February 4, 2020 • 26 mins
Catherine the Great, Russia's most famous Empress, wasn't born in Russia—she was a minor German princess engaged to the future Emperor. But less than a year after her husband ascended to the Russian throne, Catherine overthrew him in a coup with the help of her lover in one of the most extraordinary political maneuvers in history.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. On his name
Day celebration, the Emperor of Russia, Peter the Third, rode
with a large entourage from one palace to another to
meet his wife Katherine at peter Hof, where a large
(00:22):
celebration that evening was to take place. Since their wedding
in seventeen forty five, Peter had grown to despise his wife,
and he'd been making snide remarks about his intentions to
divorce Katherine and marry his mistress, a woman whom people
might generously call charmless and truthfully might call absolutely boorish.
(00:44):
The mistress Elizabeth Voronstova, was traveling with him that afternoon
from Iranian Baum, along with Mikhail Voranstove, the Russian Chancellor
and Elizabeth's uncle, a number of dignitaries and their wives,
and a gaggle of Elizabeth vorn's Stova's ladies in waiting.
At this point, Peter and his wife Catherine lived almost
(01:05):
entirely separate lives with entirely separate lovers, but for a
large state event like his name Day celebration, they would
make an appearance together. She was still his wife, and
her job was to meet him outside the palace that
day and congratulate him on his name day. There was
only one problem. When the entourage arrived at Peterhof, no
(01:27):
one was there to greet them. Where Catherine was supposed
to be waiting with open arms and a forgiving heart,
there is instead only locked doors and closed windows. The
Empress was gone. Peter and his mistress searched the bedrooms,
under the mattresses. In the closets, they saw the gown
(01:50):
that had been laid out for Catherine to wear at
the ball that evening, but there was no other sign
of Catherine. At that very moment. While Peter and his
mistress swept through the palace looking for her, the Empress
was fifteen miles away in St. Petersburg, taking an oath
in front of hundreds of regiments of soldiers, declaring herself
(02:12):
to be the new Sovereign of Russia. Back at Peterhoff,
the servants could only say that they saw Katherine leave
for St. Petersburg that morning, and that she hadn't returned
and hadn't sent word. After an hour of frantically running
from room to room, Peter's chancellor, Michael varon Stove, volunteered
to ride to the city to find out about Katherine's whereabouts.
(02:37):
When Michael varn Stove made it to the winter Palace,
he saw Katherine on the balcony waving to the hordes
of people below, cheering her name, cheering for Russia, for
their new monarch. It didn't take Michael too long to
understand what he was seeing. What about your husband, he sputtered.
You shouldn't take up arms against your husband. Katherine only mild,
(03:00):
She gestured back at the screaming crowd outside her palace window,
a sound that roared along with the echoing of the
church bells, which had been tolling for her all afternoon.
Give your message to them, sir, she replied, I only obey.
(03:21):
Mcalvern Stove promptly returned to his home, where he wrote
Catherine a letter celebrating the inevitability of her ascension to
sovereign Empress and politely asking permission to formally retire and
disappear off forever into seclusion, which he then did. Meanwhile,
Peter still searched the empty rooms at peter Hof for
(03:42):
his missing wife, not believing the servants when they told
him that she was actually gone. I can't believe she
would do this to me, he fumed, Ruining my moment,
ruining my name, day, ruining my night. He turned to
his mistress and exhaled, didn't I tell you she was
capable of anything. Peter the third was not right about
very much, but he was right about that. I'm Dana
(04:06):
Schwartz and this is noble blood. One evening, a few
years after they were married, but before Peter Ulrich ascended
to the throne as Peter the Third, Katherine entered the
chamber of her husband to find him playing with toys.
(04:26):
A dead rat was hanging from the wall. The two
of them still hadn't produced an air, and the failure
had begun to weigh on Katherine. She saw it reflected
in the faces of courtiers and in the snide comments
and increasingly cruel outbursts of the Empress Elizabeth. Creating an
air a clear dynastic legacy was the only reason Elizabeth
(04:50):
plucked Katherine out from her minor Prussian family to bring
her to Russia to marry her nephew in the first place.
The two of them, Katherine and Peter, had been married
for seven years, and there were still murmurs that the
marriage was unconsummated. When Katherine opened the doors to their
chambers that day, she could barely walk without disturbing her
(05:12):
husband's intricate toy soldier military maneuvers. Though he was the
future Emperor of Russia, all of his toy soldiers and
Peter himself, we're wearing the blue of the Holstein military uniform.
Peter had come to Russia as Empress Elizabeth's heir when
he was thirteen, but he never gave up his obsession
(05:32):
with the memory of his homeland, nor his childish fixation
on the Prussian King Frederick the third. The toy soldiers
were in their intricate lines, but Katherine couldn't stop looking
at the hanging rat, a string noose wrapped around its neck.
Why did you do that to the rat, Catherine asked.
(05:53):
Peter didn't look up from the regiment that he was
rearranging on the floor. He was hanged after a military
tribunal found him guilty for treason. Katherine was silent, so
Peter continued. I found him climbing up the rampart invasion.
He ate two of my soldiers. Catherine stared at the rath,
(06:13):
hanged by a string loop, its tiny eyes open and bulging,
a small bloom of a red tongue protruding from its mouth.
Playing with toy soldiers was the closest Peter ever came
to military service. Peter spent every night in Catherine's bed,
but as soon as the lights were out, he would
pull from beneath the mattress a box of soldiers. He'd
(06:35):
arrange on the bed sheets, playing for hours, spreading them
across the dubai until Catherine couldn't move without disturbing them.
Early in their marriage, she had tried to please Peter,
to appease his whims and childishness by listening to him
and opening her heart to his complaints. He rewarded her
by telling her on their wedding night that he was
(06:57):
in love with one of her ladies in waiting, and
spending next half a dozen years treating Catherine like a
wearisome acquaintance, forcing her to listen to his middling violin recitals,
and making her stand guard an oppression uniform when he
wanted to play toy soldiers with human beings. That incident
with the rat reveals just about how seriously. Peter took
(07:19):
military justice. A rat that to paper machee soldiers was
sentenced to death, and as the future Emperor, he was judge,
jury and executioner. Catherine knew Peter well enough that upon
seeing the scene, she couldn't say what she was thinking,
so instead she went back and wrote it with a
sly smile in her own memoirs. Maybe the rat had
(07:42):
committed treason, but it hadn't been allowed to speak in
its own defense. On its own behalf. Even pitiable creatures,
Catherine thought, should be permitted a chance to save themselves.
That was the key difference between Catherine and Peter. Catherine
understood that, and power wasn't something confined to silly play
(08:03):
acting in private chambers, and that's why less than a
year after her husband Peter took the throne as Emperor
Peter the Third, she would usurp him, becoming the Empress
of Russia, the figure that would pull Russia into the
modern age. Peter loved toys, but Katherine knew how to
(08:23):
play the game. Though her fiance remained indifferent to her,
the entire Russian Empire fell in love with the future
Katherine the Great when she was unconscious in her bed chamber.
Back then, she was just Sophia, a young German princess
brought to Russia to marry the Archduke Peter Elra. She
wouldn't become a Katarina or Katherine until she was baptized
(08:47):
in the Russian Orthodox Church, when she would be given
a new name, a new Russian identity. But unlike her
fiance Peter, the young Sophia devoted herself to learning all
that she could about the new country to which she
now belonged. She begged her Russian tutors for longer lessons,
and then spent the evenings pacing the icy stone floors
(09:09):
of the Palace in St. Petersburg, studying. That's how she
got sick, walking barefoot in the cold in her flimsy
night dress, her eyes straining to make out the letters
by candle light. Her servants had seen her, and when
she got sick, the whisper of Sophia's devotion spread quickly
throughout the palace. When Sophia's illness worsened, and when it
(09:32):
seemed as though she was close to death, her mother
inquired about bringing in a Lutheran pastor for her final rights.
Why would you call a Lutheran? Sophia chirped from her bed,
still too weak to sit upright. Instead, she asked for
her tutor in the Russian Orthodoxy. Words spread quickly. There
had been doubts about bringing in a German princess to
(09:55):
marry the heir to the Russian throne, whether a foreigner
would accept Russian culture and language, or whether she would
always be secretly loyal to her homeland over all else.
After Sophia's illness, there were no more doubts. Sophia was
just a minor princess from a middling family, but Russia,
she understood, was her great opportunity. She devoted herself to
(10:20):
the land, its language, its people, and its religion. Even
if her husband never really loved her, Russia would she
would leave Sophia behind entirely and walk into history as Katherine.
When embrass Elizabeth, the woman who had named her nephew
(10:40):
Peter as her heir and selected Catherine to be his bride, died,
Catherine sat respectfully in mourning throughout the entire funeral, While
Peter couldn't resist rolling his eyes and walking around the church.
He refused to kneel or say the prayers, murmuring the
entire time that the Russian Orthodox Church was ridiculous. Though
(11:02):
he had technically converted, Peter never gave up his conviction
that Lutheranism was far superior to the as he saw them,
primitive and frivolous traditions of the Russian religion. But it
wasn't just his religion that worried the noblemen about their
brand new emperor, and for Peter the Third was almost
thirty four years old and still acting like a child
(11:25):
in almost every way, not limited to his lack of
interest in his wife. During Elizabeth's funeral procession, Peter was
tasked with walking behind the casket, wearing a long formal
black robe with a long train carried by elder noblemen.
During the procession, Peter would slow down, letting the coffin
(11:47):
pull a distance in front of him, then stop entirely,
letting it pull ahead even further. Then all at once,
Peter would sprint up ahead to catch up, causing the
elderly nobleman at his train to he even pant and
ultimately give up, letting the rope flap in the wind
behind the giggling emperor. He repeated this routine. Several times,
(12:09):
even foolishness could have been forgiven, though, if Peter didn't
still seem loyal to Prussia and Frederick the Third over Russia,
the country of which he had just been made emperor.
Russia had been fighting and winning the Seven Years War
against Prussia with the help of their Austrian allies, but
with Elizabeth barely cold in the ground, Peter declared that
(12:31):
the war would be over and that there would be peace,
and all of the victories Russia had made, all of
the spoils of war that the Russian soldiers were finally
enjoying after years of battle, would be returned to Prussia.
The soldiers were dumbfounded, Russia's allies were flabbergasted, and, as
if to add insult to injury, Peter insisted that his
(12:54):
elite regiments where not the traditional Russian military uniform but
the tight fitting Prussian costumes that he had always personally preferred.
He further humiliated his officers by forcing them to act
out the soldier drills he had once perfected with his toys,
and so Peter's long suffering wife, the charming, slender, good
(13:16):
looking Catherine, who had worked so hard to learn Russian,
who by that point had already born Peter a son
and an heir. Well she became a martyr, it didn't
matter that the son's paternity might be in dispute, and
for the record, the paternity of her next two children
would not be in dispute. There was no dispute necessary.
(13:36):
They weren't Peter's. It didn't matter. No, the nation loved
Catherine in all the ways they hated Peter, and when
Peter forced his wife to pin the ribbon of the
Order of St. Catherine on the gown of his dull
and common boorish mistress, the nation fell further in love
with her. It's a cliche to point out that someone
(13:57):
is so shorted that they failed to see what's in
run of their own nose. But Peter was so shortsighted
he completely failed to see the woman he was married to.
He knew she was there, but he didn't know who
she was. Within six months of Peter taking the throne,
plans for a coup began to take shape with Katherine
(14:18):
as she conspired with her lover Gregory Orlov and Orlov's
brother Alexei. Both of them were well liked and high
ranking soldiers and Russian forces. The Orlov brothers had been
convertly converting soldiers to Katherine's cause, sharing bottles of wine
and messages of her benevolence and wisdom. Catherine just needed
(14:39):
to garner the support of a few other key statesmen, which,
given her husband's general incompetence, wasn't difficult. Next, they just
needed to plan when they would make their strike, But
as it happens, they didn't get to make that choice.
A soldier who had heard about the coming coup asked
(15:01):
an officer if the rumors were true, whether Catherine had
been taken into custody and the planned revolt was over.
The rumor was not true, and the officer that the
soldier happened to ask was not involved in the coup.
He promptly had the soldier and his superior officer arrested.
As soon as the conspirators got word of the arrests,
(15:24):
they knew the clock had begun ticking. It was only
a matter of time before the soldiers were tortured and
turned over more names. It had to be now. The
officer who had made the arrests sent a message to
Emperor Peter at Iranian bomb warning him of the conspiracy.
Peter dismissed the message and began practicing his violin. Later,
(15:45):
a second messenger came bearing news of even more unrest
in St. Petersburg. Peter, who hated to be disturbed when
he was playing his violin, asked the messenger to leave
the note on a small table for him to look
at later. He never did like a proverbial nero, He
literally fiddled as his empire crumbled around him. Alexei or
(16:13):
Love rode from St. Petersburg to Peterhof, where Katherine was staying,
to alert the Empress that the revolution was beginning. He
arrived at five am and opened the curtains to let
the light in. Matuchka, He said, little mother, the time
has come. Wordlessly, Catherine emerged from her bed and threw
on the nearest clothes she could find, a simple black dress.
(16:35):
Applying no makeup or powder to her hair, she knew
that there was no time to waste. She and Alexei
began their ride back to St. Petersburg and his carriage,
but the horses were still tired for making the journey
from there that morning. Fortunately, they happened to pass a
peasant farmer in his cart. They begged and emptied the
coins in their pockets, and the farmer agreed to swap horses,
(16:58):
so Alexey and Catherine contin nude on their frantic journey
to the city, with two fresh farm horses leading the way.
With the Orlov brothers by her side, Katherine stood before
the guard regiments outside St. Petersburg and said that she
was forced to take on the mantle of Empress for
love of the Russian people and the Russian Church. The
(17:19):
men cheered, their colonel, who was loyal to Katherine, kissed her,
hen the chaplain blessed her. There thus began an afternoon
of regiments, one by one declaring their loyalty for Katherine,
culminating in her heroic march to the Winter Palace, where
the archbishop blessed her and declared her to be Sovereign
(17:39):
Empress Katherine. The second senior regiments shed the Prussian uniforms
that Peter had forced them to wear and put on
as many of their old Russian uniforms as they could find.
They arrested the few officers who didn't support the new Empress.
Katherine had St. Petersburg, the Senate, and the Church behind her.
(17:59):
She had the crowds, but victory wasn't complete. Peter was
still alive, was still miles away somewhere, convinced that he
was still the emperor. He still had the loyalty of
his army back in Holstein and at least temporarily a
fleet at the island naval base of Kronstadt. It had
been a long day, but it wasn't over yet. Catherine
(18:22):
would need to capture her husband before she would truly
become the sovereign leader of Russia. Peter first got word
that something regarding his wife was going on in St.
Petersburg from the man on the barge delivering fireworks to
peter Hoff Palace for the scheduled gala that night. At
(18:45):
nine am, when the fireworks man was leaving St. Petersburg,
there were rumors going around that soldiers were declaring Catherine
to be the empress. But then it was time for
the fireworks man to leave and come deliver his fireworks,
so he didn't hear anything else. But then word began
to trickle in and Peter surrounded himself with advisers debating
(19:05):
what to do. Someone sent a messenger to Kronstadt, the
naval base, to make sure that the fortress was still
loyal to Peter. In the meantime, they dug up a
Russian military uniform and had Peter change out of the
Prussian one that he was wearing. One faction of advisors
told Peter that he should march into Saint Petersburg in
full military regalia and remind people of their loyalty to
(19:28):
the emperor. Another faction advised Peter to go seventy miles
to the west, away from the city, to meet up
with a larger group of soldiers that he could lead back.
A third faction, perhaps the wisest faction, advised Peter just
to retreat to the safety of Holstein, the soon to
be former Emperor. Peter, in classic Peter fashion, did nothing,
(19:53):
but good news arrived. The messenger who had been sent
to Kronstad returned with word that it was still loyal
to the Emperor. The messenger was half right. The fortress
had been loyal to Peter when the messenger got there,
but in the few hours since he left and returned
to Peter half the admiral of the Russian navy, loyal
to Catherine, had arrived and taken command of the fortress personally.
(20:17):
All of the soldiers inside had followed his lead all
the while. In Saint Petersburg, Catherine changed into a borrowed
military uniform and began to lead her guards out of
the city on a white stallion. The only part of
the uniform that she was missing was a sword knot
and impertinently, a young soldier of twenty two rode up
(20:38):
to the empress and handed her his own. She asked
his name, Gregory Petempken, he said, bowing before quickly returning
to his ranks. Catherine would remember that name. With very
few options, Peter got into a boat with his mistress
and sailed for a fort that he thought would be safe.
(21:00):
When they arrived at Cronstadt, they found the entrance to
the harbor closed. Peter stood on the deck of the ship.
Don't you recognize your emperor, He shouted at the guards.
We have no emperor. The guards shouted back, long live
Empress Catherine. The second. Peter's boat retreated back towards Iranian Baum,
(21:21):
where he quickly composed a letter apologizing to his wife
for everything he had done wrong in their marriage and
the way he had treated her, and generously offering to
share the throne with her. Catherine received the message, and,
in the eighteenth century version of leaving him on read,
sent no reply. Peter wrote a second time, offering his
(21:43):
abdication if only he could bring his mistress with him
to the safety of Holstein. This time Catherine sent word
back that she would agree if she got the abdication
in writing, which he did, Peter declared himself incapable of
ruling and officially renowned the throne of Usha for eternity.
Catherine's guards captured Peter and his mistress and brought them
(22:06):
in an old carriage back to peter Hoff, where they
said goodbye for the final time. The next day, Peter
was spirited off to Ropsha, a summer house of states
some fourteen miles away that Peter selected for his own
temporary safe keeping while rooms were being prepared for him
at a more permanent fortress. Though he was a prisoner,
(22:27):
Katherine did her best to make his stay comfortable. When
he wrote to her, Katherine had Peter's own four poster
bed from Iranian bomb sent to him by carriage so
he could at least get a good night's sleep. But
just eight days after the coup that put his wife
on the imperial throne of Russia. Peter the third was dead,
killed in a drunken brawl or in a vert assassination
(22:49):
by the men assigned to be his guards men, which
included Alexei or Love, the brother of Catherine's lover Gregory.
There's no evidence that Katherine knew about the murder beforehand,
and she did seem genuinely shocked hearing of it, but
it was convenient that Peter was dead. Nonetheless, though he
had been strangled, Catherine had the doctors declare that Peter
(23:12):
had died of hemorrhoidal colic, just to keep things simple
so people wouldn't ask too many questions. Since Peter had
never formally been crowned emperor, he wasn't permitted to lie
in the Fortress Cathedral, where the consecrated emperors and empresses
of Russia were buried, so instead his remains were placed
in the Nevsky Monastery. But first Catherine prudently decided to
(23:35):
display the body to the public so they would know
that the former emperor was actually dead, that he wasn't
still secretly alive somewhere waiting to reclaim power. A giant,
three cornered hat covered most of the corpses swollen face
and a wide cravat circled the neck to cover what
might have been bruising from strangling. And of course, Peter's
(23:58):
body was put in the blue Holstein uniform that he
had so cherished during his lifetime, so that even in death,
people who saw his body would remember that he had
been at heart a foreigner all along. Catherine may not
have been born in Russia, but she was one of them.
(24:24):
That's the story of Catherine the Great's rise to power.
But keep listening for a brief debunking of one of
history's most pervasive rumors about her. This part verges on sexual.
So if there are extremely young children listening with you,
and you don't want now to be the moment that
you have to explain the concept of beast reality, it's
probably best that they stopped listening about ten seconds ago. Okay,
(24:53):
I'm sorry, I had to do it. I had to
bring up the terrible, everlasting, decades long, century long rumor
that Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, who wrote
letters with Voltaire and brought the Enlightenment to her empire,
died having sex with her horse. She didn't the historians
tend to paint Catherine the Great as an incredibly sexual
(25:16):
person thanks to a handful of love affairs that she
had with younger men when she was empress. Like many
women in power, a number of rumors then circulated about
her to try to undermine and discredit her consensual relationships
with the young men. Yes, horses now. Catherine the Great
died of a stroke when she was sixty seven years
(25:36):
old in her bed at the Winter Palace. Rarely in
this podcast is the truth less fun than fiction, And
I take no pleasure in reporting a fairly standard end
to an extraordinary figure if it cushions the blow here's something.
Although she did make it to her bed before her
actual death, some historians say that the stroke she suffered
(25:59):
before she actually occurred while she was on the toilet.
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
(26:20):
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts,
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio
and Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. On his name
Day celebration, the Emperor of Russia, Peter the Third, rode
with a large entourage from one palace to another to
meet his wife Katherine at peter Hof, where a large
(00:22):
celebration that evening was to take place. Since their wedding
in seventeen forty five, Peter had grown to despise his wife,
and he'd been making snide remarks about his intentions to
divorce Katherine and marry his mistress, a woman whom people
might generously call charmless and truthfully might call absolutely boorish.
(00:44):
The mistress Elizabeth Voronstova, was traveling with him that afternoon
from Iranian Baum, along with Mikhail Voranstove, the Russian Chancellor
and Elizabeth's uncle, a number of dignitaries and their wives,
and a gaggle of Elizabeth vorn's Stova's ladies in waiting.
At this point, Peter and his wife Catherine lived almost
(01:05):
entirely separate lives with entirely separate lovers, but for a
large state event like his name Day celebration, they would
make an appearance together. She was still his wife, and
her job was to meet him outside the palace that
day and congratulate him on his name day. There was
only one problem. When the entourage arrived at Peterhof, no
(01:27):
one was there to greet them. Where Catherine was supposed
to be waiting with open arms and a forgiving heart,
there is instead only locked doors and closed windows. The
Empress was gone. Peter and his mistress searched the bedrooms,
under the mattresses. In the closets, they saw the gown
(01:50):
that had been laid out for Catherine to wear at
the ball that evening, but there was no other sign
of Catherine. At that very moment. While Peter and his
mistress swept through the palace looking for her, the Empress
was fifteen miles away in St. Petersburg, taking an oath
in front of hundreds of regiments of soldiers, declaring herself
(02:12):
to be the new Sovereign of Russia. Back at Peterhoff,
the servants could only say that they saw Katherine leave
for St. Petersburg that morning, and that she hadn't returned
and hadn't sent word. After an hour of frantically running
from room to room, Peter's chancellor, Michael varon Stove, volunteered
to ride to the city to find out about Katherine's whereabouts.
(02:37):
When Michael varn Stove made it to the winter Palace,
he saw Katherine on the balcony waving to the hordes
of people below, cheering her name, cheering for Russia, for
their new monarch. It didn't take Michael too long to
understand what he was seeing. What about your husband, he sputtered.
You shouldn't take up arms against your husband. Katherine only mild,
(03:00):
She gestured back at the screaming crowd outside her palace window,
a sound that roared along with the echoing of the
church bells, which had been tolling for her all afternoon.
Give your message to them, sir, she replied, I only obey.
(03:21):
Mcalvern Stove promptly returned to his home, where he wrote
Catherine a letter celebrating the inevitability of her ascension to
sovereign Empress and politely asking permission to formally retire and
disappear off forever into seclusion, which he then did. Meanwhile,
Peter still searched the empty rooms at peter Hof for
(03:42):
his missing wife, not believing the servants when they told
him that she was actually gone. I can't believe she
would do this to me, he fumed, Ruining my moment,
ruining my name, day, ruining my night. He turned to
his mistress and exhaled, didn't I tell you she was
capable of anything. Peter the third was not right about
very much, but he was right about that. I'm Dana
(04:06):
Schwartz and this is noble blood. One evening, a few
years after they were married, but before Peter Ulrich ascended
to the throne as Peter the Third, Katherine entered the
chamber of her husband to find him playing with toys.
(04:26):
A dead rat was hanging from the wall. The two
of them still hadn't produced an air, and the failure
had begun to weigh on Katherine. She saw it reflected
in the faces of courtiers and in the snide comments
and increasingly cruel outbursts of the Empress Elizabeth. Creating an
air a clear dynastic legacy was the only reason Elizabeth
(04:50):
plucked Katherine out from her minor Prussian family to bring
her to Russia to marry her nephew in the first place.
The two of them, Katherine and Peter, had been married
for seven years, and there were still murmurs that the
marriage was unconsummated. When Katherine opened the doors to their
chambers that day, she could barely walk without disturbing her
(05:12):
husband's intricate toy soldier military maneuvers. Though he was the
future Emperor of Russia, all of his toy soldiers and
Peter himself, we're wearing the blue of the Holstein military uniform.
Peter had come to Russia as Empress Elizabeth's heir when
he was thirteen, but he never gave up his obsession
(05:32):
with the memory of his homeland, nor his childish fixation
on the Prussian King Frederick the third. The toy soldiers
were in their intricate lines, but Katherine couldn't stop looking
at the hanging rat, a string noose wrapped around its neck.
Why did you do that to the rat, Catherine asked.
(05:53):
Peter didn't look up from the regiment that he was
rearranging on the floor. He was hanged after a military
tribunal found him guilty for treason. Katherine was silent, so
Peter continued. I found him climbing up the rampart invasion.
He ate two of my soldiers. Catherine stared at the rath,
(06:13):
hanged by a string loop, its tiny eyes open and bulging,
a small bloom of a red tongue protruding from its mouth.
Playing with toy soldiers was the closest Peter ever came
to military service. Peter spent every night in Catherine's bed,
but as soon as the lights were out, he would
pull from beneath the mattress a box of soldiers. He'd
(06:35):
arrange on the bed sheets, playing for hours, spreading them
across the dubai until Catherine couldn't move without disturbing them.
Early in their marriage, she had tried to please Peter,
to appease his whims and childishness by listening to him
and opening her heart to his complaints. He rewarded her
by telling her on their wedding night that he was
(06:57):
in love with one of her ladies in waiting, and
spending next half a dozen years treating Catherine like a
wearisome acquaintance, forcing her to listen to his middling violin recitals,
and making her stand guard an oppression uniform when he
wanted to play toy soldiers with human beings. That incident
with the rat reveals just about how seriously. Peter took
(07:19):
military justice. A rat that to paper machee soldiers was
sentenced to death, and as the future Emperor, he was judge,
jury and executioner. Catherine knew Peter well enough that upon
seeing the scene, she couldn't say what she was thinking,
so instead she went back and wrote it with a
sly smile in her own memoirs. Maybe the rat had
(07:42):
committed treason, but it hadn't been allowed to speak in
its own defense. On its own behalf. Even pitiable creatures,
Catherine thought, should be permitted a chance to save themselves.
That was the key difference between Catherine and Peter. Catherine
understood that, and power wasn't something confined to silly play
(08:03):
acting in private chambers, and that's why less than a
year after her husband Peter took the throne as Emperor
Peter the Third, she would usurp him, becoming the Empress
of Russia, the figure that would pull Russia into the
modern age. Peter loved toys, but Katherine knew how to
(08:23):
play the game. Though her fiance remained indifferent to her,
the entire Russian Empire fell in love with the future
Katherine the Great when she was unconscious in her bed chamber.
Back then, she was just Sophia, a young German princess
brought to Russia to marry the Archduke Peter Elra. She
wouldn't become a Katarina or Katherine until she was baptized
(08:47):
in the Russian Orthodox Church, when she would be given
a new name, a new Russian identity. But unlike her
fiance Peter, the young Sophia devoted herself to learning all
that she could about the new country to which she
now belonged. She begged her Russian tutors for longer lessons,
and then spent the evenings pacing the icy stone floors
(09:09):
of the Palace in St. Petersburg, studying. That's how she
got sick, walking barefoot in the cold in her flimsy
night dress, her eyes straining to make out the letters
by candle light. Her servants had seen her, and when
she got sick, the whisper of Sophia's devotion spread quickly
throughout the palace. When Sophia's illness worsened, and when it
(09:32):
seemed as though she was close to death, her mother
inquired about bringing in a Lutheran pastor for her final rights.
Why would you call a Lutheran? Sophia chirped from her bed,
still too weak to sit upright. Instead, she asked for
her tutor in the Russian Orthodoxy. Words spread quickly. There
had been doubts about bringing in a German princess to
(09:55):
marry the heir to the Russian throne, whether a foreigner
would accept Russian culture and language, or whether she would
always be secretly loyal to her homeland over all else.
After Sophia's illness, there were no more doubts. Sophia was
just a minor princess from a middling family, but Russia,
she understood, was her great opportunity. She devoted herself to
(10:20):
the land, its language, its people, and its religion. Even
if her husband never really loved her, Russia would she
would leave Sophia behind entirely and walk into history as Katherine.
When embrass Elizabeth, the woman who had named her nephew
(10:40):
Peter as her heir and selected Catherine to be his bride, died,
Catherine sat respectfully in mourning throughout the entire funeral, While
Peter couldn't resist rolling his eyes and walking around the church.
He refused to kneel or say the prayers, murmuring the
entire time that the Russian Orthodox Church was ridiculous. Though
(11:02):
he had technically converted, Peter never gave up his conviction
that Lutheranism was far superior to the as he saw them,
primitive and frivolous traditions of the Russian religion. But it
wasn't just his religion that worried the noblemen about their
brand new emperor, and for Peter the Third was almost
thirty four years old and still acting like a child
(11:25):
in almost every way, not limited to his lack of
interest in his wife. During Elizabeth's funeral procession, Peter was
tasked with walking behind the casket, wearing a long formal
black robe with a long train carried by elder noblemen.
During the procession, Peter would slow down, letting the coffin
(11:47):
pull a distance in front of him, then stop entirely,
letting it pull ahead even further. Then all at once,
Peter would sprint up ahead to catch up, causing the
elderly nobleman at his train to he even pant and
ultimately give up, letting the rope flap in the wind
behind the giggling emperor. He repeated this routine. Several times,
(12:09):
even foolishness could have been forgiven, though, if Peter didn't
still seem loyal to Prussia and Frederick the Third over Russia,
the country of which he had just been made emperor.
Russia had been fighting and winning the Seven Years War
against Prussia with the help of their Austrian allies, but
with Elizabeth barely cold in the ground, Peter declared that
(12:31):
the war would be over and that there would be peace,
and all of the victories Russia had made, all of
the spoils of war that the Russian soldiers were finally
enjoying after years of battle, would be returned to Prussia.
The soldiers were dumbfounded, Russia's allies were flabbergasted, and, as
if to add insult to injury, Peter insisted that his
(12:54):
elite regiments where not the traditional Russian military uniform but
the tight fitting Prussian costumes that he had always personally preferred.
He further humiliated his officers by forcing them to act
out the soldier drills he had once perfected with his toys,
and so Peter's long suffering wife, the charming, slender, good
(13:16):
looking Catherine, who had worked so hard to learn Russian,
who by that point had already born Peter a son
and an heir. Well she became a martyr, it didn't
matter that the son's paternity might be in dispute, and
for the record, the paternity of her next two children
would not be in dispute. There was no dispute necessary.
(13:36):
They weren't Peter's. It didn't matter. No, the nation loved
Catherine in all the ways they hated Peter, and when
Peter forced his wife to pin the ribbon of the
Order of St. Catherine on the gown of his dull
and common boorish mistress, the nation fell further in love
with her. It's a cliche to point out that someone
(13:57):
is so shorted that they failed to see what's in
run of their own nose. But Peter was so shortsighted
he completely failed to see the woman he was married to.
He knew she was there, but he didn't know who
she was. Within six months of Peter taking the throne,
plans for a coup began to take shape with Katherine
(14:18):
as she conspired with her lover Gregory Orlov and Orlov's
brother Alexei. Both of them were well liked and high
ranking soldiers and Russian forces. The Orlov brothers had been
convertly converting soldiers to Katherine's cause, sharing bottles of wine
and messages of her benevolence and wisdom. Catherine just needed
(14:39):
to garner the support of a few other key statesmen, which,
given her husband's general incompetence, wasn't difficult. Next, they just
needed to plan when they would make their strike, But
as it happens, they didn't get to make that choice.
A soldier who had heard about the coming coup asked
(15:01):
an officer if the rumors were true, whether Catherine had
been taken into custody and the planned revolt was over.
The rumor was not true, and the officer that the
soldier happened to ask was not involved in the coup.
He promptly had the soldier and his superior officer arrested.
As soon as the conspirators got word of the arrests,
(15:24):
they knew the clock had begun ticking. It was only
a matter of time before the soldiers were tortured and
turned over more names. It had to be now. The
officer who had made the arrests sent a message to
Emperor Peter at Iranian bomb warning him of the conspiracy.
Peter dismissed the message and began practicing his violin. Later,
(15:45):
a second messenger came bearing news of even more unrest
in St. Petersburg. Peter, who hated to be disturbed when
he was playing his violin, asked the messenger to leave
the note on a small table for him to look
at later. He never did like a proverbial nero, He
literally fiddled as his empire crumbled around him. Alexei or
(16:13):
Love rode from St. Petersburg to Peterhof, where Katherine was staying,
to alert the Empress that the revolution was beginning. He
arrived at five am and opened the curtains to let
the light in. Matuchka, He said, little mother, the time
has come. Wordlessly, Catherine emerged from her bed and threw
on the nearest clothes she could find, a simple black dress.
(16:35):
Applying no makeup or powder to her hair, she knew
that there was no time to waste. She and Alexei
began their ride back to St. Petersburg and his carriage,
but the horses were still tired for making the journey
from there that morning. Fortunately, they happened to pass a
peasant farmer in his cart. They begged and emptied the
coins in their pockets, and the farmer agreed to swap horses,
(16:58):
so Alexey and Catherine contin nude on their frantic journey
to the city, with two fresh farm horses leading the way.
With the Orlov brothers by her side, Katherine stood before
the guard regiments outside St. Petersburg and said that she
was forced to take on the mantle of Empress for
love of the Russian people and the Russian Church. The
(17:19):
men cheered, their colonel, who was loyal to Katherine, kissed her,
hen the chaplain blessed her. There thus began an afternoon
of regiments, one by one declaring their loyalty for Katherine,
culminating in her heroic march to the Winter Palace, where
the archbishop blessed her and declared her to be Sovereign
(17:39):
Empress Katherine. The second senior regiments shed the Prussian uniforms
that Peter had forced them to wear and put on
as many of their old Russian uniforms as they could find.
They arrested the few officers who didn't support the new Empress.
Katherine had St. Petersburg, the Senate, and the Church behind her.
(17:59):
She had the crowds, but victory wasn't complete. Peter was
still alive, was still miles away somewhere, convinced that he
was still the emperor. He still had the loyalty of
his army back in Holstein and at least temporarily a
fleet at the island naval base of Kronstadt. It had
been a long day, but it wasn't over yet. Catherine
(18:22):
would need to capture her husband before she would truly
become the sovereign leader of Russia. Peter first got word
that something regarding his wife was going on in St.
Petersburg from the man on the barge delivering fireworks to
peter Hoff Palace for the scheduled gala that night. At
(18:45):
nine am, when the fireworks man was leaving St. Petersburg,
there were rumors going around that soldiers were declaring Catherine
to be the empress. But then it was time for
the fireworks man to leave and come deliver his fireworks,
so he didn't hear anything else. But then word began
to trickle in and Peter surrounded himself with advisers debating
(19:05):
what to do. Someone sent a messenger to Kronstadt, the
naval base, to make sure that the fortress was still
loyal to Peter. In the meantime, they dug up a
Russian military uniform and had Peter change out of the
Prussian one that he was wearing. One faction of advisors
told Peter that he should march into Saint Petersburg in
full military regalia and remind people of their loyalty to
(19:28):
the emperor. Another faction advised Peter to go seventy miles
to the west, away from the city, to meet up
with a larger group of soldiers that he could lead back.
A third faction, perhaps the wisest faction, advised Peter just
to retreat to the safety of Holstein, the soon to
be former Emperor. Peter, in classic Peter fashion, did nothing,
(19:53):
but good news arrived. The messenger who had been sent
to Kronstad returned with word that it was still loyal
to the Emperor. The messenger was half right. The fortress
had been loyal to Peter when the messenger got there,
but in the few hours since he left and returned
to Peter half the admiral of the Russian navy, loyal
to Catherine, had arrived and taken command of the fortress personally.
(20:17):
All of the soldiers inside had followed his lead all
the while. In Saint Petersburg, Catherine changed into a borrowed
military uniform and began to lead her guards out of
the city on a white stallion. The only part of
the uniform that she was missing was a sword knot
and impertinently, a young soldier of twenty two rode up
(20:38):
to the empress and handed her his own. She asked
his name, Gregory Petempken, he said, bowing before quickly returning
to his ranks. Catherine would remember that name. With very
few options, Peter got into a boat with his mistress
and sailed for a fort that he thought would be safe.
(21:00):
When they arrived at Cronstadt, they found the entrance to
the harbor closed. Peter stood on the deck of the ship.
Don't you recognize your emperor, He shouted at the guards.
We have no emperor. The guards shouted back, long live
Empress Catherine. The second. Peter's boat retreated back towards Iranian Baum,
(21:21):
where he quickly composed a letter apologizing to his wife
for everything he had done wrong in their marriage and
the way he had treated her, and generously offering to
share the throne with her. Catherine received the message, and,
in the eighteenth century version of leaving him on read,
sent no reply. Peter wrote a second time, offering his
(21:43):
abdication if only he could bring his mistress with him
to the safety of Holstein. This time Catherine sent word
back that she would agree if she got the abdication
in writing, which he did, Peter declared himself incapable of
ruling and officially renowned the throne of Usha for eternity.
Catherine's guards captured Peter and his mistress and brought them
(22:06):
in an old carriage back to peter Hoff, where they
said goodbye for the final time. The next day, Peter
was spirited off to Ropsha, a summer house of states
some fourteen miles away that Peter selected for his own
temporary safe keeping while rooms were being prepared for him
at a more permanent fortress. Though he was a prisoner,
(22:27):
Katherine did her best to make his stay comfortable. When
he wrote to her, Katherine had Peter's own four poster
bed from Iranian bomb sent to him by carriage so
he could at least get a good night's sleep. But
just eight days after the coup that put his wife
on the imperial throne of Russia. Peter the third was dead,
killed in a drunken brawl or in a vert assassination
(22:49):
by the men assigned to be his guards men, which
included Alexei or Love, the brother of Catherine's lover Gregory.
There's no evidence that Katherine knew about the murder beforehand,
and she did seem genuinely shocked hearing of it, but
it was convenient that Peter was dead. Nonetheless, though he
had been strangled, Catherine had the doctors declare that Peter
(23:12):
had died of hemorrhoidal colic, just to keep things simple
so people wouldn't ask too many questions. Since Peter had
never formally been crowned emperor, he wasn't permitted to lie
in the Fortress Cathedral, where the consecrated emperors and empresses
of Russia were buried, so instead his remains were placed
in the Nevsky Monastery. But first Catherine prudently decided to
(23:35):
display the body to the public so they would know
that the former emperor was actually dead, that he wasn't
still secretly alive somewhere waiting to reclaim power. A giant,
three cornered hat covered most of the corpses swollen face
and a wide cravat circled the neck to cover what
might have been bruising from strangling. And of course, Peter's
(23:58):
body was put in the blue Holstein uniform that he
had so cherished during his lifetime, so that even in death,
people who saw his body would remember that he had
been at heart a foreigner all along. Catherine may not
have been born in Russia, but she was one of them.
(24:24):
That's the story of Catherine the Great's rise to power.
But keep listening for a brief debunking of one of
history's most pervasive rumors about her. This part verges on sexual.
So if there are extremely young children listening with you,
and you don't want now to be the moment that
you have to explain the concept of beast reality, it's
probably best that they stopped listening about ten seconds ago. Okay,
(24:53):
I'm sorry, I had to do it. I had to
bring up the terrible, everlasting, decades long, century long rumor
that Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, who wrote
letters with Voltaire and brought the Enlightenment to her empire,
died having sex with her horse. She didn't the historians
tend to paint Catherine the Great as an incredibly sexual
(25:16):
person thanks to a handful of love affairs that she
had with younger men when she was empress. Like many
women in power, a number of rumors then circulated about
her to try to undermine and discredit her consensual relationships
with the young men. Yes, horses now. Catherine the Great
died of a stroke when she was sixty seven years
(25:36):
old in her bed at the Winter Palace. Rarely in
this podcast is the truth less fun than fiction, And
I take no pleasure in reporting a fairly standard end
to an extraordinary figure if it cushions the blow here's something.
Although she did make it to her bed before her
actual death, some historians say that the stroke she suffered
(25:59):
before she actually occurred while she was on the toilet.
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Aaron Mankey. The show is written and hosted by Dana
Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams,
and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at
(26:20):
Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the
show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts,
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
M
Host
Dana Schwartz
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