Catherine the Great (50 page)

On 22 April, the day after publishing her manifesto on duels on her fifty-eighth birthday, Catherine set out at four in the afternoon on board a Roman-style galley, commissioned by Potëmkin, designed by Samuel Bentham and decked out in red and gold. On 16 May, Vice Admiral Peter Ivanovich Pushchin, who had masterminded every one of her cruises since 1767, was invested with the Order of St Alexander Nevsky.
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Wending its leisurely way downriver toward the cataracts, the flotilla made frequent stops at picturesque settlements where the empress was greeted by crowds of well-dressed peasants, all carefully stage-managed by Potëmkin and his lieutenants. But it would be wrong to suppose that these ‘Potëmkin villages’–a byword ever since for fraudulent attainments–were cardboard silhouettes, deliberately erected to hoodwink a gullible empress. That was a rumour circulated by the prince’s enemies even before her departure from St Petersburg.
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In fact, Catherine was fully complicit in the theatricality of the cruise, conscious of being the star of an elaborate show.
Naturally there were signs of haste in many of the new buildings she saw, but most of her companions chose, like Ségur, to emphasise the scale of the achievements that had been made in a short time. The empress caught the balance nicely by describing Kherson–then a town of 1200 stone buildings and a population of around 50,000, including 5000 convicts–as ‘very fine, for a six-year-old adolescent’.
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It was certainly a different scene from the one that had greeted Bobrinsky and his tutor in 1783, when there had been ‘very few buildings in the town itself’.
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Catherine reached her principal naval base on the Dnieper estuary on 12 May. There had apparently been no stirring of emotion at her meeting with her former lover, Stanislaw Poniatowski. To the king’s evident chagrin, their interview at Kaniev on 25 April was brief indeed. She not only refused the Polish alliance that Potëmkin had wanted her to make, but determined to press on with her journey without even attending the ball on which Poniatowski had lavished a small fortune. It was more than twenty-five years since they had seen each other. Now, urged on by Potëmkin’s most influential critic, Alexander Vorontsov, she had a more important ally to impress.
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While the Caucausus reminded Joseph II of the Alps, Catherine and her image-makers invented complex layers of overlapping symbolism which portrayed the Crimean peninsula simultaneously as an Edenic paradise, an exotic Orient and a new Greece, complete with Greek place names and Greek Orthodox bishops, with Catherine cast in the role of Iphigenia in Tauride.
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At the khan’s palace at Bakhchisaray, she heard the imams calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. At Inkerman, overlooking the harbour at Sevastopol, she reviewed the fleet with the emperor. Simferopol and Karazubazar were further exotic destinations on their itinerary. Catherine contributed to the prevailing atmosphere of unreality by collaborating on an ‘Authentic relation of a journey overseas that Sir Léon the Grand Equerry would have undertaken in the opinion of some of his friends’. Written before her departure from St Petersburg, this was a fantasy in which Lev Naryshkin, blown ashore off Constantinople in the sort of preposterous storm that featured widely in eighteenth-century adventure stories, met the Sultan before sailing back to Kronstadt, where he narrowly escaped drowning and had to be rescued by Admiral Greig’s Newfoundland dogs.
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Catherine herself returned to St Petersburg by land, making the long trek north in the heat of the summer via Poltava, where Potëmkin, who was henceforth allowed to call himself ‘Tavrichesky’ (‘of the Tauride’), staged a re-enactment of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes in 1709. Then came Kharkov, Kursk, Orël and Tula, where the empress was too exhausted to attend
the nobles’ ball.
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Having arrived at Kolomenskoye late on 23 June, she made her entry into the old capital on the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession. Tuesday 29 June, the feast of SS Peter and Paul, was Archbishop Platon’s fiftieth birthday. During the service at the Dormition Cathedral, the empress surprised him by instructing her confessor to address him as ‘metropolitan’, the most senior office in the Russian Orthodox Church. Platon emerged from the altar to bow to her in acknowledgement of his unexpected promotion.
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Next morning, she drove out to Kuskovo to be fêted by Count Nikolay Sheremetev, Count Peter’s son and heir, who had been planning her reception since the previous autumn. ‘The money is flowing like water,’ he told his St Petersburg estate manager on 17 May, announcing that he was ‘building quite a lot’. Apart from the obligatory triumphal arches, the most elaborate project was a new 150-seat theatre, designed by Charles de Wailly, the architect of the French royal opera at Versailles, in conjunction with Louis XVI’s chief theatrical machinist. Catherine sat on a gilded throne in the count’s box for a performance of Grétry’s neoclassical comic opera
The Marriage of the Samnites
, a celebration of heroic virtue and loyalty to family and state. The heroine was played by Sheremetev’s wife, the former serf Praskovya Kovalyova, who was presented to the empress at the end. Conscious of the effort her host had made, Catherine reassured the expectant Sheremetev that it was the most magnificent performance she had ever seen.
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Six months later, the voyage to the South seemed no more than ‘a dream’.
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Aggravated by Potëmkin’s aggressive posturing in the Crimea, the Turks had imprisoned Catherine’s ambassador in Constantinople soon after her return to St Petersburg. This was the traditional Ottoman way of declaring war. Fortified by her implacable faith in Potëmkin, Catherine expected her troops to make a better start to the campaign than they had in 1768. But her partner was in no fit state to lead the charge. Exhausted by the summer’s celebrations and alarmed by a diarrhoea epidemic at Kherson (Catherine ordered him to cure the sick with rice and a tot of fortified wine), he sank into a debilitating bout of hypochondria. ‘In truth, I’m not sure I can stand this for long,’ he warned on 16 September. ‘I can neither sleep nor eat…When can I retire or cut myself off so that the world will hear of me no more?!’ Eight days later, when a storm threatened to destroy his precious fleet at Sevastopol, he seemed a broken man: ‘My mind and spirit are gone. I have requested that my command be transferred to another.’ Catherine
initially responded to such wailing with a combination of encouragement and reassurance that prompted the prince to acknowledge that ‘you genuinely write to me like my own mother’. By early October, however, tolerance had given way to irritation. Her affairs demanded unshakeable patience, she chided him, whereas he was ‘as impatient as a five-year-old’. She was far from serene herself: ‘There is one way to lessen my anxiety,’ she declared on 9 October: ‘write more often and inform me about the state of affairs. I await the promised details with impatience. And don’t forget to write to me about Kinburn.’
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In the event, the details were unexpectedly encouraging. Potëmkin recovered both his health and his energy; his fleet, though damaged, had escaped destruction; and, thanks to General Suvorov, Kinburn, the Russian fort at the mouth of the Dnieper, successfully resisted the bombardment to which it had been subjected since August. The respite, however, was only temporary. Now it was Catherine’s turn to suffer: she complained of sickness and headaches throughout the winter and was so ill in the spring that on 11 April 1788, just before her fifty-ninth birthday,
The Times
prematurely announced her death. Neither the Russians nor the Austrians, who belatedly came to Catherine’s aid in February 1788, made much progress that summer. Joseph II proved a limited general and his troops were stymied by disease. The mercurial Potëmkin had to be dissuaded from abandoning the Crimea to the Turks: ‘When you are sitting on a horse,’ Catherine pointed out, ‘there is no point in dismounting and holding on by the tail.’ Instead, he committed himself to a lengthy siege of Ochakov, the Turkish fort opposite Kinburn, whose 24,000-strong garrison trapped the Russian fleet in the Dnieper estuary. Thanks to an attack by gunboats armed by Samuel Bentham, the Turks lost fifteen ships in two days in June (Catherine donned naval uniform for the exultant Te Deum at Tsarskoye Selo). Yet attempts in the following month to blockade the fort proved inconclusive and heavy snow in November prevented Potëmkin from delivering Ochakov to the empress as a gift on her name day. Not until 6 December did he launch a full-scale attack. Ten days later, Catherine learned of the fall of the fortress, the main aim of her strategy since the beginning of the conflict. ‘I grasp you by the ears with both hands and kiss you in my thoughts, dearest friend.’
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Plagued with headaches, she had been sleepless for days. Now she caught a chill at the Te Deum in celebration of the victory, complaining to Khrapovitsky of an unbearable backache that left her tossing and turning until four in the morning.
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It had not been an easy year. That summer, while Catherine was diverted by her campaign against the Turks, Gustav III had grasped the
opportunity to limit Russian interference in Swedish politics by bombarding the Russian fort at Nyslott on 22 June. (Since his constitution prevented him from appearing to be the aggressor, the attack was launched in pseudo-retaliation against a raid into Swedish territory by a ‘Cossack’ band from Russian Finland, alleged at the time to be Swedish troops wearing costumes borrowed from the royal opera in Stockholm.)
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Admiral Greig came to the rescue for one last time by holding off the Swedish fleet at a brutal stalemate off the island of Hogland on 6 July. Catherine, who sent Dr Rogerson to minister to her feverish admiral, mourned Greig’s death at Reval on 15 October as a ‘great loss to the state’ and paid for his funeral. By then, she herself had survived one of her nerviest summers under threat of a Swedish descent on her palace. St Petersburg resembled an armed camp as regiment after regiment assembled for its defence. ‘This is a difficult time for me,’ Catherine admitted to Potëmkin on 3 July. Yet even an enervating heatwave failed to blunt her competitive edge. ‘The heat was so great here,’ she wrote a fortnight later, ‘that the thermometer registered over 39 and a half degrees in the sun. In Portugal they can’t remember anything higher than 44.’
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Over the following winter, a tearful empress faced divisions within her own Council, as her determination to maintain the Austrian alliance and to prop up King Stanislaw in Poland (a policy supported by Bezborodko, Zavadovsky and Alexander Vorontsov) came under pressure from those who favoured a compromise with Prussia at the Poles’ expense. By far the most important of these was Potëmkin himself, who had built up his Polish estates to the point where he owned 112,000 serfs. In the spring of 1789, having sent Catherine a map outlining his plans for the occupation of three Polish provinces (Bratslav, Kiev and Podolia), he travelled to St Petersburg in a vain attempt to persuade Catherine to change her course. While he returned to the South in May, the empress renewed her Austrian alliance in a further exchange of letters with Joseph II.
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She did so against a background of personal crisis when it emerged that ‘Redcoat’ Mamonov had betrayed her with one of her maids of honour, Princess Darya Shcherbatova. As her courtiers noticed, the cracks had been opening in Catherine’s relationship with her favourite for some months, prompting tears and bad temper. She spent her sixtieth birthday–one of the most significant state occasions in the Court calendar–closeted in her rooms.
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Mamonov’s request for permission to marry his lover was the ultimate blow. As she confessed in a self-styled ‘apophthegm’ to Potëmkin on 29 June, ‘I nearly fell over, so great was my surprise, and had still not recovered when he came into my room, fell at my feet and confessed his whole intrigue.’
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Despite copious tears, meticulously
recorded by Mamonov’s friend Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine betrothed the couple herself and sent them to Moscow. This time there was to be no lonely interlude between lovers. On the day of Mamonov’s dismissal, her friend Anna Naryshkina introduced her to the young man who was to be her last and youngest favourite. The swarthy Platon Zubov, thirty-eight years Catherine’s junior, was promptly dubbed ‘the little black one’ in the apophthegm to Potëmkin, which outlined all the usual virtues of gentleness, eagerness and modesty (a singular misapprehension of the new favourite’s nature).

It was in Zubov’s company that the empress faced the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789. Though no friend of sedition, Catherine initially had little reason to fear events in Paris, and indeed could reasonably hope to profit from French weakness in the international arena. Her subjects could read about the fall of the Bastille in the Russian newspapers (whose circulation increased in response to such exciting developments), and many also had access to the range of French revolutionary pamphlets and news-sheets which circulated freely in St Petersburg and Moscow.
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One reason for the empress’s confidence was the good news she received from the Southern front, where Potëmkin and General Suvorov were enjoying a triumphant summer on the Bug and the Dniester. After 15,000 Turks were slaughtered on the River Rymnik on 11 September, Suvorov was made a count of both the Russian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, and allowed to call himself ‘Rymniksky’ at Potëmkin’s suggestion.
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Wider European developments, however, prevented Catherine from converting military victories into a peaceful settlement on her own terms. British hostility was an increasing hazard for her, and so were Prussia’s ambitions in Poland. ‘We are stroking the Prussians,’ she told Potëmkin in October 1789, ‘but how our heart can endure their words and deeds which are filled with rudeness and abuse, God alone knows.’
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Russia’s international position was still critical when Radishchev’s
Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow
appeared in May 1790. A book that criticised ‘the murder called war’ was bound to catch Catherine on the raw. ‘What do they want?’ she asked in a splenetic marginal comment. ‘To be left defenceless to fall captive to the Turks and Tatars, or to be conquered by the Swedes?’ A noble writer twenty years her junior, Radishchev had grown up as a page at the empress’s Court and had been one of the first Russian students selected to study at Leipzig at her government’s expense.
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Now he had betrayed her trust with a fictional travelogue in the mould of Sterne’s
Sentimental Journey.
His book launched a stinging attack on the evils of favouritism and a bitter critique of the
inhumanity of slavery, derived from Radishchev’s reading of Raynal’s
History of the Two Indies
and now applied to Russian serfdom in particular. The empress was appalled. ‘The purpose of this book is clear on every page,’ she retorted in notes which subsequently provided the basis for the interrogation conducted by Sheshkovsky, the prosecutor who later investigated Novikov. ‘Its author, infected and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and for the authorities, to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government.’ If Radishchev’s views on serfdom made him a rebel worse than Pugachëv, then the chapter on corruption, levelled primarily at Potëmkin (identifiable by his craving for oysters), revealed the purpose of the whole book: ‘It is a safe bet that the author’s motive in writing it was this, that
he does not have entrée to the palace
. Maybe he had it once and lost it, but since he does not have it now but does have an evil and consequently ungrateful heart, he is struggling for it now with his pen.’ As Catherine sensed, the point of Radishchev’s book could be derived from the very direction of travel of his fictional narrator–towards the heart of old Muscovy and away from the false foreign values of her northern
Residenzstadt
. ‘Our babbler is timid. If he stood closer to the sovereign, he would pipe a different tune. We have seen a lot of such humbugs, especially among the schismatics.’
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Although Catherine eventually commuted Radishchev’s death sentence to exile in Siberia, where his passage was smoothed by his embarrassed patron, Alexander Vorontsov, no one could miss the increasing signs of a significant change of heart on the empress’s part–a mounting hostility to the intellectual independence of the very writers whom she had done so much to encourage in the earlier part of her reign. Its twilight years would be recalled as a period of intellectual repression.