Peter II of Russia

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter II of Russia was an emperor who died on the morning of his own wedding day. He was fourteen years old. The date was the 30th of January 1730, and the bride, Ekaterina Dolgorukova, was already waiting. Instead, the boy who had briefly held one of the most powerful thrones in the world slipped away at dawn, unconscious, calling out in his delirium for his dead sister. He had ruled for less than three years. His reign had begun with a power struggle he barely understood, passed through a coronation at the Cathedral of Dormition in Moscow, and ended with smallpox and an unsigned will. What had gone wrong? And what does a reign so brief, so chaotic, and so young tell us about the empire Peter the Great had built?

• 2. A Boy Left Behind

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  Peter was born in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of October 1715, the only son of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich and Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Luneburg. His mother died when he was just ten days old. His father fared worse: Alexei, accused of treason by his own father, Peter the Great, died in prison in 1718. That left Peter, aged three, and his four-year-old sister Natalya as orphans in the court of a grandfather who had no desire to raise them. Peter the Great had despised his son Alexei, and young Peter reminded him too sharply of the man he had suspected of treachery. The solution was strict seclusion. The boy's first governesses were the wives of a tailor and a vintner from the Dutch settlement in the city. A sailor named Norman taught him the basics of navigation. Only later was he placed in the care of a Hungarian noble, Janos Zeikin, who appears to have been a genuinely committed teacher. Yet the damage of those early years was difficult to undo. Through his mother's line, Peter was a first cousin of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, connecting him to the highest circles of European royalty. His grandfather showed no interest in that connection, and no interest in the boy.

• 3. Menshikov's Gamble

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  When Peter the Great died in 1725, his second wife, Catherine I, took the throne with the support of the powerful minister Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov. Catherine replaced Peter's existing teachers with the vice-chancellor Count Ostermann, whose curriculum for the future emperor covered history, geography, mathematics, and foreign languages. But the boy himself cared little for study. His favored pastimes were hunting and feasting, and Ostermann's careful program remained shallow in practice. By the time Catherine I herself was dying in 1727, it was apparent that Peter, as the only grandson of Peter the Great, could not be denied the throne indefinitely. Three-quarters of the Russian nobility backed his claim, and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who was married to a relative of Peter's mother, pressed the point through his ambassador in Saint Petersburg. Menshikov maneuvered skillfully to make himself indispensable to whatever came next. He secured Peter's designation as heir apparent, and arranged that the relevant documentation also required Peter to be betrothed to Menshikov's own daughter, Maria. It was a neat piece of political engineering. It did not hold.

• 4. The Emperor Strikes Back

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  After Catherine I died in May 1727, the eleven-year-old Peter II was proclaimed emperor, and Menshikov moved the boy into his own house on Vasilievsky Island. For a few months that summer, the Saxon ambassador recorded that not even Peter the Great had been so feared or so obeyed as Menshikov. The minister issued orders to the Emperor himself. He also removed a silver plate that Peter had given as a gift to his sister Natalya, which provoked a pointed reply from the young tsar: "We shall see who is emperor, you or I." When Menshikov fell ill that same year, his opponents acted quickly. Under the influence of Ostermann and the Dolgorukov family, Peter stripped Menshikov of his rank in September 1727 and sent him to exile in Siberia. The engagement to Menshikov's daughter was dissolved. At the same time, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach was appointed as tutor to take over from Ostermann in Peter's education. Peter was described by contemporaries as quick-witted but stubborn and wayward, much like his grandfather in temperament. Unlike his grandfather, however, he had no appetite for the work of ruling.

• 5. Disorder and Indulgence

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  Foreign witnesses at the coronation of Peter II, held at the Cathedral of Dormition in the Kremlin on the 9th of January 1728, recorded a court already slipping into disarray. "All of Russia is in terrible disorder," one dispatch read. "Money is not paid to anyone. God knows what will happen with finances. Everyone steals, as much as he can." Peter almost never appeared at the Supreme Privy Council. Officials, afraid to take responsibility without imperial direction, let decisions pile up unanswered. The Russian fleet fell into neglect; the Emperor showed no concern. Peter tightened serfdom by banning serfs from volunteering for military service, one of the few concrete policy acts of his reign, closing a path that had allowed some to escape their status. Moving the court from Saint Petersburg back to Moscow in 1728 compounded the disruption, undoing much of what Peter the Great had built in the northern city. Meanwhile, with Menshikov gone, the Dolgorukov family filled the vacuum. Prince Aleksey Dolgorukov and his son Ivan became the Emperor's closest companions. Ivan Dolgorukov was known for a reckless, profligate lifestyle, and Peter soon fell into a pattern of feasting, card-playing, and drinking, eventually becoming addicted to alcohol. Historian Mykola Kostomarov later wrote that Peter "was totally engrossed in amusements, and was kept under someone else's influence."

• 6. The Final Days

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  The Dolgorukovs had one final scheme. Peter had become smitten with the eighteen-year-old Ekaterina Alekseyevna Dolgorukova, and the family pressed for an engagement, hoping to tie themselves permanently to the imperial line. Planning for the wedding moved forward despite signs that Peter himself had lost interest in his fiancee, possibly influenced by his aunt Elizabeth Petrovna, who disliked Ekaterina. In late December 1729, Peter fell dangerously ill. His condition worsened sharply after the frosty Epiphany observance, when he took part in an outdoor feast. He was rushed to the Lefortovo palace, standing at the back of his sleigh in the cold. Doctors the next day diagnosed smallpox. The Dolgorukovs tried to get the dying Emperor to sign a testament naming Ekaterina as his heir, but they were barred from his quarters: Peter was already unconscious. In his delirium he called for horses to visit his sister Natalya, who had died in 1728. He died a few minutes later, at dawn on the 30th of January 1730, the day of his scheduled wedding. Peter was buried in the Cathedral of the Archangel at the Moscow Kremlin, the only post-Petrine Russian monarch to receive that honor. With his death, the direct male line of the Romanov dynasty ended. The throne passed to his cousin Anna Ivanovna, daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother and co-ruler Ivan V.