Peter III

1728--62, grandson of Peter I and tsar of Russia (1762): deposed in a coup d'état led by his wife (later Catherine II); assassinated

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Peter III

(Peter III Fedorovich; Karl Peter Ulrich). Born Feb. 10 (21), 1728, in Kiel, Germany; died July 7 (18), 1762, in Ropsha, near St. Petersburg. Russian emperor from 1761 to 1762. Son of Charles Frederick, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and Anna Petrovna, the daughter of Emperor Peter I the Great.

Peter III’s aunt, the Russian empress Elizaveta Petrovna, declared him her heir in 1742. In 1745 he married Princess Sophia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst (later, Empress Catherine II). An admirer of Frederick It’s Prussian system, Peter III ignored Russia’s national interests and in 1762 ended military operations against Prussia in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), concluding a peace agreement with Frederick II. An ignorant man who occupied himself primarily with court diversions, Peter III left the tasks of governing to the court nobility and the highest administrators (A. I. Glebov, M. I. Vorontsov, and D. V. Volkov, for example). They adopted a number of measures in the interests of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry), including a decree freeing the dvorianstvo from service obligations (1762) and a decree abolishing the Tainaia Kantseliariia (Secret Office). Some of the changes aroused the discontent of the clergy—for example, the reestablishment of the Collegium of the Economy to administer ecclesiastical, monastery, and synodal estates, and preparations for the secularization of monasterial property.

An opposition movement headed by Peter Ill’s wife, Catherine, developed in the guards regiments in response to the tsar’s antinational foreign policy, his contempt for Russian customs, and the introduction of Prussian practices in the army. Peter III was deposed, arrested, and sent to his country home at Ropsha, where, with Catherine’s consent, he was murdered. The palace coup of 1762 gave rise to unfounded rumors that Peter III had been overthrown by the dvoriane (nobility or gentry) because of his intention to emancipate the peasants. E. I. Pugachev claimed to be Peter III.

REFERENCES

Solov’ev, S. M. Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, book 13, vols. 23-25.
Moscow, 1965. Firsov, N. N. Petr III i Ekaterina II: Pervye gody ee tsarstvovaniia. St. Petersburg, 1915.

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References in periodicals archive

In this work, Catherine's marital behavior was still being discussed under the guise of criticizing Peter III for raising distasteful questions:

Miranda depends for its depiction of Catherine overwhelmingly on Rulhiere's just-published account of the coup and his stories of the Grand Duchess's lovers in the years before Peter III came to the throne; after the Rulhiere materials, which take up more than three quarters of Albrecht's novel, the years of Catherine's reign are treated swiftly so that the book ends with the empress's (natural) death.

(3) This claim is repeated almost exactly in one of the first biographies of Peter III (Denkwurdigkeiten, 70).

Eighteenth-century libertinism in a time of change: representations of Catherine the Great

The lines of inheritance would follow only descending lines of the family, first male, then female: the same order that had been set forth in the Austrian system adopted in the "Testament of Catherine I." But the draft made clear that the succession would not derive from past generations, which would have included Peter III, but with herself, defined as the Emperor-Progenitor (Imperator-rodonachal 'nik) as the founder of a new legal order, and with her son, Paul, as the heir.

Paul dramatized his assumption of power in a series of macabre ceremonies to erase his mother's reign from the history of the previous century and to demonstrate that he had inherited the throne directly from his father, Peter III. On 19 November, he and the members of the imperial family attended a ceremony of disinterment of Peter III at the Aleksandr Nevskii Monastery.

The representation of dynasty and "fundamental laws" in the evolution of Russian monarchy

Or if Catherine is Great and also Pugachev, the Cossack who pretended to be Peter III?

Liberated from the dead hand ... Lev Anninskiy describes his encounters with censored and uncensored history in Soviet Russia. (Point Of Departure)

Herzen feared that the influence of this notoriously Russophobic and militaristic educator might turn the grand dukes Nikolai Aleksandrovich and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich into something resembling Peter III: Herzen's explicit comparison to the late emperor was clearly based on Catherine's portrayal (295).

Angelina Vacheva, The Empress's Novel: Novelistic Discourse in Catherine the Great's Memoirs. Approaches to Reading in the Second Half of the 19th Century/Romanut na Imperatritsata: Romanoviiat diskurs v avtobiografichnite zapiski na Ekaterina II. Rakursi na chetene prez vtorata polovina na XIX vek

But Catherine through her lover, the guards officer Grigory Orlov and his four dashing brothers, won over the army to her cause, and by sheer force of personality, many of the high officials as well, even those close to Peter III. Her supporters proclaimed her not as regent for her son Paul, as some had hoped, but as ruler in her own right, as Empress regnant.

During this time she had given birth to one son by a lover, to a daughter, who died, by another lover, Stanislas Poniatowski, and to a second son by her lover Grigory Orlov, born in secret only four months before her coup, who was not recognised by Peter III. She had had to manoeuvre between the many factions in the Russian court, her friends had been removed, some disgraced and sent into exile, leaving her at times in considerable solitude.

Catherine the great: a personal view

By freeing the nobility from compulsory state service except in wartime, Peter III gave the ruling class more political autonomy and economic independence.

Leonard's view contrasts sharply with the contemporary and traditional picture of Peter III as a man badly raised and poorly educated, who yielded to wild whims, spurned sensible advice, and achieved little of significance.

Reform and Regicide: The Reign of Peter III of Russia

The German princess who was to become the empress Catherine II connived at the overthrow and possibly the murder of her husband Peter III, whose brief rule followed that of the empress Elizabeth.

Empress Elizabeth, Her Reign and Her Russia: 1741-1762