CHAPTER SIX

‘OUR LADY OF ST PETERSBURG’ 1763–1766

A few days before Catherine’s return to St Petersburg in the summer of 1763, the foreign ambassadors gathered for supper at the house of the Earl of Buckinghamshire. ‘We were all questioning one another, each man doubtful of his own information, yet everyone agreeing that we ought to be prepared for any event.’ Convinced from the start of the new regime’s inherent instability, they were sure they could scent its imminent collapse. The French attaché and the Austrian ambassador interpreted the desecration of the empress’s portrait on one of moscow’s triumphal arches as a symptom of the wider unrest generated by rumours that she was about to marry Grigory orlov.¹ Catherine herself had unwittingly caused the scare by seeking official approval for a second marriage in case her sickly son died. one supporter of her coup, the Guards Captain Fëdor Khitrovo, was so appalled by the idea that he planned to kill Grigory and his brothers. Arrested at the end of may, Khitrovo caused alarm by claiming that he had been told by Aleksey orlov that Catherine had accepted the throne only under pressure from his brothers, having initially promised Panin that she would rule as regent for Grand Duke Paul.² Though Khitrovo was quietly bundled away to his estates, in a vain attempt to avoid publicity, the security cordon erected in a six-mile radius around Tsarskoye Selo struck the diplomats as a sign of Catherine’s lasting nervousness. The Prussian ambassador Count Solms in turn thought her too frantic in her rush to reform. now that she had quarrelled with Princess Dashkova–‘the sort of woman to attempt a new revolution every week, purely for the pleasure of it’–Solms feared that her reign would last no longer than her husband’s. Buckinghamshire was inclined to agree: ‘i cannot help feeling for Her Imperial Majesty. Her present distress must be very great, and at the best, Her future prospect a most melancholy one.’³

If Catherine shared any of these concerns–and it is difficult to imagine that they wholly escaped her–then she was careful to give no sign of it. Optimistic by nature, she spent her final week in Moscow cementing her links with favoured courtiers by touring their country estates. On 7 June, after lunch at Znamenskoye with the Chief Cup-Bearer, Alexander Naryshkin, she took a stroll through the garden to see the museum where her host preserved a treasured yacht built before the foundation of the Russian fleet in the early 1690s. From there, it was but a short journey to inspect the troops on exercise in the neighbouring fields. Having dined at Pokrovskoye with the Master of the Horse, Lev Naryshkin, she returned to her palace along a route illuminated by extravagant fireworks. Two days later, she drove out to Tsar Boris’s ponds, eight miles from the city centre, where she kissed the icons in the local church before watching the fishing. Then it was Peter Sheremetev’s turn to entertain her at Kuskovo, one of Russia’s most opulent estates, where a magnificent orangery was currently under construction. They sailed on the lake before playing cards; it was two in the morning before she got back to Moscow. There was still time for a final afternoon’s hawking before the Court departed for Tsarskoye Selo on Saturday 14 June. After a journey punctuated by the customary visits to churches and monasteries, it was one of Catherine’s first priorities to check on the progress of her new dacha at Oranienbaum, where she travelled ‘with the smallest possible entourage’ on 25 June.⁴

Any residual anxieties were masked by her ceremonial re-entry into the capital on Saturday 28 June, the first anniversary of Catherine’s accession. There could hardly have been a greater public display of self-confidence.⁵ Bathed in the cool glow of the midsummer ‘white nights’, more than 11,000 soldiers lined the streets to salute the procession. As her open carriage rolled over the Obukhov bridge at 7 p.m., three cannon fired to signal the start of a carillon across the city. Seventy-one guns roared from the Admiralty and seventy more from the Peter and Paul fortress as the empress and her Court were led past the cheering crowds by a detachment of mounted cavalry. In the Haymarket, at the junction of Pea Street and Garden Street, Savva Yakovlev, an ennobled merchant of fabulous wealth, had hoisted a crown onto the main cupola of his new Church of the Dormition to mark the completion of the exterior in the year of her coronation.⁶ When the procession reached the Kazan Church, Catherine descended from her carriage to meet Archbishop Gavriil and paused briefly for prayers while seminarians from the Alexander Nevsky monastery chanted salutations from platforms raised on either side of the great door. Her emergence from the church triggered a second, longer salute as she continued along the Great Perspective Road to meet the city’s merchants, who turned out in force at Gostiny dvor, a vast covered market. At the Anichkov Palace, it was the turn of Prince Nikolay Repnin and the Cadet Corps to greet her. Only when she reached the Summer Palace did a final 101-gun salute issue from the fortresses. Three times the cry went up: ‘Vivat, Yekaterina: Great Empress!’ Then she passed inside to permit the foreign diplomats assembled in the throne room to kiss her hand. ⁷

After dining alone, Catherine emerged from her apartments just before midnight to stroll through the Summer Gardens to the riverbank where Colonel Melissino was ready to set off one of Jacob Stählin’s most extravagant firework displays. The first rockets went up as soon as she had taken her place in a baroque wooden gallery, built in short order by carpenters from the Admiralty College according to designs sent up from Moscow.⁸ ‘Vigilance and Virtue’ was the theme of the first scene, set in the temple of Pallas, where the goddess fired thunderbolts from her perch in the clouds, brandishing in her left hand a sceptre with the Russian coat of arms and in her right the head of Medusa to ward off her enemies. ‘Glory’ was the slogan emblazoned on a temple flanked by allegorical figures of Wisdom and Courage; ‘Astonishment’ the name of an obelisk celebrating Catherine’s prowess as a female sovereign. No sooner had the smoke from this first tableau cleared than the scene changed to reveal a forest of luxuriant palm trees on ‘the island of scholarship and amusement’. This time the subject was ‘Wisdom and Clemency’ and the empress was represented as Minerva, the helmeted goddess of wisdom.⁹ Even the hostile French attaché had to concede that the whole evening had been ‘a very brilliant and well organised spectacle’.¹⁰ And no one could miss its central message: here was a ruler whose maternal gentleness was not to be mistaken for weakness. On the contrary, she had every intention of deploying knowledge and reason in the service of her formidable empire.

Proud and imperturbable in public, Catherine was well aware of the scale of the challenge she faced in restoring order and prosperity to her empire in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War. In the wake of that gruelling conflict, every state in Europe faced a period of tough internal consolidation. Russia was no exception. Over the next few years, Catherine would write several memoranda bemoaning the legacy she had inherited: ‘the fleet was derelict, the army in disarray, the fortresses collapsing’; the treasury was in arrears, though no one could tell her by how much; the prisons were overflowing (she secretly arranged for minor debtors to be released); corrupt officials were everywhere despised; and parts of the countryside were in open revolt.¹¹ No state could have survived for long the massive peasant unrest that characterised Catherine’s early years on the throne.¹² Fortunately for her, most Russian peasants had more to gain from violence against each other than from risky attempts to overthrow the authorities. Once the major incidents had been summarily put down, the empress turned her mind to more fundamental change. Although serfdom was far too integral to Russian political culture to allow for wholesale emancipation of the serfs, an audience with Pastor Eisen in October 1763 may have persuaded her to try out his controversial ideas for a free, property-owning peasantry on the crown estate at Bronnaya, beyond Oranienbaum. Though it ultimately proved too small for the purpose, Eisen soon discovered that the greatest obstacle to imperial initiatives was presented by officials hostile to change. ‘Not only has Hell in its entirety opened up against me,’ he told a fellow pastor in January 1764, ‘but devilish extraordinary chance events have occurred which have really put me in the firing line. If the ground underneath me were not so secure, I should long since have broken my neck.’¹³

One excuse offered to Eisen in explanation of the delays was that Catherine was too busy with other projects to attend to his own. There was some truth in that. No sooner had she seized the throne than the pace was set for a sustained burst of reforming energy which on average saw almost twice as many edicts issued each month between 1762 and 1767 as in the reign as a whole.¹⁴ Since her main aim was to change her subjects’ hearts and minds, popular education–a subject all the rage in Europe in the wake of Rousseau’s Emile (1762)–was at the forefront of her priorities. Over the next few years, she commissioned a wide range of projects, many of which drew on the interest in the subject that had flourished in Russia since the end of the previous decade. Daniel Dumaresq, a former chaplain to the British Factory in St Petersburg, returned in 1764 bearing information about a variety of English and Irish institutions, ranging from Moravian boarding schools to the dormitories at Eton. He was personally acquainted with Catherine and spent time with Grand Duke Paul while he devised a ‘General Plan of Gymnasia’, completed two years later.¹⁵ By that time, however, Catherine had placed her trust in a rival scheme devised by her mother’s old paramour, Ivan Betskoy. Authorised to admit destitute and illegitimate children without question, his Moscow Foundling Home, opened on her thirty-fifth birthday in 1764, was intended to foster the creation of a wholly ‘new kind of people’, raised in isolation from the damaging influence of a backward Russian environment according to an ambitious curriculum set out in Betskoy’s General Plan for the Education of Young People of Both Sexes. This remarkable document envisaged nothing less than a new generation of Russians imbued with a high moral sense of duty to the fatherland and to their fellow men.¹⁶ Betskoy believed that the empire’s greatest need was for the sorts of artisan and craftsman who could supply the ‘third estate’ that Russia notoriously lacked. He drove the point home to Catherine by giving Paul a carpenter’s bench for the Winter Palace, where a French master carpenter was employed to teach him.¹⁷

Females were to be catered for by the Society for the Education of Young Noblewomen (the Smolny Institute founded in May 1764), another experiment in social engineering designed to produce nothing less than ‘a new type of mother in the form of cultured, industrious, proper young women who combined social graces with domesticity, and who would raise the general level of society through their upbringing of children’.¹⁸ Like the foundling home, the Smolny was a charitable organisation rather than a government institution, in which both Catherine and Betskoy invested personal fortunes (his, of course, being ultimately derived from hers). The empress remained devoted to the Institute for the rest of her life, taking several favourite pupils under her wing.¹⁹

Central to the success of Catherine’s various projects were three long-serving state secretaries: Adam Olsufyev, Grigory Teplov and Ivan Yelagin. Since they and their successors probably spent more time in the empress’s company than anyone else, it was vital that each of them should know how to respond to her playful imperiousness. All three had demonstrated their loyalty to her during her difficult years as a grand duchess; all three knew how to get things done; and all three were cultivated men–precisely the sorts of educated and industrious individual that Catherine wanted to flourish in her Enlightened empire. They not only dealt with all her confidential business, but were also responsible for responding to the hundreds of petitions that flooded in despite her attempts to deter them (within a week of her coup, she had told the assembled Senate that no petitions whatsoever were to be presented to her in person).²⁰ In return, she offered them security and material rewards, and was characteristically solicitous for their personal wellbeing.

At the age of thirty-seven, Olsufyev had been chosen in 1758 to head Elizabeth’s Closet (Kabinet), the personal office responsible for the distribution of imperial funds which acted as the tsars’ principal point of contact with other government bodies. Once Catherine reappointed him on 8 July 1762, he was to remain at her side until his death in 1784. As a junior member of Chancellor Bestuzhev’s staff, he had earned her lasting trust by helping her to conduct a secret correspondence with her mother in the 1750s. Now, fluent in several languages and generally acknowledged as one of the most erudite and capable men in Russia, he acted as a link between the palace, the College of Foreign Affairs and the Senate.²¹

Widely supposed to be the bastard child of Peter the Great’s influential prelate, Feofan (Prokopovich), Teplov was actually the son of a smelter at the Novgorod episcopal palace, which was how he acquired his name, meaning ‘warmth’. Aged forty-six when Catherine seized the throne, he had come to prominence by supervising the education of Kirill Razumovsky, touring Europe with him for two years and managing his business when he became president of the Academy of Sciences in 1746 and Ukrainian chieftain (hetman) four years later. A competent violinist like Olsufyev, Teplov had translated into Russian the libretti of several operas by Francesco Araja in the 1740s and 1750s. Teplov was also a talented amateur actor who published learned articles on poetics and was familiar with radical Western writings on materialism and atheism. Having been both cuckolded and imprisoned by Peter III, he had every reason to support Catherine’s coup. It was Teplov who drafted the most important edicts in the first crucial days of her reign, when it was one of Olsufyev’s first duties to pay him a reward of 20,000 roubles. After that, he became the moving force behind numerous major projects, including the reorganisation of the Medical Chancery (one of several reforms motivated by Catherine’s determination to preserve and increase the population). He was intimately involved with Dumaresq’s abortive plans for urban primary schools, having drawn up proposals for a university at the Ukrainian town of Baturin in 1760. Probably his most important role lay in the Commission on Church Lands, created in November 1762, which was responsible two years later for a wholesale secularisation of monastic property. Since this yielded the state an annual income of almost 1.37 million roubles, of which less than 463,000 was returned to the Church each year between 1764 and 1768, it is not surprising that he remained an influential presence in Catherine’s government until his death in 1779.²²

Ivan Yelagin, the last of the three secretaries to be appointed in July 1762, was another lifelong servant who was still at her side in 1793. Four years older than the empress, he had first encountered her in 1748 as an impoverished acolyte of Elizabeth’s favourite, Aleksey Razumovsky. Ten years later, he suffered on Catherine’s behalf when he was arrested with Bestuzhev as a friend and correspondent of Stanislaw Poniatowski. Notable for his connections to English Masonic lodges, Yelagin was a leading light in Russian Freemasonry, a movement that Catherine held increasingly in contempt. On being shown one of his Masonic manuscripts after his death in 1794, she took it as evidence that her secretary had gone mad. But she always admired his loyalty. ‘This was a man of probity whom one could trust,’ the empress declared that same year. ‘Once one had gained his affection, it was not easily lost; he always demonstrated zeal and a marked liking for me.’²³

In September 1763, Catherine decided that Teplov should report on Mondays and Wednesdays, Olsufyev on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Yelagin on Fridays and Saturdays.²⁴ By the time they arrived at her study at eight in the morning, she had already been up for two hours, writing and reading alone, having lit her own fire. Sketching her routine in a letter to Madame Geoffrin, she explained how a succession of secretaries and advisers trooped in one by one, keeping her busy until eleven, when she dressed for her first public appearance of the day (in the relative privacy of her own apartments Catherine wore a loose-fitting silk gown). On Sundays and feast days she attended mass in the palace chapel, after a vigil service in her rooms. Otherwise, she liked to wander into the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where visitors lurked in the hope of catching her eye. Lunch was a relatively modest affair, sometimes eaten alone, but usually taken in the company of between ten and twenty courtiers. Since Catherine drank little and was frugal in her culinary tastes, it was by no means an experience to savour: seasoning was limited (pepper was not sold on the capital’s markets, though it may have been supplied from the imperial greenhouses), and even some of St Petersburg’s poorest people probably ate almost as nourishing food as their empress.²⁵ After lunch, she retreated to her own rooms, shuttling silken knots while Betskoy kept her company by reading aloud:

Our reading, when it is not interrupted by parcels of letters and other nuisances, lasts until half-past five, when I either go to the theatre, or I play, or I gossip to the first people to arrive before dinner, which is over before eleven when I retire to bed in order to do the same again on the following day. And all this is ruled out as regularly as musical manuscript paper.²⁶

In practice, of course, her life was more varied than this jocular summary implied. The letter studiously avoided any mention of Grigory Orlov, whom she usually entertained after lunch–an hour that gossips were to dub ‘the Time of Mystery’ for the rest of her reign.²⁷ Paul, who lived with his Young Court in a neighbouring part of the palace, was another regular visitor to her rooms, though she rarely spent as much as half an hour with him. He saw her early on Wednesday evenings or after church on Sunday mornings–both were Court reception days when the empress entertained not only her courtiers, but also foreign visitors to the city.²⁸ Hawking was still a favourite pastime, though Catherine’s days in the saddle were all but over, and when the weather permitted, she enjoyed a carriage ride through the streets with a favourite lady-in-waiting. These, however, were distractions from a gruelling week at her desk.

Noticeably missing from the empress’s working day was any collective meeting of her advisers. Although she had initially been tempted to accept Panin’s proposal for an imperial council of between six and eight aristocrats, she soon rejected the idea as a potential limitation on her own absolute power. While Panin had made his suggestion in December 1762 as a way of preventing a recurrence of the arbitrary favouritism of Elizabeth’s time, Catherine almost certainly suspected a bid to enhance his own influence at the expense of the Orlovs. Although the idea was quietly shelved, the membership of the Imperial Assembly, secretly formed in Moscow on 11 February 1763 to determine how to respond to Peter III’s manifesto on the nobility, was much the same as Panin had projected for his council. Meeting some twenty-one times before the end of October with the ubiquitous Teplov as its secretary, this informal but highly influential body became, in effect, the Russian government. In a balanced representation of elite political interests, Panin and Grigory Orlov were joined by Bestuzhev, Kirill Razumovsky, Mikhail Vorontsov, Yakov Shakhovskoy and Zakhar Chernyshëv, whom Catherine had put in charge of the College of War. When the Court returned to St Petersburg, the Assembly extended its remit to consider a root-and-branch reform of the Senate, much as Panin had originally intended.²⁹ Catherine was delighted. At the time of her accession, she later complained, ‘the Senate regarded it as excessive to hear state business with a map on the table in front of them’, so that ‘sometimes they did not know what they were judging. Shameful to say, there was not a single printed map in the Senate, and indeed, being present there, I sent for the first one to be bought from the Academy [of Sciences].’ Always a scourge of laziness and inefficiency, she sent the Senators a long list of personal orders that they had failed to fulfil, insisting that they attend their office for four hours every morning and for three afternoons a week until the backlog had been cleared.³⁰

In January 1764, Glebov was replaced as the Procurator-General of the Senate by Alexander Vyazemsky, who was to dominate the Russian bureaucracy until his death in 1792. The instruction Catherine sent to him on his appointment is rightly considered as ‘one of the most important documents illustrating her conception of statecraft’. Ordering him to remain above and beyond factional conflict and to trust in her alone, she explained what he could expect in return:

You will find that I have no other view than the greatest welfare and glory of the fatherland, and I wish for nothing but the happiness of my subjects, of whatever order they may be. All my thoughts are directed towards the preservation of external and internal peace, satisfaction and tranquillity. I am very fond of the truth, and you may tell me the truth fearlessly and argue with me without any danger if it leads to good results in affairs. I hear you are regarded as an honest man by all; I hope to show you by experience that people with such qualities do well at Court. And I may add that I require no flattery from you, but only honest behaviour and firmness in affairs.³¹

She was as good as her word. Conscious of the fate that had traditionally befallen most advisers of a disgraced monarch in Russia, Peter III’s leading minister, Dimitry Volkov, assumed that his time had come. Yet he, too, found that he had nothing to fear. ‘I am always delighted when I see a swift attitude to business and an earnest approach to service in my subjects,’ Catherine assured him. ‘When subjects wish to see an industrious and solicitous sovereign taking care of their interests, then the sovereign is no less happy to see her subjects helping her. Don’t bother about your circumstances: just get on with the job, because your reasoning is good. Upright service will always rectify circumstances, of that you should have no doubt.’³² Having proved his efficiency as governor of Orenburg, Volkov was recalled to St Petersburg in 1764 to take charge of the College of Manufactures, where he remained until retiring age. Long periods of office were to be the norm in the new reign, even for some of the families whose loyalty Catherine initially had reason to doubt. Since the pool of available talent was limited, she was even prepared to give jobs to the aloof Vorontsovs. Count Alexander Vorontsov, brother of Peter III’s mistress, was president of the College of Commerce for twenty years from 1773, his brother Semën a long-serving ambassador in London. ‘Tolerate an unpleasant person in your sight,’ the empress later exhorted her infant grandson, the future tsar Alexander I, ‘and do not glance askance at him: a man who can get on only with people he likes, and not with those he does not, is lacking in wisdom.’³³

The nerve centre of Catherine’s government was the Winter Palace, still under reconstruction when the Court returned from Moscow, though not under the direction of its original architect. Having been close to Peter III, Rastrelli thought it prudent to take temporary leave from Russia shortly after Catherine’s coup. When he returned a year later, he found that his circumstances had changed for the worse. Among the petitions forwarded to Yelagin’s secretariat in the autumn of 1763 was one from the disgruntled architect:

Your holy Imperial Highness, I am taking the liberty to inform Your Imperial Majesty with the most humble respect that, having received permission to return to Italy for a year thanks to Your kindness, and having received at that time a gift of 5000 roubles to allow me to complete my journey in the greatest comfort, for which I express my eternal gratitude to Your Imperial Majesty, I would have been happy on my return to continue in Your Imperial Majesty’s humble service, on the same basis established by Your august predecessors. However, Your Majesty has ordered the Great Marshal, Count Sievers, to inform me that in future I must depend solely on the Director of the Construction Chancellery and not on the Court. This change has grieved me greatly, since after so many years of service I have found myself deprived of the pleasure of receiving Your precious orders, with which I was always honoured in the past, and this compels me with great sadness to beg humbly for my retirement, since it is impossible for me to agree to subject myself to any other instructions than the ones I have hitherto received. I hope that an old retainer, who has been in service for forty-eight years, and who has always fulfilled his duties across this long period of time, will have the pleasure of receiving from Your Imperial Majesty, by virtue of Her great mercy, instructions about some sort of compensation, so that I may live with my family in our native land and continually pray to the Almighty to preserve the precious lives of Your Majesty and Her most august heir.

Your holy Imperial Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant, Count de Rastrelli³⁴

Though he was duly granted an annual pension of 1000 roubles, Catherine remained deaf to his pleas to be confirmed in the rank of major general granted to him by Peter III since this would have entitled him to more money. While he continued to be treated respectfully at Court, dining with her in the spring of 1764, it was not long before Rastrelli finally left Russia for good.

It fell to Catherine’s contemporary–the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe–to fill Rastrelli’s empty shell, and he set to work as soon as she departed for her coronation in Moscow in September 1762. Vallin began by designing neoclassical interiors and furniture for a new bedroom, dressing room, boudoir and study in the west wing, overlooking the Admiralty, where the empress initially intended to live. At that stage his role was restricted largely to decorative detail, but he became more ambitious when she changed her mind at the beginning of 1763 and decided instead to convert the apartments formerly occupied by Peter III in the south-east corner of the palace. Here the architect created a suite of staterooms based on the neoclassical principles he had learned from Jean Blondel at the Parisian École des Arts. Racing to meet the empress’s deadlines, Vallin told Stählin that he had ‘thrown the internal walls out of the window’ and replaced them with wooden partitions.³⁵ By the time Catherine returned to St Petersburg, the transformation was obvious. As the Prussian ambassador reported in June 1763:

She is making considerable alterations in the palace of stone. The apartments of the former empress have been turned entirely upside down and rebuilt so differently that they look nothing like they used to do. But since the workers have not been paid for two months, this prompts lines of reasoning which are not favourable to Her Imperial Majesty.³⁶

Oblivious to such carping, Catherine forged ahead, inspecting progress over the summer, and finally moving in with great pomp and ceremony on Tuesday 14 October, some three weeks later than planned and more than a year since she had last occupied the Winter Palace.³⁷ By then, the ceremonial first floor was largely complete, save for the suite of rooms overlooking the River Neva, and Vallin had also finished most of the work on the warren of staircases and corridors that led to the floor above, where Catherine’s twenty maids of honour were to live for the remainder of her reign in the western and south-western parts of the building. ‘Guess where I’ve been today!’ proclaimed an excited Paul after Grigory Orlov had taken him to visit them. Back downstairs, in the grip of a crush on Vera Choglokova, he immersed himself in the Encyclopédie article on ‘Amour’.³⁸

Vallin’s work for Catherine differed from his other private commissions only in scale. At the heart of his creation for the empress, just as in the house he built for the Chernyshëvs at much the same time, was a salon–the centre of civility and sociability–surrounded by a suite of private and semi-public apartments, all conceived as part of a single stylistic whole, and ranged around two inner courtyards on the western, southern and eastern sides of a large square, whose northern side was taken up by the great palace chapel. Although these rooms underwent a major renovation between 1782 and 1784, their layout and use remained essentially unchanged until the end of Catherine’s life.³⁹ Having ascended the main staircase near the west door of the chapel, visitors passed through a suite of three antechambers flowing south towards what is now Palace Square, with their windows facing westwards towards the Admiralty. The central anteroom was a Portrait Room, hung with portraits of the imperial family as a reminder of Catherine’s dynastic pretensions. Here, sergeants of the guard permitted well-dressed nobles to enter the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where the Court gathered on a Sunday before processing to chapel. To ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’ was to enjoy privileged access to the empress’s own apartments, ranged in a line overlooking the square to the south. The first of these rooms was also the largest: an audience chamber some 227 metres square, decorated in green damask, where Catherine received her ambassadors. Until a permanent throne room was built in 1795, the audience chamber shared that function with another, overlooking the river, where banquets were held on state occasions. With her sixty Chevaliers Gardes fanned out two-by-two on either side of her, the empress sat beneath a huge gilded canopy, draped in red silk, on a velvet throne raised up against the eastern wall.

Immediately behind this throne lay a green and gold dining room which doubled as a billiard room in the evenings. Although Catherine was always keen to enrich the imperial porcelain collection–she paid the Saxon merchant Poggenpohl more than 13,000 roubles for a 256-piece service for Tsarskoye Selo in 1762–banquets were also served on gold and silver tableware dating back to time of Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Fëdorovich. Though Paul was bored by a visit to the storerooms at the foot of the main staircase, where Panin insisted on scrutinising every item of his priceless heritage, these historic dinner services offered a further reminder of a usurper’s claims to dynastic legitimacy.⁴⁰ Above the dining-room ceiling was a glass lantern, initially placed by Georg Veldten over the western entrance to the palace, which was large enough to have doors leading to a balcony. Here Catherine occasionally listened to the liturgy when she failed to attend the chapel, which was entered via a large gallery leading northwards from the dining room between the two inner courtyards.

Directly to the east of the dining room was the Diamond Room, so called because the regalia were kept there when not on public display. Though this was formally the state bedroom, equipped with an appropriately imposing lit de parade under a canopy in an alcove on the northern wall, it was in effect the empress’s salon, furnished with two sofas, four armchairs, two upright chairs and several marble tables, all designed by Vallin de la Mothe in keeping with his neoclassical concept for the palace interior. ‘As you know, every piece of furniture is a different colour, even in the same room,’ Panin reminded his mistress in 1767.⁴¹ Here the empress was to spend countless evenings at the card table. Beyond lay a dressing room leading to her bedroom, whose panels were decorated in green lacquer. It was there that Catherine heard reports from her advisers each morning, sitting on an upright chair at a small table. (Her secretaries occupied a nearby room, overlooking the inner courtyard and accessible via a private staircase.) Catherine’s bedroom led to a small boudoir and from there to her study, at the far south-eastern corner of the palace. This gave access to the last of her private apartments, the library, which stretched northwards towards the chapel until she had it moved upstairs in the mid-1770s, converting the lower apartment to a Mirror Room where in later life she worked every morning from seven until nine. It was in her library that Catherine had scientific experiments set up for visiting ambassadors, using apparatus such as the ‘small electrical machine’ with which her son enjoyed electrocuting his servants.⁴²

Since all these interiors were either lost in subsequent alterations or destroyed by the great fire of December 1837, the achievements of Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe have come down to us only in their plans and correspondence.⁴³ However, it seems clear that the Winter Palace impressed visitors then, as now, more by its massive proportions than by any claim to elegance or beauty. In its final incarnation, the building could boast 1050 rooms, 117 staircases, 1886 doors and 1945 windows. Its principal cornice was almost two kilometres long.⁴⁴ The full extent of such a colossal structure could only be appreciated from the opposite bank of the Neva. To Lord Cathcart, who arrived as British ambassador in 1768, the conception was comparable in both extent and magnificence to ‘Inigo Jones’s idea for Whitehall, with which it also corresponded in the happy circumstance of being situated on a very noble river’.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, as European tastes swung from Baroque exuberance towards classical simplicity, Rastrelli’s monster was bound to seem ‘very large and very heavy’. And as another traveller pointed out in the mid-1770s, comparing the palace with the work of Britain’s most lugubrious Baroque architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, the creator of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, it was still ‘not quite finished, like almost everything else in Russia’.⁴⁶

Panin, who was negotiating an alliance with the Danes in the autumn of 1764, liked to boast that the Winter Palace had cost twenty times as much as the royal palace in Copenhagen.⁴⁷ Magnificent as it seemed as a symbol of Russian power and prosperity, it was too vast and uncomfortable for the relaxed sociability in which Catherine excelled. Not that she found it easy to relax once she had ascended the throne of all the Russias. ‘Believe me,’ she complained to Madame Geoffrin in 1764, ‘there is nothing more unpleasant in the world than greatness’:

When I enter a room, you would say that I had the head of a Medusa: everyone is petrified and they all stiffen up. I often screech like an eagle against such habits. But I can tell you that this isn’t the way to stop them because the more I screech, the less people are at their ease. So I employ other expedients.⁴⁸

Courtiers could be forgiven for approaching the empress with caution since, for all her yearning for informality, she was swift to complain when they failed to observe due ceremony. Emerging unexpectedly early from her apartments one Sunday in July 1765, she was furious to find only the senior chamberlain in attendance. Count Sheremetev’s subsequent admonishment to his juniors caused ‘much whispering’ at lunch.⁴⁹ By the time the image of Medusa’s head recurred in a letter of 1781, Catherine seemed more sympathetic to her courtiers’ dilemmas: ‘With due respect to my fellow monarchs, I suppose that we must all of us, such as we are, become unbearable people in society…There are no more than ten or a dozen people who put up with me without constraint.’⁵⁰

One of the pleasures of this more intimate entourage, which remained remarkably constant throughout her life in Russia, was the opportunities it offered to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the palace. Nowhere was etiquette more relaxed than at the aristocratic country houses which had sprung up along the Peterhof road since Peter the Great first laid out regular plots ‘like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland’. As Derzhavin put it in his poem ‘Picnics’ in 1776, it was here, in a striking reversal of the bourgeois notion Stadtluft macht Frei! (City air makes you free!), that the Russian elite could abandon the social distinctions imposed on them in the capital:

We resolved among friends

To preserve the laws of equality;

To abandon the conceits,

Of wealth, power, and rank.⁵¹

Ivan Chernyshëv had one such estate by the sea where Catherine occasionally called in on the way to Peterhof and Oranienbaum; Yakov Sievers owned another. Some of their freedoms carried over to Peterhof itself, where she could go fishing and her friends liked to help cook what they had caught. In the heat of the summer, they loved swimming there, too, following the empress into the sea or the pool at Monplaisir until they were up to their necks in water. ‘It must be said that they were fully clothed,’ recorded Paul’s strait-laced tutor, Semën Poroshin, after Yelagin had regaled the Young Court with one such escapade.⁵² Alexander Stroganov lived closer in at Chernaya Rechka (Black River) on St Petersburg’s Vyborg Side, a favourite hunting ground for Empress Elizabeth. From Colonel Passek’s house, Catherine could drive to Stone Island, which she purchased from Bestuzhev in 1765 for the use of her son, to watch the common people at play in the delta of the River Neva.⁵³

Along with Zakhar Chernyshëv, Prince Andrey Beloselsky and the Orlov brothers, these were among the empress’s closest intimates. She played billiards or cards with them most nights. Gambling presented Catherine with a dilemma. On the one hand, she condemned its pernicious impact on society. ‘The noble who has squandered his money,’ she warned Moscow’s Governor General in 1763, ‘will be obliged to sell his village, which other nobles, lacking sufficient resources, will be in no position to buy; and in that case the only remaining purchasers will be manufacturers…so you are to make very sure that no games of chance are played, and confirm to the police that the published edicts about this are to be precisely enforced.’⁵⁴ On the other hand, import duties on foreign playing cards and a tax on Russian-made packs led the College of Commerce to promise her in 1765 a combined annual revenue of 27,000 roubles, which Betskoy persuaded her to donate to the Moscow Foundling Home.⁵⁵ The empress’s favourite game was ombre, the fashionable Spanish three-hander whose addictive powers were satirised in 1763 by the poet Vasily Maikov.⁵⁶ Piquet was another regular pastime. Nothing, however, gave her greater pleasure than her friends’ amateur theatricals. In the carnival of 1765, she went to the Sheremetev Palace on the Fontanka to see Stroganov, Beloselsky, Prince Peter Khovansky and the Prussian ambassador, Count Solms, perform Le philosophe marié under the direction of Ivan Chernyshëv. His brother Zakhar was the house manager who collected the tickets while Ivan’s fiancée played the part of the usher. More than a hundred top-ranking courtiers made up the audience with the foreign ambassadors. Catherine enjoyed herself so much that she returned four days later for a repeat performance.⁵⁷

In private, the company was even more relaxed, and especially so on Christmas Day when they gathered late in the afternoon with Paul and his Young Court to play games in the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. Ribbon dancing and hunt the treasure were particular favourites. In the Russian dances that followed, Catherine was partnered by Panin, who remained on the fringes of her inner circle, never quite a friend. In a mock tribute to the Smolny Institute, and in a curious echo of Elizabeth’s cross-dressing masquerades, several of the men, including the beefy Passek and Grigory Orlov, excelled themselves by dressing up as noble girls under the watchful eye of their ‘mama’, Prince Beloselsky. ‘They were all wearing jackets, skirts and bonnets,’ Paul’s tutor noted warily. ‘Only Beloselsky had a scarf, and he was dressed worse than the others.’ There was more mischief as they sat down to punch and a cold table, and then the dancing began all over again.⁵⁸

Not all Catherine’s leisure pursuits were so mindless. In Alexander Stroganov she had acquired a genuinely cultivated companion who provided an important link to Paul’s Young Court. In a ceiling painting at the Stroganov Palace by Giuseppe Valeriani, Alexander’s grand tour in the 1750s was represented in the guise of Fénelon’s celebrated Adventures of Télémaque (1699), in which the young son of Ulysses encounters contrasting models of good and bad kingship as his tutor leads him on a journey through the Mediterranean world.⁵⁹ It was an appropriate analogy. While his friends Alexander and Ivan Cherkasov went to Cambridge–‘not a very entertaining place in itself, but pleasant enough in good company’–Stroganov chose Geneva, where, in addition to winning his spurs at the riding school, he learned to play the clavichord, studied Latin and Italian, and launched himself with enthusiasm into courses in natural law, geometry and physics under the direction of Professor Jean Jallabert, an expert in electricity.⁶⁰ Ancient history, his favourite subject, was taught by Pastor Jacob Vernet, celebrated for his attempts to steer between revealed religion and Enlightened reason. By the end of the century, Stroganov had produced his own scholarly catalogue of what had become one of the finest private art collections in Europe. Though many of his sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Italian paintings were acquired during his second spell in Paris in the 1770s, Stroganov had bought his first significant work, by Antonio Correggio, as early as 1755.⁶¹ Already a committed bibliophile by the time of his grand tour, he admired a collection belonging to the Elector of Hanover which contained ‘the best books now to be found’. Later, he saw the more extensive holdings at Frankfurt am Main and a library that surpassed them both in Cardinal de Soubise’s palace at Strasbourg. Above all, he was impressed by access afforded to the public at the royal library in Turin, which was open every day except Thursdays, Sundays and holidays so that ‘anyone who wishes may subscribe and read there’.⁶² On his return to Russia, Stroganov opened up his own collection, which ran to some 4000 titles in 10,000 volumes. According to the loan book kept in his own hand and dating from the period between Catherine’s accession and her coronation, the empress herself borrowed a French play called, appropriately enough, Le Philosophe.⁶³ Stroganov entertained her to an annual banquet lunch in January and his palace became open house to leading courtiers. It was there, in 1766, that a plan was formed to found the Imperial Russian Public Library, of which he was eventually appointed director in 1800.⁶⁴

Stroganov had plenty of time to spend with the empress and her son because his marriage to Anna Vorontsova had fallen apart by the summer of 1765. Their wedding seven years earlier had been sandwiched in between those of Count Buturlin and Lev Naryshkin. According to Catherine, Kirill Razumovsky made a bet with the Danish ambassador as to which of the three grooms would be cuckolded first, and it turned out to be Stroganov, ‘whose new wife seemed at the time the ugliest, the most innocent, and the most childish’.⁶⁵ By spring 1766, as the British ambassador reported, both partners desired a divorce with equal zeal, ‘the only thing in which, it is said, they ever agreed in’.⁶⁶ Yet as Catherine had already explained to Count Mikhail Vorontsov, this was a matter over which she had no control:

From your letter of 14 November, I have seen your request about the divorce of your daughter from her husband, to which I can make no other reply than to say that I am very sorry about your considerable domestic sadness over the differences between your daughter and son-in-law; however, divorce does not depend on me, but is solely an ecclesiastical matter, in which I cannot and will not intervene. Count Stroganov sent me a similar request a month ago, but I ordered it to be given back to him with the message that I cannot intervene in this affair because it is spiritual and there are established channels for such a case; secondly, in the absence of his wife and your daughter [who were then abroad], there can be no resolution; and third, I hesitate even more to intervene in this case because of the close relationship between the Counts Skavronsky and my late grandmother of blessed memory, Catherine I.⁶⁷

Only his wife’s death could release Stroganov from his misery. It came in 1768, but not before she had caused him further embarrassment by embarking on an open affair with Nikita Panin. Though it had amused Panin to make fun of his friend’s marital problems over lunch with Grand Duke Paul, he was disconcerted to find himself the butt of jokes by a public which, as Sir George Macartney remarked, could ‘scarce pardon an undisguised boyish passion, in a man of his years, station and experience’.⁶⁸

Not even a failed marriage could dull Stroganov’s natural wit: as Catherine’s regular ‘carver’ on state occasions, he had stood behind her chair at the fateful banquet when Peter III denounced her as a fool, comforting her with ‘the witty banter of which he was such a master’.⁶⁹However, the real life and soul of the empress’s inner circle was Lev Naryshkin. Though his presence at the empress’s side doubtless helped to reinforce his family’s grip on senior appointments, Lev Aleksandrovich himself played no overt part in either government or the administration of the Court. It became a running joke that he had been made Master of the Horse because he was so rarely to be seen in the saddle (‘We must mount him on a donkey,’ Catherine quipped).⁷⁰ Critics dismissed him as a gadfly–‘a quite intelligent man’, as Prince Shcherbatov put it, ‘but with the sort of mind that never concentrates, greedy for honours and gain, prone to every luxury, a joker, and, in a word, from his behaviour and his love of joking, more fit to be a court-jester than a grandee’.⁷¹ Yet these were precisely the qualities that Catherine had loved and admired since Naryshkin first lit up the Young Court in the dark years of Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had liked him then for his ‘good heart and quick understanding’. To Catherine, he was simply ‘the most trustworthy person I have among this nation’.⁷² As she put it in her memoirs:

He was one of the most singular personages that I have known, and no one ever made me laugh as much. He was a born Harlequin, and had he been of different birth, he could have made a living and a lot of money from his genuinely comic talents. He lacked for nothing in qualities of mind, he had heard tell of everything, and it was all uniquely arranged in his head. He was capable of discoursing on whatever art or science one might wish. He used the relevant technical terms and spoke to you continuously for a quarter hour or more, and when he stopped, neither he nor anyone else could make anything of the stream of words that had flowed from his mouth, and everyone ended up bursting with laughter.⁷³

‘No serious person could resist him’, she said, particularly on the subject of politics. Perhaps only such an accomplished jester could have managed the tightrope act of remaining equally trusted by Peter III and his consort, right down to the very day of Catherine’s coup.

Observing that the empress’s life was ‘a mixture of trifling amusements and intense application to business’, Buckinghamshire singled out Countess Bruce as the leading lady in Catherine’s ‘private party’. Even in her thirties, she remained ‘the first ornament of the circle’:

She dresses well, dances tolerably, speaks French with fluency and elegance, has read a dozen plays and as many brochures, and has naturally a partiality for a nation to whom she is indebted for all her acquired accomplishments. Not averse to gallantry, but discreet in her choice of those she favours, her affections, ever subservient to her judgement and studiously observant of those of her mistress, fix upon an object so connected with the favourite of the hour as must necessarily introduce her to the confidence of the secrets and the society of the pleasures.⁷⁴

The amorous adventures of Countess Praskovya Bruce were eventually to be her undoing. In 1779, she was banished from Court when Catherine discovered, long after it had become public knowledge, that the countess had ‘conceived a violent passion’ for her own twenty-four-year-old favourite, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov.⁷⁵ But there was no sign of such indiscretions in the 1760s, when the empress could look back on a friendship lasting more than twenty years. As the second daughter of Countess Rumyantseva, Catherine’s first Russian governess in 1744, Praskovya had been introduced to Catherine soon after her arrival in Moscow. They formed an immediate bond. ‘At my request, she often slept in my room, and even in my bed, and then the whole night was spent in romping, dancing and frolics. Sometimes it was nearly morning before we went to bed, so great was the racket we made.’⁷⁶ Despite the fact that, like Naryshkin, Praskovya later became attached to Peter III in ‘heart, body and soul’,⁷⁷ she recovered Catherine’s confidence to the point where ‘of all the Ladies she is the one who comes to me most often’. The empress dedicated her first significant memoir to this trusted female ‘friend, to whom I can say everything without fear of consequences’.⁷⁸ In a Court shot through with rumour and innuendo, that was no mean tribute.

Praskovya had known about Catherine’s affair with Grigory Orlov from the moment it began in 1761 and the two of them performed regularly in amateur theatricals.⁷⁹ Although there could be no question of a marriage in the aftermath of the Khitrovo fiasco, Catherine had come to rely on Grigory’s bear-like support, seeing his intellectual limitations not as a defect but rather as an opportunity for her to bring him on. To the astonishment of the foreign ambassadors, she made no attempt to conceal their shared domestic bliss. He occupied rooms above hers at the Winter Palace, connected to the imperial apartments by a private staircase. There was a similar arrangement at the Summer Palace, where Grigory indulged his passion for astronomy in an observatory occasionally visited by Grand Duke Paul. (They missed the eclipse of the sun in August 1765 because it was too cloudy, though Paul’s tutor was no less satisfied with the close-up of the capital’s bell towers afforded by Grigory’s telescope.⁸⁰)

Considered alongside the crucial role the Orlovs had played in Catherine’s coup, the widespread eighteenth-century assumption that only a man could hold the reins of power was enough to persuade many foreigners that the empress must be in thrall to her favourite. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Grigory certainly served as an important counterweight to Panin and his acolytes and took an interest in many of Catherine’s initiatives. His appointment as president of the Chancellery of Guardianship of Foreigners, opened on 22 July 1763 as a means of attracting foreigners to make more productive use of the vast Russian lands, was a clear indication of the significance she attached to the scheme. This was a big operation–17,866 potential colonists were dispatched from Lübeck in 1766 alone; the total number of registered arrivals between 1762 and 1775 was 30,623–and Grigory played an active part in the administration. Indeed, he did more than that. While Catherine apparently visited settlers in transit for the Volga in the barracks built for her husband’s Holstein regiments at Oranienbaum, Grigory settled individual colonists at Peter III’s old estate at Ropsha (given to him by the empress in 1764), where Pastor Eisen was commissioned to continue his experiments with peasant land-ownership.⁸¹ At his house on Millionnaya, Orlov also hosted meetings of the Free Economic Society, founded in 1765, puffing on his pipe as he listened to learned papers on agronomy. In political terms, he represented Catherine’s most personal link to the Guards regiments who had brought her to the throne. Yet he was not a natural man of intrigue. ‘He is good natur’d, indolent, unaffected, and unassuming,’ Macartney reported in 1767. ‘His sudden elevation has neither made him giddy nor ungrateful; and his present friends are the same satellites which attended his course when he moved in a humbler sphere.’⁸² While Catherine showered him with expensive gifts of porcelain, decorated with symbols of their mutual love, he made every attempt to entertain her in the manner to which she had become accustomed. On his name day, 25 January 1766, he threw a ball in her honour at which sixty-seven guests sat down to a banquet accompanied not only by Court choristers, but also by table fireworks in the manner preferred by Peter III. Afterwards Grigory was joined in a comedy by his fellow amateurs. Catherine enjoyed herself so much that she stopped out until two in the morning.⁸³

She was not so keen to stay up for the mind-numbing round of public masquerades she had hated as a grand duchess. These were now staged with such obvious economy (no food, and only sour milk to drink) that Panin thought it would have been better to abandon them altogether, despite their popularity with the merchantry.⁸⁴ More popular still was the theatre, which remained as central to the rhythm of the Court’s secular festivities as it had been under Elizabeth. Only the setting was different. A team of twenty-seven artists worked round the clock for two months to allow the theatre in the south-west corner of the Winter Palace to open on 13 December 1763 with a performance of Sumarokov’s familiar tragedy, Sinav and Truvor. With an auditorium seating 600 in four rows of boxes and the stalls, this was to remain the principal Court stage for the next twenty years.⁸⁵ The main imperial box faced the stage, but Catherine also had another one stage-left, immediately opposite her son’s (he was often brought to see her after a performance). This was where Paul developed his lifelong delight in French comedies, though he cried if they lasted too long and showed worrying signs of petulance if the audience applauded before he did, a practice that his mother was happy to tolerate.⁸⁶

It was even harder for his tutors to keep Paul amused at gala performances of opera seria. The boy enjoyed the battle scene in Manfredini’s Carlo Magno [Charlemagne], staged to commemorate Catherine’s name day in 1764, but he was glad when the performance ended at half past eight: ‘although Italian operas are bad’, he remarked to his tutor, ‘this one was good because it finished early’.⁸⁷ The adults were no better pleased. Learned as they may have been, Manfredini’s intricate arias failed to sustain his audience’s attention and Count Sievers determined to secure the services of a more celebrated composer. While the search was on, Manfredini partially redeemed himself with an extravagant musical drama for the third anniversary of Catherine’s accession. The Court celebrated the occasion with a week-long military exercise at Krasnoye Selo, where the empress wore nothing but uniform and Paul, who had been dreaming about the event for almost a year, was sick with excitement. Apollo and Minerva required an orchestra and two choruses; dinner was served in a marquee to some 365 guests, including the whole generalitet and all the Russian staff officers; and the entertainment was brought to a spectacular conclusion at midnight when fireworks were used to blow up an artificial town.⁸⁸

Baldasare Galuppi, who had first attracted the Russian Court’s attention in the late 1750s, arrived in St Petersburg, after protracted negotiations with the Venetians, in September 1765. Although Catherine immediately commissioned his Dido Abandoned for her name day celebrations in November, the production had to be held over until the following February. Since the opera had been premiered in Modena as early as 1741, the problem lay not with the composer’s creativity, but rather in the scale of the production. No fewer than seventy-two boys from the Guards regiments were brought in as extras and Galuppi insisted on additional rehearsals with his new orchestra, berating them in his native dialect until standards improved. On her name day, the empress had to be satisfied with a cantata, ‘Virtue emancipated’, which was so successful that it was repeated on 26 November with three encores. ‘The music is extremely good, massive and pleasant,’ commented Semën Poroshin. ‘If you listen to it carefully, the heart is rapt with admiration.’ Still more delighted with Galuppi’s opera when it was finally ready, Catherine gave its composer a diamond-encrusted snuff box and 1000 roubles, accompanied by a characteristically skittish note saying that Dido had bequeathed this present to him in her will.⁸⁹

If these were all developments typical of a Baroque Court, the carousel staged in 1766 was even more of a throwback to Louis XIV’s Versailles.⁹⁰ This medieval tournament had originally been planned for the summer of 1765, when Catherine visited Elizabeth’s old wooden winter palace to inspect the costumes and took part in a full-scale rehearsal.⁹¹ In the event, inclement weather caused it to be postponed until the following year. To raise echoes of the Olympic games in ancient Greece, the medallion struck to commemorate the occasion was engraved with the slogan ‘From the banks of the Alfei to the banks of the Neva’, and its designers drove home the classical allusions by depicting a cylindrical structure on the model of the Roman coliseum.⁹² Rinaldi’s wooden amphitheatre in Palace Square, which Catherine inspected several times during the course of its construction, was actually in the form of a rectangle, 200 yards by 180, in which the empress and her son sat facing each other in boxes on the eastern and western sides. Thomas Newberry, a British instructor in navigation at the Cadet Corps, described the performance on 11 July to the merchant Robert Dingley:

There were six Rows of Seats on each side, the lowest of which was eight feet from the Ground. All round the Square, there was a path of about 5 yards in breadth and the rest was inclos’d in a handsome manner breast high, and turn’d into the form of an Oval, in the Centre of which sat the Famous old Count Munich, who with his officers, was to judge of the performances and distribute the Prizes. The Knights, Sir, were sixteen, and the Ladies eight, beside an innumerable train of Squires, who carried their Shields &c. They were divided into four Parties call’d Quadrills, and supposed to be of four different Nations, namely the Roman, the Sclavonian, the Turkish, and the Indian, and were all properly and most magnificently Cloath’d in the Habits of the several Countrys.

The knights and their ladies jousted not against each other, but against ‘Beasts only, who appeared in the formidable shape of Bears, Lyons, Tygers and Dragons’, and afterwards they were all invited to a masquerade, honoured with Catherine’s presence. ‘Your humble Servant was in a Black Domino, without a Mask, because my views and wishes, Sir, were only to be seen, and taken notice of by Her Majesty.’⁹³

‘Our carousel was extremely good,’ a delighted empress reported after the first performance, though critics later grumbled that the Russian knights ‘displayed more magnificence than gallantry, and greater strength than dexterity’, so that the tourneys ‘were beheld with disapprobation, as frivolous and expensive’.⁹⁴ It was true that representational monarchy never came cheap. Its costs rose steeply in the early years of Catherine’s reign. The bill for fourteen Turkish costumes for the masquerade in honour of Paul’s tenth birthday came to 1950 roubles–half the annual salary of the Court Kapellmeister, and almost twice as much as Father Platon (Lëvshin) was paid as tutor in divinity to the grand duke. The annual budget for the Imperial theatres, re-organised under Yelagin’s direction in 1766, was set at 138,410 roubles, including pensions and a small theatrical school. But this was never enough to support nine Italian opera singers, a thirty-two-piece orchestra, a ballet company of forty-two and both French and Russian theatre troupes.⁹⁵ Formally speaking, the Court’s basic operations were still sustained by the same annual grant of 260,000 roubles decreed by Empress Anna in 1733, with a further 6765 roubles 73 and a quarter kopecks for the servants’ salaries.⁹⁶ Yet this was merely a fiction. By one generally accepted estimate, all told the Court consumed 9.5 per cent of the total state budget in 1763. Six years later, the proportion had risen to 12 per cent and expenditure had almost doubled in absolute terms from 1.64 million roubles to 3 million.⁹⁷

Within two years of his accession to the Habsburg throne in 1765, Joseph II had reduced the number of religious services attended annually by his Court from seventy-eight to thirty-two. Ten more had gone by 1774. As a leading Viennese official noted, the emperor’s decision to abolish the Maundy Thursday ritual of washing the feet in 1767 created ‘an exceptional sensation’.⁹⁸ In St Petersburg, such a move would have been inconceivable. Catherine may have worn her own religion lightly, but she had come to the throne as a defender of Orthodoxy. The number of religious rituals in the Russian Court calendar went up rather than down during her reign as her Court remained knee-deep in holy water.

The very first entry in the Court journals after the coup is from 1 August 1762, when the empress followed an elaborate clerical procession from the chapel at the Summer Palace to the blessing of the waters on the Moika canal at the beginning of the Dormition Fast.⁹⁹ A similar ceremony was repeated three times in the 1760s, Catherine sheltering from the rain in 1764 in a specially constructed gallery. That was the year in which the Court clergy first staged an icon procession at mid-Pentecost, the moveable feast halfway between Easter and Trinity Sunday. On 30 August 1762, the empress made a point of processing on foot for more than two miles from the Kazan Church to worship at the relics of St Alexander Nevsky–a severe test of patience for one so sceptical. In later years, she either drove to the Anichkov Palace and processed from there or bypassed the annual icon procession altogether. Not until 1772 was she once again persuaded to complete the full route on foot. It was a similar story at Epiphany. Catherine followed the icons to the Jordan in both 1764 and 1765, while Zakhar Chernyshëv showed the watching Paul a plan of the layout of the 8900 soldiers on parade. After that, she was ill for several days and never again ventured out after being deterred by a severe frost in 1766, when the parade was cancelled and only a single company from each regiment braved the cold to present their standards to be dipped.¹⁰⁰ For the remainder of her reign, Catherine was content to watch the blessing of the waters from the windows of the Winter Palace.

The palace’s great chapel had been consecrated on Easter Saturday, 1762, the day that Peter III moved in. Two weeks after her return from Moscow in 1763, Catherine had it re-consecrated in the name of the icon ‘not made by human hands’ (a version of this celebrated image, made seventy years earlier by F. F. Ukhtomsky and studded with gold and diamonds, was placed by the altar). Rastrelli had originally intended the chapel to extend to the full height of the palace, but eventually opted to place it on the first floor at the same level as the other staterooms so that, exceptionally for a sacred space, there were kitchens and laundries beneath, not to mention the bathhouse where Catherine later spent time with Potëmkin. The chapel remained a ‘very lofty and spacious room’, lined by ‘gilt Ionic pillars’ and decorated with icons which one visiting Protestant found ‘glaring and ill-executed’, but which are now reckoned among the finest examples of collaboration between Russian and Italian artists in the eighteenth century. Much of the plate was taken from the Moscow Armoury to represent a clear line of succession from Catherine’s Muscovite ‘ancestors’, and the chapel also housed treasured relics, including a cross incorporating a fragment of the Life-Giving Cross of Our Lord, an image of the Filermskaya Mother of God, said to be the work of St Luke, and part of the right hand of John the Baptist.¹⁰¹ In the depth of winter, Paul kept warm by listening to the service from an adjoining room while his mother regularly took her place behind the railing in front of the altar. Here she could listen to her choir, more than fifty strong by the late 1760s, perform works influenced by the Italian style by Western-educated composers such as Maxim Berezovsky. Daily services were accompanied by traditional chants and the occasional motet, but in the empress’s presence, on Sundays and lesser feast days, there was always an ornate mass, and the twelve great feasts in the Orthodox calendar were celebrated with a full-scale cantata.¹⁰²

Not that Catherine’s worship was confined to her palaces. On Thursday 17 October 1762, she and her entourage made the traditional post-coronation pilgrimage to the Trinity St Sergius monastery. Advised of her visit in August, the monks had lost no time in smartening the place up and preparing gorgeous new vestments. The suite where the empress was to stay was also rejuvenated. Proclaimed on her arrival as a ‘second Helen’ in piety and ‘the image of Judith of Israel’ in courage, Catherine was shown the library and took particular pleasure from debates between the pupils of the seminary, organised by its twenty-four-year-old rector, Archimandrite Platon.¹⁰³ Father Platon made another favourable impression with a sermon on ‘the uses of piety’ when the empress returned to the monastery in the following May, on the first leg of her pilgrimage to Rostov.¹⁰⁴ Following the pattern set by Elizabeth, she proceeded in crab-like fashion, covering up to seven miles on foot during the day, and then partially retracing her steps by carriage to spend the night at a favourite staging post. As far as the Trinity monastery, the route was dotted with imperial villages, each of which had its own small wooden ‘palace’. At Taininskoye, where the exquisite seventeenth-century church still stands in the shadow of a huge electric power station, a new log cabin had been built alongside the palace to house her suite.¹⁰⁵ She made good progress, completing the journey in eleven days. However, as so often on Catherine’s travels, the elements were against her: driving wind and rain turned the roads to mud, ‘depriving us of the pleasure we might have taken from the journey in better times’.¹⁰⁶ Pereyaslavl, where she arrived on 21 May, offered ‘foul weather and boredom in equal measure’. She stayed with a government official, whose house was ‘very large, good, and full of cockroaches’. The empress insisted, against the Church’s better wishes, that monasteries should serve some useful purpose by caring not only for the sick, but also for the insane. Less certain about the use of monasteries as gaols, she was appalled to discover a monastic prisoner who had been held captive at Pereyaslavl for fifteen years: ‘Find out about him!’ she ordered.¹⁰⁷ Peasants had flocked to Rostov in the hope of glimpsing their sovereign and being cured by the saint’s relics. ‘Yesterday there was another miracle,’ reported the sceptical empress. ‘A woman was healed and Bishop [Dimitry] Sechënov wants to seal the casket, so that the relics cannot be stolen; however, in order that the common people shouldn’t think that the relics had been hidden from me, I requested that they be left out for some time longer.’¹⁰⁸

Father Platon followed Catherine to St Petersburg at the beginning of August 1763. On Sunday 10 August, the empress travelled to the Trinity hermitage, where she had received representatives of the deposed Peter III on the day after her coup, to hear him preach at the consecration of the Baroque cathedral, begun seven years earlier to a design by Trezzini and completed under the supervision of the ubiquitous Rastrelli.¹⁰⁹ Given rooms in Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace, Platon was to deliver more than thirty sermons to Catherine and her Court over the next two years. In addition to his annual salary of 1000 roubles, he received a further 300 for subsistence, and was supplied not only with firewood and candles, but also with beer, more than a litre of vodka each week and a bottle of Rhine wine every day. Although Panin worried that this ‘clear-headed’ monk might be corrupted by his new surroundings, he remained alert to the dangers of ambition and extravagance. Several of his Lenten sermons touched on the temptations faced by hedonistic courtiers, and on 10 October 1764 he ‘spoke with considerable vehemence against those who ruin themselves by squandering their wealth on frivolous and unnecessary things and, consequently, are unable to be of any help to the poor’. ‘Father Platon was in a bad mood today,’ Catherine remarked afterwards, ‘but he spoke extremely well.’¹¹⁰ Always impressed by the young monk’s eloquence, she had been moved to tears by his sermon on the tsarevich’s tenth birthday on 20 September. Many in the congregation also wept at the end, when ‘the preacher spoke of her Majesty’s patience in bearing her labours for the use and safety of the fatherland, on the success of his Highness in the sciences which he was taught, and the resultant hope for Russia’.¹¹¹ Catherine had herself attended Paul’s first lesson with Platon on 29 August 1763, the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. Two years later, she stood at her son’s side as he faced a carefully rehearsed oral examination on matters of basic dogma in the presence of a large number of courtiers. ‘Her Majesty deigned to listen with the greatest attention,’ Poroshin recorded. ‘The examination lasted for three quarters of an hour. After it was completed, Reverend Father Platon addressed her Majesty in a brief speech. The Sovereign lady deigned to thank him for teaching the Grand Duke, about whom she said: “I thought he would be shy, but not all; he answered very well.”’¹¹²

Since religious ritual remained central to the life of every eighteenth-century monarchy, one of the paradoxical effects of Russia’s cultural Westernisation was to reinforce its role at the Court of St Petersburg. For many of Catherine’s courtiers, there was nothing offensive about that. ‘If I am not much mistaken,’ remarked the prescient William Richardson, ‘there are among them a greater number who affect indifference or disbelief in religious matters, than who really disbelieve. Perhaps, in times of sickness, disgrace, and low-spirits, they have more faith in St Nicholas, than in Voltaire.’¹¹³

It was different for Catherine herself: her cast of mind was wholly secular, and one reason why Father Platon felt the need to emphasise the difference between (true) spiritual enlightenment and (mere) secular learning was that he knew he was swimming against the prevailing intellectual tide.¹¹⁴ The empress had lionised Voltaire since reading him in the 1740s and made attempts to cultivate him as soon as she came to the throne. As she insisted from the start, they both had much to gain from the correspondence that began in the autumn of 1763 and continued until Voltaire’s death fifteen years later. While her association with him promised to enhance his status as a writer, ‘Our lady of St Petersburg’, as Voltaire later christened her, realised in turn that his approval could only enhance her reputation in Enlightened circles in Europe.¹¹⁵ If her letters gave her the chance to show off–‘Her conversation is brilliant’, Macartney remarked in 1766, ‘perhaps too brilliant for she loves to shine’–then they also gave her the chance to model her prose on one of the greatest stylists of her age. Frederick the Great declared that he liked ‘to maintain correspondences with superior minds, with people who are completely cerebral, as if they had no bodies; this is the human elite’.¹¹⁶ Catherine took a similar view, self-consciously representing herself as a writer with much to learn. She struck the same tone in her correspondence with Jean d’Alembert, the joint editor of the Encyclopédie, whom she attempted in vain to lure to Russia. ‘I have long owed a letter to Monsieur d’Alembert,’ the empress wrote to Mme Geoffrin, ‘and I beg you Madame to tell him that I shall shortly send him a notebook…I hope he will be pleased even though it is from the pen of a novice.’¹¹⁷

Realising the philosophes’ difficulties with the French censorship, Catherine tried to help them (and embarrass Louis XV) by offering to print the final volumes of the Encyclopédie in Riga even before her coronation. That invitation was refused, but it was impossible for its second impoverished editor, Denis Diderot, to turn down the empress’s subsequent offer to purchase his library for 15,000 livres and pay him to look after it for her. The completion of the deal apparently sent him into a state of stupor. Catherine was just as pleased. ‘I would never have believed that the purchase of a library would bring me so many compliments,’ she wrote disarmingly to Voltaire. ‘Everyone is paying me them for buying Monsieur Diderot’s. But admit, you to whom humanity owes a debt for the help you have given to innocence and virtue in the persons of the Calas family, that it would have been cruel and unjust to separate a scholar from his books.’¹¹⁸

Catherine realised very early on in their correspondence that it would be ‘very difficult’ to reduce Voltaire’s sparkling shafts of wisdom to a practical programme of reform. Philosophes who disagreed among themselves never offered a blueprint for government.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, the Enlightenment was an important influence on Catherine’s legislation right from the start. Motivated primarily by the need for money, her secularisation of the monasteries was greeted with acclaim by philosophes who condemned the contemplative life as useless. Celibate monks and nuns were an obvious liability in a world which believed, quite wrongly, that the population had declined since classical times. Sharing the widespread perception that Russia was under-populated, Catherine sent the colonists recruited by the College of Guardianship to a huge new province of New Russia, stretching from the Polish border in the west to the Don Cossack territory in the east. Appointing Count Peter Rumyantsev as its Governor General in November 1764, the empress gave him characteristically explicit instructions in the sort of rational administration she expected:

First of all, you must proceed to learn about the province that has been entrusted to you in all of its conditions and confines, and, for this purpose, you are to obtain a reliable map of sufficient detail to indicate the location of regiments, towns, settlements, villages, outlying farms, seasonal work camps, monasteries, hermitages, manufactures, and any and all places of human habitation, as well as rivers, lakes, marshes, woods, farmland, steppes, roads, and the location of [all]…borders.¹²⁰

It was almost certainly the empress who initiated the essay competition set up by the Free Economic Society in November 1766 in the manner of the earlier one sponsored by the Academy of Dijon, which had prompted Rousseau’s first Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. The topic she set was squarely linked to the Enlightened utility she had claimed as her watchword in a letter to Voltaire: ‘What is most useful for society–that the peasant should own land or only moveable property, and how far should his rights over the one or the other extend?’ It was the first public discussion in Russia of the question of serfdom. Of the 164 anonymous entries to the competition, only seven were in Russian. One was in Dutch, another in Swedish; the great majority were in German. Of the twenty French entries, one was by the philosophe Le Mercier de la Rivière, who made an unsuccessful visit to Russia, and another by Voltaire himself, under the motto ‘si populus dives, rex dives’ (if the people are rich, the king is rich). Voltaire also revealed to Catherine that he was the author of one of three essays submitted in Latin, under the motto ‘ex tellure omnia’ (everything from the land). Emancipation was the talk of the French salons. But it was all in vain. When the result of the competition was announced in April 1768, the prize-winning entry, duly published in Russian translation, was by the Frenchman Beardé de l’Abbaye, who was critical of serfdom, but advocated only a very gradual liberation of the serfs.¹²¹

As the choice of Beardé’s essay signalled, Catherine was gradually beginning to realise the difficulties raised by her early reforms. When she first encouraged Eisen to contemplate a property-owning peasantry, she can hardly have grasped the extent to which Russia’s imperial expansion had been underwritten by the exploitation of unfree labour since the time of Peter the Great. Her other initiatives were scarcely less ambitious ventures, whose impact could only be judged over the long term. Many of their immediate results were questionable. More than four-fifths of the children admitted to the Moscow Foundling Home in 1764 were dead within a year, and in 1767 the mortality rate reached almost 99 per cent.¹²² Not surprisingly, Catherine lost confidence in the more extravagant of Betskoy’s schemes, leaving herself open to the charge that she failed to complete what she had begun, and invested only in her personal glory.¹²³ That accusation was false. Having overcome two serious challenges to her authority–a plot among the Guards to restore Ivan VI to the throne in 1763, and a much more menacing attempt by the guardsman Mirovich to release Ivan from captivity while Catherine and her Court were at Reval in 1764–she embarked on her most ambitious project of all. ‘For the last two months,’ she told Madame Geoffrin at the end of March 1765, ‘I have spent three hours every morning working on the laws of this empire. It is an immense task.’¹²⁴ This was the origin of the great treatise which she intended to present to a new Legislative Commission in Moscow. By the time she was ready to convene it, there was nothing insecure about Catherine’s position on the throne. As if to prove it, while the greater part of the Russian political nation gathered in the old capital to prepare for the commission’s opening, she herself set sail on a voyage down the Volga to Kazan, a Muslim city 500 miles east of Moscow, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1552 as his ‘gateway to Siberia’.