The Romanovs

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Catherine and Potemkin, who had just arrived in Petersburg, argued about what to do. Potemkin wanted a deal with Prussia, while Catherine vacillated. At the same time, Poland adopted a new constitution under the slogan ‘The King with the Nation’. Catherine chose to regard this as an extension of French Jacobinism and tended towards backing Potemkin’s plans for Poland, where he was considering hiving off the Orthodox provinces as his own private kingdom. She cried, he banged the doors and bit his nails, she went to bed with spasms in her bowels. Finally she agreed to let Potemkin appease Prussia. But the coalition had already fallen apart when Charles James Fox scuppered Pitt in Parliament. Once again, their paws were almost out of the mud.23

  *

  At 7 a.m. on 28 April 1791, Catherine slowly dismounted from her carriage at the neo-classical colonnade of Potemkin’s Taurida Palace, wearing a full-length long-sleeved Russian dress with a rich diadem. Potemkin, in a scarlet tailcoat and diamond-spangled cloak, knelt before her and then led her into the gigantic Colonnade Hall (the biggest in Europe) where 3,000 guests (but not the uninvited Blackie) awaited them. The party was a wild extravagance, costing more than 150,000 roubles. As the climax, forty-eight boys and girls, led by Alexander and Constantine, danced the first quadrille, then a bejewelled elephant was unveiled, its rider ringing a bell that heralded the emergence of an entire theatre with boxes. Potemkin invited Catherine to stay in the cosy apartments decorated in her style and had prepared one overture if she stayed and another if she went home. When the empress left at 2 a.m., Serenissimus fell to his knees and then gave a sign to the orchestra which played a love song he had written long before: ‘The only thing that matters in the world is you’. Both Catherine and Potemkin burst into tears.

  During the next two months, they worked out a plan for peace with Warsaw, Berlin and Constantinople. Yet throughout July news of more victories arrived from the Caucasus, the Danube and the Black Sea, all celebrated by dinners for Potemkin. He wanted to ‘pull the Tooth’ (zub means tooth) but failed to dislodge Zubov. Nonetheless Potemkin remained the indispensable statesman. As Blackie himself admitted later, ‘I couldn’t remove him from my path’ because ‘The Empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he was an exacting husband.’ In a revealing aside, Zubov added: ‘It’s his fault I’m not twice as rich as I am.’

  On 24 July, Potemkin left Petersburg, pursued by a note from Catherine: ‘Bye, my friend, I kiss you.’ When he reported on the preliminary peace with the Ottomans, she wrote, ‘Everybody here is thrilled.’ But then came the terrifying news that Potemkin was ill. She burst into tears and prayed for him. Catherine sent doctors to him with Sashenka. Travelling to Jassy, he fell ill again.

  ‘My sincere friend, Prince Grigory Alexandrovich,’ she wrote on 30 September, the day he turned fifty-two. ‘Your sickness upsets me utterly; for love of Christ, take whatever the doctors recommend!’ Now desperately ill, finding it hard to breathe and fainting, he wrote this letter with a shaking hand: ‘Matushka, Most Merciful Lady! In my present condition, so tired by illness, I pray to the Most High to preserve your precious health and I throw myself at your sacred feet. Your Imperial Majesty’s most faithful and grateful subject. Prince Potemkin of Taurida. Oh Matushka, how ill I am!’

  Catherine was just reading his earlier letters. ‘Your doctors assure me you’re better,’ she wrote back, ordering Sashenka: ‘Stay with him.’ When he awoke next morning, he insisted on leaving for the Black Sea, dictating her a note: ‘No more strength to bear my torment. Salvation alone remains to leave this town. I don’t know what will become of me.’ Then he managed to scrawl to Catherine: ‘The only escape is to leave.’ On a track amid the Bessarabian steppe, Potemkin cried out: ‘That’s enough.’ Sashenka had him carried out on to the steppe where his Cossacks laid him down, his head on her knee, sighing ‘forgive me, merciful Matushka-Sovereign.’ As Potemkin, probably the dynasty’s greatest minister, died on the steppe, a watching Cossack muttered: ‘Lived on gold, died on grass.’

  Seven days later, on 12 October, when the news arrived in Petersburg, Catherine fainted and her courtiers feared she had suffered a stroke. ‘Tears and desperation,’ recorded her secretary. ‘At 8 they let blood, at ten to bed.’

  ‘A sudden deathblow has just fallen on my head,’ she wrote in praise of Potemkin. ‘My pupil, my friend, almost my idol, Prince Potemkin of Taurida has died. You can’t imagine how broken I am . . .’

  Catherine appointed Bezborodko to finalize the Ottoman peace, securing the territories of New Russia and the protection of the Orthodox Christians. When Potemkin’s entourage returned, she sobbed with them. She frequently moved into Potemkin’s Taurida Palace. ‘How can I replace Potemkin?’ she asked her secretary. ‘Now everybody, like snails, will start to stick their necks out,’ she said. ‘So, I too am old.’ She constantly reflected that ‘No one came close to Potemkin.’

  Zubov’s moment had come. ‘Without feeling triumphant’, he could finally ‘breathe at the end of a long and hard subordination’.24

  ‘The Tooth outrageously shows off his power,’ reported Fyodor Rostopchin, Paul’s retainer, but he ‘isn’t clever, concealing his lack of talent with technical phrases’. Worse, ‘he displays a coarse, excessive arrogance, and visiting him is totally humiliating. Each morning, crowds of sycophants besieged the doors of his apartments, filling the anteroom and reception halls.’ When the egregious Zubov was ready to receive visitors, the folding doors of his reception room were opened. Then ‘Zubov slowly entered in a dressing-gown’ as ‘servants approached him to dress his hair and powder it, curled and brushed up into a tuft’. Everyone ‘remained standing and no one dared talk’. Once dressed, ‘this young man sprawled on an armchair picking his nose and staring at the ceiling, a puffed-up and lifeless expression on his face’, smirking as his monkey ‘jumped over the head of those lickspittles or he talked to his jesters’. Zubov was educated and had a good memory but, concluded Rostopchin, ‘He’s just negligent and incapable.’25

  Yet this popinjay was now ‘the head of everything’. The French Revolution had tilted the world. Russia, Austria and Prussia were keen to suppress it. On 10 January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotined and Catherine retired to bed, depressed. On 8 March, she fell downstairs but suffered only bruising. She turned to Zubov, now raised to count, to arrange the Second Partition of Poland. ‘Now I’m taking Ukraine in recompense for my expenses and loss of people,’ she said – and Prussia shared the spoils.

  Catherine heaped rewards on Blackie: her portrait in diamonds (only ever received by Orlov and Potemkin), and some of Potemkin’s old posts – though Saltykov was rewarded with the War Collegium.

  Catherine felt her age. She noticed how hardly anyone could remember her own accession over thirty years earlier. One of the few was Ivan Shuvalov. He was touchingly shy with her, and courtiers laughed at his antique manners. Catherine told them, ‘Gentlemen, the Grand Chamberlain and I have been friends for forty years and I’m entitled to jest with him.’ But the old empress had lost none of her charm. ‘Still fresh, rather short and stout, her whole person was marked by dignity and grace, grave and noble,’ noted a young Pole, Prince Adam Czartoryski, who was at court as a hostage for Polish good behaviour and to seek restitution of his confiscated estates. He hated her for destroying Poland yet could not help but admire her. ‘She was like a mountain stream which carries everything with it. Her face, already wrinkled but full of expression, showed haughtiness and the spirit of domination, on her lips a perpetual smile.’ Countess Varvara Golovina remembered a hearty dinner with the other ladies-in-waiting when a hand offered them some more food. They were helping themselves before they noticed the iceberg-sized solitaire diamond on the finger: it was the empress.

  If she was to bypass Paul in the succession, she would have to find a wife for Alexander. Catherine was in a hurry. Even when he was nine Catherine admitted, ‘I fear one danger for him: that of women, for he will be chased . . . for he is a figure who
sets everyone alight.’ When he was twelve and his governor reported the boy’s ‘nocturnal dreams’, Catherine deputed a court lady to initiate Alexander into ‘the mysteries of all transports engendered by sensual delight’. Now, after reviewing the available German princesses, she invited the daughters of the prince of Baden to Petersburg, where they were welcomed by Catherine, Zubov and Sashenka. The fifteen-year-old Alexander chose Princess Louise, aged fourteen, as his future wife. ‘Everyone said it was two angels getting betrothed,’ gushed Catherine. ‘They’re quite in love.’

  On 9 October 1793, Catherine presided over Alexander’s marriage to the Baden princess who, converted to Orthodoxy, was renamed Elizabeth Alexeievna. Shuvalov and Bezborodko held the crowns over ‘these beautiful children’ before a sobbing empress.

  Elizabeth was pretty, with blue eyes and flowing flaxen locks. ‘She united indescribable grace and attraction of face and form with quick understanding and clearness of thought,’ recalled Varvara Golovina. Alexander looked like his tall fair mother. ‘His soul’, considered Rostopchin, ‘is even more beautiful than his body: never in one person has such moral and physical perfection been combined.’ Elizabeth thought him ‘very tall and well formed, especially the legs, light-brown hair, blue eyes, very pretty teeth, charming skin colour, rather handsome’.

  ‘You ask me if the Grand Duke truly pleases me,’ Elizabeth wrote to her mother. ‘Yes, Mama . . . for some time he has pleased me like mad.’ But there were problems: ‘One notices little nothings which are not to my taste.’ Meanwhile Alexander was touchingly answering his mother’s awkward questions about sex: ‘You ask me my dear Mama if my little Lisa is pregnant. No not yet for the thing is not accomplished. It must be agreed that we are big children and very maladroit ones since we take all the trouble imaginable to do so but don’t succeed.’

  Alexander ‘has fine qualities’ but ‘he’s lazy, never touches a book’, complained Rostopchin, who admired Elizabeth. ‘Her husband adores her and together they’re like children when there’s nobody there.’ As one of his courtiers complained, ‘he is spoiled in every sense.’ But the youngsters were corrupted by the sexual and political intrigues of the court, ground between the forces of Catherine and Paul.26

  Alexander navigated between his father and grandmother with a permanent mask of inscrutability, advised by his ‘crafty and intriguing’ oberhofmeister, Nikolai Saltykov, descendant of Tsarina Praskovia’s family, a meagre, limping weasel with a pomaded toupee and the habit of constantly hitching up his breeches. ‘Wishing to conciliate both the empress and her son, he used to involve the Grand Duke in perpetual dissimulation . . . to inspire in him a dislike for the empress and dread for his father.’ Alexander and his brother Constantine simultaneously lived two lives – one at Tsarskoe Selo with the empress where they dressed in French-style court dress, and another at Gatchina with the grand duke where they wore Prussian military uniform.

  Now living in the Alexander Palace built for them by Catherine, Alexander’s and Elizabeth’s relationship suffered under this pressure. ‘He had the feelings of a brother for his wife but she wanted from him the love she would have given him.’ Ignored by her husband, ‘She’s dying of boredom,’ observed Rostopchin. Her ‘angelic face, slight and elegant figure and graceful movements’, wrote Varvara Golovina, ‘attracted universal attention . . .’ Catherine tried to amuse them and herself with constant parties: ‘we’re constantly doing nothing,’ said Elizabeth, ‘we spend all week dancing.’

  ‘One evening in the midst of the entertainments,’ wrote Golovina, sensitive wife of the couple’s grand marshal and niece of Ivan Shuvalov, ‘Grand Duke Alexander came up to me and said, “Zubov is in love with my wife.”’ Golovina soon noticed that Platon Zubov was looking ‘dreamy’ and ‘casting languishing looks at the Grand Duchess’. Zubov was indeed in love with Elizabeth: ‘Soon all Tsarskoe Selo was in on the secret of this unfortunate folly.’ Zubov was now ‘everything here. There’s no power but his,’ so the couple’s courtiers tried to corrupt her to promote Zubov’s ‘crazy passion’. ‘Count Zubov is in love with my wife – what an embarrassing situation,’ Alexander kept telling his friends. ‘If you treat him well, it’s as if you approve and if coldly to discourage him, the empress will be offended.’ It was usually after dinner that Zubov ‘was seized with a love fit’, noticed Czartoryski, ‘and he then did nothing but sigh, lie on a sofa with a sad air and the appearance of a man seriously in love’.

  Confiding her agonizing situation to her mother in Baden and to her friend Varvara Golovina, she codenamed Zubov ‘the Zodiac’. The attentions of the Zodiac did turn her head: ‘I could beat myself when I think of the follies of that time . . . there is no longer any question of them; I care no more for the Zodiac than for the wind,’ she told Golovina.

  While the bride fended off Zodiac, Catherine was eager for her to become pregnant, and her lupine courtiers spied on the girl constantly: when her period was late, her governess told Catherine. ‘Even more embarrassing,’ Elizabeth confessed to Golovina, ‘the empress told Zodiac and if I tell the empress it’s not so, she will tell him that too,’ but when her ‘red bird’ arrived, Zubov knew all about it.

  Elizabeth unsurprisingly sought feminine consolation, which she found in the person of the twenty-eight-year-old Varvara Golovina. One day out hunting, fetching in their riding-habits, they surreptitiously swapped beaver hats ‘without a word being spoken’ and later ‘She gave me a little paper with her portrait and a locket of her hair,’ wrote Golovina. One day at Mon Plaisir at Peterhof, ‘She suddenly took me into the little palace and unreservedly laid bare her most intimate feelings.’ On 30 May 1794, the two girls went on a drive through Tsarskoe Selo at which something happened between them: ‘one of my dearest recollections’. On an idyllic spring night, alone in the gardens, ‘The Grand Duchess leaned against me while I drank in every word from her lips,’ recalled Golovina. On another occasion, she ‘took me by the hand, pulled me into my bedroom, locked the door and flinging herself into my arms burst into tears’. Elated by their love affair, whether or not it was consummated, Elizabeth bombarded the countess with love letters. ‘Oh it is cruel to be here at the Taurida Palace,’ she wrote on 11 August. ‘I don’t enjoy life when I am separated from you . . . You’re constantly in my mind and you agitate me till I can do nothing. Oh I have lost the sweet thought that occurred to me this morning . . .’ Alexander seemed to approve this lesbian crush. ‘They cannot forbid me to love you and I am in a manner authorized by someone else who has quite as much right if not more to order me to love you,’ Elizabeth told Golovina. ‘You occupy my thoughts all day and until I go to sleep; if I wake in the night, you come immediately into my mind.’

  In the spring of 1795, Elizabeth sent her most enigmatic letter remembering their passion of 30 May: ‘My God, all the sensations that merely the memories of those sweet moments bring back to me.’ But Alexander had read Golovina’s latest letter and, Elizabeth explained, he ‘asked me for an explanation. I partly told him.’

  Alexander and the courtiers now demanded that the two girls be parted. ‘I’m separated from you and cannot see you . . . Oh heavens, if you only knew my torments,’ wrote Elizabeth. ‘Oh God, how dearly I love you. You make my life bearable here . . . You really are mine. Even my husband doesn’t know me as well as you.’ Meanwhile Catherine finally noticed Zubov’s infatuation – there was a row and his attentions ceased. These intrigues brought Elizabeth and Alexander together. They shared their disgust with this degenerate and suffocating court. Alexander sought to escape the crown altogether.27

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ Alexander wrote a little later to his tutor Laharpe. ‘Everyone is stealing; there’s scarcely a single honest man,’ and he insisted that ‘I’d willingly give up my rank for a farm next to yours. My wife shares my feelings and I am enchanted to find such feelings in her.’

  Catherine might have been equally horrified by his sympathies for his father Paul, who now commanded 130 officers
and 2,000 men in his private army at his fiefdom of Gatchina. There Alexander and Constantine shared their father’s pain and found consolation in the simple military life at Gatchina. ‘That’s our manner, in the Gatchina style,’ Alexander said, delighted that they ‘do us the honour of fearing us’. Yet they themselves were often victims of Paul’s demented military drilling.

  ‘The Grand Duke invents ways to make himself hated by everyone,’ wrote Rostopchin. ‘He punishes indiscriminately without distinction.’ Drilling his mini-army, he ‘imagines himself to be the late King of Prussia. The slightest delay or contradiction unhinges him and inflames him with fury.’ In one of the few things that united him with his mother, Paul was obsessed with the French Revolution. ‘He sees Jacobins everywhere and the other day he arrested four officers whose plaits were too short, a sure sign of revolutionary sympathy,’ noted Rostopchin. Paul tyrannized his court and even his wife and sons, infuriated that at forty-one ‘I have nothing to do.’ When he lost his temper with his sons, Maria and his mistress Nelidova tried to soothe him. Meanwhile an artillery blast deafened Alexander in one ear, which Rostopchin explained, ‘Makes chatting unpleasant because you have to shout’.

  Catherine could hear the artillery booming over at Gatchina as she walked her greyhounds at Tsarskoe Selo. She loathed Paul’s militarism and saw in him Peter III redux. He was so bitter that she compared him to ‘mustard after dinner’.* After Alexander’s marriage, she wrote that he would in time be ‘crowned with all the ceremonies’ – no mention of Paul at all. She remembered Peter the Great and Tsarevich Alexei: ‘Peter’s wisdom here is unquestionable’ in ‘dethroning his ungrateful, disobedient and incapable son’ who was filled with ‘hatred for his father, malice and singular jealousy’.