Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  When Paul returned with his new consort at the end of August 1776, barely four months after the death of his first wife, Catherine promptly declared herself ‘crazy’ about a girl who seemed to have everything Natalia had lacked. ‘She is exactly what I had hoped for: the figure of a nymph; the colour of lilies and roses; the finest complexion in the world; tall and broad-shouldered, yet slight.’25 Whereas Natalia’s progress in the Russian language had been maddeningly slow, Sophia had already begun to master the Cyrillic alphabet in Berlin. Catherine sent a tutor to ‘lessen the task of learning’ on the journey.26 She need not have worried: re-baptised Grand Duchess Maria Fëdorovna on her conversion to Orthodoxy, Sophia was to prove the most dutiful of consorts. When the empress led the couple to the altar on 26 September, Grigory Orlov held a crown above Paul’s head after the Orthodox custom. Betskoy, now in his seventies, performed the same service for the bride, his hand trembling with the effort. Why had this honour been granted to such a grizzled courtier? ‘Because bastards are lucky,’ grumbled Corberon, who left the ceremony early finding the crowded chapel uncomfortably warm. Dinner was more agreeable, and much the same in form as Catherine’s own wedding feast thirty-one years earlier. Seated between bride and groom, she dined under a canopy with Alexander and Lev Naryshkin in attendance, facing four tables for statesmen of the first four ranks and their wives:

  The gallery above was packed with people and occupied by the orchestra, to whom no one listened. The famous Nolly [the violinist, Antonio Lolli, who had given four public concerts to great acclaim in the spring] played well to no purpose amidst this brouhaha and the fanfare that followed the toast to Her Imperial Majesty. The tables were narrow and served en filet; they were placed underneath the orange trees, which poked their rounded heads out over the guests and made a very fine effect.27

  In the tradition established by Peter the Great, there followed ten days of celebrations, including the obligatory firework display and a reprise of the opera Armida (‘I saw and heard little because I was talking,’ Corberon confessed, ‘but the music was feeble, so they say, and only one duet gave me pleasure’).28 For once, such public festivities were not the prelude to personal disaster. Only mildly offended by the tone of Paul’s written instructions urging thrift, regularity and obedience, his spouse devoted herself to the difficult task of pleasing both her husband and the empress.29 In time, the couple would irritate Catherine with their profligacy and her son’s eye would begin to wander. In the short term, however, his personal life proved noticeably less volatile than hers. As a waspish Harris noted in February 1778, ‘The great duke and duchess live indeed on the best terms, and offer an example they neither receive, nor can get imitated.’30

  By then the Court had launched into another round of lavish celebrations following the birth of the couple’s first son on 12 December 1777. Potëmkin hosted a dinner reputed to have cost 50,000 roubles and the ambassadors were invited to inspect the table decorations for Catherine’s banquet for top-ranking Russians, ‘set out with jewels to the amount of upwards of two millions sterling’.31 There was more to this than mere magnificence. In christening her grandson Alexander, the empress associated him with both Alexander of Macedon and St Alexander Nevsky, the medieval warrior saint adopted by Peter the Great as the protector of his new capital. As Catherine explained to Grimm, Nevsky ‘was respected by the Tatars, the republic of Novgorod submitted to him out of respect for his virtues, he gave the Swedes a good thrashing, and the title of grand duke was conferred upon him thanks to his reputation’.32 At 8 a.m. on 30 August 1778, the empress solemnly initiated the infant as a knight of the Order of St Alexander and processed in her carriage to the monastery for the annual liturgy. It was not a ritual dear to Catherine’s heart—‘You stand there like a dog,’ she had once complained to Potëmkin, ‘and no one thanks you for it’33—but this year she had the consolation of laying the foundation stone for the massive neoclassical Trinity Cathedral commissioned from Ivan Starov in November 1774. He had set to work while the Court was in Moscow and in February 1776 Catherine had confirmed his designs with a budget of half a million roubles. For the foundation ceremony, a yellow canvas awning, emblazoned with the warrior saint’s monogram, had been stretched out above a wooden gallery, decorated by Corinthian columns, built out over the foundations. To the accompaniment of cannon and choristers, Catherine ceremonially lowered into the ground a silver shrine containing the remains of Peter the Great’s patron saint, St Andrew the First-Called, and a silver salver engraved in commemoration of the event.34

  Despite such symbol-laden spectacle, it was in private that the empress’s maternal instincts were finally allowed to blossom at the age of forty-eight. ‘The infant instinctively likes me,’ she boasted to Grimm, and indeed to anyone else who would listen. Gustav III, whose heir had been born not long before, was a natural target for her ideas about child rearing and soon received a detailed description of Alexander’s nursery, evidently designed to provide the cool, natural environment denied to her own son in 1754:

  The balustrade prevents too many people from approaching the child at once. Care is taken to ensure that only a few of his entourage are allowed in the room at the same time, and only a couple of candles are lit in the evening so that the air around him doesn’t get stuffy. Monsieur Alexander’s bed, for he knows neither rocker nor cradle, is made of iron and has no curtains; he sleeps on a leather-covered mattress covered with a sheet. He has a pillow and his English bedspread is very light. He is not roused by ear-splitting alarms, but by the same token neither are voices lowered in his room, even when he is asleep. No sort of noise is prohibited in the corridors above and below his room. Cannon are fired from the bastions of the Admiralty, opposite his window, which has made him afraid of nothing [legend had it that this was the cause of his subsequent deafness]. Great care has been taken to ensure that the thermometers in his room do not rise above fourteen or fifteen degrees. Every morning, while his room is swept, whether it be winter or summer, he is taken to another apartment while his own windows are opened to let in fresh air.35

  A second grandson, Constantine, born eighteen months later, was similarly taken over, though he could never compare with Alexander in Catherine’s eyes. Dr Dimsdale was re-called to Russia to inoculate both boys at seven o’clock on the evening of 27 August 1781. She was surprised that Gustav should be so reluctant to offer his own son the same treatment: ‘If you yourself were in any danger, then it was assuredly the fault of the method by which you were inoculated.’ The king should send a doctor to St Petersburg to learn Dimsdale’s method, ‘without contradiction, the best’.36

  As Catherine later explained to Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, ‘your children belong to you, to me, and to the state. From their earliest childhood I have made it a duty and a pleasure to take the most tender care of them.’37 She aimed to nurture not only healthy boys, but also rational children of the Enlightenment. While tears were forbidden, as a sign of stubbornness or undue sensitivity, inquisitiveness was encouraged.38 By the time of his fourth birthday, Alexander was already said to be ‘a determined questioner’, just like his grandmother.39 He could point out Vienna, Kiev and St Petersburg on the globe and willingly devoted two or three hours a day to his ABC. ‘If he continues like this,’ Catherine boasted to his mother, ‘there is no doubt that he will be reading by the spring.’40 Anticipating the need, she had prepared her own Russian primer to teach young people to read, a series of maxims written ‘even while legislating’ in the spring of 1780.41 ‘No child is born learned,’ the empress declared at the outset: ‘the parent’s duty is to give learning to the child.’ Then she moved on to a series of moral injunctions based on her own brand of secularised Protestantism—‘the law requires a man to love his neighbour as himself’; ‘do as you would be done by’—before concluding with a definition of citizenship highlighting her favourite virtues: obedience and exactitude. ‘Question: what is a good citizen? Answer: A good citizen is he who fulfils precisely all
the duties of a citizen.’42

  Such ideas were soon to be given wider application in the empire thanks to the efforts of an advisory commission on education, set up in 1782 under the aegis of Paul’s old science tutor, Professor Aepinus. It was partly on his advice that Catherine adopted the Austrian model of village, urban and provincial schools, using a teaching system initially introduced in Prussian Silesia by the Augustinian abbot Johann Ignaz von Felbiger. Though Felbiger’s emphasis on rote learning was a far cry from the permissive methods advocated by Betskoy in the 1760s, it seemed better suited to the needs of a diverse multinational empire. F. I. Jankovich de Mirjevo, who had been responsible for introducing the Habsburg reforms to the predominantly Orthodox population of his native Serbia, arrived in St Petersburg on 4 September 1782. Three days later Zavadovsky was appointed to head a new Commission of National Schools. In the following year, the empress sponsored the publication of The Book On the Duties of a Man and Citizen, a textbook based on a work by Felbiger which emphasised society’s duty to obey an appropriately enlightened monarch. Pupils were to be taught to believe that ‘those who give orders know what is useful to the state, their subjects and all civil society in general, that they do not wish for anything but that which is generally recognised as useful to society’.43

  Not until August 1786 was a statute promulgated to put these maxims into action in schools at provincial and district level (rural schools, mentioned in earlier drafts were dropped from the final legislation). Meanwhile, although the Russian primer was also intended for a wider readership—Catherine improbably claimed that the published version sold 20,000 copies in barely a fortnight—she had eyes only for Alexander, whose progress continued to delight her. By January 1782, she claimed that he could divide the map of Russia into provinces and count to a thousand, ‘beginning with two times two’.44 A month later, she revealed that she was compiling a suitable reader for a child who ‘seizes every [book] he finds’.45 Catherine’s Tale of Tsarevich Khlor was the first children’s story to be written in the Russian language. Sure enough, these ‘dozen tales, wise and not so wise’ were soon judged to have had ‘an excellent effect: he reads and re-reads them and follows them afterwards; he is polite, obedient, and jolly, like Constantine; this one imitates his brother and has a very pleasant personality’.46

  Whether the grand dukes were really the paragons that their proud grandmother described, we cannot tell. Yet there is no doubt about the purpose of their education. While Alexander was being groomed to inherit the Russian throne, Constantine (as his name proclaimed) was destined for Constantinople. That was why Catherine’s Russian primer incorporated a section on the Greek alphabet and why Richard Brompton’s saccharine portrait of the two boys, completed in July 1781, depicts Alexander cutting the Gordian knot on the altar of Zeus while Constantine holds a flag topped with a victory cross (‘With this sign you will conquer’).47 Potëmkin, who had celebrated Constantine’s birth with a stylised Greek festival at his country estate at Ozerki, wanted both boys to concentrate on Greek as the foundation of all other languages: ‘One can scarcely credit what learning and delicacy of style it has given to so many writers who are distorted in translation, not so much by the translators as by the weakness of other languages.’48

  Reporting Potëmkin’s obsession ‘with the idea of raising an Empire in the east’, Harris noted that ‘he has so far infected the Empress with these sentiments, that she has been chimerical enough to christen the new born Grand Duke, Constantine; to give him a Greek nurse, whose name was Helen, and to talk in her private society, of placing him on the throne of the Eastern Empire. In the meanwhile, she is building a town at Czarsco Zelo, to be called Constantingorod.’49 The new town was in fact named, no less emblematically, Sofia, with a cathedral resembling Hagia Sophia visible across the great pond in an echo of the Bosphorus.50 Though Catherine denied any expansionist ambitions, she spoke at length to Harris ‘on the ancient Greeks, of their alacrity and the superiority of their genius, and the same character being still extant in the modern ones, and of the possibility of their again becoming the first people, if properly assisted and seconded. She told me she talked this language to me as she knew my father was an admirer of the Greeks, and that she hoped I inherited his predilection.’51 James Harris senior, who had presented Catherine with a copy of his celebrated universal grammar, Hermes (1751), was indeed delighted. When his daughter-in-law sent him the Greek chorus, sung at Peterhof at the end of June 1779 to celebrate Constantine’s birth, he spent the next two years badgering his son for a copy of the score by Paisiello, one of his favourite composers.52

  * * *

  Catherine’s so-called Greek project—a visionary plan to recreate the Byzantine empire under Russian domination, first formulated in detail between 1780 and 1782—was the logical culmination of a foreign policy whose intellectual foundations had been laid more than a decade earlier during Russia’s war against the Ottomans. Whereas the Prussian alliance (still formally in existence) had been the linchpin of Panin’s Northern System, this reorientation towards the south dictated the need for a rapprochement with Austria, a policy firmly supported by Potëmkin. So when Joseph II suggested a meeting in 1780 as an extension of his tour of Galicia, Catherine readily accepted. Her journey to Mogilëv in Belorussia would not only build bridges with her southern neighbour, but also give her the opportunity to test the impact of her Provincial Reform in lands acquired in the first partition of Poland and governed since 1775 by her old friend Zakhar Chernyshëv.53

  Accompanied by Alexander Lanskoy, she set off from Tsarskoye Selo supported by an entourage including her secretary, Alexander Bezborodko, the rising star of her administration, and Alexander Stroganov, who had returned from France in December 1779 talking about nothing but Paris.54 Even such a small suite was expensive. As Elizabeth Dimsdale learned from Catherine’s apothecary, ‘at every stage they had four hundred and forty horses and twenty coaches besides other carriages’. There were fifty-two of those, drawn by animals requisitioned from some 177 provincial towns. More than 60,000 roubles had been spent on sprucing up the wooden ‘palaces’ along the route.55

  The expedition got off to a bad start at Pskov, a medieval stronghold now in terminal decline. ‘Inoculate someone with your talent for development and send him here,’ Catherine appealed to Grimm: ‘Perhaps he will be able to bring on its industry.’56 ‘Tomorrow we move on,’ Bezborodko noted on 15 May, ‘having seen much that is not good among the nobles, merchants and others.’57 As they advanced south-westward towards Poland, another disconcerting phenomenon was revealed at Polotsk: ‘Jesuits and Dominicans etc., and Jews all lined up on parade.’ To Catherine, the Jews looked ‘horribly filthy’ while the others made ‘an august masquerade’ to greet her ceremonial entry to the town.58 ‘Everyone lives jumbled together here,’ she observed, unwittingly encapsulating one of the most awkward problems facing her administrators’ attempts to standardise the government of the empire: ‘Orthodox, Catholics, Uniates, Jews etc., Russians, Poles, Finns, Germans, Courlanders—there are not two people dressed the same who speak the same language correctly.’59 Stroganov, who had started out with a terrible cold, improved after being purged in Polotsk. His ‘main task in each town’, as he explained to his son’s tutor on 20 May, was to discover from the local authorities ‘and even the simple citizens’ what their needs were, how justice was administered and about ‘the unfortunates who languish in prison’:

  As soon as I have informed the empress, if the crimes are not capital, the prison doors open and her largesse is distributed to all those in genuine need. Apart from here, where the schools are on a fairly good footing thanks to the Jesuits, education is everywhere badly neglected. The empress wants to take effective measures to repair this deficiency which requires a prompt remedy.60

  At lunch on 21 May, Zakhar Chernyshëv brought out the treasured silver service presented to him as Governor General after the Provincial Reform. That evening he threw a ball for 500 guests: �
��I should never finish if I named them all,’ Catherine boasted to Paul and Maria Fëdorovna.61 Next morning, she was up early for the sixty-mile drive to Sennoye, where she realised that the emperor had already beaten her in the mock race for Mogilëv: ‘When he learned that I had lopped off four days from my schedule to overtake him, he ran night and day and overtook me by two days.’62 Suppressing the urge to join him immediately, Catherine stuck to her schedule. On 23 May she drove through a landscape resembling one of her favourite English gardens to meet Field Marshal Rumyantsev at Shklov, the estate to which Zorich had retired to dispense hospitality on a heroic scale. Guests came from as far away as the two capitals to act in his theatre and there was always a place at his table for ‘Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Serbs, Greeks, Moldavians, Turks—in a word, every kind of riff-raff and tramp’.63 To greet this exceptional vagrant, he had built his own triumphal arch, where he formally welcomed the empress at 6 p.m. But Zorich’s day had passed. Catherine may never even have set eyes on the Saxon dinner service on which he was said to have spent 50,000 roubles since she retired early to write to her ‘loving friend’, Potëmkin. Leaving her entourage to indulge themselves (and their host) at Zorich’s ball and banquet, she drifted off to sleep to the sound of fireworks exploding on an obelisk inside the house and music from a Jewish band dressed in Turkish costume.64