Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Panin, the Orlovs, and Dashkova understood that the crisis was near. Panin’s support was firm. What rapport could there be between a feather-brained, garrulous monarch, pretending to be a soldier and affecting the language of the barracks, and a highly educated statesman, elegant, naturally reserved, of fastidious taste, who had spent half his life at courts, wearing a powdered wig and an elaborate, brocaded costume? There was more than a difference in style. Peter had spoken openly of sending Panin back to Sweden, where his task as Russian ambassador would be to work in the interests of Frederick and Prussia—in direct contradiction to Panin’s own political views. This cautious diplomat never intended to be a principal leader in a revolution, but Panin had now become not only the guardian of Catherine’s son and heir but also her chief ministerial counselor during this critical moment in her life. He was well qualified.

  Another powerful figure had joined the empress. This was Count Kyril Razumovsky, who, twelve years before, had ridden forty miles every day to visit Catherine. Well educated and genial, a court figure whom everyone admired, he was chafing under the regime of Peter III. Razumovsky, grown plump, knew how absurd he looked in a tight-fitting Prussian uniform and that his clumsiness on the parade ground offended as well as amused the emperor. When Peter had boasted to him that King Frederick had made him a colonel in the Prussian army, Razumovsky caustically replied, “Your Majesty can have your revenge by making him a field marshal in the Russian army.” Razumovsky had already cast his lot with Catherine and could help in many ways. Besides being hetman of the Cossacks, he was colonel of the Izmailovsky Guards Regiment and president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At a critical moment, Razumovsky told the director of the academy printing press to begin secretly printing copies of a manifesto, written by Panin and approved by Catherine, declaring that Peter III had abdicated and that Catherine had assumed the throne. Frightened, the director protested that this was premature and dangerous. Razumovsky fixed him with a stare. “You already know too much,” he said. “Now your head, as well as mine, is at stake. Do as I say.”

  Nothing, however, could be done without the Guards. By chance, Gregory Orlov had been appointed paymaster of the Guards Artillery, giving him access to substantial funds, which he used to pay for the wine he distributed to the soldiers. By the end of June, he and his brothers had won the support of fifty officers, and, they believed, thousands of the rank and file. One of the most enthusiastic officers was a Captain Passek of the Preobrazhensky Guards.

  Thus, while Peter at Oranienbaum was preparing his military campaign against Denmark, the conspirators were planning their coup against him. Their first idea had been to seize Peter in his room in the palace and declare him incompetent to rule, just as Empress Elizabeth had seized Ivan VI and his mother while they were asleep, twenty-one years earlier. The departure of Peter for Oranienbaum, where he would be surrounded by hundreds of loyal Holstein soldiers, had thwarted this plan. To replace it, they had agreed to Panin’s proposal that Peter be arrested when he returned to the capital to witness the departure of the Guards regiments for the Danish campaign. The Guards, still in the capital and primed by the Orlovs, would depose Peter and swear allegiance to Catherine.

  On June 7, members of the emperor’s retinue were told to be ready to start within ten days. The Preobrazhensky Guards were ordered to prepare to leave for Germany on July 7. Foreign embassies were informed that when the emperor left to command his armies, he wished all foreign ambassadors to accompany him. But Mercy of Austria had already left for Vienna; Breteuil of France departed quickly for Paris; of the prominent diplomatic envoys in the capital, only Keith of England packed his trunks. The Russian naval squadron at Kronstadt was ordered to be ready to sail. Unfortunately, the admiral reported that many sailors were sick; Peter responded by issuing a decree commanding the sailors “to get well immediately.”

  The atmosphere at Oranienbaum remained remarkably peaceful. Peter seemed almost reluctant to leave. On June 19, an opera was performed during which Peter played his violin in the court orchestra. Catherine was invited and came from Peterhof. This was the last time husband and wife were to see each other.

  On the evening of June 27, one of the conspirators, Captain Passek of the Guards, was accosted by a soldier who asked him whether the rumor was true that the empress had been arrested and a conspiracy discovered. Passek dismissed the story, whereupon the soldier went to another officer, this one ignorant of the conspiracy, and repeated his question and Passek’s reaction. This officer promptly arrested the soldier and reported the matter to his superior. The senior officer then arrested Captain Passek and sent a report to the emperor at Oranienbaum. Peter disregarded the warning. He considered the presence of the principal ministers of state with their wives at Oranienbaum to be a guarantee of the good behavior of the capital. He dismissed the idea that Russians would prefer Catherine to himself as ruler. When he was given a second report describing the increasing restlessness in St. Petersburg, Peter, who was playing his violin and resented interruptions, impatiently ordered the note left on a small table nearby so he could read it later. He forgot it.

  In the capital, news of Passek’s arrest alarmed the leading conspirators. When Gregory Orlov hurried to Panin to ask what should be done, he found the older man with Princess Dashkova. Panin recognized the possibility that Passek might be tortured and that the conspirators could be sure of their freedom for only a few hours. They must act quickly. Catherine must be brought back to the capital and proclaimed empress without waiting for the arrest and deposition of the emperor. Panin, Dashkova, and Orlov agreed that Gregory’s brother, Alexis, should hurry to Peterhof and bring Catherine back to the city. The other brothers were to circulate through the barracks of the Guards, sounding the alarm that the empress’s life was in danger and preparing the regiments to support her. Gregory himself was to go to the barracks of Kyril Razumovsky’s Izmailovsky Guards, which lay at the city’s limits on the western road to Peterhof and Oranienbaum. This unit would be the first Guards regiment Catherine would reach when she was escorted back from Peterhof. Alexis Orlov arrived at the meeting, was told what had happened, and immediately went down to the street and hired an ordinary Petersburg street carriage. In this shabby rig, he set off through the luminous, silvery night on the road to Peterhof, twenty miles away.

  The next morning, Friday, June 28, Catherine was asleep in Peter the Great’s small waterside pavilion of Mon Plaisir in the gardens of Peterhof. Built in the Dutch style, this little building sat on a narrow terrace only a few feet above the gently lapping waves of the Gulf of Finland. At five o’clock, the empress was awakened by a maidservant. The next moment Alexis Orlov, arriving from St. Petersburg, quietly entered the room and whispered, “Matushka, Little Mother, wake up! The time has come! You must get up and come with me! Everything is ready for your proclamation!”

  Startled, Catherine sat up in bed. “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Passek is arrested,” Orlov explained. Wordlessly, the empress arose and put on a simple black dress. Without arranging her hair or powdering her face, she accompanied Orlov out the door and through the gardens to the road where his hired carriage was waiting. Catherine got in, accompanied by her maid and her servant Shkurin, while Orlov sat up on the box next to the driver. They set off to return to the capital, twenty miles away, but the two horses, which had already traveled twenty miles that night, were exhausted. Fortunately, a peasant cart drawn by two farm horses appeared on the road. Persuaded by arguments and coins, the peasant driver agreed to exchange his two fresh farm horses for the tired city horses and, in this rustic style, the empress-to-be proceeded toward her destiny. Halfway to the city, they met Catherine’s hairdresser on his way to Peterhof to prepare her hair for the day. The empress turned him around, saying that she would not need him. Then, nearing the capital, they encountered another carriage, bringing Gregory Orlov and Prince Bariatinsky to meet them. Gregory took Catherine and Alexis into his carriage and drove
directly to the barracks of the Izmailovsky Guards.

  It was nine in the morning when they reached the barracks courtyard. Gregory Orlov leaped from the carriage and ran to announce Catherine’s arrival. A drummer boy came tumbling out a door, followed by a dozen solders, some half-dressed, others fastening on their sword belts. They pressed around Catherine, kissed her hands, feet, and the hem of her black dress. To a gathering, larger crowd of soldiers, the empress said that her life and that of her son had been threatened by the emperor, but that it was not for her own sake, but for that of her beloved country and their holy Orthodox religion that she was compelled to throw herself on their protection. The response was enthusiastic. Kyril Razumovsky, the regiment’s popular colonel and Catherine’s supporter, arrived, bent his knee before the empress, and kissed her hand. On the spot, the regimental chaplain, holding a cross before him, administered an oath of allegiance to “Catherine II of Russia.” It was the beginning.

  The Izmailovskys, with Razumovsky riding at their head with a drawn sword, escorted Catherine to the nearby barracks of the Semyonovsky Guards. The Semyonovskys rushed to meet Catherine and swear allegiance. She decided to enter the city immediately. Preceded by chaplains and other priests and followed by a mass of cheering Guardsmen, she rode to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan on the Nevsky Prospekt. There, flanked by the Orlov brothers and Razumovsky, she stood before the iconostasis (icon screen) while the archbishop of Novgorod solemnly proclaimed her Gosudarina (sovereign autocrat) Catherine II and her son, Paul Petrovich, heir to the throne.

  Surrounded by a cheering crowd, with church bells ringing across the city, the empress walked down the Nevsky Prospect to the Winter Palace. There, an obstacle arose. The senior regiment of the Guards, the Preobrazhensky, had wavered. The majority of the soldiers favored Catherine, but some of the officers, having sworn an oath to defend the emperor, were uncertain. After a debate among themselves, the soldiers buckled on their swords, snatched up their muskets, tore off their tight-fitting Prussian uniforms, and dressed in as many of their old bottle-green jackets as they could find. Then, more like a mob than a military body, they hurried to the Winter Palace, which they found surrounded and guarded by the Izmailovsky and Semyonovsky regiments. The Preobrazhenskys shouted to Catherine, “Matushka, forgive us for coming last. Our officers held us back and, to prove our zeal, we have arrested four of them. We wish the same thing as our brothers.” The empress responded by nodding, smiling, and sending the archbishop of Novgorod to administer the oath of allegiance to the latecomers.

  Soon after the empress entered the Winter Palace, an older man and a young boy, still in his nightdress, arrived. It was Panin, holding Paul in his arms. On the palace balcony, Catherine presented her eight-year-old son to the crowd as heir to the throne. At this moment, Panin abandoned his thought that Catherine should act as regent for a boy emperor; Catherine now was God’s anointed, the sovereign autocrat. Soon, another late arrival came on the scene. Princess Dashkova had been at home that morning when she learned that Catherine had returned to the city in triumph. She had started immediately to join her idol, but was forced to abandon her carriage when it was immobilized by the dense crowd on the Nevsky Prospect. Squirming and elbowing, she made her way through the mass of bodies in Palace Square. In the palace itself, she was recognized by members of her husband’s regiment, who lifted her small figure above their heads, and passed her, hand over hand, up Rastelli’s magnificent white marble staircase. She landed at Catherine’s feet, crying, “Heaven be praised.”

  In the palace, members of the Senate and the Holy Synod waited to greet the new empress and listen to her first imperial manifesto. It declared that Catherine, moved by the perils threatening Russia and the Orthodox religion, eager to rescue Russia from a shameful dependence on foreign powers, and sustained by divine providence, had yielded to the clear wishes of her faithful subjects that she should ascend the throne.

  By early evening Catherine was in a commanding position in the capital. She was sure of the Guards, the Senate, the Holy Synod, and the crowds in the street. Calm prevailed in the city and no blood had been shed. But, as she knew, if she was mistress of St. Petersburg, acclaimed by the regiments there and by the political leaders and the leaders of the church, Peter was unaware of this. He still believed he was emperor. Possibly he still possessed the allegiance of the army in Germany and the fleet at Kronstadt. The Holstein soldiers at Oranienbaum would certainly support their master. To confirm her victory, Catherine must locate Peter and persuade him to abdicate, the Holsteiners must be disarmed, and the fleet and all Russian soldiers near the capital must be persuaded to join her. The key to success was Peter himself; he remained free and had neither abdicated nor been deposed. If he made his way to the Russian army in Germany, calling on the king of Prussia to support him, a civil war was inevitable. Accordingly, he must be found, seized, and forced to accept what had happened.

  After this tumultuous, triumphant day, Catherine was exhausted, but, sustained by excitement and ambition, she decided to finish what she had begun. A strong force of the Guards pledged to her must march to Oranienbaum to arrest Peter III. Here, Catherine made another dramatic decision: she would lead this march herself. First, she had herself proclaimed colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards; this was the traditional privilege and rank of a Russian sovereign. Borrowing different parts of the bottle-green Preobrazhensky uniform from various obliging young officers, she dressed and put on one of their black, three-cornered hats crowned with oak leaves. Still, one piece of equipment was missing. A twenty-two-year-old subaltern of the Horse Guards rode out of the ranks to hand to the empress the sword knot her uniform was lacking. His officers frowned on the impertinence, but his proud, confident bearing pleased the empress, who accepted the gift with a smile. She asked his name; it was Gregory Potemkin. His face, his name, and his action would not be forgotten.

  By then, it was ten o’clock at night. Catherine mounted a white stallion, placed herself at the head of the three Guards regiments, the Horse Guards, and two infantry regiments of the line, and led fourteen thousand men out of St. Petersburg to Oranienbaum. It was a dramatic sight, the slim figure of Catherine, a superb horsewoman, at the head of a long column of marching men. At her side rode Kyril Razumovsky, colonel of the Semyonovsky Guards, and Princess Dashkova, also dressed in a Preobrazhensky uniform, which she had borrowed from a young lieutenant. This was her moment of glory, riding beside her beloved empress, and looking—as she described herself—“like a fifteen-year-old boy.” She saw herself that night as the central figure in the great adventure. Eventually, this presumption was to lose her the friendship she valued so highly, but on this night nothing clouded her relationship with Catherine. Despite the enthusiasm of their departure, everyone on the march—the empress, the princess, the officers, and the men—all were exhausted. When the column reached a wooden hut on the road to Peterhof, Catherine called a halt. The soldiers watered their horses and bivouacked in the open fields. Catherine and Dashkova, both fully clothed, lay down in the hut, side by side on a narrow bed, but both women were too excited to sleep.

  Before leaving St. Petersburg, Catherine had sent off messages. One was to the Kronstadt island fortress and the ships waiting there, informing them of her accession. A special courier was dispatched to the army in Pomerania authorizing Nikita Panin’s brother, General Peter Panin, to take over as commander. Another courier went to General Zakhar Chernyshev in Silesia ordering him to bring his army corps back to Russia immediately. If the king of Prussia tried to prevent this, Chernyshev was to “join the nearest army corps of her Imperial Roman Majesty, the empress of Austria.” Before leaving, she also wrote to the Senate, “I go now with the army to secure and safeguard the throne and leave in your care as my highest representatives with fullest confidence, the fatherland, the people, and my son.”

  • • •

  That morning of June 28, even as Catherine was being proclaimed Autocrat of All the Russias in the
Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Peter III, wearing his blue Prussian uniform, was drilling his Holstein soldiers on the parade ground at Oranienbaum. This concluded, he ordered six large carriages to carry him and his entourage to Peterhof, where, he had informed Catherine, he would celebrate his name day, the Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. In the emperor’s party were Elizabeth Vorontsova; her uncle, Chancellor Michael Vorontsov; the Prussian ambassador, Baron von Goltz; Count Alexander Shuvalov; the elderly Field Marshal Count Münnich; and the senior senator, Prince Trubetskoy. Many of these dignitaries were accompanied by their wives, and there were also sixteen young maids of honor who served the presumed empress-to-be. This cavalcade started without the usual escort of hussars; Peter had forgotten to order it.

  In high spirits, the company arrived at Peterhof at two in the afternoon. The carriages pulled up in front of the Mon Plaisir pavilion, where Catherine was supposed to be waiting to congratulate her consort on his name day. When they arrived, the doors and windows were tightly closed and no one came out to greet them. No one, in fact, was there at all except a frightened servant, who could tell them only that the empress had left early that morning and that he did not know where she had gone. Refusing to believe what he had seen and been told, Peter rushed inside the empty house, running from room to room, peeping under beds, lifting mattresses, and finding nothing except the gala dress laid out the night before for Catharine to wear at Peter’s name day celebration. Infuriated that Catherine had spoiled his moment and his day, he screamed at Vorontsova, “Didn’t I always tell you she was capable of anything?” After an hour of tumult and dismay, the chancellor, Michael Vorontsov, volunteered to go to back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was presumed to have gone, to seek information and “speak seriously to the empress.” Alexander Shuvalov and Prince Trubetskoy offered to accompany him. At six o’clock, when they reached the city, Catherine was still there and Vorontsov made an effort to tell her that she should not be taking up arms against her husband and sovereign. Catherine’s response was to lead him onto a palace balcony and point to the cheering crowd below. “Deliver your message to them, sir,” she said. “It is they who command here. I only obey.” Vorontsov was taken to his house where, that evening, he wrote to Catherine as his “most gracious sovereign, whom the inscrutable decree of Providence has raised to the Imperial throne.” He asked to be relieved of all his offices and duties and allowed to pass the rest of his days in seclusion. Before nightfall, Alexander Shuvalov swore allegiance to Catherine.