Russia's First Catherine

MARTA OF MUSCOVY -- Phil Stong --Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

Lean, dark Prince Menshikov watched the plump maiden withdraw, blushing. "And now who might that be?" he leered.

"Just a poor Lithuanian peasant girl from Marienburg," answered his cautious host, bumbling 60-year-old Marshal Boris Sheremetiev, the third most powerful man in Peter the Great's Russia. "Does housework for Mme. Sheremetiev. I drew her when we divided the people."

"Drew her, eh," said the second most powerful Russian thoughtfully. "I must ask Mme. Sheremetiev to lend her to me awhile. That barn of mine is a perfect shambles."

Thus did 19-year-old Marta Skavronsky, orphan daughter of a Lithuanian serf, climb the next-to-last rung of a ladder rising from a peasant's hovel to the throne of Russia.

"Quantities of stuff," says bluff Iowa-born Novelist Phil Stong, have been written about the "vain German nymphomaniac" who was Russia's Catherine II, "Catherine the Great." But Marta, "who was truly great" both as Peter's wife and as Empress Catherine I in her own right, has rated only one biography, written in the 18th Century. Author Stong, with the same racy narrative power that made his State Fair one of the most likable novels of more than a decade ago and has since earned for his two dozen-odd novels and children's tales a legion of readers, has set himself to revive her reputation. His Russia is hazy, gory, barbaric and lecherous. Against it, Stong's Marta stands forth commonsensical, sturdy, ruddy, self-reliant as an Iowa housewife.

The Dominator. Marta Skavronsky entered the "tavern brawl" of Peter's Moscow "as she would have gone into a new kitchen.... History felt her broom." She was illiterate, clean and piously Lutheran. Purchased for a ruble (approximately 50-c-) from the Russian corporal who first claimed her as a prisoner, the sturdy Lithuanian entered the household of Marshal Sheremetiev without fuss or fume. She obediently went to bed with him and next day set about tidying his house.

Transferred to the household of the Privy Councilor Menshikov, Marta soon became "a part of the gay, foul pageant of the Muscovite demimonde." She endured with patience Menshikov's orgiastic embraces and downed her vodka with his roistering friends, glass for glass, without losing a shred of dignity. She could sit placidly through wild banquets where the big joke of the evening might be a string of boiled mice slyly hidden in the cabbage soup, a trick that made some of the revelers vomit on the floor--"which capped the joke though it made things slightly unsanitary for the guests who would later fall on the floor."

Marta's white, hospitable bosom attracted the towering (6 ft. 4 in.) young (30) Tsar Peter, who was to win his place in history by westernizing Russia almost singlehanded. When Peter promptly made an imperial pass at her, Marta began to cry. "You sodden, stinking scoundrel," the Tsar shouted at Menshikov. "This is a decent girl you have attempted to debauch." With a curt injunction to his minister to take her price "from the rents you have stolen from me," Peter took Marta for himself and set her up in a neat house in the German quarter, Moscow's equivalent of Greenwich Village.

Fruitful Wedding. At first Marta was only another mistress. But soon he found that she was a kind of woman he had never known. Early in their relationship she witnessed his first epileptic fit. His mouth began to twitch and a thin froth bubbled from his contorted lips. Easily and quietly, the sturdy peasant girl "swept the tall Tsar up in her arms like a baby, carried him to a sofa, and cradled his head in her lap." The racked Tsar's spasms relaxed. His bloodshot eyes fixed on her wide, placid face, and he smiled, "Marta."

The grateful Peter became almost uxorious. Together they spent long, quiet evenings sitting by the stove and discussing the latest accomplishments of little Petrcovchka or another of their babies. After a year he moved her into the palace. In 1711 he married her, in a ceremony "so secret that there was hardly an infant under the age of one year . . . who did not know about it." Marta was rechristened Catherine and the marriage was made official. "I think this will be a fruitful wedding," quipped the happy groom. "See, we have been married only three hours and already we have five children."

In 1724 Peter's new consort, hung with 150 Ibs. of ceremonial jewels and gold, was crowned Empress and Co-Ruler of Russia, as powerful--in theory--as Peter himself.

Peter was the dominator of Muscovy, but compliant, politic, tactful Marta was in fact (says Biographer Stong) the dominator of Peter. There was, says he, "both great tenderness and pathos in this relationship of the great Tsar and the peasant girl [who] so moderated the fury that went with the crown that Peter was finally reduced to sneaking when he wished to inflict his more violent punishments."

"I have learned to master Russia," said Peter when Marta had dissuaded him from peremptorily executing an annoying ambassador. "I do not think I shall ever learn to master myself."

Moods and Jealousies. Marta bore Peter twelve children, of whom one (Elizabeth) lived to become a great empress. Despite almost continual pregnancy, she traveled constantly with her husband as he followed his armies or ranged over the vast primitive land he was determined to remold in a European pattern. But Marta was neither a pecking hen nor a clinging vine. Peter had his freedom whenever he wanted it, and he had Marta, whom he generally wanted more. At Pruth, when the Russian Army almost came to grief at the hands of the Turks, Peter's empress seized a saber and fought till she was half-smothered under the debris of a bombarded earthwork. Peter, angry at first, shortly founded the Order of St. Catherine in honor of his wife's feat.

Peter's fidelity often lapsed. Marta,

constantly spied on by a jealous court, had

little chance to be unfaithful, but she took her husband's accusations patiently, as she did his glass-and-china-breaking tantrums. Her calm calmed him. When, in a last effort to discredit Marta, Peter's old mistress Anna whispered that her brother had enjoyed the Empress' favors, the tormented Peter did not dare confront Marta with the charge. Instead, as a warning gesture, a sort of royal sulk, he had the brother's head cut off, pickled in alcohol, and placed on Marta's dressing table. Marta tactfully said nothing about it.

A few months later, solicitously nursed by his wife, Tsar Peter died. Says Author Stong: it was not, as historians have asserted, of a broken heart, but of a ruptured bladder. Marta lived to rule in his stead for two tactful years.

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