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Updated: April 30, 2025
Once, we are told, at a banquet, he "amused himself by decapitating twenty Streltsy, emptying as many glasses of brandy between successive strokes, and challenging the Prussian envoy to repeat the feat." Mad? There can be little doubt that Peter had madness in his veins. He was a degenerate and an epileptic, subject to brain storms which terrified all who witnessed them.
Religious and political opposition have joined hands, and to this combination is due the strength of the great popular movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the Streltsy insurrections at the time of the revolt of Pougatchef, whose excesses curiously recall the wars of the Peasants and Anabaptists in the West before the abolition of serfdom.
He would then be able to trade with Europe and have intercourse with countries that were previously unknown. But only war could accomplish this high ambition, and he had, as yet, no real skill in arms. An attempt on Azov, then in Turkish hands, had led to ignominious defeat. Peter returned home to find that the Streltsy had broken out again.
When it was reported that he was about to visit foreign lands, discontent was louder, for the rulers of the east did not travel far from their own dominions if they followed the customs of their fathers, and observed their people's will. The Streltsy, a privileged class of soldiers, rose on the eve of the departure for the west.
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