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The day after Pugachev declared himself emperor, his wily opportunism had won him 300 supporters, who began storming government forts. His army increased. Those so-called forts were really just villages encircled by wooden fences and filled with unreliable Cossacks, discontented peasants and a small sleepy garrison of soldiers. They were not hard to capture. Within weeks, the south-eastern borderlands were almost literally ablaze.5
On 5 October, ‘Peter III’ arrived before the local capital of Orenburg, now with an army of 3,000 and over twenty cannons, leaving the bodies of nobles and officers hanging in their fallen strongholds or outside their burning mansions, usually headless, handless and legless. Women were raped and then beaten to death; men were often hanged upside down. One corpulent officer was flayed alive and stuffed while the rebels cut out his fat and rubbed it on to their wounds. His wife was torn to pieces and his daughter was consoled by being placed in the ‘Amparator’s’ harem, where she was later murdered by Cossacks who envied her place of favour.
On 6 November, ‘Amperator Peter Fadarivich’ founded a College of War at his headquarters at Berda outside Orenburg. Soon he wore a gold-embroidered kaftan and a fur hat, his chest was covered in medals and his henchmen were known as ‘Count Panin’ and ‘Count Vorontsov’. He had secretaries writing out his manifestos in Russian, German, French, Arabic and the Turkic languages; judges to keep order among his men; commanders to lead different armies; deserters to fire his cannons. His mounted army must have been an awesome, exotic and barbaric sight: much of it was made up of peasants, Cossacks and Turkic horsemen, armed with lances, scythes, and bows and arrows.
When the news first reached the ‘Devil’s daughter’ back in St Petersburg in mid-October, Catherine took it for a minor Cossack mutiny and despatched General Vasily Kar with a force to suppress it. In early November, Kar was defeated by the frenzied horde, suddenly 25,000 strong, and fled back to Moscow in shame.
These initial successes gave Pugachev the prestige he needed. As his ruffians took cities, he was received by bell-ringing, icon-bearing reception committees of priests and townsfolk offering prayers to ‘Peter III and the Grand Duke Paul’ (not to Catherine of course).
‘Pugachev was sitting in an armchair on the steps of the commandant’s house,’ wrote Pushkin in his story The Captain’s Daughter, which is based on his research and conversations with witnesses. ‘He was wearing a red Cossack coat trimmed with gold lace. A tall sable cap with gold tassels was set low over his flashing eyes…The Cossack elders surrounded him…In the square gallows were being prepared’.6 Sometimes, sixty nobles were hanged together. It is said rewards of 100 roubles were offered for each dead nobleman and the title ‘general’ for ten burned mansions.
‘The Emperor’ would then dine in the local governor’s house, often accompanied by his terrified widow and daughters; the governor himself would probably be hanging outside. The ladies would either be hanged or granted to a chieftain for his private pleasure. While he was publicly hailed as Sovereign, the Emperor’s private dinners were informal Cossack feasts. After recruiting more men, commandeering cannons and stealing the local treasury, he would ride off again to the ringing of bells and the singing of prayers.7 By early December, Pugachev was besieging the towns of Samara and Orenburg, as well as Ufa in Baskiria, with an army now approaching 30,000, swelled by all the discontented of the south – Cossacks, Tartars, Bashkirs, Kirghiz and Kalmyks.
Pugachev was already making mistakes; his marriage for example to his favourite mistress was hardly the behaviour of an emperor who, if he was really alive, was already married to a certain ‘Devil’s daughter’ in St Petersburg. Nonetheless, as December arrived, it was suddenly clear that he was a real threat to the Russian Empire.
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The timing of Catherine’s letter to Potemkin was far from coincidental. She wrote to him when she had just received news that Pugachev had routed Kar. This was no minor upheaval: the Volga region was rising under what appeared to be an organized and competent leader. Five days before lifting her pen to Potemkin, she had appointed the impressive General Alexander Bibikov, a friend of both Panin and Potemkin, to suppress the pretender. Politically, she needed someone unattached to the leading parties but linked only to her who could advise on her military matters. Personally, she missed the friend whom she now loved. It was as if all the years of their strange relationship, potentially so close yet perpetually so distant, had been preparing for this moment.
As Potemkin got ready to come to her, the rebellion was far from the only worrying challenge. There was another true pretender, much closer to home and all the more dangerous: her son. On 20 September 1772, Grand Duke Paul – the Tsarevich and the threat to her reign and therefore her life – turned eighteen, so she could not long delay recognizing his majority when he had every reason to expect to be allowed to marry, maintain his own court and play a significant political role. The first was possible, if not attractive, the second was feasible but far from convenient and the third was impossible. Catherine feared that to take Paul as any sort of co-ruler would be the first step to her own overthrow. While she considered what to do, a new plot demonstrated that Paul remained her Achilles’ heel.
Catherine’s difficulties had started with her dismissal of Prince Orlov a year earlier and her embrace of Vassilchikov, who was no help in matters of state – or the heart. The fall of Orlov appeared to mark the triumph of Nikita Panin, who as Paul’s Governor must have anticipated an even larger slice of power. But the balance was restored by the reappearance of a cheerful Prince Orlov in May 1773, after ‘travelling abroad’. He rejoined the Council in June. He must have imposed a three-line whip of his family since Petersburg now felt the formidable presence of all five Orlov brothers.
Faced with Paul’s majority, Catherine searched for a grand duchess in much the same way that Elisabeth had found her. Then and now, the Empress decided that a German princess, not directly linked to either Austria or Prussia, would be most appropriate. In June, Paul expressed his interest in Princess Wilhelmina, second daughter of the Landgraf of Hesse-Darmstadt, whose family business was renting out his Hessians as mercenaries. At about the time Wilhelmina converted to Orthodoxy on 15 August, Paul received a not altogether unattractive proposition from a diplomat in the Russian service, Caspar von Saldern, a native of Paul’s Duchy of Holstein. He persuaded Paul to put his name to a plan for mother and son to rule jointly like Maria Theresa and Joseph of Austria. As soon as Panin heard of this, he tried to cover up. When Catherine discovered the plot, she was so angry with Saldern she wanted ‘the wretch tied neck and heels and brought straight here’.8 He never visited Russia again.9
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As if all this – war, filial tension, possible treason and the widespread peasant rebellion – was not enough, a literary celebrity arrived in Petersburg on 28 September 1773 and provided Catherine with a short interval of comic relief. The Empress admired his Encyclopaedia but it is hard to imagine a more inconvenient moment for Denis Diderot’s visit. The Encyclopaedist, bearing all the ludicrous delusions of the French philosophes, expected to advise Catherine on the immediate reform of her entire Empire. Staying for five months in a house a few hundred yards from the Winter Palace (it is marked with a plaque near St Isaac’s Cathedral), his conversations helped her through the monotony of life with Vassilchikov.
However, Diderot soon began to irritate her – though if one compares his sojourn to Voltaire’s disastrous stay with Frederick the Great, it was a moderate success. Catherine naughtily claimed that he bruised her knees which he pummelled as he over-excitedly told her how to run Russia.10 He did at least introduce her to his companion Frederich Melchior Grimm, who became her dearest correspondent for the rest of her life.
Diderot’s sole achievement was probably to convince her, if Pugachev had not already done so, that
abstract reform programmes had little use in Russia: ‘you only work on paper…’, she told him, ‘while I, poor Empress, I work on human skin.’11 Catherine, said Diderot, had ‘the soul of Caesar with the seductions of Cleopatra.’12
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On 29 September, Paul, undermined by the Saldern Affair, married his Grand Duchess Natalia (formerly Wilhelmina), followed by ten days of celebrations. Count Panin remained Foreign Minister but he had to give up his position as Paul’s Governor, losing his rooms in the palaces. He was consoled with promotion to the highest echelon of the Table of Ranks, a pension of 30,000 roubles and a gift of 9,000 souls. To pacify the Orlovs, Catherine promoted their ally Zakhar Chernyshev to field-marshal and President of the College of War. But the Saldern Affair had damaged all of them: Catherine no longer trusted Panin but was stuck with his Northern System. She no longer respected Orlov, but his clan was a pillar of her regime. She forgave him the folly of Fokshany but would not take him back as a lover. She found her own son Paul narrow-minded, bitter and uncongenial. She could never trust him in government – yet he was Heir. She was bored with Vassilchikov yet she had made him her official favourite. Catherine, surrounded by a fierce rivalry between Panins and Orlovs, had never been more alone.13
This risky dilemma was also harming her image in Europe. Frederick the Great, that misanthropic genius who presided over an austere all-male court, was particularly disgusted: Orlov had been recalled to all offices, he fumed, ‘except that of fucking’. Frederick also sensed that the uncertainty at Court would threaten Panin and his Prussian alliance. ‘It is a terrible business’, declared the King of Prussia, ‘when the prick and the cunt decide the interests of Europe.’14 But by late January the freshly arrived Potemkin was deciding nothing. He could not wait any longer. He decided to force Catherine’s hand.
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Potemkin declared he was no longer interested in earthly glories: he was to take holy orders. He at once left Samoilov’s cottage, moved into the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, founded by Peter the Great, on the outskirts of eighteenth-century Petersburg, and lived, as a monk, growing a beard, fasting, reading, praying and chanting ostentatiously. The suspense of waiting, on the verge of success, in a political and personal hothouse, was, in itself, enough to strain Potemkin’s manic nature to the edge of a breakdown, which he soothed by immersing himself in Orthodox mysticism. But he was also a born politician with the appropriate thespian talents. His melodramatic retreat put public pressure on Catherine; he was almost going ‘on strike’, withdrawing his advice and support unless she gave him the credit for it. It has been suggested that he and the Empress arranged this together to accelerate his rise. The pair were soon to show they were quite capable of prearranged stunts, but in this case Potemkin’s behaviour seems equally divided between piety, depression and artifice.15
His cell, more like a coenobitic political campaign headquarters, saw much coming and going between fasts. Carriages galloped through the gates and departed again; servants, courtiers and the rustling skirts of imperial ladies, particularly Countess Bruce, rushed on and off the Baroque stage of the monastery like characters in an opera, bearing notes and whispered messages.16 First, as in every opera, there was a song. Potemkin let Catherine know that he had written one to her. It has the ring of Potemkin’s passion – and also the mawkishness that is the hallmark of love songs, then and now. But as a description of his situation, it is not bad. ‘As soon as I beheld thee, I thought of thee alone…But O Heavens, what torment to love one to whom I dare not declare it! one who can never be mine! Cruel gods! Why have you given her such charms? And why did you exalt her so high? Why did you destine me to love her and her alone?’17 Potemkin made sure Countess Bruce told the Empress how his ‘unfortunate and violent passion had reduced him to despair and, in his sad situation, he deemed it prudent to fly the object of his torment since the sight alone could aggravate his sufferings which were already intolerable.’18 He began ‘to hate the world because of his love for her – and she was flattered’.19
Catherine replied with an oral message that went something like this: ‘I cannot understand what can have reduced him to such despair since I have never declared against him. I fancied on the contrary that the affability of my reception must have given him to understand that his homage was not displeasing.’20 It was not enough. The fasting, chanting, rustling of go-between skirts and delivery of messages continued. The holier of the monks must surely have rolled their eyes at this worldly bustle.
Catherine, by all accounts, made up her mind and despatched Countess Bruce – ironically, Rumiantsev’s estranged sister – to bring Potemkin back. The Countess, in all her finery, arrived at the monastery in a Court coach. She was taken to Potemkin, who was bearded, wearing monk’s habit and prostrated in a plain cell before an icon of St Catherine. In case the Countess was in any doubt about his sincerity, he continued praying and chanting for a very long time. Finally Potemkin deigned to hear her message. He then swiftly shaved, washed and dressed in uniform to re-emerge at Court.
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What was Catherine feeling during this operatic interlude? During the next weeks, when they were finally lovers, she revealed to him, in this most tender and moving account, how she already loved him by the time he returned from the army:
Then came a certain hero [bogatr]: this hero, through his valour and demeanour, was already very close to our heart; on hearing of his arrival, people began to talk of his staying here, not knowing we had already written to him, on the quiet, asking him to do so, with the secret intention however of not acting blindly when he did come, but of trying to discover whether he really had the inclination of which Countess Bruce said that many suspected him, the inclination I wanted him to have.21
The Empress was at Tsarskoe Selo outside the city. Potemkin rode out there, most likely accompanied by Countess Bruce. The Court Journal tells us that Potemkin was presented on the evening of 4 February: he was ushered straight into her private apartments, where they remained alone for an hour. He is mentioned again on the 9th, when he attended a formal dinner at the Catherine Palace. They dined officially together four times in February, but we can guess that they were together much more: we have a few undated notes from Catherine to Potemkin that we can place in those days.22 The first is addressed ‘Mon ami’, which suggests a growing warmth but warns him about bumping into a shocked Grand Duke, who already hated Prince Orlov for being his mother’s lover.23 In the second, written a few days later, Potemkin has been promoted to ‘Mon cher ami’. Already she is using the nicknames they have made up for the courtiers: one of the Golitsyns is ‘M. le Gros’ – ‘Fatty’ – but, more importantly, she calls Potemkin ‘l’esprit’ – ‘the wit’.24
They were coming closer by the hour. On the 14th, the Court returned to the Winter Palace in town. On the 15th, there was another dinner with both Vassilchikov and Potemkin among the twenty guests. One can imagine the unhappiness of poor Vassilchikov as Potemkin dominated the scene.
Potemkin and the Empress might have consummated their love affair around this time. Few of their thousands of notes are dated, but there is one that we can tentatively place around 15 February in which Catherine cancels a meeting with ‘l’esprit’ in the banya, the Russian steam-bath, mainly because ‘all my ladies are there now and probably won’t leave for another hour’.25 Ordinary men and women bathed together in banyas in the eighteenth century, much to the indignation of foreigners, but empresses did not. This is the first mention of Catherine and Potemkin meeting in the banya, but it was to be their favourite place for rendezvous. If they were meeting in the intimate banya on the 15th, it is likely they were already lovers.
On the 18th, the Empress attended a Russian comedy at the House of Opera and then probably met Potemkin in her apartments. They talked or made love until one in the morning – extremely late for that disciplined German
ic princess. In a note in which one can sense their increasing intensity but also her submissiveness to him, she sweetly worries that ‘I exceeded your patience…my watch stopped and the time passed so quickly that an hour seemed like a minute.’26
‘My darling, what nonsense you talked yesterday…’, she wrote in these early days. ‘The time I spend with you is so happy. We passed four hours together, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part with you. My dear, my friend, I love you so much: you are so handsome, so clever, so jovial, so witty: when I am with you, I attach no importance to the world. I’ve never been so happy…’.27 For the first time, we can hear the intimate laughter that must have echoed at night out of the Winter Palace banya. They were both sensualists – a pair of Epicureans. ‘My darling friend, I fear you might be angry with me. If not, all the better. Come quickly to my bedroom and prove it.’28
Vassilchikov was still in residence – at least officially. Catherine and Potemkin nicknamed him ‘soupe à la glace’ – ‘iced soup’.29 It was now she told Potemkin that she wished they had started a year and half before instead of wasting precious time unhappily.30 But the presence of Vassilchikov in his apartments was still upsetting Potemkin, who was always hysterically jealous. He had apparently flounced off because, in a letter a few days later, Catherine had to coax him back: ‘I cannot force someone to caress…You know my nature and my heart, you know my good and bad qualities, I let you choose your behaviour…It is silly to torment yourself…You ruin your health for nothing.’31
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 17