Catherine the Great (36 page)

Catherine was equally determined that the works should not damage the three great Muscovite cathedrals, monuments of the national heritage that she was proud to show off to Prince Henry along with the university and the foundling home in December 1770.
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Not satisfied with mere preservation, the empress wanted their priceless frescoes to be restored to their former glory by appropriately qualified ‘religious people’. There was no shortage of such experts in the old capital and its monasteries, she reminded Archbishop Amvrosy, instructing him to ‘make sure that they carry out their work with the decorum appropriate to God’s holy churches’.
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This was no mere whim. After Amvrosy’s assassination,
responsibility for the work was transferred to the disciplinarian Samuil (Mislavsky), a favourite Court preacher whom Catherine had appointed to a suffragan see in the diocese of Moscow. Though modern scholars are aghast at the damage done by eighteenth-century ‘restoration’ methods, she was pleased to learn that the work had been completed over the following two years, first in the Annunciation cathedral and later in the Archangel and Dormition cathedrals.
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She was not present at the foundation ceremony for the Kremlin Palace on 1 June 1773, but Bazhenov’s speech on that occasion left no doubt about the meaning of his plans. If Catherine had yet to conquer Constantinople, Constantinople must come to her in a classic instance of
translatio imperii
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It proved to be a false hope. Before the building could rise from the ground, Bazhenov’s project was cancelled. The empress had a more pressing need for a residence in Moscow, where she planned to celebrate her ultimate victory against the Turks. When Elizabeth’s Golovin Palace finally burned down in December 1771, Catherine expressed surprise ‘only that it had survived for so long, despite my hundredfold prophesies about it’.
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In the search for a replacement the following autumn, her thoughts turned first to the Menshikov Palace at Lefortovo. As usual, she was closely involved in the design. ‘Ask Prince Makulov if he agrees to take on the construction work,’ Catherine instructed Prince Volkonsky, Salytkov’s successor as Moscow’s Governor General, ‘and tell him that he will see from my plan that the internal wall of this palace should be rebuilt and pushed out into the courtyard so that we obtain a double room whose width is indicated on the plan.’ Only after the architect went to see her in St Petersburg did she concede that her designs were impracticable. ‘I see that it is impossible to reconstruct the house at Lefortovo according to my plan and it would be better to knock almost all of it down and start anew. Even then it would be bad since it is near a slope and it would cost up to 900,000 roubles, which I am certainly not prepared to spend on a temporary building.’
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In the end, the Menshikov Palace was used to house theatrical staff and Catherine chose to build a new stone residence on the site of the burnt-out palace on the other side of the Yauza River. Noting that it was ‘designed to be two or three English miles in circumference’, Wraxall observed that there was ‘a sort of savage and barbarous grandeur in this taste, which never appears in the edifices and productions of Athenian sculpture or architecture’.
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So ambitious was the project that the empress never occupied her Catherine Palace, which was completed only in 1796. Since the immediate need for a useable residence remained, Bazhenov’s assistant, Matvey Kazakov, returned from St Petersburg at the end of August 1774 with a more modest commission to connect three large houses belonging to the Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys and the Lopukhins. It was in this ramshackle Prechistensky Palace, dismantled shortly afterwards, that Catherine was to celebrate victory over the Turks in 1775. Before then, however, she had not only to defeat the enemy, but also to overcome the most serious internal challenges of her reign.

F
ive years of war and plague would have taken their toll on any eighteenth-century empire. For Catherine, they were particularly ominous. If her son, now rapidly approaching the age of majority, were to become the figurehead for ‘patriotic’ nobles alarmed by the damage inflicted on their estates by Russian troops en route to the battlefields, the empress’s position would be no more secure than Peter III’s had been in the face of her own claims to represent the national interest. The plague afflicting Moscow made such dangers all the more acute in a city where Paul’s popularity had always been higher than hers.
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To unsettle her further, Catherine lost faith in Grigory Orlov, her constant companion since the last years of the reign of Elizabeth. Against Panin’s better judgement, Grigory had been sent to conduct the peace negotiations at Fokshany in May 1772. Shortly after his departure, Catherine learned that he had been unfaithful. Now the foreign ambassadors, whose reports on the rivalry between Panin and the Orlovs had so far been little more than whistling in the dark, suddenly found themselves at the heart of an extended crisis that was to transform the empress’s personal life, and with it the politics of her Court.

The story began to unfold on 1 August 1772, three days after Naryshkin’s celebrations at Leventhal. In the heat of the summer, Catherine had been forced to escape ‘suffocation’ at Tsarskoye Selo by spending longer than usual at the ‘detestable, hateful’ Peterhof.
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Courtiers sweetened the pill by staging an amateur performance of her comedy
O, these times!
on 30 July, when 227 tickets were collected at the door of the opera house. This brought to an end a week of festivities by the seaside. Yet even as the atmosphere darkened at the onset of the
Dormition Fast, when the empress followed the icons to a sanctification service on the upper pond, there was news to keep her cheerful.
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As she sailed that evening to visit a new summer house at Oranienbaum, she left her Court humming at the appointment, as gentleman of the bedchamber, of Alexander Vasilchikov, a previously unnoticed lieutenant in the Horse Guards who had commanded the sentries at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘It is true,’ Solms reported, ‘that to diminish somewhat the surprise of such an extraordinary promotion of a man who has no connection with the Court, the empress has simultaneously appointed four more…But everyone knows perfectly well that these were merely a bridge for the other to cross.’
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By the time the Crimean Khan’s emissary, Kalga Sultan, came to take his leave on 12 August, the twenty-eight-year-old Vasilchikov was already a fixture in the empress’s intimate circle.
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While they spent the summer at Marly and the Dutch cottage at Peterhof, with the occasional hunt on horseback after the Court had returned to Tsarskoye Selo, Orlov charged back from Moldavia only to find himself diverted to Gatchina on the pretext of quarantine regulations. In any case, he was too late: on 30 August, the feast of St Alexander Nevsky, Vasilchikov was promoted to Adjutant General, the office now firmly associated with the role of favourite. Sometime in early September, he moved into the palace.

As the recently arrived British ambassador straightaway realised, ‘the advancement of a new minion’ was bound to ‘occasion some change’.
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Yet neither Sir Robert Gunning nor his fellow diplomats fully anticipated what was to follow. They watched transfixed as Grigory held out for a satisfactory redundancy package in negotiations conducted by his brother Ivan. In addition to permission to use the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, conferred on him in 1763, he finally settled at the end of September for an annual pension of 150,000 roubles; a further 100,000 to do out Rinaldi’s Marble Palace, still under construction; the run of the empress’s other palaces until it was finished; two silver services (one for everyday use, the other for special occasions); and more than double the number of serfs on the estates he owned jointly with his brother Aleksey. For her part, Catherine bore no grudges. Grigory was not to be blamed for the failure of the peace conference, and although she offered, in a veiled reference to his unfaithfulness, to consign ‘all that has passed to perpetual oblivion’, she vowed never to forget ‘how much I owe to your whole clan and the qualities with which you are adorned’.
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Cynics saw merely a prudent measure of self-preservation. Warning that she would ‘do well to be on her guard’ against the resentful Orlovs, Frederick the Great thought that if they were all like Aleksey, the menacing giant
whom he had met at Potsdam in April 1771, then they must indeed be ‘a very enterprising family, capable of achieving the greatest aims’.
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Gunning could scarcely credit the exit of the man widely assumed to have installed the empress on the throne: ‘The successor that has been given him is perhaps the strongest instance of weakness and the greatest blot in the character of her Imperial Majesty, and will lessen the high opinion that was generally and in a great measure deservedly entertained of her.’
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There was some force to these charges. Shortly after Grigory’s departure for Fokshany, a plot to enthrone Paul had been discovered among the Preobrazhensky Guards in which between thirty and a hundred men, stiffened by a recent mutiny against their officers’ cruelty, were said to have taken part. Under interrogation in July, their ringleaders confessed their dream of unseating the Orlovs and consigning Catherine to a convent. One was knouted and committed to hard labour at Nerchinsk; others were flogged and exiled in perpetuity. Though mild by contemporary standards, partly on account of the conspirators’ youthfulness (most were non-commissioned officers, aged twenty or less), the sentences reflected the empress’s deepening sense of unease. No sooner had one foreign adventure come to fruition with the first partition of Poland on 5 August, than another clouded the horizon three days later. To deter the partitioning powers from casting their acquisitive eyes towards Sweden, Gustav III suspended the constitution of 1720 and restored the monarchy’s absolute powers. ‘In less than a quarter of an hour,’ Catherine complained to Voltaire, Sweden had lost her liberty and gained a king ‘as despotic as the one in France’.
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The real cause of her anxiety, however, was the damage inflicted on her own diplomacy. Backed by the French, Gustav’s coup had turned the tables on Russia’s long-standing influence in Stockholm and raised the threat of a descent on the empire’s Baltic lands.
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While the empress and her Council were forced to plan for such an attack, there could be no question of purging the rebellious Guards. Vasilchikov’s confirmation as the new favourite looked more like an olive branch to the disaffected. Meanwhile, ‘no precautions’ had been ‘neglected to guard against sudden attempts’ on her life.
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To take her mind off her troubles, Catherine regaled Voltaire with the success of her new comedies. He would enjoy these works by ‘an anonymous Russian author’, she told him in August, since any weakness in their plots was more than compensated by the liveliness of the characters: ‘some of them are really rather good’. Announcing the forthcoming French translation of
O, these times!
two months later, she seemed to be on top form: ‘Perhaps you will say after reading it
that it is easier to make me laugh than other sovereigns, and you will be right. I am fundamentally an extremely jolly person.’
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Behind the bravado, however, diplomats in St Petersburg sensed a different mood that autumn. A telltale sign was Catherine’s own admission that she had put off a routine reply to Falconet until ‘the next day and the next day and the day after that’.
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‘Hitherto active and industrious,’ the Prussian ambassador complained at the end of December, ‘she is becoming indolent and slack over business.’ Indeed, though she preferred not to dwell to Voltaire on ‘the great tragedy’ of the Turkish war and the prospect of a more general conflict if Gustav III invaded Norway, Solms thought that these pressures, when combined with the crisis in her love life, had been enough to prompt a spiral of depression that threatened to paralyse her government. ‘The empress increasingly displays the strongest of passions for her new favourite,’ he reported when Orlov finally left for Reval in January 1773. ‘Nevertheless, the departure of the former one made her sad and irritable and for three days she sent back all business.’
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Vasilchikov, it transpired, was no more than a handsome face, and certainly no substitute for Grigory. ‘I have never cried so much since the day I was born as I have over the last eighteen months,’ she later admitted to Potëmkin.
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Although Panin undoubtedly benefited from the fall of Orlov and did his best to hasten it once the die was cast, there is no evidence that he was responsible for poisoning Catherine’s mind against Grigory. Still less did he plot to install Paul on the throne. Conscious of Panin’s reputation for sloth, Gunning concluded that the grand duke’s future had been entrusted to him ‘from a conviction that he has neither abilities, resolution nor creativity enough to attempt placing [the crown] on the head of this young Prince, even if the latter had spirit enough to wear it, which is as yet very problematical’.
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If that was an underestimate of Panin’s intellect, it was a shrewd assessment of the ambitions of both tutor and pupil. Paul himself posed no threat to his mother. Despite his simmering resentment of her treatment of Peter III, she received the same unquestioning loyalty from her heir as he later expected from his subjects. Indeed, at this point they seemed to be united by more than mere duty. Following his recovery from illness in 1771, relations between mother and son sharply improved after a decade in which her lack of affection attracted regular comment from foreign diplomats. Though some saw nothing more in this reconciliation than an arrangement of convenience between two inveterate dissemblers, it was impossible to ignore their newfound fondness for each other’s company. ‘I will be returning to town on Tuesday,’ Catherine told Frau Bielke at the end of August 1772, ‘with my son
who no longer wants to be a step away from me and whom I have the honour of amusing so well that he sometimes changes his place at table in order to sit beside me.’
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In the excitement over the negotiations with Orlov, Paul’s eighteenth birthday passed without incident. In a private ceremony, attended only by Panin and his Holsteiner associate, Caspar von Saldern, the empress exhorted him on the need to govern justly and with moderation. Though the foreign ministers were entertained at Court to celebrate his Holstein inheritance, no promotions were announced. With luck, his Russian coming-of-age in the following year could be similarly overshadowed by his marriage.
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Had either Panin or the grand duke harboured any design of pressing Paul’s claim to the throne, they would surely have exploited the opportunity offered by unscrupulous Saldern in the months before the wedding. Though the circumstances remain mysterious, it was apparently the Holsteiner who persuaded Paul that Panin could no longer be relied upon to serve his interests. Cathcart had characterised Saldern in 1769 as ‘a man of consummate knowledge in business, great perspicacity, strong expression, and very much the friend or enemy of every system he adopts or opposes and in the same degree of the persons who espouse them’. At that time, he seemed ‘a great assertor of the northern system’, and it was in that capacity that he was appointed to lead Russia’s negotiations in Warsaw in 1771.
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By the time he returned, embittered by Panin’s criticism of his peremptory treatment of the Poles, his loyalties had been reversed. Sometime in late 1772 or early 1773, Saldern talked the grand duke into authorising him to act as his representative in his dealings with the Young Court. Armed with a signed agreement to this effect, he approached Panin with a plan to increase Paul’s role in government, allegedly to the point of creating a co-regency on the model of Joseph II and Maria Theresa. Perhaps he was trying on behalf of the Orlovs to discredit his former patron; just as probably, he had mercenary self-interest at heart. Whatever his motives, this time he had overreached himself. Panin destroyed the incriminating paper. While Paul, for the moment, kept silent, Saldern was packed off to Copenhagen, his reputation temporarily intact. Now all eyes turned to the wedding, for which plans were already complete by January 1773.
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The search for a bride had been entrusted to Baron von Assebourg, the former Danish minister to the empress’s Court, as long ago as 1768. By Easter 1771 he had submitted the results of his preliminary researches, which Catherine considered at Tsarskoye Selo not long before Paul fell ill. Just as Elizabeth had done before her, the empress sought a pliable candidate, no older than the grand duke,
from the Protestant ‘third Germany’ (the Princess of Nassau was explicitly ruled out on grounds of her Catholicism). Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha had been an early front-runner, not least because her paternal grandmother was first cousin to the late Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst. On investigation, however, the girl turned out to be too plump and her mother too squeamish about her conversion to Orthodoxy. ‘Think no further of the princess of Saxe-Gotha,’ Catherine ordered Assebourg: ‘She is exactly what it takes to displease us.’ Though the empress found it hard to believe that Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt could be quite so attractive as Assebourg claimed, she seemed worthy of further consideration despite doubts about her temperament and the expense involved in settling an establishment on her siblings. Even so, Catherine still favoured Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, whose father had been assiduous in his attentions and ‘who will be at the end of her twelfth year next October. Her doctor’s reflections on her robust health draw me to her’.
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Panin, however, had already determined that Sophia Dorothea was too young (thirteen was then the age of consent for females in the Orthodox Church) and since his view prevailed, it was Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt and her sisters, Amalia and Louisa, who eventually travelled to Russia via Berlin, just as Catherine had done almost thirty years earlier, in the company of their mother and with the assistance of Frederick the Great. ‘I have intrigued like the very devil to lead things to this point,’ the king told Prince Henry, predicting that the alliance would be ‘of the greatest possible utility to posterity’.
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