It is true that the king of Prussia was counting on the grand duke to bring Russia back to its senses. Elizabeth would prefer to be damned by the Church than to accept such a humiliation! To prove that she was still in charge, on November 17 she took measures to reduce the very unpopular tax on salt and, in a belated burst of leniency, she published a list of prisoners condemned for life whom she suggested should be released. A short time later a hemorrhage, more violent than usual, curtailed all her activity.
With every coughing fit, she vomited blood. The doctors stayed by her bedside now and acknowledged that they had given up all hope.
On December 24, 1761, Elizabeth received extreme unction and summoned up the strength to repeat, after the priest, the words of the prayer for the dying. As she slid toward the great void, she guessed how pathetically agitated must be those, in this world that was receding from her little by little, who would have to carry her out to be buried. It was not she who was dying, but the universe of the others. Having failed to make a decision about her succession, she relied on God to settle Russia’s fate after she heaved her last sigh. Didn’t He know better than anyone down here what was appropriate for the Russian people? For a few more hours, the tsarina held off the night that was invading her brain. The following day, December 25 - the day Christ was born - at about 3:00 in the afternoon, she ceased breathing and a great calm spread across her, where traces of make-up still remained. She had just reached the age of 53.
When the double doors of the death chamber opened wide, all the courtiers assembled in the waiting room knelt down, crossed themselves and lowered their heads to hear the fateful announcement uttered by old prince Nikita Trubestkoy, Procurator General of the Senate: “Her Imperial Majesty Elizabeth Pet«233»
Terrible Tsarinas rovna sleeps in the peace of the Lord,” adding the consecrated formula, “She has commanded to us to live long.” Lastly, in his powerful voice, doing away with any possible ambiguity, he said, “God keep our Very Gracious Sovereign, the Emperor Peter III.”
After the death of Elizabeth “the Lenient,” her associates piously inventoried her wardrobes and trunks. They found 15,000 dresses, some of which Her Majesty had never worn.
The first to bow down before the trimmed and made-up corpse were, as expected, her nephew Peter III (who found it difficult to disguise his joy) and her daughter-in-law Catherine (already preoccupied with how to play this new hand of cards).
The cadaver, embalmed, scented, hands crossed and head crowned, remained on exhibit for six weeks in a room in the Winter Palace. Among the crowd that filed past the open casket, many unknown individuals wept for Her Majesty who had so loved the ordinary people and who had not hesitated to punish the faults of the mighty. But the visitors irresistibly shifted their gaze from the impassive mask of the tsarina to the pale and serious face of the grand duchess, who knelt by the catafalque. Catherine seemed to have sunk into a never-ending prayer. Actually, while she may have been murmuring interminable prayers, she must in fact have been thinking about how to conduct herself in the future, to thwart the hostility of her husband.
The presentation of the late empress to the people, in the palace, was followed by the transfer of the remains to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. There again, during the religious ceremonies (which lasted ten days), Catherine astonished those in attendance by her demonstrations of grief and piety. Was she trying to prove how Russian she was, whereas her husband, the Grand Duke Peter, never missed an occasion to show that he was not? While the coffin was being solemnly transported from the Kazan Cathedral to that of the Peter and Paul Fortress, for burial
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Another Catherine! in the crypt reserved for sovereigns of Russia, the new tsar scandalized the most enlightened minds by laughing and making faces behind the hearse. He must have been taking his revenge for all the past humiliations by thumbing his nose at the dead. But no one laughed at his high-jinks on a day of national mourning.
Covertly watching her husband, Catherine realized that he was contributing to his own undoing. Moreover, he very quickly announced the color of his intentions. The night following his accession, he gave the order for Russian troops immediately to evacuate the territories that they occupied in Prussia and Pomerania. At the same time, he offered to sign “an accord of eternal peace and friendship” with Frederick II, who had been conquered only yesterday. Blinded by his admiration for this prestigious enemy, he threatened to impose the Holstein uniform on the Russian imperial guard, to disband in a flourish of the quill certain regiments that he considered too devoted to the dear departed, and to make the Orthodox Church toe the line by obliging the priests to shave their beards and to wear frock coats like Protestant pastors.
His Germanophilia took such proportions that Catherine was afraid he would soon repudiate her and lock her up in a convent. However, her partisans told her repeatedly that she had all of Russia behind her - and that the imperial guard would not tolerate anyone touching a hair on her head. The five Orlov brothers, led by her lover Grigory, persuaded her that, far from despairing, she should be delighted by the turn of events. It was time to play all-out, they said. Didn’t Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, and Elizabeth I all win the throne through coups of outrageous audacity? The first three empresses of Russia had shown her the way. Now, she only had follow in their footsteps.
On June 28, 1762, the very same day that the Baron of Breteuil wrote in a dispatch to his government that, “a public cry of diss atisfaction is going up [in Russia],” Catherine, escorted by
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Terrible Tsarinas Alexis Orlov, went to visit the Guard regiments. She went from one barrack to another and was hailed enthusiastically everywhere. The supreme consecration was given to her at once at Our Lady of Kazan, where the priests, who knew her by her so-often displayed piety, blessed her for her imperial destiny. The following day, riding (in an officer’s uniform) at the head of several regiments who had joined her cause, she moved on to Oranienbaum where her husband, who suspected nothing, was regaling himself in the company of his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsov. He was stunned to receive an emissary from his wife and to hear, from his mouth, that a military uprising has just driven him out.
His Holstein troops not having managed to offer any resistance to the insurgent, he signed, sobbing and trembling with fear, the act of abdication that was presented to him. At that, Catherine’s partisans packed him off in a closed carriage to the palace of Ropcha, some thirty versts from St. Petersburg, where he was placed under house arrest.
Catherine returned to St. Petersburg on Sunday, June 30, 1762, and was greeted by the peeling carillon of church bells, salvos of artillery fire and howls of joy.6 It seemed that Russia was delighted to be become Russian again, thanks to her. Was it reassuring to the people to find another woman at the helm? In the sequence of the dynastic succession, she would be the fifth, after Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth I (Petrovna) to ascend the steps of the throne. Who then could claim that the skirt impedes the natural movements of a woman?
Never had Catherine felt more at ease nor more sure of herself.
Those who had preceded her in this difficult role had given her courage and a kind of legitimacy. It was brains, not sex, that was now the best asset for achieving power.
However, six days after her entry in St. Petersburg in apotheosis, Catherine received a letter from an extremely embar«236»
Another Catherine! rassed Alexis Orlov, stating that Peter III had been mortally wounded during a brawl with his guards at Ropcha. She was thunderstruck. Wouldn’t the people blame her for this brutal and suspicious death? Wouldn’t all those who had cheered her so vigorously yesterday in the streets rather come to hate her for a crime that she did not commit, but that indeed suited her interests very well? The next day, she was relieved - no one
