Part 14

Between Petersburg and Moscow, a slight cloud threatening delay rose above the horizon. It appeared in the direction of the train of Count Panin and his pupil, the Grand Duke Paul. The Empress received a message from Panin that his pupil had fallen ill of a fever and might not be able to enter Moscow on the expected day. Would the Empress travel more slowly? The Empress halted and waited with impatience. She was rewarded by a second message saying that the Grand Duke had another and a worse attack. The Empress no longer wavered; she sent her ultimatum to Panin. It directed that Panin and his train should travel forward when the boy’s health permitted; in any case, the Empress would enter Moscow on the following Friday. On the receipt of this message, Paul’s health suddenly became better and he was able, under the escort of Panin, to enter Moscow in the company of his mother.

Catherine’s coronation took place in the Kremlin on Sunday, September 23, 1762. In the early morning the regiments marched through the towering gates and stationed themselves in front of the four great cathedrals whose pinnacles rise like glittering golden tulips above the city. At ten o’clock the Empress appeared on the Red Staircase leading to the Uspensky Cathedral. Six chamberlains carried her train and Count Sheremetiev bore the end of it. Six months previously he had carried the train of the erratic Peter at the funeral of the Empress. This time his offices were accepted by his sovereign with supreme decorum. The procession advanced slowly, while the great crowds who had gathered without the military cordon and occupied the roofs of the houses gazed in awestruck silence at the ermine-and-silver clad figure of the Empress, their Little Mother. Only the myriad bells of Moscow spoke and the cannons thundered their salute.

From cathedral to cathedral, the stately procession advanced. As Catherine placed the crown upon her own head, the cannons fired a salute on the Red Square. Surrounded by Prelates and Archimandrites, she nevertheless chose to give the Holy Communion to herself. As she had on the night of June 28 unhesitatingly placed herself at the head of the army as Colonel, she now placed herself with just as much assurance at the head of the Church of Russia. Now as then, no one questioned her right to do so.

While the Empress distributed honors in the Granovitaya Palata, the sacred chamber into which women had been first admitted by Peter the Great, the whole city of Moscow was turned into one vast festival. The merry-making was prolonged for weeks. The fountains ran wine, bread and roast meat were given for the asking, and silver rubles were thrown to the people. No single tradition of grandeur or graciousness was overlooked by the new Russian monarch. An allegorical pageant called the Procession of the Triumphant Minerva brought the coronation festivities to a close, but by this time winter was so far advanced that the performers shivered in the flying snow.

The triumphant Minerva was a happy allegory for Catherine. Not so happy perhaps was the inspiration of the Archimandrite of Troitsky who welcomed her at the gates of the Cloister with an oration comparing her to Judith. Afterwards a group of students, wearing gold-embroidered garments and green wreaths on their flowing locks, sang a cantata composed in her honor. The unmusical Empress could not distinguish one note from another but she bore herself graciously throughout. A few years later, grown more accustomed to power and partly satiated, she was less tolerant. She would sometimes send a page to the orchestra in the theater and arbitrarily stop the music.

9

Captain Gregory Orlov became Count Orlov on the day of Catherine’s coronation. She also named him General-Adjutant and gave him her portrait set with diamonds which he wore on his breast. Gregory Orlov sat many times for portraits which may still be seen in Petersburg showing him to be as handsome as report has made him out. He was indolent and unaspiring, content to be the escort of her Majesty and to eschew all influence in public affairs. In the spring of 1763, after Catherine had been Empress for about a year, a rumor of her marriage to Gregory Orlov was whispered about. Whence arose this rumor? Had the slothful Gregory suddenly become ambitious? It was more likely that the idea came from Alexei, the head of the Orlov clan.

Count Gregory occupied an equivocal position. He was a parvenu and the favorite of the Empress. Among the nobles, the Orlovs were not popular. Among the forty officers who had supported Catherine’s conspiracy, were many who regarded them with a jealous eye. They had been showered with honors and riches, though the Empress had done much also for a number of her supporters. The intimacy between the Empress and Gregory Orlov aroused distrust. If the favorite were promoted to the position of a consort, the Orlovs would certainly become powerful. Their fellow-conspirators were not pleased to be so far outstripped.

There is a legend that about this time the Empress sent Chancellor Vorontsov to sound out Count Alexei Razumovsky on his alleged marriage to Empress Elisabeth. According to the story, the ancient Count, fast falling to decay in his chimney corner, behaved very strangely when questioned. He produced an old yellow satin-covered document which he kissed dramatically and then threw into the open fire. Tradition says this was his certificate of marriage which he sacrificed to prevent its being used as a precedent by Gregory Orlov in his suit with the Empress. He destroyed by this act his last chance to go down to posterity as an honest husband. But he also destroyed whatever hopes of a precedent the Orlovs may have had. The story was first told by a descendant of the Razumovsky family and may well be doubted.

Whatever may have happened in Razumovsky’s house, the gossip did not stop. The Empress, attended by Gregory Orlov, left Moscow for Rostov to spend the month of May in a cloister. No sooner had she left the city than old Bestushev produced a petition, suggesting a second marriage for the Empress on the grounds that the Grand Duke Paul had such delicate health. When this paper reached Panin, he asked the Empress outright whether it was issued with her permission or not. The Empress said not, but Panin did not believe her. The town talk increased, and little groups began to put their heads together behind closed doors. Presently a certain groom of the Bed Chamber, Chitrovo, who had been one of the guards of the late Czar at Ropsha, was arrested and held for a secret investigation. The young man’s grandfather was enraged. He met old Bestushev on the street and scolded him. “Mercy on us, your Highness. What power these Orlovs have, that gentlemen can so completely disappear!”

Chitrovo was accused of having made threats against the life of Alexei Orlov. The Empress, watching everything from her hiding-place in the cloister, saw that matters were growing serious. Messengers galloped back and forth between Rostov and Moscow, while Catherine directed the hearing of Chitrovo to the last detail. The least word from his lips was set down on paper for her. In the end she sent him off to his own country estate. It was a light sentence, for she did not want to increase the talk.

She gave peremptory orders that the investigation was to be kept secret. But it was no longer possible. All Moscow was talking of the affair, and the Empress knew that Moscow was talking. She decided to issue a manifesto which she called the “Manifesto of Silence” and which she ordered to be read aloud in the streets of Moscow. The President of the Senate summoned the crowds together by the beating of drums and then read aloud to them these commands of the Empress:

“It is Our Will and Wish, that each and all of Our faithful subjects shall attend alone to their office and occupation, and shall refrain from spreading unseemly and bold rumors. But against Our expectations and to Our great distress and dissatisfaction, we hear that there are people with wicked thoughts and manners who think not at all of the common good and peace; but, attacked by singular ideas about things which do not concern them and of which they can have no real knowledge, nevertheless they busy themselves with putting these ideas into other weak heads.... Although such harmful judgments really deserve punishment, for they damage Our own and the general peace, we shall not in this case proceed with full strictness; but, with Our inborn humanity, maternally admonish all those who have been affected by these restless thoughts to refrain from unnecessary conversation.... If however Our motherly admonition has no effect upon their wicked hearts and does not lead them back upon the way of the good, then let every one of these bad people know that we shall proceed with the full strength of the law....”

With the Manifesto of Silence, the talk stopped. But the project of marriage with Gregory Orlov also came to an end. When Catherine returned to Moscow the subject had been forgotten. It was the only attempt of her reign to acquire a legal consort and to win back the good name she had lost. Henceforth she was to remain the widow of Peter III and the mistress of many lovers. In her life-time she made two valiant attempts to become a respectable married woman but both of them failed for wholly different reasons. The first time was when she married the ineffectual Peter. The second time was when she tried to marry Gregory Orlov and was stopped by public opinion in Russia.

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IX

CATHERINE THE GREAT

In 1762, Petersburg was still a wooden city. The court itself had only just removed from the drafty wooden palace on the Nevsky to the great stone palace on the Neva. The houses were simple or multiple structures of squared logs of the type still seen in Russian villages. Cellars and basements were unknown. To the substantial German mind of the Empress, the superficial grandeur of her capital was an object of secret derision. “Greifenheim’s house,” in which she had been born, had been better built. She wrote a verse about the house that Jack built without any stairway because the stairway had been forgotten.

The composition illustrates what the Empress often said of herself, and very truly, that she was no poet. But it very well expresses what she thought of Russian building in her time. She called her doggerel a _Chanson_.

“Jean bâtit une maison, Qui n’a ni rime ni raison: L’hiver on y jèle tout roide, L’été ne la rend point froide; Il y oublia l’escalier, Puis le bâtit en espalier.”

When a fire broke out in the city, it was a glorious spectacle. During the first winter of her reign, the Empress watched from her window two hundred and forty wooden houses going up in flames. As the sparks ascended from the roaring logs against the blackness of the winter sky, she watched the disaster with mixed feelings, for she yearned to rebuild that quarter of the city anyhow. Within three years it was actually rebuilt of brick. Several great fires devastated the city during the early part of her reign and the Empress restored the ravaged sections with brick and stucco washed pink and green by Italian architects. First raised by Peter the Great and developed by Catherine the Great, Petersburg was and remains for all time a wholly un-Russian city, a fitting monument to these two rulers who joined Europe and Russia together.

Though Catherine the Second prided herself on being a Russian she cherished a private scorn for much that was precious to the Russians. Her honest opinion of Moscow, set down in her journal, shows this. “At that time [1750], even more than now, it was in general very hard for the nobility to leave Moscow, the city which they all so loved, where laziness and indolence are their chief occupation. They would gladly spend their whole lives there, driving about in a richly gilded carriage behind six spans of horses, a symbol of the false idea of luxury which reigns there and conceals from the eyes of the masses the slovenliness of the master, the complete disorganization of his household and his manner of life. It is no rarity to see a splendidly gowned lady in a wonderful carriage with six lean and shabbily harnessed horses drive out from a great courtyard heaped with dirt and trash. Her unkempt lackeys in pretty livery disgrace her by their boorish behavior. Generally speaking, both men and women grow soft in this great city: they see and practice only wretchedness, which leaves the most undoubted genius to perish and decay. Because they follow their humors and their whims, they evade all laws and execute them badly. The consequence is that they never learn to command at all or that they become tyrants.... Besides this there was never a people who had more objects of fanaticism before their eyes, such as wonder-working saints at every step; churches, parsons, cloisters, praying brothers, rascals, thieves, useless servants in their houses--and such houses! What dirt in those houses, which occupy whole fields and have mudholes for courtyards. In general every person of fashion in the city occupies not a house but a small farm.” The Empress complained that if she sent for a person in Moscow, she had to wait until the next day for her answer. The Muscovites had time. The Muscovites were Russians.

Although Catherine was free in her criticism of the Moscow nobles, her own court at Petersburg was just as extravagant and ostentatious though possibly more orderly and cleanly withal. Both gentlemen and ladies wore jewels and diamonds. Gregory Orlov, at the height of his fortunes, had a suit of clothes which cost a million rubles and which was sewed all over with diamonds. Orlov’s extravagance was mild compared with that of his successor, Potiomkin, who was clearly obliged to outshine the achievements of his predecessor. Historians have estimated what the Empress spent on the clothes and upkeep of her several favorites and how much she turned over to them in the form of estates and other valuable goods and have found the total shocking. In this she seems to have but continued the tradition of Elisabeth who gave the Anitchkov Palace to Razumovsky and a handful of national monopolies to the Shuvalovs. All the nobles about the court had inherited lavish standards from Peter the Great and the favorites of the Empress could not possibly be outshone by Sheremetiev and Stroganov who were counts and rich men by inheritance. Catherine’s favorites were parvenus; they owed every copeck to her. She always saw to that. The Empress herself was a parvenu; but the nobles of Moscow were not. In the palaces there with their miry courtyards dwelt the ancient blood of Russia. While the Empress criticized their dirt and ostentation, she knew that from the point of view of Moscow she herself was a parvenu and her favorites were but creatures of yesterday.

2

Up to the time of Catherine the Second, the Czars of Russia had been addressed by the European courts as “Your Majesty.” As soon as the Empress was crowned at Moscow, she notified the sovereigns of Europe that she expected in the future to be addressed as “Your Imperial Majesty.” Her request was granted except in France, which had the consciousness of being the most civilized country in the world and was bound to regard Russia as a savage interloper. France would gladly have pushed the big, unwieldy, dirty chaos known as Russia back into the arms of Asia. The French maintained that “Czar” did not mean the same as “Emperor” at all. But Catherine said the two titles were exactly the same, and insisted that “His Most Christian Majesty” of France should always address her as “Her Imperial Majesty” of Russia. At last the French minister, Choiseul, agreed. Then he sent official communications to Russia in which the word “Imperial” did not appear. Catherine refused to read them or to recognize an envoy who carried papers addressed merely to “Her Majesty.” Pushed into a corner, Choiseul finally declared that “Imperial Majesty” was impure French, a corruption of the sacred language which the French Academy existed to protect. The argument between Versailles and Petersburg spun itself out for years.

Like a good and faithful wife, Madame de Choiseul joined in the quarrel and went about calling the Empress of Russia a “monster.” It was this lady who provoked from Voltaire his famous words in defense of Catherine the Great. “I may boast to you that I stand rather in the good graces of the Empress; I am her knight toward and against all. I know well that she is reproached for several trifles towards her husband. Those are family matters in which I do not mix. Moreover it is also well if one has a wrong to make good. Then it becomes one’s first interest to make great efforts to win for oneself the respect and admiration of the public. Certainly her dreadful husband would not have accomplished one of the things which my Catherine accomplishes every day.”

Catherine the Second was her own foreign minister. The men whom she placed at the head of the College of Foreign Affairs were followers not leaders. When she ascended the throne, she knew more about the international relations of Europe than she did about the internal affairs of Russia. She was to learn about Russia after she became its Empress. In 1762, the alignment of the European nations had been thrown into high relief by the warlike activities of Frederick the Great. International problems were perfectly familiar to her. Her opinion was formed and she was ready to take action. Catherine had been inspired by Machiavelli’s “Prince,” which she had read during the Poniatovsky period when she had intrigues for power with Sir Charles Hanbury Williams for an ally.

In his monumental work on Catherine the Great, Bilbassov devotes a chapter to a detailed account of the reading of the Grand Duchess during the years of her virtual imprisonment by the Empress Elisabeth, and emphasizes the influence which her favorite authors had on her subsequent career as Empress. Bilbassov found on her table Voltaire, Montesquieu, Tacitus, Boyle; in short, a collection of free thinkers who might be expected to form the mind of a future liberal monarch. Catherine read all of these, but she also read Machiavelli, whose name is not mentioned by Bilbassov in his carefully prepared chapter on her reading. In one of her letters to Chevalier Williams, she quotes a maxim of Machiavelli to the effect that a man is rarely as wicked as he ought to be. Williams was a little shocked apparently, for he replied, “What I say is, thank God, the wicked rarely have the courage which they ought to have to execute their wickedness.” To which Catherine replied coolly, “So much the better, if le bon Dieu has curtailed the courage of the wicked for the execution of their wickedness.”

The foreign policy of this Empress was uniformly aggressive. In her domestic policies, her intentions were at least liberal, but all her dealings with foreign nations were astute and predatory. The trail of Machiavelli was over all. She worked for the expansion of Russia and boasted as an old woman of the number of square miles which she had added to her territory. Russia was a parvenu and she was a parvenu; their cause was one. Europe should be astonished, and it was astonished. It responded by calling her the Semiramis and Messalina of the North and Catherine the Great. In these high-sounding titles, she exulted and her personality settled into them as her body settled comfortably into its ermine robe.

3

When the squire falls heir to wide ancestral acres, his first thought is for his boundaries and his fences. So it was with Catherine when she fell heir to Russia. Courland was entrusted to Biron, the decrepit old Duke ruled by his daughters and devoted to Catherine. Thus the Empress secured this boundary well and could henceforth dismiss it safely from her mind. She next considered her own border provinces and found them too restless for her taste. Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland needed to be stabilized and she wrote to Viazemsky recommending treatment to that end. “These provinces, like that of Smolensk, must be induced in the gentlest manner to Russify themselves, so that they no longer look around them like wolves in the forest.”

To Poland she gave her own personal attention. Catherine’s name plays a great rôle in the history of that country as one of the originators of the historical looting party known as the partition of Poland. Three monarchs shared the booty: Catherine of Russia, Frederick of Prussia, and Maria Theresa of Austria. Maria Theresa is the only one of the three who has never been accused of inventing the idea. Since Catherine herself exonerated the Austrian Empress in a letter which she wrote to Grimm in 1770, Maria Theresa’s lack of responsibility for the crime in Poland seems sufficiently established. “As far as the dear worthy Lady Prayerful is concerned,” wrote the Russian Empress, “I can say nothing more than that she suffers from severe attacks of covetousness and imperiousness. To weep is a sign of repentance, but since she always holds fast to what she has and quite forgets that not to do a thing again is the best kind of repentance, there must be something stubborn in her bosom. I fear it must be the original sin of Adam which plays this crazy comedy. But what does one ask more from such a woman? If she is faithful to her husband, she has all the virtues and needs nothing more.” Maria Theresa’s retaliation was to speak of the Empress of Russia as “cette femme” and talk about her openly as a loose woman. Notwithstanding this exchange of personal insults, they coöperated willingly in the seizure of Polish territory.

The exact part played by Frederick the Great in the partition of Poland has never been so clearly established. It is an embarrassing episode for the Prussian historian to explain. To assert, as Schlözer does, that Frederick only gradually and reluctantly consented is an attempt to whitewash the hero in a way which makes him slightly unheroic. To ascribe the initiative to the Russian Empress is to place the great Frederick in a secondary position which is inconsistent with the invincible front he has always presented to history. Nevertheless the actual idea, that is, the execution of the idea seems to have occurred first of all to Catherine. The expectation of the disaster had long existed in Poland, which had been forewarned a century before by one of its Kings, Jan Casimir, who said that one day the thing would happen just as it actually did happen. The dismemberment of Poland had been seen as a possibility by all the international politicians of Europe for more than a century before it became a definite picture in the mind of Catherine the Second. She alone had the energizing image that leads to action, and was undoubtedly responsible for the first Partition of Poland, although Frederick the Great shared the guilt for the second and third partitions which followed logically on the first.