Terrible Tsarinas: Five Russian Women in Power (28 page)

On June 28, 1762, the very same day that the Baron of Breteuil wrote in a dispatch to his government that, “a public cry of dissatisfaction is going up [in Russia],” Catherine, escorted by Alexis Orlov, went to visit the Guard regiments. She went from one barrack to another and was hailed enthusiastically everywhere. The supreme consecration was given to her at once at Our Lady of Kazan, where the priests, who knew her by her so-often displayed piety, blessed her for her imperial destiny. The following day, riding (in an officer’s uniform) at the head of several regiments who had joined her cause, she moved on to Oranienbaum where her husband, who suspected nothing, was regaling himself in the company of his mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsov. He was stunned to receive an emissary from his wife and to hear, from his mouth, that a military uprising has just driven him out.

His Holstein troops not having managed to offer any resistance to the insurgent, he signed, sobbing and trembling with fear, the act of abdication that was presented to him. At that, Catherine’s partisans packed him off in a closed carriage to the palace of Ropcha, some thirty versts from St. Petersburg, where he was placed under house arrest.

Catherine returned to St. Petersburg on Sunday, June 30, 1762, and was greeted by the peeling carillon of church bells, salvos of artillery fire and howls of joy.6 It seemed that Russia was delighted to be become Russian again, thanks to her. Was it reassuring to the people to find another woman at the helm? In the sequence of the dynastic succession, she would be the fifth, after Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth I (Petrovna) to ascend the steps of the throne. Who then could claim that the skirt impedes the natural movements of a woman?

Never had Catherine felt more at ease nor more sure of herself. Those who had preceded her in this difficult role had given her courage and a kind of legitimacy. It was brains, not sex, that was now the best asset for achieving power.

However, six days after her entry in St. Petersburg in apotheosis, Catherine received a letter from an extremely embarrassed Alexis Orlov, stating that Peter III had been mortally wounded during a brawl with his guards at Ropcha. She was thunderstruck. Wouldn’t the people blame her for this brutal and suspicious death? Wouldn’t all those who had cheered her so vigorously yesterday in the streets rather come to hate her for a crime that she did not commit, but that indeed suited her interests very well? The next day, she was relieved - no one was upset at the death of Peter III, and no one thought of implicating her in such a necessary development. Indeed, this murder that reviled her seemed rather to answer to the wishes of the nation.

Some in her entourage had been present during the accession of another Catherine, in 1725. They could not be prevented from thinking that in the past 37 years, four women had occupied the throne of Russia: the Empresses Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna and Elizabeth I, with the short interlude of a regency led by Anna Leopoldovna. How could the survivors be kept from drawing comparisons between the different sovereigns? The oldest among them cited odd similarities between these female autocrats. In Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna and Anna Leopoldovna, they detected the same lubricity, the same surfeits of pleasure and cruelty, the same taste for buffoonery and ugliness, combined with the same quest for luxury and the same need to throw dust in people’s eyes.

This primitive frenzy and this fundamental egoism were also found in Elizabeth, but moderated by her concern to appear “lenient,” in accordance with the nickname given her by the people. Admittedly, for those who were familiar with the court, each of these extreme personalities was distinguished by a hundred other characteristics; but, for anyone who had not been closely involved, they all became confused. Was it Catherine I, or Anna Leopoldovna, or Anna Ivanovna, or Elizabeth I who had dreamt up that wedding night of the two buffoons locked in an ice palace? Which of those omnipotent ogresses had taken a Cossack as her lover, the cantor of the imperial chapel? Which of the four enjoyed the clowning of her dwarves as much as the groans of the prisoners put to torture? Which one had combined, with an omnivorous greed, the pleasures of the flesh and those of political action? Which of them had been a good person but indulged her vilest instincts, pious while offending God at every step? Which of them, although barely literate, opened a university in Moscow and made it possible for Lomonosov to lay the bases of the modern Russian language? For the flabbergasted contemporaries, during this period, it seemed that there had been only one tyrannical and sensual woman, not three tsarinas and a regent, who inaugurated the era of the matriarchy in Russia under different faces and names.

Perhaps it is because she loved men so much that Elizabeth so much liked to dominate them. And they, eternal fire-eaters, were happy to feel her heel on the back of their necks, and they even asked for more! Reflecting on the fates of her famous predecessors, Catherine must have thought that the ability to adopt a masculine mindset when it came to politics and to be physically feminine in bed was the outstanding characteristic of all her congenerics, as soon as they felt the inkling of an opinion on state affairs. The exercise of autocracy, rather than blunting their sensuality, exacerbated it. The more they assumed responsibility for leading the nation, the more they felt the need to appease their reproductive instincts that had to be set aside during the tedious administrative discussions. Wasn’t that proof of the original ambivalence of woman, whose vocations were surely not only pleasure and procreation but who was also exercising her legitimate role when determining the destiny of a people? Suddenly, Catherine was dazzled by the evidence of history: more than any other nation, Russia was the empire of women. She dreamed to model it to match her ideal, to polish it without distorting it.

From the first Catherine to the second, the morals of the land had imperceptibly evolved. The robust oriental cruelty had already given way, in the salons, to false airs of European culture.

The new tsarina was determined to encourage that metamorphosis. But her next ambition was to make everyone forget her Germanic origins, her German accent, her former name of Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, and to have all the Russians accept her as the most Russian of sovereigns, the Empress Catherine II of Russia. She was 33 years old, and had her whole life before her to prove her merit. And that is more than one needs when one has, as she had, faith in one’s own star and in one’s country. What difference did it make that this wasn’t her country by birth - it was her country by choice. What could be more noble, she thought, than to build a future independent of the concepts of nationality and genealogy? And isn’t that why she would one day be known as Catherine the Great?

Peter the Great, by G. Kneller. London, Kensington Palace.

Photo A. C. Cooper (copyright reserved).

St. Petersburg in the time of Peter the Great. The Neva Embankment, the Admiralty, and the Academy of Sciences. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Prints Division. Photo B.N.

View of the Isaakievsky Bridge and St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Winter Palace, and the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg. Photo Giraudon.

The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, 1843. Russian School, Sodovnikov. Preserved in Peterhof Library. Photo Josse.

The grand palace and the park at Tsarskoye Selo. Engraving by Damane-Demartrais.

Catherine I (1682-1727), wife of Peter I (The Great). Empress of Russia (1725-1727).