Pierre le Grand

Peter the Great played at soldiers when young; he played with sailboats on the river Moskva too, so I heard last week, when Tatiana gave a talk about the man in French. His life story was impressive, shocking, disturbing.

As a young man he spent a while incognito in the Netherlands lodging at a smithy's in Zaandam and working as a carpenter. Every morning at 7 o'clock he'd start work, employed by a ship building company; he also worked like this in England. These quasi nautical experiences stood him in good stead when he established the first ever Russian navy, which with hardly any coastline to its name had the cheek to conquer the Swedes in the Baltic.

Back in Moscow young Peter set off on a new tack, applying his knowledge of anatomy that he'd picked up in Amsterdam by taking up amateur surgery! His vision for the Russian people was that they should be masters of science, technology and engineering. He also decreed that his compatriots should speak French and wear clothes in the French style, not like the old Russian establishment. Beards were out with a vengeance, to such an extent that a man was to be fined for letting one grow. The more decolleté a woman's dress was, the better. The older generation thought it scandalous that men and women should be seen dancing together. Until those days aristocratic women had been kept apart in a sort of harem.

In those days Peter was rather like Falstaff's pal Harry (the crown prince) in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Pts 1 and 2, with a stable boy for his best friend. The two of them took to frequenting the notorious "German" district of Moscow, an enclave of Englishmen, Dutchmen and Huguenots. Peter had a German mistress there and indulged in not very refined tastes. They knocked back the vodka, let off fireworks, kept "pet" dwarfs for entertainment. Another remarkable companion was a black African whose descendants were to include Pushkin.

Peter's mother, an educated woman, thinking her 16 year old son needed calming down, married him to a pious girl who gave him his son Alexis, but the marriage was a disaster. Quickly tiring of his family Peter abandoned them, at which his wife shut herself away in a convent. Alexis was to remain a problem. Aged 25, Peter attached himself to an illiterate peasant girl from Lithuania. Most of their 12 children died in infancy. Alexis meanwhile was turning into an alcoholic, having been married off to a German protestant girl who had died in childbirth. Alexis renounced his title, at which Peter retorted, "You'd better become a monk, then." The poor son escaped to Vienna to beg for asylum at the Austrian court, but was tricked into returning home under the false promise of an amnesty, was promptly arrested as a traitor and imprisoned, before being sentenced to death after a severe whipping. In fact Alexis did not survive the whipping. Peter never showed any remorse; in fact, "Il n'avait pas de compréhension de ceux qui n'étaient pas comme lui," as Tatiana put it in her talk.

Peter believed in merit rather than nobility and surrounded himself with the intelligentsia of his day, founding an Academy of Science and a Museum of Curiosities. Although detested by the Slavophiles of those days, he joined the church choir in the orthodox church he attended, because he liked singing.

The other thing Peter is remembered for is the founding of St Petersburg in 1703 where before his time were nothing but swamps. It's going to be my Paradise, he said, avidly joining in with the planning. Because of an embarrassing lack of manpower for the great project the noblemen were forced to send the Tsar their able-bodied serving men as construction workers. Swedish prisoners of war were conscripted as well and Italian architects brought in. A sorry shortage of stone masons led to their being forbidden to work anywhere but in St Petersburg. Each aristocratic Russian family was obliged to have a house built there and at least half the cargo of any boat or ship that sailed in had to be stones, to mitigate the boggy nature of St Petersburg's foundations.

The gardens at the Summer Palace, the Peterhof, were modelled on those of Versailles, incorporating a Dutch house for the Tsar, Monplaisir. The Tsarina could live in the palace; he preferred his summerhouse.