Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  In any case, no prominent actor at the Court of St Petersburg seriously doubted that Paul would inherit the throne. The only uncertainty lay in what he would do once he finally had power within his grasp. It was obvious to all that his natural impatience had been intensified by years of waiting in the wings. While the grand duke remained isolated at Gatchina, endlessly parading his troops, the cream of Russian society had been anxious for some time about what lay in store for them. After Potëmkin’s death threw into question the future of his extensive network of clients, John Parkinson was told in 1792 that Paul’s accession was to be ‘feared’ because he was ‘anxious to make alterations and regulations which would make it more difficult to commit abuses’. The following year, Parkinson was again warned that ‘all may not go well, perhaps’ at the empress’s death.5 No one, however, had fully anticipated the speed and determination with which the new tsar would reject everything his mother had stood for. ‘The most important practices of the Court were changed,’ recalled Countess Varvara Golovina, ‘and with the wave of a baton he destroyed what had taken a glorious reign of thirty-four years to consolidate.’6

  Appalled by the paltry burial that Catherine had given to Peter III, whom he always regarded as his father, Paul initially intended to consign the empress to an equally anonymous grave in the cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. There would have been no clearer way of declaring that his mother had no right to rule. Only when he was persuaded that this was politically impossible did he consent to funeral arrangements that followed the pattern established for Russia’s rulers since the death of Peter the Great.7 Catherine’s corpse was embalmed on 8 November and carried on 15 November from her bedroom to the audience chamber of the Winter Palace. It was an emotional scene for the courtiers who had been closest to her. According to Countess Golovina, who recalled the ceremony in openly sentimental terms, the occasion was stage-managed by the new empress, Maria Fëdorovna, whose officious approach to the proceedings ‘cut me to the heart’. The countess herself claimed more in common with the melancholy scene she observed through the door of the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, which was draped from floor to ceiling in swathes of black silk and lit only by the flickering flames in the hearth. ‘A mournful silence reigned in the apartment, interrupted only by sobs and sighs,’ as the Chevaliers, dressed in their red capes and silver helmets, stood listlessly about, ‘some leaning on their carbines, others lying on chairs’. Only the sound of the approaching funeral chant roused the countess from the ‘depression’ into which this ‘mournful sight’ had plunged her:

  I saw the clergy appear, then the candle-bearers, the choristers, and the Imperial family, and lastly the corpse, which was carried on a magnificent bier covered with the Imperial mantle, the ends of which were borne by persons holding the highest offices at Court. When I caught sight of my sovereign, I began to tremble all over and ceased to weep, while my sobs changed to involuntary little cries.

  Six gentlemen of the bedchamber carried the train while ten chamberlains bore the corpse to a raised bed covered with red velvet fringed with gold. At the end of the ceremony, the whole imperial family ‘prostrated themselves in turn in front of the body and kissed the hand of her deceased Majesty’. Once they had withdrawn, a priest began to read from the Bible, while six Chevaliers Gardes formed a guard of honour around the bed. The countess returned home ‘after being in attendance twenty-four hours, exhausted both in mind and body’.8

  Ten days later, Catherine was laid to rest in a coffin done out in gold fabric decorated with Russian imperial crests and taken to a chamber of mourning in the palace’s Grand Gallery. Familiar to the Court as the site of its glittering balls and masquerades, the gallery had been transformed by the erection of an elaborate chamber of sorrows designed by Antonio Rinaldi. This dome-shaped structure, supported by classical pillars and topped by a bronze statue of the imperial eagle, enclosed the coffin on a raised platform beneath a canopy draped in black velvet with silver fringes. The corpse was dressed in a robe of silver brocade. A gold brocade mantle trimmed with ermine and silver tassels was placed at its feet. As leading courtiers stood in vigil over their late sovereign, and bishops and archimandrites chanted requiem services around the clock, only badly dressed peasants were refused admission to the lying-in-state as the public flocked in to pay their respects with a final kissing of hands.9

  Paul agreed to such pomp and ceremony only in order to undermine it by extraordinary means. Three days after his mother’s death, the tsar announced plans for a joint funeral at the Peter-Paul Cathedral, in which Peter III, rather than Catherine, was bound to be the focal point of attention. The point, he sardonically remarked, was merely to remedy her ‘oversight’ in failing to accord her husband a proper burial: ‘My mother, having been called to the throne by the voice of the people, was too busy to arrange for my father’s last rites.’10 On 10 November, after paying their respects to Catherine’s corpse, the imperial family were ordered to attend a requiem service for Peter III in Rastrelli’s Winter Palace chapel. On 19 November, Peter’s remains were exhumed from their anonymous grave and opened in the tsar’s presence at the Cathedral of the Annunciation at the Alexander Nevsky monastery. Since the corpse had never been embalmed, the remains were severely corrupted. Paul nevertheless insisted on kissing them, and returned to the monastery on 25 November to place a crown on top of a new golden coffin, in posthumous compensation for the coronation that his father had never staged. The casket was transferred to the Winter Palace on a hearse drawn by eight horses on the morning of 2 December. The procession, which lasted two and a half hours and was followed by the whole Court, was described by the Swedish ambassador as ‘the most august, melancholy, and in every respect compelling ceremony I have ever experienced’.11 Officials permitted it to proceed only provided that the temperature did not drop ‘below 15 degrees of frost’.12 In a particularly macabre gesture, the tsar humiliated the eighty-year-old Aleksey Orlov, the last surviving participant in the dreadful events at Ropsha in 1762, by ordering him to carry the large crown in the procession. (An allegorical engraving of the exhumation by Nicolas Ancelin portrayed Orlov alone reacting in horror.) One memoirist favourable to Paul recalled that Orlov broke down in the cathedral and took the crown with trembling hands. Two more surviving conspirators from 1762—Peter Passek, the Governor General of Belorussia, and Prince Fëdor Baryatinsky, the recently dismissed Marshal of the Court—were forced to do penance by carrying the corners of the pall-cloth.13

  On arrival at the Winter Palace, Peter’s coffin was placed alongside Catherine’s in Rinaldi’s chamber of mourning. But there was no sense that the two were to be seen as equals. To make the point that Paul ruled by right as Peter’s son, the large crown was placed on Peter’s casket; Catherine’s bore only the small crown as a symbol of her posthumous dethronement. Their funeral was held on 5 December, following the customary procession across the ice to the cathedral, where the two coffins were placed side by side on a catafalque designed by Vincenzo Brenna.14 Only after two further weeks of vigil and requiem masses were they lowered side by side into the vault. The tsar even prevented Metropolitan Amvrosy (Podobedov) from reading a graveside oration in memory of his mother. Amvrosy, who had lauded Catherine for the ‘security, peace and glory’ she had brought to Russia as recently as the anniversary of her coronation in September 1796, was not to mention her name in public again until the thanksgiving service for the peace with Sweden in 1809.15

  Everything Paul did seemed to signal his contempt for his mother’s claims to immortality. He converted her treasured Tauride Palace into stables and had Charles Cameron’s unfinished Temple of Memory at Tsarskoye Selo, built to celebrate her victory over the Turks in 1792, pulled to the ground five years later.16 Although Catherine had ensured that Paul received an Enlightened education from Nikita Panin and Father Platon, her son unaccountably developed an obsession with medieval chivalry. The tsar was elected Grand Master of the Knights of Jerusalem in 1798. Metropolitan Pl
aton was horrified to learn that he even contemplated extending the Russian orders of chivalry to the Orthodox episcopate. In a welter of legislation—by one estimate, Paul issued 48,000 orders in the first year of his reign alone—he reversed Catherine’s trend towards civilian government, imposing an overwhelmingly military ethos modelled on the regimes of Peter III and Frederick the Great. In such a hostile climate, prudent admirers of the late empress understandably thought discretion the better part of valour. Some may have contemplated symbolic ways to commemorate her, as Prince Nikolay Lvov seems to have done in designing a statue of Minerva for Bezborodko’s Moscow estate in 1797, but it was not until the accession of Alexander I in 1801 that the prospects for a public revival of her reputation improved.17

  In the event, Paul’s reign lasted less than five years. In his anxiety to discipline his subjects, he went too far too fast, alienating the elite with a series of measures that undermined the privileges Catherine had granted to them in the Charter to the Nobility—not content with limiting their freedom of expression and freeing their serfs from Sunday labour, the tsar himself lashed out at nobles with his cane. On 1 February 1801, the imperial family moved into the new Mikhailovsky Palace, a fortress built on the site of Rastrelli’s wooden Summer Palace, which Paul had ordered to be demolished. Less than six weeks later, he enjoyed his last meal in the company of nineteen relations and courtiers. Many of them would have been familiar to his mother. Alexander and Constantine were both present with their wives; so were Alexander Stroganov, Alexander Naryshkin and Nikolay Yusupov. Later that night, 11 March 1801, he was strangled in his apartments by a group of disaffected officers coordinated by St Petersburg’s Governor General, General Count Peter von der Pahlen. With fitting symmetry, Paul’s brief reign ended, like that of Peter III, in cold-blooded assassination. However his successor might rule, he could never openly imitate Paul’s example.18

  * * *

  Instead, the new tsar, Alexander I, promised in his accession manifesto that he would rule according to his grandmother’s ‘heart and laws’.19 Delighted by the prospect, Princess Dashkova anticipated an opportunity to bask in Catherine’s reflected glory. Although their tempestuous relationship had ended in tears—as early as 1792, John Parkinson found that ‘her conversation evidently savoured of disaffection to the empress’—the princess was never less than effusive after Catherine’s death, relishing the opportunity to regale visitors such as Martha and Catherine Wilmot with tales of ‘the wonderful scenes of the revolution in which she acted so wonderful a part at the age of 18’.20 Noting that Dashkova always pronounced Catherine’s name ‘with rapture’, one of her Russian acquaintances suggested that her oratory was so mesmerising that her ‘audience unwittingly submitted to her attractive eloquence’.21 That was stretching the truth. Catherine Wilmot felt uncomfortable in the face of the princess’s stories: ‘These subjects as ripping up a life that is almost past gives [sic] a powerful sort of agitated animation to her Countenance, & I long till it is over.’22 But Dashkova was undeterred. Apparently oblivious to such reactions, she sought a wider readership by sending anecdotes about Catherine to the new journals that sprang up under Alexander I, and in 1806 published a volume of anecdotes of her own, praising the empress’s ‘most kind and affectionate love for humanity, a love that rarely dwells in the hearts of rulers’.23

  Nor was the princess alone in seeking to publicise her heroine’s glorious achievements. Documents about Catherine accounted for almost four-fifths of the historical material published in Russian journals in the first five years of the nineteenth century.24 Within months of Alexander’s accession, Catherine’s own historical works had been republished alongside a translation of her correspondence with Dr Zimmerman. Editions of some of her plays and multiple Russian versions of her correspondence with Voltaire and Field Marshal Rumyantsev soon followed.25 As a bandwagon of publications in praise of the late empress began to roll, Nikolay Karamzin set the tone in 1802 with a paean of praise eulogising the formative role of the ruler in Russian history.26 Sponsored by seventy subscribers, including Maria Perekusikhina and Metropolitan Amvrosy, Peter Kolotov published a six-volume chronology of Catherine’s reign in 1811, drawing on material he had been collecting for the past twenty years.27 Three years later, Ivan Sreznevsky published a collection of short anecdotes declaring it ‘desirable that all the works of the Great Catherine, having glorified and magnified Russia, should be made known to everyone’.28

  ‘Every circumstance attending Katherine’s Time begins to bear a sacred stamp already,’ noted Martha Wilmot following a visit to Tsarskoye Selo in 1808: ‘The grounds are not remarkable for beauty nor the Contrary; they interest one as being often walk’d by Katherine.’29 Nor was it only at Tsarskoye Selo that Catherine had left her indelible imprint. ‘Without Catherine,’ one memoirist claimed, St Petersburg ‘would soon have sunk back into the bog from which it emerged’.30 The capital, however, was Peter the Great’s shrine. To reach a territory that was distinctively Catherine’s, it was necessary to radiate outwards to Tver, where the triumphal gates marking the empress’s visit in 1767 still stood, or to that other favourite city of hers, Kazan, where Peter Sumarokov ‘bowed his head with heartfelt feeling’ to the berth in Catherine’s cabin on her galley in 1838.31

  Among the military men who proved especially susceptible to the mixture of nostalgia and self-importance that characterised Catherine’s posthumous admirers, none was more gallant than Denis Davydov, hero of 1812 and hero-worshipper of Field Marshal Suvorov. Horrified that ‘the immortal Catherine’ should be subjected to ‘lampoons about her private life’, Davydov praised her reign in 1831 as ‘most brilliant, most triumphant’, and no less useful to Russia than that of Peter the Great. Many fellow veterans shared in his veneration of Catherine’s ‘miraculous age’.32 It was partly among such circles of ‘old people, officers of the Guards in Catherine’s time’ that the young Alexander Herzen grew up in Moscow in the 1830s.33 For all their importance as mythmakers, however, soldiers were ultimately outranked by salon hostesses. Though Alexandra Branicka, Potëmkin’s eldest niece and one of Catherine’s closest friends, remained closeted on her husband’s estate at Belaya Tserkov, there was no shortage of female relics of Catherine’s reign who continued to proclaim it as their finest hour. Catherine’s last maid of honour, Praskovia Myatleva (née Saltykova), lived until 1859, when the cream of Petersburg society processed down Nevsky Prospect behind her catafalque.34 The most flamboyant was Platon Zubov’s elder sister, Olga Zherebtsova, who became a legend in her own right as a former lover of the British ambassador Charles Whitworth, an alleged lynchpin in the conspiracy to assassinate Tsar Paul. Steeped as deeply as her heroine in the works of the French philosophes, Zherebtsova struck Herzen, who met her in her seventies, as ‘a strange, eccentric ruin of another age, surrounded by degenerate successors that had sprung up on the mean and barren soil of Petersburg court life.’35 But she was far from the only Russian noblewoman to delight in reminiscing about her gilded youth in the shadow of the empress. Alexandra Shishkova hung a full-length portrait of Catherine in her bedroom alongside another of Christ and was said never to wear any other blouse than those she had purchased from the empress’s wardrobe. Maria Kikina, daughter of a leading Court official, also preserved her sitting room as a shrine to Catherine.36

  Even a chance encounter with the empress was enough to infuse a lasting glow in those who outlived her. Yet the sense that hers had been a golden age was by no means confined to subjects who were prominent enough to revel in the memory of personal contact. On the contrary, these few members of the elite merely personified the strong tide of popular sentiment that swelled demand for Nikolay Utkin’s engraving of Borovikovsky’s Lady with a dog, commissioned in 1826 by Count Nikolay Rumyantsev and printed in the following year.37 A whole generation of Russians grew up, like the writer Apollon Grigoryev, at the feet of grandfathers who reminisced about Catherine and her times as the smoke from their pipes curled into the night.38
Many, it seemed, still succumbed to the mood of nostalgia which engulfed the ‘babbling old Widow’ the Wilmot sisters met at Tsarskoye Selo in 1808, ‘who has been talking of the days that were pass’d till she was obliged to wipe her eyes in the sleeve of her gown’.39

  While the modern eye might not detect anything sinister in any of this, the tsar was understandably wary of attempts to veil intemperate demands on his own regime under praise for aspects of Catherine’s, and he could hardly have been expected to approve of attempts to manipulate the past as a means of reproaching the present. ‘Happily for us,’ wrote a canny contributor to Karamzin’s Messenger of Europe in 1804, ‘everything demonstrates the particular resemblance in heart and soul between Alexander and Catherine—favourite grandson of his adored grandmother.’40 Writers were particularly keen to urge the tsar to reject his father’s philistinism and return to the more tolerant atmosphere of the 1760s and 1770s. Before the reign of Alexander II in the mid-nineteenth century, no one paid much attention to Catherine’s own literary achievements. The point was that by joining the ranks of the writers, she had radically improved the status of their emergent profession. Without the empress’s personal interest and protection, the argument ran, there would have been no Fonvizin, no Derzhavin, and none of the other ‘immortal’ literary figures who emerged in her reign.41 ‘Talents perish like spring flowers from stormy winds and frost,’ warned Nikolay Grech in a lecture at the Imperial Public Library in 1817, ‘but in Russia there are no such obstacles…Catherine gave her subjects the freedom to express their thoughts freely both in print and in speech.’42 Catherine had loved scholarship for scholarship’s sake, Grech told readers of his history of Russian literature. Others took up the refrain. ‘Here, at every step,’ wrote Konstantin Batyushkov of the Academy of Sciences, ‘the enlightened patriot should bless the memory of the monarch who deserves to be called “great and wise” by posterity not so much on account of her victories as for the useful institutions’ she established.43 It was impossible not to notice the veiled criticism of the tsar who had conquered Napoleon. In his speech to the Russian Academy in 1818, Karamzin offered another tactful reminder to Alexander that Catherine had loved ‘both the glory of victory and the glory of reason’, accepting ‘this happy fruit of the Academy’s work with the same flattering favour with which she succeeded in rewarding everything praiseworthy and which she bequeathed to you, gracious Tsar, as an unforgettable, precious memory’.44 The note of reproach sounded rather more obviously in the Decembrist journal Polar Star, which looked back on Catherine’s reign in 1823 as a ‘golden age for literary scholars’: ‘All our best writers arose or were educated under her dominion.’45 ‘The Age of Catherine is the age of encouragement,’ Pushkin remarked in 1825. ‘In that respect it is no worse than any others.’46 In private, scholars were more openly critical. Already in 1810, the American ambassador John Quincy Adams met an official at the Academy of Sciences who complained ‘of the neglect of the sciences in the present day. The Age of Catherine is past.’47