Catherine the Great

by Simon Dixon

  ‘Between you and me,’ Esterhazy confided to his wife not long afterwards, ‘I believe the empress has not missed Potëmkin much. He rather abused the sway he had over her and I am assured that she received complaints against him every day.’52 This was the voice of the prince’s enemies, led by Repnin and the governor of Alexander’s Young Court, Count Nikolay Saltykov, who had drawn General Suvorov into their ambit by arranging protection at Court for his daughter, a pupil at the Smolny Institute. Anxious not to be associated too publicly with critics of his late patron, Suvorov claimed that his conscience was clear ‘before God and my Great Empress’. Even so, he privately described Bezborodko, who had replaced Potëmkin in the peace negotiations at Jassy, as ‘wise, like the deceased, only less treacherous’.53

  In fact, though conscious of the mistrust he inspired, Catherine never lost her faith in her ‘pupil, friend and almost idol’. So devastated was she by Potëmkin’s death that her doctors insisted she be bled as soon as she heard the news on the afternoon of 12 October. Sleepless with grief, she poured out her feelings to Grimm in the early hours of the following morning, telling him of the ‘bludgeoning blow’ her mind had just sustained:

  You can have no idea of my state of affliction! He combined an excellent heart with a rare understanding and an extraordinary breadth of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous; he was very humane, full of knowledge, singularly loveable, and his ideas were always original; no other man had his gift for bons mots and apt remarks; his military genius during this war must have been striking, because he never missed a blow on land or sea. No one in the world was less easily led than he; he also had a particular talent for knowing how to use the people around him. In a word, he was a statesman in both counsel and action; he was passionately and zealously attached to me; scolding and getting angry when he believed I might have done better; with age and experience he was correcting his faults…But his rarest quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which set him completely apart from the rest of humanity, and which meant that we understood each other perfectly and could allow those who understood less to babble as much as they liked. I regard Prince Potëmkin as a very great man, who did not fulfil half of what was in his grasp.54

  * * *

  It took almost year to settle the prince’s affairs. On 20 August 1792, Catherine signed a decree at Tsarskoye Selo paying his testators a total of 2,611,144 roubles and 1 kopeck for his property and possessions. The Tauride Palace, built mainly at her own expense for almost 400,000 roubles between 1782 and 1790, was valued at more than twice as much, mostly on the basis of alterations made in the last summer of Potëmkin’s life. His art collection, purchased from the Duchess of Kingston among others, included paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens, van Dyck, Murillo, Poussin and Watteau. His library amounted to some 1065 foreign-language titles, many in multiple volumes, and 106 in Russian. She gave the books he had purchased from Eugenios Voulgaris, including nearly 150 Greek works dating from the early sixteenth century, to the Department of Public Welfare in Yekaterinoslav (Potëmkin’s plans for a university there had never borne fruit). Among his jewels and treasures, valued at well over a million roubles in total, were a diamond ring set in pink foil (20,000 r), two marble vases (10,000 r), 176 porcelain vases, urns and dolls (17,600 r), sixty-five hunting horns (1500 r), a large mahogany organ (3460 r); a lacquered commode, mounted in bronze (4000 r) and another decorated with gilded mirrors (2500 r); a bronze oak tree covered with mechanical birds (11,000 r); four pieces of topaz, one of which weighed almost 500 lbs (2300 r); and no fewer than seventy-three of his trademark pearl-encrusted kaftans (13,505 r). By comparison, the white marble bust of Her Majesty was a mere bagatelle at 1000 roubles.55

  Once the war with the Turks had finally been settled at the peace of Jassy in January 1792, Catherine herself planned to spend more time at the Tauride Palace. Though at first she was conscious of the shade of her late partner, it was convenient, as she grew less mobile, to have everything on one level, right down to the pond for the summer sanctification ceremonies. ‘This palace is the height of fashion,’ she boasted to Grimm in 1794, ‘since it is all on the ground floor, with a large and beautiful garden, right in the middle of the barracks on the bank of the Neva, the cavalry to the right, the artillery to the left, and the Preobrazhensky [Guards] behind the garden. There is nowhere better for the spring and autumn.’56 Designed by Ivan Starov in the restrained neoclassical style she had come to prefer, there was nothing modest about the palace’s dimensions: as an English visitor remarked in 1790, its apartments were as ‘immense’ as Potëmkin himself.57 The colonnade hall in which he had entertained the empress in April 1791 was reputed to be the largest in Europe. The prince had dined in the semicircular bow at one end while his orchestra played at the other; the empress preferred to eat in the centre of the room.58 From there she could see into Gould’s Winter Garden, beyond the temple containing Fëdor Shubin’s statue of Catherine the Legislatrix. Having lost none of her enthusiasm for building, she commissioned a Palladian villa for Gould in the palace grounds in 1793.59 But before she herself could embark on long periods of residence there, the palace required significant restoration. In January 1793, Catherine approved a long list of repairs to be completed by 20 March. The wooden partitions erected in her private apartments the year before were to be strengthened; beams were to be replaced ‘in all those places where danger is most foreseen’; the porcelain stoves were to be stripped to their foundations so that the panels behind them could be replaced in brick to prevent a conflagration; and all ‘doubtful places’ near the theatre were to be reinforced. Further work, including a safety inspection of the cupola, was planned for the summer while the Court was at Tsarskoye Selo.60

  The structural deficiencies that Catherine strove to correct at the Tauride Palace were not so different from the ones she mocked in her description of Elizabeth’s draughty residences in the final version of her memoir, written in 1794. But this was a text designed to highlight contrasts rather than similarities between the two eras. In later life Catherine liked to boast how much more orderly her own Court had become by comparison with the chaos she had experienced as a grand duchess (failures of protocol on the part of her officials were treated with corresponding severity).61 Modelled on Plutarch’s Lives, her memoirs pursued the same theme in more subtle form. Platon Zubov had been obliged to construe Plutarch with her while waiting for news from the Danube in the spring of 1790, when they translated his biographies of Alcibiades and Coriolanus (‘it fortifies my soul’). After that, the author first recommended to her by Count Gyllenborg in Hamburg was never far from her mind (in February 1796, an eighteen-volume edition of his works was among her last purchases for her library at Tsarskoye Selo).62 Plutarch’s pairing of lives of the great men of ancient Greece with those of ancient Rome suggested to Catherine a way of comparing herself with her murdered husband. Like her classical mentor, she concentrated primarily on questions of character and personal virtue, implying that she, and not Peter III, was the worthier successor to Elizabeth.63

  Unable to read her confidential memoirs, contemporaries struggled to match Catherine’s claims to orderliness with the reality of Russia in the early 1790s. Though it came as no surprise at the end of a degenerative illness that had rendered him ‘useless for four years’, the death of Prince Vyazemsky on 8 January 1793 significantly destabilised her regime. ‘You can’t imagine what a state he’s in,’ Catherine had warned Zubov after seeing her ailing Senate Procurator in 1792. ‘As he says himself, he neither eats nor sleeps. His heart races almost continually; his head is so weak that it drops on his shoulder when he sits down; seated in his chair, he rocks from side to side out of feebleness; he says that every movement is unbearable and that fresh air leaves him breathless.’64 Such was the nature of Russia’s patronage system that Vyazemsky’s demise signalled far more than the loss of a single experienced administrator. Between the onset of the prince’s illness in 1791 and his deat
h, nearly half the empire’s senior provincial offices changed hands. The political implications of this merry-go-round were all the more unsettling because Catherine’s reforms had left provincial bodies responsible for many of her government’s most important functions. And among her newly appointed provincial governors and their staff were men who had begun to wonder where the new centre of gravity would lie in the absence of Vyazemsky and Potëmkin.65

  If some of them understandably looked sidelong towards Gatchina, where Grand Duke Paul was waiting impatiently in the wings, the one thing that united most prominent courtiers and officials was the conviction that Platon Zubov was unsuited to fill the void. Since an age gap of thirty-eight years between the empress and her favourite was bound to excite comment, John Parkinson found the Russian capital alive with prurient gossip in 1792–3. This was the atmosphere in which the fabulist Ivan Krylov could venture to publish (anonymously) suggestive verses about ‘The dying coquette’ that owed something to the libertine tradition of pornographic journalism rampant in late eighteenth-century France.66 But if Catherine’s increasingly desperate search for comfort and companionship threatened to desacralise the monarchy, Zubov’s inflated ambitions were even more damaging to her reputation. While she tirelessly advertised his virtues to Grimm, St Petersburg remained unconvinced. Ivan Shuvalov, the leading influence behind Russia’s cultural efflorescence in the late 1750s, had shown what could be done by an intelligent favourite operating under the aegis of an ailing empress. Zubov was a mere cipher by comparison. Here was an avaricious upstart who had achieved nothing and yet pretended to everything. Making a pun on ‘zub’, the Russian word for tooth, Potëmkin had likened Catherine’s latest protégé to an irritating molar that ought to be removed. Released from his rivalry with Potëmkin, whose enemy Saltykov became Zubov’s firmest ally at Court, the new favourite interfered in both domestic and foreign policy, relentlessly acquiring offices in the army and New Russia in a vain attempt to inherit the master’s mantle. On the day before her sixty-seventh birthday in 1796, Catherine rewarded his service to the state with 100,000 roubles; in January 1792, she had given him his own chancery; he even held his own elaborate lever in his palace apartments. ‘This Zeuboff has the character of being an active little man,’ Parkinson remarked, ‘who however behaves with no small degree of hauteur, which in a person from the dust as he is gives no small offence.’67

  The exposure of the corrupt Court banker in 1791 symbolised the cracks that had begun to open up in Catherine’s administration. Living in style on the English Line as the scion of a prominent shipbuilding family, Richard Sutherland had acquired a reputation for wheeler-dealing that led Catherine to trust him with her finances and invest him, as she had Dr Dimsdale, as a baron of the Russian empire in 1788. Three years later, when she began to hear complaints about his activities, Derzhavin, whom Zubov had helped to appoint as one of her secretaries, was ordered to investigate. Frustrated to discover that almost all the leading figures in the government were as indebted to Sutherland as he was himself, Derzhavin was unable to complete his inquiry before the banker died on 4 October 1791, the day before Potëmkin. Nevertheless, a further probe in the following spring revealed that he had embezzled more than 2 million roubles. The prince, who had been borrowing from Sutherland since 1783, owed 800,000; Zubov’s influential protégé, Arkady Morkov, owed 42,000; Vyazemsky and Grand Duke Paul were also deeply in debt. Infuriated by her son’s behaviour, Catherine had no option but to order the treasury to absorb the largest debts.68

  A different investigation was begun in the following year when Nikolay Novikov again fell under suspicion. After the raids on his shops in 1787, the cautious publisher had issued very few radical occult books and spent more time at his family estate at Avdotino, forty miles east of Moscow. But since his efforts at famine relief were combined with a determination to improve the profitability of the estate, critics accused him of using Masonic philanthropy as a smokescreen for the exploitation of his peasants. Though Catherine initially wanted Novikov to defend himself against such charges in a court of law, the Governor General of Moscow, Prince Prozorovsky, persuaded her to have him sent under armed guard to the fortress at Schlüsselburg. There he was questioned by the widely feared prosecutor Sheshkovsky and sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on 1 August 1792. Although the interrogation was based on twelve points raised by the empress herself, her motivation remains uncertain. Was it pressure from the Holy Synod that inclined her to make an example of this Rosicrucian heretic? Was it his links with the Prussian-based Masons who surrounded Grand Duke Paul? Why was it that Novikov, rather than his many collaborators, was singled out for persecution?69

  In the absence of definitive answers to such questions, Novikov’s arrest and imprisonment seem best interpreted as part of a wider pattern of increasingly visceral (and increasingly erratic) responses to the challenges of the revolutionary era. It was not an easy time for Europe’s sovereigns. Joseph II had died in 1790; his brother, Leopold II, unexpectedly followed him to the grave two years later. Within less than a month, Catherine was horrified to learn that Gustav III of Sweden had been shot by a disgruntled aristocrat at a masked ball on 5 March 1792 (the incident inspired Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera). Small as her respect for Louis XVI had been, she was completely disconcerted by his execution on 21 January 1793NS—by a macabre coincidence, the anniversary of the execution of Pugachëv in 1775. After retiring to bed, Catherine remained out of the public eye until 1 February, when she emerged to proclaim six weeks of mourning at Court. All relations with the revolutionary regime in Paris were broken off.70

  The empress’s inveterate English critic Horace Walpole was sure that the wrong monarch had died:

  Oh! that Catherine Slay-Czar had been Queen of France in the room of Antoinette—I do not say it would have been any security for her husband’s life; but it would have saved thousands and thousands of other lives, and preserved the late new, amiable and disinterested Constitution of Poland—Well, that Fury of the North has barefaced her own hypocrisy—She pretended to give a code of laws to her ruffians, and to emancipate their slaves; and now plunges the poor Poles again into vassalage under a vile system.71

  Although the Polish question remained in most respects as complex as ever—not least as a result of the confessional heterogeneity of some parts of the population72—there was one sense in which Catherine’s options had been simplified by Potëmkin’s demise. By the end of his life, there were almost a quarter of a million people on his Polish estates around Śmila, on the River Dnieper, which he was widely suspected of wanting to transform into a feudal principality. After his death, Catherine could pursue his ambitions for a further partition without fear of a rival power base.73 Having signalled her intention to intervene in Poland in February 1792, she seized her chance in May when a group of Polish reactionaries, with Russian support, appealed to her to restore Polish liberties at the Confederation of Targowica, a town in eastern Poland. As many as 100,000 Russian troops soon overwhelmed the Polish resistance that helped to justify their intervention. Now the way was open for a second partition, shared between Russia and Prussia. ‘My part is sung,’ wrote Catherine to Rumyantsev when the Prussian alliance was sealed in November, ‘It is an example of how it is not impossible to attain an end and to succeed if one really wills it.’74 Handicapped by the French declaration of war in August 1792, the Austrians, having unwisely consented to Prussian gains in Poland in the false hope of exchanging Belgium for Bavaria, were left to seek compensation from France by the deal agreed in January 1793 which gave Russia most of eastern Poland and a further 3 million subjects, including, for the first time, a significant number of Jews.75 Now that Stanislaw August’s dreams of autonomy had been shattered, the final dismemberment of his kingdom could not be long postponed. When Tadeusz Kościusko led an insurrection against the Russian plenipotentiary in March 1794, all three eastern powers combined to suppress it. Initially delayed by the threat of another war with the Tur
ks, Catherine sent Suvorov into Poland in August. On 4 November, he stormed Praga, a suburb of Warsaw, butchering between 13,000 and 20,000 Poles. After that, Zavadovsky predicted to Rumyantsev that ‘the impending partition’ would be straightforward enough: ‘Our neighbours, in their current exhaustion, are in no state to swagger.’76 So it proved. On 24 December 1794, the third partition removed the name of Poland from the map of Europe, giving the Russians 120,000 square kilometres of new territory, by comparison with 48,000 for Prussia and 47,000 for Austria. In celebration, Catherine granted 107,000 Polish serfs to her closest advisers, 13,199 of them to Platon Zubov.77