History of Russia (1721–96) drills on the Russian army, and depriving Russia of a military victory by establishing his sudden alliance with Prussia. Making use of the discontent and fearing for her own position, Peter III's wife, Catherine, deposed her husband in a coup, and her lover's brother, Aleksey Orlov, subsequently murdered him, so in June 1762 Catherine became Catherine II, empress of Russia. Peter the Great had two wives, Yevdokiya Lopukhina (the daughter of a minor noble) and Marfa Skavronskaya (a Lithuanian peasant, renamed Catherine after her conversion to Orthodoxy). Catherine I's rise through Peter I's Table of Ranks from a simple peasant
Church reform of Peter the Great century the majority of the Russian Orthodox Church was headed by people from Ukraine (Little Russia or Galicia). Between 1700 and 1762, out of the 127 hierarchs who headed cathedrals in Russia 70 were from Ukraine and only 47 from Russia (the rest originating from other regions). Peter I, known as "Peter the Great" (ruled 1682–1725), ushered in an era in which the church government was fundamentally transformed: instead of being governed by a patriarch or metropolitan, the government of the church came under the control of a committee known as the Most Holy Governing Synod, which was composed both