Terrible Tsarinas

tures. 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 pri-

ority 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 bar-

racks to prepare the officers of the Guard for a coup d’état 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 assem-

bled 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

< 6 >

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, conscious of her re-

sponsibility 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 hier-

archy — a sort of Council of the Wise known as the “Generalité”

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 Maj-

esty’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 succes-

sion. 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

< 7 >

Terrible Tsarinas

disturbances. The latest, centered around the Grand Duchess

Sophia, had nearly compromised the reign of her brother Peter the

Great. She had woven against him intrigues so black that she had

had to be thrown into a convent to stop her wicked ways. Did the

nobles want to go through that kind of experience again, by

bringing to power their protégé, with a guardian hovering over

him and offering advice? The adversaries in this party suggested

that women are not prepared to direct the affairs of an empire as

vast as Russia. Their nerves, they said, are too fragile, and they are

surrounded by greedy favorites whose extravagances are far too

costly to the nation. With that, the supporters of young Peter

asserted that Catherine was a woman like Sophia and that it was

better to have an imperfect regent than an inexperienced empress.

Stung by the affront, Menshikov and Tolstoy reminded the critics

that Catherine had demonstrated an almost virile courage in fol-

lowing her husband to every battlefield and had shown a well-

trained mind in her covert participation in all his political deci-

sions. When the debate was at its hottest, murmurs of approval

rose from the back of the room. Several officers of the Guard had

infiltrated the assembly (without being invited), and they deliv-

ered their opinion on a question which, in theory, concerned only

the members of the Generalité.

General Repnin, outraged by this impertinence, sought to

drive out the intruders, but Ivan Buturlin had already gone up to a

window and was moving his hand in a queer way. At this signal,

drum rolls resounded from afar, accompanied by fifes playing mar-

tial music. Two regiments of the Guard, convened in haste, were

waiting in an inner court of the palace for the order to intervene.