Peter had his own mistress by now, and Saltykov was sent abroad. Catherine soon took up with a young Polish nobleman, Stanislaw Poniatowski, who came to Russia with the English ambassador, but politics soon removed him as well. The politics of Elizabeth’s court did not just affect Catherine’s private life, but her political status as well. Russia had entered the Seven Years War in 1756 under the foreign policy leadership of Bestuzhev-Riumin, who had maintained an alliance with England and Austria against France and Prussia. Unfortunately for Bestuzhev-Riumin, as well as many of his colleagues throughout Europe, the Austrian chancellor count Wenzel Anton Kaunitz engineered a major reversal of alliances in 1756. Austria allied with France in order to get revenge on Prussia. England allied with Prussia, for in London the main enemy and rival was always France – in India and the New World, as well as in Europe. Russia had to choose, and Bestuzhev-Riumin persuaded Elizabeth to remain with Austria and join it in fighting Prussia when war broke out in 1756. At the same time Russia did not declare war on England, nor did England on Russia. This tangle led to Bestuzhev-Riumin’s fall in 1758, and the rise of the Vorontsov family (whose sympathies were with France, not England) to power at court. Hence they accused Bestuzhev-Riumin of lack of zeal in the war and convinced the empress to oust him. As the Seven Years’ War progressed and the Russian army kept Frederick the Great on the defensive, Peter’s pro-Prussian sympathies became more and more of an irritant to Elizabeth and made him unpopular in the army and much of the court. As his wife, Catherine incurred the empress’s suspicions. Personal conflicts added fuel to the flames, though Catherine was able to appeal personally to the empress through several crises.
In this delicate and potentially dangerous situation Catherine encountered Grigorii Orlov in the summer of 1760. Orlov was one of five brothers, all of them officers in the guards and very popular in that milieu. This was a powerful romantic attachment, but also politically quite important, for it was the guards who had already decided three times who would rule Russia. She also found her first real woman friend, Princess Elizabeth Dashkova. Dashkova was much younger than Catherine, but was a woman of intelligence and fortitude, and moreover was the sister of Peter’s mistress, one of the Vorontsovs. In spite of this family tie, Dashkova had developed an intense personal dislike of Peter and shared the general discontent with his political orientation. The tutor to Catherine’s son Paul, count Nikita Panin, a shrewd and experienced diplomat, also distrusted Catherine’s husband. Though Peter was still the heir, he was acquiring many enemies.
Then, just at the moment when Prussia seemed about to collapse, Empress Elizabeth died. In January 1762, the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp ascended the Russian throne as Peter III. His first act was to make peace with Prussia, negating all of Russia’s efforts and sacrifices over the previous five years. To add insult to injury, he persuaded Prussia to help him to attack Denmark, a traditional Russian ally, to recover territory he believed to rightly belong to Holstein. He even ordered Prussian style uniforms for the guards, and drilled them endlessly after the Prussian fashion. No moves could be more precisely calculated to insult the Russian army and the court elite. It did not matter that peace allowed him to take up some of the old proposals of the Shuvalov group and to abolish the requirement that noblemen serve in the army or civil service (which once again made service voluntary). Peter had hopelessly ruined his relations with his most important constituency in St. Petersburg.
Catherine and the Orlovs began to plan a way to remove him and proclaim Catherine empress in her own right. Peter had suspicions that he had enemies, and one of the conspirators was arrested. Grigorii Orlov’s brother Aleksei decided that the time had come and on June 28, 1762, he came at dawn to Peterhof and told Catherine they had to strike. She had no hesitation and with Dashkova rode into St. Petersburg. Orlov took them to the barracks of the Izmailov guards, and the soldiers fell on their knees, swearing loyalty to Empress Catherine II. Catherine and her party went to the two other guards regiments, who joined her, ending at the Winter Palace by ten o’clock in the morning. A manifesto was readied, officially proclaiming her the sovereign and ordering the army and people to swear the oath of allegiance.
Peter III still remained with his Holstein hussars and German advisers at Oranienbaum, the suburban palace on the Gulf of Finland west of Peterhof that Menshikov had built decades before. Catherine donned the uniform of the oldest guards regiment, the Preobrazhenskii guards, and riding like a man on a white horse, moved out of the city toward Oranienbaum with the troops to capture her husband. Peter completely collapsed in fear, and surrendered after feeble attempts at escape. Catherine had him sent to one of his nearby estates to await incarceration under the watch of Aleksei Orlov and there on July 6, he perished. The public announcement was that he died of colic, and there was a sumptuous public funeral, but Catherine privately knew that Aleksei Orlov had taken matters into his own hands. The murder may have been unplanned, for everyone at the scene, including Peter, was drunk – but whatever the case, the murder was done. Aleksei Orlov secretly wrote to Catherine begging her forgiveness, and she kept the letter locked in her desk to the end of her life. With Peter out of the way, the once obscure German princess was now – at the age of thirty-three – Catherine II, the empress of Russia.
7 Catherine the Great
Catherine’s first task on ascending the throne was to secure her power and deal with the unfinished business of her husband’s reign. She quickly confirmed his decree abolishing compulsory service for the nobility, but she delayed the decree confiscating monastery lands. She had proclaimed herself the defender of Russian interests and of Orthodoxy, and she knew that the church was not happy with the move. Furthermore count Panin had plans to reorganize the central government around a state council that would have some sort of power alongside the monarch. The new empress, after a delay of more than a year, and after deposing the obstreperous and very rich bishop of Rostov, decreed the secularization of church lands in 1764. Nearly a fifth of the Russian peasantry ceased to be serfs. Regarding Panin’s plans she was more cautious, merely ignoring them and keeping him to head the College of Foreign Affairs and supervise the education of her son and heir Paul.
Foreign policy demanded Catherine’s attention for much of the first decade of her reign, even though she had been preoccupied with notions of reform of state and society from the time of her reading of Montesquieu and others in the 1750s. Unfortunately, Catherine could not control events and in the autumn of 1763 the king of Poland died. His death created a serious problem and Catherine had to act. From the last years of the Northern War, Poland, the onetime great power of Eastern Europe, had succumbed to a declining economy and population and an anarchic constitution. It had a weak elected king, all-powerful magnates, and a diet of nobles whose main aim was the conservation of traditional law and privileges above all else. Its neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and especially Russia liked this situation, and however absolute at home, their rulers were intent on preserving the “Golden Freedom” of the Polish nobility. A weak Poland with a tiny army suited them all and their ambassadors directed the Polish state.
The death of the king in 1763 came at a time of slowly returning prosperity and calls for modest constitutional reform. Catherine decided to support some of these calls, and with the aid of Polish allies, intimidation of their opponents, and simple bribery, placed her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, on the throne of Poland. Poniatowski and his allies were able to enact some of their very modest proposals, but Catherine wanted a practical guarantee of continued Russian influence, and she found it in the issue of political rights of dissidents (non-Catholics) in Poland. Poland possessed a sizable Protestant minority (who mostly spoke German) in the northwest and a more numerous Orthodox minority in the east and southeast. The Protestants included a number of noble families as well as townsmen, but were excluded from political representation and most offices. The Orthodox were mostly Ukrainian peasants, and had no spokesman but the one Orthodox bishop, a Ukrainian from the Russian side of the border. Both groups, but especially the Orthodox peasants, were subject to continuous harassment from Catholic clergy and nobles. Catherine, through her ambassador, ordered Poniatowski and his allies to enact legal toleration of the religious dissidents. The ultimate result in 1768 was a revolt of Catholic nobles against the Russians and the king, and this involved the Russian army in the internal dissensions of Poland. Catherine knew that her intervention in Poland could have dangerous consequences, but she had formed a firm alliance with Prussia and hoped for the best. Unfortunately the Ottomans, prompted by France and understandably disturbed by the specter of even greater Russian influence in Poland, declared war on Russia at the end of the year. Russia was again at war with a major power possessing a huge – if sometimes unwieldy – army; this was a war that would have to be fought across vast and largely empty steppes very far from Russia’s home bases.