chopped cabbage, 500 buckets of shredded cabbage and 2000 buckets of cucumber for the imperial table. Mint, used in cooking since the seventeenth century and also for flavouring vodka, became a particular speciality of the Dmitrovo kitchen gardens, which each year supplied between 400 and 500 poods of mint to the Court by the end of Elizabeth’s reign (a pood weighed approximately 36 lb or 16.38 kg).
Gardeners from Kolomenskoye were sent out to advise the winegrowers at Chuguyev; they also travelled to Astrakhan, from where fruit was shipped to Tsaritsyn before beginning the long overland journey to St Petersburg. (In an effort to prevent it from rotting, Elizabeth personally decreed that the posting stations should be no more than thirty versts—around thirty-two kilometres—apart.) Still more Muscovite specialists helped to establish the imperial kitchen gardens in St Petersburg, where several acres of both the Summer Garden and the Italian Garden were given over to orchard and allotments. There were similar establishments at all the suburban palaces, where foreign specialists such as Michelangelo Mass, Justus Riger and Johann Brandt, assisted by Russian apprentices, coaxed radish, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, onions and various sorts of grass and flowers to grow in the orangeries all year round, so that the Court could enjoy them even out of season.76
And then there were the fish. ‘I have dined with Russians in Lent,’ reported an English governess in St Petersburg in the mid-1730s, ‘and seen them eat heartily of a sole of salmon raw.’77 The Court was offered even richer pickings. In the normal run of things, the second upper kitchen served up for Catherine and Peter almost exactly the same daily fare as the first upper kitchen prepared for the empress’s table: 3 poods of ham, 1 pood and 20 pounds of mutton, 1 fresh tongue, 1 and a half poods of veal, 4 and a half poods of lamb, 3 pounds of lard, 2 geese, 4 turkeys, 4 duck, 38 Russian hens, 3 suckling pigs, 5 chickens and a selection of grouse and partridge in season. On fast days, these quantities were halved to cater for foreign guests and heterodox courtiers while Orthodox members of the household dined on 6 sterlets (a particular delicacy, generally boiled but sometimes roasted), 14 pike (usually fried), 2 bream, 2 ide-carp, 10 burbots, 16 perch, 10 roach, 3 freshwater salmon, 6 grayling, 2 pike-perch, 1 salmon, 50 ruff fish, 100 crayfish and a variety of salted fish and caviars.78
On such a diet, it is no wonder that courtiers were plagued by constipation. But then, as Catherine soon discovered, personal comforts were everywhere subordinated to the relentless requirements of representational display. She grew up surrounded by scaffolding and workmen, ever-present symbols of recurrent alterations to the imperial palaces, usually completed at breakneck speed. If Rastrelli submitted a budget for 200 labourers for a project lasting six months, he was likely to be told to recruit 1200 and complete the job in four weeks, though such a timescale never allowed for the empress’s frequent changes of mind over the details, often announced on a whim over lunch.79 One of the Court architect’s first commissions in St Petersburg, the summer house he built for Empress Anna, was simply chopped in two in 1748 and rebuilt on either side of the palace at Yekaterinhof, where the empress stipulated that the trees should not be destroyed.80 Elsewhere, his pattern was to begin with cosmetic changes before launching into wholesale reconstruction, as at Peterhof.81 ‘This was the work of Penelope,’ Catherine remarked of a similar operation at Tsarskoye Selo: ‘they pull down tomorrow what has been built today. This house was destroyed and rebuilt six times before it reached its present state.’82 The result was a restless progress from palace to palace, in which she and Peter scarcely ever returned to the apartments they had previously occupied.
A thirst for splendour was by no means the only reason why they lived in perpetual discomfort. ‘The Dutch may brag that Amsterdam is built out of the water,’ observed a British visitor in 1741, ‘but I insist that Petersburg is built in spite of all the four elements…the Earth is all a bog, the air is commonly foggy, the Water sometimes fills half the Houses, and the fire burns down half the Town at a time.’83 Catherine discovered for herself the perils of building on frost-bitten marshland when Aleksey Razumovsky’s three-storey country house at Gostilitsy gave way underneath her in May 1748. Having laid a limestone foundation the previous autumn, the architect had departed for Ukraine leaving strict instructions that the beams he had used to support the vestibule were not to be touched. Thinking them unsightly, the steward of the estate nevertheless had them removed, rendering the whole structure unstable as the foundations began to shift in the spring thaw. Comparing the noise of the collapsing building to a ship of the line shuddering down the launch pad, Catherine was careful to stress in her memoirs that her husband had fled to save his own skin while she selflessly paused to rescue a slumbering member of their household. Whatever the truth of that claim, there was no doubt about the scale of the tragedy. While Catherine’s maid of honour, Princess Anna Gagarina, was dragged bleeding from the wreckage, three labourers were killed on the ground floor and a further sixteen, employed on the neighbouring sleigh-run, were crushed to death in the basement. The distraught Razumovsky threatened to shoot himself while Catherine, who had only just recovered from measles, was bled to relieve her shock.84
Even architects who built to last were frustrated by the Russian climate. ‘Because spring and summer together last only three months,’ Rastrelli complained, ‘it is very hard to achieve perfection in work on the facades, since barely have they been completed than the cold and damp take hold of them and everything cracks up.’85 Just as much damage was caused by stoves designed to ward off the elements from the inside. Works of art in themselves, these ceramic monsters played havoc with the interior decoration. Catherine complained loudest about water seeping down the panelling of Moscow’s wooden palaces.86 But condensation was everywhere a menace. No sooner had the celebrated Amber Room, a gift to Peter the Great from Frederick William I of Prussia in 1717, finally been installed in the Winter Palace between 1743 and 1745, than the stone started to come unstuck. As cracks appeared across the entire surface of one of the panels, the room was already under restoration by 1746.87
In 1750, Peter and Catherine enjoyed a brief return to Peter the Great’s summer house while their new rooms in the Summer Palace were being finished. The ground floor at Monplaisir, where they spent part of that summer, was also ‘fairly pleasant’ because there were windows on both sides. But these were exceptions that proved the rule. It rained so hard that year that the landings at Yekaterinhof were ‘covered in pools of water’, and the new Summer Palace rooms which had initially promised much, being further from Elizabeth’s part of the palace than before, turned out to overlook the Fontanka—dismissed by Catherine as ‘nothing but a muddy swamp’ before its banks were clad with granite in her own reign—and ‘an ugly, narrow little courtyard on the other side’.88 The apartments they replaced had been even less satisfactory:
This was an enfilade of double rooms which had only two exits: one via the staircase, through which everyone who came to see us had to pass; and the other adjoining the empress’s staterooms, so that our servants were obliged to pass through one or other of these exits with the necessary, and one day it happened that when one of the foreign ministers (I don’t remember which) arrived for an audience, the first thing he encountered was a commode being taken away to be emptied.89
The only escape from such privations lay at their country estate at Oranienbaum, attractively situated on rising ground overlooking Kronstadt and the Gulf of Finland, four miles west of Peterhof. Here Catherine and Peter had ‘more freedom’ than in town, though it was to be some time before they could count themselves as masters of their own household.90 Built in the 1720s for Peter the Great’s corrupt favourite, Alexander Menshikov, the palace bore several marks of his insatiable vanity: subtly in the form of a personalised iconostasis, and more brazenly in the form of a monstrous princely crown, carved in stone on top of the main building. After Menshikov’s disgrace in 1727, the estate fell rapidly into disrepair. Although Sir Francis Dashwood reckoned Oranienbaum ‘with the additions of art very grand’, the future founder of the Hellfire Club noted that it was already ‘going the way of their other buildings’ when he visited it in 1733.91 Three further years of neglect were to follow before the palace was requisitioned for use as a naval hospital, whose patients were transferred to Kronstadt when Elizabeth granted the estate to Peter in November 1743. By then, serious work was required to make the place inhabitable and it is not surprising that Catherine should have remembered it as being ‘in a fairly dilapidated state’ when they first began to spend time there in 1746.92
At that point, traipsing in the wake of the restless Elizabeth, she and her husband were rarely able to spend more than a week at a time ‘in the country’. Perhaps it was just as well. Until 1750, their estate was little more than a building site as thousands of the grand duke’s serfs laboured to transform it into a cross between a summer palace and a military encampment. The first project to be completed in 1746 was a small but heavily armed fortress which may have been partly designed by Peter himself. Built near the pond to the south of the palace, the fortress was christened ‘Yekaterinburg’ in Catherine’s honour. Yet her husband’s obsession with his soldiers drove her to
