Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (17 page)

The next morning she was back at work with Simon Todorsky. She had agreed to enter the Orthodox Church, and a brisk correspondence ensued between Moscow and Zerbst in order to obtain her father’s formal consent to her change of religion. She knew that Christian Augustus would be deeply grieved, but Zerbst was far away and she was now committed to Russia. At the beginning of May, she wrote to her father:

Christian Augustus was slow to agree. Frederick of Prussia, who had a great interest in the marriage, wrote of the situation to the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, “
Our good prince is entirely obstinate on this point. I have gone to endless trouble to overcome his religious scruples. His answer to all my arguments is ‘My daughter shall not enter the Orthodox church.’ ” Frederick eventually found an obliging Lutheran minister to persuade Christian Augustus that there was “no essential difference” between the Lutheran and Orthodox faiths, and Christian Augustus gave his consent. Later, Frederick wrote, “
I have had more trouble in accomplishing this business than if it had been the most important matter in the world.”

8
Intercepted Letters

N
O SOONER HAD
Frederick of Prussia managed the successful massaging of Christian Augustus’s religious scruples than Sophia’s other parent, Johanna, believing herself to be Frederick’s primary secret agent in Russia, participated in the botching of his larger diplomatic enterprise. Frederick had recruited Johanna to help bring about the fall of Bestuzhev by telling her that the Russian vice-chancellor was hostile to Prussia and therefore to Sophia’s marriage, which he would do his best to prevent. Once in Russia, Johanna had joined the French and Prussian ambassadors in an anti-Bestuzhev conspiracy. When this plot was uncovered, the consequences were disastrous for the two ambassadors and seriously damaging for Johanna.

Elizabeth’s behavior during Sophia’s illness had made plain to everyone the empress’s affection for the young princess. With the betrothal about to take place, Johanna might have asked herself what danger to the marriage now could come from Bestuzhev. A moment’s reflection might have told her that there was little; that Bestuzhev, no matter how opposed, could not possibly at this point have prevailed on the empress to cancel the German marriage. Johanna, therefore, should have been gracious to a defeated enemy; indeed, wisdom would have dictated that she work to win him to her daughter’s support. But Johanna was incapable of such a reversal. From the moment she arrived in
St. Petersburg, Bestuzhev’s enemies, Mardefeld and La Chétardie, had become her confidants. There had been secret meetings, plans had been hatched, coded letters sent to Paris and Berlin. Johanna was not a woman to turn away from this heady brew. In any case, it was too late to change. She was already ensnared.

Alexis Bestuzhev-Ryumin, then almost fifty-one, was one of the most gifted Russians of his day. His diplomatic talents ranked high; his political ability to survive in the swirling currents of domestic policy and court intrigue placed him higher still. As a boy, he had shown outstanding ability in languages. At fifteen, he had been sent abroad by Peter the Great to be educated and begin a long apprenticeship in diplomacy. In 1720, Peter appointed him, at twenty-seven, as Russian ambassador in Copenhagen. Five years later, after Peter’s death, he was shunted off to the minor post of resident in Hamburg, where he remained for fifteen years. When Elizabeth succeeded the two German women, empress and regent, she meant to restore the foreign policies of her father. In order to administer these policies, she plucked Bestuzhev, her father’s protégé, from the backwater of Hamburg and placed him at the head of foreign affairs as vice-chancellor.

A thin-lipped man with a large nose, sharp chin, and broad, sloping forehead, Bestuzhev was an epicure, an amateur chemist, and a hypochondriac. By nature, he was moody, secretive, irascible, and ruthless. A master of intrigue, by the time he returned to power, he was so silent and efficient in wielding power that he was more feared than loved. But while merciless in dealing with his enemies, he was devoted to his country and to Elizabeth. Before Sophia became the empress Catherine, he first opposed and then befriended her, and she came to understand the two sides of his character: blunt, headstrong, even despotic, but also an excellent psychologist and judge of men, a fanatical worker of selfless devotion, a passionate Russian nationalist, and a faithful servant of the autocrat.

During her reign, Elizabeth’s was the only opinion that counted. She may have disliked her vice-chancellor as a man, but she trusted him as her chief adviser, and rejected all attempts of Frederick’s ambassador and agents to undermine her confidence in him. She allowed him to have his way in most things, but there were occasions when she
asserted herself. She did not, for example, consult him when she brought her nephew to Russia to become her heir, and she acted against Bestuzhev’s advice when she chose Sophia to be Peter’s bride. On both these occasions she acted impulsively on her own intuition and initiative. On the other hand, there were long periods when she chose to be no more than a beautiful woman at the center of a glittering, admiring court, a woman who demanded no more than to be constantly entertained. Sometimes, when she was in this mood, Bestuzhev had to wait for weeks, even months, to get her signature on important documents. “
If the empress would give to government affairs only one one-hundredth of the time Maria Theresa devotes to them, I should be the happiest man on earth,” Bestuzhev once told an Austrian diplomat.

Frederick’s instructions to Johanna in Berlin had been to assist his ambassador to get rid of the vice-chancellor. But none of the conspirators had any real knowledge of their enemy. They thought him a man of moderate gifts and many failings: a gambler, a drinker, and a bumbling intriguer. Accordingly, they imagined that it would take only a slight, well-timed effort to push him over the edge. They never imagined that he knew about their secret meetings, that he was astute enough to have guessed their purpose, that he was expertly on guard, and that he, not they, would strike first.

Bestuzhev’s precautions were simple: he intercepted their letters, had them decoded, read them, and then had them copied. The work of decoding was done by a German specialist in the Foreign Office, who deciphered, copied, and resealed the letters so well that no trace of interference could be seen. Thus it was that innumerable letters passed between Moscow and Europe without either writer or recipient having the slightest suspicion that Bestuzhev had read and recorded every word.

Bestuzhev had no need to fear what was disclosed about himself in these letters; their most prominent feature was a string of snide comments and irreverent attacks La Chétardie had made about the empress. Elizabeth, the marquis informed his government, was lazy, extravagant, and immoral; she changed her clothes four or five times a day; she put her signature on letters she had not even read; she was “
frivolous, indolent, running to fat” and “and no longer had sufficient
energy to rule the country.”
Written with a supercilious rancor intended to titillate Louis XV and his ministers at Versailles, they were letters to infuriate a far less sensitive and irascible monarch than the daughter of Peter the Great.

Beyond personal insults, La Chétardie’s letters also thrust into light the political conspiracy to overthrow Bestuzhev and his pro-Austrian policy. In this connection the clandestine involvement of the Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst was revealed. By citing her support of his opinions and referring to her correspondence with Frederick in Berlin, the marquis laid bare Johanna’s role as a Prussian agent.

Bestuzhev did not hurry; he gave his enemies plenty of time to incriminate themselves. Not until he had collected about fifty of these poisonous letters, mostly from the pen of La Chétardie, did he carry the evidence to the empress. On June 1, 1744, Elizabeth took Peter, Sophia, and Johanna with her on retreat to the Troitsa Monastery. Here, calculating that in the seclusion of this religious place the empress would have more time to read, Bestuzhev placed before her the evidence he had gathered. What Elizabeth saw, along with the effort to overthrow her vice-chancellor, was that Sophia’s mother, while being overwhelmed with generosity and luxury, was scheming against Russia in the interests of a foreign power.

On June 3, Sophia, Peter, and Johanna had just finished their midday dinner when the empress, followed by Lestocq, entered their room and commanded Johanna to follow her. Left alone, Sophia and Peter climbed onto a window ledge and sat, side by side, legs dangling, talking and joking. Sophia was laughing at something Peter had said when suddenly the door burst open and Lestocq appeared. “
This horseplay will stop at once!” he shouted. Turning to Sophia, he said, “You can go pack your bags. You will be leaving for home immediately.” The two young people were stunned.

“What is this about?” Peter asked.

“You will find out,” Lestocq said grimly and stalked away.

Neither Peter nor Sophia could imagine what had happened; for even a highly placed courtier to speak with this insolence to the heir to the throne and his future wife seemed unthinkable. Groping for an explanation, Peter said, “
If your mother has done something wrong, that does not mean that you have.”

Frightened, Sophia replied, “My duty is to follow my mother and obey her commands.” Feeling that she was about to be sent back to
Zerbst, she looked at Peter, wondering how he would feel if this happened. Years later, she wrote, “I saw clearly that he would have parted from me without regret.”

The two were still sitting there, bewildered and trembling, when the empress, her blue eyes flashing, her face crimson with rage, emerged from her apartment. Behind her came Johanna, her eyes red with tears. As the empress stood over them beneath the low ceiling, the two children jumped down from their perch and bowed their heads in respect. This gesture seemed to disarm Elizabeth, and impulsively she smiled and kissed them. Sophia understood that she was not being held responsible for whatever her mother had done.

There was no forgiveness, however, for those who had insulted and betrayed the empress. She struck first at La Chétardie. The French ambassador was ordered to leave Moscow within twenty-four hours, going directly to the frontier at Riga without passing through St. Petersburg. Elizabeth’s anger against this former friend was so great that she commanded him to return the portrait of herself set in diamonds that she had given him. He returned the portrait and kept the diamonds. Mardefeld, the Prussian ambassador, was allowed to linger, but he, too, was sent home within a year. Johanna was permitted to remain, but only because she was Sophia’s
mother, and only until her daughter married the grand duke.

With his political enemies overthrown and scattered, Bestuzhev rose higher. He was promoted from vice-chancellor to chancellor; he was awarded a new palace and estates; the downfall of his diplomatic enemies meant the success of his pro-Austrian, anti-Prussian policy. Secure in his new power, he no longer felt it necessary to oppose Peter’s marriage to Sophia. He could see that this was a project the empress was determined to carry out; to attempt to block it would be dangerous. Further, even after the marriage, the girl’s mother would be harmless.

Princess Johanna’s brief career in diplomacy had ended in ruin: the French ambassador had been summarily banished; the Prussian ambassador, a veteran of twenty years at the Russian court, had been stripped of influence; Bestuzhev had been promoted to chancellor. Finally, there was the downfall of Johanna herself. Elizabeth’s friendship for the sister of the man she had loved had now been replaced by an intense desire to send Sophia’s mother back to Germany as soon as possible.