Streltsy Uprising of 1698: Revolt Against Peter the Great

The Streltsy uprising of 1698 was a revolt by four regiments of Russian musketeers who marched on Moscow while Tsar Peter I was abroad on his Grand Embassy. Government troops scattered them in a single short engagement in June 1698. Peter’s response, a wave of interrogations and mass executions, destroyed the Streltsy as a political force and cleared the way for his new European-style army.

Who were the Streltsy?

The Streltsy (“shooters”) were Russia’s first standing infantry, created under Ivan IV in the mid-16th century and armed with matchlock muskets and poleaxes. By the late 17th century there were around 20 regiments in Moscow alone. They lived with their families in their own districts and were allowed to run shops and crafts to supplement irregular pay.

They had also become a political power. In the Moscow uprising of 1682 the Streltsy killed members of the Naryshkin family, relatives of Peter’s mother, in front of the young Peter. The revolt helped bring his half-sister Sophia Alekseyevna to power as regent. When Peter took control in 1689, Sophia was shut away in the Novodevichy Convent, but many Streltsy still looked to her.

Causes of the revolt

After the capture of Azov in 1696, several Streltsy regiments were kept on garrison and construction work in the south, then four of them, about 2,200 men, were sent to Velikiye Luki near the Lithuanian border. They had not been allowed home for years, their pay and supplies were short, and their businesses in Moscow were suffering.

Resentment was also directed at Peter himself. He was abroad on the Grand Embassy, favoured foreign officers and his new guards regiments, and broke with Orthodox customs. Rumours spread that the tsar had died abroad. Some 175 deserters went to Moscow in spring 1698 to plead their case and returned with talk, never proven, of letters from Sophia.

What happened

In June 1698 the four regiments deposed their colonels and marched on Moscow. They planned to enter the city, punish the foreigners of the German Quarter and Peter’s officials, and, according to later confessions, to put Sophia back in power.

The government sent several thousand troops, including the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards, under the boyar Aleksei Shein, with the Scottish general Patrick Gordon. On 18 June 1698 (Old Style; 28 June in the Gregorian calendar) they met the rebels by the Istra River near the New Jerusalem Monastery, about 50 kilometres west of Moscow. After negotiations failed, Colonel de Grage’s guns opened fire. The rebel ranks broke within about an hour.

Shein held a quick inquiry on the spot. Several dozen ringleaders were hanged, commonly given as 56, and close to 2,000 men were sent to prisons and monasteries around Moscow.

Peter’s investigation and the executions

News of the revolt reached Peter in Vienna in July, and he hurried home, arriving on 25 August. Believing Shein’s inquiry had been too lenient and had missed the question of Sophia’s role, he reopened it in September at Preobrazhenskoye, his residence outside Moscow. Prisoners were tortured with the knout and fire to obtain confessions.

The executions began on 30 September 1698 (Old Style) and continued in waves into early 1699. The usual figure is about 1,200 men executed, by hanging, beheading or breaking on the wheel, with hundreds more flogged, branded or exiled. Bodies were left on display through the winter, some hanging outside the windows of Sophia’s convent.

Much of what is known comes from the diary of Johann Georg Korb, secretary to the Austrian embassy in Moscow. Korb and other foreign observers reported that Peter and some of his courtiers personally took part in beheadings. Sophia was forced to take the veil as the nun Susanna.

Consequences

Peter dissolved the Moscow Streltsy regiments over the following years and transferred many men to provincial garrisons or other service. The corps was finally abolished in the 1720s. In its place he built a conscripted army trained and organised on Western lines, which suffered its first great test at the Battle of Narva in 1700.

The revolt and its suppression also marked the start of Peter’s open assault on old Muscovite customs. In the same weeks he began cutting off the beards of his nobles and ordering Western dress at court.

Legacy

The brutality of 1698 shaped Peter’s reputation as a ruler who combined reform with terror. Vasily Surikov’s 1881 painting The Morning of the Streltsy Execution fixed the scene in the Russian imagination, and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina draws on the earlier Streltsy unrest of 1682.

Timeline

• 1682, May: The Streltsy rise in Moscow; Sophia becomes regent.
• 1689, September: Peter takes power and Sophia is confined in the Novodevichy Convent.
• 1698, June: Four regiments at Velikiye Luki rebel and march on Moscow.
• 1698, 18 June (Old Style): The rebels are defeated near the New Jerusalem Monastery.
• 1698, 25 August: Peter returns to Moscow from Europe.
• 1698, 30 September: The first mass executions take place in Moscow.
• 1699: Executions continue, and the Moscow regiments begin to be disbanded.

Why it matters

The Streltsy uprising was the last serious armed challenge to Peter from the old Muscovite order. By crushing it, he removed a force that had made and unmade rulers since 1682 and gained a free hand for the reforms and wars, above all the Great Northern War, that followed.