Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Something else disturbed her as well. The region along the Volga was prey to violent unrest and attacks by outlaw bands, and the frequency of these incidents was increasing. More and more serfs were rising up against their masters, burning crops and mansions, maiming and killing. Some serfs joined army deserters and vagabonds to form large gangs of brigands, heavily armed and difficult to subdue. All the major Volga towns had suffered attacks from these brigands, who sometimes turned cannon on the townspeople and always left terrified victims in their murderous wake. The lawlessness, and the relative defenselessness of the towns, was worrisome to the empress; it challenged her vision of a peaceful society and a contented polity as nothing else ever had.

  After six weeks on the river Catherine cut short her Volga journey, which was taking longer than she expected it would, and hurried to Moscow to await the convocation of the Legislative Commission, the assembly of delegates that would grapple with the huge task of overhauling Russia's laws.

  Nearly six hundred deputies, including delegates from towns, from Cossack communities, from noble assemblies, and meetings of state peasants gathered in the Granovitaia Palace in the Kremlin to commence their work. Although the deputies did not constitute a representative body—Catherine was no democrat, and had no intention of becoming a constitutional monarch—they did bring with them statements of concern and grievances (the taxes were much too heavy, labor services too arduous, restrictions on merchants too binding) that spoke for the subjects at large. No one spoke for the serfs, of course; even though they made up more than half of the total population, they had no rights and hence they chose no delegates. In theory their masters spoke for them.

  The empress opened the Legislative Commission in great state, wearing her crown and mantle, flanked by her son, court officials and an imposing retinue of priests and dignitaries. Her instructions, leather-bound and voluminous, were prominently displayed. The deputies sat on benches in the spacious hall, the nobles in front, then the Cossacks, the delegates from the towns and finally the state peasants. All listened in respectful silence as the vice chancellor addressed them, reminding them of the solemnity and importance of the task they faced. They were to rewrite the laws in such a way as to bring about that perfect commonwealth Catherine envisioned, in which each person would put aside his selfish desires for the sake of the common good, in which humane values would replace vice and crime, bringing lasting happiness and creating a model for other societies to follow. They were to "glorify themselves and their times" by looking beyond the old order toward a felicitous, if not quite Utopian, future.

  Visionary sentiments soon gave way to practicalities. The hundreds of deputies were divided into dozens of committees and subcommittees, each of which began burrowing through piles of recommendations. Elaborate protocols were followed, with secretaries making notes, editing drafts, recording the contents of debates. Progress was difficult, as the delegates were mired in paperwork and procedures. Views were freely aired by the delegates, some of which horrified the empress when they were reported to her. But it soon became evident that the magnitude of the undertaking was too great for swift progress to be made. The deputies were better at talking than they were at arriving at a consensus, written or oral; they attacked one another (verbally only, as they were prohibited from carrying swords during sessions); they came and went at will, reluctant to commit themselves to staying in Moscow for as long as it took to complete the commission's work.

  By the winter of 1767, the empress, who was always impatient with anyone who could not work at her own lightning pace, was frustrated and irritable. She was uncomfortable in her apartments, she resented having to spend months among the arrogant, gossipmongering Moscow nobility, and she was eager to get on with other projects.

  Abruptly in December Catherine ordered the deputies to cease work and to reassemble in Petersburg in mid-February. Many failed to make the journey to the capital, including officials whose work kept them in Moscow. The remnant seemed to lose energy and momentum, though the debates remained long and lively. Months went by, until after a year of labor only one document, a draft law on the rights of the nobility, had been completed, and even this could not be adopted because of interminable amendments, reconsiderations and differences of opinion. Meanwhile Catherine was reeling from another blow. More conspirators had been uncovered, one group intending to kill Gregory Orlov, another sworn to assassinate the empress.

  Amid these alarms, and the looming threat of conflict with Turkey, the empress lost her last ounce of patience with the Legislative Commission. Disillusioned not only by the evident failure of the grand legislative effort but by the ignorance and boorishness of the noble deputies in particular, she adjourned the commission at the end of 1768. A few sub-committees continued to meet on and off for three more years, but no significant work was accomplished. The experiment with populism was over. The great event that was, Catherine hoped, to represent "the cast of mind of this century," ended in nothing.

  But if the commission created nothing substantive it did add an important dimension to Catherine's international repute. Copies of her instructions were translated into French and German, and made their way to the West as well as being publicized in journals and newssheets. European journalists wrote of the Russian empress's efforts to reach out to her people, Voltaire praised the great northern lawgiver, and even King Frederick, still recovering from his virtual defeat at the hands of the Russian armies, had to admit that the lawgiving work o£ the clever Catherine was worthy of admiration. The deputies themselves fawningly offered Catherine the title of "the Great, Most Wise, and Mother of the Fatherland," but she declined to accept it—and her modesty resulted in even more praise.

  Outside the salons where the commission met, there was less eagerness for Catherine's reexamination of the laws, and some unrest. Stones were thrown at the palace, guardsmen complained that the empress and her commissioners were bent on freeing the serfs and undermining the time-honored social structure. Clearly the population at large was not yet ready for the kind of overhaul of the laws the empress envisioned.

  In October of 1768, while the commission was in its last weeks, hostilities broke out at the southern town of Balta, an area under Turkish protection just across the Polish border. For several years Catherine, with Panin's enthusiastic support, had been aggressively advancing Russian interests in Poland, placing her client Poniatowski on the Polish throne and intervening militarily to try to force the Polish Diet to protect the rights of Orthodox Poles, who were being harassed by the Catholic majority. Now her policy led Russia into unforeseen conflict.

  A Russian military presence in Poland was bound to be provocative to the Turks, and to create a tense and volatile situation. Beyond this, the French government, well aware of Catherine's gallophobia and convinced that her hold on her empire was fragile, poured three million livres into the treasury of the Porte in hopes of financing a quick and decisive Turkish victory.

  Certainly the advantage lay with the Turks, for their army of more than half a million men outnumbered the Russian forces by three to one, and their control of the Crimea gave them logistical superiority. It was not clear whether the Russian soldiers would fight willingly for Catherine; she was unproven as a war leader and her generals had not taken the field in a decade.

  By January of 1769, however, the empress and her advisers had begun to gear up for war, and Catherine was displaying a fine zeal for battle. With an overconfidence that was coming to typify her, she made plans for a bold assault on the Turkish forces by sea and by land. Orlov was a member of her war council, and as in the past, she led where he followed, though she also listened to the more cautious Panin. Orlov proposed meeting the Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean while at the same time moving against key enemy fortresses in Moldavia and at the head of the Sea of Azov. Armies under Field Marshal Golitsyn, General Rumyantsev, and later Nikita Panin's brother Peter Panin were swelled by some thirty thousand new recruits, and by late summer Khoti
n, Jassy, Azov and Taganrog were all in Russian hands.

  "My soldiers go to war against the Turks as if they were on their way to a wedding," was Catherine's boast. To Voltaire she wrote, "We are at war, to be sure, but Russia has long been used to warfare; she ends each war in a more flourishing state than when she entered it!" Catherine reminded her admirer at Ferney that in capturing Azov and Taganrog she was completing a work begun long before by Peter the Great. In war, as in so many other spheres of Russian life, she was following the lead of her great predecessor and indeed surpassing him. She referred to the two strongholds as "two jewels which I am having mounted" and crowed that the Turkish sultan Mustafa III was so unmanned by the ferocity of Russian arms that "all the poor man can do is cry." "So much for the terrible phantom that I was supposed to be so afraid of!" she went on. The empire of the Turks might be large, their armies as numerous as the grains of sand on the sea shore. But were not her own armies even stronger? Had not the Russians sent the Turks fleeing for their lives, not once but twice, each time routing a Turkish force twice its size?

  The second year of the war saw the most resounding victory of all. The Russian fleet, refitted, manned by Russian and Livonian seamen and with many officers recruited from Britain, made its way from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. The European states were taken aback. Russian armies had proven themselves formidable, but a Russian navy, never.

  On June 24, 1770, twelve Russian ships engaged twenty-two Turkish vessels in the Aegean off Khios near Chesme on the Anatolian coast. Neither fleet was well manned; both the Russians and Turks were poor sailors and blind courage was no substitute for seamanship. Still the Russians, though outgunned, made the most of their opportunities and, having driven the Turkish fleet into Chesme harbor, sent in fireships and destroyed it completely. By one reckoning, eleven thousand Turkish sailors drowned.

  The Battle of Chesme demoralized the Turks, sent the Russians into transports of nationalistic ecstasy and made Catherine an international heroine. The Russian David had slain the Turkish Goliath, for centuries the quintessential enemy of Christendom.

  Fireworks, grand celebrations, and church services of thanksgiving went on in Petersburg for weeks. All the Russian sailors were given special rewards, and Alexis Orlov, architect of the Mediterranean naval venture, was granted the title "Chesmensky."

  The public mood was higher than it had ever been since the thrilling, tumultuous early days of Catherine's reign. Ever since the start of the war people had been talking excitedly of the transit of Venus, convinced that such a significant event in the heavens inevitably meant that human affairs had come to a critical juncture; a momentous change was under way. The victory at Chesme was taken to be the turning point in that momentous change. With it Russia moved into the forefront of European affairs as a great power, a power to be reckoned with, bargained with, and feared.

  Catherine promoted her famous victory enthusiastically, setting aside a room in the Peterhof Palace as the Chesme Room and ordering medals, paintings, and commemorative memorabilia in abundance.

  "What an ugly thing war is!" the empress wrote to Voltaire in mock horror. "Count Orlov tells me that on the day following the burning of the fleet, he was aghast to see that the waters of the bay of Chesme—a fairly small area—were tinted red with blood, so many Turks had perished there."

  Catherine's lament was a thinly disguised boast. She gloated over her victory, not only for the renown it gave Russia and the prestige conferred on her but because it gave the lie to those who had dismissed her as a weak woman whose reign was sure to be a nine days' wonder. Though she privately credited luck as much as skill in causing Russia to win the day, publicly she swaggered.

  She, Catherine, unmarried and in sole command of her own beloved Russia, had done what even the great Peter could not do. Like the unmarried, commanding Elizabeth of England two centuries earlier, she had won a stupendous naval victory, and had become a heroine. Just as Elizabeth had repulsed the dread Spanish Armada, so Catherine had crushed the fleet of the hated Turk.

  Though she wrote to Voltaire that she truly wanted peace—and indeed she did want to end the costly drain of the war on her finances—in actuality she was elated by all the adulation, the sense of power the war had brought her. In 1770 she was forty-one, and "not exactly improving in intelligence or looks," as she confided to her mentor. Her long affair with Orlov still brought her the comfort of familiarity (along with the pangs caused by his casual affairs) but held little or no passion. Her son Paul brought her no joy, only obligation tinged with uneasiness. But her fame, her newfound sense of triumph, made her pulse race and filled her heart with maternal love for her adoptive realm and its people.

  As long as Russia was triumphant, Catherine was happy. And she felt sure that there were more triumphs to come.

  "See, the sleeping cat has been awakened!" she wrote to Ivan Chernyshev, her ambassador in London. Russia, long in slumber, was rousing herself to full vigor. "People are going to talk about us!" she promised Chernyshev. 'You won't believe all the noise we're going to make!"

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  GRAND DUKE PAUL WAS GROWING UP. HE WAS TURNING out to be a small man, short and compact, with a slight yet well-proportioned body—the body of a dancer or an actor suited for juvenile roles. In 1773 he was nineteen, yet he looked much younger, like an unformed boy. His round face and tightly compressed, unattractive features had none of the depth or character of his mother's open, inquisitive, engaging face; his blue eyes were intelligent, but full of distrust, and he moved with a nervous quickness that betrayed his deep-seated unease.

  To observers, Paul seemed driven by fear—fear of his mother, who was cold to him and, as he grew toward his majority, apprehensive about his popularity, fear of his immature body and fragile health, fear of falling prey to court intrigues. His fear drove him to lie, to hide, to deceive those around him in petty ways.

  He had no special talents on which to pride himself. Though quick to learn he was no scholar, and in any case his indifferent education had been conducted in a rather lackadaisical fashion by the indolent Nikita Panin, the lessons interrupted far too often by the boisterous Gregory Orlov, who distrusted learning and wanted to toughen Paul by taking him hunting. Nor was Paul an athlete—he was agile but not muscular—nor was he gifted in music or drawing or any other polite accomplishment.

  He was, in short, nothing but his remarkable mother's son. Of his paternity he now, at nineteen, knew the worst, as did everyone else at Catherine's court: that Sergei Saltykov, and not Peter III, was his father; that his mother despised him for his illegitimacy, and for reminding her of the circumstances that led to it; that, according to court gossip, his putative father Peter had wanted him put to death, along with Catherine; and that his mother had almost certainly been complicit in Peter's own death.

  Fatherless (for Saltykov was away in Dresden, kept abroad by Catherine in one minor diplomatic post after another) Paul looked to Panin, who tutored him and hovered over him, even sleeping in his bedroom, as his guide to life. Orlov he had liked as a young child, but once Paul discovered the role the Orlov brothers played in his mother's coup and the late emperor's death, he could no longer trust the jovial, bearlike companion of his childhood.

  In his teens Paul began to understand and appreciate his importance as grand duke, heir to the Romanov throne, though he remained so fearful of his mother that he could hardly imagine taking any kind of independent action. He aped the showy superficiality of the younger nobles, "speaking ravishingly of the French and of France," as one observer noted, and insisting that all his possessions come from Paris. He paraded in front of his mother dressed in extravagantly costly coats and breeches gleaming with jewels and trimmings of silver and gold. Waterfalls of fine lace adorned his throat and wrists, his shoe buckles were sparkling diamonds, his buttons glittering rubies.

  Catherine, who often spoke to her son about her preference for what she called "English simplicity" in all things, pretend
ed indifference but privately gritted her teeth, as he knew she would. Mother and son were nettlesome to each other, and though Catherine took great pains to guard Paul's health, having him inoculated against smallpox and whisking him away from any place where infection threatened, he knew that she did it more for her own political safety than for his well-being. Paul inherited his mother's gift for verbal sparring, though not her wit; his tongue was his sharpest weapon, and as he grew older he was occasionally able to overcome his terror and lash out at her to some effect.

  In the summer that Paul was sixteen he succumbed to a very grave attack of influenza, and for over a month he hovered between life and death. He had often been ill before, but never at so critical a time, with Russia still at war with the Turks in the Crimea, poor harvests creating discontent in the countryside and high prices in the towns, turmoil in Poland and fears of pestilence in the army and in the southern provinces.

  At such a time Catherine could not afford to have her official heir die. As Paul sank deeper into what many feared would be his final illness, there were troubling rumors that Catherine would declare her other son her heir. This boy, Catherine's son by Gregory Orlov, was nearly nine years old, and was in every way healthier, more robust, good-looking and presentable than the unfortunate Paul. He was called Alexis Grigorevich Bobrinsky, and though he was kept away from court he was not forgotten. Should Catherine decide to declare young Bobrinsky heir to the throne, Gregory Orlov's power would reach new heights; he might even be able to persuade Catherine to marry him at last.

  There was universal surprise when Paul rallied, and after five weeks he was able to get up from his sickbed, apparently fully restored to health. Still, the episode had left Catherine and the members of her government shaken, and in the immediate aftermath of the crisis Catherine became fearful. Paul was popular, and he was male—officially, if not biologically, he was the last surviving male of the line of Peter the Great. His claim to the throne of Russia was unimpeachable, while she herself had no claim at all, she held the throne solely through conquest—and capability. When Paul and Panin were in Moscow, huge crowds poured into the streets to shout greetings. Many Muscovites, resenting Catherine, cried out to her son that he was their "only true sovereign," and pledged to support him to the death.