Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

Grigory Grigorevich Orlov was handsome, tall and blessed, wrote an English diplomat, with ‘every advantage of figure, countenance and manner’.17 Orlov came of a race of giants*1 – all five brothers were equally gargantuan.18 His face was said to be angelic, but he was also the sort of cheerful bluff soldier everyone loved – ‘he was a simple and straightforward man without pretensions, affable, popular, good-humoured and honest. He never did an unkindness to anyone’19 – and was immensely strong.20 When Orlov visited London fifteen years later, Horace Walpole caught something of his oversized charm: ‘Orlov the Great or rather the Big is here…he dances gigantic dances and makes gigantic love.’21*2

  Orlov was the son of a provincial governor and not of wealthy higher nobility. He was descended from a Streltsy officer who was sentenced to beheading by Peter the Great. When it was his turn to die, Orlov’s grandfather stepped up to the reeking block and kicked the head of the man before him out of the way. The Tsar was so impressed with his swagger that he pardoned him. Orlov was not particularly clever – ‘very handsome’, wrote the French envoy Breteuil to his Minister Choiseul in Paris, ‘but…very stupid’. On his return in 1759, Orlov was appointed adjutant to Count Peter Shuvalov, Grand Master of Ordnance, the cousin of Potemkin’s university patron. Orlov soon managed to seduce Shuvalov’s mistress, Princess Elena Kurakina. It was Orlov’s luck that Shuvalov died before he could avenge himself.

  Early in 1761, Catherine and Orlov fell in love. After the slightly precious sincerity of Poniatowski, Grigory Orlov provided physical vigour, bearlike kindness and, more importantly, the political muscle that would soon be needed. As early as 1749, Catherine had been able to offer her husband the support of those Guards officers who were devoted to her. Now she received the support of the Orlov brothers and their merry band. The most impressive in terms of ability and ruthlessness was Grigory’s brother Alexei. He closely resembled Grigory, except that he was scar-faced and of ‘brute force and no heart’, the qualities that made the Orlovs such an effective force in 1761.22

  Orlov and his fellow Guardsmen discussed various daring plans to raise Catherine to the throne in late 1761 – though probably in the vaguest terms. The precise order of events is obscure but it was also around this time that young Potemkin first came into contact with the Orlovs. One source recalled that it was Potemkin’s reputation as a wit that attracted the attention of Grigory Orlov, though they shared other interests too – both were known as successful seducers and daring gamblers. They never became friends exactly, but Potemkin now moved in the same galaxy.23

  Catherine needed such allies. In the last months of Elisabeth’s life, she was under no illusions about Grand Duke Peter, who talked openly of divorcing Catherine, marrying his mistress Vorontsova and reversing Russia’s alliances to save his hero Frederick of Prussia. Peter was a danger to her, her son, her country – and himself. She saw her choices starkly:

  Primo – to share His Highness’s fate, whatever it might be; Secundo – tobe exposed at any moment to anything he might undertake for, or against, me; Tertio – to take a route independent of any such eventuality…it was a matter of either perishing with (or because of) him, or else saving myself, the children, and perhaps the State, from the wreckage…

  Just at the moment that Elisabeth began her terminal decline and Catherine needed to be ready to save herself ‘from the wreckage’ and lead a possible coup, the Grand Duchess discovered that she was pregnant by Grigory Orlov. She carefully concealed her belly, but, politically, she was hors de combat.

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  At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 25 December 1761, the Empress Elisabeth, now fifty, had become so weak that she no longer had the strength to vomit blood. She just lay writhing on her bed, her breathing slow and rasping, her limbs swollen like balloons, half filled with fluid, in the imperial apartments of the unfinished, Baroque Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The courtiers, bristling with hope and fear of what her death would bring them, were gathered around her. The death of a ruling monarch was even more public than a royal birth: it was a formal occasion with its own etiquette, because the demise of the Empress was the passing of sacred power. The pungence of sweat, vomit, faeces and urine must have overwhelmed the sweetness of candles, the perfume of the ladies and the vodka breath of the men. Elisabeth’s personal priest was praying, but she no longer recited with him.24

  The succession of the spindly, pockmarked Grand Duke Peter, now thirty-four and ever more uncomfortable with Russian culture and people, was accepted, though hardly with jubilance. There was already an undercurrent of anxiety about Peter and hope about Catherine. Many of the magnates knew the Heir was patently ill-suited to his new role. They had to make the appropriate calculations for their careers and families, but the key to survival was always silence, patience and vigilance.

  Outside the Palace, the Guards stood sentry duty in the freezing cold, tensely observing the transfer of power, proudly aware of their own role in raising and breaking tsars. The will to act existed especially among the daredevils around the Orlovs, who included Potemkin. However, Catherine’s relationship with Orlov, and especially the tightly guarded secret that she was six months pregnant, was known only to the inner circle. It was hard enough for private individuals to conceal pregnancy, yet alone imperial princesses. Catherine managed it even in the crowded sickroom of a dying empress.

  Elisabeth’s two veteran favourites, the genial, athletic Alexei Razumovsky, the Cossack choirboy-turned-Count, and the aesthetic, round-faced Ivan Shuvalov, Potemkin’s university patron, still only thirty-four, attended her fondly – and anxiously. Prince Nikita Trubetskoi, the bull-like Procurator-General of the Senate, watched on behalf of the older Russian nobility. The Heir, Grand Duke Peter, was nowhere to be seen. He was drinking with his German cronies outside the sickroom, with the lack of dignity and tact that would make him hated. But his wife Catherine, who half hated and half loved the Empress, was ostentatiously beside the deathbed and had been there, sleeplessly and tearfully, for two nights.

  Catherine was a picture of solicitous affection for her dying aunt and Empress. Who, admiring her lachrymose sincerity, would have guessed that a few years earlier she had mischievously quoted Poniatowski about the Empress thus: ‘Oh, this log! She simply exhausts our patience! Would that she die sooner!’ The Shuvalovs, the latest of a succession of intriguers, had already approached Catherine about altering the succession in favour of her and her infant son, Grand Duke Paul – but to no avail. All those intriguers had fallen or departed. Catherine alone survived, closer and closer to the throne.25

  The Empress became still. The gawky Grand Duke was summoned, as Elisabeth was about to die. He came at once. As soon as she died, the courtiers fell to their knees before Peter III. He left swiftly, heading straight for the Council to take control. According to Catherine, he ordered her to remain beside the body until she heard from him.26 Elisabeth’s ladies had already begun bustling around the body, tidying up the detritus of death, drying the sweat on her neck and brow, rouging her cheeks, closing those bright-blue eyes for the last time.

  Everyone was weeping – for Elisabeth had been loved despite her frivolities and cruelties. She had done much to restore Russia to its position as a great European power, the way her father had left his Empire. Razumovsky rushed to his room to mourn. Ivan Shuvalov was overcome with ‘hypochondriacal thoughts’ and felt helpless. The sturdy Procurator-General threw open the doors into the anteroom and announced, with tears rolling down his old face, ‘Her Imperial Majesty has fallen asleep in God. God save Our Most Gracious Sovereign the Emperor Peter III.’ There was a murmur as they hailed the new reign – but the Court was filled with ‘moans and weeping’.27 Outside, the Guards on duty ‘looked gloomy and dejected. The men all spoke at once but in a low voice…That day [thus] wore an almost sinister aspect with grief painted on every face.’28

  At 7 p.m., Senators, generals and courtiers swore alleg
iance to Peter III. A thanksgiving ‘Te Deum’ was sung. While the Metropolitan of Novgorod solemnly lectured the new Emperor, Peter III was beyond himself with glee and did not conceal it, behaving outrageously and ‘playing the fool’.29 Later the 150 leading nobles of the Empire gathered for a feast in the gallery to toast the new era, three rooms from the chamber where the imperial cadaver lay. The weeping Catherine, who was both a woman of sensibilité and a cool-hearted political player, acted her part. She mourned the Empress and went to sit beside the body three days afterwards. By then, the overheated rooms must have been thoroughly rank.30

  In Prussia, Russian troops had just taken the fortress of Kolberg and were occupying East Prussia, while in Silesia another corps was advancing with units of Russia’s Austrian allies. The destruction of Frederick the Great was imminent. The road to Berlin was open. Only a miracle could save him – and the death of Elisabeth was just that. Peter ordered an immediate halt and opened peace talks with an astonished, relieved King of Prussia. Frederick was willing to offer East Prussia to Russia, but even this was not necessary.*3 Instead, Peter prepared to start his own private war against Denmark, to win back Schleswig for his German Duchy of Holstein.

  At Elisabeth’s funeral on 25 January 1762, Emperor Peter III, in high spirits, invented a game to make the day pass more quickly: he loitered behind the hearse, let it advance for thirty feet and then ran after it to catch up, dragging the elderly courtiers, who had to hold his black train, along behind him. ‘Criticism of the Emperor’s outrageous behaviour spread rapidly.’

  His critics naturally looked to his wife. In the very hour of Elisabeth’s death, Catherine received a message from Prince Kirill Dashkov of the Guards which said: ‘You have only to give the order and we will enthrone you.’ Dashkov was another of a circle of Guardsmen including heroes of the Seven Years War like the Orlov brothers. The pregnant Catherine discouraged treason. What is remarkable about her eventual coup was not that it was successful, because so much of a conspiracy depends on chance, but that it was already fully formed six months earlier. Catherine somehow managed to prevent it blossoming before she had recovered from her confinement.

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  It was the new Emperor himself who unconsciously decided both the timing and the intensity of the conspiracy. In his reign of barely six months, Peter contrived to alienate virtually all the major forces of Russian political society. Yet his measures were far from barbarous, though often imprudent. On 21 February 1762, for example, he abolished the feared Secret Chancellery – though its organs survived and were concealed as the Secret Expedition under the aegis of the Senate. Three days earlier, the Emperor had promulgated his manifesto on the freedom of the nobility, which liberated the nobles from Peter the Great’s compulsory service.

  These measures should have won him some popularity, but his other actions seemed deliberately designed to alienate Russia’s most powerful interests. The army was the most important: during the Seven Years War, it had defeated Frederick the Great, raided Berlin and brought Prussia’s awesome military machine to the very edge of destruction. Now Peter III not only made peace with Prussia but also arranged to lend Frederick the corps that had originally aided the Austrians. And it got worse: on 24 May, Peter issued his ultimatum to Denmark, on behalf of Holstein, that was calculated to lead to a war, quite unconnected to Russian interests. He decided to command his armies in person.

  Peter mocked the Guards as ‘Janissaries’ – the Turkish infantrymen who enthroned and deposed Ottoman sultans – and decided to disband parts of them.31 This redoubled the Guards’ conspiracies against him. Sergeant-Major Potemkin himself, who already vaguely knew the Orlovs, now demanded to join the plot. This is how it happened. One of the Orlov set, a captain in the Preobrazhensky Guards, invited a university friend of Potemkin’s, Dmitri Babarykin, to ‘enter their society’. Babarykin refused – he disapproved of their ‘wild life’ and Grigory Orlov’s affair with Catherine. But he confided his distaste to his university friend. Potemkin ‘on the spot’ demanded that Babarykin introduce him to the Preobrazhensky captain. He immediately joined the conspiracy.32 In his first recorded political act, this Potemkin rings true – shrewd, brave, ambitious and acting on the emotional impulse that was to be his trademark. For a young provincial, it was truly a stimulating moment to be a Guardsman.

  Meanwhile Peter promoted his Holsteiner family to major positions. His uncle (and Catherine’s) Georg-Ludwig of Holstein-Gottorp was appointed member of the Council, colonel-in-chief of the Horse-Guards, and field-marshal. This Georg-Ludwig had once flirted with a teenage Catherine before she left for Russia. By coincidence, when he arrived from Holstein on 21 March, Prince Georg-Ludwig was assigned Sergeant-Major Potemkin as his orderly.33 Potemkin was not shy in pushing himself forward: this position ensured that, as the regime unravelled, he was well placed to keep the conspiracy informed. His immaculate horsemanship was noted by Prince Georg-Ludwig, who had him promoted to Guards full sergeant. Another Holstein prince was named governor-general of St Petersburg and commander of all Russian troops around the Baltic.

  Lastly the Empress Elisabeth had agreed to secularize much of the lands of the Orthodox Church, but early in his reign, on 21 March, Peter issued a ukaz, an imperial decree, to seize the property.34 His buffoonery and disrespect at Elisabeth’s funeral had displayed contempt for Orthodoxy – as well as a lack of manners. All these actions outraged the army, alarmed the Guards, insulted the pious, and wasted the victories of the Seven Years War.

  Such was the anger in Petersburg that Frederick the Great, who most benefited from Peter’s follies, was afraid that the Emperor would be overthrown if he left Russia to command the Danish expedition.35 To anger the army was foolish, to upset the Church was silly, to outrage the Guards was simply idiotic, and to arouse all three was probably suicidal. But the plot, suspended at Elisabeth’s death because of Catherine’s pregnancy, could not stir until it had a leader. As Peter himself was aware, there were three possible claimants to the throne. In his unfortunate and clumsy way, the Tsar was probably planning to remove them from the succession, one by one – but he was too slow.

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  On 10 April 1762, Catherine gave birth to a son by Grigory Orlov, named Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, her third child. Even four months into Peter’s reign only a small circle of Guardsmen were aware of Catherine’s relationship with Orlov – her friend Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, a player in the coup and wife of one of her Guards supporters, did not know. Peter certainly acted as if he was in the dark. This gives us a clue to how the conspiracies remained undiscovered. No one was informing him. He was unable to use the secret powers that autocrats require.36

  Catherine had recovered from her confinement by early May, but she still hesitated. The drunken Emperor boasted ever more loudly that he would divorce her and marry his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova. This concentrated Catherine’s mind. She confirms to Poniatowski in her letter of 2 August 1762 that the coup had been mooted for six months. Now it became real.37

  Peter’s ‘rightful’ successor was not his wife but his son Grand Duke Paul, now aged six: many of the conspirators joined the coup believing that he would be acclaimed emperor with his mother as a figurehead regent. There were rumours that Peter wanted to force Saltykov to admit that he was Paul’s real father so that he could dispense with Catherine and start a new dynasty with Vorontsova.

  It is easy to forget that there was another emperor in Russia: Ivan VI, buried alive in the bowels of Schlüsselburg, east of Petersburg on the shore of Lake Ladoga, since being overthrown by Elisabeth as a baby in 1741, was now over twenty. Peter went to inspect this forgotten Tsar in his damp dungeon and discovered he was mentally retarded – though his answers sound relatively intelligent. ‘Who are you?’ asked Emperor Peter. ‘I am the Emperor,’ came the reply. When Peter asked how he was so sure, the prisoner said he knew it from the Virg
in and the angels. Peter gave him a dressing gown. Ivan put it on in transports of delight, running round the dungeon like ‘a savage in his first clothes’. Needless to say, Peter was relieved that at least one of his possible nemeses could never rule.38

  Peter himself transformed the plot from a few groups of daredevil Guardsmen into a deadly coalition against him. On 21 May, he announced he would leave Petersburg to lead his armies in person against Denmark. While he made arrangements for his armies to begin the march west, he himself left the capital for his favourite summer palace at Oranienbaum near Peterhof, whence he would set off for war. Many soldiers did not wish to embark on this unpopular expedition.

  A couple of weeks earlier, Peter had managed to light the fuse of his own destruction: at the end of April, the Emperor held a banquet to celebrate the peace with Prussia. Peter was drunk as usual. He proposed a toast to the imperial family, thinking of himself and his Holstein uncles. Catherine did not stand. Peter noticed and shouted at her, demanding to know why she had neither risen nor quaffed. When she reasonably replied that she was a member of the family too, the Emperor shrieked, ‘Dura!’ – ‘Fool!’ – down the table. Courtiers and diplomats went silent. Catherine blushed and burst into tears but regained her composure.

  That night, Peter supposedly ordered his Adjutant to arrest Catherine so that she could be packed off to a monastery – or worse. The Adjutant rushed to Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who grasped the folly of such an act. Peter’s uncle, whom Potemkin served as orderly, persuaded him to cancel the order.

  Catherine’s personal and political existence as well as the lives of her children were specifically threatened. She had little choice but to protect herself. During the next three weeks, the Orlovs and their subalterns, including Potemkin, canvassed feverishly to raise the Guards.39