In the first month of 1725 he had a superficial reconciliation with Catherine. A few weeks later, however, he caught a fatal chill, and he died within a fortnight. Russia did not mourn. His great and real services were such as only a later age could appreciate. His rugged, vicious, cruel personality was known to all, and the cost of his work had been heavy. One might say that there was in Peter the material of a great man, but the Romanoff dynasty never produced a great man. The material, in this one opportunity, was too deeply vitiated to develop. Peter was an incarnation of the national vices and--except indolence--the weaknesses he ought to have assailed. The unsubstantiality of most of his work appears in the sequel. Before he was dead there began the traditional squabble for power, the familiar grouping and intriguing of parties. The great majority of the nobles and clergy were in favour of Peter, the young son of Alexis and Charlotte. Catherine was too closely identified with the dying Tsar and all his hated schemes and reforms. But a few great nobles like Prince Menshikoff and Count Tolstoi knew that their fortune was bound up with that of Catherine, and they set to work as soon as the Tsar’s illness proved fatal. The troops were discontented, their pay in arrears and their limbs weary from the heavy constructive work to which Peter had put them. Catherine was directed to appeal to them for support and promise ample pay. The higher clergy who held power under Peter’s new scheme of Church-government were equally interested in sustaining his work. The palace was full of whispers and secret movements. The Council met while Peter lay dying, and the spokesmen of the majority confidently proposed his grandson for the throne. Tolstoi attacked them, and proposed Catherine; and after a long and furious debate Catherine was declared Autocrat of all the Russias. They found her weeping at Peter’s bedside, and there was a rush to take the oath. Moscow was mutinous for a time, but the army was won by generous treatment, and the country followed. The guards were provided with new uniforms and pay, and it was decreed that in future soldiers must not be employed upon such work as the making of canals. For the mass of the people, too, a great relief was afforded by the reduction, by one third, of the crushing poll-tax which Peter had imposed; and a political amnesty brought back thousands to their homes from the squalid jails or the frozen wastes of the north and of Sibera.