Catherine the Great (54 page)

Although the Polish question remained in most respects as complex as ever–not least as a result of the confessional heterogeneity of some parts of the population
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–there was one sense in which Catherine’s options had been simplified by Potëmkin’s demise. By the end of his life, there were almost a quarter of a million people on his Polish estates around Śmila, on the River Dnieper, which he was widely suspected of wanting to transform into a feudal principality. After his death, Catherine could pursue his ambitions for a further partition without fear of a rival power base.
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Having signalled her intention to intervene in Poland in February 1792, she seized her chance in May when a group of Polish reactionaries, with Russian support, appealed to her to restore Polish liberties at the Confederation of Targowica, a town in eastern Poland. As many as 100,000 Russian troops soon overwhelmed the Polish resistance that helped to justify their intervention. Now the way was open for a second partition, shared between Russia and Prussia. ‘My part is sung,’ wrote Catherine to Rumyantsev when the Prussian alliance was sealed in November, ‘It is an example of how it is not impossible to attain an end and to succeed if one really wills it.’
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Handicapped by the French declaration of war in August 1792, the Austrians, having unwisely consented to Prussian gains in Poland in the false hope of exchanging Belgium for Bavaria, were left to seek compensation from France by the deal agreed in January 1793 which gave Russia most of eastern Poland and a further 3 million subjects, including, for the first time, a significant number of Jews.
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Now that Stanislaw August’s dreams of autonomy had been shattered, the final dismemberment of his kingdom could not be long postponed. When Tadeusz Kościusko led an insurrection against the Russian plenipotentiary in March 1794, all three eastern powers combined to suppress it. Initially delayed by the threat of another war with the Turks, Catherine sent Suvorov into Poland in August. On 4 November, he stormed Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, butchering between 13,000 and 20,000 Poles. After that, Zavadovsky predicted to Rumyantsev that ‘the impending partition’ would be straightforward enough: ‘Our neighbours, in their current exhaustion, are in
no state to swagger.’
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So it proved. On 24 December 1794, the third partition removed the name of Poland from the map of Europe, giving the Russians 120,000 square kilometres of new territory, by comparison with 48,000 for Prussia and 47,000 for Austria. In celebration, Catherine granted 107,000 Polish serfs to her closest advisers, 13,199 of them to Platon Zubov.
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Though the empress never totally rejected French ideas–a luxurious edition of Bayle’s
Dictionary
, which she had first read at the beginning of the 1750s, was on the list with Plutarch among her last orders from Johann Weitbrecht, the leading bookseller in St Petersburg–she did little to conceal her growing pessimism.
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Faced with revolutionary death threats from France in April 1792, she complained to Grimm that ‘it is apparently a good thing to assassinate people at the end of the eighteenth century, and I am told that it is Voltaire who preached this. See how they dare to cast calumnies on people: I think Voltaire would rather stay where he is buried than find himself in the company of Mirabeau’. By February 1794, however, she told Grimm that he had been right to distance himself from the
philosophes
, whose work had ‘served only to destroy’. In April she went further: ‘I remembered yesterday something you have said to me more than once: that this century has been a century of preparation.’ Now that preparation seemed only to have led to ‘filth’ of every kind, with the prospect of ‘calamities without end and innumerable wretched people’.
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In such a climate, the moderate Russian writers whose careers Catherine had done so much to foster found themselves under increasing suspicion. A year after the assassination of Louis XVI, even Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
was removed from the bookshops because it dealt with regicide. Catherine’s last significant piece of legislation was the edict of 11 October 1796 which revoked the right of individuals to operate private presses, granted in 1783. Anxious as she had been to propagate improving ideas, an empress obsessed with obedience not only baulked at the growth of independent publishing but was unable to conceive of an orderly system of censorship for the private presses. Twelve of the sixteen closed overnight. Whereas 320 secular books had been published in Russia in 1796, only 212 appeared in the first year of Tsar Paul’s reign, the lowest total since 1777.
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Although the empress’s view of the Enlightenment had undergone a marked transformation since her patronage of Voltaire and Diderot in the 1760s, little in her daily routine had changed. Sitting in her study every morning, she continued
to dispatch business just as she had done throughout her reign. One of her secretaries’ jobs was to process the petitions submitted in her name. Of the 1920 submitted to the chancellery directed by Dimitry Troshchinsky and Adrian Gribovsky between January 1795 and 4 November 1796, two thirds (1036) were from nobles. Merchants (119) constituted the next largest group; 85 came from non-noble officials and army officers; 66 were from peasants, 46 from foreigners and 12 from the empress’s own Court servants. Of the noble petitions, the greatest number (147) concerned disputes over estates, with 56 more to do with squabbles over land. Few such documents reached the empress as a result of the draconian legislation against false petitions and official attempts to limit their number–on her trip to the South in 1787, the archbishop of Yekaterinoslav had strictly forbidden his clergy from daring to appeal to her directly (they were not to go near the palace, still less lurk outside her windows).
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Of those petitions she scrutinised, however, a fair number seem to have received a positive response: of the 133 requests for aid in these two years, 74 were granted and so were 48 of the 61 requests for pensions.
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Another of her secretaries’ functions was to dispense her largesse as Catherine allocated funds from the Closet and other sources to favoured friends and advisers. As a sop for Zubov’s inexorable rise, Bezborodko received 50,000 roubles from the postal taxes on New Year’s Day 1795, with a pension of 10,000. On 18 April, another 50,000 was sent to Suvorov in Warsaw. (When he stayed at the Tauride Palace later in the year, wandering about in various states of undress, the empress thought him ‘a very strange individual. He is very erudite, and naturally very talented, but infinitely eccentric, in ways which do him no good.’) There were the customary Easter presents for courtiers and servants, mostly in the form of new uniforms and dresses at a cost of 21,900 roubles (by 1796, the price had risen to 25,300 roubles). Property had always been one of the empress’s greatest gifts. In January, she bought Count Osterman’s house on Millionnaya for 150,000 roubles and gave it to Prince Repnin; in April she paid 160,000 roubles for Andrey Shuvalov’s house on the Moika and presented it to Alexandra Branicka, furnished and fitted out with new mirrors from Potëmkin’s glassworks. Foreign dignitaries were given more intricate treasures. In July she sent a snuffbox with her portrait on it, valued at 11,656 roubles, to Prime Minister Pitt; the Austrian foreign minister Baron Thugut received another worth 14,000 roubles in September. Aleksey Orlov had been sent a more personalised gift in July: ‘I would have put in it snuff from tobacco grown in my own garden, for I take no other, but I was worried that it would dry out on the journey.’ Meanwhile she had paid for the transport of a Herschel telescope, presented to her by George III, and given another 3229
roubles to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod to whom she had first been introduced on the Volga cruise in 1767. Fëdor Shubin received 3000 roubles for a waxwork of Joseph II.
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For an ageing empress, the length and frequency of Orthodox services was an increasing irritation, especially in Lent when she might spend up to eight hours a day in the palace chapel.
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The Church nevertheless had its uses as a bastion against revolutionary excess: ‘for my part,’ Catherine proclaimed tongue in cheek to Grimm in February 1794, ‘I propose that all the Protestant powers should embrace the Greek religion to preserve themselves against this irreligious, immoral, anarchical, evil and diabolical plague, the enemy of throne and altar. It is the sole apostolic and truly Christian [faith]’.
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In the circumstances, it was all the more important to continue to make lavish donations as a public expression of her religious commitment. In 1790, she commissioned two sets of liturgical plate from Iver Buch, the son of a Danish goldsmith who had worked in Russia since 1776. Each set was studded with diamonds from the treasury and ‘antique stones’ from her own collection in the Hermitage. While one was sent to the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow, the other was presented to the Trinity Cathedral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery at the annual celebrations on 30 August 1791.
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Further internal gilding there, costing over 24,000 roubles, was paid for by February 1795, and in May of that year she spent another 90,000 roubles on marble to rebuild the ageing Kazan Church.
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Although the upkeep of the palaces constituted another drain on the imperial purse–in June 1795, 68,193 roubles had to be set aside to repair General Bauer’s water-supply system at Tsarskoye Selo–Catherine was as usual more parsimonious with her own accommodation.
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The secretary with responsibility for the royal residences was Suvorov’s old comrade Peter Turchaninov, ‘a little slip of a man, and so addicted to bowing and scraping that he only seemed half as high as he was’.
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In preparation for the empress’s visit to Tsarskoye Selo after Easter 1795, he instructed the Court administration on 8 April to furnish the Chinese pagodas with curtains and leather chairs. Twelve days later came a characteristic amplification: ‘1) do not make fringes and tassels for the curtains; 2) only hang the smallest icons; 3) mirrors at 25 roubles each; 4) use old dressing-tables and commodes and buy only what cannot be supplied from these; 5) black leather chairs are much cheaper, on no account purchase any armchairs; 6) also use old stone wash-basins’. ‘Listen,’ Catherine once told Grimm, ‘the thing I like least in the world is to speak about finances.’ Still, she was anxious that the Court had been running a 2-million-rouble deficit on an annual turnover of 3 million since 1789.
Caution even came through in the autumn preparations for Constantine’s wedding to Princess Juliana Henrietta of Sachsen-Coburg. The upper floor of the Marble Palace was to be furnished for the empress and several guests, but only ‘for the shortest possible time’ so that everything could be taken ‘back to where it belongs’. Even so, 118,528 roubles were set aside over the course of 1796 and 1797 to convert new Winter Palace apartments for the groom.
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Though Constantine’s wedding had to be postponed when the bride was struck down by toothache, it went ahead in February 1796 with all the customary banquets, balls and fireworks. ‘So far I am very well,’ Catherine reported to Grimm in the middle of the whirl, after being told that she seemed as merry as a lark: ‘and that is a very good compliment I have been given at the age of sixty-seven’.
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Alexander had already married the fourteen-year-old Princess Louise of Baden-Durlach in September 1793 (‘everyone said that it was two angels who were betrothed’).
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The empress had always revelled in the preparations for such nuptials, and these were especially important as they seemed to presage a happy and glorious future for the two boys she had brought up as her own. Other family news was less welcome. She scarcely troubled to conceal her disappointment when Maria Fëdorovna gave birth to another girl, Olga, on 11 July 1792. Fretting that a clutch of expensive grand duchesses would be left on the shelf, the empress resented everything from the costs of their upkeep (from jewels for the newborn child down to the single rouble given to each of the palace sentries) to the complications their birthdays and name days would bring to an over-crowded Court calendar. Even so, she was distraught when Olga died less than three years later. While teething, the child had ‘developed such a hunger that she wanted to eat all the time,’ Catherine explained to Grimm on 16 January 1795. ‘After sixteen weeks of suffering and a slow consumptive fever came 24 hours of terrible agony.’ Four days later, dressed in deep mourning, the empress braved the cold to travel to the funeral at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, accompanied in her carriage by her two eldest granddaughters Alexandra and Yelena. Though it was greeted by rejoicings at Court, the birth on 7 January of a sixth granddaughter, Anna, was scant compensation.
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Not until her last grandchild, the future Nicholas I, came into the world on 25 June 1796, did the prospects for the dynasty seem to improve. ‘His brothers will prove to be dwarfs before this colossus,’ Catherine boasted to Grimm: ‘his hands are only a bit smaller than my own.’
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By then her own horizons were already shrinking. ‘I am old, too,’ she had confessed as she grieved for Potëmkin in October 1791.
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Six months later, Khrapovitsky found among her papers an undated will in her own hand, specifying
various burial grounds depending on her place of death. Should it occur at Tsarskoye Selo, she wanted to be interred (alongside the unmentioned Alexander Lanskoy) in the cemetery at Sofia; if she died in St Petersburg, then she must be buried in the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Its Trinity Cathedral, as a later note made clear, had been ‘built by me’: there was no mention of the imperial necropolis at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, indelibly associated with Peter the Great. ‘Lay out my corpse dressed in white, with a golden crown on my head, and on it inscribe my Christian name. Mourning dress is to be worn for six months, and no longer: the shorter the better.’
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Increasingly conscious of the passage of time, she observed mordantly to Grimm in February 1794, the fiftieth anniversary of her arrival in Russia, that there were now barely a dozen people who could remember the event, one of whom was Lev Naryshkin, who denied it for fear of appearing aged, and another Ivan Shuvalov, ‘who scarcely leaves his house as a result of his decrepitude’.
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That same month, William Gould told John Parkinson that ‘though the empress looks very well when made up, she appears very much otherwise in dishabille, indeed with strong symptoms of old age’.
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In public, Catherine wore ‘a great deal of rouge, for she was still desirous to prevent the impressions of time from being visible on her face’.
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In the relative privacy of her own apartments, she received ambassadors in a simple white negligee, using spectacles and a magnifying glass for reading. Her hair was worn low, a simple old-fashioned style, with curls behind the ears.
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It was an image of vulnerability soon to be attacked by her Western detractors. In his controversial
Secret Memoirs of Russia
, published in Paris soon after her death, Charles Masson described the allegedly toothless empress as ‘fat to the point of deformity’, mocking her faith in a Greek client of Zubov, the piratical Colonel Lambro-Kochoni, who prescribed seawater for the ulcers that disfigured her legs.
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