The latest celebration of Peter the Great, founder of the Russian navy, is a revival in Moscow of the opera Zar und Zimmermann at the Pokrovsky Chamber Musical Theater (December 9–10, 2011). Translated as "The Czar and the Carpenter", the opera is a flight of fancy based on Peter’s time in Zaandam, the shipbuilding suburb of Amsterdam, learning the shipwright’s trade.
According to The Moscow Times, the 1837 opera by Berlin-born Albert Lortzing was not staged in Russia until 1907 when a ban on the theatrical depiction of members of the ruling Romanov dynasty was rescinded. But the theme was also unpopular with the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg. In 1918 they destroyed a bronze public statue by Leopold Bernshtam titled "Peter the Great learning the craft of ship building in the city of Zaandam", which had been presented to the city nine years earlier by the last Czar, Nicholas II.
A Proliferation of Statues
As luck would have it, a copy of the sculpture had been sent to the Dutch city, and in 1996 this was copied and sent back to St Petersburg to be reinstalled on the Admiralty Embankment.
Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp and London were all presented with statues of Peter the Great by the Russian Federation to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Peter’s Great Embassy tour of 1697–98. The young Czar of Muscovy made the journey at the age of 25 in order to gather information for modernising his country and establishing a professional army and navy.
The Great Embassy Tour
The journey is given a full account in History of the Russian Empire Under Peter the Great (1759) by Voltaire whose entire library is in the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg. The Czar travelled with a coterie of around 200, and it included three Russian ambassadors: Swiss-born General Le Fort, the boyar Alexis Gollowin who had concluded peace treaties with China, and Russia’s secretary of state Prokopii Voznitzyn. Peter himself, dressed like the Muscovy ambassadors in long Asiatic robes, caps buttoned with jewels and scimitars at their sides, had a modest personal retinue of “one valet de chambre, a servant in livery and a dwarf”.
Breaking away from the main party Peter sought anonymity as well as information, dressing in workers’ clothes and living in a hut in the Amsterdam shipyard, which today is preserved as the Czaar Peterhuisje. It remains a place of pilgrimage for Russians: Mikhail Gorbechev and Vladimir Putin have both visited it.
From Holland Peter sailed with a party of 16 to London in the royal yacht, sent to fetch him by Dutch-born William III of England, with two warships for escort. Again, in London and in the Deptford dockyards, Peter sought anonymity, despite his occasional reprobate behaviour. His appetite for knowledge was unquenchable. Among the reasons he had come to London was that shipbuilding was more of a science in Britain than on the Continent. He met a Scottish mathematician called Ferguson who, according to Voltaire, became responsible for introducing written arithmetic into the Russian exchequor. Up until this point, Tartar methods of counting had been used, with beads and a wire (an abacus). A major problem was that after a calculation had been made, there was no way of proving it.
Nothing Left of the Royal Dockyard Peter Knew
Unlike Amsterdam, London has nothing to show for Peter’s visit. The royal dockyards at Deptford, next to Greenwich, were closed in 1869. Sayes Court, the house rented by Czar Peter, which belonged to the diarist John Evelyn, has not survived, and the whole historic dockyard area, now known as Convoys Wharf, is an abandoned site currently the subject of planning approval, contested by local action groups such as Deptford is….
After three months in England, Peter was given a ship called the Royal Transport to return to Holland. He took with him a full complement of English know-how to help found his navy: three warship captains, 25 merchant ship captains, 40 lieutenants, 30 pilots, 30 surgeons and 250 gunners.
Though a Thames-side statue by Mikhail Shemyakin now commemorates the visit of the Czar of Muscovy, with his dwarf, an opera is yet to be written about his fruitful time in the shipyards of Deptford.
