Silken carpets, draped over the balconies of the grander houses, added a splash of semi-Asiatic colour to this most verdant of cities. Even the meanest streets through which the parade passed were strewn with festive fir- branches, carved and formed into decorative trellises.18 Yet Moscow was by no means wholly synonymous with squalor. ‘Some parts of this city have the look of a sequestered desert,’ Coxe reported, ‘other quarters of a populous town, some of a contemptible village, others of a great capital’.19 Often dismissed as unplanned and unkempt by comparison with the geometrically regimented St Petersburg, the old capital could boast some impressive modern architecture of its own. The Kremlin Arsenal, begun in 1702 but completed only in 1736, was an early example of Russian classicism, the university (Russia’s first, founded in 1755), one of the most recent at the time of Catherine’s coronation. To these had been added four new triumphal arches, built by 3000 labourers under the supervision of architects working for Prince Nikita Trubetskoy’s Coronation Commission.20 Each arch featured two full-scale portraits of the empress by the Synodal artist Aleksey Antropov, and incorporated a mixture of classical and panegyric motifs chosen by Trubetskoy’s stepson Mikhail Kheraskov, the curator of Moscow University and one of the leading Russian writers of the age.21
Nor was it only the foreign elements in Russian culture that were mobilised to welcome the new sovereign. Priests bowed from the porches of every church in the city as a carillon rang out on the eve of the second great feast in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, the Exaltation of the Life-Giving Cross. Spectators who could find a ticket or bribe the guards mounted galleries erected in all the city’s main squares to gain a better view of their empress as she swept past in an open eight-horse carriage through streets lined with cheering subjects on her way to the Nikolsky Gate. There, at the north-eastern corner of the Kremlin, Catherine was formally greeted by Metropolitan Timofey (Shcherbatsky), while a choir of students from Moscow’s Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, dressed in white and holding forth laurel branches, hymned God’s chosen ruler before accompanying her to a service of celebration at the Cathedral of the Dormition. ‘Sing solemnly, Russia,’ the seminarists chanted: ‘raise your voice to the heavens.’22
Catherine’s entry into Moscow could hardly have presented a more impressive spectacle. Behind the scenes, however, the government worried that an unprecedented influx of migrants might destabilise an already overcrowded city. The Court and all its acolytes had decamped en masse from St Petersburg, leaving the Earl of Buckinghamshire, who arrived there as the new British ambassador on 11 September, stranded without hope of reaching Moscow in time for the coronation (he had to be satisfied with the celebrations presided over by Ivan Neplyuev, the Senator left in charge of the capital in the empress’s absence).23 Already softened by the autumn rains, the roads to the old capital were ‘very bad, and the horses so much fatigued with the concourse of people who have lately travelled that way, as to make any degree of expedition impracticable’.24 Some 395 horses were required at each posting station merely to transport the 63 carriages needed by Catherine’s small entourage of 23. Since the tsarevich’s suite demanded 257 horses for 27 carriages, the Postal Chancellery took more than a month to assemble the necessary animals. By one estimate, some 19,000 horses were hired to haul the remaining notables, the wheels of their carriages splashing mud over the lines of straggling rustics, beggars and petty tradesmen who flocked to the old capital in the hope of sharing in the bounty traditionally distributed by a ‘merciful’ new monarch. In 1903, the contrast between richly attired courtiers and ragged peasants would wreck Nicholas II’s quest for national reconciliation at the canonisation of St Serafim of Sarov. Anxious to avoid any such comparison during Catherine’s coronation, her officials belatedly banned the import of fabric woven in gold and silver thread on 17 September.25
Fears that speculators might cause unrest by artificially inflating bread prices proved unfounded. Though Moscow remained a paradise for petty criminals throughout the festivities, the mood among the crowds was jubilant from the moment that Catherine arrived in the city. On the eve of her coronation, thousands of men and women streamed towards the Kremlin, where those lucky enough to acquire tickets would be admitted the following morning to places reserved for the populace. Undeterred by forecasts of wind and rain, their less fortunate fellows clambered up onto neighbouring rooftops in the hope of catching a glimpse of their sovereign.26
In the event, the day dawned dry, if gloomy, and those intrepid enough to secure a vantage point did not have long to wait. The participants in the coronation had been summoned to their various assembly points across the Kremlin at the same early hour as the soldiers,27 and at ten o’clock Prince Trubetskoy began to count out the elaborate procession that flowed slowly through the Holy Vestibule on the first floor of the Palace of Facets, out onto the ceremonial Red Staircase, and down into Cathedral Square.
Though Catherine would ultimately come to question the baroque extravagance of Elizabethan ceremonial, deeming classical self-restraint better suited to a monarch who claimed to rule in the public interest, her initial aim was simply to outdo her predecessors by staging the grandest coronation in living memory. Whereas there had been twenty sections in Empress Anna’s procession in 1730 and forty-two in Elizabeth’s in 1742, Catherine’s boasted no fewer than fiftyone.28 They represented a microcosm of Russia’s multinational elite, constituting at once an impressive demonstration of political unity and an equally visible reminder of the various potentially conflicting interests that the empress would need to reconcile if she was to consolidate her position on the throne.
Leading off down the Red Staircase, thirty Chevaliers Gardes, three abreast, were the first to set foot onto a specially erected wooden walkway ‘21 English feet wide’ which stretched across Cathedral Square, its railings draped with colourful silks and carpets in the manner of its prototype in 1742.29 On reaching the Cathedral of the Dormition, the cavaliers fanned out on either side of its great south door to allow the thirty-one pages behind them to pass inside. Since there was no room for them during the coronation service, they processed straight out through the north door into the Synodal Palace to await the end of the ritual.30 Behind them, two masters of ceremonies took up their positions near the throne of Monomakh, the tsar’s place of worship just inside the cathedral, ready to guide the main body of the procession to their places.
First came representatives of Catherine’s non-Russian subjects, headed by twenty-two townsmen from the Baltic lands and Russian Finland, territories conquered from Sweden by Peter the Great in the Great Northern War of 1700–21. Two Englishmen formed part of a seven-strong cohort of foreign-born merchants who had pledged their loyalty to the Russian monarchy: John Tames, a member of the linen manufacturing dynasty whose Dutch founder had been friendly with Tsar Peter, and Martin Butler, joint proprietor of a wallpaper business whose establishment of a privileged manufactory in Moscow in 1751 had provoked British rivals to protest to the Lords Commissioners for Trade.31 Even in their finest attire, such worthies must have cut a sober figure alongside the Zaporozhian and Don Cossack officers who followed them down the Red Staircase bedecked in strident colour. Next came four delegations from Little Russia (Ukraine), and nine German knights from Livland and Estland. Only then did Russians themselves join the procession, led by members of the twelve administrative Colleges established by Peter the Great as Russia’s principal institutions of central government. Seventeen groups of officials culminated in a delegation from the College of Foreign Affairs including the empress’s influential secretary, Grigory Teplov. Behind them followed eight of the twenty-five members of the Senate, Russia’s highest secular court and principal governing body, in the customary order of seniority, juniors first.32
Once some of Catherine’s closest allies had assumed their places in the procession, bearing the imperial regalia, the appearance at the top of the staircase of Prince Trubetskoy was the signal for the emergence of the empress herself.33 Beneath a silken canopy carried by nine senior officials—another mark of the sacral status of the monarch, adopted from ecclesiastical processions—could be seen the unmistakeable silhouette of the woman who was soon to become the most celebrated monarch in Europe.34 Already statuesque at the age of thirty-three, Catherine had never been blessed with conventional good looks. Admitting that her ‘features were far from being so delicately and exactly formed as to compose what might pretend to regular beauty’, Buckinghamshire was too polite to single out her long, aquiline nose. At least it was compensated by ‘a fine complexion, an animated and intelligent eye, a mouth agreeably turned, and a profusion of glossy chestnut hair’, all of which combined to ‘produce that sort of countenance which, a very few years ago, a man must have been either prejudiced or insensible to have beheld with indifference’.35 The overall effect—a streak of masculinity running through her feminine form—would fascinate her contemporaries for the rest of her life. Catherine did nothing to dispel their puzzlement. Years of isolation at the Court of Empress Elizabeth had taught her never to reveal her innermost thoughts.
