Catherine the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  Then a strange thing happened: Paul’s face began to change. A lengthy illness when Paul was nine eroded his childhood prettiness; his face and features, which had been pleasing, became distorted in a manner that was more than temporary adolescent asymmetry. He developed thin brown hair, a receding chin, and a protruding bottom lip. He looked more like Peter than Sergei, and had the same abrupt, clumsy movements as Peter. Some who had known Peter began to believe that Paul really was the dead tsar’s son.

  By the time Paul reached adolescence he, at least, was convinced that he was Peter’s son, and Peter was the paternal figure the boy came to revere. He began to ask people about the death of his father, and why the throne had come to his mother instead of himself. If they hesitated to answer, he said that when he was grown up, he would find out. When he asked about his own chances of ruling, there were long, uncomfortable silences. There were other gaps in his knowledge. He heard rumors that the brother of Gregory Orlov, his mother’s favorite, was suspected of being responsible for his father’s death. Thereafter, the sight of the Orlov brothers at court, and the knowledge of his mother’s relationship with Gregory Orlov, tormented him. At the same time, he was constructing an idealized image of Peter, modeling himself on Peter and imitating Peter’s traits and behavior. Aware that Peter had been passionately fond of everything connected with the army, Paul began playing with soldiers, first toys, then real soldiers, as Peter had done. Again following Peter’s lead, he turned to admire the greatest soldier of the age, Frederick of Prussia.

  Since 1760, when Paul was six, Nikita Panin had been his governor and senior tutor. Paul’s lessons had included languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, astronomy, religion, drawing, and music. He learned to dance, ride, and fence. He was intelligent, impatient, and highly strung. “His Highness has the bad habit of rushing things; he rushes to get up, to eat, to go to bed,” said one of his tutors. “At dinner-time, how many ruses will he think of to gain a few minutes and sit down sooner.… He eats too fast, doesn’t chew properly, and so charges his stomach with an impossible task.”

  At ten, Paul began to study the works of Jean d’Alembert, the French mathematician and co-editor of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Catherine invited d’Alembert to come to Russia to teach mathematics to her son. When the Frenchman first declined, she tried again, this time offering him a house, a large salary, and the status and privileges of an ambassador.

  Unfortunately, this approach to d’Alembert elicited a personally humiliating response. Not only did d’Alembert reiterate his refusal to come to Russia, but he privately uttered a remark that traveled far. Referring to the official reason given by Catherine for Peter III’s death, he said, “I am too prone to hemorrhoids which in Russia is a severe complaint. I prefer to have a painful behind in the safety of my home.” The empress never forgave him.

  In the summer of 1771, Paul, then seventeen, endured a five-week battle with influenza. Catherine and Panin watched anxiously as he struggled with a high fever and debilitating diarrhea. Once he began to recover, the question of the succession reasserted itself. Catherine knew that she could not postpone his official coming of age much beyond his eighteenth birthday in September 1772. It was Panin who, in this context, suggested that marriage to some healthy young woman might help mature the difficult young man. This way, too, the tutor added, Her Majesty would probably soon have a grandson whom she could raise according to her own views. This reasoning appealed to Catherine.

  Three years earlier, in 1768, when Paul was fourteen, Catherine had already begun thinking of a suitable bride for him and had made a list of candidates. Characteristically, she sought a bride in her own image: a sensible German princess from a minor court. The one who appealed to her most was Sophia of Württemburg, but Sophia was then only fourteen, too young for marriage. The empress’s eye shifted to the younger daughters of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. Catherine’s plan was to invite the landgravine and her three still-unmarried daughters, Amalie, Wilhelmina, and Louise, to Russia. They were eighteen, seventeen, and fifteen, respectively. Paul would be asked to chose among them. As had been true in her own case years before, the invitation did not include the father.

  During the summer of 1772, after Gregory Orlov had been replaced, the relationship between Catherine and her son improved. Living together with Paul at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine made a companion of her son, and the long estrangement seemed to be over. “We have never had a jollier time at Tsarskoe Selo than these nine weeks I have spent there with my son, who is becoming a nice lad. He really appears to enjoy my company,” she wrote to her Hamburg friend Frau Bielcke. “I return to town on Tuesday with my son who does not want to leave my side, and whom I have the honor to please so well that he sometimes changes his place at the table to sit next to me.” Then, after what Paul assumed was Orlov’s final disappearance, Gregory reappeared at court. Paul was dismayed.

  In the spring of 1773, the three Hessian princesses and their mother were invited to Russia. They stopped first in Berlin, where, as he had done with Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-one years earlier, Frederick reminded them always to remember they had been born Germans. At the end of June, four Russian naval vessels arrived in Lübeck to carry the Hessian party up the Baltic. The commander of the frigate transporting the young women and their mother was Paul’s best friend, Andrei Razumovsky, the son of Catherine’s friend Kyril Razumovsky. Andrei was captivated by the middle daughter, Wilhelmina, and she by him.

  In St. Petersburg, Paul took only two days to make his choice: it was the same as Andrei Razumovsky’s—Princess Wilhelmina. Unfortunately, Wilhelmina’s reaction to the small, strange young man soon to be her husband was not enthusiastic. Catherine noticed her hesitation; so did the girl’s mother. Nevertheless, the machinery of diplomacy and protocol ground ahead. As had been the case with Catherine and her own mother, both the bride-to-be and the landgravine were indifferent to the requirement for a religious conversion. Predictably, as the date of the wedding approached, the landgrave wrote from Germany, objecting to his daughter changing her religion. Also predictably, he surrendered to his wife’s decision. On August 15, 1773, Wilhelmina was received into the Orthodox Church as Natalia Alekseyevna. The next day she was betrothed to Paul and became a Russian grand duchess.

  There were banquets, balls, and late-summer picnics at which Catherine enjoyed the company of the landgravine, an energetic woman who was a friend of Goethe’s. Prince Orlov invited the three princesses, their mother, Catherine, and the court to Gatchina, where he gave a lavish reception: five hundred guests dined from Sèvres porcelain and gold plate. Orlov, hoping to irritate the empress, who had brought along her new favorite, Vasilchikov, immediately began to flirt with Louise, the youngest of the visiting princesses. To Berlin, the Prussian minister described “the extraordinary attentions which Prince Orlov pays the landgravine and the freedom of manner with which he treats the princesses, especially the youngest one.”

  The wedding of nineteen-year-old Paul and seventeen-year-old Natalia took place on September 29, 1773. It was followed by ten days of court balls, theatrical performances, and masquerades, while people in the streets drank free beer, ate hot meat pies, and watched fireworks soaring above the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. Paul was exultant; a new life and a new freedom seemed to be offering itself. Natalia consoled herself because Andrei Razumovsky was always nearby.

  As Paul’s wedding approached, Nikita Panin had been waging a battle to retain his influence over Paul and his wife-to-be. Catherine realized that, once married, Paul would become more independent of her; she was determined that, simultaneously, he also become more independent of Panin. Paul’s marriage would be both the pretext and the moment for severing this tie with Panin. With the loss of his role as tutor, however, Panin would be deprived of the base at court that entitled him to live at the palace and see his charge daily. He would no longer be able to influence Paul’s political views, which, Catherine believed, had helped steer her s
on toward what she regarded as an excessive admiration of Prussia and Frederick II.

  Panin, who had held his position for thirteen years, was unprepared for this maneuver. Being governor and tutor to the heir to the throne gave him a commanding position in government and society. As the guardian of the physical well-being and the education of the future sovereign, he had chosen, directed, and dismissed tutors, librarians, doctors, and all servants at the grand ducal court. The establishment over which he presided had its own table, famous as one of the best in the city. There, Panin received guests every day—supposedly on behalf of the grand duke, who was present to listen—including senior state officials, court dignitaries, foreign guests, writers, scientists, and many of his own relatives. His position as tutor, in short, was the foundation of Panin’s political influence. To avoid jeopardizing it, he had always refused to accept any other official post. On assuming the real leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs in 1763, he remained only at the second level of rank, leaving the senior title to the largely absentee chancellor, Michael Vorontsov. Being in constant contact with the empress, Panin was also able to offer frequent counsel to her on personal subjects; a year before, in the autumn of 1772, he had helped Catherine break with Orlov by producing Vasilchikov. Given these many duties and services, he had believed himself invaluable and invulnerable.

  Unfortunately for Panin, in May 1773 Orlov had returned to the capital and been readmitted to the council. There, he was eager to retaliate against Panin and assist Catherine in breaking the tutor’s hold on the grand duke. The result was that as Paul was about to be married, Panin was informed that the education of the grand duke was completed and that his mission as tutor was fulfilled. He responded by threatening to retire altogether to his estate near Smolensk if he were separated from Paul. Catherine, who did not wish to lose Panin completely, found a compromise. Panin would cease to be Paul’s tutor and give up administration of the grand ducal household. When he balked at vacating his rooms in the palace, Catherine announced that the rooms needed remodeling. To pacify Panin, she raised him to the equivalency in rank of the chancellor or a field marshal, and gave him the title of minister of Foreign Affairs. He was awarded a special grant of one hundred thousand rubles, an annual pension of thirty thousand rubles, and a salary of ten thousand rubles. Paul regretted the separation, but, caught up in his marriage to Natalia, he did not complain.

  After the wedding, the empress told the landgravine that the new grand duchess was “a golden young woman” with whom her son appeared to be deeply in love. Over time and on closer examination, however, Catherine’s praise of her new daughter-in-law turned to irritation. She complained to Grimm:

  Everything is done to excess with this lady. If she goes for a walk, it is for … [thirteen miles]; if she dances, it’s twenty quadrilles and as many minuets … in order to avoid the apartments being overheated, she has no fire lit in them at all … in short, the middle way is unknown here.… There is neither grace, nor prudence, nor wisdom in any of this and God knows what will become of her.… Just think that after more than a year and a half, she still doesn’t speak a word of the language.

  With Potemkin, she shared a different complaint:

  The grand duke … came to tell me himself that he and the grand duchess are in debt again.… He told me that her debt was from this, that, and the other thing to which I answered that she has an allowance, just as he does, like no one else in Europe; that this allowance is simply for clothing and passing fancies, but that the rest—servants, table, and carriage—is provided them.… I fear there will be no end to this.… If you count everything, then more than five hundred thousand has been expended on them during the year, and still they are in dire straits. But not a single thank you or a word of gratitude.

  Catherine also heard rumors that Natalia’s relationship with Andrei Razumovsky had grown excessively warm. To her lectures to Paul on his wife’s extravagance, she added suggestions that he should keep an eye on her private behavior. Paul was aware that something was wrong. His marriage was a disappointment; his frivolous wife never encouraged his affection. But when his mother talked of sending Razumovsky away, Paul declared that he would never part with Andrei, his best friend, the person second only to his wife in his affections.

  Catherine’s real complaint against Natalia was not financial, but that after two and a half years of marriage, her daughter-in-law showed no signs of producing an heir. These complaints were forgotten, however, when, in the fall of 1775, the grand duchess believed herself to be pregnant. “Her friends are, with reason, very anxious that she should prove so,” reported the British ambassador. A month later, it was officially announced that Natalia was pregnant; a baby was expected in the spring. By March 1776, Natalia’s pregnancy was proceeding so smoothly that the empress ordered wet nurses for the coming infant. Frederick II’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, was on his way from Berlin to be present at the important dynastic event.

  At four on Sunday morning, April 10, Paul awakened his mother to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. Catherine rose, put on a robe, and hurried to the bedside, and, although serious contractions had not yet begun, she stayed with the couple until ten in the morning. She left to be dressed and returned at noon, when the contractions became powerful and Natalia was in such pain that birth seemed imminent. But the afternoon and evening passed without result, and pain alternated with exhausted sleep. Monday was the same. On Tuesday, the midwife and doctors announced that there was no possibility of saving the child; all agreed that the baby was probably dead. On Wednesday, the thirteenth, they also despaired of saving the mother, and Natalia was given last rites. Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died.

  Catherine and Paul had both remained with her through the five days. “Never in my life have I found myself in a more difficult, more hideous, more painful position,” the empress told Grimm. “For three days, I neither ate nor drank. There were moments when her suffering made me feel that my own body was being torn apart. Then I went stony. I, who am tearful by nature, saw her die, and never shed a tear. I said to myself, ‘If you cry, others will sob. If you sob, others will faint.’ ” Catherine’s anguish was magnified by the knowledge that her dead grandchild had been a “perfectly formed boy.” The autopsy revealed that the baby had been too large to pass through the birth canal; the cause was an inoperable malformation of the bone, which the empress was told would have prevented Natalia from ever giving birth to a living child. After the young woman’s body was opened after her death, Catherine reported that “it was found that there was only a space of four fingers’ breadth; the child’s shoulders were eight fingers wide.”

  Despite fatigue, Catherine maintained her presence of mind. She had to; Paul, in a frenzy of grief, was refusing to allow his wife to be removed, and insisting on remaining beside her body. He did not attend the burial at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. His mother was accompanied by Potemkin and Gregory Orlov.

  Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. Further, the grand duke’s emotional state was such that no one could predict when he would be willing and able to fulfill his dynastic duty. At one moment rigid with grief, the next sobbing and screaming, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, threatening to kill himself by jumping out a window, he refused ever to think of marrying again.

  To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his. He groaned, wept—and then erup
ted with rage. He demanded that Razumovsky be sent to Siberia, but the empress, loyal to Andrei’s father, refused and simply ordered Andrei to leave the capital immediately. Exhausted, almost unable to function, Paul then agreed to all of his mother’s decisions. He was ready to marry again immediately, long before the year of official mourning had passed. To Grimm, Catherine wrote, “I have wasted no time. At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us. The dead being dead, we must think of the living.”

  Catherine was distressed by Natalia’s death, not because she had lost a daughter-in-law but because she had lost a grandson. In a letter to Frau Bielcke, she addressed the situation with an icy absence of sympathy: “Well, since it has been proven that she could not give birth to a living child, we must not think about her any more.” The essential thing now was to replace the dead wife quickly. The future of the dynasty and the empire were at stake; ensuring them was a sovereign’s duty. On the day Natalia died, Catherine was already considering possible replacements.

  65

  Paul, Maria, and the Succession

  THREE YEARS BEFORE, Princess Sophia of Württemburg had been Catherine’s first choice as a bride for Paul, but Sophia had been ruled out because she was only fourteen. Now, Sophia, almost seventeen, was in every respect exactly what Catherine sought: a German princess whose family was aristocratic but of modest circumstances, prolific with nine children, the three sons tall and strong, the six daughters handsome and wide-hipped. The presence of Prince Henry of Prussia in St. Petersburg made Catherine’s new project easier to achieve. Sophia of Württemburg was a great-niece of Frederick II and Prince Henry, and, as Paul idealized Prussia and the Prussian monarch, Catherine hoped that Prince Henry could help persuade her distraught son to marry a relative of his hero. Henry, knowing that his brother was always eager to strengthen ties with Russia, sent a message to Frederick by the fastest courier.