Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  The absurdity of what they were doing, often until two in the morning, sometimes made Catherine laugh, but usually she simply endured. She could not move in bed, the whole surface being covered with toys, some of which were heavy. In addition, she worried that Madame Choglokova would hear of these nocturnal games. Sure enough, one evening toward midnight, she knocked at the bedroom door. It had a double lock, and those inside did not open it immediately because Peter, Catherine, and Madame Krause were scrambling to collect the toys from the top of the bed and cram them under the blankets. When Madame Krause eventually opened the door, Madame Choglokova entered, furious at having been kept waiting. Madame Krause explained that it had been necessary for her to go and get her key. Then Madame Choglokova asked why Catherine and Peter were not asleep. Peter replied curtly that he was not ready to sleep. Madame Choglokova lashed back that the empress would be furious to learn that the couple was not asleep at this late hour. Eventually, she left, grumbling. Peter began playing again and continued until he fell asleep.

  The situation was farcical: a newly married couple constantly on guard lest they be caught playing with toys. Behind this farce lay the greater absurdity of a young husband playing with toys in the marital bed, leaving his young wife with nothing to do but to watch. (In her Memoirs, an older, more sophisticated Catherine commented wryly, “It seems to me that I was good for something else.”) Yet the real context in which these games were played was as dangerous as it was bizarre. Elizabeth was a woman accustomed to having her way. These two impudent grand ducal children were thwarting her. She had done everything for them: she had reached out and brought them to Russia; she had loaded them with gifts, titles, and kindness; she had given them a magnificent wedding; all in the hope of a speedy fulfillment of her wish for an heir.

  When, as the months passed, Elizabeth found her hope still frustrated, she was determined to know which of the pair was responsible. Was it conceivable that Catherine, at seventeen, with her freshness, her intelligence and charm, should leave her eighteen-year-old husband entirely cold? Was it not far more likely that Peter’s ugliness and disagreeable nature had repelled his wife, and that she was expressing her revulsion in the privacy of their bedroom by repulsing his advances? If this were not so, what other reason could there be?

  Peter was not completely indifferent to women. Proof of this was his constant infatuation with one or another of the ladies of the court. His remark on his wedding night, “How it would amuse my servants …,” is proof of his awareness of the role of intimacy in sex, although by mocking it, he was turning intimacy into a vulgar joke.

  It may be that the doctors were right and that Peter, in spite of his eighteen years, had not yet fully arrived at physical manhood. This was more or less Madame Krause’s opinion as she fruitlessly interrogated the young wife every morning. We do not know why he did not or would not or could not reach over and touch his wife. In her Memoirs, Catherine gives no answer. Peter left no records. But two possible explanations, one psychological, the other physical, have been suggested.

  The psychological inhibitions brought forward from youth may have prevented Peter from exposing his fragile ego to the physical intimacy of lovemaking. Peter’s childhood and youth had been horrendous. He had grown up an orphan in the unloving care of martinet tutors. He had been barred from having companions and playmates his own age. He had known people who gave him orders and people who obeyed him, but never anyone with whom he could share common interests and develop friendship and trust. Catherine, during her first year in Russia, had offered him companionship, but she had unintentionally failed him at the moment in the dimly lit hall when he stood before her bearing the hideous scars of smallpox. In that instant, his new friend had struck his self-confidence a blow. To forgive her, to trust her again, to recommit his shaky self-image to her; these were steps he could not bring himself to take. Peter had some idea of what he was supposed to do with Catherine in bed, but her intelligence and charm, even her close female presence, aroused no initiative in him. Instead, they stimulated his sense of inadequacy, failure, and humiliation.

  Another possibility has been offered to explain Peter’s apparent indifference. The Marquis de Castéra, a French diplomat who wrote a three-volume Life of Catherine II published a year after her death, suggested: “The least rabbi of Petersburg or the least surgeon would have been able to correct his little imperfection.” He was talking about a physiological condition called phimosis, a medical term for a tightness of the foreskin that prevents it from easily and comfortably sliding down over the tip of the penis. This problem is normal in a newborn or an infant and sometimes cannot be detected in an uncircumcised boy before the age of four or five because some foreskins remain tight until then. Usually, the problem naturally resolves itself before puberty, when the foreskin loosens and becomes flexible. If this does not happen, however, and the condition continues into adolescence, it can become acutely painful. Sometimes, the foreskin is so tight that the boy cannot have an erection without pain. This, of course, would make sexual intercourse unappealing. If this was true in Peter’s case, his reluctance to reach arousal—and to attempt to explain this problem to an uninformed young woman—can be understood.*

  If Peter suffered from phimosis when he and Catherine were betrothed, this may have been the reason Elizabeth’s doctors recommended that the marriage be delayed. In another context in her Memoirs, Catherine says that Dr. Lestocq recommended waiting until the grand duke reached twenty-one; this advice may have stemmed from Lestocq’s awareness that the condition should certainly have resolved itself by then. But if Lestocq did discuss this matter with the empress, Elizabeth simply overrode his opinion. She was in a hurry for an heir.

  Neither explanation for Peter’s persistent coldness in the marriage bed can be proved or disproved. In any case, whether the problem was psychological or physical—or perhaps involved elements of both—Peter was guilty of no wrong. Still, it was inevitable that, just as Catherine’s rejection of him when she first saw his ravaged face had affected him, so his physical rejection of her produced a reaction in her. Approaching marriage, she had not been in love with Peter, but she had made up her mind to live with him and to fulfill the expectations of her husband and the empress. Catherine, who knew little about sex, about erections and foreskins, and, certainly, nothing about phimosis, knew well what was expected of wives in a royal marriage. It was not Catherine who said no.

  But Peter made it impossible for her. He scorned her physically and acted moonstruck over other women. He encouraged her to flirt with other men. The whole court witnessed her humiliation. Every foreign ambassador observed that she could not attract her husband’s interest; every servant knew the name of whatever young woman the grand duke happened to be pursuing at the moment. And since no one understood why Peter was ignoring his young wife, everyone, including the empress, laid the blame on her. Peter and Catherine continued to live together; they had no choice. But they were estranged by a thousand mutual misunderstandings and mortifications, and a desert of unspoken animosity stretched between them.

  19

  A House Collapses

  NEAR THE END of May 1748, the empress Elizabeth and the court visited Count Razumovsky’s country estate outside St. Petersburg. Catherine and Peter were assigned to a small three-story wooden house built on a hill. Their apartment, in the upper story, had three rooms; they slept in one, Peter dressed in another, and Madame Krause slept in the third. The floor below lodged the Choglokovs and Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting. The first night, the party lasted until six in the morning, when everyone went to bed. Around eight, while all were asleep, a sergeant of the guards posted outside heard strange creaking noises. Looking around the base of the house, he saw that the large blocks of stone supporting the building were moving on the damp, slippery earth, detaching themselves and sliding downhill from the bottom timbers of the house. He hurried to awaken Choglokov, telling him that the foundation was giving way and that everyone had
to get out. Choglokov rushed upstairs and burst open the bedroom door where Catherine and Peter were sleeping. Tearing aside the curtain around their bed, he shouted, “Get up and get out as fast as you can! The foundation of the house is crumbling!” Peter, who had been fast asleep, made one leap from the bed to the door and disappeared. Catherine told Choglokov that she would follow. While dressing, she remembered that Madame Krause was sleeping in the next room and went in to awaken her. The floorboards began to rock—“like the waves of the sea,” said Catherine—and there was a tremendous crash. The house was settling and disintegrating, and Catherine and Madame Krause fell to the floor. At that moment, the sergeant entered, picked up Catherine, and carried her back to the staircase—which was no longer there. Amid the rubble, the sergeant handed Catherine down to the nearest person below, who handed her down to the next, and the next, from one set of hands to another, until she reached the bottom, from where she was carried into a field. There she found Peter and other people who had walked or been carried from the house. Soon, Madame Krause, rescued by another soldier, appeared. Catherine escaped with bruises and a severe shock, but, on a lower floor, three servants sleeping in the kitchen had been killed when the fireplace collapsed. Next to the foundation, sixteen sleeping workers had been crushed and buried in the rubble.

  The house collapsed because it had been hurriedly built in early winter on half-frozen earth. Four limestone blocks had served as the foundation, with the bottom timbers resting on them. With the coming of the spring thaw, the four stone blocks began to slide in different directions and the house was pulled apart. Later that day, when the empress sent for her and Peter, Catherine asked Elizabeth to grant a favor to the sergeant who had carried her from her room. Elizabeth stared at her and, at first, did not reply.

  Immediately afterward, she asked if I was very much frightened. I said, “Yes, very much.” This displeased her still more. She and Madame Choglokova were angry with me the whole day. I suppose I did not notice that they wished to look upon the whole occurrence as a mere trifle. But the shock was so great, that this was impossible. As she wanted to make light of the accident, everyone tried to pretend that the danger had been minimal and some even said there had been no danger at all. My terror displeased her greatly and she hardly spoke to me. Meanwhile, our host, Count Razumovsky, was in despair. One moment, he seized his pistol and talked of blowing out his brains. He sobbed and wept throughout the day; then, at dinner, he emptied his glass, over and over. The empress could not conceal her distress over her favorite’s condition and burst into tears. She had him closely watched; this man, at other times so gentle, was unmanageable and raving when intoxicated. He was prevented from doing himself harm. The following day, everyone returned to St. Petersburg.

  After the episode of the collapsing house, Catherine noticed that the empress seemed constantly displeased with her. One day, Catherine walked into a room where one of the empress’s chamberlains was standing. The Choglokovs had not yet arrived, and the chamberlain whispered to Catherine that she was being vilified to the empress. At dinner a few days before, he said, Elizabeth had accused her of getting deeper and deeper into debt; declared that everything she did was marked by stupidity; and noted that while she might imagine herself very clever, no one else shared that opinion because her stupidity was obvious to everyone.

  Catherine was unwilling to accept this appraisal, and, putting aside her usual deference, flared back:

  That, as to my stupidity, I could not be blamed because everyone is just as God has made him; that my debts were not surprising because, with an allowance of thirty thousand rubles, I had to pay off sixty thousand rubles of debt left me by my mother; and that he should tell whoever had sent him that I was extremely sorry to hear that I was being blackened in the eyes of Her Imperial Majesty to whom I had never failed to show respect, obedience and deference and that the more closely my conduct was observed, the more she would be convinced of this.

  The prohibition against any unapproved communication between the married couple and the outside world remained, but it was porous. “To show how useless this kind of order is,” Catherine wrote later, “we found many people willing and eager to undermine it. Even the Choglokovs’ closest relatives sought to reduce the harshness of this policy.” Indeed, Madame Choglokova’s own brother, Count Hendrikov, who was also the empress’s first cousin, “often slipped me useful and necessary information. He was a kind and outspoken man who ridiculed the stupidities and brutalities of his sister and brother-in-law.”

  Similarly, there were cracks in the wall Bestuzhev had erected to block Catherine’s correspondence. Catherine was forbidden to write personal letters; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote them for her. This injunction was underscored when Catherine learned that an official at the ministry had almost been charged with a crime because she had sent him a few lines, begging him to insert them into a letter he was writing over her signature to Johanna. But there were people who tried to help. In the summer of 1748, the Chevalier di Sacrosomo, a Knight of Malta, arrived in Russia and was warmly greeted at court. When he was presented to Catherine, he kissed her hand, and, as he did so, he slipped a tiny note into her palm. “This is from your mother,” he whispered. Catherine was frightened, dreading that someone, especially the Choglokovs, who were standing nearby, might have seen him. She managed to slip the note inside her glove. In her room, she found a letter from her mother rolled up inside a note from Sacrosomo. Johanna wrote that she was anxious about Catherine’s silence, wanted to know the reason for it, and what her daughter’s situation was. Catherine wrote back that she was forbidden to write to her or to anyone, but that she was well.

  In his own note, Sacrosomo had informed Catherine that she was to send her reply through an Italian musician who would be present at Peter’s next concert. Accordingly, the grand duchess rolled up her response in the same way as the one sent to her and waited for the moment when she could pass it along. At the concert, she made a tour of the orchestra and stopped behind the chair of a cellist, the man described to her. When he saw the grand duchess behind his chair, the cellist opened his coat pocket wide and pretended to take out his handkerchief. Catherine quickly slipped her note into the open pocket and walked away. No one saw. During his stay in Petersburg, Sacromoso passed her three other notes and her replies went back the same way. No one knew.

  20

  Summer Pleasures

  THE CHOGLOKOVS had been appointed to enforce Bestuzhev’s desire to isolate Catherine and Peter from the outside world and also to provide the young couple with a shining example of virtue, marital happiness, and productive fertility. In the first of these assignments, they partially succeeded; in the second, they failed spectacularly.

  During a stay at the Peterhof estate on the Gulf of Finland in the summer of 1748, Catherine and Peter, looking out their windows across the garden, frequently saw Monsieur and Madame Choglokov walking back and forth from the main palace on the hill to Monplaisir, Peter the Great’s small redbrick Dutch-style house at the edge of the water, where the empress had chosen to stay. They quickly discovered that these recurring trips were all related to a secret affair Monsieur Choglokov had been having with one of Catherine’s maids of honor, Maria Kosheleva, and that the young woman was pregnant. The Choglokovs now faced ruin, a possiblity for which the watchers from the upper palace windows fervently prayed.

  Carrying out the constant surveillance demanded by Bestuzhev required Monsieur Choglokov, as Peter’s principal watchdog, to sleep in a room in the grand duke’s apartment. Madame Choglokova, who was also pregnant, and lonely without her husband, asked Maria Kosheleva to sleep near her; she took the girl into her own bed or obliged her to sleep in a small bed next to her own. Kosheleva, according to Catherine, was, “a large, stupid, clumsy girl, but with beautiful blond hair and very white skin.” In the mornings, Monsieur Choglokov would come to awaken his wife and find Maria lying next to her in deshabille, her blond hair spread out on the pillows,
her white skin bare to inspection. The wife, never doubting her husband’s love, noticed nothing.

  When Catherine contracted measles, the door of opportunity opened for Monsieur Choglokov. He persuaded his wife that it was her duty to remain day and night at Catherine’s bedside, nursing her and making sure that no doctor, lady-in-waiting, or anyone else brought the grand duchess a forbidden message. This gave him ample time with Mlle Kosheleva. A few months later, Madame Choglokova gave birth to her sixth child and Maria Kosheleva’s pregnancy became apparent. Once Elizabeth was informed, she summoned the still-unknowing wife and confronted her with the fact that she had been deceived. If Madame Choglokova wished to separate from her husband, she, Elizabeth, would be pleased; from the beginning, she had never really approved of her cousin’s choice. In any case, the empress decreed that Monsieur Choglokov could not remain in Peter and Catherine’s household. He would be dismissed and Madame Choglokova placed in absolute control.