Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Even if Peter didn’t love her, so be it. Nothing would deter Sophia from her destiny. The young couple was formally betrothed on June 29, 1744, in a formal ritual at the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Assumption, where Russian tsars had been crowned for generations. The day before, Sophia was formally converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and given the new name of Catherine, as well as the title of Imperial Highness and the rank of grand duchess. The former German princess had made a significant step on her way to becoming a Russian royal. Marriage, however, would have to wait.

  Peter was still sexually underdeveloped at the age of sixteen and incapable of siring an heir. Thus Elizabeth was urged to postpone his nuptials in order to give the grand duke more time to mature. Though impatient to secure the dynasty, the empress reluctantly agreed. Then, later that year, came disaster. Following a bout with the measles, the heir to the throne was stricken with the far more dangerous smallpox. Unexpectedly, given the risks to her life and, even more important, to her looks, it was the empress who lovingly tended to her nephew as he suffered the near-lethal effects of the contagious disease. And though Peter survived, he emerged from his sickbed looking almost monstrous. Catherine was barely able to contain her revulsion after seeing her future husband in this condition for the first time.

  “The sight of the Grand Duke filled me almost with terror,” she wrote; “he had grown very much in stature but his face was unrecognizable—his features were coarser, his face was still swollen, and one could see beyond doubt that he would always remain deeply pockmarked. His head had been shaven and he wore an immense wig which disfigured him all the more. He came up to me and asked whether I found it difficult to recognize him. I stammered a few wishes for his convalescence, but in fact he had become horrid to look at.”

  Some historians attribute Peter’s subsequent treatment of Catherine to her reflexive recoil at seeing him in such a state, but given his disposition, as well as his previously demonstrated attitude toward her, it seems inevitable that he would have made a vile spouse either way. Still, a deeper chasm did develop in the aftermath of the grand duke’s illness. “This was the end of all the Grand Duke’s attentions for me,” Catherine wrote. “I understood perfectly how little he wanted to see me and how little affection he bore me.”

  It was in the thick of this frost that the empress, eager as ever, set a wedding date for the toxic couple. As she bustled about planning the festivities, which she insisted must be more extravagant than any ever seen in Europe, Elizabeth was blithely indifferent to the hostility her nephew had for his intended. She was also unaware of his woeful ignorance about the opposite sex, nor of the physical limitations that would make fully appreciating a woman almost impossible for him. Sure, Peter vaguely understood the mechanics of sex, relayed to him in the crudest way possible by his drinking pals, but that was the extent of it. And as for intimacy, the grand duke could never be taught that. In fact, about the only thing Peter grasped about marriage was what one of the servants relayed to him: that a husband should keep his wife submissive, and, if necessary, slap her around a bit should she forget her place. It was this lesson that Peter, “about as discreet as a cannonball,” delighted in passing along to Catherine.

  Although her love life would later become legendary (see Chapter 8), Catherine was, at the time, actually more naïve about sex than Peter was. Several weeks before the wedding, the sixteen-year-old went to her mother for guidance about the opposite sex and was severely scolded for her sauciness.

  Catherine may have been kept ignorant about what would actually happen when she went to bed with Peter, but she was wise enough to sense what was in store for her otherwise. “As my wedding day came nearer, I became more melancholy, and very often I would weep without quite knowing why,” she wrote. “My heart predicted little happiness; ambition alone sustained me. In my inmost soul there was something that never for a single moment allowed me to doubt that, sooner or later, I would become the sovereign Empress of Russia in my own right.”

  On August 21, 1745, all of Empress Elizabeth’s meticulous planning came to fruition in a splendid wedding ceremony. “Of all the pompous shows in Russia,” reported one English observer, “the appearance made upon the [grand] duke’s marriage, in clothes and equipage, was the most magnificent.” Bride and groom were both dressed to dazzle, although the effort was wasted somewhat on Peter. “The sumptuous apparel only made him look more like a monkey,” as biographer Henri Troyat so artfully put it. It was all a glittering show that delighted the empress but disguised something essentially rotten. Then came the wedding night.

  Catherine was undressed by her ladies and put to bed. There she waited for two hours before Peter arrived, drunk, and declared how amused the servants would be to see them in bed together. She awoke the next morning still a virgin. And so she would remain for the next eight years.

  Her new husband had no interest in sleeping with her, nor, for that matter, was he capable. Though he certainly liked to crow about his prowess with other women, really all that interested the grossly immature grand duke was carousing with his low-level servants, playing with his toys, and indulging his obsession with all things military. There was no room for his wife, unless, of course, he was putting her through military drills. Stuck in this loveless rut, Catherine wrote, “I yawned and yawned with boredom.” She also came to a quick conclusion about Peter:

  I should have loved my new husband if only he had been willing or able to be in the least lovable, but in the very first days of my marriage I made some cruel reflections about him. I said to myself: “If you love that man, you will be the most wretched creature on earth; it is in your nature to want to be loved in return; that man scarcely even looks at you, practically all he talks about is dolls, and he pays more attention to any other woman than to you.”… This first impression, made on a heart of wax, remained, and I never got these reflections out of my head.

  In the midst of her lonely marriage, Catherine found comfort with the most unlikely of persons: the woman who berated her unmercifully and competed with her for attention at court: her mother. Yet Johanna was in disgrace and her days in Russia were numbered. Empress Elizabeth had allowed the woman she now despised to remain at court long enough to see her daughter married, but soon after the wedding Johanna was unceremoniously sent back to Germany. “At that time,” Catherine wrote, “I would have given much if I could have left the country with her.”

  Empress Elizabeth had for some time presented herself as a benevolent second mother to Catherine, lavishing expensive gifts upon her and tenderly nursing her during her illness. “My respect for the empress and my gratitude to her were extreme,” Catherine wrote. “And she used to say that she loved me almost more than the Grand Duke.” But Elizabeth was every bit as mercurial as her father had been, and, soon enough, Catherine was subjected to the darker, more capricious side of the empress.

  There were petty slights, like sending Catherine’s best friend away for no reason, or making her change her dress because she looked too pretty in it. The empress assaulted the girl she once seemed to adore for the debts she had accumulated, and when Catherine’s father died in 1747, Elizabeth ordered that she limit her mourning to a week, “because, after all, your father was not a king.” The empress’s capacity for cruelty now seemed boundless. “She did harm gratuitously and arbitrarily,” Catherine recalled, “without the shadow of reason.”

  Yet Elizabeth’s wrath wasn’t reserved just for Catherine. Peter shared in the abuse as well, and for much better reasons. “My nephew, Devil take him, is a monster!” she declared. On one occasion, when the empress found that the grand duke had secretly drilled a hole in a chamber wall to spy on her, she stormed into Peter’s apartment and, as Catherine wrote, “let fly at him with the most shocking insults and abuse, displaying as much contempt as anger. We were dumbfounded, stupefied and speechless, both of us, and, though this scene had nothing to do with me, it brought tears to my eyes.”

  Though she had pl
enty of reasons to scorn Peter, much of Elizabeth’s rancor was rooted in the couple’s persistent infertility—and for that she blamed Catherine. In one particularly nasty scene, the empress confronted the hapless grand duchess directly on the issue. “She said … that it was because of me that my marriage had not yet been consummated,” Catherine wrote. “She began to revile me, to ask me if it was from my mother that I had received the instructions which guided my conduct: she said that I was betraying her for the King of Prussia, that she knew all about my cunning tricks and double-dealing, that she knew everything.”

  And now the empress was in full fury. “I could see the moment coming when she would strike me,” Catherine wrote, “I knew that she beat her women, her servants and even her gentlemen-in-waiting sometimes when she was angry; I could not save myself by flight because I had my back against a door and she was directly in front of me.” The only option was abject humility, which seemed to appease Elizabeth’s wrath.

  Peter and Catherine’s unproductive marriage had serious consequences for both of them. The empress’s policy was to isolate the couple, which, in her mind, would give them the alone time they clearly needed to reproduce. And this corresponded well with the agenda of Elizabeth’s anti-Prussian chancellor, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, who was wary of the German-born pair and fiercely opposed their marriage in the first place. All of Peter and Catherine’s closest associates were gradually sent away, and a decree was issued governing the couple’s behavior.

  One person of distinction would watch over Peter to “correct certain unseemly habits of His Imperial Highness, such as … emptying the contents of his glass over the heads of those serving him at table, accosting those who have the honor to approach him with rude remarks and indecent jests and disfiguring himself in public by continually grimacing and contorting his limbs.” Considering the behavior described, Catherine’s ordered role in the marriage would seem near impossible: “that Her Imperial Highness, by her reasonable behavior, her wit and virtue, should inspire sincere love in His Imperial Highness and win his heart, so that there may be produced the heir so greatly desired for the Empire and the scion of our illustrious house.”

  To enforce the couple’s isolation, as well as to inspire them with their own fruitful marriage, a cousin of the empress, Maria Choglokova, and eventually her husband, Nicholas, were appointed as watchdogs. She was “uneducated, malicious, and full of self-interest,” as Catherine described Maria, while he was “an arrogant and brutal fool … stupid, conceited, malicious, pompous, secretive, and silent, with never a smile on his lips … an object of terror to everyone.” Together, the Choglokovs made life for Catherine and Peter a perpetual torment, with the added horror of forcing them closer together. For Catherine, that was the height of misery.

  “Never did two minds resemble each other less,” she wrote. “We had nothing in common in our tastes or ways of thinking.… There was no amusement, no conversation, no kindness or attention to help alleviate this boredom for me. My life became unbearable.”

  Peter became entirely dependent on his wife, even if he didn’t care for her. She was his sole confidante and playmate, a role Catherine found increasingly burdensome. “Often I was very bored by his visits, which would last for hours,” she wrote, “and even exhausted by them, for he never sat down, and I always had to walk up and down the room with him.… He walked quickly, taking long strides, so that it was hard for me to keep up with him and at the same time maintain a conversation about the most minute military details, a subject which he was always eager to talk about and upon which, once launched, he would hold forth interminably.”

  The marriage bed remained as inactive as ever, at least when it came to lovemaking. Peter filled it instead with his own childish diversions. “Often I laughed,” Catherine wrote, “but more often still I was exasperated and even made uncomfortable, the whole bed being covered and filled with dolls and toys, some of them quite heavy.” Even playing cards with her husband was an ordeal. “I would deliberately lose to avoid his tantrums.”

  One regrettable hobby Peter picked up during his enforced isolation was dog training, which, Catherine noted ruefully, was an unwelcome addition to his vain attempt to become a violinist—especially since he decided to keep the hounds in the apartments they shared. “So,” she wrote, “from 7 o’clock in the morning until late into the night, either the discordant sound which he drew very forcefully from the violin or the horrible barking and howling of the five or six dogs, which he thrashed throughout the rest of the day, continually grated on my core. I admit that I was driven half mad.… After the dogs I was the most miserable creature in the world.”

  The only relief Catherine found was in reading, which she pursued voraciously, and horseback riding, her “dominant passion.” But in 1751 she found a new, more enticing diversion in a charming young nobleman who would relieve her not only of her deep loneliness, but of her virginity as well. His name was Sergei Saltykov.

  Love was an alien feeling for Catherine: She had known little of it growing up, and had certainly not found it in her marriage. But that all changed when, after a year’s wooing, Saltykov finally managed to seduce her. He was “as handsome as a god,” Catherine wrote, “not lacking either in wit or in the sort of worldly knowledge, manners and savoir faire which one acquires in the best society and especially at court. He was twenty-six years old. All in all, by reason of his birth and his many other qualities, he was a distinguished gentleman.” He was also a rascal, a wily seducer who would eventually leave her devastated. “His chief interest in life was winning a lady’s heart, laying siege to her virtue and demolishing it,” wrote biographer Henri Troyat. Nevertheless, while the affair lasted, Catherine found true passion for the first time. She also found herself pregnant—a rather inconvenient state for a woman with a reputation to maintain and a husband who had not yet slept with her after eight years of marriage.

  Some historians believe Peter’s inability to have sex was due to an affliction of the penis known as phimosis, in which the foreskin is so tight that it causes extremely painful erections. The remedy is circumcision, and, according to the French diplomat Jean-Henri Castéra, it was Saltykov who, perhaps seeking insurance against any unwelcome potential paternity questions, convinced the grand duke to undergo the procedure. Whether or not Castéra’s account is accurate, it was around this time that Madame Choglokova, under pressure from the empress, arranged through one of Peter’s valets to have a young widow by the name of Madame Groot introduce the virginal grand duke to the carnal pleasures of which he had long been deprived. Now, either freed of his physical impediment or his inhibitions (perhaps both), Peter, at age twenty-five, could finally bed his wife. Not that either one of them particularly enjoyed the experience.

  While the grand duke was being initiated by Madame Groot, Catherine’s affair with Saltykov appeared to be receiving some kind of imperial sanction. It seemed abundantly evident that Empress Elizabeth would have her heir, no matter how Catherine managed to conceive him.

  After two miscarriages, Catherine was pregnant again early in 1754. But in April of that year Nicholas Choglokov died. It was quite a blow for Catherine, as her keeper had become far more humble and pliable, especially after the supposedly virtuous guardian had been caught having an affair. “He was dying just at a time when, after many years of trouble and pain, we had succeeded in making him not only less unkind and malicious, but even tractable,” Catherine wrote. “As for his wife, she was now sincerely attached to me, and she had changed from a harsh and spiteful guardian to a loyal friend.”

  Unfortunately, Madame Choglokova was dismissed after her husband’s death, and the vacancy left by the couple was filled by persons Catherine found far more formidable: Count Alexander Shuvalov and his wife. It was not just Shuvalov’s position as the head of the feared secret police that disconcerted Catherine, but the “convulsive movement” that sometimes distorted half his face. “It was astonishing,” she wrote, “how this man, with so hideous a
grimace, could have been chosen to be the constant companion of a pregnant young woman. Had I been delivered of a child having this same unfortunate tic, I think the Empress would have been greatly vexed.”

  As her pregnancy progressed, Catherine was becoming increasingly miserable. She was stuck with a ferocious new watchdog; a lover who, having conquered her, was growing increasingly distant; and, of course, a simpleton husband, who, though now sexually mature, nevertheless remained an emotionally disturbed child with a drinking problem. One day, Catherine walked into Peter’s room and found a rat hanging, “with all the formality of an execution,” she wrote, from a makeshift gallows. The rodent had committed treason, the grand duke explained, having devoured two of his toy soldiers made of starch. And there it would remain “for three days, as an example.”

  On October 1, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a son, Paul, the paternity of whom remains a mystery. Was he Saltykov’s child, or did Peter actually manage to impregnate his wife?*2 As far as the empress was concerned, the father was of no consequence. Neither was the mother, for that matter. Indeed, as soon as Catherine delivered the baby, Paul was whisked away by the triumphant Elizabeth, who intended to raise the boy herself. As for Catherine, Troyat wrote, “she was only a womb emptied of its contents. She was no longer of interest to anyone. In an instant her room was deserted.”

  Exhausted by her prolonged labor, Catherine was left alone on the mattress upon which she had given birth. Her pleas for fresh linen and something to drink went unanswered for hours. “I was dying of fatigue and thirst,” she wrote. “I had been in tears ever since the birth had taken place, particularly because I had been so cruelly abandoned.… Nobody worried about me.… At last they placed me in my own bed, and I saw no other living soul all that day, nor did anyone send to inquire after me. As for the Grand Duke, he did nothing but drink with anyone he could find, and the Empress busied herself with the child.” Catherine would not see her baby again for well over a month. And Saltykov, conveniently sent away on a diplomatic mission to Sweden (ironically to announce the birth of the boy who may have been his son), was gone for good.