Fortunately, Peter's life wasn't always so darkly destructive. There were brighter, zanier moments, most of them involving insulting the Church under wild inebriation. In 1692, Peter got some of his friends together and christened themselves the "Most Drunken Synod", and parodied the entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday by having Peter's friend Matvei Flilmonovich ("an elderly drunkard related to the family of the tsar's mother," Anderson tells us) ride on a camel to an inn, "where riotous drinking took place." While this might seem like an exercise better relegated to fraternities, yet perhaps forgivable on a one-off basis, recall this is Peter the Great, who did nothing half way. Anderson elaborates:
The purpose of these childishly provocative ceremonies remains obscure. There is no doubt that Peter himself attached importance to the 'Synod': he wrote out its relatively complex rules with his own hand and revised them several times. A generation later one of the last acts of his life was to attend one of its meetings.
It should not surprise our gentle readers that our buddy Voltaire just couldn't resist such a colorful (and drunk) subject. His biography of Peter the Great displays the smug attitude that got him beaten so often. He notes, "We could not expect the amusements of Peter's day to be as noble or as refined as they have become since," but seems to think some of them were OK, if not downright juicy. The following narrative from Voltaire's work requires no commentary:
Before promulgating his ecclesiastical laws, he created one of his court jesters pope and celebrated the Festival of the Conclave. The jester, whose name was Zotov [later a camel-rider in the Most Drunken Synod. -HH], was eighty-four years old. The tsar conceived the idea of marrying him to a widow as old as himself, and of solemnly celebrating the nuptials. The guests were invited by four stammerers; some decrepit old men escorted the bride, while four of the fattest men in Russia served as runners. The band was on a cart drawn by bears goaded with steel points, which, by their roaring, provided a bass worthy of the tunes being played on the wagon. The bride and groom were blessed in the cathedral by a blind and deaf priest wearing spectacles. The procession, the wedding ceremony, the nuptial feast, the disrobing of the bridal couple, and the ritual of putting them to bed were all equally appropriate to the buffoonery of the entertainment.
Stutterers, fat men, and nude octogenarians. Sheer genius, and he brought a backward eighteenth century Russia up to step with Europe to boot.