Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

The reputation the empress had cultivated in western Europe, that of a wise and benevolent ruler, a patron of intellectuals and philosophers, a beacon of humanitarian sentiment, was tainted by accusations of immorality and base excess. The more straitlaced rulers of the Western states were appalled and offended by the stories coming out of Russia. The English King George III, an ultra-respectable married man and father of a huge brood of children, refused to offer Potemkin the Order of the Garter when Catherine requested it—"and was shocked," his ambassador noted. The Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was as bourgeois as King George, and militantly moralistic. She had organized a Chastity Commission in her empire, and attempted to cleanse her court of adultery (a task equivalent to cleansing the Augean stables, an impossibility that only made her look ridiculous; Catherine called her "Saint Theresa"). She could hardly bring herself to utter the name of her vice-ridden counterpart in Russia, and referred to Catherine simply as "that woman." Other sovereigns made appropriately censorious noises, remarking that, at the very least, Catherine was engaging in behavior unbecoming to her high office, and particularly reprehensible in a woman.

  The political climate at the imperial court seethed with intrigue, talebearing, titillating rumormongering. Believing the empress to be in the grip of her insatible passions (and many of those at court, servants and officials alike, remembered well how irrational Empress Elizabeth had been in her last decade, and saw a similar fit of irrationality developing in her successor), they speculated constantly on when the present favorite would fall and who would be chosen next, and spread tales of shadowy figures seen going in and out of the imperial bedchamber. Families with handsome young men tried to thrust them in the empress's path, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly. Gregory Orlov suggested to Princess Dashkov—now a middle-aged widow, recently returned to favor in the circle around the empress—that she ought to prepare her attractive son for a career as imperial favorite. Though the princess did not view the suggestion kindly, many another mother hoped that her son would be the one to turn Catherine's head, if only for a night or two, believing that the reward of such a dalliance would be wealth and influence.

  The whispers and laughter, the deriding of the empress, whose passion for younger men made her an object of ridicule, the scramble for power kept the court in a state of churning immobility. In such a climate, and given the empress's measurable loss of respect, a coup was not impossible. People nervously watched Grand Duke Paul, and even more Potemkin, whose military authority had increased and who by 1780 commanded thousands of soldiers, wondering when either or both might make a bid for power.

  In actuality The Imperturbable was in firm command. Though fully and no doubt unhappily aware of what was being said about her, she continued to live as she chose, taking heart from her happy liaison with Alexander Lanskoy. As she entered her sixth decade, new challenges beckoned. The empress was gathering her forces for the most ambitious undertaking of her astounding career.

  She had decided, as she confided to a visitor to her court, "to chase the Turks out of Europe and to enthrone herself in Byzantium."

  Potemkin went to work with relish carrying out his mistress's grand scheme. With a large army and an abundant store of funds at his disposal, he extended Russian influence to the south, bringing in colonists and building new towns to serve as administrative centers and garrisons, spearheads of a future Russian takeover. In the Crimea, nominally independent of both Russia and the Ottoman Empire but in actuality ruled by a puppet khan whose tenure in power was dependent on Russian support, Potemkin was poised to invade the peninsula himself as soon as the empress ordered him to.

  But first Catherine had to come to terms with the other power in the region: Austria. She approached Empress Maria Theresa's son and co-ruler Joseph and proposed that they meet in person to discuss issues of common concern. It was a bold suggestion, and one that revealed the extent to which the empress had taken foreign policy matters into her own hands. No longer looking to Panin for advice, she alone determined the nature of Russia's aims and the diplomatic strategies to be used to achieve them. She asked the opinions of Potemkin and her secretary Bezborodko, and weighed their views, but hers remained the primary will and the only authority. She read every ambassadorial dispatch, read and approved all correspondence, presided over every significant council meeting. The future direction of the Russian Empire was in the empress's confident hands.

  Or rather, her right hand; her left one was becoming weakened and tender from repeated attacks of rheumatism. She wrapped it warmly against the late spring chill when she set off in May of 1780 on a month-long journey through the newly reformed western provinces of her empire. She was eager to discover at close range how the new regulations she had put in place were working, and to this end she sent investigators on ahead to each of the towns she intended to visit, ordering them to inquire about the functioning of the schools and hospitals, the courts and tax offices so that when she arrived she would know what to expect.

  Rain spoiled the elaborate ceremonies prepared for the empress's arrival in the provincial towns. The roads were knee-deep in mud, and muddy streams ran along the cobbled streets and through the gaily decorated squares. Forlorn bands played on, dripping and sloshing water with each step; damp dignitaries stood under rain-soaked canopies to deliver speeches of welcome, while hundreds of people congregated wherever the empress went, following her coach, waiting outside banqueting houses or mansions where she went to dine, standing for hours under dark, weeping skies while she attended parties and balls.

  Ignoring the rain and the flooded roads that delayed her progress from town to town, Catherine beamed appreciatively at those who came to gawk at her and received the speeches and rituals of homage with gracious words of thanks. She was gratified at her reception, and even more gratified to hear that great and far-reaching changes had taken place in the towns. Her investigators painted a glowing picture of improved commercial life and greater general prosperity, more efficient administration and a more law-abiding populace. The good news and thronging crowds more than compensated for the rain and chill winds that made the empress's swollen hand hurt; she looked forward to the climax of her tour, her meeting with the Austrian Archduke Joseph at the town of Mogilev.

  Afterwards, Catherine recalled the day of her meeting with Archduke Joseph as "the best and most memorable day of my life." They spent the entire day and evening together, and Catherine wrote to Grimm that Joseph "didn't seem to be bored. I found him to be very knowledgeable," she added. "He loves to talk and talks very well." Joseph was in fact a man after Catherine's own heart—well informed, blunt, candid, utterly lacking in pretension and unafraid of facing unpleasant truths.

  Empress and future emperor met as equals, each wielding great power (for Maria Theresa, elderly and ill, had conceded very substantial authority to her son and co-ruler), each able to survey Europe from a lofty eminence and make decisions as to its future. For Catherine this must have been a heady experience, being closeted with her fellow-sovereign, two crowned heads together, communing about the satisfactions and impediments of ruling large and tumultuous empires.

  Catherine and Joseph had much in common: both were simple, even austere in their personal styles (Joseph liked to tour the European capitals incognito, as "Count Falkenstein," accompanied by only a single servant); both were well read, opinionated, and garrulous; both were liberal and inclined to follow the principles of Montesquieu and Voltaire; both were considered eccentric—-Joseph could be sharp, tactless and curmudgeonly on occasion, and contemptuous of his high-born peers—and both took pride in their singularity and even, one suspects, in the gossip their eccentricity gave rise to.

  They attended a comic opera together, and talked throughout the performance, Joseph making observations that Catherine thought "worthy of being printed." They went together to a Catholic mass sung by the bishop of Mogilev, and laughed and joked throughout the ceremony in the most irreligious way. "We talked about everything in the worl
d," Catherine told Grimm with evident delight. "He knows everything." She preferred to let the man take the lead, and Joseph led easily, though he was eleven years her junior; with pleasure she listened, fascinated, as he trotted out his views and aired his prejudices—many of which she shared.

  "If I tried to summarize his virtues I would never come to the end," she told Grimm. "He is the most solidly intelligent, profound, and learned man I know."

  Joseph, for his part, was favorably impressed by the witty, commonsensical empress about whom he had heard so much. "Her spirit, her high-mindedness, her bravery, her pleasing conversation have to be experienced to be appreciated," he wrote in a letter to his mother. He approved of her, and his approval was not lightly given. Yet he saw through her. She was self-centered, and vain of her looks and feminine appeal. She had not the knack of diplomacy, she could not disguise her obsession with conquering the Ottomans. She brought up her "Greek Project" again and again, always, tacitly or overtly, soliciting Austrian participation. Even when she showed Joseph portraits of her small grandsons, two-and-a-half-year-old Alexander and year-old Constantine, products of Paul's second marriage, the Greek theme was brought forward. Constantine was named for Constantinople, the city she meant to conquer; she had had the infant's portrait painted against a classical Greek backdrop. Someday, she said, the tiny Constantine would rule over a revitalized Greece, liberated by Russia from centuries of Turkish oppression.

  The meeting between the two sovereigns accomplished Catherine's goal. In 1781 Russia and Austria signed a secret alliance; henceforth they would stand together against the Turk. Now Catherine had the might of the Austrian Empire behind her in her grand endeavor. And now Joseph was no longer archduke, but emperor, his mother Maria Theresa having recently died.

  Catherine's Austrian initiative led to changes at her court. Pan-in, who had always favored a northern orientation in Russian foreign policy and who advocated a close alliance with Prussia, not Austria, left for his estates in the spring of 1781 and did not return. Paul too was gone for a time, sent away to travel in Europe with his wife.

  Paul was becoming more and more of a liability, and the hardheaded Catherine, who did not allow herself illusions where the security of her rule was at stake, recognized that she had to protect herself against him. He and his new wife, Maria, had done what she needed them to do: they had produced two healthy heirs to the throne. But Paul, described by King Frederick after the two men met in 1776 as "haughty, arrogant and violent," was acting at cross purposes to Catherine's political aims. Partly from angry frustration, partly because he had well-formed (if undistinguished) views of his own on what the aims of the Russian Empire should be abroad, partly because he was Panin's student, and shared many of the former chancellor's prejudices, Paul did not agree with his mother. He was critical of the increasing rapprochement with Austria. Frederick II had become Paul's hero, as he had once been Peter Ill's, and Paul's secret correspondence with King Frederick—a secret he could not manage to keep from the all-knowing Catherine—aroused the empress's suspicions. She decided it was best that her son leave Petersburg for a time.

  The first stages in the accomplishment of Catherine's sweeping Greek Project took quite a different turn from what the empress expected. Though she authorized Potemkin to launch what amounted to a full-scale invasion of the Crimea, he hesitated for many months, suffering from one of his periods of lassitude and inertia. Joseph too dragged his heels, despite Catherine's ex-, hortations ("I think that there is little our two strong states could not do, given our united efforts," she wrote to him). In the end the Crimea fell into Russian hands. In 1784 the puppet khan gave his territory to the Russian empress in return for an annual pension of a hundred thousand rubles, and Potemkin belatedly marched his troops in and took possession of the newly christened "Tauride Region." Potemkin himself, named governor-general, took the title Prince of Tauris.

  Catherine had made a start on gaining her vast objective. But she had had to do it alone. Potemkin had let her down, losing his courage just at the time she needed him most, while Emperor Joseph was proving to be a fair-weather ally. In international affairs, as in the more treacherous, more delicate matters of the heart, Catherine was discovering that, in the end, she had no one to rely on but herself.

  That sobering truth announced itself cruelly in June of 1784. One afternoon while the court was in residence at the summer palace of Tsarskoe Selo Alexander Lanskoy began to complain of a sore throat, and went to his quarters to lie down. By six o'clock he was well enough to accompany Catherine on a walk around the garden pond, and suffered through a social evening that had been planned in advance, not wanting Catherine to cancel it on his account. Such an accommodating attitude was like him; it was among the things the empress valued most in him—his mild and sweetly self-effacing nature. Lanskoy took himself off and went to lie down again, sending a messenger to fetch a surgeon who lived in the neighborhood of the palace.

  The following day the surgeon informed Catherine that Lan-skoy's pulse was intermittent and that he and a colleague he had consulted both thought that the young man had much more wrong with him than just a sore throat. Catherine summoned a German specialist from Petersburg, who told her, in blunt German, that Lanskoy had a virulent fever and would die of it.

  Full of dread, yet continuing to get what medical advice she could and taking note of Lanskoy's worsening symptoms—severe fever, swelling, and changes in skin color—Catherine kept vigil by the bedside of her Sashinka. Since Natalia's death she had been having to come to terms with mortality all too often: her mentor Voltaire had succumbed, and a number of her courtiers; only months earlier Diderot had died, and the previous winter she had buried her beloved greyhound, Tom Anderson, after sixteen years of close companionship.

  Lanskoy was a robust man with a strong constitution, but he could not seem to shake off the affliction that was weakening his heart. He refused to eat or drink and would not take any medicine until a friend of his, a Polish doctor, persuaded him to drink a little cold water and eat some ripe figs. After three days he was terribly pale and burning with fever, but the Petersburg specialist gave Catherine some hope. Taking her aside he said that if Lanskoy did not become delirious, he might recover.

  By this time Catherine had a sore throat of her own, though she told no one, unwilling to let her advisers force her away from her beloved Sashinka's bedside in order to nurse her own illness. Another day passed, and Lanskoy was able, making a supreme effort, to get up and walk under his own power into a different bedroom. He confided to Catherine that the previous night, feeling terribly ill, he had made his will.

  An hour later he began raving, and Catherine knew that the hope the specialist had held out was gone. Lanskoy still recognized her, and knew her name, but he no longer knew where he was. He kept on calling for his carriage and grew angry when the servants would not hitch his horses to the bed. In a final effort to stave off death Catherine ordered her physician Dr. Rogerson to administer to Lanskoy a cure she had heard of called "James's powders," but the medicine had no appreciable effect.

  "I left his room at eleven at night," Catherine wrote later to Grimm. "I could do no more and I concealed my own illness." That night, or early the following morning, Lanskoy died.

  "I am plunged into the most lively sorrow," she told her correspondent, "and my happiness is no more. I thought I would die myself from the loss of my best friend." Lanskoy had been the hope of her future, she told Grimm, referring to him as "the young man whom I was raising." He had sorrowed with her over her difficulties and rejoiced with her when things went well. He had been gentle and decent, and very grateful to her for her patronage. He had responded quickly and well to her training. Now she had lost him, and she felt as if she had lost everything. "My room, once so pleasant, has become an empty cave; I drag myself around in it like a shadow." She could not bring herself to face anyone, and though she did what work had to be done ("with order and intelligence," she assured Grimm), life
had lost all its color and savor.

  "I can't eat, I can't sleep," she told the Swiss. "Reading bores me, and I can't muster the strength to write. I don't know what will become of me, but I do know that I have never before in my life been so unhappy as I have since my best and most lovable friend abandoned me."

  For nearly a year Catherine mourned Lanskoy. She shut herself in a tiny room and read ancient Russian chronicles and began work on a comparative study of words in two hundred languages. Servants brought her books—a Finnish dictionary, a multivolume study of early Slavonic peoples, atlases and grammars—but for months she felt too crushed by grief to face her court, and there were rumors that she had died. Her four grandchildren were a slight consolation, especially the youngest, a pretty infant girl who people said resembled her grandmother. ("I have a weakness for her," Catherine admitted.) Yet she continued to "suffer like one of the damned," inconsolable over her great loss. After six months Potemkin, who had arrived from his new kingdom of Tauris soon after Lanskoy's death to console her, forced Catherine to leave her cramped study and learn to live and breathe again. She rebeled, she fought him with every step, but in the end she was grateful to him. Finally she was able to put on court dress and appear in public. In private, however, she remained "a very sad being," she told Grimm, "who speaks only in monosyllables . . . Everything afflicts me."

  The depth of the empress's mourning, and her unprecedented personal sorrow over the loss of Lanskoy did nothing to stop the tide of scurrilous tales about her. Atrocious stories circulated about the death of the gentle and poetic young man. Catherine had exhausted him with her sexual demands, it was said. He had died in her bed, while trying in vain to satiate her insatiable passion. She had forced him to swallow poisonous aphrodisiacs, potions so strong they had made his body swell up and burst. She had poisoned him, as surely as she poisoned her husband Peter, and the proof was that his corpse gave off an unbearably foul odor and his limbs separated from his torso.