Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The plan was to arrest Peter as he left Oranienbaum for his foolish war against Denmark and imprison him in the fortified tomb of Schlussenburg with the simpleton–Tsar, Ivan VI. According to Catherine, thirty or forty officers and about 10,000 men were ready.⁴⁰ Three vital conspirators came together but, until the last few days, they barely knew of each other’s involvement. Catherine was the only link. So, comically, each of the three believed that it was they – and only they – who had placed Catherine on the throne.

Orlov and his Guardsmen, including Potemkin, were the muscle and the organizers of the coup. There were officers in each regiment. Potemkin’s job was to prepare the Horse-Guards.⁴¹ But the other two groups were necessary not merely for the coup to succeed but to maintain the reign of Catherine II afterwards.

Ekaterina Dashkova, née Vorontsova, was certain that she alone had made the coup possible. This slim, gamine nineteen-year-old, married to one of Catherine’s supporters in the Guards, thought of herself as Machiavelli in petticoats. She was a useful conduit to the high aristocracy: the Empress Elisabeth and Grand Duke Peter stood as godparents at her christening. She personified the tiny, interbred world of Court because she was not only the niece of both Peter III’s Chancellor, Mikhail Vorontsov, and Grand Duke Paul’s Governor, Nikita Panin, later Catherine’s Foreign Minister, but also the sister of the Emperor’s ‘ugly, stupid’ mistress.⁴² She was appalled by her sister’s taste in emperors. Dashkova demonstrates how family ties did not always decide political loyalties: the Vorontsovs were in power, yet this Vorontsova was conspiring to overthrow them. ‘Politics was a subject that interested me from my earliest years,’ she writes in her immodest and deluded Memoirs that, with Catherine’s own writings, are the best accounts of those days.⁴³

Nikita Ivanovich Panin, Dashkova’s uncle, was the third key conspirator: as the Ober-Hofmeister or Governor of the Grand Duke Paul, he controlled a crucial pawn. Thus Catherine needed Panin’s support. When Peter III considered declaring Paul illegitimate, he threatened Panin’s powerbase as his Ober-Hofmeister. Panin, aged forty-two, lazy, plump and very shrewd, was far from being an industrious public servant: one has the sense of something almost eunuch-like in his swollen, smooth-skinned insouciance. According to Princess Dashkova, Panin was ‘a pale valetudinarian…studious only of ease, having passed all his life in courts, extremely precise in his dress, wearing a stately wig with three well-powdered ties dangling down his back, he gave one the pasteboard idea of an old courtier from the reign of Louis XIV’.⁴⁴ However, Panin did not believe in the unbridled tyranny of the tsars, particularly in the light of Peter III’s ‘most dissolute debauchery of drunkenness’.⁴⁵ Like many of the educated higher nobility, Panin hoped to create an aristocratic oligarchy on Peter’s overthrow. He was the righteous opponent of favouritism but his family’s rise stemmed from imperial whim.^*4 In the 1750s, the Empress Elisabeth had shown interest in Nikita Panin and there may have been a short affair before the ruling favourite, Ivan Shuvalov, had him despatched on a diplomatic mission to Sweden. When Panin returned in 1760, he was untainted by the poison of Elisabethan politics and acceptable to all factions.⁴⁶ So both Catherine and Panin wished to overthrow Peter, but there was a worrying difference in the details: Catherine wanted to rule herself, while Panin, Dashkova and others believed that Grand Duke Paul should become emperor.⁴⁷ ‘A youthful and female conspirator’, writes Princess Dashkova, ‘was not likely all at once to gain the confidence of a cautious politician like Monsieur Panin,’ but this uneasy cabal of differing interests now came together.

On 12 June, Peter left Petersburg for Oranienbaum. Just eight versts away in Peterhof, Catherine waited in her summer villa, Mon Plaisir.

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On 27 June, the conspiracy was suddenly thrown into disarray when Captain Passek, one of the plotters in the Guards, was denounced and arrested. Peter III would not remain unaware of the plot for long. Though nobles were rarely tortured, the threat was there. Passek would surely sing.

The Orlovs, Dashkova and Panin came together for the first and last time in a panic-stricken meeting, while Potemkin and other plotters awaited their instructions. The tough Orlovs, according to Dashkova, were distraught, but ‘to quieten apprehensions…as well as to show that I did not personally shrink from the danger, I desired them to repeat an assurance to their soldiers, as coming direct from me, that I had daily account from the Empress…and they should be tranquil’. Since a mistake could cost these men their lives, the bragging of this bumptious teenage Princess can hardly have been reassuring.⁴⁸