Catherine the Great

  During Elizabeth’s twenty years on the throne, Ivan had never left her thoughts. It was because of him that the empress was afraid to sleep at night. When Elizabeth died, Peter III had assumed the throne without challenge. Peter had been a Romanov; he was the grandson of Peter the Great and had been named heir to the throne in the manner prescribed by his towering grandfather; that is, he was named by the reigning sovereign, his aunt Elizabeth. Catherine lacked these credentials. She was a foreigner; she had seized the throne in a coup d’etat, and, some believed, may have been implicated in her husband’s death. For these reasons, Catherine was concerned about any reports of opposition, conspiracy, or rebellion. In the Khitrovo affair, she had remained calm and had dealt with it efficiently. But nothing that came before was quite like the affair involving Vasily Mirovich and the imprisoned Tsar Ivan VI.

  In June 1764, Catherine left St. Petersburg for a tour of the Baltic provinces. She was in Riga on July 9 when word arrived that there had been an attempt to free the former emperor that had ended in the young man’s death.

  Ivan had been eighteen months old in 1740 when Elizabeth removed him from the throne. When he was four, he was separated from his parents. He had received no formal education but in childhood had been taught the Russian alphabet by a priest. Now twenty-four, he had spent eighteen years in solitary confinement in an isolated cell in the Schlüsselburg Fortress, fifty miles up the Neva River from St. Petersburg. Here, designated Prisoner No. 1, he was allowed to see no one except his immediate jailers. There were reports that he was aware of his identity; that once, goaded to anger by his guards, he had shouted, “Take care! I am a prince of this empire. I am your sovereign.” A report of this outburst brought a harsh response from Alexander Shuvalov, head of Elizabeth’s Secret Chancellery. “If the prisoner is insubordinate or makes improper statements,” Shuvalov instructed, “you shall put him in irons until he obeys, and if he still resists, he must be beaten with a stick or a whip.” Eventually, the guards reported, “The prisoner is somewhat quieter than before. He no longer tells lies about his identity.” Elizabeth continued to worry and, on the empress’s command, Shuvalov issued a further instruction: if any attempt to free Prisoner No. 1 seemed likely to succeed, Ivan’s jailers were to kill him.

  In the turmoil following her own accession, Catherine paid a visit to Ivan in order to judge the prisoner for herself. She found a tall, slender young man with fair hair and a red beard, his skin pale from years hidden from sunlight. His expression was innocent, but his intelligence was stunted by years of solitude. Catherine wrote, “Apart from his painful and almost unintelligible stammering, he was bereft of reasoning and human understanding.”

  Nevertheless, he, like Peter III, was a Romanov, a direct descendant of Peter the Great’s elder brother and co-tsar, Ivan V, and his right to the crown was dynastically impeccable. Had Catherine found him an idiot or insane, she might have had nothing to fear. Citing his obvious unfitness to rule, she could have proclaimed his incapacity, shown mercy, released him and provided him with a quiet, comfortable existence. But if this level of disability were not true, it was possible that Ivan might somehow be rehabilitated, physically and intellectually. Even if obviously unfit to rule, he remained dangerous as a symbol. To protect herself, she ordered a continuation of the severe conditions in which he had previously been held. Nikita Panin was assigned to oversee Ivan’s imprisonment.

  There was a point at which Catherine hoped the young man might be persuaded to choose a cloistered, monastic life that would disqualify him from returning to the throne. If he accepted tonsure as a monk, it would mean a permanent withdrawal from the political world, and the officers who guarded him were instructed to attempt to guide him along this path. Another possible solution was that Ivan die in prison of genuine natural causes. To enhance this possibility, Panin ordered that medical treatment be denied him; if he became gravely ill, a priest was to be admitted, but not a doctor. Meanwhile, Panin also signed a specific order renewing the previous instructions for guarding the prisoner: if anyone, no matter who, sought to take the prisoner away without an express written order personally signed in the empress’s handwriting, Ivan was not to be handed over. Instead, if efforts to liberate him seemed likely to succeed, his guards were commanded to put their prisoner to death. The command reiterated Shuvalov’s earlier instruction: “The prisoner shall not be allowed to fall alive into the hands of any rescuers.”

  Two officers, Captain Danilo Vlasev and Lieutenant Luka Chekin, were assigned to guard Ivan. Only they and the fortress governor had access to the prisoner. As the two guardian officers themselves were never permitted to leave Schlüsselburg, they were, in effect, locked in with the nameless prisoner. The situation, therefore, was that Ivan remained in the hands of two men who were authorized to kill him in certain circumstances and whose own goal was to be free of him so that they could resume living normal lives.

  The guards reported bimonthly to Panin. With the passage of time, these reports reflected their growing boredom, frustration, and longing for their own freedom. With every letter, their pleas grew stronger. In August 1763, Panin replied, counseling them to be patient, promising that their duties would end soon. In November, growing more desperate, they addressed an urgent petition to Panin: “Release us for we have come to the end of our strength.” Panin’s response, on December 28, 1763, was to send each of them one thousand rubles—an enormous sum for them—and the promise that they would not have to wait much longer. “Compliance with your request will not be postponed later than the early months of the summer.”

  In midwinter 1764, a young officer, Lieutenant Vasily Mirovich of the Smolensk Regiment, was assigned to the garrison at Schlüsselburg. A proud, lonely, embittered young man, in debt and given to drinking and gambling, he harbored a deep and gnawing sense of injustice and persecution. Mirovich was twenty-four and of aristocratic Ukrainian origin. His family’s estates had been confiscated in 1709 by Peter the Great because the young man’s grandfather had sided with the Ukrainian Cossack hetman Ivan Mazeppa against the tsar during the Swedish invasion of Russia in 1708. Deprived of his family heritage, Mirovich had been brought up in poverty. Without money, he tried to win at cards and was unlucky. His creditors pressed him constantly. His three sisters, living in Moscow, were close to starving, but he could not help them. He prayed to God, but there was no reply. In hopes of recovering his family lands, he came to St. Petersburg. He petitioned the Senate twice for restoration, but the Senate refused. He appealed twice to Catherine; she rejected him. When he approached Kyril Razumovsky, appointed Ukrainian hetman by Catherine, Razumovsky told him that his claims were hopeless. Razumovsky’s only advice was, “Make your own career, young man. Seize fortune by the forelock as others have done.” Mirovich filed these words away in memory.

  Resentful, without money or connections, he joined the army and was posted to Schlüsselburg. His fellow officers found him moody and difficult. His post was in the outer fortress, where no one was allowed to know what went on in the inner casements. He wondered about the nameless Prisoner No. 1, entombed in the labyrinth of cells in the inner citadel, where he was watched over by special guards who were never relieved. When he learned, eventually, that the prisoner was “Ivanushka,” the anointed infant tsar, Mirovich remembered Razumovsky’s advice: “Seize fortune by the forelock.” This counsel reminded Mirovich of the recent history of another young officer, Gregory Orlov, who had helped Catherine overthrow a sovereign and thereby had promoted himself to spectacular power and wealth. Why should he, Vasily Mirovich, not do the same on Ivan’s behalf? Why should not he, like the Orlov brothers, reach fame and fortune by arranging the rescue of the true tsar?

  From this ambitious beginning, Mirovich’s horizon expanded. His original motive for restoring Ivan to the throne was to alleviate his own misery and poverty by becoming another Orlov. Soon he had a grander vision. Besides being a gambler and a drinker, Mirovich was a churchgoer, and he convinced himself that God
had assigned him a sacred mission. Surely God himself would welcome and bless the overthrow of a usurping woman and the restoration of an anointed tsar. Excited by this new idea, Mirovich found a comrade at Schlüsselburg, Appolon Ushakov. Together they considered the layout of the fortress and the means of convincing or overpowering the garrison of the inner fortress. Early in May 1764, Mirovich drew up a manifesto—a tangle of misstatements and grievances—for Ivan to sign and proclaim once he had been liberated.

  Not long had Peter III possessed the throne when by the intrigues of his wife and by her hands he was given poison to drink, and by these means and by force, the vain and spendthrift Catherine seized my hereditary throne. To the day of our accession, she has sent out of my country up to twenty-five million in gold and silver.… And, moreover, her inborn weaknesses have led her to take as a husband her subject Gregory Orlov … for which she will not be able to excuse herself at the Last Judgment.

  Their plan was for Ushakov to present himself at Schlüsselburg pretending to be a courier from Catherine, bringing with him an order for Ivan’s release. Mirovich would read the order to the garrison, arrest the commandant, release the prisoner, and take him by boat down the Neva River to St. Petersburg, where Ivan would proclaim his accession to the troops in the capital. To seal their bond, the two conspirators went to church and swore an oath. Their moment to act would come when the empress departed on her already announced journey to the Baltic provinces. What Mirovich and Ushakov did not know—only Catherine, Panin, and the two guards, Vlasev and Chekin, knew—was that any effort to free the prisoner would result in his death.

  Just before Catherine’s departure from St. Petersburg for the Baltic provinces, Ushakov disappeared. He had been ordered by the College of War to to carry funds to Smolensk and give them to the commander of his regiment there. Mirovich waited for his collaborator to return—he did not. His hat and dagger were discovered on a riverbank; a neighborhood peasant reported that the body of a drowned officer had washed ashore and that they had buried it. The circumstances of his death were unknown.

  Mirovich was dismayed, but, driven by compulsion—and, he may have believed, also bound by his oath—he decided to proceed on his own. He assembled a group of soldiers in the fortress, told them his plan, and asked them to join him. Uneasily, each replied, “If the others agree, I will not refuse.” At half past one on the night of July 4, Mirovich mustered his followers. When the fortress commandant, aroused by the noise, rushed out in his nightshirt, Mirovich clubbed him unconscious with a musket butt. Over one hundred shots were fired between the men in the outer and inner bastions; no one was killed or wounded. Impatient to overcome the defenders of the inner casement, Mirovich dragged up an old cannon; a white flag quickly went up. Mirovich crossed the moat to the inner casement and made his way by torchlight to Ivan’s cell. Outside the door stood the two wardens, Vlasev and Chekin. Mirovich seized Chekin and demanded, “Where is the emperor?” Chekin replied, “We have no emperor. We have an empress.” Pushing him aside, Mirovich stepped into the cell. Ivan’s body lay on the floor in a pool of blood. The two officers had obeyed Panin’s command and done their duty; when they heard shots fired, they had pulled the sleeping prisoner from his bed and run him through eight times with their swords. Ivan died, only half awake, because a man he had never seen had wished to place him on the Russian throne.

  Overcome by what he saw, Mirovich dropped to his knees, embraced the body, and picked up and kissed a bloody hand. His attempted coup having failed, he surrendered. When Ivan’s body was carried to the outer fortress, Mirovich cried, “See, my brothers, this is our emperor, Ivan Antonovich. You are innocent, because you were ignorant of my intentions. I assume responsibility and will take all the punishment upon myself.”

  On regaining consciousness, the Schlüsselburg commandant immediately reported the episode to Nikita Panin, who was at Tsarskoe Selo with Grand Duke Paul. Panin relayed the news by the fastest messenger to Catherine in Riga. She was startled, and then her surprise was followed—she made no attempt to disguise it—by overwhelming relief. “The ways of God are wonderful beyond prediction,” she wrote to Panin. “Providence has given me a clear sign of its favor by putting an end to this shameful affair.” The Prussian ambassador accompanying the empress’s party reported to Frederick that “she left here [Riga] with an air of the greatest serenity and the most composed countenance.”

  It was difficult for her to believe that the brief uprising had been a desperate act of a single man; a game played for these stakes must be the work a conspiracy. She ordered an immediate investigation. Fifty officers and men from the fortress were arrested. Interrogated by a special commission, Mirovich confessed his guilt frankly and refused to incriminate anyone else. Despite his honesty, once Catherine had examined the documents in the dossier and read Mirovich’s manifesto accusing her of being a usurper, of poisoning her husband, and of marrying Gregory Orlov, she put aside any thoughts of leniency. On August 17, an imperial manifesto announced that the investigators had found Ivan insane and that Mirovich would be tried by a special court composed of the Senate, the Holy Synod, the presidents of the colleges of War, the Navy, and Foreign Affairs, and members of the high nobility. In handing Mirovich over for trial, Catherine announced, “As regards the insult to my person, I pardon the accused. But regarding the attack on the general peace and welfare of the country, let the loyal assembly pass judgment.”

  The two men who had taken Ivan’s life were never placed on trial. The court’s assignment was to judge the act committed by Mirovich, and the question of guilt for Ivan’s death was shifted from those who had actually killed the prisoner to the man who had tried to set him free. Mirovich, brought before the court three times and exhorted to implicate others, doggedly reaffirmed that he had acted alone. During the trial, Catherine herself intervened only once: when a member demanded that Mirovich be tortured to extract the names of his accomplices, Catherine ordered that the examination be conducted without torture. Ironically, in some quarters, this decision damaged her reputation, because it bred suspicion that she feared that pain would bring out incriminating disclosures. In fact, Catherine did attempt to suppress any reference to Panin’s secret orders authorizing Ivan’s keepers to kill him in the event of an attempt to free him. The few who became aware of this instruction were told that it was based on orders given by Empress Elizabeth.

  Mirovich’s fate was not in doubt. On September 9, he was condemned to death and sentenced to beheading. Throughout the trial, Mirovich maintained an attitude of composure. This too militated against Catherine; it was said that only the knowledge that he would escape punishment could give a guilty man such calm dignity. Catherine was aware of this, and to rebuff this notion, when the court assigned a death sentence, she, for the first time in her reign, signed it. Mirovich thereby was to become the first Russian executed in the twenty-two years since Empress Elizabeth had vowed never to sign a death warrant.

  When the day came, Mirovich faced death with serenity, so much so that many eyewitness were certain that he would be pardoned at the last minute. Mirovich’s behavior during his final minutes suggested that he thought so, too. He stood next to the block, exuding calm, while the crowd waited, expecting the arrival of a messenger from the empress bringing an order to commute the sentence. When no messenger arrived, Mirovich laid his head on the block. The executioner raised his axe and paused. Still no one came. The axe fell. Mirovich’s remains were left on public display until nightfall, when they were burned.

  The details of the Mirovich conspiracy were never made public. The two guards, Vlasev and Chekin, were rewarded with promotion and seven thousand rubles each for “loyally performing their duty.” The sixteen soldiers who had been under their command guarding Ivan in the inner Schlüsselburg citadel each received one hundred rubles; in return, they pledged not to speak of what they had seen and heard.

  In Russia, public doubts regarding the empress’s role in Ivan’s death could be m
anaged. Within the Russian government, the court, the nobility, and the army, the opinion was that whether or not Catherine bore some responsibility, she had done what had to be done. In Europe, however, where Catherine had been working to present herself as a daughter of the Enlightenment, it was not so easy. Some supported what Catherine had done; others disapproved; some both approved and disapproved. Madame Geoffrin, the leader and hostess of the dominant literary and artistic salon in Paris, wrote to Stanislaus Poniatowski in Poland criticizing Catherine for becoming too involved in the trial and sentence. “The manifesto she [Catherine] has issued on the death of Ivan is ridiculous,” she said. “There was no necessity of her saying anything whatever. Mirovich’s trial was entirely sufficient.” To Catherine herself, with whom she occasionally corresponded, Madame Geoffrin wrote, “It seems to me that if I were on the throne, I should wish to let my actions speak and impose silence on my pen.”

  Offended by these judgments from afar, Catherine fired back:

  I am tempted to say to you that you discuss this manifesto as a blind man discussed colors. It was never composed for foreign powers, but to inform the Russian public of Ivan’s death. It was necessary to say how he died. To have failed to do so would have been to confirm the malicious rumors spread by the ministers of courts which envy me and bear me ill will.… In your country, people find fault with this manifesto; in your country they have also found fault with the Good Lord, and here people sometimes find fault with the French. But it is nonetheless true that here this manifesto and the criminal’s head have put an end to all fault-finding. Therefore, the purpose was accomplished and my manifesto did not fail of its object. Therefore, it was good.