Peter was deeply suspicious of his sister and could not believe that she was not always intriguing against him. To confirm his suspicions, a number of women, including wives of the Streltsy and all of Sophia's female attendants, were examined. Two chambermaids were brought to the torture rooms and stripped naked to the waist. One had already received several blows of the knout when Peter entered. He noticed that she was pregnant and for this reason absolved her from further torture, but both women were condemned to death.
Under torture, a Strelets, Vaska Alexeev, declared that two letters purporting to be from Sophia had been sent to the Streltsy camp and been read aloud to the soldiers. These letters supposedly urged the Streltsy to march on Moscow, seize the Kremlin and summon the Tsarevna to the throne. According to one account, the letters were smuggled out of Sophia's rooms inside loaves of bread given by Sophia to old beggar women. Other letters, less inflammatory, had been written by Sophia's sister Martha, informing Sophia that the Streltsy were marching on Moscow.
Peter went to Novodevichy himself to interrogate Sophia. There was no question of torture; according to one account, he alternated between weeping with her over the fate that had made them antagonists, and threatening her with death, using the example of Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots. Sophia denied that she had ever written to the Streltsy. When he suggested that she might have reminded them that she could be called back to rule, she told him straightforwardly that on this matter they needed no letter from her; they would certainly remember that she had ruled the state for seven years. In the end, Peter learned nothing from her. He spared his sister's life, but decided that she must be more closely restricted. She was forced to shave her head and take religious vows, as the nun Susanna. He confined her permanently to Novodevichy, where she was guarded by one hundred soldiers and permitted to have no visitors. She lived in this fashion for another six years and died at forty-seven in 1704. Her sisters Martha and Catherine Miloslavskaya (also Peter's half-sisters) were politically exonerated, but Martha, too, was sent to a convent for the rest of her days.
The first executions of the condemned Streltsy took place on October 10 at Preobrazhenskoe. Behind the barracks, a bare field rose into a steep hill, and at the top the gallows were placed. A regiment of Guards was drawn up between the execution site and the large crowd of spectators, pushing and shoving, craning their necks to see. The Streltsy, many of whom could no longer walk, arrived in a procession of small carts, each containing two men seated back to back, each holding a lighted candle. Almost without exception, the condemned men were silent, but their wives and children, running beside the carts, filled the air with shrieks and calamitous sobbing. As the carts rumbled across the brook that separated the gallows from the crowd, the individual cries rose into a loud, collective wail.
When all the carts had arrived, Peter, wearing the green polish coat given him by Augustus, appeared with his boyars near the spot where the ambassadors of the Hapsburg empire, Poland and Denmark were watching from their carriages. As the sentence was being read, Peter shouted to the crowd to listen well. Then the guilty men began walking to the gallows, dragging logs tied to their feet to prevent escape. Each man tried to climb the gallows unaided, but some had to be helped. At the top, each made the sign of the cross in four directions and covered his own face with a piece of linen. Some put their heads in the nooses and jumped from the gallows, hoping to break their necks and find a quick end. In general, the Streltsy met death with great calm, following one another without any great sadness on their faces. Because the regular executioners were unable to handle so many, Peter ordered several military officers to mount the gallows and help with the work. That night, Korb reported, Peter went to supper at General Gordon's. He sat in gloomy silence, commenting only on the stubborn resistance of the men who had died.
This grim pageant was only the first of many similar scenes that autumn and winter. Every few days, several score or more were executed. Two hundred were hanged from the walls of the city on special beams extended out from the embrasures in the parapet, two Streltsy to each beam. At each gate to the city, six more bodies swung from gibbet, a reminder to all who entered of the fruits of treason. On October 11, 144 were hanged in Red Square, on beams projecting through the crenellations in the Kremlin wall. One hundred and nine were beheaded by axe and sword over an open trench at Preobrazhenskoe. Three brothers, among the most stubborn of the rebels, were executed in Red Square, two being broken on the wheel and left to die slowly while the third was beheaded before their eyes. The two survivors complained bitterly at the injustice of their brother being permitted to die so quickly and easily.
For some, there were special humiliations. For the regimental priests who had encouraged the Streltsy, a gibbet constructed in the shape of a cross was erected in front of St. Basil's Cathedral. The priests were hanged by the court jester, dressed for the occasion in clerical robes. To make the connection between the Streltsy and Sophia crystal clear, 196 were hanged from a huge square gallows erected near Novodevichy Convent, where the Tsarevna was imprisoned. Three, the supposed ringleaders, were strung up directly outside the window of Sophia's room, with one of the corpses holding a piece of paper representing the Streltsy petition asking her to rule. They remained dangling, near enough for her to touch, for the rest of the winter.
Not all the men of the four rebellious regiments were executed. Peter reduced the sentences of 500 soldiers under twenty years of age from death to branding on the right cheek and exile. Others had their noses or ears lopped off to mark them hideously as participants in treason. Throughout Peter's reign, noseless, earless, branded men, evidence of both the Tsar's wrath and his mercy, roamed\ the edges of his realm.
Korb reported that in his vengeful fury Peter forced a number of his favorites to act as executioners. On October 23, according to Korb, the boyars who constituted the council at which the Streltsy were condemned were summoned to Preobrazhenskoe and ordered to carry out executions themselves. To each boyar a Strelets was brought and an axe was given, with the command that he decapitate the man before him. Some took the axe with trembling hands, aimed poorly and struck without sufficient force. One boyar struck far too low, hitting his victim in the middle of the back and almost cutting him in half. With the creature writhing, screaming and bleeding in front of him, the boyar could not finish his task.
In this grisly work, two apparently distinguished themselves. Prince Romodanovsky, already renowned for his relentless prosecution of the investigation in the torture chambers, beheaded four Streltsy, according to Korb. Romodanovsky's grim passion, "surpassing all the rest in cruelty," perhaps had root in the murder of his father by the Streltsy in 1682. Alexander Menshikov, the Tsar's young favorite, eager to please, later boasted of having cut off twenty heads. Only the foreigners among the Tsar's intimates refused, saying that it was not the custom of their countries for men of their kind to act as executioners. Peter, Korb says, surveyed the whole proceeding from his saddle, frowning with displeasure when he saw a boyar, pale and trembling, reluctant to accept the axe.
Korb also says that Peter himself beheaded some of the Streltsy. The Austrian secretary declared that on the day of the first public executions at Preobrazhenskoe he was standing with a German major in Peter's army. Leaving Korb, the major pressed forward through the crowd and eventually returned to tell Korb that he had seen Peter personally decapitate five of the Streltsy. On another day later in the fall, Korb says, "it was reported by a number of persons that today again the Tsar had himself executed public vengeance upon some traitors." Most historians—Western and Russian, pre-Revolutionary and Soviet—have rejected this hearsay evidence. Those who have already found in Peter an excessive violence and brutality will have no difficulty imagining him personally wielding an executioner's axe. He did indeed become violent when he was angry, and he was enraged at these mutineers who, once again, had raised their swords against his throne; to him it was treason that was immoral, not its punishment. Those who do not wish to believe that the Tsar became an executioner can take solace in the fact that neither Korb nor his Austrian colleagues actually witnessed the event described; their evidence could not be used in a modern court.