Six months

Aleksey Antropov painted Peter III in 1762 in the green of the Preobrazhensky Guards, sash and star in place. The uniform is a claim to the regiment that had made and unmade sovereigns since Peter I’s youth. Within months that same Guards world would help to take the coat back. Use the portrait as a document of how the emperor wished to be seen in the year he reigned, not as proof that the Preobrazhensky men loved him. A likeness can put a man in a regiment. It cannot make the regiment his.

He was born on 21 February 1728, 10 February Old Style, in Kiel, in Holstein-Gottorp. He was the son of Anna, one of Peter I’s daughters, and of Charles Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp. His aunt Elizabeth brought the young duke to Russia shortly after she became empress in December 1741. Renamed Peter, Pyotr Fyodorovich, he was received into the Russian Orthodox Church on 18 November 1742, 7 November Old Style, and proclaimed heir. On 21 August 1745 he married Sophie Frederike Auguste, a princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, who took the name Catherine, Yekaterina Alekseyevna. He was a nephew imported to secure a daughter’s line. He remained, in habit and affection, a Holstein prince.

Elizabeth died at the turn of 1761 and 1762. Peter became emperor on 5 January 1762, 25 December 1761 Old Style. His reign ran until 9 July 1762, 28 June Old Style — six months by the calendar, less by any count of friends. He did not gain the politically powerful court cliques. He alienated his wife’s affections soon after their marriage and did not repair that fact when he had a crown. He was extremely pro-Prussian. Reversing Elizabeth’s foreign policy, he made peace with Prussia, withdrew from the Seven Years’ War, formed an alliance with Prussia, and prepared to engage Russia in a war against Denmark to help his native Holstein gain control of Schleswig. An army that had occupied Berlin was told, in effect, that the point had been his uncle Frederick’s survival. Officers who had fought that war did not need a lecture to feel the insult.

Even when he relieved the gentry of their obligation to serve the state, on 1 March 1762, he did not gain supporters. The manifesto mattered. For decades service nobles had lived inside Peter I’s wager: rank, salary, sometimes land, in return for compulsory service. To lift that obligation was to change the terms of the elite. A man might now be noble without the old compulsion to stand in a line or at a desk. Later Russian memory would treat the measure as a landmark of noble liberty. In the spring of 1762 it did not buy this emperor a party large enough to keep him. Privilege without gratitude is a common court story. Here it is also a precise date.

Lucas Conrad Pfandzelt’s coronation portrait, painted about December 1761 or January 1762, shows ermine, armour, a crown, ships in a distant light. It is ceremonial time, the face of a reign that had not yet lasted a season. Britannica’s Peter III page even uses this picture. Use it as a claim of permanence. Then remember how little permanence he bought. A coronation likeness is not a count of months.

He offended the Russian Orthodox Church by trying to force it to adopt Lutheran religious practices. He alienated the imperial Guards by making their service requirements more severe and by threatening to disband them. Those two sentences are enough to explain a conspiracy without inventing tavern talk. The Church was not a decoration in Elizabeth’s capital; it was a public language of Russian-ness her nephew seemed willing to rewrite. The Guards were not a costume. They were the usual instrument of a palace coup, and he had told them they might be abolished. Catherine, who suspected that he was planning to divorce her, conspired with her lover Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov and other members of the Guard to overthrow him. The pattern of this whole chapter — Guards, favourite, a threatened woman of the dynasty — returned in a summer.

On 9 July 1762, 28 June Old Style, Catherine, with the approval of the Guard, the Senate and the Church, became Catherine II, empress of Russia. Peter was at his residence at Oranienbaum, now Lomonosov, near St Petersburg. He formally abdicated on 10 July, 29 June Old Style. He was arrested and taken to the village of Ropsha. While in the custody of one of the conspirators, Aleksey Grigoryevich Orlov, he was killed. He died on 18 July 1762, 7 July Old Style. No last words are recorded here, because none are needed and none should be invented. The facts that do not require embroidery are already grim: a signed abdication, a suburban palace, a village, a brother’s custody, a corpse.

The long yellow front in the photograph is the Grand Menshikov Palace at Oranienbaum, taken by Andrey Korchagin in 2013. It is the building in a later season, not the courtyard of July 1762. Peter abdicated there. The camera cannot recover the hour. It can only show why a residence away from the capital was a trap as well as a refuge: far enough to be absent when the Guard, the Senate and the Church had already chosen someone else.

He gave the nobles their liberty, the army a Prussian peace, and the Guards a reason to finish the chapter as they had begun it — at night.

Six months is not a reign in which to found a university or lose a northern war over twenty years. It is long enough to reverse a foreign policy, to publish a social revolution for one class, to insult a church and a regiment, and to die. Peter III does not need to be turned into a fool for those acts to be coherent. He was a Holstein heir who treated Russia as a resource for Schleswig and for Frederick, and who thought a manifesto to the gentry could replace the older arts of making the Guards feel necessary. Catherine’s coup is the last palace revolution in this chapter’s span. Her government, her wars, her enlightenment theatre and her peasant war are the next numbered era. They are not this page.

Stop with the abdication and the death. The woman who took the crown had been a German princess too; the difference was not blood but the coalition she assembled — Guard, Senate, Church — and the speed with which she used it. What the six months leave behind, for the last article of this era, is not her programme. It is the social world that all these unstable courts had been standing on: service nobles who wanted relief from compulsion and still wanted serfs, peasants who ran estates in the landlord’s absence, household servants making Western objects for town houses. Peter III’s manifesto is one document in that world. It is not the whole of it. Two Russias had been living side by side since Peter I’s Table and Peter I’s soul tax. The coups did not invent them. The coups were how the upper Russia changed occupants while the lower one kept the harvest.

The Holstein programme was not a mystery. Peace with Prussia, an alliance with Frederick, a planned war on Denmark for Schleswig: those were the foreign policy of a duke who had become emperor, not of a Russian cabinet that had just fought the Seven Years’ War. Officers did not need to be told that Berlin had been occupied for a purpose their new sovereign did not share. The Church did not need a long memorandum to hear Lutheran practice as an insult in Elizabeth’s capital. The Guards did not need a translation of “disband.” Catherine’s suspicion of a divorce, Orlov’s presence in the conspiracy, the Senate’s and the Church’s approval on 9 July: those are the documented coalition. Invented last words would only decorate it.

Oranienbaum was a residence, then a trap. Ropsha was a village, then a death. Aleksey Orlov’s custody is the last office of the reign. Between Antropov’s Guards uniform and Pfandzelt’s coronation ermine sits a man who tried to rewrite the service bargain for nobles and the religious bargain for the Church in the same spring. The nobles took the liberty. They did not keep him. The next page is not his widow’s enlightenment. It is the country both of them had been standing on, whether the occupant was a Holstein nephew or a Baltic widow or a daughter of Peter: two Russias, poorly joined.

Dates keep the six months from becoming a fable. He became emperor on 5 January 1762, issued the manifesto for the gentry on 1 March, was overthrown on 9 July, abdicated at Oranienbaum on 10 July, and died at Ropsha on 18 July, in Aleksey Orlov’s custody. Peace with Prussia and a planned Danish war sit inside those same weeks, as do Lutheran pressure on the Church and harsher terms for the Guards. Catherine’s suspicion of a divorce is part of the coalition, not a romance novel. Grigory Orlov was her lover and a Guardsman; his brother held the prisoner. The Senate and the Church approved. That is a coup in the same family as 1741 and 1725: the household troops, the notables, a woman of the dynasty. The difference is the speed. Elizabeth had twenty years. Peter III had a season.

Do not enlarge him into a comic German, and do not enlarge her, yet, into Catherine the Great. This page is only the Holstein reign: a peace, a liberty for nobles, an insult to Church and Guards, an abdication, a killing. The social world that made noble liberty look like a gift and peasant labour look like weather is the last article of the era. His manifesto is one document in that world. It is dated. It did not keep its author alive.