The Son Peter The Great Had Beaten To Death

Peter the Great is remembered as the giant — literally, at nearly seven feet tall — who dragged Russia into the modern world. He built St Petersburg from a swamp, created a navy from nothing, crushed the Swedes, and forced a medieval nation to modernise, often at sword-point. But the darkest thing he ever did was to his own family.

His eldest son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexei, was everything Peter was not: timid, deeply pious, drawn to the old traditional Russia his father was trying to tear down. Peter browbeat and despaired of the boy for years. Eventually, terrified of what his father might do to him, Alexei did the unthinkable for a Russian prince: in 1716 he fled the country and placed himself under the protection of a foreign emperor.

THE HORROR Peter was enraged. A runaway heir was a public humiliation and, worse, a ready figurehead for every enemy of his reforms. He sent his most cunning agent to track Alexei down in Naples, carrying a letter written in Peter’s own hand: come home, and you will be pardoned. You may live quietly. You may marry the woman you love.

Alexei believed his father’s written promise. In January 1718, he came home. The promise was worthless.

Peter immediately stripped him of his right to the throne and made the “pardon” conditional on Alexei naming everyone who had helped him. Alexei, breaking under pressure, named them. What followed was a bloodbath. His friends and supporters were publicly broken on the wheel, impaled, and beheaded. His servants had their tongues cut out. His own mother, long ago forced into a convent, was dragged out and put on trial. Peter was dismantling every possible ally his son had — and then he turned on Alexei himself.

The heir to Russia was handed to the torturers. On 19 June 1718, the frail Alexei was lashed twenty‑five times with the knout — a whip reinforced with leather and metal that could strip the flesh from a man’s back and snap his spine. He survived it. On 24 June, they reopened his raw, infected wounds and gave him fifteen strokes more. Under that agony, he confessed to wishing his father dead. A special court of 127 men sentenced the tsar’s own son to death.

THE MODERN RELIC He never reached a scaffold. On 26 June 1718, two days after the sentence, the twenty‑eight‑year‑old Alexei died inside his cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. The official record blandly called it a stroke. Everyone understood that forty strokes of the knout were more than enough to kill even a strong man, let alone a weakened one. To this day, no one knows for certain whether he died directly from the torture, from shock and infection, or was quietly finished off in that cell to spare Peter the public spectacle of executing his own son.

Peter attended to the aftermath and then went on ruling as though nothing had happened. He had destroyed his own heir, and the future of his own dynasty, to protect his life’s work — and within a few years the direct male Romanov line had died out anyway.

The relic is one of the most‑visited places in Russia. The Peter and Paul Fortress still stands on its island in the Neva at the heart of St Petersburg — the very first building of the city Peter founded. Its cathedral holds the tombs of the Romanov tsars, Peter the Great among them. Tourists walk through its courtyards and cells every day. Somewhere inside those same walls, three centuries ago, the greatest tsar in Russian history had his own son whipped with a metal‑tipped scourge until he died.

← Back to the archive