St. Petersburg

by Jonathan Miles

  In 1708, before St Petersburg was secure, Peter the Great had ordered Tsar Ivan’s widow, Praskovia Saltykova, and her children to move from Moscow to his new settlement. If a good number of Muscovites found it hard to adjust to Peter’s city, then Praskovia was no exception. Her ‘barbaric’ household – peopled with grotesques and soothsayers – sat uncomfortably with the hopes that Peter had for his new Russia.50 When, in 1710, the tsar started forging links with European powers by searching for a Russian bride to marry the impoverished, hard-drinking Frederick William, Duke of Courland, Praskovia proposed her least-loved child, Anna Ivanovna. When Anna eventually returned to St Petersburg in triumph after years of impoverished widowhood in Courland, she brought back with her both a taste for oddity and a delight in Europeanised entertainment.

  Empress Anna’s bizarre retinue was a grab-bag of ‘freaks’ who looked like the most disturbing exhibits from the Kunstkammer sprung to life. There were midgets, giants, hunchbacks, cripples – a damaged entourage that made visiting Europeans blanch. Freaks, of course, had been common in European courts, but as rulers became less rough around the edges, deformity ceased being a means to offset the majesty of kings. Anna’s attraction for the ugly was perhaps an expression of her physical and intellectual discomfort. Natalia Sheremeteva, Prince Ivan Dolgoruky’s bride, described the empress as ‘taller than everyone by a head and unusually fat’.51 The wife of the British Consul agreed that Anna was ‘a very large made woman’, but added that she was ‘very well shaped for her size’.52 Others recorded her sombre, short-necked masculine bulk, with a face lightly pockmarked and a voice that was high-pitched and strident.53 At Anna’s court, outlandish burlesques, cruel displays and the indecent pranks of a multitude of jesters and dwarfs became commonplace. As the court emerged from Mass on Sunday, her six favourite jesters, their faces blacked by coal, would line up in a row and imitate hens laying eggs. They would also enact cockfights, clawing viciously at one another and drawing blood. At the sight of their contortions and bloodshed, Anna and her lackeys shrieked with laughter. As for the empress herself, she was often vicious – grabbing courtiers, tweaking and pinching them, and slapping those who both pleased and displeased her. It was, perhaps, more hazardous to be at court than in the meanest shack in the least salubrious quarter.

  Sir Francis Dashwood travelled to St Petersburg with George, Baron Forbes, envoy extraordinary to the court of St Petersburg, the man who negotiated the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1734 – Russia’s first commercial accord with a European power. Arriving in June 1733 on one of the ninety English ships that sailed to St Petersburg that year, Dashwood’s first impression was that Kronstadt was built ‘upon marsh and bog in the sea’.54 There was a fine forge, but the haven and the brick houses on the island were ‘gone very much to decay’ through neglect and ‘the violence of the cold’. Arriving in the city, the visitor found both the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Alexander Nevsky Monastery unfinished, and much evidence that work had halted during the absence of the court. On Vasilevsky Island ‘long rows of large houses, that look well on the outside’ were ‘almost all unfinished, and most uninhabited’. Later in the year, Dashwood found those that were occupied ‘exceeding cold’ and damp, despite being heated by sizeable ovens faced with Dutch tiles. As for the one-storey wooden houses, each crack and crevice in the walls was sealed with tow by professional ‘corkers’ who moved through the city from house to house.55

  At the time of Dashwood’s arrival, even the empress was living in a hastily built wooden Summer Palace. The visitor marvelled at its speedy construction, which had only taken six weeks, commenting that ‘they make nothing here of employing two thousand men at work upon the same building’.56 Under more protracted construction was the third Winter Palace. Work started during the year Anna returned the court to St Petersburg and lasted until 1735. The result, according to Mrs Rondeau, was ‘nothing remarkable either in architecture, painting, or furniture’, for it comprised ‘a great number of little rooms ill-contrived’.57

  A vivid picture of life in St Petersburg midway through Anna’s reign is given by the ironically named Elizabeth justice, who – after being ill-used by her husband and the British legal system – went to Russia in 1734 as a governess to an English family. She arrived in August, the season of thunder and lightning, ‘which often causes damage and frightens her majesty’. Despite the poor soil around and about, Justice gave the impression that horticulture had advanced since the early days of the settlement. While cherries were ‘scarce and very bad’, the inhabitants enjoyed good strawberries, gooseberries and a kind of ‘transparent apple’ that – when ripe – ‘is so clear that you can see the kernel through it’,58 and which tasted superior to any variety she had eaten in England. Apart from an abundance of the predictable crops such as turnips, carrots and cabbages, the local farmers also grew asparagus, French beans and lettuce. As for fish, Elizabeth Justice saw:

  finer smelts . . . than ever I did in England; and twenty of them sold for a kopek, which is equal to a penny. The price of salmon is three kopeks each pound . . . But what appears to me the most valuable, is what they call the Sterlate. They cost five or six roubles, which amount to nearly thirty shillings a-piece. They are very luscious and the water in which they are boiled appears yellow as gold. They eat them with nothing but vinegar and pepper and salt.’59

  While Petersburg exported a great deal of caviar to England, it was not to be compared with that on offer in the capital itself, where it was eaten upon ‘toasted bread with pepper and salt and has the taste of a fine oyster’. Dining with Russians during Lent, Justice watched them ‘eat heartily of a jole of salmon raw’. They removed the skin, cut it into large pieces and marinated it in ‘a great deal of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper’. They also made fish soup and prepared ‘small fish, very like our shrimps which are fried and served up in the dish they are cooked in. The nicety of them is to have them hot and crisp.’

  As for meat, ‘mutton is but small, very sweet and fat. There’s very good veal but it’s scarce. The beef is excellently good and cheap. They have also fine pork and are very fond of kids which they have in great plenty.’ Methods of preparation included frying, boiling, baking and marinating, and the locals made broth with lean meat flavoured with herbs and onions. There were also turkeys, chickens, pigeons, rabbits, partridges, wild fowl and snowbirds – the now-outlawed ortolan – costing ten kopeks a pair. With such a cornucopia, it is hardly surprising that Justice claimed that ‘I believe there is no part of the world where the English live better than they do at Petersburg.’ As for the poorer Russians, ‘they can make an hearty meal on a piece of black sour bread, some salt, an onion or garlic’.60

  Elizabeth Justice’s obvious talent as a travel writer provides us with vivid pictures of different times of year. In summer – during which ships are launched in the presence of the empress – people idled on the Neva in barges to the accompaniment of live music. They went fishing upriver and built fires on which to cook their catch. In winter, no expense was spared on illuminations and yet more firework displays, as ‘rockets and bombs . . . played off before the Palace’. In one display the figure of ‘Plenty’ was traced in the night sky beside a likeness of Anna, adorned with the motto ‘Beyond Praise’ – the kind of crude tribute so beloved, two centuries later, by Joseph Stalin. There were sophisticated firework effects, such as ‘a garden so natural, that you would imagine you might gather oranges from the trees’. During the Butter Week carnival there was sledging on nearby hills – a great source of broken arms and legs. This was a time of ‘regaling’, when revellers ate and drank until Shrove Tuesday. On that day they would kiss and ‘bid adieu, saying “Tomorrow I die” and mortify themselves to Easter’. During fasts, Justice observed, the Russians were very good at abstaining from food, but not from drink. They ‘love the strongest liquor they can get; and if they cannot obtain it honestly, they will steal it’. On one occasion, attending a christening, she recalled that the celebrant ‘w
as very drunk’. When Easter arrived, guns and cannon around the citadel were fired at one or two o’clock in the morning and, later in the day, the wealthier people exchanged elaborately decorated Easter eggs with ‘figures that move’.61

  Meanwhile, at court Anna abolished the Supreme Privy Council in response to their interference at her accession and restored the status of the Senate, setting its membership at twenty-one. The German presence at her court was considerable, but influential figures formed no unified group because of their diverse origins: the ambitious von Löwenwolde came from Livland; the uncompromising Count Münnich from Oldenberg; the industrious Andrei Osterman from Westphalia; and Anna’s favourite, Count Biron, from Courland. This young man ‘got deep into the favour of the Duchess, who took such delight in his company, that she made him her confidant’. Biron married one of Anna’s maids of honour, but had by then become Anna’s lover. Later, in St Petersburg, the empress effectively became a member of the Biron family. She openly held hands with the count and it was even rumoured that she was the mother of Biron’s youngest son.62 If the count was ill, the empress would attend him and, towards the end of her reign, Biron always slept in her rooms. According to General Manstein, Münnich’s adjutant, Biron was ‘haughty and ambitious beyond all bounds, abrupt, and even brutal . . . He took a great deal of pains to learn to dissemble, but could never attain any degree of perfection in it, comparable to that of Count Osterman, who was master of the art.’63 Yet, with a little learning and a modicum of good sense, Biron ruled ‘with perfect despotism over the vast Empire of Russia’. Anna – having little interest in the affairs of state – entrusted the task to her lover, while she turned her attention not only to the animals that she delighted in riding, killing and torturing, but also to her freaks, jesters and servants. Prince Mikhail Golitsyn was appointed ‘Prince Kvasnik’, the imperial cup-bearer, and Princess Volkonskaya was entrusted with Anna’s pet rabbit.64

  With her youth having passed in impoverished provincial obscurity, nothing seemed too beautiful or too expensive to satisfy the ‘capricious, passionate and indolent’ empress. In this she was matched by Biron, who adored pomp and magnificence. They shared a great love of horses – Anna, it is said, kept a different horse for each day of the year, and Biron owned 200 jewel-studded saddles. Inspecting her stables every morning, Anna rode whenever the weather permitted. She also loved hunting and shooting and was a crack shot with the rifles that were beautifully fashioned for her in the imperial workshops. During 1739 it was recorded that Anna shot no fewer than nine stags, sixteen wild goats, four wild boars, a wolf, 374 hares and 608 ducks – without counting all the birds she blew to bits. The cruellest manner of killing involved the jagdwagen into which animals would be herded, only to be picked off at point-blank range by smug hunters sitting comfortably, waiting for each batch to arrive. The empress had zoological gardens and aviaries installed at Peterhof so that she could wander through Le Blond’s park, killing at will. Dangerously – in a country in which there was a perennial threat to the throne – loaded rifles were placed all over the Winter Palace, so that Anna, on a sudden whim, could fling open a window and pick off the sparrows, cranes and magpies soaring overhead. She would then invite her maids of honour to try their luck. After her exertions, the empress would invite the court to feast on what she had shot.65

  The empress rose before eight in the morning, and by nine she was dealing swiftly with despatches. At midday she dined with Count Biron and his family on simple food, drinking beer or Tokay in moderation. When there were no functions at court, she had a light supper and retired between eleven and twelve. Cards were played privately and were also part of the evening’s entertainment at a ball. Although gambling was banned in 1733, General Manstein observed ‘deep play at court: many made their fortune by it in Russia and many others were ruined’. He witnessed as many ‘as twenty thousand roubles lost in one sitting at Quinze or at Pharoah’66 – and there was also a social cost. The wife of the British Consul observed, ‘I fancy, one might find agreeable conversation, if cards were not known in Russia.’67

  Chatter – rather than conversation – was an important diversion for Anna, who was always searching out new companions: ‘Princess Viazemsky, a young girl, lives at the home of the widow Zagriazhskoy . . . Locate her and send her here . . . I want her for my own amusement as they say she talks a great deal.’68 In the search for companions, the empress ordered General Saltykov to find her tall, clean Persian or Georgian girls who were not stupid. She preferred garrulous companions of about her own age and needed new supplies to replenish her dwindling stocks – Tatiana Novokshchenova would ‘die soon and I want someone to take her place’.69 With her strange passion for the croaking of frogs, when human voices ceased to entertain her, Anna sat at a window in the palace just above a specially stocked well and enjoyed the laryngeal mating calls.70

  Although she recoiled from the sight of cripples or paupers on the streets of St Petersburg, Anna spent a good deal of time with old, amputated and crippled servants from her mother’s court. Among them were to be found storytellers, bedtime heel-scratchers and a lively band of six jesters. Two of these were foreign: a Portuguese Jew named Jan d’Acosta and a Neapolitan violinist, Pietro Mira, nicknamed Pedrillo. When Pedrillo – for a lark – married a goat, Anna was beside herself when he took it to bed. Pranks delighted the empress. She thought there was nothing funnier than to ring the city fire bells in the middle of the night and rouse the inhabitants of the capital, who came stumbling half-dressed out into the dark streets, only to realise that as the hands of the clock passed midnight, it became I April 1735 and they were April Fools. When, several days later, a church steeple was struck by lightning and set on fire, people claimed it was God’s judgement against Anna’s folly. 71

  Despite its unsettling roughness, in its more public guise the court under Anna took on a fresh level of brilliance. Women were required to have a new dress for each holiday. The uniforms of officers were trimmed with gold, their cockades knotted with broad white ribbons and red feathers. Anna avoided sober colours on public occasions,72 and the total effect was summed up by a foreign envoy: ‘I have never seen such a brilliant gala and first-class supper. You cannot imagine the splendour of this court’, its ‘luxury and magnificence surpasses even the most opulent ones, including the French’. The city hosted frequent masquerades, both at court and in the houses of the nobility, for which, despite a general ‘want of money, great sums’ were ‘laid out by all courtiers to get magnificent habits’.73

  The garden of the Summer Palace hosted sumptuous dinners, followed by dancing in a huge tent in the cool of the evening. Ladies appeared in diaphanous gowns of white gauze decorated with scatters of silver flowers. On one occasion during the War of the Polish Succession, French prisoners taken at Danzig in June 1734 were introduced to the company in what – at first sight – seemed to be a cruel act of humiliation on the part of the empress. However, Anna ‘called to several ladies, who she knew spoke French, and desired them to do all they could to make the gentlemen forget they were prisoners, at least for the evening’. The wife of the English Consul was among those chosen, but – feeling too weak to dance – acidly observed that she ‘passed the evening in chat’ with a French officer, experiencing ‘a pretty strong dash of that redundancy of rhetorical expression so inherent to his country’74

  Masquerade at the court of Anna I, c. 1736.

  In the cold months, balls were held in an indoor winter garden containing ‘orange trees and myrtles in full bloom’. The consul’s wife was present at one and observed that the ‘fragrance and warmth of this new formed grove, when you saw nothing but ice and snow through the windows, looked like enchantment’. Indeed, ‘the music and the dancing in one part, and the walks and trees filled with beaux and belles . . . made me fancy myself in Fairy-land’.75

  Russian reality was not so fabulous. Outside in the streets – as in the country at large – there was aching poverty. Even the nobility ha
d been much impoverished by the cost of incessant wars and their enforced toing and froing between Moscow and St Petersburg. At court, the pinch was visible. Manstein records that the ‘richest coat would sometimes be worn together with the vilest uncombed wig; or you might see a beautiful piece of stuff spoiled by some botcher of a tailor; or if there was nothing amiss in the dress, the equipage would be deficient. A man richly dressed would come to court in a miserable coach.’76 Like the buildings of the city that crumbled because of the cost of incessant repairs, many minor nobles could not sustain the financial burden of extravagant display, and the effect was somewhat like a Soviet-era opera, where economic constraint was visible in the tattiness of a wig or the crudity of faded drapes painted on rickety theatre flats.

  In apparent contrast to her delight in the barbarity of her entourage and the slapstick savagery of wild burlesques, Anna possessed a keen interest in opera and ballet. She rifled the treasury in order to sponsor visiting European musical talents, opera companies and commedia dell’arte troupes. In 1733, Anna appointed the Venetian Luigi Madonis as concert master of her court orchestra. Most probably a student of Vivaldi, Madonis dedicated his Twelve Diverse Symphonies for Violin and Bass to Anna. While these were firmly anchored in the traditions of Venetian baroque, Madonis took the novel step of incorporating Russian and Ukrainian folk songs into his violin sonatas.