For the chancellor, Bestuzhev, the problem was different. At issue was not only the matter of an unsuccessful marriage that had produced no child but also Russia’s diplomatic future. This was Bestuzhev’s sphere, and to keep and use the power he needed, he encouraged Elizabeth’s suspicion and whipped up her resentments. Personally, he, too, was concerned about the young couple: he was alarmed by Peter’s opinions and behavior, and he mistrusted Johanna’s daughter, whom he suspected of conspiring secretly with Frederick of Prussia. Because Peter openly admired Frederick, Bestuzhev could scarcely help fearing the accession of such a sovereign to the Russian throne. As for Catherine, the chancellor had always opposed the German grand duke’s marriage to a German princess. Accordingly, the young couple and the young court must not be permitted to become an alternative power center, an independent political body made up of faithful friends and loyal partisans; this happened often enough in kingdoms with independent-thinking heirs to thrones. To prevent it, Bestuzhev employed two tactics: first, the isolation of the young couple from the outside world, and, second, the placement of a powerful, vigilant watchdog inside the young court to watch every move and overhear every word.
As the empress’s first minister, he had, of course, to address her first concern: her need for an heir. Bestuzhev’s approach was to recommend that a strong woman loyal to him be appointed as senior governess to Catherine, to act as the young wife’s constant companion and chaperone. This woman’s duty be would to superintend the marital intimacies and ensure the fidelity of Catherine and Peter. She was to watch the grand duchess and prevent any familiarity with the cavaliers, pages, and servants of the court. Further, she was to see that her charge wrote no letters and had no private conversations with anyone. This prohibition neatly combined Elizabeth’s worries about infidelity with Bestuzhev’s insistence on political isolation; it was critically important to the chancellor that Catherine’s correspondence and her conversations with foreign diplomats be kept under strict surveillance. Thus, Bestuzhev imposed a new entourage on Catherine, charged to enforce a new set of rules dictated by the chancellor, supposedly aimed at consolidating the mutual affection of the married couple, but also intended to render them politically harmless.
Only the first half of this agenda was made explicit to Catherine. In a decree signed by Elizabeth, the young wife was reminded that:
Her Imperial Highness has been selected for the high honor of being the noble wife of our dear nephew, His Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke, heir to the empire.… [She] has been elevated to her present dignity of Imperial Highness with none other but the following aims and objects: that her Imperial Highness might by her sensible behavior, her wit and virtue, inspire a sincere love in His Imperial Highness and win his heart, and that by so doing may bring forth the heir so much desired for the empire and a fresh sprig of our illustrious house.
The woman carefully selected by Bestuzhev to oversee and administer these tasks was twenty-four-year-old Maria Semenovna Choglokova, Elizabeth’s first cousin on her mother’s side. She was one of Elizabeth’s favorites, and both she and her husband, one of the empress’s chamberlains, were also devoted servants of the chancellor. Further, Madame Choglokova had a remarkable reputation for virtue and fertility. She idolized her husband and produced a child with almost annual regularity, a domestic accomplishment meant to set an example for Catherine.
Catherine hated her from the beginning. In her Memoirs, she directed a barrage of unflattering adjectives at this woman who was to rule her existence for many years: “simple-minded … uneducated … cruel … malicious … capricious … self-serving.” The afternoon following Madame Choglokova’s appointment, Peter took Catherine aside and told her that he had learned that the new governess had been assigned to watch over her because she, his wife, did not love him. Catherine replied that it was impossible that anybody could believe that this particular woman could make her feel more tenderness for him. To act as a watchdog was a different matter, she said, but for that purpose they should have chosen someone more intelligent.
The war between the new governess and her charge began immediately. Madame Choglokova’s first act was to inform Catherine that she was to be kept at a greater distance from the sovereign. In the future, she said, if the grand duchess had anything to say to the empress, it must be passed along through her, Madame Choglokova. Hearing this, Catherine’s eyes filled with tears. Madame Choglokova ran to report the lack of enthusiasm with which she had been received, and Catherine’s eyes still were red when Elizabeth appeared. She led Catherine to a room where they were completely alone. “In the two years I had been in Russia,” Catherine said, “this was the first time she had ever spoken to me privately, without witnesses.” The empress then unleashed a torrent of complaint and accusation. She asked “whether it was my mother who had given me instructions to betray her to the King of Prussia. She said that she was well aware of my wiles and deceitfulness and, in a word, knew everything. She said that she knew it was my fault that the marriage had not been consummated.” When Catherine again began to weep, Elizabeth declared that young women who did not love their husbands always wept. Yet no one had forced Catherine to marry the grand duke; it had been her own wish; she had no right to weep over it now. She said that if Catherine did not love Peter, she, Elizabeth, was not to blame; Catherine’s mother had assured her that her daughter was marrying Peter for love; certainly, she had not forced the girl into marriage against her will. “Now, as I was married,” Catherine reported Elizabeth saying, “I must not cry anymore. Then she added that, of course, she knew very well that I was in love with another man, but she never mentioned the name of the man I was supposed to love.” Finally, she added, “I know quite well that you alone are to blame if you have no children.”
Catherine could think of nothing to say. She believed that at any moment Elizabeth was going to strike her; the empress, she knew, regularly slapped the women of her household and even the men when she was angry.
I could not save myself by flight because I had my back against a door and she was directly in front of me. Then I remembered Madame Krause’s advice and I said to her, “I beg your pardon, Little Mother,” and she was appeased. I went to my bedroom, still crying and thinking that death was preferable to such a persecuted life. I took a large knife and lay down on a sofa, intending to plunge it into my heart. Just then, one of my maids came in, threw herself on the knife, and stopped me. Actually, the knife was not very sharp and would not have penetrated my corset.
Unaware of the degree to which Bestuzhev had agitated Elizabeth on the subject of Prussia, Catherine assumed that there was only one reason for Elizabeth’s outburst. None of the empress’s criticisms was valid. She was obedient and submissive; she was not indiscreet; she was not betraying Russia to Prussia, she never bored holes through doors, and she did not love another man. Her failure was that she had not produced a child.
A few days later, when Peter and Catherine accompanied the empress on a visit to Reval (today Tallinn, capital of Estonia), Mme Choglokova rode in their carriage. Her behavior, Catherine said, was “a torment.” To the simplest remark, however innocent or trivial, she responded by saying, “such talk would displease the empress” or “such things would not be approved by the empress.” Catherine’s reaction was to close her eyes and sleep through the journey.
Madame Choglokova kept her position for the next seven years. She possessed none of the qualities necessary to assist an inexperienced young wife. She was neither wise nor sympathetic; on the contrary, she had a reputation as one of the most ignorant and arrogant women at court. Not even remotely did it occur to her to win Catherine’s friendship or, as a wife and the mother of a large family, to discuss the underlying problem she had been called in to solve. In fact, she had no success in the area about which Elizabeth cared most; her oversight of the marriage bed was fruitless. Nevertheless, her power was real. Functioning as Bestuzhev’s jailor and spy, Madame Choglokova made Catherine a roy
al prisoner.
In August 1746, in the first full summer following their marriage, Elizabeth allowed Peter and Catherine to go to Oranienbaum (Orange Tree), an estate on the Gulf of Finland that Elizabeth had given to her nephew. There in the courtyard and terraced gardens, Peter established a simulated military camp. He and his chamberlains, gentlemen-in-waiting, servants, gamekeepers, even gardeners, walked around with muskets on their shoulders, doing daytime parade ground drill and taking turns standing guard at night. Catherine was left with nothing to do except sit and listen to the Choglokovs grumble. She tried to lose herself in reading. “In those days,” she said, “I read romances only.” Her favorite that summer was an exaggerated French romance titled Tiran the Fair, the story of a French knight-errant who travels to England, where he triumphs in tournaments and battles and becomes a favorite of the daughter of the king. Catherine particularly loved the description of the princess, “whose skin was so transparent that when she drank red wine, you could see it pass down her throat.” Peter read too, but his taste lay in tales of “highwaymen eventually hanged for their crimes or broken on the wheel.” Of that summer, Catherine wrote:
Never did two minds resemble each other less. We had nothing in common in our tastes or ways of thinking. Our opinions were so different that we would never have agreed on anything had I not often given in to him so as not to affront him too noticeably. I was already restless enough and this restlessness was increased by the horrible life I had to lead. I was constantly left to myself and suspicion surrounded me on all sides. There was no amusement, no conversation, no kindness or attention to help alleviate this boredom for me. My life became unbearable.
Catherine began to suffer from severe headaches and insomnia. When Madame Krause insisted that these symptoms would disappear if the grand duchess would drink a glass of Hungarian wine in bed at night, Catherine refused. Whereupon Madame Krause always raised the glass to Catherine’s health—and then emptied it herself.
17
“He Was Not a King”
IN ZERBST on March 16, 1747, Catherine’s father, Prince Christian Augustus, suffered a second stoke and died. He was fifty-six; Catherine was seventeen. He had not been allowed to come to her betrothal or to her wedding, and she had not seen him since leaving home three years before. In the last year of his life, she had had little contact with him. This was the work of Empress Elizabeth, Count Bestuzhev, and their agent, Madame Choglokova. Relations between Prussia and Russia were worsening, and Bestuzhev insisted to the empress that all private correspondence between Russia and anyone in Germany be stopped. Catherine, therefore, was strictly forbidden to write personal letters to her parents. Her monthly letters to her mother and father were drafted by the Foreign Office; she was allowed only to copy her message from this draft and then to sign her name at the bottom. She was forbidden to slip any personal news or even a single word of affection into the text. And now her father, who in his quiet, undemonstrative way had given her the only disinterested affection she had ever known, was gone, without a final word of tenderness from her.
Catherine’s grief was profound. Shutting herself up in her apartment, she sobbed for a week. Then Elizabeth sent Madame Choglokova to tell her that a grand duchess of Russia was not permitted to mourn for more than a week “because, after all, your father was not a king.” Catherine replied that “it was true that he was not a reigning sovereign, but he was my father.” Elizabeth and Choglokova prevailed, and after seven days Catherine was forced to reappear in public. As a concession, she was allowed to wear black silk in mourning, but only for six weeks.
The first time she left her room, she encountered and spoke a few casual words to Count Santi, the Italian-born Court Master of Ceremonies. A few days later, Madame Choglokova came to tell her that the empress had learned from Count Bestuzhev—to whom Count Santi had reported it in writing—that Catherine had said she found it strange that ambassadors had not offered her condolences on her father’s death. Madame Choglokova said that the empress considered her remarks to Santi highly improper; that Catherine was too proud, and, once again, that she ought to remember that her father had not been a king; for that reason no expressions of sympathy from foreign ambassadors should be expected.
Catherine could hardly believe what Madame Choglokova was saying. Forgetting her fear of the governess, she said that if Count Santi had written or said that she had spoken a single word to him on this subject, he was a monstrous liar; that nothing of the kind had entered her head; that she had never said a word to him or to anyone else on the subject. “Apparently, my words carried conviction,” Catherine wrote in her Memoirs, “for Madame Choglokova conveyed my words to the empress who then directed her rage at Count Santi.”
Several days later, Count Santi sent a messenger to Catherine to tell her that Count Bestuzhev had forced him to tell this lie and that he was very ashamed of himself. Catherine told this messenger that a liar was a liar, whatever his reasons for lying, and that in order that Count Santi should not further entangle her in his lies, she would never speak to him again.
If Catherine imagined that the petty tyranny of Madame Choglokova and her sorrow at the death of her father had brought her to the nadir of her early years in Russia, she was in error. In that same spring of 1747, even as she was mourning her father, her situation—and Peter’s—became decidedly worse when Madame Choglokova’s husband was promoted to become Peter’s governor. “This was a dreadful blow for us,” Catherine said. “He was an arrogant, brutal fool; a stupid, conceited, malicious, pompous, secretive and silent man who never smiled; a man to be despised as well as feared.” Even Madame Krause, whose sister was the principal ladies’ maid to the empress and one of Elizabeth’s favorites, trembled when she heard about this choice.
The decision had been made by Bestuzhev. The chancellor, distrusting everyone who might come in contact with the grand ducal couple, wanted another implacable watchdog. “Within a few days of Monsieur Choglokov taking over, three or four young servants of whom the grand duke was very fond were arrested,” Catherine said. Then Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss his chamberlain, Count Devier. Soon after, a master chef who was a good friend of Madame Krause’s and whose dishes Peter particularly liked was sent away.
In the autumn of 1747, the Choglokovs imposed more restrictions. All of Peter’s gentlemen-in waiting were forbidden access to the grand duke’s room. Peter was left alone with only a few lesser servants. As soon as it was noticed that he showed a preference for one of these, that person was removed. Next, Choglokov forced Peter to dismiss the head of his domestic staff, “a gentle, reasonable man who had been attached to the grand duke since birth, and who gave him much good advice.” Peter’s valet, the rough old Swedish retainer Romburg, who had given him brusque advice on how to treat a new wife, was dismissed.
The restrictions tightened again. An order from the Choglokovs prohibited anyone, on pain of dismissal, from entering either Peter’s or Catherine’s private rooms without the express permission of Monsieur or Madame Choglokov. The ladies and gentleman of the young court were to remain in the antechamber, where they were never to speak to Peter or Catherine except in a loud voice that everyone in the room could hear. “The grand duke and I,” Catherine noted, “were now forced to remain inseparable.”
Elizabeth had her own reason for isolating the young couple: she believed that if they were reduced to each other’s company they would produce an heir. The calculation was not entirely irrational:
In his distress, the grand duke, deprived of everyone suspected of being attached to him, and being unable to open his heart to anyone else, turned to me. He often came to my room. He felt that I was the only person with whom he could talk without every word being turned into a crime. I realized his position and was sorry for him and tried to offer all the consolation in my power. Actually, I would often be exhausted by these visits which lasted several hours because he never sat down and I had to walk up and down the room with him all the time.
He walked fast and took great strides so that it was difficult to keep up with him and at the same time to continue a conversation about very specialized military details about which he spoke interminably. [But] I knew that it was the only amusement he had.
Catherine could not talk about her own interests; Peter was usually indifferent:
There were moments when he would listen to me, but it was always when he was unhappy. He was constantly afraid of some plot or intrigue which might mean that he would end his days in the fortress. He had, it is true, a certain perspicacity but no judgment. He was incapable of disguising his thoughts and feelings and was so extraordinarily indiscreet that, after he had undertaken not to reveal himself in words, he would then turn around and betray himself through gesture, expression, and behavior. I believe it was these indiscretions that caused his servants to be removed as often as they were.
18
In the Bedroom
PETER NOW SPENT most of the day with his wife. Sometimes he played his violin for her; Catherine listened, hiding her hatred of his “noise.” Often, he talked about himself for hours. Sometimes, he was permitted to hold small evening parties at which he ordered his and her servants to wear masks and dance while he played the violin. Bored by this primitive shuffling, so different from the graceful movement at the great court balls she loved, Catherine, pleading a headache, lay on a couch, still wearing her mask, and closed her eyes. And then at night when they went to bed—during the first nine years of their marriage, Peter never slept elsewhere than in Catherine’s bed—he would ask Madame Krause to bring his toys.
Because everyone in the young court detested and feared the Choglokovs, everyone united against them. Madame Krause had suffered from her supplanter’s arrogance and so despised Madame Choglokova that she had swung her allegiance entirely to Peter and Catherine. She delighted in outwitting the principal duenna and regularly broke the new restrictions, mostly on behalf of Peter, whom she wanted to please because she, like the grand duke, was a native of Holstein. She rebelled most dramatically by procuring for him as many toy soldiers, miniature cannon, and model fortresses as he wanted. He could not play with them during the day, because Monsieur and Madame Choglokov would have demanded to know from where and whom they came. The toys were hidden in and under the bed and Peter played with them only at night. After supper, Peter undressed and went to bed; Catherine followed. As soon as both were in bed, Madame Krause, who slept in the next room, came in, locked their door, and brought out so many toy soldiers dressed in blue Holstein uniforms that the bed was covered with them. Whereupon Madame Krause, then in her fifties, joined Peter in moving them around as he commanded.