Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [256]
This is not true.
Firstly, as to Peter’s reason for going, the latter must certainly leave no shadow of doubt. It was to prepare for war – as a start, against Turkey. Diplomatically, the embassy was to persuade western countries to join an anti-Turkish alliance. The practical side of the tour of Europe was to learn shipbuilding so that Russia could build a proper, sea-going fleet.
Already in 1696, soon after his victory at Azov, Peter had sent fifty horrified Russians, without their families, to western Europe to learn navigation and shipbuilding. Amongst them, amazingly, was the fifty-two-year-old Tolstoy who had somehow, despite his close links to Peter’s Miloslavsky enemies, managed to get into Peter’s favour.
His own embassy, therefore, followed soon after.
But why did Peter himself go; and why did he go incognito – officially only as a junior member of the party led by his ambassadors?
We do not know for certain. But it was probably to give himself more freedom to roam unofficially in the dockyards of the west. Certainly he spent months working as a ship’s carpenter and learning the whole business very thoroughly.
It also perhaps gave this devotee of the Mock Synod and the Jolly Company more opportunity to play the fool. This he and his friends also did. In London, they were installed, near the docks, in the house of the distinguished diarist John Evelyn, and so effectively wrecked both house and garden that the great Sir Christopher Wren, who inspected the place afterwards, estimated the damage at the then astounding sum of three hundred and fifty pounds. Amongst other items, the floor had to be renewed; the tiles from the Dutch stoves had been pulled off; the brass door locks broken; the feather beds ripped open; all the lawns and a four-hundred-foot-long, nine-foot-high holly hedge – one of the horticultural prizes of London – completely destroyed.
In this manner, in 1697–8, Tsar Peter came to learn about the civilization of Europe.
The Baltic; the port of Riga; the German states of Brandenburg and Hanover; Holland; England; Hapsburg Vienna; Poland.
It was not, Procopy would say in later years, that he had entered other lands. He had entered another century.
He never really understood how great the difference was. This was not lack of intelligence on his part. The huge, two-thousand-year-old tradition of philosophical enquiry, from Socrates to Descartes; the splendours of the Renaissance; the beginnings of modern science; and, most of all, the complex and flexible western societies with their ancient institutions, professions, legal and moral codes and brilliant culture – all these things, despite some imported books and furniture at the Tsar’s court, were simply not comprehended by more than a handful of Russians. None of Peter’s entourage really understood what they were seeing. Peter himself certainly did not, nor could he have.
But if Procopy did not understand what he saw, it still made a profound impression on him, and he intuited much that he did not fully comprehend.
With Peter, he had been impressed by the ships and the huge ports. The cannon he had seen on board the ships had hugely excited him and, with Peter, too, he had been delighted to discover that one could obtain greatly superior gunpowder in the west.
But when his father had questioned him upon his return and asked him which country he admired most, he replied: ‘I think it was Holland.’
‘Why?’ Nikita enquired. ‘Is it their ships, their trade?’
Procopy shook his head.
‘No. It is …’ he searched for a word ‘ … it is their order.’ And seeing Nikita look puzzled, he went on: ‘They have even tamed the sea. I saw great walls – not like our wooden walls across the steppe to keep out the Tatars, but huge walls of stone to keep out the sea itself. They call them dykes. They have taken land back from the sea and laid out fields – thousands of them, all so neatly arranged in squares and rectangles, within their dykes. You can scarcely credit that men could accomplish such a thing. And they have canals, straight as arrows, that stretch to the