EPILOGUE

THE AFTERLIFE OF AN EMPRESS

After thirty-four years on the throne, Catherine had become synonymous with Russian rule. Most of her subjects could remember no other monarch. Finding it impossible to imagine anyone else in her place, the Court was stunned by her unexpected demise. ‘No one knew what to do,’ admitted Platon Zubov’s dwarf amanuensis, Ivan Yakubovsky: ‘The mind could not grasp that this time had come.’¹ It did not take them long to realise, however, that in an intensely personal monarchy such as the Russian empire, the accession of a new ruler could immediately signal a radical reversal of regime. By the time that shocked courtiers arrived at the Winter Palace on the morning after Catherine’s death, ‘the change was so great that it looked like nothing other than an enemy invasion’.² All the empress’s ‘brilliance’ seemed to have vanished into thin air as her successor staged the first of the military parades that were to dominate life at his Court. Not for nothing did the poet Derzhavin refer to Tsar Paul’s accession as an act of conquest: armed soldiers were everywhere. ‘The ease and tranquillity of the late Reign are lost with Her from whom they deriv’d,’ the British ambassador reported barely a fortnight after Catherine’s death. ‘A most severe and exact discipline is introduced into every department both civil and military, and this with such a degree of rigour, as has even absolutely chang’d the face of society.’³

The Russian succession in 1796 was in practice no more controversial than it had been in December 1761 on the death of Elizabeth. In accordance with Peter the Great’s succession law of 1722, Catherine had nominated her Russian-born son as her heir immediately after her coup. Although her growing dissatisfaction with Paul prompted her to investigate the history of the regulations governing the succession when she returned from the Crimea in 1787, and rumours circulated after 1791 that she intended to disinherit him in favour of her grandson Alexander, it seems unlikely that she would ever have taken such a fateful step. Alexander’s Swiss tutor claimed to have suffered ‘the two most unpleasant hours’ of his life at an audience in 1793, in which the empress, without raising the subject directly, apparently tried to persuade him to broach the idea with his pupil. Paul certainly lived in trepidation that his mother might disinherit him, and some historians believe that he found and destroyed a draft law of succession on the night of 6 November. Yet the circumstances of Catherine’s own accession surely ruled out any open discussion of the subject while she was alive. To issue a law of succession would have been to advertise her status as a usurper.⁴

In any case, no prominent actor at the Court of St Petersburg seriously doubted that Paul would inherit the throne. The only uncertainty lay in what he would do once he finally had power within his grasp. It was obvious to all that his natural impatience had been intensified by years of waiting in the wings. While the grand duke remained isolated at Gatchina, endlessly parading his troops, the cream of Russian society had been anxious for some time about what lay in store for them. After Potëmkin’s death threw into question the future of his extensive network of clients, John Parkinson was told in 1792 that Paul’s accession was to be ‘feared’ because he was ‘anxious to make alterations and regulations which would make it more difficult to commit abuses’. The following year, Parkinson was again warned that ‘all may not go well, perhaps’ at the empress’s death.⁵ No one, however, had fully anticipated the speed and determination with which the new tsar would reject everything his mother had stood for. ‘The most important practices of the Court were changed,’ recalled Countess Varvara Golovina, ‘and with the wave of a baton he destroyed what had taken a glorious reign of thirty-four years to consolidate.’⁶

Appalled by the paltry burial that Catherine had given to Peter III, whom he always regarded as his father, Paul initially intended to consign the empress to an equally anonymous grave in the cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. There would have been no clearer way of declaring that his mother had no right to rule. Only when he was persuaded that this was politically impossible did he consent to funeral arrangements that followed the pattern established for Russia’s rulers since the death of Peter the Great.⁷Catherine’s corpse was embalmed on 8 November and carried on 15 November from her bedroom to the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. It was an emotional scene for the courtiers who had been closest to her. According to Countess Golovina, who recalled the ceremony in openly sentimental terms, the occasion was stage-managed by the new empress, Maria Fëdorovna, whose officious approach to the proceedings ‘cut me to the heart’. The countess herself claimed more in common with the melancholy scene she observed through the door of the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, which was draped from floor to ceiling in swathes of black silk and lit only by the flickering flames in the hearth. ‘A mournful silence reigned in the apartment, interrupted only by sobs and sighs,’ as the Chevaliers, dressed in their red capes and silver helmets, stood listlessly about, ‘some leaning on their carbines, others lying on chairs’. Only the sound of the approaching funeral chant roused the countess from the ‘depression’ into which this ‘mournful sight’ had plunged her:

I saw the clergy appear, then the candle-bearers, the choristers, and the Imperial family, and lastly the corpse, which was carried on a magnificent bier covered with the Imperial mantle, the ends of which were borne by persons holding the highest offices at Court. When I caught sight of my sovereign, I began to tremble all over and ceased to weep, while my sobs changed to involuntary little cries.

Six gentlemen of the bedchamber carried the train while ten chamberlains bore the corpse to a raised bed covered with red velvet fringed with gold. At the end of the ceremony, the whole imperial family ‘prostrated themselves in turn in front of the body and kissed the hand of her deceased Majesty’. Once they had withdrawn, a priest began to read from the Bible, while six Chevaliers Gardes formed a guard of honour around the bed. The countess returned home ‘after being in attendance twenty-four hours, exhausted both in mind and body’.⁸

Ten days later, Catherine was laid to rest in a coffin done out in gold fabric decorated with Russian imperial crests and taken to a chamber of mourning in the palace’s Grand Gallery. Familiar to the Court as the site of its glittering balls and masquerades, the gallery had been transformed by the erection of an elaborate chamber of sorrows designed by Antonio Rinaldi. This dome-shaped structure, supported by classical pillars and topped by a bronze statue of the imperial eagle, enclosed the coffin on a raised platform beneath a canopy draped in black velvet with silver fringes. The corpse was dressed in a robe of silver brocade. A gold brocade mantle trimmed with ermine and silver tassels was placed at its feet. As leading courtiers stood in vigil over their late sovereign, and bishops and archimandrites chanted requiem services around the clock, only badly dressed peasants were refused admission to the lying-in-state as the public flocked in to pay their respects with a final kissing of hands.⁹

Paul agreed to such pomp and ceremony only in order to undermine it by extraordinary means. Three days after his mother’s death, the tsar announced plans for a joint funeral at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, in which Peter III, rather than Catherine, was bound to be the focal point of attention. The point, he sardonically remarked, was merely to remedy her ‘oversight’ in failing to accord her husband a proper burial: ‘My mother, having been called to the throne by the voice of the people, was too busy to arrange for my father’s last rites.’¹⁰ On 10 November, after paying their respects to Catherine’s corpse, the imperial family were ordered to attend a requiem service for Peter III in Rastrelli’s Winter Palace chapel. On 19 November, Peter’s remains were exhumed from their anonymous grave and opened in the tsar’s presence at the Cathedral of the Annunciation at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Since the corpse had never been embalmed, the remains were severely corrupted. Paul nevertheless insisted on kissing them, and returned to the monastery on 25 November to place a crown on top of a new golden coffin, in posthumous compensation for the coronation that his father had never staged. The casket was transferred to the Winter Palace on a hearse drawn by eight horses on the morning of 2 December. The procession, which lasted two and a half hours and was followed by the whole Court, was described by the Swedish ambassador as ‘the most august, melancholy, and in every respect compelling ceremony I have ever experienced’.¹¹Officials permitted it to proceed only provided that the temperature did not drop ‘below 15 degrees of frost’.¹² In a particularly macabre gesture, the tsar humiliated the eighty-year-old Aleksey Orlov, the last surviving participant in the dreadful events at Ropsha in 1762, by ordering him to carry the large crown in the procession. (An allegorical engraving of the exhumation by Nicolas Ancelin portrayed Orlov alone reacting in horror.) One memoirist favourable to Paul recalled that Orlov broke down in the cathedral and took the crown with trembling hands. Two more surviving conspirators from 1762–Peter Passek, the Governor General of Belorussia, and Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, the recently dismissed Marshal of the Court–were forced to do penance by carrying the corners of the pall-cloth.¹³

On arrival at the Winter Palace, Peter’s coffin was placed alongside Catherine’s in Rinaldi’s chamber of mourning. But there was no sense that the two were to be seen as equals. To make the point that Paul ruled by right as Peter’s son, the large crown was placed on Peter’s casket; Catherine’s bore only the small crown as a symbol of her posthumous dethronement. Their funeral was held on 5 December, following the customary procession across the ice to the cathedral, where the two coffins were placed side by side on a catafalque designed by Vincenzo Brenna.¹⁴ Only after two further weeks of vigil and requiem masses were they lowered side by side into the vault. The tsar even prevented Metropolitan Amvrosy (Podobedov) from reading a graveside oration in memory of his mother. Amvrosy, who had lauded Catherine for the ‘security, peace and glory’ she had brought to Russia as recently as the anniversary of her coronation in September 1796, was not to mention her name in public again until the thanksgiving service for the peace with Sweden in 1809.¹⁵

Everything Paul did seemed to signal his contempt for his mother’s claims to immortality. He converted her treasured Tauride Palace into stables and had Charles Cameron’s unfinished Temple of Memory at Tsarskoye Selo, built to celebrate her victory over the Turks in 1792, pulled to the ground five years later.¹⁶ Although Catherine had ensured that Paul received an Enlightened education from Nikita Panin and Father Platon, her son unaccountably developed an obsession with medieval chivalry. The tsar was elected Grand Master of the Knights of Jerusalem in 1798. Metropolitan Platon was horrified to learn that he even contemplated extending the Russian orders of chivalry to the Orthodox episcopate. In a welter of legislation–by one estimate, Paul issued 48,000 orders in the first year of his reign alone–he reversed Catherine’s trend towards civilian government, imposing an overwhelmingly military ethos modelled on the regimes of Peter III and Frederick the Great. In such a hostile climate, prudent admirers of the late empress understandably thought discretion the better part of valour. Some may have contemplated symbolic ways to commemorate her, as Prince Nikolay Lvov seems to have done in designing a statue of Minerva for Bezborodko’s Moscow estate in 1797, but it was not until the accession of Alexander I in 1801 that the prospects for a public revival of her reputation improved.¹⁷

In the event, Paul’s reign lasted less than five years. In his anxiety to discipline his subjects, he went too far too fast, alienating the elite with a series of measures that undermined the privileges Catherine had granted to them in the Charter to the Nobility–not content with limiting their freedom of expression and freeing their serfs from Sunday labour, the tsar himself lashed out at nobles with his cane. On 1 February 1801, the imperial family moved into the new Mikhailovsky Palace, a fortress built on the site of Rastrelli’s wooden Summer Palace, which Paul had ordered to be demolished. Less than six weeks later, he enjoyed his last meal in the company of nineteen relations and courtiers. Many of them would have been familiar to his mother. Alexander and Constantine were both present with their wives; so were Alexander Stroganov, Alexander Naryshkin and Nikolay Yusupov. Later that night, 11 March 1801, he was strangled in his apartments by a group of disaffected officers coordinated by St Petersburg’s Governor General, General Count Peter von der Pahlen. With fitting symmetry, Paul’s brief reign ended, like that of Peter III, in cold-blooded assassination. However his successor might rule, he could never openly imitate Paul’s example.¹⁸

Instead, the new tsar, Alexander I, promised in his accession manifesto that he would rule according to his grandmother’s ‘heart and laws’.¹⁹ Delighted by the prospect, Princess Dashkova anticipated an opportunity to bask in Catherine’s reflected glory. Although their tempestuous relationship had ended in tears–as early as 1792, John Parkinson found that ‘her conversation evidently savoured of disaffection to the empress’–the princess was never less than effusive after Catherine’s death, relishing the opportunity to regale visitors such as Martha and Catherine Wilmot with tales of ‘the wonderful scenes of the revolution in which she acted so wonderful a part at the age of 18’.²⁰ Noting that Dashkova always pronounced Catherine’s name ‘with rapture’, one of her Russian acquaintances suggested that her oratory was so mesmerising that her ‘audience unwittingly submitted to her attractive eloquence’.²¹ That was stretching the truth. Catherine Wilmot felt uncomfortable in the face of the princess’s stories: ‘These subjects as ripping up a life that is almost past gives [sic] a powerful sort of agitated animation to her Countenance, & I long till it is over.’²² But Dashkova was undeterred. Apparently oblivious to such reactions, she sought a wider readership by sending anecdotes about Catherine to the new journals that sprang up under Alexander I, and in 1806 published a volume of anecdotes of her own, praising the empress’s ‘most kind and affectionate love for humanity, a love that rarely dwells in the hearts of rulers’.²³

Nor was the princess alone in seeking to publicise her heroine’s glorious achievements. Documents about Catherine accounted for almost four-fifths of the historical material published in Russian journals in the first five years of the nineteenth century.²⁴ Within months of Alexander’s accession, Catherine’s own historical works had been republished alongside a translation of her correspondence with Dr Zimmerman. Editions of some of her plays and multiple Russian versions of her correspondence with Voltaire and Field Marshal Rumyantsev soon followed.²⁵As a bandwagon of publications in praise of the late empress began to roll, Nikolay Karamzin set the tone in 1802 with a paean of praise eulogising the formative role of the ruler in Russian history.²⁶ Sponsored by seventy subscribers, including Maria Perekusikhina and Metropolitan Amvrosy, Peter Kolotov published a six-volume chronology of Catherine’s reign in 1811, drawing on material he had been collecting for the past twenty years.²⁷ Three years later, Ivan Sreznevsky published a collection of short anecdotes declaring it ‘desirable that all the works of the Great Catherine, having glorified and magnified Russia, should be made known to everyone’.²⁸

‘Every circumstance attending Katherine’s Time begins to bear a sacred stamp already,’ noted Martha Wilmot following a visit to Tsarskoye Selo in 1808: ‘The grounds are not remarkable for beauty nor the Contrary; they interest one as being often walk’d by Katherine.’²⁹ Nor was it only at Tsarskoye Selo that Catherine had left her indelible imprint. ‘Without Catherine,’ one memoirist claimed, St Petersburg ‘would soon have sunk back into the bog from which it emerged’.³⁰ The capital, however, was Peter the Great’s shrine. To reach a territory that was distinctively Catherine’s, it was necessary to radiate outwards to Tver, where the triumphal gates marking the empress’s visit in 1767 still stood, or to that other favourite city of hers, Kazan, where Peter Sumarokov ‘bowed his head with heartfelt feeling’ to the berth in Catherine’s cabin on her galley in 1838.³¹

Among the military men who proved especially susceptible to the mixture of nostalgia and self-importance that characterised Catherine’s posthumous admirers, none was more gallant than Denis Davydov, hero of 1812 and hero-worshipper of Field Marshal Suvorov. Horrified that ‘the immortal Catherine’ should be subjected to ‘lampoons about her private life’, Davydov praised her reign in 1831 as ‘most brilliant, most triumphant’, and no less useful to Russia than that of Peter the Great. Many fellow veterans shared in his veneration of Catherine’s ‘miraculous age’.³² It was partly among such circles of ‘old people, officers of the Guards in Catherine’s time’ that the young Alexander Herzen grew up in Moscow in the 1830s.³³ For all their importance as mythmakers, however, soldiers were ultimately outranked by salon hostesses. Though Alexandra Branicka, Potëmkin’s eldest niece and one of Catherine’s closest friends, remained closeted on her husband’s estate at Belaya Tserkov, there was no shortage of female relics of Catherine’s reign who continued to proclaim it as their finest hour. Catherine’s last maid of honour, Praskovia Myatleva (née Saltykova), lived until 1859, when the cream of Petersburg society processed down Nevsky Prospect behind her catafalque.³⁴ The most flamboyant was Platon Zubov’s elder sister, Olga Zherebtsova, who became a legend in her own right as a former lover of the British ambassador Charles Whitworth, an alleged lynchpin in the conspiracy to assassinate Tsar Paul. Steeped as deeply as her heroine in the works of the French philosophes, Zherebtsova struck Herzen, who met her in her seventies, as ‘a strange, eccentric ruin of another age, surrounded by degenerate successors that had sprung up on the mean and barren soil of Petersburg court life.’³⁵ But she was far from the only Russian noblewoman to delight in reminiscing about her gilded youth in the shadow of the empress. Alexandra Shishkova hung a full-length portrait of Catherine in her bedroom alongside another of Christ and was said never to wear any other blouse than those she had purchased from the empress’s wardrobe. Maria Kikina, daughter of a leading Court official, also preserved her sitting room as a shrine to Catherine.³⁶

Even a chance encounter with the empress was enough to infuse a lasting glow in those who outlived her. Yet the sense that hers had been a golden age was by no means confined to subjects who were prominent enough to revel in the memory of personal contact. On the contrary, these few members of the elite merely personified the strong tide of popular sentiment that swelled demand for Nikolay Utkin’s engraving of Borovikovsky’s Lady with a dog, commissioned in 1826 by Count Nikolay Rumyantsev and printed in the following year.³⁷ A whole generation of Russians grew up, like the writer Apollon Grigoryev, at the feet of grandfathers who reminisced about Catherine and her times as the smoke from their pipes curled into the night.³⁸ Many, it seemed, still succumbed to the mood of nostalgia which engulfed the ‘babbling old Widow’ the Wilmot sisters met at Tsarskoye Selo in 1808, ‘who has been talking of the days that were pass’d till she was obliged to wipe her eyes in the sleeve of her gown’.³⁹

While the modern eye might not detect anything sinister in any of this, the tsar was understandably wary of attempts to veil intemperate demands on his own regime under praise for aspects of Catherine’s, and he could hardly have been expected to approve of attempts to manipulate the past as a means of reproaching the present. ‘Happily for us,’ wrote a canny contributor to Karamzin’s Messenger of Europe in 1804, ‘everything demonstrates the particular resemblance in heart and soul between Alexander and Catherine–favourite grandson of his adored grandmother.’⁴⁰ Writers were particularly keen to urge the tsar to reject his father’s philistinism and return to the more tolerant atmosphere of the 1760s and 1770s. Before the reign of Alexander II in the mid-nineteenth century, no one paid much attention to Catherine’s own literary achievements. The point was that by joining the ranks of the writers, she had radically improved the status of their emergent profession. Without the empress’s personal interest and protection, the argument ran, there would have been no Fonvizin, no Derzhavin, and none of the other ‘immortal’ literary figures who emerged in her reign.⁴¹ ‘Talents perish like spring flowers from stormy winds and frost,’ warned Nikolay Grech in a lecture at the Imperial Public Library in 1817, ‘but in Russia there are no such obstacles…Catherine gave her subjects the freedom to express their thoughts freely both in print and in speech.’⁴² Catherine had loved scholarship for scholarship’s sake, Grech told readers of his history of Russian literature. Others took up the refrain. ‘Here, at every step,’ wrote Konstantin Batyushkov of the Academy of Sciences, ‘the enlightened patriot should bless the memory of the monarch who deserves to be called “great and wise” by posterity not so much on account of her victories as for the useful institutions’ she established.⁴³ It was impossible not to notice the veiled criticism of the tsar who had conquered Napoleon. In his speech to the Russian Academy in 1818, Karamzin offered another tactful reminder to Alexander that Catherine had loved ‘both the glory of victory and the glory of reason’, accepting ‘this happy fruit of the Academy’s work with the same flattering favour with which she succeeded in rewarding everything praiseworthy and which she bequeathed to you, gracious Tsar, as an unforgettable, precious memory’.⁴⁴ The note of reproach sounded rather more obviously in the Decembrist journal Polar Star, which looked back on Catherine’s reign in 1823 as a ‘golden age for literary scholars’: ‘All our best writers arose or were educated under her dominion.’⁴⁵ ‘The Age of Catherine is the age of encouragement,’ Pushkin remarked in 1825. ‘In that respect it is no worse than any others.’⁴⁶ In private, scholars were more openly critical. Already in 1810, the American ambassador John Quincy Adams met an official at the Academy of Sciences who complained ‘of the neglect of the sciences in the present day. The Age of Catherine is past.’⁴⁷

The fate of the empress’s Instruction in the new century seemed to confirm the point. At first, the signs seemed optimistic. Appointing her former favourite, Peter Zavadovsky, to chair a new commission to codify the laws in 1801, the tsar considered it ‘almost superfluous to note…that the suppositions in the Nakaz by my Most Kind Grandmother, the Empress Catherine II…may cast great light on the commission’s work. You know this better than anyone else.’⁴⁸ For some, such as the poet Derzhavin, the treatise had always remained an object of veneration. While the Russian transcript had been sent to the Senate in 1777, the French original had been placed in a bronze casket at the Kunstkammer, where it was exhibited to foreign visitors and taken to meetings of the Academy of Sciences. The casket and its priceless contents remained on the table at the Academy at its centenary celebrations in 1826.⁴⁹ Neither did Catherine’s treatise lack practical application. Predictably ignored in the reign of Tsar Paul, it was quoted in at least forty-one court cases under Alexander I.⁵⁰ Turning to the Nakaz in the context of the proposed codification of the laws, the liberal Alexander Turgenev remarked that though it may only have been a work of theory, it had done more to educate and enlighten the conscience of Russian judges than twenty reprints of the Muscovite law codes. For all this enthusiasm, however, few people seem to have read the Nakaz. By 1817, the fiftieth anniversary of the Legislative Commission, Nikolay Turgenev was urging another of his brothers to read Bibikov’s memoirs to discover that the empress’s efforts were ‘not so risible as people generally think’. In the following year, 1421 copies of the empress’s treatise were pulped at 4 roubles 5 kopecks per pood.⁵¹

However promising an official revival of Catherine’s principles may have seemed in 1801, the opportunity had evaporated almost as soon as it emerged. Although his grandmother’s name appeared in a number of edicts promulgated by Alexander I between his accession and his coronation, it subsequently disappeared from view. In practice, his early reference to Catherine’s ‘heart and soul’ was no more than a rhetorical disavowal of his father’s arbitrariness. Early in the new reign, Dashkova was disturbed to learn that ‘for all the disagreement among the people surrounding the emperor, they were unanimous in disparaging the reign of Catherine II and instilling in the young monarch the idea that a woman could never govern an empire.’⁵² To attempt to turn the clock back would have been hard enough even had the tsar had no aspirations of his own. But his determination to take an ethical approach to both foreign and domestic affairs was in itself sufficient to question Catherine’s morals, as Karamzin doubtless realised when criticising the personal ‘foibles’ that made him ‘blush for mankind’ in his Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia, written in 1810–11.⁵³ Mikhail Speransky, the tsar’s leading minister between 1808 and 1812, was a genuine constitutionalist with little time for Catherine’s style of absolutism. Dismissing her gurus Montesquieu and Blackstone as ‘superficial minds’, Speransky was scathing about her attempts simultaneously ‘to enjoy all the benefits of despotism with all the honour of philosophical conceptions’: ‘Comparing her instructions and various economical and juridical institutions with the unlimited power and accountability of the administrators, one might say that our laws were written in Athens or England, and our mode of government borrowed from Turkey.’⁵⁴

The empress’s fascination with the French Enlightenment seemed equally suspect to a generation which had been taught by French émigré propaganda and the dictates of international politics to regard the philosophes as perfidious mentors. ‘Posterity judges, and will judge, Catherine with all human prejudice,’ wrote Countess Golovina. ‘The new philosophy, by which she was unfortunately influenced, and which was the mainspring of her failings, covered as with a thick veil her great and fine qualities.’⁵⁵ The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 understandably made such anxieties more urgent. Ascribing ‘all our mistakes’ to ‘the French alone’, Ivan Muravëv-Apostol blamed the philosophes for the decline of French morals from the time of Louis XIV. It was then, he declared, that ‘the light of true enlightenment begins to fade; talents are employed as a weapon of depravity, and that most dangerous of sophists, the false-sage of Ferney [Voltaire], strains every nerve of his extraordinary mind over the course of half a century to strew with flowers the cup of hemlock he prepared to poison future generations’. The poet Konstantin Batyushkov could only watch in horror as the fall of Moscow set the seal on a catalogue of French treachery: ‘And this nation of monsters dared to speak of freedom, of philosophy, of humanity! And we were so blind that we imitated them like apes! How well they have repaid us!’⁵⁶ Once Alexander had made his own glory by defeating Napoleon, any lingering need to cling to his grandmother’s skirts was finally removed. Celebrating the tsar’s ‘subjugation of Paris’ in 1814, when he rode down the Champs Elysées at the head of his troops on a magnificent white charger, Derzhavin was led to wonder whether even ‘Peter and Catherine were as great as you’.⁵⁷

Nicholas I, who succeeded his brother in 1825, was certainly not the man to restore Catherine’s reputation. Born in the year of her death, nineteen years younger than Alexander, he had no personal memory of his grandmother. So notorious did Nicholas’s hostility to her memory become that in 1885 a set of miniature portraits of the tsars was identified as his on the grounds that only Catherine’s and his own were missing. Devoted, like his father, to the martial image of Peter the Great, and exuding the same uncompromising masculinity, Nicholas did little to hide his contempt for Catherine’s legacy. Even before her beloved Russian Academy was absorbed into the Academy of Sciences in 1841, the Chesme Palace was converted into a dilapidated home for invalids, while the palace at Tsaritsyno became a barracks, the ultimate symbol of the Nicolaevan regime.

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’.⁵⁸ 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.⁵⁹ Even under Nicholas, Catherine’s name continued to be raised in defence of intellectual independence. Nikolay Polevoy reminded readers of his Moscow Telegraphhow 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’.⁶⁰ 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’.⁶¹ 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.’⁶²

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.⁶³ 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.’⁶⁴ 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’.⁶⁵ 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’.⁶⁶

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.’⁶⁷Like 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.⁶⁸ 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’.⁶⁹Turgenev 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’.⁷⁰ 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’.⁷¹ 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 1835–6.⁷²

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’.⁷³ 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’.⁷⁴ 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.⁷⁵

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.⁷⁶ 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.⁷⁷ 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’.⁷⁸

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.⁷⁹ 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:

A whole century separates us from that glorious era; passions have cooled; the time has come for the unbiased judgement of history, that unhypocritical judgement which, by means of factual enrichment, is reconstructing the attractive, majestic image of Catherine II more clearly and more brightly as each day passes.⁸⁰

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.⁸¹

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.⁸²Bilbasov’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’.⁸³ 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.⁸⁴ 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.)⁸⁵ 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.⁸⁶ 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.⁸⁷ 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.⁸⁸ 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’.⁸⁹ The British ambassador Sir George Buchanan outlined the more attractive characteristics that raised echoes of Catherine the Great:

A grande dame in the best sense of that term, but without any pretensions as regards the strict observation of Court etiquette, the Grand Duchess was admirably fitted to play the part of the hostess and to do the honours of the Court. With great conversational gifts, she was not only herself full of verve and entrain, but possessed the art of inspiring them in others. Her entertainments, no matter what form they took, were never dull, and no one was ever bored. At her dinners and receptions one met many of the younger members of the Imperial family and the elite of Russian society, more especially the ‘smart set’, as well as a sprinkling of the official and artistic worlds.⁹⁰

While an uninterrupted male line of succession in Prussia permitted successive Hohenzollerns to draw inspiration from the heroic image of Frederick the Great–as, indeed, did Bismarck, Hitler and Goebbels–no nineteenth-century Romanov tsar could comfortably model himself on Catherine. Major General Sir John Hanbury Williams thought he could still detect in 1914 the shadows of that ‘halo of mystery’ attaching to the days when Catherine addressed letters to his ancestor Sir Charles ‘as “Madame” and he to her as “Monsieur”’. But the more historians emphasised Catherine’s contribution to Russia’s great power status, the less likely her latest successor seemed to be able to sustain it. One need only recall Hanbury Williams’ doleful comment after an interview with the tsar at his Mogilëv headquarters in October 1915: ‘Catherine was a wonderful ruler of Russia, but these are not the days of Catherine.’⁹¹

‘True glory cannot be sought,’ General Suvorov reminded Admiral Ribas in November 1790, ‘it comes from the sacrifice that one makes to the utility of the public good.’⁹² Catherine was aware of the tension. Regularly reaffirming her commitment to the common good, she was nevertheless obsessed with her own posthumous reputation. It would have delighted her to know that, after her death, Academician Peter Pallas re-christened one of the steppe grasses he had discovered ‘Catharinaea sublimis’.⁹³ ‘She loves glory and is assiduous in her pursuit of it,’ Prince Shcherbatov wrote in 1786–7.⁹⁴ Those were years in which she embarked on a major renovation of the road from St Petersburg to Moscow, recommended to her by Diderot in 1773 as a good way of securing immortality. This, indeed, was one subject on which Catherine was particularly anxious to assure the approbation of the philosophes.⁹⁵ She offered her own self-assessment to Grimm in 1778:

Here lies Catherine the Second, born at Stettin on 21 April 1729. She came to Russia in 1744 to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she conceived the triple ambition of pleasing her husband, Elizabeth and the nation. She overlooked nothing to achieve this. In eighteen years of boredom and solitude she read many books. Once she had reached the throne of Russia, she wanted only good and sought to procure happiness, freedom and property for her subjects. She forgave with ease and hated no one; indulgent, happy to be alive, cheerful by nature, with a republican soul and a good heart, she had friends; work was easy for her, company and the arts pleased her.⁹⁶

That was not how contemporary critics saw her. Shcherbatov complained in a treatise written only for the eyes of his family that ‘true friendship never resided in her heart, and she is ready to betray her best friend and servant in order to please her lover’. According to him, the empress’s obsessive quest for immortality had left her vulnerable to a series of cunning flatterers–Betskoy, Yelagin, Vyazemsky and Bezborodko prominent among them. Too many of her projects, founded ostensibly ‘for the good of the nation’ were in fact ‘simply symbols of her love of glory, for if she really had the nation’s interest at heart, she would, after founding them, have also paid attention to their progress’. This was the voice of a scholarly aristocrat who had once enjoyed Catherine’s patronage as an historian but now found himself permanently excluded from her inner circle. Although she had always tried to balance one adviser against another, never allowing anyone to think that his ideas had no prospect of being accepted, this proved an increasingly difficult balance to hold. To those outside her charmed circle, Potëmkin had come to epitomise the corrupting influence of favouritism in the last decade of her reign: ‘love of power, ostentation, pandering to all his desires, gluttony and hence luxury at table, flattery, avarice, rapaciousness, and it may be said, all the other vices known in the world, with which he himself is full and with which he fills his supporters, and so on throughout the empire’. ⁹⁷

In April 1790, the chief of the St Petersburg police entered Catherine’s inner sanctum to present her with Denis, a four-year-old boy of unknown origin found wandering the streets. Since no one had yet answered advertisements for his parents, the empress adopted him at the Court’s expense and placed him in the care of a courtier living close by the Hermitage.⁹⁸ She was capable of demonstrative acts of kindness to those who had no right to expect them. Yet she was certainly no saint. Despite her idealised view of the Russian people as a whole, she took a dim view of many of the individuals she met on her travels, reserving some of her cattiest remarks for the earnest merchants’ wives who served her at table. Though her legislation allowed for a limited degree of social mobility, her policy was always to encourage her subjects to seek satisfaction in the station into which they had been born. As befitted a believer in a rigid social hierarchy, she relaxed only in the privacy of a narrow circle of aristocratic friends which remained remarkably constant throughout her fifty-two years in Russia (Ivan Betskoy, one of her first contacts at Elizabeth’s Court, died at the age of ninety-three in August 1795). Having begun her reign as a usurper, she sought a degree of legitimacy by portraying many of her early edicts as an attempt to complete the work of Peter the Great. But she was never a slavish imitator.⁹⁹ On the contrary, having sought throughout to exceed the achievements of her glorious predecessor, she ended her life surrounded by images of her own triumphs on the European stage: paintings commemorating the battle of Chesme by the English artist Richard Paton were originally hung in the Hermitage but significantly moved in 1779 to the throne room at Peter’s own summer residence, Peterhof.¹⁰⁰Catherine had presided over the greatest expansion of Russian territory since the mid-sixteenth century and seen her empire’s economy grow in proportion. She had shown at least as great a commitment to the power of ideas as Peter I. But since she had ultimately been unable to trust the Enlightenment’s fundamental belief in self-development, a reign which began by fostering a degree of intellectual independence ended by enveloping some of Russia’s most interesting writers in clouds of suspicion. Catherine had not succeeded in her aim of establishing a firm rule of law, and the rational bureaucratic institutions she had worked so hard to establish never emasculated the informal patronage networks by which Russia has long been governed. Although she had offered her subjects the example of a tolerant and trusting ruler, her gentle methods have rarely been adopted by her successors. For them, the empress’s conduct has most often been an anti-model, not least because it has served as a subtle form of ammunition for their critics for most of the two centuries since her death.