At the tender age of 10, the boy who would become known as Peter the Great was made to watch as rampaging soldiers of the Moscow garrison, the Streltsy, hunted down and murdered some 40 of his relatives, friends and advisors inside the walls of the Kremlin. The year was 1682 and Peter’s eldest half-brother, Tsar Fedor II, had recently passed away without leaving a clear line of succession. Although Peter was the preferred choice of many within the Russian political elite, the men of the Streltsy, in league with the family of Peter’s other half-brother, Ivan, conspired to protect the rights of their candidate. While their actions proved successful in this particular episode, this event would never be forgotten by the man who would one day be their tsar.
The Streltsy were royal musketeers whose origins dated back to the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century. Serving as the ceremonial palace guard of the Russian tsars and the core of their standing army, the Streltsy had acquired many privileges over the decades. Conservative, traditional and deeply suspicious of all things foreign, their resentment over Peter’s affinity for western ways in his early reign caused them to recoil in paranoia and fear when Peter embarked on his Great Embassy in 1697 to visit the kingdoms of Western Europe. They took it as an ill omen that Peter was the first Russian tsar to leave the country during his reign and many expected that their ruler would become hopelessly corrupted in his absence.
Peter had been gone from Russia for almost 18 months when news reached him in Vienna that four regiments of the Moscow Streltsy had risen in revolt. Hastily settling his affairs in the Austrian capital, Peter rushed home to find that the poorly organized uprising had already been crushed. However, unconvinced that the sedition had been fully squelched, Peter proceeded to have all of the rebellious Streltsy transferred to one of his suburban palaces for further interrogation. Fire and knout (a thick, hard leather whip) were the preferred instruments for compelling testimony in what became an orgy of violence and punishment.
| For almost two years the perpetrators of the Streltsy revolt were vigorously questioned regarding the depths of the conspiracy against the tsar; in some cases, Peter himself tortured the hapless victims. While no grand conspiracy was ever uncovered, Peter elected to make an example of these men who stood as a vivid personification of a traditional and backwards Russia that he sought to change. Men were broken publicly on the wheel, heads were displayed on poles and the corpses of dead Streltsy were displayed for all to see for many months. In all, 1,182 were executed and 601 others were banished. Peter’s |
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| devastating ruthlessness in stamping out this rebellion would serve as a reminder to the Russian people of the cost of disobedience in his reign. | ||||||||||||
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