Catherine the Great

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.