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THE ARCHBISHOP OF NOVGOROD blessed Peter as the new gosudar (autocrat), the Senate and the heads of the Colleges of State (government ministries) took the oath of allegiance, and the cannon of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul thundered the proclamation of the accession of the new monarch. Peter rode out into the Palace Square to receive the oaths of the regiments of Foot Guards, the Preobrazhensky, Semyonovsky, and Izmailovsky; the Horse Guards; the line regiments; and the Cadet Corps. When the figure of the new emperor, wearing the bottle-green uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards, appeared, illuminated by torches, the regimental standards dipped in salute. Delighted, Peter returned to the palace and told the Austrian ambassador, Count Mercy, “I did not think they loved me so much.” That evening, he presided over a supper for 150 people who had been instructed to dress in light colors to celebrate Peter’s accession rather than the usual black customary for mourning. At the table, Catherine sat on one side of the emperor. Ivan Shuvalov, Elizabeth’s favorite, in tears at the empress’s bedside, stood behind Peter’s chair, laughing and joking. The following night, Peter gave another banquet for which ladies were commanded to come “richly dressed.” Princess Dashkova refused to attend these festivities, pleading illness. As the evening progressed, she received a message from her sister saying that the new emperor was annoyed by her absence and did not believe her excuse, and that it might go hard with the princess’s husband, Prince Dashkov, if she did not appear. Dashkova obeyed. When she appeared, Peter approached and said in a low voice, “If, my little friend, you will take my advice, pay a little more attention to us. The time may come when you will have good reason to repent of any negligence shown your sister. Believe me, it is for your interest alone I speak. You have no other way of making yourself of consequence in the world than by seeking her protection.”
Ten days before the funeral, the body of Empress Elizabeth was moved to the Kazan Cathedral, where, in a silver embroidered robe, it was placed in an open coffin, surrounded by candles. A stream of mourners, flowing past the coffin in semidarkness, could not help seeing a veiled figure, draped in black, wearing neither crown nor jewelry, kneeling on the stone floor beside the bier, apparently lost in grief. All knew that this was the new empress, Catherine. Catherine was there in part out of respect but also because she understood that there was no better way to appeal directly to the people than with this demonstration of humility and apparent devotion. Indeed, she played the part so well that the French ambassador reported to Paris that “more and more, she captures the hearts of Russians.”
Peter’s behavior in the presence of Elizabeth’s body was in stark contrast. Through the weeks of public mourning, the new emperor acted out his joy at being released from eighteen years of political and cultural imprisonment. Intoxicated by his new freedom, he resisted conforming to the customs of the Orthodox Church regarding death. He refused to stand in respectful vigil or to kneel beside the coffin. On the few occasions he appeared in the cathedral, he paced restlessly, talking loudly, making jokes, laughing, pointing, and even sticking out his tongue at the priests. Most of the time, he remained in his own apartment, drinking and shouting with an excitement he seemed unable to control.
The climax to this display of mockery came on the day Elizabeth’s body was moved from the Kazan Cathedral, across the Neva River bridge, to the mausoleum on the island fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. Peter, conspicuously alone, walked immediately behind the coffin. He wore a black mourning robe with a long train, carried by elderly noblemen. The new emperor’s prank was to lag behind, then stop completely until the coffin had advanced thirty feet ahead of him. Then, with long strides, he would hurry forward to catch up. The older men, unable to manage the emperor’s pace, were forced to let go of his train and let it flap wildly in the wind. Delighted by their embarrassment, Peter repeated this sequence over and over. This grotesque buffoonery by a man almost thirty-four years old, walking at the funeral of the woman who had made him an emperor, shocked everyone: the noblemen walking in the procession, the officers and soldiers lining the route, and the crowds of people watching.
Despite this flamboyantly inappropriate behavior, Peter followed a moderate political path in the early weeks of his reign. Michael Vorontsov, restored to the chancellorship after Bestuzhev’s fall, retained that post, although in Elizabeth’s last years he had sided with the anti-Prussian, pro-French Shuvalovs. Peter immediately recalled long-banished officials. Ernst Johann Biron, Empress Anna’s German chancellor and lover and the father of the Princess of Courland, was permitted to exchange his retirement in Yaroslavl for a comfortable residence in Petersburg. Lestocq, Elizabeth’s French physician and counselor, and old Field Marshal Münnich, another German, were pardoned and brought back from exile. Nothing was done, however, to ameliorate the disgrace of Alexis Bestuzhev, the former chancellor, who had always supported Austria and opposed Prussia. His exclusion from the general amnesty made a painful impression on many Russians. It seemed that political offenders with foreign names were being allowed to return, but this Russian statesman, who had worked so long for his country’s secure position in Europe, remained in disgrace.
A stream of popular administrative changes followed these amnesties. Whether these efforts stemmed from a planned effort to win public favor or were simply an extension of Peter’s unpredictable behavior, no one knew. On January 17, he pleased the entire population by reducing the government tax on salt. On February 18, he delighted the nobility by issuing a manifesto ending compulsory service to the state. This obligation was a legacy from the reign of Peter the Great, who, after declaring that he, as tsar, was “the first servant of the state,” had then decreed that all landowners and other noblemen owed a similar duty. The result had created a permanent officer corps for the army and navy and a permanent administration staff for the Russian bureaucracy. Now, the descendants of these noblemen were freed from all military and civil obligations; they would no longer be compelled to perform years of state service. They were also granted freedom to travel abroad and, except in wartime, to remain as long as they liked. On February 21, Peter abolished the Secret Chancellery, the dreaded investigative chamber that dealt with those accused of treason or sedition. At the same time, Russian religious dissenters, the Raskolniki, were permitted to return, with full liberty of worship, from the countries to which they had fled to avoid persecution by the the Orthodox Church.
In March, Peter visited the grim Schlüsselburg Fortress, where the former emperor, Ivan VI, deposed by Empress Elizabeth, had been confined for eighteen years. Peter, certain that his own place on the throne was secure, thought of giving Ivan an easier life, perhaps even of releasing him and appointing him to a military post. The condition of the man he found made these plans impossible. Ivan, now twenty-two, was tall and thin, with hair to his waist. He was illiterate, stammered out disconnected sentences, and was uncertain about his own identity. His clothes were torn and dirty, his bed was a narrow pallet, the air in his prison room was heavy, and the only light came from small, barred windows high up in the wall. When Peter offered to help, Ivan asked whether he could have more fresh air. Peter gave him a silk dressing gown, which the former emperor hid under his pillow. Before leaving the fortress, Peter ordered a house to be built in the courtyard where the prisoner might have more air and more room to walk.
Peter rose at seven o’clock and dressed with his adjutants standing by, reading reports and receiving orders. From eight to eleven he consulted his ministers and made a round of public offices, often finding only junior clerks on duty. At eleven, he appeared on the parade ground, where he conducted a rigorous inspection of uniforms and weapons and drilled the troops, assisted by his Holstein officers. At one o’clock, he dined, inviting to his table anyone to whom he wished to speak, regardless of rank. His afternoons often included a nap, followed by a concert in which he played his violin. Then came supper and a party, which sometimes lasted late into the night. Most of these evenings involved heavy smoking, drinking, and carousing. Peter always carried a pipe and was followed by a servant carrying a large basket filled with Dutch clay pipes and a variety of tobaccos. The room quickly filled with smoke, and through this haze, the emperor strutted up and down, loudly talking and laughing. The company, sitting at long tables covered with bottles, and understanding that Peter hated ceremony and liked to be treated as a comrade, let themselves go. Presently, they would all get up and stagger into the courtyard, where they played hopscotch like children, hopping on one leg, butting their comrades, and kicking them from behind. “Imagine our feelings to see the first men of the empire, covered with ribbons and stars, behaving this way,” said a onetime guest. When one of the Holsteiners fell to the ground, the others would laugh and clap until the servants came and carried him away. But Peter was always up again at seven o’clock.
This frantic energy displayed little organization or purpose. “The moderation and clemency of the emperor’s acts,” Count Mercy wrote to Vienna, “do not indicate anything fixed or definite. He has a mind but little exercised in affairs, little given to solid considerations, and continually occupied by prejudices. His natural disposition is heady, violent, and irrational.” A few days later, Mercy added, “I can find nobody here of sufficient zeal and courage energetically to resist the vehement and obstinate temper of the monarch. They all flatter his stubbornness for their own private ends.”
Severe conflict arose when Peter attempted to impose change on some of the deep-rooted institutions of the Russian empire. His goodwill did not extend to the Orthodox Church. Since coming to Russia eighteen years before, he had hated his adopted form of Christianity. He believed its doctrines and dogmas to be sheer superstition, its services ludicrous, its priests contemptible, and its wealth obscene. The religion he had brought with him from Holstein was Lutheran. Now, as emperor and the official head of the Orthodox Church, he decided that this age-old pillar of Russian life and culture must be remade on the Protestant model practiced in Prussia. Frederick II was a freethinker who sneered at priests and religious belief; why should he, Peter, not do the same? On February 16, a decree secularized all church property, placing it in the hands of a new governmental department. Dignitaries of the Orthodox Church were to become salaried officials paid by the state. When the higher clergy expressed indignation and dismay, Peter bluntly announced that the veneration of icons was a primitive practice that must be eliminated. All icons except those of Jesus Christ—all of the painted and carved renditions of the saints who were a part of Russian history—were to be removed from churches. Then, striking directly at the Russian clergy themselves, he demanded that priests shave off their beards and abandon the long brocaded robes that reached to the floor; in the future, he said, they must wear black cassocks like Protestant pastors. The archbishops replied that if the clergy obeyed these commands, they would be murdered by their flocks. That Easter, the usual open-air religious processions were banned, spurring talk among the people that the emperor was a pagan—or, worse, a Protestant. Indeed, Peter told the archbishop of Novgorod that he meant to establish a Protestant chapel in the new Winter Palace. When the archbishop protested, Peter shouted that the prelate was an old fool and that a religion good enough for the king of Prussia should be good enough for Russia.
To change the beliefs and practices of the Orthodox Church would require a sustained effort, but the clergy and the millions of faithful would have difficulty forming an effective opposition. The army, the other pillar of the Russian state and autocracy, posed a different problem. He considered himself a soldier and was keenly aware of the importance of possessing a loyal, efficient army. Nevertheless, from his first days on the throne, Peter managed to offend the institution that he most needed for support. He was determined to reorganize the Russian army on the Prussian model. Everything was to be reformed or replaced: uniforms, discipline, drill, battlefield tactics, even its commander—all were to be Prussianized. Peter liked neatness and smartness and wanted his soldiers to wear close-fitting German uniforms. He took away the long, loose coats of Russian soldiers, useful in the cold of a northern winter, and put them into lighter, thinner, tight-fitting German uniforms. Before long, some could scarcely recognize the newly costumed, powdered men of the Russian Imperial Guard. Russian officers were expected to appear in new uniforms garnished with shoulder straps and gold knots. Peter himself began wearing the blue uniform of a Prussian colonel. At the beginning of his reign, he was content to wear the broad blue ribbon of the Russian Order of St. Andrew; then he switched to the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. He often showed off a ring containing a miniature portrait of Frederick, which he announced was his most precious possession.
Peter had never been near a battlefield, but he was an excellent drillmaster, and on the parade ground he made Russian soldiers practice Prussian exercises for hours, enforcing his commands with a little cane. No officer was excused from these drills, and fat, middle-aged generals were obliged to turn out at the head of their regiments and do parade ground drill on their stiff, gouty limbs.
The antics of old generals trying to carry out Prussian exercises gave Peter amusement, but dressing his soldiers as Germans and teaching them Prussian drill was only the beginning. He replaced the traditional Russian sovereign’s personal bodyguard, drawn from the Preobrazhensky regiment—a unit founded by Peter the Great and of which Peter III was honorary colonel—with a Holstein Cuirassier Regiment to which he gave the name of Body Guard of the Imperial Household. This created intense indignation in the Guards and in the army generally. He announced that he intended to disband and abolish the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard altogether and distribute the men among the regular line regiments. As a culminating insult, he placed his uncle, Prince George Lewis of Holstein, who had no military experience, in command of the Russian army.
At the moment Peter was proclaimed emperor in December 1761, Frederick of Prussia was in a precarious position. Nearly a third of his dominions were in enemy hands. The Russians had occupied East Prussia and part of Pomerania; the Austrians had regained most of Silesia: Berlin, his capital, had been pillaged and lay half in ruins. His army now was composed mostly of young recruits, and the king himself resembled “a demented scarecrow.” To rid himself of Russia as an enemy, he was prepared to sign a treaty, permanently sacrificing East Prussia. Then came Empress Elizabeth’s death and Peter’s accession to the throne. When Frederick learned that the new emperor had ordered a cessation of hostilities, he responded by ordering the immediate release of all Russian prisoners and sent a twenty-six-year-old officer, Baron Bernhard von Goltz, to St. Petersburg to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, Prussia’s interests were in the care of the English ambassador, Sir Robert Keith, who had followed Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams’s practice of sending military information to Frederick in Berlin. Now that Peter was on the throne, Keith’s influence was at a peak. The Austrian ambassador, Count Mercy, called him “the chief instrument of the Prussian party. Not a day passes that the emperor does not see Mr. Keith, or send him fruit, or pay him other attentions.” Keith’s own dispatches also reveal this closeness. Only three days after Peter’s accession, Keith informed London that “at a dinner, His Imperial Majesty, with whose good graces I have always been honored, came up to me and smilingly told me in my ear that he hoped I would be pleased with him as the night before he had sent couriers to the different corps of his army with orders not to advance further into Prussian territory and to cease all hostilities.” Three weeks later, when Keith was supping with the emperor in Elizabeth Vorontsova’s apartment, Peter told him that he wanted to settle matters with the king of Prussia as soon as possible and was “resolved to get free of all commitments to the Court of Vienna.”
On February 25, Count Mercy was present at a banquet given by Chancellor Vorontsov for the emperor and for all foreign ambassadors; three hundred people were in the hall. Mercy found Peter uneasy. At nine o’clock the company sat down. During the meal, which lasted four hours, Peter drank Burgundy, became excited, and, at the top of his voice, proposed a toast to the king of Prussia. At two in the morning, the diners rose from the table, baskets of clay pipes and tobacco were brought, and the men began to smoke. Peter, pacing up and down the room, pipe in hand, confronted the new French ambassador, Baron de Breteuil: “We must make peace,” he said. “For my part, I have declared it.”
“And we, too, sire, would have it,” the ambassador replied, then added, “honorably, and in agreement with our allies.”
Peter’s face darkened. “Just as you please,” he said. “For my part, I have declared it. You can do as you please. I am a soldier and I don’t joke.”
“Sire,” said Breteuil, “I will report to my king the declaration Your Majesty has been pleased to make to me.”
Peter turned and walked away. The following day, the ambassadors of Russia’s allies, Austria and France, were handed an official document which declared that the war had been going on for six years to the detriment of all. Now, the new Russian emperor, anxious to terminate so great an evil, had decided to announce to all the courts in alliance with Russia that in order to restore the blessings of peace to his own empire and to Europe, he was ready to sacrifice all the conquests made by Russian arms. He believed that the allied courts would also prefer restoration of general tranquillity and would agree with him. After reading the declaration, Count Mercy declared to Chancellor Vorontsov that he found the declaration obscure and impertinent. Writing to his own court in Vienna, he described it as venomous; as an effort to avoid the most solemn treaty obligations; and as an excuse to save the king of Prussia from impending destruction.
For Mercy and Austria, worse was to come. Peter’s declaration of peace turned out to be a preliminary to the signing of a formal alliance between Russia and Prussia. On March 3, the new Prussian envoy, young Baron von Goltz, arrived in St. Petersburg, where Peter received him enthusiastically. Goltz scarcely had time to congratulate the new monarch on his accession when Peter overwhelmed him with ardent assurances of his own admiration for the king of Prussia. He had a great deal to talk to him about in private, he whispered. Immediately after the audience, Peter thrust his arm through that of this new friend and carried him off to dinner, talking incessantly about the Prussian army and amazing Goltz with his intimate knowledge of the subject, including the names of almost every senior officer of every Prussian regiment. Goltz was provided with a mansion in which Peter visited him twice a day. Within a week, Goltz had completely eclipsed Keith, his English colleague, and, henceforth, until the end of Peter’s reign, Prussian influence dominated at the Russian court.
Goltz’s mission was to speed the end of the war and the detachment of Russia from her allies. To achieve this, he told Peter that Frederick was willing to consent to the permanent cession of East Prussia. Peter did not require this. On the contrary, he was willing to sacrifice everything to please Frederick. He let Frederick set the terms. When the king sent to St. Petersburg a draft treaty for an eternal peace between Prussia and Russia, it did not go through the normal channel; it was not submitted, or even shown, to Chancellor Vorontsov. Instead, Goltz simply read the text to Peter in private without witnesses, and on April 24, Peter signed it without comment, sending it to Vorontsov for confirmation. By this stroke of a pen on a secret treaty, the new emperor not only restored to Prussia all the territory won from her by Russia during five years of war but contracted an “eternal” alliance with Prussia.
Six days after the signing, the emperor celebrated the peace treaty with a banquet at which every guest was seated according to rank, the first time this precedence had been observed during his reign. Peter and his chancellor, Vorontsov, both wore the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. The banquet lasted for four hours and four toasts were drunk: an expression of joy at the restoration of peace with Prussia; personal congratulations to Frederick II; a toast to perpetual peace between the two powers; and a toast to the “honor of all the valiant officers and soldiers of the Prussian army.” Each toast was accompanied by a triple salvo from the guns of the fortress of Peter and Paul, as well as from fifty cannon planted in the square outside the palace. There was no mention of the achievements, bravery, or losses of the Russian army, and, said Count Mercy, “nothing was omitted in the way of indecency and offensiveness in regard to his ancient ally, Austria.”
This sensational diplomatic and military volte-face startled the chancelleries of Europe. When Maria Theresa’s government in Vienna learned that the Russian emperor meant to sacrifice all his conquests “in the interests of peace,” the Austrian reply was guarded, asking for details as to how this was to be achieved. The Russian explanation, arriving in April, was pretentious and pompous: to make peace, it declared, one belligerent must step forward as a general proponent and agent of peace; Russia had chosen this role “out of compassion for suffering humanity and from personal friendship for the king of Prussia. The Austrian court is therefore invited to follow our example.” To Vienna, the message was menacing; the threat became real when Peter signed the treaty of alliance with Frederick. Peter explained this by saying that inasmuch as his good offices had proved useless, he found himself regretfully compelled to resort to the extreme measure of assisting the king of Prussia with his army as being the quickest way to restore to humanity the blessings of peace. He ordered General Zakhar Chernyshev, the commander of a Russian corps attached to the Austrian army in Silesia (and Catherine’s ardent admirer fourteen years earlier) to join the Prussian army with his force of sixteen thousand infantry and a thousand Cossacks to fight against Austria. At this betrayal and the collapse of all his years of diplomatic effort in Russia, Count Mercy asked to be recalled to Vienna. He recommended sending a third-rank diplomat as his replacement.
With Russia defecting from the alliance and switching sides, France and Austria had no alternative except to negotiate with Prussia. The French were outraged. The Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister, said to the Russian ambassador, “Sir, the maintenance of solemn engagements ought to override every other consideration.” Louis himself declared that while he was willing to listen to overtures for a durable and honorable peace, he must act in full accord with his allies; he would consider himself a traitor if he took part in secret negotiations; he would stain the honor of France if he deserted his allies. The result was a rupture of Russian diplomatic relations with France and the recall of ambassadors from both St. Petersburg and Paris.
Peter had provoked and insulted the Orthodox Church, infuriated and alienated the army, and betrayed his allies. Nevertheless, effective opposition still needed a specific cause around which to rally. Peter himself supplied this by endeavoring to impose on his exhausted country a frivolous new war—against Denmark.
As Duke of Holstein, Peter had inherited the grievances of his duchy against the Danish monarchy. In 1721, the small province of Schleswig, then a hereditary possession of the dukes of Holstein, had been seized and handed over to Denmark by England, France, Austria, and Sweden. No sooner was Peter on the Russian throne than he proceeded to insist upon “his rights.” As early as March 1, even before peace with Prussia was settled, he demanded to know whether Denmark was prepared to satisfy his claims to Schleswig; if not, he said he would be compelled to take extreme measures. The Danes proposed a conference and the English ambassador recommended negotiations; why should the mighty emperor of Russia make war with Denmark over a few villages? But everyone soon discovered that on the Holstein question, Peter meant to have his way and that even the advice of his new ally, Frederick of Prussia, was powerless to restrain him. Hitherto, Peter had proved pliable in Prussian hands; now even these hardheaded Germans learned about his obstinacy. Ultimately, on June 3, Peter agreed to a conference in Berlin to be mediated by Frederick, but he stipulated that the Russian propositions were to be regarded as an ultimatum to Denmark and that rejection meant war.
Redressing a perceived wrong against his duchy was one motive for provoking a war, but Peter had a second. Having idealized the warrior king of Prussia, having bragged that he had defeated “gypsies” when he was a boy in Kiel, having marched paste soldiers across a tabletop in a palace room and ordered real soldiers around a parade ground, he wanted now to be a hero on a real battlefield. Peter had just proclaimed to his allies and to Europe his passion for peace; now he was preparing to attack Denmark. The Russian army, deprived of its hard-won victory over Prussia, now learned that it was to spill its blood in a new campaign that had nothing to do with the interests of Russia.
Unable to dissuade Peter from undertaking this new war so soon after his accession, Frederick II urged his admirer to take precautions before his departure from Russia. “Frankly, I distrust these Russians of yours,” he said to Peter. “What if, during your absence, a cabal were formed to dethrone Your Majesty?” He advised Peter to have himself crowned and consecrated in Moscow before leaving, to lock up all unreliable persons, and to leave St. Petersburg garrisoned by his faithful Holsteiners. Peter refused to be persuaded; he saw no need. “If the Russians had wanted to do me harm,” he wrote to Frederick, “they could have done it long ago, seeing that I take no particular precautions, going freely about the streets on foot. I assure Your Majesty that when one knows how to deal with the Russians, one can be quite sure of them.”
A Russian army of forty thousand veterans was already assembled in occupied Prussian Pomerania, and Peter, without waiting to arrive himself, ordered these troops to advance. The Danes reacted by moving first and met the Russians in Mecklenburg. Then, to the astonishment of Danish commanders, the Russians in front of them began to retreat.
The riddle was solved a few days later. There had been a coup d’état in St. Petersburg. Peter III had been overthrown, had abdicated, and was a prisoner. Peter’s wife, now styled Catherine II, had been proclaimed empress of Russia.