Secret Lives of the Tsars (16 page)

Catherine II (1762–1796): “Prey to This Mad Passion!”

It is my misfortune that my heart cannot be content, even for one hour, without love.

—E
MPRESS
C
ATHERINE
II

Catherine II certainly ranks among the most impressive of Russian sovereigns, standing firmly beside Peter I, the visionary monarch after whom she modeled herself and with whom she shares the laudatory appellation “the Great.” The accomplishments of her thirty-four-year reign were remarkable, from subduing the Turks and annexing the Crimea to her energetic leadership in fully incorporating Russia into the political and cultural life of Europe—all hallmarks of the German-born empress’s fierce pride in her adopted homeland. Voltaire and Diderot adored the autocrat for her liberalizing spirit (though the realities of internal revolt and revolution abroad greatly dimmed her initial zeal for reform), while the great courts of Europe alternately envied, admired, and feared her. Still, no matter what glories Catherine the Great managed to attain, her legendary love life remains her most enduring legacy. It was a busy one indeed, though never inclining toward the equine, as many still believe
.

The empress was startlingly candid when she recounted in her
Memoirs
how as a young girl she would straddle her pillow at night and ride it vigorously, trying to satisfy some yearning yet to be defined. The pillow would eventually be replaced by a long procession of lovers, starting with Sergei Saltykov, who finally showed the future sovereign what real passion was after she had endured eight years of virginal marriage to a dolt. And though Saltykov turned out to be a cad, abandoning Catherine (after perhaps siring her son Paul) and bragging to the world about his royal conquest, the sexuality he awakened in her remained an essential component of her being. It invigorated and intoxicated her—sometimes to the point of foolishness, especially as the empress grew older and tricked herself into believing that the handsomely rewarded young men she took to her bed were there because they loved her, even if she had grown heavy and was missing most of her teeth. Certainly Catherine’s carnal desires carried no shame for her, and she made no apologies for them. Each young man to whom she devoted herself had as prominent a place at court as he did in her bed—until he was replaced. And even then, the gaps between lovers never lasted too long. “It is my misfortune,” she declared, “that my heart cannot be content, even for one hour, without love.”

After Saltykov’s cruel betrayal, Catherine found comfort in the arms of Stanislaus Poniatowski, who, unlike his predecessor, was entirely enchanted by his married mistress. Years later, he still rhapsodized about “her black hair, her skin fair but of the liveliest coloring, her very eloquent big blue eyes and long dark lashes, her Grecian nose, her mouth which
seemed to ask for kisses, her perfect arms and hands, her dignified and noble bearing, and a laugh as gay as her humor.” It was Catherine who initiated the virginal Pole, two years her junior, into the bedroom pleasures she herself had discovered only recently. “I cannot deny myself the pleasure of noting even the very clothes I found her in that day,” Poniatowski recalled of their first sexual interlude: “a little gown of white satin with a light trimming of lace, threaded with pink ribbon for its only ornament.” Though Poniatowski was eventually forced to leave Russia when Catherine’s political maneuverings were revealed, she did make him king of Poland when she became empress—then proceeded to devour a huge chunk of his kingdom. Still, Poniatowski’s love was enduring, even if it was no longer reciprocated.

The vacancy left by Poniatowski’s untimely departure was filled by Gregory Orlov, the dashing adventurer who, along with his four brothers, had helped Catherine seize the throne of her husband Peter III. In recognition of the pivotal role he played in her rise, as well as a testament to her love, Catherine heaped vast riches upon her favorite and made him the most powerful man in the empire. Yet this wasn’t enough to satisfy Orlov’s grand ambitions; he wanted to make the autocratic empress his wife
—his
subject. As biographer Robert Coughlan wrote, he was “a natural daredevil full of self-assertiveness and male pride; a predatory rough-and-ready man’s man to whom it would be altogether unnatural and impossible to be a woman’s man—any woman’s. Not that he was a brute. He was capable of love, sentiment, tenderness, and even constancy. But it was an intrinsic part of this masculine love that he be the possessor, protector, and giver, not the possessed, protected, and receiver. Before and during the coup he had filled a role that entirely suited him, a man working and taking
risks on behalf of the woman he loved. But in helping to make her Empress, he had made himself her subject, no longer her bold, possessing lover but her imperial ‘favorite.’ ”

There is some evidence that Catherine was not opposed to the idea of marrying Orlov. In fact, one account has it that she even went as far as to investigate the possible precedent for such a union by sending her chancellor, Michael Vorontzov, to the home of Alexis Razumovsky—the late Empress Elizabeth’s so-called Night Emperor (see
Chapter 5
)—to see if he might have any documentation proving that Elizabeth had secretly married him, as many believed she had. But Razumovsky disliked Orlov and mistrusted his motives. Thus, according to the story handed down by Chancellor Vorontzov’s descendants, the old man went over to a cabinet, withdrew a faded parchment tied with a pink ribbon, and, without saying a word to Vorontzov, tossed it into the fire.

Even if Razumovsky had not destroyed whatever possible evidence there was that an empress had once made a lowly subject her husband, there was still plenty of political opposition to Catherine wedding Orlov—a man whom many among the Russian nobility and gentry considered to be an uncouth, greedy upstart who, with his brothers, harbored dangerous ambitions to wield imperial power. “The Empress can do what she wishes,” declared her foreign minister, Count Nikita Panin, “but Madame Orlov will never be the Empress of Russia.”

Deprived of his ambition to share Catherine the Great’s power as her husband, Orlov sulked bitterly that he remained little more than the empress’s service stud, albeit a very well compensated one. “The larger her figure loomed on the political horizon, the more he shrank in her shadow,” wrote biographer Henri Troyat. “She sought his kisses and silenced
him as soon as he expressed an opinion on public affairs.” Like a bored mistress, Orlov lashed out at his lover, who, consumed as she was with managing the empire, often had little time left for him. The triumphs of his past had been long since subsumed by a life of indolence, and as the breach with Catherine widened, Orlov sought fresh conquests in other women
—lots
of other women. Yet this was not enough to revive him, or give his gilded life much meaning. And still Catherine the Great dominated him.

Orlov hoped to prove himself in battle against the Turks like his brother Alexis, but the empress wouldn’t hear of it. After all, someone needed to keep her bed warm. However, another opportunity for glory arose when an epidemic of plague swept through Moscow in 1771 and resulted in violent eruptions of public disorder. Orlov asked to be sent to take control of the dangerously unsettled city and Catherine, her ardor having cooled somewhat, agreed to let him go. It was a magnificent success for the favorite, accompanied by the great acclaim he craved, and on the heels of it the empress sent him as her representative to a peace conference with the Turks in Moldavia.

A flush of her old feelings for her longtime lover seemed to have overwhelmed Catherine as Orlov prepared to depart for the conference—proud, handsome, and literally shining in the diamond-studded jacket she had given him as a gift. “My angels of peace are now on the spot, I think, and face to face with those ugly bearded Turks,” the empress wrote to her friend Madame de Bielke. “Count Orlov, who, without exaggeration, is the handsomest man of his time, must really look like an angel compared to those louts; his retinue is brilliant and select.… But I would wager that his person eclipses everyone around him. He is such a remarkable personage, this
ambassador; Nature has been so extraordinarily liberal with him from the point of view of face, mind, heart and soul!”

As it turned out, any revived passion Catherine may have felt for her fading favorite was only temporary. Soon enough she began to receive reports of his strutting arrogance at the peace conference, coupled with his striking incompetence as a negotiator. And while he was making a buffoon of himself in Moldavia, Orlov’s enemies at home gleefully informed the empress of his many excursions outside her bedroom. That news was little more than a knife in a corpse, though, because after more than ten years with this turbulent lover, Catherine was ready to move on anyway.

For her next paramour, the empress had in mind a virile, highly charismatic officer with only one eye (the other reportedly lost in a brawl with Orlov’s brother Alexis). His name was Gregory Potemkin, and Catherine admired not only his many talents, energy and wit, but his hulking physique as well. Unfortunately, Potemkin was otherwise occupied with military matters when the empress needed a fresh new body by her side, and so she settled for the services of a strapping young guardsman by the name of Alexander Vasilchikov, who happened to be nearly half her age. “I was only a kept woman,” he later said of the relationship. “I was treated as such.” But Vasilchikov did his duty, and apparently did it well—even if, out of bed, Catherine found him unbearably boring. “The Empress writes Monsieur Vasilchikov the most burning letters,” reported Sabatier de Cabre, the French chargé d’affaires, “and constantly gives him presents that know no bounds.”

When Orlov received word that his place at court had been usurped by young Vasilchikov, he immediately abandoned his post as Catherine’s representative at the peace negotiations and raced back toward St. Petersburg to reclaim it. But he was
intercepted along the way and ordered to his summer palace at Gatchina. There was no menace in Catherine’s command, only fear of what her brash former lover might do in the face of his demotion. “You don’t know him!” the empress told friends. “He is capable of killing me!”

To placate her erratic ex-lover, Catherine sent him a steady stream of lavish gifts, and even conferred upon him the title of prince. Orlov, however, took all this as an indication that he had been restored to favor and so returned to court without permission. The empress received him coolly, but did not send him away. Instead, she simply continued to bed Vasilchikov. Prince Orlov did not handle this well. Frozen from the empress’s affections, he turned to drinking and whoring to soothe the deep bruises of his precipitous fall, and his crass behavior seemed to reflect this diminished stature. He acted “like a man who wants to resume his old way of life or to have himself locked up,” observed Sabatier de Cabre.

As Orlov unraveled, and his replacement Vasilchikov—“his head stuffed with hay”—remained unrelentingly dull, the empress once again set her sights on Potemkin, the one-eyed giant who so intrigued her with his extraordinary mixture of vigor and mysticism, brawn and intelligence. After coaxing her desired one back from the front lines in 1774, Catherine happily plunged into what became one of history’s more storied romances. As she wrote to her friend and confidant Friedrich Melchoir Grimm, “I have parted from a certain excellent but very boring citizen [Vasilchikov], who has been immediately replaced, I know not how, by one of the greatest, oddest, most amusing and original personalities of this iron age.”

The forty-five-year-old empress, ruler of vast domains and literally the most powerful woman in the world, became positively
giddy when it came to Potemkin, for whom she lovingly conjured an arsenal of pet names: “golden cock,” “dear plaything,” “my darling pet,” “my twin soul,” “my dearest doll,” “tiger,” “little parrot,” “infidel,” “my little Grisha,” “my golden pheasant,” “lion of the jungle,” “wolfbird,” “my marble beauty,” “my beloved whom no king on earth can match.”