Free Peter the Great by Robert K. Massie

Prince Yury Dolgoruky, ordered the soldier presenting the petition to be whipped for insubordination. But this time, as the petitioner was being led to the knout, he passed a watching group of his regimental comrades. "Brothers," he cried "why do you give me up? I gave the petition by your orders and for you!" Aroused, the Streltsy fell upon the guards and liberated the prisoner.
    This incident inflamed the Streltsy Quarter. Seventeen regiments immediately accused their colonels of cheating or maltreatment and demanded punishment. The Regent Natalya's fledgling government, just taking office, inherited the crisis and floundered badly. Many boyars of the oldest families of Russia—the Dolgorukys, Repnins, Romodanovskys, Sheremetevs, Sheins, Kurakins and Urusovs—had rallied behind Peter and his mother, but none knew how to placate the Streltsy. In the end, desperate to blunt the soldiers' hostility, Natalya sacrificed the colonels. Without investigation, she ordered the colonels arrested and stripped of rank, and their property and wealth divided to meet the soldiers' claims. Two of the colonels, one of them Semyon Griboyedov, were publicly knouted, while twelve others were given the lesser punishment of being beaten with sticks, called batogs, at the direction of the Streltsy themselves. "Beat them harder," they urged, until their officers fainted. Then, the Streltsy grumbled with satisfaction. "They have had enough. Let them go-"
    Allowing a mutinous soldiery to beat its officers was a risky way of restoring discipline. For the moment, the Streltsy were appeased, but in fact their new sense of power, their increased assurance that they were entitled and even obligated to purge the state of its enemies, had made them far more dangerous.
    The Streltsy thought they knew who these enemies were: the boyars and the Naryshkins. Sinister stories had been passed among them. It was rumored that Fedor had not died naturally, as had been announced, but had been poisoned by foreign doctors with the connivance of the boyars and the Naryshkins. These same enemies had then pushed aside Ivan, the rightful heir, in favor of
    Peter. Now that their diabolical schemes had succeeded, foreigners would be given power in the army and government, Orthodoxy would be degraded and trampled, and, worst of all, those faithful defenders of the old values in Muscovy, the Streltsy, would be horribly punished.
    These were stories which played on the traditional prejudices of the Streltsy. And other events were described in a manner calculated to arouse the soldiery. On taking office, Natalya had distributed wholesale new promotions in rank to all her Naryshkin relatives, even elevating her arrogant twenty-three-year-old younger brother Ivan to the rank of boyar. Ivan Naryshkin already was an object of dislike for his remark at Fedor's funeral. Now, fresh rumors spread: that he had rudely pushed the Tsarevna Sophia to the ground; that he had taken the crown and placed it on his own head, declaring that it looked better on him than on anyone else.
    But the stories had a source, the rumors a purpose. Who was behind this effort to arouse the Streltsy? One instigator was Ivan Miloslavsky, who was keenly anxious to overthow Peter, Natalya and the Naryshkin party. Having already been exiled himself during the previous period of Naryshkin dominance at court, he had retaliated by sending Matveev to six years of harsh internment in the Arctic; now, Matveev was returning to Moscow to act as chief advisor to the new Regent—Tsaritsa Natalya Naryshkina— and Ivan Miloslavsky knew what he could expect in this- latest shift of power. Another plotter was Prince Ivan Khovansky, a vain, incessantly noisy man whose soaring ambitions were constantly thwarted by his own incompetence. Relieved of his post as Governor of Pskov, he was called before Tsar Alexis, who told him, "Everybody calls you a fool." Never willing to accept this valuation, convinced by the Miloslavskys that