Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  There is no evidence that Catherine ever concluded that Peter’s death was necessary to her own political—and perhaps physical—survival. She did agree with her advisers that he must be rendered “harmless.” Catherine was determined to take no risks, and her friends were aware of this determination. She was, on the other hand, too prudent to hint at the desirability of an unnatural death. It is possible, however, that the Orlovs had already guessed her inner thoughts and persuaded themselves that, as long as their mistress was not admitted into their confidence or given foreknowledge of their plans, they might safely rid her of this danger. Certainly, the Orlovs themselves had a strong motive for ending Peter’s life. Gregory Orlov was hoping to marry his imperial mistress, and Peter stood in his way. Even dethroned and imprisoned, Peter still would be, in the eyes of God, Catherine’s lawful husband; nothing but death could sever a marriage bond that had received the blessing of the Orthlodox Church. If, on the other hand, the former emperor were to die, there would be no religious bar to a marriage between Catherine and Gregory. Empress Elizabeth had married Alexis Razumovsky, a Ukranian peasant; he, Gregory, an officer of the Guards, was of a higher class and rank.

  At Ropsha, mental confusion and fear of the unknown plagued Peter’s health. Alternately, he lay prostrate on his bed and rose to pace the small room. On Tuesday, the third day of his captivity, he was stricken by acute diarrhea. On Wednesday evening, he suffered a headache so violent that his Holstein physician, Dr. Luders, was brought from St. Petersburg. On Thursday morning, the former emperor seemed no better, and a second doctor was summoned. Later that day, the two doctors pronounced their patient recovering and, having no desire to share his incarceration, returned to the capital. On Friday, all was quiet. Then, early Saturday morning, Peter’s seventh day at Ropsha, while the prisoner still slept, his French valet, Bresson, who had been allowed to stroll in the park, was abruptly seized, gagged, thrust into a closed carriage, and driven away. Peter was not told and did not know. At two o’clock, Peter was invited to dinner with Alexis Orlov, Lieutenant Bariatinsky, and the other officers of his guard.

  The only eyewitness to describe the subsequent event confessed to the empress herself. At six o’clock on Saturday evening, a rider galloping from Ropsha reached St. Petersburg and Catherine was handed a note from Alexis Orlov. It was written in Russian on a sheet of dirty gray paper. The handwriting was scrawled and almost illegible; its message verged on incoherence. The letter seemed to have been written by a man shaking from drink or frantic with worry. Or both.

  Matushka, Little Mother, most merciful Gosudarina, sovereign lady, how can I explain or describe what happened? You will not believe your faithful servant, but before God I speak the truth, Matushka. I am ready for death, but I myself know not how it came about. We are lost if you do not have mercy on us. Matushka, he is no more. But no one intended it so. How could any of us have ventured to raise our hands against our Gosudar, sovereign lord. But, Gosudarina, it has happened. At dinner, he started quarreling and struggling with Prince Bariatinsky at the table. Before we could separate them, he was dead. We ourselves know not what we did. But we are all equally guilty and deserve to die. Have mercy on me, if only for my brother’s [Gregory’s] sake. I have confessed my guilt and there is nothing further for me to tell. Forgive us or quickly make an end of me. The sun will no longer shine for me and life is not worth living. We have angered you and lost our souls forever.

  What had happened? The circumstances and cause of death, and the intentions and degree of responsibility of those involved, can never be known, but perhaps one can merge what is known and what can be imagined:

  On Saturday, July 6, Alexis Orlov, Prince Theodore Bariatinsky, and others invited the prisoner to join them for midday dinner. It may be that they had spent the week wondering how long they were to be separated from their fortunate comrades celebrating in St. Petersburg while they were assigned to remain watching over this wretched, contemptible man. During the meal, everyone drank heavily. Then, because they had planned it, or because there was quarreling that soared out of control, they fell on Peter and attempted to suffocate him by placing him under a mattress. He struggled and escaped. They pinioned him, wrapped a scarf around his neck, and strangled him.

  Whether Peter’s death was accidental, the result of a drunken scuffle after dinner that got out of control, or a deliberate, premeditated murder will never be known. The frantic, semicoherent tone of Orlov’s scribbled letter, seeming to betray fear of repercussion as well as horror and remorse, suggests that he had not planned to go that far. When he arrived in the capital that night, he was disheveled, bathed in sweat, and covered with dust. “His face,” said someone who happened to see him “wore an expression that was frightful to see.” Orlov’s pleas to Catherine for mercy—“We ourselves know not what we did” and “Forgive us or quickly make an end of me”—suggest that, while admitting that he was present when Peter died, this was not what he had planned.

  In either case, whether the death was unintended or was planned in advance by the officers, Catherine herself would seem to have been innocent. However, she was not blameless. She had placed her husband in the hands of Alexis Orlov, knowing that Alexis was a soldier untroubled by violent death and that he hated Peter. But Orlov’s letter shocked Catherine. Its frantic language and desperate pleas make it almost impossible to believe that Catherine had previous knowledge of any intent to murder and had given her consent. Nor was Alexis Orlov the kind of sophisticated, duplicitous writer who could manage to concoct so frenzied and abject a story. In the mind of Princess Dashkova, Orlov’s letter exonerated Catherine of all suspicion of complicity. When Dashkova visited her friend on the following day, she was greeted by Catherine’s words, “My horror at this death is inexpressible. This blow strikes me to the earth!” The princess, still equating her role in events with that of the empress, could not refrain from saying, “It is a death too sudden, Madame, for your glory and for mine.”

  Whatever happened, Catherine had to deal with the aftermath. Her husband, the former emperor, was dead in the custody of her friends and supporters. Would she arrest Alexis Orlov and the other officers at Ropsha? If she did so, how would Gregory, the father of her three-month-old child, react? How would the Guards react? How would the Senate, St. Petersburg, and the Russian people react? Her decision, made, perhaps, on Panin’s recommendation, was to treat the death as a medical tragedy. To deal with the widespread knowledge that the officers guarding her husband were known to have hated him, she ordered a postmortem examination. She had the body dissected by doctors who could be trusted to clear Orlov. The doctors opened the body, and, as they were told to do, looked only for evidence of poisoning. Reporting that there was no such evidence, they declared that Peter had died of natural causes, probably an acute hemorrhoidal attack—a “colic”—which had affected his brain and brought on an apoplectic stroke. Catherine then issued a proclamation, composed with Panin’s assistance:

  On the seventh day of our reign we received the news to our great sorrow and affliction that it was God’s will to end the life of the former emperor Peter III by a severe attack of hemorrhoidal colic. We have ordered his mortal remains to be taken to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. We ask all our faithful subjects to bid farewell to his earthly remains without rancor and to offer up prayers for the salvation of his soul.

  Panin also advised that the body be exhibited in as nearly normal a fashion as could be managed; he believed it wiser to display a dead Peter than to risk fostering the belief that he was still alive, hidden away somewhere, and might reappear. The former emperor’s body, lying in state in St. Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery, had been forced into the blue uniform of a Holstein cavalry officer, apparel that Peter had delighted in wearing when he was alive but which, on this occasion, was intended to draw attention to his foreign origins and preferences. On his chest, he wore no medal or ribbon. A three-cornered hat, a size too large, covered his forehead, but the part of his
face remaining uncovered and visible was black and swollen. A long, wide cravat was wound around his neck up to his chin around what—had the dead man been throttled—must have been a bruised and discolored throat. His hands, which it was the custom of the Orthodox Church to leave bare and holding a cross, were encased in heavy leather riding gloves.

  The body was placed on a bier with candles at the head and feet. The line of viewers, kept moving quickly by soldiers, saw no Catherine kneeling and praying over her husband as she had done for Empress Elizabeth. Her absence, it was explained, was a result of an appeal from the Senate that she not attend, “so that Her Imperial Majesty might spare her health out of love for the Russian Fatherland.” The site of Peter’s interment was also unusual. Although he was the grandson of Peter the Great, the dead Peter III had not been crowned, and therefore could not lie in the fortress cathedral with the remains of consecrated tsars and empresses. On July 23, Peter’s remains were placed in the Nevsky Monastery alongside the body of Regent Anna Leopoldovna, mother of the deposed and imprisoned Ivan VI. Here Peter was to lie throughout his wife’s thirty-four-year reign.

  Catherine’s explanation of this sequence of events was conveyed in a letter to Stanislaus Poniatowski, written two weeks after her husband’s death:

  Peter III had lost the few wits he had. He wanted to change his religion, break up the Guards, marry Elizabeth Vorontsova, and shut me up. On the day of celebrating the peace with Prussia, after publicly insulting me at dinner, he ordered my arrest the same evening. The order was retracted, but from that time I listened to proposals [that she replace Peter on the throne] that had been made to me since the death of Empress Elizabeth. We could count on many captains of the Guards. The secret was in the hands of the Orlov brothers. They are an extremely determined family and much loved by the common soldiers. I am under great obligation to them.

  I sent the deposed emperor to a remote and very agreeable spot called Ropsha, under the command of Alexis Orlov with four officers and a detachment of picked, good-natured men, while decent and convenient rooms were being prepared for him at Schlüsselburg. But God disposed otherwise. Fear had caused a diarrhea which lasted three days and ended on the fourth when he drank excessively.… A hemorrhoidal colic seized him and affected his brain. For two days he was delirious and then delirium was followed by extreme exhaustion. Despite all the help the doctors could give him, he died while demanding a Lutheran priest. I feared that the officers might have poisoned him so I had him opened up, but not the slightest trace of poison was found. The stomach was quite healthy, but the lower bowels were greatly inflamed and a stroke of apoplexy carried him off. His heart was extraordinarily small and quite decayed.

  So at last God has brought everything to pass according to His designs. The whole thing is rather a miracle than a pre-arranged plan, for so many lucky circumstances could not have coincided unless God’s hand had been over it all. Hatred of foreigners was the chief factor in the whole affair and Peter III passed for a foreigner.

  Most of Europe held Catherine responsible. Journals and newspapers across the continent wrote of a return to the days of Ivan the Terrible. Many were cynical about the officially proclaimed explanation that the emperor had died of “colic.” “Everyone knows the nature of colic,” quipped Frederick of Prussia. “When a heavy drinker dies from colic, it teaches us to be sober,” deadpanned Voltaire. Frederick nevertheless believed that Catherine herself was innocent. In his memoirs, he wrote:

  The empress was quite ignorant of this crime and learned of it with an indignation and despair which was not feigned. She correctly foresaw the judgment which all the world now passes on her. An inexperienced young woman, on the point of being divorced and shut up in a convent, she had committed her cause to the Orlov brothers. And, even so, she had known nothing of the intention to murder the emperor. Left to herself, she would have kept Peter alive, partly because she thought that once she was crowned, all would be well, and that so cowardly an enemy as her husband would not be dangerous. The Orlovs, more audacious and clear-sighted, foreseeing that the ex-emperor might be turned into a rallying point against them, had been made of sterner stuff and had put out him of the way. She has reaped the fruits of their crime and has been obliged, in order to secure their support, not only to spare, but even to retain about her person, the authors of that crime.

  Catherine, however much she might pretend to ignore foreign comment and gossip, was never at ease about Europe’s reaction to her husband’s death. Years later, in conversation with the French Enlightenment figure and Encyclopedist Denis Diderot, her guest in St. Petersburg, she asked, “What do they say in Paris of the death of my husband?” Diderot was too embarrassed to answer. To relieve his discomfort, she turned the conversation in another direction.

  There was another interested party in the matter of Catherine’s possible involvement, who, years later, after reading Alexis Orlov’s letter, exonerated the empress of guilt in the death of Peter III. Having received and read Orlov’s letter, Catherine locked it away in a drawer. For the rest of her life, she kept the letter hidden. After her death, her son, Emperor Paul, was told that the letter had been discovered and that the handwriting had been identified as that of Alexis Orlov. Paul read the letter. It convinced him that his mother was innocent.

  None of the participants was ever punished. Although, by proceeding against them, she could have established or at least powerfully reinforced her own innocence, Catherine could hardly have punished them. It was to Alexis Orlov and his brothers that she owed her throne. It was Alexis who had come to awaken her at dawn at Mon Plaisir and bring her to St. Petersburg. He and his brothers had risked their lives for her; in return, she was obligated to protect them. She therefore declared that Peter had died of natural causes. Some in Russia believed her; some did not; many did not care.

  It was a death she had not planned, but it suited her purpose. She was free of her husband, but had acquired another burden: the shadow over her character and over Russia remained for the rest of her life. This was not the first time in history—nor would it be the last—that this kind of mixed blessing has befallen the ruler of a nation. Henry II of England appointed his former friend and protégé Thomas à Becket, to be archbishop of Canterbury. When, later, Becket confronted and opposed the king on many issues regarding the church, Henry believed himself betrayed. “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” he burst out in a moment of frustration. Whereupon four of his household knights spurred their horses to Canterbury and murdered the archbishop in front of his cathedral altar. In penance for this act that he did not specifically intend, Henry walked barefoot down miles of dusty roads to the cathedral, where he kneeled before the altar and asked forgiveness. Catherine, less secure on her throne, could not risk a similar gesture.

  The dream of the child in Stettin who wanted to be a queen, and the ambition of the grand duchess who knew that she was better suited than her husband to rule, were achieved. Catherine was thirty-three. Half of her life lay ahead of her.

  * * *

  *George Lewis was Catherine’s mother’s younger brother, and Peter’s second cousin. This was the young man who had believed himself in love with Catherine—then Sophia, a girl of fourteen.

  45

  Coronation

  SHE SAT ON THE THRONE of Peter the Great and ruled an empire, the largest on earth. Her signature, inscribed on a decree, was law and, if she chose, could mean life or death for any one of her twenty million subjects. She was intelligent, well read, and a shrewd judge of character. During the coup, she had shown determination and courage; once on the throne, she displayed an open mind, willingness to forgive, and a political morality founded on rationality and practical efficiency. She softened imperial presence with a sense of humor and a quick tongue; indeed, with Catherine more than any other monarch of her day, there was always a wide latitude for humor. There was also a line not be crossed, even by close friends.

  She had come to the throne with t
he support of the army, the church, most of the nobility, and the people of St. Petersburg, all of whom assisted her because her personality and character offered stark contrasts to the domineering ineptitude of her husband. The coup itself created few enemies, and in the first weeks of her reign, she faced no opposition. Nevertheless, a multitude of problems awaited her. She had not reached the throne in a traditional Russian way. Most earlier tsars had succeeded by hereditary right and had been accepted and treated as representatives of the divinity. But the last tsar who ruled in this godlike manner was Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, the father of Peter the Great, and Alexis died in 1676. Peter, as part of his effort to Westernize Russia, had transformed this image, creating for the autocrat a new, secular role as “first servant of the state.” Peter had also altered the right of succession, decreeing that the throne would no longer pass down a fixed hereditary male line but that each sovereign would be free to name his successor. Even by these new rules, however, Catherine failed to qualify. Neither Empress Elizabeth, who had brought her to Russia, nor Peter III, who succeeded Elizabeth, had named her heir to the Russian throne. If the old laws of hereditary succession had been observed, Peter III’s heir would have been Catherine’s seven-year-old son, Paul. Or, as some Russians continued to whisper, the real tsar was the imprisoned Ivan VI, removed from the throne as an infant and locked in a cell for most of his life. Catherine had come to power supported by no right or precedent; she was, in the baldest definition, a usurper. For the first decade of her reign, this cloud hung over her, leaving her vulnerable to challenge, conspiracy, and, finally, to rebellion. In the first summer of her reign, this turmoil lay in the future, but Catherine was aware that it might come. She began her reign, therefore, with the traditional rules reversed. Earlier sovereigns, choosing to favor a subject, could do this by delivering a flow of privileges. Catherine was in the opposite position; it was she who was the supplicant for favor. Writing to Stanislaus Poniatowski, she said wryly, “The least soldier of the guards, when he sees me, thinks that ‘this is the work of his own hands.’ I am compelled to do a thousand strange things. If I yield, they will adore me; if not, then I do not know what will happen.”