Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  ‘Dear spouse,’ she announced in one such letter, ‘there is to be a concert.’83 Music had always filled the air at the summer celebrations as the wagons of the Court orchestra joined the straggling caravan of carriages that choked the road to the seaside. This year, there was a new star in the firmament: one of the most stunning sopranos in Europe. Catherine liked to tease her faithless ‘whipping-boy’ that, by reducing him to tears during a recital at Yelagin’s house, Caterina Gabrielli had taken him ‘half-way to salvation’.84 Though no less an authority than Mozart judged that ‘in the long run, G could not please, for people soon get tired of coloratura passages,’ her initial impact was seductive, deriving as much from her charismatic personality as it did from the quality of her voice.85 One modern writer has seen her as forerunner of the modern prima donna, a fragile proto-Callas who swept from the opera house surrounded by servants carrying her train, her dog, her parrot and her monkey, and who broke free from the semi-servility in which most artists were forced to perform by singing only when it suited her.86 ‘She is indolent and capricious, so there is no depending on her,’ Elizabeth Harris complained during a later London season. ‘I fancy a good English hiss might be of service to her, and most probably in time she may have it.’87 There was no hissing at Peterhof on 25 June. So captivating was Gabrielli that Catherine, who talked through most concerts, approached the orchestra to listen. Another member of the audience, the English traveller Nathaniel Wraxall, recognised ‘a sovereign of a different kind, and perhaps not less despotic or unlimited in her empire’: ‘I must own I never heard any voice so perfectly sweet, melting, and absolute in its command over the soul: nor can any thing exceed the negligent carelessness apparent in her whole manner, which she employed in this occupation, as if she despised the appearance of exertion or any labor to please.’88 There was no gainsaying genius. ‘Gabrielsha wants to renew her contract,’ Catherine told Yelagin the following winter: ‘Renew it!’89 But the singer left for London all the same.

  As the festivities continued at Peterhof, good news from the Danube helped to compensate for a shocking report from the Volga. Pugachëv, having escaped capture at Berda in March, had emerged from his hideaway in the Urals and appeared before Kazan at the head of 20,000 troops on 11 July. Next day, nearly three quarters of the 2873 houses in the city were destroyed by fire as the rebels indulged in an orgy of looting and pillage. News of the disaster reached Catherine on Monday 21 July, the day after the feast of the Prophet Elijah. At the Council meeting that morning, she had to be dissuaded from going straight to Moscow to restore confidence in a city whose gaols were overflowing with rebel prisoners. This time, fortune was on her side. Though she learned about it only on 23 July, Rumyantsev had already agreed peace with the Turks at Kuchuk Kainardzhi, not far from Potëmkin’s old camp outside Silistria, after Generals Kamensky and Suvorov had finally broken the back of Ottoman resistance at Koludzhi on 9 June. Since the news was better than she had been led to expect, the prayers Catherine offered at a hastily arranged thanksgiving service that afternoon were probably unusually heartfelt. And there was more to come. On the last day of the month, Prince Repnin and Count Semën Vorontsov arrived from Moldavia to explain that, in the treaty signed on 14 July, Rumyantsev had secured the whole of the coast between the Bug and the Dnieper, and an indemnity of 4.5 million roubles. Now she could turn her mind to challenging Pugachëv’s final rally.

  As Catherine prepared for a Te Deum in honour of the peace treaty at the Kazan Church on Sunday 3 August, the pretender was already carving a swathe through the steppe.90 Routed by General Mikhelson in a four-hour battle at Kazan on 13 July, he had retreated southwards into an area settled mostly by nobles owning fewer than twenty serfs. These were the plentiful lands that Catherine had so admired on her Volga cruise only seven years earlier. Now, in the last and bloodiest phase of the revolt, the peasants flocked to the rebel cause in increasing numbers, burning their lords’ manor houses and slaughtering many of their ‘unjust’ and ‘cruel’ occupants. Penza fell to Pugachëv on 1 August, Saratov five days later. But even as he marched towards his native Don Cossack territory, the unsuspecting pretender was finally approaching his nemesis. Shortly after he drew up at the outskirts of Tsaritsyn on 21 August, one of his fellow Cossacks finally recognised him as an illiterate imposter. Once ‘the world of suspended belief’ in which so many of his followers had lived was shattered, it was only a matter of time before the so-called Peter III was defeated once and for all.91 On 25 August, while Catherine was lunching with Potëmkin in the Hermitage in preparation for Natalia’s name day, Mikhelson inflicted a final devastating defeat.92 Though Pugachëv again escaped capture, this time his luck was out. On 15 September, the Cossacks betrayed him to the authorities and the greatest revolt of Russia’s eighteenth century ended in ignominy.

  As the authorities began their interrogation of the pretender, the autumn balls had already begun in St Petersburg. Catherine prepared for the winter by inspecting an array of valuable sables and silks, laid out for her in the Summer Palace much as they had once been for Empress Elizabeth.93 This time there were no rash announcements about the fate of the rebellion, but two days after Paul’s twentieth birthday, she celebrated the twelfth anniversary of her coronation in greater security than she had enjoyed for at least four years.

  Potëmkin’s incipient rivalry with Nikita Panin was meanwhile being played out at a secondary level in the struggle between their relatives for control over the investigation into the revolt in Kazan. ‘Count Panin wants to make his brother the ruler with unlimited powers in the best part of the empire,’ Catherine complained, as Peter Panin departed for the Volga at the end of July. Though Catherine was anxious to keep the Panins’ pretensions in check, Peter’s appointment signalled a noticeable change of policy. Until then, the government had been moderate in its treatment of the rebels. In March Catherine had explicitly urged Bibikov to be cautious in his methods: ‘For twelve years the Secret Expedition under my own eyes has not flogged a single person under interrogation, and every single affair has been properly sorted out, and even more came out than we needed to know.’ Most of the prisoners taken from the rebels had been released without harm. Now retribution was placed in the hands of Peter Panin, a martinet who calculated that 324 insurgents were executed during his time in charge. A further 399 lost an ear and were knouted; 7000 more were flogged in other ways.94

  Nothing could compare in Catherine’s mind with the damage inflicted by Pugachëv himself. ‘There has hardly been anyone so destructive of the human race since Tamerlane,’ she spluttered to Voltaire in October. ‘He entertains some hope that I might treat him gracefully, saying that he might erase the memory of his past crimes by his courage and future services. If it were only me that he had offended, his reasoning would be just and I would pardon him; however, this is the empire’s cause and the empire has laws.’95 Brought to Moscow in an iron cage on 4 November, Pugachëv was subjected to a secret trial at the Kremlin at the end of December. Vyazemsky was on hand to make sure that no torture was applied. Though the rebel was sentenced to be quartered, Catherine gave orders that his executioner should behead him first, much to the rage of the ghoulish mob that gathered to witness the event on Bolotnaya Square on 10 January.96 Five days later, as a symbol of her determination to look forward rather than back, she decreed that the Yaik, the name of the river where Pugachëv had begun his revolt, should be changed to the Ural, ‘so that the unhappy occurrences on the said Yaik should be forgotten forever’.97 Her wider ambition was now to consign to the same oblivion the ‘blindness, stupidity, ignorance and superstition’ that had tempted her subjects into rebellion. And that meant tackling the ‘weakness, indolence, carelessness in respect to their duties, idleness, arguments, disagreements, extortions and injustices’ perpetrated by her inadequate provincial officials.98 The task of improving local government was to preoccupy her for much of the following decade.

  * * *

  With Pugachëv gone, M
oscow was safe to visit, seven years after Catherine had last set foot in the old capital. ‘Seven years seems like a whole century to us,’ Sumarokov made the populace exclaim in his Ode to Potëmkin in 1774. But since the empress was less certain of a rapturous reception, she delayed her departure until news of the pretender’s execution had been confirmed, making her formal entry into Moscow on 23 January 1775.99 Passing two newly erected triumphal arches, commemorating her victories against the Turks, she processed to the customary service at the Dormition Cathedral, and from there to her new palace, where she retired to her apartments. ‘The whole passed with scarce any acclamations amongst the populace, or their manifesting the least degree of satisfaction,’ Gunning reported secretly to Whitehall. ‘The Empress’s visit here is far from agreeable to them, and as little so to the nobility. Her Majesty is not ignorant of this, nor of the little affection they bear her; nor are they less acquainted with the unfavourable opinion she entertains of them.’100

  Inside the porticoed entrance of the Prechistensky Palace, Matvey Kazakov had created a large reception room leading to a throne room, just as big, where Catherine could receive the ambassadors. Beyond that lay a still greater apartment, running the length of the building and divided by columns: she played cards in one half while her courtiers danced in the other.101 ‘To be fair,’ as she acknowledged to Grimm, the conversion had been artfully done. But she enjoyed poking fun at the ‘labyrinth’ connecting the disparate parts of her new palace, portraying her new study as ‘a triumph of exits’ from which it had taken her two hours to escape. ‘I have never seen so many doors in my life. I have already condemned half a dozen of them, and I still have twice as many as I need.’102

  Thrust into this unfamiliar environment, Catherine and Potëmkin struggled to maintain the explosive intensity of their initial affair, relapsing instead into bickering about the terms of their relationship. It was already clear that they were partners in government. Indeed, when her sulky lover took offence at some corrections she sent him, she assured him that they were ‘only guidelines’ from which he could make his own choice. While he set to work to ensure that there could never be another Pugachëv, she concentrated on commemorating the defeat of the Turks. At first sight, it was Potëmkin who had the more ambitious task and he set about it with characteristic ruthlessness. Powerless to intervene, Panin watched in horror as the new favourite heaped obloquy on the errant Zaporozhian Cossacks barely twelve years after they had taken a proud role at the empress’s coronation. Their host was summarily disbanded on 3 August and its territory assimilated under the regular imperial administration.103 Meanwhile, Catherine had taken responsibility for an equally visionary piece of legislation. The manifesto commemorating the end of the Turkish war on 17 March 1775 has rightly been accorded ‘considerable importance in the history of human rights in Russia’ because it offered unprecedented protection to the individual by preventing the arbitrary enserfment of the population by census-takers who had deprived more than 830,000 men of their freedom between 1721 and 1741 alone.104

  The vagaries of life with Potëmkin help to explain why Easter Sunday found Catherine in wistful mood about Grigory Orlov. ‘If ever you catch sight of him,’ she wrote to Frau Bielke, ‘you will see without contradiction the finest man that you have ever encountered in your life.’105 Paul and his wife were treated less charitably. Now that Natalia’s wilfulness had begun to emerge, the empress’s patience was starting to wear thin. She mocked the girl’s headstrong profligacy in a letter to Grimm in December: ‘we cannot stand this or that; we are indebted beyond twice what we have, and what we have is twice more than anyone else in Europe.’106 Now that her son had requested a further 20,000 roubles, she grumbled to Potëmkin that there would be ‘no end to it’: ‘If you count everything, including what I have given to them, then more than five hundred thousand has been spent on them this year, and still they want more. But neither thanks nor a penny-worth of gratitude!’107 On the whole, however, Catherine’s mood was positive. Even the obligatory summer pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery, with the Chernyshëvs and Kirill Razumovsky in tow, turned out to be ‘very agreeable and a real promenade: we had fine weather and good company and weren’t bored for a moment; I returned in perfect health’.108

  Unfortunately, it was not to last. The peace celebrations had to be postponed when a surfeit of peaches gave her chronic diarrhoea. Onlookers remembered her looking old when she was finally fit to attend having been bled by the medics. On the southern perimeter of the city, fourteen obelisks, each decorated with battle scenes, had been erected to commemorate the greatest victories of the war. From there, the troops marched through the two similarly adorned triumphal arches toward the Kremlin, where Catherine processed down the Red Staircase just as she had at her coronation, only this time in full military uniform. The sound of Slizov’s bell ‘was so tremendous that it seemed that the Ivan Tower itself trembled’, recalled Andrey Bolotov at the beginning of the nineteenth century. ‘Many of us feared it would collapse.’ Bazhenov had initially proposed temples to Janus, Bacchus and Minerva, but Catherine was having none of it. Classical imagery was deliberately excluded as the empress insisted on a range of neo-Gothic structures, erected on Khodynka field at the north-western edge of the city. All of them found their place on an imaginary map of the Black Sea, where Kerch and Yenikale were made to serve as ballrooms, Kinburn as a theatre, and Azov a huge banqueting hall.109 Not since the carousel of 1766 had the Court been treated to such a riot of medievalism. The Black Sea transported to a field near Moscow? It was too much even for Voltaire: ‘I knew very well that the very great Catherine II was the leading person in the whole world; but I hadn’t realised that she was a magician.’110

  In the midst of this glorious fantasy, the empress had turned her very practical mind to one of the most significant statutes of her reign, the Provincial Reform of November 1775, designed to bring her government closer to the people through a rationalisation of local administration in the wake of the Pugachëv rebellion. Though six surviving drafts in her own hand testify to the depth of Catherine’s commitment to the legislation, the ideas in it came from her advisers. The most influential was Yakov Sievers, who had been brought to Moscow to help her with the reform. ‘Work this out with Sievers,’ ran a typical note on one of her drafts. ‘This is the most stupid article of all,’ she confessed at a moment of particular frustration. ‘My head hurts from it. This endless rumination is very dry and boring. To tell the truth, I am already at the end of my Latin, and I do not know what to do about the Lower Court, the Board of Public Welfare, and the Conscience Court. One word from your excellency on these subjects would be a ray of light, bringing order out of chaos, as when the world was created.’111 In November, Sievers was appointed Governor General of Tver, Novgorod, Olonets and Pskov, an area larger than many European states in which he was given the honour of being the first to put the new reform into practice. As a sign that they had been appointed as the empress’s personal viceroys, he and Zakhar Chernyshëv in Belorussia were each rewarded with an English silver service weighing over 45 poods. Catherine eventually paid a total of 125,000 roubles for the two services, setting aside a further 42 roubles and 35 kopecks to provide fur coats for officers in the troop which accompanied the final consignment.112 ‘I think these regulations are better than my Instruction for the code,’ she told Grimm in January 1776. ‘They are being introduced at this moment in the provinces of Tver and Smolensk where they have been received with open arms.’113

  The Court had returned to St Petersburg in December. It would be another ten years before Catherine saw Moscow again. By then, the city and the surrounding provinces had been transformed almost beyond recognition, at least in part by her own reforming zeal. Yet even that transformation paled by comparison with the turbulence in the empress’s personal life.

  Photographic Insert

  PeterIII’s tutor, Jacob Stählin, thought Rotari’s portrait of Elizabeth in a black lace mantilla the best
likeness of this beautiful, irascible empress. Done in the last years of her life, it passed into the collection of her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov.

  Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709–61) by Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707–62): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

  The prevailing myth of a conquering foreign ruler bringing civilization and prosperity to Russia is encapsulated by Vigilius Erichsen’s portrait of the uniformed empress astride Brilliant, the charger she rode out towards Oranienbaum the day after her coup.

  Equestrian Portrait of Catherine II (1729–96) the Great of Russia by Vigilius Erichsen (1722–82): Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France/The Bridgeman Art Library

  To ensure that enlightened female rule was not mistaken for weakness, Catherine’s image-makers represented her as Minerva, the war-like goddess of Wisdom, from the time of her coronation in 1762. This Parisian snuff-box may well have been made to mark her son’s visit to the French capital, twenty years later.