The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Artemii Volynsky, member of the Council

  Christoph von Münnich, count, field marshal, head of the War Collegium, later premier minister

  Ernst von Münnich, the marshal’s son, chamberlain, later grand marshal of court

  Anna Leopoldovna (née Elisabeth of Mecklenburg), regent 1740–1, daughter of Ekaterina and Leopold of Mecklenburg, Anna’s niece and heiress, princess of Brunswick

  Prince Anton Ulrich of Brunswick, husband of Anna Leopoldovna, later generalissimus

  IVAN VI, emperor 1740–1, the Brunswicks’ eldest son

  Baroness Julie von Mengden, friend of Anna of Brunswick, ‘Julka’

  Count Maurice Lynar, Anna of Brunswick’s lover, Julie’s fiancé, Saxon ambassador

  ELIZAVETA, empress 1741–62, daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I, first cousin of Ivan V’s daughter Anna

  Anna, her elder sister, married the duke of Holstein, ‘Annushka’

  Catherine’s golden boy was her chamberlain Willem Mons, aged thirty, the brother of Peter’s early mistress. Mons, who had served at Poltava, was ‘one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen’, according to a Danish envoy, but also one of the most ostentatious. At her glittering new court,* he liked to dress in plumed cap, velvet suit and silver cummerbund and was mocked for ennobling his name to Moens de la Croix – but his splendour was paid for in bribes, which he charged for access to Catherine. Worse, it was rumoured that he was her lover. ‘Her relations with M. Mons were public knowledge,’ wrote Jean-Jacques Campredon, the French envoy. ‘I am Your Grace’s slave,’ read a letter found among his papers, ‘and true only to you, ruler of my heart.’ Was the empress too clever to risk an affair? Did she fall in love?

  On 27 October 1724, when Peter returned to St Petersburg after his tour, he was informed of Mons’s bribe-taking. On 8 November, he dined with Catherine, coolly greeted the omnipresent Mons, then retired. When Mons was smoking a pipe before bed, General Ushakov, deputy chief of the Secret Chancellery, arrested him. Next day, Peter attended the interrogations, but before the torture had started, Mons fainted and confessed to embezzlement.

  Catherine may have appealed for Mons. ‘I made you and I can unmake you as easily as this,’ Peter supposedly screamed at Catherine as he smashed a Venetian mirror in the palace.

  ‘Do you think that will improve the beauty of the palace?’ replied Catherine calmly. But a wounded tiger is always the most dangerous and Mons was doomed. While he awaited execution, he wrote love poetry in German:

  I know how I will die

  I dared to love the one

  I should have only respected,

  I burn with passion for her.

  *

  On 16 November, in freezing weather, Mons was beheaded on Trinity Square; his sister Matrena was flogged and exiled. Mons’s head was preserved in a jar and presented to Catherine.*1

  On the day of the execution, Peter ordered the betrothal of his daughter Annushka to the duke of Holstein and, in a display of grace under pressure, Catherine practised dancing the minuet with her daughters. It was agreed that Annushka would renounce the succession herself, but their children would ultimately succeed to the throne.

  A cheerful Peter drafted decrees, despatched the Danish navigator Vitus Bering to explore the borders of America,† and on 3 January 1725 wrote a note to his Moscow governor which catches his fearsome tone: ‘I’ve no idea if you’re alive or dead or have forsaken your duty or turned to crime, but since we left Moscow I’ve seen no reports from you. If you haven’t arrived here by 10 February, you will be the cause of your own ruin!’ But, long before that, Peter was contemplating his own.

  On 6 January, the ailing emperor presided over the Blessing of the Waters on the frozen Neva – one of the few Muscovite religious rituals transferred to Petersburg. After ten days, doctors diagnosed inflammation of the bladder and probably gangrene, but Peter, in agony and unable to urinate, retired to bed in Catherine’s apartments upstairs at the Winter Palace in a small room off the Grand Hall. Nursed devotedly by Catherine, who scarcely left him, he kept working from bed, but on 23 January he realized he was dying. He told Prokopovich, his chief churchman, that he was ‘apprehensive of his coming fate’, observing that ‘mortal man is a wretched creature’. Two days later, the panicking doctors, all Germans and Dutch, managed to extract almost two pints of putrid urine from the feverish emperor, who then rallied. The next day, he felt well enough to eat porridge, which brought on violent spasms. Gangrene putrefied him from within. Complaining of a ‘burning sensation’, he cried in agony.

  Once again, the deathbed of a tsar was a theatre of the public and the private. Amid the sweat, the groaning, the stench of infection and the weeping of his henchmen, all leaned in to hear to whom Peter had decided to leave the throne. At one point, Catherine left the deathbed to consult with Tolstoy – and with Menshikov, whom Peter had rejected. She and her daughters would be vulnerable if Peter died. On 27 January, the last rites were administered twice by Prokopovich. ‘Lord I believe,’ Peter gasped. ‘I hope . . . I hope God will forgive me my many sins because of the good I tried to do.’ Catherine asked him to pardon Menshikov, who, lurking outside, was brought in and forgiven – just in time. At 2 p.m., Peter supposedly requested pen and paper, wrote ‘Give all to . . .’ and, since he could write no more, asked for his daughter Annushka so that he could dictate his wishes. Instead he sank into a coma.2

  While Catherine and his daughters knelt praying by the emperor, Menshikov and Tolstoy canvassed the Guards. At 6 a.m. on 28 January, Peter, aged fifty-two, in the forty-third year of his reign, died. The grandees gathered down the corridor in the Great Hall to fight it out. As no one seriously considered Peter’s nieces, there were three candidates for the throne: the obvious one by male primogeniture was Peter Alexeievich, aged nine, Peter’s grandson, supported by the aristocracy of Dolgorukys and Golitsyns. But that would surely mean the destruction of those who had tortured his father Alexei to death. The second was Annushka, Peter’s eldest daughter, and her fiancé Holstein – but they were not yet married. The other daughters Elizaveta and Natalya were too young.

  The third option was Empress Catherine, already crowned, and supported by Peter’s henchmen. Catherine had no hunger for power; Menshikov had it in spades. He summoned the Guards, who had shared the rigours of Peter’s wars with Catherine, their praetorian mood sweetened with bonus pay in her name. Some officers of the Guards crept into the room to listen at the back as Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, an experienced official, proposed that Peter Alexeievich succeed with the widow as regent. Tolstoy warned against the rule of a child and proposed the Empress Catherine, ‘who has learned the art of ruling from her husband’. The Guards, on parade in the courtyard below, shouted their approval; drums started to roll. ‘Who dared bring troops here without my orders?’ shouted Prince Nikita Repnin, chief of the War Collegium. ‘Aren’t I field marshal?’

  ‘I did it, Your Excellency,’ answered the Guards commander Ivan Buturlin, ‘on the express command of our Sovereign Lady Empress Catherine to whom you and I owe immediate obedience.’ As the ordinary Guardsmen wept – ‘Our Father is dead; Our Mother lives’ – Apraxin and Menshikov proposed that ‘Her Majesty be proclaimed Autocrat’.

  Catherine had remained on her knees by her husband’s bed, but now she emerged, leaning on Holstein’s arm, to face the grandees, sobbing that she was ‘widow and orphan’. Apraxin fell to his knees and hailed her to the roar of the Guards outside. Her accession was announced by the Senate and the Generalitet, the fifty generals of the high command. She promised to rule in Peter’s spirit. No woman had ever ruled Russia in her own right. Now Russia was entering an age dominated by the rule of women.3

  Peter was embalmed and lay in state. While she mourned Peter, the empress lost another child, Natalya, aged six, who died of measles, and her little coffin was placed in the Great Hall next to the giant one of her father. On 8 March, Catherine walked behind two coffins, one huge and one tiny, to the b
eat of kettledrums, the thunder of cannonades and the chant of sacred choirs. At the funeral, Prokopovich, standing beside the coffin in the unfinished Peter and Paul Cathedral,* compared Peter to Moses, Solomon, David and Constantine the Great. ‘He left us in body but his spirit remains.’ That spirit was personified by Catherine, who had to be prised weeping off the coffin. Peter remained unburied and on display in the Peter and Paul Cathedral until it was completed eight years later.4

  Between sobbing visits to his body, Catherine embraced Petrine debauchery even before the end of official mourning. ‘Those amusements were almost daily drinking bouts,’ observed the French envoy Campredon, ‘which last the entire night and into the next day.’ At dinners, where most of the company ended up unconscious under the table, the empress partied with Menshikov and Princess Anastasia Golitsyna, who won 100 roubles by bumpering two goblets of vodka. Catherine dictated her own ironic instructions: ‘No ladies are to get drunk upon any pretence whatever nor shall gentlemen, before 9 p.m.’ Yet she combined this with homeliness, cooking for her coterie.†

  Menshikov took over the planning of Annushka’s wedding to the duke of Holstein and, to make sure the special pavilion was ready, he slept in it to supervise the workers. Annushka’s marriage on 21 May to the small, unprepossessing German would ultimately decide the succession until 1917.

  Catherine aspired to rule herself, rather than through ministers and commanded the Senate to report to her every Friday, planning to ease the taxes on the peasantry, yet she lacked both the discipline to wade through papers and the force to stop the brawls of Peter’s pugnacious henchmen. So, on 8 February 1726, she created a Supreme Privy Council, made up of six of Peter’s henchmen (Chancellor Golovkin was now sixty-six; Apraxin sixty-seven; Tolstoy* eighty), with the traditional aristocrats represented by Prince Dmitri Golitsyn. Although Menshikov was the fifth member, much of the real work was done by the sixth and youngest, the industrious Baron Andrei Osterman, aged forty, nicknamed the Oracle. This German clergyman’s son, recruited by Peter at the age of seventeen, managed foreign policy as vice-chancellor, but Catherine also appointed him to the vital role of governor – or oberhofmeister in court rank – of young Grand Duke Peter.

  Catherine hoped these old retainers would balance Menshikov while confining their fissiparous feuds to the Council chamber. Instead Menshikov, still just fifty-three, dominated them while bombarding Catherine with demands for more money, souls, titles. Menshikov’s ‘lust for power, arrogance, greed, neglect of friends and relations’ was now so boundless that he became by far the richest magnate, owning 3,000 villages, seven towns, building up the domain he had always wanted in Ukraine. Soon he owned 300,000 serfs. (In 1700, the richest grandee, Prince Mikhail Cherkassky, had owned just 33,000.) Since there were other marshals, he persuaded Catherine to appoint him generalissimus, a title held by a select few – culminating in Stalin. Like the shark that can clean its gills only by eating more, Menshikov could survive only by consuming more to safeguard what he already had. If he stopped, he would be destroyed – the dilemma of Russian power, then and now, when the retirement of a leader is impossible without insurance that he will not be prosecuted nor his fortune confiscated. His rapacity soon aroused ‘general hatred’.

  Catherine attended the Council’s first sessions but soon started roistering at all hours. On 1 April 1726, during a drinking marathon, she ordered the alarms to be sounded throughout the city, but when the inhabitants of Petersburg and the denizens of the palaces rushed out of their beds and into the streets in fear of fire or flood, they learned that it was an April Fool’s Day joke. When courtiers wore the wrong clothes to her balls, she imposed bumpers of the dreaded vodka goblet. Released from her husband’s despotism, she thoroughly enjoyed the young men now available to her, taking a young lover, flaxen-haired chamberlain Count Reinhold von Löwenwolde (who closely resembled the decapitated Mons). But she played so hard that Löwenwolde collapsed, either from sexual exhaustion or alcohol poisoning.5

  She almost immediately faced a near-war with Britain, the beginning of a long rivalry. That naval power, reliant on supplies of timber and tar from the Baltic, had been alarmed by Peter’s successes there and George I, who as elector of Hanover also resented Russian influence in Germany, had tried to organize a coalition against him. In spring 1726, George tried again, this time blockading the Baltic. In the panic that Petersburg might come under attack, Catherine promised to command the fleet in person. It did not come to war, but the crisis increased her dependence on Menshikov, who took charge on the Baltic, travelling to Courland where he tried to make himself duke. His brutality so alienated the Courlanders that Tolstoy persuaded Catherine to dismiss him. But Menshikov did not break. He bounced.6

  During Petersburg’s White Nights, that phenomenon of northern climes when the sun is visible all night and it is never dark, the court register records that for days on end, Catherine banqueted at 3 a.m., rising at 5 p.m. to party until dawn again. She sometimes held parades at night. After these wassails, she suffered fevers, asthma, coughs, nosebleeds and swollen limbs, which concentrated the minds of her ministers.

  Grand Duke Peter, son of the murdered Alexei, was the sole male heir. How to reconcile Petrine parvenus with the aristocrats? While Menshikov was out of favour after his Courlandish atrocities, the wily Osterman noticed that the adolescent Peter was attracted to his curvaceous blonde sixteen-year-old aunt, Elizaveta, and proposed that they marry, thereby merging the factions.

  Since the Church forbade such consanguinity, Menshikov suggested that his own daughter Maria should marry Peter. Maria was already engaged to a Lithuanian, Prince Peter Sapieha, but it happened that Catherine took a fancy to him. Menshikov seized the opportunity, offering Sapieha to the empress. ‘The empress has literally snatched Sapieha away from the princess [Maria],’ noticed the Dutch envoy, ‘and made him her favourite.’ She was so happy with her conquest that she agreed to Menshikov’s suggestion. The granddaughter of a pie-seller was marrying the grandson of an emperor. Menshikov would be father-in-law and controller of the next tsar. Tolstoy mobilized his allies to stop him, backing Peter the Great’s daughters Annushka (or Elizaveta) for the succession. The girls fell to their knees and tearfully begged their mother not to back Menshikov and the son of Tsarevich Alexei. Catherine sobbed too but backed Menshikov. In November 1726, she collapsed with a chill, bleeding from the nose, her limbs swollen. But she recovered to Bless the Waters on Epiphany, arriving in a golden carriage, wearing a silvery dress trimmed with gilded Spanish lace, a white-feathered hat and a field marshal’s baton. That night she fell ill.

  Taking command of the palace, Menshikov realized that only ‘the very cunning’ Tolstoy could stop him. ‘In dealing with him,’ he mused, ‘it doesn’t hurt to keep a good stone in one’s pocket to break his teeth if he decides to bite.’

  Catherine was dying – and one of Tolstoy’s allies, Anton Devier, blunderingly blabbed about Tolstoy’s scheming. On 26 April, Menshikov struck against his enemies. He arrested Tolstoy, Police Commissioner Devier and secret policeman Ushakov, uncovering a ‘conspiracy’ against the empress. Now she signed her will.* On 6 May, Menshikov brought the sinking empress the evidence against Tolstoy, who was exiled to Solovetsky Island in the Northern White Sea. He never returned. At 9 p.m. that evening, Catherine died. This time there was no crisis. Men-shikov had terrorized all opposition. Peter II, aged eleven, was declared imperator.7

  The embalming was flawed. Such was the heat that Catherine’s body started to decompose. After her funeral, she joined her husband, unburied in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Supreme Privy Councillors, who now included Peter the Great’s daughters Elizaveta and Annushka and the latter’s husband Holstein, were meant to act as joint regents but Menshikov took control with ‘perfect despotism’.

  The boy-emperor, ‘who had great vivacity and an excellent memory’, was ‘very tall and large-made, fair but much tanned from hunting, young and handsome.’ He trusted his governor, Osterm
an the Oracle, and adored his aunt Elizaveta, but his best friend was his hunting pal, the nineteen-year-old Prince Ivan Dolgoruky. At first he was probably afraid of the abrasive Menshikov, who dictated his every move. Determined that Peter should marry his daughter Maria, Menshikov moved the emperor into his own palace to control him better. The prince played the role of trying to balance the factions beneath him, promoting the Dolgorukys and Golitsyns who privately despised him..

  Menshikov had not completely given up the ambition of procuring the dukedom of Courland, as princely domain and potential sanctuary. There, Anna was again ensconced with her older lover Bestuzhev. After Bestuzhev had been denounced for turning Anna’s palace ‘into a dishonourable whorehouse’, he was arrested. Anna was crushed and in twenty-five letters to Petersburg she begged Menshikov ‘not to take Bestuzhev away from me’ and beseeched Osterman ‘to intervene for me, a poor woman, with His Serene Highness [Menshikov]. Don’t let me spend the rest of my life in tears.’ She ended with a pathetic testament to her love for Bestuzhev: ‘I have grown accustomed to him.’ No penurious provincial widow could have more prostrated herself before the paramount pie-seller – yet Anna was a tsar’s daughter. She consoled herself with male lovers and then enjoyed a ‘particular friendship’, a lesbian crush on a pretty Lithuanian, Princess Oginski: ‘The two were continually together and they very often lay in the same bed.’

  No one would have guessed her imminent destiny, but however hopeless her prospects for the throne, however plain her looks, she was not bereft of male company for long.8

  When Tsar Peter fell ill with pleurisy, Aunt Elizaveta rushed to his bedside in the Menshikov Palace and nursed him. The doctors ordered Peter to take the air in the countryside. At Peterhof, the emperor hunted with Ivan Dolgoruky, consulted with Osterman and flirted with Elizaveta, an alliance united by nothing except hatred of Menshikov.

  Peter decided to send Elizaveta 9,000 ducats for her expenses, but Menshikov intercepted the courier: ‘The emperor’s too young to know how to dispose of the money. Carry it to my apartments.’ When Peter discovered what had happened, he summoned Menshikov ‘in a great rage’. Menshikov was ‘perfectly thunderstruck’, but the tsar, ‘stamping his foot’, said, ‘I will make you know that I am the emperor and I will be obeyed.’ In June, Menshikov invited the emperor to celebrate his birthday at the prince’s Oranienbaum estate, but Elizaveta persuaded him that he should go hunting instead. Then, aided by Elizaveta, he moved out of Menshikov’s house and into the Summer Palace.