Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

One of them, if legend is to be believed, was the occasion when Barkov was invited to the court of Empress Catherine II, who was brought to power by the Imperial Guards in 1762. Allegedly, Catherine asked Barkov to say a few lines impromptu. He raised his glass of wine and proclaimed, “To the health of the gates through which all mankind entered life!” The empress is said to have replied instantly, “And I drink to the health of the key that unlocks those gates without a knock!”¹

Barkov’s biography is skimpy on precise information and rich in legend and anecdote. In this case, what is important is not the veracity or apocryphal nature of this story but that the names of Catherine the Great and Barkov are intertwined in historical memory. This probably reflects the attitude toward the empress, in whose lifetime popular pornographic caricatures depicted her in flagrante delicto with her lovers (I saw one at a New York Public Library exhibit in 2003).

The legend of Catherine’s debauched ways is very persistent, remaining in the public mind (both in Russia and in the West) for more than two centuries. It is not surprising, since the greatest minds insisted upon it, among them young Pushkin (“The corrupt sovereign corrupted her state”) and Alexander Herzen (“The history of Catherine II cannot be read in the presence of ladies”).

In Soviet times, she was vilified in serious monographs and textbooks: “depraved and criminal woman” and “semiliterate slut who turned the tsar’s house into a whorehouse.”²

Yet when diligent historians compiled a documentary list of Catherine’s lovers, it contained between twelve and eighteen men for the period from 1753 to 1796—that is, on average one affair for every two and a half years.³ A monastic lifestyle? Hardly. But a promiscuous nymphomaniac? That is not a conclusion that would be drawn either in our day or in the rather dissolute eighteenth century.

There was another widespread charge (both then and now) from the opposite side: Catherine II was a hypocrite, “a Tartuffe in skirt and crown” (Pushkin again). But here this makes no sense at all: it is just as silly to accuse a political figure of hypocrisy as it would be to rebuke a zebra for its stripes; hypocrisy and politics are, alas, inseparable. Catherine was perhaps the first politician in the modern sense on the Russian throne—in any case, the first empress politician.

Her predecessor, Elizabeth I, came to the throne as the legitimate daughter of Peter the Great. Catherine II had to fight for the throne, and she conducted that fight just like a modern political candidate: kissing babies, listening patiently to old people, and saluting the military.

Catherine wrote about it in her memoirs, extremely frank for a professional politician: “I tried to gain the affection of everyone, from young to old; I never overlooked anyone and made it a rule to think that I needed everyone and to act accordingly in order to gain general approbation, in which I succeeded.”⁴

Given in marriage on the orders of Elizabeth I to Peter the Great’s grandson (and her nephew), the future Peter II, the fourteen-year-old German princess was brought to Russia in 1744, and that homely, ambitious, calculating, and phenomenally gifted young woman eventually took over the throne, realizing her long-held plans.

The future Catherine II put all her prodigious effort into turning from a German into an ultra-Russian: she learned to speak, read, and write fluently in Russian; she converted to Russian Orthodoxy, using every opportunity to show her allegiance to her new faith; and, most importantly, from her early years she surrounded herself with friends who were Russian nobles and officers. She learned much from Elizabeth I, whom she observed closely and patiently, in particular how cleverly she used the institution of favoritism in the interests of strengthening her power.

Elizabeth continued Peter’s change of ruling class within the framework of absolute monarchy. Peter the Great had marginalized the boyars and made the military caste the country’s new elite. It had its own crème de la crème: two Guards regiments, each with three thousand bayonets. These were the tsar’s most loyal people, his favorites, his emissaries in varied fields from industry to culture. And they eventually became the striking fist of the new force—the Russian nobility (dvoriane), who placed Elizabeth I on the throne in 1741.

Elizabeth clung to power by using their support. Her favorites were not simply and not only her lovers, they were also her most trusted proponents. Sexual proximity guaranteed political loyalty.

For Catherine, this was one of the most important political lessons she mastered. She used the Guards to ascend to the Russian throne in 1762 and absorbed Elizabeth’s method of generous rewards to her favorites, which so outraged not only contemporaries but later generations as well.