Russia. A History

Catherine succeeded Peter the day of his death via a bloodless palace coup master-minded by Menshikov and backed by the guards’ military muscle. The coup pre-empted the claims of Peter’s grandson, Peter Alekseevich, but Catherine endorsed the traditional right of male succession as personified in the 9-year-old boy. Menshikov and the other Petrine ‘principals’ had apparently talked Catherine out of becoming regent for Peter on grounds that such an arrangement would foster division and discord. Just before his death Peter I had approved the marriage of his eldest daughter, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a secret article of the contract providing that the Russian ruler might bring back Anna’s male issue as successor to the Russian throne. Considering the late great tsar’s estrangement from Catherine during the final three months of his life (because of a scandal involving William Mons), her actual succession entailed abundant surprise and irony. Most amazingly, Catherine I inaugurated virtually continuous female rule in Russia for almost seventy years. Paradox also abounded in the efforts exerted over her reign of barely twenty-six months to undo several Petrine policies.

Some reaction against the imperious Petrine legacy was probably inevitable. Three decades of unremitting mobilization had engendered widespread crisis in much of the expanded empire, troubles lately compounded by harvest failures, massive peasant flight, and near bankruptcy. Hence Catherine’s first steps included reduction of the poll-tax (from 74 to 70 copecks) and withdrawal of the army from the provinces. Her government also strove to economize the workings of the inflated Petrine administration by abolishing many offices and dispensing with salaries for low-ranking civil servants in favour of restoring the customary practice of charging petitioners for official services. Much wrangling raged over bloated military expenditures in particular.

Though empress and autocratrix in name, Catherine I was so tired and sickly that her reign looked to be short. A new era of ‘clique government’ ensued much like that which had prevailed for almost a quarter century after Alexis’s death in 1676. This oligarchy assumed institutional shape on 8 February 1726 under a new governmental body, the Supreme Privy Council, a six-man council empowered to advise the empress and headed by the masterful Menshikov But he was ageing and so uncertain of his future that he vainly attempted to become duke of Courland. As Catherine’s demise approached in the spring of 1727, Menshikov endeavoured to safeguard his future by purging two rivals, Count Peter Tolstoy and his brother-in-law Policemaster-General Anton Devier, who were sentenced to death for conspiracy and treason before banishment to remote regions. Just prior to Catherine’s death on 7 May 1727 Menshikov oversaw the compilation of her ‘Testament’, which named Peter Alekseevich ‘sukt-sessor’ under a joint regency of nine persons. With a minor on the throne, Menshikov’s dominance seemed assured. He sought to conciliate young Peter by freeing his grandmother, the nun Elena, and arranged his daughter Maria’s betrothal to the future tsar on 25 May 1727. Barely a month later Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein and his wife Anna left for Kiel, removing two more political rivals from the scene. Even so, prolonged illness in the summer of 1727 enabled Menshikov’s rivals led by Ivan Dolgorukii and the crafty Andrei Osterman to rally the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov’s ‘tyranny’, so the ‘semi-sovereign despot’ was placed under house-arrest on 8 September 1727. Stripped of his honours, jewels, and multiple estates, Menshikov was exiled with his family to Berezov in Siberia, where he died in 1729.

Peter II’s reign proved as brief and uneventful as Catherine I’s. He hardly ‘reigned’, for actual power rested with the Supreme Privy Council until he suddenly died of smallpox as an unmarried minor on 18/19 January 1730. The general domestic tranquillity was underlined by abolition of the Preobrazhenskii Bureau in 1729. Peter II moved the court and several offices to Moscow, where he spent the last two years of his life mainly hunting in silent protest against the rigours of Petersburg life.