Catherine the Great

river, where banquets were held on state occasions. With her sixty Chevaliers Gardes fanned out two-by-two on either side of her, the empress sat beneath a huge gilded canopy, draped in red silk, on a velvet throne raised up against the eastern wall.

Immediately behind this throne lay a green and gold dining room which doubled as a billiard room in the evenings. Although Catherine was always keen to enrich the imperial porcelain collection—she paid the Saxon merchant Poggenpohl more than 13,000 roubles for a 256-piece service for Tsarskoye Selo in 1762—banquets were also served on gold and silver tableware dating back to time of Ivan the Terrible and Mikhail Fedorovich. Though Paul was bored by a visit to the storerooms at the foot of the main staircase, where Panin insisted on scrutinising every item of his priceless heritage, these historic dinner services offered a further reminder of a usurper’s claims to dynastic legitimacy.⁴⁰ Above the dining-room ceiling was a glass lantern, initially placed by Georg Veldten over the western entrance to the palace, which was large enough to have doors leading to a balcony. Here Catherine occasionally listened to the liturgy when she failed to attend the chapel, which was entered via a large gallery leading northwards from the dining room between the two inner courtyards.

Directly to the east of the dining room was the Diamond Room, so called because the regalia were kept there when not on public display. Though this was formally the state bedroom, equipped with an appropriately imposing lit de parade under a canopy in an alcove on the northern wall, it was in effect the empress’s salon, furnished with two sofas, four armchairs, two upright chairs and several marble tables, all designed by Vallin de la Mothe in keeping with his neoclassical concept for the palace interior. ‘As you know, every piece of furniture is a different colour, even in the same room,’ Panin reminded his mistress in 1767.⁴¹ Here the empress was to spend countless evenings at the card table. Beyond lay a dressing room leading to her bedroom, whose panels were decorated in green lacquer. It was there that Catherine heard reports from her advisers each morning, sitting on an upright chair at a small table. (Her secretaries occupied a nearby room, overlooking the inner courtyard and accessible via a private staircase.) Catherine’s bedroom led to a small boudoir and from there to her study, at the far south-eastern corner of the palace. This gave access to the last of her private apartments, the library, which stretched northwards towards the chapel until she had it moved upstairs in the mid-1770s, converting the lower apartment to a Mirror Room where in later life she worked every morning from seven until nine. It was in her library that Catherine had scientific experiments set up for visiting ambassadors, using apparatus such as the ‘small electrical machine’ with which her son enjoyed electrocuting his servants.⁴²

Since all these interiors were either lost in subsequent alterations or destroyed by the great fire of December 1837, the achievements of Veldten and Vallin de la Mothe have come down to us only in their plans and correspondence.⁴³ However, it seems clear that the Winter Palace impressed visitors then, as now, more by its massive proportions than by any claim to elegance or beauty. In its final incarnation, the building could boast 1050 rooms, 117 staircases, 1886 doors and 1945 windows. Its principal cornice was almost two kilometres long.⁴⁴ The full extent of such a colossal structure could only be appreciated from the opposite bank of the Neva. To Lord Cathcart, who arrived as British ambassador in 1768, the conception was comparable in both extent and magnificence to ‘Inigo Jones’s idea for Whitehall, with which it also corresponded in the happy circumstance of being situated on a very noble river’.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, as European tastes swung from Baroque exuberance towards classical simplicity, Rastrelli’s monster was bound to seem ‘very large and very heavy’. And as another traveller pointed out in the mid-1770s, comparing the palace with the work of Britain’s most lugubrious Baroque architect, Sir John Vanbrugh, the creator of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, it was still ‘not quite finished, like almost everything else in Russia’.⁴⁶

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Panin, who was negotiating an alliance with the Danes in the autumn of 1764, liked to boast that the Winter Palace had cost twenty times as much as the royal palace in Copenhagen.⁴⁷ Magnificent as it seemed as a symbol of Russian power and prosperity, it was too vast and uncomfortable for the relaxed sociability in which Catherine excelled. Not that she found it easy to relax once she had ascended the throne of all the Russias. ‘Believe me,’ she complained to Madame Geoffrin in 1764, ‘there is nothing more unpleasant in the world than greatness’:

When I enter a room, you would say that I had the head of a Medusa: everyone is petrified and they all stiffen up. I often screech like an eagle against such habits. But I can tell you that this isn’t the way to stop them because the more I screech, the less people are at their ease. So I employ other expedients.⁴⁸

Courtiers could be forgiven for approaching the empress with caution since, for all her yearning for informality, she was swift to complain when they failed to observe due ceremony. Emerging unexpectedly early from her apartments one Sunday in July 1765, she was furious to find only the senior chamberlain in attendance. Count Sheremetev’s subsequent admonishment to his juniors caused ‘much whispering’ at lunch.⁴⁹ By the time the image of Medusa’s head recurred in a letter of 1781, Catherine seemed more sympathetic to her courtiers’ dilemmas: ‘With due respect to my fellow monarchs, I suppose that we must all of us, such as we are, become unbearable people in society…There are no more than ten or a dozen people who put up with me without constraint.’⁵⁰

One of the pleasures of this more intimate entourage, which remained remarkably constant throughout her life in Russia, was the opportunities it offered to escape the suffocating atmosphere of the palace. Nowhere was etiquette more relaxed than at the aristocratic country houses which had sprung up along the Peterhof road since Peter the Great first laid out regular plots ‘like the keys of a giant piano pressed up against the south shore of the Gulf of Finland’. As Derzhavin put it in his poem ‘Picnics’ in 1776, it was here, in a striking reversal of the bourgeois notion Stadtluft macht Frei! (City air makes you free!), that the Russian elite could abandon the social distinctions imposed on them in the capital:

We resolved among friends
To preserve the laws of equality;
To abandon the conceits,
Of wealth, power, and rank.⁵¹

Ivan Chernyshev had one such estate by the sea where Catherine occasionally called in on the way to Peterhof and Oranienbaum; Yakov Sievers owned another. Some of their freedoms carried over to Peterhof itself, where she could go fishing and her friends liked to help cook what they had caught. In the heat of the summer, they loved swimming there, too, following the empress into the sea or the pool at Monplaisir until they were up to their necks in water. ‘It must be said that they were fully clothed,’ recorded Paul’s strait-laced tutor, Semen Poroshin, after Yelagin had regaled the Young Court with one such escapade.⁵² Alexander Stroganov lived closer in at Chernaya Rechka (Black River) on St Petersburg’s Vyborg Side, a favourite hunting ground for Empress Elizabeth. From Colonel Passek’s house, Catherine could drive to Stone Island, which she purchased from Bestuzhev in 1765 for the use of her son, to watch the common people at play in the delta of the River Neva.⁵³

Along with Zakhar Chernyshev, Prince Andrey Beloselsky and the Orlov brothers, these were among the empress’s closest intimates. She played billiards or cards with them most nights. Gambling presented Catherine with a dilemma. On the one hand, she condemned its pernicious impact on society. ‘The noble who has squandered his money,’ she warned Moscow’s Governor General in 1763, ‘will be obliged to sell his village, which other nobles, lacking sufficient resources, will be in no position to buy; and in that case the only remaining purchasers will be manufacturers…so you are to make very sure that no games of chance are played, and confirm to the police that the published edicts about this are to be precisely enforced.’⁵⁴ On the other hand, import duties on foreign playing cards and a tax on Russian-made packs led the College of Commerce to promise her in 1765 a combined annual revenue of 27,000 roubles, which Betskoy persuaded her to donate to the Moscow Foundling Home.⁵⁵ The empress’s favourite game was ombre, the fashionable Spanish three-hander whose addictive powers were satirised in 1763 by the poet Vasily Maikov.⁵⁶ Piquet was another regular pastime. Nothing, however, gave her greater pleasure than her friends’ amateur theatricals. In the carnival of 1765,