by Simon Dixon
Though the empress never totally rejected French ideas—a luxurious edition of Bayle’s Dictionary, which she had first read at the beginning of the 1750s, was on the list with Plutarch among her last orders from Johann Weitbrecht, the leading bookseller in St Petersburg—she did little to conceal her growing pessimism.78 Faced with revolutionary death threats from France in April 1792, she complained to Grimm that ‘it is apparently a good thing to assassinate people at the end of the eighteenth century, and I am told that it is Voltaire who preached this. See how they dare to cast calumnies on people: I think Voltaire would rather stay where he is buried than find himself in the company of Mirabeau’. By February 1794, however, she told Grimm that he had been right to distance himself from the philosophes, whose work had ‘served only to destroy’. In April she went further: ‘I remembered yesterday something you have said to me more than once: that this century has been a century of preparation.’ Now that preparation seemed only to have led to ‘filth’ of every kind, with the prospect of ‘calamities without end and innumerable wretched people’.79 In such a climate, the moderate Russian writers whose careers Catherine had done so much to foster found themselves under increasing suspicion. A year after the assassination of Louis XVI, even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was removed from the bookshops because it dealt with regicide. Catherine’s last significant piece of legislation was the edict of 11 October 1796 which revoked the right of individuals to operate private presses, granted in 1783. Anxious as she had been to propagate improving ideas, an empress obsessed with obedience not only baulked at the growth of independent publishing but was unable to conceive of an orderly system of censorship for the private presses. Twelve of the sixteen closed overnight. Whereas 320 secular books had been published in Russia in 1796, only 212 appeared in the first year of Tsar Paul’s reign, the lowest total since 1777.80
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Although the empress’s view of the Enlightenment had undergone a marked transformation since her patronage of Voltaire and Diderot in the 1760s, little in her daily routine had changed. Sitting in her study every morning, she continued to dispatch business just as she had done throughout her reign. One of her secretaries’ jobs was to process the petitions submitted in her name. Of the 1920 submitted to the chancellery directed by Dimitry Troshchinsky and Adrian Gribovsky between January 1795 and 4 November 1796, two thirds (1036) were from nobles. Merchants (119) constituted the next largest group; 85 came from non-noble officials and army officers; 66 were from peasants, 46 from foreigners and 12 from the empress’s own Court servants. Of the noble petitions, the greatest number (147) concerned disputes over estates, with 56 more to do with squabbles over land. Few such documents reached the empress as a result of the draconian legislation against false petitions and official attempts to limit their number—on her trip to the South in 1787, the archbishop of Yekaterinoslav had strictly forbidden his clergy from daring to appeal to her directly (they were not to go near the palace, still less lurk outside her windows).81 Of those petitions she scrutinised, however, a fair number seem to have received a positive response: of the 133 requests for aid in these two years, 74 were granted and so were 48 of the 61 requests for pensions.82
Another of her secretaries’ functions was to dispense her largesse as Catherine allocated funds from the Closet and other sources to favoured friends and advisers. As a sop for Zubov’s inexorable rise, Bezborodko received 50,000 roubles from the postal taxes on New Year’s Day 1795, with a pension of 10,000. On 18 April, another 50,000 was sent to Suvorov in Warsaw. (When he stayed at the Tauride Palace later in the year, wandering about in various states of undress, the empress thought him ‘a very strange individual. He is very erudite, and naturally very talented, but infinitely eccentric, in ways which do him no good.’) There were the customary Easter presents for courtiers and servants, mostly in the form of new uniforms and dresses at a cost of 21,900 roubles (by 1796, the price had risen to 25,300 roubles). Property had always been one of the empress’s greatest gifts. In January, she bought Count Osterman’s house on Millionnaya for 150,000 roubles and gave it to Prince Repnin; in April she paid 160,000 roubles for Andrey Shuvalov’s house on the Moika and presented it to Alexandra Branicka, furnished and fitted out with new mirrors from Potëmkin’s glassworks. Foreign dignitaries were given more intricate treasures. In July she sent a snuffbox with her portrait on it, valued at 11,656 roubles, to Prime Minister Pitt; the Austrian foreign minister Baron Thugut received another worth 14,000 roubles in September. Aleksey Orlov had been sent a more personalised gift in July: ‘I would have put in it snuff from tobacco grown in my own garden, for I take no other, but I was worried that it would dry out on the journey.’ Meanwhile she had paid for the transport of a Herschel telescope, presented to her by George III, and given another 3229 roubles to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod to whom she had first been introduced on the Volga cruise in 1767. Fëdor Shubin received 3000 roubles for a waxwork of Joseph II. 83
For an ageing empress, the length and frequency of Orthodox services was an increasing irritation, especially in Lent when she might spend up to eight hours a day in the palace chapel.84 The Church nevertheless had its uses as a bastion against revolutionary excess: ‘for my part,’ Catherine proclaimed tongue in cheek to Grimm in February 1794, ‘I propose that all the Protestant powers should embrace the Greek religion to preserve themselves against this irreligious, immoral, anarchical, evil and diabolical plague, the enemy of throne and altar. It is the sole apostolic and truly Christian [faith]’.85 In the circumstances, it was all the more important to continue to make lavish donations as a public expression of her religious commitment. In 1790, she commissioned two sets of liturgical plate from Iver Buch, the son of a Danish goldsmith who had worked in Russia since 1776. Each set was studded with diamonds from the treasury and ‘antique stones’ from her own collection in the Hermitage. While one was sent to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, the other was presented to the Trinity Cathedral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the annual celebrations on 30 August 1791.86 Further internal gilding there, costing over 24,000 roubles, was paid for by February 1795, and in May of that year she spent another 90,000 roubles on marble to rebuild the ageing Kazan Church.87
Although the upkeep of the palaces constituted another drain on the imperial purse—in June 1795, 68,193 roubles had to be set aside to repair General Bauer’s water-supply system at Tsarskoye Selo—Catherine was as usual more parsimonious with her own accommodation.88 The secretary with responsibility for the royal residences was Suvorov’s old comrade Peter Turchaninov, ‘a little slip of a man, and so addicted to bowing and scraping that he only seemed half as high as he was’.89 In preparation for the empress’s visit to Tsarskoye Selo after Easter 1795, he instructed the Court administration on 8 April to furnish the Chinese pagodas with curtains and leather chairs. Twelve days later came a characteristic amplification: ‘1) do not make fringes and tassels for the curtains; 2) only hang the smallest icons; 3) mirrors at 25 roubles each; 4) use old dressing-tables and commodes and buy only what cannot be supplied from these; 5) black leather chairs are much cheaper, on no account purchase any armchairs; 6) also use old stone wash-basins’. ‘Listen,’ Catherine once told Grimm, ‘the thing I like least in the world is to speak about finances.’ Still, she was anxious that the Court had been running a 2-million-rouble deficit on an annual turnover of 3 million since 1789. Caution even came through in the autumn preparations for Constantine’s wedding to Princess Juliana Henrietta of Sachsen-Coburg. The upper floor of the Marble Palace was to be furnished for the empress and several guests, but only ‘for the shortest possible time’ so that everything could be taken ‘back to where it belongs’. Even so, 118,528 roubles were set aside over the course of 1796 and 1797 to convert new Winter Palace apartments for the groom.90
Though Constantine’s wedding had to be postponed when the bride was struck down by toothache, it went ahead in February 1796 with all the customary banquets, balls and fir
eworks. ‘So far I am very well,’ Catherine reported to Grimm in the middle of the whirl, after being told that she seemed as merry as a lark: ‘and that is a very good compliment I have been given at the age of sixty-seven’.91 Alexander had already married the fourteen-year-old Princess Louise of Baden-Durlach in September 1793 (‘everyone said that it was two angels who were betrothed’).92 The empress had always revelled in the preparations for such nuptials, and these were especially important as they seemed to presage a happy and glorious future for the two boys she had brought up as her own. Other family news was less welcome. She scarcely troubled to conceal her disappointment when Maria Fëdorovna gave birth to another girl, Olga, on 11 July 1792. Fretting that a clutch of expensive grand duchesses would be left on the shelf, the empress resented everything from the costs of their upkeep (from jewels for the newborn child down to the single rouble given to each of the palace sentries) to the complications their birthdays and name days would bring to an over-crowded Court calendar. Even so, she was distraught when Olga died less than three years later. While teething, the child had ‘developed such a hunger that she wanted to eat all the time,’ Catherine explained to Grimm on 16 January 1795. ‘After sixteen weeks of suffering and a slow consumptive fever came 24 hours of terrible agony.’ Four days later, dressed in deep mourning, the empress braved the cold to travel to the funeral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, accompanied in her carriage by her two eldest granddaughters Alexandra and Yelena. Though it was greeted by rejoicings at Court, the birth on 7 January of a sixth granddaughter, Anna, was scant compensation.93 Not until her last grandchild, the future Nicholas I, came into the world on 25 June 1796, did the prospects for the dynasty seem to improve. ‘His brothers will prove to be dwarfs before this colossus,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm: ‘his hands are only a bit smaller than my own.’94
By then her own horizons were already shrinking. ‘I am old, too,’ she had confessed as she grieved for Potëmkin in October 1791.95 Six months later, Khrapovitsky found among her papers an undated will in her own hand, specifying various burial grounds depending on her place of death. Should it occur at Tsarskoye Selo, she wanted to be interred (alongside the unmentioned Alexander Lanskoy) in the cemetery at Sofia; if she died in St Petersburg, then she must be buried in the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Its Trinity Cathedral, as a later note made clear, had been ‘built by me’: there was no mention of the imperial necropolis at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, indelibly associated with Peter the Great. ‘Lay out my corpse dressed in white, with a golden crown on my head, and on it inscribe my Christian name. Mourning dress is to be worn for six months, and no longer: the shorter the better.’96 Increasingly conscious of the passage of time, she observed mordantly to Grimm in February 1794, the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Russia, that there were now barely a dozen people who could remember the event, one of whom was Lev Naryshkin, who denied it for fear of appearing aged, and another Ivan Shuvalov, ‘who scarcely leaves his house as a result of his decrepitude’.97 That same month, William Gould told John Parkinson that ‘though the empress looks very well when made up, she appears very much otherwise in dishabille, indeed with strong symptoms of old age’.98 In public, Catherine wore ‘a great deal of rouge, for she was still desirous to prevent the impressions of time from being visible on her face’.99 In the relative privacy of her own apartments, she received ambassadors in a simple white negligee, using spectacles and a magnifying glass for reading. Her hair was worn low, a simple old-fashioned style, with curls behind the ears.100 It was an image of vulnerability soon to be attacked by her Western detractors. In his controversial Secret Memoirs of Russia, published in Paris soon after her death, Charles Masson described the allegedly toothless empress as ‘fat to the point of deformity’, mocking her faith in a Greek client of Zubov, the piratical Colonel Lambro-Kochoni, who prescribed seawater for the ulcers that disfigured her legs.101
Though the infirmities of old age had done nothing to dull her mind—in addition to her memoirs, she was still at work on a history of Russia in the last years of her life—they made it harder for Catherine to cope with the stresses of Court ceremonial. The arrival in August 1796 of a 140-strong Swedish delegation was bound to take its toll. Led by the duke of Sudermania, the brother of the late Gustav III, the Swedes had come to secure the betrothal of the empress’s eldest granddaughter, Alexandra, to the uncrowned Gustav IV. All the magnificence of the Russian Court was laid out to impress the young king, but on 11 September, when the ceremony was due to take place, he refused to appear, objecting to Catherine’s insistence on a written guarantee that Alexandra would be allowed to practise the Orthodox faith in Lutheran Sweden. Whether or not the empress suffered the mild seizure rumoured by one contemporary, she was irritated and exhausted by such a public failure.102 Although she summoned the energy to celebrate the thirty-fourth anniversary of her coronation at a ball in the St George’s Hall of the Winter Palace, the throne room completed by Quarenghi in 1792, public appearances were now infrequent. At lunch in the Diamond Room on Friday 31 October, Arkady Morkov, the negotiator who had struggled in vain to satisfy the Swedes, sat beside companions of much longer standing. Catherine had known Ivan Shuvalov even before he became Elizabeth’s favourite in 1749; the Marshal of her Court, Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, had guarded her husband at Ropsha on the fateful night in 1762 when Peter III was assassinated; soon afterwards, the faithful Anna Protasova had joined the Court ladies at the behest of Aleksey Orlov (according to Countess Golovina, she was nicknamed ‘la reine’, because she was as dusky as the queen of Tahiti). Later that evening, these intimates were joined at the Hermitage by the empress’s grandsons and granddaughters, as the empress watched a French comedy incognito in the presence of her Court and the whole generalitet.103
That, it transpired, was the last entry in the Court journals for Catherine’s reign. The end, when it came, took everyone by surprise. On the morning of Wednesday 5 November, she settled down to her papers after her customary morning coffee. But when the duty chamberlain arrived sometime after nine, he found her palpitating body, barely conscious, on the floor of the neighbouring dressing room. Despite his efforts to revive her, she lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. Six men were required to lift her into the bedroom, where Dr Rogerson, having diagnosed a stroke, tried in vain to bring her round. Soon Catherine’s confessor was summoned; Metropolitan Gavriil arrived that afternoon. Tended by Protasova and Maria Perekusikhina, their sovereign was vomiting so much blood that it was only when the flow briefly abated that she could be given communion and anointed with holy oil. Count Nikolay Zubov was sent to Gatchina to fetch Grand Duke Paul, who had dreamed the night before of being visited by a mysterious, unknown force. Though he rushed to take charge at the Winter Palace, there was little he could do. Informed at dawn next morning that all hope was lost, he ordered that Catherine be given the last rites. Now he could only watch and wait as his mother’s pulse gradually faded. Not until a quarter to ten on the evening of 6 November 1796 did the most famous woman in Europe finally breathe her last.104
EPILOGUE
The Afterlife of an Empress
After thirty-four years on the throne, Catherine had become synonymous with Russian rule. Most of her subjects could remember no other monarch. Finding it impossible to imagine anyone else in her place, the Court was stunned by her unexpected demise. ‘No one knew what to do,’ admitted Platon Zubov’s dwarf amanuensis, Ivan Yakubovsky: ‘The mind could not grasp that this time had come.’1 It did not take them long to realise, however, that in an intensely personal monarchy such as the Russian empire, the accession of a new ruler could immediately signal a radical reversal of regime. By the time that shocked courtiers arrived at the Winter Palace on the morning after Catherine’s death, ‘the change was so great that it looked like nothing other than an enemy invasion’.2 All the empress’s ‘brilliance’ seemed to have vanished into thin air as her successor staged the first of the military parades that were to dominate li
fe at his Court. Not for nothing did the poet Derzhavin refer to Tsar Paul’s accession as an act of conquest: armed soldiers were everywhere. ‘The ease and tranquillity of the late Reign are lost with Her from whom they deriv’d,’ the British ambassador reported barely a fortnight after Catherine’s death. ‘A most severe and exact discipline is introduced into every department both civil and military, and this with such a degree of rigour, as has even absolutely chang’d the face of society.’3
The Russian succession in 1796 was in practice no more controversial than it had been in December 1761 on the death of Elizabeth. In accordance with Peter the Great’s succession law of 1722, Catherine had nominated her Russian-born son as her heir immediately after her coup. Although her growing dissatisfaction with Paul prompted her to investigate the history of the regulations governing the succession when she returned from the Crimea in 1787, and rumours circulated after 1791 that she intended to disinherit him in favour of her grandson Alexander, it seems unlikely that she would ever have taken such a fateful step. Alexander’s Swiss tutor claimed to have suffered ‘the two most unpleasant hours’ of his life at an audience in 1793, in which the empress, without raising the subject directly, apparently tried to persuade him to broach the idea with his pupil. Paul certainly lived in trepidation that his mother might disinherit him, and some historians believe that he found and destroyed a draft law of succession on the night of 6 November. Yet the circumstances of Catherine’s own accession surely ruled out any open discussion of the subject while she was alive. To issue a law of succession would have been to advertise her status as a usurper.4
