CHAPTER THREE

LIVING AND LOVING AT THE COURT OF EMPRESS ELIZABETH 1746–1753

Having been raised as an adult from a comparatively tender age, Catherine now found herself treated as a child just as she was blossoming into maturity. For nine lonely years between her wedding and the birth of her son Paul, she had to negotiate the hazards of a Court shot through with intrigue while coping with an unpredictable empress irritated by her failure to produce a male heir. It was all a far cry from the carefree life she had led at the Court of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel.

Though Catherine had been provided with young female companions on her arrival in Moscow, it was only after her betrothal that a formal establishment was settled upon her. Peter’s household was also expanded on the occasion of the celebration of the peace with Sweden in 1744. Count Zakhar Chernyshëv, one of three gentlemen of the bedchamber appointed to the Young Court (the small entourage settled on the grand duke and duchess), was still among Catherine’s closest advisers on his death in 1785. Another, Field Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, was to lead her troops against the Turks in 1768. But if these proved to be early examples of her capacity for lifelong trust, the immediate prospects for lasting friendships looked bleak. Zakhar was soon removed when Johanna Elisabeth feared that he might be pressing his attentions on her daughter and the level of supervision over the Young Court was sharply intensified when Countess Rumyantseva was replaced as Catherine’s leading lady-in-waiting by the empress’s cousin, Maria Choglokova.¹

Only six years older than her new charge, Choglokova was appointed in May 1746 when Elizabeth, alarmed that Catherine had failed to conceive in the early months of her marriage, ordered Bestuzhev to draw up a formal instruction for the Young Court which made ‘marital relationships between both Imperial Highnesses’ a matter of state significance, second only to the formulaic acknowledgement of Catherine’s ‘true zeal’ in the Orthodox faith.² It was widely assumed that the attractive new governess, who had grown up as a maid of honour in Elizabeth’s household in the 1730s, had been chosen in the hope that her affection for her equally uxorious spouse might serve as a model for the royal couple.³ At first, however, Catherine regarded her as ‘the most disagreeable and most capricious woman at Court’. Not that her husband was any better. However adorable he may have seemed to Maria, Nikolay Choglokov, who assumed charge of Peter’s household, struck the young grand duchess as ‘far from loveable’. ‘No man in the world was more puffed up with amour propre.’ ‘Fat, stupid, arrogant and contemptuous,’ Choglokov was ‘at least as unpleasant as his wife, which was saying something.’ Faced with the prospect of life under the surveillance of such a ghastly couple, Catherine spent much of the Court’s visit to Reval (now Tallinn) in tears and continued to be plagued by headaches and low mood on her return at the end of July.⁴

It would be wrong to paint a picture of unrelieved misery. Over the winter of 1746–7, she and Peter enjoyed living in the ‘very comfortable’ Winter Palace apartments occupied by Empress Anna in the 1730s and were thrilled by the twice-weekly productions in the large theatre opposite the Kazan Church. ‘In a word, that winter was one of the happiest and best arranged that I have spent in my life. We did nothing but laugh and romp about all day long.’⁵ Yet the pleasure was shattered in March 1747 by news from Zerbst of the death of Prince Christian August. Catherine had her first taste of the Romanovs’ dynastic pretensions when her grieving was cut short by the instruction that ‘it was not fitting for a grand duchess to mourn any longer for a father who was not a king’.⁶ More misery was to follow when Andrey Chernyshëv was packed off to Orenburg with his cousins Zathar and Ivan at the end of May. So persistent were the whispers of an attraction between him and Catherine that even her confessor was prevailed upon to ask her about it. Although she continued to write to Andrey in exile, smuggling letters out with the help of her faithful ‘oracle’, the valet Timofey Yevreinov, her friend’s departure left Catherine feeling lonelier than ever. As if to emphasise her sense of isolation, she had to undergo the indignity of a visit from the empress herself. It was the first time they had been alone together and Elizabeth took the opportunity to express her disappointment in no uncertain terms, accusing the eighteen-year-old of unfaithfulness, a charge she vehemently denied.⁷

Over the following autumn, the Choglokovs sought to limit the potential for temptation by restricting access to Peter and Catherine so severely that it seemed they were virtually under house arrest. Yet such crude attempts to drive the young couple into each other’s arms merely succeeded in feeding their mutual resentments. Far from producing the universally desired heir, Catherine and her husband already seemed to be leading separate lives. During the pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery while the Court was in Moscow in summer 1749, they rarely met except at table and in bed–and ‘he came there after I had fallen asleep and went out before I woke up’.⁸

Seeking solace in private reading, Catherine was often to be found with her head in a book. Shortly before the Court returned to St Petersburg at the end of 1744, Count Henning Adolf Gyllenborg, a Swedish nobleman whom she had first met in Hamburg, had flatteringly suggested that she might draft an autobiographical ‘character-sketch of a fifteen-year-old philosophe’. As models, he recommended Plutarch’s Lives, which she tracked down only later, and the life of Cicero, of which she apparently read no more than a couple of pages in German translation. Neither did she finish Montesquieu’s short treatise On the Causes of the Grandeur and Decline of the Roman Republic (1734): ‘it made me yawn’.⁹ Even for one so self-consciously ‘studious’, such works were too demanding. Voltaire’s fiction, which she discovered in 1746, was more immediately attractive. Two years later, she had graduated to Brantôme’s lubricious memoirs of the sixteenth-century French Court and Péréfixe’s life of its most celebrated monarch, Henri IV, who was to remain one of her lifelong heroes. Soon more difficult books came within her range. Before tackling Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), the greatest work of political philosophy of the age on which she would later base her own Instruction to the Legislative Commission, she started in 1751 to read Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, a fundamental work of the early Enlightenment. ‘Every six months I finished a volume, and from this, one can imagine in what solitude I spent my life.’¹⁰

Withdrawal was only one of Catherine’s strategies for survival. In public she embarked on a concerted campaign to please Elizabeth and her Court, though it was by no means simple to retain the approval of such a volatile monarch. It was particularly fruitless to try to share her developing literary interests with an empress who had inherited her father’s volcanic temper with none of his intellectual curiosity. Although the library at St Petersburg’s Summer Palace contained almost 600 volumes in French, including classic works by Bayle, Michel Montaigne and Hugo Grotius, Elizabeth had them removed to the Academy of Sciences in 1745, when diplomatic relations between St Petersburg and Versailles were damaged by the disgrace of the French ambassador, the Marquis de Chétardie, and their return five years later seems unlikely to have been connected with her personal tastes in reading.¹¹ Indeed, as Catherine soon discovered, ‘there was a whole raft of subjects that she did not like at all. So, for example, one must not speak of the king of Prussia, nor of Voltaire, illness, the dead, beautiful women, French manners or the sciences; all these subjects displeased her.’¹²

There is no need to accept this verdict on Elizabeth’s philistinism at face value. Monarchs are famously difficult to talk to–‘I would rather let people interpret my silence than my words,’ remarked the taciturn Louis XVI¹³–and Catherine was understandably cautious about offending the woman whose permission was required every time she wanted to set foot outside the palace. Though there seems little reason to credit the empress with bookish interests, her attitude to death, mocked by Catherine as fearful superstition, was by no means incompatible with rational Enlightened thinking. Nauseated by the smell of corpses on her way to the suburban palace at Yekaterinhof, she ordered more earth to be piled on the graves she could see from her carriage and insisted that future burials be carried out further from the centre of St Petersburg. Still more drastic steps were taken in advance of the Court’s visit to Moscow in 1749, when not only were burials banned at churches between the Kremlin and the Golovin Palace, but existing graves were razed to the ground, the tombstones being donated for new church buildings.¹⁴ These were measures which owed something to a growing concern with public hygiene. Meanwhile, Elizabeth had done everything in her power to limit the ‘great and useless expense’ that her leading subjects insisted on lavishing on their funerals.¹⁵ Whereas Russian nobles continued to regard an elaborate funeral as the ultimate status symbol, their monarch’s attitude was more in tune with changing sentiments in Western Europe, where ‘grief was becoming more introverted and intense, more private, separated from the formal observances of the corporate hierarchical society’.¹⁶

Elusive though it remained, privacy was highly prized by Elizabeth, who had a metal grille put up around her box at the opera house in St Petersburg. One of the best-known episodes in Catherine’s memoirs describes the empress’s splenetic outburst on discovering that Peter had drilled holes through a door so that he could spy on her meals with Aleksey Razumovsky.¹⁷ It was this incident which prompted the reorganisation of the Young Court in 1746. Usually interpreted as evidence of her husband’s incurable infantilism (or, at any rate, of Catherine’s anxiety to highlight it), it tells us just as much about the empress’s yearning to escape the relentless public eye at a Court where the monarch was permanently on display.

Hunting offers another revealing example. Had they known that Louis XV and his entourage had shot more than 1700 partridges on the plain of Saint-Denis on a single day in September 1738, readers of the St Petersburg News might have been less impressed to learn that in the six weeks between 10 July and 26 August 1740, Empress Anna had bagged a total of 488 items: 9 stags, each with between 14 and 24 antlers, 16 wild goats, 4 wild boar, a wolf, 374 hares, 68 wild duck and 16 large seabirds.¹⁸ Nevertheless, lists of such achievements were routinely published since success in the field was understood everywhere in Europe as a sign of imperial prowess and international prestige. In September 1751, Elizabeth staged an extravagant hunt at Krasnoye Selo for the Austrian ambassador, who was given one of the best horses from the imperial stables and led by grooms wearing costumes designed expressly for the event at a cost of 20,000 roubles. This hunt took place in the full glare of publicity. Yet when the official press drew attention to the empress’s personal passion for hawking later that autumn, she promptly banned all articles referring to the imperial family without her prior approval.¹⁹

Elizabeth had grown up at the hunting lodge at Tsarskoye Selo and consistently sought to preserve it as a private space. Though it was later to become Catherine’s favourite summer residence, she and Peter were invited there a mere eight times before 1762. Only in 1748 were they in residence with the empress herself, to celebrate Bartolomeo Rastrelli’s first reconstruction of the palace, and even then Elizabeth often dined alone.²⁰ For the most part, she preferred private jaunts with Razumovsky and her friends, during which she could most readily resume her father’s role as ‘the leader of revelry’.²¹ For one such bacchanalian expedition, the cellarer at Monplaisir brought out 11 half-flasks of ‘Her Majesty’s sweet wine’ (Hungarian Tokay), 21 bottles of her favourite English beer, 12 bottles of fortified wine, 1 bottle of the ‘new sweet wine’, 17 bottles of Burgundy, 16 bottles of champagne, 53 bottles of Rhine wine, 6 flasks of Gdansk vodka, 2 flasks of aniseed-flavour vodka, half a flask of lemon vodka and 2 phials of mustard.²²

While the governors of the Young Court held Peter and Catherine to a clockwork routine, Elizabeth’s life was famously irregular. Visitors to Russia in the 1730s had recognised in the attractive young tsarevna a free spirit ill-suited to the constraints of formal ritual. ‘She dances better than anyone I have ever seen,’ one acknowledged, ‘but hates the ceremony of a court.’²³ Even after her accession, she shunned formal society, preferring the earthier company of her far from blue-blooded relatives, the Hendrikovs and the Skavronskys (Maria Choglokova’s family). Surrounded by the guards who had brought her to the throne, Elizabeth gave special licence to the new Life Company (her personal bodyguard), the majority of them peasants by origin, who ‘committed all imaginable disorders’ in the early months of the reign as ‘the new noble lieutenants ran through all the dirtiest public-houses, got drunk, and wallowed in the streets. They entered into the houses of the greatest noblemen, demanding money with threats, and took away, without ceremony, whatever they liked.’²⁴ It was a pardonable exaggeration on the part of the Austrian ambassador. Fourteen men were discharged following disorders at Elizabeth’s coronation, and the regimental archives from her reign are peppered with the records of fights, broken windows, and a rich variety of derelictions of duty caused by severe inebriation. One wretched drunk was so hungover that he turned out on guard in his slippers.²⁵

Hawking and hunting with hounds were pleasures generally reserved for the period between lunch and dinner; grouse shooting, in autumn and winter, lasted from five or six in the morning until midday. These, however, were almost the only fixed points in Elizabeth’s daily regime. Mealtimes were unstable (and often the occasion for the empress to dictate haphazard personal edicts); theatrical performances regularly began late and continued into the small hours so that, until the empress condescended to provide carriages for her musicians late in her reign, they could be seen lumbering through the streets with their bulky instruments in the middle of the night.²⁶ It was entirely characteristic for Elizabeth to finish the carnival season in 1748 ‘with a magnificent bal masqué and a supper of a hundred and fifty covers in the opera house, which she honoured with her presence, till three o’clock in the morning’.²⁷ On less formal occasions, she might retire to bed only as dawn was breaking. Such irregular habits have long been ascribed to Elizabeth’s fear of assassination.²⁸ Yet although the anxieties of a usurper are not to be underestimated, it seems more plausible to interpret her erratic daily timetable as an extreme example of the ‘nocturnalisation’ of Court life–a move traceable in most European Courts in the century after 1650 away from a dawn-to-dusk regimen towards one in which mealtimes, balls and masquerades moved ever further into the night, when fireworks and Baroque theatrical spectacles acquired even greater powers of illusion under cover of darkness.²⁹

The roots of Russia’s Baroque Court culture stretched back into seventeenth-century Muscovy, when its image-makers lacked for nothing in intellectual sophistication.³⁰ Manners were not always so refined. By the time of Catherine’s arrival, barely a generation had passed since Peter the Great first introduced women to Russian public society by obliging them in 1718 to attend his ‘assemblies’–gatherings inspired by his visit to Paris at which both sexes were obliged to dance, smoke and play cards. Since these were all habits formerly condemned as ‘foreign devilishness’, the tsar found that the best way of encouraging guests to participate was to post armed guards at the door. If his new forms of sociability were largely alien to the Muscovite elite, then so was the Western dress he imposed in 1702. Decades later, hooped skirts and corsets (the English style laced down the front, the French down the back, rather tighter, to emphasise the waist) still seemed uncomfortable and unwieldy to noblewomen who hankered after the looser garments of a bygone age. Even those who were keen to adapt to new ways of doing things had precious few sources of instruction. First published in 1717, The Honourable Mirror of Youth, or a guide to social conduct, an advice book for both sexes based on Erasmus and other Western authorities, remained the only work of its kind in Russia until the mid-1730s and was still being reprinted in 1767, five years into Catherine’s own reign.³¹

Peter’s efforts to create a refined European society were disrupted by the Court’s return to Moscow under his teenage grandson. Even when Anna brought the Court back to St Petersburg in 1732, visitors could expect to find as many rough edges there as in any of the smaller German Courts. ‘The richest coat would be sometimes worn together with the vilest uncombed wig,’ noted Manstein, the condescending Austrian ambassador, ‘or you might see a beautiful piece of stuff spoiled by some botcher of a tailor.’³² Even Manstein nevertheless had to acknowledge that ‘at length, every thing grew to be well regulated’ so that by the end of the 1730s St Petersburg could boast many of the attributes of a recognisable Court society.³³ Anna held regular reception days–kurtagy was the Russian word, taken from the German Courtag; the English called them drawing rooms–where the atmosphere was relatively informal. ‘Our drawing-room is more like an assembly,’ the English envoy’s wife observed. ‘There is a circle in form, for about half an hour, then the czarina and the princesses make their party at cards.’³⁴ By the mid-1740s, when Catherine arrived in Russia, the main ladies’ costume at such gatherings was the shlafrok (from the German Schlafrock), which resembled English informal morning dress. For more formal occasions, there was the samara, a loose dress with a pleated back, not unlike the French contouche, worn over a corset and a decorated underskirt and supported by a hooped panier.³⁵

‘The Empress is a great lover of English stuffs,’ reported the British ambassador in the year of Catherine’s wedding, ‘particularly white and other light colours with large flowers of gold and silver.’³⁶ Europe was not the only source of such gorgeous fabrics. Although they never showed much profit, the cumbersome, state-controlled caravans to Peking, sanctioned by the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727, remained a crucial link in the palace’s supply chain. Anna’s Court had bought a third of the goods from the 1738 caravan and funds confiscated from her disgraced favourite, Ernst Bühren, helped Elizabeth to take her pick from the next in 1743. Yards of her favourite white velvet headed the list of Chinese silks purchased at auction, where the empress also invested in green, yellow, crimson and scarlet satins, woven with silver and gold thread, a multiplicity of damasks, muslin, gauze and coloured brocades, and some 4117 wire-mounted paper flowers.³⁷ Diplomats, appalled by Elizabeth’s dilatory attitude to business, were irritated to find that she thought nothing of making a trip from one of her summer palaces expressly to examine silks on the market in St Petersburg.³⁸ Yet there was nothing casual about such visits to an empress who, in common with her fellow European sovereigns, used dress as a political instrument to inculcate loyalty, satisfy vanity and impress the world at large.³⁹

Although Elizabeth prided herself on driving a hard bargain, the sums she allocated to her own wardrobe were effectively limitless. The young cavalier assigned to supervise alterations to her furs in 1759 claimed that some 70,000 roubles were spent in less than nine months–more than twice Catherine’s total annual allowance of 30,000 roubles and only marginally less than the (grossly inadequate) budget for rebuilding the palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1744.⁴⁰ Manstein calculated that a courtier in the 1730s who ‘did not lay out above two or three thousand roubles, or from four to six hundred pounds a year in his dress, made no great figure’.⁴¹ Catherine’s expenses were far higher. Though she had to be careful not to outdo a capricious monarch–not long after her arrival in Russia, Elizabeth ordered all her ladies to shave their heads, a fate Catherine escaped only because she was recovering from pleurisy–the grand duchess’s wardrobe was expected to range far beyond the standard repertoire. Like the empress, she usually changed costume three times at a public masquerade, and when an outfit attracted praise, it was never worn again because she made it ‘a rule that if it had once made a big impact, it could only make a lesser one the second time’. Though indebtedness was a crucial marker of nobility in a culture defined by conspicuous consumption, the grand duchess’s need for money would ultimately leave her vulnerable to bribes from foreign Courts. At first, it was Elizabeth who saved her from embarrassment. By the end of Catherine’s first year in Russia, only a gift from the empress could prevent her arrears from exceeding 2000 roubles, and her debts kept on mounting thanks to expenditure on jewellery and gambling.⁴²

Gift-giving was a central part of Court culture, and although Catherine might occasionally expect to receive presents from visiting royalty, she was usually expected to offer them. On the night of her conversion to Orthodoxy, she had been able to present Peter with a jewel-encrusted hunting knife and a gold cane-head only because Elizabeth had provided them for her. After her marriage, she had to pay for her own presents. The empress set the standard, providing courtiers with new clothes every Easter and bestowing valuable dowries on her maids of honour. Her stepsister Anna Karlovna received 10,000 roubles when she married Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov in 1742. Sixteen years later, their daughter Anna Mikhailovna in turn received 15,000 roubles along with dresses, silks and bed linen that brought the total value of the gift to more than 25,000 roubles.⁴³ So we may believe Catherine when she complains of the demands of Countess Rumyantseva–‘the most spendthrift woman in Russia’–and Maria Choglokova, who alone was said to cost her 17,000 roubles a year.⁴⁴

Such sums were a drop in the ocean by comparison with the outlay required to sustain a rapidly expanding Court. Though it remained significantly smaller than Versailles or Vienna, the establishment in St Petersburg was beginning to spiral out of control at the time of Catherine’s arrival in Russia.⁴⁵ In 1748, when a financial crisis prompted officials to compare Elizabeth’s household with the establishment under Anna in 1739, seven dwarves provided a reassuring measure of continuity, testifying to the Russian elite’s persistent fascination with human freaks. In every other respect, however, the Court had undergone unprecedented growth. Whereas Anna had managed with eight gentlemen-in-waiting, Elizabeth needed twice as many. She employed seven chamber pages, compared to Anna’s three, and the number of ordinary pages had increased from eight to fourteen. In 1739, the Court had required but a single cupbearer: nine years later there were six–and fourteen assistants. To manage them, the empress revived a series of offices unknown to Anna but mentioned in documents from previous reigns (among others, her Court now boasted a Chief Cellar-master and Chief Cupbearer). In view of her passion for clothes, a maître de garderobe seemed equally indispensable and Elizabeth duly appointed Vasily Chulkov, a former lackey who had looked after her wardrobe since 1731. Inflation was even more obvious among the burgeoning ranks of coffee-servers, table-cloth layers and table-setters. As for the lesser servants, Anna had made do with four chamber lackeys, forty-eight lackeys, eight heyducks and four messengers. By 1748, their total numbers had more than doubled. All of them had to be kitted out in expensive livery: at 13,000 roubles, Elizabeth’s annual bill on this count was more than three times higher than Anna’s. Lackeys, drawn mainly from the Ukrainian regiments, wore an outfit based on the standard Russian military uniform: green breeches and tunics with red cuffs and a scarlet cloth blouson. Heyducks dressed in red breeches, like the Hussars, and a fancier tunic, trimmed with lace, loops and large buttons. For state occasions and major religious feast days, the livery was still more extravagant. Below stairs, forty-five cooks manned Elizabeth’s kitchens in much the same way as they had done under Anna, but by 1748 they had sixty-eight apprentices to her eighteen. It was only because most of this mushrooming establishment were miserably paid–the eighty stokers each had to survive on 30 roubles a year, half as much again as the twenty grooms–that the increase in the total salary bill could be held at 239,331 roubles in 1748 by comparison with 148,388 in 1739.⁴⁶

The costs of consumption rose faster still. In 1746, the three palace kitchens responsible for preparing food for the empress, the grand ducal couple and the leading courtiers paid 10,721 roubles for wine and fresh vegetables–more than twice as much as Anna had spent. The drinks budget was even higher: 38,830 roubles in 1746 by comparison with 18,163 in the 1730s. (Despite the drunken portrait of her husband presented in Catherine’s memoirs, the 13,150 roubles spent on alcohol for her and Peter tell us less about their personal habits than about the central role they played in entertaining the Court and the foreign ambassadors.) Changing fashions led Elizabeth to pay three times as much for coffee as Anna had done, while the bill for sweets rose more than sevenfold to 6389 roubles. It was this ‘enormous number of sweets’ that contributed to the Russians’ lasting reputation for bad breath–‘especially at court’ reported a visitor in the early nineteenth century, ‘where the ladies not merely chew them all through dinner, but send plates back to their rooms’.⁴⁷ All told, the catering budget for the imperial family and the leading courtiers in 1746 came to 83,714 roubles–well over twice as much as Anna’s total of 35,388–and actual expenditure was almost certainly higher.⁴⁸

Although the 1740s was the decade in which Peter the Great’s reforms finally began to take root in a number of areas of government, it would have taken a more robust accounting system than any Russia could command to control expansion on this scale. Not long before the national debt peaked in 1748 at around 3.6 million roubles–between a quarter and a third of the empire’s annual gross income–the Admiralty College blithely allocated more than 1.5 million roubles to an attempt to rebuild the military harbour at Kronstadt in stone, abandoning the plan three years later only when it learned that even an outlay of 3 million would offer no guarantee of success.⁴⁹ The Court’s deficit may have been trivial by comparison, but by the time administrators worked it out for themselves, it was already too late. In theory, salaries and catering were accounted for by an annual state grant of 200,000 roubles, to which Elizabeth had added a recurrent supplement of 30,000 roubles in April 1747. Yet although payments were supposed to be made in instalments every four months, the Court Office complained that the money was transferred only ‘with great delays, and never in a single issue’. No funds at all were handed over on 1 May 1748, so that officials, already behind with salary payments and facing a formal protest from sentries who had been given no new uniforms for the past three years, now found themselves more than 43,000 roubles in arrears and unable to pay for the ‘drinks, Gdansk vodka, vegetables and other provisions without which it is impossible for the Court to manage, either for its ordinary needs or for banquets’. By mid-May, the Court Office’s resources were ‘utterly exhausted’: not only was there no money to buy luxury goods from the foreign vessels expected imminently in St Petersburg; they could not even afford to commission orders from the regular packet-boats that brought cloth and alcohol from Danzig.⁵⁰

Expensive as the Court had proved, there was never any question that Elizabeth would rein in her spending. In a political climate in which ‘the main currency of imperial competition was cultural achievement’, there was nothing self-indulgent about representational display. On the contrary, as Tim Blanning has shown, display was a ‘constitutive element of power itself’. And nowhere was it a more vital element than in Russia under the usurper Elizabeth, because the representational culture which radiated across Europe from Versailles was by no means an expression of unbounded confidence: ‘On the contrary, the greater the doubts about the stability or legitimacy of a throne, the greater the need for display.’⁵¹

For a sense of what that meant in practice, consider the magnificent four-poster bed in the state bedroom at Tsarskoye Selo. A shimmering confection of light-blue French damask fringed with silver brocade, this lit de parade was the most expensive piece of furniture in the palace. Above it hung a massive canopy decorated with crimson velvet into which a cross and a crown lying on a feather pillow had been embroidered in gold and silver. The interior of the canopy was embroidered with the empress’s monogram.⁵² No matter that the Russian Court had never adopted the elaborate public rituals of the lever and coucher practised at Versailles, or that Elizabeth preferred to sleep in a room next to Aleksey Razumovsky’s: the state bed’s purpose was representational rather than functional. And it was no more than Europe had come to expect. Touring the continent in the early 1750s, the young Demidov brothers, heirs to the precious-metal mines in the Urals, were proudly told that it had taken forty craftsmen twelve years to construct the bed at the Elector of Bavaria’s palace in Munich, where a dozen people were required merely to lift the bedspread.⁵³ A later British visitor learned that the furniture in that bedroom alone had cost £100,000.⁵⁴

For a further representation of the power and prosperity that Elizabeth claimed to have brought to the Russian throne, visitors to Tsarskoye Selo had only to glance up at the ceiling in the Great Hall. In the words of the artist, Giuseppe Valeriani, his painting’s allegorical central panel depicted:

Russia seated amidst the coats of arms of the Kingdoms and Provinces of her Empire, leaning on one where the Crowned Name of Her Imperial Majesty can be seen surrounded by Graces with festoons of flowers; next to her is Abundance, pouring out horns of fruit; on every side there are the Genies of War and Peace.

In the foreground are the Sciences and the Arts, Navigation and Commerce which the Genies of Her Majesty’s Magnanimity and Magnificence pour their Horns of Plenty to recompense and encourage the Sciences and the Arts.

In the niches at the four corners are the four parts of the World expressing their just admiration for the heroic virtues of Her Imperial Majesty.⁵⁵

The New Year firework in 1751 represented the northern hemisphere of a colossal globe, where the empress’s initials burned at the centre of a vast map of Russia.⁵⁶ Writers conveyed similar messages, sometimes in overtly sexual terms. In Lomonosov’s anniversary ode for 1748, for example, Russia ‘sits and spreads her legs upon the steppe’, turning her ‘lively eyes’ to ‘take stock of the prosperity around her, leaning with her elbow on the Caucasus’.⁵⁷ Masculine associations were even more frequent. Female rule had been associated with bravery in Russia since Catherine I’s legendary role at the battle of the Pruth in 1711, and Elizabeth’s clerical mythmakers duly seized on the image to portray their empress as ‘Peter’s daughter’.⁵⁸

Since no artistic form was better suited to represent heroism than opera, opera libretti, usually published simultaneously in St Petersburg in Russian, Italian and French, added to the chorus. As Jacob Stählin reminded readers of the St Petersburg News, everything in opera was ‘exaggerated, magnificent and amazing. It contains nothing save high and incomparable deeds, godlike faculties in man, a prosperous world, and portraits of golden ages.’⁵⁹ Giuseppe Bonecchi drove the point home by announcing that the hero of Araja’s opera Bellerofont, staged to commemorate the anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession in 1750, was intended to represent ‘an image of Her Imperial Majesty, who, gloriously surmounting on that day all the obstacles that injustice and envy had placed in her way, came to the paternal throne, to which she has consistently brought glory, and to which she gives by her virtues more éclat than she receives in return’.⁶⁰ Indeed, the very presentation of Italian opera in St Petersburg was widely interpreted as evidence of the civilised blessings that Elizabeth’s rule had conferred on her empire. As Voltaire declared in his Anecdotes on Peter the Great, published in 1748 to flatter the Russian Court: ‘Magnificence and even taste have in every respect replaced barbarity.’⁶¹

In such a cultural climate, only the monarch mattered. Although Catherine’s birthday (21 April) and her name day (24 November) were cause for formal celebration, as were Peter’s (10 February and 29 June), these were secondary events, designed more to promote the dynasty than to fete the heir and his wife. Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, the most important days in the Court calendar were, in descending order of significance, the empress’s accession day (25 November), coronation day (25 April), name day (5 September) and birthday (18 December). It was these that provided the occasions not only for operas and literary commemorations, but also for extravagant banquets culminating in the presentation of intricate allegorical desserts, each of which was a work of art in itself.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the sugar subtleties first created for medieval Arab potentates had slid far enough down the English social scale to be recommended by Hannah Glasse in The Art of Cookery (1747), one of the bestselling books of the age: ‘If you make them in pretty little figures, they make a fine little dish.’⁶² In Russia, they remained a novelty confined to the Court elite, though a marginally wider group of readers could drool over the descriptions that appeared in the official press. To celebrate one of her triumphs against the Turks in the late 1730s, Anna’s Parisian confectioner made a model fortress complete with twelve sugar cannons; on another occasion, the dessert resembled the park and gardens at Peterhof.⁶³ Under Elizabeth, designs became more ambitious still. At the first coronation-day banquet Catherine attended, shortly after her recovery from illness in April 1744, the dessert took the form of a coronation hall, complete with throne and regalia. ‘Among the subtleties at high table,’ reported the St Petersburg News, ‘there were various triumphal gates with avenues, and magnificent buildings with entertainment gardens and parterres; incidentally, the chamber of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Kunstkamera with its observatory in St Petersburg were also represented, in models done to scale.’⁶⁴

Sheer extravagance was itself a powerful enough symbol of prosperity, and Rastrelli’s favourite device, used on many occasions after Catherine’s wedding, was a pyramid of fire created by setting light to wax poured through thousands of glass globes.⁶⁵ These were merely the centrepiece of fantastic theatrical settings. Fountains played in the banqueting hall, where tables for up to 200 guests were laid out in a single ‘figured’ sequence, flanked by orange and pomegranate trees. Our earliest description dates from 1738, when the tables were arranged in the shape of a double-headed eagle.⁶⁶ Even a genius such as Rastrelli found it hard to keep up this level of inspiration, but Catherine attended banquets where the architect had laid out the tables in the form of her own monogram, or the empress’s, or in an echo of the formal palace gardens. One young officer retained a sufficiently vivid memory of a Summer Palace feast to reproduce the table plan in his memoirs: Elizabeth, Catherine and Peter were placed as jewels in a crown, from which four long tassels trailed out, one for each of the guards regiments.⁶⁷

On state occasions, when the tables were arranged in a single sequence like this, Catherine sat to the left of the empress with the Court ladies ranged out alongside her in order of seniority, while her husband was placed on Elizabeth’s right next to members of the generalitet. At lesser banquets, when the tables were set separately, the heir and his consort were expected to entertain the foreign diplomats and leading courtiers, dining either in their own apartments or in one of the palace staterooms. At the premier of Araja’s opera Mithridates on 26 April 1747, when Peter and Catherine hosted the ambassadors in the empress’s box, dinner was served throughout the performance. There was plenty of time for a banquet: the performance of Seleucco on 9 January 1746 lasted more than seven hours.⁶⁸ Only Peter’s manners left something to be desired. In 1746, Chancellor Bestuzhev felt obliged to instruct the Young Court that the grand duke must refrain from pulling faces and telling vulgar jokes to foreign dignitaries, and that when at table, he must not, for example, ‘pour his drinks over the poor servants’ heads’.⁶⁹

Such puerile behaviour was doubly embarrassing in church, where Catherine spent a good deal of her time. Elizabeth’s reign was a golden age of Baroque church-building. Most of the major monasteries she visited underwent major reconstruction. In and around the old capital, she spent a small fortune rebuilding the Trinity Lavra and the ‘New Jerusalem’ Ascension monastery, established by Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century to represent the Holy Sepulchre in Russia. In St Petersburg, not content with founding the St Nicholas (Naval) Cathedral and the Smolny Cathedral, Elizabeth commissioned Savva Chevakinsky to build a sumptuous new chapel at Tsarskoye Selo, consecrated in 1756, ten years after the foundation stone was laid.⁷⁰ Several of the capital’s churches incorporated a ‘tsar’s place’ where she could listen to the liturgy, and some had more than one of these gilded canopies since, as Catherine later recalled, the empress liked to wander about during the service, in the manner of humbler members of the congregation. There was no doubt about the sincerity of her conspicuous piety. It was at Elizabeth’s behest, for example, that public floggings were prohibited on religious feast days and a ban was placed on imported porcelain and other items bearing images of the crucifixion.⁷¹ However, in keeping with her quest for privacy, the empress preferred to make her devotions in the seclusion of the smaller of the two Winter Palace chapels, named after St Zachary and the Blessed Elizabeth, where she could emulate her father by ‘singing with great grace in the most difficult motets’ and ‘competing with the strongest choristers’.⁷² In her absence, Peter and Catherine, and even Catherine alone, were often left to represent the imperial family in the Great Chapel, not only at regular Sunday services, but also on the major feast days in the Orthodox calendar.

Churches were often perishingly cold. On Christmas Day in 1748, when the Court was in Moscow, Catherine and her husband were already preparing to take the carriage to mass when they were told that Elizabeth had excused them because ‘it was twenty-eight or twenty-nine degrees below zero’. It was barely warmer in April, when Catherine returned from the Easter service ‘as blue as a prune’.⁷³ Faced with such icy conditions, courtiers were inclined to stay away, much to the irritation of the empress who accepted only illness as an excuse for their absence (those who failed to attend the blessing of the waters at Epiphany in 1752 were threatened with a ban from Court receptions).⁷⁴ Less of an ordeal were the summer sanctification services, which appealed to Catherine’s sense of theatre. In her first summer in St Petersburg, she and her mother followed the procession of the cross to a Jordan on the Moika canal. When the ritual was performed at Peterhof–where the upper pond was christened ‘the Jordan’ to symbolise the flow of ‘holy water’ through the palace’s system of ponds and fountains–Elizabeth occupied a gallery lined with velvet to the left of the Jordan, while the attendant notables took their places in a second stand lined with scarlet cloth.⁷⁵

On fast days the Court dined on fish and vegetables, though the variety of dishes served scarcely amounted to the sacrifice which many common people made and which threatened to undermine the performance of Russian troops in the field. In and around Moscow alone, there were at least sixty-five imperial orchards and kitchen gardens in the first half of the eighteenth century, supplying the Court with their choicest produce and sending the rest to market. Tons of fruit and berries from the orchards at Kolomenskoye, Izmailovo and Vorobëvo were stewed and sweetened at the end of every summer under the direction of the Court’s deputy confectioner. The largest operation was at Kolomenskoye, where cabbages (Russian, red and Savoy), beans (Russian and Turkish), peas and cucumbers were also grown in prodigious quantities. In 1737 alone, Kolomenskoye supplied 2500 buckets of chopped cabbage, 500 buckets of shredded cabbage and 2000 buckets of cucumber for the imperial table. Mint, used in cooking since the seventeenth century and also for flavouring vodka, became a particular speciality of the Dmitrovo kitchen gardens, which each year supplied between 400 and 500 poods of mint to the Court by the end of Elizabeth’s reign (a pood weighed approximately 36 lb or 16.38 kg).

Gardeners from Kolomenskoye were sent out to advise the winegrowers at Chuguyev; they also travelled to Astrakhan, from where fruit was shipped to Tsaritsyn before beginning the long overland journey to St Petersburg. (In an effort to prevent it from rotting, Elizabeth personally decreed that the posting stations should be no more than thirty versts–around thirty-two kilometres–apart.) Still more Muscovite specialists helped to establish the imperial kitchen gardens in St Petersburg, where several acres of both the Summer Garden and the Italian Garden were given over to orchard and allotments. There were similar establishments at all the suburban palaces, where foreign specialists such as Michelangelo Mass, Justus Riger and Johann Brandt, assisted by Russian apprentices, coaxed radish, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, onions and various sorts of grass and flowers to grow in the orangeries all year round, so that the Court could enjoy them even out of season.⁷⁶

And then there were the fish. ‘I have dined with Russians in Lent,’ reported an English governess in St Petersburg in the mid-1730s, ‘and seen them eat heartily of a sole of salmon raw.’⁷⁷ The Court was offered even richer pickings. In the normal run of things, the second upper kitchen served up for Catherine and Peter almost exactly the same daily fare as the first upper kitchen prepared for the empress’s table: 3 poods of ham, 1 pood and 20 pounds of mutton, 1 fresh tongue, 1 and a half poods of veal, 4 and a half poods of lamb, 3 pounds of lard, 2 geese, 4 turkeys, 4 duck, 38 Russian hens, 3 suckling pigs, 5 chickens and a selection of grouse and partridge in season. On fast days, these quantities were halved to cater for foreign guests and heterodox courtiers while Orthodox members of the household dined on 6 sterlets (a particular delicacy, generally boiled but sometimes roasted), 14 pike (usually fried), 2 bream, 2 ide-carp, 10 burbots, 16 perch, 10 roach, 3 freshwater salmon, 6 grayling, 2 pike-perch, 1 salmon, 50 ruff fish, 100 crayfish and a variety of salted fish and caviars.⁷⁸

On such a diet, it is no wonder that courtiers were plagued by constipation. But then, as Catherine soon discovered, personal comforts were everywhere subordinated to the relentless requirements of representational display. She grew up surrounded by scaffolding and workmen, ever-present symbols of recurrent alterations to the imperial palaces, usually completed at breakneck speed. If Rastrelli submitted a budget for 200 labourers for a project lasting six months, he was likely to be told to recruit 1200 and complete the job in four weeks, though such a timescale never allowed for the empress’s frequent changes of mind over the details, often announced on a whim over lunch.⁷⁹ One of the Court architect’s first commissions in St Petersburg, the summer house he built for Empress Anna, was simply chopped in two in 1748 and rebuilt on either side of the palace at Yekaterinhof, where the empress stipulated that the trees should not be destroyed.⁸⁰ Elsewhere, his pattern was to begin with cosmetic changes before launching into wholesale reconstruction, as at Peterhof.⁸¹ ‘This was the work of Penelope,’ Catherine remarked of a similar operation at Tsarskoye Selo: ‘they pull down tomorrow what has been built today. This house was destroyed and rebuilt six times before it reached its present state.’⁸² The result was a restless progress from palace to palace, in which she and Peter scarcely ever returned to the apartments they had previously occupied.

A thirst for splendour was by no means the only reason why they lived in perpetual discomfort. ‘The Dutch may brag that Amsterdam is built out of the water,’ observed a British visitor in 1741, ‘but I insist that Petersburg is built in spite of all the four elements…the Earth is all a bog, the air is commonly foggy, the Water sometimes fills half the Houses, and the fire burns down half the Town at a time.’⁸³ Catherine discovered for herself the perils of building on frost-bitten marshland when Aleksey Razumovsky’s three-storey country house at Gostilitsy gave way underneath her in May 1748. Having laid a limestone foundation the previous autumn, the architect had departed for Ukraine leaving strict instructions that the beams he had used to support the vestibule were not to be touched. Thinking them unsightly, the steward of the estate nevertheless had them removed, rendering the whole structure unstable as the foundations began to shift in the spring thaw. Comparing the noise of the collapsing building to a ship of the line shuddering down the launch pad, Catherine was careful to stress in her memoirs that her husband had fled to save his own skin while she selflessly paused to rescue a slumbering member of their household. Whatever the truth of that claim, there was no doubt about the scale of the tragedy. While Catherine’s maid of honour, Princess Anna Gagarina, was dragged bleeding from the wreckage, three labourers were killed on the ground floor and a further sixteen, employed on the neighbouring sleigh-run, were crushed to death in the basement. The distraught Razumovsky threatened to shoot himself while Catherine, who had only just recovered from measles, was bled to relieve her shock.⁸⁴

Even architects who built to last were frustrated by the Russian climate. ‘Because spring and summer together last only three months,’ Rastrelli complained, ‘it is very hard to achieve perfection in work on the facades, since barely have they been completed than the cold and damp take hold of them and everything cracks up.’⁸⁵ Just as much damage was caused by stoves designed to ward off the elements from the inside. Works of art in themselves, these ceramic monsters played havoc with the interior decoration. Catherine complained loudest about water seeping down the panelling of Moscow’s wooden palaces.⁸⁶ But condensation was everywhere a menace. No sooner had the celebrated Amber Room, a gift to Peter the Great from Frederick William I of Prussia in 1717, finally been installed in the Winter Palace between 1743 and 1745, than the stone started to come unstuck. As cracks appeared across the entire surface of one of the panels, the room was already under restoration by 1746.⁸⁷

In 1750, Peter and Catherine enjoyed a brief return to Peter the Great’s summer house while their new rooms in the Summer Palace were being finished. The ground floor at Monplaisir, where they spent part of that summer, was also ‘fairly pleasant’ because there were windows on both sides. But these were exceptions that proved the rule. It rained so hard that year that the landings at Yekaterinhof were ‘covered in pools of water’, and the new Summer Palace rooms which had initially promised much, being further from Elizabeth’s part of the palace than before, turned out to overlook the Fontanka–dismissed by Catherine as ‘nothing but a muddy swamp’ before its banks were clad with granite in her own reign–and ‘an ugly, narrow little courtyard on the other side’.⁸⁸ The apartments they replaced had been even less satisfactory:

This was an enfilade of double rooms which had only two exits: one via the staircase, through which everyone who came to see us had to pass; and the other adjoining the empress’s staterooms, so that our servants were obliged to pass through one or other of these exits with the necessary, and one day it happened that when one of the foreign ministers (I don’t remember which) arrived for an audience, the first thing he encountered was a commode being taken away to be emptied.⁸⁹

The only escape from such privations lay at their country estate at Oranienbaum, attractively situated on rising ground overlooking Kronstadt and the Gulf of Finland, four miles west of Peterhof. Here Catherine and Peter had ‘more freedom’ than in town, though it was to be some time before they could count themselves as masters of their own household.⁹⁰ Built in the 1720s for Peter the Great’s corrupt favourite, Alexander Menshikov, the palace bore several marks of his insatiable vanity: subtly in the form of a personalised iconostasis, and more brazenly in the form of a monstrous princely crown, carved in stone on top of the main building. After Menshikov’s disgrace in 1727, the estate fell rapidly into disrepair. Although Sir Francis Dashwood reckoned Oranienbaum ‘with the additions of art very grand’, the future founder of the Hellfire Club noted that it was already ‘going the way of their other buildings’ when he visited it in 1733.⁹¹ Three further years of neglect were to follow before the palace was requisitioned for use as a naval hospital, whose patients were transferred to Kronstadt when Elizabeth granted the estate to Peter in November 1743. By then, serious work was required to make the place inhabitable and it is not surprising that Catherine should have remembered it as being ‘in a fairly dilapidated state’ when they first began to spend time there in 1746.⁹²

At that point, traipsing in the wake of the restless Elizabeth, she and her husband were rarely able to spend more than a week at a time ‘in the country’. Perhaps it was just as well. Until 1750, their estate was little more than a building site as thousands of the grand duke’s serfs laboured to transform it into a cross between a summer palace and a military encampment. The first project to be completed in 1746 was a small but heavily armed fortress which may have been partly designed by Peter himself. Built near the pond to the south of the palace, the fortress was christened ‘Yekaterinburg’ in Catherine’s honour. Yet her husband’s obsession with his soldiers drove her to distraction. Everyone, from the leading courtiers down to the household servants, was forced to march about with muskets on their shoulders, as Peter was finally able to indulge his passion for military drill. While he drove his troops up and down the parade ground, Catherine was left to a ‘detestable’ life playing shuttlecock with her maids of honour. Reading and hunting were her only consolations.⁹³

Prospects temporarily improved in the following spring, when work began on the conversion of Menshikov’s stables into an opera house. But this was soon abandoned, apparently because the master stonemason in charge of the works was anxious not to destroy the effect of the façade. An alternative site was approved in August, but progress was delayed by the disaster at Gostilitsy. This prompted a safety inspection of all the imperial palaces in the summer of 1748, forcing Catherine and Peter to move into one of the wings attached to the main building and to dine in a tent in the courtyard. The inspectors’ efforts were ultimately in vain, since fire destroyed the new buildings at Oranienbaum in September 1748, along with Menshikov’s bell tower. ⁹⁴ Construction restarted only after the Court had left for Moscow in December and it was not until 25 July 1750 that Peter could celebrate the completion of the first stage by throwing a lavish ball for the empress and 450 guests, including the foreign ambassadors. ‘There was also a very fine illumination,’ the British Resident reported, ‘and Her Imperial Majesty took this occasion to make the great duke a present of sixty thousand roubles to finish the additional buildings and improvements.’⁹⁵

Having enjoyed hunting with Aleksey Razumovsky on the Court’s visit to Reval in 1746, Peter acquired a pack of hounds at Oranienbaum the following summer. Catherine, who mocked his sporting prowess in every version of her memoirs, complained that he ‘tortured’ his dogs and kept them chained up in a room adjoining their palace apartments over the winter of 1747. This, however, was all part of a strategy designed to depict her husband as a brutal ingrate, all the more suspicious for consorting with German huntsmen.⁹⁶ While Elizabeth was on her pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery in 1749, Catherine herself rode out into the fields almost every day. So sunburned was she on arrival at Bratovshchina at the end of June that the empress sent her a rinse made of lemon, egg white and French eau de vie to restore her complexion: ‘When the skin is overheated, I know of no better remedy.’⁹⁷

By her own account, however, she took little pleasure from the chase: it was riding that she found exhilarating–‘and the more violent the exercise, the more I enjoyed it’. At Oranienbaum the following summer, she hunted ‘every day that God granted, sometimes spending thirteen hours a day on horseback’.⁹⁸ Generations of biographers have made much of this passion for riding, seeing it as a means of relief for everything from sexual frustration to premenstrual tension. Perhaps it was. But it is just as plausibly explained as a healthy escape from dank, smoke-filled palaces. Catherine certainly thought so. She told the doctor who inoculated her against smallpox in 1768 that although she had taken asses’ milk and spa water for seven years to relieve her weakened lungs in the wake of her illness in 1744, she attributed her recovery largely to riding.⁹⁹In her memoirs, Catherine presented her prowess on horseback somewhat differently, as a symbol of courage and virility. By refusing to ride side-saddle, even when the empress complained that riding astride was unseemly and might prevent her from conceiving a child, she could ‘keep up with the most determined huntsmen’. Indeed, she liked nothing better than to dress ‘from head to toe’ in male attire for a day’s duck shooting in the reeds of the Oranienbaum canal with an old hunter who sometimes took her further out to risk the open sea.¹⁰⁰

Back in St Petersburg for the winter of 1750–51, Elizabeth revived her cross-dressing balls, events for between 150 and 200 guests at which ‘most of the women resembled stunted little boys’. As Catherine later complained, ‘the eldest had fat, short legs that hardly flattered them’. Only the empress was displayed to advantage: ‘She had more beautiful legs than I have ever seen on any man and admirably proportioned feet.’¹⁰¹ Less bizarre, though scarcely less onerous, were the public masquerades held every autumn and at New Year. Guests arrived between half past six and eight, briefly dropped their masks at the door to establish their noble status, surrendered their weapons (if they had been naïve enough to suppose that daggers were a legitimate part of Turkish costume) and entered a fantasy world that lasted long into the night. No alcohol was served, but liveried pages were on hand to offer tea, coffee, lemonade, orshad (a milky drink made with almonds), a variety of luscious fruits and piles of the ubiquitous sweets. Music began at half past seven and continued until the early hours. Dinner was usually served between midnight and two in the morning, when Catherine and her husband sat down with dignitaries of the top two ranks before dancing the night away. It was a test of endurance to survive these entertainments in the first six weeks of the New Year, when up to seven of them were held as little as three or four days apart with theatrical performances sandwiched in between. Since sickness was rife at that time of year, it is perhaps not surprising that only 665 nobles appeared at the first masked ball of 1751, though more than 1400 tickets had been issued and the Academy of Sciences was ordered to publish an attendance of ‘as many as 1500 guests’ in the newspapers.¹⁰² ‘One pretended to be entertained by them,’ Catherine later wrote of these balls, ‘but in fact one was bored to death.’

To judge from her memoirs, tedium was the dominant feature of Catherine’s life by the beginning of the new decade. Bored with the stultifying round of social occasions at Court and even more bored with her husband, who had already embarked on a series of more or less open liaisons with other women, she found her own eyes beginning to wander. There was no shortage of potential suitors now that the ugly duckling from Stettin had begun to mature into an elegant Russian swan. Zakhar Chernyshëv, who returned to Court in the autumn of 1751, told her how much prettier she looked. ‘This was the first time in my life that someone had said such a thing to me. I did not find it displeasing.’ They secretly exchanged billets-doux, using Anna Gagarina as a reluctant postman. Though Zakhar hoped that the relationship might blossom, Catherine eventually demurred. When he left to rejoin his regiment in the spring, she found herself courted by a new and more persistent admirer.

Two years older than the grand duchess, who celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday around the time of their first meeting, Sergey Saltykov was handsome, intelligent and adept in the courtly arts. He was also married. With characteristic insouciance, he played on Catherine’s sympathies by telling her ‘that he was paying dearly for a moment of blindness’. Though at first she resisted his advances, she enjoyed his company. Thanks to his friendship with the Choglokovs, he became her almost constant companion throughout the spring and summer of 1752. After a secret tryst during a hunt on Choglokov’s island at the mouth of the Neva, she was disconcerted to find that she had begun to lose control of her emotions. Having initially supposed that she could ‘govern and elevate both his thoughts and mine’, she discovered that it was ‘difficult, if not impossible’.¹⁰³

It was not the last time that Catherine would embark on a relationship with such high-minded aspirations–and it was not the last time that the object of her affections would let her down. If we are to believe the jaundiced account in her memoirs, coloured by Sergey’s subsequent infidelity, his ardour had already begun to cool by the winter of 1752. As he ‘became distracted, and sometimes smug, arrogant, and dissolute’, Catherine found it hard to accept that he was merely trying to distract attention from their affair. Even so, she was pregnant by the time the Court departed for Moscow in December. Although she suffered a miscarriage on the journey, the relationship revived when Sergey arrived in the old capital. It was then, according to a passage which censors excised from the first Russian edition of Catherine’s memoirs in 1907, that Maria Choglokova seized her chance to secure the succession by encouraging the grand duchess to sleep with him. By May 1753, there were renewed signs of pregnancy, but this too was brought to an end by an early miscarriage. ‘I was in great danger for thirteen days because it was suspected that part of the afterbirth had remained inside me. No one told me this. Eventually, on the thirteenth day, it came out of its own accord, without pains or effort. I was made to rest for six weeks in my room because of this complication, during an intolerable heatwave.’¹⁰⁴

It was to be the beginning of a long year of discomfort. That month, Elizabeth decreed that no further wooden structures were to be allowed near the Kremlin and China Town.¹⁰⁵ Three stokers and another workman had been whipped in January for allowing burning coals to fall from a stove in the palace, setting light to the floor and a panel in the wall of the empress’s apartments. Yet although primitive fire equipment was carted from palace to palace in an attempt to limit any conflagration, both capitals became tinderboxes in a hot, dry summer, when it was one of Elizabeth’s more melancholy diversions to drive out to witness the destruction of one of her courtier’s homes. On 1 November 1753, she experienced the same fate herself.

A mere two days after she had moved into her new Golovin Palace, the whole edifice was reduced to ashes by a fire that began at midday in the heating pipes under the floor of the great hall. ‘It was twenty paces from our wing,’ Catherine recalled. ‘I went into my rooms and found them already full of soldiers and servants, who were removing the furniture and carrying what they could.’ Since there was nothing to be done, she retreated to a safe distance in the carriage of the Court Kapellmeister, reserving her coolest irony for the passage in her memoirs in which she describes the ‘astonishing number of rats and mice’ that allegedly ‘descended the stairs in single file, without even really hurrying’. For once, Rastrelli’s advanced techniques counted against him because it proved impossible, even by firing cannon balls into the burning ruins, to dislodge the iron girders that underpinned the whole structure, and so to isolate the fire in the main staterooms. Flames soon engulfed the entire 400-metre length of the building. By the time they were finally extinguished at six o’clock, only the chapel and the summer apartments remained standing, though a salvage operation managed to rescue the majority of the valuables. The most sensible loss for the empress was her wardrobe, including a dress she had had made from Parisian fabric sent to Catherine as a gift from her mother.¹⁰⁶

Even as she looked on aghast, Elizabeth boasted to the Dutch ambassador that she would commission a new palace, ‘only not in the Italian style, but more in the Russian’.¹⁰⁷ She was as good as her word. Having defiantly returned to the neighbouring theatre to see a French comedy the day after the fire, she ordered that a new palace must be ready in time for her birthday in six weeks’ time. Clearance work began on 5 November and building started three days later under the direction of Russian architects working to a new design by Rastrelli. To speed reconstruction, materials were brought from both the Petrovsky palace and the old wooden palace in the Kremlin, dismantled in the spring (the Moscow nobility might have been unnerved to learn of the further order to survey the surrounding area for ‘buildings made of good timber belonging to private individuals’). By 10 November, 1018 men were already at work, erecting a new superstructure onto the existing foundations since fresh ones would have threatened a repeat of the disaster at Gostilitsy by sweating through the winter. As all the Court’s neighbouring construction projects came to a halt to release the necessary labour force, the total soon reached 6000, including 3000 carpenters and 120 specialist woodcarvers. Fed and housed on site, they worked around the clock to complete the project in time for an architects’ inspection on 13 December.¹⁰⁸ Two days later, Elizabeth took possession of her new apartments and on 18 December she duly celebrated her birthday in a richly gilded hall, even larger than its predecessor, lit by twenty-two tall windows. ‘There was no court at noon, as usual,’ the British resident reported, ‘because of the excessive cold, but in the evening there was a ball, illuminations and a magnificent supper at a table which held near three hundred people.’¹⁰⁹ The fact that only 130 guests sat down at a table laid for 160 scarcely diminishes the scale of the achievement. Ambitious state construction projects were by no means a creation of the Stalinist era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Count Alexander Vorontsov highlighted the resurrection of the Golovin Palace in his autobiography as an example of ‘what can be done in Russia’.¹¹⁰

Catherine was less impressed. Though a degree of inconvenience was to be expected in the aftermath of such a disaster, the misery she endured at a nearby courtier’s house was insufferable. ‘It is hardly possible to be worse off than we were there,’ she recalled. ‘The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, and you could get two or three fingers into the cracks in the floor.’ Conditions were little better when she and Peter moved to a former episcopal palace, where they feared being burned alive. Prospects improved only when they were allowed to go to Liuberets, an estate outside Moscow granted to her husband in 1751, where they had initially been obliged to sleep in tents: ‘Here we thought we were in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished.’¹¹¹

The first indications of a third pregnancy showed in February 1754. In view of the earlier miscarriages, anxieties about Catherine’s health were understandable. The empress herself paid her a visit in Easter week, perhaps to check that Saltykov was not lurking in her apartments. She left after half an hour, having excused the grand duchess from appearing in public on her birthday and on coronation day.¹¹² That was small relief by comparison with the distress caused by the discovery that Nikolay Choglokov, who collapsed during the Easter service, was terminally ill. It had taken Catherine seven years to bring the Choglokovs round by flattering them and pandering to their weakness for gambling. Now Nikolay had selfishly chosen to die ‘just at the point when we had managed, after several years of trouble and effort, to make him less wicked and nasty, and he had become more tractable’. As for his wife, she too ‘had changed from a hard-hearted and malevolent Argus into a firm and devoted friend’. Now they were gone, and at the moment of her greatest uncertainty Catherine had to face the future under the supervision of a new governor of the Young Court: Alexander Shuvalov, the head of the Secret Chancellery. Finding it astonishing that ‘a man with such a hideous grimace’ should have been placed in the company of a pregnant young woman, she cried all the way back to St Petersburg.¹¹³