Peter the Great

To deal with the beggars themselves, the Tsar attached a hospital to every church, personally endowed by himself, to provide for the poor. That the conditions in these hospitals may have been stark was suggested by another ambassadorial witness, who wrote, “This soon cleared the streets of those poor vagrants, many of whom chose to work rather than to be locked up in the hospitals.”

Romodanovsky was a grim figure with a leaden sense of humor. He enjoyed forcing his guests to drink a large cup of pepper brandy by having the cup presented in the paws of a large, upright, trained bear; if the cup was refused, the bear proceeded to pull off the hat, wig and other articles of clothing of the reluctant guest.

Through most of the eighteenth century, Englishmen were executed for stealing five shillings, and women were hanged for stealing a handkerchief.

Ordinary criminals in France were beheaded, burned or broken alive on the wheel. In Italy, travelers complained of the public gallows: “We see so much human flesh along the highways that trips are disagreeable.”

This incredible hardiness and unconquerable endurance of pain astonished not only foreigners but also Peter himself. Once, after a man had been tortured four times by knout and fire, Peter approached him in sheer wonder and asked how he could stand such great pain. The man was happy to talk about it and revealed to Peter the existence of a torture society of which he was a member. He explained that nobody was admitted without first being tortured, and that thereafter promotion within the society rested on being able to accept higher grades of torture. To this bizarre group, the knout was nothing. “The sharpest pain of all,” he explained to Peter, “is when a burning coal is placed in the ear; nor is it less painful when the head is shaved and extremely cold water is let fall slowly drop by drop upon it from a height.”

It was true that the old Russian clothing was bulky and made walking difficult; limbs were certainly freer once the long robes and coats were cast off. But in the rigorous cold of Russian winter, the freer limbs were also more likely to be frostbitten. When the temperature sank to twenty or thirty below zero, the old Russian in his warm boots, his greatcoat rising above his ears and reaching down to the ground, with his bushy beard protecting his mouth and cheeks, could look with satisfaction at that poor Westernized fellow whose face was purple in the cold and whose knees, showing beneath his shortened coat, knocked together in a futile effort to keep warm.

Ivan the Terrible expressed the traditional Muscovite feeling when he declared, “To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God.”

hoping, says an observer, “to prove by the promptitude of their obsequiousness, the constancy of their loyalty.”

Russians were technologically backward—decades, perhaps centuries, behind the West.
Asking himself how this had happened and what could be done about it, Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men’s minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish. He knew that these bonds of religious orthodoxy still existed in Russia, reinforced by peasant folkways and traditions which had endured for centuries. Grimly, Peter resolved to break these bonds on his return.

At times, also, the Polish king would be at war, but the Polish republic, as represented by the Diet, would be at peace.