Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

8

POWER

She is crazy about him. They may well be in love because they are exactly the same.

Senator Ivan Yelagin to Durand de Distroff

‘These two great characters were made for each other,’ observed Masson. ‘He first loved his Sovereign as his mistress and then cherished her as his glory.’¹ Their similarity of ambitions and talents was both the foundation of their love and its flaw. The great love affair of the Empress heralded a new political era because everyone immediately appreciated that, unlike Vassilchikov or even Grigory Orlov, Potemkin was capable of exerting his power and would strive to do so at once. But, in early 1774, they had to be very careful at the most sensitive moment in Catherine’s reign so far: Pugachev was still rampaging through the territory north of the Caspian, south of the Urals, east of Moscow – and the worried nobles wanted him stopped quickly. The Turks were still not ready to negotiate and Rumiantsev’s army was tired and fever-stricken. A false move against Pugachev, a defeat by the Turks, a provocation against the Orlovs, a slight to the Guards, a concession to the Grand Duke – any of these could literally have cost the lovers their heads.

Just in case they were under any illusions, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky decided to let them know that he was carefully watching the illuminated window of the imperial bathhouse. The Orlov brothers, who had recovered so much ground since 1772, would be the first casualties of Potemkin’s rise.

‘Yes or no?’, ‘Le Balafre’ asked the Empress with a slight laugh.

‘About what?’, replied the Empress.

‘Is it love?’, persisted Orlov-Chesmensky.

‘I cannot lie,’ said the Empress.

Scarface asked again: ‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes!’, said the Empress finally.

Orlov-Chesmensky began to laugh again: ‘Do you meet in the banya?’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘Because for four days we’ve seen the light in the window of the bath later than usual.’ Then he added: ‘It was clear yesterday that you’ve made an appointment later so you’d agree not to display affection, to put others off the scent. Good move.’² Catherine reported all this to her lover and the two revelled in it like naughty children shocking the adults. But there was always something menacing in Alexei Orlov’s jokes.

—

Between bouts of love-making and laughter in the banya, Potemkin immediately began to help Catherine on both the Russo-Turkish War and the Pugachev Rebellion. These political actors often discussed how to play a scene: ‘Goodbye brother,’ she told him. ‘Behave cleverly in public and that way, no one will know what we are really thinking.’³ Yet she felt safe with Potemkin, who gave her the feeling that everything was possible, that all their glorious dreams were achievable and that the problems of the moment could be settled.

Catherine was already under pressure about Potemkin. In early March, unidentified but powerful courtiers, including one nicknamed ‘the Alchemist’ – possibly Panin or an Orlov – advised Catherine to dispense with Potemkin: ‘The man you call “the Alchemist” visited…He tried to demonstrate to me the frenzy of yours and my actions and finished by asking if he wanted me to ask you to go back to the Army: to which I agreed. They are all of them at least trying to lecture me…I didn’t own up but I didn’t excuse myself too so they couldn’t claim that I’d lied.’ But the letters also show Potemkin and Catherine’s unity in political matters:

In short, I have masses of things to tell you and particularly on the subject we spoke about yesterday between noon and two o’clock; but I do not know if you are in the same mood as yesterday and I don’t know either whether your words correspond always to your actions since you promised me several times you would come and you do not come…I am thinking about you all the time. Oh! La! La! What a long letter I have written to you. Excuse me, I always forget that you don’t like it. I’ll never do it again. ⁴

Catherine struggled to prevent Potemkin’s rise from causing a rift with the Orlovs: ‘I ask you – don’t do one thing: don’t injure and don’t try to injure Prince Orlov in my thoughts because that would be ingratitude on your part. Before your arrival there was no one who was praised and loved by him as you.’⁵

Potemkin now demanded a place in government. The most important positions were war and foreign affairs. Since he had come back as a war hero from the Danube, it was natural for him to choose the War College as his target. As early as 5 March 1774, within a week of his appointment as her adjutant-general, she channelled orders to Zakhar Chernyshev, President of the College of War, Orlov’s ally, through Potemkin.⁶ As ever, the Pugachev Rebellion worked to Potemkin’s advantage: all governments require scapegoats for public disasters. Thus Zakhar Chernyshev, who received none of the credit for Rumiantsev’s victories, bore the blame for the rampages of Pugachev, and was none too happy about it: ‘Count Chernyshev is very anxious and keeps saying he will retire.’⁷ Ten days after Potemkin had delivered Catherine’s messages to Chernyshev, she promoted him to lieutenant-colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, of which she was colonel. This had been Alexei Orlov’s place, so it was a sign of the highest favour – and of the eclipse of the Orlovs. And he became captain of the sixty gorgeously attired Chevaliers-Gardes who patrolled the palaces in silver helmets and breastplates and whose Hussar or Cossack squadrons escorted her carriage.

Potemkin knew that it would be madness to take on all the factions at Court, so he tried ‘to be friends with everyone’, wrote Countess Rumiantseva⁸ – especially Nikita Panin.⁹ The smug and slothful Panin looked ‘more content than before’ Potemkin’s advent. But Count Solms did not underestimate him: ‘I’m only afraid that Potemkin, who has a reputation for being sly and wicked, can benefit by Panin’s kindness.’¹⁰

The favourite hoped, through Panin, to neutralize the other dangerous element in Catherine’s Court – the pug-nosed, punctilious, Prussophile Heir Grand Duke Paul, now twenty, who longed to play a political role befitting his rank. Paul had disliked Prince Orlov, but he was to hate the new favourite even more, because he already sensed that Potemkin would forever exclude him from Court. Potemkin soon crossed him. Paul, a stickler for military discipline à la Prusse, bumped into the favourite when he visited his mother and grumbled about Potemkin’s dress. ‘My darling,’ Catherine told her lover, ‘the Grand Duke comes to me on Tuesdays and Fridays…9 to 11 o’clock…No criticism because Count…Andrei Razumovsky [friend of Grand Duke Paul] goes to see them in the same dress, I don’t find him any worse dressed than you…’.¹¹ Fortunately, Grand Duke Paul had not encountered Potemkin in one of his half-open bearskins with the pink bandanna, which was enough to alarm anyone.

Panin undertook to stroke the increasingly bitter Tsarevich towards ‘clever’ Potemkin’s side.¹² So Potemkin was using Panin, who thought he was using Potemkin. Countess Rumiantseva told her husband that Potemkin’s return had changed everything politically – and she was right.¹³

—

Potemkin was concentrating on the Pugachev Rebellion. Soon after Catherine and Potemkin had become lovers and political partners, General Alexander Bibikov, setting up his headquarters at Kazan, managed to defeat Pugachev’s 9,000-strong army on 22 March, raise the sieges of Orenburg, Ufa and Yaiksk and force the impostor to abandon his ‘capital’ at Berda, outside Orenburg. The favourite suggested the appointment of his cousin, Pavel Sergeievich Potemkin, the son of the man who had tried to persuade his father that he was illegitimate, to head the Secret Commission in Kazan which was to find the cause of the Rebellion – the Turks and the French were the main suspects – and punish the rebels. Potemkin and Catherine ordered Zakhar Chernyshev¹⁴ to recall Pavel Potemkin from the Turkish front. Pavel Sergeievich was a very eighteenth-century all-rounder – efficient soldier, gracious courtier, poet and multilingual scholar, the first to translate Rousseau into Russian. When he arrived in Petersburg, Catherine immediately ‘told him to join Bibikov’ in Kazan.¹⁵ Now that Bibikov was so close to throttling the false Peter III and Pavel Potemkin was on his way to handle the post-mortem, the lovers switched their minds to ending the Turkish War.

—

‘Matushka,’ Potemkin scrawled as he read through one of Catherine’s drafts of the Russian peace terms, ‘what do the articles underlined mean?’ Underneath, the Empress replied: ‘It means that they have already been added and if there is debate, they will not be insisted on…’.¹⁶ The moment he arrived in the Empress’s counsels, he began working with her on the instructions to be given to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev. At first the courtiers presumed that Potemkin was trying to destroy his former chief. The Potemkin legend claims that throughout his life he was viciously jealous of the few others as talented as himself. This was not so. ‘It was said he was unkind to Rumiantsev,’ Solms told Frederick, ‘but I got to know the opposite – they are friends and he defends him against reproaches.’ The Field-Marshal’s wife was equally surprised that ‘he tries to serve you at every opportunity…he even favours me.’¹⁷

A forceful jolt was required to drive the Turks to the peace table, but Rumiantsev’s dwindling army needed reinforcements for his planned attack across the Danube, and the authority to make peace on the spot. In late March, Potemkin persuaded Catherine ‘to empower Rumiantsev and so the war was ended’, as she put it herself.¹⁸ This meant that the traditional Ottoman delaying tactics would not work, because Rumiantsev was given authority to make peace on the spot, within the boundaries defined by Catherine and Potemkin, but without the need to refer back to Petersburg. The Field-Marshal was sent the new peace terms corrected by Potemkin on 10 April. By this time, the Turks had lost their appetite for talking. Ottoman decision-making, agonizingly slow at the best of times, had been delayed by the death of Sultan Mustafa III and the succession of his cautious brother Abdul-Hamid. The Turks were encouraged to keep fighting by the French and probably by the duplicitious Prussians: Frederick, while swallowing his share of the Polish Partition, was still jealous of Russian gains in the south. More than that, Turks were also heartened by the Pugachev Rebellion. So there could be no more peace without war first. Once again, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev prepared to cross the Danube.

—

Potemkin’s first step to power was to join the State Council, the consultative war cabinet created by Catherine in 1768. His rise is always described as quick and effortless. But, contrary to historical cliché, imperial favour did not guarantee him power. Potemkin thought he was ready for the Council. Few agreed with him. Besides, all the other members of the Council were on the First or Second of the Table of Ranks; Potemkin was still on the Third. ‘What am I to do? I am not even admitted to the Council. And why not? They won’t have it but I’ll bring things about,’ raged Potemkin, ‘with an openness that astonished’ the French diplomat Durand.¹⁹ He tended to stun most diplomats he encountered with his outspoken asides. This was the first sign to the foreign ambassadors that Potemkin, after barely three months in Catherine’s bed, wanted real power and was set on getting it.

While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Catherine still refused to appoint him to the Council. He brought his determination and moodiness to bear. ‘On Sunday, when I was sitting at the table near him and the Empress,’ Durand recorded, ‘I saw that not only did he not speak to her but that he did not even reply to her questions. She was beside herself and we for our part very much out of countenance. The silence was only broken by the Master of Horse [Lev Naryshkin] who never succeeded in animating the conversation. On rising from the table, the Empress retired alone and reappeared with red eyes and a troubled air.’²⁰ Had Potemkin got his way?

‘Sweetheart,’ the Empress wrote on 5 May, ‘because you asked me to send you with something to the Council today, I wrote a note that must be given to Prince Viazemsky. So if you want to go, you must be ready by twelve o’clock. I’m sending you the note and the report of the Kazan Commission.’²¹ This note asking Potemkin to discuss the Secret Commission created to investigate and punish the Pugachev rebels sounds casual, but it was not: Catherine was inviting Potemkin to join the Council. Potemkin ostentatiously delivered the note to Procurator-General Viazemsky and then sat down at the top table: he was never to leave it. ‘In no other country’, Gunning informed London the next day, ‘do favourites rise so fast. To the great surprise of the Council members, General Potemkin took his place among them.’²²

It was about this time that the Kazan Secret Commission uncovered a ‘plot’ to assassinate Catherine at her summer residence, Tsarskoe Selo: a captured Pugachev supporter had confessed under interrogation that assassins had been despatched. Potemkin arranged the investigation with Viazemsky: ‘I think the mountain will give birth to a mouse,’²³ Catherine bravely told Potemkin. He was alarmed, but it turned out the story was probably invented under interrogation by the Commission in the south, one reason why Catherine was against the Russian habit of knouting suspects. She was too far away to prevent the Commission using torture on rebels, though she tried to get Bibikov to minimize its use.²⁴

On 30 May, Potemkin was promoted to General-en-Chef and Vice-President of the College of War. It is easy for us to forget that, while this tough factional battle was going on in the councils of the Empress, Potemkin and Catherine were still enjoying the first glow of their affair. On possibly the very same day as his promotion, the Empress sent Potemkin this note in babyish love-talk: ‘General loves me? Me loves General a lot.’²⁵ The undermined War Minister Chernyshev was ‘hit so hard’, reported Gunning, ‘that he could not remain at his post…’.²⁶ The lame duck soon resigned to become governor of the new Belorussian provinces, taken in the First Partition of Poland. There ended the factional crisis that had started two years earlier with the fall of Prince Orlov.

—

Honours, responsibilities, serfs, estates and riches rained down on Potemkin: on 31 March he had been appointed Governor-General of New Russia, the huge southern provinces that bordered on the Tartar Khanate of the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire; on 21 June, he was made commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, namely his beloved Cossacks. It is hard to imagine the scale of wealth that Potemkin suddenly enjoyed. It was a world away from his upbringing in Chizhova or even his godfather’s house in Moscow. A peasant soldier in the Russian infantry was paid about seven roubles a year; an officer around 300. Potemkin regularly received gifts of 100,000 roubles on his namedays, on holidays or to celebrate his particular help on a given project. He had a huge table allowance of 300 roubles a month. He lived and was served by the imperial servants in all the palaces for free. He was said to receive 12,000 roubles on the first of every month on his dressing table, but it is more likely that Catherine simply handed him thousands of roubles when she felt like it, as Vassilchikov had testified. Potemkin spent as easily as he received, finding it embarrassing on one hand, while, on the other, constantly demanding more. Yet he was still far from touching the ceiling of either his income or his extravagance. Soon there was to be no ceiling on either.²⁷

Catherine made sure that Potemkin received as many Russian and foreign medals as possible – to increase his status was to consolidate hers. Monarchs liked to procure foreign medals for their favourites. The foreign monarchs resented handing them out – especially to the lovers of usurping regicides. But, unless there was a very good excuse, they usually gave in. The correspondence about these awards between monarchs and Russian ambassadors are most amusing studies in the tortuously polite, almost coded euphemism that was the language of courtly diplomacy.

‘Good morning sweetheart,’ Catherine greeted Potemkin playfully around this time, ‘…I got up and sent to the Vice-Chancellor asking for the ribbons; I wrote that they were for…General Potemkin and I planned to put them on him after mass. Do you know him? He’s handsome, he’s as clever as he is handsome. And he loves me as much as he’s handsome and clever and I love him too…’.²⁸ That day, he got the Russian Order of St Alexander Nevsky and the Polish Order of the White Eagle, kindly sent by King Stanislas-Augustus. There was prestige in these orders, though the higher nobility regarded them as their due: one of Potemkin’s more winning characteristics was his childish delight in medals. Soon he had collected Peter the Great’s Order of St Andrew; Frederick the Great sent the Prussian Black Eagle; Denmark sent the White Elephant; Sweden the Holy Seraphim. But Louis XVI and Maria Theresa refused the Holy Ghost and the Golden Fleece respectively, claiming they were only for Catholics. In London, George III was shocked by his ambassador’s attempt to procure Potemkin the Garter.²⁹

—

‘It seems the Empress is going to commit the reins of government to Potemkin,’ Gunning told London. Indeed the unthinkable had happened: Potemkin was now Prince Orlov’s superior. The foreign ambassadors could not swallow this. They had become so used to the Orlovs that they could not believe that they were not about to return to power at any minute. The Orlovs could not believe it either.

Prince Orlov stormed in to see Catherine on 2 June – an alarming sight, even for an Empress. ‘They say’, reported the well-informed Gunning, ‘Orlov and Catherine had it out.’³⁰ Prince Orlov had always been good-natured, but now he was permanently and dangerously irascible. His temper, once released, was fearsome. Indeed Catherine called him a ‘madcap’ and was upset by whatever Orlov said to her. But she was capable of dealing with him too: he agreed ‘to travel abroad’ again. She did not care. She had Potemkin: ‘Goodnight my friend. Send to tell me tomorrow how you are. Bye – I’m very bored without you.’³¹

On 9 June, Rumiantsev took the offensive against the Turks, despatching two corps across the Danube, which defeated their main army near Kozludzhi. This cut the Grand Vizier off from the Danubian forts. Russian cavalry galloped south past Shumla into today’s Bulgaria.

Catherine and Potemkin were sorry to learn of the sudden death from fever of Pugachev’s vanquisher, Bibikov, but the Rebellion seemed over and they appointed the mediocre Prince Fyodor Shcherbatov to succeed him. Suddenly, in early July, Catherine learned that Pugachev, despite his defeats, had resurfaced with another army. She sacked Shcherbatov and appointed another, General Prince Peter Golitsyn: ‘I’m sending you my dear the letter that I’ve done to Prince Shcherbatov. Correct it please and then I’ll have it read to the Council.’ The Empress wrote optimistically to Potemkin, ‘it’ll hit the nail on the head’.³²

On 20 June, the Turks sued for peace: usually this would have meant a truce, a congress and the months of negotiating that had ruined the last peace talks. This is where Potemkin’s advice to ‘empower’ Rumiantsev bore fruit, because the Field-Marshal set up camp in the Bulgarian village of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and told the Turks that either they signed peace or the two armies went back to war. The Ottomans began to talk; news of a peace treaty was expected any day; Catherine’s spirits rose. Everything was going so well.

—

A new Pugachev crisis struck Catherine in mid-July. On the 11th, Pugachev appeared before the ancient and strategic city of Kazan with a swelling army of 25,000. The supposedly defeated Pugachev was not defeated at all, but he was being pursued by the true hero of the Rebellion, the tirelessly competent Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Mikhelson. Kazan was a mere 93 miles from Nizhny Novgorod and that was just over a hundred miles from Moscow itself. The old Tartar city, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 1556, had 11,000 inhabitants and mainly wooden buildings. It happened that General Pavel Potemkin, the new appointee to run both the Kazan and Orenburg Secret Commissions, had arrived in Kazan on 9 July, two days before Pugachev. The old Governor was ill. Pavel Potemkin took over the command, but he possessed only 650 infantry and 200 unreliable Chuvash cavalry, so he barricaded his forces in the citadel. On the 12th, Pugachev stormed Kazan, which was razed in an infernal orgy of violence that lasted from 6 a.m. to midnight. Anyone in ‘German dress’ or without a beard was killed; women in ‘German dress’ were delivered to the pretender’s camp. The city was reduced to ashes before Pugachev’s army escaped, leaving Pavel Potemkin to be rescued by Mikhelson.

The Volga region was now one teeming peasant rebellion. The Rebellion had taken an even nastier turn: it had started as a Cossack rising. Now it became a savage class war, a regular jacquerie, meaning a slaughter of landowners by peasants, named after the rebellion in northern France in 1358. The regime faced the prospect of the millions of serfs massacring their masters. This was a threat not just to Catherine but to the very foundations of the Empire. Factory serfs, peasants and 5,000 Bashkir horsemen now followed the flag of the pretender. Serfs rose in village after village. Gangs of runaway slaves roamed the countryside. Rebel Cossacks galloped through the villages urging the serfs to rise.^*1 On 21 July, the news of the fall of Kazan reached Catherine in Petersburg. The authorities in the centre began to panic. Would Pugachev march on Moscow?³³

—

The next day the Empress held an emergency Council meeting at Peterhof. She declared that she would travel directly to Moscow to rally the Empire. The Council heard this in smouldering silence. No one dared speak. The members of the Council were worried and uneasy. Catherine herself was rattled: Kazan made her seem suddenly vulnerable. Unusually for her, she showed it. Some of the magnates, especially Prince Orlov and the two Chernyshev brothers, bitterly resented Potemkin’s rise and Panin’s resurgence.

The Council was stunned by the Empress’s wish to go to Moscow. Its defeated silence reflected the depth ‘of the wordless depression’. Catherine turned to her senior minister, Nikita Panin, and asked his opinion of her idea. ‘My answer’, he wrote to his brother, General Peter Panin, ‘was that it would not only be bad but disastrous,’ because it smacked of fear at the top. Catherine passionately argued the benefits of her descent on Moscow. Potemkin backed her. The Moscow option may have been his idea because as the most old Russian among these cultured grandees, he instinctively saw Moscow as the Orthodox capital when the Motherland was in danger. Equally, he may simply have agreed with her because he was too new there to risk independence of Catherine.

The reaction of most of the Council members was almost comical: Prince Orlov refused to give an opinion at all, claiming like a child that he felt off colour, had not slept well and did not have any ideas. Kirill Razumovsky and Field-Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, a pair of ‘fools’, could not summon up a word. Zakhar Chernyshev ‘trembled between the favourites’ – Orlov and Potemkin – and managed to emit ‘half-words twice’. It was recognized that there was no one of any military weight on the Volga to co-ordinate Pugachev’s defeat: ‘a distinguished personage’ was required. But who? Orlov presumably went off to get his beauty sleep while the downhearted Council resolved nothing, other than to wait for news of the Turkish peace treaty.³⁴

Nikita Panin had an idea. After dinner, he took Potemkin aside and proposed that the ‘distinguished personage’ to save Russia was none other than his brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin. There was something to be said for this: he was a victorious battle general with the aristocratic credentials necessary to soothe the fears of landowners. He was already in Moscow. But there was a problem with Peter Panin. He was a rude, arrogant and snobbish curmudgeon for whom the word ‘martinet’ might have been invented. Even for a Russian soldier in the eighteenth century, many of his loudly declared views were absurd: he was a pedant on the privileges of nobles and the minutiae of military etiquette and flaunted a stalwart belief that only men were qualified to be tsar. This harsh disciplinarian and spluttering tyrant was capable of appearing in the anteroom of his headquarters in a grey satin nightgown and a high French nightcap with pink ribbons.³⁵ Catherine loathed him, distrusted him politically and even had him under secret police surveillance.

So Nikita Panin, not daring to raise his brother aloud at the Council, cautiously approached Potemkin, who went straight to the Empress. She was probably furious at the very thought of it. Perhaps he persuaded her that they had little choice when they felt as if even her closest supporter were wavering. She agreed. When Nikita Panin spoke to her later, the Empress dissembled her real views and, ever the actress, graciously swore that she wanted Peter Panin to take supreme command of the Volga provinces and ‘save Moscow and the internal parts of the Empire’. Nikita Panin immediately wrote to his brother.³⁶

The Panins had pulled off what was almost a coup d’état, forcing Catherine to swallow the humiliation of the hated Peter Panin saving the Empire. They were now, in their way, as much of a threat to Catherine and Potemkin as Pugachev. Having gulped Panin’s distasteful medicine, the lovers at once realized that they had to water it down. It was to get worse before it got better: the Panins demanded massive viceregal powers for the general over all towns, courts and Secret Commissions in the four huge provinces affected, and over all military forces (except Rumiantsev’s First Army, the Second Army occupying the Crimea and the units in Poland), as well as power to issue death sentences. ‘You see my friend,’ Catherine told Potemkin, ‘from the enclosed pieces, that Count Panin wants to make his brother the dictator of the best parts of the Empire.’ She was determined not to raise this ‘first-class liar…who has personally offended me, above all the mortals in the Empire’. Potemkin took over the negotiations with the Panins and the management of the Rebellion.³⁷

Catherine and Potemkin did not know that, before Kazan had fallen, Rumiantsev had signed an extremely beneficial peace with the Turks – the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi. On the evening of 23 July, two couriers, one of them Rumiantsev’s son, galloped into Peterhof with the news. Catherine’s mood changed from despair to gloating enthusiasm. ‘I think today is the happiest day of my life,’ she told the Governor of Moscow.³⁸ The Treaty gave Russia a toehold on the Black Sea, granting the fortresses of Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn and the narrow strip of coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers. Russian merchant ships could pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean. She could build a Black Sea Fleet. The Khanate of the Crimea became independent of the Ottoman Sultan. This success was to make Potemkin’s achievements possible. Catherine ordered extravagant festivities. The Court moved to Oranienbaum three days later to celebrate.

This strengthened Potemkin’s position with Peter Panin, who waited excitedly in Moscow for confirmation of his dictatorial powers. The surviving drafts of these powers show that Catherine and Potemkin were equally excited about cutting the Panins down to size. They certainly did not hurry: Nikita Panin now realized that he might have overplayed his hand: ‘I could see from the first day that this affair was considered…an extreme humiliation.’ Potemkin was not overawed by the Panins: ‘he doesn’t listen to anything and doesn’t want to listen but decides everything with his mind’s impudence.’³⁹

When Potemkin wrote to Peter Panin a few days later with the Empress’s instructions, he spelt out, with all that ‘impudence’, that the appointment was completely thanks to his own efforts with the Empress: ‘I’m absolutely sure that Your Excellency will treat my actions as a good turn to you.’⁴⁰ General Panin received his orders on 2 August – he was only to command forces already fighting Pugachev and enjoy authority over Kazan, Orenburg and Nizhny Novgorod. Potemkin still had his tough cousin Pavel Sergeievich in Kazan as a counterbalance to the overmighty Panin: authority was split between them. Panin’s job was to destroy the Pugachev forces; Pavel Potemkin was to arrest, interrogate and punish. Not all the members of the Council quite understood that Peter Panin was not to be ‘dictator’: when Viazemsky suggested placing Pavel Potemkin’s Secret Commission under Panin, he received a laconic rebuttal in the imperial hand: ‘No, because it is under me.’⁴¹

The latest news from the Volga weakened the Panins yet further. It emerged that Mikhelson had beaten Pugachev several times right after the fall of Kazan, so that the news of its sacking was out of date by the time it rocked the Council in Petersburg. Far from marching on Moscow, Pugachev escaped southwards. Catherine’s political crisis had passed. The celebrations for the victory over the Turks began at Oranienbaum on the 27th with parties for the diplomatic corps. But Catherine was still busy watching the strange disturbances on the Volga.

It was always hard to tell if Pugachev was fleeing or advancing. Even his flight resembled an invasion. Rabbles rallied to him, towns surrendered, manors burned, necks snapped, bells were rung. In the remote Lower Volga, the local towns kept falling, culminating on 6 August in the sack of Saratov, where renegade priests administered oaths of allegiance to Pugachev and his wife, which undermined his imposture even more. Twenty-four landowners and twenty-one officials were hanged. But Pugachev was doing what every cornered criminal does: heading home, to the Don.

The victors swiftly fell out among themselves: Peter Panin and Pavel Potemkin, both arrogant and aggressive, undermined each other wherever possible on behalf of their respective relations in Petersburg. This was precisely the reason Potemkin had divided their responsibilities.

Pugachev arrived in the land of the Don Cossacks before Tsaritsyn,^*2 and learned the hard way that a pretender is never honoured in his own country. When he parleyed with Don Cossacks, they realized that ‘Peter III’ was the boy they remembered as Emelian Pugachev. They did not rally. Pugachev, still with 10,000 rebels, fled downriver and was then arrested by his own men. ‘How dare you raise your hands against your emperor!’, he cried. It was to no avail. The ‘Amperator’ had no clothes left. He was handed over to Russian forces in Yaiksk, where the Rebellion had started a year earlier. There was a glut of forceful and ambitious soldiers on the Lower Volga – Pavel Potemkin, Panin, Mikhelson and Alexander Suvorov – among whom there was an undignified scrummage to claim credit for capturing the ‘state villain’ even though none of them had actually done so. Suvorov delivered Pugachev to Peter Panin, who refused to allow Pavel Potemkin to interrogate him.⁴² Like children telling tales to their teachers, they spent August to December writing complaints to Petersburg. Often their contradictory letters arrived on the same day.⁴³ Now that the crisis was over and the lovers were in firm control, Catherine and Potemkin were half outraged, half amused by this squabbling. ‘My love,’ wrote Catherine some time in September, ‘Pavel is right. Suvorov had no more part in this [capture of Pugachev] than Thomas [her dog].’ Potemkin spoke for everyone when he wrote to Peter Panin: ‘We are all filled with joy that the miscreant has come to an end.’⁴⁴

Peter Panin had the bit between his teeth. He even killed some of the witnesses. When he got his hands on the pretender himself, who had served unnoticed under him at Bender in the war, he slapped him across the face and made him kneel. He brought him out and slapped him again for every curious visitor – except Pavel Potemkin, whose job it was to question him.⁴⁵ Catherine and Potemkin neatly cut this Gordian knot by dissolving the Kazan Commission to create the Special Commission of the Secret Department of the Senate in Moscow, which was to arrange Pugachev’s trial. They appointed Pavel Potemkin to it⁴⁶ – but not Panin. Potemkin was obviously protecting his cousin’s interests, and his own, for Catherine told him: ‘I hope all Pavel’s quarrels and dissatisfactions come to an end when he receives my orders to go to Moscow.’ In the midst of the politics, she added: ‘Sweetheart, I love you very much and wish that pill would cure you of all illness. But I ask you to abstain: eat just soup and tea without milk.’⁴⁷

—

Peter Panin ‘now decorated rural Russia with a forest of gallows’, according to one modern historian.⁴⁸ ‘The murderers [of officials]’, declared Panin in a circular that was not approved by Catherine, ‘and their accomplices shall be put to death first by cutting off their hands and feet and then their heads and placing the bodies on blocks beside thoroughfares…those villages in which they were murdered or betrayed shall…hand over the guilty by drawing lots, every third man to be hanged…and if by this means they still do not give them up, then every 100^th man by lot shall actually be hanged from the rib and all remaining adults to be flogged…’.

Panin boasted to Catherine that he did not shrink from ‘spilling of the damned blood of state miscreants’.⁴⁹ The hanging from the rib, which he specified, was performed on a forgotten delicacy – the glagoly, a special form of gallows in the shape of a small letter ‘r’ but with a longer arm, from which victims were hanged by the rib, held in place by a metal hook that was inserted behind their ribs and threaded through.⁵⁰ This macabre exhibition was the last thing Catherine wanted Europe to see, but Panin claimed that it was only to act as a deterrent. Rebels were trussed up on gallows on rafts and sent down the Volga, their corpses decaying on these amphibious gibbets. In fact, far fewer miscreants were executed that one might expect, though there must have been many cases of rough justice. Only 324, many of them renegade priests and nobles, were officially sentenced to death, which, considering the scale of the Rebellion, compares well to the English reprisals after the 1745 Battle of Culloden.⁵¹

The Yaik Cossack Host where the Rebellion had begun was abolished and renamed. In a foretaste of the Soviet fashion for renaming places after their leaders, Catherine ordered that Zimoveyskaya stanitsa,⁵² Pugachev’s home village on the far bank of the Don, should be renamed Potemkinskaya, erasing, in Pushkin’s elegant words, ‘the gloomy remembrance of the rebel with the glory of a new name that was becoming dear to her and the Motherland’.⁵³

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The ‘state miscreant’ was despatched to Moscow, staring like a wild animal out of a specially constructed iron cage. When he arrived at the beginning of November, the angry Muscovites were already relishing the prospect of a particularly sadistic execution. This began to worry Catherine, who knew that the Rebellion was already an embarrassing blight on her Enlightened reputation.

Catherine and Potemkin secretly resolved to reduce the cruelty of the execution – admirable at a time when judicial killing in England and France was still astonishingly vicious. Procurator-General Viazemsky was sent to Moscow, accompanied by the ‘Senate secretary’, Sheshkovsky, the feared knout-wielder who, Catherine chillingly informed Pavel Potemkin, ‘has a special gift with common people’. However, Pugachev was not tortured.⁵⁴

Catherine tried to oversee as much of the trial as she could. She sent Potemkin her Pugachev Manifesto to read – if he was not too ill. The hypochondriac did not reply, so the Empress, who obviously needed his approval, sent him another note: ‘Please read it and tell us now what you make of it: is it good or bad?’ Later that day or the next, the Empress became impatient – ‘it’s twelve o’clock but we haven’t got the end of the Manifesto so it can’t be written out in time and can’t be sent to the Council…If you like the drafts, we ask you to send them back…If you don’t like them, correct them.’ Potemkin may really have been ill or perhaps he was working on the peace celebrations to be held in Moscow. ‘My dear soul, you begin new enterprises every day.’⁵⁵

The trial opened on 30 December in the Great Kremlin Hall. On 2 January 1775, Pugachev was sentenced to be quartered and beheaded. There was no ‘drawing’, or disembowelling while alive, in Russia: that was part of English civilization. However, the ‘quartering’ meant that all four limbs would be cut off while the victim was alive. Muscovites were enthusiastically anticipating this grisly spectacle. Catherine had other ideas. ‘As regards executions,’ she wrote to Viazemsky, ‘there must be no painful ones.’ On 21 December, she was at last able to tell Grimm that ‘in a few days, the farce of the “Marquis de Pugachev” will be finished. When you receive this letter, you can count on it that you won’t hear any more talk about that particular gentleman.’⁵⁶

So the last setpiece scene of the ‘farce of the Marquis de Pugachev’ was prepared in the Bolotnaia Square below the Kremlin. On 10 January 1775, the crowds gathered, keen to witness the dismemberment of the living ‘monster’. Pugachev, ‘besmeared all over with black’, was drawn in ‘a kind of dung-cart’, in which he was fastened to a stake. There were two priests with him and the executioner stood behind. Two gleaming axes lay on the block. ‘Not a trace of fear’ was discernible on his serene face ‘in the hour approaching dissolution’. The ‘monster’ climbed up the ladder to the scaffold, undressed himself and stretched out, ready for the executioner to begin his carving.

Something ‘strange and unexpected’ happened. The executioner swung his axe and, contrary to the sentence, beheaded Pugachev without ‘quartering’. This outraged both the judges and the crowd. Someone, possibly one of the sentencing judges, called out to the executioner and ‘threatened him in severe terms’. Another official shouted, ‘Ah, you son of a bitch – what have you done?’ And then added: ‘Well hurry up – hands and feet!’ Witnesses said it was generally believed that the executioner ‘will lose his tongue…for his neglect’. The executioner paid no attention and dismembered the corpse, before moving on to cut off the tongues and clip the noses of the other miscreants who had avoided the death penalty. Pugachev’s diverse quarters were exposed at the top of a pole in the middle of the scaffold. The head was stuck on an iron spike and displayed.⁵⁷ The Pugachevschina – the Time of Pugachev – was over.

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Some time in the last stages of the crisis, Catherine wrote this letter to Potemkin: ‘My dear soul, cher Epoux, darling husband, come and snuggle up, if you please. Your caress is sweet and lovely to me…Beloved husband.’⁵⁸

Skip Notes

*1 It was a mark of the anarchy engulfing the Volga region that yet another false Peter III, a fugitive serf, now managed to raise another rabble army and conquer Troitsk, south-east of Moscow, where he set up another grotesque Court.

*2 Renamed Stalingrad in 1925. Since 1961, it has been called Volgagrad.