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Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The ‘state miscreant’ was despatched to Moscow, staring like a wild animal out of a specially constructed iron cage. When he arrived at the beginning of November, the angry Muscovites were already relishing the prospect of a particularly sadistic execution. This began to worry Catherine, who knew that the Rebellion was already an embarrassing blight on her Enlightened reputation.

Catherine and Potemkin secretly resolved to reduce the cruelty of the execution – admirable at a time when judicial killing in England and France was still astonishingly vicious. Procurator-General Viazemsky was sent to Moscow, accompanied by the ‘Senate secretary’, Sheshkovsky, the feared knout-wielder who, Catherine chillingly informed Pavel Potemkin, ‘has a special gift with common people’. However, Pugachev was not tortured.⁵⁴

Catherine tried to oversee as much of the trial as she could. She sent Potemkin her Pugachev Manifesto to read – if he was not too ill. The hypochondriac did not reply, so the Empress, who obviously needed his approval, sent him another note: ‘Please read it and tell us now what you make of it: is it good or bad?’ Later that day or the next, the Empress became impatient – ‘it’s twelve o’clock but we haven’t got the end of the Manifesto so it can’t be written out in time and can’t be sent to the Council…If you like the drafts, we ask you to send them back…If you don’t like them, correct them.’ Potemkin may really have been ill or perhaps he was working on the peace celebrations to be held in Moscow. ‘My dear soul, you begin new enterprises every day.’⁵⁵

The trial opened on 30 December in the Great Kremlin Hall. On 2 January 1775, Pugachev was sentenced to be quartered and beheaded. There was no ‘drawing’, or disembowelling while alive, in Russia: that was part of English civilization. However, the ‘quartering’ meant that all four limbs would be cut off while the victim was alive. Muscovites were enthusiastically anticipating this grisly spectacle. Catherine had other ideas. ‘As regards executions,’ she wrote to Viazemsky, ‘there must be no painful ones.’ On 21 December, she was at last able to tell Grimm that ‘in a few days, the farce of the “Marquis de Pugachev” will be finished. When you receive this letter, you can count on it that you won’t hear any more talk about that particular gentleman.’⁵⁶

So the last setpiece scene of the ‘farce of the Marquis de Pugachev’ was prepared in the Bolotnaia Square below the Kremlin. On 10 January 1775, the crowds gathered, keen to witness the dismemberment of the living ‘monster’. Pugachev, ‘besmeared all over with black’, was drawn in ‘a kind of dung-cart’, in which he was fastened to a stake. There were two priests with him and the executioner stood behind. Two gleaming axes lay on the block. ‘Not a trace of fear’ was discernible on his serene face ‘in the hour approaching dissolution’. The ‘monster’ climbed up the ladder to the scaffold, undressed himself and stretched out, ready for the executioner to begin his carving.

Something ‘strange and unexpected’ happened. The executioner swung his axe and, contrary to the sentence, beheaded Pugachev without ‘quartering’. This outraged both the judges and the crowd. Someone, possibly one of the sentencing judges, called out to the executioner and ‘threatened him in severe terms’. Another official shouted, ‘Ah, you son of a bitch – what have you done?’ And then added: ‘Well hurry up – hands and feet!’ Witnesses said it was generally believed that the executioner ‘will lose his tongue…for his neglect’. The executioner paid no attention and dismembered the corpse, before moving on to cut off the tongues and clip the noses of the other miscreants who had avoided the death penalty. Pugachev’s diverse quarters were exposed at the top of a pole in the middle of the scaffold. The head was stuck on an iron spike and displayed.⁵⁷ The Pugachevschina – the Time of Pugachev – was over.

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Some time in the last stages of the crisis, Catherine wrote this letter to Potemkin: ‘My dear soul, cher Epoux, darling husband, come and snuggle up, if you please. Your caress is sweet and lovely to me…Beloved husband.’⁵⁸

Skip Notes

*1 It was a mark of the anarchy engulfing the Volga region that yet another false Peter III, a fugitive serf, now managed to raise another rabble army and conquer Troitsk, south-east of Moscow, where he set up another grotesque Court.

*2 Renamed Stalingrad in 1925. Since 1961, it has been called Volgagrad.