Catherine the Great
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Waiting to greet her at the south portal of the cathedral, Archbishop Dimitry imparted a vital sense of authority to the whole proceedings. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the story circulated that he made Catherine tremble by inquiring severely, ‘Why have you come?’57 In reality, however, there could hardly have been a more reassuring figure for the empress to meet at the start of a ritual intended to symbolise the harmony of the earthly and the celestial spheres—he had been rewarded for his support during her coup with the personal grant of 1000 serfs.58 Surrounded by no fewer than twenty bishops, thirty-five archimandrites and a host of lesser clergy resplendent in their finest vestments, Catherine kissed the life-giving cross, believed to be studded with a fragment from Christ’s crucifix, and followed Dimitry and Metropolitan Timofey past the massive, copper-plated doors into an aesthetic world that, for all her professions of loyalty to the Orthodox faith, she never fully understood.
Already installed on tiered benches erected between the cathedral’s four great internal pillars was a select congregation of Court ladies, native dignitaries and foreign diplomats who had not taken part in the procession and had, as usual, been left uncertain about the arrangements until the last moment. Like the others, the French ambassador received his invitation only on 20 September, after frantic negotiations about precedence in the seating plan: ‘There was nothing they could have done to persuade me to appear at the coronation as a gawping tourist.’59 Facing the altar, in a gallery in front of the west wall, the diplomats occupied the first row with the Baltic nobility behind them, brigadiers in the third row and the Baltic merchants at the back. Female guests sat along the north wall, ranged according to rank behind Countess Anna Vorontsova, and the empress’s ladies and maids of honour. Opposite them was a gallery for the foremost Russian officials. Holders of the first three ranks on the Table decreed by Peter the Great in 1722 sat at the front with lesser-ranking bureaucrats further back.60
At the heart of the cathedral, within full view of all three stands, twelve steps led up to a dais, six feet high, fourteen feet long and five and a half feet wide, draped in red velvet and surrounded by balustrades carved with gilded hieroglyphs. Catherine’s throne had been sent from Persia for Tsar Boris Godunov at the end of the sixteenth century. To its right stood a gilded table for her regalia; to the left was a place for the young tsarevich. Above the throne, a huge velvet canopy, decorated with gold braid and fringed with lace, was suspended from the ceiling by a chain, joined to each corner by silken ropes in the shape of a pyramid. Into the lining of this canopy was sewn the imperial coat of arms, so that the empress, should she glance to the heavens during her coronation, would stare straight into the eyes of a double-headed eagle.61
By combining his knowledge of Renaissance engineering with rare sensitivity to Russian tradition, Fioravanti had created a building whose conventional exterior, modelled on the twelfth-century Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir, concealed one of the lightest and most spacious interiors in the Orthodox world. Yet it was by no means so cavernous as it was made to seem in the commemorative illustrations of Catherine’s coronation by Jean-Louis de Veilly, a French artist who had had a chequered career since arriving in St Petersburg from England in 1754. (His appointment to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts was terminated ‘thanks to the peculiarities of his character’ and the figures he painted on the floor of the Chinese Room at Tsarskoye Selo seemed ‘flushed and somehow drunken because of their slitty eyes’.62) De Veilly evidently used illustrations of the Bourbon coronations as one of his models. But even had the Orthodox Church permitted the use of musical instruments to accompany the liturgy, there would scarcely have been room for the 100-piece orchestra hidden behind the altar at Reims for the coronation of Louis XVI in 1775.63 Barely a quarter of the size of Reims or Westminster Abbey, and much more intimate in atmosphere, the Dormition Cathedral had only limited space for guests. Competition for places was intensified by two eighteenth-century developments: the expansion of the noble elite and Peter the Great’s insistence that both sexes should attend Court ceremonials in a church conceived by its Muscovite founders as a strictly male preserve.
Catherine’s nineteen-year-old friend, Princess Dashkova, who might have expected to benefit from the new dispensations, was mortified to discover that instead they militated against her. Having travelled from St Petersburg in the empress’s own carriage, Dashkova found that her membership of the Order of St Catherine, to which only thirteen candidates had been appointed during Elizabeth’s twenty-year reign, counted for nothing at a ceremony where precedence depended on rank alone. As the wife of a mere colonel, the most junior officer admitted to the coronation, the princess was relegated to the back of the stand, even though her husband, as one of the two masters of ceremonies, had the honour of leading the procession of the imperial regalia from the Senate Palace, where they had been stored overnight, to the Palace of Facets.64 The slight still rankled when Dashkova came to write her self-serving memoirs in 1804. Blaming her humiliation on the Orlovs, who distrusted her as the younger sister of Peter III’s disgraced mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova, she was forced to swallow her pride or absent herself altogether, as friends advised her to do. There was never really a choice. ‘I said to myself that if they were putting on an opera I wanted to see and the only seats were in the gods, then I should, as a passionate music-lover, take my place there rather than miss the performance.’65
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Catherine’s coronation was a performance in three acts, of which the first was purely liturgical. As the empress processed to kiss the icons before taking her seat on the throne, the choir chanted Psalm 101 from their specially constructed stalls to the side of the holy gates: ‘I will sing of mercy and judgement: unto thee, O Lord, will I sing.’66 By the time they reached King David’s final menacing verse—‘I will early destroy all the wicked of the land; that I may cut off all wicked doers from the city of the Lord’—there had been plenty of time for the congregation to contemplate the frescoes of the Last Judgement on the west wall. Though many of these masterpieces had been damaged by condensation—Catherine herself later paid for their renovation in the early 1770s67—their message was given added urgency in a cathedral built at a time when many Muscovites anticipated the imminent end of the world in 1492 (the year 7000 according to the Byzantine calendar numbered from the Creation).68 Now that fears of the Apocalypse had subsided, Catherine’s courtiers were less inclined to dwell on divine punishment than on the rewards to be anticipated by the righteous. Though the empress may privately have mocked superstition, the overwhelming majority of her subjects, including many of the most eminent, never abandoned their belief in the power of icons and relics to cure all manner of afflictions. As the most important church in Muscovy, the Cathedral of the Dormition housed some of Orthodoxy’s most precious relics, including the head of John Chrysostom, the right hand of the apostle Andrew, one of Basil the Great’s fingers, part of a leg of St John the Baptist, and the remains of many lesser, local saints.69
It mattered that the cathedral also contained the most famous miracle-working image in all Russia, the icon of Our Lady of Vladimir, because it had become an established literary convention to associate female Russian monarchs with the Virgin Mary. In sharp contrast to St Petersburg, Marian imagery was prominent all over Moscow, which claimed to have inherited the Virgin’s traditional role as protectress of Constantinople when the ‘second Rome’ fell to the Turks in 1453. (The church now famous as St Basil’s Cathedral at the southern end of Red Square was officially known as the Cathedral of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God because it had been consecrated in memory of the fall of the Tatar stronghold of Kazan to Ivan the Terrible on the feast of the protective veil in 1552.) Orthodox writers who had celebrated the feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God as recently as 8 September now portrayed Catherine in the image of a virginal queen capable of restoring happiness and leading her people to paradise. But while it was convenient to associ
ate the empress with the Virgin by virtue of her sex, her office led to analogies with Christ himself. Since the image of the sun king had been commonplace in absolute monarchies since the time of Louis XIV, there was nothing apparently extraordinary in Alexander Sumarokov’s depiction of Catherine, in the ode he dedicated to her ‘On the First Day of 1763’, as the light to drive out all darkness (by which he meant any surviving vestige of support for Peter III). Sophisticated Russian readers, however, would have had no difficulty in recognising an additional allusion to the transfigured Christ. Vasily Petrov, the empress’s ‘pocket poet’, later made still more explicit references to Catherine as ‘the beginning and end of all things’ and the ‘image of the all-powerful Deity’, pouring ‘light from [her] lofty throne’.70 Whilst the jewels in the empress’s regalia reflected hundreds of flickering candles and glinted in the pale light filtering through windows set high in the cathedral walls, the most important illumination at her coronation was that which radiated metaphorically from Catherine herself.
Only the most accomplished of actresses could have carried off the part of a Christ-like virgin queen when all present knew her as both an adulteress and a usurper and many suspected her of regicide to boot. Yet while the Russian elite suspended its disbelief in the face of the realities of power, Catherine’s theatrical talents were never in doubt. No less a rival than Louis XV acknowledged shortly before the coronation that her courage and powers of dissimulation marked her out as ‘a princess capable of planning and executing great deeds’.71 Unlike contemporaries unwisely tempted to regard coronations as so much mumbo-jumbo, Catherine was determined to take hers with all seriousness. Whereas Austria’s Francis Stephen had seemed playfully to wave his regalia during the procession that followed his installation as Holy Roman Emperor in 1740—a ceremony that his wife Maria Theresa dismissed as ‘a comedy’72—Catherine invested even those elements of the ritual in which she could scarcely believe with the dignity expected of a rightful sovereign, beginning with a confident public declaration of her adherence to the articles of the Orthodox faith.73
She was at her most convincing in the investiture—the central act of the coronation, developed from the ceremony invented in the sixteenth century, on the basis of selective use of Byzantine ideas, to give religious sanction to the conquests of Ivan the Terrible. As Catherine passed Tsar Ivan’s elaborately carved throne of Monomakh on her way into the cathedral, she can hardly have forgotten the promise she had made six years earlier to her confidant, the British ambassador Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, when she recalled seeing a treaty signed by Queen Elizabeth and Ivan himself: ‘That prince, tyrant though he was, was a great man; and since I shall try, as far as my natural weakness will allow me, to imitate the great men of this country, I hope one day to adorn your own archives with my name, and I shall be proud to go wrong in the steps of Peter the Great.’74 Now she emulated the tendency of Tsar Peter and his successors to elevate the importance of the monarch in the coronation ritual at the expense of the Church.
First she invested herself with the ermine imperial mantle, decorated with the insignia of the Order of St Andrew the First Called, the highest of the Russian orders of chivalry established by Tsar Peter, ceremonially presented to her by Countess Vorontsova and her successor as the Court’s senior lady-in-waiting, Yelena Naryshkina.75 Then Aleksey Razumovsky approached the throne bearing on a cushion the new crown designed by the Court jeweller, Gérémie Pauzié. Working on characteristically explicit instructions from Catherine herself, Pauzié had fashioned a diadem to rival any in Europe. At its centre was a cross mounted on a 389-carat ruby purchased in Peking from the Emperor Kangxi on the orders of Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich. Further encrusted with 75 unusually large pearls, 2500 diamonds and more than 5000 other precious jewels, Catherine’s crown weighed almost two kilograms and was valued at 2 million roubles at the time of the coronation.76 Following the precedent set by Elizabeth in 1742, she lowered it onto her own brow.
As cannon fired a 101-gun salute and the bells rang out to signal the high-point of the ceremony, the newly crowned empress stood before her throne, grasping in her left hand the great golden orb and in her right a sceptre made only a fortnight earlier when a panic-stricken search for the old one ended in failure.77 Three times the deacon chanted ‘many years’, and three times the congregation of notables prostrated themselves before her. As silence fell, Catherine returned both orb and sceptre to their bearers and prayed to God to preserve her ‘in the hearing of all present’. While she remained standing, the congregation sank to its knees to hear Dimitry pray for her in the name of the whole people.78 Then the archbishop—‘a prelate of great learning’ who ‘combined with his other qualities a moving and manly eloquence that entranced his audience’79—made a congratulatory speech, driving home Catherine’s central theme of selflessness. Not for her the temptations of worldly power and glory, Dimitry insisted. ‘Only maternal love for the fatherland, only faith in God, and ardour for piety, only compassion for the suffering and oppressed Russian children impelled You to take on this great service to God.’80
Only now, once the investiture was over, did the anointment take place (in France and England, it was significantly the other way around).81 Having removed her crown, the empress processed towards the iconostasis, where the gates swung open to admit her to the holy sanctuary. There the final act of her coronation was completed as this sceptical convert from Lutheranism became the first female ruler of Russia to take her own communion bread from the platen, a sacerdotal privilege hitherto restricted to members of the Orthodox priesthood.82
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Nothing in the coronation rite implied the existence of any contract between monarch and subjects. Neither did they expect it. Monarchy in Russia was intensely personal and Catherine intended that it should remain so. Since she was nevertheless aware that ‘power without the confidence of the nation is nothing’, it was a relief to emerge from the cathedral’s north door to be greeted by cheering so wild that she allowed it to continue for half an hour before continuing her procession.83 Convinced that such popular acclaim owed more to stage-management than to genuine affection, the French ambassador gleefully reported the alarm which ensued when a section of the soldiery and crowd unexpectedly hailed not Catherine, but ‘Our Emperor Paul Petrovich’: officers were immediately sent to silence them.84 This, as even Breteuil admitted, was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-ordered ceremony. As her procession snaked along the wooden walkway into Ivanov Square, round the Ivan the Great bell tower and then back into Cathedral Square—first to allow the empress to pay her respects at the tombs of her Muscovite predecessors in the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael and then to kiss the relics in the Annunciation Cathedral—Catherine rewarded the attendant populace for their devotion by showering them with gold and silver coins from 120 oak barrels, each containing coins worth 5000 roubles.85
Naturally, the elite were not forgotten. Still in full regalia, Catherine lavished rewards on them when she returned to the Palace of Facets. Dashkova recovered some pride when she was made a lady-in-waiting; the title of count was conferred on all five Orlov brothers. For the remainder of her reign, Catherine was to remain powerfully attached to Aleksey, the scar-faced giant who had been responsible for guarding her husband at the time of his death. Vladimir became the president of the Academy of Sciences; Fëdor kept an eye on proceedings in the Senate; and Ivan was close enough to the empress to broker her eventual split with Grigory in 1772. Now, however, Grigory was appointed Adjutant General, an office that carried ceremonial duties to allow the favourite to remain at his sovereign’s side. Nor were titles and promotions the only gifts on offer. Catherine’s coup was by far the most expensive in eighteenth-century Russia. Between July and December 1762, she paid out 1.5 million roubles to buy support at a time when the annual state budget amounted to little more than 16 million. By the following March, she had given away 21,423 male peasants since her accession—almost three times as many as
Peter III had distributed to his henchmen during his short reign.86
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Not until three in the afternoon did Catherine finally process to a banquet that was to last long into the evening. As late as 17 September, Trubetskoy remained uncertain of the guest list because the Synod had characteristically failed to tell him how many clergy would be attending. In the end, on the model of Elizabeth’s coronation, he arranged for four tables to be laid in the Palace of Facets for the churchmen and 102 senior courtiers, while 259 lesser ranking guests were accommodated in the hall above and 26 more in a neighbouring gallery. Catherine, as was customary, dined alone on a dais under a silken canopy. To her right, Countess Anna Vorontsova sat at the head of a table of Court ladies. To the left of the throne, the leading male courtiers occupied the second table; the third, placed opposite, was for the clergy; gentlemen of the third rank were served at the remaining table. Although de Veilly’s illustration of the banquet depicts a far from solemn occasion, every effort had been made to ensure that it proceeded in an orderly way. Count Karl Sievers, one of four Court stewards, had instructed his chamberlains in the sternest terms to organise the liveried servants in teams for each table, to take good care of the silver, and to report drunken or disorderly lackeys to the Court administration so that none should escape a fine.87