It was impossible to see without tears how through the whole steppe for five hundred miles men and horses lay half-eaten by the wolves, and many villages were full of sick, some of whom died."
On December 2, the army reached Moscow. Peter, imitating the precedent of Sophia and Golitsyn which he himself had condemned, attempted to mask his defeat by staging a triumphal entry into the capital. He marched through the city with a single pathetic Turkish prisoner walking ahead of him. No one was fooled, and the grumbling against the Tsar's foreign military advisors increased. How could an Orthodox army expect to conquer when it was commanded by foreigners and heretics?
This argument was given additional weight by the fact that Sheremetev's army, an old-style Russian host entirely officered by Russians, had achieved considerable success on the lower Dnieper. Together with the horsemen of the Cossack Herman Mazeppa, Sheremetev's troops had stormed two of the Turkish fortresses along the river, after which the Turks had withdrawn from two others. This achievement gave the Russians control of the whole line of the Dnieper almost down to its estuary on the Black Sea.
But, despite Sheremetev's successes, Peter's own campaign against Azov had been a failure. His vaunted "Western-style" army had been held at bay and had suffered disastrously in retreat. Yet, if defeat was a shock for the exuberant twenty-three-year-old, it did not discourage him. Peter meant to return. Making no excuses, acknowledging failure, Peter threw himself into preparations for a second attempt. He had been thwarted by three mistakes: divided command, a lack of skilled engineers to construct efficient siege works and an absence of control of the sea at the river mouth to seal off the fortress from outside help.
The first defect was easiest to rectify: The following summer, a supreme military commander would be named. Peter attempted to remedy the second problem by writing to the Austrian Emperor and the Elector of Brandenburg for competent siege experts to aid in defeating the infidel Turk. Far more difficult was the third factor, a fleet to control the river. And yet Peter decided he had to provide one, and demanded that by May—in five short months—a war fleet of twenty-five armed galleys and 1,300 new river barges be built for transporting troops and supplies. The galleys were to be not merely shallow-draft river craft but respectable sea-going men of war fit to defeat Turkish warships on the estuary of the Don or even on the open waters of the Sea of Azov.
The effort appeared impossible. Not only was the time ridiculously short, but these particular five months were the worst time of the year. Rivers and roads were frozen by ice and snow, the days were short as winter night came early, men working in the open air would hammer and saw with fingers numbed by cold. And there was no seaport, no shipbuilding site. Peter would have to build his ships somewhere- in the interior of Russia and float them downriver to bring them into position to fight the Turks. Moreover, in the Russian heartland there were no real shipwrights. Russians knew only how to make river boats, simple craft 100 feet long by 20 feet wide, fitted together without the use of a single nail, used for one voyage down the river and then broken up for timber or firewood. Peter's plan, then, was to build the shipyards, assemble the workmen, teach them to mark, cut and hew the timber, lay the keels, build the hulls, step the masts, shape the oars, weave the ropes, sew the sails, train the crews and sail the whole massive fleet down the River Don to Azov. All within five winter months!*
He went to work. As a shipbuilding site, he chose the town of Voronezh on the upper Don, about 300 miles below Moscow and 500 miles above the sea. The town had several advantages. Sheer distance made it secure from the threat of Tatar raids. It was situated above the line of the treeless steppe and lay in a belt of thick virgin forest where timber was readily available. For these reasons, since the reign of Alexis and the adherence of the Ukraine to Russia, Voronezh had been a site for building the simple barges which carried goods to the Don Cossacks. On the low eastern bank of the river at Voronezh, Peter built new shipyards, expanded the old ones and summoned huge numbers of conscripted unskilled laborers. Belgorod province, where Voronezh lay, was commanded to send 27,828 men to work in the shipyards. Peter sent to Archangel for skilled carpenters and shipbuilders, routing foreign and Russian artisans out of their winter indolence, promising that they would finish by summer. He appealed to the Doge of Venice to send him experts in the construction of galleys. A galley ordered from Holland and newly arrived at Archangel was cut into sections and brought to Moscow, where it served as a model for others being built that winter at Preobrazhenskoe. These one- and two-masted vessels, constructed at Preobrazhenskoe or Lake Pleschev, were built in sections like modern prefabricated ships; then the sections were mounted on sledges and dragged over the snowy roads for the final assembly at Voronezh.
*Naval shipbuilding began in Russia and America at about the same time. In 1690. five years before Peter commenced his urgent shipbuilding program at Voronezh, a small man of war, the Falkland, was built for the British navy at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The vessel, constructed entirely by colonial shipwrights, was the first warship built in North America.
* * *
In the middle of Peter's Herculean effort, on February 8, 1696, Tsar Ivan suddenly died. Feeble, uncomprehending and harmless, gentle Ivan had passed most of his twenty-nine years as a living icon, presented at ceremonies or dragged forward in moments of crisis to calm an angry mob. The difference between restless, energetic Peter and his silent, passive half-brother and co-Tsar was so great that there remained great affection between them. By keeping the royal title, Ivan had lifted many wearisome burdens of state ceremony from the royal bombardier and skipper. During his travels, Peter had always written tender and respectful letters to his brother and co-monarch. Now that Ivan was gone, buried in state in the Kremlin's Archangel Michael Cathedral, Peter took Ivan's young widow, the Tsaritsa Praskovaya, and her three daughters under his care. Praskovaya, in gratitude, remained loyal to Peter for the rest of her life.
Ivan's death had no active political significance, but it put a final, formal seal on Peter's sovereignty. He was now sole Tsar, the single, supreme ruler of the Russian state.
When Peter returned to Voronezh, he found vast activity and confusion. Mountains of timber had been cut and dragged to the building yards, and dozens of barges had already taken shape. But there were endless problems: Many of the ship's carpenters were slow in arriving from Archangel; many unskilled laborers, improperly housed and badly fed, deserted; the weather varied between thaws which turned the ground to mud and sudden new freezes which turned the river and the roads to ice.
Peter hurled himself into action. He slept in a small log house next to the shipyard and rose before dawn. Warming himself by a fire next to his carpenters, surrounded by the sound of blows of axe, hammer and mallet, Peter worked on a galley, the Principium, which he was building along Dutch lines. He reveled in the work. "According to the divine decree to our grandfather Adam, we are eating our bread in the sweat of our face," he wrote.
In March, the weather improved, and in mid-April three galleys, including the Principium, were launched. Hundreds of new barges were already moored in the river, ready for loading. To crew this new armada, Peter sent for boatment from even the most distant Russian rivers and lakes. To man the war galleys, he created a special marine force of 4,000 men culled from many regiments, with a heavy proportion coming from his own Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards.
The overall mobilization was smaller than it had been the previous summer—in this second campaign there would be no march on the Dnieper—but the force destined to make the second assault on Azov would be double the size of the previous summer. Forty-six thousand Russian soldiers would be bolstered by 15,000 Ukrainian Cossacks, 5,000 Don Cossacks and 3,000 Kalmucks— wiry, brown-skinned, semi-Asiatic horsemen, who could ride with any Tatar. A single officer, the boyar Alexis Shein, had been appointed commander-in-chief of the expedition. Shein was not an experienced military commander, but he came from a distinguished family, his judgment was considered sound and his appointment silenced those conservative Muscovites who grumbled that a Russian army commanded by a foreigner could never succeed. Lefort, although no seaman, was made admiral of the new fleet, while Peter, shifting his interest from Mars to Neptune, took the title of naval captain rather than artillery bombardier.