Catherine the Great Read Online Free

‘great facility to sudden and dangerous revolutions’, 41 many of Europe’s wisest heads predicted that Catherine’s coup would be merely a prelude to another in which she herself must surely be overthrown. Barely a week after seizing the throne, she had already resolved that attack remained the best form of defence. On 7 July, the same day that she issued a risible manifesto proclaiming that her murdered husband had perished from an attack of his haemorrhoids, she announced her intention to stage a coronation, on an unspecified date in September, ‘in the manner of our former Orthodox Monarchs, and of the pious Greeks [the Byzantine emperors], and of the most ancient Kings of the Israelites, who were customarily anointed with Holy oil’. 42
    Here, it seemed, was a classic case in which the need for a ritual celebration of the crown’s legitimacy had increased as the stability of the state became less certain. 43 Yet Catherine was undoubtedly playing for high stakes in holding the coronation so soon after her coup. Some of her most influential supporters, headed by Paul’s tutor, Count Nikita Panin, had expected her to rule as regent for her son, and no Russian regent had yet been crowned. 44 The precedents could scarcely have been less encouraging. Tsarevna Sophia, who governed Muscovy on behalf of the boy tsars Ivan V and Peter I from 1682 to 1689, had fatally undermined her authority by campaigning for recognition as ruler in her own right. In The Antidote (1770), a polemical work intended to convince sceptical Europeans of Muscovite achievements, Catherine later claimed that Sophia had ‘not been given the credit she deserves’: ‘She conducted the affairs of the Empire for a number of years with all the sagacity that one could hope for.’ But the empress can hardly have relished the prospect of ending her life under house-arrest in a convent, the fate that befell Sophia following the coup that installed Peter the Great as de facto sole ruler. 45 In principle, there was no need to hurry: nowhere in Europe was the interval between accession and coronation prescribed, and Louis XIV, given pause by noble unrest during the Fronde, had set a French record by waiting eleven years before staging his in 1654. 46 Yet the fate of Peter III warned Catherine against delay. By putting off his coronation on the grounds that the regalia were not yet ready, her husband had merely advertised the contempt for Orthodox tradition that contributed to his downfall. Determined to learn from his mistakes, Catherine, as a hostile French diplomat reported in early October, missed ‘no opportunity to convey to her people a great idea of her profound piety and devotion to the Greek religion’. 47
    The vision of Peter III’s strangled corpse was not the only violent image that might have flashed across the empress’s mind as she descended a flight of stairs that had borne silent witness to some of the bloodiest scenes in Russian history. A reference in her memoirs to the ‘famous’ Red Staircase suggests that tales of the Moscow rebellion that brought Sophia to power in May 1682 might have been part of the folklore she learned from her pious lady-in-waiting, Praskovya Vladislavova (‘that woman was a living archive who knew the scandalous history of every family in Russia from the time of Peter the Great and beyond’). 48 It was then that the boyar Artamon Matveyev, once the leading minister to Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich (1645–76), had allegedly been hurled from the top of the stairs onto the pikes of the mutinous musketeers. Reformed into new regiments by Peter the Great, the Guards had been guarantors of the Russian throne ever since. Conscious that resentment of her relationship with Orlov extended even to supporters of her own coup, Catherine knew as she gazed down on the serried ranks of extravagantly plumed helmets that it would take only one treacherous officer to ignite a riot. The threat was real enough: not long after