Catherine the Great

69

Art, Architecture, and the Bronze Horseman

THE FOUNDATION of the superb collection of art in St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum today was laid by Catherine only a year after she reached the throne. In 1763, she learned that a collection of 225 paintings accumulated by a Polish art dealer in Berlin who regularly supplied pictures to Frederick II had not been paid for. The dealer had been buying and holding the paintings for the king’s Potsdam palace, Sans Souci, but Frederick had decided that he could not afford them. His finances, personal and national, had been ravaged by the cost of the Seven Years’ War, and the need to pay his army and to begin reconstruction of his devastated country took precedence over the purchase of paintings for his palace walls. The art dealer was, therefore, deeply in debt and urgently needed a customer. Catherine stepped forward and, without serious bargaining, bought the entire collection.

There may have been an element of spite in her purchase of a collection originally destined for Frederick. When Elizabeth was on the throne, Russia had been at war with Prussia; then Peter III had succeeded his aunt, had switched sides, and had become Frederick’s ally. Now, pulling Frederick’s paintings out from under him would partially balance the ledger. Not all of her new paintings were masterpieces, but they included three Rembrandts, a Franz Hals, and a Rubens.

When the paintings arrived in St. Petersburg, Catherine was so pleased that she sent word to her ambassadors and agents in Europe to be alert for other collections that might come up for sale. Fortunately, the Russian ambassador in Paris was Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, a polished Enlightenment figure, a friend of Voltaire’s and Diderot’s, and a habitué of the intellectual and artistic salon of Madame Geoffrin. Golitsyn arranged Catherine’s purchase of Diderot’s library in 1765 and continued to buy paintings for Catherine as long as he remained in Paris. When he left France to become Russian ambassador in The Hague, Diderot agreed to become Catherine’s scout, selecting and buying paintings for her. The most prestigious and best-informed art critic in the world now was acting for the richest and most powerful woman in the world.

A few years later, in 1769, Catherine scored a coup when the famous Dresden collection of the late Count Heinrich von Brühl, minister of foreign affairs to Augustus II, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, came on the market. She paid 180,000 rubles to acquire the collection, which included four more Rembrandts, a Caravaggio, and five works by Rubens. The paintings were delivered by sea, up the Baltic and into the Neva River, where the ships tied up at the Winter Palace quay only fifty feet from the palace doors. For the next quarter of a century, this was a frequent sight in St. Petersburg: vessels from France, Holland, and England lying against the quay, unloading packing crates and boxes containing paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, Franz Hals, and Van Dycks. Inside the palace, Catherine had the crates opened in her presence alone so as to see and judge them first. As the containers were unpacked and the paintings emerged and were propped against the walls, she stood in front of them and walked back and forth studying them, trying to understand them. In her first years of collecting, Catherine valued the paintings she bought less for their visual beauty or artistic technique than for their intellectual and narrative content and for the notice and prestige their acquisition conferred on her.

On March 25, 1771, the empress surprised Europe again by buying the famous collection of Pierre Crozat, which, since the collector’s death, had passed through many hands. It included eight works by Rembrandt, four by Veronese, a dozen by Rubens, seven by Van Dyck, and several by Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The entire collection came to her with a single exception: Van Dyck’s portrait of King Charles I of England, who had been beheaded by Oliver Cromwell. Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, bought this painting because she was convinced that she had Stuart blood. Catherine was pleased when Diderot told her that he had succeeded in acquiring the collection for half its value. Four months later in the same year, Catherine bought 150 paintings from the collection of the Duc de Choiseul. Again, Diderot, who arranged the purchase, estimated that she had paid less than half the market value.

In 1773, Diderot and Grimm both came to St. Petersburg. Once back in France, Grimm took over Diderot’s role as Catherine’s agent in Paris. She felt more at ease with Grimm; Diderot, like Voltaire, seemed to her a great man who had to be handled carefully; Grimm was a clever, congenial man with whom she exchanged an informal correspondence of more than fifteen hundred letters. Grimm spread his net wide on Catherine’s behalf: it was Grimm, for example, who acquired for her a copy of the sculptor Houdon’s extraordinarily lifelike statue of a seated Voltaire. The original is now in the Comédie Française; Catherine’s copy is in the Hermitage Museum.

In 1778, the empress received news from her ambassador in London that George Walpole, the spendthrift grandson and heir of Sir Robert Walpole, intended to sell the family’s collection of paintings. Robert Walpole, a Whig who had been prime minister for more than twenty years under George I and George II, had been a lifelong collector of paintings. For thirty-three years, since Robert Walpole’s death, they had been hanging in the family home at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Walpole’s grandson, in order to pay his debts and support his passion for raising greyhounds, had decided to sell the entire collection, the finest and most famous private art collection in England, and among the finest in the world. There were almost two hundred paintings, including Rembrandt’s Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, fifteen works by Van Dyck, and thirteen works by Rubens. Catherine wanted them all. After two months of negotiations, she acquired the entire collection for thirty-six thousand pounds.

The consequence was a storm of public indignation in England. That a foreign empress should be allowed to buy and carry away a British national treasure was intolerable. More than a collection of paintings was being removed from the country; a whole chapter of British history and culture was being shipped away. Horace Walpole, the writer and aesthete who was the grandson’s uncle, had always coveted the collection and expected that one day it would come to him. He called what had happened a “theft.” If he couldn’t have the paintings, he said, “I would rather they were sold to the crown of England than to that of Russia, where they will be burned in a wooden palace at the first insurrection.” A public subscription campaign to buy back the paintings failed. Catherine was never worried. Writing to Grimm, she said, “The Walpole paintings are longer to be had for the simple reason that your humble servant has already got her claws on them and will no more let them go than a cat would a mouse.”

The Walpole purchase confirmed Catherine’s reputation as Europe’s foremost collector of art and as the leading prospective customer for all owners with major collections to sell. She continued buying, although more selectively. In 1779, when Grimm recommended purchasing the collection of the French Comte de Baudouin, which contained nine Rembrandts, two Rubenses, and four Van Dycks, she held back, complaining about the price. Grimm reported, “The Comte de Baudouin leaves it to your Majesty to decide conditions, timing, and all other considerations.” Catherine admitted, “It would indeed be discourteous to refuse such a generous offer,” but she did not concede until 1784. “The world is a strange place and the number of happy people very small,” she wrote to Grimm. “I can see that the Comte de Baudouin is not going to be happy until he sells his collection and it appears that I am the one destined to make him happy.” She sent Grimm fifty thousand rubles. When the paintings arrived and were uncrated, Catherine wrote to Grimm, “We are prodigiously delighted.”

Many wealthy Europeans wished to be considered connoisseurs, and competition in the art market was keen. Catherine was the leader; she was an immensely rich collector who trusted her agents and possessed the self-confidence of one who wants only the best and is willing to pay for it. Later, she confessed that ego and prestige played a part; that she loved to possess, to amass. “It is not love of art,” she admitted, in part facetiously. “It is voracity. I am a glutton.” Her agents continued to buy everything available of beauty and value. During her reign, Catherine’s collection expanded to almost four thousand paintings. She became the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe.

Catherine was more than a collector; she was also a builder. It was through architecture as well as her collection of paintings that she was determined to leave on St. Petersburg a cultural mark that time would not obliterate. During her reign, architects of genius were commissioned to create elegant public buildings, palaces, mansions, and other structures, all examples and reminders of the larger world she wished Russia to join. Elizabeth had also been a builder, but now Elizabethan baroque exuberance, as manifested by Rastrelli, was succeeded by a sober, pure, neoclassical style. Catherine’s buildings were intended to represent in form and stone her personal character and taste. She preferred to combine simplicity with elegance, employing stately columns and geometrical façades built of granite and marble rather than Rastrelli’s brick and painted plaster.

The huge, baroque Winter Palace, Rastrelli’s signature masterpiece, had taken eight years to build and was completed in 1761, the year Elizabeth died. Painted apple-green and white, with a façade that rose 450 feet, it was a massive structure of 1,050 rooms and 117 staircases. Six months later, when Catherine reached the throne, she found this palace crushing in size and herself stifled by its lush decor. With her love of rationality and order, she rejected the ornate atmosphere of gold, blue, and glitter and looked for an escape. She disliked pomp and crowds, as well as architectural frills; she preferred informal gatherings in small rooms where she could enjoy the intimate companionship of a few close friends. She also wanted a spacious, well-lighted hall nearby to serve as a gallery in which to hang the paintings now arriving on the quay below. To create such a refuge, she turned to a French architect brought to Russia by Ivan Shuvalov, Elizabeth’s favorite during the final years of her reign. Shuvalov had persuaded the empress to permit the founding of a permanent Academy of Art and subsequently had persuaded the French architect Michel Vallin de la Mothe to come to St. Petersburg and build a gallery to house this academy. Catherine, then a grand duchess, had admired Mothe’s new building when it was finished in 1759, and, once on the throne, she commissioned the architect to build something for her.

In 1765, Mothe designed for Catherine a private retreat and art gallery in which to hang her new paintings. She called it her Hermitage, and subsequently it became known as the Little Hermitage. Mothe attached the three-story building as an annex to Rastrelli’s enormous Winter Palace, and, somehow, perhaps because of its far smaller size, its neoclassical façade was compatible with the huge, ornate Winter Palace next door. Throughout her reign, she used the smaller building as a European town house in which to read, work, and talk. It was here that she met Diderot on his visit to St. Petersburg, Grimm on his two visits, the British ambassador James Harrris, and many others. She could also stroll through its gallery, by herself or surrounded by friends, and reflect on her latest treasures.

“You should know our mania for building is stronger than ever,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in 1779. “It is a diabolical thing. It consumes money and the more you build, the more you want to build. It’s a sickness like being addicted to alcohol.” She built mostly for others, however. In 1766, she had commissioned Antonio Rinaldi to construct a country palace for Gregory Orlov at Gatchina, thirty miles south of St. Petersburg. It was to Gatchina that Orlov invited Jean-Jacque Rousseau; it was to Gatchina, too, that Catherine placed Orlov in a month’s “quarantine” when, in a rage, he rode back from the south having learned that he had been replaced as Catherine’s favorite by the hapless Vasilchikov. In 1768, she commissioned Rinaldi to build the Marble Palace for Orlov in St. Petersburg, set in a garden facing the Neva River. Rather than constructing a palace of brick and then coating the brick with thick layers of stucco painted in bright colors as Rastrelli might have done, Rinaldi built Orlov’s palace of gray and red granite, faced with different shades of marble: pink, white, and blue-gray. On the façade, Catherine inscribed, “In grateful friendship.”

Of all the private palaces built for others by Catherine, the largest and most spectacular was constructed for Potemkin. She chose a Russian architect, Ivan Starov, who had spent a decade studying in Paris and Rome. Starov built the unique neoclassical Tauride Palace; when it was finished in 1789, it was considered the finest private residence in Russia. Its domed entry hall led to a gallery of 230 feet lined by Ionic columns and opening onto an enormous winter garden. In 1906, when Tsar Nicholas II established the first Russian State Duma, or parliament, this body, soon to become irrelevant, sat in the Tauride Palace.

For all the responsibility she gave to Starov, he was not the architect who worked most closely with Catherine and who most fully reflected her personal taste. This was a quiet, unpretentious Scotsman, Charles Cameron. Born in 1743, Cameron was a Jacobite who had studied in Rome. Fascinated by the design of classical antiquities, he had written a book on ancient Roman baths. When he arrived in Russia in the summer of 1779, he was already well known as a designer of neoclassical interiors and furniture. Catherine commissioned him to redesign and decorate her private apartments in the palace at Tsarskoe Selo where she spent her summers. Just as she disliked Rastrelli’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, she found equally unlivable the enormous, bright blue, pistachio green, and white baroque palace Rastrelli had built for Elizabeth at Tsarskoe Selo. Its façade of 326 feet was too large for her; its endless row of elaborately decorated public rooms seemed to her like an ornamented army barracks. Catherine’s first commission for Cameron was to remodel and redecorate the private apartment she used in the palace. This assignment was a test of Cameron’s taste and skill. He created simple, elegant rooms, gentle in color: milky white, light blues, greens, and violet. “I never cease to be surprised by this work,” Catherine wrote Grimm. “I have never seen anything to equal it.” Thereafter, she allowed, and then encouraged, Cameron to use only the most expensive materials: agate, jasper, lapis, malachite, and bronze.

In 1780, the empress asked Cameron to build a palace for her son, Grand Duke Paul, and his wife, Maria, at Pavlovsk, three miles from Tsarskoe Selo. In 1777, at the birth of her grandson Alexander, the empress had given the couple a thousand acres and a large English park with ponds, bridges, temples, statues, and colonnades. Cameron went to work on the palace, which became Maria’s place of refuge during her many years of widowhood. Today, restored from the terrible damage it suffered during World War II, it is considered a masterpiece.

Cameron’s next commission was the transformation of another part of the great palace at Tsarskoe Selo. He created the Agate Pavilion, three rooms with walls of solid jasper interspersed with red agate. His ultimate triumph followed: the terrace and colonnade that bears his name, the Cameron Galley. This marble gallery is 270 feet long, set on a granite base with an open-air colonnaded balcony featuring slender Ionic columns. It was placed at the far end of Rastrelli’s palace near Catherine’s new, private apartment and at a sharp left angle, making it perpendicular to the long line of the main building. Between the columns in this covered gallery, Catherine placed more than fifty bronze busts of Greek and Roman philosophers and orators. Surrounded by figures she admired, she sat and read during the summer. When she rose, she could walk to the end of he gallery, which opened onto a sweeping curved staircase divided into two branches, one with steps, the other with a ramp, leading down to the park. In her later years, she could choose to walk slowly up or down, or be pushed in a wheelchair, to or from the park.

After Cameron, Catherine’s favorite architect was Giacomo Quarenghi, an Italian also designing and building in neoclassical style. Quarenghi arrived in Russia in 1780, two years after Cameron. He began by designing the neoclassical Palladian Theater at the Litttle Hermitage, decorating it with marble columns and statues of playwrights and composers. Quarenghi also designed the austere Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo for Catherine’s beloved grandson Alexander, who became Tsar Alexander I. A century later this palace became the country home of Catherine’s great-great-great-grandson, Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family.

Not all of the artists encouraged and supported by Catherine came from abroad. The best Russian students at the Academy of Art were being sent abroad in groups of twelve at state expense to spend two, four, or more years studying in France, Italy, or Germany. The greatest portraitists of Catherine’s time were both Ukrainians, Dmitry Levitsky and Vladimir Borovikovsky; Borovikovsky’s best-known portrait depicts an elderly Catherine walking her dog in the park of Tsarskoe Selo. Another Russian-born artist of Catherine’s day was the architect Georg Friedrich Velten, whose father had come to Russia as Peter the Great’s master cook. The younger Velten studied architecture abroad and, on returning, was commissioned to remove the wooden quays along the Neva River and to face the embankments with Finnish granite. The architectural continuity of this work, stretching for twenty-four miles along the river, gave the waterfront a stately elegance. At the same time, the solid granite quays served as landing stages where both river traffic and seagoing vessels could tie up and discharge cargo.

If Catherine sought straight, pure classical lines in her buildings, she wanted the opposite in her parks and gardens. When she transformed the formal Dutch and French gardens at Tsarskoe Selo, her adviser and chief gardener was John Busch, an Englishman of Hanoverian origin, who spoke to the empress in German. Busch’s language ability had been useful when he was cast as the German “innkeeper” during Emperor Joseph II’s visit to Tsarskoe Selo as “Count Falkenstein.” Busch retained the post of gardener for years, and when he retired, he was succeeded by his son, Joseph. Busch also found himself related to Cameron. On arriving in Tsarskoe Selo, the Scottish architect, speaking no Russian or French, moved into Busch’s house; eventually, he married Busch’s daughter.

Catherine helped design the new park. She liked flowers, shrubs, monuments, obelisks, triumphal arches, canals, and winding paths, and Busch laid these out for her. She wrote to Voltaire, “Now I love to distraction gardens in the English style, the curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes … and I hold in contempt straight lines.… I hate fountains that torture water and force it into a course contrary to its nature.… In a word, Anglomania rules my plantomania.” At the end of her working day, she walked in the park in a plain dress, exercising her dogs and mingling with the public, which, if decently dressed, was freely admitted. It was in the park at Tsarskoe Selo that Alexander Pushkin set the penultimate scene in his story of the Pugachev rebellion, The Captain’s Daughter, written forty years after Catherine’s death. A young woman, the distressed eighteen-year-old betrothed of an imprisoned and wrongly condemned young officer caught up in the rebellion, is walking in the park. She happens to meet a plainly dressed, unaccompanied, middle-aged woman sitting on a bench. The older woman asks why she is upset. The young woman tells her story and says she hopes to find a way to beg for mercy from the empress. The questioner, who “seemed to be about forty,” has “a plump and rosy face … an expression of calm and dignity … blue eyes … a slight smile … and an indescribable charm.” She tells the anxious girl that she often goes to court and will pass her story along to the empress, encouraging her not to lose hope. Soon after, the young woman is summoned to the palace and taken to the empress’s dressing room, where she realizes that the woman she met in the park was Catherine herself. The young officer is pardoned and despair is transformed into joy.

It was not simply her unmatched collection of paintings or the elegant neoclassical palaces she built for herself and others that made Catherine’s reputation as a patron of the arts. The single most famous artistic work produced in Russia during her reign was Étienne Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great. Since its unveiling in 1782, this unique masterpiece, commissioned by Catherine in a deliberate effort to assert her claim to the legacy of the greatest of Russian tsars, has stood for two and a quarter centuries on the bank of the Neva River in the middle of the city Peter founded.

Empress Elizabeth, Peter’s daughter, idolized her father, but she had never erected what Catherine considered an appropriate monument to him. Now Catherine, not born a Russian but hoping to be accepted as the great tsar’s true political heir, decided that there should be a supreme visual tribute to the figure who had made Russia a great European power. She considered herself, a daughter of Europe coming to Russia eighteen years after Peter’s death, as resuming his journey to civilization and greatness. She wanted Russians to understand and accept this connection between them.

Because she believed that no one in Russia had sufficient talent to do the work she wanted done, she instructed her ambassador in Paris, then Prince Dmitry Golitsyn, to find a French sculptor to design and cast a heroic equestrian statue in bronze. The price originally offered was 300,000 livres. Golitsyn approached three well-known French sculptors; they asked 450,000, 400,000, and 600,000 livres. Golitsyn then spoke to his friend Diderot, and Diderot spoke to the sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, director of the sculpture workshop of the Royal Sèvres porcelain factory. Falconet seemed an unlikely candidate. The son of a poor carpenter, he was considered competent but not brilliantly talented. Although Catherine had told Golitysn and Diderot that her monument was to be on a grand scale, Falconet was known for his small figures in porcelain, greatly admired by Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour. At fifty-one, he had never worked on a large scale. Nevertheless, he succumbed to Diderot’s persuasion, accepted the empress’s offer, and agreed to work for 25,000 livres per year, saying that he was ready to devote eight years to the work. In fact, he remained in Russia for twelve years.

Falconet arrived in St. Petersburg in 1766, and Catherine greeted him enthusiastically. It pleased her that Falconet had asked less in payment than the sum offered and far less than others had asked. Although in Paris Falconet had a reputation for a prickly ego, once he reached St. Petersburg and began working on the first clay models of the statue he seemed in constant need of his patron’s approval. Catherine obliged by showing him not only enthusiasm but deference. In 1767, when Falconet submitted his first design for the statue of Peter, she protested her lack of knowledge and excused herself from expressing an opinion. She recommended that the artist rely on his own judgment and the probable views of posterity. Falconet argued back, “My posterity is Your Majesty. The other may come when it will.”

“Not at all,” Catherine replied. “How can you submit yourself to my opinion. I do not even know how to draw. The merest schoolboy knows more about sculpture than I do.”

Pleased by the value the empress placed on his judgement, Falconet began to offer advice on the paintings that Diderot was buying and sending. His comments were often obsequious. “What a charming picture,” he wrote of a painting by a lesser-known artist. “What magnificent brushwork! What beautiful tones! What a sweet little head of Aphrodite! What an admirable consistency!” Concerning another painting, he said, “We should fall on our knees before it. Anyone who dares to think otherwise has neither faith nor morals. After all, I do know something about it; it is practically my profession.” To which Catherine replied, “I think you are right. I am well aware of the reason I cannot approve. It is because I don’t understand enough to see in it all that you do.” Often, after taking a private first look at her new paintings, Catherine wanted to share them with Falconet. “My paintings are beautiful,” she wrote about one arriving shipment. “When would you like to come and see them?”

Catherine may have assumed an ignorance of art, but in imagining her statue of Peter, she knew what she wanted. Falconet had never hoped to work on the scale that the empress was demanding, but her high expectations elevated his design and effort. In order to help him understand the appearance and movements of a rearing horse, the empress made available two of her favorite animals, along with their trainers, who could make them rear as the artist wished. Meanwhile, Falconet’s apprentice, eighteen-year-old Marie-Anne Collot, who had come with him from Paris, began working on the head and face of the tsar, using Peter’s death mask and the portraits available. She remained in Russia as long as Falconet and later married the sculptor’s artist son who came to visit.

By the summer of 1769, Falconet’s work on the statue was sufficiently advanced to allow the public to see the model. Not every reaction was favorable. One point of contention was the presence of the serpent the sculptor had placed beneath the horse’s rear hooves. Falconet was told that the creature was inappropriate and should be removed by people who did not realize that the support given by attachment to the serpent was essential. Without the three points made up by the hooves and tail resting on the serpent’s back, the horse would not stand. “They have not made, as I have, the calculation of forces which I need,” the sculptor declared of his critics. “They do not know that if their advice were followed, the work would not survive at all.” Catherine had no intention of getting involved in the controversy and replied to Falconet, “There is an old song which says ‘what will be, will be.’ That is my response to the serpent. Your reasons are good.”

By the spring of 1770, the model was complete, and there were more complaints. Falconet was said to have represented the Russian hero dressed as a Roman emperor, provoking leaders of the Orthodox Church to complain that this Frenchman had made Peter resemble a pagan monarch. Catherine calmed these critics by declaring that Peter was wearing an idealized representation of Russian costume. Later, Catherine wrote again to reassure her sensitive artist: “I hear only praise of the statue. I have heard from only one person a comment which was that she wished the clothing was more pleated, so that stupid people would not think it was a chemise, but you can’t please everybody.” Finally when the completed clay version was unveiled, Catherine still had to reassure the nervous Falconet, who now was worrying that there seemed to be no reaction to his work; people weren’t speaking to him, he complained. Again, Catherine tried to reassure him. “I know that … in general everyone is very happy,” she told him. “If people don’t say anything to you, it is out of delicacy. Some feel they aren’t qualified enough; others are perhaps afraid of displeasing you by telling you their opinion; still more can’t see a thing. Don’t take everything the wrong way.”

While the colossal statue was being molded, the sculptor and his patron were trying to find a base on which to mount the work. Prospectors searching in nearby Finnish Karelia for granite for the new Neva quays had discovered an enormous, monolithic rock, deeply embedded in marsh. When unearthed, it was twenty-two feet high, forty-two feet long, and thirty-four feet wide. Its weight, experts calculated, was fifteen hundred tons. Catherine decided that this Ice Age boulder must serve as the pedestal for her statue. To bring it to St. Petersburg, a system was worked out that in itself was an engineering feat. Once winter came and the ground was frozen, the boulder was dragged four miles to the sea. It was cradled in a metallic sledge, which rolled over copper balls serving the function of modern ball bearings; the balls rolled in tracks hollowed out in logs laid end to end. It took capstans, pulleys, and a thousand men to inch the stone along, a hundred yards a day, from the forest clearing to the coast of the Gulf of Finland. There, a specially constructed barge was waiting; once it was loaded, the barge was supported on each side by a large warship to prevent its capsizing. In this fashion, the boulder moved slowly across the gulf and was towed up the Neva River, to be brought ashore, maneuvered into position, and deposited at its final site on the riverbank.

By this time, five years had gone by. Another four years were spent finding the right casting master and constructing a mold to cast the immense mass of copper and tin into the form of the statue. Horse and rider together would weigh sixteen tons, with the thickness of the bronze varying from one inch to a quarter of an inch. At one point in the casting, the mold broke, pouring out molten bronze. Fires started and were extinguished, and then the melted, hardened metal had to be pried and scraped up, remelted and recast. Failure followed failure and money drained away. Falconet’s relations with Catherine frayed. What had been enthusiasm and encouragement on her part turned to indifference and irritation. Falconet, nervous and irascible, was unable to stand up to the empress, who could not understand the constant delays. At first, he had pleased her with his artistic temperament; eventually she wearied of it. Writing to Grimm and commissioning him to hire two Italian architects, she expressed her frustration: “You will choose honest and reasonable people, not dreamers like Falconet; [I want] people who walk on the earth, not in the air.”

Falconet remained in Russia for nearly twelve years, but eventually, he could not continue. In 1778, tired of the delays, exasperated by criticism, and broken in spirit and health, Falconet asked permission to leave, Catherine paid him what was due but refused to see him. He returned to Paris, where he became director of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. In 1783, he suffered a stroke, although he lived another eight years. He continued to write about art, but he never sculpted again.

After Falconet’s departure, another four years—sixteen years in all since the sculptor had come to Russia—were to pass before his statue was unveiled. Catherine did not invite the sculptor to return for the ceremony. But time has made up for her ingratitude. The result of his twelve years of work became a permanent landmark in St. Petersburg, Russia’s best-known monument and, then and now, one unparalleled in the world. During the nine-hundred-day siege in the Second World War, the city suffered constant German air and artillery bombardment. Falconet’s statue, exposed on the riverbank, was never touched.

On August 7, 1782, Catherine presided over the formal unveiling of the statue. Looking down from a window of the nearby Senate building at the massed Guards regiments and an immense crowd in the square below, the empress gave a signal. The drapery fell away and cries of admiration and awe burst from the crowd.

There was Peter, immortalized in bronze, his head almost fifty feet in the air. He wore a simple Roman shift and was crowned with a laurel wreath. He faced the Neva flowing before him. His left hand grasped the reins of his horse, rearing on the crest of a wave frozen in stone. His right arm was outstretched, the hand pointing across the river to the fortress and the first buildings of the city he had created. The serpent, symbolizing the difficulties he had overcome, lay trodden and crushed under the horse’s rear hooves. The horse’s tail rested on the serpent, providing the three points needed to give the statue balance. On either side of the granite base, metallic letters embedded in the stone bore the inscriptions TO PETER THE FIRST, FROM CATHERINE THE SECOND—on one side in Russian, on the other in Latin. Thus the empress paid tribute to her predecessor and identified herself with him.

In his classic poem “The Bronze Horseman,” Alexander Pushkin wrote:

The Image with an arm flung wide,

Sat on his brazen horse astride …

Him, Who moveless and aloft and dim

Our city by the sea had founded,

Whose will was Fate. Appalling there,

He sat, begirt with mist and air.

What thoughts engrave his brow!

What hidden Power and Authority He claims!

Proud charger, whither art thou ridden

Where leapest thou? And where, on whom

Wilt plant they hoof?

This was the greatest of all Russian poets’ description of a French sculptor’s representation of the greatest of Russian emperors, created by the inspiration and determination of a German-born empress. The statue was the culmination and embodiment of Catherine’s effort to identify herself with her predecessor. Catherine was Peter’s equal—his only equal—in vision, strength of purpose, and achievement during the centuries that Russia was ruled by tsars, emperors, and empresses.

70

“They Are Capable of Hanging Their King from a Lamppost!”

HIS MOST CHRISTIAN MAJESTY, Louis XVI, king of France and Navarre, was a gawky, amiable, well-intentioned man whose joys in life came from eating heartily, hunting stags, and tinkering with the inner workings of locks. Surrounded by ministers offering contradictory advice, he had difficulty making decisions. Demands that he choose one way or another threw him into confusion; once he had chosen, he continued to vacillate and sometimes changed his mind. This unfortunate thirty-five-year-old monarch was in his sixteenth year on the throne when, in May 1789, he summoned the Estates-General to meet at Versailles. Louis did not do this because he wished to, or because it was part of the usual practice of French kings. Rather, Louis acted because he had no choice; his government desperately needed to raise money to avoid national bankruptcy.

Outwardly, France still seemed to be at the summit of European culture and power. Its population of twenty-seven million was the largest in Europe. It possessed the richest, most productive agriculture on the continent. It was the center of intellectual thought, and its language was the lingua franca of literate, educated people everywhere. Since William of Normandy had triumphed at Hastings in 1066, it had been the victor on numberless battlefields. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, the great kings of France—Francis I, Henri IV, Louis XIV—had been preeminent among the monarchs of Europe. But when, in 1715, the Sun King had been succeeded by his great-grandson, Louis XV, and still the endless wars continued, success had become intermittent. In the Seven Years’ War, ending in 1763, England had stripped away most of France’s important colonial possessions in North America and India. In return, by backing the American colonists in their fight for independence, France had taken revenge. The euphoria following the military triumph in America was as great in Paris as in Philadelphia.

But wars cost money and the bills had to be paid. The nation’s finances had been depleted, then ravaged, by war; still, government expenditures continued to mount. The treasury responded by borrowing, and by 1788 interest on the debt absorbed half the government’s spending. Taxes, levied most heavily on the lower class, were crushing, and in the fertile land of France, common people were impoverished. Poor harvests in 1787 and 1788 resulted in grain shortages and rising food prices. Facing financial collapse, the king and the government had no choice but to call a meeting of the Estates-General, France’s long-dormant representative body. By summoning this assembly, the government was admitting that it could raise taxes no further without the consent of the nation.

The Estates-General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789. Three estates—classifications of people—were represented by twelve hundred delegates. The clergy, considered the First Estate, owned 10 percent of the land in France, were exempt from most taxes, and had three hundred delegates. The nobility, the Second Estate, owned 30 percent of the land, enjoyed many tax exemptions, and made up another three hundred delegates. One hundred of these noblemen were liberal-minded, and fifty, under forty years old, were ready, even eager, for change. The commoners of the Third Estate, represented by six hundred delegates, were there to speak for the people who made up 97 percent of the French population. The great majority of these people were agricultural peasants, although the Third Estate also included urban laborers. Bread constituted three-fourths of an ordinary person’s diet and cost one-third to one-half of his or her income. The bourgeoisie, or middle class—bankers, lawyers, doctors, artists, writers, shopkeepers, and others—were also reckoned among the Third Estate. Plagued by heavy taxes, food shortages, unemployment, poverty, and general restlessness, the Third Estate was anxious, even desperate, for change. Its delegates were aware, however, that they had been summoned not for the purpose of improving the condition of the people they represented but because the government was desperate for money.

Within a few weeks of the first meeting, delegates from the two privileged estates, the clergy and the nobility, succeeded in making the commoners feel their inferior status. On June 20, members of the Third Estate arrived at the usual meeting place to find themselves locked out by armed guards and forced to stand and wait in a heavy rain. Someone remembered the existence of a covered tennis court nearby and it was to this place that the six hundred delegates hurried. Once there, they vented their feelings by declaring themselves to be the true National Assembly and swore “to God and the country never to be separated until we have written a solid and equitable constitution as our constituents have asked us to.” Forty-seven members of the liberal nobility joined this new National Assembly and swore to what became known as the Tennis Court Oath.

The Third Estate had no permission to declare itself or act as a national assembly, and the king threatened to dissolve the entire Estates-General, by force if necessary. The Count of Mirabeau, a nobleman elected as a commoner who quickly became the leading presence among the delegates of the Third Estate, confronted the king’s messengers. “Go tell those who have sent you,” he said, “that we are here by the will of the people and that we will not be dispersed except at the point of bayonets.” On June 27, a decree from Louis terminated all meetings of the Estates-General, declaring them “null, illegal, and unconstitutional.” Riots in cities and uprisings in the countryside were the result. The most famous of these was the storming of the Bastille.

The Bastille, a fourteenth-century fortress with eight round towers and walls five feet thick, had been converted into a state prison to which men who had broken the law or offended the government were spirited away, sometimes never to reappear. By 1789, however, this had changed and the prison had become more a symbol of tyranny than a grim place of incarceration. The Marquis de Sade, a prisoner in the Bastille until a week before the fortress was stormed, hung family portraits on his walls and kept a wardrobe of fashionable clothing and a library of dozens of volumes. On the day of the attack, the fortress contained only seven prisoners: five forgers and two people who were mentally adrift. Still, because it was considered a royal arsenal and possessed a garrison of 114 soldiers, the government decided to use it as a place to deposit 250 barrels of gunpowder.

On July 14, twenty thousand Parisians, incensed by the royal dismissal of the Estates-General, the presence of a growing number of soldiers in Paris, and the stocking of gunpowder, marched on the Bastille. A few hours later, the fortress had surrendered, and the mob had liberated the seven prisoners and taken possession of the gunpowder. The governor of the fortress was stabbed with knives, swords, and bayonets, his neck was sawed through with a pocket knife, and his head, mounted on a pike, was bobbing at the head of a street parade.

The fall of the Bastille was a political and psychological turning point. The National Assembly wrote a new constitution and voted on August 4 to abolish most of the aristocratic rights and fiscal privileges of the nobility and clergy. On August 26, the assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a charter of liberties whose wording reflected the ideas of the Enlightenment and the language of the American Declaration of Independence.

Louis XVI and his family remained at Versailles. On October 5, a procession of five thousand women (and men disguised as women; it was rightly believed that the king would not order soldiers guarding the palace to fire on women) walked ten miles from Paris, invaded the palace built by the Sun King, and, the following day, forced the royal family to return with them to Paris. The family was installed in the Tuileries Palace in a state of semidetention (afternoon carriage rides in city parks were permitted). They remained there for nine months while the leaders of the National Assembly, most of them intellectuals and lawyers, with a few noblemen, all of whom thought in terms of maintaining order while bringing reform, tried to create a new form of constitutional monarchy. While they worked, and until the spring of 1791—twenty-four months after the summoning of the Estates-General, and twenty-two months after the storming of the Bastille—France was governed by a National Assembly with a monarchist majority led by Mirabeau.

On the night of March 25, 1791, Mirabeau took two dancers from the opera home with him, slept with them, became violently ill, and, eight days later died. His departure removed the one figure whose political reputation and oratorical powers might have ensured the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. Even without him, on May 3, the National Assembly proclaimed a new constitution, establishing a limited monarchy. The monarch now would be titled King of the French rather than King of France, but France remained a monarchy and bourgeois politicians remained in control.

On June 20, Louis and Marie Antoinette opened the door to personal and political catastrophe. Managing to escape from the Tuileries disguised as servants, the king and queen fled Paris with their children and headed toward the eastern frontier and the Austrian Netherlands. The royal carriage traveled no faster than seven miles an hour because the queen insisted that the whole family remain together in a single large overweight vehicle. Believing that they were out of danger, they stopped for the night at Varennes, only a few miles from the border. There, the awkward figure wearing a bottle-green coat and a lackey’s hat was recognized, apprehended, and, with his family, ignominiously brought back to Paris.

Politically, the failure of the flight to Varennes cut the ground from under the king. It discredited the leaders of the National Assembly, who had been negotiating with Louis to create a new form of monarchy and who now felt themselves betrayed. Many abroad also condemned the king. Until Louis’s capture and return from Varennes, Catherine had still regarded him as a free agent—weak, but free. But after he had been trundled back to Paris like an animal in a cage, any illusion of freedom disappeared. “I fear that the greatest obstacle to the escape of the king is the king himself,” Catherine said. “Knowing her husband, the queen does not leave him, and she is right, but it complicates the problem.”

The disastrous muddle of the escape attempt spurred talk elsewhere of the need to rescue the monarch and his family. Before the end of June, Marie Antoinette’s brother, the new emperor Leopold II of Austria, appealed to all European powers to assist in the restoration of the French monarchy. Leopold, succeeding his older brother, Joseph II, on the imperial throne, had been emperor for only a year. His appeal was halfhearted, even duplicitous, since at that moment he had no intention of leading, or even joining, an anti-French military crusade. But Leopold’s concern did precipitate a meeting with King Frederick William of Prussia, at the spa of Pillnitz, in Saxony. The two monarchs were joined by Louis XVI’s arrogant brother the Count of Artois, who arrived uninvited and demanded immediate armed intervention.

The Declaration of Pillnitz, signed on August 27, 1791, stopped short of the demand made by Artois. It restated Leopold’s argument that the fate of the French monarchy was of “common interest” and invited other European monarchs to assist in taking “the most effective means of putting the king of France back on his throne.” No concrete steps were proposed. Leopold was cautious because the empire he had inherited from his brother was in a state of revolt in the Netherlands and dissent elsewhere. At the same time, he could not ignore the fate of his sister and brother-in-law in Paris, who, he realized, could now be in physical danger. On the other hand, Leopold worried that the kind of military action Artois was urging might increase his sister’s peril. Leopold’s final decision was that he could act against France only in concert with other powers, and, in this stipulation, he knew he was safe. Therefore, the Pillnitz Declaration committed Austria to nothing. In fact, its only achievement was to so outrage the French National Assembly that, eight months later, in April 1792, France declared war on Austria. By then, Leopold, who died suddenly in March, had been replaced by his inexperienced twenty-four-year-old son, Francis II.

During the first two years of the French Revolution—from the spring of 1789 to the summer of 1791—information about events in France was freely available in the Russian press. No censorship was imposed on news from France, just as news about the newborn United States, which had just drafted its own republican constitution, was openly presented. The summoning of the Estates-General, the declaration by the Third Estate that it had transformed itself into the National Assembly, the storming of the Bastille, the surrender of noble privileges, the Declaration of the Rights of Man—all this was published in full Russian translation in the St. Petersburg Gazette and the Moscow Gazette. According to Philippe de Ségur, the fall of the Bastille aroused widespread enthusiasm: “French, Russians, Danes, Germans, Englishmen, and Dutch … all congratulated and embraced each other in the street.”

When the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly and Catherine realized that the peasants and the bourgeoisie had been joined by a group of noblemen willing to give up their own political and social privileges, she was astonished. “I cannot believe in the superior talents of cobblers and shoemakers for government and legislation,” she wrote to Grimm. As the weeks went by, astonishment turned to alarm. “It’s a veritable anarchy,” she exclaimed in September 1789. “They are capable of hanging their king from a lamppost!” She was especially concerned about Marie Antoinette. “Above all, I hope that the situation of the queen will match my lively interest in her. Great courage triumphs over great perils. I love her as the dear sister of my best friend, Joseph II, and I admire her courage.… She may be sure that if I can ever be of use to her, I shall do my duty.” But as long as Russia was fighting wars on two fronts—against Turkey in the south and Sweden in the Baltic—she could not do her “duty,” however she might interpret it.

By October 1789, Catherine had realized that if France slid into genuine revolution, it could threaten all European monarchies. This put her in a difficult position with Philippe de Ségur. When the ambassador’s four years of service in Russia were concluded, he came to say goodbye to the empress. Catherine gave him a friendly message for his king and also some personal advice,

I am sad to see you go. You had far better stay here with me than to throw yourself into the eye of the storm which may spread further than you think. Your leanings toward the new philosophy, your passion for liberty will probably lead you to adopt the popular cause. I shall be sorry for I am and shall remain an aristocrat. It is my métier. Remember, you will find France very feverish and very sick.

Ségur, equally distressed, replied, “I am afraid so, Madame, and that is what makes it my duty to return.” When she invited him to stay for dinner and displayed the warmth of her feelings toward him, the parting became difficult. “When I went, I thought I was only going on leave,” he wrote later. “The departure would have been still more painful had I known I was seeing her for the last time.”

Catherine’s comments about events in France became increasingly caustic. The National Assembly was “the Hydra with twelve hundred heads.” In the new governing figures, she discerned “only people who set in motion a machine which they lack the talent and skill to control.… France is the prey of a crowd of lawyers, fools masquerading as philosophers, rascals, young prigs destitute of common sense, puppets of a few bandits who do not even deserve the title of illustrious criminals.” Her defense of monarchy followed from her belief in the need for efficiency in administration and the preservation of public order: “Tell a thousand people to draft a letter, let them debate every phrase, and see how long it takes and what you get.” She hated to see order crumbling and anarchy looming in France because she knew something about anarchy; she had seen it in the Pugachev rebellion.

She was unable to support her views with military action half a continent away, but even before the flight to Varennes, she was not wholly passive. She told her ambassador in Sweden that she wanted the future of France to become the concern of all European monarchs. It was not merely a question of crushing revolution, she wrote, but also of France resuming its role in the European balance of power. Knowing that Gustavus III of Sweden, always in search of glory, coveted the leadership of a monarchist crusade against the revolution in France, she chose him as the figure to support. In October 1791, only a year after the end of the short, pointless Baltic war between Russia and Sweden, she offered to provide Gustavus a subsidy to maintain a corps of twelve thousand Swedish soldiers to be used in an invasion of France. The date discussed for this operation was the spring of 1792.

A violent event in Sweden prevented this military enterprise. On March 5, 1792, Gustavus III was shot in the back and gravely wounded at a masked ball in Stockholm; he died at the end of the month. Although the assassin was a Swedish aristocrat and the issue was peculiar to Swedish politics, Catherine immediately saw it as part of a rising tide of antimonarchical violence. There were police reports that a French agent was on his way to St. Petersburg to assassinate the empress, and the number of guards at the Winter Palace was doubled. There was no further talk of landing Swedish troops in France.

In the spring of 1792 Catherine issued a ten-page memorandum, suggesting measures to suppress anarchy in France, reestablish the monarchy, and set France back on the road to tranquillity and greatness. She began by writing that “the cause of the king of France is the cause of all kings.… All the works of the [French] National Assembly have been devoted to the abolition of the form of monarchy established in France for a thousand years. [Now] it is important to Europe to see France resume her position as a great power.” As to how this could be achieved, she said, “A body of ten thousand men would suffice to march across France from one end to the other.… Perhaps mercenaries—the best would be the Swiss—could be hired, and perhaps others from the German princes. With this force, one could deliver France from the bandits, reestablish the monarchy, chase away the impostors, punish the rascals and deliver the kingdom from oppression.” Once a restoration was achieved, the empress advised against widespread, vindictive repression. “A few genuine revolutionaries should be punished and amnesty should follow for those who have submitted and returned to their allegiance.” She believed that many delegates in the National Assembly would accept forgiveness, realizing that “they had gone beyond their powers because the electorate had not demanded the abolition of the monarchy, much less the Christian religion.” It was essential in the newly restored kingdom, she continued, that there be a balance of the original three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. The property of the clergy should be restored, the nobility should regain their privileges, and the popular and valid demand for liberty “could be satisfied by good and wise laws.” Before everything else, she wrote, the royal family must be liberated: “As the troops advance, the princes and the troops must focus on the most essential point: the deliverance of the king and the royal family from the hands of the population of Paris.”

This document, written only months before the September massacres, the formal abolition of the French monarchy, and the beheading of the king, was hopelessly naïve; it displays Catherine’s complete misunderstanding of the evolving political, economic, social, and psychological condition of the people of France. Even as Catherine was writing, the radicalization of France was accelerating. The Jacobin Club, immensely powerful in Paris, was extending its membership and influence across the country. Meeting at a former convent of the Jacobins in the rue St.-Honoré, it had begun its revolutionary role as a place for reading and discussion of needed reforms; then it evolved into an arena of radical thought, fiery speeches, and demands for drastic action. Its leaders, Georges Danton, Jean Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre, were reaching the summit of political power. By the summer of 1792, the Paris Commune, the new municipal government supported by the sansculottes—ordinary citizens “without fine knee breeches”—controlled the city. Danton, the new, thirty-year-old minister of justice, assumed responsibility for the royal family at the Tuileries.

On August 10, a mob, organized by the Commune, stormed the Tuileries Palace. Six hundred members of the Swiss Guard protecting the royal family resisted until the king, to prevent bloodshed, ordered them to surrender. The Swiss obeyed, were taken prisoner, and slaughtered. The royal apartments were invaded and the king, his wife, and their children were seized and carried off to the prison of the Temple.

That spring of 1792, Prussia had entered the Austrian war against France. By midsummer, a Prussian army stood on the Rhine, ready to march on Paris. As the army began to move, the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian forces, learned that Louis XVI and his family had been taken from the Tuileries. The duke’s response was to issue a manifesto threatening that Paris would be singled out for “an exemplary and unforgettable act of vengeance … if the king and his family came to any harm.” This threat produced a result opposite to that intended. The Brunswick manifesto seemed to expose Paris to a terrible retribution. Having been told that they had already committed acts for which they would be punished, Parisians were persuaded that they had nothing more to lose. Rumor declared that when the enemy arrived, the population of the city would be massacred.

On July 30, 1792, five hundred men wearing red caps arrived in Paris from Marseilles and the south. Described by one member of the Assembly as “a scum of criminals vomited out of the prisons of Genoa and Sicily,” they had been hired by the Commune to come to Paris to help defend the city. To further bolster these ranks, the Commune drew on the local criminal population. Prisoners were released on condition that they would obey orders given by the Commune.

The savagery of the prison massacres of September 2–8, 1792, was planned. During the final two weeks of August, hundreds of Parisians, described as “presumed traitors,” were arrested. Destined to be killed, they were gathered in prisons to make this more convenient. Many of the prisoners were priests taken from seminaries and churches and accused of antirevolutionary beliefs. Some were former personal servants of the king and queen. Those arrested also included the playwright Pierre Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette’s close friend the Princesse de Lamballe, who had fled to London and then returned to Paris to be with the queen. Most were ordinary people. Danton was not an instigator, but he was aware of what was about to happen. “I don’t give a damn about the prisoners,” he said. “Let them fend for themselves.” Later, he added that “the executions were necessary to appease the people of Paris.” Robespierre said simply that the will of the people had been expressed.

News that the Prussians had seized Verdun reached Paris on Sunday morning, September 2. The massacres began that afternoon. Twenty-four priests being brought to the prison at the Abbaye de St.-Germain-des-Prés were pulled from the carriages transporting them and, before entering at the prison gate, slaughtered with swords, knives, axes, and a shovel on the cobbles of the narrow street. Prisoners already held in the abbey were pushed, one by one, down steps into a garden, where they were hacked to death with knives, hatchets, and a carpenter’s saw. Other bands attacked other prisons: 328 prisoners were slaughtered in the Conciergerie; 226 at the Châtelet; 115, including an archbishop, at a Carmelite convent. At the Bicêtre, 43 adolescent boys were butchered. Thirteen were fifteen-year-olds, three were fourteen, two were thirteen, and one was twelve. Women of all ages including adolescent girls were brutally violated. When the Princesse de Lamballe refused to swear an oath of hatred against the royal couple, she was hacked to death. Her head was taken to the Temple to dance on a pike before the eyes of the king and queen.

On September 9, the French defeated the Prussians at Valmy, ending the allied invasion and forcing the Prussian army to retreat to the Rhine. The French did not stop there; they swept on to capture Mainz and Frankfurt. On September 21, three weeks after the massacres, the French monarchy was abolished and a republic established. In December, the National Assembly proclaimed that wherever France’s armies marched, the existing form of government would be replaced by the rule of the people.

On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. This was too much for some who, until then, had believed in the revolution. General François Dumouriez, the military victor of Valmy, who had been Danton’s friend, deserted to the Austrians; Lafayette had defected after the storming of the Tuileries. The provinces rose against the Paris government and then paid dearly. When Lyon, France’s second city after Paris, capitulated, those to be killed, most of them peasants or laborers. were roped together in groups of two hundred, herded to fields outside the city, and executed by cannon firing grapeshot into the bunched human mass. One of Robespierre’s agents was present and reported to his master: “What delights you would have tasted could you have seen national justice wrought on two hundred and ninety scoundrels! Oh, what majesty! What a lofty tone! It was thrilling to see all those wretches chew the dust!”

A new executive committee of the government, the Committee of Public Safety, was created that included Danton and Robespierre. Eventually, Robespierre decided that the revolution was ideologically impure. A Reign of Terror was instituted “to protect the republic from its internal enemies … those who whether by their conduct, their contacts, their words, or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny or enemies of liberty” or those “who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.” Over nine months, the official count of those executed was sixteen thousand; there were estimates that the Terror actually claimed two or three times that number.

Informed that Louis of France had been sent to the guillotine, a shaken Catherine became physically ill. She remained in seclusion for a week and ordered six weeks of court mourning. She ordered a total break in relations with France. The French chargé d’affaires, Edmond Genet, was expelled. The Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 was annulled and all trade between the two countries was prohibited. No vessel flying the tricolor flag of the revolution was allowed in Russian waters. All Russian subjects living or traveling in France were recalled, and all French citizens in Russia were given three weeks to publicly pledge allegiance to the king of France or leave Catherine’s empire. Of fifteen hundred French citizens in Russia, only forty-three refused to take this oath. In March 1793, two months after his brother’s death, she welcomed the Count of Artois to St. Petersburg, agreed to finance him, and exhorted him to work together with other émigrés. But she still held back from military involvement in the war against France. With Austria and Prussia rebuffed, she believed that little could be achieved without Britain and that Britain had no intention of going to war. William Pitt, the prime minister, had said as much: that British policy was concerned with the security of Europe, not with the nature of the French government. The execution of Louis XVI changed Pitt’s mind. The king’s execution, Pitt said, was “the foulest and most atrocious act the world has ever seen.”^* The French ambassador was ordered to leave England. Once again, France acted first. On February 1, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain.

Six months after her husband’s death, the widowed Marie Antoinette, her hair white at thirty-seven, was taken from her children in the Temple tower and placed in the prison of the Conciergerie. The former queen of France—a Hapsburg archduchess, the daughter of an Austrian empress, the sister of two Austrian emperors, and the aunt of a third—remained alone for two months in a cell eleven feet by six feet. On October 5, 1793, she was placed in a tumbrel and taken through the streets to the guillotine.

The tumbrels continued to roll. The massive blade rose and fell forty, fifty, sixty times a day. Terrified politicians guillotined one another in order to escape the guillotine themselves. Hundreds went to their deaths for no better reason than personal quarrels or neighborhood jealousies; their crime was being “under suspicion.” The victims included twenty peasant girls from Poitou, one nursing a baby while sleeping on the cobbles of the Conciergerie courtyard, awaiting execution. The poet André Chénier was guillotined because he was mistaken for his brother; then, informed of its mistake, the Commune guillotined the brother, too. Antoine Lavoisier, the scientist, requested a short stay of his execution in order to complete an experiment. “The revolution has no need of scientists” was the reply. One of the condemned was the eighty-year-old Marshal Duke de Mouchy, whose elderly wife did not understand what was happening. “Madame, we must go now,” her husband said gently. “God wishes it, let us therefore honor His will. I shall not leave your side. We shall depart together.” As they were taken from the prison, someone shouted, “Courage!” Mouchy replied, “My friend, when I was fifteen, I went into the breach for my king. At eighty, I go to the scaffold for my God. I am not unfortunate.” French émigrés and refugees told these stories to Catherine.

The Terror crested and began to ebb. On July 13, 1793, Marat was stabbed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday. It was on April 5, 1794, that Danton was sent to the guillotine by Robespierre. Three and a half months later, on July 27, 1794, Robespierre’s head rolled into a basket. With the death of Robespierre, the worst of the Terror came to an end. The Directory followed, and, in 1799, the Consulate. A young army general, Napoleon Bonaparte, became first consul until 1804, when he crowned himself emperor. The wars begun by revolutionary France in 1792 continued under Napoleon, until they had spanned twenty-three years. With the downfall of Napoleon, the former Count of Provence, the older of the surviving brothers of Louis XVI, returned to France and ascended the throne as Louis XVIII. He was succeeded by his younger brother, the former Count of Artois, who became King Charles X. Then followed the last king of France, Louis Philippe. None of these three kings was an improvement on the amiable, indecisive Louis XVI, who failed as a monarch but was devoted to his country, endured his imprisonment with dignity, and went to his death bravely and without bitterness.

The lasting symbol of the French Revolution is the guillotine. The executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, reinforced in literature by Dickens’s image of Madame Defarge sitting and knitting at the foot of this implacable machine, have imprinted this method of inflicting death deep on cultural memory.

Originally, the guillotine was designed to give practical effect to the belief that the purpose of capital punishment was the ending of life rather than the inflicting of pain. Until it took its first victim, in April 1792, condemned prisoners in France had sometimes died horribly; they could be broken on the wheel or torn apart by four horses, each tied to one limb of the victim. More generally, noblemen were beheaded by sword or axe and commoners were hanged. But headsman were clumsy and swords and axes dull, while nooses often strangled slowly while the choking victim danced in the air. The guillotine was meant to be humane and deliver an instant, painless death; its inventor, Dr. Jospeh Guillotin, described its operation: “The mechanism falls like thunder; the head flies off; blood spurts; the man is no more.” It was also considered more equitable because it was to be used on all condemned people regardless of class. In any case, it had a long life of service. It was used in imperial Germany, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany, where, between 1933 and 1945, sixteen thousand people were guillotined. It remained a form of execution in France until 1977; four years later France abolished the death penalty.

Whether the guillotine was more humane than the axe, the noose, the electric chair, the firing squad, and lethal injection is a medical, as well as a political and moral, question. The most effective resolution would be to let the question fade away by the universal prohibition of state-inflicted death penalties. While societies struggle toward this goal, a second medical or scientific question may be asked: was death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless? Some believe not. They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness. If this is true, should one believe that some victims were aware of what was happening? Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movement of the eyes, lips, and mouth. As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pinprick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action; that no intelligent awareness was involved. Certainly, the shock of the blow to the spinal column and a sudden, massive drop in cerebral blood pressure must bring a loss of consciousness rapidly, if not instantaneously. But in that flicker of time, was there awareness?

In June 1905, a respected French medical doctor was permitted to experiment with the freshly severed head of a prisoner named Languille. He reported that “immediately after the decapitation … the spasmodic movements ceased.… It was then that I called out in a strong sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up … with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.… Next, Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.… I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.… After several seconds, the eyelids closed.… I called out again, and once more the eyelids lifted and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids … [and] no further movement.”

What awareness, if any, a severed head might have is something that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and tens of thousands of others who died by the guillotine may have discovered. We cannot know.

71

Dissent in Russia, Final Partition of Poland

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION had a dramatic impact on Catherine, not only because the empress was horrified by the degradation, humiliation, and violent destruction of the French monarchy but because she feared that revolutionary fervor would spread. Her belief that she must act to protect herself and Russia precipitated a significant reversal in her early liberal thinking about freedom of thought and expression. In the political and military sphere, her fear of what she called the “French poison” resulted in—or was used to justify—a rare event in European history: the complete disappearance of a large, proud nationstate.

In the beginning, as a young woman and new empress, Catherine had been the admiring friend of the philosophes. Voltaire and Diderot had acclaimed her as the most liberal sovereign in Europe, the Semiramis of the North. By them and from her reading of Montesquieu, she been taught that the best form of government was benevolent autocracy, informed and guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. In her first years on the throne, she had hoped that she could correct or at least ameliorate the workings of some of the more inefficient and unjust institutions in Russia, among them serfdom. She had summoned the Legislative Commission in 1767 and listened to the complaints and recommendations of different classes of people, including peasants. But then had come the Pugachev rebellion. After this, she still had cordial friendships with various philosophes, but she was no longer a disciple. She questioned and often challenged their utopias.

By 1789, after twenty-seven years on the throne, Catherine had achieved some of the liberal goals formulated in her youth. She had helped to create a Russian intelligentsia. Among the nobility, more people attended universities, traveled abroad, spoke foreign languages, and wrote plays, novels, and poetry. Promising young men were sent at state expense to study and acquire knowledge in foreign schools and universities. Educated men, not born to the nobility, had become senior government officials, poets, writers, doctors, architects, and painters. But then, seeming to call into question her early efforts and goals, came the grim reality of Pugachev, followed, twenty years later, by the events in France.

Catherine had observed with dismay the destruction of the French monarchy and the Old Regime. Every month, French émigrés and refugees arrived in Russia with frightful stories. More than any other European monarch, she felt that the ideology of radical France was also directed at her, and the more radical France became, the more defensive and reactionary were her responses. She now discovered dangers implicit in Enlightenment philosophy. Some responsibility for the excesses of the revolution seemed traceable to the writings of philosophers she had admired. For years, their writing had attacked and undermined respect for authority and religion. Were they not, therefore, at least partly responsible? How had they and she failed to see where this path was leading?

In 1791, she ordered all bookshops to register with the Academy of Sciences their catalogs of available books that were opposed to “religion, decency, and ourselves.” In 1792, she ordered the confiscation of a complete edition of the works of Voltaire. In 1793, she ordered provincial governors to forbid the publication of books that appeared “likely to corrupt morals, concerned with the government, and, above all, those dealing with the French revolution.” She began to fear the ease with which revolutionary ideas could cross frontiers, and the importation of French newspapers and books was prohibited. In September 1796, the first formal system of censorship during her reign was established. All private printing presses were closed; all books were to be submitted to a censorship office before publication. One of the first to be affected by these new restraints was a young, intellectual nobleman who had risen to a significant position in the imperial administration.

Alexander Radishchev was born in 1749 in Saratov province, the oldest of eleven children of an educated, noble landowner who possessed three thousand serfs. At thirteen, Alexander entered the Corps des Pages in St. Petersburg and served at court. At seventeen, he was among twelve young men chosen to study philosophy and law at the University of Leipzig at state expense; there, he knew Goethe, a fellow student. In 1771, at twenty-two, he returned to Russia, where he served first as a clerk in the offices of the Senate and then on the legal staff of the College of War. In 1775, Radishchev married and took a post in the College of Commerce, presided over by Alexander Vorontsov, a brother of Catherine’s friend Princess Dashkova. Eventually, he became the director of the St. Petersburg Customs House.

During the 1780s, Radishchev began writing a book, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. In 1790, he printed a few copies on his private home printing press. As required, he submitted a copy to the chief police censor in St. Petersburg. This official glanced briefly at the book’s title, assumed it to be a travelogue, approved it, and returned it to the nobleman in the Customs House. Radishchev then printed six hundred copies anonymously. His timing was unlucky, coming a year after the fall of the Bastille, and while Russia was still at war with Turkey and Sweden.

Radishchev’s Journey was not a travelogue. Instead, it was a passionate indictment of the institution of serfdom and a criticism of the government and social structure that permitted serfdom to exist. He began with an emotional appeal:

Shall we be so devoid of humane feeling, devoid of pity, devoid of the tenderness of noble hearts, devoid of brotherly love, that we endure under our eyes an eternal reproach to us … [by keeping] our comrades, our equal fellow citizens, our beloved brothers in nature, in the heavy fetters of servitude and slavery? The bestial custom of enslaving one’s fellow men … a custom that signifies a heart of stone and a total lack of soul, has spread over the face of the earth. And we Slavs, sons of glory among earth-born generations … have adopted this custom, and, to our shame … to the shame of this age of reason, we have kept it inviolate even to this day.

Radishchev illustrated the effects of serfdom by creating numerous scenes described by “the traveler” as he passed through villages, towns, and staging posts during his journey. He portrayed the abuse of serf labor, the shocking verdicts of corrupt judges, and the defenseless situation of serf women at the mercy of predatory owners. In one episode, three brutal sons of a landlord attack, bind, and gag a beautiful serf maiden on the morning of her wedding day, intending to use her for their “beastly purpose.” The serf bridegroom sees what is happening, charges the three evildoers, routs them, and “breaks the head” of one of them. As punishment, the landlord then orders a merciless flogging of the bridegroom. The young serf accepts this—until he sees the landlord’s three sons dragging his future wife back into their house. He breaks free, saves the girl, and faces his three enemies, whirling a fencepost over his head. At this point, other serfs arrive, and in the ensuing melee, the landlord and his three sons are beaten to death. All of the serfs involved are condemned to penal servitude for life. Radishchev told this story not only as an example of the nature of master-serf relationships but also to warn his readers that many serfs, driven to desperation, were only awaiting a chance to rise in revolt:

Do you know, dear fellow citizens, what destruction threatens us and in what peril we stand? … A stream that is barred in its course becomes more powerful. Once it has burst the dam, nothing can stem its flood. Such are our brothers whom we keep enchained. They are waiting for a favorable chance and time. The alarm bell rings. And the destructive force of bestiality breaks loose with terrifying speed.… Death and fiery desolation will be the answer to our harshness and inhumanity. The more procrastinating and stubborn we have been about the loosening of their fetters, the more violent they will be in their vengefulness. Bring back to your memory the events of former times [Pugachev].… They spared neither sex nor age. They sought more the joy of vengeance than the benefit of broken shackles. This is what awaits us. This is what we must expect.

As a palliative to this grim prospect, Radishchev offered a plan for the gradual emancipation of serfs. All domestic serfs were to be emancipated at once; agricultural serfs would be granted full ownership of private plots and then be allowed to use their profits to buy their own freedom. They would be allowed to marry without asking their masters’ permission. And they would be judged in courts of their peers—that is, by other peasants.

Catherine read the book in June 1790 and filled the margins with notes. She gave Radishchev intellectual credit: “[The author] has learning enough, and has read many books … he has imagination enough, and he is audacious in his writing.” She guessed that he acquired his education in Leipzig, “hence the suspicion falls on M. Radishchev, the more so because he is said to have a printing press in his house.” Had the book been written thirty or even twenty years earlier, Catherine might have recognized some of her own views; now, from her new perspective, she declared that “the purpose of this book is clear on every page. Its author, infected and filled with the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and the authorities, to stir up in the people’s indignation against their superiors and against the government.” She rejected Radishchev’s portrayal of the behavior of landowners and the condition of serfs and was outraged by his warnings of serf rage and impending revenge. The author, she declared, is “a rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev … inciting the serfs to bloody rebellion.” And he was inciting not only the peasants but the general population to disregard the authority of all rulers, from empresses down to local officials. In Radishchev’s denunciations of her government and his mingling of the Pugachev horrors with the new “poisons” being concocted in France, she saw an effort to propagate the beliefs of the revolutionaries in Paris and destabilize Russia at a time when the country was fighting two wars. The book, she wrote in a margin, “could not be tolerated.”

Radishchev was identified, arrested, and taken to the Peter and Paul Fortress for interrogation. He was not tortured. Even so, aware of the consequences for his family, he began to renege. He declared that his book had stemmed from vanity; he said he had wanted to win literary fame. He did his best to minimize retribution by admitting that his language had been exaggerated and that his accusations against government officials were inaccurate. He denied any intention of attacking Catherine’s government; he meant only to point out certain correctable shortcomings. He had not intended to rouse peasant against landowner; he had only wished to force bad landowners to be ashamed of their behavior. He admitted that he hoped for the freedom of the serfs but declared that he wanted to achieve this through legislative action, such as that already taken or proposed by the Empress Catherine. He threw himself on Catherine’s mercy. He was tried by the Central Criminal Court in St. Petersburg, charged with sedition and lese-majesté, and sentenced to death by beheading. The Senate routinely confirmed the verdict. In the interim, however, Catherine had forwarded the book to Potemkin for comment. Despite the personal attacks on himself as well as the empress, the prince advocated leniency. “I’ve read the book you sent me. I am not angry,” he wrote to Catherine. “It seems, Matushka, he has been slandering you, too. And you also won’t be angry. Your deeds are your shield.” Potemkin’s moderate response calmed Catherine, who did what she always did: she commuted the death penalty and changed it to a sentence of ten years of Siberian exile.

Thereafter, Radishchev was treated with relative leniency. After sentencing, he was taken from the court in chains, but the following morning the chains were struck off by Catherine’s order. He was allowed sixteen months to reach his place of exile four thousand miles east of St. Petersburg. Minister of Commerce Alexander Vorontsov, his patron and friend, sent him clothes, books, and a thousand rubles a year. Eventually, Radishchev, by now a widower, was joined in Siberia by his two youngest children, brought to him by his sister-in-law, who remained with him and bore him three more children. He constructed a large house for his family, his servants, and his books. He worked as an amateur doctor, taught his children, and read the books sent to him by his friends. Soon after Catherine’s death in 1796, her son, Paul, terminated Radishchev’s exile and allowed him to return to his estate near Moscow. In 1802, deeply depressed, he committed suicide, leaving behind the dying words of Cato: “Now I am my own master.” His Journey was published in London in 1859. Three years later—sixty years after Radishchev’s death—Catherine’s great-grandson, Emperor Alexander II, abolished serfdom.

When partitioning Poland in 1772, Russia, Austria, and Prussia had imposed on that nation a constitution that limited the authority of the king and the Diet and left power in the hands of an independent, conservative aristocracy that refused to govern or be governed, leaving the country in a perpetual state of near-anarchy. Stanislaus Augustus, the king installed by Catherine, reigned for the next sixteen years, but in all important matters, Poland’s government was overseen by St. Petersburg. Territorially, Poland remained large, and through these years the resentment of many Poles against the partitioning powers, particularly Russia, continued to fester. In September 1788, with both Catherine and her ally Joseph II of Austria involved in war with Turkey, Poles saw their chance to make a change. A Polish Diet, hostile to Polish dependence on Russia, met and was almost immediately confederated. The liberum veto was set aside, enabling the Diet to make decisions by majority vote. Amid an eruption of anti-Russian feeling and much verbal abuse of Catherine, Stanislaus warned of the danger of making unilateral changes in a constitution approved by the empress. He was ignored. During the following months, the confederated Diet proceeded to overturn the governmental structure endorsed by Russia for sixteen years. With her army in the south, Catherine could do nothing—for the moment, at least—but pretend not to notice.

The following year, 1790, Catherine suffered a series of political setbacks. In March, King Frederick William of Prussia, who in 1886 had succeeded his uncle Frederick the Great, surprised Russia and Austria by signing a defensive treaty with Poland, pledging military assistance against foreign interference. On May 3, 1791, the emboldened Polish confederated Diet, knowing that Russia was still enmeshed in war on the Black Sea, and also believing that Poland was now protected by its treaty with Prussia, voted to adopt a new constitution, providing for a hereditary, rather than elective, monarchy. The present ruler, Stanislaus, would be allowed to remain during his lifetime, but on his death, the crown was to become hereditary, passing from father to son in the house of the electors of Saxony. The liberum veto was to be abolished and replaced in the Diet by majority rule. The purpose of the new constitution was to weaken the old nobility and provide Poland with a more effective national government.

Catherine, realizing the extent to which the new constitution diminished the power of the old Polish nobility, on whom she relied to keep Poland weak, was alarmed. The Russian-Polish treaty of 1772 had been unilaterally scrapped. She had no troops available to uphold the old constitution, but, in her anger and frustration, she quickly found allies among the Poles themselves. The conservative Polish nobility, knowing that a weak central government was necessary if they were to keep power in their hands, also rejected the May 3 constitution. These noblemen, meeting in Grodno, formed their own new federation, proclaimed the restoration of the 1772 constitution, and sent a delegation to St. Petersburg to ask Catherine to help them.

Catherine was eager to help. The May 3 constitution was far from radical, but to Catherine there seemed a disturbing similarity between it and the developing attack on the monarchy in France. By July 1791, peace with Turkey was near, and the Russian army would soon be available to support the conservative Poles. She had already told Potemkin, during his last visit to St. Petersburg, that she intended to appoint him commander in chief in this new campaign. There were risks to be considered. Both Leopold of Austria and Frederick William of Prussia, concerned about the deteriorating situation in France, and hoping to calm the increasing turmoil behind their backs in eastern Europe, had agreed to accept Poland’s new May 3 constitution. Frederick William did so as Poland’s new ally; Leopold because he wished to be free to concentrate on France. Both monarchs urged Catherine to join them.

Catherine, who had already decided to act alone if necessary, refused. She tried instead to persuade the Prussians and Austrians to support her approach. She bluntly told her own College of Foreign Affairs in December 1791 that she would never agree to the new Polish political structure, and that she was determined to act. Prussia and Austria “will oppose us with only a pile of written paper,” she predicted. She anticipated protest, but Austria, facing war with France, would do nothing, and if Prussia’s agreement to ignore its treaty with Poland had to be bought with additional Polish territory, she would agree to another partition. As for the Poles themselves, she understood that to restore the 1772 constitution, an invasion by the Russian army would be necessary.

Behind Catherine’s militant new Polish policy was the fact that, despite her talk of a crusade against France, her real worries lay closer to home. She was angered by the steps the Poles had already taken and alarmed by what might follow. An effective, potentially revolutionary regime in Poland would be dangerous to Russia. Was she to ignore this possible threat in order to fight Jacobinism in France? Her duty was to deal with the enemy in the place most threatening to her. She was determined, she told Grimm, to “exterminate that nest of Jacobins in Warsaw.” This was the façade of her argument, but she revealed her real strategy in an outburst to her private secretary on November 14, 1791: “I am breaking my head to push the courts of Vienna and Berlin to involve themselves in the affairs of France. The Austrian court is willing but the court of Berlin refuses to move.… There are reasons which I cannot explain [to them]. I wish to engage them in these affairs in order to have elbow room. I have in mind much unfinished business and it is necessary that they be kept busy so that they cannot hinder me.” Her “unfinished business” was to restore Russian control of Poland.

On April 9, 1792, France unintentionally assisted Catherine by declaring war on Austria. The empress could now be certain that Austria would not honor its promises to Poland to support the May 3 Polish constitution. At the end of April, she informed Berlin and Vienna of her intention to invade Poland; on May 7, sixty-five thousand Russian troops crossed the Polish border, followed by another thirty-five thousand a few weeks later. Poland immediately appealed to Frederick William of Prussia on the basis of the 1790 defensive treaty. The king of Prussia behaved as Catherine had foreseen. Anticipating war with France, he betrayed his treaty obligation to assist Poland, declaring that he had not been consulted about the May 3 constitution and that this absolved him of treaty commitments. He was not, he declared, “obliged to defend a constitution drawn up without his knowledge.” Stanislaus, again playing both sides, first swore to fight for the May 3 constitution and then attempted to negotiate with Catherine by offering to give up the throne to her grandson Constantine. She was not interested. Having nothing further to offer, the Polish king ordered the Polish army to lay down its arms.

The military occupation proceeded smoothly, but Russia soon found itself caught in a thicket of political difficulties. The conservative Polish leaders Catherine was supporting fell to squabbling among themselves and proved unable to govern. By December 1792, Catherine had decided that the only solution to growing chaos was to formalize the occupation in a second partition. Frederick William was offered the areas in the north and west that Prussia had long desired. He accepted. Both Russia and Prussia declared that their actions were aimed at fighting Jacobinism in Poland. Frederick William announced that he was forced to send his army to protect Prussia from the raging Jacobinism across his border. Catherine continued to use this argument. “Apparently you ignore that the Jacobiniere of Warsaw were in correspondence with the Jacobin Club in Paris,” she wrote to Grimm. In January 1793, Russia and Prussia secretly signed a treaty that sealed the Second Partition of Poland.

Unaware of this treaty, Poland’s conservative leaders asked Catherine for assurance that she would protect the physical integrity of their country. It was too late; early in April 1793, Russian and Prussian manifestos announcing the new partition were published. Attempting to give their actions a cloak of legality, Catherine and Frederick William forced Stanislaus to leave Warsaw for Grodno, the center of the failing conservative confederation, and there to preside over a Diet that was to come to “an amiable understanding with the partitioning powers.” To help the Diet make this decision, the Russian ambassador announced that “soldiers of Her Imperial Majesty would occupy the lands of any deputy who opposed the will of the nation.” In July, members of the Diet sullenly gave consent to the new partition treaty with Russia, but, hating Prussia more, they refused to ratify the cession of territory to a nation that had betrayed them. The Diet building in Grodno was surrounded by Russian troops, and the deputies were told that no one would be allowed to leave until the partition treaty was approved. The session continued into the night. At first, the deputies shouted and refused to sit; then they lapsed into total silence and sat immobile in their seats. At 4 in the morning, the marshal of the Diet asked three times: “Does the Diet authorize the delegates to sign the treaty?” No deputy replied. Whereupon, the marshal announced: “Silence means consent.” In this manner, the partition treaty was approved by the Polish Diet.

In effect, the treaty with Russia turned newly truncated Poland into a protectorate—or, as one Polish deputy said bitterly, “a Russian province.” All domestic and foreign policies were to be submitted for Russian approval; the personnel of the government would be approved by St. Petersburg; the Polish army would be reduced to fifteen thousand men. Stanislaus kept his throne. Politically impotent, superfluous, and pathetic, he returned to his palace in Warsaw, despised by his subjects.

Russia’s new share of Poland was large: eighty-nine thousand square miles of eastern Poland, including the rest of Belorussia, with the city of Minsk; further extensive slices of Lithuania, including Vilnius; and the remaining Polish Ukraine. In all, three million people were added to Catherine’s empire. Prussia took twenty-three thousand square miles, finally acquiring the long-coveted regions of Danzig and Thorn, as well as other territory in western Poland; Prussia’s gain was one million inhabitants. Austria had no share in the spoils this time, but Francis II was promised that Prussia would remain an active ally in Austria’s war against France. Poland now was reduced to one-third its original size and a population of four million. When the treaties were signed, Catherine told herself that not only had she fended off the revolutionary virus spreading from France, but she was simply reoccupying lands that had once belonged to the great sixteenth-century principality of Kiev, “lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.”

By the spring of 1794, when Robespierre was supreme in France, many Poles had concluded that the further mutilation of their country and the humiliating constitutional settlement imposed were intolerable. In March, when the disarming of the Polish army was attempted, the nation rose up. Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish officer trained in France who had fought beside Washington and Lafayette in the American War of Independence, suddenly appeared in Kraców and took command of Polish rebel forces. On March 24, with four thousand soldiers and two thousand peasants armed with scythes, he defeated seven thousand Russian soldiers near Kraców. The revolt spread, moving so quickly that when it reached Warsaw, the Russian occupation garrison of seven thousand men was caught by surprise. Three thousand Russian soldiers were killed or taken prisoner; the bodies of the dead were stripped and thrown naked into the streets. Frederick William of Prussia was denounced as a betrayer, and a portrait of Catherine, taken from the Russian embassy, was publicly torn to pieces.

When reports of these events reached St. Petersburg, Catherine told Prussia and Austria that the time had come “to extinguish the last spark of the Jacobin fire in Poland.” Frederick William, smarting from the personal insults hurled at him by the Poles, asked for the honor of personally strangling Polish resistance. Catherine suggested that he take charge of putting down the revolt in Poland west of the Vistula River, and then advised Francis II of Austria to move into the south. Both hurried to oblige, and both expected to be paid for their efforts; thus, still another partition of Poland became an expectation of all parties. Frederick William divided the army he had deployed against France and sent twenty-five thousand men to the east against Poland. By mid-July, these twenty-five thousand Prussians and fourteen thousand Russians were advancing on Warsaw from two directions. Late in July, Frederick William himself arrived before Warsaw to direct a siege of the city. The Prussians made little progress, and in September, the king, declaring that he needed his troops to face threats from France, lifted his siege and withdrew.

By then, the Russians needed no help. Indeed, Catherine had realized that if Russia were to crush the revolt without assistance, she would be able to dictate a settlement. She placed Rumyantsev in overall command of her army in Poland and Suvorov in tactical command. On October 10, Suvorov defeated Kosciuszko in a battle in which thirteen thousand Russians overwhelmed seven thousand Poles. Kosciuszko was severely wounded, captured, and sent to St. Petersburg, where he was locked in the Schlüsselburg Fortress. Suvorov next appeared before Praga, the fortified suburb across the Vistula from Warsaw.

Before launching his attack, Suvorov reminded his soldiers of the April slaughter of the Russian garrison in Warsaw. The assault began at dawn; “three hours later,” Suvorov reported, “the whole of Praga was strewn with bodies, and blood was flowing in streams.” Estimates of the dead ranged between twelve and twenty thousand. The Russians later claimed that Suvorov was unable to restrain his soldiers from taking revenge for the slaughter of their comrades in the spring—an argument that failed to explain the killing of women, children, priests, and nuns. Suvorov then used the carnage as an example to warn Warsaw that if it did not surrender, it would be treated as another Praga. Warsaw capitulated immediately, and armed resistance throughout Poland came to an end.

Catherine regarded Kosciuszko as an agent of revolutionary extremism and believed him to be in correspondence with Robespierre. It was in this context that she and her council decided what was to be done with a prostrate Poland. They agreed that because the dangers of Jacobinism continued to threaten Russia, it was unwise to allow any Polish government to exist. Bezborodko insisted that centuries of experience had shown that it was impossible to make friends with the Poles; they would always support any future enemy of Russia, be this Turkey, Prussia, Sweden, or somebody else. Further, the buffer state concept did not apply to ideas that could cross frontiers. The council’s decision, therefore, was to treat Poland as a conquered enemy: all Polish regalia, banners, and state insignia, along with archives and libraries, were collected and sent to Russia. Suvorov was to govern by decree.

The next step was to agree on a new division of territory. Catherine would have preferred outright Russian annexation of all that remained of Poland, but she knew that this would be unacceptable to Prussia and Austria. Accordingly, she proposed a third and final partition. Austria hesitated, suggesting a return to the status quo but with greater supervision from outside. Prussia favored partition, either total or leaving a small, insignificant buffer state between the partitioning powers. Catherine’s proposal was the most extreme: she wanted to subdivide the entire remaining territory of Poland and thereby simply erase this dangerous neighbor from the map. Her proposal was accepted.

On January 3, 1795, Russia and Austria agreed to the third and final partition of Poland. Prussia, still at war with France, was told that the territory it desired could be taken whenever it was ready to do so. On May 5, Prussia made peace with revolutionary France and occupied its allotted slice of Poland. Russia’s prizes were Courland, what was left of Lithuania, the remaining part of Belorussia, and the western Ukraine. Prussia took Warsaw and Poland west of the Vistula. Austria took Kraców, Lublin, and western Galicia. Afterward, Catherine repeated that she had annexed “not a single Pole,” and that she had simply taken back ancient Russian and Lithuanian lands with Orthodox inhabitants who were “now reunited with the Russian motherland.”

On November 25, 1795, Stanislaus, his kingdom dismembered, abdicated. When Catherine died a year later, the new emperor Paul invited the former king to St. Petersburg, where he was housed in the Marble Palace that the empress had built for Gregory Orlov. He died there in 1798. For Poland, the Third Partition meant national extinction. Not until the signing of the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, when the Russian, German, and Austrian empires had collapsed, did Poland physically reemerge. In the interim, for 126 years, the people and culture of Poland did not possess a nation.

72

Twilight

IN 1796, CATHERINE, in her thirty-fifth year on the Russian throne, was the preeminent royal personage in the world. Age had affected her appearance, but not her devotion to work or her positive attitude toward life. She was heavier, and her gray hair had turned to white, but her blue eyes were youthful, bright, and clear. Even at sixty-seven, her complexion was fresh, and dentures preserved the illusion that her teeth were intact. Dignity and grace were embodied in her bearing, particularly in the way she held her head high and nodded graciously in public. From friends, officials, courtiers, and servants, she drew deep affection as well as respect.

She rose at six and wrapped herself in a silk dressing gown. Her movements awakened the family of small English greyhounds sleeping on a pink satin couch next to her bed. The oldest of them, whom she had named Sir Tom Anderson, and his spouse, Duchess Anderson, were gifts from Dr. Dimsdale, who had inoculated her and her son, Paul, against smallpox. They, with the help of Sir Tom’s second wife, Mademoiselle Mimi, had produced numerous litters. Catherine attended them; when the dogs wanted to go out, Catherine herself opened the door into the garden. This done, she drank four or five cups of black coffee and settled down to work on the mass of official and personal correspondence awaiting her. Her sight had weakened, and she read with spectacles and sometimes used a magnifying glass. Once when her secretary saw her reading this way, she smiled and said, “You probably don’t need this contrivance yet. How old are you?” He said that he was twenty-eight. Catherine nodded and said, “Our sight has been blunted by long service to the State and now we have to use spectacles.” Promptly at nine, she put down her pen and rang a little bell, which told the servant outside her door that she was ready for her daily visitors. This meant a long morning of receiving ministers, generals, and other government officials; of reading or listening to their reports; and of signing the papers they had prepared for her. These were working sessions; visitors were expected to object to her ideas and offer their own when they thought she was wrong. Her attitude almost always remained attentive, pleasant, and imperturbable.

An exception to this demeanor was her reaction to the visits of her brilliant general Alexander Suvorov. Devout as well as eccentric, Suvorov entered her room, bowed three times to the icon of Our Lady of Kazan hanging on a wall, and fell on his knees before the empress, touching the ground with his forehead. Catherine always tried to stop him, saying, “For heaven’s sake, are you not ashamed of yourself?” Unabashed, Suvorov sat down and repeated his request to be allowed to fight the French army in northern Italy, commanded by a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte. “Matushka, let me march against the French!” he pleaded. After many visits and many pleas, she agreed, and in November 1796, Suvorov was ready to march at the head of sixty thousand Russians. Catherine died on the eve of his departure, and the campaign was canceled. No battlefield meeting of these two famous soldiers ever took place.

At one in the afternoon, her morning work was finished, and Catherine retired to dress, often in gray or violet silk, for midday dinner. Ten to twenty guests sat down with her: personal friends, noblemen, senior officials, and her favorite foreign diplomats. She was not interested in food, and the fare was Spartan; afterward guests discreetly retreated to the apartments of courtiers living in the palace where they could supplement their meal.

In the afternoon, Catherine read books or was read to while she sewed or embroidered. At six, if there were a court reception, she moved among her guests in the drawing rooms of the Winter Palace. Supper was served, but Catherine never ate, and at ten she withdrew. When there was no official court reception, she entertained privately in the Hermitage. The company listened to a concert, watched a French or Russian play, or simply played games, performed charades, or played whist. During these gatherings, her long-standing rules remained in force: formality was banned; it was forbidden to rise when the empress stood; everyone talked freely; bad tempers were not tolerated; laughter was required. To her friend Frau Bielcke, she wrote: “Madame, you must be gay; only thus can life be endured. I speak from experience for I have had to endure much, and have only been able to endure it because I have always laughed whenever I had the chance.”

In the 1790s, Catherine’s health was declining. For years, she had suffered from headaches and indigestion; now colds and rheumatism were added. By the summer of 1796 she was afflicted by open leg sores. Sometimes swollen and bleeding, her legs bothered her so much that she tried soaking them daily in fresh, ice-cold seawater; Dr. Rogerson’s skepticism regarding this unconventional treatment only made her more certain that it was having “marvelous effects.”

Her physical infirmities were an inconvenience, but she was not immobilized. She spent autumn and winter at the Winter Palace and the Hermitage. After Potemkin’s death, she had another residence in the capital and lived for a few weeks in spring and again in autumn in the Tauride Palace, which she had bought from the prince’s heirs. Living there helped her keep fresh the memory of the man who had been her partner, lover, and perhaps her husband. In preference to the estates at Peterhof and Oranienbaum on the Gulf of Finland, which could summon unhappy memories from the past, Tsarskoe Selo, where she could be surrounded by her friends and grandchildren, was her favorite summer retreat. No serious barriers were placed between the imperial family and the public; all parks in the capital and the nearby countryside were open to all who were “decently dressed.” This included the park at Tsarskoe Selo. One day, Catherine was seated on a bench with her favorite personal maid after their early morning walk. A man passed by, glanced briefly at the two elderly women, and, failing to recognize the empress, walked on, whistling. The maid was indignant, but Catherine merely remarked, “What do you expect, Maria Savichna? Twenty years ago this would not have happened. We have grown old. It is our fault.”

Catherine was forty-eight when, in 1777, her daughter-in-law, Maria, gave birth to the empress’s first grandson. She, not the child’s mother or father, named him Alexander. Motherhood had provided Catherine with few joys; now, as a grandmother, she had an opportunity to catch up. Setting aside her long-ago grief when Empress Elizabeth had taken away her firstborn, Paul, Catherine assumed the dominant role in the new infant’s life. Her reason was similar to Elizabeth’s. Both women had been frustrated by their inability, in one case to conceive, in the other to mother a child. Both used the same excuse for their subsequent behavior: a young, inexperienced mother could not be given the responsibility of raising and educating a future tsar.

Catherine did not take complete possession of Alexander, as Elizabeth had done with Paul. She had him brought to her every afternoon to be placed on the carpet next to her desk. When he arrived, she stopped whatever she was doing to play with him. She lay on the floor next to him, told him stories, invented games, corrected his mistakes, and hugged him repeatedly. “I have said it to you before and I say it again,” she wrote to Grimm. “I dote on the little monkey.… In the afternoon, my little monkey comes as often as he likes and spends three or four hours a day in my room.” She called him “Monsieur Alexander” and announced, “It is astonishing that, although he cannot yet talk, at twenty months he knows things that are beyond the grasp of any other child at the age of three.” When he was three, she said, “If you only knew what wonders Alexander achieves as a cook, and an architect; how he paints, mixes colors, chops wood; how he plays being the groom and the coachman; how he is teaching himself to read, draw, calculate and write.” These conceits are no different from the effusions of any grandmother eager for the world to know—indeed, insisting that the world must know—of the extraordinary qualities and accomplishments of her grandchild. In any case, Catherine was convinced that Alexander was unique and that this was due exclusively to her. “I am making a delicious child of him,” she said. “He loves me instinctively.” She designed a loose, one-piece garment that could be put on him easily and would not restrict his arms and legs. “It is sewn together and goes on at once, and fastens behind with four or five little hooks,” she told Grimm. “The king of Sweden has demanded and received a pattern of the dress of Monsieur Alexander.”

Her second grandson was born eighteen months after Alexander. The empress named him Constantine to indicate the throne she had in mind for him: one day, she hoped, he would reign over a great new Orthodox Greek empire based on Constantinople. When Constantine was old enough, he joined his brother to play on her carpet. As they were intended for different thrones, they were given different educations. Alexander, who would become the future occupant of Catherine’s own throne, was brought up on the English model. He was given an English nanny and was taught the history of Europe and the literature of the Enlightenment. Constantine, destined for Constantinople, was given a Greek nurse, Greek servants, and Greek playmates so that he could begin speaking the language early. His lessons included the histories of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, as well as of Russia.

When Alexander was seven and Constantine almost six, and they had reached the age for tutors, Catherine wrote thirty pages of instructions to guide their education. They were to be truthful and courageous. They were to be courteous to servants as well as to elders. They must go to bed early in rooms with plenty of fresh air circulating at a temperature of sixty degrees Farenheit. They were to sleep on flat beds with leather mattresses. They were to wash every day in cold water, and, in winter, to go to Russian steam baths. In summer, they were to learn to swim. Food was to be plain; fruit of all kinds was to serve as breakfast in summer. They were to plant their own gardens and grow their own vegetables. Any necessary punishment would consist of teaching the child to be ashamed of his misbehavior. Rebukes were to be delivered in private; praise in public. Corporal punishment was forbidden.

In 1784, Catherine appointed a Swiss, Frédéric-César de La Harpe, to be the boys’ primary tutor. A republican, skeptical of autocracy, he won Alexander’s respect and affection and, with Catherine’s permission, continued to preach the blessings of liberty and the duties of a sovereign toward his people. Alexander listened to these teachings; Constantine rebelled against them. Once he shouted at La Harpe that when he came to power, he would enter Switzerland with his army and destroy the country. La Harpe replied calmly, “There is in my country, near the little town of Morat, a building in which we keep the bones of those who pay us such a visit.”

From Alexander’s earliest years, Catherine nourished a hope that she could put him in place of her son, Paul, as her successor. Just as it had not taken Paul long to suspect that his mother’s intention to disinherit him was behind her possessive behavior regarding his son, Alexander, as he grew older, realized that he was the object of a struggle between his parents and his grandmother. He learned to adapt himself to the company he was in. At Gatchina, he listened to his father’s diatribes against the empress; back at court, he concurred with whatever his grandmother said. Unable to choose, he retreated into irresolution and equivocation; throughout his life, Alexander had difficulty making straightforward, unambiguous decisions.

Paul and Maria’s ten children were produced over a period of nineteen years. There were four boys and six girls. Their third son, Nicholas, arrived in 1796, the last year of Catherine’s life, and he escaped her strict supervision. The girls, unlike their older brothers, were left with their parents, who were allowed to educate them however they wished. Alexander remained Catherine’s primary concern, and her anxiety about the succession and the future of the dynasty led her to push him to marry early. Although his tutors believed that he was too immature for marriage, Catherine, in October 1792, invited two German princesses from Baden to visit St. Petersburg for scrutiny. The elder sister, Louisa, was fourteen; Fredericka was a year younger. Louisa was shy but quickly fell in love with the Russian prince. Alexander admitted that he liked her. This was sufficient for Catherine. In January 1793, Louisa converted to Orthodoxy and became the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Alekseyevna. The wedding of Alexander when he was still fifteen and the newly named Elizabeth was fourteen took place in September 1793. Unfortunately for Catherine’s dynastic hopes, Elizabeth never gave birth to a living child. Constantine, who refused the throne at the end of Alexander’s reign in 1825, remained without legitimate children. That left Nicholas, the grandson Catherine had left to his mother to educate, to inherit the throne and, through his descendants, to carry on the dynasty.

Catherine permitted Paul and Maria to keep their daughters at home, but when she believed that the young women were ready to marry she took charge. The eldest of her granddaughters, Alexandra Pavlovna, was thirteen years old when the empress decided the time had come. Catherine wanted a marriage to Gustavus Adolphus, the young uncrowned king of Sweden, the son of Gustavus III, who had been assassinated four years earlier. A marriage to young Gustavus would ameliorate the long-standing hostility between Russia and Sweden and secure the Russian position on the upper Baltic.

There was an obstacle. In November 1795, Gustavus’s engagement to Princess Louisa, the Protestant daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, had been announced. Catherine was not deterred. Word was passed to the Swedish regent, the Duke of Sudermania, brother of the murdered Gustavus III and uncle of the young uncrowned king, that hundreds of thousands of rubles would be available to subsidize the Swedish treasury once the empress’s wish was granted. At the beginning of April 1796, the regent agreed to postpone his nephew’s marriage until the young man reached his majority at eighteen in November of that year.

Catherine invited Gustavus and his uncle to visit St. Petersburg. As the king was still uncrowned, it would be a “private” visit, and the royal Swedes would come incognito; Gustavus would arrive as “Count Haga” and the regent as “Count Vasa.” On August 15, the two “counts” arrived. The king turned out to be a solemn young man with fair hair down to the shoulders of his black suit. He was introduced to Alexandra, and the pair opened the ball that evening by leading a minuet. Catherine, contrary to custom, stayed until midnight. The next three weeks were crowded with entertainment, but the couple was given time to be alone. The empress was pleased to see that Gustavus was losing some of his stiffness and was often observed speaking in a low voice to Alexandra. Eventually, during a dance, he went so far as to squeeze her hand. “I didn’t know what would become of me,” she whispered to her governess. “I was so frightened I thought I would fall.” Two days later, after a dinner in the Tauride Palace, Gustavus joined Catherine on a bench in the garden and confided that he would like to marry her granddaughter. Catherine reminded him that he was already engaged to someone else; Gustavus promised to break that engagement immediately. Negotiations began regarding the Russian-Swedish alliance that would accompany the marriage. The annual subsidy promised Sweden was to be three hundred thousand rubles.

Pleased with this progress, Catherine set a formal betrothal ceremony for September 11. One significant matter remained to be confirmed: the bride’s religion after marriage. Catherine was determined that Alexandra be free to practice Russian Orthodoxy. Gustavus said he did not see how this would be possible; that he thought it had always been clear that, were he to marry Alexandra, she would be expected to embrace Lutheranism. Catherine reacted by insisting that he guarantee that, even as queen of Lutheran Sweden, her granddaughter would remain a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, Catherine was surprised; it never occurred to her that an uncrowned adolescent monarch would expect a Russian grand duchess, the granddaughter of an empress, to abandon her religion. For Catherine, personal and national prestige were as important as—perhaps more important than—religious observance. Further, she believed that she was entitled to set the terms because her large subsidies to Sweden would, in effect, be paying for the marriage.

There was still another reason. She had been the same age as Alexandra when she had received a marriage proposal that had been accepted for her and which had forced her, over her father’s objection, to change her religion. Now, she promised herself, her granddaughter would not have to endure what she had been through half a century before. She inserted into the marriage contract a clause not only guaranteeing Alexandra’s right to remain Orthodox as queen of Sweden but permitting her to have a private chapel with an Orthodox priest and confessor in the Swedish royal palace. Gustavus, devoted to his kingdom’s established Protestant religion, and believing that his queen should share his faith, refused. To Catherine’s protest that his ministers had already pledged the guarantees she desired, the young man replied that his ministers and the Russian officials with whom they were negotiating must have misunderstood each other. Catherine then demanded that the king now put his private pledge in his own handwriting. Gustavus hesitated; then, under pressure from his uncle, he agreed to amend the contract.

The way seemed clear for the betrothal ceremony, which was to be followed by a ball at the Tauride Palace. The families and the plenipotentiaries met at noon to witness the signing of the treaty. The Russians quickly discovered, however, that the clause regarding Alexandra’s religion was missing from the treaty text. Gustavus had removed it so that he could discuss the matter again with the empress. That afternoon, he refused to go beyond a promise that “the grand duchess will never be troubled in her conscience with regard to religion.” Catherine interpreted this as a new commitment and suggested to the regent that the couple go ahead with the formal betrothal. After consulting Gustavus, the regent agreed. “With the church’s blessing?” asked Catherine. “Yes,” the regent said. “According to your rite.” Confident that the matter was settled, Catherine saw no need to continue her personal discussions with Gustavus and left the final drafting of the document to Platon Zubov.

At seven, Catherine entered the throne room and took her seat on the throne. Beside her stood the Orthodox metropolitan, Gavril; on a table lay two rings. Two armchairs, upholstered in blue velvet, awaited the king and his bride-to-be. Paul, Maria, and the entire imperial family were present. All eyes were on Alexandra, standing by her grandmother’s throne, waiting for her intended fiancé. Time passed … half an hour … then a full hour. Officials glanced at one another. Something was wrong; under Catherine II, the Russian court stressed promptness. At last the double doors opened. But it was not Gustavus, only a secretary who whispered to Zubov and handed him a paper. Zubov hurried out. The king had refused to sign the amended marriage contract in which he read the new clause reinserted by Catherine. He had reverted to his earlier position: that a queen of Sweden must be Lutheran. Zubov, increasingly desperate, tried to convince him to change his mind. Catherine, her family, and her court continued to wait.

Suspense filled the room. At first, Catherine was calm. Then, as time passed, her smile disappeared and her face became red. Nearby, her granddaughter was in tears. The hands of the clock passed nine and moved toward ten. At last the double doors opened. Zubov appeared and handed Catherine a paper. The king had changed his mind again. His last word was that he had given his word of honor that Alexandra would not be hindered in the practice of her religion, but that he would put nothing in writing and would not sign the marriage contract as long as it contained the clause Catherine demanded.

Catherine could scarcely believe what she was reading. Rising from her throne, she tried to speak, but her words were unintelligible. To some, it seemed that she was suffering from dizziness; others thought it was a mild stroke. The attack, whatever it was, was temporary, and, a minute later, she was able to announce, “His Majesty King Gustavus is not well. The ceremony is postponed.” She left the room on the arm of Alexander. Although the regent sent an apology for his nephew’s behavior, Catherine was shaken. The next morning she reappeared and spoke briefly to the regent and the king. The regent was in despair, but Gustavus, “stiff as a ramrod,” kept repeating, “What I have written, I have written. I will never change what I have written.”

Catherine refused to admit that a seventeen-year-old could defeat the empress of Russia in her own palace. More time, she decided, would overcome his stubbornness, and she insisted that Gustavus and his uncle remain in St. Petersburg for another two weeks. Gustavus agreed to an additional ten days but would not retreat from his position. In the end, there was no marriage.

Catherine’s humiliation and her effort to suppress her anger in public affected her health. Later, she learned that a strict Lutheran pastor had taught Gustavus that his subjects would never forgive him if he took a wife belonging to any but the Lutheran faith. Catherine also discovered that, during their long moments together, when the young king appeared to be wooing the young grand duchess, he was in fact attempting to convert her to Lutheranism. She wrote bitterly to Paul:

The fact is that the king pretended that Alexandra had promised him to change her religion and take the sacrament the Lutheran way and that she had given him her hand on it.… She told me with the candor and naivete natural to her how he had told her that on the coronation day she would have to take the [Luthernan] sacrament with him, and that she had replied, “Certainly, if I can, and if Grandmama consents.”

Alexandra, the bride-to-be, never completely recovered. After her grandmother’s death, her father, the new emperor, Paul, married her to a Hapsburg archduke. The marriage was unhappy, and at seventeen Alexandra died in childbirth. On November 1, 1796, Gustavus was crowned as King Gustavus IV. He subsequently married Princess Fredericka of Baden, a younger sister of Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the wife of Catherine’s grandson Alexander.

73

The Death of Catherine the Great

ON TUESDAY EVENING, November 4, 1796, Catherine appeared in public for the last time when a small number of close friends gathered at the Hermitage. One was Lev Naryshkin, who, more than forty years before, had been proposed, along with Sergei Saltykov, as a potential father of the child Catherine urgently needed to bear, and, subsequently, had meowed like a cat to spirit her out of the palace at night to visit her lover Poniatowski. Now, still playing the role of court jester, Lev, costumed as a peddler, shuffled up to Catherine with a tray full of toys and trinkets, pretending to hawk them. His performance made her shake with laughter. She retired early, explaining that she had laughed so hard that she needed to rest.

The next morning, November 5, she rose at six, drank black coffee, and sat down to write. At nine, she asked to be left alone for a moment and went into her dressing room. She did not reemerge. Her attendants waited. Her valet knocked, entered the room, and saw no one. He waited a minute, then pushed on the door of the adjacent water closet. It was partially jammed. He and a maid forced the door open and discovered the empress unconscious on the floor against the door. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were closed. When he gently raised her head, she issued a low groan. He called for help and with other servants managed to carry and drag her into her bedroom. There, finding her limp body too heavy to lift onto her high bed, they placed her on a leather mattress on the floor. Dr. Rogerson arrived and opened a vein in her arm.

The empress was alive, but her eyes were closed and she did not speak. The officials who gathered agreed to send urgently for Grand Duke Paul. Platon Zubov immediately sent his brother Nicholas galloping to Gatchina to notify Paul. Soon after, nineteen-year-old Alexander, in tears, asked Count Fyodor Rostopchin to go to Gatchina and officially inform his father of what had happened; Alexander wanted to assure Paul that no one—and certainly not he—thought of seizing the throne. Rostopchin followed Nicholas Zubov on the road to Gatchina.

Nicholas Zubov arrived at Gatchina at 3:45 p.m. with the news that Catherine had probably suffered a stroke. Paul ordered a sleigh and left immediately with Maria for St. Petersburg. At a staging post on the road, halfway to the capital, they met Rostopchin. The count later recalled:

The grand duke got out of his sleigh to satisfy a need of nature. I got out too and drew his attention to the beauty of the night. It was extremely calm and light … the moon was visible through the clouds, every sound was muffled and silence reigned.… I saw the grand duke fix his gaze on the moon; tears filled his eyes and flowed down his face.… I seized his hand. “My lord, what a moment this is for you!” He pressed my hand. “Wait, my dear friend, wait. I have lived forty-two years. Perhaps God will give me the strength and good sense to bear my appointed destiny.”

Paul and Maria arrived at the Winter Palace at 8:25 p.m. They were greeted by Alexander and Constantine, who had already changed into Prussian-style “Gatchina” uniforms with stiff, buttoned tunics and high boots. The grand duke found his mother lying on the leather mattress, motionless, her eyes closed. Kneeling, Paul kissed her hands. There was no response, and he and Maria sat down near her for the rest of the night.

Everywhere in the palace, the stricken woman became an object of pity and calculations. Would she recover? Would she at least regain consciousness long enough to disinherit Paul and name Alexander? Courtiers wondered whether to declare their allegiance. And to whom. And when. One who said nothing, sitting alone in a corner, shunned by everyone, was Platon Zubov.

The vigil lasted through the night. At dawn, the doctors told Paul that Catherine had suffered a stroke and that there was no hope. Paul sent for Bezborodko and told him to prepare a manifesto announcing his accession. At noon, the grand duke ordered Bezborodko to sort and seal the papers in his mother’s study under the supervision of his sons, then to lock the study and bring him the key. At five that afternoon, with Catherine struggling to breathe, Rogerson informed Paul that the end was near. Metropolitan Gavril administered the last rites, anointing Catherine with holy oil on the forehead, cheeks, mouth, breast, and hands.

Hours passed. No one spoke. At 9:45 on the night of November 6, 1796, thirty-six hours after she was stricken and without ever recovering consciousness, Catherine died. To courtiers assembled in an antechamber, an official announced, “Gentlemen, the Empress Catherine is dead and His Majesty Paul Petrovich has deigned to mount the throne of all the Russias.”

On November 8, two days after his mother’s death, the new emperor went to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the coffin of the man he believed was his father, Peter III, was opened. The body had not been embalmed, and the coffin contained only bones, dust, a hat, gloves, boots, and buttons. On December 2, a procession left the monastery to escort the coffin to the Winter Palace. Paul, his family, the court, and the diplomatic corps walked behind, through streets lined by the Guards regiments. A figure from the past also walked. Eighty-year-old Alexis Orlov, who had commanded the guard at Ropsha and written the note informing Catherine of her husband’s death, had been commanded by Paul to walk behind Peter’s casket, carrying Paul’s crown on a cushion held before him. Orlov endured this humiliation, his head erect, his face carved in stone. At the palace, Peter’s coffin was placed beside that of Catherine for a lying-in-state honoring both. On December 5, the two coffins were carried across the ice of the frozen Neva River to the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, where they were placed near the tomb of Peter the Great. They are there today.

Catherine believed in enlightened autocracy. Supporting her belief and the practice of it was the keen attention she paid to public opinion. It was with this in mind that she said to Diderot, “What I despair of overthrowing, I undermine.” Her wielding of absolute power rested on her sensitivity to the nuances of the possible. Years later, Potemkin’s aide, V. S. Popov, elaborated on this by telling the young Emperor Alexander I of a conversation he had once had with the empress:

The subject was the unlimited power with which the great Catherine ruled her empire.… I spoke of the surprise I felt at the blind obedience with which her will was fulfilled everywhere, of the eagerness and zeal with which all tried to please her.

“It is not as easy as you think,” she replied. “In the first place, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out. You know with what prudence and circumspection I act in the promulgation of my laws. I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience.

That is the foundation of unlimited power. But, believe me, they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people.”

She was aware that aspects of her personal life were criticized; her reply was that her life had been unique. “Before I became what I am today, I was thirty-three years the same as other people. It is only thirty years since I have become what they are not, and that teaches one to live.”

After Potemkin’s death, Catherine wrote an epitaph for herself:

HERE LIES CATHERINE THE SECOND

Born in Stettin on April 21, 1729.

In the year 1744, she went to Russia to marry Peter III. At the age of fourteen, she made the threefold resolution to please her husband, Elizabeth, and the nation. She neglected nothing in trying to achieve this. Eighteen years of boredom and loneliness gave her the opportunity to read many books.

When she came to the throne of Russia she wished to do what was good for her country and tried to bring happiness, liberty, and prosperity to her subjects.

She forgave easily and hated no one. She was good-natured, easy-going, tolerant, understanding, and of a happy disposition. She had a republican spirit and a kind heart.

She was sociable by nature.

She made many friends.

She took pleasure in her work.

She loved the arts.

This description is, of course, both idealized and excessively modest. She always refused extravagant titles, whether from the Legislative Assembly in 1764, which wished to name her Catherine the Great; from Voltaire, who filled his letters with flowery tributes; or from Grimm, who called her Catherine the Great in a letter in 1788. Replying to Grimm, she wrote, “I beg you no longer to call me Catherine the Great, because … my name is Catherine II.” It was after her death that Russians began speaking of her as “Catherine the Great.”

She was a majestic figure in the age of monarchy; the only woman to equal her on a European throne was Elizabeth I of England. In the history of Russia, she and Peter the Great tower in ability and achievement over the other fourteen tsars and empresses of the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty. Catherine carried Peter’s legacy forward. He had given Russia a “window on the West” on the Baltic coast, building there a city that he made his capital. Catherine opened another window, this one on the Black Sea; Sebastopol and Odessa were its jewels. Peter imported technology and governing institutions to Russia; Catherine brought European moral, political, and judicial philosophy, literature, art, architecture, sculpture, medicine, and education. Peter created a Russian navy and organized an army that defeated one of the finest soldiers in Europe; Catherine assembled the greatest art gallery in Europe, hospitals, schools, and orphanages. Peter shaved off the beards and truncated the long robes of his leading noblemen; Catherine persuaded them to be inoculated against smallpox. Peter made Russia a great power; Catherine magnified this power, and advanced the nation toward a culture that, during the century that followed, produced, among others, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Petipa, and Diaghilev. These artists and their work were a part of Catherine’s legacy to Russia.

In 1794, when she was sixty-four, she wrote to Grimm:

Day before yesterday, on February ninth, it was fifty years since I arrived with my mother in Moscow. I doubt if there are ten people living today in St. Petersburg who remember. There is still Betskoy, blind, decrepit, gaga, asking young couples whether they remember Peter the Great.… There is one of my old maids, whom I still keep, though she forgets everything. These are proofs of old age and I am one of them. But in spite of this, I love as much as a five-year-old child to play blindman’s buff, and the young people, including my grandchildren, say that their games are never so merry as when I play with them. And I still love to laugh.

It was a long and remarkable journey that no one, not even she, could have imagined when, at fourteen, she set off for Russia across the snow.

* Jones wrote this letter in a mixture of French and English, and it was he who chose the French word badiner. This can mean “played with,” “bantered with,” “joked with,” “toyed with,” or “trifled with.” In today’s vernacular, it could mean “fooled around with.” No one will ever know now how intimate this encounter became. Jones, however, was not denying that something had happened. He was insisting that he did not have sexual intercourse with a ten- or twelve-year-old girl.

* Pitt had perhaps forgotten that in 1588, England had beheaded Mary Stuart, a former queen of France and, subsequently, of Scotland. And that in 1649, the English, after overthrowing their monarchy, had beheaded King Charles I.