Terrible tsarinas

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Catherine Shows the Way The tsar’s death was finally announced by a 100-gun salute fired from the Peter and Paul fortress. The bells tolled on every church. It was time to make a decision. The whole nation was waiting to find out whom it would have to adore - or fear - in the future. At eight o’clock in the morning, cons cious of her responsibility before History, Catherine proceeded to a large hall in the palace where the senators were gathered, with the members of Holy Synod and the dignitaries of the first four classes of the hierarchy - a sort of Council of the Wise known as the “Generalite” of the empire.

The discussion was impassioned from the start. To begin with, Peter the Great’s personal secretary Makarov swore on the Gospels that the tsar had not written a will. Seizing the ball on the rebound, Menshikov pleaded eloquently on behalf of His Majesty’s widow. His first argument was that, having married the former maidservant from Livonia (Catherine was born Marta Skawronska) in 1707, Peter the Great had then chosen, one year before his death, to have her crowned empress in the Cathedral of the Archangel, in Moscow. By this solemn and unprecedented act, according to Menshikov, he had shown that there was no need to resort to any written will since, while he was alive, Peter had taken care to bless his wife as sole inheritor of power.

But this explanation struck his adversaries as specious: they objected that in no monarchy in the world did the crowning of the monarch’s wife confer upon her ipso facto the right to the succession. Supporting this viewpoint, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn advanced the candidature of the sovereign’s grandson, Peter Alexeyevich, the proper son of Alexis - saying that this child, of the same blood as the deceased, should be considered before all the other applicants. However, given the boy’s tender age, that choice would imply the designation of a regent until he came of majority; and every regency in Russia had been marred by conspiracies and