Terrible Tsarinas

delighted to be become Russian again, thanks to her. Was it reas-

suring to the people to find another woman at the helm? In the

sequence of the dynastic succession, she would be the fifth, after

Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna, Anna Leopoldovna and Elizabeth I

(Petrovna) to ascend the steps of the throne. Who then could

claim that the skirt impedes the natural movements of a woman?

Never had Catherine felt more at ease nor more sure of herself.

Those who had preceded her in this difficult role had given her

courage and a kind of legitimacy. It was brains, not sex, that was

now the best asset for achieving power.

However, six days after her entry in St. Petersburg in apo-

theosis, Catherine received a letter from an extremely embar-

< 236 >

Another Catherine!

rassed Alexis Orlov, stating that Peter III had been mortally

wounded during a brawl with his guards at Ropcha. She was

thunderstruck. Wouldn’t the people blame her for this brutal and

suspicious death? Wouldn’t all those who had cheered her so vig-

orously yesterday in the streets rather come to hate her for a crime

that she did not commit, but that indeed suited her interests very

well? The next day, she was relieved — no one was upset at the

death of Peter III, and no one thought of implicating her in such a

necessary development. Indeed, this murder that reviled her

seemed rather to answer to the wishes of the nation.

Some in her entourage had been present during the accession

of another Catherine, in 1725. They could not be prevented from

thinking that in the past 37 years, four women had occupied the

throne of Russia: the Empresses Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna and

Elizabeth I, with the short interlude of a regency led by Anna Leo-

poldovna. How could the survivors be kept from drawing com-

parisons between the different sovereigns? The oldest among

them cited odd similarities between these female autocrats. In

Catherine I, Anna Ivanovna and Anna Leopoldovna, they detected

the same lubricity, the same surfeits of pleasure and cruelty, the

same taste for buffoonery and ugliness, combined with the same

quest for luxury and the same need to throw dust in people’s eyes.

This primitive frenzy and this fundamental egoism were also

found in Elizabeth, but moderated by her concern to appear

“lenient,” in accordance with the nickname given her by the peo-

ple. Admittedly, for those who were familiar with the court, each

of these extreme personalities was distinguished by a hundred

other characteristics; but, for anyone who had not been closely

involved, they all became confused. Was it Catherine I, or Anna

Leopoldovna, or Anna Ivanovna, or Elizabeth I who had dreamt

up that wedding night of the two buffoons locked in an ice pal-

< 237 >

Terrible Tsarinas

ace? Which of those omnipotent ogresses had taken a Cossack as

her lover, the cantor of the imperial chapel? Which of the four

enjoyed the clowning of her dwarves as much as the groans of the

prisoners put to torture? Which one had combined, with an om-

nivorous greed, the pleasures of the flesh and those of political

action? Which of them had been a good person but indulged her

vilest instincts, pious while offending God at every step? Which

of them, although barely literate, opened a university in Moscow

and made it possible for Lomonosov to lay the bases of the modern

Russian language? For the flabbergasted contemporaries, during

this period, it seemed that there had been only one tyrannical and

sensual woman, not three tsarinas and a regent, who inaugurated

the era of the matriarchy in Russia under different faces and

names.

Perhaps it is because she loved men so much that Elizabeth

so much liked to dominate them. And they, eternal fire-eaters,

were happy to feel her heel on the back of their necks, and they

even asked for more! Reflecting on the fates of her famous prede-

cessors, Catherine must have thought that the ability to adopt a

masculine mindset when it came to politics and to be physically

feminine in bed was the outstanding characteristic of all her con-

generics, as soon as they felt the inkling of an opinion on state af-

fairs. The exercise of autocracy, rather than blunting their sensu-

ality, exacerbated it. The more they assumed responsibility for

leading the nation, the more they felt the need to appease their

reproductive instincts that had to be set aside during the tedious

administrative discussions. Wasn’t that proof of the original am-

bivalence of woman, whose vocations were surely not only pleas-

ure and procreation but who was also exercising her legitimate

role when determining the destiny of a people? Suddenly, Cath-

erine was dazzled by the evidence of history: more than any other

nation, Russia was the empire of women. She dreamed to model it

< 238 >

Another Catherine!

to match her ideal, to polish it without distorting it.

From the first Catherine to the second, the morals of the

land had imperceptibly evolved. The robust oriental cruelty had

already given way, in the salons, to false airs of European culture.