Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Her own main personal concern that autumn was the health of Aleksey Orlov. Rendered immobile by a bad back (the result of too many jolting carriage rides), he was believed to be at death’s door from chronic stomach pains and jaundice. From an account of his symptoms sent on behalf of the anxious empress, doctors in Vienna, Leiden and Leipzig diagnosed gallstones, recommended a less gargantuan diet and advised their patient to take the waters. But since he was too ill to travel abroad, and unable even to join his four brothers for a private lunch with Catherine on her name day, she and Panin went to visit him after Christmas.84 If she needed a further memento mori, it had come on 18 December, birthday of the late Empress Elizabeth, when Catherine donned mourning dress for a memorial service at the Chrysostom monastery before going on to Andrey Shuvalov’s mansion to watch for almost an hour as Archbishop Dimitry’s funeral procession crawled along Myasnitskaya Street. To dispel the gloom, she took coffee with her host and his family before returning to the Golovin Palace for a game of billiards.85

  The discomforts of life in that draughty wooden building had long since exhausted its minimal charms. Already on 12 October she had told Falconet of her intention to return to St Petersburg.86 Irritated by slow progress in the Legislative Commission, which had laboriously worked through each social estate’s submissions without reaching any resolutions, she announced in November that its sessions would be suspended in the middle of the following month. The deputies were to reconvene in St Petersburg in February.87 She travelled north earlier, setting off through streets lined with cheering subjects after attending the consecration of a new church on the Solyanka on Saturday 19 January. At the end of a fifty-three-hour journey via a sequence of ‘nasty’ roadside palaces, it was a relief to be home in time to celebrate Grigory Orlov’s name day, 25 January. ‘You can’t believe how good Tsarskoye Selo is,’ she told Panin. Town seemed even better: ‘Petersburg is paradise by comparison with Ispahan, and especially the palace.’88

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  Catherine was particularly delighted by the large turnout at her first Court reception day and the celebratory mood continued in the festivities surrounding her thirty-ninth birthday. Galuppi pulled out all the stops for his last opera in Russia. When they met shortly after the composer’s return to Venice, the renowned Dr Burney thought him still ‘full of genius and fire’ and later noted that he seemed ‘to have constantly kept pace with all the improvements and refinements of the times, and to have been as modern in his dramatic music, to the last year of his life, as ever’.89 Iphigenia in Tauride, premiered on 27 April after Catherine’s private audience with the Austrian ambassador, Prince Lobkowitz, was promptly acclaimed in Russia as ‘the strongest of his compositions’. It had a more vigorous plot than most opera seria, and the ten basses, thirteen tenors, thirteen altos and fifteen trebles of the chapel choir gave an ‘outstanding performance’ of its innovative, integral choruses.90 Catherine had spent the birthday itself at Tsarskoye Selo. After church, she invested Aleksey Orlov with the Order of St Andrew and gave him 200,000 roubles (fifty times Galuppi’s annual salary) to pay for his convalescence.91

  Meanwhile the Court was re-adapting to life in the north after its prolonged stay in the old capital. At the end of his affair with Countess Stroganova, Panin had unexpectedly found happiness (and renewed respectability) with one of Catherine’s maids of honour, Countess Anna Sheremeteva. Since he was by no means a rich man, her income of 40,000 roubles and family connections made this, as the Prussian ambassador reported, ‘the most eminent match that could be made in Russia’.92 A less fortunate courtier was forced to appeal to the empress when his mother-in-law refused to allow his wife to accompany him to St Petersburg. Catherine sent an official to fetch the girl, entrusting him with a letter for Moscow’s Governor General that combines a sense of legal propriety with unmistakeable hauteur:

  If the mother becomes stubborn and wants to travel with her daughter, then prevent the mother from leaving the town by my command and bring the daughter whatever happens. If they say that she is ill, then fetch a doctor to examine her to see whether Lopukhina is fit to travel without endangering her life. If the mother cries out a lot, then you should order her to be silent by my command. So that all this should not strike you as strange, let me explain in confidence that the mother will not allow her daughter to join her husband and that the husband has appealed to me to give him his wife. I found his request so just and so in conformity with the laws that I could not refuse; but the mother is to be told nothing of this. Please give the Court official any assistance he needs: the shorter and less public the scene, the better.93

  For her own part, it was time to catch up with old friends. Within a couple of days of her return to St Petersburg, she had made an informal visit to the girls at the Smolny Institute. Alexander Stroganov entertained her to lunch in March. After Easter, she received Archbishop Gavriil, elected to the Legislative Commission in place of Dimitry, who was escorted to his audience in the Diamond Room by ten noble deputies.94 Then tragedy struck when Panin’s fiancée died from smallpox. Despite her sympathy for his loss, Catherine was more anxious about the threat to her son. Though his Young Court had always been alert to the danger from urban epidemics, now the menace was closer to home. 95 As the empress secretly admitted to Yelagin, the public would never forgive her if the legitimate heir to the throne were to die in her care. ‘I am very worried, not being sure what to do for the best, since everything in this critical situation is bad.’96 Reduced to flitting from one suburban palace to another in the hope of dodging the disease, she tried to relax on the boats and toboggans at Gatchina, and spent longer than usual at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘Here I am with my son for the seventh week running,’ she told Saltykov at the end of May, ‘and there’s such an outbreak of the pox, and that of the worst kind, that I decided it was better to live here. It’s grist to my mill to have a pretext to stay in the country.’97 Nothing, she told Panin, could quite match her favourite summer palace:

  Count Nikita Ivanovich. Having parted from you on Thursday, we found ourselves in an autumn zephyr in the hills on the way to Krasnoye Selo, although we had left Tsarskoye Selo in very warm weather. On Friday, we travelled in the rain to Gatchina and came back in such a sharp frost that we all wished we had taken our fur coats. Yesterday was Saturday, and although the skies were grey, we didn’t feel the cold and are warm and well at Peterhof. Still, it touches the heart to see everything here so neglected, although I have spent a hundred and eighty thousand on it since 1762, including twenty thousand to pay off the debt on the iron piping alone, and the devil alone knows what has been done with the money if it hasn’t been used to repair Peterhof. I think it may have been used to pay off the debts of the Construction Chancellery.98

  As Catherine knew, the chancellery was still as active as ever. Shortly before leaving Moscow, she had agreed to spend 64,915 roubles on marble from the western shores of Lake Ladoga for a new cathedral in honour of St Isaac of Dalmatia. The total budget, to be paid for from state funds, was almost four times as much.99 As the empress explained, it was not the first attempt to build such a church, which had ‘suffered more tribulations and persecutions than the early Christians’.100 Peter the Great had been born on St Isaac’s feast day—30 May 1672—but his own St Isaac’s Cathedral, where he married Catherine I in 1712, had burned down five years later and its replacement proved to have been built too close to the river. Chevakinsky was appointed to design a grandiose Baroque successor in the last year of Elizabeth’s reign, but by 1768 a revised project was in the hands of Rinaldi, currently building a mansion for the Naryshkins on the western side of St Isaac’s Square.101 Although it was not until the following January that Catherine saw the architect’s model of the cathedral—a work of art in itself, promising a riot of jasper, marble and porphyry in the manner of the Marble Palace she had commissioned that same year for Grigory Orlov—by midsummer, it was time for her to lay the foundation stone. She inspected the site on 10 July, following lunch
with Betskoy and a brief visit to the Academy of Arts on the other side of the river. After reviewing naval exercises in the Gulf on her yacht, the Saint Catherine—‘yesterday and the day before,’ she boasted, ‘I covered ninety miles by sea’—Catherine went to Oranienbaum for the feast of St Panteleymon the Healer on 27 July and to Peterhof for the customary summer sanctification service four days later. Then, braving her fears of the pox, she was back in St Petersburg for the foundation ceremony on 8 August.102

  Since this was the first public spectacle witnessed by William Richardson, tutor to the sons of the new British ambassador, Lord Cathcart, let Richardson describe the scene:

  All the space to be occupied by the church had been previously railed in; and into this place, only persons of high rank, and those who had a particular permission, were admitted. An immense multitude of people were assembled without. An arch, supported upon eight pillars of the Corinthian order, and adorned with garlands, was raised immediately over the place intended for the altar. Beneath this arch was a table covered with crimson velvet, fringed with gold; upon which was placed a small marble chest, fixed to a pully directly above the table. On a side-table, fixed to one of the pillars, was a large gold plate, two pieces of marble in the form of bricks, a gold plate with mortar, and other two plates of the same metal, in which were two hammers and two trowels of gold.103

  Although guests had been ordered to take their places by 9.30 a.m., it was not until midday that the carriages bearing the imperial party arrived from the Summer Palace.104 Paul came first, dressed in naval uniform and attended by Panin. Then, bringing up the rear of a solemn clerical procession, Catherine herself appeared, wearing ‘a silver-stuff negligee, the ground pea-green, with purple flowers and silver trimming’, and carrying a small, green parasol. She made a powerful impression:

  The Empress of Russia is taller than the middle size, very comely, gracefully formed, but inclined to grow corpulent; and of a fair complexion, which, like every other female in this country, she endeavours to improve by the addition of rouge. She has a fine mouth and teeth; and blue eyes, expressive of scrutiny, something not so good as observation, and not so bad as suspicion. Her features are in general regular and pleasing. Indeed, with regard to her appearance altogether, it would be doing her injustice to say it was masculine, yet it would not be doing her justice to say it was entirely feminine.

  After some gold coins had been consecrated by the clergy and laid in the chest, it was closed and raised by the pulley. The table disappeared through a trapdoor, so that the empress could lower the chest into place. Once she had cemented a marble brick on top of it, Paul and the bishops followed suit with trowel and mortar, along with some of the attendant notables and the foreign ambassadors. The ceremony was brought to a close with an oration by Archimandrite Platon. Richardson sensed his eloquence but, having no Russian, failed to understand the distinctly political address in which the preacher heralded a new temple of Solomon with Catherine in the role of King David. She was wise as the king of the Israelites, Platon proclaimed, only more peace-loving (a claim which stood at odds with her increasingly belligerent stance on the Polish question). Singling out the empress’s humanitarian Instruction for special praise, Platon portrayed the new cathedral as a monument to Russia’s greatness and the empress’s personal glory.105 Timofey Ivanov drove home the point with a commemorative medal, designed on the basis of Rinaldi’s model, which quoted from the gospel of St Matthew (22: 21): ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’106

  No less anxious to pander to the empress’s obsession with posterity was the Parisian sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, a friend of Diderot and Prince Dimitry Golitsyn who had recommended him to Catherine as the ideal candidate for the statue of Peter the Great she had determined to commission as early as 1764. Falconet arrived in St Petersburg at the end of October 1766, working from a studio on the site of Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace. ‘Diderot,’ he exclaimed just three months later, ‘you can’t imagine how this unusual woman can elevate one’s merits and talents.’107 In June 1768 he told her of a drawing ‘that I shall show to no one until Your Majesty has seen it: Catherine the Second gives laws to her Empire. She deigns to lower her sceptre to propose to her subjects a means of rendering them happier. If this simple idea is not convenient, I know nothing better nor more glorious.’108 Catherine agreed that it was a noble idea, ‘much better’ than his earlier plan to depict her with ‘tottering Russia’, a reference to the coup of 1762 that was judged ‘injurious to Peter III and to Russia’: ‘You will tell me when it is time for me to come to see the statue and the drawing.’109 Knowing that she had never previously authorised a statue of herself, Falconet wondered why there should be a problem when it was proposed to strike medallions to commemorate the new law code. Only her own ‘delicatesse’ stood in its way, Catherine replied, ‘but perhaps the beauty of your drawing will make me forget my previous resolutions’.110

  Apparently it did not. Though the empress sat for at least two busts and two medallions by Falconet’s attractive young pupil Marie-Anne Collot,111 his own statue was never done, perhaps because Catherine had grown anxious about the progress of the Legislative Commission. Its sessions in the long Winter Palace gallery overlooking the river still seemed active enough, as Lord Cathcart discovered during a break in the proceedings on 18 August:

  The room seemed so full, and the different groups so busy in conversation, that it was impossible to look down upon the assembly without thinking of a beehive. The empress’s throne fills one end of the room, the other end and both sides have benches as in the House of Commons; on the left side of the throne is a table of State. At the upper end there was a chair for the Marshal of the commission, and on one side two other chairs, one for the director who minutes the proceedings, and the other for the procureur-général who is there as commissioner for the empress and who has a right to interpose in her name, in case the standing orders should be attached.112

  Catherine, however, worried that all this activity seemed to be leading nowhere. In turning to discuss justice and judicial procedure when they reconvened in St Petersburg, the deputies had become lost in a morass of shapeless detail. Only a desperate attempt to revise their procedures had focused their attentions on a draft law on the rights of the nobility at the beginning of July, and even then, no decisions were reached.113

  The fundamental problem facing the Commission was the unbridgeable gap between Catherine’s expectations and the preoccupations of most deputies. Having written in one of her earliest notebooks that ‘The thing that is most subject to drawbacks is the making of a new law’, she was well aware of the restraining power of custom.114 Her Instruction followed Montesquieu in stressing the need to prepare people’s minds for new legislation—scarcely the philosophy of an intemperate despot. On the other hand, having once embarked on a project, the empress was always impatient for swift results. She had boasted to Voltaire during the Christmas recess that the Russian people were ‘an excellent ground in which a good seed will quickly grow’.115 But this turned out to be wishful thinking. She had misjudged both the amount of preparatory work required to ensure the smooth running of the Commission and the inherent conservatism of the deputies. ‘The number of ignorant noblemen,’ she later admitted, ‘was immeasurably larger than I could ever have supposed.’116 Living in the company of sophisticated friends, Catherine had presumed that their views were widely shared. Many of them took some part in the Commission: Panin as the author of the submission by the Moscow nobility, Grigory Orlov as a noble deputy for St Petersburg, Andrey Shuvalov as director of the journals recording the proceedings. The young Count Semën Vorontsov read Beccaria just before the Commission convened. But while such men reflected the interests of Russia’s educated, Western-oriented elite, the overwhelming majority of the deputies had little interest in either philosophy or national politics. Their interests were selfish and parochial.117