Catherine the Great (46 page)
Read Catherine the Great Online
Authors: Simon Dixon
It had cost Catherine more than 7 million roubles to keep Khan Shagin Girey on the Crimean throne since 1774 and by the end of the decade she was beginning to question the value of her investment. The revolt that broke out in the khanate in the winter of 1780–81 threatened to topple her handsome puppet altogether. By May 1782, he had been forced to flee to the Russian port of Kerch, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov. After Potëmkin had been sent to quell the rebellion on 1 September, Catherine outlined the clearest statement so far of the ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II contemplating joint Austro-Russian action to deliver Europe from the Turk. But there was no hope of achieving her grandest ambitions just yet. Though her partner returned from the Crimea in late October convinced of the need for outright annexation–diplomats noticed that he was now a man with a mission–Catherine remained hesitant, anxious about the reaction of rival powers. She was brought round to his way of thinking in the spring of 1783. So long as France and Britain were paralysed by the War of American Independence, Russia had little to fear. The preliminary peace the two powers had signed in January was an added incentive not to delay. On 8 April, the empress issued a manifesto signalling her intention to annexe the strategically significant peninsula. That same month, her partner returned to the South, exasperating her this time by his prevarication. ‘I expected that the Crimea would be occupied by the middle of May,’ she complained, ‘and now here we are in the middle of July and I know nothing more about it than the Pope in Rome.’
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She did not have long to wait. Five days before this impatient letter was written, Potëmkin had already secured the prize. As usual, his jubilation was soon followed by physical collapse, prompting renewed anxieties in Catherine’s heart. It was to be November before he returned to St Petersburg. There, far from receiving a hero’s welcome, he found that his triumphs had merely intensified his rivals’ jealousies. Their resentments seemed to affect the empress, who treated him with unanticipated coolness. From then on, he was to spend more and more time in the South. On 2 February 1784, Catherine appointed him Governor General of the new province of the Tauride, incorporating the former Crimean
khanate. The tensions between her and the prince were partially resolved by a division of spoils which made him the effective ruler of some of the most productive lands in her empire.
No sooner had this crucial relationship been resolved than another old friendship, potentially no less difficult to handle, was reignited. After a long period of residence in Europe, during which her son had studied at the University of Edinburgh, Princess Dashkova returned to St Petersburg. Her reception at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July 1782 marked the beginning of a renaissance at Court that lasted, with varying degress of intensity, for the remainder of the decade.
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On 24 January 1783 Dashkova was unexpectedly named as director of the Academy of Sciences in succession to the ineffectual Sergey Domashnëv. As Isabel de Madariaga has written, ‘it was a tribute to Catherine’s perception and to her disregard for current prejudices, that she appointed a woman to take charge of an institution regarded as a male preserve. It was also a way of keeping a busybody busy.’
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Lacking nothing in nerve and determination, Dashkova set to work with her customary tactless vim. Led into the hall by the mathematician Leonhard Euler, the most distinguished scientist to work in eighteenth-century Russia, then in the final year of his life, she presided over her first meeting less than a week after her appointment. It took all the organisational ability she could muster to tackle the Academy’s mounting debts, revitalise its publishing activity, organise public lectures and reform its creaking administration.
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Impressed by the rapid results, Catherine appointed her later in the year to preside over a new Russian Academy tasked with producing a dictionary of the Russian language (its first six volumes were published between 1789 and 1794). It was in Dashkova’s new journal,
The Companion of Lovers of Russian Literature
(1783–4), that the empress published her first essays on Russian history, a subject that was to remain a more or less constant preoccupation for the rest of her life. But it was too much to hope that Dashkova’s return would be trouble free. It was not long before her ambitions for her son put her at loggerheads with Alexander Lanskoy.
En route to Mogilëv in 1780, Cobenzl had reassured Joseph II that Lanskoy belonged to ‘that species of favourite, who are frequently subject to change, have no influence on affairs, and who limit themselves to making their fortune and that of all those who belong to them’.
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The twenty-two-year-old major general certainly relished the trappings of office, strutting about at Court ‘dressed most
magnificently with a shoulder knot of fine brilliant diamonds’. True to form, he ‘leapt like a hind’ when he learned that Gustav III planned to invest him with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Polar Star.
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To Catherine, however, the dashing young Sashinka was no mere trinket. Her relationship with him was the closest she came to repeating her experience with Grigory Orlov, except that Lanskoy lacked Orlov’s streak of ruthless courage and both she and Potëmkin always treated him like a child in a gilded cage.
After Catherine’s roller-coaster ride with Potëmkin–‘the leading nail-biter in the universe’
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–life with Sasha Lanskoy must have seemed reassuringly undemanding. It was certainly less competitive. Catherine’s illegitimate son, Aleksey Bobrinsky, who paid regular visits to the Winter Palace during his time at the Cadet Corps, caught the prevailing balance of power in a note on a game of billiards in 1782: ‘She won the game, then started another one and began to win again. She told me to finish the game for her, and I won it.’
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Dashkova recalled a scene in which a petulant favourite allegedly tried to deter the empress from giving her a treasured bust he regarded as his own: ‘“But this bust is mine,” exclaimed Lanskoy in protest. “It belongs to me.”’
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Sasha, however, was a ‘golden individual’, accustomed to such ‘sacrifices’. It was presumably easier to regard them with equanimity when Quarenghi was not only designing a house for him at Sofia, but also working on a grandiose palace at Velë, the estate Catherine had bought for him in Pskov province. Sent there to plan the park, the Scot James Meader, who had designed the English Park at Peterhof, found that ‘the spot where the gardens are to be is very fine laid & planted by nature so that it only wants a little polishing & planting to complete it’.
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Lanskoy was just as keen to share the empress’s passion for engraved gemstones. She tried to stimulate his literary interests, too. As the sceptical French
chargé
noted in September 1780, ‘He has just been bought a library for 10,000 roubles, which he certainly will not read.’
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Lanskoy’s support was more emotional than intellectual. As she approached her mid-fifties, Catherine faced the loss of some of her closest companions. When she learned of General Bauer’s fatal illness in the autumn of 1782, she complained to Dr Rogerson that ‘there was scarcely a doctor who knew how to cure even the bite of a bed-bug’. Bauer’s death on 11 February prompted ‘great floods of tears for many days’.
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Though the carnival continued all around her–3130 nobles and merchants attended the masked ball at the Winter Palace on 17 February–it was almost three weeks before the empress could bear to break the news to Grimm, a sure sign of the depression which often afflicted her at times
of personal despair.
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Before making her annual confession at the end of the first week of the Great Fast, she quipped bleakly to her
souffre-douleur
that the ‘bovine medics’ had seen off ‘yet another person who has been close to me for thirty-three years’. Only Monsieur Tom, a favourite greyhound, was safe–‘he who has no use for any doctor’.
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At the end of March, Panin, who had had ‘one foot in the grave’ since his sacking in 1781, finally breathed his last. And worse was to come. Since the autumn, the empress had been nursing Grigory Orlov, whose descent into insanity after the death of his wife disturbed all who witnessed it. ‘One cannot see him in this state without pity,’ Zavadovsky admitted.
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Refusing to have her patient confined, Catherine tended him with unfailing compassion. ‘His wild and incoherent discourse ever affect her to tears,’ Harris learned, ‘and discompose her so entirely, that for the remainder of the day she can enjoy neither pleasure nor business.’
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Though the end, when it came in Moscow on 11 April, was a blessed release, it was no less shocking for that. On hearing the news at Tsarskoye Selo just before her fifty-fourth birthday, Catherine confessed ‘the most acute affliction’ to Grimm. In Orlov, she had lost ‘a friend and the man to whom I have the greatest obligations in the world…General Lanskoy is tearing himself apart to help me bear my grief, but that makes me melt even more.’
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‘It has been a black year for me,’ she admitted to Potëmkin when Field Marshal Golitsyn went to his grave in October: ‘It seems that whoever falls into Rogerson’s hands is already a dead man.’
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The one loss for which nothing had prepared her was the death of Lanskoy himself. In her mind, at least, everything seemed set fair for a long and happy future. Plunged into ‘the most acute grief’ by her bereavement, she made one of her frankest admissions to Grimm:
I thought I myself would die as a result of the irreparable loss I sustained, just eight days ago, of my best friend. I hoped that he would be my support in my old age: he applied himself, he profited, he acquired all my tastes. This was a young man whom I brought up myself, who was grateful, sweet and honest. He shared my troubles when I had them and rejoiced in my happiness. In a word, I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I am, that General Lanskoy is no more.
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Not yet twenty-six, Lanskoy died of what was probably diphtheria on Tuesday 25 June 1784. The tragedy rapidly became the stuff of legend. Following a raucous dinner in 1792 at which the guests cracked crude jokes about the empress’s insatiable
sexual appetite, John Parkinson, an Oxford don conducting a young English nobleman on the Grand Tour, wrote a ‘Note on Lanskoy’ that gives a fine sense of the fecundity of the Petersburg rumour-mill in the last years of Catherine’s life:
It is certain that after his death his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. The boy who gave him his coffee disappeared or died I believe the day after. All these circumstances lead [one] to suppose that he was poisoned. The Empress was inconsolable for his loss. No person but her faithful valet de chambre was suffered to approach her. Grief and the loss of sleep occasioned some spots to appear on her breasts which led her to fancy that she had caught the putrid fever of which they made her believe that L[anskoy] died. For four months afterwards, she kept herself shut up at Peterhoff. Her first reappearance was on occasion of the Polish Deputies; which gave Nariskin occasion to say ‘A plague on these Polish Deputies, I have not sat down to one of these murderous dinners before for an age.’
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Apparently inspired by Quarenghi, and demonstrably inaccurate in almost every respect, such a tissue of invention tells us little about the events of summer 1784. Yet, along with Princess Dashkova’s claim that Lanskoy’s ‘stomach burst open’ after his death, it has helped to prompt some impossibly romanticised accounts of the favourite’s demise.
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His corpse, it is alleged, was left to rot in the heat of the summer because Catherine could not bear to see it buried for more than a month.
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The truth is more prosaic, but none the less touching for that.
The favourite’s lifeless body was taken from the palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the house Quarenghi had designed for him in Sofia. From there it was borne ‘with due honour’ to Cameron’s new cathedral on the morning of Thursday 27 June and immediately interred in the neighbouring cemetery following a funeral service conducted by Metropolitan Gavriil.
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Bezborodko’s attempts not to trouble the empress with the details were thwarted by typically persistent questioning which, as he pointed out, ‘only made her grief the greater’. Catherine did not attend, having been confined to her apartments since Sunday. She, too, had developed alarming symptoms–a sore throat and a high fever–which prompted Dr Rogerson to draw two cups of ‘extremely inflamed’ blood on the day of the funeral. By then, he decided, she was out of danger. Prescribing salt to relieve the indigestion that had prevented her from sleeping, he confidently predicted a full recovery.
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In physical terms, he was right. Emotionally, however, Catherine took longer to recuperate. She shunned most visitors. Sasha’s mother, who
arrived in response to the empress’s letter of condolence in the hope of securing her family’s favour, was deflected onto a lady-in-waiting.
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Though Catherine could hardly refuse to receive Paul and his wife on Paul’s name day, the audience was brief and the subdued celebrations went ahead without her. Servants were confined to their everyday livery and the customary salute, music and toasts were all cancelled as a mark of respect.
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Soon the wider implications of the crisis were on everyone’s lips. Princess Dashkova would scarcely mourn the favourite, observed her younger sister: ‘They hated one another.’
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Personalities were scarcely the point, countered Alexander Vorontsov. Even those who had no connection with Lanskoy must regret his passing when they learned of its impact on Catherine: ‘The preservation of the empress is too interesting to us all.’
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Riding to the rescue from Kremenchug, Potëmkin arrived at Tsarskoye Selo on 10 July, having covered 760 miles in barely a week. He and Fëdor Orlov went straight to comfort their bereaved sovereign. On the following Sunday, they were joined briefly by Bruce, Osterman, Kirill Razumovsky, Ivan Chernyshëv and Lev Naryshkin. Catherine was persuaded to ride out in her carriage with a favourite lady-in-waiting, Maria Perekusikhina, but not even such close friends could draw her out of her self-imposed seclusion. She continued to dine alone, seeing few apart from Bezborodko, Potëmkin, Orlov and her confessor. Though she received further brief visits from Paul and Maria Fëdorovna, she avoided the traditional rituals during the Dormition Fast. By 18 August, she felt well enough to write a jocular letter to the Prince de Ligne, explaining (without mentioning Lanskoy) that she had immersed herself in work on her universal etymological dictionary. Anticipating Ligne’s next visit to Russia, she teased him about his son’s abortive flight in the Montgolfier balloon that tore open in mid-air on 19 January: