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.
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 Schliisselburg, 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.
That night, Peter supposedly ordered his Adjutant to arrest Catherine so that she could be packed off to a monastery - or worse. The Adjutant rushed to Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who grasped the folly of such an act. Peter's uncle, whom Potemkin served as orderly, persuaded him to cancel the order.
Catherine's personal and political existence as well as the lives of her children were specifically threatened. She had little choice but to protect herself. During the next three weeks, the Orlovs and their subalterns, including Potemkin, canvassed feverishly to raise the Guards.39
The plan was to arrest Peter as he left Oranienbaum for his foolish war against Denmark and imprison him in the fortified tomb of Schlussenburg with the simpleton-Tsar, Ivan VI. According to Catherine, thirty or forty officers and about 10,000 men were ready.40 Three vital conspirators came together but, until the last few days, they barely knew of each other's involvement. Catherine was the only link. So, comically, each of the three believed that it was they - and only they - who had placed Catherine on the throne.
Orlov and his Guardsmen, including Potemkin, were the muscle and the organizers of the coup. There were officers in each regiment. Potemkin's job was to prepare the Horse-Guards.41 But the other two groups were necessary not merely for the coup to succeed but to maintain the reign of Catherine II afterwards.
Ekaterina Dashkova, nee Vorontsova, was certain that she alone had made the coup possible. This slim, gamine nineteen-year-old, married to one of Catherine's supporters in the Guards, thought of herself as Machiavelli in petticoats. She was a useful conduit to the high aristocracy: the Empress Elisabeth and Grand Duke Peter stood as godparents at her christening. She personified the tiny, interbred world of Court because she was not only the niece of both Peter Ill's Chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov, and Grand Duke Paul's Governor, Nikita Panin, later Catherine's Foreign Minister, but also the sister of the Emperor's 'ugly, stupid' mistress.42 She was appalled by her sister's taste in emperors. Dashkova demonstrates how family ties did not always decide political loyalties: the Vorontsovs were in power, yet this Vorontsova was conspiring to overthrow them. 'Politics was a subject that interested me from my earliest years,' she writes in her immodest and deluded Memoirs that, with Catherine's own writings, are the best accounts of those days.43
Nikita Ivanovich Panin, Dashkova's uncle, was the third key conspirator: as the Ober-Hofmeister or Governor of the Grand Duke Paul, he controlled a crucial pawn. Thus Catherine needed Panin's support. When Peter III considered declaring Paul illegitimate, he threatened Panin's powerbase as his Ober-Hofmeister. Panin, aged forty-two, lazy, plump and very shrewd, was far from being an industrious public servant: one has the sense of something almost eunuch-like in his swollen, smooth-skinned insouciance. According to Princess Dashkova, Panin was 'a pale valetudinarian ... studious only of ease, having passed all his life in courts, extremely precise in his dress, wearing a stately wig with three well-powdered ties dangling down his back, he gave one the pasteboard idea of an old courtier from the reign of Louis XIV'.44 However, Panin did not believe in the unbridled tyranny of the tsars, particularly in the light of Peter Ill's 'most dissolute debauchery of drunkenness'.45 Like many of the educated higher nobility, Panin hoped to create an aristocratic oligarchy on Peter's overthrow. He was the righteous opponent of favouritism but his family's rise stemmed from imperial whim.[12] In the 1750s, the Empress Elisabeth had shown interest in Nikita Panin and there may have been a short affair before the ruling favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, had him despatched on a diplomatic mission to Sweden. When Panin returned in 1760, he was untainted by the poison of Elisabethan politics and acceptable to all factions.46 So both Catherine and Panin wished to overthrow Peter, but there was a worrying difference in the details: Catherine wanted to rule herself, while Panin, Dashkova and others believed that Grand Duke Paul should become emperor.47 'A youthful and female conspirator', writes Princess Dashkova, 'was not likely all at once to gain the confidence of a cautious politician like Monsieur Panin,' but this uneasy cabal of differing interests now came together.