Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  "I couldn't bear the last hour of waiting for you," he told Johanna ingenuously. "I would have liked to harness myself to your sleigh and pull it along faster." His boyish effusiveness was encouraging. He stayed with Sophie and Johanna for several hours, while they waited in their rooms for the summons to meet the empress. Finally, late in the evening, it came. Armand Lestocq, the empress's physician and one of her most trusted political advisers, came to tell Johanna and Sophie that his mistress was at last ready to receive them.

  She met them at the entrance to her bedroom, a strikingly tall, heavy woman with a plumply beautiful face, bright blue eyes and a warm smile. Her auburn hair was elaborately arranged and sparkled with diamonds and a single long black feather; her gown, with a wide hoop skirt, shimmered with silver and gold lace. To the fourteen-year-old Sophie she was a vision of beauty and magnificence.

  The empress hastened to embrace Johanna, and looked critically, then approvingly, at Sophie. Vanity was among Empress Elizabeth's besetting sins, and she had chosen Sophie as a prospective bride for her heir in part because it was clear from Sophie's portraits that she would never be a beauty. Elizabeth needed to outshine those around her, she couldn't stand having other pretty women nearby. At thirty-four, she was as striking as ever, though very fleshy, but there were lines at the corners of her lively blue eyes and her pink cheeks had faded. She relied on cosmetics to restore her look of youth, and she had developed a sharp eye for potential rivals.

  The most beautiful woman at Elizabeth's court, Countess Lopukhin, had felt the wrath of the empress. Pink was Elizabeth's favorite color, and she had made it an unwritten rule of the court that she and she alone could wear it. The countess had dared to ignore this edict and had worn a pink gown. Indeed she had gone even further and copied the empress's hair style, adding a pink rose to her coiffure. Incensed, Elizabeth commanded the countess to kneel, and while the entire court watched, she cut the rose from her hair (and some of the hair with it), then slapped her smartly on both cheeks. She took the further vindictive step of banishing the countess's lover to Siberia, and hounded the countess herself, finally accusing her formally of plotting against the throne.

  Sophie, curtseying in her pink and silver gown, was ignorant of the story of Countess Lopukhin, yet she was aware that the empress was staring at her, she felt her scrutiny along with her affability. The empress was scrutinizing Johanna too, and suddenly she saw something in Johanna's face that made her rush from the room. When she returned sometime later it was evident that she had been crying. Johanna looked very much like her late brother Karl August, Elizabeth's long-dead fiance. Seeing Johanna brought back tender memories of Karl August, and the sentimental empress had been overcome.

  That evening Peter dined with Sophie and Johanna, and Sophie, listening to him talk, was astonished at how childlike he was. Though older than she was—he was to turn sixteen the following day—Peter still had the interests and passions of a ten-year-old. It was not just that he had led a sheltered, tethered life: Sophie had observed that for herself, and could make allowances for it. But beyond that, there was something essentially unformed about this very boyish young man, physically slight, with a thin chest and thick waist and underdeveloped muscles. Something essential to manliness had been left out of his makup, he chattered on about soldiers and uniforms and drill in a puerile way that Sophie found disconcerting. Still, he had a guileless charm and fair good looks, and everyone said that he was a young man of great promise. Distrusting her uniquely skeptical judgment, Sophie decided to be pleased with him.

  The rituals of Elizabeth's very large and grand court put a distance between the empress and the visitors from Zerbst. Sophie caught sight of Elizabeth only briefly as she walked briskly along the wide corridors or through the crowded reception rooms on her way to attend official functions. She was a gleaming icon, glimpsed from afar.

  Sophie began to find out more about her. That she was the daughter of the venerated Emperor Peter the Great she already knew. That Elizabeth owed her beauty to her mother, a peasant woman who had been Peter's second wife, she now found out, along with the fact that Elizabeth had been born out of wedlock. The empress's physical vigor was evident, as was her fondness for expensive finery and for unrestrained eating. She loved to ride and hunt, she wore her ladies out with her energetic stride and her fast gallop. She was capricious, moody, temperamental.

  Sophie knew that Elizabeth had not been educated or trained for rulership. Her father had not intended that either of his daughters should succeed him, and Elizabeth spent much of her childhood and young womanhood away from the court, living in the countryside and interesting herself in the lives of the peasants on the imperial estates. While her earthiness and hearty physicality were nurtured in this rural existence, her mind remained uncultivated, and though intelligent and shrewd, she was mentally lazy.

  Elizabeth had courage, certainly—and much boldness. When the throne passed to a distant relative of her father's, the infant known as Ivan VI, Elizabeth had allowed herself to be persuaded to seize it from him. Encouraged by a small circle of advisers, including her physician Lestocq, and being assured that she had the full approval of the French and Swedish courts, Elizabeth went to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Guards in Petersburg and appealed to them to back her in a coup. She put her fate in the guardsmen's hands—and they did not fail her. The infant Emperor Ivan was deposed and, with his parents and siblings, imprisoned.

  Young Ivan was still in prison, and Elizabeth continued to be apprehensive about him. So long as he lived he could be used by conspirators as the figurehead of a plot to depose her. Yet she could not bring herself to order the child's execution, opposed as she was to all judicial executions. As a result, she lived in fear, her nerves taut, a victim of insomnia. She was afraid to close her eyes, knowing that anyone, even one of her trusted servants, might betray her.

  Two years before Sophie's arrival in Russia one of the empress's manservants, Turchaninov, tried to assassinate her by placing a barrel of gunpowder under her bed. Luckily the deed was discovered and Turchaninov was imprisoned. Under torture he refused to name his accomplices, but some were eventually brought to light and punished—though not with execution, only maiming.

  The empress had no peace of mind. Not long after the discovery of the barrel of gunpowder some hotheaded young officers of the guard were overheard to threaten her and had to be exiled to Siberia. The court, Elizabeth knew only too well, was full of plotters and opportunists, servants whose loyalty could be bought and officials who could not be counted on. She ordered additional men recruited for the dread secret police and had all conversation at the palace monitored. People suspected of having divided loyalties were watched at all times. Yet vigilance alone could not prevent disaster, and the knowledge that her throne was far from secure continued to vex and plague the empress.

  And now there was another vexing problem: the succession.

  Elizabeth had decided, for reasons Sophie was never to discover, that she would not make a political marriage of the kind arranged for her in her teens. Instead, she made a secret morganatic marriage to the tall, dark, divinely handsome Alexei Razu-movsky, a Ukrainian whose extraordinary singing voice won him an appointment to the palace chapel. Razumovsky, whose father was a farmer and who as a youth had tended sheep on a rural hillside, did not try to dominate the empress; a soulful man with melting black eyes, he cared a great deal for music and dancing and his beautiful wife but was indifferent to politics. In marrying Razumovsky Elizabeth chose personal happiness over dynastic duty. She would bequeath her throne to her nephew Peter, and he and his children would carry on the line.

  Yet Peter was proving to be a disappointment. He looked puny and girlish. He offended people. His health was poor and his personality odd and disturbing. Elizabeth disliked him, and probably regretted having made him her heir. Worst of all, Peter seemed bent on rejecting, with contempt, every aspect of Russian culture. He spoke German and resisted learning Russ
ian. He despised Russian servants and surrounded himself with Germans and Swedes, preferring the company of his boyhood favorites, the valets Cramer and Roumberg. He had formally converted to Orthodox Christianity—indeed his becoming heir apparent was contingent on this—but he showed his disregard for the church at every opportunity, displaying scant reverence and laughing and joking during the long services conducted in the palace chapel and in the soaring, candlelit cathedrals of Moscow and Petersburg. This flamboyant irreverence was particularly displeasing to Elizabeth, who spent hours in prayer and was punctilious in her religious observances, regarding Orthodox worship as the foundation of a moral life.

  Peter was a disappointment—and a liability. With her necessary overconcern about the security of her throne, the empress was only too aware that the plotters and potential plotters around her looked on Peter and took heart. He was not winning the loyalty of any of the courtiers, and it was hard to imagine him growing into a commanding, feared ruler. He had no political skills and Elizabeth, whose own political astuteness was modest, was not teaching him how to acquire them. He continued to assert, to anyone who would listen, that he was a German and not a Russian and that German ways were in every respect superior to Russian ways. He offended the Russian soldiers by wearing the uniform of an officer in the Prussian army, and he thoroughly enjoyed their discomfiture, smiling and laughing at them until they all but bared their teeth and wanted to reach out to throttle him.

  The festivities at court for Peter's sixteenth birthday surpassed any splendor Sophie had ever witnessed. The sprawling wooden palace with its hundreds of rooms and thousands of servants was filled to overflowing with guests, all of them eager to see the princess imported from the West. They thronged the staircases and stood on chairs, the women's movements impeded by their wide hoop skirts, the long jewelled swords of the men a hazard in the crush.

  Johanna and Sophie made their appearance, a thousand eyes on them as they exited their apartments. The empress summoned Johanna, and Sophie was left waiting, displayed like a bijou in a jeweller's shop, scrutinized from all angles, whispered about and openly discussed. Eventually she too was summoned and made her way to Elizabeth's private rooms, nodding and smiling to all those who lined the corridors and galleries along her route.

  A gracious Elizabeth, elegant in a gown of dusky silk embroidered in silver, with jewels at her neck and waist, received Sophie and presented her with the ribbon and star of the Order of St. Catherine. Johanna too was invested with her ribbon and star and afterwards Elizabeth's chamberlain, the Prince of Homburg, paid Sophie a compliment on her grace and winning manners. She was glad to hear that she had been found pleasing "both to the empress and the nation." She had passed her test.

  Ordinarily talkative, she consciously restrained herself and said little. Yet the courtiers whispered to one another that she was highly intelligent and a brilliant conversationalist—convinced by their own expectations that it was so. Her smiles and nods had made a good impression on the courtiers, who, having expected her to be haughty and full of pride, were delighted at her warmth and affability. One of them remarked to her that she greeted the chancellor and the servant who was stoking the stove with the same degree of openness and respect.

  Lent began, the six-week period before Easter during which the church prescribed self-denial, penance and prayer. The empress set off on a pilgrimage to the Troitsky monastery forty-five miles outside of Moscow. She wanted Sophie to begin instruction in the Orthodox faith while she was gone.

  Sophie had known that a formal conversion would be required of her before she could marry Peter. She also knew that her father had been adamant in his opposition to her forsaking the Lutheran faith, and the knowledge of his opposition may have weighed on her. Before she left Zerbst he had given her a thick scholarly book setting out the differences between Lutheranism and other Christian theologies, along with a long list of instructions, repeatedly insisting on the importance of her maintaining the creed into which she had been born. As a child Sophie had associated religious teaching with anxiety and trauma, and she must have heard with some trepidation that Simon Todorsky, Archimandrite of the Orthodox church and sometime student in the German university of Halle, would be her instructor.

  Todorsky was a cultivated man and an intellectual. He was able to present theological concepts in a way that intrigued Sophie's agile mind and could answer her questions as Pastor Wagner never had been able to. Yet though she studied long and eagerly, Sophie was troubled by her change of religion. The lonely tearful evenings she had spent in Stettin, pondering the torments of hellfire, now came back to her, and led, when she was with people she trusted, to fresh floods of tears. Her father's letters, brought by courier along the frozen roads from Zerbst, added to her distress.

  "Do not take this difficulty lightly," he cautioned her. "Question yourself scrupulously to discover whether your heart is led by inspiration or whether perhaps, unawares, your conversion has been influenced by the approval of the empress and others in her service." Christian August reminded his daughter that God "searches the heart and our secret desires," and that nothing she might do could deceive him.

  Adjusting to a harsh new climate and to life at the imperial court, studying for her lessons with Todorsky, struggling to learn the unfamiliar Russian words of the creed, all the while trying to imagine herself married to the callow Peter all combined to strain Sophie's constitution. She became seriously ill.

  At first it was feared that she had come down with smallpox, which was frequently fatal, or else a grave disease of the lungs. The servants gossiped to one another that the Saxon ambassador had found a way to poison Sophie so that Peter would have to marry the Saxon Princess Marianne. The empress's Dutch physician Boerhave diagnosed pleurisy and recommended that Sophie be bled, but Johanna, mindful that her brother Karl August had been bled almost at once when he arrived in Russia seventeen years earlier and had died, was afraid that bloodletting would kill Sophie too. Johanna complained to Boerhave, who continued to insist that bleeding was the sovereign remedy. Sophie's blood was inflamed, he explained, as a result of the rigors of the rough journey and the terrible cold of the roads. Unless she was bled at once, she would die.

  Facing an impasse, Boerhave ordered ointments applied to Sophie's chest—Johanna did not complain about that, at least— and wrote to Lestocq, who was at the Troitsky Monastery with the empress. The princess would not survive long without bleeding, he said. Lestocq told Elizabeth, who immediately ended her devotions and rushed back to Moscow to deal with the emergency.

  She took charge, ordering the anxious Johanna to stand aside and taking Sophie in her arms while the surgeon pricked a vein in her foot and let several ounces of blood flow into a basin. Almost at once Sophie recovered consciousness, and looked up into the plump, concerned face of Empress Elizabeth. She was dimly aware of the others in the room, the doctors and officials, and Johanna, greatly upset and worried. But she soon lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  The surgeon continued to bleed his royal patient at frequent intervals, every six hours or so, and Johanna, whose hand-wringing and complaints became intolerable, was ordered to stay in her apartments. Days passed, a week, two weeks, and still Sophie lay in a stupor, hardly aware of anything save the murmuring of voices and the rustling of skirts. The empress came to sit by her every day, and began to feel maternal and possessive about her. It was like Elizabeth to want to monopolize people's attention and emotions, and during Sophie's illness she became jealously bonded to the girl she had chosen to marry her nephew. Stepping into Johanna's role, and wanting to supplant her, Elizabeth began to find excuses to blacken Johanna in her daughter's eyes, claiming that Johanna's opposition to having Sophie bled was a sign of her indifference and lack of affection. Relations between mother and daughter had never been smooth, Sophie had never felt greatly valued or loved. Now the empress was intervening to make them worse.

  Unconscious or at best semiconscious, unable to eat and growi
ng weaker by the day, Sophie lay in her sickbed, all but inert. A message was brought to her from her mother. Would she like to see a Lutheran pastor? No, she said faintly. She would see the archimandrite instead.

  Simon Todorsky brought the frail girl the comforts of the church, and the empress was pleased. Now if Sophie died, she would at least die having turned in her heart to the Orthodox faith.

  More days passed, and gradually, thanks to her innate robustness, Sophie began to recover. She coughed up quantities of pus, her fever gradually abated, and Boerhave and Lestocq began to smile.

  Easter was approaching, and Johanna, who had been consistently kept away from Sophie, made the miscalculation of asking Sophie for the length of brocade fabric her uncle had given her before leaving Zerbst so that she could have a new gown made from it for herself. Sophie, still convalescent, readily agreed. But when Elizabeth heard of the request she condemned Johanna as heartless and selfish, and ordered two lengths of more costly fabric in the same color sent to Sophie to replace her loss. Earlier, after Sophie's first bloodletting, the empress had sent her a pair of diamond earrings and a cluster of diamonds. She was demonstrating her love for Sophie in countless ways, while doing her best to stir up resentment against Johanna.

  As Sophie recovered she heard nothing but tales of petty quarrels and disputes, little animosities and slights that rippled through the court like a contagion. No one, it seemed, could be trusted to be free of intrigue; no words could be relied on, no act or gesture of kindness was what it seemed. Though the empress spread tales about Johanna's selfishness, she continued to smile at her in public and show her favors, sending her jewels, giving her a special and honored status in the midst of the other courtiers. And Johanna, for her part, while professing the utmost gratitude and loyalty to Elizabeth, was meeting with the Prussian and French ambassadors, corresponding with King Frederick, doing her utmost to be useful to the clique that intended to topple the chancellor Bestuzhev and his anti-Prussian policies. Spies and informers listened at keyholes, slipped in and out of private rooms, watched for secret letters and messages. All was reported to the empress, who bided her time.