Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
Until they entered Russian territory, Sophie’s mother had been travelling
incognito as Countess Rheinbeck, accompanied by only the most modest of suites: her chamberlain, her lady-in-waiting, four chambermaids, a valet, a handful of lackeys and a cook. Now, wrapped in the priceless sables presented to them by Naryshkin, they continued their journey under cavalry escort in long imperial sleighs drawn by ten horses. As Catherine later recalled, it was quite an art even to climb into these elaborate vehicles, in which passengers lay recumbent on bulky feather mattresses, lined with silk and covered with satin cushions.
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Still, there was little enough to see as they traversed a snowy landscape razed by the Russians in the first decade of the century when it seemed that the invading Swedish army might triumph in the Great Northern War. Not until the 1770s did Russia’s Baltic provinces recover their pre-war population levels after a campaign in which as many as 70 per cent of the population of Livland and Estland may have perished. At Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), which the Russians had taken from the Swedes in 1704, the signs of the bombardment were still visible.
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Their final calling point was Narva, where 11,000 Swedish troops had humiliated Peter the Great’s 40,000-strong army in November 1700, prompting far-reaching military reforms that helped to underpin tsarist imperial expansion for the remainder of the century. From there, it was a relatively short distance along the southern shores of the gulf of Finland to the Russian capital, where they arrived on the afternoon of 3 February towards the end of the carnival season.
T
hough unaware of it at the time, Sophie had arrived in St Petersburg at a pivotal period in the city’s short history. Its origins are shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that on 16 May 1703, Peter the Great landed with a group of military companions on Hare Island, digging two turves with a bayonet and laying them crosswise as he pronounced: ‘Here a city is to be!’ But since there are no records of the occasion in the Court journals, and no first-hand accounts have survived, it is not even certain where Peter was on the date in question.
1
There can be no doubt, however, of the importance of the new capital which began to emerge after the tsar’s victory over the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709. Whereas Turin and Madrid had grown by having a Court imposed upon them, St Petersburg was the ultimate
Residenzstadt
: a city expressly developed as the site of the imperial Court. ‘Petersburg is just the Court,’ the
philosophe
Denis Diderot would remark following his visit to Catherine in 1774: ‘a confused mass of palaces and hovels, of
grands seigneurs
surrounded by peasants and purveyors.’
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For the first twenty years of its existence, the city was little more than a building site. While Russian noblemen grumbled about being forced to settle in such inhospitable surroundings, visitors were astonished by the sheer speed of construction. By the early 1720s, the new capital was consuming almost 5 per cent of the Russian empire’s total revenue: between 10,000 and 30,000 labourers worked there every year; thousands more were conscripted to replace those who sacrificed their lives in the effort to sink reliable foundations into the bog.
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Struck by such awesome ambition and progress, the Hanoverian envoy duly ranked St Petersburg as ‘a wonder of the
world, was it only in consideration of the few years that have been employed in the raising of it’.
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Foreign verdicts such as this helped to generate the city’s lasting reputation as a fantastic place where nothing is quite as it seems.
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Tsar Peter and his image-makers did their best to enhance the illusion by investing the place he called his ‘paradise’ with layer upon layer of symbolic significance, designed to transform it at once into a New Amsterdam (a symbol of trade and prosperity), a New Rome and New Constantinople (symbols of power and kingship), and not least a New Jerusalem, a symbol of piety and devotion ‘coming down out of heaven from God’ and bisected by a ‘river of water of life’ (Revelation 21: 2; 22: 1).
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These were probably not comparisons that entered the minds of most of St Petersburg’s 70,000 inhabitants at the time of Sophie’s arrival in 1744. She herself claimed fifty years later that only three of the city’s streets had then been built in stone: Millionnaya (Millionnaires’ Row, a street of grand mansion houses which still runs parallel to the Neva to the south-east of the Winter Palace); Lugovaya (Meadow Street, which ran westwards towards the Admiralty); and the elegant row of merchants’ houses along the river to the west of St Isaac’s Square (known as the English Line or Quay by the time of Catherine’s reign, and subsequently as the English Embankment). These three thoroughfares formed ‘a curtain, so to speak’ around rows of ‘wooden barracks as unpleasant as it is possible to imagine’.
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Though this was plainly an attempt to advertise her own glorious achievements in the field of urban reconstruction, there was no disguising the squalor of much of the early eighteenth-century city. Even its palaces were wooden. So were most churches apart from Trezzini’s Peter-Paul Cathedral. By the early 1740s, many of St Petersburg’s leading buildings had already gone the way of the derelict Holy Trinity, where Tsar Peter had worshipped almost every day when resident in his new capital.
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Far from admiring the city, foreign visitors were now more likely to highlight the consequences of shoddy construction on marshy soil. According to Carl Reinhold Berch, a Swedish official resident in St Petersburg in 1735–6, careless building methods condemned the city’s brick walls to remain damp for years, while the timber in widespread use for roofs, gutters, staircases and vestibules was ‘notoriously and readily combustible’. ‘Many handsome houses,’ Berch complained, ‘cannot be reached by even a single carriage, so that one must enter via the back gates or through a breach in the wall on the first floor, in which case the passageway is as high as any triumphal arch: both these methods are utterly disgraceful.’
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Critics of tsarist despotism had a field day. Following his
visit to Russia in 1739, the Venetian savant Francesco Algarotti snidely remarked that:
If the ground were a little higher and less marshy, if the plans had not been changed so many times, if a Palladio had been the architect and the building materials had been of a better quality and better assembled and, furthermore, if it were inhabited by people who try to live there pleasantly and comfortably, St Petersburg would be surely one of the finest towns in the world.
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As it was, he found the Russian capital characterised by ‘a kind of bastard architecture’ in which Dutch influences predominated over those from Italy and France, and believed that the poor quality of the city’s construction reflected the fact that its palaces had been ‘built out of obedience rather than choice’: ‘Their walls are all cracked, quite out of perpendicular, and ready to fall.’ Ruins generally formed themselves, Algarotti famously quipped, but at St Petersburg they were built from scratch.
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For more than a decade after Peter the Great’s death in 1725, the city’s growth had indeed lacked direction. The initial impetus was lost when the Court returned to Moscow in 1728, and even when Empress Anna brought it back to St Petersburg four years later, her advisers hesitated to take decisive action for fear of disturbing a volatile populace. Only when fire destroyed hundreds of wooden shacks in the area around the Admiralty in August 1736 did the government contemplate the opportunity for wholesale change, though not before taking instant retribution against three alleged arsonists. John Cook, a visiting Scottish doctor, saw the two men chained to the top of tall masts:
They stood upon small scaffolds and many thousand billets of wood were built from the ground, so as to form a pyramid round each mast. These pyramids were so high as to reach within two or three fathoms of the little stages on which the men stood in their shirts, and their drawers. They were condemned in this manner to be burnt to powder. But before the pyramids were set on fire, the woman was brought betwixt these masts, and a declaration of their villainy, and the order for their execution, read…No sooner was the woman’s head chopped off, than a link was put to the wooden pyramids, and as the timber was very dry, it formed in an instant a very terrible fire. The men would soon have died had not the wind frequently blown the flames from them; however, they both expired in less than three quarters of an hour, in great torment.
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A second fire on Millionnaya and the palace embankment in June 1737 hastened plans for longer-term reconstruction.
.
Led by the first Russian architects to make a serious impact on the new capital–Peter Yeropkin, Mikhail Zemtsov and Ivan Korobov–the Commission for the Construction of St Petersburg, established shortly afterwards, definitively shifted the centre of the city to the south.
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It was a logical enough move to make. Although Peter the Great had insisted on locating his main government buildings on Vasilevsky Island, both these and the Peter-Paul Fortress were inconveniently situated on the northern bank of the Neva, accessible in summer only by boat (the sole bridge was a temporary pontoon to the west of the Admiralty, first strung across the river in 1727 and rebuilt annually after 1732).
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The new commission determined instead to develop three great avenues radiating out from the Admiralty: Voznesensky Prospect, leading to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards in the south-west; Gorokhovaya (Pea Street), culminating at the barracks of the Semënovsky Guards to the south; and Nevsky Prospect, then known as the Great Perspective Road, which stretched south-eastward for almost three miles towards the Alexander Nevsky monastery founded by Peter the Great in memory of the thirteenth-century warrior-saint. Though delayed by political upheavals after Anna’s death in 1740, these three avenues, linked by a network of semicircular streets between the Moika and Fontanka canals, were soon to give the city the elegant, geometrical ground plan at which visitors still marvel today.
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In the early 1750s, Russia’s greatest polymath Mikhailo Lomonosov claimed that from the top of any tall building in the capital one could see ‘houses that seemed to float on water and streets laid out in lines as straight as regiments on parade’.
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As if to prove his point, Mikhailo Makhaev spent the late 1740s perched among the city’s bell towers and on top of Tsar Peter’s
Kunstkamera
, sketching with the assistance of a large optical ‘camera’. The machine’s wide-angled lens combined with the artist’s elevated viewpoint to distort the perspective in such a way that his famous engravings are dominated by the space between buildings rather than by the buildings themselves.
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But that is not to underestimate the extent to which St Petersburg was transformed in Elizabeth’s reign ‘from a Europeanized riverfront backed by thousands of native hovels into a Western metropolis’.
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In a conscious attempt to legitimise her seizure of the throne, the grandest Baroque edifices were built to mark the route she had taken on that fateful night in November 1741.
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Indeed, so rapidly had those events acquired mythical status, that shortly after her arrival in February 1744, Johanna Elisabeth was taken to retrace the empress’s steps, starting from ‘the famous barracks of the
Preobrazhensky Guards’ where Elizabeth had already laid the foundation stone of a magnificent new cathedral of the Transfiguration. ‘It is incomprehensible that Her Majesty should have managed such a long march without being betrayed.’
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Since Tsar Peter had intended his new capital to stand as an icon of Russia’s aspirations to sophisticated cosmopolitanism, it is all the more striking that the entertainment laid on for fourteen-year-old Princess Sophie should have been unashamedly exotic and emphatically popular. After dinner at the Winter Palace, she was treated to a display by the fourteen elephants which had become familiar figures on the capital’s streets following their presentation to Empress Anna by a visiting Turkish embassy. One of the animals on that occasion was said to be draped in King Solomon’s tent, a characteristically extravagant notion duly dismissed by Dr Cook: ‘It was of silk, very large, and certainly the worse of the wearing, but I scarcely believe it was Solomon’s.’ Not long afterwards, a bystander lost his life when two beasts bolted from soldiers who had thrown fireworks at their feet in an attempt to make them fight in the snow.
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Fortunately for her hosts, the show staged in Sophie’s honour passed off without incident. Once the elephants had completed their stately pirouettes in the palace courtyard, she was taken out onto the frozen river to see the ice hills that were a prominent feature of the capital at carnival time.
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By the time the last of Anna’s elephants died in 1765, the elephant house had long been moved from its central location on the Fontanka Canal to a suburban site near the Alexander Nevsky monastery.
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Ice hills, however, remained popular throughout Catherine’s reign, attracting vast crowds of spectators to watch as intrepid revellers descended precipitous slopes at great speed, either upright on skates or seated on wooden trays. She adored the one at Gostilitsy–the suburban estate belonging to Elizabeth’s favourite, Aleksey Razumovsky, where the Russian Court regularly paid a visit halfway through Lent–and in 1762 she had Antonio Rinaldi build her own all-weather tobogganing pavilion at the Summer Palace at Oranienbaum, a fantasy of powder-blue and white.
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It consists of steep declivities built of timber, the highest end being ten fathoms above the ground, and borne up on an arch. The impetus acquired by rapidly descending the first forces the carriage up the second, which having turned it is carried up a third and so proceeds in diminishing altitudes, with amazing
velocity. The carriages are made to contain one person, or two seated facing one another, the wheels running in grooves.
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A less extravagant wooden sleigh-run at Tsarskoye Selo was demolished in 1777 to make way for a merry-go-round. Even in the last years of her life, Catherine liked to take visitors to play on the ice hills near the Tauride Palace she had built for Potëmkin, where she treated the local populace and donated money to their other entertainments.
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In 1744, such pleasures lay in the future, for no sooner had Sophie arrived in St Petersburg than she was whisked off to Moscow, where the Court was in residence and where Elizabeth expected her in time to celebrate Grand Duke Peter’s sixteenth birthday on 10 February. Improved in Catherine’s own reign by a series of costly schemes, the highway between the two capitals remained in 1744 in much the same state as other Russian roads–a primitive track, constructed from tree-trunks covered with gravel and sand, and passable at speed only when frozen. While it might take the empress’s humbler subjects several weeks to complete the 370-mile journey, she herself could cover the distance in a little over three days by racing through the night and changing horses every twelve or fifteen miles. That January, she had spent forty-nine hours on the road and another twenty-six at staging posts along the way.
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Even Elizabeth had come to regard the price of such speed as prohibitive. When the officer charged with removing snowdrifts, branches and tree stumps from the relatively short section of road between Chudov and Novgorod requested another 1600 men to assist the 400 already assigned to him, he was ordered to dismiss the whole detachment as the decree went out making the owner of each property along the road responsible for clearing it in the following spring.
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Sophie’s entourage encountered a different problem. Shortly after their departure, her mother’s sleigh hit a building while cornering too fast in the dark, injuring a sentry and catapulting the driver from his seat. While Johanna Elisabeth described the incident in typically purple prose, implying that they had all had a brush with death, Catherine’s memoir was cooler: ‘She claimed that she had been grievously injured, though nothing could be seen, not even a bruise.’ Nevertheless, they were delayed for several hours, and it was not until the afternoon of 9 February that they approached the outskirts of the old capital to be escorted to the palace at Lefortovo on the Yauza River, not far from the island where relatives of the young Peter I had created a fortress for his play regiments as a way of mobilising support for his candidature for the throne in the 1680s.
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