Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  The sour Vassilchikov was not happy either. ("I'm just a little whore," he was heard to say.) His chest hurt, he was unable to please his powerful, aging mistress. The empress's entire household despised him, and let him know it. He must have longed to return to the contented obscurity of his former life.

  Catherine thought anxiously of sending Vassilchikov away, as she had Orlov, but something held her back. Unsatisfying and insipid as he was, Vassilchikov was nonetheless someone to love, someone to cling to. Catherine needed love, or at least its simulacrum. Without someone to love she felt lost, bewildered, in thrall to the bleakness of life. Yet the longer she tolerated the inadequate Vassilchikov, the more depressed she became. Real satisfaction, the deep contentment of love, eluded her.

  Melchior Grimm, who became Catherine's close friend during the winter of 1773-1774, and who was present at the palace every day from midmorning until late at night, observed her closely in this unhappy season. She often sent for him after supper and sat with him, talking and doing needlework, until nearly midnight. She preferred Grimm's conversation to the usual evening entertainments. Plays were tedious to her, the comedies bored her and the tragedies were not to her taste. She had never been able to appreciate concerts or opera. Gambling for high stakes never piqued her interest for long. She had never lost her enthusiasm for ideas, but after eleven years of rule, idealism in and of itself irritated her. Diderot had grown irksome to her, with his endless queries about serfdom in Russia and his naive assumptions about human nature. She had discovered at first hand how government must assert its primacy over chaos by force alone; all considerations of public good and individual liberty had to be secondary. Diderot had made himself a prickly voice of conscience, and she was not sorry when the Frenchman left Petersburg in March of 1774, though it did distress her to learn of his many mishaps on the return journey.

  Grimm was in any case much more to Catherine's taste than the searching, volatile, high-minded Diderot. The Swiss was down-to-earth and gossipy, as Catherine herself was, a man of the world who had few illusions when it came to human betterment. With Grimm Catherine could talk of the follies and foibles of her courtiers, and chatter on, as she liked to do, about what she called "this iron century" and its peculiarities. Grimm wrote that by the end of the winter he and the empress were on the most cordial of terms. He was enchanted with her company. "I entered her apartments with the same assurance as that of the most intimate friend," he confided, "certain of finding in her conversation an inexhaustible store of the greatest interest presented in the most piquant form."

  Catherine turned to Grimm for companionship in part because of her boredom with Vassilchikov. But by February she was working on another sweeping change in her personal life. She brought to court a giant of a man, huge and ugly, disfigured by the loss of an eye and so slovenly in his dress and uncouth in his manners that he made the more fastidious courtiers shudder. He was Gregory Potemkin.

  Potemkin burst in upon the court like a hot wind off the faraway southern desert, strange and exotic and with more than a hint of threat. He was outsize and ungainly, and his blinded eye—which he kept uncovered—was an affront to the prettified courtiers accustomed to veiling their defects behind patches and wigs and yards of frothy scented lace. Potemkin did not blend with Petersburg society, and he could not have cared less. He was utterly different, an alien being, and no one knew what to make of him. A hero of the Turkish war, decorated for bravery and gallantry, he had none of the dash or swagger of the soldier. His dress was unmilitary in the extreme; he favored flowing caftans in soft glowing silks, his large fleshy fingers sparkled with jeweled rings, his hair was long and unpowdered, and he carried himself with a world-weary slouch that made everyone around him vaguely squeamish.

  He was extremely clever, and could be entertaining when he was in the mood to be (one could never tell, his moods varied widely and he was frequently morose or misanthropic). In short, Potemkin brought little to court but his quick-thinking, well-stocked mind. He was not highborn, in fact his father was an army colonel who owned a mere four hundred serfs. (Wealthy nobles owned tens of thousands of serfs.) He was certainly not handsome, though a few women admitted to falling prey to his raw animal magnetism. He was no longer young, and had never held any important post. But he unsettled everyone, he caused a tremendous stir. And it soon became evident that he would be the empress's next lover.

  The British ambassador Gunning was convinced that Potem-kin's arrival and meteoric rise (Catherine conferred on him the rank of adjutant-general, installed him and a number of his relatives in the Winter Palace, and rewarded him with honors and orders) marked a major turning point in Catherine's reign.

  "We have here a change of decoration which to my mind merits more attention than any other event which has happened since the beginning of the reign," he wrote in a dispatch to London. "Mr. Vassilchikov, who was too dull-witted to have any influence in affairs and to enjoy the confidence of his mistress, now has a successor who promises to have both to a supreme degree." The shaggy, odorous Potemkin caused "general astonishment, even consternation," the ambassador wrote. He was no Vassilchikov, callow and retiring; Potemkin was a force to be reckoned with, fearsomely clever, physically intimidating, with untapped capabilities and high aspirations. He was said to have unusual discernment and what the ambassador called "a deep knowledge of men."

  "Given these qualities, and thanks to the indolence of his rivals, he ought naturally to hope that he can elevate himself to the heights envisioned by his boundless ambitions," Gunning concluded. In short, he might well take over the governing of Russia.

  Catherine was obviously enraptured with the huge, erratic, cerebral Potemkin. Her mood, which had been sour and truculent, abruptly became sanguine, buoyant, elated in the extreme, and her new favorite was clearly the source of the change. "She is mad about him," one of her senior officials, Senator Elagin, told another. "They must really love each other, for they are exactly alike." Alike or not, Catherine felt that at last she had found the soul mate for whom she had been waiting all her life. She was radiant, beside herself, quite giddy with joy.

  "Oh, Monsieur Potemkin!" she wrote in one of her numerous love notes, "what a confounded miracle you have wrought, to have so deranged a head that heretofore in the world passed for one of the best in Europe!. . . . What a shame! What a sin! Catherine the Second a prey to this mad passion!"

  At the age of forty-five, Catherine felt as if she were discovering love for the first time. "Everything I have laughed about all my life has happened," she wrote to her beloved, "so much so that my love for you dazzles me. Sentiments which I used to consider as idiotic, exaggerated and unnatural, I feel them now. I cannot tear away my stupid look from you. I forget everything my reason tells me and I feel I become quite stupid when I am in your presence."

  Love sent Catherine's mind reeling, even as her spirits soared. She lost her customary reasonableness and balance. Her zest for intellectual conversation flagged. She was not herself, she was "somebody with delirium." Yet that somebody wore a perpetual smile. "I forget the whole world when I am with you," Catherine wrote to her new favorite. "I have never been so happy as I am now."

  Potemkin knew how to touch Catherine's heart and make her feel cherished. He sang to her, the songs sweet and melodious, his voice soft and full of sincerity. He admired the ruins of beauty in her, the fleeting traces of youthfulness in her bright eyes and overpainted complexion. He awoke her passion—he called her "a woman of fire"—and made her believe that for him, she was the only woman in the world.

  Potemkin was, it seems, genuinely in love with the sovereign he greatly admired. As a very young officer he had played a minor role in her coup, helping to bring her to the throne. No doubt he remembered her as she had been then, a thrillingly daring figure on a great white horse, riding in triumph toward a unique destiny. He loved her daring, it matched his own. He loved her forthright, far-ranging mind, with its visions of betterment and change; he too
had broad and soaring visions. He loved her strong, responsive, womanly body, that freely sought love and as freely gave it; his appetite matched hers, and in her he found satiety.

  The senator was right: Catherine and Potemkin were very much alike, and if their volcanic romance had, on his side, overtones of adoration and self-serving ambition, it was no less an earthshaking, once-in-a-lifetime romance for all that.

  "There is something extraordinary between us that cannot be expressed in words," Catherine wrote. "The alphabet is too short, the letters are not numerous enough." In the midst of calamities great and small, time-bound in that iron century, on the threshold of age with its bleakness and futility, Catherine stumbled upon the great love of her life.

  Fortune smiled on Russia even as it blessed the empress. In March of 1774 the rebel Pugachev, strutting in his lace-trimmed red coat, was attacked and decisively beaten before Orenburg, his fierce but untrained army scattered to the four winds. The impact of his imposture was blunted. He slunk away, his forces in tatters, his tawdry court reduced to a ragtag masquerade. Everywhere the earth warmed, the ice melted, the rivers ran high and swift, and even the floods that drowned the land and swept away houses, cottages, whole villages, seemed no more than momentary misfortunes in a benign and benevolent grand design.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ACCORDING TO ONE ACCOUNT, TOWARD THE END OF THE year 1774 Empress Catherine went in great secrecy—perhaps in disguise—to the small church of St. Samson in an obscure suburb of Petersburg, taking with her only a single female attendant. There she met Potemkin, accompanied by one of his nephews and a chamberlain from the palace. A priest appeared, and for the next hour and more the church was closed to worshipers for the duration of a private ceremony. A wedding ceremony.

  The bride, matronly, gray-haired and bright-eyed, her face flushed with delight, stood quietly while her attendant passed the gold crown over her head three times. The groom, towering and massive, his one good eye fixed on the glowing holy pictures in the iconostasis, had to stoop each time the crown was passed over his head. The choir sang, the couple was blessed and at length dismissed. For the second time in her life, Catherine acquired a husband.

  It is impossible to say with certainty that Catherine underwent a marriage ceremony with her beloved Potemkin, but it seems likely that she did. In her notes to him she often called herself his wife, and called him "dear husband." Referring to herself in the third person, she asked coyly in one letter, written in 1776, "Was she attached to you two years ago by holy ties?"

  Catherine knew that Empress Elizabeth had married her lover Alexei Razumovsky, and that Razumosvky possessed documents to prove it, though he gallantly burned them when the existence of a marriage contract threatened to dishonor the late empress's good name. There was thus a recent precedent for the private marriage of a Russian Empress.

  Only a few years earlier Catherine had decided against marrying Gregory Orlov, leaving Orlov aggrieved. But Potemkin was not Orlov. He was that dazzling blend of ideal lover, stimulating intellectual companion, and potential collaborator in governing who she had always longed for. He was everything she needed, and more. If she married him there would be no inconvenient dynastic complications, for she was past childbearing age. Besides, no one need know; the marriage would be their whimsical, sentimental, romantic secret, a symbol of what Catherine vowed would be "an eternal love." The evidence, and Catherine and Potemkin's state of mind and heart, suggest that a wedding ceremony may well have taken place.

  Catherine needed the fortifying reassurance of Potemkin's love and support more than ever, for her realm was still recovering from the violent upheaval of a widespread peasant war, a war that had challenged her own security to a greater degree than any earlier crisis.

  During the previous summer the rebellion originally sparked by Pugachev's imposture became something larger and more terrifying than a localized revolt among marginal peoples. Tens of thousands of peasants throughout east and southeast Russia rose against their masters, proclaiming their freedom and condemning the time-honored laws and customs that bound them to cultivate the land for the benefit of privileged landowners. Inspired by word of Pugachev's revived leadership, bands of peasants armed with axes and knives, wooden clubs and crude pointed sticks descended on the houses of local gentry and began an orgy of maiming and massacre.

  Noble victims were decapitated, their hands and feet cut off, their mangled torsos displayed as gory trophies. Women were raped and murdered, children cut down pitilessly to die beside their parents. No one was spared, not the aged, not infants, not monks or priests. Houses were burned, churches looted and destroyed, barns and outbuildings put to the torch. The traditional deep-going piety of the peasants was overwhelmed as bloodthirsty emotions were unleashed; rebels gouged out the eyes of holy icons, desecrated altars, defaced religious paintings and stole the precious vessels that held the host. Altogether thousands of innocents lost their lives at the rebels' hands, and many thousands more were left without food or shelter or the means to provide them.

  As the summer advanced the terrifying wave of violence continued to spread. Townspeople, dreading attack by the murderous peasant gangs, tried to flee to safety yet found none. Word reached Moscow that the town of Kazan had been overrun, sacked and burned to the ground by Pugachev and twenty thousand vengeful followers, and there was widespread fear that Moscow would soon come under assault. Catherine's spies informed her that assassins had been sent to murder her and her son; for weeks thereafter it looked as though the forces she had sent to hunt down and destroy the insurgents would not be able to succeed.

  Finally, late in August, the tide turned. Government troops harried and captured roaming gangs of lawless peasants and subjected all those suspected of taking part in the mayhem to horrible punishments. The reprisals were as savage as the crimes they were meant to avenge. Entire villages suffered; in some villages, every third man was hanged, while the remaining inhabitants suffered severe beatings and mutilation. Soldiers erected torture-wheels and gallows in each village and before they moved on, left the ditches piled high with corpses. Coincident with the gory backlash, crops failed throughout the Volga region, adding famine to the parade of atrocities. The imposter and arch-rebel Pugachev, betrayed by his own men, was captured and brought to Moscow in an iron cage, where he still languished on Catherine's wedding day.

  That after twelve years of benign government her empire could be convulsed by peasant war must have disheartened Catherine, bringing her long-range hopes for Russia into question and challenging her belief in the possibility of human betterment. She had long been sustained in her efforts by the expectation that she could be a teacher and guide for her subjects, leading them toward abundance, moral improvement, and harmony. In time, she thought, with sufficient prosperity and under the suasion of improved administration and just laws, crime would diminish and eventually disappear.

  But the defiance, venom and bloodlust unloosed by Pugachev, and the eagerness with which his imposture had been embraced, forced her to acknowledge the shortsightedness of her expectations. The peasants who formed the overwhelming majority of her subjects had shown themselves to be, not a docile and devoted collection of willing learners, waiting to be led into the light, but an ugly combustible mass of haters, seething with murderous rage, ready to avenge themselves on their betters. Pugachev's rebellion, and the peasant war it ignited, had laid bare the dark side of humanity, and Catherine, chastened by the experience, saw that she had to incorporate those dark impulses into a revised set of expectations for herself and her realm.

  Her accomplishments thus far had not been few. She had given her people a code of laws, the foundation stone of her program of improvement. She had reformed and reorganized the government agencies in Petersburg, and had begun to reform provincial government as well, though progress had been frustratingly slow. She had begun the building of dozens of new towns, issued dozens of new edicts, ordered the mapping of her realm (an ambitious
and unprecedented undertaking) and a census to accompany it, and had enjoyed some success in establishing orphanages and making prisons more humane. She had encouraged the growing of tobacco in the Ukraine, distributing seeds and providing pamphlets to growers to teach them the newest and most efficient methods of cultivation. She had subsidized Russian shipping, founded factories for tanning, candle-making, and the manufacture of silk and linen. Under her auspices, skilled workers were imported from France to show imperial craftsmen better ways of weaving hangings, embroidering lace, and making fine china.

  In keeping with her belief that both boys and girls ought to be educated from the age of five, the empress had given a good deal of attention to projects to build schools, founding the Smolny Institute, an academy designed for five hundred girls and young women modeled on Madame de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr, and visiting the school often. (Diderot saw her there in the year of the peasant rebellion, smiling and opening her arms to the pupils, who ran to hug her and clung to her; the sight "touched him to the point of tears.") Though books were still a rarity in Russia, apart from religious works, the empress had made great strides in promoting the value of reading and learning and took pride in the forty thousand volumes belonging to the Academy of Sciences. She founded and endowed a medical college to educate Russian physicians and apothecaries, and commissioned the first Russian pharmacopeia. And she did her best to prop up the fledgling Moscow University, not yet twenty years old, plagued by a sparse and underqualified faculty, incompetent direction, and a paucity of students, few of whom remained enrolled long enough to complete degrees.

  In foreign affairs the empress had most to boast of—not only major military victories but triumphs of a more pervasive and lasting kind. She had succeeded in transforming the image Europeans held of her empire from that of a backward and barbarous place, stigmatized by credulousness, culturally and intellectually feeble and insignificant on the world stage to that of a major power with a fearsome army, led by an enlightened philosopher-empress of astounding gifts, a land of promise of which great things could be expected. In July of 1774, as the rebellion roared on unchecked, Catherine learned that at last her envoys had succeeded in concluding peace with the Turks, closing an immense chapter in her recent endeavors and allowing her to look to the future with a lighter spirit.