The discussion was impassioned from the start. To begin with, Peter the Great’s personal secretary Makarov swore on the Gospels that the tsar had not written a will. Seizing the ball on the rebound, Menshikov pleaded eloquently on behalf of His Majesty’s widow. His first argument was that, having married the former maidservant from Livonia (Catherine was born Marta Skawronska) in 1707, Peter the Great had then chosen, one year before his death, to have her crowned empress in the Cathedral of the Archangel, in Moscow. By this solemn and unprecedented act, according to Menshikov, he had shown that there was no need to resort to any written will since, while he was alive, Peter had taken care to bless his wife as sole inheritor of power.
But this explanation struck his adversaries as specious: they objected that in no monarchy in the world did the crowning of the monarch’s wife confer upon her ipso facto the right to the succession. Supporting this viewpoint, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn advanced the candidature of the sovereign’s grandson, Peter Alexeyevich, the proper son of Alexis - saying that this child, of the same blood as the deceased, should be considered before all the other applicants. However, given the boy’s tender age, that choice would imply the designation of a regent until he came of majority; and every regency in Russia had been marred by conspiracies and
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Terrible Tsarinas disturbances. The latest, centered around the Grand Duchess Sophia, had nearly compromised the reign of her brother Peter the Great. She had woven against him intrigues so black that she had had to be thrown into a convent to stop her wicked ways. Did the nobles want to go through that kind of experience again, by bringing to power their protege, with a guardian hovering over him and offering advice? The adversaries in this party suggested that women are not prepared to direct the affairs of an empire as vast as Russia. Their nerves, they said, are too fragile, and they are surrounded by greedy favorites whose extravagances are far too costly to the nation. With that, the supporters of young Peter asserted that Catherine was a woman like Sophia and that it was better to have an imperfect regent than an inexperienced empress.
Stung by the affront, Menshikov and Tolstoy reminded the critics that Catherine had demonstrated an almost virile courage in following her husband to every battlefield and had shown a welltrained mind in her covert participation in all his political decisions. When the debate was at its hottest, murmurs of approval rose from the back of the room. Several officers of the Guard had infiltrated the assembly (without being invited), and they delivered their opinion on a question which, in theory, concerned only the members of the Generalite.
General Repnin, outraged by this impertinence, sought to drive out the intruders, but Ivan Buturlin had already gone up to a window and was moving his hand in a queer way. At this signal, drum rolls resounded from afar, accompanied by fifes playing martial music. Two regiments of the Guard, convened in haste, were waiting in an inner court of the palace for the order to intervene.
While they noisily penetrated the building, Repnin, crimsonfaced, howled: “Who dared… without my orders…?” “I followed those of Her Majesty, the Empress,” answered Buturlin, without leaving the window.
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Catherine Shows the Way This demonstration by the army stifled the last of the protesters’ exclamations. In the meantime, Catherine had slipped away. She had been sure of her victory from the first comments.
In the presence of the troops, the Lord High Admiral Apraxin had Makarov confirm that no will existed that opposed the assembly’s decision and, thus reassured, he concluded good-naturedly, “Let us go and offer our homage to the reigning empress!” The best arguments are those of the saber and the gun. Convinced in the wink of an eye, the Generalite, princes, senators, generals and ecclesiastics submissively moved toward the apartments of Her very new Majesty.
In order to conform to legal procedures, Menshikov and Buturlin promulgated a proclamation that same day certifying that “the very serene Prince Peter the Great, emperor and sovereign of all the Russias,” had wished to regulate the succession of the empire by having “his dear wife, our very gracious Empress and Dame Catherine Alexeyevna [crowned],… because of the great and important services that she has rendered to the advantage of the Russian Empire…” At the bottom of the proclamation one may read, “Presented to the Senate, in St. Petersburg, January 28,
1725.”3
The publication of this document aroused no serious opposition among the notables nor the general public; and Catherine began to breathe more easily. The deal was done. For her, it was a second birth. When she thought back to her past as a soldiers’ whore, she was dizzied by her elevation to the rank of legitimate wife, then of sovereign. Her parents, simple Livonian farmers, had died of the plague one after the other, when she was still very young. After wandering through the countryside, famished and all in tatters, she was taken in by the Lutheran pastor Gluck, who employed her as a maidservant. But, an orphan with a tempting figure, she quickly betrayed his tutelage and ran off, sleeping in
Terrible Tsarinas the camps of the Russian army that had come to conquer Polish Livonia. She rose in rank from one lover to another, until she became the mistress of Menshikov, then of Peter himself. If he enjoyed her, it was certainly not for her education, for she was practically illiterate and she spoke execrable Russian; but he had many occasions to appreciate her valiancy, her spirit and her great allure. The tsar had always sought out women who were wellendowed in flesh and simple in spirit. Even if Catherine was often untrue to him, even if he was fed up with her betrayals, he returned to her even after the worst quarrels. The notion that the “break up” was final, this time, left her feeling both punished and relieved.
The fate that was in store for her seemed extraordinary, not only because of her modest origins but because of her gender, which historically had been relegated to secondary roles. No woman before her had ever been empress of Russia. From time immemorial, the throne of that immense land had been occupied by males, according to the hereditary line of descent. Even after the death of Ivan the Terrible and the confusion that followed, neither the impostor Boris Godunov nor the shaky Fyodor II nor the theory of the false Dmitris that plagued the “Time of Troubles” had changed anything in the monarchical tradition of virility.
It took the extinction of the house of Rurik, the founder of old Russia, for the country to resign itself to having a tsar elected by an assembly of boyars, prelates and dignitaries (the “Sobor”).
Young Mikhail Fyodorovich, the first of the Romanovs, was chosen. After him, imperial power was transmitted without too many clashes for nearly a century. It was only in 1722 that Peter the Great, breaking with tradition, decreed that the sovereign should thenceforth designate an heir however seemed best to him, without regard for the dynastic order. Thus, thanks to this innovator who had already upset his country’s ways from top to bot«10»
Catherine Shows the Way tom, a woman of no birth or political qualification had the same rights as a man to assume the throne. And the first to benefit from this inordinate privilege would be a former servant, a Livonian by origin and a Protestant at that, who became Russian and Orthodox late in the game and whose only claims to glory were acquired in the sack. Is it possible that the hands that had so often washed the dishes, made the beds, bleached the dirty linen and prepared the swill for the army rabble would be the same ones that tomorrow, scented and bearing rings, would sign the ukases upon which hung the future of million subjects, frozen with respect and fear?