His death came only days after she seized his throne.
The men guarding him belonged to the faction that had put her in power.
And the new government did not punish anyone for his death.
All of those facts created suspicion.
But none alone proves a murder order.
Some accounts explicitly distinguish between Peter being killed by conspirators and Catherine personally authorizing the killing. One historical reference describes Peter as murdered by some of the conspirators who had deposed him, while another notes that even if he was killed, it was not necessarily on Catherine’s explicit instructions.
There is another possibility.
Peter’s captors may have decided themselves that keeping him alive was too dangerous.
If so, his death could have been a murder committed for Catherine without necessarily being a murder ordered by Catherine.
That distinction is uncomfortable but historically important.
A ruler can benefit enormously from a crime without having commanded it.
The problem is that Peter’s death was almost perfectly convenient.
Eight days earlier, Catherine had been the wife of Russia’s emperor.
Now she was empress in her own right—and the man with the strongest immediate ability to challenge the circumstances of her accession was dead.
Peter’s Death Solved One Problem and Created Another
Politically, the removal of Peter eliminated an obvious rallying point for counterrevolution.
But it also created a permanent stain on Catherine’s legitimacy.
She could never completely separate her accession from her husband’s death.
Foreign observers noticed the uncomfortable sequence immediately.
The official medical explanation was mocked abroad. Catherine’s enemies could portray her not merely as a usurper but as a woman who had taken her husband’s throne and then benefited from his suspicious death.
And there remained another dynastic problem.
Paul.
Catherine and Peter’s son had been born in 1754. Whether rumors surrounding his biological paternity were true or not, he was publicly and dynastically recognized as Peter’s son and heir.
Some conspirators had apparently contemplated ruling through the young Paul rather than installing Catherine as sovereign in her own right.
Catherine had no intention of surrendering the throne to him.
She ruled herself.
That decision reveals something important about the coup.
Catherine did not merely escape an unhappy marriage or rescue herself from a threatening husband.
She seized imperial authority.
The German Princess Became the Russian Autocrat
Catherine was crowned in Moscow in September 1762.
She would rule until 1796.
More than 34 years.
Her reign would become one of the most famous in Russian history.
She corresponded with leading Enlightenment thinkers, including Voltaire and Diderot. She pursued administrative and legal projects intended to present her as an enlightened monarch. She expanded Russian power dramatically and oversaw territorial gains that transformed the empire’s position in Europe.
Russia annexed Crimea during her reign.
Catherine participated in the partitions of Poland.
Russian influence pushed farther into the Black Sea region.