Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Round snuff-box showing Catherine as Minerva, Paris 1781–2 (gold, verre églomisé, silver): Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen

  ‘If ever you catch sight of him, you will see without contradiction the finest man that you have ever encountered in your life.’ Embracing putti symbolise Catherine’s love for Grigory Orlov on the service she commissioned for him from the Imperial Porcelain Factory sometime between 1762 and 1765.

  Tea caddy, coffeepot, and teapot from the Orlov Service, St. Petersburg, Imperial Porcelain Factory, 1762–5: Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen

  Completed as she arrived in Russia, Rastrelli’s Summer Palace on the Fontanka was an exuberant timber fantasy that survived Catherine’s reign, along with many other features of a Baroque Court, before being demolished by order of Paul I.

  The Summer Palace, St. Petersburg, Russian School (18th century): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Exemplified by the Green Dining Room, Charles Cameron’s cool interiors at Tsarskoye Selo marked the triumph of the restrained neoclassical style in Russian architecture from the late 1770s.

  Summer Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, Green Dining Room, designed by Charles Cameron, 1784–91: Bridgeman Art Library, London

  The empress’s comedies and operatic pageants played to select audiences at Giacomo Quarenghi’s neoclassical Hermitage Theatre, which opened on 22 November 1785. Catherine entered from the adjoining Hermitage, guests from the granite-clad embankment, itself admired as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.

  The Hermitage Theatre seen from Vasilevsky Island, 1822 (colour lithograph), Russian School (19th century): Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Done in Kiev in 1787, Mikhail Shibanov’s portrait of the empress in travelling dress combines the image of a maternal ruler with the expansionist ambitions represented by the insignia of three chivalric orders: St Andrew the First Called (founded by Peter I), St George (founded ‘for bravery’ during the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74) and St Vladimir (founded in 1782, the year in which the empress outlined her ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II of Austria).

  Catherine II in a travelling costume, 1787 by Mikhail Shibanov (f1.1783–89): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

  ‘His rarest quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which set him completely apart from the rest of humanity.’ Potëmkin’s outsized personality is well captured in Giovanni Battista Lampi’s celebration of his martial valour, painted in the last year of the prince’s life.

  Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potëmkin (1739–91), c.1790 by Johann Baptist I Lampi (1751–1830): Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Small as it was, the palace at Zerbst provided Catherine’s father, Prince Christian August, with the quintessentially cosmopolitan setting of a Baroque Court in miniature.

  The Schloss at Zerbst

  Boisterous in private, discreet and demure in public, the young Grand Duchess Catherine set out on her arrival at the Russian Court ‘to please the grand duke, to please the empress, and to please the nation’.

  The young Grand Duchess Catherine soon after her marriage, after Grooth

  Few eighteenth-century princes escaped unscathed at the hands of second-rate artists. Peter III was no exception. The Synodal painter Aleksey Antropov captured something of the fabled vacuity of Catherine’s ill-fated husband.

  Peter III, engraving after A. P. Antropov

  While the empress’s memoirs implied that Paul I was the progeny of Sergey Saltykov, her son always regarded Peter III as his father and resembled him strongly in both personality and physique.

  Paul I, English engraving of the 1790s

  Modelling his illustrations of Catherine’s coronation on those of the French kings at Reims, Jean-Louis de Veilly transformed the intimate interior of the Cathedral of the Dormition into a cavernous temple.

  Catherine’s coronation: nineteenth-century engraving after J. L. de Veilly

  Elaborate allegorical fireworks were one feature of Baroque Court culture that remained central to Russian ceremonials throughout Catherine’s reign. This display, performed on the banks of the Moscow River opposite the Kremlin on 29 September 1762, was intended to confer dynastic legitimacy on a newly-crowned usurper.

  Coronation fireworks, 1762: A. K. Melnikov from an engraving by E. G. Yinogradov

  Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742 served as the model for Catherine’s twenty years later. In a scene facing north towards the Cathedral of the Dormition, the cockaigne for the populace on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square is flanked by the Red Staircase and the Ivan the Great bell-tower. Such feasts were still staged in the 1790s, though by then they had long been dismissed as barbaric by Western visitors to Russia.

  Elizabeth’s coronation feast in the Kremlin Square, 1742: engraving of 1744

  ‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto chosen by Falconet for his statue of the empress’s most glorious predecessor. On 7 August 1782 she witnessed the unveiling of the first public monument in Russia from the balcony of the former Bestuzhev mansion on the left of the engraving.

  The unveiling of Falconet’s monument to Peter the Great: engraving by A. K. Lemnikov after A. P. Davydov, 1782

  ‘Apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’

  The Cameron Gallery, Tsarskoye Selo: aquatint engraving by J. G. de Mayr, 1793

  Though Catherine sought to surpass rather than merely imitate Peter I, her declared intention to complete what he had begun was part of her spurious claim to legitimacy. Tsar Peter gazes down approvingly from the heavens in Ferdinand de Meys’s allegorical representation of the empress’s great journey to the South in 1787.

  Catherine’s journey to the south, 1787: allegorical engraving by Ferdinand de Meys, courtesy of Dr James Cutshall

  The first pornographic British caricature of the empress appeared less than two months after Caroline Walker’s majestic engraving, done at the outset of the Russo-Turkish War in 1787 from the copy of Alexander Roslin’s portrait owned by Catherine’s ambassador to London, Count Semën Vorontsov.

  Catherine II, engraving by Caroline Walker after Roslin, London, 1787

  Though Platon Zubov liked to pose as a worthy successor to Potëmkin, he was in reality an arrogant upstart who damaged the empress’s reputation in her declining years. This version of Lampi’s portrait was done by the British engraver, James Walker, resident in Russia between 1784 and 1802.

  Prince Platon Zubov, engraving by James Walker after Lampi, St Petersburg, 1798

  The caricature in this French version of ‘The Imperial Stride’, first published in London on 12 April 1791 NS, was the sort of salacious image that corrupted Catherine’s reputation among her 19th-century male successors.

  ‘L’Enjambée impériale’, French cartoon of 1791

  Under Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, it was left to the beholder to imagine the relationship between the bronzed youth and the statuesque empress represented by Lampi’s portrait of 1794. Pride of place on the 500-rouble note went to Peter the Great.

  100 rouble note of 1910

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Search for Emotional Stability

  1776–1784

  After her accession to the throne, Catherine spent all too little time at Oranienbaum. But had she ever gazed up from the bed in the Damask Room, she would have seen on the ceiling a painting that perfectly encapsulated the tutelary relationship she strove to establish with each of her favourites. Urania te
aching a youth, by the Venetian artist Domenico Maggiotto, portrayed a bare-breasted goddess looking down at a virile young man who returns her gaze in simple trust.1 Leonine, earnest and not very bright, Grigory Orlov had fitted the mould to perfection. ‘The apprehension of the Empress is extremely quick,’ Lord Cathcart observed in 1770, ‘that of Mr. Orloff rather slow, but very capable of judging well upon a single proposition, though not of combining many different ideas.’2 Horace Walpole was typically franker: ‘Orlow talks an infinite deal of nonsense,’ he remarked during Grigory’s visit to London in 1775, ‘but parts are not necessary to a royal favourite or to an assassin.’3

  Potëmkin, by contrast, demanded to be treated not as a pupil, but as an equal, and it made for heated arguments between them in the spring of 1776. ‘Sometimes,’ Catherine complained, ‘to listen to you speak one might think that I was a monster with every possible fault, and especially that of being beastly.’ It upset her that he resented her other friends, and flounced off in a temper when she refused to listen: ‘We quarrel about power, not about love. That’s the truth of it.’4 Potëmkin, however, had reason to be unnerved. As a sign of Catherine’s wavering affections, Rumyantsev’s protégé Peter Zavadovsky, who had worked with her on the Provincial Reform, had been promoted Adjutant General on 2 January. This was the favourite’s office, still indelibly associated with Grigory Orlov. Later that month, Orlov himself unexpectedly returned to Russia, where he promptly fell sick, creating a complicated love triangle in which only Catherine herself can have felt fully at ease. A British diplomat reported that ‘two visits, which the Empress made to the Prince during his illness, caused a very warm altercation between her and the favourite’. Amidst rumours that he had poisoned Orlov, Potëmkin’s downfall was widely predicted, although some acknowledged that this arose ‘rather from its being universally wished, than from any actual symptoms’.5 Meanwhile, Catherine firmly resisted his attempts to persuade her to remove Zavadovsky. Quite apart from the ‘injustice and persecution’ the dismissal would inflict on ‘an innocent man’, there was her own reputation to consider: ‘If I fulfil this request, my glory will suffer in every possible way.’6 Instead, her affair with Zavadovsky was publicly confirmed when he was promoted major general and granted 20,000 roubles and 1000 serfs on 28 June, the fourteenth anniversary of the empress’s accession. In an attempt to appease Potëmkin, she appealed to his vanity by presenting him with the Anichkov Palace and 100,000 roubles to decorate it as he pleased. Most of all, however, she appealed to his conscience, reassuring him that even as her passion had cooled, her friendship remained unquestioned: ‘I dare say that there is no more faithful friend than me. But what is friendship? Mutual trust, I have always thought. For my part, it is total.’7 There is no reason to think this insincere, but she had meant it just as much when she insisted in an earlier note that ‘the first sign of loyalty is obedience’.8 True equality remained beyond reach in any relationship with an absolute monarch.

  Such rapid changes of scene in the empress’s bedchamber prompted persistent rumours in the autumn of 1776 that she had taken yet another lover. Rumyantsev’s name was mentioned. ‘The leading actor of the German comedy is also spoken of,’ noted the venomous French chargé, the chevalier de Corberon: ‘It wouldn’t be surprising, but I doubt it.’9 In the event, Zavadovsky was to remain in place until May 1777, a month before Orlov finally married his teenage cousin, Elizabeth Zinovyev. While Catherine bombarded ‘Petrushinka’ with passionate billets-doux, the stolid Ukrainian struggled to keep up his working relationship with her, sulking that she had so little time to spend on him. Increasingly conscious that Icarus was an impossible part to play, Zavadovsky discovered that politics was a topic best avoided: ‘If you had thought as much about despotism as I have,’ Catherine warned him, ‘you would not mention it much.’ Soon she was urging him to exchange his insecurity for trust and playfulness: ‘all this feeds love, which without amusement is dead, like faith without kind deeds’.10 In the end, it was he who tearfully begged the empress to release him from his misery. As Catherine told Potëmkin, ‘the whole conversation lasted less than five minutes’.11 Zavadovsky would soon return to a long career at Court, forgiven and befriended like all her former lovers. For the moment, however, he retired smarting to his Ukrainian estate at Lyalichi (later rechristened Ekaterinindar—‘Catherine’s Gift’).12 ‘Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken, like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt; [her] love for me has vanished.’13

  No sooner had Zavadovsky faded from the scene than a more colourful lover emerged to take his place. This was Potëmkin’s Serbian-born adjutant, Semën Zorich, a swarthy hussar sixteen years younger than Catherine. ‘What a funny creature you have introduced to me!’14 Having been imprisoned by the Turks after distinguishing himself in action, Zorich seemed less likely than Zavadovsky to suffer from hypochondria. Yet it was no easier for him to cope with the mercurial presence of his patron, who remained the guiding influence in the empress’s life.15 In May 1778, when Potëmkin humiliated him by presenting a handsome young officer to Catherine on her way to the theatre at Tsarskoye Selo, Zorich could no longer control himself. ‘As soon as Her Imperial Majesty was gone, he fell upon Potemkin in a very violent manner, made use of the strongest expressions of abuse, and insisted on his fighting him.’ Irritated by such a ‘fuss about nothing’, Catherine forced the rivals to shake hands over dinner in St Petersburg, but it was only a temporary rapprochement. ‘Potemkin is determined to have him dismissed,’ reported the recently arrived British ambassador, James Harris, ‘and Zoritz is determined to cut the throat of his successor. Judge of the tenour of the whole Court from this anecdote.’16

  Insensitive to the anguish the empress suffered in her search for a stable, loving relationship—she blamed her recurrent headaches on her recent bout of ‘legislomania’—Harris regarded the ‘scene of dissipation and inattention’ presented by the Court of St Petersburg as the inevitable consequence of unnatural female rule. ‘Age does not deaden the passions, they rather quicken with years: and on a closer approach I find report had magnified the eminent qualities, and diminished the foibles, of one of the greatest ladies in Europe.’17 Two years later, after Catherine had exchanged the favours of Zorich’s unfaithful successor, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, for those of another strapping young guards officer, Alexander Lanskoy, Corberon came to much the same conclusion:

  If this sovereign were led, as she could be, by a man of genius, the greatest and best things might be achieved: but this man is not to be found, and by deluding each of her favourites, doing away with them and renewing them one by one, this woman’s successive weaknesses become innumerable and their consequences appalling. With the greatest of visions and the best of intentions, Catherine is destroying her country through her morals, ruining it by her expenditure, and will end up being judged a weak and romantic woman.18

  * * *

  Generally the preserve of foreigners, and provoked most often by the failure of a particular ambassador’s diplomacy at St Petersburg, such verdicts owed more to stereotypical assumptions about female rule than to the realities of Catherine’s reign. The political impact of her sex was felt less in her relationship with her favourites than in her treatment of her two grandsons. They were not, however, to be born in the way that she had originally anticipated when the pregnant Natalia was rushed back from Moscow in the summer of 1775. The grand duchess went into labour early in the morning of 10 April 1776, at the height of the crisis between Catherine and Potëmkin. At first there seemed no reason to panic, but when it emerged that the birth canal was too narrow—‘four fingers wide,’ as the watching empress subsequently described it to Frau Bielke, ‘when the baby’s shoulders measured eight’—the midwife left Natalia to writhe in agony for forty-eight hours before calling a surgeon. The unborn child, a large boy, may already have been dead before forceps were used in a vain attempt to save his mother. The cause of the obstruction, a deformation of h
er spine, was revealed only at the autopsy. Natalia died on 15 April, leaving Paul inconsolable for three days. Even the annual cannon salute to herald the breaking of the ice on the Neva was cancelled as a mark of respect.19 Dressed ‘very richly in white satin’, with her dead infant at her feet, the grand duchess lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where mourners ‘might go and see them, walk up to the coffin, kiss her hand, and then walk round on the other side, but were not suffered to stop, and were obliged to go out again immediately’.20 Corberon, who blamed Catherine for Natalia’s negligent treatment, noted that she ‘gave the impression of crying’ at the funeral. ‘But I give no credence to her tears: her heart is too dry.’21

  The empress certainly did not linger over her disappointment. As she explained to Voltaire on 25 June: ‘We are currently very busy recouping our losses.’22 That meant finding a new wife for Paul and there was only one serious candidate: the sixteen-year-old Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, passed over in 1773 only because she was too young. Ruthless in a crisis, Catherine bought off her existing fiancé Prince Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt—‘I never want to see him again,’ she told Grimm—and cunningly soured Paul’s memory of Natalia by revealing her dalliance with Andrey Razumovsky. While Field Marshal Rumyantsev and Prince Henry of Prussia, visiting St Petersburg for the second time, escorted Paul to Berlin for an audience with his hero, Frederick the Great, the empress made arrangements to welcome Sophia to Russia.23 Having ordered twelve dresses and plenty of Dutch bedlinen, she turned her attentions to the apartments in the Winter Palace, marking out the position of new stoves on the plans and dictating a revised colour scheme for the furnishings: pink and white for the bedroom, with columns of blue glass; blue and gold for the state bedroom, with a new lit de parade and a drawing of Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican ‘which I will give you’; cushions for the sofa in the sitting room ‘in gold fabric which I shall supply’. All the rooms were to be hung with tapestries of a specified colour and type, and ‘the second ante-chamber should be decorated in stucco or artificial marble with ornaments as pretty as they are rich’.24