Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

There were two other candidates for the throne with a better claim than hers: Ivan VI, the simpleton of Schlüsselburg, and Paul, her own son. The first conspirators, on behalf of Ivan, were uncovered in October 1762 during her coronation in Moscow: two Guardsmen of the Izmailovsky Regiment, Guriev and Khrushchev. They were tortured and beaten with sticks, with Catherine’s permission, but their ‘plot’ was really little more than inebriated boasting.

Catherine never lost her nerve: she balanced the different factions at Court while simultaneously strengthening her security and shamelessly bribing the Guards with lavish gifts. Each side in this factional struggle had its own dangerous agenda. Catherine made it clear at once that, like Peter the Great before her and following the example of the hero of the day, Frederick the Great, she would be her own Chancellor. She ran Russia through a strong secretariat which became the true government of the Empire. Within two years, she found Prince Alexander Alexeiovich Viazemsky, aged thirty-four, the tireless if unloved administrator with bug eyes and ruddy face, who would run the internal affairs of Russia for almost thirty years from the Senate as her Procurator-General, a role which combined the modern jobs of Finance, Justice and Interior Ministers.

Nikita Panin became her senior minister. That believer in aristocratic restraint of absolutist whim proposed an imperial council which would be appointed by the Empress but which she could not dismiss. Panin’s ideal was a threat both to Catherine and to the ‘upstarts’ in the Guards who had placed her on the throne.²⁵ Panin’s guardianship of Paul, widely regarded as the rightful Emperor, made him the natural advocate of a handover to the boy as soon as he was of age. He openly despised the rule of ‘capricious favourites’.²⁶ So the five Orlovs were his enemies. During the next twelve years, both factions tried to use Potemkin’s growing imperial friendship in their struggle for supremacy.

Catherine distracted Panin from his schemes by confining him to foreign policy as ‘senior member’ of the College of Foreign Affairs – Foreign Minister – but she never forgot that Panin had wanted to place Paul, not her, on the throne in 1762. It was safer for this reptilian schemer to be the serpent inside her house. They needed each other: she thought Panin was ‘the most skilful, intelligent and zealous person at my Court’, but she did not particularly like him.²⁷

Beneath these two main factions, the court of the new Empress was a labyrinth of families and factions. Catherine appointed her admirer from the 1750s, Zakhar Chernyshev, to run the College of War, while his brother Ivan was made head of the navy: the Chernyshevs initially remained neutral between the Panins and Orlovs. But members of the big families often supported different factions as we saw with Princess Dashkova and the Vorontsovs.²⁸ Even she soon overreached herself by claiming to exercise power she did not possess.²⁹ ‘This celebrated conspirator who boasted of having given away a crown…became a laughingstock to all Russians.’³⁰ Dashkova, like the Elisabethan magnates Chancellor Vorontsov and Ivan Shuvalov, would ‘travel abroad’, the euphemism for a gentle exile in the spa-resorts of Europe.

Catherine’s Court became a kaleidoscope of perpetually shifting and competing factions that were groups of individuals linked by friendship, family, greed, love or shared views of the vaguest sort. The two basic shibboleths remained whether a courtier supported a Prussian or Austrian alliance, and whether he or she was closer to the Empress or the Heir. All was dominated by the simplest self-interest – ‘Thy enemy’s enemy is my friend.’

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The new regime’s first foreign-policy success was the placing of the crown of Poland on the head of Catherine’s last lover. Within days of the coup, on 2 August 1762, Catherine wrote to earnest Stanislas Poniatowski: ‘I am sending Count Keyserling to Poland immediately to make you king after the death of the present one,’ Augustus III.