Catherine the Great (57 page)

It cannot have been an unmitigated pleasure for Nicholas to be reminded in 1826 that Catherine’s armies, ‘less numerous and less well trained than now’,
nevertheless achieved ‘great feats, worthy of Greece and Rome’.
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Neither can the tsar’s hypersensitive ear have failed to detect the reproachful overtones emitted by a chronicler of the Cadet Corps who proclaimed Catherine’s ‘glorious’ reign as ‘unforgettable’, and went on to praise Count Anhalt, the director of the Corps between 1786 and 1794, for an Enlightened regime whose values could scarcely have been further removed from Nicholas’s militarism.
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Even under Nicholas, Catherine’s name continued to be raised in defence of intellectual independence. Nikolay Polevoy reminded readers of his
Moscow Telegraph
how well she had understood the loss to her reign ‘had poetry, art and sciences not added their voices and their glory to the thunder of military victories and the dazzle of courtly magnificence’.
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In a memorandum of 1833 ‘On the silence of the Russian press’, Prince Peter Vyazemsky stressed that an unmuzzled European press had been Catherine’s ‘brave and faithful servant’.
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And the Decembrist Alexander Kornilovich mused from his confinement in the Peter-Paul fortress that ‘Catherine loved Russian literature, and Derzhavin, Dmitriev and Karamzin appeared. They could be found now, if only they were sought out.’
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In the light of the Russian elite’s experiences under Tsar Paul, Catherine’s generosity towards her subordinates seemed even more deserving of praise. Anecdotes about the empress published in the first three decades of the nineteenth century portrayed a ruler who was equally well disposed towards each of her subjects, generous in her mercy, just in her punishments, tolerant of human weaknesses and severe only towards herself.
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Catherine, in other words, had been an autocrat, but not a despot. Sumarokov claimed that not a single instance of ‘cruelty, vengeance, the intensification of punishments or menacing autocracy’ was to be found in the whole of her reign. For all her superhuman energy–following Perekusikhina he suggested that the empress had been blessed with ‘miraculous quantities of static electricity’–Catherine was a model of self-control whose heart never dominated her head. ‘He who can govern himself in this way is worthy to rule the universe.’
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Remembering how the empress had protected him from intrigue, Prince Dolgorukov observed that ‘with such a tsaritsa’ every subject could ‘labour with pleasure’ and relax in the knowledge that he was trusted. Under Catherine, ‘fools were not frightening and scoundrels were not dangerous’.
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Such a tolerant monarch could not only forgive her servants their every misdemeanour, but would also respect loyal ministers even when she did not admire them. Repeated in anecdote after anecdote, this point was driven home by Pushkin in his
History of Pugachëv
. Catherine, he reminded the notoriously mistrustful Nicholas I, ‘knew how to overcome her prejudices’.
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Faced with the possibility that his grandmother might become an icon to inspire his critics, Nicholas instinctively tried to prevent them from learning too much about her. He may have allowed Pushkin access to the archives on the Pugachëv rebellion, but he had no intention of permitting the publication of potentially damaging testimony from Catherine’s time. Apart from the empress’s own memoirs, Khrapovitsky’s diary was pre-eminent. ‘No single book,’ judged his friend Ivan Dmitriev, ‘could give a better understanding of Catherine’s mind, character and life.’
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Like Dmitriev, Alexander Turgenev recognised that Catherine’s secretary, having ‘recorded
ipsissima verba
everything that he saw and heard’, offered an unparalleled guide to her ‘inner life’ and the morals of her Court.
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Yet such titillating detail was anathema to the tsar. When Pavel Svinin, who had already published fragments of the diary, proposed a complete annotated edition in 1833, the president of the main censorship committee responded on the tsar’s behalf that it was ‘politically speaking premature’ to publish a text which revealed ‘a certain weakening in governmental power, some incongruity in the relationships and behaviour of people close to the Court, and vacillation in the authorities of state’.
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Turgenev was soon to experience a similar frustration when he sought to publish ‘all the gossip’ about Catherine’s Court that he had unearthed in the French diplomatic archives. Nicholas personally retorted that such sources were ‘offensive to Russia and of no historical importance’.
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Catherine’s own memoirs, which implied that all the nineteenth-century Romanovs were descended from Sergey Saltykov, were so incendiary that they remained unpublished in Russia until 1907.

Yet the harder the censors tried to restrict the available information, the more Russians yearned to taste the forbidden fruit. And it was by no means impossible for the well-connected to do so. Catherine’s own memoirs circulated in copies from the manuscript version cherished by Turgenev as ‘the apple of his eye’. The copy that Pushkin lent to the grand duchess Yelena Pavlovna sent her ‘out of her mind’.
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Natalia Zagryazhskaya, the favourite daughter of the Ukrainian
hetman
Kirill Razumovsky, was a further source of titillating information. Marked down by Catherine herself as ‘an adventuress’ in 1787, Natalia rapidly gained the reputation of one who was exciting but dangerous to know. Pushkin was introduced to her in 1830 on his engagement to her great-niece, and became captivated, like other members of his circle, by this living link with a recent but disappearing past. In the absence of authoritative written sources, it became all the more important to record her anecdotes for posterity. They supplied most of the information for Pushkin’s ‘Table-Talk’, compiled in 1835–6.
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To the untutored eye, paeans of praise to the late empress might seem no more than saccharine effusions. However, the Catherine myth is better regarded as a series of pointed attempts to reshape the pattern of autocracy. The code was transparent enough. To her idolaters, Catherine’s name stood for liberty of expression, moderation in government, and respectful treatment of loyal subordinates. To her immediate successors, however, she came to personify unnatural female rule, unethical territorial expansion, and an unnerving flirtation with juridical reform and intellectual speculation. As a result, once the first flush of enthusiasm for a revival of Catherine’s ideals had evaporated early in the reign of Alexander I, her devotees made little progress in the first half of the nineteenth century in their attempt to convert their private fascination for the empress into the public adoration they thought she deserved. It was only in the 1860s, once Herzen had published in London the memoirs that Nicholas I had suppressed, that some of the tsarist regime’s most intelligent supporters appreciated that by disowning Catherine and all that she stood for, they had inadvertently handed their radical opponents a powerful weapon. The last four decades of the nineteenth century therefore witnessed a concerted attempt to claw back the empress for the establishment.

As the secretary of the Russian Historical Society later confirmed, the ‘fundamental idea’ underlying its establishment in 1866 was the assumption that the past would seem the ‘more attractive’ the better it became known. Not for nothing did Alexander II’s foreign minister Prince Gorchakov christen the society and its publications a ‘patriotic enterprise’.
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Catherine was at the heart of the venture. When its patron, the future tsar Alexander III, conferred imperial status on the society in 1873, he expressed pleasure that its work had been directed mainly to the preservation of documents concerning her ‘praiseworthy actions, tending to the well-being of Russia’.
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Together with monthly historical journals such as
Russian Archive
, whose founder-editor worked from an office dominated by a portrait of the empress, the society published a voluminous series of sources that ultimately permitted a new generation of scholars to give the empress a new lease of life.
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Historical fiction reached an even wider readership. A year after he retired as a senior official at the Ministry of Education, G. P. Danilevsky wrote his first novella,
Catherine the Great on the Dnieper
. Twenty years later, it was followed by
another,
Potëmkin on the Danube
. By that time, the author was deputy editor-in-chief of the government newspaper, whose staff was dragooned into publishing a trilogy of more substantial novels about Catherine’s reign.
Mirovich
and
Princess Tarakanova
were both based on authentic sources. So was the last and longest of the novels, which continued the theme of rebellion by discussing Pugachëv.
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In 1890, the last year of Danilevsky’s life, he set St Petersburg society alight by delivering a lecture claiming, plausibly enough, that Catherine had married Potëmkin.
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Works such as these helped to lift Catherine’s public profile higher by the centenary of her death than at any time since the reign of Alexander I. According to an American tourist, her picture greeted the visitor ‘everywhere, in every variety of costume and position’. Indeed, the honours were divided with Peter the Great, for both were ubiquitous ‘in effigy or picture or memorial or legend or belongings’. ‘They made Russia what it is’, he went on, ‘but their remembrance is not so fragrant as Washington or Lincoln’.
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On 24 November 1873, Alexander II inaugurated M. O. Mikeshin’s majestic monument to Catherine in the square outside the St Petersburg Public Library. The tsar had followed every step of its development as the budget almost doubled from the original estimate in 1865 to a total cost of 456,896 roubles.
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At a meeting in his presence on the following day, Academician Grot, who edited Catherine’s correspondence with Grimm for the Imperial Russian Historical Society, claimed that it was now possible to see the empress in a new perspective:

In similar fashion, the great Russian historian Vasily Klyuchevsky argued at the centenary of her death in 1896 that ‘posterity’s accounts’ had by then been settled. The empress, he said, had become ‘merely a subject for study’ who could be safely consigned to the ‘remoteness of history’ now that she no longer served as either scapegoat or inspiration.
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Grot and Klyuchevsky were both mistaken. Unfortunately for those who sought to sanitise Catherine’s image, it proved impossible to focus solely on her glorious achievements. On the contrary, a campaign designed primarily to drape Catherine in the Russian flag served rather to enliven interest in her personality.
Biographers, in particular, found it hard to detach her patriotic ‘virtues’ from her chequered morals. The liberal journalist Vasily Bilbasov managed to complete only the first part of a projected twelve-volume work before running into trouble with the censors. They objected to his quotations from Catherine’s memoirs, to a reference to her illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, and to his discussion of the vexed question of Tsar Paul’s paternity. The book was published thanks to the intervention of Alexander III, who insisted on raising the price to a prohibitive five roubles, but the censors had the last laugh when the tsar discovered that Bilbasov was the same ‘swine’ who edited the liberal newspaper
The Voice
.
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Bilbasov’s second volume had to be published in Berlin. Russians nevertheless found ways of reading it, and the demand for titillating information about Catherine never abated.

In 1897, the teenage poet Alexander Blok declared that Catherine was his favourite heroine in history on a visit to Bad Neuheim during which, by a delicious coincidence, he lost his virginity to a woman more than twice his age, described by his biographer as ‘his type: big, spontaneous, and talented rather than intellectual’.
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Though it was only after the revolution of 1905 that salacious stories of the empress’s ‘intimate life’ could be published in Russia, Catherine’s admirers found their own way of celebrating her memory.
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Thanks to the patronage of Grand Duke Nikolay Mikhaylovich, a circle of antiquarians including the snuffbox connoisseur S. N. Kaznakov, and Grigory Orlov’s biographer, Alexander Golombiyevsky, staged an exhibition of imperial portraits at the Tauride Palace in spring 1905. Between February and May, undeterred by revolutionary unrest, some 45,000 visitors marvelled at forty-four paintings of Catherine, displayed alongside thirty-five of Peter the Great and Alexander I in the palace she had built for Potëmkin. (Shortly afterwards the great colonnade where he had entertained her in April 1791 became the outer hall of Russia’s first national representative assembly, the State Duma.)
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The exhibition’s guiding force was Sergey Dyaghilev, whose collaborators in the predominantly homosexual ‘World of Art’ group experienced their own scandalous frisson by gathering in 1906 to examine what they believed to be a wax model of Potëmkin’s phallus, allegedly commissioned by Catherine ‘for the edification of diminished successors’, and smuggled out of the Hermitage by a curator at the behest of his son, the erotic artist Konstantin Somov.

One reason why the empress continued to have such a profound resonance at the beginning of the twentieth century was the presence at the Court of St Petersburg, throughout the reigns of the last two tsars, of a woman who deliberately
modelled herself on Catherine the Great. This was the grand duchess Maria Pavlovna, wife of Alexander III’s brother, Grand Duke Vladimir Aleksandrovich, born Princess Marie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Gossips claimed that this ‘debauched German’ led a ‘dissolute life’ by holding ‘small orgies’ at her residence along the embankment from the Winter Palace. A scandal at the Cubat Frères restaurant in 1889 prompted rumours that she would be forced to emigrate.
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Shortly afterwards, the customarily humourless Alexander III joked at a fisheries trade fair that a stand featuring semi-naked peasant women dressed as mermaids might inspire Maria Pavlovna’s next costumed ball.
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Recalling Catherine’s own mistreatment under Elizabeth and Peter III, friends of the grand duchess attributed such sniping to envy of her intelligence and beauty.
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To her critics, however, she personified the reasons why Catherine’s reign symbolised not the golden age of the Romanov dynasty, but rather, to quote Richard Wortman, its ‘reprehensible past’ in which the empress herself, ‘possessed by ambition, flagrant in her inconstancy and indifference to the family, seemed threatening to the very notion of nineteenth-century legitimacy’.
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The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan outlined the more attractive characteristics that raised echoes of Catherine the Great: