Secret Lives of the Tsars by Michael Farquhar Page B

rule: She asked to be sent home.
    When her letter failed to get a response, Catherine intensified the pathos, feigning illness and calling for the empress’s own confessor, who promised he would go to Elizabeth right away and urge her to receive the unfortunate young woman. On April 13, 1759, the fateful meeting took place. Catherine performed brilliantly, summoning the perfect mixture of despairand servility while spiritedly defending her loyalty to the empress. Peter, who had been watching the proceedings from behind a curtain, popped out at one point and began to cruelly berate his wife, which served only to make Catherine seem all the more sympathetic. All the while, Elizabeth’s anger slowly melted away.
    “I could see that my words made a strong and favorable impression on her,” Catherine wrote. “Tears stood out in her eyes and to conceal how much she was moved, she dismissed us.”
    Catherine’s Memoirs stop abruptly as she begins to relate the details of a second, more private interview with the empress. Nevertheless, it is clear that while she emerged chastened, she was unbroken. Now all she had to do was survive the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, and her husband’s malevolent hatred.
    On January 5, 1762, Empress Elizabeth died of a massive stroke at the age of fifty-three. Peter was now emperor, and, as such, immediately set about alienating his new subjects. After six years of bloody warfare, Russia was poised to finally crush the Prussian forces of Frederick the Great. But Peter III wasn’t about to let his idol Frederick go down in such ignominious defeat. Instead, he simply canceled the war, snatching certain victory away from his own armies. It was an outrage, compounded by the new emperor’s insistence that the elite Guard units start wearing Prussian-style uniforms.
    Having essentially routed his own military, Peter began an assault on the Orthodox faith—one of the pillars of Russian society. Although he had officially converted upon being designated as Elizabeth’s heir, the emperor held the Russian religionin total contempt, clinging stubbornly to the Lutheran tradition with which he had been raised. In a move almost perfectly designed to estrange himself from the Orthodox hierarchy, he ordered sacred icons removed from places of prayer and even went as far as to confiscate church property.
    “Do you know that your emperor must be mad as a hatter?” a foreign diplomat remarked to a lady of the court. “No man could behave as he does otherwise.”
    Peter III was making powerful enemies with his galling behavior, but perhaps none greater than his own wife. The couple had grown to truly loathe each other, and the emperor made no secret of his desire to rid himself of his detestable wife and marry instead his ugly mistress, Elizabeth Vorontzova. * 4 He installed Elizabeth in his own apartments and made her head of the household while relegating Catherine to a distant side of the palace. As an additional humiliation, he ordered his wife to attend a public ceremony in which he awarded to his mistress one of Russia’s highest honors for women, the Order of St. Catherine, created by Peter the Great in tribute to his wife Catherine’s heroism during the Pruth River campaign against the Turks in 1711 (see Chapter 3 ). The bestowal of such an award to Elizabeth Vorontzova had a certain menacing significance, since it was given automatically to those who married into the royal family.
    Peter’s malignant feelings toward Catherine were made viciouslyapparent during a banquet celebrating a treaty with Prussia, in which the two nations, only recently enemies, agreed to ally themselves in an ill-advised war against Denmark. The emperor proposed a toast “to the imperial family,” after which all the guests rose, except Catherine. When Peter sent an adjunct to his wife’s end of the table to inquire why she remained seated, Catherine sent word back explaining that as a member of the imperial family being