In the memoirs, Catherine often mentions a person’s relatives to draw a quick portrait, to indicate his or her significance, and to explain a situation. These connections constitute the warp and woof of the Russian court, the government, and the military in the eighteenth century, and they are often unspoken because everyone knew them and took their importance for granted. While the index presents individuals, this note provides some background on the history of the complex interrelationships of noble families, which provides an essential window into the world of Catherine’s memoirs.
In this memoir Catherine makes particular mention of the importance of Mme. Vladislavova, appointed by Empress Elizabeth in 1748 as head of Catherine’s personal court.
Her name was Praskovia Nikitichna. She got off to a very good start; she was sociable, loved to talk, spoke and told stories with intelligence, knew all the anecdotes of past and present times by heart, knew four or five generations of all the families, had the genealogies of everyone’s fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, and paternal and maternal great-grandparents fixed in her memory, and no one informed me more about what had happened in Russia over the past hundred years than she.
The essential lore of the history of kinship relations of noble families at the Russian court proved invaluable to Catherine, who was an outsider. Armed with this information, she could better understand and use the women and men around her.
Individual families formed noble patronage networks through marriage, especially with the czars. Through their marriages and official and unofficial positions, families fought for prestige and power, or access to the ruler and to the distribution of patronage. Most important for Catherine’s purposes, they intrigued in succession struggles to promote their candidates and bring down their opponents. Thus in this memoir, Catherine takes a great personal interest in Mme. Vladislavova’s knowledge.
The wives of the seventeenth-century czars created two major extended families, the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs. Peter the Great’s mother was Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina (1651–94), and the extended Naryshkin clan included the Streshnevs (Peter’s grandmother) and the Lopukhins (Peter’s first wife), and came to include the Golitsyns and the Trubetskois. Peter the Great’s half brother and co-ruler, Ivan V, married Praskovia Fedorovna Saltykova (1664–1723); their daughter Anna, Duchess of Courland, became Empress. The Saltykov clan included the Dolgorukovs and Apraksins.1 As Catherine writes in this memoir, “the Saltykov family was one of the oldest and most noble of this empire. It was related to the Imperial house itself by the mother of Empress Anna, who was a Saltykov.” When Peter the Great’s daughter Elizabeth succeeded Anna in a coup in 1741, the Naryshkins defeated the Saltykovs by adding several members to Elizabeth’s senate, in particular Vice Chancellor (later Chancellor) Count Bestuzhev-Riumin and Prince Alexander Kurakin (1697–1749).2 The prestige, power, and collective fortunes of these two clans changed, but they remained the two most powerful groups throughout Catherine’s reign and into the nineteenth century.3
The ruthless competition between these two families during the succession struggles after Peter the Great’s death abated under Elizabeth.4 The Saltykovs expanded to include the Trubetskois (through three marriages), and the Naryshkins added the Kurakins and the Golitsyns.5 In addition, Elizabeth’s mother’s family, the Skavronskys, provided a way to advance politically and themselves needed to solidify their power with status. Elizabeth married her niece Anna Skavronskaia to Mikhail Vorontsov (from an old noble family). Vorontsov continued his ascent by plotting with the family of Elizabeth’s favorite, the Shuvalovs, against Chancellor Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, and succeeded him after his arrest in 1758, where Catherine’s memoir ends. Two husbands of two other Skavronsky nieces likewise succeeded to important posts at this time, as did relatives of the Naryshkins, thus leaving the Saltykovs in the background.6 Under Peter III, the Vorontsovs placed Elizabeth Vorontsova as his mistress, but Catherine cut short their hopes in 1762 with her coup. However, Vorontsova’s sister, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, was at Catherine’s side during the coup, and the family continued to prosper under Catherine.
To maintain the balance of power between rival clans, Elizabeth went outside Russia to choose her own candidate as a wife for her nephew Grand Duke Peter. However, she turned to the two main families ten years later. Elizabeth responded to Peter and Catherine’s failure to consummate their marriage and have children with a plan so sensitive that it was left out of the Russian Academy edition of Catherine’s final memoir. In 1753, Elizabeth’s niece Mme. Choglokova proposed that Catherine take a lover and offered her “L.N.” or “S.S.” Given the central importance of the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs to the ruling Romanov family, Elizabeth had found a respectable and reasonable, albeit unorthodox, solution to dynastic instability by proposing an affair with either Lev Naryshkin or Sergei Saltykov. Thus Elizabeth could accept Paul as a possibly illegitimate future heir. (Elizabeth herself was illegitimate, which had been an impediment to a royal marriage.) Catherine recalls the affair with Saltykov as a matter of necessity in the account of her lovers that she wrote for Potemkin.7
In this memoir, Catherine demonstrates how she understood and used this system of relationships in which women as well as men played potentially important roles. Thus in 1757 Catherine arranged a marriage that improved her relations with the Razumovskys, the family of Elizabeth’s favorite and secret husband, at the expense of the family of Elizabeth’s other favorite, the Shuvalovs. These two families opposed each other in the succession struggle.
The marriage of Lev Naryshkin linked me more strongly than ever in friendship with the Counts Razumovsky, who were truly grateful to me for having procured such a good and advantageous match for their niece, nor were they at all upset to have gotten the upper hand over the Shuvalovs, who were not even able to complain about it and were obliged to conceal their mortification. This was yet one more advantage that I had obtained for them.
Catherine leaves the obvious unsaid: both the Razumovskys and the Shuvalovs needed to solidify their relatively recent ascents as favorites’ families, and the Razumovskys gained more prestige and power from a connection with the Naryshkins than with almost any other family, thus significantly outdoing their rivals. The Shuvalovs later married into the Saltykovs. Catherine too does not explain that in return for her support, Kirill Razumovsky was instrumental in organizing her coup. Thus, noble family relations provide an essential key to understanding the dramas at court and continuous rise and fall of Catherine’s position in the evolving succession struggle that forms the background for the final memoir.
NOTES
John P. LeDonne, “Ruling Families in the Russian Political Order, 1689–1825,” Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique 28.3–4:233–322 ( July–December 1987). He includes charts of the major families.
Bestuzhev-Riumin’s brother Mikhail was married to Anna Gavrilovna Golovkina (died 1751), whose father, Gavriil Golovkin, was the second cousin of Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina. Kurakin’s mother, Kseniia Fedorovna Lopukhina (1677–98), was the younger sister of Peter the Great’s first wife, Evdokiia. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 298–99; V. Fedorchenko, Imperatorskii dom: Vydaiushchiesia sanovniki, 2 vols. (Moscow: Olma-Press, 2000).
Neither Elizabeth nor Catherine, once widowed, officially married, but their favorites performed a similar function for the ruling class. John LeDonne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism, 1762–1796 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 4.
LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 301.
Ibid.
Ivan Glebov and Nikolai Korf. LeDonne, “Ruling Families,” 300.
Catherine to Potemkin, February 21, 1774. Smith, Love and Conquest, 9–11.