After establishing the city of St Petersburg, what was Peter the Great’s next step in his titanic struggle against Charles XII of Sweden, for mastery of northern and eastern Europe? What drastic, brutal action did he take against Poland, to slow the Swedish advance into his territories? And, after the defection of one of his oldest and most important allies - the leader of the Ukrainian Cossacks - to the Swedes, could Peter and his army survive to fight on? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the next and deadliest stage of the Great Northern War: from action-packed military conquests, and harsh marches into the depths of a northern winter, to great betrayals, and the outbreak of the battle that would decide the fate of two of Europe’s mightiest rulers… The Rest Is History Club: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestishistory.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestishistory. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who were Charles XII and Peter the Great, and what was the Great Northern War about?
Yeah, we think that now, but they didn't think that then. So if you remember, we are in the frozen grip of the Great Northern War, the great struggle, the titanic showdown between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII of Sweden for mastery of the north and the east of Europe. And...
When Charles set off, if you remember, everybody was terribly optimistic and there was no thought of frostbite or missing toes and heels. Certainly no thought of stuffing a boot with straw to make up for the loss of your foot. They would be celebrating in the Kremlin. That was the plan. That's what they thought.
So listeners will remember from the last episode that Peter had seized part of the Baltic coast and he'd founded his new city of St. Petersburg amid the bogs and marshes. But all the momentum seemed to lie with the ultimate Scandinavian. I mean, surely he'd be played by Alexander Skarsgård, wouldn't he? Of course he would, yeah. He would be hunting bears with a pitchfork.
He'd be sleeping outside, won't even wear a hat, if you remember from the last episode. He'd gone through Poland. He'd gone through Saxony. He had deposed fox-tossing champion Augustus the Strong as king of Poland. And now he's decided to go east. August 1707, he's ordered this thousand-mile march on Moscow to depose Peter the Great and redraw the map of Europe.
However, as your reading from Gustav Peiper suggests, things don't go according to plan. So let's get into exactly what went wrong. As soon as the Swedes crossed the border from Silesia into Poland, they discovered that the Russians had been expecting them. So the Russians have moved into Poland themselves. Peter had sent in his Cossack and Kalmyk, their kind of Central Asian horsemen,
into Western Poland, and there there had been a preview of what would come in the rest of the campaign. So they had basically tried to turn the whole place into a desert. They'd burned the towns, they'd smashed the bridges, they'd poisoned the wells. And does this come as a surprise to Charles, or do you think he'd been expecting this?
I think you've been expecting a bit of it, but the sheer scale of it, the ruthlessness of it is terrifying to the Swedes. Of course, the Swedes are a long way from Sweden. I mean, their supply lines are very stretched. And I think they are probably taken aback a bit by just the absolute single-mindedness of it. But of course, most people think that the Swedes are going to win.
Even in Moscow, most people think the Swedes are going to win. So we have reports, letters and things from foreign diplomats in Moscow, an Austrian envoy. No one spoke of anything except for flight or death.
The foreigners, not just to Moscow, but of all the neighboring towns, applied to their ministers for protection as they feared not only the harshness and rapacity of the Swedes, but also a general rising and massacre in Moscow where people are already embittered by the immeasurable increase of the taxes. So they have a couple of previews of some of the issues. in this series.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did Charles XII face during his invasion of Russia?
Poland, very flat country. The Swedes will probably smash us. We must withdraw east and they head back to what's now Belarus. And while they're doing that, his great friend, Alexander Menshikov, who's commanding his dragoons. So he's the guy who's very avaricious, who's risen from the streets. Risen from the streets, exactly. And the guy who introduced him to Catherine, now his wife.
So Menshikov will try to delay the Swedes at the river crossings on the River Vistula and the Niemen. So the kind of the rivers which have already appeared in the rest is history, because we may remember that when we did Hitler's war on Poland, this is where the Poles hoped to withdraw in 1939. Peter is very, very anxious at this point.
If you think of Peter the Great as a man of sort of unflappable, formidable stoicism, that is quite wrong. Peter is very jittery. He's twitching. I mean, he's literally twitching. He's literally twitching. He's facing all sorts of rebellions in the east and the south of Russia. He spends weeks in bed with fever. He seems depressed.
What's worse for him, his greyhound has died and he has to send his greyhound, who's called Lizetka, back to Moscow and he orders that she be stuffed for him.
I mean, that's something he's very into, isn't it, that he's picked up in Amsterdam, is watching how corpses can be either stuffed or preserved in the equivalent of formaldehyde. Exactly.
And I think he had he not bought a swordfish and some other creature in London, a crocodile, I think. Yeah. So he's very into all this. And it probably is no coincidence that it's at this point, November 1707, that he marries that mistress that Menshikov had introduced him to, Catherine, because he's clearly feeling emotionally very fraught and he's very dependent on her at this point.
So he goes back to Moscow for Christmas. And then on the 8th of January, 1708, he leaves to rejoin the army in the West. And he's on his way when he receives one of multiple bombshell messages that will be occurring during this episode. The Swedes are advancing much more quickly than anybody anticipated. This is the Swedes' great trademark. They're incredibly aggressive and decisive and swift.
They've already crossed the River Vistula and they are heading towards the eastern border of Poland. So a blitzkrieg. It is a bit of a blitzkrieg. So what has actually happened? Menshikov was meant to try and stop them on the Vistula near Warsaw.
What had happened is they had completely skirted the Polish capital, they had crossed the Vistula further north, and now they are heading through eastern Poland towards the Missourian Lakes and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Now, We're in the winter, 1707, 1708. So why is he invading in winter?
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Chapter 3: How did Peter the Great's scorched earth tactics affect the Swedish army?
So that is, I mean, again, it's very Operation Barbarossa. It's very Operation Barbarossa. Did you know that just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Swedes sent Hitler a statue of Charles XII to mark his birthday?
I did not know that. That's an amazing fact. Why did he not learn the appropriate lesson? I don't know. Lessons of history. Yeah. The lessons of history. We always love a lesson of history, don't we? Well, actually, we always say there aren't any lessons of history. I think in this case, we can say that they don't invade Russia in the winter.
It would be definitely a lesson.
All right. So we're in January, the end of January 1708. It may have been so fast, they've already reached the eastern frontier of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. And this is the town of Hrodno, or Hrodna, as it's called now, on the River Neman, which is now in Belarus. Charles' scouts go ahead and they say, there are Russian troops moving into the town.
We must seize the main bridge over the Neman first. And Charles says, great, I'll do it. Because remember from last time, he is, you could say, cocky, hubristic, but also possessed with a sense of, you know, God has chosen him. God has already decided when he'll die. So there's no point in him trying to avoid it. And he's a great one rather than sort of Nelsonian spirit. of leading by example.
I put myself in the thick of the action and my men will follow. With about 700 Swedish cavalry, he advances on this bridge and he finds the Russian cavalry already there, three times more Russians than there are Swedes. Is that going to put him off? No, of course not. He's the king of Sweden. It's a really Hollywood scene. He leads his horsemen down. The river is frozen.
They cross the frozen river. Some of the other Swedes storm onto the bridge. The Russians are stunned. They didn't expect this. Charles is slashing with his sword, firing off shots with his pistol. The Russians completely panic and start to fall back. There are loads more Russians inside the town. But they panic. Oh, my God, the Swedes are coming. And they evacuate too.
And so presumably this is confirming Charles in his sense that the Russians are hopeless. Of course, the Russians are useless. Here's the thing.
One of those Russians who runs away is Peter the Great. Wow. He was in the town. And so Charles was actually within, I don't know, a few hundred yards possibly or a mile or whatever of capturing Peter. Weirdly, like 700 Swedes and thousands and thousands of terrified Russians. I mean, this is just how this war is working.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the Battle of Lesnaya in the Great Northern War?
Our old friend Stanislaw Fleszczynski, famous for his very easily pronounceable name. I could honestly hear you say that all day. Love it. Say it again. Stanislaw Fleszczynski. That's a strange fetish that you have, Tom, but I applaud it. So Peter is doing exactly as you would expect him to.
He tells his men what he calls a belt of total destruction, 100 miles wide, along all routes heading north, south, or east from the Swedish camp. Every village must be burned. Every single scrap of food or fodder removed. I want the land to be a desert for the Swedes. He is assailed by the same doubts as everybody else. Peter comes down with a terrible fever in the early months of 1708.
He has to miss the Easter services because he's so ill. And he says to his friends, you know, I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. I'm so anxious. All of this. So the summer comes, and now on the 9th of June, Charles orders his men to continue the march. Now, his main force is about 35,000 men, which you might say is not that big.
But if you heard the last episode, listeners will remember that there was a second Swedish force going to come down from Riga. Yeah, up in the north, right? Exactly, which has got a massive supply chain from Sweden. So they have thought about this. And this is under a guy called Count Löwenhaupt. And these two armies are going to rendezvous before the advance on Moscow.
Now, Peter has many more men, more than 100,000, but they're really spread out across the front. And everybody knows the Swedes have a track record of beating armies much larger than themselves. You know, the odds are you could say more or less even. So Charles sets out at the beginning of June. His men cross the river Berezina, and they are now heading towards Smolensk, very western Russia.
And then they turn south. It's pouring with rain. They are trudging through a sea of mud, and of course they don't have much food. They're still waiting to meet up with the second army. And at the end of the month... they meet a Russian army at a place called Holovchin, which is now in Belarus.
You're just hitting it out of the park.
I'm just doing it for the name.
Because there are yet more. W, C, Z, Y. I mean, honestly, so impressive, Dominic.
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Chapter 5: Why did Charles XII change his strategy and march toward Ukraine?
No, I don't think he's voluble and doing excessive gesturing or anything like that. I think quite the opposite, actually. I think he's very reserved. And Löwenhaupt is the kind of man who will follow his orders to the absolute letter, you know, in the face of the most overwhelming danger. But he's not great at thinking for himself and using his own initiative. Now, he had set off from Riga late.
It had taken him ages to get these 2,000 wagons of supplies together. He's got about 12,000 men and he's made very, very slow progress through Latvia and Lithuania. Again, the problem is the weather. It's pouring with rain.
The terrain is so wet and muddy that these wagons are always getting stuck, and his men are having to effectively build makeshift roads of timber for the wagons to roll over them as they go through these marshes and whatnot. Charles waits and waits for Löwenhaupt in Mogilev. He waits for a month. Then he waits for another month.
It's now in the middle of August and there was still no sign of this Baltic relief column. His men are getting very restless and their horses have run out of fodder, out of food. So now he thinks, okay, I won't wait any longer. I'm just going to press on and this guy can catch up with me later. So he crosses the Dnieper and by the 11th of September, he is just 50 miles outside Smolensk. But...
They really don't have any food at this point. And the mercenaries he has hired from Germany are very, very unhappy. You know, we've signed up for this. We thought this was going to be a great campaign and we're just incredibly hungry. Everywhere they look, there's a huge pool of black smoke over the fields. The fields are burning. So thick it was said that it blotted out the sun.
And at night, in the darkness, they can see the red glow of the countryside burning all the way to Slemence because, of course, Peter's men have set it alight. So now Charles faces a fateful decision. He could go back to the river, to the Dnieper, to the rendezvous point and wait for Löwenhaupt. Or change direction.
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Chapter 6: Who were the Ukrainian Cossacks and why was Ivan Mazepa's defection important?
Instead of continuing towards Slomensk and then Moscow, he could turn south towards a Russian province called Severia, which is on the border of modern-day Ukraine. Now, why would he do that? The answer, because the fields there haven't been burned. So they could rest in this area, they could get the food they need, and then perhaps they could turn back towards the road to Moscow.
And Charles is a gambler. He hates going back. He hates retreating. So it's pretty obvious which he's going to pick. He's never going to go back to the river to the rendezvous point. He's going to say to his men, Yeah, why not? Why not head south towards Ukraine? We can find food there. And we're kind of going slightly off piste and off track. And a long way from Sweden.
Chapter 7: What is the historical and cultural background of Ukraine during the Great Northern War?
Yeah, we're going a lot further away from Sweden. But we're only kind of going the wrong way so that we can go the right way later. That's kind of his thinking. So it is. On the 15th of September, he says to his men, we break camp, we head south towards Ukraine. This, by the way, will be the single most disastrous decision of his life.
Because three days later, Löwenhaupt does reach the rendezvous point on the Dnieper. And when he gets there, there's no sign of the king. But there are messengers who say to him, the king has changed his plans. He wants you to press on south as quickly as possible. But of course, Löwenhaupt and his guys are totally exhausted. They've been trudging through all this mud for months.
So they start very miserably to head across the river and to head south. And then, to his horror, his scouts report they can see Russian cavalry on the horizon. So the Russians are coming. And what's obviously happened is Peter, who up to this point has never been a great military tactician. You know, he hasn't actually been one of the great commanders of history by any means.
But he has spotted this gap between the two Swedish armies. And he said, let's let Charles go to Ukraine. We'll deal with this Baltic relief column. Let's hoover this up.
He's actually adopting Charles' tactics.
Yeah, I guess so.
You know, target one of your enemies and leave the other, and then... Yes, target the weaker one, deal with that, and then we'll... Exactly. Yeah.
So by the 28th of September, Löwenhaupt has been cornered by Peter near a village called Lesnaya, with his back to the river. The numbers are roughly equal. The Swedes are exhausted, though, after this ridiculous march through all this mud. Peter orders the attack around midday. It lasts all afternoon. It's a horribly kind of attritional, muddy, bloody, miserable encounter.
The Swedes, of course, because they're so good, even though they're exhausted, they equip themselves pretty well. And so as night falls and the snow starts falling, inevitably, the honors are roughly even. And in fact, the snowstorm is so fierce, they can't continue. The Russians fall back a bit. And now Löwenhaupt has a choice to make. And he says to his men, look, we can't stay here.
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Chapter 8: Who was Ivan Mazepa and how did his background influence his role in the war?
These cannons that they have been dragging for hundreds of miles, they lift them out of the wagons and they bury them underground, and then they set fire to the wagons.
This doesn't seem a display of master strategy. No.
Well, no, I suppose it isn't. What else could he do, though? The supply train is really slowing him down. I suppose he could stand and fight for a second day. Yeah. But his men are so tired that he thinks, you know, we're really risking disaster then. Okay, so maybe I'm being harsh on him. You're not, Tom, because actually what then happens is a complete and utter catastrophe.
And the Swedes behave in a very unscandinavian way, I would say. So they've set their own wagons on fire. And in the darkness, some of the soldiers decide they will loot the wagons of their officers. Okay. And they get stuck into their brandy. They're all tanked up on brandy, which goes straight to their heads because they're so tired. Discipline completely falls apart.
Some of the Swedes say, let's just run for it. And they run off into the forest. Some of them even to say, we're doomed. Let's desert to the Russians. And the army begins to fragment. And in the darkness, Cossack horsemen kind of come out of the woods and set upon little kind of groups of the Swedish blokes staggering drunkenly around.
And by dawn, as dawn breaks, Löwenhaupt has just about managed to restore order among his troops. But in the chaos... Of about 12,000 men, he has lost perhaps 6,000 overnight, who've either wandered into the snow, they've drowned, they've been picked off by the Cossacks.
Is this what inspires the Swedes to make alcohol so expensive?
Almost certainly. They learnt their lesson. Almost certainly. I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, they have learnt their lesson. So he's lost everything. He's lost all the clothing, the uniforms, the gunpowder, the muskets, the medicines, the cannons on which Charles was counting. A total and utter catastrophe.
He manages to get the 6,000 men away and they stagger south towards Charles's camp in Severia where they arrive 10 days later and you can imagine Charles's face falling when he sees them. Like, where are all the wagons?
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