Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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THE GUARDSMAN AND THE GRAND DUCHESS: CATHERINE’S COUP

Heaven knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant.

Grand Duke Peter, in Catherine the Great, Memoirs

The future Catherine II, known as the Great, was not a Russian at all, but she had lived at Elisabeth’s Court since she was fourteen and she had made every effort to behave, in her words, ‘so the Russians should love me’. Few yet realized that this Grand Duchess aged thirty-two was a gifted politician, far-sighted statesman and consummate actress, with a burning ambition to rule the Russian Empire, a role for which she was admirably qualified.

She was born Princess Sophia of Zerbst-Anhalt on 21 April/2 May 1729 in Stettin. Her dreary destiny as the daughter of a minor German princely house was changed in January 1744 when the Empress Elisabeth scoured the Holy Roman Empire, that dating agency for kings, to find a girl to marry her newly appointed Heir, Karl-Peter-Ulrich, Duke of Holstein, her nephew and therefore a grandson of Peter the Great. He had just been proclaimed Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich of Russia and required an heir to safeguard Elisabeth’s throne. For a variety of reasons – political, dynastic and personal – the Empress settled on Sophia, who converted to Orthodoxy as Ekaterina Alexevna – Catherine – and then married Peter on 21 August 1745, wearing modest dress and unpowdered hair. Observers remarked on her excellent Russian and cool composure.

Catherine realized swiftly that Peter was not suited to be either her husband or the tsar of Russia. She noted ominously that he was ‘very childish’, lacking in ‘judgement’ and ‘not enamoured of the nation over which he was destined to reign’. It was not to be a happy or romantic marriage. On the contrary, it was a tribute to Catherine’s character that she survived it in such an advantageous way.

Peter was already afraid of the Russian Court and perhaps sensed that he was out of his depth. Despite being the grandson of Peter the Great, ruling Duke of Holstein and, at one moment, the heir of Russia and Sweden, Peter had had an ill-starred life. When he was a boy, his late father had handed him over to the pedantic and cruel marshal of the Holstein Court, who starved him, beat him and made him kneel for hours on dried peas. He grew up into a teenage paradomaniac obsessed with drilling dolls and later soldiers. Alternately starved of affection and spoilt with sycophancy, Peter developed into a confused, pitiful creature who loathed Russia. Once ensconced at the Russian Court, he clung desperately on to his belief in all things German – particularly Prussian. He despised the Russian religion, preferring Lutheranism; he disdained the Russian army, avidly hero-worshipping Frederick the Great.¹ He could not help but display his worrying lack of sense and sensitivity, so Catherine resolved on this plan: ‘(1) to please the Grand Duke, (2) to please the Empress, (3) to please the nation’. Gradually the third became more important than the first.

Peter’s already unprepossessing features had been scarred by smallpox soon after Catherine’s arrival. She now found him ‘hideous’ – though his hurtful behaviour was worse.² On the night of her wedding, no one came to join her, a humiliation for any bride.³ During the peripatetic seasonal migrations of the Court from Petersburg’s Summer to Winter Palaces, from Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland and Tsarskoe Selo inland, south to Moscow and westwards to Livonia, she consoled herself by reading the classics of the Enlightenment – for the rest of her life she always had a book to hand – and by energetic riding. She had designed a special saddle so that she could pretend to ride sidesaddle for the Empress and then switch once she was on her own. Though far from our own age of psychology, when one reads her Memoirs one has the distinct impression that the era of sensibilité perfectly understood the sexual implications of this frantic exercise.⁴

Catherine was sensuous and flirtatious, though possibly unawakened, but she found herself stranded in a sterile, unconsummated marriage to a repulsive and childish man while being surrounded by a treacherous Court filled with the most handsome and sophisticated young men in Russia. Several now fell in love with her, including Kirill Razumovsky, brother of the Empress’s favourite, and Zakhar Chernyshev, her future minister. She was watched at all times. The pressure became awkwardly specific: she had to be faithful and she had to conceive a child. Faced with this life, Catherine became addicted to games of chance, especially faro – the lot of many unhappy and privileged women in that time.

By the early 1750s, the marriage had deteriorated from awkwardness to misery. Catherine had every reason to ruin the reputation of Peter, but she also showed pity and kindness towards him until his behaviour began to threaten her very existence. Yet in this aspect her accounts of his backwardness and rudeness are not exaggerated: the marriage had still not been consummated. Peter may have had a physical malformation like that of Louis XVI. Certainly he was an inhibited and ignorant late developer.⁵ The details of the marriage would chill any female heart: Catherine lay alone in bed while her puny husband played with dolls and toy soldiers and sometimes scratched away at a violin beside her; he kept his dogs in her room and made her stand guard for hours with a musket.⁶

Most of her flirtations came to nothing, but Serge Saltykov, then twenty-six and a scion of old Muscovite nobility, was different: he was ‘handsome as the dawn’ according to Catherine, but, reading between the lines, he was something of a cheap ladies’ man. She fell for him. He was probably her first lover. Amazingly, steps were now taken at the highest level to make sure this was indeed the case – the Empress required an heir no matter who was the father.⁷

After one miscarriage, Catherine found herself pregnant again. The moment the child was born on 20 September 1754, the heir, named Paul Petrovich, was taken away by the Empress. Catherine was left in tears, ‘cruelly abandoned’ for hours in her sweaty and soiled linen: ‘nobody worried about me’.⁸ She comforted herself by reading Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois and Tacitus’ Annals. Saltykov was sent away.

Who was the father of the future Emperor Paul I, from whom the rest of the Romanov dynasty, down to Nicholas II, were descended? Was it Saltykov or Peter? Catherine’s claim that the marriage was never consummated may or may not be true: she had every reason to belittle Peter and she later considered disinheriting Paul. He grew up to be ugly and pug-nosed while Saltykov, nicknamed ‘le beau Serge’, was admired for his looks. But then Catherine slyly noted the ugliness of Saltykov’s brother. Most likely, Saltykov was the natural father.

It was possible to feel some pity for Peter, who was so unqualified for the venomous subtleties of Court intrigues, but it was impossible to like this vainglorious, drunken bully. One day Catherine found an immense rat hanging in Peter’s rooms. When she asked him what it was doing there, he replied that the rodent had been convicted of a crime and deserved the highest penalty according to military law. Its ‘crime’ had been to climb over Peter’s cardboard fortress and eat two sentinels made of starch. Another time he broke down in front of Catherine and told her he knew that Russia would be the ruin of him.⁹

Catherine’s Memoirs claim that it was only when his wilful foolishness endangered her and Paul that this innocent young mother began to consider the future. She implies that her ultimate accession to the throne was almost preordained. This was far from true – Catherine plotted to usurp the throne with an ever changing cast of conspirators throughout the 1750s, from Elisabeth’s Chancellor to the English envoy. As Elisabeth’s health began to fail and Peter took to drink, as Europe edged closer to the Seven Years War and the strings of Russian politics tightened, she had every intention of surviving – and on top.

Yet her domestic life was freer, now she had delivered an heir. She began to enjoy the pleasures of being an attractive woman in a Court fragrant with amorous intrigue, as she herself explained:

I have just said I was attractive. Consequently one half of the road to temptation was already covered and it is only human in such situations that one should not stop halfway. For to tempt and be tempted are closely allied…Perhaps escape is the only solution but there are situations when escape is impossible for how can one escape…in the atmosphere of a Court?…and if you do not run away, nothing is more difficult…than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.¹⁰

In 1755, at a ball at Oranienbaum, the Grand Duke’s country palace near Peterhof, Catherine met Stanislas Poniatowski, aged twenty-three, the Polish secretary to the new English envoy.¹¹ It happened that Poniatowski was the representative of Poland’s powerful pro-Russian party, based around his uncles, the Czartoryski brothers, and their cousinhood, hence known as the ‘Familia’. But he was also the young ideal of the cultured Enlightened man of the world, with a streak of romantic, melancholic idealism. The pair fell in love.¹² It was her first true love affair in which her feelings were passionately reciprocated.

A series of skirmishes between the British and the French in the upper Ohio river now set off the events that would lead to the Seven Years War, a global conflagration that extended from the Rhine to the Ganges, from Montreal to Berlin. The starting point of the Russian involvement was Elisabeth’s hatred of Prussia’s new power and of Frederick the Great, whose jokes about her carnality infuriated her. In this huge diplomatic dance, the other powers suddenly changed partners in a dramatic switch that ended the ‘Old System’ of alliances and became known as the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’. When the music stopped in August 1756, Russia, allied with Austria and France, went to war against Prussia, which was financed by English subsidies (though Russia was not at war with England). Russian armies invaded East Prussia in 1757. The war poisoned Court politics and ruined Catherine’s love affair with Poniatowski, who was obviously in the English camp and ultimately had to leave. Catherine was pregnant with Poniatowski’s child – Anna Petrovna was born in December 1757 and again purloined and raised by Elisabeth herself.¹³

Catherine now entered the most dangerous crisis of her life as Grand Duchess. After a victory over Prussia on 19/30 August 1757 at the Battle of Gross-Jägersdorf, Field-Marshal Apraxin, with whom Catherine was friendly, heard that the Empress Elisabeth had fallen ill. He let the Prussians retreat in good order and withdrew his own armies, probably believing the Empress was about to die and Peter III would make peace with his hero, Frederick the Great. The Empress did not die and, like all tyrants, she was extremely sensitive about her mortality. In wartime, such thoughts were treasonable. The pro-English party was destroyed and Catherine found herself under grave suspicion, especially after her terrified husband denounced her. The Grand Duchess was alone and in real danger. She burned her papers, waited – and then played her hand with cool, masterly skill.¹⁴

Catherine provoked a showdown: on 13 April 1758, as she recounted in her Memoirs, she demanded to go home to her mother, exploiting Elisabeth’s fondness for her and growing disgust for her nephew. The Empress decided to interrogate Catherine personally. In a scene of Byzantine drama, Catherine argued her case to the Empress while Peter grunted denunciations. She used charm, wide-eyed indignation and her usual display of loving gratitude to disarm the Empress. When they parted, Elisabeth whispered: ‘I have many more things to say to you…’.¹⁵ Catherine knew she had won and was especially cheered to hear from a maid that Elisabeth was repelled by Peter: ‘My nephew is a monster.’¹⁶ When the dust settled, Catherine and Peter managed to coexist quite cordially. Peter had taken a famously plain mistress named Elisabeth Vorontsova, the Chancellor’s niece, and so he tolerated Catherine’s liaison with Poniatowski, who had returned for a while. Finally, the Pole, who still loved Catherine, had to leave and she was alone again.

Two years later, Catherine noticed Grigory Orlov, a lieutenant of the Izmailovsky Guards who, after distinguishing himself by taking three wounds from the Prussians at the Battle of Zorndorf, had returned to Petersburg charged with guarding a noble Prussian prisoner-of-war, Count Schwerin. Peter, who worshipped all things Prussian, flaunted his friendship with Schwerin. This was probably how Catherine came to know Orlov, though legend claims she first admired him on guard duty from her window.

Grigory Grigorevich Orlov was handsome, tall and blessed, wrote an English diplomat, with ‘every advantage of figure, countenance and manner’.¹⁷ Orlov came of a race of giants^*1 – all five brothers were equally gargantuan.¹⁸ His face was said to be angelic, but he was also the sort of cheerful bluff soldier everyone loved – ‘he was a simple and straightforward man without pretensions, affable, popular, good-humoured and honest. He never did an unkindness to anyone’¹⁹ – and was immensely strong.²⁰ When Orlov visited London fifteen years later, Horace Walpole caught something of his oversized charm: ‘Orlov the Great or rather the Big is here…he dances gigantic dances and makes gigantic love.’^21*2

Orlov was the son of a provincial governor and not of wealthy higher nobility. He was descended from a Streltsy officer who was sentenced to beheading by Peter the Great. When it was his turn to die, Orlov’s grandfather stepped up to the reeking block and kicked the head of the man before him out of the way. The Tsar was so impressed with his swagger that he pardoned him. Orlov was not particularly clever – ‘very handsome’, wrote the French envoy Breteuil to his Minister Choiseul in Paris, ‘but…very stupid’. On his return in 1759, Orlov was appointed adjutant to Count Peter Shuvalov, Grand Master of Ordnance, the cousin of Potemkin’s university patron. Orlov soon managed to seduce Shuvalov’s mistress, Princess Elena Kurakina. It was Orlov’s luck that Shuvalov died before he could avenge himself.

Early in 1761, Catherine and Orlov fell in love. After the slightly precious sincerity of Poniatowski, Grigory Orlov provided physical vigour, bearlike kindness and, more importantly, the political muscle that would soon be needed. As early as 1749, Catherine had been able to offer her husband the support of those Guards officers who were devoted to her. Now she received the support of the Orlov brothers and their merry band. The most impressive in terms of ability and ruthlessness was Grigory’s brother Alexei. He closely resembled Grigory, except that he was scar-faced and of ‘brute force and no heart’, the qualities that made the Orlovs such an effective force in 1761.²²

Orlov and his fellow Guardsmen discussed various daring plans to raise Catherine to the throne in late 1761 – though probably in the vaguest terms. The precise order of events is obscure but it was also around this time that young Potemkin first came into contact with the Orlovs. One source recalled that it was Potemkin’s reputation as a wit that attracted the attention of Grigory Orlov, though they shared other interests too – both were known as successful seducers and daring gamblers. They never became friends exactly, but Potemkin now moved in the same galaxy.²³

Catherine needed such allies. In the last months of Elisabeth’s life, she was under no illusions about Grand Duke Peter, who talked openly of divorcing Catherine, marrying his mistress Vorontsova and reversing Russia’s alliances to save his hero Frederick of Prussia. Peter was a danger to her, her son, her country – and himself. She saw her choices starkly:

Primo – to share His Highness’s fate, whatever it might be; Secundo – tobe exposed at any moment to anything he might undertake for, or against, me; Tertio – to take a route independent of any such eventuality…it was a matter of either perishing with (or because of) him, or else saving myself, the children, and perhaps the State, from the wreckage…

Just at the moment that Elisabeth began her terminal decline and Catherine needed to be ready to save herself ‘from the wreckage’ and lead a possible coup, the Grand Duchess discovered that she was pregnant by Grigory Orlov. She carefully concealed her belly, but, politically, she was hors de combat.

—

At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 25 December 1761, the Empress Elisabeth, now fifty, had become so weak that she no longer had the strength to vomit blood. She just lay writhing on her bed, her breathing slow and rasping, her limbs swollen like balloons, half filled with fluid, in the imperial apartments of the unfinished, Baroque Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The courtiers, bristling with hope and fear of what her death would bring them, were gathered around her. The death of a ruling monarch was even more public than a royal birth: it was a formal occasion with its own etiquette, because the demise of the Empress was the passing of sacred power. The pungence of sweat, vomit, faeces and urine must have overwhelmed the sweetness of candles, the perfume of the ladies and the vodka breath of the men. Elisabeth’s personal priest was praying, but she no longer recited with him.²⁴

The succession of the spindly, pockmarked Grand Duke Peter, now thirty-four and ever more uncomfortable with Russian culture and people, was accepted, though hardly with jubilance. There was already an undercurrent of anxiety about Peter and hope about Catherine. Many of the magnates knew the Heir was patently ill-suited to his new role. They had to make the appropriate calculations for their careers and families, but the key to survival was always silence, patience and vigilance.

Outside the Palace, the Guards stood sentry duty in the freezing cold, tensely observing the transfer of power, proudly aware of their own role in raising and breaking tsars. The will to act existed especially among the daredevils around the Orlovs, who included Potemkin. However, Catherine’s relationship with Orlov, and especially the tightly guarded secret that she was six months pregnant, was known only to the inner circle. It was hard enough for private individuals to conceal pregnancy, yet alone imperial princesses. Catherine managed it even in the crowded sickroom of a dying empress.

Elisabeth’s two veteran favourites, the genial, athletic Alexei Razumovsky, the Cossack choirboy-turned-Count, and the aesthetic, round-faced Ivan Shuvalov, Potemkin’s university patron, still only thirty-four, attended her fondly – and anxiously. Prince Nikita Trubetskoi, the bull-like Procurator-General of the Senate, watched on behalf of the older Russian nobility. The Heir, Grand Duke Peter, was nowhere to be seen. He was drinking with his German cronies outside the sickroom, with the lack of dignity and tact that would make him hated. But his wife Catherine, who half hated and half loved the Empress, was ostentatiously beside the deathbed and had been there, sleeplessly and tearfully, for two nights.

Catherine was a picture of solicitous affection for her dying aunt and Empress. Who, admiring her lachrymose sincerity, would have guessed that a few years earlier she had mischievously quoted Poniatowski about the Empress thus: ‘Oh, this log! She simply exhausts our patience! Would that she die sooner!’ The Shuvalovs, the latest of a succession of intriguers, had already approached Catherine about altering the succession in favour of her and her infant son, Grand Duke Paul – but to no avail. All those intriguers had fallen or departed. Catherine alone survived, closer and closer to the throne.²⁵

The Empress became still. The gawky Grand Duke was summoned, as Elisabeth was about to die. He came at once. As soon as she died, the courtiers fell to their knees before Peter III. He left swiftly, heading straight for the Council to take control. According to Catherine, he ordered her to remain beside the body until she heard from him.²⁶ Elisabeth’s ladies had already begun bustling around the body, tidying up the detritus of death, drying the sweat on her neck and brow, rouging her cheeks, closing those bright-blue eyes for the last time.

Everyone was weeping – for Elisabeth had been loved despite her frivolities and cruelties. She had done much to restore Russia to its position as a great European power, the way her father had left his Empire. Razumovsky rushed to his room to mourn. Ivan Shuvalov was overcome with ‘hypochondriacal thoughts’ and felt helpless. The sturdy Procurator-General threw open the doors into the anteroom and announced, with tears rolling down his old face, ‘Her Imperial Majesty has fallen asleep in God. God save Our Most Gracious Sovereign the Emperor Peter III.’ There was a murmur as they hailed the new reign – but the Court was filled with ‘moans and weeping’.²⁷ Outside, the Guards on duty ‘looked gloomy and dejected. The men all spoke at once but in a low voice…That day [thus] wore an almost sinister aspect with grief painted on every face.’²⁸

At 7 p.m., Senators, generals and courtiers swore allegiance to Peter III. A thanksgiving ‘Te Deum’ was sung. While the Metropolitan of Novgorod solemnly lectured the new Emperor, Peter III was beyond himself with glee and did not conceal it, behaving outrageously and ‘playing the fool’.²⁹ Later the 150 leading nobles of the Empire gathered for a feast in the gallery to toast the new era, three rooms from the chamber where the imperial cadaver lay. The weeping Catherine, who was both a woman of sensibilité and a cool-hearted political player, acted her part. She mourned the Empress and went to sit beside the body three days afterwards. By then, the overheated rooms must have been thoroughly rank.³⁰

In Prussia, Russian troops had just taken the fortress of Kolberg and were occupying East Prussia, while in Silesia another corps was advancing with units of Russia’s Austrian allies. The destruction of Frederick the Great was imminent. The road to Berlin was open. Only a miracle could save him – and the death of Elisabeth was just that. Peter ordered an immediate halt and opened peace talks with an astonished, relieved King of Prussia. Frederick was willing to offer East Prussia to Russia, but even this was not necessary.^*3 Instead, Peter prepared to start his own private war against Denmark, to win back Schleswig for his German Duchy of Holstein.

At Elisabeth’s funeral on 25 January 1762, Emperor Peter III, in high spirits, invented a game to make the day pass more quickly: he loitered behind the hearse, let it advance for thirty feet and then ran after it to catch up, dragging the elderly courtiers, who had to hold his black train, along behind him. ‘Criticism of the Emperor’s outrageous behaviour spread rapidly.’

His critics naturally looked to his wife. In the very hour of Elisabeth’s death, Catherine received a message from Prince Kirill Dashkov of the Guards which said: ‘You have only to give the order and we will enthrone you.’ Dashkov was another of a circle of Guardsmen including heroes of the Seven Years War like the Orlov brothers. The pregnant Catherine discouraged treason. What is remarkable about her eventual coup was not that it was successful, because so much of a conspiracy depends on chance, but that it was already fully formed six months earlier. Catherine somehow managed to prevent it blossoming before she had recovered from her confinement.

—

It was the new Emperor himself who unconsciously decided both the timing and the intensity of the conspiracy. In his reign of barely six months, Peter contrived to alienate virtually all the major forces of Russian political society. Yet his measures were far from barbarous, though often imprudent. On 21 February 1762, for example, he abolished the feared Secret Chancellery – though its organs survived and were concealed as the Secret Expedition under the aegis of the Senate. Three days earlier, the Emperor had promulgated his manifesto on the freedom of the nobility, which liberated the nobles from Peter the Great’s compulsory service.

These measures should have won him some popularity, but his other actions seemed deliberately designed to alienate Russia’s most powerful interests. The army was the most important: during the Seven Years War, it had defeated Frederick the Great, raided Berlin and brought Prussia’s awesome military machine to the very edge of destruction. Now Peter III not only made peace with Prussia but also arranged to lend Frederick the corps that had originally aided the Austrians. And it got worse: on 24 May, Peter issued his ultimatum to Denmark, on behalf of Holstein, that was calculated to lead to a war, quite unconnected to Russian interests. He decided to command his armies in person.

Peter mocked the Guards as ‘Janissaries’ – the Turkish infantrymen who enthroned and deposed Ottoman sultans – and decided to disband parts of them.³¹ This redoubled the Guards’ conspiracies against him. Sergeant-Major Potemkin himself, who already vaguely knew the Orlovs, now demanded to join the plot. This is how it happened. One of the Orlov set, a captain in the Preobrazhensky Guards, invited a university friend of Potemkin’s, Dmitri Babarykin, to ‘enter their society’. Babarykin refused – he disapproved of their ‘wild life’ and Grigory Orlov’s affair with Catherine. But he confided his distaste to his university friend. Potemkin ‘on the spot’ demanded that Babarykin introduce him to the Preobrazhensky captain. He immediately joined the conspiracy.³² In his first recorded political act, this Potemkin rings true – shrewd, brave, ambitious and acting on the emotional impulse that was to be his trademark. For a young provincial, it was truly a stimulating moment to be a Guardsman.

Meanwhile Peter promoted his Holsteiner family to major positions. His uncle (and Catherine’s) Georg-Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp was appointed member of the Council, colonel-in-chief of the Horse-Guards, and field-marshal. This Georg-Ludwig had once flirted with a teenage Catherine before she left for Russia. By coincidence, when he arrived from Holstein on 21 March, Prince Georg-Ludwig was assigned Sergeant-Major Potemkin as his orderly.³³ Potemkin was not shy in pushing himself forward: this position ensured that, as the regime unravelled, he was well placed to keep the conspiracy informed. His immaculate horsemanship was noted by Prince Georg-Ludwig, who had him promoted to Guards full sergeant. Another Holstein prince was named governor-general of St Petersburg and commander of all Russian troops around the Baltic.

Lastly the Empress Elisabeth had agreed to secularize much of the lands of the Orthodox Church, but early in his reign, on 21 March, Peter issued a ukaz, an imperial decree, to seize the property.³⁴ His buffoonery and disrespect at Elisabeth’s funeral had displayed contempt for Orthodoxy – as well as a lack of manners. All these actions outraged the army, alarmed the Guards, insulted the pious, and wasted the victories of the Seven Years War.

Such was the anger in Petersburg that Frederick the Great, who most benefited from Peter’s follies, was afraid that the Emperor would be overthrown if he left Russia to command the Danish expedition.³⁵ To anger the army was foolish, to upset the Church was silly, to outrage the Guards was simply idiotic, and to arouse all three was probably suicidal. But the plot, suspended at Elisabeth’s death because of Catherine’s pregnancy, could not stir until it had a leader. As Peter himself was aware, there were three possible claimants to the throne. In his unfortunate and clumsy way, the Tsar was probably planning to remove them from the succession, one by one – but he was too slow.

—

On 10 April 1762, Catherine gave birth to a son by Grigory Orlov, named Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, her third child. Even four months into Peter’s reign only a small circle of Guardsmen were aware of Catherine’s relationship with Orlov – her friend Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, a player in the coup and wife of one of her Guards supporters, did not know. Peter certainly acted as if he was in the dark. This gives us a clue to how the conspiracies remained undiscovered. No one was informing him. He was unable to use the secret powers that autocrats require.³⁶

Catherine had recovered from her confinement by early May, but she still hesitated. The drunken Emperor boasted ever more loudly that he would divorce her and marry his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova. This concentrated Catherine’s mind. She confirms to Poniatowski in her letter of 2 August 1762 that the coup had been mooted for six months. Now it became real.³⁷

Peter’s ‘rightful’ successor was not his wife but his son Grand Duke Paul, now aged six: many of the conspirators joined the coup believing that he would be acclaimed emperor with his mother as a figurehead regent. There were rumours that Peter wanted to force Saltykov to admit that he was Paul’s real father so that he could dispense with Catherine and start a new dynasty with Vorontsova.

It is easy to forget that there was another emperor in Russia: Ivan VI, buried alive in the bowels of Schlüsselburg, east of Petersburg on the shore of Lake Ladoga, since being overthrown by Elisabeth as a baby in 1741, was now over twenty. Peter went to inspect this forgotten Tsar in his damp dungeon and discovered he was mentally retarded – though his answers sound relatively intelligent. ‘Who are you?’ asked Emperor Peter. ‘I am the Emperor,’ came the reply. When Peter asked how he was so sure, the prisoner said he knew it from the Virgin and the angels. Peter gave him a dressing gown. Ivan put it on in transports of delight, running round the dungeon like ‘a savage in his first clothes’. Needless to say, Peter was relieved that at least one of his possible nemeses could never rule.³⁸

Peter himself transformed the plot from a few groups of daredevil Guardsmen into a deadly coalition against him. On 21 May, he announced he would leave Petersburg to lead his armies in person against Denmark. While he made arrangements for his armies to begin the march west, he himself left the capital for his favourite summer palace at Oranienbaum near Peterhof, whence he would set off for war. Many soldiers did not wish to embark on this unpopular expedition.

A couple of weeks earlier, Peter had managed to light the fuse of his own destruction: at the end of April, the Emperor held a banquet to celebrate the peace with Prussia. Peter was drunk as usual. He proposed a toast to the imperial family, thinking of himself and his Holstein uncles. Catherine did not stand. Peter noticed and shouted at her, demanding to know why she had neither risen nor quaffed. When she reasonably replied that she was a member of the family too, the Emperor shrieked, ‘Dura!’ – ‘Fool!’ – down the table. Courtiers and diplomats went silent. Catherine blushed and burst into tears but regained her composure.

That night, Peter supposedly ordered his Adjutant to arrest Catherine so that she could be packed off to a monastery – or worse. The Adjutant rushed to Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who grasped the folly of such an act. Peter’s uncle, whom Potemkin served as orderly, persuaded him to cancel the order.

Catherine’s personal and political existence as well as the lives of her children were specifically threatened. She had little choice but to protect herself. During the next three weeks, the Orlovs and their subalterns, including Potemkin, canvassed feverishly to raise the Guards.³⁹

—

The plan was to arrest Peter as he left Oranienbaum for his foolish war against Denmark and imprison him in the fortified tomb of Schlussenburg with the simpleton–Tsar, Ivan VI. According to Catherine, thirty or forty officers and about 10,000 men were ready.⁴⁰ Three vital conspirators came together but, until the last few days, they barely knew of each other’s involvement. Catherine was the only link. So, comically, each of the three believed that it was they – and only they – who had placed Catherine on the throne.

Orlov and his Guardsmen, including Potemkin, were the muscle and the organizers of the coup. There were officers in each regiment. Potemkin’s job was to prepare the Horse-Guards.⁴¹ But the other two groups were necessary not merely for the coup to succeed but to maintain the reign of Catherine II afterwards.

Ekaterina Dashkova, née Vorontsova, was certain that she alone had made the coup possible. This slim, gamine nineteen-year-old, married to one of Catherine’s supporters in the Guards, thought of herself as Machiavelli in petticoats. She was a useful conduit to the high aristocracy: the Empress Elisabeth and Grand Duke Peter stood as godparents at her christening. She personified the tiny, interbred world of Court because she was not only the niece of both Peter III’s Chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov, and Grand Duke Paul’s Governor, Nikita Panin, later Catherine’s Foreign Minister, but also the sister of the Emperor’s ‘ugly, stupid’ mistress.⁴² She was appalled by her sister’s taste in emperors. Dashkova demonstrates how family ties did not always decide political loyalties: the Vorontsovs were in power, yet this Vorontsova was conspiring to overthrow them. ‘Politics was a subject that interested me from my earliest years,’ she writes in her immodest and deluded Memoirs that, with Catherine’s own writings, are the best accounts of those days.⁴³

Nikita Ivanovich Panin, Dashkova’s uncle, was the third key conspirator: as the Ober-Hofmeister or Governor of the Grand Duke Paul, he controlled a crucial pawn. Thus Catherine needed Panin’s support. When Peter III considered declaring Paul illegitimate, he threatened Panin’s powerbase as his Ober-Hofmeister. Panin, aged forty-two, lazy, plump and very shrewd, was far from being an industrious public servant: one has the sense of something almost eunuch-like in his swollen, smooth-skinned insouciance. According to Princess Dashkova, Panin was ‘a pale valetudinarian…studious only of ease, having passed all his life in courts, extremely precise in his dress, wearing a stately wig with three well-powdered ties dangling down his back, he gave one the pasteboard idea of an old courtier from the reign of Louis XIV’.⁴⁴ However, Panin did not believe in the unbridled tyranny of the tsars, particularly in the light of Peter III’s ‘most dissolute debauchery of drunkenness’.⁴⁵ Like many of the educated higher nobility, Panin hoped to create an aristocratic oligarchy on Peter’s overthrow. He was the righteous opponent of favouritism but his family’s rise stemmed from imperial whim.^*4 In the 1750s, the Empress Elisabeth had shown interest in Nikita Panin and there may have been a short affair before the ruling favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, had him despatched on a diplomatic mission to Sweden. When Panin returned in 1760, he was untainted by the poison of Elisabethan politics and acceptable to all factions.⁴⁶ So both Catherine and Panin wished to overthrow Peter, but there was a worrying difference in the details: Catherine wanted to rule herself, while Panin, Dashkova and others believed that Grand Duke Paul should become emperor.⁴⁷ ‘A youthful and female conspirator’, writes Princess Dashkova, ‘was not likely all at once to gain the confidence of a cautious politician like Monsieur Panin,’ but this uneasy cabal of differing interests now came together.

On 12 June, Peter left Petersburg for Oranienbaum. Just eight versts away in Peterhof, Catherine waited in her summer villa, Mon Plaisir.

—

On 27 June, the conspiracy was suddenly thrown into disarray when Captain Passek, one of the plotters in the Guards, was denounced and arrested. Peter III would not remain unaware of the plot for long. Though nobles were rarely tortured, the threat was there. Passek would surely sing.

The Orlovs, Dashkova and Panin came together for the first and last time in a panic-stricken meeting, while Potemkin and other plotters awaited their instructions. The tough Orlovs, according to Dashkova, were distraught, but ‘to quieten apprehensions…as well as to show that I did not personally shrink from the danger, I desired them to repeat an assurance to their soldiers, as coming direct from me, that I had daily account from the Empress…and they should be tranquil’. Since a mistake could cost these men their lives, the bragging of this bumptious teenage Princess can hardly have been reassuring.⁴⁸

On her side, the little Princess was not impressed with the coarse Orlovs, who were too vulgar and arrogant for her taste. She told Alexei Orlov, the main organizer of the coup and known as ‘Le Balafre’ – ‘Scarface’ – to ride to Mon Plaisir at once. However, Grigory Orlov vacillated over whether to fetch Catherine that night or wait until the next day. Dashkova claimed she decided for them: ‘I did not attempt to suppress the rage I felt against these brothers…to hesitate on the directions I had given Alexei Orlov. “You’ve lost time already,” I said. “As to your fears of alarming the Empress, rather let her be conveyed to St Petersburg in a fainting fit than expose her to the risk…of sharing with us the scaffold. Tell your brother to ride full speed without a moment’s delay…” ’⁴⁹

Catherine’s lover finally agreed. The plotters in Petersburg were ordered to rouse the Guards in rebellion. In the middle of the night, Alexei Orlov set off in a travelling carriage to fetch Catherine from Mon Plaisir, accompanied by a handful of Guardsmen who either rode on the running-boards or followed in another carriage: Sergeant Potemkin was among them.

At 6 a.m. the next morning, they arrived outside Mon Plaisir. While Potemkin waited around the carriage with postillions on the box, horses at the ready, whips raised, Alexei Orlov hurried into the special extension built onto the pavilion and burst into Catherine’s bedroom, waking his brother’s mistress.

‘All is ready for the proclamation,’ said Alexei Orlov. ‘You must get up. Passek has been arrested.’ Catherine did not need to hear any more. She dressed swiftly in plain black. The coup would succeed today – or never. If it failed, they would all mount the scaffold.⁵⁰

Alexei Orlov helped Catherine into his carriage, threw his cloak over her and ordered the postillions to drive the eighteen kilometres back to Petersburg at top speed. As the carriage pulled away, Potemkin and another officer, Vasily Bibikov, leaped on to its shafts to guard their precious cargo. There has always been some doubt as to where Potemkin was during these hours, but this story, cited here for the first time, was recorded by the Englishman Reginald Pole Carew, who later knew Potemkin well and probably heard it from the horse’s mouth.⁵¹

Catherine was still wearing her lace nightcap. They met a carriage coming from the capital. By a fortunate coincidence, it turned out to contain her French hairdresser, Michel, who jumped into her carriage and did her hair on the way to the revolution, though it was still unpowdered when she arrived. Nearer the capital, they met Grigory Orlov’s small carriage hurtling along the other way. Catherine, with Alexei and the hairdresser, swapped conveyances. Potemkin may have swapped too. The carriages headed directly to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards, where they found ‘twelve men and a drummer’. From such small beginnings are empires taken. ‘The soldiers’, Catherine recounted breathlessly, ‘rushed to kiss my hands, my feet, the hem of my dress, calling me their saviour. Two…brought a priest with a crucifix and started to take the oath.’ Their Colonel – and Catherine’s former admirer – Count Kirill Razumovsky, Hetman of the Ukraine, kissed hands on bended knee.

Catherine mounted the carriage again and, led by the priest and the soldiers, set off towards the Semyonovsky Guards barracks. ‘They came to meet us shouting Vivat!’. She embarked on a canvassing perambulation which grew into a triumphant procession. But not all the Guards officers supported the coup: Dashkova’s brother and nephew of Peter III’s Chancellor, Simon Romanovich Vorontsov, resisted and was arrested. Just as Catherine was between the Anichkov Palace and the Kazan Cathedral, Sergeant Potemkin reappeared at the head of his Horse-Guards. The men hailed their Empress with frenzied enthusiasm. She may already have known his name as one of the coup’s organizers because she later praised Lieutenant Khitrovo and ‘a subaltern of seventeen named Potemkin’ for their ‘discernment, courage and action’ that day – though the Horse-Guards officers also supported the coup. In fact, Potemkin was twenty-three.⁵²

The imperial convoy, swelled with thousands of Guardsmen, headed for the Winter Palace, where the Senate and Synod assembled to put out her already printed Manifesto and take the oath. Panin arrived at the Palace with her son, Grand Duke Paul, still wearing his nightshirt and cotton cap. Crowds milled outside as the news spread. Catherine appeared at a window and the mob howled its approval. Meanwhile the doors of the Palace were open and its corridors, like a ball deluged by gate-crashers, were jammed with soldiers, priests, ambassadors and townspeople, all come to take the oath to the new Sovereign – or just gawp at the revolution.

Princess Dashkova arrived soon after Panin and the Grand Duke: ‘I ordered my maid to bring me a gala dress and hastily set off for the Winter Palace…’. The appearance of an over-excited teenage princess dressed to the nines caused more drama: first she could not get in and then, when she was recognized, the crowd was so dense that she could not push through. Finally, the slim girl was passed overhead by the soldiers, hand to hand, like a doll. With ‘one shout of approbation’, they ‘acknowledged me as their common friend’. All this was enough to turn anyone’s head and it certainly turned hers. ‘At length, my head giddy, my robe tattered…I rushed into Her Majesty’s presence.’⁵³

The Empress and the Princess embraced but, while the coup had already seized Petersburg, the advantage remained with Peter: his armies in nearby Livonia, primed for the Danish war, could easily crush the Guards. Then there was the fortress of Kronstadt, still under his control, which commanded the sea approaches to St Petersburg itself. Catherine, advised by Panin, the Orlovs and other senior officials such as Count Kyrill Razumovsky, sent Admiral Talyzin to win over Kronstadt.

The Emperor himself now had to be seized. The Empress ordered the Guards to prepare to march on Peterhof. Perhaps remembering how fine the Empress Elisabeth had looked in men’s clothes, Catherine demanded a Guardsman’s uniform. The soldiers eagerly shed the hated Prussian uniforms that Peter had made them wear and replaced them with their old tunics. If her men were tearing off their old clothes, so would Catherine. ‘She borrowed one suit from Captain Talyzin [cousin of the Admiral],’ wrote Dashkova, ‘and I procured another from Lieutenant Pushkin, two young officers of our respective sizes…of the ancient costume of the Preobrazhensky Guards.’⁵⁴

—

While Catherine received her supporters in the Winter Palace, Peter arrived, as arranged, at Peterhof to celebrate the Feast of St Peter and St Paul with Catherine. Mon Plaisir was deserted. Catherine’s gala dress, abandoned on her bed, was an almost ghostly auspice – for she had changed her clothes in every sense. Peter III saw it and collapsed: he wept, drank and dithered.

The only one of his courtiers not to lose his head was the octogenarian Field-Marshal Count Burhard von Münnich, a German veteran of the palace revolutions of 1740/1, recently recalled from exile. Münnich proposed an immediate march on St Petersburg in the spirit of his grandfather – but this was no Peter the Great. The Tsar sent emissaries into Petersburg to negotiate or arrest Catherine, but each one defected to her: Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, who had ridden on the boards of Elisabeth’s sleigh during her coup twenty years earlier, volunteered to go but joined Catherine at once, falling to his knees. Already dejected and confused, Peter’s dwindling entourage trundled sadly back the eight versts to Oranienbaum. The grizzled Münnich finally persuaded the Emperor that he should seize the fortress of Kronstadt to control the capital. Emissaries were sent ahead. When Peter’s schooner arrived at Oranienbaum at about 10 p.m. on this white silvery night, he was drunk and had to be helped aboard by his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova, and the old Field-Marshal. Three hours later, he appeared off Kronstadt.

Münnich called to the Kronstadt watch that the Emperor was before them, but they shouted back: ‘There is no longer an Emperor.’ They declared that they only recognised Catherine II. It was too late: Admiral Talyzin had reached Kronstadt just in time. Peter lost all control of himself and events. He fainted in his cabin. On his return to Oranienbaum, the broken, tipsy Emperor, who had always foreseen this destiny, just wanted to abdicate and live in Holstein. He decided to negotiate.

In Petersburg, Catherine massed her Guards outside the Winter Palace. It was at this exhilarating and unforgettable moment that Potemkin contrived to meet his new Empress for the first time.⁵⁵

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin too was described by foreigners as a giant. The best specimens were bound to join the Guards, but the physique of Russian men seems to have been undergoing a blossoming in this period, to judge by the comments of visitors: ‘The Russian peasant is a fine, stout, straight, well-looking man,’ gushed Lady Craven as she travelled the Empire.

*2 His strength was no legend – as witnessed by Baroness Dimsdale in 1781 when the Empress Catherine’s carriage on the fairground Flying Mountain, an early version of the ‘big dipper’, flew off its wooden groove: Orlov, ‘a remarkably strong man, stood behind the carriage and with his foot guided it in its proper direction’.

*3 This was the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg that so inspired Hitler and Goebbels in 1945 in the Berlin bunker when the death of President Roosevelt was supposed to split the Allies. Frederick exulted that ‘The Messalina of the North is dead’ and acclaimed Peter III’s ‘truly German heart.’

*4 The Panin fortunes were founded on marriage to the niece of Peter the Great’s favourite Prince Alexander Menshikov, who had started life as a pie-seller.