Catherine the Great (13 page)

The roots of Russia’s Baroque Court culture stretched back into seventeenth-century Muscovy, when its image-makers lacked for nothing in intellectual sophistication.
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Manners were not always so refined. By the time of Catherine’s arrival, barely a generation had passed since Peter the Great first introduced women to Russian public society by obliging them in 1718 to attend his ‘assemblies’–gatherings inspired by his visit to Paris at which both sexes were obliged to dance, smoke and play cards. Since these were all habits formerly condemned as ‘foreign devilishness’, the tsar found that the best way of encouraging guests to participate was to post armed guards at the door. If his new forms of sociability were largely alien to the Muscovite elite, then so was the Western dress he imposed in 1702. Decades later, hooped skirts and corsets (the English style laced down the front, the French down the back, rather tighter, to emphasise the waist) still seemed uncomfortable and unwieldy to noblewomen who hankered after the looser garments of a bygone age. Even those who were keen to adapt to new ways of doing things had precious few sources of instruction. First published in 1717,
The Honourable Mirror of Youth, or a guide to social conduct
, an advice book for both sexes based on Erasmus and other Western authorities, remained the only work of its kind in Russia until the mid-1730s and was still being reprinted in 1767, five years into Catherine’s own reign.
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Peter’s efforts to create a refined European society were disrupted by the Court’s return to Moscow under his teenage grandson. Even when Anna brought the Court back to St Petersburg in 1732, visitors could expect to find as many rough edges there as in any of the smaller German Courts. ‘The richest coat would be sometimes worn together with the vilest uncombed wig,’ noted Manstein, the condescending Austrian ambassador, ‘or you might see a beautiful piece of stuff spoiled by some botcher of a tailor.’
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Even Manstein nevertheless had to acknowledge that ‘at length, every thing grew to be well regulated’ so that by the end of the 1730s St Petersburg could boast many of the attributes of a recognisable Court society.
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Anna held regular reception days–
kurtagy
was the Russian word, taken from the German
Courtag
; the English called them drawing rooms–where the atmosphere was relatively informal. ‘Our drawing-room is more like an assembly,’ the English envoy’s wife observed. ‘There is a circle in form, for
about half an hour, then the czarina and the princesses make their party at cards.’
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By the mid-1740s, when Catherine arrived in Russia, the main ladies’ costume at such gatherings was the
shlafrok
(from the German
Schlafrock
), which resembled English informal morning dress. For more formal occasions, there was the
samara
, a loose dress with a pleated back, not unlike the French
contouche
, worn over a corset and a decorated underskirt and supported by a hooped
panier
.
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‘The Empress is a great lover of English stuffs,’ reported the British ambassador in the year of Catherine’s wedding, ‘particularly white and other light colours with large flowers of gold and silver.’
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Europe was not the only source of such gorgeous fabrics. Although they never showed much profit, the cumbersome, state-controlled caravans to Peking, sanctioned by the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727, remained a crucial link in the palace’s supply chain. Anna’s Court had bought a third of the goods from the 1738 caravan and funds confiscated from her disgraced favourite, Ernst Bühren, helped Elizabeth to take her pick from the next in 1743. Yards of her favourite white velvet headed the list of Chinese silks purchased at auction, where the empress also invested in green, yellow, crimson and scarlet satins, woven with silver and gold thread, a multiplicity of damasks, muslin, gauze and coloured brocades, and some 4117 wire-mounted paper flowers.
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Diplomats, appalled by Elizabeth’s dilatory attitude to business, were irritated to find that she thought nothing of making a trip from one of her summer palaces expressly to examine silks on the market in St Petersburg.
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Yet there was nothing casual about such visits to an empress who, in common with her fellow European sovereigns, used dress as a political instrument to inculcate loyalty, satisfy vanity and impress the world at large.
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Although Elizabeth prided herself on driving a hard bargain, the sums she allocated to her own wardrobe were effectively limitless. The young cavalier assigned to supervise alterations to her furs in 1759 claimed that some 70,000 roubles were spent in less than nine months–more than twice Catherine’s total annual allowance of 30,000 roubles and only marginally less than the (grossly inadequate) budget for rebuilding the palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1744.
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Manstein calculated that a courtier in the 1730s who ‘did not lay out above two or three thousand roubles, or from four to six hundred pounds a year in his dress, made no great figure’.
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Catherine’s expenses were far higher. Though she had to be careful not to outdo a capricious monarch–not long after her arrival in Russia, Elizabeth ordered all her ladies to shave their heads, a fate Catherine escaped only because she was recovering from pleurisy–the grand duchess’s wardrobe was expected to range far beyond the standard repertoire. Like the empress, she
usually changed costume three times at a public masquerade, and when an outfit attracted praise, it was never worn again because she made it ‘a rule that if it had once made a big impact, it could only make a lesser one the second time’. Though indebtedness was a crucial marker of nobility in a culture defined by conspicuous consumption, the grand duchess’s need for money would ultimately leave her vulnerable to bribes from foreign Courts. At first, it was Elizabeth who saved her from embarrassment. By the end of Catherine’s first year in Russia, only a gift from the empress could prevent her arrears from exceeding 2000 roubles, and her debts kept on mounting thanks to expenditure on jewellery and gambling.
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Gift-giving was a central part of Court culture, and although Catherine might occasionally expect to receive presents from visiting royalty, she was usually expected to offer them. On the night of her conversion to Orthodoxy, she had been able to present Peter with a jewel-encrusted hunting knife and a gold cane-head only because Elizabeth had provided them for her. After her marriage, she had to pay for her own presents. The empress set the standard, providing courtiers with new clothes every Easter and bestowing valuable dowries on her maids of honour. Her stepsister Anna Karlovna received 10,000 roubles when she married Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov in 1742. Sixteen years later, their daughter Anna Mikhailovna in turn received 15,000 roubles along with dresses, silks and bed linen that brought the total value of the gift to more than 25,000 roubles.
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So we may believe Catherine when she complains of the demands of Countess Rumyantseva–‘the most spendthrift woman in Russia’–and Maria Choglokova, who alone was said to cost her 17,000 roubles a year.
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Such sums were a drop in the ocean by comparison with the outlay required to sustain a rapidly expanding Court. Though it remained significantly smaller than Versailles or Vienna, the establishment in St Petersburg was beginning to spiral out of control at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.
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In 1748, when a financial crisis prompted officials to compare Elizabeth’s household with the establishment under Anna in 1739, seven dwarves provided a reassuring measure of continuity, testifying to the Russian elite’s persistent fascination with human freaks. In every other respect, however, the Court had undergone unprecedented growth. Whereas Anna had managed with eight gentlemen-in-waiting, Elizabeth needed twice as many. She employed seven chamber pages, compared to Anna’s three, and the number of ordinary pages had increased from eight to fourteen. In
1739, the Court had required but a single cupbearer: nine years later there were six–and fourteen assistants. To manage them, the empress revived a series of offices unknown to Anna but mentioned in documents from previous reigns (among others, her Court now boasted a Chief Cellar-master and Chief Cupbearer). In view of her passion for clothes, a
maître de garderobe
seemed equally indispensable and Elizabeth duly appointed Vasily Chulkov, a former lackey who had looked after her wardrobe since 1731. Inflation was even more obvious among the burgeoning ranks of coffee-servers, table-cloth layers and table-setters. As for the lesser servants, Anna had made do with four chamber lackeys, forty-eight lackeys, eight heyducks and four messengers. By 1748, their total numbers had more than doubled. All of them had to be kitted out in expensive livery: at 13,000 roubles, Elizabeth’s annual bill on this count was more than three times higher than Anna’s. Lackeys, drawn mainly from the Ukrainian regiments, wore an outfit based on the standard Russian military uniform: green breeches and tunics with red cuffs and a scarlet cloth blouson. Heyducks dressed in red breeches, like the Hussars, and a fancier tunic, trimmed with lace, loops and large buttons. For state occasions and major religious feast days, the livery was still more extravagant. Below stairs, forty-five cooks manned Elizabeth’s kitchens in much the same way as they had done under Anna, but by 1748 they had sixty-eight apprentices to her eighteen. It was only because most of this mushrooming establishment were miserably paid–the eighty stokers each had to survive on 30 roubles a year, half as much again as the twenty grooms–that the increase in the total salary bill could be held at 239,331 roubles in 1748 by comparison with 148,388 in 1739.
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The costs of consumption rose faster still. In 1746, the three palace kitchens responsible for preparing food for the empress, the grand ducal couple and the leading courtiers paid 10,721 roubles for wine and fresh vegetables–more than twice as much as Anna had spent. The drinks budget was even higher: 38,830 roubles in 1746 by comparison with 18,163 in the 1730s. (Despite the drunken portrait of her husband presented in Catherine’s memoirs, the 13,150 roubles spent on alcohol for her and Peter tell us less about their personal habits than about the central role they played in entertaining the Court and the foreign ambassadors.) Changing fashions led Elizabeth to pay three times as much for coffee as Anna had done, while the bill for sweets rose more than sevenfold to 6389 roubles. It was this ‘enormous number of sweets’ that contributed to the Russians’ lasting reputation for bad breath–‘especially at court’ reported a visitor in the early nineteenth century, ‘where the ladies not merely chew them all
through dinner, but send plates back to their rooms’.
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All told, the catering budget for the imperial family and the leading courtiers in 1746 came to 83,714 roubles–well over twice as much as Anna’s total of 35,388–and actual expenditure was almost certainly higher.
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Although the 1740s was the decade in which Peter the Great’s reforms finally began to take root in a number of areas of government, it would have taken a more robust accounting system than any Russia could command to control expansion on this scale. Not long before the national debt peaked in 1748 at around 3.6 million roubles–between a quarter and a third of the empire’s annual gross income–the Admiralty College blithely allocated more than 1.5 million roubles to an attempt to rebuild the military harbour at Kronstadt in stone, abandoning the plan three years later only when it learned that even an outlay of 3 million would offer no guarantee of success.
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The Court’s deficit may have been trivial by comparison, but by the time administrators worked it out for themselves, it was already too late. In theory, salaries and catering were accounted for by an annual state grant of 200,000 roubles, to which Elizabeth had added a recurrent supplement of 30,000 roubles in April 1747. Yet although payments were supposed to be made in instalments every four months, the Court Office complained that the money was transferred only ‘with great delays, and never in a single issue’. No funds at all were handed over on 1 May 1748, so that officials, already behind with salary payments and facing a formal protest from sentries who had been given no new uniforms for the past three years, now found themselves more than 43,000 roubles in arrears and unable to pay for the ‘drinks, Gdansk vodka, vegetables and other provisions without which it is impossible for the Court to manage, either for its ordinary needs or for banquets’. By mid-May, the Court Office’s resources were ‘utterly exhausted’: not only was there no money to buy luxury goods from the foreign vessels expected imminently in St Petersburg; they could not even afford to commission orders from the regular packet-boats that brought cloth and alcohol from Danzig.
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Expensive as the Court had proved, there was never any question that Elizabeth would rein in her spending. In a political climate in which ‘the main currency of imperial competition was cultural achievement’, there was nothing self-indulgent about representational display. On the contrary, as Tim Blanning has shown, display was a ‘constitutive element of power itself’. And nowhere was it a more
vital element than in Russia under the usurper Elizabeth, because the representational culture which radiated across Europe from Versailles was by no means an expression of unbounded confidence: ‘On the contrary, the greater the doubts about the stability or legitimacy of a throne, the greater the need for display.’
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For a sense of what that meant in practice, consider the magnificent four-poster bed in the state bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo. A shimmering confection of light-blue French damask fringed with silver brocade, this
lit de parade
was the most expensive piece of furniture in the palace. Above it hung a massive canopy decorated with crimson velvet into which a cross and a crown lying on a feather pillow had been embroidered in gold and silver. The interior of the canopy was embroidered with the empress’s monogram.
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No matter that the Russian Court had never adopted the elaborate public rituals of the
lever
and
coucher
practised at Versailles, or that Elizabeth preferred to sleep in a room next to Aleksey Razumovsky’s: the state bed’s purpose was representational rather than functional. And it was no more than Europe had come to expect. Touring the continent in the early 1750s, the young Demidov brothers, heirs to the precious-metal mines in the Urals, were proudly told that it had taken forty craftsmen twelve years to construct the bed at the Elector of Bavaria’s palace in Munich, where a dozen people were required merely to lift the bedspread.
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A later British visitor learned that the furniture in that bedroom alone had cost £100,000.
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