Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (56 page)

“Exactly,” Orlov replied, smiling. “The empress asked me to open them.”

“I doubt that,” Dashkova replied. “They could have waited until Her Majesty had appointed someone who was qualified to read them. Neither you nor I are sufficiently experienced in these matters,” she said, and left the room.

Returning later, she found Orlov still reclining on the couch, and, this time, the empress, relaxed and happy, was sitting beside him. A table set for supper for three was drawn up beside the couch. Catherine welcomed Dashkova and invited her to join them. During the meal, the princess noted the deference with which the empress treated the young officer, nodding and laughing at whatever he said, making no effort to hide her affection for him. It was at that moment, Dashkova wrote later, that “
I realized with unspeakable pain and humiliation that a liaison existed between the two.”

The long day was not over. Catherine was exhausted, but the officers and men of the Guards wanted to return to St. Petersburg to celebrate, and she wished to please them. Accordingly, the victorious empress left Peterhof that same night to return to St. Petersburg. She halted briefly for a few hours of sleep, and on Sunday morning, June 30, still in uniform and still riding her white horse, she made a triumphant entry into the capital. The streets were crowded with excited people; church bells
pealed, drums rolled. She attended a mass and a solemn Te Deum—and went to bed. She slept until midnight, when a rumor that the Prussians were coming spread among the Izmailovsky Guards, many of them tipsy from the generous amounts of alcohol they had been drinking. Fearing that she had been kidnapped or assassinated, they left their barracks, marched to the palace, and demanded to see the empress. She rose, put on her uniform, and went out to reassure them that all was well: she was safe, they were safe, the empire was safe. Then she went back to bed and slept another eight hours.

At eight o’clock that night, Peter arrived at Ropsha. The stone house, built during the reign of Peter the Great, was surrounded by a park with a lake in which Empress Elizabeth had liked to fish. She had given it to Peter, her nephew. Alexis Orlov, responsible for the prisoner, lodged him in a small ground-floor room containing little more than a bed. The window blinds were kept closely drawn so that the soldiers posted around the building could not see in. Even at midday, the room remained in twilight. An armed sentry stood guard at the door. Peter, shut up inside, was not permitted to walk in the park or to take the air on the terrace outside. He was permitted, however, to write to Catherine, and over the next days, he wrote three letters to her. The first:

Your Majesty can rest assured that I will not think or do anything against Your Majesty’s person or reign.

The second letter:

The third letter:

The first full day of Peter’s imprisonment was Sunday, June 30. The next morning, he complained that he had suffered a bad night and would never be able to sleep properly until he could sleep in his own bed from Oranienbaum. Catherine immediately had the bed, a large four-poster with a white satin coverlet, sent to him by wagon. Next, he asked that his violin, his poodle, his German doctor, and his black servant be sent to him. The empress ordered that all of these requests be granted; in fact, only the doctor arrived. Whenever the prisoner asked permission to take the air outside, Alexis opened the door, pointed to the armed sentry barring the way, and shrugged his shoulders.

Catherine and her advisers were still uncertain what to do with the former emperor. The original plan of imprisoning Peter in Schlüsselburg now seemed inadequate. Schlüsselburg was only forty miles from the capital and he would become the second deposed emperor imprisoned
in this bastion. Sending him back to Holstein had been ruled out. But if not to Schlüsselburg or Holstein, where was he to go?

There is no evidence that Catherine ever concluded that Peter’s death was necessary to her own political—and perhaps physical—survival. She did agree with her advisers that he must be rendered “harmless.” Catherine was determined to take no risks, and her friends were aware of this determination. She was, on the other hand, too prudent to hint at the desirability of an unnatural death. It is possible, however, that the Orlovs had already guessed her inner thoughts and persuaded themselves that, as long as their mistress was not admitted into their confidence or given foreknowledge of their plans, they might safely rid her of this danger. Certainly, the Orlovs themselves had a strong motive for ending Peter’s life. Gregory Orlov was hoping to marry his imperial mistress, and Peter stood in his way. Even dethroned and imprisoned, Peter still would be, in the eyes of God, Catherine’s lawful husband; nothing but death could sever a marriage bond that had received the blessing of the Orthlodox Church. If, on the other hand, the former emperor were to die, there would be no religious bar to a marriage between Catherine and Gregory. Empress Elizabeth had married Alexis Razumovsky, a Ukranian peasant; he, Gregory, an officer of the Guards, was of a higher class and rank.

At Ropsha, mental confusion and fear of the unknown plagued Peter’s health. Alternately, he lay prostrate on his bed and rose to pace the small room. On Tuesday, the third day of his captivity, he was stricken by acute diarrhea. On Wednesday evening, he suffered a headache so violent that his Holstein physician, Dr. Luders, was brought from St. Petersburg. On Thursday morning, the former emperor seemed no better, and a second doctor was summoned. Later that day, the two doctors pronounced their patient recovering and, having no desire to share his incarceration, returned to the capital. On Friday, all was quiet. Then, early Saturday morning, Peter’s seventh day at Ropsha, while the prisoner still slept, his French valet, Bresson, who had been allowed to stroll in the park, was abruptly seized, gagged, thrust into a closed carriage, and driven away. Peter was not told and did not know. At two o’clock, Peter was invited to dinner with Alexis Orlov, Lieutenant Bariatinsky, and the other officers of his guard.

The only eyewitness to describe the subsequent event confessed to
the empress herself. At six o’clock on Saturday evening, a rider galloping from Ropsha reached St. Petersburg and Catherine was handed a note from Alexis Orlov. It was written in Russian on a sheet of dirty gray paper. The handwriting was scrawled and almost illegible; its message verged on incoherence. The letter seemed to have been written by a man shaking from drink or frantic with worry. Or both.

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:

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.