Livonian Cinderella on the Russian throne: how Martha Skavronskaya became Catherine I. Catherine I - biography, information, personal life Martha Skavronskaya

Should the title end with an exclamation point or a question mark? Let each Honorable Reader decide for himself. After reading the article and familiarizing yourself with the facts.

As follows from documents, encyclopedias and monographs, the full name of Catherine the First before the adoption of Orthodoxy was Marta Samuilovna Skavronskaya. Do you, dear reader, know many Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Belarusians whose name is Samuil? I'm sure none. And in the history of these countries there were no such things. But Jews were often called Samuels. Just like Khaimami and Abramami. Well, the name Martha itself (in the Hebrew original Martha in Hebrew מרתה, translated meaning “mistress”, “mistress”) is a name mentioned in the Gospels: Jesus stayed in the house of the sisters Mary and Martha, and therefore the name Martha (letter “f” in German it moved to “t”, but in Russian it remained) included in the calendar. But in this case, the question arises: why was Martha renamed when she was “rebaptized” into Orthodoxy from Lutheranism? They would have left behind the queen the beautiful Russian name Martha, given at birth, and that would have been the end of it. Moreover, the phrase "Empress Martha the First" undoubtedly, it would delight the Russian ear and would play into the hands of the “Tsar Antichrist”! Answer: that’s why the first and patronymic names were replaced because the Russian Empress did not renounce her father Samuil! Remembering her parents perfectly (contrary to the fiction included in textbooks that the wife of Peter the Great did not remember either her mother or her father). Not just remembered, but honored and respected! Well, Empress Marfa Samuilovna Romanova would indeed sound annoying. Not for Peter - that’s why Peter was Great because he could turn everything around if he wanted. Annoying for the educated and uneducated classes of Russia. Including modern ones: not for Peter the Great - for us.

The change of the patronymic name of the First Russian Empress from Samuilovna to Alekseevna was the first precedent in Russian history for assigning a new patronymic name. Contradictory not only to Russian tradition, but also to the fundamental principles of Christianity. In the era of localism, the tsar could grant anything he wanted with the exception of a patronymic - and, therefore, a change in the pedigree. Even God cannot change the past! And then suddenly, for the first time in the Russian State, in violation of all Russian traditions, the patronymic name is being replaced. And not just anyone, but the Empress! Moreover, with the blessing of the Church (obedient, of course, to the Sovereign). This is not some small violation that is corrected by repentance and for which penance is imposed - this is a violation of one of the Founding Principles! Why was this done (and then, according to precedent, this is how it went)? There can be only one answer: so that the patronymic “Samuilovna” disappears. If the church had not done this, it would have been even “worse.” The patronymic “Samuilovna” too clearly revealed the Jewish roots of the Tsar’s wife. And in any case, it raised a very unpleasant question. Which would have to be answered over and over again. Including our glorious time with you.

Before the coronation of the new Empress, by order of the Emperor, a commission headed by Repnin was created to study her origins. And lo and behold! Despite lengthy “efforts,” it was not possible to establish not only who the parents of the crowned queen were, but even what country the queen was from. And this despite the fact that the Empress was not at all weak-minded, as it irrefutably follows from the fact that she “does not remember where she was from.” And here - it’s as if my memory has been lost! And mind!! Either she is from Livonia, or vice versa from Estonia. Later, another, completely different hypothesis about the origin of Catherine the First appeared. Namely: that Marta Skavronskaya is from Belarus and her father worked in the house of Kazimir Sapieha, in Minsk (a family whose members were chancellors in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), and from there he moved to Livonia. And the queen of the Russian State herself - in health, memory and a clear mind - does not remember where she came from. Such is the amnesia of an otherwise absolutely healthy woman when answering the most basic question: in which country was she born? He honors the name of his father, Samuel, remembers and does not renounce his father until death, and where they lived, down to the country, has been completely forgotten. This means, at the same time, what her native language is. Well, she’s just not an empress, but some kind of crazy person. I completely forgot what happened to her before she was 12 years old. This is such a strange “disease” for an otherwise absolutely healthy woman. After all, Martha was sent to Pastor Gluck’s house not as a baby, but as a twelve-year-old girl. Isn’t it madness—not of the First Empress of Russia, but of those who compiled her biography, adjusted to fit History?! Wasn’t the Commission created to study the origins of the Empress not with the goal of finding out the truth, but with the goal of hiding the truth (as has happened more than once in the history of Russia)?? The answer is obvious: well, of course, that’s why the Government Commission was created, to hide the truth!

Marfa Skavronskaya grew up in the house of Pastor Gluck, from which she was first taken in by her husband, then by Sheremetyev. So why not ask the pastor himself, his wife, for whom Martha worked in Marienburg and in whose house she grew up, and the pastor’s children, who spoke Russian and only lived in Moscow? Reading the textbooks, you might think that Pastor Gluck disappeared somewhere without a trace. But this is a lie. Pastor Gluck, having fallen under the sack of Marienburg after the capture of the fortress by Russian troops (about which Field Marshal Sheremetyev proudly reports to Peter: “I sent in all directions to captivate and burn, nothing was left intact, everything was devastated and burned, and your military sovereign’s people took full men and women and robbed several thousand, also work horses, and 20,000 or more cattle... and what they couldn’t lift they pricked and chopped”) survived, like his pupil Martha, among those “not chopped”, but taken “ full of males and females, and several thousand robbers, also work horses, and 20,000 or more livestock", but in a slightly different way. Not by moving higher and higher from Sheremetyev to Menshikov, but from Menshikov to the Sovereign, but by earning respect for himself as an educator. Having been transported to Russia as a prisoner, the pastor founded Russia's first gymnasium in Moscow. Becoming a “chick of Petrov’s nest”, who made a huge contribution to the education of Russians. Well, what, one wonders, was the commission doing if it interrogated anyone except the household members of the house in Moscow in which Marfa Samuilovna was brought up, and the Empress herself?

And here's another thing that's suspicious. To find out the origins of Marfa Samuilovna, her relatives were brought to St. Petersburg, who were immediately awarded count titles. However, immediately after being presented to the Sovereign, both (Karl and Friedrich), by order of the Repnin commission, were expelled from the capital to remote parts of the vast country, because about the origin of the Empress, I quote “lying” end of quote. And why did they lie? Why were their lies about the origin of the Empress classified? And why, as soon as they conferred titles and presented palaces, these Counts were immediately exiled to somewhere far away? They're not Decembrists! The answer is obvious: because they knew the secrets of the Empress’s origin, which were not subject to disclosure. Well, what secrets could not be disclosed if the official version “lowers” the Empress so low that, it would seem, there is nowhere lower? The answer is clear: because the truth about the origin of the Empress was even more unacceptable than the washerwoman and the orphan!

In fact, the commission to investigate the origins of the empress knew and found out everything. And the fact that Catherine’s sisters were married to members of the Jewish Veselovsky family (from the Polish city of Veselov, which at that time had a large Jewish community). And who was the mother - who was the father of the Empress. And the fact that, secretly from the Emperor, the whole of Petersburg was giggling at Catherine’s Jewish relatives. From mouth to mouth in the “newborn capital” it was conveyed how the Empress’s brother Karl Samuilovich was introduced to the Emperor and Empress in the house of the General-in-Chief and Chief Marshal Dmitry Andreevich Shepelev. The Empress almost burned with shame. And Peter, for whom business and professional qualities were more important than origin and religion, said: “There is no need to blush, I recognize him as my brother-in-law, and if he turns out to be of any use, I will make him a man.”

It is documented that the Empress’s mother’s sisters were married to the Veselovskys, who belonged to an influential Jewish family, one of whose members, Abram Veselovsky, rose to the rank of adjutant to Peter and was with the Tsar during the Battle of Poltava (Belozozerskaya N.A. Origin of Catherine the First, Historical Bulletin. No. 1. 1902; V. Anokhin Empress Martha. 2009). Since the queen’s sisters were Jewish, Martha-Catherine’s mother was undoubtedly also a Jew. And also - by birth - she herself, but how could it be otherwise?! Only a commission, whose goal is to eliminate documents and not to study them, could not “find out” who the third sister married, while this is known about Queen Martha’s two aunts. Empress Marfa Samuilovna (renamed Ekaterina Alekseevna upon converting to Orthodoxy) was Jewish by birth. This is absolutely indisputable.

The story of Marfa Skavronskaya, real and not fictional, is truly amazing. Moreover, at every single point of her existence, it was as if an Angel had stretched out a wing over her. A girl from a Jewish family, whose parents either died from an epidemic, or the family was caught in a pogrom (if she lived in Minsk or Ukraine easily - and the Cossacks came to Poland with pogromists: remember Taras Bulba), her relatives brought her to Marienburg, where she was sent to the house of Pastor Gluck, the most enlightened man in the city. And she accepted Lutheranism. At the age of seventeen, the girl was married to a dragoon named Johann Kruse. Who, the very next day after the First Wedding Night (with such a woman!!) went with his regiment to the war with the Russians and died (every episode of life is a frame for a film). After the capture of Marienburg, during which Russian troops burned, killed and robbed, and the inhabitants were lined up to be captured or put to death, the officer who decided the fate of everyone drew attention to the beauty. Like SS officers two and a half centuries later in the same areas: with the only difference that not only Jews were lined up, but people of all faiths. After which the beauty, incapacitated and doomed to death or slavery, goes to Sheremetyev, then to Menshikov, and from him to the Tsar. The girl was not only incredibly charming and sexy. She had the gift of healing, and during Petra’s epileptic seizures, she could calm and heal the sovereign with her touch: a rare gift! During numerous hikes - neither in a tent, nor by the fire, nor at full gallop - she never left her beloved Petenka and did not lag behind him in anything. Becoming a soldier's favorite and a field wife. And after the death of her husband, she was elected by the Empress as the most faithful Companion and Companion to Peter’s Cause. Why is this extraordinary woman, the favorite of soldiers, guards and ordinary people, not favored by the history of the Russian State? For what else, except for Jewish origin!

Well, now let’s turn to the portraits of Empress Catherine the First.

Messrs. Prokhanov and Makashov, nationalists and people without national preferences: take a look at this face. In these eyes. On these lips. In this nose (in official portraits, straightened as soon as possible - and still). Who does the Russian Empress look like: a Baltic woman (as the conclusions of the commission to determine her origin teach)? To the polka? To Belarusian? Or Jewish? Have you seen Baltic, Polish or Belarusian women with such shapes? With such magnificent breasts? With such a nose, eyes and hair? And among Jewish women, it couldn’t be more typical. And this despite the fact that in official portraits the face and body of the person depicted are changed so that it a) looks as August as possible and b) corresponds to the subjects’ ideas about the monarch.

Do you know who the portraits of Marfa Samuilovna Romanova resemble most? To Elina Avraamovna Bystritskaya. Her face turned out to be the most Russian of Russians, because director Gerasimov chose her, the beauty of the beauties of cinema and theater, to play Aksinya in the film adaptation of “Quiet Don”. The most Russian of all Sholokhov’s heroines! The symbol of the Russian woman and the embodiment of the Cossack ideal (as textbooks wrote about the heroine of the Nobel Prize-winning novel) was embodied in a Jewish woman!

Jewish beauties, it turns out, can be symbols of Russian beauty!! The entire Soviet Union fell in love with the Russian images created by the Jewish woman Elina Avraamovna. Just as Peter the Great fell in love with the enchanting beauty and cavalry empress Martha. Possessed, among other virtues, the gift of touch to ease the suffering of a sovereign suffering from convulsions of epilepsy. A Jewish woman who, despite monstrous pressure, refused to betray her father’s memory and not mention his name Samuel as her patronymic. And this is not something out of the ordinary. In a multinational state and a civilized society, this is completely normal. And the message that the queen is Jewish should sound about as neutral as the queen playing the piano, or that the king married a German woman.

But does the title of the article sound as neutral as it is required and expected in a civilized society and a multinational state?

Let's summarize what has been said. The first Russian Empress Catherine the First was Jewish. Empress Elizabeth, daughter of Pyotr Alekseevich Romanov and Marfa Samuilovna Skavronskaya, half Russian and half Jewish, was Jewish by halakhah, having a Jewish mother. And since Martha Samuilovna is the foremother of all Russian tsars, descendants of Peter the Great, in each of them there is as much Russian blood as there is Jewish blood. In Paul the First, great-grandson of Peter the Great and “ Catherine” Samuilovna, one eighth each (and the German is not 7/8, as is believed, but ¾, remaining from the Russian and Jewish “eighths”). Paul's grandson Alexander II has 1/32 Russian and 1/32 Jewish blood. In the grandson of Alexander II, Nicholas II, there is 1/128 Russian and the same 1/128 Jewish. SINCE THE WIVES OF ALL THE AUGUSTIC DESCENDANTS OF PETER THE GREAT WERE GERMAN, THE EMPERORS OF THE RUSSIAN STATE ELIZABETH, PAUL, THE FIRST AND SECOND NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDERS THE FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD WERE EQUALLY OF RUSSIAN AND JEWISH GENES U. It seems to me that the awareness of this fact (seemingly nothing more than amusing and tertiary) for the citizens of the Superpower renamed the Federation will be a little dumbfounded. And it will make you fall into thought.

http://www.echo.msk.ru/blog/ym4/991788-echo/

True, no direct evidence has been provided, but indirect evidence, in my opinion, is quite convincing.
Otherwise, why was it necessary to rewrite her family tree, expel her brothers from the capital, invent the most ridiculous story that the queen supposedly doesn’t remember anything about her parents with whom she lived until she was 12 years old, replace her patronymic name, why was all this “forgotten” ask Pastor Gluck, who raised her, who lived very close - in Moscow, where he founded a gymnasium? Why did they need to invent a shameful legend for her, what shameful things in her past were they trying to hide?
Why did Peter say (and these are really his words): “There is no need to blush, I recognize him as my brother-in-law, and if there is any use in him, I will make him a man”?
Why, exactly, would one blush?
Why were her aunts - the Veselovskys - married to Jews?
(and Veselovo was a Jewish town! and not a Polish city, as Magarshak erroneously writes). Or was Abram Veselovsky also, quite by chance, both Abram and Veselovsky?

Finally - and this is something Magarshak did not write about - Catherine, apparently, herself was not Skavronskaya, but Veselovskaya (and the Veselovskys were Jews). At least this is what Wikipedia says:

However, since the end of the 19th century, a number of historians have questioned this relationship. The fact is pointed out that Peter I called Catherine not Skavronskaya, but Veselevskaya or Vasilevskaya, and in 1710, after the capture of Riga, in a letter to the same Repnin, he called completely different names to “my Catherine’s relatives” - “Yagan-Ionus Vasilevsky (brother of the Empress), Anna Dorothea, also their children." Therefore, other versions of Catherine’s origin have been proposed, according to which she is a cousin, and not the sister of the Skavronskys who appeared in 1726.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_I#.D0.92.D0.BE.D0.BF.D1.80.D0.BE.D1.81_.D0.BE_.D0.BF.D1.80 .D0.BE.D0.B8.D1.81.D1.85.D0.BE.D0.B6.D0.B4.D0.B5.D0.B D.D0.B8.D0.B8

According to another version, until the age of 12, the girl lived with her aunt Anna-Maria Veselovskaya, before ending up in the Gluck family.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_I

Finally, another argument: Skavronskaya is not an Estonian, not Lithuanian or Latvian surname. And there was never a market anywhere about the fact that the queen was Polish.

By the way, Peter himself was a descendant of the Karaite Jew Mordka Kubrat, nicknamed Naryshko, the founder of the Naryshkin family (Peter’s mother bore the surname Naryshkin), and there were many Jews in his circle.

Ancestor of Peter's mother I (Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina), the founder of the Naryshkin family, was the Crimean Karaite Mordka Kubrat, nicknamed Narysh, or Naryshko, who converted to Orthodoxy and became the okolnik of Moscow Prince Ivan III. The Jewish-Karaite origin of the ancestor of Peter the Great was noted by N. M. Karamzin, V. O. Klyuchevsky, V. V. Nekhlyudov, M. A. Miller, M. I. Artamonov, M. S. Shapshal, M. M. Kazas, M. S. Sarach.

Among the entourage of Peter I the following Jews were noticed:

1. Peter's chief vizier is Peter Shafirov, Minister of Foreign Affairs.
2. Abram Veselovsky - secretary and adjutant of Peter.
3. Isaac Veselovsky - Ambassador at Large.
4. Fyodor Veselovsky - diplomat.
5. Anton Manuilovich Devier (Divier, 1682-1745) - the first chief general of police of St. Petersburg (1718-1727 and 1744-1745), count (1726), chief general (1744). Anton Devier was a Portuguese Jew who settled in Holland and was accepted into the service by Peter I
6. First postal director F. Yu. Ash.
7. The Tsar’s valet, Privy Councilor P. Wulf.
8. Privy Councilor, head of secret investigation A. Vivier.
9. The emperor’s favorite jester was the Sephardic Jew Jan d’Acosta (Jan Lacoste; 1665-1740), whom Peter bestowed with the amusing title of Samoyed king and gave him Sommers Island in the Gulf of Finland.
10. Many researchers consider the statesman and military leader Abram Petrovich Hannibal, Pushkin’s ancestor, to be an Ethiopian Jew.

Well, and, apparently, a wife and children. In my opinion, this is a serious mishpuha.
So if we are to look for a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, then here, and not in the first Soviet government, where anti-Semites regularly look for it, although there were only 2 Jews there.

P.S. The funniest thing, by the way, is that Isaac Veselovsky, a small-town Jew from Poland, was assigned by Elizabeth to the heir to the throne, Peter III, as a teacher Russian language:) And his brother was a curator at Moscow State University.

P.P.S. . It turns out that Yekaterininburg (Sverdlovsk) bore only Jewish names :)

P.P.P.S. And here is another famous Jewish woman with the same type of face:

Girl illuminated by the sun

But in this case, the question arises: why was Martha renamed when she was “rebaptized” into Orthodoxy from Lutheranism? They would have left behind the queen the beautiful Russian name Martha, given at birth, and that would have been the end of it. Moreover, the phrase “Empress Martha the First” would undoubtedly delight the Russian ear and would be beneficial to the “king of the Antichrist”! Answer: that’s why the first and patronymic names were replaced because the Russian Empress did not renounce her father Samuil! Remembering her parents perfectly (contrary to the fiction included in textbooks that the wife of Peter the Great did not remember either her mother or her father). Not just remembered, but honored and respected! Well, Empress Marfa Samuilovna Romanova would indeed sound annoying. Not for Peter - that’s why Peter was Great because he could turn everything around if he wanted. Annoying for the educated and uneducated classes of Russia. Including modern ones: not to Peter the Great - to us. The change of the patronymic name of the First Russian Empress from Samuilovna to Alekseevna was the first precedent in Russian history for assigning a new patronymic name. Contradictory not only to Russian tradition, but also to the fundamental principles of Christianity.

In the era of localism, the tsar could grant anything he wanted with the exception of a patronymic - and, therefore, a change in the pedigree. Even God cannot change the past! And then suddenly, for the first time in the Russian State, in violation of all Russian traditions, the patronymic name is being replaced. And not just anyone, but the Empress! Moreover, with the blessing of the Church (obedient, of course, to the Sovereign). This is not some small violation that is corrected by repentance and for which penance is imposed - this is a violation of one of the Founding Principles! Why was this done (and then, according to precedent, this is how it went)? There can be only one answer: so that the patronymic “Samuilovna” disappears. If the church had not done this, it would have been even “worse.” The patronymic “Samuilovna” too clearly revealed the Jewish roots of the Tsar’s wife. And in any case, it raised a very unpleasant question. Which would have to be answered over and over again. Including our glorious time with you.

Before the coronation of the new Empress, by order of the Emperor, a commission headed by Repnin was created to study her origins (!!). And lo and behold! Despite lengthy “efforts,” it was not possible to establish not only who the parents of the crowned queen were, but even what country the queen was from. And this despite the fact that the Empress was not at all weak-minded, as it irrefutably follows from the fact that she “does not remember where she was from.” And here - it’s as if my memory has been lost! And mind!! Either she is from Livonia, or vice versa from Estonia. Later, another, completely different hypothesis about the origin of Catherine the First appeared. Namely: that Marta Skavronskaya came from Belarus and her father worked in the house of Kazimir Sapieha in Minsk (a family whose members were chancellors in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), and from there he moved to Livonia. And the queen of the Russian State herself - in health, memory and a clear mind - does not remember where she came from. Such is the amnesia of an otherwise absolutely healthy woman when answering the most basic question: in which country was she born? He honors the name of his father, Samuel, remembers and does not renounce his father until death, and where they lived, down to the country, has been completely forgotten. This means, at the same time, what her native language is. Well, she’s just not an empress, but some kind of crazy person. I completely forgot what happened to her before she was 12 years old. This is such a strange “disease” for an otherwise absolutely healthy woman.

After all, Martha was sent to Pastor Gluck’s house not as a baby, but as a twelve-year-old girl. Isn’t it madness—not of the First Empress of Russia, but of those who compiled her biography, adjusted to fit History?! Wasn’t the Commission created to study the origins of the Empress not with the goal of finding out the truth, but with the goal of hiding the truth (as has happened more than once in the history of Russia)?? The answer is obvious: well, of course, that’s why the Government Commission was created, to hide the truth! Marfa Skavronskaya grew up in the house of Pastor Gluck, from which she was first taken in by her husband, then by Sheremetyev. So why not ask the pastor himself, his wife, for whom Martha worked in Marienburg and in whose house she grew up, and the pastor’s children, who spoke Russian and only lived in Moscow?

Reading the textbooks, you might think that Pastor Gluck disappeared somewhere without a trace. But this is a lie. Pastor Gluck, having fallen under the sack of Marienburg after the capture of the fortress by Russian troops (about which Field Marshal Sheremetyev proudly reports to Peter: “I sent in all directions to capture and burn, there was nothing left, everything was devastated and burned, and your military sovereign’s people took it in full male and female and kill several thousand, also work horses, and cattle with 20,000 or more... and what they could not lift was pricked and chopped") survived, like his pupil Martha, among those “not chopped”, but taken “in full male and female and robber several thousand, also work horses, and livestock from 20,000 or more,” but in a slightly different way. Not by moving higher and higher from Sheremetyev to Menshikov, but from Menshikov to the Sovereign, but by earning respect for himself as an educator. Having been transported to Russia as a prisoner, the pastor founded Russia's first gymnasium in Moscow. Becoming a “chick of Petrov’s nest”, who made a huge contribution to the education of Russians.

Well, what, one wonders, was the commission doing if it interrogated anyone except the household members of the house in Moscow in which Marfa Samuilovna was brought up, and the Empress herself? And here's another thing that's suspicious. To find out the origins of Marfa Samuilovna, her relatives were brought to St. Petersburg, who were immediately awarded count titles. However, immediately after being presented to the Sovereign, both (Karl and Friedrich), by order of the Repnin commission, were expelled from the capital to remote parts of the vast country, because about the origin of the Empress, I quote “lying” end of quote. And why did they lie? Why were their lies about the origin of the Empress classified? And why, as soon as they conferred titles and presented palaces, these Counts were immediately exiled to somewhere far away? They're not Decembrists! The answer is obvious: because they knew the secrets of the Empress’s origin, which were not subject to disclosure. Well, what secrets could not be disclosed if the official version “lowers” the Empress so low that, it would seem, there is nowhere lower? The answer is clear: because the truth about the origin of the Empress was even more unacceptable than the washerwoman and the orphan!

Only a commission, whose goal is to eliminate documents and not to study them, could not “find out” who the third sister married, while this is known about Queen Martha’s two aunts. Empress Marfa Samuilovna (renamed Ekaterina Alekseevna upon converting to Orthodoxy) was Jewish by birth. This is absolutely indisputable.

Why is this extraordinary woman, the favorite of soldiers, guards and ordinary people, not favored by the history of the Russian State? For what else, except for Jewish origin!

Well, now let’s turn to the portraits of Empress Catherine the First. Messrs. Prokhanov and Mokashov, nationalists and people without national preferences: take a look at this face. In these eyes. On these lips. In this nose (in official portraits, straightened as soon as possible - and still). Who does the Russian Empress look like: a Baltic woman (as the conclusions of the commission to determine her origin teach)? To the polka? To Belarusian? Or Jewish? Have you seen Baltic, Polish or Belarusian women with such shapes? With such magnificent breasts? With such a nose, eyes and hair? And among Jewish women, it couldn’t be more typical. And this despite the fact that in official portraits the face and body of the person depicted are changed so that it a) looks as August as possible and b) corresponds to the subjects’ ideas about the monarch. Do you know who the portraits of Marfa Samuilovna Romanova resemble most? To Elina Avraamovna Bystritskaya. Her face turned out to be the most Russian of Russians, because director Gerasimov chose her, the beauty of the beauties of cinema and theater, to play Aksinya in the film adaptation of “Quiet Don”. The most Russian of all Sholokhov’s heroines!

The symbol of the Russian woman and the embodiment of the Cossack ideal (as textbooks wrote about the heroine of the Nobel Prize-winning novel) was embodied in a Jewish woman! Jewish beauties, it turns out, can be symbols of Russian beauty!! The entire Soviet Union fell in love with the Russian images created by the Jewish woman Elina Avraamovna. Just as Peter the Great fell in love with the enchanting beauty and cavalry empress Martha. Possessed, among other virtues, the gift of touch to ease the suffering of a sovereign suffering from convulsions of epilepsy. A Jewish woman who, despite monstrous pressure, refused to betray her father’s memory and not mention his name Samuel as her patronymic.

And this is not something out of the ordinary. In a multinational state and a civilized society, this is completely normal. And the message that the queen is Jewish should sound about as neutral as the queen playing the piano, or that the king married a German woman. But does the title of the article sound as neutral as it is required and expected in a civilized society and a multinational state?

SINCE THE WIVES OF ALL THE AUGUSTIC DESCENDANTS OF PETER THE GREAT WERE GERMAN, THE EMPERORS OF THE RUSSIAN STATE ELIZABETH, PAUL, THE FIRST AND SECOND NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDERS THE FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD WERE EQUALLY OF RUSSIAN AND JEWISH GENES U.

And if we remember that the patronymic of Alexei Mikhailovich (to the son of Peter, who became the Great Tsar, but in fact was not similar either in appearance or behavior) is disputed by the most serious historians, attributing paternity to a person of non-Russian origin (let’s not take his name in vain), then it turns out that There is more Jewish blood in the blood of all Russian tsars since Peter the Great than Russian. It seems to me that the awareness of this fact (it would seem nothing more than amusing and tertiary) for the citizens of the Superpower renamed the Federation will be a little dumbfounded. And it will make you fall into thought.

Ekaterina Alekseevna Marta Samuilovna Skavronskaya


Coronation:
Predecessor:
Successor:
Birth:

Buried:	Peter and Paul Cathedral, St. Petersburg
Dynasty:	Romanovs (by marriage)
	According to the most common version, Samuil Skavronsky
	Assum. (Anna-)Dorothea Hahn
	1) Johann Kruse (or Rabe) 2) Peter I
	Anna Petrovna Elizaveta Petrovna Pyotr Petrovich Natalya Petrovna the rest died in infancy
Monogram:

early years

Question about origin

1702-1725

Mistress of Peter I

Wife of Peter I

Rise to power

Governing body. 1725-1727

Foreign policy

End of reign

Question of succession to the throne

Will

Catherine I (Marta Skavronskaya, ; 1684-1727) - Russian empress from 1721 as the wife of the reigning emperor, from 1725 as the reigning empress; second wife of Peter I the Great, mother of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.

According to the most common version, Catherine’s real name is Marta Samuilovna Skavronskaya, later baptized by Peter I under a new name Ekaterina Alekseevna Mikhailova. She was born into the family of a Baltic (Latvian) peasant from the outskirts of Kegums, captured by Russian troops, became the mistress of Peter I, then his wife and the ruling empress of Russia. In her honor, Peter I established the Order of St. Catherine (in 1713) and named the city of Yekaterinburg in the Urals (in 1723). The Catherine Palace in Tsarskoe Selo (built under her daughter Elizabeth) also bears the name of Catherine I.

early years

Information about the early life of Catherine I is contained mainly in historical anecdotes and is not sufficiently reliable.

The most common version is this. She was born on the territory of modern Latvia, in the historical region of Vidzeme, which was part of Swedish Livonia at the turn of the 17th-18th centuries.

Martha's parents died of the plague in 1684, and her uncle sent the girl to the house of the Lutheran pastor Ernst Gluck, famous for his translation of the Bible into Latvian (after the capture of Marienburg by Russian troops, Gluck, as a learned man, was taken into Russian service, founded the first gymnasium in Moscow, taught languages and wrote poetry in Russian). Marta was used in the house as a servant; she was not taught literacy.

According to the version set out in the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary, Martha’s mother, having become a widow, gave her daughter to serve in the family of Pastor Gluck, where she was allegedly taught literacy and handicrafts.

According to another version, until the age of 12, Katerina lived with her aunt Anna-Maria Veselovskaya, before ending up in the Gluck family.

At the age of 17, Martha was married to a Swedish dragoon named Johan Cruse, just before the Russian advance on Marienburg. A day or two after the wedding, trumpeter Johann and his regiment left for the war and, according to the widespread version, went missing.

Question about origin

The search for Catherine's roots in the Baltic states, carried out after the death of Peter I, showed that Catherine had two sisters - Anna and Christina, and two brothers - Karl and Friedrich. Catherine moved their families to St. Petersburg in 1726 (Karl Skavronsky moved even earlier, see Skavronsky). According to A.I. Repnin, who led the search, Khristina Skavronskaya and her husband “ they lie", both of them " people are stupid and drunk", Repnin offered to send them " somewhere else, so that there are no big lies from them" Catherine awarded Charles and Frederick the dignity of counts in January 1727, without calling them her brothers. In the will of Catherine I, the Skavronskys are vaguely named “ close relatives of her own surname" Under Elizaveta Petrovna, the daughter of Catherine, immediately after her accession to the throne in 1741, the children of Christina (Gendrikovs) and the children of Anna (Efimovskys) were also elevated to the dignity of counts. Subsequently, the official version became that Anna, Christina, Karl and Friedrich were Catherine’s siblings, children of Samuil Skavronsky.

However, since the end of the 19th century, a number of historians have questioned this relationship. The fact is pointed out that Peter I called Catherine not Skavronskaya, but Veselevskaya or Vasilevskaya, and in 1710, after the capture of Riga, in a letter to the same Repnin, he called completely different names to “my Katerina’s relatives” - “Yagan-Ionus Vasilevsky, Anna-Dorothea , also their children." Therefore, other versions of Catherine’s origin have been proposed, according to which she is a cousin, and not the sister of the Skavronskys who appeared in 1726.

In connection with Catherine I, another surname is called - Rabe. According to some sources, Rabe (and not Kruse) is the surname of her first husband, a dragoon (this version found its way into fiction, for example, the novel by A. N. Tolstoy “Peter the Great”), according to others, this is her maiden name, and someone Johann Rabe was her father.

1702-1725

Mistress of Peter I

On August 25, 1702, during the Great Northern War, the army of the Russian Field Marshal Sheremetev, fighting against the Swedes in Livonia, took the Swedish fortress of Marienburg (now Aluksne, Latvia). Sheremetev, taking advantage of the departure of the main Swedish army to Poland, subjected the region to merciless devastation. As he himself reported to Tsar Peter I at the end of 1702:

In Marienburg, Sheremetev captured 400 inhabitants. When Pastor Gluck, accompanied by his servants, came to intercede about the fate of the residents, Sheremetev noticed the maid Martha Kruse and forcibly took her as his mistress. After a short time, around August 1703, Prince Menshikov, a friend and comrade-in-arms of Peter I, became its owner. So says the Frenchman Franz Villebois, who had been in Russian service in the navy since 1698 and was married to the daughter of Pastor Gluck. Villebois's story is confirmed by another source, notes from 1724 from the archives of the Duke of Oldenburg. Based on these notes, Sheremetev sent Pastor Gluck and all the inhabitants of the Marienburg fortress to Moscow, but kept Marta for himself. Menshikov, having taken Marta from the elderly field marshal a few months later, had a strong falling out with Sheremetev.

The Scotsman Peter Henry Bruce in his Memoirs presents the story (according to others) in a more favorable light for Catherine I. Martha was taken by Dragoon Colonel Baur (who later became a general):

“[Baur] immediately ordered her to be placed in his house, which entrusted her to his care, giving her the right to dispose of all the servants, and she soon fell in love with the new manager for her manner of housekeeping. The general later often said that his house was never as tidy as during the days of her stay there. Prince Menshikov, who was his patron, once saw her at the general’s, also noting something extraordinary in her appearance and manners. Having asked who she was and whether she knew how to cook, he heard in response the story he had just told, to which the general added a few words about her worthy position in his house. The prince said that this is the kind of woman he really needs now, because he himself is now being served very poorly. To this the general replied that he owed too much to the prince not to immediately fulfill what he had just thought about - and immediately calling Catherine, he said that before her was Prince Menshikov, who needed just such a maid like her, and that the prince will do everything within his power to become, like himself, her friend, adding that he respects her too much not to give her the opportunity to receive her share of honor and good fate.”

In the fall of 1703, during one of his regular visits to Menshikov in St. Petersburg, Peter I met Martha and soon made her his mistress, calling her Katerina Vasilevskaya in letters (possibly after her aunt’s last name). Franz Villebois recounts their first meeting as follows:

“This is how things stood when the tsar, traveling by mail from St. Petersburg, which was then called Nyenschanz, or Noteburg, to Livonia to go further, stopped at his favorite Menshikov, where he noticed Catherine among the servants who served at the table. He asked where it came from and how he acquired it. And, having spoken quietly in the ear with this favorite, who answered him only with a nod of his head, he looked at Catherine for a long time and, teasing her, said that she was smart, and ended his humorous speech by telling her, when she went to bed, to carry a candle to his room. It was an order spoken in a joking tone, but brooking no objection. Menshikov took this for granted, and the beauty, devoted to her master, spent the night in the king's room... The next day the king left in the morning to continue his journey. He returned to his favorite what he had lent him. The satisfaction the king received from his night conversation with Catherine cannot be judged by the generosity he showed. She limited herself to only one ducat, which is equal in value to half of one louis d’or (10 francs), which he put into her hand in a military manner when parting.”

In 1704, Katerina gives birth to her first child, named Peter, and the following year, Paul (both soon died).

In 1705, Peter sent Katerina to the village of Preobrazhenskoye near Moscow, to the house of his sister Princess Natalya Alekseevna, where Katerina Vasilevskaya learned Russian literacy, and, in addition, became friends with the Menshikov family.

When Katerina was baptized into Orthodoxy (1707 or 1708), she changed her name to Ekaterina Alekseevna Mikhailova, since her godfather was Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich, and the surname Mikhailov was used by Peter I himself if he wanted to remain incognito.

In January 1710, Peter organized a triumphal procession to Moscow on the occasion of the Poltava victory; thousands of Swedish prisoners were held at the parade, among whom, according to the story of Franz Villebois, was Johann Kruse. Johann confessed about his wife, who gave birth to one after another of children to the Russian Tsar, and was immediately exiled to a remote corner of Siberia, where he died in 1721. According to Franz Villebois, the existence of Catherine's living legal husband during the years of the birth of Anna (1708) and Elizabeth (1709) was later used by opposing factions in disputes about the right to the throne after the death of Catherine I. According to notes from the Duchy of Oldenburg, the Swedish dragoon Kruse died in 1705, however one must keep in mind the interest of the German dukes in the legitimacy of the birth of the daughters of Peter, Anna and Elizabeth, for whom grooms were sought among the German appanage rulers.

Wife of Peter I

Even before her legal marriage to Peter, Katerina gave birth to daughters Anna and Elizabeth. Katerina alone could cope with the king in his fits of anger; she knew how to calm Peter’s attacks of convulsive headaches with affection and patient attention. According to Bassevich's memoirs:

In the spring of 1711, Peter, having become attached to a charming and easy-tempered former servant, ordered Catherine to be considered his wife and took her on the Prut campaign, which was unlucky for the Russian army. The Danish envoy Just Yul, from the words of the princesses (nieces of Peter I), wrote down this story as follows:

“In the evening, shortly before his departure, the tsar called them, his sister Natalya Alekseevna, to a house in Preobrazhenskaya Sloboda. There he took his hand and placed his mistress Ekaterina Alekseevna in front of them. For the future, the tsar said, they should consider her his legitimate wife and Russian queen. Since now, due to the urgent need to go to the army, he cannot marry her, he takes her with him to do this on occasion in more free time. At the same time, the king made it clear that if he died before he could get married, then after his death they would have to look at her as his legal wife. After that, they all congratulated (Ekaterina Alekseevna) and kissed her hand.”

In Moldavia in July 1711, 190 thousand Turks and Crimean Tatars pressed the 38 thousand-strong Russian army to the river, completely surrounding them with numerous cavalry. Catherine went on a long hike while she was 7 months pregnant. According to a well-known legend, she took off all her jewelry to bribe it to the Turkish commander. Peter I was able to conclude the Prut Peace and, sacrificing Russian conquests in the south, lead the army out of encirclement. The Danish envoy Just Yul, who was with the Russian army after its release from encirclement, does not report such an act of Catherine, but says that the queen (as everyone now called Catherine) distributed her jewelry to the officers for safekeeping and then collected them. The notes of Brigadier Moro de Braze also do not mention bribing the vizier with Catherine’s jewelry, although the author (Brigadier Moro de Braze) knew from the words of the Turkish pashas about the exact amount of government funds allocated for bribes to the Turks.

The official wedding of Peter I with Ekaterina Alekseevna took place on February 19, 1712 in the Church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia in St. Petersburg. In 1713, Peter I, in honor of the worthy behavior of his wife during the unsuccessful Prut campaign, established the Order of St. Catherine and personally conferred the insignia of the order on his wife on November 24, 1714. Initially it was called the Order of Liberation and was intended only for Catherine. Peter I remembered Catherine’s merits during the Prut campaign in his manifesto on the coronation of his wife dated November 15, 1723:

In his personal letters, the tsar showed unusual tenderness for his wife: “ Katerinushka, my friend, hello! I hear that you are bored, and I am not bored either...“Ekaterina Alekseevna gave birth to 11 children to her husband, but almost all of them died in childhood, except for Anna and Elizaveta. Elizabeth later became empress (reigned 1741-1762), and Anna's direct descendants ruled Russia after Elizabeth's death, from 1762 to 1917. One of the sons who died in childhood, Pyotr Petrovich, after the abdication of Alexei Petrovich (Peter's eldest son from Evdokia Lopukhina) was considered from February 1718 until his death in 1719, he was the official heir to the Russian throne.

Foreigners who closely followed the Russian court noted the tsar’s affection for his wife. Bassevich writes about their relationship in 1721:

In the fall of 1724, Peter I suspected the empress of adultery with her chamberlain Mons, whom he executed for another reason. He stopped talking to her and she was denied access to him. Only once, at the request of his daughter Elizabeth, Peter agreed to dine with Catherine, who had been his inseparable friend for 20 years. Only at death did Peter reconcile with his wife. In January 1725, Catherine spent all her time at the bedside of the dying sovereign; he died in her arms.

Descendants of Peter I from Catherine I

	Year of birth	Year of death	Note
Anna Petrovna			In 1725 she married the German Duke Karl Friedrich; went to Kiel, where she gave birth to a son, Karl Peter Ulrich (later Russian Emperor Peter III).
Elizaveta Petrovna			Russian Empress since 1741.
Natalia Petrovna
Margarita Petrovna
Petr Petrovich			He was considered the official heir to the crown from 1718 until his death.
Pavel Petrovich
Natalia Petrovna

Rise to power

With a manifesto dated November 15, 1723, Peter announced the future coronation of Catherine as a sign of her special merits.

On May 7 (18), 1724, Peter crowned Catherine empress in the Moscow Assumption Cathedral. This was the second coronation of a female sovereign's wife in Rus' (after the coronation of Marina Mnishek by False Dmitry I in 1605).

By his law of February 5, 1722, Peter abolished the previous order of succession to the throne by a direct descendant in the male line, replacing it with the personal appointment of the reigning sovereign. According to the Decree of 1722, any person who, in the opinion of the sovereign, was worthy to lead the state could become a successor. Peter died in the early morning of January 28 (February 8), 1725, without having time to name a successor and leaving no sons. Due to the absence of a strictly defined order of succession to the throne, the throne of Russia was left to chance, and subsequent times went down in history as the era of palace coups.

The popular majority was for the only male representative of the dynasty - Grand Duke Peter Alekseevich, the grandson of Peter I from his eldest son Alexei, who died during interrogations. Peter Alekseevich was supported by well-born nobility, who considered him the only legitimate heir, born from a marriage worthy of royal blood. Count Tolstoy, Prosecutor General Yaguzhinsky, Chancellor Count Golovkin and Menshikov, at the head of the serving nobility, could not hope to preserve the power received from Peter I under Peter Alekseevich; on the other hand, the coronation of the empress could be interpreted as Peter's indirect indication of the heiress. When Catherine saw that there was no longer hope for her husband’s recovery, she instructed Menshikov and Tolstoy to act in favor of their rights. The guard was devoted to the point of adoration for the dying emperor; She transferred this affection to Catherine as well.

Guard officers from the Preobrazhensky Regiment appeared at the Senate meeting, knocking down the door to the room. They openly declared that they would break the heads of the old boyars if they went against their mother Catherine. Suddenly a drumbeat was heard from the square: it turned out that both guards regiments were lined up under arms in front of the palace. Prince Field Marshal Repnin, president of the military college, angrily asked: “ Who dared to bring shelves here without my knowledge? Am I not a field marshal?“Buturlin, commander of the Semenovsky regiment, answered Repnin that he called up the regiments at the behest of the empress, whom all subjects are obliged to obey, “ not excluding you“he added impressively.

Thanks to the support of the guards regiments, it was possible to convince all of Catherine’s opponents to give her their vote. The Senate “unanimously” elevated her to the throne, calling her “ the Most Serene, Most Sovereign Great Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna, Autocrat of the All-Russian” and in justification, announcing the will of the late sovereign interpreted by the Senate. The people were very surprised by the accession of a woman to the throne for the first time in Russian history, but there was no unrest.

On January 28 (February 8), 1725, Catherine I ascended the throne of the Russian Empire thanks to the support of the guards and nobles who rose to power under Peter. In Russia, the era of the reign of empresses began, when until the end of the 18th century, only women ruled, with the exception of a few years.

Governing body. 1725-1727

The actual power in Catherine's reign was concentrated by the prince and field marshal Menshikov, as well as the Supreme Privy Council. Catherine, on the other hand, was completely satisfied with the role of the first mistress of Tsarskoye Selo, relying on her advisers in matters of government. She was only interested in the affairs of the fleet - Peter’s love for the sea also touched her.

The nobles wanted to rule with a woman and now they really achieved their goal.

From “History of Russia” by S.M. Solovyova:

Under Peter, she shone not with her own light, but borrowed from the great man whose companion she was; she had the ability to hold herself at a certain height, to show attention and sympathy for the movement taking place around her; she was privy to all the secrets, the secrets of the personal relationships of the people around her. Her situation and fear for the future kept her mental and moral strength in constant and strong tension. But the climbing plant reached its height only thanks to the giant of the forests around which it twined; the giant was slain - and the weak plant spread out on the ground. Catherine retained knowledge of persons and relationships between them, retained the habit of making her way between these relationships; but she did not have the proper attention to matters, especially internal ones, and their details, nor the ability to initiate and direct.

On the initiative of Count P. A. Tolstoy, a new body of state power was created in February 1726, the Supreme Privy Council, where a narrow circle of top dignitaries could govern the Russian Empire under the formal chairmanship of the semi-literate empress. The Council included Field Marshal General Prince Menshikov, Admiral General Count Apraksin, Chancellor Count Golovkin, Count Tolstoy, Prince Golitsyn, Vice-Chancellor Baron Osterman. Of the six members of the new institution, only Prince D. M. Golitsyn came from well-born nobles. In April, the young Prince I. A. Dolgoruky was admitted to the Supreme Privy Council.

As a result, the role of the Senate sharply declined, although it was renamed the "High Senate". The leaders decided all important matters together, and Catherine only signed the papers they sent. The Supreme Council liquidated the local authorities created by Peter and restored the power of the governor.

The long wars that Russia waged affected the country's finances. Due to crop failures, bread prices rose, and discontent grew in the country. To prevent uprisings, the poll tax was reduced (from 74 to 70 kopecks).

The activities of Catherine's government were limited mainly to minor issues, while embezzlement, arbitrariness and abuse flourished. There was no talk of any reforms or transformations; there was a struggle for power within the Council.

Despite this, the common people loved the empress because she had compassion for the unfortunate and willingly helped them. Soldiers, sailors and artisans were constantly crowding in its halls: some were looking for help, others asked the queen to be their godfather. She never refused anyone and usually gave each of her godsons several ducats.

During the reign of Catherine I, the Academy of Sciences was opened, the expedition of V. Bering was organized, and the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky was established.

Foreign policy

During the 2 years of the reign of Catherine I, Russia did not wage major wars, only a separate corps under the command of Prince Dolgorukov operated in the Caucasus, trying to recapture Persian territories while Persia was in a state of turmoil, and Turkey unsuccessfully fought the Persian rebels. In Europe, matters were limited to diplomatic activity in defending the interests of the Duke of Holstein (husband of Anna Petrovna, daughter of Catherine I) against Denmark.

Russia fought a war with the Turks in Dagestan and Georgia. Catherine's plan to return Schleswig, which had been taken by the Danes, to the Duke of Holstein led to military action against Russia by Denmark and England. Russia tried to pursue a peaceful policy towards Poland.

End of reign

Catherine I did not rule for long. Balls, celebrations, feasts and revelries, which followed in a continuous series, undermined her health, and on April 10, 1727, the empress fell ill. The cough, previously weak, began to intensify, a fever developed, the patient began to weaken day by day, and signs of lung damage appeared. Therefore, the government had to urgently resolve the issue of succession to the throne.

Question of succession to the throne

Catherine was easily elevated to the throne due to Peter Alekseevich’s minority, but in Russian society there were strong sentiments in favor of the maturing Peter, the direct heir to the Romanov dynasty in the male line. The Empress, alarmed by anonymous letters directed against the decree of Peter I of 1722 (according to which the reigning sovereign had the right to appoint any successor), turned to her advisers for help.

Vice-Chancellor Osterman proposed to reconcile the interests of the well-born and new serving nobility to marry Grand Duke Peter Alekseevich to Princess Elizabeth Petrovna, Catherine’s daughter. The obstacle was their close relationship; Elizabeth was Peter’s aunt. In order to avoid a possible divorce in the future, Osterman proposed, when concluding a marriage, to more strictly define the order of succession to the throne.

Catherine, wanting to appoint her daughter Elizabeth (according to other sources, Anna) as heir, did not dare to accept Osterman’s project and continued to insist on her right to appoint a successor for herself, hoping that over time the issue would be resolved. Meanwhile, the main supporter of Catherine Menshikov, appreciating the prospect of Peter becoming the Russian emperor, moved to the camp of his adherents. Moreover, Menshikov managed to obtain Catherine’s consent to the marriage of Maria, Menshikov’s daughter, with Pyotr Alekseevich.

The party led by Tolstoy, which most contributed to Catherine’s enthronement, could hope that Catherine would live for a long time and circumstances might change in their favor. Osterman threatened popular uprisings for Peter as the only legitimate heir; they could answer him that the army was on Catherine’s side, that it would also be on the side of her daughters. Catherine, for her part, tried to win the affection of the army with her attention.

Menshikov managed to take advantage of the illness of Catherine, who signed on May 6, 1727, a few hours before her death, an indictment against Menshikov’s enemies, and on the same day Count Tolstoy and other high-ranking enemies of Menshikov were sent into exile.

Will

When the Empress became dangerously ill, members of the highest government institutions: the Supreme Privy Council, the Senate and the Synod gathered in the palace to resolve the issue of a successor. Guards officers were also invited. The Supreme Council decisively insisted on the appointment of the young grandson of Peter I, Pyotr Alekseevich, as heir. Just before his death, Bassevich hastily drew up a will, signed by Elizabeth instead of the infirm mother-empress. According to the will, the throne was inherited by the grandson of Peter I, Pyotr Alekseevich.

Subsequent articles related to the guardianship of the minor emperor; determined the power of the Supreme Council, the order of succession to the throne in the event of the death of Peter Alekseevich. According to the will, in the event of Peter’s childless death, Anna Petrovna and her descendants (“descendants”) became his successor, then her younger sister Elizaveta Petrovna and her descendants, and only then Peter II’s sister Natalya Alekseevna. At the same time, those contenders for the throne who were not of the Orthodox faith or who had already reigned abroad were excluded from the order of succession. It was to the will of Catherine I that 14 years later Elizaveta Petrovna referred to in a manifesto outlining her rights to the throne after the palace coup of 1741.

The 11th article of the will amazed those present. It commanded all nobles to promote the betrothal of Pyotr Alekseevich to one of the daughters of Prince Menshikov, and then, upon reaching adulthood, to promote their marriage. Literally: “In the same way, our crown princesses and the government administration are trying to arrange a marriage between his love [Grand Duke Peter] and one princess of Prince Menshikov.”

Such an article clearly indicated the person who participated in the drawing up of the will, however, for Russian society, Pyotr Alekseevich’s right to the throne - the main article of the will - was indisputable, and no unrest arose.

Later, Empress Anna Ioannovna ordered Chancellor Golovkin to burn the spiritual will of Catherine I. He complied, nevertheless keeping a copy of the will.

Peter I and Marta Skavronskaya

Undoubtedly, Peter I was and remains the most extraordinary and charismatic monarch in the history of the Russian state. No wonder they call him the Great. His merits in the history of the country were great - it was he who “cut a window to Europe”, won great battles and founded the beautiful city named after him - St. Petersburg.

Portrait of Peter I. Jean-Marc Nattier

The reformer king built ships with his own hands, forged iron, and he forged and found his destiny himself. And, despite the evil and at times obscene gossip behind his back, Peter himself chose a woman with whom he not only cohabited, like many of his contemporaries, which would have been understandable to many, but elevated a simple girl, who did not even have a noble rank, to the throne of the Russian Empire .

Marta Skavronskaya, the future Empress Catherine I, about whose life before the appearance of Peter we know not so much, was born on the territory of modern Estonia. In those days, the region was called Livonia and was part of Sweden. Martha was an orphan who lost her parents at an early age and grew up in her aunt’s family. At fifteen, the girl entered the service of pastor Ernst Gluck, and at seventeen she got married.

She made a good match - dragoon Johann Krause became her husband. However, marital happiness did not last long: the war began, and during the siege of the Marienburg fortress, Martha’s husband went missing.

The life of the former maid began to change with amazing speed. After the capture of Marienburg by Russian troops, she was noticed by Field Marshal Boris Petrovich Sheremetyev. The aging Russian prince liked the beautiful girl so much that he, without thinking twice, made her his mistress. According to the laws of war, this was not surprising - prisoners were often sold and recorded as serfs, but Martha was lucky in this sense: she was given the quite decent name “housekeeper”, and in this rank she lived under Sheremetyev.

A few months later, the black-eyed and black-browed “war trophy” was taken away from Prince Sheremetyev by a much stronger rival - Alexander Menshikov himself, Peter’s favorite and associate, an all-powerful favorite whom Sheremetyev could not refuse. So Martha passed into yet another hand and found herself very close to the emperor. So close that their meeting was bound to take place - sooner or later.

By that time, Peter’s heart was free, and not just free. There was an emptiness in him, left by the image of his first long-term love, Anna Mons, torn out with blood and agony. The beauty from the German settlement preferred another - the Saxon envoy Koenigsegg. Having learned about the betrayal, Peter fell into a real rage - Anna was more than a mistress for him. She personified everything that the king liked so much in Europe: order and cleanliness, neatness and enlightenment. In addition, Anna was so beautiful that one of the diplomats received at court wrote: “She makes all men fall in love with her, without wanting it!”

Peter noticed among the “courtyard girls” in Menshikov’s palace one beautiful black-eyed beauty. Martha now bore the name Katerina Alekseevna Mikhailova, was baptized into the Orthodox faith and spoke smart Russian, although with an accent.

The future Russian queen had not only a cheerful disposition and a pleasant appearance - there was something more about her than just good character and beauty. They say that only she alone could cope with the uncontrollable fits of rage that often seized Peter. Katerina laid her beloved’s head on her chest and stroked his hair. Peter, prone to epileptic seizures and severe headaches that tormented him, calmed down and fell asleep like a child. And Katerina sat motionless for two or three hours, afraid to disturb the person dear to her. After a life-giving sleep, Peter usually woke up healthy, in a clear mind and in a great mood.

Katerina became not just a mistress, like Anna Mons, who had palaces, serfs, and jewelry that was worth a lot of money, granted by the tsar. She did not take bribes for appointments to positions, like the selfish Anna; on the contrary, while she was with her lover on the Prut military campaign, Katerina took off all the jewelry given to her by Peter and handed them over to the Turks who surrounded the army as a ransom. This step touched the emperor so much that he promised himself to marry the generous woman.

Peter and Catherine got married on February 19, 1712 in the Church of St. Isaac of Dalmatia in St. Petersburg. And in 1713, Peter, who had not forgotten the act of his then simple mistress that so touched him, established the Order of St. Catherine. The first holder of the order was, of course, she, the Tsar’s beloved wife, friend and like-minded person. In 1724, Catherine was crowned and proclaimed empress.

Undoubtedly, the crowned couple had the most sincere feelings for each other - but Cinderella’s story did not end with the prince putting a glass slipper on her foot and taking her to his palace. It is after marriage that quarrels and friction between spouses usually begin. They did not bypass Peter and Catherine.

Peter, who was not distinguished by his pickiness, but stood out for his insatiable sexual appetite, had many mistresses during his life. As a rule, these were very simple women: courtyard girls, soldiers, wives of sailors and artisans. They say that the king had about four hundred illegitimate children alone! And after his marriage to Catherine, Peter kept making connections on the side. Catherine also made herself a “dear friend.” They became Anna Mons's brother, Willim, who, like his sister, was distinguished by rare beauty.

The husband is always the last to know about his wife’s affairs, and Peter was no exception to this rule. Even before Catherine’s coronation, the Secret Order received a denunciation about her connection with Willim Mons, but it reached the Tsar only six months later. By that time, the entire court was already talking about the Empress’s infidelity; rumors were spreading throughout St. Petersburg and Moscow.

By order of Peter, Mons was captured and taken into custody. However, Peter did not publicly delve into the queen’s dirty laundry: the investigation lasted only a few days, and Willim was accused of... embezzlement! We must give this man his due - during the interrogations, which at that time were certainly accompanied by terrible torture, he remained silent about his connection with the empress. Peter, apparently, was grateful to him for this, but still did not consider it possible to pardon his wife’s lover, and did not want to.

Willim Mons died a hard death - he was wheeled on the wheel in front of a large crowd of people, and then his head was cut off. Peter also brought his wife to the execution, but, they say, the queen did not move a muscle from the spectacle... In the evening, Catherine was cheerful, drank and danced at the betrothal of her eldest daughter to the German Duke. Well, she’s seen something different in her life. She went through military campaigns, and through the siege of fortresses, and through the death of her own children... Of the eleven heirs to the crown, whom the queen gave birth to from Peter, only two remained alive, Anna and Elizabeth - the future Empress Elizabeth I.

Peter ordered the head of his wife’s lover to be preserved in alcohol in a jar and brought it to Catherine’s bedroom as an edification. The queen endured this too, but, they say, from that time on the couple stopped communicating with each other. Soon the king died - was it because there was now no one to prevent his seizures? Although the official version says that the sovereign died from the consequences of many years of syphilis, a disease that was extremely common in those days. On their deathbed, the couple reconciled, and Catherine literally held her husband in her arms until his death on January 28, 1725.

Since Peter did not leave a will, Catherine inherited the throne. However, she did not turn out to be a real ruler: unlike her talented husband, who delved into literally everything, the new empress signed state papers without reading. She was a good wife and loving mother, but she could not rule a huge country. In addition, Catherine drank a lot - the tsar himself became addicted to wine, who loved irrepressible fun and demanded the same from his courtiers. Drunk, disheveled, Catherine wandered around the palace, which had once heard the steps of her beloved husband...

Empress Catherine I died of pneumonia in May 1727, having outlived her great love by a little more than two years. She was only forty-three at that time...

From the book Ice March (Memoirs of 1918) author Bogaevsky African Petrovich

Chapter XI. Kornilov's decision to attack Ekaterinodar. Fights March 29, 30. Death of Colonel Nezhentsev. The last military council in Kornilov's life. His death on the morning of March 31st The comparative ease with which my brigade managed to defeat and push back the Bolsheviks advancing on March 27th

From the book 100 great military leaders author Shishov Alexey Vasilievich

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Russian emperors: stories of life and death
LIFLAND CINDERELLA

The story of the life and death of Marta Skavronskaya,
the first Russian Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna Romanova
Each of us is God. Each of us knows everything.
And we just have to open our minds.
BUDDHA

The history of Russia knows many amazing characters, unusual personalities who have reached the heights of power, but Marta Skavronskaya, aka the Russian Empress Catherine I (hereinafter, for simplicity of presentation, Catherine - without the prefix “I”), perhaps occupies an exceptional place among them.

The purpose of my research is not an attempt to identify new aspects of Catherine’s rise, or her influence on Russian foreign policy, etc. - two dozen monographs and hundreds of articles are devoted to these and other topics. The least studied are the issues of her health and death, which was dramatic for her immediate circle and subjects. Contemporary St. Petersburg historian Evgeny V. Anisimov writes: “We do not know what Catherine was ill with.” And you can trust him, because the area of his scientific research is the era of Peter the Great, and everything connected with it...

Martha Catherine was born on April 5, 1684, , , . Other years of her birth are also named: 1679, 1682, 1683, 1686. Options for place of birth: the town of Vyshki-Ozero in the vicinity of Riga; Swedish farm Germunderid; Dorpat, Estland; estate Ringen, Livonia; Marienburg, now Aluksne in Latvia...

1. Origin

While collecting material about Martha-Catherine, I was naturally interested in her origins, and not so much for the sake of curiosity, but in the context of the topic I stated (see above). Of course, diseases do not choose their victims based on skin color, nationality, religion, etc. They are cosmopolitan, but... there are exceptions to the rules. In particular, geneticists were able to discover that genes determine resistance or susceptibility to diseases. The propensity for some of them depends on nationality. This direction in science is called “Ethnogenomics”. True, there are very few such diseases, but in this case, due to the lack of information, everything should be taken into account...

German historian Friedrich Bülau, who carefully studied the literature dedicated to the first Russian empress, comes to the conclusion that “Catherine’s real origin has not yet been precisely proven.” Kazimir Waliszewski also points out that “there is almost nothing reliable [about her life before captivity].” E.V. Anisimov: “Much in the early history of Martha’s life is hidden from us in the fog of the unknown.” It is no coincidence that among her possible maiden names are (listed in alphabetical order): von Alfendahl, Badendak, Rabe, Rosen, Skavronskaya, , , , , etc. .

Briefly about the people to whom Catherine's paternity is attributed.

In the "Genealogical Tables" of Johann Hübner it is said: "Katherine von Alfendel, wife of Peter I, from Livonia." Von Alvendal (Albendil, Alfendal, Alfendel), a Livonian nobleman, the owner of the estate, was in a love affair with the serf Anna-Dorothea Hahn, who lived in the town of Ringen. From this connection the future empress was born. After the birth of the child, Alvendal married his mistress to a rich peasant, who subsequently had several children from her, already legitimate (from the report of the Caesar's envoy Rabutin de Bussi to the Viennese court dated September 28, 1725). Many historians refer in their works to this report, , , , , etc. .

The Estonian historian Gottlieb Alexis Iversen, in the article “Das Madchen von Marienburg”, and later in the book “On the Life of Catherine I” (1852), indicates that Martha was the daughter of the Riga burgher Peter Badendik, who was married twice and had five children from his first marriage, from his second marriage there are four children. But it is not indicated which of the two marriages she was born from. His works are referred to by J. K. Grot and N. I. Kostomarov.

The historian of Charles XII, the Swedish court preacher J. Nordberg, who was taken prisoner near Poltava in 1709 and lived for about six years in Russia, cites the testimony of one Livonian who knew Catherine’s father and mother, allegedly confirmed by the church book : “Her father was the quartermaster of the Elfsberg regiment of the Swedish army, Johann Reingoldson Rabe. While with the regiment in Riga, he married a local native, the daughter of the Riga Secretary of State Elisabeth Moritz. Upon arrival in Sweden, Elisabeth gave birth, on Bastel Germunderid, in the parish of Toarpa, a daughter, Martha. This message is given by J. Nordberg in his works, , , , , and others. I. I. Lazhechnikov in his novel “The Last Novik” calls young Martha Ekaterina Rabe, and A. N. Tolstoy in the novel “Peter I” - Martha Rabe .

The German writer Christofor Schmidt-Phiseldeck, in his book on Russian history, cites a letter from the Hanoverian envoy to Russia Friedrich Christian Weber, in which the latter talks about the first years of Catherine’s life. I am passing on this story to my editors. Catherine's mother was a serf girl of the landowner Rosen, who lived on his estate Ringen, Dorpat district. Soon after the birth of the child, she died. Rosen, a retired Swedish lieutenant colonel, who also had no family, took the girl in to raise her. This was the reason for rumors that he was Martha’s real father... Weber claimed that he received this information from his children’s teacher Wurm, who lived in the house of Pastor Gluck, who knew Martha and was captured in Marienburg with her. Later, Weber, in his extensive work “Das veraenderte Russland,” made a reservation: “I confess that regarding the origin of Catherine I do not know anything solid and trustworthy, because the reported news extremely controversial And rather dubious"Nevertheless, N. A. Belozerskaya, J. K. Grot, N. Pavlenko refer to Weber in their studies.

Domestic historiography considers the most likely version that Catherine came from a poor peasant family (Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, - there is no clarity here). Her father was Samuil Skavronsky (Skovronsky, Skovoronsky, Skovoroshenko), and her mother was either Dorothea Gan or Elizaveta Moritz.

I dwelled in some detail on the question of Catherine’s origins in order to show that, when solving the problems I have set in my work, it will be extremely difficult to focus on the above information about him due to their inconsistency...

2. On the way to the throne

At the age of three, Martha, no matter where she was born, and no matter who her parents were, due to their death from the “pestilence”, was left an orphan. Further information about her again diverges: either she was taken into the family of her maternal aunt (see above), or the Roop priest Daut, her godfather, or immediately into the orphanage of Nikolai Eck at the Revel courtyard. Until what age she was under the guardianship of all these people is not known exactly: up to 7 years old, up to 12 years old, several years. Eventually, she catches the eye of Pastor Johann Ernst Gluck, manager of the Lutheran churches in Marienburg, who takes her to his home. It is now impossible to establish whether he was motivated by a Christian feeling of compassion for the orphan, or by pragmatic interests. Perhaps it’s both. The first is supported by the fact that Martha was brought up in the Gluck family along with his children, and the latter was gradually introduced to the role of a nanny, to work in the kitchen and laundry, and to clean the house that the Glucks occupied.

* Roop ( Straupe)- name of the locality, in 70 km from Riga

At the age of eighteen, she was married to the Swedish dragoon trumpeter Johann Krause. This is probably how her life would have turned out as a soldier’s wife, if not for the war between Russia (as part of the Northern Union) and Sweden for access to the Baltic Sea. It was at the initial stages of this war (1701-1704) that Russian troops gained a foothold on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, took Dorpat, Narva and other fortresses, including Marienburg (August, 1702). Marta Skavronskaya-Krause, not having time to get used to the role of a husband's wife (her husband was recalled to the army on the second day after the wedding), was captured along with the entire family of Pastor Gluck.

Marcountess Wilhelmina of Bayreth: “She (Catherine - V.P.) was short, fat and black... The dress she was wearing, in all likelihood, was bought in a market shop... Based on her outfit, one could assume her for a German traveling artist... The queen had about a dozen orders and the same number of icons and amulets hung on her, and when she walked, everything rang, as if a dressed mule had passed" (however, in 1718, when she saw the queen, the margravine was only ten years).

An officer, a Scot, Peter Henry Bruce, in his “Memoirs” published by his wife after his death, wrote, in particular: “Prince Menshikov, seeing her with General Baur, noted something extraordinary in her appearance and manners.” There was, precisely, “something extraordinary” about her. Genning-Friedrich von Bassevich: “Catherine owes her success in life to her spiritual qualities.” Nikolai Pavlenko: “The explanation of Peter’s affection, most likely, must be sought in her spiritual qualities.” I am impressed by the idea expressed by the historian N.I. Kostomarov: “For Peter, this great man, the softening, calming influence of the female soul was necessary. He found this female soul in Catherine.”

In the overwhelming majority of works dedicated to Catherine, in those sections that dealt specifically with her spiritual qualities, one can find many heartfelt words, words of admiration for this woman. I. I. Lazhechnikov created, in the literal sense of the word, an ode to her soul: “Her soul was poured into the shape of her beautiful (! - V. P.) appearance. To deprive yourself of a pleasant thing in order to give it to the poor; to remember the good, to her done by anyone; to sacrifice her peace of mind to please others; to patiently endure the weaknesses of those with whom she lived; to be faithful to friendship, despite changes in circumstances - these were the qualities of the maiden Rabe.” Burchard Christopher Minich:

“This empress was loved and adored by her subjects for her spiritual kindness, which she showed in all cases when she had the opportunity to take part in persons [in need of it].” J. J. Campredon wrote about her in his “Memoirs”: “... she saw her role in the manifestation of compassion and mercy, a humble servant who knew all the sorrows of life” (Quoted by K. Waliszewski). He testified: “She was neither vengeful nor vindictive.” E. Anisimov: “With her gentle demeanor and hard work, Catherine was liked by those around her... Observers were amazed at her tirelessness and patience... she, having no education or secular upbringing, was subtle, attentive, knew how to please, to make something pleasant.” Already being an empress, every morning she went to the reception room, where soldiers, sailors and artisans were constantly crowded, gave out alms to everyone, never refused a request to be the adoptive mother of his child, and immediately gave each godson several ducats; she remained sweet, unpretentious, retaining her cheerful, even, affectionate character. Catherine's inner tact, modesty, selflessness, mercy and compassion were noted by many of her contemporaries. She never forgot that she came from poverty, and did not try to hide it.

Many authors, emphasizing Catherine’s lack of education, do not deny her natural intelligence. S. M. Solovyov: “She had the ability to hold herself at a certain height, to show attention and sympathy for the movement taking place around her... to retain knowledge of persons and the relationships between them, the habit of making their way between these relationships.” N.P. Vilboa: “[Having become Peter’s unmarried wife], she became acquainted with the main principles of state power and government... Listening to the reasoning of the Tsar and his ministers, she became aware of the various interests of the most prominent families of Russia, as well as the interests of neighboring monarchs.. "Not being able to read or write in any language, she spoke fluently in four, namely Russian, German, Swedish, Polish and... understood a little French." Peter constantly found that his wife was smart, and gladly shared with her political news and thoughts about present and future events. Courtiers close to the sovereign noted: Peter, who generally did not tolerate women interfering in “men’s” affairs, on the contrary, was pleased when Catherine entered into a “state” conversation; her simple and reasonable logic more than once led them out of the labyrinths of court sophistry and cast new light on many questions.

Undoubtedly, Catherine had the ability to win people over, knowledge, as they would say today, of their psychology, and the ability to manage people. This was manifested in her relationship with Peter the Great, who doted on his “heartfelt friend.” You can read from Honore Balzac: “...it is not difficult to prove to your husband that you love him, but it is much more difficult to assure him that you understand him.” Many authors are convinced that Peter’s affection for his wife was due to her ability, unsurpassed by any of the women close to him before, to understand his loneliness, his dream of a family, of children, to get as close as possible to what he lived, to make his interests her own without a shadow of hypocrisy, suffer his troubles and rejoice in his successes. She always tried to be next to him: in the palace, and in the tent of the military leader, and during a boat trip, and on the battlefield - under bullets, she shared with him the life of the march and festive assemblies, she delighted him with her cheerful mood and motherly, in the literal sense this word, taking care of it. “Peter needed only a friend like Catherine; the great man himself was aware of this and that is why he exalted his “Katerinushka” so highly.” N.P. Vilboa: “He met a devoted friend, alien to boyar sp?sy and inherited prejudices, brought up in the circle of a poor and honest family, capable of understanding and sharing the difficult worries of the royal duty.”

How healthy was the lifestyle of Peter I’s companion already in the rank of queen?

Catherine tried in every possible way to match her great husband in everything connected with his life, including food. It is known that she herself prepared pearl barley porridge, Peter’s favorite, and not only porridge. Due to an allergy to fish, Peter’s family avoided fish dishes. But on the table, as a rule, there should have been boiled beef with cucumbers, Limburg cheese, kvass, fruits and vegetables. Peter, and with him Catherine, were moderate in food, and invariably observed all fasts. The table that Catherine often set for her husband and his friends, the Dutch skippers, was not distinguished by royal variety...

Considering the question of the health of Catherine I Alekseevna, I cannot ignore the topic of her drinking, supposedly in immeasurable quantities, of alcohol, if only for the reason that her husband, Peter I Alekseevich, drank quite often, and often without any measure. It is known that Peter had a kind of club of drunkards - an “all-drunk cathedral”, all the rituals of which were based on the chanting of Bacchus and his faithful priests in the person of the emperor and his drinking companions. N.I. Kostomarov: “When the sovereign was abroad, he sent her Hungarian wine, expressing a desire for her to drink to his health.” Genning-Friedrich von Bassevich: “During great celebrations, all the ladies were at her table, and at the table "The king has only nobles. She got her own first-class drinker (une bibironne de premier ordre), who was in charge of her treats and drinks and bore the title of chief shanksha."

5. Why haven’t they talked about her!

And here I move on to events that many researchers of the life of the first Russian empress are trying to understand the cause of.

Catherine I (Unknown artist, 1725)

The point is that after the death of her great husband, having become the autocrat of Russia, a certain breakdown occurred with Catherine, it was as if she was reborn. At the same time, her behavior and lifestyle did not fit in any way with the image of the sovereign’s faithful friend, the genius of his home, which was still preserved in the memory of the people around her. “Student Wurm, who served as a teacher for Super-Intendant Gluck, and [knew] the then Catherine, assured that the Tsarina, throughout her service with the Super-Intendant, behaved decently and honestly and never upset, even in the slightest, her adoptive parents. ... as well as her concern for the health of her husband and her constant advice to resort to gentler and more moderate means ... completely wash away the stains that lie on her origin and crowd out other fatal accidents she has experienced." “The wife of Peter the Great was created, rather, for the family than for political activity. When the children were small, her main task was to give them a comprehensive education, which she herself was deprived of as a child. She personally supervised the education of the princesses, and when she left with the tsar, she entrusted the supervision of the children to her husband’s sister, Natalya Alekseevna, or the Menshikov family. And later she did everything in her power to arrange their fate.

And suddenly, in the dispatches of foreign envoys at the Russian court to their patrons, we encounter something difficult to imagine. Here are some of them as an example.

French ambassador to the Russian court Campredon (the dispatch was sent in the summer of 1725, i.e. five months after the death of Peter): “These entertainments consist of almost daily, lasting all night and a good part of the day, drinking bouts in the garden, with persons who duties of service must always be at court."

Again Campredon (dispatch dated October 14, 1725): “The Queen continues to indulge in pleasures with some excess.”

He (dispatch dated December 22, 1725): “The queen was quite ill after the revelry on the day of St. Andrew the First-Called.”

Envoy of the Polish king and Saxon prince-elector Augustus, Lefort (dispatch dated May 26, 1726): “I’m afraid to be branded a liar if I describe the lifestyle of the Russian court. Who would have thought that he spends the whole night in terrible drunkenness.”

The secretary of the Saxon embassy, Frensdorf, points out that Menshikov’s morning visits to the empress invariably began with the question: “What should we drink?” (quoted by K.F. Valishevsky). “Most often the choice was Danzig vodka, sometimes vodka mixed with various foreign liqueurs. Sometimes there could be Hungarian wine. She gave special preference to the latter in the evenings.” The same Frensdorf, in a report to his king, reported about the new empress that she was “always drunk, always staggering, always in an unconscious state” (quoted by I.M. Vasilevsky). “The Danish ambassador Westphal calculated the amount of Hungarian wine and Danzig vodka consumed during the two years of Catherine’s reign, and received an amount of about a million rubles - not a bad figure for a state whose total income was only about ten million.”

Foreign diplomats unanimously claim that Catherine’s main pastimes are balls, kurtags, carriage rides around the capital at night, continuous feasting, dancing, fireworks, walks along the Neva with cannons firing, regiment reviews, awards celebrations, launchings galleys, balls again. And in addition to this, the “strawberry” details of her intimate life, supposedly filled with a nightly change of lovers, , , , etc. , moreover, not only from among high-ranking persons at the palace, but also of a lower rank, so to speak, “second class, but they are known only by Fraulein Johann, the old maid of the queen, in charge of her entertainment” (J. J. Campredon). Everyone quotes Campredon, convinced of his knowledge, suggesting that Johanna either “stood with a candle” at Catherine’s bedside, or looked into her bedroom when she was secluded there with her next favorite. How much gossip, rumors, and fiction accompany the life of people of this rank to this day, and Catherine’s life was no exception. “Why haven’t they talked about her!” - exclaims V. G. Grigoryan...

“Ekaterina’s entire pastime consisted of openly wasting her life,” writes E. Anisimov. Why would the empress, who, according to some historians, so strived for supreme power, take up “wasting her life”? Here are some of the versions on this matter.

In everyday understanding, rheumatism is a disease of the joints that occurs with age. But this is not true. From my student days I remember the figurative expression of the French doctor Lasegue: “Rheumatism licks the joints, pleura and even the meninges, but bites the heart painfully"One of the manifestations of rheumatic heart disease is inflammation of its inner lining (endocardium), accompanied by changes in the heart valves (their deformation or destruction). As a consequence, this leads, as the pathological process progresses, to severe circulatory disorders. Without going into details of the issue, I will say only that the entire valvular system of the heart can undergo changes, and not just one of the valves. Based on the available information, I do not undertake to firmly judge which particular valve of the Empress’s heart, whether all of them were involved in the pathological process. We can only say that By the time Catherine ascended the throne, the disease in its development had already gone, as they say, quite far, as indicated by the presence of shortness of breath at the slightest physical exertion, and even attacks of suffocation, a painful cough, as well as swelling of the lower extremities, pasty soft tissues. at the same time, assume that we are talking about narrowing (stenosis) of the aortic valve: one of the characteristic manifestations of this defect are precisely the symptoms of deterioration of cerebral circulation (convulsions, loss of consciousness), which Catherine repeated from October 1725...

French diplomats Campredon and Magnan report that the empress suffered from repeated fevers. P. N. Petrov: “[Her] illness is mysterious - the lungs are clearly affected... The circulation of the blood is constrained, it is very thick, causing the legs to swell, the memory is clouded” (by the way, “clouded memory” is one of the manifestations of cerebrovascular accident). E. Anisimov reports “almost continuous pneumonia, which did not leave Catherine throughout her short reign.” Apparently, we should accept the word “continuous” with a reservation, replacing it with the word “frequent”. And indeed, with severe circulatory disorders, and in Ekaterina they can be classified in terms of severity as class 3-4 (i.e., maximum), including the pulmonary, pulmonary, and circulatory systems, frequent pneumonias are observed, which are called congestive .

Briefly about them: thick and viscous sputum accumulates in the bronchi, which promotes the activation of local, opportunistic, and introduced pathogenic microflora, causing the development of inflammation of the lung tissue. The danger of congestive pneumonia is that, developing in people already suffering from a severe chronic disease, it often becomes the direct cause of the patient’s death. Clinically, congestive pneumonia is no different from its primary forms, with the exception of growth signs of heart failure.

Another pneumonia was the last in her short, by modern standards, life. This is how it developed. Six months before her death, her general condition deteriorated significantly: shortness of breath tormented her, her legs were swollen. She still tried to overcome her malaise, left the bedroom, and even gave a ball on the occasion of the birthday of her daughter Elizabeth. This reflected the strong character of the empress. On April 10, 1727, her body temperature increased, her cough became more frequent, and shortness of breath appeared at rest. I assume that it was an acute respiratory viral infection (ARVI), possibly adenoviral, with symptoms of bronchospasm. This is indicated by the fact that, against the background of treatment (what exactly, it was not possible to find out), by the sixteenth of April there was an improvement in the empress’s well-being (“she fell asleep... and after that she seemed to feel better”). Typically, uncomplicated forms of ARVI are completed by 6-7 days from the onset of the disease. There was hope that Catherine would get out of another misfortune. Alas, on April 22, there was a sharp deterioration in the patient’s condition. Clinicians know that if at the stage of recovery from ARVI there is a sharp exacerbation of previously occurring symptoms of the disease, in particular, intoxication, catarrhal, respiratory failure, then we are talking about the addition of a bacterial infection with the development of pneumonia. In the case of Ekaterina, this was facilitated, as doctors say, by an unfavorable somatic background: rheumatic carditis with manifestations of heart failure.

This is how her personal physician, life physician Ivan-Bogdan Blumentrost, describes the further course of Catherine’s illness until her death: “Her Imperial Majesty fell into a fever; the cough that she had before, only not very severe, began to multiply, and so did febra happened and began to become more impotent, and the sign announced that there should be some damage in the lung, and the opinion was given that there was a phoma (abscess - V.P.) in the lung, which four days before Her Majesty’s death clearly turned out to be , after a great cough, Her Majesty began to spit out direct pus in great abundance, which did not cease until Her Majesty’s death, and from that foma, on the 6th day of May, she died with great peace.”

Reading Blumentrost’s entry, I never cease to be amazed at the capabilities of the human body: Ekaterina fought for two weeks with a terrible disease - without antibiotics, drugs that improve cardiac activity, or drip therapy. Please note that pneumonia complicated by the formation of large purulent cavities (which was the case in this case) is especially severe, leading to death.

I don’t know whether to believe this or not, but “shortly before her death, she decided to take a ride through the streets of St. Petersburg, where sunny spring reigned, but soon turned back - she didn’t even have the strength to ride in a carriage.” If this took place, then, apparently, until the twenty-second of April, that is, in that short period of time when she felt somewhat better. Over the next two weeks, she was tormented by relapses of “suffocation, lost consciousness several times, and became delirious.” “On the day of the empress’s death, death seemed to have retreated from its victim, and consciousness returned to her,” but from the second half of the last day she began to delirium again. Her eldest daughter Anna Petrovna was constantly near the sick empress.

“At 9 o’clock in the afternoon” on May 6 (17), 1727, just two years and three months after accession to the throne, having lived for 43 years, Catherine died. I believe that death occurred due to pulmonary heart failure incompatible with life.

Post-mortem diagnosis
Basic:
Rheumatic carditis. Aortic valve stenosis (?). Heart failure class 4
Related:
Congestive pneumonia. Lung abscess. Respiratory failure grade 2-3
Complications:
Cerebrovascular disorders

It is believed that the main cause of death of Catherine I was consumption. Indications of this can be found in the works of some authors. As P.N. Petrov rightly noted, “consumption, but unusual.”

And indeed, instead of weight loss, there is an increase in body weight, not a single mention of hemoptysis (see Blumentrost’s conclusion), and yet these two signs are considered the most important in the clinical diagnosis of tuberculosis. And at the same time, there are signs of severe heart damage. Among doctors there is such a serious-joking expression: “The opinions of scientists differ.” This is exactly the case...

Martha Catherine was buried in the still unfinished Peter and Paul Cathedral. The tightly closed coffin with the body of the empress was placed on a hearse under a canopy upholstered in gold fabric, next to the coffins of Peter I and their daughter Natalya Petrovna (both of them died in 1825) in the southern nave of the cathedral in front of the iconostasis. All three coffins were interred at the same time only four years later (at 11 a.m. on May 29, 1731). During the burial of Catherine I, fifty-one cannon shots were fired.

The grave of Catherine I in the Peter and Paul Cathedral

Thus ended this amazing life, proving that there is still a place for miracles in our world. But this miracle of ascension from the washtub to the throne of the Russian Empire would not have happened if there had not been another miracle: the birth of a woman gifted with talents, and who managed to realize these talents. “Talent is an order from the Lord God,” the poet Evgeny Baratynsky once said. Who knows, maybe God brought Pastor Gluck to her, which became the first step in her ascent. I do not undertake to judge what was the main thing in this “assignment”: to play the role of a faithful girlfriend of Peter the Great, helping him in his deeds, or, having ascended the throne, to continue the work of Peter.

She was given too little time for this. It has been established (by Professor Jim Fowles) that the life expectancy of gifted people is on average 14 years shorter than that of ordinary people. And so it happened. N. And Kostomarov: “...we can recognize the special mercy of Providence towards her that she outlived her husband by only two years and three months. Who knows what would have awaited her in this whirlpool of machinations of temporary workers, insidious self-lovers, greedy people who clashed with each other self-interested people who tried to drown one another in order to become higher themselves... Fate saved her from this temptation.”

I, too, following Kostomarov, will put an end to this in my story about the Livonian Cinderella, Marta Skavronskaya.

LITERATURE

2. E. V. Anisimov. Catherine I. The Romanovs. In the book: Historical portraits, 1613-1762. Mikhail Fedorovich - Peter III [Text]: [collection / Institute of Russia. history of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Ed. and from the entrance. Art. A. N. Sakharov]. - Moscow: Armada, 1997
) [The basement cat, with its obvious weaknesses and limited worldview, is who it really is. guarantor of peace and stability, not self-proclaimed...] : [I don't want. I don’t want what torments me to lose its power over me. There is something treacherous in this in relation to my memories, to those...] Gleb Bogachev, And still lives [The anthology of early departed poets “Leave. Stay. Live” was presented three times in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.] Alexandra Sandomirskaya: Rain and fog [With sweet juice, fragrant resin, / a current of air, a bee dance, / God, usually so silent, / begins to speak to me...]

early years

Question about origin

1702-1725

Mistress of Peter I

Wife of Peter I

Descendants of Peter I from Catherine I

Rise to power

Governing body. 1725-1727

Foreign policy

End of reign

Question of succession to the throne

Will

LIFLAND CINDERELLA

The story of the life and death of Marta Skavronskaya, the first Russian Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna Romanova

1. Origin

2. On the way to the throne

5. Why haven’t they talked about her!

LITERATURE

The story of the life and death of Marta Skavronskaya,
the first Russian Empress Ekaterina Alekseevna Romanova