Catherine the Great

distance in the carriage of the Court Kapellmeister, reserving her coolest irony for the passage in her memoirs in which she describes the ‘astonishing number of rats and mice’ that allegedly ‘descended the stairs in single file, without even really hurrying’. For once, Rastrelli’s advanced techniques counted against him because it proved impossible, even by firing cannon balls into the burning ruins, to dislodge the iron girders that underpinned the whole structure, and so to isolate the fire in the main staterooms. Flames soon engulfed the entire 400-metre length of the building. By the time they were finally extinguished at six o’clock, only the chapel and the summer apartments remained standing, though a salvage operation managed to rescue the majority of the valuables. The most sensible loss for the empress was her wardrobe, including a dress she had had made from Parisian fabric sent to Catherine as a gift from her mother.¹⁰⁶

Even as she looked on aghast, Elizabeth boasted to the Dutch ambassador that she would commission a new palace, ‘only not in the Italian style, but more in the Russian’.¹⁰⁷ She was as good as her word. Having defiantly returned to the neighbouring theatre to see a French comedy the day after the fire, she ordered that a new palace must be ready in time for her birthday in six weeks’ time. Clearance work began on 5 November and building started three days later under the direction of Russian architects working to a new design by Rastrelli. To speed reconstruction, materials were brought from both the Petrovsky palace and the old wooden palace in the Kremlin, dismantled in the spring (the Moscow nobility might have been unnerved to learn of the further order to survey the surrounding area for ‘buildings made of good timber belonging to private individuals’). By 10 November, 1018 men were already at work, erecting a new superstructure onto the existing foundations since fresh ones would have threatened a repeat of the disaster at Gostilitsy by sweating through the winter. As all the Court’s neighbouring construction projects came to a halt to release the necessary labour force, the total soon reached 6000, including 3000 carpenters and 120 specialist woodcarvers. Fed and housed on site, they worked around the clock to complete the project in time for an architects’ inspection on 13 December.¹⁰⁸ Two days later, Elizabeth took possession of her new apartments and on 18 December she duly celebrated her birthday in a richly gilded hall, even larger than its predecessor, lit by twenty-two tall windows. ‘There was no court at noon, as usual,’ the British resident reported, ‘because of the excessive cold, but in the evening there was a ball, illuminations and a magnificent supper at a table which held near three hundred people.’¹⁰⁹ The fact that only 130 guests sat down at a table laid for 160 scarcely diminishes the scale of the achievement. Ambitious state construction projects were by no means a creation of the Stalinist era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Count Alexander Vorontsov highlighted the resurrection of the Golovin Palace in his autobiography as an example of ‘what can be done in Russia’.¹¹⁰

Catherine was less impressed. Though a degree of inconvenience was to be expected in the aftermath of such a disaster, the misery she endured at a nearby courtier’s house was insufferable. ‘It is hardly possible to be worse off than we were there,’ she recalled. ‘The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, and you could get two or three fingers into the cracks in the floor.’ Conditions were little better when she and Peter moved to a former episcopal palace, where they feared being burned alive. Prospects improved only when they were allowed to go to Liuberets, an estate outside Moscow granted to her husband in 1751, where they had initially been obliged to sleep in tents: ‘Here we thought we were in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished.’¹¹¹

The first indications of a third pregnancy showed in February 1754. In view of the earlier miscarriages, anxieties about Catherine’s health were understandable. The empress herself paid her a visit in Easter week, perhaps to check that Saltykov was not lurking in her apartments. She left after half an hour, having excused the grand duchess from appearing in public on her birthday and on coronation day.¹¹² That was small relief by comparison with the distress caused by the discovery that Nikolay Choglokov, who collapsed during the Easter service, was terminally ill. It had taken Catherine seven years to bring the Choglokovs round by flattering them and pandering to their weakness for gambling. Now Nikolay had selfishly chosen to die ‘just at the point when we had managed, after several years of trouble and effort, to make him less wicked and nasty, and he had become more tractable’. As for his wife, she too ‘had changed from a hard-hearted and malevolent Argus into a firm and devoted friend’. Now they were gone, and at the moment of her greatest uncertainty Catherine had to face the future under the supervision of a new governor of the Young Court: Alexander Shuvalov, the head of the Secret Chancellery. Finding it astonishing that ‘a man with such a hideous grimace’ should have been placed in the company of a pregnant young woman, she cried all the way back to St Petersburg.¹¹³

CHAPTER FOUR Ambition 1754–1759

When Catherine finally gave birth to a son on 20 September 1754, the Russian Court erupted in an explosion of relief whose tremors were felt across the continent. The British minister in Florence, Sir Horace Mann, wrote in December:

All Europe seems to have agreed for some months past to do nothing worth talking of—except the Great Prince of Russia, who has made a little Great Prince to exclude forever the lawful Czar [Ivan VI, still imprisoned at Schlusselburg], and for whose birth the Empress has given such presents, and made such rejoicings, both at home and abroad, as quite outdo those on the birth of an heir to the French monarchy.¹

It was a pardonable exaggeration. Among the courtiers who competed to stage celebrations in Elizabeth’s honour in a series of festivities lasting through the New Year carnival, none could surpass her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, who hosted a public masquerade that lasted for two whole days and nights in the last week of October, beginning and ending with allegorical fireworks.² The scale of the empress’s own accession-day celebrations on 25 November can be judged from the tally of candles alone. In addition to 4000 plain white sticks for the chandeliers and 300 table candles of unspecified weight, the Court accountants recorded 1642 ‘semi-banquet’ candles and 1505 ‘ordinary’ ones weighing almost 900 lbs. Some 725 of these were used for the seven flaming pyramids designed by Rastrelli, who excelled himself by requiring 4000 glass bottles for their construction.³

In contrast to such unrestrained public rejoicing, Catherine had been abandoned in miserable isolation. On her return from Moscow, she had been disconcerted to find that the apartment being prepared for her confinement was in Elizabeth’s wing of the Summer Palace, where she was later to remember two sombre rooms, ‘badly done out with crimson damask, and with almost no furniture or comfort of any kind’. The reason for their location was confirmed when her child was taken from her at the end of a difficult labour lasting from two in the morning until midday. Catherine’s room was cold and draughty, and since no one dared to change her linen without orders from the empress, she was left to writhe in blood-stained sheets soaked with sweat. At the baptism on 25 September, when the baby was christened Paul, it was the fifty-four-year-old Princess of Hesse-Homburg (nee Anna Trubetskaya), flanked by Ober-hofmeister Shepelev and General Alexander Shuvalov, who carried him into the palace chapel behind Grand Duke Peter and the empress. Catherine could learn of him only ‘furtively’, because ‘asking for news would have been interpreted as casting doubt on the care the empress was taking of him, and would have been very badly received’. By the following Easter, she had seen her son on only three occasions, the first being the forty-day churching ceremony to celebrate the end of her confinement, when she was too weak even to stand for prayers. Paul’s upbringing for the first eight years of his life was almost entirely in Elizabeth’s hands.⁴

Anxious about the stifling conditions in which the swaddled child was kept, bathed in sweat in a cradle lined with the fur of a silver fox, Catherine descended into post-natal depression. Her mood sank lower still with the news that Sergey Saltykov had been sent abroad on the pretext of announcing Paul’s birth to the Court of Stockholm. (Later he was dispatched to Hamburg, showing every sign of having tired of their relationship.) Whether Saltykov was Paul’s father is a mystery that will never be resolved. Catherine’s memoirs hint strongly that he was, much to the horror of her nineteenth-century descendants who struggled to censor such an explosive revelation, and it is striking that Grand Duke Peter sired no other child, in spite of his many dalliances. Perhaps he was simply infertile. On the other hand, Catherine’s memoir may have been a rhetorical way of disinheriting her deposed husband rather