The Romanovs

  Elizaveta became more dangerous as she aged. ‘Never did a woman reconcile herself with greater difficulty to the loss of youth and beauty,’ observed Favier. When she was angry with what she saw in the mirror, she ‘locks herself in her chambers’. She tried to beat ageing by appearing in gold brocade, ‘her hair loaded with diamonds, combed back and gathered on top’, and no one else was allowed to attempt this coiffeur. Once her hair-dyeing went wrong and, since the blunder obliged her to shave off her hair, she forced every girl at court to do the same. ‘The ladies wept but obeyed. The empress sent them black perukes to wear till it grew out again.’ She forbade any mention of illness, beautiful women or her enemy Frederick the Great. ‘Through her kindness and humanity’, wrote Favier, ‘one sees frequently her pride, arrogance, sometimes even cruelty, but most of all her paranoia.’ She was always on the move, ‘she rarely slept two nights in a row in the same place’, changed palaces in the middle of the night, altered the positions of doors in her houses – and closely followed any investigations by Alexander Shuvalov, the Terror.10 Her own ageing concentrated her mind on the sex life of Catherine and Peter: ‘The empress was very angry that we had no children and wanted to know whose fault it was.’

  Their principal lady-in-waiting, Choglokova, procured a ‘pretty painter’s widow’ Madame Groot to seduce Peter, but whether he was impotent, infertile or just inept, someone else would have to impregnate the grand duchess. Catherine implied that there were moments of closeness between her and Peter. She admits that their marriage was consummated after five years – at this time – and she boasts that Peter asked her advice on political matters and nicknamed her ‘Madame Resource’ for her ingenuity. But the good times were fleeting. She could have loved him, she claimed, if only he had loved her. Having clearly lost his virginity to Madame Groot, he started affairs with Biron’s daughter and an actress, followed by a relationship with Madame Teplova, wife of an official. ‘Imagine, she writes me four-page letters,’ this charmless unromantic bragged to his wife, showing her Teplova’s love letters, ‘and claims that I should read it and what’s more answer it, while I have to go and drill [the Holsteiners]?’ Catherine’s memoirs are thoroughly prejudiced, written much later in different versions, and she had every reason to libel Peter. But, judging by the reactions of everyone else at court, he was as rebarbative as she claimed.

  Catherine found herself the object of much flirtation from Zakhar Chernyshev, now back at court, and from the ‘truly handsome’ (and married) Kyril Razumovsky, who was genial ‘with an original mind’. She asked why he kept visiting.

  ‘Love,’ he said.

  ‘For whom?’

  ‘For you,’ he replied. Delighted, she burst out laughing.*

  Yet she was most taken with her chamberlain, the twenty-six-year-old Sergei Saltykov, ‘handsome as the dawn’, who, she noticed, kept turning up. Choglokova, with the empress as puppet mistress, was facilitating the access to Catherine of two courtiers: Lev Naryshkin and Saltykov. It was surely no coincidence that the Naryshkins and the Saltykovs were the two families that had married into the Romanovs.

  In a clumsy conversation about sex that Catherine thought suspicious (was it a trick?), Choglokova, declaring ‘how much I love my country’, offered: ‘You are free to choose “LN” or “SS”.’ Catherine chose SS who, as she later put it, ‘told me he loved me passionately’ and explained to her the mystery of ‘the happiness that could come from such things’ – the joys of sex.

  By December 1752, as the court moved to Moscow, Catherine was pregnant, yet her marriage was miserable. Peter captured a rat which he sentenced to death in a military tribunal and hanged in her bedroom. When she laughed, he was offended. Even though she miscarried twice, Choglokova allowed the lovers to meet, while in a significant gambit, Chancellor Bestuzhev, once Catherine’s enemy, encouraged the affair and started to cultivate her: she was the future. She needed little encouragement, either politically or sexually, and soon was pregnant again. Elizaveta appointed Alexander Shuvalov – the Terror – as oberhofmeister of the young household.

  On 20 September 1754, in the Summer Palace in Petersburg, Catherine gave birth to a son, whom she named Paul. The baby was immediately swept up and kidnapped by the empress, thrilled to have an heir. Catherine was left exhausted and bloodied on dirty sheets. While the grand duke boozed with his lackeys, she recovered by reading Voltaire and Montesquieu. When she was given 100,000 roubles as a reward for producing an heir, Peter complained that he had not received a prize, so Elizaveta borrowed the money back and gave it to him. Saltykov, his work done, was sent abroad.

  Was Paul the son of Saltykov or of Peter? Catherine, radiating unforgivable malice towards Paul, insisted in her private writings that he was her lover’s son – which would make the entire dynasty down to 1917 Saltykov, not Romanov. It is impossible to know, but even in the eighteenth century some babies were the children of their official parents. It is a miracle of genetics that traits of parents appear in children who have never known either of them. Paul grew up hideous so Catherine deliberately muddied the waters by emphasizing the ugliness of Saltykov’s brother. Certainly Paul did not look anything like le beau Saltykov, but he did look and behave like Peter.11

  Now the countdown to a new European war intensified the deadly rivalries that Peter and Catherine could not avoid.

  On 12 June 1755 a new British ambassador, Sir Charles Hanbury-Williams, arrived in Petersburg charged with winning over Elizaveta to an alliance against France and Prussia, a policy supported by Bestuzhev. When Catherine sat next to the ‘merry and pleasant’ Hanbury at dinner, they hit it off and he became her elder mentor – and she even wrote her first memoirs for him. Afterwards they watched his twenty-two-year-old Polish secretary, Stanisław Poniatowski, as he danced. The Pole, romantic and cultured child of the Enlightenment, flirted with her. ‘Endowed with very great sensitivity and an appearance that was at least interesting and pleasing at first sight,’ Catherine knew she was attractive, ‘and therefore halfway along the road to temptation . . . for to tempt and be tempted are very close’. Catherine and Poniatowski became lovers – but their affair was soon overtaken by the baroque drama that was European power politics.*

  On 19 September, Bestuzhev and Hanbury persuaded Elizaveta to agree an alliance with Britain – designed to stop Frederick’s aggression and specifically protect George II’s German kingdom, Hanover. Hanbury ‘was overjoyed with his success’ and Frederick was rattled – but Elizaveta delayed signing the treaty for so long that on 16 January 1756, Frederick of Prussia dramatically pulled off his own alliance with Britain. This Anglo-Prussian axis made a confusing mess of Elizaveta’s own Anglo-Russian treaty aimed at Prussia – and it threw Frederick’s old ally France into the arms of its traditional enemy Austria, which was already allied with Russia. Elizaveta was incensed and blamed Bestuzhev but these poisonous contradictions were unsustainable and could only be resolved by a diplomatic revolution: in May, France and Austria signed the Treaty of Versailles.

  On 18 August 1756, Frederick, funded by London, invaded Saxony, a strike that Russia could not tolerate. Elizaveta joined France and Austria in the Seven Years War, to crush Frederick who now faced the greatest powers in Europe.† Elizaveta created a war cabinet called the Conference of the Imperial Court. Behind the scenes, it was Ivan Shuvalov, now aged twenty-nine, who, while refusing to join the Conference, read despatches and sent orders to generals.

  Yet the future was uncertain: Peter, who spent his time drilling a small detachment of Holstein soldiers in Prussian style, often wearing a Prussian general’s uniform, had always hero-worshipped Frederick. Now that Russia was at war with his hero, he greeted news of Russian successes with increduility: ‘All this is a lie; my sources speak quite differently.’ He did not conceal from Catherine that he ‘felt he hadn’t been born for Russia and he didn’t suit the Russians nor the Russians him’.

  Worried about what would happen when the empress died, Bestuzhev made desp
erate contingency plans – always a risky activity. Using the society jeweller Bernardi as covert courier to Catherine, the old chancellor proposed that Peter should rule in tandem with his wife while he himself ran the government. Catherine did not commit herself.

  Elizaveta appointed as commander-in-chief the head of the War Collegium, Stepan Apraxin, son of Peter the Great’s admiral, who was an ally of Bestuzhev and a friend of Catherine. But travelling with a personal baggage train that took 500 horses to bear his luxuries, he advanced slowly, nervous of the brilliance of his enemy Frederick and the instability of his own court. On 19 August 1757 at Gross-Jägersdorf, Apraxin defeated the Prussians.

  Elizaveta was ecstatic, yet Russian supply and command were both woeful. Apraxin did not advance – instead, learning the empress was ill, he ‘retreated as if vanquished’, wrote an amazed Frederick. Bestuzhev became uneasy and encouraged Catherine to write to Apraxin telling him ‘to turn his march around’.

  Peter had come to hate Catherine so much that she feared his accession. She was superb with male potentates and spent hours talking with old countesses: ‘I sat down with them, inquired about their health, offered advice on what to take in case of illness . . . I learned the names of pugdogs, parrots, fools. In this simple and innocent fashion I accumulated great goodwill.’ She promoted herself as ‘an honest and loyal knight’ in whom ‘the charms of a very attractive woman’ were ‘joined to the mind of a man . . . Thus I disarmed my enemies.’ But she had to be careful: she fell pregnant by Poniatowski.

  ‘God knows where my wife gets her pregnancies,’ shouted Peter. ‘I don’t know if the child is mine.’ She realized she faced three possible paths: ‘1. to share the Grand Duke’s fortune; 2. to be exposed constantly to everything it pleased him to devise against me; 3. to take a path independently. A question of perishing with him or by him or saving myself, my children and perhaps the state.’

  Elizaveta attended the birth of the grand duchess’s daughter. Soon Catherine was in real jeopardy.12

  On 8 September 1757, as Elizaveta came out of mass in Tsarskoe Selo, she fell in a dead faint and did not wake up for two hours. As she recovered, the empress, encouraged by Shuvalov and vice-chancellor Vorontsov, mulled over the fishy manoeuvrings of Apraxin and Bestuzhev. It smelt like treason. On 14 February 1758, Bestuzhev was arrested and interrogated by the Terror; Vorontsov was promoted to chancellor; and the procurator-general Trubetskoi, somehow implicated, fell under a cloud.

  Next morning, Poniatowski sent Catherine a note of warning: Bernardi the jeweller, her go-between with Bestuzhev, was under interrogation. Assailed by ‘a flood of ideas each more unpleasant than the last’, Catherine felt ‘a dagger in my heart’. She knew that the spotlight of the Secret Chancellery had been turned on her and Peter, but she was greatly reassured when Bestuzhev sent this message: ‘Nothing to fear; there was time to burn everything.’

  If there was no evidence of Bestuzhev’s plans for the succession, Catherine was still vulnerable thanks to her letters to Apraxin and the denunciations of her husband. But she knew that the empress preferred her to Peter. ‘Today my damned nephew irritated me as never before,’ Elizaveta wrote to Ivan Shuvalov. At 1.30 a.m. on 13 April, the nocturnal tsarina had Catherine woken up and brought to her: Peter and the Terror joined them, while Ivan Shuvalov listened from behind a screen. Catherine threw herself on her knees before Elizaveta, begging to be sent home to Zerbst because ‘I’ve incurred your disfavour and the hatred of the grand duke.’

  ‘Why do you want to be sent back? Remember you have children,’ replied the empress.

  ‘My children are in your hands,’ answered Catherine cleverly.

  ‘You’re extremely proud,’ said Elizaveta. ‘You imagine no one’s cleverer than you.’

  ‘If I did believe this, nothing would disabuse me more than my present state.’

  Catherine ‘was terribly wicked and very stubborn’, Peter told the Terror. The empress wheeled round to silence him.

  ‘How did you dare send orders to Marshal Apraxin?’ Elizaveta asked Catherine. ‘How can you deny it? Your letters are right here.’

  ‘Bestuzhev’s lying,’ asserted Catherine.

  ‘Well then, if he’s lying, I’ll have to have him tortured,’ said the empress.

  Catherine had survived the showdown. When Peter left, Elizaveta held her back. ‘I’ll have many more things to tell you,’ she said quietly – and later their mutual loathing for Peter brought them back together. Secretly Catherine was no longer impressed by the bullying empress. ‘Oh that log of a woman,’ she quoted Poniatowski as saying, ‘she drives us mad. If only she would die!’

  The war strained Elizaveta’s nerves. The coalition of Russia, Austria, France and Sweden should have been able to crush Frederick, but he knew that ‘unity of command is the most important thing in war’ and he outwitted the clumsy allies. Elizaveta ordered Apraxin’s arrest. After his first interrogation by Alexander Shuvalov, he perished from a stroke. Catherine now lost Poniatowski, banished to Poland. She distracted herself by reading Diderot, but in March 1759 her baby died.13

  On 12 April, a lieutenant of the Izmailovsky Guards, Grigory Orlov, aged twenty-five, wounded thrice at the Battle of Zorndorf the previous August, arrived in Petersburg escorting a prisoner, Count Kurt von Schwerin, an adjutant of Frederick. With ironic symmetry, Peter’s head was completely turned by the Prussian, while Catherine fell in love with his dashing escort, Orlov.

  Gigantic in stature, angelic of face, Orlov deployed heroic derring-do on the battlefield and legendary sexual equipment in the bedroom. He was ‘blessed with every advantage of figure, countenance and manner’. He was soon appointed adjutant to Peter Shuvalov, but quickly offended the Mughal by seducing his mistress, Princess Elena Kurakina.

  Meanwhile Peter was thrilled to hobnob with Schwerin, his link to Frederick the Great. ‘If I were sovereign,’ he told the count, ‘you would not be a prisoner of war.’ This was the sort of foolish comment that outraged Orlov and his fellow Guardsmen, who had shed so much blood at Zorndorf.

  Catherine surely arranged to meet Orlov whenever Schwerin talked to her husband. Their affair did not start immediately, but by late 1760 they were in love and Catherine was pregnant. Orlov was ‘very handsome,’ wrote the French ambassador, the baron de Breteuil, and ‘very stupid’. The sort of bluff soldier everyone loves, son of a provincial governor, ‘he was a simple and straightforward man without pretensions, affable, popular, good humoured and honest. He never did an unkindness.’ He and his four brothers were popular in the Guards, particularly Alexei Orlov, known as ‘Scarface’, who was all ‘brute force and no heart’, precisely the sort of cut-throat a princess in distress might require.14

  The war was bleeding Russia – and Elizaveta. The new Winter Palace was nearly ready, but she could not afford to finish her apartments. ‘I fight on,’ she declared, ‘even if I have to sell half my clothes and all my diamonds.’ Frederick outmanoeuvred his cumbersome opponents, but in the spring the Russians, now under General Peter Saltykov, took Frankfurt, then in August 1759 routed Frederick himself at Kunersdorf. ‘I believe all is lost,’ wrote Frederick who wore a suicide pack around his neck containing eighteen opium pills. ‘Farewell for ever.’

  Elizaveta celebrated but Peter did not believe it: ‘I know Russians can never beat Prussians.’ The empress appointed her first lover, Alexander Buturlin, promoted to count and field marshal, to take command, but his leaden slowness outraged her. ‘The news of your retreat’, she wrote, ‘has caused us more sorrow than a lost battle. We command you to move directly on Berlin and occupy it. If anyone says our army is not fit to storm fortresses, he’ll be arrested and brought here in chains!’

  In July 1761, Elizaveta, now fifty, collapsed with ‘an attack of hysterical vapours and convulsions that left her unconscious for some hours’. Ignoring her accession-day and birthday, she recuperated alone with Ivan Shuvalov and her grandson Paul, her legs so swollen she could scarcely walk. In Augu
st, her cavalry took Berlin for four days – but Frederick fought on. She was dying and Ivan Shuvalov felt the power haemorrhaging away as courtiers looked to the future, to Peter. ‘I see cunning which I don’t understand,’ Shuvalov wrote to Vorontsov, ‘and danger which comes from people for whom I have only done good services. My inability to continue providing these has resulted in a loss of respect for me . . . I was never so naive as to think they loved me rather than the benefit they obtained from me.’ In August, Elizaveta sacked Trubetskoi as procurator-general – after twenty years, leading to a purge of 153 of his protégés in top posts. As the government shook, several conspiracies were hatching. Catherine was encouraged in her plans by Kyril Razumovsky and was backed by Orlov. While Peter was now in love with the unprepossessing Elizabeth Vorontsova, the chancellor’s niece, her sister Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, the sparky wife of a Guards officer, represented another group keen to overthrow Peter as soon as Elizaveta was dead. All the factions visited Catherine by night.

  ‘Trust me,’ Dashkova said to her.

  ‘No one trusted her,’ thought Catherine.

  ‘You have only to give the order,’ said Dashkova, ‘and we will enthrone you.’

  ‘I’ve made no plans,’ replied Catherine, who was very pregnant by Orlov. ‘Only one thing to do: meet events bravely.’15

  Elizaveta ordered Ivan Shuvalov to approach Nikita Panin, the governor of Catherine’s baby son Paul, to discuss bypassing Peter. Paul would be tsar with Catherine as regent. Panin discouraged him. On 23 December Elizaveta suffered a stroke. In a bedroom in an old wing of the Winter Palace, the Razumovskys and a weeping Ivan Shuvalov stood around the deathbed. Catherine, pregnancy artfully hidden, sat by the bed while Peter drank outside. On the 24th, news of victories against Prussia arrived – Frederick was on the verge of destruction – but the empress was unconscious. At 4 p.m. on Christmas Day she died – then the sobbing courtiers fell to their knees and kissed Peter’s hand. The doors were thrown open: Marshal Trubetskoi, with tears running down his face, announced the accession of Peter III.16