Читаем Catherine the Great полностью

The end of the Khitrovo affair settled a larger problem: there would be no more talk of an Orlov marriage. The public demonstration of how much the Orlovs were hated had shaken Catherine, and she had no desire to further inflame public opinion. There was no further talk of marriage, but Catherine still kept Gregory by her side for another nine years, putting up with his moodiness, his jealousy, and his petty infidelities. “There would never have been anybody else,” Catherine would later tell Potemkin, “had he not grown tired.” The relationship took on an odd psychological balance: she controlled him because she was his sovereign and far superior in intelligence and culture; he, in turn, had power over her because he knew that she was fond of him, was indebted to him, and that she felt a permanent guilt because she would not marry him. For almost a decade, he was the only man in Russia who could make her suffer. The fact was that Catherine had no time for suffering and little enough for passion; she was simply too busy. To compensate, she made Orlov a prince of the empire; she gave him a palace in St. Petersburg and another at Gatchina, set in the middle of an enormous park. He became lord of vast stretches of land in Russia and Livonia. As always, he alone was privileged to wear the empress’s portrait set in diamonds. Officially, he remained one of the empress’s advisers. To please her, he attempted to enter the world of scholarship and intellect the empress admired. He supported the scientist Mikhail Lomonosov. He was interested in astronomy and had an observatory constructed on the roof of the Summer Palace. He offered to become the patron of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and wrote to persuade Rousseau to come to Russia:

You will not be surprised at my writing to you, as you know everyone has his peculiarities. You have yours; I have mine. This is natural and the motive of my letter is equally so. I see that for a long time you have been living abroad, moving about from one place to another.… I believe that at the moment you are in England with the Duke of Richmond, who no doubt makes you very comfortable. But I have an estate [at Gatchina] which is … [forty miles] … from St. Petersburg where the air is healthy and the water good, where the hills and lakes lend themselves to meditation, and where the inhabitants speak neither English nor French, still less Greek or Latin. The priest is incapable of arguing or preaching and his flock thinks they have done their duty when they have made the sign of the cross. Should you think this place would suit you, you are welcome to live in it. You will be provided with the necessities of life and find plenty of fishing and shooting.

Catherine was probably pleased when Rousseau declined. Her taste in Enlightenment philosophers ran to Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot, who believed in benevolent despotism, rather than to Rousseau, who advocated government administered by the volonté générale—the “general will”—of the entire population.


49


The Death of Ivan VI

ASHADOWY FIGURE, potentially more threatening than any other who might challenge her right to the throne, loomed over Catherine during the first two years of her reign. This was the silent, imprisoned former tsar, Ivan VI, deposed as an infant. His existence haunted Catherine as it had haunted Empress Elizabeth. After Catherine’s accession, when some were reproaching her for not accepting the superior dynastic claim of her son, Paul, and contenting herself with the role of regent, others spoke discreetly of releasing Ivan from the cell where he had spent most of his life. After the Khitrovo affair, Catherine had issued her Manifesto of Silence, but talk and rumors about the imprisoned former tsar were impossible to stamp out.

During Elizabeth’s twenty years on the throne, Ivan had never left her thoughts. It was because of him that the empress was afraid to sleep at night. When Elizabeth died, Peter III had assumed the throne without challenge. Peter had been a Romanov; he was the grandson of Peter the Great and had been named heir to the throne in the manner prescribed by his towering grandfather; that is, he was named by the reigning sovereign, his aunt Elizabeth. Catherine lacked these credentials. She was a foreigner; she had seized the throne in a coup d’etat, and, some believed, may have been implicated in her husband’s death. For these reasons, Catherine was concerned about any reports of opposition, conspiracy, or rebellion. In the Khitrovo affair, she had remained calm and had dealt with it efficiently. But nothing that came before was quite like the affair involving Vasily Mirovich and the imprisoned Tsar Ivan VI.

In June 1764, Catherine left St. Petersburg for a tour of the Baltic provinces. She was in Riga on July 9 when word arrived that there had been an attempt to free the former emperor that had ended in the young man’s death.


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