Peter the Great: A Biography by Lindsey Hughes

Author:Lindsey Hughes [Hughes, Lindsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780300103007
Google: -Ag2bbYzgacC
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2002-01-01T21:33:13+00:00

Statutes and regulations

Peter spent the first two months of 1720 in St Petersburg in a frenetic round of Yuletide visitations and assemblies – Dolgoruky's on 14 January, Golitsyn's on the 19th, Tolstoy's on the 21st, the Prince-Pope's on the 24th, a party on board ship on the 27th. February, before the start of Lent, was the time for weddings. The tsar attended at least five between 5 and 21 February, and on the 22nd he was the chief guest at the wedding of the giant Nicolas Bourgeois (Nikolai Zhigant) and a Finnish giantess. Giants were in shorter supply than dwarfs and Peter gave his permission for the couple to marry only when the bride-to-be was pregnant, in the hope of obtaining additional tall recruits for his guards. Bourgeois, it seemed, had no duties apart from being on view as his obesity made him incapable of doing much else. For this he was paid the considerable salary of 300 roubles per year.61 After his death from a stroke in 1724 a stuffed effigy in his skin went on show in the Kunstkamera, where it was painted by the Swiss artist Georg Gsell. The ample skeleton is still displayed there today. Other entertainments recorded in the court journal for February included rides on bulls, dogs, bears and goats and a procession of the Prince-Pope in a giant jug ‘at the tavern’.

As always, Peter had no difficulty in combining work with play. He visited the Admiralty on several occasions to put the finishing touches to the Naval Statute, ‘on all which pertains to the good organisation while the fleet is at sea … selected from five maritime regulations [French, British, Danish, Swedish and Dutch], with a substantial part added’.62 The introduction declared that ‘a potentate who has only land forces has but a single arm; he who also has a fleet has two arms’,63 and explained that the word ‘fleet’ was French: ‘By this word is meant a number of water-going vessels travelling along together, or standing, both military and merchant’. The work illustrates two of Peter's approaches to the edification of his subjects. On the one hand, he was adept, with a little help from Feofan Prokopovich, at making his own myths. The preface to the Statute relates the history of Russia's naval exploits, culminating in the uplifting tale of Peter's little boat, the ‘grandfather’ of the Russian navy. To underline the point, the 1720 edition had an engraving of a sailing ship without a steering wheel and a naked boy sitting in it to signify inexperienced Russia. The text is highly allusive, transforming Peter's search for ever greater expanses of water to sail his ships into a sort of pilgrimage. On the other hand, the main body of the Statute illustrates Peter's blunt, practical side, his mania for written rules and regulations to specify precisely what each person's duties were, ‘from the first to the last’. Book 3, for example, includes among the tasks of the shipboard janitor the responsibility for ensuring that people relieve themselves in the authorised places.

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