But the intrigue has been thoroughly scratched by the chatty, Massie & massive biography of Catherine the Great which I am presently about half way through, on the second attempt, with power transferring from Catherine's husband to Catherine in the course of a coup which started on the evening of Thursday June 27th, 1762 and was more or less over a few days later, with, in the short term anyway, no loss of life or even limb.
The scene is illustrated in the map above, taken and annotated from gmaps, my first attempt at same, google having failed to come up with a decent ready made. The island is the fortress of Kronstadt. Below that is the palace of Oranienbaum and a little to the right that of Peterhof. Further to the right, below St. Petersburg proper (now equipped with their version of the M25), is the country estate of Tsarskoe Selo, now subsumed in the suburban town of Puskin. To the far south, the palace of Gatchima and to the far right the fortress of Schlüsselburg ( a German word, predating Catherine, despite the ancient Russian origins of the place). To give an idea of scale, this second fortress is about twenty miles from the centre of St. Petersburg.
Catherine's husband Peter (another German, but this one was also a grandson of Peter the Great) was made Peter III on the death of the Empress Elizabeth on Christmas Day, 1761. He was weak and unpleasant rather than wicked, but he had a life-long passion for all things German, and in particular for his duchy of Holstein, a place lying between Denmark and Germany, sometimes in dispute and better known to us Brits for its cows and for the Schleswig-Holstein question, sent to vex us at school. Peter had a passion for his contemporary Frederick the Great and loved to play soldiers. As a very young man he had to content himself with toy soldiers and servants, but by the time in question he had a small army of around 1,500 Holsteiners to play with.
By the middle of 1762 he had made himself thoroughly unpopular, Prussianising the Russian army (very angry at being made to dump their Bottle Green uniforms in favour of Prussian Blue (well known from painting boxes) ones), pulling out of the war against Prussia when on the point of victory (see volte-face below) and starting a war with Denmark about his native but far-off Holstein. There was a young heir, subsequently Paul II, fathered by a real Russian lounge-lizard rather than by the German Peter (which was well known and perhaps helped rather than hindered Paul's right of succession). There was also another pretender, Ivan, who had been rotting away for years and years in Schlüsselburg.
So Peter went off to war in Denmark with his Holsteiners, stopping on the way at Oranienbaum. He, rather insouciantly, left key elements of his army - the guards regiments - behind at St. Petersburg. His wife Catherine, whom he was about to dump in favour of his mistress, was left at Peterhof. Her lover, one of the Orlov brothers, a bunch of swaggering and outrageously brave soldiers, was in Petersburg and decided to act.
He sent to Peterhof to fetch Catherine in the middle of the night. In the morning, she is presented to the guards regiments who, suitably fed, oiled and watered, proclaim her empress, putting aside the Paul option favoured by some.
There was then the problem of what to do about Peter and his Holsteiners, who would certainly stand up for him if properly asked. He, as yet unware of what was going on in town, headed off to Peterhof without them to celebrate his name day. At Peterhof there was no Catherine to greet him, but there was news. On which, his Holsteiners were summoned from Oranienbaum, a summons which forgot to include the suggestion that they should bring their real muskets with them rather than the wooden ones they had been using for parades.
Rather late in the day, Peter then tries to get help from Kronstadt, to find that they have already declared for Catherine. With his power and courtiers slipping away, he collapses and writes abject letters of surrender to Catherine, winding up with a letter of abdication and a request that he be allowed to retire to Holstein with his mistress.
This last not being realistic, plans are made to put him in Schlüsselburg, but before he gets there he is killed, possibly in a drunken brawl in his temporary prison. Some time later Ivan is also killed, leaving Catherine reasonably secure on her throne, but tainted by these two deaths. Most serious people knew that both deaths were necessary, but nevertheless disliked the doing of them, wanting things both ways.
So Catherine might now be reasonably secure on her throne, but she was also very behoven to those who put her there, in particular the Orlov brothers. I am now reading about how she managed to wean herself off them and become autocrat proper. Perhaps a harder trick than that of just getting rid of the useless (but legitimate) Peter - a lesson which we westerners had not learned a couple of hundred years later when we came to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
Peter's mistress went on to marry again in Moscow and lived there, happily ever after.
Catherine was clearly of rather different mettle than that other, vaguely contemporary foreign bride, Marie Antoinette.
PS: I wonder if the textbooks used to teach history in Russian schools these days make much mention of the fact that one of their most successful autocrats was a German by birth and breeding, only connected with Russia by marriage. Or, indeed, that lots of Germans emigrated to Russia in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I wonder what happened to them in the twentieth century? And then there is the business of Frederick the Great's bacon being saved by Peter's unpopular volte-face in 1762. A volte-face which was, in the event, quietly confirmed by Catherine a year or so later. The chap whose portrait hung in front of Hitler's desk in his East Prussian bunker during the Great Patriotic War.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/civics.html.
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