Eventually those who insisted on keeping their beards were permitted to do so on paying an annual tax. Payment entitled the owner to a small bronze medallion with a picture of a beard on it and the words TAX PAID, which was worn on a chain around the neck to prove to any challengers that his beard was legal. The tax was graduated; peasants paid only two kopeks a year, wealthy merchants paid as much as a hundred roubles. Many were willing to pay this tax to keep their beards, but few who came near Peter were willing to risk his wrath with a chin that was not hairless. Finding men in his presence still bearded, Peter sometimes, "in a merry humor, pulled out their beards by the roots or took it off so roughly [with a razor] that some of the skin went with it."
Although Peter was merry about it, most Russians considered beard-cutting an act of aggression and humiliation. Some would rather give up anything than lose the beards which they had worn through life, expected to carry to the grave and thus arrive, proudly wearing them, in the next world. They could not resist; Peter's will was too strong. But they tried pathetically to atone for what they had been taught was a mortal sin. John Perry, the English engineer whom Peter signed up for service during his trip to London, described an aged Russian carpenter whom he met on the wharves of Voronezh.
About this time the Tsar came down to Voronezh where I was on service, and a great many of my men who had worn their beards all their lives were now obliged to part with them, amongst whom, just coming from the hands of the barber, was an old Russ carpenter ... a very good workman with his hatchet and whom I always had a friendship for. I jested a little with him . . . telling him that he was become a young man and asked him what he had done with his beard. ... He put his hand in his bosom and pulled it out and showed it to me; further telling me that when he came home, he would lay it up to have it put in his coffin and buried along with him, that he might be able to give an account of it to St. Nicholas, when he carpe to the other world, and that all his brothers [fellow workers] had taken the same care.*
Peter's mood on his return was cheerful and enthusiastic. He was happy to be back in the company of his friends and so eager to start making changes that he scarcely knew where to begin. Impulsively, he went one place, then rushed off to another. On his second day in Moscow, he reviewed his troops—and was immediately displeased. "Seeing at a glance how backward they were as compared with other soldiers," said Johann Korb, an Austrian diplomat,
he went himself through all the attitudes and movements of the manual exercises, teaching them by his own motions how they should endeavor to form their heavy, clumsy bodies. Tired at last with the uncouth horde, he went off with a bevy of boyars to a dinner which he had ordered at his Ambassador Lefort's. Salvos of artillery mingled with the shouts of the drinkers, and the pleasures of the table were protracted to a late hour of the evening. Then, taking advantage of the shades of night, attended by a very few of those in whom he reposes most confidence, he went to the Kremlin, where he indulged a father's affection in seeing his darling little son [the Tsarevich Alexis], kissed him thrice, and leaving many other pledges of endearment, returned to his wooden dwelling in Preobrazhenskoe, fleeing the sight of his wife, the Tsaritsa [Eudoxia], whom he dislikes with a loathing of old date.
A few days later, Peter celebrated the Russian New Year— which, according to the calendar of Old Muscovy, began September 1—with a huge banquet at General Shein's house. The guests included a large crowd of boyars, officers and others, among them a group of common sailors from the infant fleet. Peter particularly honored the sailors, spending much of the evening with them, halving apples and giving one part to a sailor while eating the other himself: He threw his arm around one sailor and called him "brother." Toast followed toast, and each lifting of the glasses provoked a salute of twenty-five guns.
*After Peter, beards returned very slowly to the upper levels of Russian society. Through the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, all public officials and officers and soldiers of the army were required to be shaved. In the 1860's and 1870's, under Alexander II, this rule was relaxed and many government ministers and Russian soldiers—with the exception of members of the Imperial Guard—again began to wear beards. All the tsars who followed Peter I were clean-shaven except the last two, Alexander III and Nicholas II, who both wore beards in order to manifest their strong Slavophile tastes.
Still another "sumptuous entertainment" took place two weeks after the Tsar's return, and although Peter arrived with "his gums swollen with toothache," the Austrian ambassador reported that he had never seen him happier. General Patrick Gordon arrived to present himself to the Tsar for the first time since Peter's return, excusing himself for the delay by saying that he had been at his country house and had been held back by bad weather and storms. The old soldier twice bowed low and was about to go on his knees to embrace the Tsar around the knees when Peter extended his hand and clasped it warmly.
Not long after Peter compelled his boyars to shave their beards, he also began to insist they change from traditional Russian clothing to Western dress. Some had already done so; Polish costume had appeared at court and was regularly worn by progressive figures such as Vasily Golitsyn. In 1681, Tsar Fedor had insisted that his courtiers shorten their long robes so as to permit them to walk. But most continued to wear the traditional Russian national costume: embroidered shirt, wide breeches tucked into floppy boots brilliantly colored in red or green with turned-up toes and gold trim, and on top of that a caftan reaching to the ground with a straight collar of velvet, satin or brocade and sleeves of exaggerated length and width. To go outdoors, another long garment was added, light in summer, fur-lined in winter, with high, square collar and even longer sleeves which fell to the bottom of the heels. Walking in procession in Moscow in their long, flowing robes and tall, fur-lined hats, a group of Russian boyars made an opulent, almost Oriental picture.
Peter detested this national dress because it was impractical. In his own active life, working in a shipyard, sailing, marching with his soldiers, the long, bulky robes got in the way and he could scarcely walk. Nor did he like the expressions of curiosity, amusement and contempt which he saw on Western faces when a group of Russians in national costumes walked through the streets of a Western town. Back in Moscow, he resolved on change. Among the most persistent wearers of the old dress was the stem Prince Romodanovsky. When Romodanovsky was told that Fedor Golovin, an ambassador of the Great Embassy, had taken off his Russian clothes in the West and put on fashionable foreign garments, Romodanovsky said, "I do not believe Golovin to be such a brainless ass as to despise the dress of his fatherland." Yet on October 30, when Peter ordered that Golovin and Lefort be received in state to acknowledge the Embassy's return, and that only those in Western dress be allowed to appear, Romodanovsky himself was obliged to conform.
That winter, in the course of a two-day banquet and celebration to dedicate Lefprt's new palace, Peter took a pair of long cutting shears and clipped the wide sleeves of the boyars around him at the table. "See," he said, "these things are in your way. You are safe nowhere with them. At one moment you upset a glass, then you forgetfully dip them in the sauce." He handed the sheared-off sleeves to the astonished guests, suggesting, "Get gaiters made of them."
A year later, in January 1700, Peter transformed persuasion into decree. With rolling drums in the streets and squares, it was proclaimed that all boyars, government officials and men of property, both in Moscow and in the provinces, were to abandon their long robes and provide themselves with Hungarian or German-style caftans. The following year, a new decree commanded men to wear a waistcoat, breeches, gaiters, boots and a hat in the French or German-style, and women to put on petticoats, skirts, bonnets and Western shoes. Later decrees prohibited the wearing of high Russian boots and long Russian knives. Models of the new approved costumes were hung at Moscow's gates and in public places in the city for people to observe and copy. All who arrived at the gates in traditional dress except peasants were permitted to enter only after paying a fine. Subsequently, Peter instructed the guards at the city gates to force to their knees all visitors arriving in long, traditional coats and then to cut off the coats at the point where the lowered garment touched the ground. "Many hundreds of coats were cut accordingly," says Perry, "and being done with good humor it occasioned mirth among the people and soon broke the custom of wearing long coats, especially in places near Moscow and those towns wherever the Tsar came."