tures. The elder of the two daughters, Anna Petrovna, was just
seventeen years old; the junior, Elizabeth Petrovna, was barely
sixteen. Neither one was particularly dangerous. In any event,
according to the order of the succession, they would only come
after their mother, the putative empress. For the moment, the pri-
ority was to get them married as quickly as possible. Catherine
was quite unconcerned about that and relied on Menshikov and
his friends to support her in her intrigues. Before the tsar had
even heaved his last sigh, they sent emissaries to the principal bar-
racks to prepare the officers of the Guard for a coup d’état in favor
of their future “little mother Catherine.”
As the doctors and then the priests recorded the death of
Peter the Great, a wan sunrise seeped over the sleeping city. It
was snowing, with great soft flakes. Catherine wrung her hands
and wept so abundantly in front of the plenipotentiaries assem-
bled around the funeral bed that Captain Villebois, Peter the
Great’s aide-de-camp, would note in his memoirs: “One could not
conceive that there could be so much water in a woman’s brain.
Many people ran to the palace just to see her crying and sighing.”2
< 6 >
The tsar’s death was finally announced by a 100-gun salute
fired from the Peter and Paul fortress. The bells tolled on every
church. It was time to make a decision. The whole nation was
waiting to find out whom it would have to adore — or fear — in
the future. At eight o’clock in the morning, conscious of her re-
sponsibility before History, Catherine proceeded to a large hall in
the palace where the senators were gathered, with the members of
Holy Synod and the dignitaries of the first four classes of the hier-
archy — a sort of Council of the Wise known as the “Generalité”
of the empire.
The discussion was impassioned from the start. To begin
with, Peter the Great’s personal secretary Makarov swore on the
Gospels that the tsar had not written a will. Seizing the ball on
the rebound, Menshikov pleaded eloquently on behalf of His Maj-
esty’s widow. His first argument was that, having married the
former maidservant from Livonia (Catherine was born Marta
Skawronska) in 1707, Peter the Great had then chosen, one year
before his death, to have her crowned empress in the Cathedral of
the Archangel, in Moscow. By this solemn and unprecedented
act, according to Menshikov, he had shown that there was no
need to resort to any written will since, while he was alive, Peter
had taken care to bless his wife as sole inheritor of power.
But this explanation struck his adversaries as specious: they
objected that in no monarchy in the world did the crowning of the
monarch’s wife confer upon her
sion. Supporting this viewpoint, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn advanced
the candidature of the sovereign’s grandson, Peter Alexeyevich,
the proper son of Alexis — saying that this child, of the same
blood as the deceased, should be considered before all the other
applicants. However, given the boy’s tender age, that choice
would imply the designation of a regent until he came of majority;
and every regency in Russia had been marred by conspiracies and
< 7 >
disturbances. The latest, centered around the Grand Duchess
Sophia, had nearly compromised the reign of her brother Peter the
Great. She had woven against him intrigues so black that she had
had to be thrown into a convent to stop her wicked ways. Did the
nobles want to go through that kind of experience again, by
bringing to power their protégé, with a guardian hovering over
him and offering advice? The adversaries in this party suggested
that women are not prepared to direct the affairs of an empire as
vast as Russia. Their nerves, they said, are too fragile, and they are
surrounded by greedy favorites whose extravagances are far too
costly to the nation. With that, the supporters of young Peter
asserted that Catherine was a woman like Sophia and that it was
better to have an imperfect regent than an inexperienced empress.
Stung by the affront, Menshikov and Tolstoy reminded the critics
that Catherine had demonstrated an almost virile courage in fol-
lowing her husband to every battlefield and had shown a well-
trained mind in her covert participation in all his political deci-
sions. When the debate was at its hottest, murmurs of approval
rose from the back of the room. Several officers of the Guard had
infiltrated the assembly (without being invited), and they deliv-
ered their opinion on a question which, in theory, concerned only
the members of the Generalité.
General Repnin, outraged by this impertinence, sought to
drive out the intruders, but Ivan Buturlin had already gone up to a
window and was moving his hand in a queer way. At this signal,
drum rolls resounded from afar, accompanied by fifes playing mar-
tial music. Two regiments of the Guard, convened in haste, were
waiting in an inner court of the palace for the order to intervene.
