When he celebrated his eighteenth birthday, in September of 1772, Paul came of age and left childhood and tutelage behind.
But his mother, reluctant to acknowledge any advancement in his status, put off officially recognizing that he had reached adulthood. Paul was a thorn in her side. He was beginning to assert opinions of his own, critical of Catherine's enduring war with the Turkish empire and of the costly conflict with Poland. He was gathering a following of sorts, not yet an influential following, but an irritating one nonetheless. Troublemakers were beginning to rally to him as the natural focus of opposition.
Early in 1773 one such troublemaker, Caspar von Saldern, a shady Holsteiner who held a petty diplomatic post, attempted to organize a conspiracy to force Catherine to let her son rule along with her. Von Saldern, who supplemented his meager earnings by bribery and theft—he stole a diamond-studded gold snuffbox from the empress—was too inept a conspirator not to be discovered, and the indignant Catherine banished him from the kingdom. But the episode deepened her resolve to keep Paul under tight control, and to guard against any further plotting on his behalf
At eighteen Paul was old enough to marry, and Catherine was eager for him to start a family in order to assure the continuity of the succession. There was no doubt of his ability to father a child. When he was sixteen he had been initiated sexually by a suitable older woman, probably provided by Panin, with Catherine's knowledge and approval; his mistress had given birth to a son, who was given the name Simon Veliky. Catherine kept the infant with her, just as Elizabeth had kept the infant Paul in her apartments.
To choose a bride for Paul from among the Russian noble families would have invited factionalism of the most dangerous kind, so Catherine looked to the German principalities for eligible young women. As always, there were princesses without number, but finding a presentable, intelligent girl of good character who would not overshadow the bland grand duke or tower over him physically was a challenge.
In the summer of 1773 Countess Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt was invited to come to Petersburg with her three unmarried daughters, all under the age of twenty. The middle daughter, seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina, pleased Paul—and Catherine. She was outgoing and obliging, and if her complexion was rather blotchy at least she had been spared the marks of the pox. More important, Wilhelmina was healthy and presumably fertile.
Catherine may have assumed that, because Wilhelmina's mother was an exceptionally cultivated woman, the daughter would also have intellectual tastes. In any event, she made up her mind to accept Wilhelmina, and the girl began her instruction in the Orthodox church and was rechristened Natalia. On September 29 the wedding took place.
Having taken pains with the choice of a bride for her son, Catherine was equally painstaking in her preparations for their life together. She designated a new suite of rooms in the Winter Palace for the bridal couple and had them redecorated according to her own designs. "English simplicity" was forgotten as the empress wrote out her instructions: the formal bedchamber was paneled in gold brocade with a blue velvet border, while the inner, private bedchamber had columns faceted with blue glass and white damask wall coverings. The empress specified all the details of ornaments and upholstery for the various rooms and even supplied some of the gold fabric to be used from her own store of finery. All was intended to make Natalia happy, and to elicit from her a willingness to work hard at fulfilling her role as grand duchess.
Remembering her own arrival in Petersburg nearly twenty years earlier, her painful isolation, and the severe emotional burdens of her grotesque marriage, Catherine wrote a special letter of advice to her daughter-in-law. She cautioned her to avoid political entanglements and ill-advised friendships with foreign ministers (something Catherine herself had not been able to do), and to stay out of debt and live as simply as possible. She should learn Russian right away, Catherine told Natalia, and make an effort to embrace the customs and manners of her adopted country, while devoting herself with singleness of heart to being the best wife she could be. To help Natalia in her adjustment Catherine granted her a generous allowance of fifty thousand rubles a year. Catherine could be certain that Natalia would enjoy one advantage she herself had not had: the good will and steady support of her mother-in-law.
A conspicuous figure in her gown studded with jewels and pearls, Catherine dominated Paul's wedding ceremony. Guests noticed that the empress's chestnut hair had grown quite gray, and that she wore it pulled severely back off her face in an unflattering, no-nonsense style. Her once small waist was now thick and matronly, and she no longer moved with the grace and lightness that once had distinguished her. Still, onlookers thought, her fair complexion was soft and smooth, albeit heavily rouged, and her expressive blue eyes were open and friendly, full of benevolence and intelligence. Everyone commented on the empress's strong teeth. (Women tended to lose their teeth in Petersburg by the time they reached middle age; it was a universally acknowledged hazard of the climate and diet.) When Catherine smiled her kindly, good-humored smile, her teeth winked out in all their pristine whiteness, leading many of her ladies to hide their own less than intact smiles behind their fans.
Only when Catherine stood near her friend Countess Bruce, the lovely, exceedingly well-preserved companion she had known since girlhood, did she look her age. Another member of Catherine's entourage, Countess Bruce's mother, Maria Rumyantsev—once Catherine's nemesis but now, in old age, a trusted companion—put all the women of the court to shame, for though she was elderly she was still miraculously beautiful.
Catherine found birthdays galling. "I hate this day like the plague," she announced when another year came to a close. Birthdays wounded her vanity—though she made fewer concessions now to vanity than she had a decade earlier—and besides that they were a reminder that time was passing and the problems of the empire were only marginally nearer being solved.
Advancing years brought minor infirmities. Catherine's back hurt from time to time, and she got severe headaches from long hours of reading by dim candlelight. Stronger light and spectacles helped the headaches, but for her aching back the only cure the doctors could suggest was a medicinal powder intended to make the patient sweat profusely. The powder failed, and the backaches went on.
By and large, Catherine distrusted doctors and apothecaries and preferred unorthodox therapies. She was a strong believer in the health benefits of alternating exposure to heat and cold. She had her own preferred routine, in which she and her female attendants shrouded their bodies in long petticoats and wound scarves around their necks, then jumped into a pond, shivering in the freezing water; they subsequently scalded themselves sitting in front of hot stoves. Between the shock of the cold and the enervating, sweat-inducing heat, disease was kept at bay.
Catherine had been under great strain in recent years. The Turkish war, whatever fame and glory it brought, was proving to be a hugely expensive drain on Russia's human and financial resources. (The treasury, enriched by newly discovered silver deposits in Mongolia, was still solvent, but was diminishing rapidly.) Plague had devastated Moscow, killing tens of thousands of people and unleashing riotous chaos and mayhem. Would-be assassins, some half mad, some with the intention of avenging the death of the late Emperor Peter, broke into the palace and terrified the empress; Gregory Orlov discovered one murderous officer lying in wait for Catherine, a long pointed dagger in his hand.
It was no wonder the empress began to see conspiracy everywhere, and to fear the consequences of her growing unpopularity. Only a year earlier a major plot had been discovered in the Preobrazhensky regiment, and Catherine was deeply shaken by it. Some thirty officers and men (some said as many as a hundred) were involved in a conspiracy to proclaim Paul emperor. Fortunately for Catherine, imperial agents learned of the plot and the Secret Branch went to work ferreting out the disloyal men, interrogating and punishing them. Soon all that was left of the conspiracy was seething resentment—and, on Catherine's part, wariness and apprehension.
Suddenly, to the amazement of the entire imperial household, Catherine sent Gregory Orlov away and replaced him with a dark, handsome, rather retiring lieutenant in the Horse Guards, Alexander Vassilchikov.
Swiftly the young Vassilchikov was promoted to adjutant general, gentleman-in-waiting, and then to chamberlain. He was presented with the Order of St. Alexander and was installed in the suite that had previously belonged to Orlov. Catherine's political enemies sniggered. Vassilchikov was twenty-eight, the empress forty-three. She risked making herself ridiculous, or worse. Yet even her enemies had to admit that what she had done was politically astute.
There could be no clearer signal to the guardsmen that the power of the Orlovs was broken once and for all. For a time, the plottings and murmurings ceased. Catherine breathed more easily. Besides, the change was personally beneficial to Catherine—or so she hoped. "After eleven years of suffering," she told a friend, she intended to live "according to her pleasure, and in entire independence."
Orlov's hold over her was broken. There would be no more scenes, she would no longer have to tolerate his infidelity, humor his whims, or salve his ego. The shy Vassilchikov would be her escort, confidant and lover. But he was only a good-looking overgrown boy. He headed no faction, he had no formidable brothers. He would never try to control her. And if he did, she would be able to dismiss him at a moment's notice.
Orlov did not accept his demotion meekly. True, he knew that for some time his preeminence had been at risk. He had disappointed the empress in the last assignment she gave him, when she sent him to attend peace negotiations with the Turks at Focsani and he had failed to achieve any results—indeed, his haughty behavior had actually worsened relations and dimmed peace prospects. True, Catherine had discovered him with his newest love, his delicate young cousin, a girl barely out of childhood, and had been deeply hurt by his betrayal. Yet Catherine still owed him a great deal. He was determined not to yield his place at her side without standing up for his rights.
In the end, as was characteristic of her, the empress gave her former lover a generous settlement. Besides endowing him with large grants of money, property and serfs, she obtained for him a princely title abroad and, after he completed a relatively brief period of self-imposed exile, she readmitted him to her circle of advisers. Now he was once again a prominent courtier, and at Paul's wedding he looked as toweringly handsome, wealthy, and intimidating as ever. Certainly he made a stronger impression than the diffident Vassilchikov, who looked uncomfortable and was in fact troubled by pains in his chest.
The wedding of the grand duke and grand duchess was followed by weeks of parties, masquerade balls, theatrical entertainments and imperial receptions. Night after night the feasting and celebrating went on, now in the white-and-gold salons of the palace, now amid the cut crystal and silver and gold plate of nobles' dining rooms. Catherine lent her gracious presence to most of these gatherings, beaming at her new daughter-in-law and doing her best to seem less icy toward Paul. She relied on Vassilchikov to attend her, but otherwise ignored him. She could not quite ignore Gregory Orlov, however. He irked her a great deal by paying court to one of Natalia's sisters, unleashing a new flood of gossip. What if he married the new grand duchess's sister? That would make him Paul's brother-in-law, and, by extension, part of the imperial family. Was there no end to Orlov's brazen ambition?
The court was still preoccupied with festivities when Catherine's regular bi-weekly imperial council met on October 15, 1773. A message was read to the councillors and the empress: the Yaik Cossacks were in revolt, led by an army deserter who claimed to be Peter III.
The empress and her advisers heard the news with equanimity. Cossack revolts were common. Over the past century the Russian government had had to confront the Cossack bands, or hordes, dozens of times but in the end authority had been restored and resistance broken.
Catherine was aware, as her predecessors had been, that the threat of rebellion was inherent in the always-tense alliance between the Cossacks and the throne. For the Cossacks were frontiersmen, fiercely independent, democratic, bitterly hostile to any attempt to restrict their largely self-directed way of life. They occupied the relatively empty southern steppe lands, along the Volga, eastward to the shores of the Caspian Sea and into western Siberia. They were the descendants of runaway serfs, criminal fugitives, army deserters, marginal men and wanderers who instinctively avoided the authorities and remained on the fringes of settled society. Yet they served the emperor by forming themselves into fierce mounted fighting units and forming a living cordon between Russia and the hostile tribespeople that menaced her ill-defined eastern borders.
The Cossacks were loyal to the ruling authority, and valuable fighting allies, but their loyalty was in conflict with their need to be, and to remain, their own masters. Whenever they felt that their independence was threatened, they rose in rebellion, and each time they rebelled, they invoked the near-mythic figure of Stenka Razin, the great Cossack folk hero, who had once kindled the spirit of revolt until it blazed across the steppes like wildfire, threatening to engulf all Russia.
A century earlier, in the reign of Peter the Great's father, Emperor Alexis, Stenka Razin had posed as the deliverer of the Russian people and had drawn thousands to follow his banner by promising freedom from noble oppression and the establishment of a vast Cossack republic to encompass the entire Volga littoral. Time after time the armies of the emperor had been turned back by Razin and his peasant hosts, and Razin's Cossacks had carried out fearsome massacres, crop burnings, and general devastation throughout northeastern Russia. Muscovites had feared that the mighty rebel would sweep down and destroy their city, and for a time it appeared that no force could stop him, so fierce and forceful was his army and so powerful his message of liberation. In the end his own people had betrayed Razin, but not before he had become a strong prince in his own right, with a fleet of two hundred galleys and an extensive territory where his commands held sway.
Stenka Razin had terrorized the government and the ruling elite. Like a force of nature, a whirlwind or a terrifying storm, he and his hordes had seemed to rise up out of the black earth itself, threatening to overturn every obstacle in their path. Razin and his followers were a fearsome reminder to those in command that beyond their relatively limited circle of power lay the vast, uncharted, chaotic reaches of Russia—the real Russia, not the Russia of a Westernized few living in artificial splendor surrounded by the artifacts of a borrowed culture. The real Russia was peopled by rough, fur-clad peasants who lived in squalor, could neither read nor write and whose only true loyalty was to God. Razin had awakened these people, stirred their resentments, brought their age-old grievances to the boiling point. Under his leadership, they had spilled out across the steppes to imperil the precarious social order of the Russian state. And they had very nearly overbalanced it.
Now, it seemed, the old grievances had been stirred up afresh, by a leader claiming to be the lost Emperor Peter III.
The imposture was not in itself troublesome. Over the past decade, nearly every year had brought at least one impostor claiming to be Peter; in time this one, like the others, would be exposed as false. In the meanwhile, however, the empress and her councillors took prudent measures to put down
the rising, for the Yaik Cossacks had mutinied only a few years earlier and the executions, fines and beatings imposed on the rebels had left the horde angry and full of hate.
Soldiers were dispatched to confront the defiant Yaiks, local leaders in the area were put on alert. Couriers were sent out along the slow, rutted provincial roads with instructions to return to court as swiftly as possible with news of the situation among the Yaiks. Then, having done what could be done, the council turned to other concerns.
In Moscow, chilly days and frost gave way to the first snowfalls. Sleigh rides and skating parties preoccupied the courtiers, and the empress, having launched her son and daughter-in-law on their new life, turned her attention to a distinguished visitor from France.
Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopedic had for years been Catherine's bible, and who some years earlier had been the object of her generous philanthropy, arrived in Russia after an arduous five-month journey and settled in to spend the winter in Petersburg.
Catherine was delighted to meet the man who, with Voltaire and Montesquieu, had been the intellectual idol of her youth. The Encyclopedic had greatly influenced her thinking, moving her along the path toward toleration, moderation and humanitarian-ism. Catherine associated Diderot with all that was progressive in social thought, and now she could hear from his own lips the ideas, old and new, that had enlightened Europe. She lost no time in sitting down with him and talking—and they continued to talk, sometimes daily, for hours at a time.
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