On this date in 1718, Tsar Peter the Great had his brother-in-law beheaded.

The brother of Peter’s discarded first wife Eudoxia Lopukina, our man Avram Fedorovich Lopukhin (Russian link) had neatly installed himself as a grey eminence of the rebellious Tsarevich Alexei.

It was to this youth Alexei that Old Russia turned its hopes while Peter westernized and modernized the empire. Someday Peter would die, and Alexei would inherit, and the clawback would begin.

Lopukhin foresaw a place of power for himself in Alexei’s Russia. He was an old guard boyar prince, formerly an influential courtier, and he had the blood and the ear of the tsarevich.

That also meant he would share the fate of the tsarevich.

What a disaster for Lopukhin when the truculent Alexei made bold enough to outright break with his father by fleeing Russia — but what was even worse was when Alexei returned.

Investigating the matter as a treason, the famously pitiless Peter did not spare his own child from torture and death; still less would he pardon the others in Alexei’s circle whom his inquisitions revealed to be scheming to overturn Peter’s life’s work, if not his very life.

Seditious correspondence and torture-adduced accusations implicated Lopukhin as just such a figure, and he was tossed into the dungeons of Peter and Paul Fortress to face interrogations, knouting, and execution.

Made to confess to desiring the death of the sovereign, Lopukhin had his head publicly removed on December 8. It was mounted afterwards on a pike overlooking a public market, and his body exposed on a wheel, until the tsar suffered his kinsman’s remains to be interred in the Lopukhin family crypt the following March.

On this day..

• 1452: Antonio Rizzo, cannonaded
• 1905: Mary Rogers, chloroformer
• 1915: Cordella Stevenson lynched
• 1746: Charles Radclyffe, twice Jacobite rebel
• 1975: Isobel Lobato, wife of East Timor's Prime Minister
• 1934: John and Betty Stam, China missionaries
• 1922: Four anti-Treaty Irish Republicans
• Hand of Glory: 1,500 days and counting
• 2009: Yang Yanming, hedge fund manager
• 1828: Joseph Hunton, forger
• Themed Set: Reputation
• 1982: Suriname's "December murders"
• 1793: Madame du Barry, who hated to go
• 1596: Francisca Nunez de Carvajal, her children, and four other crypto-Jews of her family