Catherine the Great

1

Sophia’s Childhood

PRINCE CHRISTIAN AUGUSTUS of Anhalt-Zerbst was hardly distinguishable in the swarm of obscure, penurious noblemen who cluttered the landscape and society of politically fragmented eighteenth-century Germany. Possessed neither of exceptional virtues nor alarming vices, Prince Christian exhibited the solid virtues of his Junker lineage: a stern sense of order, discipline, integrity, thrift, and piety, along with an unshakable lack of interest in gossip, intrigue, literature, and the wider world in general. Born in 1690, he had made a career as a professional soldier in the army of King Frederick William of Prussia. His military service in campaigns against Sweden, France, and Austria was meticulously conscientious, but his exploits on the battlefield were unremarkable, and nothing occurred either to accelerate or retard his career. When peace came, the king, who was once heard to refer to his loyal officer as “that idiot, Zerbst,” gave him command of an infantry regiment garrisoning the port of Stettin, recently acquired from Sweden, on the Baltic coast of Pomerania. There, in 1727, Prince Christian, still a bachelor at thirty-seven, bowed to the pleas of his family and set himself to produce an heir. Wearing his best blue uniform and his shining ceremonial sword, he married fifteen-year-old Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, whom he scarcely knew. His family, which had arranged the match with hers, was giddy with delight; not only did the line of Anhalt-Zerbst seem assured, but Johanna’s family stood a rung above them on the ladder of rank.

It was a poor match. There were the problems of difference in age; pairing an adolescent girl with a man in middle age usually stems from a confusion of motives and expectations. When Johanna, of a good family with little money, reached adolescence and her parents, without consulting her, arranged a match to a respectable man almost three times her age, Johanna could only consent. Even more unpromising, the characters and temperaments of the two were almost entirely opposite. Christian Augustus was simple, honest, ponderous, reclusive, and thrifty; Johanna Elizabeth was complicated, vivacious, pleasure-loving, and extravagant. She was considered beautiful, and with arched eyebrows, fair, curly hair, charm, and an exuberant eagerness to please, she attracted people easily. In company, she felt a need to captivate, but as she grew older, she tried too hard. In time, other flaws appeared. Too much gay talk revealed her as shallow; when she was thwarted, her charm soured to irritability and her quick temper suddenly exploded. Underlying this behavior, and Johanna had known this from the beginning, was the fact that her marriage had been a terrible—and was now an inescapable—mistake.

Confirmation first came when she saw the house in Stettin to which her new husband brought her. Johanna had spent her youth in unusually elegant surroundings. Because she was one of twelve children in a family that formed a minor branch of the ducal Holsteins, her father, the Lutheran bishop of Lübeck, had passed her along for upbringing to her godmother, the childless Duchess of Brunswick. Here, in the most sumptuously magnificent court in north Germany, she had become accustomed to a life of beautiful clothes, sophisticated company, balls, operas, concerts, fireworks, hunting parties, and constant, tittering gossip.

Her new husband, Christian Augustus, a career officer existing on his meager army pay, could provide none of this. The best he could manage was a modest gray stone house on a cobbled street constantly swept by wind and rain. The walled fortress town of Stettin, overlooking a bleak northern sea and dominated by a rigid military atmosphere, was not a place where gaiety, graciousness, or any of the social refinements could flourish. Garrison wives led dull lives; the lives of the wives of the town were duller still. And here, a lively young woman, fresh from the luxury and distractions of the court of Brunswick, was asked to exist on a tiny income with a puritanical husband who was devoted to soldiering, addicted to rigid economy, equipped to give orders but not to converse, and eager to see his wife succeed in the enterprise for which he had married her: the bearing of an heir. In this endeavor, Johanna did her best—she was a dutiful if unhappy wife. But always, underneath, she yearned to be free: free of her boring husband, free of their relative penury, free of the narrow, provincial world of Stettin. Always, she was certain that she deserved something better. And then, eighteen months after her marriage, she had a baby.

Johanna, at sixteen, was unprepared for the realities of motherhood. She had dealt with her pregnancy by wrapping herself in dreams: that her children would grow into extensions of herself and that their lives eventually would supply the broad avenue on which she would travel to achieve her own ambitions. In these dreams, she took it for granted that the baby she was carrying—her firstborn—would be a son, an heir for his father, but more important a handsome and exceptional boy whose brilliant career she would guide and ultimately share.

At 2:30 a.m. on April 21, 1729, in the chill, gray atmosphere of a Baltic dawn, Johanna’s child was born. Alas, the little person was a daughter. Johanna and a more accepting Christian Augustus managed to give the baby a name, Sophia Augusta Fredericka, but from the beginning, Johanna could not find or express any maternal feeling. She did not nurse or caress her little daughter; she spent no time watching over her cradle or holding her; instead, abruptly, she handed the child over to servants and wet nurses.

One explanation may be that the process of childbirth nearly cost Johanna her life; for nineteen weeks after Sophia was born, the adolescent mother remained confined to her bed. A second is that Johanna was still very young and her own bright ambitions in life were far from fulfilled. But the stark, underlying reason was that her child was a girl, not a boy. Ironically, although she could not know it then, the birth of this daughter was the crowning achievement of Johanna’s life. Had the baby been the son she so passionately desired, and had he lived to adulthood, he would have succeeded his father as Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst. Then the history of Russia would have been different and the small niche in history that Johanna Elizabeth earned for herself never would have existed.

Eighteen months after the birth of her first child, Johanna gave birth to the son upon whom she had set her heart. Her fondness for this second infant, Wilhelm Christian, became all the more intense when she realized that something about the child was seriously wrong. The boy, who appeared to suffer from rickets, became her obsession; she petted him, spoiled him, and scarcely let him out of her sight, lavishing on him all the affection she had denied her daughter. Sophia, already keenly aware that her own birth had been a disappointment to her mother, now observed the love with which Johanna surrounded her little brother. Gentle kisses, whispered endearments, tender caresses all were bestowed on the boy—while Sophia watched. It is, of course, common for the mother of a handicapped or chronically ill child to spend more time with that child, just as it is normal for other children in the family to resent this disproportionate attention. But Johanna’s rejection of Sophia began before Wilhelm’s birth, and then continued in aggravated form. The result of this maternal favoritism was a permanent wound. Most children, rejected or neglected in favor of a sibling, react more or less as Sophia did: to avoid more hurt, she sealed off her emotions; nothing was being given her and nothing was expected. Little Wilhelm, who simply accepted his mother’s affection as normal, was quite innocent of any wrongdoing; even so, Sophia hated him. Forty years later, writing her Memoirs, her resentments still simmered:

It was told me that I was not very joyfully welcomed.… My father thought I was an angel; my mother did not pay much attention to me. A year and a half later, she [Johanna] gave birth to a son whom she idolized. I was merely tolerated and often I was scolded with a violence and anger I did not deserve. I felt this without being perfectly clear why in my mind.

Thereafter, Wilhelm Christian goes unmentioned in her Memoirs until his death in 1742 at the age of twelve. Then, her brief account is unemotionally clinical:

He lived to be only twelve and died of spotted [scarlet] fever. It was not until after his death that they learned the cause of an illness which had compelled him to walk always with crutches and for which remedies had been constantly given him in vain and the most famous physicians in Germany consulted. They advised that he be sent to baths at Baden and Karlsbad, but he came home each time as lame as before he went away and his leg became smaller in proportion as he grew taller. After his death, his body was dissected and it was found that his hip was dislocated and must have been so from infancy.… At his death, my mother was inconsolable and the presence of the entire family was necessary to help her bear her grief.

This bitterness only hints at Sophia’s enormous resentment against her mother. The harm done to this small daughter by Johanna’s open display of preference marked Sophia’s character profoundly. Her rejection as a child helps to explain her constant search as a woman for what she had missed. Even as Empress Catherine, at the height of her autocratic power, she wished not only to be admired for her extraordinary mind and obeyed as an empress, but also to find the elemental creature warmth that her brother—but not she—had been given by her mother.

Even minor eighteenth-century princely families maintained the trappings of rank. Children of the nobility were provided with nurses, governesses, tutors, instructors in music, dancing, riding, and religion to drill them in the protocol, manners, and beliefs of European courts. Etiquette was foremost; the little students practiced bowing and curtseying hundreds of times until perfection was automatic. Language lessons were paramount. Young princes and princesses had to be able to speak and write in French, the language of the European intelligentsia; in aristocratic German families, the German language was regarded as vulgar.

The influence of her governess, Elizabeth (Babet) Cardel, was critical at this time in Sophia’s life. Babet, a Huguenot Frenchwoman who found Protestant Germany safer and more congenial than Catholic France, was entrusted with overseeing Sophia’s education. Babet quickly understood that her pupil’s frequent belligerence arose out of loneliness and a craving for encouragement and warmth. Babet provided these things. She also began to give Sophia what became her permanent love of the French language, with all its possibilities for logic, subtlety, wit, and liveliness in writing and conversation. Lessons began with Les Fables de La Fontaine; then they moved on to Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Too much of her education, Sophia decided later, had been sheer memorization: “Very early it was noticed that I had a good memory; therefore I was incessantly tormented with learning everything by heart. I still possess a German Bible in which all the verses I had to memorize are underlined with red ink.”

Babet’s approach to teaching was gentle compared to that of Pastor Wagner, a pedantic army chaplain chosen by Sophia’s fervently Lutheran father to instruct his daughter in religion, geography, and history. Wagner’s rigid methodology—memorize and repeat—made little headway against a pupil whom Babet had already described as an esprit gauche and who asked embarrassing questions: Why were great men of antiquity such as Marcus Aurelius eternally damned because they had not known of Christ’s salvation and therefore could not have been redeemed? Wagner replied that this was God’s will. What was the nature of the universe before the Creation? Wagner replied that it had been in a state of chaos. Sophia asked for a description of this original chaos; Wagner had none. The word “circumcision” used by Wagner naturally triggered the question: What does that mean? Wagner, appalled at the position in which he found himself, refused to answer. By elaborating on the horrors of the Last Judgment and the difficulty of being saved, Wagner so frightened his pupil that “every night at dusk I would go and cry by the window.” The next day, however, she retaliated: How can the infinite goodness of God be reconciled with the terrors of the Last Judgment? Wagner, shouting that there were no rational answers to such questions, and that what he told her must be accepted on faith, threatened his pupil with his cane. Babet intervened. Later Sophia wrote, “I am convinced in my inmost soul that Herr Wagner was a blockhead.” She added, “All my life I have had this inclination to yield only to gentleness and reason—and to resist all pressure.”

Nothing, however, neither gentleness nor pressure, could assist her music teacher, Herr Roellig, in his task. “He always brought with him a creature who roared bass,” she later wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchior Grimm. “He had him sing in my room. I listened to him and said to myself, ‘he roars like a bull,’ but Herr Roellig was beside himself with delight whenever this bass throat was in action.” She never overcame her inability to appreciate harmony. “I long to hear and enjoy music,” Sophia-Catherine wrote in her Memoirs, “but I try in vain. It is noise to my ears and that is all.”

Babet Cardel’s approach to teaching children lived on in the empress Catherine, and, years later, she poured out her gratitude: “She had a noble soul, a cultured mind, a heart of gold; she was patient, gentle, cheerful, just, consistent—in short the kind of governess one would wish every child to have.” To Voltaire, she wrote that she was “the pupil of Mademoiselle Cardel.” And in 1776, when she was forty-seven, she wrote to Grimm:

One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience and experience has made them cautious in conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw from that the fine maxim that one should not scold children too much but should make them trustful, so that they will not conceal their stupidities from us?

The more independence Sophia displayed, the more she worried her mother. The girl was arrogant and rebellious, Johanna decided; these qualities must be stamped out before her daughter could be offered in marriage. As marriage was a minor princess’s only destiny, Johanna was determined “to drive the devil of pride out of her.” She repeatedly told her daughter that she was ugly as well as impertinent. Sophia was forbidden to speak unless spoken to or to express opinions to adults; she was made to kneel and kiss the hem of the skirt of all visiting women of rank. Sophia obeyed. Bereft of affection and approval, she nevertheless maintained a respectful attitude toward her mother, remained silent, submitted to Johanna’s commands, and smothered her own opinions. Later, concealment of pride in humility came to be recognized as a deliberate and useful tactic which Sophia—renamed Catherine—used when confronting crisis and danger. Threatened, she drew around herself a cloak of meekness, deference, and temporary submission. Here, too, an example was set by Babet Cardel: a woman of gentle birth who accepted her inferior position as a governess but still managed to preserve a self-respect, dignity, and pride that raised her, in Sophia’s eyes, higher than her own mother.

Outwardly, in these years, Sophia was a cheerful child. In part this sprang from the ebullient curiosity of her mind and in part from her sheer physical energy. She needed a great deal of exercise. Walks in the park with Babet Cardel were not enough, and her parents allowed her to play games with children of the town. Sophia easily took command of these little bands of boys and girls, not simply because she was a princess but because she was a natural leader and her imagination created the games that everyone liked to play.

Eventually, Christian Augustus was promoted from commander of the garrison to governor of the town of Stettin, an advance that entitled him to move his family into a wing of the granite castle on the town’s main square. For Johanna, the move to the castle did not help. She was still unhappy, still unable to reconcile herself to the situation in which life had deposited her. She had married beneath her, and instead of the brilliant life she had dreamed of she was now no more than a provincial lady in a garrison town. Two more children had followed her first two—another son and another daughter—but they brought no added happiness.

In her longing to escape, her thoughts turned to the high connections she still possessed. By birth, Johanna belonged to one of the great families of Germany, the ducal house of Holstein-Gottorp, and she remained convinced that with her family rank, her cleverness, her charm and vivacity, she still might create a better place for herself in the world. She began spending time cultivating her relatives by writing frequent letters and by paying regular visits. She went often to Brunswick, the glittering court of her girlhood, where Rembrandts and Van Dycks hung on the walls. Then, every February at carnival time, she visited Berlin to pay her respects to the king of Prussia. She had a passion for intrigue, and, from the perspective of Stettin, even the gossipy intrigues of petty German courts, where she thought she would shine, attracted her. But somehow, wherever she went, Johanna was always aware that she was no more than a poor relation, a girl of good family who had made an unpromising marriage.

When Sophia was eight, Johanna began taking her along on these travels. Arranging a marriage was a duty Johanna meant to fulfill, and it could do no harm, even at an early stage, to let society know that an available little princess was growing up in Stettin. And, indeed, marriage was a major conversational topic as mother and daughter made these rounds. By the time Sophia was ten, talk of this or that potential husband was commonplace among her aunts and uncles. Sophia never objected to traveling with her mother; indeed, she enjoyed it. As she grew older, she was not only well aware of the purpose of their visits, she wholeheartedly approved. Not only did marriage offer the best avenue of escape from her mother and family, but Sophia had been introduced to another dreadful alternative. This was the condition of her spinster aunts, surplus daughters of the north German petty nobility, who had been put away in the farthest wings of family castles or permanently stabled in remote Protestant convents. Sophia remembered visiting one of these unfortunates, an older sister of her mother’s, who owned sixteen pug dogs, all of whom slept, ate, and performed their natural functions in the same room as their mistress. “A large number of parrots besides lived in the same room,” Sophia wrote. “One can imagine the fragrance which reigned there.”

Despite her own wish to marry, Sophia’s chances of an excellent match appeared only marginal. Each year produced a new crop of eligible adolescent European princesses, most of whom offered far more of substance to reigning royal and noble families than a union with the insignificant house of tiny Zerbst. Nor was Sophia a child with remarkable physical attractions. At ten, she had a plain face with a thin, pointed chin, which Babet Cardel had advised her to keep carefully tucked in. Sophia understood the problem of her appearance. Later, she wrote:

I do not know whether as a child I was really ugly, but I remember well that I was often told that I was and that I must therefore strive to show inward virtues and intelligence. Up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, I was firmly convinced of my ugliness and was therefore more concerned with acquiring inward accomplishments and was less mindful of my outward appearance. I have seen a portrait of myself painted when I was ten years old and that is certainly very ugly. If it really resembled me, they told me nothing false.

And so it was that, despite mediocre prospects and a plain appearance, Sophia trailed around north Germany after her mother. During these journeys, she added new subjects to her education. Listening to adults gossiping, she learned the genealogy of most of the royal families of Europe. One visit was of particular interest. In 1739, Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick, the Prince-Bishop of Lübeck, was appointed guardian of the newly orphaned young Duke of Holstein, eleven-year-old Charles Peter Ulrich. This was an extraordinarily well-connected boy, presumably destined for an exalted future. He was the only living grandson of Peter the Great of Russia, and he also stood first in line to become heir to the throne of Sweden. A year older than Sophia, he was also her second cousin on her mother’s side. Once he became her brother’s ward, Johanna lost no time in gathering up Sophia and paying the prince-bishop a visit. In her Memoirs, Sophia-Catherine described Peter Ulrich as “agreeable and well-bred, although his liking for drink was already noticeable.” This description of the eleven-year-old orphan was far from complete. In reality, Peter Ulrich was small, delicate, and sickly, with protuberant eyes, no jaw, and thin, blond hair falling to his shoulders. Emotionally as well as physically, he was underdeveloped. He was shy and lonely, he lived surrounded by tutors and drillmasters, he had no contact with anyone his own age, he read nothing, and he was greedy at meals. But Johanna, like every other mother of an eligible daughter, watched every movement he made, and her heart soared when she saw her own ten-year-old Sophia talking to him. Afterward, Sophia saw her mother and her aunts whispering. Even at her age, she knew that they were discussing the possibility of a match between herself and this strange boy. She did not mind; already she had begun letting her own imagination wander:

I knew that one day he would become king of Sweden, and although I was still a child, the title of queen fell sweetly on my ears. From that time on, the people around me teased me about him and gradually I grew accustomed to thinking that I was destined to be his wife.

Meanwhile, Sophia’s appearance was improving. At thirteen, she was slender, her hair was a silky, dark chestnut, she had a high forehead, brilliant dark blue eyes, and a curved rosebud mouth. Her pointed chin had become less prominent. Her other qualities had begun to attract attention; she was intelligent and had a ready wit. Not everyone thought her insignificant. A Swedish diplomat, Count Henning Gyllenborg, who met Sophia at her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, was impressed by her intelligence and told Johanna in Sophia’s presence, “Madame, you do not know the child. I assure you she has more mind and character than you give her credit for. I beg you therefore to pay more attention to your daughter for she deserves it in every respect.” Johanna was unimpressed, but Sophia never forgot these words.

She was discovering the way to make people like her, and, once she had learned the skill, she practiced it brilliantly. It was not a matter of behaving seductively. Sophia—and, later, Catherine—was never a coquette; it was not sexual interest she wished to arouse but warm, sympathetic understanding of the kind Count Gyllenborg had given her. To produce these reactions in other people, she used means so conventional and modest that they appear almost sublime. She realized that people preferred to talk rather than to listen and to talk about themselves rather than anything else. In this respect, her mother, pathetically anxious to be considered important, had provided a telling example of how not to behave.

Other feelings were stirring within her. Sophia was awakening to sensuality. At thirteen and fourteen, she often went to her room at night, still restless with nervous energy. Attempting to find some release, she sat up in bed, placed a hard pillow between her legs, and, astride an imaginary horse, “galloped until I was quite worn out.” When maids outside her room came in to investigate the noise, they found her lying quietly, pretending to be asleep. “I was never caught in the act,” she said. There was a reason for her steely control in public. Sophia had a single, overriding desire: to escape her mother. She understood that her only avenue of escape would be marriage. To achieve that, she must marry—and marry not just any husband, but one who would raise her in rank as far as possible above Johanna.

She succumbed, however, to one episode of adolescent infatuation. At fourteen, she flirted briefly with a handsome young uncle, her mother’s younger brother, George Lewis. Ten years older than Sophia and attracted by the fresh innocence of his blossoming niece, this pomaded lieutenant of cuirassiers began to pay court. Sophia describes the progress of this little romance, which ended with her uncle George suddenly asking her to marry him. She was dumbfounded. “I knew nothing about love and never associated it with him.” Flattered, she hesitated; this man was her mother’s brother. “My parents will not wish it,” she said. George Lewis pointed out that their family relationship was not an obstacle; unions of this kind often occurred in the aristocratic families of Europe. Sophia was confused and allowed Uncle George to continue his suit. “He was very good looking at the time, had beautiful eyes, and knew my disposition. I was accustomed to him. I began to feel attracted by him and did not avoid him.” In the end, she tentatively accepted her uncle’s proposal, provided “my father and mother give their consent. At that point, my uncle abandoned himself entirely to his passion which was extreme. He seized every opportunity of embracing me and was skilled at creating them, but apart from a few kisses, it was all very innocent.”

Was Sophia really prepared to set aside her ambition to become a queen in order to become her own mother’s sister-in-law? For a moment, she teetered. Perhaps she might have given in, permitted George Lewis to have his way, and married him. But before anything final had happened, a letter arrived from St. Petersburg.

2

Summoned to Russia

THE LETTER FROM RUSSIA was a surprise, but its message was one Johanna had been dreaming of and hoping for. Even as the ambitious mother was trooping her daughter through the petty courts of north Germany, she had been reaching out to make use of a more exalted connection. There was a family history involving Johanna’s relatives in the house of Holstein with the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia. In December 1741, when Sophia was twelve, Elizabeth, the younger daughter of Peter the Great, had seized the Russian throne in a midnight coup d’état. The new empress had several strong ties to the house of Holstein. The first was through Elizabeth’s beloved older sister, Anne, Peter the Great’s eldest daughter, who had married Johanna’s cousin Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein. This marriage had produced the sad little Peter Ulrich; three months after her child was born, Anne was dead.

Elizabeth had an even closer personal bond with the house of Holstein. At seventeen, she had been betrothed to Johanna’s older brother, Charles Augustus. In 1726, this Holstein prince had traveled to St. Petersburg to be married, but a few weeks before the wedding, the prospective bridegroom had caught smallpox in the Russian capital and died there. Elizabeth was left with a grief she never entirely overcame, and thereafter she regarded the house of Holstein as almost a part of her own family.

Now, when the news arrived that this same Elizabeth had suddenly ascended the Russian throne, Johanna immediately wrote to congratulate the new empress, who, at one time, had been about to become her sister-in-law. Elizabeth’s reply was amiable and affectionate. The relationship continued to prosper. Johanna had in her possession a portrait of Elizabeth’s dead sister, Anne, which the empress wanted. When Elizabeth wrote to her “dear niece” and asked whether the picture might be returned to Russia, Johanna was overjoyed to do this favor. Soon after, a secretary from the Russian embassy in Berlin arrived in Stettin bringing Johanna a miniature portrait of Elizabeth set in a magnificent frame of diamonds worth eighteen thousand rubles.

Determined to nurture this promising connection, Johanna took her daughter to Berlin, where the Prussian court painter Antoine Pesne painted a portrait of Sophia to be sent as a gift to the empress. The portrait was unremarkable; the subjects of most of Pesne’s paintings wound up on his canvases looking almost identical, and his portrait of Sophia emerged as a generic eighteenth-century portrait of a pleasant young woman. Nevertheless, once the likeness had been dispatched to St. Petersburg, the desired response came back: “The empress is charmed by the expressive features of the young princess.”

Thereafter, Johanna passed up no opportunity to forge new links in this family chain. At the end of 1742, she gave birth to a second daughter, Sophia’s only sister. As soon as the infant’s gender was known, Johanna wrote to the empress, saying that the child was to be named Elizabeth and asking Her Majesty to consent to act as the baby’s godmother. Elizabeth agreed and soon another portrait of the empress, again set in diamonds, arrived in Stettin.

Meanwhile, another series of events favorable to Johanna was taking place. In January 1742, young Peter Ulrich of Holstein, the orphaned boy whom Sophia had met three years before, suddenly disappeared from Kiel and reappeared in St. Petersburg, where he was adopted by his aunt Elizabeth and proclaimed heir to the Russian throne. This boy, now a future emperor of Russia, was Johanna’s cousin (and, by extension, Sophia’s). In 1743, there was another wonderful surprise for Johanna. As a condition of Peter Ulrich’s becoming heir to the Russian throne, the little Holstein prince renounced his claim to the crown of Sweden. By the terms of a treaty concluded between Russia and Sweden, Empress Elizabeth was permitted to designate her nephew’s replacement as heir to the Swedish throne. She chose Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick, Prince-Bishop of Lübeck, who had been Peter Ulrich’s guardian. Thus it was that when all these proclamations, changes, and replacements were in place, Johanna found herself at the center of a wheel of astonishing good fortune. She had lost to smallpox a brother who would have been the consort of the new Russian empress, but now she possessed a cousin who would one day be the Russian emperor and a living elder brother who would become the king of Sweden.

As his wife was courting St. Petersburg and escorting their daughter through north Germany, Prince Christian Augustus, husband and father, remained at home. Now over fifty, unchanging in his disciplined, frugal way of life, he survived a temporary paralytic stroke, recovered, and lived to see his own rank and status improve. In July 1742, the new king of Prussia, Frederick II, promoted him to the rank of field marshal in the Prussian army. In November of the same year, the prince and his elder brother succeeded to joint sovereignty of the little principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, a town southwest of Berlin with medieval walls and towers, a moat, and gabled houses. Resigning from the army and leaving Stettin, Christian Augustus moved his family to Zerbst and devoted himself to the welfare of his twenty thousand subjects. Johanna was mildly pleased; now she was a reigning princess of a small—very small—sovereign German state. She lived in a small—very small—baroque palace. Despite her correspondence with an empress and her visits to her well-placed relatives, she still worried that life was passing her by.

Then, on January 1, 1744, after a service in the castle chapel, the family had just sat down to New Year’s Day dinner when a courier brought a sealed letter for Johanna. She opened it immediately. It was from St. Petersburg and had been written by Otto Brümmer, grand marshal of the court of Peter Ulrich, the young Duke of Holstein, now heir apparent to the Russian throne. Brümmer wrote:

At the explicit command of Her Imperial Majesty [the Empress Elizabeth], I have to inform you, Madame, that the empress desires Your Highness, accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter, to come to Russia as soon as possible and repair without loss of time to whatever place the Imperial Court may then be found. Your Highness is too intelligent not to understand the true meaning of the impatience of the empress to see you here soon as well as the princess your daughter of whom report has said much that is lovely. At the same time, our incomparable monarch has expressly charged me to inform Your Highness that His Highness the prince shall under no circumstances take part in the journey. Her Majesty has very important reasons for wishing it so. A word from Your Highness will, I believe, be all that is necessary to fulfill the will of our divine empress.

Brümmer’s letter contained other requests. He asked that Johanna travel incognito as far as Riga, on the Russian frontier, and that, if possible, she keep her destination a secret. If, somehow, the destination became known, she was to explain that duty and etiquette required her to thank the Russian empress personally for her generosity to the house of Holstein. To cover Johanna’s expenses, Brümmer enclosed a bill of exchange for ten thousand rubles on a Berlin bank. The letter did not specify the ultimate purpose of the summons, but a second letter, arriving by another courier only a few hours later, made the purpose clear. This letter came from Frederick II of Prussia and also was addressed only to Johanna:

I will no longer conceal the fact that in addition to the respect I have always cherished for you and for the princess your daughter, I have always had the wish to bestow some unusual good fortune upon the latter; and the thought came to me that it might be possible to arrange a match for her with her cousin, the Grand Duke Peter of Russia.

Brümmer’s specific exclusion of Prince Christian Augustus from the empress’s invitation, reinforced by Frederick’s having written only to Johanna, was, of course, humiliating for the nominal head of the family. And the wording of both letters made it clear that everyone involved seemed confident that the wife could manage to override whatever objections her stolid husband might raise, not only to his exclusion from the invitation but to other aspects of this possible marriage. These objections, they feared, would center on the requirement that a German princess marrying a future tsar would have to abandon her Protestant faith and convert to Greek Orthodoxy. Christian Augustus’s devout Lutheranism was well known, and all parties understood that he would oppose his daughter’s setting it aside.

For Johanna, this was a glorious day. After fifteen years of a depressing marriage, an empress and a king had put before her the prospect that all her dreams of excitement and adventure were to be realized. She was to be a person of importance, a performer on the world stage; all the heretofore wasted treasures of her personality were to be put to use. She was euphoric. As the days passed, messages from Russia and Berlin urging haste continued to arrive in Zerbst. In St. Petersburg, Brümmer, now under constant pressure from an impatient empress, told Elizabeth that Johanna had written that “she lacked only wings, otherwise she would fly to Russia.” And this was almost true: it took Johanna only ten days to make preparations for the journey.

While Sophia’s mother savored her crowning moment, her father secluded himself in his study. The old soldier had always known how to behave on a battlefield, but he did not know how to behave now. He resented his exclusion from the invitation, yet he wished to support his daughter. He abhorred the prospect of her being forced to change her religion, and was uneasy at the idea of her being sent far from home to a country as politically unstable as Russia. Ultimately, despite all these worries and reservations, the old, good soldier felt that he had no choice; he must listen to his wife and obey the orders of King Frederick II. He locked his study door and began composing cautionary advice to his daughter as to how she should behave at the Russian court:

Next to the empress, Her Majesty, you must respect the Grand Duke [Peter, her future husband] above all as your Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Your Lord and his will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world and nothing is to be done which he dislikes.

Within three days, Johanna was able to report to Frederick: “The prince, my husband, has signified his approval. The journey, which at this time of year is an exceedingly dangerous one, holds no terrors for me. I have made my decision and am firmly convinced that everything is happening in the best interests of Providence.”

Prince Christian was not the only member of the Zerbst family whose role in this momentous undertaking was unmistakably secondary. As Johanna read and wrote, ordered and tried on clothes, Sophia was ignored. The money available went into improving her mother’s wardrobe; nothing was left for the daughter. Sophia’s clothing—what might have been considered her trousseau—consisted of three old dresses, a dozen chemises, some pairs of stockings, and a few handkerchiefs. Her bridal linen was made up of a few of her mother’s used sheets. Altogether, these fabrics filled half of a small trunk of a size that a local girl might carry with her when she traveled to be married in the next village.

Sophia already knew what was happening. She had caught a glimpse of Brümmer’s letter and saw that it came from Russia. As her mother was opening it, she had read the words, “accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter.” Moreover, her mother’s subsequent breathless behavior and her parents’ hasty withdrawal to whisper together encouraged her belief that the letter concerned her future. She knew the importance of marriage; she remembered the excitement her mother had shown four years earlier when she met the little duke Peter Ulrich; she knew that her portrait had been sent to Russia. Eventually, unable to contain her curiosity, she confronted her mother. Johanna admitted what the letters said and confirmed what they implied. “She told me,” Catherine wrote later, “that there was also a considerable risk involved, given the instability of that country. I answered that God would provide for stability, if such was his will; and that I had sufficient courage to face the risk, and that my heart told me that all would be well.” The matter that tormented her father—the question of a change in her religion—did not trouble Sophia. Her approach to religion was, as Pastor Wagner already knew, pragmatic.

During this week, which was to be their last together, Sophia did not tell Babet Cardel about her imminent departure. Her parents had forbidden her to mention it; they put it about that they and their daughter were leaving Zerbst simply to pay their annual visit to Berlin. Babet, keenly attuned to her pupil’s character, realized that no one was being straightforward. But the pupil, in her tearful farewell to her beloved teacher, still would not reveal the truth. And teacher and pupil were never to see each other again.

On January 10, 1744, mother, father, and daughter entered a carriage for the ride to Berlin, where they were to see King Frederick. Sophia now was as eager as her mother. This was the escape she had dreamed of, the beginning of her climb toward a higher destiny. When she left Zerbst for the Prussian capital, there were no painful scenes. She kissed her nine-year-old brother, Frederick (Wilhelm, the brother she hated, was already dead), and her new little sister, Elizabeth. Her uncle, George Lewis, whom she had kissed and promised to marry, was already forgotten. As the carriage rolled through the city gates and onto the high road, Sophia never turned to look back. And in the more than five decades of her life that lay before her, she never returned.

3

Frederick II and the Journey to Russia

THREE AND A HALF YEARS before Sophia and her parents visited Berlin, when twenty-eight-year-old Frederick II ascended the throne of Prussia, Europe confronted an intriguing bundle of contradictions. The new monarch possessed an enlightened mind, restless energy, political astuteness, and remarkable—if thus far unrevealed—military genius. When this introspective lover of philosophy, literature, and the arts, who was also a ruthless practitioner of Machiavellian statecraft, came to the throne, his small kingdom was already pulsing with militant energy, ready to expand and make its mark on the history of Europe. Frederick had only to give the order to march.

This was not what Europe or Prussia had expected. In his childhood, Frederick had been a dreamy, delicate boy, often beaten by his father, King Frederick William I, for being unmanly. As an adolescent, he wore his hair in long curls hanging down to his waist, and costumed himself in embroidered velvet. He read French writers, wrote French poetry, and performed chamber music on the violin, the harpsichord, and the flute. (The flute was a lifelong passion; he wrote more than a hundred flute sonatas and concerti.) At twenty-five, he accepted his royal destiny and took command of an infantry regiment. On May 31, 1740, he became Frederick II, king of Prussia. His appearance was unimpressive—he was five feet seven inches tall and had a thin face, high forehead, and large, slightly protruding blue eyes—but this mattered to no one, least of all, by then, to Frederick. He had no time for finery or nonsense; there was no formal coronation. Six months later, Frederick suddenly plunged his kingdom into war.

The Prussia Frederick inherited was a small state, poor in population and natural resources, scattered in disconnected fragments from the Rhine to the Baltic. In the center lay the electorate of Brandenburg, whose capital was Berlin. To the east lay East Prussia, separated from Brandenburg by a corridor of land belonging to the kingdom of Poland. To the west were a number of separate enclaves on the Rhine, in Westphalia, in East Frisia, and on the North Sea. But if lack of territorial cohesion was a national weakness, Frederick also possessed an important instrument of strength. The Prussian army, man for man, was the best in Europe: eighty-three thousand well-trained, professional soldiers, an efficient officer corps, and armories stocked with modern weapons. Frederick’s intention was to use Prussia’s formidable military strength to address his country’s geographical weaknesses.

Opportunity quickly thrust itself upon him. On October 20, 1740, five months after Frederick ascended the Prussian throne, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI of Austria, suddenly died. Charles, the last Hapsburg in the male line, was survived by two daughters, and the elder, twenty-three-year-old Maria Theresa, assumed the Austrian throne. Frederick, seeing his chance, immediately summoned his generals. By October 28, he had decided to seize the province of Silesia, one of the richest Hapsburg possessions. His arguments were pragmatic: his own army was ready while Austria seemed leaderless, weak, and impoverished. Other considerations Frederick put aside; the fact that he had solemnly sworn to recognize Maria Theresa’s title to all the Hapsburg dominions did not restrain him. Later, in his Histoire de Mon Temps, he candidly admitted that “ambition, the opportunity for gain, the desire to establish my reputation—these were decisive and thus war became certain.” He chose Silesia because it was next door and because its agricultural and industrial riches and largely Protestant population would constitute a substantial reinforcement to his small kingdom.

On December 16, in an icy, drenching rain, Frederick led thirty-two thousand soldiers across the Silesian frontier. He met practically no resistance; the campaign was more an occupation than an invasion. By the end of January, Frederick was back in Berlin. But in making his prewar calculations, the young king lacked one important piece of information: he had not known the character of the woman he had made his enemy. Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary, possessed a deceptive, doll-like beauty, with blue eyes and golden hair. Under stress, she managed to appear unusually calm, which led some observers to conclude that she was stupid. They were mistaken. She possessed intelligence, courage, and tenacity. When Frederick attacked and seized Silesia, everyone in Vienna was paralyzed—except Maria Theresa. Although in an advanced state of pregnancy, she reacted with the energy of the enraged. She raised money, mobilized troops, and inspired her subjects, meanwhile giving birth to the future emperor Joseph II. Frederick was surprised by this inexperienced young woman’s stubborn refusal to surrender the province he had stolen from her. He was even more surprised when in April an Austrian army crossed the Bohemian mountains and reentered Silesia. The Prussians defeated the Austrians again, and, in the temporary peace that followed, Frederick kept Silesia, with its fourteen thousand miles of productive farmland, its rich vein of coal mines, its prosperous towns, and a population of 1,500,000, most of them German Protestants. Added to the number of subjects Frederick had inherited from his father, Prussia now grew to a population of four million. But these spoils came at a cost. Maria Theresa regarded her Hapsburg inheritance as a sacred trust. What Frederick’s aggressive war created was her lifelong hatred of him and a Prussian-Austrian antagonism that lasted a century.

Despite his victory in Silesia, Frederick was in a dangerous position. Prussia remained a small country, her territories continued to be fragmented, and her growing strength was making her powerful neighbors uneasy. Two great empires, each larger and potentially stronger than Prussia, were potential enemies. One was Austria under an embittered Maria Theresa. The other was Russia, the immense, sprawling empire that lay on his northern and eastern flank, ruled by the newly crowned Empress Elizabeth. In this situation, nothing was of greater importance to Frederick than the friendship, or at least the neutrality, of Russia. He remembered that on his deathbed his father had passed along a cautionary maxim: that there would always be more to lose than to gain by going to war with Russia. And at this point, Frederick could not be sure what Empress Elizabeth would do.

Immediately after taking the throne, the empress had placed at the head of her political affairs a man who hated Prussia, her new vice-chancellor, Count Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Bestuzhev’s lifelong ambition was to create an alliance linking Russia to the sea powers, England and Holland, and to the central European land powers, Austria and Saxony-Poland. Aware of Bestuzhev’s views, Frederick believed that only the vice-chancellor stood in the way of a diplomatic arrangement between himself and the empress. It seemed imperative, therefore, that this obstacle be removed.

Some of these diplomatic tangles, Frederick calculated, might be smoothed if he involved himself in the Russian empress’s search for a bride for her fifteen-year-old nephew and heir. Over a year before, the Prussian ambassador in St. Petersburg had reported that Bestuzhev was pressing Elizabeth to choose a daughter of Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland. Such a marriage, if it took place, could become a critical element in the vice-chancellor’s policy of building his alliance against Prussia. Frederick was determined to prevent this Saxon marriage. To do this, he needed a German princess of some reasonably distinguished ducal house. Empress Elizabeth’s choice of Sophia, the convenient little pawn from Anhalt-Zerbst, suited Frederick admirably.

By New Year’s Day, 1744, the timing of these negotiations had become critical. The emphasis on speed and secrecy in Brümmer’s first letter to Johanna, reiterated by Frederick’s letter, arose from the fact that Bestuzhev was continuing to press the empress on behalf of the Polish-Saxon Marianne. Now that Elizabeth’s choice of Sophia had been made, both she and Frederick wanted the two Holstein princesses to reach St. Petersburg as soon as possible. For Frederick, it was essential that the empress not have time to change her mind.

Frederick II was anxious to see the little princess from Zerbst in order to judge for himself how she might be received in St. Petersburg. On arriving in Berlin, however, Johanna, either because she feared that Sophia might fail to measure up to the king’s expectations or because she simply could not imagine that Frederick’s interest would be more in her daughter than in herself, rushed immediately to present herself at court—alone. When Frederick asked about Sophia, Johanna said that her daughter was ill. The next day she offered the same excuse; pressed, she said that her daughter could not be presented at court because she had brought no court dress. Losing patience, Frederick ordered that a gown belonging to one of his sisters be provided and that Sophia come immediately.

When at last Sophia appeared before him, Frederick saw a girl neither plain nor beautiful, wearing a gown that did not fit, adorned with no jewelry, her hair unpowdered. Sophia’s shyness turned to surprise when she learned that she—but neither her mother nor her father—was to sit at the king’s table. Surprise turned into astonishment when she found herself actually sitting next to the monarch himself. Frederick made an effort to put the nervous girl at ease. He spoke to her, she wrote later, about “opera, plays, poetry, dancing and I don’t know what, but anyway a thousand things that one usually does not talk about to entertain a girl of fourteen.” Gradually gaining confidence, Sophia managed to answer intelligently and, she proudly said later, “the entire company stared in amazement to see the king engaged in conversation with a child.” Frederick was pleased with her; when he asked her to pass a dish of jam to another guest, he smiled and said to this person, “Accept this gift from the hand of the Loves and Graces.” For Sophia, the evening was a triumph. And Frederick was not indulging his young dinner partner; to Empress Elizabeth he wrote, “The little princess of Zerbst combines the gaiety and spontaneity natural to her age with intelligence and wit surprising in one so young.” Sophia was then only a political pawn, but one day, he knew, she might play a greater role. She was fourteen and he was thirty-two, and this was the first and only meeting of these two remarkable monarchs. Both would eventually be accorded the title “the Great.” And between them, for decades, they would dominate the history of central and eastern Europe.

Despite the public attention Frederick paid to Sophia, the king’s private business was with her mother. It was Frederick’s plan that in St. Petersburg Johanna should become an unofficial Prussian diplomatic agent. Thus, quite apart from the long-term advantage of marrying Sophia to the heir to the Russian throne, Johanna, being close to the Russian empress, would be able to exercise an influence on Prussia’s behalf. He explained to her about Bestuzhev and his policies. He emphasized that as a sworn enemy of Prussia, the vice-chancellor would do everything in his power to prevent Sophia’s marriage. If for no other reason than this, the king insisted, it was in Johanna’s interest to do everything she could to undermine Bestuzhev’s position.

It was not difficult for Frederick to fire Johanna’s enthusiasm. The secret mission entrusted to her delighted her. She was no longer traveling to Russia as a secondary personage, her daughter’s chaperone, but as the central figure of a great diplomatic enterprise: the toppling of an imperial chancellor. Carried away, Johanna lost her bearings. She forgot her oft-proclaimed gratitude and devotion to Elizabeth; forgot the advice of her earnest, provincial husband that she take no part in politics; and forgot that the real purpose of her journey was to escort her daughter to Russia.

On Friday, January 16, Sophia left Berlin with her mother and father in a little procession of four coaches. In accordance with Brümmer’s instructions, the small group going to Russia was limited in number: the two princesses, one officer, a lady-in-waiting, two maids, a valet, and a cook. As arranged, Johanna was traveling under the assumed name Countess Reinbeck. Fifty miles east of Berlin, at Schwest on the Oder River, Prince Christian Augustus said goodbye to his daughter. Both wept on parting; they were not aware that they would never see each other again. Sophia’s feelings about her father, although formally expressed, shine through a letter she wrote two weeks later from Königsberg. She makes a promise that she knows will please him: that she will try to fulfill his wish that she remain a Lutheran.

My Lord: I beg you to assure yourself that your advice and exhortation will remain forever engraved on my heart, as the seeds of the holy faith will in my soul, to which I pray God to lend all the strength it will need to sustain me through the temptations to which I expect to be exposed.… I hope to have the consolation of being worthy of it, and likewise of continuing to receive good news of my dear Papa, and I am, as long as I live, and in an inviolable respect, my lord, your Highness’s most humble, most obedient, and faithful daughter and servant, Sophia.

Traveling toward an unknown country, propelled by an empress’s sentimentality, a mother’s ambition, and the intrigues of the king of Prussia, an adolescent girl was launched on a great adventure. And once the sadness of parting with her father had passed, Sophia was filled with excitement. She had no fear of the long journey or the complications of marrying a boy whom she had met only briefly four years before. If her future husband was considered ignorant and willful, if his health was delicate, if he was miserable in Russia, none of this mattered to Sophia. Peter Ulrich was not the reason she was traveling to Russia. The reason was Russia itself and proximity to the throne of Peter the Great.

In summer, the road from Berlin to St. Petersburg was so primitive that most travelers chose to go by sea; in winter, no one used the road except diplomatic and postal couriers on urgent errands. Johanna, spurred by the empress’s demand for haste, had no choice. Although it was already mid-January, no snow had fallen, and sledges designed to glide across a packed surface could not be used. Instead, the travelers lumbered along day after day in heavy carriages, lurching and jolting over frozen ruts while freezing wind sweeping down from the Baltic whistled through cracks in the floor and sides. Inside one carriage, mother and daughter huddled together, muffled in heavy coats, with wool masks pulled over their cheeks and noses. Often, Sophia’s feet were so numbed by cold that she had to be carried from the carriage when they stopped to rest.

Frederick had instructed that everything possible be done to ease the journey of “Countess Reinbeck” and her daughter, and in the Germanic towns of Danzig and Königsberg, his orders produced considerable comfort. After a day of creaking wheels and whips cracking on the horses’ backs, the travelers were met with warm rooms, pitchers of hot chocolate, and suppers of roasted fowl. Farther east along the frozen road, they found only crude postal stations, each with a single giant stove in its central common room. “The bedchambers were unheated and icy,” Johanna reported to her husband, “and we had to take refuge in the postmaster’s own room which was little different from a pigsty.… He, his wife, the watchdog, and a few children, all lay on top of each other like cabbages and turnips.… I had a bench brought for myself and lay down in the middle of the room.” Where Sophia slept, Johanna did not report.

In fact, Sophia, healthy and curious, saw everything as part of her great adventure. While passing through Courland (now in Latvia), Sophia watched the giant comet of 1744 blaze across the dark night sky. “I had never seen anything so grand,” she wrote in her Memoirs. “It seemed very close to earth.” During one part of the journey, she made herself sick. “In these last days I had a little indigestion because I had drunk all the beer I could find,” she wrote her father. “Dear mama has put a stop to that and I am well again.”

The cold grew worse but still it did not snow. From dawn to darkness, they rattled over the frozen ruts. Beyond Memel, there were no more postal stops, and relays of horses had to be hired from peasants. On February 6, they reached Mitau, on the frontier between Polish Lithuania and the Russian empire. Here, they were greeted by a Russian colonel, the commander of the frontier garrison. Farther down the road, they were met by Prince Semyon Naryshkin, a court chamberlain and the former Russian ambassador to London, who welcomed them officially in the name of the empress. He handed Johanna a letter from Brümmer, who reminded her not to forget, when she was presented to the empress, to show “extraordinary respect” by kissing the sovereign’s hand. On the bank of the frozen Dvina River across from the city of Riga, the city’s vice-governor and a civic delegation awaited them, along with a handsome state coach for the travelers’ use. Inside, reported Johanna, “I found ready to wrap us two splendid sables covered with gold brocade … two collars of the same fur, and a coverlet of another fur, quite as beautiful.” Mother and daughter then rode across the ice into the city while the guns of the fortress roared in salute; this was the moment at which the unknown Countess Reinbeck was transformed into Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst, mother of the wife-to-be of the future emperor of Russia.

In Riga, the travelers moved their calendar back eleven days because Russia used the Julian calendar, which followed eleven days behind the Gregorian calendar employed in western Europe. In Riga, too, the snow finally began to fall. On January 29 (February 9 in Berlin and Zerbst), the two princesses left Riga for St. Petersburg. They traveled now in a magnificent imperial sledge—actually a wooden hut on runners, pulled by ten horses—hung inside with scarlet draperies trimmed with gold and silver braid and so roomy that it was possible for passengers to completely stretch out on quilted feather beds with silk and satin cushions. In this comfortable vehicle, with a squadron of cavalry galloping alongside, they proceeded to St. Petersburg. They reached the Winter Palace at noon on February 3. Their approach was signaled by the thunder of the guns of the Peter and Paul Fortress facing the icebound Neva River. Outside the palace, a guard of honor presented arms; inside, a crowd of people in bright-colored uniforms and silks and velvet smiled and bowed.

Empress Elizabeth was not there; she had gone ahead to Moscow two weeks earlier, but many in the court and diplomatic corps remained behind, and Elizabeth had commanded that the visitors be given an imperial welcome. Johanna wrote to her husband:

Here everything goes on in such magnificent and respectful style that it seemed to me … as if it all were only a dream.… I dine alone with the ladies and gentlemen whom Her Imperial Majesty has given me; I am served like a queen.… When I go in to dinner, the trumpets inside the house, and the drums of the guard outside sound a salute.… It does not seem real that all this can happen to poor me, for whom at only a few places a drum was ever stirred.

It was not all for “poor me,” of course, but while her mother draped herself in these honors, Sophia stood by and watched. The truth was that she was more interested in the antics of fourteen elephants, presented to the empress by the Shah of Persia, performing tricks in the Winter Palace courtyard.

To Frederick in Berlin, Johanna wrote in a different tone, presenting herself as his dutiful subject, working on his behalf. While the German princesses were being fitted with Russian wardrobes before proceeding to Moscow, Johanna had conversations with the two men in Russia whom Frederick had assigned to guide her. One was his own ambassador, Baron Mardefeld, the other the French minister, the Marquis de La Chétardie. The ambassadors reiterated that Vice-Chancellor Bestuzhev was fiercely opposed to the choice of Sophia as the bride of the heir. For this reason, they emphasized, he must be removed, and they counted on her assistance. Meanwhile, to put herself on the most amiable possible terms with the empress, they urged that she and her daughter hurry to Moscow in time to celebrate the new grand duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on February 10.

Guided by this advice, the two travelers left for Moscow on the night of February 5 in a cavalcade of thirty sledges. This time, they traveled smoothly and swiftly over four hundred miles of hard-packed snow on the best-maintained road in Russia, the winter highway used by the empress. When they stopped to change horses, village people stared and told each other, “It is the bride of the grand duke.”

At four o’clock on the fourth day—it was the afternoon of February 9, 1744—the cavalcade reached a rest house forty-five miles from Moscow. There they found a message from the empress requesting that they delay their entrance into Moscow until after dark. While waiting, they drank fish soup and coffee and dressed for their presentation to the monarch; Sophia put on a rose-colored silk gown trimmed with silver. Meanwhile, to increase the speed of their sledge, sixteen fresh horses replaced the relays of ten that had brought them this far. Back in their sledge, they hurtled forward, reaching the walls of Moscow before eight. The city was dark until they reached the Golovin Palace, whose courtyard was lit by flaring torches. The journey was over. Now, at the foot of a wide staircase in the entrance hall, stood Otto Brümmer, the writer of the empress’s summons, to welcome them. They had only a little time to speak, to remove their furs and smooth their gowns. Within a few minutes, fourteen-year-old Sophia would stand before the empress Elizabeth and her nephew, Grand Duke Peter, the two people who, for the next eighteen years, would dominate her life.

4

Empress Elizabeth

ELIZABETH HAD A FLAIR for the dramatic. On December 18, 1709, her father, Peter the Great, was just setting out through snowy streets of Moscow at the head of a parade celebrating his astonishing victory at Poltava the previous summer over his formidable enemy Charles XII of Sweden. Behind the tsar marched the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard, followed by other Russian soldiers dragging three hundred captured Swedish battle flags through the snow, a file of defeated Swedish generals, and finally, by a long column of more than seventeen thousand Swedish prisoners, the remnants of the formerly invincible army that had invaded Russia two years before.

Suddenly, an officer rode up to the tsar and delivered a message. Peter’s hand went up. The parade halted. The tsar spoke a few words, then galloped away. Soon after, Peter reined his frothing horse before the great wooden Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow and burst through the door. In a room, he found his wife just emerging from childbirth. Beside her in the bed lay an infant baby girl. Her name was to be Elizabeth and, thirty-two years later, she would become empress of Russia.

Elizabeth was the fifth child born to Peter and the peasant who became his wife—the fifth of twelve, six boys and six girls, only two of whom lived beyond the age of seven. The other survivor was Elizabeth’s sister Anne, one year older. As far as the world knew, Elizabeth and Anne were both illegitimate; their father said that he had “not found the time” to publicly marry her mother, the buxom Livonian peasant Martha Skavronskya, renamed Catherine. In fact, in November 1707, Peter had married Catherine in private, but the secret was kept for reasons of state. Peter had already been married as a very young man, and his first wife, Eudoxia, to whom he was grievously ill-suited, had been divorced and placed in a convent. In 1707, with the Swedish army on the march, many traditional Russians would have found it shocking for the tsar to choose that moment to marry an illiterate foreign peasant. Five years later, with the victory at Poltava accomplished, Peter felt differently. On February 9, 1712, he married Catherine again, this time with public fanfare. At the second wedding, the two little girls, Anne and Elizabeth, then four and two, wearing jewels in their hair, served as their mother’s bridesmaids.

Peter always said that he “loved both his girls like his own soul.” On January 28, 1722, when he declared thirteen-year-old Elizabeth to be of age, she was fair-haired, blue-eyed, brimming with energy and health. She delighted everyone with her laughter and high spirits; this in contrast to her more sedate older sister, Anne, whom she worshipped. Both Anne and Elizabeth received the education of European princesses: languages, manners, and dancing. They learned French as well as Russian, and Anne, the better pupil, also learned some Italian and Swedish. Many years later, the empress Elizabeth recalled the keen interest her father had taken in his daughters’ education. He came frequently to their rooms to see them and often asked what they had learned in the course of the day. When he was satisfied, he praised them, kissed them, and sometimes gave each a present. Elizabeth also remembered how greatly Peter regretted the neglect of his own formal education. “My father often repeated,” she said, “that he would have given one of his fingers if his education had not been neglected. Not a day passed in which he did not feel this deficiency.”

When she reached fifteen, Elizabeth was not as tall and stately as her sister Anne, yet there were many who preferred the radiance of the lively blonde to the grace and majesty of the statuesque brunette. The Duke of Liria, the Spanish ambassador, described Elizabeth in superlatives: “She is a beauty the like of which I have never seen. An amazing complexion, glowing eyes, a perfect mouth, a throat and bosom of rare whiteness. She is tall and her temperament is lively. She is always with one foot in the air. One senses in her a great deal of intelligence and affability, but also a certain ambition.” The Saxon minister, Lefort, praised her large and brilliant blue eyes and he found irresistible her high spirits and her lighthearted sense of fun.

At fifteen, she was considered ready for marriage. From the time of Peter the Great’s visit to Paris in 1717, the great tsar had hoped to marry Elizabeth to Louis XV, who was two months younger than she. Elizabeth had been schooled with this marriage in mind. She was taught the French language and court manners along with French history and literature. Campredon, the French ambassador to St. Petersburg, wholeheartedly endorsed the tsar’s plan: “There is nothing but what is agreeable in the person of the Princess Elizabeth,” he wrote to Paris. “It may be said that she is a beauty in her figure, her complexion, her eyes and her hands. Her defects, if she has any, are on the side of education and manners, but I am assured that she is so intelligent that it will be easy to rectify what is lacking by the care of some skillful and experienced person who should be placed near her if the affair should be concluded.” Yet despite this recommendation and the girl’s manifest charms, at Versailles her credentials were tarnished: her mother was a peasant, and the daughter may have been born out of wedlock. France did not want a bastard on or near the throne.

Peter’s hope for Elizabeth was thwarted, but one of his two daughters was to marry. In 1721, when Elizabeth was not quite twelve and Anne was thirteen, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, the only nephew of Peter the Great’s legendary adversary Charles XII of Sweden, had come to St. Petersburg. When King Charles had died, the duke had been displaced in Stockholm as heir to his dead uncle’s throne.

In Russia, Peter welcomed the young man with a pension and a place of honor. To further advance his own cause, the duke began to pay court to Elizabeth’s sister Anne. Four years later, when Anne was seventeen—and despite Anne’s lack of enthusiasm for this suitor—the couple were betrothed in a service in which the emperor himself took rings from each partner and exchanged them with the other. Then, suddenly, on January 25, 1725, Peter the Great, fifty-two years old, died. Anne’s wedding was postponed while her mother assumed the throne as Empress Catherine I. On May 21, four months after her father’s death, Anna married Charles Frederick. Her fifteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, was her bridesmaid.

The death of Peter the Great and the marriage of his daughter Anne plunged the already complicated Russian succession into greater confusion. In a decree in February 1722, Peter had denounced as a dangerous practice, unfounded in scripture, the rule of male primogeniture, the ancient, time-honored sequence by which the grand dukes of Muscovy and later the Russian tsars had passed down the throne from father to eldest son. Henceforth, Peter declared, every reigning sovereign would have the power to designate his or her successor. Following his proclamation, Peter placed a crown on Catherine’s head and declared her empress.

Her father’s early death profoundly affected Elizabeth’s future. The prospect of a brilliant match for Elizabeth became remote. Her mother still hoped for a French marriage, but Louis XV had married a Polish princess. At this point in St. Petersburg, Elizabeth’s new brother-in-law, Duke Charles Frederick of Holstein, began praising the merits of his twenty-year-old cousin, Prince Charles Augustus of Holstein (who happened to be a brother of Princess Johanna of Anhalt-Zerbst). Catherine I, who was fond of her son-in-law, agreed to invite this second young Holstein nobleman to Russia.

Charles Augustus reached St. Petersburg on October 16, 1726, and made a favorable impression. Elizabeth saw him as the kinsman of her adored older sister’s husband, which made it easy for her to fall in love. The engagement announcement had been set for January 6, 1727, when Empress Catherine I was stricken by a series of chills and fevers. The ceremony was postponed until she recovered. The empress did not recover; instead, she grew worse, and in April, after reigning only twenty-seven months, she died. In May, only a month after her mother’s death, Elizabeth decided to go ahead with her marriage. Then, on May 27, on the eve of her engagement announcement, her prospective husband, Charles Augustus, was stricken; several hours later, the doctors diagnosed smallpox; four days later, he, too, was dead. Elizabeth, her happiness shattered at seventeen, cherished his memory for the rest of her life—although as her hopes for a conventional marriage slipped away, her sadness did not prevent her from seeking consolation with other men.

When Catherine I died, the throne passed to Peter the Great’s eleven-year-old grandson, who became Emperor Peter II. In July 1727, soon after Catherine’s death, the Duke of Holstein decided that he had been in Russia long enough. Having spent his childhood in Sweden and six years of his young manhood in Russia, the hereditary duke was belatedly accepted as the ruler of his German duchy. He and his wife, Anne, departed for Kiel, the capital of Holstein, with a generous Russian pension.

Left behind, Elizabeth was plunged into grief. Within six months, her mother, her future husband, and her beloved sister had all abandoned her. Although, by her mother’s will, she now was next in line to the throne after Peter II, she posed no political threat to the youthful tsar. Indeed, she turned to him for friendship, and soon she and her nephew, a handsome, physically robust boy, tall for his age, became companions. Peter enjoyed his aunt’s beauty and bubbling high spirits and liked having her nearby. In March 1728, when the court moved to Moscow, Elizabeth accompanied him. She shared the young emperor’s passion for hunting, and together they galloped through the hills of the Moscow countryside. In summer, they went boating together; in winter, sledging and tobogganing. When Peter was not there, Elizabeth sought other male companions. She confessed that she was “content only when she was in love,” and there was talk that she had been generous in giving pleasure to the young emperor himself.

To the world, she might seem madcap, but despite her frivolity, there was another side to Elizabeth. She was a serious religious believer, and her moods of precipitous pleasure-seeking were followed by extended retreats into prayer. When in a mood of piety, she would spend hours on her knees in churches and convents. Then life would reach out for her again in the form of some laughing Guards officer. She was endowed with her father’s ardent impetuosity and never hesitated to gratify her desires; before she was twenty, there were reports that she had given herself to six young men. She was unashamed; she told herself that she had been made beautiful for a reason and that fate had robbed her of the only man she had ever really loved.

She remained indifferent to power and responsibility. The friends who urged her to take more interest in her future were turned away. Then, there was a moment when the throne itself seemed there for the taking. On the night of January 11, 1730, fourteen-year-old Peter II, dangerously ill, died of smallpox. Elizabeth, then twenty, was asleep nearby. Her French physician, Armand Lestocq, burst into her bedroom, saying that if she arose, presented herself to the Guards, showed herself to the people, hurried to the Senate, and proclaimed herself empress, she could not fail. Elizabeth sent him away and went back to sleep. By morning, the opportunity had evaporated. The Imperial Council had elected her thirty-six-year-old cousin, Anne of Courland, as empress. Elizabeth’s failure to act was based partly on her apprehension that if she moved and failed, there was the chance of disgrace, even imprisonment. The stronger reason was that she was not ready. She did not want power and protocol; she preferred freedom. She never regretted that night’s decision. Later, she said, “I was too young then. I am very glad that I did not assert my right to the throne earlier; I was too young and my people would never have borne with me.”

The council had pushed Anne of Courland forward that night because it believed that Anne would prove a weaker, more docile monarch than the daughter of Peter the Great. Anne, who had left Russia twenty years before as a seventeen-year-old widow and who had remained unmarried and had no children, was the daughter of Peter’s gentle, weak-minded half-brother and co-tsar, Ivan V. Peter had been fond of Ivan, and when his hapless brother died, Peter swore to take care of his wife and her three young daughters. Peter kept his word. In 1710, after his victory at Poltava, he arranged the marriage of his half-niece, seventeen-year-old Anne, to nineteen-year-old Frederick William, Duke of Courland. The marriage, however, was brief. Peter himself arranged a gargantuan wedding feast at which the new bridegroom drank himself into a stupor. On leaving Russia a few days later, he developed colic, went into paroxysms, and died on the road. His young widow begged to be allowed to remain with her mother in St. Petersburg, but Peter insisted that she take up her position in Courland. She obeyed and, supported by Russian money and military power, became the ruler of the duchy. Twenty years later, she still was there, governing with the aid of her German secretary and lover, Count Ernst Johann Biron. When the Imperial Council of Russia offered her the throne, the offer was hedged with many conditions: she was not to marry or appoint her successor, and the council was to retain approval over war and peace, levying taxes, spending money, granting estates, and the appointment of all officers over the rank of colonel. Anne accepted these conditions and was crowned in Moscow in the spring of 1730. Then, with the support of the Guards regiments, she tore up the documents she had signed and reestablished the autocracy.

Despite her crown, Anne was always wary of Elizabeth. Concerned that her twenty-one-year-old cousin might constitute a threat, she took Elizabeth aside when the younger woman came to pay her respects. “My sister,” Anne said, “we have very few princesses of the Imperial House remaining and it therefore behooves us to live together in the strictest union and harmony, whereto I mean to contribute with all my power.” Elizabeth’s cheerful, open reply partially convinced the empress that her own fears were exaggerated.

For eleven years, from the age of twenty to the age of thirty-one, Elizabeth lived under the rule of Empress Anne. At first, she was expected to attend court on formal occasions and sit demurely near the empress. Elizabeth did her best, but nothing could prevent her outshining her cousin. Not only was she the only living child of Peter the Great, she was also the undisputed belle of the imperial court. Eventually, she wearied of the strain of living at court and retreated to a country estate, where she resumed her independent life, and her behavior and morals were free of court surveillance. A magnificent horsewoman, she often rode dressed as a man; her purpose was to display her legs, which were shapely and could best be admired in male breeches. Elizabeth loved the Russian countryside, with its primeval forests and wide meadowlands. She joined in the lives of the peasants and shared their amusements: dancing and singing, mushrooming in summer, tobogganing and skating in winter, sitting before a fire, eating roasted nuts and butter cakes.

Because she was an unmarried young woman, her private life subject to no rules or authority, she became a subject of court gossip—and, inevitably, of the empress’s attention. Anne was offended by Elizabeth’s frivolity, jealous of her appeal to men, nervous about her popularity, and uncertain of her loyalty. At one point, Anne was so incensed by tales of Elizabeth’s behavior that she threatened to shut her up in a convent. For her part, Elizabeth understood that her status was changing when her yearly income was cut, then cut again. Anne’s hostility, veiled at first, turned to personal meanness. When Elizabeth was infatuated with a young sergeant named Alexis Shubin, the empress banished the young man to Kamchatka, on the Pacific, five thousand miles away. Elizabeth herself was commanded to return immediately to St. Petersburg.

Elizabeth obeyed, taking a house in the capital, where she made a point of getting to know the soldiers in the Guards regiments. The officers who had served under her father and who had known Elizabeth since childhood were delighted to see the last surviving child of their hero. She visited and spent time in their barracks, became familiar with the speech and habits of soldiers as well as officers, flattered them, reminisced with them, lost money to them at cards, stood godmother to many of their children, and soon had dazzled and conquered them. As much as her beauty and generosity, they admired and trusted the fact that she was Russian. No one knew whether, at this stage, she had an ulterior motive, a plan. Empress Anne was on the throne; the idea of dislodging her must have been remote, if it existed at all. Probably the obvious was true: Elizabeth was spontaneous, generous, and hospitable; she loved people and wanted to be surrounded by people who admired her. In any case, she was constantly about in the streets of the capital. And the more she was seen, the more popular she became.

Ironically, this handsome, much-admired young woman now found herself unable to marry. That she was the daughter and a potential heir of Peter the Great should have given her a glittering marital allure. But with Anne of Courland on the throne, Elizabeth faced insurmountable obstacles to any gilded marriage. No royal house in Europe could allow a son to pay her court lest this be interpreted as an unfriendly act toward Empress Anne. A different handicap affected the possibility of marriage to a son of the Russian nobility. The danger here was that by marrying a countryman of lesser rank, a woman who was a potential sovereign could undermine any potential future claim to the throne.

Elizabeth’s reaction was to reject any thought of marriage and choose freedom instead. If she could not have a royal or a noble husband, she would have a soldier of the Guards, a coachman, a handsome lackey. Indeed, a man appeared whom she was to love devotedly and to whom her attachment was to be lifelong. As her father had found happiness with a peasant wife, Elizabeth discovered her own companion of humble origin. One morning she heard a powerful new voice, a deep, rich bass, singing in the choir of the court chapel. The voice, she discovered, belonged to a tall young man with black eyes, black hair, and an appealing smile. He was a son of Ukrainian peasants, born the same year as Elizabeth; his name was Alexis Razumovsky. Elizabeth immediately made him a member of the choir in her private chapel. Soon, he had a room near her apartment.

As a favorite, Razumovsky was ideal for Elizabeth, not only because of his extraordinary good looks but because he was a genuinely decent and simple man, universally liked for his kindliness, good nature, and tact. Untroubled by education, he was wholly lacking in ambition and never interfered in politics. Later, Catherine the Great wrote of Alexis Razumovsky and his younger brother Kyril that she “knew of no other family enjoying the sovereign’s favor to a like degree, who were so much loved, by so many people, as the two brothers.” Elizabeth loved his handsome face, his gentle manner, his magnificent voice. He became her lover, and possibly, after a secret marriage, her morganatic husband; between themselves, courtiers called him “the Emperor of the Night.” Once she was on the throne, Elizabeth made him a count, a prince, and a field marshal. But while his sovereign loaded him with titles, Razumovsky said to her, “Your Majesty may create me a field marshal, but I defy you or anyone to make even a tolerable captain out of me.”

In her mid-twenties, Elizabeth still seemed all froth and exuberance in comparison to the austere, forbidding Empress Anne. In a different sphere, the contrast was more striking: Anne was surrounded by Germans; Elizabeth was heart and soul a Russian, a lover of the language, the people, the customs. Although there remained no external sign that she was eager to assert her claim to the throne, beneath her outer calm, some thought they saw something else. “In public, she has an unaffected gaiety, and a certain air of giddiness that seems to possess her whole mind,” said the wife of the British ambassador. “But in private I have heard her talk with such a strain of good sense and steady reasoning that I am persuaded the other behavior is a feint.”

Another shadow fell across Elizabeth’s future when Empress Anne, a childless widow, brought to St. Petersburg her German niece, the daughter of her sister, Catherine of Mecklenburg, and converted her to Orthodoxy under the name Anna Leopoldovna. Next, the empress proposed that Anna Leopoldovna marry the German prince Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Anna Leopoldovna, who was in love with someone else, refused, but Empress Anne insisted, and in the spring of 1738 the engagement was announced. The months before her marriage saw Anna Leopoldovna transformed from a lively, pleasant girl into a plain, silent, unhappy bride-to-be, bitterly resentful of her aunt’s decision. Elizabeth, in contrast, continued to appear confident and charming, and her beauty, if not quite as fresh as a decade before, remained sufficiently striking to irritate the empress.

In July 1739, Anna Leopoldovna married Anthony Ulrich, and on August 24, 1740, she gave birth to a son. Overjoyed, Empress Anne insisted that the boy be named Ivan after her own father. Scarcely a month later, the empress suffered a stroke. She recovered temporarily and, in feverish haste, declared her infant grandnephew to be her heir; the baby’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, would be named regent if the boy came to the throne while still a minor. On October 16, Empress Anna suffered a second stroke. This time her doctors pronounced her condition hopeless, and, at the age of forty-seven, she died. The following day, the empress’s will was read publicly. The two-month-old baby was proclaimed Emperor Ivan VI. Elizabeth, then thirty, and the baby’s parents dutifully swore allegiance to their new sovereign.

Turmoil followed. The infant’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna, swallowed her chagrin at not being awarded the crown herself and assumed the office of regent. She appointed her German husband, Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, commander in chief of the Russian army and then resumed her relationship with her lover, the Saxon ambassador, Count Lynar. Her husband’s humiliation was public; soldiers, visible to all, were posted to bar him from his wife’s apartments whenever her lover was with her.

Elizabeth, Peter the Great’s closest descendant by blood, had now been passed over three times, and still she seemed not to care. She did not challenge the new regent’s authority. Nor, on the other hand, did she alter her own way of life. She was often seen in the streets of St. Petersburg; she walked every day on the parade ground of the Preobrazhensky Guards barracks, close to her palace. Diplomats and foreign capitals hummed with speculation. The British ambassador reported to London that Elizabeth was “extremely obliging and affable, and in consequence much personally beloved and extremely popular. She has also the additional advantage of being the daughter of Peter the Great who, though he was more feared than any former prince of this century, was at the same time more beloved also.… This love certainly descends to his posterity and gives a general bent to the minds of the common people and of the soldiery, too.”

At first, the relationship between Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth was correct. Elizabeth was frequently invited to the Winter Palace, but she soon became more reserved and went only for ceremonies she could not avoid. By February 1741, the regent had given orders that Elizabeth be watched; these constraints did not escape the notice of the court and the diplomatic community. During the summer of 1741, the relationship worsened. Anna Leopoldovna now surrounded herself only with foreigners. Count Lynar continually pressed her to order Elizabeth’s arrest. The restrictions placed on Elizabeth became more onerous. In July, her income was reduced. In early autumn, she heard rumors that the regent was planning to insist that she put in writing a renunciation of her claim to the throne. A tale circulated that Anna Leopoldovna was about to force her to become a nun and enter a convent. On the morning of November 24, Dr. Lestocq came into Elizabeth’s bedroom, awakened her, and handed her a paper. On one side, he had drawn a picture of her as empress, seated on the throne; on the other, he had depicted her dressed as a nun, and behind her he had drawn a rack and a gibbet. “Madam,” he said, “you must choose finally now whether to be empress or to be relegated to a convent and see your servants perish under torture.” Elizabeth decided to act. At midnight, she set off for the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards. There, she said, “You know whose daughter I am. Follow me!”

“We are ready,” shouted the soldiers. “We will kill them all.”

“No,” said Elizabeth, “no Russian blood is to be spilled.” Followed by three hundred men, she made her way through a bitterly cold night to the Winter Palace. Walking past the unprotesting palace guards, she led the way to Anna Leopoldovna’s bedroom, where she touched the sleeping regent on the shoulder and said, “Little sister, it is time to rise.” Realizing that all was lost, Anna Leopoldovna begged for mercy for herself and her son. Elizabeth assured her that no harm would come to any member of the Brunswick family. To the nation she announced that she had ascended her father’s throne and that the usurpers had been apprehended and would be charged with having deprived her of her hereditary rights. On November 25, 1741, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Elizabeth reentered the Winter Palace. At thirty-two, the daughter of Peter the Great was the empress of Russia.

Her first act as sovereign was to shower gratitude on those who had supported her during the long years of waiting. Promotions, titles, jewels, and other rewards poured out in a rich stream. Each of the Preobrazhensky Guardsmen who had marched with her to the Winter Palace was promoted. Lestocq was made a privy councillor and physician in chief to the sovereign, besides receiving a portrait of the empress set in diamonds and a handsome annuity. Razumovsky became a count, a court chamberlain, and the Grand Master of the Hunt. Other privy councillors were appointed, other counts created, and more jewel-encrusted portraits, snuff boxes, and rings placed in eager hands.

But Elizabeth’s most pressing problem could not be resolved with largesse. A living tsar, Ivan VI, remained in St. Petersburg. He had inherited the throne at the age of two months, he was dethroned at fifteen months, he did not know he was emperor, but he had been anointed, his likeness had been scattered through the country on coins, and prayers had been offered for him in all the churches of Russia. From the beginning, Ivan haunted Elizabeth. She had originally intended to send him abroad with his parents, and, for this reason, she packed the entire Brunswick family off to Riga as a first stage of their journey west. Once they arrived in Riga, however, she had a second thought: perhaps it would be safer to keep her small, dangerous prisoner securely under guard in her own country. The child was removed from his parents and classified as a secret state prisoner, a status he retained for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. He was moved from one prison to another; even then, Elizabeth could not know when an attempt to liberate him and restore him to the throne might be made. Almost immediately, a solution suggested itself: if Ivan was to live and still be rendered permanently harmless, a new heir to the throne must be found, a successor to Elizabeth who would anchor the future of her dynasty and be recognized by the Russian nation and the world. Such an heir, Elizabeth knew by then, would never come from her own body. She had no acknowledged husband; it was late now, and no one suitable would ever be found. Furthermore, in spite of her many years as a carefree voluptuary, she had never known pregnancy. The heir she must have, therefore, must be the child of another woman. And there was such a child: the son of her beloved sister, Anne; the grandson of her revered father, Peter the Great. The heir whom she would bring to Russia, nurture, and proclaim was a fourteen-year-old boy living in Holstein.

5

The Making of a Grand Duke

THERE WAS NO ONE Elizabeth loved better than her sister Anne. Just as the younger of the two sisters had inspired rhapsodic descriptions of her beauty and high spirits, the elder also found euphoric admirers. “I don’t believe there is a princess in Europe at the present time who could vie with Princess Anne in majestic beauty,” wrote Baron Mardefeld, Prussian minister in St. Petersburg. “She is a brunette, but of a vividly white and quite un-artificial complexion. Her features are so perfectly beautiful that an accomplished artist, judging them by the severest classical standards, could desire nothing more. Even when she is silent, one can read the amiability and magnanimity of her character in her large and beautiful eyes. Her behavior is without affectation, she is always the same and serious rather than gay. From her youth up she has striven to cultivate her mind.… She speaks French and German perfectly.”

Anne’s life was shorter than Elizabeth’s. She was married at seventeen to Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein, a young man of exalted prospects and moderate abilities. He was the only son of Hedwig Sophia, the sister of the legendary King Charles XII of Sweden, and Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein, who died fighting in King Charles’s army. Educated in Sweden, he had good reason to believe that his childless uncle, Charles XII, intended him to be his heir. When King Charles died and Frederick, Prince of Hesse, was given the Swedish throne, the rejected nineteen-year-old Charles Frederick retreated to St. Petersburg to seek the protection of Peter the Great. The tsar received the duke, who, being a pretender to the Swedish crown, could serve as a useful political weapon.

The visiting duke, whose ambition exceeded his abilities, had not been at the Russian court long before he began intriguing for the hand of one of the emperor’s daughters. Peter opposed any such marriage, but his wife, Catherine, liked the duke and persuaded her daughter Anne that he would be a good match. The princess yielded to her mother and an engagement was agreed upon.

Suddenly, in January 1725, Peter the Great fell mortally ill. On his deathbed, he awoke from delirium and cried, “Where’s little Annie. I would see her.” His daughter was summoned, but before she arrived, her father was delirious again, and he never recovered consciousness. The betrothal and marriage were postponed, but only briefly. On May 21, 1725, Anne married the duke.

During her mother’s short reign, Anne and her husband lived in St. Petersburg. When Catherine died in 1727, the duke and his wife left Russia for Holstein. Anne was sorry to leave her sister, Elizabeth, but pleased to find herself pregnant. On February 21, 1728, six months after her arrival in Holstein, she gave birth to a son, who, the following day, was christened in the Lutheran church in Kiel. The baby’s name, Charles Peter Ulrich, proclaimed his illustrious lineage: “Charles” came from his father, but also from his great-uncle, Charles XII; “Peter” from his grandfather, Peter the Great; “Ulrich” from Ulrica, the reigning queen of Sweden.

While Anne was recovering, a ball was given in honor of the new prince. It was February, and although the weather was damp and icy, the happy nineteen-year-old mother insisted on standing at an open window to watch the fireworks that followed the ball. When her ladies protested, she laughed and said, “I am Russian, remember, and my health is used to a ruder climate than this.” She caught a chill, which aggravated a tubercular condition; three months after the birth of her son, she was dead. In her will, she had asked to be buried next to her father, and a Russian frigate arrived to carry her body up the Baltic to St. Petersburg.

When Anne died, Charles Frederick mourned not only the loss of his young wife but also the shutting off of the golden stream flowing to Kiel from the imperial treasury in St. Petersburg. The duke’s expenses were high; he maintained a crowd of servants and gaudily uniformed bodyguards, all justified by the fact that he still considered himself the heir to the crown of Sweden. Preoccupied by these concerns, Charles Frederick took little interest in his infant son. The boy was handed over to nurses and then, until he was seven, to French governesses, who taught him to speak a serviceable French, although he was always more at home in his native German. At seven, Peter began military training, learning to stand erect at guard posts and to strut about with a miniature sword and musket. Soon, he came to love the forms and atmosphere of military drill. Sitting with a tutor, he would leap up from his lessons and run to the window to watch soldiers drilling in the courtyard. He was happiest on the parade ground himself, wearing a soldier’s uniform. But Peter had little endurance. Frequently ill, he had to sit in his room and substitute the lining up and maneuvering of toy soldiers for real parade ground drill. Eventually, his father noticed him. One day when Peter was nine and had reached the rank of sergeant, he was standing guard at the door of a room where the duke was dining with his officers. When the meal began, the hungry boy did nothing but stare at the procession of dishes being carried past him to the table. Then, during the second course, his father rose and brought him to the table, where he solemnly promoted his son to the rank of lieutenant and invited him to sit down among the officers. Years later, in Russia, Peter said that this was “the happiest day of my life.”

Peter received a haphazard education. He mastered Swedish as well as French and learned to translate that language into German. He loved music, although his interest was not encouraged. He delighted in playing the violin but he was never taught to play properly. Instead, he practiced on his own, playing his favorite melodies as best he could, tormenting all within earshot.

As a child, Peter was pulled in many directions. He was the heir, after his father, to the dukedom of Holstein, and on his father’s death, he would also inherit his father’s claim to the throne of Sweden. Through his mother, he was the only surviving male descendant of Peter the Great, and therefore he also remained a potential heir to the Russian throne. But when, on the death of his cousin Tsar Peter II, the Russian Imperial Council ignored the claim of the little Holstein prince, along with the claim of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth, and elected Anne of Courland to the Russian throne, the Holstein court, which had hoped for benefits from little Peter’s Russian connection, reacted bitterly. Thereafter, in Kiel, Russia was ridiculed in the boy’s presence as a nation of barbarians.

This multiplicity of possible futures placed too many demands on Peter. It was almost as if nature had failed him: the child who was the nearest male blood relation of both of the towering adversaries in the Great Northern War—the grandson of the great Peter, that dynamo of human energy, and the grandnephew of the invincible Charles, the most brilliant soldier of his day—was a puny, sickly boy with protruding eyes, a weak chin, and little energy. The life he was forced to lead, the immense legacy he was forced to carry, were too great a burden. In any subordinate position, he would have performed his duty unflinchingly. Command of a regiment would have delighted him. An empire, even a kingdom, would be too much.

In 1739, when Peter was eleven, his father died and the boy became, in name at least, Duke of Holstein. In addition to the dukedom, his father’s claim to the Swedish crown passed to the son. His uncle, Prince Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, the Lutheran bishop of Eutin, was appointed his guardian. Obviously, the bishop should have devoted particular care to the upbringing of a boy who was the possible heir to two thrones, but Adolphus was good-natured and lazy, and he shirked this duty. The task was delegated to a group of officers and tutors working under the authority of the grand marshal of the ducal court, a former cavalry officer named Otto Brümmer. This man, a rough, choleric martinet, abused his little sovereign without mercy; the young duke’s French tutor observed that Brümmer was “better suited to train a horse than a prince.” Brümmer assaulted his young charge with harsh punishment, mockery, public humiliation, and malnutrition. When, as frequently happened, the young prince performed poorly at his lessons, Brümmer would appear in the dining room and threaten to punish his pupil as soon as the meal was over. The frightened boy, unable to continue eating, would leave the table, vomiting. Thereupon, his master would order that he be given no food the next day. Throughout that day, the hungry child would be compelled to stand by the door at mealtimes with a picture of a donkey hung around his neck, watching his own courtiers eat. Brümmer routinely beat the boy with a stick or a whip and made him kneel for hours on hard, dried peas until his naked knees were red and swollen. The violence which Brümmer constantly inflicted on him produced a pathetic, twisted child. He became fearful, deceitful, antagonistic, boastful, cowardly, duplicitous, and cruel. He made friends only with the lowest of his servants, those whom he was allowed to strike. He tortured pet animals.

Brümmer’s senseless regime, his pleasure in tormenting a child who might one day become king of Sweden or emperor of Russia, has never been explained. If by ill-treatment he hoped to steel the boy’s character, the result was the opposite. Life was made too hard for Peter. His mind rebelled at every effort to pound knowledge or obedience into his head by beating and humiliating him. In all the chapters of Peter’s unhappy life, the worst monster he had to face was Otto Brümmer. The damage inflicted would be revealed in the future.

Just before his thirteenth birthday, Peter’s life changed. On the night of December 6, 1741, his aunt Elizabeth put an end to the reign of little Tsar Ivan VI and to the regency of Ivan’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna. One of the new empress’s first acts on the throne was to summon her nephew, Peter, her last remaining male kinsman, whom she intended to adopt and proclaim her successor. Her command was obeyed, and her nephew was secretly hurried from Kiel to St. Petersburg; Elizabeth neither consulted nor revealed her intention to anyone until she had the boy in safekeeping. Diplomats, obliged to explain her action to their courts, suggested reasons: they cited the threat of Ivan VI; they noted her devotion to her sister Anne. They also mentioned another, less noble motive: self-preservation. With Ivan under guard, Peter was Elizabeth’s only competitor for the throne. If he remained in Holstein and his Russian claim were to be backed by foreign powers, it could be dangerous for her. But if he became a Russian grand duke, living under her eye, it was she who would control his future.

As for Peter himself, Elizabeth’s coup d’état turned the boy’s life upside down. At fourteen, he left the castle in Kiel and his native Holstein, of which he was still nominally the ruler, and, accompanied by Brümmer, his tormentor, traveled to St. Petersburg. His departure from Holstein was sudden and stealthy, almost an abduction; his subjects did not know he was gone until three days after he was across the frontier. Peter reached St. Petersburg at the beginning of January 1742. There, in an emotional reception at the Winter Palace, the empress held out her arms, shed tears, and promised to cherish her sister’s only child as if he were her own.

Elizabeth had never seen Peter before that moment. When she examined him, she saw what Sophia had seen four years before. He was still an odd little figure, short for his age, pale, thin, and gawky. His straggling blond hair was combed straight down to his shoulders. Attempting to show respect, he held his puny body as stiff as a wooden soldier. When spoken to, Peter responded in a squeaking, prepubescent mixture of German and French.

Surprised and disappointed by the appearance of the adolescent standing before her, Elizabeth was even more appalled by his ignorance.

She herself was far from a scholar and even regarded excessive bookishness as injurious to health; she worried that this had caused the premature death of her sister Anne. She assigned Professor Staehlin, of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, an amiable Saxon, to accept chief responsibility for Peter’s education. Introducing Staehlin to the boy, she said, “I see that Your Highness has still a great many pretty things to learn and Monsieur Staehlin here will teach them to you in such a pleasant manner that it will be a mere pastime for you.” Staehlin began examining his new pupil, and it was immediately apparent that the boy was ignorant in almost every branch of knowledge. Staehlin also discovered that while his pupil was astonishingly childish for his age and so fidgety that it was difficult to fix his attention on anything, he nevertheless had a passion for everything relating to soldiers and warfare. On arrival, Elizabeth had made him a lieutenant colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Peter was unimpressed; he sneered at the loose, bottle-green uniforms of the Russian soldiers, so different from the tight-fitting, blue, Germanic uniforms of Holstein and Prussia.

Staehlin adapted as best he could. He made everything as easy as possible. He exposed his pupil to the history of Russia using books filled with maps and pictures, and by showing his pupil collections of old coins and medals borrowed from the art gallery. He gave Peter an idea of the geography of the country he was one day to rule by showing him a huge folio displaying all the fortresses of the empire, from Riga to the Turkish and Chinese frontiers. To broaden his pupil’s horizons, he read news items from diplomatic dispatches and foreign gazettes, using maps or a globe to point out where these events were taking place. He taught geometry and mechanical sciences by making scale models; natural science by strolling with Peter in the palace gardens to point out categories of plants, trees, and flowers; architecture by taking him through the palace to explain how it was designed and built. As the boy was unable to sit quietly and listen while the tutor was talking, most of Peter’s lessons were conducted with the teacher and his pupil walking up and down, side by side. The attempt to teach Peter to dance, a project removed from Staehlin’s responsibility but one particularly close to the empress’s heart, was a spectacular failure. Elizabeth, a consummate dancer, required her nephew to take intensive training in performing quadrilles and minuets. Four times a week, Peter was forced to drop whatever he was doing when the dancing master and a violinist arrived in his room. The result was disaster. Throughout his life, his dancing was comical.

For three years, Staehlin kept at his task. That he had little success was not his fault; the mischief had been done earlier when his student’s spirit and interest in learning had been twisted and broken. To Peter, life seemed an oppressive round of instruction in matters about which he cared nothing. In his journal, Staehlin wrote that his pupil was “utterly frivolous” and “altogether unruly.” Nevertheless, Staehlin was the only person in Peter’s young life who made any attempt to understand the boy and handle him with intelligence and sympathy. And, although Peter learned little, he remained on friendly terms with this tutor for the rest of his life.

During his first year in Russia, Peter’s schooling was affected by his delicate health. In October 1743, Staehlin wrote, “He is extremely weak and has lost the taste for everything that pleased him, even music.” Once on a Saturday, when music was being played in the young duke’s antechamber and a castrato was singing Peter’s favorite air, the boy, lying with his eyes closed said in a barely audible whisper, “Will they stop playing soon?” Elizabeth hurried to his side and burst into tears.

Even when Peter was not ill, other problems afflicted him. He had no friends; indeed, he knew no one his age. And Brümmer, whose real character had not been seen or understood by Elizabeth, was always nearby. The boy’s nerves, weakened by illness, were constantly threatened by Brümmer’s violent behavior. Staehlin reports that one day Brümmer attacked and began to beat the young duke with his fists. When Staehlin intervened, Peter ran to the window and called for help from the guards in the courtyard. Then he fled to his own room and returned with a sword, shouting at Brümmer, “This will be your last piece of insolence. The next time you dare to raise your hand to me I will run you through with this sword.” Nevertheless, the empress allowed Brümmer to stay. Peter realized that he had gained no respite from persecution by coming to Russia. If anything, his situation was worse: however unhappy he might have been with Brümmer in Kiel, at least he was home.

Elizabeth was distressed by her nephew’s failure to make any discernable progress. She was not a patient woman; she wanted favorable results, and her nagging anxiety about the existence of Ivan VI drove her to push Peter and his tutors harder. Why, she asked herself, was her nephew such a difficult, unpromising boy? Surely, soon he would change. Sometimes, attempting to calm her anxiety and convince herself that all was well, Elizabeth showered exaggerated praise on her nephew’s progress. “I cannot express in words the pleasure I feel when I see you employing your time so well,” she would say. But as the months went by and there was no improvement, her hopes were sinking.

Elizabeth’s principal grievance was her nephew’s open dislike of everything Russian. She appointed teachers to instruct him in the Russian language and Orthodox religion and worked tutors and priests overtime to see that he learned. Studying theology two hours a day, he learned to babble bits of Orthodox doctrine, but he despised this new religion and felt nothing but contempt for its bearded priests. Cynically, he told the Austrian and Prussian ambassadors, “One promised priests a great many things that one could not perform.” He approached the Russian language with the same attitude. He was given lessons, but he hated the language and made no effort to speak it grammatically. When he could, he surrounded himself with as many Holstein officials as possible and conversed with them only in German.

Peter’s difficulty ran deeper than dislike and cynicism. It was not merely a matter of acquiring the Russian language; given sufficient time, he might have mastered it. But behind every task his teachers set him loomed the greater obstacle: the prospect of succeeding to the Russian throne; it was against this future that Peter rebelled. He had not the least interest in governing a vast and—as he saw it—primitive, foreign empire. He was homesick for Germany and Holstein. He longed for the simple, straightforward life of the barracks in Kiel, where life required only uniforms and drums, command and obedience. Chosen to be the future ruler of the greatest empire on earth, he remained at heart a little Holstein soldier. His hero was not his own towering Russian grandfather but the idol of every German soldier, Frederick of Prussia.

Nevertheless, the empress eventually had her way. On November 18, 1742, in the court chapel of the Kremlin, Peter Charles Ulrich was solemnly baptized and received into the Orthodox Church under the Russian name of Peter Fedorovich—a Romanov name intended to wipe away the taint of his Lutheran beginnings. Empress Elizabeth then formally proclaimed him heir to the Russian throne, raised him to the rank of Imperial Highness, and granted him the title of grand duke. Peter, speaking in memorized Russian, promised to reject all doctrines contrary to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, whereupon, at the end of the service, the assembled court took the oath of allegiance to him. Throughout the ceremony and at the public audience afterward, he displayed an unmistakable sullenness; foreign ambassadors, noting his mood, said that “as he spoke with his customary petulance, one may conclude he will not be a fanatical believer.” That day, at least, Elizabeth simply refused to see these negative signs. When Peter was confirmed, she wept. Afterward, when the new grand duke returned to his apartment, he found waiting for him a draft for three hundred thousand rubles.

Despite her passionate display of emotion, Elizabeth still did not trust her nephew. To make his Russian commitments irrevocable and cut off all possibility of retreat, she liquidated his claim to the Swedish throne by making it a condition of a Russian-Swedish treaty that her nephew’s Swedish rights be transferred to his former guardian, Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, Bishop of Lübeck. The bishop became heir to the Swedish throne in Peter’s place.

The more obvious it became that Peter was miserable in Russia, the more Elizabeth worried. She had removed from the throne a branch of her family hated for its German connections only to find that the new heir she had chosen was even more German. Every possible Russian influence had been brought to bear on Peter, yet his ideas, tastes, prejudices, and outlook remained stubbornly German. She was bitterly disappointed, but she had to accept him. She could not send him back to Holstein. Peter was her closest living relative; he was newly Orthodox, newly proclaimed the heir, now the future hope of the Romanov dynasty. And when, in October 1743, he became seriously ill—not leaving his bed until mid-November—she realized how very much she needed him.

Indeed, the poor condition of Peter’s health pushed Elizabeth into further action. He was always ailing; suppose he were to die? What then? A solution—the best, perhaps the only, solution—was to find him a wife. He was fifteen, and the presence of the right young wife might not only help him mature but might serve an even greater purpose by providing a new infant heir, a child better equipped than his father to guarantee the succession. Elizabeth decided to follow this path: a wife must be found quickly and an heir begotten. Hence the empress’s haste to choose a bride for Peter; hence the urgent dispatches that Brümmer wrote at her behest to Johanna in Zerbst: Come to Russia! Bring your daughter! Make haste! Make haste! Make haste!

6

Meeting Elizabeth and Peter

WHILE SOPHIA AND HER MOTHER waited, Peter suddenly appeared. “I could wait no longer,” he declared in German with an exaggerated smile. His enthusiasm seemed genuine, however, and both Sophia and her mother were pleased. As he stood before them, nervously fidgeting, Sophia looked carefully at the future husband whom she had seen only once before, as a boy of ten. Now, at fifteen, he was still unusually short and thin, and his features—pale face, wide mouth, sharply receding chin—had not changed greatly since she had seen him five years before. The warmth of his greeting might be explained by the fact that she was a cousin near his own age, someone with whom he could speak German and who had shared, and therefore understood, the background from which he had come. He may have believed that this little cousin would become his ally in resisting the demands that Russia was making on him. Walking back and forth, talking incessantly, he stopped only when Dr. Lestocq arrived to say that the empress was ready to receive them. Peter offered his arm to Johanna, a lady-in-waiting gave hers to Sophia, and they passed through a succession of candlelit halls, filled with people bowing and curtsying. At last, they reached the portal of the imperial apartments, and the double doors were flung open. Before them stood Elizabeth, empress of Russia.

Sophia and her mother were dazzled. Elizabeth was tall, with a full, rounded figure. She had large, brilliant blue eyes, a broad forehead, a full mouth, red lips, white teeth, and a clear, rosy complexion. Her hair, naturally blond, now was dyed a luxuriant black. She was dressed in an immense, hoop-skirted gown of silver trimmed with gold lace, and her hair, neck, and ample bosom were covered with diamonds. The effect of this woman, standing before her in a blaze of silver, gold embroidery, and jewels, was overwhelming. And Sophia still managed to notice and would always remember a particular crowning touch: a black feather standing upright from her hair on one side of her head, then curving to cover part of her face.

Johanna, remembering Brümmer’s advice, kissed Elizabeth’s hand and stammered her thanks for the favors showered on her and her daughter. Elizabeth embraced her and said, “All that I have done for you so far is nothing compared to what I shall do for your family in the future. My own blood is not dearer to me than yours.” When Elizabeth turned to Sophia, the fourteen-year-old bowed from the waist and curtsied. Elizabeth, smiling, noticed the girl’s freshness, intelligence, and discreet, submissive manner. Sophia meanwhile had made her own judgment, and, thirty years later, she wrote, “It was quite impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be astonished by her beauty and the majesty of her bearing.” Here, in this woman covered with jewels and radiating power, she saw the embodiment of what she hoped someday to become.

The next day was Peter’s sixteenth birthday. The empress, appearing in a brown dress embroidered with silver, “her head, neck, and bosom covered with jewels,” presented both mother and daughter with the Order of St. Catherine. Alexis Razumovsky, costumed as Master of the Hunt, bore the ribbons and insignia of the order on a golden plate. As he approached, Sophia passed another judgment: Razumovsky, the official lover, the “Emperor of the Night,” was, in Sophia’s words, “one of the most handsome men I have seen in my life.” Again, Elizabeth was in an excellent humor. Smiling broadly, she beckoned Sophia and Johanna and hung the ribbon of the order around their necks.

The empress’s display of warmth to Johanna and Sophia came from something deeper than her satisfaction that a promising political marriage seemed in the offing. Elizabeth had not had children. Two years before, she had reached out to her sister’s child, Peter, brought him to Russia, and made him her heir. But Peter had not responded to the kind of maternal love she had tried to give. Now she had chosen for him a bride who was the niece of the man she had loved. Alone on her throne, the empress of Russia was hoping to create around herself a family.

Johanna perceived the empress’s welcome as a part of her own political triumph. She found herself at the center of a glittering court, favored by a monarch whose generosity was legendary. Mother and daughter were given their own household, with chamberlains, ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting, and a staff of lesser servants. “We are living like queens,” Johanna wrote to her husband. “Everything is bedecked, inlaid with gold, wonderful. We drive out in marvelous style.”

Johanna’s ambition for herself and her daughter was approaching fruition. As to the private, intimate side of this coming marriage, and the obligation to give her daughter useful advice, the thirty-two-year-old mother had given the matter little thought; after all, no one had cared about her feelings when, years earlier, she had married a man almost twice her age. She knew little about the real character of the future bridegroom; the fact that he was to be an emperor was sufficient. If Johanna had asked herself whether these two adolescents were likely to develop any mutual romantic passion, her honest answer would have been a shrug. In arranged royal marriages, these questions were irrelevant. Johanna knew this; Sophia sensed it. The only figure who still believed in love and hoped that passion as well as politics would bind this youthful relationship was Elizabeth.

Sophia later remembered of Peter that “for the first ten days, he seemed glad to see my mother and me.… In that short space of time I became aware that he cared little for the nation over which he was destined to rule, that he remained a convinced Lutheran, did not like his entourage, and was very childish. I kept silent and listened which helped gain his confidence.”

What did Peter think of Sophia and their approaching betrothal? It is true that on the night of her arrival, he had made a pretty speech. And in the days that followed, he repeatedly expressed his delight at having a relative his own age to whom he could talk freely. But soon her polite interest in him encouraged him to speak freely, too freely. At the first opportunity, he told her that he was really in love with someone else, the daughter of a former lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth’s. He still wanted to marry this girl, he said, but, sadly, her mother had recently been disgraced and exiled to Siberia. Now his aunt, the empress, would not permit a marriage to the daughter. He went on to say that he was now resigned to marrying Sophia “because his aunt wished it.”

Peter, still regarding Sophia more as a playmate than as a future wife, had not meant to hurt her; he was simply, in his way, being honest. “I blushed to hear these confidences,” Sophia wrote in her Memoirs, “and thanked him for his trust in me, but in my heart I was astonished at his imprudence and want of judgment.” If she was wounded by his mindless insensitivity, she did not show this. She had learned to deal with absence of love in her own family, and now she was prepared to deal with it in this new situation. Besides, her father’s parting command had been that she should respect the grand duke as her “master, father and sovereign lord” and seek to win his love “through meekness and docility.”

Sophia was only fourteen, but she was wise and practical. For the moment, she adapted herself to Peter’s ways and accepted her role as a friend and playmate. But there was no trace of love, not even the fumbling version she had experienced with her uncle George.

7

Pneumonia

IT DID NOT TAKE Sophia long to understand two underlying facts about her position in Russia: first, that it was Elizabeth, not Peter, whom she had to please; and, second, that if she wanted to succeed in this new country, she must learn its language and practice its religious faith. Within a week of her arrival in Moscow, her education began. A professor was provided to teach her to read and speak Russian, and a scholarly priest was assigned to instruct her in the doctrines and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church. In contrast to Peter, who had bucked and rebelled against everything his teachers tried to teach him, Sophia was eager to learn.

The more urgent task, in the empress’s thinking, was conversion to Orthodoxy, and the religious figure chosen to teach was specifically equipped to calm the apprehensions of a young Protestant being asked to abandon her Lutheran faith. Simon Todorsky, bishop of Pskov, was a cultivated, broad-minded man who spoke fluent German, having spent four years studying at the University of Halle in Germany. There he had come to believe that what mattered in religion was not the differences between creeds but the inner, fundamental message of Christianity. He counseled Sophia that the Orthodox faith was not so different from the Lutheran and that she would not be betraying her promise to her father if she converted. Impressed, Sophia wrote to her father that she had come to realize that the discrepancy between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy was only that “the external rites are quite different, but the Church here is bound to them by the uncouthness of the people.” Christian Augustus, alarmed at the speed with which his daughter’s Protestantism seemed to be slipping away, wrote back:

Search yourself with care whether you are really in your heart inspired by religious inclination or whether, perhaps, without being aware of it, the marks of favor shown you by the empress … have influenced you in that direction. We human beings often see only what is before our eyes. But God in His infinite justice searches the heart and our secret motives and manifests accordingly to us His mercy.

Sophia, struggling to reconcile the opposing beliefs of two men she respected and honored, had difficulty finding her way. “The change of religion gives the princess infinite pain,” Mardefeld, the Prussian ambassador, wrote to King Frederick. “Her tears flow abundantly.”

While studying with Todorsky, Sophia also flung herself into study of the Russian language. The day was too short for her; she begged that her lessons be prolonged. She began rising from bed at night, taking a book and a candle, and walking barefoot on the cold stone floor, repeating and memorizing Russian words. Not surprisingly, this being Moscow in early March, she caught a cold. At first, Johanna, alarmed that her daughter might be criticized as too susceptible to illness, tried to conceal her sickness. Sophia developed a fever, her teeth began to chatter, she was bathed in sweat—eventually, she fainted. Doctors, summoned belatedly, diagnosed acute pneumonia and demanded that the unconscious patient be bled. Johanna vehemently refused, claiming that excessive bleeding had caused the death of her brother Charles, about to be betrothed to the young Elizabeth, and that she would not permit other doctors to kill her daughter. “There I lay with a high fever between my mother and the doctors, arguing,” Sophia wrote later. “I could not help groaning, for which I was scolded by my mother who expected me to suffer in silence.”

Word that Sophia’s life was in danger reached the empress in retreat at the thirteenth-century Troitsa Monastery, forty miles away. She rushed back to Moscow, hurried to the sickroom, and walked in on an argument still raging between Johanna and the physicians. Elizabeth immediately intervened and commanded that whatever the medical men considered necessary must be done. Berating Johanna for daring to oppose her doctors, she ordered an immediate bloodletting. When Johanna continued to protest, the empress had the girl’s mother evicted from the room. Elizabeth then cradled Sophia’s head while a doctor opened a vein in her foot and took two ounces of blood. From that day on, for the four weeks that followed, Elizabeth nursed Sophia herself. Because the fever persisted, Elizabeth prescribed repeated bleeding—and the fourteen-year-old girl was bled sixteen times in twenty-seven days.

With the patient slipping in and out of consciousness, Elizabeth sat by her bed. When the physicians shook their heads, the empress wept. The childless woman was filled with a kind of maternal love for this young girl whom she scarcely knew and whom she thought she was about to lose. When Sophia awoke, it was in Elizabeth’s arms. Afterward, Sophia always remembered these moments of intimacy. Through all she was to enjoy and endure over the years at Elizabeth’s hands—generosity and kindness, alternating with pettiness and harsh disapproval—Sophia was never to forget the woman who, during these uncertain days, had leaned over her, stroked her hair, and kissed her forehead.

There were some for whom Sophia’s illness was a cause for joy, not grief. The vice-chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev, and those who had favored a Saxon marriage for Peter were jubilant, although Elizabeth quickly dampened their glee by declaring that no matter what happened—even if she had the misfortune to lose Sophia—“the devil would take her before she would ever have any princess of Saxony.” In Berlin, Frederick of Prussia began thinking of replacement candidates; he wrote to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt asking about his daughter’s availability in case Sophia should die.

Meanwhile, the youthful invalid was—without awareness of the fact—winning hearts. Her ladies-in-waiting knew how she had contracted this illness; they told the chambermaids, who told the lackeys, who passed it through the palace and thence out into the city: the little foreign princess loved Russia so much that now she was lying at death’s door because she had risen from bed every night in order to learn the Russian language more quickly! In the space of a few weeks, this story won Sophia the affection of many who had been repelled by the aloof, negative attitude of Grand Duke Peter.

Another incident in the sickroom, widely reported, further burnished Sophia’s reputation. At a moment when the worst was feared, Johanna spoke of bringing a Lutheran pastor to comfort her daughter. Sophia, still exhausted by fever and bloodletting, nevertheless managed to whisper, “Why do that? Call Simon Todorsky instead. I would rather talk to him.” Elizabeth, hearing this, burst into tears. Soon, Sophia’s request was the talk of the court and the city, and people who had regarded the arrival of the Protestant German girl with apprehension now were filled with sympathy.

Whether Sophia knew what she was doing and understood the possible effect of her words cannot be known. It is unlikely that in the few weeks she had been in Russia she had become a genuine convert to the Orthodox faith. And yet the fact remains that, lying close to death, she had the extraordinary luck—or the extraordinary presence of mind—to use the most effective means of winning the sympathy of her future countrymen: “Call Simon Todorsky.”

In her Memoirs, Catherine, looking back, seems to suggest that the fourteen-year-old girl did, in fact, understand the impact of her request. She admits that there were times during her illness when she did deceive. Sometimes, she would shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep in order to listen to the conversation of the ladies by her bedside. French, which she spoke, was commonly used at the Russian court. Together, she said, “the ladies would speak their minds freely and in that way I learned a great many things.”

Perhaps the explanation is even simpler. There is no apparent reason that Sophia’s spirits should have been raised or her health improved by the appearance at her bedside of an unknown Lutheran clergyman. And if Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were essentially similar, as Todorsky had explained to her, why not ask Todorsky himself, a man she liked and whose conversation she enjoyed, to come and comfort her?

By the first week in April, Sophia’s fever had passed. As she was regaining her strength, she noticed changes in the attitudes of people around her. Not only were the ladies in the sickroom more sympathetic; she also noticed that “my mother’s behavior during my illness had lowered her in everyone’s esteem.” Unfortunately, just at this point, Johanna chose to create more difficulty for herself. Johanna’s concern for her daughter’s life had been genuine, but while the young girl was quietly winning praise and admirers, her mother, barred from the sickroom, had become querulous. One day when Sophia was recovering, Johanna sent a maid to ask her daughter to give her a piece of blue and silver brocade that had been a parting gift from Sophia’s uncle, her father’s brother. Sophia surrendered the cloth, but she did so reluctantly, saying that she treasured it, not only because her uncle had given it to her but because it was the only beautiful thing she had brought with her to Russia. Indignant, the ladies in the sickroom repeated the incident to Elizabeth, who immediately sent Sophia a large quantity of beautiful material, including a new length of rich blue silk woven with silver flowers, similar to, but much finer than, the original fabric.

On April 21, her fifteenth birthday, Sophia appeared at court for the first time since her illness. “I cannot imagine that the world found me a very edifying sight,” she wrote later. “I had become as thin as a skeleton. I had grown taller, but my face and all its features were drawn; my hair was falling out and I was deathly pale. I appeared to myself as frightfully ugly; I didn’t even recognize my own face. The empress sent me a pot of rouge that day and ordered me to use it.” To reward Sophia for her courage and to celebrate her recovery, Elizabeth gave her a diamond necklace and pair of earrings worth twenty thousand rubles. Grand Duke Peter sent her a watch encrusted with rubies.

When she emerged into the world that birthday evening, Sophia was perhaps not a picture of youthful beauty, but as she entered the reception rooms of the palace, she became aware that something had changed. In the look on every face, the warm pressure of every touched hand, she saw and felt the sympathy and respect she had won. She was no longer a stranger, an object of curiosity and suspicion; she was one of them, returned to them, welcomed back. In those weeks of suffering, Russians had begun to think of her as a Russian.

The next morning she was back at work with Simon Todorsky. She had agreed to enter the Orthodox Church, and a brisk correspondence ensued between Moscow and Zerbst in order to obtain her father’s formal consent to her change of religion. She knew that Christian Augustus would be deeply grieved, but Zerbst was far away and she was now committed to Russia. At the beginning of May, she wrote to her father:

My Lord, I make so bold as to write to Your Highness to ask your consent to Her Imperial Majesty’s intentions with regard to me. I can assure you that your will shall always be my own, and that no one shall make me fail in my duty to you. Since I can find almost no difference between the Orthodox faith and the Lutheran, I am resolved (with all due regard to Your Highness’s gracious instructions) to change, and shall send you my confession of faith on the first day. I may flatter myself that Your Highness will be pleased with it and I remain, while I live, with profound respect, my lord, Your Highness’s very obedient and very humble daughter and servant. Sophia.

Christian Augustus was slow to agree. Frederick of Prussia, who had a great interest in the marriage, wrote of the situation to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, “Our good prince is entirely obstinate on this point. I have gone to endless trouble to overcome his religious scruples. His answer to all my arguments is ‘My daughter shall not enter the Orthodox church.’ ” Frederick eventually found an obliging Lutheran minister to persuade Christian Augustus that there was “no essential difference” between the Lutheran and Orthodox faiths, and Christian Augustus gave his consent. Later, Frederick wrote, “I have had more trouble in accomplishing this business than if it had been the most important matter in the world.”

8

Intercepted Letters

NO SOONER HAD Frederick of Prussia managed the successful massaging of Christian Augustus’s religious scruples than Sophia’s other parent, Johanna, believing herself to be Frederick’s primary secret agent in Russia, participated in the botching of his larger diplomatic enterprise. Frederick had recruited Johanna to help bring about the fall of Bestuzhev by telling her that the Russian vice-chancellor was hostile to Prussia and therefore to Sophia’s marriage, which he would do his best to prevent. Once in Russia, Johanna had joined the French and Prussian ambassadors in an anti-Bestuzhev conspiracy. When this plot was uncovered, the consequences were disastrous for the two ambassadors and seriously damaging for Johanna.

Elizabeth’s behavior during Sophia’s illness had made plain to everyone the empress’s affection for the young princess. With the betrothal about to take place, Johanna might have asked herself what danger to the marriage now could come from Bestuzhev. A moment’s reflection might have told her that there was little; that Bestuzhev, no matter how opposed, could not possibly at this point have prevailed on the empress to cancel the German marriage. Johanna, therefore, should have been gracious to a defeated enemy; indeed, wisdom would have dictated that she work to win him to her daughter’s support. But Johanna was incapable of such a reversal. From the moment she arrived in St. Petersburg, Bestuzhev’s enemies, Mardefeld and La Chétardie, had become her confidants. There had been secret meetings, plans had been hatched, coded letters sent to Paris and Berlin. Johanna was not a woman to turn away from this heady brew. In any case, it was too late to change. She was already ensnared.

Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, then almost fifty-one, was one of the most gifted Russians of his day. His diplomatic talents ranked high; his political ability to survive in the swirling currents of domestic policy and court intrigue placed him higher still. As a boy, he had shown outstanding ability in languages. At fifteen, he had been sent abroad by Peter the Great to be educated and begin a long apprenticeship in diplomacy. In 1720, Peter appointed him, at twenty-seven, as Russian ambassador in Copenhagen. Five years later, after Peter’s death, he was shunted off to the minor post of resident in Hamburg, where he remained for fifteen years. When Elizabeth succeeded the two German women, empress and regent, she meant to restore the foreign policies of her father. In order to administer these policies, she plucked Bestuzhev, her father’s protégé, from the backwater of Hamburg and placed him at the head of foreign affairs as vice-chancellor.

A thin-lipped man with a large nose, sharp chin, and broad, sloping forehead, Bestuzhev was an epicure, an amateur chemist, and a hypochondriac. By nature, he was moody, secretive, irascible, and ruthless. A master of intrigue, by the time he returned to power, he was so silent and efficient in wielding power that he was more feared than loved. But while merciless in dealing with his enemies, he was devoted to his country and to Elizabeth. Before Sophia became the empress Catherine, he first opposed and then befriended her, and she came to understand the two sides of his character: blunt, headstrong, even despotic, but also an excellent psychologist and judge of men, a fanatical worker of selfless devotion, a passionate Russian nationalist, and a faithful servant of the autocrat.

During her reign, Elizabeth’s was the only opinion that counted. She may have disliked her vice-chancellor as a man, but she trusted him as her chief adviser, and rejected all attempts of Frederick’s ambassador and agents to undermine her confidence in him. She allowed him to have his way in most things, but there were occasions when she asserted herself. She did not, for example, consult him when she brought her nephew to Russia to become her heir, and she acted against Bestuzhev’s advice when she chose Sophia to be Peter’s bride. On both these occasions she acted impulsively on her own intuition and initiative. On the other hand, there were long periods when she chose to be no more than a beautiful woman at the center of a glittering, admiring court, a woman who demanded no more than to be constantly entertained. Sometimes, when she was in this mood, Bestuzhev had to wait for weeks, even months, to get her signature on important documents. “If the empress would give to government affairs only one one-hundredth of the time Maria Theresa devotes to them, I should be the happiest man on earth,” Bestuzhev once told an Austrian diplomat.

Frederick’s instructions to Johanna in Berlin had been to assist his ambassador to get rid of the vice-chancellor. But none of the conspirators had any real knowledge of their enemy. They thought him a man of moderate gifts and many failings: a gambler, a drinker, and a bumbling intriguer. Accordingly, they imagined that it would take only a slight, well-timed effort to push him over the edge. They never imagined that he knew about their secret meetings, that he was astute enough to have guessed their purpose, that he was expertly on guard, and that he, not they, would strike first.

Bestuzhev’s precautions were simple: he intercepted their letters, had them decoded, read them, and then had them copied. The work of decoding was done by a German specialist in the Foreign Office, who deciphered, copied, and resealed the letters so well that no trace of interference could be seen. Thus it was that innumerable letters passed between Moscow and Europe without either writer or recipient having the slightest suspicion that Bestuzhev had read and recorded every word.

Bestuzhev had no need to fear what was disclosed about himself in these letters; their most prominent feature was a string of snide comments and irreverent attacks La Chétardie had made about the empress. Elizabeth, the marquis informed his government, was lazy, extravagant, and immoral; she changed her clothes four or five times a day; she put her signature on letters she had not even read; she was “frivolous, indolent, running to fat” and “and no longer had sufficient energy to rule the country.” Written with a supercilious rancor intended to titillate Louis XV and his ministers at Versailles, they were letters to infuriate a far less sensitive and irascible monarch than the daughter of Peter the Great.

Beyond personal insults, La Chétardie’s letters also thrust into light the political conspiracy to overthrow Bestuzhev and his pro-Austrian policy. In this connection the clandestine involvement of the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was revealed. By citing her support of his opinions and referring to her correspondence with Frederick in Berlin, the marquis laid bare Johanna’s role as a Prussian agent.

Bestuzhev did not hurry; he gave his enemies plenty of time to incriminate themselves. Not until he had collected about fifty of these poisonous letters, mostly from the pen of La Chétardie, did he carry the evidence to the empress. On June 1, 1744, Elizabeth took Peter, Sophia, and Johanna with her on retreat to the Troitsa Monastery. Here, calculating that in the seclusion of this religious place the empress would have more time to read, Bestuzhev placed before her the evidence he had gathered. What Elizabeth saw, along with the effort to overthrow her vice-chancellor, was that Sophia’s mother, while being overwhelmed with generosity and luxury, was scheming against Russia in the interests of a foreign power.

On June 3, Sophia, Peter, and Johanna had just finished their midday dinner when the empress, followed by Lestocq, entered their room and commanded Johanna to follow her. Left alone, Sophia and Peter climbed onto a window ledge and sat, side by side, legs dangling, talking and joking. Sophia was laughing at something Peter had said when suddenly the door burst open and Lestocq appeared. “This horseplay will stop at once!” he shouted. Turning to Sophia, he said, “You can go pack your bags. You will be leaving for home immediately.” The two young people were stunned.

“What is this about?” Peter asked.

“You will find out,” Lestocq said grimly and stalked away.

Neither Peter nor Sophia could imagine what had happened; for even a highly placed courtier to speak with this insolence to the heir to the throne and his future wife seemed unthinkable. Groping for an explanation, Peter said, “If your mother has done something wrong, that does not mean that you have.”

Frightened, Sophia replied, “My duty is to follow my mother and obey her commands.” Feeling that she was about to be sent back to Zerbst, she looked at Peter, wondering how he would feel if this happened. Years later, she wrote, “I saw clearly that he would have parted from me without regret.”

The two were still sitting there, bewildered and trembling, when the empress, her blue eyes flashing, her face crimson with rage, emerged from her apartment. Behind her came Johanna, her eyes red with tears. As the empress stood over them beneath the low ceiling, the two children jumped down from their perch and bowed their heads in respect. This gesture seemed to disarm Elizabeth, and impulsively she smiled and kissed them. Sophia understood that she was not being held responsible for whatever her mother had done.

There was no forgiveness, however, for those who had insulted and betrayed the empress. She struck first at La Chétardie. The French ambassador was ordered to leave Moscow within twenty-four hours, going directly to the frontier at Riga without passing through St. Petersburg. Elizabeth’s anger against this former friend was so great that she commanded him to return the portrait of herself set in diamonds that she had given him. He returned the portrait and kept the diamonds. Mardefeld, the Prussian ambassador, was allowed to linger, but he, too, was sent home within a year. Johanna was permitted to remain, but only because she was Sophia’s mother, and only until her daughter married the grand duke.

With his political enemies overthrown and scattered, Bestuzhev rose higher. He was promoted from vice-chancellor to chancellor; he was awarded a new palace and estates; the downfall of his diplomatic enemies meant the success of his pro-Austrian, anti-Prussian policy. Secure in his new power, he no longer felt it necessary to oppose Peter’s marriage to Sophia. He could see that this was a project the empress was determined to carry out; to attempt to block it would be dangerous. Further, even after the marriage, the girl’s mother would be harmless.

Princess Johanna’s brief career in diplomacy had ended in ruin: the French ambassador had been summarily banished; the Prussian ambassador, a veteran of twenty years at the Russian court, had been stripped of influence; Bestuzhev had been promoted to chancellor. Finally, there was the downfall of Johanna herself. Elizabeth’s friendship for the sister of the man she had loved had now been replaced by an intense desire to send Sophia’s mother back to Germany as soon as possible.

9

Conversion and Betrothal

THE EMPRESS, wishing to hurry events along, fixed the date of Sophia’s betrothal to Peter for June 29. Accordingly, on the day just before, June 28, 1744, the young German princess was scheduled to formally and publicly disavow the Lutheran faith and be admitted into the Orthodox Church. Almost to the last minute, Sophia worried about the irreversible step she was about to take. Then, on the night before the ceremony, her hesitations seemed to disappear. “She slept soundly the whole night,” Johanna wrote to her husband, “a sure sign that her mind is at peace.”

The next morning, the empress sent for Sophia to be dressed under her supervision. Elizabeth had ordered the young woman a gown identical to her own; both were made of heavy, scarlet, silk taffeta, embroidered with silver threads along the seams. The difference was that Elizabeth’s dress was ablaze with diamonds, while Sophia’s only jewels were the pendants and brooch that the empress had given her after her pneumonia. Sophia was pale from the required three days of fasting before the service, and she wore only a white ribbon in her unpowdered hair, but, Johanna wrote, “I must say, I thought she was lovely.” Indeed, many that day were struck by the elegance of the slender figure with her dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, and scarlet dress.

Elizabeth reached for her hand and together they led a long procession through many halls to the crowded palace chapel. There, Sophia kneeled on a square cushion and the long ceremony began. Johanna described parts of it to her absent husband: “The forehead, eyes, neck, throat, and palms and backs of hands are anointed with oil. The oil is wiped off with a piece of cotton immediately after application.”

Kneeling on the cushion, Sophia performed her role expertly. Speaking in a firm, clear voice, she recited the creed of her new faith. “I had learned it by heart in Russian. Like a parrot,” she admitted later. The empress cried, but, said the young convert, “I remained quite in control for which I was highly praised.” For her, this ceremony was another challenging piece of schoolwork, the kind of performance at which she excelled. Johanna was proud of her daughter: “Her bearing … through the entire ceremony was so full of nobility and dignity that I should have admired her [even] had she not been to me what she is.”

In this way, Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst became Ekaterina, or, in English, Catherine. Sophia could have been baptized with her own name, Sophia, which was a common name in Russia. But Elizabeth had rejected this because Sophia had been the name of her own aunt, the half-sister and rival of Peter the Great who had struggled for the throne with the young tsar fifty-five years before. Instead, Elizabeth chose the name of her own mother, Catherine.

As she left the chapel, the new convert was presented with a diamond necklace and brooch by the empress. Despite her gratitude, the new Catherine was so exhausted that, in order to save her strength for the morrow, she asked permission to be excused from the banquet following the ceremony. Later that night, she drove with the empress, the grand duke, and her mother to the Kremlin, where her betrothal was to be celebrated the following day.

The next morning, Catherine opened her eyes and was handed two miniature portraits, one of Elizabeth, the other of Peter, both framed with diamonds, both gifts from the empress. Soon, Peter himself arrived to escort her to the empress, who was wearing the imperial crown and, over her shoulders, an imperial mantle. Leaving the Kremlin palace, Elizabeth walked under a canopy of solid silver whose great weight required eight generals to carry it. Behind the empress came Catherine and Peter, followed by Johanna, the court, the Synod, and the Senate. The procession descended the famous Red Staircase, crossed the square lined by men of the Guards regiments, and entered the Assumption Cathedral, where Russian tsars were crowned. Once inside, Elizabeth took the two young people by the hand and led them to a velvet-carpeted dais erected between the massive pillars in the center of church. The archbishop of Novgorod conducted the service, and the betrothal rings exchanged by the couple were handed to them by the empress herself. Johanna, with her appraising eye, observed that the rings were “real little monsters, both of them”; her daughter noted specifically, “The one he gave me was worth twelve thousand rubles, the one he received from me, fourteen thousand.” At the end of the ceremony, a court official read an imperial decree granting Catherine the rank of grand duchess and the title of imperial highness.

Johanna’s report on the betrothal service was a litany of complaint:

The ceremony lasted four hours during which it was impossible to sit down for a moment. It is no exaggeration to say that my back was numb from all the bowing I had been obliged to do as I embraced all the numerous ladies and that there was a red mark the size of a German flourin on my right hand from all the times it had been kissed.

Johanna’s mixed feelings about her daughter, now the central figure in this ceremonial pageantry, should have been mollified when Elizabeth went out of her way to be gracious to a woman she despised. In the cathedral, the empress had prevented Johanna from kneeling before her, saying, “Our situation is the same; our vows are the same.” But when the ceremony was over, with the cannon thundering, the church bells pealing, and the court moving to the adjacent Granovitaya Palace for the betrothal banquet, Johanna’s unhappiness burst out. By rank, the bride’s mother could not sit at the imperial table with the empress, the grand duke, and the newly proclaimed grand duchess. When this was explained to her, Johanna protested, declaring that her place could not be among mere ladies of the court. The master of ceremonies was uncertain what to do, and Catherine witnessed and suffered her mother’s behavior in silence. Elizabeth, again infuriated by the presumption of this ungrateful, deceitful guest, ordered a separate table set up in a private alcove where Johanna could watch from a window.

The ball that evening was in the Hall of Facets of the Granovitaya Palace, a room constructed with a single central pillar, filling one quarter of the room, supporting the low ceiling. In this place, said Catherine, “one was almost suffocated by the heat and the crowd,” Then, walking back to the state apartments, other new rules of precedence took effect. Catherine now was Her Imperial Highness, a Grand Duchess of Russia, the future wife of Heir to the Throne; Johanna, therefore, was obliged to walk behind her daughter. Catherine attempted to avoid these situations, and Johanna recognized Catherine’s effort. “My daughter conducts herself very intelligently in her new situation,” she wrote to her husband. “She blushes each time she is forced to walk in front of me.”

Elizabeth continued to be generous. “There was not a day on which I did not receive presents from the empress,” Catherine said later. “Silver and jewels, cloth and so forth, indeed everything that one can imagine, the least of which was worth from ten to fifteen thousand rubles. She showed me extreme affection.” Soon afterward, the empress gave Catherine thirty thousand rubles for personal expenses. She, who had never had any pocket money at all, was awed by this sum. She immediately sent money to her father to help with the education and medical care of her younger brother. “I know that Your Highness has sent my brother to Hamburg and that this has entailed heavy expenses,” she wrote to Christian Augustus. “I beg Your Highness to leave my brother there as long as is necessary to restore him to health. I will undertake to pay all his expenses.”

Elizabeth also gave the new grand duchess a small court of her own, including young chamberlains and maids-in-waiting. Peter already had his own court, and in the apartments of the grand duke and grand duchess, the young people played blindman’s buff and other games, laughing, jumping, dancing, running—even taking the lid off a big harpsichord, placing it on pillows, and using it as a toboggan to slide along the floor. By participating in these frolics, Catherine was trying to please her future husband. Peter was friendly toward this willing playmate; he was also intelligent enough to know that any fondness he showed his fiancée would please the empress. Even Brümmer, observing them together and deciding that she might help him deal with his rebellious charge, asked her to “use my influence to correct and reprimand the Grand Duke.” She refused. “I told him it was impossible for in that case, I should become as hateful to him [Peter] as the rest of his entourage already were.” She understood that to have any influence on Peter, she must be the opposite of those who tried to “correct” him. He could not come to her looking for friendship only to find he had another watchdog.

Johanna became more distant. Now, when she wanted to see her daughter, she had to have herself announced. Reluctant to do this, she stayed away, declaring that the young court around Catherine was too wild and noisy. Meanwhile, Johanna herself was making new friends. She joined a circle of people of whom the empress and most of the court disapproved. It was not long before her intimacy with the chamberlain, Count Ivan Betskoy, began to cause talk; eventually, the two were so often together that some at court began saying that they were having an affair—and even whispering that the thirty-two-year-old Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was pregnant.

10

A Pilgrimage to Kiev and Transvestite Balls

THE BRIDE HAD ARRIVED in Russia, she was young, her health was restored, and the difficulties involving her conversion to Orthodoxy had been overcome. Now that she and Peter were betrothed, what stood in the way of an immediate marriage? One obstacle, difficult to surmount even for an empress, was the doctors’ strong cautionary opinion regarding Peter. At sixteen, the grand duke looked more like fourteen, and the medical men still could not detect in him any convincing signs of puberty. It would be at least a year, they believed, before he could father a child. Even if a pregnancy occurred, there must be another nine months before an infant could be born. To Elizabeth, this length of time—twenty-one months—seemed an eternity. And because the wedding had to be postponed, the empress also had to postpone Johanna’s departure.

Reluctantly accepting these disappointments, Elizabeth decided on another means of presenting her new dynasty to the public eye. In August 1744 she set out on a pilgrimage to Kiev, the oldest and holiest of Russian cities, where Christianity was first introduced by Grand Prince Vladimir in A.D. 800. The journey of almost six hundred miles between Moscow and Kiev had been suggested by Elizabeth’s Ukrainian lover, Razumovsky, and the trek included Peter, Catherine, and Johanna and their respective retainers, along with two hundred and thirty courtiers and hundreds of servants. Once under way, the cavalcade of carriages and wagons loaded with baggage jolted and swayed day after day over the endless roads, inflicting weariness, boredom, hunger, and thirst on the passengers. The horses were frequently exchanged; at every relay station, eight hundred fresh animals awaited the arrival of the imperial caravan.

While the grandees of the Russian court rode in velvet-cushioned carriages, one figure made most of the journey on foot. Elizabeth took penance and pilgrimages seriously. Walking along the hot, shadeless Russian roads, sweating in the heat and murmuring prayers, Elizabeth stopped to pray at every village church and wayside shrine. Meanwhile, Razumovsky, as practical and modest in his heavenly as in his earthly expectations, preferred to ride behind her in his comfortable carriage.

Catherine and Johanna began the journey riding in a carriage with two ladies-in-waiting; Peter was in a separate carriage with Brümmer and two of his tutors. One afternoon, Peter tired of his “pedagogues,” as Catherine called them, and decided to join the two German princesses, whose company he thought would be more lively. He abandoned his carriage, “got into ours and refused to leave,” bringing with him one of the spirited young men of his entourage. Very soon, Johanna, irritated by the company of the young people, reshuffled the arrangements. She had one of the carts that was loaded with beds rearranged with boards and pillows so that as many as ten people could sit in it. To Johanna’s annoyance, Peter and Catherine insisted on filling the cart with other young people. “We allowed only the most amusing and entertaining of the entourage to join us,” she said. “From morning till night, we did nothing but laugh, play and make merry.” Brümmer, Peter’s tutors, and Johanna’s ladies-in waiting were insulted by this reshuffle, which ignored court precedence. “While we were enjoying ourselves, they were, all four of them, in one carriage where they sulked, scolded, condemned, and made sour remarks at our expense. In our carriage we knew this, but we just laughed at them.”

For Catherine, Peter, and their friends, this journey became not a religious pilgrimage but an excursion, a lark. There was no need to hurry; Elizabeth walked no more than a few hours a day. At the end of three weeks, the main cavalcade arrived at Alexis Razumovsky’s large mansion in Koseletz, where they waited three additional weeks for the empress to appear. When she finally arrived on August 15, the religious complexion of the pilgrimage was temporarily suspended; for two weeks, the “pilgrims” joined in a succession of balls, concerts, and, from morning to night, card games so feverish that sometimes forty or fifty thousand rubles lay on the tables.

While they were staying in Koseletz, an incident occurred that drove a permanent wedge between Johanna and Peter. It began when the grand duke entered a room where Johanna was writing. On a low stool beside her, she had placed her jewel case, in which she kept the small things that were important to her, including her letters. Peter, romping and frisking in an attempt to make Catherine laugh, made as if to rummage through the case and snatch the letters. Johanna fiercely told him not to touch it. The grand duke, still prancing, started across the room, but in pirouetting away from Johanna, his coat caught the open lid of the little case and tipped it and its contents onto the floor. Johanna, thinking he had done it intentionally, flew into a rage. Peter tried at first to apologize, but when she refused to believe that it had been an accident, he, too, became angry. The two began to shout at each other, and Peter, turning to Catherine, appealed to her to verify his innocence.

Catherine was caught in the middle.

“Knowing how easily excited my mother was and that her first impulses were always very violent, I feared she would slap me if I disagreed with her. Wanting neither to lie to her nor to offend the grand duke, I kept silent. Nevertheless, I did tell my mother that I did not think the grand duke had done it intentionally.”

Johanna then turned on Catherine:

When my mother was in a temper, she had to find someone to quarrel with. I remained silent and then burst into tears. At first, my silence angered them both. Then, the grand duke, seeing that all my mother’s anger was now directed at me because I had taken his part and that I was crying, accused my mother of being an unjust, over-bearing shrew. She hurled back that he was “an ill-bred little boy.” It would have been impossible to quarrel more violently without coming to blows.

From that moment on, the grand duke took a great dislike to my mother and he never forgot this quarrel. My mother, in turn, bore him an unforgiving grudge. Their strained relationship became one of ever-worsening bitterness and suspicion, liable to turn sour at any moment. Neither of them could hide their feelings from me. And, as hard as I worked to obey the one and please the other—and somehow to reconcile them—I succeeded only for short periods. Each always had some sarcastic or malicious barb ready to let fly. My own position became more and more painful every day.

Catherine was torn, but her mother’s bad temper and her sympathy for the grand duke had an effect: “In truth, at that time, the grand duke opened his heart to me more than to anyone else. He could see that my mother often attacked and scolded me when she was unable to find fault with him. This placed me high in his estimation; he believed he could rely on me.”

At the climax of the pilgrimage, the empress and the court spent ten days in Kiev. Catherine first saw the magnificent city in panorama, its golden domes rising from a bluff on the western bank of the Dnieper River. Elizabeth, Peter, and Catherine entered the city on foot, walking with a crowd of priests and monks behind a large cross. Everywhere in this holiest of Russian cities, in a period when the church was immensely rich and the people devoutly pious, the empress was welcomed with extravagant pomp. At the famous Pecharsky Monastery Church of the Assumption, Catherine was awed by the majesty of the religious processions, the beauty of the religious ceremonies, the incomparable splendor of the church themselves. “Never in my whole life,” she wrote later, “have I been so impressed as by the extraordinary magnificence of this church. Every icon was covered with solid gold, silver, pearls and encrusted with precious stones.”

Impressed though she was by this visual display, Catherine never in her lifetime was devoutly religious. Neither the strict Lutheran beliefs of her father nor the passionate Orthodox faith of Empress Elizabeth ever took possession of her mind. What she saw and admired in the Russian church was the majesty of architecture, art, and music merged into a splendid unity of inspired—but still man-made—beauty.

No sooner had Elizabeth and the court returned from Kiev than another round of operas, balls, and masquerades began in Moscow. Every evening, Catherine appeared in a new dress and was told how well she looked. She was shrewd enough to recognize that flattery was the lubricating oil of court life, and she was also aware that some people still disapproved of her: Bestuzhev and his followers; jealous court ladies who envied a rising star; parasites who kept careful count of the distribution of favors. Catherine worked hard to disarm her critics. “I was afraid of not being liked and did everything in my power to win those with whom I was to spend my life,” she wrote later. Above all, she never forgot to whom she owed primary allegiance. “My respect for the empress and my gratitude to her were extreme,” she said. “And she used to say that she loved me almost more than the grand duke.”

A sure way to please the empress was to dance. For Catherine, this was easy; she, like Elizabeth, was passionately fond of dancing. Every morning at seven, Monsieur Landé, the French ballet master of the court, arrived with his violin and, for two hours, taught her the latest steps from Paris. From four to six in the afternoon, he returned to teach again. And then, in the evenings, Catherine would impress the court with her graceful dancing.

Some of these evening balls were bizarre. Every Tuesday by decree of the empress, men would attend dressed as women and women would dance dressed as men. Catherine, then fifteen, was delighted by this change of costume: “I must say that there was nothing more hideous and at the same time more comical than to see most men dressed this way and nothing more miserable than to see women in men’s clothes.” Most of the court roundly detested these evenings, but Elizabeth had a reason for this caprice: she looked superb in male clothing. Though she was far from slender, her full-bosomed figure was set off by a pair of slim, splendidly shaped legs. Her vanity demanded that these elegant limbs should not remain hidden, and the only way to display them was in a pair of tight male trousers.

Catherine described the hazards she encountered on one of these evenings:

The very tall Monsieur Sievers, who was wearing a hoop skirt the empress had lent him, was dancing a Polonaise with me. Countess Hendrikova, who was dancing behind me, stumbled over the hoop skirt of Monsieur Sievers as he turned around with his hand in mine. In falling, she struck me so hard that I fell beneath the hoop skirt of Monsieur Sievers which had sprung upright beside me. Sievers himself became entangled in his own long skirts which were in great disorder and there we were, all three of us, sprawling on the floor with me entirely covered by his skirt. I was dying of laughter trying to get up, but people had to come and help us up because the three of us were so entangled in Monsieur Sievers’s clothing that no one could get up without causing the other two to fall down.

That autumn, however, Catherine saw and felt the darker side of Elizabeth’s personality. The empress’s vanity demanded that she should be not only the most powerful woman in the empire but the most beautiful. She could not tolerate hearing another woman’s beauty praised. Catherine’s triumphs had not escaped her notice, and her annoyance found an outlet. One evening at the opera, the empress was sitting with Lestocq in the royal box opposite the box in which Catherine, Johanna, and Peter were seated. During the intermission, the empress noticed Catherine talking gaily to Peter. Could this young woman, a picture of glowing health and confidence, now so popular at court, be the same shy girl who had come to Russia less than a year ago? Suddenly, the empress’s jealousy flared. Staring at the younger woman, she seized on the first grievance that popped into her head. As if the matter were something that could not wait, Elizabeth dispatched Lestocq to Catherine’s box to tell Catherine that the empress was furious with her because she had run up unacceptable debts. Elizabeth had given her thirty thousand rubles; where had it all gone? In delivering this message, Lestocq made certain that Peter and everyone else within earshot could hear. Tears sprang to Catherine’s eyes and, even as she wept, more humiliation was added. Peter, instead of consoling her, said that he agreed with his aunt and thought it appropriate that his betrothed had been reprimanded. Johanna then declared that as Catherine no longer consulted her as to how a daughter should behave, she “washed her hands” of the matter.

The fall was sudden and steep. What had happened? What crime had the fifteen-year-old girl whose one thought was to please everyone, particularly the empress, committed? Catherine checked and found that she was in debt for two thousand rubles. The sum was absurd, in view of Elizabeth’s own extravagance and generosity, and the reprimand was an obvious excuse to cloak another grievance. It was true that Catherine had spent freely. She had sent money to her father to help pay expenses for her brother. She had spent money on herself. Arriving in Russia with only four dresses and a dozen chemises in her trunk, and taking her place at a court where women changed clothes three times a day, she had used some of her allowance to create a wardrobe. But the greater part had been spent showering presents on her mother, her ladies-in-waiting, and even on Peter himself. She had discovered that the most effective way of pacifying her mother’s temper and of stopping the constant bickering between Johanna and Peter was to give them both presents. She had realized that in this court, gifts could win her friends. She had noticed, too, that most of the people around her did not object to receiving gifts. Accordingly, eager to find favor, she saw no reason to scorn this simple, blatant method. In a few months, she had learned not only the language but also the customs of Russia.

This sudden blow from the empress was difficult for her to understand and accept. It revealed to her the two faces of the empress, a woman who, alternately and with no warning, charmed and intimidated. Afterward, when Catherine remembered that evening, she also remembered the lesson it had taught: that in dealing with a massive ego such as Elizabeth’s, all other women at court had to beware of succeeding too well. She worked hard to reingratiate herself with her patron. And Elizabeth, when her fit of jealousy subsided, relented and eventually forgot the incident.

11

Smallpox

IN NOVEMBER, while the court was still in Moscow, Peter came down with measles and, since Catherine had never had the disease, all contact between the two was forbidden. During his illness, Catherine was told, Peter “was uncontrollable in his whims and passions.” Confined to his room and neglected by his tutors, he spent his time ordering his servants, dwarfs, and gentlemen-in-waiting to march and countermarch in parade ground drill around his bed. When, after six weeks of convalescence, Catherine saw him again, “he confided his childish pranks to me and it was not my business to restrain him; I let him do and say what he wished.” Peter was pleased by her attitude. He felt no romantic attraction for her, but she was his comrade and the only person to whom he dared speak freely.

Toward the end of December 1744, when Peter recovered from the measles, the empress decided that the court should leave Moscow and return to St. Petersburg. A heavy snowfall lay over the city, and the temperature was bitterly cold. Catherine and Johanna were to travel together with two ladies-in-waiting; Peter was in another sledge with Brümmer and a tutor. As the women were taking their seats, the empress, who was traveling separately, leaned in and tucked Catherine’s furs tightly around her; then, worried that these still might be insufficient against the cold, she wrapped her own magnificent ermine cloak over Catherine’s shoulders.

Four days later, between the towns of Tver and Novgorod, Catherine and Peter’s little procession halted for the night at the village of Khotilovo. That evening, Peter began to shiver; then he fainted and was put to bed. The next day, when Catherine and Johanna went to see him, Brümmer stopped them in the doorway. The grand duke, he said, had developed a high fever during the night, and spots—symptoms of smallpox—had appeared on his face. Johanna turned pale. Terrified of the disease that had killed her brother, she instantly pulled Catherine away from the door, ordered their sledge, and left immediately for St. Petersburg, leaving Peter to be cared for by Brümmer and the two ladies-in-waiting. A courier galloped ahead to inform the empress, who had already reached the capital. As soon as Elizabeth was told, she ordered her sledge and, with the horses under the lash, raced back toward Khotilovo. The two sledges, Catherine’s and Elizabeth’s, hurtling across the snow in opposite directions, met in the middle of the night on the road. They stopped and Johanna told Elizabeth what she knew. The empress listened, nodded, then gave the signal to proceed. As the horses pounded forward, Elizabeth stared into blackness—not just the blackness of the night outside, but also the blackness of the future of her dynasty if Peter should die.

But it was more than self-interest that drove the empress to behave as she did once she reached Khotilovo. On arriving, she seated herself by the patient’s bed and declared that she would care for her nephew herself. She was to remain at Peter’s side for six weeks, rarely lying down, hardly changing her clothes. Elizabeth, who had seemed to care for nothing as much as the preservation of her beauty, now took on all the menial duties of a sick nurse. Dismissing the risk of smallpox and consequent disfigurement, she hovered over the bed where her nephew lay. This was the same warm, maternal impulse that had compelled her to sit by Catherine’s bedside when the little German princess collapsed with pneumonia. While Peter slept, she sent couriers galloping with messages to the one person who, she believed, fully shared her affection and fears.

In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited anxiously for news. Could the grand duke, just recovered from measles, survive this more ominous disease? Catherine’s anxiety was genuine; although she found Peter childish and often irritating, she had accepted her fiancé. There was, of course, more to it than that; she was anxious for her own future. If Peter died, her life would change. Her position at court, all the honors heaped upon her, were bestowed on the wife of the future tsar. Already in St. Petersburg, certain courtiers, foreseeing the death of the grand duke, were turning away from her. Powerless to do anything else, she wrote respectful, affectionate letters to Elizabeth, asking about Peter’s health. The letters, in Russian, were drafted by her teacher, then copied by Catherine in her own hand into Russian. Elizabeth, who may or may not have known this, was touched.

Meanwhile, Johanna continued to create trouble. The empress had assigned Catherine a suite of four rooms in the Winter Palace; these rooms were separated from the four rooms assigned to her mother. Johanna’s rooms were of the same size, furnished with the same furniture, and the same fabric of blue and red cloth; the only difference was that Catherine’s were to the right of a stairway and Johanna’s to the left. Nevertheless, when Johanna discovered the arrangement, she complained. Her daughter’s rooms were grander than hers, she said. Furthermore, why was Catherine being separated from her at all? She had not proposed it; she had not approved it. When Catherine told her mother that the separation had been ordered and the rooms specifically assigned by the empress, who did not want her to share her mother’s quarters, Johanna’s indignation mounted. She regarded this new arrangement as a form of criticism of her conduct at court and of her influence on her daughter. Unable to direct her anger at Elizabeth, Johanna poured it out on Catherine. She picked constant quarrels “and was on such bad terms with everybody that she no longer joined us for meals but had them served in her apartment.” Catherine confessed, however, that the separation “was very much to my liking. I was not at all at ease in my mother’s rooms and had no good opinion of the group of intimate friends which she gathered around herself.”

Catherine’s separation from her mother and her careful avoidance of her mother’s friends meant that there were areas of Johanna’s life of which her daughter had little knowledge. The nature and extent of Johanna’s relationship with Count Betskoy was one of these. Catherine was aware that her mother was fond of Betskoy and saw him constantly, and that many people at court, including the empress, believed that the relationship had become too intimate. Of the rumors that Johanna had become pregnant by Betskoy, Catherine says nothing in her Memoirs. She does, however, tell this story:

One morning, Johanna’s German chambermaid rushed into Catherine’s room to say that her mother had fainted. Catherine ran to her mother’s room and found Johanna, pale but conscious, lying on a mattress on the floor. Catherine asked what had happened. Johanna said that she had asked to be bled and that the surgeon had been clumsy. “He had not succeeded with two veins on her arms and then had tried to open two on her feet” and failed again. She had fainted. Catherine knew that Johanna was afraid of bloodletting and had violently opposed it as treatment for her own pneumonia; she did not understand why her mother had wanted it done now to herself—or as treatment for what illness. Johanna, becoming hysterical, refused to answer further questions and began to scream. She accused her daughter of caring nothing about her and then “she ordered me to go.”

Here, Catherine ends her account, hinting at what had happened. Johanna offered a flimsy excuse that she had contracted a sudden, unspecified illness. It is unlikely that this particular woman would ever ask to be bled. There is the accusation of gross surgical incompetence to explain heavy bleeding. There is the placement of a titled patient on a mattress on the floor rather than on a bed, suggesting that Johanna had suddenly staggered and collapsed. There is Johanna’s rage and hysteria when confronting her daughter. And, finally, in the days that followed, there is the absence of any further symptoms of the illness that this surgical bleeding might have been intended to cure or alleviate. A possible explanation of this sequence is that Johanna had suffered a miscarriage.

Not long after this episode, Johanna suffered another blow. From Zerbst came the news that her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, Catherine’s younger sister, had died suddenly. Johanna had been away from home for over a year. In his letters, her husband had repeatedly asked her to come home. Always, she replied that her primary obligation was to shepherd and oversee the brilliant marriage being offered to her eldest daughter.

Eventually, a message from the empress at Khotilovo reached Catherine:

Your Highness, my very dear niece, I am infinitely obliged to Your Highness for your agreeable messages. I have delayed replying to them because I could not reassure you with regard to the health of His Highness, the Grand Duke. Now this day, I can assure you that, to our joy, God be Praised, we may hope for his recovery. He has come back to us.

On reading this letter, Catherine’s natural cheerfulness returned, and that evening she went to a ball. When she appeared, the whole room crowded around her; the news had spread that the danger was over, the grand duke was recovering. Relieved, Catherine saw the Moscow days repeat themselves: every evening a ball or masquerade; every evening another triumph.

In the midst of this whirlwind, the Swedish diplomat Count Adolf Gyllenborg arrived in St. Petersburg. He came as an official envoy to announce the marriage of the new crown prince of Sweden, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein (Johanna’s brother and Catherine’s uncle) to Princess Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick II of Prussia. It was Catherine’s second encounter with Gyllenborg; they had met five years before at her grandmother’s house in Hamburg, when she was ten. It was then that she had so impressed him with her precocious intelligence that he had advised her mother to pay her more attention.

As Catherine described their second encounter:

He was a man of great intelligence, who was no longer young [Gyllenborg then was thirty-two].… He noticed that I accepted without protest all the intrigues and customs of the court and it seemed to him that I was showing less intelligence in Petersburg than he had given me credit for in Hamburg. He told me one day that he was surprised by the prodigious change that had taken place in me. “How is it,” he said, “that your character, so vigorous and strong in Hamburg, has allowed itself to deteriorate. You busy yourself now only with superficialities, with luxury and pleasure. You must recover the natural inclination of your mind. Your genius is destined for great achievements and you are wasting yourself on trifles. I would wager that you have not read a book since you have been in Russia.”

I told him of the hours I spent in my room, reading. He said that a philosopher of fifteen was too young yet for self-knowledge and that I was surrounded by so many pitfalls that I would stumble unless my soul was of an utterly superior metal; that I should nourish it with the best possible reading. He recommended Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a life of Cicero, and The Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic by Montesquieu. I promised to read them and actually did look for them. I found the life of Cicero in German and read a few pages; then I was brought the Montesquieu. When I began to read, it caused me to reflect, but I could not read it straight through because it made me yawn and I tossed it aside.…

I was not able to find Plutarch’s Lives; I read it only two years later.

To prove to Gyllenborg that she was not superficial, Catherine composed an essay about herself, “so that he would see whether I knew myself or not.” The next day, she wrote and handed to Gyllenborg an essay titled “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher.” He was impressed and returned it with a dozen pages of comments, mostly favorable. “I read his remarks again and again, many times; I impressed them on my consciousness and resolved to follow his advice. In addition, there was something else surprising: one day, while conversing with me, he allowed the following sentence to slip out: ‘What a pity that you will marry!’ I wanted to find out what he meant, but he would not tell me.”

Early in February, Peter was finally well enough to travel, and the empress brought him back to St. Petersburg. Catherine went to meet them in a reception hall of the Winter Palace. It was after four in the afternoon and the light was failing; they met, Catherine says, in “semi-darkness.” Until that moment, absence and anxiety had softened Catherine’s image of the man she was to marry. Peter had never been handsome, but he had possessed a certain nondescript, inoffensive blandness. Sometimes he wore a surly grin, sometimes a slight smile that might be inane or could be merely shy. Overall, his appearance had not been not wholly displeasing. Catherine was eager to see him.

The figure now standing before her in the gloom was quite different; it filled her “almost with terror.… His face was practically unrecognizable.” It was ravaged, swollen and pitted with still unhealed pockmarks. It was evident that he would be deeply scarred. His head had been shaved, and the enormous wig he was wearing made him appear even more terrifying. Despite the poor light, Catherine was unable to mask her horror; later, she described her future husband as “hideous.” As she stood there, “he came up to me and asked, ‘Do you recognize me?’ ” Summoning her courage, she stammered congratulations on his recovery, then fled to her apartment, where she collapsed.

Catherine was not a simple, romantic young woman. The empress, nevertheless, worried about her reaction to her nephew’s appearance. Fearing that the girl might impulsively reject so appalling-looking a future spouse and ask her parents to withdraw their consent to the match, Elizabeth redoubled her show of affection. On February 10, Peter’s seventeenth birthday, with her nephew still in no condition to appear in public, the empress invited Catherine to dine with her alone. During the meal, she complimented Catherine on her letters in Russian, spoke to her in Russian, praised her pronunciation, and told her that she was becoming a handsome young woman.

Elizabeth’s efforts were gratifying to Catherine, but unnecessary. Catherine had no intention of breaking her engagement. Not for a moment, whatever her fiancé’s appearance, did she think of returning to Germany. There was one promise to which Catherine was faithful throughout her life, one commitment on which she would never renege: this was to her own ambition. She had come not to marry a face, handsome or hideous, but to marry the heir to an empire.

Peter was more affected emotionally and psychologically than Catherine by what smallpox had done to him. But once the disease had done its damage, the fault in behavior lay with Catherine. Her initial reaction was natural enough; most young women would shrink from seeing horrible disfigurement, and probably few would possess the self-control to disguise their feelings. In this case, however, if the relationship was going to surmount this challenge and continue successfully, the moment of meeting demanded something more than Catherine was able to give. And this was something she could not summon: a warm, unrestrained affection, the kind of spontaneous tenderness that came naturally to Empress Elizabeth.

Peter was distressed to feel himself physically repulsive to his fiancée. At the moment they met in the dimly lit hall, Peter was able to read her thoughts in her eyes and voice. Thereafter, he believed himself “hideous” and therefore unlovable. This new sense of inferiority reinforced feelings that had afflicted him all his life. Throughout his bleak and lonely childhood, Peter had never had an intimate friend. Now, just as the cousin he was being forced to marry was becoming a comrade, a shocking ugliness had been added to the list of his disadvantages. When he had asked, “Do you recognize me?” Peter had revealed his anxiety about the effect his changed appearance would have on her. That was precisely the moment that Catherine had unknowingly failed him. Had she managed to give him a compassionate smile and a word of affection, it might have ensured some kind of amicable future. The smile was not given; the word not spoken. The frightened young man saw his trusted playmate shuddering at the sight of him; he knew that he was, in her word, “hideous.”

Catherine understood none of this. At first, she was confused; she would have been astonished to learn that her involuntary reaction had alienated him. Once his reaction was clear, her own pride dictated that she respond to his coolness with a corresponding reserve of her own. In turn, her reserved behavior could only reinforce Peter’s belief that he had become repulsive to her. It did not take long for his dismay and loneliness to turn to perversity and spite. He decided that when she was friendly to him, it was merely for form’s sake. He hated her success. He held it against her that she was blooming into womanhood. The more beautiful, spontaneous, and gay she became in company, the more he felt himself isolated in his own ugliness. Catherine danced and charmed while Peter mocked and withdrew. Both were miserable.

It was Catherine’s wish, however, that the deterioration of their private relationship be kept hidden. Peter, lacking both the inner resources and Catherine’s consuming ambition, could put on no such show. Smallpox had delivered a shattering blow to his mental as well as his physical health; his gross disfigurement had affected his psychological balance. Under these pressures, the young man retreated into the world of his childhood. In the spring and summer of 1745, Peter made elaborate excuses to remain in his own room, where he was surrounded and protected by his servants. His joy was to dress them in uniforms and drill them. Even as a child, uniforms, military drill, and words of command had helped him to forget his loneliness. Now, unloved and ever more conscious of being alone, he sought relief in the old remedy. His indoor parades with a squad of costumed servants were Peter’s way of protesting the prison he considered his life to be and the unwelcome destiny toward which he was being driven.

12

Marriage

ELIZABETH’S PATIENCE was exhausted; the nightmare dash to Khotilovo and her long vigil over Peter’s bedside continued to haunt her. Her nephew had almost died, but he had survived. He was seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old bride-to-be had been in Russia for more than a year, but they were not yet married, and no infant child was on the way. True, the doctors had told her again that the grand duke was still too young, too immature, and had not recovered yet from the effects of his illnesses. This time the empress dismissed their arguments. She saw only that the succession hung on the health of Peter and his ability to produce an heir. If she waited another year, another fatal illness might carry off the grand duke, but if she went ahead with the marriage, a year might bring Russia a small Romanov heir, stronger and healthier than Peter, as strong and healthy as Catherine. For this reason, there must be a marriage as soon as possible. The physicians bowed and the empress began considering dates. In March 1745, an imperial decree set the wedding for the first of July.

Because the young imperial house of Russia had never celebrated a public royal wedding, Elizabeth decided that it must be so magnificent that her own people and the world would be convinced of the strength and permanence of the Russian monarchy. It must become the talk of Europe; it must be modeled after the great ceremonials of the French court; the Russian ambassador in Paris was instructed to report every detail of recent royal weddings at Versailles. Extensive memoranda and minute descriptions arrived, to be imitated and, if possible, surpassed. Thick folders of sketches and designs were brought back, accompanied by samples of velvet, silks, and gold braid. Enormous fees enticed French artists, musicians, painters, tailors, cooks, and carpenters to come to Russia. As this tide of information and people flowed into St. Petersburg, Elizabeth read, looked, listened, studied, compared, and calculated. She supervised every detail; indeed, through the spring and early summer, the empress was so taken up with wedding preparations that she had no time for anything else. She neglected affairs of state, ignored her ministers, and normal governmental activity almost ceased.

Once the Baltic and the Neva River were free of ice, ships began arriving in St. Petersburg with bales of silk, velvets, brocades, and the heavy cloth of silver from which Catherine’s wedding gown was to be made. Senior court officials were given a year’s salary in advance in order to equip themselves with finery. A decree ordered members of the nobility to provide themselves with carriages to be drawn by six horses.

While the court churned with excitement, the bride and bridegroom were left curiously alone. Of practical instruction as to what marriage involved, they were given nothing. Peter’s lessons on the proper relationship between a husband and wife came haphazardly from one of his servants, a former Swedish dragoon named Romburg whose own wife had been left behind in Sweden. The husband, Romburg declared, must be the master. The wife should not speak in his presence without his permission, and only a donkey would allow a wife to have opinions of her own. If there was trouble, a few well-timed knocks on the head would put things right. Peter liked listening to this kind of talk and—“about as discreet as a cannon ball,” as Catherine put it—enjoyed passing along to her what he had heard.

As for sex, Peter had been given a few basic facts, but only partially understood their meaning. His servants passed on information, coarsely expressed, but instead of enlightening him, their words only bewildered and intimidated him. No one bothered to tell him the essential fact that humans often find pleasure in sexual activity. Confused, embarrassed, and lacking in desire, Peter would come to his new wife’s bed with no more than a sense of duty and only an elementary, mechanical idea of how this duty was to be performed.

In the spring and summer before their marriage, Catherine saw her future husband frequently, as their apartments were adjoining. But Peter never remained with her for long and, as the days passed, it became increasingly apparent that he was avoiding her company so that he could be with his servants. In May, he moved with the empress to the Summer Palace, leaving Catherine and her mother behind. Catherine wrote later: