Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Events were overtaking the new regime. In the soldiers' barracks, murmurs of discontent had grown into clamorous shouts of protest. Fed by the constant harangues of the Orlovs, who stirred up the men by praising Catherine and defaming Peter at every opportunity, and who passed out money and drink in Catherine's name, dissatisfaction was ripening into rebellion.

  Peter's military reforms were seen as punitive, his peace treaty with Prussia—a treaty, it was said, that had been drafted by an envoy of Frederick—an affront too grave to be borne. The men hated their new German commander, and hated having to wear the blue uniforms of Prussia even more. Their pay was slow in reaching them, and there was talk of a new campaign against Denmark, not to uphold Russian sovereignty but to preserve the integrity of the emperor's Holstein lands.

  Preparations for the new campaign were intensifying as the cold weather retreated and the river ice, which had been a thick solid sheet, began to grind and tear itself into huge chunks that floated toward the sea. Quantities of arms and provisions, equipment and supplies were carted into the Petersburg barracks and stored in warehouses. Rumor had it that Peter intended to lead the Russian army himself, as soon as the warm season arrived and all the needed equipment had been delivered. It was to be his moment of glory, the chance the late empress had so long denied him, to prove himself on the field of battle. And he would be fighting on the Prussian side, just as he had always wanted to do. Some Russian units, it was said, were already being transferred to Prussian command.

  As they made ready to follow a leader they detested into a military adventure they abhorred, the men began to talk openly of how much better things would be if the emperor's wife, a woman who knew and understood her adopted country instead of despising it, were on the throne. Some remained faithful to the man they viewed as their legitimate sovereign, however contemptible he seemed to them. But many hoped for change, and pledged themselves, in secret, to help to bring it about.

  To the extreme disquiet among the soldiers was added the condemnation of the clergy when the emperor decided to augment his depleted treasury by seizing church lands.

  Plans had been made in the previous reign to secularize vast amounts of property held by religious houses, but Elizabeth had not taken any steps to implement them. Now Peter revived the scheme, and with a vengeance. He had never bothered to disguise his contempt for the Russian church, with its lengthy and intricate liturgy, its rich, sonorous vocal music and its panoply of saints enshrined in jewel-studded icons. In truth, all religion was distasteful to Peter; Catherine had once said of him that she had "never known a more perfect atheist in practice than he, though he often feared the devil and God too, and more often despised them both." Throughout his years in Russia Peter had continued to prefer the relative simplicity and aesthetic severity of Lutheranism to the coruscations and labyrinthine rituals of Russian Orthodoxy, and he had often insulted priests and pious worshippers when he deliberately interrupted services with loud laughter and impudent remarks.

  Troops of soldiers were sent out into the countryside to take possession of farmlands that had belonged to the church for hundreds of years. Where they encountered resistance, they seized the properties by force. Though many of the soldiers found this work odious, they obeyed when commanded to break into the houses of priests and higher clergy and ransack their contents. No chapel, hermitage or monastery was spared; even the bare cells of the monks were raided and rifled.

  Official protests on behalf of the clergy were ignored and in fact Peter seemed to be carrying out a personal vendetta against the priests, commanding them to cut their long hair and waist-length beards and to exchange their long black robes for the sober dark coats and breeches, linen shirts and tricorn hats of Lutheran ministers. Insult was added to injury when the emperor announced that the sons of all married clergy were no longer to be exempt from conscription, as traditionally they had been.

  But the worst was still to come. Not content to attack the wealth of the church and longstanding clerical traditions, Peter began to make what many believers saw as an assault on faith itself. He summoned Archbishop Dmitri of Novgorod, the man who only a few months earlier had saluted him as autocrat and led the senior court dignitaries in taking their solemn oath of allegiance to him, and ordered him to remove from the churches all icons except those representing Christ and the Virgin Mary.

  No greater blow to traditional Russian piety could be imagined. The icons of the saints were at the heart of Orthodox belief. Every day the faithful knelt to worship them, soldiers marched into battle behind them, every Russian home displayed them in the "beautiful corner," where a lamp was kept burning every hour of the day and night to illuminate the elongated, thin-lipped faces and glowing eyes of the holy images. In the marketplace, huge piles of icons were for sale and merchants in sacred art carried on a thriving business. Every Russian owned at least one icon; venerated icons were handed down through the generations and were among a family's most valued possessions. Especially revered images were believed to manifest miraculous powers to heal and bless. In churches large and small, holy pictures overwhelmed the worshiper, looking down from every pillar and wall, arranged in glittering rows on the tall iconostasis that represented the gateway to the holy of holies.

  A cry went up from the faithful: their precious icons must not be taken down. The saintly images must not be desecrated. The emperor had finally gone too far. He must be replaced. And his obvious replacement was Catherine. In the streets of Petersburg and Moscow there was talk of the change that had to come. Seditious speeches were made, rebellious murmurs disquieted those with a stake in maintaining the present government.

  "Everyone hates the emperor," Breteuil noted. "The empress has courage in her soul and in her mind; she is as loved and respected as the emperor is hated and despised." The hatred was spreading, but it was as yet impotent. "To tell the truth, everyone is cowardly and a slave," the ambassador added, not knowing to what extent the people he saw as cowards and slaves were already preparing to carry out a grand upheaval.

  Baron Korff, chief of police, was well aware of the extent of the dissatisfaction in the capital. Throughout April and May his spies brought him word of disturbances in every quarter of the city, of disloyal talk in the guards barracks, of grievances held by the police themselves. He knew that unless the police took immediate and forceful action, there might well be an insurrection. Yet he decided to do nothing.

  For months the baron had been among the emperor's intimates, enjoying the benefits of Peter's special favor. He had been a frequent guest at the lengthy banquets at the Winter Palace, both a witness to and a participant in the debauchery that went on there. But then, suddenly, at the end of May, the emperor's favor evaporated. Capriciously, and most unwisely, Peter picked a quarrel with Korff, with the result that the baron ceased to be a welcome guest in the imperial quarters. Within days the baron was making himself a familiar presence in Catherine's apartments. He had chosen sides; he was betting that, when the emperor went off to war, as he was about to do, Petersburg would rise for Catherine. And he meant to throw his weight behind the winning side.

  Early in June Peter gave a great banquet to celebrate the peace he had made with Prussia. Hundreds of guests made their way to the grand salon where long tables had been laid with fine white linen, shining golden plates and huge silver epergnes. Long white tapers set in gilt candelabra illuminated the vast room, though the evening, glimpsed through the long windows, was softly bright. The sun would not set until close to midnight, and above its blue depths the Neva reflected the warm orange and gold tints of the sky.

  The salon filled with guests, the first courses were served. The emperor sat on a raised dais, with Elizabeth Vorontzov, her ugliness adorned with the late empress's rubies and sapphires, seated beside him. Nearby was the evening's guest of honor, the Prussian envoy. Far down the table, separated from the dais by hundreds of guests, sat Catherine, self-composed and sociable, conspicuously dressed in black for she was
still in mourning for Elizabeth.

  Peter surveyed the room with satisfaction. He was master here, the officers and courtiers did his bidding now, just as they had once done the bidding of his hated predecessor. To be sure, there was some unrest in the city, and word had recently come to him of uprisings among the peasants of Astrakhan. But Astrakhan was far away, and besides a regiment had been dispatched to arrest the leaders and crush the rebellion. Slightly more irritating were the reports he was receiving from his generals, telling him that large numbers of soldiers claimed to be ill, and were unable to embark for the Danish campaign. But he knew how to deal with that. He had issued a ukase, a legislative order, commanding them to recover their health. They dared not go against an imperial command.

  More courses were brought, and flagons of wine. The emperor drained his goblet again and again, until he began to have trouble holding it steady as he lifted it to salute the Prussian envoy. There were those, he knew, who cautioned him against leaving the country to command the Danish campaign. Even his mentor Frederick, whom he respected more than anyone, had written to advise him not to leave Russia until he had undergone the rite of coronation. The people were not to be trusted, Frederick had written. They might prove rebellious against a sovereign who had not received the divine sanction of coronation. But he meant to leave anyway, he was eager to be about the work of soldiering. He could not be bothered to go to Moscow—that hateful, priest-ridden city with its hundreds of churches and thousands of noisy clanging bells—merely to submit himself to some archaic ritual.

  Peter ordered his goblet refilled and stood to propose a toast. "Let us drink," he called out, his words slurred, "to the health of the king our master." There was a rustling of silk and a scraping of chairs as the guests stood to share the toast.

  "To King Frederick," Peter said loudly. "He did me the honor of giving me a regiment; I hope he won't take it back from me." He turned to the Prussian envoy. "You can assure him that, if he asks it of me, I'll go and make war in hell with all my empire."

  With that the emperor drained his glass, and his guests joined him. More toasts followed, including one to the imperial family. Everyone stood to raise his or her glass, even the French and Austrian ambassadors, the resentful Russian officers, the servants and officials who had felt the lash of the emperor's tongue and the punishing impact of his wrath.

  Everyone, that is, but Catherine. She sat where she was, provocative in her self-possession, alone in her mute defiance of her husband's salutes. He saw what she was doing, tried to ignore her, but finally lost his temper. Why, he demanded to know, had she not stood like the others?

  The diners held their breaths, the servants stopped where they were. Not a glass clinked, not a knife scraped. Catherine turned toward Peter.

  "We toasted the imperial family. I am a member of that family, along with the emperor and our son. How could I stand up to drink a toast to myself?"

  As enraged by Catherine's calm as he was by her sophistry, Peter shouted at her.

  "Fool! Fool!" His voice echoed in the huge chamber. The diners, frightened by the ugliness and bitterness in the emperor's tone, sat as if paralyzed, hardly daring to blink.

  But Catherine, though fully aware of the danger she was in, retained her outward poise. Earlier that evening she had come to a quiet resolve. She would no longer sit by and watch her husband's pathetic charade of rule. She would not wait until he took his vengeance on her. She would let those who were eager to act on her behalf do what they planned to do. With their help, and trusting in the invisible hand that guided all things, she would seize the throne.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE AIR OFF THE BALTIC WAS THICK AND HUMID, AND WARM even for June. On the horizon a pale gold, watery sun hung suspended as the murky twilit night gave way to a blurry dawn. The rickety carriage that sped toward Peterhof from the capital careened over the bumpy, pitted road but did not slacken speed, even when the horses stumbled and the fragile wooden frame shivered as if it would break. Inside were Alexis Orlov and his lieutenant Vasily Bibikov, the latter disguised as a valet. They were on their way to Catherine, bringing her a message of the greatest urgency. One of the men she was relying on most to help her take the throne had been arrested, and the others, fearing that under torture he might reveal the entire plan, had decided that the time had come to act.

  It was June 28, two days before Peter was due to lead his army on campaign into Denmark. For weeks Catherine and her allies had been quietly making preparations to take power, meeting at the house of Princess Dashkov, drawing more and more guards officers into the conspiracy, along with thousands of the private soldiers who pledged themselves to come to Catherine's defense whenever she called on them. Gregory Orlov took the lead, throwing his immense energy and his immense prestige into a one-man campaign of persuasion. He and his brothers worked to circumvent the strictly military hazards—securing the roads, assuring the loyalty of the artillery corps, defusing potential pockets of resistance—while Panin, Catherine's principal adviser, addressed the political questions and took responsibility for safeguarding the heir to the throne, Paul, who, rumor had it, was about to be discarded by his putative father along with Catherine.

  Panin and Catherine had drawn up a manifesto to be issued on the day she took power. It was even now being printed, in the greatest secrecy, by an officer at the risk of his life.

  The carriage clattered to a halt outside the small villa called Mon Plaisir where Catherine was living, and the servants, already awake, admitted the tall Alexis Orlov to her bedroom.

  Gently he woke the drowsing Catherine.

  "It is time to get up," Catherine later remembered hearing him say, in a voice that conveyed a remarkable serenity. "All is ready to proclaim you."

  It had been agreed by all the conspirators that, if their plan was betrayed, the guards would immediately be assembled and Catherine would be declared empress—no matter where Peter was or what he was doing. At the moment, Peter was at Oranien-baum, only a few miles away, with his fifteen hundred Holstein-ers. But Peter was no doubt still in bed, sleeping the sleep of the inebriated, and if Catherine hurried to the capital, and her luck held, she had a good chance of securing the city before her husband could give orders for her arrest.

  While Catherine's women rapidly dressed her in the simplest of black gowns—she was still in mourning for the late empress— Orlov told her of the arrest of Lieutenant Passek, who had been overheard giving encouragement to seditious talk by one of the emperor's spies. She understood at once the need for haste, and stepped into the waiting carriage, which sped off toward Petersburg.

  During the tense hour and a half that followed, as the carriage lurched and jolted over the uneven road, with the driver whipping the horses to breakneck speed, Catherine came fully awake and did her best to gather her thoughts. The hour had come at last to test her resolve. She who had told the French ambassador "There is no woman bolder than I," and who had confessed to Charles Hanbury-Williams that her ambition was "as great as is humanly possible," was about to prove to the world that her boasts were not in vain.

  Her thoughts may for a brief time have lingered on Hanbury-Williams, who had believed in her and encouraged her and who, sadly, had not long outlived his stay in Russia. She had often talked to her English friend about her sustaining belief that her life was guided by a supernal force that had preserved her and would continue to do so until she fulfilled her destiny. She may well have said a silent prayer or two as the suburbs of Petersburg came into view and she turned her attention to more immediate concerns.

  The original plan had been to choose a propitious time and arrest Peter in his chamber at the palace, with the guardsmen locking him up and then relying on their overwhelming numbers to intimidate the palace bodyguard. Now the conspirators would have to improvise. With the guards' backing, they would need to secure the city, isolating Peter at Oranienbaum and laying siege to the estate if necessary. At all costs, the emperor—and those with a s
take in keeping him in power—had to be prevented from communicating with foreign governments, and from fleeing abroad to seek safety.

  A hundred doubts must have raced through Catherine's restless mind as the carriage hurtled over the rough stones and along the scarred, unpaved track that led into the city. Would the guardsmen all acclaim her, or would some hold back? How many lives would her bid for power cost? Would there be time to do all that needed to be done before a counterattack came? Would the people of the capital support her? Peter was known to be nearly as popular among the ordinary citizens as he was hated by the nobles, the soldiers and the clergy—though Catherine too was popular, probably more so. Could she succeed? Had she the stomach for the contest?

  All doubts aside, there was no longer any choice. Only a few weeks earlier, on the night of the peace celebration, Catherine had sensed that a turning point had been reached, and that she dared not hesitate. She had known Peter too long and too well not to recognize a change in him, a new recklessness in his dealings with all those whom he perceived as his enemies. He was bent on a campaign of destruction, lashing out at the guards regiments, the church, the governing nobles, herself. Seeking protection from his wrath she had taken refuge at Peterhof, drawing as little attention to herself as possible while secretly sending and receiving messages from those who had promised to enthrone her. Now, suddenly, she and her fellow conspirators were out in the open. There was no longer any zone of protection. There were only two choices: the path of daring or the path of cowardice. And Catherine had never been a coward.

  The carriage lurched to a halt at the side of the road, the lathered horses drooping and spent. Another carriage was waiting, and beside it stood the tall, strapping figure of Gregory Orlov, massive and imposing in his green and red uniform.