Terrible tsarinas

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Another Catherine! in the crypt reserved for sovereigns of Russia, the new tsar scandalized the most enlightened minds by laughing and making faces behind the hearse. He must have been taking his revenge for all the past humiliations by thumbing his nose at the dead. But no one laughed at his high-jinks on a day of national mourning.

Covertly watching her husband, Catherine realized that he was contributing to his own undoing. Moreover, he very quickly announced the color of his intentions. The night following his accession, he gave the order for Russian troops immediately to evacuate the territories that they occupied in Prussia and Pomerania. At the same time, he offered to sign “an accord of eternal peace and friendship” with Frederick II, who had been conquered only yesterday. Blinded by his admiration for this prestigious enemy, he threatened to impose the Holstein uniform on the Russian imperial guard, to disband in a flourish of the quill certain regiments that he considered too devoted to the dear departed, and to make the Orthodox Church toe the line by obliging the priests to shave their beards and to wear frock coats like Protestant pastors.

His Germanophilia took such proportions that Catherine was afraid he would soon repudiate her and lock her up in a convent. However, her partisans told her repeatedly that she had all of Russia behind her - and that the imperial guard would not tolerate anyone touching a hair on her head. The five Orlov brothers, led by her lover Grigory, persuaded her that, far from despairing, she should be delighted by the turn of events. It was time to play all-out, they said. Didn’t Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, and Elizabeth I all win the throne through coups of outrageous audacity? The first three empresses of Russia had shown her the way. Now, she only had follow in their footsteps.

On June 28, 1762, the very same day that the Baron of Breteuil wrote in a dispatch to his government that, “a public cry of diss atisfaction is going up [in Russia],” Catherine, escorted by