The marriage, arranged by Empress Elizabeth to secure succession, was miserable from the start — the couple were mismatched in temperament and rarely intimate. Catherine, renamed and converted to Orthodoxy for the wedding, spent years cultivating allies and reading Enlightenment philosophy, knowledge that helped her seize the throne in a coup seventeen years later after Peter's brief, disastrous reign.
Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst arrived in Russia at fourteen, a minor German princess chosen by Empress Elizabeth largely because her modest family posed no political threat. She converted to Russian Orthodoxy, took the name Catherine, and on July 22 (July 21 by some calendar reckonings; Russia used the Julian calendar) married her second cousin, the awkward and unstable Grand Duke Peter.
The marriage was a disaster in every private sense — Peter reportedly preferred playing with toy soldiers to consummating the union, and years passed before Catherine bore a son, Paul, whose paternity courtiers openly doubted. But Catherine used her years of marginalization productively, devouring works by Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot, and building a network of supporters among the Russian nobility and the Imperial Guard.
When Peter finally became tsar in 1762, his erratic policies — including abruptly ending a war against Prussia that Russia was winning — alienated the same guards regiments Catherine had courted. Within six months, she orchestrated a coup, had Peter arrested, and took the throne herself. He died mysteriously in custody days later. The unhappy teenage bride of 1745 would go on to rule for thirty-four years, expanding Russia's borders and earning the epithet 'the Great.'
Key people: Catherine the Great, Peter III of Russia