Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [257]
Nikita looked unimpressed.
‘We do not need such things in Russia. We have land without end.’
‘I know. But don’t you see,’ Procopy went on excitedly, ‘that’s not the point.’ It was something he had been brooding about ever since he first saw these wonders. ‘The point, Father, is that they have conquered nature. They have imposed a pattern, an order, on the land, even the sea itself.’ He paused and then added with a sudden flash of insight, ‘It’s as if, in their own hearts and minds, they ordered themselves.’
Nikita laughed.
‘I can’t see us Russians ordering ourselves. Can you?’
Procopy agreed.
‘No, I can’t. But we can impose order from above. That’s the only way to do it, as the Tsar himself has said to me many times.’
Nikita sighed.
‘So do you mean that you and the Tsar have come back meaning to impose your will upon Mother Nature?’ he asked with a wry smile. ‘My poor Procopy, nature in Russia is mightier than any Tsar. You cannot impose anything upon her. The land,’ he suggested, ‘is endless.’
But now it was Procopy’s turn to smile.
‘Wait until you’ve seen Tsar Peter try,’ he remarked drily.
If these comments depressed Nikita, because he thought them impractical, it was nothing to the effect they had on Eudokia.
‘God made nature,’ she warned him, ‘and if you seek to impose your order upon nature too, then I say that this is nothing but pride. You and your Tsar are evil.’
And to Procopy’s great sorrow, he found his mother estranged from him.
Strangely enough, all three parties to this argument were profoundly and equally Russian: Eudokia in her religious conservatism; Nikita in his fatalism; and perhaps most of all young Procopy in his optimism. For, having seen the outside world and its order, even if remaining unaware of its complex underpinnings, Procopy had assumed that, just as the villagers in Russia can build a house in a day, so with a strong leader and a titanic effort, a new order can be imposed from above. This belief is the perennial tragedy of Russia.
What, then, had the embassy really accomplished?
In fact, a great deal. Peter had wanted to study shipbuilding: he and others had done so quite thoroughly. He wanted new armaments, gunpowder that did not continually misfire, and knowledge of modern fighting methods, especially at sea. He obtained all of these. He also opened up new avenues for trade.
The Russians’ diplomacy failed. No one wanted to fight the Sultan of Turkey at that time. But if his drive to the warm seas of the south might be stalled, Peter had discovered in his travels that there could be other alliances he could make that would get him access to the other trade route he needed: the Baltic Sea in the north.
Above all, it was the long-term consequences of the embassy which were the most important. Men like cunning old Peter Tolstoy might not have learned a great deal about shipbuilding, as they had been told to do, but they came back with a wealth of observations, a knowledge of foreign languages, and some insight, at least, into European education and culture. These were the early Europeanized Russians, the group of which Sophia’s counsellor Golitsyn had been the forerunner. These were the men who, in the long run, would open Russia’s windows on the west.
Was Procopy Bobrov such a man? Not quite. But though he lacked the desire to educate himself profoundly, he had still taken in enough to see that his homeland was centuries out of date.
This had one sad consequence. For while her sense of religious propriety had separated Eudokia and her son, Procopy now found a subtler barrier between himself and his father. Nor could he help it.
For to Nikita, his son had become a stranger. It was not his western style of dress, nor his travels as such. But Nikita could sense, in that faint but unmistakable reserve in Procopy’s manner, by the distant look in his eye, that his son no longer warmed to the same things; he knew something his own people did not. Nikita had seen German and English officers look at their Russian troops that way.
He’s not really a Russian any more,