Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

Count Cobenzl was more interested in the political consequences of such ‘immoderate grief’. Mercifully for a supporter of the Austrian alliance, they had proved to be minimal. For all Catherine’s emotional turbulence, the direction of her government had remained firm:

There has been not a single sort of discord within the Court. On the contrary, I believe that there have been few epochs where there has been so much unity and so little jealousy between the people to whom the management of affairs is entrusted. There is no question of a new favourite, and many people are beginning to believe that there won’t be one. If the health of the Empress is not altered by this change, it will certainly do more good than harm. 151

In the event, the interval between favourites, though longer than usual, proved to be only temporary. During the celebrations surrounding Catherine’s fifty-sixth birthday on Easter Monday 1785, a new shooting star emerged. Introduced to the empress by Potëmkin, the thirty-one-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Yermolov was first mentioned in the Court journal on 22 April. His presence among the five guests at lunch on the following day suggests that the relationship may have begun during Lent, a time of greater privacy than any other for the empress. 1Although Potëmkin dubbed him the ‘white negro’ on account of his unusually flat nose, it was Yermolov’s flat-footedness in politics that led to his rapid downfall. Drawn into business in April 1786 by his appointment to a commission to restructure the assignat bank, he struggled, as his friend Bezborodko had predicted, to cope with machinations at Court. After being inveigled into an intrigue against Potëmkin that may have been inspired by Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov, Yermolov was dismissed in July with the now customary redundancy package—the Polish Order of the White Eagle, 4300 serfs in Belorussia, 130,000 roubles in cash and a silver dinner service—and sent abroad. In the following year, he embarrassed Semën Vorontsov, Catherine’s ambassador in London, by demanding to be presented to George III. ‘The king has always found it ridiculous that in Russia one can be promoted from sergeant to major general in the space of two years without serving at all.’ 2

By comparison with Yermolov’s extended ‘retirement’ (he died in Vienna at the age of eighty in 1834), the empress’s infatuation was brief indeed. While it lasted, however, it served its purpose, as Cobenzl noted, by staving off melancholy and stimulating her natural joie de vivre . During the long months of misery after Lanskoy’s death, she had been consoled by a treatise sent to her by the Court physician at Hanover, Dr Johann Zimmerman. Solitude considered with respect to its influence on the mind and the heart was eventually published in Russian translation in 1791. For the moment, Catherine acknowledged the support of the new favourite and her other faithful friends: ‘My inner self has regained its calm and serenity.’ 3Restored to health and happiness, she had launched into a new bout of ‘legislomania’, capping a decade of fundamental domestic reform by promulgating the Charter to the Nobility and the Charter to the Towns on her birthday, 21 April 1785.

Though Catherine had no intention of inflating the pretensions of the nobility as a whole—it was part of the compact by which her empire was governed that nobles should abdicate corporate political ambitions in return for virtually unlimited social and economic control over their serfs—she wanted to boost the nobles’ esprit de corps in order to convert them into a civilised instrument for the transmission of her Enlightened policies. Whereas most European sovereigns were anxious to limit noble status, Catherine was keen to enhance it in the interests of her empire. Far from being a concession to noble pressure, the Charter of 1785 represented a consolidation and development of Peter III’s ‘emancipation’ manifesto of 1762. Corporate rights granted to the noble estate as a whole—including the right to attend provincial assemblies and elect a provincial marshal—were linked to the assumption that individuals would continue to serve voluntarily in the provinces: those who failed to serve could play no part in the assemblies. The charter confirmed nobles’ property rights and personal security (they could not be flogged; they were permitted to petition the empress direct; they could be tried only by their peers; and they could be deprived of their nobility only by decision of the Senate, confirmed by Catherine herself). The legislation also attempted to regulate membership of the noble estate by making provincial assemblies responsible for registering six different groups of nobles, defined for the first time according to the antiquity and origins of their titles. 4

The Charter to the Towns similarly divided the merchantry and urban-dwellers into six categories, defined according to wealth and occupation. As part of the hierarchical social order Catherine strove to create, they too were given rights of personal security and property (to a lesser degree than the nobles) and the institutional modernisation begun in the Provincial Reform of 1775 was capped by the creation of an even more elaborate system of urban government, based on a representative town council ( duma ). Although the empress contemplated an equally rational approach to social engineering in a draft charter to the state peasantry, this was never published, perhaps because of its unsettling implications for the serfs. Symmetrical in form, obsessively detailed in content, and increasingly prescriptive as they descended the social scale, the charters stand as a monument to Catherine’s confidence in the reforming power of legislation. 5Although some of that confidence was misplaced, since it took too little notice of prevailing social realities, there was no doubt about her commitment to the development of a vigorous urban economy. On Saturday 24 May 1785, she set out from Tsarskoye Selo without escort in a small suite of twenty carriages to inspect the progress that had been made in the decade since the Provincial Reform.

Passing through the staging posts immortalised five years later in Alexander Radishchev’s sentimentalist Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow , Catherine had no eyes for the rural misery he was soon to depict. Her immediate purpose was to inspect the newly enlarged locks at Vyshny Volochëk, the pivot of the system of inland waterways built by forced labour under Peter the Great which carried 216,000 tons of freight a year to St Petersburg by the 1750s. Soon after arriving in the little town, she looked on as some thirty barges passed through its new stone locks, loaded with grain and iron. 6

The empress had originally planned to be away for no longer than a month. 7But while she was at Vyshny, Count Bruce persuaded her to divert briefly to Moscow in order to quell rumours of potential unrest. Although the road between the two capitals was probably the only one in Russia smooth enough to attempt at short notice, only the most entertaining of company could have persuaded her to face such a punishing schedule with equanimity (in the following year she approved a comprehensive programme of improvements to the road, scheduled for completion in 1790 at a total cost of 4 million roubles). 8Her sixteen-strong entourage included not only Potëmkin and Lev Naryshkin, but also three ‘very easy-going, very clever, NB. very jolly’ travelling companions in Cobenzl, Alleyne Fitzherbert and Count Ségur, the ‘pocket ministers’ who took turns to share her six-seater with Yermolov. They relieved the tedium by playing word games devised by Ségur, who seemed particularly ‘pleased to be with us and is as jolly as a chaffinch’. 9‘The journey is doing me a lot of good,’ Catherine reported to her grandsons’ governor from Torzhok. 10