Secret Lives of the Tsars by Michael Farquhar

husband, who, though now sexually mature, nevertheless remained an emotionally disturbed child with a drinking problem. One day, Catherine walked into Peter’s room and found a rat hanging, “with all the formality of an execution,” she wrote, from a makeshift gallows. The rodent had committed treason, the grand duke explained, having devoured two of his toy soldiers made of starch. And there it would remain “for three days, as an example.”
    On October 1, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a son, Paul, the paternity of whom remains a mystery. Was he Saltykov’s child, or did Peter actually manage to impregnate his wife? * 2 As far as the empress was concerned, the father was of no consequence. Neither was the mother, for that matter. Indeed, as soon as Catherine delivered the baby, Paul was whisked away by the triumphant Elizabeth, who intended to raise the boy herself. As for Catherine, Troyat wrote, “she was only a womb emptied of its contents. She was no longer of interest to anyone. In an instant her room was deserted.”
    Exhausted by her prolonged labor, Catherine was left alone on the mattress upon which she had given birth. Her pleas for fresh linen and something to drink went unanswered for hours. “I was dying of fatigue and thirst,” she wrote. “I had been in tears ever since the birth had taken place, particularlybecause I had been so cruelly abandoned.… Nobody worried about me.… At last they placed me in my own bed, and I saw no other living soul all that day, nor did anyone send to inquire after me. As for the Grand Duke, he did nothing but drink with anyone he could find, and the Empress busied herself with the child.” Catherine would not see her baby again for well over a month. And Saltykov, conveniently sent away on a diplomatic mission to Sweden (ironically to announce the birth of the boy who may have been his son), was gone for good.
    Alone and in despair, Catherine retreated to a small, drafty room where she would remain through the winter, nursing her sorrow while the rest of the world celebrated the birth of her son. “This was the worst, cruelest, indeed the most devastating period of her whole life,” wrote her biographer Robert Coughlan. “During it she arrived at the edge of emotional collapse and perhaps even of lifelong emotional invalidism. She survived. And in surviving became a different person.”
    Catherine emerged from isolation transformed indeed. No longer would she be the compliant, eager-to-please young woman she had been, but instead a fierce advocate of her own interests and an instrument of her own advancement. “I drew myself up,” she wrote. “I walked with my head held high, more like the leader of a great faction than like one humiliated and crushed.”
    For too long Catherine had endured Peter’s folly and neglect. Now the two were emerging as mortal enemies. Still, the grand duke continued to consult his wife on many matters—from wooing his mistresses to ruling his duchy of Holstein from afar. “Madam Resourceful,” he called her. “No matter how angry or sulky he might be with me,” she wrote, “if he was in distress on any point whatever, he would comerunning to me as fast as his legs would carry him, as was his wont, to snatch a word of advice and, as soon as he had it, would run off again as fast as he had come.”
    Yet despite his reliance on “Madame Resourceful,” Peter ignored her counsel when it came to his overt allegiance to his native Holstein. At one point he even imported into Russia a large contingent of soldiers from his native land, which only served to antagonize his future subjects, especially the army, and added to the mounting evidence that he would serve only German interests when he became tsar.
    “The Grand Duke had an extraordinary passion for the little corner of the earth where he was born,” Catherine wrote. “It constantly occupied his mind though he had left it behind at the age of thirteen; his imagination