Vashka

Peter I of Russia, often called Peter the Great, reigned from 1682 until his death on 8 February 1725 and spent his last decade administering reforms from his new capital at Saint Petersburg, founded in 1703. The imperial decree of 1724, preserved in copies among the Senate records (Senatskie ukazy) of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA) in Moscow, instructed palace administrators across the major imperial estates to maintain working cats in granaries and storehouses to control rodent damage to grain and other supplies. The decree is often cited as the founding instrument of the Hermitage cat tradition, although the formal Hermitage establishment dates only to a 1745 expansion under Peter's daughter Empress Elizabeth. Vashka, the diminutive form of the Russian male name Vasily, appears in court records from the final year of Peter's reign as the tsar's personal cat, kept at the Winter Palace then under construction and at his earlier wooden residence on Petrovskaya Embankment. The cat is described in the records as a short-haired tabby, said to have travelled with Peter between Saint Petersburg and Moscow on the long carriage journeys the tsar continued to make into his final illness. The principal nineteenth-century source on Vashka is Nikolai Kostomarov's Russian History in the Lives of its Chief Figures (Russkaya istoriya v zhizneopisaniyakh eyo glavnyeyshikh deyateley), published in seven volumes between 1873 and 1888, which reproduces the relevant court entries. Modern Petrine scholar Lindsey Hughes drew on the same archival material for her 1998 study Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (Yale University Press), which mentions Vashka briefly in the context of the broader 1724 rodent-control programme rather than as a documented personal anecdote. The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg currently maintains a population of around sixty working cats under a permanent heritage programme that traces itself back to Peter's 1724 instruction; the cats live in the basements and have their own foundation funded partly through public donations.