The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Nikita Panin became the senior member of Catherine’s Foreign Collegium though never its chief – she could never forget that he wanted Paul to rule as soon as he was of age. She appointed Zakhar Chernyshev, her suitor of the 1740s, to head the War Collegium, and found a skilful and honest politician in Prince Alexander Viazemsky, who as procurator-general ran her entire domestic government, from finance to law, for a remarkable twenty-eight years. In an illustration of the tiny world of the political clans, he was married to the daughter of Trubetskoi, who had served as procurator for twenty years before him. She did not over-promote Grigory Orlov, placing him in charge of artillery and of attracting colonists to the new lands of southern Ukraine. After the initial excitement of reading state papers, the lazy, pleasure-loving Orlov did not exert himself to exercise power. Panin hated the upstart Orlovs, while the Chernyshevs and Razumovsky oscillated between the two. But the Orlovs had a plan to ensure their priceless position of intimate proximity: Grigory must marry Catherine. Unfortunately, she already had a husband.22

  Peter, now guarded at Ropsha by Scarface, Bariatinsky and twelve others, including Potemkin, bombarded Catherine with requests: ‘Your Majesty, if you don’t want to kill someone already quite wretched, then take pity and leave me Elizabeth [Vorontsova] as my only consolation . . . If you wanted to see me for a moment, that would be the height of my wishes.’ When she did not answer, he pitifully asked to live in a bigger room and to be allowed to retire to Germany: ‘I ask Your Majesty not to treat me as the greatest criminal; I don’t know if I ever offended you?’

  Closeted with Scarface, Peter had every reason to be frightened. The guards and the prisoner drank copiously in this danse macabre: ‘Our ugly freak’, Scarface wrote to Catherine on 2 July, ‘is seriously ill with cholic. I fear he might die tonight, but I fear even more he might survive. The first fear is that he talks gibberish all the time which amuses us and the second fear is that he is really a danger to all of us.’ The menace was blood-chilling, but Catherine did not replace the jailers.

  On 6 July, Scarface reported that Peter was so ill he was almost unconscious: ‘I don’t think he’ll last till evening.’ This sinister diagnosis sounded more like a death sentence, and the atmosphere at Ropsha was like a tightening garrotte – but neither Catherine nor the Orlovs could be safe while Peter lived.

  That evening, Scarface reported that there had been a most unfortunate accident: ‘Matushka, how can I explain!’ The ‘dying’ man had miraculously recovered by evening to join his jailers in a drinking bout. During a brawl with Bariatinsky at the table, ‘we had no time to separate them. He is no more. I don’t remember what we did but all of us are guilty. Have mercy on me for my brother’s sake. I’ve confessed everything . . . Forgive us and order an end quickly. Life is not worth living. We have angered you and lost our souls for ever.’ The letters suggest that the killing was premeditated but lubricated with alcohol. The strangling was a necessity and a convenience for Catherine, but she believed that she would be tainted for ever with a matricide and regicide: ‘My glory is spoilt, Posterity will never forgive me.’ But it did.

  The emperor’s body lay in state in a plain coffin at the Nevsky Monastery. A cravat concealed his livid throat, a lowered hat the blackened face. Catherine issued a statement that Peter had died of ‘haemorrhoidal colic’, an absurd diagnosis that was to become a humorous euphemism for political murder. When Catherine invited the philosophe Jean d’Alembert to visit, he joked he did not dare go, since he was ‘prone to piles, a very dangerous condition in Russia’.

  Peter had delayed his coronation; Catherine was not going to make the same mistake.23

  * Vorontsov came from an old boyar family; the Shuvalov brothers were a new family from Kostroma but both were connected to the Scavronskys, the family of Elizaveta’s mother. Peter Shuvalov consolidated his position by marrying Elizaveta’s confidante Mavra Shepeleva. The empress remembered her father’s favourites too: Hannibal had only just survived the intrigues of Menshikov, Anna and the regency, but on 12 January 1742 Elizaveta promoted him to major-general and awarded him the 6,000-acre estate of Mikhailovskoe, later famous as the home of his grandson, the poet Pushkin. And in the last act of a roller-coaster career, she recalled her godfather, Marshal Vasily Dolgoruky, from the frozen hell of Solovetsky Island, to become head of the War Collegium. In 1746, he died in office.

  † Son of that repellent maniac Frederick William, who had beheaded his son’s best friend outside his window, Frederick inherited the throne of a small northern kingdom with a full treasury and a fine army. An aesthete who played the flute and wrote music, an intellectual who debated with the philosophes, and a wit whose acidic bons mots are still funny today, he despised Christianity which he saw as a superstition ‘spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Hebrews’. His Silesian war was the exploit of a reckless political gambler: ‘Take first; negotiate after,’ said this cynical diplomat. He was also an enlightened visionary who regarded himself as ‘servant of the state’ and a brilliant general. He despised female power and was uninterested in women, completely ignoring his unfortunate wife, and created an openly homoerotic court, favouring a series of male minions including the Italian Count Agarotti to whom he addressed a poem entitled ‘The Orgasm’. The paragon of a warriorking, he was hero-worshipped by many. When Napoleon visited his tomb after defeating Prussia he said, ‘Hats off, gentlemen. If he was alive we wouldn’t be here.’

  * Osterman and Münnich were sentenced to death, a penalty that was demanded particularly by Marshal Dolgoruky, who had been exiled and almost executed while Osterman was in power. On 18 January 1742, as Osterman laid his head on the block before an avid crowd, a voice rang out: ‘God and the empress grant you life!’ The reprieved prisoners set out for Siberia where, somewhere on the road, Münnich passed his victim Biron, whom Elizaveta had allowed to settle on a provincial estate. Osterman died in Siberia in 1747.

  * When two minor plotters, Sophie Liliefeld and her husband, were arrested, the girl was pregnant but Elizaveta insisted that ‘Notwithstanding her condition, as they disregarded the Sovereign’s health, there’s no reason to spare the rogues, it’s better not to hear from them for a century than to expect any fruits from them.’ Apart from Lopukhina, the main victim was Anna Bestuzheva, whose connections reveal the tiny world of the court: daughter of Chancellor Golovkin, ex-wife of procurator-general Iaguzhinsky, now married to vice-chancellor Bestuzhev’s brother.

  * Anna’s husband Anton lived on in Kholmogory with four of his children for over twenty years until his death in 1776. Their two sons and two daughters remained imprisoned in the house there, humble and yet contented for almost forty years. During the 1770s, one daughter, then aged thirty-seven, asked Catherine the Great that ‘we be allowed to leave the house and go for walks in the meadow; we have heard that flowers grow there’, and also that ‘someone be sent to us who could teach us to dress properly’ as ‘neither we nor our servants know’ how to wear corsets or toques. These notes were so poignant that in 1780 Catherine the Great allowed the four to move to Denmark, but they were unaccustomed to normal life. In 1803, Princess Catherine Antonovna of Brunswick asked Alexander I if she could return to Kholmogory ‘because for me that was paradise’. The last of the family died aged sixty-six in Denmark in 1807. As for Julie von Mengden, after twenty years in confinement, she was released aged forty-three by Catherine the Great in 1762 and died in 1786.

  * She commissioned a new Winter Palace from Bartolomeo Rastrelli (Carlo Rastrelli’s son), but his rococo masterpiece was the Catherine Palace, named after her mother, at Tsarskoe Selo. Everything was done in a rush and Elizaveta interfered in every detail. ‘It was the work of Penelope,’ joked Catherine. ‘What was done today, was destroyed tomorrow. That house was pulled down six times and rebuilt again.’ But the result, finished in 1756, was stupendous – the façade 1,000 feet long with some 220 pounds of gold; its Great Hall was 1,000 square feet in size. Its Amber Room featured amber panels (g
iven to Peter the Great by the Prussian King Frederick William) set in gold. Elizaveta even travelled rococo: her favourite carriage, ordered from Paris by Kyril Razumovsky (now in the Kremlin Armoury), was so big its wheels are taller than a man; its doors and sides are painted with mythologically sensual scenes by François Boucher.

  * Keeping up with Elizaveta was so expensive that even her ministers were constantly on the verge of impoverishment – and were always begging for more cash. ‘I’ve been compelled to buy and furnish households, servants, carriages, and for ceremonies and festivities to make uniforms, rich clothes, fireworks and feasts,’ Vorontsov told Elizaveta, asking for money for a ‘poor man’ because ‘the maintenance of a house has begun to exceed my daily income. My duties force me to live like a minister not like a philosopher.’ Bestuzhev begged Vorontsov to intercede with the empress in respect of his own debts, ‘or I’ll be forced to live in my old wooden kennel and hold meetings with ambassadors in there!’ Catherine herself, living on a generous allowance, was soon deeply in debt.

  * She ordered crackdowns on Old Believers. There had been ineffective decrees to expel the Jews in 1727 and 1740. Elizaveta ordered these decrees to be applied. When a minister pointed to the utility of Jewish trade, she wrote: ‘I’m not interested in earning profit from the enemies of Christ.’ Even when Bestuzhev asked if he could employ a Jew in Vienna, she ‘refused, not wanting a single Jew in her service’. Anti-semites are often willing to overlook the Jewishness of their doctors: Elizaveta had inherited Anna’s Jewish-born Dr Sanchez.

  * Peter Shuvalov, married to the empress’s confidante Mavra, was a creative and innovative minister in charge of domestic affairs, and was later chief of artillery, reforming taxes and ordnance. He was notorious for his pomposity and greed, sucking up monopolies of tallow and whale so that he could live with ‘Asiatic luxury, covered with diamonds like the Mughal’, said the French diplomat Jean-Louis Favier. His brother Alexander, whose spasmodic nervous twitch gave him a ‘hideous grimace’, succeeded the late Ushakov as secret police chief – ‘the Terror of the court, city, the whole empire’.

  * Elizaveta had sent Kyril on a Grand Tour of Europe to make a Cossack goatherd into a grand seigneur. He studied at Göttingen University. On his return, aged eighteen, she appointed him president of the Academy of Sciences; when he was twenty-two, she made him hetman of Ukraine and a count, and he remained a favourite throughout Elizaveta’s and Catherine the Great’s reigns. In the Cossack capital Baturin, he built a neo-classical palace. Later, when his sons behaved like aristocrats, Kyril reminded them of their origins by calling for his valet: ‘Here, bring me my peasant’s rags in which I came to Petersburg. I want to recall the happy time when I drove my cattle, crying “Tsop! Tsop!”’

  * Its serpentine twists were personified by a transvestite French diplomat, the Chevalier d’Eon, who now arrived in Petersburg as an agent of ‘Le Secret de Roi’, the covert personal policy of Louis XV that aimed to secure the Polish throne for the king’s brother and a French alliance with Russia. D’Eon, who was apparently born with hermaphroditic genitals that were more male than female, was unsure of his transgender sexuality – a rather twenty-first-century phenomenon. In Petersburg, he claimed that he had assumed the identity of a woman, Mademoiselle Auguste, to communicate with Elizaveta whose transvestite balls made such sexual transformation quite natural. But it seems he invented his cross-dressing in Petersburg. His transgender crisis came later when he was sent on to London in 1763. There he embarrassed his king by unconsciously revealing plans to invade Britain. Rumours spread that d’Eon was really a woman. In 1777, Louis XVI disowned but pardoned him provided he assumed his female identity, which he did for the rest of his life, asserting that he had been born a woman. Yet when he died in 1810, doctors found him male.

  † When Elizaveta learned of Frederick the Great’s plans to overthrow her in favour of Ivan VI she tightened the already draconian security around the fifteen-year-old prisoner who was moved to the Shlisselburg Fortress. He was once brought into Petersburg where at Peter Shuvalov’s house, Elizaveta inspected this wreck of a boy, hollow-eyed, stuttering and half mad, though he knew who he was. He was returned to his place of secret, solitary confinement – a Russian version of the man in the iron mask. ‘If he talks obscenely, put him in chains,’ ordered Alexander Shuvalov. ‘If he pays no attention, beat him with a stick.’ In the event of any attempt to liberate him, he was to be killed.

  * Peter recalled from exile the victims of the 1740s – Julie von Mengden, the tongueless Lopukhina, Biron and the seventy-nine-year-old Marshal Münnich. The head of the War Collegium, Alexander Glebov, was promoted to procurator-general, Dmitri Volkov became state secretary. Government effectively moved to Glebov’s house. Peter’s uncles Prince Georg of Holstein and Prince August Friedrich of Holstein-Beck joined his Council with the latter in the key security role, governor-general of Petersburg.

  † This was the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. In April 1945, Hitler, trapped in his Berlin bunker as the allies closed in, hoped that the death of US President F. D. Roosevelt would break up the alliance and save him – just as the death of Elizaveta had done for his hero Frederick the Great. The king’s portrait hung optimistically in the bunker.

  * The tsar promoted the fallen (and dying) Peter Shuvalov to field marshal (along with the Terror) and offered Ivan the vice-chancellorship, but the former favourite asked to retire. Alexei Razumovsky also retired from court. (On her deathbed, Elizaveta had made Peter promise to honour the Razumovskys and Shuvalovs.)

  * The fireworks were organized by General Abram Hannibal, Peter the Great’s black godson. As a favourite of Elizaveta, he was hated by Peter III. At the start of the dinner, Hannibal was handed an imperial order by Prince Georg of Holstein dismissing him. ‘Sacked after fifty-seven years of loyal service,’ said Hannibal who ‘retired to his estates’.

  * Frederick was unsurprised by the fall of his protégé but underestimated his successor: ‘He allowed himself to be removed like a child sent off to bed,’ he said. ‘Catherine was young, weak, alone and foreign and on the verge of prison. The Orlovs did everything. Catherine is unable to rule anything. She leapt into the arms of those who wished to save her. Peter III’s lack of courage and refusal to take Münnich’s advice ruined him.’

  SCENE 4

  The Golden Age

  CAST

  CATHERINE II THE GREAT, empress 1762–96 (née Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst), widow of Peter III

  PAUL I, emperor 1796–1801, son of Peter and Catherine

  Natalya Alexeievna (née Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt), Paul’s first wife

  Maria Fyodorovna (née Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg), Paul’s second wife

  ALEXANDER I, emperor 1801–25, first son of Paul and Maria

  Elizabeth Alexeievna, Alexander’s wife (née Princess Louise of Baden)

  CONSTANTINE I, emperor 1825, second son of Paul and Maria

  Anna Fyodorovna (née Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld), Constantine’s wife

  CATHERINE’S FAVOURITES: adjutant-generals

  Grigory Orlov, grand master of ordnance, count, later prince

  Alexander Vasilchikov, ‘Iced Soup’

  Grigory Potemkin-Tavrichesky, prince, ‘Alcibiades’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Serenissimus’

  Peter Zavadovsky, imperial secretary, later count, member of the Council, ‘Petrusa’

  Semyon Zorich, ‘Savage’

  Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, ‘King of Epirus’

  Alexander Lanskoy, ‘Sasha’

  Alexander Yermolov, ‘White Negro’

  Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov, count, ‘Mr Redcoat’

  Platon Zubov, count, later prince, ‘Blackie’, ‘Tooth’, ‘Zodiac’

  COURTIERS: ministers etc.

  Nikita Panin, oberhofmeister of Grand Duke Paul, member of the Foreign Collegium, count

  Zakhar Chernyshev, president of the War Collegium, count

  Kyril Razumovsky, c
ount, hetman of Ukraine, then field marshal

  Peter Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, count, field marshal

  Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, admiral, count, brother of Grigory, ‘Scarface’

  Alexander Bezborodko, secretary for foreign affairs, later count, prince, chancellor

  Nikolai Saltykov, oberhofmeister of Paul then Alexander, later count and prince, president of War Collegium

  Valerian Zubov, count, ‘Child’, brother of Platon

  Fyodor Rostopchin, Paul’s retainer

  Countess Praskovia Bruce, lady-in-waiting to Catherine

  Alexandra Branitska (née Engelhardt), Potemkin’s niece, countess, ‘Sashenka’

  Ekaterina Scavronskaya (née Engelhardt), Potemkin’s niece, countess, ‘Katinka’, ‘Kitten’, ‘Angel’, ‘Venus’

  Ekaterina Nelidova, Paul’s mistress, ‘Little Monster’

  Countess Varvara Golovina, courtier and friend of Grand Duchess Elizabeth

  In mid-September 1762, Catherine, along with her son Paul, aged eight, and his governor Panin, entered Moscow in procession. On the 22nd, she crowned herself as empress in the Dormition Cathedral. Afterwards in the coronation honours, Grigory Orlov was named adjutant-general, a title that came to mean the same as grand chamberlain under Empress Anna – imperial inamorato. All five Orlov brothers and Panin were raised to count. Potemkin received another 400 souls and the court rank of gentleman of the bedchamber.

  Straight after the ceremony, little Paul came down with a fever. Catherine, who already hated Moscow where she had almost died as a teenager, was frantic that he should not die: he was the only legitimate pillar of her regime for she herself had not the slightest claim to the throne – unless Paul pulled through. Mercifully he recovered.