Catherine the Great (47 page)

Yet it was one thing to joke to a friend, another to face her Court. While the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 30 August brought a welcome opportunity to see her elder grandson, the annual celebrations, transferred from the monastery to Tsarskoye Selo, were conducted in her absence. To deepen her misery, a courier
arrived from Moscow next day to announce the death of Zakhar Chernyshëv. At the time of their dalliance in 1751, Catherine had been unable to imagine paradise without her dashing cavalier; now he had got there before her.
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Having initially intended to remain in the country until 10 September, she returned to town five days early, travelling in a simple two-seater with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Anna Protasova, and sleeping in the Hermitage. The rooms she had occupied with Lanskoy carried too many memories, and it was not until the following spring that she returned to her usual Winter Palace apartments. Looking back, Catherine remembered the summer of 1784 as a perpetual series of battles to recover her equilibrium: ‘one to be fought, one to be won, one to be lost.’
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Only on 8 September did she finally summon the courage to appear in public on the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. After mass, she endured a lengthy hand-kissing ceremony before retiring to the Hermitage for lunch with Potëmkin, a handful of friends, and Prince Repnin, who had come to request her permission to take his sick daughter abroad.
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‘In truth,’ Catherine confessed to Grimm, ‘it was such a big effort that on returning to my bedroom, I felt so exhausted that anyone else would have fainted, something which has never happened to me in my life.’ ‘If you want to know my true state,’ she continued a fortnight later:

Count Cobenzl was more interested in the political consequences of such ‘immoderate grief’. Mercifully for a supporter of the Austrian alliance, they had proved to be minimal. For all Catherine’s emotional turbulence, the direction of her government had remained firm:

I
n the event, the interval between favourites, though longer than usual, proved to be only temporary. During the celebrations surrounding Catherine’s fifty-sixth birthday on Easter Monday 1785, a new shooting star emerged. Introduced to the empress by Potëmkin, the thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Yermolov was first mentioned in the Court journal on 22 April. His presence among the five guests at lunch on the following day suggests that the relationship may have begun during Lent, a time of greater privacy than any other for the empress.
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Although Potëmkin dubbed him the ‘white negro’ on account of his unusually flat nose, it was Yermolov’s flat-footedness in politics that led to his rapid downfall. Drawn into business in April 1786 by his appointment to a commission to restructure the assignat bank, he struggled, as his friend Bezborodko had predicted, to cope with machinations at Court. After being inveigled into an intrigue against Potëmkin that may have been inspired by Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov, Yermolov was dismissed in July with the now customary redundancy package–the Polish Order of the White Eagle, 4300 serfs in Belorussia, 130,000 roubles in cash and a silver dinner service–and sent abroad. In the following year, he embarrassed Semën Vorontsov, Catherine’s ambassador in London, by demanding to be presented to George III. ‘The king has always found it ridiculous that in Russia one can be promoted from sergeant to major general in the space of two years without serving at all.’
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By comparison with Yermolov’s extended ‘retirement’ (he died in Vienna at the age of eighty in 1834), the empress’s infatuation was brief indeed. While it lasted, however, it served its purpose, as Cobenzl noted, by staving off
melancholy and stimulating her natural
joie de vivre
. During the long months of misery after Lanskoy’s death, she had been consoled by a treatise sent to her by the Court physician at Hanover, Dr Johann Zimmerman.
Solitude considered with respect to its influence on the mind and the heart
was eventually published in Russian translation in 1791. For the moment, Catherine acknowledged the support of the new favourite and her other faithful friends: ‘My inner self has regained its calm and serenity.’
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Restored to health and happiness, she had launched into a new bout of ‘legislomania’, capping a decade of fundamental domestic reform by promulgating the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns on her birthday, 21 April 1785.

Though Catherine had no intention of inflating the pretensions of the nobility as a whole–it was part of the compact by which her empire was governed that nobles should abdicate corporate political ambitions in return for virtually unlimited social and economic control over their serfs–she wanted to boost the nobles’
esprit de corps
in order to convert them into a civilised instrument for the transmission of her Enlightened policies. Whereas most European sovereigns were anxious to limit noble status, Catherine was keen to enhance it in the interests of her empire. Far from being a concession to noble pressure, the Charter of 1785 represented a consolidation and development of Peter III’s ‘emancipation’ manifesto of 1762. Corporate rights granted to the noble estate as a whole–including the right to attend provincial assemblies and elect a provincial marshal–were linked to the assumption that individuals would continue to serve voluntarily in the provinces: those who failed to serve could play no part in the assemblies. The charter confirmed nobles’ property rights and personal security (they could not be flogged; they were permitted to petition the empress direct; they could be tried only by their peers; and they could be deprived of their nobility only by decision of the Senate, confirmed by Catherine herself). The legislation also attempted to regulate membership of the noble estate by making provincial assemblies responsible for registering six different groups of nobles, defined for the first time according to the antiquity and origins of their titles.
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The Charter to the Towns similarly divided the merchantry and urban-dwellers into six categories, defined according to wealth and occupation. As part of the hierarchical social order Catherine strove to create, they too were given rights of personal security and property (to a lesser degree than the nobles) and the institutional modernisation begun in the Provincial Reform of 1775 was capped by the creation of an even more elaborate system of urban government, based on a representative town council (
duma
). Although the empress
contemplated an equally rational approach to social engineering in a draft charter to the state peasantry, this was never published, perhaps because of its unsettling implications for the serfs. Symmetrical in form, obsessively detailed in content, and increasingly prescriptive as they descended the social scale, the charters stand as a monument to Catherine’s confidence in the reforming power of legislation.
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Although some of that confidence was misplaced, since it took too little notice of prevailing social realities, there was no doubt about her commitment to the development of a vigorous urban economy. On Saturday 24 May 1785, she set out from Tsarskoye Selo without escort in a small suite of twenty carriages to inspect the progress that had been made in the decade since the Provincial Reform.

Passing through the staging posts immortalised five years later in Alexander Radishchev’s sentimentalist
Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow
, Catherine had no eyes for the rural misery he was soon to depict. Her immediate purpose was to inspect the newly enlarged locks at Vyshny Volochëk, the pivot of the system of inland waterways built by forced labour under Peter the Great which carried 216,000 tons of freight a year to St Petersburg by the 1750s. Soon after arriving in the little town, she looked on as some thirty barges passed through its new stone locks, loaded with grain and iron.
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The empress had originally planned to be away for no longer than a month.
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But while she was at Vyshny, Count Bruce persuaded her to divert briefly to Moscow in order to quell rumours of potential unrest. Although the road between the two capitals was probably the only one in Russia smooth enough to attempt at short notice, only the most entertaining of company could have persuaded her to face such a punishing schedule with equanimity (in the following year she approved a comprehensive programme of improvements to the road, scheduled for completion in 1790 at a total cost of 4 million roubles).
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Her sixteen-strong entourage included not only Potëmkin and Lev Naryshkin, but also three ‘very easy-going, very clever, NB. very jolly’ travelling companions in Cobenzl, Alleyne Fitzherbert and Count Ségur, the ‘pocket ministers’ who took turns to share her six-seater with Yermolov. They relieved the tedium by playing word games devised by Ségur, who seemed particularly ‘pleased to be with us and is as jolly as a chaffinch’.
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‘The journey is doing me a lot of good,’ Catherine reported to her grandsons’ governor from Torzhok.
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Seen through such rose-tinted spectacles, even the old capital seemed to have
something to recommend it. She told Paul and Maria Fëdorovna that General Bauer’s aqueduct at Rostokino, built in imitation of Roman models to channel water into the city from the springs at Mytishchi and completed only in 1803, was already ‘the best building in Moscow: it seems as light as a feather’.
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If the city itself was ‘far better than it used to be’, as Catherine was prepared to acknowledge on the return journey, then so were the villages on the main Petersburg road, rebuilt in stone as a consequence of the Provincial Reform.
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While the ancient settlements along the route had sunk into decline–‘No place,’ Coxe admitted in 1778, ‘ever filled me with more melancholy ideas of fallen grandeur than the town of Novgorod’–the new and recently restored towns showed signs of genuine vigour. Enlivened by a ‘rising spirit of commerce’, Tver itself promised to be ‘no inconsiderable ornament to the most opulent and civilized country’.
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Although such rapid improvements could hardly have been achieved without the active involvement of merchants who shared the Charter to the Towns’ aspirations towards a prosperous civic society protected by law, Catherine took legitimate pride in having inspired them under the energetic direction of Tver’s Protestant governor, Yakov Sievers.
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‘I am told that this is a consequence of the arrangements I put in place and which have been followed to the letter for ten years: and seeing all that, I say that I am well pleased.’
¹⁵

Although the main aim of her travels was to publicise the benefits of modern technology and administration, the rituals that punctuated the journey spoke of the resilience of an older cultural world. To celebrate their recently granted charters, nobles and townsmen flocked to pay homage to their sovereign. The merchants of Torzhok presented her with leather bags and slippers, embroidered with golden thread, which she promptly sent back to St Petersburg as a gift for Constantine and Alexander.
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As befitted an expedition resembling a medieval monarch’s progress, the tone of the proceedings remained overwhelmingly religious. Catherine attended cathedral services at every major calling point, kissing the holy relics in several more churches along the way and permitting a succession of bishops, abbots and abbesses, themselves attended by countless clergy, monks and nuns, to kiss her hand.
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Yet even the religious aspect of the journey was given a distinctive new colouring. After dining in Moscow with Archbishop Platon and his brother, Alexander, archpriest of the Dormition Cathedral, the empress made a parting gesture towards toleration by receiving a delegation of registered Old Believers at the Petrovsky Palace on 5 June.
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Four days later, on the feast of the Holy Spirit, she laid the foundation stone for Prince Nikolay Lvov’s monumental neoclassical cathedral at the Torzhok monastery of Boris
and Gleb. (The Scottish stonemason Adam Menelaws had left Tsarskoye Selo a week ahead of her to begin work there.)
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The final part of the return journey was completed by water from Borovichy on 11 June. One of the large galleys manned by the 674 sailors under Vice Admiral Pushchin’s command was devoted entirely to the preparation of lunch, another was responsible for dinner. Catherine shared her craft with Yermolov and her favourite ladies-in-waiting, Anna Protasova and Maria Perekusikhina.
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As Ségur later recalled, Lake Ilmen, a ‘sort of calm and limpid sea’ south of Novgorod, ‘was covered with a number of boats of all sizes, adorned with painted sails, and garlands of flowers’:

Catherine’s company was more raucous. As always, she had taken plenty of work with her, chivvying Prince Vyazemsky about a series of unresolved criminal cases in St Petersburg province. In the evenings, however, she and her entourage relaxed by compiling a fantastic story about the revolution that had failed to materialise in Moscow. No wonder ‘Prince Potëmkin died of laughing throughout the journey’.
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Though the wide range of personal and public funds used to subsidise the empress’s travels makes it impossible to determine their total costs, the following accounts, issued by the Court administration, give some estimate of the types of expenditure involved:

Back at Peterhof for the twenty-third anniversary of her coup, Catherine boasted to Grimm about the comparative etymological dictionary on which she had been working since the death of Lanskoy: ‘It is perhaps the most useful thing that has ever been done for all languages and every dictionary, and namely for the Russian language, of which the Russian Academy has undertaken to produce a dictionary, and for which, if the truth be told, it totally lacked the requisite knowledge.’
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Requests for information were sent across Europe, and also to both South and North America. Invited to contribute lists of Native American words by the marquis de Lafayette, George Washington replied in May 1786 that he would do his best to help Catherine, ‘but she must have a little patience–the Indian tribes on the Ohio are numerous, dispersed & distant from those who are most likely to do the business properly’.
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She forged ahead regardless.
Linguarum totius orbis, vocabularia comparativa
was published in 1787 with a title page in Russian and Latin. Since the empress’s contribution depended more on enthusiasm than expertise, the scholarly value of the work owed most to Peter Simon Pallas, the leader of the Academy of Sciences’ expeditions to the steppes. However, her own patriotic instincts were reflected in a determination to detect Slavonic influences in many of the world’s languages.
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