Okay, I see you wanted the Russian shenanigans in this post, so here goes. You asked for it!
selenak may have to flesh out some of the details, it's been 20 years since I looked at European history from the Russian perspective.
So, Elizabeth is Tzarina of Russia. She haaaates Fritz's guts, hopes he chokes on his own spite and has an aneurysm and dies. (I'm making the details up, but she does hate him.)
Now she's in an alliance with Austria and France and a half-hearted Sweden*, who have all ganged up on Fritz in a three-and-a-half front war because he's like that guy mouthing off in a bar who's dead set on provoking everyone in sight. (I will spare you the details, but you do not understand how ridiculously improbable this alliance was--Austria and France getting together was called the Diplomatic Revolution because it was *so* revolutionary that they would agree on anything the way they agreed that Fritz needed to be taught a lesson. Okay, the Seven Years' War was not all about Fritz, it was a lot of superpowers clashing over a million things. But let's note that Fritz did nothing to avoid making everyone in Europe mad at him.)
Uncle George (II) in Great Britain, who has also been provoked by Fritz, has balance of power considerations in continental Europe, and huge conflicts with France overseas, decides that it's worth putting up with his nephew the obnoxious little shit in order to kick France's ass. Especially since Fritz is Machiavellian (ask me about Fritz and Machiavelli) enough to be willing to present himself as the savior of the Protestant faith for the sake of propaganda, lol Fritz.
But mostly George (whose name I'm using metonymically for him and his ministers, he was not nearly as active in foreign policy as some of his neighbors) is interested in his overseas territories, of which Prussia has none, and so he offers Prussia some money and mostly moral support, and some distraction of his neighbors, but isn't fielding an army to fight alongside Prussia, which is on its own in this three-front war. So Fritz 1) got his country into an avoidable three-front war with enemies bigger than he was and 2) won it, barely, which accounts for a great deal of his ambivalent legacy (more on ambivalent legacy later).
* When Sweden eventually made peace with Fritz, he snarked at their ambassadors, "I'm sorry, were you at war with me? Wow, you learn something new every day." (Paraphrased.)
Also, remember that Austria AND France AND GB were all on Fritz's side when he was running away from his dad and tried to get FW to calm down, and FW actually attributed his decision not to kill his son to foreign intervention, and how does Fritz show his gratitude when he comes to power ten years later? "Screw you all, I do what I want. My dad left me an army and a treasury."
So here's Fritz, well into the Seven Years' War, barely hanging in there, swaying around in the bar seeing stars but landing enough punches his opponents are also bleeding out of various orifices. No one understands how he's still on his feet, this was supposed to be over in thirty seconds. "You have got to be kidding me" is the general reaction. But he might finally be about to drop.
Enter...the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg! (Brandenburg is where the Hohenzollerns are from. It's the area around Berlin.)
Elizabeth, who we remember hates Fritz's guts, has been getting progressively sicker. Finally, finally (Fritz has been calling her an "old bitch" for not doing it sooner), she dies.
Her heir is Peter III. He's a German prince who ended up on the throne of Russia because intermarriage.
What happens when he succeeds to the throne?
"Hey, Fritz! ILLLUUUUU! You're my hero! Can I get your autograph? I dress like you and wear my hair like you and I wanna have an army just like you and initiate reforms just like you and I pretend I'm you when I play with my soldiers! *hyperventilates*
"OMG, I'm soooooo sorry about my predecessor making war on you. Women, amirite? Here's my army which was trying to kill you yesterday. My soldiers are totally on your side now and will attack your enemies and defend you with their lives. YOUR CAUSE IS MINE!
"P.S. If you ever come visit, I will totally give you a blow job, you have only to ask."
(Okay, I made up the postscript, there's no evidence for that, but it's in the spirit of things. :P)
Fritz: "Oh thank the Supreme Being that I as a Deist kind of believe in when I'm not sporadically pretending to be a Protestant for the peasants, I might not actually have destroyed my entire country with my ill-thought-out decisions. Comin' at you, Austria and France! It's two on two now! How do you like *them* apples?" *gets a second wind*
Peter: Lasts approximately five minutes (six months, which is like five minutes for a reign) as Tzar before the "Russia is not a province of Prussia" party led by his wife overthrows and probably assassinates him.
His wife and successor, Catherine the soon-to-be-Great: "Fritz is a total asshole, and sucking his dick is not going to be this country's foreign policy. Yes, he's an intelligent asshole and I like some of his reforms, but we are out of this war. Attention, soldiers! Return to Russia at once."
Russian general on site with Fritz in Poland or thereabouts: "Sorry, dude, there was a coup; boss says I have to go home."
Fritz: "Shit. Shit. Enemies approaching now. Okay, Russian guy, I know you can't disobey orders, but it takes time to pack up an army and move it. Can you stick around for, like, two days, arrange your army in battle order, and pretend like you're going to attack, but really just watch, so no one dies and your Empress isn't pissed off? I can work with that."
Russian general: "I guess, yeah."
Austrians or French or both, I forget: "Wow, Fritz sure has a lot of troops on his side. Approach with caution." *battle ensues* "I wonder why the Russians are looking so menacing over there but never actually engaging?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fritz: "Thank you SO MUCH. You can go home now."
And thus concluded the Russian fanboy shenanigans.
To understand how significant all this was on a major geopolitical scale, you have to realize that Prussia was on the verge of losing. Fritz lost some major battles, partly through very questionable decisions when his generals were yelling at him to do basically anything but what he was doing but Fritz has never listened to anyone in his life except for Voltaire on matters of French literary style, and after having his army destroyed repeatedly, he was on the verge of abdicating and committing suicide. Like, imo, "I've been reading the Stoics" suicide, not "I'm suicidally depressed" suicide, although he was also in a pretty rotten emotional state. (Wilhelmine died on the day of one of his military defeats, it was pretty distressing.)
But he won the war. Three bigger guys set out to teach the scrawny little wiseguy a lesson, and at the end of the day, they're all staggering around punch drunk, and he's ready to come back for more. They all stare at each other in disbelief and head off to the hospital to get their injuries treated, leaving him sitting at the bar wearily drinking that glass of beer he snatched out of someone else's hand that started the whole thing.
Friedrich attributed his victory to the two "Miracles of the House of Brandenburg." The one where Elizabeth finally died and Peter came to power for like 6 whole months, and the one where he had lost a battle catastrophically and had no power to stop his enemies from sacking Berlin and conquering his entire country, but his enemies, like, did some tourism in Prussia and left without capitalizing on their opportunity.
It has been plausibly argued that Friedrich overrated the importance of these "miracles" and that, for once in his life he overestimated his enemies, by underestimating the extent to which, even if they won some key battles, they were losing the war because they didn't have the resources to keep fighting. The one thing Friedrich and FW before him did was make sure their country had a near bottomless pool of resources to keep fighting from.
Regardless. Friedrich said he came within a hairsbreadth of losing and was saved by his enemies, and everyone believed him.
Critically, almost two hundred years later, the Nazis believed him. When they were at the end of WWII and staring a really obvious defeat in the face, they held out without surrendering longer than they otherwise would, on the grounds that they were exactly like Old Fritz in every way possible (*Fritz spinning in his misplaced grave*) and Providence had saved Friedrich with some miracles, so it would save them! This is what Selenak was referring to about Roosevelt dying and all that.
Also, their propagandistic version of their hero Old Fritz who tooootally would have endorsed the Nazi party that was just following in his footsteps...is so OOC character assassination as to be unrecognizable and as deluded as the idea that Truman was going to withdraw America from the war...because...he was such a fan of Hitler???
In conclusion, the Russian fanboy shenanigans perfectly encapsulate how decisive Fritz was both to his contemporaries and to later generations. Reactions ranged from "Kill the bastard" to "I want your autograph" to the middle ground, summarized by the best description of Fritz I've ever seen, which I think is contemporary: "Thinks like a philosopher and acts like a king."
At the time, after the Seven Years' War, Fritz was a big celebrity in Europe, both to Protestants (because defender of the Protestant faith, omg lol) and Germans and liberal thinkers and hero-worshippers and intellectuals and so forth. People named their kids after him and their taverns, and people with money traveled to Potsdam to see Old Fritz toward the end of his life (but he was getting increasingly antisocial and only saw you if he wanted to, so a lot of people walked away disappointed).
In later times, fast forwarding through nineteenth-century German nationalism, Hitler and the Nazis made Old Fritz into their epitome of everything Aryanism was striving for. (That the RL guy would have ended up in a concentration camp wearing a pink triangle is just...the mind boggles.) After the Holocaust, everyone except the neo-Nazis hated Fritz for a long time because they saw him as the predecessor to Hitler and practically a Nazi himself, with all his unprovoked expansionist warfare, absolutism, and glorification of the army. Eventually, everyone calmed down a little, read some books, and decided Fritz should only be held responsible for his own actions, not the ones that later people invoked his name to justify, and his historical context should be taken into account. Current communis opinio is that Fritz's legacy should be handled with caution, but as long as we remember not to be nationalistic and to criticize the conquest of Silesia etc., it's okay to like him and write thousands of words about him in cahn's comment threads, because he was actually kind of amazing for his time.
Among contemporaries, Joseph II was a middle-grounder. He respected the hell out of Fritz's brain, not so much the repeated betrayal of allies, invasions of states that were minding their own business, and general reneging on agreements. Had some pretty sharp things to say about that, and definitely had political goals of his own that brought him into conflict with Friedrich. But okay, a lot of people feel that way about Fritz.
But what's amazing about Joseph fanboying as much as he did, even if it was significantly less than Peter over in Russia, was that Joseph was the SON and HEIR of Maria Theresia, whose country Fritz had INVADED within months of coming to power, meaning Fritz had conquered part of JOSEPH'S future territory, DURING Joseph's lifetime! (I just checked the dates, and Fritz began the invasion scarce months before Joseph was born, and made war on Joseph's country for the first five years of his life, then again for seven years when Joseph was a teenager and young man.) And yet that portrait of Joseph looking at Fritz like he can barely stand to be in the presence of so much awesomeness. Omg, the date of that meeting, it's 6 years after Fritz has just finished a super-bloody war (1 million casualties worldwide, since Britain and France brought in their colonial possessions) to confirm that Austria did not get to kidnap what he had rightfully stolen (to quote from Princess Bride).
Fritz had some nice things to say about Joseph after that meeting, and how bright the future looked with young people like this ready to take the helm, and Voltaire was pretty skeptical. "Dude, you're saying that because you're his hero and he's modeling himself after you. Come back when you can get an objective opinion."
And in conclusion, one of the most entertaining summaries of Fritz's ambivalent legacy is from a tumblr post I linked to somewhere in another post, the one called: "Should You Fight Them? The Prussian Monarch Edition."
"Frederick the Great: on the one hand, his father and the Seven Years' War already did. On the other, he’s an absolute warmongering asshole. Probably could beat you through some sneaky maneuver. Proceed with caution and maybe an Italian greyhound to win him over."
What I love most about that post is not only the ambivalence, but that, of all the Prussian monarchs, he's the only one predicted to win against a random internet reader! I guess that's why he's the only one in the list with an epithet instead of a regnal number.
And I'll stop there, but more later in reply to one of your other comments, omg.
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So, Elizabeth is Tzarina of Russia. She haaaates Fritz's guts, hopes he chokes on his own spite and has an aneurysm and dies. (I'm making the details up, but she does hate him.)
Now she's in an alliance with Austria and France and a half-hearted Sweden*, who have all ganged up on Fritz in a three-and-a-half front war because he's like that guy mouthing off in a bar who's dead set on provoking everyone in sight. (I will spare you the details, but you do not understand how ridiculously improbable this alliance was--Austria and France getting together was called the Diplomatic Revolution because it was *so* revolutionary that they would agree on anything the way they agreed that Fritz needed to be taught a lesson. Okay, the Seven Years' War was not all about Fritz, it was a lot of superpowers clashing over a million things. But let's note that Fritz did nothing to avoid making everyone in Europe mad at him.)
Uncle George (II) in Great Britain, who has also been provoked by Fritz, has balance of power considerations in continental Europe, and huge conflicts with France overseas, decides that it's worth putting up with his nephew the obnoxious little shit in order to kick France's ass. Especially since Fritz is Machiavellian (ask me about Fritz and Machiavelli) enough to be willing to present himself as the savior of the Protestant faith for the sake of propaganda, lol Fritz.
But mostly George (whose name I'm using metonymically for him and his ministers, he was not nearly as active in foreign policy as some of his neighbors) is interested in his overseas territories, of which Prussia has none, and so he offers Prussia some money and mostly moral support, and some distraction of his neighbors, but isn't fielding an army to fight alongside Prussia, which is on its own in this three-front war. So Fritz 1) got his country into an avoidable three-front war with enemies bigger than he was and 2) won it, barely, which accounts for a great deal of his ambivalent legacy (more on ambivalent legacy later).
* When Sweden eventually made peace with Fritz, he snarked at their ambassadors, "I'm sorry, were you at war with me? Wow, you learn something new every day." (Paraphrased.)
Also, remember that Austria AND France AND GB were all on Fritz's side when he was running away from his dad and tried to get FW to calm down, and FW actually attributed his decision not to kill his son to foreign intervention, and how does Fritz show his gratitude when he comes to power ten years later? "Screw you all, I do what I want. My dad left me an army and a treasury."
So here's Fritz, well into the Seven Years' War, barely hanging in there, swaying around in the bar seeing stars but landing enough punches his opponents are also bleeding out of various orifices. No one understands how he's still on his feet, this was supposed to be over in thirty seconds. "You have got to be kidding me" is the general reaction. But he might finally be about to drop.
Enter...the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg! (Brandenburg is where the Hohenzollerns are from. It's the area around Berlin.)
Elizabeth, who we remember hates Fritz's guts, has been getting progressively sicker. Finally, finally (Fritz has been calling her an "old bitch" for not doing it sooner), she dies.
Her heir is Peter III. He's a German prince who ended up on the throne of Russia because intermarriage.
What happens when he succeeds to the throne?
"Hey, Fritz! ILLLUUUUU! You're my hero! Can I get your autograph? I dress like you and wear my hair like you and I wanna have an army just like you and initiate reforms just like you and I pretend I'm you when I play with my soldiers! *hyperventilates*
"OMG, I'm soooooo sorry about my predecessor making war on you. Women, amirite? Here's my army which was trying to kill you yesterday. My soldiers are totally on your side now and will attack your enemies and defend you with their lives. YOUR CAUSE IS MINE!
"P.S. If you ever come visit, I will totally give you a blow job, you have only to ask."
(Okay, I made up the postscript, there's no evidence for that, but it's in the spirit of things. :P)
Fritz: "Oh thank the Supreme Being that I as a Deist kind of believe in when I'm not sporadically pretending to be a Protestant for the peasants, I might not actually have destroyed my entire country with my ill-thought-out decisions. Comin' at you, Austria and France! It's two on two now! How do you like *them* apples?" *gets a second wind*
Peter: Lasts approximately five minutes (six months, which is like five minutes for a reign) as Tzar before the "Russia is not a province of Prussia" party led by his wife overthrows and probably assassinates him.
His wife and successor, Catherine the soon-to-be-Great: "Fritz is a total asshole, and sucking his dick is not going to be this country's foreign policy. Yes, he's an intelligent asshole and I like some of his reforms, but we are out of this war. Attention, soldiers! Return to Russia at once."
Russian general on site with Fritz in Poland or thereabouts: "Sorry, dude, there was a coup; boss says I have to go home."
Fritz: "Shit. Shit. Enemies approaching now. Okay, Russian guy, I know you can't disobey orders, but it takes time to pack up an army and move it. Can you stick around for, like, two days, arrange your army in battle order, and pretend like you're going to attack, but really just watch, so no one dies and your Empress isn't pissed off? I can work with that."
Russian general: "I guess, yeah."
Austrians or French or both, I forget: "Wow, Fritz sure has a lot of troops on his side. Approach with caution." *battle ensues* "I wonder why the Russians are looking so menacing over there but never actually engaging?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fritz: "Thank you SO MUCH. You can go home now."
And thus concluded the Russian fanboy shenanigans.
To understand how significant all this was on a major geopolitical scale, you have to realize that Prussia was on the verge of losing. Fritz lost some major battles, partly through very questionable decisions when his generals were yelling at him to do basically anything but what he was doing but Fritz has never listened to anyone in his life except for Voltaire on matters of French literary style, and after having his army destroyed repeatedly, he was on the verge of abdicating and committing suicide. Like, imo, "I've been reading the Stoics" suicide, not "I'm suicidally depressed" suicide, although he was also in a pretty rotten emotional state. (Wilhelmine died on the day of one of his military defeats, it was pretty distressing.)
But he won the war. Three bigger guys set out to teach the scrawny little wiseguy a lesson, and at the end of the day, they're all staggering around punch drunk, and he's ready to come back for more. They all stare at each other in disbelief and head off to the hospital to get their injuries treated, leaving him sitting at the bar wearily drinking that glass of beer he snatched out of someone else's hand that started the whole thing.
Friedrich attributed his victory to the two "Miracles of the House of Brandenburg." The one where Elizabeth finally died and Peter came to power for like 6 whole months, and the one where he had lost a battle catastrophically and had no power to stop his enemies from sacking Berlin and conquering his entire country, but his enemies, like, did some tourism in Prussia and left without capitalizing on their opportunity.
It has been plausibly argued that Friedrich overrated the importance of these "miracles" and that, for once in his life he overestimated his enemies, by underestimating the extent to which, even if they won some key battles, they were losing the war because they didn't have the resources to keep fighting. The one thing Friedrich and FW before him did was make sure their country had a near bottomless pool of resources to keep fighting from.
Regardless. Friedrich said he came within a hairsbreadth of losing and was saved by his enemies, and everyone believed him.
Critically, almost two hundred years later, the Nazis believed him. When they were at the end of WWII and staring a really obvious defeat in the face, they held out without surrendering longer than they otherwise would, on the grounds that they were exactly like Old Fritz in every way possible (*Fritz spinning in his misplaced grave*) and Providence had saved Friedrich with some miracles, so it would save them! This is what Selenak was referring to about Roosevelt dying and all that.
Also, their propagandistic version of their hero Old Fritz who tooootally would have endorsed the Nazi party that was just following in his footsteps...is so OOC character assassination as to be unrecognizable and as deluded as the idea that Truman was going to withdraw America from the war...because...he was such a fan of Hitler???
In conclusion, the Russian fanboy shenanigans perfectly encapsulate how decisive Fritz was both to his contemporaries and to later generations. Reactions ranged from "Kill the bastard" to "I want your autograph" to the middle ground, summarized by the best description of Fritz I've ever seen, which I think is contemporary: "Thinks like a philosopher and acts like a king."
At the time, after the Seven Years' War, Fritz was a big celebrity in Europe, both to Protestants (because defender of the Protestant faith, omg lol) and Germans and liberal thinkers and hero-worshippers and intellectuals and so forth. People named their kids after him and their taverns, and people with money traveled to Potsdam to see Old Fritz toward the end of his life (but he was getting increasingly antisocial and only saw you if he wanted to, so a lot of people walked away disappointed).
In later times, fast forwarding through nineteenth-century German nationalism, Hitler and the Nazis made Old Fritz into their epitome of everything Aryanism was striving for. (That the RL guy would have ended up in a concentration camp wearing a pink triangle is just...the mind boggles.) After the Holocaust, everyone except the neo-Nazis hated Fritz for a long time because they saw him as the predecessor to Hitler and practically a Nazi himself, with all his unprovoked expansionist warfare, absolutism, and glorification of the army. Eventually, everyone calmed down a little, read some books, and decided Fritz should only be held responsible for his own actions, not the ones that later people invoked his name to justify, and his historical context should be taken into account. Current communis opinio is that Fritz's legacy should be handled with caution, but as long as we remember not to be nationalistic and to criticize the conquest of Silesia etc., it's okay to like him and write thousands of words about him in
Among contemporaries, Joseph II was a middle-grounder. He respected the hell out of Fritz's brain, not so much the repeated betrayal of allies, invasions of states that were minding their own business, and general reneging on agreements. Had some pretty sharp things to say about that, and definitely had political goals of his own that brought him into conflict with Friedrich. But okay, a lot of people feel that way about Fritz.
But what's amazing about Joseph fanboying as much as he did, even if it was significantly less than Peter over in Russia, was that Joseph was the SON and HEIR of Maria Theresia, whose country Fritz had INVADED within months of coming to power, meaning Fritz had conquered part of JOSEPH'S future territory, DURING Joseph's lifetime! (I just checked the dates, and Fritz began the invasion scarce months before Joseph was born, and made war on Joseph's country for the first five years of his life, then again for seven years when Joseph was a teenager and young man.) And yet that portrait of Joseph looking at Fritz like he can barely stand to be in the presence of so much awesomeness. Omg, the date of that meeting, it's 6 years after Fritz has just finished a super-bloody war (1 million casualties worldwide, since Britain and France brought in their colonial possessions) to confirm that Austria did not get to kidnap what he had rightfully stolen (to quote from Princess Bride).
Fritz had some nice things to say about Joseph after that meeting, and how bright the future looked with young people like this ready to take the helm, and Voltaire was pretty skeptical. "Dude, you're saying that because you're his hero and he's modeling himself after you. Come back when you can get an objective opinion."
And in conclusion, one of the most entertaining summaries of Fritz's ambivalent legacy is from a tumblr post I linked to somewhere in another post, the one called: "Should You Fight Them? The Prussian Monarch Edition."
"Frederick the Great: on the one hand, his father and the Seven Years' War already did. On the other, he’s an absolute warmongering asshole. Probably could beat you through some sneaky maneuver. Proceed with caution and maybe an Italian greyhound to win him over."
What I love most about that post is not only the ambivalence, but that, of all the Prussian monarchs, he's the only one predicted to win against a random internet reader! I guess that's why he's the only one in the list with an epithet instead of a regnal number.
And I'll stop there, but more later in reply to one of your other comments, omg.