Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (23 page)

Two weeks after the marriage, the empress sent Catherine, Peter, and Johanna to the country estate of Tsarskoe Selo, outside St. Petersburg. The September weather was superb—an intense blue autumn sky and the birch leaves turning to gold—but Catherine was miserable. As her mother’s departure approached, her own ambition seemed to waver. Sharing memories with Johanna became a pleasure and, for the first time since coming to Russia, Catherine was homesick for Germany.
“At that time,” Catherine wrote later, “I would have given much if I could have left the country with her.”

Before going, Johanna requested and was granted an audience with the empress. Johanna gave her version of the meeting to her husband:

A different description of this interview came from an eyewitness, the English ambassador:

Elizabeth was determined to send Johanna away, but she also wanted to appear magnanimous and the princess departed with a cartload of gifts. To console the long-neglected Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, Johanna carried home diamond shoe buckles, diamond coat buttons, and a diamond-studded dagger, all described as presents from the prince’s son-in-law, the grand duke. In addition, before leaving, Johanna was given sixty thousand rubles to pay her debts in Russia. After her departure, it turned out that she owed more than twice that sum. To shield her mother from further shame, Catherine agreed to pay the arrears. Having only her personal allowance of thirty thousand rubles a year, this obligation was beyond her means and helped create a debt that dragged on for seventeen years until she became empress.

When the moment of departure arrived, Catherine and Peter accompanied Johanna on the short first stage of her journey, from Tsarskoe Selo to nearby Krasnoe Selo. The next morning, Johanna left before dawn without saying goodbye; Catherine assumed that it was “
not to make me any sadder.” Waking up and finding her mother’s room empty, she was distraught. Her mother had vanished—from Russia and from her life. Since Catherine’s birth, Johanna had always been
present, to guide, prompt, correct, and scold. She might have failed as a diplomatic agent; she certainly had not become a brilliant figure on the European stage; but she had not been unsuccessful as a mother. Her daughter, born a minor German princess, was now an imperial grand duchess on a path to becoming an empress.

Johanna would live another fifteen years. She died in 1760, at the age of forty-seven, when Catherine was thirty-one. Now, she was leaving behind a sixteen-year-old daughter who would never see any member of her family again. The daughter was under the control of a temperamental, all-powerful monarch, and was lying in bed every night beside a young man whose behavior was increasingly peculiar.

Traveling slowly, Johanna took twelve days to reach Riga. There, Elizabeth’s delayed punishment caught up with her ungrateful, duplicitous guest. Johanna was handed a letter from the empress commanding her to tell Frederick of Prussia, as she passed through Berlin, that he must recall his ambassador, Baron Mardefeld. The letter was phrased with cool, diplomatic politeness: “
I consider it necessary to enjoin you to impress upon His Majesty the King of Prussia when you arrive in Berlin, that it would please me if he were to recall his plenipotentiary minister, Baron Mardefeld.” The choice of Johanna to deliver this message was a slap at both the princess and the king. La Chétardie, the French ambassador, had been given twenty-four hours to leave Moscow after the scene at Troitsa Monastery; Mardefeld, the Prussian ambassador, who had served in Russia for twenty years, had been spared for an additional year and a half, but now he, too, was to be sent home. And Elizabeth’s choice of Johanna to carry the news was explicit recognition of the fact that, while in Russia, the princess had conspired on behalf of the Prussian king to overthrow the empress’s chief minister, Bestuzhev. There is no proof that this painful assignment was the work of Bestuzhev—but it sounds like him. If so, Elizabeth had concurred.

Certainly, the letter, its content and its means of delivery, made plain to Frederick how greatly he had overrated Johanna. Regretting his own misjudgment, he never forgave her. Ten years later, after her husband had died and Johanna was acting as regent for her young son, Frederick suddenly reached out and peremptorily incorporated the principality of Zerbst into the kingdom of Prussia. Johanna was forced to take refuge in Paris. There, she died on the fringe of society two years before her daughter became empress of Russia.

14
The Zhukova Affair

R
ETURNING TO
St. Petersburg after saying goodbye to her mother, Catherine immediately asked for Maria Zhukova. Before her marriage, the empress had added to Catherine’s small court a group of young Russian ladies-in-waiting to help the German-speaking bride-to-be improve her Russian. Catherine was delighted to have them. The girls were all young; the oldest was twenty. “
From that moment on,” Catherine recalled, “I did nothing but sing, dance, and frolic in my room from the moment I awoke until I fell asleep.” These were the playmates with whom Catherine played blindman’s buff, used the lid of a harpsichord as a toboggan, and spent a night on mattresses on the floor wondering what men’s bodies looked like. The liveliest and most intelligent of these young women, a seventeen-year-old named Maria Zhukova, had become Catherine’s favorite.

When she asked for Maria, she was told that the girl had gone to visit her mother. The following morning, Catherine asked again and the answer was the same. At noon that day, when she called on the empress in her bedroom, Elizabeth began to talk about Johanna’s departure and said she hoped Catherine would not be too much affected by it. Then, almost in passing, she said something that struck Catherine dumb—“
I thought I would faint,” Catherine wrote later. In a loud voice and in the presence of thirty people, the empress announced that, in response to Johanna’s parting request, she had dismissed Maria Zhukova from court. Johanna, Elizabeth told Catherine, “
feared that I had grown too attached to the girl and that a close friendship between two young women the same age was undesirable.” Then, on her own, Elizabeth added a stream of insults directed at Maria.

Catherine wondered whether Elizabeth was telling the truth; whether, in fact, her mother had actually asked the empress to send the girl away. Had Johanna felt this much hostility for Maria, Catherine was certain that her mother would have spoken to her before departing; Johanna had never been reticent with criticism. It was true that Johanna had always ignored Maria, but Catherine explained this to herself
as stemming from Johanna’s inability to speak to the girl: “
My mother did not know Russian and Maria spoke no other language.” If, on the other hand, Johanna was not to blame and the idea was solely Elizabeth’s, perhaps Madame Krause had told the empress about the close friendship between the young women. And perhaps Elizabeth had considered this information relevant to the reports that nothing productive was happening at night in the marital bedchamber. This might explain why, behind the cover of its being Johanna’s wish, Elizabeth had summarily removed Catherine’s closest friend. If any of this conjectured sequence was true, Catherine never learned.

In any case, Catherine knew that Maria Zhukova was innocent of wrongdoing. Upset, she told Peter that she did not intend to abandon her friend; Peter showed no interest. Catherine then attempted to send money to Maria, but was informed that the girl had already left St. Petersburg for Moscow with her mother and sister. Catherine next asked that the money she wanted to send to Maria be sent instead to Maria’s brother, a sergeant in the Guards. She was told that the brother and his wife had also disappeared; the brother had suddenly been posted to a distant regiment. Refusing to give up, Catherine tried to arrange a marriage. “
Through my servants and others, I looked for a suitable husband for Mlle Zhukova. A man was located who seemed eligible, a junior officer in the Guards, who was a gentleman of property. This man traveled to Moscow to offer to marry Maria if she liked him. She accepted his proposal.” But when word of this arrangement reached the empress, she intervened again. The new husband was assigned (essentially, banished) to a regiment in Astrakhan.
“It is difficult,” Catherine wrote later, “to find an explanation for this further persecution. Later on, I gathered that the only crime ever attributed to this girl was my affection for her and the attachment she was supposed to have for me. Even now, I find it difficult to find any plausible explanation for all this. It seems to me that people were being gratuitously ruined out of mere caprice, with no shadow of reason.”

This was a warning of what lay ahead. Indeed, Catherine soon realized that the harsh treatment of Maria Zhukova was a clear signal to everyone in the young court that those who were suspected of closeness to either Catherine or Peter were liable to find themselves, on one pretext or another, transferred, dismissed, disgraced, or even imprisoned. Responsibility for this policy lay with the chancellor, Alexis Bestuzhev, and, above him, the empress. Bestuzhev hated Prussia and had always
opposed the bringing of the two German adolescents to Russia. Now that they were married despite his wishes, he was determined that they should not be in a position to undermine his administration of Russian diplomacy. This meant strict surveillance of the married couple, the curbing of all independent friendships and contacts of any kind, and, eventually, an attempt to isolate them completely. Behind Bestuzhev, of course, stood Elizabeth, whose concerns and fears were personal: she feared for the security of her person, her throne, and the future of her branch of the dynasty. In her plans, of course, Catherine, Peter, and their future child were of supreme importance. For this reason, over the years ahead, Elizabeth’s attitudes toward both the young husband and the young wife oscillated dramatically between affection, concern, disappointment, impatience, frustration, and rage.

Not only in appearance but in character, Elizabeth was her parents’ child. She was the daughter of Russia’s greatest tsar and his peasant wife, who became Empress Catherine I. Elizabeth was tall, like her father, and she resembled him in her energy, ardent temper, and sudden, impulsive behavior. Like her mother, she was quickly moved to sympathy and to lavish, spontaneous generosity. But her gratitude, like her other qualities, lacked moderation and permanence. The moment her mistrust was aroused, her dignity or vanity affronted, or her jealousy incurred, she would become a different person. Because it was difficult to guess the empress’s moods, no one could predict her public actions. A woman of extreme, sometimes violent, contradictions, Elizabeth could be easy—or impossible—to get along with.