Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Important shifts were taking place in European politics, and thanks to the combined efforts of the empress and her advisers, chiefly Panin, Russia would play a large role in the new order. England was embroiled in North America, where her colonies were restive and rebellious; Spain was moribund; France was in transition, with the death of Louis XV and the accession of his shy, inept young grandson Louix XVI and the latter's beautiful young Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette; the aging Frederick II still ruled in Prussia, but could not last long. Now was the time for Russia to advance herself territorially, to move Europe-ward by absorbing western lands.

  Catherine had begun this process by joining Frederick and the Austrian co-ruler Joseph II, son of Empress Maria Theresa, to divide roughly one-third of the Polish kingdom between them. With one stroke of the quill Russia gained vast lands and more than a million and a half new subjects. A second annexation of Polish land had swiftly followed, adding more valuable territory and more new subjects. Russia's role in the destruction of the chaotic kingdom of the Poles was lauded by European observers, adding to Catherine's prestige. Poland was widely regarded as an artificial entity, in a state of constant turmoil, where a Catholic tyranny stifled freedom. The relatively more benevolent rule of Austria, Prussia and Russia was seen as an improvement over the prevailing situation; Catherine was regarded as a savior of the Poles, not their oppressor.

  She had done a great deal, but much more needed to be done, and with Potemkin beside her, as husband, partner, perhaps in time even co-ruler, it would be accomplished. Together the empress and her cherished, greatly admired lover dreamed large and expansive dreams. They liked to meet in the steambath, lolling and sporting in the near-scalding water like two whales. Both were capable of being as playful as children, and both loved to play. Both were mimics, and Potemkin made Catherine laugh uncontrollably with his imitations of the courtiers; she may have brought out her old repertoire of animal noises to amuse him. When play turned erotic she reveled in his lovemaking, in his capacity to thrill and disarm her. For a powerful woman to surrender her power in the arms of a trusted and skillful lover must have given infinite pleasure and release. Potemkin offered the empress that release as night after night they met, loved, and talked beside the steaming waters, reclining and refreshing themselves from platters of meats and fruit and sweet confections, washed down by fine wines.

  Potemkin was happiest wearing nothing but an embroidered caftan, the soft flowing silk billowing over his huge bulk. Possibly he taught Catherine to enjoy the ease of shapeless silk as well; certainly he helped her relax amid his preferred surroundings— yielding divans, thick cushions and pillows, scented air and myriad delights of touch and taste.

  Lulled and warmed by his abundant sensuality, hers bloomed. Though she had always been an earthy woman with a hearty sexuality, Catherine had never been one to indulge her sexual side. Now, however, at the very time when the intense irritations of menopause made her sleepless with night sweats and caused her joints to ache and her cheeks to flush beet-red as heat rose in a sudden wall of flame from her chest to the top of her head, she allowed her muscles to unclench and gave in to the seductions of satiety. Ever the rigidly self-disciplined German daughter of a Prussian officer, Catherine began, with Potemkin, to savor doing nothing, to sink deep into contented emptiness for hours at a time. Ever her mother's ugly duckling at heart, with Potemkin Catherine became the loveliest swan of all, restored to youth and hope by the sweetness of his wooing.

  And always, along with the wooing, there was, at some point, mutual cogitation. Catherine was planning to prepare another fundamental document, as important and far-reaching as her law code. It was to be a statute reforming provincial government, addressing the corruption and laxity of the present system and installing a more accountable system in which police would maintain order, local officials would keep the roads in good repair, oversee schools, prisons and the workings of commerce, and facilitate the collection of taxes while dispensing justice with an even hand. Catherine had been reading, in a French translation, the six thick volumes of the great English jurist Blackstone ("Oh, his commentaries and me, we are inseparable," she remarked) and taking detailed notes. She talked to Potemkin about Blackstone's concepts, and how they differed from those of Montesquieu and from the thoughts that had flowed so volubly from the fertile brain of Diderot during his six-month seminar with the empress.

  Potemkin and Catherine conversed at length, he impressing her with his quickness of apprehension and his ability to perceive nuances and to cast aside irrelevancies to point up essentials. Their minds worked as well together as their bodies, and one way and another, they communed late into the night.

  Early in 1775 the empress entered Moscow in triumph, to begin many months of official celebrations of the end of the Turkish war and Russia's deliverance from the peasant rebellion. Amid splendor recalling that of her coronation, Catherine rode into the city in state, a jeweled figure in a gilded coach, smiling amiably and waving to the crowds that lined her path. With an entourage of hundreds of guardsmen and liveried servants the imperial coach moved slowly through huge triumphal arches built specially for the occasion, rolling past gaudy pageants representing the conquest of the Turks, the destruction of Pugachev and the restoration of peace and right order in the realm.

  Though the cold was severe thousands of people came to watch the spectacle, stamping their feet and flapping their arms and emitting thin halfhearted cheers in response to the glowers of the guardsmen. The crowds were much larger and their shouts more spirited, though, when Grand Duke Paul made his official entry into the city several weeks later. He rode at the head of his regiment, looking taller and more princely on his magnificent horse than he did when at court, and the Muscovites, seeing in Paul their hope for the future, cheered and clapped and shouted out blessings until long after the last of the soldiers had gone past.

  Catherine was well aware of the contrast between her own reception by the people of Moscow and that of her son. It was galling to her—though hardly unexpected—that Paul should be received with such enthusiasm, particularly when she knew how openly contemptuous he had become of Russia and the Russian people. But then, the Muscovites had always been perverse in their preferences. She knew that many of them had been secret supporters of Pugachev. They were not only perverse, they were ungrateful, these indolent, decadent, pleasure-loving Muscovites; they did not appreciate Catherine's clemency toward them, her general pardon of all ex-rebels, her many benefits to the city, her recent lowering of the salt tax and her continual concern to keep bread prices low. They greeted each official announcement of her imperial benefactions not with shouts of gratitude but with mutters of suspicion.

  An ambassador looked on one day as Catherine stood at a window of the palace when her edicts were read to the Muscovites outside. She watched their reactions, how they crossed themselves as if warding off evil, and then melted away into the city.

  "What stupidity!" the ambassador heard the empress say.

  She could not stand the Golovin Palace, and had ordered the vast wooden Kolomenskoe Palace torn down several years earlier. Intensely ill at ease amid the onion domes and tent roofs of the old city, she chose to move into a large estate some distance away, to which she gave the name Tsaritsyno. Here she entertained the Moscow nobles—she gave eight receptions and three balls during her first month of residence—and held court.

  When her birthday came, toward the end of April, she ordered her servants to prepare a special ball and supper. At least five thousand guests were expected. Supper tables were set up and decorated, enormous quantities of food prepared. The appointed hour arrived. Catherine, splendidly dressed to greet the start of her forty-seventh year, awaited her well-wishers.

  They trickled in, a dozen here, a dozen there, a sparse group of merrymakers alighting from a thin stream of carriages. Onlookers noticed that the empress "could not hide her surprise" at how few guests were in attendance. She was mortified. The perverse,
cruel Muscovites were deliberately insulting her by staying away in droves. "She spoke of this emptiness in a way that revealed that it humiliated her," the British ambassador Gunning wrote. In Petersburg Catherine would have been mobbed on her birthday; in Moscow she was snubbed.

  This intensely unpleasant incident, following on the heels of too much excitement and perhaps too many late nights in the steam-bath, made Catherine ill. "I have had fever and violent diarrhea," she wrote to her friend Madame Bielke, "of which I was cured by strong bleeding." The highlight of the peace celebration, the feast held for all the people of Moscow, had to be postponed for more than a week because of the empress's indisposition, but when the day came at last the ungrateful Muscovites were treated to a spectacular entertainment.

  In a huge open field two miles from Red Square a vast pleasure-ground was built, covering four square miles. Enormous temporary kitchens produced enough spitted meat, roasted fowl, loaves of bread and barrels of pickled vegetables to feed a hundred thousand people for twelve hours. Fountains flowed with wine, beer and kvass were freely available. Musicians played, rope-dancers performed daredevil tricks, peddlers sold trinkets and plays were presented in a large theater. In the evening, fireworks lit up the sky and all the temporary buildings shone with candlelight. The entire festival ground was christened the Black Sea, and decorated with replicas of ships. Every building was given a name commemorating a town or region Russia had gained in the peace treaty: Azov and Taganrog, Kerch and Yenikale and Kinburn.

  "Everything went off well," Catherine told Voltaire in a letter. 'The weather was the finest in the world; there was no confusion, and the utmost gaiety; not the slightest little disaster spoilt this celebration." "I would love to have danced with you there," she added, a little wistfully, for Voltaire was now quite aged and she knew they would never meet.

  Catherine remained in Moscow for the better part of a year, devoting herself primarily, in the intervals between council meetings, working with her six secretaries, and maintaining an ever larger correspondence, to her monumental labor of provincial reform. Looking to key regional governors for advice and ideas, and relying on Potemkin—who was rapidly gaining political experience in his various important court posts—for help and encouragement, she drafted and redrafted her long document, writing out changes in her own hand, revising some parts nearly a dozen times. It was a difficult task requiring constant acuity, sober judgment, and a sense of the pragmatic that the empress was honing with every passing year of her rule. She commented to one of her secretaries that she felt it essential to act with "prudence and circumspection" in writing new laws or reforms.

  "I examine the circumstances, I take advice, I consult the enlightened part of the people," she told him, "and in this way I find out what sort of effect my laws will have. And when I am already convinced, in advance, of general approval, I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power."

  When the reforms were complete, and given the support of the Senate, they inaugurated a process of slow but deep-going change. Local administrative units, which had been huge, sprawling, and understaffed, now became smaller and more manageable. Local officials were more accountable to the empress and her deputies in the capital and less captive to the whims and caprices of the nobles in their vicinity. Bureaus of public welfare, endowed by the central treasury in Petersburg, were set up to establish hospitals and schools, asylums and poorhouses. New towns were founded, laid out along grids in the European manner; they were a symbol of how planning, orderly execution and systematic, steady purpose could create a changed Russia. Overall, Catherine's reforms marked a profound turning point in local governance; tradition-bound inertia gave way to an atmosphere of innovation and slow improvement. Though many were suspicious of the alteration, there was no denying that it brought to the stagnant, troubled countryside a breath of fresh air.

  Preoccupations of a more personal nature ate away at Catherine as her year in Moscow drew to a close. The "deep, frank and extraordinary love" she shared with Potemkin was turning sour. That astonishing rapport, compounded of physical chemistry, intense desire, playfulness and rare mental kinship was being shattered with increasing regularity by quarrels, coldness, recriminations. Catherine was on the whole even-tempered and kind, magnanimous in personal relations; she did not tend to provoke quarrels and when they arose, she tried to bring them to an end as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

  Potemkin, on the other hand, was always either sunk in torpor or nervous, restless and dissatisfied. His elation was inevitably short-lived, and gave way to melancholy. He had taken to shutting himself away for days at a time, abandoning Catherine to her worries about their future together, and when he did emerge from his self-imposed isolation he tortured her with questions about her past relationships with other men. Catherine did her best to reassure him, but his incessant need for reassurance must itself have grated on her. And besides, he had a gift for discovering new occasions for disagreement and bad feeling.

  "You simply like quarreling," Catherine wrote to her lover in exasperation. "Tranquillity is a condition unacceptable to your nature." There were still times when passion flared and quarrels were forgotten, but the complications, crises and conflicts were mounting. In vain Catherine recited the litany of her earlier liaisons: "I took the first [Saltykov] because I was compelled to, the fourth [Vassilchikov] because I was in despair. ... As for the three others [Peter III, Poniatowski, and Orlov], God knows it was not from wantonness, for which I have never had any inclination.

  She talked to Potemkin sensibly, calmly, soothingly—but he brooded and paced the room and bit his nails in anxiety, until at last she saw that there would be no end to the tension between them.

  Larger issues loomed. Would Catherine ever make Potemkin a full co-ruler, if not in law then in fact? How much of her authority would she be willing to turn over to him? And if she held back, could she keep his love?

  Potemkin knew full well that he owed his standing entirely to the empress's sponsorship. "I am the work of your hands," he told her candidly. Yet his pride must have rebeled. Was he not the male, the naturally dominant one in their partnership? And was not her exalted status an obstacle, both to his advancement and to their harmonious relations? A French diplomat, the Baron de Corberon, who was at Catherine's court in 1775 recalled how Potemkin was "puffed up with pride and egoism," his "lively, supple, facile spirit" veiled by less attractive qualities of voluptuousness and "Asiatic softness" and apparent passivity.

  Issues of dominance and authority, both in their love affair and in the rulership of the empire, lay between them and widened the gap caused by his insecurity and her unwillingness to capitulate to it. "We always fight about power, never about love," Catherine wrote in a note. She longed for peace, for an end to uncertainty and torment. For one entire day "without disputes, without debates, without discussions."

  It was proving to be impossible to go on as they were. Not only were their clashes and tensions interfering with her work of governing, but more basic differences between them were surfacing, differences that made a fundamental change in their relationship inevitable.

  With Catherine, work always came first: the relentless, demanding work of ruling. It preoccupied her, it was what gave her life and her days meaning. It was her craft, what she called "her metier." In the service of that work, she arranged her life so that she greeted each morning with a clear head and, if possible, a serene mind. She liked to go to bed early, to read for a while, or do a bit of needlework, then settle down for the night. She needed and craved love, but she was unwilling to let love tyrannize her or upset the balance and order of her life—at least, not for long.

  Potemkin was an altogether different creature. Work never ruled him, indeed casual observers believed him all but incapable of it, fond as he was of napping on his soft divans in his preferred state of undress. He seemed to find a hundred diversions and pleasures, a
ny one of which sufficed to let him postpone the beginning of his labors.

  In truth he accomplished a great deal, but in short bursts of prodigious activity, preceded and followed by long naps or meditative trances. Immoderation suited him, whether it meant endless nights of drinking or lovemaking, extended religious meditations or long periods of somnolence or erratic wakefulness. Ordered domesticity of the kind Catherine was nourished by bored him, indeed routine of any sort was anathema to him. And after nearly two years of sharing the empress's bed—or bath—he was eyeing other women and more than likely having affairs.

  Yet Potemkin continued to share with Catherine a unique and undiminished passion, and in the intervals between their quarrels and periods of estrangement, their mental kinship continued to give pleasure to them both and purpose to their joint endeavors. Potemkin sought increased power and authority; Catherine, with a shrewd perception of his abilities that was not clouded by her infatuation (or exasperation) with him, wanted to delegate to Potemkin as much power and authority as she felt she dared. And there remained a strong tie of sentiment between them. She was still his "little wife," he her "beloved husband."

  Somehow, during the winter of 1775-1776, they came to an agreement. Potemkin would continue to have the empress's love, and would be her chief deputy in the work of governing. But another man—a young, good-looking one, someone Catherine could mold to suit her tastes—would deputize for Potemkin in the imperial bedroom. To make Potemkin feel more at ease with this arrangement, he could participate in the choice of the younger man.