Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  Yet she knew the risk she was taking. Incipient conspiracies were uncovered at least once a month, sometimes every week. Agents of the reinstated Secret Branch brought the empress word of treasonous utterances, secret plotting, small but significant betrayals that undermined Catherine's authority. Two of the maids of Catherine's bedchamber were arrested for gossiping about her, sneering that she was more man than woman. They were sent away from court. Guards officers threatened to raise another rebellion, or boasted of their ability to do so. They were banished to Siberia. Nobles and others, chagrined at the favoritism Catherine showed toward Gregory Orlov—having granted him the title of count, she made him chamberlain, gentleman of the bedchamber, and general adjutant, adding other lucrative positions and giving him generous gifts of money and jewelry— plotted to remove him or even kill him. They were ferreted out, interrogated, and sent away.

  Still, no matter how active the Secret Branch was, the climate of insecurity could not be dispelled. The British ambassador Lord Buckingham wrote to his superiors in London in February of 1763 that "great confusion" reigned within Catherine's government. "One does not see the same air of general satisfaction and contentment which appeared two months ago," he added, "and many people dare to let show their disapprobation with the measures taken by the court." Muscovites paused in their winter amusements to grumble about the empress and her paramour Orlov. Peasants bringing goods into the city to sell complained that ever since Catherine became empress the weather had been poor; her accession had brought bad luck, they said, crossing themselves and redoubling their prayers.

  Catherine did her best to keep her balance amid the unsettled atmosphere, dividing her time between work and pleasure. 'The life of the empress," Lord Buckingham reported, "is a melange of frivolous amusements and an intense application to business— which application has not produced anything yet, due to the obstacles which people throw deliberately in Catherine's path, and also due to the diversity of her projects." "Her plans are numerous and vast," he noted, "but very disproportionate to the means at her disposal."

  Day after day she took council with her six secretaries, the men who brought her official documents and with whom she consulted on decisions to be made, edicts and other pronouncements to be issued. She talked with Panin and the elderly Bestuzhev— she had recalled the latter from his exile, and listened to his advice with the greatest interest—and read, studied, and thought through a wide range of issues. And day after day, having put in hours of effort, she was forced to admit that her efforts were largely wasted. Inertia, hostility, the petty self-interest of those she was forced to rely on to forward her plans thwarted her and drove her projects backward.

  Ruling was not proving to be what she had imagined it would be, and in her inmost heart she was disappointed.

  Catherine opened her heart to the French ambassador Breteuil early in 1763. She admitted to him that "she was not at all happy, and that she had to govern people who were impossible to please." She expected that it would take her subjects several years to become accustomed to her, and this left her ill at ease, she told Breteuil.

  The ambassador was struck not only by the empress's candor, but by her vanity. "She has a high opinion of her grandeur and her power," he wrote. In talking to him she referred again and again to her "great and powerful empire," using the phrase almost as a talisman. She alluded more than once to her sustaining ambition, which had propelled her toward power from the day she first set foot in Russia.

  Clearly her exalted position had turned her head—yet it was as clearly causing her anxiety, and no wonder, Breteuil noted, given all the chicanery surrounding her. Everyone at her court, even those she trusted most, was maneuvering for influence, wealth and high status, the Frenchman thought. "The intrigues, the manipulations, could not help but make her uneasy." Factionalism was growing, and in the midst of all the countercurrents, it seemed to the ambassador that the formerly rock-steady Catherine was wavering and at times losing her sense of command.

  "The empress," he wrote, "is feeble and indecisive, defects which never before appeared in her character. . . . The fear of losing what she had the audacity to seize is easily read in her conduct. Everyone takes advantage of her, sensing this."

  If Catherine was indecisive, many people said, it was because she needed a husband. Bestuzhev in particular urged her to marry, and, with her knowledge and agreement, began sounding out opinion on the subject.

  He soon discovered that, not surprisingly, the question of whether or not the empress ought to marry, and whom she ought to marry, was embroiled in politics. Two factions had emerged among the royal advisers, one coalescing around Panin, the other around Gregory Orlov and his brothers and Bestuzhev himself. As the senior statesman well knew, the Orlovs and their allies wanted Catherine to do the logical, natural thing and marry the man she loved, the man whose personal magnetism, vigor, and influence had been the driving force behind her coup. With Gregory Orlov as her husband Catherine could strengthen the dynasty by having more children. After all, Orlov had already given her one son, and she would have had a second child by him had her recent pregnancy not ended in a miscarriage. Should the weak Paul die, there would be no succession crisis. The empress and her virile, attentive husband would be certain to provide another heir to the throne.

  Gregory Orlov himself had been urging Catherine to marry him every since the conspiracy among the guardsmen was brought to light in October of 1762. What form his inducements took can only be imagined, but in addition to his emotional and no doubt sexual hold on the empress he had precedent on his side: Empress Elizabeth had married a man who was a commoner by birth, Alexei Razumovsky. Catherine could do the same.

  Panin and those who supported him took an opposing view, contending that if Catherine married at all, it should be a prince of royal blood, perhaps a brother of the deposed Emperor Ivan VI, or another, more distant Romanov relation. If she married a commoner such as Orlov she would inevitably weaken her own position, while she ought to be strengthening it. Then there was the scandal of Peter's death, in which the Orlov brothers had been instrumental. How would it look, Panin argued, if the empress married a man who was generally believed to have been her accomplice in killing her husband?

  Catherine's own musings in the winter and spring of 1763 on the question whether or not she should marry are difficult to surmise. She admired women who had ruled unmarried, such as Elizabeth I of England, yet she saw the political advantages to be derived from taking the right husband. Her own experience of marriage had been as bad as possible, a nightmarish ordeal of suffering, cruelty and neglect. Yet for that very reason she may have dreamed of healing her wounds and finding redemption in a happier union with a benign and pleasing husband of her own choosing.

  Clearly Orlov pleased her, though she was neither blind to his flaws nor overly impressed with his talents. She knew that he was, in her phrase, "nature's spoiled child," and that he relied on his handsome face and brawny body, his courage and charisma to carry him through life without his having to put forth much effort. He was intelligent, but indolent and self-indulgent. He was excessive in his appetites and extravagant with the money she lavished on him. He gambled, he put pleasure before business, he did as little business as possible.

  Yet Orlov pleased Catherine because, as she confided some years later to her friend Melchior Grimm, she always liked to be propelled forward by men more purposeful and active than she was. She had never known a man who suited her better in this way; Orlov, she told Grimm, "instinctively leads, and I follow him." He had lead her to the throne, she could trust him to lead her on through life, as her husband.

  But Catherine was cautious, and took her time making up her mind. In May she made a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Resurrection in Rostov. Muscovites, critical of Orlov and convinced that the empress meant to marry him before long, assumed that while at the monastery, and temporarily free of the influence of Panin, she would secretly be wedded to her favorite.
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br />   The circumstances gave rise to imaginative stories. The stories built on one another, growing more and more threatening with the retelling. Orlov was forcing Catherine to do his will, people said; Catherine had never wanted to be empress, indeed she would have been content to be regent for her son had Orlov not insisted that she take power for herself. Orlov was behind it all, using Catherine to carve out a powerful niche for himself at her side. Now the final part of his devious plan was coming into being.

  Jealousy and suspicion of Orlov fed the gossip, and inevitably, conspiracies blossomed. A group of guards officers were discovered plotting to overthrow Catherine and murder Orlov if a marriage between them were to be made public. The conspirators knew, and the knowledge encouraged them, that Panin was opposed to an Orlov marriage. "Mrs. Orlov," Panin was quoted as saying, "would never be Empress of All the Russias."

  The scathing pronouncement attributed to Panin was repeated throughout the city, and lead to a popular outcry. Unruly Muscovites gave vent to noisy protest, and within days the city seemed to be on the brink of rebellion. Loyal guardsmen took up positions in Red Square, in the suburbs, along every major thoroughfare. Taverns were closed, unruly assemblies dispersed. The Secret Branch moved furtively to detain and interrogate suspicious protesters, while the empress issued a "manifesto of silence" forbidding "improper discussion and gossip on matters concerning the government."

  The brief, hot summer descended. Huge black flies buzzed in the dusty streets, the pounding of carpenters' hammers rang through the suburbs damaged by fires during the cold months. The Moscow nobles left for their country estates, having had their fill of the empress and the servile creatures who surrounded her. The nobility of Moscow prided itself on its antiquity and independence; many families had held their titles for a dozen generations, some even longer, while Catherine's pet noblemen were of very recent creation. Some, like the Orlovs, had risen to their high status with dizzying swiftness. That Catherine should consider marrying one of these upstarts only revealed her own inherent vulgarity, the Muscovite nobles told one another. After all, she was only the daughter of a German soldier, even if he had called himself a prince.

  Quite aware of the hauteur of the Moscow nobles, and unnerved by the plots and uprisings that seemed as endemic in the old city as the flies and the stenches, the churches and the echoing bells, Catherine gave up all thought of marrying Orlov and slowly resigned herself to the realization that she might never be free to act as she chose. For as long as she sat on the throne, there would be opposition. She had enemies, she would make more enemies. Ingratitude, not admiration and appreciation, would be her lot; she had to learn to lower her expectations.

  Somehow, she came to terms with Orlov. It may be that he too saw the wisdom in her decision not to marry him, though he cannot have relished the political defeat the decision represented. Henceforth Panin was in the ascendant, and by the fall of 1763, having lost the battle over the marriage, Bestuzhev had left court and gone into involuntary retirement. Catherine had made her choice. Panin, the careful pragmatist, had won.

  Once they returned to Petersburg, both Catherine and Orlov were more at ease. But there was an ugly postscript to their Moscow sojourn. Orlov received a carefully wrapped package from Moscow. No letter accompanied it, there was no way to identify the sender. Inside the package was a large cheese, hollowed out and filled with horse dung. A huge truncheon had been stabbed through the center of the cheese.

  No doubt the dauntless Orlov shrugged off the incident, but it must have worried Catherine. It was not enough that she had given up the idea of marrying him. For as long as he remained at her side, as her lover, there were Muscovites who continued to meditate his death.

  Years were to pass before Catherine returned to Moscow for an extended stay. She settled into her Petersburg routine, devoting her working days to practical matters which concerned the entire empire.

  One thing that absorbed her attention was that Russia, though enormous in land area, was thinly populated. Montesquieu and other writers associated the relative strength of a realm with the size of its population. "We need people," the young Catherine had once written, long before she became empress. "If possible, make the wilderness swarm like a bee hive." She brought foreign settlers into Russia by the thousands and set up a government agency, the Chancellery for the Guardianship of Foreigners, to recruit colonists and establish new settlements for them. Gregory Orlov was nominally in charge of the chancellery. Under his increasingly fitful leadership colonies were set up on the lower Volga, on fertile steppe lands. In addition, the area around Petersburg, a barren landscape of deep swamps and groves of pine trees, was tamed and made habitable. Catherine ordered the swamps drained and the forests removed; by the fall of 1766 there were three prospering villages where only a few years before there had been nothing but reeds and sedge and stagnant water.

  A more delicate and controversial area of the empress's concern was the church—not as a religious but as an economic institution. The Russian church owned very extensive lands worked by over a million serfs. The government was desperately in need of money and resources. Why should the church be so rich when the imperial treasury was insolvent?

  Both Empress Elizabeth and her successor had eyed the lands of the church with envy. Both had been on the brink of secularizing the lands, yet had held back from actually doing so. Catherine did not hesitate. In February of 1764 she ordered that the ecclesiastical estates, which in the words of her decree had been acquired illegally, be turned over to an agency of the crown, the College of Economy. At one stroke the imperial government became, for the time being, solvent once again—though what it gained in solvency it lost in popularity.

  Once again a spate of disturbing reports crossed Catherine's desk, reports of seditious talk, subterranean plots, pockets of dissatisfied guardsmen seething with discontent and on the verge of taking overt action against the government. Riots broke out in Pskov, Orel, Voronezh—areas distant from the principal seats of bureaucratic control. Bandits terrorized villages and laid siege to noble estates. To put an end to the chaos, Catherine gave added authority to the nobles. Yet she soon found that they often abused their power, extorting more in taxes from the peasants than the legal amount, taking bribes, stealing the government's money. Not infrequently the enraged peasants rose up en masse and murdered their landlords. The dilemma weighed on the empress; how could she create peace and order without advancing tyranny?

  And something even more distressing was happening. Here and there, always in areas remote from Moscow and Petersburg, strange men were emerging in peasant communities, claiming to be the lost Emperor Peter III.

  It happened every few months, this spectral resurrection of the dead emperor, a phenomenon as threatening to Catherine as it was unnerving. The impostors were welcomed eagerly by the rural populace. They received gifts, honors, pledges of support. They began to gather bands of followers, partisans eager to fight on their behalf to reclaim the throne. One by one, the false Peters were hunted down by soldiers and captured. But as soon as one was removed, another came forward to take his place. And as the months passed, the idea took deep root among the peasants that the true emperor was alive and well. Now it was said that he was away in the Crimea, raising an army; at another time he was said to be in the east, resting, awaiting the advent of good weather before he began his grand campaign to regain his rights.

  Impostors could be captured, punished and shut away, but, as Catherine knew very well, ideas were too powerful to be eradicated by force or threats. It was as if the idea of Peter III had declared war on her. For nearly twenty years her husband had tormented her in life. Now he continued to torment her from the grave.

  When Catherine had been empress for two years, a grand masked ball was held in Petersburg. The entertainment went on for two days and three nights, with the guests, disguised in expensive costumes, dancing, eating and drinking themselves into near exhaustion. A visitor from Venice, the celebrated Giovan
ni Casanova, was present and described the exuberant scene.

  While the revelry advanced, a modestly dressed guest slipped in, her short figure entirely encased in black. Fully masked, she mingled with the laughing, animated crowd, sometimes losing her balance when someone jostled her unintentionally. Casanova's acquaintances told him, in whispers, that the mysterious black-clad guest was the empress. However, most of the guests did not know who she was, and she preferred it that way.

  Now and then she joined a group of diners and listened unobtrusively to their conversation. Very likely, Casanova thought, she overheard opinions about herself, some of which no doubt were wounding to her. But she did not let on. Not once, throughout her stay at the ball, did she reveal her true identity. Casanova was impressed, not only by her self-possession but by her astuteness in acting as a spy at her own court.

  Now that she had ruled for several years Catherine had learned a great deal about power, its sources and satisfactions—and its limitations.

  She was in charge; no one had managed to wrest authority from her hands. She made the important decisions, and scrutinized the work she delegated to others. She dominated. Her "majestic air," Buckingham thought, and her "happy mixture of dignity and ease" won her respect, while her devotion to the improvement of Russia and her hard-working efforts to achieve it impressed all observers.

  Catherine was the glittering center of a dazzling court. She liked to shower herself with diamonds, they were a symbol of her wealth—or rather her appearance of wealth, for despite the seizure of the church lands, the treasury was not solvent for long. Gleaming from head to hem, richly gowned, carefully coiffed and heavily rouged—visitors to the Russian court remarked on the brightly rouged cheeks of the women, including the empress— she made the rounds of her guests at the Sunday court concerts. She appeared to be imperturbable, and was invariably in a good humor, or so the ambassadors thought; though her glance was always shrewd (one visitor to court called her expression "fierce and tyrannical") there was an evident gentleness and softness in her features, and she treated people with exceptional kindness. She seemed to know everyone, even the lowest ranking servants, and spoke to each with the same easy familiarity.