The city was a busy naval base, accommodating forty-eight ships of the line and 300 galleys manned by more than 7,000 Russian sailors.107 The head of this Russian Navy was Ivan Mikhailovich Golovin. Without enthusiasm or skill, Golovin had proved a duff craftsman during his sojourn in Holland, so Peter sent him off to Venice to study shipbuilding. Once in the Republic, Golovin hardly left his lodgings and, when he returned to Russia, Peter was so impressed by the man’s confession of indolence that he made him Chief Surveyor and Supervisor of the Fleet. According to the German diarist Friedrich Wilhelm von Bergholtz, at the wedding of Golovin’s daughter to Prince Trubetskoy, Peter approached the ‘prince master-craftsman’, Head of the Fleet, who was greedily gobbling jelly, and rammed more and moredown his throat as if he wished to stifle him.108 Peter often humiliated those close to him, behaving like an immature tsar superstar, abusing his followers. Exercising absolute power, Peter’s whims and wishes galloped out of control. He stubbornly gave a heavily pregnant woman a punishment drink for missing a victory parade. Bergholtz records that the woman later sent the corpse of her stillborn child – pickled in alcohol – to the tsar.
The Twelve Colleges designed by Trezzini – as seen in 1753.
Peter’s All-Mad, All-Jesting, All-Drunken Assembly was an affront to the rituals of Orthodox Christianity, an attack on respectability. There were drunken orgies at which a naked Bacchus appeared, wearing a bishop’s mitre. At the marriage celebration of one of their number, Peter Burturlin – who replaced the ageing tutor Nikita Zotov as ‘Prince Pope’ – the newly-weds drank vodka from vessels in the shape of outsized genitals: male for the bride, female for the groom. After the feast they made their way to a specially constructed pyramid sprinkled with spy holes, which allowed the revellers to ogle the nuptial mating. Opposite ‘Prince Pope’ Burturlin’s house, members of the British colony set up the Bung College in imitation of Peter’s mock-court. College officials carried titles such as ‘Prick Farrier’ and ‘Cunt Peeper’, and their antics included basting a penis with egg and oatmeal and setting two hungry ducks on it.109
On 2.2 November 1721, shortly after the marriage of Burturlin and the celebration of the Peace of Nystad, Peter was proclaimed Emperor. It was decreed that ‘through his own guidance only . . . he has brought the state of all Russia into such a strong and prosperous condition and his subjects such glory in the whole world’ that they must ‘beg His Majesty, in the name of the whole Russian people, to accept from them . . . the title of “Father of the Fatherland”, Emperor of all Russia, Peter the Great’. The images used in the coronation panegyrics – as with the myths surrounding the remarkable origins of St Petersburg – invoked a movement from darkness to light, from nothingness to being.110 These representations and allegories were not unlike those used by the ‘Sun King’, but while Louis XIV’s persona was artifice, Peter’s glorification was closely based on his exceptional courage and acumen, which had brought his country, quite suddenly, to prominence.111 Although other nations were slow to acknowledge the newly elevated status of the Russian ruler – Britain and Austria recognised the title of ‘Emperor’ only in 1742, Spain and France two years later – Peter had gained an enormous victory over the old Russia. Orthodoxy was subdued and the emperor took his place among the pantheon of classical gods. Secular pageants eclipsed liturgical celebration. The divine order ceded to imperial prowess. The secularisation of the Russian state had begun.
In order to consolidate his new order, at the outset of 1722 Peter decreed the Table of Ranks, based on a system used in Prussia. The fourteen grades equated the status of occupations in the civil service, the military and the court. For instance, the fifth rank in the civil service was a State-Councillor, the equivalent of a Brigadier in the army or a Master of Ceremonies at court. Peter hoped that his system would neutralise the privileges of inheritance. A person born noble would receive no recognition of that fact until he achieved a service rank that entitled him to nobility. But the tenacity of privilege is revealed by the fact that thirteen families in the top four ranks – the Burturlins, Cher-kasskys, Dolgorukys, Golitsyns, Golovins, Kurakins, Plescheevs, Romodanovksys, Saltykovs, Shcherbatovs, Sheremetevs, Veliaminovs and Volynskys – were among the twenty-two families comprising the Boyar Duma 150 years earlier.112 The nobility would not let go. Furthermore, commoners rising through the ranks became protective of their new position, their mixture of pride and paranoia providing the material for a good deal of the comedy in nineteenth-century Petersburg literature.
In 1722, Peter turned fifty and his thoughts focused on the succession. He had eliminated his son in 1718 and issued a Charter on the Succession to the Throne consolidating that action: ‘It will always be subject to the desires of the ruling monarch to appoint whomsoever he wishes to the succession or to remove the one he has appointed in the event of unseemly behaviour.’ Accidents of birth and aberrations of character were thereby subordinated to the will of the tsar. Attempting to disentangle the Russian monarchy from the intrigues and inbreeding of noble families, and launch it into the orbit of the politically motivated match-making of the West, Peter declared that members of his family should marry Europeans. He was, in effect, preparing for Catherine’s succession – something that almost didn’t happen.
To judge by her rapid rise, Catherine was ambitious and politically adept. When Peter was attacked by muscular spasms which gave him a ‘wild and terrible air’,113 it seemed that Catherine alone was able to calm him. She personally selected Peter’s mistresses, and he wrote to her openly about them. For her part, she assured the tsar that when courtiers came to dine with her while he was away, they were men of advanced age. His letters were full of jokes and innuendoes, anxieties about possible infidelities, and despair at being separated for long periods. Above all, they reveal a relationship that was both robust and tender. When Peter was in Brussels in 1717, he wanted to send Catherine some lace and wrote to her asking for a pattern to give the lace-makers. Catherine replied sweetly, if not cunningly, that she required nothing special, ‘only that there should be two names worked into the lace, yours and mine, interwoven together’.114
Catherine was crowned the first Empress of Russia in Moscow’s Assumption Cathedral on 7 May 1724 – a foreign-born Cinderella inaugurating seven decades of female rule. Catherine was already imperatritsa by marriage so this unnecessary ritual, can only have served to consolidate Peter’s intention that she should succeed. The Archbishop of Novgorod, Feofan Prokopovich, delivered a strange sermon. Seemingly laudatory, upon closer scrutiny it was clearly barbed. Feofan placed Catherine in an apparently impressive context, among some of the most powerful women of myth and history. But oddly – and perhaps necessarily, in order to flourish in a man’s world – these women all had darker sides. Semiramis of Babylon, noted for her sexual energy, was granted her wish of ruling for five days, during which she had her husband, Ninus, put to death. The Amazon, Penthesileia, was another odd choice, as she killed her sister. Among the three Roman empresses cited, Helena, Pulcheria and Eudokia, the last was a jarring choice, as Peter’s first wife, Evdokia, still lived.115 Grouping Catherine with women whose fame rested on their lust for power and sinister deeds, Feofan was either expressing covert displeasure at Peter’s choice of empress and successor, or warning Peter about some aspect of her character or activity.
Just five months after Catherine’s coronation, the William Mons embezzlement scandal broke – quite possibly a cover for the fact that ‘the handsome and stately’ Mons, who was head of Catherine’s Estates Office, was also her lover. Peter’s Procurator General, Pavel Yaguzhinsky, spread stories at court, so that when the tsar saw Catherine and the man she ‘much loved’ alone in a garden or dining together, he could only imagine the worst.116 Mons was knouted and axed to death in Trinity Square and his head was impaled on a post, past which the tsar drove Catherine day after day.117 Subsequently it was pickled, to become an admonitory exhibit in the Kunstkammer. But as Peter’s rage over the Mons affair
subsided, he seemed happy for his second wife to be his successor. Perhaps the touching testimony to shared tastes was not lost on the tsar – he had fallen for Anna Mons, and Catherine for Anna’s brother.
On the morning of 28 January 1725, Peter the Great died in the Winter Palace, and Catherine Skavronskaya became Empress of All Russia in her own right. Peter lay in state in the palace for almost six weeks, as the inhabitants of the city that he had spent the previous two decades building filed past. Edward Lane, the talented Welsh engineer who worked on the fortifications and harbour at Kronstadt for a decade,118 called to pay his respects to the tsar who had masterminded the enterprise. Often seen grieving beside the coffin was Catherine, whose youngest daughter, Natalya, died on 4 March, aged seven – her tiny pall placed near that of her father.
On 10 March, the funeral train of 166 different groups of mourners slowly processed through the snow flurries dusting the path marked out across the frozen Neva. Choristers sang as Catherine, weak from weeping, followed the coffin. Cannon fired, trumpets blew, tympani boomed with a sound like the ice on the Neva cracking. Regimental drums beat the steady funeral march to the unfinished Peter and Paul Cathedral. The elegy by Feofan Prokopovich was unequivocal in its praise: ‘What he made of his Russia, thus it shall remain:. . . He made it frightening for enemies, frightening it shall remain; he made it glorious throughout the world, then it shall never cease to be glorious.’119 The man who thought it possible to build a city on a marsh was being buried. The glorious city he imagined had yet to be built.
The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that Peter wanted to civilise the Russians ‘when he should only have checked their brutality. He wanted to make them at once, Germans and Englishmen, whereas he ought to have begun by making them first Russians.’120 Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film Russian Ark is a stroll through Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in a single 96-minute shot that carries the viewer through 300 years of Russian history. Its central character, based on the acerbic early nineteenth-century Marquis de Custine, asks, ‘Why borrow Europe’s mistakes?’121
Peter the Great was not only the author of St Petersburg, but also of its subsequent afflictions, which stemmed from a dangerous acceleration revving up in the back of beyond. Yet against the backdrop of war with Sweden and much domestic unrest, Peter created a shipyard, a naval base, a port, an administrative centre, a court, a capital increasingly marked by solid and elegant stuccoed buildings, ordered gardens and straight, clean streets – the first pan-European city created by architects from Italy, Switzerland, France, England, Germany and Russia – a ‘paradise’.122 Building was driven by hubris, its mythology mired in misinformation. In 1720, Weber recorded the already-exaggerated ‘one hundred thousand souls’123 who perished in the construction of the capital. By 1733, when Sir Francis Dashwood visited, gossip had already flown well ahead of credibility – in ‘laying the foundation of this town and Kronstadt, there were three hundred thousand men perished by hunger and the air’.124 And all for a second choice. Peter’s original intention had been to construct a new capital on the Black Sea – a place more suited to the exotic birds that the tsar imported to Petersburg, only to watch them die. In the event, he had been forced to create a capital with naval access on Russia’s Baltic shore, a site vulnerable to invading enemies and unforgiving nature. Ominously, Peter the Great set his imperial will against nature, historical precedent and the practices of an entire nation.
Some thought of the capital as a new Rome – if so, it was brought into the world by Caesarean section. The city was the upshot of an unparalleled act of megalomania. A Finnish legend spoke of the many kings of different countries who tried to build on Neva’s marshes but it was the vision, volition and technical accomplishment of Peter the Great that successfully brought such attempts to fruition. The poet Joseph Brodsky, who grew up in the sad, standard ‘room and a half’ of a Leningrad family flat, summarised Peter the Great’s achievement: ‘This ruler used only one instrument while designing his city: a ruler.’125
4
OBLIVION AND REBIRTH
1725–40
There was a rumour circulating that Catherine poisoned Peter in revenge for the murder of her lover.1 Medical opinion has it that the founder of St Petersburg died of prostate adenoma or stricture of the urethra, resulting from an inflammation frequently caused by badly treated gonorrhoea.2 Drink must have also played its part. Catherine, meanwhile, made great demonstration of her grief and took steps to secure her succession. As it was a novelty for a woman to be anointed sovereign, Archbishop Feofan used great skill and a certain audacity to ease matters. He addressed Catherine in his funeral oration for the emperor: ‘The whole world sees that your female flesh does not prevent you from being like Peter the Great.”3 A coin was struck. On one side, there was a bust of Peter. On the other, a likeness of Catherine surrounded by accessories suggesting that indeed she was worthy to take Peter’s place – a globe, sea-charts, plans and mathematical instruments.4 Thereafter she would often appear as an Amazon, a ‘warrior queen’ – a potent tactic to mollify traditionalists, who believed that only a man should rule Russia. On the ceiling of her throne room, The Triumph of Catherine showed the empress in a sumptuous and revealing gown, holding the figure of a warrior.5
Yet Catherine’s right to the throne was disputed and there were murder threats. Two reckless con-men emerged – one in the Ukraine, the other in Siberia – both claiming to be the dead tsarevich Alexei. They were arrested, sent to St Petersburg and beheaded.6 Catherine’s more serious rival, the nine-year-old son of the murdered Alexei, was in a strong position. Grandson of Peter the Great and Evdokia Lophukina, he had the support of the powerful Golitsyns and Dolgorukys. Yet when voices in the State Assembly started to clamour for the boy, the late tsar’s Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards – generously lubricated by Catherine – arrived in full dress uniform, their drums menacingly beating out their support for their bounteous lush.7 By the following morning Catherine was confirmed as empress and the guards were given more vodka. In Alexander Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor, a character suggests that ‘no one will serve a ruler who is stingy with drink’. To reward the army as a whole, Catherine pledged to honour arrears in pay.8
But if Catherine had the guards in the palm of her hand, Menshikov had the empress in his grasp. Owing her advancement to the prince, Catherine acted as his protector. Whenever accusations of theft and extortion had compromised Menshikov’s relations with the late tsar, Catherine had interceded. This occurred in 1711, 1715 and 1719 and climaxed in 1723, when Peter became so furious about the corruption surrounding him that he urged the immediate execution of all officials found stealing from the state. He was dissuaded by his Procurator General, Pavel Yaguzhinsky, who declared that ‘we all steal. Some take a little, some take a great deal, but all of us take something.’9 Just over a century later, Nikolai Gogol’s swindling hero, Chichikov, candidly explained, ‘I helped myself to the surpluses . . . had I not, others would have taken them instead.’10 Another century on, under the Soviets, comrades wryly observed that Russia was the richest state on earth because people had been stealing from it for years, and there was still more to pilfer.11 Protecting Catherine on the throne, Menshikov protected himself, while nurturing a scheme to further the fortunes of his own house. If Alexei’s son, Peter, could be married to one of his daughters, then Menshikov’s grip on the country would be secure for years. Not surprisingly, the prince had powerful enemies with similar ideas.
It was, in fact, another marriage that – by hook or by crook – was to secure the Romanov succession. In the late spring of 1725, Catherine and Peter’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Anna Petrovna, was married to Charles-Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. To honour the occasion, the duke gave a superb dinner in his Petersburg palace and the crowd of spectators gathered outside was invited to join the celebrations by drinking as much as they wanted, a generosity that resulted in ten deaths. The duke was given a place in the Suprem
e Privy Council, formed in February 1726. Although Catherine was the nominal leader of this small policy-making body, after several appearances she seemed to lose interest, stopped attending, and for the rest of her reign allowed Menshikov to dominate.12 The Council had its work cut out – simplifying Peter’s reforms, reducing the size of the army and abandoning imperial projects in order to slash taxes. Several years of bad harvests and a high poll tax were crippling Russia’s rural population at a time when the elite was spending exorbitantly.13’’ Under the influence of Catherine and Menshikov, the court was becoming noted for its extravagance. The empress – happy to obliterate all memory of her humble past – spared no expense in the pursuit of imperial splendour. In her first year on the throne, her lust for luxury disposed of 450,000 roubles, nearly 4.5 per cent of state expenditure.14 Assemblées were replaced by lavish balls and more formal receptions at court. At these grand dinners, guests were forced to drink toasts from a communal cup that was in constant circulation. The feasting was followed by the dancing of popular sarabandes, allemandes and gavottes. Pierre Deschisaux, a French physician and botanist, noted that the empress arrived and departed to a fanfare of trumpets and kettledrums. During the evening – which lasted until 2 a.m. – she changed several times and ordered glasses to be filled and refilled so that the assembled company could drink her health, which, after years of boozing with Peter, was rapidly deteriorating.
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