Great Catherine (27 page)

Stories of this victory made the rounds in Petersburg, and all the Russian regiments began to recruit more men. Winter closed in, the coldest winter in years. The Prussians, encamped in the snow and inadequately equipped, began to die of disease and hunger. Russia and her allies took heart. The final victory seemed close now. One more campaign and the Prussian menace would be quashed forever.

When spring came a huge army of Russians, Austrians and French, nearly four hundred thousand in all, marched against the Prussian strongholds. All summer the grand assault was pressed. In October of 1760 Berlin fell to a dogged Russian attack, and although the Russians soon abandoned their prize, they held it long enough to ravage its defenses and plunder its arsenal, enriching themselves with a huge ransom from the terrified Berliners. Still Frederick refused to surrender, though his losses were monumental and the loyalty of his men was being tested almost beyond endurance. Another Prussian victory at Torgau in November was sobering to the allies, and both sides settled in for the long winter respite.

Catherine, deeply engaged in her own fight for political survival, was preparing her defenses as best she could. While hoping against hope that the empress might cut Peter out of the succession and declare Paul her heir—with Catherine as regent—she built a new group of allies.

To replace Bestuzhev as her political adviser she chose one of

the ex-chancellor's proteges. Count Nikita Panin was a diplomat and a confirmed Anglophile like Catherine herself. Panin had broken with the pro-French policies of the Vorontzovs and Shu-valovs and was serving as tutor to young Paul. He was astute and capable, and Catherine came to believe that she could trust him. For several years she had had her eye on Panin as a candidate to join the new government when the empress died. Now she confided in him, and was gratified to discover in what contempt he held Peter and how eager he was to see a regency replace Elizabeth.

Secret diplomatic approaches that would previously have been made through Bestuzhev now came to Catherine directly. Several European governments let the grand duchess know that they were prepared to lend financial backing to any plan to remove Peter from the succession. Russia's military allies, chiefly Austria and France, were alarmed at the possibility that the pro-Prussian Peter might come to the throne and immediately take Russia out of the war. They opened their treasuries to Catherine, and she gladly accepted what was offered, knowing she might need it quite soon.

One unlikely ally joined Catherine, as it were, from the enemy camp. Peter's mistress Elizabeth Vorontzov had a younger sister, Catherine, married to a guards officer, Prince Dashkov. Catherine Dashkov had little in common with her brash, slatternly older sister save that she was rather plain. Like the grand duchess, whom she greatly admired, Princess Dashkov had a roving, curious mind and a thirst for new ideas. At the age of seventeen, when she began her friendship with Catherine, Princess Dashkov was the proud owner of one of the largest libraries in the capital and had read widely from the works of the French philosophes. It was no wonder Catherine enjoyed conversing with the precocious princess. Before long, she discovered that the idealistic Catherine Dashkov yearned to see her on the Russian throne and was working behind the scenes to gather support for her.

Little by little, one by one, the roster of Catherine's supporters

ricRson

grew. A number of officers in the prestigious and strategically crucial guards regiments got word to her that they would support her should their loyalty be put to the test. Kiril Razumovsky, colonel of the Ismailovsky regiment, had told Catherine several years earlier that he would defend her "at the cost of his life" and that she had many other secret partisans who would do the same.

That the guards regiments were the key military prop to the imperial court, Catherine well knew. No government could stand for long should these regiments revolt, nor could any attempted coup succeed if the Preobrazhensky, Semenovsky, and Ismailovsky regiments remained loyal to the emperor or empress.

Everyone in the government knew the story of how Elizabeth's claims to her father's throne had been made good by the Petersburg guards regiments eighteen years earlier. On a bitterly cold December night in 1741 she had gone to the barracks of the Preobrazhensky Grenadiers. Beautiful in her courageous vulnerability, a leather cuirass around her slight shoulders and a Russian cross in her hand, Elizabeth had asked the men for their support against the regent Anna and her German ministers. With shouts and cries the soldiers had pledged her their undying loyalty, swearing that she deserved to reign as the wholly Russian daughter of Peter the Great. Elizabeth led the men on to the Winter Palace, riding in a sledge over the crusted snow, and there she woke the regent and sent her and the baby Emperor Ivan to prison.

The men of the Preobrazhensky regiment had created Elizabeth Empress. With their brother officers in the guards, they could do the same again—for Catherine.

Gregory Orlov, the handsome hero of Zorndorf, was a lieutenant in the Ismailovsky guards. And he had four magnificent brothers: Ivan, Alexis, Feodor and Vladimir. All guardsmen. All outsize and fiercely strong. All respected leaders in their regiments, looked up to by the men and able to sway them politically.

Nothing is known for certain about how Catherine and Gregory Orlov became lovers. She was an experienced woman of

thirty, romantic and passionate, with pretensions to power yet handicapped by her gender and by the precarious state of her relations with her husband. She needed a man who would love her loyally and champion her cause. Orlov was a worldly, celebrated warrior of twenty-five whose rampant ardor expended itself in fighting, carousing and lovemaking. He was eager to advance himself, yet he lacked high birth, education, important connections at court. He needed an opportunity to make himself useful. Perhaps her passion ignited his ambition, or perhaps he loved Catherine as he had never loved before.

All that is certain is that by the summer of 1761, with Prussia still undefeated and war losses mounting on both sides, with the empress locked in a macabre cycle of sinking into deathlike swoons and rallying to life mouthing curses at the hated Frederick, with Elizabeth Vorontzov counting the days until she became Peter's wife and Peter secretly passing on military information to the Prussians, Catherine became pregnant with Gregory Orlov's child.

Their liaison was not common knowledge, and Catherine managed to conceal her pregnancy and to stay in the background as events unfolded in the fall.

No one knew what the capricious empress would do next. Desperate to ensure a Russian victory over her arch-enemy of Prussia, she issued order after order to the army, changing generals, heaping abuse on anyone who got in her way.

She could no longer stand; often she held her hand to her heart as if to still its erratic pounding. When she became excited, blood ran from her nose; her attendants kept lengths of linen ready to stanch the flow. A terrible sore that would not heal disfigured her left foot. The sore preoccupied her. She stared at it as if in a trance, muttering that it was a punishment from God, sent because her father, the Great Peter, had kissed her foot when she was a girl. Her mind at times seemed dormant, or lost in bizarre musings, yet time and again she roused herself from her mental lethargy and croaked out demands, orders, punishments.

New fears grew in all those whose fortunes depended on the succession. What if the empress were to go mad? For a number of years she had been intrigued by madness, setting aside rooms in the palace where lunatics were kept and increasing her stock of demented men and women at frequent intervals. On one occasion, Catherine noted in her memoirs, twelve mad women were brought to court at once, perhaps because the empress felt compassion for them, more likely because their freakish behavior entertained her.

Now there was a risk that Elizabeth herself might become as deranged as her pet lunatics. If she did, would Michael Vorontzov and his faction control her? Or could Peter manage to maneuver himself into power, as regent for his incapacitated aunt?

October came, the cold weather set in and despite it, the newly appointed Russian general Buturlin sent thousands of Russian troops into battle against the Prussians. Buturlin had reason to hope that this campaign would be the final one. Large armies of Austrians and Swedes were joining with his Russians in this grand assault against an exhausted and disheartened Prussian foe.

Prussia had been laid low by six years of warfare. Nearly half a million soldiers and civilians had died, out of a total population of less than five million. For every man who had died in battle or as a result of wounds, two more had succumbed in the suffering that followed the battles, with crops ruined, towns burned, trade destroyed. Every Prussian family was in mourning. There were no men left alive, apart from old men; boys of fourteen were being forced into the army to replace the fallen. The end could not be far off. Emperor Frederick, in great secrecy, had sent a message to the grand duke several months earlier; could he, in return for a bribe of two hundred thousand rubles, prevail upon his aunt the empress to make a separate peace with Prussia, and withdraw the Russian troops?

Before Peter could send his answer a fresh wave of panic rippled outward from the imperial apartments. The empress had gone into convulsions. She was hemorrhaging. Doctors and priests

surrounded her bed, the former shaking their heads funereally, the latter intoning the prayers for the dying. The last rites were administered by the empress's confessor who, though he had often before seen her in extremis, now felt certain that he was truly preparing his mistress for eternity.

By an odd quirk of fate Peter Shuvalov too lapsed into the twilit world of the dying. His heart had failed, he lay pallid and unmov-ing on his silken coverlet, apparently senseless, his eyelids fluttering uselessly.

It was mid-December. Thick snow fell from a dark sky, the Winter Palace was ablaze with candlelight even at midday. In the imperial apartments, servants came and went quietly, while prayers were offered for the salvation of Elizabeth's immortal soul. Catherine was among those who kept vigil, watching by the empress's bedside, aware of the old woman's labored breathing and of the gradual weakening of her useless body. No doubt she rehearsed in her mind the essential acts she must carry out when the empress died: to secure her children, to gather around her Gregory Orlov and his brothers and all those guardsmen sworn to keep her safe, and to protect herself, should the need arise, from Peter's vengeance. She had decided, given her pregnancy, not to go beyond this, not to heed the voices that urged her to take advantage of the empress's death to seize the throne for herself.

Five days before Christmas Princess Dashkov came to Catherine in private and entreated her to lead her supporters in a coup. Catherine demurred.

"Whatever happens," she told the princess, "I shall face it with courage."

The princess was impatient. "Then your friends must act on your behalf," she said.

"I beg you not to risk yourself for me," Catherine insisted. "Besides, what can anyone do?"

With difficulty Catherine persuaded her supporters to restrain themselves. Even as she kept her deathbed vigil, she was interrupted by messages from those who wanted to see her pro-

ricRson

claimed empress. She responded to all such messages with anxious negatives. "Don't lead us into anarchy!" was her urgent answer. Her best course, as she saw it, was to let Peter accede to power. Perhaps, after her child was born, when she was stronger and no longer vulnerable to the obvious charge that she was an adulteress and a traitor to the dynasty, she could make other plans.

Elizabeth removed any remaining uncertainty about the succession when she summoned Peter and Catherine to her side and gave Peter a series of final instructions. As Catherine stood silently by, she heard the empress counsel her husband to let go of old resentments and start the new reign in a spirit of forgiveness. With tears in her eyes Elizabeth begged Peter to look after his little son Paul, and to show kindness to the servants she would soon be leaving behind in his care. It must have grieved her to hand on all that she had valued in life—her throne, her power, all those she loved—to the peculiar man who knelt beside her bed, stiff and without visible emotion, seemingly oblivious to the solemnity of the occasion. It must have grieved Catherine too to see them thus, aunt and nephew, the one still majestic even in her dying, the other stunted, half-formed, wooden. Hardly fit to become an emperor.

Elizabeth had no final words for Catherine. She had always been envious of her niece, and this envy may have reared itself even in her final hours of life. She must have known, or sensed, that in handing her realm over to Peter she was in truth giving it to Catherine to govern, either in person or from behind the throne; it is possible that she deliberately snubbed Catherine in order to discourage plotters. Did her weak old eyes detect the growing bulk under Catherine's full gown? If so, she said nothing. The light was fading. She had done all she could.

Christmas morning dawned cold and clear. All over Petersburg, bells rang in celebration of the great church feast, and there was a further cause for rejoicing: word had arrived the evening before that the Russian army under Buturlin had captured the

important Prussian fortresses of Schweidnitz and Kolberg. The war was all but won.

Yet at the Winter Palace the rejoicings were muted. A crowd of courtiers had gathered outside the empress's bedroom, waiting for word of her condition. Elated as they were about the war news, they were apprehensive about the new regime that would soon begin. Would there be an attempt on the throne? Would Peter be able to assume power, and if he did, how would he govern? Would he put aside his wife?

Hours passed, and no word came forth from the sickroom. The courtiers, weary of their vigil, watched the high carved double doors that led into the inner apartments. Finally, at four in the afternoon, the doors were opened and the dread announcement was made.