Great Catherine (41 page)

Pugachev was undergoing a change. No longer a Christlike martyr, he now held court in a lace-trimmed red coat and displayed himself to his followers holding a scepter and a silver axe. He surrounded himself with tinsel and mock ceremony in a caricature of court life. He issued orders, and had his secretaries seal them with an official-looking seal bearing the imperial double eagle. He continued to assure his followers ("my children, my bright falcons," as he called them) that he would look after them, and promised the peasants their freedom, but he demanded that they play a bloody role in bringing the new order into being. Peasants were ordered to kill their landlords, in return for a fee. "He who kills a landowner and destroys his house will be given a wage of a hundred rubles," one of Pugachev's orders read. "He who kills ten landowners and destroys their houses will get a thousand rubles and the rank of general." From his camp at Berda Pugachev commanded thousands of would-be assassins, all loyal to the man they had begun to call Nadezha Gosudar, the "Tsar of our Hopes."

As if the specter of Pugachev and his wild-eyed assassins were not enough, Catherine was aggravated just at this time by a tart memorandum from her son—his first recorded attempt to influence his mother's governance. Paul drew up a long analytical document, which he called "Considerations about the State in General, Relative to the Number of Troops Needed for its Defense and Regarding the Defense of All Borders." Despite the cumbersomely military title, it was in fact less a document about the military than a persuasion to peace. The Turkish war, Paul argued, with its attendant costs and sacrifices, had led Russia into internal dissension and near ruin; only many years of peace, with lower taxes and a smaller, dispersed, less oppressive army could

restore the empire to her natural condition of prosperity and harmony.

That her son should propose weakening the army at a time when the eastern part of the realm had burst into rebellion— a rebellion that was spreading virtually unchecked—must have galled Catherine and soured her opinion of her son's judgment. She was annoyed by her critics: it was not only Paul who took her to task but Diderot as well, who questioned her closely about her governmental methods and hinted broadly that she had crossed the line separating benign monarchy from tyranny. She needed friends and allies, not critics. Only Melchior Grimm, a visiting Parisian with whom Catherine felt immediately at ease and whose worldliness and sympathetic intelligence made him a delightful companion for her, gave her the diversion and friendly support she craved.

Catherine was in need of support just then, as she had embarked on uncertain waters in her emotional life. She had discarded her longtime partner Orlov in order to gain independence, yet Orlov's replacement, the boyish, correct, vapid Vassilchikov, bored her to tears and beyond. At forty-five, gray-haired and heavy-footed, disappointed in her son and greatly beleaguered by the cares of state, Catherine needed a helpmeet—a lover, yes, but also a friend and colleague who could ease her burdens by sharing them.

She had tried to accustom herself to Vassilchikov, but she soon became scornful of him, and she could not hide her scorn; he withdrew, she cried, he clutched his chest in pain, she cried still more. (She was later to remember her time with Vassilchikov as the most tearful of her life.) She had become habituated to the tedious young man, yet she feared that she had made a bad bargain. Would she become so emotionally bonded to him that she couldn't bear to send him away? Was she destined to be miserable with him for the rest of her life?

The sour Vassilchikov was not happy either. ("I'm just a little

whore," he was heard to say.) His chest hurt, he was unable to please his powerful, aging mistress. The empress's entire household despised him, and let him know it. He must have longed to return to the contented obscurity of his former life.

Catherine thought anxiously of sending Vassilchikov away, as she had Orlov, but something held her back. Unsatisfying and insipid as he was, Vassilchikov was nonetheless someone to love, someone to cling to. Catherine needed love, or at least its simulacrum. Without someone to love she felt lost, bewildered, in thrall to the bleakness of life. Yet the longer she tolerated the inadequate Vassilchikov, the more depressed she became. Real satisfaction, the deep contentment of love, eluded her.

Melchior Grimm, who became Catherine's close friend during the winter of 1773-1774, and who was present at the palace every day from midmorning until late at night, observed her closely in this unhappy season. She often sent for him after supper and sat with him, talking and doing needlework, until nearly midnight. She preferred Grimm's conversation to the usual evening entertainments. Plays were tedious to her, the comedies bored her and the tragedies were not to her taste. She had never been able to appreciate concerts or opera. Gambling for high stakes never piqued her interest for long. She had never lost her enthusiasm for ideas, but after eleven years of rule, idealism in and of itself irritated her. Diderot had grown irksome to her, with his endless queries about serfdom in Russia and his naive assumptions about human nature. She had discovered at first hand how government must assert its primacy over chaos by force alone; all considerations of public good and individual liberty had to be secondary. Diderot had made himself a prickly voice of conscience, and she was not sorry when the Frenchman left Petersburg in March of 1774, though it did distress her to learn of his many mishaps on the return journey.

Grimm was in any case much more to Catherine's taste than the searching, volatile, high-minded Diderot. The Swiss was down-to-earth and gossipy, as Catherine herself was, a man of the world

who had few illusions when it came to human betterment. With Grimm Catherine could talk of the follies and foibles of her courtiers, and chatter on, as she liked to do, about what she called "this iron century" and its peculiarities. Grimm wrote that by the end of the winter he and the empress were on the most cordial of terms. He was enchanted with her company. "I entered her apartments with the same assurance as that of the most intimate friend," he confided, "certain of finding in her conversation an inexhaustible store of the greatest interest presented in the most piquant form."

Catherine turned to Grimm for companionship in part because of her boredom with Vassilchikov. But by February she was working on another sweeping change in her personal life. She brought to court a giant of a man, huge and ugly, disfigured by the loss of an eye and so slovenly in his dress and uncouth in his manners that he made the more fastidious courtiers shudder. He was Gregory Potemkin.

Potemkin burst in upon the court like a hot wind off the faraway southern desert, strange and exotic and with more than a hint of threat. He was outsize and ungainly, and his blinded eye—which he kept uncovered—was an affront to the prettified courtiers accustomed to veiling their defects behind patches and wigs and yards of frothy scented lace. Potemkin did not blend with Petersburg society, and he could not have cared less. He was utterly different, an alien being, and no one knew what to make of him. A hero of the Turkish war, decorated for bravery and gallantry, he had none of the dash or swagger of the soldier. His dress was unmilitary in the extreme; he favored flowing caftans in soft glowing silks, his large fleshy fingers sparkled with jeweled rings, his hair was long and unpowdered, and he carried himself with a world-weary slouch that made everyone around him vaguely squeamish.

He was extremely clever, and could be entertaining when he was in the mood to be (one could never tell, his moods varied widely and he was frequently morose or misanthropic). In short,

son

Potemkin brought little to court but his quick-thinking, well-stocked mind. He was not highborn, in fact his father was an army colonel who owned a mere four hundred serfs. (Wealthy nobles owned tens of thousands of serfs.) He was certainly not handsome, though a few women admitted to falling prey to his raw animal magnetism. He was no longer young, and had never held any important post. But he unsettled everyone, he caused a tremendous stir. And it soon became evident that he would be the empress's next lover.

The British ambassador Gunning was convinced that Potem-kin's arrival and meteoric rise (Catherine conferred on him the rank of adjutant-general, installed him and a number of his relatives in the Winter Palace, and rewarded him with honors and orders) marked a major turning point in Catherine's reign.

"We have here a change of decoration which to my mind merits more attention than any other event which has happened since the beginning of the reign," he wrote in a dispatch to London. "Mr. Vassilchikov, who was too dull-witted to have any influence in affairs and to enjoy the confidence of his mistress, now has a successor who promises to have both to a supreme degree." The shaggy, odorous Potemkin caused "general astonishment, even consternation," the ambassador wrote. He was no Vassilchikov, callow and retiring; Potemkin was a force to be reckoned with, fearsomely clever, physically intimidating, with untapped capabilities and high aspirations. He was said to have unusual discernment and what the ambassador called "a deep knowledge of men."

"Given these qualities, and thanks to the indolence of his rivals, he ought naturally to hope that he can elevate himself to the heights envisioned by his boundless ambitions," Gunning concluded. In short, he might well take over the governing of Russia.

Catherine was obviously enraptured with the huge, erratic, cerebral Potemkin. Her mood, which had been sour and truculent, abruptly became sanguine, buoyant, elated in the extreme, and her new favorite was clearly the source of the change. "She is

mad about him," one of her senior officials, Senator Elagin, told another. "They must really love each other, for they are exactly alike." Alike or not, Catherine felt that at last she had found the soul mate for whom she had been waiting all her life. She was radiant, beside herself, quite giddy with joy.

"Oh, Monsieur Potemkin!" she wrote in one of her numerous love notes, "what a confounded miracle you have wrought, to have so deranged a head that heretofore in the world passed for one of the best in Europe!. . . . What a shame! What a sin! Catherine the Second a prey to this mad passion!"

At the age of forty-five, Catherine felt as if she were discovering love for the first time. "Everything I have laughed about all my life has happened," she wrote to her beloved, "so much so that my love for you dazzles me. Sentiments which I used to consider as idiotic, exaggerated and unnatural, I feel them now. I cannot tear away my stupid look from you. I forget everything my reason tells me and I feel I become quite stupid when I am in your presence."

Love sent Catherine's mind reeling, even as her spirits soared. She lost her customary reasonableness and balance. Her zest for intellectual conversation flagged. She was not herself, she was "somebody with delirium." Yet that somebody wore a perpetual smile. "I forget the whole world when I am with you," Catherine wrote to her new favorite. "I have never been so happy as I am

now."

Potemkin knew how to touch Catherine's heart and make her feel cherished. He sang to her, the songs sweet and melodious, his voice soft and full of sincerity. He admired the ruins of beauty in her, the fleeting traces of youthfulness in her bright eyes and overpainted complexion. He awoke her passion—he called her "a woman of fire"—and made her believe that for him, she was the only woman in the world.

Potemkin was, it seems, genuinely in love with the sovereign he greatly admired. As a very young officer he had played a minor role in her coup, helping to bring her to the throne. No doubt he

remembered her as she had been then, a thrillingly daring figure on a great white horse, riding in triumph toward a unique destiny. He loved her daring, it matched his own. He loved her forthright, far-ranging mind, with its visions of betterment and change; he too had broad and soaring visions. He loved her strong, responsive, womanly body, that freely sought love and as freely gave it; his appetite matched hers, and in her he found satiety.

The senator was right: Catherine and Potemkin were very much alike, and if their volcanic romance had, on his side, overtones of adoration and self-serving ambition, it was no less an earthshaking, once-in-a-lifetime romance for all that.

"There is something extraordinary between us that cannot be expressed in words," Catherine wrote. "The alphabet is too short, the letters are not numerous enough." In the midst of calamities great and small, time-bound in that iron century, on the threshold of age with its bleakness and futility, Catherine stumbled upon the great love of her life.

Fortune smiled on Russia even as it blessed the empress. In March of 1774 the rebel Pugachev, strutting in his lace-trimmed red coat, was attacked and decisively beaten before Orenburg, his fierce but untrained army scattered to the four winds. The impact of his imposture was blunted. He slunk away, his forces in tatters, his tawdry court reduced to a ragtag masquerade. Everywhere the earth warmed, the ice melted, the rivers ran high and swift, and even the floods that drowned the land and swept away houses, cottages, whole villages, seemed no more than momentary misfortunes in a benign and benevolent grand design.