Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [243]
Above all, honouring her father’s memory, she was contemptuous of the Tsar’s army with its foreign officers. ‘These Germans: what do they know? They know how to give orders. Good.’ She would stand up and mimic an unfortunate peasant standing in utter confusion with his musket. ‘I’ve seen them,’ she would cry. ‘The officer calls out. Nobody understands. He tries again – ah, now they understand. So this one turns left. This one goes right. This one fires his musket. One advances, one retreats. They don’t know what they’re doing. And why? Because the officer who drilled them the week before had a different method altogether. Imbeciles!’
And Nikita would roar with laughter because it was perfectly true, the officers from different countries often brought their own drill books with them, which did not agree with each other, and which they utterly refused to change.
On this, as on many other matters, Eudokia would conclude with the words: ‘Things were better in the time of Ivan the Terrible. He’d have sorted them out.’
It was strange, therefore, that she did not approve of the Tsar’s wars. To Nikita, the absorption of the Ukraine and the drive into the Polish territories to the west meant glory for Russia. To his practical wife, however, they did not. ‘War just means ruin for our poor peasants,’ she complained.
Even Nikita admitted she had a point. There were at this time a hundred thousand men under arms. The military took up sixty-two per cent of the state’s budget and, as always, the taxes fell on the peasants. ‘If we go on like this, we’ll have another rebellion like Stenka Razin’s,’ Eudokia predicted.
She began to insist, each year, that they inspect their villages, which Nikita found a great bore; and she personally would interview the peasants and frequently give them money. ‘It’s lucky we’re rich, with so many peasants to feed,’ he would remark wryly. But she paid no attention.
Given her conservative views, therefore, it did not surprise Nikita that in religious matters his wife should sympathize with the Raskolniki. Nor was she alone among the noblewomen of the day. The Tsar’s first wife had done so. And a little group of prominent ladies, including one of the great boyar family of Morozov, had not only supported the followers of Avvakum but even gone to prison for it. Such sympathies, however, were becoming unfashionable amongst the noble class, as well as dangerous; and Nikita had told Eudokia she must keep her thoughts to herself.
He supposed that she had.
The troubles of Nikita Bobrov began with a change in the court, when suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, Tsar Alexis had died, leaving behind him a court split into two factions.
By his first wife he left several daughters and two sons: Fedor, pleasant but sickly and Ivan, an unfortunate child, mentally retarded and with a growth of skin over his eyes. By his second wife, a woman of modest birth, Alexis had left two infant children – a baby girl and a boy of three.
The little boy’s name was Peter.
The family of Alexis’s first wife, the mighty Miloslavskys, had not been pleased at the appearance of the second wife’s family, the humble Naryshkins. Above all, they hated the Tsar’s friend Matveev, who had first introduced the couple.
It was a predictable Muscovite business. Young Fedor became Tsar; Peter and his mother were kindly treated, but the Miloslavskys took over all the reins of power. It did not take them long to find a pretext for arresting Matveev. That educated gentleman was foolish enough to be found with a book of algebra in his baggage, which was, naturally, taken to be a form of black magic. Even Nikita, when he heard of the arrest of his mentor, could only shake his head and remark: ‘He was asking for trouble. What did he want with such stuff anyway?’
Though he had lost a powerful patron, the change at court did not mean the end for Nikita Bobrov. He was not important enough to worry the Miloslavskys. He had friends. Given time, he might have continued his advance.
Except for those fatal words to young Tolstoy.
The palace of Kolomenskoye