Great Catherine (42 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

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\ CCORDING TO ONE ACCOUNT, TOWARD THE END OF THE

jl\, year 1774 Empress Catherine went in great secrecy—perhaps in disguise—to the small church of St. Samson in an obscure suburb of Petersburg, taking with her only a single female attendant. There she met Potemkin, accompanied by one of his nephews and a chamberlain from the palace. A priest appeared, and for the next hour and more the church was closed to worshipers for the duration of a private ceremony. A wedding ceremony.

The bride, matronly, gray-haired and bright-eyed, her face flushed with delight, stood quietly while her attendant passed the gold crown over her head three times. The groom, towering and massive, his one good eye fixed on the glowing holy pictures in the iconostasis, had to stoop each time the crown was passed over his head. The choir sang, the couple was blessed and at length dismissed. For the second time in her life, Catherine acquired a husband.

It is impossible to say with certainty that Catherine underwent a marriage ceremony with her beloved Potemkin, but it seems likely that she did. In her notes to him she often called herself his wife, and called him "dear husband." Referring to herself in the

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third person, she asked coyly in one letter, written in 1776, "Was she attached to you two years ago by holy ties?"

Catherine knew that Empress Elizabeth had married her lover Alexei Razumovsky, and that Razumosvky possessed documents to prove it, though he gallantly burned them when the existence of a marriage contract threatened to dishonor the late empress's good name. There was thus a recent precedent for the private marriage of a Russian Empress.

Only a few years earlier Catherine had decided against marrying Gregory Orlov, leaving Orlov aggrieved. But Potemkin was not Orlov. He was that dazzling blend of ideal lover, stimulating intellectual companion, and potential collaborator in governing who she had always longed for. He was everything she needed, and more. If she married him there would be no inconvenient dynastic complications, for she was past childbearing age. Besides, no one need know; the marriage would be their whimsical, sentimental, romantic secret, a symbol of what Catherine vowed would be "an eternal love." The evidence, and Catherine and Potemkin's state of mind and heart, suggest that a wedding ceremony may well have taken place.

Catherine needed the fortifying reassurance of Potemkin's love and support more than ever, for her realm was still recovering from the violent upheaval of a widespread peasant war, a war that had challenged her own security to a greater degree than any earlier crisis.

During the previous summer the rebellion originally sparked by Pugachev's imposture became something larger and more terrifying than a localized revolt among marginal peoples. Tens of thousands of peasants throughout east and southeast Russia rose against their masters, proclaiming their freedom and condemning the time-honored laws and customs that bound them to cultivate the land for the benefit of privileged landowners. Inspired by word of Pugachev's revived leadership, bands of peasants armed with axes and knives, wooden clubs and crude pointed sticks

descended on the houses of local gentry and began an orgy of maiming and massacre.

Noble victims were decapitated, their hands and feet cut off, their mangled torsos displayed as gory trophies. Women were raped and murdered, children cut down pitilessly to die beside their parents. No one was spared, not the aged, not infants, not monks or priests. Houses were burned, churches looted and destroyed, barns and outbuildings put to the torch. The traditional deep-going piety of the peasants was overwhelmed as bloodthirsty emotions were unleashed; rebels gouged out the eyes of holy icons, desecrated altars, defaced religious paintings and stole the precious vessels that held the host. Altogether thousands of innocents lost their lives at the rebels' hands, and many thousands more were left without food or shelter or the means to provide them.

As the summer advanced the terrifying wave of violence continued to spread. Townspeople, dreading attack by the murderous peasant gangs, tried to flee to safety yet found none. Word reached Moscow that the town of Kazan had been overrun, sacked and burned to the ground by Pugachev and twenty thousand vengeful followers, and there was widespread fear that Moscow would soon come under assault. Catherine's spies informed her that assassins had been sent to murder her and her son; for weeks thereafter it looked as though the forces she had sent to hunt down and destroy the insurgents would not be able to succeed.

Finally, late in August, the tide turned. Government troops harried and captured roaming gangs of lawless peasants and subjected all those suspected of taking part in the mayhem to horrible punishments. The reprisals were as savage as the crimes they were meant to avenge. Entire villages suffered; in some villages, every third man was hanged, while the remaining inhabitants suffered severe beatings and mutilation. Soldiers erected torture-wheels and gallows in each village and before they moved on, left the

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ditches piled high with corpses. Coincident with the gory backlash, crops failed throughout the Volga region, adding famine to the parade of atrocities. The imposter and arch-rebel Pugachev, betrayed by his own men, was captured and brought to Moscow in an iron cage, where he still languished on Catherine's wedding day.

That after twelve years of benign government her empire could be convulsed by peasant war must have disheartened Catherine, bringing her long-range hopes for Russia into question and challenging her belief in the possibility of human betterment. She had long been sustained in her efforts by the expectation that she could be a teacher and guide for her subjects, leading them toward abundance, moral improvement, and harmony. In time, she thought, with sufficient prosperity and under the suasion of improved administration and just laws, crime would diminish and eventually disappear.

But the defiance, venom and bloodlust unloosed by Pugachev, and the eagerness with which his imposture had been embraced, forced her to acknowledge the shortsightedness of her expectations. The peasants who formed the overwhelming majority of her subjects had shown themselves to be, not a docile and devoted collection of willing learners, waiting to be led into the light, but an ugly combustible mass of haters, seething with murderous rage, ready to avenge themselves on their betters. Pugachev's rebellion, and the peasant war it ignited, had laid bare the dark side of humanity, and Catherine, chastened by the experience, saw that she had to incorporate those dark impulses into a revised set of expectations for herself and her realm.

Her accomplishments thus far had not been few. She had given her people a code of laws, the foundation stone of her program of improvement. She had reformed and reorganized the government agencies in Petersburg, and had begun to reform provincial government as well, though progress had been frustratingly slow. She had begun the building of dozens of new towns, issued dozens of new edicts, ordered the mapping of her realm (an

ambitious and unprecedented undertaking) and a census to accompany it, and had enjoyed some success in establishing orphanages and making prisons more humane. She had encouraged the growing of tobacco in the Ukraine, distributing seeds and providing pamphlets to growers to teach them the newest and most efficient methods of cultivation. She had subsidized Russian shipping, founded factories for tanning, candle-making, and the manufacture of silk and linen. Under her auspices, skilled workers were imported from France to show imperial craftsmen better ways of weaving hangings, embroidering lace, and making fine china.

In keeping with her belief that both boys and girls ought to be educated from the age of five, the empress had given a good deal of attention to projects to build schools, founding the Smolny Institute, an academy designed for five hundred girls and young women modeled on Madame de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr, and visiting the school often. (Diderot saw her there in the year of the peasant rebellion, smiling and opening her arms to the pupils, who ran to hug her and clung to her; the sight "touched him to the point of tears.") Though books were still a rarity in Russia, apart from religious works, the empress had made great strides in promoting the value of reading and learning and took pride in the forty thousand volumes belonging to the Academy of Sciences. She founded and endowed a medical college to educate Russian physicians and apothecaries, and commissioned the first Russian pharmacopeia. And she did her best to prop up the fledgling Moscow University, not yet twenty years old, plagued by a sparse and underqualified faculty, incompetent direction, and a paucity of students, few of whom remained enrolled long enough to complete degrees.

In foreign affairs the empress had most to boast of—not only major military victories but triumphs of a more pervasive and lasting kind. She had succeeded in transforming the image Europeans held of her empire from that of a backward and barbarous place, stigmatized by credulousness, culturally and in-

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tellectually feeble and insignificant on the world stage to that of a major power with a fearsome army, led by an enlightened philosopher-empress of astounding gifts, a land of promise of which great things could be expected. In July of 1774, as the rebellion roared on unchecked, Catherine learned that at last her envoys had succeeded in concluding peace with the Turks, closing an immense chapter in her recent endeavors and allowing her to look to the future with a lighter spirit.

Important shifts were taking place in European politics, and thanks to the combined efforts of the empress and her advisers, chiefly Panin, Russia would play a large role in the new order. England was embroiled in North America, where her colonies were restive and rebellious; Spain was moribund; France was in transition, with the death of Louis XV and the accession of his shy, inept young grandson Louix XVI and the latter's beautiful young Austrian Queen Marie Antoinette; the aging Frederick II still ruled in Prussia, but could not last long. Now was the time for Russia to advance herself territorially, to move Europe-ward by absorbing western lands.

Catherine had begun this process by joining Frederick and the Austrian co-ruler Joseph II, son of Empress Maria Theresa, to divide roughly one-third of the Polish kingdom between them. With one stroke of the quill Russia gained vast lands and more than a million and a half new subjects. A second annexation of Polish land had swiftly followed, adding more valuable territory and more new subjects. Russia's role in the destruction of the chaotic kingdom of the Poles was lauded by European observers, adding to Catherine's prestige. Poland was widely regarded as an artificial entity, in a state of constant turmoil, where a Catholic tyranny stifled freedom. The relatively more benevolent rule of Austria, Prussia and Russia was seen as an improvement over the prevailing situation; Catherine was regarded as a savior of the Poles, not their oppressor.

She had done a great deal, but much more needed to be done,

and with Potemkin beside her, as husband, partner, perhaps in time even co-ruler, it would be accomplished. Together the empress and her cherished, greatly admired lover dreamed large and expansive dreams. They liked to meet in the steambath, lolling and sporting in the near-scalding water like two whales. Both were capable of being as playful as children, and both loved to play. Both were mimics, and Potemkin made Catherine laugh uncontrollably with his imitations of the courtiers; she may have brought out her old repertoire of animal noises to amuse him. When play turned erotic she reveled in his lovemaking, in his capacity to thrill and disarm her. For a powerful woman to surrender her power in the arms of a trusted and skillful lover must have given infinite pleasure and release. Potemkin offered the empress that release as night after night they met, loved, and talked beside the steaming waters, reclining and refreshing themselves from platters of meats and fruit and sweet confections, washed down by fine wines.

Potemkin was happiest wearing nothing but an embroidered caftan, the soft flowing silk billowing over his huge bulk. Possibly he taught Catherine to enjoy the ease of shapeless silk as well; certainly he helped her relax amid his preferred surroundings— yielding divans, thick cushions and pillows, scented air and myriad delights of touch and taste.

Lulled and warmed by his abundant sensuality, hers bloomed. Though she had always been an earthy woman with a hearty sexuality, Catherine had never been one to indulge her sexual side. Now, however, at the very time when the intense irritations of menopause made her sleepless with night sweats and caused her joints to ache and her cheeks to flush beet-red as heat rose in a sudden wall of flame from her chest to the top of her head, she allowed her muscles to unclench and gave in to the seductions of satiety. Ever the rigidly self-disciplined German daughter of a Prussian officer, Catherine began, with Potemkin, to savor doing nothing, to sink deep into contented emptiness for hours at a

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time. Ever her mother's ugly duckling at heart, with Potemkin Catherine became the loveliest swan of all, restored to youth and hope by the sweetness of his wooing.

And always, along with the wooing, there was, at some point, mutual cogitation. Catherine was planning to prepare another fundamental document, as important and far-reaching as her law code. It was to be a statute reforming provincial government, addressing the corruption and laxity of the present system and installing a more accountable system in which police would maintain order, local officials would keep the roads in good repair, oversee schools, prisons and the workings of commerce, and facilitate the collection of taxes while dispensing justice with an even hand. Catherine had been reading, in a French translation, the six thick volumes of the great English jurist Blackstone ("Oh, his commentaries and me, we are inseparable," she remarked) and taking detailed notes. She talked to Potemkin about Blackstone's concepts, and how they differed from those of Montesquieu and from the thoughts that had flowed so volubly from the fertile brain of Diderot during his six-month seminar with the empress.