Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

3

FIRST MEETING: THE EMPRESS’S RECKLESS SUITOR

The Horse-Guards came, in such a frenzy of joy as I have never seen, weeping and shouting that the country was free at last.

Catherine the Great to Stanislas Poniatowski, 2 August 1762

Of all the sovereigns of Europe, I believe the Empress of Russia is the richest in diamonds. She has a kind of passion for them; perhaps she has no other weaknesses…

Sir George Macartney on Catherine the Great

The newly acclaimed Catherine II, dressed raffishly in a borrowed green uniform of a captain of the Preobrazhensky Guards, appeared at the door of the Winter Palace on the night of 28 June 1762, accompanied by her entourage, and holding a naked sabre in her bare hands. In the blue incandescence of St Petersburg’s ‘white nights’, she walked down the outside steps into the crowded square and towards her thoroughbred grey stallion, who was named Brilliant. She swung into the saddle with the ease of a practised horsewoman – her years of frantic exercise had not been wasted.

The Guards, 12,000 who had rallied to her revolution, were massed around her in the square, ready to set off on ‘The March to Peterhof’ to overthrow Peter III. All of them must have peered at the thirty-three-year-old woman in her prime, with her long auburn hair, her bright-blue eyes, her black eyelashes, so at home in the Guardsman’s uniform, at the moment of the crucial drama of her life. Among them, Potemkin, on horseback in his Horse-Guards uniform, eagerly awaited any opportunity to distinguish himself.

The soldiers stiffened to attention with the Guards’ well-drilled pageantry – but the square was far from silent. It more resembled the bustling chaos of an encampment than the polished stiffness of a parade. The night resounded with clattering hooves, neighing horses, clinking spurs and swords, fluttering banners, the coughing, muttering and whispering of thousands of men. Many of the troops had been waiting there since the night before in a carnival atmosphere. Some of them were drunk – the taverns had been looted. The streets were littered with discarded Prussian-style uniforms, like the morning after a fancy-dress party. None of this mattered because every man knew he was changing history: they peered at the enchanting vision of this young woman they were making empress and the excitement of it must have touched all of them.

Catherine took Brilliant’s reins and was handed her sword, but she realized that she had forgotten to attach a dragonne, or sword-knot, to the sabre. She must have looked around for one because her hesitation was noticed by a sharp-eyed Guardsman who was to understand her better, more instinctively, than anyone else. He instantly galloped over to her across the square, tore the dragonne off his own sword and handed it to her with a bow. She thanked him. She would have noticed his almost giant stature, that splendid head of auburn-brown hair and the long sensitive face with the cleft chin, the looks that had won him the nickname ‘Alcibiades’. Grigory Potemkin could not have brought himself to her attention in a more daring way, at a more memorable occasion, but he had a talent for seizing the moment.

Princess Dashkova, also dressed dashingly in a Guardsman’s uniform, mounted her horse just behind the Empress. There was a distinct element of masquerade in this ‘petticoat revolution’. Now it was time to move in order to strike at dawn: Peter III was still at large and still emperor in name at Oranienbaum, a night’s march away. Yet Alcibiades was still beside the Empress.

Catherine took the dragonne from Potemkin, fixed it to her sword and urged Brilliant forward. Potemkin spurred his mount back to join his men, but his horse had been trained in the Horse-Guards to ride, knee to knee, in squadron formation for the charge. The beast stubbornly refused to return, so that for several minutes, as the fate of the Empire revolved around this little scene, Potemkin struggled to master his obstinate horse and was forced to talk to the new Empress. ‘This made her laugh…she noticed his looks…she talked to him. Thus’, Potemkin himself told a friend when he was Catherine’s co-ruler, he was ‘thrown into the career of honour, wealth and power – all thanks to a fresh horse’.¹

All accounts agree on the way he met Catherine but differ on the detail: was it the dragonne or the upright plumage for a hat, a sultane?² What mattered for the superstitious Potemkin was the way the horse would not leave the imperial side, as if the beast sensed their joint destiny: this ‘happy chance’, he called it.³ But it was not chance that had made him gallop up to offer his dragonne. Knowing Potemkin’s artifice, love of play-acting and fine horsemanship, it is quite possible that it was not the horse that delayed his return to the ranks. Either way, it now obeyed its rider and galloped back to his place.

The long column of men, marching around two mounted women in male uniforms, set out into the light night. Military bands played; the men sang marching songs. Sometimes they whistled and shouted: ‘Long live our little mother Catherine!’

—

At 3 a.m., Catherine’s column stopped at Krasni-Kabak to rest. She lay down on a narrow, straw bed beside Dashkova, but she did not sleep. The Orlovs pushed ahead with their vanguard. The main body set off again two hours later and were met by the Vice-Chancellor, Prince A. M. Golitsyn, with another offer from Peter. But there was nothing to negotiate except unconditional abdication. The Vice-Chancellor took the oath to Catherine.

Soon the news arrived that Alexei Orlov had taken peaceful possession of the two summer estates, Oranienbaum and Peterhof. At 10 a.m., Peterhof received Catherine as sovereign empress: it was only twenty-four hours since she had left in her lace nightcap. Her lover Grigory Orlov, accompanied by Potemkin, was already at nearby Oranienbaum forcing Peter to sign the unconditional abdication.⁴ When the name was on the paper, Grigory Orlov brought it back to the Empress. Potemkin remained behind to guard this husk of an emperor.⁵ A disgusted Frederick the Great, for whom it might be said that Peter III had sacrificed his Empire, remarked that the Emperor ‘let himself be driven from the throne as a child is sent to bed’.⁶

The ex-Emperor was guided into his carriage accompanied by his mistress and two aides. The carriage was surrounded by a guard. Potemkin was among them. The milling troops taunted the convoy with hurrahs of ‘Long live the Empress Catherine the Second.’⁷ At Peterhof, Peter handed over his sword, his ribbon of St Andrew and his Preobrazhensky Guards uniform. He was taken to a room he knew well, where Panin visited him: the ex-Tsar fell to his knees and begged not to be separated from his mistress. When this was refused, an exhausted, weeping Peter asked if he could take his fiddle, his negro Narcissus and his dog Mopsy. ‘I consider it one of the great misfortunes of my life that I had to see Peter at that moment,’ Panin remembered later, ‘the greatest misfortune of my life.’⁸

Before he could be taken to his permanent home at Schlüsselburg, a closed Berline carriage with guards on the running-boards, commanded by Alexei Orlov, transferred the ex-Emperor to his estate at Ropsha (about nineteen miles inland). Potemkin is not mentioned among this guard, but he was there days later, so he was probably present. Catherine granted her husband his fiddle, blackamoor – and dog.⁹ She never saw Peter again.

—

A few days later, Princess Dashkova entered Catherine’s cabinet and was ‘astonished’ to see Grigory Orlov ‘stretched at full length on a sofa’ going through the state papers. ‘I asked what he was about. “The Empress has ordered that I open them,” he replied.’ The new regime was in power.¹⁰

Catherine II arrived back in the jubilant capital on 30 June. Now she had won, she had to pay for her victory. Potemkin was among the beneficiaries specified by the Empress herself: no doubt she remembered the sword-knot. The cost was over a million roubles in a total annual budget of only sixteen million. Her supporters received generous rewards for their roles in the coup: St Petersburg’s garrison were given half a year’s salary – a total of 225,890 roubles. Grigory Orlov was promised 50,000 roubles; Panin and Razumovsky got pensions of 5,000 roubles. On 9 August, Grigory and Alexei Orlov, Ekaterina Dashkova and the seventeen leading plotters received either 800 souls or 24,000 roubles each.

Grigory Potemkin was among the eleven junior players who received 600 souls or 18,000 roubles.¹¹ He appeared on other lists in Catherine’s own handwriting: in one, the Horse-Guards commanders presented their report, suggesting that Potemkin be promoted to cornet. Catherine in her own hand wrote, ‘has to be lieutenant’, so he was promoted to second lieutenant,¹² and she promised him another 10,000 roubles. Catherine left Chancellor Vorontsov in his job, but Nikita Panin became her chief minister. Panin’s coterie wanted a regency for Paul, steered by aristocratic oligarchy, but the Orlovs and their Guards protected Catherine’s absolute power, which was their sole reason for being in government at all.¹³ However, the Orlovs had a further plan: the marriage of Grigory Orlov to the Empress. There was a not insurmountable obstacle to this: Catherine was already married.

—

Peter III, Narcissus and Mopsy remained at Ropsha, guarded by Alexei Orlov and his 300 men, Potemkin among them. Orlov kept Catherine abreast of this awkward situation in a series of hearty, informal yet macabre letters. He mentioned Potemkin by name in these notes, another sign that Catherine was acquainted with him, albeit vaguely. But he concentrated on mocking Peter as the ‘freak’. One senses a tightening garotte in Orlov’s sinister jokes, as if he was seeking Catherine’s approval for his deed before he undertook it.¹⁴

She cannot have been surprised to learn around 5 July that Peter had been murdered. The details remain as murky as the deed. All we know is that Alexei Orlov and his myrmidons played their roles and that the ex-Emperor was throttled.¹⁵

The death served everyone’s ends. Ex-emperors were always living liabilities for their successors in a country plagued by pretenders. Even dead, they could rise again. Peter III’s mere existence undermined Catherine’s usurpation. He also threatened the Orlovs’ plans. There was no mistake in his murder. Was Potemkin involved? Since he was to be accused of every imaginable sin in his subsequent career, it is significant that the murder of Peter is never mentioned in connection with him, and this can only mean that he played no part in it. But he was at Ropsha.

Catherine shed bitter tears – for her reputation, not for Peter: ‘My glory is spoilt, Posterity will never forgive me.’ Dashkova was shocked but was also thinking about herself. ‘It is a death too sudden, Madame, for your glory and mine.’¹⁶ Catherine appreciated the benefits of the deed. No one was punished. Indeed Alexei Orlov was to play a prominent role for the next thirty years. But it made Catherine notorious in Europe as an adulterous regicide and matricide.

The Emperor’s body lay in state in a plain coffin at the Alexander Nevsky convent for two days in a blue Holstein uniform without any decorations. A cravat covered its bruised throat and a hat was placed low over its face to hide the blackening caused by strangulation.¹⁷

Catherine recovered her composure and issued a much mocked statement blaming Peter’s death on ‘a haemorrhoidal colic’.¹⁸ This absurd if necessary diagnosis was to become a euphemism in Europe for political murder. When Catherine later invited the philosophe d’Alembert to visit her, he joked to Voltaire that he did not dare since he was prone to piles, obviously a very dangerous condition in Russia.¹⁹

—

The tsars of Russia were traditionally crowned in Moscow, the old Orthodox capital. Peter III, with his contempt for his adopted land, had not bothered to be crowned at all. Catherine, the usurper, was not about to make the same mistake. On the contrary, a usurper must follow the rituals of legitimacy down to the smallest detail, whatever the cost. Catherine ordered a lavish, traditional coronation to be arranged as soon as possible.

On 4 August, the very day he was promoted to second lieutenant on the personal order of the Empress, Potemkin was among three squadrons of Horse-Guards who departed for Moscow to attend the coronation. His mother and family still lived there to welcome the homecoming of the prodigal, for he had left as a scapegrace and now returned to guard an empress at her coronation. On the 27th, Grand Duke Paul, aged eight, the sole legitimate pillar of the new regime, accompanied by his Governor Panin with twenty-seven carriages and 257 horses, left the capital, followed by Grigory Orlov. The Empress left five days later with an entourage of twenty-three courtiers, sixty-three carriages and 395 horses. The Empress and the Tsarevich entered Moscow, city of cupolas and towers and old Russia, on Friday, 13 September. She always hated Moscow, where she felt disliked and where she had once fallen gravely ill. Now her prejudice was proved right when little Paul contracted fever, which just held off for the actual ceremony.

On Sunday, 22 September, in the Assumption Cathedral at the heart of the Kremlin, the Empress was crowned ‘the most serene and all-powerful Princess and lady Catherine the Second, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias’ before fifty-five Orthodox dignitaries standing in a semi-circle. Like Elisabeth before her, she deliberately placed her own crown on the head to emphasize that her legitimacy derived from herself, then took the scepter in her right land and the orb in her left, and the congregation fell to its knees. The choir sang. Cannons fired. The Archbishop of Novgorod anointed her. She took communion.

Catherine returned to her place in a golden carriage, guarded by the unmounted Horse-Guards including Potemkin, while gold coins were tossed to the crowds. When she had passed, the people fell to their knees. Later, when it was time for the coronation honours to be announced, the new regime began to take shape: Grigory Orlov was named adjutant-general, and the five brothers, with Nikita Panin, were raised to counts of the Russian Empire. Second Lieutenant Potemkin, who was there on duty at the palace, once again appeared in these lists: he received a silver table set and another 400 souls in the Moscow region. On 30 November, he was appointed Kammerjunker, or gentleman of the bedchamber, with permission to remain in the Guards²⁰ while other new Kammerjunkers left the army and became courtiers.²¹

There was now a tiring week of balls, ceremonies and receptions, but the Grand Duke Paul’s fever worsened: if he died, there could be no worse omen for Catherine’s reign. Since Catherine had claimed power partly to protect Paul from Peter III, his death would also remove much of her justification for ruling. It was clear that his claim to the throne was superior to hers. One emperor had already suffered from murderous piles; the death of his son would taint Catherine, already a regicide, with more sacred royal blood. The crisis reached its height during the first two weeks of October with the Tsarevich in delirium, but afterwards he began to improve. This did not help the tense atmosphere. Catherine’s regime had survived to her coronation, but already there were plots and counter-plots. In the barracks, Guardsmen who had made one emperor now thought they could make others. At Court, the Orlovs wanted their Grigory to marry Catherine, while Panin and the magnates wished to curb imperial powers and govern in Paul’s name.

In the year or so since he had arrived at Horse-Guards from Moscow, Potemkin had advanced from an expelled student to serving the Empress as gentleman of the bedchamber, doubling his souls and being promoted two ranks. Now, back in Petersburg, the Orlovs told the Empress about the funniest man in the Guards, Lieutenant Potemkin, who was an outrageous mimic. Catherine, who knew the name and the face from the coup, replied that she would like to hear this wit. So the Orlovs summoned Potemkin to amuse the Empress. He must have thought his moment had come. The self-declared ‘spoilt child of fortune’, always swinging between despair and exultation, possessed an absolute belief in his own destiny, that he could achieve anything, beyond the limits of ordinary men. Now he had his chance.

Grigory Orlov recommended his imitation of one particular nobleman. Potemkin could render the man’s peculiar voice and mannerisms perfectly. Soon after the coronation, the Guardsman was formally presented for the first time and Catherine requested this particular act. Potemkin replied that he was quite unable to do any mimicry at all – but his voice was different and it sent a chill through the whole room. Everyone sat up straight or looked studiously at the floor. The voice was absolutely and unmistakably perfect. The accent was slightly German and the intonation was exquisitely accurate. Potemkin was imitating the Empress herself. The older courtiers must have presumed that this youngster’s career was to finish before it had started. The Orlovs must have waited nonchalantly to see how she would take this impertinence. Everyone concentrated on the boldly handsome, somewhat mannish face and high, clever forehead of their Tsarina. She started to laugh uproariously, so everyone else laughed too and agreed that Potemkin’s imitation was brilliant. Once again, his gamble had paid off.

It was then that the Empress looked properly at Second Lieutenant and Gentleman of the Bedchamber Potemkin and admired the striking looks of this ‘real Alcibiades’. Being a woman, she at once noticed his flowing and silky head of brown-auburn hair – ‘the best chevelure in all Russia’. She turned to Grigory Orlov and complained that it was more beautiful than hers: ‘I’ll never forgive you for having introduced me to this man,’ she joked. ‘It was you who wanted to present him but you’ll repent.’ Orlov would indeed regret it. These stories are told by people who knew Potemkin at this time – a cousin and a fellow Guardsman. Even if they owe as much to hindsight as history, they ring true.²²

In the eleven-and-a-half years between the coup and the beginning of their love affair, the Empress was watching Potemkin and preparing him for something. There was nothing inevitable in 1762 about his rise to almost supreme power, but the more she saw of him, the more fascinating she found his infinite originality. They were somehow converging on each other, running on apparently parallel lines that became closer and closer. At twenty-three, Potemkin flaunted his mimicry and intelligence to the Empress. She soon realized that there was much more to him than a gorgeous chevelure: he was a Greek scholar and an expert in theology and the cultures of Russia’s native peoples. But he appears scantily in the history of those years and always swathed in legend: while we sketch the daily life of Empress and Court, we catch glimpses of Potemkin, stepping out of the crowd of courtiers to engage in repartee with Catherine – and then disappearing again. He made sure these fleeting appearances were memorable.

—

Lieutenant Potemkin had fallen in love with the Empress and he did not seem to mind who knew it. He was unafraid of the Orlovs or anyone else in the bearpit of Catherine’s unstable Court. This is the world he now entered, playing only for the highest stakes. The reign of Catherine II appears to us as long, glorious and stable – but this is with hindsight. At the time, the illicit regime of a female usurper and regicide seemed to the foreign ambassadors in St Petersburg to be ill-starred and destined to last only a short time. Potemkin, who had been in the capital for little over a year, had much to learn about both the Empress and the magnates of the Court.

‘My position is such that I have to observe the greatest caution,’ Catherine wrote to Poniatowksi, her ex-lover, who was threatening to visit her, on 30 June. ‘The least soldier of the Guard thinks when he sees me: “That is the work of my hands.” ’ Poniatowski was still in love with Catherine – he always would be – and now he longed to reclaim the Grand Duchess he had been forced to leave. Catherine’s reply leaves us in no doubt about the atmosphere in Petersburg nor about her irritation with Poniatowski’s naive passion: ‘Since I have to speak plainly, and you have resolved to ignore what I have been telling you for six months, the fact is that, if you come here, you are likely to get us both slaughtered.’²³

While she was busy creating the magnificent Court she believed she needed, she was simultaneously struggling behind the scenes to find stability amid so many intrigues. Almost at once, she was deluged with revelations of conspiracies against her, even among the Guardsmen who had just placed her on the throne. Catherine’s secret police, inherited from Peter III, was the Secret Expedition of the Senate, run throughout her reign by Stepan Sheshkovsky, the feared ‘knout-wielder’, under the Procurator-General. The Empress tried to reduce the use of the torture, especially after the suspect had already confessed, but it is impossible to know how far she succeeded: it is likely that the further from Petersburg, the more torture was liberally applied. Whipping and beating were more usual than real torture. The Secret Expedition was tiny – around only forty employees, a far cry from the legions employed by the NKVD or KGB of Soviet times – but there was little privacy: courtiers and foreigners were effectively watched by their own servants and guards while civil servants would not hesitate to inform on malcontents.²⁴ Catherine sometimes ordered political opponents to be watched and she was always ready to receive Sheshkovsky. There was no such thing as a police state in the eighteenth century, but, whatever her noble sentiments, the Secret Expedition was always ready to observe, arrest and interrogate – and they were particularly busy in these early years.

There were two other candidates for the throne with a better claim than hers: Ivan VI, the simpleton of Schlüsselburg, and Paul, her own son. The first conspirators, on behalf of Ivan, were uncovered in October 1762 during her coronation in Moscow: two Guardsmen of the Izmailovsky Regiment, Guriev and Khrushchev. They were tortured and beaten with sticks, with Catherine’s permission, but their ‘plot’ was really little more than inebriated boasting.

Catherine never lost her nerve: she balanced the different factions at Court while simultaneously strengthening her security and shamelessly bribing the Guards with lavish gifts. Each side in this factional struggle had its own dangerous agenda. Catherine made it clear at once that, like Peter the Great before her and following the example of the hero of the day, Frederick the Great, she would be her own Chancellor. She ran Russia through a strong secretariat which became the true government of the Empire. Within two years, she found Prince Alexander Alexeiovich Viazemsky, aged thirty-four, the tireless if unloved administrator with bug eyes and ruddy face, who would run the internal affairs of Russia for almost thirty years from the Senate as her Procurator-General, a role which combined the modern jobs of Finance, Justice and Interior Ministers.

Nikita Panin became her senior minister. That believer in aristocratic restraint of absolutist whim proposed an imperial council which would be appointed by the Empress but which she could not dismiss. Panin’s ideal was a threat both to Catherine and to the ‘upstarts’ in the Guards who had placed her on the throne.²⁵ Panin’s guardianship of Paul, widely regarded as the rightful Emperor, made him the natural advocate of a handover to the boy as soon as he was of age. He openly despised the rule of ‘capricious favourites’.²⁶ So the five Orlovs were his enemies. During the next twelve years, both factions tried to use Potemkin’s growing imperial friendship in their struggle for supremacy.

Catherine distracted Panin from his schemes by confining him to foreign policy as ‘senior member’ of the College of Foreign Affairs – Foreign Minister – but she never forgot that Panin had wanted to place Paul, not her, on the throne in 1762. It was safer for this reptilian schemer to be the serpent inside her house. They needed each other: she thought Panin was ‘the most skilful, intelligent and zealous person at my Court’, but she did not particularly like him.²⁷

Beneath these two main factions, the court of the new Empress was a labyrinth of families and factions. Catherine appointed her admirer from the 1750s, Zakhar Chernyshev, to run the College of War, while his brother Ivan was made head of the navy: the Chernyshevs initially remained neutral between the Panins and Orlovs. But members of the big families often supported different factions as we saw with Princess Dashkova and the Vorontsovs.²⁸ Even she soon overreached herself by claiming to exercise power she did not possess.²⁹ ‘This celebrated conspirator who boasted of having given away a crown…became a laughingstock to all Russians.’³⁰ Dashkova, like the Elisabethan magnates Chancellor Vorontsov and Ivan Shuvalov, would ‘travel abroad’, the euphemism for a gentle exile in the spa-resorts of Europe.

Catherine’s Court became a kaleidoscope of perpetually shifting and competing factions that were groups of individuals linked by friendship, family, greed, love or shared views of the vaguest sort. The two basic shibboleths remained whether a courtier supported a Prussian or Austrian alliance, and whether he or she was closer to the Empress or the Heir. All was dominated by the simplest self-interest – ‘Thy enemy’s enemy is my friend.’

—

The new regime’s first foreign-policy success was the placing of the crown of Poland on the head of Catherine’s last lover. Within days of the coup, on 2 August 1762, Catherine wrote to earnest Stanislas Poniatowski: ‘I am sending Count Keyserling to Poland immediately to make you king after the death of the present one,’ Augustus III.

This has often been presented as an imperial caprice to thank Poniatowski for his amorous services. But that tautological institution, the Serene Commonwealth of Poland, was not a frivolous matter. Poland was in every way unique in Europe, but it was an infuriating state of absurd contradictions: it was really not one country, but two states – the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; it had one parliament, the Sejm, but parallel governments; its kings were elected and almost powerless; when they appointed some officials, they could not dismiss them; its nobility, the szlachta, were almost omnipotent. Sejms were elected by the entire szlachta, which, since it included almost 10 per cent of the population, made Poland more democratic than England. One vote was enough to annul the proceedings of an entire Sejm – the famous liberum veto – which made the poorest delegate more powerful than the King. There was only one way around this: nobles could form a Confederation, a temporary alternative Sejm that would exist only until it had achieved its aims. Then it would disband. But really Poland was ruled by its magnates, ‘kinglets’ who owned estates as large as some countries and possessed their own armies. The Poles were extremely proud of their strange constitution, which kept this massive land in a humiliating chaos that they regarded as golden, unbridled freedom.

Choosing Polish kings was one of the favourite diplomatic sports of the eighteenth century. The contestants in this diplomatic joust were Russia, Prussia, Austria and France. Versailles had three traditional allies in the East, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden and Poland. But ever since 1716, when Peter the Great had guaranteed the flawed constitution of Poland, Russia’s policy was to dominate the Commonwealth by maintaining its absurd constitution, placing weak kings in Warsaw, encouraging the power of the magnates – and having a Russian army ever ready on the border. Catherine’s sole interest in all this was to preserve the Petrine protectorate over Poland. Poniatowski was the ideal figurehead for this because through his pro-Russian Czartoryski uncles, the ‘Familia’, backed by Russian guns and English money, Catherine could continue to control Poland.

Poniatowski began to dream of becoming king and then marrying Catherine, hence, as his biographer writes, he could combine the two great desires of his life.³¹ ‘If I desired the throne,’ he pleaded to her, ‘it was because I saw you on it.’ When told that this was impossible, he beseeched her: ‘Don’t make me king, but bring me back to your side.’³² This gallant if whining idealism did not auger well for his future relationship with the female paragon of raison d’état. Since the usual contestants in this game of king-making were exhausted after the Seven Years War, Catherine and Panin were able to pull it off. Catherine won Frederick the Great’s backing because Prussia had been ruined by the Seven Years War and was so isolated that this alliance with Russia, signed on 31 March/11 April 1764, was his only hope. On 26 August/6 September the Election Sejm, surrounded by Russian troops, elected Poniatowski king of Poland. He adopted the name Stanislas-Augustus.

The Prussian alliance – and the Polish protectorate – were meant to form the pillars of Panin’s much vaunted ‘Northern System’, in which the northern powers, including Denmark, Sweden and hopefully England, would restrain the ‘Catholic Bloc’ – the Bourbons of France and Spain, and the Habsburgs of Austria.³³

Now that Poniatowski was a king, would Catherine marry Grigory Orlov? There was a precedent of sorts. The Empress Elisabeth was rumoured to have married her Cossack chorister Alexei Razumovsky. He now lived in retirement in Moscow.

—

An old courtier called at Alexei Razumovsky’s Elisabethan Baroque palace and found him reading the Bible. The visitor was Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, performing his last political role before ‘travelling abroad’. He came to offer Razumovsky the rank of imperial highness. This was a polite way of asking if he had secretly married the Empress Elisabeth. Catherine and the Orlovs wished to know: was there a marriage certificate? Razumovsky must have smiled at this. He closed his Bible and produced a box of ebony, gold and pearl. He opened it to reveal an old scroll sealed with the imperial eagle…

Catherine had to tread carefully. She absolutely understood the dangers of raising the Orlovs too high. If she married Orlov, she would threaten Grand Duke Paul’s claim to the throne, and possibly his life, as well as outraging the magnates and the army. But she loved Orlov. She owed the Orlovs her throne. She had borne Grigory a son.^* This was an age when the imperial public and private lives were indissoluble. All through her life, Catherine longed for a family: her parents were dead; her aunt had terrorized her and taken away her son; the interests of her son were a living threat to her reign if not her life; even Anna, her daughter with Poniatowski, had died young. Her position was extraordinary, yet she yearned for an almost bourgeois home with Grigory Orlov, whom she regarded as her partner for life. So she let the question ride – and probably allowed the Orlovs to send this envoy to ask Razumovsky whether the precedent existed.

Yet the brothers were not the most subtle of operators. At one small party, Grigory boasted with gangsterish swagger that, if he wished, he could overthrow Catherine in a month. Kirill Razumovsky, the good-natured brother of Alexei, replied quick as a flash: ‘Could be; but, my friend, instead of waiting a month, we would have hanged you in two weeks.’³⁴ The guffaws were hearty – but chilling. When Catherine hinted at an Orlov marriage, Panin supposedly replied: ‘The Empress can do what she wishes but Madame Orlov will never be Empress of Russia.’³⁵

This vacillation was not a safe policy. In May 1763, while Catherine was on a pilgrimage from Moscow to Rostov-on-Don, she was given a shock that put paid to Orlov’s project. Gentleman of the Bedchamber Fyodor Khitrovo, who with Potemkin had raised the Horse-Guards for Catherine, was arrested. Under interrogation, he admitted planning to kill the Orlovs to stop the marriage and marry Catherine to Ivan VI’s brother. This was no ordinary officer muttering over his vodka but a player in the inner circle of Catherine’s conspiracy. Did Panin or Catherine herself create this decisive nyet to Orlov ambitions? If so, it served its purpose.

This brings us back to the question asked of Alexei Razumovsky, who toyed with the scroll in the bejewelled box until Chancellor Vorontsov held out his hand. Razumovsky tossed it into the fire. ‘No, there is no proof,’ he said. ‘Tell that to our gracious Sovereign.’³⁶ The story is mythical, but it appears in some histories that Razumovsky thus stymied Catherine’s wish to marry Orlov. In fact, Catherine was fond of both Razumovskys – two genial charmers and old friends of about twenty years. There probably was no marriage certificate. The burning of the scroll sounds like the droll Cossack’s joke. But, if the question was asked, it is most likely that Alexei Razumovsky gave the answer that Catherine wanted in order to avoid having to marry Orlov. If she needed to ask the question, she did not want an answer.³⁷

—

Just as she celebrated success in Poland, Catherine faced another challenge from the simpleton known as ‘Nameless Prisoner Number One’, the Emperor in the tower. On 20 June 1764, the Empress left the capital on a progress through her Baltic provinces. On 5 July a tormented young officer, Vasily Mirovich, with dreams of restoring his family’s fortunes, launched a bid to liberate Ivan VI from the bowels of Schlüsselburg and make him emperor. Poor Mirovich did not know that Catherine had reconfirmed Peter III’s orders that, if anyone tried to free Prisoner Number One, he had to be killed instantly. Meanwhile Mirovich, whose regiment was stationed at Schlüsselburg, was trying to discover the identity of the mysterious prisoner without a name who was held so carefully in the fortress.

On 4 July, Mirovich, who had lost his most trusted co-conspirator in a drowning accident, wrote a manifesto proclaiming the accession of Emperor Ivan VI. Given the atmosphere of instability after the regicide of Peter III and the superstitious reverence Russians held for their tsars, he managed to recruit a few men. At 2 a.m. Mirovich seized control of the gates, overpowered the commandant and headed for Ivan’s cell. Shooting broke out between the rebels and Ivan’s guards and then abruptly ceased. When he rushed into the cell, he found the ex-Emperor’s body still bleeding from a handful of stab wounds. Mirovich understood immediately, kissed the body and surrendered.

Catherine continued with her trip for one more day but then returned, fearing that the conspiracy might have been wider. Under interrogation, it turned out that Mirovich was not the centre of a spider’s web, just a loner. After a trial in September, he was sentenced to death. Six soldiers were variously sentenced to run the gauntlet of 1,000 men ten or twelve times (which would probably prove fatal) – and then face exile if they survived. Mirovich was beheaded on 15 September 1764.

The murder of two emperors shocked Europe: the philosophes, who were already enjoying a flattering correspondence with the Empress and regarded her as one of their own, had to bend over backwards to overcome their scruples: ‘I agree with you that our philosophy does not want to boast of too many pupils like her. But what can one do? One must love one’s friends with all their faults,’ wrote d’Alembert to Voltaire. The latter wittily coined a new euphemism for murdering two tsars: ‘These are family matters,’ said the sage of Ferney, ‘which do not concern me.’³⁸

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Being Catherine, she did not relax. She knew that it was not enough merely to rule. Her Court was the mirror which would reflect her successes to the world. She knew that she herself had to be its finest ornament.

‘I never saw in my life a person whose port, manner and behaviour answered so strongly to the idea I had formed of her,’ wrote the English envoy Sir George Macartney. ‘Though in her 37^th year of her age, she may still be called beautiful. Those who knew her younger say they never remembered her so lovely as at present and I very readily believe it.’³⁹ The Prince de Ligne, looking back from 1780, thought, ‘She had been more handsome than pretty. The majesty of her forehead was tempered by the eyes and agreeable smile.’⁴⁰ The perspicacious Scottish professor William Richardson, author of Anecdotes of the Russian Empire, wrote, ‘The Russian Empress is above average height, gracious and well proportioned but well covered, has pretty colouring but seeks to embellish it with rouge, like all women in this country. Her mouth is well-shaped with fine teeth; her blue eyes have a scrutinizing expression. The whole is such that it would be insulting to say she had a masculine look but it would not be doing her justice to say she was entirely feminine.’ The celebrated lover Giacomo Casanova, who met Catherine and knew something about women, captured the workings of her charm: ‘Of medium stature, but well built and with a majestic bearing, the Sovereign had the art of making herself loved by all those whom she believed were curious to know her. Though not beautiful, she was sure to please by her sweetness, affability and her intelligence, of which she made very good use to appear to have no pretensions.’⁴¹

In conversation, she was ‘not witty herself’⁴² but she made up for it by being quick and well informed. Macartney thought ‘her conversation is brilliant, perhaps too brilliant for she loves to shine in conversation’. Casanova revealed her need to appear effortlessly clever: when he encountered her out walking, he talked about the Greek calendar and she said little, but when they met again, she was fully informed on the subject. ‘I felt certain that she had studied the subject on purpose to dazzle.’⁴³

She possessed the gift of tact: when she was discussing her reforms with some deputies from Novgorod, the Governor explained that ‘these gentlemen are not rich’. Catherine shot back: ‘I demand your pardon, Mr Governor. They are rich in zeal.’ This charming response brought tears to their eyes and pleased them more than money.⁴⁴

When she was at work, she dressed sensibly in a long Russian-style dress with hanging sleeves, but when at play or display, ‘her dress is never gaudy, always rich…she appears to great advantage in regimentals and is fond of appearing in them’.⁴⁵ When she entered a room, she always made ‘three bows à la Russe…’ to the right, left and middle.⁴⁶ She understood that appearances mattered, so she followed Orthodox rituals to the letter in public, despite Casanova noticing that she barely paid attention in church.

She was indeed a woman who took infinite pains to be a great empress and she had a Germanic attitude to wasting time: ‘waste as little time as possible’, she said. ‘Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire.’⁴⁷ One part of her genius was choosing talented men and getting the best out of them: ‘Catherine had the rare ability to choose the right people,’ wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, who knew her and her top officials. ‘History has justified her choices.’⁴⁸ Once they had been selected, she managed her men so adroitly that each of them ‘began to think [what she proposed] was his own idea and tried to fulfil it with zeal’.⁴⁹ She was careful not to humiliate her servants: ‘My policy is to praise aloud and scold in a low voice.’⁵⁰ Indeed many of her sayings are so simple and shrewd that they could be collected as a modern management guide.

In theory, the absolute power of the tsars received blind obedience in an empire without law – but Catherine knew it was different in practice, as Peter III and later her son Paul I never learned. ‘It is not as easy as you think [to see your will fulfilled]…’, she explained to Potemkin’s secretary, Popov. ‘In the first place my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out…I take advice, I consult…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.’⁵¹

She was polite and generous to her courtiers, kind and considerate to her servants, but there were sinister sides to her thorough enjoyment of power: she relished the secret powers of her state, reading the police reports, then chilling her victims like any dictator by letting them know that they were being watched. Years later, the young French volunteer Comte de Damas, alone in his room watching some troops parade past the window on their way to fight the Swedes, muttered, ‘If the King of Sweden were to see those soldiers…he’d make peace.’ Two days later, when he was paying his court to the Empress, ‘she put her lips close to my ear and said, “So you think if the King of Sweden were to inspect my Guards, he’d make peace?” And she began to laugh.’⁵²

Her charm did not fool everyone: there was some truth in the barbs of the priggish Prince Shcherbatov, who served at Court, when he described this ‘considerable beauty, clever, affable’, who ‘loves glory and is assiduous in pursuit of it’. She was ‘full of ostentation…infinitely selfish’. He claimed: ‘True friendship has never resided in her heart and she is ready to betray her best friend…her rule is to cajole a man as long as he is needed and then in her own phrase “to throw away a squeezed-out lemon”.’⁵³ This was not exactly so, but power always came first. Potemkin was the one exception who proved the rule.

As a gentleman of the bedchamber, Potemkin now spent much of his time around the imperial palaces performing his duties, which included standing behind her chair at meals to serve her and her guests. This meant that he saw the Empress frequently in public, getting to know the routine of her life. She took an interest in him – and he began to take a reckless interest in her that was not necessarily fitting for such a junior courtier.

Skip Notes

* This was the child with whom she was pregnant at Elisabeth’s death – Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, 1762–1813. Though he was never officially recognized, Catherine saw to his upbringing. He led a debauched life in Paris with the Empress paying his debts, before returning home and later travelling again. Paul I finally recognized him as a half-brother and made him a count.