Peter the Great: The Rock Star Tsar

Tsar Peter Romanov was a strong leader who overcame difficult odds to seize the throne of Russia, then forge his dominion into a dominant Empire that became a powerful force in European politics for years to come, but he was also possibly the hardest-partying world leader in all of human history. Ben and Pat discuss Peter the Great's lifelong fight... for the right... to party!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio podcast produced by
High five Content. It is nighttime at the Grand Palace
in Saint Petersburg, and the elite of the Russian nobility
have gathered here to see and be seen. Soft music
plays as the aristocracy and the political leadership sip champagne,
eat caviard, dance and talk quietly, each dressed in their

(00:23):
finest silks and brocades, all eager for opportunities to use
various machinations to improve their social and political standing. Perhaps
they will even get a glimpse of the Emperor himself.
It is not long before he enters, and when he does,
his presence is unmistakable. He is extremely tall, physically strong,

(00:44):
and wildly energetic, bellowing and laughing as he dances into
the room triumphantly. He is followed by a group of
trained Siberian brown bears carrying silver trays of vodka shats,
a parade of drunken revelers, and a full choir of
singers bellowing out obscene parody versions of famous Russian Christmas carols.

(01:04):
The assembled nobles react with a mix of shock, excitement
and concern, unsure how to deal with any of this.
This is Peter Romanov, Czar of all the Russias, the
most influential man in Eastern Europe. He has forged an
empire in battle built navies where none existed before, took

(01:25):
on the dominant powers in the region, wrested valuable lands
from their possession, and built ports and cities to cement
his claims on those new conquests. He's a bold leader,
a man who has worked hard to modernize this country
and claim a space for it on the international stage.
But tonight, Peter the Great is going to party, and

(01:47):
he's going to do it better than anyone else in Europe.
Hello and welcome back to Badass of the Week. My
name is Ben Thompson and I am here as always
with my co host, doctor Pat Larish. Pat, we just
had Thanksgiving and we've got a lot of holidays coming up.

(02:08):
Do you have any Do you have any big plans?

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Well? Finishing the semester, which means that in addition to
celebrating Christmas with my family, I also get to celebrate
Oh hey, I have a whole pack of exams to grade.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Fantastic You get homework for the vacation.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, yeah, that's the paradox of being a teacher, like
you assign your student's homework, but then that's worked for you,
and it's just this vicious cycle and it seems like
there's a way out of this.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
But yeah, just don't give any homework.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
Yeah. Well, the holidays, you know, they mean different things
to different people, and there are different holidays. Before the show,
Pat and I were discussing whether or not people still
celebrate Festivus.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Oh yeah, from the Seinfeld.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Sure, you think the nineties are back, But I don't
know if festiv Us is back yet or if it
ever left. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
I don't know. Yeah, what's the same of Festivus the
airing of grievance of grievances. Yes, and that is Yeah,
we still celebrate fest of Us. Yeah, that is a
thing that comes up no matter what, no matter what. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
what holiday you are celebrating. Family drama is a theme. Yes,
grievances are aired and sometimes more than aired.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yes, that is actually going to be a theme for
today as we talk about Peter the Great. He is
a very large man who loved large parties and had
a large family and had a lot of drama. With
that family.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah. And when you say a large man, you mean
not just a large personality, but also he was he
was a big guy.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
Yeah. He was like six eight physically, big dude, really
big guy at a time when most people, like at
that time when six ' eight was less common than
it is now, at a time when most people were
like five six. Right.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
So, yeah, so this is Peter the Great and we're
pitching him as the center of this whole family feud,
family drama, YadA, YadA, YadA, big old Russian soap opera.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
But also, you know, since we do claim to be
somewhat history themed, I would just like to add as
a footnote that Peter the Great did also help to
usher in a new period of prosperity for the Russian Empire. Yes,
incidentally along the way.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
Yes, that is true. Although the partying and the family
drama are sometimes a little bit more exciting to talk
about when we get into.

Speaker 2 (04:23):
Peter the where the anecdotes are yes, yeah sometimes, and
we're here for the ant Sometimes the soap.

Speaker 1 (04:27):
Opera stuff is even more interesting than the historical significance
of a particular person or family.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah. So yeah, Peter the Great, can you imagine holiday
dinner at the house of Peter the Great. I guess
you have to specify which house, like the wind in
Moscow or the one out in the country or you
know whatever. He had a lot of past Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he was crashing at when he was on his tours
and things. I mean, he was actually like kind of
allergic to Moscow for some of the time. And yeah,

(04:54):
so you know, Aunt Sophia, she's going to have to
zoom in because she's incarcerated in a monastery and I'm
allowed to leave. Mom's quote unquote secretary can't come because oops,
he's been decapitated. You know, this is this is drama,
and I have to say, our episode is about Peter
the Great. But as I learned about Peter the Great,

(05:15):
I found myself clicking on the names of the people
around him, and each of people has their own story,
and I kind of wanted to tell all of their stories.
So what I had to do was just forcibly remove
myself from the Internet and say, Okay, this is it.
We're just going to plow ahead with this, and I

(05:36):
want our listeners to know these are all very interesting people.
But this episode is about Peter the Great.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yes, yes, And if you read some of the larger
biographies of him, like the Life of Peter the Great,
they get into some of these other characters that are
around him, you know, his sister, his family, a lot
of his friends that were going to meet along the way.
We don't have time to get into all of them,
but they're all characters. Like he surrounded himself with interesting
and unique and weird people and they all have these

(06:02):
crazy stories. But he is He is such an interesting
character that interesting characters kind of gravitate towards him and
then you end up with so all of the people
around him are interesting. But I think that's a factor
of him being interesting and seeking out interesting people and
not wanting the same boring stuff that everybody had been doing.
He wanted the new stuff and the cool stuff. And

(06:25):
you know, is this guy interesting? Is this guy cool?
And yeah, so we'll get into him and really, like
you know, we're talking family drama, and nothing says family
drama like the Romanovs. So so we're gonna take a
quick break and then we're gonna talk about Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanovs,

(06:46):
Peter the great father of his country and emperor of
all the.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Russias Russia's plural.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yes, there are multiple Russias, depending on who you ask,
of course, according to Peter the Great and a few
Russian leaders who have come since him, Belarus and Ukraine
are also considered Russia's, but the people that live in
those places might not always agree. But we're going to
get into that. This is all going to tie back
together in the Peter the Great story, So stick with

(07:15):
us and we'll be right back. Yes, Peter the Great
was born Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov on June ninth, sixteen seventy two.
In the current calendar, there's a bunch of weird calendar

(07:36):
stuff that I'm not going to get into, but dates
are always.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, we don't need that for this episode.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
Yeah, it'll come up later that he's going to change
the calendar and the calendar's calendars. When you're talking about
Russia at this time period, everything's weird. So let's go
with June ninth, sixteen seventy two. Yeah, he had auburn
hair and dark eyes. They describe his eyes as being black.
They say that maybe it was some kind of descendancy

(08:02):
of the Tatars or the Mongols.

Speaker 2 (08:04):
He is a very striking appearance.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Yes, he's from the House of Romanov, who has ruled
Russia as tsars since the days of Ivan the Terrible
in the sixteenth century, and the House of Romanov will
will run Russia from basically Ivan the Terrible up until
the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century. So they ruled
Russia for hundreds of years, and Peter the Great is

(08:28):
one of the main people in that line historically, when
you're talking about historical significance, Peter's father was the Tsar
Alexis the First, and Peter was the fourteenth child of
Tsar Alexis the First, although he was the only one
from Alexis's second wife. Alexis's first wife had thirteen kids

(08:49):
and the second one, Yeah, I had one, I guess.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
Okay, Yeah, I just want to give a shout out
to the first one for having thirteen kids. That's kind
of badass of.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
Itself, seems intense.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah, that's kind of what you did if you were
an elite Russian woman in those days.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
I was waiting in line, and I was doing my
day before Thanksgiving grocery shopping, and there was a woman
in front of me in line who was trying to
wrestle two children and do the groceries at the same time.
And they were pretty little kids, and it looked like
it looked like a Waryea, it looked like a war zone.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
She's out numbered.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, yeah, what happens if they running opposite directions? I
just think your favorite.

Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, or just reach into the nearest grocery bag and
pull out the bag of goldfish crackers.

Speaker 1 (09:36):
Yes, yes, that is key. I have that. This is
my dad pro tip is I have these little little
packages of emergency goldfish that I keep in the center
console of my car that I could just kind of
throw in his direction if he gets mad at me.

Speaker 2 (09:50):
I should try that with my ninth graders.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it would work. I think it
works probably. I mean I think it would work with
like thirty year olds, honestly.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
But we're not here to talk about goldfish crackers. We're
here talk about the Romanov. The Romanov Peter, yes and
Alexis the first had two wives.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Two wives, I mean not at the same time, but no,
he got he divorced the first wife and then the
second wife he had. Peter was the eldest son. Now
in sixteen seventy six, Peter is only four years old
when his dad dies. The Tzar Alexis goes outside in
the Russian winter without his coat on, catches a cold
and dies a few days later.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
And okay, where your winter coat? Yes, okay, if it's
cold out, bundle up.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, you'll catch your death. So that's the expression, yeah, don't.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
Be like Zara. Alexis the first yes, And so.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
When he dies, he's got the two wives. So he's
married to the second wife, but the first wife has
thirteen kids, and the families of the two wives kind
of have a little bit of a feud. But what
ends up happening is is very simple. The eldest son
of the tzar, this boy named Fyodor. He's fifteen years old.

(10:58):
He's not in great health. He's he was sick as
a child. He never really got over it. But he
is the eldest son of the czar. He is dynastically
the person who was supposed to ascend to the throne.
He was confirmed by his father. There's a little bit
of arguing, but generally it is accepted. Okay, Fyoder, he's

(11:20):
going to become the Tzar of Russia, and he is
crowned Czar Theodore the third at his at his inauguration ceremony,
he was so ill that he couldn't walk down the
aisle by himself. He had to kind of be carried
down the aisle by some by some helpers.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
Okay, but if you're czar or you know, czar about
to be crowned, Hey you've got staff.

Speaker 1 (11:41):
You've got staff. Yeah, you can afford to have a
carrier around today.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
But I also understand that in you know, elite Moscow
in seventeenth century, the optics of this might not go
over so well, like, oh, this is our zar, which
is totally ablest.

Speaker 1 (11:54):
But yeah, so Fyoda becomes the these the czar, and hey,
look at that. Everything's cool. Dynastic transition in Europe without
a war. Wow, what a what a rarity success. Everybody's happy,
everybody agrees. Yeah, yeah, and that works out great for
a very short period of time, until.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
I got the sense you were setting us up for
some fielder dies. Well, everyone dies eventually, but Foda.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Dies pretty quickly after becoming czar, and now succession is
supposed to go to his his brother Ivan, who is
even in worse state than Fyodor. Who's you know, physically
is not in great shape, but is kind of mentally
not all there either. There's definitely, like we don't know

(12:42):
for sure, but certainly some sort of like mental illness
or developmental issues happening with him.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
People didn't have confidence in him right for whatever.

Speaker 1 (12:52):
The ways in which he is described by historians writing
at the time was extremely unflattering of his physical and
mental capabilities. But he's bizarre. Now he's going to.

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Desire yeah, yeah, and even calibrating for biases and sources, YadA, YadA, YadA. Okay,
this is ivan. He got the job, or he's in
line to get the job because of who his daddy was.

Speaker 1 (13:18):
Right, he's the second son of the czar. And keep
in mind here that Peter is the well, let's let's
look down the line here, he's the fourteenth kid of
the czar. So yeah, that's pretty far down the line.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, and I don't think it makes them fourteenth in
line because we're not giving women the czar ship, right.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Oh no, no, the no girls allowed rule is firmly
in place in Russia in the seventeenth century.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
Yeah, Okay, we have the benefit of hindsight. We know
that Peter did become not only Czar, Butzar Peter the First,
the great of all the How yeah, so how do
we get from uh, you know, the first two eldest
sons of wife number one of the formers are to

(14:00):
this random kid. His second wife popped out. I mentioned
the well you be mentioned the no girls allowed rule.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
You gave it. It's a tradition in Europe around the sky.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah. So between Alexis the First's two wives, we've got
fourteen kids, statistically speaking, some of them are going to
be girls. And what is it like to be a Muscovite,
elite woman, a member of the royal family in Russia. Well,
actually you had to stay indoors a lot. You were

(14:35):
not only not well, okay, that was probably.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Part of jacket.

Speaker 3 (14:39):
No no, no, no no, But even if you put
on your nice warm winter jacket, if you were a woman,
you were not supposed to be active in public socially,
you were not supposed to be active in public politics.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
You were not really supposed to be at a lot
of ceremonies that we would thought would have been co ed.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
You know.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
So Peter, okay, this is all going to come back
to Peter of course, but he has to get through
his older half sister, Sophia. I kind of wonder if
things have been just a little different, maybe we'd be
doing this episode about Sophia the Great and Peter, her
half brother, would be a sidebar. But we're in this timeline.

(15:25):
So we've got Sophia. She was a daughter of Alexei
the First, and she was a daughter of the first wife,
Maria Miloslavskaya.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
So a sister too, Ivan and Foder.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Yes, and full sister. And this is really relevant because
Maria the First Wife's family, like her extended clan, was
not just things weren't just awkward. They were feuding with
the clan of Natalia Natalia and Arishkina, the second wife.
So it's the Miloslavskis versus the and Alexis the First,

(16:03):
the late Alexis the First is at the center of this.
And Peter is the only uh scion of the Narishkins,
so he's heavily outnumbered. He's heavily outnumbered, but the.

Speaker 1 (16:15):
Nurishkins, so his his mom is the White is still
the wife of the of the now deceased emperor, and
his uncles are pretty powerful figures. Oh yeah, there's a
marriage of like power between Peter's mom and Zara Alexis
and the Millaslavskis. There's a lot of them, and they

(16:35):
are supposed to inherit, but he divorced her and they've
been you know there there there's some some stuff going
on here, and so this is not as one sided
of a battle as you'd expect based on thirteen verses one.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
Yeah, because that's only the snapshot of that particular generation,
that particular clade or whatever. But yeah, we've got the
Milislavsky's and we've got the Nurish And if it helps,
M comes before N in the alphabet, So Maria Miyoslavskya
she's the first wife and Natalia Naryshkina is the second wife.

(17:11):
That's how I figured it out. Anyway, I'll be here
all week. I've got more like this.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
No, I love neumonics like that. I do that one
at the time.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah, yeah, I just it just amused me that their
names alliterated. Anyway, So we've got Sophia, who is one
of the siblings from the first wife. She is actually
generally agreed to be competent, smart, savvy, but she's a
girl or a woman. She as an elite Muscovite woman,

(17:42):
she was subject to this practice, called terrem by historians.
The contemporary term was polkoi. And if you were an
elite Roman woman in Moscow, you were not supposed to
be seen in public. You were supposed to be very private.
It was all about preserving your chastity and your your
image and your eligibility and your respectability for the marriage market,

(18:03):
which was a really big deal. Commoners were not subject
to this. It was just a noble woman thing. So
Sophia is older than Fyodor, she's older than Ivan, and
she's much older than Peter. I seriously get really serious
big sister vibes from her, Yes, because not just as
she a representative of her clan, the Milaslovsky's, but also

(18:28):
she's looking out for her little brother. And I know
that I can romanticize things when I get into that
kind of mode. You're like, Oh, she's looking out for
her little brother. She's looking out for her kid brother Ivan.
But you know, we're telling this story. So what does
big Sister Sophia do. She's lived a lot of her
life subject to the seclusion, but she seems to have

(18:49):
a pretty rich life behind doors. She was tutored by
this guy named sum And Polatsky, whom I mentioned because
he gets mentioned. Of all of her sisters, she's the
only one to work with this particular tutor, and he
seems to have a very good reputation. He has really
good student recommendations. She is clearly mentally very sharp and

(19:13):
knows all sorts of things and knows how to think
about things. Theodor when he was our you know, Ben,
you said that he had this reputation of being very weak, sickly, frail, whatever,
maybe mentally not quite as competent as some other people.
But after Feodor became Czar, Sophia had been helping to

(19:33):
guide him behind the scenes. And also it seems like
he was working with this Simeon Polotski tutor guy. And
you know, he did seem to I don't know whether
it was Sofia or Simeon or whoever. He did seem
to I don't know, grow in his ideas.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
Yeah, yeah, he improved during his He had a pretty
short reign, but he got better. And I think you're
right that Sophia probably a lot to do with that,
as well as Sami and Volotski.

Speaker 2 (20:02):
Oh yeah, yeah, and so just a big shout out
to the people behind the scenes, who you know, I
don't know, push you to achieve. Now, Fyodor, he was sickly,
he didn't have any kids. And then, as you said, Ben,
then you have to go back through the family tree
and say, okay, did it? How are our rules of
succession working? Theodore had a sister and she was older

(20:23):
than him. Why didn't the throne go to her? Well,
no girls allowed and no girls allowed, as the actuals are,
but also no girls allowed at public things like funerals.
So she actually caused a scene simply by showing up
at her brother Fyodor's funeral. Wow, apparently this was a

(20:43):
guy's only thing. And I haven't looked into this, but
I assume that elite Muscovite women had their own rituals
of mourning and grief. But that was that. So her
little brother Ivan was in line to be are as
the next son of Alexis. Sophia was worried that Ivan,

(21:06):
who was also not in the greatest of health, would
get passed over Shanta de size for some other son
of Alexis. She was maybe particularly worried or I don't know.
I don't know if she was worried about Peter specifically
at this point, because Peter was just nine at this point.
But by all accounts, Peter was hale and.

Speaker 1 (21:25):
Hardy and yeah, and as we know, Peter is going
to become a big, giant dude. He's going to be
six ' eight, like a big strong guy. He's he's
got a powerful family backing him. They're probably doing some
behind the scenes machinations trying to like that the nobles
and the Boyars and trying to build alliances. The odds

(21:47):
are not that they're going to pass over Ivan for
the next best son in the Millislovsky line, but that
they are going to pass him over for Peter, the
big strong kid from the the Narishkin line.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah. Yeah, you know, if Peter became Czar, that means
that his mom, Natalia would get all that behind the
scenes power. Does that sit well with Sophia? You know,
she's thinking ahead. So the way you get named zar
is the patriarchs of the Church and the Boyars, which
is the collection of noblemen name you Zar, and they

(22:23):
named Peter Czar. But it doesn't stop there. Sophia has
been working her connections, She's been forming alliances behind the scenes,
she has this really really good working relationship with this
nobleman basically a prince Vasiligoltsen, who we'll hear about later.

(22:43):
Sophia makes the case that her brother Ivan is legitimate heir,
and she makes the case for uh appointing Ivan and
herself as cozars.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Oh has that happened before?

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah? Uh, cozar with us a woman?

Speaker 1 (23:03):
I don't know, a woman before.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
So technically there was a few generations before I forget
the exact year, there was a female Zar, Irena, but
she was, uh, she was the wife of the reigning zar.
The czar died actually I think it was another czar
named Theodor, one of the earlier Theodorsar Fodors and he

(23:28):
died and she, as his widow, was czar kind of
for like nine days or something.

Speaker 1 (23:34):
It was like a regent for the kid or something.

Speaker 2 (23:36):
I think. So, yeah, yeah, it didn't last long.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
So this is revolutionary. Then what she's what she's suggesting
is revolutionary.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, just suggesting it is very you know, very yeah
yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. And the court, the Duma
rejects this, and Sophia she's been working her connections, so
she has an alliance with the Streltzi, which is the
kind of the elite army guard very roughly kind of

(24:09):
filling the same niche in the ecosystem as the Praetorian
Guard of Imperial Rome.

Speaker 1 (24:13):
Kind they are the guard. They are the military regiments
stationed in Moscow, like elite troops, but yeah, kind of
home guard. Powerful. They're the army, right, they're the military.
They're the guys in the streets with the guns, and
that those are good friends to have if you're trying
to have a succession war.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
Yeah. Ooh, did we say succession war, because didn't we
just avoid that earlier with Alexis passing on the throne of.

Speaker 1 (24:38):
Theodore thinks were great when they stayed in the in
the line of the first Wafe.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Yeah, So Sophia calls on the Streltzi, and they, for
various reasons, were already kind of disgruntled, and this leads
to the Streltzi Uprising or the Moscow Uprising of sixteen
eighty two. Some of Peter's own people, friends, family members,
some uncles were killed right in front of his own eyes,

(25:04):
murdered from his perspective, and he's like, what nine or ten.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
At this point. Yeah, he's ten, and the Strelzi they
storm the Kremlin and Peter is being installed as czar
and all of his family, all of those powerful uncles
and his mom and everybody are in building and Strelzi
storm it and they go door to door looking for
narishkins and executing them and killing them on the spot
in like right there. And they they're in the Kremlin

(25:29):
for two days kind of finding all of Peter's uncles
and killing them and dragging others off to be imprisoned
or whatever. Yeah, this is Peter's not going to forget this.
This is a pretty traumatic moment for him.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
I mean, yeah, I can you imagine I don't know,
hiding in a closet or whatever for two days while
thump thump thump all around you or whatever. You know. Wow,
So he's scarred, I mean anyone would be. What's the result,
what's the upshoot of this? This uprising? Will? In sixteen
eighty two, the patriarch and this is the Orthodox patriarchs

(26:05):
we've got, you know, the religious side involved. Patriarch Joachim
installs Ivan as Ivan the viv and Peter as Peter
the first as Kozars Sophia. Because Ivan and Peter are
both young, Sophia is named regent, and she's the regent

(26:25):
of Ivan and Peter. It's not what she asked for,
but it's pretty she figures out how to work it. Yeah,
it's pretty good.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
She gets to rule for Ivan, who isn't really capable
of ruling, and Peter, who is almost certainly there in
name only. He's nine years old. He can't make any decisions,
and for sure, this is her opportunity to make sure
that he is never in a position where he can
make any decisions.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
She's run in the show fourth grader. Yeah, he's a
fourth grader basically. Now, my apologies to all fourth graders.
I know that you are intelligent human beings who can
make your own decisions, but running an empire is above
your pay scale. So Sophia, how does she manage his regent?
How does she take advantage of this? How does she
exercise her will in the world? How does she make

(27:14):
team Milloslavsky secure in their position? She made Vasali Glitzen,
whom I mentioned earlier, as her principal minister of State,
which I think was probably a good move because he
was a dude and he was free to act in
the world publicly, honestly. As a side note, he seemed
pretty cool in a practical badass kind of way, not

(27:35):
in a party animal kind of way, not in an
over the top kind of way, but just one of
those kind of people who is really competent at policy
and thinks about things. Back under Theodor, Golitzen was frustrated
with this whole seniority based promotion in the army that
was more tied to the rank and society you were
born with than anything else, and he actually got zar

(27:57):
Fyodor to replace it with a more merit based of promotion.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
This is this is very funny, pat because this is
an interesting like Peter the greats, the big drinking party animal,
that's the one I like. And you're like, oh, Glitzen
got things done, like he was very practical and got things.
May things happen. I think of how your favorite emperor
is Vespasian and mine is probably like Caligula. Hey, so

(28:22):
why would work well together?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (28:24):
Yeah, okay, So what does Glitzen and Sophia do? And
Glitzen is basically a mouthpiece for Sophia as far as
I understand it, he kind of is doing her work
because she can't issue the orders herself or or at
least like yeah, people are more likely to chafe if
they're being ordered by her to do the thing, but

(28:44):
Glitzen can kind of get the stuff done her in
her stead.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah, so that's what's happening as far as like actually
running the place. As far as the I don't know,
public facing face of the monarchy of the Tzara Hood,
We've got Ivan and Peter and there are two of them.
They actually sit on a double throne. It's a you know,
a throne that's twice as wide, and it's got a
little seat for one of them in a seat for

(29:10):
the other one.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
They're both little kids. I bet that's really cute.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
I can imagine them, like, you know, kicking their legs
off the side, like Lily Tomlin in that big chair. Yeah. Yeah,
Tzara of all Russia, Tsars of all Russia. I'm sure
they had access to as many gold fish crackers as
they wanted.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
He's a little cranky, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
Give him some gogurt. And Sophia knew that she was
not really supposed to appear in public, so she had
a hole cut in the back of the throne so
she could sit in and listen in on all of
the meetings and conversations and audiences and give the young

(29:53):
tsar's advice. I thinking kind of like Raymie the rat
in Ratitui, except she's not pulling the hair.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Maybe she probably was doing some of that.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Oh I hope, So I hope. I mean that would
be a very big sister thing to do. So she
ruled like this for seven years, and she was in
effect the autocrat of Russia.

Speaker 1 (30:14):
Well, so, yeah, z our Sophia, she won't be the
last czar, a female Zar of Russia because we're gonna
get We're gonna get some female Zars of Russia after her.
So she's kind of a groundbreaking precedent for this. Get
into the other ones because they're gonna they're gonna come
up in this story. But yeah, really interesting Sophia. And
so she is running the show in Russia for these

(30:35):
seven years. You've got Peter and Ivan as kozars, but
they're not in the picture, right. Peter saw what happened
when he tried to or his family tried to assert dominance,
and that was like a lot of people got beheaded
in front of him. So he doesn't want to be
any part of this, and so for the from the
ages of ten to seventeen, he hates Moscow. He doesn't

(30:59):
want to be there. He hates the strell s. No,
he's got his little double throne, but he hates sitting there.
He hates taking orders from Sofia and his hair pol yes, exactly.
So he goes out to the countryside with his family,
his surviving family. He just kind of chills out in
the countryside. He starts to find hobbies. Among his hobbies

(31:20):
are sailing. He loves sailboats. He likes hunting, he likes
horseback riding. He likes As he starts getting older, he
likes partying. He likes going around in the Foreign quarter
of Moscow when he's in town because there's more Westerners
out there, more people from from Western Europe. He can
kind of party with these people who aren't quite so

(31:43):
probably are quite so allied with Sofia. And Yeah, so
they go out and they shoot fireworks. He gets in
trouble for shooting fireworks and setting some stuff on fire.
He accidentally kills a boyard with a bottle rocket at
one point. As a kid, Yeah, he likes he likes archery, fencing, musketry.
He likes shooting guns, he likes fighting, he likes wrestling,

(32:06):
he likes sailboats, building his own sailboats. Yes, extremely active,
So Peter. For most of his life he only sleeps
four hours a night, and he's the entire rest of
the time he's partying. He's just loving life. As we said,
he runs around and anything that is potentially like dangerous

(32:26):
or could cause grievous bodily injury to himself or someone else.
Peter and his buddies love doing it, and as he
starts getting older, they love doing it while drinking. So okay, right, yeah,
that's Peter.

Speaker 2 (32:41):
So if skydiving had been invented, he'd be doing it.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
He would be doing it with a bottle of vodka
in hand.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
Yes, yeah, that's and maybe like a paintball gun or something.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
Yeah, So that's what he's off doing. He's off partying
and building his own boats and shooting off bottle rockets
and setting things on fire and getting in trouble for fighting,
shooting guns trying to make them himself, all kinds of
crazy stuff. And Sophia meanwhile, is running the show.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
She's running the show pretty well from behind the scenes,
or at least she's able to exercise her will pretty
well from behind the scenes, and sometimes it goes well
for her, sometimes not so much. She joins a Okay, Sofia,
When I say Sophia, I mean Sofia, I e. The
Russian Empire joins a European war against the Tatars, who

(33:30):
were allied with the Ottomans in Crimea. And from Russia's
point of view, it was not completely successful, but that
war did play an important role in holding back Ottoman
expansion in Europe. Sophia gets a nice little gift out
of this. Poland gives her a chunk of Ukraine, including
the city of Kiev.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yes, well, we know is what we know today is Ukraine.
Sofia and Peter would have referred to as little Russia.
So that too Russia. Yeah, and so KEIV goes over
to Russia here and it will more or less stay
there until the fall of the Soviet Union. But that's
a that's a different story. But she so, she is

(34:13):
getting into these European wars though, which is something that
Russia has traditionally not done. Russia has kind of for
the last several hundred years as they were under the
Mongol rule for a long time, and then it was
the Golden Horde and then and now Russia is working
on integrating themselves into Europe and the West, and them

(34:35):
siding with making deals with France and Poland and England
to join them militarily. That's a big step for Russia
to modernize their country and to bring them more into
the forefront as a world power, which is what they're
trying to accomplish. But it's difficult because they are a

(34:57):
very rural society at this point, with a lot of
people but not a lot of central governing strength, and
so they need a strong hand to try to guide
them more into the modern era, into the West, and
that is what Sophia begins to do. So Sophia does

(35:18):
a pretty good job, but in sixteen eighty nine, the
Boyars they're against her, right the Strelzi is for her,
and the Streltzi has the guns. But the Boyars are
powerful noblemen and they have power. And when Peter turns seventeen,
the Boyars attempt again to get him installed as the

(35:39):
Souls are. And there's the yeah, and so Ivan is
not doing great and some of this war, like you said,
you got some land out of it. It began integrate
Russia into the West. But Russia has lost troops and
the Boyars are able to kind of spin this and
get Peter and stalled as soul czar. In sixteen eighty nine.

Speaker 2 (36:03):
What happens to Sophia.

Speaker 1 (36:04):
Sophia goes to a convent and is forced to become
a nun.

Speaker 2 (36:08):
Okay, I was gonna say, does she go willingly? It's like, oh, yeah,
I'm done, It's time for me to retire.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
No, I don't think we've seen the last of her. Yeah,
she does not see the kind of person that would
just be like, okay, cool, I'm a none. Now great,
that sounds awesome. I even gets to stay. He did
nothing bad happens to I have and he lives. But
now Peter is the sole ruler of one hundred million
people in one of the largest area wise and a

(36:34):
very rapidly modernizing Russia. So we are going to take
a really quick break and then we get back. We're
going to talk about the rule of Czar Peter the First. Okay,
welcome back. So now Peter is Peter the First of Russia,

(36:58):
and he is the sole ruler of Russia, and what
is he going to do. Well, the first thing he
wants to do is continue those modernization efforts that Sophia
had begun and to some degree his father had done
as well during his reign. He will abolish arranged marriages,
although I guess not for his family, who he arranges

(37:19):
marriages off to various European royalty to kind of widen
the gene pool of Europe a little bit of the
European royals.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Different rules for royalty.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:28):
And I also suspect that if you snap your fingers
and say behold, I am Czar, I am banning arranged marriages,
I suspect that there are still marriages that are at
least somewhat arranged.

Speaker 1 (37:42):
Yeah yeah, but on the books, yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah. On the books you're
not supposed to and yes, yeah, So it's not like
a total sea change.

Speaker 1 (37:51):
Overnight, right, but he is attempting to put that rule
on the books. He changed the calendar, so he changed
it from the old Russian calendar to the Julian calendar.
So there was a whole it was the year was
seven two hundred, and he's like, no, actually it's seventeen hundred,
and he tried to make it the Gregorian calendar, but
the Church blocked him on it.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
That was just too much.

Speaker 1 (38:13):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So we got three calendars operating here
in Russia, and who knows what's happening. It's a mess,
but he's trying.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
He's doing his scheduling as a bear, even with one calendar.
Yeah yeah, yeah. So was it just the calendar or
were there other reforms?

Speaker 1 (38:30):
So he encourages people to start studying abroad, the nobles
and the boyars, to send their families to get Western educations,
to try to learn more about the modernization stuff that's
happening in the West.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
So all that partying in the foreign quarter of Moscow opened.

Speaker 1 (38:46):
His mind, right, and he starts to dress western too,
like you know, in like a cowboy hat, no, no,
think like, so we are in seventeen hundred, right, is
roughly the year. So if you want to think about
it this way, the old style, of the old Russian
traditional way, I picture almost like a Russian Orthodox priest,

(39:07):
like big beard with the big heavy cloaks and coats
and kind of ponderous yes.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
Yes, and very elaborately brocaded and whatever. I'm sure it's
absolutely beautiful to look at.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
Yeah, but it's a style that's kind of adapted from
the old ways. Picked up some stuff from the Mongols,
picked up some stuff from the step nomads, and very
traditional Constantinople dress.

Speaker 2 (39:32):
So might get you through the Russian winters, yes, if
you remember to wear them.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Yeah. And Peter the Great is he is alive at
the same time as Louis the fourteenth, the son king
in France. So that's the style he's looking at instead, right,
the breaches, the tights, the clean shaven. There's a great
story about that. Yeah. So so Peter one day, he's

(39:59):
pretty early on into being bizarre, and we're going to
get to Peter. He is a big personality, big giant dude,
a really loud voice that projects really well, just this magnetic,
charismatic person who just could not be ignored.

Speaker 2 (40:15):
Yeah, so when he enters the room you notice exactly,
maybe because like one of his staff members his herald says,
oh this is Peter, Or if he's like in disguise
or incognito, you still notice him anyway, because you can't
disguise six foot eight Peter the Great.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
Yes, yeah, he will try to disguise himself a few times,
and I only imagine it being hilarious. But on this
one particular day, he is having this huge party in
one of his palaces, and picture all of the boyars,
and the boyars are the ones who have supported him,
so they've come all of the nobles and the aristocrats
and they are all assembled in the palace to have

(40:55):
a party with Peter the Great. There's drinks. Peter was
famous for having trained bears that would serve vodka shots
to his guests and then growl it people who didn't
take one.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
Oh so spiritual ancestors of Voitexa bears exactly.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
This is the situation. We're having some Russian classical music playing.
There is a very fancy party. People are talking, they're drinking,
they're having a good time, and Peter makes his grand entrance.
Czar Peter the Great six foot eight, eighteen years old.
He enters and he has shaved his beard into kind
of a pencilly mustache. Ooh record scratch right.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
Yeah, yeah, So he's looking more like I don't know,
the Three Musketeers than like a Russian patriarch slash c ar.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
Right, And everybody stops and They're like, what is this?
And Peter says, in his big, giant voice, this is
what we are going to look like. Now. We're going
to dress like this, and we are going to shave
our beards. And then an assistant comes up to him
with a silver tray, and on that silver tray is
a brush, a bunch of shaving cream, and a couple

(42:06):
of razors, and Peter the Tzar of Russia begins personally
shaving the beards off of all of the boyars in
attendance to get them to look more Western, generally against
their will. But they can't really argue with him because
he's the bizarre and he could do whatever he wants. Okay,
that's how he introduced We're getting rid of beards by

(42:27):
getting rid of beards, by just literally physically getting rid
of beards. You said it's hard to enforce the arranged
marriage thing. He is going to enforce the aristocrats have
no beards thing by making it happen himself through brute force.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Well, I would hope, maybe not brute force, but maybe
fine force. Sure, I would hope he has a certain
amount of manual dexterity. Right, if I were a boyar
and this big guy were coming at me with a
sharp instrument.

Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah, big giant drunk Peter the Great with a straight razor, Like,
can you kill your head up so I can get
your next.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (43:04):
Eventually he realized he couldn't shave the faces of every
single person in Russia, so he that.

Speaker 2 (43:09):
Would take a lot of doing. Yes, so he I mean,
did you did you say the population was one hundred
million at this point?

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Okay, so fifty million of them are women who generally
don't have beards, although sometimes and so.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
You know, but even so, even so, even accounting for
you know, demographic.

Speaker 1 (43:26):
Various children them. Yeah, yeah, anyway, he puts in a
beard tax, so and I have to pay a tax.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Beard tax if you have a beard. Okay, at least
it's just it's just a tax, right, you don't get
your head chalk off.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
No, No, you just had to pay a little bit
extra money to have a beard, and that encourages people
to shave. Also, like people are creatures. People have always
been creatures of fashion. And if the fashion is now,
if if all of the fancy people are wearing mustaches,
then that's going to be what some of them more
commoners do to to emulate that. So that's, uh, that's
what happens.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Yeah, like what's on the cover of GQ Moscow these
days exactly.

Speaker 1 (44:04):
Yeah, we're into tights and breeches and buckles on your
shoes and big giant hats and mustaches. Beards are out, okay,
And so the first thing he wants to do is
build boats. Peter loves boats. He loved building boats, he
likes sailing, and he thinks the kind of boats are
a thing that Russia is lacking.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Why might Russia be lacking boats?

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Well, for starters, they only have one port that is
capable of having the kind of ships that you'd need
to have a good navy or sea trade, and that
port is archangel And archangel Is is frozen like three
quarters of the year, So yeah, frozen over. It's way
up north and it's not accessible for the majority of

(44:50):
the year.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
So yeah, Russia is a huge place and it has
a lot of coastline, but apparently not all of the
coastline is usable.

Speaker 1 (44:58):
Yeah, a lot of it is frozen most of the
the year, so you can't you can't sail in and
out of it, especially with those old wooden boats that'll
just get destroyed. They don't have ice breakers and stuff
like that.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Oh, maybe they should hire the Resolute.

Speaker 1 (45:11):
Yeah right, okay, so okay, So Peter loved boats, he
and so he is like obsessed with it. He gets
up at five am every morning, he goes down to
whatever docks and a lot of times it's lakes and stuff,
but he goes down to the docks and he works
on boats. He talks to the shipbuilders. He's out on

(45:31):
the like literally the Tizar of Russia out there with
the two by four and a hammer building boats.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Okay, so he's not just like some rich hancho who
happens to own a yacht that he goes out and
parties on. He's actually out there building the ships.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
Yeah. He's fascinated by the design. He's fascinated by all
of these aspects of it. He loves. He loves the
building of him and the structure, how they work. Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah,
And so okay, great, but we don't have anywhere to
put these boats, so we need some warm water ports
and seventeen hundred. The best way to gain something like

(46:08):
that is you're going to have to take it from
somebody else who's got one yep. And luckily for Peter
at least he is inheriting this war with the Ottoman
Empire that began with Sofia, that Sofia had joined. They'd
been kind of in a little bit of a lull.
The Ottomans had won a battle and it it kind
of stagnated the war. But he picks it up and

(46:30):
he says, you know what the Ottoman Empire has that
we love is Crimea, the Asov Sea, the Black Sea.
So he attacks, He builds up his army and he
sends them into the Ottoman Empire into Crimea to capture
lands on the Black Sea, Crimea, Asov, the Sea of Azov.

(46:52):
And he has some success and he sets up actually
the first warm water port in the history of Russia,
which is the porta Sevastopol in Crimea.

Speaker 2 (47:04):
Uh huh.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
And we will have Sevastopol will have a lot of
Savastival is interesting because it will be it comes up
a lot when we're talking about the Ukraine War and
the providence of Crimea. Sevastopol is kind of the Alamo
of Russia because they have huge defenses there against the
French during the Crimean War and against later against the
Germans in World War two, and so Sevastopol has a

(47:28):
lot of historical significance for Russia and the Russian people,
and they first acquire it by Peter the Great defeating
the Ottoman Empire in this war. Here from there he
can access the Mediterranean, which is where all of those
prosperous North African and the European countries are. And now
we can start doing trade year round, we can start

(47:50):
working on a navy, we can improve our economy, we
can I mean, we've talked before about how hard it
was to travel between countries back then. Suddenly travel to
France is not a thing that takes you months, because
you can get on a boat and it will just
take you only weeks to get from Russia to France.
That's a big difference. Makes it much more accessible for

(48:11):
people to study there, or for you to, you know,
marry your cousin off to some French baron or whatever.
And it begins having you start to have a little
bit more of a cultural exchange with Europe, which is
great for Russia. They are looking to modernize and Peter's
looking to modernize, and this is helpful. Well, Peter himself

(48:32):
decides you know what, I should get out there and
see all this stuff.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
That sounds very much in character for him.

Speaker 1 (48:38):
Yes, he doesn't want to hear about it. He doesn't
want to read about it. He doesn't want to sit
on his little cute double throne with his feet dangling,
hearing stories about all this cool stuff. He wants to
go do it.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
Like this is a guy who's out there nailing two
by fours with other shipbuilders.

Speaker 1 (48:51):
Yes, he wants to be part of this. He wants
to be in the middle of it. So in sixteen
ninety seven he undertakes the Grand Embassy, which is what
he calls it.

Speaker 2 (49:00):
He a Grand Embassy, Yes, okay.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Yeah, he takes a bunch of his closest friends. And this,
like the Grand Embassy, sounds very formal, and it sounds
very staid. And we are on the Grand Embassy of Europe.
We are going to gather aid for our war against
the Ottoman Empire and build relations with our neighbors in
the West. In reality, Peter's like twenty something, and this

(49:26):
is like closer to I just graduated college and me
and my buddies are going to go backpack around Europe.
That's the vibe of this Grand Embassy because he is
Peter the Great of Russia. He's in disguise, which we've
talked about as being hilarious. His name is Peter Mikhaylov and.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
He's Okay, I mean, couldn't he just be Peter alexey
of I mean Peterson of Alexei, because I'm sure there
were a lot of Peter's son of Alexey's. I guess, Okay,
he's in disguise.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
He's just a goofball, right, he's just dressing up in
a in an incognito. But he's still traveling. He's still
six 's eight, He's still traveling in a golden cart carriage.
He's still accompanied by an entourage of court gestures and
dancing bears, all of his like friends. They're all drinking
and partying all over Europe.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
And that's going to attract attention.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
That's going to attract some attention. Yeah, And you know,
the Russian delegation meet a lot of European nobles and
they make it impression. We'll say they are I don't know.
They go to they go to Prussia, they go to Holland, Austria, Poland, England.
In Prussia, they make it as far as England. Yes,

(50:37):
they make it all. They make it all the way
to England and they stay there for a while. In Prussia,
the the the Baron de Blomberg. He refers to them
as baptized bears and says he's never seen anyone drink
so hard in his entire life.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Does he mean this as an insult or grudging respect
or who knows?

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Difficult to say. He's Prussian. He's kind of a you know,
serious guy. He was a little annoyed because they trash
his house while they were staying there.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
Okay, yeah, that's fair, that's fair.

Speaker 1 (51:05):
Yeah, these guys are like wandering rock stars, like going
around partying, meeting people. But just really, here's an example
when they're in England. A couple things. First thing in
England is they drink so much at this one bar
in London that the bar renames itself the Tzar of Muscovie,

(51:25):
and the bar the bar no longer exists, but there
is a Muscovy Street in London, and that is there
in London. Yeah, there's a Muscovy street in London and
it still stands today and it's named after that bar.
Then Peter the Great drink aad.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
Okay, so you can't actually go to the pub where
Peter the Great drink room temperature beer. But I'm sure
there's some pub on the street somewhere Muscovie Street where
you can you know, approximate the experience, maybe with less
property damage. I'm assuming there was property damage.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Oh, there was property damage.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
There was proper damage.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
Yes, okay, so here's the property damage we're going to
talk about. This is the Lord John Evelyn. So when
you are the bizarre of all the Russias and you're
traveling around with your buddies, you don't just stay there plural, yes, yes,
you don't just stay at a hotel. You don't just
stay at it in above a tavern or anything along

(52:22):
those lines. You are right, you know, an AIRBNBA, you
were put up in the home of a wealthy lord
or lady and they set out there a summer home
of theirs for you to stay at for free, and
you you know, it's a great honor for you to
be there. Oh you could say, oh, the Czar was
here and he stayed here, it was entertained by my

(52:42):
servants and blah blah blah, very fancy stuff. So the
Grand Embassy stays at the home of Lord John Evelyn
of England. They stay there for about a week. What
happens during that week ben difficult to know, but I
would like you to pitch this as I would like
you to picture Peter and his entourage as like the

(53:03):
sex pistols or the rolling stones or something, because that's
what these guys are like. They're partying and they're trash
and hotel rooms. And here is the report of Lord
John Evelyn on the condition of his home after he
returned to it following the visit of the Grand Embassy.
And this quote comes from Stephen Graham's The Life of
Peter One of Russia, which is a massive series of

(53:26):
books that are very very good and they get into
a lot of detail on Peter the Great, and I
highly recommend them. But I'm going to read from it.
Some notion of the boisterous high jinks that took place
may be obtained from considering the damage done. They broke
three hundred panes of glass, They had busted or prize
open the brass locks of twelve doors. They had blown

(53:47):
up the kitchen floor, They cut up the dressers and
several doors. They covered the parlor floor with grease and ink,
broke walnut tables and stands. They seem to have had
wild games in the beds, tearing up the feather their beds,
ripping the sheets, tearing canopies to pieces, and ruining precious
silk counterpanes. Oh my, and you know, knowing what we

(54:12):
know about Peter, I don't think he was like in
a drunken rage and blowing this stuff up out of anger.
I guarantee you he was laughing and with a big
group of people laughing while all of this was happening,
and he.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Was in the moment, he was vibing. He was he was.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
Raving, raving, raging house party, Peter the Gray. Yes, yeah,
he's a person you would or maybe wouldn't want to
invite to your birthday party.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
It depends. Yeah, this is coming from a place of joy.

Speaker 1 (54:40):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (54:42):
Do we know how Lord John Evelyn of England survived
like presumably he took it in stride somehow he was upset.

Speaker 1 (54:50):
My understating is that Peter Peter was extremely rich and
a lot of this was paid by either him or
like by the Crown of England to compensate him for
his life losses. But he wasn't happy. I don't think
he was very happy about it. I don't think he was,
like I think they tried. He rented his Airbnb out
to them, and they annihilated it, and I don't think
he was very happy about it.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
Yeah, zero out of five stars, these guests. But eventually
he goes back to Russia. I assume.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Yes, so the party has to end because in sixteen
ninety eight there is a revolt back in Moscow. Remember
those Streltzi and sister Sophia. Yeah, the Streltzier rebelling again,
and Sophia's possibly involved, right, This.

Speaker 2 (55:39):
Is Sofia who had been tucked away in a monastery somewhere. Yes, okay,
but she's still around.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
She's still around, and the Streltzier in contact with her,
and they are planning to overthrow Peter the Great and
install her as the czar again. Or it's all her
actually as the czar, not.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
A region or anything or yeah person talk for a
little hole in the back of the throne, but like
actual Czar Sophia.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Yes, So, when the Streltzi rebelled last time and murdered
several of his uncles, I think they killed three or
four of his uncles. They beat up his mom, they
intimidated him, that grabbed him and imprisoned him. And he
was ten years old and he watched all of this
happen over two days of rioting. Now he's twenty six.
He's the bizarre of all the Russias, and he's not

(56:27):
gonna let this happen again. He is leveled up, and
now he's got an opportunity to take his revenge. So
he crushes the rebellion. He demands an investigation into how
it got started. He finds that a thousand Streltzi are

(56:48):
responsible for contributing to this conspiracy. He has them all executed,
mostly by being buried alive. He digs a big hole
in the middle of Moscow and he throws them in it,
and he buries them.

Speaker 2 (57:00):
Oh that's awful.

Speaker 1 (57:03):
He disbands Strelzia regiments, He exiles people, he exiles their families.
He splits the Strelzi up, destroys them as an entity,
replaces them with something else. Sister Sophia, she stays in
the convent like. He moves her to a different thing like.

Speaker 2 (57:19):
She doesn't get buried alive, doesn't.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
Get very alive. She doesn't die, so it's kind of interesting.
We don't really know exactly how he felt about her
for real, but it's interesting that she lives. She's out
of the story from that point forward. Peter also uses
this opportunity. He was talking about arranged marriages. He was
in an arranged marriage from when he was very young.

(57:43):
Fourteen fifteen, he gets married to this woman that he
never really got along with. They did have one son together,
but so he divorces her when he gets back to
Moscow and sends her to a different convent as well.
So that's how he uses the Streltzi rebellion as a
kind of an excuse for that. So Peter's back, and

(58:03):
he really is done with Moscow. He's so mad about it.
I'm so mad about all of this.

Speaker 2 (58:09):
He decides he's got bad associations with him, not a.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Bad associations with Moscow. The Muscovites don't seem to like
him that much, and he doesn't like them either. So
what do you do when you Peter's the Great and
you don't like your capital city, Well you build a
new one. So that's what he did. Okay, Yeah, he
decides he's going to build a new capital city, and
where he wants to build it is up on the
Baltic Sea, up northwest of Moscow. Problem here is that

(58:37):
the Baltic Sea is being held by Sweden currently, and
so if he wants to build his new capital there,
he's got to take that from.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
Them, and he's got to deal with the Swedes, right.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
And so that that's what he does. Sweden is in
a period of power for their country there. King Charles
the eleventh has just died and has been succeeded by
Charles the twelfth. Charles the twelfth's only eighteen years old, and.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
Yeah, still it's more than nine or ten, which is
what Peter was when he becomes our but he's only
eighteen eighteen.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Sweden doesn't have a ton of people compared to some
of the other countries of Europe, and they are holding
some pretty valuable territory. So Russia, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth,
Denmark and Norway all joined together to attack Sweden right
after Charles takes over, like, we'll get them while they're down.
Let's take the land that we want back from them
that they took from us. So that begins what's known

(59:34):
as the Great Northern War. Peter sees an opportunity to
grab some land on the Baltic get another warm water
port or warmish water port, and so he attacks. He evades.
How that go not well, turns out Charles the twelfth,
or not well for or for Peter. It turns out
that Emperor Charles the twelfth is actually awesome. He apparently
was like an emotionless automaton who could not feel pain

(59:57):
and was completely brave, and he was a military genius.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Sounds useful in certain contexts. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:02):
He crushes Denmark and Norway they both surrender. He conquers
Warsaw and Crackou from the Poles, and then at the
Battle of Narva, Peter the Great attacks him with thirty
seven thousand guys. Charles has eighty five hundred Swedes defending,
and the Swedes win like with a crushing victory. Peter
gets crushed.

Speaker 2 (01:00:22):
Against over four to one odds.

Speaker 1 (01:00:24):
Yes, wow, yeah, Peter's army smashed there in disarray. He's retreating.
And then Charles, who like I said, was a brilliant
military genius, he does a very unwise thing and he
attempts to invade Russia in the winter.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Wait hold on, he attempts to invade Russia in the winter,
Like this is proverbially a very stupid thing to do,
Like it's up there with wearing stripes with plaid. There's
an entire saying don't invade Russia in the winter. So
what were you thinking, Charles.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Well, in Charles's defense, nobody had tried to do it
really yet. So the rule about don't invade Russia in
the winter, it kind of starts with Peter the Great
Charles invade.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Oh okay, So Charles is the reason we have.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
He is the first one. Yeah, And Charles starts to invade,
and Peter is doing the thing that we will see
again with Napoleon and again with Hitler and again with
everybody else who tries to invade Russia.

Speaker 2 (01:01:23):
Is he okay? So what are our takeaways from this episode? A,
don't invade Russia in the winter and B if you
are going to invade Russia in the winter, wear a
warm coat.

Speaker 1 (01:01:32):
Yes, yeah, okay, And so that's it. I mean, that's
literally what happens is he retreats back into the winter.
He burns the food stores and the towns as he's going,
so that as the Swedish Army is marching forward. They
don't have any resources or supplies to pick up, and
they do start dying of the cold. Even their jackets
are going to keep them warm.

Speaker 2 (01:01:53):
Oh yeah, yeah, they're dying. That's hard.

Speaker 1 (01:01:56):
And he just waits for them to die, and eventually
he has to face them. And this is where Ukraine
is going to come back up again, actually, because one
thing that ends up happening is he's withdrawing and he's
having success and he's whittling down Charles's numbers. But Charles
starts marching through Ukraine. It's called the Cossack head Minute

(01:02:16):
at the time, but it's present day Ukraine and they
are allied with Peter the Great. There's a guy in
charge of the Head Minute, the Heapman is called Ivan Mazepa,
and Mazepa has been a loyal friend of Peter's and
they have fought wars together. Cossacks have been riding in
the Russian Army. There's a close relationship here. But Peter
starts saying, hey, we need you to start burning your

(01:02:38):
cities and your villages so that we don't lose this war.
I'm going to double down in Moscow. But they're going
to come through your territory, just burn it all. And
Mazepa says, no, I don't want to do that. So
he actually makes a deal with Charles to join him.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, Charles the King of Sweden.

Speaker 1 (01:02:56):
Yes, so Ivan Mazepa turns on Russia. He flips to
Sweden and joins them. Okay, that's a problem for Peter. Now,
Peter's got to do something, so he sends it a
request to their or sends a messenger to the rest
of the Heat Minute. Like he marches into the Heat Minute.
He burns one town there. He defeats some Cossacks there

(01:03:19):
and burns the town, and he sends a message to
the Heat Minute, Hey, I'm coming to fight Charles. You
guys have to decide whose side you're on, and I'll
remember the decision you make. So there's a big battle
at this place called Poltava, which is actually like a
five hour drive from Bachmut. It's in Ukraine, and there's

(01:03:39):
going to be a fight here, and the Cossacks by
and large choose Peter, and Peter wins the battle. He's
got this huge cavalry force of Cossacks. Charles is actually
sick on the day of the battle. He was wounded
a few days earlier. He's not healing well. He gets sick,
he can't lead his army in the battlefield, and the
Swedes Loo Mazepa escapes. Peter never forgives him. He creates

(01:04:05):
the Order of Saint Judas and awards it to him.
Oh jis the trader, and uh, he never forgives Moapa
before it he orders the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Every year they have a day where they kind of
list like the enemies of the Church, and Ivan Mazepa
makes it onto that list. And he's on that list
for two hundred years. Right, he's the great Trader, He's

(01:04:28):
the Benedict Arnold of Russia. He betrayed us. And this
is actually, weirdly kind of a central thing in the
current Ukraine conflict. Is Ukraine has I have Am Mazepa
on their money. They view him as a hero who
fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians, and this is
a this is a source of tension between the Ukrainians

(01:04:49):
and the Russians to this day. Right, this battle is
from the seventeen hundreds. But yeah, they don't forget that.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
Yeah, So Peter wins the war, defeats Sweden. King Charles
flees to to the Ottoman Empire. He tries to attack again.
He gets shot in the head and dies in battle.
He's killed in battle, but the Russians are able to
take land on the Baltic Sea. They build Saint Petersburg,
which is just literally in the like a snow covered

(01:05:15):
nothing in the middle of nowhere. He builds Saint Petersburg
on top of it, names it after his favorite saint,
which is Saint Peters. Okay, yeah, but he's defeated the Swedes.
He's asserted the dominance of Russia in Europe. He succeeded
where a lot of these other European powers had been defeated.
He defeated a major European power. He now has warmwater

(01:05:38):
ports on the Baltic and in the Mediterranean. He's modernizing
the army, he's building the navy. He's doing pretty good.
And this is when he declares himself the Czar of
all the Russias. He's the first one that is like
kind of the Tzar of the Russian Empire. Now we've
declared it. Now we're not just the Principate or the
kingdom or the princeton or whatever we are. We are

(01:05:59):
there the Russian Empire, and I am the Emperor. But
Peter is. He's doing a lot of moves as czar.
But his personal life is extremely interesting, and I do
want to talk about this because he is a legendary
party monster. He famously would have arguments with the Church
over various things, probably his drinking or whatever, but Peter

(01:06:22):
would occasionally butt heads with the Church, and at one
point he gets angry and he creates what he calls
it's a parody of the Holy sonat of the Orthodox Church.
He calls it the most drunken Council of Fools and jesters,
where they all get together and they sing, they drink vodka,
and they seeing obscene parodies of well known church hymns.
They scattered vodka from holy water sprinklers. If you show

(01:06:45):
up late, you have to drink a penalty shot, which
is a shot of vodka for the person who showed
up late. You you have those those bears that are
serving wine and liquor and growling at you. If you
don't take it on Christmas. Every year, the most drunken
council of fools and jesters would parade through the streets
of Moscow or Saint Petersburg on slaves being pulled by

(01:07:07):
bears and goats, and they would stop at the homes
of prominent noblemen that Peter didn't like and would sing
profane Christmas carols as loud as they could.

Speaker 2 (01:07:17):
Okay, that must have been quite a scene.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
Yes, they elected a prince pope in seventeen eighteen. This
was one of Peter's childhood friends from the Foreign Quarter.
He wasn't even a Russian guy. They made him the
principle the Ox Church.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
Yeah, they give him like the Burger king crown.

Speaker 1 (01:07:33):
Yeah, exactly. According to the story, they drank a shot
of vodka every fifteen minutes for eight days straight. That
was this inauguration of the Prince Pope.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
That sounds a little bit either exaggerated or deeply unhealthy.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
It's not good, no, I mean, as we will see,
Peter is going to be dead by fifty two of
gang greeness bladder. Because alcoholism is a very gnarly thing
to deal with. But this is this is it. He
lived fast and he partied hard, and he you know,
if we're talking family drama. He ends up having some

(01:08:10):
family drama later in life as well, possibly because of
his drinking. I don't know. But in seventeen eighteen, his
son from his first marriage I talked about. He sent
his first wife to a convent.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Yeah, like you do.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Their son was going to be This was the Tsarevich.
He was going to succeed Peter as emperor, but his
name was Alexey. Alexei had no real interest in doing that.
He had been in an arranged marriage he didn't like.
He had a Finnish woman that was a commoner that
he was in love with, and he wanted to be
with her instead, and Peter was against this, and there

(01:08:46):
was argument about it. Yeah, Alexei doesn't want to be
the prince. He just wants to live by himself. He
flees Russia at one point to try to get away.
Peter calls him back. He comes back, and then Peter I.

Speaker 2 (01:08:59):
Want to just pause it right here and say, I
think I know where this is going, but I would
just like to imagine an alternate timeline where Alexey has
a happy end.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
Yeah, it would be nice, but that's not what happens
to huss not this timeline. He comes back and whether
it is a trumped up charge or not, Alexey is
accused of conspiring against Peter. He's put on a torture
rack and he dies. Yeah, he put his own kid
on a torture rack and he dies from the wounds

(01:09:28):
of it. And that's the end of him.

Speaker 2 (01:09:31):
Peter's kind of right, Alexei.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
Yeah, Peter's kind of a ruthless guy. And this is
the family drama thing, right, I mean, I'm sure that
some of that trauma of having his own family try
to kill him on multiple occasions didn't didn't help. And yeah,
at one point, Peter's second wife allegedly had an affair

(01:09:53):
with a guy named williem Mons who was her secretary.

Speaker 2 (01:09:57):
Her secretary, Ye, so, and how did that go? Were
we just a happy copacetic group counseling polyamorous thrupple?

Speaker 1 (01:10:07):
No, No, there's no tryad happening here. Williem Mounds's head
is cut off and it is pickled in a jar
of vodka and it's put in a museum in Saint.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
Petersburg, like you do, right.

Speaker 1 (01:10:17):
Peter also weirdly like liked stuff like this. He liked
curious things. He liked different things. He would collect all
of any kind of strange things, like here's a human
leg or whatever. He'd collect all this stuff and put
it in the museum in Saint Petersburg. He made a deal.
He put out a call so that anybody who was
over I want to say, like seven feet or under

(01:10:41):
four feet tall, any adult that was under four feet
tall or over seven feet tall, they could come live
in Saint Petersburg for free. Stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
Okay, I don't know. I guess being a person of tallness,
he appreciated people at various ends of the spectrum.

Speaker 1 (01:11:00):
I think more than anything. Like, well, I think more
than anything. He was kind of this, like I don't know,
hedonistic might not be the right word, but he like
was constantly in search of new and interesting things that
he hadn't seen before or whatever. So like he always
wanted if there was any kind of outlier, he was
interested in it, and I wanted to see it for himself.

(01:11:20):
So I don't know. Sometimes it serves him well, sometimes
it serves him well. The deal with Alexe is a
pretty dark moment in his life, and it happens towards
the end, and he's he's drinking very heavily at this point,
and you know, he's kind of done a lot of
the things that are going to make him famous. In
the USSR, Peter was kind of demonized by the Communist

(01:11:41):
as a you know, as an autocrat, as a dictator,
and they famously one Communist writer wrote that Peter is
the person who put the country and his own son
on the torture rack.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
So honestly, that's a good line.

Speaker 1 (01:11:55):
Yeah, he's a divisive.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
Character, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:00):
But like I said, he lived large, he partied hard.
He died of again greatest bladder in seventeen twenty five
at the age of fifty two. So we had talked earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
About Sophia, who succeeds him.

Speaker 1 (01:12:11):
Yeah, so he succeeded by his second wife as czar.
So the son is gone and he puts it in
place that his wife will succeed him, and she has
crowned Czar Catherine the First. She's the first woman to
rule Russia except for the example you gave earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:12:31):
Avirina, who is a little bit disputed anyway on technicalities. Yeah,
so Catherine the first, Yeah, Okay.

Speaker 1 (01:12:37):
It's Peter's widow. She rules, yeah, and she also sets
the stage for Catherine the Second is who we will
we remember as Catherine the Great today. We'll probably talk
about her on this show in the future, but she
is one of the other like most influentials, Peter and
Catherine the Great are. They're the two of the greats,
and they're two of the most influential leaders in the

(01:12:58):
history of Russia. And the stage was kind of set
up by Cat from the first taking over after the
death of her husband. So, okay, that is Peter the Great.
He was an interesting character. He contributed a lot to
the history of Russia. He was a really interesting personal life,
full of family drama and revenge and bears and parties.

(01:13:22):
So I guess what I want to say is, whatever
holiday you are celebrating this season, I hope it is
not quite as intense as those that Peter the Great
celebrated in seventeen twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:13:34):
Indeed, and I'd like to add I'm cold, so put
on a sweater in those cold Russian winters.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
Yeah, thank you guys so much.

Speaker 2 (01:13:44):
Stay bad Ass. Badass of the Week is an iHeartRadio
podcast produced by High five Content executive producers are Andrew Jacobs, Me,
Pat Larish, and my co host Ben Thompson. Writing is
by me Ben. Story editing is by Ian Jacobs Brandon Phibbs.
Mixing and music and sound design is by Jude Brewer.

(01:14:08):
Special thanks to Noel Brown at iHeart Badass of the
Week is based on the website Badass of Theweek dot com,
where you can read all sorts of stories about other badasses.
If you want to reach out with questions ideas, you
can email us at Badass Podcast at badassoftheweek dot com.

(01:14:29):
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