98 The Warrior Tsar, I 689-I 725
The musketeers were not in themselves a serious threat to Peter's power, as
was shown by their role in the crisis of August 1689 (see ch. 3 ). The victorious
Naryshk!n faction, hc'.ve•.ier, looked elsc;vhcrc foi military 5upport. Since i683
the young tsar had been building up a force, the 'mock' or 'play' (poteshnye)
regiments, which were clearly designed for use against domestic as well as
external opponents. The pleasure-loving regent and her advisers tolerated this
menacing enterprise, partly because it kept Peter busily employed at, arm's
length from the Kremlin. Preobrazhenskoye, a court village near the capital,
gave its name to the first guards regiment, which was little more than a motley
band. until 1687 or even 1692.^4 Its officers were recruited wherever possible
from scions of noble or gentry families, as were some of the men; the rest were
drawn from their dependants or those of the court. From the start this was
conceived as an elite force personally beholden to Peter and ready to do his
bidding. Training was supervised by foreign officers from the German suburb;
conducted most vigorously during the summer months, it included realistic
mock battlefield exercises and embraced all branches of the service, including
artillery and engineering (for which Peter entertained a particular interest). By
1687 some poteshnye had been relocated in another court village, Semenov-
skyoe, which gave its name to a guards infantry regiment that claimed second
place in seniority throughout the Imperial epoch. By the mid-1690s there were
four units, two named after their commanders in the Muscovite tradition, in
this royal bodyguard. It carried on the traditions of the two vybornye infantry
regiments founded in 1642,^5 and-although the pro\ld guardsmen would have
been loath to admit it-of the stremyannoy polk of Moscow musketeers.
For this corps, with its popular roots, was now cast as the natural enemy of
the more privileged poteshnye. In the military exercises held after Peter's coup
d'etat the two forces were invariably pitted against each other. The stre/'tsy
were allotted a passive, defensive role and ended up as the losers. The aim of
this was as much political as professional: it built up the morale of one forma-
tion while weakening that of the other. The first climax came in September
1694, when for several weeks four infantry regiments with cavalry support,
commanded by F. Yu. Romodanovsky, engaged six stre/'tsy units-under 1. 1.
Buturlin for possession of a fortress at Kozhukhovo, just outside Moscow,
which Peter had built for the purpose. The action was sufficiently lifelike to
cause a number of casualties.^6
(^4) The Preobrazhensky regiment proudly dated its origins from 1683, which led to an unedifying
controversy over the historical justification for the practice: cf. Bobrovsky, 'Poteshnye';
'Uchrezhdeniye'; P-v, 'Dvukhsotletiye'; Truvorov, 'O vremeni'; for a summing up: Smel'nitsky,
'Proiskhozhdeniye'.
s On these see now Rabinovich, Polki, p. 24.
6 Kurakin, 'Gistoriya', p. 67, gives a figure on 24 killed and 1.5 wounded (including Romod-
anovsky himself), but this cannot be corroborated; he puts the number of participants at 30,000,
but the real figure was only half as greal. Kurakin's account and his brief autobiography ('Zhizn'')
are, however. valuable since he was the only con1~mporary Russian writer to express (guarded)
criticism of Peter's policies. For a recem study of the manoeuvres: Warner, 'Koluchovo
Campaign'.