Terrible tsarinas

«5»

Terrible Tsarinas old aristocracy, had no hesitation: only Peter’s widow had the right and the ability to succeed him.

Of the men who were determined to defend the cause of “the true guardian of the imperial thought” the most devoted was the one who had the most to gain - the dashing Alexander Menshikov. He owed his entire career to the tsar’s friendship, and he counted on the gratitude of the wife to maintain his privileges.

His conviction was so strong that he would not even hear of Peter the Great’s grandson’s claims to the crown; certainly, he was the son of the tsarevich Alexis, but nothing, except that coincidence of family, destined him to such a glorious fate. Similarly, he shrugged off the pretensions of the daughters of Peter the Great and Catherine who could, after all, also present their candidatures. The elder of the two daughters, Anna Petrovna, was just seventeen years old; the junior, Elizabeth Petrovna, was barely sixteen. Neither one was particularly dangerous. In any event, according to the order of the succession, they would only come after their mother, the putative empress. For the moment, the priority was to get them married as quickly as possible. Catherine was quite unconcerned about that and relied on Menshikov and his friends to support her in her intrigues. Before the tsar had even heaved his last sigh, they sent emissaries to the principal barracks to prepare the officers of the Guard for a coup d’etat in favor of their future “little mother Catherine.”

As the doctors and then the priests recorded the death of Peter the Great, a wan sunrise seeped over the sleeping city. It was snowing, with great soft flakes. Catherine wrung her hands and wept so abundantly in front of the plenipotentiaries assembled around the funeral bed that Captain Villebois, Peter the Great’s aide-de-camp, would note in his memoirs: “One could not conceive that there could be so much water in a woman’s brain.

Many people ran to the palace just to see her crying and sighing.”2