Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (14 page)

T
HERE WAS NO ONE
Elizabeth loved better than her sister Anne. Just as the younger of the two sisters had inspired rhapsodic descriptions of her beauty and high spirits, the elder also found euphoric admirers.
“I don’t believe there is a princess in Europe at the present time who could vie with Princess Anne in majestic beauty,” wrote Baron Mardefeld, Prussian minister in St. Petersburg. “She is a brunette, but of a vividly white and quite un-artificial complexion. Her features are so perfectly beautiful that an accomplished artist, judging them by the severest classical standards, could desire nothing more. Even when she is silent, one can read the amiability and magnanimity of her character in her large and beautiful eyes. Her behavior is without affectation, she is always the same and serious rather than gay. From her youth up she has striven to cultivate her mind.… She speaks French and German perfectly.”

Anne’s life was shorter than Elizabeth’s. She was married at seventeen to Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein, a young man of exalted prospects and moderate abilities. He was the only son of Hedwig Sophia, the sister of the legendary King Charles XII of Sweden, and Frederick IV, Duke of Holstein, who died fighting in King Charles’s army. Educated in Sweden, he had good reason to believe that his childless uncle, Charles XII, intended him to be his heir. When King Charles died and Frederick, Prince of Hesse, was given the Swedish throne, the rejected nineteen-year-old Charles Frederick retreated to St. Petersburg to seek the protection of Peter the Great. The tsar received the duke, who, being a pretender to the Swedish crown, could serve as a useful political weapon.

The visiting duke, whose ambition exceeded his abilities, had not been at the Russian court long before he began intriguing for the hand of one of the emperor’s daughters. Peter opposed any such marriage, but his wife, Catherine, liked the duke and persuaded her daughter Anne that he would be a good match. The princess yielded to her mother and an engagement was agreed upon.

Suddenly, in January 1725, Peter the Great fell mortally ill. On his deathbed, he awoke from delirium and cried, “Where’s little Annie. I would see her.” His daughter was summoned, but before she arrived, her father was delirious again, and he never recovered consciousness. The betrothal and marriage were postponed, but only briefly. On May 21, 1725, Anne married the duke.

During her mother’s short reign, Anne and her husband lived in St. Petersburg. When Catherine died in 1727, the duke and his wife left Russia for Holstein. Anne was sorry to leave her sister, Elizabeth, but pleased to find herself pregnant. On February 21, 1728, six months after her arrival in Holstein, she gave birth to a son, who, the following day, was christened in the Lutheran church in Kiel. The baby’s name, Charles Peter Ulrich, proclaimed his illustrious lineage: “Charles” came from his father, but also from his great-uncle, Charles XII; “Peter” from his grandfather, Peter the Great; “Ulrich” from Ulrica, the reigning queen of Sweden.

While Anne was recovering, a ball was given in honor of the new prince. It was February, and although the weather was damp and icy, the happy nineteen-year-old mother insisted on standing at an open window to watch the fireworks that followed the ball. When her ladies protested, she laughed and said, “
I am Russian, remember, and my health is used to a ruder climate than this.” She caught a chill, which aggravated a tubercular condition; three months after the birth of her son, she was dead. In her will, she had asked to be buried next to her father, and a Russian frigate arrived to carry her body up the Baltic to St. Petersburg.

When Anne died, Charles Frederick mourned not only the loss of his young wife but also the shutting off of the 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 Brümmer. This man, a rough, choleric martinet, abused his little sovereign without mercy; the young duke’s French tutor observed that Brümmer was “better suited to train a horse than a prince.” Brümmer assaulted his young charge with harsh punishment, mockery, public humiliation, and malnutrition. When, as frequently happened, the young prince performed poorly at his lessons, Brümmer 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. Brümmer 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 Brümmer 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.

Brümmer’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 Brümmer. 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’état 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 Brümmer, 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.

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.