Google's counterfactual on Peter III and Catherine's coup: history versus myth

Google's counterfactual on Peter III: what would have peine without Catherine's coup?

Google's artificial intelligence has set out to rewrite history with an alternative scenario: what if Peter III of Russia had not been overthrown by his vvife Catherine the Great in 1762? The algorithm paints a tsar who saves Prussia, allies with Frederick the Great and launches a war against Denmark. But the analysis of the historical data reduces that counterfactual to a baseless digital myth.

Six months of chaos: Peter III's incompetence

Peter III reigned for only six months, but it was enough time to burn down the Empire. His obsession with Prussia —he changed the Russian army's uniforms to the Prussian fashion, pulled Russia out of the Seven Years' War when Prussia was on the verge of collapse— was not a reform, but a humiliation. The plan to attack Denmark over a German duchy was an absurd distraction in the midst of Europe's reconfiguration. More than 90% of the population were serfs; his "manifesto on the freedom of the nobility" only freed the boyars from state service, who squeezed the peasants even harder. The secularization of Church lands fattened the royal treasury, not the people.

The myth of the "tsar of the poor" and the reality of the usurper

Online, the figure of Peter III is resurfacing as a defender of the lower classes. The data refute it: his six months were not enough for structural change. Catherine's coup was not the plot of an ambitious woman, but a surgical operation backed by the Orlovs, the Panins, the imperial guard and half the nobility. Catherine herself, called a "usurper" in a La Vanguardia headline, built her 34-year reign on territorial expansion at the expense of Poland and Turkey, and a cultural modernization that does not hide the foundations of the autocratic regime.

The question remains open: if Peter III had stayed on the throne, would he have averted the disaster or simply accelerated it? Google's AI chooses the first option; the evidence, the second.