Free Secret Lives of the Tsars by Michael Farquhar

husband if only he had been willing or able to be in the least lovable, but in the very first days of my marriage I made some cruel reflections about him. I said to myself: “If you love that man, you will be the most wretched creature on earth; it is in your nature to want to be loved in return; that man scarcely even looks at you, practically all he talks about is dolls, and he pays more attention to any other woman than to you.”… This first impression, made on a heart of wax, remained, and I never got these reflections out of my head.
    In the midst of her lonely marriage, Catherine found comfort with the most unlikely of persons: the woman who berated her unmercifully and competed with her for attention at court: her mother. Yet Johanna was in disgrace and her days in Russia were numbered. Empress Elizabeth had allowed the woman she now despised to remain at court long enough to see her daughter married, but soon after the weddingJohanna was unceremoniously sent back to Germany. “At that time,” Catherine wrote, “I would have given much if I could have left the country with her.”
    Empress Elizabeth had for some time presented herself as a benevolent second mother to Catherine, lavishing expensive gifts upon her and tenderly nursing her during her illness. “My respect for the empress and my gratitude to her were extreme,” Catherine wrote. “And she used to say that she loved me almost more than the Grand Duke.” But Elizabeth was every bit as mercurial as her father had been, and, soon enough, Catherine was subjected to the darker, more capricious side of the empress.
    There were petty slights, like sending Catherine’s best friend away for no reason, or making her change her dress because she looked too pretty in it. The empress assaulted the girl she once seemed to adore for the debts she had accumulated, and when Catherine’s father died in 1747, Elizabeth ordered that she limit her mourning to a week, “because, after all, your father was not a king.” The empress’s capacity for cruelty now seemed boundless. “She did harm gratuitously and arbitrarily,” Catherine recalled, “without the shadow of reason.”
    Yet Elizabeth’s wrath wasn’t reserved just for Catherine. Peter shared in the abuse as well, and for much better reasons. “My nephew, Devil take him, is a monster!” she declared. On one occasion, when the empress found that the grand duke had secretly drilled a hole in a chamber wall to spy on her, she stormed into Peter’s apartment and, as Catherine wrote, “let fly at him with the most shocking insults and abuse, displaying as much contempt as anger. We were dumbfounded, stupefied and speechless, both of us, and, though this scene had nothing to do with me, it brought tears to my eyes.”
    Though she had plenty of reasons to scorn Peter, much of Elizabeth’s rancor was rooted in the couple’s persistent infertility—and for that she blamed Catherine. In one particularly nasty scene, the empress confronted the hapless grand duchess directly on the issue. “She said … that it was because of me that my marriage had not yet been consummated,” Catherine wrote. “She began to revile me, to ask me if it was from my mother that I had received the instructions which guided my conduct: she said that I was betraying her for the King of Prussia, that she knew all about my cunning tricks and double-dealing, that she knew everything.”
    And now the empress was in full fury. “I could see the moment coming when she would strike me,” Catherine wrote, “I knew that she beat her women, her servants and even her gentlemen-in-waiting sometimes when she was angry; I could not save myself by flight because I had my back against a door and she was directly in front of me.” The only option was abject humility, which seemed to appease Elizabeth’s wrath.
    Peter and Catherine’s unproductive marriage had serious consequences for both of them. The empress’s policy was to isolate