by Simon Dixon
On 28 October, Henry was driven to Tsarskoye Selo under cover of darkness in a sledge equipped with mirrors so that the snow-covered landscape would seem to stretch to infinity. After a brilliantly lit triumphal arch there followed a series of illuminated pyramids and pleasure gardens in which peasants dressed in national costume could be seen dancing behind newly married couples in an allegorical display of fertility and happiness. Outside the menagerie, Semën Naryshkin had arranged for a Temple of Diana, where his huntsmen played on their distinctive horns.98 Still more extravagant was the masquerade staged at the Winter Palace on 28 November when some twenty-one staterooms were commandeered to provide dancing and games for 3600 guests. Shortly before nine, a fanfare of trumpets announced the arrival of Apollo with the four seasons and the twelve months of the year, played by boys from the Cadet Corps and girls from the Smolny Convent school for noble girls. Twelve alcoves, each set with a table for ten, had been created in the banqueting hall.99 The stolid soldier must have needed all the tact he could muster to smile at a Frenchman in parrot costume who squawked ‘Henri! Henri! Henri!’ into his ear before vanishing into the crowd. Yet it was hard not to admire the pyrotechnic representation of Russia’s recent conquests. For all Catherine’s periodic attempts at self-restraint, the Court of St Petersburg had lost none of its fascination for Baroque spectacle:
The various colours, the bright green, and the snowy white, exhibited in these fireworks, were truly astonishing. For the space of twenty minutes, a tree adorned with the loveliest and most verdant foliage, seemed to be waving as with a gentle breeze. It was entirely of fire; and during the whole of this stupendous scene, an arch of fire, by the continued throwing of rockets and fireballs in one direction, formed as it were a suitable canopy.100
Literary celebrations of the Russian victories and Catherine’s letters of this period betray the ideological foundations of the so-called Greek project which emerged between 1780 and 1782—the plan to recapture Byzantium and install a Russian ruler on its throne.101 ‘Soon it will be time for me to study the Greeks at some university,’ the empress told Voltaire in October 1770, ‘until such time as I can translate Homer into Russian.’ She made a start by donning Grecian costume for the masquerade in honour of Prince Henry.102
So determined was Catherine to advertise the magnificence of this event that she checked several times that Voltaire had received her detailed description of it.103 Indeed he had, but it was her triumphs at the expense of the Infidel that really sparked his imagination. As she regaled him with Aleksey Orlov’s lurid accounts of the waters of Chesme harbour churning with Turkish blood, he responded by picturing himself ‘transported’ from the eighteenth century ‘to the Alps at the time of the foundation of Babylon’: ‘Monsieur d’Alembert, who is here at Ferney now, is as enthusiastic as I am, and the only difference is that he expresses himself better. We both hate Mustapha just as much.’104
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Blissfully unaware of the danger he faced, Prince Henry left Moscow only days before Saltykov, the city’s Governor General, reported an epidemic on 22 December 1770. Catherine had first referred to the disease at the end of May, when she gave her approval to counter-measures taken by Rumyantsev in the south-west. By the time Kiev succumbed in mid-September, she was already concerned about the threat to the old capital, ‘for besides sickness and fires, there is much stupidity there’.105 Since it was almost certainly Ottoman cloth that carried what she called the ‘infectious pestilential distemper’ to the heart of the Russian empire, the empress’s efforts to blame it on the enemy carried some plausibility. But while Voltaire urged her to ‘exterminate the two great scourges on earth, the plague and the Turks’,106 a cure proved elusive as doctors continued to debate the nature of the disease. Though a cold snap in the New Year brought a temporary respite, warmer weather saw a sharp increase in mortality at Moscow’s leading woollen manufactory, prompting the police to stage a secret evacuation of the 640-strong workforce on the night of 13 March 1771. Sensing trouble ahead, many nobles fled to their rural estates. Since nothing alarmed Catherine more than indecision, Saltykov was tactfully sidelined at the end of the month to allow Senator Peter Yeropkin to take charge of the anti-plague campaign. At first, his impeccably modern methods suggested little for the authorities to do. Statistics supplied by the parish clergy showed no marked increase in the death rate, and Archbishop Amvrosy sensibly warned that public prayers for deliverance were likely to result only in panic. No one anticipated the scale of the disaster to come, and only a mass evacuation of the city—scarcely a feasible option—would significantly have stemmed the losses that followed in a warm, wet summer which provided the ideal conditions for the spread of plague.107
Meanwhile, the empress had problems of her own in St Petersburg, though not quite the ones she had foreseen in the autumn. In the face of her intransigence, the pressure from the German powers had eased. In the intensive debates in Vienna over the winter of 1770–71, it was probably the Russian-born Marshal Lacy, whose father had danced in Catherine’s ill-fated wedding quadrille, who did most to convince Austria’s rulers of Russia’s impregnability. For different reasons, neither the pacific Maria Theresa nor Joseph II supported Chancellor Kaunitz’s arguments in favour of a campaign against Catherine. ‘I am for a thousand reasons of opinion that we ought never to wage war on our own against Russia,’ the emperor wrote in January 1771, ‘but that we ought to put ourselves into a condition to profit promptly and without risk from the Russians’ moments of weakness, if any present themselves.’ Joseph imagined that the most likely way for the Austrians to profit would be from some future partition of the Ottoman Empire.108 By that time, however, irritated by Austria’s incorporation of the Polish enclave of Zips (Spisz) on the Galician border, Frederick the Great had decided that his best hope of compensating Prussia for Russia’s Black Sea conquests was to take some Polish territory for himself: ‘ointment for the burn’ as he described it to Solms in February. From what Prince Henry told him, Catherine was not averse to the idea—‘Why shouldn’t we all take something?’ she had asked towards the end of his visit, though as usual he found it hard to decide whether she was joking. Playing up the prospect of Austrian aggression, and pretending that he wanted only ‘little parcels’ of land for himself, Frederick embarked on a determined push for partition. Though Panin tried to warn Stanislaw August what was in store, and Austrian hesitations held up the final division of spoils for a further year, the die was effectively cast. On 19 May, after the negotiations with Prussia had been revealed to the Russian Council for the first time, Panin and Solms pored over a map in St Petersburg, discussing precisely which territories Frederick hoped to take.109
Thanks to a poor harvest and the impact of plague on both sides, campaigning on the Danube was limited that summer, when Russian forces concentrated on a successful occupation of the Crimea. Even so, not everything went to plan. ‘These last two days have not been very happy,’ Catherine admitted to Panin on 19 June. ‘My son is ill, we have lost Zhurzha [to the Turks], [Admiral] Senyavin has lost a bomb-ship, and on top of that, I have received six different denunciations these past few weeks containing such nonsense that it tries your patience and I have ordered three of the Semnovsky Guards to be flogged on parade.’110
Paul’s illness—apparently a virulent form of influenza accompanied by persistent diarrhoea—was by far the most serious difficulty. In view of his approaching name day, there could scarcely have been a more awkward time for him to fall sick. ‘The grand duke has already been indisposed for ten days,’ Catherine continued on 23 June from a damp Peterhof. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to come to town for the celebrations, rather than risk moving him?’111 ‘They are in mortal anguish here about the grand duke,’ the French ambassador reported after Paul had failed to appear in public on the appointed day.112 All the empress could do to deter rumours about the succession was to make a very obvious show of caring for her son. As he took his first uncertain steps around his b
edroom at the end of July, she announced his recovery in a studiously lighted-hearted letter to Mme Bielke. ‘He has grown a lot during this illness,’ she added a month later, ‘and his beard has started to sprout. There is a Russian proverb which says that no moustache appears without illness. I don’t know whether this saying is just, but on the subject of the grand duke we have had a severe alarm.’113
There was worse news to come from Moscow, where the recorded daily death rate peaked at 920 on 15 September, unleashing a riot that lasted for several days. Already unpopular thanks to his attempts to control clerical vagrancy, Archbishop Amvrosy was assassinated by a mob outraged by rumours that he intended to confiscate a renowned miracle-working icon and transfer all the money donated to it to Betskoy’s Foundling Home. Yeropkin reported on 18 September that at least 100 had died in the Kremlin, where rioters ransacked the archbishop’s residence before hounding him to his death at the Don monastery on the other side of the river. It was not what the empress wanted to hear. ‘She is much affected with these calamities,’ Cathcart reported on 27 September, ‘and cannot, though she endeavours, conceal it.’114 ‘Truly this famous eighteenth century has a lot to be proud of here,’ Catherine wrote a week later in describing Amvrosy’s fate to Voltaire. ‘What wise people we have become.’115
By the time Grigory Orlov learned of the riots, he was already en route to the old capital to take over from Saltykov, who had petitioned for his retirement after taking unauthorised (and unforgiven) leave. While he was away, elaborate measures were taken to protect St Petersburg and its palaces from infection. The gates at Tsarskoye Selo were to be kept shut at all times; only Court carriages were permitted on the new road between the menagerie and the toboggan ride at Pulkovo; sentries were posted at the entrance to every village on the estate with instructions to turn away anyone suspected of coming from an infected area.116 Moscow’s government offices were not to reopen until 1 December 1772 after the end of the epidemic had been formally proclaimed by successive Te Deums in both cities.117 Yet still the war with the Ottomans dragged on, as Catherine concentrated on recording her victories for posterity.
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‘If this war continues,’ she told Voltaire in August 1771, ‘my garden at Tsarskoye Selo will soon resemble a game of skittles, because I put up a monument there after each of our glorious battles’:
The battle of Kagul, where seventeen thousand men fought a hundred and fifty thousand, produced an obelisk with an inscription stating only the event and the name of the general. The naval battle at Chesme gave birth to a rostral column in the middle of a large stretch of water. The capture of the Crimea will be preserved by one large column; the descent in the Morea and the capture of Sparta by another. All these are made of the finest marbles one can see, admired by the Italians themselves. Some are found on the shores of Lake Ladoga, the remainder in Yekaterinburg in Siberia, and we use them as you see. They come in nearly every colour. Besides this, in a wood behind my garden, I have had the idea of building a temple of memory to be approached through a triumphal arch. All the important events of the war will be engraved on medallions, with simple and short inscriptions in the language of this country, giving the date and the names of those who took part. I have an excellent Italian architect [Rinaldi], who is drawing up the plans for this building, which will, I hope, be a beautiful one, in good taste, and will relate the history of this war. This idea amuses me greatly and I trust that you will not find it inappropriate.118
Falconet had told her that the ‘lapidary style is the simplest and best that the Ancients used for the inscriptions on their monuments’. Catherine duly followed his example when she came to specify the inscriptions for the plaques on the Kagul obelisk. Meanwhile, two Medal Committees, apparently inspired by Louis XIV’s Académie des inscriptions, set to work between May 1772 and November 1774.119
‘I wouldn’t know how to live in a place where I could neither plant nor build,’ Catherine admitted to Frau Bielke in April 1772. ‘After that, even the most beautiful place in the world would seem insipid.’ As it was, much to the amusement of Grigory Orlov, she was in the grip of a bout of ‘plantomania’. That spring, as Orlov departed for the peace talks at Fokshany, he left her in charge of his garden at Gatchina, where she could commit her own ‘indiscretions’.120 She had done so all along. The Scot Charles Sparrow, who designed the widely admired park at Gatchina, had been the first of several British gardeners recruited to Russia by Ivan Chernyshëv in 1769. Soon the Hanoverian Johann Busch (John Bush) joined the list, signing a contract for a salary of 1500 roubles a year in January 1771. Having briefly worked at Oranienbaum, he took charge of landscaping the English park at Tsarskoye Selo, where Vasily Neëlov, who had worked there since the 1740s, was already busy rearranging the paths and bridges. An even more obvious result of Neëlov’s six-month visit to England in 1770 was the fashion for all things Chinese. In 1772, he completed the Large Caprice, a Chinese summer house spanning the road to the palace. He also worked on Rinaldi’s Chinese Village, a neo-oriental fantasy which comprised some fifteen small houses by the time it was finished by Charles Cameron, connected by a colonnade that cost 41,000 roubles and dominated by a pagoda built for 48,000. Chinoiserie was equally prominent in Thomas Whately’s influential Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which Catherine acquired in French translation in 1771.121
Though the Russian version she planned never appeared in print, Catherine dedicated her adaptation of Whately’s book ‘To the owners of estates bordering the sea and lying along the Peterhof road… by one who has seen their natural attractions and capabilities, so that they should be further improved according to the principles herein prescribed.’122 One such owner was Lev Naryshkin, to whom Novikov dedicated the second printing of The Drone on 28 July 1769, the eve of Naryshkin’s annual masquerade at Leventhal (Lev’s Valley). To Novikov, the estate seemed ‘the most perfect Eden’, and indeed, three years later, it proved to be the ideal setting for an entertainment that was remembered in Russia long into the nineteenth century.123 By the time Catherine arrived at 7 p.m. on 29 July 1772, 2000 guests had already spent a pleasant afternoon strolling in her friend’s sylvan groves. When two shepherdesses, played by his daughters, Natalia and Katerina, gambolled into view to invite her to their hut on a nearby hillside, it seemed that they were to witness no more than a conventional pastoral idyll. Soon, however, the crowd gasped when the hillside parted, as if by magic, to reveal a magnificent temple of victory, its entrances guarded by statues representing the Russian army and navy. Dressed as the ‘genius of victory’, Naryshkin’s son Dimitry led the empress through a portal emblazoned with the slogan ‘CATHERINE II: CONQUEROR’. Inside, he presented her with a laurel wreath and a speech which had been printed (in French) along with plans of the temple in a booklet distributed to all the guests. As she crossed the threshold into a hall adorned with the trophies of war, a cannon salute signalled the first of a series of scenes representing a litany of all her finest triumphs at Khotin, the River Larga, Kagul, Chesme and Bender. Only after reliving the glories of her annus mirabilis was she permitted to relax among Naryshkin’s colourful Chinese pagodas, where attendants in Chinese costume were on hand to serve her to the accompaniment of Chinese musical instruments. There was still a magnificent banquet to come. Not until three in the morning, an exceptionally late hour, did she finally return to Peterhof.124
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Although St Petersburg in the early 1770s remained, as a British traveller remarked, ‘only an immense outline, which will require future empresses, and almost future ages, to complete’, there was no doubt about the scale of Catherine’s ambitions in the field of urban reconstruction.125 ‘Augustus said that he had found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble,’ she told Frau Bielke in July 1770, ‘and I shall say that I found Petersburg almost entirely made of wood and will leave it with buildings decorated in marble. Despite the war and the Welches, we continue to build.’126 In the light of her determination t
o press ahead in difficult circumstances, it was all the more frustrating to see hard-earned progress undone. ‘I have resembled Job since yesterday’, she wrote angrily to Panin, after a fire destroyed part of Vasilevsky Island on 23 May 1771. ‘I sent Count Orlov into town with instructions not to return until the last spark is extinguished.’ Having initially suspected arson, she soon blamed careless residents.127 Voltaire received a different explanation: ‘There is no doubt that the wind and the excessive heat caused all the damage which will soon be repaired. In Russia we build faster than in any other country in Europe.’ She was as good as her word. On 26 July, plans were approved for the development of low-rise stone houses to replace the majority of burnt-out wooden ones.128
Designs for Moscow were more grandiose. Vasily Bazhenov had been appointed to oversee a major reconstruction of the Kremlin just before Catherine’s departure from the old capital in January 1768 and she kept in close touch with him as he surveyed the foundations. ‘Be so good as to open the air-vents,’ she instructed Saltykov at the end of May. ‘Bazhenov needs to move about the cellars and if the vents won’t open he’ll be in danger of suffocating.’129 Warned that even this prestige project would be subject to wartime economies, the architect took advantage of successive delays to develop increasingly ambitious plans. Having originally intended to begin with new government buildings, the empress soon opted instead for a four-storey neoclassical palace with a 700-yard frontage onto the Moscow River.130 Pandering to her obsession with posterity, Bazhenov planned to glorify her name with a building to rival all the wonders of the world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Parisian Palais Royal: the main reception hall alone was destined to measure seventy metres by fifty metres. However, as he soon discovered, Catherine was just as preoccupied with more immediate practicalities. After meeting him in St Petersburg in December 1768, she insisted that the kitchens and confectionery should be built side by side for ease of service.131 And she could barely conceal her irritation on discovering, a year later, that crucial comforts had been neglected. On reviewing the revised plans in February 1770, Grigory Teplov reported that ‘Her Majesty made the following observations’:
