It is appropriate to remark here that Russian women were considered silly, intellectually void, morally irresponsible and potentially evil and promiscuous from childhood on. As wives they could be legally and religiously beaten or divorced by forced entrance into a convent, where they were essentially considered "dead". Any Russian man could thus have two "divorces" but had to keep the third wife. For the men of that time the chief problem was drunkenness and in the lower classes the women joined them in drunken, free-love carousing until all fell asleep in an alcoholic stupor, night after night. Sisters and daughters of the czar were different than other women and could never marry Russians beneath their rank (and there were none other) and their religion prevented marriage with foreigners, considered heretics. They spent their time in prayer, embroidery, gossip and boredom, in what was called the
Almost immediately after the crowning of Peter as czar, his half-sister Sofia Miloslavsky instigated a terrible revolt of the Streltsy, a professional police-army originally formed by Ivan the Terrible and consisting of 22 regiments of 1,000 men each and whose officers had become rich through "moon-lighting" and paying no taxes. Fed by untrue rumors of the poisoning of Fedor and plotting to kill Sophia's brother Ivan, they stormed the Kremlin and in a bloody and terrible massacre dismembered and killed most of the boyars as well as Mateev and finally, after torturing Natayla's brother, demanded the crowning of young Ivan as co-czar, with Sophia serving as regent. In that way she succeeded in ruling Russia for the next 7 years. The impact of all this savage revolt and the murder of many of his family scarred young Peter for life and affected the whole future of Russia, Moscow and the Orthodox religion as well.
Peter was a bright, physically healthy and attractive boy, who started to learn the arts of war from foreigners in the "German" suburb (actually a ghetto), using his boyhood friends and neighboring children in the vicinity of Preobrazhenskoe as soldiers, as each year he had more real implements of war sent out from Moscow. He learned to build and sail western-type boats from Dutchmen in the foreign colony and developed an intense interest in the sea. In the meantime, under Sophia the regent and her prime minister and lover, Vasily Golitsyn, a treaty had been signed with King Sobieski of Poland in which Russia received Kiev in exchange for warring against the Crimean Tatars, vassals of Sobieski's enemy, the Turks. Twice Golitsyn marched south to wipe out those Tatars and twice he came back soundly defeated, although this was never acknowledged in Moscow publicly. The Tatars had previously carried off 20,000 Russian men to slavery in one raid alone in 1662 and by the end of the century Russian slaves manned the oars of galleys in every harbor in the eastern Mediterranean. In Golitsyn's two abortive attacks he lost 80,000 men - dead or taken prisoner - and to aggravate matters the Tatar Khan then raided the Ukraine again, taking 60,000 more prisoners.