Catherine the Great

Impassive as the empress seemed as she paused at the top of the Red Staircase, she might have been forgiven a moment of private trepidation. Catherine had first processed across Cathedral Square to commemorate her engagement to Grand Duke Peter shortly after her arrival in Russia in 1744, a ceremony she recalled with distaste. Scarcely less miserable was the memory of the extraordinary occasion in 1753 when Elizabeth had chosen to celebrate the eleventh anniversary of her own coronation by re-staging the ritual in every respect bar the placing of the crown on her head.³⁶ For everyone except the empress, who moved into the Kremlin apartments on the eve of the ceremony, the proceedings proved tiresome in the extreme. Catherine and her husband had to travel in state from the draughty wooden palace on the Yauza River where the Court resided during its visits to Moscow, their servants trotting alongside the carriage for several miles. Neither did matters improve once the ceremony began. As Catherine later recalled:

It was as cold and damp in that church as I had ever felt in my life. I was blue all over and freezing cold in a Court dress open at the neck. The Empress told me to put on a sable stole but I had none with me. She had her own brought to her and took one, wrapping it round her neck. I saw another in her box and thought that she was going to give it to me to put on, but I was wrong. She sent it back. It seemed to me to be rather a clear sign of ill will.³⁷

After the service, while Elizabeth dined alone in the Kremlin, Peter and Catherine returned to the suburbs in the pouring rain—and in no better a temper than Elizabeth had displayed during the ceremony itself.

More sinister than any temporary discomfort were the wider cultural values represented by the old capital. Catherine instinctively disliked almost everything Moscow stood for. To a monarch obsessed by the value of time, the city merited condemnation as ‘the seat of sloth’. Its very size was an obstacle to efficiency. ‘When there,’ she wrote later, ‘I make it a rule not to send for anyone, since one never finds out until the following day whether the person will come or not and to pay a visit oneself is to waste a whole day in the carriage.’ Nobles lived in Moscow ‘in idleness and luxury’, tended by too many ‘useless domestic servants’, and ‘apart from that, nowhere do people have before their eyes so many symbols of fanaticism, miraculous icons at every step, churches, priests, and convents, side by side with thieves and brigands’.³⁸ Since ‘Moscow’ signified many of the vices that Catherine would seek to extirpate from her Enlightened empire during her thirty-four years on the Russian throne, there was every reason for her to sympathise with the subjugation of the Muscovite past symbolised by her triumphal entry into the city.³⁹ However, since she nevertheless acknowledged the old capital as the repository of a national heritage that she was determined (and committed) to defend, her decision to be crowned there, confirmed within ten days of her accession, suggests that she was equally anxious to mobilise the Kremlin’s sacred historic associations in support of her own precarious regime.

So shaky were the foundations of Catherine’s authority in September 1762 that it was by no means certain that she would reach the first anniversary of her accession. She owed her power to a conspiracy shared with Grigory Orlov and a handful of fellow guards officers, who had deposed her unpopular husband, Peter III, in a bloodless coup accomplished with unexpected ease on the night of 28 June. ‘We have ascended the All Russian throne to the acclamation of the whole people and, as the whole world can attest, the former Emperor has himself willingly renounced the throne in a letter written in his own hand.’⁴⁰ This was a hollow boast. Peter was assassinated soon afterwards in circumstances that still remain mysterious and his death left Catherine exposed as both usurper and assassin. Any shred of legitimacy she might possess was vested in her sickly son Paul, still to reach his eighth birthday. As a further complication, Ivan VI, deposed as an infant by Elizabeth in 1741, remained a prisoner in the Schlusselburg fortress, a few miles east of St Petersburg. Remarking on Russia’s ‘great facility to sudden and dangerous revolutions’,⁴¹ many of Europe’s wisest heads predicted that Catherine’s coup would be merely a prelude to another in which she herself must surely be overthrown. Barely a week after seizing the throne, she had already resolved that attack remained the best form of defence. On 7 July, the same day that she issued a risible manifesto proclaiming that her murdered husband had perished from an attack of his haemorrhoids, she announced her intention to stage a coronation, on an unspecified date in September, ‘in the manner of our former Orthodox Monarchs, and of the pious Greeks [the Byzantine emperors], and of the most ancient Kings of the Israelites, who were customarily anointed with Holy oil’.⁴²

Here, it seemed, was a classic case in which the need for a ritual celebration of the crown’s legitimacy had increased as the stability of the state became less certain.⁴³ Yet Catherine was undoubtedly playing for high stakes in holding the coronation so soon after her coup. Some of her most influential supporters, headed by Paul’s tutor, Count Nikita Panin, had expected her to rule as regent for her son, and no Russian regent had yet been crowned.⁴⁴ The precedents could scarcely have been less encouraging. Tsarevna Sophia, who governed Muscovy on behalf of the boy tsars Ivan V and Peter I from 1682 to 1689, had fatally undermined her authority by campaigning for recognition as ruler in her own right. In The Antidote (1770), a polemical work intended to convince sceptical Europeans of Muscovite achievements, Catherine later claimed that Sophia had ‘not been given the credit she deserves’: ‘She conducted the affairs of the Empire for a number of years with all the sagacity that one could hope for.’ But the empress can hardly have relished the prospect of ending her life under house-arrest in a convent, the fate that befell Sophia following the coup that installed Peter the Great as de facto sole ruler.⁴⁵ In principle, there was no need to hurry: nowhere in Europe was the interval between accession and coronation prescribed, and Louis XIV, given pause by noble unrest during the Fronde, had set a French record by waiting eleven years before staging his in 1654.⁴⁶ Yet the fate of Peter III warned Catherine against delay. By putting off his coronation on the grounds that the regalia were not yet ready, her husband had merely advertised the contempt for Orthodox tradition that contributed to his downfall. Determined to learn from his mistakes, Catherine, as a hostile French diplomat reported in early October, missed ‘no opportunity to convey to her people a great idea of her profound piety and devotion to the Greek religion’.⁴⁷

The vision of Peter III’s strangled corpse was not the only violent image that might have flashed across the empress’s mind as she descended a flight of stairs that had borne silent witness to some of the bloodiest scenes in Russian history. A reference in her memoirs to the ‘famous’ Red Staircase suggests that tales of the Moscow rebellion that brought Sophia to power in May 1682 might have been part of the folklore she learned from her pious lady-in-waiting, Praskovya Vladislavova (‘that woman was a living archive who knew the scandalous history of every family in Russia from the time of Peter the Great and beyond’).⁴⁸ It was then that the boyar Artamon Matveyev, once the leading minister to Tsar Aleksey Mikhailovich (1645–76), had allegedly been hurled from the top of the stairs onto the pikes of the mutinous musketeers. Reformed into new regiments by Peter the Great, the Guards had been guarantors of the Russian throne ever since. Conscious that resentment of her relationship with Orlov extended even to supporters of her own coup, Catherine knew as she gazed down on the serried ranks of extravagantly plumed helmets that it would take only one treacherous officer to ignite a riot. The threat was real enough: not long after the coronation, some fifteen guardsmen were arrested and tortured on suspicion of a conspiracy to dethrone her in favour of Ivan VI.⁴⁹ On the morning of 22 September, however, all remained tranquil as the crowd waited patiently in silence—a sign not of popular disapproval, as it would have been in France, but rather of awed anticipation, as the official record of the coronation was anxious to stress.⁵⁰

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Seeking to invent a myth of legitimacy for the new empress, Catherine’s supporters set out to demonstrate the parallels between her and Elizabeth, and beyond Elizabeth to her father, Peter the Great. ‘Elizabeth has risen for our sakes,’ proclaimed Mikhailo Lomonosov in his ‘Ode on the Accession of Catherine II’: ‘Catherine is the unity of both!’⁵¹ To drive home the analogy, artists painted Catherine in poses already familiar from portraits of Elizabeth. To ensure that the new empress’s coronation followed the same format as Elizabeth’s twenty years earlier, Trubetskoy refreshed his memory of that event by researching the historical precedents.⁵² Even as Catherine’s procession made its stately progress towards the Cathedral of the Dormition, her leading supporters offered a visible representation of continuity among Russia’s governing elite.

Although that elite served the tsar in a variety of military and bureaucratic organisations, their institutional hierarchies were then overlaid (as they have been ever since in Russia) by a network of informal patronage groups too flexible to be classed as factions. By marrying into the Romanov dynasty, the Saltykovs and the Naryshkins, themselves related by marriage to the Trubetskoys, had cornered an increasing number of leading offices since the reign of Peter the Great.⁵³ So it is no surprise to find Peter Naryshkin among the gentlemen-in-