Not surprisingly, Peter's sartorial transformation was much more readily accepted by women than by men. His sister Natalya and his widowed sister-in-law, Praskovaya, were the first to set the example, and many Russian noblewomen hurried to follow. Seeing great possibilities in foreign dress, anxious to be a la mode, they sent to the West for examples of the gowns, shoes and hats being worn at Versailles.
As time passed, subsequent decrees further extended and refined Peter's will that the new clothes be worn "for the glory and comeliness of the state and the military profession." Resistance was never so strong as that which had greeted his condemnation of beards; priests might still berate clean-shaven men, but the church did not rise to the defense of the traditional robes. Fashion has its own authority, and lesser men scurried to adopt the dress of their superiors. Within five years. Whitworth, the English ambassador, reported from Moscow that "in all this great city not a single person of importance is to be met dressed otherwise than in the German manner."
In the country, however, fashion still bowed to age-old habit. Those of the nobility, the bureaucracy and the merchants who fell under Peter's eye dressed as he desired, but other gentry living on their far-off estates still serenely wore their long robes. In a way, this first and most obvious of Peter's reforms on his return from the West was typical of what followed. In his impatience to apply Western customs to Russian society, he jettisoned Russian habits whose existence was based on common sense. It was true that the old Russian clothing was bulky and made walking difficult; limbs were certainly freer once the long robes and coats were cast off. But in the rigorous cold of Russian winter, the freer limbs were also more likely to be frostbitten. When the temperature sank to twenty or thirty below zero, the old Russian in his warm boots, his greatcoat rising above his ears and reaching down to the ground, with his bushy beard protecting his mouth and cheeks, could look with satisfaction at that poor Westernized fellow whose face was purple in the cold and whose knees, showing beneath his shortened coat, knocked together in a futile effort to keep warm.
Peter's ardent determination to rid himself quickly of all appurtenances and reminders of the old Muscovite customs and traditions had bleak results for his wife, Eudoxia. The autumn of his return from the West marked the final break between the twenty-six-year-old Tsar and the twenty-nine-year-old Tsaritsa.
Peter had long wished to end his marriage and to shed this sad and cloying woman whom he had never loved and whom he had been forced to marry. From the beginning, it had been no secret that Peter went out of his way to avoid his wife. She was simple and uneducated. She feared his enthusiasms and disliked his friends—particularly Lefort—and the foreigners who thronged into Peter's life. A good Orthodox woman who believed that foreigners were the source of heresy and contamination, she could not bear to see her husband adopting their clothes, their language, their habits and their ideas. Inevitably, by trying to come between her enthusiastic, headstrong husband the glittering life he had found with his new friends, Eudoxia only made her own position weaker. She also knew that Peter was unfaithful, that he kept Anna Mons in handsome style. Foolishly, she showed her jealousy openly, which angered Peter, while her own attempts to please him with letters or marks of affection merely wearied him. In short, he was bored with her, embarrassed by her and longed to be free of her.
While still in the West, dining, dancing and making conversation with the fascinating ladies he met everywhere, Peter resolved to be rid of his own helpless, uninteresting and possessive wife. He did not write a single line to Eudoxia during his eighteen months abroad, but his letters to his friends in Russia'contained broad hints of his intentions. From London he wrote to his uncle Lev Naryshkin and to Tikhon Streshnev, urging that they persuade his wife to take religious vows and become a nun. Once she took the veil, all earthly relationships, including marriage, were null and void. On returning to Amsterdam, Peter increased the pressure, asking Romodanovsky to intervene and use his influence on the reluctant Tsarita. Even the Patriarch was induced to work on Peter's behalf, although he tried to avoid the unwelcome task. By the time he reached Vienna, Peter had made up his mind. His refusal to offer a toast to the Empress, which would require him to drink the reciprocal toast that would be offered to the Tsarita, was a clear signal of his hardened purpose.
On returning to Moscow, Peter at first refused to see Eudoxia. Instead, he angrily asked Naryshkin and the others why his orders regarding her had not been carried out. They replied that in so delicate a matter the sovereign himself must handle the arrangements. Thus, after he had been in Moscow for several days, Peter summoned Eudoxia to meet him at Vinius' house. For four hours they argued, Peter insisting furiously that she must accept the veil and release him. Eudoxia, finding strength in desperation, steadfastly refused, pleading that her duty as a mother made it impossible for her to leave the world. Once incarcerated in a convent, she predicted (accurately, as it turned out), she would never see her son again. Therefore, she declared that she would never voluntarily abandon either the palace or her marriage.
Peter left the interview determined to have his way. First, Alexis, then eight and a half, was forcibly taken from his mother and put in the care of Peter's younger sister, Natalya, at Preobrazhenskoe. One morning soon after, a simple postal carriage, without ladies-in-waiting or servants, was sent to the palace. Eudoxia was bundled into it and the cart rattled off to the Pokrovsky Monastery in Suzdal. There, ten months later, Eudoxia's head was shaved and she was forced to take a new name as a nun, Helen. Later in Peter's life, she would reappear in a surprising way, but, for the moment, Peter's wish was accomplished: he at last was free.
In the months that followed Peter's return from the West, he imposed other changes on Russian life. Most were superficial and symbolic; like the cutting of beards and the trimming of clothes, they were harbingers of the deeper institutional reforms to come in the decades ahead. These early transformations really changed nothing fundamental in Russian society. Yet, to Russians they seemed very strange, for they had to do with the commonest ingredients of everyday life.
One of these changes had to do with the calendar. Since the earliest times, Russians had calculated the year not from the birth of Christ but from the moment when they believed the world had been created. Accordingly, by their reckoning, Peter returned from the West not in the year 1698 but in the year 7206. Similarly, Russians began the New Year not on January 1, but on September 1. This stemmed from their belief that the world was created in autumn when the grain and other fruits of the earth had ripened to perfection and were ready to pluck, rather than in the middle of winter when the earth was covered with snow. Traditionally, New Year's Day, September 1, was celebrated with great ceremony, with the tsar and the patriarch seated on two thrones in a courtyard of the Kremlin surrounded by crowds of boyars and people. Peter had suspended these rites as obsolete, but September 1 still remained the beginning of the New Year.