Glorious Misadventures: Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America

by Owen Matthews

  In December 1788 Rezanov went to work for the Treasury, presumably on the strength of his Pskov accounting experience. He remained at the post for nearly two years. Alexander Radishchev, a radical and one of the greatest oppositional minds of his age, was his colleague. Radishchev was thirteen years Rezanov’s senior in years but one step below him in bureaucratic rank; he had studied at the University of Leipzig and returned full of Jacobin ideas.* Rezanov was either nervous of befriending such a dangerous mind or found Radishchev’s radicalism distasteful. In any case, the two men never became friends. Instead Rezanov used his toehold in the bureaucracy of the capital to work on his late grandfather Okunev’s connections. Belatedly these came through, even ten years after the old man’s death. In 1791 the Admiralty finally offered a suitable position to the old shipbuilder’s young grandson, as junior secretary to Count Ivan Grigoryevich Chernyshev, vice president of the Navy Board.8

  Chernyshev had been one of the original backers of Catherine the Great’s coup and had served as her ambassador in London for many years before returning to Russia and the gigantic estate of Alexandrino, given to him by a grateful empress.9 He was a powerful patron, and Rezanov, showing a talent for both administration and ingratiation that would stand him in good stead in the future, quickly became Chernyshev’s chef de cabinet. In less than three years Rezanov had moved from provincial mediocrity to within touching distance of the court itself.

  Catherine had seized the throne when Nikolai Rezanov was just six months old. In the intervening twenty-four years she had applied her extraordinary energy to remaking the Russian Empire in her own image. Born a minor German princess, she had not a drop of Russian blood. As a daughter of Europe, Catherine saw herself as the spiritual successor of Peter the Great’s quest to bring Russia to civilization and greatness. Indeed she saw those two concepts as inextricably linked. The neoclassical palaces and boulevards of St Petersburg which took shape during her reign were a mirror to a larger civilized world that she was determined Russia should join.10

  Like Peter she believed that only an enlightened absolute monarch, supported by an educated aristocracy, could reform Russia. But where Peter had indulged in impulsive, almost boyish, enthusiasms for the kind of grand engineering projects that brought instant gratification – his navy, for instance, his capital, or the Ladoga Canal – Catherine tackled the fundamental architecture of the state itself. In the early years of her reign she banned judicial torture and experimented with a nobles’ assembly and a basic constitution. She undertook a massive codification of Russia’s tangled mass of statute and common law, drafting many of the clarifications personally. ‘Russia is a European State,’ Catherine wrote in a preamble to her Instruction on Laws – written in French.11 ‘There are 20 peoples of various kinds in this town who do not in any way resemble each other. And yet we have to make a coat which fits them all. I might say that there is almost a whole world to be created, united, preserved,’ she wrote to Voltaire, the leading public intellectual of the day, from Kazan in May 1767 during a barge cruise down the Volga. ‘Imagine I beg you that these laws must serve for Asia as well as for Europe . . . Here I am in Asia.’12

  The Empress considered the abolition of serfdom and attempted to canvas ideas internationally for reforming Russia. In 1766, at the behest of the palace, the Free Economic Society of St Petersburg sponsored a Europe-wide essay competition, offering cash prizes for the best answer to the question ‘What is useful to society, that the peasant should own land or only movable property, and how far should his right over one or the other extend?’ There were 164 anonymous entries, only seven of them in Russian. Voltaire submitted two, one in French and the other in Latin.*

  However, the anarchic violence of Pugachev’s revolt in 1773-4 dampened Catherine’s reforming enthusiasms and put off attempts to end serfdom for nearly a century.13 The American Revolution and the rise of Jacobinism in France further steeled her against constitutionalism. But Catherine’s determination to bring Russia kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century by enlightened despotism rather than democracy continued unabated. For twenty years she conducted a semi-public correspondence with Voltaire. The old sage was delighted to be an unofficial adviser to the Empress and called his Russian penfriend the ‘Semiramis of the North’ after the great law-giving Assyrian queen.

  Catherine also invited the Encyclopediste Denis Diderot to St Petersburg. Their daily talks became so animated that the Empress was forced to place a table between them to stop the Frenchman from grabbing her knees in his enthusiasm. In 1765 she had bought the impoverished Diderot’s library and made him its salaried librarian for life. Like her correspondence with Voltaire, the purchase was partly driven by private intellectual curiosity and partly by a calculated public display of cultural diplomacy. The acquisition of the library was Catherine’s grand reproach to a French society which had failed to support his genius. ‘Would you ever have suspected fifty years ago that one day the Scythians would so nobly recompense in Paris the virtue, science, and philosophy that are treated so shamefully among us?’ wrote Voltaire.14

  In 1779 Catherine caused a similar sensation when she bought the art collection amassed by former British Prime Minister Robert Walpole from his spendthrift grandson. Its 204 pieces included works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Hals and Guido Reni, and was probably the greatest single art purchase of the eighteenth century. It formed the basis of a new public museum attached to the Winter Palace that Catherine called the Hermitage. The English public was indignant, and the export of the Walpole collection became a national scandal. ‘How sad it is to see passing into the hands of Scythians things that are so precious that ten people at most will admire them in Russia,’ wrote the French collector and art dealer Jean-Henri Eberts of an earlier purchase of Catherine’s in September 1769.15 It was not the last time that Russian money would buy great British institutions, to the titillated disapproval of London’s chattering classes.

  ‘You forget that we are in different positions – you work with paper which forgives all while I, the poor Empress, must work with human hide,’ Catherine had written to Diderot after his departure from St Petersburg in 1774. That human hide had proved, by the late 1780s, less tractable than she had once imagined. By the time young Rezanov came to the capital to make his way in the world, the gulf between the Enlightenment enthusiasms of Catherine’s early reign and the reality of the absolute personal power of the Russian monarch was clearly apparent.

  Like the Empress Elizabeth before her, Catherine added a twist to the traditional carousel of patronage and vying for place: the possibility of gaining the heights of power via the imperial bed. This practice is probably the part of Catherine’s life and world most misunderstood today. Catherine was a passionate woman lonely at the pinnacle of power she had seized for herself. She had been brought to Russia as a fourteen-year-old and married to the future Peter III, a psychologically crippled adolescent who preferred to play with toy soldiers rather than make love to his young wife.16 By her own account, in a startling frank autobiography that was banned by her son Paul, Peter did not touch her for the first nine years of their marriage. When he finally did perform his marital duty, Catherine’s three children were taken from her almost immediately and looked after by her domineering mother-in-law, the Empress Elizabeth. Small wonder that in later life Catherine’s relationships with both her children and her lovers were complicated by her emotional neediness and by the fact that her absolute power made a truly equal relationship impossible. ‘The trouble is that my heart is loath to be without love for even a single hour. If you want to keep me for ever then show me as much friendship as love and, more than anything else, love me and tell me the truth,’ she wrote to her greatest favourite of all, Grigory Potemkin.

  In all, Catherine had twelve lovers during her life. She had long, passionate and faithful relationships with great men such as Grigory Orlov, the man who had helped her depose her husband, with Stanislaus Poniatowski, the brilliant Poli
sh magnate whom she would elevate to the kingship of his native land, and with Potemkin. The rest of her lovers were found, loved and fired with a rather Germanic no-nonsense briskness. Candidates were checked for signs of venereal disease by the Empress’s Scottish physician Dr John Rogerson, and her lady-in-waiting the Countess Bruce would chat to them to assess their suitability as conversationalists, sending Catherine little notes with her conclusions.17

  Prince Grigory Potemkin was the Empress’s longest-serving favourite. He was also for a time virtual co-ruler of Russia. He caught her eye as a dashing young sergeant on the very day of her coup against Peter III. According to his own later account, Catherine was reviewing her troops in full (male) guards uniform in preparation for a march on the Palace of Peterhof, but lacked a sword knot. Impertinently, Potemkin rode out of the line to offer her his own, which was graciously accepted. He was subsequently rewarded with an officer’s commission and the favour of the Empress. He persisted in his gallantry, and meanwhile rose to major-general and covered himself in glory in Catherine’s wars against the Turks. Finally in February 1774 his persistence was rewarded and he became Catherine’s lover – but not before he had threatened to retreat to a monastery in a fit of amorous anguish.

  Their relationship was tempestuous. Catherine was frequently exasperated by Potemkin’s tantrums and fits of jealousy, but she recognized that he was ‘one of the great originals of the age’. Part of her was clearly happy to have found a man who was her match in terms of energy and intellect. In December 1774 Catherine privately referred to Potemkin as her ‘husband’ for the first time and continued to do so in twenty-two letters between 1774 and 1791. To marry officially would have been politically and dynastically complicated for Catherine, who despite her late husband’s inadequacies had at least produced a legitimate heir, the future Paul I. But it is probable that Potemkin became her consort, at least secretly.18

  Catherine showered Potemkin with wealth and titles, including that of prince of the Holy Roman Empire (Reichsfürst), and remained devoted to him until the end of her life. But their physical relations probably ended soon after Catherine took one of her secretaries, Pyotr Zavadovsky, as a new lover in 1776. Potemkin himself was spectacularly unfaithful, taking at least one of his nieces to his bed. But they remained close and affectionate allies, and despite his lingering jealousy Potemkin had to tolerate Catherine’s taking a succession of young lovers.

  In August of 1789 the sixty-two-year-old Catherine wrote to Potemkin that she had ‘returned to life after a long winter slumber as a fly does’. A new friend, ‘a dark, little one’, had made her ‘well and gay again’. The new favourite was twenty-two-year-old Platon Zubov, a pretty young aristocrat whose arrogance and corruption would appall even the hardbitten court of St Petersburg. Zubov played shamelessly on Catherine’s maternal instincts. ‘Our baby weeps when denied the entry into my room,’ Catherine wrote to the long-suffering Potemkin. ‘At last, the Empress has a “Platonic” relationship,’ was the snide joke that went around the court. But Platon Zubov’s rise was to play a defining role in the career of another ambitious young aristocrat – Rezanov – also desperate to push into the golden glow of the Empress’s regard.

  At first Potemkin paid little heed to the upstart lover, assuming that Catherine would tire of him as she had tired of others. But Zubov quickly established a strong hold on the Empress’s affections and, increasingly, her exercise of power.19 Potemkin was irritated and disappointed by Catherine’s catastrophic lack of judgement, and set off on a tour of the newly conquered territories of New Russia. On 16 October 1791 Potemkin expired on a dusty roadside in the southern empire to which he had dedicated so much of his life.

  Catherine was inconsolable. But with his greatest rival now dead, the path was now clear for the clever and utterly cynical Zubov to make his career in his predecessor’s image. ‘Count Zubov is everything here. There is no other will but his. His power is greater than that of Potemkin,’ the diplomat Fyodor Rostopchin reported. ‘He is as reckless and incapable as before, although the Empress keeps repeating that he is the greatest genius the history of Russia has known.’20 Catherine had regularly used her lovers as lieutenants even after they had stopped being her intimates – Stanislaus Poniatowski had been made King of Poland and presided over the division and then disappearance of his homeland into the Russian Empire; Potemkin continued as ruler of New Russia long after he had stopped sharing the Empress’s bed – but Zubov took open advantage of his position as no other favourite had done before. Over his seven-year reign, Zubov accumulated thirty-four state posts and the titles first of count and then prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He succeeded Potemkin as governor general of New Russia and amassed a fortune in diamonds, serfs and lands lavished on him by the soft-hearted old Empress. He spoke of himself in the plural and was rude to the heir apparent, the Tsarevich Paul.

  At court one took opportunities where they presented themselves. Gavriil Derzhavin, now governor of Tambov, quickly spotted the steel behind the foppish young Zubov’s good looks and attached himself to the rising young favourite. He received his reward in December 1791, two months after Potemkin’s death, when at Zubov’s prompting the Empress appointed Derzhavin state secretary for petitions.

  Her immoderate fondness for Zubov notwithstanding, Catherine remained a formidable administrator and judge of men. She liked her advisers to be frank; sycophants irritated her. ‘I am very fond of the truth and you may tell me without any danger if it leads to good results in affairs,’ she had instructed Count Vyazemsky on his appointment to procurator general of the Senate. ‘And may I add I require no flattery from you but only honest behaviour and firmness in affairs.’21 Derzhavin was certainly both firm and honest – so much so that he achieved the rare feat of being sacked by three successive sovereigns for his excessive candour.

  Meanwhile, Derzhavin’s new post was a hugely influential one in the semi-feudal government of Russia. A petition – a formal letter requesting promotion, funding or justice – was the principal form of interaction between the state and its citizens. Whether from a private citizen, noble or corporation, a petition would be approved by a governor, then by a governor-general, and then, with crisp banknotes changing hands at every stage, would make its way expensively to the desk of the secretary of petitions. He alone would decide whether to bring it to the Empress’s personal attention or forward it to one of Russia’s four chief ministries – Marine, Foreign Affairs, Education and Commerce. Derzhavin stood at the centre of a web of paper and patronage that governed the fate of fifty million people.

  Immediately on his appointment Derzhavin followed the first principle of court life and remembered to reward his old friends and advance his young protégés. So he summoned the young Rezanov from the Admiralty to act as his private secretary. The twenty-six-year-old Rezanov was now ensconced in a small office in the Winter Palace, within yards of the empire’s ultimate centre of power.

  Like the Palace of Versailles, on which it was modelled, St Petersburg’s Winter Palace was a small city in itself. With 1,050 rooms, 117 staircases, 1,886 doors and 1,945 windows, the place was a labyrinth.22 Catherine ruled Russia from her apartments on the sunny south-eastern corner.* From her windows Catherine could look south across Palace Square towards Moscow, or east down Millionaya, St Petersburg’s most fashionable street, where she could keep a watchful eye on the comings and goings of carriages at the mansions of her courtiers. Behind her apartments (rebuilt after a fire in 1837) is a staircase, now known as the Archive Staircase, which led up to the apartments of her current lover. The door could only be locked or unlocked from the inside.

  The Empress habitually rose at six and lit her own fire. Her secretaries – led by Derzhavin – would arrive at eight and find her sitting alone, usually reading. Wearing a loose silk gown, she would receive advisers one by one until about eleven. Catherine held no council or collective discussions except at moments of national emergency. After she had dressed, the Empress
often walked through the eight-room enfilade of her private apartments into the closest of her reception rooms, known as the Hall of the Chevalier Gardes, where privileged petitioners waited to present their cases to Derzhavin or to catch a glimpse of the Empress herself.

  After a light lunch with between ten and twenty courtiers, usually including her secretary of petitions and visiting officers and ministers, the Empress would retire to her rooms to read or be read to. This was also known as ‘the time of the favourite’ or ‘the time of mystery’. Government business was suspended, the door to the Archive Staircase would perhaps be unbolted, and the Empress’s more personal needs were ministered to. ‘I am doing the Empire a great favour by educating the young,’ Catherine wrote archly to her old favourite Sergei Saltykov of her young lover Zubov.23

  On winter afternoons she also liked to tinker with her collection of scientific instruments, including a ‘small electrical machine’ – a generator invented by the Bolognese Doctor Luigi Galvani – with which Catherine enjoyed electrocuting her servants. She also wrote political and philosophical tracts, producing essays for literary journals under the pseudonym Patrikei Pravdomyslov (a play on the Russian for ‘right-thinking’). At five in the afternoon, ‘I either go to the theatre or play [cards] or I gossip with the first people to arrive for dinner, which is over by eleven.’24

  The shows were often of Catherine’s own composition. She was an enthusiastic playwright, producing over thirty plays, several of which were made into operas. Her subjects ranged from tales of the witch Baba Yaga and other Russian folk stories to pseudo-medieval romances like The Knight Orkideyevich and allegorical pieces such as her ballet Prejudice Overcome, in which Minerva the Genius of Science conquers Ignorance and Superstition. The only opera her bumptious and militaristic son Paul enjoyed, however, was the battle scene in Manfredini’s Carlo Magno.25