ABSTRACT
The heedless energy, the driving urge to immediate action, which had marked Peter’s life also contributed to his death. Early in November 1724, en route by river from St Petersburg to the ironworks at Systerbeck, he saw a boat full of soldiers and sailors driven aground by the weather. Leaping into the water, he worked throughout the night, helping to save the lives of twenty men. This episode brought on a severe attack of fever; and new attacks of strangury and the stone, from which he had long suffered, soon added to the pain. Though he was only in his fifty-third year his health had for long been uncertain. Almost to the end he lived as he had in youth, indulging in bouts of heavy drinking with his cronies, incessantly encouraging and superintending new enterprises of all kinds. The good progress which had been made with the Ladoga canal, designed to connect St Petersburg with its hinterland, greatly pleased him when he inspected it in October; and as late as 27 January 1725 he proposed to travel to Riga in connection with the marriage of his daughter Anna to Charles Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp. By then, however, it was clear that he was seriously ill. By the beginning of February he was in intense pain; early in the morning of the 8th he died in St Petersburg. On 19 March the corpse was transferred with great ceremony to the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, where it was finally buried in 1731. Nothing in the tsar’s life was more fitting than this burial, not in the Moscow which for most of his life he had disliked and rejected but in the new capital, the visible symbol of the new Russia.
