Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Pugachev’s revolt was also the most serious challenge to Catherine’s authority during her reign. She took no pride in the defeat of Pugachev and his execution. She was aware that many in Russia and Europe considered her responsible—some for what she had done, others for what she had not done. She noted their criticism, moved on, and never turned back. She never forgot, however, that, after she had reigned for eleven years, her people, whose lives she had hoped to better, had risen against her and rallied to “Peter III.” Nor did she forget that, once again, her supporters had been the nobility. There would be no further talk of eliminating serfdom. Landowners were encouraged to treat their serfs and peasants humanely, but the empress now was convinced that enlightenment could not be bestowed on a nation of illiterates until the people had been prepared by education. The Nakaz, which embodied the principles of the Enlightenment and the ideals and aspirations of her youth, became no more than a memory. After Pugachev, she concentrated on what she believed to be Russian interests within her power to change: the expansion of her empire and the enrichment of its culture.

  58

  Vasilchikov

  FOR ELEVEN YEARS, from 1761 to 1772, Catherine had been faithful to Gregory Orlov. She was fiercely proud of him, often praising his bravery, generosity, and loyalty to her and the crown. Although his achievements were not balanced by sparkling intelligence and his character defects included selfishness, conceit, and indolence, he still had exhibited the courage and masculine charm that had originally attracted her. Having failed to persuade her to marry him, and finding himself unable to dominate her, he found other women. Catherine suffered but looked away. In 1771, he had rehabilitated himself by his heroic behavior during the Moscow plague. Impressed, she gave him another assignment intended to enhance his prestige. The battlefield stalemate in southern Russia had led to an attempt to negotiate peace with the Turks. Catherine appointed Gregory to be Russia’s chief negotiator, and, in March 1772, he left for the Danube. As he departed, she wrote to Frau Bielcke in Hamburg, “He must appear to the Turks as an angel of peace in all his great beauty.” In the peace talks, however, his egotistical clumsiness brought him down. He insisted that Russian demands be treated as those of a conqueror and stuck to this position with such arrogance that the offended Turkish emissaries suspended negotiations. Before this denouement, his position in St. Petersburg had already collapsed. On the day he departed for the south, Catherine was told that her “angel” had begun another affair. Orlov’s reign had lasted thirteen years and she had forgiven him much—this was too much. Weary of this recurring behavior, Catherine made up her mind to end the relationship. She did not bring herself to this rupture easily, but once decided, she resolved to do it in a way that would make reconciliation impossible. She waited until he was far away.

  Nikita Panin, no friend of the Orlovs and seeing the empress oscillating between rage and despair, pushed forward a replacement for Orlov, a twenty-eight-year-old Horse Guards officer, Alexander Vasilchikov. Catherine admitted, “I cannot live one day without love,” but it was hardly a question of love with this candidate. Alexander Vasilchikov appeared innocuous. He came from an old noble family; he was modest and sweet-tempered; his manners were polished; he spoke perfect French. Dining at court, Catherine noticed these qualities, along with his handsome face and beautiful black eyes. The Prussian minister noted the empress’s good humor in the young man’s presence and the corresponding nervousness of Orlov’s relatives. When Vasilchikov was presented with a gold snuffbox, his reluctance to accept intensified the donor’s desire to give him more. By August, he had become a gentleman-in-waiting; by September, a court chamberlain. Then, suddenly, the young man was installed in Orlov’s apartment in the Winter Palace, his rooms linked to Catherine’s apartment by the private stairway. He was appointed adjutant general and given a hundred thousand rubles, along with an annual salary of twelve thousand rubles; and jewels, a new wardrobe, servants, and a country estate. This remarkable ascent astonished the court, tempered by the widespread belief that once Orlov returned, Vasilchikov would not last a week.

  Gregory was still waiting for negotiations to resume in the Balkans when he received an urgent message from his brother Alexis, in St. Petersburg: the empress had taken a new lover, a young Guards officer, described by Alexis as “good looking, amiable, and a complete nonentity.” Russia’s chief delegate abandoned the peace talks immediately and rushed back to St. Petersburg. On the city’s outskirts, he was abruptly halted; on Catherine’s orders he was instructed to retire to his estate at Gatchina. The pretext was that because of plague the previous year, all travelers from the south were required to pass through a period of quarantine before entering the capital. The truth was that Catherine was afraid of Gregory. She had new locks put on her doors and surrounded her apartment with loyal soldiers. Even with this added security, the slightest noise made her imagine that Orlov was coming, and she was always ready to flee. “You don’t know him,” she said. “He is capable of killing me and the Grand Duke Paul.”

  From Gatchina, Gregory begged to see her. She refused but sent him messages, telling him that he must be reasonable, must go away and travel for his health. Gregory retorted that he had never felt better. She asked him to send back the jeweled miniature portrait of her which he had worn over his heart. He refused to send the portrait but returned the diamonds from the frame.

  After four weeks in “quarantine,” Orlov suddenly reappeared in society, behaving as though nothing had happened. He pretended not to notice that Vasilchikov was attending to duties that had been his; he even indulged in his own brand of humor by making friends with the new favorite, praising him loudly and joking about himself. It was Vasilchikov who blushed with embarrassment when, at night in the presence of the entire court, including Orlov, the empress gave him her arm to escort her to her apartment. No one knew how to react. Before long, Orlov realized that the pretty-faced “nonentity” had triumphed. He knew that Catherine was not in love; that she had taken this young man for the same reason he collected mistresses: a need for a companion who would be always available and submissive. Realizing that his own position was becoming ridiculous, he requested permission to travel. Catherine agreed without uttering a word of recrimination. Indeed, before he left, Orlov allowed himself to be awarded a trove of additional rubles and was given the right to use the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Gregory Orlov’s departure brought peace to court, but for Catherine it was a peace paid for with boredom. Vasilchikov was handsome, but his intellect and personality were so limited as to make conversation impossible. Catherine, wearied by a day of administering her empire, wanted to be intellectually stimulated, amused, and distracted in her hours of relaxation. Vasilchikov had none of these skills, and she soon realized that she had linked herself to a bore incapable of saying anything interesting or funny. He did his best. He was attentive, dutiful, well meaning, and decorative. Nothing helped; she found him increasingly, and then unendurably, boring. Later favorites, picked out by the empress for their physical appearance, had to be acclaimed for their superior mental qualities—or, at least, for the speed with which they were learning. Vasilchikov possessed neither these aptitudes nor prospects. The twenty-two months of his tenure as favorite witnessed some of the most traumatic, challenging, anxiety-producing events of Catherine’s reign: the partition of Poland, war with Turkey, the Pugachev rebellion. She needed someone to talk to who could offer support and consolation, if not useful political or military advice. That Vasilchikov was unable to provide anything of this kind was obvious to everyone.

  Thus Vasilchikov, not Orlov, had turned out to be the primary victim of this boudoir upheaval, and no one knew better than the wretched favorite himself. He was sufficiently sensitive to realize that he bored his mistress and that he was viewed as only a stopgap. His shy, sweet temper, which had been one of his assets, turned peevish and sour. His description of his life with the empress is the wail of an abandoned child:<
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  I was nothing more to her than a kind of male cocotte, and was treated as such. I was not allowed to receive guests or go out. If I made a request for myself or anyone else, she did not reply. When I wished to have the Order of St. Anne, I spoke to the empress about it. The next day I found a thirty thousand ruble banknote in my pocket. In this way, she always stopped my mouth and sent me to my room. She never condescended to discuss with me any matters that lay close to my heart.

  Catherine kept him on because, having made the unfortunate choice of this obscure young guardsman, she thought it would be cruel to dismiss him for faults for which he was not responsible. Finally, however, when she could endure him no longer, she wrote to Potemkin, “Tell Panin that he must send Vasilchikov away somewhere for a cure. I feel suffocated by him and he complains of pains in his chest. Later he could be appointed envoy somewhere as ambassador—somewhere where there is not too much work to do. He is a bore. I burned my fingers and I shall never do it again.”

  Although Vasilchikov’s performance in the role of favorite was probably the weakest of any of Catherine’s lovers, she accepted most of the blame. He was a sudden replacement, installed when she was angry at the frequently and flagrantly unfaithful Gregory. “It was a random choice,” she admitted later, “made out of desperation. I was more heartbroken at that time than I can say.”

  The hapless Vasilchikov departed, generously pensioned for his efforts and good intentions. He retired to a large country estate near Moscow—a gift from the empress. Over the years, he aged into a quiet country gentleman, ignored and mostly forgotten by his sovereign. Once he had gone, she replaced mediocrity with genius and boredom with intellectual fireworks. She sent for Potemkin.

  59

  Catherine and Potemkin: Passion

  THE OUTSTANDING FIGURE of Catherine’s reign, other than Catherine herself, was Gregory Potemkin. For seventeen years, from 1774 to 1791, he was the most powerful man in Russia. No one else during her life was closer to Catherine; he was her lover, her adviser, her military commander in chief, the governor and viceroy of half of her empire, the creator of her new cities, seaports, palaces, armies, and fleets. He was also, perhaps, her husband.

  Gregory Potemkin’s family had served Russian sovereigns for generations. His seventeenth-century ancestor Peter Potemkin had been sent by Tsar Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, on diplomatic missions to Spain and France. Determined to uphold the rank and dignity of his master, he demanded in Madrid that the king of Spain take off his hat whenever the tsar’s name was mentioned. In Paris, he refused to speak to the Sun King, Louis XIV, because an error had been made in the tsar’s titles. Later, in Copenhagen, he was received by the king of Denmark, who was ill and confined to bed. The envoy demanded that another bed be brought and placed next to the king so that he could negotiate from a position of absolute equality. This Potemkin, Gregory’s grandfather, died in 1700 at the age of eighty-three, demanding and eccentric to the end.

  Gregory Potemkin’s father, Alexander Potemkin, was not dissimilar. As a young man in 1709, he fought in the Battle of Poltava against Charles XII of Sweden. Retired as a colonel to a small estate near Smolensk, Alexander Potemkin, while traveling, met an attractive, indigent young widow, Daria Skouratova. He was fifty and she was twenty, but he married her on the spot, forgetting to tell her that he already had a wife. Daria was pregnant before she discovered that she was married to a bigamist. She reacted by going to Potemkin’s first wife and asking for guidance. The older woman, whose life with her husband was unhappy, resolved the situation by entering a convent, in effect divorcing the colonel. Daria got along with her new husband no better than had her predecessor, but she eventually produced six children, five daughters and a son, Gregory.

  The boy was born on September 13, 1739, and began life surrounded and coddled by a loving mother and five sisters. The family was unable to afford a tutor, and Gregory began his education with the village deacon. The pupil loved music, and the deacon had an exceptional voice; he enforced discipline on his precocious, obstreperous student by threatening to sing him no more songs. At five, Gregory was sent to live with his godfather, a senior civil servant in Moscow. With an ear for languages as well as music, he learned Greek, Latin, French, and German. As an adolescent, he was drawn to theology, but also to the army; whichever career he chose, he said, he wished to command. “If I become a general,” he declared to his friends, “I will have soldiers under my orders. If I become a bishop, it will be monks.” When he entered the recently founded University of Moscow, he won a gold medal for studies in theology. Then, losing interest, he refused to attend lectures and was expelled. He entered the army as a private in the Horse Guards, became a corporal, and, by 1759, a captain. In 1762, he joined the five Orlov brothers and Nikita Panin in the coup that put Catherine on the throne. It was during this tumult that he supplied the missing sword knot that Catherine borrowed for the march on Peterhof. Subsequently, when Catherine was distributing rewards for assistance in the coup, Captain Potemkin was given an army promotion and ten thousand rubles.

  At twenty-two, Potemkin was tall and slim, with thick auburn hair. He was intelligent, educated, and spirited. His appearance at court and his introduction to Catherine were sponsored by the Orlovs, who admired the young soldier as an engaging conversationalist and a talented mimic who successfully impersonated the voices of people around him. One evening, Catherine asked him to mimic her. Without hesitation, he spoke to her in her own voice, perfectly imitating her idiom and German accent. Catherine, always seeking wit and humor, could not stop laughing. The impertinence was risky, but Potemkin had guessed that the empress would be amused and would forgive and probably not forget him. He had judged her correctly. Thereafter, he was often invited to her intimate evenings, which included no more than twenty people and from which all ceremony and formality were banned. She decreed that her guests must be good-humored and not speak badly of anyone. Lying and boasting were forbidden, and all unpleasant thoughts were to be deposited with hats and swords at the door. In this uninhibited atmosphere, Gregory—quick-witted, artistic, musical, and able to make the empress laugh—was always welcome.

  Others at court noticed that a strong mutual admiration was developing, and there was gossip. It was said that Potemkin, encountering the empress in a palace corridor, had fallen on his knees, kissed her hand, and not been reprimanded. The Orlovs did not like these stories. Gregory was the established favorite and the father of her child, Bobrinsky; he and his brothers had been endowed with enormous power and wealth. It seemed to them that Potemkin had begun to trespass. By some accounts, Potemkin was called to Gregory Orlov’s room, where, to teach him a lesson, the two brothers, Gregory and Alexis, fell on him and beat him. Later, it was rumored that it was in this struggle that Potemkin lost the sight in his left eye (a more believable explanation is that he was permanently blinded because of faulty treatment of an infection by an incompetent doctor). Whatever the cause, this disfigurement so upset Potemkin that he withdrew from court. When the empress asked about him and was told that he was suffering from a physical disfigurement, she sent word that this was a poor reason and that he should return. He obeyed.

  Catherine began making use of Potemkin’s administrative talents in 1763, when, aware of his interest in religion, she appointed him assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who oversaw church administration and finances. She simultaneously advanced his military career, and, by 1767, he was a senior commander in the Horse Guards Regiment. The following year, he became a court chamberlain. When the Legislative Commission met, he was assigned to be trustee of the Tartars and other ethnic minorities in the Russian empire. Thereafter, Potemkin always had a special interest in Catherine’s non-Russian subjects; in later years, holding supreme power in the south, his entourage always included tribal leaders of all faiths. His early love of ecclesiastical controversy continued. He rarely missed an opportunity to discuss points of religious belief with leaders of all faiths.
When the First Turkish War began, in 1769, he immediately volunteered for the front. With Catherine’s permission, he joined the army of General Rumyantsev, in which he served first as Rumyantsev’s aide-de-camp and then as an outstanding leader of cavalry. In recognition of his services, he was promoted to the rank of major general and chosen in November 1769 to carry Rumyantsev’s campaign reports to the empress. In St. Petersburg, Potemkin was received as a prominent commander and invited to dine with the empress.

  When he returned to the army in the south, it was with Catherine’s permission to write to her privately. She was surprised that he was slow to use this privilege. On December 4, 1773, she prompted him:

  Sir Lieutenant General and Chevalier: I suppose you have your eyes so thoroughly trained on Silestra [a Turkish fortress on the Danube under siege by the Russian army] that you haven’t time to read letters.… Nonetheless I am certain that everything you undertake can be ascribed to nothing but your ardent zeal toward me personally and toward the dear fatherland which you love to serve. But since I very much desire to preserve fervent, brave, clever, and skillful individuals, so I ask you not endanger yourself.… Upon reading this letter you may well ask: why was it written? To which I can offer the following reply: so that you had confirmation of my opinion of you, for I am always most benevolent toward you. Catherine.

  Potemkin could hardly fail to see an invitation in this language. In January 1774, once the army was in winter quarters, he took leave and hurried to St. Petersburg.