Catherine the Great

empress to send Suvorov to Finland on 25 April, as a way of putting pressure on the Swedes, Potemkin could pose as the sole victor of Ismail. By the time he was ready to greet her, resplendent in his new crimson velvet tailcoat, his private party resembled a state occasion in almost every detail, down to the cockaigne for the populace in the square outside.³⁸ For Catherine, the event brought to an end an exceptionally stressful week, in which her pleasure at the news of Pitt’s growing difficulties in Parliament was balanced by the need for preparations at Kronstadt in case the threatened British squadron materialised. She was later to pay for her excitement with an attack of the colic, but for now she celebrated her relief by staying at the Tauride Palace until two in the morning. ‘There you are, monsieur,’ she boasted to Grimm on her return to her apartments: ‘That is how we conduct ourselves in Petersburg in the midst of trouble and war and the threats of dictators.’³⁹

In one crucial respect, Potemkin’s entertainment missed its mark. It failed to dislodge Platon Zubov and his relations, the only prominent Russians left off the 3000-strong guest list. Diplomats heard that the empress was privately critical of the prince’s extravagance and irritated by his machinations against her favourite. Certainly his appearances at Court were few in May and June. Since Radishchev had reminded Catherine of the damage that Potemkin’s reputation for corruption could do, a measure of hesitation was understandable. But it was never enough to rupture the trust between them. As Isabel de Madariaga puts it, ‘there was a solidity in the link between the two which could be ruffled, but not broken by a Zubov’.⁴⁰

That was just as well, since before Potemkin left for the South on 24 July, he and Catherine had to agree on their response to the latest developments in Warsaw. The Poles had already taken advantage of the Russo-Turkish war to operate free from Russian influence through the sovereign Diet that began its four-year term in 1788.⁴¹ On 3 May 1791 NS, the week before the entertainment at the Tauride Palace, King Stanislaw August and a group of royalist conspirators, acting in temporary alliance with Ignacy Potocki and the Patriot Party, forced through the Diet a new constitution promising a major overhaul of the Polish political system. By abolishing the liberum veto, by which a single objection could de-rail proposed legislation, they sought to replace Poland’s anarchic ‘republic of nobles’ with a more orderly bi-cameral legislature backed by executive royal authority (‘Experience has taught us that the neglect of this essential part of government has overwhelmed Poland with disasters’).⁴² The Constitution of 3 May was doubly offensive to Catherine: not only did it threaten the prospect of a permanently stronger Western neighbour, but to a sovereign unable to distinguish between electoral reform and revolutionary Jacobinism, it seemed to signal the advance of the French contagion towards the borders of her own empire. For as long as the Turkish war continued, there could be no question of direct intervention against the Poles. So the empress satisfied herself by signalling her determination to overthrow the new constitution in the name of the old order. ‘This,’ Paul Schroeder has suggested, ‘was a serious, middle-of-the-road kind of programme for dealing with the Polish problem, stabilising Central and Eastern Europe, and making the European system work—about as good a one as the eighteenth century could offer.’ And it had the further advantage of leaving open two more radical options for the future: once the new constitution had been pushed aside, Poland could either be preserved as a Russian satellite or partitioned once more by a Russian- dominated coalition.⁴³

Events in Poland obliged Catherine to cast her eye towards France with new urgency. Not long after Louis XVI’s abortive flight to Varennes in June 1791, she made a secret loan of 500,000 roubles ‘for use in French affairs’.⁴⁴ Yet much as she might urge Sweden, Prussia and Austria to intervene against the Revolution, her aim was always to embroil them while retaining a free hand (not until 1798 did Russia join the anti-French coalition, with disastrous results for Tsar Paul). As the leading French emigre Count Valentin Esterhazy discovered, Catherine’s methods were at once more subtle and less risky. Soon after arriving in St Petersburg at the end of August, the count was entertained to dinner by Alexander Stroganov, an old acquaintance from Paris:

There were thirty of us. I ate several Russian dishes, sterlet soup, mushroom pate and other nourishing ragouts which are good when they are prepared by good cooks, excepting, however, an iced soup which was detestable and a drink whose name I have forgotten, made with flour, which was no better.⁴⁵

Yet even Stroganov’s hospitality paled into insignificance alongside Catherine’s determination to woo the emigres. ‘I work on the feelings of everyone of that ilk who falls into my hands,’ she admitted to Grimm. ‘I do not know in what state they return, but I cover them with fur as far as I can, and I tell them to seek their plans and their measures in the conduct of Henri IV.’ Catherine knew full well that Louis XVI was no Henri IV. Still, treating Esterhazy ‘entirely without ceremony’, she thought he seemed ‘fairly pleased’ with her. In fact, he was bowled over. After Catherine had shown off her paintings during the interval at his first ‘small Hermitage’, the astonished count told his wife that it was the sort of tour he might have taken ‘at the country estate of a private individual who was kind enough to show me round his house’.⁴⁶ Formal occasions were stunning in a different way. ‘The empress was in white,’ Esterhazy reported after chapel one Sunday, ‘with a sky-blue, sleeveless Russian robe and a broad, blue sash, tied in front of her skirt. She wore gauze on her head and a pendant with two enormous diamonds, diamond clusters in each ear and a pretty bracelet.’ On the twenty-ninth anniversary of Catherine’s coronation, he kissed her hand and dined at the house of Count Osterman, the vice chancellor, with a hundred others at the Court’s expense. That night, more than a thousand carriages were ranged across the square for the dress ball at the Winter Palace.⁴⁷

Behind the facade, Catherine was deeply troubled. Although the summer had brought good news from the Danube, where the Turks, weakened by the fall of Ismail, had sued for peace in the wake of defeats inflicted by Prince Nikolay Repnin, the preliminary treaty agreed at Jassy on 1 August was unsatisfactory. Despite securing the swathe of land between the Bug and the Dnieper, including Ochakov, Repnin had conceded the Turkish demand that the conquered territory should remain unfortified, and also agreed to an eight-month armistice which Potemkin regarded as no more than a ruse to postpone the final treaty, thereby hampering Russia intervention in Poland.⁴⁸ Worse was to come when the prince contracted a fatal fever while trying to negotiate a better settlement. News of his illness reached the empress at the end of August and fluctuating reports of his health left her increasingly agitated. ‘My true friend Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich,’ she wrote on 16 September. ‘I have received your letters of 29 August and 6 September. The first greatly cheered me, since I could see you were better, whereas the second only made me more anxious, seeing that for four days you had an uninterrupted fever and a headache. I beg God to give you strength…I, thank God, am well, and the colic has completely gone, which I put down to the girdle and the Hungarian wine you recommended.’ At the end of the month, she sent him a little fur coat and a homily: ‘For Christ’s sake, if need be, take whatever the doctors prescribe to bring you relief. And after taking it I beg you to avoid any food and drink that might counteract the medicine.’⁴⁹ (The prince’s appetite exceeded even his disdain for the medical profession: ‘his ordinary breakfast was the greater part of a smoke-dried goose from Hamburgh’ washed down by ‘a prodigious quantity of wine and Dantzick-liqueurs’.) ⁵⁰ On 3 October, Catherine was in tears on hearing that he had been given the last rites. Still hoping against hope, she wrote a final note of encouragement, reassuring him that his physicians were sure he was improving. Potemkin never saw it. On 4 October, he confessed that he could no longer bear his suffering. Next day, the man with whom she had shared more than any other was laid out on the road to Jassy and died in a coma soon after his fifty-second birthday.⁵¹

‘Between you and me,’ Esterhazy confided to his wife not long afterwards, ‘I believe the empress has not missed Potemkin much. He rather abused the sway he had over her and I am assured that she received complaints against him every day.’⁵² This was the voice of the prince’s enemies, led by Repnin and the governor of Alexander’s Young Court, Count Nikolay Saltykov, who had drawn General Suvorov into their ambit by arranging protection at Court for his daughter, a pupil at the Smolny Institute. Anxious not to be associated too publicly with critics of his late patron, Suvorov claimed that his conscience was clear ‘before God and my Great Empress’. Even so, he privately described Bezborodko, who had replaced Potemkin in the peace negotiations at Jassy, as ‘wise, like the deceased, only less treacherous’.⁵³

In fact, though conscious of the mistrust he inspired, Catherine never lost her faith in her ‘pupil, friend and almost idol’. So devastated was she by Potemkin’s death that her doctors insisted she be bled as soon as she heard the news on the afternoon of 12 October. Sleepless with grief, she poured out her feelings to Grimm in the early hours of the following morning, telling him of the ‘bludgeoning blow’ her mind had just sustained:

You can have no idea of my state of affliction! He combined an excellent heart with a rare understanding and an extraordinary breadth of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous; he was very humane, full of