Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  When the children of the Austrian empress were successfully inoculated by another British doctor, Maria Theresa held a feast at Schönbrunn at which the royal family waited on his sixty-five lesser-ranking patients.38 Obsessed with order and hierarchy, Catherine would never have turned the world upside down. Competitive as ever, she gaily told Voltaire in December 1768 that ‘more people have been inoculated here in one month than in eight at Vienna’. For her part, she teased, the best medicine during her convalescence had been to listen to readings from Candide, in which the master had written that if two armies of 30,000 men were to meet in battle, two-thirds of the soldiers would be pock-marked: ‘After that, it is impossible to feel the slightest bit ill.’39

  To make Catherine feel even better, an extension to her palace was nearing completion. At last she would be able to escape echoing staterooms, indulge her passion for informal entertainment, and exercise her legendary charm to devastating effect. Designed by Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Small Hermitage was built on a narrow plot of land immediately to the east of the Winter Palace, hitherto occupied by dilapidated mansions built for two of Peter the Great’s admirals, Cornelius Cruys and Fëdor Golovin. Catherine inspected some early plans while in Moscow after her coronation, work started in 1764, and by the time she returned to the old capital in February 1767, she had seen a magnificent pavilion grow up at the southern end of the site. Grigory Orlov was to live there until 1775 in a suite of rooms linked to her own apartments by a flying bridge. His three reception rooms and a dining room overlooked Millionnaya to the south; to the north, a bedroom, mirrored boudoir and study faced onto a hanging garden. While the empress was preparing to sail the Volga, Cruys’s house on the Neva was finally demolished, and work began to extend the garden northwards to a new pavilion overlooking the river, originally known as the orangery after the fruit trees planted in decorative pots on the balustrade. Catherine inspected a wooden model in March 1768 and by the following February the new building was ready to hold the first of many private entertainments—themselves soon christened ‘small hermitages’—beginning with a theatrical performance in the neighbouring stables and ending with dinner at the two mechanical tables in the easternmost room.40

  Soon imitated by leading aristocrats, this device had been pioneered by Elizabeth at Tsarskoye Selo, where it remained a source of merriment in Catherine’s time:

  When the plates are changed you pull a string by the side of everybody’s right hand which goes underneath the table and rings a bell. Your plate goes down, as all round it is composed of so many divisions like stove holes. You write down upon a slate and pencil which is fixed ready, and what you want immediately comes up. A great diversion was from one table to the other to send something or other that served to laugh.41

  Towards the end of the carnival, Dr Dimsdale had to be called when Catherine caught a fever that knocked her off her feet ‘for six whole days, which was highly inconvenient for someone who loves to bustle about and who hates being stuck in bed’.42 But this proved to be merely a temporary interruption to her convivial way of life. ‘Those who form her society,’ Lord Cathcart reported, ‘are either young people who are extremely gay, or such as are capable from the vivacity of their disposition to keep pace with those who are younger than themselves.’43

  While the northern part of the Small Hermitage was under construction, Catherine decided in March 1768 to build a new gallery along the sides of the hanging garden to house her growing art collection. Some of the finest works to be seen in today’s Hermitage Museum were acquired in these early years. The foundations of the collection had been laid in 1764 with the purchase of 225 paintings belonging to the Berlin picture dealer, Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, whose seventeenth-century Flemish Masters included Jan Steen’s Revellers and Frans Hals’s Young Man Holding a Glove. In the following year, Prince Dimitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn became Catherine’s principal agent in Paris having been appointed ambassador to Versailles at the age of thirty-one. It was thanks to his collaboration with Diderot that the Hermitage acquired Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and a more recent masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paralytic, or the Fruits of a Good Education (1763). When he moved to The Hague in 1768, Golitsyn negotiated the purchase of about 600 paintings—including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Wouvermans and Watteau—from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, who had amassed his treasures by stealing from his master, Augustus III of Poland. But Golitsyn had not lost touch with Diderot, who helped him to secure François Tronchin’s Genevan collection in 1770 and brokered an even more sensational deal in the following year, when Catherine paid the heirs of the Parisian financier Pierre Crozat 460,000 livres for 500 paintings including Giorgione’s Judith, Titian’s Danaë and Raphael’s Holy Family. Diderot believed that the collection was worth more than twice as much.44

  It is hard to say what pleasure Catherine took from most of these purchases. Although her charmed circle included the connoisseurs Alexander Stroganov and Ivan Shuvalov, who spent much of the period between 1763 and 1777 in Italy collecting sculptures for himself and the Hermitage, she seems to have revelled in a kind of inverted snobbery that oscillated between dependence on ‘expert’ opinion and a determination to defy it. She and Lev Naryshkin were ‘professional ignoramuses’, the empress later declared, ‘and we use our ignorance to annoy the Grand Chamberlain Shuvalov and Count Stroganov, who are both members of at least 24 academies’.45 She clearly took a liking to Jean Huber’s innovative cycle of portraits of Voltaire in various intimate, everyday poses, which arrived in St Petersburg at the rate of about one a year after Grimm had announced her commission in the Correspondance littéraire in March 1769. ‘I had to burst out laughing when I saw the patriarch getting out of bed,’ Catherine admitted on re-discovering the paintings hidden away at Tsarksoye Selo in 1776. ‘I think that one’s original: the vivacity of his character and the impatience of his imagination give him no time to do one thing at once. The kicking horse being corrected by Voltaire is also very good.’46 However, since her early letters reveal little about her personal tastes, it is tempting to conclude that many of the masterpieces arriving in St Petersburg by the carton-load left her unmoved. The sheer scale of her acquisitions prevented any intimate acquaintance with all of them: she bought some 4000 canvases in the first twenty years of her reign.

  Apart from the fact that Catherine liked a bargain, the most important benefit conferred by great works of art was international prestige. Like diplomacy, collecting was a competitive business. And paintings, no less than territory, were best acquired at the expense of weakened rivals. Gotzkowsky’s collection was snatched from under the nose of Frederick the Great when financial embarrassments brought about by the Seven Years’ War prevented him from fulfilling his promise to buy them for himself. Paradoxically, such triumphs made it harder for the empress’s agents to strike a confidential deal once her interest leaked out to journalists hungry for gossip on the Parisian art market. In 1768 Bachaumont’s Mémoires secrets mocked Diderot’s vain attempts to acquire Louis-Jean Gaignat’s paintings, which foundered on a will forbidding the sale of the collection as a whole. Forced to compete against the duc de Choiseul at auction in February 1769, he eventually acquired only five pictures, including Murillo’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Falconet told Catherine that it was a painting ‘to speak of on one’s knees’. As Diderot discovered, to represent an upstart foreign power that threatened to denude France of such treasures was to invite widespread obloquy. Some feared that the greatest Western masterpieces were disappearing into oblivion. ‘How sad it is to see going and passing into the hands of the Scythians things that are so precious that ten people at most will admire them in Russia,’ complained Jean-Henri Eberts in September 1769. ‘Everyone can aspire to the pleasure of seeing the banks of the Seine, but few are curious to visit those of the cold Neva.’47 Diderot himself was more philosophical. Having initially doubted the empress’s ability to collect enough paintings to inspir
e good taste in art, he gradually acknowledged the changing balance of power. ‘We sell our pictures and our statues in the midst of peace, but Catherine buys them in the midst of war,’ he remarked in rueful admiration to Falconet in April 1772. ‘The sciences, the arts, taste and wisdom climb to the north, and barbarism with its train comes southwards.’48

  Egged on by Grimm, Diderot’s Neapolitan friend, the economist abbé Galiani, later found a philosophical explanation for these developments in an ironic contrast between Catherine and the king of France. If one wanted to know why ‘the Russians have climbed so high and the French come tumbling down so low under Catherine and Louis XV’, then the causes were to be found ‘in the character, conduct and gestures of their sovereigns’. Both monarchs had encouraged luxury and the arts, and yet ‘French morals have been corrupted, valour has gone soft, while the opposite has happened to the Russians. The reason is that in France they have encouraged a voluptuous luxury which enervates, and in Russia a magnificent luxury which invigorates.’ ‘The cause of the decadence of French military power,’ Galiani concluded, ‘and the aggrandisement of that of the Russians derives from the same principle.’ The Russians would never have won their battles had they been covered ‘in lace and chiffon’.49

  * * *

  Since war was even more expensive than art collecting, its onset led Catherine to tighten her tax policy. She could also draw on a new stream of income because the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1768–74 was the first to be financed by foreign loans, advanced by the Amsterdam finance markets on the strength of her armies’ performance in the Seven Years’ War. These loans in turn prompted unprecedented financial sophistication within Russia as the empress oversaw the introduction of paper money under the aegis of a new bank, created at the end of December 1768 and headed by Andrey Shuvalov. Whereas Peter III had contemplated five notes in 1762, ranging in value from 10 to 500 roubles, Catherine settled for four denominations: 25, 50, 75 and 100. Before long she faced problems of forgery and inflation. ‘I have in my hands a 100-rouble note numbered 80,000’, reported the hostile French ambassador in September 1770. ‘It is from last year: another indication that this operation is overstretched.’ By the end of the war, notes to the value of some 12.7 million roubles were in circulation.50 There were short-term worries too. While Count Solms, the Prussian ambassador, was anxious that Shuvalov’s very name would be sufficient to revive ‘disagreeable memories’ of his father—Elizabeth’s unpopular minister, Peter Shuvalov—who had ‘acquired millions at the expense of the state and to the ruin of several individuals’, Catherine was more concerned about the change of culture required in her own Court administration. 51 As she complained to Yelagin in April 1769:

  It is with the greatest possible surprise that I hear that the palace chancellery is refusing to accept state assignats from private individuals. A peasant presented his papers and was told to bring cash. Can it be that my statutes are not valid in the palace chancellery, or do the clerks steal [coins] for their own loathsome gain, when no accounting errors can be made with assignats? Kindly look into this without delay: I beg you to punish those who have infringed my statutes.52

  Such tones were always reserved for officials who should have known better. Even so, a degree of tetchiness was understandable as the empress became impatient with the protracted preparations for battle. Although war had been declared in the autumn, it was not until the following spring that campaigning could begin. While more than 50,000 troops were being recruited, Catherine spent the winter of 1768–9 reading herself into a world as far removed from Panin’s Northern System as it was possible to imagine. Since there was no prospect of drawing the Italian states into her conflict with the Turks—Naples, she discovered, danced ‘to the sound of the French flute, and this flute is not in harmony with the voice of Russia’—she concentrated on trying to support the Corsican revolt against France. Boswell’s account of his travels on the island, provided for her by Lord Cathcart, enhanced her admiration for the revolt’s leader, General Pasquale Paoli.53 Judging from the letter she wrote to Ivan Chernyshëv on 14 December, Paoli’s buccaneering spirit proved more infectious than the smallpox:

  And now the sleeping cat has been awakened; and now the cat is going to chase the mice; and now you will see what you will see; and now they’re going to talk about us; and no one will expect all the racket we’re going to make; and now the Turks are going to be defeated; and now the French will everywhere be treated as the Corsicans treat them; and now that’s quite enough verbiage. Adieu, Monsieur!54

  Meanwhile, spontaneous revolts among the Balkan Slavs seemed to offer the prospect of coordinated resistance against the Turks, and especially in Montenegro, where an Italian bandit calling himself Stephen the Little had publicly declared that he was Peter III, giving Catherine an added incentive to intervene. She employed an Italian aristocrat in a vain attempt to draw the Order of the Knights of Malta into her struggle against the infidel. ‘Above all,’ as Franco Venturi has shown, ‘she created a net of agents and listening posts in Italy and thus set in motion a type of diplomacy quite different from the traditional one.’55

  Most of this was as much the stuff of fantasy as the ancient prophecy, unexpectedly given renewed credence by Russian designs on Constantinople, that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire would be brought about by a race of blond men.56 Yet for Catherine the deeds of war were bound to remain a thing of the mind. Unlike the male monarchs of her age, who regularly led their troops into battle, she could experience war only vicariously. For much of the time, she was forced to play a waiting game, not without its stresses for a sovereign accustomed to rapid progress in all her activities. Both her mood and her health fluctuated sharply with the news from the front. Victories were greeted with unrestrained joy, reverses with undisguised irritation. During the anxious intervals in between, her entourage did their best to keep her relaxed and amused.

  At the beginning of April 1769, Vladimir Orlov reintroduced her to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod whose clock in the form of a mechanical toy egg struck the hour with Easter tunes and opened to reveal a scene of the Resurrection, played out by miniature figures done in gold and silver. Catherine rewarded him with 1000 roubles.57 God seemed firmly on her side when campaigning opened just before her fortieth birthday. General A. M. Golitsyn was her commander-in-chief, appointed as a compromise between two more distinguished candidates: General Peter Panin (favoured by his brother, Nikita) and General Peter Rumyantsev (supported by Grigory Orlov against the Panins).58 When news of his first victory at Khotin, the main Turkish fort on the Dniester, reached Tsarskoye Selo on the afternoon of 30 April, Catherine called her courtiers into the dining room to deliver the glad tidings herself. ‘The Turkish camp is taken,’ she informed Saltykov next day, ‘along with a great number of trophies and prisoners. Our losses were almost nil, since the enemy cannon fired over our heads.’ That morning, the Court travelled to St Petersburg for a thanksgiving service at the Kazan Church where she made sure Paul was present. A jubilant crowd lined the streets to join the celebrations.59 Soon there were more. By 10 May, Catherine was delighted to report that Golitsyn had defeated another 30,000-strong Turkish army.60

  Confident of his further progress, she relaxed at Gatchina, where Rinaldi’s building work was advancing apace, and where she and Grigory Orlov strolled through the park to see the pheasants in the menagerie after Lev Naryshkin had played the violin for them in the new wooden apartments on 15 May. Eight days later, Zakhar Chernyshëv and Praskovya Bruce joined the three of them at the dacha at Bronnaya, where they sat up all night playing cards to watch the long-awaited transit of Venus through a telescope set up by Paul’s science tutor, Professor Aepinus (the Russian Academy of Sciences played a central part in the world-wide observations of the event).61 Military matters loomed larger at the beginning of June, when Grigory, acting in his capacity as Master of the Ordinance, took Catherine on a tour of the Liteyny cannon foundry in St Petersburg attended by all
her artillery generals. Not that the common people were forgotten. At the accession day celebrations in the Dutch Hall at Monplaisir, the empress made a patriotic gesture by proposing a new toast ‘to all her subjects’ after the usual toasts to herself and the heir to the throne.62

  The summer brought more disconcerting news. Catherine’s early boasts were made to seem embarrassing when adroit manoeuvring by the Ottomans forced Golitsyn to retreat across the Dniester, abandoning his earlier gains. Yet no sooner had she given orders to sack him on 13 August than he embarrassed her again by retaking Khotin in September. That was a more pardonable offence. ‘The tsarina is drunk with joy,’ reported the appalled French ambassador. ‘Her health, which had been crushed by the reverses, is visibly restored.’63 Until then, the atmosphere had indeed been tense in St Petersburg, where rumours of conspiracies and mysterious disappearances circulated in the sort of ‘confidential whispers’ that Richardson attributed to a people ‘prohibited from speaking or writing about politics’: