Catherine the Great (21 page)

After his first restless night at Ropsha, Peter complained of headaches and wrote a pathetic letter to Catherine, asking her to remove the sentries from the neighbouring room since his own was so small and he was too fastidious to relieve himself in the presence of others. ‘[Your Majesty] knows that I always pace about in my room. This will make my legs swell up.’ That day, 30 June, his favourite bed was brought from Oranienbaum to make him more comfortable. Catherine, however, had no intention of granting his request to be taken to Holstein. As she later explained to Poniatowski, ‘he had everything he wanted, except for his freedom’.
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They made an odd couple, the giant, scar-faced Aleksey Orlov, and the shrivelled, sickly emperor. Only copious quantities of alcohol obscured the artificiality of their situation. This was fully revealed on 2 July, when Peter’s health took a turn for the worse. As Orlov reported to Catherine, ‘our ugly freak’ had fallen ‘seriously ill’ with ‘an unexpected colic’. ‘I fear that he might die tonight, but I fear even more that he might live through it. The first fear is caused by the fact that he talks nonsense all the time, which amuses us, and the second fear is that he is really a danger to us all and behaves as though nothing had happened.’
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The note of menace was unmistakeable. According to the Danish diplomat
Andreas Schumacher, the end was swift. After refusing a poisoned cocktail made up by Dr Kruse, Peter was murdered on 3 July, so that he was dead by the time Dr Lüders reached Ropsha, and the only remaining job for a medic was the dissection performed by a second physician.
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The villains of the piece in this version of Peter’s demise are Grigory Teplov and Nikita Panin. Indeed, a prominent Russian historian has recently argued on the basis of Schumacher’s account that Panin ordered the deposed tsar’s murder as a last-ditch attempt to wrest the initiative from Catherine and the Orlovs and to ensure that she ruled as regent for her son.
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Ingenious as this reconstruction of events may be, its central assumption remains incredible. Why should Panin, the urbane constitutionalist who had been anxious all along to ensure a bloodless transition of power, suddenly sanction Peter’s assassination? It is no more likely that Catherine herself gave explicit orders to kill him. She had proved herself audacious in a crisis, but there was nothing to be gained from making a martyr of her husband. Though a third letter from Aleksey Orlov to Catherine, dated 5 July, survives only in the form of a later copy, there seems no reason to disbelieve its claim that Peter was killed in a drunken scuffle:

Catherine accepted his word. She may not have sanctioned her husband’s death, but his survival would surely have imperilled hers. Now she was not only a usurper, but an assassin by association. Peter was given a paltry burial at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Thirty-four years later, Tsar Paul would make Orlov, Baryatynsky and Passek pay dearly for their treachery. But for the moment, their star was in the ascendant, as Russia’s new ruler laid plans for her coronation and for the burst of reforming legislation that was to occupy the first five years of her reign.

A
few days before Catherine’s return to St Petersburg in the summer of 1763, the foreign ambassadors gathered for supper at the house of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. ‘We were all questioning one another, each man doubtful of his own information, yet everyone agreeing that we ought to be prepared for any event.’ Convinced from the start of the new regime’s inherent instability, they were sure they could scent its imminent collapse. The French attaché and the Austrian ambassador interpreted the desecration of the empress’s portrait on one of moscow’s triumphal arches as a symptom of the wider unrest generated by rumours that she was about to marry Grigory orlov.
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Catherine herself had unwittingly caused the scare by seeking official approval for a second marriage in case her sickly son died. one supporter of her coup, the Guards Captain Fëdor Khitrovo, was so appalled by the idea that he planned to kill Grigory and his brothers. Arrested at the end of may, Khitrovo caused alarm by claiming that he had been told by Aleksey orlov that Catherine had accepted the throne only under pressure from his brothers, having initially promised Panin that she would rule as regent for Grand Duke Paul.
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Though Khitrovo was quietly bundled away to his estates, in a vain attempt to avoid publicity, the security cordon erected in a six-mile radius around Tsarskoye Selo struck the diplomats as a sign of Catherine’s lasting nervousness. The Prussian ambassador Count Solms in turn thought her too frantic in her rush to reform. now that she had quarrelled with Princess Dashkova–‘the sort of woman to attempt a new revolution every week, purely for the pleasure of it’–Solms feared that her reign would last no longer than her husband’s. Buckinghamshire was inclined to agree: ‘i cannot help
feeling for Her Imperial Majesty. Her present distress must be very great, and at the best, Her future prospect a most melancholy one.’
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If Catherine shared any of these concerns–and it is difficult to imagine that they wholly escaped her–then she was careful to give no sign of it. Optimistic by nature, she spent her final week in Moscow cementing her links with favoured courtiers by touring their country estates. On 7 June, after lunch at Znamenskoye with the Chief Cup-Bearer, Alexander Naryshkin, she took a stroll through the garden to see the museum where her host preserved a treasured yacht built before the foundation of the Russian fleet in the early 1690s. From there, it was but a short journey to inspect the troops on exercise in the neighbouring fields. Having dined at Pokrovskoye with the Master of the Horse, Lev Naryshkin, she returned to her palace along a route illuminated by extravagant fireworks. Two days later, she drove out to Tsar Boris’s ponds, eight miles from the city centre, where she kissed the icons in the local church before watching the fishing. Then it was Peter Sheremetev’s turn to entertain her at Kuskovo, one of Russia’s most opulent estates, where a magnificent orangery was currently under construction. They sailed on the lake before playing cards; it was two in the morning before she got back to Moscow. There was still time for a final afternoon’s hawking before the Court departed for Tsarskoye Selo on Saturday 14 June. After a journey punctuated by the customary visits to churches and monasteries, it was one of Catherine’s first priorities to check on the progress of her new dacha at Oranienbaum, where she travelled ‘with the smallest possible entourage’ on 25 June.
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Any residual anxieties were masked by her ceremonial re-entry into the capital on Saturday 28 June, the first anniversary of Catherine’s accession. There could hardly have been a greater public display of self-confidence.
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Bathed in the cool glow of the midsummer ‘white nights’, more than 11,000 soldiers lined the streets to salute the procession. As her open carriage rolled over the Obukhov bridge at 7 p.m., three cannon fired to signal the start of a carillon across the city. Seventy-one guns roared from the Admiralty and seventy more from the Peter and Paul fortress as the empress and her Court were led past the cheering crowds by a detachment of mounted cavalry. In the Haymarket, at the junction of Pea Street and Garden Street, Savva Yakovlev, an ennobled merchant of fabulous wealth, had hoisted a crown onto the main cupola of his new Church of the Dormition to mark the completion of the exterior in the year of her coronation.
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When the procession reached the Kazan Church, Catherine descended from her carriage to meet Archbishop Gavriil and paused briefly for prayers while seminarians from the Alexander Nevsky monastery chanted salutations from platforms raised on
either side of the great door. Her emergence from the church triggered a second, longer salute as she continued along the Great Perspective Road to meet the city’s merchants, who turned out in force at Gostiny dvor, a vast covered market. At the Anichkov Palace, it was the turn of Prince Nikolay Repnin and the Cadet Corps to greet her. Only when she reached the Summer Palace did a final 101-gun salute issue from the fortresses. Three times the cry went up: ‘Vivat, Yekaterina: Great Empress!’ Then she passed inside to permit the foreign diplomats assembled in the throne room to kiss her hand.
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After dining alone, Catherine emerged from her apartments just before midnight to stroll through the Summer Gardens to the riverbank where Colonel Melissino was ready to set off one of Jacob Stählin’s most extravagant firework displays. The first rockets went up as soon as she had taken her place in a baroque wooden gallery, built in short order by carpenters from the Admiralty College according to designs sent up from Moscow.
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‘Vigilance and Virtue’ was the theme of the first scene, set in the temple of Pallas, where the goddess fired thunderbolts from her perch in the clouds, brandishing in her left hand a sceptre with the Russian coat of arms and in her right the head of Medusa to ward off her enemies. ‘Glory’ was the slogan emblazoned on a temple flanked by allegorical figures of Wisdom and Courage; ‘Astonishment’ the name of an obelisk celebrating Catherine’s prowess as a female sovereign. No sooner had the smoke from this first tableau cleared than the scene changed to reveal a forest of luxuriant palm trees on ‘the island of scholarship and amusement’. This time the subject was ‘Wisdom and Clemency’ and the empress was represented as Minerva, the helmeted goddess of wisdom.
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Even the hostile French attaché had to concede that the whole evening had been ‘a very brilliant and well organised spectacle’.
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And no one could miss its central message: here was a ruler whose maternal gentleness was not to be mistaken for weakness. On the contrary, she had every intention of deploying knowledge and reason in the service of her formidable empire.

Proud and imperturbable in public, Catherine was well aware of the scale of the challenge she faced in restoring order and prosperity to her empire in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. In the wake of that gruelling conflict, every state in Europe faced a period of tough internal consolidation. Russia was no exception. Over the next few years, Catherine would write several memoranda bemoaning the legacy she had inherited: ‘the fleet was derelict, the army in
disarray, the fortresses collapsing’; the treasury was in arrears, though no one could tell her by how much; the prisons were overflowing (she secretly arranged for minor debtors to be released); corrupt officials were everywhere despised; and parts of the countryside were in open revolt.
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No state could have survived for long the massive peasant unrest that characterised Catherine’s early years on the throne.
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Fortunately for her, most Russian peasants had more to gain from violence against each other than from risky attempts to overthrow the authorities. Once the major incidents had been summarily put down, the empress turned her mind to more fundamental change. Although serfdom was far too integral to Russian political culture to allow for wholesale emancipation of the serfs, an audience with Pastor Eisen in October 1763 may have persuaded her to try out his controversial ideas for a free, property-owning peasantry on the crown estate at Bronnaya, beyond Oranienbaum. Though it ultimately proved too small for the purpose, Eisen soon discovered that the greatest obstacle to imperial initiatives was presented by officials hostile to change. ‘Not only has Hell in its entirety opened up against me,’ he told a fellow pastor in January 1764, ‘but devilish extraordinary chance events have occurred which have really put me in the firing line. If the ground underneath me were not so secure, I should long since have broken my neck.’
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One excuse offered to Eisen in explanation of the delays was that Catherine was too busy with other projects to attend to his own. There was some truth in that. No sooner had she seized the throne than the pace was set for a sustained burst of reforming energy which on average saw almost twice as many edicts issued each month between 1762 and 1767 as in the reign as a whole.
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Since her main aim was to change her subjects’ hearts and minds, popular education–a subject all the rage in Europe in the wake of Rousseau’s
Emile
(1762)–was at the forefront of her priorities. Over the next few years, she commissioned a wide range of projects, many of which drew on the interest in the subject that had flourished in Russia since the end of the previous decade. Daniel Dumaresq, a former chaplain to the British Factory in St Petersburg, returned in 1764 bearing information about a variety of English and Irish institutions, ranging from Moravian boarding schools to the dormitories at Eton. He was personally acquainted with Catherine and spent time with Grand Duke Paul while he devised a ‘General Plan of Gymnasia’, completed two years later.
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By that time, however, Catherine had placed her trust in a rival scheme devised by her mother’s old paramour, Ivan Betskoy. Authorised to admit destitute and illegitimate children without question, his Moscow Foundling Home, opened on her thirty-fifth birthday in
1764, was intended to foster the creation of a wholly ‘new kind of people’, raised in isolation from the damaging influence of a backward Russian environment according to an ambitious curriculum set out in Betskoy’s
General Plan for the Education of Young People of Both Sexes
. This remarkable document envisaged nothing less than a new generation of Russians imbued with a high moral sense of duty to the fatherland and to their fellow men.
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Betskoy believed that the empire’s greatest need was for the sorts of artisan and craftsman who could supply the ‘third estate’ that Russia notoriously lacked. He drove the point home to Catherine by giving Paul a carpenter’s bench for the Winter Palace, where a French master carpenter was employed to teach him.
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Females were to be catered for by the Society for the Education of Young Noblewomen (the Smolny Institute founded in May 1764), another experiment in social engineering designed to produce nothing less than ‘a new type of mother in the form of cultured, industrious, proper young women who combined social graces with domesticity, and who would raise the general level of society through their upbringing of children’.
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Like the foundling home, the Smolny was a charitable organisation rather than a government institution, in which both Catherine and Betskoy invested personal fortunes (his, of course, being ultimately derived from hers). The empress remained devoted to the Institute for the rest of her life, taking several favourite pupils under her wing.
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Central to the success of Catherine’s various projects were three long-serving state secretaries: Adam Olsufyev, Grigory Teplov and Ivan Yelagin. Since they and their successors probably spent more time in the empress’s company than anyone else, it was vital that each of them should know how to respond to her playful imperiousness. All three had demonstrated their loyalty to her during her difficult years as a grand duchess; all three knew how to get things done; and all three were cultivated men–precisely the sorts of educated and industrious individual that Catherine wanted to flourish in her Enlightened empire. They not only dealt with all her confidential business, but were also responsible for responding to the hundreds of petitions that flooded in despite her attempts to deter them (within a week of her coup, she had told the assembled Senate that no petitions whatsoever were to be presented to her in person).
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In return, she offered them security and material rewards, and was characteristically solicitous for their personal wellbeing.

At the age of thirty-seven, Olsufyev had been chosen in 1758 to head Elizabeth’s Closet (
Kabinet
), the personal office responsible for the distribution of imperial funds which acted as the tsars’ principal point of contact with other
government bodies. Once Catherine reappointed him on 8 July 1762, he was to remain at her side until his death in 1784. As a junior member of Chancellor Bestuzhev’s staff, he had earned her lasting trust by helping her to conduct a secret correspondence with her mother in the 1750s. Now, fluent in several languages and generally acknowledged as one of the most erudite and capable men in Russia, he acted as a link between the palace, the College of Foreign Affairs and the Senate.
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Widely supposed to be the bastard child of Peter the Great’s influential prelate, Feofan (Prokopovich), Teplov was actually the son of a smelter at the Novgorod episcopal palace, which was how he acquired his name, meaning ‘warmth’. Aged forty-six when Catherine seized the throne, he had come to prominence by supervising the education of Kirill Razumovsky, touring Europe with him for two years and managing his business when he became president of the Academy of Sciences in 1746 and Ukrainian chieftain (
hetman
) four years later. A competent violinist like Olsufyev, Teplov had translated into Russian the libretti of several operas by Francesco Araja in the 1740s and 1750s. Teplov was also a talented amateur actor who published learned articles on poetics and was familiar with radical Western writings on materialism and atheism. Having been both cuckolded and imprisoned by Peter III, he had every reason to support Catherine’s coup. It was Teplov who drafted the most important edicts in the first crucial days of her reign, when it was one of Olsufyev’s first duties to pay him a reward of 20,000 roubles. After that, he became the moving force behind numerous major projects, including the reorganisation of the Medical Chancery (one of several reforms motivated by Catherine’s determination to preserve and increase the population). He was intimately involved with Dumaresq’s abortive plans for urban primary schools, having drawn up proposals for a university at the Ukrainian town of Baturin in 1760. Probably his most important role lay in the Commission on Church Lands, created in November 1762, which was responsible two years later for a wholesale secularisation of monastic property. Since this yielded the state an annual income of almost 1.37 million roubles, of which less than 463,000 was returned to the Church each year between 1764 and 1768, it is not surprising that he remained an influential presence in Catherine’s government until his death in 1779.
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