Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  In this way, Sophia Augusta Fredericka of Anhalt-Zerbst became Ekaterina, or, in English, Catherine. Sophia could have been baptized with her own name, Sophia, which was a common name in Russia. But Elizabeth had rejected this because Sophia had been the name of her own aunt, the half-sister and rival of Peter the Great who had struggled for the throne with the young tsar fifty-five years before. Instead, Elizabeth chose the name of her own mother, Catherine.

  As she left the chapel, the new convert was presented with a diamond necklace and brooch by the empress. Despite her gratitude, the new Catherine was so exhausted that, in order to save her strength for the morrow, she asked permission to be excused from the banquet following the ceremony. Later that night, she drove with the empress, the grand duke, and her mother to the Kremlin, where her betrothal was to be celebrated the following day.

  The next morning, Catherine opened her eyes and was handed two miniature portraits, one of Elizabeth, the other of Peter, both framed with diamonds, both gifts from the empress. Soon, Peter himself arrived to escort her to the empress, who was wearing the imperial crown and, over her shoulders, an imperial mantle. Leaving the Kremlin palace, Elizabeth walked under a canopy of solid silver whose great weight required eight generals to carry it. Behind the empress came Catherine and Peter, followed by Johanna, the court, the Synod, and the Senate. The procession descended the famous Red Staircase, crossed the square lined by men of the Guards regiments, and entered the Assumption Cathedral, where Russian tsars were crowned. Once inside, Elizabeth took the two young people by the hand and led them to a velvet-carpeted dais erected between the massive pillars in the center of church. The archbishop of Novgorod conducted the service, and the betrothal rings exchanged by the couple were handed to them by the empress herself. Johanna, with her appraising eye, observed that the rings were “real little monsters, both of them”; her daughter noted specifically, “The one he gave me was worth twelve thousand rubles, the one he received from me, fourteen thousand.” At the end of the ceremony, a court official read an imperial decree granting Catherine the rank of grand duchess and the title of imperial highness.

  Johanna’s report on the betrothal service was a litany of complaint:

  The ceremony lasted four hours during which it was impossible to sit down for a moment. It is no exaggeration to say that my back was numb from all the bowing I had been obliged to do as I embraced all the numerous ladies and that there was a red mark the size of a German flourin on my right hand from all the times it had been kissed.

  Johanna’s mixed feelings about her daughter, now the central figure in this ceremonial pageantry, should have been mollified when Elizabeth went out of her way to be gracious to a woman she despised. In the cathedral, the empress had prevented Johanna from kneeling before her, saying, “Our situation is the same; our vows are the same.” But when the ceremony was over, with the cannon thundering, the church bells pealing, and the court moving to the adjacent Granovitaya Palace for the betrothal banquet, Johanna’s unhappiness burst out. By rank, the bride’s mother could not sit at the imperial table with the empress, the grand duke, and the newly proclaimed grand duchess. When this was explained to her, Johanna protested, declaring that her place could not be among mere ladies of the court. The master of ceremonies was uncertain what to do, and Catherine witnessed and suffered her mother’s behavior in silence. Elizabeth, again infuriated by the presumption of this ungrateful, deceitful guest, ordered a separate table set up in a private alcove where Johanna could watch from a window.

  The ball that evening was in the Hall of Facets of the Granovitaya Palace, a room constructed with a single central pillar, filling one quarter of the room, supporting the low ceiling. In this place, said Catherine, “one was almost suffocated by the heat and the crowd,” Then, walking back to the state apartments, other new rules of precedence took effect. Catherine now was Her Imperial Highness, a Grand Duchess of Russia, the future wife of Heir to the Throne; Johanna, therefore, was obliged to walk behind her daughter. Catherine attempted to avoid these situations, and Johanna recognized Catherine’s effort. “My daughter conducts herself very intelligently in her new situation,” she wrote to her husband. “She blushes each time she is forced to walk in front of me.”

  Elizabeth continued to be generous. “There was not a day on which I did not receive presents from the empress,” Catherine said later. “Silver and jewels, cloth and so forth, indeed everything that one can imagine, the least of which was worth from ten to fifteen thousand rubles. She showed me extreme affection.” Soon afterward, the empress gave Catherine thirty thousand rubles for personal expenses. She, who had never had any pocket money at all, was awed by this sum. She immediately sent money to her father to help with the education and medical care of her younger brother. “I know that Your Highness has sent my brother to Hamburg and that this has entailed heavy expenses,” she wrote to Christian Augustus. “I beg Your Highness to leave my brother there as long as is necessary to restore him to health. I will undertake to pay all his expenses.”

  Elizabeth also gave the new grand duchess a small court of her own, including young chamberlains and maids-in-waiting. Peter already had his own court, and in the apartments of the grand duke and grand duchess, the young people played blindman’s buff and other games, laughing, jumping, dancing, running—even taking the lid off a big harpsichord, placing it on pillows, and using it as a toboggan to slide along the floor. By participating in these frolics, Catherine was trying to please her future husband. Peter was friendly toward this willing playmate; he was also intelligent enough to know that any fondness he showed his fiancée would please the empress. Even Brümmer, observing them together and deciding that she might help him deal with his rebellious charge, asked her to “use my influence to correct and reprimand the Grand Duke.” She refused. “I told him it was impossible for in that case, I should become as hateful to him [Peter] as the rest of his entourage already were.” She understood that to have any influence on Peter, she must be the opposite of those who tried to “correct” him. He could not come to her looking for friendship only to find he had another watchdog.

  Johanna became more distant. Now, when she wanted to see her daughter, she had to have herself announced. Reluctant to do this, she stayed away, declaring that the young court around Catherine was too wild and noisy. Meanwhile, Johanna herself was making new friends. She joined a circle of people of whom the empress and most of the court disapproved. It was not long before her intimacy with the chamberlain, Count Ivan Betskoy, began to cause talk; eventually, the two were so often together that some at court began saying that they were having an affair—and even whispering that the thirty-two-year-old Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was pregnant.

  10

  A Pilgrimage to Kiev and Transvestite Balls

  THE BRIDE HAD ARRIVED in Russia, she was young, her health was restored, and the difficulties involving her conversion to Orthodoxy had been overcome. Now that she and Peter were betrothed, what stood in the way of an immediate marriage? One obstacle, difficult to surmount even for an empress, was the doctors’ strong cautionary opinion regarding Peter. At sixteen, the grand duke looked more like fourteen, and the medical men still could not detect in him any convincing signs of puberty. It would be at least a year, they believed, before he could father a child. Even if a pregnancy occurred, there must be another nine months before an infant could be born. To Elizabeth, this length of time—twenty-one months—seemed an eternity. And because the wedding had to be postponed, the empress also had to postpone Johanna’s departure.

  Reluctantly accepting these disappointments, Elizabeth decided on another means of presenting her new dynasty to the public eye. In August 1744 she set out on a pilgrimage to Kiev, the oldest and holiest of Russian cities, where Christianity was first introduced by Grand Prince Vladimir in A.D. 800. The journey of almost six hundred miles between Moscow and Kiev had been suggested by Elizabeth’s Ukrainian lover, Razumovsky, and the trek included Peter, Cather
ine, and Johanna and their respective retainers, along with two hundred and thirty courtiers and hundreds of servants. Once under way, the cavalcade of carriages and wagons loaded with baggage jolted and swayed day after day over the endless roads, inflicting weariness, boredom, hunger, and thirst on the passengers. The horses were frequently exchanged; at every relay station, eight hundred fresh animals awaited the arrival of the imperial caravan.

  While the grandees of the Russian court rode in velvet-cushioned carriages, one figure made most of the journey on foot. Elizabeth took penance and pilgrimages seriously. Walking along the hot, shadeless Russian roads, sweating in the heat and murmuring prayers, Elizabeth stopped to pray at every village church and wayside shrine. Meanwhile, Razumovsky, as practical and modest in his heavenly as in his earthly expectations, preferred to ride behind her in his comfortable carriage.

  Catherine and Johanna began the journey riding in a carriage with two ladies-in-waiting; Peter was in a separate carriage with Brümmer and two of his tutors. One afternoon, Peter tired of his “pedagogues,” as Catherine called them, and decided to join the two German princesses, whose company he thought would be more lively. He abandoned his carriage, “got into ours and refused to leave,” bringing with him one of the spirited young men of his entourage. Very soon, Johanna, irritated by the company of the young people, reshuffled the arrangements. She had one of the carts that was loaded with beds rearranged with boards and pillows so that as many as ten people could sit in it. To Johanna’s annoyance, Peter and Catherine insisted on filling the cart with other young people. “We allowed only the most amusing and entertaining of the entourage to join us,” she said. “From morning till night, we did nothing but laugh, play and make merry.” Brümmer, Peter’s tutors, and Johanna’s ladies-in waiting were insulted by this reshuffle, which ignored court precedence. “While we were enjoying ourselves, they were, all four of them, in one carriage where they sulked, scolded, condemned, and made sour remarks at our expense. In our carriage we knew this, but we just laughed at them.”

  For Catherine, Peter, and their friends, this journey became not a religious pilgrimage but an excursion, a lark. There was no need to hurry; Elizabeth walked no more than a few hours a day. At the end of three weeks, the main cavalcade arrived at Alexis Razumovsky’s large mansion in Koseletz, where they waited three additional weeks for the empress to appear. When she finally arrived on August 15, the religious complexion of the pilgrimage was temporarily suspended; for two weeks, the “pilgrims” joined in a succession of balls, concerts, and, from morning to night, card games so feverish that sometimes forty or fifty thousand rubles lay on the tables.

  While they were staying in Koseletz, an incident occurred that drove a permanent wedge between Johanna and Peter. It began when the grand duke entered a room where Johanna was writing. On a low stool beside her, she had placed her jewel case, in which she kept the small things that were important to her, including her letters. Peter, romping and frisking in an attempt to make Catherine laugh, made as if to rummage through the case and snatch the letters. Johanna fiercely told him not to touch it. The grand duke, still prancing, started across the room, but in pirouetting away from Johanna, his coat caught the open lid of the little case and tipped it and its contents onto the floor. Johanna, thinking he had done it intentionally, flew into a rage. Peter tried at first to apologize, but when she refused to believe that it had been an accident, he, too, became angry. The two began to shout at each other, and Peter, turning to Catherine, appealed to her to verify his innocence.

  Catherine was caught in the middle.

  “Knowing how easily excited my mother was and that her first impulses were always very violent, I feared she would slap me if I disagreed with her. Wanting neither to lie to her nor to offend the grand duke, I kept silent. Nevertheless, I did tell my mother that I did not think the grand duke had done it intentionally.”

  Johanna then turned on Catherine:

  When my mother was in a temper, she had to find someone to quarrel with. I remained silent and then burst into tears. At first, my silence angered them both. Then, the grand duke, seeing that all my mother’s anger was now directed at me because I had taken his part and that I was crying, accused my mother of being an unjust, over-bearing shrew. She hurled back that he was “an ill-bred little boy.” It would have been impossible to quarrel more violently without coming to blows.

  From that moment on, the grand duke took a great dislike to my mother and he never forgot this quarrel. My mother, in turn, bore him an unforgiving grudge. Their strained relationship became one of ever-worsening bitterness and suspicion, liable to turn sour at any moment. Neither of them could hide their feelings from me. And, as hard as I worked to obey the one and please the other—and somehow to reconcile them—I succeeded only for short periods. Each always had some sarcastic or malicious barb ready to let fly. My own position became more and more painful every day.

  Catherine was torn, but her mother’s bad temper and her sympathy for the grand duke had an effect: “In truth, at that time, the grand duke opened his heart to me more than to anyone else. He could see that my mother often attacked and scolded me when she was unable to find fault with him. This placed me high in his estimation; he believed he could rely on me.”

  At the climax of the pilgrimage, the empress and the court spent ten days in Kiev. Catherine first saw the magnificent city in panorama, its golden domes rising from a bluff on the western bank of the Dnieper River. Elizabeth, Peter, and Catherine entered the city on foot, walking with a crowd of priests and monks behind a large cross. Everywhere in this holiest of Russian cities, in a period when the church was immensely rich and the people devoutly pious, the empress was welcomed with extravagant pomp. At the famous Pecharsky Monastery Church of the Assumption, Catherine was awed by the majesty of the religious processions, the beauty of the religious ceremonies, the incomparable splendor of the church themselves. “Never in my whole life,” she wrote later, “have I been so impressed as by the extraordinary magnificence of this church. Every icon was covered with solid gold, silver, pearls and encrusted with precious stones.”

  Impressed though she was by this visual display, Catherine never in her lifetime was devoutly religious. Neither the strict Lutheran beliefs of her father nor the passionate Orthodox faith of Empress Elizabeth ever took possession of her mind. What she saw and admired in the Russian church was the majesty of architecture, art, and music merged into a splendid unity of inspired—but still man-made—beauty.

  No sooner had Elizabeth and the court returned from Kiev than another round of operas, balls, and masquerades began in Moscow. Every evening, Catherine appeared in a new dress and was told how well she looked. She was shrewd enough to recognize that flattery was the lubricating oil of court life, and she was also aware that some people still disapproved of her: Bestuzhev and his followers; jealous court ladies who envied a rising star; parasites who kept careful count of the distribution of favors. Catherine worked hard to disarm her critics. “I was afraid of not being liked and did everything in my power to win those with whom I was to spend my life,” she wrote later. Above all, she never forgot to whom she owed primary allegiance. “My respect for the empress and my gratitude to her were extreme,” she said. “And she used to say that she loved me almost more than the grand duke.”

  A sure way to please the empress was to dance. For Catherine, this was easy; she, like Elizabeth, was passionately fond of dancing. Every morning at seven, Monsieur Landé, the French ballet master of the court, arrived with his violin and, for two hours, taught her the latest steps from Paris. From four to six in the afternoon, he returned to teach again. And then, in the evenings, Catherine would impress the court with her graceful dancing.

  Some of these evening balls were bizarre. Every Tuesday by decree of the empress, men would attend dressed as women and women would dance dressed as men. Catherine, then fifteen, was delighted by this change of costume: “I must say that there was nothing mor
e hideous and at the same time more comical than to see most men dressed this way and nothing more miserable than to see women in men’s clothes.” Most of the court roundly detested these evenings, but Elizabeth had a reason for this caprice: she looked superb in male clothing. Though she was far from slender, her full-bosomed figure was set off by a pair of slim, splendidly shaped legs. Her vanity demanded that these elegant limbs should not remain hidden, and the only way to display them was in a pair of tight male trousers.

  Catherine described the hazards she encountered on one of these evenings:

  The very tall Monsieur Sievers, who was wearing a hoop skirt the empress had lent him, was dancing a Polonaise with me. Countess Hendrikova, who was dancing behind me, stumbled over the hoop skirt of Monsieur Sievers as he turned around with his hand in mine. In falling, she struck me so hard that I fell beneath the hoop skirt of Monsieur Sievers which had sprung upright beside me. Sievers himself became entangled in his own long skirts which were in great disorder and there we were, all three of us, sprawling on the floor with me entirely covered by his skirt. I was dying of laughter trying to get up, but people had to come and help us up because the three of us were so entangled in Monsieur Sievers’s clothing that no one could get up without causing the other two to fall down.

  That autumn, however, Catherine saw and felt the darker side of Elizabeth’s personality. The empress’s vanity demanded that she should be not only the most powerful woman in the empire but the most beautiful. She could not tolerate hearing another woman’s beauty praised. Catherine’s triumphs had not escaped her notice, and her annoyance found an outlet. One evening at the opera, the empress was sitting with Lestocq in the royal box opposite the box in which Catherine, Johanna, and Peter were seated. During the intermission, the empress noticed Catherine talking gaily to Peter. Could this young woman, a picture of glowing health and confidence, now so popular at court, be the same shy girl who had come to Russia less than a year ago? Suddenly, the empress’s jealousy flared. Staring at the younger woman, she seized on the first grievance that popped into her head. As if the matter were something that could not wait, Elizabeth dispatched Lestocq to Catherine’s box to tell Catherine that the empress was furious with her because she had run up unacceptable debts. Elizabeth had given her thirty thousand rubles; where had it all gone? In delivering this message, Lestocq made certain that Peter and everyone else within earshot could hear. Tears sprang to Catherine’s eyes and, even as she wept, more humiliation was added. Peter, instead of consoling her, said that he agreed with his aunt and thought it appropriate that his betrothed had been reprimanded. Johanna then declared that as Catherine no longer consulted her as to how a daughter should behave, she “washed her hands” of the matter.