Catherine the Great & Potemkin
Page 22
Peter Panin had the bit between his teeth. He even killed some of the witnesses. When he got his hands on the pretender himself, who had served unnoticed under him at Bender in the war, he slapped him across the face and made him kneel. He brought him out and slapped him again for every curious visitor – except Pavel Potemkin, whose job it was to question him.45 Catherine and Potemkin neatly cut this Gordian knot by dissolving the Kazan Commission to create the Special Commission of the Secret Department of the Senate in Moscow, which was to arrange Pugachev’s trial. They appointed Pavel Potemkin to it46 – but not Panin. Potemkin was obviously protecting his cousin’s interests, and his own, for Catherine told him: ‘I hope all Pavel’s quarrels and dissatisfactions come to an end when he receives my orders to go to Moscow.’ In the midst of the politics, she added: ‘Sweetheart, I love you very much and wish that pill would cure you of all illness. But I ask you to abstain: eat just soup and tea without milk.’47
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Peter Panin ‘now decorated rural Russia with a forest of gallows’, according to one modern historian.48 ‘The murderers [of officials]’, declared Panin in a circular that was not approved by Catherine, ‘and their accomplices shall be put to death first by cutting off their hands and feet and then their heads and placing the bodies on blocks beside thoroughfares…those villages in which they were murdered or betrayed shall…hand over the guilty by drawing lots, every third man to be hanged…and if by this means they still do not give them up, then every 100th man by lot shall actually be hanged from the rib and all remaining adults to be flogged…’.
Panin boasted to Catherine that he did not shrink from ‘spilling of the damned blood of state miscreants’.49 The hanging from the rib, which he specified, was performed on a forgotten delicacy – the glagoly, a special form of gallows in the shape of a small letter ‘r’ but with a longer arm, from which victims were hanged by the rib, held in place by a metal hook that was inserted behind their ribs and threaded through.50 This macabre exhibition was the last thing Catherine wanted Europe to see, but Panin claimed that it was only to act as a deterrent. Rebels were trussed up on gallows on rafts and sent down the Volga, their corpses decaying on these amphibious gibbets. In fact, far fewer miscreants were executed that one might expect, though there must have been many cases of rough justice. Only 324, many of them renegade priests and nobles, were officially sentenced to death, which, considering the scale of the Rebellion, compares well to the English reprisals after the 1745 Battle of Culloden.51
The Yaik Cossack Host where the Rebellion had begun was abolished and renamed. In a foretaste of the Soviet fashion for renaming places after their leaders, Catherine ordered that Zimoveyskaya stanitsa,52 Pugachev’s home village on the far bank of the Don, should be renamed Potemkinskaya, erasing, in Pushkin’s elegant words, ‘the gloomy remembrance of the rebel with the glory of a new name that was becoming dear to her and the Motherland’.53
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The ‘state miscreant’ was despatched to Moscow, staring like a wild animal out of a specially constructed iron cage. When he arrived at the beginning of November, the angry Muscovites were already relishing the prospect of a particularly sadistic execution. This began to worry Catherine, who knew that the Rebellion was already an embarrassing blight on her Enlightened reputation.
Catherine and Potemkin secretly resolved to reduce the cruelty of the execution – admirable at a time when judicial killing in England and France was still astonishingly vicious. Procurator-General Viazemsky was sent to Moscow, accompanied by the ‘Senate secretary’, Sheshkovsky, the feared knout-wielder who, Catherine chillingly informed Pavel Potemkin, ‘has a special gift with common people’. However, Pugachev was not tortured.54
Catherine tried to oversee as much of the trial as she could. She sent Potemkin her Pugachev Manifesto to read – if he was not too ill. The hypochondriac did not reply, so the Empress, who obviously needed his approval, sent him another note: ‘Please read it and tell us now what you make of it: is it good or bad?’ Later that day or the next, the Empress became impatient – ‘it’s twelve o’clock but we haven’t got the end of the Manifesto so it can’t be written out in time and can’t be sent to the Council…If you like the drafts, we ask you to send them back…If you don’t like them, correct them.’ Potemkin may really have been ill or perhaps he was working on the peace celebrations to be held in Moscow. ‘My dear soul, you begin new enterprises every day.’55
The trial opened on 30 December in the Great Kremlin Hall. On 2 January 1775, Pugachev was sentenced to be quartered and beheaded. There was no ‘drawing’, or disembowelling while alive, in Russia: that was part of English civilization. However, the ‘quartering’ meant that all four limbs would be cut off while the victim was alive. Muscovites were enthusiastically anticipating this grisly spectacle. Catherine had other ideas. ‘As regards executions,’ she wrote to Viazemsky, ‘there must be no painful ones.’ On 21 December, she was at last able to tell Grimm that ‘in a few days, the farce of the “Marquis de Pugachev” will be finished. When you receive this letter, you can count on it that you won’t hear any more talk about that particular gentleman.’56
So the last setpiece scene of the ‘farce of the Marquis de Pugachev’ was prepared in the Bolotnaia Square below the Kremlin. On 10 January 1775, the crowds gathered, keen to witness the dismemberment of the living ‘monster’. Pugachev, ‘besmeared all over with black’, was drawn in ‘a kind of dung-cart’, in which he was fastened to a stake. There were two priests with him and the executioner stood behind. Two gleaming axes lay on the block. ‘Not a trace of fear’ was discernible on his serene face ‘in the hour approaching dissolution’. The ‘monster’ climbed up the ladder to the scaffold, undressed himself and stretched out, ready for the executioner to begin his carving.
Something ‘strange and unexpected’ happened. The executioner swung his axe and, contrary to the sentence, beheaded Pugachev without ‘quartering’. This outraged both the judges and the crowd. Someone, possibly one of the sentencing judges, called out to the executioner and ‘threatened him in severe terms’. Another official shouted, ‘Ah, you son of a bitch – what have you done?’ And then added: ‘Well hurry up – hands and feet!’ Witnesses said it was generally believed that the executioner ‘will lose his tongue…for his neglect’. The executioner paid no attention and dismembered the corpse, before moving on to cut off the tongues and clip the noses of the other miscreants who had avoided the death penalty. Pugachev’s diverse quarters were exposed at the top of a pole in the middle of the scaffold. The head was stuck on an iron spike and displayed.57 The Pugachevschina – the Time of Pugachev – was over.
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Some time in the last stages of the crisis, Catherine wrote this letter to Potemkin: ‘My dear soul, cher Epoux, darling husband, come and snuggle up, if you please. Your caress is sweet and lovely to me…Beloved husband.’58
Skip Notes
*1 It was a mark of the anarchy engulfing the Volga region that yet another false Peter III, a fugitive serf, now managed to raise another rabble army and conquer Troitsk, south-east of Moscow, where he set up another grotesque Court.
*2 Renamed Stalingrad in 1925. Since 1961, it has been called Volgagrad.
9
MARRIAGE: MADAME POTEMKIN
My marble beauty…my beloved, better than any king…no man on earth can equal you…
Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin
Catherine and Potemkin planned a secret rendezvous that must have filled them with a sense of mounting anticipation, jubilation and anxiety. On 4 June 1774, the Empress, still recovering in Tsarskoe Selo from her blistering confrontation with Prince Orlov, wrote this cryptic note to Potemkin, who was in the city: ‘My dear, I’ll come tomorrow and I’ll bring with me that which you wrote about. Order them to prepare Field-Marshal Golitsyn�
�s boat opposite the Sievers’ landing-stage, if it will be possible to pull in to the shore not far from the palace…’.1 Alexander Golitsyn, Potemkin’s first commander in the war, was Governor-General of the capital, so he had his own boat. Count Yakov Sievers had a landing stage on the Fontanka, beside the Summer Palace.
On 5 June, as promised to Potemkin, the Empress returned to St Petersburg. Next day, a Friday, she held a small dinner for her senior courtiers in the little garden of the Summer Palace, perhaps to say goodbye to Prince Orlov, about to ‘travel abroad’. On Sunday, 8 June, Catherine and Potemkin attended a dinner in honour of the Izmailovsky Guards: the toasts were answered by salvoes of cannon; the meal on a silver service from Paris was accompanied by Italian singers. Afterwards, Catherine walked on the banks of the Fontanka beside Count Sievers’s house.2
At midnight on that summer’s evening, the Empress set off on a mysterious boating trip from the Summer Palace on the Fontanka. She often visited her courtiers in their houses on the Neva or on the islands that made up St Petersburg. But this was different. It was late for a woman who liked to be in bed by 11 p.m. She left secretly, her face probably hidden by a hooded cloak.3 It is said that she was alone – except for her loyal maid, Maria Savishna Perekushina. General-en-Chef Potemkin, who had been with her all day, was absent. He had slipped away at dusk to a boat waiting on the river, which had borne him into the mist and then out of sight.
Catherine’s boat struck out of the Fontanka, past the Summer Palace with its gardens, into the Great Neva river, heading for the unfashionable Viborg Side. The boat moored at the one of the little jetties on the Little Nevka. There the Empress climbed into an unmarked carriage, waiting with the curtains drawn. As soon as Empress and maid were inside, the postillions whipped the horses and the carriage headed briskly down the road. It stopped on the right outside the Church of St Sampsonovsky. There was no one around. The ladies disembarked and entered St Sampsonov. The church had been built by Peter the Great, unusually in the Ukrainian style, in wood (it was rebuilt in stone in 1781), to celebrate the saint’s day of the Battle of Poltava. Its most striking feature was a high bell tower, painted in lilac blue, white and green.4
The Empress found Potemkin inside the church, illuminated by candles. ‘The greatest nailbiter in the Empire’ would have chewed his fingers to the quick. Since they had attended the Izmailovsky Guards dinner earlier, both would still be in their ‘regimentals’ – Potemkin in his uniform of a general-en-chef – green coat with red collar, braided with gold lace, red breeches, high boots, sword, hat with gold border and white feathers. We know from the Court Journal that Catherine was wearing her ‘long Regimental Guards uniform’ all day: it was ‘trimmed in gold lace made in the form of a lady’s riding habit’.5 The Empress could now hand the hooded cloak to her maid, knowing that she looked most fetching in ‘regimentals’. Perhaps her dress reminded them of the day they met.
There were just three other men in the church. A nameless priest and the two ‘grooms’. Catherine’s ‘groom’ was Chamberlain Evgraf Alexandrovich Chertkov; Potemkin’s was his nephew, Alexander Nikolaievich Samoilov. It was the nephew who read the portion from the Gospel. When he reached the words ‘wife be afraid of her husband’, Samoilov hesitated and glanced at the Sovereign. Could an empress be afraid of her husband? Catherine nodded and he continued.6 The priest then commenced the marriage ceremony. Samoilov and Chertkov stepped forward to hold the crowns over their heads as in a traditional Orthodox wedding. When the long ceremony was finished, the wedding certificates were signed and distributed among the witnesses. All were sworn to secrecy. Potemkin had become the secret consort of Catherine II.
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This is the legend of Potemkin and Catherine’s wedding. There is no conclusive proof that they married, but it is almost certain they did. However, secret marriages have always been the stuff of royal myth. In Russia, Empress Elisabeth was said to have married Alexei Razumovsky. In England, the Prince of Wales was soon to marry Mrs Fitzherbert in a secret ceremony, the validity of which was much debated.
There are many versions of the marriage: some say they married in Moscow the next year or in Petersburg in 1784 or 1791.7 The Moscow version takes place in the Church of the Ascension of our Lord near Nikitsky, with its distinctive round dome, painted yellow. This was close to the house of Potemkin’s mother, where he lived in Moscow. The church was later embellished with Potemkin’s money,8 in his mother’s memory. It is most famous now as the church where Alexander Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova on 18 February 1831 – one of many links between them.*1
A secret marriage could well have taken place on many another day during their relationship and the details of it concealed in the routine account of their activities. However, this time and place are the most likely. The letter from Catherine mentioned a secret enterprise and the Sievers’s jetty. The Court Journal of 8 June showed her embarking and disembarking there. There is time in the early or late evening for the secret boat trip. All the oral legends, handed down by the wedding guests and their descendants and recorded by Professor Bartenev in the nineteenth century, mentioned the St Samsonov Church, mid- to late 1774, and the same four witnesses. But where are the certificates? Potemkin’s was supposed inherited by his dearest niece, Alexandra Branicka. She told the secret to her son-in-law Prince Michael Vorontsov, and left the certificate to her daughter, Princess Lise. Count Orlov-Davydov remembered a visit to Count Samoilov, who showed him a jewelled buckle. ‘This’, he said, was presented to me by the Empress in memory of her marriage with my late uncle.’ Samoilov’s certificate was buried with him, according this his grandson Count A. A. Bobrinsky. Chertkov’s copy passed into obscurity.
The disappearance of the evidence and the secrecy are not as dubious as they might seem, because no one would have dared expose this during the strict, militaristic reigns of Tsars Paul, Alexander I and Nicholas I – or afterwards. The ‘Victorian’ Romanovs were embarrassed by Catherine’s love life, which, through the doubts about Paul’s paternity, questioned their legitimacy. As late as the 1870s, Professor Bartenev had to ask the Emperor’s permission even to do the research and it could not be published until 1906: only in the interim between the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, when the Autocracy was on its last legs, did Nicholas II permit its publication.9
The strongest evidence of their marriage lies in Catherine’s letters; the way she treated Potemkin; how he behaved; and how their relationship was described by insiders. She signed her letters ‘devoted wife’ and called him her ‘dear husband’ in at least twenty-two letters, naming him her ‘lord’ or ‘master’ in hundreds of others.10 ‘I’ll die if you’ll change…my dear friend, loving husband’11 is an early mention of the word in their love letters. ‘Father, Ch[er] Ep[oux] – [darling husband] –…I’ve sent Kelhen to cure your chest, I love you very much, my beloved friend,’ she wrote.12 She called Potemkin’s nephew – ‘our nephew’13 (author’s italics). Monarchs, more than normal mortals, have a very precise definition of who is or is not a member of their family. She was to treat some of his family as if they were her own until her death – so much so that there were rumours that his niece Branicka was her own child.14 Her most revealing and specific letter on the subject probably dates from a year later, possibly in early 1776:
My Lord and Cher Epoux…Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and I am bound to you by all possible ties. Just compare, were my acts more meaningful two years ago than they are now?15 (author’s italics)
The marriage, as both no doubt hoped, seemed to bring them even closer together. Probably Potemkin, in love with Catherine, tormented by jealousies and the fragility of his position, and ambitious to play an independent role, was soothed by it. He may have been as dissolute as he was pious, but he was a practising Ort
hodox believer, which may have helped persuade her. For her part, it might seem that marriage would be odd after a relationship of just a few months, but one should also quote that mother’s saying – ‘you just know when it is the right person’. Moreover Catherine had known Potemkin for twelve years and had loved him for some time: she knew him very well already. Their love was not only overwhelming but they were, as she put it, ‘twin souls’. At last she had found an intellectual equal with whom she could share the burden of ruling and the warmth of family.