golden stream flowing to Kiel from the imperial treasury in St. Petersburg. The duke’s expenses were high; he maintained a crowd of servants and gaudily uniformed bodyguards, all justified by the fact that he still considered himself the heir to the crown of Sweden. Preoccupied by these concerns, Charles Frederick took little interest in his infant son. The boy was handed over to nurses and then, until he was seven, to French governesses, who taught him to speak a serviceable French, although he was always more at home in his native German. At seven, Peter began military training, learning to stand erect at guard posts and to strut about with a miniature sword and musket. Soon, he came to love the forms and atmosphere of military drill. Sitting with a tutor, he would leap up from his lessons and run to the window to watch soldiers drilling in the courtyard. He was happiest on the parade ground himself, wearing a soldier’s uniform. But Peter had little endurance. Frequently ill, he had to sit in his room and substitute the lining up and maneuvering of toy soldiers for real parade ground drill. Eventually, his father noticed him. One day when Peter was nine and had reached the rank of sergeant, he was standing guard at the door of a room where the duke was dining with his officers. When the meal began, the hungry boy did nothing but stare at the procession of dishes being carried past him to the table. Then, during the second course, his father rose and brought him to the table, where he solemnly promoted his son to the rank of lieutenant and invited him to sit down among the officers. Years later, in Russia, Peter said that this was “the happiest day of my life.”
Peter received a haphazard education. He mastered Swedish as well as French and learned to translate that language into German. He loved music, although his interest was not encouraged. He delighted in playing the violin but he was never taught to play properly. Instead, he practiced on his own, playing his favorite melodies as best he could, tormenting all within earshot.
As a child, Peter was pulled in many directions. He was the heir, after his father, to the dukedom of Holstein, and on his father’s death, he would also inherit his father’s claim to the throne of Sweden. Through his mother, he was the only surviving male descendant of Peter the Great, and therefore he also remained a potential heir to the Russian throne. But when, on the death of his cousin Tsar Peter II, the Russian Imperial Council ignored the claim of the little Holstein prince, along with the claim of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth, and elected Anne of Courland to the Russian throne, the Holstein court, which had hoped for benefits from little Peter’s Russian connection, reacted bitterly. Thereafter, in Kiel, Russia was ridiculed in the boy’s presence as a nation of barbarians.
This multiplicity of possible futures placed too many demands on Peter. It was almost as if nature had failed him: the child who was the nearest male blood relation of both of the towering adversaries in the Great Northern War—the grandson of the great Peter, that dynamo of human energy, and the grandnephew of the invincible Charles, the most brilliant soldier of his day—was a puny, sickly boy with protruding eyes, a weak chin, and little energy. The life he was forced to lead, the immense legacy he was forced to carry, were too great a burden. In any subordinate position, he would have performed his duty unflinchingly. Command of a regiment would have delighted him. An empire, even a kingdom, would be too much.
In 1739, when Peter was eleven, his father died and the boy became, in name at least, Duke of Holstein. In addition to the dukedom, his father’s claim to the Swedish crown passed to the son. His uncle, Prince Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, the Lutheran bishop of Eutin, was appointed his guardian. Obviously, the bishop should have devoted particular care to the upbringing of a boy who was the possible heir to two thrones, but Adolphus was good-natured and lazy, and he shirked this duty. The task was delegated to a group of officers and tutors working under the authority of the grand marshal of the ducal court, a former cavalry officer named Otto Brummer. This man, a rough, choleric martinet, abused his little sovereign without mercy; the young duke’s French tutor observed that Brummer was “better suited to train a horse than a prince.” Brummer assaulted his young charge with harsh punishment, mockery, public humiliation, and malnutrition. When, as frequently happened, the young prince performed poorly at his lessons, Brummer would appear in the dining room and threaten to punish his pupil as soon as the meal was over. The frightened boy, unable to continue eating, would leave the table, vomiting. Thereupon, his master would order that he be given no food the next day. Throughout that day, the hungry child would be compelled to stand by the door at mealtimes with a picture of a donkey hung around his neck, watching his own courtiers eat. Brummer routinely beat the boy with a stick or a whip and made him kneel for hours on hard, dried peas until his naked knees were red and swollen. The violence which Brummer constantly inflicted on him produced a pathetic, twisted child. He became fearful, deceitful, antagonistic, boastful, cowardly, duplicitous, and cruel. He made friends only with the lowest of his servants, those whom he was allowed to strike. He tortured pet animals.
Brummer’s senseless regime, his pleasure in tormenting a child who might one day become king of Sweden or emperor of Russia, has never been explained. If by ill-treatment he hoped to steel the boy’s character, the result was the opposite. Life was made too hard for Peter. His mind rebelled at every effort to pound knowledge or obedience into his head by beating and humiliating him. In all the chapters of Peter’s unhappy life, the worst monster he had to face was Otto Brummer. The damage inflicted would be revealed in the future.
Just before his thirteenth birthday, Peter’s life changed. On the night of December 6, 1741, his aunt Elizabeth put an end to the reign of little Tsar Ivan VI and to the regency of Ivan’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna. One of the new empress’s first acts on the throne was to summon her nephew, Peter, her last remaining male kinsman, whom she intended to adopt and proclaim her successor. Her command was obeyed, and her nephew was secretly hurried from Kiel to St. Petersburg; Elizabeth neither consulted nor revealed her intention to anyone until she had the boy in safekeeping. Diplomats, obliged to explain her action to their courts, suggested reasons: they cited the threat of Ivan VI; they noted her devotion to her sister Anne. They also mentioned another, less noble motive: self- preservation. With Ivan under guard, Peter was Elizabeth’s only competitor for the throne. If he remained in Holstein and his Russian claim were to be backed by foreign powers, it could be dangerous for her. But if he became a Russian grand duke, living under her eye, it was she who would control his future.
As for Peter himself, Elizabeth’s coup d’etat turned the boy’s life upside down. At fourteen, he left the castle in Kiel and his native Holstein, of which he was still nominally the ruler, and, accompanied by Brummer, his tormentor, traveled to St. Petersburg. His departure from Holstein was sudden and stealthy, almost an abduction; his subjects did not know he was gone until three days after he was across the frontier. Peter reached St. Petersburg at the beginning of January 1742. There, in an emotional reception at the Winter Palace, the empress held out her arms, shed tears, and promised to cherish her sister’s only child as if he were her own.
Elizabeth had never seen Peter before that moment. When she examined him, she saw what Sophia had seen four years before. He was still an odd little figure, short for his age, pale, thin, and gawky. His straggling blond hair was combed straight down to his shoulders. Attempting to show respect, he held his puny body as stiff as a wooden soldier. When spoken to, Peter responded in a squeaking, prepubescent mixture of German and French.
Surprised and disappointed by the appearance of the adolescent standing before her, Elizabeth was even more appalled by his ignorance.
She herself was far from a scholar and even regarded excessive bookishness as injurious to health; she worried that this had caused the premature death of her sister Anne. She assigned Professor Staehlin, of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, an amiable Saxon, to accept chief responsibility for Peter’s education. Introducing Staehlin to the boy, she said, “I see that Your Highness has still a great many pretty things to learn and Monsieur Staehlin here will teach them to you in such a pleasant manner that it will be a mere pastime for you.” Staehlin began examining his new pupil, and it was immediately apparent that the boy was ignorant in almost every branch of knowledge. Staehlin also discovered that while his pupil was astonishingly childish for his age and so fidgety that it was difficult to fix his attention on anything, he nevertheless had a passion for everything relating to soldiers and warfare. On arrival, Elizabeth had made him a lieutenant colonel in the Preobrazhensky Guards, the senior regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. Peter was unimpressed; he sneered at the loose, bottle-green uniforms of the Russian soldiers, so different from the tight-fitting, blue, Germanic uniforms of Holstein and Prussia.
