Death of Peter III of Russia

Documents available for reviewing the facts of the Peter III murder mystery include a fragment of the memoirs of Princess Dashkov, who appears to have been a confidante of Catherine and whose sister was the mistress of Catherine's husband Peter III; first-person accounts of Peter's death provided by both partisans and opponents of Peter and Catherine, as well as Catherine's own account in a letter of events surrounding her accession to the throne and the death of Peter; an account of the events by the French charge d'affaires at the time of the power transition; an excerpt from Catherine's memoirs regarding the death, a well as transcripts of Catherine's letters to a Polish count written around the time of the coup d'état that displaced Peter and installed Catherine; and letters from Peter to Catherine at the time of the coup.

What must be understood about all of the documents available for this research is that they all reflect to some degree the self-interest of the person giving information about the Russian succession crisis of 1762. If any single assumption about the death of Peter III can be made, it is that self-intere

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ted to change his religion, marry Elizabeth Vorontsov and shut me up (Bain, 1902e, p. 191). One need not conclude that Catherine's primary object in participating in a coup was to protect herself from being shut up or to take revenge on her faithless husband and his mistress Elizabeth to see that his project of abandoning Russia's ally Austria and concluding a separate peace with Germany in the Seven Years' War could have the effect of putting the Russian military in a state of chaos. In her memoirs, Catherine characterizes Peter's political behavior and plans for Russia as "thoughtless" (1935, p. 276), and she quotes an equerry of Peter's to the effect that his was "a reign of folly; all our time is spent in eating, drinking and madness" (p. 278). In a culture conscious that it was an emerging force in Europe, a tsar who acted to diminish or trivialize that force either psychologically or strategically was bound to place himself in danger of being opposed and deposed. Dashkov's comment (1995, p. 54) that Peter "continued to behave in his usual way" says much about the low regard in which he was held by the aristocracy and the court, which had witnessed Peter III's attitude problem as he grew from a lad of 14 to a "tsarlet" of 3
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3195
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)