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.
Potemkin’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 Pugachev 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.’95 Brought to Moscow in an iron cage on 4 November, Pugachev 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 Pugachev 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 Pugachev 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
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 Potemkin 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 Pugachev, she concentrated on commemorating the defeat of the Turks. At first sight, it was Potemkin 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 Potemkin 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 Potemkin 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 Chernyshevs 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 Pugachev 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
