The conspiracy was discovered upon the eve of its accomplishment.  Sophia immediately fled with the two tzars and the princes, to the monastery of the Trinity.  This was a palace, a convent and a fortress.  The vast pile, reared of stone, was situated thirty-six miles from Moscow, and was encompassed with deep ditches, and massive ramparts bristling with cannon.  The monks were in possession of the whole country for a space of twelve miles around this almost impregnable citadel.  From this safe retreat Sophia opened communications with the rebel chief.  She succeeded in alluring him to come half way to meet her in conference.  A powerful band of soldiers, placed in ambush, seized him.  He was immediately beheaded, with one of his sons, and thirty-seven strelitzes who had accompanied him.

As soon as the strelitzes in Moscow, numbering many thousands, heard of the assassination of their general and of their comrades, they flew to arms, and in solid battalions, with infantry, artillery and cavalry, marched to the assault of the convent.  The regent rallied her supporters, consisting of the lords who were her partisans, and their vassals, and prepared for a vigorous defense.  Russia seemed now upon the eve of a bloody civil war.  The nobles generally espoused the cause of the tzars under the regency of Sophia.  Their claims seemed those of legitimacy, while the success of the insurrectionary soldiers promised only anarchy.  The rise of the people in defense of the government was so sudden and simultaneous, that the strelitzes were panic-stricken, and soon, in the most abject submission, implored pardon, which was wisely granted them.  Sophia, with the tzars, surrounded by an army, returned in triumph to Moscow.  Tranquillity was thus restored.

Sophia still held the reins of power with a firm grasp.  The imbecility of Ivan and the youth of Peter rendered this usurpation easy.  Very adroitly she sent the most mutinous regiments of the strelitzes on apparently honorable missions to the distant provinces of the Ukraine, Kesan, and Siberia.  Poland, menaced by the Turks, made peace with Russia, and purchased her alliance by the surrender of the vast province of Smolensk and all the conquered territory in the Ukraine.  In the year 1687, Sophia sent the first Russian embassy to France, which was then in the meridian of her splendor, under the reign of Louis XIV.  Voltaire states that France, at that time, was so unacquainted with Russia, that the Academy of Inscriptions celebrated this embassy by a medal, as if it had come from India.[10] The Crimean Tartars, in confederacy with the Turks, kept Russia, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania, and the various provinces of the German empire in perpetual alarm.  Poland and Russia were so humiliated, that for several years they had purchased exemption from these barbaric forays by paying the Tartars an annual tribute amounting to fifty thousand dollars each.  Sophia, anxious to wipe out this disgrace, renewed the effort, which had so often failed, to unite all Europe against the Turks.  Immense armies were raised by Russia and Poland and sent to the Tauride.  For two years a bloody war raged with about equal slaughter upon both sides, while neither party gained any marked advantage.