Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

To judge from her memoirs, tedium was the dominant feature of Catherine’s life by the beginning of the new decade. Bored with the stultifying round of social occasions at Court and even more bored with her husband, who had already embarked on a series of more or less open liaisons with other women, she found her own eyes beginning to wander. There was no shortage of potential suitors now that the ugly duckling from Stettin had begun to mature into an elegant Russian swan. Zakhar Chernyshëv, who returned to Court in the autumn of 1751, told her how much prettier she looked. ‘This was the first time in my life that someone had said such a thing to me. I did not find it displeasing.’ They secretly exchanged billets-doux, using Anna Gagarina as a reluctant postman. Though Zakhar hoped that the relationship might blossom, Catherine eventually demurred. When he left to rejoin his regiment in the spring, she found herself courted by a new and more persistent admirer.

Two years older than the grand duchess, who celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday around the time of their first meeting, Sergey Saltykov was handsome, intelligent and adept in the courtly arts. He was also married. With characteristic insouciance, he played on Catherine’s sympathies by telling her ‘that he was paying dearly for a moment of blindness’. Though at first she resisted his advances, she enjoyed his company. Thanks to his friendship with the Choglokovs, he became her almost constant companion throughout the spring and summer of 1752. After a secret tryst during a hunt on Choglokov’s island at the mouth of the Neva, she was disconcerted to find that she had begun to lose control of her emotions. Having initially supposed that she could ‘govern and elevate both his thoughts and mine’, she discovered that it was ‘difficult, if not impossible’. 103

It was not the last time that Catherine would embark on a relationship with such high-minded aspirations—and it was not the last time that the object of her affections would let her down. If we are to believe the jaundiced account in her memoirs, coloured by Sergey’s subsequent infidelity, his ardour had already begun to cool by the winter of 1752. As he ‘became distracted, and sometimes smug, arrogant, and dissolute’, Catherine found it hard to accept that he was merely trying to distract attention from their affair. Even so, she was pregnant by the time the Court departed for Moscow in December. Although she suffered a miscarriage on the journey, the relationship revived when Sergey arrived in the old capital. It was then, according to a passage which censors excised from the first Russian edition of Catherine’s memoirs in 1907, that Maria Choglokova seized her chance to secure the succession by encouraging the grand duchess to sleep with him. By May 1753, there were renewed signs of pregnancy, but this too was brought to an end by an early miscarriage. ‘I was in great danger for thirteen days because it was suspected that part of the afterbirth had remained inside me. No one told me this. Eventually, on the thirteenth day, it came out of its own accord, without pains or effort. I was made to rest for six weeks in my room because of this complication, during an intolerable heatwave.’ 104

It was to be the beginning of a long year of discomfort. That month, Elizabeth decreed that no further wooden structures were to be allowed near the Kremlin and China Town. 105Three stokers and another workman had been whipped in January for allowing burning coals to fall from a stove in the palace, setting light to the floor and a panel in the wall of the empress’s apartments. Yet although primitive fire equipment was carted from palace to palace in an attempt to limit any conflagration, both capitals became tinderboxes in a hot, dry summer, when it was one of Elizabeth’s more melancholy diversions to drive out to witness the destruction of one of her courtier’s homes. On 1 November 1753, she experienced the same fate herself.

A mere two days after she had moved into her new Golovin Palace, the whole edifice was reduced to ashes by a fire that began at midday in the heating pipes under the floor of the great hall. ‘It was twenty paces from our wing,’ Catherine recalled. ‘I went into my rooms and found them already full of soldiers and servants, who were removing the furniture and carrying what they could.’ Since there was nothing to be done, she retreated to a safe distance in the carriage of the Court Kapellmeister , reserving her coolest irony for the passage in her memoirs in which she describes the ‘astonishing number of rats and mice’ that allegedly ‘descended the stairs in single file, without even really hurrying’. For once, Rastrelli’s advanced techniques counted against him because it proved impossible, even by firing cannon balls into the burning ruins, to dislodge the iron girders that underpinned the whole structure, and so to isolate the fire in the main staterooms. Flames soon engulfed the entire 400-metre length of the building. By the time they were finally extinguished at six o’clock, only the chapel and the summer apartments remained standing, though a salvage operation managed to rescue the majority of the valuables. The most sensible loss for the empress was her wardrobe, including a dress she had had made from Parisian fabric sent to Catherine as a gift from her mother. 106

Even as she looked on aghast, Elizabeth boasted to the Dutch ambassador that she would commission a new palace, ‘only not in the Italian style, but more in the Russian’. 107She was as good as her word. Having defiantly returned to the neighbouring theatre to see a French comedy the day after the fire, she ordered that a new palace must be ready in time for her birthday in six weeks’ time. Clearance work began on 5 November and building started three days later under the direction of Russian architects working to a new design by Rastrelli. To speed reconstruction, materials were brought from both the Petrovsky palace and the old wooden palace in the Kremlin, dismantled in the spring (the Moscow nobility might have been unnerved to learn of the further order to survey the surrounding area for ‘buildings made of good timber belonging to private individuals’). By 10 November, 1018 men were already at work, erecting a new superstructure onto the existing foundations since fresh ones would have threatened a repeat of the disaster at Gostilitsy by sweating through the winter. As all the Court’s neighbouring construction projects came to a halt to release the necessary labour force, the total soon reached 6000, including 3000 carpenters and 120 specialist woodcarvers. Fed and housed on site, they worked around the clock to complete the project in time for an architects’ inspection on 13 December. 108Two days later, Elizabeth took possession of her new apartments and on 18 December she duly celebrated her birthday in a richly gilded hall, even larger than its predecessor, lit by twenty-two tall windows. ‘There was no court at noon, as usual,’ the British resident reported, ‘because of the excessive cold, but in the evening there was a ball, illuminations and a magnificent supper at a table which held near three hundred people.’ 109The fact that only 130 guests sat down at a table laid for 160 scarcely diminishes the scale of the achievement. Ambitious state construction projects were by no means a creation of the Stalinist era. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Count Alexander Vorontsov highlighted the resurrection of the Golovin Palace in his autobiography as an example of ‘what can be done in Russia’. 110

Catherine was less impressed. Though a degree of inconvenience was to be expected in the aftermath of such a disaster, the misery she endured at a nearby courtier’s house was insufferable. ‘It is hardly possible to be worse off than we were there,’ she recalled. ‘The wind blew in from all directions, the windows and doors were half rotted, and you could get two or three fingers into the cracks in the floor.’ Conditions were little better when she and Peter moved to a former episcopal palace, where they feared being burned alive. Prospects improved only when they were allowed to go to Liuberets, an estate outside Moscow granted to her husband in 1751, where they had initially been obliged to sleep in tents: ‘Here we thought we were in paradise. The house was completely new and quite well furnished.’ 111