2 
THE LETTER FROM RUSSIA was a surprise, but its message was one Johanna had been dreaming of and hoping for. Even as the ambitious mother was trooping her daughter through the petty courts of north Germany, she had been reaching out to make use of a more exalted connection. There was a family history involving Johanna’s relatives in the house of Holstein with the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia. In December 1741, when Sophia was twelve, Elizabeth, the younger daughter of Peter the Great, had seized the Russian throne in a midnight coup d’état. The new empress had several strong ties to the house of Holstein. The first was through Elizabeth’s beloved older sister, Anne, Peter the Great’s eldest daughter, who had married Johanna’s cousin Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein. This marriage had produced the sad little Peter Ulrich; three months after her child was born, Anne was dead.
Elizabeth had an even closer personal bond with the house of Holstein. At seventeen, she had been betrothed to Johanna’s older brother, Charles Augustus. In 1726, this Holstein prince had traveled to St. Petersburg to be married, but a few weeks before the wedding, the prospective bridegroom had caught smallpox in the Russian capital and died there. Elizabeth was left with a grief she never entirely overcame, and thereafter she regarded the house of Holstein as almost a part of her own family.
Now, when the news arrived that this same Elizabeth had suddenly ascended the Russian throne, Johanna immediately wrote to congratulate the new empress, who, at one time, had been about to become her sister-in-law. Elizabeth’s reply was amiable and affectionate. The relationship continued to prosper. Johanna had in her possession a portrait of Elizabeth’s dead sister, Anne, which the empress wanted. When Elizabeth wrote to her “dear niece” and asked whether the picture might be returned to Russia, Johanna was overjoyed to do this favor. Soon after, a secretary from the Russian embassy in Berlin arrived in Stettin bringing Johanna a miniature portrait of Elizabeth set in a magnificent frame of diamonds worth eighteen thousand rubles.
Determined to nurture this promising connection, Johanna took her daughter to Berlin, where the Prussian court painter Antoine Pesne painted a portrait of Sophia to be sent as a gift to the empress. The portrait was unremarkable; the subjects of most of Pesne’s paintings wound up on his canvases looking almost identical, and his portrait of Sophia emerged as a generic eighteenth-century portrait of a pleasant young woman. Nevertheless, once the likeness had been dispatched to St. Petersburg, the desired response came back: “The empress is charmed by the expressive features of the young princess.”
Thereafter, Johanna passed up no opportunity to forge new links in this family chain. At the end of 1742, she gave birth to a second daughter, Sophia’s only sister. As soon as the infant’s gender was known, Johanna wrote to the empress, saying that the child was to be named Elizabeth and asking Her Majesty to consent to act as the baby’s godmother. Elizabeth agreed and soon another portrait of the empress, again set in diamonds, arrived in Stettin.
Meanwhile, another series of events favorable to Johanna was taking place. In January 1742, young Peter Ulrich of Holstein, the orphaned boy whom Sophia had met three years before, suddenly disappeared from Kiel and reappeared in St. Petersburg, where he was adopted by his aunt Elizabeth and proclaimed heir to the Russian throne. This boy, now a future emperor of Russia, was Johanna’s cousin (and, by extension, Sophia’s). In 1743, there was another wonderful surprise for Johanna. As a condition of Peter Ulrich’s becoming heir to the Russian throne, the little Holstein prince renounced his claim to the crown of Sweden. By the terms of a treaty concluded between Russia and Sweden, Empress Elizabeth was permitted to designate her nephew’s replacement as heir to the Swedish throne. She chose Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick, Prince-Bishop of Lübeck, who had been Peter Ulrich’s guardian. Thus it was that when all these proclamations, changes, and replacements were in place, Johanna found herself at the center of a wheel of astonishing good fortune. She had lost to smallpox a brother who would have been the consort of the new Russian empress, but now she possessed a cousin who would one day be the Russian emperor and a living elder brother who would become the king of Sweden.
As his wife was courting St. Petersburg and escorting their daughter through north Germany, Prince Christian Augustus, husband and father, remained at home. Now over fifty, unchanging in his disciplined, frugal way of life, he survived a temporary paralytic stroke, recovered, and lived to see his own rank and status improve. In July 1742, the new king of Prussia, Frederick II, promoted him to the rank of field marshal in the Prussian army. In November of the same year, the prince and his elder brother succeeded to joint sovereignty of the little principality of Anhalt-Zerbst, a town southwest of Berlin with medieval walls and towers, a moat, and gabled houses. Resigning from the army and leaving Stettin, Christian Augustus moved his family to Zerbst and devoted himself to the welfare of his twenty thousand subjects. Johanna was mildly pleased; now she was a reigning princess of a small—very small—sovereign German state. She lived in a small—very small—baroque palace. Despite her correspondence with an empress and her visits to her well-placed relatives, she still worried that life was passing her by.
Then, on January 1, 1744, after a service in the castle chapel, the family had just sat down to New Year’s Day dinner when a courier brought a sealed letter for Johanna. She opened it immediately. It was from St. Petersburg and had been written by Otto Brümmer, grand marshal of the court of Peter Ulrich, the young Duke of Holstein, now heir apparent to the Russian throne. Brümmer wrote:
At the explicit command of Her Imperial Majesty [the Empress Elizabeth], I have to inform you, Madame, that the empress desires Your Highness, accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter, to come to Russia as soon as possible and repair without loss of time to whatever place the Imperial Court may then be found. Your Highness is too intelligent not to understand the true meaning of the impatience of the empress to see you here soon as well as the princess your daughter of whom report has said much that is lovely. At the same time, our incomparable monarch has expressly charged me to inform Your Highness that His Highness the prince shall under no circumstances take part in the journey. Her Majesty has very important reasons for wishing it so. A word from Your Highness will, I believe, be all that is necessary to fulfill the will of our divine empress.
Brümmer’s letter contained other requests. He asked that Johanna travel incognito as far as Riga, on the Russian frontier, and that, if possible, she keep her destination a secret. If, somehow, the destination became known, she was to explain that duty and etiquette required her to thank the Russian empress personally for her generosity to the house of Holstein. To cover Johanna’s expenses, Brümmer enclosed a bill of exchange for ten thousand rubles on a Berlin bank. The letter did not specify the ultimate purpose of the summons, but a second letter, arriving by another courier only a few hours later, made the purpose clear. This letter came from Frederick II of Prussia and also was addressed only to Johanna:
I will no longer conceal the fact that in addition to the respect I have always cherished for you and for the princess your daughter, I have always had the wish to bestow some unusual good fortune upon the latter; and the thought came to me that it might be possible to arrange a match for her with her cousin, the Grand Duke Peter of Russia.
Brümmer’s specific exclusion of Prince Christian Augustus from the empress’s invitation, reinforced by Frederick’s having written only to Johanna, was, of course, humiliating for the nominal head of the family. And the wording of both letters made it clear that everyone involved seemed confident that the wife could manage to override whatever objections her stolid husband might raise, not only to his exclusion from the invitation but to other aspects of this possible marriage. These objections, they feared, would center on the requirement that a German princess marrying a future tsar would have to abandon her Protestant faith and convert to Greek Orthodoxy. Christian Augustus’s devout Lutheranism was well known, and all parties understood that he would oppose his daughter’s setting it aside.
For Johanna, this was a glorious day. After fifteen years of a depressing marriage, an empress and a king had put before her the prospect that all her dreams of excitement and adventure were to be realized. She was to be a person of importance, a performer on the world stage; all the heretofore wasted treasures of her personality were to be put to use. She was euphoric. As the days passed, messages from Russia and Berlin urging haste continued to arrive in Zerbst. In St. Petersburg, Brümmer, now under constant pressure from an impatient empress, told Elizabeth that Johanna had written that “she lacked only wings, otherwise she would fly to Russia.” And this was almost true: it took Johanna only ten days to make preparations for the journey.
While Sophia’s mother savored her crowning moment, her father secluded himself in his study. The old soldier had always known how to behave on a battlefield, but he did not know how to behave now. He resented his exclusion from the invitation, yet he wished to support his daughter. He abhorred the prospect of her being forced to change her religion, and was uneasy at the idea of her being sent far from home to a country as politically unstable as Russia. Ultimately, despite all these worries and reservations, the old, good soldier felt that he had no choice; he must listen to his wife and obey the orders of King Frederick II. He locked his study door and began composing cautionary advice to his daughter as to how she should behave at the Russian court:
Next to the empress, Her Majesty, you must respect the Grand Duke [Peter, her future husband] above all as your Lord, Father, and Sovereign; and withal win by care and tenderness at every opportunity his confidence and love. Your Lord and his will are to be preferred to all the pleasures and treasures of the world and nothing is to be done which he dislikes.
Within three days, Johanna was able to report to Frederick: “The prince, my husband, has signified his approval. The journey, which at this time of year is an exceedingly dangerous one, holds no terrors for me. I have made my decision and am firmly convinced that everything is happening in the best interests of Providence.”
Prince Christian was not the only member of the Zerbst family whose role in this momentous undertaking was unmistakably secondary. As Johanna read and wrote, ordered and tried on clothes, Sophia was ignored. The money available went into improving her mother’s wardrobe; nothing was left for the daughter. Sophia’s clothing—what might have been considered her trousseau—consisted of three old dresses, a dozen chemises, some pairs of stockings, and a few handkerchiefs. Her bridal linen was made up of a few of her mother’s used sheets. Altogether, these fabrics filled half of a small trunk of a size that a local girl might carry with her when she traveled to be married in the next village.
Sophia already knew what was happening. She had caught a glimpse of Brümmer’s letter and saw that it came from Russia. As her mother was opening it, she had read the words, “accompanied by the princess, your eldest daughter.” Moreover, her mother’s subsequent breathless behavior and her parents’ hasty withdrawal to whisper together encouraged her belief that the letter concerned her future. She knew the importance of marriage; she remembered the excitement her mother had shown four years earlier when she met the little duke Peter Ulrich; she knew that her portrait had been sent to Russia. Eventually, unable to contain her curiosity, she confronted her mother. Johanna admitted what the letters said and confirmed what they implied. “She told me,” Catherine wrote later, “that there was also a considerable risk involved, given the instability of that country. I answered that God would provide for stability, if such was his will; and that I had sufficient courage to face the risk, and that my heart told me that all would be well.” The matter that tormented her father—the question of a change in her religion—did not trouble Sophia. Her approach to religion was, as Pastor Wagner already knew, pragmatic.
During this week, which was to be their last together, Sophia did not tell Babet Cardel about her imminent departure. Her parents had forbidden her to mention it; they put it about that they and their daughter were leaving Zerbst simply to pay their annual visit to Berlin. Babet, keenly attuned to her pupil’s character, realized that no one was being straightforward. But the pupil, in her tearful farewell to her beloved teacher, still would not reveal the truth. And teacher and pupil were never to see each other again.
On January 10, 1744, mother, father, and daughter entered a carriage for the ride to Berlin, where they were to see King Frederick. Sophia now was as eager as her mother. This was the escape she had dreamed of, the beginning of her climb toward a higher destiny. When she left Zerbst for the Prussian capital, there were no painful scenes. She kissed her nine-year-old brother, Frederick (Wilhelm, the brother she hated, was already dead), and her new little sister, Elizabeth. Her uncle, George Lewis, whom she had kissed and promised to marry, was already forgotten. As the carriage rolled through the city gates and onto the high road, Sophia never turned to look back. And in the more than five decades of her life that lay before her, she never returned.