by Simon Dixon
It was a logical enough move to make. Although Peter the Great had insisted on locating his main government buildings on Vasilevsky Island, both these and the Peter-Paul Fortress were inconveniently situated on the northern bank of the Neva, accessible in summer only by boat (the sole bridge was a temporary pontoon to the west of the Admiralty, first strung across the river in 1727 and rebuilt annually after 1732).14 The new commission determined instead to develop three great avenues radiating out from the Admiralty: Voznesensky Prospect, leading to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards in the south-west; Gorokhovaya (Pea Street), culminating at the barracks of the Semënovsky Guards to the south; and Nevsky Prospect, then known as the Great Perspective Road, which stretched south-eastward for almost three miles towards the Alexander Nevsky monastery founded by Peter the Great in memory of the thirteenth-century warrior-saint. Though delayed by political upheavals after Anna’s death in 1740, these three avenues, linked by a network of semicircular streets between the Moika and Fontanka canals, were soon to give the city the elegant, geometrical ground plan at which visitors still marvel today.15
In the early 1750s, Russia’s greatest polymath Mikhailo Lomonosov claimed that from the top of any tall building in the capital one could see ‘houses that seemed to float on water and streets laid out in lines as straight as regiments on parade’.16 As if to prove his point, Mikhailo Makhaev spent the late 1740s perched among the city’s bell towers and on top of Tsar Peter’s Kunstkamera, sketching with the assistance of a large optical ‘camera’. The machine’s wide-angled lens combined with the artist’s elevated viewpoint to distort the perspective in such a way that his famous engravings are dominated by the space between buildings rather than by the buildings themselves.17 But that is not to underestimate the extent to which St Petersburg was transformed in Elizabeth’s reign ‘from a Europeanized riverfront backed by thousands of native hovels into a Western metropolis’.18 In a conscious attempt to legitimise her seizure of the throne, the grandest Baroque edifices were built to mark the route she had taken on that fateful night in November 1741.19 Indeed, so rapidly had those events acquired mythical status, that shortly after her arrival in February 1744, Johanna Elisabeth was taken to retrace the empress’s steps, starting from ‘the famous barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards’ where Elizabeth had already laid the foundation stone of a magnificent new cathedral of the Transfiguration. ‘It is incomprehensible that Her Majesty should have managed such a long march without being betrayed.’20
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Since Tsar Peter had intended his new capital to stand as an icon of Russia’s aspirations to sophisticated cosmopolitanism, it is all the more striking that the entertainment laid on for fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie should have been unashamedly exotic and emphatically popular. After dinner at the Winter Palace, she was treated to a display by the fourteen elephants which had become familiar figures on the capital’s streets following their presentation to Empress Anna by a visiting Turkish embassy. One of the animals on that occasion was said to be draped in King Solomon’s tent, a characteristically extravagant notion duly dismissed by Dr Cook: ‘It was of silk, very large, and certainly the worse of the wearing, but I scarcely believe it was Solomon’s.’ Not long afterwards, a bystander lost his life when two beasts bolted from soldiers who had thrown fireworks at their feet in an attempt to make them fight in the snow.21 Fortunately for her hosts, the show staged in Sophie’s honour passed off without incident. Once the elephants had completed their stately pirouettes in the palace courtyard, she was taken out onto the frozen river to see the ice hills that were a prominent feature of the capital at carnival time.22
By the time the last of Anna’s elephants died in 1765, the elephant house had long been moved from its central location on the Fontanka Canal to a suburban site near the Alexander Nevsky monastery.23 Ice hills, however, remained popular throughout Catherine’s reign, attracting vast crowds of spectators to watch as intrepid revellers descended precipitous slopes at great speed, either upright on skates or seated on wooden trays. She adored the one at Gostilitsy—the suburban estate belonging to Elizabeth’s favourite, Aleksey Razumovsky, where the Russian Court regularly paid a visit halfway through Lent—and in 1762 she had Antonio Rinaldi build her own all-weather tobogganing pavilion at the Summer Palace at Oranienbaum, a fantasy of powder-blue and white.24
It consists of steep declivities built of timber, the highest end being ten fathoms above the ground, and borne up on an arch. The impetus acquired by rapidly descending the first forces the carriage up the second, which having turned it is carried up a third and so proceeds in diminishing altitudes, with amazing velocity. The carriages are made to contain one person, or two seated facing one another, the wheels running in grooves.25
A less extravagant wooden sleigh-run at Tsarskoye Selo was demolished in 1777 to make way for a merry-go-round. Even in the last years of her life, Catherine liked to take visitors to play on the ice hills near the Tauride Palace she had built for Potëmkin, where she treated the local populace and donated money to their other entertainments.26
In 1744, such pleasures lay in the future, for no sooner had Sophie arrived in St Petersburg than she was whisked off to Moscow, where the Court was in residence and where Elizabeth expected her in time to celebrate Grand Duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on 10 February. Improved in Catherine’s own reign by a series of costly schemes, the highway between the two capitals remained in 1744 in much the same state as other Russian roads—a primitive track, constructed from tree-trunks covered with gravel and sand, and passable at speed only when frozen. While it might take the empress’s humbler subjects several weeks to complete the 370-mile journey, she herself could cover the distance in a little over three days by racing through the night and changing horses every twelve or fifteen miles. That January, she had spent forty-nine hours on the road and another twenty-six at staging posts along the way.27 Even Elizabeth had come to regard the price of such speed as prohibitive. When the officer charged with removing snowdrifts, branches and tree stumps from the relatively short section of road between Chudov and Novgorod requested another 1600 men to assist the 400 already assigned to him, he was ordered to dismiss the whole detachment as the decree went out making the owner of each property along the road responsible for clearing it in the following spring.28 Sophie’s entourage encountered a different problem. Shortly after their departure, her mother’s sleigh hit a building while cornering too fast in the dark, injuring a sentry and catapulting the driver from his seat. While Johanna Elisabeth described the incident in typically purple prose, implying that they had all had a brush with death, Catherine’s memoir was cooler: ‘She claimed that she had been grievously injured, though nothing could be seen, not even a bruise.’ Nevertheless, they were delayed for several hours, and it was not until the afternoon of 9 February that they approached the outskirts of the old capital to be escorted to the palace at Lefortovo on the Yauza River, not far from the island where relatives of the young Peter I had created a fortress for his play regiments as a way of mobilising support for his candidature for the throne in the 1680s.29
Had it been summer, Sophie and her mother would have been greeted by ‘rows of clipped yew-trees, long straight canals’ and what her own generation, fond of less formal layouts, would dismiss as ‘a profusion of preposterous statues’: ‘every little structure was a pantheon; and every grove was haunted by its Apollos and Dianas’.30 For the moment, however, the gardens on which Empress Anna had lavished such careful attention were deep in snow, and the Court was resident not in Rastrelli’s Summer Palace but at the nearby Winter Annenhof (re-christened the Golovin Palace by imperial decree on 29 February) on the other side of the Yauza.31 This ornate wooden structure had been transferred in its entirety from the Kremlin in 1736 before being enlarged and embellished six years later in preparation for Elizabeth’s coronation. Its interiors were brightly painted in green, yellow and blue—all typical colours for Russian palaces in the first half o
f the eighteenth century.32
Having met the new arrivals at the foot of the ceremonial staircase, Field Marshal the Prince of Hesse-Homburg, a leading member of the pro-Prussian party at Court, offered his arm to Johanna Elisabeth and led them to their apartments. There they were joined by the household of Grand Duke Peter, who apparently burst in on Sophie’s mother as she was loosening her head-dress. A little before 10 p.m., another anti-Austrian schemer, the empress’s surgeon Armand Lestocq, announced that the empress was ready to receive them. Having been presented to the ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting in the crowded ante-chamber, where Johanna Elisabeth was conscious of being scrutinised ‘from head to toe’, they processed through the state apartments to the audience chamber, where the thirty-five-year-old empress appeared before them on the threshold of her state bedroom.
On seeing her for the first time, it was impossible not to be struck by her beauty and majestic bearing. She was a large woman who, in spite of being very stout, was neither disfigured by her size, nor embarrassed in her movements; her head, too, was very beautiful.33
Sophie would soon come to suspect that Elizabeth’s ‘good looks and natural sloth had significantly spoiled her character’. ‘Her beauty ought to have saved her from the envy and rivalry she exhibited against every woman who wasn’t remotely hideous; but in fact, the anxiety not to be outdone by anyone else was the cause of the extreme jealousy which often threw her into bouts of captiousness unworthy of her majesty.’34 At this first meeting, however, the star-struck girl followed dutifully as Elizabeth, wearing a huge hooped skirt, embroidered in silver and gold, with a black feather to one side of her head and diamonds in her hair, admitted them to the state bedroom. There they spoke in French for about half an hour before retiring to eat, observed incognito by the empress, who dined separately during the Lenten Fast.35
Next day, Peter’s birthday, Sophie caught her first sight of Aleksey Razumovsky, ‘one of the most handsome men I have seen in my life’.36 He had first been listed among Elizabeth’s servants in 1731, when he was recruited to join the ranks of other talented Ukrainian singers in the Court choir. He soon caught the eye of a princess devoted to Orthodox chant, and even when a throat infection ruined his voice, forcing him instead to take up the bandura (a large Ukrainian mandolin), his dashing looks were enough to preserve the spell. Before long, he and the tsarevna were sharing a bed. They may even have married in secret in 1742, though neither this ceremony nor persistent rumours of children have ever been substantiated. Still, there is no doubt that the languid Razumovsky—the most equable of men unless roused by drink—was Elizabeth’s right-hand man until the end of the 1740s. Revelling in the riches she bestowed upon him, including vast estates at Kozelets in his native Chernigov province, he took no active part in either her coup or her subsequent government. But to judge from the number of petitions he received and the fawning attitude of the empress’s ministers, many Russians shared the view of the Saxon envoy that she hung on his every word.37 Even if such judgements depended on a widespread misapprehension that only men were fit to rule, Aleksey was at his mistress’s side on all major Court occasions as Grand Master of the Hunt. Now he was on hand to pass her the insignia of the Order of St Catherine, which she presented to Sophie and her mother ‘in a ritual of sorority that simultaneously welcomed them as “princesses of the blood” and placed them formally under Elizabeth’.38
Since the empress customarily took her annual communion after confession at the end of the first week of the Lenten Fast, Sophie’s first experience of the incense-filled world of the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the most emotional services in the ecclesiastical calendar. In the mocking phrase of a later foreign diplomat, Lent was a time when ‘mushrooms, pickled cucumber, prayers and priests succeed to the active dance, the becoming dress, the genial banquet and the gallant officers’ and when Court ladies were left with nothing ‘to subsist on but faith, hope and meditation—faith in the constancy of their lovers, hope that the same dear delusions may return, and meditation upon pleasures past’.39 In 1744, however, the conventional routine was broken by a hectic round of social gatherings as the curious Russian elite scrambled to meet the new arrivals and they in their turn settled into the endless games of cards with which the Court passed the time between Lenten vigil services. Elizabeth herself occasionally called on Sophie and her mother as a sign of her satisfaction with them. Indeed, when the empress set out at the beginning of March on one of her frequent pilgrimages to the Trinity monastery, forty miles north-east of the old capital, all seemed set fair for the future.40
Disaster struck on the following Tuesday when Sophie suffered an attack of pleurisy, the first serious illness she had ever experienced. Convinced that it must be smallpox, Johanna Elisabeth refused to allow doctors to bleed her daughter, alleging that her brother, Karl Friedrich, had perished under similar treatment in Russia in 1727. While the bickering continued, Sophie lapsed into a state of delirium until the Saturday, when Elizabeth returned to take command. With the agitated Johanna Elisabeth in attendance, she held the girl’s head in her arms as a surgeon opened the first vein. Over the following four weeks, while her mother was kept out of the way and the empress offered prayers for her recovery in a variety of Moscow churches, bleedings were repeated with a vengeance, sometimes as often as four times a day. It is hard to be sure of the effects of this treatment. Sophie certainly did not lack for medical expertise. Abraham Boerhaave, Peter’s doctor, was related to the celebrated Dutch specialist, Herman Boerhaave, while the empress’s personal physician, António Sanches (1699–1783), a baptised Portuguese Jew who had studied with Boerhaave at Leiden, was a specialist in venereal disease who later published a treatise on the curative powers of steam baths.41 Yet if her memoir is to be believed, it was not until an abscess on one of her inflamed lungs burst of its own accord that their severely weakened patient began to regain her strength. She managed her first tentative steps around her bedroom at the beginning of April. Though this episode is understandably thought to have bequeathed a lifelong suspicion of doctors, it is worth remembering the tribute she paid to Sanches and Abraham Boerhaave in 1771: ‘I swear by God that it is to their care that I owe my life.’ Soon after she came to the throne, she rewarded Sanches with an annual pension of 1000 roubles.42
To Sophie’s anxious Prussian sponsors, her recovery came as a blessed relief.43 The Russian Court expressed its gratefulness with a series of lavish presents, all duly publicised in the official press. Elizabeth had already rewarded the girl’s bravery after the first bleeding with earrings and a diamond cluster variously estimated at between 25,000 and 60,000 roubles. Now more jewels and a diamond watch from the grand duke helped to compensate for Sophie’s distress at having to appear in public at the ball in honour of her fifteenth birthday. Heavily rouged, at the empress’s insistence, she was as ‘thin as a skeleton’ and miserably conscious that her scalp had been shaven as smooth as her hand. ‘I thought I looked frighteningly ugly and was unable to recognise my own features.’ The loss of her hair was especially keenly felt at a time when she ‘had the finest hair in the world: it curled naturally without being waved or crinkled in any way’.44
More damaging for the pro-Prussian party at Court was Johanna Elisabeth’s behaviour during Sophie’s illness. Well aware that daughters of eighteenth-century princely houses were little more than saleable breeding stock, she had been enterprising in the search for a match for her firstborn. Dizzy with success on arrival in Russia, she failed to grasp that she was bound to lose control of her prized asset as soon as the deal had been done. Instead, still dreaming of a glorious future for herself, she rashly attempted to help topple the pro-Austrian vice chancellor Bestuzhev. Perhaps she had been lulled into thinking that this would be a simple operation by the pro-Prussian courtiers who had watched over her since that first dinner at the Winter Palace.45 No doubt her pretensions had been further inflated by Frederick the Great’s promise to ‘do everything in the world to bring wha
t we have begun to a happy conclusion’. For the king, struggling against Austria for mastery of Germany in the wake of his invasion of Silesia in 1740, Bestuzhev’s removal seemed ‘a sine qua non’: ‘We need a minister at the Russian Court who would compel the empress to do as we wish.’46 To achieve this aim, which he regarded as the essential precondition for a triple alliance between Prussia, Russia and Sweden, Frederick was prepared to trust even such an inexperienced agent as Johanna Elisabeth. He was amply repaid for his folly. At the beginning of June, when the king was contemplating a desperate attempt to bribe the vice chancellor to switch sides, Bestuzhev presented the empress with more than seventy decoded dispatches revealing Johanna Elisabeth’s unguarded conversations with his other main enemy, the former French ambassador, the Marquis de la Chétardie. The consequences could hardly have been more embarrassing. Bestuzhev was promoted Chancellor; Chétardie was arrested and escorted to the border; Johanna Elisabeth’s reputation was permanently blackened. Reduced to tears by the empress’s ‘terrible wrath’, she, too, would soon be obliged to return home.47
The sole consolation for the pro-Prussian party was their success in persuading Elizabeth not to cancel plans for Sophie’s wedding. Though Lestocq had feared the worst when the scandal broke, the empress had invested too much political capital to send the girl packing now. The sooner she married, the sooner Russia could be rid of her meddlesome mother, and the sooner the succession could be secured. Since the couple were not yet formally engaged, and a crucial precondition of their betrothal was Sophie’s conversion to Orthodoxy, it was all the more pressing to complete her induction to the Russian faith. Frederick, who feared that her stubbornness in matters of religion would be the greatest stumbling block to the whole project, was confident that she could be brought round by careful persuasion. To make the task as painless as possible, her conversion was entrusted to Archimandrite Simon (Todorsky), a monk who had studied in Halle, the nerve centre of the Pietist religion in which she had been raised. Only 29 of his 800 books were in Russian, the overwhelming majority being in German, Latin and Greek.48 At a time when Orthodox theologians depended so heavily on Western scholarship, it was not so difficult to argue that the two faiths were separated more by external rituals than by essential doctrine. Simon assuaged any anxieties on the former score by ascribing the Russian Church’s famously flamboyant rites to popular superstition. He probably did not have to work very hard. Sophie’s acceptance of Orthodoxy is the first clear sign of her lifelong grasp of the realities of power. Since there was plainly no alternative, she wrote coolly to her father at the beginning of May that because she could detect ‘hardly any difference’ between Orthodoxy and Lutheranism, she had already resolved to convert.49
