Catherine the Great (35 page)

Meanwhile, the empress had problems of her own in St Petersburg, though not quite the ones she had foreseen in the autumn. In the face of her intransigence, the pressure from the German powers had eased. In the intensive debates in Vienna over the winter of 1770–71, it was probably the Russian-born Marshal Lacy, whose father had danced in Catherine’s ill-fated wedding quadrille, who did most to convince Austria’s rulers of Russia’s impregnability. For different reasons, neither the pacific Maria Theresa nor Joseph II supported Chancellor Kaunitz’s arguments in favour of a campaign against Catherine. ‘I am for a thousand reasons of opinion that we ought never to wage war on our own against Russia,’ the emperor wrote in January 1771, ‘but that we ought to put ourselves into a condition to profit promptly and without risk from the Russians’ moments of weakness, if any present themselves.’ Joseph imagined that the most likely way for the Austrians to profit would be from some future partition of the Ottoman Empire.
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By that time, however, irritated by Austria’s incorporation of the Polish enclave of Zips (Spisz) on the Galician border, Frederick the Great had decided that his best hope of compensating Prussia for Russia’s Black Sea conquests was to take some Polish territory for himself: ‘ointment for the burn’ as he described it to Solms in February. From what Prince Henry told him, Catherine was not averse to the idea–‘Why shouldn’t we all take something?’ she had asked towards the end of his visit, though as usual he found it hard to decide whether she was joking. Playing up the prospect of Austrian aggression, and pretending that he wanted only ‘little parcels’ of land for himself, Frederick embarked on a determined push for partition. Though Panin tried to warn Stanislaw August what was in store, and Austrian hesitations held up the final division of spoils for a further year, the die was effectively cast. On 19 May, after the negotiations with Prussia had been revealed to the Russian Council for the first time, Panin and Solms pored over a map in St Petersburg, discussing precisely which territories Frederick hoped to take.
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Thanks to a poor harvest and the impact of plague on both sides, campaigning on the Danube was limited that summer, when Russian forces concentrated on a
successful occupation of the Crimea. Even so, not everything went to plan. ‘These last two days have not been very happy,’ Catherine admitted to Panin on 19 June. ‘My son is ill, we have lost Zhurzha [to the Turks], [Admiral] Senyavin has lost a bomb-ship, and on top of that, I have received six different denunciations these past few weeks containing such nonsense that it tries your patience and I have ordered three of the Semnovsky Guards to be flogged on parade.’
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Paul’s illness–apparently a virulent form of influenza accompanied by persistent diarrhoea–was by far the most serious difficulty. In view of his approaching name day, there could scarcely have been a more awkward time for him to fall sick. ‘The grand duke has already been indisposed for ten days,’ Catherine continued on 23 June from a damp Peterhof. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to come to town for the celebrations, rather than risk moving him?’
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‘They are in mortal anguish here about the grand duke,’ the French ambassador reported after Paul had failed to appear in public on the appointed day.
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All the empress could do to deter rumours about the succession was to make a very obvious show of caring for her son. As he took his first uncertain steps around his bedroom at the end of July, she announced his recovery in a studiously lighted-hearted letter to Mme Bielke. ‘He has grown a lot during this illness,’ she added a month later, ‘and his beard has started to sprout. There is a Russian proverb which says that no moustache appears without illness. I don’t know whether this saying is just, but on the subject of the grand duke we have had a severe alarm.’
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There was worse news to come from Moscow, where the recorded daily death rate peaked at 920 on 15 September, unleashing a riot that lasted for several days. Already unpopular thanks to his attempts to control clerical vagrancy, Archbishop Amvrosy was assassinated by a mob outraged by rumours that he intended to confiscate a renowned miracle-working icon and transfer all the money donated to it to Betskoy’s Foundling Home. Yeropkin reported on 18 September that at least 100 had died in the Kremlin, where rioters ransacked the archbishop’s residence before hounding him to his death at the Don monastery on the other side of the river. It was not what the empress wanted to hear. ‘She is much affected with these calamities,’ Cathcart reported on 27 September, ‘and cannot, though she endeavours, conceal it.’
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‘Truly this famous eighteenth century has a lot to be proud of here,’ Catherine wrote a week later in describing Amvrosy’s fate to Voltaire. ‘What wise people we have become.’
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By the time Grigory Orlov learned of the riots, he was already en route to the old capital to take over from Saltykov, who had petitioned for his retirement after taking unauthorised (and unforgiven) leave. While he was away, elaborate
measures were taken to protect St Petersburg and its palaces from infection. The gates at Tsarskoye Selo were to be kept shut at all times; only Court carriages were permitted on the new road between the menagerie and the toboggan ride at Pulkovo; sentries were posted at the entrance to every village on the estate with instructions to turn away anyone suspected of coming from an infected area.
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Moscow’s government offices were not to reopen until 1 December 1772 after the end of the epidemic had been formally proclaimed by successive Te Deums in both cities.
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Yet still the war with the Ottomans dragged on, as Catherine concentrated on recording her victories for posterity.

‘If this war continues,’ she told Voltaire in August 1771, ‘my garden at Tsarskoye Selo will soon resemble a game of skittles, because I put up a monument there after each of our glorious battles’:

Falconet had told her that the ‘lapidary style is the simplest and best that the Ancients used for the inscriptions on their monuments’. Catherine duly followed his example when she came to specify the inscriptions for the plaques on the
Kagul obelisk. Meanwhile, two Medal Committees, apparently inspired by Louis XIV’s
Académie des inscriptions
, set to work between May 1772 and November 1774.
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‘I wouldn’t know how to live in a place where I could neither plant nor build,’ Catherine admitted to Frau Bielke in April 1772. ‘After that, even the most beautiful place in the world would seem insipid.’ As it was, much to the amusement of Grigory Orlov, she was in the grip of a bout of ‘plantomania’. That spring, as Orlov departed for the peace talks at Fokshany, he left her in charge of his garden at Gatchina, where she could commit her own ‘indiscretions’.
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She had done so all along. The Scot Charles Sparrow, who designed the widely admired park at Gatchina, had been the first of several British gardeners recruited to Russia by Ivan Chernyshëv in 1769. Soon the Hanoverian Johann Busch (John Bush) joined the list, signing a contract for a salary of 1500 roubles a year in January 1771. Having briefly worked at Oranienbaum, he took charge of landscaping the English park at Tsarskoye Selo, where Vasily Neëlov, who had worked there since the 1740s, was already busy rearranging the paths and bridges. An even more obvious result of Neëlov’s six-month visit to England in 1770 was the fashion for all things Chinese. In 1772, he completed the Large Caprice, a Chinese summer house spanning the road to the palace. He also worked on Rinaldi’s Chinese Village, a neo-oriental fantasy which comprised some fifteen small houses by the time it was finished by Charles Cameron, connected by a colonnade that cost 41,000 roubles and dominated by a pagoda built for 48,000.
Chinoiserie
was equally prominent in Thomas Whately’s influential
Observations on Modern Gardening
(1770), which Catherine acquired in French translation in 1771.
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Though the Russian version she planned never appeared in print, Catherine dedicated her adaptation of Whately’s book ‘To the owners of estates bordering the sea and lying along the Peterhof road…by one who has seen their natural attractions and capabilities, so that they should be further improved according to the principles herein prescribed.’
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One such owner was Lev Naryshkin, to whom Novikov dedicated the second printing of
The Drone
on 28 July 1769, the eve of Naryshkin’s annual masquerade at Leventhal (Lev’s Valley). To Novikov, the estate seemed ‘the most perfect Eden’, and indeed, three years later, it proved to be the ideal setting for an entertainment that was remembered in Russia long into the nineteenth century.
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By the time Catherine arrived at 7 p.m. on 29 July 1772, 2000 guests had already spent a pleasant afternoon strolling in her friend’s sylvan groves. When two shepherdesses, played by his daughters, Natalia and Katerina, gambolled into view to invite her to their hut on a nearby hillside, it
seemed that they were to witness no more than a conventional pastoral idyll. Soon, however, the crowd gasped when the hillside parted, as if by magic, to reveal a magnificent temple of victory, its entrances guarded by statues representing the Russian army and navy. Dressed as the ‘genius of victory’, Naryshkin’s son Dimitry led the empress through a portal emblazoned with the slogan ‘CATHERINE II: CONQUEROR’. Inside, he presented her with a laurel wreath and a speech which had been printed (in French) along with plans of the temple in a booklet distributed to all the guests. As she crossed the threshold into a hall adorned with the trophies of war, a cannon salute signalled the first of a series of scenes representing a litany of all her finest triumphs at Khotin, the River Larga, Kagul, Chesme and Bender. Only after reliving the glories of her
annus mirabilis
was she permitted to relax among Naryshkin’s colourful Chinese pagodas, where attendants in Chinese costume were on hand to serve her to the accompaniment of Chinese musical instruments. There was still a magnificent banquet to come. Not until three in the morning, an exceptionally late hour, did she finally return to Peterhof.
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Although St Petersburg in the early 1770s remained, as a British traveller remarked, ‘only an immense outline, which will require future empresses, and almost future ages, to complete’, there was no doubt about the scale of Catherine’s ambitions in the field of urban reconstruction.
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‘Augustus said that he had found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble,’ she told Frau Bielke in July 1770, ‘and I shall say that I found Petersburg almost entirely made of wood and will leave it with buildings decorated in marble. Despite the war and the Welches, we continue to build.’
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In the light of her determination to press ahead in difficult circumstances, it was all the more frustrating to see hard-earned progress undone. ‘I have resembled Job since yesterday’, she wrote angrily to Panin, after a fire destroyed part of Vasilevsky Island on 23 May 1771. ‘I sent Count Orlov into town with instructions not to return until the last spark is extinguished.’ Having initially suspected arson, she soon blamed careless residents.
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Voltaire received a different explanation: ‘There is no doubt that the wind and the excessive heat caused all the damage which will soon be repaired. In Russia we build faster than in any other country in Europe.’ She was as good as her word. On 26 July, plans were approved for the development of low-rise stone houses to replace the majority of burnt-out wooden ones.
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Designs for Moscow were more grandiose. Vasily Bazhenov had been appointed to oversee a major reconstruction of the Kremlin just before Catherine’s departure from the old capital in January 1768 and she kept in close touch with him as he surveyed the foundations. ‘Be so good as to open the air-vents,’ she instructed Saltykov at the end of May. ‘Bazhenov needs to move about the cellars and if the vents won’t open he’ll be in danger of suffocating.’
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Warned that even this prestige project would be subject to wartime economies, the architect took advantage of successive delays to develop increasingly ambitious plans. Having originally intended to begin with new government buildings, the empress soon opted instead for a four-storey neoclassical palace with a 700-yard frontage onto the Moscow River.
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Pandering to her obsession with posterity, Bazhenov planned to glorify her name with a building to rival all the wonders of the world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Parisian Palais Royal: the main reception hall alone was destined to measure seventy metres by fifty metres. However, as he soon discovered, Catherine was just as preoccupied with more immediate practicalities. After meeting him in St Petersburg in December 1768, she insisted that the kitchens and confectionery should be built side by side for ease of service.
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And she could barely conceal her irritation on discovering, a year later, that crucial comforts had been neglected. On reviewing the revised plans in February 1770, Grigory Teplov reported that ‘Her Majesty made the following observations’: