The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Returning to Petersburg, Catherine was only too aware of the fragility of her position. Carefully watching everyone through her Secret Expedition and deftly stroking all factions and offending few, she presented a reassuring picture of smiling intelligence and imperturbable confidence. Almost immediately there was a plot among a few Guardsmen to enthrone Ivan VI but it was swiftly foiled. Tirelessly hard working – ‘Time belongs not to me but to the empire’ she said, like Peter the Great – Catherine rose each morning at six, made her own coffee before her servants got up, and started work. Knowing what suited her figure, and her Russian constituency, she wore rich but never gaudy long Russian-style dresses for every day. Now in her mid-thirties, ‘she may still be called beautiful’, in the view of the British ambassador Sir George Macartney, while the prince de Ligne, who knew her later, thought her ‘more handsome than beautiful’: all cited her pretty colouring, good teeth and bright blue eyes.

  She wrote numerous letters every day, suffering she admitted from a ‘graphomania’ that matched her other compulsive hobbies – ‘Anglomania,’ her taste for English painting and gardens, also ‘plantomania’, neo-classical building and what she called her ‘gluttonous greed’ for art-collecting, all of which were also ways of projecting her majesty. She added a pavilion on to the Winter Palace, which she called the Little Hermitage, to store her art and entertain her friends in private at her soirées. In the tradition of Peter the Great, she wrote ten rules for her guests:

  1. All ranks to be left at the doors along with swords and hats.

  2. Parochialism and ambitions shall likewise be left at the doors.

  And lastly:

  10. One shall not wash dirty linen in public and shall mind one’s own business until one leaves.

  Like Elizaveta, she used tables volants, raised by pulleys, to avoid the eavesdropping of servants. She later added a further extension, known as the Old Hermitage, to show off her art.* She wrote decrees, letters, satirical plays and instructions as well as constantly reworking her secret memoirs. Catherine was a tireless self-promoter: her letters to Voltaire and the philosophes were designed to be copied.

  This born politician was utterly realistic about the limits of her own autocracy: ‘One must do things in such a way that people think they themselves want it to be done this way.’ When her secretary cited her boundless power, she laughed. ‘It’s not as easy as you think. First, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders that could be carried out . . . I take advice, I consult and when I am convinced of general approval, I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power.’ But when her power was challenged, she was ruthless though never cruel: ‘It’s necessary to have a wolf’s teeth and a fox’s tail.’ When she heard of a nobleman who was repeatedly criticizing her, she advised him to cease ‘or get himself transferred to a place where even the ravens wouldn’t be able to find his bones’.

  She received ministers in the morning and drafted her decrees. At 11 a.m., she performed her toilette, entertained Orlov and often went on a walk with just him, her beloved greyhounds and a couple of ladies-in-waiting. After lunch at one, she worked in her apartments until six, the ‘lover’s hour’ when she received Orlov before dressing for a gala, a court day (Sundays), the theatre (Mondays and Thursdays) or a masquerade ball (Saturdays). On these occasions, Catherine, who understood the power of splendour, projected her grandeur to Europe. She retired with Orlov and liked to be in bed by eleven.

  ‘My position’, wrote Catherine to her former lover Poniatowski, ‘is such that I have to observe the greatest caution. The least soldier of the Guard thinks when he sees me: “That is the work of my hands.”’ Poniatowski, still in love with her, dreamed of marrying her. Catherine found this naivety irritating: ‘Since I have to speak plainly, and you have resolved to ignore what I have been telling you, the fact is that if you come here you are likely to get us both slaughtered.’ But the disappointed Pole was to be royally consoled.1

  ‘I am sending Count Keyserling to Poland immediately to make you king after the death of the present one,’ wrote Catherine to Poniatowski a month after the coup. Augustus III died in September and the Orlovs and Chernyshevs wanted his son to succeed but she decided on Poniatowski. Far from an imperial caprice to repay sexual services, Catherine was a dispassionate paragon of raison d’état, pursuing the Petrine policy of controlling Poland as a satellite through a client king. Poniatowski, related through his Czartoryski mother to the Polish magnates, would be utterly submissive, but he still fantasized: ‘If I desired the throne, it was because I saw you on it.’ When she put him in his place, he whined gallantly: ‘Don’t make me king but bring me to your side.’

  Frederick the Great was happy to back this policy in return for Russian support, and an alliance was signed on 31 March 1764. On 26 August, Poland’s Election Sejm (assembly), surrounded by Russian troops, elected Poniatowski as King Stanislas-Augustus. ‘Nikita Ivanovich! I congratulate you on the king we have made,’ Catherine exulted to Panin. ‘This event greatly increases my trust in you.’* Panin saw the Prussian alliance as the first step in a new ‘Northern System’ of Protestant– Scandinavian powers to fortify Russian control of the Baltic and restrain the ‘Catholic Block’ of Austria and France. Meanwhile, having made her ex-lover a king, would she now marry her present love and make Orlov an emperor?2

  If bringing Poniatowski to Russia would have been a quick way to get slaughtered, so was marrying Orlov. But all through her life, Catherine longed for the intimacy of family, which she had to find in her friends and lovers.

  Her parents were dead. Her son Paul was still little, but, as with so many royal families, their relationship was poisoned by the inevitable sequence of heredity that reversed the benign nature of motherhood. His maturity could herald her destruction. If Paul showed ability, his interests could become undeniable. Fortunately, his erratic character ruined their relationship but justified her rule.

  In the place of family, Catherine created an intimate coterie. Her closest friend was her long-serving lady-in-waiting, Countess Praskovia Bruce, the daughter of Countess Rumiantseva, once Peter the Great’s mistress. Bruce was an ally in all matters amorous – ‘the person to whom I can say everything, without fear of the consequences’. They shared the same taste in men and the same sexual enthusiasm which led to Praskovia’s reputation as l’éprouveuse, ‘trying out’ the empress’s lovers. It turned out to be a bit more complicated than that, but every monarch needs a confidant for such matters who combines the loyalty of a friend, the tact of a diplomat and the earthiness of a pimp.

  Catherine forgave her ‘born comic’ Lev Naryshkin for supporting Peter III and reappointed him master of the horse, though he was so unathletic she joked that he should be ‘master of the donkey’. But, for Catherine, her lover would always be the centre of her life. Far from being the nymphomaniac of legend, she was an obsessional serial monogamist who adored sharing card games in her cosy apartments and discussing her literary and artistic interests with her beloved: she gave Adjutant-General Orlov the apartment above hers. Whenever he liked, he descended the green staircase directly into her rooms. She played cards, pharo and bezique, every evening with Orlov, to whom she was committed, yet she had another admirer in the palace. Potemkin, whom she had met on the night of the coup, was famous for his good looks (‘his hair is more beautiful than mine,’ she said), brilliant intellect, interest in theology, and mimicry. When Orlov was struggling to entertain the empress, he invited Potemkin to amuse her. When she asked him to show off his mimicry, he denied any such talents but did so in a slight German accent that was identical to that of the empress herself. After a short silence while the company waited to see if this would amuse her, she laughed uproariously. At some point, when she encountered Potemkin in the palace corridors, he fell to this knees and, taking her hand, declared his love.

  She did not encourage him – and yet
Catherine carefully promoted Potemkin’s career. His love life was legendary and there are hints that he may have had an affair with her confidante Countess Bruce. Then he suddenly disappeared from court. It is said that he had been beaten up with billiard cues by the Orlovs for flirting with Catherine. More likely it was an infection. Either way he lost his left eye and his confidence, sinking into depression. Catherine asked what had become of Potemkin, sending a message via Countess Bruce: ‘It’s a great pity when a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him.’ When he returned to court, the man once known as Alcibiades for his wit and beauty was re-nicknamed ‘Cyclops’.

  She needed and loved Orlov, who was a central part of her life: she was openly warm with him, a man who loved music and singing. ‘After dinner,’ the Court Journal recorded one evening, ‘Her Imperial Majesty graciously returned to her inner apartments and the gentlemen in the card room sang songs; then the court singers and servants and, on the orders of Count G. G. Orlov, the soldiers of the Guard, sang gay songs in another room.’ For now, Catherine had to balance the aspirational Orlovs with the old aristocracy. Like every favourite, Grigory sought to perpetuate the brothers’ position through marriage.

  The rumours disturbed the sensitive balance of the court. ‘The empress can do as she wishes,’ Panin warned her, ‘but Madame Orlov will never be empress of Russia.’ In May 1763, while Catherine was on a pilgrimage from Moscow to Rostov, a gentleman of the bedchamber Khitrovo was arrested for planning to kill the Orlovs and marry Catherine to Ivan VI. The case made an Orlov marriage impossible.

  On 5 July 1764, while Catherine was touring her Baltic provinces, the second of her big tours, an unhinged officer, Vasily Mirovich, tried to liberate Prisoner Number One – once known as Ivan VI – from the bowels of Shlisselburg in order to make him emperor. Unaware that Catherine had confirmed the orders of Elizaveta and Peter that he should be killed if anyone attempted access, Mirovich and his friends seized the gatehouse and headed for the cell. After a shoot-out, he found the ex-emperor bleeding from multiple stab wounds. He kissed the body and surrendered. Catherine rushed back to the capital. Mirovich was beheaded while his cohorts suffered the dreaded Spitsruten, in which victims stripped to the waist ran the gauntlet down a line of 1,000 men who beat them with rods. A sentence of ten or twelve such runs could be fatal.

  Two ex-tsars had died messily, yet their vanishing, and the youth of her son Paul, left a clear path for her to work her magic. Amazingly the regicidal, uxoricidal German usurper recovered her reputation not just as Russian tsar and successful imperialist but also as an enlightened despot, the darling of the philosophes.3

  On 30 July 1767, Catherine, in a coach drawn by eight horses and followed by sixteen carriages of courtiers who included two Orlovs, two Chernyshevs and Potemkin, as well as her son Paul, processed from Moscow’s Golovin Palace into the Kremlin to open her enlightened project, the Legislative Commission. Five hundred elected delegates, from nobility and townsfolk to peasants and non-Russians, first joined her for a blessing in the Dormition Cathedral (Muslims waiting outside), and then walked into the Palace of Facets to launch Catherine’s Great Instruction. It was a mark of her commitment that all her favourites were involved: just returned from eighteen months of mysterious absence, her now one-eyed protégé Potemkin was appointed one of the ‘Guardians of Exotic Peoples’, while Grigory Orlov read out the Great Instruction, which she had written herself, in a ceremony based on the opening of Parliament by the British monarch.

  The Instruction digested the works of Montesquieu, Beccaria and the philosophes such as Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. The philosophes were not modern democratic liberals, but they were enemies of superstition and tyranny and advocates of justice, order and reason. Like all vain intellectuals, their heads were easily turned by the favour of potentates and they had a weakness for showy, enlightened despots. Catherine sincerely shared their ideas and abhorred slavery. Behind the façades of baroque palaces, particularly in Moscow, she remembered how serfs were imprisoned in stinking dungeons – ‘There’s not a house there without iron collars, chains and instruments of torture for those who commit the least infraction.’ At its most extreme, this had led to a case of serial murder when Daria Saltykova, a young widow and member of the family of Empress Anna’s mother, tortured and killed hundreds of serfs.* But Catherine’s decency did not stop her giving away tens of thousands of souls to her favourites. She was extremely wary of challenging the privileges of her nobility, particularly that of owning serfs. Indeed as owner of the millions of serfs on crown lands, she was herself the biggest serf-owner, and she knew that this partnership of tsar and nobility, based on their convergence of interests – service in government and army on one hand and suppression and ownership of millions of human chattels on the other – was the foundation of the empire. She missed few opportunities to reinforce it.

  If the Commission was partly designed as an advertisement of her enlightened philosophy and philanthropy, it was to prove a very long-winded one. The delegates were keener to discuss the petitions, pleading local and social issues instead of imperial ones – though they did also coin the soubriquet ‘Catherine the Great’ that was echoed around Europe by Voltaire. The talking-shop soon started to irk Catherine. She returned to Petersburg where she was rescued from its ponderous deliberations by the turbulence of war and love.4

  In June 1768 Russian Cossacks, in a bid to defeat Polish rebels who had risen against King Stanislas, pursued a number of them over the border into Ottoman territory, only to run amok in a massacre of Jews and Tatars. On 25 September, Sultan Mustafa III threw the Russian ambassador into the Fortress of Seven Towers, thereby declaring war. Deploying 80,000 troops, Catherine’s two armies, one under her commander-in-chief Prince Alexander Golitsyn and the other under the gifted Peter Rumiantsev, thrust down the Dniester River with orders to win control of southern Ukraine. If all went well, they could fight their way round the Black Sea and attack Crimea while crossing the Pruth and the Danube into today’s Bulgaria to threaten Constantinople itself.

  ‘My soldiers are off to fight the Turks as if off to a wedding,’ enthused the over-confident Catherine to her correspondent Voltaire. But warmongering politicians soon discover that war is never a wedding. The army was made up of conscripted peasants, stolen from village and family, often ill treated by serfmaster-officers and serving for twenty-five years. But in some ways service allowed them to escape the dreary poverty of rural life. They could become officers and, despite savage discipline, they found a unique national and Orthodox esprit in military communes known as artels, one of the peculiarities that made the Russian army formidable in morale (and cheaper to run than any Western equivalent). ‘The Turks are tumbling like ninepins,’ went the Russian saying, ‘but our men stand firm – though headless.’

  When the first Ottoman fortress fell, Catherine was exhilarated, but the gains came slowly. Alexei ‘Scarface’ Orlov suggested ‘a cruise’ to the Mediterranean and Catherine ordered the Baltic Fleet to sail via Gibraltar to attack the Ottomans and rally Orthodox and Arab rebellions. Orlov, who had never been to sea, was in command – though he left the sailing to his Scottish admiral, Samuel Greig. On 24 June 1770, Scarface sailed fireships into the Ottoman fleet moored in Chesme harbour. The sultan’s fleet was destroyed, 11,000 Ottoman sailors drowned. Catherine celebrated and awarded Scarface a new surname: Chesmensky. The Russians found themselves temporary masters of the eastern Mediterranean and for the first time embarked on a military adventure in the Arab world, bombarding Syrian ports and, for six months, occupying Beirut.*

  On the same day as Chesme, Rumiantsev led 25,000 Russians to defeat 150,000 Turks at the River Larga in today’s Romania, and in August, he pulled off another victory on the Kagul River. A frosty and flinty grand seigneur who had learned his craft from Frederick the Great during the Seven Years War, Rumiantsev, brother of Countess Bruce, supposedly the natural son of Peter the Great, earned his marsh
al’s baton.

  Catherine immortalized her victories by creating a Russian triumphal theme park at Tsarskoe Selo with obelisks for the land battles and a lake and column for Chesme.† But all was not quite well either in the empire or in the empress’s apartments: that November, the heroic general who brought back Rumiantsev’s despatches was Potemkin.5

  Privately, Catherine’s relationship with Orlov was becoming strained. Politically there was a fault in the design of the Orlovs: the brains, the brawn, the taste and the charm were not united in one man but distributed with admirable fairness among the five brothers: Scarface had the ruthlessness, Fyodor the culture, while Grigory had only his courage, charm and looks. ‘All his good qualities were overshadowed by licentiousness.’ Diderot, who met him in Paris, described him as ‘a boiler always boiling but never cooking anything’. His low tastes were notorious. ‘Anything is good enough for him,’ observed Durand de Distroff, a French diplomat. ‘He loves like he eats – he’s as happy with a Kalmyk or a Finnish peasant girl as with the prettiest girl at court. That’s the sort of oaf he is.’

  Catherine was tiring of his limited intellect and clumsy manners – but she later told Potemkin that Orlov would have ‘remained for ever had he not been the first to tire’. She was corresponding in secret with Potemkin, whose career she watched so carefully. At the start of the war, Potemkin received the ceremonial key of court chamberlain, a signal of high favour. But at the same time he wrote to Catherine chivalrously: ‘The only way I can express my gratitude to Your Majesty is to shed my blood for Your glory. The best way to achieve success is fervent service to the Sovereign and scorn for one’s own life.’ Catherine sent a note to Zakhar Chernyshev, president of the War Collegium: ‘Chamberlain Potemkin must be appointed to the war.’ Potemkin performed brilliantly as a cavalry general. ‘He was the hero of the victory,’ reported his commander, Rumiantsev, after one battle. It was unlikely that he returned to court without some encouragement from the empress, and the Court Journal reveals that Potemkin dined with her eleven times during his short stay. He then returned to the front, pulling off more victories. While Rumiantsev besieged Silistria and another general invaded Crimea, fever ravaged the armies; harvests failed; and then terrible news arrived.