The Memoirs of Catherine the Great Read Free Page B

Elizabeth’s senate, in particular Vice Chancellor (later Chancellor) Count Bestuzhev-Riumin and Prince Alexander Kurakin (1697–1749). 2 The prestige, power, and collective fortunes of these two clans changed, but they remained the two most powerful groups throughout Catherine’s reign and into the nineteenth century. 3
    The ruthless competition between these two families during the succession struggles after Peter the Great’s death abated under Elizabeth. 4 The Saltykovs expanded to include the Trubetskois (through three marriages), and the Naryshkins added the Kurakins and the Golitsyns. 5 In addition, Elizabeth’s mother’s family, the Skavronskys, provided a way to advance politically and themselves needed to solidify their power with status. Elizabeth married her niece Anna Skavronskaia to Mikhail Vorontsov (from an old noble family). Vorontsov continued his ascent by plotting with the family of Elizabeth’s favorite, the Shuvalovs, against Chancellor Count Bestuzhev-Riumin, and succeeded him after his arrest in 1758, where Catherine’s memoir ends. Two husbands of two other Skavronsky nieces likewise succeeded to important posts at this time, as did relatives of the Naryshkins, thus leaving the Saltykovs in the background. 6 Under Peter III, the Vorontsovs placed Elizabeth Vorontsova as his mistress, but Catherine cut short their hopes in 1762 with her coup. However, Vorontsova’s sister, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, was at Catherine’s side during the coup, and the family continued to prosper under Catherine.
    To maintain the balance of power between rival clans, Elizabeth went outside Russia to choose her own candidate as a wife for her nephew Grand Duke Peter. However, she turned to the two main families ten years later. Elizabeth responded to Peter and Catherine’s failure to consummate their marriage and have children with a plan so sensitive that it was left out of the Russian Academy edition of Catherine’s final memoir. In 1753, Elizabeth’s niece Mme. Choglokova proposed that Catherine take a lover and offered her “L.N.” or “S.S.” Given the central importance of the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs to the ruling Romanov family, Elizabeth had found a respectable and reasonable, albeit unorthodox, solution to dynastic instability by proposing an affair with either Lev Naryshkin or Sergei Saltykov. Thus Elizabeth could accept Paul as a possibly illegitimate future heir. (Elizabeth herself was illegitimate, which had been an impediment to a royal marriage.) Catherine recalls the affair with Saltykov as a matter of necessity in the account of her lovers that she wrote for Potemkin. 7
    In this memoir, Catherine demonstrates how she understood and used this system of relationships in which women as well as men played potentially important roles. Thus in 1757 Catherine arranged a marriage that improved her relations with the Razumovskys, the family of Elizabeth’s favorite and secret husband, at the expense of the family of Elizabeth’s other favorite, the Shuvalovs. These two families opposed each other in the succession struggle.
    The marriage of Lev Naryshkin linked me more strongly than ever in friendship with the Counts Razumovsky, who were truly grateful to me for having procured such a good and advantageous match for their niece, nor were they at all upset to have gotten the upper hand over the Shuvalovs, who were not even able to complain about it and were obliged to conceal their mortification. This was yet one more advantage that I had obtained for them.
    Catherine leaves the obvious unsaid: both the Razumovskys and the Shuvalovs needed to solidify their relatively recent ascents as favorites’ families, and the Razumovskys gained more prestige and power from a connection with the Naryshkins than with almost any other family, thus significantly outdoing their rivals. The Shuvalovs later married into the Saltykovs. Catherine too does not explain that in return for her support, Kirill