Russian Whirlwind

In her delightful Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia , Suzanne Massie has a wonderful chapter on Peter the Great. She gives a vivid portrait of his 1697 visit to the West, the first time in six hundred years a Tsar had left Russia, and the first visit a Tsar ever made to the West: “In March 1697, led by Peter’s Genevan General Lefort, the friend and adviser of his youth, a Grand Embassy of some two hundred and seventy persons set out for Europe. There were ambassadors with their suites of young nobles wearing long furred coats and hats covered with pearls and jewels, accompanied by trumpeters, drummers, interpreters, merchants and jesters. There were Cossacks, halberdiers and guardsmen with gleaming weapons, and even a Caucasian prince armed with a jeweled scimitar. Lefort was dressed as a Tatar khan and attended by ten gentlemen in flowing robes, fifteen servants, an orchestra and four dwarfs.”

Typically, Peter himself went incognito, sort of, dressed as a sailor. He got to Konigsberg before the rest of the delegation and used the extra few days to earn a master’s certificate in gunnery from a Prussian engineer. Peter wanted to know everything:

“He would stop people on the streets and abruptly ask, ‘What is it?’ ‘Show it to me,’ as he unceremoniously examined a lady’s watch or removed a man’s wig. In Hanover, where Peter was a guest of Sophia the Electress, he danced with the court ladies and mistook the ribs of their corsets for bones. ‘The bones of these German women are devilishly hard!’ exclaimed the Tsar.” Peter, it should be remembered, was 6’7” tall. When he asked to look at a watch, people complied.

In Zaandam he lived in a small home at the edge of the dikes so he could learn shipbuilding. He worked in a paper factory, learned engraving, “cut up whale blubber in Texel” and studied “human anatomy and surgery in Leyden.” He stopped at Wurttemberg to see the ink spot where Luther had attacked the devil, but wrote in the guest book “The story is false. The ink stains are new.” Later, in 1717, he visited Paris, roaming the city in cabs.

Everywhere he went he recruited: “On his first Grand Embassy alone, over eight hundred people skilled in various specialties were hired and sent back to Russia.”

Valentin Serov’s 1907 painting of the founding of Peterburg captures the Tsar’s character: He strides erect and confident across the painting, followed by a huffing, puffing collection of stooped architects.