Russian Mysteries I

I have been a Russophile for over forty years now, and a Russian History buff. I have been friendly with the local Russian emigre community  and speak only in the past tense not because of any falling out, but because as is the way of things, I drifted away from my contacts therein. But one of them, name of Ilya, teaches Russian history at the small school attached to the local Orthodox Church, and he told me that my knowledge of the history of his homeland was "good."  I took this as an immense compliment.

Regarding the mysteries I am speaking of  I am only offering my opinion based on what little knowledge, compared perhaps to a trained historian and specialist, I have gathered over the years. This and any companions to it I might feel inclined to offer are opinion piece. The chances are that the truth is lost to history

The first I offer is this: Was Tsar Paul Petrovich the natural son of the one whose patronym he bore, namely Peter III the husband of Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst who later became grand duchess Catherine  Alexeyevna  and then Empress Catherine II?

Many have claimed that he was not as both Catherine and Peter hated each other and the one who became the mad Tsar Paul, so irksome to the Russian nobility that he was murdered in a place coup in 1801, was the son instead of Catherine's lover at the time, who was, if my memory serves correctly one Sergei Saltykov.

But if this is so then the House of Romanov ended in 1762 when Peter III died of Haemorrhoidal
Colic. Of course this cause of death is to me a hilarious irony. He was murdered when Catherine seized the throne, but this was put out as the official story, and a final amusing twist on this story was that when Catherine invited a French philosopher out to visit her in Russia, Diderot, I think, he declined on the grounds that as he himself suffered from piles it would not be safe for him out in Russia. A gracious but fierce rebuke if ever there was one!

Of course the murder of any lawfully ordained monarch is no laughing matter but the historical record can drop some grand ironies from time to time.

So here endeth House Romanov?

Pavel Petrovich resembled his putative father both in looks, unprepossessing, and in character traits, even more unprepossessing, being a military martinet obsessed with trivial detail like the alignment of buttons on a soldiers kit.

But his two parents loathed each other. Peter hated Russia. He regarded his native duchy of Schleswig Holstein as more important to him - he was only heir to the Russian throne as  it was Peter I , the Great\, who started the western practise of marrying off what we call princesses to foreign nobility, in this case one of his  daughters to the Duke of Holstein. Young Karl Peter Ulrich  favoured dolls to real people preferring them while even in bed with his wife. And he once put a mouse on trial for upsetting his toys and hanged it with all military ceremony. Catherine on the other hand made it a point to ingratiate herself with  her Russian surroundings at the court of Elizabeth Petrovna  and inhabitants therein. She embraced Russian culture, was highly intelligent, a patron of the arts, literate, all in  contrast to her boorish boy of a husband.

But I read either in the book Five Empresses by Eugene Anisimov or in a biography of Catherine II by the late  Isabel de Madariaga that a letter was found in archives whereby Catherine II admitted to hardening herself up to do what was repulsive to her and engaged in carnal intercourse with her husband as such was no less than her duty.

Of course this does not prove the issue but in my opinion is satisfactory. But there was on honour in any of it. The son of a father which father  was murdered by agents of his own wife was excluded from power, and he hated Catherine for it with a passion.So on becoming Emperor in 1801 he passed Salic Law forbidding women ever to sit on the Romanov throne. Thus though in the eighteenth century  there was Five Empresses, being four Empresses Regnant and one Empress Regent, Anna Leopoldovna, mother of the baby Ivan VI, the boy whose whose life was unmitigated tragedy. there were none thereafter.

One wonders if Russian history would have been different if Alexei Nikolayevich, son and heir of the Last Tsar of Russia, suffering from haemophilia, could have been passed over for one of his sisters, saving the throne and the nation from 70 years of Bolshevik  horror, if the Salic Law were not in force?