Catherine the Great

Elaborate allegorical fireworks were one feature of Baroque Court culture that remained central to Russian ceremonials throughout Catherine’s reign. This display, performed on the banks of the Moscow River opposite the Kremlin on 29 September 1762, was intended to confer dynastic legitimacy on a newly-crowned usurper.

^{Coronation fireworks, 1762: A. K. Melnikov from an engraving by E. G. Yinogradov}

Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742 served as the model for Catherine’s twenty years later. In a scene facing north towards the Cathedral of the Dormition, the cockaigne for the populace on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square is flanked by the Red Staircase and the Ivan the Great bell-tower. Such feasts were still staged in the 1790s, though by then they had long been dismissed as barbaric by Western visitors to Russia.

^{Elizabeth’s coronation feast in the Kremlin Square, 1742: engraving of 1744}

‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto chosen by Falconet for his statue of the empress’s most glorious predecessor. On 7 August 1782 she witnessed the unveiling of the first public monument in Russia from the balcony of the former Bestuzhev mansion on the left of the engraving.

^{The unveiling of Falconet’s monument to Peter the Great: engraving by A. K. Lemnikov after A. P. Davydov, 1782}

‘Apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’

^{The Cameron Gallery, Tsarskoye Selo: aquatint engraving by J. G. de Mayr, 1793}

Though Catherine sought to surpass rather than merely imitate Peter I, her declared intention to complete what he had begun was part of her spurious claim to legitimacy. Tsar Peter gazes down approvingly from the heavens in Ferdinand de Meys’s allegorical representation of the empress’s great journey to the South in 1787.

^{Catherine’s journey to the south, 1787: allegorical engraving by Ferdinand de Meys, courtesy of Dr James Cutshall}

The first pornographic British caricature of the empress appeared less than two months after Caroline Walker’s majestic engraving, done at the outset of the Russo-Turkish War in 1787 from the copy of Alexander Roslin’s portrait owned by Catherine’s ambassador to London, Count Semen Vorontsov.

^{Catherine II, engraving by Caroline Walker after Roslin, London, 1787}

Though Platon Zubov liked to pose as a worthy successor to Potemkin, he was in reality an arrogant upstart who damaged the empress’s reputation in her declining years. This version of Lampi’s portrait was done by the British engraver, James Walker, resident in Russia between 1784 and 1802.

^{Prince Platon Zubov, engraving by James Walker after Lampi, St Petersburg, 1798}

The caricature in this French version of ‘The Imperial Stride’, first published in London on 12 April 1791 NS, was the sort of salacious image that corrupted Catherine’s reputation among her 19th-century male successors.

^{‘L’Enjambee imperiale’, French cartoon of 1791}

Under Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, it was left to the beholder to imagine the relationship between the bronzed youth and the statuesque empress represented by Lampi’s portrait of 1794. Pride of place on the 500- rouble note went to Peter the Great.

^{100 rouble note of 1910}

CHAPTER TEN The Search for Emotional Stability 1776–1784

After her accession to the throne, Catherine spent all too little time at Oranienbaum. But had she ever gazed up from the bed in the Damask Room, she would have seen on the ceiling a painting that perfectly encapsulated the tutelary relationship she strove to establish with each of her favourites. Urania teaching a youth, by the Venetian artist Domenico Maggiotto, portrayed a bare- breasted goddess looking down at a virile young man who returns her gaze in simple trust.¹ Leonine, earnest and not very bright, Grigory Orlov had fitted the mould to perfection. ‘The apprehension of the Empress is extremely quick,’ Lord Cathcart observed in 1770, ‘that of Mr. Orloff rather slow, but very capable of judging well upon a single proposition, though not of combining many different ideas.’² Horace Walpole was typically franker: ‘Orlow talks an infinite deal of nonsense,’ he remarked during Grigory’s visit to London in 1775, ‘but parts are not necessary to a royal favourite or to an assassin.’³

Potemkin, by contrast, demanded to be treated not as a pupil, but as an equal, and it made for heated arguments between them in the spring of 1776. ‘Sometimes,’ Catherine complained, ‘to listen to you speak one might think that I was a monster with every possible fault, and especially that of being beastly.’ It upset her that he resented her other friends, and flounced off in a temper when she refused to listen: ‘We quarrel about power, not about love. That’s the truth of it.’⁴ Potemkin, however, had reason to be unnerved. As a sign of Catherine’s wavering affections, Rumyantsev’s protege Peter Zavadovsky, who had worked with her on the Provincial Reform, had been promoted Adjutant General on 2 January. This was the favourite’s office, still indelibly associated with Grigory Orlov. Later that month, Orlov himself unexpectedly returned to Russia, where he promptly fell sick, creating a complicated love triangle in which only Catherine herself can have felt fully at ease. A British diplomat reported that ‘two visits, which the Empress made to the Prince during his illness, caused a very warm altercation between her and the favourite’. Amidst rumours that he had poisoned Orlov, Potemkin’s downfall was widely predicted, although some acknowledged that this arose ‘rather from its being universally wished, than from any actual symptoms’.⁵ Meanwhile, Catherine firmly resisted his attempts to persuade her to remove Zavadovsky. Quite apart from the ‘injustice and persecution’ the dismissal would inflict on ‘an innocent man’, there was her own reputation to consider: ‘If I fulfil this request, my glory will suffer in every possible way.’⁶ Instead, her affair with Zavadovsky was publicly confirmed when he was promoted major general and granted 20,000 roubles and 1000 serfs on 28 June, the fourteenth anniversary of the empress’s accession. In an attempt to appease Potemkin, she appealed to his vanity by presenting him with the Anichkov Palace and 100,000 roubles to decorate it as he pleased. Most of all, however, she appealed to his conscience, reassuring him that even as her passion had cooled, her friendship remained unquestioned: ‘I dare say that there is no more faithful friend than me. But what is friendship? Mutual trust, I have always thought. For my part, it is total.’⁷ There is no reason to think this insincere, but she had meant it just as much when she insisted in an earlier note that ‘the first sign of loyalty is obedience’.⁸ True equality remained beyond reach in any relationship with an absolute monarch.

Such rapid changes of scene in the empress’s bedchamber prompted persistent rumours in the autumn of 1776 that she had taken yet another lover. Rumyantsev’s name was mentioned. ‘The leading actor of the German comedy is also spoken of,’ noted the venomous French charge, the chevalier de Corberon: ‘It wouldn’t be surprising, but I doubt it.’⁹ In the event, Zavadovsky was to remain in place until May 1777, a month before Orlov finally married his teenage cousin, Elizabeth Zinovyev. While Catherine bombarded ‘Petrushinka’ with passionate billets-doux, the stolid Ukrainian struggled to keep up his working relationship with her, sulking that she