Catherine the Great

arched colonnade in front of a cathedral. Above the arch, two allegorical figures crowned a shield with the emblem of the new empress. The colonnade was adorned with six allegorical statues, including Faith, Hope and Plenty. In the foreground another emblem in the form of a flaming star stood on a pedestal surrounded by a railing decorated with whirling Catherine wheels.⁸⁸ Hoping to get a better view of the illuminations that transformed the Ivan the Great bell tower into a pillar of flame, the empress herself stepped out incognito onto the Red Staircase at midnight. But it was no use. Immediately spotted by the crowd, she was forced to acknowledge yet another prolonged bout of applause. Three days later, she found it ‘impossible to describe’ to her ambassador in Warsaw ‘the delight of a numberless crowd to see me here. I cannot go out, nor even put my face to the window, without the acclamations beginning all over again.’⁸⁹ And still the public’s appetite was not sated. Such was the popular fascination with the monarchy that some 122,138 people of various ranks filed past the regalia when they were put on public display between 6 and 25 October.⁹⁰

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The coronation had revealed in microcosm many of the tensions that a successful Russian tsar had to be able to resolve: between tradition and innovation; between the noble elite and the peasantry; between multinational Rossiya and native, ethnic Rus. Underlying them all lay the dilemma facing any ruler. How far should she seek to build consent? When should she resort to force? In the immediate aftermath of her coup, Catherine had passed a series of crucial tests. She had staged a coronation that fused Orthodox tradition with classical imagery in a symbolic reconciliation of mercy and conquest. More important still, she had demonstrated the personal qualities that persuaded all those who met her that success lay within her grasp. ‘Affability and dignity,’ Buckinghamshire reported at the end of October 1762, ‘are blended in her manner, which inspires you at once with ease and respect. When the hurry, the unavoidable consequence of a revolution is over, she has every talent to make this a great and powerful country.’⁹¹ Propagandists insisted that victory was already hers. ‘Listen, universe!’ urged Sumarokov during the great street pageant ‘Triumphant Minerva’, staged under the direction of Russia’s leading actor Fedor Volkov in Moscow in January 1763: ‘Astraea is on earth, Astraea has settled in the lands of the Russians, Astraea has ascended the throne.’⁹² In April, Aleksey Rzhevsky’s ‘Birthday Ode’ returned to the same theme: ‘Astraea has now descended to us, the golden age has already begun in Russia, and wisdom has come to the throne as a result of the holy will of the Almighty.’⁹³

Catherine was understandably more cautious. ‘I can congratulate myself on my growing popularity, but must be wary of it in spite of all the manifestations in my favour. This must not, however, prevent me from acting as though it were real…I may be too young to become a favourite sovereign, but I must behave as though I believed myself to be one.’⁹⁴ Since arriving in Russia as the fourteen-year-old prospective fiancee for Grand Duke Peter, she had devoted many of her most private moments to preparing for the challenge.

CHAPTER ONE From Pomerania to St Petersburg 1729–1744

In a scene far removed from the splendour of the Moscow Kremlin, Princess Sophie Auguste Friderike of Anhalt-Zerbst was born in a merchant’s house in the Grosse Domstrasse, nestled in the shadow of St Mary’s Church, just inside the northern city wall of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland).¹ The house offered temporary quarters to her father, Prince Christian August, who was stationed there as a general in the service of Frederick William I of Prussia (r. 1713–40), Europe’s most uncompromising soldier-king. Whereas Christian August was already thirty-nine, his wife, Princess Johanna Elisabeth of Holstein-Gottorp, was not quite seventeen when she gave birth to their first child in the early hours of the morning of 2 May 1729 (21 April according to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, eleven days behind the Western Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century). Never one to suffer in silence, the young mother soon made it clear to her daughter that it had been a painful, life-threatening delivery. Though her father did his best to disguise his disappointment, Sophie was left in no doubt that both parents would have preferred a boy.²

They were lucky that she had survived at all. Since death made little distinction between the cradles of rich and poor in the eighteenth century, twenty-nine out of every thousand infants in Europe’s ruling families were stillborn, a further forty-seven were dead within a week, and 106 more failed to complete the first year of their life.³ To the fortunate infants who passed that early milestone, smallpox offered the greatest threat. Though its impact in the eighteenth century can be estimated only approximately, the total number of European deaths per annum caused by the disease is commonly put at 400,000 and the secretary of the Royal Society of London calculated that smallpox had killed a fourteenth of the city’s population between 1680 and 1743.⁴ When Catherine had herself inoculated against the greatest killer of the age in her fortieth year, she told her Prussian ally, Frederick the Great, that she had suffered ‘a thousand sorrows’ in her attempts to overcome her childhood fear of the disease. Every time she fell ill, however slight the infection, she imagined that it must be the dreaded pox.⁵ Though no eighteenth-century royal letter was sent without careful official consideration—and this one was evidently intended to portray Catherine as an Enlightened monarch confronting the forces of unreason—the emotion it implied was sincere enough. As it transpired, her worries were unnecessary. Right from the start, Sophie showed all the signs of the hearty constitution that was to carry her through to the age of sixty-seven. A bout of pneumonia when she was seven seems to have been her only serious childhood illness. Apart from that, she chose to recall only a skin infection, generally assumed to be impetigo or some form of scrofula, whose periodic attacks forced her to cover her shaven, powdered scalp with a bonnet and to wear gloves until the scabs fell off her hands.⁶

Until Christian August inherited the family seat at Zerbst in 1743, the greater part of Sophie’s childhood was spent in her bleak Baltic birthplace. Situated near the mouth of the River Oder, a hundred miles north-east of Berlin, Stettin in 1729 could boast about 11,000 inhabitants and more than 900 stone houses. Describing the town fifty years earlier, an English writer claimed that ‘the greatest beauty thereof is the palace, or prince’s Court, which is built with such art and magnificence, that none of the Italian Courts can equal it’.⁷ By then, however, Stettin’s princely glories already lay in the past. Duke Philip II of Pomerania-Stettin (r. 1606–18) had indeed been a leading artistic patron who commissioned a celebrated Kunstschrank—a cabinet made in Augsburg which opened to reveal hidden paintings, symbolic carvings, and precious objects that were believed to constitute an epitome of the universe.⁸ But when his Greifen dynasty expired in 1637, both Stettin and the surrounding duchy of Pomerania rapidly became battle-scarred pawns on the chessboard of international politics.

Sweden, the dominant Baltic power in the seventeenth century, was the first to take control, counting Stettin and Western Pomerania among its spoils at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. But while the Swedes regarded their new German possessions primarily as a means of exerting pressure on Denmark from the south, Brandenburg-Prussia, the rising power in northern Germany, never gave up hope of capturing them. Serious damage was inflicted on Stettin during a six-month siege in 1677. Two years later, France’s diplomatic intervention on behalf of its Swedish satellite forced the Prussians to abandon their gains at the Treaty of Saint-Germain, so that it was not until 1713 that the Great Northern War again brought the town under their control, this time by agreement with Peter the Great’s Russia, the second emergent power in the Baltic. Only in February 1720, five years after the death of Louis XIV had temporarily loosened France’s stranglehold on European diplomacy, was Frederick William I finally able to purchase the town and the surrounding area for 2 million thalers under the terms of the Peace of Stockholm.⁹

It was as an officer in Prussian service that Sophie’s father, the impoverished scion of a cadet branch of the princely House of Anhalt, had been obliged to make his career. By 1729, having served in the Low Countries during the War of the Spanish Succession, he had reached the rank of major general and was stationed at Stettin in command of the 8th infantry regiment. Following his promotion to command the garrison, Christian August and his family moved from the house on the Domstrasse into the nearby ducal castle, which had been denuded of its more exuberant decoration in keeping with the king’s militarist ideals.¹⁰ Having had himself crowned ‘king in Prussia’ in 1701 at a ceremony in Konigsberg that cost roughly twice the annual revenues of the Hohenzollern administration, Frederick William I’s father (Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, 1688–1713) had gone on to establish