Secret Lives of the Tsars
Page 13
And yet the infatuated empress believed that Zubov—or “the child,” as she called him—was a precious cherub. He has “the most innocent soul,” Catherine wrote to Potemkin, and is “without malice or treachery, modest, devoted, supremely grateful.” Clearly Potemkin knew better, and as news of Zubov’s dangerous ascendency reached him, he abruptly left the front lines for St. Petersburg.
“Prince Potemkin arrived here four days ago, more handsome, agreeable, witty and brilliant than ever, and in the gayest possible humor,” Catherine wrote to Grimm; “that’s what a fine and glorious campaign does for a man, it puts him in a good mood.” The prince’s spirits darkened, though, when he realized that the reports of Zubov’s sensational rise were entirely accurate. And though the empress continued to show her “lion of the jungle” proper respect and esteem, the one-eyed giant was no longer master of Russia. He had been supplanted by “the child.”
In what was either a futile attempt to reassert his position, or a formal farewell to the empress he had loved and helped become “the Great”—perhaps both—Potemkin threw an extravagant ball at his Tauride Palace in the spring of 1791, the opulence of which had rarely been seen in the capital before. It was a grand success, in that the empress stayed until two in the morning, but at the end of the night it was Zubov trailing behind her as she left.
Dejected, Potemkin returned to the front, where he at least hoped to pursue an aggressive policy against the Turks. However, he arrived to find that Catherine had overridden all his designs and, following Zubov’s own policy, had ordered an immediate cessation of hostilities. Now the once-invincible prince was broken entirely, his proud spirit replaced by weakness and doubt. “The Prince was destroying himself,” reported Count Langeron. “I have seen him, during an attack of fever, devour a ham, a salted goose, and three or four chickens, and drink kvass, klukva [cranberry liquor], mead, and all sorts of wines.”
With no real sense of purpose, Potemkin left the peace conference, writing to Catherine, “Little Mother, gracious sovereign, I can no longer endure my torments. The only chance remaining for me is to quit this city [Jassey]; I have given orders that I be taken to Nikolayev [the town he founded in the Ukraine]. I do not know what will become of me. Your very faithful and very grateful subject—Potemkin.”
It was while traveling to Nikolayev in October 1791 that Potemkin fell ill again. He asked to be taken out of the carriage and laid in the grass to rest. And there he died, essentially in a ditch: the conqueror of new territory, the builder of cities, the man of genius who served an empress as lover, possible husband, and virtual co-sovereign.
“Once again, a terrible, crushing blow has fallen on my head,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in a long, despairing letter. “I regard Prince Potemkin as a very great man, who did not accomplish half of what he was capable of.” Yet no matter how powerfully she felt about the man she had just lost, Catherine’s tributes to him would have to remain private—on that Zubov insisted, no doubt keenly aware of how insignificant a specimen he really was compared to the great Russian he had replaced. Thus was Potemkin quietly laid to rest. “What is most extraordinary is that he has already been completely forgotten,” Count Feodor Rostopchin later wrote. “The generations to come will not bless his memory.”
With the towering prince gone, his pale shadow emerged more powerful than ever. “Count Zubov is everything here,” reported Rostopchin. “There is no other will but his. His power is greater than that of Potemkin. He is as reckless and incapable as before, although the Empress keeps repeating that he is the greatest genius the history of Russia has known.”
Indeed, Catherine remained enchanted with this colossal ninny. At his insistence, she put him in charge of all foreign affairs,*9 and decorated him with so many awards that Masson was prompted to quip that he looked like “a hawker of [ribbons] and trinkets at a fair.” The empress also turned over Potemkin’s apartments to Zubov, but there was little she could do to transfer his achievements.
“Potemkin owed almost all his greatness to himself,” wrote Masson; “Zubov owed his only to Catherine’s decrepitude. We watched him wax in power, wealth, prestige, in proportion as Catherine waned in activity, vigor and understanding.… He was obsessed with the desire to do everything, or seem to do everything.… His haughtiness was equaled only by the servility of those who hastened to prostrate themselves before him.… Everyone crawled at Zubov’s feet; he stood erect and thought himself great.”
So arrogant had Zubov become that he even had the audacity to hit on the wife of Catherine’s grandson, the future emperor Alexander I. And there was not much the royal couple could do about it. “My wife behaves like an angel,” Alexander confided to a friend. “But you must admit that it is exceedingly awkward to know how to conduct oneself toward Zubov.… If you treat him well, it is as if you approved of his love, and if you treat him coldly to discourage him, the Empress, who is ignorant of the situation, may be offended that you are not sufficiently honoring a man whom she favors. It is extremely difficult to keep the middle course, as is necessary, especially before a public as malicious and as ready to do spiteful things as ours.”
What Zubov apparently failed to recognize as he preened and swaggered in the glow of imperial favor was the inescapable fact that his mistress’s remaining time was limited. And without her protection, he was nothing. Thus, when Catherine II was felled by a stroke in 1796, Zubov was in “despair … beyond comparison,” as one witness described him. With his power slipping away as quickly as the empress’s life, he stood by her bed sobbing uncontrollably.
Then, on November 17, 1796, Platon Zubov found himself the subject of a new sovereign—one he had been foolish enough to scorn and mock. (In one very public scene, for example, the future emperor Paul voiced his agreement with a point Zubov made one night at dinner. To this the favorite responded contemptuously, “What? Have I said something silly?”)
Just when it seemed severe retribution was in order, though, Emperor Paul showed himself to be rather magnanimous. He made a personal visit to the now-helpless Zubov and raised a toast to him. “I wish you as many happy days as there are drops in this glass,” Paul declared. It was a cruel ruse. Soon after, the emperor confiscated all Zubov’s property and sent him into exile. But Catherine the Great’s “child” would have the last laugh against her half-mad son.
* * *
*1 Then there was that kind of comfortable intimacy shared by married couples. “I have some diarrhea today, but apart from that, I am well, my adored one,” the empress shared. “Do not be distressed because of my diarrhea, it cleans out the intestines.” This was ancillary evidence of a marriage, to be sure, but certainly not the language of lovebirds caught up in the anticipatory blush of a budding romance.
*2 Potemkin was indeed subject to fits of black despair, even when things seemed ideal. On one occasion, after his nephew commended him for his good spirits, he replied, “Could any man be happier than I? All my hopes, all my desires have been fulfilled as if by magic.” Then, after elucidating all the manifold bounty he enjoyed, Potemkin smashed a valuable plate, stormed off to his room, and locked the door behind him.
*3 Some of Catherine II’s biographers—including the more scholarly among them, such as John T. Alexander and Isabel de Madariaga—have dismissed this as legend (much like her supposed equine proclivities), conjured by the empress’s French detractors.
*4 The empress further elucidated on love, lust, and desire in her Memoirs: “For to tempt, and to be tempted are closely allied, and, in spite of the finest moral precepts, no sooner is feeling excited than we have gone vastly further than we are aware of. And how is it possible to prevent one’s feelings aroused I have yet to learn.… All that can be said in opposition must seem prudery quite out of harmony with the instincts of the human heart; besides, no one holds his heart in his hand, tightening or relaxing his grasp at pleasure.”
*5 Zavadovsky later reemerged as state secretary in Catherine’s government.
*7 Byron probably used the memoirs of Charles Masson, a chronicler hostile to Catherine, as his source for the term “l’Eprouveuse,” which has a near translation in French as “an apparatus formerly used to test the strength of gunpowder.”
*8 It was along the river route of this Crimean tour that Potemkin allegedly set up the legendary “villages” for Catherine’s edification: elaborate façades in front of which cheerful residents of the newly annexed territory supposedly stood and waved to their new monarch.
*9 In one of Zubov’s more glaring blunders in this capacity, he arranged the marriage of Catherine’s thirteen-year-old granddaughter Alexandra to the young king of Sweden, Gustav IV. Only he neglected to settle the vital question of religion before King Gustav came to officially court the Russian princess. The Swedes thought it essential their queen become Lutheran. The empress, on the other hand, would not countenance the girl’s conversion from Orthodoxy. It all ended in a humiliating debacle when it became apparent too late that neither side was prepared to budge on the issue.
Paul (1796–1801): “He Detests His Nation”
There is no one who does not daily remark on the disorder of his faculties.
—GRAND DUCHESS (LATER EMPRESS) MARIA FEODOROVNA
After her death in 1796, Catherine the Great was succeeded by her son Paul, whose father was either the late empress’s murdered husband, Peter III, or, more likely, her first lover, Sergei Saltykov. Though questions of paternity lingered, Paul believed he was Peter’s son and honored him accordingly—by imitation, alas, which ultimately resulted in the two emperors sharing the same ghastly fate.
Catherine II was dead, and now it was time for her son and successor, Paul, to rectify some wrongs. Certainly he would bury with all due honor the mother he so feared and despised. But she wouldn’t be alone. The new emperor ordered that the skeletal remains of his putative father, Peter III, be disinterred from his vault at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery and, with much ceremony, carried to the Winter Palace and laid in state next to Catherine’s coffin. Thus, after thirty-four years, the husband and wife who loathed each other in life were reunited in death as their former subjects shuffled by to pay homage. Paul was pleased with this bit of macabre handiwork, but he still had more planned. During the funeral procession that followed, he arranged for the architect of his father’s murder, the now aged and decrepit Alexis Orlov, to carry the dead emperor’s crown on a cushion, while other surviving conspirators were designated pallbearers. Then, amid the incense and solemn chants at the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, Catherine II and Peter III were interred together forever.
The bond between the baby Paul and his mother had been broken at a most critical time, when the infant was whisked away by Empress Elizabeth immediately after Catherine delivered him in 1754. The new mother was only allowed to see her son occasionally, and then for just the briefest visits. Paul was a child of the state, and the state, in the person of the empress, literally smothered him.
“He was kept in an excessively warm room,” Catherine wrote, “swaddled in flannel, and laid in a cradle lined with black fur; he was covered with a counterpane of pink satin, lined with wadding, and another one above it, lined with black fur. I saw him many times often lying so, with sweat running down his face and his whole body, and so it was that when he grew older, the least breath of air chilled him and made him ill. In addition, he was surrounded by a bevy of ignorant old crones, who, by dint of their senseless means of management, did him infinitely more harm than good, both physically and mentally.”
While Catherine was always concerned about the welfare of the baby snatched away from her by Elizabeth, her husband showed no such inclination. Perhaps Peter doubted whether Paul really was his child, or, just as likely, there was little room in his disordered mind for much paternal sentiment. Indeed, the only real interest Peter ever showed in the boy was when he insisted at Paul’s birth that he receive the same financial reward his wife did when she delivered the child. (To satisfy this petulant demand, Elizabeth, her treasury nearly empty at the time, had to ask Catherine to temporarily return her bequest so the empress could pay off Peter.) Yet despite his father’s near-total indifference, it would be Peter III whom Paul would come to emulate.
Even as a boy, the future emperor was demonstrating some of Peter’s more unsettling characteristics—evidence, perhaps, that they were indeed father and son after all. He was often restless and agitated, with a mania for all things military, and possessed of a disturbing capacity for cruelty. “With the best intention in the world,” the boy’s tutor warned him, “you will make yourself thoroughly hated.”
Once, during a theatrical performance when he was ten, Paul was so outraged when some members of the audience dared applaud before he had himself indicated his reaction to the play that he asked his mother—now empress—to exile the offenders. Of course Catherine ignored this impudent demand, but she couldn’t ignore the emerging character deficits in her son that were so frighteningly reminiscent of her late, demented spouse. They left her cold.
“He is believed to be vindictive, headstrong and absolute in his ideas,” the French chargé d’affaires Sabatier de Cabre reported of Paul when he was fourteen. “It is only to be feared that by virtue of having his wings clipped, a potentially decided character may be rendered obstinate, that it may be replaced by duplicity, repressed hatred and perhaps pusillanimity, and that the high-mindedness which might have been developed in him may be stifled at last by the terror that his mother has always inspired in him.… It is true that the Empress, who is careful of appearances so far as everything else is concerned, observes none of them in relation to her son. For him she always has the tone and manner of a sovereign, and this attitude is often combined with a coldness and neglect that disgust the young prince. She has never treated him as a mother treats her son. Therefore the Grand Duke [Paul] behaves with her as if he stood before a judge.”
Catherine II did indeed have a difficult time loving her son, who in his adolescence was becoming increasingly unstable as he seethed with suspicion and paranoia—especially toward the empress he was beginning to suspect had murdered his father. “The mere sight of her made him think of death,” wrote biographer Henri Troyat; “the breath of the tomb hung about her.” Once, after finding a few tiny shards of glass in his food, Paul, wild with fury, ran screaming through the palace and accused his mother to her face of trying to kill him. Even his appearance started to reflect his temperament. The features of the once-charming, fair-haired boy with his pert turned-up nose became grossly distorted as he grew—with thickened lips, facial tics, and flattened nostrils resembling those of a bulldog. Worst of all, Paul was beginning to pose a threat to his mother’s throne.
“This young Prince gives evidence of sinister and dangerous inclinations,” reported the French diplomat Bérenger. “A few days ago, he was asking why they had killed his father and why they had given his mother the throne that rightfully belonged to him. He added that when he grew up, he would get to the bottom of all that. People are saying … that the child allows himself too many remarks of that sort for them not to reach the ears of the Empress. Now, no one doubts that that Princess will take all possible precautions to prevent him from putting words into action.”
Catherine hoped that marriage might divert Paul from some of his more malignant passions, and, even better, produce an heir she could mold in her own image to carry on the policies her own son seemed to despise. Accordingly, she turned to Frederick the Great (the Prussian monarch who had helped arrange her own marriage to the future Peter III) to find Paul an eligible German bride—hopefully one possessing the same qualities the empress admired so much in herself.
Frederick immediately thought of the three youngest daughters of the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. But, unable to choose which one, he decided to send all three princesses to Russia
for Catherine’s inspection and Paul’s approval. The grand duke was immediately taken by the eldest, Wilhelmina, who also captured the fancy of his best friend Andrei Razumovsky as he accompanied her by ship from Germany. For Wilhelmina, Paul represented the prize—future sovereignty over Russia—but his person left much lacking. “The distinction of which the heir to the throne has made her the object does not seem to be disagreeable to her,” Wilhelmina’s mother wrote to the empress, with a notable lack of enthusiasm.
Like young Princess Sophia had all those years ago, Wilhelmina was to be thoroughly Russianized, converted to Orthodoxy, and rechristened Natalia. She would also cheat on her husband with his best friend Razumovsky, although, unlike her mother-in-law, she wouldn’t wait nearly a decade to stray. And it wouldn’t be from a spouse who despised her.
Paul was in fact smitten with his bride; Catherine not so much. “The Grand Duchess loves extreme in all things,” the empress wrote to her friend Friedrich Melchoir Grimm. “She will listen to no advice, and I see in her neither charm, nor wit, nor reason.” Natalia spent most of her time either conspiring with her husband against his mother, or carrying on with his friend. And to help facilitate those extramarital romps, the two lovers often dosed Paul with a little opium to put him to sleep, and, as the Count d’Allonville put it, “reduce their trio to a single tête-à-tete.”