Catherine the Great (49 page)
Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
It had been long enough in the planning. Four years earlier, Zavadovsky had told Field Marshal Rumyantsev of the empress’s secret intention to travel via Smolensk and Kiev for a meeting with Joseph II at Kherson.
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Orders went out in September 1784 that all the dams on the Dnieper and its tributaries be cleared to allow ‘navigation from their very sources’ in the following spring. Court officials were urged to do everything possible to economise and limit the number of horses required.
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Later that autumn, however, the renewed threat of plague in the South threw the whole project into doubt–in the aftermath of Lanskoy’s death, the Vorontsovs were not the only ones opposed to the idea of exposing Catherine to unnecessary risk–and by the time she returned from Moscow in summer 1785 it had already been decided to postpone her great venture until January 1787.
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When her cavalcade left Tsarskoye Selo on 7 January Catherine and her suite sheltered under bearskins inside their carriages while their servants’ faces were exposed to driving sleet and wind. She had to stop for three days at Smolensk while their eyes recovered and Dr Rogerson administered St James’s powders to the feverish ‘Redcoat’. Archdeacon Coxe, who passed through Smolensk in the summer of 1778, thought it ‘by far the most singular town’ he had ever seen. ‘The walls stretching over the uneven sides of the hills till they reach the banks of the Dnieper, their ancient style of architecture, their grotesque towers, the spires of churches shooting above the trees, which are so numerous as almost to conceal the buildings from view, the appearance of meadows and the arable ground, all these objects blended together exhibit a scene of the most singular and contrasted kind.’
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The empress liked the place better. Though far from enchanted by the
populace who thronged to catch a glimpse of her–‘they’d gather in fistfuls to see a bear, too’
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–she was so impressed by the local nobility that she staged an impromptu ball and congratulated the Governor General and his staff on ‘their zeal for the common good and the precision with which each fulfilled his duties’.
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At Smolensk, Catherine worshipped in the Dormition Cathedral, a huge, five-domed edifice completed in 1772 almost a century after the foundation stone had been laid.
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At Chernigov, she admired an altogether more ancient foundation, the tenth-century cathedral founded by Mstislav Vladimirovich, while privately singling out Bishop Feofil for his ‘stupidity’. Archimandrite Dorofey made a better impression at Kozelsk, receiving 500 roubles for a pleasing sermon.
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But it was left to one of her favourite preachers, Bishop Georgy of Mogilëv, to greet the empress at Mstislavl with an oration studded with the sorts of leaden bon mot she most admired: ‘Let us leave it to the astronomers to prove that the earth revolves around the sun: our Sun travels around us, and travels in order that we may rest in prosperity.’
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The ‘palace’ in which Catherine slept at Potëmkin’s estate at Krichëv on 19 January was in reality a large wooden house similar to those built at every staging post on the journey. Here the sentries fell under the command of the twenty-one-year-old Lev Nikolayevich Engelhardt, a relative of the prince who spent most of the night scurrying round in search of buckets of water to guard against fire.
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Staying nearby was Jeremy Bentham, on a visit to his brother, Samuel, who had been in Potëmkin’s service since 1784. Bentham, who preferred to be ‘inquired after’ rather than seen, learned that the empress had processed through fir-strewn streets ‘illuminated with tar barrels, alternating with rows of lamps, formed by earthen-pots filled with tallow and a candle wick in the middle’. Though it was hard not to be impressed by her cavalcade, Bentham derived a jaundiced view of the proceedings from Alleyne Fitzherbert, who was ‘sick of the excursion’ having ‘got something the matter with his liver’:
The same company, the same furniture, the same victuals: it is only Petersburg carried up and down the empire. Natives have too much awe to furnish any conversation: if it were not for the diplomatic people, she would have been dead with ennui.
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Back in St Petersburg, Zavadovsky was just as cynical, telling Alexander Vorontsov that those ‘eternal companions of the court–baseness, meanness, hypocrisy, flattery, lies and cunning’ had merely ‘migrated from the banks of the
Neva to the stream of the Dnieper’.
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Yet in a characteristic triumph of hope over experience Catherine was enjoying herself in the company of the ‘pocket ministers’ who took turns to share her carriage, just as they had on the journey to Moscow in 1785.
Effervescent as ever, Ségur kept boredom at bay by devising word games with which a delighted empress could later regale Grimm (only the occasional risqué joke backfired–Catherine was never bawdy in public). Unlike Fitzherbert, Ségur recognised her talent for eliciting useful information from her subjects:
‘More is to be learned,’ she said to me one day, ‘by speaking to ignorant persons about their own affairs, than by talking with the learned, who have nothing but theories, and who would be ashamed not to answer you by ridiculous observations on subjects of which they have no positive knowledge. How I pity these poor
savans
! They never dare to pronounce these four words,
I do not know
, which we ignorant people find so convenient, and which often prevent us from adopting dangerous decisions, for, in a doubtful case, it is much better to do nothing than to do wrong.’
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Montesquieu would have been proud of her.
Though Kiev lay under 20 degrees of frost when the empress arrived on 29 January, she was amazed to discover that neither her ears nor her nose had frozen: ‘that would be impossible in Petersburg, but here the air is softer’.
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The weather, which remained a topic of conversation throughout the journey, was not the only surprise in store. Not long after her arrival, Catherine complained that although she had seen ‘two fortresses and their suburbs’, she couldn’t yet ‘find the town’. From the ‘scattered dwellings they call Kiev’, she could only conclude that it had shrunk since her first visit in 1744.
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This was indeed a city in decline. ‘Of its former splendour’, she wrote to Dr Zimmerman, ‘only some rich churches remain.’ ‘Straggling’ and ‘extremely badly built’, Kiev was ill-equipped to accommodate the unprecedented crowd of cosmopolitan visitors who descended in the empress’s wake, plagued by crowds of beggars in a city whose almshouses provided for only 136 paupers.
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Conscious that ‘illusion is always more attractive than reality’, Ségur famously declared that the city had been transformed into ‘a magic theatre, where ancient and modern times seemed to be mingled and confounded with one another, where civilization went hand in hand with barbarism’.
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No less aware of the theatrical aspect of her journey, which she described to Grimm as a ‘continuous series of fêtes’, Catherine was more brutal: ‘We have
here four Spanish counts, numberless imperial princes, a crowd of Poles, English, Americans, French, Germans,…more heathens than I have ever seen, including even Kirghizians [i.e. Kazakhs], and they are all living in Kievan shacks, and one cannot understand how there is room for them.’
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Affecting not to know what had attracted such a crowd, the empress attributed the influx to reports in the foreign press that she planned to provoke the Turks by staging a second coronation in New Russia ‘of which there was never any question’.
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‘Half Poland’ had come to bend her ear before she renewed her acquaintance with her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, and a good number of his nobles had to be turned away from her apartments: ‘I think they wanted to see me and had come to keep me company.’ The king’s American secretary, Lewis Littlepage, was there to keep an eye on the Poles; Potëmkin, stretched languidly on his divan at the Monastery of the Caves, wove his own web of intrigue.
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In such a feverish atmosphere, a hectic round of social engagements served to raise the sexual stakes. Field Marshal Rumyantsev could think of ‘no better representation of temptation’ than the low-cut dress worn by Countess Natalia Sollogub to Cobenzl’s ball.
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If we are to believe the South American Francisco de Miranda, who let it be thought that the empress herself had been one of his conquests, the whole company descended into hedonistic excess: one of his Russian friends claimed to have won 28,000 roubles at cards since leaving St Petersburg.
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While her entourage indulged themselves, Catherine found more improving relaxation. Deprived of the attentions of Alexander and Constantine, whom she had reluctantly left behind in St Petersburg when they were stricken with illness just before her departure, she all but adopted a surrogate grandson: the five-year-old child of Potëmkin’s niece, Alexandra Branicka. ‘His mother, having seen how the grand dukes behave, follows my regulations precisely.’ According to Catherine, the boy duly responded in kind: ‘healthy, agile, not stubborn, and so free in his manner that it is as though he had lived with us for a century: far from wild, not timid, but clever and happy, so that anyone who sees him is devoted to him’. She had him inoculated against smallpox in mid-March.
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Though the enervating round of balls and masquerades had by then been brought to an end by the onset of Lent, the relief proved short-lived as Catherine immersed herself in an equally exhausting series of religious rituals. Expecting the Dnieper to thaw before Easter, she chose to observe the first week of the Great Fast. On 7 February, she returned from a liturgy at the New Maiden Convent complaining about the canting hypocrisy of the abbess, a former lady-in-waiting at Court.
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She confessed at the Monastery of the Caves on the
following Saturday. Sunday was set aside for communion. Next day, Catherine returned to inspect the relics buried deep in the catacombs, emerging coated in sweat ‘as if from the bath-house’.
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Passing through narrow underground passages, she was greeted by a scene as macabre as the one that Baedeker advertised to tourists at the beginning of the twentieth century:
No fewer than 73 saints are buried here in niches, the bodies lying like mummies in open coffins and enveloped in costly garments…Another curiosity is a head projecting from the ground, and covered with a mitre said to have been worn by John the Longsuffering, who had himself buried in the earth up to his neck and is said to have lived so for 30 years, while his dead body was afterwards preserved in the same position (Twelfth Cent.).
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Although Aleksey Bobrinsky’s tutor had been told in 1783 that the ceilings had been raised to allow Empress Elizabeth to walk without stooping, the catacombs remained so constricted that many courtiers in Catherine’s entourage were forced to turn back when their candles filled the tunnels with smoke and condensation.
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Despite such a ‘terrible promenade’, she herself remained ‘as nimble as a bird’ as she boasted to Count Bruce in her ninth letter on the following morning. The visit had ‘lasted at least two hours because we went all over, in both the highest and the deepest catacombs, and everywhere on foot, and the monk who accompanied us could not have been more ignorant’.
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Such mockery was common enough among the more sceptical members of Russia’s westernised elite. In public, however, the empress took care to demonstrate her reverence for the cradle of Orthodoxy, donating 24,000 roubles for building work, gold candelabra studded with diamonds for the relics of St Vladimir, and new silk shrouds for the other saints’ remains.
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As so often, Catherine presented her religious observances as a form of physical endurance from which it was a relief to settle down to work. Amidst the routine letters of congratulation to efficient subordinates, there was time to catch up with artistic purchases ranging from antique gemstones to furniture. On 29 June, she handed over to Grimm the largest single payment of the reign: 100,000 roubles, roughly a third of the total paid to him in Russian coin between 1765 and 1797. Meanwhile, she was as anxious as ever to achieve value for money, warning him not to buy at a public sale: ‘make sure you get the best possible price so that Prince Vyazemsky [in charge of the state budget] doesn’t choke’.
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Much time was spent completing the manifesto on duels, an ultimately ineffective piece of
legislation inspired by the
Encyclopédie
. While confirming her earlier prohibition on duelling, regarded by Catherine as dishonourable, it introduced milder penalties for a crime against the individual.
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When this manifesto was finished, she returned to Blackstone. All her notes on the British jurist had been taken on the journey, along with a copy of her own Instruction, so that she could work on further constitutional reform, which never came to fruition.
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By early April, even Catherine’s patience was wearing thin. To an absolute monarch who regarded her own travel plans as ‘almost faultless’, it was vexing to be delayed first by the weather and then by Potëmkin. Yet the prince had good reason to prevaricate. Although the prospect of an imperial visit had given renewed urgency to all sorts of dormant provincial projects (the municipal
duma
at Kharkov was one), not all of them were ready on schedule. Along the route, officials complained about the difficulty of finding sober servants for the empress’s palaces and the impossibility of completing the necessary building work. Pleading for more time on 31 March, the major general in charge of the palace at Kremenchug, where Potëmkin had his headquarters, reported that it was so cold that the pitch was freezing on the roofs.
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Embarrassed by such problems, the prince held Catherine off as long as he could, adamant in his desire to display New Russia in all its glory. But when some of the foreigners in Kiev began to drift away in search of Stanislaw and Joseph II, she determined to leave for the South.
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