Catherine the Great

The eldest of these three was the diplomat, forty-two-year-old Count Nikita Panin. He was Bestuzhev’s protégé and had survived his master’s fall by having been absent from Russia when it occurred. The son of one of Peter the Great’s generals, Panin was born in Danzig in 1718, educated abroad, and had come home to serve in the Guards. At twenty-nine, he had been appointed Russian envoy to Denmark by Bestuzhev. A few years later, he was transferred to Sweden, where, for twelve years, he had served as ambassador. In Stockholm, Panin was recognized as a cultivated, sophisticated, liberal-minded Russian, and, as such, a rarity. Panin had believed in Bestuzhev’s policy of favoring Austria and England and opposing Prussia. When Bestuzhev fell and the Shuvalovs and Vorontsov forged their alliance with France, Panin, still in Stockholm, resisted their demand that he support this new alignment. Out of step, he resigned and, in the summer of 1760, came back to St. Petersburg. Elizabeth, recognizing his ability, shielded him from the Shuvalov-Vorontsov faction and appointed him chamberlain and chief tutor to her beloved Paul, placing him in a politically sheltered post that gave him prestige at court and an avid interest in the succession. Peter, unsurprisingly, was displeased by the choice of Panin. “Let the boy remain for the time being under Panin’s supervision,” he grumbled. “Soon, I shall take steps to provide for a more suitable military training.” Panin, aware of Peter’s hostility, was also, by character and education, a natural ally for Catherine, but the two—grand duchess and tutor—had different ideas about the future. Panin, believing that Peter was unfit to rule and should somehow be removed, wished Paul to be placed on the throne as a boy emperor with Catherine as regent. Catherine pretended to agree with Panin; “I had rather be the mother than the wife of the emperor,” she told him. In reality, she had no desire to be subordinated to her own child; her ambition was to occupy the throne herself. Panin aligned himself with Catherine because she had been close to his patron, Bestuzhev; because she had faithfully maintained this allegiance throughout the former chancellor’s disgrace; and because, in his mind, any arrangement involving her was preferable to seeing Peter on the throne. In addition, he shared her interest in Enlightenment political theory and in the appeal of a government by enlightened monarchy as advocated by Montesquieu. Panin knew that Catherine was discreet and that it was safe to discuss his ideas with her. They had worked out no plan of action–there were too many unknowns—but there was a bond of understanding.

The second of Catherine’s new allies was a hero of the war against Prussia, Gregory Orlov. By 1758, Frederick of Prussia was struggling to defend his kingdom against three large allied powers, Austria, France, and Russia. In August that year, a Russian army of forty-four thousand men under General Fermor crossed the Prussian frontier and, on the twenty-fifth, fought a battle with Frederick and thirty-seven thousand Prussians near the town of Zorndorf. The nine-hour battle was among the bloodiest of the eighteenth century: more than ten thousand men were killed on each side; Frederick admitted losing more than a third of his army. In the ferocity of the combat, he and his men also acquired a new respect for the Russians; one Prussian officer wrote afterward that “the terror which the enemy has inspired in our troops is indescribable.” After the carnage, both sides claimed victory, and in both camps a Te Deum thanksgiving was sung, but for two days neither of the blood-stained, crippled armies could move. Cannon still fired across the battlefield and cavalry skirmished, but Frederick and Fermor had fought each other to a standstill.