Peter The Great: Autocrat And Reformer

by W. Simmons, Michael

  The Death of Peter the Great

  Apart from the reformation of his government, the last few year of Peter’s life were preoccupied by two principle questions: settling the succession, and arranging marriages for his young teenage daughters, Elizaveta and Anna. Negotiations with the French for Elizaveta’s hand had failed, but she was the younger daughter; there would be time to dispose of her later. In the mean time, he began considering the suit of Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and nephew of Charles XII. Charles Frederick had arrived in Russia in 1721, three years after the death of Charles XII, hoping to persuade Peter to support his claim to the Swedish throne. Peter, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Swedish government, was unwilling to become involved, but he made the young duke feel at home. Charles Frederick enjoyed great popularity in St. Petersburg. There were a number of Swedish officers who had become permanent exiles in Russia after the war, because they had married Russian wives, whom they were forbidden to bring home to Sweden. These young officers and their families gravitated to the Duke of Holstein, who became the glittering center of their social circle. After a few years, Charles Frederick renounced his claim on the Swedish throne, and was rewarded by Charles XII’s successor with the title of Royal Highness and a pension. He was now eligible for marriage to the daughter of the Russian tsar, and the match with Anna was approved. Peter lived to see Anna’s betrothal celebrations, but not her marriage, which took place a few weeks after his death.

  When it came to the succession, Peter had limited options. With the death of his son Alexei in 1718, and the death of Petrushka in 1719, Peter himself represented the end of the male-descended Romanov line. He had once told Alexei that he would leave the throne of Russia to some worthy and well-qualified stranger rather than leave it to an unworthy member of his family. But the worthy person to whom his thoughts turned now was not a stranger; she was his wife. Catherine was not only the person closest to him, she was as much his equal as a Russian wife in the 18th century could be the equal of her husband. When Peter went to war with the sultan of the Ottoman empire, Catherine stood by his side on the front lines of the battle, demonstrating to the soldiers and the tsar alike that she was willing to share their danger. Her courage had not gone unnoticed by the Guards regiments, who adored her. Most importantly, Peter knew that she understood what he had been trying to achieve with his great reforms. Catherine’s talents were not the same as his; she was unlikely to contribute much to the continuation of that work. But, crucially, Peter trusted her not to undermine it.

  In February of 1722, Peter issued an ukase, or decree, stating that male primogeniture was a dangerous practice, unfounded in Scripture, that encouraged “the sin of Absalom”, i.e. rebellion of a son and heir against his king and father. No one had to wonder who Peter was thinking of when he referenced the Biblical story of King David’s rebellious son, who had hanged himself to evade his father’s retribution. From now on—or at least, until his great-grandson Paul I overturned his edict some sixty years later—every tsar would be free to name whomsoever he wished as his successor.

  This decree, like so many of Peter’s decrees, came as a profound shock to traditional Muscovites. But in November of 1723, he shocked them even further. Peter had been declared emperor after the Treaty of Nystad brought a formal end to the war with Sweden in August of 1721. The Russian Senate had rewarded Peter for this victory by declaring him, “Peter the Great, Emperor of All Russia”. At the same time, Catherine had received the conjugal title of empress, but now Peter determined to make the title more than a courtesy. Catherine would be, not only his wife, but his co-sovereign. Just as his hero, William of Orange, had ruled England with his wife Queen Mary, Peter would rule Russia with his wife, Empress Catherine.

  The formal decree read:

  “[Whereas] our best beloved Spouse, Consort and Empress Catherine has been a great support to us, and not only in this, but also in many military operations, putting aside womanly weakness, of her own will she has been present with us and has helped in every way possible… for these labors of our Spouse we have decided that by virtue of the supreme power given to us by God, she shall be crowned, which, God willing, is to take place formally in Moscow in the present winter.”

  The ukase made no mention of the succession, but Peter made a point of letting it be quietly known amongst high churchmen and members of the Senate that he was crowning Catherine as his co-ruler so that she would be in position to step smoothly into his place when he died. This was a stunning act: no tsarina had ever shared the burden of the monarchy with her husband, and no woman had ever ruled Russia in her own right. William and Mary had established a European precedent, but Mary was the daughter of King James II; Catherine was a Lithuanian peasant girl, a former servant and prisoner of war who had been Peter’s mistress, and possibly the mistress of Menshikov. Her father’s name was not even known.

  From a historical point of view, however, Peter’s decision is in keeping with his lifelong custom of promoting and elevating people based on merit, rather than birth and precedence. If he could overlook Menshikov’s low birth to make him the second most powerful man in Russia, it is hardly surprising that he could overlook Catherine’s sex to make her Empress. Besides, Peter had seen first hand that a woman could rule Russia. Though he feared and mistrusted his sister Sophia, he had never accused her of being anything less than supremely intelligent and capable.

  In 1722, Peter began to experience the first symptoms of strangury, the illness that would eventually claim his life. Blockages were forming in his urethra which prevented him from expressing urine from his bladder. Off and on for the next three years, it would cause him to suffer bouts of extreme pain, fever, bloating, and other signs of infection. Then it would pass, and he would be well again. On his doctors’ recommendation, Peter altered his lifestyle, drinking a great less than he had in his youth, and “taking the waters” at mineral spas in Germany and Russia, which in the eighteenth century was a commonly prescribed remedy for all manner of complaints. The list of foods which his doctors forbade him to eat during his illnesses included raw fruit, cucumber, lemons with salt, and Limburger cheese. He did not always abide strictly by this prescription—he is recorded as having eaten four pounds of cherries and figs during one of his bouts of illness—but a modern doctor would probably admit that it made little difference.

  In 1724, Peter’s suffering was so extreme that doctors were forced to insert a catheter in his urethra, a gruesome medical procedure when undergone without anesthesia. A doctor stood on either side of him, gripping his hands as the catheter forced an opening for the removal of a huge stone. Peter neither screamed nor cried, but he nearly broke the hands of the doctors. The procedure provided him with relief for about half a year. Then, shortly after the New Year in January of 1725, he came down with a high fever and became so delirious that he was forced to take to his bed. An examination by half a dozen panicked doctors revealed an infection so far advanced that gangrene had formed in his bladder. Frantically, they consulted with every European medical expert available in St. Petersburg and all that could be reached by special courier. But there was nothing to be done.

  For about three weeks, he was well enough to conduct business from his bed. Then, on January 23, he became so ill that he called for Last Rites to be administered. As an act of deathbed clemency, he ordered the release of every prison being held by the state for any charge less severe than murder, and granted amnesty to young noblemen who had been arrested for attempting to evade their mandatory government service. Calling his foreign minister to his bedside, he made him swear to safeguard the foreigners who had come to live in Russia at his urging. Then, on the 26th, he began to suffer convulsions. All the ministers in his service were called to the palace to await the end. Painfully aware that he was on the verge of being called to answer to God for all that he had done in a long career that included prosecuting wars and torturing prisoners, he asked for Last Rites to be adminis
tered again. “I hope God will forgive me my many sins because of the good I have tried to do for my people,” he murmured after.

  Empress Catherine remained next to Peter’s bedside throughout, holding his hand and soothing him as best she could as he lay wracked by intense pain and delirium. By then, he was incapable of speech. But he was still conscious, and the succession seems to have been weighing on his mind. Thee day before he died, he asked for pen and paper to be brought to him, on which scrawled the words, “Give all to...” Then his hand fell from the paper, lacking strength to continue writing. He then asked for his daughter, Anna, presumably so she could write while he dictated, though some historians have speculated that he may have intended to name her as his successor. But by the time she arrived, he was too delirious to speak. Shortly afterwards, he fell into a coma, from which he never awakened.

  One historian describes Peter the Great’s final moments thus:

  “At last, at six o’clock in the morning of January 28, 1725, just as [Catherine] was pleading, ‘O Lord, I pray Thee, open Thy paradise to receive unto Thyself this great soul,’ Peter the Great, in the fifty-third year of his life and the forty-third year of his reign, entered eternity.”

  The legacy of Peter the Great

  Catherine was acclaimed empress shortly after Peter’s death; no one protested the decision. Menshikov, and a number of other ministers who, like him, had been appointed by Peter to high office despite their low birth, were keenly aware that if the succession went to anyone else, they would shortly be out of power. It was Menshikov who summoned Peter’s Imperial Guards to the palace and reminded him that they had seen Catherine suffer danger and hardship alongside them during the war against the sultan. Like the Streltsy of old, the Guards were now the ultimate arbiters of imperial successions. They immediately declared for Catherine, crying, “Our father is dead, but our mother still lives.” No one dared oppose them.

  Peter’s body lay in state so that the public could pay their respects for over a month. In early March, it was taken to the unfinished Peter and Paul Cathedral; it was not interred until construction was completed in 1731. Peter and Catherine’s seven-year-old daughter, Natalia Petrovna, died of measles on March 25. Her small coffin was placed next to her father’s.

  Catherine was forty-two years old when she was acclaimed Empress. True to Peter’s hopes, she acted as the guardian of his reforms, taking special care to cultivate the trust of the army, who were always paid punctually. Menshikov remained her closest advisor, and the de facto head of the government. Her reign lasted for only two years before she died in 1727, succeeded by the eleven-year-old Peter Alexeevich, son of the ill-fated tsarevitch Alexei. Her daughters, Anna and Elizaveta, were named to the Privy Council to help act as his regents.

  A few weeks after Peter’s death, Anna was married to Duke Charles Frederick, after which she returned with him to live in Holstein. The match would not prove a happy one. Out from under the watchful eye of Anna’s family, especially her titan of a father, Charles Frederick proved a neglectful, unfaithful husband. Anna wrote often to Elizaveta, expressing her misery. She died four years later, at the age of twenty, from childbed fever, following the birth of her son.

  In 1727, Elizaveta was betrothed to Charles Augustus of Holstein-Gottorp, first cousin of Anna’s husband Charles Frederick. She was extremely attached to him, but two weeks before the wedding was to take place, he contracted smallpox and died a short time later, probably as a result of repeated bloodlettings. The blow fell all the heavier, because her mother, Empress Catherine, had died on two weeks before that. Now that she was no longer the daughter of a reigning monarch, there was very little chance she would ever marry again—although her nephew, Peter II, was extremely attached to her, and probably would have married her had he survived to adulthood. There was talk of Elizaveta becoming empress after Peter II’s death, but he was succeeded instead by her first cousin, Anna of Courland, daughter of tsar Ivan and his wife Praskovia. Anna, who was jealous and suspicious of Peter the Great’s daughter, chose not to make Elizaveta her heir, instead leaving the throne to Ivan, the infant son of her niece, also named Anna, who acted as his regent for six months. Elizaveta, backed by her father’s Preobrazhensky Guards, staged a coup to remove Anna and Ivan from the palace. In December of 1741, she was acclaimed Empress Elizabeth I.

  Since Elizabeth had no children of her own, she adopted the fourteen-year-old son of her beloved sister Anna and brought him to Russia to raise him as her heir. This was Karl Peter Ulrich, the Duke of Holstein, grandson of both Peter the Great and Charles XII, heir to the throne Sweden. Shortly after he arrived in Russia, Elizabeth began searching for a suitable bride. She turned to Johanna von Anhalt-Zerbst, the sister of her deceased fiancé Charles Augustus, whose fourteen-year-old daughter was the cousin of the newly created Grand Duke Peter. This was Sophie Fredericke Auguste, who, after her conversion to the Orthodox faith, became known as Catherine. Elizabeth chose the name for her, in memory of mother, the Empress Catherine.

  Six months after the Empress Elizabeth’s death, Catherine deposed her husband, Peter III, and became sovereign empress of Russia. She saw herself as a reformer, a modernizer and westernizer of Russia, whose destiny it was to take up the mantle of Peter the Great and continue in his footsteps. Near the end of her reign, she commissioned a bronze statue of Peter on horseback, to emphasize her connection with his legacy. It is inscribed, in Russian and Latin, “To Peter I, from Catherine II.”

  Other great books by Michael W. Simmons on Kindle, paperback and audio:

  Elizabeth I: Legendary Queen Of England

  Alexander Hamilton: First Architect Of The American Government

  William Shakespeare: An Intimate Look Into The Life Of The Most Brilliant Writer In The History Of The English Language

  Thomas Edison: American Inventor

  Catherine the Great: Last Empress of Russia

  Romanov: The Last Tsarist Dynasty

  Further Reading

  Peter the Great, by Robert K. Massie

  The Romanovs, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The History of Peter the Great, by Voltaire

  https://archive.org/stream/historyofpetergr00volt/historyofpetergr00volt_djvu.txt

  The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, by Voltaire

  https://archive.org/stream/voltaireshistory00voltuoft/voltaireshistory00voltuoft_djvu.txt

  Samuel Collins on the Court of Alexei Mikhailovich

  http://academic.shu.edu/russianhistory/index.php/Samuel_Collins,_On_the_Present_State_of_Russia

  Excerpts from the writings of Johann-Georg Kerb from the court of Peter the Great

  http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/petergreat.asp