ministers and by the machinations of the young court. If a few unimportant letters had been found, why should not others of a more dangerous nature have been written and then destroyed or hidden? Why was Catherine interfering in matters concerning the crown? It was pointed out that the young court had been going its own way for a long time, flouting her wishes. Was not Poniatowski staying on in St. Petersburg simply because Catherine wanted him and because Bestuzhev preferred to obey the grand duchess rather than the monarch? Was not everybody running to the young court to flatter the rulers of tomorrow? Elizabeth was assured that she had only to arrest Bestuzhev and have his papers examined to find documents that would prove the chancellor’s complicity with the grand duchess on matters verging on treason.
Elizabeth ordered a meeting of the war council for the evening of February 14, 1758. The chancellor was summoned. Bestuzhev sent word that he was ill. His excuse was rejected, and he was ordered to come immediately. He obeyed, and, upon arrival, he was arrested. His offices, titles, and orders were stripped from him, and he was sent back to his house a prisoner—without anyone troubling to tell him of what crimes he was accused. To make certain that the overthrow of the leading statesman of the empire would not be challenged, a company of the Imperial Guard was ordered out. As the guardsmen were marching along the Moika Canal, where Counts Alexander and Peter Shuvalov lived, the soldiers were cheerful, telling one another, “Thank God, we are going to arrest those cursed Shuvalovs!” When the men realized that it was not the Shuvalovs but Bestuzhev who was to be arrested, they grumbled, “It is not this man. It is the others who trample on the people.”
Catherine learned about the arrest the following morning in a note from Poniatowski. The note added that three other men—the Venetian jeweler Bernardi; her former Russian language teacher Adadurov; and Elagin, a former adjutant of Count Razumovsky’s who had become a friend of Poniatowski’s—had also been arrested. Reading this note, Catherine understood that she might be implicated. She was a friend and ally of Bestuzhev’s. Bernardi, the jeweler, was a man whose profession gave him entree to all of the leading houses in St. Petersburg. Everyone trusted him, and Catherine had used him to send and receive messages from Bestuzhev and Poniatowski. Adadurov, her teacher, had remained devoted to her, and she had recommended him to Count Bestuzhev. Elagin, she said, was, “a loyal, honest man; once one gained his affection, one did not lose it. He had always shown marked zeal and devotion for me.”
Upon reading Poniatowski’s note, she was alarmed, but steeled herself not to display weakness. “With a dagger in my heart, so to speak,” she said, “I dressed and went to Mass where it seemed to me that most of the faces were as long as my own. No one said anything to me.” In the evening, she went to a ball. There, she marched up to Prince Nikita Trubetskoy, one of the commissioners appointed to assist Alexander Shuvalov in examining the arrested men.
“What do all these wonderful things mean?” she whispered to him. “Have you found more crimes than criminals or more criminals than crimes?”
“We have done what we were ordered to do,” Trubetskoy replied stolidly. “But as for crimes, we are still searching for them. Up to now, we have not found any.” His response encouraged Catherine, who also noted that the empress, having just ordered the arrest of her senior minister, failed to appear that night.
The next day, Gottlieb von Stambke, the Holstein administrator who was close to Bestuzhev, brought Catherine good news. He said that he had just received a clandestine note from Count Bestuzhev asking him to tell the grand duchess that she should not worry because he had had time to burn all his papers. These included, most significantly, the drafts of his proposal that the grand duchess share power with Peter after Elizabeth’s death. Further, the former chancellor had said that he would keep Stambke informed of what happened to him during his interrogation and would pass along the questions put to him. Catherine asked Stambke through what channel he had received Bestuzhev’s note. Stambke said that Bestuzhev’s horn player had passed it to him, and that, in future, all communications were to be placed in a pile of bricks near Bestuzhev’s house.
A few days later, Stambke came back to Catherine’s room, frightened and pale, to tell her that his correspondence and that of Count Bestuzhev with Count Poniatowski had been intercepted. The horn player had been arrested. Stambke himself expected to be dismissed, if not arrested, at any moment, and he had come to say goodbye. Catherine was certain that she had done nothing wrong, and she knew that, aside from Michael Vorontsov, Ivan Shuvalov, and the French ambassador, everyone in St. Petersburg was convinced that Count Bestuzhev was innocent of any crime.
Already, the commission charged with prosecuting the former chancellor was struggling. It became known that the day after Count Bestuzhev’s arrest, a manifesto had been drafted secretly in Ivan Shuvalov’s house, intended to inform the public why the empress had been obliged to arrest her old servant. Unable to find and state any specific offense, the accusers had decided that the crime was to be lese-majeste: offending the empress by “attempting to sow discord between Her Imperial Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses.” On February 27, 1758, the manifesto was published, announcing the arrest, the charges, the fact that Bestuzhev had been stripped of his offices and decorations and that he would be examined by a special commission. The flimsy document convinced no one in St. Petersburg, and the public found it ludicrous to threaten the former statesman with exile, confiscation of property, and other punishments, with no evidence of a crime, no trial, and no judgment.
The first step taken by the commissioners was equally absurd. They ordered all Russian ambassadors, envoys, and officials at foreign courts to send copies of all dispatches Count Bestuzhev had written to them during the twenty years he had administered Russia’s foreign affairs. It was alleged that the chancellor had written whatever he pleased, often in opposition to the wishes of the empress. But because Elizabeth never wrote or signed anything, it was impossible to prove that the chancellor had acted contrary to her orders. As for verbal orders, the empress could hardly have given any significant number of these to the chancellor, who sometimes waited for months without being admitted to see her. Nothing came of this. None of the personnel in embassies bothered to examine archives ranging back over many years in order to search for crimes committed by the man whose instructions these same subordinates had loyally obeyed. Who knew but that this might lead to finding themselves implicated? Besides, once these documents arrived in St. Petersburg, it would take years of research to locate and interpret whatever nuggets, favorable or unfavorable, they might contain. The order was ignored. The inquiry lumbered along for a year. No evidence was produced, but the former chancellor was exiled to one of his own estates where he remained until, three years later, Catherine became empress.
With Stambke’s departure for Holstein, Catherine’s handling of the affairs of Peter’s duchy ended. The empress told her nephew that she disapproved of his wife’s involvement in the ruling of his hereditary duchy. Peter, who had enthusiastically encouraged Catherine’s participation in that work, now declared that he agreed with his aunt. The empress then formally asked the king of Poland to recall Count Poniatowski.
When she heard of Stambke’s dismissal and that Poniatowski was to be sent home, Catherine reacted quickly. She ordered Vasily Shkurin, her valet, to gather all of her papers and account books and bring them to her. Once everything was in her room, she sent him away, and then threw everything—every document, and every paper and letter she had ever received—into the fire; this was how the manuscript of her “Portrait of a Fifteen-Year-Old Philosopher,” written in 1744 for Count Gyllenborg, disappeared. When these materials had been reduced to ashes, she called Shkurin back: “You are a witness to the fact that all my papers and accounts are burned. If you are ever asked where they are, you will be able to swear that you saw me burn them.” Shkurin was grateful that she had spared him involvement.
38
A Gamble
ON THE DAY before Lent, the last day of Carnival, 1758, Catherine decided that she had had enough of discretion and timidity. In the weeks that had followed her confinement, she had not appeared in public. Now, she decided to attend a Russian play scheduled for performance at the court theater. Catherine knew that Peter did not
