Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (63 page)

Between 1784 and 1788, Nicholas staged over forty different productions: grand operas, operas comiques, comedies, and ballets. The Russian nobility flocked to see and listen to Praskovia sing. Empress Catherine, on her return from her Crimean trip in 1787, came to Kuskovo and, despite her tin ear, was deeply moved by Praskovia. It was, the empress said, the “most magnificent performance” she had ever attended. After the opera, Catherine asked to meet Praskovia, who was brought forth. The empress spoke to the singer briefly and later sent Praskovia a diamond ring worth 350 rubles—this at a time when giving gifts to serfs was unprecedented.

By 1796, however, Praskovia was suffering from an illness manifesting itself in severe headaches, dizziness, coughing, and pains in her chest. Forced to retire, she last sang on April 25 of that year when she was twenty-eight. Nicholas closed his theater and, in 1798, gave Praskovia her freedom. Later he explained:

He proposed that they marry. The idea was revolutionary; no nobleman of Nicholas’s rank had ever married a woman born a serf. What would it mean—marriage between Russia’s wealthiest aristocrat and a serf, even one now liberated? Nicholas ignored the consequences and
went ahead. On November 4, 1801, he married Praskovia. On February 3, 1803, at the age of thirty-four, she gave birth to her only child, Dmitry. Three weeks later, on the morning of February 23, Praskovia died. The city’s nobility, still enraged that Nicholas had married a former serf, refused to attend the funeral. Nor was Nicholas present; crushed by grief, he was unable to leave his bed. Six years later, at fifty-seven, he died and was laid beside her in St. Petersburg’s Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Their son, Dmitry, his only legitimate child, inherited the Sheremetev estates.

The story became a legend. It is said that in 1855, Catherine’s great-grandson, Tsar Alexander II, was walking at Kuskovo with Dmitry, listening to stories about Dmitry’s mother, Praskovia. Immediately afterward, according to family history, the tsar signed the initial decree that led in 1861 to the emancipation of Russia’s serfs. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed America’s black slaves.

48
“Madame Orlov Could Never Be Empress of Russia”

I
N THE FIRST YEARS
of Catherine’s reign, Gregory Orlov was always at her side in his scarlet uniform, wearing on his chest the emblem of the empress’s favor: her portrait set in diamonds. The empress loved him as a man and as the hero who, with his brothers, had put her on the throne. He was also, of the four men with whom she had slept, the one who had given her the most physical satisfaction. He rode in the imperial carriage, sitting next to the sovereign, while men of great aristocratic families rode escort outside on horseback. People wishing to make their way at court sought his ear.

Not everyone was fond of him. Some, like Princess Dashkova, complained of his common origins, his sudden rise, his unpolished manners. Catherine was aware that eminent members of the nobility avoided him and his brothers. Knowing this, she did what she could to smooth Gregory’s rough edges and transform him into a grand seigneur. She gave him a French tutor to teach him the language used by cultivated Russians; the effort had little success. Writing to Poniatowski, she tried to explain her situation. “
The men who surround me
are devoid of education,” she said, “but I am indebted to them for the situation I now hold. They are courageous and honest and I know they will never betray me.”

Her position on the throne complicated her relationship with Orlov. She showered titles, decorations, and wealth on him and his brothers, but Gregory wanted something else. She was a widow now and he sought the prize he considered his service had earned: he wanted her to become his wife. This was more than political ambition. Orlov was a fearless soldier, the same man who, with three bullets in his body, had stood by his cannon at Kunersdorf, and who later had dared to elope with his general’s mistress. Vanity had played a part when he pursued Catherine as a grand duchess, but there was passion, too. Courage was not required; being her lover had not placed him in jeopardy. These relationships, when discreet—and sometimes when indiscreet—were accepted at the Russian court. Empress Anne had had Johann Biron; Empress Elizabeth had had Alexis Razumovsky; Catherine’s husband, Peter III, had had Elizabeth Vorontsova; and Catherine herself had already been the lover of Sergei Saltykov and Stanislaus Poniatowski. In western Europe, royal liaisons were common. Charles II, George I, and George II of England, as well as Louis XIV and Louis XV of France, had officially recognized mistresses. Orlov, therefore, was in no danger because of his relationship with Catherine until he became involved with her in a conspiracy to overthrow the sovereign. For him and his brothers, this was a capital offense. On the other hand, during the months their plot was taking shape, he and Catherine had shared the danger as equals. The fact that he was risking his life for her leveled the difference in their stations; in truth, he had been in a position to do more for her than she for him.

This situation had appealed to Orlov. Men can be attracted to women whom they believe need help. Orlov may have mistaken Catherine for a needy women; she was not. She was brave, proud, and confident. While still a grand duchess, she may have seemed and even felt politically and emotionally vulnerable, but she concealed it well. She was Orlov’s mistress and had borne his child; he had faced death for her sake. She was on the throne because he had helped put her there. He knew all this, believed it balanced out, and was not disposed to play the role of a subordinate. He wanted Catherine to belong to him during the day, in public, not merely for a few nocturnal hours behind silk curtains.

For Catherine, this was impossible. She was no longer a grand
duchess and could not remain simply a loving mistress. She was empress of Russia. The role, as she played it, was demanding. She rose every morning at five or six and worked fifteen hours a day. This left perhaps a single hour between the time her official duties ended—usually late in the evening—and the time she fell asleep, exhausted. This was all the time she could spare to be a man’s plaything. She had no time for elaborate lovers’ games, for teasing, for weaving and sharing dreams of the future. She knew she was depriving him of what he wanted, but in her mind, she had no choice. Because of this, she carried a burden of guilt, and it was to lessen this burden that she loaded him with titles, jewels, and estates. They were meant as compensation for not being ready to marry him.

They were not the rewards Gregory wanted. He wanted to marry her, not because he desired the role of prince consort but because he wanted to play the dominant marital role of an eighteenth-century Russian husband. He resented that her work stole hours during which he burned to display and satisfy his passion. He was angry that she spent these hours with men like Nikita Panin and Kyril Razumovsky, whose superior education now seemed to trump his passion and military courage. They advised her on matters about which he was completely ignorant. His sense that she was withdrawing from him drove him to clumsy efforts to force her to remember the debt she owed him and his brothers. He sometimes burst out in public and asserted himself with deliberate rudeness to Catherine. One evening before she left to be crowned in Moscow, at a supper of her intimate circle in the Winter Palace, the conversation turned to the coup a few months earlier. Gregory began boasting about his influence with the Guards. Turning to Catherine, he said how easily he had put her on the throne and how, if he wished, he could remove her with equal ease within a month. Everyone at the table was shocked; no one but Orlov would have dared to speak to the empress this way. Then Kyril Razumovsky spoke up. “
Perhaps you are right, my friend,” he said, smiling coolly. “But long before the month was past, we would have you hanging by the neck.” Gregory was stung; it was a reminder that, essentially, he was no more than Catherine’s lover, a handsome, muscular pawn.

Catherine looked for a way to restructure and continue the relationship. When she came to the throne, she believed that she could happily
spend the rest of her life with Gregory Orlov. He had been her lover for three years; he was the father of her infant child, Alexis Bobrinsky; he and his brothers had risked their lives for her. Further, atop the pinnacle to which ambition had brought her, she felt the loneliness of power. She needed company and affection as much as passion. For this reason, Catherine considered marrying him.

Orlov became insistent, demanding. He declared that he would prefer going back to being a subaltern in the army rather than acting the role of a “male Pompadour.” Catherine sorted through her own feelings. She dared not refuse him outright. She was not blind to Orlov’s faults. She exaggerated his qualities in front of others, but she knew exactly what he was worth. She knew that there was nothing of the intellectual or man of culture about him and that he was not qualified to participate in the serious business of government.

Orlov could not understand, or would not accept, Catherine’s hesitation. He did not comprehend the years of ambition beginning in childhood; the years of waiting, of hungering for power, of always knowing that she was superior in intellect, education, knowledge, and willpower to everyone around her. Through all of this, she had been forced to wait. Now the waiting was over. If she had to choose between having Orlov as a husband or wielding imperial power—if she could have only one—it would not be Orlov.

Yet the marriage question still tantalized her. There were moments when she thought she might have both Orlov and the throne. For a while, she considered saying yes. Later, she did not know how to say no. She could not afford to alienate the Orlovs; at the same time, she could guess the anger and dismay such a match would unleash in other quarters, particularly in Nikita Panin, who was essential to her in administering the government. To all Russians, but to Panin especially, an Orlov marriage would be seen as jeopardizing Paul’s right of succession in favor of her younger son by Orlov. Indeed, Panin, who was permitted to speak honestly to Catherine, reacted to marriage talk by coldly declaring, “A Madame Orlov could never be empress of Russia.”

At one point, hoping that she might find a precedent for a marriage to Orlov, Catherine decided to explore the rumors that Empress Elizabeth had married her peasant lover, Alexis Razumovsky. She sent Chancellor Michael Vorontsov to call on Razumovsky and tell him that if he would provide proof of his marriage to Elizabeth, he would have the right, as a widower prince consort, to all the honors due a member
of the imperial family, a position that would entitle him to a substantial pension. The chancellor found Razumovsky sitting by his fire reading his Bible. The older man listened silently to what the visitor said and then shook his head; already one of the richest men in Russia, he was not interested in honors and did not need money. He rose, went to a locked ivory cabinet, opened it, and took out a scrolled parchment document tied with a pink ribbon. Making the sign of the cross, he touched the scroll to his lips, removed the ribbon, and threw the document into the fire. “
Tell Her Imperial Majesty that I was never anything more than the humble slave of the late Empress Elizabeth Petrovna,” he said.

Orlov refused to consider this a significant setback. Razumovsky had been only a handsome peasant with a superb voice, whereas he, Gregory Orlov, and his brothers had raised his mistress to an imperial throne. His attempt to arrange a marriage continued. In the winter of 1763, Alexis Bestuzhev, now aligning himself with the Orlovs against Panin, began circulating a petition to gather support from the high nobility, the members of the Senate, and the clergy, requesting that the empress marry again. The petition’s argument was that, given the frailty and frequent illnesses of Grand Duke Paul, Russia must be provided with another heir. Whether Bestuzhev alone or the Orlovs or Catherine herself were behind this effort, no one knew. But the petition elicited strong opposition, and when Panin got hold of the document, he took it to Catherine, who refused to authorize Bestuzhev to circulate it.