CHAPTER SEVEN
As news of Catherine’s travel plans leaked out in the summer of 1766, the foreign ambassadors were consumed with curiosity about her motives. ‘There has been no other question here for some time,’ reported Rossignol, Louis XV’s secret envoy, on 13 May. Since the journey would oblige her to exchange her fine Petersburg palaces for ‘an old house made of wood’, as the king’s official ambassador put it, she could hardly be travelling for pleasure. The notion that the journey was intended to quell growing turbulence in Moscow seemed equally improbable. Even if Princess Dashkova was stirring up trouble there, ‘distant storms’ were unlikely to threaten Catherine and she would scarcely be wise to move closer to a centre of unrest. Rossignol was prepared to believe that the whole expedition might be no more than a stunt on the part of the pretentious Orlovs. But he gave little credence to rumours that the empress intended to marry Grigory: ‘I doubt that she still has that idea, if it ever existed, especially since the Synod has come out against this union, which would surely revolt all the great men of this empire.’ In the end, he was driven to the reluctant conclusion that Catherine must indeed be intent on the bold experiment that Russians had begun to talk about: ‘It is said that the Empress will promulgate a code which she wishes to substitute for the multitude of contradictory edicts which are the only laws of this empire and which serve merely as a resource for the dishonesty of litigants, and even more often for that of judges.’ 1
Despite the title Code russe, given to the third French edition in 1775, the Great Instruction (Bolshoy Nakaz) on which Catherine had been slaving away since the beginning of 1765 was never intended as a law code. ‘Don’t let the title frighten you as if it anticipated us,’ Jeremy Bentham reassured his brother while working on his own Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: ‘It is only a plan for putting the Courts of Justice upon a regular establishment.’2 In fact, the empress’s Instruction was much more than that. She intended it partly as a statement of the theoretical foundations of her own regime, and partly as a guide to the Enlightened principles on which a better government and society might ultimately rest. When she had finished, she told Frederick the Great how hard it had been to take account of present needs without ‘closing off the way forward to a more favourable future’.3 Joking that she hoped she might be forgiven for plagiarism, she made no attempt to disguise her debt to two of the most advanced works of Western political thought: Montesquieu’s On the Spirit of the Laws (1748) and On Crimes and Punishments (1764) by the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria. Yet even filleting their books into a slimmer treatise of her own was ‘an immense task’ in itself, as she told Madame Geoffrin, and it occupied most of her mornings for the best part of eighteen months: ‘If providence allows, I hope to put everything in a more natural order, acknowledged by humanity and founded on public and private utility.’4Such labours took their toll. When Catherine came to complete a medical questionnaire in advance of her inoculation against smallpox in 1768, she complained of unbearable headaches over the previous two years, caused by tired eyes, ‘overwork, and the fact that for three years running I got up at between four and five in the morning’.5
The ultimate task of codification could scarcely have been more ambitious. The comprehensive code envisaged by Peter the Great in 1700 had been completed only after his death and was never promulgated. Since then, four further attempts had come to grief. The most recent, inspired by Peter Shuvalov in 1754, had collapsed during the Seven Years’ War, though it remained formally in existence in 1766. Although Catherine admired the direct style of the last complete Russian Law Code, issued as long ago as 1649–‘We listen with pleasure when extracts are quoted from it; no one can mistake the meaning of what he hears; the words in it are understood even by persons of middling capacities’6–the catalogue of brutal punishments approved by Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich scarcely matched her own views on the subject. And since many of the thousands of edicts promulgated in the intervening period remained unpublished, and some were mutually contradictory, there was much to do to bring order out of chaos. This task was to be left to a new Legislative Commission, a consultative body at which elected deputies from the free estates of the Russian empire–nobles, merchants, townsmen and state peasants–were to be encouraged to reveal the needs of provincial society ‘from below’. Meanwhile, as her subjects launched themselves into elections set in motion in December 1766, the empress planned to see Russian provincial life for herself.7 As she explained to Voltaire the following March:
In June this great assembly will begin its sessions, and it will tell us what it needs. After which we shall work on laws of which, I hope, humanity will not disapprove. From now until then, I shall be making a tour of various provinces the length of the Volga; and perhaps at the moment when you least expect it, you will receive a letter from some little hut in Asia.8
Since no imperial journey was undertaken without elaborate preparation, plans for the Volga expedition developed alongside those for the Legislative Commission. They were already well advanced by the time of Catherine’s trip to the Ladoga Canal in summer 1765, when Paul was excited to hear from Ivan Chernyshëv of the special vessels being designed for the cruise.9 To build these boats, at an eventual cost of almost 40,000 roubles, Captain P. I. Pushchin was sent out in December to Tver, the empress’s favourite provincial capital, where the adventure was to begin. While a new neoclassical town was rebuilt around him following the great fire of 1763, he oversaw the construction of a luxurious galley for Catherine–in effect, a small floating palace–and a further twenty-four large vessels, including one for a detachment of the imperial hunt. This was the fleet which eventually set sail in April 1767 with Pushchin in command of 23 officers, 779 sailors, and a guard of 345. Further downstream, numberless churches and monasteries were spruced up in anticipation of Catherine’s arrival. At every calling point on the river, she moored at a newly built quayside covered with green or red cloth; miles of canvas sheeting kept her feet dry as she walked ashore. While three detachments of Cossacks had been dispatched to ward off the bandit gangs reported to be gathering along the Volga’s tributaries in Penza province in the summer of 1766, soldiers were sent in December to all the major towns along the route, partly to maintain order and partly to manage the complex logistics for the return journey overland. Half of the 350 horses required at each of the thirty-three staging posts were to be provided by the Postal Chancellery; the remainder had to be prised out of a less than willing merchantry.10
At first, the merchants of Tver proved equally reluctant to pay for the triumphal arch that the provincial governor, Count Villem Fermor, had determined to build as early as November 1765. However, there was no deterring a man who had headed Elizabeth’s Construction Chancellery in the heyday of Rastrelli before briefly assuming command of the Russian troops during the Seven Years’ War. Having collected the necessary funds by the summer of 1766, Fermor ordered four columns to be driven into the ground before the frost set in for the winter, later sending an extravagantly gilded frame for the empress’s monogram and decreeing that Her Majesty’s portrait should be placed over the archway, facing her as she entered the town.11 Similar triumphal arches were built all along the route, where provincial governors competed to stage receptions, each more magnificent than the last, at the expense of local dignitaries gathered for the elections to the Legislative Commission.
While the populace made ready to greet their sovereign, Catherine was doing her homework about the provinces. To prepare her for the journey, the Academy of Sciences drew up a short Geographical Description of the River Volga, which also allowed her to chart her progress once the cruise had begun. Great care was taken to ensure the accuracy of this attractive publication, whose first edition was pulped when it turned out to contain significant errors. Dividing the course of the river into sections, it illustrated each one with an engraved map accompanied by four readily referenced columns of text. Here Catherine could look up lists of the churches and principal economic activity of the towns along the route, the distances travelled from Tver, the distances between tributaries (faithfully marked on each bank of the Volga), and the position and direction of bends in the river. Full of the sorts of detail the empress admired, this pamphlet gave a good sense of the variety in store for her along the way. For example, whereas Nizhny Novgorod, at the confluence of the Volga and the Oka, could boast thirty-nine churches, four cathedrals, three monasteries, two convents and a trade in grain and handicrafts, there was but a single church at Kokshaisk, the last sizeable settlement before the old Tatar capital at Kazan, where ‘the inhabitants feed themselves entirely from agriculture and cattle-breeding’.12
Catherine made her final preparations for the journey in Moscow, chosen as the seat of the Legislative Commission in memory of the ad hoc gatherings, later known as Assemblies of the Land, at which the Muscovite tsars had ritually consulted their leading subjects.13 ‘I prefer Petersburg,’ she admitted, rehearsing all her frustrations with the unruly old capital that seemed to represent ‘a nasty autumn’ by comparison with the new one’s ‘onset of spring’.14 If her palace was lacking in comfort, she had only herself to blame. ‘The Construction Chancellery has asked me for more than 60,000 roubles for repairing and cleaning the Golovin and Kremlin palaces,’ she had complained to the Governor General the previous summer. ‘And most of it, as you will see, is purely for decoration and furniture. But since I am going to Moscow not for magnificence but for the good of the state, I have not the slightest need for luxury.’ In the end, in one of her first clear rejections of Baroque extravagance, she spent only 7000 roubles on safety measures at the Golovin Palace, where she arrived on 13 February to celebrate the beginning of Lent with typically irreverent gusto.15 As she explained to the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet:
I read yesterday in the Encyclopédie article on ‘religious orders’ that your king, Saint Louis, said that if he could divide himself in two, he would do so, and give one half to the Dominicans and the other to the Franciscans. You can see that this good king would not have much left of his kingdom. Good king is the wrong expression: I should have said good man, for a good man can tell such stories, whereas a good king does better to keep his kingdom intact, and not to divide it among mendicant monks.16
Lent nevertheless had its uses. It gave her an excuse to keep out of the public eye until she had taken the political temperature of a city where she had delayed elections for the Legislative Commission until after her arrival. Occasional Court reception days were held during the Great Fast, shorn of the customary musical accompaniment, and Catherine celebrated the feast of the Annunciation with her cavalry officers. Otherwise, Moscow saw little of its empress until 5 April, when she travelled in state to the Kremlin to take her annual communion at the Cathedral of the Dormition and watch as Archbishop Dimitry performed the Maundy Thursday ritual of the washing of the feet. That weekend, cannon salutes signalled the progress of her nocturnal drives back and forth across the city for the Easter vigil services.17 Alarmed by the decrepitude of all three Kremlin cathedrals, Catherine ordered Field Marshal Saltykov to call a meeting of all the city’s architects to decide how to make them safe. ‘PS There’s no time to lose with the Archangel cathedral.’18
On 21 April, the atmosphere was once again more intimate, as the empress celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday at the little wooden palace at Taininskoye in the company of Alexander Stroganov and other friends.19 She did not attend the public lecture given two days later at Moscow University by Professor Johann Schaden, who looked forward to the Legislative Commission by discoursing ‘On the Spirit of the Laws’.20 By then, she was almost ready to depart for the Volga. On the evening of 29 April, Fermor and Ivan Chernyshëv were on hand to greet her at Tver with the usual barrage of fireworks. ‘We are all well,’ she reported to Panin, who had remained in Moscow with his mistress and Grand Duke Paul: ‘the journey was average, the weather very good.’21
It stayed fine for the next two days, as Catherine was treated to the sorts of gala reception that were to be repeated again and again over the coming weeks: whole regiments stood on parade, awaiting her inspection; nobles and merchants queued to offer her hospitality; seminarians dressed all in white chanted Russian and Latin verses written expressly for the occasion; hundreds of subjects were permitted to kiss her hand. Braving the cold on 1 May, she spent a couple of hours with Archbishop Gavriil (Petrov) in the garden of his new cathedral. Only after that did the clouds burst. But since the following day was mid-Pentecost, the empress and her suite processed through the rain for almost a mile to a sanctification service at a Jordan on the Volga. Once Grigory Orlov had passed her the customary glass of holy water, they returned to the cathedral where Gavriil had given ‘a very good sermon’ earlier that morning, and the empress lunched with him before finally boarding her galley, the Tver. Thousands thronged the streets in the hope of catching a glimpse of the procession of the cross and Catherine declared it ‘impossible to count the people and carriages’ blocking the route as she made her way to the quayside. Some women in the crowd rowed out to the Tver, at anchor in the river, while other cheering well-wishers sailed in her wake or scampered along the riverbank as the colourful flotilla at last set sail at three in the afternoon.22
By seven the following evening, Catherine had reached Prince Dolgoruky’s estate almost sixty miles downstream. The rain had stopped, she had plenty of good company–among others, she shared the Tver with Grigory and Vladimir Orlov, the Chernyshëv brothers and Alexander Bibikov, the man she was grooming to be Marshal of the Legislative Commission–and she was relieved to report that they had all stayed well, despite the weather. It remained changeable as they sailed on to the Makaryev monastery on 5 May. ‘Small but handsome’, in Vladimir Orlov’s words, this ancient house had once owned more than 60,000 peasants in a single provincial district. Since it also marked the boundary of Gavriil’s diocese, it was here that she took leave of her favourite prelate. Local boatmen rowed alongside for several miles, accompanying Catherine with their melancholy songs as she departed for Uglich, where Ivan the Terrible’s son, the tsarevich Dimitry, had died from stab wounds in 1591. Both Pushkin and Musorgsky later dramatised the event in a version alleging (almost certainly wrongly) that Boris Godunov had brought destruction upon himself by ordering the assassination of a prince who blocked his own path to the throne. In the light of Peter III’s fate, this was one aspect of the Muscovite legacy that no one wanted to highlight in 1767. Catherine cruised on regardless. ‘It’s very jolly to sail on the water,’ she told her own son, adding disingenuously: ‘I’m sorry only that you are not with me.’23
The routine established in these early days set the pattern for the remainder of the journey. While ashore, Catherine divided her time in the manner anticipated by the Geographical Description in a programme guided by the young president of the Academy of Sciences, Vladimir Orlov. Part of it was devoted to inspections of the sorts of prosperous economic enterprise that she wanted to promote in Russia (the head of the College of Manufactures, Dimitry Volkov, was another of her companions on board the Tver). A fortnight before leaving Moscow, she had secretly decreed that small, unregistered workshops there should no longer be persecuted by the authorities. Matching her instinctive preference for free labour, this policy was also influenced by Catherine’s reading of the Cameralist economist Jacob Bielfeld, who believed that large, privileged manufactories were better suited to the provinces than to a capital city. ‘The excessive aggrandizement of a capital which is made at the expense of provincial towns, can never be a sign of a state’s prosperity,’ Bielfeld insisted, in a passage that played directly into the empress’s prejudices against Moscow.24 Now she planned to inspect some of Russia’s largest textile manufactories in the Volga region. Despite this preoccupation with the modern economy, however, by far the greater part of her journey was taken up by visits to monasteries and churches where she could conveniently associate herself with medieval princely glories. Here the clergy could show off their miracle-working icons to a sceptical empress while the populace presented her with the traditional symbols of Russian hospitality: bread and salt (usually delivered on silverware made expressly for the occasion), and fish (preferably still live and wriggling).
While under sail, Catherine’s priorities were different again. One of the books that she had set aside for the journey was Bélisaire, a political novel by the philosophe Jean-François Marmontel, which had been banned in France as openly deist. On 7 May, stuck at anchor in a howling headwind, she found time to thank the author. ‘I was enchanted to read it and I wasn’t the only one: it is a book that deserves to be translated into every language.’ As good as her word, she and her companions whiled away the delay by completing the Russian version begun in Tver. It was dedicated to Archbishop Gavriil, whose virtues, listed in the inscription by Voltaire’s friend Count Andrey Shuvalov, were said to include ‘gentleness, humility, moderation [and] enlightened devotion’.25 The empress herself translated the chapter on monarchy which projected the image of a just and tolerant ruler that she hoped to propagate by distributing the book throughout the empire (it was published in the following year).26 The weather defeated even the maps in the Geographical Description. ‘I know not where to date my letter from,’ she complained, ‘since I am on a vessel in the middle of the Volga in some rather nasty weather that many ladies would call a frightful storm.’27 ‘Yesterday was the first boring day,’ she confessed to Moscow’s Governor General next morning, ‘but we are all healthy, and although there are close on two thousand people in my entourage, only five are in hospital, and they are not seriously ill. And although troops have been sent to replace the sick soldiers, those on my galley don’t want to leave and say that they are well.’28
A flotilla of small craft decked with multicoloured flags came out to greet her at Yaroslavl on 9 May. The town ‘could hardly be better situated’, she boasted, ‘it is very pleasing to everyone’. Not quite: Vladimir Orlov found the place ‘very badly built, almost all of peasant huts, the streets are narrow and paved with planks’. He was more impressed by a visit to Ivan Zatrapezny’s silk works, which had not only supplied many of the hangings in the imperial palaces, but also exported more than 65,000 yards of cloth to England in the previous year. Having taken coffee and dessert with the proprietor’s family, Catherine was briefly shown some of their wares before sailing over to Savva Yakovlev’s equally thriving enterprise on the opposite side of the river. Orlov, who returned two days later for a more detailed demonstration, learned that 3000 people worked for Zatrapezny in winter, and since there were ‘incomparably more at the Sobakina factory’, he could count on a combined winter workforce of up to 10,000. Most of them were serfs belonging to Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, elected to the Legislative Commission in March as the noble deputy for Yaroslavl. Shcherbatov, the most ardent defender of Russia’s ancient aristocracy against the pretensions of the service nobility promoted since the time of Peter the Great, was no less critical of lethargic merchants, but since his serfs would otherwise have remained idle in winter, he released them to the enterprising Zatrapezny in exchange for capital to invest in his own weaving sheds, which in turn supplied semi-finished cloth to the larger manufactories.29
Having inspected four such enterprises in and around Yaroslavl, interspersed with visits to local monasteries, Catherine chose to relax as she might have done in St Petersburg. After lunch with the ambassadors, she played cards with them in her apartments and sat down to dinner at a table ‘laid with fitting magnificence and decorated with pyramids of flaming crystal bottles, covered with white wax, which looked very handsome’.30 After such a banquet, Catherine was pleased to report to Panin, ‘the diplomatic corps is apparently very happy and will travel to Kostroma, where the nobles are making great preparations for my arrival tomorrow’. The Yaroslavl nobility had already made a good impression when they were presented to her in the archbishop’s refectory, built by Patriarch Filaret in 1634 on the model of the Kremlin’s Palace of Facets: ‘It was all very seemly,’ the empress reported. Meanwhile, she asked for more government papers to be sent to her: ‘I live idly in the extreme.’31
For all her professed inactivity, Catherine looked tired on her first morning in Kostroma. Although the obligatory triumphal arch had been built at the entrance to the cathedral, the town could provide no accommodation fit for an empress and she had been obliged to sleep on her galley.32 Lunch helped to revive her, and so did reports on the five local textile works, whose rival owners, she was pleased to learn, lived in the sort of harmony she desired for all her subjects. No effort was spared to make Muscovite comparisons explicit, though the aim was always to show that Catherine had surpassed rather than merely imitated past triumphs. Bibikov struck a suitably flattering note by comparing her with Tsar Mikhail Fëdorovich, the founder of the Romanov dynasty who had travelled from the nearby Ipatyevsky monastery to accept the crown in 1613: ‘What joy this town experienced in the presence of that Sovereign, and what joy it must feel now, when you take incomparably greater care of our well-being!’33 For Catherine’s visit to the monastery on 15 May, the ‘tsar’s place’ built for Mikhail–an intricately carved canopy almost thirty feet tall which had been stored away since the fire of 1649–was restored to the Trinity Cathedral and carved with her monogram as a memento for posterity.34
Next day, she sailed on to an estate belonging to the family of Bibikov’s wife, Anastasia Kozlovskaya. Despite their modest means, the Kozlovskys had not only found the wherewithal for a new quayside, but also built the obligatory triumphal gate opposite the empress’s mooring, topped by a crown and with several obelisks to one side. Their investment was rewarded by an invitation to dine on the Tver. And there was more to come. On Ascension Day, 17 May, Catherine was greeted by cheering crowds of neighbouring nobles, merchants and clergy as she followed the procession of the cross up a path flanked by prostrate peasants. During the service, Bibikov himself read from the Gospel at her request. At lunch, Catherine was served by the daughters of the family and her hosts proposed a toast on their knees. She, in turn, enrolled Bibikov’s seven-year-old son as a junior court official. There could hardly have been a more telling ritual celebration of the mutual bonds between a sovereign and her subjects. Although there was never any question of a formal contract between Catherine and the Russian people, she was fully aware of the implicit bargain represented by the cruise. ‘Settlements are very frequent,’ she told her son, ‘and people are all glad to see me, but I know the proverb “one hand washes the other” and so I behave in the same way towards them.’35
No amount of festivity could disguise the harsh realities of Russian provincial society. The Yaroslavl merchants seemed so restive that, on her return to Moscow, Catherine sent a Guards officer to restore order and replaced the provincial governor.36 The brothers of the Fëdorov monastery at Gorodets irritated her even more. Suspicious of monks as an obstacle to Enlightenment, she had seen more than enough of them by the time she arrived there on 19 May to distinguish a well-run establishment from a disorderly one. As the Synod knew, theft and corruption were familiar problems, sometimes involving hundreds of thousands of roubles.37 Here, however, the empress encountered troubles of a different order. She could hardly have been welcomed more generously by the crowd who flocked to the quayside: Vladimir Orlov overheard one of the pious women who strewed shawls and silk scarves in her path refer to her as ‘a little apple’, another as ‘a little ray of sunshine’ and a third as ‘our benefactress’.38 Yet Catherine felt no warmth for the monks as they consecrated their new stone church. Behind its impressive façade, rebuilt from local funds after a fire in 1765, the monastery left much to be desired. Although it enjoyed a proud reputation as the place where St Alexander Nevsky had died in 1263, Abbot Zosima was too old and too ignorant even to say the liturgy properly and, as Catherine discovered, his disrespectful brothers ‘swore loudly while telling him how to do it’. She left them a derisory donation.39
Worse still, the local clergy told her they were losing their flock (and with it their income) to the schism, which had put down tenacious roots deep in the forests around Nizhny Novgorod since Patriarch Nikon first split the Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century. In their turn, the Old Believers, who had been outlawed by Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich for resisting Nikon’s reforms to the liturgy, complained to Yelagin that Orthodox priests treated them ‘like Muslims’ and refused to christen their babies. Faced with such open discord, Catherine realised that there would be no easy route to the ‘tranquillity between citizens which prudence is everywhere trying to establish’. Since it was impossible to trust the local bishop–a ‘weak’ man who surrounded himself with ‘equally weak simpletons’ rather than seek out ‘clean-living clergy, enlightened by learning, and meek of morals’–she secretly urged Archbishop Dimitry to reform the diocese on the models of Novgorod and Tver.40 Insisting on civilised clerical behaviour in the months after the cruise, she urged punishment for priests who extorted money from the Old Believers by violence. Yet the problem was at least in part one of her own making. While her own relatively generous legislation had alarmed the Synod by stimulating a rise in schismatic numbers in the mid-1760s–the official figure of 10,697 reported by the diocese of Nizhny Novgorod in 1765 was surely an underestimate–none of the older, repressive edicts had been repealed. As a result, aggressive clergy were able to exploit precisely the sort of confused legal position that the Legislative Commission was intended to correct, exposing the limits of Catherine’s much-vaunted commitment to religious toleration. Although she continued to condemn the degradation of the Old Believers in the combined causes of humanity and civil tranquillity, she had no intention of undermining the privileged status of the Orthodox Church. As a perceptive Times correspondent noted a century later, it was to remain a feature of ‘the peculiar relations between Church and State’ in Russia that ‘the Government vigilantly protects the Church from attack, and at the same time prevents her from attacking her enemies’.41
Perhaps it was her experiences at Gorodets that led Catherine to be more critical of Nizhny Novgorod than of the other places she had visited. Perhaps it simply failed to live up to the extravagant billing in the Geographical Description. At any rate, the empress found little to please her during her stay in Bishop Feofan (Charnutsky)’s palace. Perched high on a cliff above the Volga, the town’s situation was striking enough, and made the more attractive by the sunshine which had finally broken through. However, in an unconscious anticipation of the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche, Catherine declared Nizhny to be ‘abominably built’.42 Vladimir Orlov agreed: though the cathedral seemed in many ways the finest they had yet seen, there was ‘almost nothing worthy of remark’ in a town whose merchants seemed ‘very meagre’ in view of their advantageous position at the crossroads of Russian trade.43 Not content with decreeing the reconstruction of its principal public buildings, Catherine immediately set about founding a new trading company to boost the local economy.44 News of the impending bankruptcy of the British timber merchant William Gomm seemed to confirm all her suspicions about privileged manufacturers. Demanding ‘precise accounts’ of his various activities, which ranged from tobacco to iron, she was inclined to ‘conclude that all these are sustained out of state money’.45 One of the few bright spots in the visit was when Orlov introduced her to a local inventor, Ivan Kulibin, the protégé of an Old Believer merchant who delighted her with a microscope and telescope. She would see him again in St Petersburg when he had perfected his clock in the form of a mechanical golden egg.46
As her galley weighed anchor on 23 May, Catherine was leaving the longest settled Russian lands for the intersection of the Orthodox and Islamic worlds. She had given her first audience to a Tatar delegation at Kostroma.47 Now she was entering an area where a brutal missionary campaign, sponsored by Church and state in the early 1740s, had culminated in the forcible mass baptism of some 400,000 Finno-Ugric people: Mordvins, Chuvash and Maris. The driving force behind the attack on ‘the vile Mordvin faith’ had been none other than Catherine’s trusty Archbishop Dimitry, who claimed to have barely escaped with his life when a group of Mordvins attacked his convoy in protest against the razing of a sacred burial ground. This incident led to reprisals by Russian troops and mass flight into the forest on the part of the native population. In the following decade, hundreds of mosques were destroyed, particularly in areas where they might ‘seduce’ converts to revert to their former ways.48 Though Orthodox missionary work had continued in a more emollient key under Catherine, who scarcely troubled to conceal her distaste for Elizabeth’s methods, violence was still a living memory in the Volga region in 1767. So it is perhaps no coincidence that no converts were presented to the empress at Kozmodemyansk or Cheboksary (‘superior to Nizhny Novgorod in every way’), or that she sailed straight past Svyazhsk, where the government office in charge of the conversions had been closed in 1764.49 A reminder of the deviant potential of popular Orthodoxy came at Kozmodemyansk, where a merchant presented her with an icon of the Holy Trinity with three faces and four eyes. She sent it to the Holy Synod, anxious lest ‘senseless icon-painters’ succumb to the temptation ‘to add several further arms and legs’ in the manner of Chinese paintings. Appalled by ‘such a ridiculous and unworthy image’, the Synod swiftly decreed that no more icons should be painted without the express permission of its own specialist artists. That was ‘all very well,’ Catherine retorted, but ‘scarcely possible in an empire of Russia’s dimensions’ since ‘it could give rise to a lot of pestering’. She required only that ‘all bishops be instructed that in future no such indecent images should be permitted in their dioceses’.50
Had there been any doubt about the friendliness of the reception she could expect in Tatar territory, it was dispelled when the empress arrived at Kazan on the evening of 26 May. ‘All along the way my welcome has been equally affectionate,’ she told Adam Olsufyev, ‘only here it seems a degree higher owing to the rarity of their seeing me.’51 Overlooking the point where the Volga carves out a majestic 90-degree turn to the south, Kazan is one of the most attractively situated towns in Russia. The decorations in honour of Catherine’s visit were no less impressive. She told Panin that the triumphal arches there were better than any she had so far seen. One of them had been designed by Julius von Canitz, director of the town’s high schools, founded at the instigation of Ivan Shuvalov to feed suitably qualified noble and non-noble entrants to Moscow University in 1758 (the poet Derzhavin was the most famous pupil). Struggling against unsympathetic neighbours, who littered the road to the schools with dung, Canitz increased the roll to a peak of 125 between his appointment in 1765 and 1773. But Vladimir Orlov found the institution ‘in a very bad condition’ in 1767, ‘with 12 teachers and only 40 pupils’ whose speeches in German, French, Russian and Latin were ‘very imperfect’. Catherine did not visit the school, but she encouraged the provincial governor to revive the amateur theatricals that Canitz had instituted there as a way of fostering the ‘pleasant address and the savoir vivre essential in polite society’.52
‘Pleasant address’ seemed a distant enough prospect at Kazan where the cancellation of Canitz’s plays was a symptom of feuding between the governor and local nobles. Such tensions were only to be expected in a provincial society that had only recently begun to break away from patriarchal ways of life, in which the greater part of the nobility, living en famille on small estates in circumstances not much different from their own peasants, had been unaccustomed to socialising.53 Arguments among the Russian elite nevertheless helped to cast a more flattering light on the Tatars. The Orlovs were by no means the last Russians to be impressed by the simplicity of the Muslim service they witnessed at a mosque where the attentive humility of the worshippers contrasted sharply with the disrespectful behaviour of many Orthodox in church.54 Catherine herself watched with pleasure at a ball on 31 May as ‘the Mordvins, Chuvash, Cheremis, Votiaks and Tatars…all danced according to their custom to the sound of Tatar music and songs’. But it was impossible not to be unnerved by the kaleidoscopic variety she encountered in Kazan. In the course of the week she spent there, the empress saw the Tatar children at the seminary, finally received a delegation of recently baptised converts, greeted the son of the Kazakh khan and was presented to a party of Siberian merchants who had travelled almost 500 miles to petition her.55 Such experiences impressed upon her as never before the complexity of her multinational empire. Daunted by the challenge facing the Legislative Commission, she sat down to write her promised letter to Voltaire:
These laws about which people talk so much are, in the final analysis, not yet made. And who can answer for their benefits? In truth, it is posterity, and not us, who will have to decide that question. Imagine, I beg you, that they must serve for Asia as well as Europe, and what a difference in climate, peoples, customs, and even ideas! Here I am in Asia; I wanted to see it with my own eyes. There are twenty people of various kinds in this town, who in no way resemble one another. And yet we have to make a coat that will fit them all. It may well be possible to discover general principles, but the details? And what details! I might say that there is almost a whole world to be created, united, preserved. I may never finish it!56
Although Catherine’s original intention had been to sail all the way to Astrakhan, the Geographical Description allowed for a shorter cruise ending further north, at Dmitrevsk. In the event, to speed her return to Moscow, the empress travelled only as far as Simbirsk, almost 700 miles downstream from Tver and ‘one hour eleven minutes and twenty seconds ahead of St Petersburg time’.57 Here she stayed on an estate belonging to Ivan Orlov. The beauty of the Volga lands was breathtaking. ‘These people are spoiled by God,’ she wrote to Panin, whose brother Peter owned an estate not far away. ‘Everything you can imagine is here in plenty and I do not know what else they could need: everything is available and everything is cheap.’58 Having taken seven weeks to reach her destination, she raced back to Moscow in seven days, travelling by night and sleeping through the heat of the steppe, pausing only to change horses. Hundreds of subjects who lined the roadside to pay homage were passed by in a blur. When she reached the Golovin Palace at 7 p.m. on Thursday 14 June, she needed two days’ rest to recover from the journey.59
Though the Court was immediately plunged into mourning–first for Prince Frederick of Prussia and then for Joseph II’s unhappy second wife, Josepha, who had fallen victim to smallpox in May–there was nothing gloomy about the empress’s mood.60 While Vasily Maikov celebrated her return with verses hymning the usefulness of her enlightened voyage, the deputies converged on Moscow in readiness for the opening of the Legislative Commission. Once Catherine had put the finishing touches to the protocols, she took the opportunity to relax.61 Although she had to review the cavalry on exercise in the Petrovsky woods and there were the usual festivities in honour of her accession day and Paul’s name day on 28 and 29 June, she preferred the less formal entertainments to be found on the various imperial estates dotted around the old capital. As soon as she returned from the Volga, she inspected her new apartments and stables at Kolomenskoye. ‘There is no need for any sort of rich decorations inside,’ she had insisted the previous December, after six months of close involvement with the plans. Though the project had been scheduled for completion by the Feast of St Peter at the end of June, she eventually moved in on 11 July, greeted at the gates by the local clergy in full fig.62 While waiting for Prince Makulov to finish the work, she found time to play on the new sledging pavilion at Pokrovskoye, to drive to the Sparrow Hills on the far side of the city, and to watch the fishing at Tsar Boris’s Ponds.63 She also inspected the stallions brought up from the provinces for the annual sale at the imperial stud farms at Khoroshevo and Pakhrino, where a huge quadrangular stable for 532 horses, under construction since 1752, had been completed in 1764.64 Perhaps she saw Gardi, a black stallion bred from Lombard stock in 1766, whose exceptionally luxuriant tail made him one of the most celebrated animals of the age.65
Hunting was by far Catherine’s most frequent leisure activity. Between 18 June and 15 October, the court journal (by no means necessarily a complete record) registered some thirty-seven separate outings. The detailed breakdown–two grouse shoots, three hare chases and no fewer than thirty-two hawking expeditions–gives a good sense of her personal preferences, already reflected in institutional changes over the previous five years, which had seen the animal hunt cut back while the staff of the bird hunt rose from thirty-nine to forty-nine. As in St Petersburg, the preferred time for hawking was after lunch, at four or five in the afternoon, when Catherine liked to ride out in her carriage with her falconers alongside her to while away the journey.66 They also accompanied her as far as the palace at Bratovshchina on her pilgrimage to worship at the remains of St Sergii on his feast day, 5 August. For all her reservations about monasticism, the empress had always found at the Trinity lavra a scholarly atmosphere quite different from the obscurantism she encountered at the Fëdorov monastery, and it was a pleasure to return to the library she had so admired in 1762.67
All this, however, was but a prelude to the ceremonial opening of the Legislative Commission on 30 July. Whereas her predecessors’ abortive commissions had been dry, bureaucratic affairs, hidden away in the chancelleries of St Petersburg, Catherine wanted hers to begin in a blaze of publicity. It was launched in the manner of a major Court occasion with a glittering carriage procession from the Golovin Palace to the Kremlin. The deputies assembled in the Monastery of Miracles before processing with the empress to a liturgy at the Dormition Cathedral at which those who belonged to other faiths remained outside. Afterwards, Catherine, wearing the small crown, stood before the throne in the audience hall of the old Kremlin palace (it does not survive today) with copies of her Instruction on the table beside her. In a notable departure from earlier Muscovite assemblies, only one clerical deputy had been elected. The ubiquitous Archbishop Dimitry, elected on behalf of the Synod, made a speech comparing the empress with Justinian. Replying on her behalf, the vice chancellor Prince Alexander Golitsyn (Alexander Stroganov’s friend from their student days in Geneva) stressed her hopes that the deputies would confer glory on themselves and their age by contributing to ‘the common good, the happiness of mankind, and the introduction of good manners and humanity, tranquillity, security and happiness to your dear fatherland’. Those who had already gathered in Moscow (some 460 out of the eventual total of 564) were permitted to kiss her hand.68
On the following morning, the Commission began its formal proceedings in the Palace of Facets. Once Bibikov had duly been chosen as its marshal, the deputies listened to a public reading of her Instruction by Grigory Orlov. Though Catherine had compiled her treatise in French, each deputy was presented with a copy of the Russian translation by her secretary, Grigory Kozitsky, published simultaneously with a German version on 30 July. ‘There is not a foreign word in it,’ the empress boasted in a characteristic effort to advertise the richness and subtlety of her adopted language. ‘However, the subject matter is not of the simplest, and I hope that no one will mistake one word for another.’69 Fond of listening to her friends read to her (and conscious of the illiteracy of a good proportion of the Russian elite), Catherine had written her text to be read aloud, giving it ‘an urgent rhythm’ by imitating Montesquieu’s series of ‘short, staccato chapters’ in 526 laconic paragraphs of her own.70 Even so, it took a full five sessions of the Commission to hear it out, as Yelagin and Volkov succeeded Orlov on the reader’s podium.71
Catherine was not an original thinker and the Instruction was not a systematic work. Yet there was nothing conventional about her treatise. It set out her vision of a tolerant, educated society in which her subjects’ liberty and property would be protected by unambiguous laws, established by a virtuous absolute sovereign and implemented by judges who were to presume the accused innocent until proved guilty. The widespread nineteenth-century belief that she had suggested that it was better to release ten guilty people than convict a single blameless man prompted Solzhenitsyn to quip that Stalin had reversed the empress’s maxim by preferring to incarcerate 999 innocents rather than miss a single genuine spy. Although there is no such passage in the Instruction–it was Diderot, in his critical commentary on the text, who declared that ‘for humanity’s sake, we should allow a crime to escape unpunished rather than put innocence to death’–the legend says much about the Instruction’s reputation as a repository of Enlightened thought.72 Never had such radical ideas been publicly proclaimed by a Russian ruler.
‘Russia is a European State.’ Catherine began her first chapter with one of her few original contributions to her treatise, a cultural rather than a geographical claim, designed to challenge the prevailing view of her empire as a slough of oriental backwardness. The same motive underlay her implicit argument that Montesquieu had been wrong to classify Russia as a despotism ruled by fear, the only form of government he thought workable in a very large state and the ultimate insult in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century politics. Catherine instead presented Russia as an absolute monarchy in which the sole ruler voluntarily accepted the limitations imposed by fundamental laws. Historians have argued ever since about the plausibility of this claim, resorting to precisely the sort of semantic debates that the empress hoped to avoid. Her intention was almost certainly not to distort Montesquieu, but rather to adapt the ideas of a writer she admired to Russian circumstances about which he knew little. Even so, there were obvious difficulties with her position. Although contemporary thinkers disagreed about the nature of the fundamental laws by which they set such store, an inviolable law of succession was generally taken to be central. We know from an incomplete draft, written in her own hand and dating from after 1767, that Catherine eventually contemplated such a law. But since it was impossible to promulgate one without admitting that she had taken the throne by force, there was no mention of the subject at the time of the Legislative Commission.73
Serfdom was another controversial question on which the final version of the Instruction said little. Prompted partly by her experiences with Pastor Eisen, Catherine had initially been prepared to contemplate ways of ‘creating new citizens’ (that is, reducing the number of serfs), for example by allowing serfs to accumulate sufficient property to purchase their freedom. But these radical proposals were swiftly dropped after she showed drafts of her treatise to her confidants. Panin famously declared that they were ‘maxims to bring down walls’. Catherine was particularly astonished to discover that even Alexander Stroganov–‘a gentle and very humane person’ who was ‘kind to the point of weakness’–defended ‘the cause of slavery with fury and passion’: ‘There were not twenty people at that time, who thought on that subject like human beings.’ In the circumstances, the best that could be done was to condemn the mass enserfment of free men and to restrict abuses by exhorting masters to treat their serfs with humanity. Meanwhile, Chapter 11 of the Instruction left the deputies in no doubt of the virtues of social stability: ‘There ought to be some to govern, and others to obey.’74
The empress was on surer ground when she turned her practical mind to matters of crime and punishment. Since it was a besetting problem of Russian justice that not even the judges could be sure what the laws actually said, her Instruction identified clarity, precision and uniformity as the key requirements for future legislation. Only if laws were written in plain language and imposed with predictable regularity could her subjects have confidence in the courts. Deterrence was no less important: ‘By making the penal laws always clearly intelligible, word by word, every one may calculate truly, and know exactly the inconveniences of a bad action; a knowledge which is absolutely necessary for restraining people from committing it.’75 Judges were to execute rather than interpret the laws since to interpret a law was almost always to corrupt it and only the sovereign had the right to interpret laws which she had made. Nothing could be so dangerous as the idea that the spirit of the law was more important than the letter. That way, ‘we should see the same crimes punished differently, at different times, by the very same court of judicature.’ Torture was firmly declared ‘contrary to all the dictates of nature and reason; even mankind itself cries out against it’. Catherine was equally opposed to the death penalty: ‘The most certain curb upon crimes, is not the severity of the punishment, but the absolute conviction in the people, that delinquents will inevitably be punished.’ Even so, it was better to prevent crimes than to punish them, and that made education a clear priority: ‘Would you prevent crimes? Order it so that the light of knowledge may be diffused among the people.’ But were there enough people? As we have seen, Catherine shared the widespread contemporary anxiety–particularly acute in the vast, empty spaces of the Russian empire–that the world’s population had fallen since classical times. The way to increase it was to make people happy: ‘The more happily people live under a government the more easily the number of the inhabitants increases.’76
Such ideas may have been familiar to Enlightened circles in Western Europe, but to the majority of the empress’s humble provincial deputies they came as a bolt from the blue. The Commission itself was an equally stunning phenomenon. As Henry Shirley reported to Whitehall:
The Russians think and talk of nothing else, and in seeing the representatives of several nations, so very different both as to dress, customs, and religion, such as the Samoiedes, Cossacks, Bulgarians, Tartars etc., and whom they suppose to be (perhaps not without foundation) entirely dependants of the Russian Empire, assemble in their capital, they are apt to conclude, that they are now the wisest, the happiest, and the most powerful nation in the universe.77
The barely concealed note of sarcasm reflected Shirley’s disappointment that Catherine had failed to create an institution on the model of the Westminster Parliament. He was particularly offended by the secret gallery, originally built to allow female members of the Muscovite royal family to observe ambassadorial audiences, ‘from whence she can hear every thing that is said, without being seen’:
The Russians instead of perceiving how much this takes from the freedom their deputies ought to enjoy, admire this very much, and think it an undoubted proof of their sovereign’s love and regard to them. But, to render the farce as complete as possible, the deputies went yesterday in a body to thank Her Imperial Majesty for the instructions she has been pleased to give them, and to offer her the new titles of the Great, the Wise, and the Mother of her country.78
In a carefully choreographed performance at the Golovin Palace, Catherine formally refused the honour, saying that it should be left to posterity to judge. The episode nevertheless provided a gratifying ritual confirmation of her own dubious legitimacy–almost certainly the prime motive for convening the Legislative Commission in the first place.79
Anxious to avoid debates among ‘the blind, the semi-educated, and the half-witted’, Catherine made it clear from the start that her own treatise was to be the sole intellectual guide to the Commission’s proceedings.80 Here was another apparent restriction on the deputies’ freedom. And yet to think in such terms is surely anachronistic. Since no tsar had ritually consulted his subjects since 1653, the very notion of public discussion in Russia lay beyond living memory. Lacking a tradition of civic responsibility, the deputies needed to learn not only to speak, but, no less importantly, to listen. Catherine, having sought their advice on the condition of the empire, more in the manner of a sixteenth-century Humanist than an eighteenth-century Parliamentarian, needed to provide the conditions in which they could be heard. That was why she paid such close attention to the rules governing behaviour: deputies were forbidden from interrupting one another (one noble was fined and forced to apologise to a non-noble deputy whom he had insulted), no swords were to be worn, and fighting was to be punishable by fines or exclusion from the chamber.81 Here was an even more fundamental conception of mutual tolerance than the one that the empress sought to convey in a letter to Voltaire:
I think you would be pleased to attend this assembly, where orthodox sits alongside heretic and muslim, and all three listen calmly to a heathen; and all four often confer to make their opinions mutually acceptable. So well have they forgotten the habit of burning one another at the stake, that if anyone were sufficiently ill-advised to suggest to a deputy that he should burn his neighbour to please the supreme being, I can say on behalf of all of them that there is not one who would fail to reply: ‘He is a man, just as I am; and according to the first paragraph of her Imperial Majesty’s Instruction, we must do one another all the good we can, and no harm.’82
While Catherine was pleased to encourage measured discussion among Russia’s free population at the Legislative Commission, she was far less tolerant of unsolicited complaints from the serfs. Most of the 600 petitions with which she had been bombarded on the Volga cruise were submitted by soldier-farmers and newly baptised converts bemoaning a shortage of land. These led her to stress the need for the General Survey, begun in 1766, to be extended to this very area. However, as she told the Senate on her return, there were also ‘a few unfounded petitions from serfs complaining of their owners’ exactions, which were returned to them with the instruction not to submit such petitions in future’. Among them was a petition from serfs on an estate belonging to Adam Olsufyev’s family, who not only refused to return to work as she insisted, but paid for a representative to plead their case in Moscow. When an infantry regiment was sent to reward them for their disobedience, 130 peasants were arrested and some were flogged with the knout. Further rioting on estates where peasants had presented petitions to Catherine prompted her to attempt to limit the number of such petitions in future. Her edict of 22 August 1767, which confirmed a range of earlier laws limiting the right of serfs to denounce their masters to the authorities, stopped short of threatening the torture that the Senate had been prepared to contemplate. Nevertheless, it increased the penalty for wrongful petitioning by adding hard labour for life to the list of punishments already decreed in 1765: a month’s hard labour in the Siberian mines for the first offence, a year’s hard labour for a second offence, and public whipping and perpetual exile for a third. This menacing edict was intended merely as a stopgap until the Legislative Commission could formulate a suitable alternative. Since this was never done, and the edict of 22 August was never repealed, it served both to consolidate the landowners’ powers over their serfs for the remainder of the reign and to deter petitioners from all but the noble estate. Not long after becoming Holy Roman Emperor in 1765, Joseph II had rashly aspired to ‘give the whole universe freedom’ to bring him their complaints and he remained receptive to petitioners from all classes of the population. Catherine strongly disapproved, believing, as she told Baron Grimm after Joseph’s death, that he had ‘ruined his health with his eternal audiences’.83
Her own main personal concern that autumn was the health of Aleksey Orlov. Rendered immobile by a bad back (the result of too many jolting carriage rides), he was believed to be at death’s door from chronic stomach pains and jaundice. From an account of his symptoms sent on behalf of the anxious empress, doctors in Vienna, Leiden and Leipzig diagnosed gallstones, recommended a less gargantuan diet and advised their patient to take the waters. But since he was too ill to travel abroad, and unable even to join his four brothers for a private lunch with Catherine on her name day, she and Panin went to visit him after Christmas.84 If she needed a further memento mori, it had come on 18 December, birthday of the late Empress Elizabeth, when Catherine donned mourning dress for a memorial service at the Chrysostom monastery before going on to Andrey Shuvalov’s mansion to watch for almost an hour as Archbishop Dimitry’s funeral procession crawled along Myasnitskaya Street. To dispel the gloom, she took coffee with her host and his family before returning to the Golovin Palace for a game of billiards.85
The discomforts of life in that draughty wooden building had long since exhausted its minimal charms. Already on 12 October she had told Falconet of her intention to return to St Petersburg.86 Irritated by slow progress in the Legislative Commission, which had laboriously worked through each social estate’s submissions without reaching any resolutions, she announced in November that its sessions would be suspended in the middle of the following month. The deputies were to reconvene in St Petersburg in February.87 She travelled north earlier, setting off through streets lined with cheering subjects after attending the consecration of a new church on the Solyanka on Saturday 19 January. At the end of a fifty-three-hour journey via a sequence of ‘nasty’ roadside palaces, it was a relief to be home in time to celebrate Grigory Orlov’s name day, 25 January. ‘You can’t believe how good Tsarskoye Selo is,’ she told Panin. Town seemed even better: ‘Petersburg is paradise by comparison with Ispahan, and especially the palace.’88
Catherine was particularly delighted by the large turnout at her first Court reception day and the celebratory mood continued in the festivities surrounding her thirty-ninth birthday. Galuppi pulled out all the stops for his last opera in Russia. When they met shortly after the composer’s return to Venice, the renowned Dr Burney thought him still ‘full of genius and fire’ and later noted that he seemed ‘to have constantly kept pace with all the improvements and refinements of the times, and to have been as modern in his dramatic music, to the last year of his life, as ever’.89 Iphigenia in Tauride, premiered on 27 April after Catherine’s private audience with the Austrian ambassador, Prince Lobkowitz, was promptly acclaimed in Russia as ‘the strongest of his compositions’. It had a more vigorous plot than most opera seria, and the ten basses, thirteen tenors, thirteen altos and fifteen trebles of the chapel choir gave an ‘outstanding performance’ of its innovative, integral choruses.90 Catherine had spent the birthday itself at Tsarskoye Selo. After church, she invested Aleksey Orlov with the Order of St Andrew and gave him 200,000 roubles (fifty times Galuppi’s annual salary) to pay for his convalescence.91
Meanwhile the Court was re-adapting to life in the north after its prolonged stay in the old capital. At the end of his affair with Countess Stroganova, Panin had unexpectedly found happiness (and renewed respectability) with one of Catherine’s maids of honour, Countess Anna Sheremeteva. Since he was by no means a rich man, her income of 40,000 roubles and family connections made this, as the Prussian ambassador reported, ‘the most eminent match that could be made in Russia’.92 A less fortunate courtier was forced to appeal to the empress when his mother-in-law refused to allow his wife to accompany him to St Petersburg. Catherine sent an official to fetch the girl, entrusting him with a letter for Moscow’s Governor General that combines a sense of legal propriety with unmistakeable hauteur:
If the mother becomes stubborn and wants to travel with her daughter, then prevent the mother from leaving the town by my command and bring the daughter whatever happens. If they say that she is ill, then fetch a doctor to examine her to see whether Lopukhina is fit to travel without endangering her life. If the mother cries out a lot, then you should order her to be silent by my command. So that all this should not strike you as strange, let me explain in confidence that the mother will not allow her daughter to join her husband and that the husband has appealed to me to give him his wife. I found his request so just and so in conformity with the laws that I could not refuse; but the mother is to be told nothing of this. Please give the Court official any assistance he needs: the shorter and less public the scene, the better.93
For her own part, it was time to catch up with old friends. Within a couple of days of her return to St Petersburg, she had made an informal visit to the girls at the Smolny Institute. Alexander Stroganov entertained her to lunch in March. After Easter, she received Archbishop Gavriil, elected to the Legislative Commission in place of Dimitry, who was escorted to his audience in the Diamond Room by ten noble deputies.94 Then tragedy struck when Panin’s fiancée died from smallpox. Despite her sympathy for his loss, Catherine was more anxious about the threat to her son. Though his Young Court had always been alert to the danger from urban epidemics, now the menace was closer to home. 95 As the empress secretly admitted to Yelagin, the public would never forgive her if the legitimate heir to the throne were to die in her care. ‘I am very worried, not being sure what to do for the best, since everything in this critical situation is bad.’96 Reduced to flitting from one suburban palace to another in the hope of dodging the disease, she tried to relax on the boats and toboggans at Gatchina, and spent longer than usual at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘Here I am with my son for the seventh week running,’ she told Saltykov at the end of May, ‘and there’s such an outbreak of the pox, and that of the worst kind, that I decided it was better to live here. It’s grist to my mill to have a pretext to stay in the country.’97 Nothing, she told Panin, could quite match her favourite summer palace:
Count Nikita Ivanovich. Having parted from you on Thursday, we found ourselves in an autumn zephyr in the hills on the way to Krasnoye Selo, although we had left Tsarskoye Selo in very warm weather. On Friday, we travelled in the rain to Gatchina and came back in such a sharp frost that we all wished we had taken our fur coats. Yesterday was Saturday, and although the skies were grey, we didn’t feel the cold and are warm and well at Peterhof. Still, it touches the heart to see everything here so neglected, although I have spent a hundred and eighty thousand on it since 1762, including twenty thousand to pay off the debt on the iron piping alone, and the devil alone knows what has been done with the money if it hasn’t been used to repair Peterhof. I think it may have been used to pay off the debts of the Construction Chancellery.98
As Catherine knew, the chancellery was still as active as ever. Shortly before leaving Moscow, she had agreed to spend 64,915 roubles on marble from the western shores of Lake Ladoga for a new cathedral in honour of St Isaac of Dalmatia. The total budget, to be paid for from state funds, was almost four times as much.99 As the empress explained, it was not the first attempt to build such a church, which had ‘suffered more tribulations and persecutions than the early Christians’.100 Peter the Great had been born on St Isaac’s feast day–30 May 1672–but his own St Isaac’s Cathedral, where he married Catherine I in 1712, had burned down five years later and its replacement proved to have been built too close to the river. Chevakinsky was appointed to design a grandiose Baroque successor in the last year of Elizabeth’s reign, but by 1768 a revised project was in the hands of Rinaldi, currently building a mansion for the Naryshkins on the western side of St Isaac’s Square.101 Although it was not until the following January that Catherine saw the architect’s model of the cathedral–a work of art in itself, promising a riot of jasper, marble and porphyry in the manner of the Marble Palace she had commissioned that same year for Grigory Orlov–by midsummer, it was time for her to lay the foundation stone. She inspected the site on 10 July, following lunch with Betskoy and a brief visit to the Academy of Arts on the other side of the river. After reviewing naval exercises in the Gulf on her yacht, the Saint Catherine–‘yesterday and the day before,’ she boasted, ‘I covered ninety miles by sea’–Catherine went to Oranienbaum for the feast of St Panteleymon the Healer on 27 July and to Peterhof for the customary summer sanctification service four days later. Then, braving her fears of the pox, she was back in St Petersburg for the foundation ceremony on 8 August.102
Since this was the first public spectacle witnessed by William Richardson, tutor to the sons of the new British ambassador, Lord Cathcart, let Richardson describe the scene:
All the space to be occupied by the church had been previously railed in; and into this place, only persons of high rank, and those who had a particular permission, were admitted. An immense multitude of people were assembled without. An arch, supported upon eight pillars of the Corinthian order, and adorned with garlands, was raised immediately over the place intended for the altar. Beneath this arch was a table covered with crimson velvet, fringed with gold; upon which was placed a small marble chest, fixed to a pully directly above the table. On a side-table, fixed to one of the pillars, was a large gold plate, two pieces of marble in the form of bricks, a gold plate with mortar, and other two plates of the same metal, in which were two hammers and two trowels of gold.103
Although guests had been ordered to take their places by 9.30 a.m., it was not until midday that the carriages bearing the imperial party arrived from the Summer Palace.104 Paul came first, dressed in naval uniform and attended by Panin. Then, bringing up the rear of a solemn clerical procession, Catherine herself appeared, wearing ‘a silver-stuff negligee, the ground pea-green, with purple flowers and silver trimming’, and carrying a small, green parasol. She made a powerful impression:
The Empress of Russia is taller than the middle size, very comely, gracefully formed, but inclined to grow corpulent; and of a fair complexion, which, like every other female in this country, she endeavours to improve by the addition of rouge. She has a fine mouth and teeth; and blue eyes, expressive of scrutiny, something not so good as observation, and not so bad as suspicion. Her features are in general regular and pleasing. Indeed, with regard to her appearance altogether, it would be doing her injustice to say it was masculine, yet it would not be doing her justice to say it was entirely feminine.
After some gold coins had been consecrated by the clergy and laid in the chest, it was closed and raised by the pulley. The table disappeared through a trapdoor, so that the empress could lower the chest into place. Once she had cemented a marble brick on top of it, Paul and the bishops followed suit with trowel and mortar, along with some of the attendant notables and the foreign ambassadors. The ceremony was brought to a close with an oration by Archimandrite Platon. Richardson sensed his eloquence but, having no Russian, failed to understand the distinctly political address in which the preacher heralded a new temple of Solomon with Catherine in the role of King David. She was wise as the king of the Israelites, Platon proclaimed, only more peace-loving (a claim which stood at odds with her increasingly belligerent stance on the Polish question). Singling out the empress’s humanitarian Instruction for special praise, Platon portrayed the new cathedral as a monument to Russia’s greatness and the empress’s personal glory.105Timofey Ivanov drove home the point with a commemorative medal, designed on the basis of Rinaldi’s model, which quoted from the gospel of St Matthew (22: 21): ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’106
No less anxious to pander to the empress’s obsession with posterity was the Parisian sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet, a friend of Diderot and Prince Dimitry Golitsyn who had recommended him to Catherine as the ideal candidate for the statue of Peter the Great she had determined to commission as early as 1764. Falconet arrived in St Petersburg at the end of October 1766, working from a studio on the site of Elizabeth’s temporary wooden palace. ‘Diderot,’ he exclaimed just three months later, ‘you can’t imagine how this unusual woman can elevate one’s merits and talents.’107 In June 1768 he told her of a drawing ‘that I shall show to no one until Your Majesty has seen it: Catherine the Second gives laws to her Empire. She deigns to lower her sceptre to propose to her subjects a means of rendering them happier. If this simple idea is not convenient, I know nothing better nor more glorious.’108 Catherine agreed that it was a noble idea, ‘much better’ than his earlier plan to depict her with ‘tottering Russia’, a reference to the coup of 1762 that was judged ‘injurious to Peter III and to Russia’: ‘You will tell me when it is time for me to come to see the statue and the drawing.’109 Knowing that she had never previously authorised a statue of herself, Falconet wondered why there should be a problem when it was proposed to strike medallions to commemorate the new law code. Only her own ‘delicatesse’ stood in its way, Catherine replied, ‘but perhaps the beauty of your drawing will make me forget my previous resolutions’.110
Apparently it did not. Though the empress sat for at least two busts and two medallions by Falconet’s attractive young pupil Marie-Anne Collot,111 his own statue was never done, perhaps because Catherine had grown anxious about the progress of the Legislative Commission. Its sessions in the long Winter Palace gallery overlooking the river still seemed active enough, as Lord Cathcart discovered during a break in the proceedings on 18 August:
The room seemed so full, and the different groups so busy in conversation, that it was impossible to look down upon the assembly without thinking of a beehive. The empress’s throne fills one end of the room, the other end and both sides have benches as in the House of Commons; on the left side of the throne is a table of State. At the upper end there was a chair for the Marshal of the commission, and on one side two other chairs, one for the director who minutes the proceedings, and the other for the procureur-général who is there as commissioner for the empress and who has a right to interpose in her name, in case the standing orders should be attached.112
Catherine, however, worried that all this activity seemed to be leading nowhere. In turning to discuss justice and judicial procedure when they reconvened in St Petersburg, the deputies had become lost in a morass of shapeless detail. Only a desperate attempt to revise their procedures had focused their attentions on a draft law on the rights of the nobility at the beginning of July, and even then, no decisions were reached.113
The fundamental problem facing the Commission was the unbridgeable gap between Catherine’s expectations and the preoccupations of most deputies. Having written in one of her earliest notebooks that ‘The thing that is most subject to drawbacks is the making of a new law’, she was well aware of the restraining power of custom.114 Her Instruction followed Montesquieu in stressing the need to prepare people’s minds for new legislation–scarcely the philosophy of an intemperate despot. On the other hand, having once embarked on a project, the empress was always impatient for swift results. She had boasted to Voltaire during the Christmas recess that the Russian people were ‘an excellent ground in which a good seed will quickly grow’.115 But this turned out to be wishful thinking. She had misjudged both the amount of preparatory work required to ensure the smooth running of the Commission and the inherent conservatism of the deputies. ‘The number of ignorant noblemen,’ she later admitted, ‘was immeasurably larger than I could ever have supposed.’116 Living in the company of sophisticated friends, Catherine had presumed that their views were widely shared. Many of them took some part in the Commission: Panin as the author of the submission by the Moscow nobility, Grigory Orlov as a noble deputy for St Petersburg, Andrey Shuvalov as director of the journals recording the proceedings. The young Count Semën Vorontsov read Beccaria just before the Commission convened. But while such men reflected the interests of Russia’s educated, Western-oriented elite, the overwhelming majority of the deputies had little interest in either philosophy or national politics. Their interests were selfish and parochial.117
We can only guess what might have transpired had the Legislative Commission been allowed to run its course. Its proceedings generated a vast reservoir of information, much of which helped to inform Catherine’s subsequent legislation, and its sub-commissions continued to work until around 1774. The gold and silver tabernacle donated by the empress to the Dormition Cathedral on the Commission’s tenth anniversary depicted Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments as a reminder of her status as lawgiver.118 A skeletal secretariat was still employed at the end of her reign. By then, however, the whole project was little more than a memory. All through the empress’s time in Moscow, the international situation had been increasingly destabilised by her support for a group of Orthodox fanatics in overwhelmingly Catholic Poland, a perverted stand in favour of religious toleration which resulted in civil war. When Cossack troops were sent to suppress it in June 1768, they crossed the border into the Ottoman Empire, sacking the little frontier town of Balta and massacring its Jews. In retaliation, the Turks declared war in October by imprisoning the Russian ambassador in Constantinople. Since most deputies were required for military service, Catherine announced the suspension of the Legislative Commission on 18 December. The 203rd and final plenary session was held on 12 January 1769. Now all Europe had another extraordinary prospect to occupy its attention. ‘An unsuccessful foreign war tends to impair the authority of all despots,’ warned William Richardson, ‘and this is the first foreign war she has ever waged.’ 119