Simon Dixon - Catherine the Great

The triumphant premiere of her operatic pageant The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign on 22 October signalled a change of mood. At the large Hermitage two days later, the empress danced the polonaise and stayed up for the ball and dinner. 14For Count Nikolay Saltykov’s masked ball at the Vorontsov palace, she wore ‘a white satin dress in the Russian style’ with a ‘cocked hat à la Henri IV, decorated with a plume of white feathers and a glittering diamond solitaire’. ‘The costume was fine, simple and grand,’ reported the secretary of the Swedish embassy. 15In November, the knights of the orders of St George and St Andrew were able to celebrate with due ceremony in Catherine’s company; Princess Dashkova sat beside her at the banquet on her name day. 16Meanwhile she had resumed her efforts to charm the foreign diplomats. Invited to inspect Voltaire’s library, Stedingk and the Prussian ambassador ‘spent a part of the day, as one might say, with Voltaire himself. The remarks he scribbled in the margins of his books while he was reading perhaps paint a better picture of this extraordinary man than his works themselves. His spirit, his gaiety, his humour and his caprices appear in their true light.’ 17

Something of the empress’s own capacity for whimsy was revealed when she surprised her courtiers at a masquerade on 10 November. The event was a mixture between Elizabeth’s cross-dressing balls and the entertainment staged for Grand Duke Peter at Oranienbaum in 1757. Ordered in advance not to wear hooped underskirts, her guests at the Hermitage found themselves steered towards stalls manned by actors from the French theatre, who sold them (on credit) the costumes she had chosen—a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Egyptian dress, all designed for a quick change. ‘Everyone was very happy,’ Khrapovitsky commented. 18Flushed with success, Catherine became noticeably more relaxed as winter set in. ‘Her Majesty gladly speaks of education in general,’ Stedingk noted, ‘and those of her grandsons in particular.’ The voyage to the South was another favoured subject: ‘“I have never felt better than I did on that journey,” the empress said to me, “and what amused me greatly was that all the newspapers announced that I was dying.” “Fortunately, madame, the newspapers almost never tell the truth.”’ 19

By the end of the year, she had a new topic of conversation, widely reported in the European press. Potëmkin’s autumn advances along the Danube had been thwarted at Ismail, a 265-gun fortress on the northern bank of the river defended by an exceptionally large garrison of 35,000 Turks. But on 29 December, the favourite’s younger brother Valerian Zubov arrived in St Petersburg with news that even this seemingly impregnable stronghold had fallen. Summoned expressly for the task, Suvorov had stormed the ramparts in swirling mists in the early hours of the morning of 11 December. While six columns of men attacked the walls—built with the assistance of French military engineers, four miles in circumference and protected by moats fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep—a galley flotilla invaded from the river under the command of the Neapolitan adventurer José de Ribas. 20‘The most horrible carnage followed,’ recalled the Comte de Damas, ‘the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood.’ Immortalised by Byron in Don Juan , the fighting took on a romantic hue from the start. ‘The walls and people of Ismail fell at the foot of Her Imperial Majesty’s throne,’ Suvorov announced to Potëmkin at the end of the day. ‘The assault was prolonged and bloody. Ismail is taken, thank God!’ 21‘We are assured that 20,000 Turks perished in this affair,’ Stedingk reported, ‘and 11,000 were taken prisoner, though the assailants numbered no more than 18,000 so they say. The Russians lost 2000 men and a further 4000 injured.’ That was almost certainly an understatement. Though the precise casualties may never be known, the Turks are thought to have lost 26,000 men and the Russians somewhere between 4000 and 8000. 22

While Potëmkin had been plotting the defeat of the Sultan, Catherine had been faced with a crisis in the Court theatre. It erupted at the Hermitage on 11 February 1791 when the leading lady threw herself at the empress’s feet at the end of a performance of her latest comic opera, Fedul and his children . Once interpreted as a young lover’s struggle against the arbitrary tsarist regime, Yelizaveta Uranova’s plea to be released from the attentions of the debauched Count Bezborodko seems more likely to have been staged by the empress as a way of embarrassing Khrapovitsky and the count. Assuming that she would be distracted by the pressures of international events, Bezborodko had defied Catherine’s earlier decision to permit Uranova to marry her fiancé, the actor Silu Sandunov, who had been dismissed after demanding more money. Now it was the count’s turn to be humiliated when the empress not only granted Uranova’s petition, but reinstated Sandunov at a higher salary than before (though not quite the rate he had himself requested). The seemingly vacuous plot of Fedul and his children has been revealed by Andrey Zorin as an allegory of the transfer of the direction of the Court theatre to the sovereign from Khrapovitsky, who was removed from his position immediately after the performance. Part of Catherine’s concern lay with the lax behaviour of his voluptuous young actresses, many of whom were drawn into covert prostitution. But her earlier warning to her secretary that France had been undone by a decline in morals pointed to a significantly wider anxiety. 23

Beyond the walls of her own palace, few regarded the empress as a plausible guardian of morality of any kind. Now that the storming of Ismail had reinforced the European stereotype of the Russians as a primitive people led by bloodthirsty savages, Catherine’s international rivals drew increasingly explicit parallels between her apparently insatiable appetite for imperial expansion and her notorious sexual rapaciousness. In the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, English caricaturists were in their element. The first semi-pornographic engraving to feature the empress had appeared on 24 October 1787 NS, two months after the beginning of the Turkish war. Backed by a cowering Joseph II complete with dunce’s cap, Catherine appears as ‘The Christian Amazon’ as a simian Louis XVI lobs towards her two grenades that form testicles to the phallic symbol of the Turk’s bayonet. 24The great majority of such satirical prints, however, date from the spring of 1791. One of the most explicit—‘The Imperial Stride’, published anonymously on 12 April NS—features a colossal figure of the empress with one foot in Russia and the other stretched out to Constantinople. Beneath her, ten diminished European rulers gaze up into her skirts in awe: ‘By Saint Jago,’ declares the king of Spain, ‘I’ll strip her of her fur!’ George III splutters his trademark ‘What! What! What! What a prodigious expansion!’, and the Sultan reluctantly admits that ‘The whole Turkish army wouldn’t satisfy her.’ 25

This sudden rash of derogatory images signalled that Anglo-Russian relations had reached an all-time low. Irritated by the Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 that undermined Britain’s longstanding domination of the Russia trade, William Pitt had been further alarmed by the empress’s gains at the Turks’ expense. In January 1791, spurred on by his ambassador in Berlin, the prime minister demanded an end to the war and a return to the status quo ante by which Russia would have been forced to relinquish Ochakov, whose capture had been interpreted as a harbinger of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. 26In March, when Catherine refused to capitulate, Pitt threatened to send a fleet to the Baltic with Prussian support. As King Frederick William II mobilised 88,000 troops in preparation for an attack on his eastern neighbour, both Bezborodko and Potëmkin urged concessions. Catherine was clearly disturbed: ‘Anxiety about Prussia,’ Khrapovitsky recorded in his diary on 15 March. ‘It has gone on a long time. She cried.’ 27