Catherine the Great (22 page)

Ivan Yelagin, the last of the three secretaries to be appointed in July 1762, was another lifelong servant who was still at her side in 1793. Four years older than the empress, he had first encountered her in 1748 as an impoverished acolyte of Elizabeth’s favourite, Aleksey Razumovsky. Ten years later, he suffered on Catherine’s
behalf when he was arrested with Bestuzhev as a friend and correspondent of Stanislaw Poniatowski. Notable for his connections to English Masonic lodges, Yelagin was a leading light in Russian Freemasonry, a movement that Catherine held increasingly in contempt. On being shown one of his Masonic manuscripts after his death in 1794, she took it as evidence that her secretary had gone mad. But she always admired his loyalty. ‘This was a man of probity whom one could trust,’ the empress declared that same year. ‘Once one had gained his affection, it was not easily lost; he always demonstrated zeal and a marked liking for me.’
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In September 1763, Catherine decided that Teplov should report on Mondays and Wednesdays, Olsufyev on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Yelagin on Fridays and Saturdays.
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By the time they arrived at her study at eight in the morning, she had already been up for two hours, writing and reading alone, having lit her own fire. Sketching her routine in a letter to Madame Geoffrin, she explained how a succession of secretaries and advisers trooped in one by one, keeping her busy until eleven, when she dressed for her first public appearance of the day (in the relative privacy of her own apartments Catherine wore a loose-fitting silk gown). On Sundays and feast days she attended mass in the palace chapel, after a vigil service in her rooms. Otherwise, she liked to wander into the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where visitors lurked in the hope of catching her eye. Lunch was a relatively modest affair, sometimes eaten alone, but usually taken in the company of between ten and twenty courtiers. Since Catherine drank little and was frugal in her culinary tastes, it was by no means an experience to savour: seasoning was limited (pepper was not sold on the capital’s markets, though it may have been supplied from the imperial greenhouses), and even some of St Petersburg’s poorest people probably ate almost as nourishing food as their empress.
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After lunch, she retreated to her own rooms, shuttling silken knots while Betskoy kept her company by reading aloud:

In practice, of course, her life was more varied than this jocular summary implied. The letter studiously avoided any mention of Grigory Orlov, whom she usually entertained after lunch–an hour that gossips were to dub ‘the Time of
Mystery’ for the rest of her reign.
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Paul, who lived with his Young Court in a neighbouring part of the palace, was another regular visitor to her rooms, though she rarely spent as much as half an hour with him. He saw her early on Wednesday evenings or after church on Sunday mornings–both were Court reception days when the empress entertained not only her courtiers, but also foreign visitors to the city.
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Hawking was still a favourite pastime, though Catherine’s days in the saddle were all but over, and when the weather permitted, she enjoyed a carriage ride through the streets with a favourite lady-in-waiting. These, however, were distractions from a gruelling week at her desk.

Noticeably missing from the empress’s working day was any collective meeting of her advisers. Although she had initially been tempted to accept Panin’s proposal for an imperial council of between six and eight aristocrats, she soon rejected the idea as a potential limitation on her own absolute power. While Panin had made his suggestion in December 1762 as a way of preventing a recurrence of the arbitrary favouritism of Elizabeth’s time, Catherine almost certainly suspected a bid to enhance his own influence at the expense of the Orlovs. Although the idea was quietly shelved, the membership of the Imperial Assembly, secretly formed in Moscow on 11 February 1763 to determine how to respond to Peter III’s manifesto on the nobility, was much the same as Panin had projected for his council. Meeting some twenty-one times before the end of October with the ubiquitous Teplov as its secretary, this informal but highly influential body became, in effect, the Russian government. In a balanced representation of elite political interests, Panin and Grigory Orlov were joined by Bestuzhev, Kirill Razumovsky, Mikhail Vorontsov, Yakov Shakhovskoy and Zakhar Chernyshëv, whom Catherine had put in charge of the College of War. When the Court returned to St Petersburg, the Assembly extended its remit to consider a root-and-branch reform of the Senate, much as Panin had originally intended.
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Catherine was delighted. At the time of her accession, she later complained, ‘the Senate regarded it as excessive to hear state business with a map on the table in front of them’, so that ‘sometimes they did not know what they were judging. Shameful to say, there was not a single printed map in the Senate, and indeed, being present there, I sent for the first one to be bought from the Academy [of Sciences].’ Always a scourge of laziness and inefficiency, she sent the Senators a long list of personal orders that they had failed to fulfil, insisting that they attend their office for four hours every morning and for three afternoons a week until the backlog had been cleared.
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In January 1764, Glebov was replaced as the Procurator-General of the Senate
by Alexander Vyazemsky, who was to dominate the Russian bureaucracy until his death in 1792. The instruction Catherine sent to him on his appointment is rightly considered as ‘one of the most important documents illustrating her conception of statecraft’. Ordering him to remain above and beyond factional conflict and to trust in her alone, she explained what he could expect in return:

She was as good as her word. Conscious of the fate that had traditionally befallen most advisers of a disgraced monarch in Russia, Peter III’s leading minister, Dimitry Volkov, assumed that his time had come. Yet he, too, found that he had nothing to fear. ‘I am always delighted when I see a swift attitude to business and an earnest approach to service in my subjects,’ Catherine assured him. ‘When subjects wish to see an industrious and solicitous sovereign taking care of their interests, then the sovereign is no less happy to see her subjects helping her. Don’t bother about your circumstances: just get on with the job, because your reasoning is good. Upright service will always rectify circumstances, of that you should have no doubt.’
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Having proved his efficiency as governor of Orenburg, Volkov was recalled to St Petersburg in 1764 to take charge of the College of Manufactures, where he remained until retiring age. Long periods of office were to be the norm in the new reign, even for some of the families whose loyalty Catherine initially had reason to doubt. Since the pool of available talent was limited, she was even prepared to give jobs to the aloof Vorontsovs. Count Alexander Vorontsov, brother of Peter III’s mistress, was president of the College of Commerce for twenty years from 1773, his brother Semën a long-serving ambassador in London. ‘Tolerate an unpleasant person in your sight,’ the empress later exhorted her infant grandson, the future tsar Alexander I, ‘and do not glance askance at him: a man who can get on only with people he likes, and not with those he does not, is lacking in wisdom.’
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The nerve centre of Catherine’s government was the Winter Palace, still under reconstruction when the Court returned from Moscow, though not under the direction of its original architect. Having been close to Peter III, Rastrelli thought it prudent to take temporary leave from Russia shortly after Catherine’s coup. When he returned a year later, he found that his circumstances had changed for the worse. Among the petitions forwarded to Yelagin’s secretariat in the autumn of 1763 was one from the disgruntled architect:

Though he was duly granted an annual pension of 1000 roubles, Catherine remained deaf to his pleas to be confirmed in the rank of major general granted
to him by Peter III since this would have entitled him to more money. While he continued to be treated respectfully at Court, dining with her in the spring of 1764, it was not long before Rastrelli finally left Russia for good.

It fell to Catherine’s contemporary–the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe–to fill Rastrelli’s empty shell, and he set to work as soon as she departed for her coronation in Moscow in September 1762. Vallin began by designing neoclassical interiors and furniture for a new bedroom, dressing room, boudoir and study in the west wing, overlooking the Admiralty, where the empress initially intended to live. At that stage his role was restricted largely to decorative detail, but he became more ambitious when she changed her mind at the beginning of 1763 and decided instead to convert the apartments formerly occupied by Peter III in the south-east corner of the palace. Here the architect created a suite of staterooms based on the neoclassical principles he had learned from Jean Blondel at the Parisian École des Arts. Racing to meet the empress’s deadlines, Vallin told Stählin that he had ‘thrown the internal walls out of the window’ and replaced them with wooden partitions.
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By the time Catherine returned to St Petersburg, the transformation was obvious. As the Prussian ambassador reported in June 1763:

Oblivious to such carping, Catherine forged ahead, inspecting progress over the summer, and finally moving in with great pomp and ceremony on Tuesday 14 October, some three weeks later than planned and more than a year since she had last occupied the Winter Palace.
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By then, the ceremonial first floor was largely complete, save for the suite of rooms overlooking the River Neva, and Vallin had also finished most of the work on the warren of staircases and corridors that led to the floor above, where Catherine’s twenty maids of honour were to live for the remainder of her reign in the western and south-western parts of the building. ‘Guess where I’ve been today!’ proclaimed an excited Paul after Grigory Orlov had taken him to visit them. Back downstairs, in the grip of a crush on Vera Choglokova, he immersed himself in the
Encyclopédie
article on ‘Amour’.
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Vallin’s work for Catherine differed from his other private commissions only in
scale. At the heart of his creation for the empress, just as in the house he built for the Chernyshëvs at much the same time, was a salon–the centre of civility and sociability–surrounded by a suite of private and semi-public apartments, all conceived as part of a single stylistic whole, and ranged around two inner courtyards on the western, southern and eastern sides of a large square, whose northern side was taken up by the great palace chapel. Although these rooms underwent a major renovation between 1782 and 1784, their layout and use remained essentially unchanged until the end of Catherine’s life.
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Having ascended the main staircase near the west door of the chapel, visitors passed through a suite of three antechambers flowing south towards what is now Palace Square, with their windows facing westwards towards the Admiralty. The central anteroom was a Portrait Room, hung with portraits of the imperial family as a reminder of Catherine’s dynastic pretensions. Here, sergeants of the guard permitted well-dressed nobles to enter the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where the Court gathered on a Sunday before processing to chapel. To ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’ was to enjoy privileged access to the empress’s own apartments, ranged in a line overlooking the square to the south. The first of these rooms was also the largest: an audience chamber some 227 metres square, decorated in green damask, where Catherine received her ambassadors. Until a permanent throne room was built in 1795, the audience chamber shared that function with another, overlooking the river, where banquets were held on state occasions. With her sixty Chevaliers Gardes fanned out two-by-two on either side of her, the empress sat beneath a huge gilded canopy, draped in red silk, on a velvet throne raised up against the eastern wall.