by Simon Dixon
* * *
Six months later, the voyage to the South seemed no more than ‘a dream’.96 Aggravated by Potëmkin’s aggressive posturing in the Crimea, the Turks had imprisoned Catherine’s ambassador in Constantinople soon after her return to St Petersburg. This was the traditional Ottoman way of declaring war. Fortified by her implacable faith in Potëmkin, Catherine expected her troops to make a better start to the campaign than they had in 1768. But her partner was in no fit state to lead the charge. Exhausted by the summer’s celebrations and alarmed by a diarrhoea epidemic at Kherson (Catherine ordered him to cure the sick with rice and a tot of fortified wine), he sank into a debilitating bout of hypochondria. ‘In truth, I’m not sure I can stand this for long,’ he warned on 16 September. ‘I can neither sleep nor eat…When can I retire or cut myself off so that the world will hear of me no more?!’ Eight days later, when a storm threatened to destroy his precious fleet at Sevastopol, he seemed a broken man: ‘My mind and spirit are gone. I have requested that my command be transferred to another.’ Catherine initially responded to such wailing with a combination of encouragement and reassurance that prompted the prince to acknowledge that ‘you genuinely write to me like my own mother’. By early October, however, tolerance had given way to irritation. Her affairs demanded unshakeable patience, she chided him, whereas he was ‘as impatient as a five-year-old’. She was far from serene herself: ‘There is one way to lessen my anxiety,’ she declared on 9 October: ‘write more often and inform me about the state of affairs. I await the promised details with impatience. And don’t forget to write to me about Kinburn.’97
In the event, the details were unexpectedly encouraging. Potëmkin recovered both his health and his energy; his fleet, though damaged, had escaped destruction; and, thanks to General Suvorov, Kinburn, the Russian fort at the mouth of the Dnieper, successfully resisted the bombardment to which it had been subjected since August. The respite, however, was only temporary. Now it was Catherine’s turn to suffer: she complained of sickness and headaches throughout the winter and was so ill in the spring that on 11 April 1788, just before her fifty-ninth birthday, The Times prematurely announced her death. Neither the Russians nor the Austrians, who belatedly came to Catherine’s aid in February 1788, made much progress that summer. Joseph II proved a limited general and his troops were stymied by disease. The mercurial Potëmkin had to be dissuaded from abandoning the Crimea to the Turks: ‘When you are sitting on a horse,’ Catherine pointed out, ‘there is no point in dismounting and holding on by the tail.’ Instead, he committed himself to a lengthy siege of Ochakov, the Turkish fort opposite Kinburn, whose 24,000-strong garrison trapped the Russian fleet in the Dnieper estuary. Thanks to an attack by gunboats armed by Samuel Bentham, the Turks lost fifteen ships in two days in June (Catherine donned naval uniform for the exultant Te Deum at Tsarskoye Selo). Yet attempts in the following month to blockade the fort proved inconclusive and heavy snow in November prevented Potëmkin from delivering Ochakov to the empress as a gift on her name day. Not until 6 December did he launch a full-scale attack. Ten days later, Catherine learned of the fall of the fortress, the main aim of her strategy since the beginning of the conflict. ‘I grasp you by the ears with both hands and kiss you in my thoughts, dearest friend.’98
Plagued with headaches, she had been sleepless for days. Now she caught a chill at the Te Deum in celebration of the victory, complaining to Khrapovitsky of an unbearable backache that left her tossing and turning until four in the morning.99 It had not been an easy year. That summer, while Catherine was diverted by her campaign against the Turks, Gustav III had grasped the opportunity to limit Russian interference in Swedish politics by bombarding the Russian fort at Nyslott on 22 June. (Since his constitution prevented him from appearing to be the aggressor, the attack was launched in pseudo-retaliation against a raid into Swedish territory by a ‘Cossack’ band from Russian Finland, alleged at the time to be Swedish troops wearing costumes borrowed from the royal opera in Stockholm.)100 Admiral Greig came to the rescue for one last time by holding off the Swedish fleet at a brutal stalemate off the island of Hogland on 6 July. Catherine, who sent Dr Rogerson to minister to her feverish admiral, mourned Greig’s death at Reval on 15 October as a ‘great loss to the state’ and paid for his funeral. By then, she herself had survived one of her nerviest summers under threat of a Swedish descent on her palace. St Petersburg resembled an armed camp as regiment after regiment assembled for its defence. ‘This is a difficult time for me,’ Catherine admitted to Potëmkin on 3 July. Yet even an enervating heatwave failed to blunt her competitive edge. ‘The heat was so great here,’ she wrote a fortnight later, ‘that the thermometer registered over 39 and a half degrees in the sun. In Portugal they can’t remember anything higher than 44.’101
Over the following winter, a tearful empress faced divisions within her own Council, as her determination to maintain the Austrian alliance and to prop up King Stanislaw in Poland (a policy supported by Bezborodko, Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov) came under pressure from those who favoured a compromise with Prussia at the Poles’ expense. By far the most important of these was Potëmkin himself, who had built up his Polish estates to the point where he owned 112,000 serfs. In the spring of 1789, having sent Catherine a map outlining his plans for the occupation of three Polish provinces (Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia), he travelled to St Petersburg in a vain attempt to persuade Catherine to change her course. While he returned to the South in May, the empress renewed her Austrian alliance in a further exchange of letters with Joseph II.102
She did so against a background of personal crisis when it emerged that ‘Redcoat’ Mamonov had betrayed her with one of her maids of honour, Princess Darya Shcherbatova. As her courtiers noticed, the cracks had been opening in Catherine’s relationship with her favourite for some months, prompting tears and bad temper. She spent her sixtieth birthday—one of the most significant state occasions in the Court calendar—closeted in her rooms.103 Mamonov’s request for permission to marry his lover was the ultimate blow. As she confessed in a self-styled ‘apophthegm’ to Potëmkin on 29 June, ‘I nearly fell over, so great was my surprise, and had still not recovered when he came into my room, fell at my feet and confessed his whole intrigue.’104 Despite copious tears, meticulously recorded by Mamonov’s friend Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine betrothed the couple herself and sent them to Moscow. This time there was to be no lonely interlude between lovers. On the day of Mamonov’s dismissal, her friend Anna Naryshkina introduced her to the young man who was to be her last and youngest favourite. The swarthy Platon Zubov, thirty-eight years Catherine’s junior, was promptly dubbed ‘the little black one’ in the apophthegm to Potëmkin, which outlined all the usual virtues of gentleness, eagerness and modesty (a singular misapprehension of the new favourite’s nature).
It was in Zubov’s company that the empress faced the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789. Though no friend of sedition, Catherine initially had little reason to fear events in Paris, and indeed could reasonably hope to profit from French weakness in the international arena. Her subjects could read about the fall of the Bastille in the Russian newspapers (whose circulation increased in response to such exciting developments), and many also had access to the range of French revolutionary pamphlets and news-sheets which circulated freely in St Petersburg and Moscow.105 One reason for the empress’s confidence was the good news she received from the Southern front, where Potëmkin and General Suvorov were enjoying a triumphant summer on the Bug and the Dniester. After 15,000 Turks were slaughtered on the River Rymnik on 11 September, Suvorov was made a count of both the Russian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and allowed to call himself ‘Rymniksky’ at Potëmkin’s suggestion.106 Wider European developments, however, prevented Catherine from converting military victories into a peaceful settlement on her own terms. British hostility was an increasing hazard for her, and so were Prussia’s ambitions in Poland. ‘We are stroking the Prussians,’ she told Pot
ëmkin in October 1789, ‘but how our heart can endure their words and deeds which are filled with rudeness and abuse, God alone knows.’107
Russia’s international position was still critical when Radishchev’s Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow appeared in May 1790. A book that criticised ‘the murder called war’ was bound to catch Catherine on the raw. ‘What do they want?’ she asked in a splenetic marginal comment. ‘To be left defenceless to fall captive to the Turks and Tatars, or to be conquered by the Swedes?’ A noble writer twenty years her junior, Radishchev had grown up as a page at the empress’s Court and had been one of the first Russian students selected to study at Leipzig at her government’s expense.108 Now he had betrayed her trust with a fictional travelogue in the mould of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. His book launched a stinging attack on the evils of favouritism and a bitter critique of the inhumanity of slavery, derived from Radishchev’s reading of Raynal’s History of the Two Indies and now applied to Russian serfdom in particular. The empress was appalled. ‘The purpose of this book is clear on every page,’ she retorted in notes which subsequently provided the basis for the interrogation conducted by Sheshkovsky, the prosecutor who later investigated Novikov. ‘Its author, infected and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and for the authorities, to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government.’ If Radishchev’s views on serfdom made him a rebel worse than Pugachëv, then the chapter on corruption, levelled primarily at Potëmkin (identifiable by his craving for oysters), revealed the purpose of the whole book: ‘It is a safe bet that the author’s motive in writing it was this, that he does not have entrée to the palace. Maybe he had it once and lost it, but since he does not have it now but does have an evil and consequently ungrateful heart, he is struggling for it now with his pen.’ As Catherine sensed, the point of Radishchev’s book could be derived from the very direction of travel of his fictional narrator—towards the heart of old Muscovy and away from the false foreign values of her northern Residenzstadt. ‘Our babbler is timid. If he stood closer to the sovereign, he would pipe a different tune. We have seen a lot of such humbugs, especially among the schismatics.’109 Although Catherine eventually commuted Radishchev’s death sentence to exile in Siberia, where his passage was smoothed by his embarrassed patron, Alexander Vorontsov, no one could miss the increasing signs of a significant change of heart on the empress’s part—a mounting hostility to the intellectual independence of the very writers whom she had done so much to encourage in the earlier part of her reign. Its twilight years would be recalled as a period of intellectual repression.
CHAPTER TWELVE
End of an Era
1790–1796
The Swedish menace evaporated as suddenly as it had appeared after a period of rising alarm in the spring of 1790. When a courier arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 4 May to announce the capture of an enemy man-of-war off Reval, Catherine hastily announced thanksgiving prayers: she had scarcely slept in anticipation of an adverse result.1 When Admiral Chichagov nevertheless failed to block the Swedish fleet’s course toward the Russian capital, her nerves stretched tauter still. From dawn on 23 May, ‘a terrible cannonade’ echoed all day, rattling windows from St Petersburg to the summer residence. ‘Anxiety’ was Khrapovitsky’s laconic comment.2 While Catherine tried to ease the tension by boating on the lake, the implications for the conflict on the Danube were inescapable. ‘Everyone is sick of the war,’ Zavadovsky told Field Marshal Rumyantsev on 14 June. ‘Any peace would be desirable and useful in our state of complete exhaustion.’3 Subsequent developments were even more disturbing. Although the Russian galley fleet under Prince Nassau Siegen captured seven Swedish ships of the line at Vyborg on 22 June, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory. Even as the empress was boasting about it in a letter to Potëmkin on the twenty-eighth anniversary of her coup, a disastrous encounter was taking place off Svensksund in which Nassau Siegen lost a total of sixty-four ships and more than 7300 men, most of them taken prisoner. Magnanimous as ever, Catherine refused to blame her distraught commander. ‘It was not the king of Sweden or even his fleet that defeated the prince of Nassau,’ she suggested to Grimm. ‘It was the high wind and people who thought themselves invincible out of an excess of ardour.’4 She was fortunate that Gustav III, deprived of the British subsidies that might have kept him in the war, was as keen as she was to sue for peace. At the price of Russia’s tacit abdication from further interference in Swedish politics, a settlement was reached at the small town of Verela on 3 August. ‘We have dragged one paw out of the mud,’ a relieved empress told Potëmkin. ‘When we drag the other out, we’ll sing Hallelujah.’5
While Potëmkin contemplated ways to bring the Turkish war to a triumphant conclusion—by no means a predictable outcome to pessimists such as Zavadovsky—Catherine prepared to commemorate the peace with Sweden with festivities out of all proportion to Russia’s achievements (the peace was announced with a glittering procession to the Kazan Church at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August and commemorated with sixteen days of celebrations beginning on the next great feast in the Orthodox calendar, the Feast of the Nativity of the Mother of God on 8 September). Meanwhile, neither Radishchev’s trial nor the exceptionally wet weather could dampen her mood. After an enjoyable summer in the company of Platon Zubov, playing cards in the Arabesque Room and strolling through the park at Tsarskoye Selo, she even managed to express enthusiasm for the annual celebrations at the Alexander Nevsky monastery, where echoes of her imperial ambitions sounded loud and clear. On 30 August, Giuseppe Sarti’s Te Deum, commissioned by Potëmkin to celebrate the fall of Ochakov and incorporating the sound of cannon fire, was sung to full orchestral accompaniment at the banquet following the consecration of Starov’s Trinity Cathedral (‘it is a pity it cannot be sung in church because of the instruments’).6 That morning, Catherine had processed with Grand Duke Paul and his sons as the silver casket containing St Alexander’s relics was borne to its ultimate resting place. Metropolitan Gavriil was assisted at the service by Bishop Innokenty of Pskov and another of the empress’s favourite prelates, the seventy-three-year-old Greek, Eugenios Voulgaris, recently retired as the first bishop of Kherson and now in the last stages of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Greek (it was published in 1791–2 by the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg).7 The day before, she had presented Gavriil with ‘an extremely fine’ emerald-studded panageia to wear round his neck alongside his pectoral cross ‘as a sign of his contribution to the building of the church’.8
As it transpired, these high spirits were only temporary. At the end of September, Baron Stedingk, the new Swedish ambassador, reported that Catherine had not been seen since ‘the day of the firework that brought the peace celebrations to an end, thank God’. Soaked by persistent rain, she had developed ‘a bad cold and was exhausted with all these fêtes, though that did not prevent her from going into her garden in the evening after the firework, so eager was she to appear at every rejoicing’.9 In fact, her colic had put her in such a bad mood that when told of the costs of the display on the meadow in front of Rastrelli’s Summer Palace, she demanded a full account from Colonel Melissino, whose pyrotechnics had ‘resembled a comic puppet show’. In this weakened state, it became a chore even to sign a decree (‘it was easier for Empress Anna: her name was shorter’), and she was irritated by all manner of setbacks, not least the slow progress of elementary education in Moscow (‘I shall have to go and live there for a year’).10 The same gallows humour was shared with Grimm once she had retired to bed to cure her cough: ‘In six weeks time I hope to read in the papers that I am at death’s door.’11 Her comedies might have been expected to lift her spirits—‘tragedies are never given at the Hermitage,’ Stedingk remarked later, ‘the empress being unable to endure the emotions of a tragedian’—but these had been playing to an increasingly select company. ‘Often there are only four or five in the audience,’ the Swede was
told, ‘which drives the actors to despair.’ At larger gatherings, ‘which are very rare’, she was content with a hand of boston if there was no theatrical performance. ‘It is all over by nine o’clock. The empress goes to bed and a small company of the men dine with Mr Zubov.’12 Early in the New Year, Stedingk reported the creation of a new institution—‘middling-size Hermitages’, with a guest list of about sixty. In the first half of October, however, illness kept Catherine out of the public eye. When she appeared at Court on the morning of Maria Fëdorovna’s birthday, it was the first time she had been seen for three weeks.13
The triumphant premiere of her operatic pageant The Beginning of Oleg’s Reign on 22 October signalled a change of mood. At the large Hermitage two days later, the empress danced the polonaise and stayed up for the ball and dinner.14 For Count Nikolay Saltykov’s masked ball at the Vorontsov palace, she wore ‘a white satin dress in the Russian style’ with a ‘cocked hat à la Henri IV, decorated with a plume of white feathers and a glittering diamond solitaire’. ‘The costume was fine, simple and grand,’ reported the secretary of the Swedish embassy.15 In November, the knights of the orders of St George and St Andrew were able to celebrate with due ceremony in Catherine’s company; Princess Dashkova sat beside her at the banquet on her name day.16 Meanwhile she had resumed her efforts to charm the foreign diplomats. Invited to inspect Voltaire’s library, Stedingk and the Prussian ambassador ‘spent a part of the day, as one might say, with Voltaire himself. The remarks he scribbled in the margins of his books while he was reading perhaps paint a better picture of this extraordinary man than his works themselves. His spirit, his gaiety, his humour and his caprices appear in their true light.’17