On August 7, 1782, the centenary of Peter the Great’s coronation and the twentieth anniversary of her accession, Catherine and her courtiers sailed down the Neva from the Winter Palace. After tying up at a Peter’s Pier and enjoying a welcome from her troops, Catherine took her place on the balcony of the Senate. Throngs crowded the large square and filled the rooftops that Sunday afternoon; a flotilla of riverboats and warships anchored in the Neva. Eight Guards regiments—some 15,000 soldiers—led by Gregory Potemkin gathered along the embankment. Catherine blessed her people and declared a general amnesty for criminals and debtors. Then at the signal of her hand, the curtains below fell.
Triple life-size, fifty feet in the air, Peter the Great appeared on his rearing horse. With an outstretched arm, he seemed to be pointing past the Neva toward the west. At the sight of the monumental bronze tribute, the warships hoisted flags, cannons boomed, and troops fired off guns and presented their regimental colors. Music and fireworks continued into the evening.
The unveiling of Russia’s first public monument was a historic moment witnessed by all of St. Petersburg—all, that is, except its creator. After twelve years of setbacks and disputes, Étienne-Maurice Falconet had returned to Paris four years earlier. The Frenchman compared his westbound journey across Russia to an escape from prison. “I felt my chest expanding and my blood, more fluid, circulating with a smoothness which I have almost ceased to experience,” he wrote.1 After the unveiling, when Falconet and Marie-Anne Collot received gold and silver medals, he wrote his collaborator: “You see, in spite of all the poison launched against us, those who knew us a little have not forgotten us.”2
In 1775, Falconet’s first attempt to cast Peter failed and Collot left for Paris, spending a year in Houdon’s studio before returning to St. Petersburg. It’s there she entered into an ill-fated marriage with Falconet’s abusive son, Pierre-Étienne Falconet in July, 1777. By early 1778, Falconet’s second try at casting succeeded; Thunder Rock was shaped and hewn. All that remained was to create the supporting serpent, and install the statue. But instead of celebrating, the sculptor got the silent treatment from Catherine, who called him “Falconet the difficult.” Denis Diderot stopped writing. Pierre-Étienne took off for Paris shortly before Collot gave birth to their daughter. When Falconet left Russia in 1779, his equestrian statue seemed destined for oblivion.
In Falconet’s absence, architect Yury Velten set the gilded bronze inscription “To Peter the First from Catherine the Second” in Russian and Latin on either side of the granite base. Catherine’s monumental tribute to Peter was arguably her most impressive use of art to legitimize her reign. To many observers, it was Catherine, not Peter, who stole the show. Two days after the unveiling, Sir James Harris, England’s envoy to Russia wrote: “I could not avoid, during this ceremony, reflecting on how impossible it was that any successor of Her Imperial Majesty, who might, in some future day, erect a statue in commemoration of Her great Actions, ever should be so much superior to Her, as she Herself is superior to Peter the Great, both in the art of governing, and in that of making Her People respected and happy.”3
But following the ancient Roman convention of defining oneself as great by glorifying others, Catherine refused a tribute. “As far as my statue is concerned, it will not exist in my lifetime,” she insisted.4 Similarly, Catherine also declined extravagant titles. After Prince de Ligne and Grimm began calling her Catherine the Great in the salons of Paris, and Grimm addressed her with the epithet in a 1788 letter, she corrected them. “Please don’t call me the sobriquet Catherine the Great because (i) I don’t like any nickname (ii) my name is Catherine II and I don’t want people to say of me like Louis XV that they thought me wrongly named,” she wrote Grimm.5 Russians added “Great” to Catherine’s name after her death.
During her lifetime, Potemkin commissioned two full-scale statues of the empress as a lawgiver. One, by Wilhelm Christian Meyer in 1782, was erected in Ekaterinoslav in 1846 and melted down during the Nazi occupation in 1941; the other by Fedot Shubin in 1789–90 for Potemkin’s Tauride Palace (The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). It would take nearly a century for Catherine’s great-grandson to commission the kind of tribute envisioned by Voltaire, Falconet, and Grimm.
The year that Peter’s tribute was unveiled, Gregory Orlov’s brothers brought him back to Russia. Five years earlier, Catherine had arranged for the Holy Synod to set aside its ban on marriages of people from the same family to allow Orlov to marry his fifteen-year-old second cousin, Catherine Zinovieva. Her death four years later from tuberculosis sent Orlov on a downward mental spiral. He tried taking the waters and other cures, but nothing helped relieve the guilt he felt over his young wife’s death.
Refusing to have her former lover confined, Catherine moved Orlov into the Winter Palace, where her own doctors attended to him. The gaunt, white-haired Orlov roamed the halls ranting, “It’s my punishment!” and calling himself Peter’s assassin. “His wild and incoherent discourse ever affect her [Catherine] to tears and discompose her so entirely, that for the remainder of the day she can enjoy neither pleasure nor business,” observed Sir James Harris.6
With Orlov’s madness spiraling out of control, Catherine moved him to a house in Moscow, where he died in April 1783 at age forty-six. His death caused Catherine “the most acute affliction.” Orlov was “the man to whom I have the greatest obligations in the world,” she wrote Grimm. “. . . General Lanskoy is tearing himself apart to help me bear my grief, but that makes me melt even more.” Field Marshal Golitsyn’s death six months later prompted Catherine to tell Potemkin: “It has been a black year for me. It seems that whoever falls into Rogerson’s hands [her physician] is already a dead man.”7
Orlov left his vast fortune to Alexei Bobrinsky, his son with Catherine. Catherine bought back her spectacular gift, the Roettiers silver service, and ordered Orlov’s coat of arms removed. The empress also purchased Gatchina and the Marble Palace, the extravagant suburban and city palaces she’d given him. In 1784, Catherine presented the five-hundred-room Gatchina to Paul to mark the birth of his first daughter, Alexandra. Despite the fact that Gatchina had been owned by the man who helped depose and murder his father, the castle became Paul’s favorite residence. For Catherine, its remote location thirty miles south of the capital kept her son conveniently out of the way. “I am thirty years old and have nothing to do,” a bored grand duke declared that year.8 Paul kept himself busy by turning Gatchina into a military camp, where he drilled his two thousand troops.
Meanwhile Paul’s nemesis was busy leading a real battle. After the unveiling of Peter the Great’s statue, Gregory Potemkin ordered an invasion of the Crimea in which four hundred rebels were killed and the capital Bakhchisaray was taken. He also oversaw construction and shipbuilding in the new town of Kherson, along with the Kinburn fortress opposite the Ottoman stronghold Ochakov. As hoped, Russia’s alliance with Austria proved to be an effective deterrent, preventing the Ottomans from declaring war. By late October, Potemkin returned to St. Petersburg noticeably changed. “He rises early, attends to business, is become not only visible but affable to everybody,” noted Sir James Harris.9
Potemkin set about organizing his estate—selling his numerous houses, horses, and jewels—and settling his debts. Reportedly, he offered his resignation to Catherine, who quickly rejected it. Potemkin was also masterminding a daring move. With Britain wrapping up its war with France and America, and plague-ravaged Istanbul consumed with rioting, he urged Catherine to annex the Crimea, the 18,000-square-mile peninsula jutting into the northern shore of the Black Sea—something she had been focused on doing throughout the entire Ottoman War. The prized peninsula had been controlled by various peoples throughout history, including the ancient Greeks, the Byzantines, and the Mongols. And now it was vulnerable enough to potentially be the subject of a successful annexation.
In late November, Potemkin sent Catherine an impassioned letter: “Imagine the Crimea is Yours and the wart on your nose is no more. . . . Gracious Lady . . . You are obliged to raise Russian glory! See who has gained what: France took Corsica, the Austrians without a war took more in Moldavia than we did. There is no power in Europe that has not participated in the carving-up of Asia, Africa, America. Believe me, that doing this will win you immortal glory greater than any other Russian Sovereign ever. This glory will force its way to an even greater one: with the Crimea, dominance over the Black Sea will be achieved.” Potemkin ended his stunning letter, “Russia needs paradise.”10
Catherine knew the window of opportunity was closing. But could Russia grab the strategic peninsula without triggering war with the myriad of other nations who had their eye on the region? By mid-December, having apprised Joseph II, she made her decision. “We hereby declare our will,” she wrote Potemkin, “for the annexation of the Crimea and the joining of it to the Russian Empire with full faith in you and being absolutely sure that you will not lose convenient time and opportune ways to fulfill this.”11
During the first months of 1783, Potemkin remained in the capital making preparations. He devised a plan to defend Russia’s borders in case of war and created Cossack-inspired uniforms for Russia’s troops. On April 8, 1783, Catherine signed an annexation manifesto to be made public only after its execution, and gave Potemkin detailed instructions in case Turkey declared war. Potemkin left for the south, taking along his beautiful niece Tatiana Engelhardt.
In the rush to annex the Crimea, Potemkin ran into a number of snags. The issues dated back to the history of the region. Starting in the 13th century, Italian merchants from Genoa controlled trade along Crimea’s southern coast for two centuries. Crimean Tatars, a mainly Muslim, Turkic-language speaking people descended from the Mongols, inhabited the steppe north of the coast. Together with the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars expelled the Genoese from their key trading port, Caffa (today’s Feodosia). Since that time, from 1441 on, the Crimean Khanate had ruled the region, partly subject to the Ottomans.
Now after nearly 350 years of a khanate, the current khan had to renounce his throne before the Tatars could swear an oath of allegiance to Catherine. In 1777, three years after the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, Catherine installed handsome Shagin Girey as the Crimea’s puppet ruler (similar to Stanislaus Poniatowski in Poland). In preparation for Russian annexation, Girey had agreed to a generous pension and a new state in the eastern Caucasus on the border with Persia. But instead of leaving for his new realm, the shrewd politician demanded more money from Potemkin, and dragged his feet hoping to see how the Ottomans would respond to Russia’s gamble.
Catherine’s patience was wearing thin. On July 15, she chided Potemkin from Tsarskoe Selo: “You can imagine how worried I must be not having received a word from you in more than five weeks. . . . I expected the Crimea would be occupied by the middle of May at the latest, and here it is in the middle of July and I still don’t know anything more about the situation than the Pope himself. . . .” Five days earlier, Potemkin had written Catherine a congratulatory note: “. . . The entire elite has already taken the oath, and now all the others will follow. . . . So far nothing has been discerned on the Turks’ side. It seems to me they are afraid we might attack, and all their troops have been placed on the defensive. . . . The plague surrounds the camp, but so far God protects us. Goodbye, matushka, I kiss your tender hands.”12
By the end of August, Potemkin contracted a fever that left him so weak he had to be physically carried out of the Crimea. In a letter to Catherine a month later, Potemkin heightened her anxiety by hinting he was gravely ill. “I shall be mortally worried if you leave me without news for a long time,” Catherine replied from the Winter Palace. “Farewell, my dear friend, take care of yourself. Once you take care of yourself, everything else will go fine.” Despite assurances from Potemkin that his health was improving, Catherine remained anxious through the fall. “. . . [A]lthough you assure me that you are better, still I worry and will continue to till I know that you have fully recovered, for I know how you are when you’re ill. . . . God grant you get well soon and return here to us. Oh, for truth, I’m very often lost without you,” she confessed.13
Meanwhile, Shagin Girey devised his own exit strategy. Instead of traveling to the eastern Caucasus as discussed, he landed in Tasman. There, he incited a group of Tatar nomads to rebel against Catherine. Potemkin quickly dispatched General Alexander Suvorov. On October 1, Suvorov’s troops crushed the rebels, but the khan eluded capture. Potemkin had snagged another sparkling jewel for Catherine’s crown, the coveted Crimea, but there was much work to be done. As viceroy for southern Russia, Potemkin began developing the sparsely populated region and strengthening security with a Black Sea fleet.
Catherine rewarded Potemkin with the titles of field marshal, Russia’s highest military rank, and governor-general of the new district of Tauride—after the ancient Roman name for Crimea (Chersonesus Taurica). In 1783, Catherine hired Ivan Starov to design the Tauride Palace for Potemkin, a luxurious Greek-inspired palace near the Smolny Institute. A winner of the prestigious gold medal from Academy of Fine Arts, the St. Petersburg–born architect had studied with Charles de Wailly in Paris (along with Vasily Bazhenov). As chief architect of the “Commission of the stone construction of St. Petersburg and Moscow,” Starov helped plan cities like Yaroslavl, Voronezh, Pskov, and Mykolaiv. In 1775, Catherine had been delighted with Starov’s bold neoclassical cathedral for the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (where he was buried in 1808).
Occupied with the War of American Independence, France and England watched nervously from the sidelines. Most anxious were the retreating Turks who saw their vast empire reduced by a former German princess. Peter the Great had opened the Baltic Sea by wresting swampland from Sweden and building St. Petersburg. Now Catherine completed the mission, securing Russia’s access to the Black Sea by annexing the Crimea. The land grab brought Catherine a step closer to realizing her dream of stripping Turkey of Constantinople and resurrecting a Russian-ruled Greek Empire.