Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  As the months stretched into years, Catherine’s young lover became indispensable to her. Even the cynical Bezborodko admitted that “compared to the others, he was an angel. He had friends, did not try to harm his neighbors, and often he tried to help people.” From time to time, there were rumors that Potemkin was jealous of this nonthreatening young man and that Lanskoy was on the brink of dismissal. This was far from the truth. Potemin was thoroughly satisfied, and Catherine was free to devote herself to Lanskoy, whose good humor, she said, had made Tsarskoe Selo “into the most charming and pleasant of places where the days passed so quickly one did not know what had become of them.”

  Four years passed, a longer period than Catherine had spent with any lover since she had separated from Orlov twelve years earlier. On June 19, 1784, Lanskoy complained of a sore throat. It grew worse. A high fever set in. Suddenly, five days from the onset, he died of inflammation of the throat. It was said to have been diphtheria.

  The suddenness of this death was overwhelming, and the reaction of the woman left behind was uncontrollable grief. She collapsed into bed and for three weeks refused to leave her room. Her son, his wife, and her beloved grandchildren all were refused admittance; they heard only endless sobbing behind her bedroom door. Potemkin came immediately from the south. He and others tried to comfort her, but, as Catherine later told Grimm, “they helped, but I could not endure the help. No one was able to speak, to think in accord with my feelings. One step at a time had to be taken, and with each step a battle had to be endured; one to be won; one to be lost.” Eventually, Potemkin managed to calm and distract her. “He succeeded in awakening us from the sleep of the dead,” she said.

  Her weeping stopped, but her depression remained. As she described it to Grimm:

  I am plunged into the most profound grief and my happiness no longer exists. I thought that I myself would die from the irreparable loss of my best friend. I had hoped that he would become the support of my old age.… This was a young man whom I was educating, who was grateful, gentle and honest, who shared my pains and who rejoiced in my joys.… I have become a desperate, monosyllabic creature. I drag myself about like a shadow. I cannot set eyes on a human face without the tears choking my mouth. I do not know what will become of me, but I do know that in all my life I have never been so unhappy as now that my best, dearest, and kindest friend has abandoned me like this.

  Lanskoy left to Catherine the fortune he had acquired as her favorite; she divided it equally among his mother, brother, and sisters. She could not face spending the rest of the summer at Tsarskoe Selo without him, did not appear in public until September, and refused to return to the Winter Palace until February. Eventually, when she went back to Tsarskoe Selo, it was to place a Grecian urn dedicated to his memory in the garden where they had worked together. The inscription read, “From Catherine to my dearest friend.”

  In the procession of Catherine’s favorites, it seemed that the ending of a significant relationship was often followed by the appearance of a lesser figure. Orlov had been followed by Vasilchikov, and Zavadovsky by Zorich. Now, this sequence recurred: after the death of Lanskoy came Alexander Yermolov, although not immediately. The deep wound caused by Lanskoy’s death healed slowly, and the favorite’s apartment remained vacant for a year. When she resumed life, she found only tepid consolation in the thirty-year-old Yermolov.

  He, like most of the others, was a Guards officer, and he, like Lanskoy, had served as an aide to Potemkin. The prince approved of Yermolov, whom he thought to be safe and knew to be ignorant and uninterested in being taught anything. He was handsome and seemed honest, which suited Catherine at that moment. She was in no mood for another ardent young student; in her mind, no one could compete with the charm, brilliance, and devotion of Lanskoy. By the spring of 1785, she was writing to Grimm, “I am once more inwardly calm and serene.… I have found a friend who is very capable.”

  During his seventeen months as favorite, Yermolov made little claim on Catherine’s time or interest. In the end, he engineered his own demise. He had been Potemkin’s protégé, but he began behaving toward Potemkin as if he considered himself the prince’s equal. Secure, he thought, in his position, he began to criticize the prince to Catherine. He reported every scandalous story, true or false, that reached his ears. He passed along an accusation that Potemkin was pocketing the pension intended for the deposed khan of the Crimea. The denouement was predictable. In June 1786, an infuriated Potemkin descended on Yermolov at court and shouted, “You cur, you monkey, who dares to bespatter me with the mud of the gutters from which I have raised you.” Yermolov, who was proud, put his hand on his sword hilt, but a sudden blow from Potemkin sent him reeling. Then Potemkin burst into Catherine’s’s apartment and roared, “Either he or I must go! If this nonentity of nonentities is allowed to remain at court, then I quit the state’s services as of today.” Yermolov was dismissed immediately and was given 130,000 rubles in cash and permission to live abroad for five years. Catherine never saw him again.

  After Yermolov’s dismissal, Catherine followed her pattern of replacing a nonentity with a seeming paragon, someone she believed was another Lanskoy. Alexander Mamonov, then twenty-six, was another Guards officer, handsome, educated, fluent in French and Italian, and the nephew of the generous Count Stroganov, whose young wife had run off with Rimsky-Korsakov. Only one evening after Yermolov’s dismissal, Mamonov escorted Catherine to her apartment. “They slept until nine o’clock,” Catherine’s secretary wrote in his notebook the following morning. The new favorite was immediately promoted to high rank in the Preobrazhensky Guards and in May 1788 was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general. Later that month, Catherine made him a count. Her private name for him was “L’habit rouge” (the Red Coat), after the color of his favorite uniform. Because he was more intelligent than most of his predecessors, she occasionally asked his advice on political matters. Although she treated him seriously to his face, she spoke of him to others as a doting mother might speak of her child: “We are as clever as the very devil; we adore music; we hide our fondness for poetry as though it were a crime,” she wrote to Grimm. To Potemkin, she reported enthusiastically: “Sasha is beyond price … an inexhaustible source of gaiety, original in his outlook and exceptionally well-informed.… Our whole tone is that of the best society. We write Russian and French to perfection; our features are very regular; we have two black eyes and eyebrows, and a noble, easy bearing.”

  Despite Catherine’s initial enthusiasm, her relationship with Mamonov began to cool after eighteen months. By January 1788, the favorite was showing signs of weariness, and there were rumors that he was attempting to evade his intimate duties. In fact, Mamonov found the restrictions involved in life with Catherine burdensome. In St. Petersburg, he was rarely permitted out of her sight, and he hated trips outside the capital, when he was shut up for days on a boat or in a coach; he complained that he found traveling in her coach “stifling.”

  In the spring of 1788, he began a clandestine affair with twenty-five-year-old Princess Darya Scherbatova. Soon he was writing to Potemkin, begging to be released from his relationship with Catherine. Potemkin replied sternly, “It is your duty to remain at your post. Don’t be a fool and ruin your career.” By December 1788, Mamonov was in a state of decline, warning that he could no longer perform. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1789, he was still the official favorite, and Catherine remained deaf to any suggestions that he be replaced. Then, on the evening of February 11, 1789, they quarreled, he asked to resign, and she wept all the next day. Potemkin briefly patched things up, but Mamonov confided to a friend that he considered his life “a prison.” On February 21, Catherine tearfully complained that Mamonov was “cold and preoccupied.” In the weeks that followed, the empress saw him infrequently; on April 21, 1789, her sixtieth birthday, she passed the day in seclusion. By then, Mamonov’s affair with Scherbatova was known to many at court, although still not to Catherine. On June 1, Peter Zavadovsky, the
former favorite, was told that Mamonov was determined to marry Scherbatova, whom he described as “a girl most ordinary, not possessing either looks or other gifts.” On June 18, Mamonov finally came to the empress to confess. Beginning his argument with duplicity, he complained that she was cold to him and asked her advice as to what he should do. She understood that he was asking to be released, but, in order to keep him at court, she suggested that he marry Countess Bruce’s thirteen-year-old daughter, one of the richest heiresses in Russia. Catherine was surprised when he declined—and then suddenly the whole truth came out. Trembling, Mamonov admitted that for a year he had been in love with Scherbatova, and that six months earlier, he had given his word to marry her. Catherine was shocked, but she was too proud not to be magnanimous. She summoned Mamonov and Scherbatova and saw immediately that the young woman was pregnant. She pardoned Mamonov and granted the couple permission to marry, even insisting that the ceremony be performed in the palace chapel. She did not attend, but gave them a hundred thousand rubles and a country estate. “God grant them happiness,” she said, stipulating only that they leave St. Petersburg.

  She had been generous, but behind her generosity was a woman badly hurt. “I cannot express how I have suffered,” she wrote to Potemkin. “Can you imagine?” He was guilty of “a thousand contradictions and contradictory ideas and irrational behavior.” That anyone should think she had kept him against his will made her indignant. “I have never been anybody’s tyrant and I hate constraint,” she said.

  The greater misfortune was Mamonov’s. Somehow, he mistook the empress’s parting generosity for lingering embers of passion. In 1792, tiring of his wife, he began writing the empress from Moscow, pleading for a renewal of the imperial liaison, lamenting his youthful “folly” in precipitating the loss of her favor, a memory, he said, that “constantly tortures my soul.” Catherine did not reply.

  What was Catherine seeking in these ornamental young men? She has suggested that it was love. “I couldn’t live for a day without love,” she had written in her Memoirs. Love has many forms, however, and she did not mean sexual love alone, but also companionship, warmth, support, intelligence, and, if possible, humor. And also respect—not just the respect automatically due an empress, but the admiration a man gives an attractive woman. As she grew older, she wanted assurance that she could still attract a man and keep his love. A realist as well as a romantic, she knew and accepted the fact that because she was their sovereign, young men were drawn to her for reasons and with goals different from hers. Desire for love and sex played little part in attracting her lovers to her; they were motivated by ambition, desire for prestige, wealth, and, in some cases, power. Catherine knew this. She asked them for things other than simple sexual congress. She wanted an indication of pleasure in her company, a desire to understand her point of view, a willingness to be instructed by her intelligence and experience, an appreciation of her sense of humor, and an ability to make her laugh. The physical side of her relationships offered only brief distraction. When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.

  The history of her youth and young womanhood helps explain her relationships with favorites. She had been a fourteen-year-old stranger brought to a foreign land. At sixteen, she had married a psychologically crippled and physically blemished adolescent. She spent nine years untouched by this man in their marriage bed. She had no family: her mother and father were dead; her three children were spirited away at the moment of birth. As the years passed, she became caught up in a search for the Fountain of Youth. Today, there are various ways of prolonging the illusion of youth, but in Catherine’s day there were not. She attempted to preserve her youth by identifying it with the affection—simulated, if necessary—of young men. When they were unable to prolong that illusion, either they or she ended the charade, and she tried again with someone else.

  Catherine had twelve lovers. What shocked her contemporaries was not this number, but the age difference between Catherine and her later favorites. She crafted an explanation: she categorized these young men as students whom she hoped to develop into intellectual companions. If they did not completely measure up—and she did not pretend that one would become another Voltaire or Diderot, or even another Potemkin—then she could at least say that she was helping to train them for future roles in administering the empire.

  How severely should her young favorites be judged for allowing themselves to be used; specifically, for submitting to a sexual liaison with someone they did not love? This is not just an eighteenth-century question, nor one to be asked only of young men. Women have always submitted to sexual relationships with men they do not love. Beyond physical force, and arrangements made by family, they usually have reasons similar to those of Catherine’s young men: ambition, a desire for wealth, for some form of power, and possible future independence. Catherine’s young men did not always independently aspire to become favorites. Rising from the lesser nobility, they were frequently urged on by relatives who hoped that the shower of imperial benevolence would also fall on them. Nor was it widely seen as immoral. Indeed, there was no case involving one of Catherine’s favorites in which the young man’s family raised a warning finger and said, “Stop! This is wrong!”

  Catherine conducted the public side of her romantic life on an open stage. Privately, writing in her memoirs or to Potemkin or other correspondents, she included glowing descriptions of the young men who became her favorites. These descriptions erred on the side of poor judgment and excess sentimentality, nothing else. About herself, she was honest; she admitted to Potemkin that she had taken four lovers before him; she wrote in her memoirs about the difficulty of resisting temptation in a setting like the Russian court. Who she was and where she came from helped determine her relationships with men. Perhaps if she had been the daughter of a great king, as Elizabeth I of England had been; perhaps if she, like Elizabeth, had been able to use virginity and abstinence as prizes to tempt and manipulate powerful men, the lives of these two preeminent woman rulers in the history of European monarchy would have been more similar.

  * * *

  *In the eighteenth century, a request of this kind was not extraordinary. Kings and princes, mostly German, happily rented their soldiers to the highest bidder. England eventually hired thousands of Hessians, who made themselves hated throughout the American colonies. The impact that twenty thousand Russians might have had on eighteenth-century America can only be imagined.

  *The family decided to keep the new name, and the nineteenth-century composer Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov came from a collateral branch.

  64

  Catherine, Paul, and Natalia

  CATHERINE HAD BEEN brought to Russia to produce an heir and ensure the succession. Her obligation to conceive a child with her husband, Peter, had stretched over nine wasted years. Failure had prompted Empress Elizabeth to insist that Catherine choose between two potential surrogate fathers, Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin. And then, the moment success was achieved, Elizabeth had snatched the newborn infant away.

  This cruel mischief permanently affected the lives of both Catherine and her son, Paul. Catherine was permitted no complete experience of motherhood, and her memories of the birth and infancy of this child were painful. Saltykov, almost certainly Paul’s father, had abandoned her to boast about his conquest. Paul thereafter became a reminder of a man who had ruthlessly deserted her. Peter, her husband, was worse. Peter humiliated her for years and threatened to seal her away in a convent. Both of these men, Paul’s dynastically recognized father and his biological father, left her with bitter memories of misery, disillusionment, and loneliness.

  In 1762, when Catherine reached the throne and retrieved her son, it was too late to repair their relationship. Paul was eight years old, small for his age, frail, and frequently ill. At first, he missed Elizabeth, the
tall, overwhelmingly affectionate woman who had spoiled him by surrounding him with nurses and women who refused to let him do anything for himself. When Catherine was allowed to see him, she came, but she was usually accompanied by the giant figure of Gregory Orlov, who claimed the attention Paul felt should be his.

  Catherine’s relationship with Paul, involving as it did the question of the succession, was the most psychologically difficult personal and political problem of her reign. From the beginning, Catherine realized that anyone plotting against her could always point to a Romanov heir in the person of her son. The issue was clouded by the question of whether Paul was the son of Peter III or the child of Catherine’s lover, Sergei Saltykov. In her memoirs, Catherine strongly implies that Paul was Saltykov’s son, and, at the time of Paul’s birth, almost no one at court believed the child to be Peter’s son. There was general knowledge of Peter’s sexual incapacity, of the emotional and physical breach between the married partners, and of Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. The mass of the Russian people, however, were not privy to this information, and believed that the heir to the throne was the son of Catherine’s husband, the future Tsar Peter III. The Moscow crowds cheering Paul at Catherine’s coronation believed that Paul was the legitimate great-grandson of Peter the Great. Catherine, riding in the coronation procession, heard the cheers and understood their meaning: that Paul was her rival. Officially, however, Paul’s status as heir did not hinge on the question of his paternity. Once proclaimed empress, Catherine had made certain that Paul’s succession rights derived from her. Basing her proclamation on Peter the Great’s decree that the sovereign could name his or her successor, she publicly proclaimed Paul her heir. No one ever challenged her right to make this decision.