In the late eighteenth century, marriages to foreigners were all the rage among the Russian nobility, and the foreign partners were at times not representatives of the hereditary aristocracy at all, neither counts nor even barons, but merely French…
In the late eighteenth century, marriages to foreigners, male and female, were all the rage among the Russian nobility, and the partners from abroad were at times not representatives of the hereditary aristocracy at all, neither counts nor even barons, but merely French émigrés or Italian singers. With the marriage came a new religion. Russian countesses and princesses newly converted to the Latin faith often strove to break away to Europe, where some abbé would suddenly appear in their lives and become the family's chief counsellor, the tutor of the children and the manager of the property. More than one family was brought to beggary by such means: back at home the estates were run anyhow, in Paris, Vienna and Florence great debts were contracted, and total ruin followed.
Those who did not leave Russia but were nonetheless tempted by Western Christianity made their houses centres of missionary work and raised their children in the new faith. After that Latinism spread through kinship and acquaintance; it simply became fashionable to convert from Orthodoxy while outwardly keeping up a pretended Orthodox appearance. An example is Princess Irina Dolgorukaya (née Golitsyna). Since the men took no part in the spiritual life of the family, these processes moved quickly and briskly: governesses who were also preachers appeared in the houses, along with new conversations and customs, and imperceptibly the young nephews, dowager aunts and other relations were drawn into the new faith.
Catherine the Great did not hinder the marriages with foreigners as such, but she could not help being concerned about the weakening of Orthodoxy among her nobles, and she took a personal part in the fate of aristocratic unions with foreign subjects. For example, when Princess Varvara Shakhovskaya, one of the heiresses to the Stroganov wealth, secretly married her daughter Elizaveta to Prince d'Arenberg in Paris, the Empress sent the commander-in-chief of Moscow, Prozorovsky, a decree to summon Major General Prince Boris Shakhovskoy and find out whether he had given his consent to this marriage. What does «secretly» mean? It means without the Empress's knowledge. Catherine personally forbade Arenberg to come to Russia, ordered both princesses to return as soon as possible, and decreed that Arenberg would have no right to Shakhovskaya's Russian dowry, above all her peasants, of whom there were up to 13,000 in Penza. In effect, Catherine deprived Elizaveta of her inheritance. The stress even left Princess Shakhovskaya with a paralysed leg. The Tsaritsa's indignation was also aroused by Arenberg's own person, since he had taken part in two rebellions against lawful authority, the French and the Dutch: "by his debauchery, God forbid, trouble may come of it."
The Empress saw particular importance in ensuring that heterodox foreigners from alien lands could not own peasants who professed the Orthodox faith dominant in Russia. Catherine also recalled the decree of Peter I that the children of marriages between noble daughters and foreigners must be baptised into Orthodoxy.
In the end Catherine saw to it that Shakhovskaya's marriage was dissolved. Elizaveta was forcibly married off to Prince Pyotr Shakhovskoy. But she soon died, at only 23: the girl poisoned herself because of an unhappy love for a Guards officer. Shakhovskaya's story was not unique. In the last days of Catherine's reign our envoy in Paris and Holland, Dmitry Alexeyevich Golitsyn, married Countess Schmettau, a fanatical Jesuit, who, given her husband's indifferent, or rather negative, attitude to faith in general, secretly made her children Jesuits. Golitsyn, a close friend of Diderot and Voltaire, failed to notice how his wife hired disguised Jesuits to teach the children their sciences.
