Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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  The plan was to arrest Peter as he left Oranienbaum for his foolish war against Denmark and imprison him in the fortified tomb of Schlussenburg with the simpleton–Tsar, Ivan VI. According to Catherine, thirty or forty officers and about 10,000 men were ready.40 Three vital conspirators came together but, until the last few days, they barely knew of each other’s involvement. Catherine was the only link. So, comically, each of the three believed that it was they – and only they – who had placed Catherine on the throne.

  Orlov and his Guardsmen, including Potemkin, were the muscle and the organizers of the coup. There were officers in each regiment. Potemkin’s job was to prepare the Horse-Guards.41 But the other two groups were necessary not merely for the coup to succeed but to maintain the reign of Catherine II afterwards.

  Ekaterina Dashkova, née Vorontsova, was certain that she alone had made the coup possible. This slim, gamine nineteen-year-old, married to one of Catherine’s supporters in the Guards, thought of herself as Machiavelli in petticoats. She was a useful conduit to the high aristocracy: the Empress Elisabeth and Grand Duke Peter stood as godparents at her christening. She personified the tiny, interbred world of Court because she was not only the niece of both Peter III’s Chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov, and Grand Duke Paul’s Governor, Nikita Panin, later Catherine’s Foreign Minister, but also the sister of the Emperor’s ‘ugly, stupid’ mistress.42 She was appalled by her sister’s taste in emperors. Dashkova demonstrates how family ties did not always decide political loyalties: the Vorontsovs were in power, yet this Vorontsova was conspiring to overthrow them. ‘Politics was a subject that interested me from my earliest years,’ she writes in her immodest and deluded Memoirs that, with Catherine’s own writings, are the best accounts of those days.43

  Nikita Ivanovich Panin, Dashkova’s uncle, was the third key conspirator: as the Ober-Hofmeister or Governor of the Grand Duke Paul, he controlled a crucial pawn. Thus Catherine needed Panin’s support. When Peter III considered declaring Paul illegitimate, he threatened Panin’s powerbase as his Ober-Hofmeister. Panin, aged forty-two, lazy, plump and very shrewd, was far from being an industrious public servant: one has the sense of something almost eunuch-like in his swollen, smooth-skinned insouciance. According to Princess Dashkova, Panin was ‘a pale valetudinarian…studious only of ease, having passed all his life in courts, extremely precise in his dress, wearing a stately wig with three well-powdered ties dangling down his back, he gave one the pasteboard idea of an old courtier from the reign of Louis XIV’.44 However, Panin did not believe in the unbridled tyranny of the tsars, particularly in the light of Peter III’s ‘most dissolute debauchery of drunkenness’.45 Like many of the educated higher nobility, Panin hoped to create an aristocratic oligarchy on Peter’s overthrow. He was the righteous opponent of favouritism but his family’s rise stemmed from imperial whim.*4 In the 1750s, the Empress Elisabeth had shown interest in Nikita Panin and there may have been a short affair before the ruling favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, had him despatched on a diplomatic mission to Sweden. When Panin returned in 1760, he was untainted by the poison of Elisabethan politics and acceptable to all factions.46 So both Catherine and Panin wished to overthrow Peter, but there was a worrying difference in the details: Catherine wanted to rule herself, while Panin, Dashkova and others believed that Grand Duke Paul should become emperor.47 ‘A youthful and female conspirator’, writes Princess Dashkova, ‘was not likely all at once to gain the confidence of a cautious politician like Monsieur Panin,’ but this uneasy cabal of differing interests now came together.

  On 12 June, Peter left Petersburg for Oranienbaum. Just eight versts away in Peterhof, Catherine waited in her summer villa, Mon Plaisir.

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  On 27 June, the conspiracy was suddenly thrown into disarray when Captain Passek, one of the plotters in the Guards, was denounced and arrested. Peter III would not remain unaware of the plot for long. Though nobles were rarely tortured, the threat was there. Passek would surely sing.

  The Orlovs, Dashkova and Panin came together for the first and last time in a panic-stricken meeting, while Potemkin and other plotters awaited their instructions. The tough Orlovs, according to Dashkova, were distraught, but ‘to quieten apprehensions…as well as to show that I did not personally shrink from the danger, I desired them to repeat an assurance to their soldiers, as coming direct from me, that I had daily account from the Empress…and they should be tranquil’. Since a mistake could cost these men their lives, the bragging of this bumptious teenage Princess can hardly have been reassuring.48

  On her side, the little Princess was not impressed with the coarse Orlovs, who were too vulgar and arrogant for her taste. She told Alexei Orlov, the main organizer of the coup and known as ‘Le Balafre’ – ‘Scarface’ – to ride to Mon Plaisir at once. However, Grigory Orlov vacillated over whether to fetch Catherine that night or wait until the next day. Dashkova claimed she decided for them: ‘I did not attempt to suppress the rage I felt against these brothers…to hesitate on the directions I had given Alexei Orlov. “You’ve lost time already,” I said. “As to your fears of alarming the Empress, rather let her be conveyed to St Petersburg in a fainting fit than expose her to the risk…of sharing with us the scaffold. Tell your brother to ride full speed without a moment’s delay…” ’49

  Catherine’s lover finally agreed. The plotters in Petersburg were ordered to rouse the Guards in rebellion. In the middle of the night, Alexei Orlov set off in a travelling carriage to fetch Catherine from Mon Plaisir, accompanied by a handful of Guardsmen who either rode on the running-boards or followed in another carriage: Sergeant Potemkin was among them.

  At 6 a.m. the next morning, they arrived outside Mon Plaisir. While Potemkin waited around the carriage with postillions on the box, horses at the ready, whips raised, Alexei Orlov hurried into the special extension built onto the pavilion and burst into Catherine’s bedroom, waking his brother’s mistress.

  ‘All is ready for the proclamation,’ said Alexei Orlov. ‘You must get up. Passek has been arrested.’ Catherine did not need to hear any more. She dressed swiftly in plain black. The coup would succeed today – or never. If it failed, they would all mount the scaffold.50

  Alexei Orlov helped Catherine into his carriage, threw his cloak over her and ordered the postillions to drive the eighteen kilometres back to Petersburg at top speed. As the carriage pulled away, Potemkin and another officer, Vasily Bibikov, leaped on to its shafts to guard their precious cargo. There has always been some doubt as to where Potemkin was during these hours, but this story, cited here for the first time, was recorded by the Englishman Reginald Pole Carew, who later knew Potemkin well and probably heard it from the horse’s mouth.51

  Catherine was still wearing her lace nightcap. They met a carriage coming from the capital. By a fortunate coincidence, it turned out to contain her French hairdresser, Michel, who jumped into her carriage and did her hair on the way to the revolution, though it was still unpowdered when she arrived. Nearer the capital, they met Grigory Orlov’s small carriage hurtling along the other way. Catherine, with Alexei and the hairdresser, swapped conveyances. Potemkin may have swapped too. The carriages headed directly to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards, where they found ‘twelve men and a drummer’. From such small beginnings are empires taken. ‘The soldiers’, Catherine recounted breathlessly, ‘rushed to kiss my hands, my feet, the hem of my dress, calling me their saviour. Two…brought a priest with a crucifix and started to take the oath.’ Their Colonel – and Catherine’s former admirer – Count Kirill Razumovsky, Hetman of the Ukraine, kissed hands on bended knee.

  Catherine mounted the carriage again and, led by the priest and the soldiers, set off towards the Semyonovsky Guards barracks. ‘They came to meet us shouting Vivat!’. She embarked on a canvassing perambulation which grew into a triumphant procession. But not all the Guards offic
ers supported the coup: Dashkova’s brother and nephew of Peter III’s Chancellor, Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, resisted and was arrested. Just as Catherine was between the Anichkov Palace and the Kazan Cathedral, Sergeant Potemkin reappeared at the head of his Horse-Guards. The men hailed their Empress with frenzied enthusiasm. She may already have known his name as one of the coup’s organizers because she later praised Lieutenant Khitrovo and ‘a subaltern of seventeen named Potemkin’ for their ‘discernment, courage and action’ that day – though the Horse-Guards officers also supported the coup. In fact, Potemkin was twenty-three.52

  The imperial convoy, swelled with thousands of Guardsmen, headed for the Winter Palace, where the Senate and Synod assembled to put out her already printed Manifesto and take the oath. Panin arrived at the Palace with her son, Grand Duke Paul, still wearing his nightshirt and cotton cap. Crowds milled outside as the news spread. Catherine appeared at a window and the mob howled its approval. Meanwhile the doors of the Palace were open and its corridors, like a ball deluged by gate-crashers, were jammed with soldiers, priests, ambassadors and townspeople, all come to take the oath to the new Sovereign – or just gawp at the revolution.

  Princess Dashkova arrived soon after Panin and the Grand Duke: ‘I ordered my maid to bring me a gala dress and hastily set off for the Winter Palace…’. The appearance of an over-excited teenage princess dressed to the nines caused more drama: first she could not get in and then, when she was recognized, the crowd was so dense that she could not push through. Finally, the slim girl was passed overhead by the soldiers, hand to hand, like a doll. With ‘one shout of approbation’, they ‘acknowledged me as their common friend’. All this was enough to turn anyone’s head and it certainly turned hers. ‘At length, my head giddy, my robe tattered…I rushed into Her Majesty’s presence.’53

  The Empress and the Princess embraced but, while the coup had already seized Petersburg, the advantage remained with Peter: his armies in nearby Livonia, primed for the Danish war, could easily crush the Guards. Then there was the fortress of Kronstadt, still under his control, which commanded the sea approaches to St Petersburg itself. Catherine, advised by Panin, the Orlovs and other senior officials such as Count Kyrill Razumovsky, sent Admiral Talyzin to win over Kronstadt.

  The Emperor himself now had to be seized. The Empress ordered the Guards to prepare to march on Peterhof. Perhaps remembering how fine the Empress Elisabeth had looked in men’s clothes, Catherine demanded a Guardsman’s uniform. The soldiers eagerly shed the hated Prussian uniforms that Peter had made them wear and replaced them with their old tunics. If her men were tearing off their old clothes, so would Catherine. ‘She borrowed one suit from Captain Talyzin [cousin of the Admiral],’ wrote Dashkova, ‘and I procured another from Lieutenant Pushkin, two young officers of our respective sizes…of the ancient costume of the Preobrazhensky Guards.’54

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  While Catherine received her supporters in the Winter Palace, Peter arrived, as arranged, at Peterhof to celebrate the Feast of St Peter and St Paul with Catherine. Mon Plaisir was deserted. Catherine’s gala dress, abandoned on her bed, was an almost ghostly auspice – for she had changed her clothes in every sense. Peter III saw it and collapsed: he wept, drank and dithered.

  The only one of his courtiers not to lose his head was the octogenarian Field-Marshal Count Burhard von Münnich, a German veteran of the palace revolutions of 1740/1, recently recalled from exile. Münnich proposed an immediate march on St Petersburg in the spirit of his grandfather – but this was no Peter the Great. The Tsar sent emissaries into Petersburg to negotiate or arrest Catherine, but each one defected to her: Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, who had ridden on the boards of Elisabeth’s sleigh during her coup twenty years earlier, volunteered to go but joined Catherine at once, falling to his knees. Already dejected and confused, Peter’s dwindling entourage trundled sadly back the eight versts to Oranienbaum. The grizzled Münnich finally persuaded the Emperor that he should seize the fortress of Kronstadt to control the capital. Emissaries were sent ahead. When Peter’s schooner arrived at Oranienbaum at about 10 p.m. on this white silvery night, he was drunk and had to be helped aboard by his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova, and the old Field-Marshal. Three hours later, he appeared off Kronstadt.

  Münnich called to the Kronstadt watch that the Emperor was before them, but they shouted back: ‘There is no longer an Emperor.’ They declared that they only recognised Catherine II. It was too late: Admiral Talyzin had reached Kronstadt just in time. Peter lost all control of himself and events. He fainted in his cabin. On his return to Oranienbaum, the broken, tipsy Emperor, who had always foreseen this destiny, just wanted to abdicate and live in Holstein. He decided to negotiate.

  In Petersburg, Catherine massed her Guards outside the Winter Palace. It was at this exhilarating and unforgettable moment that Potemkin contrived to meet his new Empress for the first time.55

  Skip Notes

  *1 Potemkin too was described by foreigners as a giant. The best specimens were bound to join the Guards, but the physique of Russian men seems to have been undergoing a blossoming in this period, to judge by the comments of visitors: ‘The Russian peasant is a fine, stout, straight, well-looking man,’ gushed Lady Craven as she travelled the Empire.

  *2 His strength was no legend – as witnessed by Baroness Dimsdale in 1781 when the Empress Catherine’s carriage on the fairground Flying Mountain, an early version of the ‘big dipper’, flew off its wooden groove: Orlov, ‘a remarkably strong man, stood behind the carriage and with his foot guided it in its proper direction’.

  *3 This was the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg that so inspired Hitler and Goebbels in 1945 in the Berlin bunker when the death of President Roosevelt was supposed to split the Allies. Frederick exulted that ‘The Messalina of the North is dead’ and acclaimed Peter III’s ‘truly German heart.’

  *4 The Panin fortunes were founded on marriage to the niece of Peter the Great’s favourite Prince Alexander Menshikov, who had started life as a pie-seller.

  3

  FIRST MEETING: THE EMPRESS’S RECKLESS SUITOR

  The Horse-Guards came, in such a frenzy of joy as I have never seen, weeping and shouting that the country was free at last.

  Catherine the Great to Stanislas Poniatowski, 2 August 1762

  Of all the sovereigns of Europe, I believe the Empress of Russia is the richest in diamonds. She has a kind of passion for them; perhaps she has no other weaknesses…

  Sir George Macartney on Catherine the Great

  The newly acclaimed Catherine II, dressed raffishly in a borrowed green uniform of a captain of the Preobrazhensky Guards, appeared at the door of the Winter Palace on the night of 28 June 1762, accompanied by her entourage, and holding a naked sabre in her bare hands. In the blue incandescence of St Petersburg’s ‘white nights’, she walked down the outside steps into the crowded square and towards her thoroughbred grey stallion, who was named Brilliant. She swung into the saddle with the ease of a practised horsewoman – her years of frantic exercise had not been wasted.

  The Guards, 12,000 who had rallied to her revolution, were massed around her in the square, ready to set off on ‘The March to Peterhof’ to overthrow Peter III. All of them must have peered at the thirty-three-year-old woman in her prime, with her long auburn hair, her bright-blue eyes, her black eyelashes, so at home in the Guardsman’s uniform, at the moment of the crucial drama of her life. Among them, Potemkin, on horseback in his Horse-Guards uniform, eagerly awaited any opportunity to distinguish himself.

  The soldiers stiffened to attention with the Guards’ well-drilled pageantry – but the square was far from silent. It more resembled the bustling chaos of an encampment than the polished stiffness of a parade. The night resounded with clattering hooves, neighing horses, clinking spurs and swords, fluttering banners, the coughing, muttering and whisp
ering of thousands of men. Many of the troops had been waiting there since the night before in a carnival atmosphere. Some of them were drunk – the taverns had been looted. The streets were littered with discarded Prussian-style uniforms, like the morning after a fancy-dress party. None of this mattered because every man knew he was changing history: they peered at the enchanting vision of this young woman they were making empress and the excitement of it must have touched all of them.

  Catherine took Brilliant’s reins and was handed her sword, but she realized that she had forgotten to attach a dragonne, or sword-knot, to the sabre. She must have looked around for one because her hesitation was noticed by a sharp-eyed Guardsman who was to understand her better, more instinctively, than anyone else. He instantly galloped over to her across the square, tore the dragonne off his own sword and handed it to her with a bow. She thanked him. She would have noticed his almost giant stature, that splendid head of auburn-brown hair and the long sensitive face with the cleft chin, the looks that had won him the nickname ‘Alcibiades’. Grigory Potemkin could not have brought himself to her attention in a more daring way, at a more memorable occasion, but he had a talent for seizing the moment.

  Princess Dashkova, also dressed dashingly in a Guardsman’s uniform, mounted her horse just behind the Empress. There was a distinct element of masquerade in this ‘petticoat revolution’. Now it was time to move in order to strike at dawn: Peter III was still at large and still emperor in name at Oranienbaum, a night’s march away. Yet Alcibiades was still beside the Empress.

  Catherine took the dragonne from Potemkin, fixed it to her sword and urged Brilliant forward. Potemkin spurred his mount back to join his men, but his horse had been trained in the Horse-Guards to ride, knee to knee, in squadron formation for the charge. The beast stubbornly refused to return, so that for several minutes, as the fate of the Empire revolved around this little scene, Potemkin struggled to master his obstinate horse and was forced to talk to the new Empress. ‘This made her laugh…she noticed his looks…she talked to him. Thus’, Potemkin himself told a friend when he was Catherine’s co-ruler, he was ‘thrown into the career of honour, wealth and power – all thanks to a fresh horse’.1