Catherine the Great Read Online Free Page A

the coronation, some fifteen guardsmen were arrested and tortured on suspicion of a conspiracy to dethrone her in favour of Ivan VI. 49 On the morning of 22 September, however, all remained tranquil as the crowd waited patiently in silence–a sign not of popular disapproval, as it would have been in France, but rather of awed anticipation, as the official record of the coronation was anxious to stress. 50
     
    Seeking to invent a myth of legitimacy for the new empress, Catherine’s supporters set out to demonstrate the parallels between her and Elizabeth, and beyond Elizabeth to her father, Peter the Great. ‘Elizabeth has risen for our sakes,’ proclaimed Mikhailo Lomonosov in his ‘Ode on the Accession of Catherine II’: ‘Catherine is the unity of both!’ 51 To drive home the analogy, artists painted Catherine in poses already familiar from portraits of Elizabeth. To ensure that the new empress’s coronation followed the same format as Elizabeth’s twenty years earlier, Trubetskoy refreshed his memory of that event by researching the historical precedents. 52 Even as Catherine’s procession made its stately progress towards the Cathedral of the Dormition, her leading supporters offered a visible representation of continuity among Russia’s governing elite.
    Although that elite served the tsar in a variety of military and bureaucratic organisations, their institutional hierarchies were then overlaid (as they havebeen ever since in Russia) by a network of informal patronage groups too flexible to be classed as factions. By marrying into the Romanov dynasty, the Saltykovs and the Naryshkins, themselves related by marriage to the Trubetskoys, had cornered an increasing number of leading offices since the reign of Peter the Great. 53 So it is no surprise to find Peter Naryshkin among the gentlemen-in-waiting carrying the empress’s train and Lev Naryshkin among her closest friends. The imperial mantle was entrusted to Field Marshal Peter Saltykov, a hero of the Seven Years’ War whom Catherine admired as ‘a very good man, active and full of good sense’. 54 She made him Governor General of Moscow. The state sword, first used in 1742, was carried by the Master of the Horse, Peter Sumarokov, whose service in the Senate stretched back to Anna’s reign in the 1730s. Admiral Ivan Talyzin, who had ridden out into Cathedral Square to shower coins over the populace at Elizabeth’s coronation, now carried the state seal. 55 During Catherine’s coup at the end of June, he had been responsible for turning away the deposed Peter III from the island fortress of Kronstadt. The crown itself was borne by Aleksey Razumovsky, a Ukrainian of Cossack extraction whom Elizabeth had promoted as her Grand Master of the Hunt after plucking him from the choir loft to become her lover thirty years earlier. In his case, lineage was less important than loyalty, and no one was more loyal to Catherine than Count Aleksey Petrovich Bestuzhev-Ryumin. Having initially opposed her invitation to Russia in 1744, Bestuzhev had been arrested fourteen years later as one of her most faithful supporters. Now, ‘debauched, profligate, deceitful and interested to excess’, 56 the old man was about to enjoy a brief Indian summer.
    Waiting to greet her at the south portal of the cathedral, Archbishop Dimitry imparted a vital sense of authority to the whole proceedings. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the story circulated that he made Catherine tremble by inquiring severely, ‘Why have you come?’ 57 In reality, however, there could hardly have been a more reassuring figure for the empress to meet at the start of a ritual intended to symbolise the harmony of the earthly and the celestial spheres–he had been rewarded for his support during her coup with the personal grant of 1000 serfs. 58 Surrounded by no fewer than twenty bishops, thirty-five archimandrites and a host of lesser clergy resplendent in their finest vestments, Catherine