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cahnFrederician fandom is the best! 3 stories in main archive and 2 stories in Madness, eeeeeeee and I have only managed to read my own gifts so far (well, I guess Madness isn't open yet either, but even if it had been I wouldn't have managed to have read them) but they are so goooooood
Also, I would like to apologize on behalf of the fandom that none of us apparently managed any Fritz/Voltaire. Some of us, uh, didn't know enough about Voltaire, and we are Taking Steps to attempt to rectify this in the future if anyone requests it, say, next year. Just saying.
I'm making this post because the last one has an insane number of comments, but I still owe SO many comments on the last post and I kiiiinda would like to read and comment on Yuletide stories for the next week as time permits so I almost hope this post doesn't get much action and then we resume in the new year? (Especially since there is a limited amount of discussion we can do on the fics right now!) :D I was thinking of making another post anyway for reveals.
(*) My husband D came up with this :P :)
Also, I would like to apologize on behalf of the fandom that none of us apparently managed any Fritz/Voltaire. Some of us, uh, didn't know enough about Voltaire, and we are Taking Steps to attempt to rectify this in the future if anyone requests it, say, next year. Just saying.
I'm making this post because the last one has an insane number of comments, but I still owe SO many comments on the last post and I kiiiinda would like to read and comment on Yuletide stories for the next week as time permits so I almost hope this post doesn't get much action and then we resume in the new year? (Especially since there is a limited amount of discussion we can do on the fics right now!) :D I was thinking of making another post anyway for reveals.
(*) My husband D came up with this :P :)
Holstein Pete and P(Russian) Pete
Date: 2019-12-27 04:23 am (UTC)Re: Holstein Pete and P(Russian) Pete
Date: 2019-12-27 06:44 am (UTC)Re: Holstein Pete and P(Russian) Pete
Date: 2019-12-27 07:38 am (UTC)I don't think we told you all of this, which I was writing up when
Peter III was born Karl Peter Ulrich in Holstein, which was a duchy in the HRE at the time, and today is part of Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, just south of Denmark. His mother was a daughter of Peter the Great. She died after giving birth to him. His father claimed the the Swedish throne but never managed to sit on it. Dad more successfully managed to be duke of Holstein, but, alas, lost Schleswig to the Danes. So when Peter was born, he was duke of Holstein (and Gottorp, which doesn't enter into this story). There were wars, there were treaties, territories changed hands, it's complicated.
Anyway, Peter grows up a German-speaking prince in a Germany duchy. This is relevant to his story.
Elizaveta (sorry, her name is etched in my brain in this form), daughter of Peter the Great and aunt of young Karl Peter Ulrich, becomes Tzarina of Russia. She's the one who haaaates Fritz's guts, fairly so as he also hates her. They will end up fighting the Seven Years' War against each other, and her troops will hand him his worst defeat at Kunersdorf. (After which he handed over command to one of his generals, talked about abdicating and letting Heinrich run things, and considered suicide. Through a combination of control issues and terrier personality, Fritz was back in sole command in a week or two.)
Anyway, back in Holstein. When he's 11, Peter Karl Ulrich's dad dies and he becomes Duke of Holstein. But if you think that's exciting, wait until he turns fourteen.
Finland: Congratulations, Karl Peter Ulrich, you're king!
Sweden: Congratulations, Karl Peter Ulrich, you're heir presumptive!
Russia: Congratulations, Karl Peter Ulrich, you're heir presumptive! Elizaveta may or may not have a secret husband and may or may not have secret kids, but she sure hasn't produced any heirs to the throne.
Finland, Sweden, Russia: *catch up on the news*
Finland, Sweden, Russia: ...Wait a minute! You can't be all those things!
Sweden: Takesy-backsies!
Sweden and Russia: Ha, no, what were we thinking, letting the Finns have a king. Finland belongs to Sweden, which definitely does not belong to Karl Peter Ulrich.
Russia: Hey, Karl Peter Ulrich, what kind of weirdo foreign name is that? Your name is Pyotr Fyodorovich, you're moving to St. Petersburg, and you're Orthodox now. Congratulations, Grand Duke Pyotr, you're now heir presumptive to your aunt Elizaveta! I hope you like Russia.
And so it was that HolsteinPete became RussianPete. But RussianPete did not like Russia so much, and in his heart he was still German, hence (P)RussianPete. And if you're German, who's the coolest? Fritz is the coolest, that's who.
Fritz: *has just conquered Silesia for the first time*
ViennaJoe: *is one year old*
Evidently (working off DW and tumblr write-ups here), young Karl Peter is separated from his BFF Christian August von Brockdorff, who is not allowed to accompany him to Russia, on grounds of being a bad influence. But Brockdorff is a persistent BFF. After being turned away at the Russian border, he manages to slip in incognito, make it to St. Petersburg, and be welcomed by Peter and made chamberlain. The slashers go wild.
A few years later, Fritz arranges for one of his general's daughters, Sophie Friederike, to move to St. Petersburg to marry Grand Duke Pyotr, in hopes that after Elizaveta dies, Russia will become (P)Russia. When she's on her way to Russia, that episode happens that we told you about, where she's young and nervous and sitting next to Fritz at dinner, and Fritz charms her, and they have a nice conversation about music and such.
But young Sophie Friederike moves to St. Petersburg, changes her name to Catherine, becomes Orthodox, and sees which way the wind is blowing. She becomes fluent in Russian (albeit with a German accent), and embraces her new religion instead of speaking German and making fun of Orthodoxy. When she was deeply ill and lying on her sickbed facing the possibility of death, she's said to have refused Lutheran religious comfort and sent for an Orthodox priest, thus making all the Russians happy with their new Grand Duchess.
When Elizaveta dies, (P)RussianPete decides his first moves as Tsar Peter III will be to:
1) Tell Fritz he is the coolest.
2) Switch sides in the war and basically place his army at Fritz's disposal, instead of attacking him all the time and making him consider suicide.
3) Return to Prussia all the Prussian lands that the Russian army had conquered under Elizaveta. For free. Just because "OMG Fritz I'm SO SORRY about my predecessor."
4) Institute a bunch of reforms in imitation of Fritz. (Russia was in desperate need of reforms, I kid you not.)
5) Try to get Schleswig back from the Danes, because *clearly* what is most important to Russia is some minor German principality. And this principality is totally worth pissing off the Danes over, right after you've handed over recently conquered Russian territory to the Prussians.
Re (5), I have read that even Fritz suggested to Peter that this might not be the best idea ever, in that it might not go over so well with the Russians.
To summarize: HolsteinPete proved that he was nominally RussianPete but really PrussianPete, or at the very least StillExtremelyGermanPete.
Well, the Russians are indeed not too thrilled about all this, and there are a few more of them in Russia than Peter's German buddies, and they speak Russian with their Russian-speaking Grand Duchess (well, I suppose now that Elizaveta's dead, she's Empress Consort), with the result that 6 months later, former Grand Duchess/Empress Consort is reigning Tzarina/Empress Catherine the soon-to-be-Great, and Peter III is twiddling his thumbs in prison for about a week, before he dies of Extremely Natural and Not At All Suspicious Causes. (Historians debate.)
And since AnhaltSophie, the cow who didn't even get Fritz's autograph for (P)RussianPete at that dinner, has become RussianCatherine, the pro-German foreign policy ends, and she gets to stay Tzarina for more than
5 minutes6 months. She will undo Peter's reforms, then re-issue a bunch of them in her own name because they were such obviously good ideas to any product of the Enlightenment, plus add in a bunch more reforms, and she will fangirl Voltaire (although not stage Semiramis for him) and be very sad when he dies. Like Fritz, though, the longer she hangs onto absolute power, the more conservative she becomes.Catherine: Idk, maybe freeing the serfs is a noble cause for an enlightened monarch.
Serfs: *riot*
Catherine: On second thought, that sounds scary.
So that is the story of HolsteinPete, AnhaltSophie, (P)RussianPete, and RussianCatherine. :)
Re: Holstein Pete and P(Russian) Pete
Date: 2019-12-29 02:38 am (UTC)...somehow (among other things) I had not internalized that Peter III was only Tsar for six months! (Possibly because of the perennial Yuletide request, I had thought it was a little longer, lol.)
(now I'm just imagining AnhaltSophie's tumblr, and then changing its name to RussianCatherine, lol!)
Re: Holstein Pete and P(Russian) Pete
Date: 2019-12-29 06:24 am (UTC)(Possibly because of the perennial Yuletide request, I had thought it was a little longer, lol.)
What can I say, it was an eventful 6 months! Re the perennial Yuletide request, I think what we have here is a Richard III situation. Guy is king for a short time (R3 lasted 2 years), gets overthrown in a coup, gets some really bad press from the propagandists of the subsequent reign outlining how he was the Worst King Ever and desperately needed overthrowing, and eventually people start to question that account. Then you get the Ricardian apologists, some of whom have strong feelings.
As for (P)RussianPete, Catherine's propaganda said, among other things, that he was an alcoholic and mentally retarded. Supporters and beneficiaries of the coup made a big deal out of him "playing" with "toy soldiers" as an adult. Which is actually, if you have 3D models of various terrains, a legit way of studying tactics and strategy that allows you to visualize different situations and deployments of troops. But it's much better to overthrow someone because they're mentally incompetent and being ruled by bad advisors (them again) than because you don't like their foreign policy. Because what if someone doesn't like *your* foreign policy someday?
More recent research has indicated that (P)RussianPeter was as mentally competent as anyone else, that he was making sensible Enlightenment reforms, just...a lot at one time (not unlike Rational Fanboy ViennaJoe), enough to get serious pushback, and that the big reason for his overthrow was that foreign policy that showed that he really hadn't assimilated in Russia and didn't have Russia's best interests at heart. As noted, many of his reforms were kept/reinstituted by Catherine, without, of course, giving credit to him.
I have no data on his alcohol consumption, but it doesn't seem to have impaired him from getting work done. Like I said, he got a lot done in those 6 months, and he seems to have been seriously actively involved himself, no Louis XV.
(now I'm just imagining AnhaltSophie's tumblr, and then changing its name to RussianCatherine, lol!)
Lol! It's RomKat in the v. secret transcript, which is snazzier, but I was trying to make explicit the foreign policy differences for my non-fictional write-up.