CHAPTER V
PETER THE GREAT AND THE HOLY SYNOD
Alexis died in the year 1676 at the age of forty-seven, and was succeeded by his eldest son Feodor, a young man of weak health, who reigned without distinction for six years, and died without an heir. Sophia, the daughter of Alexis, a handsome, clever woman, then contrived to have herself proclaimed regent for her imbecile brother Ivan and her young half-brother Peter, a child of Alexis by a second wife, born in the year 1672, and therefore four years of age when his father died. Peter was an intelligent, keenly observant child. But by the cruel policy of Sophia and the able but unpopular minister Basil Golitsin, who was as her right hand, his education was deliberately neglected. The object of this cruel injustice was to keep him permanently unfit to administer the government of the State, so that they might continue to share it between them. It was a diabolically subtle policy. But it failed utterly. At the age of seventeen Peter seized the reins and sent his unnatural sister off to a convent, where she died after seventeen years' imprisonment. Much of the brutality and coarseness of the great tsar's subsequent conduct must be set down to the account of his deliberately neglected youth. His life-story would have been very different in many respects if it had not been for the iniquitous dis-
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