Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Gift-giving was a central part of Court culture, and although Catherine might occasionally expect to receive presents from visiting royalty, she was usually expected to offer them. On the night of her conversion to Orthodoxy, she had been able to present Peter with a jewel-encrusted hunting knife and a gold cane-head only because Elizabeth had provided them for her. After her marriage, she had to pay for her own presents. The empress set the standard, providing courtiers with new clothes every Easter and bestowing valuable dowries on her maids of honour. Her stepsister Anna Karlovna received 10,000 roubles when she married Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov in 1742. Sixteen years later, their daughter Anna Mikhailovna in turn received 15,000 roubles along with dresses, silks and bed linen that brought the total value of the gift to more than 25,000 roubles.43 So we may believe Catherine when she complains of the demands of Countess Rumyantseva—‘the most spendthrift woman in Russia’—and Maria Choglokova, who alone was said to cost her 17,000 roubles a year.44

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  Such sums were a drop in the ocean by comparison with the outlay required to sustain a rapidly expanding Court. Though it remained significantly smaller than Versailles or Vienna, the establishment in St Petersburg was beginning to spiral out of control at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.45 In 1748, when a financial crisis prompted officials to compare Elizabeth’s household with the establishment under Anna in 1739, seven dwarves provided a reassuring measure of continuity, testifying to the Russian elite’s persistent fascination with human freaks. In every other respect, however, the Court had undergone unprecedented growth. Whereas Anna had managed with eight gentlemen-in-waiting, Elizabeth needed twice as many. She employed seven chamber pages, compared to Anna’s three, and the number of ordinary pages had increased from eight to fourteen. In 1739, the Court had required but a single cupbearer: nine years later there were six—and fourteen assistants. To manage them, the empress revived a series of offices unknown to Anna but mentioned in documents from previous reigns (among others, her Court now boasted a Chief Cellar-master and Chief Cupbearer). In view of her passion for clothes, a maître de garderobe seemed equally indispensable and Elizabeth duly appointed Vasily Chulkov, a former lackey who had looked after her wardrobe since 1731. Inflation was even more obvious among the burgeoning ranks of coffee-servers, table-cloth layers and table-setters. As for the lesser servants, Anna had made do with four chamber lackeys, forty-eight lackeys, eight heyducks and four messengers. By 1748, their total numbers had more than doubled. All of them had to be kitted out in expensive livery: at 13,000 roubles, Elizabeth’s annual bill on this count was more than three times higher than Anna’s. Lackeys, drawn mainly from the Ukrainian regiments, wore an outfit based on the standard Russian military uniform: green breeches and tunics with red cuffs and a scarlet cloth blouson. Heyducks dressed in red breeches, like the Hussars, and a fancier tunic, trimmed with lace, loops and large buttons. For state occasions and major religious feast days, the livery was still more extravagant. Below stairs, forty-five cooks manned Elizabeth’s kitchens in much the same way as they had done under Anna, but by 1748 they had sixty-eight apprentices to her eighteen. It was only because most of this mushrooming establishment were miserably paid—the eighty stokers each had to survive on 30 roubles a year, half as much again as the twenty grooms—that the increase in the total salary bill could be held at 239,331 roubles in 1748 by comparison with 148,388 in 1739.46

  The costs of consumption rose faster still. In 1746, the three palace kitchens responsible for preparing food for the empress, the grand ducal couple and the leading courtiers paid 10,721 roubles for wine and fresh vegetables—more than twice as much as Anna had spent. The drinks budget was even higher: 38,830 roubles in 1746 by comparison with 18,163 in the 1730s. (Despite the drunken portrait of her husband presented in Catherine’s memoirs, the 13,150 roubles spent on alcohol for her and Peter tell us less about their personal habits than about the central role they played in entertaining the Court and the foreign ambassadors.) Changing fashions led Elizabeth to pay three times as much for coffee as Anna had done, while the bill for sweets rose more than sevenfold to 6389 roubles. It was this ‘enormous number of sweets’ that contributed to the Russians’ lasting reputation for bad breath—‘especially at court’ reported a visitor in the early nineteenth century, ‘where the ladies not merely chew them all through dinner, but send plates back to their rooms’.47 All told, the catering budget for the imperial family and the leading courtiers in 1746 came to 83,714 roubles—well over twice as much as Anna’s total of 35,388—and actual expenditure was almost certainly higher.48

  Although the 1740s was the decade in which Peter the Great’s reforms finally began to take root in a number of areas of government, it would have taken a more robust accounting system than any Russia could command to control expansion on this scale. Not long before the national debt peaked in 1748 at around 3.6 million roubles—between a quarter and a third of the empire’s annual gross income—the Admiralty College blithely allocated more than 1.5 million roubles to an attempt to rebuild the military harbour at Kronstadt in stone, abandoning the plan three years later only when it learned that even an outlay of 3 million would offer no guarantee of success.49 The Court’s deficit may have been trivial by comparison, but by the time administrators worked it out for themselves, it was already too late. In theory, salaries and catering were accounted for by an annual state grant of 200,000 roubles, to which Elizabeth had added a recurrent supplement of 30,000 roubles in April 1747. Yet although payments were supposed to be made in instalments every four months, the Court Office complained that the money was transferred only ‘with great delays, and never in a single issue’. No funds at all were handed over on 1 May 1748, so that officials, already behind with salary payments and facing a formal protest from sentries who had been given no new uniforms for the past three years, now found themselves more than 43,000 roubles in arrears and unable to pay for the ‘drinks, Gdansk vodka, vegetables and other provisions without which it is impossible for the Court to manage, either for its ordinary needs or for banquets’. By mid-May, the Court Office’s resources were ‘utterly exhausted’: not only was there no money to buy luxury goods from the foreign vessels expected imminently in St Petersburg; they could not even afford to commission orders from the regular packet-boats that brought cloth and alcohol from Danzig.50

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  Expensive as the Court had proved, there was never any question that Elizabeth would rein in her spending. In a political climate in which ‘the main currency of imperial competition was cultural achievement’, there was nothing self-indulgent about representational display. On the contrary, as Tim Blanning has shown, display was a ‘constitutive element of power itself’. And nowhere was it a more vital element than in Russia under the usurper Elizabeth, because the representational culture which radiated across Europe from Versailles was by no means an expression of unbounded confidence: ‘On the contrary, the greater the doubts about the stability or legitimacy of a throne, the greater the need for display.’51

  For a sense of what that meant in practice, consider the magnificent four-poster bed in the state bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo. A shimmering confection of light-blue French damask fringed with silver brocade, this lit de parade was the most expensive piece of furniture in the palace. Above it hung a massive canopy decorated with crimson velvet into which a cross and a crown lying on a feather pillow had been embroidered in gold and silver. The interior of the canopy was embroidered with the empress’s monogram.52 No matter that the Russian Court had never adopted the elaborate public rituals of the lever and coucher practised at Versailles, or that Elizabeth preferred to sleep in a room next to Aleksey Razumovsky’s: the state bed’s purpose was representational rather than functional. And it was no more than Europe had come to expect. Touring the continent in the early 1750s, the young Demidov brothers, heirs to the precious-metal mines in the Urals, were proudly told that it had taken forty craftsmen twelve years to const
ruct the bed at the Elector of Bavaria’s palace in Munich, where a dozen people were required merely to lift the bedspread.53 A later British visitor learned that the furniture in that bedroom alone had cost £100,000.54

  For a further representation of the power and prosperity that Elizabeth claimed to have brought to the Russian throne, visitors to Tsarskoye Selo had only to glance up at the ceiling in the Great Hall. In the words of the artist, Giuseppe Valeriani, his painting’s allegorical central panel depicted:

  Russia seated amidst the coats of arms of the Kingdoms and Provinces of her Empire, leaning on one where the Crowned Name of Her Imperial Majesty can be seen surrounded by Graces with festoons of flowers; next to her is Abundance, pouring out horns of fruit; on every side there are the Genies of War and Peace.

  In the foreground are the Sciences and the Arts, Navigation and Commerce which the Genies of Her Majesty’s Magnanimity and Magnificence pour their Horns of Plenty to recompense and encourage the Sciences and the Arts.

  In the niches at the four corners are the four parts of the World expressing their just admiration for the heroic virtues of Her Imperial Majesty.55

  The New Year firework in 1751 represented the northern hemisphere of a colossal globe, where the empress’s initials burned at the centre of a vast map of Russia.56 Writers conveyed similar messages, sometimes in overtly sexual terms. In Lomonosov’s anniversary ode for 1748, for example, Russia ‘sits and spreads her legs upon the steppe’, turning her ‘lively eyes’ to ‘take stock of the prosperity around her, leaning with her elbow on the Caucasus’.57 Masculine associations were even more frequent. Female rule had been associated with bravery in Russia since Catherine I’s legendary role at the battle of the Pruth in 1711, and Elizabeth’s clerical mythmakers duly seized on the image to portray their empress as ‘Peter’s daughter’.58

  Since no artistic form was better suited to represent heroism than opera, opera libretti, usually published simultaneously in St Petersburg in Russian, Italian and French, added to the chorus. As Jacob Stählin reminded readers of the St Petersburg News, everything in opera was ‘exaggerated, magnificent and amazing. It contains nothing save high and incomparable deeds, godlike faculties in man, a prosperous world, and portraits of golden ages.’59 Giuseppe Bonecchi drove the point home by announcing that the hero of Araja’s opera Bellerofont, staged to commemorate the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession in 1750, was intended to represent ‘an image of Her Imperial Majesty, who, gloriously surmounting on that day all the obstacles that injustice and envy had placed in her way, came to the paternal throne, to which she has consistently brought glory, and to which she gives by her virtues more éclat than she receives in return’.60 Indeed, the very presentation of Italian opera in St Petersburg was widely interpreted as evidence of the civilised blessings that Elizabeth’s rule had conferred on her empire. As Voltaire declared in his Anecdotes on Peter the Great, published in 1748 to flatter the Russian Court: ‘Magnificence and even taste have in every respect replaced barbarity.’61

  In such a cultural climate, only the monarch mattered. Although Catherine’s birthday (21 April) and her name day (24 November) were cause for formal celebration, as were Peter’s (10 February and 29 June), these were secondary events, designed more to promote the dynasty than to fete the heir and his wife. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, the most important days in the Court calendar were, in descending order of significance, the empress’s accession day (25 November), coronation day (25 April), name day (5 September) and birthday (18 December). It was these that provided the occasions not only for operas and literary commemorations, but also for extravagant banquets culminating in the presentation of intricate allegorical desserts, each of which was a work of art in itself.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sugar subtleties first created for medieval Arab potentates had slid far enough down the English social scale to be recommended by Hannah Glasse in The Art of Cookery (1747), one of the bestselling books of the age: ‘If you make them in pretty little figures, they make a fine little dish.’62 In Russia, they remained a novelty confined to the Court elite, though a marginally wider group of readers could drool over the descriptions that appeared in the official press. To celebrate one of her triumphs against the Turks in the late 1730s, Anna’s Parisian confectioner made a model fortress complete with twelve sugar cannons; on another occasion, the dessert resembled the park and gardens at Peterhof.63 Under Elizabeth, designs became more ambitious still. At the first coronation-day banquet Catherine attended, shortly after her recovery from illness in April 1744, the dessert took the form of a coronation hall, complete with throne and regalia. ‘Among the subtleties at high table,’ reported the St Petersburg News, ‘there were various triumphal gates with avenues, and magnificent buildings with entertainment gardens and parterres; incidentally, the chamber of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Kunstkamera with its observatory in St Petersburg were also represented, in models done to scale.’64

  Sheer extravagance was itself a powerful enough symbol of prosperity, and Rastrelli’s favourite device, used on many occasions after Catherine’s wedding, was a pyramid of fire created by setting light to wax poured through thousands of glass globes.65 These were merely the centrepiece of fantastic theatrical settings. Fountains played in the banqueting hall, where tables for up to 200 guests were laid out in a single ‘figured’ sequence, flanked by orange and pomegranate trees. Our earliest description dates from 1738, when the tables were arranged in the shape of a double-headed eagle.66 Even a genius such as Rastrelli found it hard to keep up this level of inspiration, but Catherine attended banquets where the architect had laid out the tables in the form of her own monogram, or the empress’s, or in an echo of the formal palace gardens. One young officer retained a sufficiently vivid memory of a Summer Palace feast to reproduce the table plan in his memoirs: Elizabeth, Catherine and Peter were placed as jewels in a crown, from which four long tassels trailed out, one for each of the guards regiments.67

  On state occasions, when the tables were arranged in a single sequence like this, Catherine sat to the left of the empress with the Court ladies ranged out alongside her in order of seniority, while her husband was placed on Elizabeth’s right next to members of the generalitet. At lesser banquets, when the tables were set separately, the heir and his consort were expected to entertain the foreign diplomats and leading courtiers, dining either in their own apartments or in one of the palace staterooms. At the premier of Araja’s opera Mithridates on 26 April 1747, when Peter and Catherine hosted the ambassadors in the empress’s box, dinner was served throughout the performance. There was plenty of time for a banquet: the performance of Seleucco on 9 January 1746 lasted more than seven hours.68 Only Peter’s manners left something to be desired. In 1746, Chancellor Bestuzhev felt obliged to instruct the Young Court that the grand duke must refrain from pulling faces and telling vulgar jokes to foreign dignitaries, and that when at table, he must not, for example, ‘pour his drinks over the poor servants’ heads’.69

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  Such puerile behaviour was doubly embarrassing in church, where Catherine spent a good deal of her time. Elizabeth’s reign was a golden age of Baroque church-building. Most of the major monasteries she visited underwent major reconstruction. In and around the old capital, she spent a small fortune rebuilding the Trinity Lavra and the ‘New Jerusalem’ Ascension monastery, established by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century to represent the Holy Sepulchre in Russia. In St Petersburg, not content with founding the St Nicholas (Naval) Cathedral and the Smolny Cathedral, Elizabeth commissioned Savva Chevakinsky to build a sumptuous new chapel at Tsarskoye Selo, consecrated in 1756, ten years after the foundation stone was laid.70 Several of the capital’s churches incorporated a ‘tsar’s place’ where she could listen to the liturgy, and some had more than one of these gilded canopies since, as Catherine later recalled, the empress liked to wander about during the service, in the manner of humbler members of the cong
regation. There was no doubt about the sincerity of her conspicuous piety. It was at Elizabeth’s behest, for example, that public floggings were prohibited on religious feast days and a ban was placed on imported porcelain and other items bearing images of the crucifixion.71 However, in keeping with her quest for privacy, the empress preferred to make her devotions in the seclusion of the smaller of the two Winter Palace chapels, named after St Zachary and the Blessed Elizabeth, where she could emulate her father by ‘singing with great grace in the most difficult motets’ and ‘competing with the strongest choristers’.72 In her absence, Peter and Catherine, and even Catherine alone, were often left to represent the imperial family in the Great Chapel, not only at regular Sunday services, but also on the major feast days in the Orthodox calendar.

  Churches were often perishingly cold. On Christmas Day in 1748, when the Court was in Moscow, Catherine and her husband were already preparing to take the carriage to mass when they were told that Elizabeth had excused them because ‘it was twenty-eight or twenty-nine degrees below zero’. It was barely warmer in April, when Catherine returned from the Easter service ‘as blue as a prune’.73 Faced with such icy conditions, courtiers were inclined to stay away, much to the irritation of the empress who accepted only illness as an excuse for their absence (those who failed to attend the blessing of the waters at Epiphany in 1752 were threatened with a ban from Court receptions).74 Less of an ordeal were the summer sanctification services, which appealed to Catherine’s sense of theatre. In her first summer in St Petersburg, she and her mother followed the procession of the cross to a Jordan on the Moika canal. When the ritual was performed at Peterhof—where the upper pond was christened ‘the Jordan’ to symbolise the flow of ‘holy water’ through the palace’s system of ponds and fountains—Elizabeth occupied a gallery lined with velvet to the left of the Jordan, while the attendant notables took their places in a second stand lined with scarlet cloth.75