Peter III ruled Russia for 186 days before his wife took the throne
Peter III became emperor in January 1762, made peace with Prussia, handed back Russia's hard-won conquests and was overthrown by his wife Catherine that July. Days later he was dead. The official explanation, haemorrhoids, was scoffed at across Europe, with Voltaire among the skeptics.
He was born Charles Peter Ulrich in Kiel on 21 February 1728, son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Anna Petrovna, a daughter of Peter the Great. His mother died weeks after his birth, and at 11 he inherited his father's duchy. His childless aunt Elizabeth became empress of Russia in 1741 and brought him east, naming him heir in 1742. That same autumn the Swedish parliament chose him as its heir too, unaware that Russia had got there first; his conversion to Orthodoxy that November ruled out the Swedish crown. Omitting the phrase grandson of Peter the Great from his official title was made a crime.
Elizabeth married him in 1745 to his second cousin, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, who took the name Catherine. Smallpox had scarred him shortly before, and the empress arranged their first meeting in a dim room to hide the damage. The marriage was unhappy. Their son became Emperor Paul I, though Catherine later wrote that Peter was not the father.
Once on the throne, Peter pulled Russia out of the Seven Years' War, signed peace with Prussia in May 1762 and offered Frederick II 12,000 troops. Russian forces left Berlin and turned against Austria, handing Frederick the initiative and the chance to retake southern Silesia. Peter also prepared a war on Denmark to recover parts of Schleswig for his German duchy.
Much of his reputation comes from Catherine's memoirs, which call him an idiot and a drunkard, and from Frederick's jibe that he let himself be dethroned like a child sent to bed. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica painted him as mean, hideous and loathsome. Later historians have pushed back: A. S. Mylnikov describes a sharp, frank and hot-tempered man of contradictions, while Elena Palmer sees a cultured reformer. After his death, impostors claiming to be him flourished, the most famous being Yemelyan Pugachev.
Source: Peter III of Russia
