Catherine the Great Seizes Power
Catherine overthrew her husband Peter III on 9 July 1762 and ruled Russia for thirty-four years. She was a minor German princess from Stettin, brought to Russia at fifteen to marry the heir, and had spent eighteen unhappy years learning Russian, converting to Orthodoxy, reading Montesquieu and Voltaire, and being ignored by a husband who preferred playing with toy soldiers. Peter succeeded his aunt Elizabeth in January 1762 and destroyed himself in six months. He was an open admirer of Frederick the Great, and his first act was to make peace with Prussia — which Russia had been beating, and whose capital its troops had occupied — returning every conquest and turning a won war into nothing. He then proposed a war with Denmark for Holstein, which was his own family's interest and no Russian's; insulted the Orthodox clergy and threatened their estates; and put the guards into Prussian-style uniforms. The Orlov brothers, one of whom was Catherine's lover, organised the regiments. She was woken at Peterhof, taken to the barracks, and acclaimed by the Izmailovsky and then the Semyonovsky guards; the senate and the church followed within hours, and Peter signed an abdication without resistance. He was killed eight days later in confinement, in a scuffle the official announcement attributed to haemorrhoidal colic. Catherine's knowledge of it has never been established. She took Crimea, partitioned Poland three times, founded the Hermitage, and abandoned reform after Pugachev. She corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot for decades while extending serfdom, which is the contradiction her reign is argued about on. She was thirty-three at the coup and never remarried.
- Year: 1762 CE
- Category: Political
