Great Catherine

by Erickson, Carolly, 1943-

  During the course of her journey Catherine followed with interest the accounts reaching her of the French Assembly of Notables, called into being to solve the country's mounting financial crisis. She disapproved of the frivolity of Queen Marie Antoinette (Emperor Joseph's youngest and prettiest sister) and of the ineptitude of the stolid Louis XVI. The French government was all but bankrupt, and the country seemed, if not ungovernable, at least intractable. It pleased Catherine to think that the ideas of enlightened rulership born in France had taken root in Russia; she, Catherine, and not Louis XVI, was the true heir of Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire.

  Letters reaching Catherine aboard her galley brought news of personal matters. Her grandson Alexander and his sister Helen had measles. Constantine had come out in a rash. Her son by Orlov, Alexei Bobrinsky, living in high style in Paris, had run through his generous allowance and needed more money to pay his creditors. (Catherine asked Grimm to take the young man in hand, to coerce him into vowing solemnly not to go further into debt. On receipt of this vow she authorized Grimm to give Bobrinsky more money.) Grand Duchess Maria's sister-in-law Zelmira, married to Maria's violent and dangerous brother, had come to Catherine for asylum with her three small children; knowing at first hand the agonies of an abusive marriage, Catherine gave Zelmira the peace she sought and, throughout her journey, wrote letters to Zelmira's in-laws in an effort to secure a safe future for her.

  An amusing letter came informing Catherine that Lavater, father of the fashionable science of phrenology, had studied Catherine's features in order to read her character. Her face showed recklessness, Lavater said, not greatness or distinction. She was not to be compared with the late Queen Christina of Sweden, a truly sage monarch. No doubt Catherine dismissed Lavater's judgment and thought no more about it. Queen Christina, after all, had abdicated her throne and gone to live in Rome in the shadow of the Vatican. She had not succeeded, as Catherine had, in the work of government. Judged against Catherine's measure of a worthwhile life—usefulness—Queen Christina had failed. While she herself was succeeding, so far.

  Emperor Joseph's illness passed quickly enough for him to join the Russian traveling party and together he and Catherine visited the Crimea. For five days they stayed in the former khan's palace at Baktshi-Serai, a fairyland of Turkish, Moorish and Chinese architecture where sparkling fountains played in lush courtyards and elaborate mosaics decorated every inch of the walls, ceilings and graceful pillared colonnades. In the grand audience hall, resplendent with gilding and tilework, colored marble and intricate stone traceries, Catherine took her place where once the khans had presided. A golden inscription on one wall informed "the whole world" that "there is nothing as rich as this in Ispahan, Damascus, or Istanbul."

  Leaving the site of the khans' former glory, empress and emperor traveled across wide stretches of waste, once occupied by Tatar tribes but now, scoured of their inhabitants by Potemkin's pitiless troops, returned to their natural state. Sleeping in huge tents erected by servants of the Prince of Tauris, the imperial pair marveled at the extent of Russia's newly conquered lands, and were taken to see the results of Potemkin's efforts to transform the wastes into fertile ground. New villages had been built, new groves of trees planted, new crops introduced. A few foreign immigrants had been established, many more, Potemkin said, were on their way.

  Catherine was astounded by Potemkin's ingenuity in planning spectacles to gladden her journey—and to show off Russian might to the Turks. Military reviews featured thousands of smartly dressed, smartly marching soldiers. Troops of Tatars on swift horses maneuvered their mounts in a dazzling display. One evening just at sunset the hills surrounding a town where Catherine was staying lit up with fireworks. The ring of fire covered several miles, and at its center, high on one hill, was her imperial monogram set off by an explosion of tens of thousands of rockets. The very ground shook. Never had so much might been concentrated in one place. The Russians appeared to be formidable, if not invincible.

  Catherine and Joseph were now on the best of terms. They shared confidences about the burdens of power. They talked of the other European states, and their interests, and of the prospects for France, which Joseph had visited. Observers thought there was "no reserve" between the two sovereigns.

  "Has anyone ever tried to kill you?" one asked. "As for me, I've been threatened."

  "I've received anonymous letters," the other replied.

  Yet despite their harmonious rapport, Catherine and Joseph were not able to reach a detailed agreement about the coming war. According to Segur, who talked privately with Joseph on many occasions, the emperor had no plans to actively support Catherine in her grand schemes of conquest. He had learned of a revolt against Austria in the Netherlands, and knew that restoring order there would have to be his first priority. (Catherine too knew of the Netherlands uprising, and feared that it might dissuade the Austrians from sending troops to engage the Turks, though she did not say this to Joseph.)

  The climax of the empress's tour was her visit to the Black Sea ports. Here Potemkin outdid himself. When the empress's party arrived at Sebastopol, and sat down to a sumptuous banquet, the Prince of Tauris presided. He spoke expansively of the might of Russian arms.

  "A hundred thousand men await my signal," he announced, and no sooner had the words left his mouth than the closed shutters of the room opened to reveal a panorama of military splendor. Outside the windows, stretching toward the vast bay, rank on rank of soldiers stood at attention. Entire regiments, some outfitted in the traditional costumes of their regions, waited alertly for Potemkin's signal. One Greek battalion was made up of warrior women, powder horns and pouches slung over their skirts, glittering feather-trimmed turbans wrapped around their heads.

  Beyond the massed soldiery, out in the tranquil bay, the stillness was shattered by an ear-splitting burst of cannonfire from the decks of several dozen ships. From ten thousand throats roared forth a shouted pledge, repeated again and again: "Long live the Empress of Pontus Euxinus! Long live the Empress of Pontus Euxinus!"

  It must have been an overwhelming moment. Warmed by the excellent local wine, heartened by all that she had seen and heard

  over five months of travel, gratified by the applause of her guests and the thunderous approbation rising from her loyal fighting forces, Catherine must have been profoundly moved. The new Russian fleet, which Potemkin had built, stood ready to attack Constantinople, which was scarcely a two days' sail distant. The portals of Byzantium stood open. She had only to gird up her loins, give the signal to her army and navy, and make her determined way through them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  AS IT TURNED OUT, EVENTS MOVED MORE SWIFTLY THAN Catherine expected. Her Tauride tour and display of military might led the Ottoman officials immediately to arrest the Russian minister in Constantinople, effectively precipitating war.

  Hardly had Catherine returned from her prolonged journey than she was faced with crisis. At the end of August 1787, she met with her council and ordered Potemkin to move rapidly against the Turkish foe, believing that no more than a few weeks were needed to launch a full-scale offensive. She asked Alexis Orlov, hero of the great battle of Chesme, to take over command of the Black Sea fleet, to be enlarged by the addition of ships from the Baltic fleet. To her annoyance, Orlov declined. He was jealous of Potemkin, and coveted supreme command of the army, which would make him Potemkin's superior. Unless he received higher rank than his rival, he told the empress, he would not serve.

  Catherine needed Orlov, yet she could not afford to offend Potemkin. (She feared him, wrote one who observed her closely, "as a wife fears an angry husband.") She relied on Potemkin completely. Without him, as she once told him in a letter, she felt like a person without arms. So Orlov had to be disappointed.

  In the first weeks of the war the Russians seemed to take two steps backward for each advance. General Suvorov defended Russian-held Kinburn successfully against a Turkish assault, but Potemkin's Black Sea flee
t, which was to make Russia invincible at sea, succumbed to a severe storm and was unable to engage the Turks.

  The fleet had been built in great haste. Pressured to have it ready by the time the empress reached the Crimea, Potemkin had ordered the shipwrights to use available timber of inferior quality rather than waiting for sound materials to be sent from the northern forests. The vessels were weak and fragile, unable to stand up to harsh weather and untrustworthy in battle. In addition, there were shortages of powder and shot, crews were not at their full complement, and provisions were running short.

  Worst of all, Potemkin himself, Catherine's "arms," had given in to depression. He delayed sending couriers to Petersburg with the bad news about the fleet, and when at last he did write to Catherine he asked her to allow him to give up his command. Tauris, he feared, was indefensible after all. Catherine should retreat from the peninsula and let the Turks reclaim it.

  This was the last thing the indomitable Catherine wanted to hear. Her response to Potemkin was gentle, even motherly, in tone—she knew that a firm rejoinder would only deepen his depression—but encouraging in content. She urged him not to give in to despair but to launch an attack by land, meanwhile waiting for ships from the Baltic fleet to arrive to replace those that had been damaged or were unreliable. She did not tell him that, according to reports she was receiving from the Western capitals, the outbreak of war with Turkey might well be only one dimension of a larger, Europe-wide war.

  The winter of 1787-1788 took a harsh toll on Catherine's nerves. Potemkin continued to be intractable, and uncommunicative. Poor harvests led to food shortages and high prices in the Russian towns, always a cause for unease, and in addition the empress worried that an outbreak of plague—an everpresent danger along the border with Turkey—might disrupt the war effort and carry off Potemkin. Catherine was besieged by Potemkin's detractors, both at her court and abroad. Alexis Orlov continued his running critique of the Prince of Tauris's inertia and ineptitude. Accounts in the western European press, based on the inaccurate but vivid assertions of the Saxon ambassador, accused Potemkin of deceiving Catherine on a lavish scale, treating the Crimea like a colossal stage set where peasants dragged in from elsewhere paraded through sham villages (so-called Potemkin villages) built of cardboard and paste. Even Catherine's waiting women derided Potemkin, calling down their mistress's violent wrath; she ordered several of the women whipped for their insolence.

  It must have been galling to Catherine to have to defend Potemkin to his critics while feeling such dissatisfaction with him herself. She wrote to him, pleading with him to send her news more frequently than once a month, telling him how much his silence made her suffer agonies of uncertainty and anguish. Her head ached, her stomach rebeled. She was worried about money, and had to borrow heavily as war expenses mounted. She was worried about Emperor Joseph, who was holding back from launching an attack because of Potemkin's inertia. She feared that the British King George III and his ministers, alarmed at Russia's growing might, were giving secret encouragement to the Turks. And she was worried over reports that her cousin, King Gustavus of Sweden, was amassing soldiers and fitting out his fleet. Should the Turkish war go badly, she might face a second enemy on her northern border.

  Grand Duchess Maria was pregnant for the sixth time, and hoped to present her mother-in-law with another grandson. On a frigid afternoon in mid-May Maria went into labor, and Catherine, preoccupied with stories of a Turkish-Swedish alliance and pressed hard by some in her council to attack the Swedish fleet before the unpredictable King Gustavus unleashed his ships against Russia, interrupted her consultations to visit the birth chamber.

  Maria was struggling bravely, but was losing the battle; she could not expel the child. No doubt recalling the terribly prolonged, ultimately fatal labor of her first daughter-in-law, Natalia, and combating her own dread of illness and incapacity in others, Catherine forced herself to supervise the midwives as they tried in vain to bring Maria's child into the world. Catherine took command, refusing to permit the fatalistic midwives to give up on poor Maria and exhorting her time and again to make a supreme effort.

  For nearly three hours the ordeal continued, with Maria shrieking and screaming, Catherine shouting impatient orders, the mid-wives pummeling and tugging at the young mother's swollen belly and frightened servants scrambling to fetch cloths and coals, burn herbs and prepare the swaddling blankets. A fire blazed in the small room but the cold was so deep that everyone, even the sweat-bathed Maria, shivered and could not get warm.

  Convinced that Maria was dying, Catherine made a last effort to save her, and she believed that her intervention prevented tragedy. Against the odds, a tiny girl was born, and quickly wrapped up warmly against the deepending cold. She was apparently healthy and gave a lusty cry. Weakly, Maria cried too—because the baby was not a boy. To reassure the mother, as well as from vanity, Catherine gave the baby her own name before seeking the warmth of her own apartments, chilled to the bone.

  By June it was evident that King Gustavus was indeed intent on war. Encouraged by promises of clandestine British assistance he attacked a border fortress and soon afterward sent the empress an ultimatum.

  Catherine laughed at her cousin's extravagant demands for territory in Russian Finland and his rumored boast that he would soon be in Petersburg with his army, calling him "Don Quixote the Knight Errant." All the same she met personally with her entire council and pressed Bezborodko and the others hard to arrange in haste for the defense of the capital and the port of Kronstadt.

  Orders went out for garrison troops to come to Petersburg posthaste. Arms and artillery were brought in from neighboring towns and peasants were commanded to relinquish their horses to the army. Horses from the imperial stables were hitched to carts and cannon and palace servants put aside their regular duties to form militias and go on watch. In addition to the elite regiments, citizen bands were organized to help defend the city. Merchants from the bazaars, street sweepers, police and even clergy prepared to fight the terrible Swedes under their bellicose king, who was rumored to be mad. Within days, all Petersburg was in a frenzy.

  Catherine's declaration of war against Sweden was officially announced on July 2. Buoyed by recent minor naval victories against the Turks, the empress was ebullient and resolute. She put on a naval uniform and celebrated the triumphs, announcing that she intended to stay in Petersburg and face King Gustavus.

  "God is with us!" Catherine told her councillors, and Zava-dovsky, her former favorite and currently a high court official, was struck—not for the first time—by her courage. "The spirit of bravery never leaves Her Imperial Highness," Zavadovsky commented after one meeting. "She is our inspiration."

  The Swedes were in Finland, on Russian soil. Grand Duke Paul took his regiment and marched to intercept them, while ships of the Russian Baltic fleet, delaying their scheduled departure for the Black Sea, patroled the coast. The scent of gunpowder filled the streets of Petersburg, men drilled and marched every hour of the day and much of the night. Catherine supervised all, assured her officials frequently of divine support for Russian arms, and, in the privacy of her rooms, suffered colic and insomnia.

  August came and still the Knight Errant had not managed to enter the Russian capital. Catherine wrote to Potemkin, telling him about the "foolish Swedish war"—in reality a very dangerous situation—and urging him to send her more frequent bulletins from the south. King Gustavus had meanwhile discovered a mutiny among his Finnish troops. He pulled back, and did not muster the daring to attack a second time before the onset of winter weather.

  Over the next few months Catherine found time, despite recurrent illness and endless hours of meetings and paperwork, to write a comic play about her enemy cousin. The Knight Errant was performed at the palace in January 1789, and the laughter of the courtiers temporarily broke the tension that had prevailed for so long.

  On Catherine's sixtieth birthday, April 21, there was no public celebration. The empress spent
the day alone, except for her servants. Her advancing age weighed heavily on her, all the more so as many of those she had known and worked with closely over the years were dying off. Her ally Emperor Joseph was fatally ill, she learned (though in fact he lingered on until the following winter). The spring thaw and warm, mild air could not lift Catherine's spirits. She was often in tears, her servant Khrapo-vitsky wrote in his diary. Her many cares absorbed her and made her despondent. A host of chronic complaints, from dizziness to nervous attacks to excruciating back pains, assailed her with more and more frequency. And her favorite, Mamonov, was rarely with her anymore. Their estrangement had been going on for months, and Catherine had fallen into the habit of keeping her own melancholy company. It may be that, at sixty, she was learning a new lesson: that despite what she had always believed, she could, in fact, live for long periods of time without love.

  The ultimate break with Mamonov came in late spring, and when it came, it was deeply painful and humiliating for the failing, white-haired Empress.

  Many contemporaries noted how the morals of Catherine's courtiers, always casual, had become much more lax in recent years. Illicit liaisons, sexual flirtations, betrayals of spouses and lovers were becoming commonplace. Mamonov succumbed to the epidemic of sexual intrigue and began a passionate affair with Daria Scherbatov, a rather plain, lumpish young woman with a disagreeable disposition who was one of the empress's maids of honor.

  For several years Mamonov had complained petulantly to his friends of his "imprisonment" by the empress, and his complaints had led to bruising scenes with tears, quarrels, and, for Catherine, great nervous strain. She had confessed her anxieties and upsets to Potemkin, who on occasion had tried to mediate between the lovers during his visits to court. More often, however, Potemkin had told Catherine privately that Mamonov was not worth all the turmoil and grief he had caused her. ("Eh, Little Mother, spit on him!" was his earthy advice.)