CHAPTER EIGHT

IMPERIAL AMBITIONS 1768–1772

Catherine’s readiness to provoke a conflict in defence of Orthodoxy occasioned widespread surprise. ‘Where bigotry baffles reason, and where fanaticism supplies courage,’ Sir George Macartney remarked in 1766, the result was bound to be uncertain: ‘A religious war, however justly undertaken, is always of the most odious nature, and of all wars of the most doubtful success.’¹ However, if the empress’s cause proved unexpected, then there had never been any doubt of her seething ambition. Having entered the Seven Years’ War in 1756 as the junior partner in the anti-Prussian coalition, Russia had emerged by 1763 as ‘the arbiter of eastern Europe’.² Victories over Frederick the Great at Gross-Jägersdorf and Kunersdorf, not long after he had himself routed the French at Rossbach, had raised memories of the glorious era of Peter the Great. No ambassador accredited to St Petersburg in the early years of her reign could fail to sense Russia’s growing self-confidence. ‘This Court rises hourly higher and higher in her pride,’ Macartney reported in 1765, ‘and dazzled by her present prosperity looks with less deference upon other powers and with more admiration on herself.’³

Now Catherine was keen to translate isolated military triumphs into lasting diplomatic prestige. As Joseph II discovered during his visit to Russia in 1780, she was closely involved in day-to-day diplomacy. ‘Among the conversations in which our guest engaged me hourly,’ reported the empress’s secretary, Alexander Bezborodko, ‘he asked me about Her Imperial Majesty’s way of managing business, and was amazed when in answer to his question I said that all the dispatches from our ministry, whether they be sent to our ambassadors or to [foreign] courts, have been approved in draft by the Sovereign herself, so that not a single paper goes out that has not been presented to Her Majesty in the original: he thought that relations or letters were put up to her only in abbreviated form, and only those directly worthy of her attention.’⁴ Yet for all her hard work, there was a limit to what Catherine could do. Russia’s finances were as badly dented by the war as any other power’s, her soldiers remained unpaid, and the empress’s position on the throne, though never seriously threatened, even by Mirovich, was sufficiently uncertain to deter any grandiose foreign adventure.

Poland, over which Russia had effectively established a protectorate since 1717, seemed to offer the greatest prospect of gain at the lowest level of risk. In September 1763, the death of King Augustus III (who was also the Elector of Saxony) opened up what Princess Dashkova later described as ‘a vast field for political intrigue’.⁵ Following the convictions of a lifetime, Chancellor Bestuzhev tried to persuade Catherine to support another Saxon candidate for the Polish throne, acceptable to Austria and France. His failure marked the end of a long career and a decisive moment in Russian foreign policy. Instead the empress decided to support the election of a native Pole–and she knew just who she wanted. Soon after her coup, Catherine had promised Stanislaw Poniatowski that she would make him king, just as Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams had once imagined. According to Dashkova, whose husband died while serving with the Russian troops sent to put pressure on the Poles, Grigory Orlov and Zakhar Chernyshëv were appalled by the idea. Neither relished the prospect of a revival of the empress’s relationship with her former lover. They need not have worried. When it came to international power politics, Catherine always set personal feelings aside. Now it was up to Nikita Panin, who took charge of Russian foreign policy at the end of October 1763, to realise her manipulative intent.⁶

It was far from easy for Panin to hold the balance of forces at Court. Behind the scenes, Zakhar Chernyshëv was already so eager to annexe Polish territory that on 6 October he outlined a plan, probably hatched earlier in the spring, to redraw the border along a line similar to the one eventually agreed in the first partition of 1772.⁷ When the news leaked out, Catherine promptly denied any expansionist ambitions. Claiming that she ruled on the basis of ‘justice, equity and humanity’, a sanctimonious manifesto of December 1763 declared:

If ever malice and falsehood could invent a rumour absolutely untrue, it is certainly that which people have dared to spread about, that we allegedly decided to press for the election of a Diet simply in order that with its help and connivance, we might facilitate the means of invading certain provinces of the King of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, to dismember them and then to appropriate them for ourselves and our Empire. The beginning of our reign alone is enough to destroy at its root this sort of fiction and deprive it of all likelihood and foundation. We hold that the prosperity of a people does not consist in foreign conquests. We are firmly convinced that a ruler is only greater when he directs the springs of government towards the welfare and happiness of his people.⁸

It was true that Russia had little to gain from conquering a state whose overwhelmingly Catholic population, Jewish minority, unruly noble elite, and direct borders with Prussia and Austria would all have been liabilities to St Petersburg (as indeed they proved in the era of the partitions). But that did not mean that Catherine had no ulterior motives in Poland. In fact, Augustus’s demise provided her with a perfect opportunity to extend her indirect control over a vital buffer state by installing a pliant ruler and keeping his government weak.⁹

She knew that her rivals had similar ambitions. ‘Don’t laugh at me because I leapt from my chair when I heard of the death of the king of Poland,’ she warned Panin: ‘the king of Prussia jumped up from his table.’¹⁰ Fortunately for her, Frederick was even more preoccupied by internal reconstruction than she was and decided that his best option was to collaborate with Russia to frustrate his Austrian rivals. Like the Prussians, the French were stymied by their disastrous performance in the Seven Years’ War and without their support the Habsburgs were powerless to intervene. Given this relatively free hand, Catherine was able to engineer Stanislaw’s election in August 1764.¹¹ To Panin, she could hardly restrain her delight:

Nikita Ivanovich! I congratulate you on the king we have made. This event greatly increases my trust in you, since I see how faultless all your measures were. I didn’t want to miss showing you how pleased I am. My back aches so badly that I cannot hold a pen for long, so would you kindly, having explained the reason, take my place on this occasion and write to Count Keyserling and to Prince Repnin, expressing my pleasure at their work and zeal, through which they have obtained no small glory both for themselves and for us. And order a letter to the new King to be prepared for my signature, in reply to his. Either I have rheumatism in my back or I am dying. I fear that it may be a stone, only after a bath it felt better for the first time, so perhaps it is only a chill.¹²

There was a price to pay for Frederick’s collaboration, and it came in the form of a defensive alliance with Prussia, concluded in March 1764. In the unstable balance of power bequeathed by the Seven Years’ War, Catherine would have preferred to keep her distance from both Austria and Prussia who were now her main rivals to fill the vacuum created by the decline of French influence in eastern Europe. However, since Austria and Prussia were themselves implacable enemies, competing for the domination of the smaller German states, it was utopian to suppose that Russia could stay neutral for long.¹³ Since the Austrians remained allied to the French, who continued to resent Russian policies against their traditional satellites, Sweden, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, an Austrian alliance for Catherine was impossible. Frederick, who made it a principle of Prussian policy ‘to seek an alliance with those of one’s neighbours capable of delivering the most dangerous blows’, was swift to see the opportunity presented by Catherine’s ambitions in Poland.¹⁴ Outwitting her inexperienced ambassador in Berlin, he inveigled the empress into an alliance by pretending that he might otherwise strike a wholly improbable deal with the Turks.¹⁵

Making a virtue from necessity, Panin envisaged the Prussian alliance as the first building block in a new ‘Northern System’ designed to protect Russia’s hegemony in the Baltic. He described what he meant to Ivan Chernyshëv, who set out for London as ambassador in 1768:

By the Northern System we have in mind and mean the largest and closest possible union of northern powers in a direct focal point for our common interest, in order to oppose to the Bourbon and Austrian Houses a firm counter-weight among European Courts, and a northern peace completely free from their influence, which has led so often to harmful effects.¹⁶

This was easier said than done. Frederick had no interest in an alliance with Britain and was anxious not to be drawn into Russian machinations in Sweden. Willing enough to support such machinations as a way of embarrassing the French, the British saw no reason to support Catherine’s ambitions in Poland or the Ottoman Empire. Though the empress renewed the Anglo-Russian trade treaty of 1734 in 1766, on terms favourable to Russia, Macartney failed to conclude a diplomatic alliance because Catherine insisted on unilateral British assistance in the event of war with the Turks. ‘This Court has listened to me with the most provoking phlegm and the most stoical indifference,’ the ambassador was forced to admit. ‘The result of the whole is a flat refusal.’¹⁷ In the end, the only tangible evidence of a wider Northern System was the defensive alliance concluded between Russia and Denmark–still a significant naval presence in the Baltic–at the end of February 1765. This scarcely counted as a close union of northern powers. And even if it had, there remained an obvious defect in Panin’s Northern System, which left the southern and south-western parts of Russia’s extensive borders exposed to precisely the sort of incident that sparked off the Russo-Turkish War in 1768.

Though he remained at Catherine’s side until 1781, Panin’s authority was never the same again. Against his advice, she decided to direct the war through a newly created council, which bore all the marks of her deft approach to government. Though the council was a purely advisory body, the empress left its members in no doubt that they were complicit in any decisions that might emerge from their deliberations:

I intend to carry out all the measures proposed with great firmness, since I take them to be measures which you, moved by zeal, fervour and devotion to me and to your country, have unanimously advised me to take in this important matter: hence, if any one still has any doubts, let him say so without loss of time.¹⁸

Not content with risking her empire in war with the Turks, Catherine risked her own life in October 1768 by electing to be inoculated against smallpox. As an advocate of fresh air and a wholesome diet, the empress generally maintained a healthy disrespect for doctors–‘charlatans’, as she described them on the death of the French king, ‘who always do you more harm than good, witness Louis XV, who had ten of them around him and is dead all the same’.¹⁹ Still, faced with two evils, as she emphasised to Frederick the Great, ‘every reasonable man’ would choose the lesser, ‘all other things being equal’.²⁰ So, rather than relapse into more indecisive shuttling between suburban palaces–her pattern, as we have seen, throughout the summer of 1768–Catherine determined to submit herself to a controversial treatment. Inoculation had been banned by the Sorbonne as an interference with the workings of Providence and was opposed even in some Enlightened circles on the grounds that it might lead to infection. Provided all went well, she could claim to have acted both rationally and courageously.²¹

The doctor chosen to perform the operation was the fifty-six-year-old Thomas Dimsdale, whose celebrated treatise on the subject had been published in 1767.²² When he arrived in St Petersburg at the end of August, Dimsdale found himself ‘upon as free and easy a footing in the imperial palace as he could be in the house of any nobleman in England’.²³ Despite his execrable French and Catherine’s minimal English, doctor and patient established an immediate rapport (their interpreter, on days when he was not paralysed by gout, was Alexander Cherkasov, who had studied informally at Cambridge in the early 1740s and now headed the Medical College). Understandably nervous about exposing a foreign sovereign to risk, and sharing the widespread belief that diseases varied according to climate and geography, Dimsdale hesitated to operate until he was sure that his treatment would be as effective in Russia as it had been at home. Catherine gave him the confidence to continue, even when tests on impoverished local youths proved equivocal. Adding sauce to an already titillating story, a Scottish merchant in St Petersburg reported that the doctor, whose presence in Russia was an open secret, had ‘free access’ every morning to the empress’s bedroom, where Grigory Orlov often sat on the bedspread beside them.²⁴ Grigory, however, was away on a hunting expedition when Catherine finally summoned Dimsdale to the Winter Palace in the dead of night on 12 October. Apart from Cherkasov, only two others were present at the inoculation: Panin, the treatment’s leading advocate, and Caspar von Saldern, the fixer from Holstein who had attached himself to Paul’s household in the 1760s.

Complaining of low mood, Catherine retreated to Tsarskoye Selo on the following day. At first she was able to live relatively normally, chatting and playing cards in the afternoon, taking regular walks outside and even a drive to inspect the new road to Gatchina.²⁵ As she retired to her apartments over the course of the next few days, Panin let it be known that she continued to work, and that her only reported symptom, other than ‘a very favourable eruption of small pox, very few in number’, was a mild fever.²⁶She also complained of persistent giddiness, ‘in a manner according to her like drunkenness’, and of mild constipation, which Dimsdale treated with his trusty bedtime laxative made from calomel, crabs’ claws and tartar emetic, either crushed into pills or mixed with syrup or jelly. To keep her temperature down, he prescribed the occasional glass of cold water and a stroll in the unheated Great Hall. Having noticed the first marks on her arm on the evening of 19 October, he spent the whole of the following day on watch in her apartments. Catherine woke at seven, having ‘sweated considerably in the night’. ‘The inflammation of the arms was spread considerably & a number of small pustules were discoverable around the incision.’ Only one spot had appeared on her forehead, offering no serious threat to her complexion, and two more on her hand or wrist. ‘Her complaints were of stiffness under the arms, particularly the left, of some pain in her back and legs and a sort of general weariness, but not sleepy as yesterday. Upon the whole Her Majesty was very brisk and cheerful the whole afternoon.’²⁷ Now the danger was past, she began a period of active convalescence, informing Saltykov in Moscow on 27 October that she had not only remained on her feet throughout, but experienced only the sort of minor discomfort that was to be expected. ‘I tell you this happy outcome so that you can counter any erroneous rumours.’²⁸ After another drive and a walk in the fresh air, she felt sufficiently confident to reassure Falconet, who had written to her in mock reproach for defying the Sorbonne, that she had no intention of succumbing to the disease: ‘They often decide in favour of absurdities, which in my opinion should have discredited them long ago; after all, the human species are no longer goslings.’²⁹

Following Catherine’s return to St Petersburg on 1 November, Paul, who might have been inoculated earlier had he not been recovering from chickenpox, was treated next evening after a formal Te Deum in the palace chapel led by Archbishop Gavriil.³⁰ More than a hundred nobles soon followed suit. ‘Starting with me and my son,’ Catherine boasted to Ivan Chernyshëv a fortnight later, ‘there is not an aristocratic household that does not contain some of the inoculated–and many complain that they had smallpox naturally and so cannot follow the fashion.’ Grigory Orlov and Kirill Razumovsky were among the ‘countless others’ who had ‘passed through Mr Dimsdale’s hands’, including even ‘beauties’ such as Princess Shcherbatova and Princess Trubetskaya. ‘See what setting an example can do! Three months ago, no one wanted to hear of it, and yet now they look on it as salvation.’³¹

Once Paul’s survival seemed assured, the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar–the Presentation of the Mother of God in the Temple on 21 November–marked a natural opportunity for a formal service of thanksgiving in the Winter Palace chapel. ‘On the inside of a rail which extended across the room,’ William Richardson recorded, ‘and close by the pillar which was next to the altar, on the south side, stood the Empress and her son; and also on the inside of the rail, and on each side of the altar, was a choir of musicians. All the rest who witnessed, or took part in the solemnity, excepting the priests, stood on the outside of the rail.’³² This service, commemorated annually at Court until 1795 and perpetuated by the Senate in February 1769 in churches across the empire, was the first of a barrage of measures designed to propagate the image of a selfless and knowledgeable empress conferring benefits on her people. Bells rang out day and night from every church in the capital for the next two days, with fireworks across the city at midnight.³³ No one was more relieved than Dimsdale. ‘I shall never forget the care you gave me,’ Catherine later wrote to him, ‘and the anxiety you experienced in the time following my inoculation and that of my son.’³⁴ On her name day, 24 November, she invested her doctor as a baron of the Russian empire and rewarded him with £10,000–an outlandish sum, supplemented by an annual pension of £500 for life.³⁵ Alexander Markov, the boy who had supplied the necessary infected matter, was ennobled under the unflattering soubriquet ‘ospenny’ (‘Lord Smallpox’). The Court theatre staged an allegorical ballet, Prejudice Overcome, in which the Genius of Science (played by the ballet master Angiolini), Minerva (representing Catherine), and Ruthenia (Russia), conquered Superstition and Ignorance with the assistance of Alcind (Paul) and released the common people from their grasp.³⁶ The commemorative medal, struck in 1772, when inoculations were still being administered in a variety of Russian hospitals, drove home the empress’s fundamental message: ‘She herself set an example.’³⁷

When the children of the Austrian empress were successfully inoculated by another British doctor, Maria Theresa held a feast at Schönbrunn at which the royal family waited on his sixty-five lesser-ranking patients.³⁸ Obsessed with order and hierarchy, Catherine would never have turned the world upside down. Competitive as ever, she gaily told Voltaire in December 1768 that ‘more people have been inoculated here in one month than in eight at Vienna’. For her part, she teased, the best medicine during her convalescence had been to listen to readings from Candide, in which the master had written that if two armies of 30,000 men were to meet in battle, two-thirds of the soldiers would be pock-marked: ‘After that, it is impossible to feel the slightest bit ill.’³⁹

To make Catherine feel even better, an extension to her palace was nearing completion. At last she would be able to escape echoing staterooms, indulge her passion for informal entertainment, and exercise her legendary charm to devastating effect. Designed by Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe, the Small Hermitage was built on a narrow plot of land immediately to the east of the Winter Palace, hitherto occupied by dilapidated mansions built for two of Peter the Great’s admirals, Cornelius Cruys and Fëdor Golovin. Catherine inspected some early plans while in Moscow after her coronation, work started in 1764, and by the time she returned to the old capital in February 1767, she had seen a magnificent pavilion grow up at the southern end of the site. Grigory Orlov was to live there until 1775 in a suite of rooms linked to her own apartments by a flying bridge. His three reception rooms and a dining room overlooked Millionnaya to the south; to the north, a bedroom, mirrored boudoir and study faced onto a hanging garden. While the empress was preparing to sail the Volga, Cruys’s house on the Neva was finally demolished, and work began to extend the garden northwards to a new pavilion overlooking the river, originally known as the orangery after the fruit trees planted in decorative pots on the balustrade. Catherine inspected a wooden model in March 1768 and by the following February the new building was ready to hold the first of many private entertainments–themselves soon christened ‘small hermitages’–beginning with a theatrical performance in the neighbouring stables and ending with dinner at the two mechanical tables in the easternmost room.⁴⁰

Soon imitated by leading aristocrats, this device had been pioneered by Elizabeth at Tsarskoye Selo, where it remained a source of merriment in Catherine’s time:

When the plates are changed you pull a string by the side of everybody’s right hand which goes underneath the table and rings a bell. Your plate goes down, as all round it is composed of so many divisions like stove holes. You write down upon a slate and pencil which is fixed ready, and what you want immediately comes up. A great diversion was from one table to the other to send something or other that served to laugh.⁴¹

Towards the end of the carnival, Dr Dimsdale had to be called when Catherine caught a fever that knocked her off her feet ‘for six whole days, which was highly inconvenient for someone who loves to bustle about and who hates being stuck in bed’.⁴² But this proved to be merely a temporary interruption to her convivial way of life. ‘Those who form her society,’ Lord Cathcart reported, ‘are either young people who are extremely gay, or such as are capable from the vivacity of their disposition to keep pace with those who are younger than themselves.’⁴³

While the northern part of the Small Hermitage was under construction, Catherine decided in March 1768 to build a new gallery along the sides of the hanging garden to house her growing art collection. Some of the finest works to be seen in today’s Hermitage Museum were acquired in these early years. The foundations of the collection had been laid in 1764 with the purchase of 225 paintings belonging to the Berlin picture dealer, Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, whose seventeenth-century Flemish Masters included Jan Steen’s Revellers and Frans Hals’s Young Man Holding a Glove. In the following year, Prince Dimitry Alekseyevich Golitsyn became Catherine’s principal agent in Paris having been appointed ambassador to Versailles at the age of thirty-one. It was thanks to his collaboration with Diderot that the Hermitage acquired Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son and a more recent masterpiece by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Paralytic, or the Fruits of a Good Education (1763). When he moved to The Hague in 1768, Golitsyn negotiated the purchase of about 600 paintings–including works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Wouvermans and Watteau–from the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, who had amassed his treasures by stealing from his master, Augustus III of Poland. But Golitsyn had not lost touch with Diderot, who helped him to secure François Tronchin’s Genevan collection in 1770 and brokered an even more sensational deal in the following year, when Catherine paid the heirs of the Parisian financier Pierre Crozat 460,000 livres for 500 paintings including Giorgione’s Judith, Titian’s Danaë and Raphael’s Holy Family. Diderot believed that the collection was worth more than twice as much.⁴⁴

It is hard to say what pleasure Catherine took from most of these purchases. Although her charmed circle included the connoisseurs Alexander Stroganov and Ivan Shuvalov, who spent much of the period between 1763 and 1777 in Italy collecting sculptures for himself and the Hermitage, she seems to have revelled in a kind of inverted snobbery that oscillated between dependence on ‘expert’ opinion and a determination to defy it. She and Lev Naryshkin were ‘professional ignoramuses’, the empress later declared, ‘and we use our ignorance to annoy the Grand Chamberlain Shuvalov and Count Stroganov, who are both members of at least 24 academies’.⁴⁵ She clearly took a liking to Jean Huber’s innovative cycle of portraits of Voltaire in various intimate, everyday poses, which arrived in St Petersburg at the rate of about one a year after Grimm had announced her commission in the Correspondance littéraire in March 1769. ‘I had to burst out laughing when I saw the patriarch getting out of bed,’ Catherine admitted on re-discovering the paintings hidden away at Tsarksoye Selo in 1776. ‘I think that one’s original: the vivacity of his character and the impatience of his imagination give him no time to do one thing at once. The kicking horse being corrected by Voltaire is also very good.’⁴⁶ However, since her early letters reveal little about her personal tastes, it is tempting to conclude that many of the masterpieces arriving in St Petersburg by the carton-load left her unmoved. The sheer scale of her acquisitions prevented any intimate acquaintance with all of them: she bought some 4000 canvases in the first twenty years of her reign.

Apart from the fact that Catherine liked a bargain, the most important benefit conferred by great works of art was international prestige. Like diplomacy, collecting was a competitive business. And paintings, no less than territory, were best acquired at the expense of weakened rivals. Gotzkowsky’s collection was snatched from under the nose of Frederick the Great when financial embarrassments brought about by the Seven Years’ War prevented him from fulfilling his promise to buy them for himself. Paradoxically, such triumphs made it harder for the empress’s agents to strike a confidential deal once her interest leaked out to journalists hungry for gossip on the Parisian art market. In 1768 Bachaumont’s Mémoires secrets mocked Diderot’s vain attempts to acquire Louis-Jean Gaignat’s paintings, which foundered on a will forbidding the sale of the collection as a whole. Forced to compete against the duc de Choiseul at auction in February 1769, he eventually acquired only five pictures, including Murillo’s Rest on the Flight to Egypt. Falconet told Catherine that it was a painting ‘to speak of on one’s knees’. As Diderot discovered, to represent an upstart foreign power that threatened to denude France of such treasures was to invite widespread obloquy. Some feared that the greatest Western masterpieces were disappearing into oblivion. ‘How sad it is to see going and passing into the hands of the Scythians things that are so precious that ten people at most will admire them in Russia,’ complained Jean-Henri Eberts in September 1769. ‘Everyone can aspire to the pleasure of seeing the banks of the Seine, but few are curious to visit those of the cold Neva.’⁴⁷ Diderot himself was more philosophical. Having initially doubted the empress’s ability to collect enough paintings to inspire good taste in art, he gradually acknowledged the changing balance of power. ‘We sell our pictures and our statues in the midst of peace, but Catherine buys them in the midst of war,’ he remarked in rueful admiration to Falconet in April 1772. ‘The sciences, the arts, taste and wisdom climb to the north, and barbarism with its train comes southwards.’⁴⁸

Egged on by Grimm, Diderot’s Neapolitan friend, the economist abbé Galiani, later found a philosophical explanation for these developments in an ironic contrast between Catherine and the king of France. If one wanted to know why ‘the Russians have climbed so high and the French come tumbling down so low under Catherine and Louis XV’, then the causes were to be found ‘in the character, conduct and gestures of their sovereigns’. Both monarchs had encouraged luxury and the arts, and yet ‘French morals have been corrupted, valour has gone soft, while the opposite has happened to the Russians. The reason is that in France they have encouraged a voluptuous luxury which enervates, and in Russia a magnificent luxury which invigorates.’ ‘The cause of the decadence of French military power,’ Galiani concluded, ‘and the aggrandisement of that of the Russians derives from the same principle.’ The Russians would never have won their battles had they been covered ‘in lace and chiffon’.⁴⁹

Since war was even more expensive than art collecting, its onset led Catherine to tighten her tax policy. She could also draw on a new stream of income because the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1768–74 was the first to be financed by foreign loans, advanced by the Amsterdam finance markets on the strength of her armies’ performance in the Seven Years’ War. These loans in turn prompted unprecedented financial sophistication within Russia as the empress oversaw the introduction of paper money under the aegis of a new bank, created at the end of December 1768 and headed by Andrey Shuvalov. Whereas Peter III had contemplated five notes in 1762, ranging in value from 10 to 500 roubles, Catherine settled for four denominations: 25, 50, 75 and 100. Before long she faced problems of forgery and inflation. ‘I have in my hands a 100-rouble note numbered 80,000’, reported the hostile French ambassador in September 1770. ‘It is from last year: another indication that this operation is overstretched.’ By the end of the war, notes to the value of some 12.7 million roubles were in circulation.⁵⁰ There were short-term worries too. While Count Solms, the Prussian ambassador, was anxious that Shuvalov’s very name would be sufficient to revive ‘disagreeable memories’ of his father–Elizabeth’s unpopular minister, Peter Shuvalov–who had ‘acquired millions at the expense of the state and to the ruin of several individuals’, Catherine was more concerned about the change of culture required in her own Court administration. ⁵¹ As she complained to Yelagin in April 1769:

It is with the greatest possible surprise that I hear that the palace chancellery is refusing to accept state assignats from private individuals. A peasant presented his papers and was told to bring cash. Can it be that my statutes are not valid in the palace chancellery, or do the clerks steal [coins] for their own loathsome gain, when no accounting errors can be made with assignats? Kindly look into this without delay: I beg you to punish those who have infringed my statutes.⁵²

Such tones were always reserved for officials who should have known better. Even so, a degree of tetchiness was understandable as the empress became impatient with the protracted preparations for battle. Although war had been declared in the autumn, it was not until the following spring that campaigning could begin. While more than 50,000 troops were being recruited, Catherine spent the winter of 1768–9 reading herself into a world as far removed from Panin’s Northern System as it was possible to imagine. Since there was no prospect of drawing the Italian states into her conflict with the Turks–Naples, she discovered, danced ‘to the sound of the French flute, and this flute is not in harmony with the voice of Russia’–she concentrated on trying to support the Corsican revolt against France. Boswell’s account of his travels on the island, provided for her by Lord Cathcart, enhanced her admiration for the revolt’s leader, General Pasquale Paoli.⁵³ Judging from the letter she wrote to Ivan Chernyshëv on 14 December, Paoli’s buccaneering spirit proved more infectious than the smallpox:

And now the sleeping cat has been awakened; and now the cat is going to chase the mice; and now you will see what you will see; and now they’re going to talk about us; and no one will expect all the racket we’re going to make; and now the Turks are going to be defeated; and now the French will everywhere be treated as the Corsicans treat them; and now that’s quite enough verbiage. Adieu, Monsieur!⁵⁴

Meanwhile, spontaneous revolts among the Balkan Slavs seemed to offer the prospect of coordinated resistance against the Turks, and especially in Montenegro, where an Italian bandit calling himself Stephen the Little had publicly declared that he was Peter III, giving Catherine an added incentive to intervene. She employed an Italian aristocrat in a vain attempt to draw the Order of the Knights of Malta into her struggle against the infidel. ‘Above all,’ as Franco Venturi has shown, ‘she created a net of agents and listening posts in Italy and thus set in motion a type of diplomacy quite different from the traditional one.’⁵⁵

Most of this was as much the stuff of fantasy as the ancient prophecy, unexpectedly given renewed credence by Russian designs on Constantinople, that the downfall of the Ottoman Empire would be brought about by a race of blond men.⁵⁶ Yet for Catherine the deeds of war were bound to remain a thing of the mind. Unlike the male monarchs of her age, who regularly led their troops into battle, she could experience war only vicariously. For much of the time, she was forced to play a waiting game, not without its stresses for a sovereign accustomed to rapid progress in all her activities. Both her mood and her health fluctuated sharply with the news from the front. Victories were greeted with unrestrained joy, reverses with undisguised irritation. During the anxious intervals in between, her entourage did their best to keep her relaxed and amused.

At the beginning of April 1769, Vladimir Orlov reintroduced her to Ivan Kulibin, the inventor from Nizhny Novgorod whose clock in the form of a mechanical toy egg struck the hour with Easter tunes and opened to reveal a scene of the Resurrection, played out by miniature figures done in gold and silver. Catherine rewarded him with 1000 roubles.⁵⁷ God seemed firmly on her side when campaigning opened just before her fortieth birthday. General A. M. Golitsyn was her commander-in-chief, appointed as a compromise between two more distinguished candidates: General Peter Panin (favoured by his brother, Nikita) and General Peter Rumyantsev (supported by Grigory Orlov against the Panins).⁵⁸ When news of his first victory at Khotin, the main Turkish fort on the Dniester, reached Tsarskoye Selo on the afternoon of 30 April, Catherine called her courtiers into the dining room to deliver the glad tidings herself. ‘The Turkish camp is taken,’ she informed Saltykov next day, ‘along with a great number of trophies and prisoners. Our losses were almost nil, since the enemy cannon fired over our heads.’ That morning, the Court travelled to St Petersburg for a thanksgiving service at the Kazan Church where she made sure Paul was present. A jubilant crowd lined the streets to join the celebrations.⁵⁹ Soon there were more. By 10 May, Catherine was delighted to report that Golitsyn had defeated another 30,000-strong Turkish army.⁶⁰

Confident of his further progress, she relaxed at Gatchina, where Rinaldi’s building work was advancing apace, and where she and Grigory Orlov strolled through the park to see the pheasants in the menagerie after Lev Naryshkin had played the violin for them in the new wooden apartments on 15 May. Eight days later, Zakhar Chernyshëv and Praskovya Bruce joined the three of them at the dacha at Bronnaya, where they sat up all night playing cards to watch the long-awaited transit of Venus through a telescope set up by Paul’s science tutor, Professor Aepinus (the Russian Academy of Sciences played a central part in the world-wide observations of the event).⁶¹ Military matters loomed larger at the beginning of June, when Grigory, acting in his capacity as Master of the Ordinance, took Catherine on a tour of the Liteyny cannon foundry in St Petersburg attended by all her artillery generals. Not that the common people were forgotten. At the accession day celebrations in the Dutch Hall at Monplaisir, the empress made a patriotic gesture by proposing a new toast ‘to all her subjects’ after the usual toasts to herself and the heir to the throne.⁶²

The summer brought more disconcerting news. Catherine’s early boasts were made to seem embarrassing when adroit manoeuvring by the Ottomans forced Golitsyn to retreat across the Dniester, abandoning his earlier gains. Yet no sooner had she given orders to sack him on 13 August than he embarrassed her again by retaking Khotin in September. That was a more pardonable offence. ‘The tsarina is drunk with joy,’ reported the appalled French ambassador. ‘Her health, which had been crushed by the reverses, is visibly restored.’⁶³ Until then, the atmosphere had indeed been tense in St Petersburg, where rumours of conspiracies and mysterious disappearances circulated in the sort of ‘confidential whispers’ that Richardson attributed to a people ‘prohibited from speaking or writing about politics’:

The Empress tells them, that as her maternal care for her dear people keeps her sleepless by night, and busy by day–and I really believe that her nights are as sleepless as her days are busy–they have no occasion to give themselves any further trouble about public affairs, than to act implicitly as she directs…Happy king of England! who may go about with as much security after a defeat, as after a victory; who has no occasion for a board of spies against his own subjects; and may allow his people to speak, write, and think as they please.⁶⁴

Richardson’s timing could hardly have been less felicitous. Far from spurning public opinion, Catherine was even keener to nurture it in the aftermath of the abortive Legislative Commission. Now that it was clear that the ideas she had borrowed from Montesquieu and Beccaria were unrecognisable to the majority of Russian nobles, she tried another tack. Posing as ‘Granny’ (Babushka), the benign editorial persona of a new journal, All Sorts, at the beginning of 1769, Catherine tried to coax her subjects to improve their manners by mocking their bad habits in light-hearted journalism in the tradition of Addison and Steele’s Spectator. Much of their material was indeed paraphrased in Catherine’s journal, which openly acknowledged its debt to its progenitor: ‘There is not a little salt in the English Spectator, and All Sorts resembles it, so why should it not contain something useful for society?’⁶⁵ Although she was still a woman in a hurry–‘We have no doubts regarding the speedy correction of morals and expect an immediate extirpation of all vices’, Granny confidently declared–Catherine permitted a degree of playful banter between her own journal and others in the same vein published by Nikolay Novikov, a former minute-taker at the Legislative Commission who was as keen as she was to disperse the clouds of prejudice and injustice.⁶⁶ His journal The Drone mocked corrupt judges who had unaccountably failed to read Beccaria On Crimes and Punishments and understood as little of their own duties as they did of the Syrian and Khaldean languages: ‘O enlightenment, heavenly gift, lift the veil of ignorance and cruelty swiftly for the defence of humanity!’⁶⁷

Although it remains a mystery why Catherine chose to encourage public discussion of the defects of Russian society at the start of her war with the Turks, her turn to journalism was entirely of a piece with the first of five aims she had once jotted down under the heading ‘Maxims of Administration’: ‘One must refine the nation one is to govern.’⁶⁸ Conscious of the benefits of her own reading, she paid 5000 roubles a year to support a Society for the Translation of Foreign Books, founded in November 1768 under the aegis of her secretary Grigory Kozitsky, a graduate of the Kiev Spiritual Academy who had studied in Leipzig. Kozitsky translated her Instruction into Latin and Ovid’s Metamorphoses into Russian before committing suicide in December 1775. (‘He was in bed with his wife,’ Jeremy Bentham learned later, ‘who finding herself wet in the morning spoke to her husband, and receiving no answer, drew aside the Cloaths and found him with a penknife in his hand, dead, with upwards of 30 wounds about him.’)⁶⁹ The Society’s life lasted longer. More than forty titles were in print by 1772, and by the time its work was transferred to the newly created Russian Academy in 1783, 112 translations had been published with a further 129 still in progress. Many of the first works to appear were extracts from the Encyclopédie which reflected the empress’s current interest in Greece and the Mediterranean. Boswell’s Corsica came out in 1773. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels may well have reflected her personal tastes (Catherine read English literature in French and German translation). Corneille and Voltaire were also on the list.⁷⁰

Though she confessed to Voltaire in March 1771 that she was ‘too busy fighting’ to contemplate a widespread implementation of her Instruction, such a burst of intellectual activity helped to create an atmosphere in which the empress might reasonably think that her treatise had not been in vain. That autumn, Novikov published a number of positive European responses to it in his journal The Painter.⁷¹ Archbishop Platon had offered more explicit reassurance in his New Year sermon, given in her presence at the Winter Palace. ‘Our age is the age of enlightenment,’ he proclaimed in his most fulsome acknowledgement of the achievements of secular reform, going on to praise impartial judges for bringing clarity to Russian legislation, in words which echoed Catherine’s own, and to praise her for stressing the need for moderate punishments. The aim was to destroy vice itself, rather than the unhappy criminal. ‘Never, indeed, has a government incorporated so abundantly the spirit of guardianship and philanthropy.’⁷² On her forty-second birthday in April, the empress began a memoir designed to highlight the uncivilised features of Elizabeth’s Court. So it came as a shock when she discovered in May that her own servants were still being dragged off to the palace candle factory to be flogged, just as they had been when she first arrived in Russia. Since this was an ‘evil custom’ that she had banned at the beginning of her reign, she expressed outrage that it had been revived. Henceforth, no liveried servant was to be beaten on any account. ‘If some of them commit a major crime such as theft, then they should be stripped of their livery and sent to the criminal courts. Attempts should be made to correct drunks, defaulters and the disobedient by: 1) gentleness, and if that doesn’t work: 2) detention. 3) The punishment should be 48 hours on bread and water.’⁷³

Evidently the empress was unable to rely on books alone in her quest for polite refinement. Many Russian nobles were illiterate and, as Novikov discovered, it was impossible to make a profit from the small number of sophisticated men who subscribed to his journals (many of which were eventually recirculated as hair-curlers). Though it sold better than any other Russian journal in the eighteenth century, The Drone petered out like the others as print runs slipped. They would scarcely have survived at all without support from Catherine and her Court. Novikov was swift to return the compliment, as part of a new compact between writer and ruler in Russia. When the empress turned to her beloved theatre as the best way of promoting civilised noble values in 1772, Novikov declared O these times!, the first, best-known and most successful of the five comedies she wrote that year, worthy of comparison with Molière. The play was modelled on Die Betschwester by C. F. Gellert, transposing its plot into a denunciation of superstitious bigotry that must have made uncomfortable viewing for some of her more conspicuously pious courtiers.⁷⁴

It was precisely because she was so keen to eradicate it that Catherine was so prickly in response to condescending foreign verdicts on Russian backwardness. Even so sympathetic a foreigner as Lord Cathcart, who praised the empress for her ‘quickness of thought and discernment, an attention to business and a desire to fill her throne with dignity and with utility even to the lowest of her subjects’, followed a widespread tendency to dismiss ‘the Russians in general’ as ‘men of no education or principles of any sort, though not without quickness of parts’.⁷⁵Travelling to Russia in 1769, the Lutheran pastor and political thinker Johann Gottfried Herder regarded the Russians’ desire to imitate as ‘nothing but the healthy disposition of a developing nation–a tendency in the right direction’. But he was equally sure that ‘the great work of “civilizing a nation to perfection”’ was ‘yet to be accomplished’ because the Russians had bungled the adoption of everything they had taken from Western Europe, from the art of navigation to French manners.⁷⁶ Anxious to counter that her subjects showed ‘great natural aptitude’ for reasoned behaviour, Catherine attributed their earlier failings to faulty methods on the part of her predecessors. ‘I would willingly blame the government for acting clumsily. When this nation is better known in Europe, people will take back many errors and prejudices about Russia.’⁷⁷

No one seemed more prejudiced than Le Mercier de la Rivière, whose visit to St Petersburg, arranged by Diderot in 1768, failed also because he believed that it was the ruler’s task to implement immutable geometric laws (a strategy totally at variance with Catherine’s flexible cast of mind). She was still complaining in 1774 of the philosophe ‘who supposed, six years ago, that we walked on four paws, and who very politely gave himself the trouble of coming from Martinique to stand us up on our hind feet’.⁷⁸When the abbé Chappe d’Auteroche’s A Journey into Siberia (1768) ridiculed her subjects as impoverished alcoholics, superstitious slaves, and lascivious mixed-bathers, Catherine countered with an indignant Antidote, published in French in 1770 (almost certainly in St Petersburg, though the title page said Amsterdam) and translated into English two years later. Acknowledging that parents were tempted to marry their sons off too young in order to acquire a working daughter-in-law, the empress insisted that the practice survived only in isolated provinces where her bishops were striving to restrict it. When the common people drank in Russia, they fell into no ‘greater excess during the carnival than those of any other nation, where Lent is strictly observed’. Of course Russian peasants were credulous, but they were surely not alone in maintaining absurd beliefs. ‘For many centuries,’ Catherine reminded the abbé, French queens ‘could not be brought to bed without an astrologer being placed in the wardrobe to foretell the good or ill fortune of the new-born child’. In sum, she concluded in the spirit of Enlightened universalism, since Russia was ‘inhabited by men’, people would ‘prove the same there as in every other part of the globe’.⁷⁹

After a characteristically hesitant start, her armed forces were certainly proving equal to anything the enemy could throw at them. Reviewing the navy at Kronstadt in July 1769, she had treated Admiral Spiridov and his officers to a glass of champagne. But once the fleet had set sail, its fate was out of her hands.⁸⁰ By mid-October, Spiridov had been obliged to put into Hull, seeking treatment for 800 sick sailors. Catherine was undeterred. It was hard to keep anything in perspective when your principal correspondent was Voltaire. ‘I believe that my fleet is at Gibraltar, if it has not already passed through the Straits,’ wrote an excited empress in mid-December. ‘By now you will have news of it sooner than I. May God protect Mustapha!’ Reporting the fleet’s arrival at Port-Mahon ‘in very good order’ at the beginning of the New Year, Voltaire renewed his encouragement:

I cannot refrain from telling Your Majesty once more that your project is the greatest and most astonishing that was ever conceived: Hannibal’s scarcely came close to it. I very much hope that yours will be more successful than his. Indeed, how will the Turks be able to resist you? They pass for the worst sailors in Europe, and they currently have very few ships.⁸¹

So far did it threaten the prevailing maritime balance of power that the appearance of three squadrons of Russian ships in the eastern Mediterranean has been plausibly ranked as ‘one of the most spectacular events of the eighteenth century’.⁸² Their commander-in-chief was equally extraordinary. While he convalesced from his gallstones, Aleksey Orlov had been swaggering round Tuscany with servants dressed in gold-trimmed livery and two eunuchs taken from a seraglio. Inspirational as a leader of men, he had almost certainly never previously been to sea. So he wisely flew his flag on the 66-gun Three Bishops, commanded by Admiral Samuel Greig of Inverkeithing, who had entered Russian service in 1764. It was Greig who masterminded the victory over the 11,000-man Turkish navy on 24–25 June. A total of 523 Russian lives were lost in a two-hour engagement on the first day, when Fëdor Orlov was one of few survivors rescued from the sinking Saint Evstafy. The following night, it was a different story as Greig destroyed the enemy, holed up in Chesme harbour, with a bomb-ship and four fire-ships. In a characteristically extravagant gesture, Orlov later blew up one of his own ships to give artists an accurate impression of the devastation he had inflicted.⁸³ ‘Almost a hundred vessels of every kind have been reduced to ashes,’ Catherine boasted to Voltaire. ‘I dare not say how many Muslims perished: it may be as many as twenty thousand.’⁸⁴ Trumpeting news of her triumphs to Europe was one of her greatest contributions to the war effort. Another was inspiring her commanders. On discovering that Orlov had lost a signet ring with her portrait on it at Chesme, she sent another to spur him on: ‘Having lost that ring, you won the battle and destroyed the enemy fleet. On receipt of this new one, you will capture their fortresses.’⁸⁵

That was exactly what General Rumyantsev was doing, in a scarcely less spectacular series of victories in Moldavia and Wallachia that had a far greater impact on the outcome of the war. In July 1770, he led a 25,000-strong army to victory over 150,000 enemy soldiers at the River Larga, emphasising in his reports to the empress the leading roles played by Lieutenant General Potëmkin and by General Bauer, a military engineer who had been close to her through his friendship with Grigory Orlov since entering Russian service the year before.⁸⁶ Their troops received simple silver medals inscribed with the date of the battle and a bust of the empress. By mid December 18,000 such medals, minted in St Petersburg in October, had already been delivered to Jassy, and when these proved too few to meet the demand, she authorised 1157 more in the spring of 1772.⁸⁷ All her armies’ victories were celebrated with an elaborate Te Deum at the Kazan Church in St Petersburg.⁸⁸ Yet for Catherine there was always a measure of relief amidst the triumphalism. Tidings of Rumyantsev’s next victory at the River Kagul, which reached Tsarskoye Selo on the evening of 1 August, unleashed a migraine that prevented her from writing for three days.⁸⁹

When she had recovered, she composed an ironic letter to Voltaire, reassuring him that there was as yet no prospect of a truce:

I agree with you that peace is a fine thing: so long as it existed, I thought it the nec plus ultra of happiness. Now that I have been at war for almost two years, I see that one can get used to anything. War, it is true, does have some fine moments. The one great fault I find with it is that [in war] one does not love one’s neighbour as oneself. I used to think it dishonourable to do people harm; however I console myself somewhat today by saying to Mustapha [like Molière]: ‘Georges [Dandin], you wished it on yourself!’ And after that reflection, I am at ease, almost as before.⁹⁰

In fact, that same month, Catherine, while planning for the following summer’s campaign, permitted Rumyantsev to enter into peace negotiations with the Turks provided that they released her imprisoned ambassador at Constantinople (a condition they refused). What she was not prepared to accept was the repeated offers of mediation made by Austria and Prussia at the instigation of Frederick the Great, who was desperate to prevent Russia from making further unilateral conquests.⁹¹

Catherine’s determination to hold out for maximal gain made it impossible for Prince Henry of Prussia, sent to St Petersburg by Frederick in October 1770, to persuade Russia to settle for peace.⁹² It was the first time Catherine had seen him since their youthful dalliance at the Court of Berlin. Small in stature and cold in manner, the king’s notoriously ugly younger brother made a poor impression on courtiers who mocked the toupee perched precariously above his unnaturally high forehead. The empress, by contrast, made a great show of warming to him, declaring Henry ‘cheerful, honest and humane’ and reassuring Frau Johanna Bielke, a friend of her mother’s in Hamburg, that ‘no visit from a prince could be more agreeable to me than his’. At any rate, as she observed sarcastically to Voltaire, shortly after Henry’s departure in January 1771, ‘he seemed to enjoy himself here more than the abbé Chappe, who raced along the post-road in an entirely enclosed sleigh, from which he saw everything in Russia.’⁹³

Competitive to the core, Catherine had good reason to impress her Prussian rivals. ‘You know how patriotic I am,’ she reminded Field Marshal Saltykov, who had defeated Frederick at Kunersdorf: ‘I wish our nation to shine in all the military and civil virtues and that we should surpass all other nations in every genre.’ So she spared no expense to ensure that her guest returned to Potsdam convinced that the Russians were ‘sufficiently polite to know how to beat their enemies’.⁹⁴ She sent three yachts to meet him at Reval, where she personally arranged for a suitable wine cellar and Court chef to be on hand at the Yekaterintal Palace.⁹⁵ Soon after arriving in St Petersburg, Henry attended the thanksgiving prayers for the fall of Bender. Later he was shown captured Turkish standards at the Peter-Paul fortress, where Peter the Great’s ‘little boat’ was on display as a symbol of Russian naval power.⁹⁶ Determined to demonstrate that she could outdo even such a virile predecessor, Catherine also took Henry to see the ‘thunder-rock’, a block of Karelian granite weighing some 3 million pounds on which Falconet planned to mount his statue of Tsar Peter. This massive boulder, so-called because peasants believed that the crack at one corner had been caused by a bolt of lightning, had taken far longer than Henry himself to reach the Russian capital. Selected for the purpose just before the outbreak of war, it began its overland journey from Count Bruce’s estate at Konnaya in November 1769, using machinery designed by a Greek engineer. ‘Daringly performed’ was the inscription on the medal struck to commemorate Catherine’s visit to see the rock on 20 January 1770, when it was being rolled along at the rate of approximately a mile per month. For the final part of its journey, it was floated down the Neva on a purpose-built raft, reaching St Petersburg on the eighth anniversary of Catherine’s coronation. A few days later, Prince Henry saw it manoeuvred into position at the centre of Senate Square, where it still stands today. Acknowledged across Europe as a stunning feat of engineering, this operation was duly claimed by Catherine’s panegyrists as superior to the building of the Egyptian pyramids and the creation of the Colossus of Rhodes.⁹⁷

On 28 October, Henry was driven to Tsarskoye Selo under cover of darkness in a sledge equipped with mirrors so that the snow-covered landscape would seem to stretch to infinity. After a brilliantly lit triumphal arch there followed a series of illuminated pyramids and pleasure gardens in which peasants dressed in national costume could be seen dancing behind newly married couples in an allegorical display of fertility and happiness. Outside the menagerie, Semën Naryshkin had arranged for a Temple of Diana, where his huntsmen played on their distinctive horns.⁹⁸ Still more extravagant was the masquerade staged at the Winter Palace on 28 November when some twenty-one staterooms were commandeered to provide dancing and games for 3600 guests. Shortly before nine, a fanfare of trumpets announced the arrival of Apollo with the four seasons and the twelve months of the year, played by boys from the Cadet Corps and girls from the Smolny Convent school for noble girls. Twelve alcoves, each set with a table for ten, had been created in the banqueting hall.⁹⁹ The stolid soldier must have needed all the tact he could muster to smile at a Frenchman in parrot costume who squawked ‘Henri! Henri! Henri!’ into his ear before vanishing into the crowd. Yet it was hard not to admire the pyrotechnic representation of Russia’s recent conquests. For all Catherine’s periodic attempts at self-restraint, the Court of St Petersburg had lost none of its fascination for Baroque spectacle:

The various colours, the bright green, and the snowy white, exhibited in these fireworks, were truly astonishing. For the space of twenty minutes, a tree adorned with the loveliest and most verdant foliage, seemed to be waving as with a gentle breeze. It was entirely of fire; and during the whole of this stupendous scene, an arch of fire, by the continued throwing of rockets and fireballs in one direction, formed as it were a suitable canopy.¹⁰⁰

Literary celebrations of the Russian victories and Catherine’s letters of this period betray the ideological foundations of the so-called Greek project which emerged between 1780 and 1782–the plan to recapture Byzantium and install a Russian ruler on its throne.¹⁰¹ ‘Soon it will be time for me to study the Greeks at some university,’ the empress told Voltaire in October 1770, ‘until such time as I can translate Homer into Russian.’ She made a start by donning Grecian costume for the masquerade in honour of Prince Henry.¹⁰²

So determined was Catherine to advertise the magnificence of this event that she checked several times that Voltaire had received her detailed description of it.¹⁰³ Indeed he had, but it was her triumphs at the expense of the Infidel that really sparked his imagination. As she regaled him with Aleksey Orlov’s lurid accounts of the waters of Chesme harbour churning with Turkish blood, he responded by picturing himself ‘transported’ from the eighteenth century ‘to the Alps at the time of the foundation of Babylon’: ‘Monsieur d’Alembert, who is here at Ferney now, is as enthusiastic as I am, and the only difference is that he expresses himself better. We both hate Mustapha just as much.’¹⁰⁴

Blissfully unaware of the danger he faced, Prince Henry left Moscow only days before Saltykov, the city’s Governor General, reported an epidemic on 22 December 1770. Catherine had first referred to the disease at the end of May, when she gave her approval to counter-measures taken by Rumyantsev in the south-west. By the time Kiev succumbed in mid-September, she was already concerned about the threat to the old capital, ‘for besides sickness and fires, there is much stupidity there’.¹⁰⁵ Since it was almost certainly Ottoman cloth that carried what she called the ‘infectious pestilential distemper’ to the heart of the Russian empire, the empress’s efforts to blame it on the enemy carried some plausibility. But while Voltaire urged her to ‘exterminate the two great scourges on earth, the plague and the Turks’,¹⁰⁶ a cure proved elusive as doctors continued to debate the nature of the disease. Though a cold snap in the New Year brought a temporary respite, warmer weather saw a sharp increase in mortality at Moscow’s leading woollen manufactory, prompting the police to stage a secret evacuation of the 640-strong workforce on the night of 13 March 1771. Sensing trouble ahead, many nobles fled to their rural estates. Since nothing alarmed Catherine more than indecision, Saltykov was tactfully sidelined at the end of the month to allow Senator Peter Yeropkin to take charge of the anti-plague campaign. At first, his impeccably modern methods suggested little for the authorities to do. Statistics supplied by the parish clergy showed no marked increase in the death rate, and Archbishop Amvrosy sensibly warned that public prayers for deliverance were likely to result only in panic. No one anticipated the scale of the disaster to come, and only a mass evacuation of the city–scarcely a feasible option–would significantly have stemmed the losses that followed in a warm, wet summer which provided the ideal conditions for the spread of plague.¹⁰⁷

Meanwhile, the empress had problems of her own in St Petersburg, though not quite the ones she had foreseen in the autumn. In the face of her intransigence, the pressure from the German powers had eased. In the intensive debates in Vienna over the winter of 1770–71, it was probably the Russian-born Marshal Lacy, whose father had danced in Catherine’s ill-fated wedding quadrille, who did most to convince Austria’s rulers of Russia’s impregnability. For different reasons, neither the pacific Maria Theresa nor Joseph II supported Chancellor Kaunitz’s arguments in favour of a campaign against Catherine. ‘I am for a thousand reasons of opinion that we ought never to wage war on our own against Russia,’ the emperor wrote in January 1771, ‘but that we ought to put ourselves into a condition to profit promptly and without risk from the Russians’ moments of weakness, if any present themselves.’ Joseph imagined that the most likely way for the Austrians to profit would be from some future partition of the Ottoman Empire.¹⁰⁸ By that time, however, irritated by Austria’s incorporation of the Polish enclave of Zips (Spisz) on the Galician border, Frederick the Great had decided that his best hope of compensating Prussia for Russia’s Black Sea conquests was to take some Polish territory for himself: ‘ointment for the burn’ as he described it to Solms in February. From what Prince Henry told him, Catherine was not averse to the idea–‘Why shouldn’t we all take something?’ she had asked towards the end of his visit, though as usual he found it hard to decide whether she was joking. Playing up the prospect of Austrian aggression, and pretending that he wanted only ‘little parcels’ of land for himself, Frederick embarked on a determined push for partition. Though Panin tried to warn Stanislaw August what was in store, and Austrian hesitations held up the final division of spoils for a further year, the die was effectively cast. On 19 May, after the negotiations with Prussia had been revealed to the Russian Council for the first time, Panin and Solms pored over a map in St Petersburg, discussing precisely which territories Frederick hoped to take.¹⁰⁹

Thanks to a poor harvest and the impact of plague on both sides, campaigning on the Danube was limited that summer, when Russian forces concentrated on a successful occupation of the Crimea. Even so, not everything went to plan. ‘These last two days have not been very happy,’ Catherine admitted to Panin on 19 June. ‘My son is ill, we have lost Zhurzha [to the Turks], [Admiral] Senyavin has lost a bomb-ship, and on top of that, I have received six different denunciations these past few weeks containing such nonsense that it tries your patience and I have ordered three of the Semnovsky Guards to be flogged on parade.’¹¹⁰

Paul’s illness–apparently a virulent form of influenza accompanied by persistent diarrhoea–was by far the most serious difficulty. In view of his approaching name day, there could scarcely have been a more awkward time for him to fall sick. ‘The grand duke has already been indisposed for ten days,’ Catherine continued on 23 June from a damp Peterhof. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to come to town for the celebrations, rather than risk moving him?’¹¹¹ ‘They are in mortal anguish here about the grand duke,’ the French ambassador reported after Paul had failed to appear in public on the appointed day.¹¹² All the empress could do to deter rumours about the succession was to make a very obvious show of caring for her son. As he took his first uncertain steps around his bedroom at the end of July, she announced his recovery in a studiously lighted-hearted letter to Mme Bielke. ‘He has grown a lot during this illness,’ she added a month later, ‘and his beard has started to sprout. There is a Russian proverb which says that no moustache appears without illness. I don’t know whether this saying is just, but on the subject of the grand duke we have had a severe alarm.’¹¹³

There was worse news to come from Moscow, where the recorded daily death rate peaked at 920 on 15 September, unleashing a riot that lasted for several days. Already unpopular thanks to his attempts to control clerical vagrancy, Archbishop Amvrosy was assassinated by a mob outraged by rumours that he intended to confiscate a renowned miracle-working icon and transfer all the money donated to it to Betskoy’s Foundling Home. Yeropkin reported on 18 September that at least 100 had died in the Kremlin, where rioters ransacked the archbishop’s residence before hounding him to his death at the Don monastery on the other side of the river. It was not what the empress wanted to hear. ‘She is much affected with these calamities,’ Cathcart reported on 27 September, ‘and cannot, though she endeavours, conceal it.’¹¹⁴ ‘Truly this famous eighteenth century has a lot to be proud of here,’ Catherine wrote a week later in describing Amvrosy’s fate to Voltaire. ‘What wise people we have become.’¹¹⁵

By the time Grigory Orlov learned of the riots, he was already en route to the old capital to take over from Saltykov, who had petitioned for his retirement after taking unauthorised (and unforgiven) leave. While he was away, elaborate measures were taken to protect St Petersburg and its palaces from infection. The gates at Tsarskoye Selo were to be kept shut at all times; only Court carriages were permitted on the new road between the menagerie and the toboggan ride at Pulkovo; sentries were posted at the entrance to every village on the estate with instructions to turn away anyone suspected of coming from an infected area.¹¹⁶ Moscow’s government offices were not to reopen until 1 December 1772 after the end of the epidemic had been formally proclaimed by successive Te Deums in both cities.¹¹⁷ Yet still the war with the Ottomans dragged on, as Catherine concentrated on recording her victories for posterity.

‘If this war continues,’ she told Voltaire in August 1771, ‘my garden at Tsarskoye Selo will soon resemble a game of skittles, because I put up a monument there after each of our glorious battles’:

The battle of Kagul, where seventeen thousand men fought a hundred and fifty thousand, produced an obelisk with an inscription stating only the event and the name of the general. The naval battle at Chesme gave birth to a rostral column in the middle of a large stretch of water. The capture of the Crimea will be preserved by one large column; the descent in the Morea and the capture of Sparta by another. All these are made of the finest marbles one can see, admired by the Italians themselves. Some are found on the shores of Lake Ladoga, the remainder in Yekaterinburg in Siberia, and we use them as you see. They come in nearly every colour. Besides this, in a wood behind my garden, I have had the idea of building a temple of memory to be approached through a triumphal arch. All the important events of the war will be engraved on medallions, with simple and short inscriptions in the language of this country, giving the date and the names of those who took part. I have an excellent Italian architect [Rinaldi], who is drawing up the plans for this building, which will, I hope, be a beautiful one, in good taste, and will relate the history of this war. This idea amuses me greatly and I trust that you will not find it inappropriate.¹¹⁸

Falconet had told her that the ‘lapidary style is the simplest and best that the Ancients used for the inscriptions on their monuments’. Catherine duly followed his example when she came to specify the inscriptions for the plaques on the Kagul obelisk. Meanwhile, two Medal Committees, apparently inspired by Louis XIV’s Académie des inscriptions, set to work between May 1772 and November 1774.¹¹⁹

‘I wouldn’t know how to live in a place where I could neither plant nor build,’ Catherine admitted to Frau Bielke in April 1772. ‘After that, even the most beautiful place in the world would seem insipid.’ As it was, much to the amusement of Grigory Orlov, she was in the grip of a bout of ‘plantomania’. That spring, as Orlov departed for the peace talks at Fokshany, he left her in charge of his garden at Gatchina, where she could commit her own ‘indiscretions’.¹²⁰ She had done so all along. The Scot Charles Sparrow, who designed the widely admired park at Gatchina, had been the first of several British gardeners recruited to Russia by Ivan Chernyshëv in 1769. Soon the Hanoverian Johann Busch (John Bush) joined the list, signing a contract for a salary of 1500 roubles a year in January 1771. Having briefly worked at Oranienbaum, he took charge of landscaping the English park at Tsarskoye Selo, where Vasily Neëlov, who had worked there since the 1740s, was already busy rearranging the paths and bridges. An even more obvious result of Neëlov’s six-month visit to England in 1770 was the fashion for all things Chinese. In 1772, he completed the Large Caprice, a Chinese summer house spanning the road to the palace. He also worked on Rinaldi’s Chinese Village, a neo-oriental fantasy which comprised some fifteen small houses by the time it was finished by Charles Cameron, connected by a colonnade that cost 41,000 roubles and dominated by a pagoda built for 48,000. Chinoiserie was equally prominent in Thomas Whately’s influential Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), which Catherine acquired in French translation in 1771.¹²¹

Though the Russian version she planned never appeared in print, Catherine dedicated her adaptation of Whately’s book ‘To the owners of estates bordering the sea and lying along the Peterhof road…by one who has seen their natural attractions and capabilities, so that they should be further improved according to the principles herein prescribed.’¹²² One such owner was Lev Naryshkin, to whom Novikov dedicated the second printing of The Drone on 28 July 1769, the eve of Naryshkin’s annual masquerade at Leventhal (Lev’s Valley). To Novikov, the estate seemed ‘the most perfect Eden’, and indeed, three years later, it proved to be the ideal setting for an entertainment that was remembered in Russia long into the nineteenth century.¹²³ By the time Catherine arrived at 7 p.m. on 29 July 1772, 2000 guests had already spent a pleasant afternoon strolling in her friend’s sylvan groves. When two shepherdesses, played by his daughters, Natalia and Katerina, gambolled into view to invite her to their hut on a nearby hillside, it seemed that they were to witness no more than a conventional pastoral idyll. Soon, however, the crowd gasped when the hillside parted, as if by magic, to reveal a magnificent temple of victory, its entrances guarded by statues representing the Russian army and navy. Dressed as the ‘genius of victory’, Naryshkin’s son Dimitry led the empress through a portal emblazoned with the slogan ‘CATHERINE II: CONQUEROR’. Inside, he presented her with a laurel wreath and a speech which had been printed (in French) along with plans of the temple in a booklet distributed to all the guests. As she crossed the threshold into a hall adorned with the trophies of war, a cannon salute signalled the first of a series of scenes representing a litany of all her finest triumphs at Khotin, the River Larga, Kagul, Chesme and Bender. Only after reliving the glories of her annus mirabilis was she permitted to relax among Naryshkin’s colourful Chinese pagodas, where attendants in Chinese costume were on hand to serve her to the accompaniment of Chinese musical instruments. There was still a magnificent banquet to come. Not until three in the morning, an exceptionally late hour, did she finally return to Peterhof.¹²⁴

Although St Petersburg in the early 1770s remained, as a British traveller remarked, ‘only an immense outline, which will require future empresses, and almost future ages, to complete’, there was no doubt about the scale of Catherine’s ambitions in the field of urban reconstruction.¹²⁵‘Augustus said that he had found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble,’ she told Frau Bielke in July 1770, ‘and I shall say that I found Petersburg almost entirely made of wood and will leave it with buildings decorated in marble. Despite the war and the Welches, we continue to build.’¹²⁶ In the light of her determination to press ahead in difficult circumstances, it was all the more frustrating to see hard-earned progress undone. ‘I have resembled Job since yesterday’, she wrote angrily to Panin, after a fire destroyed part of Vasilevsky Island on 23 May 1771. ‘I sent Count Orlov into town with instructions not to return until the last spark is extinguished.’ Having initially suspected arson, she soon blamed careless residents.¹²⁷ Voltaire received a different explanation: ‘There is no doubt that the wind and the excessive heat caused all the damage which will soon be repaired. In Russia we build faster than in any other country in Europe.’ She was as good as her word. On 26 July, plans were approved for the development of low-rise stone houses to replace the majority of burnt-out wooden ones.¹²⁸

Designs for Moscow were more grandiose. Vasily Bazhenov had been appointed to oversee a major reconstruction of the Kremlin just before Catherine’s departure from the old capital in January 1768 and she kept in close touch with him as he surveyed the foundations. ‘Be so good as to open the air-vents,’ she instructed Saltykov at the end of May. ‘Bazhenov needs to move about the cellars and if the vents won’t open he’ll be in danger of suffocating.’¹²⁹ Warned that even this prestige project would be subject to wartime economies, the architect took advantage of successive delays to develop increasingly ambitious plans. Having originally intended to begin with new government buildings, the empress soon opted instead for a four-storey neoclassical palace with a 700-yard frontage onto the Moscow River.¹³⁰ Pandering to her obsession with posterity, Bazhenov planned to glorify her name with a building to rival all the wonders of the world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Parisian Palais Royal: the main reception hall alone was destined to measure seventy metres by fifty metres. However, as he soon discovered, Catherine was just as preoccupied with more immediate practicalities. After meeting him in St Petersburg in December 1768, she insisted that the kitchens and confectionery should be built side by side for ease of service.¹³¹ And she could barely conceal her irritation on discovering, a year later, that crucial comforts had been neglected. On reviewing the revised plans in February 1770, Grigory Teplov reported that ‘Her Majesty made the following observations’:

1: Nowhere in the palace is there provision for the necessary, without which it will be impossible for a large number of residents and visitors to remain there, and if this is not taken care of, then there will always be dirtiness and filth in the palace. 2: Nowhere can it be seen how and from where carriages will arrive at the various entrances so that it will not to be too far to walk in case of a severe frost.¹³²

Catherine was equally determined that the works should not damage the three great Muscovite cathedrals, monuments of the national heritage that she was proud to show off to Prince Henry along with the university and the foundling home in December 1770.¹³³ Not satisfied with mere preservation, the empress wanted their priceless frescoes to be restored to their former glory by appropriately qualified ‘religious people’. There was no shortage of such experts in the old capital and its monasteries, she reminded Archbishop Amvrosy, instructing him to ‘make sure that they carry out their work with the decorum appropriate to God’s holy churches’.¹³⁴ This was no mere whim. After Amvrosy’s assassination, responsibility for the work was transferred to the disciplinarian Samuil (Mislavsky), a favourite Court preacher whom Catherine had appointed to a suffragan see in the diocese of Moscow. Though modern scholars are aghast at the damage done by eighteenth-century ‘restoration’ methods, she was pleased to learn that the work had been completed over the following two years, first in the Annunciation cathedral and later in the Archangel and Dormition cathedrals.¹³⁵

She was not present at the foundation ceremony for the Kremlin Palace on 1 June 1773, but Bazhenov’s speech on that occasion left no doubt about the meaning of his plans. If Catherine had yet to conquer Constantinople, Constantinople must come to her in a classic instance of translatio imperii:

The Eastern Church celebrates the renovation of Tsar-Grad because the pious Constantine transferred his throne from the banks of the Tiber to Byzantium and adorned it with magnificence, and consecrated that place in the spirit of God. On this day Moscow, too, is renewed. You, great Catherine, in the midst of a bloody conflict, and in the midst of the many affairs entrusted to you by God, have not forgotten the adornment of the capital city…Exult, O Kremlin! On this day, we are laying the first stone of a new temple of Ephesus.¹³⁶

It proved to be a false hope. Before the building could rise from the ground, Bazhenov’s project was cancelled. The empress had a more pressing need for a residence in Moscow, where she planned to celebrate her ultimate victory against the Turks. When Elizabeth’s Golovin Palace finally burned down in December 1771, Catherine expressed surprise ‘only that it had survived for so long, despite my hundredfold prophesies about it’.¹³⁷ In the search for a replacement the following autumn, her thoughts turned first to the Menshikov Palace at Lefortovo. As usual, she was closely involved in the design. ‘Ask Prince Makulov if he agrees to take on the construction work,’ Catherine instructed Prince Volkonsky, Salytkov’s successor as Moscow’s Governor General, ‘and tell him that he will see from my plan that the internal wall of this palace should be rebuilt and pushed out into the courtyard so that we obtain a double room whose width is indicated on the plan.’ Only after the architect went to see her in St Petersburg did she concede that her designs were impracticable. ‘I see that it is impossible to reconstruct the house at Lefortovo according to my plan and it would be better to knock almost all of it down and start anew. Even then it would be bad since it is near a slope and it would cost up to 900,000 roubles, which I am certainly not prepared to spend on a temporary building.’¹³⁸

In the end, the Menshikov Palace was used to house theatrical staff and Catherine chose to build a new stone residence on the site of the burnt-out palace on the other side of the Yauza River. Noting that it was ‘designed to be two or three English miles in circumference’, Wraxall observed that there was ‘a sort of savage and barbarous grandeur in this taste, which never appears in the edifices and productions of Athenian sculpture or architecture’.¹³⁹ So ambitious was the project that the empress never occupied her Catherine Palace, which was completed only in 1796. Since the immediate need for a useable residence remained, Bazhenov’s assistant, Matvey Kazakov, returned from St Petersburg at the end of August 1774 with a more modest commission to connect three large houses belonging to the Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys and the Lopukhins. It was in this ramshackle Prechistensky Palace, dismantled shortly afterwards, that Catherine was to celebrate victory over the Turks in 1775. Before then, however, she had not only to defeat the enemy, but also to overcome the most serious internal challenges of her reign.