with comforts. The old man was nearly seventy now and of no great
service to her. But she owed him much and he was a magnificent monument
because he had once known Peter the Great. She recalled Biron, also
aged with exile, and made him the Grand Duke of Courland. He was
useful to her there because he kept the House of Saxony from getting
a foothold in Courland. Poniatovsky, who had long awaited this day in
Poland, now wrote asking to be summoned to Russia, but she did not
recall him. She discouraged him from writing to her at all, saying, “I
must walk straight ahead; I must not be suspected.” She had long ago
planned with Poniatovsky and Williams that the Count was one day to be
made the King of Poland. She now urged the Count to stop at home in
Poland and abide the course of events.
One of Catherine’s first acts as Empress was to give orders for her
coronation. The ceremony which Peter had postponed until he had at
last died uncrowned was foremost in her thoughts. Four days after
her accession, she ordered the fire-works for her coronation; and
seven days afterwards, the day on which the death of the unfortunate
Peter became known, she announced the date. It was to take place in
September. She gave Prince Trubetsky fifty thousand rubles and sent
him to Moscow to get everything in readiness. He carried with him the
specifications for a great spectacle, and, with the assistance of a
corps of official merry-makers, managed to complete all preparations
within the time arranged for. Promptly on the first day of September,
the Empress left Petersburg with an enormous train. There was evidently
to be no postponement of the date originally set for the ceremony,
no repetition of the succession of postponements which had delayed
the marriage of the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess under the late
Empress. The new Empress had none of the dilatoriness of Elisabeth; she
had respect for time. In this regard, she remained always only half a
Russian.
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.
[Illustration]
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.