ASSASSINATION OF PETER THE THIRD OF RUSSIA
In a previous chapter we have told the story, full of horror and crime, of the life of Ivan the Terrible of Russia. It was not one famous assassination which placed that life-story in this series of historical murders; it was an uninterrupted, long-continued succession of butcheries and assassinations which entitled it to this place. In the long line of historical characters extending through the ages there is not one who so fully deserves the designation of a wholesale assassin as Ivan the Terrible, the demon of the North. But strange to say, the Russians, who during his lifetime execrated him and fled from him as from contagion, to-day seem to have forgotten his iniquities, and place him among their great rulers. Let Karamsin, one of the few great historians Russia has produced, explain this seeming anomaly: “Such was the Czar! Such were his subjects! Their patience was boundless, for they regarded the commands of the Czar as the commands of God, and they considered every act of disobedience to the Czar’s will as a rebellion against the will of God. They perished, but they saved for us, the Russians of the nineteenth century, the greatness and the power of Russia, for the strength of an empire rests in the willingness of an empire to obey.” Words like these make us comprehend--what otherwise would be utterly incomprehensible to us--that a monster like Ivan the Terrible was permitted to continue his career of crime and murder until it was terminated by death brought on by disease and not by violence.
The history of Russia, after the death of Ivan the Terrible, is full of crimes and assassinations. Czars and heirs to the crown were ruthlessly murdered in order to make way for usurpers and pretenders, until these again fell victims to conspiracies. The most famous of these assassinations is that of Peter the Third, not only because it was carried out in the interest of his own wife, the Empress Catherine, but mainly perhaps because Russia, at that time,--1762--had already entered the list of great European powers. Peter the Third was the son of Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and of the Grand-Duchess Anna of Russia, oldest daughter of Peter the Great. As such, young Peter had even a better right to the crown of Russia than the Empress Elizabeth, who was a younger daughter of Peter the Great; and it was Elizabeth herself who, in 1742, sent for Peter--then a boy at school in Germany--and declared him her heir and successor to the crown.