Peter III lost what little intelligence he ever had. He shocked and offended everyone . . . I was sleeping peacefully at Peterhof at six in the morning of the 28th. Alexei Orlov came in very calmly and said, ‘All is ready for the proclamation, you must get up.’24
The conspirators proceeded to the Winter Palace, where the Senate and Synod were assembled along with 14,000 troops, while Peter – as Catherine informed Poniatowsky – ‘abdicated in perfect freedom at Oranienbaum’. Yet, even before that letter was written, ‘We Catherine II by the grace of God, Empress’, gave out the following statement:
The 7th day after our accession to the throne of all the Russias, we received information, that the late Emperor Peter III by means of a bloody accident in his hinder parts, commonly called piles, to which he had been formerly subject, obtained a most violent, griping, cholick . . . to our great regret and affliction we learned yesterday evening, that by the permission of the Almighty, the late Emperor departed this life.25
‘Bloody accident’? Allegedly without Catherine’s knowledge, Peter was strangled and poisoned by the Orlovs.
Having dealt with Peter in 1762, there was another skeleton in the closet. Ivan VI had been imprisoned at Schlüsselberg since 1756 and Catherine visited him when she took the throne. How great, she wrote, ‘was our surprise! When, besides a defect in his utterance, that was uneasy to himself, and rendered his discourse almost unintelligible to others, we observed in him a total privation of sense and reason.’26 She decided to leave him where he was. Two summers later, in 1764, when there was a plot to put him on the throne, Ivan was murdered.27 The court behaved as if nothing had happened – apart from arranging the suppression of a play written in Hamburg, Innocence Oppressed, or The Death of Ivan, Emperor of Russia.28 Yet usurpation would haunt Catherine throughout her reign, despite much support and soft words. The Senate – five years after her coup – pressed her to accept the titles ‘the Wise, the Great, and Mother of the Fatherland’. Catherine replied with characteristic wit and acumen, ‘only God is Wise; my progeny will appraise my greatness; as for the Mother of the Fatherland? I would rather say: I love you and want to be loved.’29
In Catherine’s devious, self-justifying and thrice-revised Memoirs the Russian court appears as a place of bickering and politicking. As grand duchess, she was constantly bowed at, bobbed at. Her statements were endlessly dissected by mischievous courtiers, and her every movement scrutinised by foreign diplomats. But while there were customs and ceremonies that could not be escaped, there was a marked change in the tone of the court when she took the throne. The excessive indulgence of Elizabeth’s reign was replaced by a measured grandeur and a tacit assertion of Catherine’s industry and devotion to the intellectual prosperity and administrative well-being of Russia. Her coronation may have outdone that of her predecessors, and her triumphal arrival in St Petersburg in 1763 may have been extravagant,30 but thenceforth there was a noticeable relaxation of pomp in Catherine’s court, though it remained ‘vast and colossal’.
The empress rose at six, lit her own fire and had a modest breakfast of toast and strong coffee mit schlag. She read and wrote till eight, when an adviser came to read her the news. After numerous court interviews, Catherine ate lunch.31 As she preferred fatty foods, gastronomes were reluctant guests. Then, after a little private time with her current favourite – an interval known to court gossips as the ‘Time of Mystery’ – the empress worked on diligently through the afternoon. One face of the commemorative medal struck to mark her accession showed Catherine in the double capacity of warrior and wise woman – a helmeted Minerva. The medal’s obverse showed the empress taking her crown from a kneeling figure representing St Petersburg.32 By 1770, secretly disparaging Peter the Great’s achievements, her own spectacular transformation of his city was taking on mythical status. She amassed a treasure trove of art and commissioned magnificent buildings. In a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Vasily Petrov – follower of Lomonosov and librarian to Catherine II evoked ‘miserable hovels’ being replaced by ‘the splendour of the city’. Virgil was talking about Dido’s triumph at Carthage. Petrov was talking about Dido and Catherine. The capital became the most visible manifestation of her greatness, as Catherine’s ‘splendour’ trumped Peter the Great’s ‘hovels’. The Cameo Service that Catherine ordered for her favourite, Grigory Potempkin, included a table decoration with a bust of the empress, again as Minerva, goddess of wisdom. For his part, Potempkin gave Catherine a service in which she was celebrated as Dido.33
Catherine’s disarming desire to bridge the gap between court and capital was visible in her habit of driving about St Petersburg after dark in an open sledge, virtually unattended.34 Subjects – if they were suitably dressed – were welcome to visit imperial parks. The Summer Garden was open to people from the upper levels of society, who could enjoy its tree-lined alleys and fountains and consume the non-alcoholic juices on sale.35 Townspeople were also invited to share in the celebrations of the court. Balls on public occasions staged ‘separate entertainments to different classes; to the first class of nobility, then the second, the military . . . and the merchants last’. Catherine was indefatigable. The French Ambassador, the Comte de Ségur, observed her flaming pink cheeks – the consequence of kissing the over-rouged faces of merchants’ wives.36’ When Casanova rented accommodation in the smart Millionnaya, his landlord gave him a ticket to a court reception – a masked ball for 5,000 people, which lasted no fewer than sixty hours. He was impressed by Russian court spectacles and marvelled at the huge amphitheatre designed by Antonio Rinaldi for a medieval joust in Palace Square, which took place in June and July 1766. It was opened by Russian Amazons – ladies from all the best families – in chariots.37 As the empress observed the pageant from the palace, spectators crowded into the amphitheatre or crouched on nearby rooftops. And on the occasion of an imperial marriage, a ‘cocagne’ was set up in the same square. It consisted of two reservoirs holding 36,000 litres of red and white wine, which fountained into huge basins. Above, scaffolding pyramids supported shelves laden with loaves ‘of bread, roasted fowls, geese, ducks, hams, &c.’ and ‘at the top of the pyramid, a whole roasted bullock’ covered with crimson damask, so that only its head and gilded horns were visible. Guarded by police until the moment the imperial family appeared on the balcony of the Winter Palace, the cordon surrounding the cocagne was then dropped. From that moment, the bullock’s head was targeted with food and the first person to hit home won a prize. Ammunition that missed its mark fell and bobbed in the wine until it was consumed, sodden with alcohol.38
In political terms, Catherine fell far short of her expressed desire to be an empress for the people. The nineteenth-century thinker Alexander Herzen noted sharply that ‘Russia and the people’ were absent from her Memoirs.39 But Catherine possessed the talent witnessed by numerous observers, including Casanova – for ‘pleasing by her geniality and her wit, and also by that exquisite tact which made one forget the awfulness of the sovereign in the gentleness of the woman’.40 Care replaced empty ostentation, as the maternal love of the empress for her subjects became the avowed measure of the new reign.
There was, nonetheless, a good deal of licentiousness at a court where liaisons were either politically motivated or mere sport. The Earl of Pembroke wrote in a letter from the capital that ‘the Narishkin girls are married ere this and fucking about Petersburg like rabbits’.41 The preference for intrigue and dalliance over tenderness and affection is recorded in the sensational and anonymously published memoirs of Charles François Philibert Masson: ‘Almost all the ladies of the Court kept men, with the title and office of favourites. I do not say lovers, for that would imply sentiment, while theirs was merely gross desire’.42 The visitor John Richard observed that circulating libraries, ‘those seminaries of gallantry’ were ‘as yet unknown here, nor are love letters the study of beaus or belles . . . In short, love seems here a passion of instinct.’43
To an extent, this was the case wit
h Catherine, who took an undetermined number of lovers – somewhere between twelve and fifty – all of whom were judiciously examined by her physician.44 Catherine was an exceptional woman in an exceptional position, and her cravings were perhaps driven by pressure as much as by desire. In flight from a loveless marriage, she indulged in the delights and anguishes of a succession of affairs. She was devastated by the infidelity of men such as Sergei Saltykov and Grigory Orlov, her lover for twelve years.45 In 1773, she began her brief but supremely important liaison with Grigory Potempkin, ten years her junior. Potempkin was more than a favourite, and Catherine relied on him until his death in 1791.46 Possibly her secret husband, the prince became viceroy of southern Russia and one of the country’s great military statesmen. The empress obviously enjoyed the intrigue of their affair: ‘Behave cleverly in public, and that way no one will know what we are thinking, I so enjoy being crafty!’47
Catherine wanted to improve the infrastructure of her capital and initiate architectural projects that would add to its majesty. She had early experience of the dangerous deficiencies of local building when, as a nineteen-year-old guest of Alexei Razumovsky at nearby Gostilitsa, she was almost killed. Lodged on the third floor of a wooden outbuilding, the grand duchess awoke to find the stone foundation blocks giving way and – as the building began to shake and totter – she was lifted to safety by a human chain of servants.48 Not so lucky were the twenty domestics and workers who were killed. After such a scare, Catherine energetically addressed the problem of building in the capital, with legislation and cash. Thirty thousand roubles were given to rebuild the hemp warehouse that was destroyed in the year before she took the throne.49 In December 1762, the Commission for the Masonry Construction of St Petersburg and Moscow was created, to make these cities more solid and habitable. At the outset of Catherine’s reign, wooden houses outnumbered masonry structures by nearly nine to one. By the time Catherine died, the ratio was just two to one, with the highest concentration of stone structures near the centre – close to the Winter Palace in the First Admiralty Quarter, where three- or four-storey structures were becoming common.
The canals and a large stretch of the Neva’s bank were clad in granite to help the city rise above the perpetual flooding. Eight vaulted bridges over the Fontanka replaced the previous wooden structures,50 but there was almost no building in the boggy lands to the north of the city or on the western end of Vasilevsky Island. As for the built-up eastern portion, the Scottish traveller Andrew Swinton found the canals, which still ran through the middle of some streets in the late 1780s, to be foul in the summer, just as they had been forty years earlier.51 As for the surrounding houses, those that had burned down in the great fire of 1736 had not been rebuilt – desolation compounded by another fire, which destroyed a further 140 houses on the island in May 1771. St Petersburg was still far from being the uninterrupted urban mass that we recognise as a city. There were many open spaces for kitchen gardens, and about 20,000 cows grazed in the capital.
Under Catherine, a number of new, intelligently situated factories were established and private ownership began to replace some state monopolies. Manufacturing processes that were highly flammable were sited on the outskirts, and tanneries were moved downriver so as not to further pollute the Neva. There were closures due to lack of funding, stock surplus and because Russian produce was considered inferior. The College of Medicine – which supervised apothecaries and hospitals – demanded that instruments be made of English or German steel. The city was controlled by such bodies: the College of Commerce monitored honesty and hygiene in the markets; the College of War supervised the sentry booths on street corners; and the Admiralty was responsible for that impossible task – flood prevention.52
A foundling home was set up in the capital in 1770. Corporal punishment was forbidden and, despite high rates of infant mortality, eyewitnesses testified to the fact that pupils of both sexes emerged with vastly increased prospects. France and England provided models for noble and charitable education, while the Austrian system became the model for a proposed national school system during the 1770s and ’80s, when Russia took its first tiny steps towards general education. Teachers were trained and textbooks produced, but the number of pupils remained low. In the capital, interest among the city’s artisans and minor officials – a group whose children would have most to gain from such an education – was slight. However, the boarding establishment for noble girls that Catherine established at the Smolny survived until the Revolution, and a sister school was attached to it for girls from the lower orders, who were provided with twelve years of lodging and education. The satirist and philanthropist Nikolai Novikov, a tireless publisher of abrasive magazines, launched one to help fund a charity school in the capital. Ironically, the school attracted more funding and ended up paying for the periodical53 – one of the many publications that enabled satirical voices to be heard for the first time in Russia. Remarkably, one such voice belonged to the empress herself. Catherine secretly supported, subsidised and even wrote for these fly-by-night journals, which were loosely modelled on Addison and Steele’s London Spectator. As a result of Catherine’s approval of private presses in January 1783, around 400 Russian-language books and periodicals were published each year – more than one-third of them by Novikov.54 During the early 1790s, in the wake of the French Revolution when written attacks on autocracy were less welcome, Novikov was incarcerated without trial and his presses shut down. But during the twenty-year heyday of Catherine’s ‘enlightenment’, intellectual renegades had a certain freedom to attack the injustices of Russian life and – being hotheaded young men – each other.55 However precariously, Grub Street had come to St Petersburg.
Apart from her mocking and subversive squibs, Catherine was a prodigious writer. Fluent in German, French and Russian, she compiled a secular Russian Primer for the Instruction of Youth, which became a best-seller. She was a tireless correspondent with some of the finest minds of the century, including Voltaire, Diderot and Baron von Grimm – editor of the French Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et politique – who became Catherine’s informant in Paris.56 Early on in her reign she funded the Society for the Translation of Foreign Books. Among the volumes published in Russian there was a spectacular absence of theology and a predominance of classics, English literature and works of political science, which were so important to Catherine’s avowed desire for reform. Russia’s first dictionary began to appear in 178857 – only three decades after Dr Johnson published his groundbreaking work in London.
Catherine’s intellectual sweep was wide, if not always profound. Like the thriving international port that was her capital, she was a channel through which the best of contemporary civilisation and culture came to Russia. Within two weeks of ascending the throne, the empress invited Denis Diderot to Petersburg to finish his great Encyclopédie. German writers such as Gotthold Lessing and Christian Geliert were widely read.58 Sheridan and Molière were performed. French, Italian and Scottish architects arrived. European paintings were bought in bulk, ideas and artefacts were amassed, and a growing network of connections abroad helped secure the men and masterpieces necessary to make the Russian capital great among the cities of the world. One significant early translation was Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s huge success, La Nouvelle Héloïse. In this epistolary novel the hero, Saint-Preux, writes to his alpine sweetheart about the frisson he experiences as he plunges into the bewildering spin of Paris. He becomes lost in a whirl of conflicting opinions, where ‘nothing is shocking because everyone is accustomed to everything’. He is disturbed by ‘all the things that strike’ him, yet finds that nothing holds his heart. He seeks something tangible, but finds only phantoms.59 It is telling that Heinrich von Storch, in his lengthy survey of St Petersburg at the end of Catherine’s reign, should talk about the Russian capital in terms clearly borrowed from Rousseau’s vision of Paris: ‘Even those unsettled characters who attach themselves to everything and adhere to nothing, who detest tod
ay what filled them with transports yesterday, who are pleased everywhere and no where – even these find their proper station here.’60 Both writers were describing the upsetting sensation of ‘modernity’. As with Paris, the speed, noise and challenge of modernity would rattle St Petersburg over the course of the next 150 years, as the driving energy of the city moved from the court to the street.
Diderot travelled to Petersburg in 1773. Alexei Naryshkin had met him while taking the waters in Aix-la-Chapelle and flattered the philosopher into sharing his carriage all the way to the Russian capital. It proved to be an unhappy visit. Diderot’s politics had become more radical, while Catherine’s monarchy had been challenged by rebellion. Nonetheless, daily meetings were scheduled for three in the afternoon, during which the empress and the Frenchman discussed literature, philosophy and economy as well as social and legal questions. Diderot was pushing ‘enlightenment’, but Catherine exercised – as Voltaire put it in a letter to the mathematician and physicist Jean le Rond d’Alembert – ‘the most despotic power on earth’. She was not about to relinquish one iota, on the urging of a dangerous French philosophe. To add to his ideological frustration, Diderot was out of sorts – a victim of the cold and the infected water of the Neva, host to the parasite Giardia lamblia, which has given cramps and diarrhoea to generations of the city’s visitors and inhabitants. No ambassador for French fashion, Diderot seemed uncomfortable at court balls in his single mean black suit, and became the butt of jokes. On one occasion he was approached and asked, ‘If a plus b to the power of n over z equals x – therefore God exists. Reply!’ Diderot declined.61
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