The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Bubonic plague raged in Moscow. By August 1770, some 500 were dying a day. As the governor fled, the city spun out of control and a mob murdered the bishop. On 21 September 1771 Grigory Orlov rushed to Moscow where, courageously facing down mobs, he efficiently restored order. Catherine built him a triumphal arch at Tsarskoe Selo. ‘Count Orlov’, she told one of her Western correspondents, ‘is the handsomest man of his generation.’

  The Orlovs seemed safe – but Catherine was privately consulting Potemkin, back in Petersburg. The empress later regretted not starting a relationship with Potemkin in 1772. At the same time, Catherine sent Orlov to open talks with the Turks at Fokshany. Watched by Rumiantsev and Potemkin, Orlov floundered, storming out of the negotiations. Catherine was demanding that the Ottomans recognize the independence of Crimea, a first step towards Russian control. But Austria and Prussia had a price for their acquiescence: a carve-up of Poland. Catherine agreed the so-called First Partition in which Russia, Prussia and Austria annexed slices of Poland. But just when it seemed peace was close, Sweden encouraged the Ottomans to fight on.

  On 30 August 1772 Catherine appointed Alexander Vasilchikov, a good-looking but stolid Guards officer, as her new adjutant-general and moved him into a Winter Palace apartment near her own. While Orlov was ruining the negotiations, Catherine had taken a new lover. Orlov galloped back but was stopped – for ‘quarantine’ – at the city gates and ordered to wait at his nearby estate. Catherine had to tread carefully with the Orlovs. In sensitive negotiations, she promised Grigory to consign ‘all that has passed to oblivion’. She would never forget ‘how much I owe your clan’. She settled their break-up with a generosity that was to be her signature. Orlov received an annual pension of 150,000 roubles, a sum of 100,000 roubles to set up his household, 10,000 serfs, the neo-classical Marble Palace that she was already building for him, and the right to use the title of prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Prince Orlov went travelling for a while, later returning with honour to court; Potemkin was promoted to lieutenant-general while Catherine tried to settle down with Vasilchikov. Presumably she had chosen Vasilchikov because she knew that Potemkin would be dominant, eccentric and all-consuming. But she found Vasilchikov corrosively dull. She admitted later to Potemkin that ‘his caresses made me cry’. She nicknamed him ‘soupe à la glace’ – ‘Iced Soup’.6

  She was keen to get out of the war. Rumiantsev’s army, ravaged by disease, was stuck besieging Silistria, where Potemkin distinguished himself with lightning cavalry raids. In July 1773, Catherine mentioned his name for the first time to Voltaire. Then on 17 September the Cossacks, Tatars and runaways serfs of Yaiksk in the south-eastern borderlands rose in rebellion, under the leadership of a Don Cossack claiming to be the undead Peter III. The pretender was actually Emelian Pugachev, a deserter who declared that his scrofula scars were signs of royalty. His revolt unleashed a powder keg. Towns fell, nobles were dismembered, women raped and added to the ‘emperor’s harem’, while Pugachev’s army swelled – and marched northwards.

  As if this was not enough, Catherine now faced a challenge from her own son: on 20 September 1772, Paul turned eighteen. He could expect marriage, his own court and a political role. Paul and his adviser Panin believed that the rightful tsar should actually reign. That would spell disaster for Catherine.7

  Paul needed a wife. As a boy, Catherine had teased him about love, while Orlov and Panin took him to visit the maids-of-honour. When he reached puberty, Catherine had introduced him to a young Polish widow who bore him a son.* Unsurprisingly, growing up in this louche milieu, Paul feared a cuckold’s horns when he was married. Culturally he was steeped in the Enlightenment and had been taught by Panin that vainglorious war, unfettered absolutism and immoral female rule – all implicit criticisms of his mother – endangered good government and orderly society. Yet these ideas were completely contradicted by his belief in limitless sacred autocracy, Prussian militarism and medieval chivalry.

  Catherine started to look for wives among the minor princesses of the Holy Roman Empire, whence she herself had come. She selected Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt and invited her to Petersburg. Paul liked her, but just as she converted to Orthodoxy under the name Natalya, he was embroiled in an intrigue, hatched by an ambitious Holsteiner diplomat, Caspar von Saldern, to make him joint tsar with Catherine. Panin discouraged it, but Catherine was alarmed. She avoided giving him a full separate court.

  On 29 September 1773, Paul married Natalya in a blaze of festivities and fireworks. At times mother and son had been close, particularly when she had nursed him during an illness two years earlier, but even before the Saldern affair Catherine found Paul narrowminded, sour and charmless. Now he was dangerous too. Rivalry would gradually destroy their meagre familial ties.8

  As Russia became bogged down in this interminable war, and the southern Volga region exploded in the Pugachev revolt, Petersburg and Europe watched in fascination as Prince Orlov cheerfully returned to court, where Catherine was now ensconced with Iced Soup. That expert analyst of Russia, Frederick the Great, noted that Orlov was performing all duties ‘except fucking’, but the fastidiously homoerotic warlord was disgusted by Catherine’s earthy sexuality: ‘It’s a terrible business when the prick and the cunt decide the interests of Europe.’ Her very throne in jeopardy, Catherine picked up her pen and wrote a letter to an officer besieging a faraway Ottoman fortress:

  Sir! Lieutenant-General and Chevalier, you are probably so absorbed with staring at Silistria that you have no time to read letters . . . But since I am most anxious to preserve for ever brave, clever and talented individuals, I beg you to keep out of danger. When you read this letter you may well ask yourself why I have written it. To this I reply: so that you have confirmation of my way of thinking about you because I have always been

  Your most benevolent, Catherine

  As soon as the army had fought its way back across the Danube, with Potemkin the last to cross, covering the rear, he galloped for Petersburg, where he hurried to present himself at court. He bumped into Orlov on the stairs of the Winter Palace.

  ‘Any news?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ replied Prince Orlov, ‘except I’m on the way down and you’re on the way up.’ But nothing happened. Vasilchikov remained in position. Catherine vacillated. Always mercurial, swinging between coenobite and sybarite, Potemkin confronted her and then stormed off to the Nevsky Monastery where he declared that he would become a monk. Countess Bruce rushed between the monastic cell and the imperial palace, bearing the words of Potemkin’s love song – he was very musical: ‘As soon as I saw you, I thought of you alone. But O heavens, why did you destine me to love her and her alone?’

  Finally Catherine surrendered – as she remembered in a letter to Potemkin:

  Then came a certain hero [bogatry, a Russian mythical knight] who, through his valour and demeanour, was already very close to our heart: on hearing of his arrival, people began to talk, not knowing we had written to him already on the quiet with the secret intention of trying to discover whether he really had the intention Countess Bruce suspected, the inclination I wanted him to have.

  Potemkin joined her in Tsarskoe Selo, then at the Winter Palace. When he became her lover, Catherine was captivated by this flamboyant force of nature, their sexual affinity equalled only by their shared intellectual and political enthusiasms.

  ‘My darling,’ she wrote to Potemkin, ‘the time I spend with you is so happy. We passed four hours together, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part. My dear, my friend, I love you so much: you’re so handsome, so clever, so playful, so witty. When I’m with you, I attach no importance to the world. I’ve never been so happy.’ They planned their trysts in the palace banya, the bathhouse.

  ‘Yes or no?’ asked Count Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky.

  ‘About what?’ replied the empress.

  ‘Is it love?’ asked Scarface.

  ‘I can’t lie.’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  �
��Yes!’

  Scarface started to laugh. ‘You meet in the banya?’

  ‘Why do you think so?’

  ‘Because for four days we’ve seen the light in the window later than usual. It was clear yesterday you’d made an assignation later so you’ve agreed not to display affection – to put others off the scent. Good move!’ Only Scarface could talk to her like this – but his chat, repeated by her to Potemkin, showed how the court was electrified. The bathhouse echoed with the laughter and love-making of these two sensualists. ‘My darling friend,’ she scribbled in a note, ‘I fear you might be angry with me. If not all the better. Come quickly to my bedroom and prove it.’

  Poor Iced Soup was miserable. ‘I was merely a sort of kept woman,’ he later recalled, ‘I was scarcely allowed to go out or see anyone. When I was anxious for the Order of St Anna, I mentioned it to the empress and next day found 30,000 roubles in my pocket. As for Potemkin, he gets what he wants. He is the master.’ Vasilchikov moved out of the palace; Potemkin moved in.

  Catherine was still in crisis, but now she had a fearless and intelligent partner. ‘I’ve withdrawn from a certain good-natured but extremely dull character,’ she wrote, ‘who has immediately been replaced by one of the greatest, wittiest and most original eccentrics of this iron century.’9

  ‘A woman is always a woman,’ wrote an aghast Frederick the Great, who coined his own vaginal principle of philosophical misogyny. ‘In feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by reason.’

  This would be the great love affair and the supreme political partnership of her life. Potemkin and Catherine were opposites in terms of their style of living: she was orderly, Germanic, measured and cool; Potemkin was wild, disorganized, Slavic, emotional and larger than life, panache personified. She was ten years older, born royal; he was the son of minor Smolensk gentry, brought up spoiled among five sisters. In religion, she was a rationalist, almost an atheist, while he combined Orthodox mysticism with a rare Enlightened tolerance. He was a wit; she liked to laugh; he sang and wrote music; she was tone deaf but loved to listen. He was nocturnal; she went to bed at eleven every night. She was practical in foreign policy; he was imaginative and visionary. While she was always in love with one person, he was a voracious and animalistic enthusiast who could not stop seducing and making love to the most beautiful aristocratic women and European adventuresses of his time – as well as to at least three of his gorgeous nieces.

  Yet they shared many passions – both were sexual creatures, earthy and unshockable. They adored literature, neo-classicist architecture and English gardens (Potemkin travelled with a garden, borne by serfs, that was planted wherever he stopped for the night). Both were obsessional collectors of art and jewels and both relished splendour – though his tastes were sultanic, if not pharaonic. But above all they lived for power. Potemkin was the only man she ever loved who was as intelligent as she was – Grigory Orlov said Potemkin was ‘clever as the devil’. For all his flights of poetical fancy he possessed the energy and acumen to make vast projects into reality, a master of the art of the possible: ‘our duty is to improve on events’ was how he defined the politician’s challenge. ‘She is crazy about him,’ said her friend Senator Ivan Yelagin. ‘They may well be in love because they are exactly the same.’ That is why Catherine called him ‘my twin soul’.

  Catherine was already teaching Potemkin, who she later boasted she had raised from ‘sergeant to marshal’, the theatre of politics: ‘Behave cleverly in public and that way no one will know what we’re really thinking.’ Even in their early letters, sexual play alternates with power play. ‘The doors will be open,’ she writes in one note. ‘I’m going to bed. Darling I will do whatever you command. Shall I come to you or will you come to me?’

  She called him ‘my Cossack’ and ‘Bijou’ as well as ‘Golden Cockerel’, ‘Lion of the Jungle’ and ‘Tiger’; he always called her ‘Matushka’. During her Hermitage card parties, attended by favoured ambassadors, Potemkin often burst in, unannounced and wearing Turkish dressing-gowns or even pantaloons, chewing on a radish and walking moodily through the room, an Oriental personification of a Slavic hero, sometimes the sparkling life and soul, at other times brooding and silent. Catherine had to rewrite her list of Hermitage regulations: ‘Rule Three: You are requested to be cheerful without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.’

  As with all his eccentricities there was a point to this: he was a unique phenomenon not dependent on the rules of ordinary men. Even though his tantrums and hypochondria exhausted her, her own desire for him amazed her:

  I woke at five . . . I have given strict rules to the whole of my body to the last hair to stop showing you the slightest sign of love . . . Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick you have played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe . . . What a shame! Catherine II the victim of this crazy passion . . . one more proof of your supreme power over me. Well, mad letter, go to where my hero dwells . . .

  The empress was so in love with him that she crept to his room and waited outside in the cold for his aides to leave. Their letters resemble modern emails, and we can imagine the messengers scampering back and forth between their apartments.

  He: ‘Dear Matushka I’ve just got back but I’m frozen . . . First I want to know how you’re feeling.’

  She: ‘I rejoice you’re back, my dear. I’m well. To get warm: go to the banya.’

  He replies that he has now had his bath.

  She: ‘My beauty, my darling, whom nothing resembles, I am full of warmth and tenderness for you and you will have my protection as long as you live. You must be, I guess, more handsome than ever after the bath.’

  Yet she needed him in her crisis of power: ‘I have masses of things to tell you and in particular on the subject we spoke about yesterday.’ On 5 March 1774, she used him to give orders to Chernyshev on military matters and he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, but he concentrated first on organizing the defeat of Pugachev. As for the war, he was already checking through the peace terms with the Ottomans, but he suggested that one more offensive was needed: he persuaded her ‘to empower Rumiantsev and thus peace was achieved’, as she put it. On 31 March, Potemkin was appointed governor-general of New Russia, the newly conquered regions of southern Ukraine. Catherine gave him regular gifts of 100,000 roubles, but it was power that interested him. He demanded to join her council running the war: ‘Sweetheart, as you asked me to send you with something to the Council today, I wrote a note . . . so if you want to go, be ready at midday.’ On 30 May, he was promoted to general-en-chef and vice-president of the War Collegium. This upset the old balance of her entourage: Chernyshev resigned, but the couple revelled in partnership. ‘General loves me?’ she wrote to him. ‘Me loves general.’10

  On 9 June, Rumiantsev crossed the Danube and thrust into Ottoman territory – but on 21 July news arrived that the Cossack rebel, Pugachev, had raised a new army and stormed Kazan. The Volga region was aflame, unleashing a savage class war, a serf uprising and slaughter of landowners. Would he march on Moscow? A rattled Catherine held an emergency Council at Peterhof. The Orlovs, Chernyshevs and Razumovsky, all upset by the rise of Potemkin and terrified by Pugachev, barely uttered a word, until afterwards Panin suggested to Potemkin that they send his aggressive brother General Peter Panin with dictatorial powers to suppress the revolt. Catherine loathed Peter Panin, ‘a first-class liar’, but she agreed, backed by Potemkin.

  The stress was alleviated two days later by the news that Rumiantsev, armed with Catherine’s articles corrected by Potemkin, had signed the Peace of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi. ‘I think today is the happiest day of my life,’ Catherine rejoiced, for she had won a toehold on the Black Sea, a strip of southern Ukraine, an independent khanate of Crimea, the right to build a Black Sea fleet – and, vaguely, the role as protector of Ottoman Christians, a right that would become important in the next century.

 
On 13 July, her generals had managed finally to defeat Pugachev, who fled back towards his home, the Don, where he was betrayed. General Panin decimated villages, hung thousands from their ribs and floated gallows down the Volga. Pugachev was sentenced to quartering then beheading, but Catherine humanely ordered that he be first beheaded.11 There died the ghost of Peter III.*

  After Pugachev, Catherine was in no mood to take any risks with pretenders and now she faced a very different case: ‘Princess Elizabeth’, a slender twenty-year-old with an Italianate profile, alabaster skin and grey eyes, claimed to be the daughter of Empress Elizaveta and the Night Emperor. No one ever discovered her true identity – maybe the daughter of a Nuremberg baker – but she was adept at hooking credulous older aristocrats. Scarface monitored her progress around Italy. Catherine demanded in gangsterish tones that the Ragusans hand Elizabeth over. If not, ‘one can toss a few bombs into the town’. Even better, Scarface should just ‘capture her without noise’.

  Orlov-Chesmensky courted the ersatz princess. She believed she was gulling him, but when she came on board his flagship, greeted as the ‘empress’, the ‘villain’ was arrested and sent to Petersburg where she was imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. She appealed to Catherine, signing her letters ‘Elizabeth’, only for the empress to show how a real autocrat behaved: ‘Send someone to tell the notorious woman that if she wishes to lighten her petty fate, she should stop playing comedy.’†