for three afternoons a week until the backlog had been cleared.30
In January 1764, Glebov was replaced as the Procurator-General of the Senate by Alexander Vyazemsky, who was to dominate the Russian bureaucracy until his death in 1792. The instruction Catherine sent to him on his appointment is rightly considered as ‘one of the most important documents illustrating her conception of statecraft’. Ordering him to remain above and beyond factional conflict and to trust in her alone, she explained what he could expect in return:
You will find that I have no other view than the greatest welfare and glory of the fatherland, and I wish for nothing but the happiness of my subjects, of whatever order they may be. All my thoughts are directed towards the preservation of external and internal peace, satisfaction and tranquillity. I am very fond of the truth, and you may tell me the truth fearlessly and argue with me without any danger if it leads to good results in affairs. I hear you are regarded as an honest man by all; I hope to show you by experience that people with such qualities do well at Court. And I may add that I require no flattery from you, but only honest behaviour and firmness in affairs.31
She was as good as her word. Conscious of the fate that had traditionally befallen most advisers of a disgraced monarch in Russia, Peter III’s leading minister, Dimitry Volkov, assumed that his time had come. Yet he, too, found that he had nothing to fear. ‘I am always delighted when I see a swift attitude to business and an earnest approach to service in my subjects,’ Catherine assured him. ‘When subjects wish to see an industrious and solicitous sovereign taking care of their interests, then the sovereign is no less happy to see her subjects helping her. Don’t bother about your circumstances: just get on with the job, because your reasoning is good. Upright service will always rectify circumstances, of that you should have no doubt.’32 Having proved his efficiency as governor of Orenburg, Volkov was recalled to St Petersburg in 1764 to take charge of the College of Manufactures, where he remained until retiring age. Long periods of office were to be the norm in the new reign, even for some of the families whose loyalty Catherine initially had reason to doubt. Since the pool of available talent was limited, she was even prepared to give jobs to the aloof Vorontsovs. Count Alexander Vorontsov, brother of Peter III’s mistress, was president of the College of Commerce for twenty years from 1773, his brother Semen a long-serving ambassador in London. ‘Tolerate an unpleasant person in your sight,’ the empress later exhorted her infant grandson, the future tsar Alexander I, ‘and do not glance askance at him: a man who can get on only with people he likes, and not with those he does not, is lacking in wisdom.’33
The nerve centre of Catherine’s government was the Winter Palace, still under reconstruction when the Court returned from Moscow, though not under the direction of its original architect. Having been close to Peter III, Rastrelli thought it prudent to take temporary leave from Russia shortly after Catherine’s coup. When he returned a year later, he found that his circumstances had changed for the worse. Among the petitions forwarded to Yelagin’s secretariat in the autumn of 1763 was one from the disgruntled architect:
Your holy Imperial Highness, I am taking the liberty to inform Your Imperial Majesty with the most humble respect that, having received permission to return to Italy for a year thanks to Your kindness, and having received at that time a gift of 5000 roubles to allow me to complete my journey in the greatest comfort, for which I express my eternal gratitude to Your Imperial Majesty, I would have been happy on my return to continue in Your Imperial Majesty’s humble service, on the same basis established by Your august predecessors. However, Your Majesty has ordered the Great Marshal, Count Sievers, to inform me that in future I must depend solely on the Director of the Construction Chancellery and not on the Court. This change has grieved me greatly, since after so many years of service I have found myself deprived of the pleasure of receiving Your precious orders, with which I was always honoured in the past, and this compels me with great sadness to beg humbly for my retirement, since it is impossible for me to agree to subject myself to any other instructions than the ones I have hitherto received. I hope that an old retainer, who has been in service for forty-eight years, and who has always fulfilled his duties across this long period of time, will have the pleasure of receiving from Your Imperial Majesty, by virtue of Her great mercy, instructions about some sort of compensation, so that I may live with my family in our native land and continually pray to the Almighty to preserve the precious lives of Your Majesty and Her most august heir.
Though he was duly granted an annual pension of 1000 roubles, Catherine remained deaf to his pleas to be confirmed in the rank of major general granted to him by Peter III since this would have entitled him to more money. While he continued to be treated respectfully at Court, dining with her in the spring of 1764, it was not long before Rastrelli finally left Russia for good.
It fell to Catherine’s contemporary—the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe—to fill Rastrelli’s empty shell, and he set to work as soon as she departed for her coronation in Moscow in September 1762. Vallin began by designing neoclassical interiors and furniture for a new bedroom, dressing room, boudoir and study in the west wing, overlooking the Admiralty, where the empress initially intended to live. At that stage his role was restricted largely to decorative detail, but he became more ambitious when she changed her mind at the beginning of 1763 and decided instead to convert the apartments formerly occupied by Peter III in the south-east corner of the palace. Here the architect created a suite of staterooms based on the neoclassical principles he had learned from Jean Blondel at the Parisian Ecole des Arts. Racing to meet the empress’s deadlines, Vallin told Stahlin that he had ‘thrown the internal walls out of the window’ and replaced them with wooden partitions.35 By the time Catherine returned to St Petersburg, the transformation was obvious. As the Prussian ambassador reported in June 1763:
She is making considerable alterations in the palace of stone. The apartments of the former empress have been turned entirely upside down and rebuilt so differently that they look nothing like they used to do. But since the workers have not been paid for two months, this prompts lines of reasoning which are not favourable to Her Imperial Majesty.36
Oblivious to such carping, Catherine forged ahead, inspecting progress over the summer, and finally moving in with great pomp and ceremony on Tuesday 14 October, some three weeks later than planned and more than a year since she had last occupied the Winter Palace.37 By then, the ceremonial first floor was largely complete, save for the suite of rooms overlooking the River Neva, and Vallin had also finished most of the work on the warren of staircases and corridors that led to the floor above, where Catherine’s twenty maids of honour were to live for the remainder of her reign in the western and south-western parts of the building. ‘Guess where I’ve been today!’ proclaimed an excited Paul after Grigory Orlov had taken him to visit them. Back downstairs, in the grip of a crush on Vera Choglokova, he immersed himself in the
Vallin’s work for Catherine differed from his other private commissions only in scale. At the heart of his creation for the empress, just as in the house he built for the Chernyshevs at much the same time, was a salon— the centre of civility and sociability—surrounded by a suite of private and semi-public apartments, all conceived as part of a single stylistic whole, and ranged around two inner courtyards on the western, southern and eastern sides of a large square, whose northern side was taken up by the great palace chapel. Although these rooms underwent a major renovation between 1782 and 1784, their layout and use remained essentially unchanged until the end of Catherine’s life.39 Having ascended the main staircase near the west door of the chapel, visitors passed through a suite of three antechambers flowing south towards what is now Palace Square, with their windows facing westwards towards the Admiralty. The central anteroom was a Portrait Room, hung with portraits of the imperial family as a reminder of Catherine’s dynastic pretensions. Here, sergeants of the guard permitted well-dressed nobles to enter the Chevaliers Gardes’ Room, where the Court gathered on a Sunday before processing to chapel. To ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’ was to enjoy privileged access to the empress’s own apartments, ranged in a line overlooking the square to the south. The first of these rooms was also the largest: an audience chamber some 227 metres square, decorated in green damask, where Catherine received her ambassadors. Until a permanent throne room was built in 1795, the audience chamber shared that function with another, overlooking the
