruler. One willing to break with the past and transform his country.
Nigel Jones is an author and former deputy editor of History Today magazine. We asked him to describe Peter's childhood.
Peter, from an early age, was not a member of the rather stiff and stilted court. He was brought up in a village to the east of the city, and he was more or less given free run. He mingled with peasants. He, from an extremely early age, got interested in things like ships and sailing. He loved outdoor sports. He loved running. He loved hunting. The wilder and the more savage, the better.
He had an inquiring mind about the many discoveries, scientific and technological, that were going on in the late 17th century when he was growing up. Peter's inquiring mind is fed by time spent in a segregated area of Moscow where foreigners live.
They were kept separate from the mass of the Russian aristocracy. They had their own suburb known as the German suburb in eastern Moscow. And Peter used to frequent there and he, in fact, from quite an early age, seemed to prefer the company of these Westerners with their advanced ideas, their advanced clothing, their advanced habits and fashions, than the native, rather high-bound and conservative Russians.
Growing up away from court has given Peter the opportunity to mingle with people that few Tsars would ever have had contact with before. And these foreigners are exciting for him, because Russia itself has remained stubbornly unchanged for centuries. It's a place of long beards, short lives, and slow progress. Peter soon grows scornful of the conservative Tsarist court, and would much sooner be drinking and smoking
sailing his boat, or hanging out with these stimulating Westerners. His mother, however, is less keen on his lifestyle and arranges for Peter to marry a Russian noblewoman called Eudoxia. But any hopes that Eudoxia would tame her unruly son are soon dashed. As author and historian Tony McMahon reveals, Peter prefers the company of a Dutch woman called Anna Mons.
Hard to imagine that Eudoxia was ever going to please Peter. I mean, she was dodgy, she was puritanical, she was terribly conservative. In contrast, along comes Anna Mons. Peter likes to drink. She's the daughter of a wine merchant. Perfect. And they can match each other drink for drink and she's jolly good fun. So he preferred Anna. Anna would become Peter's royal mistress. But his life away from court is not entirely carefree.
As Peter comes of age, he fears that Sofia may try to eliminate him. And so, when he's 17, he decides to move first and take back power. By summer 1689, Sofia's hold on power back in Moscow has become increasingly weak. Two disastrous military campaigns in the Crimea have damaged her reputation, and Peter sees his chance.
He slowly gathers people to his cause and eventually convinces the Streltsy, those palace guards who had once ousted him, to now pledge allegiance to him. Sophia realizes her time is up. Powerless to fight back, she renounces her place in the succession and is banished to a monastery. With Sophia out of the way, the era of Peter the Great is about to begin.
But by now, Peter is so scornful of the traditional way of ruling that he sidelines the Russian court. Instead, he convenes his new dining society, the all-joking, all-drunken synod of fools and jesters. As Tony McMahon describes, "Alcohol takes center stage."
The rules and regulations of the Jester Synod laid down by Peter the Great pretty much revolved around drinking. So, for example, he had a massive cup, the Great Eagle Cup, which held about a litre of vodka. He'd set kind of random tasks for members of the Synod, you know, chop down a load of trees on a path, reward vodka. So, "You don't please me, your punishment is you're barred from all the taverns in Russia." But most of it was all about
setting tasks, and reward vodka. The Synod is presided over by Peter's old tutor, whom he appoints as Prince Pope. Wearing a tin hat and a coat half made of gambling cards, he chairs a group that includes jesters, giants, a circus of dwarves, dancing girls, and enough alcohol to sink a battleship. The antics of the Synod reveal just how unconventional Peter is.
And he's also a man with a warped sense of humor. Peter was unusually tall for his time. He was about 6'8". And maybe that contributed to his obsession or his rather lurid interest in people with disabilities. So, for example, he got involved in the organization of a wedding and he thought it would be hilarious for the four people who were announcing the guests
to be the four greatest stammerers in Russia. So this must have taken for ages to announce all the people who were arriving. And then the four footmen, who had to do lots of running around, he found four people with chronic gout, you know, and massively overweight, who actually needed other people to help them doing the running around.
Listening to this, you may reasonably wonder how a man like this is ever going to be a successful Tsar, let alone a Tsar who will be revered throughout history as truly great. But as Nigel Jones describes, the reasons for Peter's behavior go beyond a love of alcohol.
The drunken synod in many ways was Peter mocking the orthodoxes of the Orthodox Russian Church. And he would really, frankly, take the piss out of the church in this select company. Peter is setting out his rule as a break from the traditions he's grown up to despise. This drinking society is the government. He binds his henchmen to him with insane ritual before bending them to his will.
And the power he wields here is about to become crucial as he takes his country to war. Peter sees himself as a warlord, and so in spring 1695, he attacks the fortress of Azov in the Ottoman Empire. But after besieging it for four months, he doesn't win the victory he so desires. The reason soon becomes clear.
Strange as it may seem, Russia is lacking a key part of its military arsenal, a navy. In the first sign of the supreme will that will mark Peter out as a great Tsar, he decides, quite simply, to build one. Peter saw from an early stage that in order to become a dominant power in Europe, Russia had to have a fleet...
And he set about in the most incredibly practical way, himself mastering all the skills of seamanship, literally from sail making and timbering and caulking, right up to the naval tactics to be used in great fleet battles. For the next year, Peter sleeps in a log house next to the shipyard, rising at the crack of dawn each day to oversee Russia's first ever navy taking shape.
A year later, he and his new navy attack Azov once again. This time, he's successful, and Azov falls. But despite his victory, this episode has demonstrated to Peter that Russia has fallen behind its rivals. And so, perhaps recalling the foreigners he met as a teenager, Peter decides that the answers to Russia's problems lie in Europe.
He plans to be the first Tsar in over a century to experience a foreign country for himself. Dominic Selwood is an author and historian, and explains why Peter felt he needed to experience Europe first-hand.
The Russia that he inherited was still a Byzantine country in terms of its culture and its legacy. It was stifled by manners and etiquette. He knew that to be a modern country, he had to engage with the outside world. The idea that no Tsar had traveled for a hundred years before him was absurd. In March 1697, Peter and his entourage leave Russia for a European tour. That will become known as the Grand Embassy.
And as he arrives in Amsterdam, it soon becomes clear how serious he is about broadening his mind. He really wanted to immerse himself in the things that were going to help make Russia great again. So instead of being told how a dockyard worked in an afternoon's presentation, he would go and work there for weeks or even months to really understand how it functions.
His curiosity knows no bounds as he immerses himself in the science and culture of Europe. Tony McMahon tells us about one of Peter's great loves, anatomy. Peter the Great loved attending anatomy demonstrations, dissections in Amsterdam. One of the courtiers was quite revolted by the spectacle, and Peter the Great forced him to bite a piece off the corpse and chew it.
Peter also carried around his own surgical instruments, and he'd offer to pull people's teeth. Well, not offer, he insisted on pulling people's teeth, which no doubt made many of the courtiers keep their dental problems to themselves. Peter inspires equal measures of wonderment and shock in the people he meets. Sometimes he seems enlightened, but other times, he and his entourage behave like wild animals.
Historians Hallie Rubenhold and Tony McMahon describe the scenes at the Russian party's accommodation in London, generously provided for free by a man called John Evelyn. He and his entourage
just basically trashed the place. The paintings in his house have been used for dartboard practice. They used the curtains as toilet paper. All floors had to be replaced because they were covered in grease and ink and God knows what else. They used the furniture as firewood.
They developed this game with the wheelbarrows in the garden and Peter the Great would be carted around and they'd smash through hedges and walls and so on. Completely destroyed John Evelyn's garden, which was his pride and joy. And a very angry Evelyn demanded that the British state pay for all the repairs, which came to about £350, an enormous sum at the time. Peter may have behaved like a rock star in a hotel room, but England itself makes a huge impression on him.
Peter found, especially in England, almost everything about the modern world that fascinated him. He would go and visit the Royal Mint in the Tower of London. In fact, he could barely tear himself away from it and kept going back. In April 1698, Peter tears himself away from London and makes his way to Vienna. But upon arrival in Austria, he receives news from back home.
In his absence, the Streltsy have turned against him once more and rebelled. He is told not to worry. The rebellion has been easily put down, but by now, Peter's had enough of these unpredictable palace guards. He orders the construction of 14 torture chambers in Russia to be ready for his return in a few months' time.
Western Europe has left a profound and enduring impression on the young Tsar. His experiences in the thriving cities and harbors of the West, and in meeting scientists, inventors, and engineers along the way, have convinced him that Russia is technologically backwards.
decades, perhaps centuries behind the West, he is determined that this will change and both sides of his personality will be unleashed. For when education and persuasion fails, he will be willing to use lethal force.
Hello, I'm Violet Manners and welcome to Hidden Heritage, the podcast that brings you inside Great Britain's favourite destinations. From the same team that brought you the number one history podcast, Duchess, Hidden Heritage will uncover the fascinating stories behind the UK's brightest, shining hidden gems.
You'll hear from top experts in British heritage, including custodians, historians, artisans, experts and even the craftsmen and restorers who've worked on some of the most celebrated historic buildings.
We will share the untold and unique stories that celebrate UK heritage, from landmarks to architecture, artefacts to myths and legends. Hidden Heritage will highlight a side of British history you have never seen before. I'm your host, Violet Manners, and founder of HeritageX, and I invite you all to join us on this exciting journey. This is Hidden Heritage. You can find Hidden Heritage wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Dawn breaks on the morning of September 5th, 1698, and Moscow awakens to the news that the Tsar has returned. A crowd of Russian noblemen flock to Peter's door to welcome him back home. Peter embraces them enthusiastically. But after two years in clean-shaven Europe, being greeted by these traditional noblemen with their long flowing beards epitomizes everything that is wrong with Russia.
And so after embracing them, Peter makes his first change to Russian society. He puts his hand in his pocket, pulls out a razor, and begins to shave them. Superficially, at least. Remaking them into Western nobles. And as Dominic Selwood reveals, beards would soon come with a price tag.
One thing that frustrated Peter more than anything else was how backward Russia appeared to be. His noble courtiers still wore the long beards and the long flowing sleeves and skirts of the Byzantine court. Peter had seen Europe. He knew that the world had moved on from this. So he imposed a beard tax. Anybody who wanted to keep a beard would have to pay 100 rubles a year and carry a little coin with a beard on it to show that he'd paid his beard tax.
Beards cut, Peter turns his attention to those who had rebelled in his absence. He is said to have remarked, Moscow will be saved not by pity, but by cruelty. And he will be as good as his word. He makes his way to the new torture chambers and starts them on their bloody work.
For the next four weeks, members of the Streltsy will be tortured here day and night in an attempt to force them to reveal all about their uprising. And just as Peter was hands-on in the shipyards of Europe, so too will he play a personal role now. True to his hands-on nature, Peter took personal charge of the torturing of the Streltsy. He himself
flogged them. Sometimes they were roasted alive. Their bleeding backs were held over open flames. They were racked and their limbs were torn from the joints. Peter saw this. He took part in all this. He supervised this. I think he probably enjoyed it. Peter also took the opportunity to sort the strong from the weak.
Peter the Great was quite amazed by a man who'd been tortured by the knout and by fire four times and hadn't cracked. And so he went to visit him personally and discovered that this man was a member of a torture society.
And the way to progress through the society was to withstand ever greater levels of torture. And this seems to have impressed the Tsar so much that he kissed the man and whispered in his ear that he'd pardon him and make him a colonel if he just confessed to the conspiracy he'd been involved in. And the man did this and was made a colonel.
After a month, Peter is satisfied that the Streltsy have said all they're ever going to say. Their bodies are hung from the gates of every entrance to the city as a reminder to the population of what happens when you cross the Tsar. The first part of Peter's reign has seen his iron will begin to manifest itself.
What had begun with drunken mockery of the conventions of his forefathers ends with beard cutting and the utter obliteration of the Streltsy. And when he throws his wife, Eudoxia, into a monastery, both Russians and foreign observers start to understand Peter's purpose: the destruction of old Russia.
And so as the sun rises on 1700, Peter begins to replace it with a European-inspired modernization program. His first goal is an ambitious one: to establish a full trading relationship with Europe. It will mean constructing a port on the Baltic Sea. And this will mean war.
In wanting to modernise, Peter realised that one thing he lacked, one crucial thing, was a large working seaport. So he had his eyes on the Baltics, but the problem was that Sweden was already there. So Peter declared war on Sweden, and this was to be the longest campaign, lasted 21 years of his rule.
But for Peter, the war does not start well. His forces are defeated by a far smaller Swedish force at the Battle of Narva. But with Sweden then forced to deal with Peter's allies, Russia has a chance to regroup. And by 1703, Peter's forces capture a fort on the River Neva called Nianskans. Peter soon orders the building of his own fort, the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Construction is complete in just a year, but Peter soon begins to see it as part of a far larger project: to build a new city. This city would be a symbol of his ambitions for Russia and a catalyst to help him achieve them. And as Nigel Jones describes, in conceptualizing it, Peter's thoughts turned to his time in England during his Grand Embassy.
He loved looking at the new architecture of London, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Royal Naval College. Fantastic. This city that had risen from the ashes of the Great Fire gave him, I think, the germ of the idea for the city that he would found, St. Petersburg. But building St. Petersburg would be no mean feat. As Hayley Rubenhold describes, it was hardly an ideal location to build Peter's vision of a European metropolis.
Saint Petersburg, before the city was founded there, was a very undesirable patch of land. It was basically marshland, it was swamp. The land wasn't worth anything. But Peter saw its strategic usefulness and set about building effectively what became the cultural capital of Russia there.
Peter divides his time between the front lines of the ongoing war with Sweden and the site of St. Petersburg as it slowly grows. Unlike the sprawling city of Moscow, St. Petersburg would be much more rigidly defined. Nigel Jones
It was not an old organically grown city like Moscow. It was a city that was planned. So in that way, it was like many modern cities of the 20th century, like the new towns around London, like Brasilia, for example. It was planned on a grid scale.
Peter was inspired by what he'd seen in Amsterdam, to want canals in the city, the buildings that he'd seen in London, he wanted them reproduced there. So it was, in many ways, an uber-modern city at the time it was built. Today, you can still walk in the Tsar's footsteps, with some notable exceptions.
In Peter's time, the city would have looked far more like the Amsterdam he so loved. But the canals soon silted up and were replaced with roads. Even Tsar Peter couldn't control geology. The heart of the city today, as it was then, remains the River Neva. But incredibly, there would have been no bridges.
It seems crazy, but Peter the Great didn't allow for any bridges to be built in a city with so many waterways. He insisted that everybody learn how to sail, you know, with his own experience of sailing boats. And it's only when the Polish ambassador, a major general, and one of his own doctors died in sailing accidents that he relents a bit and allows for the use of oars, but still no bridges.
Peter describes his new city as his paradise, his Eden. But its creation comes at a human cost. Peter has this amazing vision for his new modern city, but he builds it the old-fashioned way. He basically drafts in tens of thousands of serfs who basically force labor.
The human costs in St. Petersburg were enormous. Essentially, the ground around there was marshy, swamp-laden. Many, many died of disease. Many, many died of accidents. These poor, nameless tens of thousands of ordinary Russian serfs and peasants, and also a good smattering of Swedish prisoners of war, died. So, if you like, the city of St. Petersburg was built on bones.
While St. Petersburg is taking shape, the war with Sweden rages on. Peter's dedication to the growing St. Petersburg prevents he and the Swedish Emperor from making peace. But at the Battle of Poltava in modern-day Ukraine, Russia has a decisive victory. When he finally brought Charles to battle at Poltava, Charles had led the Swedish armies right into the interior of Russia
It was both a duel between these two men and also it was a sign that Russia was now the major player after he defeated the Swedes and Charles on the stage of Europe and that from then on Russia would be a power that every other European country would have to take into consideration.
Russia's victory at Poltava is the death knell of Sweden's war aspirations. And St. Petersburg is now secure and growing by the day. And so Peter inaugurates a new building in the city: the Kuntzkamera, the first museum in Russia's history. You can still visit the Kuntzkamera today and see Peter's vast collection.
But those who do would be forgiven for thinking that it's a display of the gruesome side of Peter's personality. As you make your way through the exhibits, which include medical tools, books, minerals, and stuffed exotic animals, you come across shelves housing row upon row of large glass jars.
Contained within these jars, pickled in an alcohol-based solution, are deformed, stillborn human infants. Some are missing limbs, others are misshapen, and many are conjoined twins. We asked Dominic Selwood about the Kunstkammerer and its macabre collection. Peter created a vast Kunstkammerer.
A cabinet of curiosities. They were very popular at the time for artefacts from natural and historical science. Peter's was different. Anybody who looks at it now will see that it features
stillborn children with deformities, animals that are in some way malformed. And that gives a strange impression of Peter. But it wasn't that he had an unusual interest in that side of nature. He wanted to show the Russian people that these were natural creations of nature. He wanted to try and impose upon them the idea that there were no monsters, that nature created these things normally. This was an attempt to sweep away superstition.
The specimens are designed to educate the Russian people, whose mode of thinking is still highly superstitious. And by bringing printed books to Russia, he will expand his people's knowledge. Nigel Jones
Peter was very, very interested in reading books, usually books with a practical purpose. He not only commissioned translations of technical manuals and Western books into Russia, but he read them himself, he annotated them himself. His surviving library is full of his own jottings and his own writing. It's this urge to improve, to find out how things worked,
and to put them into practice that marks Peter out as a great Tsar, as Peter the Great. And as I like to say, he dragged Russia by its beard into the 18th century. And as Tony McMahon tells us, Russia's legal code also sees Peter's attention, as he strikes through some of the more antiquated laws that most of the world has moved on from.
He instituted a lot of progressive reforms that are sometimes forgotten. I mean, for example, he banned the infanticide of babies who were deformed from birth. He got rid of arranged marriages. And at the wedding ceremony, the groom no longer wielded a whip, as had been the tradition, but sealed the deal with a kiss.
Peter's reforms soon start to make their mark on Russia. As they do, Peter becomes increasingly aware of his own mortality. His thoughts soon turn to who will carry on as his successor. By now, he is married to Catherine. She is a total antidote to his former wife Eudoxia. Young, intelligent, and one of the few people who can keep up with Peter's relentless drive and energy.
Peter utterly adores her. But tradition dictates that the Tsar's successor will be his oldest son, Alexei, the boy he fathered with his first wife. But Peter had never made any effort to shape him as a future ruler.
Because Alexei was the son of his first wife, Eudoxia, who Peter rather came to despise, I think he rejected his son from a very, very early age. And as he began to see that Alexei was everything that he despised in Russia, old, traditional, backward-looking, I think this combined with his neglect of the boy to produce something which actually was very close to murderous hatred.
Alexei was going to be the worst person to succeed Peter. You know, Peter had broken the mold. He was energetic. He was changing and modernizing Russia. And then along comes Alexei, you know, a shadow of the past. Peter's main concern is that when Alexei becomes Tsar, he will undo his modernizing reforms and take Russia backwards.
And as Nigel Jones tells us, by now he's also started to suspect that his son is actively plotting against him. Peter, who shared with Stalin a sort of paranoid suspicion that there was always plots going on behind his back, accused his son of actively being in league with the opposition forces and actually conspiring to overthrow and even possibly assassinate him. There had been attempts on Peter's life and he...
Peter is taking no chances. He will let nobody stand in the way of himself or his efforts to change Russia, even his own son. And so he throws Alexei into the Peter and Paul fortress.
Peter set out to essentially exterminate
Alexei, all his friends, his allies, his servants, his friends were impaled or even broken on the wheel, a very gruesome way to be executed. Servants were beheaded, some of them had their tongues cut out to stop them from talking. And of course, Alexei himself was interrogated in such a way that he most likely died as a result of the interrogation. And I think all of this
like the murder of the Stralsi, tells us that Peter was able to effectively turn his heart to stone when it suited him.
It was officially given out that Alexei had died of natural causes, that he'd got an illness and sadly passed away. In fact, the evidence is pretty clear that Alexei was flogged with the traditional brutal Russian whip, the knout. Peter himself wielded the knout. He probably, almost certainly, flogged his own son. I think he had two sessions, one with 15 strokes and one with 25 strokes.
And so, Peter literally tortured his own son to death. Alexei's death secures Peter's modern Russia. And when Peter himself dies of a bladder infection seven years later, the future is secure in the hands of his wife, Catherine. The Tsar's last words are said to have been, "I hope God will forgive my sins for the good I tried to do."
Peter the Great had dragged Russia into the modern world and put it on a path that would enable it to become a superpower in the future. But whether we can forgive his sins is a question that will continue to be debated, while the man himself will continue to enthrall us.
Peter had two very contrasting sides to his personality. There was the brutal man to members of his own family. On the other hand, there was the ruler who succeeded in bringing together the whole of Russia. He was a very complex man, but in his reign, he achieved a vast amount for Russia. Peter the Great creates...
much of the Russia that we know today, this vast country that dominates its neighbors, St. Petersburg's still there, a great city, but he also creates some of the downsides that are unfortunately associated with Russian history. I think that Peter personally and Russia
As a society, and of course all the thousands and thousands of victims who died in this headlong rush to modernity, were the high price that had to be paid if Russia was going to be turned from an antiquated, backward-looking, inward-looking state into the formidable power which has been a dominant force in world affairs ever since Peter lived.
Did he have to be that brutal? Did he have to torture his own son to death? Probably yes.
Next time on Forbidden History. Two murders in a single day. One on the train and one next to the train tracks. And at that point, the police realized that they have a serial killer on their hands. We investigate a criminal case which baffled detectives in 1940s Berlin, one month after the start of the Second World War. In any serial killing, one murder happens after another.
The police are bound to be under tremendous pressure. When it's happening in the capital of the Third Reich, you're under pressure from people who can have you killed, who can make you disappear. Why did the Nazi High Command want to keep it a secret? And how did they finally catch him? The S-Bahn murderer. A serial killer in Nazi Berlin.
Forbidden History was a Like A Shot Entertainment production. Produced by Matt Bone. Executive Producers Henry Scott, Steve Gillum, and Danny O'Brien. Edit and Sound Design by James McGee for Aerothon.