Catherine the Great (2 page)

Dates
: All Russian domestic dates are given according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar, which in the eighteenth century was eleven days behind the New Style (Gregorian) calendar in use in most European states by 1800. New Style dates, when given for events outside Russia, are marked NS.

Spelling and punctuation
: English spelling and punctuation have generally been modernised, as has the use of capital letters, even in quotations from eighteenth-century sources.

Transliteration
: There is no universally satisfactory system of transliteration for the Cyrillic alphabet. While the endnotes and the Further reading section adopt the Library of Congress system now in widespread scholarly use, a modified version is used in the text. Diacritical marks are omitted. The soft vowel ‘ia’ becomes ‘ya’: so, Yaroslavl rather than Iaroslavl; Trubetskaya rather than Trubetskaia. The soft vowel ‘e’ sometimes becomes ‘ye’: so, Tsarskoye Selo rather than Tsarskoe Selo. ‘ii’ and ‘iy’ endings on masculine proper names become ‘y’: so, Vyazemsky not Viazemskii. The soft vowel ‘e’, pronounced ‘yo’, is given as ‘ë’: so, Potëmkin rather than Potemkin or Potyomkin.

Names
: Catherine’s name, along with those of other ruling monarchs, is anglicised according to convention; otherwise the Russian is normally retained, e.g. Nicholas I but Nikolay Novikov. In some cases, e.g. Peter and Alexander, the anglicised version is always used. Although Russian makes extensive use of the patronymic in forms of address, most Russian names are given with Christian name and surname only: so Nikolay Novikov, rather than Nikolay Ivanovich Novikov or N. I. Novikov.

J
esus Christ, Napoleon and Richard Wagner are said to have inspired more biographies than any other figures in history. Catherine the Great cannot be far behind. Fascinated by a German princess who captured the Russian throne and corresponded with the leading minds of her age, her contemporaries started to tell her story from the moment she died on 6 November 1796. Ever since, her political achievements as ruler of the most powerful emergent empire in Europe have been set against rumours about the amorous liaisons on which she embarked in search of elusive personal fulfilment.

Over 200 years after the empress’s death, when both aspects of her life still make headlines in Russia and the West, my aim has been to bridge the gap between formidable historical scholarship and the popular accounts that risk trivialising a woman whose life requires no embellishment to reveal its interest and importance. There is no need to invent her conversations: though her writings can rarely be taken at face value, they tell us much about her active mind. And there is no shortage of acute contemporary comment on her personality and reign (what posterity made of it is the subject of my final chapter). Unless otherwise acknowledged, translations from these sources are my own, though readers who want to explore for themselves now have access to a growing range of excellent English versions, listed in the Further reading section. In addition to identifying the sources of my quotations, the endnotes offer a further (if necessarily inadequate) guide to the scholarship on which I have drawn. A comprehensive list would fill a book far larger than this one.

The Russian historian and journalist Vasily Bilbasov made the same discovery
at the end of the 1880s. In addition to filling a fat bibliographical volume, he took more than a thousand lively pages to cover only half of Catherine’s life before the reigning tsar, Alexander III, intervened to prevent further revelations about his controversial predecessor. Since comprehensiveness is clearly an impossible goal, it is important to have a guiding purpose in choosing what to discuss and what to omit. In attempting to give a fully rounded portrait of the empress, I have taken a broadly chronological approach that helps to emphasise the very wide variety of problems with which an absolute monarch was confronted at any one time. (Corrections to generally accepted dates are largely silent, except where they significantly revise our understanding of the course of events, as, for example, in the case of the funerals of Empress Elizabeth and Alexander Lanskoy.) Above all, however, I have sought to recover a sense of place, situating Catherine in the context of the Court society in which she grew up in Germany and lived most of her long life in Russia. For all that she did to reshape the values of the Court of St Petersburg, it still preserved in the 1790s many of the features of the Baroque Courts which she had first experienced, at Stettin, Zerbst and Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Here the Court is understood in the multiplicity of senses familiar to her and her contemporaries: an institution alive with intrigue extending from the monarch at its heart to the servants at its outer penumbra; a network of rival aristocratic clienteles at the centre of politics in much of Europe before the French Revolution; the symbolic authority to which foreign ambassadors were accredited; an extraordinary range of palaces, both urban and surburban; and a glittering cultural icon representing the power and majesty of the ruler to her subjects, great and small. That was how Catherine experienced the Court. And no single event did more to reveal its kaleidoscopic significance than her coronation, with which my version of her story begins.

THE CORONATION OF A USURPER 1762

‘N
owhere perhaps is the vicinity of a church more disagreeable than in Russia,’ complained a Swedish prisoner of war in 1760, tormented by the ‘perpetual dinging’ from St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Cathedral.
¹
its bell tower was only a few feet from his cell. Yet had Count Johann Hård been incarcerated in the moscow Kremlin, his ears would have been even sorer. While the Russians long continued to attribute magical powers to their bells, ringing them out to drive the devil from their parishes, their eighteenth-century rulers had co-opted the instrument as a symbol of the sacralisation of tsarist power.
²
Empress Anna could think of no better way of adding to her glory in the 1730s than by commissioning the world’s largest bell. Fatally cracked by fire in may 1737, before it had been raised from its casting pit,
tsar-kolokol
–‘the tsar bell’–lay buried in the Kremlin until 1836, escaping the designs of an enterprising moscow freemason who planned to smelt it in the 1780s and use the metal for fonts to print a new children’s Bible.
³
But while Hård was languishing in the Peter-Paul Fortress, Empress Elizabeth had commissioned a rival instrument, almost as massive, measuring more than forty feet in circumference. Alongside depictions of Christ, the Virgin mary and John the Baptist, the bell’s founder Konstantin Slizov had adorned it with portraits of the imperial family. His inscription drove home the dedication:

By the time the bell was finished in 1762, the scene had radically changed. Elizabeth was dead; her successor, Peter III, overthrown and assassinated within six months of his accession. And so it was that on the morning of Sunday 22 September, Slizov’s bell unexpectedly rang out for the first time to herald the coronation of Peter’s widow, Yekaterina Alekseyevna, as Catherine II of Russia.

At the stroke of ten, a fanfare of trumpets and drums heralded the empress’s ceremonial emergence from her private apartments in the Kremlin into the vaulted audience chamber of the Palace of Facets.
⁵
She can hardly have had much sleep. Thousands of lesser bells had tolled from every church in the city at three in the morning for vespers and then again at six o’clock to call worshippers to the vigil service that preceded Russian coronations. Two hours later, Slizov’s ‘great new bell’ summoned the clergy to the Cathedral of the Dormition, emitting the ‘deep hollow murmur’ that a later visitor described, vibrating all over Moscow ‘like the fullest and lowest tones of a vast organ, or the rolling of distant thunder’.
⁶
The empress herself had been fasting in preparation for the coronation communion service and before she could make her public appearance there were still some intricate personal devotions to perform. In these she was guided by her confessor, archpriest Fëdor (Dubyansky), who had grown so close to the pious Elizabeth that she conferred hereditary nobility on all his children (he himself died in possession of some 8000 serfs).
⁷
But ritual observance was always a duty rather than a consolation to Catherine’s sceptical mind, and she was less anxious about her prayers than about the need to present a suitably majestic image to her new subjects. Comforted by the servants who had taught her the Russian proverbs in which she took a childish delight, she set about composing herself for the ceremony that was to mark the ultimate stage in the transformation of an insignificant German princess, born Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst on 21 April 1729, into ‘the most serene and all-powerful Princess and lady, Catherine the Second, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias’.

She had plenty of time to think while she dressed for the part. Catherine had spent at least 20,000 roubles on her wardrobe, almost half as much as the initial 50,000-rouble budget for the coronation itself (the final bill was for 86,000
roubles, though such was the variety of funds that supported this extraordinary event that the total costs may never be known).
⁸
As a succession of startled subordinates had discovered in the brief interval since her accession on 28 June, no matter was too trivial to escape their new sovereign’s attention to detail. Gone were the days of haphazard accounting under the profligate Elizabeth. Catherine, who valued precision above all else, always remembered what she had commissioned and always insisted on value for money. Her new coronation robe–a shimmering confection of silver brocade, trimmed with ermine and embossed with eagles and gold braid–had already been pored over for imperfections. Now it remained only to manoeuvre into place the bulky train that required seven gentlemen-in-waiting to carry it in her wake. The most senior was one of Russia’s richest magnates, Count Peter Sheremetev, who had served the empress at her wedding banquet seventeen years earlier.
⁹
Only once she was satisfied that everything was secured was Catherine ready to face the world.

Outside in the Kremlin’s Ivanov Square, the four Guards regiments, summoned from their barracks by a 21-gun salute at 5 a.m., were already on parade, the colourful satins of their uniforms etched sharply against the pale stone walls of the three great Kremlin churches.
¹⁰
Though these were all monuments to Muscovy’s imperial pretensions in the reign of Ivan III (1462–1505), only the tsars’ diminutive chapel royal, the Cathedral of the Annunciation, had been built by Russians. The Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, which preceded St Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Cathedral as the royal necropolis, was the work of a Venetian architect. And it was a man from Bologna, Aristotele Fioravanti, who designed the most important church in Muscovy, the Cathedral of the Dormition, where the sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible had been the first to be crowned tsar in January 1547. Although the Muscovite coronation rite had been a single, standalone ceremony, Peter the Great had changed all that when he crowned his second wife, Catherine, in May 1724. Subsequent eighteenth-century coronations were followed by a week-long litany of receptions, balls and firework displays and preceded by a triumphal ‘entry’ into the city–a ‘glorification of force’ intended to show that the monarch’s power derived as much from conquest as from consecration.
¹¹
However, since even this entry procession culminated in a service at the Cathedral of the Dormition, which was followed by a recessional to the remaining two cathedrals,
¹²
Catherine’s guardsmen had grown all too familiar with these hallowed buildings in the exhausting period of drills and rehearsals that had occupied them since the first detachments left St Petersburg on 4 August. They had scarcely been allowed to rest during the week of festivities and
proclamations that had passed since Catherine formally entered Moscow on Friday 13 September. As their sergeants barked a final series of commands to send each platoon to its post, the soldiery probably faced the great day itself with a mixture of anticipation and relief.

More complicated emotions affected some of their officers. Among the proud subalterns marshalling the Horse Guards into position was the newly promoted Second Lieutenant Grigory Potëmkin, with whom Catherine was to fall in love in February 1774. She was probably betrothed to him in a secret ceremony sometime that summer, sharing with him not only a passionate and very public affair, but also some of the most important decisions in the second half of her reign.
¹³
For the moment, however, she remained committed to Grigory Orlov, a handsome hero of the Seven Years’ War by whom she had given birth to an illegitimate son as recently as 11 April. While Potëmkin passed unnoticed among several young bucks who had pledged their allegiance to the new empress in return for lavish rewards, Orlov had been closely involved in the preparations for the coronation, taking a particular interest in arrangements made for the artists who had been commissioned to record the event for posterity.
¹⁴

Catherine was no less concerned with the reactions of a more immediate public. On top of the Kremlin ramparts, a separate troop of guardsmen wheeled into place the cannon that would proclaim crucial moments of the ceremony to an expectant crowd on Red Square. From that unpaved thoroughfare at the heart of the sprawling old capital, the throng spilled over into a maze of narrow lanes. Visiting in 1780, Joseph II of Austria found Moscow ‘much larger than anything I’ve seen. Paris, Rome, Naples, in no way approach its size’.
¹⁵
Two years earlier, the British traveller Archdeacon William Coxe declared it ‘certainly the largest town in Europe, its circumference within the rampart…being exactly 39 versts or 26 miles’.
¹⁶
Though contemporary estimates of the city’s population varied widely, and it fluctuated according to the season, as many as 300,000 people could cram into the city after the summer harvest.
¹⁷
All of them, it seemed, had turned out to witness Catherine’s triumphal entry nine days before the coronation.

Silken carpets, draped over the balconies of the grander houses, added a splash of semi-Asiatic colour to this most verdant of cities. Even the meanest streets through which the parade passed were strewn with festive fir-branches, carved and formed into decorative trellises.
¹⁸
Yet Moscow was by no means wholly synonymous with squalor. ‘Some parts of this city have the look of a sequestered desert,’ Coxe reported, ‘other quarters of a populous town, some of a contemptible village, others of a great capital’.
¹⁹
Often dismissed as unplanned and
unkempt by comparison with the geometrically regimented St Petersburg, the old capital could boast some impressive modern architecture of its own. The Kremlin Arsenal, begun in 1702 but completed only in 1736, was an early example of Russian classicism, the university (Russia’s first, founded in 1755), one of the most recent at the time of Catherine’s coronation. To these had been added four new triumphal arches, built by 3000 labourers under the supervision of architects working for Prince Nikita Trubetskoy’s Coronation Commission.
²⁰
Each arch featured two full-scale portraits of the empress by the Synodal artist Aleksey Antropov, and incorporated a mixture of classical and panegyric motifs chosen by Trubetskoy’s stepson Mikhail Kheraskov, the curator of Moscow University and one of the leading Russian writers of the age.
²¹

Nor was it only the foreign elements in Russian culture that were mobilised to welcome the new sovereign. Priests bowed from the porches of every church in the city as a carillon rang out on the eve of the second great feast in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, the Exaltation of the Life-Giving Cross. Spectators who could find a ticket or bribe the guards mounted galleries erected in all the city’s main squares to gain a better view of their empress as she swept past in an open eight-horse carriage through streets lined with cheering subjects on her way to the Nikolsky Gate. There, at the north-eastern corner of the Kremlin, Catherine was formally greeted by Metropolitan Timofey (Shcherbatsky), while a choir of students from Moscow’s Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, dressed in white and holding forth laurel branches, hymned God’s chosen ruler before accompanying her to a service of celebration at the Cathedral of the Dormition. ‘Sing solemnly, Russia,’ the seminarists chanted: ‘raise your voice to the heavens.’
²²

Catherine’s entry into Moscow could hardly have presented a more impressive spectacle. Behind the scenes, however, the government worried that an unprecedented influx of migrants might destabilise an already overcrowded city. The Court and all its acolytes had decamped en masse from St Petersburg, leaving the Earl of Buckinghamshire, who arrived there as the new British ambassador on 11 September, stranded without hope of reaching Moscow in time for the coronation (he had to be satisfied with the celebrations presided over by Ivan Neplyuev, the Senator left in charge of the capital in the empress’s absence).
²³
Already softened by the autumn rains, the roads to the old capital were ‘very bad, and the horses so much fatigued with the concourse of people who have lately travelled
that way, as to make any degree of expedition impracticable’.
²⁴
Some 395 horses were required at each posting station merely to transport the 63 carriages needed by Catherine’s small entourage of 23. Since the tsarevich’s suite demanded 257 horses for 27 carriages, the Postal Chancellery took more than a month to assemble the necessary animals. By one estimate, some 19,000 horses were hired to haul the remaining notables, the wheels of their carriages splashing mud over the lines of straggling rustics, beggars and petty tradesmen who flocked to the old capital in the hope of sharing in the bounty traditionally distributed by a ‘merciful’ new monarch. In 1903, the contrast between richly attired courtiers and ragged peasants would wreck Nicholas II’s quest for national reconciliation at the canonisation of St Serafim of Sarov. Anxious to avoid any such comparison during Catherine’s coronation, her officials belatedly banned the import of fabric woven in gold and silver thread on 17 September.
²⁵

Fears that speculators might cause unrest by artificially inflating bread prices proved unfounded. Though Moscow remained a paradise for petty criminals throughout the festivities, the mood among the crowds was jubilant from the moment that Catherine arrived in the city. On the eve of her coronation, thousands of men and women streamed towards the Kremlin, where those lucky enough to acquire tickets would be admitted the following morning to places reserved for the populace. Undeterred by forecasts of wind and rain, their less fortunate fellows clambered up onto neighbouring rooftops in the hope of catching a glimpse of their sovereign.
²⁶