Catherine the Great

impossible to reconstruct the house at Lefortovo according to my plan and it would be better to knock almost all of it down and start anew. Even then it would be bad since it is near a slope and it would cost up to 900,000 roubles, which I am certainly not prepared to spend on a temporary building.’¹³⁸

In the end, the Menshikov Palace was used to house theatrical staff and Catherine chose to build a new stone residence on the site of the burnt-out palace on the other side of the Yauza River. Noting that it was ‘designed to be two or three English miles in circumference’, Wraxall observed that there was ‘a sort of savage and barbarous grandeur in this taste, which never appears in the edifices and productions of Athenian sculpture or architecture’.¹³⁹ So ambitious was the project that the empress never occupied her Catherine Palace, which was completed only in 1796. Since the immediate need for a useable residence remained, Bazhenov’s assistant, Matvey Kazakov, returned from St Petersburg at the end of August 1774 with a more modest commission to connect three large houses belonging to the Golitsyns, the Dolgorukys and the Lopukhins. It was in this ramshackle Prechistensky Palace, dismantled shortly afterwards, that Catherine was to celebrate victory over the Turks in 1775. Before then, however, she had not only to defeat the enemy, but also to overcome the most serious internal challenges of her reign.

CHAPTER NINE Paul, Pugachev and Potemkin 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