Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (52 page)

To change the beliefs and practices of the Orthodox Church would require a sustained effort, but the clergy and the millions of faithful would have difficulty forming an effective opposition. The army, the other pillar of the Russian state and autocracy, posed a different problem. He considered himself a soldier and was keenly aware of the importance of possessing a loyal, efficient army. Nevertheless, from his first days on the throne, Peter managed to offend the institution that he most needed for support. He was determined to reorganize the Russian army on the Prussian model. Everything was to be reformed or replaced: uniforms, discipline, drill, battlefield tactics, even its commander—all were to be Prussianized. Peter liked neatness and smartness and wanted his soldiers to wear close-fitting German uniforms. He took away the long, loose coats of Russian soldiers, useful in the cold of a northern winter, and put them into lighter, thinner, tight-fitting German uniforms. Before long, some could scarcely recognize the newly costumed, powdered men of the Russian Imperial Guard. Russian officers were expected to appear in new uniforms garnished with shoulder straps and gold knots. Peter himself began wearing the blue uniform of a Prussian colonel. At the beginning of his reign, he was content to wear the broad blue ribbon of the Russian Order of St. Andrew; then he switched to the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. He often showed off a ring containing a miniature portrait of Frederick, which he announced was his most precious possession.

Peter had never been near a battlefield, but he was an excellent drillmaster, and on the parade ground he made Russian soldiers practice Prussian exercises for hours, enforcing his commands with a little cane. No officer was excused from these drills, and fat, middle-aged
generals were obliged to turn out at the head of their regiments and do parade ground drill on their stiff, gouty limbs.

The antics of old generals trying to carry out Prussian exercises gave Peter amusement, but dressing his soldiers as Germans and teaching them Prussian drill was only the beginning. He replaced the traditional Russian sovereign’s personal bodyguard, drawn from the Preobrazhensky regiment—a unit founded by Peter the Great and of which Peter III was honorary colonel—with a Holstein Cuirassier Regiment to which he gave the name of Body Guard of the Imperial Household. This created intense indignation in the Guards and in the army generally. He announced that he intended to disband and abolish the regiments of the Russian Imperial Guard altogether and distribute the men among the regular line regiments. As a culminating insult, he placed his uncle, Prince George Lewis of Holstein, who had no military experience, in command of the Russian army.

At the moment Peter was proclaimed emperor in December 1761, Frederick of Prussia was in a precarious position. Nearly a third of his dominions were in enemy hands. The Russians had occupied East Prussia and part of Pomerania; the Austrians had regained most of Silesia: Berlin, his capital, had been pillaged and lay half in ruins. His army now was composed mostly of young recruits, and the king himself resembled “a demented scarecrow.” To rid himself of Russia as an enemy, he was prepared to sign a treaty, permanently sacrificing East Prussia. Then came Empress Elizabeth’s death and Peter’s accession to the throne. When Frederick learned that the new emperor had ordered a cessation of hostilities, he responded by ordering the immediate release of all Russian prisoners and sent a twenty-six-year-old officer, Baron Bernhard von Goltz, to St. Petersburg to negotiate peace. Meanwhile, Prussia’s interests were in the care of the English ambassador, Sir Robert Keith, who had followed Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams’s practice of sending military information to Frederick in Berlin. Now that Peter was on the throne, Keith’s influence was at a peak. The Austrian ambassador, Count Mercy, called him “
the chief instrument of the Prussian party. Not a day passes that the emperor does not see Mr. Keith, or send him fruit, or pay him other attentions.” Keith’s own dispatches also reveal this closeness. Only three days after Peter’s accession, Keith informed London that “
at a dinner, His Imperial Majesty, with whose
good graces I have always been honored, came up to me and smilingly told me in my ear that he hoped I would be pleased with him as the night before he had sent couriers to the different corps of his army with orders not to advance further into Prussian territory and to cease all hostilities.” Three weeks later, when Keith was supping with the emperor in Elizabeth Vorontsova’s apartment, Peter told him that he wanted to settle matters with the king of Prussia as soon as possible and was “
resolved to get free of all commitments to the Court of Vienna.”

On February 25, Count Mercy was present at a banquet given by Chancellor Vorontsov for the emperor and for all foreign ambassadors; three hundred people were in the hall. Mercy found Peter uneasy. At nine o’clock the company sat down. During the meal, which lasted four hours, Peter drank Burgundy, became excited, and, at the top of his voice, proposed a toast to the king of Prussia. At two in the morning, the diners rose from the table, baskets of clay pipes and tobacco were brought, and the men began to smoke. Peter, pacing up and down the room, pipe in hand, confronted the new French ambassador, Baron de Breteuil: “
We must make peace,” he said. “For my part, I have declared it.”

“And we, too, sire, would have it,” the ambassador replied, then added, “honorably, and in agreement with our allies.”

Peter’s face darkened. “Just as you please,” he said. “For my part, I have declared it. You can do as you please. I am a soldier and I don’t joke.”

“Sire,” said Breteuil, “I will report to my king the declaration Your Majesty has been pleased to make to me.”

Peter turned and walked away. The following day, the ambassadors of Russia’s allies, Austria and France, were handed an official document which declared that the war had been going on for six years to the detriment of all. Now, the new Russian emperor, anxious to terminate so great an evil, had decided to announce to all the courts in alliance with Russia that in order to restore the blessings of peace to his own empire and to Europe, he was ready to sacrifice all the conquests made by Russian arms. He believed that the allied courts would also prefer restoration of general tranquillity and would agree with him. After reading the declaration, Count Mercy declared to Chancellor Vorontsov that he found the declaration obscure and impertinent. Writing to his own court in Vienna, he described it as venomous; as an effort to avoid the
most solemn treaty obligations; and as an excuse to save the king of Prussia from impending destruction.

For Mercy and Austria, worse was to come. Peter’s declaration of peace turned out to be a preliminary to the signing of a formal alliance between Russia and Prussia. On March 3, the new Prussian envoy, young Baron von Goltz, arrived in St. Petersburg, where Peter received him enthusiastically. Goltz scarcely had time to congratulate the new monarch on his accession when Peter overwhelmed him with ardent assurances of his own admiration for the king of Prussia. He had a great deal to talk to him about in private, he whispered. Immediately after the audience, Peter thrust his arm through that of this new friend and carried him off to dinner, talking incessantly about the Prussian army and amazing Goltz with his intimate knowledge of the subject, including the names of almost every senior officer of every Prussian regiment. Goltz was provided with a mansion in which Peter visited him twice a day. Within a week, Goltz had completely eclipsed Keith, his English colleague, and, henceforth, until the end of Peter’s reign, Prussian influence dominated at the Russian court.

Goltz’s mission was to speed the end of the war and the detachment of Russia from her allies. To achieve this, he told Peter that Frederick was willing to consent to the permanent cession of East Prussia. Peter did not require this. On the contrary, he was willing to sacrifice everything to please Frederick. He let Frederick set the terms. When the king sent to St. Petersburg a draft treaty for an eternal peace between Prussia and Russia, it did not go through the normal channel; it was not submitted, or even shown, to Chancellor Vorontsov. Instead, Goltz simply read the text to Peter in private without witnesses, and on April 24, Peter signed it without comment, sending it to Vorontsov for confirmation. By this stroke of a pen on a secret treaty, the new emperor not only restored to Prussia all the territory won from her by Russia during five years of war but contracted an “eternal” alliance with Prussia.

Six days after the signing, the emperor celebrated the peace treaty with a banquet at which every guest was seated according to rank, the first time this precedence had been observed during his reign. Peter and his chancellor, Vorontsov, both wore the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle. The banquet lasted for four hours and four toasts were drunk: an expression of joy at the restoration of peace with Prussia; personal congratulations to Frederick II; a toast to perpetual peace between the two
powers; and a toast to the “
honor of all the valiant officers and soldiers of the Prussian army.” Each toast was accompanied by a triple salvo from the guns of the fortress of Peter and Paul, as well as from fifty cannon planted in the square outside the palace. There was no mention of the achievements, bravery, or losses of the Russian army, and, said Count Mercy, “
nothing was omitted in the way of indecency and offensiveness in regard to his ancient ally, Austria.”

This sensational diplomatic and military
volte-face
startled the chancelleries of Europe. When Maria Theresa’s government in Vienna learned that the Russian emperor meant to sacrifice all his conquests “in the interests of peace,” the Austrian reply was guarded, asking for details as to how this was to be achieved. The Russian explanation, arriving in April, was pretentious and pompous: to make peace, it declared, one belligerent must step forward as a general proponent and agent of peace; Russia had chosen this role “
out of compassion for suffering humanity and from personal friendship for the king of Prussia. The Austrian court is therefore invited to follow our example.” To Vienna, the message was menacing; the threat became real when Peter signed the treaty of alliance with Frederick. Peter explained this by saying that inasmuch as his good offices had proved useless, he found himself regretfully compelled to resort to the extreme measure of assisting the king of Prussia with his army as being the quickest way to restore to humanity the blessings of peace. He ordered General Zakhar Chernyshev, the commander of a Russian corps attached to the Austrian army in Silesia (and Catherine’s ardent admirer fourteen years earlier) to join the Prussian army with his force of sixteen thousand infantry and a thousand Cossacks to fight against Austria. At this betrayal and the collapse of all his years of diplomatic effort in Russia, Count Mercy asked to be recalled to Vienna. He recommended sending a third-rank diplomat as his replacement.

With Russia defecting from the alliance and switching sides, France and Austria had no alternative except to negotiate with Prussia. The French were outraged. The Duc de Choiseul, Louis XV’s foreign minister, said to the Russian ambassador, “Sir,
the maintenance of solemn engagements ought to override every other consideration.” Louis himself declared that while he was willing to listen to overtures for a durable and honorable peace, he must act in full accord with his allies; he
would consider himself a traitor if he took part in secret negotiations; he would stain the honor of France if he deserted his allies. The result was a rupture of Russian diplomatic relations with France and the recall of ambassadors from both St. Petersburg and Paris.

Peter had provoked and insulted the Orthodox Church, infuriated and alienated the army, and betrayed his allies. Nevertheless, effective opposition still needed a specific cause around which to rally. Peter himself supplied this by endeavoring to impose on his exhausted country a frivolous new war—against Denmark.

As Duke of Holstein, Peter had inherited the grievances of his duchy against the Danish monarchy. In 1721, the small province of Schleswig, then a hereditary possession of the dukes of Holstein, had been seized and handed over to Denmark by England, France, Austria, and Sweden. No sooner was Peter on the Russian throne than he proceeded to insist upon “his rights.” As early as March 1, even before peace with Prussia was settled, he demanded to know whether Denmark was prepared to satisfy his claims to Schleswig; if not, he said he would be compelled to take extreme measures. The Danes proposed a conference and the English ambassador recommended negotiations; why should the mighty emperor of Russia make war with Denmark over a few villages? But everyone soon discovered that on the Holstein question, Peter meant to have his way and that even the advice of his new ally, Frederick of Prussia, was powerless to restrain him. Hitherto, Peter had proved pliable in Prussian hands; now even these hardheaded Germans learned about his obstinacy. Ultimately, on June 3, Peter agreed to a conference in Berlin to be mediated by Frederick, but he stipulated that the Russian propositions were to be regarded as an ultimatum to Denmark and that rejection meant war.

Redressing a perceived wrong against his duchy was one motive for provoking a war, but Peter had a second. Having idealized the warrior king of Prussia, having bragged that he had defeated “gypsies” when he was a boy in Kiel, having marched paste soldiers across a tabletop in a palace room and ordered real soldiers around a parade ground, he wanted now to be a hero on a real battlefield. Peter had just proclaimed to his allies and to Europe his passion for peace; now he was preparing to attack Denmark. The Russian army, deprived of its hard-won victory over Prussia, now learned that it was to spill its
blood in a new campaign that had nothing to do with the interests of Russia.

Unable to dissuade Peter from undertaking this new war so soon after his accession, Frederick II urged his admirer to take precautions before his departure from Russia. “
Frankly, I distrust these Russians of yours,” he said to Peter. “What if, during your absence, a cabal were formed to dethrone Your Majesty?” He advised Peter to have himself crowned and consecrated in Moscow before leaving, to lock up all unreliable persons, and to leave St. Petersburg garrisoned by his faithful Holsteiners. Peter refused to be persuaded; he saw no need. “
If the Russians had wanted to do me harm,” he wrote to Frederick, “they could have done it long ago, seeing that I take no particular precautions, going freely about the streets on foot. I assure Your Majesty that when one knows how to deal with the Russians, one can be quite sure of them.”