Free Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

bitterly. Thereafter, in Kiel, Russia was ridiculed in the boy’s presence as a nation of barbarians.
    This multiplicity of possible futures placed too many demands on Peter. It was almost as if nature had failed him: the child who was the nearest male blood relation of both of the towering adversaries in the Great Northern War—the grandson of the great Peter, that dynamo of human energy, and the grandnephew of the invincible Charles, the most brilliant soldier of his day—was a puny, sickly boy with protruding eyes, a weak chin, and little energy. The life he was forced to lead, the immense legacy he was forced to carry, were too great a burden. In anysubordinate position, he would have performed his duty unflinchingly. Command of a regiment would have delighted him. An empire, even a kingdom, would be too much.
    In 1739, when Peter was eleven, his father died and the boy became, in name at least, Duke of Holstein. In addition to the dukedom, his father’s claim to the Swedish crown passed to the son. His uncle, Prince Adolphus Frederick of Holstein, the Lutheran bishop of Eutin, was appointed his guardian. Obviously, the bishop should have devoted particular care to the upbringing of a boy who was the possible heir to two thrones, but Adolphus was good-natured and lazy, and he shirked this duty. The task was delegated to a group of officers and tutors working under the authority of the grand marshal of the ducal court, a former cavalry officer named Otto Brümmer. This man, a rough, choleric martinet, abused his little sovereign without mercy; the young duke’s French tutor observed that Brümmer was “better suited to train a horse than a prince.” Brümmer assaulted his young charge with harsh punishment, mockery, public humiliation, and malnutrition. When, as frequently happened, the young prince performed poorly at his lessons, Brümmer would appear in the dining room and threaten to punish his pupil as soon as the meal was over. The frightened boy, unable to continue eating, would leave the table, vomiting. Thereupon, his master would order that he be given no food the next day. Throughout that day, the hungry child would be compelled to stand by the door at mealtimes with a picture of a donkey hung around his neck, watching his own courtiers eat. Brümmer routinely beat the boy with a stick or a whip and made him kneel for hours on hard, dried peas until his naked knees were red and swollen. The violence which Brümmer constantly inflicted on him produced a pathetic, twisted child. He became fearful, deceitful, antagonistic, boastful, cowardly, duplicitous, and cruel. He made friends only with the lowest of his servants, those whom he was allowed to strike. He tortured pet animals.
    Brümmer’s senseless regime, his pleasure in tormenting a child who might one day become king of Sweden or emperor of Russia, has never been explained. If by ill-treatment he hoped to steel the boy’s character, the result was the opposite. Life was made too hard for Peter. His mind rebelled at every effort to pound knowledge or obedience into his head by beating and humiliating him. In all the chapters ofPeter’s unhappy life, the worst monster he had to face was Otto Brümmer. The damage inflicted would be revealed in the future.
    Just before his thirteenth birthday, Peter’s life changed. On the night of December 6, 1741, his aunt Elizabeth put an end to the reign of little Tsar Ivan VI and to the regency of Ivan’s mother, Anna Leopoldovna. One of the new empress’s first acts on the throne was to summon her nephew, Peter, her last remaining male kinsman, whom she intended to adopt and proclaim her successor. Her command was obeyed, and her nephew was secretly hurried from Kiel to St. Petersburg; Elizabeth neither consulted nor revealed her intention to anyone until she had the boy in safekeeping. Diplomats, obliged to explain her action to their courts, suggested reasons: they cited the threat of Ivan VI; they noted her