Bariatinsky at the table. Before we could separate them, he was dead. We ourselves know not what we did. But we are all equally guilty and deserve to die. Have mercy on me, if only for my brother’s [Gregory’s] sake. I have confessed my guilt and there is nothing further for me to tell. Forgive us or quickly make an end of me. The sun will no longer shine for me and life is not worth living. We have angered you and lost our souls forever.
What had happened? The circumstances and cause of death, and the intentions and degree of responsibility of those involved, can never be known, but perhaps one can merge what is known and what can be imagined:
On Saturday, July 6, Alexis Orlov, Prince Theodore Bariatinsky, and others invited the prisoner to join them for midday dinner. It may be that they had spent the week wondering how long they were to be separated from their fortunate comrades celebrating in St. Petersburg while they were assigned to remain watching over this wretched, contemptible man. During the meal, everyone drank heavily. Then, because they had planned it, or because there was quarreling that soared out of control, they fell on Peter and attempted to suffocate him by placing him under a mattress. He struggled and escaped. They pinioned him, wrapped a scarf around his neck, and strangled him.
Whether Peter’s death was accidental, the result of a drunken scuffle after dinner that got out of control, or a deliberate, premeditated murder will never be known. The frantic, semicoherent tone of Orlov’s scribbled letter, seeming to betray fear of repercussion as well as horror and remorse, suggests that he had not planned to go that far. When he arrived in the capital that night, he was disheveled, bathed in sweat, and covered with dust. “His face,” said someone who happened to see him “wore an expression that was frightful to see.” Orlov’s pleas to Catherine for mercy—“We ourselves know not what we did” and “Forgive us or quickly make an end of me”— suggest that, while admitting that he was present when Peter died, this was not what he had planned.
In either case, whether the death was unintended or was planned in advance by the officers, Catherine herself would seem to have been innocent. However, she was not blameless. She had placed her husband in the hands of Alexis Orlov, knowing that Alexis was a soldier untroubled by violent death and that he hated Peter. But Orlov’s letter shocked Catherine. Its frantic language and desperate pleas make it almost impossible to believe that Catherine had previous knowledge of any intent to murder and had given her consent. Nor was Alexis Orlov the kind of sophisticated, duplicitous writer who could manage to concoct so frenzied and abject a story. In the mind of Princess Dashkova, Orlov’s letter exonerated Catherine of all suspicion of complicity. When Dashkova visited her friend on the following day, she was greeted by Catherine’s words, “My horror at this death is inexpressible. This blow strikes me to the earth!” The princess, still equating her role in events with that of the empress, could not refrain from saying, “It is a death too sudden, Madame, for your glory and for mine.”
Whatever happened, Catherine had to deal with the aftermath. Her husband, the former emperor, was dead in the custody of her friends and supporters. Would she arrest Alexis Orlov and the other officers at Ropsha? If she did so, how would Gregory, the father of her three-month-old child, react? How would the Guards react? How would the Senate, St. Petersburg, and the Russian people react? Her decision, made, perhaps, on Panin’s recommendation, was to treat the death as a medical tragedy. To deal with the widespread knowledge that the officers guarding her husband were known to have hated him, she ordered a postmortem examination. She had the body dissected by doctors who could be trusted to clear Orlov. The doctors opened the body, and, as they were told to do, looked only for evidence of poisoning. Reporting that there was no such evidence, they declared that Peter had died of natural causes, probably an acute hemorrhoidal attack—a “colic”—which had affected his brain and brought on an apoplectic stroke. Catherine then issued a proclamation, composed with Panin’s assistance:
On the seventh day of our reign we received the news to our great sorrow and affliction that it was God’s will to end the life of the former emperor Peter III by a severe attack of hemorrhoidal colic. We have ordered his mortal remains to be taken to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. We ask all our faithful subjects to bid farewell to his earthly remains without rancor and to offer up prayers for the salvation of his soul.
Panin also advised that the body be exhibited in as nearly normal a fashion as could be managed; he believed it wiser to display a dead Peter than to risk fostering the belief that he was still alive, hidden away somewhere, and might reappear. The former emperor’s body, lying in state in St. Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery, had been forced into the blue uniform of a Holstein cavalry officer, apparel that Peter had delighted in wearing when he was alive but which, on this occasion, was intended to draw attention to his foreign origins and preferences. On his chest, he wore no medal or ribbon. A three-cornered hat, a size too large, covered his forehead, but the part of his face remaining uncovered and visible was black and swollen. A long, wide cravat was wound around his neck up to his chin around what—had the dead man been throttled—must have been a bruised and discolored throat. His hands, which it was the custom of the Orthodox Church to leave bare and holding a cross, were encased in heavy leather riding gloves.
The body was placed on a bier with candles at the head and feet. The line of viewers, kept moving quickly by soldiers, saw no Catherine kneeling and praying over her husband as she had done for Empress Elizabeth. Her absence, it was explained, was a result of an appeal from the Senate that she not attend, “so that Her Imperial Majesty might spare her health out of love for the Russian Fatherland.” The site of Peter’s interment was also unusual. Although he was the grandson of Peter the Great, the dead Peter III had not been crowned, and therefore could not lie in the fortress cathedral with the remains of consecrated tsars and empresses. On July 23, Peter’s remains were placed in the Nevsky Monastery alongside the body of Regent Anna Leopoldovna, mother of the deposed and imprisoned Ivan VI. Here Peter was to lie throughout his wife’s thirty-four-year reign.
Catherine’s explanation of this sequence of events was conveyed in a letter to Stanislaus Poniatowski, written two weeks after her husband’s death:
Peter III had lost the few wits he had. He wanted to change his religion, break up the Guards, marry Elizabeth Vorontsova, and shut me up. On the day of celebrating the peace with Prussia, after publicly insulting me at dinner, he ordered my arrest the same evening. The order was retracted, but from that time I listened to proposals [that she replace Peter on the throne] that had been made to me since the death of Empress Elizabeth. We could count on many captains of the Guards. The secret was in the hands of the Orlov brothers. They are an extremely determined family and much loved by the common soldiers. I am under great obligation to them.
I sent the deposed emperor to a remote and very agreeable spot called Ropsha, under the command of Alexis Orlov with four officers and a detachment of picked, good-natured men, while decent and convenient rooms were being prepared for him at Schlusselburg. But God disposed otherwise. Fear had caused a diarrhea which lasted three days and ended on the fourth when he drank excessively.… A hemorrhoidal colic seized him and affected his brain. For two days he was delirious and then delirium was followed by extreme exhaustion. Despite all the help the doctors could give him, he died while demanding a Lutheran priest. I feared that the officers might have poisoned him so I had him opened up, but not the slightest trace of poison was found. The stomach was quite healthy, but the lower bowels were greatly inflamed and a stroke of apoplexy carried him off. His heart was extraordinarily small and quite decayed.
So at last God has brought everything to pass according to His designs. The whole thing is rather a miracle than a pre-arranged plan, for so many lucky circumstances could not have coincided unless God’s hand had been over it all. Hatred of foreigners was the chief factor in the whole affair and Peter III passed for a foreigner.
Most of Europe held Catherine responsible. Journals and newspapers across the continent wrote of a return to the days of Ivan the Terrible. Many were cynical about the officially proclaimed explanation that the emperor had died of “colic.” “Everyone knows the nature of colic,” quipped Frederick of Prussia. “When a heavy drinker dies from colic, it teaches us to be sober,” deadpanned Voltaire. Frederick nevertheless believed that Catherine herself was innocent. In his memoirs, he wrote:
