Alexander Menshikov

Alexander Menshikov rose from selling pies in a Moscow street, by the story he never denied, to being the richest man in Russia and the ruler of it for a few months. He attached himself to Peter the Great as a young man, travelled with him to the shipyards of Holland and England in the Great Embassy, and became the one person the tsar trusted without reserve. He was a genuinely good soldier as well as a favourite. He took Noteborg in 1702, and at Poltava on 27 June 1709 he commanded the Russian cavalry, broke the Swedish right in the opening fighting around the redoubts, and then rode down the remnant of Charles XII's army at Perevolochna three days later, taking some 16,000 prisoners without a fight. He was made a prince of the Holy Roman Empire and the first governor of the new city of St Petersburg, which he built and from which he stole on a scale that astonished even a court accustomed to it. Peter beat him personally more than once for embezzlement and never removed him, on the grounds that he was worth more than he cost. After Peter's death in 1725 Menshikov put the emperor's widow on the throne as Catherine I and governed through her, and after her death he betrothed his daughter to the boy emperor Peter II and came within weeks of founding a dynasty. The old nobility broke him in 1727. He was stripped of every title and estate and exiled to Berezov in Siberia, where he built a wooden church with his own hands and died two years later. His daughter died there before him.

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