Catherine the Great

There were times when Peter made such a fool of himself that Catherine was deeply embarrassed. On occasion, the empress permitted the gentlemen of her court to have dinner with Peter and Catherine in their apartment. The young couple enjoyed these gatherings until Peter began to spoil them by his reckless behavior. One day, when General Buturlin was dining, he made Peter laugh so hard that, throwing himself back in his chair, the heir to the throne burst out in Russian, “This son of a bitch will make me die of laughter.” Catherine blushed, knowing that this expression would offend Buturlin. The general was silent. Subsequently, Buturlin reported the words to Elizabeth, who ordered her courtiers not to return to the company of such ill-mannered people. Buturlin never forgot Peter’s words. In 1767, when Catherine was on the throne, he asked her, “Do you remember the time at Tsarskoe Selo when the grand duke publicly called me a ‘son of a bitch’?” “This,” Catherine wrote later, “is the effect that can be produced by a stupid, carelessly spoken word—it is never forgotten.”

Sometimes, Peter’s behavior could not be excused. During the summer of 1748, Peter collected a pack of dogs in the country and began to train them himself. That autumn, he brought six of these dogs into the Winter Palace and installed them behind a wooden partition that separated the bedroom he shared with Catherine from a vestibule in the rear of the apartment. As the partition consisted only of a few boards to fence in the dogs, the stench of the makeshift kennel suffused their bedroom, forcing them to sleep in a fog of putrid air. When Catherine complained, Peter said he had no choice; the kennels had to be kept a secret and this was the only possible place. “So, in order not to spoil his pleasure, I had to put up with it,” she said.

Thereafter, she continued, Peter “had only two occupations, both of which tortured my eardrums from morning to night. One was to scrape his violin; the other was his effort to train his hunting dogs.” Violently cracking a whip and yelling huntsmen’s cries, Peter made the dogs run from one end of his two rooms to the other. Any dog that tired and fell behind was rigorously whipped, making it howl still more. “From seven in the morning until late at night,” Catherine complained, “I had to listen to either the ear-shattering sounds he drew from his violin or the horrible barking and howling of the dogs whom he cudgeled and thrashed.”

Sometimes, Peter’s cruelty seemed purely sadistic:

One day, hearing a poor dog cry out piteously for a long time, I opened the door. I saw the grand duke holding a dog by its collar, suspended in the air, while a servant held the same dog up by its tail. It was a poor little English King Charles Spaniel and the grand duke was beating it with all his strength with the heavy handle of a whip. I tried to intercede for the poor animal, but this only made him redouble his blows. I returned to my room in tears. After the dog, I was the most miserable creature in the world.

22

Moscow and the Country

IN DECEMBER 1748, Empress Elizabeth and her court traveled to Moscow, where she would remain for a year. There, before Lent in 1749, the empress was stricken by a mysterious stomach illness. It quickly worsened. Madame Vladislavova, who had connections in Elizabeth’s immediate entourage, whispered this information to Catherine, begging her not to reveal that she had told her. Without naming her informant, Catherine told Peter about his aunt’s illness. He was simultaneously pleased and frightened; he hated his aunt, but if she were to die, his own future seemed terrifying to him. What made it worse was that neither he nor Catherine dared to ask for more information. They decided to say nothing to anyone until the Choglokovs spoke to them about the illness. But the Choglokovs said nothing.

One night, Bestuzhev and his assistant, General Stepan Apraksin, came to the palace and spent many hours talking in the Choglokovs’ apartment. This seemed to imply that the empress’s illness was grave. Catherine begged Peter to remain calm. She told him that, although they were forbidden to leave their apartment, if Elizabeth were to die, she would arrange for Peter to escape from their rooms; she pointed out that their ground-floor windows were low enough to enable them to jump down into the street. She also told him that Count Zakhar Chernyshev, on whom she knew she could rely, was with his regiment in the city. Peter was reassured, and several days later, the empress’s health began to improve.

During this stressful time, Choglokov and his wife remained silent. The young couple did not speak of it either; had they dared to ask whether the empress was better, the Choglokovs would immediately have demanded to know who had told them that she was ill—and those named would immediately have been dismissed.