At Elisabeth’s funeral on 25 January 1762, Emperor Peter III, in high spirits, invented a game to make the day pass more quickly: he loitered behind the hearse, let it advance for thirty feet and then ran after it to catch up, dragging the elderly courtiers, who had to hold his black train, along behind him. ‘Criticism of the Emperor’s outrageous behaviour spread rapidly.’
His critics naturally looked to his wife. In the very hour of Elisabeth’s death, Catherine received a message from Prince Kirill Dashkov of the Guards which said: ‘You have only to give the order and we will enthrone you.’ Dashkov was another of a circle of Guardsmen including heroes of the Seven Years War like the Orlov brothers. The pregnant Catherine discouraged treason. What is remarkable about her eventual coup was not that it was successful, because so much of a conspiracy depends on chance, but that it was already fully formed six months earlier. Catherine somehow managed to prevent it blossoming before she had recovered from her confinement.
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It was the new Emperor himself who unconsciously decided both the timing and the intensity of the conspiracy. In his reign of barely six months, Peter contrived to alienate virtually all the major forces of Russian political society. Yet his measures were far from barbarous, though often imprudent. On 21 February 1762, for example, he abolished the feared Secret Chancellery – though its organs survived and were concealed as the Secret Expedition under the aegis of the Senate. Three days earlier, the Emperor had promulgated his manifesto on the freedom of the nobility, which liberated the nobles from Peter the Great’s compulsory service.
These measures should have won him some popularity, but his other actions seemed deliberately designed to alienate Russia’s most powerful interests. The army was the most important: during the Seven Years War, it had defeated Frederick the Great, raided Berlin and brought Prussia’s awesome military machine to the very edge of destruction. Now Peter III not only made peace with Prussia but also arranged to lend Frederick the corps that had originally aided the Austrians. And it got worse: on 24 May, Peter issued his ultimatum to Denmark, on behalf of Holstein, that was calculated to lead to a war, quite unconnected to Russian interests. He decided to command his armies in person.
Peter mocked the Guards as ‘Janissaries’ – the Turkish infantrymen who enthroned and deposed Ottoman sultans – and decided to disband parts of them.31 This redoubled the Guards’ conspiracies against him. Sergeant-Major Potemkin himself, who already vaguely knew the Orlovs, now demanded to join the plot. This is how it happened. One of the Orlov set, a captain in the Preobrazhensky Guards, invited a university friend of Potemkin’s, Dmitri Babarykin, to ‘enter their society’. Babarykin refused – he disapproved of their ‘wild life’ and Grigory Orlov’s affair with Catherine. But he confided his distaste to his university friend. Potemkin ‘on the spot’ demanded that Babarykin introduce him to the Preobrazhensky captain. He immediately joined the conspiracy.32 In his first recorded political act, this Potemkin rings true – shrewd, brave, ambitious and acting on the emotional impulse that was to be his trademark. For a young provincial, it was truly a stimulating moment to be a Guardsman.
Meanwhile Peter promoted his Holsteiner family to major positions. His uncle (and Catherine’s) Georg-Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp was appointed member of the Council, colonel-in-chief of the Horse-Guards, and field-marshal. This Georg-Ludwig had once flirted with a teenage Catherine before she left for Russia. By coincidence, when he arrived from Holstein on 21 March, Prince Georg-Ludwig was assigned Sergeant-Major Potemkin as his orderly.33 Potemkin was not shy in pushing himself forward: this position ensured that, as the regime unravelled, he was well placed to keep the conspiracy informed. His immaculate horsemanship was noted by Prince Georg-Ludwig, who had him promoted to Guards full sergeant. Another Holstein prince was named governor-general of St Petersburg and commander of all Russian troops around the Baltic.
Lastly the Empress Elisabeth had agreed to secularize much of the lands of the Orthodox Church, but early in his reign, on 21 March, Peter issued a ukaz, an imperial decree, to seize the property.34 His buffoonery and disrespect at Elisabeth’s funeral had displayed contempt for Orthodoxy – as well as a lack of manners. All these actions outraged the army, alarmed the Guards, insulted the pious, and wasted the victories of the Seven Years War.
Such was the anger in Petersburg that Frederick the Great, who most benefited from Peter’s follies, was afraid that the Emperor would be overthrown if he left Russia to command the Danish expedition.35 To anger the army was foolish, to upset the Church was silly, to outrage the Guards was simply idiotic, and to arouse all three was probably suicidal. But the plot, suspended at Elisabeth’s death because of Catherine’s pregnancy, could not stir until it had a leader. As Peter himself was aware, there were three possible claimants to the throne. In his unfortunate and clumsy way, the Tsar was probably planning to remove them from the succession, one by one – but he was too slow.
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On 10 April 1762, Catherine gave birth to a son by Grigory Orlov, named Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, her third child. Even four months into Peter’s reign only a small circle of Guardsmen were aware of Catherine’s relationship with Orlov – her friend Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, a player in the coup and wife of one of her Guards supporters, did not know. Peter certainly acted as if he was in the dark. This gives us a clue to how the conspiracies remained undiscovered. No one was informing him. He was unable to use the secret powers that autocrats require.36
Catherine had recovered from her confinement by early May, but she still hesitated. The drunken Emperor boasted ever more loudly that he would divorce her and marry his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova. This concentrated Catherine’s mind. She confirms to Poniatowski in her letter of 2 August 1762 that the coup had been mooted for six months. Now it became real.37
Peter’s ‘rightful’ successor was not his wife but his son Grand Duke Paul, now aged six: many of the conspirators joined the coup believing that he would be acclaimed emperor with his mother as a figurehead regent. There were rumours that Peter wanted to force Saltykov to admit that he was Paul’s real father so that he could dispense with Catherine and start a new dynasty with Vorontsova.
It is easy to forget that there was another emperor in Russia: Ivan VI, buried alive in the bowels of Schlüsselburg, east of Petersburg on the shore of Lake Ladoga, since being overthrown by Elisabeth as a baby in 1741, was now over twenty. Peter went to inspect this forgotten Tsar in his damp dungeon and discovered he was mentally retarded – though his answers sound relatively intelligent. ‘Who are you?’ asked Emperor Peter. ‘I am the Emperor,’ came the reply. When Peter asked how he was so sure, the prisoner said he knew it from the Virgin and the angels. Peter gave him a dressing gown. Ivan put it on in transports of delight, running round the dungeon like ‘a savage in his first clothes’. Needless to say, Peter was relieved that at least one of his possible nemeses could never rule.38
Peter himself transformed the plot from a few groups of daredevil Guardsmen into a deadly coalition against him. On 21 May, he announced he would leave Petersburg to lead his armies in person against Denmark. While he made arrangements for his armies to begin the march west, he himself left the capital for his favourite summer palace at Oranienbaum near Peterhof, whence he would set off for war. Many soldiers did not wish to embark on this unpopular expedition.
A couple of weeks earlier, Peter had managed to light the fuse of his own destruction: at the end of April, the Emperor held a banquet to celebrate the peace with Prussia. Peter was drunk as usual. He proposed a toast to the imperial family, thinking of himself and his Holstein uncles. Catherine did not stand. Peter noticed and shouted at her, demanding to know why she had neither risen nor quaffed. When she reasonably replied that she was a member of the family too, the Emperor shrieked, ‘Dura!’ – ‘Fool!’ – down the table. Courtiers and diplomats went silent. Catherine blushed and burst into tears but regained her composure.