by Simon Dixon
Our reading, when it is not interrupted by parcels of letters and other nuisances, lasts until half-past five, when I either go to the theatre, or I play, or I gossip to the first people to arrive before dinner, which is over before eleven when I retire to bed in order to do the same again on the following day. And all this is ruled out as regularly as musical manuscript paper.26
In practice, of course, her life was more varied than this jocular summary implied. The letter studiously avoided any mention of Grigory Orlov, whom she usually entertained after lunch—an hour that gossips were to dub ‘the Time of Mystery’ for the rest of her reign.27 Paul, who lived with his Young Court in a neighbouring part of the palace, was another regular visitor to her rooms, though she rarely spent as much as half an hour with him. He saw her early on Wednesday evenings or after church on Sunday mornings—both were Court reception days when the empress entertained not only her courtiers, but also foreign visitors to the city.28 Hawking was still a favourite pastime, though Catherine’s days in the saddle were all but over, and when the weather permitted, she enjoyed a carriage ride through the streets with a favourite lady-in-waiting. These, however, were distractions from a gruelling week at her desk.
Noticeably missing from the empress’s working day was any collective meeting of her advisers. Although she had initially been tempted to accept Panin’s proposal for an imperial council of between six and eight aristocrats, she soon rejected the idea as a potential limitation on her own absolute power. While Panin had made his suggestion in December 1762 as a way of preventing a recurrence of the arbitrary favouritism of Elizabeth’s time, Catherine almost certainly suspected a bid to enhance his own influence at the expense of the Orlovs. Although the idea was quietly shelved, the membership of the Imperial Assembly, secretly formed in Moscow on 11 February 1763 to determine how to respond to Peter III’s manifesto on the nobility, was much the same as Panin had projected for his council. Meeting some twenty-one times before the end of October with the ubiquitous Teplov as its secretary, this informal but highly influential body became, in effect, the Russian government. In a balanced representation of elite political interests, Panin and Grigory Orlov were joined by Bestuzhev, Kirill Razumovsky, Mikhail Vorontsov, Yakov Shakhovskoy and Zakhar Chernyshëv, whom Catherine had put in charge of the College of War. When the Court returned to St Petersburg, the Assembly extended its remit to consider a root-and-branch reform of the Senate, much as Panin had originally intended.29 Catherine was delighted. At the time of her accession, she later complained, ‘the Senate regarded it as excessive to hear state business with a map on the table in front of them’, so that ‘sometimes they did not know what they were judging. Shameful to say, there was not a single printed map in the Senate, and indeed, being present there, I sent for the first one to be bought from the Academy [of Sciences].’ Always a scourge of laziness and inefficiency, she sent the Senators a long list of personal orders that they had failed to fulfil, insisting that they attend their office for four hours every morning and for three afternoons a week until the backlog had been cleared.30
In January 1764, Glebov was replaced as the Procurator-General of the Senate by Alexander Vyazemsky, who was to dominate the Russian bureaucracy until his death in 1792. The instruction Catherine sent to him on his appointment is rightly considered as ‘one of the most important documents illustrating her conception of statecraft’. Ordering him to remain above and beyond factional conflict and to trust in her alone, she explained what he could expect in return:
You will find that I have no other view than the greatest welfare and glory of the fatherland, and I wish for nothing but the happiness of my subjects, of whatever order they may be. All my thoughts are directed towards the preservation of external and internal peace, satisfaction and tranquillity. I am very fond of the truth, and you may tell me the truth fearlessly and argue with me without any danger if it leads to good results in affairs. I hear you are regarded as an honest man by all; I hope to show you by experience that people with such qualities do well at Court. And I may add that I require no flattery from you, but only honest behaviour and firmness in affairs.31
She was as good as her word. Conscious of the fate that had traditionally befallen most advisers of a disgraced monarch in Russia, Peter III’s leading minister, Dimitry Volkov, assumed that his time had come. Yet he, too, found that he had nothing to fear. ‘I am always delighted when I see a swift attitude to business and an earnest approach to service in my subjects,’ Catherine assured him. ‘When subjects wish to see an industrious and solicitous sovereign taking care of their interests, then the sovereign is no less happy to see her subjects helping her. Don’t bother about your circumstances: just get on with the job, because your reasoning is good. Upright service will always rectify circumstances, of that you should have no doubt.’32 Having proved his efficiency as governor of Orenburg, Volkov was recalled to St Petersburg in 1764 to take charge of the College of Manufactures, where he remained until retiring age. Long periods of office were to be the norm in the new reign, even for some of the families whose loyalty Catherine initially had reason to doubt. Since the pool of available talent was limited, she was even prepared to give jobs to the aloof Vorontsovs. Count Alexander Vorontsov, brother of Peter III’s mistress, was president of the College of Commerce for twenty years from 1773, his brother Semën a long-serving ambassador in London. ‘Tolerate an unpleasant person in your sight,’ the empress later exhorted her infant grandson, the future tsar Alexander I, ‘and do not glance askance at him: a man who can get on only with people he likes, and not with those he does not, is lacking in wisdom.’33
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The nerve centre of Catherine’s government was the Winter Palace, still under reconstruction when the Court returned from Moscow, though not under the direction of its original architect. Having been close to Peter III, Rastrelli thought it prudent to take temporary leave from Russia shortly after Catherine’s coup. When he returned a year later, he found that his circumstances had changed for the worse. Among the petitions forwarded to Yelagin’s secretariat in the autumn of 1763 was one from the disgruntled architect:
Your holy Imperial Highness, I am taking the liberty to inform Your Imperial Majesty with the most humble respect that, having received permission to return to Italy for a year thanks to Your kindness, and having received at that time a gift of 5000 roubles to allow me to complete my journey in the greatest comfort, for which I express my eternal gratitude to Your Imperial Majesty, I would have been happy on my return to continue in Your Imperial Majesty’s humble service, on the same basis established by Your august predecessors. However, Your Majesty has ordered the Great Marshal, Count Sievers, to inform me that in future I must depend solely on the Director of the Construction Chancellery and not on the Court. This change has grieved me greatly, since after so many years of service I have found myself deprived of the pleasure of receiving Your precious orders, with which I was always honoured in the past, and this compels me with great sadness to beg humbly for my retirement, since it is impossible for me to agree to subject myself to any other instructions than the ones I have hitherto received. I hope that an old retainer, who has been in service for forty-eight years, and who has always fulfilled his duties across this long period of time, will have the pleasure of receiving from Your Imperial Majesty, by virtue of Her great mercy, instructions about some sort of compensation, so that I may live with my family in our native land and continually pray to the Almighty to preserve the precious lives of Your Majesty and Her most august heir.
Your holy Imperial Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, Count de Rastrelli34
Though he was duly granted an annual pension of 1000 roubles, Catherine remained deaf to his pleas to be confirmed in the rank of major general granted to him by Peter III since this would have entitled him to more money. While he continued to be treated respectfully at Court, dining with her in the spring of 1764, it was not long before Rastrelli finally left Russia for good
.
It fell to Catherine’s contemporary—the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe—to fill Rastrelli’s empty shell, and he set to work as soon as she departed for her coronation in Moscow in September 1762. Vallin began by designing neoclassical interiors and furniture for a new bedroom, dressing room, boudoir and study in the west wing, overlooking the Admiralty, where the empress initially intended to live. At that stage his role was restricted largely to decorative detail, but he became more ambitious when she changed her mind at the beginning of 1763 and decided instead to convert the apartments formerly occupied by Peter III in the south-east corner of the palace. Here the architect created a suite of staterooms based on the neoclassical principles he had learned from Jean Blondel at the Parisian École des Arts. Racing to meet the empress’s deadlines, Vallin told Stählin that he had ‘thrown the internal walls out of the window’ and replaced them with wooden partitions.35 By the time Catherine returned to St Petersburg, the transformation was obvious. As the Prussian ambassador reported in June 1763:
She is making considerable alterations in the palace of stone. The apartments of the former empress have been turned entirely upside down and rebuilt so differently that they look nothing like they used to do. But since the workers have not been paid for two months, this prompts lines of reasoning which are not favourable to Her Imperial Majesty.36
Oblivious to such carping, Catherine forged ahead, inspecting progress over the summer, and finally moving in with great pomp and ceremony on Tuesday 14 October, some three weeks later than planned and more than a year since she had last occupied the Winter Palace.37 By then, the ceremonial first floor was largely complete, save for the suite of rooms overlooking the River Neva, and Vallin had also finished most of the work on the warren of staircases and corridors that led to the floor above, where Catherine’s twenty maids of honour were to live for the remainder of her reign in the western and south-western parts of the building. ‘Guess where I’ve been today!’ proclaimed an excited Paul after Grigory Orlov had taken him to visit them. Back downstairs, in the grip of a crush on Vera Choglokova, he immersed himself in the Encyclopédie article on ‘Amour’.38
Vallin’s work for Catherine differed from his other private commissions only in scale. At the heart of his creation for the empress, just as in the house he built for the Chernyshëvs at much the same time, was a salon—the centre of civility and sociability—surrounded by a suite of private and semi-public apartments, all conceived as part of a single stylistic whole, and ranged around two inner courtyards on the western, southern and eastern sides of a large square, whose northern side was taken up by the great palace chapel. Although these rooms underwent a major renovation between 1782 and 1784, their layout and use remained essentially unchanged until the end of Catherine’s life.39 Having ascended the main staircase near the west door of the chapel, visitors passed through a suite of three antechambers flowing south towards what is now Palace Square, with their windows facing westwards towards the Admiralty. The central anteroom was a Portrait Room, hung with portraits of the imperial family as a reminder of Catherine’s dynastic pretensions. Here, sergeants of the guard permitted well-dressed nobles to enter the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where the Court gathered on a Sunday before processing to chapel. To ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’ was to enjoy privileged access to the empress’s own apartments, ranged in a line overlooking the square to the south. The first of these rooms was also the largest: an audience chamber some 227 metres square, decorated in green damask, where Catherine received her ambassadors. Until a permanent throne room was built in 1795, the audience chamber shared that function with another, overlooking the river, where banquets were held on state occasions. With her sixty Chevaliers Gardes fanned out two-by-two on either side of her, the empress sat beneath a huge gilded canopy, draped in red silk, on a velvet throne raised up against the eastern wall.
Immediately behind this throne lay a green and gold dining room which doubled as a billiard room in the evenings. Although Catherine was always keen to enrich the imperial porcelain collection—she paid the Saxon merchant Poggenpohl more than 13,000 roubles for a 256-piece service for Tsarskoye Selo in 1762—banquets were also served on gold and silver tableware dating back to time of Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Fëdorovich. Though Paul was bored by a visit to the storerooms at the foot of the main staircase, where Panin insisted on scrutinising every item of his priceless heritage, these historic dinner services offered a further reminder of a usurper’s claims to dynastic legitimacy.40 Above the dining-room ceiling was a glass lantern, initially placed by Georg Veldten over the western entrance to the palace, which was large enough to have doors leading to a balcony. Here Catherine occasionally listened to the liturgy when she failed to attend the chapel, which was entered via a large gallery leading northwards from the dining room between the two inner courtyards.
Directly to the east of the dining room was the Diamond Room, so called because the regalia were kept there when not on public display. Though this was formally the state bedroom, equipped with an appropriately imposing lit de parade under a canopy in an alcove on the northern wall, it was in effect the empress’s salon, furnished with two sofas, four armchairs, two upright chairs and several marble tables, all designed by Vallin de la Mothe in keeping with his neoclassical concept for the palace interior. ‘As you know, every piece of furniture is a different colour, even in the same room,’ Panin reminded his mistress in 1767.41 Here the empress was to spend countless evenings at the card table. Beyond lay a dressing room leading to her bedroom, whose panels were decorated in green lacquer. It was there that Catherine heard reports from her advisers each morning, sitting on an upright chair at a small table. (Her secretaries occupied a nearby room, overlooking the inner courtyard and accessible via a private staircase.) Catherine’s bedroom led to a small boudoir and from there to her study, at the far south-eastern corner of the palace. This gave access to the last of her private apartments, the library, which stretched northwards towards the chapel until she had it moved upstairs in the mid-1770s, converting the lower apartment to a Mirror Room where in later life she worked every morning from seven until nine. It was in her library that Catherine had scientific experiments set up for visiting ambassadors, using apparatus such as the ‘small electrical machine’ with which her son enjoyed electrocuting his servants.42
Since all these interiors were either lost in subsequent alterations or destroyed by the great fire of December 1837, the achievements of Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe have come down to us only in their plans and correspondence.43 However, it seems clear that the Winter Palace impressed visitors then, as now, more by its massive proportions than by any claim to elegance or beauty. In its final incarnation, the building could boast 1050 rooms, 117 staircases, 1886 doors and 1945 windows. Its principal cornice was almost two kilometres long.44 The full extent of such a colossal structure could only be appreciated from the opposite bank of the Neva. To Lord Cathcart, who arrived as British ambassador in 1768, the conception was comparable in both extent and magnificence to ‘Inigo Jones’s idea for Whitehall, with which it also corresponded in the happy circumstance of being situated on a very noble river’.45 Nevertheless, as European tastes swung from Baroque exuberance towards classical simplicity, Rastrelli’s monster was bound to seem ‘very large and very heavy’. And as another traveller pointed out in the mid-1770s, comparing the palace with the work of Britain’s most lugubrious Baroque architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, the creator of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, it was still ‘not quite finished, like almost everything else in Russia’.46
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Panin, who was negotiating an alliance with the Danes in the autumn of 1764, liked to boast that the Winter Palace had cost twenty times as much as the royal palace in Copenhagen.47 Magnificent as it seemed as a symbol of Russian power and prosperity, it was too vast and uncomfortable for the relaxed sociability in which Catherine excelled. Not that she found it easy to relax once she had as
cended the throne of all the Russias. ‘Believe me,’ she complained to Madame Geoffrin in 1764, ‘there is nothing more unpleasant in the world than greatness’:
When I enter a room, you would say that I had the head of a Medusa: everyone is petrified and they all stiffen up. I often screech like an eagle against such habits. But I can tell you that this isn’t the way to stop them because the more I screech, the less people are at their ease. So I employ other expedients.48
Courtiers could be forgiven for approaching the empress with caution since, for all her yearning for informality, she was swift to complain when they failed to observe due ceremony. Emerging unexpectedly early from her apartments one Sunday in July 1765, she was furious to find only the senior chamberlain in attendance. Count Sheremetev’s subsequent admonishment to his juniors caused ‘much whispering’ at lunch.49 By the time the image of Medusa’s head recurred in a letter of 1781, Catherine seemed more sympathetic to her courtiers’ dilemmas: ‘With due respect to my fellow monarchs, I suppose that we must all of us, such as we are, become unbearable people in society…There are no more than ten or a dozen people who put up with me without constraint.’50
One of the pleasures of this more intimate entourage, which remained remarkably constant throughout her life in Russia, was the opportunities it offered to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the palace. Nowhere was etiquette more relaxed than at the aristocratic country houses which had sprung up along the Peterhof road since Peter the Great first laid out regular plots ‘like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland’. As Derzhavin put it in his poem ‘Picnics’ in 1776, it was here, in a striking reversal of the bourgeois notion Stadtluft macht Frei! (City air makes you free!), that the Russian elite could abandon the social distinctions imposed on them in the capital:
