However, while everyone denounced her appearance as a camp-follower masquerading as a sovereign, opinions are more varied when it comes to her intelligence and decision-making ability. She barely knew how to read and write; she barely spoke Russian (and with a Swedish-tinged Polish accent, at that); but from the first days of her reign she displayed a creditable intention to emulate her husband’s thinking. She even learned a little French and German in order to improve her understanding of foreign policy issues. And she relied on the common sense that she inherited from a difficult childhood. Some of her interlocutors found her more human, more understanding than the late tsar.
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II
Terrible Tsarinas That being said, she was conscious of her lack of experience and consulted Menshikov before making any important decision. Her enemies claimed, behind her back, that she was entirely beholden to him and that she was afraid of dissatisfying him through any personal initiative.
Was she still sleeping with him? Even if she had never deprived herself of that pleasure in the past, it is unlikely that she would have persevered at her age and in her situation. Avid for fair and flourishing flesh, she had no need to restrict herself to the pleasures that may be available in the arms of an aging partner.
With complete freedom to choose, she changed lovers according to her fantasies and did not spare any expense when it came to rewarding them for their nights of prowess. The French ambassador, Jacques de Campredon, enjoyed enumerating some of these transitory darlings in his Memoirs: “Menshikov is no longer anything but an advisor,” he writes. “Count Loewenwolde appears to have more credit. Sir Devier is still among the most outstanding favorites. Count Sapieha has also stepped up to the job. He is a fine young man, well-built. He is often sent bouquets and jewels… There are other, second-class favorites, but they are known only to Johanna, a former chambermaid of the tsarina and agent of her pleasures.”
At the many suppers she held to regale her companions in these tournaments of love, Catherine drank like a sailor. At her command, ordinary vodka (prostaya) was alternated, on the table, with strong French and German liquors. She quite often passed out at the end of these well-lubricated meals. “The tsarina was rather ill from one of these debaucheries that was held on St. Andrew’s Day,” noted the same Campredon in a report to his minister, dated December 25, 1725. “A bleeding set her up again; but, as she is extremely plump and lives so very irregularly, it is expected that she will have some accident that will shorten her days.”1
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Catherine’s Reign: A Flash of Flamboyance These binges of drinking and lovemaking did not prevent Catherine from conducting herself like a true autocrat whenever she recovered her wits. She scolded and slapped her maidservants for a peccadillo, bellowed at her ordinary advisers, and attended without a misstep the tiresome parades of the Guard; she rode on horseback for hours at a time, to soothe her nerves and to prove to one and all that her physical stamina was beyond dispute. Since she had a sense of family, she brought in brothers and sisters (whose existence Peter the Great had always chosen to ignore) from their remote provinces. At her invitation, former Livonian and Lithuanian peasants, uncouth and aw kwardly stuffed into formal clothing, disembarked in the salons of St. Petersburg.
Titles of “Count” and “Prince” rained down on their heads, to the great scandal of the authentic aristocrats. Some of these new courtiers with calloused hands joined the rest of Her Majesty’s dinner crowd in the conclaves of good humor and licentiousness.
Nonetheless, however keen she may have been for this dissolute debauchery, Catherine always set aside a few hours to deal with public affairs. Certainly, Menshikov continued to dictate decisions in matters affecting the interests of the State, but, from one week to another, Catherine gained in confidence and began to stand up to her mentor, sometimes to the point of disputing his opinions.
While recognizing that she would never be able to do without the advice of this competent, devoted, wily man, she convinced him to convene around her a High Privy Council, including not only Menshikov but several other characters whose fidelity to Her Majesty was notorious: Tolstoy, Apraxin, Vice Chancellor Golovkin, Ostermann… This supreme cabinet relegated the traditional Senate to the sidelines, where they no longer discussed any questions of primary importance. It was at the instigation of the High Council that Catherine decided to ease the fate of the
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Terrible Tsarinas Old Believers, who were persecuted for their heretical beliefs; to create an Academy of Sciences according to the desires of Peter the Great; to accelerate the beautification of the capital; to pursue the construction of the Ladoga Canal; and to equip the expedition of Danish navigator Vitus Behring, who was bound for Kamchatka. These wise resolutions mixed oddly in the tsarina’s turbulent mind with her penchant for sex and alcohol. She was voracious and well-disciplined by turn, hotly sensual and coldly lucid.
Hardly had she tasted the complementary joys of power and pleasure when she again turned her attention to her paramount concern: that of the family. Any mother, tsarina or not, cons iders it her mission to see her daughters established as soon as they reach the age of puberty. Catherine had given life to two pretty daughters, who were clever-minded enough to be as pleasing in their conversation as they were to look at. The elder, Anna Petrovna, had recently been promised to the duke of HolsteinGottorp, Charles Frederick. Weak, nervous and ungainly, he had little but his title to attract the girl. But reason can overrule feelings when, beyond the union of the hearts, political alliances and territorial annexations are foreseen. The marriage having been delayed by Peter the Great’s death, Catherine planned to celebrate it on May 21, 1725. Subservient to the maternal will, Anna sadly resigned herself to what she must have seen as her only choice.
She was 17 years old. Charles Frederick was 25. The archbishop Feofan Prokopovich, who just a few weeks before had celebrated the funeral offices of Peter the Great in Old Slavonic, the language of the Church, now blessed the union of the daughter of the deceased with the son of Duke Frederick of Holstein and Hedwige of Sweden, herself daughter of King Charles XI. As the fiance spoke neither Slavonic nor Russian, an interpreter translated the key passages into Latin for him.
The party was entertained by the acrobatics and contor«18»
Catherine’s Reign: A Flash of Flamboyance tions of a pair of dwarves, who spouted out of an enormous meat pie while dessert was being brought in. The attendees choked with laughter and burst into applause. The bride herself enjoyed it. She did not suspect the bitter disappointment that awaited her. Three day after the wedding ceremony, the Saxon diplomatic representative let his king know that Charles Frederick had stayed out all night three times in a row, leaving Anna fretting alone in her bed. “The mother is in despair at her daughter’s sacrifice,” he wrote in his report. A little later he would add that the scorned wife was comforting herself “by spending the night with one and another.”2 While regretting her elder daughter’s poor luck, Catherine refused to admit defeat and sought to interest her son-in-law in public affairs - since he appeared so little interested in private affairs. She guessed correctly: Charles Frederick was mad about politics. Invited to participate in the meetings of the Supreme Privy Council, he threw himself into the debates with so much passion that Catherine was alarmed, finding that he sometimes meddled in matters that were not his concern.
Dissatisfied with this first son-in-law, she thought to correct her mistake by arranging a marriage that all of Europe would envy for her second daughter, Elizabeth, who had been Peter the Great’s preferred. Europe was known to her mostly through the remarks of her late husband and, recently, through her diplomats’ reports. But,
