The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Catherine and Paul headed to Moscow to celebrate the victory with triumphal arches, parades and fireworks – the first of her spectacles stage-managed by her impresario of international magnificence, Potemkin. On 10 July, the empress and tsarevich proceeded through lines of troops in the Kremlin, she wearing a small crown and ermine-lined purple cloak, to a Te Deum in the Dormition, flanked by Marshal Rumiantsev and General Potemkin, while twelve generals held a purple canopy over her. Afterwards, surrounded by her four marshals, she handed out the prizes of victory: Rumiantsev received the surname ‘Zadunaisky’ – ‘Over the Danube’ – plus 5,000 souls and 100,000 roubles, while Potemkin became a count and was told by the empress, ‘I’ll give you my portrait [a miniature set in diamonds] on the day of peace, my jewel, my heart, dear husband.’

  Their relationship was so all-consuming that it started to burn them both. Catherine had found her political partner in Potemkin, but he drove her mad with his mood swings and wild jealousy. Even though she claimed that ‘For you, I’d do the impossible – I’ll be your humble maid or lowly servant or both,’ it was hard for an eighteenth-century Russian man to maintain an equal relationship with a powerful, sexually independent woman. ‘No, Grishenka,’ she reassured him, ‘it’s impossible for me to change towards you. Can one love anybody after having loved you?’ She warned him that it was bad for his health, called him a ‘cruel Tatar’, threatened to lock herself in her room for ever and then tried affection – ‘I’ll love you for ever in spite of yourself’ – and more sweetly: ‘Batinka, come to see me so I can calm you with my endless caresses.’ But she too was demanding and needy: when he threatened to kill any rivals, claiming that she had had fifteen lovers before him, she wrote him ‘a sincere confession’, surely the most extraordinary document ever written by a monarch. She admitted her four lovers before him, denied wantonness but explained the essence of her nature: ‘The trouble is that my heart can’t be without love for even an hour.’ She understood his dilemma and decided to put his mind at rest: ‘My dear soul, cher Epoux, darling husband, come and snuggle up, if you please. Your caress is sweet and lovely to me. Beloved husband.’

  She had probably gone through some form of marriage or blessing with Potemkin, whom she henceforth often called her husband and herself ‘your wife’. If she was ‘Matushka’, he became ‘Batinka’ – ‘Papa’.* But now she complained that he often did not speak to her. He seemed to be withdrawing from the relationship. His behaviour was appalling, ignoring her at her own dinners. They sometimes made up their fights in the form of letters that went back and forth between them:

  Potemkin

  Catherine

  Let me my love say this

  Which will, I hope, end our argument.

  Don’t be surprised I am

  Disturbed by our love.

  Not only have you showered me

  With good deeds,

  You have placed me in your

  Heart. I want to be

  There alone, and above everyone else Because no one has ever loved you so much

  And as I have been made by your hands That you should be happy in being good To me;

  That you should find rest from the Great labours arising from your high Station in thinking of my comfort.

  Amen.

  I allow it.

  The sooner the better.

  Don’t be disturbed.

  So have you on me.

  You are there firmly & strongly and will remain there. I see it and believe it.

  Happy to do so.

  It will be my greatest pleasure

  Of course.

  Give rest to our thoughts and let our feelings act freely. They are most tender and will find the best way.

  End of quarrel. Amen.

  She began to tire of these tempers, slow to understand the pressures on a favourite which were even greater for one so ambitious. Both she and Potemkin were human furnaces who demanded an endless supply of praise, love and attention in private, and glory and power in public. It was these gargantuan appetites that made this relationship at once so painful and so productive. It would take a delicate arrangement to keep Potemkin as partner and husband yet liberate both of them to love others. ‘The essence of our disagreement’, she reflected, ‘is always the question of power and never that of love.’

  Catherine was now working on local government reforms, with Potemkin correcting the documents, but the drafting was done by a pair of secretaries commandeered from Rumiantsev’s staff: Alexander Bezborodko, an ungainly but canny and industrious Ukrainian with a superb memory, was the cleverer of the two, while Peter Zavadovsky was more methodical and better looking. Sheltering from Potemkin’s volcanic tantrums, Catherine and the reliable Zavadovsky fell in love over these drafts – with Potemkin’s acquiescence mixed with jealousy. On 2 January 1776, Zavadovsky was appointed adjutant-general.

  ‘150 kisses shall I joyfully give you every hour. I love your smile,’ she wrote to her ‘Petrusa’, relishing the holistic powers of her breasts and their love-making. ‘Petrushinka, I rejoice you’ve been healed by my little pillows and if my caress eases your health then you’ll never be sick.’

  Catherine constantly reassured the emotional Potemkin of his unique and impregnable position in her heart and regime:

  My Lord and Cher Epoux,

  Why do you want to cry? Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and am bound to you by all possible ties.

  She gave him the Anichkov Palace (while he set up house in the Shepilev Mansion adjoining the Winter Palace on Millionnaya Street so that he could enter Catherine’s apartments through a covered passageway) and procured the title prince of the Holy Roman Empire for him. From now on, always known as ‘Serenissimus’, Potemkin would be her partner and husband while each enjoyed relationships with younger partners.

  Now, just as Catherine and Potemkin changed the direction of foreign policy, scandal and tragedy hit the marriage of Paul.12

  On 10 April 1776, Grand Duchess Natalya Alexeievna went into labour, attended by Catherine in an apron. Natalya was already a disappointment to the empress, who knew she was extravagant and suspected she was unfaithful. For two days, Catherine rushed repeatedly to the bedside, but it became apparent that Natalya was unable to give birth due to a deformation of the spine. After two days of agony the dead foetus infected the mother. On 15 April she died.

  Paul, half mad with grief, was understandably reluctant to consider a new wife – but the empire needed its heir. Catherine callously showed him his wife’s love letters to his best friend, Andrei Razumovsky, son of Kyril.

  Frederick the Great suggested a new candidate, the sixteen-year-old Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, passed over the first time because she had been too young. Inheriting his father’s Prussophilia, Paul travelled to Berlin to meet her. Frederick the Great was not impressed by Paul, whom he predicted would suffer ‘a fate like his unfortunate father’. Nonetheless the grand duke returned with a fiancée, soon renamed Maria Fyodorovna, ‘tall, fair, inclined to embonpoint’, dutiful and prudish. When they married on 26 September, Prince Orlov held the crown over Paul’s head. Obsessed with rules and inspections, Paul wrote an instruction on how he expected his wife to behave, yet the marriage was splendidly fecund: Maria would be the mother of two, if not three, emperors.

  Catherine was quite affectionate to Paul at this time. ‘My dear son,’ she wrote from Tsarskoe Selo, her favourite suburban residence, ‘yesterday I came here and it’s quite desolate without you . . . Tsarskoe Selo is bereft of its embellishment when you’re not here.’ She was delighted with ‘this delicious creature’ Maria – ‘my princess’ – and celebrated by giving ‘the Seconds’, as she grandly called them, an estate near Tsarskoe Selo. There, Catherine’s architect Cameron built Pavlovsk, a palace of Palladian perfection, which Paul resented as a manifestation of his mothe
r’s control. He sacked Cameron as fast as he could. His struggle with his mother would be fought architecturally in a battle of the palaces, as well as personally and politically.

  On 12 December 1777, Catherine was beside herself with excitement when Maria gave birth to a son whom the empress named Alexander. Kidnapping him from the maternal bedchamber, she told the parents, ‘Your children belong to you, to me and to the state.’ As he grew, she raved about Alexander’s ‘rare beauty’ and brilliant mind, ordering his toys, designing him the world’s first romper suit and writing an ABC textbook for his education. She soon called him ‘the monarch in training’ – as if Paul did not exist.13

  Just when the succession had been settled, Catherine discovered that Zavadovsky was not finding it easy to be her lover. Her Petrusa wanted to spend all his time with her, yet she told him firmly that she belonged ‘to the empire’. Zavadovsky, frightened of Potemkin, started to sulk. When Potemkin was made a prince, she coaxed Zavadovsky, ‘If you went to congratulate His Highness, the Highness will receive you affectionately. If you lock yourself up, neither I nor anyone will be accustomed to see you.’ Zavadovsky wept, knowing he was losing her, but this irked the empress: ‘I can’t understand why you can’t see me without tears in your eyes.’ But even their break-up was directed by Potemkin. ‘Both of us need spiritual peace,’ wrote Catherine. ‘I’ll talk to Prince Grigory Alexandrovich [Potemkin].’ Zavadovsky confided in the other big man of the court: ‘Prince Orlov told me you want to go,’ she wrote in May 1777. ‘I agree. After dinner I can meet you.’ In a new tradition, the outgoing lover nominated an intermediary, something between a literary agent and a divorce lawyer, to negotiate his golden goodbye. ‘He tearfully chose Count Kyril Razumovsky,’ Catherine told Potemkin, sending him a present. ‘Bye bye, dear, enjoy the books!’ Zavadovsky was showered with bounty – ‘three or four thousand souls . . . 50,000 roubles and 30,000 in future years’ – but left distraught. ‘I advise you to translate Tacitus or practise Russian history,’ she lectured him briskly. If only studying history could really cure heartbreak – but her real advice was: ‘In order that Prince Potemkin be friendly with you, make the effort.’

  It goes without saying that Catherine had found someone new. Potemkin held an opulent dinner at his new estate at Ozerki for the empress, his nieces – and Semyon Zorich, thirty-one years old, a Serbian major in the Hussars, one of the prince’s aides, nicknamed ‘le vrai sauvage’. Catherine fell in love with this macho cockatoo who was soon strutting around the court in his bejewelled clothes. The Serbian savage was resentful that her real relationship was still with Potemkin. ‘Give Senyusha the attached letters,’ she wrote to Potemkin. ‘It’s so dull without you.’ Instead of weeping like Zavadovsky, Zorich challenged Potemkin to a duel. The Savage would have to go.

  Potemkin was now spending much of his time in New Russia, planning new cities, reforming the Cossacks, constructing the new Black Sea fleet and plotting to annex the Crimea, but he kept a close eye on Catherine’s happiness, rushing back to console the empress whenever there was a crisis. She ended it with Zorich, who received an estate with 7,000 souls. ‘The child’s gone,’ Catherine reported to Potemkin. ‘As for the rest, we’ll discuss it together.’ Far from being glib switches from lover to lover, these upheavals were agonizing for Catherine – but she had already met Zorich’s successor. A few days later she was recovering at a Potemkin estate with his nieces – and another Potemkin aide-decamp, the twenty-four-year-old Major Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, vain, ‘good natured but silly’. Catherine’s confidante, Countess Bruce, was there too, however, and she was attracted to Rimsky-Korsakov herself.

  ‘I’m afraid of burning my fingers,’ Catherine confided to Potemkin, asking for his ‘clever guidance’. Two days after the house party, on 1 June 1778, Korsakov, whose ‘Grecian beauty’ inspired Catherine to nickname him ‘King of Epirus’, was appointed adjutant-general. ‘Adieu mon bijou,’ Catherine wrote to Potemkin. ‘Thanks to you and the King of Epirus, I’m happy as a chaffinch.’ Catherine, now aged forty-nine, was gratefully hungry for Korsakov, writing to him: ‘Thank you for loving me!’ But ominously he started to avoid her. ‘When will I see you?’ she asked. ‘If he doesn’t come back soon, I’ll go looking for him in town.’ When she went looking, she surprised Korsakov in flagrante delicto with Countess Bruce. In the resulting uproar, Korsakov had the impertinence to boast of his sexual antics with both women while demanding munificent gifts. Furious, humiliated but still maternally indulgent, Catherine told the boy to ‘calm yourself . . . I’ve demonstrated I’m taking care of you.’ Korsakov’s affair ruined Catherine’s friendship with Countess Bruce.

  She recovered for six months, flirting with various candidates but probably returning to Potemkin until she settled down with one of Potemkin’s aides, Alexander Lanskoy – twenty-one to her fifty-one – who was her ideal placid pupil, fitting perfectly into the Catherine– Potemkin family. Her relationships were always as pedagogic as they were sexual: she and Lanskoy enjoyed studying Greek and Latin classics, artistic studies and theatrical–literary criticism. She liked to claim that her boudoir was an academy for training servants of the state.

  It was family she craved: she wanted Lanskoy and others to regard her and Potemkin as parents. To Potemkin, she usually referred to Lanskoy as ‘the child’, while the favourites were expected to call her ‘Matushka’ and him ‘Batushka’ – Mama and Papa. When Potemkin was unwell, Lanskoy had to write, ‘I’ve heard from Matushka that you, Batushka Prince Grigory Alexandrovich, are ill which troubles me greatly: get better!’ and he too told Potemkin: ‘You can’t imagine how dull it is without you, Batushka, come immediately.’

  Meanwhile Potemkin was successively in love with his three nieces, who became the reigning court belles. First Alexandra, known as ‘Sashenka’ who became Catherine’s surrogate daughter and devoted friend. Then he moved on to Varvara (whom he called ‘Sweet Lips’ and who signed herself ‘Grishenkin’s Pussycat’ – the sexual tone is unmissable) and Ekaterina (whom both Catherine and Potemkin called ‘Katinka the Kitten’, ‘Angel’ or just ‘Venus’). Catherine treated ‘our nieces’ like daughters and he the favourites like sons whom he governed to protect her feelings – and his power. Together they were the children of this weird, unconventional marriage that allowed Catherine and Potemkin the serenity in which to embark on their greatest project. ‘One mind is good,’ Catherine told Marshal Rumiantsev about her partnership with Potemkin, ‘but two is better.’14

  On 27 April 1779, Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna gave birth to a second son whom Catherine, prompted by Potemkin, named Constantine and designated to become emperor of Constantinople after the fall of the Ottomans. Potemkin persuaded the empress that Russia’s future lay southwards around the Black Sea. Peter the Great’s work around the Baltic was finished; Poland was a secure Russian client state; but the lands of Ukraine that they now called New Russia were a wilderness waiting to be developed. On the Black Sea, Potemkin planned cities with universities and attracted foreign colonists to settle them. In 1778, he built his first naval city, Kherson, named after the ancient Khersones, and started to create the fleet that would be his legacy. To complete his plan, he needed Crimea. In 1780, Bezborodko, Catherine’s secretary and all-round ‘factotum’, who grumbled that Potemkin was good at ‘thinking up ideas that someone else has to carry out’, drafted the ‘Note on Political Affairs’ that laid out the so-called Greek Project.

  As Potemkin took over foreign policy, Britain and France were distracted by the American War of Independence. The seizure of Crimea and the Ottoman carve-up required a new alliance with Austria – and this brought Potemkin into conflict with Panin, who was snoozing astride foreign policy like a somnolent, sickly sloth. His Northern System, based around a Prussian alliance, had delivered a partition of Poland, but it was obsolete.

  Empress Maria Theresa had long regarded Catherine as a regicidal nymphomaniac, but her son, her co-ruler Emperor Joseph II, was more pragmatic a
nd ambitious, if no less snobbish. Keen to expand his own territories, he needed Russian help. As the tension rose, Potemkin grew irritable with young Lanskoy. ‘Please let me know if Alexander [Lanskoy] has annoyed you somehow,’ Catherine interceded, ‘and if you’re angry with him and why exactly.’

  Potemkin met Joseph at the border. On 9 May 1780, Catherine, accompanied by Potemkin’s nieces and Bezborodko, but leaving Panin behind, set off to meet the Holy Roman Emperor at Mogilev. They got on well with Joseph, an obsessional reformer whose military-command measures to rationalize his complicated inheritance from Belgium to Italy and the Balkans, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, would end by offending everyone. His friend Charles-Joseph, prince de Ligne, described his reign as a ‘continual erection that will never be satisfied’. He lacked all charm and empathy, but Catherine and Potemkin were delighted by his effervescent envoy, the prince de Ligne, the soi-disant ‘jockey diplomatique’.* On 18 May 1781, Catherine signed a secret alliance with Joseph to share the Ottoman empire.15

  ‘The system with Austria’s court’, Catherine congratulated Potemkin, ‘is your achievement.’ Panin retired angrily to his estates, while Catherine and Potemkin worried about the Prussophile Paul’s reaction.

  The awkward heir, now twenty-nine, balding and pug-nosed, was unlikely ever to forgive Potemkin for usurping his place as the second man of the state – and doing it so well.* Now they devised a plan to win over Paul: a Grand Tour including Austria. Since Paul was suspicious of anything connected to his mother and Potemkin, they persuaded one of his retainers to suggest it and then agreed when Paul begged to go. But the malicious Panin came up from the country and warned Paul that this could be a trick to destroy him as Peter the Great had destroyed his son Alexei. He could lose the succession and his children.