In theory, the absolute power of the tsars received blind obedience in an empire without law – but Catherine knew it was different in practice, as Peter III and later her son Paul I never learned. ‘It is not as easy as you think [to see your will fulfilled]…’, she explained to Potemkin’s secretary, Popov. ‘In the first place my orders would not be carried out unless they were the kind of orders which could be carried out…I take advice, I consult…and when I am already convinced in advance of general approval, I issue my orders and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. And that is the foundation of unlimited power.’51
She was polite and generous to her courtiers, kind and considerate to her servants, but there were sinister sides to her thorough enjoyment of power: she relished the secret powers of her state, reading the police reports, then chilling her victims like any dictator by letting them know that they were being watched. Years later, the young French volunteer Comte de Damas, alone in his room watching some troops parade past the window on their way to fight the Swedes, muttered, ‘If the King of Sweden were to see those soldiers…he’d make peace.’ Two days later, when he was paying his court to the Empress, ‘she put her lips close to my ear and said, “So you think if the King of Sweden were to inspect my Guards, he’d make peace?” And she began to laugh.’52
Her charm did not fool everyone: there was some truth in the barbs of the priggish Prince Shcherbatov, who served at Court, when he described this ‘considerable beauty, clever, affable’, who ‘loves glory and is assiduous in pursuit of it’. She was ‘full of ostentation…infinitely selfish’. He claimed: ‘True friendship has never resided in her heart and she is ready to betray her best friend…her rule is to cajole a man as long as he is needed and then in her own phrase “to throw away a squeezed-out lemon”.’53 This was not exactly so, but power always came first. Potemkin was the one exception who proved the rule.
As a gentleman of the bedchamber, Potemkin now spent much of his time around the imperial palaces performing his duties, which included standing behind her chair at meals to serve her and her guests. This meant that he saw the Empress frequently in public, getting to know the routine of her life. She took an interest in him – and he began to take a reckless interest in her that was not necessarily fitting for such a junior courtier.
Skip Notes
* This was the child with whom she was pregnant at Elisabeth’s death – Alexei Grigorevich Bobrinsky, 1762–1813. Though he was never officially recognized, Catherine saw to his upbringing. He led a debauched life in Paris with the Empress paying his debts, before returning home and later travelling again. Paul I finally recognized him as a half-brother and made him a count.
PART TWO Closer
1762–1774
4
CYCLOPS
Nature has made Grigory Orlov a Russian peasant and he will remain thus until the end.
Durand de Distroff
When the Empress and the Second Lieutenant of the Horse-Guards encountered each other in the hundreds of corridors of the Winter Palace, Potemkin would fall to his knees, take her hand and declare he was passionately in love with her. There was nothing unusual about them meeting one another in such a way, because Potemkin was a gentleman of the bedchamber. Any courtier might literally have bumped into his Sovereign somewhere in the Palace – they saw her every day. Indeed, even members of the public could enter the Palace, if they were decently dressed and not wearing livery. However, Potemkin’s conduct – kissing Catherine’s hands on bended knee and declaring his love – was rash, not to say careless. It can only have been saved from awkwardness by his exuberant charm – and her flirtatious acquiescence.
There were probably several young officers at Court who believed themselves in love with her – and many others who would have pretended to be for the sake of their careers. A long list of suitors, including Zakhar Chernyshev and Kirill Razumovsky, had fallen in love with Catherine over the years and accepted her gentle rebuttals. But Potemkin refused to accept either the conventions of the courtier or the dominance of the Orlovs. He went further than anyone else. Most courtiers were wary of the brothers who had murdered an emperor. Potemkin flaunted his courage. Long before he was in power, he disdained the hierarchies of court. He teased the secret police chief. Magnates treated Sheshkovsky circumspectly but Potemkin is said to have laughed at the knout-wielder, asking: ‘How many people are you knout-beating today?’1
He could not have behaved like this before the Orlovs without some encouragement from the Empress. She could easily have stopped him if she had wished. But she did not. This was unfair of her for there could be no prospect of Catherine accepting Potemkin as a lover in 1763/4. She owed her throne to the Orlovs. Potemkin was still too young. So Catherine could not have taken him seriously. She was in love with Grigory Orlov and, as she later told Potemkin, she was a creature of habit and loyalty. She regarded the dashing but not particularly talented Orlov as her permanent companion and ‘would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire’.2 Nonetheless she seemed to recognize that she enjoyed a special empathy with Potemkin. So did the Gentleman of the Bedchamber who contrived to meet her as much as he could during the routine of her days.
—
Catherine arose daily at 7 a.m., but, if she woke earlier, she lit her own stove so as not to wake her servants. She then worked until eleven on her own with her ministers or her cabinet secretaries, sometimes giving audiences at 9 a.m. She wrote furiously in her own hand – she herself called it ‘graphomania’ – to a wide variety of correspondents, from Voltaire and Diderot to the Germans Dr Zimmerman, Madame Bielke and later Baron Grimm. Her letters were warm, outspoken and lively, laced with her slightly ponderous sense of humour.3 This was the age of letter-writing: men and women of the world took a pride in the style and the content of their letters. If they were from a great man in an interesting situation – a Prince de Ligne or a Catherine the Great or a Voltaire – they were copied and read out in the salons of Europe like a cross between the despatches of a distinguished journalist and the spin of an advertising agency.4 Catherine liked writing, and not just letters. She loved drafting decrees – ukase – and instructions in her own hand. In the middle 1760s, she was already writing her General Instruction for the Great Commission she was to call in 1767 to codify existing laws. She copied out large portions of the books she had studied since adolescence, especially Beccaria and Montesquieu. She called this her ‘legislomania’.
At 11 a.m. she did her toilette and admitted those whom she knew best into her bedroom, such as the Orlovs. They might then go for a walk – if it was summer, she loved to stroll in the Summer Palace gardens where members of the public could approach her. When Panin arranged for Casanova to meet her,5 she was accompanied only by Grigory Orlov and two ladies-in-waiting. She dined at 1 p.m. At 2.30 p.m. she returned to her apartments, where she read until six, the ‘lover’s hour’, at which time she entertained Orlov.