Secret Lives of the Tsars (18 page)

“When I began this letter I was happy and joyful, and my thoughts sped so quickly that I knew not what became of them,” the empress wrote in the missive she had been composing to Grimm. “It is no longer so; I am plunged in the keenest grief and my happiness has fled. I almost died myself from the irreparable loss I have just sustained, a week ago, of my best friend.… He applied himself, he learned much, he had acquired all my tastes. He was a young man whom I was educating, who was grateful, sweet-tempered and gentlemanly, who shared my troubles when I had any and rejoiced in my joys. In brief I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I write it, that General Lanskoy is no more.… My bedroom, which used to be so pleasant to me, has become an empty cave in which I drag myself about like a shadow.… I cannot set eyes on a human face without being choked with sobs so that I cannot speak. I can neither sleep nor eat. It wearies me to read, and to write is beyond my strength. I know not what is to become of me, but I do know that never in all my life have I been so wretched as since my best, kind friend has abandoned me. I opened my drawer, I found this sheet begun, I have written these lines, I cannot go on.”

In her grief, Catherine waited nearly a year—a relative eternity—she before felt ready to plunge into another affair, this time with a thirty-one-year-old nonentity named Alexander Ermolov. Like Zorich before him, Ermolov was stupid enough to tangle with Potemkin. Aligning himself with the powerful prince’s enemies, the foolish favorite accused him of misappropriating funds. Catherine was understandably incensed, but Potemkin maintained his grip over her. He bluntly denied the charges without deigning to explain himself and, to show his own displeasure, stormed out of the palace.

“Don’t worry,” he said to the Count de Ségur, “a child isn’t going to topple me, and I don’t know who dare.… I scorn my enemies too much to fear them.” Supremely confident of his value to the empress, Potemkin eventually barged into her apartments with an ultimatum: “Madame, you must choose between Ermolov and me and dismiss one or the other; so long as you keep that white Negro I shall not step foot in your palace.” There was really no choice, and the inconsequential Ermolov was sent off with the usual compensatory riches.

Potemkin was quick to replace him three days later with a smarter, better-looking Guards officer named Alexander Mamonov. Catherine, now fifty-seven, was smitten with her new man (whom she referred to as “the redcoat” because of the scarlet uniform he liked to wear to bring out his dark eyes) and wrote of him with the same frenzied ecstasy she always did in the first flush of fresh romance: “This Redcoat is so admirable, so witty, so gay, handsome, obliging and well-bred that you would do well to love him without knowing him.”

But by this time in her life, Catherine’s girlish passions were making her look increasingly silly; the snickering behind her back grew bolder and more abusive, but the empress
seemed not to notice. Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who accompanied Catherine and her young lover on an extended river tour of the freshly conquered Crimea,
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was bewildered by his fellow sovereign’s undignified behavior. “What I do not understand,” he remarked, “is how a woman who is so proud and so careful of her reputation can show such a strange weakness for the caprices of her young aide-de-camp Mamonov, who is really nothing but a spoiled child.”

Though the empress was thoroughly besotted with Mamonov, he was stultified by her, which was entirely understandable. After all, behind all the glitter and prestige that came with being the favorite, Mamonov was still a vigorous young man forced to follow around and bed an increasingly fat, wheezing older woman who found it difficult to make it up a flight of stairs. As one of his friends reported, “[He] considers his life a prison, is very bored, and supposedly after every public gathering where ladies are present, the Empress attaches herself to him and is jealous.”

To escape his clingy mistress, Mamonov began to ignore her nocturnal beckoning by pleading illness and instead launched a secret affair with someone closer to his own age—whom he then impregnated. Catherine was devastated, of course, and humiliated as well. Still, she played the magnanimous sovereign and blessed the union of the young couple. Behind the scenes, though, she raged.

“I have suspected him for eight months!” she exclaimed to her secretary. “He was avoiding me.… It was always because
he was having difficulty breathing that he had to keep to his room! Then lately he took to talking about qualms of conscience that pained him and made it impossible for him to continue our life together. The traitor! It was this other love, his duplicity that was suffocating him. But since he could not help himself, why didn’t he admit it frankly?… He cannot imagine what I have suffered.”

Potemkin, whose advice to the betrayed empress was “spit upon him,” quickly distanced himself from his protégé. “I never had any illusions about him,” he declared of Mamonov. “He is a mixture of indolence and egotism. This later trait made him the ultimate Narcissus. Thinking only of himself, he demanded everything without paying anything in return.”

Once the ex-favorite settled into the dull routine of marriage and fatherhood, he realized life in the empress’s gilded prison wasn’t quite so bad after all. He begged for his old place back, but by then Catherine II was preoccupied with her very last lover.

Physically, Platon Zubov was typical fare for the empress—“supple, muscular and well proportioned,” as Masson described him. But he wasn’t Potemkin’s man. Indeed, while the great prince was off fighting the Turks, the strikingly shallow, immensely greedy twenty-two-year-old Zubov slithered in, on his own initiative, and seduced the empress, thirty-eight years his senior. Soon enough, he would eclipse Potemkin entirely—not because he exceeded him in talent, for Zubov had precious little of that—but through the indulgence of an adoring empress in her dotage, who, for the first time, allowed statecraft to be entirely subordinated to pleasure. “I have come
back to life like a fly that has been numbed by the cold,” she gleefully wrote to Potemkin of her new discovery. (“A big fly of sixty,” wrote Troyat, “restless, buzzing and hungry.”)

The strutting new favorite—“resplendent in his new uniform, with a great plumed hat on his head,” as Masson reported—immediately began lording his new status, imposing his will, and shamelessly brokering his influence. The flatterers flocked to him. “Every day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, his antechamber was filled with ministers, courtiers, generals, foreigners, petitioners, seekers after appointments or favors,” reported Count Langeron. “Usually, they had to wait four or five hours before being admitted.… At last the double doors would swing open, the crowd would rush in and the favorite would be found seated before his mirror having his hair dressed, and ordinarily resting one foot on a chair or a corner of the dressing table. After bowing low, the courtiers would range themselves before him two or three deep, silent and motionless, in the midst of a cloud of powder.”

After their interminable wait outside his chambers, the seekers were fortunate if they were acknowledged by anything more than Zubov’s capuchin monkey, which ran screaming through the room and rummaging through their hair. “The old generals, the great men of the Empire, did not blush to ingratiate themselves with the least of his valets,” wrote Masson. “Stretched out in an armchair in the most indecent, careless attire, with his little finger in his nose and his eyes fixed vaguely on the ceiling, this young man with his cold, vain face, scarcely deigned to pay attention to those around him.”

And yet the infatuated empress believed that Zubov—or “the child,” as she called him—was a precious cherub. He has “the most innocent soul,” Catherine wrote to Potemkin, and is “without malice or treachery, modest, devoted, supremely
grateful.” Clearly Potemkin knew better, and as news of Zubov’s dangerous ascendency reached him, he abruptly left the front lines for St. Petersburg.

“Prince Potemkin arrived here four days ago, more handsome, agreeable, witty and brilliant than ever, and in the gayest possible humor,” Catherine wrote to Grimm; “that’s what a fine and glorious campaign does for a man, it puts him in a good mood.” The prince’s spirits darkened, though, when he realized that the reports of Zubov’s sensational rise were entirely accurate. And though the empress continued to show her “lion of the jungle” proper respect and esteem, the one-eyed giant was no longer master of Russia. He had been supplanted by “the child.”

In what was either a futile attempt to reassert his position, or a formal farewell to the empress he had loved and helped become “the Great”—perhaps both—Potemkin threw an extravagant ball at his Tauride Palace in the spring of 1791, the opulence of which had rarely been seen in the capital before. It was a grand success, in that the empress stayed until two in the morning, but at the end of the night it was Zubov trailing behind her as she left.

Dejected, Potemkin returned to the front, where he at least hoped to pursue an aggressive policy against the Turks. However, he arrived to find that Catherine had overridden all his designs and, following Zubov’s own policy, had ordered an immediate cessation of hostilities. Now the once-invincible prince was broken entirely, his proud spirit replaced by weakness and doubt. “The Prince was destroying himself,” reported Count Langeron. “I have seen him, during an attack of fever, devour a ham, a salted goose, and three or four chickens, and drink kvass, klukva [cranberry liquor], mead, and all sorts of wines.”

With no real sense of purpose, Potemkin left the peace conference, writing to Catherine, “Little Mother, gracious sovereign, I can no longer endure my torments. The only chance remaining for me is to quit this city [Jassey]; I have given orders that I be taken to Nikolayev [the town he founded in the Ukraine]. I do not know what will become of me. Your very faithful and very grateful subject—Potemkin.”

It was while traveling to Nikolayev in October 1791 that Potemkin fell ill again. He asked to be taken out of the carriage and laid in the grass to rest. And there he died, essentially in a ditch: the conqueror of new territory, the builder of cities, the man of genius who served an empress as lover, possible husband, and virtual co-sovereign.

“Once again, a terrible, crushing blow has fallen on my head,” Catherine wrote to Grimm in a long, despairing letter. “I regard Prince Potemkin as a very great man, who did not accomplish half of what he was capable of.” Yet no matter how powerfully she felt about the man she had just lost, Catherine’s tributes to him would have to remain private—on that Zubov insisted, no doubt keenly aware of how insignificant a specimen he really was compared to the great Russian he had replaced. Thus was Potemkin quietly laid to rest. “What is most extraordinary is that he has already been completely forgotten,” Count Feodor Rostopchin later wrote. “The generations to come will not bless his memory.”

With the towering prince gone, his pale shadow emerged more powerful than ever. “Count Zubov is everything here,” reported Rostopchin. “There is no other will but his. His power is greater than that of Potemkin. He is as reckless and incapable as before, although the Empress keeps repeating that he is the greatest genius the history of Russia has known.”

Indeed, Catherine remained enchanted with this colossal
ninny. At his insistence, she put him in charge of all foreign affairs,
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and decorated him with so many awards that Masson was prompted to quip that he looked like “a hawker of [ribbons] and trinkets at a fair.” The empress also turned over Potemkin’s apartments to Zubov, but there was little she could do to transfer his achievements.

“Potemkin owed almost all his greatness to himself,” wrote Masson; “Zubov owed his only to Catherine’s decrepitude. We watched him wax in power, wealth, prestige, in proportion as Catherine waned in activity, vigor and understanding.… He was obsessed with the desire to do everything, or seem to do everything.… His haughtiness was equaled only by the servility of those who hastened to prostrate themselves before him.… Everyone crawled at Zubov’s feet; he stood erect and thought himself great.”

So arrogant had Zubov become that he even had the audacity to hit on the wife of Catherine’s grandson, the future emperor Alexander I. And there was not much the royal couple could do about it. “My wife behaves like an angel,” Alexander confided to a friend. “But you must admit that it is exceedingly awkward to know how to conduct oneself toward Zubov.… If you treat him well, it is as if you approved of his love, and if you treat him coldly to discourage him, the Empress, who is ignorant of the situation, may be offended that
you are not sufficiently honoring a man whom she favors. It is extremely difficult to keep the middle course, as is necessary, especially before a public as malicious and as ready to do spiteful things as ours.”

What Zubov apparently failed to recognize as he preened and swaggered in the glow of imperial favor was the inescapable fact that his mistress’s remaining time was limited. And without her protection, he was nothing. Thus, when Catherine II was felled by a stroke in 1796, Zubov was in “despair … beyond comparison,” as one witness described him. With his power slipping away as quickly as the empress’s life, he stood by her bed sobbing uncontrollably.

Then, on November 17, 1796, Platon Zubov found himself the subject of a new sovereign—one he had been foolish enough to scorn and mock. (In one very public scene, for example, the future emperor Paul voiced his agreement with a point Zubov made one night at dinner. To this the favorite responded contemptuously, “What? Have I said something silly?”)

Just when it seemed severe retribution was in order, though, Emperor Paul showed himself to be rather magnanimous. He made a personal visit to the now-helpless Zubov and raised a toast to him. “I wish you as many happy days as there are drops in this glass,” Paul declared. It was a cruel ruse. Soon after, the emperor confiscated all Zubov’s property and sent him into exile. But Catherine the Great’s “child” would have the last laugh against her half-mad son.