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Updated: May 10, 2025
The guards of the late Czar Alexis were storming through the maze of corridors and state apartments, breaking statues, tearing down tapestries, and piercing and cutting to pieces invaluable paintings with their spears and swords. They were big, savage-faced men, pets of the half-civilized Russian rulers, and were called the Streltsi Guard.
Among the nobility she gained a number of friends by gifts, smiles and flattery, and she paid particular attention to winning over a body of soldiers that formed the Imperial Guard, and were called the Streltsi, trying to enlist them in her cause by every means in her power. Sophia, it may be said, was base-hearted and treacherous.
We have already observed how Peter replaced the independent, turbulent streltsi with a thoroughly devoted and orderly standing army. That was one important step in the direction of autocracy. The next was the subordination of the Church to the state.
Historians show us Sophia interceded for the victims on her knees, but an understanding between the rebels and the Czarevna did exist; the streltsi obeyed orders.
Two thousand were hung or broken on the wheel, five thousand were beheaded, and Peter for many days amused himself and edified his court by the wonderful dexterity he displayed in slicing off the heads of streltsi with his own royal arm.
The double-seated throne used on those occasions is still preserved at Moscow; there is an opening in the back, hidden by a veil of silk, and behind this sat Sophia. This singular piece of furniture is the symbol of a government previously unknown to Russia, composed of two visible czars and one invisible sovereign. The streltsi, however, felt their prejudices against female sovereignty awaken.
The severe punishment of the rebellious streltsi and the immediate abolition of their military organization was clear evidence that Peter was fully determined both to break with the past traditions of his country and to compel all the Russian people to do likewise. His first care was the reconstruction of the army on the Prussian model.
The partisans of Sophia were cold and irresolute; the streltsi themselves demanded that her favorite Chaklovity should be surrendered to the Czar. She had to implore the mediation of the patriarch. Chaklovity was first put to the torture and made to confess his plot against the Czar, and then decapitated.
To him Russia owes not only the abolition of the streltsi, the loss of the independence of the Church, the Europeanization of manners and customs, and the firm establishment of autocracy, but also the pronouncement and enforcement of an elaborate scheme of foreign aggrandizement.
The Streltsi had indeed learned that the boy Peter was no coward, and their dislike changed to affection; but there were others in Moscow who plotted and planned against him, because the family of the late Czar's first wife were very powerful in Russia and they hated his second wife Natalia, and her son, who had been his father's favorite.
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