Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER NINE

PAUL, PUGACHËV AND POTËMKIN 1772–1775

Five years of war and plague would have taken their toll on any eighteenth-century empire. For Catherine, they were particularly ominous. If her son, now rapidly approaching the age of majority, were to become the figurehead for ‘patriotic’ nobles alarmed by the damage inflicted on their estates by Russian troops en route to the battlefields, the empress’s position would be no more secure than Peter III’s had been in the face of her own claims to represent the national interest. The plague afflicting Moscow made such dangers all the more acute in a city where Paul’s popularity had always been higher than hers.1 To unsettle her further, Catherine lost faith in Grigory Orlov, her constant companion since the last years of the reign of Elizabeth. Against Panin’s better judgement, Grigory had been sent to conduct the peace negotiations at Fokshany in May 1772. Shortly after his departure, Catherine learned that he had been unfaithful. Now the foreign ambassadors, whose reports on the rivalry between Panin and the Orlovs had so far been little more than whistling in the dark, suddenly found themselves at the heart of an extended crisis that was to transform the empress’s personal life, and with it the politics of her Court.

The story began to unfold on 1 August 1772, three days after Naryshkin’s celebrations at Leventhal. In the heat of the summer, Catherine had been forced to escape ‘suffocation’ at Tsarskoye Selo by spending longer than usual at the ‘detestable, hateful’ Peterhof.2 Courtiers sweetened the pill by staging an amateur performance of her comedy O, these times! on 30 July, when 227 tickets were collected at the door of the opera house. This brought to an end a week of festivities by the seaside. Yet even as the atmosphere darkened at the onset of the Dormition Fast, when the empress followed the icons to a sanctification service on the upper pond, there was news to keep her cheerful.3 As she sailed that evening to visit a new summer house at Oranienbaum, she left her Court humming at the appointment, as gentleman of the bedchamber, of Alexander Vasilchikov, a previously unnoticed lieutenant in the Horse Guards who had commanded the sentries at Tsarskoye Selo. ‘It is true,’ Solms reported, ‘that to diminish somewhat the surprise of such an extraordinary promotion of a man who has no connection with the Court, the empress has simultaneously appointed four more…But everyone knows perfectly well that these were merely a bridge for the other to cross.’4 By the time the Crimean Khan’s emissary, Kalga Sultan, came to take his leave on 12 August, the twenty-eight-year-old Vasilchikov was already a fixture in the empress’s intimate circle.5 While they spent the summer at Marly and the Dutch cottage at Peterhof, with the occasional hunt on horseback after the Court had returned to Tsarskoye Selo, Orlov charged back from Moldavia only to find himself diverted to Gatchina on the pretext of quarantine regulations. In any case, he was too late: on 30 August, the feast of St Alexander Nevsky, Vasilchikov was promoted to Adjutant General, the office now firmly associated with the role of favourite. Sometime in early September, he moved into the palace.

As the recently arrived British ambassador straightaway realised, ‘the advancement of a new minion’ was bound to ‘occasion some change’.6 Yet neither Sir Robert Gunning nor his fellow diplomats fully anticipated what was to follow. They watched transfixed as Grigory held out for a satisfactory redundancy package in negotiations conducted by his brother Ivan. In addition to permission to use the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, conferred on him in 1763, he finally settled at the end of September for an annual pension of 150,000 roubles; a further 100,000 to do out Rinaldi’s Marble Palace, still under construction; the run of the empress’s other palaces until it was finished; two silver services (one for everyday use, the other for special occasions); and more than double the number of serfs on the estates he owned jointly with his brother Aleksey. For her part, Catherine bore no grudges. Grigory was not to be blamed for the failure of the peace conference, and although she offered, in a veiled reference to his unfaithfulness, to consign ‘all that has passed to perpetual oblivion’, she vowed never to forget ‘how much I owe to your whole clan and the qualities with which you are adorned’.7 Cynics saw merely a prudent measure of self-preservation. Warning that she would ‘do well to be on her guard’ against the resentful Orlovs, Frederick the Great thought that if they were all like Aleksey, the menacing giant whom he had met at Potsdam in April 1771, then they must indeed be ‘a very enterprising family, capable of achieving the greatest aims’.8 Gunning could scarcely credit the exit of the man widely assumed to have installed the empress on the throne: ‘The successor that has been given him is perhaps the strongest instance of weakness and the greatest blot in the character of her Imperial Majesty, and will lessen the high opinion that was generally and in a great measure deservedly entertained of her.’9

There was some force to these charges. Shortly after Grigory’s departure for Fokshany, a plot to enthrone Paul had been discovered among the Preobrazhensky Guards in which between thirty and a hundred men, stiffened by a recent mutiny against their officers’ cruelty, were said to have taken part. Under interrogation in July, their ringleaders confessed their dream of unseating the Orlovs and consigning Catherine to a convent. One was knouted and committed to hard labour at Nerchinsk; others were flogged and exiled in perpetuity. Though mild by contemporary standards, partly on account of the conspirators’ youthfulness (most were non-commissioned officers, aged twenty or less), the sentences reflected the empress’s deepening sense of unease. No sooner had one foreign adventure come to fruition with the first partition of Poland on 5 August, than another clouded the horizon three days later. To deter the partitioning powers from casting their acquisitive eyes towards Sweden, Gustav III suspended the constitution of 1720 and restored the monarchy’s absolute powers. ‘In less than a quarter of an hour,’ Catherine complained to Voltaire, Sweden had lost her liberty and gained a king ‘as despotic as the one in France’.10 The real cause of her anxiety, however, was the damage inflicted on her own diplomacy. Backed by the French, Gustav’s coup had turned the tables on Russia’s long-standing influence in Stockholm and raised the threat of a descent on the empire’s Baltic lands.11 While the empress and her Council were forced to plan for such an attack, there could be no question of purging the rebellious Guards. Vasilchikov’s confirmation as the new favourite looked more like an olive branch to the disaffected. Meanwhile, ‘no precautions’ had been ‘neglected to guard against sudden attempts’ on her life.12

To take her mind off her troubles, Catherine regaled Voltaire with the success of her new comedies. He would enjoy these works by ‘an anonymous Russian author’, she told him in August, since any weakness in their plots was more than compensated by the liveliness of the characters: ‘some of them are really rather good’. Announcing the forthcoming French translation of O, these times! two months later, she seemed to be on top form: ‘Perhaps you will say after reading it that it is easier to make me laugh than other sovereigns, and you will be right. I am fundamentally an extremely jolly person.’13 Behind the bravado, however, diplomats in St Petersburg sensed a different mood that autumn. A telltale sign was Catherine’s own admission that she had put off a routine reply to Falconet until ‘the next day and the next day and the day after that’.14 ‘Hitherto active and industrious,’ the Prussian ambassador complained at the end of December, ‘she is becoming indolent and slack over business.’ Indeed, though she preferred not to dwell to Voltaire on ‘the great tragedy’ of the Turkish war and the prospect of a more general conflict if Gustav III invaded Norway, Solms thought that these pressures, when combined with the crisis in her love life, had been enough to prompt a spiral of depression that threatened to paralyse her government. ‘The empress increasingly displays the strongest of passions for her new favourite,’ he reported when Orlov finally left for Reval in January 1773. ‘Nevertheless, the departure of the former one made her sad and irritable and for three days she sent back all business.’15 Vasilchikov, it transpired, was no more than a handsome face, and certainly no substitute for Grigory. ‘I have never cried so much since the day I was born as I have over the last eighteen months,’ she later admitted to Potëmkin.16

Although Panin undoubtedly benefited from the fall of Orlov and did his best to hasten it once the die was cast, there is no evidence that he was responsible for poisoning Catherine’s mind against Grigory. Still less did he plot to install Paul on the throne. Conscious of Panin’s reputation for sloth, Gunning concluded that the grand duke’s future had been entrusted to him ‘from a conviction that he has neither abilities, resolution nor creativity enough to attempt placing [the crown] on the head of this young Prince, even if the latter had spirit enough to wear it, which is as yet very problematical’.17 If that was an underestimate of Panin’s intellect, it was a shrewd assessment of the ambitions of both tutor and pupil. Paul himself posed no threat to his mother. Despite his simmering resentment of her treatment of Peter III, she received the same unquestioning loyalty from her heir as he later expected from his subjects. Indeed, at this point they seemed to be united by more than mere duty. Following his recovery from illness in 1771, relations between mother and son sharply improved after a decade in which her lack of affection attracted regular comment from foreign diplomats. Though some saw nothing more in this reconciliation than an arrangement of convenience between two inveterate dissemblers, it was impossible to ignore their newfound fondness for each other’s company. ‘I will be returning to town on Tuesday,’ Catherine told Frau Bielke at the end of August 1772, ‘with my son who no longer wants to be a step away from me and whom I have the honour of amusing so well that he sometimes changes his place at table in order to sit beside me.’18 In the excitement over the negotiations with Orlov, Paul’s eighteenth birthday passed without incident. In a private ceremony, attended only by Panin and his Holsteiner associate, Caspar von Saldern, the empress exhorted him on the need to govern justly and with moderation. Though the foreign ministers were entertained at Court to celebrate his Holstein inheritance, no promotions were announced. With luck, his Russian coming-of-age in the following year could be similarly overshadowed by his marriage.19

Had either Panin or the grand duke harboured any design of pressing Paul’s claim to the throne, they would surely have exploited the opportunity offered by unscrupulous Saldern in the months before the wedding. Though the circumstances remain mysterious, it was apparently the Holsteiner who persuaded Paul that Panin could no longer be relied upon to serve his interests. Cathcart had characterised Saldern in 1769 as ‘a man of consummate knowledge in business, great perspicacity, strong expression, and very much the friend or enemy of every system he adopts or opposes and in the same degree of the persons who espouse them’. At that time, he seemed ‘a great assertor of the northern system’, and it was in that capacity that he was appointed to lead Russia’s negotiations in Warsaw in 1771.20 By the time he returned, embittered by Panin’s criticism of his peremptory treatment of the Poles, his loyalties had been reversed. Sometime in late 1772 or early 1773, Saldern talked the grand duke into authorising him to act as his representative in his dealings with the Young Court. Armed with a signed agreement to this effect, he approached Panin with a plan to increase Paul’s role in government, allegedly to the point of creating a co-regency on the model of Joseph II and Maria Theresa. Perhaps he was trying on behalf of the Orlovs to discredit his former patron; just as probably, he had mercenary self-interest at heart. Whatever his motives, this time he had overreached himself. Panin destroyed the incriminating paper. While Paul, for the moment, kept silent, Saldern was packed off to Copenhagen, his reputation temporarily intact. Now all eyes turned to the wedding, for which plans were already complete by January 1773.21

The search for a bride had been entrusted to Baron von Assebourg, the former Danish minister to the empress’s Court, as long ago as 1768. By Easter 1771 he had submitted the results of his preliminary researches, which Catherine considered at Tsarskoye Selo not long before Paul fell ill. Just as Elizabeth had done before her, the empress sought a pliable candidate, no older than the grand duke, from the Protestant ‘third Germany’ (the Princess of Nassau was explicitly ruled out on grounds of her Catholicism). Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha had been an early front-runner, not least because her paternal grandmother was first cousin to the late Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst. On investigation, however, the girl turned out to be too plump and her mother too squeamish about her conversion to Orthodoxy. ‘Think no further of the princess of Saxe-Gotha,’ Catherine ordered Assebourg: ‘She is exactly what it takes to displease us.’ Though the empress found it hard to believe that Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt could be quite so attractive as Assebourg claimed, she seemed worthy of further consideration despite doubts about her temperament and the expense involved in settling an establishment on her siblings. Even so, Catherine still favoured Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, whose father had been assiduous in his attentions and ‘who will be at the end of her twelfth year next October. Her doctor’s reflections on her robust health draw me to her’.22 Panin, however, had already determined that Sophia Dorothea was too young (thirteen was then the age of consent for females in the Orthodox Church) and since his view prevailed, it was Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt and her sisters, Amalia and Louisa, who eventually travelled to Russia via Berlin, just as Catherine had done almost thirty years earlier, in the company of their mother and with the assistance of Frederick the Great. ‘I have intrigued like the very devil to lead things to this point,’ the king told Prince Henry, predicting that the alliance would be ‘of the greatest possible utility to posterity’.23

By the time their party approached the Russian capital on Saturday 15 June 1773, Grigory Orlov had already been back at Court for almost a month, having resumed all his former offices except that of favourite on 20 May. It was he who rode out with General Bauer to meet the girls on their way from Count Karl Sievers’ estate at Seltsa. Catherine was waiting for them at Gatchina, where they arrived at two o’clock in time for lunch. Paul caught his first sight of his future wife when they set off for Tsarskoye Selo three hours later. He met them halfway, stepping out of his carriage to pay his respects to their mother, Landgravine Caroline. On reaching the palace, where a small crowd had gathered to greet them at the gates, the guests were given an hour to unwind in their apartments before being taken to the Picture Gallery, lined from floor to ceiling with 130 seventeenth-century masterpieces, mostly Flemish and Dutch, as a way of emphasising Russia’s rightful place among the European great powers.24 At her most resplendent in the insignia of the Order of St Andrew, the empress engaged them in conversation until she retired to bed at ten. At the dinner which followed, protocol dictated that the eldest girl, Amalia, and her mother should sit beside Paul while the seventeen-year-old Wilhelmina found herself sandwiched between Panin and Lev Naryshkin, the leading voice in foreign affairs and the wittiest man at Court.25 The same pattern followed next day, as banquet followed upon banquet in an effort to overwhelm the guests with the magnificence of Russian power. Sometimes they dined outside on the balcony, on tables made from the finest mahogany; a band played as they strolled through the garden to the grotto. Catherine was delighted to find that Wilhelmina seemed to confirm all her instincts. In view of her evident desire that her son’s marriage should be happier than her own, it was even more reassuring that Paul instantly liked the girl (by no means a foregone conclusion, particularly for such a temperamental youth) and she accepted him. At lunch on 17 June, they sat next to each other for the first time.26 Within four days of her arrival, the deal was done. Soon the young princess was taking instruction in Orthodoxy from Father Platon, now archbishop of Tver, whose Short Course in Christian Theology was familiar to her mother in German translation.27

Still dreaming of a ‘crusade’ to Constantinople, Voltaire would have preferred Wilhelmina to be ‘re-baptised in the church of Saint Sophia, in the presence of the prophet Grimm’.28 Instead, she was converted at the end of the Dormition Fast on 15 August, taking the name Natalia Alekseyevna. The couple were betrothed next day. At the end of the month, in a further demonstration of Orthodox splendour, Catherine was again persuaded to trudge to the Alexander Nevsky monastery on the saint’s feast day, for only the second time since 1762. While Landgravine Caroline looked on from Field Marshal Golitsyn’s house near the Kazan Church, Paul and his fiancée joined the empress in the procession. Wearing the small crown and dressed as a knight of the Order of St Alexander, she emerged from the Winter Palace at ten o’clock to be driven to the church, where Grigory Orlov greeted her at the door, resplendent in his silver guards’ uniform. Platon and the bishop of Mogilëv, Georgy (Konissky), led a brief service for the knights, already gathered inside the church. Then, flanked by more than fifty liveried servants, banner-carrying clergy set out on foot to the monastery. The knights followed two-by-two in order of seniority. Behind them came Paul, Natalia and Catherine herself, accompanied by senior courtiers. The Horse Guards brought up the rear. Having twice paused for prayers, first at the Anichkov bridge and then opposite the Church of the Entry into Jerusalem, the empress reached the monastery gates just before midday. Archbishop Gavriil led her past the serried ranks of the Izmailovsky Guards to a service conducted by Innokenty (Nechaev), the bishop of Pskov. Suspending her disbelief during prayers, Catherine kissed the shrine containing the saint’s relics. It was three in the afternoon before she returned to the palace, where the customary banquet and ball continued into the small hours.29

They returned to the Kazan Church for the wedding on 29 September, nine days after Paul’s nineteenth birthday had signalled his coming-of-age in Russia. Just as Catherine’s wedding had been, the ceremony was followed by ten days of celebrations, advertised almost immediately in an official guide to the proceedings.30 Gunning echoed Lord Hyndford’s praise in 1745: ‘The weather was remarkably fine, which added much to the splendid appearance of the equipages and dresses, the magnificence of which nothing could exceed.’31 To compensate him for the loss of his tutorship, and with it the direction of the Young Court, Panin was rewarded on coronation day with the rank of field marshal, 10,000 serfs, 100,000 roubles for a house, another 50,000 for a silver service, and an annual pension of 30,000. For eleven years, Catherine had lived in fear that Paul might die before reaching the age of majority. His survival had helped to ensure hers. Relieved that her son’s majority had passed without any increase in his political influence, she was not to know that a very different menace was brewing among rebellious Cossacks in the lands east of the Volga. Instead, in the brief interval before disaster struck, she delighted in her first encounter with one of the closest friends of her life and one of the most brilliant minds of the age.

Friedrich-Melchior Grimm had edited the Correspondance littéraire for twenty years before leaving for Russia in the entourage of Wilhelmina’s brother, Ludwig, whose Grand Tour he had been conducting since 1771. D’Alembert, who edited the Encyclopédiewith Diderot, had recommended this fortnightly manuscript newsletter to Catherine as long ago as 1764. She became a regular subscriber in the following year, joining the elite circle of crowned heads, never more than fifteen in number, who relied on Grimm for a digest of the Parisian journals and an insider’s view of the salons. As a member of the philosopher Baron d’Holbach’s circle, he was well placed to report on the philosophes and pulled no punches in his accounts of their debates. D’Holbach’s own Good Sense, written in response to critics of his System of Nature, was breezily dismissed as ‘atheism made easy for chambermaids and wigmakers’.32 Grimm helped to confirm Catherine’s low view of Rousseau (Voltaire was delighted to join in) and steered her towards a more favourable appreciation of Beccaria. He sent her the abbé Galiani’s influential treatise on grain prices in 1770. More practically, in his acknowledged role as ‘a great friend of humanity’,33 he had not only helped her to acquire Diderot’s library and numerous works of art, but also, as a trusted servant of Landgravine Caroline, played a crucial part as matchmaker for Paul and Natalia.

Since Catherine had every reason to admire him, Grimm found himself subjected to a charm offensive almost as soon as he arrived in St Petersburg. Even before the wedding, General Bauer had already made the first attempt to lure him into Russian service; Vladimir Orlov tried again shortly afterwards. Grimm found the courage to refuse in an audience, scheduled to last five minutes, which went on for an hour and a half.34 Dubbed ‘the white tyrant’ thanks to his penchant for face powder, he knew that no amount of make-up could conceal the social chasm separating a pastor’s son from Regensburg from a reigning empress. Nevertheless, he was determined to try. ‘I believe that it is unprecedented that a man of my station should have been treated by the sovereign of one of the most powerful empires with the kindness that I have experienced,’ Grimm boasted to Mme Geoffrin. Though protocol kept him well down the table at mealtimes, he was drawn into Catherine’s intimate circle after dinner. Predictably, he found her ‘a charming woman, the like of whom is not to be found in Paris’, admiring the way that she chattered, ‘often very gaily about serious things, and very seriously about frivolous things, by virtue of the laws of all good conversation’.35

Had Grimm accepted her repeated offers of jobs, either during this first visit or on his return to Russia in 1776, when she hoped he might play a leading role in educational reform, their talks might have lasted for longer. As it was, while he accepted a retainer from the empress from 1777, he chose to preserve a degree of independence by returning to Paris in the service of the duke of Saxe-Gotha (who promptly made him a baron). Now they had to pursue their friendship by other means. Since correspondence formed a natural extension of salon conversation in the eighteenth century, they started to write to one another as soon as he left St Petersburg in the spring of 1774. ‘Adieu, monsieur’, Catherine concluded her opening salvo on 25 April, ‘this letter is beginning to resemble our gossip after eight at Tsarskoye Selo, and the fools who read it after you might find it indecent that people as serious as us should write such letters.’36 It was worth taking care over compositions that straddled the boundary between private and public spheres. The whole correspondence is punctuated by the sorts of self-conscious literary artifice that characterised all such exchanges at the time.37 ‘For as long as there have been German barons in the world,’ ran a typical missive from the empress, ‘no one has been so passionately in favour of the post-scriptum as you.’ ‘For my honour and glory,’ she continued on another occasion, ‘I have to tell you that everything that was written above on the 20th of September between dinner and the ball is divine in style and inspiration and the promulgation of a divine communication [from Grimm himself] acting on a mortal brain on a day half cloudy, half rainy. You will see that it is vital for you to know all this for the sake of historical understanding. If anyone ever makes a commentary on this letter, I think the price of paper will go up.’38 Since there could be no more responsible business than writing for posterity, it was crucial that nothing should fall into unscrupulous hands. Appalled in 1787 that Beaumarchais might include her letters in his edition of Voltaire’s correspondence, Catherine ordered Grimm to buy up every relevant volume and consign it to the flames. ‘And make sure that this objectionable man doesn’t keep a copy, so that having sold it to me, he cannot publish it again.’ ‘Listen, we are all mortal,’ she had written earlier that autumn. ‘Burn my letters so that they cannot be printed in my lifetime; they are much more sprightly than the ones I wrote to Voltaire, and could do the most awful damage; I insist that you burn them, do you understand? Or that you put them somewhere so safe that no one will unearth them for a hundred years.’39

Quite how Grimm managed to inspire her to write such revealing letters remains a mystery. His own are deadly dull. Yet somehow he gave her the confidence to rise above conventional generic pleasantries so that her side of the correspondence not only sparkles, but also takes us to the heart of her sensibility. It was to her Parisian ‘whipping-boy’ that Catherine confided some of her most intimate thoughts for the remainder of her life. ‘I think,’ she declared in 1791, ‘that it is decreed on high that you and I have been created expressly so that we may each have a pen continually in hand to write to one another without stopping.’40

One reason why Catherine felt so secure with Grimm was that he was generally to be found at the least radical end of the Enlightened political spectrum. Whereas Voltaire was uncomfortably aware that by supporting his heroine’s campaign against the Turks he was not thinking ‘sufficiently as a philosophe ought’, Grimm regarded war as a good in itself because it channelled man’s violent instincts into active, noble virtues. Along with his growing intimacy with Catherine, that was one reason why he was eventually disowned by one of his oldest pacifist collaborators. ‘My friend, I no longer recognise you,’ sighed Diderot, looking back on their time together in Russia. ‘Perhaps without suspecting it, you have become one of the most closet and yet most dangerous anti-philosophes. You live among us, yet you hate us.’41

Having been the beneficiary of Catherine’s largesse since she purchased his library in 1765, Diderot was in no position to refuse her invitation to St Petersburg. His arrival on the eve of Paul’s wedding brought the empress into contact with a very different sort of Enlightenment from Grimm’s. For a sixty-year-old with no experience of continental travel, the journey had proved predictably gruelling. Illness had delayed him along the way and continued to afflict him for much of his stay (he drank from the infested waters of the River Neva and ‘paid them the tribute they obtain from all foreigners’).42 The visit could hardly have got off to a less auspicious start when he discovered, to his distress, that the room promised by his friend Falconet was occupied by the sculptor’s artist son, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Forced to take refuge at the Naryshkin mansion in St Isaac’s Square, Diderot was a fish out of water at Court, turning up for all the dinners and balls in his little black suit to widespread ridicule and suspicion. Etiquette and intrigue were foreign to him; he had virtually no Russian, though he made desultory efforts to learn some over the course of the autumn; and he made little impact on polite or academic society. Although he and Grimm were elected foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences on 25 October, that inauguration was the only meeting he attended, even though a further twenty-six were held before he left for Holland in the following March. Grimm told Mme Geoffrin that it was ‘the only occasion on which I should have been well disposed to see my name alongside that of Diderot’.43

Catherine, however, was fascinated by him. ‘And with her he is just as odd, just as original, just as much Diderot, as when with you,’ Grimm explained to another Parisian salon hostess, Suzanne Necker. ‘He shakes her hand as he takes yours, he shakes her arm as he shakes yours; but in this last point he obeys sovereign orders, and, as you may imagine, a man does not seat himself opposite to Her Majesty unless he is so obliged.’44 By the end of October, if not before, they were meeting daily at the Winter Palace. So bored was she with Vasilchikov that Diderot was received at the lover’s hour, after lunch, when he joined her to discuss the essays he presented to her in advance. Happy to borrow an occasional joke from Lev Naryshkin–‘A capital at the edge of an empire is like an animal with a heart at the tip of its finger’–he kept most of these essays short, out of a self-confessed antipathy to ‘purely systematic ideas on serious subjects’. Nevertheless, the empress had encouraged him to write at length and he had no intention of patronising her. Following their disillusion with Frederick the Great, Catherine was the monarch that the philosophes had been waiting for. It was for her, Diderot proclaimed, that Montesquieu has written his great book, The Spirit of the Laws. ‘Your Majesty has a strong mind, a great soul, extensive vision.’45

A meeting of minds was nevertheless prevented by the recent radicalisation of Diderot’s political views. In 1765, when Catherine bought his library, he could still reconcile his materialism with his politics by trusting the superior abilities of the ‘great soul’–a wise, absolute ruler surrounded by equally enlightened advisers who could realise the general will by their unique capacity to incorporate in microcosm the social and physiological harmony of the whole species.46 But that confidence had been severely undermined by Chancellor Maupeou’s abolition of the French parlements in January 1771. Though Diderot had little respect for these noble-dominated law courts, they played an important constitutional role in registering the king’s edicts and their abolition was widely interpreted as an act of tyranny. ‘We are on the brink of a crisis which will end in slavery or liberty,’ Diderot warned Princess Dashkova in an apocalyptic letter that April, ‘and if it is slavery, it will be slavery like that which exists at Morocco or Constantinople.’47 By the time he arrived in Russia, he was already convinced that liberty could be preserved only by a shift of power away from the monarch and towards a representative national body. ‘All arbitrary government is bad,’ he insisted to Catherine, not excepting the ‘arbitrary government of a good, firm, just and enlightened master’. ‘One of the greatest misfortunes that could happen to a free nation,’ he continued, in an essay urging the creation of a permanent representative assembly, ‘would be two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism. Three sovereigns in a row like Elizabeth, and the English would have been imperceptibly led to a condition of servitude of which no one could predict the end.’48

Few monarchs would have listened to such subversive talk. Yet the empress remained unperturbed as Diderot went on to inform her, in the space of that same essay, that resistance was ‘a natural right, inalienable and sacred’; that the sovereign was made for the nation and not the other way round; and that any impartial judge of the conflict between the English monarchs and their parliaments would conclude that the king was ‘almost always wrong’ because he attacked popular liberties.49 ‘I am allowed to say everything that comes into my head,’ the astonished philosophe explained to Dashkova, ‘wise things, perhaps, when I’m feeling stupid, and perhaps very silly things when I’m feeling wise. Ideas transplanted from Paris to Petersburg certainly take on a very different colour.’50 The most remarkable thing was that Catherine should be prepared to condescend so graciously to a mere writer. ‘I swear to you that the empress, this astonishing woman, does all in her power to come down to my level,’ Diderot wrote to his wife, ‘but it is at moments like these that I find her ten feet tall.’51

Catherine was quite right to tell a later French ambassador that if she had placed her faith in Diderot, ‘every institution in my empire would have been overturned’.52 Nevertheless, she was prepared to offer guarded responses to a questionnaire he gave her in search of information on the Russian economy. Since he frankly admitted that the French government hoped to profit from their acquaintance–‘I should be transported by joy to see my nation united with Russia’–it is hardly surprising that sensitive information was held back from the representative of a hostile power.53 Some of his questions were deflected to officials; others were answered more frankly, particularly when they offered Catherine the opportunity to boast about the rich variety of her empire’s wildlife; still more received a curt ‘I don’t know’. The most delicate inquiries were brushed aside with a playfulness she knew he would appreciate:

Q. In which provinces are your woollen manufactories?

A. In every province where there are sheep.

Q. What is the public debt?

A. So modest that I could pay it off in twenty-four hours if I wanted to.54

Diderot, it is now clear, took his visit to St Petersburg more seriously than once was thought. Conceiving of Russia as a tabula rasa on which an appropriately enlightened mind could create a new and glorious civilisation, he saw foreign settlement as a natural way to approach his goal. Though Catherine’s colonies on the Volga had been much discussed in the French salons in the 1760s, they had not passed without criticism. Diderot famously proposed that she should ‘plant’ the seeds of liberty in the form of a colony of Swiss people in Saratov.55 While scholars have been able to demonstrate the connection between this idea and his broader social and political thought, the empress, who had nothing more than the evidence of their conversations to go on, could be forgiven for dismissing such sallies as utopian. As she became irritated by his impracticality, Diderot was conscious of the danger: ‘Nothing is easier than bringing an empire to order with one’s head on one’s pillow. That way, everything goes as one might wish.’56 What he could not know, because Catherine did not tell him, was that his visit to Russia had coincided with the emergence of the gravest threat to the order of her empire that she ever faced.

Even as Grimm arrived in St Petersburg on 17 September 1773, an illiterate Don Cossack was issuing his first manifesto to the Yaik Cossack host almost a thousand miles to the south-east: ‘As your fathers and grandfathers served previous tsars to the last drop of their blood, so you, my friends, will serve me, the Great Sovereign Emperor Peter Fedaravich.’57 When the thirty-one-year-old Yemelyan Pugachëv set out to tempt all those who had ‘longed for him’ with the prospect of land, water, grasses, money, powder and bread, threatening them with his ‘just wrath’ if they refused to answer his call, the prospects for a rebellion in the territory between the Volga and the Urals could hardly have been more promising.58 No matter that portraits of Pugachëv made him look more like a lop-sided Peter the Great than Peter III. He had shown off the scrofulous scars on his chest as the authentic ‘marks of tsardom’ and the forts standing guard over those unruly borderlands were insufficiently manned to repel the heterogeneous band of Cossacks, Old Believers, fugitive serfs, Bashkir and Kazakh tribal leaders (eighteenth-century Russians called them Kirghizians to distinguish them from the Cossacks, kazaki) who responded to his appeal to defend their traditional freedoms against the advance of Catherine’s Enlightened administration. Not that her bureaucracy presented an indomitable force: Kazan province had only eighty permanent officials for a population of 2.5 million. Famine, plague and war had everywhere taken their toll (the latest levy of one recruit in every hundred souls, decreed on 23 August, was due to begin on 1 October, and by the time it was complete some 323,360 men had been drafted in the space of five years). Once the factory peasants in the metallurgical plants in the Urals had joined him, Pugachëv had the additional advantage of a reliable supply of arms.59

By the time General Kar was dispatched to quell the rebellion on 15 October, Catherine already knew of Pugachëv’s seizure of Iletsk. A week later, she demanded to see the latest maps of Orenburg province, comprising most of Bashkiria, in order to follow the progress of events. At first she assumed that it was merely a matter of time before Kar sent news of his victory, but this was to underestimate the power of the insurgents. In an area where the Cossacks were in effect the imperial police force, their secession signalled a serious threat to security. Having laid siege to Orenburg on 5 October, Pugachëv set up his own ‘College of War’ at nearby Berda, where his henchman Zarubin Chika called himself Field Marshal Count Chernyshëv and others among his lieutenants adopted the names of Panin and Orlov. Kar’s poorly trained punitive battalion (all that could be spared when the crack troops were in Moldavia and Wallachia) was crushed in early November by a better-disciplined Cossack force more adroit than his own in the use of artillery. News of the disaster reached Tsarskoye Selo on the evening of Catherine’s name day, throwing the Court into alarm. The rebels, she was horrified to learn, now numbered several thousand. Suspecting a Turkish conspiracy, she appointed General Bibikov, the former Marshal of the Legislative Commission, to replace the disgraced Kar, whose arrival in Moscow set off a wave of rumours that forced the government to lift its veil of secrecy over the whole affair. ‘Probably it will all end on the gallows,’ Catherine wrote to Yakov Sievers on 10 December, as Bibikov departed for Kazan, ‘but what sort of expectation is that for me, Mr. Governor, who has no love for the gallows? European opinion will relegate us to the time of Tsar Ivan the Terrible!’60

Now she had less time for Diderot, who recorded 5 December as the date of their last discussion. Nor was Vasilchikov the man for a crisis. Instead, on 4 December, the empress wrote her first surviving letter to the man who was to supplant him and almost everyone else in her affections for the remainder of his life. The thirty-four-year-old Grigory Potëmkin was at that time besieging the Turks on the Danube:

Mr Lieutenant-General and Cavalier. You, I imagine, are so firmly focused on Silistria that you have no time to read letters. And although I do not at this moment know whether your bombardment has succeeded, I am certain, nevertheless, that everything you undertake should be ascribed to nothing but your impassioned zeal toward me personally and toward the dear fatherland in general, whose service you love.

But since for my part I very much wish to preserve zealous, brave, intelligent and skilful people, so I ask you not to endanger yourself in vain. Having read this letter, you may put the question: why was it written? To which I can reply: so that you should have confirmation of the way I think about you, for I am always most benevolent toward you.61

Confronted with this tantalising summons, Potëmkin promptly sought leave from his camp and headed for St Petersburg.

While she was waiting for him, Catherine attempted to blunt the international impact of Pugachëv’s rebellion by making light of it to Frau Bielke. ‘There is no revolt at Kazan,’ she declared. ‘That kingdom is peaceful.’ It was true that the ‘so-called Peter III’ and his ‘band of robbers’ had ‘hanged five hundred people of every age and sex’ in their rapacious progress through Orenburg province. Nevertheless, Bibikov had everything in hand ‘and it will probably all come to very little’.62 In the meanwhile, there was no shortage of New Year celebrations to distract her. At a betrothal ceremony before the ball on Epiphany, she placed rings on the fingers of Duke Peter of Courland (the son of Anna’s disgraced favourite, Ernst Bühren) and his fiancée Princess Yevdokiya Trubetskaya. And although it was too cold to spend long looking at the model of Bazhenov’s new palace in the Kremlin, set up for her inspection in the furthest palace ante-chamber, she found time to play chess and cards with Grimm and other guests in the Hermitage, having attended a performance of the ballet Cupid and Psyche.63

Yet even as the carnival continued all around her, the empress failed to match its mood. A placard found at the Winter Palace on New Year’s Day, apparently alleging government corruption, was burned in front of the Senate on 11 January when it proved impossible to discover the identity of its anonymous author, a self-styled ‘honest man’. Security was stepped up at the palace so that no one below the rank of major could ‘pass beyond the Chevaliers Gardes’.64 With both Orenburg and Ufa under siege, the prospects looked a good deal less certain than Catherine had implied in her letter to Frau Bielke. Even a French comic opera performed by the girls at the Smolny Institute on 20 January was not enough to lift her spirits. After that, she retreated to her apartments for several days. ‘The Empress is at present a good deal out of order,’ Gunning reported in the middle of this self-imposed seclusion. ‘The insurrection in Orenburg, and the height it has been allowed to get to, has certainly given her great uneasiness.’65 As if to unsettle her further, Paul finally confessed Caspar von Saldern’s duplicity to Catherine before the end of the first week in February. This news ‘must have been extremely offensive to her’, Gunning concluded, ‘as, in the passion it threw her into, she declared she would have the wretch tied neck and heels and brought hither’. Only thanks to Panin was she persuaded to allow Saldern to retire, provided that he returned a snuffbox she had given him and renounced all his titles.66

Honesty and fidelity were subjects at the forefront of the empress’s mind as the turmoil in her personal life matched the chaos in the eastern borderlands. We do not know whether she was already in love with Potëmkin when she wrote to him in December. (Even if she was, it did not prevent her from continuing to lunch with Vasilchikov and Orlov, who can hardly have felt at ease as the only guests at her table apart from Alexander Cherkasov and the duty gentleman-in-waiting.)67 By the beginning of March, however, there could be no doubt about her new passion. Potëmkin was first presented to the empress at Tsarskoye Selo on 4 February. That morning, she had said farewell in the Amber Room to Prince Dolgoruky, who was returning to Berlin as her ambassador. They were joined for lunch by a regular guest, Admiral Sir Charles Knowles, a seventy-two-year-old veteran of the Royal Navy who, in addition to designing several new men-ofwar, had done much to rescue the dilapidated dockyard at Kronstadt since arriving in Russia at the beginning of 1771. Then, late in the afternoon, a very different visitor arrived to be led straight to her private apartments.68

Quite how the relationship developed we cannot be sure. But sometime that month, lost in the delirium of their new affair yet painfully conscious of its fragility, Catherine and Potëmkin consummated their passion at the Winter Palace. As a harbinger of the mood-swings to come, he was already jealous of her previous lovers. Concealing herself from public gaze on 21 February, she sent him a list of them in a ‘sincere confession’ designed to test his faith in her:

The trouble is that my heart is unwilling to be without love for as long as an hour. They say that people try to hide such vices as if out of kindness, and it may be that such a disposition of the heart is more of a vice than a virtue. Perhaps it is in vain to write this to you, since after this you will fall in love with me or will not want to go back to the army fearing that I shall forget you. However, in truth, I don’t think I should do anything so stupid, and if you want to keep me for eternity, then show me as much friendship as love, and above all, love me and tell me the truth.69

After all, he had scarcely been celibate himself. ‘I’m not surprised that the whole town has credited you with countless women,’ she continued two days later. ‘No one on earth romps with them more than you do, I imagine.’ She asked him only to refrain from criticising Orlov and his brothers: ‘He loves you, and they are my friends, and I shan’t give them up.’70

Despite their attempts to conceal it from prurient eyes, their whirlwind romance was obvious to her closest companions. ‘They’ve all begun to preach to me,’ she told her lover on 26 February after a fifth sleepless night alone, ‘and I hear them out. But inwardly they don’t dislike you, the Prince [Grigory Orlov] above all. I have not admitted to anything. Neither have I justified myself in such a way that they could reproach me for lying.’ Now they had only a few days left together before the onset of the Great Fast. ‘I shall have to prepare for communion. Ugh! I can hardly contemplate such thoughts without crying.’71 Aleksey Orlov, who had come up from Moscow to take stock of developments, twice asked her ‘Yes or no?’ ‘I cannot lie,’ she answered, causing him to laugh when she admitted that she had fallen in love: ‘“And you see each other in the bath-house?” I asked him why he thought so. “Because,” he said, “for about four days we have seen a light in the window rather later than usual.”’ There could be no room for Vasilchikov now. Panin must find some way of sending him away to take the waters. ‘Then he could be appointed ambassador somewhere where there isn’t much business. He’s boring and suffocating.’72 Meanwhile, on the first day of the Fast, Vasilchikov had to suffer the indignity of lunch in the Diamond Room with the man who had displaced him in Catherine’s affections. They sat next to one another again after mass on the following Sunday.73

By then it was clear to watching diplomats that the new favourite was cast from a different mould. ‘His figure is gigantic and disproportioned,’ Gunning reported on 4 March, ‘and his countenance far from engaging. From the character I have had of him, he appears to have a great knowledge of mankind, and more of a discriminating faculty that his countrymen in general possess…and although the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one who has formed connections with the clergy.’74 Links with the bishops were a legacy of Potëmkin’s time as a student of theology at Moscow University. Though the subject kept its hold on his mercurial mind, he was far too flamboyant to contemplate an ecclesiastical career. Now languid, now brimming with muscular energy, he presented the empress with a fascinating study in contradictions, so different from the colourless creatures who fawned on her at Court. If his intelligence was one part of the attraction, his virility was another, tested and confirmed in action against the Turk. The last time she had seen him in St Petersburg was in the afterglow of the victories at Kagul and Larga, where he had been decorated with the Order of St George, Third Class.75 Now they launched into a flurry of love letters (she burned his so that only hers survive). ‘My dear little dove, I love you so very much, you’re good, you’re clever, you’re jolly, and you’re amusing: I have no need for anyone else in the world when I’m with you.’76 And so it went on, now tender, now passionate, and studded throughout with a rich variety of affectionate diminutives: ‘sweet darling Grishenka’, ‘giaour’ (an insulting Turkish epithet for non-Muslims), ‘Muscovite’ and even, in a letter written from the Hermitage on 10 April, ‘Mr Yaik Cossack’.77

That Catherine felt able to joke about Pugachëv was a sure sign that the crisis in the east had eased. Two days earlier, in fact, Gunning had reported the arrival of a messenger from Bibikov ‘with the very agreeable tidings of the rebellion being entirely extinguished by the total defeat and dispersion of the rebel army’. On 22 March, government troops had routed the insurgents at Tatishchevo, at the junction of the roads to Orenburg and Yaitsk, forcing Pugachëv to abandon his headquarters. Most of his confederates were taken prisoner. Having learned of these developments on the morning of 7 April, a relieved Catherine sat down to lunch with Praskovya Bruce, Kirill Razumovsky, Grigory Orlov, Zakhar Chernyshëv, Alexander Golitsyn and Alexander Vyazemsky. The list reads like a roll-call of her oldest friends. Only Potëmkin was a parvenu. That evening, as her card game drew to a close, she permitted Grimm and Prince Ludwig to kiss her hand on the eve of their departure from Russia.78

In fact, the news was not quite so good as it seemed. Bibikov, it emerged soon afterwards, had died of a fever in Kazan on that same day, and it was a mistake to imagine that the revolt was over when its leader was still on the run. Nevertheless, while Pugachëv was re-grouping in the Ural mountains, Catherine had time to face up to the rivalries stimulated by Potëmkin’s meteoric rise. On the Court’s return to the Winter Palace on 9 April, he occupied a new suite of apartments on the floor beneath her own. Catherine no longer looked forward to her birthdays. ‘I hate that day like the plague,’ she complained to Grimm: ‘Tell me, truly, wouldn’t it be charming if an empress could remain fifteen years old for the whole of her life?’79 On her forty-fifth birthday, Easter Monday, she invested her new lover with the Order of St Alexander Nevsky.80 He was appointed to her Council on 5 May and later that month became vice-president of the College of War with the rank of general-in-chief. Though the most obvious casualty of these manoeuvrings was Zakhar Chernyshëv, whose mishandling of the Cossacks was held to have left the door open for Pugachëv, it was all too much for Grigory Orlov, who again went abroad after ‘a very warm altercation’ with Catherine ‘which is said to have moved her more than she was ever known to have been’.81

Just as Paul was proving a satisfactorily uxorious companion for Natalia, so Catherine herself was by now settling into something approaching married life with Potëmkin. They laughed; they made love; they quarrelled; they may even have been pledged to one another in a secret ceremony. Even now that Paul had reached the age of majority, a formal wedding was no more possible than it had been for Orlov. The best they could hope for was some sort of blessing. No such ritual could take place during Lent, when their passion first ignited; Easter also got in the way. Spring was a time for carriage rides through the streets of the capital, for coffee in the grotto at Tsarskoye Selo, where the Court transferred on 29 April, for picnics in the English garden at Pulkovo, and for relaxing visits to her friends’ estates on the Peterhof Road. If it had been difficult for Catherine to sleep with her lover in the early days (the mere sight of his valet was enough to turn her away from his door), it was now even harder to arrange a blessing. The most recent (and most scholarly) Russian editor of Catherine’s correspondence with Potëmkin suggests that the likeliest date is Trinity Sunday, 8 June, the annual feast of the Izmailovsky Guards, when the empress allegedly met her lover late in the evening at the Church of St Sampson the Hospitable, founded on the Vyborg Side by Peter the Great to commemorate the saint’s day of the battle of Poltava. The evidence could hardly be flimsier. The Court journal records only that Catherine sailed to Yekaterinhof late in the afternoon, spending an hour there before returning via Count Sievers’s suburban mansion, where a crowd had gathered to watch. She was back at the Summer Palace by nine. Though the ‘white nights’ certainly offered the perfect setting for a romantic cruise, there is no proof whatsoever that she took a detour to St Sampson’s, still less that a ceremony took place there.82 It seems just as likely that Catherine’s confessor was called upon to bless the couple in the privacy of her own apartments. At any rate, by the time the Court decamped to Peterhof on 16 June, Catherine was already addressing Potëmkin as her husband.

‘Dear spouse,’ she announced in one such letter, ‘there is to be a concert.’83 Music had always filled the air at the summer celebrations as the wagons of the Court orchestra joined the straggling caravan of carriages that choked the road to the seaside. This year, there was a new star in the firmament: one of the most stunning sopranos in Europe. Catherine liked to tease her faithless ‘whipping-boy’ that, by reducing him to tears during a recital at Yelagin’s house, Caterina Gabrielli had taken him ‘half-way to salvation’.84Though no less an authority than Mozart judged that ‘in the long run, G could not please, for people soon get tired of coloratura passages,’ her initial impact was seductive, deriving as much from her charismatic personality as it did from the quality of her voice.85 One modern writer has seen her as forerunner of the modern prima donna, a fragile proto-Callas who swept from the opera house surrounded by servants carrying her train, her dog, her parrot and her monkey, and who broke free from the semi-servility in which most artists were forced to perform by singing only when it suited her.86 ‘She is indolent and capricious, so there is no depending on her,’ Elizabeth Harris complained during a later London season. ‘I fancy a good English hiss might be of service to her, and most probably in time she may have it.’87 There was no hissing at Peterhof on 25 June. So captivating was Gabrielli that Catherine, who talked through most concerts, approached the orchestra to listen. Another member of the audience, the English traveller Nathaniel Wraxall, recognised ‘a sovereign of a different kind, and perhaps not less despotic or unlimited in her empire’: ‘I must own I never heard any voice so perfectly sweet, melting, and absolute in its command over the soul: nor can any thing exceed the negligent carelessness apparent in her whole manner, which she employed in this occupation, as if she despised the appearance of exertion or any labor to please.’88 There was no gainsaying genius. ‘Gabrielsha wants to renew her contract,’ Catherine told Yelagin the following winter: ‘Renew it!’89 But the singer left for London all the same.

As the festivities continued at Peterhof, good news from the Danube helped to compensate for a shocking report from the Volga. Pugachëv, having escaped capture at Berda in March, had emerged from his hideaway in the Urals and appeared before Kazan at the head of 20,000 troops on 11 July. Next day, nearly three quarters of the 2873 houses in the city were destroyed by fire as the rebels indulged in an orgy of looting and pillage. News of the disaster reached Catherine on Monday 21 July, the day after the feast of the Prophet Elijah. At the Council meeting that morning, she had to be dissuaded from going straight to Moscow to restore confidence in a city whose gaols were overflowing with rebel prisoners. This time, fortune was on her side. Though she learned about it only on 23 July, Rumyantsev had already agreed peace with the Turks at Kuchuk Kainardzhi, not far from Potëmkin’s old camp outside Silistria, after Generals Kamensky and Suvorov had finally broken the back of Ottoman resistance at Koludzhi on 9 June. Since the news was better than she had been led to expect, the prayers Catherine offered at a hastily arranged thanksgiving service that afternoon were probably unusually heartfelt. And there was more to come. On the last day of the month, Prince Repnin and Count Semën Vorontsov arrived from Moldavia to explain that, in the treaty signed on 14 July, Rumyantsev had secured the whole of the coast between the Bug and the Dnieper, and an indemnity of 4.5 million roubles. Now she could turn her mind to challenging Pugachëv’s final rally.

As Catherine prepared for a Te Deum in honour of the peace treaty at the Kazan Church on Sunday 3 August, the pretender was already carving a swathe through the steppe.90 Routed by General Mikhelson in a four-hour battle at Kazan on 13 July, he had retreated southwards into an area settled mostly by nobles owning fewer than twenty serfs. These were the plentiful lands that Catherine had so admired on her Volga cruise only seven years earlier. Now, in the last and bloodiest phase of the revolt, the peasants flocked to the rebel cause in increasing numbers, burning their lords’ manor houses and slaughtering many of their ‘unjust’ and ‘cruel’ occupants. Penza fell to Pugachëv on 1 August, Saratov five days later. But even as he marched towards his native Don Cossack territory, the unsuspecting pretender was finally approaching his nemesis. Shortly after he drew up at the outskirts of Tsaritsyn on 21 August, one of his fellow Cossacks finally recognised him as an illiterate imposter. Once ‘the world of suspended belief’ in which so many of his followers had lived was shattered, it was only a matter of time before the so-called Peter III was defeated once and for all.91 On 25 August, while Catherine was lunching with Potëmkin in the Hermitage in preparation for Natalia’s name day, Mikhelson inflicted a final devastating defeat.92 Though Pugachëv again escaped capture, this time his luck was out. On 15 September, the Cossacks betrayed him to the authorities and the greatest revolt of Russia’s eighteenth century ended in ignominy.

As the authorities began their interrogation of the pretender, the autumn balls had already begun in St Petersburg. Catherine prepared for the winter by inspecting an array of valuable sables and silks, laid out for her in the Summer Palace much as they had once been for Empress Elizabeth.93 This time there were no rash announcements about the fate of the rebellion, but two days after Paul’s twentieth birthday, she celebrated the twelfth anniversary of her coronation in greater security than she had enjoyed for at least four years.

Potëmkin’s incipient rivalry with Nikita Panin was meanwhile being played out at a secondary level in the struggle between their relatives for control over the investigation into the revolt in Kazan. ‘Count Panin wants to make his brother the ruler with unlimited powers in the best part of the empire,’ Catherine complained, as Peter Panin departed for the Volga at the end of July. Though Catherine was anxious to keep the Panins’ pretensions in check, Peter’s appointment signalled a noticeable change of policy. Until then, the government had been moderate in its treatment of the rebels. In March Catherine had explicitly urged Bibikov to be cautious in his methods: ‘For twelve years the Secret Expedition under my own eyes has not flogged a single person under interrogation, and every single affair has been properly sorted out, and even more came out than we needed to know.’ Most of the prisoners taken from the rebels had been released without harm. Now retribution was placed in the hands of Peter Panin, a martinet who calculated that 324 insurgents were executed during his time in charge. A further 399 lost an ear and were knouted; 7000 more were flogged in other ways.94

Nothing could compare in Catherine’s mind with the damage inflicted by Pugachëv himself. ‘There has hardly been anyone so destructive of the human race since Tamerlane,’ she spluttered to Voltaire in October. ‘He entertains some hope that I might treat him gracefully, saying that he might erase the memory of his past crimes by his courage and future services. If it were only me that he had offended, his reasoning would be just and I would pardon him; however, this is the empire’s cause and the empire has laws.’95Brought to Moscow in an iron cage on 4 November, Pugachëv was subjected to a secret trial at the Kremlin at the end of December. Vyazemsky was on hand to make sure that no torture was applied. Though the rebel was sentenced to be quartered, Catherine gave orders that his executioner should behead him first, much to the rage of the ghoulish mob that gathered to witness the event on Bolotnaya Square on 10 January.96 Five days later, as a symbol of her determination to look forward rather than back, she decreed that the Yaik, the name of the river where Pugachëv had begun his revolt, should be changed to the Ural, ‘so that the unhappy occurrences on the said Yaik should be forgotten forever’.97 Her wider ambition was now to consign to the same oblivion the ‘blindness, stupidity, ignorance and superstition’ that had tempted her subjects into rebellion. And that meant tackling the ‘weakness, indolence, carelessness in respect to their duties, idleness, arguments, disagreements, extortions and injustices’ perpetrated by her inadequate provincial officials.98 The task of improving local government was to preoccupy her for much of the following decade.

With Pugachëv gone, Moscow was safe to visit, seven years after Catherine had last set foot in the old capital. ‘Seven years seems like a whole century to us,’ Sumarokov made the populace exclaim in his Ode to Potëmkin in 1774. But since the empress was less certain of a rapturous reception, she delayed her departure until news of the pretender’s execution had been confirmed, making her formal entry into Moscow on 23 January 1775.99 Passing two newly erected triumphal arches, commemorating her victories against the Turks, she processed to the customary service at the Dormition Cathedral, and from there to her new palace, where she retired to her apartments. ‘The whole passed with scarce any acclamations amongst the populace, or their manifesting the least degree of satisfaction,’ Gunning reported secretly to Whitehall. ‘The Empress’s visit here is far from agreeable to them, and as little so to the nobility. Her Majesty is not ignorant of this, nor of the little affection they bear her; nor are they less acquainted with the unfavourable opinion she entertains of them.’100

Inside the porticoed entrance of the Prechistensky Palace, Matvey Kazakov had created a large reception room leading to a throne room, just as big, where Catherine could receive the ambassadors. Beyond that lay a still greater apartment, running the length of the building and divided by columns: she played cards in one half while her courtiers danced in the other.101 ‘To be fair,’ as she acknowledged to Grimm, the conversion had been artfully done. But she enjoyed poking fun at the ‘labyrinth’ connecting the disparate parts of her new palace, portraying her new study as ‘a triumph of exits’ from which it had taken her two hours to escape. ‘I have never seen so many doors in my life. I have already condemned half a dozen of them, and I still have twice as many as I need.’102

Thrust into this unfamiliar environment, Catherine and Potëmkin struggled to maintain the explosive intensity of their initial affair, relapsing instead into bickering about the terms of their relationship. It was already clear that they were partners in government. Indeed, when her sulky lover took offence at some corrections she sent him, she assured him that they were ‘only guidelines’ from which he could make his own choice. While he set to work to ensure that there could never be another Pugachëv, she concentrated on commemorating the defeat of the Turks. At first sight, it was Potëmkin who had the more ambitious task and he set about it with characteristic ruthlessness. Powerless to intervene, Panin watched in horror as the new favourite heaped obloquy on the errant Zaporozhian Cossacks barely twelve years after they had taken a proud role at the empress’s coronation. Their host was summarily disbanded on 3 August and its territory assimilated under the regular imperial administration.103 Meanwhile, Catherine had taken responsibility for an equally visionary piece of legislation. The manifesto commemorating the end of the Turkish war on 17 March 1775 has rightly been accorded ‘considerable importance in the history of human rights in Russia’ because it offered unprecedented protection to the individual by preventing the arbitrary enserfment of the population by census-takers who had deprived more than 830,000 men of their freedom between 1721 and 1741 alone.104

The vagaries of life with Potëmkin help to explain why Easter Sunday found Catherine in wistful mood about Grigory Orlov. ‘If ever you catch sight of him,’ she wrote to Frau Bielke, ‘you will see without contradiction the finest man that you have ever encountered in your life.’105 Paul and his wife were treated less charitably. Now that Natalia’s wilfulness had begun to emerge, the empress’s patience was starting to wear thin. She mocked the girl’s headstrong profligacy in a letter to Grimm in December: ‘we cannot stand this or that; we are indebted beyond twice what we have, and what we have is twice more than anyone else in Europe.’106 Now that her son had requested a further 20,000 roubles, she grumbled to Potëmkin that there would be ‘no end to it’: ‘If you count everything, including what I have given to them, then more than five hundred thousand has been spent on them this year, and still they want more. But neither thanks nor a penny-worth of gratitude!’107 On the whole, however, Catherine’s mood was positive. Even the obligatory summer pilgrimage to the Trinity monastery, with the Chernyshëvs and Kirill Razumovsky in tow, turned out to be ‘very agreeable and a real promenade: we had fine weather and good company and weren’t bored for a moment; I returned in perfect health’.108

Unfortunately, it was not to last. The peace celebrations had to be postponed when a surfeit of peaches gave her chronic diarrhoea. Onlookers remembered her looking old when she was finally fit to attend having been bled by the medics. On the southern perimeter of the city, fourteen obelisks, each decorated with battle scenes, had been erected to commemorate the greatest victories of the war. From there, the troops marched through the two similarly adorned triumphal arches toward the Kremlin, where Catherine processed down the Red Staircase just as she had at her coronation, only this time in full military uniform. The sound of Slizov’s bell ‘was so tremendous that it seemed that the Ivan Tower itself trembled’, recalled Andrey Bolotov at the beginning of the nineteenth century. ‘Many of us feared it would collapse.’ Bazhenov had initially proposed temples to Janus, Bacchus and Minerva, but Catherine was having none of it. Classical imagery was deliberately excluded as the empress insisted on a range of neo-Gothic structures, erected on Khodynka field at the north-western edge of the city. All of them found their place on an imaginary map of the Black Sea, where Kerch and Yenikale were made to serve as ballrooms, Kinburn as a theatre, and Azov a huge banqueting hall.109 Not since the carousel of 1766 had the Court been treated to such a riot of medievalism. The Black Sea transported to a field near Moscow? It was too much even for Voltaire: ‘I knew very well that the very great Catherine II was the leading person in the whole world; but I hadn’t realised that she was a magician.’110

In the midst of this glorious fantasy, the empress had turned her very practical mind to one of the most significant statutes of her reign, the Provincial Reform of November 1775, designed to bring her government closer to the people through a rationalisation of local administration in the wake of the Pugachëv rebellion. Though six surviving drafts in her own hand testify to the depth of Catherine’s commitment to the legislation, the ideas in it came from her advisers. The most influential was Yakov Sievers, who had been brought to Moscow to help her with the reform. ‘Work this out with Sievers,’ ran a typical note on one of her drafts. ‘This is the most stupid article of all,’ she confessed at a moment of particular frustration. ‘My head hurts from it. This endless rumination is very dry and boring. To tell the truth, I am already at the end of my Latin, and I do not know what to do about the Lower Court, the Board of Public Welfare, and the Conscience Court. One word from your excellency on these subjects would be a ray of light, bringing order out of chaos, as when the world was created.’111 In November, Sievers was appointed Governor General of Tver, Novgorod, Olonets and Pskov, an area larger than many European states in which he was given the honour of being the first to put the new reform into practice. As a sign that they had been appointed as the empress’s personal viceroys, he and Zakhar Chernyshëv in Belorussia were each rewarded with an English silver service weighing over 45 poods. Catherine eventually paid a total of 125,000 roubles for the two services, setting aside a further 42 roubles and 35 kopecks to provide fur coats for officers in the troop which accompanied the final consignment.112 ‘I think these regulations are better than my Instruction for the code,’ she told Grimm in January 1776. ‘They are being introduced at this moment in the provinces of Tver and Smolensk where they have been received with open arms.’113

The Court had returned to St Petersburg in December. It would be another ten years before Catherine saw Moscow again. By then, the city and the surrounding provinces had been transformed almost beyond recognition, at least in part by her own reforming zeal. Yet even that transformation paled by comparison with the turbulence in the empress’s personal life.

Photographic Insert

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Peter III’s tutor, Jacob Stählin, thought Rotari’s portrait of Elizabeth in a black lace mantilla the best likeness of this beautiful, irascible empress. Done in the last years of her life, it passed into the collection of her young favourite, Ivan Shuvalov.

Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (1709–61) by Pietro Antonio Rotari (1707–62): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

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The prevailing myth of a conquering foreign ruler bringing civilization and prosperity to Russia is encapsulated by Vigilius Erichsen’s portrait of the uniformed empress astride Brilliant, the charger she rode out towards Oranienbaum the day after her coup.

Equestrian Portrait of Catherine II (1729–96) the Great of Russia by Vigilius Erichsen (1722–82): Musée des Beaux-Arts, Chartres, France/The Bridgeman Art Library

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To ensure that enlightened female rule was not mistaken for weakness, Catherine’s image-makers represented her as Minerva, the war-like goddess of Wisdom, from the time of her coronation in 1762. This Parisian snuff-box may well have been made to mark her son’s visit to the French capital, twenty years later.

Round snuff-box showing Catherine as Minerva, Paris 1781–2 (gold, verre églomisé, silver): Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen

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‘If ever you catch sight of him, you will see without contradiction the finest man that you have ever encountered in your life.’ Embracing putti symbolise Catherine’s love for Grigory Orlov on the service she commissioned for him from the Imperial Porcelain Factory sometime between 1762 and 1765.

Tea caddy, coffeepot, and teapot from the Orlov Service, St. Petersburg, Imperial Porcelain Factory, 1762–5: Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens; Bequest of Marjorie Merriweather Post, 1973, photo by Ed Owen

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Completed as she arrived in Russia, Rastrelli’s Summer Palace on the Fontanka was an exuberant timber fantasy that survived Catherine’s reign, along with many other features of a Baroque Court, before being demolished by order of Paul I.

The Summer Palace, St. Petersburg, Russian School (18th century): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

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Exemplified by the Green Dining Room, Charles Cameron’s cool interiors at Tsarskoye Selo marked the triumph of the restrained neoclassical style in Russian architecture from the late 1770s.

Summer Palace, Tsarskoye Selo, Green Dining Room, designed by Charles Cameron, 1784–91: Bridgeman Art Library, London

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The empress’s comedies and operatic pageants played to select audiences at Giacomo Quarenghi’s neoclassical Hermitage Theatre, which opened on 22 November 1785. Catherine entered from the adjoining Hermitage, guests from the granite-clad embankment, itself admired as a ‘grand work, which, in regard to utility and magnificence’ could not ‘be paralleled except among the ruins of ancient Rome’.

The Hermitage Theatre seen from Vasilevsky Island, 1822 (colour lithograph), Russian School (19th century): Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

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Done in Kiev in 1787, Mikhail Shibanov’s portrait of the empress in travelling dress combines the image of a maternal ruler with the expansionist ambitions represented by the insignia of three chivalric orders: St Andrew the First Called (founded by Peter I), St George (founded ‘for bravery’ during the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74) and St Vladimir (founded in 1782, the year in which the empress outlined her ‘Greek Project’ in a letter to Joseph II of Austria).

Catherine II in a travelling costume, 1787 by Mikhail Shibanov (f1.1783–89): State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

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‘His rarest quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which set him completely apart from the rest of humanity.’ Potëmkin’s outsized personality is well captured in Giovanni Battista Lampi’s celebration of his martial valour, painted in the last year of the prince’s life.

Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potëmkin (1739–91), c.1790 by Johann Baptist I Lampi (1751–1830): Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library

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Small as it was, the palace at Zerbst provided Catherine’s father, Prince Christian August, with the quintessentially cosmopolitan setting of a Baroque Court in miniature.

The Schloss at Zerbst

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Boisterous in private, discreet and demure in public, the young Grand Duchess Catherine set out on her arrival at the Russian Court ‘to please the grand duke, to please the empress, and to please the nation’.

The young Grand Duchess Catherine soon after her marriage, after Grooth

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Few eighteenth-century princes escaped unscathed at the hands of second-rate artists. Peter III was no exception. The Synodal painter Aleksey Antropov captured something of the fabled vacuity of Catherine’s ill-fated husband.

Peter III, engraving after A. P. Antropov

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While the empress’s memoirs implied that Paul I was the progeny of Sergey Saltykov, her son always regarded Peter III as his father and resembled him strongly in both personality and physique.

Paul I, English engraving of the 1790s

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Modelling his illustrations of Catherine’s coronation on those of the French kings at Reims, Jean-Louis de Veilly transformed the intimate interior of the Cathedral of the Dormition into a cavernous temple.

Catherine’s coronation: nineteenth-century engraving after J. L. de Veilly

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Elaborate allegorical fireworks were one feature of Baroque Court culture that remained central to Russian ceremonials throughout Catherine’s reign. This display, performed on the banks of the Moscow River opposite the Kremlin on 29 September 1762, was intended to confer dynastic legitimacy on a newly-crowned usurper.

Coronation fireworks, 1762: A. K. Melnikov from an engraving by E. G. Yinogradov

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Elizabeth’s coronation in 1742 served as the model for Catherine’s twenty years later. In a scene facing north towards the Cathedral of the Dormition, the cockaigne for the populace on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square is flanked by the Red Staircase and the Ivan the Great bell-tower. Such feasts were still staged in the 1790s, though by then they had long been dismissed as barbaric by Western visitors to Russia.

Elizabeth’s coronation feast in the Kremlin Square, 1742: engraving of 1744

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‘From Catherine II to Peter I’ was the lapidary motto chosen by Falconet for his statue of the empress’s most glorious predecessor. On 7 August 1782 she witnessed the unveiling of the first public monument in Russia from the balcony of the former Bestuzhev mansion on the left of the engraving.

The unveiling of Falconet’s monument to Peter the Great: engraving by A. K. Lemnikov after A. P. Davydov, 1782

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‘Apart from seven rooms garnished in jasper, agate, and real and artificial marble, and a garden right at the door of my apartments, I have an immense colonnade which also leads to this garden and which ends in a flight of stairs leading straight to the lake. So, search for me after that, if you can!’

The Cameron Gallery, Tsarskoye Selo: aquatint engraving by J. G. de Mayr, 1793

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Though Catherine sought to surpass rather than merely imitate Peter I, her declared intention to complete what he had begun was part of her spurious claim to legitimacy. Tsar Peter gazes down approvingly from the heavens in Ferdinand de Meys’s allegorical representation of the empress’s great journey to the South in 1787.

Catherine’s journey to the south, 1787: allegorical engraving by Ferdinand de Meys, courtesy of Dr James Cutshall

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The first pornographic British caricature of the empress appeared less than two months after Caroline Walker’s majestic engraving, done at the outset of the Russo-Turkish War in 1787 from the copy of Alexander Roslin’s portrait owned by Catherine’s ambassador to London, Count Semën Vorontsov.

Catherine II, engraving by Caroline Walker after Roslin, London, 1787

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Though Platon Zubov liked to pose as a worthy successor to Potëmkin, he was in reality an arrogant upstart who damaged the empress’s reputation in her declining years. This version of Lampi’s portrait was done by the British engraver, James Walker, resident in Russia between 1784 and 1802.

Prince Platon Zubov, engraving by James Walker after Lampi, St Petersburg, 1798

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The caricature in this French version of ‘The Imperial Stride’, first published in London on 12 April 1791 NS, was the sort of salacious image that corrupted Catherine’s reputation among her 19th-century male successors.

‘L’Enjambée impériale’, French cartoon of 1791

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Under Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, it was left to the beholder to imagine the relationship between the bronzed youth and the statuesque empress represented by Lampi’s portrait of 1794. Pride of place on the 500-rouble note went to Peter the Great.

100 rouble note of 1910

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