Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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, soirées 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 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

  Skip Notes

  *1 The date of his birth is, like everything else about him, mysterious because there is much confusion about the age that he went to live in Moscow and that he was put down for the Guards. There is an argument for saying he was born in 1742, the date given by his nephew Samoilov. The dates and military records contradict each other without creating a particularly interesting debate. This date is the most likely.

  *2 When Grigory Potemkin, who was to prove even more shocking to Western sensibilities, rose to greatness in St Petersburg, it was felt he required a famous ancestor. A portrait of the foul-tempered, xenophobic and pedantic Ambassador of the era of the Sun King and the Merry Monarch was found, possibly a present from the English Embassy, and placed in Catherine the Great’s Hermitage.

  *3 This continued right up to 1917. When Rasputin’s enemies grumbled to Nicholas II about his bathing with his female devotees, the last Tsar retorted that this was a usual habit of the common people.

  *4 Today, there is little on the Potemkin side of the village except Catherine’s Well and the hut of two octogenarian peasants who subsist on bees. On the serf’s side, there is just the ruins of the church. In Communist times, the villagers say, the commissars kept cattle in ‘Potemkin’s church’ but all the cattle sickened and died. The villagers are still digging for an Aladdin’s Cave which they call ‘Potemkin’s Gold’. But all they have found are the bodies of eighteenth-century women, probably Potemkin’s sisters, in the graveyard.

  *5 He did endow the round Nikitskaya Church (Little Nikitskaya) and it was rebuilt by his heirs. But he was still planning the big project when he died. Historians who believe he married Catherine II in Moscow point to this church as the venue for the wedding.

  *6 The young Emperor, who moved the Court back to Moscow, died in the suburban Palace which today contains the War College archives (RGVIA), where most of Potemkin’s papers are stored.

  *7 Favourites had developed by the seventeenth century into the minister–favourites such as Olivares in Spain and Richelieu and Mazarin in France, who were not the King’s lovers but able politicians chosen to run the increasingly heavy bureaucracies. When Louis XIV chose to rule himself on the death of Mazarin in 1661, the fashion ended. But Russia’s female rulers, beginning with Catherine I in 1725, reinvented it.

  *8 In the Smolensk Local History Museum, there is just such a glass goblet which is said to have belonged to Potemkin. The story goes that when Catherine the Great passed through Smolensk she drank a toast from it.

  *9 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’.

  2

  THE GUARDSMAN AND THE GRAND DUCHESS: CATHERINE’S COUP

  Heaven knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant.

  Grand Duke Peter, in Catherine the Great, Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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