Catherine the Great

desperate to see them both, but neither of them missed her; one did not know, the other did not care. In those weeks, she was made to understand that, having physically produced the baby, her role in creating an heir to the throne was concluded. Her son, a future emperor, now belonged to the empress and to Russia. The result of these months of separation and suffering was that Catherine’s feelings for Paul were never normal. Through the next forty-two years of their shared existence, she was never able to feel or display toward him the warmth of a mother’s affection.

Catherine refused to rise from her bed or leave her room “until I felt strong enough to overcome my depression.” She remained the entire winter of 1754–55 in this narrow, little room with its ill-fitting windows through which freezing drafts blew in from the icebound Neva River. To shield herself and to make life bearable, she turned again to books. That winter she read the Annals of Tacitus, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws), and Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations) .

The Annals, a history of the Roman Empire from the death of the emperor Augustus in A.D. 14, through the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, to the death of Nero in A.D. 68, offered Catherine one of the most powerful works of history of the ancient world. Tacitus’s theme is the suppression of liberty by tyrannical despotism. Convinced that strong personalities, good and evil, rather than deep underlying processes, make history, Tacitus painted brilliant character portraits in a spare but telling style. Catherine was struck by his descriptions of people, power, intrigue, and corruption in the early Roman Empire; she saw parallels in people and events surrounding her own life sixteen centuries later. His work, she said, “caused a singular revolution in my brain, to which, perhaps, the melancholy cast of my thoughts at this time contributed. I began to take a gloomier view of things and to look for deeper and more basic causes that really underlay and shaped the different events around me.”

Montesquieu exposed Catherine to an early Enlightenment political philosophy that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of despotic rule. She studied his thesis that there could be contradictions between a general condemnation of despotism and the conduct of a specific despot. Thereafter, for a number of years, she attributed to herself a “republican soul” of the kind advocated by Montesquieu. Even after she reached the Russian throne— where the autocrat was, by any definition, a despot—she tried to avoid excesses of personal power, and to create a government in which efficiency was guided by intelligence; in short, a benevolent despotism. Later, she declared that L’Esprit des Lois “ought to be the Breviary of every sovereign of common sense.”

Voltaire added clarity, wit, and succinct advice to her reading. He had worked on his Essai sur les Moeurs for twenty years (the full text was published as Essai sur l’Histoire Generale) and included not only manners and morals, but customs, ideas, beliefs, and laws; he was attempting a history of civilization. He saw history as the slow advance of man by collective human effort from ignorance to knowledge. He could not see the role of God in this sequence. Reason, not religion, Voltaire declared, should govern the world. But certain human beings must act as reason’s representatives on earth. This led him to the role of despotism and to conclude that a despotic government may actually be the best sort of government possible—if it were reasonable. But to be reasonable, it must be enlightened; if enlightened, it may be both efficient and benevolent.

Understanding this philosophy required effort from a vulnerable young woman in St. Petersburg recovering from childbirth, but Voltaire made it easier by making her laugh. Catherine, like many of her contemporaries, was charmed by Voltaire. She admired the humanitarian ideas that made him the apostle of religious tolerance, but she also loved his irreligious, irreverent thrusts at the pomposity and stupidity he saw everywhere. Here was a philosopher who could teach her how to survive and laugh. And how to rule.

Catherine gathered her physical strength and attended Mass on Christmas morning, but, while in church, she began to shiver and ache throughout her body. The next day, she had a high fever, became delirious, and returned to her small, temporary room with its freezing drafts. She remained in this nook, avoiding her own apartment and formal bedchamber, because these rooms were close to Peter’s apartment, from which, she said, “all day and part of the night, there issued a racket similar to that of a military guard house.” In addition, he and his entourage “constantly smoked and there were always clouds of smoke and the foul smell of tobacco.”

Toward the end of Lent, Sergei Saltykov returned from Sweden after an absence of five months. Even before his return, Catherine had learned that, once back, he was to be sent away again, this time to Hamburg as resident Russian minister; this meant that their next separation would be permanent. Clearly, Saltykov himself considered the affair to be over and himself lucky to be out of it. He preferred the temporary dalliances of court society to this now increasingly dangerous liaison with a passionate—and annoyingly possessive—grand duchess.

His own ardor had already taken new directions. There had been an irony in his mission to Stockholm; all foreign courts were aware of his liaison with Catherine, and Saltykov could hardly help feeling ridiculous in his role of herald of Paul’s birth. But when he reached the Swedish capital, he was quickly relieved of any embarrassment on this account. He found himself a celebrity. He was recognized by everyone as Catherine’s lover and the presumed father of a future heir to the Russian throne. He found that men were curious and women fascinated; soon he had his choice of casual affairs. Rumors that he had been “indiscreet and frivolous with all the women he met” reached Catherine. “At the beginning I did not want to believe this,” she said, but Bestuzhev, receiving information from the Russian ambassador to Sweden, Nikita Panin, advised her that the rumors seemed to be true. Even so, when Saltykov returned to Russia, she wanted to see him.

Lev Naryshkin arranged a meeting. Saltykov was to come to her apartment in the evening; Catherine waited until three o’clock in the morning. He did not come. “I underwent agonies wondering what could have prevented him,” she said later. The next day, she learned that he had been invited to a meeting of Freemasons from which, he claimed, he could not escape. Catherine pointedly questioned Lev Naryshkin:

I saw as clear as day that he had failed to come because he was no longer eager to see me. Lev Naryshkin himself, although his friend, found no excuse for him. I wrote him a letter bitterly reproaching him. He came to see me and had little difficulty appeasing me for I was only too disposed to accept his apologies.

Catherine may have been appeased, but she was not deceived. When he departed again, this time for Hamburg, Sergei Saltykov was leaving Catherine’s private life forever. Their affair had lasted three years and had caused her much anguish, but the worst she could bring herself to say of him later was, “He knew how to conceal his faults, the greatest of which were a love of intrigue and lack of principles. These failings were not clear to me at the time.” When she became empress, she made him ambassador to Paris, where he continued to pursue women. A few years later, when a diplomat proposed that he be transferred to a post in Dresden, Catherine wrote to the proposer, “Has he not committed enough follies as it is? If you will vouch for him, send him to Dresden, but he will never be anything but a fifth wheel to the carriage.”

29

Retaliation

DURING THIS SOLITARY WINTER when Paul was born, Catherine decided to change her behavior. She had met her obligation in coming to Russia; she had given the nation an heir. And now, as a reward, she found herself abandoned in a little room without her child. She resolved to defend herself. Examining her situation, she saw it from a new perspective. She had lost the physical presence of her baby, but, by his birth, her own position in Russia had been secured. This realization prompted her decision “to make those who had caused me so much suffering understand that I could not be offended and mistreated with impunity.”

She made her public reappearance on February 10 at a ball in honor of Peter’s birthday. “I had a superb dress made for the occasion, of blue velvet embroidered with gold,” she said. That evening, she made the Shuvalovs her target. This family, believing itself secure in Ivan Shuvalov’s liaison with the empress, was so powerful at court, so