I found a book that should be required reading for anyone traveling to St. Petersburg (as I did): Peter the Great: His Life and World. (And remember that September and October were the guides’ recommended time of year to see St. Petersburg without the crazy crowds.)
The book is great for putting Peter the Great into context, explaining what life in the various European countries was like back then and what other monarchs were doing.
Here’s an explanation of life in Moscow:
In the third quarter of the seventeenth century, the traveler coming from Western Europe passed through this countryside to arrive at a vantage point known as the Sparrow Hills. Looking down on Moscow from this high ridge, he saw at his feet “the most rich and beautiful city in the world.” Hundreds of golden domes topped by a forest of golden crosses rose above the treetops; if the traveler was present at a moment when the sun touched all this gold, the blaze of light forced his eyes to close.
Entering Moscow through its walls of earth and brick, the traveler plunged immediately into the bustling life of a busy commercial city. The streets were crowded with jostling humanity. Tradespeople, artisans, idlers and ragged holy men walked beside laborers, peasants, black-robed priests and soldiers in bright-colored caftans and yellow boots. Carts and wagons struggled to make headway through this river of people, but the crowds parted for a fat-bellied, bearded boyar, or nobleman, on horseback, his head covered with a fine fur cap and his girth with a rich fur-lined coat of velvet or stiff brocade. At street corners, musicians, jugglers, acrobats and animal handlers with bears and dogs performed their tricks. Outside every church, beggars clustered and wailed for alms. In front of taverns, travelers were sometimes astonished to see naked men who had sold every stitch of clothing for a drink; on feast days, other men, naked and clothed alike, lay in rows in the mud, drunk.
On the riverbank itself, near the new stone bridge, rows of women bent over the water washing clothes. One seventeenth-century German traveler noted that some of the women selling goods in the square might also sell “another commodity.”
At noon, all activity came to a halt. The markets would close and the streets empty as people ate dinner, the largest meal of the day. Afterward, everyone napped and shopkeepers and vendors stretched out to sleep in front of their stalls. With the coming of dusk, swallows began to soar over the Kremlin battlements and the city locked itself up for the night. Shops closed behind heavy shutters, watchmen looked down from the rooftops and bad-tempered dogs paced at the end of long chains. Few honest citizens ventured into the dark streets, which became the habitat of thieves and armed beggars bent on extracting by force in the dark what they had failed to get by pleading during the daylight hours. “These villains,” wrote an Austrian visitor, “place themselves at the corners of streets and throw swinging cudgels at the heads of those that pass by, in which practice they are so expert that these mortal blows seldom miss.” Several murders a night were common in Moscow, and although the motive for these crimes was seldom more than simple theft, so vicious were the thieves that no one dared respond to cries for help. Often, terrorized citizens were afraid even to look out their own doors or windows to see what was happening. In the morning, the police routinely carried the bodies found lying in the streets to a central field where relatives could come to check for missing persons; eventually, all unidentified corpses were tumbled into a common grave.
As Moscow was built of logs, Muscovites always kept spares on hand for repairs or new construction. Logs by the thousand were piled up between houses or sometimes hidden behind them or surrounded by fences as protection from thieves. In one section, a large wood market kept thousands of prefabricated log houses of various sizes ready for sale; a buyer had only to specify the size and number of rooms desired. Almost overnight, the timbers, all clearly numbered and marked, would be carried to his site, assembled, the logs chinked with moss, a roof of thin planks laid on top and the new owner could move in. The largest logs, however, were saved and sold for a different purpose. Cut into six-foot sections, hollowed out with an axe and covered with lids, they became the coffins in which Russians were buried.
Relations between the sexes (the author doesn’t explain what happened regarding gender dysphoria or gender ID) were structured:
A married woman was never bareheaded. Indoors, she wore a cloth headdress; when she went out, she donned a kerchief or a rich fur hat. They daubed their cheeks with red to enhance their beauty, and wore the handsomest earrings and most valuable rings which their husbands could afford. Unfortunately, the higher a lady’s rank and the more gorgeous her wardrobe, the less likely she was to be seen. The Muscovite idea of women, derived from Byzantium, had nothing of those romantic medieval Western conceptions of gallantry, chivalry and the Court of Love. Instead, a woman was regarded as a silly, helpless child, intellectually void, morally irresponsible and, given the slightest chance, enthusiastically promiscuous. This puritanical idea that an element of evil lurked in all little girls affected their earliest childhood. In good families, children of opposite sexes were never allowed to play together—to preserve the boys from contamination. As they grew older, girls, too, were subject to contamination, and even the most innocent contact between youths and maidens was forbidden. Instead, to preserve their purity while teaching them prayer, obedience and a few useful skills such as embroidery, daughters were kept under lock and key.
Usually, a girl was married in the full bloom of adolescence to a man she had not met until all the major parties to the marriage—her father, the bridegroom and the bridegroom’s father—had made the decision final. The negotiations might have been lengthy; they involved critical matters such as the size of the dowry and guarantees of the bride’s virginity. If, subsequently, in the not necessarily expert opinion of the young bridegroom, the girl had had previous experience, he could ask that the marriage be voided and the dowry returned. This meant a messy lawsuit; far better to examine carefully in advance and be absolutely sure. When everything was settled, the young wife-to-be, her face covered with a linen veil, was summoned into her father’s presence to be introduced to her future husband. Taking a small whip, the father struck his daughter lightly on the back, saying, “My daughter, this is the last time you shall be admonished by the authority of your father beneath whose rule you have lived. Now you are free of me, but remember that you have not so much escaped from my sway as passed beneath that of another. Should you not behave as you ought to toward your husband, he in my stead will admonish you with this whip.” Whereupon the father handed the whip to the bridegroom, who, according to custom, nobly declared that he “believes he will have no need of this whip.” Nevertheless, he accepted it as a gift from his father-in-law, and attached it to his belt. [Amber Heard would have had an easier time establishing her domestic violence claims back then.]
When her husband had an important guest, she was permitted to appear before dinner, dressed in her best ceremonial robes, bearing a welcoming cup on a silver tray. Standing before the guest, she bowed, handed the cup, offered her cheek for a Christian kiss and then wordlessly withdrew. When she bore a child, those who feared her husband or wanted his patronage came to congratulate him and present a gold piece for the newborn.
This isolation of women and disdain for their companionship had a grim effect on seventeenth-century Russian men. Family life was stifled, intellectual life was stagnant, the coarsest qualities prevailed and men, deprived of the society of women, found little else to do but drink. There were exceptions. In some households, intelligent women played a key role, albeit behind the scenes; in a few, strong women even dominated weak husbands. Ironically, the lower a woman stood in the social scale, the greater her chance for equality. In the lower classes, where life was a struggle for simple existence, women could not be pushed aside and treated as useless children; their brains and muscle were needed. They were considered inferior, but they lived side by side with men. They bathed with men, and ran laughing through the snow with men, completely naked.
The part of the house reserved for women was called the “terem” (same root as “harem”?):
In various ways, Peter made serious efforts to improve the customs and conditions of Russian life. He acted to raise the status of women, declaring that they must not remain secluded in the terem, but should be present with men at dinners and on other social occasions. He banned the old Muscovite system of arranged marriages in which bride and groom had no choice in the matter and did not even meet each other until the marriage service was being performed. In April 1702, to the immense joy of young people, Peter decreed that all marriage decisions should be voluntary, that the prospective partners should meet at least six weeks before their engagement, that each should be entirely free to reject the other, and that the bridegroom’s symbolic wielding of the whip at wedding ceremonies be replaced with a kiss.
Divorce was not the package offered to American women:
To divorce his wife, an Orthodox husband had simply to thrust her, willing or not, into a convent. Once his wife was “dead,” a husband was free to remarry, but this freedom was not unlimited. The Orthodox Church permitted a man two dead wives or two divorces, but his third wife had to be his last. Thus, a husband who had violently abused his first two wives was likely to handle his third with care; if she died or ran away, he could never marry again.
Peter the Great’s half-sister Sophia nonetheless managed to rule Russia as regent while a young Peter was nominally co-tsar with his half-brother Ivan (Wikipedia places her in charge from 1682-1689; she was age 25-32 at the time). A bunch of inconvenient folks had to be killed to make this happen.
Only one person had the intelligence and courage to attempt to overthrow an elected tsar. No one knows the exact extent of her involvement in the plot and the terrible events that followed; some say it was done on her behalf but without her knowledge. But the circumstantial evidence is strong that the chief conspirator was Sophia. … Although she was filling a vacancy which she and her agents had created, Sophia was now in fact the natural choice. No male Romanov had reached sufficient age to master the government, and she surpassed all the other princesses in education, talent and strength of will. She had shown that she knew how to launch and to ride the whirlwind of the Streltsy revolt. The soldiers, the government, even the people now looked to her. Sophia accepted, and for the next seven years this extraordinary woman governed Russia.
Apparently Sony sensors ruled the digital world even in the 17th Century because Russians chose a man named “Nikon” as their religious leader:
Nikon was a stern enforcer of discipline on both laity and clergy. Attempting to regulate the daily life of the common people, he banned cursing, card playing, sexual promiscuity and even drinking. Further, he insisted that every faithful Russian spend four hours a day in church. Against the erring clergy, he was relentless.
Do you agree that children shouldn’t be allowed to play
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