Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  Q. In which provinces are your woollen manufactories?

  A. In every province where there are sheep.

  Q. What is the public debt?

  A. So modest that I could pay it off in twenty-four hours if I wanted to.54

  Diderot, it is now clear, took his visit to St Petersburg more seriously than once was thought. Conceiving of Russia as a tabula rasa on which an appropriately enlightened mind could create a new and glorious civilisation, he saw foreign settlement as a natural way to approach his goal. Though Catherine’s colonies on the Volga had been much discussed in the French salons in the 1760s, they had not passed without criticism. Diderot famously proposed that she should ‘plant’ the seeds of liberty in the form of a colony of Swiss people in Saratov.55 While scholars have been able to demonstrate the connection between this idea and his broader social and political thought, the empress, who had nothing more than the evidence of their conversations to go on, could be forgiven for dismissing such sallies as utopian. As she became irritated by his impracticality, Diderot was conscious of the danger: ‘Nothing is easier than bringing an empire to order with one’s head on one’s pillow. That way, everything goes as one might wish.’56 What he could not know, because Catherine did not tell him, was that his visit to Russia had coincided with the emergence of the gravest threat to the order of her empire that she ever faced.

  * * *

  Even as Grimm arrived in St Petersburg on 17 September 1773, an illiterate Don Cossack was issuing his first manifesto to the Yaik Cossack host almost a thousand miles to the south-east: ‘As your fathers and grandfathers served previous tsars to the last drop of their blood, so you, my friends, will serve me, the Great Sovereign Emperor Peter Fedaravich.’57 When the thirty-one-year-old Yemelyan Pugachëv set out to tempt all those who had ‘longed for him’ with the prospect of land, water, grasses, money, powder and bread, threatening them with his ‘just wrath’ if they refused to answer his call, the prospects for a rebellion in the territory between the Volga and the Urals could hardly have been more promising.58 No matter that portraits of Pugachëv made him look more like a lop-sided Peter the Great than Peter III. He had shown off the scrofulous scars on his chest as the authentic ‘marks of tsardom’ and the forts standing guard over those unruly borderlands were insufficiently manned to repel the heterogeneous band of Cossacks, Old Believers, fugitive serfs, Bashkir and Kazakh tribal leaders (eighteenth-century Russians called them Kirghizians to distinguish them from the Cossacks, kazaki) who responded to his appeal to defend their traditional freedoms against the advance of Catherine’s Enlightened administration. Not that her bureaucracy presented an indomitable force: Kazan province had only eighty permanent officials for a population of 2.5 million. Famine, plague and war had everywhere taken their toll (the latest levy of one recruit in every hundred souls, decreed on 23 August, was due to begin on 1 October, and by the time it was complete some 323,360 men had been drafted in the space of five years). Once the factory peasants in the metallurgical plants in the Urals had joined him, Pugachëv had the additional advantage of a reliable supply of arms.59

  By the time General Kar was dispatched to quell the rebellion on 15 October, Catherine already knew of Pugachëv’s seizure of Iletsk. A week later, she demanded to see the latest maps of Orenburg province, comprising most of Bashkiria, in order to follow the progress of events. At first she assumed that it was merely a matter of time before Kar sent news of his victory, but this was to underestimate the power of the insurgents. In an area where the Cossacks were in effect the imperial police force, their secession signalled a serious threat to security. Having laid siege to Orenburg on 5 October, Pugachëv set up his own ‘College of War’ at nearby Berda, where his henchman Zarubin Chika called himself Field Marshal Count Chernyshëv and others among his lieutenants adopted the names of Panin and Orlov. Kar’s poorly trained punitive battalion (all that could be spared when the crack troops were in Moldavia and Wallachia) was crushed in early November by a better-disciplined Cossack force more adroit than his own in the use of artillery. News of the disaster reached Tsarskoye Selo on the evening of Catherine’s name day, throwing the Court into alarm. The rebels, she was horrified to learn, now numbered several thousand. Suspecting a Turkish conspiracy, she appointed General Bibikov, the former Marshal of the Legislative Commission, to replace the disgraced Kar, whose arrival in Moscow set off a wave of rumours that forced the government to lift its veil of secrecy over the whole affair. ‘Probably it will all end on the gallows,’ Catherine wrote to Yakov Sievers on 10 December, as Bibikov departed for Kazan, ‘but what sort of expectation is that for me, Mr. Governor, who has no love for the gallows? European opinion will relegate us to the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible!’60

  Now she had less time for Diderot, who recorded 5 December as the date of their last discussion. Nor was Vasilchikov the man for a crisis. Instead, on 4 December, the empress wrote her first surviving letter to the man who was to supplant him and almost everyone else in her affections for the remainder of his life. The thirty-four-year-old Grigory Potëmkin was at that time besieging the Turks on the Danube:

  Mr Lieutenant-General and Cavalier. You, I imagine, are so firmly focused on Silistria that you have no time to read letters. And although I do not at this moment know whether your bombardment has succeeded, I am certain, nevertheless, that everything you undertake should be ascribed to nothing but your impassioned zeal toward me personally and toward the dear fatherland in general, whose service you love.

  But since for my part I very much wish to preserve zealous, brave, intelligent and skilful people, so I ask you not to endanger yourself in vain. Having read this letter, you may put the question: why was it written? To which I can reply: so that you should have confirmation of the way I think about you, for I am always most benevolent toward you.61

  Confronted with this tantalising summons, Potëmkin promptly sought leave from his camp and headed for St Petersburg.

  While she was waiting for him, Catherine attempted to blunt the international impact of Pugachëv’s rebellion by making light of it to Frau Bielke. ‘There is no revolt at Kazan,’ she declared. ‘That kingdom is peaceful.’ It was true that the ‘so-called Peter III’ and his ‘band of robbers’ had ‘hanged five hundred people of every age and sex’ in their rapacious progress through Orenburg province. Nevertheless, Bibikov had everything in hand ‘and it will probably all come to very little’.62 In the meanwhile, there was no shortage of New Year celebrations to distract her. At a betrothal ceremony before the ball on Epiphany, she placed rings on the fingers of Duke Peter of Courland (the son of Anna’s disgraced favourite, Ernst Bühren) and his fiancée Princess Yevdokiya Trubetskaya. And although it was too cold to spend long looking at the model of Bazhenov’s new palace in the Kremlin, set up for her inspection in the furthest palace ante-chamber, she found time to play chess and cards with Grimm and other guests in the Hermitage, having attended a performance of the ballet Cupid and Psyche.63

  Yet even as the carnival continued all around her, the empress failed to match its mood. A placard found at the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day, apparently alleging government corruption, was burned in front of the Senate on 11 January when it proved impossible to discover the identity of its anonymous author, a self-styled ‘honest man’. Security was stepped up at the palace so that no one below the rank of major could ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’.64 With both Orenburg and Ufa under siege, the prospects looked a good deal less certain than Catherine had implied in her letter to Frau Bielke. Even a French comic opera performed by the girls at the Smolny Institute on 20 January was not enough to lift her spirits. After that, she retreated to her apartments for several days. ‘The Empress is at present a good deal out of order,’ Gunning reported in the middle of this self-imposed seclusion. ‘The insurrection in Orenburg, and the height it has been allowed to get to, has certainly given her great uneasiness.’65 As if to unsettle her further, Paul finally confessed Caspar von Saldern�
�s duplicity to Catherine before the end of the first week in February. This news ‘must have been extremely offensive to her’, Gunning concluded, ‘as, in the passion it threw her into, she declared she would have the wretch tied neck and heels and brought hither’. Only thanks to Panin was she persuaded to allow Saldern to retire, provided that he returned a snuffbox she had given him and renounced all his titles.66

  Honesty and fidelity were subjects at the forefront of the empress’s mind as the turmoil in her personal life matched the chaos in the eastern borderlands. We do not know whether she was already in love with Potëmkin when she wrote to him in December. (Even if she was, it did not prevent her from continuing to lunch with Vasilchikov and Orlov, who can hardly have felt at ease as the only guests at her table apart from Alexander Cherkasov and the duty gentleman-in-waiting.)67 By the beginning of March, however, there could be no doubt about her new passion. Potëmkin was first presented to the empress at Tsarskoye Selo on 4 February. That morning, she had said farewell in the Amber Room to Prince Dolgoruky, who was returning to Berlin as her ambassador. They were joined for lunch by a regular guest, Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, a seventy-two-year-old veteran of the Royal Navy who, in addition to designing several new men-ofwar, had done much to rescue the dilapidated dockyard at Kronstadt since arriving in Russia at the beginning of 1771. Then, late in the afternoon, a very different visitor arrived to be led straight to her private apartments.68

  Quite how the relationship developed we cannot be sure. But sometime that month, lost in the delirium of their new affair yet painfully conscious of its fragility, Catherine and Potëmkin consummated their passion at the Winter Palace. As a harbinger of the mood-swings to come, he was already jealous of her previous lovers. Concealing herself from public gaze on 21 February, she sent him a list of them in a ‘sincere confession’ designed to test his faith in her:

  The trouble is that my heart is unwilling to be without love for as long as an hour. They say that people try to hide such vices as if out of kindness, and it may be that such a disposition of the heart is more of a vice than a virtue. Perhaps it is in vain to write this to you, since after this you will fall in love with me or will not want to go back to the army fearing that I shall forget you. However, in truth, I don’t think I should do anything so stupid, and if you want to keep me for eternity, then show me as much friendship as love, and above all, love me and tell me the truth.69

  After all, he had scarcely been celibate himself. ‘I’m not surprised that the whole town has credited you with countless women,’ she continued two days later. ‘No one on earth romps with them more than you do, I imagine.’ She asked him only to refrain from criticising Orlov and his brothers: ‘He loves you, and they are my friends, and I shan’t give them up.’70

  Despite their attempts to conceal it from prurient eyes, their whirlwind romance was obvious to her closest companions. ‘They’ve all begun to preach to me,’ she told her lover on 26 February after a fifth sleepless night alone, ‘and I hear them out. But inwardly they don’t dislike you, the Prince [Grigory Orlov] above all. I have not admitted to anything. Neither have I justified myself in such a way that they could reproach me for lying.’ Now they had only a few days left together before the onset of the Great Fast. ‘I shall have to prepare for communion. Ugh! I can hardly contemplate such thoughts without crying.’71 Aleksey Orlov, who had come up from Moscow to take stock of developments, twice asked her ‘Yes or no?’ ‘I cannot lie,’ she answered, causing him to laugh when she admitted that she had fallen in love: ‘“And you see each other in the bath-house?” I asked him why he thought so. “Because,” he said, “for about four days we have seen a light in the window rather later than usual.”’ There could be no room for Vasilchikov now. Panin must find some way of sending him away to take the waters. ‘Then he could be appointed ambassador somewhere where there isn’t much business. He’s boring and suffocating.’72 Meanwhile, on the first day of the Fast, Vasilchikov had to suffer the indignity of lunch in the Diamond Room with the man who had displaced him in Catherine’s affections. They sat next to one another again after mass on the following Sunday.73

  By then it was clear to watching diplomats that the new favourite was cast from a different mould. ‘His figure is gigantic and disproportioned,’ Gunning reported on 4 March, ‘and his countenance far from engaging. From the character I have had of him, he appears to have a great knowledge of mankind, and more of a discriminating faculty that his countrymen in general possess… and although the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one who has formed connections with the clergy.’74 Links with the bishops were a legacy of Potëmkin’s time as a student of theology at Moscow University. Though the subject kept its hold on his mercurial mind, he was far too flamboyant to contemplate an ecclesiastical career. Now languid, now brimming with muscular energy, he presented the empress with a fascinating study in contradictions, so different from the colourless creatures who fawned on her at Court. If his intelligence was one part of the attraction, his virility was another, tested and confirmed in action against the Turk. The last time she had seen him in St Petersburg was in the afterglow of the victories at Kagul and Larga, where he had been decorated with the Order of St George, Third Class.75 Now they launched into a flurry of love letters (she burned his so that only hers survive). ‘My dear little dove, I love you so very much, you’re good, you’re clever, you’re jolly, and you’re amusing: I have no need for anyone else in the world when I’m with you.’76 And so it went on, now tender, now passionate, and studded throughout with a rich variety of affectionate diminutives: ‘sweet darling Grishenka’, ‘giaour’ (an insulting Turkish epithet for non-Muslims), ‘Muscovite’ and even, in a letter written from the Hermitage on 10 April, ‘Mr Yaik Cossack’.77

  That Catherine felt able to joke about Pugachëv was a sure sign that the crisis in the east had eased. Two days earlier, in fact, Gunning had reported the arrival of a messenger from Bibikov ‘with the very agreeable tidings of the rebellion being entirely extinguished by the total defeat and dispersion of the rebel army’. On 22 March, government troops had routed the insurgents at Tatishchevo, at the junction of the roads to Orenburg and Yaitsk, forcing Pugachëv to abandon his headquarters. Most of his confederates were taken prisoner. Having learned of these developments on the morning of 7 April, a relieved Catherine sat down to lunch with Praskovya Bruce, Kirill Razumovsky, Grigory Orlov, Zakhar Chernyshëv, Alexander Golitsyn and Alexander Vyazemsky. The list reads like a roll-call of her oldest friends. Only Potëmkin was a parvenu. That evening, as her card game drew to a close, she permitted Grimm and Prince Ludwig to kiss her hand on the eve of their departure from Russia.78

  In fact, the news was not quite so good as it seemed. Bibikov, it emerged soon afterwards, had died of a fever in Kazan on that same day, and it was a mistake to imagine that the revolt was over when its leader was still on the run. Nevertheless, while Pugachëv was re-grouping in the Ural mountains, Catherine had time to face up to the rivalries stimulated by Potëmkin’s meteoric rise. On the Court’s return to the Winter Palace on 9 April, he occupied a new suite of apartments on the floor beneath her own. Catherine no longer looked forward to her birthdays. ‘I hate that day like the plague,’ she complained to Grimm: ‘Tell me, truly, wouldn’t it be charming if an empress could remain fifteen years old for the whole of her life?’79 On her forty-fifth birthday, Easter Monday, she invested her new lover with the Order of St Alexander Nevsky.80 He was appointed to her Council on 5 May and later that month became vice-president of the College of War with the rank of general-in-chief. Though the most obvious casualty of these manoeuvrings was Zakhar Chernyshëv, whose mishandling of the Cossacks was held to have left the door open for Pugachëv, it was all too much for Grigory Orlov, who again went abroad after ‘a very warm altercation’ with Catherine ‘which is said to have moved her more than she was ever known to have been’.81

  Just as Paul was proving a satisfactorily uxorious companion for
Natalia, so Catherine herself was by now settling into something approaching married life with Potëmkin. They laughed; they made love; they quarrelled; they may even have been pledged to one another in a secret ceremony. Even now that Paul had reached the age of majority, a formal wedding was no more possible than it had been for Orlov. The best they could hope for was some sort of blessing. No such ritual could take place during Lent, when their passion first ignited; Easter also got in the way. Spring was a time for carriage rides through the streets of the capital, for coffee in the grotto at Tsarskoye Selo, where the Court transferred on 29 April, for picnics in the English garden at Pulkovo, and for relaxing visits to her friends’ estates on the Peterhof Road. If it had been difficult for Catherine to sleep with her lover in the early days (the mere sight of his valet was enough to turn her away from his door), it was now even harder to arrange a blessing. The most recent (and most scholarly) Russian editor of Catherine’s correspondence with Potëmkin suggests that the likeliest date is Trinity Sunday, 8 June, the annual feast of the Izmailovsky Guards, when the empress allegedly met her lover late in the evening at the Church of St Sampson the Hospitable, founded on the Vyborg Side by Peter the Great to commemorate the saint’s day of the battle of Poltava. The evidence could hardly be flimsier. The Court journal records only that Catherine sailed to Yekaterinhof late in the afternoon, spending an hour there before returning via Count Sievers’s suburban mansion, where a crowd had gathered to watch. She was back at the Summer Palace by nine. Though the ‘white nights’ certainly offered the perfect setting for a romantic cruise, there is no proof whatsoever that she took a detour to St Sampson’s, still less that a ceremony took place there.82 It seems just as likely that Catherine’s confessor was called upon to bless the couple in the privacy of her own apartments. At any rate, by the time the Court decamped to Peterhof on 16 June, Catherine was already addressing Potëmkin as her husband.