I found this rather amusing.
> Peter the Great's Family Values
> So you're Peter the Great and you hate your kid Alexis 'cause he's stupid?
> Kill him!
>
> Peter the Great's son, Alexis, received a hefty brunt of physical abuse
> from his father: beaten about the head, dragged by his hair across the
> floor, and so forth. Peter </in_history/peter/> had worked hard all his
> life to create a great Russia, and was damn well not going to let his
> noodle of a son muck it up. Alexis's "wretched childhood", M.S. Anderson
> tells us in Peter the Great </book.asp?isbn=0582084113>, "left [him]
> timid, secretive and lacking in self-confidence, characteristics which
> were coupled with an increasing tendency, notable even in the Russia of
> that age, to heavy drinking." This did not sit well with Peter, whose
> correspondence to his son during Alexis's tutelage is filled with
> disparaging comments. A sampler:
> If my advice is lost on the wind and you will not do as I wish, then I do
> not recognize you as my son.
> I see that you go at too lazy a pace in these crucial days to concern
> yourself with business.
> [I grow worried] when I see you, the heir to the throne, who are so very
> useless for the conduct of state affairs.
> How often have I not scolded you for this, and not merely scolded you but
> beaten you... but nothing has succeeded, nothing is any use, all is to no
> purpose, all is words spoken to the wind, and you want to do nothing but
> sit at home and enjoy yourself.
> But if [you do not change for the better], understand that I shall deprive
> you of the succession and cast you off like a gangrened limb.
> During this period, Alexis had blundered into an unsatisfying,
> state-arranged marriage. Peter, no doubt through bouts of intense drinking
> and work, had grown ill and also wary of his son's capacity to carry on
> his leadership (i.e., "cast you off like a gangrened limb"). Alexis
> responded to these insults by begging to renounce his right of succession.
> Realizing that Alexis could always change his mind, Peter insisted that he
> join a monastery to ensure no sovereignty would be in his future. Alexis's
> tactic was instead to flee to Vienna and hide, prompting a manhunt that
> covered Europe for six months. Peter's life at this moment was in a fair
> bit of turmoil: his health was ailing, Russia was at war with the Swedes,
> and her people were wary of Peter and his disrespect for the Church. To
> make things worse, his nudnik son had vanished, leaving him no way to
> control the leadership of his beloved Russia after his passing. Indeed,
> Peter feared his son might prove a focus for conspiring nobles in a plot
> to overthrow him.
> Alexis, not quite clever enough to initiate a coup on his own at this
> point, had instead relieved his stress by knocking up his Finnish
> mistress, Afrosinia. He was collared in Moravia by Peter's agents and
> forced to return home. Upon his return to Moscow, he was forced to swear
> on a fat bible in the most important church of Russian Orthodoxy that he
> wanted nothing to do with politics ever again, and would never dream of
> becoming Tsar.
> However, Peter was still sick and ailing. Furthermore, he had plenty of
> enemies in Russia (as one French minister put it, the Russians hated
> Peter's leadership and were planning to "wait and hope only for the end of
> his life to plunge into the slough of sloth and crass ignorance."), and
> some of these enemies decided to try to convince Alexis to renounce his
> renunciation. Peter had heard of some of the plots and spent most of 1718
> torturing various individuals, looking for a well-organized plan. He heard
> nothing substantial until Afrosinia told him Alexis had been bragging
> about his plans as future tsar. This was all Peter needed, and in July
> 1718 he tortured his son for a while, and then had him put to death. Peter
> being Peter, "the very next day there were public celebrations... [two
> days later, a holiday] was, as usual, commemorated by drinking, fireworks,
> and the launching of new warships."
> Fortunately, Peter's life wasn't always so darkly destructive. There were
> brighter, zanier moments, most of them involving insulting the Church
> under wild inebriation. In 1692, Peter got some of his friends together
> and christened themselves the "Most Drunken Synod", and parodied the entry
> of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday by having Peter's friend Matvei
> Flilmonovich ("an elderly drunkard related to the family of the tsar's
> mother," Anderson tells us) ride on a camel to an inn, "where riotous
> drinking took place." While this might seem like an exercise better
> relegated to fraternities, yet perhaps forgivable on a one-off basis,
> recall this is Peter the Great, who did nothing half way. Anderson
> elaborates:
> The purpose of these childishly provocative ceremonies remains obscure.
> There is no doubt that Peter himself attached importance to the 'Synod':
> he wrote out its relatively complex rules with his own hand and revised
> them several times. A generation later one of the last acts of his life
> was to attend one of its meetings.
> It should not surprise our gentle readers that our buddy Voltaire
> </in_history/voltaire_rohan/> just couldn't resist such a colorful (and
> drunk) subject. His biography of Peter the Great displays the smug
> attitude that got him beaten so often. He notes, "We could not expect the
> amusements of Peter's day to be as noble or as refined as they have become
> since," but seems to think some of them were OK, if not downright juicy.
> The following narrative from Voltaire's work requires no commentary:
> Before promulgating his ecclesiastical laws, he created one of his court
> jesters pope and celebrated the Festival of the Conclave. The jester,
> whose name was Zotov [later a camel-rider in the Most Drunken Synod. -HH],
> was eighty-four years old. The tsar conceived the idea of marrying him to
> a widow as old as himself, and of solemnly celebrating the nuptials. The
> guests were invited by four stammerers; some decrepit old men escorted the
> bride, while four of the fattest men in Russia served as runners. The band
> was on a cart drawn by bears goaded with steel points, which, by their
> roaring, provided a bass worthy of the tunes being played on the wagon.
> The bride and groom were blessed in the cathedral by a blind and deaf
> priest wearing spectacles. The procession, the wedding ceremony, the
> nuptial feast, the disrobing of the bridal couple, and the ritual of
> putting them to bed were all equally appropriate to the buffoonery of the
> entertainment.
> Stutterers, fat men, and nude octogenarians. Sheer genius, and he brought
> a backward eighteenth century Russia up to step with Europe to boot.
>
>
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