A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

6 Two Empresses

With the restoration of autocracy, Anna came to the throne as Empress of Russia, and after a time she sent the leaders of the Golitsyn and Dolgorukii clans into exile. The ten years of Anna’s reign in the memory of the Russian nobility was a dark period of rule by Anna’s German favorites – particularly her chamberlain – Ernst-Johann Bühren (Biron to the Russians), who was allegedly all-powerful and indifferent to Russian interests. That memory was a considerable exaggeration. After a brief interlude, Empress Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter and a capable and strong monarch succeeded her (1741–1761). Underneath all the drama at court, Russia’s new culture took shape, and Russia entered the age of the Enlightenment. In these decades we can also get a glimpse of Russian society that goes beyond descriptions of legal status into the web of human relations.

Politically Anna’s court was not a terribly pleasant place, though the story of “German domination” is largely a legend. Anna was personally close to Biron, who had served her well in Courland, where she had lived since the death of her husband the duke in 1711. She entrusted foreign policy to Count Andrei Ostermann and the army to Count Burkhard Christian Münnich, but the three were in no sense a clique. Indeed, they hated one another and made alliances with the more numerous Russian grandees in the court and in the government. The truth was that Anna relied on them and a few others and she did not consult with the elite as a whole. The Senate languished. Not surprisingly, Anna was terrified that there would be plots against her in favor of Elizabeth, Peter’s eldest surviving daughter, or other candidates for the throne, and she used the Secret Chancellery to try to uncover them. The darkest episode of the reign was the trial and execution of her minister Artemii Volynskii in 1740 on the charge of insulting the Empress. This was an excuse: the real reason for his death was Volynskii’s loss of favor with Biron and Ostermann and his own ambitious plans, which frightened Anna and many others in her entourage.

Anna’s reign was by no means a failure. She restored much of Peter’s work that had been rejected by the oligarchy in the time of Peter II. She returned the capital to St. Petersburg and abolished the Supreme Privy Council. She did not restore the Senate to power, ruling with a Cabinet of Ministers dominated by her favorites. Her government tried to reduce the burden on the country of the large military and naval establishment that Peter had created, but found that they could not. Instead, Russia fought a successful war in Poland to keep France from placing a king on the Polish throne who would be hostile to Russia and Austria – and then Russia went to war with Turkey. Münnich proved a highly capable commander, and Russia was able to return the fort at Azov that was lost in 1711.

Since Anna’s husband had died before they could produce children, she remained childless. In accord with Peter’s 1722 succession law she chose her heir, albeit on her deathbed: a two-month-old infant who was given the name Ivan VI. The baby’s connection with the Russian throne was remote. He was the grandson of Anna’s elder sister Catherine, who had married the Duke of Mecklenburg in 1716. Catherine’s daughter, also named Anna, in turn married the Duke of Brunswick-Bevern-Lüneburg, and Ivan was their first son. In other words, the tsar of Russia was actually a minor German prince with only the most tenuous connection to the country he was supposed to rule. The baby tsar obviously had to have a regent to rule for him, a fact that brought the conflicts among the grandees into the open. At first Biron was in charge, but Münnich quickly ousted him, only to fall victim to Ostermann and the infant tsar’s parents. Complicating matters was a Swedish declaration of war during the summer of 1741, an attempt by the Swedes to get revenge for their earlier defeats. Not surprisingly in this situation an elaborate plot came into being with all sorts of international ramifications (the French ambassador was one of the leaders) and in November 1741, the guards overthrew the regency and carried Elizabeth on their shoulders into the Winter Palace. Ivan VI and the Brunswick family were sent into exile in northern Russia, Ivan to perish in the Mirovich affair of 1764 and his family to be released only some twenty years later.

Elizabeth’s reign brought a renewed sense of normalcy to Russia. The remaining Golitsyns, Dolgorukiis, and alleged confederates of Volynskii were returned from exile, their lands and position restored. The Senate was restored to the position that it had under Peter. The Russian army defeated the Swedes, quickly ending the war in 1743. Elizabeth was intelligent and capable, but rather lazy and self-indulgent. The number of her dresses was legendary, and in a modest way she followed her father’s taste for banquets and drink. Secretly she married her lover, originally a Ukrainian choir-boy named Aleksei Razumovskii, who became a major figure at court. He was clever enough to not try to overshadow the others, and for most of the reign affairs were in the hands of the Shuvalovs, the brothers Peter and Alexander, and the chancellor (foreign minister) Aleksei Bestuzhev-Riumin. All of these men, like their rivals the Vorontsovs, came from families of ancient nobility but far from the great aristocracy, who now settled into secondary positions in government and diplomacy. Elizabeth’s grandees were relatively new men who owed their positions to Peter’s promotion of talented young men from outside the small circle of old aristocratic families. Bestuzhev-Riumin was an experienced diplomat, and the Shuvalovs had been part of Elizabeth’s personal entourage in the 1730s. Though they owed their rise to their personal connection with the new empress, they proved energetic and intelligent. They were the first since Peter’s time to systematically turn their attention to the economic development of Russia, primarily toward strengthening its commerce. In 1752 they convinced Elizabeth to abolish all internal tolls and modestly raise the tariff, so that trade would be freer but the state revenue would not suffer. Less happy was their scheme to increase revenue through the state vodka monopoly by raising the price. There were other ideas, the most important to produce a new law code, and the plan to secularize monastery lands, though neither were realized. They also introduced their young cousin Ivan Shuvalov to Elizabeth, and he became a major force in Russian culture.

Elizabeth’s decision to join Austria against Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756–1763) put any reform plans on the shelf. Russia’s army performed well against the supposed military genius of the age, Frederick the Great, and even briefly occupied Berlin in 1760. The death of the Empress on Christmas day 1761 in the Julian calendar, however, put an end to Russia’s participation in the conflict, and simultaneously set the stage for yet another drama.

While the court alternated between routine governance, dangerous intrigue, and dramatic palace revolutions, Russia gradually integrated the cultural changes that were the result of Peter the Great’s turn toward European culture. It is not the case that the Empresses and the court elite played no role in the development and deepening of Russian culture. Empress Anna was paradoxically one of the most important innovators. It was in her reign that Russia finally abandoned the simplicity of Peter’s time and acquired a court like those of other European states with the usual cultural institutions. Anna was the first to establish a court theater, beginning with an Italian Commedia dell’arte troupe, and then a regular French and German theater. She also brought an opera company, with its composer-director, the Neapolitan Francesco Araya. Anna replaced Peter’s tiny Winter Palace with a new one, more in keeping with the status of Russia’s rulers. Anna’s government was not only concerned with the court, for she also founded the Infantry Cadet Corps, using the old buildings of Menshikov’s palace. The Cadet Corps later evolved into an elite military school, but in the eighteenth century it was the main institution for the education of young Russian noblemen and had a broad curriculum that was borrowed from the academies for young nobles common in central Europe. The school taught military subjects, but also stressed modern languages, history, elementary jurisprudence, and mathematics. Not just officers, but also government ministers and many writers studied at the Cadet Corps.

Elizabeth continued in this direction, and it was she who ordered Bartolomeo Rastrelli to build the magnificent Winter Palace that stands to this day. Finally St. Petersburg had a residence for the monarch that rivaled or even outshone those of other European capitals. Elizabeth loved the theater even more than Anna, and in her court there were performances of the opera and the French theater two or three times a week. Araya kept his position to the end of her reign, writing his own operas and producing the work of other then prominent composers. In 1749 for the first time her theater put on a Russian play, Semira, by Alexander Sumarokov (1718–1777), a recent graduate of the Cadet Corps. Semira was a typical classical drama in verse in five acts, following the classical unities of time and place and imitating the French theater, Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire (then considered a great playwright and poet more than a thinker). Today it seems wooden and dull, with unexciting verse and an eminently predictable plot pitting duty against love. It was good enough, however, to enchant Elizabeth and her court, performed as it was by the boys of the Cadet Corps taking both male and female roles. Russians had no objection to female actors, the problem was that the theater was so new there simply were not any available, nor was there yet a school for girls equivalent to the Cadet Corps. The appearance of a Russian play, quickly followed by many others, required Russian actors, and by the end of the 1750s Russia had its first native theaters, the court theater as well as some short-lived enterprises outside the court network. Russia also had no school to train visual artists, and in 1756 Ivan Shuvalov founded the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. For the next century it would be the main center for Russian painting and sculpture.

Russia, however, still lacked a university. Peter’s academy of sciences had included a university, but that aspect of the academy was too small to make much impact. Again it was Elizabeth’s favorite, Count Ivan Shuvalov, who set out to correct the situation. The empress decreed the foundation of a university in Moscow that opened its doors in 1755. The university was very much on the German model, with a heavily German faculty and lectures frequently in Latin the first years, but it worked. It had two gymnasia attached to it to prepare the students – one for nobles and one for pupils from humbler stations in society. The new university had faculties of law and medicine as well as arts and sciences, and the very first graduates were to make major contributions to Russian culture.

Shuvalov had the political skills to pilot the university through the government’s offices, but he turned for the programmatic details to the Academy, and particularly to Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765), who had been pressing the idea in vain for some time. Lomonosov was in many ways the last man of the era of Peter, for he was the son of a wealthy merchant of the far north who owned fishing boats, but who was legally a peasant. Lomonosov had walked south to Moscow to enter the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in 1731. After graduation he was sent to Germany to study mining, but eventually opted for chemistry and related sciences. He had to leave Marburg University in a hurry, as his landlord’s daughter was pregnant, and he threw himself on the mercies of the Russian ambassador in Holland. Fortunately the ambassador sent him back to St. Petersburg, where he found a position in the Academy and was able to bring his German mistress to become his wife. Lomonosov’s most important scientific achievement was an early version of the law of conservation of matter and energy that was later formulated by Lavoisier in France, but Lomonosov was something of a polymath. He was a major poet, producing many odes for court occasions, an important genre at the time, for the odes were often declaimed at court occasions before the empress herself. These were not just flattery, for Lomonosov used them to present a program of enlightened and powerful monarchy that reflected his priorities and also those of Elizabeth and the court elite. He also took time off from his chemistry to engage in disputes over Russian history, and most important, to codify Russian grammar. This apparently simple contribution was fraught with consequence, for the cultural changes of Peter’s time had left the Russian literary language in a quandary. The old literary language had been formed by the Church and it was a combination of Old Church Slavic and vernacular elements. Peter’s reign had seen the introduction of thousands of new words and concepts and the restriction of the church language to traditional religious texts. Lomonosov’s contribution was to regularize all this, declaring the Church Slavic elements to be appropriate for high-style literature, but not necessarily ordinary speech or writing, and to provide a grammar for the normal written language that was essentially the spoken vernacular. Together with his own poetry and other writings, he laid the foundation for the literary language of Pushkin and Tolstoy.

Russia may not have had a university, but it certainly had a church. The time of Elizabeth was the high point of the domination of the Orthodox Church by Ukrainian bishops, who were trained in Kiev and elsewhere on Western, and to a large extent, Catholic models. They brought Latin and Western devotional literature to the Russian clergy, and continued the effort to bring their teachings to the population through sermonizing and attempts to educate the clergy. What they could not do was interfere in the process of absorption of Western secular culture. The Church in Russia, under the power of the state through the Synod, lacked the ability to ban books or interfere in the educational process. Boys in the Cadet School certainly had religious instruction, but the curriculum was entirely in the hands of laymen. As the European Enlightenment flowered, this Russian peculiarity meant that works banned in France or Italy found their way to Russia without interference from the clergy.

Starting around 1750, the Enlightenment came to Russia. For men of Lomonosov’s generation, formed in the earlier part of the century, the European culture they absorbed was essentially that of seventeenth-century rationalism. The predominant philosophy at the Academy in Lomonosov’s youth was that of Georg Christian Wolff, a follower and systematizer of the work of Gottfried Leibniz and Peter’s advisor on the Academy of Sciences. Wolff taught a deductive rationalism that depended on mathematics and logic, not sense experience, for its conclusions. Though many Lutheran theologians saw him as a threat, Wolff had no quarrel with revealed religion and was equally respectful of absolute monarchy. This was the worldview that the philosophy faculty of Moscow University propagated as well, not surprisingly, since it still held sway in German universities until the 1770s and beyond. During the middle years of the century, however, newer ideas from France and indirectly from England began to penetrate into Russian libraries and bookstores. Voltaire’s plays, some performed in Russia, illustrated classic themes of the French enlightenment, religious tolerance, enlightened monarchy, and the struggle against superstition and the clergy. As the French language began to replace German at court in these years, French writers acquired a public in Russia for the first time. In 1756 the first of Voltaire’s essays appeared in Russian translation and three years later his novel Zadig, the first major text of the mature French Enlightenment to be translated. This small stream grew into a flood in the next reign.

The political and cultural efforts of the state and the court rested on the shoulders of the Russian peasantry, seventy percent of whom were serfs. About half of all peasants were the property of the gentry, another fifteen percent were serfs of the Orthodox monasteries, and the rest relatively free. Monastery serfs had been the object of government policy since the time of Tsar Aleksei, who had already taken control of church lands to shore up state revenues. Peter had imitated him, but after his death, control of the land went back to the church. In the 1750s the Shuvalovs decided on a more radical measure: the state would confiscate the monastery lands and make the peasants into tenants of the state. In practice this would mean the end of serfdom for monastery peasants, but the war with Prussia intervened and the reform was delayed.

The fifty percent of peasants that were the property of the gentry varied in their economic position considerably. In the old Russian heartland of central Russia and the northwest, by 1750 most peasants rarely performed labor services, though the gentry could demand them at any time. Mostly the peasants paid some sort of rent and managed the affairs of the village themselves under the supervision of an often distant estate steward and an even more distant owner. The peasant economy of these regions was a complex mix of food crops, small-scale stock raising, and more specialized pursuits like market gardening for the Moscow and St. Petersburg population, both of which were growing rapidly. Some peasants also grew flax to make linen and canvas or hemp for ropes. To the northeast of Moscow and on the upper Volga in particular, there were whole villages and even districts emerging where the peasants were scarcely farmers at all. Here they made frying pans and other iron implements, wove coarse cloth, made wooden spoons and dishes, and even produced more sophisticated items, such as painted chests, toys, and even icons on wood and metal. Herein lay the origins of the Palekh icon painting of the nineteenth century, and the later production of painted lacquer boxes. In these villages the richest artisans were merchants as well, who attended all the local fairs like the great fair near Nizhnii Novgorod or who went to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Some such peasant traders even came to Archangel as early as Peter’s time. Many of these were monastery villages, but some were the property of great magnates like the Sheremetevs. In later times the Sheremetev villages would grow into great industrial cities.

South of the Oka River, where the steppe began with its black earth, a different sort of serf economy emerged. These areas were still open to Crimean slave raids, but since the 1630s the Russian state had steadily strengthened its defenses in the south, so that the area was relatively secure by 1750. The seventeenth century defensive lines had relied on armed peasants, Cossacks, and local noblemen, but Peter’s regular army replaced them in large part, leaving land open for normal peasant settlement. Noblemen began to move farther and farther south, buying or receiving larger and larger estates as grants from the crown. Many of them were devoted at first to sheep and cattle raising, as this was easier to manage in remote and thinly settled areas, but soon the area began to shift to grain production and the nobles began to set up estates largely worked by labor services. This system demanded the presence of a nearby steward to give orders to the peasants or even the residence of the landowner. Labor services were much more oppressive to the peasantry, and were balanced only by the greater fertility of the southern soil.

The peasantry, however, under either system was not ground down into abject and universal poverty. Eighteenth century Russian peasants probably ate as well as their counterparts in France or Germany, at least in years of normal harvest, and they owned their own animals, ploughs, and other agricultural tools as well as modest material goods. The oppressive nature of the serf system lay not in the diet or the lack of material possessions of the peasants, but rather in the nature of the social relations that defined serfdom. Serfdom was never defined in written law, though by custom the master had nearly complete power over the serf. He could demand any sort of labor services or payments, forbid marriages, reorder the land allotments of the village community, or move whole villages to different parts of the country. Short of torturing or killing the serf, he could do anything. In practice radical mistreatment was not in the master’s interest, but not all masters understood that, and in any case the threat of arbitrary exactions or commands hung over the serf for the whole of his life. The only real limit to the landowner’s power was the threat of revolt or personal revenge, and this was a very real possibility given the lack of effective state power in rural areas. Yet that option meant that the peasant burned his bridges and had to flee, which was not desirable for most peasants. It was better to put up with the master and hope for the best.

Fortunately not all Russian peasants were serfs. About thirty percent of the peasantry had no master and paid only taxes and an additional “rent” to the state. These were the peasants of the north, the Urals, and Siberia, as well as many on the southern frontier. All Cossacks, who increasingly farmed the land, were also free. These areas were not unimportant, and indeed from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century the north was a land of great prosperity, founded on the fur trade with Siberia and the salt springs that supplied most of Russia’s needs. The Stroganov family had made its fortune as early as the sixteenth century on salt, so much so that the tsar granted them a separate legal status of their own – not noble but higher than all other merchants. Their houses in the north had been a major center of not only trade, but also of book production and icon painting. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the collection of salt from surface deposits around the mouth of the Volga took the profits out of the salt trade, but the Stroganovs turned to iron manufacturing in the Urals, along with the Demidovs, a peasant-merchant family from central Russia and a few other families. From Peter’s time onward the state granted them the right to use corvée labor by the peasantry to supply the iron foundries with wood for fuel, and the iron mines prospered. The Urals mines and foundries were very remote, and the iron had to be floated down the rivers on barges during the spring floods to reach the Volga where it went on to Moscow and St. Petersburg. Much of it was even exported to England and elsewhere in Western Europe. Though a technically rather primitive industry, it made enormous fortunes for the owners, and both the Stroganovs and Demidovs entered the nobility. The profitability of the iron works rested on the unpaid labor of the state peasants “assigned” to them, and their peasants fell into a sort of semi-serfdom, which in time proved highly explosive.

The Urals and the Volga River were areas with a population that included many nationalities other than the Russians. At the time of Peter the Great’s death, the Volga-Urals area had about a million people, half of them Tatars, Chuvash, Bashkirs, among others. In the seventeenth century half or more of the Tatars had served in the Russian army, while the remainder, along with the other Volga peoples, continued to pay the old yasak tax. As serfdom spread, the tax defined their status as non-serfs. From Peter’s time the yasak-payers and the Tatar soldiers were almost all converted to state peasants like the Russian peasants of the north. A continuous flow of Russian peasants and nobles came into the area, avoiding the agricultural Tatar and Chuvash territories but taking much land from the nomadic Bashkirs, leading to predictable revolts in 1705, 1735, and 1755. Altogether Russia was still about ninety percent Russian, the largest minority being the Ukrainians (who made up five percent), with the Volga peoples and the Baltic provinces making up the remaining five percent. The Baltic nobles retained their privileges, as did the Cossack nobility of the Ukrainian Hetmanate. There the office of hetman itself was restored in 1727, abolished again in 1734, and then subsequently restored by Elizabeth. The empress appointed Kirill Razumovskii, the brother of her Ukrainian lover Aleksei, to the post. He would be the last hetman.

If Elizabeth was happy with local autonomy in the Hetmanate and the Baltic provinces, she was not tolerant of religious variation. She had come to power with the support of the bishops of the Orthodox Church, most of them Ukrainians who had absorbed Catholic notions of the need for religious uniformity. Empress Elizabeth initiated a new wave of persecution of the Old Believers, and supported the efforts of the Bishop of Kazan’ and others to convert the Muslims. Hundreds of mosques were destroyed and various forms of enticement and coercion were applied to the Tatars to get them to accept Orthodox Christianity. These attempts were an abject failure, for only a small percentage abjured their faith, and those in large numbers returned to Islam after the death of the empress.

Russia remained an overwhelmingly agrarian society, and few exceptions aside, peasant labor and landowning were the basis of the wealth of the nobility. The growth of the population and the cultivation of virgin land in the south brought enormous prosperity to the nobility. They demonstrated it for all to see not only in mansions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in their new country houses. Traditionally Russian boyars had lived in towns, maintaining only small houses on their estates for their infrequent visits. At the end of the seventeenth century they began to build more magnificent residences around Moscow – whole complexes with churches in the new semi-baroque style of the time – but these were few and near the capital. Only in the middle of the eighteenth century did the newfound prosperity of the nobility lead to the construction of country houses with Baroque and later Classical architecture, far from the cities. These were real country houses with elaborate gardens, natural and artificial ponds, sculpture and pavilions for dining, and entertainment outside. The great aristocrats like the Sheremetevs and Golitsyns had entire theaters built into their house, suitable for drama or ballet. Some of them formed theatrical troupes from their serfs, who were taught to read, play music, and dance or act in performances that replicated European models. One of the Sheremetevs even married one of his serf ballerinas. For the average noble family such luxuries were unattainable, but all over the country noblemen built one or two story wooden houses with at least one room large enough for dances and entertainment. By 1800, obligatory style included a portico with classical columns around the house’s main door. These houses became one of the centers of the life and culture of the nobility in its last century, to be memorialized in countless stories and novels of the great Russian writers from Pushkin onwards: Evgenii Onegin, Fathers and Sons, and War and Peace.

With the noblemen serving in the army and civil service (and legally obliged to do so from 1714 to 1762), much of the management of the estates fell on the women. One of the many paradoxes of Russian society was that noblewomen had much stronger legal rights to property and much more control over it than their counterparts in almost all Western societies of the time. Their control of their dowrer property after marriage was virtually complete in law (if not always in fact), and widows usually retained control of their husbands’ estates. The absence of primogeniture in Russia meant that among the nobility a widow was often the ruler of the family when her sons were long-time adults with important careers. These were the ancestors of the strong women found in the classic novels that were set in the country estates a century later.

Empress Elizabeth, like her predecessor Anna, had to provide for a succession to her throne, as she had no children of her own. She chose her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and the son of her older sister Anna Petrovna, who had married the then Duke in 1725. Elizabeth’s idea was to keep the succession in her family, not in the family of Empress Anna. The Holstein connection also had diplomatic advantages in relation to Sweden and the German states, especially Prussia. Elizabeth brought the boy to Russia in 1742 with a large suite of Holsteiners and he converted to Orthodoxy with the name Peter in honor of his grandfather, Peter the Great. The young Peter was not a particularly promising boy, and Elizabeth decided that he needed a wife. She chose Sophie, the daughter of the Duke of Anhalt-Zerbst – Anhalt-Zerbst being a small German principality in the Prussian orbit. Sophie’s mother was also from the Holstein family, so that Sophie and Peter were cousins and were both related to the then King of Sweden. The family also had the support of Frederick the Great of Prussia, victorious in war with Austria (1740–1748), and whom Elizabeth opposed but wished to placate. In 1744 Sophie came to Russia with her mother and there was instructed in Orthodoxy, eventually taking the name Catherine at conversion. Thus at the age of fifteen the future Catherine the Great took up her position at the Russian court as the wife of the heir to the throne. The young girl was lonely, and her mother’s intrigues only increased their isolation. The one bright spot for the princess was that she got along with the Empress well on a personal level.

At first the marriage was uneventful, a tepid friendship rather than a real marriage, and no heir appeared. As the years passed both Peter and Catherine found other interests, and as Catherine matured she found her husband’s childish behavior and coarseness increasingly irritating. She also began to have political worries, for Peter stuck close to his Holstein entourage and displayed little interest in the country he was to rule. Catherine was already acute enough to realize that this was a dangerous characteristic in a future tsar. Finally Catherine had her first love affair with the young aristocrat Sergei Saltykov, and in 1754 she gave birth to a son whom Empress Elizabeth had baptized Paul. Russia now had an heir, whom Catherine in her later memoirs would make clear was the son of Sergei Saltykov, not her husband Peter. Paul’s presumed parentage was a well-kept secret, even in the gossipy world of the court.

As she recovered from childbirth, Catherine began to read. She had always been more of a reader than was typical in court circles. Her choices had ranged from romances to serious works like Henri Bayle’s Dictionary, a classic of early Enlightenment thought. Now in her momentary isolation she turned to Voltaire, Tacitus, and most important for her later conception of government, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which was published in 1748. Not all of her reading was so heavy, for she appreciated Voltaire’s wit as much as his ideas, but most of it seems to have been books she thought valuable for the wife of a future emperor of Russia. For whatever she thought of her husband, he seemed certain to inherit the throne.

Peter had his own mistress by now, and Saltykov was sent abroad. Catherine soon took up with a young Polish nobleman, Stanislaw Poniatowski, who came to Russia with the English ambassador, but politics soon removed him as well. The politics of Elizabeth’s court did not just affect Catherine’s private life, but her political status as well. Russia had entered the Seven Years War in 1756 under the foreign policy leadership of Bestuzhev-Riumin, who had maintained an alliance with England and Austria against France and Prussia. Unfortunately for Bestuzhev-Riumin, as well as many of his colleagues throughout Europe, the Austrian chancellor count Wenzel Anton Kaunitz engineered a major reversal of alliances in 1756. Austria allied with France in order to get revenge on Prussia. England allied with Prussia, for in London the main enemy and rival was always France – in India and the New World, as well as in Europe. Russia had to choose, and Bestuzhev-Riumin persuaded Elizabeth to remain with Austria and join it in fighting Prussia when war broke out in 1756. At the same time Russia did not declare war on England, nor did England on Russia. This tangle led to Bestuzhev-Riumin’s fall in 1758, and the rise of the Vorontsov family (whose sympathies were with France, not England) to power at court. Hence they accused Bestuzhev-Riumin of lack of zeal in the war and convinced the empress to oust him. As the Seven Years’ War progressed and the Russian army kept Frederick the Great on the defensive, Peter’s pro-Prussian sympathies became more and more of an irritant to Elizabeth and made him unpopular in the army and much of the court. As his wife, Catherine incurred the empress’s suspicions. Personal conflicts added fuel to the flames, though Catherine was able to appeal personally to the empress through several crises.

In this delicate and potentially dangerous situation Catherine encountered Grigorii Orlov in the summer of 1760. Orlov was one of five brothers, all of them officers in the guards and very popular in that milieu. This was a powerful romantic attachment, but also politically quite important, for it was the guards who had already decided three times who would rule Russia. She also found her first real woman friend, Princess Elizabeth Dashkova. Dashkova was much younger than Catherine, but was a woman of intelligence and fortitude, and moreover was the sister of Peter’s mistress, one of the Vorontsovs. In spite of this family tie, Dashkova had developed an intense personal dislike of Peter and shared the general discontent with his political orientation. The tutor to Catherine’s son Paul, count Nikita Panin, a shrewd and experienced diplomat, also distrusted Catherine’s husband. Though Peter was still the heir, he was acquiring many enemies.

Then, just at the moment when Prussia seemed about to collapse, Empress Elizabeth died. In January 1762, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp ascended the Russian throne as Peter III. His first act was to make peace with Prussia, negating all of Russia’s efforts and sacrifices over the previous five years. To add insult to injury, he persuaded Prussia to help him to attack Denmark, a traditional Russian ally, to recover territory he believed to rightly belong to Holstein. He even ordered Prussian style uniforms for the guards, and drilled them endlessly after the Prussian fashion. No moves could be more precisely calculated to insult the Russian army and the court elite. It did not matter that peace allowed him to take up some of the old proposals of the Shuvalov group and to abolish the requirement that noblemen serve in the army or civil service (which once again made service voluntary). Peter had hopelessly ruined his relations with his most important constituency in St. Petersburg.

Catherine and the Orlovs began to plan a way to remove him and proclaim Catherine empress in her own right. Peter had suspicions that he had enemies, and one of the conspirators was arrested. Grigorii Orlov’s brother Aleksei decided that the time had come and on June 28, 1762, he came at dawn to Peterhof and told Catherine they had to strike. She had no hesitation and with Dashkova rode into St. Petersburg. Orlov took them to the barracks of the Izmailov guards, and the soldiers fell on their knees, swearing loyalty to Empress Catherine II. Catherine and her party went to the two other guards regiments, who joined her, ending at the Winter Palace by ten o’clock in the morning. A manifesto was readied, officially proclaiming her the sovereign and ordering the army and people to swear the oath of allegiance.

Peter III still remained with his Holstein hussars and German advisers at Oranienbaum, the suburban palace on the Gulf of Finland west of Peterhof that Menshikov had built decades before. Catherine donned the uniform of the oldest guards regiment, the Preobrazhenskii guards, and riding like a man on a white horse, moved out of the city toward Oranienbaum with the troops to capture her husband. Peter completely collapsed in fear, and surrendered after feeble attempts at escape. Catherine had him sent to one of his nearby estates to await incarceration under the watch of Aleksei Orlov and there on July 6, he perished. The public announcement was that he died of colic, and there was a sumptuous public funeral, but Catherine privately knew that Aleksei Orlov had taken matters into his own hands. The murder may have been unplanned, for everyone at the scene, including Peter, was drunk – but whatever the case, the murder was done. Aleksei Orlov secretly wrote to Catherine begging her forgiveness, and she kept the letter locked in her desk to the end of her life. With Peter out of the way, the once obscure German princess was now – at the age of thirty-three – Catherine II, the empress of Russia.