of Holstein, with his exasperating ambitions, might be ignoring
his wife Anna’s warnings and might be overdoing things, in an
effort to destroy the
had managed to impose upon the junior tsar and his close rela-
tives. In order to cut short Charles Frederick’s foolish dreams,
Menshikov took away from him (via an
II’s vigilance one evening during a drunken binge) the island of
Oesel, in the Gulf of Riga, which the couple had received as a
wedding present, and cut back the duke’s expense account. These
displays of pettiness were accompanied by so many minor vexa-
tions at the hand of Menshikov that the Duke and his wife were
annoyed for good and decided to leave the capital, where they
were treated like poor relations and intruders. Hugging her sister
before embarking with her husband for Kiel, with heart overflow-
ing, Anna was gripped by a disastrous presentiment. She confided
to her friends that she was very much afraid of Menshikov’s in-
trigues, on behalf of Elizabeth as well as Peter. She felt he was an
< 39 >
implacable enemy of their family. Because of his giant size and his
broad shoulders, he was called the “proud Goliath,” and Anna be-
seeched Heaven that Peter II, a new David, should bring down the
monster of pride and spite that had such a hold on the empire.
After her sister departed for Holstein, Elizabeth tried at first
to forget her sorrows and her fears in a swirl of romance and in-
trigue. Peter assisted her in this distracting enterprise by invent-
ing new excuses for fooling around and intoxicating themselves
every day. He was only 14 years old, yet he felt the desires of a
man. To secure greater freedom of movement, Elizabeth and he
emigrated to the old imperial palace of Peterhof. For a moment,
they could believe that their secret vows were about to be ful-
filled; for Menshikov, although he enjoyed an iron constitution,
suddenly had a fainting spell and was spitting blood. He had to be
confined to bed. According to the echoes that reached Peterhof,
the doctors considered that the indisposition could be long last-
ing, if not fatal.
During this vacuum of power, the usual advisers met to com-
ment on current matters. In addition to the illness of His Most
Serene, another event of importance occurred meanwhile, and an
embarrassing one, at that. Peter the Great’s first wife, the Tsarina
Eudoxia, whom he had imprisoned in the convent at Suzdal and
then transferred to the fortress at Schlüsselburg, had suddenly
resurfaced. The emperor had repudiated her in order to marry
Catherine. An old woman, weak but still valiant after thirty years
of reclusion, Eudoxia was the mother of the Tsarevich Alexis who
had died under torture and the grandmother of Tsar Peter II who,
by the way, had never met her and did not see any need to do so.
Now that she was out of prison and Menshikov, her sworn enemy,
was tied to his bed, the other members of the Supreme Privy
Council thought that the grandson of this martyr, so worthy in
her effacement, should pay her a visit of homage. They considered
< 40 >
that to be even more advisable since the people saw Eudoxia as a
saint who had been sacrificed for reasons of State. There was only
one hitch, but it was a sizeable one: wouldn’t Menshikov be furi-
ous if they took such an initiative without consulting him? Spe-
cialists in public issues discussed the matter gravely. Some sug-
gested taking advantage of the young tsar’s upcoming coronation,
scheduled to take place in Moscow early in 1728, to set up a his-
toric meeting between the grandmother (embodying the past)
and the new tsar (embodying the future). Ostermann, Dolgoruky
and other characters of lesser stature were already addressing
messages of devotion to the old tsarina and requesting her sup-
port in future negotiations. But Eudoxia, immured in her prayers,
fasting and memories, ignored the courtiers’ agitation. She had
suffered too much already from the contaminated atmosphere of
the palaces to wish for any other reward than peace in the light of
the Lord.
While the grandmother was aspiring to eternal rest, the
grandson, his head on fire, was spinning out of control. But it was
not the illusion of grandeur that haunted him. Worlds away from
the legendary
to another. Hunting meets alternated with impromptu picnics,
with a roll in the hay at some rustic cottage, with reveries in the
moonlight. A light perfume of incest spiced the pleasure Peter
took in caressing his young aunt. There’s nothing like guilt to
save lovemaking from the tedium of habit. If you play by the rules,
relations between a man and a woman quickly become as tire-
some as doing one’s duty. That conviction must have been what
encouraged Peter to throw himself into parallel experiments with
Ivan Dolgoruky. In thanks for the intimate satisfactions that Ivan
