Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Conscious that the new empress had been isolated from the beginning of Peter’s reign, diplomats soon realised that she was entirely without influence. The disappointed Austrian ambassador, who had hoped to use her to undermine the tsar’s admiration for all things Prussian, assumed that her ‘calm exterior’ must conceal ‘some sort of secret undertakings’. But he had little hope of a plot maturing because, despite her obvious intelligence, Catherine seemed too impetuous to lead a successful conspiracy: ‘she lacks caution and fundamental sense, and her somewhat arrogant and lively nature will prevent her from following a premeditated plan’.49 She, not surprisingly, remembered things differently, telling Poniatowski soon after her accession that the coup had been ‘planned for the last six months’. Yet even if it was true that ‘propositions’ had been made to Catherine from the time of Elizabeth’s death, there was little that she could have done to challenge her husband before Easter.50 For one thing, she was pregnant. For another, the new tsar initially seemed to promise greater things than his detractors had anticipated.

  For all his boorishness, Peter was the first adult male to ascend the Russian throne for more than a century. That in itself was cause for widespread jubilation. Further good news followed in February, when he issued an edict emancipating the nobility from the compulsory state service enforced by Peter the Great. Though this was one of the most significant pieces of legislation in eighteenth-century Russia, it is surprisingly difficult to be sure of its origins. Prince Shcherbatov famously claimed that the tsar had locked Dimitry Volkov, one of Elizabeth’s leading officials, into a palace stateroom with a great dane and told him to come up with something important overnight while he went off to carouse with Princess Kurakina:

  Not knowing the reason for this or what the monarch had in mind, Volkov did not know what to begin writing. But write he must. Being an enterprising man, he remembered the frequent exhortations made by Count Roman Larionovich Vorontsov to the monarch, concerning the freedom of the nobility. Sitting down, he wrote out the manifesto concerning this. In the morning he was released from confinement, and the manifesto was approved by the monarch and promulgated.51

  Though we cannot be sure precisely how the final compromise was negotiated, or how difficult it was to reach it, the manifesto seems actually to have emerged from a spectrum of interests in Peter’s new government, all of which had deeper roots in Elizabeth’s reign. Roman Vorontsov was indeed anxious to secure noble property interests in an expanding land market, but his interests had to be balanced against those of the Shuvalovs, who took a more favourable view of the merchants. In the event, the nobles were denied a monopoly of serf ownership and immunity from corporal punishment (privileges that were ultimately confirmed by Catherine’s own Charter to the Nobility in 1785), but granted the option of serving voluntarily—no great sacrifice for a government which could already rely on a flourishing central bureaucracy and now wanted nobles to return to their provincial estates.52 Whatever the precise balance of forces, the decree seemed to presage a more considered approach to government than the tsar’s earlier behaviour had led people to expect. As Catherine’s first English biographer put it: ‘The grand duke had been inconsistent, impetuous and wild: Peter III now shewed himself equitable, patient, and enlightened.’53

  Easter, however, marked a turning point in the fortunes of both the tsar and his consort. One of Peter’s first acts on his accession had been to inspect Rastrelli’s stone Winter Palace, whose construction had been delayed by the Seven Years’ War. As he and Catherine made another visit on 19 February, workmen laboured day and night to allow them to move in at the end of Lent. With the snow swirling all around, the tsar made a final inspection on Tuesday 2 April, decreeing that everything be made ready for the following Saturday.54 It was a tall order. A vast swathe of land, stretching south towards the Moika and west beyond the Admiralty, was still a building site, home to a small army of craftsmen housed in primitive wooden shacks, and festooned with the debris of an eight-year construction project. The authorities solved their problem in characteristically imaginative fashion by allowing the populace to take whatever they liked: thousands of scavengers swarmed towards the palace, denuding the surrounding area of timber, stones, bricks, tar and all manner of valuable building materials. The site having been miraculously cleared, Peter duly took possession of his new residence on 6 April.55

  No ceremony was shown: the tsar entered the palace incognito and only the firing of the guns announced that he had done so. But it was a different story in the week that followed, as celebration followed celebration. There could hardly have been better cover for the final stages of Catherine’s pregnancy. On Thursday of Easter week she gave birth to a boy—named Aleksey Grigoryevich in acknowledgement of the paternity of Grigory Orlov—who was promptly spirited away. Peter, who may never have known of his wife’s pregnancy (conveniently concealed by the mourning dress she wore throughout his reign), was irritated to discover that she was too ill to attend the banquet in honour of the peace with Prussia held on 29 April, less than three weeks after the birth. While that celebration had to be turned into a men-only affair, the tsar determined to hold another as soon as the ratification papers had been exchanged.56

  Before he learned of Elizabeth’s death, Frederick had begun the New Year nervous of a Russian attack on Berlin and anxious that Europe would self-combust into a general war within six months.57 The accession of a pro-Prussian tsar in St Petersburg offered the unexpected prospect of delivery for his war-torn state. To escape from his ‘moment of great crisis’, the king had been unwilling to oppose Peter’s ambition to recapture Schleswig for Holstein by invading Denmark. ‘There is nothing more pressing for us,’ he had written at the end of January, ‘than to achieve a prompt reconciliation with Russia to pull us back from the edge of the precipice.’ To hinder Peter’s plans was to ‘risk embittering him and spoiling everything right from the start’.58 Paradoxically, it would be the tsar who ultimately suffered most from the apparent encouragement of his Prussian hero. Secure in the knowledge that Frederick would not stand in his way, he launched into rash plans to attack the Danes.

  Catherine and her friends had aspirations of their own. Left alone since February, when her husband had been appointed as ambassador to Constantinople after a public altercation with the tsar, Princess Dashkova had had plenty of time to mull over her plans for a revolution. It was in April that she later claimed to have begun to sound out contacts in the capital—and it is possible that she did, since the Austrian ambassador reported her in mid-May as an ‘intriguer who likes to meddle in affairs’.59 The signs could hardly have been more promising. If only ‘the desire of making improvements’ had not made Peter III ‘imprudently hazard premature reformations’, he might have achieved so much more.60 As it was, most of the political capital his government had gained by emancipating the nobility was dissipated by more impetuous measures that undermined the security of the governing elite. By substituting his Holsteiners for Elizabeth’s trusty Life Guards, and forcing haughty courtiers such as Prince Trubetskoy to parade in front of the Winter Palace at eleven o’clock each morning, Peter ruptured his relationship with the highest civil and military officers. By depriving the Senate of its powers of patronage over lesser government offices and formally forbidding it to declare laws in its own name, he launched ‘something in the nature of a constitutional revolution’. And by determining to confiscate the Church’s lands in a series of edicts beginning on 21 March, he had alienated the clergy and left himself open to the charge of being an alien ruler determined to undermine the foundations of Russian culture.61

  Such changes seemed all the more unnerving against a background of financial crisis. Although Russia’s annual deficit, having peaked at 3.6 million roubles in 1748, had been reduced to something nearer 1.25 million by 1755, the Seven Years’ War had put the treasury under intolerable strain. By the autumn of 1760, no further funds could be found to support a campaign that had already cost some 40
million roubles; a year later Russian troops were owed more than 1.5 million in arrears and deserters were causing havoc with arson and theft. In these circumstances, peace with Prussia was not so much an act of homage to Frederick as a financial necessity.62 Peter’s ministers planned imaginatively for financial reform. But since their measures could only be expected to bear fruit in the medium term (as indeed they did, much to Catherine’s subsequent benefit), the short-term options were limited. Since no Russian bid to borrow on the Amsterdam finance markets had yet succeeded, the tsar had more than 2 million roubles minted.63 But once the Senate learned on 23 May that the deficit stood at 1.1 million, Peter’s plan to attack Denmark could hardly be countenanced. A week later, the ten-man council of war, claiming to speak ‘on behalf of the nation’, unanimously recommended him to reconsider. Even advisers who had initially urged him on were now, as the British ambassador reported, ‘throwing pitchforks into the fire to stop the Emperor from going’.64

  It was at this point, according to his own account, that Nikita Panin began to plan for a bloodless coup. As a former ambassador to Stockholm, the idea of attacking Denmark was particularly abhorrent to him, and everything in Peter’s emerging style of government seemed to echo the arbitrary elements of Elizabeth’s reign that Panin, a confirmed constitutionalist, was anxious to supersede. Expert in the art of political bribery as a result of his time in Sweden, he set out to buy support for Catherine.65 Meanwhile, as if to prove that he remained his own worst enemy, Tsar Peter risked further obloquy by publicly humiliating the empress at the second banquet in honour of the peace with Prussia on 9 June. Having placed himself at some distance from his consort in order to sit opposite the Prussian ambassador, he lost his temper when she failed to rise for the toast to the Imperial family (among whom she had in all innocence included herself). Yelling across the table that she was ‘a fool’, Peter reduced Catherine to floods of tears. This incident understandably caused ‘a great sensation in the city’. After it, as Dashkova recalled, ‘sympathy for the empress grew in proportion to contempt for her husband’.66 Barely a week after the coup that soon followed, Sumarokov highlighted the event in his ode on her accession, in which Catherine’s tears were made to symbolise the consternation of the whole Russian nation.67

  By her own subsequent testimony, it was this public humiliation that persuaded Catherine herself to ‘lend an ear’ to the treasonous plots developing all around her.68 When Peter, who had never been blessed with sensitive political antennae, departed for Oranienbaum on 12 June, she was left in St Petersburg for a further five days, in constant touch with Dashkova, Grigory Orlov and Panin. It was then that their conspiracy began to take shape.

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  ‘If all leaders of conspiracies were to admit how much chance and opportunity had contributed to the success of their various ventures,’ Dashkova later observed, ‘they would have to descend from a very high scaffold.’69 She, however, showed little sign of modesty in a notoriously self-serving account that attributed all the major initiatives of Catherine’s coup to her own zeal and ingenuity. In fact, she knew nothing of her friend’s relationship with Grigory Orlov. He himself apparently took little part in the plotting, fearful that the tsar was having him watched. His brother, Aleksey, was more active in recruiting forty or so of his fellow Guards officers. Though his allegiances remain uncertain, the chief of police, Baron Korf, may also have been at least a tacit supporter. Having once been a firm ally of the tsar, he began to pay more attention to Catherine in June, and his subordinates did nothing to prevent the coup that they were obviously expecting.70

  Having initially determined to arrest Peter when he returned to St Petersburg to depart for the Danish campaign, the plotters were thrown into action earlier than they had expected when careless talk led to the arrest of one of their supporters, Captain Passek. At dawn on the morning of 28 June, Aleksey Orlov woke Catherine at Peterhof, where Peter was expected later that day to prepare for his name day celebrations. According to her own account, they drove at speed towards St Petersburg. Met by Grigory along the way, they made straight for the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards where Catherine was immediately proclaimed empress and sovereign of all the Russias. From there, Kirill Razumovsky took her to the Semënovsky Regiment’s barracks where they were joined by the Preobrazhensky Guards. The Horse Guards soon followed as Catherine made her way to the Kazan Church where she was again proclaimed sovereign by the clergy. It was barely ten in the morning when she reached the Winter Palace, where Paul, brought from the Summer Palace in his nightclothes by Nikita Panin, was displayed from a balcony to the cheering crowds while Archbishop Dimitry (Sechënov) circulated among the soldiers to administer the oath of loyalty.

  By their swift action, the Orlovs had ruthlessly undercut any attempt on Panin’s part to have Catherine rule as regent for her son. Now it remained to secure her throne. Although sentries were posted across the city on 30 June to prevent drunken brawls, there was surprisingly little violence in St Petersburg, where quantities of alcohol released from the taverns made the atmosphere seem festive rather than vengeful among soldiers thankful not to be sent to invade Denmark.71 Instead they attacked the house of the unpopular Prince Georg Ludwig. For Johann Georg Eisen, a Lutheran pastor resident there thanks to the prince’s support for his Enlightened agricultural reforms, it was a deeply unnerving experience. ‘Those were such days,’ wrote Eisen after his return to Estland, ‘that the Last Judgment cannot appear any worse. I got back as if saved from a great fire.’72

  ‘They who plan a conspiracy’, Tooke remarked, ‘have always more zeal, more vigilance and activity, than he against whom it is directed.’73 So it proved in the case of Peter III. For twenty-four hours he remained at Oranienbaum, unaware that he had been overthrown. Only when he found Peterhof deserted on the morning of 29 June did he begin to realise the scale of the disaster. Had the tsar been made of sterner stuff, he might have marched on the capital, as he was urged to do by Field Marshal Münnich, a veteran of Empress Anna’s war against the Turks in 1735–9 and the most distinguished of the exiles he had released from Siberia. But since Peter was no hero, this option was rapidly dismissed. Neither was he a coward, however, so he refused to flee to Mitau. Instead, he determined to sail to Kronstadt. Yet for once caution got the better of him, so that by the time he arrived the fortress had fallen to the rebels. When the tsar identified himself to a sentry at the blockaded entrance to the harbour, he was told that Peter III no longer existed. Having successfully repelled his ‘guest’, Admiral Talyzin wrote anxiously to Panin, asking for reinforcements.74 He need not have worried. Whatever resolve Peter may initially have possessed had gone. As his galley returned to Oranienbaum, he fainted into the arms of Elizabeth Vorontsova.

  Catherine had meanwhile borrowed a Guards uniform, mounted her charger and ridden out with Dashkova to arrest her deposed husband. At the Trinity monastery, on the road to Peterhof, she met the vice chancellor, Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who presented a letter in which Peter offered to negotiate. The missive went without reply as Golitsyn swore allegiance to Catherine. Peter now offered to abdicate in return for safe passage to Holstein with his mistress. After this offer, too, had been refused, he was persuaded to sign an unconditional abdication. At first, he was taken with Vorontsova to Peterhof, where he was arrested after surrendering his sword, and transferred to his country estate, Ropsha. Here he was intended to remain in the custody of Aleksey Orlov, Fëdor Baryatynsky and Peter Passek, until the Schlüsselburg fortress was ready to receive him.

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  After his first restless night at Ropsha, Peter complained of headaches and wrote a pathetic letter to Catherine, asking her to remove the sentries from the neighbouring room since his own was so small and he was too fastidious to relieve himself in the presence of others. ‘[Your Majesty] knows that I always pace about in my room. This will make my legs swell up.’ That day, 30 June, his favourite bed was brought from Oranienbaum to make him more comfortable. Cathe
rine, however, had no intention of granting his request to be taken to Holstein. As she later explained to Poniatowski, ‘he had everything he wanted, except for his freedom’.75 They made an odd couple, the giant, scar-faced Aleksey Orlov, and the shrivelled, sickly emperor. Only copious quantities of alcohol obscured the artificiality of their situation. This was fully revealed on 2 July, when Peter’s health took a turn for the worse. As Orlov reported to Catherine, ‘our ugly freak’ had fallen ‘seriously ill’ with ‘an unexpected colic’. ‘I fear that he might die tonight, but I fear even more that he might live through it. The first fear is caused by the fact that he talks nonsense all the time, which amuses us, and the second fear is that he is really a danger to us all and behaves as though nothing had happened.’76

  The note of menace was unmistakeable. According to the Danish diplomat Andreas Schumacher, the end was swift. After refusing a poisoned cocktail made up by Dr Kruse, Peter was murdered on 3 July, so that he was dead by the time Dr Lüders reached Ropsha, and the only remaining job for a medic was the dissection performed by a second physician.77 The villains of the piece in this version of Peter’s demise are Grigory Teplov and Nikita Panin. Indeed, a prominent Russian historian has recently argued on the basis of Schumacher’s account that Panin ordered the deposed tsar’s murder as a last-ditch attempt to wrest the initiative from Catherine and the Orlovs and to ensure that she ruled as regent for her son.78