Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  Voinovich’s expedition was an Enlightened mixture of Potemkin’s scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm and purely imperial aggrandizement. The meagre expedition boasted just fifty infantrymen, 600 men in all, and Potemkin’s respected German-Jewish botanist Karl-Ludwig Hablitz, who probably wrote the unsigned account of the Prince’s Persian expedition in the Quai d’Orsay archive. Voinovich was unsuited to such a sensitive role, but the expedition was in any case too small and was now left to its own devices. Probably this was the result of one of the many compromises between Catherine’s caution and Potemkin’s imagination. By the time the expedition set off, both Empress and Prince were firmly concentrating on Tsargrad and Vienna rather than Askabad and Kandahar.

  Voinovich had been ordered to use ‘only persuasion’ by the Prince, but on arrival ‘he did precisely the opposite’. When he arrived on the other side of the sea and found Aga-Mohommed camped with his army, Voinovich proved he was as ‘bad a courtier as politician’. The Persian prince was still interested in a Russian trading post and even suggested that his nephew should lead a mission to Petersburg. Voinovich instead had the imprudence to establish a fort, with just twenty cannon, as if his 650 men could possibly defy a Persian army. While he gave fetes for the Persians and ostentatiously fired his cannons, he only managed to alarm the already suspicious locals, who heard that Suvorov was marching through Daghestan with 60,000 men. This piece of disinformation was probably the first British intrigue in the ‘Great Game’ and it worked. Aga-Mohommed decided to rid himself of these inept and obnoxious Russians.

  The village chief invited Voinovich and Hablitz to dinner. They had scarcely arrived before the house was surrounded by 600 Persian warriors. Voinovich and Hablitz were given a choice of losing their heads or evacuating the fort and sailing away without delay. They were right to choose the latter since Aga-Mohommed was capable of unbridled savagery: he later blinded the entire male population – 20,000 men – of a town that resisted him. He also managed the rare feat of being the only eunuch in history to found a dynasty: the Qajars, descended from his nephew, ruled Persia until early this century, when they were replaced by the Pahlavis. It took another century before Russia conquered Central Asia.24

  The flotilla sailed miserably for home. Potemkin must take the blame for this quixotic expedition that could easily have ended in catastrophe, yet it was his Byzantine style to run an alternative policy just in case anything went wrong in Vienna.25

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  It did not. Joseph agreed to sign the secret defensive treaty with the exchange of letters. For six months, Europe believed that the negotiations had collapsed but, secretly on 18 May, Catherine signed her letter to ‘My dear Brother’ – and Joseph reciprocated. She agreed that Russia would aid Austria against Prussia; but, more relevantly, for Potemkin, Joseph promised to defend Russia if it was attacked by the Turks – ‘I am obliged three months after…to declare war…’. Austria therefore underwrote Russia’s peace treaties with Turkey.26 This realignment of Russian policy was Potemkin’s personal triumph.

  Catherine and Potemkin enjoyed fooling the international community. French, Prussian and British envoys tossed bribes around to learn what was happening. Harris suspiciously noticed that ‘my friend’ was in ‘high spirits’ but ‘avoided every political subject’. Cobenzl, who knew everything of course, enjoyed himself too. ‘The whole affair’, he told his Emperor, ‘is continuing to be a mystery here for everyone except Prince Potemkin and Bezborodko.’27 It was not long before Joseph realized that Catherine usually got what she wanted. In spite of the priority of the Greek Project, she did not allow the Armed Neutrality to drop and persuaded both Prussia and Austria to sign. ‘What Woman wants, God gives, goes the proverb,’ mused Joseph, ‘and once in their hands, one always goes further than one wants.’ Catherine and Potemkin were exultant: Catherine was so excited by one flattering letter from Joseph that she actually blushed.

  The treaty remained secret. It was 25 June, a month later, before Harris first suspected that a treaty had been signed, thanks to a bribe of £1,600 to Bezborodko’s secretary, but amazingly the secret was kept for almost two years. Only Catherine, Potemkin and Bezborodko knew everything; Grand Duke Paul was not told. Panin withdrew to his Smolensk estates.28 The partners congratulated each other. Catherine saw herself and Potemkin as the mythical best friends of the Classical world – Pylades and Orestes. ‘My old Pylades’, she congratulated him, ‘is a clever man.’

  However, they now faced a challenge from Grand Duke Paul, who was profoundly sceptical about southern expansion and Austrian alliance. Aping his father, he remained a ‘Prussian’. In July, when Catherine invited the British doctor Baron Dimsdale, with his wife, to inoculate the young Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine against smallpox, Nikita Panin demanded the right to come back and supervise, a trick he had arranged with Paul. ‘If he thinks ever to be reinstated in his post of First Minister,’ Catherine snapped, ‘he is greatly deceived. He’ll never be anything in my Court other than a sick-nurse.’

  Catherine and Potemkin must have discussed how to protect their policy from Paul and, if possible, convert him to the Austrian cause. Why not send him and his wife on a Grand Tour to Vienna and Paris, avoiding old Frederick the Great in Berlin? If Catherine suggested it, the nervous Paul would regard it as a trick by Potemkin to remove him. Serenissmus was arranging the creation of his own kingdom, founding his first cities on the Black Sea and planning his nieces’ marriages. Paul could not be allowed to derail any of these schemes. Potemkin devised a solution.29

  Skip Notes

  * Even Frederick the Great called him ‘a cloud of boredom and distaste.’

  16

  THREE MARRIAGES AND A CROWN

  Or midst a lovely little orchard

  An arbour, where a fountain plays

  A sweet-voiced harp within my hearing

  My thoughts ensnares for divers pleasures,

  First wearies and then awakens my blood;

  Reclining on a velvet divan,

  A maiden’s tender feelings coddling

  I fill her youthful heart with love.

  Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

  Soon after the Austrian treaty was signed, Catherine put her consort’s plan into practice. She persuaded Prince Repnin, Panin’s nephew, to propose the Austrian trip to Paul, as if it came to from himself. Paul swallowed the bait and begged the Empress to let him go. After pretending to be reluctant, Catherine agreed – but she also worried about the inevitable blunders of her bitter, unstable son. ‘I dare to implore the indulgence of Your Imperial Majesty’, she asked Joseph, ‘for the…inexperience of youth.’ Joseph sent the invitation. Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were excited. They were even polite to Potemkin, who in his turn praised the Heir to everyone.1

  Panin had heard about this plan. ‘The old trickster’ no longer cared to conceal his sourness. He hurried back to Petersburg and stirred up Paul’s fears that the journey was a plot. Such trips could be dangerous for Russian princes: no one could forget that Peter the Great’s son Alexei was brought back from Vienna and tortured to death. All this was real to a tsarevich whose father had been murdered by his mother and who could trust few. Panin suggested that Berlin would be a better idea than Vienna – and then hinted that Paul would not only be excluded from the succession and possibly murdered but that his children would be taken from him. Paul became hysterical.

  At Tsarskoe Selo next morning, Sunday, 13 September, the Grand Duke and Duchess, both in a state of panic, refused to travel. They partly blamed the need to remain with the children after their inoculation. Catherine brought in Doctors Rogerson and Dimsdale to reassure them. The Court was in uproar for three days and the diplomats analysed how the Heir was undermining the Austrian rapprochement, defying the Empress and her Prince. Potemkin was so ‘perplexed, irresolute and ev
en despondent’ that he even considered letting Paul visit the wily fox of Berlin. Harris, who was with him in his apartments that Friday and believed the Austrian alliance gave Britain renewed hope, warned him that such weakness could bring him down. Potemkin paced up and down the room, ‘as in his manner’, without saying anything, and then bounded off to see the Empress. Catherine was no Peter the Great, but the refusal of Paul to obey her orders would have caused a serious succession crisis. The partners resolved to force Paul to go. When Potemkin rejoined Harris an hour later, everything was settled.

  The departure was a little tragedy of the life of royal families, played out in front of the Court, Paul’s entourage, and scores of horses and serfs. On 19 September, the Heir, travelling incognito as Comte du Nord, and his wife kissed their children goodbye. The Grand Duchess fainted away and was actually carried unconscious to the carriage. The Grand Duke followed his wife with an expression of abject terror. The Empress and her big guns, Potemkin, Prince Orlov and the traitorous Count Panin, bid him goodbye. As he climbed grimly into the carriage, Paul whispered something to Panin, who did not answer.

  The Heir pulled down the blinds and ordered the coachman to drive away fast. The next morning, Panin was dismissed.2

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  Serenissimus, savouring his political victory, was arranging the marriages of both of his single mistress–nieces, Sashenka and Katinka. On 10 November 1781, Katinka ‘the Venus’ – Ekaterina Engelhardt, with whom half the Court, including at various times both Catherine’s sons, Paul and Bobrinsky, were in love – married the sickly but rich Count Pavel Martynovich Skavronsky, in the Palace Chapel. Descended from the Livonian brother of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine I, Skavronsky was a sublime eccentric. Brought up in Italy, which he regarded as home, he suited Potemkin because he was a tolerant buffoon obsessed with music – a melomaniac who composed and gave concerts though he had no talent for music whatsoever. His servants were forbidden to talk and could only communicate in recitative. He gave all his orders in music and his visitors made conversation in the form of vocal improvisations. His singing dinner parties, ornamented by the sleepy coquettish Katinka, must have been zany.3 Catherine had misgivings about Skavronsky’s ability to please a woman – ‘he’s a bit silly and clumsy’, she thought, adding that she only cared because it was an issue that was ‘close to us’, meaning she regarded Potemkin’s nieces as semi-family. The Prince disagreed – Skavronsky’s weakness and wealth suited him.4

  Two days later, Sashenka married her uncle’s Polish ally, Grand Hetman (or Grand General) of the Polish Crown, Ksawery Branicki, aged forty-nine, a good-natured, self-made and ambitious ruffian who had made his career as King Stanislas-Augustus’ hard man. He was what Casanova called a dim but swashbuckling ‘Polish bravo’. Casanova duelled with Branicki in Warsaw for insulting his mistress, an Italian actress called La Binetti. Both were wounded – Branicki seriously – but became friends.5 When Ségur passed through Warsaw, Branicki appeared in his room in traditional Polish costume – red boots, brown robe, fur hat and sabre – and said, ‘Here are two companions for your journey,’ giving him two bejewelled pistols.6

  Branicki had fallen out with the King of Poland and, seeing his future as a Russian ally, found a kindred spirit in Serenissimus. They first met in Petersburg in 1775 and Branicki had been currying favour ever since, working for Potemkin in Poland. On 27 March that year, he wrote to tell ‘my dear General’ that ‘Poland has chosen me’ to deliver the news that Potemkin had received the certificate of indigenat or Polish noble status, the first step in his long game to become either duke of Courland or king of Poland, his escape route should Catherine die.7 Branicki’s marriage to his niece was obviously designed to be Potemkin’s family bridgehead in Poland.8

  The Empress supervised Alexandra’s wedding to the ‘Polish bravo’. The bride was taken to Catherine’s rooms that morning and ‘very richly dressed in some of the Empress’s jewels, put on by her own hands’. We have a description of a similar wedding of one of the Empress’s closest maids-of-honour, Lev Naryshkin’s daughter: ‘This lady’s dress was an Italian nightgown of a white silver tissue with hanging sleeves…and a very large hoop.’ The bride dined with the Empress. In church, the bride stood on ‘a piece of brocaded sea-green silk’. The couple held candles as crowns were held over their heads according to Orthodox tradition. They exchanged rings and the priest took a ‘piece of silk 2 or 3 yards long and tied their hands together’. Once the wedding was over there was a feast, after which the bride returned the Empress’s jewels and received 5,000 roubles.9

  At almost the same time, the fourth sister, ‘hopeless’ Nadezhda who had married Colonel P.A. Ismailov less splendidly in 1779, lost her husband and then married an ally of Potemkin’s, Senator P.A. Shepilev. The last niece, Tatiana, married her distant cousin Lieutenant-General Mikhail Sergeievich Potemkin, who was twenty-five years older than her, in 1785. Serenissimus nicknamed him ‘Saint’ for his good nature, and their marriage was happy until his early death.10

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  While Varvara and Alexandra ended their liaisons with Potemkin, Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya, as we will now call her, seems to have remained his mistress. ‘Things are on the same footing between her and her uncle as they were,’ Cobenzl told Joseph II. ‘The husband who is very jealous does not approve but does not have the courage to prevent it.’ Even five years later, Skavronskaya was still ‘more beautiful than ever and the favourite Sultana-in-chief of the uncle’.11

  Potemkin had Skavronsky appointed ambassador to Naples in 1784, which delighted him because it let him inhabit the land of maestros. But Skavronskaya was not interested in Italian opera, and Potemkin, while he ran several other mistresses, enjoyed his placid niece and did not wish to part from her. Finally she did go, but did not stay long. The husband sent notes to Serenissimus that are masterpieces of pitiful sycophancy: ‘I cannot succeed in expressing all the joy and gratitude with which I read what you have deigned to write to me and how much I have been moved to see that you deign to grant me your kindness and memory which I have consecrated my life to deserve and on which I dare suggest that no one in the world could place a higher value.’ More than that, Skavronsky desperately wrote to beg Potemkin to help him avoid diplomatic faux pas. The Prince must have chuckled as he read these letters, though he liked the sculptures Skavronsky sent him from Italy.12 Remarkably the Count fathered a family in between arias in Naples, including a daughter who was one day to be notorious in Europe.

  Skavronsky always took care to tell the Prince that his wife longed to rejoin him in Russia, which was probably true, because the dreamy ‘angel’ missed her Motherland. While she was in Naples, she kept a ‘woman slave’ under her bed who helped her get to sleep by ‘telling her the same story every night’. By day she was ‘perpetually idle’, her conversation was ‘as vacuous as you could imagine’, but she could not help but flirt.13 She became Naples’s leading coquette, high praise in a city that was soon to experience the wiles of Emma, Lady Hamilton. But when Potemkin’s successes gave him the chance to woo Europe, Katinka hurried back to share his limelight.

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  Countess Alexandra Branicka remained not just Potemkin’s confidante and his Polish agent of influence, but Catherine’s closest friend. While her spendthrift husband did his best to lose their fortune, she increased it prodigiously, which led to arguments with her uncle – but they were always reconciled.14 For the rest of her life she was often with Potemkin and the Empress – though she lived on her Polish and Belorussian estates. Her almost illegible letters to him are very affectionate: ‘My father, my life, I feel so sad to be so faraway…I ask you one mercy – don’t forget me, love me for ever, nobody loves you like me. My God, I’ll be happy when I’ve seen you.’15 She was widely respected. Contemporaries emphasized her good morals, ‘remaining a model of faithfulness all
her life’,16 something remarkable in those days, especially when she was married to an older Lothario. They had a large family. Perhaps she fell in love with Branicki’s endearing roughness.

  This troika of marriages sparked rows with the Empress about the medals and money bestowed on his family – ‘600,000 roubles, money, the Order of St Catherine for the future Grande Genérale [Alexandra] and the portrait [of the Empress] for the Princess Golitsyn [Varvara]’. Potemkin expected his nieces to be endowed by the state – were they not Catherine’s extended family? He got his way after weeks of rows. He certainly believed in caring for his own.

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  Paul left Tsarskoe Selo harbouring a visceral hatred for Serenissimus. Yet, like a monarch more than a minister, Potemkin tried to preserve a balance among the Court factions and foreign powers. In November, he talked to Harris about restoring Panin to a degree of power, presumably to balance him against the rising Bezborodko.17 One of his best features – and one lacking in many politicians, even democratic ones – was the absence of vindictiveness. Perhaps he simply did not want to see Panin humiliated any more. In any case, Potemkin’s triumph had broken Panin: he fell ill in October.

  Similarly, by early 1782, the confused Cobenzl was telling Joseph that Potemkin was leaning back towards Prussia. Both Cobenzl and Harris concluded their reports by confessing that they were unable to fathom the motives for Potemkin’s manoeuvres, but the Prince, while favouring Austria, continued to steer a middle passage between these two German monarchies for the rest of his life.18

  In Vienna, Paul appalled his hosts, particularly after Joseph confided the secret of the Austrian alliance. The Habsburg saw that the ‘feebleness and pusillanimity of the Grand Duke joined to falseness’ were unlikely to make this angry snub-nosed paranoid into a successful autocrat. Paul spent six weeks in Austria, where he lectured Joseph about his loathing for Potemkin. When he arrived in the Habsburg lands in Italy, he ranted to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph’s brother, about his mother’s Court and denounced the Greek Project and the Austrian alliance. Catherine’s plans ‘for aggrandizing herself at the expense of the Turks and refounding the empire of Constantinople’ were ‘useless’. Austria had obviously bribed that traitor Potemkin. When he came to the throne, Paul would arrest him and clap him in prison!19 The Habsburg brothers were surely relieved when the Comte du Nord departed for Paris.