The first shots came on Shein's command. With a roar, smoke billowed out from the cannon muzzles, but no harm was done. De Grage's guns had fired powder but not shot; Shein had hoped that this display of force might awe the Streltsy into submission. Instead, the blank volley had the opposite effect. Hearing the noise, but seeing no damage among their ranks, the Streltsy were emboldened to think that they were the stronger party. Beating their drums and waving their banners, they advanced across the river. At this, Shein and Gordon ordered De Grage to bring his guns into action in earnest. The cannon roared again, this time sending ball and shot whistling into the lines of the Streltsy. Over and over, De Grage's twenty-five guns fired into the mass of men before them. Cannonballs volleyed into the lines, lopping off heads, arms and legs.
In an hour it was over. While the cannon still boomed, the Streltsy lay down on the ground to escape the fire, begging to surrender. From the loyal side, commands to throw down their arms were shouted. The Streltsy quickly obeyed, but even so, the artillery continued to fire, Gordon reasoning that if he silenced his guns, the Streltsy might gain courage and be persuaded to attack again before they could be properly disarmed.. And so the cowed and terrified Streltsy allowed themselves to be fettered and bound until they were truly harmless.
With the rebels in chains, Shein was merciless. On the spot, with the entire body of mutinous Streltsy in chains and under guard on the battlefield, he ordered an investigation of the rebellion. He wanted to know the cause, the instigators, the objectives. To a man, each Strelets whom he questioned admitted his own involvement and agreed that he himself deserved death. But, equally to a man, all refused to give any details as to their goals or to betray any of their fellows as instigators or leaders. Accordingly, in the pleasant countryside near the New Jerusalem Monastery, Shein ordered the Streltsy put to torture. Knout and fire did their work, and at last one soldier was persuaded to speak. Agreeing that he and all his fellows deserved death, he admitted that had the rebellion been successful, they had intended first to sack and burn the entire German Suburb and massacre all its inhabitants, then to enter Moscow, kill all who resisted, seize the leading boyars, kill some and exile others. Following this, they would announce to the people that the Tsar, who had gone abroad on the malicious advice of the foreigners, had died in the West and the Princess Sophia would be called upon to act as regent again until the Tsarevich Alexis, Peter's son, should reach his majority. To advise and support Sophia, Vasily Golitsyn would be recalled from exile.
Perhaps this was true or perhaps Shein had simply extracted by torture what he wished to hear. In any case, he was satisfied and, on the basis of this confession, ordered the executioners to begin their work. Gordon protested—not to save the lives of the condemned men, but to preserve them for more thorough interrogation in the future. Anticipating Peter's intense desire to get to the bottom of the mater on his return, he pleaded with Shein. But Shein was the commander and he insisted that immediate executions were necessary to make the proper impression on the rest of the Streltsy—and on the nation—as to how traitors were dealt with. One hundred and thirty were executed in the field and the rest, nearly 1,900, were brought back to Moscow in chains. There they were turned over to Romodanovsky, who distributed them in the cells of various fortresses and monasteries around the countryside to await Peter's return.
Peter, rushing home from Vienna, had been informed along the way of the easy victory over the Streltsy and been assured that "not one got away." Yet, despite the quick snuffing out of the revolt which had never seriously threatened his throne, the Tsar was profoundly disturbed. His first thought, after the anxiety and humiliation of having his army rebel while he was traveling abroad, was—exactly as Gordon had known it would be—to wonder how far the roots of the rebellion had spread and what high persons might have been involved. Peter doubted that the Streltsy had acted alone. Their demands and charges against his friends, himself and his way of life seemed too broad for simple soldiers. But who had instigated them? On whose behalf?
None of his boyars or officers could give him a satisfactory answer. They said that the Streltsy had been too strong under torture and that answers could not be forced out of them. Angry and suspicious, Peter ordered the Guards regiments to collect the hundreds of prisoners from cells around Moscow and bring them to Preobranzhenskoe. There, in the interrogation that followed, Peter resolved to discover whether, as he had written to Romoda-novsky, "the seed of the Miloslavskys had sprouted again." And even if this had not been a full-fledged plot to overthrow his government, he was determined to put an end to those "begetters of evil." Since his childhood, the Streltsy had opposed and threatened him—they had murdered his friends and relations, they had supported the claims of the usurper Sophia and they continued to scheme against him; only two weeks before his departure abroad, the plot of the Streltsy Colonel Tsykler had been discovered. Now, once again they had used violent language against his foreign friends and himself and had marched on Moscow intending to overthrow the state. Peter was weary of it alclass="underline" the nuisance as well as the danger, the arrogant claims to special privilege and to fight only when and where they wished, the poor performance as soldiers, the fact that they were semi-medieval figures in a modern world. Once and for all, one way or another, he would be rid of them.
Interrogation meant questioning under torture. Torture in Russia in Peter's day was used for three purposes: to force men to speak; as punishment, even when no information was desired; and as a prelude to or refinement of death by execution. Traditionally, three general methods of torture were used in Russia: the batog, the knout and fire.
A batog was a small rod or stick about the thickness of a man's finger, commonly used to beat an offender for lesser crimes. The victim was spread on the floor, lying on his stomach, his back bared and his legs and arms extended. Two men applied batogs simultaneously to the bare back, one sitting or kneeling on the victim's head and arms, the other on his legs and feet. Facing each other, the two punishers wielded their sticks rhythmically in turn, "keeping time as smiths do at an anvil until their rods were broken in pieces and then they took fresh ones until they were ordered to stop." Laid on indiscriminately over a prolonged time with a weakened victim, the batogs could cause death, although this was not usually the case.
More serious punishment or interrogation called forth the knout, a savage but traditional method of inflicting pain in Russia. The knout was a thick, leather whip about three and a half feet long. A blow from the knout tore skin from the bare back of a victim and, when the lash fell repeatedly in the same place, could bite through to the bone. The degree of punishment was determined by the number of strokes inflicted; fifteen to twenty-five was considered standard; more than that often led to death.
Applying the knout was skilled work. The wielder, observed John Perry, applied "so many strokes on the bare back as are appointed by the judges, first making a step back and giving a spring forward at every stroke, which is laid on with such force that the blood flies at every stroke and leaves a weal behind as thick as a man's finger. And these [knout] masters as the Russians call them, are so exact in their work that they very rarely strike two strokes in the same place, but lay them on the whole length and breadth of a man's back, by the side of each other with great dexterity from the top of a man's shoulders down to the waistband of his breeches."