by Simon Dixon
Something of the empress’s own capacity for whimsy was revealed when she surprised her courtiers at a masquerade on 10 November. The event was a mixture between Elizabeth’s cross-dressing balls and the entertainment staged for Grand Duke Peter at Oranienbaum in 1757. Ordered in advance not to wear hooped underskirts, her guests at the Hermitage found themselves steered towards stalls manned by actors from the French theatre, who sold them (on credit) the costumes she had chosen—a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Egyptian dress, all designed for a quick change. ‘Everyone was very happy,’ Khrapovitsky commented.18 Flushed with success, Catherine became noticeably more relaxed as winter set in. ‘Her Majesty gladly speaks of education in general,’ Stedingk noted, ‘and those of her grandsons in particular.’ The voyage to the South was another favoured subject: ‘“I have never felt better than I did on that journey,” the empress said to me, “and what amused me greatly was that all the newspapers announced that I was dying.” “Fortunately, madame, the newspapers almost never tell the truth.”’19
* * *
By the end of the year, she had a new topic of conversation, widely reported in the European press. Potëmkin’s autumn advances along the Danube had been thwarted at Ismail, a 265-gun fortress on the northern bank of the river defended by an exceptionally large garrison of 35,000 Turks. But on 29 December, the favourite’s younger brother Valerian Zubov arrived in St Petersburg with news that even this seemingly impregnable stronghold had fallen. Summoned expressly for the task, Suvorov had stormed the ramparts in swirling mists in the early hours of the morning of 11 December. While six columns of men attacked the walls—built with the assistance of French military engineers, four miles in circumference and protected by moats fifty feet wide and twenty feet deep—a galley flotilla invaded from the river under the command of the Neapolitan adventurer José de Ribas.20 ‘The most horrible carnage followed,’ recalled the Comte de Damas, ‘the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood.’ Immortalised by Byron in Don Juan, the fighting took on a romantic hue from the start. ‘The walls and people of Ismail fell at the foot of Her Imperial Majesty’s throne,’ Suvorov announced to Potëmkin at the end of the day. ‘The assault was prolonged and bloody. Ismail is taken, thank God!’21 ‘We are assured that 20,000 Turks perished in this affair,’ Stedingk reported, ‘and 11,000 were taken prisoner, though the assailants numbered no more than 18,000 so they say. The Russians lost 2000 men and a further 4000 injured.’ That was almost certainly an understatement. Though the precise casualties may never be known, the Turks are thought to have lost 26,000 men and the Russians somewhere between 4000 and 8000.22
While Potëmkin had been plotting the defeat of the Sultan, Catherine had been faced with a crisis in the Court theatre. It erupted at the Hermitage on 11 February 1791 when the leading lady threw herself at the empress’s feet at the end of a performance of her latest comic opera, Fedul and his children. Once interpreted as a young lover’s struggle against the arbitrary tsarist regime, Yelizaveta Uranova’s plea to be released from the attentions of the debauched Count Bezborodko seems more likely to have been staged by the empress as a way of embarrassing Khrapovitsky and the count. Assuming that she would be distracted by the pressures of international events, Bezborodko had defied Catherine’s earlier decision to permit Uranova to marry her fiancé, the actor Silu Sandunov, who had been dismissed after demanding more money. Now it was the count’s turn to be humiliated when the empress not only granted Uranova’s petition, but reinstated Sandunov at a higher salary than before (though not quite the rate he had himself requested). The seemingly vacuous plot of Fedul and his children has been revealed by Andrey Zorin as an allegory of the transfer of the direction of the Court theatre to the sovereign from Khrapovitsky, who was removed from his position immediately after the performance. Part of Catherine’s concern lay with the lax behaviour of his voluptuous young actresses, many of whom were drawn into covert prostitution. But her earlier warning to her secretary that France had been undone by a decline in morals pointed to a significantly wider anxiety.23
Beyond the walls of her own palace, few regarded the empress as a plausible guardian of morality of any kind. Now that the storming of Ismail had reinforced the European stereotype of the Russians as a primitive people led by bloodthirsty savages, Catherine’s international rivals drew increasingly explicit parallels between her apparently insatiable appetite for imperial expansion and her notorious sexual rapaciousness. In the age of Gillray and Rowlandson, English caricaturists were in their element. The first semi-pornographic engraving to feature the empress had appeared on 24 October 1787 NS, two months after the beginning of the Turkish war. Backed by a cowering Joseph II complete with dunce’s cap, Catherine appears as ‘The Christian Amazon’ as a simian Louis XVI lobs towards her two grenades that form testicles to the phallic symbol of the Turk’s bayonet.24 The great majority of such satirical prints, however, date from the spring of 1791. One of the most explicit—‘The Imperial Stride’, published anonymously on 12 April NS—features a colossal figure of the empress with one foot in Russia and the other stretched out to Constantinople. Beneath her, ten diminished European rulers gaze up into her skirts in awe: ‘By Saint Jago,’ declares the king of Spain, ‘I’ll strip her of her fur!’ George III splutters his trademark ‘What! What! What! What a prodigious expansion!’, and the Sultan reluctantly admits that ‘The whole Turkish army wouldn’t satisfy her.’25
This sudden rash of derogatory images signalled that Anglo-Russian relations had reached an all-time low. Irritated by the Franco-Russian commercial treaty of 1787 that undermined Britain’s longstanding domination of the Russia trade, William Pitt had been further alarmed by the empress’s gains at the Turks’ expense. In January 1791, spurred on by his ambassador in Berlin, the prime minister demanded an end to the war and a return to the status quo ante by which Russia would have been forced to relinquish Ochakov, whose capture had been interpreted as a harbinger of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.26 In March, when Catherine refused to capitulate, Pitt threatened to send a fleet to the Baltic with Prussian support. As King Frederick William II mobilised 88,000 troops in preparation for an attack on his eastern neighbour, both Bezborodko and Potëmkin urged concessions. Catherine was clearly disturbed: ‘Anxiety about Prussia,’ Khrapovitsky recorded in his diary on 15 March. ‘It has gone on a long time. She cried.’27
As so often in her declining years, nervousness led to exhaustion and lapses in concentration. ‘The empress is not what she was,’ Stedingk reported privately to Gustav III at the end of the month. ‘Age and the inconveniences it brings render her less capable of doing business.’28 But there was never anything pathetic about Catherine. ‘Angry,’ her secretary noted on 7 April, ‘obstinacy will lead to a new war.’ Since it is not always clear whose words Khrapovitsky is recording, it is hard to be sure whether this was the voice of Potëmkin, irritated by her refusal to appease the Prussians, or an expression of the empress’s own exasperation at the sabre-rattling in Whitehall and Potsdam.29 Whichever it was, Catherine held her nerve and was vindicated when British public opinion, encouraged by her ambassador, Semën Vorontsov, and her admirer, Pitt’s rival Charles James Fox, helped to force the prime minister to back down.30 On 14 September NS, William Dent’s cartoon ‘Black Carlo’s White Bust, or The Party’s Plenipo in Catherine’s Closet’ portrayed the playwright Sheridan urging Fox to visit Russia: ‘your fortune is made—she has certainly heard of your fine parts.’ Indeed she had, though not in the way the cartoonist’s innuendo implied. When the Hermitage had taken delivery of a marble bust of Fox by Joseph Nollekens, a bronze copy was placed between Demosthenes and Cicero in the Cameron Gallery at Tsarskoye Selo. There it stayed until 1793, when Fox doubly disgraced himself in the empress’s eyes by supporting the Poles and expressing sympathy for the revolution in France. At that stage, the visiting English tutor John Parkinson was told that she was prepared to sell the bust, �
��but that it was not worth while, for that she could not get thirty roubles for it’.31
According to a leading historian of international relations, the ‘Ochakov crisis’ of spring 1791 was ‘not just a clash over peace terms with Turkey or a contest of wills between Pitt and Catherine, but a wider contest between the two relatively invulnerable flank powers over which of them would lead Europe and control the balance of power’.32 For the moment, it was the Russians who were in the ascendant and they saw no reason to conceal their glee. ‘General Suvorov has been here for a fortnight,’ Stedingk reported on 14 March. ‘480 flags and regimental colours, along with several Pashas’ tails and other tokens of dignity, carried off from the Turks at Ismail and solemnly paraded on Sunday to the church in the fortress [the Peter-Paul Cathedral], constitute a eulogy to this general far more eloquent than any panegyric.’ Catherine watched the parade from the windows of the Winter Palace.33 The whole city had come to a standstill in anticipation of Potëmkin’s arrival at the end of February. On 28 April he staged his own glorification of the fall of Ismail at his new residence, later christened the Tauride Palace in his memory, complete with choruses by Derzhavin: ‘Thunder of victory, resound!’
‘Like all his other plans,’ remarked Catherine’s first Western biographer, this entertainment ‘was extraordinary and great. A whole month was consumed in preparations: artists of all kinds were employed; whole shops and warehouses were emptied to supply the necessaries of the occasion; several hundred persons were daily assembled in making previous rehearsals for the final execution; and each of these days was of itself a grand spectacle.’34 On the appointed evening, Catherine found herself serenaded by Potëmkin’s private orchestra as Alexander and Constantine—their very names redolent of Russia’s imperial ambitions in the South—opened the dancing with a stylish quadrille. Then the company moved to the Gobelins Room, where, amidst the tapestries, their host had prepared a typical conceit: a life-size mechanical elephant studded with emeralds and rubies. ‘The Persian who conducted him struck upon a bell, and this was the signal for another change: A curtain flew up as if by magic, and opened to view a magnificently decorated theatre, where two ballets and a dramatical piece afforded entertainment to the spectators with their extraordinary excellence.’ One of the pieces performed was a version of Nicolas Chamfort’s The Merchant of Smyrna, staged in celebration of the deliverance of Russia’s southern provinces from Turkish rule. Indeed, though the pouring rain obliged them to suspend their disbelief, Potëmkin’s guests found themselves transported throughout the evening to an exotic southern paradise, complete with luscious fruits in the brilliantly lit Winter Garden designed by his English gardener, William Gould.35 ‘Whichever way the spectator turned his eye, the magnificent illumination struck him with amazement. The walls and columns all seemed to glow with various-coloured fire: large mirrors, here and there judiciously fixed to the sides of the apartments, or made to form pyramids and grottos, multiplied the effect of this singular exhibition, and even made the whole enclosure from top to bottom, seem to be composed of sparkling stones.’36
At the centre of the entertainment, both physically and rhetorically, was Catherine herself. ‘Before her,’ Derzhavin proclaimed in a celebrated description of the event, ‘everything becomes more alive, everything takes on greater radiance… Her bright face encourages smiles, dances, charades, games. This is the image of a mother, this is a monarch surrounded by glory, love, magnificence.’37 Intended for her sixty-second birthday on Easter Monday, the entertainment was delayed only by the scale of its host’s ambition. Once he had persuaded the empress to send Suvorov to Finland on 25 April, as a way of putting pressure on the Swedes, Potëmkin could pose as the sole victor of Ismail. By the time he was ready to greet her, resplendent in his new crimson velvet tailcoat, his private party resembled a state occasion in almost every detail, down to the cockaigne for the populace in the square outside.38 For Catherine, the event brought to an end an exceptionally stressful week, in which her pleasure at the news of Pitt’s growing difficulties in Parliament was balanced by the need for preparations at Kronstadt in case the threatened British squadron materialised. She was later to pay for her excitement with an attack of the colic, but for now she celebrated her relief by staying at the Tauride Palace until two in the morning. ‘There you are, monsieur,’ she boasted to Grimm on her return to her apartments: ‘That is how we conduct ourselves in Petersburg in the midst of trouble and war and the threats of dictators.’39
In one crucial respect, Potëmkin’s entertainment missed its mark. It failed to dislodge Platon Zubov and his relations, the only prominent Russians left off the 3000-strong guest list. Diplomats heard that the empress was privately critical of the prince’s extravagance and irritated by his machinations against her favourite. Certainly his appearances at Court were few in May and June. Since Radishchev had reminded Catherine of the damage that Potëmkin’s reputation for corruption could do, a measure of hesitation was understandable. But it was never enough to rupture the trust between them. As Isabel de Madariaga puts it, ‘there was a solidity in the link between the two which could be ruffled, but not broken by a Zubov’.40
That was just as well, since before Potëmkin left for the South on 24 July, he and Catherine had to agree on their response to the latest developments in Warsaw. The Poles had already taken advantage of the Russo-Turkish war to operate free from Russian influence through the sovereign Diet that began its four-year term in 1788.41 On 3 May 1791 NS, the week before the entertainment at the Tauride Palace, King Stanislaw August and a group of royalist conspirators, acting in temporary alliance with Ignacy Potocki and the Patriot Party, forced through the Diet a new constitution promising a major overhaul of the Polish political system. By abolishing the liberum veto, by which a single objection could de-rail proposed legislation, they sought to replace Poland’s anarchic ‘republic of nobles’ with a more orderly bi-cameral legislature backed by executive royal authority (‘Experience has taught us that the neglect of this essential part of government has overwhelmed Poland with disasters’).42 The Constitution of 3 May was doubly offensive to Catherine: not only did it threaten the prospect of a permanently stronger Western neighbour, but to a sovereign unable to distinguish between electoral reform and revolutionary Jacobinism, it seemed to signal the advance of the French contagion towards the borders of her own empire. For as long as the Turkish war continued, there could be no question of direct intervention against the Poles. So the empress satisfied herself by signalling her determination to overthrow the new constitution in the name of the old order. ‘This,’ Paul Schroeder has suggested, ‘was a serious, middle-of-the-road kind of programme for dealing with the Polish problem, stabilising Central and Eastern Europe, and making the European system work—about as good a one as the eighteenth century could offer.’ And it had the further advantage of leaving open two more radical options for the future: once the new constitution had been pushed aside, Poland could either be preserved as a Russian satellite or partitioned once more by a Russian-dominated coalition.43
Events in Poland obliged Catherine to cast her eye towards France with new urgency. Not long after Louis XVI’s abortive flight to Varennes in June 1791, she made a secret loan of 500,000 roubles ‘for use in French affairs’.44 Yet much as she might urge Sweden, Prussia and Austria to intervene against the Revolution, her aim was always to embroil them while retaining a free hand (not until 1798 did Russia join the anti-French coalition, with disastrous results for Tsar Paul). As the leading French émigré Count Valentin Esterhazy discovered, Catherine’s methods were at once more subtle and less risky. Soon after arriving in St Petersburg at the end of August, the count was entertained to dinner by Alexander Stroganov, an old acquaintance from Paris:
There were thirty of us. I ate several Russian dishes, sterlet soup, mushroom paté and other nourishing ragouts which are good when they are prepared by good cooks, excepting, however, an iced soup which was detestable and a drink whose name
I have forgotten, made with flour, which was no better.45
Yet even Stroganov’s hospitality paled into insignificance alongside Catherine’s determination to woo the émigrés. ‘I work on the feelings of everyone of that ilk who falls into my hands,’ she admitted to Grimm. ‘I do not know in what state they return, but I cover them with fur as far as I can, and I tell them to seek their plans and their measures in the conduct of Henri IV.’ Catherine knew full well that Louis XVI was no Henri IV. Still, treating Esterhazy ‘entirely without ceremony’, she thought he seemed ‘fairly pleased’ with her. In fact, he was bowled over. After Catherine had shown off her paintings during the interval at his first ‘small Hermitage’, the astonished count told his wife that it was the sort of tour he might have taken ‘at the country estate of a private individual who was kind enough to show me round his house’.46 Formal occasions were stunning in a different way. ‘The empress was in white,’ Esterhazy reported after chapel one Sunday, ‘with a sky-blue, sleeveless Russian robe and a broad, blue sash, tied in front of her skirt. She wore gauze on her head and a pendant with two enormous diamonds, diamond clusters in each ear and a pretty bracelet.’ On the twenty-ninth anniversary of Catherine’s coronation, he kissed her hand and dined at the house of Count Osterman, the vice chancellor, with a hundred others at the Court’s expense. That night, more than a thousand carriages were ranged across the square for the dress ball at the Winter Palace.47
Behind the façade, Catherine was deeply troubled. Although the summer had brought good news from the Danube, where the Turks, weakened by the fall of Ismail, had sued for peace in the wake of defeats inflicted by Prince Nikolay Repnin, the preliminary treaty agreed at Jassy on 1 August was unsatisfactory. Despite securing the swathe of land between the Bug and the Dnieper, including Ochakov, Repnin had conceded the Turkish demand that the conquered territory should remain unfortified, and also agreed to an eight-month armistice which Potëmkin regarded as no more than a ruse to postpone the final treaty, thereby hampering Russia intervention in Poland.48 Worse was to come when the prince contracted a fatal fever while trying to negotiate a better settlement. News of his illness reached the empress at the end of August and fluctuating reports of his health left her increasingly agitated. ‘My true friend Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich,’ she wrote on 16 September. ‘I have received your letters of 29 August and 6 September. The first greatly cheered me, since I could see you were better, whereas the second only made me more anxious, seeing that for four days you had an uninterrupted fever and a headache. I beg God to give you strength…I, thank God, am well, and the colic has completely gone, which I put down to the girdle and the Hungarian wine you recommended.’ At the end of the month, she sent him a little fur coat and a homily: ‘For Christ’s sake, if need be, take whatever the doctors prescribe to bring you relief. And after taking it I beg you to avoid any food and drink that might counteract the medicine.’49 (The prince’s appetite exceeded even his disdain for the medical profession: ‘his ordinary breakfast was the greater part of a smoke-dried goose from Hamburgh’ washed down by ‘a prodigious quantity of wine and Dantzick-liqueurs’.)50 On 3 October, Catherine was in tears on hearing that he had been given the last rites. Still hoping against hope, she wrote a final note of encouragement, reassuring him that his physicians were sure he was improving. Potëmkin never saw it. On 4 October, he confessed that he could no longer bear his suffering. Next day, the man with whom she had shared more than any other was laid out on the road to Jassy and died in a coma soon after his fifty-second birthday.51