Great Catherine (39 page)

She, Catherine, unmarried and in sole command of her own beloved Russia, had done what even the great Peter could not do. Like the unmarried, commanding Elizabeth of England two centuries earlier, she had won a stupendous naval victory, and had become a heroine. Just as Elizabeth had repulsed the dread Spanish Armada, so Catherine had crushed the fleet of the hated Turk.

Though she wrote to Voltaire that she truly wanted peace—and indeed she did want to end the costly drain of the war on her

finances—in actuality she was elated by all the adulation, the sense of power the war had brought her. In 1770 she was forty-one, and "not exactly improving in intelligence or looks," as she confided to her mentor. Her long affair with Orlov still brought her the comfort of familiarity (along with the pangs caused by his casual affairs) but held little or no passion. Her son Paul brought her no joy, only obligation tinged with uneasiness. But her fame, her newfound sense of triumph, made her pulse race and filled her heart with maternal love for her adoptive realm and its people.

As long as Russia was triumphant, Catherine was happy. And she felt sure that there were more triumphs to come.

"See, the sleeping cat has been awakened!" she wrote to Ivan Chernyshev, her ambassador in London. Russia, long in slumber, was rousing herself to full vigor. "People are going to talk about us!" she promised Chernyshev. 'You won't believe all the noise we're going to make!"

Chapter Twenty-Two

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GRAND DUKE PAUL WAS GROWING UP. He WAS TURNING out to be a small man, short and compact, with a slight yet well-proportioned body—the body of a dancer or an actor suited for juvenile roles. In 1773 he was nineteen, yet he looked much younger, like an unformed boy. His round face and tightly compressed, unattractive features had none of the depth or character of his mother's open, inquisitive, engaging face; his blue eyes were intelligent, but full of distrust, and he moved with a nervous quickness that betrayed his deep-seated unease.

To observers, Paul seemed driven by fear—fear of his mother, who was cold to him and, as he grew toward his majority, apprehensive about his popularity, fear of his immature body and fragile health, fear of falling prey to court intrigues. His fear drove him to lie, to hide, to deceive those around him in petty ways.

He had no special talents on which to pride himself. Though quick to learn he was no scholar, and in any case his indifferent education had been conducted in a rather lackadaisical fashion by the indolent Nikita Panin, the lessons interrupted far too often by the boisterous Gregory Orlov, who distrusted learning and wanted to toughen Paul by taking him hunting. Nor was Paul an athlete—he was agile but not muscular—nor was he gifted in music or drawing or any other polite accomplishment.

He was, in short, nothing but his remarkable mother's son. Of his paternity he now, at nineteen, knew the worst, as did everyone else at Catherine's court: that Sergei Saltykov, and not Peter III, was his father; that his mother despised him for his illegitimacy, and for reminding her of the circumstances that led to it; that, according to court gossip, his putative father Peter had wanted him put to death, along with Catherine; and that his mother had almost certainly been complicit in Peter's own death.

Fatherless (for Saltykov was away in Dresden, kept abroad by Catherine in one minor diplomatic post after another) Paul looked to Panin, who tutored him and hovered over him, even sleeping in his bedroom, as his guide to life. Orlov he had liked as a young child, but once Paul discovered the role the Orlov brothers played in his mother's coup and the late emperor's death, he could no longer trust the jovial, bearlike companion of his childhood.

In his teens Paul began to understand and appreciate his importance as grand duke, heir to the Romanov throne, though he remained so fearful of his mother that he could hardly imagine taking any kind of independent action. He aped the showy superficiality of the younger nobles, "speaking ravishingly of the French and of France," as one observer noted, and insisting that all his possessions come from Paris. He paraded in front of his mother dressed in extravagantly costly coats and breeches gleaming with jewels and trimmings of silver and gold. Waterfalls of fine lace adorned his throat and wrists, his shoe buckles were sparkling diamonds, his buttons glittering rubies.

Catherine, who often spoke to her son about her preference for what she called "English simplicity" in all things, pretended indifference but privately gritted her teeth, as he knew she would. Mother and son were nettlesome to each other, and though Catherine took great pains to guard Paul's health, having him inoculated against smallpox and whisking him away from any place where infection threatened, he knew that she did it more for her own political safety than for his well-being. Paul inherited his mother's gift for verbal sparring, though not her wit; his tongue

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was his sharpest weapon, and as he grew older he was occasionally able to overcome his terror and lash out at her to some effect.

In the summer that Paul was sixteen he succumbed to a very grave attack of influenza, and for over a month he hovered between life and death. He had often been ill before, but never at so critical a time, with Russia still at war with the Turks in the Crimea, poor harvests creating discontent in the countryside and high prices in the towns, turmoil in Poland and fears of pestilence in the army and in the southern provinces.

At such a time Catherine could not afford to have her official heir die. As Paul sank deeper into what many feared would be his final illness, there were troubling rumors that Catherine would declare her other son her heir. This boy, Catherine's son by Gregory Orlov, was nearly nine years old, and was in every way healthier, more robust, good-looking and presentable than the unfortunate Paul. He was called Alexis Grigorevich Bobrinsky, and though he was kept away from court he was not forgotten. Should Catherine decide to declare young Bobrinsky heir to the throne, Gregory Orlov's power would reach new heights; he might even be able to persuade Catherine to marry him at last.

There was universal surprise when Paul rallied, and after five weeks he was able to get up from his sickbed, apparently fully restored to health. Still, the episode had left Catherine and the members of her government shaken, and in the immediate aftermath of the crisis Catherine became fearful. Paul was popular, and he was male—officially, if not biologically, he was the last surviving male of the line of Peter the Great. His claim to the throne of Russia was unimpeachable, while she herself had no claim at all, she held the throne solely through conquest—and capability. When Paul and Panin were in Moscow, huge crowds poured into the streets to shout greetings. Many Muscovites, resenting Catherine, cried out to her son that he was their "only true sovereign," and pledged to support him to the death.

When he celebrated his eighteenth birthday, in September of 1772, Paul came of age and left childhood and tutelage behind.

But his mother, reluctant to acknowledge any advancement in his status, put off officially recognizing that he had reached adulthood. Paul was a thorn in her side. He was beginning to assert opinions of his own, critical of Catherine's enduring war with the Turkish empire and of the costly conflict with Poland. He was gathering a following of sorts, not yet an influential following, but an irritating one nonetheless. Troublemakers were beginning to rally to him as the natural focus of opposition.

Early in 1773 one such troublemaker, Caspar von Saldern, a shady Holsteiner who held a petty diplomatic post, attempted to organize a conspiracy to force Catherine to let her son rule along with her. Von Saldern, who supplemented his meager earnings by bribery and theft—he stole a diamond-studded gold snuffbox from the empress—was too inept a conspirator not to be discovered, and the indignant Catherine banished him from the kingdom. But the episode deepened her resolve to keep Paul under tight control, and to guard against any further plotting on his behalf

At eighteen Paul was old enough to marry, and Catherine was eager for him to start a family in order to assure the continuity of the succession. There was no doubt of his ability to father a child. When he was sixteen he had been initiated sexually by a suitable older woman, probably provided by Panin, with Catherine's knowledge and approval; his mistress had given birth to a son, who was given the name Simon Veliky. Catherine kept the infant with her, just as Elizabeth had kept the infant Paul in her apartments.

To choose a bride for Paul from among the Russian noble families would have invited factionalism of the most dangerous kind, so Catherine looked to the German principalities for eligible young women. As always, there were princesses without number, but finding a presentable, intelligent girl of good character who would not overshadow the bland grand duke or tower over him physically was a challenge.

In the summer of 1773 Countess Caroline of Hesse-Darmstadt was invited to come to Petersburg with her three unmarried

daughters, all under the age of twenty. The middle daughter, seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina, pleased Paul—and Catherine. She was outgoing and obliging, and if her complexion was rather blotchy at least she had been spared the marks of the pox. More important, Wilhelmina was healthy and presumably fertile.

Catherine may have assumed that, because Wilhelmina's mother was an exceptionally cultivated woman, the daughter would also have intellectual tastes. In any event, she made up her mind to accept Wilhelmina, and the girl began her instruction in the Orthodox church and was rechristened Natalia. On September 29 the wedding took place.

Having taken pains with the choice of a bride for her son, Catherine was equally painstaking in her preparations for their life together. She designated a new suite of rooms in the Winter Palace for the bridal couple and had them redecorated according to her own designs. "English simplicity" was forgotten as the empress wrote out her instructions: the formal bedchamber was paneled in gold brocade with a blue velvet border, while the inner, private bedchamber had columns faceted with blue glass and white damask wall coverings. The empress specified all the details of ornaments and upholstery for the various rooms and even supplied some of the gold fabric to be used from her own store of finery. All was intended to make Natalia happy, and to elicit from her a willingness to work hard at fulfilling her role as grand duchess.

Remembering her own arrival in Petersburg nearly twenty years earlier, her painful isolation, and the severe emotional burdens of her grotesque marriage, Catherine wrote a special letter of advice to her daughter-in-law. She cautioned her to avoid political entanglements and ill-advised friendships with foreign ministers (something Catherine herself had not been able to do), and to stay out of debt and live as simply as possible. She should learn Russian right away, Catherine told Natalia, and make an effort to embrace the customs and manners of her adopted country, while devoting herself with singleness of heart to being the best wife she

could be. To help Natalia in her adjustment Catherine granted her a generous allowance of fifty thousand rubles a year. Catherine could be certain that Natalia would enjoy one advantage she herself had not had: the good will and steady support of her mother-in-law.

A conspicuous figure in her gown studded with jewels and pearls, Catherine dominated Paul's wedding ceremony. Guests noticed that the empress's chestnut hair had grown quite gray, and that she wore it pulled severely back off her face in an unflattering, no-nonsense style. Her once small waist was now thick and matronly, and she no longer moved with the grace and lightness that once had distinguished her. Still, onlookers thought, her fair complexion was soft and smooth, albeit heavily rouged, and her expressive blue eyes were open and friendly, full of benevolence and intelligence. Everyone commented on the empress's strong teeth. (Women tended to lose their teeth in Petersburg by the time they reached middle age; it was a universally acknowledged hazard of the climate and diet.) When Catherine smiled her kindly, good-humored smile, her teeth winked out in all their pristine whiteness, leading many of her ladies to hide their own less than intact smiles behind their fans.

Only when Catherine stood near her friend Countess Bruce, the lovely, exceedingly well-preserved companion she had known since girlhood, did she look her age. Another member of Catherine's entourage, Countess Bruce's mother, Maria Rumyantsev—once Catherine's nemesis but now, in old age, a trusted companion—put all the women of the court to shame, for though she was elderly she was still miraculously beautiful.

Catherine found birthdays galling. "I hate this day like the plague," she announced when another year came to a close. Birthdays wounded her vanity—though she made fewer concessions now to vanity than she had a decade earlier—and besides that they were a reminder that time was passing and the problems of the empire were only marginally nearer being solved.

Advancing years brought minor infirmities. Catherine's back

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hurt from time to time, and she got severe headaches from long hours of reading by dim candlelight. Stronger light and spectacles helped the headaches, but for her aching back the only cure the doctors could suggest was a medicinal powder intended to make the patient sweat profusely. The powder failed, and the backaches went on.

By and large, Catherine distrusted doctors and apothecaries and preferred unorthodox therapies. She was a strong believer in the health benefits of alternating exposure to heat and cold. She had her own preferred routine, in which she and her female attendants shrouded their bodies in long petticoats and wound scarves around their necks, then jumped into a pond, shivering in the freezing water; they subsequently scalded themselves sitting in front of hot stoves. Between the shock of the cold and the enervating, sweat-inducing heat, disease was kept at bay.

Catherine had been under great strain in recent years. The Turkish war, whatever fame and glory it brought, was proving to be a hugely expensive drain on Russia's human and financial resources. (The treasury, enriched by newly discovered silver deposits in Mongolia, was still solvent, but was diminishing rapidly.) Plague had devastated Moscow, killing tens of thousands of people and unleashing riotous chaos and mayhem. Would-be assassins, some half mad, some with the intention of avenging the death of the late Emperor Peter, broke into the palace and terrified the empress; Gregory Orlov discovered one murderous officer lying in wait for Catherine, a long pointed dagger in his hand.

It was no wonder the empress began to see conspiracy everywhere, and to fear the consequences of her growing unpopularity. Only a year earlier a major plot had been discovered in the Preobrazhensky regiment, and Catherine was deeply shaken by it. Some thirty officers and men (some said as many as a hundred) were involved in a conspiracy to proclaim Paul emperor. Fortunately for Catherine, imperial agents learned of the plot and the Secret Branch went to work ferreting out the disloyal men, in-

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terrogating and punishing them. Soon all that was left of the conspiracy was seething resentment—and, on Catherine's part, wariness and apprehension.

In response to the alarming conspiracy, which she knew to be as much a rebellion against the perceived political dominance of Gregory Orlov and his brothers as against herself, Catherine took a number of her trusted advisers and left the capital. The danger to her regime from the metropolitan regiments had to be faced. That danger was likely to grow rather than diminish now that Paul was of age of claim the throne, and the empress meant to confront it proactively. She wanted to remove all the regiments from the capital and scatter them, so that they could not quickly join forces to overwhelm the household guard. After long discussion her advisers persuaded her against this plan, as too politically explosive. But Catherine, ever resourceful, had by this time decided on a different tactic.

Suddenly, to the amazement of the entire imperial household, Catherine sent Gregory Orlov away and replaced him with a dark, handsome, rather retiring lieutenant in the Horse Guards, Alexander Vassilchikov.

Swiftly the young Vassilchikov was promoted to adjutant general, gentleman-in-waiting, and then to chamberlain. He was presented with the Order of St. Alexander and was installed in the suite that had previously belonged to Orlov. Catherine's political enemies sniggered. Vassilchikov was twenty-eight, the empress forty-three. She risked making herself ridiculous, or worse. Yet even her enemies had to admit that what she had done was politically astute.

There could be no clearer signal to the guardsmen that the power of the Orlovs was broken once and for all. For a time, the plottings and murmurings ceased. Catherine breathed more easily. Besides, the change was personally beneficial to Catherine—or so she hoped.

"After eleven years of suffering," she told a friend, she intended to live "according to her pleasure, and in entire independence."

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Orlov's hold over her was broken. There would be no more scenes, she would no longer have to tolerate his infidelity, humor his whims, or salve his ego. The shy Vassilchikov would be her escort, confidant and lover. But he was only a good-looking overgrown boy. He headed no faction, he had no formidable brothers. He would never try to control her. And if he did, she would be able to dismiss him at a moment's notice.

Orlov did not accept his demotion meekly. True, he knew that for some time his preeminence had been at risk. He had disappointed the empress in the last assignment she gave him, when she sent him to attend peace negotiations with the Turks at Focsani and he had failed to achieve any results—indeed, his haughty behavior had actually worsened relations and dimmed peace prospects. True, Catherine had discovered him with his newest love, his delicate young cousin, a girl barely out of childhood, and had been deeply hurt by his betrayal. Yet Catherine still owed him a great deal. He was determined not to yield his place at her side without standing up for his rights.

In the end, as was characteristic of her, the empress gave her former lover a generous settlement. Besides endowing him with large grants of money, property and serfs, she obtained for him a princely title abroad and, after he completed a relatively brief period of self-imposed exile, she readmitted him to her circle of advisers. Now he was once again a prominent courtier, and at Paul's wedding he looked as toweringly handsome, wealthy, and intimidating as ever. Certainly he made a stronger impression than the diffident Vassilchikov, who looked uncomfortable and was in fact troubled by pains in his chest.

The wedding of the grand duke and grand duchess was followed by weeks of parties, masquerade balls, theatrical entertainments and imperial receptions. Night after night the feasting and celebrating went on, now in the white-and-gold salons of the palace, now amid the cut crystal and silver and gold plate of nobles' dining rooms. Catherine lent her gracious presence to most of these gatherings, beaming at her new daughter-in-law

and doing her best to seem less icy toward Paul. She relied on Vassilchikov to attend her, but otherwise ignored him. She could not quite ignore Gregory Orlov, however. He irked her a great deal by paying court to one of Natalia's sisters, unleashing a new flood of gossip. What if he married the new grand duchess's sister? That would make him Paul's brother-in-law, and, by extension, part of the imperial family. Was there no end to Orlov's brazen ambition?

The court was still preoccupied with festivities when Catherine's regular bi-weekly imperial council met on October 15, 1773. A message was read to the councillors and the empress: the Yaik Cossacks were in revolt, led by an army deserter who claimed to be Peter III.

The empress and her advisers heard the news with equanimity. Cossack revolts were common. Over the past century the Russian government had had to confront the Cossack bands, or hordes, dozens of times but in the end authority had been restored and resistance broken.

Catherine was aware, as her predecessors had been, that the threat of rebellion was inherent in the always-tense alliance between the Cossacks and the throne. For the Cossacks were frontiersmen, fiercely independent, democratic, bitterly hostile to any attempt to restrict their largely self-directed way of life. They occupied the relatively empty southern steppe lands, along the Volga, eastward to the shores of the Caspian Sea and into western Siberia. They were the descendants of runaway serfs, criminal fugitives, army deserters, marginal men and wanderers who instinctively avoided the authorities and remained on the fringes of settled society. Yet they served the emperor by forming themselves into fierce mounted fighting units and forming a living cordon between Russia and the hostile tribespeople that menaced her ill-defined eastern borders.

The Cossacks were loyal to the ruling authority, and valuable fighting allies, but their loyalty was in conflict with their need to be, and to remain, their own masters. Whenever they felt that

their independence was threatened, they rose in rebellion, and each time they rebelled, they invoked the near-mythic figure of Stenka Razin, the great Cossack folk hero, who had once kindled the spirit of revolt until it blazed across the steppes like wildfire, threatening to engulf all Russia.

A century earlier, in the reign of Peter the Great's father, Emperor Alexis, Stenka Razin had posed as the deliverer of the Russian people and had drawn thousands to follow his banner by promising freedom from noble oppression and the establishment of a vast Cossack republic to encompass the entire Volga littoral. Time after time the armies of the emperor had been turned back by Razin and his peasant hosts, and Razin's Cossacks had carried out fearsome massacres, crop burnings, and general devastation throughout northeastern Russia. Muscovites had feared that the mighty rebel would sweep down and destroy their city, and for a time it appeared that no force could stop him, so fierce and forceful was his army and so powerful his message of liberation. In the end his own people had betrayed Razin, but not before he had become a strong prince in his own right, with a fleet of two hundred galleys and an extensive territory where his commands held sway.

Stenka Razin had terrorized the government and the ruling elite. Like a force of nature, a whirlwind or a terrifying storm, he and his hordes had seemed to rise up out of the black earth itself, threatening to overturn every obstacle in their path. Razin and his followers were a fearsome reminder to those in command that beyond their relatively limited circle of power lay the vast, uncharted, chaotic reaches of Russia—the real Russia, not the Russia of a Westernized few living in artificial splendor surrounded by the artifacts of a borrowed culture. The real Russia was peopled by rough, fur-clad peasants who lived in squalor, could neither read nor write and whose only true loyalty was to God. Razin had awakened these people, stirred their resentments, brought their age-old grievances to the boiling point. Under his leadership, they had spilled out across the steppes to imperil

the precarious social order of the Russian state. And they had very nearly overbalanced it.

Now, it seemed, the old grievances had been stirred up afresh, by a leader claiming to be the lost Emperor Peter III.

The imposture was not in itself troublesome. Over the past decade, nearly every year had brought at least one impostor claiming to be Peter; in time this one, like the others, would be exposed as false. In the meanwhile, however, the empress and her councillors took prudent measures to put down the rising, for the Yaik Cossacks had mutinied only a few years earlier and the executions, fines and beatings imposed on the rebels had left the horde angry and full of hate.

Soldiers were dispatched to confront the defiant Yaiks, local leaders in the area were put on alert. Couriers were sent out along the slow, rutted provincial roads with instructions to return to court as swiftly as possible with news of the situation among the Yaiks. Then, having done what could be done, the council turned to other concerns.

In Moscow, chilly days and frost gave way to the first snowfalls. Sleigh rides and skating parties preoccupied the courtiers, and the empress, having launched her son and daughter-in-law on their new life, turned her attention to a distinguished visitor from France.

Denis Diderot, whose Encyclopedic had for years been Catherine's bible, and who some years earlier had been the object of her generous philanthropy, arrived in Russia after an arduous five-month journey and settled in to spend the winter in Petersburg.

Catherine was delighted to meet the man who, with Voltaire and Montesquieu, had been the intellectual idol of her youth. The Encyclopedic had greatly influenced her thinking, moving her along the path toward toleration, moderation and humanitarian-ism. Catherine associated Diderot with all that was progressive in social thought, and now she could hear from his own lips the ideas, old and new, that had enlightened Europe. She lost no time

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in sitting down with him and talking—and they continued to talk, sometimes daily, for hours at a time.

Diderot, for his part, had admired Catherine from a distance as a ruler who had her subjects' best interests at heart and whose breadth of knowledge and thoughtful approach to governing were bound to lead to beneficial changes in Russia. He was charmed by Catherine when he met her, impressed by her curiosity and intellectual rigor yet put at his ease by her informality. She combined, he wrote, "the soul of Brutus with the charms of Cleopatra," and he looked forward to his late afternoon visits with her.

Both the philosopher and the empress had strong personalities, neither was the least bit diffident or inclined to false flattery. They soon sized one another up, and approvingly. Diderot told his family and others in France that in Catherine's stimulating company he felt a wonderful freedom to vent his opinions, and that he found Russia to be quite liberating. "In the so-called land of free men I had the soul of a slave," he wrote, "and in the so-called land of barbarians, I have found in myself the soul of a free man."

"His is an extraordinary brain," Catherine wrote to Voltaire of Diderot. "One does not encounter such every day." Indeed the Frenchman was extraordinary in many ways. His manner was impassioned, at times almost frenzied. When carried away by a thought he talked louder and louder and faster and faster until, rising from his seat, he paced the room, waving his arms and shouting. He had a habit of snatching off his wig and flinging it away. Catherine recovered it and handed it to him, whereupon he thanked her and stuffed the unwanted wad of powdered horsehair into his pocket.

Catherine looked past Diderot's frenetic intensity and applauded his wide-ranging, searching genius. She found him incomparably more worthwhile than the only other philosophe she had so far encountered, Mercier de la Riviere, who had bored her on his visit to Petersburg six years earlier by "spouting nonsense" and babbling on egotistically until she was ready to throw him