Catherine the Great

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 Pugachev 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 Pugachev 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 Chernyshev, Alexander Golitsyn and Alexander Vyazemsky. The list reads like a roll-call of her oldest friends. Only Potemkin 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 Pugachev was re-grouping in the Ural mountains, Catherine had time to face up to the rivalries stimulated by Potemkin’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 Chernyshev, whose mishandling of the Cossacks was held to have left the door open for Pugachev, 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 Potemkin. 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 Potemkin 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 Potemkin 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’.⁸⁴ Though 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. Pugachev, 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 Potemkin’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 Semen 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 Pugachev’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 Pugachev 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 Potemkin in the Hermitage in preparation for Natalia’s name day, Mikhelson inflicted a final devastating defeat.⁹² Though Pugachev 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