An Essay · Open Questions
Peter the Great's All-Drunken Synod — thirty years of pigs, mock bishops, and the Great Eagle cup. Was it a wild streak, or was it policy?
The name alone is worth the price of the book. The Vseshuteishii, Vsep'ianeishii i Sumasbrodneishii Sobor — the All-Joking, All-Drunken, and Most Mad Synod — was founded around 1690 by a tsar not yet twenty, and it ran, with its own hierarchy, liturgy, vestments, and calendar of feasts, until he died in 1725. Its head was the "Prince-Pope," and the first man to hold the office was Nikita Zotov, the elderly, bibulous clerk who had taught Peter his letters. Beneath him sat a college of mock cardinals and metropolitans drawn from the highest families in Russia. The Tsar himself took the modest rank of protodeacon. The Synod's first commandment, sworn on a cross made of pipes, was to be drunk every day and never go to bed sober; its Yuletide processions went through Moscow in sledges drawn by pigs, goats, dogs, and bears, with the Prince-Pope enthroned on a barrel. The question the guide keeps circling — how to hold Peter's greatness and his wildness in the same hand — comes to a point here. Was the Synod a very large young man blowing off steam, or was it the state, doing something?
Start with what the same man did in the same years, because the contrast is the whole puzzle. Between the founding of the Synod and its founder's death, Peter made the Great Embassy to Holland and England (1697–98) and came home to shave his boyars' beards; built Russia's first navy from nothing; lost to Charles XII at Narva in 1700 and then, nine years and a rebuilt army later, destroyed him at Poltava; founded St. Petersburg in 1703 on a Baltic marsh he had only just taken from the Swedes and moved the capital there in 1712; imposed the Table of Ranks, the Julian calendar, Arabic numerals, a reformed alphabet, the first newspaper, the first museum, the Academy of Sciences; and in 1721 took the title Emperor of All Russia. He was nearly six foot eight, worked with his hands as a carpenter and shipwright, and personally interrogated and almost certainly caused the death of his own son. Klyuchevsky's line is the one to keep: Peter hoped, through the terror of his power, to provoke initiative in an enslaved society. Whatever the Synod was, it was run by a man who was not idle.
The first reading is the tavern. Robert Massie's big popular biography, still the one most readers meet, treats the Synod essentially as Peter's inner circle at play: the drinking bouts in the German Quarter, the Swiss adventurer Lefort, the Scots general Gordon, a young giant with a colossal appetite for everything and no one to tell him no. On this account the mock church is just the shape the fun took in a country where the church was the biggest solemnity available to mock. It is not wrong. The drinking was real and lethal — courtiers died of it, Peter forced the "Great Eagle," a goblet holding well over a litre of vodka, on any guest who arrived late to his assemblies, and the Synod's sessions ran for days. Any reading that leaves out the sheer animal pleasure Peter took in it has left out Peter.
The second reading is the theatre of desacralization, and it has the weight of the scholarship. Lindsey Hughes, whose Russia in the Age of Peter the Great is the standard modern study, insists the Synod was "serious play": a sustained public mockery of ecclesiastical dignity by a tsar who intended to strip the church of its independence and needed Russia to stop being afraid of it. The timing is suggestive. When Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, Peter simply left the office empty, for twenty-one years, and then abolished it: the Spiritual Regulation of 1721 replaced the Patriarch with a committee of bishops under a lay procurator — a government department, named, with no irony that anyone dared point out, the Holy Synod. The church that Avvakum had died defending as the last pure kingdom on earth became a ministry. It is hard to look at a thirty-year parody of the patriarchate that ends in the patriarchate's abolition and see only a party.
The third reading is newer and stranger. Ernest Zitser's The Transfigured Kingdom (2004), the only book devoted wholly to the Synod, argues that it was neither simple revelry nor simple anticlericalism but a genuine cult — a sacred parody through which Peter's inner company (the kompaniia) bound itself to him in a mock-liturgy of his own charismatic authority. The Synod's rituals were initiations; its mock hierarchy mapped onto real power; its feasts were the sacraments of a court that had made the Tsar, not the church, the source of the holy. On this reading the joke was on the church, yes, but the point was Peter — the transfiguration of the kingdom around a man who had made himself its only priest. Zitser's reading is not universally accepted, but it explains something the other two do not: why the thing lasted, and why Peter never let it go.
Quantify first. A prank lasts an evening; a habit lasts a decade; an institution outlives its founding members. Zotov, the first Prince-Pope, died in 1717 — Peter had married him off two years earlier, at seventy or so, to an elderly widow, in a mock wedding at which the guests came as Chinese, Persians, Siberians, and the Tsar drummed in the procession. When Zotov died the office did not lapse. In 1718 Peter had a successor elected, Pyotr Buturlin, by a formal conclave with candidates, ballots, and a ceremony borrowed and bent from Rome, while he was also, that year, torturing his son Alexei to death and building the Baltic fleet. Buturlin married Zotov's widow in 1721, the year of the Spiritual Regulation. The Synod was in session, in one form or another, for roughly thirty-five years, across the Great Northern War, the founding of a city, and the reconstruction of the Russian state from the calendar up. A man does not sustain a joke for thirty-five years. He sustains a practice.
Qualify second. Durability proves the Synod mattered to Peter; it does not by itself prove how. The strongest version of the policy reading — that the mock Synod was consciously designed to prepare the abolition of the Patriarchate — overreads a young man in 1690 who had not yet seen Europe and did not yet know what he would do. The likeliest truth is that the thing began as revelry, in a court where drinking and mummery at Yuletide were already old customs, and became policy as Peter became Peter: that he discovered, as he went, what a standing parody of the church was good for, and kept it because it served him and because he loved it. Both. The two hands hold the same object.
It is right to admire the greatness, and this guide does. But the Synod is also the place where the cost of Peter shows most plainly, because the joke was never harmless. The drink killed courtiers and, probably, hastened Peter's own death at fifty-two; Hughes counts several of the inner circle drunk into the grave. The mockery of the church was aimed at a faith the great majority of his subjects held in earnest, and the Old Believers, who had already decided that Nikon's church was the Antichrist's, took one look at a tsar who dressed his tutor as Pope, shaved beards, smoked tobacco, and moved New Year to January, and concluded they had been right all along: Peter, in the Old Believer tracts, is Antichrist in person, and he did nothing to talk them out of it. And the tsar who forced the Great Eagle on his guests is the same tsar who kept the state vodka monopoly running as the treasury's backbone — the theme of Russia and the Bottle — so that the man's private appetite and the state's fiscal appetite pointed the same way. The city on the marsh was built by conscripted labor at a cost in lives that contemporaries put in the tens of thousands and historians cannot verify; "built on bones" is the phrase Petersburg has never shaken.
So: he built the navy, won the war, raised the city, and at the end of the day he liked a wild time. Both are true, and the mistake is to think that one of them must explain away the other — that the drinking was the price of the greatness, or the greatness the excuse for the drinking. The All-Drunken Synod was what it looked like, a colossal, decades-long bender with pigs; and it was, at the same time, the first instrument by which a Russian ruler made his people laugh at the church before he took it from them. Avvakum died in the fire at Pustozersk because he would not let the state tell him how to hold his hand. Forty years later the state had a Prince-Pope on a barrel, and no Patriarch at all. Peter did not need to burn anyone for that. He only had to make it funny.
Further reading: Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great and her shorter Peter the Great: A Biography; Ernest A. Zitser, The Transfigured Kingdom: Sacred Parody and Charismatic Authority at the Court of Peter the Great; Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World; Paul Bushkovitch, Peter the Great: The Struggle for Power, 1671–1725; James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great; V. O. Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great (the lectures, in translation); Martin Sixsmith, Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East, whose account prompted this piece.
A note on certainty: the Synod's existence, its officers, Zotov's mock wedding of 1715, the election of Buturlin in 1718, and the Spiritual Regulation of 1721 are well documented, largely from Peter's own correspondence and the accounts of foreign residents. Its founding date is approximate (c. 1690–92); the "first commandment" and the oath on a cross of pipes come from contemporary descriptions that historians treat as broadly reliable but embroidered. The interpretations — tavern, desacralization, cult — are exactly that, and Zitser's is contested. The death toll in the building of St. Petersburg is unknowable; the figures in circulation are contemporary claims, not counts. The reading here, that revelry became policy over time, is this essay's argument and not a settled position.
Reads alongside The Two-Fingered Man, on Avvakum and the schism; Russia and the Bottle; and Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, on rulers and their chosen mirrors. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.