Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  It was to be the beginning of a long year of discomfort. That month, Elizabeth decreed that no further wooden structures were to be allowed near the Kremlin and China Town.105 Three stokers and another workman had been whipped in January for allowing burning coals to fall from a stove in the palace, setting light to the floor and a panel in the wall of the empress’s apartments. Yet although primitive fire equipment was carted from palace to palace in an attempt to limit any conflagration, both capitals became tinderboxes in a hot, dry summer, when it was one of Elizabeth’s more melancholy diversions to drive out to witness the destruction of one of her courtier’s homes. On 1 November 1753, she experienced the same fate herself.

  A mere two days after she had moved into her new Golovin Palace, the whole edifice was reduced to ashes by a fire that began at midday in the heating pipes under the floor of the great hall. ‘It was twenty paces from our wing,’ Catherine recalled. ‘I went into my rooms and found them already full of soldiers and servants, who were removing the furniture and carrying what they could.’ Since there was nothing to be done, she retreated to a safe distance in the carriage of the Court Kapellmeister, reserving her coolest irony for the passage in her memoirs in which she describes the ‘astonishing number of rats and mice’ that allegedly ‘descended the stairs in single file, without even really hurrying’. For once, Rastrelli’s advanced techniques counted against him because it proved impossible, even by firing cannon balls into the burning ruins, to dislodge the iron girders that underpinned the whole structure, and so to isolate the fire in the main staterooms. Flames soon engulfed the entire 400-metre length of the building. By the time they were finally extinguished at six o’clock, only the chapel and the summer apartments remained standing, though a salvage operation managed to rescue the majority of the valuables. The most sensible loss for the empress was her wardrobe, including a dress she had had made from Parisian fabric sent to Catherine as a gift from her mother.106

  Even as she looked on aghast, Elizabeth boasted to the Dutch ambassador that she would commission a new palace, ‘only not in the Italian style, but more in the Russian’.107 She was as good as her word. Having defiantly returned to the neighbouring theatre to see a French comedy the day after the fire, she ordered that a new palace must be ready in time for her birthday in six weeks’ time. Clearance work began on 5 November and building started three days later under the direction of Russian architects working to a new design by Rastrelli. To speed reconstruction, materials were brought from both the Petrovsky palace and the old wooden palace in the Kremlin, dismantled in the spring (the Moscow nobility might have been unnerved to learn of the further order to survey the surrounding area for ‘buildings made of good timber belonging to private individuals’). By 10 November, 1018 men were already at work, erecting a new superstructure onto the existing foundations since fresh ones would have threatened a repeat of the disaster at Gostilitsy by sweating through the winter. As all the Court’s neighbouring construction projects came to a halt to release the necessary labour force, the total soon reached 6000, including 3000 carpenters and 120 specialist woodcarvers. Fed and housed on site, they worked around the clock to complete the project in time for an architects’ inspection on 13 December.108 Two days later, Elizabeth took possession of her new apartments and on 18 December she duly celebrated her birthday in a richly gilded hall, even larger than its predecessor, lit by twenty-two tall windows. ‘There was no court at noon, as usual,’ the British resident reported, ‘because of the excessive cold, but in the evening there was a ball, illuminations and a magnificent supper at a table which held near three hundred people.’109 The fact that only 130 guests sat down at a table laid for 160 scarcely diminishes the scale of the achievement. Ambitious state construction projects were by no means a creation of the Stalinist era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Count Alexander Vorontsov highlighted the resurrection of the Golovin Palace in his autobiography as an example of ‘what can be done in Russia’.110

  Catherine was less impressed. Though a degree of inconvenience was to be expected in the aftermath of such a disaster, the misery she endured at a nearby courtier’s house was insufferable. ‘It is hardly possible to be worse off than we were there,’ she recalled. ‘The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, and you could get two or three fingers into the cracks in the floor.’ Conditions were little better when she and Peter moved to a former episcopal palace, where they feared being burned alive. Prospects improved only when they were allowed to go to Liuberets, an estate outside Moscow granted to her husband in 1751, where they had initially been obliged to sleep in tents: ‘Here we thought we were in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished.’111

  The first indications of a third pregnancy showed in February 1754. In view of the earlier miscarriages, anxieties about Catherine’s health were understandable. The empress herself paid her a visit in Easter week, perhaps to check that Saltykov was not lurking in her apartments. She left after half an hour, having excused the grand duchess from appearing in public on her birthday and on coronation day.112 That was small relief by comparison with the distress caused by the discovery that Nikolay Choglokov, who collapsed during the Easter service, was terminally ill. It had taken Catherine seven years to bring the Choglokovs round by flattering them and pandering to their weakness for gambling. Now Nikolay had selfishly chosen to die ‘just at the point when we had managed, after several years of trouble and effort, to make him less wicked and nasty, and he had become more tractable’. As for his wife, she too ‘had changed from a hard-hearted and malevolent Argus into a firm and devoted friend’. Now they were gone, and at the moment of her greatest uncertainty Catherine had to face the future under the supervision of a new governor of the Young Court: Alexander Shuvalov, the head of the Secret Chancellery. Finding it astonishing that ‘a man with such a hideous grimace’ should have been placed in the company of a pregnant young woman, she cried all the way back to St Petersburg.113

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ambition

  1754–1759

  When Catherine finally gave birth to a son on 20 September 1754, the Russian Court erupted in an explosion of relief whose tremors were felt across the continent. The British minister in Florence, Sir Horace Mann, wrote in December:

  All Europe seems to have agreed for some months past to do nothing worth talking of—except the Great Prince of Russia, who has made a little Great Prince to exclude forever the lawful Czar [Ivan VI, still imprisoned at Schlüsselburg], and for whose birth the Empress has given such presents, and made such rejoicings, both at home and abroad, as quite outdo those on the birth of an heir to the French monarchy.1

  It was a pardonable exaggeration. Among the courtiers who competed to stage celebrations in Elizabeth’s honour in a series of festivities lasting through the New Year carnival, none could surpass her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, who hosted a public masquerade that lasted for two whole days and nights in the last week of October, beginning and ending with allegorical fireworks.2 The scale of the empress’s own accession-day celebrations on 25 November can be judged from the tally of candles alone. In addition to 4000 plain white sticks for the chandeliers and 300 table candles of unspecified weight, the Court accountants recorded 1642 ‘semi-banquet’ candles and 1505 ‘ordinary’ ones weighing almost 900 lbs. Some 725 of these were used for the seven flaming pyramids designed by Rastrelli, who excelled himself by requiring 4000 glass bottles for their construction.3

  In contrast to such unrestrained public rejoicing, Catherine had been abandoned in miserable isolation. On her return from Moscow, she had been disconcerted to find that the apartment being prepared for her confinement was in Elizabeth’s wing of the Summer Palace, where she was later to remember two sombre rooms, ‘badly done out with crimson damask, and with almost no furniture or comfort of any kind’. The reason for their location was confirmed when her child was taken from her at the end of a difficult labour lasti
ng from two in the morning until midday. Catherine’s room was cold and draughty, and since no one dared to change her linen without orders from the empress, she was left to writhe in blood-stained sheets soaked with sweat. At the baptism on 25 September, when the baby was christened Paul, it was the fifty-four-year-old Princess of Hesse-Homburg (née Anna Trubetskaya), flanked by Ober-hofmeister Shepelëv and General Alexander Shuvalov, who carried him into the palace chapel behind Grand Duke Peter and the empress. Catherine could learn of him only ‘furtively’, because ‘asking for news would have been interpreted as casting doubt on the care the empress was taking of him, and would have been very badly received’. By the following Easter, she had seen her son on only three occasions, the first being the forty-day churching ceremony to celebrate the end of her confinement, when she was too weak even to stand for prayers. Paul’s upbringing for the first eight years of his life was almost entirely in Elizabeth’s hands.4

  Anxious about the stifling conditions in which the swaddled child was kept, bathed in sweat in a cradle lined with the fur of a silver fox, Catherine descended into post-natal depression. Her mood sank lower still with the news that Sergey Saltykov had been sent abroad on the pretext of announcing Paul’s birth to the Court of Stockholm. (Later he was dispatched to Hamburg, showing every sign of having tired of their relationship.) Whether Saltykov was Paul’s father is a mystery that will never be resolved. Catherine’s memoirs hint strongly that he was, much to the horror of her nineteenth-century descendants who struggled to censor such an explosive revelation, and it is striking that Grand Duke Peter sired no other child, in spite of his many dalliances. Perhaps he was simply infertile. On the other hand, Catherine’s memoir may have been a rhetorical way of disinheriting her deposed husband rather than a confident biological claim. Paul certainly grew up to look and behave very much like Peter (puny, snub-nosed and prone to rage) and always revered him as his father. Amid all this circumstantial evidence, one thing is certain: Paul’s birth did nothing to reconcile Peter with Catherine. While the grand duke sought comfort in an affair with the unprepossessing Elizabeth Vorontsova, his wife looked out for a new companion of her own.

  She found him in Count Stanislaw August Poniatowski, a twenty-three-year-old Polish aristocrat who came to Russia in June 1755 in the entourage of the new British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. Having befriended Stanislaw in Berlin in 1750, Williams took him under his wing, introducing him first to the Court at Dresden and later to some of the best company in Europe as together they visited Vienna, Hanover and The Hague in 1753. A classic man of his times, equally at home with the bawdy Hellfire Club and the refinements of Latin verse, Sir Charles set out to polish Stanislaw’s manners and broaden his mind, grooming his young protégé for the most enlightened circles in Paris. There his admittance was guaranteed thanks to the renown of a father who had fought with Charles XII against Peter the Great at Poltava and was praised by Voltaire as a ‘man of extraordinary merit’. At the literary salon presided over by Madame Geoffrin, herself the uneducated daughter of a footman, Stanislaw met Montesquieu. And it was Montesquieu’s thirty-two-year-old friend Charles Yorke who became his leading companion during his visit to England in 1754, when Williams was distracted by the demands of a Parliamentary election. A Fellow of the Royal Society whose library boasted some of the latest works of the French Enlightenment, Yorke introduced the young Pole to the pleasures of the English landscape and took him to Salisbury, Bath, Oxford and Stowe. With Yakov Sievers, a youthful secretary at the Russian embassy who later became one of Catherine’s most influential advisers, he went to the debtors’ prison in London to see Theodore I, the deposed self-proclaimed king of Corsica. Having sampled everything in England from Shakespeare to cock fighting, Stanislaw arrived in Russia equipped with a cosmopolitan ease of manner in the company of an avuncular ambassador with a talent for gaining the trust of the young.5

  Catherine instinctively liked them both. While Sir Charles became her confidant (it was for him that she wrote her first memoir), Stanislaw became her lover. He offered her a seductive combination of wit, bookishness and sensitivity that her husband so obviously lacked. Hesitant at first—perhaps because he was a virgin (as he later liked to suggest), or more probably because he was understandably wary of the consequences—he eventually succumbed to her advances at the end of December. Like so many royal romances before and since, their affair began with furtive visits to her apartments and continued with secret assignations, fraught with risk, in the houses of complicit friends and courtiers. Catherine had to be smuggled in and out dressed as a man. Such a relationship was too precarious to survive for long, but while it lasted they made each other deliriously happy. ‘I did not think that I was made to love women,’ Stanislaw confessed in the revealing self-portrait he composed at her request. ‘I attributed the first attempts I made in that direction to particular circumstance, but then, at last, I found tenderness, and [now] I love with such passion that I feel that were my love to suffer any reverse I should become the most miserable man on earth.’6 Apart from ‘a mouth which seemed to invite kisses’, he later remembered the attractions of a mind capable of shifting effortlessly from madcap, childish games to complex arithmetical puzzles. In his handsome company, Catherine found the confidence to build a new life of her own.

  * * *

  She first encountered Stanislaw at Oranienbaum on 29 June 1755, when 121 guests of the first five ranks were spread across the palace staterooms at the banquet in honour of her husband’s name day.7 Though Peter had to be satisfied with toy soldiers in the winter months, he preferred drilling the real regiments he had been allowed to recruit from Holstein. An elaborate new star-shaped fort was built for their exercises. With its guns trained firmly on Yekaterinburg, Peterstadt was an excellent metaphor for their marriage.8 To avoid arguments, Catherine had bought all her own furniture for her part of the palace. But her true passion was not so much for interior design as for gardening. We cannot know how far Stanislaw discussed the subject with Catherine—on his visit to Stowe, he had risked offending his hosts by criticising ‘Capability’ Brown’s ‘natural’ landscapes—but by the time of their meeting she had both time and opportunity at Oranienbaum to create a garden of her own. ‘I began to make plans to build and plant, and since this was my first venture into building and planting, my plans became very ambitious.’9

  When it came to ambition, the standard was set by Elizabeth herself. On arrival at St Petersburg, Stanislaw had reported home on ‘the astonishing prodigality’ of a Court which continued to look to Versailles for inspiration. In 1756, in response to requests from the francophile Ivan Shuvalov, Mikhail Vorontsov urged Russian diplomats in Paris to write ‘often and in detail’, not only about international affairs, but ‘especially about the king and his family and their way of life’. The favourite would be particularly interested, the vice chancellor continued, to receive detailed reports on the king’s lever and the toilette de la reine, and also to learn of new plays, operas and comedies, and other Parisian theatrical spectacles.10 To provide an appropriate setting for such display, his mistress had embarked on several extravagant construction projects. While the Court was in Moscow, she had initially planned a fundamental restoration of the Winter Palace, masterminded by Rastrelli from May 1753 with a budget of 567,674 roubles. By the following year, however, she had concluded that the existing building was ‘inadequate, not only for the reception of foreign ministers and the performance of ritual festivities on the appointed days in accordance with our great Imperial dignity, but also to accommodate us with the necessary servants and possessions’. So instead the Senate was ordered to find 900,000 roubles to build a new stone palace, ‘longer, wider, and taller’ than the old wooden one.11 (While the new building was under construction, the Court moved into a temporary wooden structure, erected at characteristically breakneck speed at the junction of the Great Perspective Road with the Moika canal, which probably made it easier for Catherine to conduct her af
fair with Stanislaw.) Meanwhile, in May 1752, the month in which Rastrelli completed his seven-year transformation of Peterhof, Elizabeth had decreed another total reconstruction of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo. The costs will probably never be known. As Catherine later remarked, the surviving accounts totalled some 1.6 million roubles, ‘but in addition to that the empress paid a lot more money out of her own pocket of which there are no records’.12

  Scarcely less fabulous sums were spent by leading courtiers, for the mid-1750s was the heyday of private building projects in St Petersburg. Catherine’s architect at Oranienbaum, Antonio Rinaldi, had initially come to Russia to build a palace for Kirill Razumovsky, brother of Aleksey. Rastrelli also accepted numerous private commissions. Delayed by the vice chancellor’s debts, it took him more than a decade to complete the Vorontsov Palace on the Fontanka, where the empress herself attended the consecration of the chapel on 23 November 1758, rewarding its exultant (and bankrupt) owner with 40,000 roubles.13 It was there, over the coming winter, that Catherine first met and befriended his fifteen-year-old niece, the future Princess Dashkova. Between 1753 and 1755, while Vorontsov was struggling to find the money to pay his builders, Elizabeth’s largesse to her favourite allowed Savva Chevakinsky to build a palace for Ivan Shuvalov on Italian Street, overlooking the Summer Palace labyrinth.14 Nearby on the Great Perspective Road, the limitless resources of his family’s salt mines allowed Baron Sergey Stroganov to complete his new palace—an innovative design, adapted to the increasing density of building in the city centre by fronting directly onto the street without a garden—in less than two years after its predecessor was destroyed by fire in 1752.15