In the summer of 1761, Catherine and Gregory Orlov became lovers. The affair was conducted in secrecy; the empress, Peter, and Catherine’s friends were not aware of it, and the couple’s assignations took place in a little house on Vassilevsky Island in the Neva River. In August 1761, Catherine was pregnant.
Orlov was a new kind of man for Catherine, neither a sentimental European sophisticate like Poniatowski nor a drawing room predator like Sergei Saltykov. Catherine loved him as he loved her, with an uncomplicated physical passion. Although Catherine’s first nine years of marriage had been virginal, she was now a mature woman. She had loved two men outside her marriage, and by each of these men she had borne a child. Now a third man had appeared and he, too, would give her a child.
Orlov’s motives were straightforward. Catherine was a powerful, desirable woman, openly and disgracefully neglected and persecuted by her husband, the Prussia-loving grand duke, who was hated by the officers and men of the Russian army. Catherine was exceedingly discreet about their affair, but Gregory kept no secrets from his four brothers, and they all considered that an honor had come to their family. Rumors of this relationship circulated among the men of the Guards regiments; most were impressed and proud.
Catherine had won the support of Nikita Panin, and, with the help of the Orlov brothers, she was winning the sympathy of the Guards. And then she attracted a third, very different, recruit to her cause. This was Princess Catherine Dashkova, who, oddly enough, was the younger, married sister of Elizabeth Vorontsova, Peter’s mistress. Catherine Vorontsova—as Princess Dashkova had been before marrying—was born in 1744, the youngest of three daughters of Count Roman Vorontsov, himself the younger brother of the former chancellor, Michael Vorontsov. Her birth followed soon after the coronation of Empress Elizabeth, and because the Vorontsov family was one of the oldest of the Russian nobility, the infant girl was held over the baptismal font by the new empress herself, while the empress’s nephew, Peter, recently summoned from Holstein to be heir to the Russian throne, became the infant’s godfather. When she was two, Catherine Vorontsova’s mother died. Her father, Count Roman, still a young man, quickly became, in his daughters’s words, “a man of pleasure, not much occupied with the care of his children.” The child was sent to live with her uncle Michael, who arranged a superior education. “We spoke French fluently, learned some Italian, and had a few lessons in Russian,” she wrote in her memoirs. She displayed a precocious intelligence, sometimes staying up all night reading Bayle, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Catherine met this unusual young person in 1758, when Dashkova was fifteen. The grand duchess, delighted to find a Russian girl who spoke only French and who cherished Enlightenment philosophers, went out of her way to be gracious; the younger woman made Catherine her idol.
In February 1760, sixteen-year-old Catherine Vorontsova married Prince Michael Dashkov, a tall, popular, and wealthy young officer of the Preobrazhensky Guards. She followed her husband when he was assigned to Moscow, and there she had two children within eleven months. She never forgot the grand duchess in St. Petersburg. In the summer of 1761, she and her family moved back to the capital and her relationship with Catherine resumed.
In the capital, Dashkova’s sister, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s lover, Grand Duke Peter, tried to draw her into their circle, but the two sisters differed in almost every way. Elizabeth, whom Peter now had installed in his private apartments and was treating more as a future wife than a mistress, was dowdy, coarse, and ribald. Even so, having decided that she wanted to marry Peter, she pursued her goal with patient, steely determination. She outlasted all of his other diversions, and managed the ménage à quatre with Catherine and Stanislaus. Over the years, Peter found that she suited him so well that he could not give her up.
At court, Dashkova also was different. She cared little for elaborate clothes, refused to wear rouge, talked incessantly, and was regarded as intelligent, outspoken, and arrogant. Along with her political idealism, she was prudish and found her sister’s behavior a painful embarrassment. Whether or not Elizabeth ever became a crowned empress, Catherine Dashkova considered her to be living in vulgar public concubinage. Worse, her sister’s goal was to replace the woman who had become Dashkova’s idol, Grand Duchess Catherine.
Princess Dashkova spent the summer of 1761 living in her father’s dacha on the Gulf of Finland, midway between Peterhof, where the empress was staying, and Oranienbaum, where Peter and Catherine held their summer court. Paul remained in Elizabeth’s household at Peterhof, but the empress now permitted Catherine to drive every Sunday from Oranienbaum to Peterhof to spend the day watching her son play in the palace garden. On the way home, Catherine often stopped her carriage at the Vorontsov dacha and invited the princess to spend the rest of the day with her at Oranienbaum. There, in Catherine’s gardens or in her apartment, the two women talked about books and political theory. Dashkova felt that she had reached a rare intellectual summit. “I may venture to assert there were not two women in the empire except the grand duchess and myself who occupied themselves at all in serious reading,” she wrote in her memoirs. During these long conversations, the princess convinced herself that Catherine was the only possible “savior of the nation,” and that it was essential that she, not Peter, succeed to the throne. Catherine did not encourage the expression of these opinions. She looked on Dashkova as a brilliant, enchanting child, whose adoration was flattering and companionship stimulating, but she realistically saw herself coming to power as Peter’s wife—providing she could maintain her position against Elizabeth Vorontsova. Dashkova, for her part, felt something close to worship for the grand duchess: “She captured my heart and mind and inspired me with enthusiastic devotion. I felt a devoted attachment which knew no competition except the love I bore my husband and children.”
Grand Duke Peter and Elizabeth Vorontsova persisted in trying to lure Princess Dashkova into their circle. Peter, observing her admiration for his wife, warned her, saying, “My child, you would do well to remember that it is much safer to deal with honest blockheads like your sister and me than with those great wits who squeeze the juice out of the orange and then throw away the rind.” Dashkova was not afraid of standing up to Peter. Once at a dinner for eighty at which both Peter and Catherine were present, the grand duke, having drunk too much Burgundy, slurred out that a young officer suspected of being the lover of one of the empress’s relatives should be beheaded for his impertinence. Challenging the grand duke, Dashkova said that this punishment appeared tyrannical, “for even if the crime in question were proved, so frightful a punishment was highly disproportionate to the offence.”
“You are a mere child,” Peter replied, “otherwise you would know that to be sparing of the punishment of death is to encourage insubordination and every kind of disorder.”
“But, sir,” Dashkova fired back, “almost all who have the honor of sitting in your presence have lived only during a reign in which such a punishment has never yet been heard of.”
“As to that,” declared the grand duke, “it is the very cause of the present want of discipline and order. But, take my word for it, you are a mere child and know nothing about the matter.”
The Holsteiners at the table were silent, but Dashkova persisted. “I am very ready to acknowledge, sir, that I am unable to comprehend your reasoning, but one thing of which I am very sensible is that your august aunt still lives and sits on the throne.” All eyes immediately turned, first to the young woman, then to the heir to the throne. But Peter did not answer, and ultimately ended the confrontation by sticking his tongue out at his adversary.
The episode won Dashkova much praise. Grand Duchess Catherine was delighted and congratulated her; the story spread and “gained me a high degree of notoriety,” wrote Dashkova. Every episode of this kind increased the contempt the princess felt for the heir to the throne: “I saw how little my country had to hope from the grand duke, sunk as he was in the most degrading ignorance and swayed by no better pr
inciple than a vulgar pride in being the creature of the King of Prussia, whom he called, ‘the king my master.’ ”
Princess Dashkova was happy to grant Peter’s definition of himself as a blockhead, because she believed that only a blockhead would prefer the company of her sister to that of the dazzling grand duchess. Scandalized that Peter was promising to displace Catherine and marry her sister, the young princess resolved to protect her heroine. One service she could perform was to report every shard of news and gossip that could affect the grand duchess. Catherine did not encourage Dashkova to play this role, although it was useful to have an adherent so close to the talk of the grand duke and Vorontsova. On the other hand, Catherine was careful what she said to her young admirer. Just as Dashkova was a possible source of information, she was also, potentially, a source of leaks. For this reason, Catherine was also careful to compartmentalize her relationships with those who supported her. At the beginning, each of the three primary figures knew little about the others, and each of them knew a different Catherine. Panin knew the levelheaded, sophisticated politician; Orlov, the warm-blooded woman; Dashkova, the philosopher and admirer of the Enlightenment. Eventually, Princess Dashkova came to regard Panin as the kind of Europeanized Russian whom she admired. But Dashkova was completely unaware of Orlov’s importance in Catherine’s life. She would have been horrified to learn that her idol was submitting to the caresses of a rough, uneducated soldier.
As Elizabeth’s physical decline continued, the general anxiety about Peter becoming emperor grew stronger. The longer the war continued, the more flagrantly Peter manifested his hatred and scorn for Russia and his sympathy for Prussia. Certain that his failing aunt would be unable to summon the strength to strip him of his inheritance, he began speaking openly about the changes he would make once he was emperor. He would terminate the war against Prussia. After making peace, he would switch sides and join Frederick against Russia’s present allies, Austria and France. Eventually, he meant to use Russia’s strength on behalf of Holstein. This meant war with Denmark to reconquer the territory that Denmark had taken from his duchy in 1721. He began to say openly that he intended to divorce Catherine and marry Elizabeth Vorontsova.
Peter was already doing everything possible to assist Frederick. To keep the king informed of the empress’s secret war councils, he passed along whatever he could learn of the plans of the Russian high command. This information went to the new English ambassador in St. Petersburg, Sir Robert Keith, who, in forwarding his own diplomatic reports to London, included Peter’s information. Keith then sent his couriers by way of Berlin, where his colleague the British ambassador to Prussia made a copy for Frederick before sending the packet along to Whitehall. By this means, the king of Prussia often learned of operations planned by the Russian high command before Russian field commanders were told.
Peter made little effort to keep his betrayal of the empress, the army, the nation, and the nation’s allies a secret. The French and Austrian ambassadors complained to the chancellor, but they made no impression because Michael Vorontsov, along with everyone else in the capital, believed that the empress’s precarious health soon must fail, and that Grand Duke Peter’s first act on taking the throne would be to end the war, recall his armies, and sign a peace with Frederick. In the interim, Vorontsov had no intention of jeopardizing his own future by informing Elizabeth of her nephew’s treachery. In the army, however, the contempt and loathing for the heir to the throne rose to the point that even Sir Robert Keith declared, “He must be mad to behave this way.”
If the Guards and the army in general had these feelings, the Orlovs particularly hated the man who was passing information to the enemy. In Gregory Orlov, this intense feeling burned even brighter. If Peter were compelled to abdicate, what would become of the grand duchess? Like Peter, she had been born a German, but she had lived in Russia for eighteen years, she was an Orthodox believer, she was the mother of the younger heir, and her absolute allegiance was to Russia. Orlov delivered this message wherever he went and his brothers did the same. Their hatred of Peter, their popularity in the army, and their willingness to act on Catherine’s behalf were to bring her to the throne.
Elizabeth was determined to defeat Prussia and Frederick. She had entered the war to honor her treaty with Austria, and she meant to see it through. The end of the war was coming; Frederick no longer led the most effective army in Europe, and both the Austrians and the Russians had become veterans. As Frederick’s manpower dwindled, the odds against him lengthened. Proof of this came at the Battle of Kunersdorf, on August 25, 1759, where, fifty miles east of Berlin, fifty thousand Prussians supported by three hundred cannon attacked seventy-nine thousand Russians dug into a strong defensive position. Frederick’s infantry hurled itself against the firmly anchored, well-defended Russian positions. By nightfall, when the fighting ended, Kunersdorf had become Frederick’s worst defeat in the Seven Years’ War; in the aftermath, Prussian soldiers simply flung away their muskets and ran. Although the Russian army suffered sixteen thousand dead and wounded, it inflicted eighteen thousand casualties on the Prussians. The king himself had two horses killed under him, and a bullet was deflected by a gold snuffbox he carried in his coat. That night, he wrote to a close friend in Berlin, “Of an army of forty-eight thousand, I do not have three thousand left. All flee and I am no longer master of my men. Berlin must look to its own safety. This is a terrible mishap and I shall not survive it. I have no more reserves and, to tell the truth, I believe all is lost.” In the morning, eighteen thousand men straggled back to join the king, but the forty-seven-year-old monarch remained in despair. And in pain. “What is wrong with me,” he wrote to his brother, Prince Henry, “is rheumatism in my feet, one of my knees and my left hand. I have also been in the grip of an almost continual fever for eight days.”
In St. Petersburg, Elizabeth rejoiced in the good news and endured the bad. On January 1, 1760, four months after Kunersdorf, she told the Austrian ambassador, “I intend to continue the war and to remain faithful to my allies even if I have to sell half my diamonds and dresses.” The commander of her army in Germany, General Peter Saltykov, repaid her dedication. In the summer of 1760, the Russian army crossed the Oder. Cossack cavalry rode into Berlin and occupied Frederick’s capital for three days.
As her pregnancy advanced, Catherine secluded herself. Her excuse—that it mortified her to see her husband publicly according almost royal honors to his mistress—was a convenience to help her protect her real situation. Now, while the grand duke was talking of repudiating her, there was no chance that he would pretend that this new child was his. Determined not to give him any justification for setting her aside, Catherine concealed her pregnancy, wearing wide hooped skirts, spending her days in an armchair in her room, receiving no one.
Catherine’s secret was better kept than Elizabeth’s. The empress had commanded that news of her condition be hidden from the grand duke and grand duchess. She attempted to conceal the physical ravages of illness: the deathly pale face, the overweight body, the swollen legs. These were hidden beneath rouge and silver gowns. Elizabeth sensed that Peter was waiting impatiently for her death, but she was too exhausted to break her word and carry out her real wish: to transfer the succession to Paul. She had energy and focus enough only to drag herselfy from her bed to a sofa or an armchair. Ivan Shuvalov, her recent favorite, was no longer able to comfort her; she seemed at peace only when Alexis Razumovsky, her former lover and perhaps her husband, was sitting by her bed, soothing her with soft Ukrainian lullabies. As the days passed, Elizabeth lost interest in Russia’s future and took less and less interest in her surroundings. She knew what was coming.
Her agony paralyzed Europe. All eyes were on the sickroom, where the outcome of the war hung on the struggle of a woman fighting for life. The allies’ dearest hope near the end of 1761 was that the empress’s doctors might manage to prolong her life for another six—and, if possible, twelve—months, by which time they hoped
that Frederick would be beyond recovery. In private, Frederick himself admitted that he was near the end. The prize for which Russia had struggled for five years was within reach. If only Grand Duke Peter could be held back from his inheritance for a few more months, his enthusiasm for the Prussian king and all of his plans would be meaningless. It was not to be.
By the middle of December 1761, everyone knew that the empress would die soon. When Peter bluntly declared to Princess Dashkova that her sister, Elizabeth Vorontsova, would soon be his wife, Dashkova decided that something must be done to prevent this. On the night of December 20, although she was shivering with fever, she got out of bed, wrapped herself in furs, and had herself driven to the palace. Entering by a little back door, she had one of the grand duchess’s servants take her to her mistress. Catherine was in bed. Before the princess could say a word, the grand duchess said, “Before you tell me a thing, come into my bed and warm yourself.” In her memoirs, Dashkova described their conversation. She told Catherine that when the empress had only a few days, perhaps a few hours, to live, she could not endure the uncertainty involving Catherine’s future. “Have you formed any plan, or taken any precautions to ensure your safety?” the princess asked. Catherine was touched—and alarmed. She pressed her hand to Dashkova’s heart, and said, “I am grateful to you, but I declare to you that I have formed no sort of plan and can attempt nothing. I can only meet with courage whatever happens.”
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