Peter III

Czar of Russia (r. 1762)

• Born: February 21, 1728
• Birthplace: Kiel, Holstein (now in Germany)
• Died: July 18, 1762
• Place of death: Ropsha, Russia

Czar of Russia for only 186 days, Peter III nevertheless influenced both Russia and the rest of Europe. He emancipated the Russian nobility from compulsory state service, secularized the property of the Russian Orthodox Church, and reversed Russia’s traditional pro-Austrian foreign policy in favor of Prussia.

Early Life

Christened Karl Peter Ulrich, the future Czar Peter III was born in the capital of the small German duchy of Holstein. He was the only son of Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and Anna Petrovna, eldest daughter of Russia’s Peter the Great. Through his father, a nephew of Sweden’s Charles XII, Karl Peter had claims to the Swedish throne; through his mother, he stood in line for the Russian throne. Accordingly, his early education focused on preparing him to rule.

Until 1741, Karl Peter’s prospects of ruling Russia looked dim, because the Russian throne seemed firmly entrenched in the family of Peter the Great’s half brother, Ivan V, who died in 1696. In November of that year, however, Karl Peter’s maternal aunt, Elizabeth Petrovna, overthrew the infant ruler Ivan VI and established herself as Empress Elizabeth I. Unmarried and without an heir, and thus looking for a way to consolidate her position, Elizabeth brought her by then orphaned nephew to Russia in January, 1742. Following his formal conversion to the Orthodox faith, Karl Peter was proclaimed Grand Duke Peter Fedorovich, heir to the throne of the Russian Empire, on November 18, 1742.

In the years immediately following his designation as Elizabeth’s heir, Peter completed his formal education. From 1742 to 1747, Jacob von Staehlin, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, tutored the young grand duke in a variety of subjects. Although historians have traditionally depicted Peter as a dull-witted student interested in military affairs exclusively, Staehlin’s memoirs paint a different picture. According to the tutor, the grand duke possessed an excellent memory, was logical and thoughtful, and came away from their association with a solid grounding in geography, Russian history, and the achievements of Peter the Great. Other sources provide evidence that under Staehlin’s tutelage, Peter developed an interest in the arts, music becoming a particular passion.

While completing his education, Peter also married. In September, 1745, he married sixteen-year-old Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseyevna. Formerly Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst, Catherine was brought to Russia for the express purpose of providing Peter a wife. Unfortunately for both Peter and Catherine, the marriage proved unhappy from the beginning, and subsequently, both took lovers. According to Catherine, the blame belonged to Peter, who she claimed neglected her and showed a greater interest in toy soldiers than in his husbandly duties. Although officially the marriage produced a child, questions remain about the paternity of Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, later Paul I (1796-1801), born in October, 1754.

As Peter’s marriage deteriorated, his relationship with Empress Elizabeth grew increasingly strained. Disagreements over Russia’s pro-Austrian and anti-Prussian foreign policy, especially after the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756, led to the grand duke’s virtual exclusion from governmental affairs and prompted some discussion in court circles about Peter being bypassed in favor of Paul Petrovich. As events turned out, the discussions of Peter’s exclusion from the succession remained just that, and when Elizabeth died on January 5, 1762, the thirty-three-year-old Peter Fedorovich ascended the Russian throne as Czar Peter III.

Life’s Work

Peter’s most celebrated and arguably most significant accomplishment was his emancipation of the Russian nobility from compulsory state service. Beginning in the reign of Peter the Great, nobles became obliged to serve the state—either in the military, in the government, or at court—on a full-time, lifelong basis. In fact, Peter the Great made nobility and the privileges associated with it dependent upon performance of service. Any noble who refused to fulfill service obligations forfeited both title and privileges, including the right to own land and serfs. Although Empress Anna I had ameliorated the service requirement somewhat, reducing its length to twenty-five years, the Russian noble’s obligation to perform service remained in place.

By a manifesto of March 1, 1762, Peter III granted “freedom and liberty to the entire Russian nobility,” stipulating that those then in state service—and who had achieved officer’s rank in the armed forces or equivalent rank in the government or at court—could retire in time of peace. Peter’s manifesto further proclaimed that this privilege was to be regarded as “a perpetual and fundamental principle” binding on subsequent Russian rulers. Although the manifesto emphasized that nobles who had yet to achieve officer’s rank had to serve twelve years before retiring, that nobles had to continue to educate their children in preparation for state service, and that nobles remained subject to recall in wartime, the days when nobles had no choice but to serve had disappeared forever, a development leading one eminent historian of eighteenth century Russia to characterize Peter’s act as “one of the most important milestones in the modernization of Russia.”

While Russia’s nobles certainly welcomed their liberation from compulsory service—although the evidence suggests that most chose to remain in service—this was not enough to offset other decisions by which Peter rapidly alienated members of the country’s military, governmental, and religious elite. Among Peter’s most personally damaging decisions, four stand out: his withdrawal of Russia from the Seven Years’ War; his secularization of property belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church; his efforts to “Prussianize” the Russian army; and his decision to go to war against Denmark.

Peter’s decision to withdraw from the Seven Years’ War came when Russia and its allies, Austria and France, verged on a decisive victory over Prussia. On February 23, 1762, the Russian court announced that it intended to seek peace with Prussia. Peter then proceeded to negotiate a settlement without consulting his allies and without regard for the advice of his foreign minister, Mikhail Vorontsov. The result was a peace treaty actually drafted by the Prussian envoy and without real benefit to Russia. Signed on May 5, 1762, the treaty provided that Russia return all territorial conquests to Prussia. Russia’s allies, not surprisingly, felt betrayed. More important, Russia’s generals felt as if the new czar had thrown away all they had won since 1756 simply because of his well-known admiration of Prussia’s king Frederick the Great.

Peter’s secularization of the property belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, enacted April 1, 1762, transferred all church lands and peasants to the Russian state. While welcomed by the affected peasants, who greatly preferred the state as a direct overlord, secularization proved the last straw for the Orthodox hierarchy, already disenchanted by what it perceived as Peter’s Lutheran proclivities and his toleration of religious dissenters. In regard to the latter, the Orthodox leadership was especially disconcerted by Peter’s lifting of sanctions on Old Believers (dissenters who had broken with the Church in the second half of the seventeenth century and who had been persecuted by both Church and state since that time) and his inviting those who had fled to Poland and other neighboring countries to return to Russia without fear of persecution.

Peter’s “Prussianization” of the Russian army began from the moment he ascended the throne. The new czar established a military commission and entrusted it with introducing Prussian-style uniforms and drill in the army. This, along with Peter’s disbanding of the imperial bodyguard created by Elizabeth I in favor of a corps from his native Holstein, caused tremendous consternation among soldiers of Russia’s imperial guards regiments, who were quite attached to the uniforms introduced by Peter the Great. Quite possibly, Peter’s alienation of the imperial guards represented his most critical error, since, as one prominent historian has pointed out, the imperial guards were a “body that no eighteenth century Russian monarch could afford to alienate.”

Peter’s decision to go to war against Denmark was driven not by concern for Russian interests but by a desire to win Schleswig for his native Holstein (of which he had become duke in 1745). Military and diplomatic preparations for this conflict began shortly after Peter declared his intention to make peace with Prussia and continued throughout the spring of 1762. Senior government officials attempted to slow Peter’s drift toward war, while Prussia’s Frederick the Great counseled the czar against going on campaign before he had consolidated his power. Peter, however, remained committed to the acquisition of Schleswig. On June 23, he departed St. Petersburg for his estate at Oranienbaum, from where he intended to leave for the campaign. Shortly thereafter, the imperial guards received orders to join with the regular army in preparation for an assault on Denmark. This further inflamed the already discontented guards regiments.

Peter’s absence from St. Petersburg and the tremendous dissatisfaction engendered by his decisions provided his ambitious wife an opportunity to seize power. On July 9, 1762, Catherine—with the assistance of her lover, Captain Grigori Grigoryevich Orlov —staged a coup d’état, announcing Peter’s deposition and her accession as Empress Catherine the Great. Having alienated Russia’s generals, the Orthodox hierarchy, senior government officials, and the imperial guards, Peter found himself isolated and unable to counter his wife’s seizure of power. On July 10, he meekly surrendered and renounced the throne, issuing a manifesto in which he acknowledged his inability to rule.

Following his abdication, Peter was moved to Ropsha. There, on July 18, he died in rather mysterious circumstances. A manifesto explained that Peter had died of colic following an acute hemorrhoidal attack. Many historians, however, believe that Peter was killed in a drunken brawl with Aleksey Grigoryevich Orlov, brother of Catherine’s lover. Initially buried at the Alexander Nevskii Monastery in St. Petersburg, Peter’s body was, in November, 1796, following Catherine’s death, transferred to the Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the final resting place of Russia’s czars and empresses since the days of Peter the Great.

Significance

Despite ruling only 186 days, Peter III had a major impact on both Russia and Europe. His liberation of the Russian nobility from compulsory state service inaugurated a new era in the history of the Russian nobility and in the relationship between the Russian government and the country’s leading socioeconomic class. Peter’s secularization of the property of the Orthodox Church deprived the Church of much of its economic power and thereby left it almost completely dependent financially on the Russian state. This completed a process begun by Peter the Great, who in the early eighteenth century subordinated the Church politically to the state by placing a lay official in charge of the Church.

Finally, Peter reversed Russia’s traditional pro-Austrian foreign policy in favor of a pro-Prussian foreign policy. This entailed Russia’s abrupt withdrawal from the Seven Years’ War, a critical development that allowed Frederick the Great and Prussia to avoid a decisive defeat, perhaps even annihilation. Peter’s reorientation of Russia’s foreign policy also ushered in an era, lasting more than a century, during which Russia and Prussia stood together to combat the forces of revolution in Europe.

Bibliography

Bain, R. Nisbet. Peter III, Emperor of Russia. New York: Dutton, 1902. The first biography of Peter in English. Bain paints a somewhat sympathetic portrait.

De Madariaga, Isabel. Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Chapter 1 describes in some detail Peter’s alienation of Russia’s elite and the events of his overthrow.

Erickson, Carolly. Great Catherine: The Life of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. New York: Crown, 1994. Comprehensive popular biography. Includes information about Peter’s life and reign, his relationship with Catherine, and his abdication.

Jones, Robert E. The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762-1785. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973. Attempts to explain Peter’s motivation in liberating nobles from compulsory state service and shows how Catherine the Great built on the decision.

Leonard, Carol S. Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. An updated political biography of Peter that questions the accepted negative view of Peter and paints him as an energetic ruler who attempted to reform Russia in accordance with Enlightenment principles.

Lincoln, Bruce W. The Romanovs: Autocrats of All the Russias. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981. Lincoln chronicles the achievements and significance of the Romanov Dynasty, including Peter III.

Raeff, Marc. “The Domestic Policies of Peter III and His Overthrow.” American Historical Review 75 (June, 1970): 1289-1310. Explains Peter’s deposition primarily in terms of the unpopularity of his domestic policies.

Raleigh, Donald J., ed. The Emperors and Empresses of Russia: Rediscovering the Romanovs. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. Authored by Soviet historian Aleksandr Sergeevich Mylnikov, the chapter on Peter closely resembles Carol Leonard’s challenge to the accepted views of the czar, his character, and his abilities.