St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  Having concluded a war with Turkey in 1739, Russia was, once again, fighting Sweden. At court, Elizabeth strove to economise. Silk was to be cut according to rank, and there was a limit on the amount of lace that was worn. Gold and silver were temporarily forbidden. Fireworks – increasingly sophisticated displays, emblazoning patriotic allegories against Petersburg’s night sky – were restricted to the New Year and the empress’s birthday and name-day.6 Yet Elizabeth’s craving for luxury and lavish display meant that restraint was soon abandoned as she spent excessively on the glorification of herself, her court and her city. St Petersburg became more ostentatious and more comfortable. Gone was the unruliness of previous decades, although there were still outbreaks of rowdy behaviour. To reward their help during her coup, Elizabeth promoted and ennobled an entire company of the grenadiers. According to General Manstein – who, as adjutant of the banished Miinnich, may not be the most unbiased witness – they ‘ran through all the dirtiest public-houses, got drunk and wallowed in the streets. They entered into the houses of the greatest noblemen, demanding money with threats, and took away, without ceremony, whatever they liked.’7 The company was promptly disciplined.

  When English philanthropist Jonas Hanway arrived in June 1743, he found St Petersburg ‘so open, airy, and regularly built in many places’8 However, the mansions that displayed the city to advantage were mere havens in a sea of crowded shacks. When a nobleman left the comfort of a court building, the precariousness of a makeshift, hand-to-mouth life was at the gate. At the limits of the city, sodden land defied the desire to expand. Yet Elizabeth continued the efforts of her predecessor to ameliorate the capital. Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s architectural frills and furbelows adorned buildings fit for a fun-loving empress. Son of the sculptor and architect Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who had been summoned to St Petersburg in 1716 by Peter the Great, Francesco was responsible for nearly all the major construction in the city and its environs during Elizabeth’s reign. He was undoubtedly a virtuoso, and his very name conjures up the most overblown excesses of the baroque style. The interiors of his palaces – through persistent patterning, mirroring and gilding – create a flowing, frolicsome effect that match the fluid grace of his monumental, yet ostentatious exteriors. Rastrelli’s froufrou grandeur captured the spirit of a tremendously feminine empress who wore masculinity as a badge of office. His extensive façades of the Winter Palace and at Tsarskoe Selo harnessed the delicacy of contemporary courtly dance to the rigour of a march. And if his effects appear to belong to a style of decoration that is not much valued today, it is perhaps in the rhythm of his repetitions that he can appeal to the modern eye. If gilt embellishment has been ruined for us by sham gold glued to cheap reproduction furniture, then the gilded arabesques of Rastrelli’s palaces are the real thing: the dancing indulgence of a spoilt court, a declaration of a newly enriched and empowered monarchy. Rastrelli’s Winter Palace – built between 1754 and 1762 – was the fourth version of that residence and the one which stands today. Its 250-metre-long façade overlooking the Neva is one of the abiding symbols of St Petersburg. With its turquoise-coloured walls punctuated by white pilasters and more than 2,000 windows, it was completed just after Elizabeth’s death, during the short reign of Peter III.

  Rastrelli’s repetitions – the façade at Tsarskoe Selo.

  Mikhail Zemtsov was commissioned to design the Anichkov Palace for Elizabeth’s favourite, Alexei Razumovsky. When Zemtsov died in 1743, Rastrelli took over the project. He remained relentlessly in demand throughout the 1740s and ’50s. In revolt against the flat façades of earlier Petersburg buildings, Rastrelli constructed the gracious, curving Vorontsov Palace for the chancellor, its interior spaces resounding with gold. He built the now-demolished Summer Palace and a mansion for Sergei Stroganov, whose salt-mine monopoly made him one of the richest men in Russia. Meanwhile, Rastrelli’s designs for buildings such as the church at Petersburg’s Smolny Convent and the independent chapel at Peterhof revealed his ability to blend native traditions – acquired while working in Kiev and Moscow – with his signature Italian baroque. The fusion of styles responded to Elizabeth’s desire to acknowledge Russia’s heritage.

  The Smolny Convent was begun in 1748 on the site of Peter the Great’s tar yard, where ‘smola’ was stored for rigging and caulking. Although named the New Resurrection Convent of the Virgin, the association with tar stuck and it became known as the ‘Smolny’. Inspired by Moscow’s Orthodox architecture, its central church was built in the shape of a Greek cross, surmounted with five onion-dome cupolas. A rectangular perimeter building housed cells and – in each of the four corners – there was a cupola-capped chapel. Savva Chevakinsky’s Maritime Cathedral of St Nicholas was likewise indebted to earlier Russian churches. It took nearly a decade to build and was finished two years before the Smolny, in 1762. In refusing to ignore Russia’s artistic heritage, St Petersburg was signalling a certain maturity.9

  Despite her desire to promote native architectural traditions, Elizabeth was ultimately dazzled by European style, and Rastrelli’s design for her palace at Tsarskoe Selo was a proclamation of Italian baroque extravagance. Completed in July 1756, it became Elizabeth’s principal residence while the Winter Palace was under construction. Its luminous and animated interiors created a splendidly theatrical milieu for masquerades and lavish receptions. The early twentieth-century artist Alexandre Benois noted: ‘from the first hall, there opened an endless enfilade of gilded and densely decorated rooms’. Reflection was vital to the titillation of this interior space and, in the Great Hall alone, there were 300 large mirrors. The French diplomat de le Messelier recalled the sublime moment when ‘the blinds were drawn and daylight suddenly was replaced by the brilliance of twelve hundred candles’, their flames multiplied in the reiterating mirrors. When an ‘orchestra of 80 musicians began to thunder . . . The doors suddenly opened wide and we saw a splendid throne, from which the Empress descended surrounded by her attendants.’10 Sheer autocratic opulence. The palace gardens with their amusements – the swings and Great Slide in the summer, ice hills in the winter – became a playground for the nobility. The winding garden paths, threading between the games and grand pavilions, extended the rococo rhythms of the palace out into nature.

  The colours used in Rastrelli’s interiors – pastel shades of light blue, turquoise and rose – were, Théophile Gautier observed, the very tints which shone in the sky above the city when the cold was ‘dry and the snow cracks under the feet like glass powder’.11 They were also found in the colours of court dresses, although Elizabeth herself preferred to wear white and silver and to stud her hair with diamonds, out-dazzling the jewelled snow of sunlit days. The empress adored clothes, craved accessories and had a pre-emptive monopoly on all the accoutrements of beauty that arrived in her capital. Ships offloading fabrics and dresses were not allowed to sell their wares publicly until Elizabeth had scrutinised the cargo.12 The empress bought wholesale and – by royal command – cheaply. The privilege of having anything she wanted became a habit of taking everything. She bought sixty-three pairs of dogs from the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, and found a mansion to house the hounds and their handlers. She had twenty-five wooden ‘rest’ palaces built along the route between St Petersburg and Moscow, some of which were used only once.13 She acquired a superabundance of lace, bijouterie, buckles and bolts of fabric – cascades of Indian cottons, satins, shot-silk taffetas, ribbed silks – mordant-dyed and gold-spotted. There were chintzes, brocades, damask moiré: hundreds of metres of the finest stuff. White Chinese silks, along with crimson and scarlet satins, came overland from Peking, as ever more opulent items were amassed to camouflage Elizabeth’s lack of substance as a ruler. Like some eighteenth-century Imelda Marcos, she owned several thousand pairs of shoes and trunks full of silk stockings. Despite the loss of some 4,000 dresses in a Moscow fire of 1747, Peter III discovered a further 15,000 dresses in the Summer Palace after Elizabeth’s death14 – impressive for a
n empress who spent a good deal of time in uniform.

  In Peter the Great’s day, Russian envoys to foreign courts had been ordered to bid for biological curiosities to display in the Kunstkammer. Elizabeth used her agents as fashion scouts to find and purchase the latest and the best. Like a star of the silver screen with an exclusive lighting cameraman, she controlled the hierarchy of beauty at court and would never allow others to be seen to equal advantage. The empress would think nothing of cutting ribbons from a lady’s hair or even savaging the hair itself, if it threatened to eclipse her. The Grand Duchess Catherine – young wife of Elizabeth’s nephew, Peter – noted that Elizabeth reduced the ladies of the court to tears when she commanded them to shave their heads and sent them, by way of compensation, badly made black perukes.15 Catherine’s attitude towards Elizabeth’s vanity was caustic. Informed that the empress ‘had forbidden the ladies to include in their finery many kinds of ribbon and lace’, she remarked that Elizabeth need not have bothered to tell her, as she never made ‘beauty or finery the source’ of her merit – ‘when one was gone, the other became ridiculous’.16’

  In 1753–4 alone, Elizabeth’s court spent 230,000 roubles on imported luxuries such as canes, fans and snuff boxes – Field Marshal Apraksin possessed a different jewelled box for each day of the year.’17 Gems were ‘much in use’, noted the Englishman John Richard, and the Russian court was the sole market for large blemished jewels, ‘as they regard more the size than the quality’.18 Similar sham and bluff were evident in the equipage of the minor nobility. The coach might be drawn by horses of different colours and driven by a coachman in peasant dress, yet three or four well-dressed footmen would dance attendance.19 Minor nobles struggled to keep up, while the richest dazzled with excess. Sergei Naryshkin wore a uniform embroidered with silver, gold and jewels; and it seemed as if the glittering contents of a large jewellery box had been shaken over Count Peter Sheremetev when he appeared at court. Even the liveries of the pages from the richest families were of cloth of gold. Given the peasants on the streets beyond the palace, itching and sore in coarse cloth and wrapped in folds of woollen stuffs to keep them alive, it is clear that Elizabeth’s court was a bubble. While the nobility tripped the light fantastic, the poor dwelt in the gloom of Petersburg’s damp and dismal air. Beyond the capital, small groups of peasants scattered through Elizabeth’s empire – serfs owned by their masters – rose up in arms against their inhuman treatment and the mismanagement of their lords. Dragoons were despatched to quash the disturbances.

  Allegory supported Elizabeth’s dubious claim to the throne, but – in many painted images – the empress stood alone, unsustained by the iconography that had been used to buttress Catherine I. Even in Louis Caravaque’s startlingly naked image of Elizabeth aged seven, she is seen without gods in attendance and is merely holding a miniature likeness of her father as proof of her identity. Intended to seduce the King of France, the young Elizabeth is seen against an ample ermine fur with its subliminally vaginal markings – a sexual message underscored by the cleft between her toes. In mature portraits, fashion created Elizabeth’s majesty. As she got older, the empress suffered from that eternal conspiracy against women: the falsehood that they lose their looks and should make every effort to compensate. A French diplomat noted that, after spending much time adjusting her appearance, the empress became angry with the mirror, ordered the removal of her headdress and accessories and postponed her engagement. Pauzié, the court jeweller, recalled that she ‘never retired earlier than six o’clock in the morning and slept until noon or later’.20 Like her parents, Elizabeth was an alcoholic, frequently drinking so much that she fainted and had to be cut out of her dress and corsets by her maids.21

  The drink helped her flee from the terror that stalked her. Fear of a coup or assassination kept Elizabeth awake at night and on the move. She constantly had locks changed and slept in different rooms. She would suddenly decide to leave Petersburg at a moment’s notice. Or she would suddenly depart from Peterhof with a carriage full of palace cleaners, or take supper with maids and lackeys. The English traveller John Richard observed that ‘Elizabeth was a person of amorous turn, and she indulged her passions without ceremony or restraint, nor was her choice always from the nobility, persons of very mean rank had sometimes the good fortune to please her.’ The empress took many lovers, and ‘foreign courts made a point of sending as their ambassadors, men, whose persons and address might assist their negotiations’ – among them the French envoy, the Marquis de la Chétardie. This ‘Blazing Star’ found Elizabeth ‘debonaire’, but he proved indiscreet. A letter was found in which the marquis wrote ‘in such unreserved terms, that he was directly recalled’.22 In fact, Chétardie’s crime was not only sexual swaggering, but also double-dealing diplomacy. He encouraged Turkey to attack Russia while the empress was preoccupied with Sweden. Another French diplomat, Jean-Louis Favier, noted Elizabeth’s ability to dissemble. The ‘secret folds’ of the empress’s heart remained ‘inaccessible even to the oldest and most experienced courtiers, with whom she is never so gracious as at the moment she is deciding their disgrace.’23 Subject to convulsions and fits of terror, Elizabeth was capricious and violent, sometimes beating her chambermaids and thus earning the nickname Khlop-baba, ‘the woman who beats people’. Her last-minute reprieve of Miinnich when he stood on the scaffold, and of Ostermann as his head lay on the block, also suggests a sadistic streak.24

  Elizabeth used the festivities at court to sound out visiting diplomats and keep tabs on changes to the European balance of power.25 After the victories of Frederick II of Prussia during the 1740-48 War of the Austrian Succession, Russia played an important role in urging France and Austria to become allies and restrain Prussian ambition. During the Seven Years War, which began with Frederick’s provocative attack against Saxony in 1756, the Russians won important victories against Prussia and thus – during Elizabeth’s twenty-year reign – her empire became established as a powerful diplomatic and military player in European politics.26 Some measure of this new importance is suggested by the fact that Great Britain began to spy on Russia. John Maddison, a collector of Russian books, was commanded by George III to learn Russian and, to that end, travelled to St Petersburg. When he returned home, he was assigned to the British Secret Office to intercept and translate letters and crack Russian ciphers.27

  The problems of internal government were not – as with her predecessor – of much interest to Elizabeth. After attending the Senate fifteen times in her first three years on the throne, she went only three more times during the remaining seventeen years of her reign. The British envoy to Russia, Lord Hyndford, complained bitterly of Elizabeth’s ‘backwardness in all sorts of business or anything that requires one moment’s thought or application’.28 The empress preferred the gossip of her confidantes, whom she employed in her own domestic intrigues. Stroganov wittily called one of them – the ageing and disreputable Elizabeth Ivanova – ‘Le ministère des affaires étranges’.29 For matters of state, Elizabeth was content to sustain the ideas and policies of her father, reminding the Senate that, during his reign, one of its most important tasks had been to collect as much revenue as possible.30 Ideas for modest reforms came from her inner circle of favourites, a group ranging from the handsome but uneducated to the shrewd and innovative. The sweet-voiced Cossack Alexei Razumovsky was unable to read or write and so he was made ‘Grand Master of the Hunt’. 31 During the summer months, Elizabeth hawked and hunted with him – riding fast and wild.

  During the 1740s, the vain and ostentatious Peter Shuvalov began his ascent. An enlightened thinker, Shuvalov tried unsuccessfully to persuade the empress to introduce ‘fundamental and permanent’ laws to protect her subjects, laws that would apply to the monarch and people alike – an attempt to transform autocracy into enlightened monarchy. Shuvalov increased import and export duties, abolished internal customs and switched from unworkable direct taxation to indirect ways of gaining revenue for the state by ta
xing salt and alcohol. In the process he made himself enormously wealthy from monopolies and franchises. When he died in 1762, he was so unpopular that people gathered to hurl insults at his funeral procession as it moved from his mansion on the Moika to the Nevsky Cloister. Others with access to the empress – courtiers such as Alexander Shuvalov, Roman Vorontsov, Ivan Chernyshev and Sergei Yaguzhinsky – were given huge enterprises on advantageous terms. The free labour of serfs, along with vast deposits of untapped natural resources, gave these men an oligarchic potential.32

  Under Elizabeth, theatre did not exist simply for the glittering nobility to be seen and admired while onstage the actors struggled on unheeded. Drama was taken seriously and, just as her father had fined residents for missing Sunday nautical excursions on the Neva, Elizabeth was capable of fining court ladies fifty roubles if they missed a performance. In the summer of 1751, an unusually small attendance at a French comedy prompted the empress to open up her theatres outside the court to suitably attired merchants and their wives. Thenceforth, a paying audience would help to fill St Petersburg’s growing number of playhouses. A new comedy theatre opened in 1743 on the site of former stables on the Nevsky Prospekt and remained active until it burned down six years later. Beside the temporary wooden Winter Palace – swiftly erected to serve while the site on the Neva was being rebuilt – a new opera house was constructed, while Rastrelli designed yet another theatre in the Summer Garden that opened in 1750.