Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Catherine had to tread carefully. She absolutely understood the dangers of raising the Orlovs too high. If she married Orlov, she would threaten Grand Duke Paul’s claim to the throne, and possibly his life, as well as outraging the magnates and the army. But she loved Orlov. She owed the Orlovs her throne. She had borne Grigory a son.* This was an age when the imperial public and private lives were indissoluble. All through her life, Catherine longed for a family: her parents were dead; her aunt had ter
rorized 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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