The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  After the Lopukhin conspiracy, Vice-Chancellor Bestuzhev was under a cloud, the Austrian alliance in doubt, and the French and Prussians saw their chance. King Frederick proposed a wife for Elizaveta’s heir: Sophie, princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was the daughter of a poor prince in Prussian service but her mother, Joanna, was the sister of the prince-bishop of Lübeck, the only man Elizaveta herself had wanted to marry. ‘No one,’ remarked Frederick, ‘better suited the intentions of Russia and the interests of Prussia.’ Elizaveta agreed and Frederick commissioned Princess Joanna to help overthrow the pro-Austrian Bestuzhev. Sophie, the future Catherine the Great, set off for Petersburg.

  On 9 February 1744, Catherine, as Sophie was renamed on her conversion to Orthodoxy, and her busybody mother arrived at Moscow’s Golovin Palace to meet Empress Elizaveta. Then Catherine was presented to Peter, who was excited to meet her. These second cousins had a lot in common as Germans at the Russian court. Catherine’s mother had ordered her to charm empress and grand duke, and she succeeded with both. She dutifully listened to Peter’s long stories and did all she could to please the empress. Aged fourteen, she at once started instruction in Russian and Orthodoxy, swiftly mastering both – but the marriage nearly did not happen at all.

  First Peter fell ill with measles: afterwards he never returned to his studies and his Russian was barely intelligible. Next Catherine suffered a lung infection. When her mother tried to stop her being bled, the empress, sweeping in with her doctors Lestocq and Sanchez, cradled her and took over her treatment, unimpressed by the mother’s heartless interventions. Catherine soon learned that her mother was already out of her depth in this turbulent court.

  Bestuzhev, the pro-Austrian, had been opposed to the Prussian-arranged marriage, so Frederick’s agent Princess Joanna threw herself into intrigues against the vice-chancellor while he was bombarded with offers of Prussian bribes. Elizaveta ordered Bestuzhev and Vorontsov to ‘open all her letters and see what she’s scheming’. Chétardie, recently returned to court, plotted with Joanna and reported to Versailles that the empress wasted time on ‘the most trifling things, enjoying her toilette five times daily, carousing in her apartments with the most vulgar riffraff’. Bestuzhev opened the letters and broke the French code. On 6 June 1744, he confronted Chétardie – and showed the empress these insults.

  Outraged by his betrayal, Elizaveta expelled the Frenchman and threatened to throw out Princess Joanna, yet that incorrigible meddler continued to conspire with Lestocq and Frederick the Great. Elizaveta promoted Bestuzhev to chancellor and backed his consistent, traditional alliance with Austria – though the pro-French Vorontsov became his deputy. For the first time in decades, Russian ministers were directing Russian policy – but the heir’s Prussian-backed marriage went ahead. In August, Peter came down with smallpox, from which he emerged strangely different, and heavily pockmarked. He recovered in time for his wedding, but the illness may have left him sterile.

  At 7 a.m. on 21 August 1745, Catherine was dressed in a silver-brocade wedding dress with a wince-making eighteen-inch waist and a cascade of jewels topped with a diamond tiara. At ten o’clock, rouged and sleekly glowing, she joined Peter and Elizaveta in the eight-horse imperial carriage so big it resembled ‘a little castle’, focus of a procession of 120 carriages that trundled slowly through Petersburg to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan. After the three-hour ceremony, which was followed by a ball at the palace, Catherine was put to bed by giggling ladies. But her husband Peter, drinking with his German cronies, did not appear for hours and, when he did, nothing happened. The marriage would end in murder, but even in its first hours, it precipitated a deadly showdown. Bestuzhev sprang his traps. First he showed Elizaveta the treacherous letters of Catherine’s mother. She was sent home. Mother and daughter never met again. Then Bestuzhev entrapped Lestocq taking Prussian bribes.

  On 11 November, the empress attended Lestocq’s marriage. On the 13th she ordered his arrest. The doctor was tortured and sentenced to death, which Elizaveta commuted to life imprisonment. Frederick had completely failed to win over Elizaveta who, to him, personified all the faults of female power: her rule was simply the ‘rule of cunt’, and he mocked her as an oriental sultana, a power-mad nymphomaniac, like Emperor Claudius’ wife – the ‘Messalina of the North’ – insults that earned him her undying hatred.5

  After Frederick the Great’s intrigues, Elizaveta was extremely touchy on the subject of children. On 27 February 1746, the fallen regent Anna of Brunswick gave birth to a third son, but died a week later.* The body was pickled and brought to Petersburg where Elizaveta, accompanied by Catherine, sobbed throughout the funeral of a woman whom she had destroyed – and whose bounty of royal heirs illustrated the apathy of the unconsummated grand ducal marriage.

  Peter was already making himself unpopular. Just on brattish reputation, Empress Anna had nicknamed him the Little Holstein Devil, and when Elizaveta got to know him, she agreed. The eighteen-year-old paraded his Holsteiners, mocking the Russian military, giggled as he spilt wine at dinner and made faces at mass ‘whereby all those in church have been outraged’ – and ignored Catherine. Meanwhile his adjutants, Zakhar Chernyshev and his brothers, flirted with Catherine.

  Then, while recuperating from an illness, Peter arranged a puppet theatre next to the empress’s apartments. Hearing voices through a wooden partition, he drilled holes and invited his sidekicks to join him. He even brought in benches so that the audience could watch the peepshow. When Catherine looked through the hole, she was frightened – but it was too late. Elizaveta heard sniggering and caught them red-handed. ‘She showered furious condemnation and gross words upon him,’ recalled Catherine, ‘betraying as much contempt for him as anger.’

  ‘My nephew’s a monster,’ Elizaveta wrote to Razumovsky. ‘The devil take him.’ She threatened to treat him as Peter the Great had treated Alexei – and then stormed out.6

  *

  The hole in the wall was a window into Elizaveta’s world of intimidating frivolity. The teenagers had stared into the apartment where the empress dined informally with her lover Razumovsky. The table, a grand version of a dumb waiter, was hitched up from a lower floor so that the empress and her favourites could talk and play freely – without the eavesdropping servants.

  Elizaveta and Razumovsky had been together for thirteen years. Even young Catherine was dazzled, calling him ‘the most handsome man’ she had ever seen. Born just Razum, a Cossack villager hired for his looks and voice to sing in Elizaveta’s choir, he was her enduring love. There were rumours that they had secretly married in 1742 in the village of Perovo near Moscow. There is no proof of this, though this paragon of manhood never married anyone else. Both highly religious, it is more likely this ceremony was some sort of blessing.

  In 1744, the empress set off on pilgrimage to Kiev, accompanied by Catherine, Peter and Razumovsky. Elizaveta deigned to visit his village – the homecoming of the Cossack boy who had done well. Razumovsky forbade his uncles ‘to boast in my name and preen themselves as my relatives’. But Elizaveta enjoyed his earthy family and so adored his sixteen-year-old brother Kyril, a goatherd in rags, that she invited him to Petersburg and then played Pygmalion to turn him into a cultured aristocrat.

  Back in the capital, Elizaveta gave Alexei Razumovsky an apartment in the Winter Palace connected to her own. While the ‘Night Emperor’ – as diplomats called him – was not interested in power, he became fabulously rich. When he was later joined by his brother, they were powerful because of their proximity to the autocrat, yet both shepherds-turned-counts remained surprisingly easy-going. Elizaveta was always in charge, even though she worked as little as possible and partied relentlessly. Time is so often the first victim of autocracy. She often partied until 6 a.m., sleeping till midday and sending for jewellers and ministers in the middle of the night. ‘Nobody ever knew the hour Her Imperial Majesty would deign to have dinner,’ recalled Catherine, ‘and it often happened that the courtiers having waited play
ing cards till 2 a.m. and gone to sleep were awakened to attend Her Majesty’s supper.’ If they were too sleepy to speak, they were likely to get a slap.

  ‘One could not see her for the first time without being struck by her beauty and majestic bearing,’ wrote Catherine. ‘She was a large woman but, though she was stout,’ her frame could bear it: ‘she was not disfigured by it and her head was also very beautiful’. In dress, morals and taste, she personified the saucy, frothy excess of rococo, the age of the fake beauty spot and the towering wig.* Elizaveta ‘danced with perfection and had a particular grace in all she did’. According to Catherine, ‘one only regretfully turned one’s gaze away from her because no object could replace her’. Yet no one admired Elizaveta’s beauty more than she herself, and she believed she looked best in male costume. Hence she frequently held what she called Metamorphoses, transvestite balls in which, channelling the topsy-turvy games of her father, she would metamorphose into a very pretty man.

  Elizaveta herself specified every detail: ‘Ladies are to be in gentlemen’s clothes the gentlemen in ladies’ clothes whatever they have, dresses with full skirts, caftans or negligées.’ The men ‘wore hoop skirts and were coiffed like ladies’. Catherine hated the Metamorphoses because ‘most of the women resembled stunted little boys’, and men disliked them too as they ‘felt they were hideous’ in drag. ‘No women looked good except the empress since she was very tall with a powerful build. She had more beautiful legs than I’ve ever seen on a man.’

  The autocrat was a fashion despot, issuing decrees like this: ‘Ladies to wear white caftans of taffeta; cuff-edgings and skirts to be green, lapels trimmed with gold braid: they must have on their heads a papillon-like embellishment with green ribbons, hair drawn up smoothly. Gentlemen: wear white kaftans, camisoles with small slit cuffs, green collars, gold-braided buttonholes.’

  She always got what she wanted. ‘I am told a French ship has arrived with ladies’ clothes, men’s hats and for women beauty spots and gold taffeta,’ she wrote. ‘Have all this and the merchant brought here immediately!’ When she learned that she had not got there first, one can hear the menace in her response: ‘Summon the merchant and ask why he was lying when he said he’d sent all the lapels and collars which I’d chosen . . . Now I demand them so order him to find them and not keep them for someone else. And if anyone holds them back, tell him from me he will regret it (ladies included). Whoever I see wearing them will share this punishment!’

  On her death, there were 15,000 dresses in her wardrobe plus ‘two chests filled with silk stockings, several thousand pairs of shoes and more than 100 untouched lengths of French fabric’.*

  But Petersburg’s sophistication was a façade: there was so little furniture that the contents of each palace had to be moved every time the empress changed residence. Often her own palaces were so badly built they fell down. When Catherine and Peter were staying in one of Razumovsky’s new wooden palaces, the building suddenly started to sink. The grand ducal couple just got out alive; sixteen servants were killed, and a weeping Razumovsky threatened to commit suicide. In Moscow, Elizaveta’s Golovin Palace, where seventeen maids-of-honour had to sleep in a cupboard, caught fire. The empress lost 4,000 dresses, and she, Peter and Catherine only just escaped. ‘It’s not rare’, marvelled Catherine, ‘to see coming from an immense courtyard full of mire and filth that belongs to a hovel of rotten wood, a lady covered in jewels and superbly dressed, in a magnificent carriage, pulled by six old nags, and with badly combed valets.’

  No wonder Peter and Catherine were dazzled by what they saw through the spyhole. But their youthful hijinks ended in mortification and they were obliged to kneel before Elizaveta. ‘We beg your pardon, Matushka,’ they said. Even the self-absorbed Elizaveta realized that if Catherine was to get pregnant, she herself had to take control.7

  She drew up new rules: Peter’s German cronies were sent home. She reprimanded the jackanapes for his juvenile games and told Catherine that her sole purpose was to produce an heir. The flirtatious Chernyshevs were despatched abroad. Elizaveta placed her relative, Maria Choglokova, and her husband in charge of the household. Catherine loathed her and burst into tears, a tantrum that brought the empress charging into their apartments. Once again, Catherine knelt and said: ‘Pardon, Matushka!’

  Now more carefully supervised, Catherine suffered from the loneliness of her position. Her first consolation was reading: unlike her husband, who read romantic novels, she was seriously intellectual, consuming the masterpieces of the Enlightenment. But she suffered depression and headaches. ‘I lived a life for eighteen years’, she said, ‘from which ten others would have gone crazy and twenty would have died of melancholy.’

  That pale beanpole was developing into a buxom woman who, she later recalled, loved to ride a horse wildly for as long as thirteen hours at a stretch. Both the depression and the riding may well have been symptoms of sexual frustration and certainly were signs of a girl starved of affection. ‘I never believed myself to be beautiful,’ wrote Catherine, ‘but I was pleasant and that I suppose was my strength.’ She was not beautiful, but she was comely, blue-eyed and blessed with an acute political intelligence, sexual magnetism and invincible charm.

  ‘There is a woman for whom an honest man would suffer a few blows of the knout without regret,’ said a courtier as he watched her dance. While Catherine started to attract suitors, Elizaveta had fallen in love again.8

  In 1748 Elizaveta, now thirty-nine, fell seriously ill, producing conspiracies at court as nervous grandees planned for the future. Catherine told Peter that if in danger they could count on the Chernyshevs and the Guards, but when a huntsman fell to his knees and told the grand duke that he would help him win the throne, Peter panicked and rode off. ‘From that day, he showed interest in gaining power,’ Catherine noticed – but lacked the ability to manipulate it.

  When the empress recovered, she embarked on one of her many pilgrimages, this time to St Sabbas near Moscow, where her long-serving retainer Peter Shuvalov introduced her to his orphaned first cousin Ivan Shuvalov. He charmed her so much that she recruited him as companion in prayers at the New Jerusalem Monastery. Sexual indulgence blended naturally with Elizaveta’s passionate piety.*

  Appointed gentleman of the bedchamber, Shuvalov moved into the Night Emperor’s apartments next to Elizaveta, and she gave Razumovsky the Anichkov Palace as a present. Shuvalov was sweet-looking and sweet-natured, but his elevation brought his less sweet relatives to power. The Shuvalovs threatened Bestuzhev and Razumovsky, who devised a counter-seduction – in the person of a young actor who starred in the cadet corps theatre. ‘She took pleasure in dressing the actors,’ noted a diplomat, ‘had superb costumes made for them, and they were covered in her jewels. Above all we noticed that the leading man, a handsome boy of eighteen, was the most adorned.’ This was Nikita Beketov. At a performance of the playwright Alexander Sumarokov’s latest tragedy, Elizaveta fell in love with Beketov. ‘Outside the theatre he was seen wearing exquisite diamond buckles, rings, watches and lace.’ The Shuvalovs struck back by lending Beketov an ointment that gave him a rash; then they told Elizaveta the boy was homosexual and afflicted with VD. The empress was horrified.

  Ivan Shuvalov, her last great love, eighteen years her junior, had triumphed. ‘At this time, he was just eighteen and had a very nice face, respectful, polite, attentive and very sweet,’ wrote Catherine. ‘I found him in the antechamber, a book in hand. I also liked to read so I remarked upon this.’ There was something impressive in this delicate connoisseur who was ‘mild and generous to all’. Even as favourite, he was mostly regarded as ‘beautiful and noble’. He turned down titles. ‘I can say I was born without the desire to attain wealth, honours or titles,’ he explained later to Vorontsov. ‘And if, dear sir, I didn’t succumb to these temptations throughout the years when passion and vanity possess people, then today, all the more so, I see no reason to do so.’ His patrons and cousins, the Shuvalov brothers, long-serving co
urtiers in Elizaveta’s entourage, became her chief ministers.*

  Yet her young lover, a cut above all of them, grew up quickly, becoming a Russian Maecenas. He was the founder of Moscow University, a newspaper and the Academy of Arts (which met in his delicately elegant palace), backing Russian talent from the peasant-born sculptor Fyodor Shubin to Sumarokov and the poet-scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. He corresponded with Voltaire and built an extraordinary library and art collection of works by Rembrandt and Rubens, which became the seed of the Hermitage Museum.

  Titles or no titles, he gradually became the real power in Russia, creating policy privately with the empress, enjoying ‘all the privileges of a minister without being one’. Like Razumovsky, but even more so, he did the empress credit.

  She remains notorious for her fashion addiction and social tyranny, and suffers from the comparison with her brilliant successor but one, Catherine the Great. Yet she restored Russian pride and imperial authority, and clarified the succession. She enjoyed many lovers but none of them became overmighty, and all were surprisingly popular; and she chose well in her ministers Trubetskoi and Bestuzhev.

  Yet the cost of her armies, palaces and dresses fell heavily on the millions of serfs, source of all wealth. Hundreds of thousands fled while thousands of others rose up in armed rebellions that had to be crushed. As she eased her father’s system of compulsory service for nobles, who increasingly avoided serving for life, she intensified their control over their serfs who, as mere chattels, no longer even took the oath of allegiance and could now be sold and bought, and their masters could now exile them to Siberia for ‘insolence’ without any state permission. Altogether, the ‘Elizabethan Age’ of this spoilt but intelligent and well-meaning empress was a frivolous sequel to the rule of her father – and a rehearsal for that of Catherine the Great.9