An aging Catherine with one of her greyhounds in the park at Tsarskoe Selo
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The Falconet statue of Peter the Great, created at Catherine’s command to emphasize her connection with the great reforming tsar.
The inscription on the pedestal, in Russian on one side and Latin on the other, reads, TO PETER THE FIRST, FROM CATHERINE THE SECOND.
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41
Panin, Orlov, and Elizabeth’s Death
AS THE EMPRESS’S HEALTH deteriorated, Catherine considered her own political future. It seemed certain that Elizabeth would make no change in the succession and that Peter would follow his aunt on the throne. Catherine would be alone; her friends and political allies had been stripped away. The chancellor, Bestuzhev, had been disgraced and exiled. General Apraksin, also disgraced, was dead. Hanbury-Williams, the British ambassador, had returned home; now, he too was dead. Her lover, Stanislaus Poniatowski, had departed for Poland and bringing him back would be impossible. With Peter’s incompetence now clear, Catherine could not help pondering what political role she might play in a new reign. It could be as Peter’s wife and adviser, doing what she had done in helping him to manage the affairs of Holstein. But if Peter acted on his determination to marry Elizabeth Vorontsova, Catherine would have no role. If, somehow, Peter were to be replaced in the line of succession and Paul were to come to the throne, she might act as regent until the boy grew up. A more distant possibility of which Catherine sometimes dreamed was that she would play the supreme role herself. Which path would be open to her was unclear, but one thing was certain: whatever happened, she would need allies.
People were coming to her. One, surprisingly, was Ivan Shuvalov, the favorite of the failing Elizabeth, who began courting the grand duchess in a manner that led to suspicion that he would like to play the same role with the future empress that he had with Elizabeth. She was attracting other, less calculating and less obvious, new adherents and, eventually, a significant trio of dissimilar people gathered around her. One was a fastidious, sophisticated diplomat; another a young war hero; and the third, a passionate and impetuous young woman. Coming from different backgrounds, exhibiting different qualities, there was a single constant: all were Russians, a useful thing for an ambitious German woman with no Russian blood.
The eldest of these three was the diplomat, forty-two-year-old Count Nikita Panin. He was Bestuzhev’s protege and had survived his master’s fall by having been absent from Russia when it occurred. The son of one of Peter the Great’s generals, Panin was born in Danzig in 1718, educated abroad, and had come home to serve in the Guards. At twenty-nine, he had been appointed Russian envoy to Denmark by Bestuzhev. A few years later, he was transferred to Sweden, where, for twelve years, he had served as ambassador. In Stockholm, Panin was recognized as a cultivated, sophisticated, liberal-minded Russian, and, as such, a rarity. Panin had believed in Bestuzhev’s policy of favoring Austria and England and opposing Prussia. When Bestuzhev fell and the Shuvalovs and Vorontsov forged their alliance with France, Panin, still in Stockholm, resisted their demand that he support this new alignment. Out of step, he resigned and, in the summer of 1760, came back to St. Petersburg. Elizabeth, recognizing his ability, shielded him from the Shuvalov-Vorontsov faction and appointed him chamberlain and chief tutor to her beloved Paul, placing him in a politically sheltered post that gave him prestige at court and an avid interest in the succession. Peter, unsurprisingly, was displeased by the choice of Panin. “Let the boy remain for the time being under Panin’s supervision,” he grumbled. “Soon, I shall take steps to provide for a more suitable military training.” Panin, aware of Peter’s hostility, was also, by character and education, a natural ally for Catherine, but the two— grand duchess and tutor—had different ideas about the future. Panin, believing that Peter was unfit to rule and should somehow be removed, wished Paul to be placed on the throne as a boy emperor with Catherine as regent. Catherine pretended to agree with Panin; “I had rather be the mother than the wife of the emperor,” she told him. In reality, she had no desire to be subordinated to her own child; her ambition was to occupy the throne herself. Panin aligned himself with Catherine because she had been close to his patron, Bestuzhev; because she had faithfully maintained this allegiance throughout the former chancellor’s disgrace; and because, in his mind, any arrangement involving her was preferable to seeing Peter on the throne. In addition, he shared her interest in Enlightenment political theory and in the appeal of a government by enlightened monarchy as advocated by Montesquieu. Panin knew that Catherine was discreet and that it was safe to discuss his ideas with her. They had worked out no plan of action–there were too many unknowns—but there was a bond of understanding.
The second of Catherine’s new allies was a hero of the war against Prussia, Gregory Orlov. By 1758, Frederick of Prussia was struggling to defend his kingdom against three large allied powers, Austria, France, and Russia. In August that year, a Russian army of forty-four thousand men under General Fermor crossed the Prussian frontier and, on the twenty-fifth, fought a battle with Frederick and thirty-seven thousand Prussians near the town of Zorndorf. The nine-hour battle was among the bloodiest of the eighteenth century: more than ten thousand men were killed on each side; Frederick admitted losing more than a third of his army. In the ferocity of the combat, he and his men also acquired a new respect for the Russians; one Prussian officer wrote afterward that “the terror which the enemy has inspired in our troops is indescribable.” After the carnage, both sides claimed victory, and in both camps a Te Deum thanksgiving was sung, but for two days neither of the blood- stained, crippled armies could move. Cannon still fired across the battlefield and cavalry skirmished, but Frederick and Fermor had fought each other to a standstill.
Among the Prussian officers captured at Zorndorf was Frederick’s personal adjutant, Count Kurt von Schwerin, a nephew of a Prussian field marshal. When this prisoner was moved to St. Petersburg in March 1760, protocol required that he travel under escort by a Russian officer who would become as much an aide-de-camp as a security guard. The officer assigned this task was Lieutenant Gregory Orlov, who had been at Zorndorf, where he was wounded three times but continued to inspire his men and hold his position. This leadership and courage had made him a hero in the army, and escorting Count Schwerin was a reward for his bravery. When Count Schwerin reached St. Petersburg, Grand Duke Peter, distressed to see an officer close to his own hero, King Frederick, suffer any embarrassment, arranged that Schwerin be treated with the honors and hospitality ordinarily extended to a prominent visiting ally. “If I were emperor you would not be a prisoner of war,” he assured Count Schwerin. A mansion was set aside for the prisoner-guest, and Peter dined there often. In addition, he gave Count Schwerin the freedom of the city; he could come and go as he pleased, always accompanied by his escort officer, Lieutenant Orlov.
At twenty-four, Gregory Orlov, was five years younger than Catherine. He came from a line of professional soldiers for whom bravery was a family tradition. His grandfather had been a common soldier in the Streltsy, the corps of bearded pikemen and musketeers founded by Ivan the Terrible that had revolted against the military reforms imposed by the young tsar Peter the Great. In punishment, Peter had sentenced many of the Streltsy—this Orlov among them—to death. When it came his turn to lay his head on the block in Red Square, the condemned Orlov strode unhesitatingly across a platform covered with gore, and, using his foot to push aside the freshly severed head of a comrade, declared, “I must make room here for myself.” Peter, impressed by this contempt for death, immediately pardoned him, and placed him in one of his new regiments being formed for Russia’s coming war with Sweden. Orlov became an officer. In time, his son rose to be a lieutenant colonel, and
