[1718 A.D.]

chosen from amongst those who would be ready to fulfil the will of him who had named them.

The committee appointed to judge the czarevitch consisted of 127 members of the clergy and laity; in the instructions given by the czar to the first it was enjoined that they should act "without any hypocrisy or partiality"; in the instructions given to the laity the following was signified: "I ask you in order that this matter may be truthfully accomplished, without seeking to flatter me; without any respect for persons, to act righteously, and not to destroy your souls and mine, so that our consciences may be pure at the terrible day of judgment, and our country secure." Such were the words that the czar addressed to the tribunal; they were fine in themselves, but their signification could not have been great, because the judges were not independent. The conceptions of the present time require that judges should not be afraid of being dismissed from their functions, of being deprived of the salaries accompanying these functions, and so on-then only can a judge be entirely impartial; but were the judges of the czarevitch and in general all the judges of that time in such a position? They were all persons in the government service and entirely dependent on their chiefs; in the present case whom was it they risked displeasing? The czar himself! It was natural that they should try and read the czar's will in the eyes of Menshikov, Tolstoi, and others of his intimates.

On the 24th of June, 1718, the sentence of the supreme tribunal was pronounced. The clergy refused to pronounce sentence, but the laity unanimously decreed the penalty of death against the czarevitch. Execution, however, did not follow, but something far more terrible than a public death on the scaffold did the czarevitch was tortured on the rack. In fact, during the last days of the sitting of the tribunal, he had been several times subjected to it and, he was even tortured after sentence had been passed upon him! All this was more than the feeble organism of the czarevitch could bear, and on the 26th of June he died in a cell of the Petersburg fortress. Amongst the number of his friends and sharers in his flight many were executed, others banished to distant places, to monasteries and fortresses; amongst the latter was also the czarevna Marie Alexievna, who was sent to Schlüsselburg.

Such is one of the darkest episodes of the reign of Peter. The czarevitch Alexis could not have continued the work commenced by his father; he could not have succeeded him; he might have been judged, even condemned, if the tribunal (but an impartial tribunal) had found him guilty, and his head might have fallen at the hands of the public executioner like that of a criminal. But he was promised pardon if he would return, and having returned he was delivered up to the tribunal, he was judged by persons in whose impartiality it is impossible to believe; finally he was tortured after sentence was pronounced, when everywhere, even to the most insignificant of men and the greatest of criminals, time is given to prepare for death. For these things history cannot forgive the czar. Upon contemporaries the judgment and death of the czarevitch produced a deep impression. There were persons who admired the czar's decision to sacrifice his son to the welfare of the country and his great plans; they compared him to Brutus. But there were but few such persons and they for the greater part were foreigners and not Russians. The greatness of Brutus and civic virtues in general did not powerfully move the hearts of our forefathers; but each of them felt that it was unnatural for a father to take away his son's life!

Terrible rumours as to the details of the czarevitch's death began to be current amongst the people; some said that he had been secretly poisoned,

[1718 A.D.]

others that he had been strangled, and yet others that the czar himself had cut off his head in the cell. All these were fables, but fables which, however, may even now be met with in the works of many foreign authors and which also prove how powerfully the imagination of contemporaries was affected by this event and how much it was talked of. That noble quality of human nature sympathy with sufferings even when they are deserved - made the czarevitch dearer still to his numerous partisans. The idea that Peter had indeed been "changed" became stronger. The common people, the merchants, the clergy, even distinguished persons, when they were not afraid of being overheard, said: "Would such a thing have been possible if he were the rightful czar would he have killed his son and made the czarevna take the veil?" In some more fanatical minds the idea became confirmed that the czarevitch was alive and the name of the unfortunate young man became, as did in previous times the name of the czarevitch Dmitri, an ensign for impostors and pretenders.h

DOMESTIC AFFAIRS

The appalling episode we have just related was so far from engrossing the thoughts of the czar that it hardly interrupted the course of his ordinary occupations. Nay, as if to darken still more the tragic horrors of the year 1718, by mingling with them the coarsest and most disgusting buffoonery, it was in that very year he instituted the crapulous burlesque of the Conclave. The occasion of it was this: During the czar's visit to Paris, the doctors of the Sorbonne addressed him with the view of effecting a union between the Russo-Greek church and that of Rome, and they presented to him a memorial full of learned arguments against the schismatical tenets of his co-religionists. This memorial only gave great offence to the court of Rome, without pleasing either the emperor or the church of Russia.

"In this plan of reunion," says Voltaire, "there were some political matters which they did not understand, and some points of controversy which they said they understood and which each party explained according to its humour. There was a question about the Holy Ghost, who, according to the Latins, proceeds from the Father and the Son; and according to the Greeks, at present, proceeds from the Father, through the Son, after having, for a long time, proceeded from the Father only. They quoted St. Epiphanius, who says that 'the Holy Ghost is not the Son's brother, nor the Father's grandson.' But the czar, at leaving Paris, had other business than to explain passages from St. Epiphanius; however, he received the Sorbonne's memorial with great affability. They also wrote to some Russian bishops, who returned a polite answer; but the greater number received the overture with indignation." It was to dissipate the apprehensions of this reunion that, after expelling the Jesuits from his dominions, he instituted the mock conclave, as he had previously set on foot other burlesque exhibitions, for the purpose of turning the office of patriarch into ridicule.

There was at his court an old man named Sotov, an enormous drunkard, and a court-fool of long standing; he had taught the czar to write, and by this service imagined that he deserved the highest dignities. Peter promised to confer on him one of the most eminent in the known world: he created him kniaz papa, that is to say, prince-pope, with a salary of 2,000 roubles, and a palace at St. Petersburg, in the Tatar ward. Sotov was enthroned by buffoons; four fellows, who stammered, were appointed to harangue him on his exaltation; his mock holiness created a number of cardinals, and rode in procession

[1718 A.D.] at the head of them, sitting astride on a cask of brandy, which was laid on a sledge drawn by four oxen. They were followed by other sledges loaded with food and drink; and the march was accompanied by the rough music of drums, trumpets, horns, hautboys, and fiddles, all playing out of tune; and the clattering of pots and pans, brandished by a troop of cooks and scullions. The train was swelled by a number of men dressed as monks of various Romish orders, and each carrying a bottle and glass. The czar and his courtiers brought up the rear, the former in the garb of a Dutch skipper, the latter in various comic disguises.

When the procession arrived at the place where the conclave was to be held the cardinals were led into a long gallery, part of which had been boarded off into a range of closets in each of which a cardinal was shut up with plenty of food and intoxicating liquors. To every one of their eminences were attached two conclavists-cunning young fellows, whose business it was to ply their principals well with drink, carry real or pretended messages to and fro between the members of the sacred college, and provoke them to bawl out all sorts of abuse of each other and of their respective families. The czar listened eagerly to all this ribaldry, not forgetting in the midst of his glee to note down on his tablets any hints of which it might be possible for him to make a vindictive use. The cardinals were not released from confinement until they were all agreed upon a number of farcical questions submitted to them by the kniaz рара.

The orgie lasted three days and three nights. The doors of the conclave were at last thrown open in the middle of the day, and the pope and his cardinals were carried home dead drunk on sledges that is to say, such of them as survived; for some had actually died during the debauch, and others never recovered from its effects. This stupid farce was repeated three times; and on the last occasion especially it was accompanied with other abominations, which admit of no description. Peter himself had his death accelerated by his excesses in the last conclave.

From 1714 to 1717 Peter published ninety-two ordinances or regulations; in 1718 alone, in that year of crime, thirty-six ukases, or regulations, were promulgated, and twenty-seven in 1719. The majority of them related directly to his new establishments. The council of mines dates in its origin from that period, as do also the uniformity of weights and measures, the institution of schools for teaching arithmetic in all the towns of the empire; that of orphan-houses and foundling-hospitals, of workshops for the poor, and of manufactories of tapestry, silks, linens, and cloths for soldiers' clothing; the founding of the city of Ladoga; the canal of the same name, which he began with his own hands; that of Kronstadt; the plan of another, which now unites the Baltic to the Caspian by the intermedium of the Volga; besides numerous measures of detail, including the police, the health of towns, lighting and cleansing, founded upon what he had remarked during the previous year in the great cities of Europe.

At this sanguinary epoch it was that, by this multitude of establishments for the promotion of all kinds of industry, he gave the most rapid impulse to the knowledge, commerce, and civilisation to which he sacrificed his son; as though, by thus redoubling his activity, he had sought to escape from himself, or to palliate, by the importance of the result, the horror of the sacrifice. In several of these ordinances it is remarkable that, either from the inconsistency which is inherent in our nature or from the pride of a despot, which believes itself to be detached from and above everything, he required respect to be paid to religion, at the very moment when, with such cruelty, he was paying no