Alexis’s demise complicated the succession: Peter Petrovich—the tsar’s son by Catherine, not yet four but already three feet four inches tall—died on 25 April 1719, dealing another dynastic blow. ‘The Czar took the loss of his only son so much at heart, that he run his head against the wall of the chamber and was seized with two convulsion fits’, remarked the English envoy, who speculated that Catherine had passed childbearing age. She had one more daughter, Natalia, born in 1718 who died a month after her father in March 1725, and possibly two more still births. The Alexis affair, reminiscent of Ivan the Terrible’s murder of his son, may have exacerbated Peter’s tendency towards paranoia and alienation from former intimates such as Menshikov and, ultimately, Catherine herself. It also coincided with the formation of a hypercentralized and militarized police regime bent on resolute action dictated by an ageing autocrat disinclined to accept any counsel.
Outwardly the Petrine government went from triumph to triumph with the Peace of Nystadt ending the Great Northern War in 1721 and Peter proclaimed emperor of all the Russias and ‘the Great, Most Wise Father of the Fatherland’. Prussia and Holland recognized the new title the very next year, Sweden and Denmark in 1723 and 1724, but Austria delayed until the early 1740s and Poland only conceded in 1764. Peter captained the triumphal Persian campaign in 1722 that added new territories along the Caspian Sea in emulation of Alexander the Great. A new succession law, announced in 1722, gave the reigning ruler the right to name whomever he chose to succeed him, and Catherine I was proclaimed empress and crowned in Moscow in May 1724.
Peter’s death on 28 January 1725 happened so suddenly that he could not designate an heir. His health had long been in doubt despite visits to the mineral springs at Olonets. He travelled there in January 1719, for example, contracting ‘a violent cold on the road’. He was also tormented by ‘a weakness in his left arm, which was occasioned at first by his being let blood by an unskilful surgeon, who, missing the vein, made an incision in the nerve that lies by it’. Such pains led Peter to take the waters twice in 1724 in February and June. To Catherine he praised the curative qualities of the waters but complained of urinary difficulty and diminished appetite. In St Petersburg later that summer he was bedridden twice for almost two weeks between 16 August and 12 September 1724. He was one of those driven persons who cannot slow down, no matter what the doctors advise.
The condition that caused his death sparked controversy then and now, primarily whether it was venereal-related or not. Recent Russian scholars are split between gonorrhoea or uraemia. Considering the length and incredible tempo of his life, the cause of death may be less significant than the superhuman achievements of the ‘body’ and ‘soul’ involved. After the traditional forty days of mourning Peter’s body was interred in a magnificent casket in a small temporary wooden church amid the still uncompleted Peter and Paul Cathedral—the first Russian ruler to be buried outside Moscow. Feofan Prokopovich pronounced a brief grandiloquent funeral oration that was widely distributed and translated and that compared the late tsar to biblical prophets and kings—Samson, Japhet, Moses, David, Solomon, and Constantine.
Russia without Peter
Catherine succeeded Peter the day of his death via a bloodless palace coup master-minded by Menshikov and backed by the guards’ military muscle. The coup pre-empted the claims of Peter’s grandson, Peter Alekseevich, but Catherine endorsed the traditional right of male succession as personified in the 9-year-old boy. Menshikov and the other Petrine ‘principals’ had apparently talked Catherine out of becoming regent for Peter on grounds that such an arrangement would foster division and discord. Just before his death Peter I had approved the marriage of his eldest daughter, Anna Petrovna, to Karl Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a secret article of the contract providing that the Russian ruler might bring back Anna’s male issue as successor to the Russian throne. Considering the late great tsar’s estrangement from Catherine during the final three months of his life (because of a scandal involving William Mons), her actual succession entailed abundant surprise and irony. Most amazingly, Catherine I inaugurated virtually continuous female rule in Russia for almost seventy years. Paradox also abounded in the efforts exerted over her reign of barely twenty-six months to undo several Petrine policies.
Some reaction against the imperious Petrine legacy was probably inevitable. Three decades of unremitting mobilization had engendered widespread crisis in much of the expanded empire, troubles lately compounded by harvest failures, massive peasant flight, and near bankruptcy. Hence Catherine’s first steps included reduction of the poll-tax (from 74 to 70 copecks) and withdrawal of the army from the provinces. Her government also strove to economize the workings of the inflated Petrine administration by abolishing many offices and dispensing with salaries for low-ranking civil servants in favour of restoring the customary practice of charging petitioners for official services. Much wrangling raged over bloated military expenditures in particular.
Though empress and autocratrix in name, Catherine I was so tired and sickly that her reign looked to be short. A new era of ‘clique government’ ensued much like that which had prevailed for almost a quarter century after Alexis’s death in 1676. This oligarchy assumed institutional shape on 8 February 1726 under a new governmental body, the Supreme Privy Council, a six-man council empowered to advise the empress and headed by the masterful Menshikov But he was ageing and so uncertain of his future that he vainly attempted to become duke of Courland. As Catherine’s demise approached in the spring of 1727, Menshikov endeavoured to safeguard his future by purging two rivals, Count Peter Tolstoy and his brother-in-law Policemaster-General Anton Devier, who were sentenced to death for conspiracy and treason before banishment to remote regions. Just prior to Catherine’s death on 7 May 1727 Menshikov oversaw the compilation of her ‘Testament’, which named Peter Alekseevich ‘sukt-sessor’ under a joint regency of nine persons. With a minor on the throne, Menshikov’s dominance seemed assured. He sought to conciliate young Peter by freeing his grandmother, the nun Elena, and arranged his daughter Maria’s betrothal to the future tsar on 25 May 1727. Barely a month later Duke Karl Frederick of Holstein and his wife Anna left for Kiel, removing two more political rivals from the scene. Even so, prolonged illness in the summer of 1727 enabled Menshikov’s rivals led by Ivan Dolgorukii and the crafty Andrei Osterman to rally the Supreme Privy Council against Menshikov’s ‘tyranny’, so the ‘semi-sovereign despot’ was placed under house-arrest on 8 September 1727. Stripped of his honours, jewels, and multiple estates, Menshikov was exiled with his family to Berezov in Siberia, where he died in 1729.