Secret Lives of the Tsars (14 page)

Love was an alien feeling for Catherine: She had known little of it growing up, and had certainly not found it in her marriage. But that all changed when, after a year’s wooing, Saltykov finally managed to seduce her. He was “as handsome as a god,” Catherine wrote, “not lacking either in wit or in the sort of worldly knowledge, manners and savoir faire which one acquires in the best society and especially at court. He was twenty-six years old. All in all, by reason of his birth and his many other qualities, he was a distinguished gentleman.” He was also a rascal, a wily seducer who would eventually leave her devastated. “His chief interest in life was winning a lady’s heart, laying siege to her virtue and demolishing it,” wrote biographer Henri Troyat. Nevertheless, while the affair lasted, Catherine found true passion for the first time. She also found herself pregnant—a rather inconvenient state for a woman with a reputation to maintain and a husband who had not yet slept with her after eight years of marriage.

Some historians believe Peter’s inability to have sex was due to an affliction of the penis known as phimosis, in which the foreskin is so tight that it causes extremely painful erections. The remedy is circumcision, and, according to the French diplomat Jean-Henri Castéra, it was Saltykov who, perhaps seeking insurance against any unwelcome potential paternity questions, convinced the grand duke to undergo the procedure. Whether or not Castéra’s account is accurate, it was around this time that Madame Choglokova, under pressure from the empress, arranged through one of Peter’s valets to have a young widow by the name of Madame Groot introduce the virginal grand duke to the carnal pleasures of which he had long been deprived. Now, either freed of his physical impediment or his inhibitions (perhaps both), Peter, at age
twenty-five, could finally bed his wife. Not that either one of them particularly enjoyed the experience.

While the grand duke was being initiated by Madame Groot, Catherine’s affair with Saltykov appeared to be receiving some kind of imperial sanction. It seemed abundantly evident that Empress Elizabeth would have her heir, no matter how Catherine managed to conceive him.

After two miscarriages, Catherine was pregnant again early in 1754. But in April of that year Nicholas Choglokov died. It was quite a blow for Catherine, as her keeper had become far more humble and pliable, especially after the supposedly virtuous guardian had been caught having an affair. “He was dying just at a time when, after many years of trouble and pain, we had succeeded in making him not only less unkind and malicious, but even tractable,” Catherine wrote. “As for his wife, she was now sincerely attached to me, and she had changed from a harsh and spiteful guardian to a loyal friend.”

Unfortunately, Madame Choglokova was dismissed after her husband’s death, and the vacancy left by the couple was filled by persons Catherine found far more formidable: Count Alexander Shuvalov and his wife. It was not just Shuvalov’s position as the head of the feared secret police that disconcerted Catherine, but the “convulsive movement” that sometimes distorted half his face. “It was astonishing,” she wrote, “how this man, with so hideous a grimace, could have been chosen to be the constant companion of a pregnant young woman. Had I been delivered of a child having this same unfortunate tic, I think the Empress would have been greatly vexed.”

As her pregnancy progressed, Catherine was becoming increasingly
miserable. She was stuck with a ferocious new watchdog; a lover who, having conquered her, was growing increasingly distant; and, of course, a simpleton husband, who, though now sexually mature, nevertheless remained an emotionally disturbed child with a drinking problem. One day, Catherine walked into Peter’s room and found a rat hanging, “with all the formality of an execution,” she wrote, from a makeshift gallows. The rodent had committed treason, the grand duke explained, having devoured two of his toy soldiers made of starch. And there it would remain “for three days, as an example.”

On October 1, 1754, Catherine gave birth to a son, Paul, the paternity of whom remains a mystery. Was he Saltykov’s child, or did Peter actually manage to impregnate his wife?
*
2
As far as the empress was concerned, the father was of no consequence. Neither was the mother, for that matter. Indeed, as soon as Catherine delivered the baby, Paul was whisked away by the triumphant Elizabeth, who intended to raise the boy herself. As for Catherine, Troyat wrote, “she was only a womb emptied of its contents. She was no longer of interest to anyone. In an instant her room was deserted.”

Exhausted by her prolonged labor, Catherine was left alone on the mattress upon which she had given birth. Her pleas for fresh linen and something to drink went unanswered for hours. “I was dying of fatigue and thirst,” she wrote. “I had been in tears ever since the birth had taken place, particularly
because I had been so cruelly abandoned.… Nobody worried about me.… At last they placed me in my own bed, and I saw no other living soul all that day, nor did anyone send to inquire after me. As for the Grand Duke, he did nothing but drink with anyone he could find, and the Empress busied herself with the child.” Catherine would not see her baby again for well over a month. And Saltykov, conveniently sent away on a diplomatic mission to Sweden (ironically to announce the birth of the boy who may have been his son), was gone for good.

Alone and in despair, Catherine retreated to a small, drafty room where she would remain through the winter, nursing her sorrow while the rest of the world celebrated the birth of her son. “This was the worst, cruelest, indeed the most devastating period of her whole life,” wrote her biographer Robert Coughlan. “During it she arrived at the edge of emotional collapse and perhaps even of lifelong emotional invalidism. She survived. And in surviving became a different person.”

Catherine emerged from isolation transformed indeed. No longer would she be the compliant, eager-to-please young woman she had been, but instead a fierce advocate of her own interests and an instrument of her own advancement. “I drew myself up,” she wrote. “I walked with my head held high, more like the leader of a great faction than like one humiliated and crushed.”

For too long Catherine had endured Peter’s folly and neglect. Now the two were emerging as mortal enemies. Still, the grand duke continued to consult his wife on many matters—from wooing his mistresses to ruling his duchy of Holstein from afar. “Madam Resourceful,” he called her. “No matter how angry or sulky he might be with me,” she wrote, “if he was in distress on any point whatever, he would come
running to me as fast as his legs would carry him, as was his wont, to snatch a word of advice and, as soon as he had it, would run off again as fast as he had come.”

Yet despite his reliance on “Madame Resourceful,” Peter ignored her counsel when it came to his overt allegiance to his native Holstein. At one point he even imported into Russia a large contingent of soldiers from his native land, which only served to antagonize his future subjects, especially the army, and added to the mounting evidence that he would serve only German interests when he became tsar.

“The Grand Duke had an extraordinary passion for the little corner of the earth where he was born,” Catherine wrote. “It constantly occupied his mind though he had left it behind at the age of thirteen; his imagination became heated whenever he spoke of it, and, as none of the people around him had ever set foot in what was, by his account, a marvelous paradise, day after day he told us fantastical stories about it which almost put us to sleep.”

Peter’s pro-German proclivities were becoming an increasing liability, particularly after Russia went to war with Prussia in 1756. Recognizing her own fortunes were inexorably tied to her foolish husband’s, Catherine began to forge secret political alliances—including one with her erstwhile enemy Chancellor Bestuzhev-Ryumin—that would better position her for the future should Peter succeed in completely destroying his own credibility, which he seemed determined to do. “It was a question of either perishing with him or through him,” she wrote, “or else saving myself, my children and perhaps the State, from the shipwreck that was foretold by every moral and physical attribute of this Prince.”

Catherine’s concerns took on a new urgency when Empress Elizabeth suffered a series of strokes and her survival
appeared uncertain. Disaster loomed in the person of her husband, and her political maneuvering reflected the profound ambition she had long maintained to rule Russia without him, whatever the cost. “There is no woman bolder than I,” she declared to a French diplomat. “I have the most reckless audacity.” Yet it was just this quality that nearly destroyed her.

Meanwhile, though preoccupied in the forging of her own destiny, Catherine didn’t neglect her love life. She began an affair with the young protégé of her political ally the British ambassador Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams. His name was Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, and unlike his predecessor Sergei Saltykov, he was entirely in love with his mistress, particularly since it was she who first introduced him to sex. “My whole life was devoted to her,” he wrote, “much more sincerely than those who find themselves in such a situation can usually claim.”

The affair took a rather awkward turn when Peter caught Poniatowski, in disguise, sneaking into the palace. The cuckolded husband wasn’t in the least bit angry, however. Rather, he took a perverse delight in dragging his wife out of bed and insisting that she and her lover join him and his mistress for dinner. This was followed by more intimate soirees among the four, during which Peter developed an attachment to his wife’s bedmate—just as he had earlier with Saltykov. “Nature made him a mere poltroon,” Poniatowski wrote of Peter. “He was not stupid, but mad, and as he was fond of drink, this helped to addle his poor brains even further.”

During her affair with Poniatowski, Catherine found herself pregnant. And once again, the paternity of the child she was carrying was in question. “Heaven alone knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant,” Peter exclaimed. “I have no
idea whether this child is mine and whether I ought to recognize it as such.”
*
3

Though Catherine’s affair with Poniatowski, and the pregnancy that may have resulted, ultimately had few consequences (save for the tedious occasions the couple had to spend with Peter), her political dabbling had far more significant ramifications when some of her allies, including Bestuzhev-Ryumin, began to topple. Trouble began when one of Catherine’s known associates, General Stefan Apraksin, commander of the Russian forces against Prussia, suddenly retreated after an impressive victory over Frederick II’s army. Treason seemed to be afoot, and, as an investigation was pursued, Catherine fell under suspicion. After all, she had written to Apraksin, despite the fact that such correspondence was strictly forbidden her.

Feeling a noose tightening around her neck, Catherine made a bold move. She wrote a letter to the empress, “making it as moving as I could,” in which she expressed sentiments quite the opposite of what she really desired—which was to remain in Russia and ultimately rule: She asked to be sent home.

When her letter failed to get a response, Catherine intensified the pathos, feigning illness and calling for the empress’s own confessor, who promised he would go to Elizabeth right away and urge her to receive the unfortunate young woman. On April 13, 1759, the fateful meeting took place. Catherine performed brilliantly, summoning the perfect mixture of despair
and servility while spiritedly defending her loyalty to the empress. Peter, who had been watching the proceedings from behind a curtain, popped out at one point and began to cruelly berate his wife, which served only to make Catherine seem all the more sympathetic. All the while, Elizabeth’s anger slowly melted away.

“I could see that my words made a strong and favorable impression on her,” Catherine wrote. “Tears stood out in her eyes and to conceal how much she was moved, she dismissed us.”

Catherine’s
Memoirs
stop abruptly as she begins to relate the details of a second, more private interview with the empress. Nevertheless, it is clear that while she emerged chastened, she was unbroken. Now all she had to do was survive the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, and her husband’s malevolent hatred.

On January 5, 1762, Empress Elizabeth died of a massive stroke at the age of fifty-three. Peter was now emperor, and, as such, immediately set about alienating his new subjects. After six years of bloody warfare, Russia was poised to finally crush the Prussian forces of Frederick the Great. But Peter III wasn’t about to let his idol Frederick go down in such ignominious defeat. Instead, he simply canceled the war, snatching certain victory away from his own armies. It was an outrage, compounded by the new emperor’s insistence that the elite Guard units start wearing Prussian-style uniforms.

Having essentially routed his own military, Peter began an assault on the Orthodox faith—one of the pillars of Russian society. Although he had officially converted upon being designated as Elizabeth’s heir, the emperor held the Russian religion
in total contempt, clinging stubbornly to the Lutheran tradition with which he had been raised. In a move almost perfectly designed to estrange himself from the Orthodox hierarchy, he ordered sacred icons removed from places of prayer and even went as far as to confiscate church property.