Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  The ceremonies were brought to a close with a magnificent firework representing a statue of Russia under an arched colonnade in front of a cathedral. Above the arch, two allegorical figures crowned a shield with the emblem of the new empress. The colonnade was adorned with six allegorical statues, including Faith, Hope and Plenty. In the foreground another emblem in the form of a flaming star stood on a pedestal surrounded by a railing decorated with whirling Catherine wheels.88 Hoping to get a better view of the illuminations that transformed the Ivan the Great bell tower into a pillar of flame, the empress herself stepped out incognito onto the Red Staircase at midnight. But it was no use. Immediately spotted by the crowd, she was forced to acknowledge yet another prolonged bout of applause. Three days later, she found it ‘impossible to describe’ to her ambassador in Warsaw ‘the delight of a numberless crowd to see me here. I cannot go out, nor even put my face to the window, without the acclamations beginning all over again.’89 And still the public’s appetite was not sated. Such was the popular fascination with the monarchy that some 122,138 people of various ranks filed past the regalia when they were put on public display between 6 and 25 October.90

  * * *

  The coronation had revealed in microcosm many of the tensions that a successful Russian tsar had to be able to resolve: between tradition and innovation; between the noble elite and the peasantry; between multinational Rossiya and native, ethnic Rus. Underlying them all lay the dilemma facing any ruler. How far should she seek to build consent? When should she resort to force? In the immediate aftermath of her coup, Catherine had passed a series of crucial tests. She had staged a coronation that fused Orthodox tradition with classical imagery in a symbolic reconciliation of mercy and conquest. More important still, she had demonstrated the personal qualities that persuaded all those who met her that success lay within her grasp. ‘Affability and dignity,’ Buckinghamshire reported at the end of October 1762, ‘are blended in her manner, which inspires you at once with ease and respect. When the hurry, the unavoidable consequence of a revolution is over, she has every talent to make this a great and powerful country.’91 Propagandists insisted that victory was already hers. ‘Listen, universe!’ urged Sumarokov during the great street pageant ‘Triumphant Minerva’, staged under the direction of Russia’s leading actor Fëdor Volkov in Moscow in January 1763: ‘Astraea is on earth, Astraea has settled in the lands of the Russians, Astraea has ascended the throne.’92 In April, Aleksey Rzhevsky’s ‘Birthday Ode’ returned to the same theme: ‘Astraea has now descended to us, the golden age has already begun in Russia, and wisdom has come to the throne as a result of the holy will of the Almighty.’93

  Catherine was understandably more cautious. ‘I can congratulate myself on my growing popularity, but must be wary of it in spite of all the manifestations in my favour. This must not, however, prevent me from acting as though it were real…I may be too young to become a favourite sovereign, but I must behave as though I believed myself to be one.’94 Since arriving in Russia as the fourteen-year-old prospective fiancée for Grand Duke Peter, she had devoted many of her most private moments to preparing for the challenge.

  CHAPTER ONE

  From Pomerania to St Petersburg

  1729–1744

  In a scene far removed from the splendour of the Moscow Kremlin, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst was born in a merchant’s house in the Grosse Domstrasse, nestled in the shadow of St Mary’s Church, just inside the northern city wall of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).1 The house offered temporary quarters to her father, Prince Christian August, who was stationed there as a general in the service of Frederick William I of Prussia (r. 1713–40), Europe’s most uncompromising soldier-king. Whereas Christian August was already thirty-nine, his wife, Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was not quite seventeen when she gave birth to their first child in the early hours of the morning of 2 May 1729 (21 April according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, eleven days behind the Western Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century). Never one to suffer in silence, the young mother soon made it clear to her daughter that it had been a painful, life-threatening delivery. Though her father did his best to disguise his disappointment, Sophie was left in no doubt that both parents would have preferred a boy.2

  They were lucky that she had survived at all. Since death made little distinction between the cradles of rich and poor in the eighteenth century, twenty-nine out of every thousand infants in Europe’s ruling families were stillborn, a further forty-seven were dead within a week, and 106 more failed to complete the first year of their life.3 To the fortunate infants who passed that early milestone, smallpox offered the greatest threat. Though its impact in the eighteenth century can be estimated only approximately, the total number of European deaths per annum caused by the disease is commonly put at 400,000 and the secretary of the Royal Society of London calculated that smallpox had killed a fourteenth of the city’s population between 1680 and 1743.4 When Catherine had herself inoculated against the greatest killer of the age in her fortieth year, she told her Prussian ally, Frederick the Great, that she had suffered ‘a thousand sorrows’ in her attempts to overcome her childhood fear of the disease. Every time she fell ill, however slight the infection, she imagined that it must be the dreaded pox.5 Though no eighteenth-century royal letter was sent without careful official consideration—and this one was evidently intended to portray Catherine as an Enlightened monarch confronting the forces of unreason—the emotion it implied was sincere enough. As it transpired, her worries were unnecessary. Right from the start, Sophie showed all the signs of the hearty constitution that was to carry her through to the age of sixty-seven. A bout of pneumonia when she was seven seems to have been her only serious childhood illness. Apart from that, she chose to recall only a skin infection, generally assumed to be impetigo or some form of scrofula, whose periodic attacks forced her to cover her shaven, powdered scalp with a bonnet and to wear gloves until the scabs fell off her hands.6

  Until Christian August inherited the family seat at Zerbst in 1743, the greater part of Sophie’s childhood was spent in her bleak Baltic birthplace. Situated near the mouth of the River Oder, a hundred miles north-east of Berlin, Stettin in 1729 could boast about 11,000 inhabitants and more than 900 stone houses. Describing the town fifty years earlier, an English writer claimed that ‘the greatest beauty thereof is the palace, or prince’s Court, which is built with such art and magnificence, that none of the Italian Courts can equal it’.7 By then, however, Stettin’s princely glories already lay in the past. Duke Philip II of Pomerania-Stettin (r. 1606–18) had indeed been a leading artistic patron who commissioned a celebrated Kunstschrank—a cabinet made in Augsburg which opened to reveal hidden paintings, symbolic carvings, and precious objects that were believed to constitute an epitome of the universe.8 But when his Greifen dynasty expired in 1637, both Stettin and the surrounding duchy of Pomerania rapidly became battle-scarred pawns on the chessboard of international politics.

  Sweden, the dominant Baltic power in the seventeenth century, was the first to take control, counting Stettin and Western Pomerania among its spoils at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. But while the Swedes regarded their new German possessions primarily as a means of exerting pressure on Denmark from the south, Brandenburg-Prussia, the rising power in northern Germany, never gave up hope of capturing them. Serious damage was inflicted on Stettin during a six-month siege in 1677. Two years later, France’s diplomatic intervention on behalf of its Swedish satellite forced the Prussians to abandon their gains at the Treaty of Saint-Germain, so that it was not until 1713 that the Great Northern War again brought the town under their control, this time by agreement with Peter the Great’s Russia, the second emergent power in the Baltic. Only in February 1720, five years after the death of Louis XIV had temporarily loosened France’s stranglehold on European diplomacy, was Frederick William I finally able to purchase the town and the surrounding area for 2 mi
llion thalers under the terms of the Peace of Stockholm.9

  It was as an officer in Prussian service that Sophie’s father, the impoverished scion of a cadet branch of the princely House of Anhalt, had been obliged to make his career. By 1729, having served in the Low Countries during the War of the Spanish Succession, he had reached the rank of major general and was stationed at Stettin in command of the 8th infantry regiment. Following his promotion to command the garrison, Christian August and his family moved from the house on the Domstrasse into the nearby ducal castle, which had been denuded of its more exuberant decoration in keeping with the king’s militarist ideals.10 Having had himself crowned ‘king in Prussia’ in 1701 at a ceremony in Königsberg that cost roughly twice the annual revenues of the Hohenzollern administration, Frederick William I’s father (Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, 1688–1713) had gone on to establish an elaborate Baroque Court.11 Almost every feature of it except the hunt was dismantled by his son. Whereas the Court of Berlin had spent 17,000 thalers on confectionery alone in 1707, its total annual expenditure was limited under Frederick William I to 52,000 thalers.12 Surrounded by rubble from the town’s newly strengthened fortifications, Christian August’s circumstances in Stettin were even more spartan. Sophie saw little of him, though she always respected his integrity, his piety, and his knowledge of classical Rome. That was what she meant when, shortly before her fiftieth birthday, she told the Prince de Ligne that she had been ‘brought up in the army with respect for republics’.13

  In the gloomy, granite castle, the little girl and her nurses occupied three vaulted rooms on the upper floor of the wing adjoining the chapel. Every morning and evening, Sophie knelt to say her prayers in a bedroom next to the bell tower, where she remembered being disturbed by phantom noises from the organ, allegedly made by mischievous servants. As she told her principal correspondent in adult life, Baron Melchior Grimm, on discovering that he was contemplating a visit to Stettin in 1776, ‘I gambolled across the whole of this wing three or four times a day to visit my mother, who lived on the other side.’14 Johanna Elisabeth, however, had little time for her first-born, paying more attention to her lame son, Wilhelm Christian Friedrich, who came into the world eighteen months after Sophie and was taken from it by scarlet fever at the age of thirteen. Of the three further children, only Friedrich August, born in 1734, survived to adult life: Auguste Christine Charlotte lived but twelve days in 1736; the third daughter, Elisabeth, born in 1743, not long after Wilhelm’s death, was left behind when her mother took Sophie to Russia, causing both of them grief when she died in 1745.15

  Since there could be no question of formal schooling for the female offspring of a minor German prince, Sophie’s education was entrusted from the age of four to her Huguenot governess, Elisabeth (Babet) Cardel (b. 1712), the younger sister of her nurse, Magdalena. Babet taught her to spell and to read, and introduced her to a pleasure that was to remain with her for the rest of her life: listening to friends read aloud. A dancing master was employed to teach the basic courtly arts, though this was later dismissed as ‘a waste of money, because really I only learned to dance much later—this is how a precocious education usually leads nowhere’. The rudiments of a more formal curriculum in French, German and the Scriptures were taught by the Pietist pastor Friedrich Wagner, a chaplain in her father’s regiment.16 This was a far more prestigious position than it sounds. The Pietist pastors chosen to become army preachers (Feldprediger) in Frederick William I’s Prussia were a zealous elite appointed directly by the king, who relied on them to transform illiterate peasant recruits into God-fearing, disciplined soldiers. Their most prominent convert was Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau, Christian August’s cousin and the king’s leading general.17 Since the very notion of childhood was barely developed among princely households at the time—all Sophie’s dolls and toys were removed at the age of seven on the grounds that she was ‘a big girl, for whom they were no longer suitable’18—it probably never occurred to her father that an army preacher’s methods might not suit a girl of tender age. She certainly failed to respond to them. ‘I bear no grudge against Monsieur Wagner,’ Catherine told Grimm in 1778, ‘but I am intimately persuaded that he was a blockhead, and that Mademoiselle Cardel was an intelligent girl.’19

  She developed the contrast in a memoir begun on her forty-second birthday in 1771. Here Wagner is portrayed as a dull pedant, keen to resort to the rod in the face of her impudent questions (she claimed to have challenged the Creation story and asked him about circumcision). Refused permission to beat his young pupil, he took his revenge by frightening her with stories of the Last Judgement and imposing an unforgiving regime of rote learning which helped to harden her mind against organised religion. Since the Word was central to Pietism—an emotional brand of religiosity which stressed the intensely personal bonds between individual believers and their God—its pastors regarded the Scriptures as the main source of religious authority and the ultimate guide to everyday behaviour. Wagner was no exception. ‘I do not believe that it could be humanly possible to remember all that I had to learn by heart,’ Catherine later complained, ‘nor that there was any point in doing so. I have kept to this day a German Bible, in which all the verses I learned from memory are marked in red ink.’20 By contrast, Babet Cardel appears in the empress’s memoirs as ‘a model of virtue and wisdom’. ‘She possessed a naturally elevated soul, a cultivated mind, and an excellent heart: she was patient, gentle, gay, just, steadfast—in truth, everything one could wish to find in people who look after children.’ Babet’s gentle inquisitiveness generated a sympathetic response: ‘I yielded to her alone; she smiled to herself and reasoned with me so gently that I could not resist her. All my life, indeed, I have preserved this inclination to yield only to reason and gentleness: I have always resisted pressure of any kind.’21

  Artless as they may seem, such reflections form part of a carefully constructed persona which Catherine had already begun to fashion in her first brief memoir, written six years before she seized the Russian throne. Taking a detached view of her own character and conduct, she anticipated many of the features of the classic Enlightenment autobiographies by presenting herself as a rational, independent spirit—‘I was excessively lively and rather wayward in my childhood’—struggling to overcome the superstitious adults who supervised her upbringing.22 While Sophie’s parents consulted leading German doctors in their attempts to cure Wilhelm’s lameness, and sent him to take the waters at Aix-la-Chapelle, Teplitz and Karlsbad, a specialist in ‘dislocation’ proved harder to find when it seemed that Sophie might grow up with a curvature of the spine. In the end, they resorted to the public hangman, who recommended that a local girl be summoned every morning to rub Sophie’s back with her saliva and designed a primitive corset to straighten her limbs. She wore it until she was ten, growing increasingly self-conscious about her appearance. ‘I don’t know whether it is true that I was ugly as a child,’ the mature empress mused, ‘but I certainly know that people often told me so.’23

  To compensate for lack of beauty, Sophie tried to be amusing instead. If we believe her memoirs, she also learned to be secretive. Since a degree of dissimulation was regarded as an important weapon in any successful ruler’s armoury—‘Behave cleverly in public,’ Catherine told Potëmkin at the height of their affair in 1774, ‘and that way no one will know what we are thinking. I so enjoy being crafty!’24—we should not be surprised at her claim to have mastered the skill so early. But for all the careful construction in the empress’s memoirs, there seems little reason to doubt that she was accustomed to keeping things to herself from an early age. Most children do, as the adult Catherine came to realise. ‘One never knows what children are thinking,’ she warned Grimm in 1776, a year before the birth of her first grandson, ‘and children are difficult to get to know, especially when a severe education has turned them into docile listeners and they have learned from experience not to tell things to their teachers. From that, if you please, you will de
rive the fine maxim that one should not scold children, but put them at their ease, so that they do not hide their blunders from you.’25

  The greatest legacy of Sophie’s early education was a form of secularised Pietist work ethic that stayed with her for the rest of her life. ‘I have always been able to concentrate hard,’ she boasted in 1785, regularly peppering her instructions to subordinates with exhortations not to waste time. ‘Waste as little time as possible,’ she urged her favourite, Peter Zavadovsky: ‘Time belongs not to me but to the empire.’26 Crucial as this sense of duty was to become, the mature empress gave her childhood teachers no credit for it. On the contrary, as a celebrated patron of the Enlightenment and correspondent of Voltaire, she looked back on Stettin as an isolated provincial backwater. ‘Is it my fault that I do not share the taste of my century?’ she once asked Grimm, in mock defence of her alleged aesthetic shortcomings. ‘I think that Mlle Cardel and M. Wagner belonged to another age.’27

  * * *

  Frustrated by the constraints of Stettin’s narrow society, the vivacious Johanna Elisabeth escaped as often as she could, shuttling back and forth across the north German plain to visit better-connected relatives. At the age of three, Sophie accompanied her on the first of several trips to her maternal grandmother in Hamburg. Here, as she grew older, she would experience an exceptional degree of freedom: ‘I did what I wanted and ran about from morning until night in every corner of the house.’ On that first visit, however, the frightened child apparently had to be removed, screaming, from the opera house. ‘This scene left such an impression on me that I remember it even now,’ she wrote in 1771.28 Another frequent destination was the family seat at Zerbst, an insignificant town fifty miles south-west of Berlin and roughly equidistant between Magdeburg and Wittenberg, where Martin Luther had famously nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in October 1517. Best of all, the ambitious Johanna Elisabeth liked Berlin, where they regularly spent part of the winter.