Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (49 page)

People were coming to her. One, surprisingly, was Ivan Shuvalov, the favorite of the failing Elizabeth, who began courting the grand duchess in a manner that led to suspicion that he would like to play the same role with the future empress that he had with Elizabeth. She was attracting other, less calculating and less obvious, new adherents and, eventually, a significant trio of dissimilar people gathered around her. One was a fastidious, sophisticated diplomat; another a young war hero; and the third, a passionate and impetuous young woman. Coming from different backgrounds, exhibiting different qualities, there was a single constant: all were Russians, a useful thing for an ambitious German woman with no Russian blood.

The eldest of these three was the diplomat, forty-two-year-old Count Nikita Panin. He was Bestuzhev’s protégé and had survived his
master’s fall by having been absent from Russia when it occurred. The son of one of Peter the Great’s generals, Panin was born in Danzig in 1718, educated abroad, and had come home to serve in the Guards. At twenty-nine, he had been appointed Russian envoy to Denmark by Bestuzhev. A few years later, he was transferred to Sweden, where, for twelve years, he had served as ambassador. In Stockholm, Panin was recognized as a cultivated, sophisticated, liberal-minded Russian, and, as such, a rarity. Panin had believed in Bestuzhev’s policy of favoring Austria and England and opposing Prussia. When Bestuzhev fell and the Shuvalovs and Vorontsov forged their alliance with France, Panin, still in Stockholm, resisted their demand that he support this new alignment. Out of step, he resigned and, in the summer of 1760, came back to St. Petersburg. Elizabeth, recognizing his ability, shielded him from the Shuvalov-Vorontsov faction and appointed him chamberlain and chief tutor to her beloved Paul, placing him in a politically sheltered post that gave him prestige at court and an avid interest in the succession. Peter, unsurprisingly, was displeased by the choice of Panin. “
Let the boy remain for the time being under Panin’s supervision,” he grumbled. “Soon, I shall take steps to provide for a more suitable military training.” Panin, aware of Peter’s hostility, was also, by character and education, a natural ally for Catherine, but the two—grand duchess and tutor—had different ideas about the future. Panin, believing that Peter was unfit to rule and should somehow be removed, wished Paul to be placed on the throne as a boy emperor with Catherine as regent. Catherine pretended to agree with Panin; “
I had rather be the mother than the wife of the emperor,” she told him. In reality, she had no desire to be subordinated to her own child; her ambition was to occupy the throne herself. Panin aligned himself with Catherine because she had been close to his patron, Bestuzhev; because she had faithfully maintained this allegiance throughout the former chancellor’s disgrace; and because, in his mind, any arrangement involving her was preferable to seeing Peter on the throne. In addition, he shared her interest in Enlightenment political theory and in the appeal of a government by enlightened monarchy as advocated by Montesquieu. Panin knew that Catherine was discreet and that it was safe to discuss his ideas with her. They had worked out no plan of action–there were too many unknowns—but there was a bond of understanding.

The second of Catherine’s new allies was a hero of the war against Prussia, Gregory Orlov. By 1758, Frederick of Prussia was struggling to
defend his kingdom against three large allied powers, Austria, France, and Russia. In August that year, a Russian army of forty-four thousand men under General Fermor crossed the Prussian frontier and, on the twenty-fifth, fought a battle with Frederick and thirty-seven thousand Prussians near the town of Zorndorf. The nine-hour battle was among the bloodiest of the eighteenth century: more than ten thousand men were killed on each side; Frederick admitted losing more than a third of his army. In the ferocity of the combat, he and his men also acquired a new respect for the Russians; one Prussian officer wrote afterward that “
the terror which the enemy has inspired in our troops is indescribable.” After the carnage, both sides claimed victory, and in both camps a Te Deum thanksgiving was sung, but for two days neither of the blood-stained, crippled armies could move. Cannon still fired across the battlefield and cavalry skirmished, but Frederick and Fermor had fought each other to a standstill.

Among the Prussian officers captured at Zorndorf was Frederick’s personal adjutant, Count Kurt von Schwerin, a nephew of a Prussian field marshal. When this prisoner was moved to St. Petersburg in March 1760, protocol required that he travel under escort by a Russian officer who would become as much an aide-de-camp as a security guard. The officer assigned this task was Lieutenant Gregory Orlov, who had been at Zorndorf, where he was wounded three times but continued to inspire his men and hold his position. This leadership and courage had made him a hero in the army, and escorting Count Schwerin was a reward for his bravery. When Count Schwerin reached St. Petersburg, Grand Duke Peter, distressed to see an officer close to his own hero, King Frederick, suffer any embarrassment, arranged that Schwerin be treated with the honors and hospitality ordinarily extended to a prominent visiting ally. “
If I were emperor you would not be a prisoner of war,” he assured Count Schwerin. A mansion was set aside for the prisoner-guest, and Peter dined there often. In addition, he gave Count Schwerin the freedom of the city; he could come and go as he pleased, always accompanied by his escort officer, Lieutenant Orlov.

At twenty-four, Gregory Orlov, was five years younger than Catherine. He came from a line of professional soldiers for whom bravery was a family tradition. His grandfather had been a common soldier in the Streltsy, the corps of bearded pikemen and musketeers founded by Ivan the Terrible that had revolted against the military reforms imposed by
the young tsar Peter the Great. In punishment, Peter had sentenced many of the Streltsy—this Orlov among them—to death. When it came his turn to lay his head on the block in Red Square, the condemned Orlov strode unhesitatingly across a platform covered with gore, and, using his foot to push aside the freshly severed head of a comrade, declared, “
I must make room here for myself.” Peter, impressed by this contempt for death, immediately pardoned him, and placed him in one of his new regiments being formed for Russia’s coming war with Sweden. Orlov became an officer. In time, his son rose to be a lieutenant colonel, and then, in turn, begat five warrior sons, Ivan, Gregory, Alexis, Theodore, and Vladimir. All five were officers in the Imperial Guard; all were popular with brother officers and idolized by their soldiers. It was a tightly knit family clan, each brother bound in loyalty to the others. All of the brothers possessed exceptional physical strength, courage, devotion to the army and to Russia. They were drinkers, gamblers, and lovers, equally reckless in war and in tavern brawls; like their grandfather, they were contemptuous of death. Alexis, the third of the five brothers, was the most intelligent. A huge man who had been disfigured by a deep saber cut across the left side of his face, he had earned the nickname Scarface. It was Alexis who one day would accomplish the deed that would secure the throne for Catherine, a deed for which he always accepted full responsibility and for which she gave him her silent, lifelong gratitude.

But it was Gregory, the second of the five brothers, who was the hero. He was considered the handsomest of the Orlovs, with “
the head of an angel and the body of an athlete.” He feared nothing. One of his conquests followed the Battle of Zorndorf, when, still recovering from wounds, he managed to seduce Princess Helen Kurakina, the mistress of Count Peter Shuvalov, the Grand Master of the Artillery. This trespass on the turf of the mighty Shuvalovs might have imperiled Orlov, but he escaped when Peter Shuvalov suddenly died a natural death. News of this romantic conquest added to his military fame and made Gregory Orlov a conspicuous figure in St. Petersburg. He was introduced to Empress Elizabeth—and eventually he caught the eye of the wife of the heir to the throne.

There are no records describing the circumstances of Catherine and Gregory’s first meeting. An oft-told story is that one day the lonely grand duchess was staring out a palace window when she saw a tall,
handsome officer in the uniform of the Guards standing in the courtyard. He happened to look up, their eyes met, and the attraction was immediate. No amorous minuet followed, as had been the case with Catherine and Saltykov and again with Poniatowski. Orlov, despite his military reputation, was far below Catherine in rank and had no position at court. But Gregory was neither timid nor hesitant; his success with Princess Kurakina had given him courage to aspire to even a grand duchess, especially one known to be ardent and lonely. There were precedents for the mingling of social ranks: Peter the Great had married a Livonian peasant and raised her to become Empress Catherine I; the great Peter’s daughter, Empress Elizabeth, had spent many years with, and perhaps had married, a peasant, the amiable Ukrainian chorister Alexis Razumovsky.

In the summer of 1761, Catherine and Gregory Orlov became lovers. The affair was conducted in secrecy; the empress, Peter, and Catherine’s friends were not aware of it, and the couple’s assignations took place in a little house on Vassilevsky Island in the Neva River. In August 1761, Catherine was pregnant.

Orlov was a new kind of man for Catherine, neither a sentimental European sophisticate like Poniatowski nor a drawing room predator like Sergei Saltykov. Catherine loved him as he loved her, with an uncomplicated physical passion. Although Catherine’s first nine years of marriage had been virginal, she was now a mature woman. She had loved two men outside her marriage, and by each of these men she had borne a child. Now a third man had appeared and he, too, would give her a child.

Orlov’s motives were straightforward. Catherine was a powerful, desirable woman, openly and disgracefully neglected and persecuted by her husband, the Prussia-loving grand duke, who was hated by the officers and men of the Russian army. Catherine was exceedingly discreet about their affair, but Gregory kept no secrets from his four brothers, and they all considered that an honor had come to their family. Rumors of this relationship circulated among the men of the Guards regiments; most were impressed and proud.

Catherine had won the support of Nikita Panin, and, with the help of the Orlov brothers, she was winning the sympathy of the Guards. And then she attracted a third, very different, recruit to her cause. This was
Princess Catherine Dashkova, who, oddly enough, was the younger, married sister of Elizabeth Vorontsova, Peter’s mistress. Catherine Vorontsova—as Princess Dashkova had been before marrying—was born in 1744, the youngest of three daughters of Count Roman Vorontsov, himself the younger brother of the former chancellor, Michael Vorontsov. Her birth followed soon after the coronation of Empress Elizabeth, and because the Vorontsov family was one of the oldest of the Russian nobility, the infant girl was held over the baptismal font by the new empress herself, while the empress’s nephew, Peter, recently summoned from Holstein to be heir to the Russian throne, became the infant’s godfather. When she was two, Catherine Vorontsova’s mother died. Her father, Count Roman, still a young man, quickly became, in his daughters’s words, “
a man of pleasure, not much occupied with the care of his children.” The child was sent to live with her uncle Michael, who arranged a superior education. “
We spoke French fluently, learned some Italian, and had a few lessons in Russian,” she wrote in her memoirs. She displayed a precocious intelligence, sometimes staying up all night reading Bayle, Montaigne, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Catherine met this unusual young person in 1758, when Dashkova was fifteen. The grand duchess, delighted to find a Russian girl who spoke only French and who cherished Enlightenment philosophers, went out of her way to be gracious; the younger woman made Catherine her idol.

In February 1760, sixteen-year-old Catherine Vorontsova married Prince Michael Dashkov, a tall, popular, and wealthy young officer of the Preobrazhensky Guards. She followed her husband when he was assigned to Moscow, and there she had two children within eleven months. She never forgot the grand duchess in St. Petersburg. In the summer of 1761, she and her family moved back to the capital and her relationship with Catherine resumed.

In the capital, Dashkova’s sister, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s lover, Grand Duke Peter, tried to draw her into their circle, but the two sisters differed in almost every way. Elizabeth, whom Peter now had installed in his private apartments and was treating more as a future wife than a mistress, was dowdy, coarse, and ribald. Even so, having decided that she wanted to marry Peter, she pursued her goal with patient, steely determination. She outlasted all of his other diversions, and managed the
ménage à quatre
with Catherine and Stanislaus. Over the years, Peter found that she suited him so well that he could not give her up.

At court, Dashkova also was different. She cared little for elaborate
clothes, refused to wear rouge, talked incessantly, and was regarded as intelligent, outspoken, and arrogant. Along with her political idealism, she was prudish and found her sister’s behavior a painful embarrassment. Whether or not Elizabeth ever became a crowned empress, Catherine Dashkova considered her to be living in vulgar public concubinage. Worse, her sister’s goal was to replace the woman who had become Dashkova’s idol, Grand Duchess Catherine.

Princess Dashkova spent the summer of 1761 living in her father’s dacha on the Gulf of Finland, midway between Peterhof, where the empress was staying, and Oranienbaum, where Peter and Catherine held their summer court. Paul remained in Elizabeth’s household at Peterhof, but the empress now permitted Catherine to drive every Sunday from Oranienbaum to Peterhof to spend the day watching her son play in the palace garden. On the way home, Catherine often stopped her carriage at the Vorontsov dacha and invited the princess to spend the rest of the day with her at Oranienbaum. There, in Catherine’s gardens or in her apartment, the two women talked about books and political theory. Dashkova felt that she had reached a rare intellectual summit. “
I may venture to assert there were not two women in the empire except the grand duchess and myself who occupied themselves at all in serious reading,” she wrote in her memoirs. During these long conversations, the princess convinced herself that Catherine was the only possible “savior of the nation,” and that it was essential that she, not Peter, succeed to the throne. Catherine did not encourage the expression of these opinions. She looked on Dashkova as a brilliant, enchanting child, whose adoration was flattering and companionship stimulating, but she realistically saw herself coming to power as Peter’s wife—providing she could maintain her position against Elizabeth Vorontsova. Dashkova, for her part, felt something close to worship for the grand duchess: “
She captured my heart and mind and inspired me with enthusiastic devotion. I felt a devoted attachment which knew no competition except the love I bore my husband and children.”