Free Catherine the Great by Simon Dixon Page A

imperial power and prestige as they drove through crowded streets to fanfares of trumpets and drums. ‘It feels as though I am part of the entourage of Her Imperial Majesty or some great princess,’ wrote the disingenuous Johanna Elisabeth: ‘It never enters my head that all this is for poor me.’ 76
    Until they entered Russian territory, Sophie’s mother had been travellingincognito as Countess Rheinbeck, accompanied by only the most modest of suites: her chamberlain, her lady-in-waiting, four chambermaids, a valet, a handful of lackeys and a cook. Now, wrapped in the priceless sables presented to them by Naryshkin, they continued their journey under cavalry escort in long imperial sleighs drawn by ten horses. As Catherine later recalled, it was quite an art even to climb into these elaborate vehicles, in which passengers lay recumbent on bulky feather mattresses, lined with silk and covered with satin cushions. 77 Still, there was little enough to see as they traversed a snowy landscape razed by the Russians in the first decade of the century when it seemed that the invading Swedish army might triumph in the Great Northern War. Not until the 1770s did Russia’s Baltic provinces recover their pre-war population levels after a campaign in which as many as 70 per cent of the population of Livland and Estland may have perished. At Dorpat (now Tartu in Estonia), which the Russians had taken from the Swedes in 1704, the signs of the bombardment were still visible. 78 Their final calling point was Narva, where 11,000 Swedish troops had humiliated Peter the Great’s 40,000-strong army in November 1700, prompting far-reaching military reforms that helped to underpin tsarist imperial expansion for the remainder of the century. From there, it was a relatively short distance along the southern shores of the gulf of Finland to the Russian capital, where they arrived on the afternoon of 3 February towards the end of the carnival season.

CHAPTER TWO
BETROTHAL AND MARRIAGE 1744–1745
    T hough unaware of it at the time, Sophie had arrived in St Petersburg at a pivotal period in the city’s short history. Its origins are shrouded in mystery. Legend has it that on 16 May 1703, Peter the Great landed with a group of military companions on Hare Island, digging two turves with a bayonet and laying them crosswise as he pronounced: ‘Here a city is to be!’ But since there are no records of the occasion in the Court journals, and no first-hand accounts have survived, it is not even certain where Peter was on the date in question. 1 There can be no doubt, however, of the importance of the new capital which began to emerge after the tsar’s victory over the Swedes at the battle of Poltava in 1709. Whereas Turin and Madrid had grown by having a Court imposed upon them, St Petersburg was the ultimate Residenzstadt : a city expressly developed as the site of the imperial Court. ‘Petersburg is just the Court,’ the philosophe Denis Diderot would remark following his visit to Catherine in 1774: ‘a confused mass of palaces and hovels, of grands seigneurs surrounded by peasants and purveyors.’ 2 For the first twenty years of its existence, the city was little more than a building site. While Russian noblemen grumbled about being forced to settle in such inhospitable surroundings, visitors were astonished by the sheer speed of construction. By the early 1720s, the new capital was consuming almost 5 per cent of the Russian empire’s total revenue: between 10,000 and 30,000 labourers worked there every year; thousands more were conscripted to replace those who sacrificed their lives in the effort to sink reliable foundations into the bog. 3 Struck by such awesome ambition and progress, the Hanoverian envoy duly ranked St Petersburg as ‘a wonder of theworld, was it only in consideration of the few years that have been employed in the raising of it’. 4
    Foreign verdicts such as this helped to generate the city’s lasting reputation as a