Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

The same company, the same furniture, the same victuals: it is only Petersburg carried up and down the empire. Natives have too much awe to furnish any conversation: if it were not for the diplomatic people, she would have been dead with ennui. 62

Back in St Petersburg, Zavadovsky was just as cynical, telling Alexander Vorontsov that those ‘eternal companions of the court—baseness, meanness, hypocrisy, flattery, lies and cunning’ had merely ‘migrated from the banks of the Neva to the stream of the Dnieper’. 63Yet in a characteristic triumph of hope over experience Catherine was enjoying herself in the company of the ‘pocket ministers’ who took turns to share her carriage, just as they had on the journey to Moscow in 1785.

Effervescent as ever, Ségur kept boredom at bay by devising word games with which a delighted empress could later regale Grimm (only the occasional risqué joke backfired—Catherine was never bawdy in public). Unlike Fitzherbert, Ségur recognised her talent for eliciting useful information from her subjects:

‘More is to be learned,’ she said to me one day, ‘by speaking to ignorant persons about their own affairs, than by talking with the learned, who have nothing but theories, and who would be ashamed not to answer you by ridiculous observations on subjects of which they have no positive knowledge. How I pity these poor savans ! They never dare to pronounce these four words, I do not know , which we ignorant people find so convenient, and which often prevent us from adopting dangerous decisions, for, in a doubtful case, it is much better to do nothing than to do wrong.’ 64

Montesquieu would have been proud of her.

Though Kiev lay under 20 degrees of frost when the empress arrived on 29 January, she was amazed to discover that neither her ears nor her nose had frozen: ‘that would be impossible in Petersburg, but here the air is softer’. 65The weather, which remained a topic of conversation throughout the journey, was not the only surprise in store. Not long after her arrival, Catherine complained that although she had seen ‘two fortresses and their suburbs’, she couldn’t yet ‘find the town’. From the ‘scattered dwellings they call Kiev’, she could only conclude that it had shrunk since her first visit in 1744. 66This was indeed a city in decline. ‘Of its former splendour’, she wrote to Dr Zimmerman, ‘only some rich churches remain.’ ‘Straggling’ and ‘extremely badly built’, Kiev was ill-equipped to accommodate the unprecedented crowd of cosmopolitan visitors who descended in the empress’s wake, plagued by crowds of beggars in a city whose almshouses provided for only 136 paupers. 67Conscious that ‘illusion is always more attractive than reality’, Ségur famously declared that the city had been transformed into ‘a magic theatre, where ancient and modern times seemed to be mingled and confounded with one another, where civilization went hand in hand with barbarism’. 68No less aware of the theatrical aspect of her journey, which she described to Grimm as a ‘continuous series of fêtes’, Catherine was more brutal: ‘We have here four Spanish counts, numberless imperial princes, a crowd of Poles, English, Americans, French, Germans,…more heathens than I have ever seen, including even Kirghizians [i.e. Kazakhs], and they are all living in Kievan shacks, and one cannot understand how there is room for them.’ 69

Affecting not to know what had attracted such a crowd, the empress attributed the influx to reports in the foreign press that she planned to provoke the Turks by staging a second coronation in New Russia ‘of which there was never any question’. 70‘Half Poland’ had come to bend her ear before she renewed her acquaintance with her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski, and a good number of his nobles had to be turned away from her apartments: ‘I think they wanted to see me and had come to keep me company.’ The king’s American secretary, Lewis Littlepage, was there to keep an eye on the Poles; Potëmkin, stretched languidly on his divan at the Monastery of the Caves, wove his own web of intrigue. 71In such a feverish atmosphere, a hectic round of social engagements served to raise the sexual stakes. Field Marshal Rumyantsev could think of ‘no better representation of temptation’ than the low-cut dress worn by Countess Natalia Sollogub to Cobenzl’s ball. 72If we are to believe the South American Francisco de Miranda, who let it be thought that the empress herself had been one of his conquests, the whole company descended into hedonistic excess: one of his Russian friends claimed to have won 28,000 roubles at cards since leaving St Petersburg. 73

While her entourage indulged themselves, Catherine found more improving relaxation. Deprived of the attentions of Alexander and Constantine, whom she had reluctantly left behind in St Petersburg when they were stricken with illness just before her departure, she all but adopted a surrogate grandson: the five-year-old child of Potëmkin’s niece, Alexandra Branicka. ‘His mother, having seen how the grand dukes behave, follows my regulations precisely.’ According to Catherine, the boy duly responded in kind: ‘healthy, agile, not stubborn, and so free in his manner that it is as though he had lived with us for a century: far from wild, not timid, but clever and happy, so that anyone who sees him is devoted to him’. She had him inoculated against smallpox in mid-March. 74

Though the enervating round of balls and masquerades had by then been brought to an end by the onset of Lent, the relief proved short-lived as Catherine immersed herself in an equally exhausting series of religious rituals. Expecting the Dnieper to thaw before Easter, she chose to observe the first week of the Great Fast. On 7 February, she returned from a liturgy at the New Maiden Convent complaining about the canting hypocrisy of the abbess, a former lady-in-waiting at Court. 75She confessed at the Monastery of the Caves on the following Saturday. Sunday was set aside for communion. Next day, Catherine returned to inspect the relics buried deep in the catacombs, emerging coated in sweat ‘as if from the bath-house’. 76Passing through narrow underground passages, she was greeted by a scene as macabre as the one that Baedeker advertised to tourists at the beginning of the twentieth century:

No fewer than 73 saints are buried here in niches, the bodies lying like mummies in open coffins and enveloped in costly garments…Another curiosity is a head projecting from the ground, and covered with a mitre said to have been worn by John the Longsuffering, who had himself buried in the earth up to his neck and is said to have lived so for 30 years, while his dead body was afterwards preserved in the same position (Twelfth Cent.). 77

Although Aleksey Bobrinsky’s tutor had been told in 1783 that the ceilings had been raised to allow Empress Elizabeth to walk without stooping, the catacombs remained so constricted that many courtiers in Catherine’s entourage were forced to turn back when their candles filled the tunnels with smoke and condensation. 78Despite such a ‘terrible promenade’, she herself remained ‘as nimble as a bird’ as she boasted to Count Bruce in her ninth letter on the following morning. The visit had ‘lasted at least two hours because we went all over, in both the highest and the deepest catacombs, and everywhere on foot, and the monk who accompanied us could not have been more ignorant’. 79Such mockery was common enough among the more sceptical members of Russia’s westernised elite. In public, however, the empress took care to demonstrate her reverence for the cradle of Orthodoxy, donating 24,000 roubles for building work, gold candelabra studded with diamonds for the relics of St Vladimir, and new silk shrouds for the other saints’ remains. 80