Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  For years Catherine had been turning over in her mind the riddle of how Russia ought to be governed. She had defined her political principles, with the help of Montesquieu. "I want the laws obeyed," she wrote in one of her notebooks several years before she became empress, "but I want no slaves. My general aim is to create happiness without all the whimsicality, eccentricity, and tyranny which destroy it." She wanted to set in place just laws, to enforce them fairly and humanely, to raise the state above faction and above the fallibility of the rulers. Rulers come and go, generations of subjects are born and die, she wrote, but a wisely constituted governing system goes on forever.

  To a large extent, that governing system, as Catherine envisioned it, must enshrine morality and counteract the primitive ferocity, greed and self-seeking inherent in mankind. Institutions exist to promote the primacy of reasonable relations among men, to foster moderation and toleration, above all to create a bastion against the excesses to which humanity's lower nature makes it prone.

  Such were the empress's lofty aims, formed to a large extent by her thoughtful reading but also by her observation of her predecessors' incapable rule. She was determined not to be capricious, as Elizabeth had been, or narcissistic, as Peter had been, or lazy and inconsistent, as both had been. Where they had vaunted themselves, she meant to vaunt the state itself, and to make it an instrument of progress. She would be the midwife of that progress, bringing to birth a reformed, enlightened Russia.

  Panin and his assistant Teplov drew up a document stating the aims of the new government. In it they made clear that henceforth there would be no favoritism, no individuals advanced to high office merely because the sovereign found them pleasing. The era of arbitrary rule was at an end, and a new era was beginning, in which established legal procedures would govern the exercise of power and the monarch would surround herself with professional advisers who would be her conscience, helping her to rein in her impulses so that she would never slip into tyranny.

  These high-minded aims would have been empty had Catherine not possessed the energy, thirst for goodness and fervor for betterment to carry them out. Without being a zealot, she was profoundly and intensely committed to her goals, and she had the patience, sanity and even-tempered steadiness of purpose needed to implement them. Her personal symbol was the bee, tirelessly flying from flower to flower, gathering whatever it could use; the bee appeared on her crest, with the inscription L'Utile, "The Useful."

  Her constant inspiration throughout these early days was Peter the Great, whose larger-than-life energy, visionary ambition and administrative ability she emulated. The great Peter's successors had been unworthy of him, but Catherine would not be. Among the things she carried with her everywhere was a snuffbox decorated with his portrait. It reminded her, she told her advisers, "to ask each moment, what would he have ordained, what would he have forbidden, what would he have done, if he were in my place?"

  Catherine felt the ghost of Peter the Great looking over her shoulder, weighing her actions, calling her to account. He had brought Russia into the sphere of European influence, reinvigorating her with his own dynamism and introducing fresh habits of mind, aggressive, active policies and forcefulness in effectuating change. He had challenged all that was static, passive and timeless in Russian culture, churning the old ways with the force of his own vitality and forward-looking plans. She hoped to continue his work—work that had virtually come to a halt during the reigns of his three far less capable successors.

  And Catherine meant to do more. Where Peter the Great had been preoccupied with importing the military skills and technological expertise of Western Europe, she would bring to Russia the invigorating breezes of European thought.

  She would import a valued freight of new ideas, bold assertions of human freedom, of emancipation from the deadweight of tradition. She would introduce to Russian intellectuals— admittedly a very small group, to be enlarged through widened education—the concepts of limited government, free-ranging religious thought, unhampered by centuries-old dogmas, rational challenges to superstitious folkways, fresh and creative approaches to learning. She would teach Russians to play with ideas, setting them against one another, weighing them not according to age or the dictates of accepted authority but according to their real merits, as determined by the collective judgments of discerning, educated minds. She would make the members of the Russian intelligentsia, insofar as she could, into copies of herself. And she would continue to model herself, as far as possible, in the likeness of Voltaire.

  Voltaire, the archpriest of European letters, was sixty-eight in the year that Catherine became empress. His works filled dozens of volumes, and included histories, plays, essays and criticism. Every well-read citizen of Christendom knew of his unrivaled reputation for combating ignorance, prejudice, inequality and oppression; for decades he had waged a one-man campaign against intolerance and clerical tyranny, and for free expression, his only weapon his pen, and the witty, trenchant, unsparing and devastating critiques he wrote with it.

  From his estate at Ferney on the Swiss border Voltaire reigned over literary Europe. Hundreds of admirers made the pilgrimage to visit him in person (some of them coming away disappointed, dismayed to find that their hero was a shabbily dressed, uncombed, cantankerous and eccentric old nobleman), thousands more wrote to him, and became part of his vast network of correspondents. Voltaire's letters in reply were much more than personal messages; they were treasured relics, passed eagerly from hand to hand, read out loud to those who could not read themselves. Some were published. Voltaire disseminated information and opinions on every significant issue of the day, and his opinions had influence in high places and low. What Voltaire thought and wrote mattered.

  Thus when Catherine began a correspondence with the patriarch of Ferney she had several goals in mind besides the obvious one of opening a dialogue with the man she called her "teacher." She knew that if she could gain his good opinion, the resulting positive notoriety might counteract the bad press she had received following her husband's death. She hoped that by interesting him in her efforts to bring about positive changes in Russia, she could give those changes wider publicity, and draw esteem to herself.

  Her initial letters to Voltaire (to which she signed the name of her secretary Pictet, though the letters' true authorship was an open secret) elicited no more than a lukewarm response, but Catherine was persistent, and soon she and her "teacher" were on good epistolary terms. She begged him to send her his most recent writings, and let him know that several of his plays were being presented at her court. She lauded him as having "combated the massed enemies of mankind: superstition, fanaticism, ignorance, intrigue, evil judges, and the abuse of power." She saluted him for having conquered the obstacles standing in the way of progress, and for showing the way to others.

  Voltaire, who had an abiding interest in Russia as a "new civilization," created by Peter the Great out of the murk and marshes of barbaric Slavdom, responded well to Catherine's sincere if opportunistic flattery. His response grew warmer when he learned that Catherine had invited his friend Diderot, author of the Encyclopedic, to come to Russia to resume publication of his great work. (The French government had banned the work, and Diderot's efforts to continue publication in secret had become increasingly fraught.) She also invited Diderot's erstwhile colleague D'Alembert to become her son's tutor.

  Convinced that the empress's dedication to progressive ideas was genuine, Voltaire became lavish in his praise of her, calling her "the brightest star of the north," and comparing her favorably to her illustrious predecessor Peter the Great. He was also inclined to overlook her lapse of morals in tolerating the elimination of her husband. ("I know that she is reproached with some trifles about her husband," he wrote to one of his correspondents, "but these are family affairs with which I do not meddle.") So much for regicide.

  Catherine had made a good beginning, building a foundation of political loyalties, making what use she could of existing i
nstitutions and planning to establish stronger ones, working to counteract the firestorm of condemnation that greeted her at the outset of her reign. She had set forth an ambitious and idealistic program for her government to follow. Above all she had demonstrated her capacity for strenuous, ceaseless labor.

  Empress Catherine II stood on the brink of an abyss, threatened by potential rebellion, provincial anarchy, soldierly hostility, and the constant menace of a palace revolution. Yet, calmly and surely, she forestalled disaster by carrying out her duties and acting as if all were well. She showered her supporters with tens of thousands of rubles as if her treasury were overflowing. She presided over her officials as if in charge of the best-run empire the world had ever seen. She planned confidently for the future as if no threat to the throne existed. And to set the seal of divine favor on the long and prosperous reign she envisioned, she made immediate plans for her coronation in the very heart of old Russia, the holy city of Moscow.

  Chapter Nineteen

  WHITE-STONED MOSCOW, THE GLOWING CITY THAT ROSE on its hilly eminence and loomed frostily over the surrounding forested countryside. Moscow, city of five hundred churches and five thousand gleaming golden domes, steeples, cupolas and crosses, each more rich with color than the next, the crosses linked one to another with bright chains of gilded metal. Moscow of the brilliant rooftops, scaled with red and green tiles, enameled in blue and silver, painted with gold stars, or a checkerboard of black and white squares. Crenelated Moscow, ringed by its six fortresslike monasteries and dominated by the towering splendor and magnificence of the Kremlin on its high hill.

  Moscow of the bells. From each of the sixteen hundred bell towers sounded the incessant clangor of dozens of huge and sonorous metal bells, their great throats pealing forth until the earth shook, drowning all conversation and driving newcomers to the city to cover their ears and pray for deliverance. They rang on Sundays and festival days without ceasing, all day and all night, and at other times to call worshipers to services, to warn of fires or other danger, to signal the beginning and end of the workday, and to mark the occasion of funerals or saints' days or simply in token of rejoicing. Whenever the population felt the menace of sickness or bad weather, or the hovering presence of evil, all the bells were rung together, their cacophonous stridor at once a plea to heaven and a ritual meant to affright the demons of bad fortune. Bells were magical, and Moscow had more of their magic than any other city in Christendom.

  Every visitor to the great city was deafened by its bells, and awed by its magnificence. Peasants bringing goods to the marketplaces crossed themselves when the outskirts of the city came into view, and saluted "Mother Moscow." European travelers approaching the city for the first time had their coachmen pause on the summit of the Sparrow Hills so that they could admire the sprawling timbered sweep of the huge metropolis, its white churches forming a luminous halo around its vast circumference.

  Moscow was God's holy city, according to its citizens, the holiest city in Christendom. Moscow would stand forever, the saying went, because it was the Third Rome, and an ancient prophecy had said that the Third Rome was destined to be eternal. The first Rome had been corrupted by heresy and had been conquered by barbarians in late antiquity. Her mantle had fallen on Byzantium, and Constantinople had become the Second Rome. But in 1453 Constantinople had fallen to the Turks, whereupon the burden and glory of bearing Christian truth had been brought to Moscow.

  For three hundred years the Third Rome had stood as a beacon of faith, ruled by the successor of the Caesars, the divine emperor. Now Catherine II would come to the holy city to be anointed by God as his representative on earth.

  But Catherine hated Moscow. Her contempt and loathing for Russia's second most important city had grown throughout Elizabeth's reign until it became a monumental abhorrence. "Moscow is the seat of sloth," Catherine wrote in her memoirs, "partly due to its immensity. One wastes a whole day trying to visit someone or delivering a message to them. The nobles who live there are excessively fond of the place and no wonder—they live in idleness and luxury, and become effeminate. It is not houses they own there, but regular estates."

  The very grandeur of scale dwarfed all purpose and promoted languor and inactivity; a kind of sleepy torpor overlaid Moscow life. To the ever-diligent, hard-working Catherine, who could hardly bear to let a day go by without accomplishing as much as possible, this attitude toward existence was inexcusable. What was worse, the Muscovites seemed to Catherine to busy themselves with gossip and triviality, insulting their intelligence by indulging their appetites, whims and fancies.

  Law was ignored in Moscow, in Catherine's view; the result was that the upper classes turned into petty tyrants, lording it over their inferiors and treating their servants cruelly.

  "The inclination to tyrannize is cultivated here more than in any other inhabited part of the world," Catherine wrote. "It is inculcated from the tenderest age by the cruelty which children observe in their parents' behavior toward servants." Every home had its chamber of horrors where chains, whips and other instruments of torture were kept for use in punishing servants—and the punishments were severe for even the smallest infractions. To protest, as Catherine forthrightly did, that servants were no less human than their masters was to risk loud censure from the "vulgar gentry" whose brutality was exceeded only by their stupidity.

  All the worst tendencies in Moscow life were exacerbated by the religiosity that flourished there—not an honest piety, of the kind Catherine favored, but the darker sort of religion that led to intolerance, irrationality and mental aberrations. "The town is full of symbols of fanaticism, churches, miraculous icons, priests and convents," she wrote. Endless processions, day-long rituals, the mad ringing of the thousands of bells created an atmosphere, not so much of otherworldliness as of murky illogic, inhospitable to the concrete and the commonsensical; in Moscow, reason withered under the icy blast of the supernatural.

  As intractable, elusive and labyrinthine as Petersburg was regular, ordered and rectilinear, Moscow outraged Catherine's admiration for harmony and organization. Its magnificence offended her taste for simplicity, its extravagant luxury was an affront to her sense of proportion, its brazen inertia was an annoying challenge to her vision of a revitalized Russia bestirring itself in vigorous pursuit of reform. It was no wonder she hated the superstitious, reprobate old city, and gritted her teeth as she prepared to enter it for her coronation.

  For all its luminous splendor when viewed from a distance, Moscow proved to be a dirty, ramshackle, unpaved shambles when seen near at hand. Because fire swept through the city frequently, wiping out hundreds or even thousands of dwellings and outbuildings in a matter of hours, rebuilding was always going on. Blackened timbers lay in charred heaps in every quarter of the city, freshly cut logs and green timbers were piled randomly along the winding streets, as were untidy mounds of bricks and the remnants of falling-down dwellings. Moscow had suffered from neglect over the two generations since Petersburg became the seat of government; many dwellings had been allowed to fall into ruin, and others, though occupied for part of the year, showed signs of severe decay.

  And there was dirt everywhere. Refuse heaps higher than the housetops spread their stench over every neighborhood. Un-drained cesspits mired every street. The mean, dark little houses of the poor reeked of ordure and rancid oil and human and animal waste. Even in the mansions of the great, filth was piled in anterooms and corridors and staircases were hidden under accumulations of excrement and the dust of ages. Visitors deplored the Russian custom of spitting unceremoniously on the floor, "in all directions and at all times," and held their noses whenever they crossed the streets—not paved lanes but quagmires full of stinking sludge.

  The large animal population of Moscow contributed to the barnyard odors. The spacious grounds in which the houses of the nobles and gentry were set accommodated cows and pigs and chickens and ducks, along with stables and kennels, and the reek of pigsties and cattle byres, stabl
es and dog runs was an inescapable part of Moscow life.

  Urban splendor often clashed with rural squalor. With her sharp eye for all that was absurd, Catherine described how "in Moscow one quite often sees a lady covered with jewels and elegantly dressed, emerging from an immense yard, filled with all possible refuse and mud, adjoining a decrepit hut, in a magnificent carriage, drawn by eight horrible hacks, shabbily harnessed, with unkempt grooms wearing handsome liveries which they disgrace by their uncouth appearance."

  Such a sight was common in the noble quarter, where the commodious houses of the titled families sprawled amid stands of forest, lakes and streams. Nearer the heart of the city were the dozens of craftsmen's districts, where weavers, hatters, brewers, icon painters, armorers, tilers, and coppersmiths created and sold their wares. The districts were highly specialized. Breadmakers occupied one area, bakers of fancy loaves another. Pancake makers did not mix with biscuit bakers. Bell founders were distinct from blacksmiths, and painters of holy images kept themselves apart from painters of other sorts.

  In the German suburb—where Catherine was no doubt most at home—foreign merchants had built over the centuries a small replica of a northern European town, with a grid of wide streets, houses with gardens, public squares and neoclassical architecture. But this oasis of relative tidiness and patterned order seemed out of place, hemmed in as it was on all sides by warrens of pattern-less, unplanned dwellings, shops and shrines, Tatar temples and Chinese pagodas and pavilions, with here and there a Turkish mosque.