It was as an exemplar of new fashions in social and cultural life that Elizabeth had her greatest impact on elite women. She spent vast amounts of money on herself and her palaces. Famous for changing her dress three or four times in the course of one ball, she ran up enormous bills with Paris dressmakers and jewelers. She also ordered ornate furniture by the wagonload. This conspicuous consumption furthered the popularization of imported luxuries and, perhaps more important, of the West as the source of all that was stylish. Elizabeth also promoted the Western custom of wealthy women patronizing the secular arts and education.
Her courtiers believed that the empress was secretly married to one of her favorites, an army officer named Aleksei Razumovskii. Officially, she remained single. Intending never to give birth to an heir, Elizabeth appointed her nephew Peter to that position shortly after she took the throne. The young man was the son of Elizabeth’s sister Anna and a minor German ruler, the duke of Holstein-Gottorp. After bringing Peter to St. Petersburg to live with her, Elizabeth chose as his bride-to-be a fourteen-year-old princess named Sophia, from the little German principality of Anhalt-Zerbst. Sophia moved to Russia in 1744. When she was baptized in the Russian Orthodox church, she took the name Ekaterina. We know her as Catherine the Great, one of the most remarkable rulers in European history.
Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst would not have become Catherine the Great had she been the modest, unassuming princess that Elizabeth thought she was. She came from a large but not very loving family; in her memoirs, Catherine portrayed her mother Johanna as distant and abusive and said virtually nothing about her father.5 She had received the education customary for German princesses—tutoring in French, religion (hers was Lutheranism), literature, philosophy, music, and drawing. After her marriage to Peter in August 1745, Catherine settled down to the life preordained for her; within a few years she began to chafe at its limitations.
Chief among her discontents was her unhappy marriage. Catherine found her husband juvenile and crude; he found her haughty and prim. The intellectual differences between the two were profound as well, for Catherine was interested in books and the arts, Peter in military matters. In her memoirs, Catherine said the marriage had soured because Peter had never loved her. This rejection made her “more or less indifferent to him,” she wrote, “but not to the crown of Russia.”6
By the early 1750s the two were entertaining themselves with lovers. This was common practice in the courts of eighteenth-century Europe; indeed it was expected that royalty and their courtiers, locked for life into marriages with spouses chosen for them, would have extramarital affairs. The relationship between Catherine and Peter was unusually hostile, even by the relaxed standards of the era, and by the end of the 1750s the two were rarely speaking to one another. “I let him do as he wished and went my way,” Catherine wrote.7 She had performed her prime obligation in 1754 when she gave birth to a son, Paul. (She later wrote in her memoirs that Paul was the son of courtier Sergei Saltykov.) The estrangement of the royal couple troubled Empress Elizabeth, who occasionally attempted to mediate between them. Mostly the empress avoided the pair and devoted herself to rearing Paul and his sister Anna, born in 1757 of an affair with Stanislaw Poniatowski, future king of Poland. Catherine rarely saw her children.
In her memoirs, Catherine wrote this description of her talents:
“I used to say to myself, happiness and misery depend on ourselves; if you feel unhappy, raise yourself above unhappiness, and so act that your happiness may be independent of all eventualities. With such a disposition I was born… and with a face, to say the least of it, interesting and which pleased at first sight, without art or effort. My disposition was naturally so conciliating that no one ever passed a quarter of an hour in my company without feeling perfectly at ease and conversing with me as if we had been old acquaintances. Naturally indulgent, I won the confidence of those who had any relations with me, because everyone felt that the strictest probity and goodwill were the impulses that I most readily obeyed, and, if I may be allowed the expression, I venture to assert on my own behalf that I was a true gentleman, whose cast of mind was more male than female, though, for all that, I was anything but masculine, for, joined to the mind and character of a man, I possessed the charms of a very agreeable woman.”
SOURCE: ALEXANDER HERZEN, ED., MEMOIRS OF CATHERINE THE GREAT (NEW YORK: APPLETON, 1859), 319–20.
In late December 1761 the empress died and Peter III ascended the throne. He was not popular with many of the powerful at court, and he made things worse by pursuing controversial domestic and foreign policies. He may also have contemplated exiling Catherine to a convent so that he could marry his latest lover, Elizaveta Polianskaia. These proved to be fatal mistakes. In June 1762, after giving birth to a baby fathered by her current lover, Grigori Orlov, Catherine organized a coup against her husband. Peter was arrested, and church, military, and government leaders proclaimed his wife “autocrat of all the Russias.” A few days later, Peter was murdered by his captors. The same fate soon befell the former tsar Ivan VI, now a man in his early twenties who had spent his entire life as a prisoner.
Catherine’s audacity in seizing power in her own name is astonishing. A foreigner who had no powerful relatives at court, who was subject to the absolute authority of an empress who did not like her much, who had made an enemy of her theoretically powerful husband, Catherine was nonetheless able to cultivate allies among the cliques and clans of Elizabeth’s court. When the moment came to act, she chose to make herself reigning empress rather than taking the more cautious and time-honored path of becoming regent for her son Paul, despite the fact that important people at court favored that latter arrangement. She prevailed because she was a far more able politician than her hapless husband. Ambitious, intelligent, pragmatic, and duplicitous, Catherine devoted the rest of her life to governing Russia. Her overriding mission was to maintain herself in power, and at that she succeeded magnificently.
Catherine owed her success in part to her skillful blending of contemporary European ideas about queens with much older Russian notions. An ethnic German whose first language was French, Catherine presented herself as a sophisticated member of cosmopolitan European royalty. She urged her nobility to study the ideas of the Enlightenment, that is, the new thinking about politics, economics, and education that was making a stir elsewhere. Catherine’s interest in Enlightenment thought was genuine, and her espousal of it enabled her to pose as a modern-day Athena bestowing Western culture on her subjects. This image of the modernizing monarch appealed both to those courtiers who wanted to be perceived as social leaders and to educated people who admired Western thought. Catherine emphasized her own enlightenment by corresponding with leading intellectuals abroad and liberally patronizing the development of Russian arts and sciences.
The empress also exploited more traditional Russian ideas about royal women. She publicized her devotion to Russian Orthodoxy and she portrayed herself as deeply solicitous, in a very feminine way, of her people’s well-being. Catherine appeared often in loving concourse with her son Paul while he was a child. At court, she played the kindly mistress, wielding power with tact and generosity. As she aged, she encouraged her people to think of her as “Matushka,” Little Mother. This term of endearment was used throughout Russia not only by children but also by subordinated people, such as serfs, when addressing noblewomen whom they served. By claiming to be Russia’s Matushka, Catherine clothed herself with those qualities of benevolence, piety, authority, and maternal care that had long been attached to Russia’s royal women.8