Staehlin adapted as best he could. He made everything as easy as possible. He exposed his pupil to the history of Russia using books filled with maps and pictures, and by showing his pupil collections of old coins and medals borrowed from the art gallery. He gave Peter an idea of the geography of the country he was one day to rule by showing him a huge folio displaying all the fortresses of the empire, from Riga to the Turkish and Chinese frontiers. To broaden his pupil’s horizons, he read news items from diplomatic dispatches and foreign gazettes, using maps or a globe to point out where these events were taking place. He taught geometry and mechanical sciences by making scale models; natural science by strolling with Peter in the palace gardens to point out categories of plants, trees, and flowers; architecture by taking him through the palace to explain how it was designed and built. As the boy was unable to sit quietly and listen while the tutor was talking, most of Peter’s lessons were conducted with the teacher and his pupil walking up and down, side by side. The attempt to teach Peter to dance, a project removed from Staehlin’s responsibility but one particularly close to the empress’s heart, was a spectacular failure. Elizabeth, a consummate dancer, required her nephew to take intensive training in performing quadrilles and minuets. Four times a week, Peter was forced to drop whatever he was doing when the dancing master and a violinist arrived in his room. The result was disaster. Throughout his life, his dancing was comical.
For three years, Staehlin kept at his task. That he had little success was not his fault; the mischief had been done earlier when his student’s spirit and interest in learning had been twisted and broken. To Peter, life seemed an oppressive round of instruction in matters about which he cared nothing. In his journal, Staehlin wrote that his pupil was “utterly frivolous” and “altogether unruly.” Nevertheless, Staehlin was the only person in Peter’s young life who made any attempt to understand the boy and handle him with intelligence and sympathy. And, although Peter learned little, he remained on friendly terms with this tutor for the rest of his life.
During his first year in Russia, Peter’s schooling was affected by his delicate health. In October 1743, Staehlin wrote, “He is extremely weak and has lost the taste for everything that pleased him, even music.” Once on a Saturday, when music was being played in the young duke’s antechamber and a castrato was singing Peter’s favorite air, the boy, lying with his eyes closed said in a barely audible whisper, “Will they stop playing soon?” Elizabeth hurried to his side and burst into tears.
Even when Peter was not ill, other problems afflicted him. He had no friends; indeed, he knew no one his age. And Brummer, whose real character had not been seen or understood by Elizabeth, was always nearby. The boy’s nerves, weakened by illness, were constantly threatened by Brummer’s violent behavior. Staehlin reports that one day Brummer attacked and began to beat the young duke with his fists. When Staehlin intervened, Peter ran to the window and called for help from the guards in the courtyard. Then he fled to his own room and returned with a sword, shouting at Brummer, “This will be your last piece of insolence. The next time you dare to raise your hand to me I will run you through with this sword.” Nevertheless, the empress allowed Brummer to stay. Peter realized that he had gained no respite from persecution by coming to Russia. If anything, his situation was worse: however unhappy he might have been with Brummer in Kiel, at least he was home.
Elizabeth was distressed by her nephew’s failure to make any discernable progress. She was not a patient woman; she wanted favorable results, and her nagging anxiety about the existence of Ivan VI drove her to push Peter and his tutors harder. Why, she asked herself, was her nephew such a difficult, unpromising boy? Surely, soon he would change. Sometimes, attempting to calm her anxiety and convince herself that all was well, Elizabeth showered exaggerated praise on her nephew’s progress. “I cannot express in words the pleasure I feel when I see you employing your time so well,” she would say. But as the months went by and there was no improvement, her hopes were sinking.
Elizabeth’s principal grievance was her nephew’s open dislike of everything Russian. She appointed teachers to instruct him in the Russian language and Orthodox religion and worked tutors and priests overtime to see that he learned. Studying theology two hours a day, he learned to babble bits of Orthodox doctrine, but he despised this new religion and felt nothing but contempt for its bearded priests. Cynically, he told the Austrian and Prussian ambassadors, “One promised priests a great many things that one could not perform.” He approached the Russian language with the same attitude. He was given lessons, but he hated the language and made no effort to speak it grammatically. When he could, he surrounded himself with as many Holstein officials as possible and conversed with them only in German.
Peter’s difficulty ran deeper than dislike and cynicism. It was not merely a matter of acquiring the Russian language; given sufficient time, he might have mastered it. But behind every task his teachers set him loomed the greater obstacle: the prospect of succeeding to the Russian throne; it was against this future that Peter rebelled. He had not the least interest in governing a vast and—as he saw it—primitive, foreign empire. He was homesick for Germany and Holstein. He longed for the simple, straightforward life of the barracks in Kiel, where life required only uniforms and drums, command and obedience. Chosen to be the future ruler of the greatest empire on earth, he remained at heart a little Holstein soldier. His hero was not his own towering Russian grandfather but the idol of every German soldier, Frederick of Prussia.
Nevertheless, the empress eventually had her way. On November 18, 1742, in the court chapel of the Kremlin, Peter Charles Ulrich was solemnly baptized and received into the Orthodox Church under the Russian name of Peter Fedorovich—a Romanov name intended to wipe away the taint of his Lutheran beginnings. Empress Elizabeth then formally proclaimed him heir to the Russian throne, raised him to the rank of Imperial Highness, and granted him the title of grand duke. Peter, speaking in memorized Russian, promised to reject all doctrines contrary to the teaching of the Orthodox Church, whereupon, at the end of the service, the assembled court took the oath of allegiance to him. Throughout the ceremony and at the public audience afterward, he displayed an unmistakable sullenness; foreign ambassadors, noting his mood, said that “as he spoke with his customary petulance, one may conclude he will not be a fanatical believer.” That day, at least, Elizabeth simply refused to see these negative signs. When Peter was confirmed, she wept. Afterward, when the new grand duke returned to his apartment, he found waiting for him a draft for three hundred thousand rubles.
Despite her passionate display of emotion, Elizabeth still did not trust her nephew. To make his Russian commitments irrevocable and cut off all possibility of retreat, she liquidated his claim to the Swedish throne by making it a condition of a Russian-Swedish treaty that her nephew’s Swedish rights be transferred to his former guardian, Johanna’s brother, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, Bishop of Lubeck. The bishop became heir to the Swedish throne in Peter’s place.
The more obvious it became that Peter was miserable in Russia, the more Elizabeth worried. She had removed from the throne a branch of her family hated for its German connections only to find that the new heir she had chosen was even more German. Every possible Russian influence had been brought to bear on Peter, yet his ideas, tastes, prejudices, and outlook remained stubbornly German. She was bitterly disappointed, but she had to accept him. She could not send him back to Holstein. Peter was her closest living relative; he was newly Orthodox, newly proclaimed the heir, now the future hope of the Romanov dynasty. And when, in October 1743, he became seriously ill—not leaving his bed until mid-November—she realized how very much she needed him.
Indeed, the poor condition of Peter’s health pushed Elizabeth into further action. He was always ailing; suppose he were to die? What then? A solution—the best, perhaps the only, solution—was to find him a wife. He was fifteen, and the presence of the right young wife might not only help him mature but might serve an even greater purpose by providing a new infant heir, a child better equipped than his father to guarantee the succession. Elizabeth decided to follow this path: a wife must be found quickly and an heir begotten. Hence the empress’s haste to choose a bride for Peter; hence the urgent dispatches that Brummer wrote at her behest to Johanna in Zerbst: Come to Russia! Bring your daughter! Make haste! Make haste! Make haste!
6
Meeting Elizabeth and Peter
