Part 4

After the death of the great Czar a woman sat for the first time on the throne of Russia. The autocrat who had killed his son because he was incompetent to rule left his country to a woman who could neither read nor write. Good-natured, tawdry, and illiterate, the second wife of Peter the Great became Catherine I, autocrat of all the Russias. She ushered in a regiment of women. For three-quarters of a century Russia was ruled by women monarchs. Except for the brief reigns of Peter II and Peter III, the eighteenth century was dominated by three women autocrats, Anna Ivanovna, Elisabeth Petrovna, and Catherine Alexeievna. Russians, priests and peasants alike, who had been brought up to believe such proverbs as: “A chicken is not a bird, nor is a woman human” and “The more you beat the wife the better tastes the borstch,” were obliged to bow the knee three times in succession to autocrats in skirts. Among the Raskolniks were consistent fanatics who had to be knouted because they refused to take the oath of allegiance to women.

Catherine I, who had eleven children, was survived by only two of them: the melancholy Anne, married for a strip of sea-coast, and the frivolous Elisabeth, who remained unwed. The Empress left a will bequeathing the crown to the twelve-year-old son of the murdered Alexei. But the boy died of the smallpox after a brief reign of two years, and another Empress ascended the throne. His successor was Anna Ivanovna, daughter of the weak-witted Ivan, who had “of his own free will” surrendered the crown to Peter the Great. Ivan’s daughter, who had been considerably Germanized since leaving her Russian terem to become a Duchess of Courland, was now enthroned as supreme autocrat. She was the first of the two Annas, both unbeautiful and unpopular.

Having no children, she adopted a niece, Anna Leopoldovna, the daughter of a favorite sister. Her niece was married to Prince Anthony Ulrich of Brunswick, a poor shadow of a man whom she much disliked and by whom she was much disliked in return. Nevertheless, they had a large family of children, the first of whom was destined to become the infant Czar, Ivan VI. Scarcely was this child born when Empress Anna died, leaving the regency for the infant Czar in the hands of Bühren, her favorite. The mother of Ivanushka did not long submit to this arrangement. She contrived to send Bühren to Siberia and had herself made regent in his place.

Anna Leopoldovna was a recluse and a sloven. She left the government to her minister, and reverted to the old terem life, spending her days in dishabille with her favorite, Julie von Mengden and Julie’s numerous female relations. Her neglected husband was more neglected than ever. The Regent became more and more invisible; her retirement, more and more obsessional. She only went forth on moonlit nights to take the air. Ivanushka was shown to the public from a balcony on state occasions, when for instance the Persian Ambassadors brought the first elephants to Moscow. As the Imperial family withdrew from sight, gossip about them ran faster and faster. The Regent was only living as women had formerly always lived in the Russian terems, but her way of life was now regarded as reprehensible and scandalous. Julie von Mengden, her favorite, was after all a harmless, unambitious person but she became a popular bogy. Anna Leopoldovna was unable to reign because she was too shy to show herself. One of the duties of her office was what Catherine the Great called “representation” and she neglected it. Consequently she lasted only one year.

4

In the meantime Elisabeth Petrovna had been living her own life in her own way. Having signed her dying mother’s will, for Catherine I could not read or write, she retired to private life apparently without regret and left the crown to her half-brother, Peter II. The Empress Anna who followed Peter was as ugly as Elisabeth was beautiful. From jealousy she drove the debonair Princess away from the capital. Elisabeth lived in the country and shared the life of the peasants. She had a profound liking for low company and could not avoid being picturesque. In the company of her lover Shubin, she took part in all the peasant festivals. She loved to wear men’s clothes and for years wore nothing else. Her tall figure and radiant beauty were at their best in masculine attire. When she was obliged as Empress to return to skirts again, she introduced a fashion at court of balls called “metamorphoses,” where all the women were obliged to dress as men and all the men as women. The metamorphoses were not popular with the diplomats who tangled themselves hopelessly in their skirts while the Empress marched about gracefully and happily in her velvet breeches.

Elisabeth was born under the most auspicious circumstances. Her birthday coincided with the victory of Pultava. When Peter came swaggering back to Moscow he was met by the announcement of the birth of a daughter at Kolomenskoe. The great Czar cut short the victory celebration in the Kremlin in order to post away to see his babe. It was his eighth child and a girl, but Peter was never blasé.

Elisabeth was a pampered darling. Even as an infant she was a show child and a prize beauty. Her portrait in the nude, suggesting the babyhood of Venus, is one of the art treasures of the Petersburg collection. This much admired work of art may have contributed to that lack of modesty for which she was celebrated afterward. Her father’s exotic taste expressed itself in the rich Spanish costumes which formed her everyday wear, and in the pets such as monkeys and parrots which he gave her. The child was affectionate but not intellectual. She liked to sing and dance and amuse herself. The only book she ever read was the Bible. Her gayety was tempered by a melancholy which grew on her as she advanced in years. The approach of these attacks was marked by an excess of piety to which she completely abandoned herself. She prayed for hours at a time, fasted with enthusiasm, and made long pilgrimages on foot to the musty shrines of miracle-working saints. Her religious orgies alternated with periods of abandonment to frivolity and self-indulgence. She astonished the world by these apparent contradictions. It seemed paradoxical that she should at one and the same time be so immoral and so religious. As she reveled in the follies and gayeties of Butter Week, so she reveled in the rituals and mummeries of the Greek Church. She was fully as religious as her brother Alexei, whose orthodoxy had so infuriated Peter the Great that he put him to the torture.

Elisabeth was, also like Alexei, intensely Russian. Although her mother had been a foreigner and a Lutheran, and her father had been as much of a Dutchman as he could make himself, Lisanka was pure Slav. It is true that she preferred Petersburg to Moscow as a residence, and that she built the great Winter Palace there in the manner of Versailles and not of Kolomenskoe. In this respect and in her politics she followed in the footsteps of her father. But her personal way of life was exceedingly Russian and somewhat provincial. She loved luxury and show as much as did Peter himself, but she was at heart a home-keeping body with a fondness for the folk-ways of her country. Her life among the peasants had helped to make her so. Among her lovers were no foreigners. Shubin, Voshinsky, Buturlin, Razumovsky, and Shuvalov--there were only five in fact though tradition makes them three hundred--were all Russians. The two Annas were given to German favorites who were inclined to be ambitious and efficient. Elisabeth’s lovers were an easy-going lot who did not exploit their position. She, on her side, loved them for their _beaux yeux_ and not for their ability or distinction. She kept a sergeant, a hostler, a page, and a chorister in turn. Perhaps the French Duke who once refused her hand felt more than ever justified in his decision when he heard that the beautiful daughter of Peter the Great had consoled herself with such simple and lowly persons.

Elisabeth adored her family. The child who was painted in the nude and paraded in Spanish finery before an admiring world was her father’s pet and plaything. For her sake Peter decided to make her mother his legal wife and to crown her as Empress. The girl was still in her ’teens when her father and mother died and her sister Anne married and went to a foreign country. From this time on her nostalgia for these family ties never left her. Loyalty to them was the mainspring of her life.

Elisabeth’s mother had a German physician whose name was Lestocq. He was born in Hanover and was one of the many German doctors whom Peter the Great brought to Russia. From the year 1713 he was attached to Catherine’s family. Elisabeth therefore inherited him from her mother and allowed herself to be led by him, which Lestocq was not loth to do. He liked to pull the strings of political intrigue to gratify his sense of power. It was he who finally persuaded Elisabeth to dispossess the Regent and her infant son and seize the crown for herself. The Grand Duchess was now thirty-two years old. She had no more real desire to be Empress than her mother had had before her, but Lestocq was an energetic manager. He induced her at last to act by telling her stories about the torture and the convent that awaited her at the hands of Regent Anna. He also offered her sound French money that Versailles was ready to invest in a Petersburg revolution.

Elisabeth’s imagination was no doubt stimulated by recent events in Austria. In October, 1740, Charles VI died and named his daughter as his successor. If Maria Theresa had become an Empress why should not Elisabeth Petrovna? No Pragmatic Sanction was needed in Russia where two Empresses had already occupied the throne. If Europe was going to ask questions, Elisabeth could produce her mother’s will which she herself had signed. The testament read: “If the Grand Duke (Peter II) should die without heirs, the right to ascend the throne shall pass after him to the Czarevna with her descendants, after her to the Czarevna Elisabeth with her descendants, after her to the Grand Duchess; whereby masculine heirs shall have at all times preference over feminine. But never at any time shall anyone rule over the Russian Empire who does not belong to the Greek Church or who wears already another crown.” The Czarevna Anna had left a son in Kiel, but he was a Lutheran. The will in question had been declared illegal by Empress Anna but was now restored to legality by Empress Elisabeth who thought it best to have a document to justify what she intended to do anyway.

The revolution was not as costly as a modern theatrical revue, with which the old palace revolutions in Russia had much in common. Elisabeth Petrovna came to the city for the winter and kept open house in a little palace on the Field of Mars. While the Regent remained invisible in the Winter Palace, Elisabeth went abroad early and late and smiled upon the population. She visited the guards in the barracks, stood godmother to their children and gambled away her French money to them. On fine days she sped through the snowy streets of Petersburg, a shining Snegurotchka, with guardsmen perched on the rear of her sleigh. The apathetic Regent bestirred herself sufficiently to reprove Elisabeth for her improprieties. But Elisabeth knew that her mother had not become Empress by observing the proprieties nor had Peter the Great much regard for formalities. Her mother’s own daughter, Elisabeth had a way with soldiers which she now used for political ends. The guardsmen adored her.

Though Peter the Great had been feared and hated in his lifetime, he had now been dead long enough to become a popular idol. His youngest and his favorite daughter had only to stretch out her hand to collect the interest on his popularity. Elisabeth’s revolution was easy, so easy that the foreign diplomats were shocked. They reported to their home offices that a purse of money, a cask of wine, and a handful of soldiers had done it all. Elisabeth’s revolution was regarded as an illustration of the political indifference and supineness of the Russian people; but, as Bilbassov has touchily but convincingly pointed out, the revolution of 1741 was easy because it fulfilled the popular wish. The unlovely Annas had had their day and the turn of the gracious Elisabeth had come. Thirty-two, unmarried, and childless--she prolonged her beloved dynasty through a kind of political Indian Summer.

On the 5th of December, 1741, Lestocq decided that the time for action had come. Elisabeth left her palace at midnight, and, accompanied by Lestocq and Vorontsov, was whirled away in her sleigh to midnight mass. After the litany, she again entered her sleigh and sped to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky regiment. While three hundred guardsmen were silently getting into line, she disappeared into her dressing-room and arrayed herself as if for a première. Presently she appeared before the soldiers in full military regalia, a shirt of mail over her shoulders and a spontoon in her hand. If Peter the Great had fancied himself a Viking, his daughter fancied herself a Brunnhilde. Russia had had Empresses before Elisabeth, but she was the first to seize the throne in masculine attire. She set the fashion for the Empress who came after her.

[Illustration: PETER THE GREAT AND HIS SON ALEXEI]

In the dense black cold of a December night in Petersburg, the soldiers took the oath of allegiance under their breaths. Elisabeth in her coat of mail placed herself at the head of her warriors and marched to the winter palace, where the sleepy Anna, though scarcely more sleepy than usual, and the shivering Anthony Ulrich were hustled into their clothes at the point of the sword. One hopes at least that the von Mengden sisters bore themselves with spirit during the invasion; nothing of the kind was to be expected of the feeble Brunswick pair. The Regent and her household were removed by the guards to the palace on the Field of Mars which Elisabeth had just abandoned, while Elisabeth remained in the imperial chambers.

[Illustration: IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND HIS SON IVAN

_From a painting by Repin_]

The baby Ivan, asleep in his cradle, was awakened by a tall shining figure in a coat of mail. Elisabeth kissed him and cried over him. The childless woman found it hard to let him go when the soldiers carried him away.

5

Almost the first act of the new Empress was to select her successor. Her choice was hastily made and precipitately executed. The indolent woman, who usually had to be prodded into action by her advisers, showed great energy and decision in this matter. She dispatched a messenger secretly to Kiel and brought her nephew, Karl Peter Ulrich, to Petersburg. She told her intentions to nobody until she had the boy safe in her keeping. He was inducted into the Greek Church, proclaimed heir to the throne with summary haste. The determined Empress worked the priests over-time to bring this about. To make the step irrevocable and cut off all possibility of retreat for the boy, she liquidated his well-founded claim to the Swedish throne. She made it a condition of the Russian-Swedish treaty that the former guardian of her nephew, Adolph Friedrich of Holstein, should be nominated in her nephew’s place as heir-apparent of the Swedish crown. By these measures, Karl Peter Ulrich was cut off from his Swedish expectations and became Grand Duke Peter Feodorovich, a good Romanov name that was supposed to wipe out the taint of his Lutheran past.

Elisabeth had proclaimed her nephew heir without consulting the Privy Council or the Senate. She did not even ask advice of the nobles who had led her party and supported her revolution. The gentlemen thus overlooked were irritated and everybody was mystified by her driving haste. The diplomats were obliged to find reasons for her behavior, and there were many near at hand. Her sister’s son was her competitor for the throne and if his claims were backed by France and Sweden they might prove dangerous. As Grand Duke of Russia he was in the hands of his aunt. It was also seriously suggested that the pious Empress wished to bring another soul into the Greek Church and that she wished to find a good excuse for not marrying.

Her devotion to the dead Anushka was a real factor, but there was something more. Her behavior was a good deal like that of a pathological kidnapper. She cried over little Ivan in his cradle but she had let him go. Peter was never to escape. In her several kidnappings, for this was only the first, she always maintained an appearance of reasonableness. The considerations of state which she invented to justify her abduction of her nephew and her nephew’s heir were merely convenient excuses for the satisfaction of her desire for children.

In spite of Elisabeth’s much heralded reputation as a voluptuary, it is impossible to find any authentic traces of her children. Her mother’s illegitimate offspring and those of Catherine the Great are a matter of common knowledge. But no tradition remains to account for those of Elisabeth. Did she actually have no children or did she dispose of them so completely that not even a rumor of their existence came through? It seems hardly consistent with her character as we know it that she should have been so sensitive to public opinion as to have drowned them. In any case she had all the symptoms of a woman who had been disappointed in maternity. Romantic and sentimental about all family ties, she had mourned her lost lover for twenty-five years and cherished a feeling of widowhood. When the Grand Duke was confirmed in the palace chapel, Elisabeth threw herself upon the ground and burst into a flood of tears.

6

Three years after the Empress had adopted Peter, she sent an envoy to Kiel to find out something about the lad. The results of the investigation were not what any modern child-placing agency would call encouraging.

His mother died three months after his birth. The boy’s father, a cruel, sickly little man, neglected his son as he had neglected his wife. He died early, leaving Peter fully orphaned at the age of ten. The lad was brought up by a Swedish governor named Brümmer who achieved such bad results that he was accused of having intentionally destroyed the boy’s character. The Russians, Bestushev and Panin, believed that Brümmer, after discovering that Peter was to be the heir to the Russian throne and not the Swedish, took pains to corrupt his mind and disposition. “But I have always doubted this abomination,” says Catherine, “my opinion is that the unsuccessful education of Peter III is to be traced to a combination of unfortunate circumstances.”

The boy’s endowment was poor; there had been stupid Romanovs before him. Many excuses have been suggested for his inability to learn. He was taught Russian and Swedish alternately because he had pretensions to both crowns, and as a result he learned neither. But many children learn two languages whether alternately or simultaneously. Another excuse for his shortcomings relates that the Rector of the Kiel Grammar School who undertook to teach him Latin employed such tactless methods that Peter learned only to hate all study. When he arrived in Moscow at the age of fourteen he knew nothing at all. The Empress, whose standards were certainly not very high, was much disturbed by his ignorance and hastened to give him a tutor.

Stehlin was a forerunner of the best modern teachers of the feeble-minded. He used concrete materials as much as possible, borrowing from the art gallery coins and medals, picture books, globes and models. As the Grand Duke was literally unable to sit still, Stehlin walked up and down the room with him. For three years the patient man kept it up, although his unconventional teaching was often ridiculed. The scholars thought him a jester instead of a teacher. Nevertheless Stehlin seems to have been the only one in the Grand Duke’s environment who made any attempt to handle the boy intelligently and sympathetically. Peter learned little or nothing, it is true, but he remained on friendly terms with his preceptor. The mischief had been done long before Stehlin had a chance at him. Spoiled by his nurses, Peter had been handed over at seven to brutal Holstein officers who subjected him to a military régime. At fourteen he was passionately fond of military drill but had no more endurance than a baby. To play with toy soldiers was his idea of manœuvres.

Brümmer, his Swedish governor, was a hard-boiled cavalry officer. Stehlin said of Brümmer that he might be fit to train horses but he was not fit to educate a human being. In order to harden his pupil, he tortured him. His favorite punishments were to deprive the boy of his meals, to beat him with a riding-whip, to make him kneel with naked skin upon dry peas. The victim responded as might be expected. He was timid and antagonistic, cowardly and boastful. He only made friends with the meanest of the servants, those whom he was allowed to strike, and he tortured his pet animals. By the time he was brought to Russia to become its future Czar he was an institution case.

Life had been made too hard for Peter. His instinct of survival had been undermined. He frequently fell ill and with every attack it was thought that he was going to die. The grandson of Great Peter, that miracle of human energy, had no energy at all. He was just a stupid little boy who was destined never to grow up.

[Illustration]

IV

SHE GOES TO RUSSIA

The Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Anhalt-Zerbst wrote with gilt ink and many flourishes. Like King Frederick and every other educated person in the Germany of her times she carried on her correspondence in French. Her style was as ornate as her penmanship, for she never lacked the courage of her enthusiasms. As a finished letter-writer she lost no opportunity to display her art. When the news came that Elisabeth Petrovna had ascended the Russian throne, she at once wrote to congratulate the new Empress who might have been her sister-in-law. It was an exciting moment when the reply came back, penned by the hand of the glorious autocrat herself. Direct communication had been established between the obscure Stettin family and the imperial court of Petersburg. The enterprising Princess walked on air.