Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Yet it is clear that the shower of gold that fell on lucky lovers created a new power stratum loyal to the empress. “Old money” took generations to accrue, sometimes centuries, while a favorite of Elizabeth I could become a millionaire in a year or two.

Seizing the throne, Catherine reinforced her positions in the same way: she gave away money (hundreds of thousands of rubles at a time), expensive jewelry, huge estates, and serfs—her famous lover Grigory Potemkin received no fewer than 44,000 serfs.

A parallel is obvious with the turbulent 1990s, when the same method was used to create a group of loyal oligarchs who successfully masterminded the reelection of Boris Yeltsin to the presidency. But Catherine II, who reigned for thirty-four years, also managed to create a quiet life for her new elite, without the continual threat of arrest or expropriation of property, and in that sense her reign is comparable to the Brezhnev years.

Obviously, Catherine did not like Elizabeth, who played the role of demanding and unpredictable mother-in-law. In her Notes of Empress Catherine II, she describes her as being indolent, messy, and not very bright. Catherine the Great’s Notes is a malicious, prejudiced, and self-serving book, as memoirs should be, especially political ones. It makes clear that for Catherine, Elizabeth I was too much a “person of the Baroque,” while she justly considered herself a leading exponent of the new trend—Classicism.

Elizabeth did not stint on the construction of sophisticated and eccentric palaces. Her favorite architect was the Italian Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, who was brought to Russia when he was sixteen and grew up to be the greatest master of Russian Baroque. Rastrelli designed the enormous light blue palace, sumptuously ornamented in gold, for Tsarskoe Selo outside St. Petersburg, which was Elizabeth’s main residence for a while. In St. Petersburg itself, Rastrelli created the marvelous complex of the Smolny Monastery.

His most famous work is the Winter Palace, in its final form, the building in which the Hermitage Museum is now housed. It was begun in 1754 and completed in 1762, under Catherine II. The Winter Palace has more than a thousand rooms, around two hundred doors and as many windows, and more than a hundred staircases.

The facade of the palace, with its complicated, eye-catching design of four hundred columns, which Rastrelli treated as sculptural elements, works magically with the interiors, embodying Elizabeth’s idea that her “empire has reached such prosperity as it had never seen before.”

But Catherine II, even though she accepted the Winter Palace as a posthumous gift from Elizabeth, which remained the official imperial residence until the end of the Romanov dynasty, looked down her nose at the architectural excesses. For her and her enlightened entourage, the Baroque style was “low, poor taste.” Catherine II unceremoniously dispatched the sixty-two-year-old Rastrelli into retirement.

If Rastrelli’s Winter Palace may be considered the cultural symbol of Elizabeth’s reign, then the symbol for Catherine would be the equestrian monument to Peter the Great by the French sculptor Etienne Maurice Falconet (the Bronze Horseman, as Pushkin later called it). Falconet resembled Rastrelli in his independence, stubbornness, bad temper, and the fact that as a foreigner he obtained immortality through projects realized in Russia.

Denis Diderot, a famous French philosophe, had suggested bringing Falconet to St. Petersburg from Paris to Catherine. Diderot maintained a correspondence with Catherine, who considered herself a philosophe monarch, for many years and even visited St. Petersburg as her guest.

It was suggested that Falconet was Diderot’s greatest gift to Russia. The sculptor, at fifty, came to St. Petersburg with his seventeen-year-old student Marie Ann Collot, spent twelve years (1766–1778) working on the monument, and returned to France, unwilling to wait for its unveiling in 1782. The reason behind his unexpected departure was the conflict of the irritable and self-confident sculptor with Ivan Betskoy, president of the Academy of Arts and de facto minister of culture under Catherine.

This Betskoy was a remarkable man. He spent many years in Europe, where in 1728 he met the beautiful young Duchess Anhalt-Zerbst (the mother of the future Catherine II) and became her lover. Catherine was born a year later; rumor had Betskoy as the father (the husband of the frivolous duchess was twice her age).

Later Betskoy took an active part in the Guards’ coup of 1782 that led his presumed daughter to the throne. Catherine treated Betskoy kindly, even tenderly, but with a touch of irony, like a loving daughter who has surpassed her father. She valued his mind and European education and his close relations with the French philosophes she so admired.