Now she decided to leave the empire to Alexander. First Catherine invited his tutor Laharpe to help her convince the boy. Laharpe ‘made every effort to dissuade her’ at which, remembering his revolutionary sympathies, she sent him back to Switzerland. Paul seemed to flaunt his instability. In a temper, he warned a courtier that when he came to the throne he would behead him. When reported to Catherine she said: ‘He’s mad.’ When the heir agreed with something Zubov said, the favourite sneered: ‘Did I say something stupid then?’ Zubov thought Paul insane. ‘I know it as you do,’ replied Catherine, ‘but unfortunately he’s not mad enough.’ But she did not give up.28
In the spring of 1794, a new, more radical revolution had broken out in Poland where Russians and their allies were killed and arrested. Catherine and Zubov ordered a full invasion, with the Prussians attacking from the west, the double carve-up that would be replayed by Stalin and Hitler in 1939.
On 18 October, Suvorov stormed Praga, killing 7,000 and, when Warsaw surrendered, he wrote to Catherine: ‘Hurrah! Warsaw is yours!’
‘Hurrah, field marshal!’ she replied, thereby promoting him. Poland ceased to exist until 1918.* Catherine, turning sixty-seven, celebrated this tarnished victory by showering positions and gifts on Platon Zubov – 13,199 souls, prince of the Holy Roman Empire, 100,000 roubles.
Meanwhile to the south, the Persian shah Aga Mohammed Khan, who was, unusually for a fierce warrior and founder of a dynasty, a eunuch, invaded and conquered the Caucasus, annihilated Hercules’ army and sacked the Georgian capital, Tiflis (today’s Tbilisi), building Tamurlanian towers of bodies of massacred women and children. This gave the Zubovs the chance to propose their own Oriental Project to liberate the Christians of the Caucasus. Catherine appointed Valerian Zubov, who had lost a leg in Poland, to command the army that took Derbent and Baku.
At Tsarskoe Selo on 29 June 1796, as the empress watched anxiously, Maria Fyodorovna gave birth to yet another future emperor, Nicholas. Catherine proposed to Maria that they persuade Paul to renounce the throne. Dreaming of locking him in a Baltic fortress, Catherine asked the grand duchess to sign a document agreeing. Maria indignantly refused; Catherine was ‘very irritated’.
Yet at almost the same time Alexander was writing to a trusted friend that ‘I’m in no way satisfied with my position, it’s much too brilliant for my character. How can a single man manage to govern it and correct its abuses? This would be impossible not only for a man of ordinary abilities like me but even for a genius . . . My plan is once I’ve renounced this scabrous place, I will settle with my wife on the banks of the Rhine.’
Catherine’s other hope, Constantine, destined for the Byzantine throne, was even more of a worry. She married him off to a German princess,† but the grotesque Constantine, ‘unstable and obstinate, begins to resemble his father, indulging in spasms of anger’, wrote Rostopchin. His outrages included firing live rats out of cannons, playing drums at breakfast and beating up girls. He managed to infect his wife, Anna, with VD. ‘She was attacked by a complaint without knowing its cause,’ noted Countess Golovina. His ‘violent temper and savage caprices’, as Czartoryski put it, were hushed up until finally Charlotte Lieven, the governess of Paul’s small children, reported that Constantine had ferociously beaten a hussar in his regiment. Catherine had him arrested but was so shaken she almost had a stroke. Worse was to follow when Zubov delivered his final bungle.29
That summer, Catherine welcomed the young Swedish king, Gustavus IV Adolphus, who had come to finalize his betrothal to her eldest granddaughter, Alexandrine. Zubov oversaw the deal in which Paul’s daughter would be allowed to practise her Orthodoxy in Lutheran Sweden – but he had not nailed it down.
At 6 p.m. on 11 September, the empress, watched by the entire court, ascended her throne at the Winter Palace to announce the betrothal, but the king never arrived. After three and a half excruciating hours, Catherine learned that the deal was off. She lunged at Zubov’s official with her stick. Five days later, she asked Alexander directly about the succession and showed him her decree to disinherit Paul. On 24 September, he replied politely committing to nothing. She needed time, time she no longer had.30
* Her letters show the glee she took in the chase, in the deal and in the possession of art. She immediately started collecting for her Hermitage, later buying the vast collections of the Saxon minister Count von Brühl and the British premier Sir Robert Walpole – while privately she collected ivory cameos and engraved jewels that still remain in her specially constructed wooden cabinets in the Hermitage Museum, though they are not displayed.
* At the same time, in one of those very Russian reversals of fortune, she restored the duchy of Courland to Ernst Biron, Empress Anna’s favourite who had been in exile for twenty-two years until pardoned by Peter III. He ruled as a Russian puppet until his death, when he was succeeded by his son Peter Biron.
* Saltykova, wounded when her lover got married, avenged herself on her serf girls, organizing a house of horrors. Apart from two or three men, her victims were all women, tortured for minor failures in their tasks, thrashed and tormented with boiling water, hammers, nails, ‘logs, boards and rolling pins’. Nicknamed Saltychikha she repeatedly bribed the local police, who frequently punished anyone who complained because she was the relative of the governor of Moscow, a Saltykov. She was finally arrested in 1762. Catherine ordered a full investigation that revealed 138 probable murders, including ten-year-olds and pregnant women, and found her guilty of 38. But, given that cruelty towards serfs was so common among the nobility and indeed was one of their privileges, the empress was remarkably lenient. Saltychikha was publicly chained with a plaque around her neck reading ‘This woman has tortured and murdered’, and was then imprisoned for life.
* Orlov was approached by the Arab strongmen of Egypt and the area of northern Israel and southern Syria/Lebanon, who were rebelling against the Ottoman sultan and had managed for a short time to take Damascus. When Catherine approved, Orlov sent a squadron that bombarded the Syrian coast, then in June 1772 stormed Beirut, returning to occupy it the next year. The Arab leaders promised Russia possession of Jerusalem but the Russians were soon overtaken by the broiling ethnic-factional turmoil of Middle Eastern politics. They had a chance to set up an Arab client state but Catherine withdrew from Syrian politics when she made peace with the Ottomans in 1774.
† Catherine had never liked the rococo glitz of Elizaveta’s Catherine Palace, which she called ‘whipped cream’. Though experimenting in hugely wasteful projects with other styles (including Tsaritsyno near Moscow which she had pulled down and then rebuilt in neo-Gothic style), she adored the simplicity of neo-classicism. Her favourite architect was the neo-classicist Charles Cameron, who arrived in 1779: ‘At present I am very taken with Mr. Cameron, a Scot by nationality and a Jacobite, a great draughtsman, well versed in antique monuments and well known for his book on the Baths of Rome. At the moment we are making a garden with him on a terrace . . .’ Starting with the Chinese Village at Tsarskoe Selo, Cameron remodelled Elizaveta’s rococo interiors at the Catherine Palace, added her new private apartments, the Agate Rooms, created the new village and cathedral of Sophia, inspired by Constantinople and Hagia Sophia, and erected an array of commemorative columns and follies in the park there. But his masterpiece was the Cameron Gallery that still seems to hang in the air.
* Simon Veliki, who later joined the Royal Navy and died in the Antilles in 1794.
* Almost. Pugachev was not the only Peter III at large. The first of these impostors was Stephen the Small, a mysterious diminutive salesman in the tiny Balkan principality of Montenegro who in 1767 announced that he was Peter III and seized power. Liquidating any opponents, the miniature tyrant reformed Montenegrin government and defeated both Ottomans and Venetians. Fighting the Ottomans herself, Catherine sent an envoy to offer aid provided the Montenegrins remove Stephen. But in 1773, just as Catherine had finally destroyed Pugachev, Stephen was assassinated by his barber.
† The legend of this girl is that she perished in her cell when the Neva flooded – the famous painting of Flavitsky. But actually she died, aged twenty-three, of consumption on 4 December 1775. She was known as Tarakanova – the princess of the cockroaches (perhaps after the sole companions of her last days).
* The most likely date is 4 June 1774, probably in St Sampsonovsky Church, but there is no proof. Apart from Catherine’s letters, the best evidence is the way she treated Potemkin and how he behaved. She ordered that he was to be greeted with the same ceremony as the imperial family and allowed him almost unlimited access to government funds. She virtually adopted his nieces and expected them and her lovers to call her and Potemkin mother and father.
* ‘I’d like to be a pretty girl until thirty, a general till sixty, and a cardinal till eighty,’ joked Ligne, who personified the decadent cosmopolitanism of his time. His charm was such that he was friends with Frederick the Great, Marie Antoinette and Catherine the Great, as well as with Rousseau, Voltaire and Casanova. Catherine called him ‘the most pleasant and easy person who plays all sorts of tricks like a child’. ‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere, a Frenchman in Austria, an Austrian in France, both a Frenchman and an Austrian in Russia.’ His letters were copied, his bons mots repeated across Europe.
* Potemkin planned to become duke of Courland, king of Poland or monarch of a new improvised kingdom of Dacia to insure himself after Catherine’s death. As part of his strategy, he married off his nieces: Sashenka married the Polish grand hetman Ksawery Branicki, but raised her children in the Winter Palace. Katinka the Kitten married Count Paul Scavronsky, descendant of the brother of Catherine I, a zany eccentric who so loved opera he addressed everyone, including servants, in operatic recitative. Varvara married Prince Sergei Golitsyn, while the youngest, Tatiana, married Prince Nikolai Yusupov. Rasputin’s murderer was descended from them.
† Prince Grigory Orlov died insane. Much to Catherine’s chagrin – the happiness of an ex-lover is often both welcome and unbearable – Orlov had unexpectedly married his nineteen-year-old niece and gone travelling. Her sudden death in Switzerland possibly drove him to madness, but it was more likely a symptom of tertiary syphilis.
* The exception was the discerning and contrary young nobleman Fyodor Rostopchin, descendant of Tatar princelings, who, out of old-fashioned sanctimony, despised Potemkin and the favourites: when he gave the grand duke the present of a set of toy soldiers, Paul embraced him. ‘Now it turns out that I’ve become a favourite of the grand duke,’ worried Rostopchin. ‘You know what unpleasant consequences result from blatant signs of his favour.’ Rostopchin, famous as the man who burned Moscow in 1812, recorded his times in his acerbic memoirs and letters to his friend Count Simon Vorontsov.
* He travelled with his own court of aristocrats and adventurers, English, American, French, a harem of mistresses, an Italian composer, English gardeners, his own orchestra and a synod of bishops, mullahs and a Jewish rabbi and army supplier, Joshua Zeitlin, whom Potemkin promoted to ‘court adviser’, giving him noble rank and the right to own estates. When Zeitlin petitioned Catherine against calling Jews zhidi – Yids – Potemkin backed him and advised calling them evrei – Hebrews – which is how they still appear in official Russian documents. His enemies muttered that he liked anyone ‘with a big snout’. As well as Kherson, he founded new towns Nikolaev and Mariupol. Inland he created a capital on the Dnieper, Ekaterinoslav – Glory of Catherine (today’s Dnieperpetrovsk) – where he planned a university and a church based on St Paul’s-outside-the-Walls in Rome.
* The Black Sea Fleet, added to the thirty-seven ships-of-the-line in the Baltic, placed Russia instantly equal to Spain and France, though far behind the 174 of Britain. Potemkin, Grand Admiral of the Black Sea Fleet and Grand Hetman of the Black Sea Cossacks, was at his height yet the journey would be forever overshadowed by the accusation that Potemkin had falsified his achievements by painting façades of villages – ‘Potemkin Villages’. In fact, the witnesses confirmed the reality; the accusations were invented by men who had never been to the south and started before Catherine had even left Petersburg, but Paul was determined to prove that Potemkin was an inept dreamer, while Russia’s European enemies hoped that the new Russian power was illusory. The achievements were solid, but the prince was an impresario of political spectacle. At Balaclava, in a very Potemkinish touch, the monarchs were met by a regiment of Amazon cavalry: 200 girls in crimson velvet skirts and gleaming breastplates with long plaited hair, carrying muskets and sabres. There was no pretence that they were real but nowadays we are more used to presidents watching choreographed dancing on state visits. As for the phrase ‘Potemkin Village’, it unfairly came to mean a sham though it remains ideally suited to political fraud in despotic regimes, including Russia.
† Catherine hired an American admiral, John Paul Jones, whom she sent down to Potemkin. Jones commanded some of the early victories, but Potemkin preferred his other foreign admiral, Prince Karl de Nassau-Siegen, a penniless German soldier of fortune who had once been the lover of the queen of Tahiti. Nassau and Jones soon hated each other. Potemkin sent Jones back to Catherine in Petersburg where he was accused by a procuress of raping her twelve-year-old daughter. Probably framed by Nassau, Jones left for Paris where he died, his body lost until 1906 when it was reburied at the US naval base of Annapolis.
* Notorious for his idiosyncrasies, Suvorov, probably Russia’s greatest ever commander, resembled a shabby, wiry, bristlinglyly alert scarecrow who liked to do calisthenical exercises stark naked in front of the army. He was relentlessly aggressive (‘death is better than defence’) and never defeated: ‘one minute decides the battle; one day the fate of empires.’ His colloquial instructions in his Art of Victory could be taught to ordinary soldiers: ‘The bullet is a bitch; only the bayonet knows its stuff!’; ‘Train hard; fight easy’ and ‘No battle is won in the study’.
* In June 1790, a young nobleman Alexander Radishchev published A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow which, adopting the Enlightened ideals Catherine had once embraced, attacked Russian absolutism, serfdom and favouritism in the shape of Potemkinian extravagance – all signs of what she called ‘the French infection . . . the French venom’ of a ‘rabble-rouser worse than Pugachev’. On 26 July he was sentenced to be beheaded, but Catherine commuted it to exile to Siberia. Later she arrested Nikolai Novikov, whose journalism she had previously patronized. But he was connected to Paul and the Prussians. He was imprisoned in Shlisselburg.
* Paul himself was so angered by the whims of female rule that he and Maria secretly signed a sensible law of succession to be issued when he became tsar, based on male primogeniture.
* Catherine was as appalled by the Polish lords as by their Jewish stewards – ‘venal corrupt liars, braggarts, oppressors, dreamers, they lease their estates to be run by Jews who suck blood from their subjects and give the lords little. Here in a word is the Poles’ spitting image.’
† This time she invited the prince and princess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld to bring their three daughters to Petersburg. It was said that when Catherine and Constantine watched them arrive at the Winter Palace, the elder two princesses tripped as they dismounted from the carriage but the third, Juliane, stepped down without mishap. ‘All right,’ said Constantine, ‘If it must be so, I’ll have the little monkey. It dances prettily.’ On 15 February 1796, Constantine married Juliane, now Grand Duchess Anna. Later Coburg became what Bismarck called ‘the studfarm of Europe’. Anna’s brother Leopold married Princess Charlotte, heir to the British throne, and after her early death he became the first king of Belgium and promoted the marriage of his nephew Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg to Queen Victoria.
SCENE 5
The Conspiracy
CAST
PAUL I, emperor 1796–1801, son of Peter III and Catherine the Great
Maria Fyodorovna, empress (née Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg), Paul’s second wife
A
LEXANDER I, emperor 1801–5, first son of Paul and Maria
Elizabeth Alexeievna, empress (née Princess Louise of Baden), Alexander’s wife
CONSTANTINE I, emperor 1825, second son of Paul and Maria
Anna Fyodorovna (née Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld), Constantine’s wife
COURTIERS, ministers etc.
Alexander Bezborodko, chancellor, prince
Alexander Suvorov, count, prince, field marshal, generalissimus
Fyodor Rostopchin, count, adjutant-general, president of Foreign Collegium, postmaster
Alexei Arakcheev, count, co-commandant of Petersburg, quartermaster-general, ‘Corporal of Gatchina’, ‘Ape in Uniform’
Prince Alexander Kurakin, vice-chancellor
Prince Alexei Kurakin, procurator-general
Nikita Panin, vice-chancellor, nephew of Catherine the Great’s minister
Peter von der Pahlen, governor of Petersburg, chief minister, ‘Professor of Cunning’
Peter Obolyaninov, procurator-general
Prince Platon Zubov, Catherine the Great’s former lover
Count Nikolai Zubov, master of the horse, ‘Colossus’, Platon’s brother
Ekaterina Nelidova, Paul’s mistress, ‘Little Monster’
Anna Lopukhina, later Princess Gagarina, Paul’s mistress
Ivan Kutaisov, count, Paul’s barber, fixer, gentleman of the bedchamber, master of the robes, ‘Figaro’
Count Fyodor Golovkin, master of ceremonies
Countess Varvara Golovina, friend of Empress Elizabeth
On 5 November 1796, Catherine rose at 6 a.m., made her own coffee as usual and started to write. When she visited her water closet, she suffered a stroke and fell to the floor where she remained until nine when her chamberlain found her, breathless, purple-faced, speechless. She opened her eyes but then sank into a coma. It took six men to carry her into the bedroom but, unable to lift her on to the bed, they laid her on a mattress on the floor. ‘First to be warned, Prince Zubov was the first to lose his head.’ Alexander, weeping, and Constantine, both in ‘Potemkin’ uniforms, arrived with their wives. At 3.45, Dr Rogerson realized that she had suffered a massive stroke. Count Nikolai Zubov, master of the horse, the giant of the four brothers, known as ‘the Colossus’, galloped to Gatchina.
The Romanovs Page 33
