Catherine the Great

In midwinter 1764, a young officer, Lieutenant Vasily Mirovich of the Smolensk Regiment, was assigned to the garrison at Schlüsselburg. A proud, lonely, embittered young man, in debt and given to drinking and gambling, he harbored a deep and gnawing sense of injustice and persecution. Mirovich was twenty-four and of aristocratic Ukrainian origin. His family’s estates had been confiscated in 1709 by Peter the Great because the young man’s grandfather had sided with the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazeppa against the tsar during the Swedish invasion of Russia in 1708. Deprived of his family heritage, Mirovich had been brought up in poverty. Without money, he tried to win at cards and was unlucky. His creditors pressed him constantly. His three sisters, living in Moscow, were close to starving, but he could not help them. He prayed to God, but there was no reply. In hopes of recovering his family lands, he came to St. Petersburg. He petitioned the Senate twice for restoration, but the Senate refused. He appealed twice to Catherine; she rejected him. When he approached Kyril Razumovsky, appointed Ukrainian hetman by Catherine, Razumovsky told him that his claims were hopeless. Razumovsky’s only advice was, “Make your own career, young man. Seize fortune by the forelock as others have done.” Mirovich filed these words away in memory.

Resentful, without money or connections, he joined the army and was posted to Schlüsselburg. His fellow officers found him moody and difficult. His post was in the outer fortress, where no one was allowed to know what went on in the inner casements. He wondered about the nameless Prisoner No. 1, entombed in the labyrinth of cells in the inner citadel, where he was watched over by special guards who were never relieved. When he learned, eventually, that the prisoner was “Ivanushka,” the anointed infant tsar, Mirovich remembered Razumovsky’s advice: “Seize fortune by the forelock.” This counsel reminded Mirovich of the recent history of another young officer, Gregory Orlov, who had helped Catherine overthrow a sovereign and thereby had promoted himself to spectacular power and wealth. Why should he, Vasily Mirovich, not do the same on Ivan’s behalf? Why should not he, like the Orlov brothers, reach fame and fortune by arranging the rescue of the true tsar?

From this ambitious beginning, Mirovich’s horizon expanded. His original motive for restoring Ivan to the throne was to alleviate his own misery and poverty by becoming another Orlov. Soon he had a grander vision. Besides being a gambler and a drinker, Mirovich was a churchgoer, and he convinced himself that God had assigned him a sacred mission. Surely God himself would welcome and bless the overthrow of a usurping woman and the restoration of an anointed tsar. Excited by this new idea, Mirovich found a comrade at Schlüsselburg, Appolon Ushakov. Together they considered the layout of the fortress and the means of convincing or overpowering the garrison of the inner fortress. Early in May 1764, Mirovich drew up a manifesto—a tangle of misstatements and grievances—for Ivan to sign and proclaim once he had been liberated.

Not long had Peter III possessed the throne when by the intrigues of his wife and by her hands he was given poison to drink, and by these means and by force, the vain and spendthrift Catherine seized my hereditary throne. To the day of our accession, she has sent out of my country up to twenty-five million in gold and silver.… And, moreover, her inborn weaknesses have led her to take as a husband her subject Gregory Orlov … for which she will not be able to excuse herself at the Last Judgment.

Their plan was for Ushakov to present himself at Schlüsselburg pretending to be a courier from Catherine, bringing with him an order for Ivan’s release. Mirovich would read the order to the garrison, arrest the commandant, release the prisoner, and take him by boat down the Neva River to St. Petersburg, where Ivan would proclaim his accession to the troops in the capital. To seal their bond, the two conspirators went to church and swore an oath. Their moment to act would come when the empress departed on her already announced journey to the Baltic provinces. What Mirovich and Ushakov did not know—only Catherine, Panin, and the two guards, Vlasev and Chekin, knew—was that any effort to free the prisoner would result in his death.

Just before Catherine’s departure from St. Petersburg for the Baltic provinces, Ushakov disappeared. He had been ordered by the College of War to to carry funds to Smolensk and give them to the commander of his regiment there. Mirovich waited for his collaborator to return—he did not. His hat and dagger were discovered on a riverbank; a neighborhood peasant reported that the body of a drowned officer had washed ashore and that they had buried it. The circumstances of his death were unknown.