Terrible tsarinas

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Catherine Shows the Way the recently departed, but she had always remained devoted to him in spite of her many infidelities. No one had known him and served him better than she throughout the 23 years of their relationship and marriage. In the struggle for power, she had - if not dynastic legitimacy - then at least disinterested love going for her.

Among the dignitaries close to the throne, the bets were already open. Who would win the crown of Monomakh?1 Within a few feet of the corpse laid out on the ceremonial bier, they were whispering, plotting, and proffering one name or another - without daring to declare out loud their own preferences. Some were partisans of young Peter, ten years old, the son of the poor tsarevich Alexis. (Peter the Great had had Alexis tortured to death to punish him for allegedly having plotted against him.) The memory of this legal assassination still hovered like smoke over the Russian court. The coterie loyal to young Peter included the princes Dmitri Golitsyn, Ivan Dolgoruky, Nikita Repnin, and Boris Sheremetiev, all displeased with having been persecuted by the tsar and avid to take their revenge under the new reign. In the other corner were those known as “Peter the Great’s Fledglings.”

His Majesty’s right-hand men, they were always on the alert to preserve their prerogatives. At their head stood Alexander Menshikov, a former pastry-cook’s helper, a childhood friend and favorite of the deceased (who had promoted him to Serene Prince), Ivan Buturlin, a lieutenant-colonel of the Guard, the senator Count Peter Tolstoy, Grand Chancellor Count Gabriel Golovkin, and the Lord High Admiral Fyodor Apraxin. To please Peter the Great, all these high-ranking individuals had signed the High Court’s verdict condemning to torture, and consequently to death, his rebellious son Alexis. For Catherine, these men represented a group of allies of unshakeable fidelity. These “men of progress,” who were outspokenly hostile toward the retrograde ideas of the