With the death of Peter the Great, Russia came full circle. Just as fifty years earlier the death of his father, Tsar Alexei, set off years of uncertainty, courtly intrigues, and dynastic struggles, so too the death of Peter without a son meant that the leadership of Russia would depend on the competing loyalties of courtiers. Just like Ivan the Terrible a hundred years earlier, Peter the Great was complicit in the death of his son, the sole heir to the throne. Also, in both cases, Russia again seemed poised for another Time of Troubles.
Russia’s Empresses: Power, Conspiracy, and Vodka
Perhaps Peter the Great’s proudest legacy was the founding of his European capital of St. Petersburg among the low swamps of the Neva River delta. Thanks in part to his wrenching reforms and the firm financial footing provided by alcohol, Russia and its capital flourished. By the late eighteenth century, the city unveiled a new tribute to its founder in the shape of the massive statue of the Bronze Horseman: Peter seated heroically on a magnificent steed, his right hand leading Russia majestically forward. The base of this iconic symbol of St. Petersburg is inscribed in Russian and Latin: “To Peter the Great from Catherine II, 1782”—a gift from one “great” to another.
Catherine the Great led Russia’s encroachments into Europe: in the south seizing Moldova, Ukraine, Crimea, and the shores of the Black Sea; in the north absorbing the Baltic states and partitioning Poland. At home, her reforms modernized Russia’s administrative bureaucracy. She was an enlightened despot who patronized the arts and education. Catherine corresponded personally with European scholars and philosophers from Voltaire to Diderot. With them she articulated such enlightenment values of liberty and democracy yet refused to permit them in her own dominions. For all of her accomplishments, Catherine nonetheless needed grandiose symbols, such as the Bronze Horseman, to secure her place in the line of “great” Romanov leaders, perhaps because the woman who was crowned Catherine II, “Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias,” had not an ounce of Russian blood and—assuming power through a palace coup—no legitimate claim to the Russian throne. As was the case with every empress crowned during the eighteenth century, Russia’s heavily paternal society and patrilineal dynasty stacked the cards heavily against the young tsarina. Also like her female predecessors, Catherine relied heavily on vodka politics to solidify her rule.
Elizabeth’s Disappointment
Two of the most influential figures in eighteenth-century Russia were not Russian at all. From Stettin in the Baltic arose Sophia Augusta Frederica, the French-educated daughter of a Prussian prince who, through cunning and good fortune, led Russia as Catherine the Great. Meanwhile, in the German port city of Kiel was born Peter of Holstein-Gottorp. On his father’s side, Peter was grand-nephew of Swedish king Charles XII; on his mother’s side, he was grandson of Charles’s adversary in the Northern War—Peter the Great of Russia. With this lineage, the young Holstinean was a potential heir to both thrones.
The dunderheaded Peter compensated for his high pedigree by lacking woefully in virtually every other characteristic imaginable. Orphaned young, his education was left to a drunk and ignorant courtier who beat and humiliated the cowed lad. At the age of fourteen, in 1742, Peter’s aunt—the recently crowned Tsarina Elizabeth Petrovna—summoned her young nephew to St. Petersburg and named him heir to the Russian throne. Expecting the arrival of an astute and refined aristocrat, Elizabeth was horrified to learn that she had instead anointed a drunken, ignorant, immature, irritable, royal pain in her backside. According to the Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, Peter “viewed serious things childishly and approached childish enterprises with the seriousness of a grown man. He resembled a child who imagined himself an adult; in fact, he was an adult who always remained a child.”1
Hoping to solidify an alliance with Prussia, Tsarina Elizabeth arranged for Peter to marry the prominent Pomeranian princess Sophia Augusta Frederica. In 1744, the princess arrived in Russia. Well-mannered and well-educated, Sophia was everything Peter wasn’t. She ingratiated herself with the empress—fastidiously mastering the Russian language and (unlike Peter) eagerly converting from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy. Sophia even chose to be baptized with the Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna—Catherine—in honor of Elizabeth’s mother and wife of Peter the Great: Catherine I.
The brooding Peter did not share the empress’s enthusiasm for his new bride. While the festivities following their wedding on August 21, 1745, lasted ten days—with free meats roasted in the public squares and fountains running with wine so that even the common folk could join in the celebration—the two were soon conjoined in a cold, distant, and loveless marriage. It was nine full years before Peter and Catherine finally consummated their marriage—but even that was more the result of pressures to produce a royal heir than any expression of mutual fondness. In the meantime, they both carried on love affairs—encouraged by the tsarina, who hoped the two would eventually warm to each other.2
Catherine’s memoirs paint an unflattering picture of the young Peter: writing that from the age of ten Peter was prone to drink. Even years before arriving in Russia, the young princess met him at a family gathering (they were second cousins, after all), where she heard that Peter was restive, hot-headed, and that not even his attendants could keep him from getting drunk.3
After their wedding Peter’s alcoholic antics continued, now on display before the entire court. Obsessed with all things Prussian, Peter smoked and drank beer to excess, believing it would make him “a real manly officer.” According to Catherine, he got so drunk at royal feasts that he “no longer knew what he was saying or doing, slurred his words, and made for such an unpleasant sight that tears came to my eyes, for I hid or disguised as much as possible what was reprehensible in him.”4
When he tired of the world of grown-ups, Peter retired to the couple’s imperial residence at Oranienbaum to take refuge in games and alcohol. Oftentimes Peter would drink through the night with his besotted lackeys who plied him with wine and liquor. Other times he retreated to his room to drink and play with his toys. In her memoirs, Catherine recalled once finding Peter in the middle of a military-style execution of a rat that had eaten two of his papier-mâché toy soldiers. Thinking it was all a joke, Catherine burst into laughter. Peter’s gaze turned cold. This was deathly serious—she just couldn’t understand.5
Scornful of his haughty wife, Peter turned his gaze toward someone who appreciated his crudeness instead of being embarrassed by it—Countess Elizabeth Vorontsova. Sallow and shallow, Elizabeth was dirty, rude, squint-eyed, and covered with smallpox scars. Her ability to drink, curse, and sprawl on the bed for his pleasure fascinated Peter—and in turn perplexed the entire royal court. One night, Catherine recalled
I had only just fallen asleep when the Grand Duke came to bed as well. As he was drunk and did not know what he was doing, he tried to strike up a conversation with me about the eminent qualities of his belle. I pretended to be in a deep sleep so as to make him shut up more quickly, but after having spoken even more loudly to wake me up and seeing that I gave no sign of being awakened, he gave me two or three rather hard punches in the side, cursing the depth of my slumber, then turned, and fell asleep. I cried a great deal that night over the affair and the blows he had given me, and over my situation, which was in every way as disagreeable as it was tedious.6
Catherine detested the tsar-to-be, but her long-term fate was tied to his. In the short-term, however, her future was in the hands of the current empress, Elizabeth, and Catherine did her best to balance the two. At the culmination of her pregnancy with their first child in December 1758, Catherine summoned both Peter and Elizabeth. Peter arrived first and—true to his adoration for all things German—was exquisitely clad in the uniform of a Holstein officer, replete with spurs, sash, and sword. He pronounced his intention to aid the distressed Catherine by fastidiously defending her against her enemies. “One might have thought that he was joking, but not at all,” Catherine wrote; “what he said was very
serious. I easily understood that he was drunk and I advised him to go to bed so that the Empress, when she came, would not have the double displeasure of seeing him drunk and armed from head to toe in his Holstein uniform, which I knew she detested.”7 Indeed, Elizabeth could hardly stand Peter any more than Catherine could. The empress rarely spent more than fifteen minutes with him and was repulsed that detestable Peter was destined to lead Russia, often weeping that “my nephew is a monster, the devil take him!”8
It was not easy to stay in Elizabeth’s good graces, since the tsarina was as much of a disagreeable, vengeful lout as her nephew. One nineteenth-century chronicler even refused to describe her “unblushing excesses,” as they would “stain the page of history.”9 Exhausted by a lifetime of drunken affairs to curry favor with one court faction or another, Elizabeth suffered hallucinations, convulsions, and fits of terror from which she only found escape in wine and sex. Indeed, the Chevalier d’Éon—the transgender spy of French King Louis XV who gained access to the court by disguising himself as one of the empress’s maids—noted Elizabeth’s “pronounced taste for strong liquors.” Returning to her chambers from another night of drinking, she often passed out in her regalia and had to be cut out of her corsets by her oft-abused servants before they carried her to bed.10
The fading tsarina occasionally awoke in the morning with the sight of Peter and Catherine attending her bedside. In her paranoia, she feared they were in cahoots with her enemies at court to plot her overthrow. On her deathbed rumors circulated throughout St. Petersburg over who would take the throne. The detestable Peter? The German Catherine? Catherine’s infant son Paul? Finally, in 1762, at the age of fifty two—the same age as her father Peter the Great—the empress finally succumbed to her demons.
Elizabeth rallied slightly; but any hopes of her recovery were always dispelled by her persistent demand for spiritous liquors. Such was her eagerness for them, that any attempt to keep the stimulating beverage, as she thought it, from her lips threw her into a frenzy that brought on agonizing pains. The fatal cup was then handed to her, and she drank, and drank, continually, gradually sinking into lethargy, insensibility, and death.11
Mocking the solemnity of the funeral services for the deceased tsarina, Peter played the drunken fool—interrupting the priests with outbursts of laughter and sticking out his tongue—further stoking the hatred of his subjects-to-be. From that moment forth, “every word he uttered, every gesture he made, contributed to his ruin.”12
Despite hopes that his behavior would become more regal once he was ensconced on the throne, Tsar Peter III only further alienated himself from his court and other people. Under Elizabeth, the Russian army—along with its Austrian, Swedish, and French allies—were trouncing Prussia in the Seven Years’ War. With the Russian capture of the last Prussian port of Kolberg, victory was all but assured. Thoroughly defeated, Frederick II, the distraught king of Prussia, planned to renounce his throne and even contemplated suicide. Yet by some miracle, the tsarina had passed, leaving Russia in the hands of the Prussophile Peter. The fist command of the young tsar was unthinkable: Russia would switch sides in the war—give back the prize of Kolberg and all occupied territories and defend the Prussian king he so adored against Austria, which had been Russia’s ally just days before.13 Back in St. Petersburg, the new tsar redecorated his walls with the Prussian order of the Black Eagle and even wore a ring with the visage of Prussian king Frederick II, which Peter would kiss fervently. When the Prussian ambassador came to visit he found the tsar almost unable to stand he was so drunk. “Let us drink to the health of your King, our master.… I hope he will not dismiss me. You can assure him that, if he gives the order, I will make war on hell with my whole empire!”14 According to the nobles at court who witnessed Peter’s continued drunken and treasonous conduct, “the hearts of his subjects bled with shame.”15
As for his personal life, Peter mocked Catherine by openly cavorting with his mistress, the detestable Elizabeth Vorontsova, who “swore like a trooper, squinted, stank and spat as she spoke.” He humiliated Catherine further by exiling her to an apartment at the far end of the Winter Palace. Ironically, this banishment gave Catherine the freedom of movement and secrecy that were necessary for an eventual palace coup. Even before the death of Elizabeth, some of her closest friends and lovers—all of whom held positions of power in the government and the military—urged her to seek power. Now that the new tsar was seemingly intent on selling Russia out to its foreign enemies, the intrigues kicked into high gear. With every nobleman whom Peter offended Catherine gained another ally. On the eve of her coup, Catherine could count on more than forty officers and over ten thousand guardsmen. “The Empress is in the most cruel situation and is treated with the most marked contempt,” wrote French ambassador Baron de Bretuil. “Knowing as I do the courage and violence of this Princess, I cannot imagine that she will not sooner or later be moved to some extreme. I know that she has certain friends who are trying to calm her but who would risk everything for her, if she required it.”16 The actors were in place and the stage was set for a dramatic power struggle, but how would the script play out?
The Princesses’ Path To Power
When time came for Catherine’s revolution, events happened swiftly. Yet there was surprisingly little need for advanced coordination, propagandizing, or even a detailed plan of action. In fact, the plotters simply recycled the time-tested Russian script for placing a princess on the throne: a popular figure to rally the troops and plenty of vodka.17 Even back in 1682, the rebellious Moscow streltsy who invaded the Kremlin—hacking to death prominent nobles and relatives of a terrified ten-year-old Peter the Great—were treated to feasts and limitless wines and vodka poured from the hand of princess Sophia herself. (This was itself an echo of the Moscow Uprising of 1648, when outrage over corruption and increases in the salt and vodka taxes prompted a drunken, streltsy-led mob to set the city aflame, beheading and dismembering prominent nobles, before being pacified by a three-day vodka- and mead-drenched feast in the Kremlin.)18 The military rewarded Sophia’s hospitality by supporting her regency, making her the first woman to hold the reins of the great Russian state. Other women would emerge from similar succession struggles to claim the throne. All did so by using vodka to curry favor with elites, generals, and troops.
This was especially true in 1725, when Peter the Great died seconds before anointing a successor. Within hours of his death, Peter’s favorite Menshikov rallied the Preobrazhensky guard with alcohol to support the candidacy of Peter’s wife Catherine, whom the troops admired for her many qualities, not the least of which was her capacity to down glass after glass of vodka “like a real man.” With the troops behind her, Catherine I was triumphantly proclaimed sovereign of all the Russias. The widow Catherine took a bevy of lovers from competing noble families, and in regaling them, she drank like a sailor, often passing out drunk in her lovers’ arms.19 Unsurprisingly, given the hardcore binges of drinking and lovemaking, Catherine passed two short years later in 1727, leaving the throne to Peter II, who quickly succumbed to smallpox on his wedding day at the age of fourteen.
With the death of Peter II in 1730, the scheming nobles of the Russian Supreme Privy Council crowned Peter the Great’s little-known niece, Anna Ivanovna, as a pliable figurehead empress. They underestimated the mannish, roughhousing, gun-toting Anna, who continued the empresses’ tradition of solidifying their popularity with the lesser nobility and imperial guards by offering them copious amounts of vodka.20 Once secure in her position through liquor and loyalty, Anna quickly shrugged off any limits to her autocratic power and engaged in all manner of drinking and debauchery. Occasionally, during her decade-long reign, Anna invoked bizarre spectacles that were highly reminiscent of her “great” uncle Peter: when the esteemed, elderly nobleman Mikhail Golitsyn crossed the empress, she forced him to marry a hideous Kalmyk woman and “honeymoon” naked together on a bed made of ice within a specially constructed ice palace on the frozen Neva
River. But that’s another story.21
Even the Empress Elizabeth Pretrovna learned this lesson. When Anna died in 1740, leaving the throne to the three-month-old Ivan VI, Elizabeth courted the Preobrazhensky Regiment. She regaled the generals with stories of her father, Peter the Great, and flirted with them over round after round of drinks. Wine was plentiful on the night of November 21, 1741, when Elizabeth visited the regiment wearing a silver breastplate and wielding a silver cross. Leading the drunken troops, she marched on the Winter Palace and had the infant tsar Ivan VI, his parents, and their supporters imprisoned, placing herself on the throne in a bloodless coup. During her reign, she continued the grand Russian tradition of plying potential adversaries with liquor in order to worm compromising information from them.22
To be sure, vodka was a central ingredient in any Russian putsch. The only question was—would the German-born Catherine follow this recipe?
From German Princess To Russian Empress
If Peter III’s decision to give up Russia’s hard-fought gains in Prussia had not already made him enemies at court, his plan to wage war on Denmark to simply aggrandize his native Holstein certainly did. All of St. Petersburg seethed with discontent—especially the military. Word of open denunciations reached the tsar at his suburban residence of Oranienbaum but was simply ignored.23 Meanwhile, from the seclusion of her Winter Palace apartment, Catherine’s well-placed sympathizers multiplied, including Grand Chancellor Alexei Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova (who had strong connections to the guards through her husband), the generous Cossack Hetman Kirill Razumovsky (whose father helped put Elizabeth Petrovna on the throne a generation earlier) as well as a host of young officers of the Preobrazhensky and other guard regiments. At the center was the dashing and brave artillery officer Grigory Orlov—Catherine’s secret lover—and his brother Alexei. The Orlov brothers were the soul of the regiments: idolized by the young guardsmen, they organized drinking bouts and bare-knuckled boxing competitions on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.24 The stage was set for a coup d’etat.
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