CHAPTER ELEVEN

ZENITH 1785–1790

In 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.¹ 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.’²

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 heartwas 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.’³ 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.⁴

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.⁵ 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.⁶

The empress had originally planned to be away for no longer than a month.⁷ 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).⁸ 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’.⁹ ‘The journey is doing me a lot of good,’ Catherine reported to her grandsons’ governor from Torzhok.¹⁰

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’.¹¹ 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.¹² 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’.¹³ 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.¹⁴ ‘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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.)¹⁹

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.²⁰ 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’:

The numerous bodies of boatmen, peasants and peasant girls who were on board of them, strove with each other to approach our splendid flotilla, and made the air resound with their musical instruments and loud shouts, and at the close of day, with their melodious but rather plaintive songs.²¹

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’.²²

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.’²⁴ 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’.²⁵ 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.²⁶

Unlike her etymological dictionary, another of Catherine’s projects in the summer of 1785 was still incomplete in 1796 when her son decided to dismantle it. By that time, she had spent at least 823,389 roubles on the monumental neoclassical Pella Palace, designed by Ivan Starov overlooking a bend in the River Neva to the east of St Petersburg. Here, opposite Potëmkin’s estate at Ostrovki, she could watch the barges from Vyshny Volochëk gliding silently towards the capital and indulge her passion for garden design. ‘It’s a beautiful situation,’ she had told Grimm in April, ‘with a variety of views and it will be good to enhance it all with an English park.’ Having commissioned three white marble columns for her garden when she returned from Moscow, she confided the ‘fantasy that took hold of me three days ago, when I had a sort of fever for these three columns that I wish to see executed in all their grandeur and beauty’.²⁷

Only one false note had been struck on the visit to Moscow, and it was possibly a significant one. Although she reacted favourably to most of the new buildings there, Catherine angrily rejected the interiors at suburban Tsaritsyno, declaring the palace uninhabitable as it stood.²⁸ Bazhenov, who had kept her secretaries in close touch with his plans since being commissioned in 1776, had evidently failed to prepare the empress for the results.²⁹ She was not the only critic of his stunning neo-Gothic extravaganza. An English visitor in 1792, who found the buildings at Tsaritsyno ‘crowded together in such manner, that one could fancy it the object of the architect to shut out as much as possible the beauties of the situation’, noted that the external embellishments were ‘stuck all over in such profusion that we compared the ground on which they were stuck to a larded chicken’.³⁰ Yet perhaps there was a more ideological reason for the empress’s irritation. Though she did not say so, it has often been supposed that she was offended above all by the Masonic symbolism of Bazhenov’s designs.

Catherine had certainly lost patience with Freemasonry by the time of her visit to the old capital. Unable to distinguish between philanthropic Rosicrucians devoted to the inner life and the revolutionary mysticism of the ‘illuminati’ and Saint Martin, she was excluded from the movement by her sex and suspicious of it as a Prussian-dominated espionage network with the potential to ensnare her son. (Though it seems doubtful that Paul ever belonged to a Masonic lodge, it emerged in 1792 that Bazhenov himself had delivered a parcel of mystical and devotional literature to the grand duke on behalf of the publisher Nikolay Novikov.)³¹ Having been nauseated by the visit to St Petersburg in 1779 of Count Cagliostro–the Sicilian charlatan Giuseppe Balsamo, who was a pseudo-alchemist rather than a Freemason–Catherine condemned Freemasonry to Grimm as ‘one of the greatest extravagances ever in fashion among the human species’.³² Cagliostro was resurrected in the guise of Kalifalkzherston, a character who embezzles gold from gullible victims in Catherine’s play The Deceiver, one of three anti-Masonic dramas dating from 1785–6 that she claimed proved a ‘prodigious success’ with her audience.³³

Governor General Bruce had been expressing anxiety about unregulated publishing for more than a year by December 1785, when the empress ordered him to investigate some of the books published by Novikov’s Moscow university press so that she could be sure that they contained no Masonic ‘ravings’. In March 1786, warning Bezborodko that he faced ‘complete ruin’ from the sequestration of his stock, Novikov implored Catherine’s secretary to intervene on his behalf. Shortly afterwards, she banned only six Masonic texts, including the Rosicrucian New Chrysomander and the Chemical Psalter, a pseudo-Paracelsus. Sent to test the publisher’s faith, the sympathetic Archbishop Platon could find no contradiction between his Freemasonry and his Christian beliefs. Nevertheless, the empress’s suspicions continued to be fuelled by her confessor, Father Ioann Pamfilov, in cahoots with one of Platon’s most influential enemies, Archpriest Peter Alekseyev of the Archangel Cathedral in Moscow. Although no further systematic censorship was imposed, Bruce and these clerics led her to worry that her 1783 edict permitting private publishers had generated not only the sorts of ‘useful’ book she was keen to propagate, but also a lot of dangerous and potentially subversive nonsense. Though she was pleased to learn that Dr Zimmerman admired her final anti-Masonic drama, The Shaman of Siberia, ‘because I like that play very much’, she feared that it was likely to ‘correct no one: absurdities are tenacious and these particular absurdities have become fashionable. The majority of German princes think it good form to bow their heads to all these illusionists’.³⁴

While Novikov’s books were impounded, Catherine continued her own voracious reading. Necker’s Compte rendu reminded her that Louis XVI’s finances were ‘in general, completely disgusting’.³⁵ The long-awaited arrival of Diderot’s library and manuscripts in the autumn of 1785 unnerved her more. Nothing had prepared her for the shock of finding his critical ‘Observations’ on her Nakaz, which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Directing his treatise as much against Montesquieu as against the empress, Diderot had been able to see ‘only a formal difference’ between despotism and pure monarchy: ‘It is the spirit of pure monarchy which has dictated the Instruction of Catherine II. Pure monarchy remains as it is or reverts to despotism, according to the character of the monarch. It is therefore a bad sort of government.’ His verdict on serfdom was equally uncompromising: ‘There is only one way to avoid the abuses of serfdom and prevent its dangers: and that is to abolish serfdom and rule only over free men.’³⁶ ‘This essay,’ the empress retorted, ‘is utter drizzle in which one finds neither an understanding of things, nor prudence, nor foresight.’ Observing that ‘criticism is easy, but art is difficult’, she insisted to Grimm that her Nakaz had been ‘not only good, but even excellent, and well adapted to circumstances’ because ‘everyone benefits from the principles established by this Instruction’.³⁷

The benefits of Quarenghi’s Hermitage theatre were destined to be enjoyed by a much narrower circle. When the space above the stables in the courtyard of the Small Hermitage proved too small for the purpose, it was decided to build on the river on the site of Peter the Great’s Winter Palace. ‘I shall not need the theatre this winter,’ Catherine commented in response to the plans the architect sent her in 1784. ‘Therefore you may quietly proceed with the drying and painting, since it won’t be used until the winter of 1785, that is, you have a full 14–15 months ahead of you.’³⁸

Meanwhile, Quarenghi had plenty of other projects to occupy his time. He had written without exaggeration in 1783 that he had ‘so much work’ that he scarcely had ‘time to eat and sleep’. Two years later, he sent another Italian correspondent a staggering list of commissions which were soon to transform not only the urban landscape in St Petersburg, but also many provincial towns and estates:

…three pavilions in the new garden at Peterhof…; the Stock Market; a large building for the State bank; a very large two-storey block of shops for the fair in Irkutsk; a church with a hospital attached for their imperial highnesses at Pavlovsk; a building…to accommodate the copies of Raphael’s loggias;…a façade for the colleges and church in Polotsk; the façade for the governor’s residence in Smolensk; a palace and stables for General Zavadovsky in Ukraine; the Hermitage theatre…on the model of the ancients; the façade of the new imperial palace in Moscow…; a marble gallery for the palace of Her Imperial Majesty, which I have begun and which I must bring to order and re-do, and which, when finished, may be considered the richest gallery in the whole of the North; the façade of the College of Foreign Affairs; shops for silversmiths…;…. five churches;…a large group of buildings and a stock-exchange for the fair at Kursk; a house belonging to the late General Lanskoy in the town of St Sophia; a building for public shops, the press and professors’ apartments at the Academy of Sciences; a manege, stables, a great staircase and many internal decorations at the late General Lanskoy’s palace [at Velë in Polotsk province]; and equally the reconstruction of the whole of this aforementioned palace and three large gates in marble and bronze for the big square; two iron and bronze bridges for her imperial majesty’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo; the renovation and enlargement of the governor’s residence at Voronezh, and also the archbishop’s palace, the seminary and its bell-tower, houses for the choristers, the provincial administration, and many other renovations and façades for a lot of public buildings in the town; a pavilion with a large hall for music, two rooms and an open temple, dedicated to the goddess Ceres, with a ruin nearby in the ancient style in the aforementioned garden. All these buildings are part complete, part in the process of being finished.³⁹

Amidst this flurry of activity, Quarenghi pressed ahead with his theatre, modelled on the Palladian theatre at Vicenza, itself inspired by classical Rome. It opened on schedule on 22 November 1785 with a performance of Ablesimov’s ever-popular comic opera Miller-Sorcerer, Cheat and Matchmaker at which Cobenzl was the guest of honour.⁴⁰ Some months later, the architect proclaimed that he had tried to give his semicircular auditorium ‘an ancient appearance, while making it simultaneously correspond to contemporary requirements…All the seats are equivalent, and each may sit wherever he judges best’.⁴¹ It was here amidst the pink marble columns that a select audience celebrated the empress’s fifty-seventh birthday in 1786 with the first two performances of Fevei, an opera for which she herself had written the libretto.⁴² As the French émigré Prince Esterhazy later observed, Vasily Pashkevich’s music was entirely based on ‘ancient local chants’:

The production was magnificent. The action takes place in Russia in ancient times. All the costumes were made with the greatest luxury from Turkish fabrics, exactly as they wore then. There was an embassy of Kalmyks, singing and dancing in the Tatar manner, and Kamchadals, dressed in national costume, who likewise perform the dances of central Asia. The ballet with which the opera ends was performed by Picquet, Madame Rosa, and other good dancers. Represented in it are all the different peoples who populate the empire, each in its own national dress. I never saw a more magnificent or more varied spectacle: there were more than five hundred people on stage! However, there were fewer than fifty of us in the audience: so uncompromising is the empress with regard to access to her Hermitage.⁴³

Nervous about the quality of her theatrical compositions, Catherine recruited her secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky, to work through the night to correct her grammar and spelling. In 1789, she asked Lev Naryshkin to shorten her comedy The Misunderstanding, complaining that it had been the cause of ‘more labour than laughter’.⁴⁴ By then, she had turned her hand to innovative historical dramas inspired by Shakespeare. Ryurik, written in August 1786 but never performed, was an allegory intended to glorify the benefits of a benevolent foreign ruler. Its sequel was Catherine’s libretto for The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign, an operatic pageant celebrating the union of Greek and Russian cultures, published in 1787 and eventually premiered in a lavish production in the autumn of 1790 to commemorate her empire’s victories in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–91.⁴⁵

Contemporary imperial developments were indeed as fantastic as any opera plot. In October 1786 Potëmkin requested more money to fund his insatiable ambitions in the South. Not content with plans for a university at Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine), he envisaged a cathedral grand enough to rival St Peter’s in Rome and ‘dedicated to the Transfiguration of the Lord as a sign that your labours have transfigured this land from a barren steppe into an abundant garden, and the abode of beasts into a favourable refuge for immigrants from all countries’.⁴⁶Catherine had already trumpeted his claims to Dr Zimmerman:

‘In the Tauride the main thing must probably be agriculture, and also silkworms, and after that plantations of mulberry-trees. We could manufacture cloth there, though the wool is not of the best quality, and it would be good to make cheese too (NB hardly any cheese is made in the whole of Russia). A further key objective in the Tauride might be gardens, and especially botanical gardens.’⁴⁷

It remained only to see this paradise for herself in the company of her handsome new favourite. The twenty-six-year-old guards officer Alexander Dmitryev-Mamonov, nicknamed ‘Redcoat’ by the empress, had been installed by Potëmkin in July. Describing this latest paragon to Grimm in December, she praised his heart, his honesty and his intelligence: ‘in a word, he is as sound in his inner self as his dextrous, strong and brilliant exterior’.⁴⁸ Though the same optimistic tone could always be heard at the start of each new relationship, this time there was a grain of truth in the hyperbole. Mamonov shared many of Catherine’s interests and delighted a select audience at the Hermitage Theatre in 1788 with his comedy L’Insouciant, written in mock tribute to Lev Naryshkin.⁴⁹

As the empress cleared her desk at the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day 1787, a range of scandals was brewing among her closest circle. Bezborodko had fallen for an attractive dancer and set her up in a house next to his own, depositing 10,000 roubles in her name at the foundling home.⁵⁰ More menacingly, Prince Frederick of Württemberg had returned to Germany, having abandoned his long-suffering wife, Zelmira (Princess Auguste of Brunswick), the sister-in-law of Maria Fëdorovna. ‘The Prince of Württemberg’s thrashings have finally forced his wife to withdraw to my apartments because she was actually in danger for her life,’ the empress reported to Potëmkin. As her secretary noted with typical understatement, ‘various consequences transpired which took up a lot of time’. Despite the empress’s support for Zelmira, the dispute remained unresolved at the princess’s death in September 1788.⁵¹ For the moment, all Catherine could do was to try to put such troubles behind her as she left for Tsarskoye Selo on 2 January to prepare for the greatest journey of her life.

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.⁵² 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.⁵³ 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 1787.⁵⁴

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.’⁵⁵ 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’⁵⁶–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’.⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ 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.’⁶⁰

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.⁶¹ 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.⁶²

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’.⁶³ 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.’ ⁶⁴

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’.⁶⁵ 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 1744.⁶⁶ 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.⁶⁷ 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’.⁶⁸ 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.’⁶⁹

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’.⁷⁰ ‘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.⁷¹ 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.⁷² 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.⁷³

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.⁷⁴

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.⁷⁵ 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’.⁷⁶ 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.).⁷⁷

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.⁷⁸ 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’.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰

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’.⁸¹ 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.⁸² 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.⁸³

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.⁸⁴ 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.⁸⁵

On 22 April, the day after publishing her manifesto on duels on her fifty-eighth birthday, Catherine set out at four in the afternoon on board a Roman-style galley, commissioned by Potëmkin, designed by Samuel Bentham and decked out in red and gold. On 16 May, Vice Admiral Peter Ivanovich Pushchin, who had masterminded every one of her cruises since 1767, was invested with the Order of St Alexander Nevsky.⁸⁶

Wending its leisurely way downriver toward the cataracts, the flotilla made frequent stops at picturesque settlements where the empress was greeted by crowds of well-dressed peasants, all carefully stage-managed by Potëmkin and his lieutenants. But it would be wrong to suppose that these ‘Potëmkin villages’–a byword ever since for fraudulent attainments–were cardboard silhouettes, deliberately erected to hoodwink a gullible empress. That was a rumour circulated by the prince’s enemies even before her departure from St Petersburg.⁸⁷ In fact, Catherine was fully complicit in the theatricality of the cruise, conscious of being the star of an elaborate show. Naturally there were signs of haste in many of the new buildings she saw, but most of her companions chose, like Ségur, to emphasise the scale of the achievements that had been made in a short time. The empress caught the balance nicely by describing Kherson–then a town of 1200 stone buildings and a population of around 50,000, including 5000 convicts–as ‘very fine, for a six-year-old adolescent’.⁸⁸ It was certainly a different scene from the one that had greeted Bobrinsky and his tutor in 1783, when there had been ‘very few buildings in the town itself’.⁸⁹

Catherine reached her principal naval base on the Dnieper estuary on 12 May. There had apparently been no stirring of emotion at her meeting with her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski. To the king’s evident chagrin, their interview at Kaniev on 25 April was brief indeed. She not only refused the Polish alliance that Potëmkin had wanted her to make, but determined to press on with her journey without even attending the ball on which Poniatowski had lavished a small fortune. It was more than twenty-five years since they had seen each other. Now, urged on by Potëmkin’s most influential critic, Alexander Vorontsov, she had a more important ally to impress.⁹⁰

While the Caucausus reminded Joseph II of the Alps, Catherine and her image-makers invented complex layers of overlapping symbolism which portrayed the Crimean peninsula simultaneously as an Edenic paradise, an exotic Orient and a new Greece, complete with Greek place names and Greek Orthodox bishops, with Catherine cast in the role of Iphigenia in Tauride.⁹¹ At the khan’s palace at Bakhchisaray, she heard the imams calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. At Inkerman, overlooking the harbour at Sevastopol, she reviewed the fleet with the emperor. Simferopol and Karazubazar were further exotic destinations on their itinerary. Catherine contributed to the prevailing atmosphere of unreality by collaborating on an ‘Authentic relation of a journey overseas that Sir Léon the Grand Equerry would have undertaken in the opinion of some of his friends’. Written before her departure from St Petersburg, this was a fantasy in which Lev Naryshkin, blown ashore off Constantinople in the sort of preposterous storm that featured widely in eighteenth-century adventure stories, met the Sultan before sailing back to Kronstadt, where he narrowly escaped drowning and had to be rescued by Admiral Greig’s Newfoundland dogs.⁹²

Catherine herself returned to St Petersburg by land, making the long trek north in the heat of the summer via Poltava, where Potëmkin, who was henceforth allowed to call himself ‘Tavrichesky’ (‘of the Tauride’), staged a re-enactment of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes in 1709. Then came Kharkov, Kursk, Orël and Tula, where the empress was too exhausted to attend the nobles’ ball.⁹³ Having arrived at Kolomenskoye late on 23 June, she made her entry into the old capital on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession. Tuesday 29 June, the feast of SS Peter and Paul, was Archbishop Platon’s fiftieth birthday. During the service at the Dormition Cathedral, the empress surprised him by instructing her confessor to address him as ‘metropolitan’, the most senior office in the Russian Orthodox Church. Platon emerged from the altar to bow to her in acknowledgement of his unexpected promotion.⁹⁴ Next morning, she drove out to Kuskovo to be fêted by Count Nikolay Sheremetev, Count Peter’s son and heir, who had been planning her reception since the previous autumn. ‘The money is flowing like water,’ he told his St Petersburg estate manager on 17 May, announcing that he was ‘building quite a lot’. Apart from the obligatory triumphal arches, the most elaborate project was a new 150-seat theatre, designed by Charles de Wailly, the architect of the French royal opera at Versailles, in conjunction with Louis XVI’s chief theatrical machinist. Catherine sat on a gilded throne in the count’s box for a performance of Grétry’s neoclassical comic opera The Marriage of the Samnites, a celebration of heroic virtue and loyalty to family and state. The heroine was played by Sheremetev’s wife, the former serf Praskovya Kovalyova, who was presented to the empress at the end. Conscious of the effort her host had made, Catherine reassured the expectant Sheremetev that it was the most magnificent performance she had ever seen.⁹⁵

Six months later, the voyage to the South seemed no more than ‘a dream’.⁹⁶ Aggravated by Potëmkin’s aggressive posturing in the Crimea, the Turks had imprisoned Catherine’s ambassador in Constantinople soon after her return to St Petersburg. This was the traditional Ottoman way of declaring war. Fortified by her implacable faith in Potëmkin, Catherine expected her troops to make a better start to the campaign than they had in 1768. But her partner was in no fit state to lead the charge. Exhausted by the summer’s celebrations and alarmed by a diarrhoea epidemic at Kherson (Catherine ordered him to cure the sick with rice and a tot of fortified wine), he sank into a debilitating bout of hypochondria. ‘In truth, I’m not sure I can stand this for long,’ he warned on 16 September. ‘I can neither sleep nor eat…When can I retire or cut myself off so that the world will hear of me no more?!’ Eight days later, when a storm threatened to destroy his precious fleet at Sevastopol, he seemed a broken man: ‘My mind and spirit are gone. I have requested that my command be transferred to another.’ Catherine initially responded to such wailing with a combination of encouragement and reassurance that prompted the prince to acknowledge that ‘you genuinely write to me like my own mother’. By early October, however, tolerance had given way to irritation. Her affairs demanded unshakeable patience, she chided him, whereas he was ‘as impatient as a five-year-old’. She was far from serene herself: ‘There is one way to lessen my anxiety,’ she declared on 9 October: ‘write more often and inform me about the state of affairs. I await the promised details with impatience. And don’t forget to write to me about Kinburn.’⁹⁷

In the event, the details were unexpectedly encouraging. Potëmkin recovered both his health and his energy; his fleet, though damaged, had escaped destruction; and, thanks to General Suvorov, Kinburn, the Russian fort at the mouth of the Dnieper, successfully resisted the bombardment to which it had been subjected since August. The respite, however, was only temporary. Now it was Catherine’s turn to suffer: she complained of sickness and headaches throughout the winter and was so ill in the spring that on 11 April 1788, just before her fifty-ninth birthday, The Times prematurely announced her death. Neither the Russians nor the Austrians, who belatedly came to Catherine’s aid in February 1788, made much progress that summer. Joseph II proved a limited general and his troops were stymied by disease. The mercurial Potëmkin had to be dissuaded from abandoning the Crimea to the Turks: ‘When you are sitting on a horse,’ Catherine pointed out, ‘there is no point in dismounting and holding on by the tail.’ Instead, he committed himself to a lengthy siege of Ochakov, the Turkish fort opposite Kinburn, whose 24,000-strong garrison trapped the Russian fleet in the Dnieper estuary. Thanks to an attack by gunboats armed by Samuel Bentham, the Turks lost fifteen ships in two days in June (Catherine donned naval uniform for the exultant Te Deum at Tsarskoye Selo). Yet attempts in the following month to blockade the fort proved inconclusive and heavy snow in November prevented Potëmkin from delivering Ochakov to the empress as a gift on her name day. Not until 6 December did he launch a full-scale attack. Ten days later, Catherine learned of the fall of the fortress, the main aim of her strategy since the beginning of the conflict. ‘I grasp you by the ears with both hands and kiss you in my thoughts, dearest friend.’⁹⁸

Plagued with headaches, she had been sleepless for days. Now she caught a chill at the Te Deum in celebration of the victory, complaining to Khrapovitsky of an unbearable backache that left her tossing and turning until four in the morning.⁹⁹ It had not been an easy year. That summer, while Catherine was diverted by her campaign against the Turks, Gustav III had grasped the opportunity to limit Russian interference in Swedish politics by bombarding the Russian fort at Nyslott on 22 June. (Since his constitution prevented him from appearing to be the aggressor, the attack was launched in pseudo-retaliation against a raid into Swedish territory by a ‘Cossack’ band from Russian Finland, alleged at the time to be Swedish troops wearing costumes borrowed from the royal opera in Stockholm.)¹⁰⁰ Admiral Greig came to the rescue for one last time by holding off the Swedish fleet at a brutal stalemate off the island of Hogland on 6 July. Catherine, who sent Dr Rogerson to minister to her feverish admiral, mourned Greig’s death at Reval on 15 October as a ‘great loss to the state’ and paid for his funeral. By then, she herself had survived one of her nerviest summers under threat of a Swedish descent on her palace. St Petersburg resembled an armed camp as regiment after regiment assembled for its defence. ‘This is a difficult time for me,’ Catherine admitted to Potëmkin on 3 July. Yet even an enervating heatwave failed to blunt her competitive edge. ‘The heat was so great here,’ she wrote a fortnight later, ‘that the thermometer registered over 39 and a half degrees in the sun. In Portugal they can’t remember anything higher than 44.’¹⁰¹

Over the following winter, a tearful empress faced divisions within her own Council, as her determination to maintain the Austrian alliance and to prop up King Stanislaw in Poland (a policy supported by Bezborodko, Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov) came under pressure from those who favoured a compromise with Prussia at the Poles’ expense. By far the most important of these was Potëmkin himself, who had built up his Polish estates to the point where he owned 112,000 serfs. In the spring of 1789, having sent Catherine a map outlining his plans for the occupation of three Polish provinces (Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia), he travelled to St Petersburg in a vain attempt to persuade Catherine to change her course. While he returned to the South in May, the empress renewed her Austrian alliance in a further exchange of letters with Joseph II.¹⁰²

She did so against a background of personal crisis when it emerged that ‘Redcoat’ Mamonov had betrayed her with one of her maids of honour, Princess Darya Shcherbatova. As her courtiers noticed, the cracks had been opening in Catherine’s relationship with her favourite for some months, prompting tears and bad temper. She spent her sixtieth birthday–one of the most significant state occasions in the Court calendar–closeted in her rooms.¹⁰³ Mamonov’s request for permission to marry his lover was the ultimate blow. As she confessed in a self-styled ‘apophthegm’ to Potëmkin on 29 June, ‘I nearly fell over, so great was my surprise, and had still not recovered when he came into my room, fell at my feet and confessed his whole intrigue.’¹⁰⁴ Despite copious tears, meticulously recorded by Mamonov’s friend Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine betrothed the couple herself and sent them to Moscow. This time there was to be no lonely interlude between lovers. On the day of Mamonov’s dismissal, her friend Anna Naryshkina introduced her to the young man who was to be her last and youngest favourite. The swarthy Platon Zubov, thirty-eight years Catherine’s junior, was promptly dubbed ‘the little black one’ in the apophthegm to Potëmkin, which outlined all the usual virtues of gentleness, eagerness and modesty (a singular misapprehension of the new favourite’s nature).

It was in Zubov’s company that the empress faced the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789. Though no friend of sedition, Catherine initially had little reason to fear events in Paris, and indeed could reasonably hope to profit from French weakness in the international arena. Her subjects could read about the fall of the Bastille in the Russian newspapers (whose circulation increased in response to such exciting developments), and many also had access to the range of French revolutionary pamphlets and news-sheets which circulated freely in St Petersburg and Moscow.¹⁰⁵ One reason for the empress’s confidence was the good news she received from the Southern front, where Potëmkin and General Suvorov were enjoying a triumphant summer on the Bug and the Dniester. After 15,000 Turks were slaughtered on the River Rymnik on 11 September, Suvorov was made a count of both the Russian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and allowed to call himself ‘Rymniksky’ at Potëmkin’s suggestion.¹⁰⁶ Wider European developments, however, prevented Catherine from converting military victories into a peaceful settlement on her own terms. British hostility was an increasing hazard for her, and so were Prussia’s ambitions in Poland. ‘We are stroking the Prussians,’ she told Potëmkin in October 1789, ‘but how our heart can endure their words and deeds which are filled with rudeness and abuse, God alone knows.’¹⁰⁷

Russia’s international position was still critical when Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow appeared in May 1790. A book that criticised ‘the murder called war’ was bound to catch Catherine on the raw. ‘What do they want?’ she asked in a splenetic marginal comment. ‘To be left defenceless to fall captive to the Turks and Tatars, or to be conquered by the Swedes?’ A noble writer twenty years her junior, Radishchev had grown up as a page at the empress’s Court and had been one of the first Russian students selected to study at Leipzig at her government’s expense.¹⁰⁸ Now he had betrayed her trust with a fictional travelogue in the mould of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. His book launched a stinging attack on the evils of favouritism and a bitter critique of the inhumanity of slavery, derived from Radishchev’s reading of Raynal’s History of the Two Indies and now applied to Russian serfdom in particular. The empress was appalled. ‘The purpose of this book is clear on every page,’ she retorted in notes which subsequently provided the basis for the interrogation conducted by Sheshkovsky, the prosecutor who later investigated Novikov. ‘Its author, infected and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and for the authorities, to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government.’ If Radishchev’s views on serfdom made him a rebel worse than Pugachëv, then the chapter on corruption, levelled primarily at Potëmkin (identifiable by his craving for oysters), revealed the purpose of the whole book: ‘It is a safe bet that the author’s motive in writing it was this, that he does not have entrée to the palace. Maybe he had it once and lost it, but since he does not have it now but does have an evil and consequently ungrateful heart, he is struggling for it now with his pen.’ As Catherine sensed, the point of Radishchev’s book could be derived from the very direction of travel of his fictional narrator–towards the heart of old Muscovy and away from the false foreign values of her northern Residenzstadt. ‘Our babbler is timid. If he stood closer to the sovereign, he would pipe a different tune. We have seen a lot of such humbugs, especially among the schismatics.’¹⁰⁹ Although Catherine eventually commuted Radishchev’s death sentence to exile in Siberia, where his passage was smoothed by his embarrassed patron, Alexander Vorontsov, no one could miss the increasing signs of a significant change of heart on the empress’s part–a mounting hostility to the intellectual independence of the very writers whom she had done so much to encourage in the earlier part of her reign. Its twilight years would be recalled as a period of intellectual repression.