Prince of Princes -The Life of Potemkin

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2001

PRINCE OF PRINCES

THE LIFE OF

POTEMKIN

Fascinating...this highly ambitious biography has

succeeded triumphantly' Antony Beevor, Sunday Times

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

Prince of Princes The Life of Potemkin

'This splendidly written biography...Not only does it retrieve Potemkin and his eccentric career from historical obscurity, it helps bring to life all of aristocratic, 18th century Russia. Could easily have been double the length so enjoyable is it' AnnЈ Applebaum, Sunday Telegraph

Prince Grigory Potemkin was Catherine the Great's lover, secret husband and partner in ruling the Russian Empire. Catherine called him 'one of the greatest, strangest and wittiest eccentrics' of her epoch - her 'twin soul', 'tiger' and 'darling husband'; her 'hero' and 'master' in politics.

Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement allowing them to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine, her favourites. But they never stopped loving each other.

After five years' new research in archives from St. Petersburg to Odessa, Montefiore brings blazingly to life Potemkin's loving partnership with Catherine and restores him to his rightful place as an outstandingly gifted statesman, and a colossus of the eighteenth century.

' A terrific read...Book of the Year' Antonia Fraser, BBC History Magazine

'Excellent with dazzling mastery of detail and literary flair... Book of the Year...One of the great love-stories of history in a league with Napoleon and Josephine and Antony and Cleopatra' Economist

PHOENIX PRESS NON-FICTION/HISTORY £9.99 IN UK ONLY

'Magnificent...' Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail

'Superb' Frank McLynn, Financial Times

Cover: Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky by G.B. Lampi (attrib.) Suvorov Museum, St. Petersburg

Spine: Catherine II by A. Roslin / Hermitage, St. Petersburg

Cover design: Killian Strong

PRINCE OF PRINCES

'This wonderful history book!'

Jeremy Paxman, Start the Week, Radio Four

'If you want a good racy historical read, Prince of Princes certainly provides it! Book of the Year.' Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph

'Potemkin opened up a whole world ... to me. Book of the Year.'

Alain de Botton, Sunday Telegraph

'Montefiore's enthusiasm and knowledge make this more than just an engaging biography - it's a headlong gallop of a read. Potemkin was a scandalous, promiscuous and fascinating character. Through Montefiore's panoramic study, one clearly sees the split character of Russia itself. Book of the Year.'

Antony Beevor, Mail on Sunday

'Superb ..Andrew Roberts, Daily Telegraph

'His object in this exhaustive and beautifully written biography is to rescue Potemkin from 200 years of defamation ... a biography as industrious and exuberant as the man himself vividly brings to life his cast of conspirators, aristocratic mistresses, dandies, adventurers and diplomats.' Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail

'This magnificent biography beautifully brings out ... the heroic and mesmerising tale of one of history's greatest love affairs whose passion puts Antony and Cleopatra in the second league.'

Petronella Wyatt, Independent

'The best new book I've read this year and indeed for several years. Impeccably researched, beautifully written, it takes us at an unslackening pace through the colourful life of one of the most legendary Russians - war hero, politician, visionary and lover.'

Simon Heffer, Daily Mail

'A superb, passionate but scholarly defence of one of the greatest figures of Russian history. With this lavish biography, Montefiore has announced himself as a historian who deserves to be taken seriously.' Victor Sebestyen, Evening Standard

This bulky, exhilarating book about Catherine the Great's lover, general and right-hand man, Prince Grigory Potemkin, could not be better timed.' Stella Tillyard, Mail on Sunday

'This irresistible biography is history from above. To write this stupendous, engaging tour de force, the first biography of Potemkin in any language since 1891, Montefiore has devoted many hours in the archives of Moscow and Petersburg and covered thousands of miles of the former Russian empire ...'

Philip Mansel, Spectator

This is a superb biography and it is hard to see how it can be superseded. To make archives come alive, one needs psychological acumen and lucid page-turning prose. Montefiore succeeds in all these departments.' Frank McLynn, Financial Times

This splendid biography, as sprawling, magnificent and exotic as its subject, provides for the first time in English a fully researched, accurate and immensely readable history of this extraordinary man.' Nikolai Tolstoy, Literary Review

.. this gripping and richly researched biography ...'

Peter Nasmyth, TLS

'Sebag Montefiore is effortlessly readable and compelling ... this is history as it should be written.' Brian Morton, Sunday Herald

'As a scholar of Imperial Russia, I can say Mr Montefiore offers us a masterful and fair treatment of Potemkin. This is a first-rate biography.' Dr Douglas Smith, Amazon

This book ... written with great verve ... is based on a wealth of sources ... Montefiore's narrative breathes new life into them. Montefiore makes the reader appreciate the genius and forgive the absurdity.' Professor Lindsey Hughes, Rossica Magazine 'This is a wonderful book. Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin is as magnificent as its subject. For two centuries this roaring giant of a man has been either ignored or misinterpreted. Now Simon Sebag Montefiore has written a book that captures the iridescent spirit of Russia's greatest adventurer.'

Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

Simon Sebag Montefiore, who was born in 1965, read history at Gonville &c Caius College, Cambridge. He writes for the Sunday Times, the New York Times, and the Spec­tator, particularly about Russia, and spent much of the Nineties travelling throughout the ex-Soviet empire, especi­ally in the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. The author of two novels he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their daughter. He is currently researching his next book - Stalin's Inner Circle - in the Moscow Archives.

Also by Simon Sebag Montefiore

King's Parade My Affair with Stalin

PRINCE OF PRINCES

The Life of Potemkin

Simon Sebag Montefiore

w

PHOENIX PRESS

5 upper saint martin's lane london wc2h 9ea

a phoenix press paperback

First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2000 This paperback edition published in 2001 by Phoenix Press, a division of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane, London WC2H9EA

Copyright © 2000 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The moral right of Simon Sebag Montefiore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it may not be resold or otherwise issued except in its original binding.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

isbn 1 84212 438 2

To Santa

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Notes xvii

prologue: Death on the Steppes i

part one: potemkin and catherine 1739-1762

The Provincial Boy 13

The Guardsman and the Grand Duchess: Catherine's Coup 3 2

First Meeting: The Empress's Reckless Suitor 48

part two: closer 1762-1774

Cyclops 65

The War Hero 76

The Happiest Man Alive 94

part three: together i774-i776

Love 109

Power 122

Marriage: Madame Potemkin 136

Heartbreak and Understanding 151

part four: the passionate partnership 1776-1777

Her Favourites 165

His Nieces 185

Duchesses, Diplomats and Charlatans 196

x contents

part five: the colossus 1777-1783

Byzantium 215

The Holy Roman Emperor 223

Three Marriages and a Crown 236

Potemkin's Paradise: The Crimea 244

part six: the co-tsar 1784-1786

Emperor of the South 263

British Blackamoors and Chechen Warriors 285

Anglomania: The Benthams in Russia and the Emperor of Gardens 295

The White Negro 312

A Day in the Life of Grigory Alexandrovich 328

part seven: the apogee 1787-1790

The Magical Theatre 351

Cleopatra 363

The Amazons 376

Jewish Cossacks and American Admirals: Potemkin's War 388

Cry Havoc: The Storming of Ochakov 404

My Successes Are Yours 417

The Delicious and the Cruel: Sardanapalus 430

Sea of Slaughter: Ismail 448

part eight: the last dance 1791

The Beautiful Greek 459

Carnival and Crisis 467

The Last Ride 480

epilogue: Life After Death 481

List of Characters 503

Maps 50 6

Family Trees 508

Notes 512

Select Bibliography 593

Index 615

ILLUSTRATIONS

Credits for the illustration sections.

Serenissimus Prince Grigory Potemkin, by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830),

Hermitage, St Petersburg, photo by N. Y. Bolotina Catherine the Great in 1762 by Vigilius Ericksen (1722-1782), Musee des Beaux-

Arts, Chartres, France, Lauros-Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library Countess Alexandra Branicka by R. Brompton, Alupka Palace Museum, Ukraine, photo by the author

Portrait of Paul 1,1796-7 by Stepan Semeonovich Shukin (1762-1828), Hermitage,

St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library Potemkin's Palaces[1]

Portrait of Catherine II the Great in a Travelling Costume, 1787 (oil on canvas) by Mikhail Shibanov (fl. 1783-89), State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library Portrait of Field Marshal Potemkin, 1787 by Alexander Roslin, courtesy of the West

Wycombe Collection of Sir Edward Dashwood, photo by Sir Edward Dashwood Potemkin's signature

Catherine the Great, 1793 by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830), Hermitage,

St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library Portrait of Prince Grigori Potemkin-Tavrichesky, c. 1790 by Johann Baptist von

Lampi (1751-1830), Hermitage, St Petersburg, Russia/Bridgeman Art Library The roadside memorials marking Potemkin's death, photo by author The board announcing Potemkin's death, photo by author

The trapdoor in St Catherine's church in Kherson, Ukraine, leading to Potemkin's

tomb, photo by author Potemkin's coffin, St Catherine's, Kherson, Ukraine, photo by author The ruined church in Potemkin's home village of Chizhova, Russia, photo author's collection

Potemkin in Chevalier-Garde uniform, collection of V. S. Lopatin

Potemkin's mother, Daria Potemkina, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai

Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library The Empress Elisabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, etching by E. Chemesov,

Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection The Grand Duchess Catherine with husband Peter and their son, Paul, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Field-Marshal Peter Rumiantsev at the Battle of Kagul, 1770, Weidenfeld &

Nicolson picture collection Grigory Orlov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture

courtesy of the British Library Alexei Orlov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich picture cour­tesy of the British Library Catherine and Potemkin in her boudoir, author's collection

Alexander Lanskoy, by D. G. Levitsky, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai

Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library Count Alexander Dmitriyev-Mamonov, by Mikhail Shibanov, Portraits Russes by

Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library Princess Varvara Golitsyna, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich,

picture courtesy of the British Library Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya with her daughter, by Angelica Kauffman, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Princess Tatiana Yusupova, by E. Vigee Lebrun, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke

Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library Portrait of Ekaterina Samoilova by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, photo author's collection

Joseph II and Catherine meeting 1787, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, photo author's collection

Catherine walking in the park at Tsarskoe Selo, by V. L. Borovikovsky,

Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection The storming of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov in 1788, Odessa State Local

History Museum, photo by Sergei Bereninich, photo author's collection Count Alexander Suvorov, Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich,

picture courtesy of the British Library The invitation to Potemkin's ball in the Taurida Palace, 1791, Odessa State Local

History Museum, photo by Sergei Bereninich, photo author's collection Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Countess Sophia Potocka by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830), Portraits Russes by Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich, picture courtesy of the British Library

Prince Platon Zubov by Johann Baptist von Lampi (1751-1830), Weidenfeld &

Nicolson picture collection Potemkin's death, 1791, Odessa State Local History Museum, photo by Sergei

Bereninich, photo author's collection Potemkin's funeral, Weidenfeld & Nicolson picture collection

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Over several years and thousands of miles, I have been helped by many people, from the peasant couple who keep bees on the site of Potemkin's birthplace near Smolensk to professors, archivists and curators from Peters­burg, Moscow and Paris to Warsaw, Odessa and Iasi in Rumania.

I owe my greatest debts to three remarkable scholars. The inspiration for this book came from Isabel de Madariaga, Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of London and the doyen of Catherinian history in the West. Her seminal work Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great changed the study of Catherine. She also appreciated the remarkable character of Potemkin and his relationship with the Empress, and declared that he needed a biographer. She has helped with ideas, suggestions and advice throughout the project. Above all, I must thank her for editing and correcting this book during sessions which she conducted with the amused authority and intellectual rigour of the Empress herself, whom she resembles in many ways. It was always I who was exhausted at the end of these sessions, not she. I lay any wisdom in this work at her feet; the follies are mine alone. I am glad that I was able to lay a wreath on her behalf on Potemkin's neglected grave in Kherson.

I must also thank Alexander B. Kamenskii, Professor of Early & Early- Modern Russian History at Moscow's Russian State University for the Humanities, and respected authority on Catherine, without whose wisdom, charm and practical help, this could not have been written. I am deeply grateful to V. S. Lopatin, whose knowledge of the archives is without parallel and who was so generous with that knowledge: Lopatin and his wife Natasha have been so hospitable during Muscovite stays. He too has read the book and given me the benefit of his comments.

I must also thank Professor J. T. Alexander for answering my questions and Professor Evgeny Anisimov, who was so helpful during my time in Petersburg. The advice of George F. Jewsbury on Potemkin's military per­formance was most enlightening. Thanks to Professor Derek Beales, who helped greatly with Josephist matters especially the mystery of the Circassian slavegirls. I should mention that he and Professor Tim Blanning, both of Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, were the supervisors whose compelling teaching of Enlightened Despotism, while I was an undergraduate, laid the foundations for this book. I want to stress my debt too to three recent works that I have used widely - Lopatin's Ekaterina i Potemkin Lichnaya Perepiska, the aforementioned book by Isabel de Madariaga, and J. T. Alexander's Catherine the Great.

*

I would like the thank the following without whom this could not have been written: His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, for his kind help in con­nection with his work for the restoration of St Petersburg and the Pushkin Bicentenary. Sergei Degtiarev-Foster, that champion of Russian history who made many things possible from Moscow to Odessa, and Ion Florescu who made the Rumanian-Moldovian expedition such a success. Thanks also to Lord Rothschild, Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky and Geraldine Norman, chair­man, president and director of Hermitage Development Trust, who are cre­ating the permanent exhibition of Catherine the Great's treasures, including the famous Lampi portrait of Potemkin, at Somerset House in London.

I owe a debt to Lord Brabourne for reading the entire book and, for reading parts of it, to Dr Amanda Foreman, Flora Fraser, and especially to Andrew Roberts for his detailed advice and encouragement. William Hanham read the sections on art, Professor John Klier read the Jewish sections, and Adam Zamoyski read those on Poland.

In Moscow, I thank the Directors and staff of the RGADA and RGVIA archives; Natasha Bolotina, with her special knowledge on Potemkin, her mother Svetlana Romanovna, Igor Fedyukin, Dmitri Feldman, and Julia Tourchaninova and Ernst Goussinski, Professors of Education, all helped immensely. Galina Moiseenko, one of the brightest scholars of the History Department of the Russian State Humanities University, was excellent at selecting and finding documents and her historical analysis and precision were flawless.

Thanks to the following. In St Petersburg, I thank my friend Professor Zoia Belyakova, who made everything possible, and Dr Sergei Kuznetzov, Head of Historical Research of the Stroganov Palace Department of the State Russian Museum, and the staff of the RGIA. I am grateful to Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the State Hermitage Museum (again), to Vladimir Gesev, Director of the Russian State Museum of the Mikhailovsky Palace; Liudmilla Kurenkova, Assistant to the Director of the Russian State Museum, A. N. Gusanov of the Pavlovsk Palace State Museum; Dr Elana V. Karpova, Head of the XVIII-early XXth Century Sculpture Department of the State Russian Museum, Maria P. Garnova of the Hermitage's Western Europe Department, and G. Komelova, also of the Hermitage. Ina Lokotnikova showed me the Anichkov Palace and L. I. Diyachenko was kind enough to give me a private tour, using her exhaustive knowledge, of the Taurida Palace. Thanks to Leonid Bogdanov for taking the cover-photograph of Potemkin.

In Smolensk: Anastasia Tikhonova, Researcher for the Smolensk Historical

acknowledgements xv

Museum, Elena Samolubova, and Vladimir Golitchev, Deputy Head of the Smolensk Regional Department of Education, responsible for Science. In Chizhova, the schoolteacher and expert on local folklore, Victor Zheludov and fellow staff at the school in Petrishchevo, the village nearest to Chizhova, with thanks for the Potemkin feast they kindly laid on.

For the south Ukrainian journey, I thank Vitaly Sergeychik of the UKMAR shipping company and Misha Sherokov. In Odessa: Natalia Kotova, Professor Semyon J. Apartov, Professor of International Studies, Odessa State Uni­versity. At the Odessa Regional Museum of History - Leonila A. Leschinskaya, Director, Vera V. Solodova, Vice-Director, and, especially, to the know­ledgeable, charming master of the archives themselves, Adolf Nikolaevich Malikh, chief of the Felikieteriya section, who helped me so much. The Director of the Odessa Museum of Merchant Fleet of the Ukraine, Peter P. Klishevsky and the photographer there, Sergei D. Bereninich. In Ochakov: the Mayor, Yury M. Ishenko. In Kherson: Father Anatoly of St Catherine's Church. At Dniepropetrovsk: Olga Pitsik, and the staffs of the museums in Nikolaev and Simpferopol; Anastas Victorevich of the Sabastopol Naval Museum. But above all, at the Alupka Palace, Anna Abramovna Galitchenko, author of Alupka A Palace inside a Park, proved a font of knowledge.

In Rumania, thanks to Professor Razvan Magureanu, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, and loan Vorobet who drove us to Iasi, guarded us and made it possible to enter Moldova. In Iasi: Professor Fanica Ungureanu, authority on the Golia Monastery, and Alexander Ungureanu, Professor of Geography at Iasi University, without whose help I would never have found the site of Potemkin's death. In Warsaw, Poland: Peter Martyn and Arkadiusz Bautz-Bentkowski and the AGAD staff. In Paris: the staff of AAE in the Quai d'Orsay. Karen Blank researched and translated German texts. Imanol Galfarsoro translated the Miranda diary from Spanish. In Telavi, Georgia: Levan Gachechiladze, who introduced me to Lida Potemkina.

In Britain, I have many to thank for things great and small: my agent Georgina Capel, the Chairman of Orion, Anthony Cheetham, the Publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ion Trewin, and Lord and Lady Weidenfeld. Thanks to John Gilkes for creating the maps. Great thanks are owed to Peter James, my legendary editor, for applying his wisdom to this book. The staff of the British Library, British Museum, the Public Records Office, the London Library, the Library of the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies, the Cornwall and Winchester Records Offices and the Antony Estate. I thank my father, Dr Stephen Sebag-Montefiore MD, for his diagnosis of Potemkin's illnesses and singular psychology, and my mother, April Sebag-Montefiore, for her insights into Potemkin's personal relationships. I have a special thank you for Galina Oleksiuk, my Russian teacher, without whose lessons this book could not have been written. I would also like to thank the following for their help or kind answers to my questions: Neal Ascherson, Vadim

Benyatov, James Blount, Alain de Botton, Dr John Casey, the Honourable L. H. L. (Tim) Cohen, Professor Anthony Cross, Sir Edward Dashwood, Ingelborga Dapkunaite, Baron Robert Dimsdale, Professor Christopher Duffy, Lisa Fine, Princess Katya Golitsyn, Prince Emmanuel Golitsyn, David Henshaw, Professor Lindsey Hughes, Tania Illingworth, Anna Joukovskaya, Paul and Safinaz Jones, Dmitri Khankin, Professor Roderick E. McGrew, Giles MacDonogh, Noel Malcolm, the Earl of Malmesbury, Neil McKendrick the Master of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, Dr Philip Mansel, Sergei Alexandrovich Medvedev, Charles and Patty Palmer-Tomkinson, Dr Monro Price, Anna Reid, Kenneth Rose, the Honourable Olga Polizzi, Hywel Wil­liams, Andre Zaluski. The credit for their gems of knowledge belong to them; the blame for any mistakes rest entirely on me.

Last but not least, I must thank my wife, Santa, for enduring our menage- a-trois with Prince Potemkin for so long.

NOTES

Dates are given in the Old Style Julian Calendar used in Russia which was eleven days earlier than the New Style Gregorian used in the West. In some cases both dates are given.

Money: i rouble contained 100 kopecks. Approximately 4 roubles = £1 Sterling = 24 French Livres in the 1780s. At that time, an English gentleman could live on £300 a year, a Russian officer on 1,000 roubles.

Distances and measurements: 1 verst equalled 0.663 miles or 1.06 km. 1 desyatina equalled 2.7 acres.

Names and proper names: I have used the most recognizable form of most names, which means that absolute consistency is impossible in this area - so I apologize in advance to those offended by my decisions. The subject of this book is 'Potemkin', even though in Russian the pronunciation is closer to 'Patiomkin'. I have used the Russian form of names except in cases where the name is already well known in its English form; for example, the Tsarevich Pavel Petrovich is usually called Grand Duke Paul; Semyon Romanovich Vorontsov is Simon Vorontsov; the Empress is Catherine, not Ekaterina. I usually spell Peter and other first names in the English form, instead of Piotr and so on. I have used the Russian feminized form of names such as Dashkova instead of Dashkov. In Polish names, such as Branicki, I have left the name in its more polonized form, pronounced 'Branitsky'. Thus, in the feminine, I have used the Russian for Skavronskaya but the Polish for Branicka. Once someone is known by a suffix or title, I try to use it, so that A. G. Orlov is Orlov-Chesmensky once he had received this surname.

PROLOGUE DEATH ON THE STEPPES

'Prince of Princes'

Jeremy Bentham on Prince Potemkin

Whose bed - the earth: whose roof - the azure

Whose halls the wilderness round?

Are you not fame and pleasure's offspring

Oh splendid prince of Crimea?

Have you not from the heights of honors

Been suddenly midst empty steppes downed?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

Shortly before noon on 5 October 1791, the slow cavalcade of carriages, attended by liveried footmen and a squadron of Cossacks in the uniform of the Black Sea Host, stopped halfway down a dirt track on a desolate hillside in the midst of the Bessarabian steppe. It was a strange place for the procession of a great man to rest: there was no tavern in sight, not even a peasant's hovel. The big sleeping carriage, pulled by eight horses, halted first. The others - there were probably four in all - slowed down and stopped alongside the first on the grass as the footmen and cavalry escort ran to see what was happening. The passengers threw open their carriage doors. When they heard the despair in their master's voice, they hurried towards his carriage.

'That's enough!' said Prince Potemkin. 'That's enough! There is no point in going on now.' Inside the sleeping carriage, there were three harassed doctors and a slim countess with high cheekbones and auburn hair, all crowded round the Prince. He was sweating and groaning. The doctors summoned the Cossacks to move their massive patient. 'Take me out of the carriage ...' Potemkin ordered. Everyone jumped when he commanded, and he had commanded virtually everything in Russia for a long time. Cossacks and generals gathered round the open door and slowly, gently began to bear out the stricken giant.

The Countess accompanied him out of the carriage, holding his hand, dabbing his hot brow as tears streamed down her face with its small retrousse nose and full mouth. A couple of Moldavian peasants who tended cattle on the nearby steppe ambled over to watch. His bare feet came first, then his legs and his half-open dressing gown - though this vision in itself was not unusual. Potemkin notoriously greeted empresses and ambassadors in bare feet and open dressing gowns. But now it was different. He still had the leonine Slavic hand­someness, the thick head of hair, once regarded as the finest in the Empire, and the sensual Grecian profile that had won him the nickname 'Alcibiades'¹ as a young man. However, his hair was now flecked with grey and hung over his feverish forehead. He was still gigantic in stature and breadth. Everything about him was exaggerated, colossal and original, but his life of reckless indulgence and relentless ambition had bloated his body and aged his face. Like a Cyclops he had only one eye; the other was blind and damaged, giving him the appear­ance of a pirate. His chest was broad and hairy. Always a force of nature, he now resembled nothing so much as a magnificent animal reduced to this twitching, shivering pile of flesh.

The apparition on this wild steppe was His Most Serene Highness Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, probably husband of the Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great, and certainly the love of her life, the best friend of the woman, the co-ruler of her Empire and the partner in her dreams. He was Prince of Taurida, Field-Marshal, Commander- in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Eka- terinoslav Cossacks, Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets, President of the College of War, viceroy of the south, and possibly the next King of Poland, or of some other principality of his own making.

The Prince, or Serenissimus, as he was known across the Russian Empire, had ruled with Catherine II for nearly two decades. They had known each other for thirty years and had shared each other's lives for almost twenty. Beyond that, the Prince defied, and still defies, all categorization. Catherine noticed him as a witty young man and summoned him to be her lover at a time of crisis. When their affair ended, he remained her friend, partner and minister and became her co-Tsar. She always feared, respected and loved him - but their relationship was stormy. She called him her 'Colossus', and her 'tiger', her 'idol', 'hero', the 'greatest eccentric'.² This was the 'genius'³ who hugely increased her Empire, created Russia's Black Sea Fleet, conquered the Crimea, won the Second Turkish War and founded famed cities such as Sebastopol and Odessa. Russia had not possessed an imperial statesman of such success in both dreams and deeds since Peter the Great.

Serenissimus made his own policies - sometimes inspired, sometimes quix­otic - and constructed his own world. While his power depended on his partnership with Catherine, he thought and behaved like one of the sovereign powers of Europe. Potemkin dazzled its Cabinets and Courts with his titanic achievements, erudite knowledge and exquisite taste, while simultaneously scandalizing them with his arrogance and debauchery, indolence and luxury. While hating him for his power and inconsistency, even his enemies acclaimed his intelligence and creativity.

Now this barefoot Prince half staggered - and was half carried by his Cossacks - across the grass. This was a remote and spectacular spot, not even on the main road between Jassy, in today's Rumania, and Kishnev, in today's Republic of Moldova. In those days, this was the territory of the Ottoman Sultan, conquered by Potemkin. Even today it is hard to find, but in 200 years it has hardly changed.⁴ The spot where they laid Potemkin was a little plateau beside a steep stone lane whence one could see far in every direction. The countryside to the right was a rolling green valley rising in a multitude of green, bushy mounds into the distance, covered in the now almost vanished high grass of the steppes. To the left, forested hills fell away into the mist. Straight ahead, Potemkin's entourage would have seen the lane go down and then rise up a higher hill covered in dark trees and thick bushes, disappearing down the valley. Potemkin, who loved to drive his carriage at night through the rain,⁵ had called a stop in a place of the wildest and most beautiful natural drama.⁶

His entourage could only have added to it. The confection of the exotic and the civilized in Potemkin's companions that day reflected his contradictions: 'Prince Potemkin is the emblem of the immense Russian Empire,' wrote the Prince de Ligne, who knew him well, 'he too is composed of deserts and gold­mines.'⁷ His Court - for he was almost royal, though Catherine teasingly called it his 'basse-cour', halfway between a royal court and a farmyard⁸ - emerged on to the steppe.

Many of his attendants were already weeping. The Countess, the only woman present, wore the long-sleeved flowing Russian robes favoured by her friend the Empress, but her stockings and shoes were the finest of French fashion, ordered from Paris by Serenissimus himself. Her travelling jewellery was made up of priceless diamonds from Potemkin's unrivalled collection. Then there were generals and counts in tailcoats and uniforms with sashes and medals and tricorn hats that would not have been remarkable at Horse- Guards in London or any eighteenth-century court, but there was also a sprinkling of Cossack atamans, Oriental princelings, Moldavian boyars, rene­gade Ottoman pashas, servants, clerks, common soldiers - and the bishops, rabbis, fakirs and mullahs whose company Potemkin most enjoyed. Nothing relaxed him as much as a discussion on Byzantine theology, the customs of some Eastern tribe such as the Bashkirs, or Palladian architecture, Dutch painting, Italian music, English Gardens...

The bishops sported the flowing robes of Orthodoxy, the rabbis the tangled ringlets of Judaism, the Ottoman renegades the turbans, pantaloons and slippers of the Sublime Porte. The Moldavians, Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, wore bejewelled kaftans and high hats encircled with fur and encrusted with rubies, the ordinary Russian soldiers the 'Potemkin' hats, coats, soft boots and buckskin trousers designed for their ease by the Prince himself. Lastly the Cossacks, most of them Boat Cossacks known as Zapo- rogians, had fierce moustaches and shaven heads except for a tuft on top leading down the back in a long ponytail, like characters from Last of the Mohicans, and brandished short curved daggers, engraved pistols and their special long lances. They watched sadly, for Potemkin adored the Cossacks.

The woman was Potemkin's shrewd and haughty niece, Countess Alexandra Branicka, aged thirty-seven and a formidable political force in her own right. Potemkin's love affairs with the Empress and a brazen parade of noblewomen and courtesans had shocked even French courtiers who remembered Louis XV's Versailles. Had he really made all five of his legendarily beautiful nieces into his mistresses? Did he love Countess Branicka the most of all?

The Countess ordered them to place a rich Persian rug on the grass. Then she let them lower Prince Potemkin gently on to it. 'I want to die in the field,' he said as they settled him there. He had spent the previous fifteen years travelling as fast across Russia's vastness as any man in the eighteenth century: 'a trail of sparks marks his swift journey', wrote the poet Gavrili Derzhavin in his ode to Potemkin, The Waterfall. So, appropriately for a man of perpetual movement, who barely lived in his innumerable palaces, Serenissimus added that he did not want to die in a carriage.⁹ He wanted to sleep out on the steppe.

That morning, Potemkin asked his beloved Cossacks to build him a make­shift tent of their lances, covered with blankets and furs. It was a char­acteristically Potemkinian idea, as if the purity of a little Cossack camp would cure him of all his suffering.

The anxious doctors, a Frenchman and two Russians, gathered round the prone Prince and the attentive Countess, but there was little they could do. Catherine and Potemkin thought doctors made better players at the card table than healers at the bedside. The Empress joked that her Scottish doctor finished off most of his patients with his habitual panacea for every ailment - a weakening barrage of emetics and bleedings. The doctors were afraid that they would be blamed if the Prince perished, because accusations of poisoning were frequently whispered at the Russian Court. Yet the eccentric Potemkin had been a thoroughly uncooperative patient, opening all the windows, having eau-de-Cologne poured on his head, consuming whole salted geese from Hamburg with gallons of wine - and now setting off on this tormented journey across the steppes.

The Prince was dressed in a rich silk dressing gown, lined with fur, sent to him days earlier by the Empress all the way from distant St Petersburg, almost two thousand versts. Its inside pockets bulged with bundles of the Empress's secret letters in which she consulted her partner, gossiped with her friend and decided the policies of her Empire. She destroyed most of his letters, but we are grateful that he romantically kept many of hers in that sentimental pocket next to his heart.

Twenty years of these letters reveal an equal and amazingly successful partnership of two statesmen and lovers that was startling in its modernity, touching in its ordinary intimacy and impressive in its statecraft. Their love affair and political alliance was unequalled in history by Antony and Cleopatra, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Napoleon and Josephine, because it was as remarkable for its achievements as for its romance, as endearing for its humanity as for its power. Like everything to do with Potemkin, his life with Catherine was crisscrossed with mysteries: were they secretly married? Did they conceive a child together? Did they really share power? Is it true that they agreed to remain partners while indulging them­selves with a string of other lovers? Did Potemkin pimp for the Empress, procuring her young favourites, and did she help him seduce his nieces and turn the Imperial Palace into his own family harem?

As his illness ebbed and flowed, his travels were pursued by Catherine's caring, wifely notes, as she sent dressing gowns and fur coats for him to wear, scolded him for eating too much or not taking his medicines, begged him to rest and recover, and prayed to God not to take her beloved. He wept as he read them.

At this very moment, the Empress's couriers were galloping in two directions across Russia, changing their exhausted horses at imperial posthouses. They came from St Petersburg, bearing Catherine's latest letter to the Prince, and from here in Moldavia they bore his latest to her. It had been so for a long time - and they were always longing to receive the freshest news of the other. But now the letters were sadder.

'My dear friend, Prince Grigory Alexandrovich,' she wrote on 3 October, 'I received your letters of the 25th and 27th today a few hours ago and I confess that I am extremely worried by them ... I pray God that He gives health back to you soon.' She was not worried when she wrote this, because it usually took ten days for letters to reach the capital from the south, though it could be done in seven, hell for leather.¹⁰ Ten days before, Potemkin appeared to have recovered - hence Catherine's calmness. But a few days earlier on 30 September, before his health seemed to improve, her letters were almost frantic. 'My worry about your sickness knows no bounds,' she had written. 'For Christ's sake, if necessary, take whatever the doctors think might ease your condition. I beg God to give you your energy and health back as soon as possible. Goodbye my friend ... I'm sending you a fur coat ...'." This was just sound and fury - for, while the coat was sent on earlier, neither of the letters reached him in time.

Somewhere in the 2,000 versts that separated the two of them, the couriers must have crossed paths. Catherine would not have been so optimistic if she had read Potemkin's letter, written on 4 October, the day before, as he set out. 'Matushka [Little Mother] Most Merciful Lady,' he dictated to his secretary, 'I have no energy left to suffer my torments. The only escape is to leave this town and I have ordered them to carry me to Nikolaev. I do not know what will become of me. Most faithful and grateful subject.' This was written in the secretary's hand but pathetically, at the bottom of the letter,

Potemkin scrawled in a weak, angular and jumping hand: The only escape is to leave.'¹² It was unsigned.

The last batch of Catherine's letters to reach him had arrived the day before in the pouch of Potemkin's fastest courier, Brigadier Bauer, the devoted adjutant whom he often sent galloping to Paris to bring back silk stockings, to Astrakhan for sterlet soup, to Petersburg for oysters, to Moscow to bring back a dancer or a chessplayer, to Milan for a sheet of music, a virtuoso violinist or a wagon of perfumes. So often and so far had Bauer travelled on Potemkin's whim that he jokingly requested this for his epitaph: 'Cy git Bauer sous ce rocher, Fouette, cocher!'¹³[2]

As they gathered round him on the steppe, the officials and courtiers would have reflected on the implications of this scene for Europe, for their Empress, for the unfinished war with the Turks, for the possibilities of action against revolutionary France and defiant Poland. Potemkin's armies and fleets had conquered huge tracts of Ottoman territory around the Black Sea and in today's Rumania: now the Sultan's Grand Vizier hoped to negotiate a peace with him. The Courts of Europe - from the port-sodden young First Lord of the Treasury, William Pitt, in London, who had failed to halt Potemkin's war, to the hypochondriacal old Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz, in Vienna - carefully followed Potemkin's illness.

His schemes could change the map of the Continent. Potemkin juggled crowns like a clown in a circus. Would this mercurial visionary make himself a king? Or was he more powerful as he was - consort of the Empress of all the Russias? If he was crowned, would it be as king of Dacia, in modern Rumania, or King of Poland, where his sprawling estates already made him a feudal magnate? Would he save Poland, or partition it? Even as he lay on the steppe, Polish potentates were gathering secretly to await his mysterious orders.

These questions would be answered by the outcome of this desperate rush from the fever-stricken city of Jassy to the new town of Nikolaev, inland from the Black Sea, to which the sick man wished to be borne. Nikolaev was his last city. He had founded many, like the hero whose achievements he had emulated, Peter the Great. Potemkin designed each city, treating it lovingly like a cherished mistress or a treasured work of art. Nikolaev (now in Ukraine) was a naval and military base, on the cool banks of the Bug, where he had built himself a Moldavian-Turkish-style palace, low by the river, cooled by a steady breeze that would ease his fever.¹⁴ This was a long journey for a dying man.

The convoy had left the day before. The party spent the night in a village en route and set off at 8 a.m. After five versts, Potemkin was so uncomfortable that they transferred him to the sleeping carriage. He still managed to sit up.¹⁵ After five more versts, they had stopped right here.¹⁶

The Countess cradled his head: at least she was there, for the two best friends in his life were women. One was this favourite niece; the other, of course, was the Empress herself, fretting a thousand miles away, waiting for news. On the steppe, Potemkin was shaking, sweating and moaning, undergoing agonizing convulsions. 'I am burning,' he said. 'I'm on fire!' Countess Branicka, known as 'Sashenka' to Catherine and Potemkin, urged him to be calm, but 'he answered that the light grew dark in his eyes, he could not see any more and was able only to understand voices.' The blindness was a symptom of falling blood pressure, common in the dying. Ravaged by malarial fever, probable liver failure and pneumonia, after years of compulsive overwork, frantic travel, nervous tension and unbridled hedonism, his power­ful metabolism was finally collapsing. The Prince asked the doctors: 'What can you cure me with now?' Dr Sanovsky answered that 'he had to put his hopes only in God'. He handed a travelling icon to Potemkin, who embraced both the mischievous scepticism of the French Enlightenment and the super­stitious piety of the Russian peasantry. Potemkin was strong enough to take it. He kissed it.

An old Cossack, watching nearby, noticed that the Prince was slipping away and said so respectfully, with the sensitivity to death found among frontiersmen who live close to nature. Potemkin removed his hands from the icon. Branicka held them in hers. Then she embraced him.¹⁷ At the supreme moment, he naturally thought of his beloved Catherine and murmured: 'Forgive me, merciful Mother-Sovereign.'¹⁸ Then Potemkin died.¹⁹ He was fifty-two.

The circle froze around the body in that shocked silence that must always mark the passing of a great man. Countess Sashenka gently placed his head on a pillow, then raised her hands to her face and fell back in a dead faint. Some wept loudly; some knelt to pray, raising their hands to the heavens; some hugged and consoled each other; the doctors stared at the patient they had failed to save; others just peered at his face with its single open eye. To the left and right, groups of Moldavian boyars or merchants sat watching while a Cossack tried to control a rearing horse, which perhaps sensed how 'the earthly globe was shaken' by this 'untimely, sudden passing!'.²⁰ The soldiers and Cossacks, veterans of Potemkin's wars, were sobbing, one and all. They had not even had time to finish building their master's tent.

So died one of Europe's most famous statesmen. Contemporaries, while admitting his contrasts and eccentricities, rated him highly. All visitors to Russia had wished to meet this force of nature. He was always - by pure power of personality - the centre of attention: 'When absent, he alone was the subject of conversation; when present he engaged every eye.'²¹ When they did meet him, no one was disappointed. Jeremy Bentham, the English philosopher who stayed on his estates, called him 'Prince of Princes'.²²

The Prince de Ligne, who knew all the titans of his time, from Frederick the Great to Napoleon, best described Potemkin as 'the most extraordinary man I ever met... dull in the midst of pleasure; unhappy for being too lucky; surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician or like a child of ten years old ... What is the secret of his magic? Genius, genius and still more genius; natural abilities, an excellent memory, much elevation of soul; malice without the design of injuring, artifice without craft ... the art of conquering every heart in his good moments, much generosity ... refined taste - and a con­summate knowledge of mankind.'²³ The Comte de Segur, who knew Napoleon and George Washington, said that 'of all the personalities, the one that struck me the most, and which was the most important for me to know well, was the famous Prince Potemkin. His entire personality was the most original because of an inconceivable mixture of grandeur and pettiness, laziness and activity, ambition and insouciance. Such a man would have been remarkable by his originality anywhere.' Lewis Littlepage, an American visitor, wrote that the 'astonishing' Serenissimus was more powerful in Russia than Cardinal Wolsey, Count-Duke of Olivares and Cardinal Richelieu had ever been in their native kingdoms.²⁴

Alexander Pushkin, who was born eight years after this death on the Bessarabian steppe, was fascinated by Potemkin, interviewed his ageing nieces about him and recorded their stories: the Prince, he often said, 'was touched by the hand of history'. In their flamboyance and quintessential Russianness, the two complemented each other.²⁵ Twenty years later, Lord Byron was still writing about the man he called 'the spoiled child of the night.'²⁶

Russian tradition dictated that the dead man's eyes must be closed and coins placed on them. The orbs of the great should be sealed with gold pieces. Potemkin was 'richer than some kings' but, like many of the very rich, he never carried any money. None of the magnates in his entourage had any either. There must have been an awkward moment of searching pockets, tapping jackets, summoning valets: nothing. So someone called over to the soldiers.

The grizzled Cossack who had observed Potemkin's death throes produced a five-kopeck piece. So the Prince had his eye closed with a humble copper coin. The incongruity of the death passed immediately into legend. Perhaps it was the same old Cossack who now stepped back and muttered: 'Lived on gold; died on grass.'

This bon mot entered the mythology of princesses and common soldiers: few years later, the painter Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun asked a gnarled princess in St Petersburg about Potemkin's death: 'Alas, my darling, this great Prince, who had so many diamonds and such gold, died on the grass!', replied the dowager, as if he had had the bad taste to expire on one of her lawns.²⁷ During the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian army marched singing songs of Potemkin's death 'on the steppe lying on a raincoat'.²⁸ The poet Derzhavin saw the romance in the death of this unbounded man in the natural wilderness, 'like mist upon a crossroads'.²⁹ Two observers at different ends of the Empire - Count Fyodor Rostopchin (famous as the man who, in 1812, burned Moscow) in nearby Jassy, and the Swedish envoy, Count Curt Stedingk, in faraway Petersburg³⁰ - reacted with exactly the same words: 'His death was as extra­ordinary as his life.'³¹

The Empress had to be told at once. Sashenka Branicka could have told her - she was already reporting to Catherine on the Prince's health - but she was too distraught. So an adjutant was sent galloping ahead to inform Potemkin's devoted and indefatigable secretary Vasily Popov.

There was one last, almost ritual, moment. As the melancholy convoy began to retrace its footsteps back to Jassy, someone must have wanted to mark the spot where the Prince died so that they could build a monument to recall his glory. There were no rocks. Branches would blow away. It was then that the Ataman (Cossack General) Pavel Golavaty, who had known Potemkin for thirty years, commandeered the Zaporogian lance of one of his horsemen. Before he joined the rearguard of the procession, he rode to the little plateau and plunged the lance into the ground at the very spot.³² A Cossack lance to mark the place of Potemkin was as characteristic as the arrow that Robin Hood was supposed to have used to select his grave.

Meanwhile, Popov received the news and, at once, wrote to the Empress: 'We have been struck a blow! Most Merciful Sovereign, Most Serene Prince Grigory Alexandrovich is no more among the living.'³³ Popov despatched the letter with a trusted young officer who was ordered not to rest until he had delivered the terrible news.

Seven days later, at 6 p.m. on 12 October,³⁴ this courier, dressed respectfully in black - and the dust of the road - delivered Popov's letter to the Winter Palace. The Empress fainted away. Her courtiers thought she had suffered a stroke. Her doctors were called to bleed her. 'Tears and desperation' is how Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine's private secretary, described her shock. 'At eight, they let blood, at ten she went to bed.'³⁵ She was in a state of collapse: even her grandchildren were not admitted. 'It was not the lover she regretted,' wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. 'It was the friend.'³⁶ She could not sleep. At 2 a.m., she rose again to write to her loyal and fussy confidant, the philosophe Friedrich Melchior Grimm: 'A terrible death-blow has just fallen on my head. At six in the afternoon, a messenger brought the tragic news that my pupil, my friend, almost my idol, Prince Potemkin of Taurida, has died in Moldavia after about a month's illness. You cannot imagine how broken I am.. Л³⁷

In many ways, the Empress never recovered. The golden age of her reign died with him. But so did his reputation: Catherine told Grimm on that tragic sleepless night, scribbling by candlelight in her Winter Palace apartments, that Potemkin's achievements had always confounded the jealous 'babblers'.

But if his enemies could not defeat him in life, they have succeeded in death. He was barely cold before a vicious legend grew up around his outlandish character that was to obscure his achievements for 200 years.

Catherine would be amazed and appalled to discover that today her 'idol' and 'statesman' is best known for a calumny and a film. He is remembered for the historical libel of the 'Potemkin Villages', while he really built cities, and for the film Battleship Potemkin, the story of the mutinous sailors who heralded the revolutions that, long after his death, destroyed the Russia he loved. So the Potemkin legend was created by Russia's national enemies, jealous courtiers and Catherine's unstable successor, Paul I, who avenged himself, not just on the reputation, but even the bones, of his mother's lover. In the nineteenth century, the Romanovs, who presided over a rigid militaristic bureaucracy with its own Victorian primness, fed off the glories of Catherine but were embarrassed by her private life, especially by the role of the 'demi- Tsar' Potemkin.³⁸ Their Soviet successors shared their scruples while expand­ing their lies. Even the most distinguished Western historians still treat him more as a debauched clown and sexual athlete than historical statesman[3]. All these strands came together to ensure that the Prince has not received his rightful place in history. Catherine the Great, ignorant of the calumnies to come, mourned her friend, lover, soldier, statesman and probably husband for the remaining years of her life.

On 12 January 1792, Vasily Popov, the Prince's factotum, arrived back in St Petersburg with a special mission. He carried Potemkin's most cherished treasures - Catherine's secret letters of love and state. They remained tied up in bundles. Some of them were - and still are - stained by the dying Potemkin's tears as he read, and re-read them, in the knowledge that he would never set eyes on Catherine again.

The Empress received Popov. He handed over the letters. She dismissed everyone except Popov and locked the door. Then the two of them wept together.³⁹ It was almost thirty years since she first met Potemkin on the very day she seized power and became Empress of all the Russias.

PART ONE

Potemkin and Catherine 1739-1762

THE PROVINCIAL BOY

I would rather hear that you had been killed than that you had brought shame on yourself.

(The advice of a Smolensk nobleman to his son, joining the army.)

L. N. Engelhardt, Memoirs

'When I grow up,' the young Potemkin is said to have boasted, 'I shall be either a statesman or an archbishop.' His schoolfriends probably mocked his dreams, for he was born into the ranks of respectable provincial gentry without the benefits of either name or fortune. His godfather, who understood him better, liked to mutter that the boy would either 'rise to great honour - or lose his head'.¹ The only way to rise swiftly to such eminence in the Russia of that time was through the favour of the monarch - and by the time he had reached the age of twenty-two this obscure provincial had contrived to meet two reigning empresses.

Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was born on 30 September 1739[4] in the small village of Chizhova, not far from the old fortress city of Holy Smolensk. The Potemkins owned the modest estate and its 430 male serfs. The family were far from rich, but they were hardly poor either. However, they made up for their middling status by behaviour that was strange even by the standards of the wilder borderlands of the Russian Empire. They were a numerous clan of Polish descent and, like all nobility, they had concocted a dubious geneal­ogy. The more minor the nobility, the more grandiose this tended to be, so the Potemkins claimed they were descended from Telesin, the prince of an Italian tribe which threatened Rome in about 100 вс, and from Istok, a Dalmatian prince of the eleventh century ad. After centuries of unexplained obscurity, these royal Italian-Dalmatians reappeared around Smolensk bearing the distinctly unLatinate name 'Potemkin' or the polonized 'Pot- empski'.

The family proved adept at navigating the choppy seas between the tsars of Muscovy and the kings of Poland, receiving estates around Smolensk from both. The family patriarch was Hans-Tarasy (supposedly a version of Telesin) Potemkin, who had two sons, Ivan and Illarion, from whom the two branches of the family were descended.² Grigory came from Illarion's junior line. Both sides boasted middle-ranking officers and courtiers. From the time of Potemkin's great-grandfather, the family exclusively served Muscovy, which was gradually recovering these traditional Kievan lands from the Com­monwealth of Poland-Lithuania.

The Potemkins became pillars of the intermarried cousinhood of Smolensk nobility, which possessed its own unique Polish identity. While Russian nobil­ity was called the dvoryanstvo, the Smolensk nobles still called themselves szlachta, like their brethren in Poland. Smolensk today appears deeply embed­ded in Russia, but when Potemkin was born it was still on the borderlands. The Russian Empire in 1739 already stretched eastwards from Smolensk across Siberia to the Chinese border, and from the Baltic in the north towards the foothills of the Caucasus in the south - but it had not yet grasped its golden prize, the Black Sea. Smolensk had been conquered by Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexei, as recently as 1654 and before then it had been part of Poland. The local nobility remained culturally Polish, so Tsar Alexei con­firmed their privileges, permitted the Smolensk Regiment to elect its officers (though they were not allowed to keep their Polish links) and decreed that the next generation had to marry Russian, not Polish, girls. Potemkin's father may have worn the baggy pantaloons and long tunic of the Polish nobleman and spoken some Polish at home, though he would have worn the more Germanic uniform of the Russian army officer outside. So Potemkin was brought up in a semi-Polish environment and inherited much closer links to Poland than most Russian nobles. This connection assumed importance later: he acquired Polish naturalization, toyed with Poland's throne and sometimes seemed to believe he was Polish.³

Potemkin's only famous forebear (though a scion of Ivan's line) was Peter Ivanovich Potemkin, a talented military commander and later ambassador of Tsar Alexei and his successor, Tsar Fyodor, father and brother of Peter the Great. This earlier Potemkin could best be described as a one-man trans- European diplomatic incident.

In 1667, this local Governor and okolnichy (a senior court rank) was sent as Russia's first ambassador to Spain and France and then later, in 1680, as special envoy to many European capitals. Ambassador Potemkin went to almost any lengths to ensure that the prestige of his master was protected in a world that still regarded the Muscovite Tsar as a barbarian. The Russians in their turn were xenophobic and disdained the unOrthodox Westerners as not much better than Turks. At a time when all monarchs were highly sensitive

about titles and etiquette, the Russians felt they had to be doubly so.

In Madrid, the bearded and heavily robed Ambassador demanded that the Spanish King uncover his head each time the Tsar's name was mentioned. When the King replaced his hat, Peter Potemkin demanded an explanation. There were rows when the Spaniards queried the Tsar's titles and then even more when they were listed in the wrong order. On the way back to Paris, he argued again over titles, almost came to blows with customs officials, refused to pay duty on his jewel-encrusted icons or diamond-studded Muscovite robes, grumbled about over-charging and called them 'dirty infidel' and 'cursed dog'. Louis XIV wished to appease this nascent European power and apologized personally for these misunderstandings.

The Ambassador's second Parisian mission was equally bad-tempered, but he then sailed to London, where he was received by Charles II. This was apparently the sole audience in his diplomatic career that did not end in farce. When he visited Copenhagen and found the Danish King ill in bed, Peter Potemkin called for a couch to be placed alongside and lay down on it so that the Ambassador of the Tsar could negotiate on terms of supine royal equality. On his return, Tsar Fyodor was dead and Potemkin was severely reprimanded for his over-zealous antics by the Regent Sophia.[5] This cur­mudgeonly nature seemed to run in both lines of the family.⁴

Grigory Potemkin's father, Alexander Vasilievich Potemkin, was one of those oafish military eccentrics who must have made life in eighteenth-century provincial garrisons both tedious and colourful. This early Russian prototype of Colonel Blimp was almost insane, permanently indignant and recklessly impulsive. Young Alexander served in Peter the Great's army throughout the Great Northern War, and fought at the decisive Battle of Poltava in 1709, at which Peter defeated the Swedish invader, Charles XII, and thereby safe­guarded his new city St Petersburg and Russia's access to the Baltic. He then fought at the siege of Riga, helped capture four Swedish frigates, was dec­orated and later wounded in the left side.

After the war, the veteran had to serve as a military bureaucrat conducting tiresome population censuses in the distant provinces of Kazan and Astrakhan and commanding small garrisons. We do not know many details of his character or career, but we do know that when he demanded to retire because of his aching wounds he was called before a board of the War College and according to custom was stripping off his uniform to show his scars when he spotted that one of the board had served under him as an NCO. He imme­diately put on his clothes and pointed at this man: 'What? HE would examine ME? I will NOT tolerate that. Better remain in the service no matter how bad my wounds!' He then stormed out to serve another two boring years. He finally retired as an ailing lieutenant-colonel in 1739, the year his son was born.⁵

Old Alexander Potemkin already had a reputation as a domestic tyrant. His first wife was still alive when the veteran spotted Daria Skouratova, probably on the Bolshoia Skouratova estate that was near Chizhova. Born Daria Vasilievna Kondyreva, she was, at twenty, already the widow of Skou- ratov, its deceased proprietor. Colonel Potemkin married her at once. Neither of these ageing husbands was an appetizing prospect for a young girl, but Skouratov's family would have been glad to find her a new home.

The Colonel's young wife now received a most unfortunate shock. It was only when she was pregnant with her first child, a daughter named Martha Elena, that she discovered that Colonel Potemkin was still married to his first wife, who lived in the village. Presumably the whole village was only too aware of the Colonel's secret, and Daria must have felt she had been made to look a fool in front of her own serfs. Bigamy then was as contrary to the edicts of Church and state as it is now, but places like Chizhova were so remote, the records so chaotic, and the power of men over women so dominant that stories of bigamous provincial gentry were quite common. At roughly the same time, General Abraham Hannibal, Pushkin's Abyssinian grandfather, was remarrying bigamously while torturing his first wife in a dungeon until she agreed to enter a monastery, and one of his sons repeated his performance.⁶ Torture was usually unnecessary to persuade Russian wives to enter mon­asteries, thereby releasing the husbands to marry again. Daria visited the first wife and tearfully persuaded her to take holy orders, finally making her own bigamous marriage legitimate.

We can glean enough about this marriage to say that it was profoundly unhappy: Alexander Potemkin kept his wife almost perpetually pregnant. She had five daughters and one son - Grigory was her third child. Yet the splenetic taskmaster was also manically jealous. As jealousy often precipitates the very thing it most fears, the young wife was not short of admirers. We are told by one source that, around the time of Grigory's birth, Colonel Potemkin was extremely suspicious of his visiting cousin, who was to be Grigory's godfather, the worldly Grigory Matveevich Kizlovsky, a senior civil servant from Moscow. Presumably the boy was named after Kizlovsky - but was he his natural father? We simply do not know: Potemkin inherited some of his father's manic, often morose character. He also loved Kizlovsky like a father after the Colonel's death. One simply has to confront the prosaic fact that, even in the adulterous eighteenth century, children were occasionally the offspring of their official fathers.

We know far more about Potemkin's mother than about his father because she lived to see Grigory become the first man of the Empire. Daria was good- looking, capable and intelligent. A much later portrait shows an old lady in a bonnet with a tough, weary but shrewd face, a bold lumpy nose and sharp chin. Her features are cruder than her son's, though he was supposed to resemble her. When she discovered she was pregnant for the third time in 1739, the augurs were good. Locals in Chizhova still claim that she had a dream that she saw the sun detach itself from the sky to fall right on her belly - and at that point she woke up. The village soothsayer, Agraphina, interpreted this as the prospect of a son. But the Colonel still found a way to ruin her happiness.⁷ When her time was near, Daria waited to give birth in the village banya or bathhouse, attended probably by her serf-maids. Her husband, according to the story still told by the locals, sat up all night drinking strong home-made berry wines. The serfs waited up too - they wanted an heir after two daughters. When Grigory was delivered, the church bells rang. The serfs danced and drank until dawn.⁸ The place of his birth was fitting, since the banya in the Winter Palace was one day to be the frequent venue for his trysts with Catherine the Great.

Daria's children were born into a house with a shadow hanging over it - paternal paranoia. Her marriage must have lost whatever meagre romance it ever had when she discovered her husband's bigamy. His accusations of infidelity must have made it worse: he was so jealous that, when their daughters married, he banned the sons-in-law from kissing Daria's hand in case the impression of male lips on soft skin led inexorably to sin. After the birth of his heir, the Colonel was visited by, among others coming to con­gratulate him, his cousin Sergei Potemkin, who informed him that Grigory was not his son. Sergei's motives in delivering this news were scarcely phil­anthropic: he wanted his family to inherit the estates. The old soldier flew into a rage, and petitioned to annul the marriage and declare Grigory a bastard. Daria, imagining the monastery gates closing on her, summoned the worldly, sensible godfather Kizlovsky. He hurried from Moscow and persuaded the half-senile husband to drop the divorce petition. So Gregory's mother and father were stuck with each other.⁹

Grigory Potemkin's immediate world for his first six or so years was to be his father's village. Chizhova stood on the River Chivo, a stream that cut a small, steep, muddy gully through the broad flat lands. It was several hours' journey from Smolensk, whence Moscow was a further 350 versts. St Petersburg was 837 versts away. In summer, it could be baking hot there, but its flatness meant that the winters were cruel, the winds biting. The countryside was beautiful, rich and green. It was and still is a wild, open land and a refreshing and exciting place for a child.

In many ways, this village was a microcosm of Russian society: there were two essential facts of Russian statehood at that time. The first was the Empire's perpetual, elemental instinct to expand its borders in every possible direction: Chizhova stood on its restless western borderland. The second was the dichotomy of nobility and serfdom. Potemkin's home village was divided into these two halves, which it is still possible to see, even though the village scarcely exists today.

On a slight rise above the stream, Potemkin's first home was a modest, one-storey wooden manorhouse, with a handsome facade. It could not have been in greater contrast to the houses of rich magnates higher up the social scale. For example, later in the century, Count Kirill Razumovsky's estate, further to the south in the Ukraine, 'resembled more a little town than a country house ... with 40 or 50 outhouses ... his guard, a numerous train of retainers, and a large band of musicians'.¹⁰ In Chizhova, the only outhouse around the manor was probably the bathhouse where Grigory was born, which would have stood right above the stream and its well. This banya was an integral part of Russian life. Country folk of both sexes bathed together/ which was very shocking to a visiting French schoolmaster since 'persons of all ages and both sexes use them together and the habit of seeing everything unveiled from an early age deadens the senses'." For Russians, the banya was a cosy, sociable and relaxing extension of the home.

Apart from the problems of his parents' marriage, this was probably a happy, if unsophisticated, environment to grow up in. We have one account of a boy of the lower nobility growing up in Smolensk Province: though born thirty years later, Lev Nikolaevich Engelhardt was Potemkin's kinsman, who recorded the probably unchanged life in a nearby village. He was allowed to run around in a peasant shirt and bare feet: 'Physically my education resem­bled the system outlined by Rousseau - the Noble Savage. But I know that my grandmother was not only ignorant of that work but had a very uncertain acquaintance with Russian grammar itself.'¹² Another memoirist, also related to Potemkin, recalled: The richest local landowner possessed only 1,000 souls,' and 'he had ... one set of silver spoons which he set out before the more important guests, leaving the others to manage with spoons of pewter'.¹³

Grigory or Grisha, as he was known, was the heir to the village and he was, apart from his old father, the only man in a family of women - five sisters and his mother. He was presumably the centre of attention and this family atmosphere must have set the tone for his character, because he was to remain the cynosure of all eyes for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he described himself as 'Fortune's spoilt child'. He had to stand out and dominate. The household of women made him absolutely relaxed in female company. In manhood, his closest friends were women - and his career depended on his handling of one in particular. This rough household enlivened by the bustle of female petticoats could not last. Most of his sisters soon married respectably into the cousinhood of Smolensk gentry (except for Nadezhda, who died at nineteen). In particular, the marriages of Elena Marfa to Vasily Engelhardt and Maria to Nikolai Samoilov were to produce nieces and nephews who were to play important roles in Potemkin's life.¹⁴

Service to the state was the sole profession of a Russian noble. Born into the military household of an officer who had served with Peter at Poltava, Grisha would have been brought up to understand that his duty and his path to success could be found only in serving the Empire. His father's exploits were probably the hinterland of the boy's imagination. The honour of a uniform was everything in Russia, particularly for the provincial gentry. In 1721, Peter the Great had laid down a Table of Ranks to establish the hierarchy within the military, civil and court services. Any man who reached the fourteenth military or the eighth civil rank was automatically raised to hereditary nobility - dvoryanstvo - but Peter also imposed compulsory life service on all noblemen. By the time of Potemkin's birth, the nobility had whittled down this humiliating obligation, but service remained the path to fortune. Potemkin showed an interest in the priesthood. He was descended from a seventeenth-century archimandrite and his father sent him to an ecclesiastical school in Smolensk. But he was always destined for the colours.¹⁵

Right beneath the house, beside the stream, was the well, still named after Catherine today. Legend says Potemkin brought the Empress there to show her his birthplace. It is likely that as a child he himself drew water from it, for the lives of middling gentry were better than those of their well-off serfs but not much. Potemkin was probably farmed out at birth to a serf wet-nurse in the village, but, whether literally or not, this prototype of the 'Noble Savage' was raised on the milk of the Russian countryside. He would have been brought up as much by serf women as by his mother and sisters; the music he heard would have been the soulful laments that the serfs sang at night and at festival time. The dances he knew would have been the boisterous and graceful peasant gigs far more than the cotillions danced at the balls of local landowners. He would have known the village soothsayer as well as the priest. He was just as at home beside the warm, smelly hearths of the peasant houses - steamy with kasha, the buckwheat porridge, shchi, the spicy cabbage broth, and kvass, the yellow sour beer they drank alongside vodka and berry wine - as he was in the manor. Tradition tells us the boy lived simply. He played with the priest's children, grazed horses with them and gathered hay with the serfs.¹⁶

Chizhova's little Orthodox Church of Our Lady stood (and its ruined successor building remains) on the serfs' side of the village: Potemkin spent much of his time there. The serfs themselves were devout: each, 'besides the consecrated amulet round his neck from baptism, carries a little figure of his ... patron saint, stamped on copper. Soldiers and peasants often take it out of their pockets, spit on it and rub it ... then place it opposite to them and, on a sudden, prostrate themselves .. Л¹⁷ When a peasant entered a house, it was usual for him to demand where 'the God' was and then cross himself before the icon.

Potemkin grew up with a peasant's mixture of piety and superstition: he was baptized at the village church. Many landowners could afford a foreign tutor for their children, preferably French or German - or sometimes an aged

Swedish prisoner-of-war, captured in the Great Northern War, like the poor landowning family in Pushkin's novella, The Captain's Daughter. But the Potemkins did not even have this. It is said that the local priest, Semen Karzev, and sexton, Timofei Krasnopevzev, taught him alphabet and prayers, which were to spark a lifelong fascination with religion. Grisha learned to sing and to love music, another feature of his adult life: Prince Potemkin was never without his orchestra and a pile of new orchestral scores. There was a legend that, decades later, one of these village sages visited St Petersburg and, hearing that his pupil was now the most important man at Court, called on the Prince, who received him warmly and found him a job as curator of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great.¹⁸

The 430 male serfs and their families lived around the church on the other side of the village. Serfs, or 'souls' as they were called, were valued according to the number of males. The wealth of a nobleman was measured not in cash or acres but in souls. Out of a population of nineteen million, there were about 50,000 male nobles and 7.8 million serfs. Half of these were manorial peasants, owned by the individual nobles or the imperial family, while the other half were state peasants owned by the state itself. Only noblemen could legally own serfs, yet a mere one per cent of the nobles owned more than a thousand souls. The households of great noblemen, who might own hundreds of thousands of serfs, were to reach a luxurious and picturesque climax in Catherine's reign when they owned serf orchestras and serf painters of exquis­ite icons and portraits: Count Sheremetev, the wealthiest serfowner in Russia, owned a serf theatre with a repertoire of forty operas. Prince Yusupov's ballet was to boast hundreds of serf ballerinas. Count Skavronsky (a kinsman of Catherine I who married one of Potemkin's nieces) was so obsessed with music that he banned his serfs from speaking: they had to sing in recitative.¹⁹ These cases were rare: 82 per cent of nobles were as poor as church mice, owning fewer than a hundred souls. The Potemkins were middling - part of 15 per cent who owned between 101 and 500.²⁰

Chizhova's serfs were the absolute possessions of Colonel Potemkin. Con­temporary French writers used the word 'esclaves' - slaves - to describe them. They had much in common with the black slaves of the New World, except that they were the same race as their masters. There was irony in serfdom, for while the serfs in Russia at the time of Potemkin's birth were chattels at the bottom of the pyramid of society, they were also the basic resource of the state's and the nobles' power. They formed the Russian infantry when the state raised an army by forced levies. Landowners despatched the selected unfortunates for a lifetime of service. The serfs paid the taxes that the Russian emperors used to finance their armies. Yet they were also the heart of a nobleman's wealth. Emperor and nobility competed to control them - and squeeze as much out of them as possible.

Souls were usually inherited, but they could also be granted to favourites by grateful emperors or bought as a result of advertisements in newspapers like today's used cars. For example, in 1760, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, later a critic of Potemkin's morals, sold three girls to another nobleman for three roubles. Yet the masters often took pride in their paternalist care for their serfs. 'The very circumstance of their persons being property ensures them the indulgence of their masters.'²¹ Count Kirill Razumovsky's household contained over 300 domestic servants, all serfs of course (except the French chef and probably a French or German tutor for his sons), including a master of ceremonies, a chief valet de chambre, two dwarfs, four hairdressers, two coffee-servers and so on. 'Uncle,' said his niece, 'it seems to me you have a lot of servants you could well do without.' 'Quite so,' replied Razumovsky, 'but they could not do without me.'²²

Sometimes the serfs loved their masters: when the Grand Chamberlain Count Shuvalov was obliged to sell an estate 300 versts from Petersburg, he was awakened one morning by a rumpus in his courtyard in the capital. A crowd of his serfs, who had travelled all the way from the countryside, were gathered there. 'We were very content under your authority and do not wish to lose so good a master,' they declared. 'So with each of us paying ... we have come to bring you the sum you need to buy back the estate.' The Count embraced his serfs like children.²³ When the master approached, an Englishman noted, the serfs bowed almost to the ground; when an empress visited remote areas, a French diplomat recorded that they made obeisance on their knees.²⁴ A landowner's serfs were his labour force, bank balance, sometimes his harem and completely his responsibility. Yet he always lived with the fear that they might arise and murder him in his manorhouse. Peasant risings were common.

Most owners were relatively humane to their serfs, but only a tiny minority could conceive that slavery was not the serf's natural state. If serfs fled, masters could recover them by force. Serf-hunters earned bounties for this grim chore. Even the most rational landowners regularly punished their serfs, often using the knout, the thick Russian leather whip, but they were certainly not permitted to execute them. 'Punishments ought to be inflicted on peasants, servants and all others in consideration of their offence with switches,' wrote Prince Shcherbatov in his instructions to his stewards in 1758. 'Proceed cautiously so as not to commit murder or maim. So therefore do not beat on the head or legs or arms with a club. But when such a punishment occurs that calls for a club, then order him to bend down and beat on the back, or better lash with switches on the back and lower down for the punishment will be more painful, but the peasant will not be maimed.'

The system allowed plenty of scope for abuse. Catherine in her Memoirs recalled that most households in Moscow contained 'iron collars, chains and other instruments of torture for those who commit the slightest infraction'. The bedchamber of one old noblewoman, for example, contained 'a sort of dark cage in which she kept a slave who dressed her hair; the chief motive ...

was the wish of the old baggage to conceal from the world that she wore false hair.. Л²⁵

The absolute power of the landowner over serfs sometimes concealed Bluebeardish tortures: the worst of these were perpetrated by a female land­owner, though perhaps it was only because she was a woman that anyone complained. Certainly the authorities covered up for her for a long time and this was not in some distant province, but in Moscow itself. Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, aged twenty-five and known as 'the maneater' - liudoed - was a monstress who took a sadistic pleasure in torturing hundreds of her serfs, beating them with logs and rolling pins. She killed 138 female serfs, sup­posedly concentrating on their genitals. When she was finally arrested early in Catherine's reign, the Empress, who depended on noble support, had to punish the maneater carefully. She could not be executed, because the Empress Elisabeth had abolished the death penalty in 1754 (except for treason), so Saltykova was chained to the scaffold in Moscow for one hour with a placard round her neck reading 'torturer and murderer'. The whole town turned out to look at her: serial killers were rare at that time. The maneater was then confined for life in a subterranean prison-monastery. Her cruelty was the exception, not the rule.²⁶

This was Grisha Potemkin's world and the essence of life in the Russian countryside. He never lost the habits of Chizhova. One can imagine him running through hay-strewn pastures with the serf children, chewing on a turnip or a radish - as he was to do later in life in the apartments of the Empress. It was not surprising that, in the refined Voltairean Court of St Petersburg, he was always regarded as a quintessential child of Russia's soil.

In 1746, this idyll ended when his father died aged seventy-four. The six- year-old Grisha Potemkin inherited the village and its serfs, but it was a paltry inheritance. His mother, widowed for the second time at forty-two, with six children to rear, could not make ends meet in Chizhova. The adult Grigory would behave with the heedless extravagance of those who remember finan­cial straits - but it was never grinding poverty. He later granted the village to his sister Elena and her husband Vasily Engelhardt. They built a mansion on the site of the wooden manorhouse and an exquisite church on the serf side of the village to the glory of Serenissimus, the family's famous son.²⁷

Daria Potemkina was ambitious. Grigory was not going to make a career in that remote hamlet, buried like a needle in the sprawling haystack of Russia. She did not have connections in the new capital, St Petersburg, but she did in the old. Soon the family were on the road to Moscow.[6]

Grisha Potemkin's first glimpse of the old capital would have been its steeples. Deep in the midst of the Russian Empire, Moscow was the fulcrum of everything opposed to St Petersburg, Peter the Great's new capital. If the Venice of the North was a window on to Europe, Moscow was a trapdoor into the recesses of Russia's ancient and xenophobic traditions. Its grim and solemn Russian grandeur alarmed narrow-minded Westerners: 'What is particularly gaudy and ugly at Moscow are the steeples,' wrote an English­woman arriving there, 'square lumps of different coloured bricks and gilt spire ... they make a very Gothic appearance.' Indeed, though it was built around the forbidding medieval fortress, the Kremlin, and the bright onion- domes of St Basil's, all its twisting, cramped and dark alleys and courtyards were as obscure as the superstitions of old Orthodoxy. Westerners thought it barely resembled a Western city at all. 'I cannot say Moscow gives me any idea other than of a large village or many villages joined.' Another visitor, looking at the noble chateaux and the thatched cottages, thought the city seemed to have been 'rolled together on coasters'.²⁸

Potemkin's godfather (and possibly natural father) Kizlovsky, retired Presi­dent of the Kamer-Collegium, the Moscow officer of the ministry in charge of the Court (Petrine ministries were called Collegia or Colleges), took the family under his protection and helped Daria, whether his mistress or just his protege, move into a small house on Nikitskaya Street. Grisha Potemkin was enrolled in the gymnasium school attached to the university with Kizlovsky's own son, Sergei.

Potemkin's intelligence was recognized early; he had a brilliant ear for languages, so he soon excelled at Greek, Latin, Russian, German and French as well as passing Polish, and it was said later that he could understand Italian and English. His first fascination was Orthodoxy: even as a child, he would discuss the liturgy with the Bishop of the Greek convent, Dorofei. The priest of the Church of St Nikolai encouraged his knowledge of church ceremonies. Grisha's remarkable memory, which would be noted later, enabled him to learn long tracts of Greek liturgy by heart. Judging by his knowledge and memory as an adult, he found learning perhaps too easy and concentration tedious. He bored quickly and feared no one: he was already well known for his epigrams and his mimicry of his teachers. Yet he somehow befriended the high-ranking clergyman Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, later Archbishop of Moscow.²⁹

The boy used to help at the altar, but even then he was either immersed in Byzantine theology or bursting to commit some outrageous act of mischief. When Grisha appeared before his godfather's guests dressed in the vestments of a Georgian priest, Kizlovsky said: 'One day you will really shame me because I was unable to educate you as a nobleman.' Potemkin already believed he was different from others: he would be a great man. All manner of his predictions of his own future eminence are recorded: 'If I'm a general, I'll command soldiers; if a bishop, it will be priests.' And he promised his mother that when he was rich and famous he would destroy the dilapidated houses where she lived and build a cathedral.[7] The happy memories of this time remained with him for the rest of his life.³⁰

In 1750, the eleven-year-old travelled to Smolensk, escorted probably by his godfather, to register for his military service. The first time a boy dressed up in his uniform and felt the weight of a sabre, the creak of boots, the stiff grip of a tunic, the proud trappings of service, remained a joyful memory for every child-soldier of the dvoryantsvo. Noble children were enrolled at absurdly young ages, sometimes as young as five, serving as supernumerary soldiers, to get round Peter's compulsory life service. When they actually became soldiers in their late teens they would technically have served for over ten years and already be officers. Parents signed their sons into the best regiments, the Guards, just as English noblemen used to be 'put down for Eton'. In Smolensk, Grisha testified to the Heraldic Office about his family's service and nobility, recounting his soi-disant Roman descent, and his con­nection to Tsar Alexei's irascible Ambassador. The provincial office con­fusingly recorded his age as seven but, since children usually registered at eleven, it is probably a bureaucratic slip. Five years later, in February 1755, he returned for his second inspection and was put down for the Horse- Guards, one of the five elite Guards regiments.³¹ The teenager returned to his studies.

He then enrolled at Moscow University, where he appeared near the top of his classes in Greek and ecclesiastical history.³² He was to keep some of his friends from there for the rest of his life. The students wore uniforms - a green coat with red cuffs. The university itself had only just been founded. Potemkin's contemporary Denis von Vizin, in his Frank Confession of my Affairs and Thoughts, recounted how he and his brother were among the first students. Like Potemkin, they were the children of the poor gentry who could not afford private tutors. This new university was chaotic. 'We studied without any order ...', he recalled, due to 'the teachers' negligence and hard drinking .. Л³³ Von Vizin claimed that the teaching of foreign languages was either abysmal or non-existent. Potemkin's records were lost in the fire of 1812, but he certainly learned a lot, possibly through his clerical friends.

This pedogogic debauchery did not matter because Potemkin, who later in life was said to have read nothing, was addicted to reading. When he visited relations in the countryside, he spent his whole time in the library and even fell asleep under the billiard table, grasping a book.³⁴ Another time, Potemkin asked one of his friends, Ermil Kostrov, to lend him ten books. When Potemkin gave them back, Kostrov did not believe he could have read so much in so short a time. Potemkin replied he had read them from cover to cover: 'If you do not believe me, examine them!', he said. Kostrov was convinced. When another student named Afonin lent Potemkin the newly published Natural Philosophy by Buffon, Potemkin returned it a day later and amazed Afonin with his absolute recall of its every detail.³⁵

Now Potemkin caught the eye of another powerful patron. In 1757, Grisha's virtuosity at Greek and theology won him the university's Gold Medal, and this impressed one of the magnates of the Imperial Court in Petersburg. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the erudite and cultured founder and Curator of Moscow University, was young, round-faced and gentle with sweet pixie-like features - but he was also unusually modest considering his position. Shuvalov was the lover of the Empress Elisabeth, who was eighteen years his senior, and one of her closest advisers. That June, Shuvalov ordered the university to select its twelve best pupils and send them to St Petersburg. Potemkin and eleven others were despatched to the capital, where they were met by Shuvalov himself and conveyed to the Winter Palace to be presented to the Empress of all the Russias. This was Potemkin's first visit to Petersburg.

Even Moscow must have seemed a backwater compared to St Petersburg. On the marshy banks and islands of the estuary of the River Neva, Peter the Great had founded his 'paradise' in 1703 on territory that still belonged to Sweden. When he had finally defeated Charles VII at Poltava his first reaction was that St Petersburg was safe at last. It became the official capital in 1712. Thousands of serfs died driving the piles and draining the water on this vast building site as the Tsar forced the project ahead. Now it was already a beautiful city of about 100,000 inhabitants, with elegant palaces lining the embankments: on the northern side stood the Peter and Paul Fortress and the red-brick palace that had belonged to Peter's favourite, Prince Menshikov. Almost opposite these buildings stood the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and more aristocratic mansions. Its boulevards were astonishingly wide, as if built for giants, but their Germanic straightness was alien to the Russian soul, quite the opposite of the twisting lanes of Moscow. The buildings were grandiose, but all were half finished, like so much in Russia.

'It's a cheerful fine looking city with streets extremely wide and long,' wrote an English visitor. 'Not only the town but the manner of living is upon too large a scale. The nobles seem to vie with each other in extravagances of every sort.' Everything was a study of contrasts. Inside the palaces, 'the homes are decorated with the most sumptuous furniture from every country but you pass into a drawing room where the floor is of the finest inlaid woods through a staircase of coarseness, stinking with dirt.'³⁶ Even its palaces and dances could not completely conceal the nature of the Empire it ruled: 'On the one hand there are the elegant fashions, gorgeous dresses, sumptuous repasts, splendid fetes and theatres equal to those that adorn Paris and London,' observed a French diplomat, 'on the other there are merchants in Asiatic costume, domestics and peasants in sheepskins and wearing long beards, fur- bonnets, gloves without fingers and hatchets hanging from their leather belts.'³⁷

The Empress's new Winter Palace was not yet finished, but it was mag­nificent nonetheless - one room would be gilded, painted, hung with chan­deliers and filled with courtiers, the next would be draughty, leaky, almost open to the elements and strewn with masons' tools. Shuvalov led the twelve prize-winning students into the reception rooms where Elisabeth received foreign envoys. There, Potemkin and his fellow scholars were presented to the Empress.

Elisabeth, then nearly fifty and in the seventeenth year of her reign, was a big-boned Amazonian blonde with blue eyes. 'It was impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be struck by her beauty,' Catherine the Great remembered. 'She was a large woman who in spite of being very stout was not in the least disfigured by her size.'³⁸ Elisabeth, like her sixteenth-century English namesake, was raised in the glorious shadow of a dominant royal father and then spent her youth in the risky limbo between the throne and the dungeon. This honed her natural political instincts - but there end the similarities with Gloriana. She was impulsive, generous and frivolous, but also shrewd, vindictive and ruthless - truly Peter the Great's daughter. This Elisabethan Court was dominated by the exuberance and vanity of the Empress, whose appetites for elaborate fetes and expensive clothes were prodigious. She never wore the same clothes twice. She changed her dresses twice a day and female courtiers copied her. When she died, her successor found a wardrobe in the Summer Palace filled with 15,000 dresses. At Court, French plays were still a rare and foreign innovation: the usual entertainment was the Empress's so-called transvestite balls where everyone was ordered to dress as the opposite sex: this led to all sorts of horseplay with the men in 'whale-boned petticoats' and the women looking like 'scrubby little boys' - especially the old ones. There was a reason for this: 'the only woman who looked really fine, and completely a man, was the Empress herself. As she was tall and powerful, male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I have ever seen on any man.. Л³⁹

Even the purported fun at this Elisabethan Court was permeated by the struggle for political influence and fear of imperial caprice: when the Empress could not get powder out of her hair and had to shave her head to remove it, she ordered all the ladies at court to shave theirs too. 'The ladies obeyed in tears.' When she was jealous of other beauties, she cut the ribbons of one with scissors and the curls of another two. She actually issued orders to ensure that no other woman emulated her coiffeur de jour. As she lost her looks, she alternated between Orthodox devotions and the frantic application of cosmetics.⁴⁰ Politics was a risky game, even for fashionable noblewomen. Early in her reign, Elisabeth ordered that a pretty courtier named Countess Natalia Lopukhina have her tongue cut out just for vaguely chattering about a plot - yet this was the soft-hearted woman who also abolished the death penalty.

She combined her Orthodox piety with hearty promiscuity. Elisabeth's love affairs were legion and uninhibited, much more so than Catherine's: they varied from French doctors and Cossack choristers to that rich reservoir of local virility, the Guards. Her great love, nicknamed 'The Night Emperor', was a young Ukrainian half-Cossack, whom she first noticed singing in the choir: his name was Alexei Razum, which was soon dignified into Razumov- sky. He and his younger brother Kirill, a teenage shepherd, were rewarded with riches and raised to count, one of the new Germanic titles imported by Peter the Great. In 1749, Elisabeth took a new lover, Ivan Shuvalov, aged twenty-two, so another family were raised to the diamond-studded status of magnates.

By the time young Potemkin visited Petersburg, many of these magnates were the scions of a newly coined Petrine and Elisabethan aristocracy - there was no better advertisement for the benefits of life at Court. 'Orderlies, choristers, scullery boys in noble kitchens', as Pushkin put it, were raised on merit or just favour to the height of wealth and aristocracy.⁴¹ These new men served in the higher echelons of Court and military alongside the old untitled Muscovite nobles and the princely clans, who were the descendants of ruling houses: the Princes Golitsyn, for example, were descended from Grand Duke Gedemin of Lithuania, the Princes Dolgoruky from Rurik.

This was Potemkin's introduction to a world of empresses and favourites that he was ultimately to dominate. Elisabeth's father, Peter I (the Great), had celebrated his conquest of the Baltic by declaring himself imperator or emperor in 1721 in addition to the traditional title of tsar, which itself derived from the Roman Caesar. But Peter had also ensured a century of instability by decreeing that Russian rulers could choose their own heirs without con­sulting the opinion of anyone else: this has been called 'the apotheosis of autocratic rule'. Russia was not to have a law of succession until the reign of Paul I. Since Peter had tortured his own son and heir - the Tsarevich (Tsar's son) Alexei - to death in 1718 and his other male sons had died, he was succeeded in 1725 by his low-born widow as Empress Catherine I in her own right, backed by the Guards Regiments and a camarilla of his closest cronies. Catherine was the first of a line of female or child rulers, the symptom of a grievous lack of adult male heirs.

In this 'era of palace revolutions', emperors were raised to the purple by combinations of Court factions, noble magnates and the Guards Regiments, which were stationed in St Petersburg. On Catherine I's death in 1727, Peter's grandson, the son of the murdered Alexei, ruled as Peter II for a mere two years. On his death,[8] the Russian Court offered the throne to Peter's niece

Anna of Courland, who ruled, with her hated German favourite Ernst Biron, until 1740. Then a baby, Ivan VI, acceded to the throne, which was controlled by his mother, Anna Leopoldovna, the Duchess of Brunswick, as regent. The Russians did not appreciate children, German or female rulers. All three was too much to bear.

On 25 November 1741, after a series of palace coups during the reign of the infant Ivan VI, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, aged thirty-one, seized the Russian Empire with just 308 Guardsmen - and consigned the child-Emperor to a cell in the fortress of Schliisselburg. The mixture of palace intrigue and praetorian coup set the tone for Russian politics for the century. Foreigners were confused by this - especially in the century of Enlightenment when politics and law were being obsessively analysed: wits could only decide that the Russian throne was neither elective nor hereditary - it was occupative. The Russian constitution, to paraphrase Madame de Stael, was the character of the Emperor. The personality of the Autocrat was the government. And the government, as the Marquis de Custine put it, was 'an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination'.⁴²

This rule of women created a peculiar Russian version of the Court favour­ite. Shuvalov, Potemkin's patron, was the Empress's latest. A favourite was a trusted associate or lover, often of humble origins, favoured by a monarch out of personal choice instead of noble birth. Not all aspired to power. Some were happy merely to become rich courtiers. But in Russia the empresses needed them because only men could command armies. They were ideally placed to become minister-favourites⁴³ who ran the country for their mis­tresses.[9]

When Shuvalov, still only thirty-two, presented the eighteen-year-old Grisha Potemkin to the now bloated and ailing Empress, he drew attention to his knowledge of Greek and theology. The Empress ordered Potemkin to be promoted to Guards corporal as a reward, even though so far he had done no soldiering whatsoever. She probably presented the boys with a trinket - a glass goblet engraved with her silhouette - as a prize.f

The Court must have turned Potemkin's head because when he returned to Moscow he no longer concentrated on his studies. Perhaps the drunkenness and indolence of the professors infected the students. In 1760, the linguist, who had won the Gold Medal and presentation to the Empress, was expelled for 'laziness and non-attendance of lessons'. Years later, when he was already a prince, Potemkin visited Moscow University and met the Professor Barsov who had expelled him. The Prince asked the Professor if he remembered their earlier encounter. 'Your Highness deserved it,' replied Barsov. The Prince characteristically enjoyed the reply, embraced the aged Professor, and became his patron.⁴⁴

Potemkin's expulsion appeared to be something of a disaster. His godfather and mother felt that obscure young men like Grisha could not afford to be so lazy. Fortunately, he was already enrolled in the Guards, but he did not even have the money for the trip to St Petersburg, a sure sign that his family either disapproved or had cut him off. He drifted apart from his mother: indeed they hardly saw each other later in life. The Empress Catherine II later made her a lady-in-waiting and she was proud of her son - but openly disapproved of his love life. So this was not just a process of leaving home. He was leaving on his own. He borrowed 500 roubles, a considerable sum, from his friend Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, now Bishop of Mojaisk. Pot­emkin often said he meant to return it with interest, but the Bishop was to be savagely murdered later in this story before Potemkin rose to power. He never repaid it.

The life of a young Guardsman was idle, decadent and exceedingly expen­sive, but there was no surer path to greatness. Potemkin's timing was oppor­tune - Russia was fighting the Seven Years War against Prussia, while in Petersburg Empress Elisabeth was dying. The Guards were already seething with intrigue.

On arrival in St Petersburg, Potemkin reported for duty at the Headquarters of his Horse-Guards Regiment, which comprised a little village of barracks, houses and stables built round a quadrangle by the Neva river near the Smolny Convent. The Regiment had its own church, hospital, bathhouse and prison. There was a meadow behind it for feeding horses and holding parades. The oldest Guards Regiments - such as the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky - were founded by Peter the Great first as play regiments but then as his loyal forces in the vicious struggle against the corps of state musketeers, the Streltsy. His successors added others. In 1730, Empress Anna founded Potemkin's regiment, the Garde-a-Cheval - the Horse-Guards.⁴⁵

Guards officers were quite unable to withstand 'the seductions of the metropolis'.⁴⁶ When these teenage playboys were not carousing, they fought a sometimes fatal guerrilla war through the balls and backstreets with the Noble Cadet Corps that was based in the Menshikov Palace.⁴⁷ So many young bloods were ruined by debts, or exhausted by endless whoring in the Metshchansky district or by games of whist or faro, that more ascetic parents preferred their boys to join an ordinary regiment, like the father in The Captain's Daughter who exclaims, 'Petrusha is not going to Petersburg. What would he learn, serving in Petersburg? To be a spendthrift and a rake? No, let him be a soldier and not a fop in the Guards!'⁴⁸

Potemkin soon became known to the raciest daredevils among the Guards. At twenty-two, he was tall - well over six foot - broad and highly attractive to women. Potemkin 'had the advantage of having the finest head of hair in all Russia'. His looks and talents were so striking that he was nicknamed 'Alcibiades', a superlative compliment in a neo-Classical age.* Educated people at that time studied Plutarch and Thucydides, so the character of the Athenian statesman was familiar - intelligent, cultured, sensuous, incon­sistent, debauched and flamboyant. Plutarch raved about the 'Brilliance' of Alcibiades' 'physical beauty'.⁴⁹ Potemkin immediately attracted attention as a wit - he was an outstanding mimic, a gift that was to carry him far beyond the realm of comedians.⁵⁰ It was soon to win the admiration of the most glamorous ruffians in the Guards - the Orlovs - and they in turn would draw him into the intrigues of the imperial family.

The Guards protected the imperial palaces, and it was this that gave them their political significance.⁵¹ Being in the capital and close to the Court, 'the officers have more opportunity to be known,' a Prussian diplomat observed.⁵² They had the run of the city, 'admitted to the games, dances, soirees and theatrical performances of Court into the interior of that sanctuary'.⁵³ Their duties at the palaces gave them a detailed but irreverent acquaintance with magnates and courtiers - and a sense of personal involvement in the rivalries of the imperial family itself.

During the months that Empress Elisabeth was suspended between life and death, groups of Guardsmen became increasingly embroiled in plans to change the succession to exclude the hated Grand Duke Peter and replace him with his popular wife, Grand Duchess Catherine. Guarding the imperial palaces, Potemkin now had the chance to observe the romantic figure of Grand Duchess Catherine, who would soon rule in her own right as Catherine II. She was never beautiful, but she possessed qualities far superior to that ephemeral glaze: the indefinable magic of imperial dignity combined with sexual attractiveness, natural gaiety and an all-conquering charm that touched everyone who met her. The best description of Catherine at this age was written a few years earlier by Stanislas Poniatowski, her Polish lover:

She had reached that time in life when any woman to whom beauty had been granted will be at her best. She had black hair, a radiant complexion and a high colour, large prominent and expressive blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, a pointed nose, a kissable mouth ... slender figure, tall rather than small; she moved quickly yet with great nobility and had an agreeable voice and a gay good-tempered laugh.

Potemkin had not met her yet - but just about the time of his arrival in

* Alcibiades was famously bisexual - his lovers included Socrates - but there was never any suggestion that Potemkin emulated his sexual tastes. The other eighteenth-century figure known as Alcibiades was a favourite of King Gustavus III of Sweden and later friend of Tsar Alexander - Count Armfeld was 'l'Alcibiade du Nord'.

Petersburg she began to cultivate the Guards, who ardently admired her and hated her husband, the Heir. So it was that the provincial boy from Chizhova found himself perfectly placed to join the conspiracy that would place her on the throne - and bring the two of them together. Catherine herself overheard one general declare the gallant sentiments that young Potemkin would soon share: There goes a woman for whose sake an honest man would gladly suffer several lashes of the knout.'⁵⁴

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 Luther- anism; 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: '(i) 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 sensibilite 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-Jagersdorf, 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: T have many more things to say to you .. .'.^T5 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[10] - 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.'^2It

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 - to be 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 'Те 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 sensibilite 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.[11]

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 Schliisselburg, 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, nee 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 Ill'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 Ill'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.[12] 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 Ill'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 Munnich, a German veteran of the palace revolutions of 1740/1, recently recalled from exile. Munnich 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 Munnich 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.

Munnich 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

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 з 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 Schlusselburg, 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 Ill'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 marticide.

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 her head to emphasize that her legitimacy derived from herself, then took the sceptre in her right hand 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 palace 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 Schlusselburg, 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'etat. 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.[13] 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 Schlusselburg and make him emperor. Poor Mirovich did not know that Catherine had reconfirmed Peter Ill's orders that, if anyone tried to free Prisoner Number One, he had to be killed instantly. Meanwhile Mirovich, whose regiment was stationed at Schllisselburg, 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: T 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

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 a 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.