Catherine the Great

Peter spent most of this time in his own room, where his servants kept him supplied not only with military toys but with alcohol. During these days, the grand duke often found himself ignored and even flagrantly disobeyed by his servants, they being as drunk as he. Angry, Peter would strike about him with his stick or the flat of his sword, but his entourage dodged and laughed. After Catherine’s recovery, Peter asked her to make them behave. “When this happened,” she said, “I would go to his rooms and scold them, reminding them of their place and their duties. They always resumed their proper places. This made the grand duke say to me that he did not understand how I managed his servants; he flogged them, but could not make himself obeyed, while I obtained what I wanted with a single word.”

Moscow, the largest city of eighteenth-century Russia, was built primarily of wood. Palaces, mansions, houses, and hovels were constructed of logs and planks, sometimes carved and painted to give the appearance of stone, with windows, porches, and gables of many shapes and bright colors. Nevertheless, because they were built in haste, they were often uncomfortable; doors and windows did not shut, stairs wobbled, sometimes whole buildings swayed.

Worst of all was the scourge of fire. Through the icy Russian winters, palaces and houses alike were heated by tall tile stoves standing in the corners of the rooms, rising from floor to ceiling. Often the stoves were old, the tiles had cracked, rooms filled with smoke, the air became unbreathable, and headaches and swollen red eyes afflicted everyone. Sometimes sparks popped through the cracks and alighted on the wooden walls behind. In winter, which lasted for many months, with primitive stoves blazing in every house, a spark could create an inferno. Caught by the wind, flames from one burning house leaped from the roof to the next, reducing entire streets to ashes. To Muscovites the sight of a burning house with firemen struggling to localize the fire by hastily tearing down other buildings in its path was part of daily life. “No one had ever seen more fires in Moscow than in 1753 and 1754,” Catherine wrote. “More than once from the windows of my apartment, I saw two, three, four and five fires at a time burning in different parts of the city.”

On a November afternoon in 1753, Catherine and Madame Choglokova were together in the Golovin Palace when they heard shouting. The building, constructed entirely of wood, was on fire. It was already too late to save the huge structure. Catherine, hurrying to her room, saw that the stairway in the corner of the grand reception hall was already in flames. In her own apartment, she found a crowd of soldiers and servants carrying and dragging away furniture. She and Madame Choglokova could not help. Retreating to the street, deep in mud from heavy rain, they found the carriage of the choirmaster, who was coming to attend one of Peter’s concerts. Both women scrambled into his carriage. They sat and watched the fire until the heat became too great and the carriage was forced to move. Before leaving, however, Catherine saw an extraordinary sight: “An astonishing number of rats and mice were coming down the staircase in a single, orderly line without even appearing to hurry.” Eventually, Choglokov arrived and told them that the empress had ordered the young couple to move into his house. It was “a terrible place.” Catherine said, “There was no furniture, the wind blew through it on all sides, the windows and doors were half rotten, the floor was split open with cracks, and there were vermin everywhere. Even so, we were better off than the Choglokov children and servants who were living there when we arrived and were expelled to make room for us.”

The following day, their clothes and other belongings, collected from the mud where they had been sitting in front of the smoldering ruin of the palace, were brought to them. Catherine was overjoyed to find most of her small library delivered to her undamaged. What had affected Catherine most in the disaster was the thought of losing her books; she had just finished the fourth volume of Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, and these volumes were returned to her. It was the empress who suffered the heaviest personal loss in the fire. All of that part of Elizabeth’s enormous wardrobe that she had brought with her to Moscow went up in flames. She told Catherine that four thousand dresses had been destroyed and that, of them all, she most regretted losing the one made from the Parisian fabric that Catherine had received from her mother and had given to her.