Catherine the Great

bottles of champagne, 53 bottles of Rhine wine, 6 flasks of Gdansk vodka, 2 flasks of aniseed-flavour vodka, half a flask of lemon vodka and 2 phials of mustard.²²

While the governors of the Young Court held Peter and Catherine to a clockwork routine, Elizabeth’s life was famously irregular. Visitors to Russia in the 1730s had recognised in the attractive young tsarevna a free spirit ill- suited to the constraints of formal ritual. ‘She dances better than anyone I have ever seen,’ one acknowledged, ‘but hates the ceremony of a court.’²³ Even after her accession, she shunned formal society, preferring the earthier company of her far from blue-blooded relatives, the Hendrikovs and the Skavronskys (Maria Choglokova’s family). Surrounded by the guards who had brought her to the throne, Elizabeth gave special licence to the new Life Company (her personal bodyguard), the majority of them peasants by origin, who ‘committed all imaginable disorders’ in the early months of the reign as ‘the new noble lieutenants ran through all the dirtiest public-houses, got drunk, and wallowed in the streets. They entered into the houses of the greatest noblemen, demanding money with threats, and took away, without ceremony, whatever they liked.’²⁴ It was a pardonable exaggeration on the part of the Austrian ambassador. Fourteen men were discharged following disorders at Elizabeth’s coronation, and the regimental archives from her reign are peppered with the records of fights, broken windows, and a rich variety of derelictions of duty caused by severe inebriation. One wretched drunk was so hungover that he turned out on guard in his slippers.²⁵

Hawking and hunting with hounds were pleasures generally reserved for the period between lunch and dinner; grouse shooting, in autumn and winter, lasted from five or six in the morning until midday. These, however, were almost the only fixed points in Elizabeth’s daily regime. Mealtimes were unstable (and often the occasion for the empress to dictate haphazard personal edicts); theatrical performances regularly began late and continued into the small hours so that, until the empress condescended to provide carriages for her musicians late in her reign, they could be seen lumbering through the streets with their bulky instruments in the middle of the night.²⁶ It was entirely characteristic for Elizabeth to finish the carnival season in 1748 ‘with a magnificent bal masque and a supper of a hundred and fifty covers in the opera house, which she honoured with her presence, till three o’clock in the morning’.²⁷ On less formal occasions, she might retire to bed only as dawn was breaking. Such irregular habits have long been ascribed to Elizabeth’s fear of assassination.²⁸ Yet although the anxieties of a usurper are not to be underestimated, it seems more plausible to interpret her erratic daily timetable as an extreme example of the ‘nocturnalisation’ of Court life—a move traceable in most European Courts in the century after 1650 away from a dawn-to-dusk regimen towards one in which mealtimes, balls and masquerades moved ever further into the night, when fireworks and Baroque theatrical spectacles acquired even greater powers of illusion under cover of darkness.²⁹

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The roots of Russia’s Baroque Court culture stretched back into seventeenth-century Muscovy, when its image-makers lacked for nothing in intellectual sophistication.³⁰ Manners were not always so refined. By the time of Catherine’s arrival, barely a generation had passed since Peter the Great first introduced women to Russian public society by obliging them in 1718 to attend his ‘assemblies’—gatherings inspired by his visit to Paris at which both sexes were obliged to dance, smoke and play cards. Since these were all habits formerly condemned as ‘foreign devilishness’, the tsar found that the best way of encouraging guests to participate was to post armed guards at the door. If his new forms of sociability were largely alien to the Muscovite elite, then so was the Western dress he imposed in 1702. Decades later, hooped skirts and corsets (the English style laced down the front, the French down the back, rather tighter, to emphasise the waist) still seemed uncomfortable and unwieldy to noblewomen who hankered after the looser garments of a bygone age. Even those who were keen to adapt to new ways of doing things had precious few sources of instruction. First published in 1717, The Honourable Mirror of Youth, or a guide to social conduct, an advice book for both sexes based on Erasmus and other Western authorities, remained the only work of its kind in Russia until the mid-1730s and was still being reprinted in 1767, five years into Catherine’s own reign.³¹

Peter’s efforts to create a refined European society were disrupted by the Court’s return to Moscow under his teenage grandson. Even when Anna brought the Court back to St Petersburg in 1732, visitors could expect to find as many rough edges there as in any of the smaller German Courts. ‘The richest coat would be sometimes worn together with the vilest uncombed wig,’ noted Manstein, the condescending Austrian ambassador, ‘or you might see a beautiful piece of stuff spoiled by some botcher of a tailor.’³² Even Manstein nevertheless had to acknowledge that ‘at length, every thing grew to be well regulated’ so that by the end of the 1730s St Petersburg could boast many of the attributes of a recognisable Court society.³³ Anna held regular reception days—kurtagy was the Russian word, taken from the German Courtag; the English called them drawing rooms—where the atmosphere was relatively informal. ‘Our drawing-room is more like an assembly,’ the English envoy’s wife observed. ‘There is a circle in form, for about half an hour, then the czarina and the princesses make their party at cards.’³⁴ By the mid- 1740s, when Catherine arrived in Russia, the main ladies’ costume at such gatherings was the shlafrok (from the German Schlafrock), which resembled English informal morning dress. For more formal occasions, there was the samara, a loose dress with a pleated back, not unlike the French contouche, worn over a corset and a decorated underskirt and supported by a hooped panier.³⁵

‘The Empress is a great lover of English stuffs,’ reported the British ambassador in the year of Catherine’s wedding, ‘particularly white and other light colours with large flowers of gold and silver.’³⁶ Europe was not the only source of such gorgeous fabrics. Although they never showed much profit, the cumbersome, state-controlled caravans to Peking, sanctioned by the Treaty of Kyakhta in 1727, remained a crucial link in the palace’s supply chain. Anna’s Court had bought a third of the goods from the 1738 caravan and funds confiscated from her disgraced favourite, Ernst Buhren, helped Elizabeth to take her pick from the next in 1743. Yards of her favourite white velvet headed the list of Chinese silks purchased at auction, where the empress also invested in green, yellow, crimson and scarlet satins, woven with silver and gold thread, a multiplicity of damasks, muslin, gauze and coloured brocades, and some 4117 wire-mounted paper flowers.³⁷ Diplomats, appalled by Elizabeth’s dilatory attitude to business, were irritated to find that she thought nothing of making a trip from one of her summer palaces expressly to examine silks on the market in St Petersburg.³⁸ Yet there was nothing casual about such visits to an empress who, in common with her fellow European sovereigns, used dress as a political instrument to inculcate loyalty, satisfy vanity and impress the world at large.³⁹

Although Elizabeth prided herself on driving a hard bargain, the sums she allocated to her own wardrobe were effectively limitless. The young cavalier assigned to supervise alterations to her furs in 1759 claimed that some 70,000 roubles were spent in less than nine months—more than twice Catherine’s total annual allowance of 30,000 roubles and only marginally less than the (grossly inadequate) budget for rebuilding the palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1744.⁴⁰ Manstein calculated that a courtier in the 1730s who ‘did not lay out above two or three thousand roubles, or from four to six hundred pounds a year in his dress, made no great figure’.⁴¹ Catherine’s expenses were far higher. Though she had to be careful not to outdo a capricious monarch—not long after her arrival in Russia, Elizabeth ordered all her ladies to shave their heads, a fate Catherine escaped only because she was recovering from pleurisy—the grand duchess’s wardrobe was expected to range far beyond the standard repertoire. Like the empress, she usually changed costume three times at a public masquerade, and when an outfit attracted praise, it was never worn again because she made it ‘a rule that if it had once made a big impact, it could only make a lesser one the second time’. Though indebtedness was a crucial marker of nobility in a culture defined by conspicuous consumption, the grand duchess’s need for money would ultimately leave her vulnerable to bribes from foreign Courts. At first, it was Elizabeth who saved her from embarrassment. By the end of Catherine’s first year in Russia, only a gift from the empress could prevent her arrears from exceeding 2000 roubles, and her debts kept on mounting thanks to expenditure on jewellery and gambling.⁴²

Gift-giving was a central part of Court culture, and although Catherine might occasionally expect to receive presents from visiting royalty, she was usually expected to offer them. On the night of her conversion to Orthodoxy, she had been able to present Peter with a jewel-encrusted hunting knife and a gold cane-head only because Elizabeth had provided them for her. After her marriage, she had to pay for her own presents. The empress set the standard, providing courtiers with new clothes every Easter and bestowing valuable dowries on her maids of honour. Her stepsister Anna Karlovna received 10,000 roubles when she married Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov in 1742. Sixteen years later, their daughter Anna Mikhailovna in turn received 15,000 roubles along with dresses, silks