Great Catherine (36 page)

But Catherine was cautious, and took her time making up her mind. In May she made a pilgrimage to the monastery of the Resurrection in Rostov. Muscovites, critical of Orlov and convinced that the empress meant to marry him before long, assumed that while at the monastery, and temporarily free of the influence of Panin, she would secretly be wedded to her favorite.

The circumstances gave rise to imaginative stories. The stories built on one another, growing more and more threatening with the retelling. Orlov was forcing Catherine to do his will, people said; Catherine had never wanted to be empress, indeed she would have been content to be regent for her son had Orlov not insisted that she take power for herself. Orlov was behind it all, using Catherine to carve out a powerful niche for himself at her side. Now the final part of his devious plan was coming into being.

Jealousy and suspicion of Orlov fed the gossip, and inevitably, conspiracies blossomed. A group of guards officers were discovered plotting to overthrow Catherine and murder Orlov if a marriage between them were to be made public. The conspirators knew, and the knowledge encouraged them, that Panin was opposed to an Orlov marriage. "Mrs. Orlov," Panin was quoted as saying, "would never be Empress of All the Russias."

The scathing pronouncement attributed to Panin was repeated throughout the city, and lead to a popular outcry. Unruly Muscovites gave vent to noisy protest, and within days the city seemed to be on the brink of rebellion. Loyal guardsmen took up positions in Red Square, in the suburbs, along every major thoroughfare. Taverns were closed, unruly assemblies dispersed. The Secret Branch moved furtively to detain and interrogate sus-

picious protesters, while the empress issued a "manifesto of silence" forbidding "improper discussion and gossip on matters concerning the government."

The brief, hot summer descended. Huge black flies buzzed in the dusty streets, the pounding of carpenters' hammers rang through the suburbs damaged by fires during the cold months. The Moscow nobles left for their country estates, having had their fill of the empress and the servile creatures who surrounded her. The nobility of Moscow prided itself on its antiquity and independence; many families had held their titles for a dozen generations, some even longer, while Catherine's pet noblemen were of very recent creation. Some, like the Orlovs, had risen to their high status with dizzying swiftness. That Catherine should consider marrying one of these upstarts only revealed her own inherent vulgarity, the Muscovite nobles told one another. After all, she was only the daughter of a German soldier, even if he had called himself a prince.

Quite aware of the hauteur of the Moscow nobles, and unnerved by the plots and uprisings that seemed as endemic in the old city as the flies and the stenches, the churches and the echoing bells, Catherine gave up all thought of marrying Orlov and slowly resigned herself to the realization that she might never be free to act as she chose. For as long as she sat on the throne, there would be opposition. She had enemies, she would make more enemies. Ingratitude, not admiration and appreciation, would be her lot; she had to learn to lower her expectations.

Somehow, she came to terms with Orlov. It may be that he too saw the wisdom in her decision not to marry him, though he cannot have relished the political defeat the decision represented. Henceforth Panin was in the ascendant, and by the fall of 1763, having lost the battle over the marriage, Bestuzhev had left court and gone into involuntary retirement. Catherine had made her choice. Panin, the careful pragmatist, had won.

Once they returned to Petersburg, both Catherine and Orlov were more at ease. But there was an ugly postscript to their

Moscow sojourn. Orlov received a carefully wrapped package from Moscow. No letter accompanied it, there was no way to identify the sender. Inside the package was a large cheese, hollowed out and filled with horse dung. A huge truncheon had been stabbed through the center of the cheese.

No doubt the dauntless Orlov shrugged off the incident, but it must have worried Catherine. It was not enough that she had given up the idea of marrying him. For as long as he remained at her side, as her lover, there were Muscovites who continued to meditate his death.

Years were to pass before Catherine returned to Moscow for an extended stay. She settled into her Petersburg routine, devoting her working days to practical matters which concerned the entire empire.

One thing that absorbed her attention was that Russia, though enormous in land area, was thinly populated. Montesquieu and other writers associated the relative strength of a realm with the size of its population. "We need people," the young Catherine had once written, long before she became empress. "If possible, make the wilderness swarm like a bee hive." She brought foreign settlers into Russia by the thousands and set up a government agency, the Chancellery for the Guardianship of Foreigners, to recruit colonists and establish new settlements for them. Gregory Orlov was nominally in charge of the chancellery. Under his increasingly fitful leadership colonies were set up on the lower Volga, on fertile steppe lands. In addition, the area around Petersburg, a barren landscape of deep swamps and groves of pine trees, was tamed and made habitable. Catherine ordered the swamps drained and the forests removed; by the fall of 1766 there were three prospering villages where only a few years before there had been nothing but reeds and sedge and stagnant water.

A more delicate and controversial area of the empress's concern was the church—not as a religious but as an economic institution. The Russian church owned very extensive lands worked by over a million serfs. The government was desperately in need of money

and resources. Why should the church be so rich when the imperial treasury was insolvent?

Both Empress Elizabeth and her successor had eyed the lands of the church with envy. Both had been on the brink of secularizing the lands, yet had held back from actually doing so. Catherine did not hesitate. In February of 1764 she ordered that the ecclesiastical estates, which in the words of her decree had been acquired illegally, be turned over to an agency of the crown, the College of Economy. At one stroke the imperial government became, for the time being, solvent once again—though what it gained in solvency it lost in popularity.

Once again a spate of disturbing reports crossed Catherine's desk, reports of seditious talk, subterranean plots, pockets of dissatisfied guardsmen seething with discontent and on the verge of taking overt action against the government. Riots broke out in Pskov, Orel, Voronezh—areas distant from the principal seats of bureaucratic control. Bandits terrorized villages and laid siege to noble estates. To put an end to the chaos, Catherine gave added authority to the nobles. Yet she soon found that they often abused their power, extorting more in taxes from the peasants than the legal amount, taking bribes, stealing the government's money. Not infrequently the enraged peasants rose up en masse and murdered their landlords. The dilemma weighed on the empress; how could she create peace and order without advancing tyranny?

And something even more distressing was happening. Here and there, always in areas remote from Moscow and Petersburg, strange men were emerging in peasant communities, claiming to be the lost Emperor Peter III.

It happened every few months, this spectral resurrection of the dead emperor, a phenomenon as threatening to Catherine as it was unnerving. The impostors were welcomed eagerly by the rural populace. They received gifts, honors, pledges of support. They began to gather bands of followers, partisans eager to fight on their behalf to reclaim the throne. One by one, the false Peters were hunted down by soldiers and captured. But as soon as one

was removed, another came forward to take his place. And as the months passed, the idea took deep root among the peasants that the true emperor was alive and well. Now it was said that he was away in the Crimea, raising an army; at another time he was said to be in the east, resting, awaiting the advent of good weather before he began his grand campaign to regain his rights.

Impostors could be captured, punished and shut away, but, as Catherine knew very well, ideas were too powerful to be eradicated by force or threats. It was as if the idea of Peter III had declared war on her. For nearly twenty years her husband had tormented her in life. Now he continued to torment her from the grave.

When Catherine had been empress for two years, a grand masked ball was held in Petersburg. The entertainment went on for two days and three nights, with the guests, disguised in expensive costumes, dancing, eating and drinking themselves into near exhaustion. A visitor from Venice, the celebrated Giovanni Casanova, was present and described the exuberant scene.

While the revelry advanced, a modestly dressed guest slipped in, her short figure entirely encased in black. Fully masked, she mingled with the laughing, animated crowd, sometimes losing her balance when someone jostled her unintentionally. Casanova's acquaintances told him, in whispers, that the mysterious black-clad guest was the empress. However, most of the guests did not know who she was, and she preferred it that way.

Now and then she joined a group of diners and listened unobtrusively to their conversation. Very likely, Casanova thought, she overheard opinions about herself, some of which no doubt were wounding to her. But she did not let on. Not once, throughout her stay at the ball, did she reveal her true identity. Casanova was impressed, not only by her self-possession but by her astuteness in acting as a spy at her own court.

Now that she had ruled for several years Catherine had learned a great deal about power, its sources and satisfactions—and its limitations.

She was in charge; no one had managed to wrest authority from her hands. She made the important decisions, and scrutinized the work she delegated to others. She dominated. Her "majestic air," Buckingham thought, and her "happy mixture of dignity and ease" won her respect, while her devotion to the improvement of Russia and her hard-working efforts to achieve it impressed all observers.

Catherine was the glittering center of a dazzling court. She liked to shower herself with diamonds, they were a symbol of her wealth—or rather her appearance of wealth, for despite the seizure of the church lands, the treasury was not solvent for long. Gleaming from head to hem, richly gowned, carefully coiffed and heavily rouged—visitors to the Russian court remarked on the brightly rouged cheeks of the women, including the empress— she made the rounds of her guests at the Sunday court concerts. She appeared to be imperturbable, and was invariably in a good humor, or so the ambassadors thought; though her glance was always shrewd (one visitor to court called her expression "fierce and tyrannical") there was an evident gentleness and softness in her features, and she treated people with exceptional kindness. She seemed to know everyone, even the lowest ranking servants, and spoke to each with the same easy familiarity.

Yet though she was never haughty or formal, she retained her dignity. She tried not to let herself be perceived as vulnerable. That, she had learned, was essential to retaining power.

In subtle ways she kept people at a distance, careful to preserve a perceptible distinction between the monarch and those who were under her control, however lightly exercised or benevolent. Her bearing was commanding. Except in the privacy of her apartments or with those she trusted, she acted as if she expected to be obeyed. She rarely allowed herself to form a close bond with any of the court women, and when she did, it lasted only a short time.

Princess Dashkov, with whom she had once seemed on sisterly terms, soon lost her favor and was ordered to leave the court. The

princess worked off her disappointed vanity and ongoing ambition by visiting the guardsmen's barracks and dressing in uniform, as she had on the day of the coup. Princess Dashkov was succeeded in the empress's favor by Countess Matushkin, who lasted less than a year before being turned aside. Catherine complained that the countess was meddlesome and unsettled. Countess Bruce (the former Praskovia Rumyantsev, Catherine's girlhood companion), a talented, soignee and worldly beauty, quickly took Countess Matuschkin's place, but she remained the empress's malleable, amenable follower, not her confidante; she was adroit at catching Catherine's moods and preferences and imitating them, even to the point of becoming the mistress of Gregory Orlov's brother Alexis.

Though she surrounded herself with a circle of lively, active young people, and liked nothing better than to be among them, playing silly games, doing her animal imitations, romping and singing and telling stories, Catherine was always conscious of wanting to remain the puppet-master, with the court her stage.

All the courtiers, even the elderly ones, were expected to take part in frequent performances. Gala concerts, ballets, and plays were staged, and for weeks the talented (and not so talented) amateurs rehearsed their parts, under the critical eye of the empress. Gentlemen were expected to play in the orchestra, ladies to learn elaborate dances. Preference in stage roles was given to Catherine's favorites.

One of the empress's pet projects was the production of a Russian tragedy, performed in a magnificent hall on a specially built stage. Gregory Orlov took a principal part, and "made a striking figure," as one who saw the performance wrote. Countess Bruce took the lead, acting with a degree of spirit and skill a professional actress might envy. No doubt professional musicians were sprinkled in among the dilettantes in the orchestra, and at least a dozen of the dancing ladies went lame. Still, the overall effect was dramatic, and the court troupe went on to further triumphs.

The most recalcitrant of Catherine's performing courtiers was Orlov, who by the time she had ruled for several years had begun to sulk and imagine himself ill-used. When Catherine, for sound political reasons, made her former lover Stanislaus Poniatowski King of Poland, Orlov was aggrieved. Why should Poniatowski receive a kingdom when he, who had made Catherine empress, remained only a count? She would not marry him, she was always attempting to instruct him on some issue or other. He found her love of learning tiresome. In fact Orlov confided to Buckingham that he was suspicious of learning and the arts. He thought that creative and intellectual pursuits tended to enervate the body and weaken the mind.