Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Four days after Catherine received the gift of money from the empress, the cabinet secretary came to her and begged her to lend this money back to the treasury; the empress needed money for another purpose and no funds were available. Catherine sent the money back and it was returned to her in January. Eventually, she learned that Peter, having heard about the empress’s gift to his wife, had become angry and had complained vehemently because nothing had been given to him. Alexander Shuvalov had reported this to the empress, who immediately sent the grand duke an order for a sum equal to what she had given Catherine—which is why the money had to be borrowed back from the original recipient.

  While cannonades, balls, illuminations, and fireworks celebrated her son’s birth, Catherine remained in bed. On the seventeenth day after the delivery, she learned that the empress had assigned Sergei Saltykov to a special diplomatic mission: he was to deliver the formal announcement of her son’s birth to the royal court of Sweden. “This meant,” Catherine wrote, “that I was immediately going to be separated from the one person I cared about most. I buried myself in my bed where I did nothing but grieve. In order to stay there, I pretended to have continual pain in my leg which prevented me from getting up. But the truth was that I could not and would not see anybody in my sorrow.”

  Forty days after Catherine gave birth, the empress came back to her bedroom for a ceremony to mark the end of her confinement. Catherine had dutifully risen from her bed to receive the sovereign, but when Elizabeth saw her so weak and exhausted, she made her remain sitting in bed while prayers were read. The infant Paul was present, and Catherine was permitted to look at him from a distance. “I thought him beautiful and the sight of him raised my spirits a little,” Catherine said, “but the moment the prayers were finished, the empress had him carried away and she also left.” On November 1, Catherine received the formal congratulations of the court and the foreign ambassadors. For this purpose, a room was richly furnished overnight, and there, on a couch of rose-colored velvet embroidered with silver, the new mother sat and extended her hand to be kissed. Immediately after the ceremony, the elegant furniture was removed and Catherine was returned to the isolation of her room.

  From the moment of Paul’s birth, the empress behaved as if the child were her own; Catherine had been simply a vehicle for bringing him into the world. Elizabeth had many reasons for holding this point of view. She had brought the two adolescents to Russia in order to create a child. For ten years, she had been keeping them both at the expense of the state. Thus, the child, required for reasons of state, created by her command, was now, in effect, the property of the state—that is, of the empress.

  There were other reasons, beyond political and dynastic, for the love and care Elizabeth lavished on Paul. It was not for reasons of state that she took physical possession of the baby. It was also a matter of love welling up from an emotional, sentimental nature; of bottled-up maternal impulses and a desire for family. Now, forty-four years old and in declining health, Elizabeth meant to be the child’s mother, even if the motherhood was make-believe. It was as a part of her effort to make this role real to herself that she excluded Catherine from the baby’s life. Elizabeth’s extreme possessiveness was more than an expression of thwarted maternal need; it was a form of jealousy. In effect, she simply kidnapped the baby.

  What Elizabeth took, Catherine was denied. She was not allowed to care for her infant; indeed, she was scarcely allowed to see him. She missed his first smile and his early growth and development. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when aristocratic and upper-class women performed little actual child care, leaving most of this work to wet nurses and servants, most mothers still held and fondled their newborn infants. Catherine never forgot the emotional misery attending the birth of her first child. Her son and her lover, the two humans she was closest to, were absent. She was desperate to see them both, but neither of them missed her; one did not know, the other did not care. In those weeks, she was made to understand that, having physically produced the baby, her role in creating an heir to the throne was concluded. Her son, a future emperor, now belonged to the empress and to Russia. The result of these months of separation and suffering was that Catherine’s feelings for Paul were never normal. Through the next forty-two years of their shared existence, she was never able to feel or display toward him the warmth of a mother’s affection.

  Catherine refused to rise from her bed or leave her room “until I felt strong enough to overcome my depression.” She remained the entire winter of 1754–55 in this narrow, little room with its ill-fitting windows through which freezing drafts blew in from the icebound Neva River. To shield herself and to make life bearable, she turned again to books. That winter she read the Annals of Tacitus, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), and Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations).

  The Annals, a history of the Roman Empire from the death of the emperor Augustus in A.D. 14, through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, to the death of Nero in A.D. 68, offered Catherine one of the most powerful works of history of the ancient world. Tacitus’s theme is the suppression of liberty by tyrannical despotism. Convinced that strong personalities, good and evil, rather than deep underlying processes, make history, Tacitus painted brilliant character portraits in a spare but telling style. Catherine was struck by his descriptions of people, power, intrigue, and corruption in the early Roman Empire; she saw parallels in people and events surrounding her own life sixteen centuries later. His work, she said, “caused a singular revolution in my brain, to which, perhaps, the melancholy cast of my thoughts at this time contributed. I began to take a gloomier view of things and to look for deeper and more basic causes that really underlay and shaped the different events around me.”

  Montesquieu exposed Catherine to an early Enlightenment political philosophy that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of despotic rule. She studied his thesis that there could be contradictions between a general condemnation of despotism and the conduct of a specific despot. Thereafter, for a number of years, she attributed to herself a “republican soul” of the kind advocated by Montesquieu. Even after she reached the Russian throne—where the autocrat was, by any definition, a despot—she tried to avoid excesses of personal power, and to create a government in which efficiency was guided by intelligence; in short, a benevolent despotism. Later, she declared that L’Esprit des Lois “ought to be the Breviary of every sovereign of common sense.”

  Voltaire added clarity, wit, and succinct advice to her reading. He had worked on his Essai sur les Moeurs for twenty years (the full text was published as Essai sur l’Histoire Generale) and included not only manners and morals, but customs, ideas, beliefs, and laws; he was attempting a history of civilization. He saw history as the slow advance of man by collective human effort from ignorance to knowledge. He could not see the role of God in this sequence. Reason, not religion, Voltaire declared, should govern the world. But certain human beings must act as reason’s representatives on earth. This led him to the role of despotism and to conclude that a despotic government may actually be the best sort of government possible—if it were reasonable. But to be reasonable, it must be enlightened; if enlightened, it may be both efficient and benevolent.

  Understanding this philosophy required effort from a vulnerable young woman in St. Petersburg recovering from childbirth, but Voltaire made it easier by making her laugh. Catherine, like many of her contemporaries, was charmed by Voltaire. She admired the humanitarian ideas that made him the apostle of religious tolerance, but she also loved his irreligious, irreverent thrusts at the pomposity and stupidity he saw everywhere. Here was a philosopher who could teach her how to survive and laugh. And how to rule.

  Catherine gathered her physical strength and attended Mass on Christmas morning, but, while in church, she began to shiver and ache throughout her body. The next day, she had a high fever, became delirious, and retur
ned to her small, temporary room with its freezing drafts. She remained in this nook, avoiding her own apartment and formal bedchamber, because these rooms were close to Peter’s apartment, from which, she said, “all day and part of the night, there issued a racket similar to that of a military guard house.” In addition, he and his entourage “constantly smoked and there were always clouds of smoke and the foul smell of tobacco.”

  Toward the end of Lent, Sergei Saltykov returned from Sweden after an absence of five months. Even before his return, Catherine had learned that, once back, he was to be sent away again, this time to Hamburg as resident Russian minister; this meant that their next separation would be permanent. Clearly, Saltykov himself considered the affair to be over and himself lucky to be out of it. He preferred the temporary dalliances of court society to this now increasingly dangerous liaison with a passionate—and annoyingly possessive—grand duchess.

  His own ardor had already taken new directions. There had been an irony in his mission to Stockholm; all foreign courts were aware of his liaison with Catherine, and Saltykov could hardly help feeling ridiculous in his role of herald of Paul’s birth. But when he reached the Swedish capital, he was quickly relieved of any embarrassment on this account. He found himself a celebrity. He was recognized by everyone as Catherine’s lover and the presumed father of a future heir to the Russian throne. He found that men were curious and women fascinated; soon he had his choice of casual affairs. Rumors that he had been “indiscreet and frivolous with all the women he met” reached Catherine. “At the beginning I did not want to believe this,” she said, but Bestuzhev, receiving information from the Russian ambassador to Sweden, Nikita Panin, advised her that the rumors seemed to be true. Even so, when Saltykov returned to Russia, she wanted to see him.

  Lev Naryshkin arranged a meeting. Saltykov was to come to her apartment in the evening; Catherine waited until three o’clock in the morning. He did not come. “I underwent agonies wondering what could have prevented him,” she said later. The next day, she learned that he had been invited to a meeting of Freemasons from which, he claimed, he could not escape. Catherine pointedly questioned Lev Naryshkin:

  I saw as clear as day that he had failed to come because he was no longer eager to see me. Lev Naryshkin himself, although his friend, found no excuse for him. I wrote him a letter bitterly reproaching him. He came to see me and had little difficulty appeasing me for I was only too disposed to accept his apologies.

  Catherine may have been appeased, but she was not deceived. When he departed again, this time for Hamburg, Sergei Saltykov was leaving Catherine’s private life forever. Their affair had lasted three years and had caused her much anguish, but the worst she could bring herself to say of him later was, “He knew how to conceal his faults, the greatest of which were a love of intrigue and lack of principles. These failings were not clear to me at the time.” When she became empress, she made him ambassador to Paris, where he continued to pursue women. A few years later, when a diplomat proposed that he be transferred to a post in Dresden, Catherine wrote to the proposer, “Has he not committed enough follies as it is? If you will vouch for him, send him to Dresden, but he will never be anything but a fifth wheel to the carriage.”

  29

  Retaliation

  DURING THIS SOLITARY WINTER when Paul was born, Catherine decided to change her behavior. She had met her obligation in coming to Russia; she had given the nation an heir. And now, as a reward, she found herself abandoned in a little room without her child. She resolved to defend herself. Examining her situation, she saw it from a new perspective. She had lost the physical presence of her baby, but, by his birth, her own position in Russia had been secured. This realization prompted her decision “to make those who had caused me so much suffering understand that I could not be offended and mistreated with impunity.”

  She made her public reappearance on February 10 at a ball in honor of Peter’s birthday. “I had a superb dress made for the occasion, of blue velvet embroidered with gold,” she said. That evening, she made the Shuvalovs her target. This family, believing itself secure in Ivan Shuvalov’s liaison with the empress, was so powerful at court, so conspicuous, and so much feared that her attack on them was certain to cause a sensation. She neglected no opportunity to display her feelings.

  I treated them with profound contempt. I pointed out their stupidity and malice. Wherever I went, I ridiculed them and always had some sarcastic barb ready to fling at them, which afterwards would race through the city. Because many people hated them, I found many allies.

  Uncertain how Catherine’s change in behavior would affect their future, the Shuvalovs looked for support from Peter. A Holstein bureaucrat named Christian Brockdorff had just arrived in Russia to serve as chamberlain to Peter in his capacity as Duke of Holstein. Brockdorff heard the Shuvalovs complaining to the grand duke about Catherine, and he urged the husband to discipline the wife. When Peter tried, Catherine was ready for him:

  One day, His Imperial Highness came into my room and told me that I was becoming intolerably proud and that he knew how to bring me back to my senses. When I asked him in what my pride consisted, he answered that I held myself very erect. I asked him whether to please him, I must stoop like a slave. He flew into a rage and repeated that he knew how to bring me to reason. I asked how this would be done. Thereupon, he placed his back against the wall, drew his sword half out of its scabbard and showed it to me. I asked what he meant by this; if he meant to challenge me to a duel, I ought to have a sword, too. He put his half-drawn sword back into its scabbard and told me that I was dreadfully spiteful. “In what way?” I asked him. “Well, towards the Shuvalovs,” he stammered. To this, I replied that I only retaliated for what they did to me and that he had better not meddle in matters about which he knew nothing and could not understand even if he did know. He said, “This is what happens when one does not trust one’s true friends—everything goes wrong. If you had confided in me, all would have been well.” “But what should I have confided in you?” I asked. Then he began talking in a manner so extravagant and devoid of common sense that I let him go on without interruption and did not attempt to reply. Finally, I suggested he go to bed because he was clearly drunk. He took my advice. I was pleased because, not only were his words garbled, but also because, he was beginning to give off a perpetual sour odor of wine mingled with tobacco which was insufferable for those near him.

  This encounter left Peter confused and alarmed. Never before had his wife confronted him so forcefully; she had always humored him, listened to his schemes and complaints, and tried to keep his friendship. This new woman—self-possessed, unyielding, scornful, dismissive—was a stranger. Thereafter, his attempts at intimidation became more tentative and less frequent. They led increasingly separate lives. Peter continued his relationships with other women; he even continued, from long habit, to describe them to Catherine. She remained useful to him, helping him with duties he found complicated or burdensome. Peter, as heir to the throne, still offered her the likelihood that, when he became emperor, she would become empress. But, as she had come to realize, her destiny no longer depended solely on her husband. She was the mother of a future emperor.

  Later in the evening she had confronted Peter, Catherine was playing cards in a drawing room when Alexander Shuvalov approached. He reminded her that the empress had forbidden women to wear the kind of ornamental ribbon and lace on their gowns that Catherine was wearing. Catherine told him “that he could have saved himself the trouble of notifying me because I never wore anything that displeased Her Majesty. I told him that merit was not a matter of beauty, clothes, or ornament; for when one has faded, the others become ridiculous, and only character endures. He listened, his face twitching, and then he left.”

  A few days later, Peter reverted from bully to supplicant. He told Catherine that Brockdorff had advised him to ask the empress for money to pay his Holstein expenses. Catherine asked whether there was any other remedy and Peter sa
id that he would show her the papers. She looked at them and told him that it seemed to her that he could manage without begging money from his aunt, which she was likely to refuse since, not six months before, she had given him one hundred thousand rubles. Peter ignored her advice and asked anyway. The result, Catherine noted, was that “he got nothing.”

  Despite the fact that he had been told that he must cut down the Holstein budget deficit, Peter decided to bring a detachment of Holstein troops to Russia. Brockdorff, eager to please his master, had approved. The size of the contingent was concealed from the empress, who loathed Holstein. She was told that it was a trifle not worth discussing, and that oversight by Alexander Shuvalov would keep the project from becoming an embarrassment. On Brockdorff’s advice, Peter also tried to keep the impending arrival of these Holstein soldiers hidden from his wife. When she learned of it, Catherine “shuddered to think of the disastrous effect it would have on Russian public opinion, as well as on the empress.” When the battalion arrived from Kiel, Catherine stood next to Alexander Shuvalov at the Oranienbaum Palace and watched the blue-uniformed Holstein infantry march past. Shuvalov’s face was twitching.

  Soon enough, there was trouble. The Oranienbaum estate was guarded by the Russian Ingerman and Astrakhan Regiments. Catherine was told that when these men saw the Holstein soldiers, they said, “Those accursed Germans are all puppets of the King of Prussia.” In St. Petersburg, some people considered the Holstein presence scandalous, others laughable. Catherine herself considered the enterprise “a freakish prank, but a dangerous one.” Peter, who in Choglokov’s time had worn his Holstein uniform only in secret in his room, now wore nothing else except when he appeared before Elizabeth. Elated by the presence of his soldiers, he joined them in their camp and devoted his days to drilling them. They had to be fed, however. At first, the Marshal of the Imperial Court refused to accept responsibility. Finally, he yielded and ordered court servants and soldiers from the Ingerman Regiment to carry food from the palace kitchen to the Holsteiners. Their camp was some distance from the household, and the Russian soldiers received no compensation for this extra work. They reacted by saying, “We have become the servants of these accursed Germans.” Court servants assigned this duty said, “We are employed to serve a set of clowns.” Catherine resolved to keep herself “as far away as I could from this ridiculous game. None of the ladies and gentlemen of our court would have anything to do with the Holstein camp, which the grand duke never left. I used to go for long walks with people from the court and we always walked in the opposite direction from the Holstein camp.”