In 1735, an Italian opera company arrived, featuring the celebrated singer Zanetta Farussi, the mother of Giacomo Casanova, who would, when grown up, visit St Petersburg during the reign of Catherine the Great. The following year another company, directed by the Sicilian composer Francesco Araja, performed his celebration of the power of love and hate, La forza dell’amore e dell’odio. Gaudy and increasingly embellished by mechanical marvels, the effects in these operas – like sugar in a multicoloured sweet – compensated for their lack of substance. The ballet interludes were an important ingredient and were choreographed by fellow Sicilian Antonio Rinaldi, who rapidly became the rival of the French choreographer and ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé. Under his stage name of Fusano, Rinaldi took over as director of the ballet school after Landé’s death and laid the foundations for the Italianate phase of Russian ballet. Anna’s passion for the dance made her a harsh critic. Like a severe ballet mistress, she took the habit of slapping performers if they did not please. Vasily Trediakovsky, the translator of La forza dell’amore e dell’odio, was rewarded ‘with a most gracious slap in the face’ after ‘reading verses for the tsaritsa, sitting by the fireplace’. One of Trediakovsky’s tasks was to write and read dirty poems to the empress.77
During Anna’s reign a 1,000-seat theatre was built to present operas – a good number of them written by Araja, who created the lavish production of Semiramide in 1737 to celebrate the empress’s forty-fourth birthday. The ‘large and lofty’ theatre was heated by eight ovens, and performances open to all but drunkards and those in working clothes were given twice a week. Anna sat in the middle of the parterre with the princesses, Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth Petrovna, on either side. Typically Princess Anna was observed with her hair curled, wearing ‘crimson velvet, embroidered richly’, while Elizabeth was decked in silver and gold.
Straight theatre with a lack of Russian material, and without the mechanical thrills of the operatic spectacles – was slightly less popular. Elizabeth Justice noted that there were ‘sometimes Dutch plays; but I think nobody would choose to see them twice’.78 However, at the court of Anna’s cousin, the crown princess Elizabeth on Tsaritsyn Field, the medium was used privately and politically. A drama written in 1735 by one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, Mavra Shepeleva, was critical of the empress.79 Elizabeth’s circle were, at that time, in their mid-twenties and they delighted in subversive drama, which acted as an emotional release. During the 1730s the crown princess felt far from secure. General Manstein records that ‘the Empress had a great mind’ to shut Elizabeth up in a convent and ‘deprive her of any hopes of ever ascending the throne of Russia’.80 The crown princess found her sojourns at Tsarskoe Selo – inherited from her mother, Catherine I unsettling. On one occasion she sent to Petersburg for ammunition because bandits were ‘roving and skulking to hurt me’.81 Under considerable strain, Elizabeth took refuge in drama, drinking and dance.
Among those enlisted in the Ukrainian Cossack choir established at Elizabeth’s court was a farmboy from Chernihiv, Alexei Rozum, who had been spotted by one of Anna’s courtiers singing in his village church. Alexei became a favourite of the sweet-voiced Elizabeth Petrovna and – perhaps – even her secret husband. Under the name of Alexei Razumovsky, he rose to the rank of general field marshal and resided in the Anichkov Palace. Surpassing even this rapid rise from rags to riches is the meteoric story of Alexei’s brother, Kyril. At sixteen he was brought to court and despatched to study at the University of Gottingen for two years, before returning to be appointed President of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg at the age of eighteen. He then went on to become the Hetman of the Ukraine by the age of twenty-two.82 If St Petersburg transfigured an obscure delta, it also transformed many lives.
In the summers of 1736 and 1737 large fires raged through the central part of the city near the Admiralty. Behind the stone edifices lining the banks of the canals and rivers, ramshackle wooden houses crammed too close together provided dangerous tinder. In August 1736, the new British Consul, Claudius Rondeau, counted 1,000 houses ‘consumed to ashes’.83 The suspected cause of the fire was arson and, as a result, a woman was beheaded and two men were burned to death – rather slowly, as the wind that day was wayward.84 In the fires of June 1737 the Millionnaya, where some of the grandest houses stood, the Palace Embankment and the palace of the crown princess Elizabeth were touched, while hundreds of lesser buildings were completely destroyed.85 The upshot of these conflagrations was the creation, in 1737, of a Commission for Construction, set up under Peter Eropkin. It established five administrative areas in the city, regulated building and planned an ordered expansion of the left bank of the Neva – an important departure from the Trezzini/Le Blond way of thinking, which had centred the capital on the Peter and Paul Fortress and Vasilevsky Island. By focusing on the mainland instead of the islands, Eropkin made for limitless expansion along three avenues radiating from the Admiralty.
Among the young men whom Peter the Great had despatched to Europe to learn their profession, Eropkin had returned – after seven years in Italy studying the villas of Andrea Palladio – to become the architect of this definitive phase of St Petersburg’s expansion. Eropkin worked with Mikhail Zemtsov, Ivan Korobov-a Dutch-educated architect employed at the Admiralty – and Domenico Trezzini’s relative, Pietro Antonio Trezzini. Under Eropkin, they created a masterpiece of urban planning: three diverging avenues – Nevsky, Gorokhovaya and Vosnezensky – connected by a succession of semicircular streets.86 Although few architectural landmarks remain from Anna’s reign, the creation of this street plan, fanning out from the Admiralty, marks the main axes of the central city as it stands today. Rapidly constructed unbroken façades lined these avenues, along which the empress loved to race in wintertime. For others, speed restrictions were introduced.
The first stretch of Petersburg’s central prospekt, the Great Perspective Road, already existed, paved by Swedish prisoners and hung with lights along its short length. With their ambitious plans to enlarge the city, the Commission for Construction extended this prospekt all the way to the still-unfinished Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Although he was focused on Europe, Peter the Great did not neglect the memory of great Russians, especially when he perceived similarities between a historical figure and himself. Such was the case with Alexander Nevsky. Both men were accomplished generals, and both raised Russia to a new position of importance. It is therefore not surprising that, as early as 1704, Peter promoted the cult of Nevsky and that – in July 1710 – he had founded the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in honour of the man who had beaten the Swedes in 1240 and the Teutonic Knights in the celebrated battle on the frozen Lake Chudskoe in 1242. Peter brought the general’s remains from Vladimir to the new monastery. After Eropkin’s extension of the thoroughfare in 1738, the Great Perspective Road was renamed the Nevsky Prospekt in honour of the venerated general.
Eropkin’s three diverging thoroughfares, the Nevsky, Gorokhovaya and Vosnezensky, fanning out from the Admiralty.
If Eropkin’s greatest contribution to the future of St Petersburg was the result of fire, then his most bizarre commission involved ice. The puffy-faced, barrel-stomached empress could be particularly spiteful. When Prince Mikhail Golitsyn married a non-Orthodox Italian woman, Anna was furious and made Golitsyn – who held the rank of lieutenant – her jester. The Italian bride died shortly after the marriage, and the empress thought it just and funny to force the widowed Golitsyn to marry one of her servants, a shrunken, hunchbacked old lady, Avdotya Buzheninova, whose ugliness frightened even the priests. When Avdotya confessed to Anna that life without a husband was like a hard frost, she planted an idea.
February 1740 was registering a drastic cold rarely seen in Petersburg, and the empress decided to construct a mansion out of ice on the banks of the Neva between the Winter Palace and the Admiralty. The luckless newly-weds would spend their wedding night in a baroque igloo. Throughout each winter the poor were routinely employed to break the ri
ver ice in order to obtain water. Now they were cutting blocks for artisans to sculpt an elaborate palace, designed by Eropkin. The sixty-metre-long, six-metrewide, six-and-a-half-metre-high structure was held together by water which froze as it was poured between the blocks of ice. The edifice was decorated by an ice balustrade at ground level and by a gallery with statue-capped columns of ice on the roof. Its windows were ornamental, their frames painted in mock green marble. Except for a few real cards frozen into a table, everything inside was ice: ice beds, ice blankets, ice goblets, even ice candles that burned a reservoir of oil briefly, but not long enough to cause them to melt. Outside, an ice cannon capable of shooting ice cannonballs guarded the structure. An ice dolphin and ice elephant spouted water during the day and burned oil at night.87 The bride and groom – in a cage mounted on an elephant – processed at the head of the 300 wedding guests, summoned from all corners of Russia. Some were in sledges drawn by reindeer, goats or hogs, others mounted on camels. The participants paused for a meal and a ball at the Duke of Courland’s old riding stables, then the party moved on to the Ice Palace, where the bride and groom spent the night almost perishing on their frigid marriage bed.88
The whole prank was typical of autocratic excess. But Anna – like those who came before and followed after – was guilty of a worse kind of excess. In 1740, Eropkin was implicated in a plot against Anna’s lover, Count Biron. Organised by Eropkin’s brother-in-law, Ober-Jägermeister Artemy Volynsky, the plotters were caught and severely punished. Volynsky had his hand cut off, followed by his head. Eropkin – whose work on St Petersburg much pleased the empress – was also beheaded, while the other conspirators were knouted, tortured and exiled to Siberia.89
As Anna’s reign progressed, arrests and executions increased. Her ‘natural inclination . . . to tattling and inquisitiveness’ kept her well informed, and in dealing with threats to the state, the empress made good use of gossip. To help her with ‘dirty’ political work, she used the President of the College of War, General Burkhard Christoph von Miinnich. This general, ‘more feared than loved by the troops’,90 was a practised dissembler. Mrs Rondeau described him as ‘one of the most gallant men of this court’, who, when he was ‘amongst the ladies . . . affects a gaiety and tenderness that are to me very disagreeable’. Seen ‘in the papers as slaying his thousands and ten thousands, how would you be surprised to see him hearken to your voice with dying eyes, on a sudden snatch your hand and kiss it in raptures! But how much more would you be surprised to find he thought it necessary to do so to all women!’91
Anna created the Chancellery for Secret Investigatory Affairs in April 1731 under Andrei Ushakov, a man who had cut his teeth in Peter the Great’s secret police. 92 Ushakov’s department was a terrifying place, with racks for torture and red-hot irons to coax stubborn suspects. Tongue-cutting was the punishment for those who spread malicious gossip and was much used at a time when ‘insulting the Imperial Person of Her Majesty’ constituted a major offence. If anyone was suspected of antipathy towards Anna, or was heard tattling about the exact nature of the relations between the empress and her married favourite, Count Biron, they would be detained by Ushakov. When someone informed against a person, they too were arrested.93’ If the suspect didn’t crack, then the informer was probed, and so the methods of Ushakov’s department became the terrible prototype for the Cheka and the KGB. Under Anna – who enjoyed sharing all the dirt that Ushakov collected – the eyes, ears and paranoid misgivings of a police state were already on the streets of St Petersburg.
In August 1740, the empress’s niece, Anna Leopoldovna, gave birth to a boy called Ivan. The twenty-two-year-old mother, granddaughter of Ivan V, had lived in the empress’s palace until her 1739 marriage to Anthony Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Unprepossessing, bashful and – according to Münnich – ‘naturally lazy’, Anna Leopoldovna lacked the dynamism to rule. But she offered a way for the empress to block Peter and Catherine’s popular daughter, Elizabeth, and secure the Romanov line through the descendants of her father, Ivan V. The birth of Anna Leopoldovna’s son was timely, as Anna’s health was failing. She had gout. She was fainting frequently and spitting blood.
In mid-October, a huge and exotic procession of 4,000 foreigners appeared on the streets of Petersburg. There were camels and mules bearing gifts, along with fourteen elephants to be presented to the newborn, Ivan. This was the embassy of the Shah Nadir, who had conquered India and wished to woo the crown princess, Elizabeth. The industrious Ostermann, one of the power-sharers at court, refused to allow her to meet the ambassador, and Elizabeth – furious to be treated thus by a man whom her father had raised from the position of scribe – vowed revenge.
Several days later – having nominated the baby Ivan as her successor, and her favourite, Count Biron, as regent – Empress Anna died. Charles Cottrell, son of the Master of Ceremonies to George III, was in St Petersburg at the time of the empress’s funeral and adds an eerie footnote to the life of a woman renowned for her ghoulish curiosity. Anna lay ‘in state a month but not having been rightly embalmed was almost fallen to pieces before her burial’.94
In November, Münnich – in a bid for power – marched on the Summer Palace with his adjutant, Manstein, and eighty soldiers. When they entered the regent’s bedchamber, Biron tried to hide under the bed, but Manstein grabbed the bellowing man, gagged him, bound his hands and dragged him off. When brought before the notorious Ushakov, Count Biron was exiled to Siberia and Anna Leopoldovna became regent.
About St Petersburg during the reign of Ivan VI there is almost nothing to say, as he acceded to the throne at just over two months old and was deposed when he was three months past his first birthday. His mother – a gloomy regent – had little appetite for ruling and spent all her time with her maid of honour, Julia Mengden. According to Edward Finch, the English minister plenipotentiary who played cards at court, ‘Anna loved Julia as passionately as only a man could love a woman’, noting that ‘they often slept together’. When, on 25 November 1741, Crown Princess Elizabeth staged a coup, Mengden was in Anna Leopoldovna’s bed. Johann Friedrich Ostermann and Miinnich had been outmanoeuvred by the group supporting Elizabeth. Exiling Ostermann and the entire Brunswick family, the drink-loving, man-iser Elizabeth Petrovna returned the succession to the descendants of Peter the Great.95
Despite the excesses and indolence of her court, city life had been calmer and cleaner under Empress Anna. More streets were paved, more river banks reinforced. With expansion to the south, new markets had opened in different parts of the city – including a central market between the Fontanka River and the Catherine Canal. Those able to work were kicked out of almshouses, to make way for the truly destitute.96 However, the secretary of the Prussian Legation observed that ‘no advantage has been obtained by the country from St Petersburg which would not have been had in far greater measure at Moscow, had the government been left there’.97 Furthermore, appraisal of the country as a whole was far from positive. Edward Finch said of Russia in mid-1741, ‘I must confess that I can yet see it in no other light, than as a rough model of something meant to be perfected hereafter.’ But it is remarkable to observe how a court and a city had so rapidly shaped their particular approximation of European style and taste. When Anna died, she may have left no heir, but the city to which she returned the court had been reborn.
5
DANCING, LOVE-MAKING, DRINK
1741–61
Her father, Peter the Great, intended her as a bride for the French king, Louis XV. To that end, Elizabeth had a French dancing master, learned European languages and was painted stark-naked as ‘a young Venus’ by Louis Caravaque.1 According to the Spanish envoy, at eighteen she was a beauty ‘such as I have rarely seen . . . exceptionally lively .. . gracious and very flirtatious’.2 These were qualities that made Elizabeth popular, upset the Empress Anna and fueled gossip: she took lovers, held orgies, drank like her parents – qualities and behaviour that ensured informers were plant
ed, while the police hired cabmen to watch the crown princess’s palace.
Elizabeth’s rollicking lifestyle made her the darling of the regiments. When she seized power with a pre-dawn coup in 1741, she was dressed in the uniform of the Preobrazhensky Guards. The soldiers were glad to be ousting the foreigners who wielded so much power – Münnich, Ostermann and von Löwenwolde.3 But despite their removal and an upsurge of nationalism, St Petersburg was stimulated by unending and ever more elaborate European influences during Elizabeth’s twenty-year reign. The arts thrived, and the city – animated by a newly sensual style of architecture – grew.
As the annual thaw liberated winter’s stranglehold on the Neva delta, foreign ships arrived and visitors came ashore to marvel at the ravishing young city that spread before them. Elizabeth’s chief architect, Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, was creating a series of elaborate baroque buildings that answered her desire for vivacious ornamentation to animate the practical, rectilinear city established by her father and developed by Eropkin under Anna. When Elizabeth returned to St Petersburg after her Moscow coronation on 25 April 1742, her triumphal entry – grander than Anna’s a decade earlier – consolidated her usurpation of the throne. The daughter of Peter the Great was claiming Peter’s burg.
While a legitimate male tsar lived, Elizabeth’s rule was illegal and there were plots to assassinate her and put Ivan VI on the throne. A conspiracy by a palace servant and two members of the guards was uncovered. They were knouted, their nostrils were slit, the leader’s tongue was cut out and they were exiled to Siberia.4 Although Elizabeth abolished capital punishment, torture was still used. Two society ladies involved in a 1743 plot to crown Ivan were also knouted and had their tongues branded. Another conspiracy that same year resulted in the knouting and exiling of four members of the Lopukhins, the family of Peter the Great’s first wife. Ushakov – who remained in place as Head of the Secret Chancellery – was kept busy, as Elizabeth’s position remained precarious5
St. Petersburg Page 10
