The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Paul collapsed in panic, ‘terrified of the empress as sovereign and mother’. While capable of rational political plans, aesthetic taste and chivalrous generosity, he was also morose and hysterical, prone to foam-flecked rages, and tormented by the memory of his murdered father. He had nightmares about Peter the Great in which his great-grandfather warned ‘poor Paul’ that he would die young.

  When they were due to leave on 13 September, the grand duke and duchess suddenly refused to depart. Finally on the 19th, the Seconds, travelling in the fairytale incognito of ‘Count and Countess of the North’, kissed their children tearfully. The grand duchess fainted and had to be carried to the carriage, while Paul followed in abject terror. The next morning, Panin was dismissed.

  Paul was welcomed to Vienna by Joseph, to whom he soon denounced the new alliance, threatening to throw Potemkin into prison. Catherine had his entourage’s letters opened and, reading those of Paul’s courtier Prince Alexander Kurakin, she discovered that her son hated ‘the horrible situation in the Motherland’ and discussed ‘breaking the neck’ of Potemkin. Kurakin was banished.

  Catherine never forgave the Seconds, whom she more often nicknamed ‘the Heavy Baggage’, but she tried to get on with her son even when he lost control of his own household.16

  Catherine soon afterwards presented Paul with Orlov’s former estate Gatchina.† While Maria embellished Pavlovsk with Roman busts and a chalet to remind her of Württemberg, he made Gatchina a cross between a neo-classical palace with follies like his ‘Isle of Love’ – and a Germanic barracks. Like his father, he worshipped Frederick the Great. ‘It was like a visit to a foreign country,’ wrote Nikolai Sablukov, a Guards officer. ‘Like a small German town.’ There this martinet attracted a cadre of harsh German and cashiered Russian officers.* In charge of the army, Potemkin had designed a loose-fitting military uniform for ease of movement. Paul hated ‘the Potemkin Army’, insisting that everyone at Gatchina wear Prussian uniform, including stockings, a pointed hat, a waxed hairdo and a pigtail, which took hours to prepare. Paul punished any infringement according to Prussian rules.

  Paul’s marriage appeared ideal: Maria was ‘loved for her high virtues and finds happiness only in her children’. Despite being sorely tried by Paul’s behaviour, she was devoted to him – and constantly pregnant, producing four sons and six daughters.

  Yet Paul’s household was in turmoil: soon after his return from abroad, Paul fell in love with one of Maria’s ladies-in-waiting, Ekaterina Nelidova, an unmarried and pious twenty-seven-year-old, who was, noted a courtier, ‘small, exceedingly plain, swarthy, tiny-eyed, with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear and legs as short as a dachshund’s’. But this ‘petite brunette with dark and sparkling black eyes’ was ‘astonishingly quick and clever and a most elegant dancer’.

  Paul never slept with Nelidova, who called herself his ‘sister’ and would have preferred to live in a monastery. Her chastity appealed to Paul’s sentimental chivalry, which was a reaction to his mother’s lubricity. Although he enjoyed fleeting sexual escapades with low-born mistresses, he valued Nelidova’s faith in him – and her slapstick humour. ‘The little enchantress’ arranged for guests to fall into baths or sleep in beds that fell apart, much to Paul’s honking delight.

  Maria was so unhappy that she appealed to Catherine, who was bemused by her son’s lack of taste, telling Maria: ‘Look how beautiful you are; your rival is a little monster; stop torturing yourself and be sure of your charms.’ Paul sanctimoniously explained to his mother that his relationship with Nelidova was ‘a friendship holy and gentle but innocent and pure’. Given his other affairs, Catherine must have snorted at the humbug.

  This only convinced Catherine even more that the future lay with her grandson Alexander. She appointed an experienced soldier-courtier Nikolai Saltykov (a great-nephew of Empress Anna) as his governor and hired a young Swiss tutor of Enlightened views, Frédéric-César Laharpe to teach him French. Laharpe became, Alexander later wrote, ‘a man to whom I owe everything except life itself’. When the child was ten, Catherine praised him as ‘a person of rare beauty, goodness and understanding’ who showed precocious knowledge, as happy discussing history as playing blind man’s buff. She even started to build the child the biggest palace in Russia, which she called Pella after the birthplace of Alexander the Great. She was tempted to skip the Heavy Baggage and make Alexander heir.17

  As Britain and France fought and the Americans won their independence, Potemkin persuaded Catherine to annex Crimea. ‘Imagine Crimea is yours,’ he wrote to Catherine, ‘and the wart on your nose is no more . . . This deed will win you immortal glory greater than any Russian Sovereign. Crimea assures dominance of the Black Sea . . . Russia needs paradise!’

  ‘We could decide it all in half an hour together but now I don’t know where to find you,’ wrote Catherine. Potemkin bounded into town in a state of febrile ebullience: they now proposed the entire Greek Project to Joseph, who agreed to the annexation of Crimea.

  ‘Keep your resolution, Matushka,’ said Serenissimus as he left in April 1783. But, once in the south, he toiled so hard that he forgot to write to Catherine, who grumbled, ‘Neither I nor anyone knows where you are!’ On 10 July Potemkin wrote that ‘In three days, I will congratulate you with Crimea.’

  A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another rabbit out of the hat, when the indomitable old warrior-king Hercules (or Erakle) of Kartli-Kakhetia placed the largest of the Georgian kingdoms under Catherine’s protection. ‘The Georgian business is concluded,’ he wrote. ‘Has any other Sovereign so illuminated an epoch? You’ve acquired territories that Pompey and Alexander just glanced at.’ Crimea was where St Vladimir had converted to Orthodoxy, ‘the source of our Christianity and thus our humanity’, wrote Serenissimus to the empress. ‘You’ve destroyed the Tatar Horde – the tyrant of Russia in olden times. Order your historians to prepare much ink and paper!’ Catherine was thrilled and disdained the complaints of Europe: ‘Let them jest while we do business!’

  Exhausted in bed after a quick journey back to Petersburg, Serenissimus awoke to find a sealed message from Catherine on his bedside table: Potemkin was promoted to field marshal, appointed president of the War Collegium and given 100,000 roubles to build the Taurida Palace; Kuban and Crimea were added to his viceroyalty and he received the surname ‘Tavrichesky’: prince of Taurida. ‘I’m committed to you for a century!’ Catherine told him.

  Now spending most of his life in the south, in constant dynamic motion, living in Sardanapalian extravagance,* Potemkin’s first act was to found a naval base on the site of the Turkish village of Akhtiar – ‘the best harbour in the world’, he told Catherine. He called it the ‘August City’ – Sebastopol.18

  Potemkin’s work required tranquillity in Catherine’s bedroom, but on 25 June 1784 Lanskoy, at the age of twenty-six, died of diphtheria.

  ‘I’ve been plunged into the most acute sorrow,’ she told Potemkin, ‘and my happiness is no more.’ She spent three weeks in bed, desperately ill. Her Scottish doctor John Rogerson feared for her life, which he further endangered by bleeding and laxatives; Bezborodko, recently raised to count, summoned Potemkin.

  On 10 July, Serenissimus arrived from Sebastopol. The courtiers heard the two of them ‘howling’ together. Tsarskoe Selo was sweltering, but Catherine had delayed the burial. She was too ill to attend the funeral. Potemkin lived with her day and night, like an old husband and wife, until, as she put it, ‘he awakened us from the sleep of the dead’. For a year, Catherine had no lover. When she went to church, young Guardsmen preened in their best uniforms and tightest breeches to catch her attention.

  Now fifty-seven, Catherine flirted with two aides of Potemkin. Serenissimus held a ball at his Anichkov Palace where Alexander Yermolov stood behind the empress’s chair as she played cards. The new lover was straw-haired and almond-eyed with a flat nose: Potemkin nicknamed him ‘the White Negro’. Catherine still decided everything with Potemkin. ‘Without
you I feel as if I’m without hands,’ she wrote. Yermolov intrigued against Potemkin.

  On 15 July 1786, the White Negro departed with 4,000 souls and 130,000 roubles. That very evening, Serenissimus arrived with his aide-de-camp Alexander Dmitriev-Mamonov, whom he supposedly sent to Catherine with a watercolour and a saucy question: what did she think of the painting? ‘The contours are fine,’ she replied, ‘but the choice of colours less fortunate.’ But Mamonov, twenty-six, a cultured Francophile who always wore a red coat, was much better liked. ‘Mr Redcoat’, as she called him, was soon a count, owner of 27,000 serfs and a much loved member of her improvised family. Catherine was ready to celebrate the climax of her reign and the rise of Russia as a Black Sea power in a spectacular southern junket.19

  At 11 a.m. on 7 January 1787, Catherine left Tsarskoe Selo in a convoy of fourteen carriages and 124 sleighs with an entourage of twenty-two including her lover Mr Redcoat and Ivan Shuvalov (Empress Elizaveta’s favourite, recently returned to Russia and appointed grand chamberlain), along with the ambassadors of France, Austria and England (whom she called her ‘Pocket Ministers’). On 22 April, after the ice had melted on the Dnieper, Catherine and Potemkin embarked on a flotilla of seven luxurious barges, each with its own orchestra, library and drawing room, painted in gold and scarlet, decorated in gold and silk, manned by 3,000 oarsmen, crew and guards and serviced by eighty boats. The dining barge seated seventy and Catherine’s Dnieper had a boudoir with twin beds for her and Mr Redcoat. ‘It was like Cleopatra’s fleet,’ observed Ligne. ‘Never was there a more brilliant and agreeable voyage.’ The French minister, the comte de Ségur, likewise thought ‘it was like a fairytale’.

  On 7 May, disembarking at Kremenchuk, Catherine rendezvoused with Emperor Joseph II. They laid the foundation stones for the prince’s new city Ekaterinoslav, then travelled on to his port of Kherson through an arch that read: ‘The Road to Byzantium’. The monarchs were escorted by Tatar horsemen into Crimea. On 22 May, they dined in a palace on the Heights of Inkerman on a spit that jutted out over the sea. When Serenissimus gave a sign, the curtains were drawn to unveil twenty-four ships-of-the-line in the natural amphitheatre of the new naval base of Sebastopol. ‘Madame,’ declared Ségur, ‘by creating Sebastopol, you have finished in the south what Peter the Great started in the north.’ Catherine, noted Joseph, was ‘totally ecstatic’. She kept saying, ‘It’s Prince Potemkin to whom I owe everything.’ Joseph squirmed with jealous astonishment at the fleet: ‘The truth is it is necessary to be here to believe what I see.’

  Back in Petersburg, Grand Duke Paul summoned the ambassadors to question Potemkin’s achievements.* When they insisted that the cities and the ships-of-the-line were real, Paul exploded, ‘This bitch of a nation doesn’t want to be governed only by women!’20

  After the party came the hangover: on 5 August, when Catherine and Potemkin were recovering from the trip, Sultan Abdul Hamid declared war. While she mobilized her armies, under Potemkin and Rumiantsev, Catherine had to hold her nerve until the spring. Potemkin was shivering and sick in Kremenchuk. Catherine encouraged him: ‘I’m afraid you have no more nails on your fingers,’ she wrote. But when a freak storm scattered his beloved new fleet, Potemkin offered to resign: ‘I can’t stand it any more.’ Catherine rallied Serenissimus: ‘In these moments, my dear friend, you’re not just a private person who does what he likes. You belong to the state, you belong to me.’ Only one ship had been lost. Potemkin advanced to protect his new cities by besieging the Ottoman stronghold of Ochakov. After defeating the Ottomans in the estuary overlooked by Ochakov,† he declared: ‘I’ve gone mad with joy.’ But just when things were finally improving, Sweden attacked Russia.

  Now it was Catherine’s turn to panic: Petersburg was almost undefended. On 9 July, Greig defeated the Swedish fleet – to Catherine’s delight: ‘Petersburg has the look of an armed camp . . . so, my friend, I too have smelled gunpowder.’

  ‘Nothing in the world do I desire as much as that, on taking Ochakov, you come here for an hour,’ Catherine wrote to Potemkin, ‘so that I might first have the satisfaction of seeing you after such a long separation and second that I might talk over so many things with you in person.’ The Western powers were suspicious of Russia’s Crimean annexation and naval power. In August, England, Prussia and Holland signed an alliance aimed at Russia, while in Poland ‘a great hatred has risen against us’, Catherine informed Serenissimus. ‘Take Ochakov,’ she begged him. At 4 a.m. on 6 December, Potemkin stormed Ochakov. Mr Redcoat woke Catherine with the news: ‘I was poorly but you cured me!’

  She celebrated with Te Deums. On 4 February 1789, Potemkin returned to Petersburg. Catherine left the ball she was at and surprised him while he was changing. Britain and Prussia were encouraging the new Sultan Selim III and Sweden to stay in the war; Russia’s ally Joseph was dying in Vienna. Potemkin advised appeasement until he had won the Ottoman war; Catherine wanted peace from the Ottomans to face Prussia.

  Her lover, Mamonov, was neglecting her, often either ill or absent. Potemkin kept warning her: ‘Haven’t you been jealous of [maid-of-honour] Princess Shcherbatova?’ he asked her. ‘Isn’t there an affaire d’amour?’ Catherine was frequently in tears. ‘Matushka, spit on him!’ said Potemkin. In May he left for the front. They would not meet for another two years during which Paris turned the world upside down.21

  As Potemkin advanced into Wallachia and Moldavia, by now often known as the Danubian Principalities, the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. Louis XVI had lost control of Paris. Soon afterwards, the National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which in turn encouraged the Poles in their own revolution against Russia. Catherine was horrified by both. Then Redcoat confessed he had fallen in love with maid-of-honour Daria Shcherbatova ‘a year and a half earlier’ and asked to marry her. Catherine collapsed at this betrayal.

  ‘I’ve never been a tyrant to anybody,’ she told Potemkin, ‘and I hate compulsion. Is it possible you forgot my generosity of character and considered me a wretched egotist? You could have healed me by telling me the truth.’ Potemkin replied that ‘I hinted, I felt sorry for you.’ Catherine granted Redcoat 2,250 serfs and 100,000 roubles.

  ‘A sacred place’, joked Zavadovsky ruefully, ‘is never empty for long.’

  Catherine had already found Redcoat’s replacement – or two. In her letter to Potemkin, she mentioned that she had met Platon Zubov, a twenty-two-year-old cornet in the Guards whom she called ‘le Noiraud’ (‘Blackie’,) and his younger brother Valerian, ‘the Child’, aged eighteen: ‘both innocent souls and sincerely attached to me’.22 As the court had long known about Redcoat’s infidelity, Nikolai Saltykov, oberhofmeister of Paul’s household and an enemy of Potemkin, had time to push the Zubov boys forward – because Potemkin was away at war.

  Zubov was probably the handsomest of her favourites. Now sixty-one, stout with swollen legs, dyspepsia and wind, tormented by crises of war and revolution, Catherine could not resist. She took because she could. One of four brothers of minor nobility related to Saltykov, Zubov was pretty, dark and musical – he played the violin. Catherine fell in love with Blackie. ‘I’m fat and merry,’ she told Potemkin, ‘come back to life like a fly in summer.’ She praised Zubov’s ‘beautiful eyes’, yet she rationalized her sexual fever. ‘By educating young men,’ she told Potemkin, ‘I do a lot of good for the state.’ It was certainly an unusual form of civil service training.

  On 3 July, the day the Bastille fell, Blackie was promoted to adjutant-general. Catherine nervously awaited Potemkin’s approval. ‘Your peace of mind is most necessary,’ she insisted to Potemkin. ‘Comfort us, caress us.’ She made Zubov write flattering letters to Potemkin: ‘I enclose for you an admiring letter from the most innocent soul . . . Think what a fatal situation it would be for my health without this man. Adieu, mon ami, be nice to us!’

  ‘My dear Matushka, how can I not sincerely love the man who makes you happy?’ Potemkin replied finally. Zubov was a pi
nprick. He had important news: ‘a multitude of victories’. On 20 July, the superb general and irrepressible eccentric Alexander Suvorov* defeated the Turks at Fokshany; and just a few weeks later he, together with the Austrians, vanquished the grand vizier at the River Rimnik. Three days later Potemkin took the fortress of Hadji-Bey where he decided to build a new city – Odessa – and then accepted the surrender of Bender. Catherine raised Suvorov to count with the surname ‘Rymniksky’ and lectured Potemkin on the dangers of stardom: ‘Show the world your greatness of character.’

  Catherine was still attracted to the younger Zubov brother Valerian: ‘I’m terribly fond of the child and he’s attached to me too and cries like a baby when barred from seeing me.’ It is most likely it was his elder brother Blackie who stood in his way, for ten days later the Child was sent off to the army.

  A nation’s enemies multiply in proportion to its successes. Just as the Ottomans were about to collapse, Prussia put together a coalition of Ottomans, Poles and Swedes against Russia while threatening Austria with attack if it did not withdraw from the war. On 31 January 1790, Prussia signed an alliance with Constantinople. Nine days later, Joseph II, Catherine’s ally, died. Prussia tightened its ring by signing an alliance with revolutionary Poland. On 16 July, the Austrian monarch, Leopold, king of the Romans, withdrew from the war. ‘Now we’re in a crisis,’ said Catherine, facing the ‘danger of triple war’ while ‘the French madness’ spread to Russia.*

  In Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine could hear the thunder of cannonades from the sea battles won by Nassau-Siegen – until that reckless adventurer was defeated on 28 June. But the rout enabled the Swedes to make peace with honour. ‘We pulled one paw out of the mud,’ Catherine celebrated to Potemkin. ‘As soon as you pull out the other one, we’ll sing hallelujah!’ That autumn, Potemkin delivered a series of victories from the Caucasus to the Danube and finally besieged the fortress of Ismail with its garrison of 35,000 men and 265 cannon. On 11 December, Suvorov stormed it: almost 40,000 perished in one of the bloodiest days of the century that should have vanquished Constantinople. Instead William Pitt, the British prime minister, demanded that Catherine give up all her gains – or face war against Britain and Prussia.