Catherine the Great

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.