Why power after Peter felt so unstable

The regiment in the picture did not paint itself. Alexander Sauerweid reconstructed the Preobrazhensky Life Guards decades later, green coats and drums arranged for a museum eye. Use the canvas as a reminder of a political fact, not as a morning report from 1725. Those guard companies were the grown form of the play-soldiers Peter had drilled at Preobrazhenskoye. They had helped to make him. After he died, they helped to make whoever came next. A throne in this climate was not only inherited. It was escorted.

Peter died in 1725, unexpectedly, at the age of fifty-two. The last chapter of his reign closed on an unnamed successor and a programme still in motion. This one opens on the two problems that death left standing. They are not a list of emperors. They are why the list kept changing.

The first problem was the succession itself. Peter had reserved the right to choose who followed him and then died without using it. For the rest of the century, Britannica’s account of these years is blunt: almost any powerful individual or group could disregard the choice of the preceding ruler. Biology did some of the work — children, childlessness, a wedding day that became a death day. Force did the rest. Palace coups, not a quiet family tree, decided who sat in St Petersburg and who was sent out of it. A law that lets a sovereign pick an heir is only as stable as the picking. When the picker is gone, the law is a vacancy.

The second problem sat beside the first and made it worse. There was no firm centre that could plan, direct and control imperial policy once the autocrat was a widow, a boy, an infant or a woman who preferred the court to the chancery. Who belonged to the “ruling circle,” and how that circle related to the crown, remained unsettled. Favourites filled the gap, then became the gap. High officials wanted routine that did not depend on a single darling. Rank-and-file service nobles wanted a path up the Table of Ranks that a favourite could not slam shut. Guards wanted to be needed. The failure to solve those questions produced a climate of instability. From 1725 until Catherine II’s accession in 1762, crises in the two capitals make it hard to give the period a single plot. The plot is the instability.

The grenadier cap in the case is surviving kit, photographed in the State Historical Museum with cannon barrels in front of it. It is not a confession from a conspirator. It shows what a Guards identity looked like when it was sewn and stored: height, embroidery, metal, the claim to be more than a line regiment. The men who wore such things did not write constitutions. They moved at night.

Normal, peaceful succession was thwarted by that combination of accident and coup. At Peter’s death his chief collaborators, headed by Prince Aleksandr Menshikov and assisted by the guard regiments, put Peter’s widow on the throne — Catherine I, his second wife, born a Baltic peasant. Menshikov ruled in her name until he had to share power with other Petrine dignitaries. A Supreme Privy Council took the centre, displacing the Senate in political weight. When Catherine died in 1727 the council proclaimed Peter’s grandson as Peter II. The boy fell under the Dolgorukys; Menshikov went into exile; the wedding meant to lock that family in place never happened, because the bridegroom died on the day set for it. Here the point is the pattern: a favourite, a council, a child, a corpse, another choice.

The pattern did not stop in 1730. An empress was offered the crown with conditions meant to leave the decisive voice with a few princes. Service nobles, fearing an oligarchy that would shut them off from the autocrat and from promotion, helped to wreck that experiment. A Baltic favourite collected a black name. An infant was proclaimed. A daughter of Peter took the Guards into the palace at night. A Holstein nephew lasted six months. Each of those stories is told later in this chapter. What they share is the unfinished business of 1725: nobody had made the succession boring, and nobody had made the ruling circle a settled machine that could survive a weak occupant.

Peter’s administrative reforms did, even so, begin to bear fruit in these decades. The Table of Ranks became the frame for a class of servicemen whose lives were devoted to the state. In principle the door was open to ability and education, including sons of priests and non-Russian landowners. In fact promotion still needed recognition by the ruler or, more often, by the high men who could reach the ruler. At the top sat an almost permanent elite, co-opting its membership, trying to pull routine under regulations so that daily government would not require a personal appeal. Autocratic power could not be cancelled, because the same authority settled special cases and handed out protection, rank and land. The greatest threat to that system was the favourite — the “accidental person” who stood between the service world and the crown. Against such people the oligarchy and the ordinary nobles could, and did, ally. Palace coups against favourites were not the opposite of Peter’s state. They were one of the ways that state learned to keep itself.

Military and civil hierarchies were interchangeable at that top. The same cluster of families could supply a general, a senator, a favourite’s enemy, a coup’s financier. The personal element, bolstered by kinship, determined who sat in the very highest echelon. To solidify influence, that group aimed to bring as many routine operations as possible under regulations that would make appeal to the ruler unnecessary — and then still needed the ruler, because only the autocrat could promote, protect and reward clients when the routine ran out. It is a dry mechanism. It explains more than a cartoon of German villains. A weak occupant did not stop the machine. A favourite who bypassed it could start a night in the barracks.

The alliance worked well enough, Britannica notes, to allow the consolidation of Peter’s reforms, some success in foreign policy, and a general increase in the power and wealth of the state, despite the low calibre of several rulers and the mismanagement of favourites. Instability at the centre is not the same as collapse. Taxes still came in. Armies still existed to be pointed at Sweden, Prussia or a southern frontier. What did not exist was a dull, boring way to change the person who signed.

Because promotion required a minimum of education, cultural policy became a major concern of government and nobility alike. Service families demanded schools that would prepare sons for better careers and let them skip the lowest ranks. That demand was answered, from 1731, with the Corps of Cadets, then with further special institutions, and later with a university in Moscow. Those foundations have their own dates and reigns. The point here is earlier: the unstable polity still had to train the people who staffed it. A coup does not replace a syllabus. A favourite does not make a clerk.

Read that way, the years 1725–62 are not an empty corridor between Peter and Catherine II. They are the time in which a Petrine service state learned to persist without a Petrine autocrat. Persistence had a cost in peasant dues and in court fear. It also had a yield: an elite that knew how to survive a widow, a child, an infant and a Holstein nephew, and how, when survival failed, to call the Guards. The next pages name the occupants. This page has named the weather that made occupancy so short.

Mikhail Makhaev’s 1753 prospect of the Academy of Sciences shows the capital a generation after the founder’s death: a long front on the water, boats, a city that looks as if it had always been there. It is a different plate from the Neva view used in Peter’s chapter, and it belongs to Elizabeth’s years, not to the night he died. Use it anyway. Institutions outlived occupants. The Academy opened after Peter; the Guards outlived him; the Table outlived him. What did not outlive him was a clear answer to who spoke when the emperor was a child or a favourite’s shadow.

The empire had a title, a capital and a table of ranks. It did not have a way to change rulers without a crisis.

That is why power after Peter felt so unstable. Not because every year was a catastrophe, and not because the Petrine machine stopped. Taxes were still gathered, often harshly. Armies still marched. Foreign policy still found coalitions. The service class still wanted schools that would let its sons skip the lowest rungs. What failed was the political weather at the centre: a succession that biology and the Guards could rewrite, and a ruling circle that was never quite a ministry and never quite a court cabal, but something brittle between the two. Later memory would flatten the decades into a cartoon of German favourites and Russian saviours. The record is colder. Instability was structural. It lasted until 1762, when another coup — the last in this chapter’s span — put Catherine II on the throne. Her reign is another book of the story. This one is about the thirty-seven years in which the empire learned, repeatedly, that Peter had built a state that could not easily do without him.

The next pages take the reigns in turn, without pretending they form a smooth dynasty. First the widow and the boy: Catherine I and Peter II, a favourite’s government and a child’s court that ended on a wedding morning. Then a throne offered with conditions. Then Peter’s daughter. Then six months. Then the two Russias of those same years, court and village, which did not wait for a stable emperor in order to be unequal. Read them as answers to the questions this page has posed. Who could disregard a predecessor’s choice? Who stood in the ruling circle? Who could call the Guards out at night? Until those questions had dull answers, the imperial title would keep sounding louder than the imperial succession. A reader who wants only names will find them. A reader who wants the reason the names would not stay will already have it: an unused right to choose, a circle that was never a ministry, and a гвардия that had learned it could write the rest.