While worrying that unrest abroad might reignite tensions between the classes at home, Catherine found diversion in her new lover. As usual, it was important she get Potemkin’s blessing on Platon Zubov, and she enclosed his flattering letters with hers. “I know that you love me and would not offend me in any way,” she wrote Potemkin in early July. “And just think what a fatal condition for my health I might be in without this man. Farewell, my friend, caress us, so that we can be completely happy.”
A month into their relationship, she described Zubov like one of her grandchildren: “We have a kind heart and a most agreeable disposition, without malice and cunning, and a very determined desire to do good. We have four rules which we try to keep, namely: to be loyal, modest, devoted and extremely grateful . . .”1
The 22-year-old had his own rule—reaping maximum benefit for himself and family members while he could. Potemkin promoted Zubov’s older and younger brothers Nikolai and Valerian to officers. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Zubov spent hours in front of a mirror having his hair curled, and watched in amusement while his pet monkey humiliated respected petitioners by pulling off their wigs.2
August 1789 proved a good month on both the romantic and military fronts for Catherine. Russia’s army won an important victory against the Turks at Fokshany; after a fourteen-hour battle, its navy took seven Swedish ships at Svenskund. More victories followed that fall, culminating in the capture of Bender from the Turks. By mid-month, just as the French National Assembly was passing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Catherine developed severe colic. After a long convalescence in bed with chamomile pillows placed around her, Catherine wrote to Grimm, predicting Louis XVI’s fate. By October, Parisian women led a mob to Versailles and forced the royal family back to Paris and house arrest at the Tuileries Palace.
The stress from France’s anti-monarchial crisis and fighting two simultaneous wars began to take a toll on Catherine’s health. In early December, she suffered another bout of colic. At year-end, after learning about a secret alliance between Prussia and the Ottomans, Catherine told her secretary, “Now we are in a crisis; either peace or a triple war with Prussia.”3 On top of this development, in early February, Joseph II died after an agonizing operation for an anal abscess. His successor and brother Leopold was not a fan of Catherine’s territorial expansion.
By the following May, fighting between Swedish and Russian fleets came so close to Russia’s coast that Catherine heard the ships’ guns all day. The empress kept calm by translating Plutarch into Russian with Platon Zubov.4 At month end, Catherine traveled to Kronstadt via Peterhof, where cannon fire rattled the windows. “We’ve pulled one paw out of the mud,” Catherine wrote Potemkin about the grueling final months of the Russo-Swedish War. “Once we pull out the other, we’ll sing Hallelujah.”5
But it was too early to celebrate. In May 1790, Alexander Radischev published Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow anonymously. Calling Catherine’s Enlightenment a sham, the aristocrat declared that Russia would remain barbaric until serfs were freed and predicted a far worse uprising than the Pugachev Rebellion if reforms were not made. His scathing depictions of serfdom and government corruption drew the wrath of Catherine, who called the author “a rabble-rouser, worse than Pugachev . . . inciting the serfs to bloody rebellion.”6
Catherine ordered Journey confiscated and destroyed. Of the original 650 copies, only 17 survived to be reprinted in England five decades later. In addition to writing rebuttals in the margins of her copy, she penned the ten-page Notes on the Journey. “The purpose of this book is clear on every page,” she wrote, “its author, infected and full of the French madness, is trying in every possible way to break down respect for authority and for the authorities, to stir up in the people indignation against their superiors and against the government.”7 After his arrest and imprisonment in the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, Radischev was sentenced to death for sedition. Disowning his book, Radischev begged the Catherine for forgiveness. But it was Potemkin who would save him from execution.
Though Radischev had depicted Potemkin as an oriental tyrant, he urged Catherine to show leniency. “I’ve read the book sent to me. I am not angry. . . . It seems, Matushka, he’s been slandering you too. And you also won’t be angry. Your deeds are your shield.” In honor of the peace treaty with Sweden, Catherine commuted Radischev’s death sentence to a decade of exile in Ilimsk, eastern Siberia (she also revoked his status as a member of the gentry, rank in the service, and order of knighthood). After Count Alexander Vorontzov, brother of Russia’s ambassador to England, intervened on behalf of his lifelong friend, Catherine allowed Radischev to make the two-year, 4,500-mile journey to Siberia without chains.
Ironically, not long before Journey was published, Catherine had named its author chief of St. Petersburg’s Custom House. Born into a minor noble family on an estate just outside of Moscow, Radischev’s father was known for treating his three thousand serfs humanely. Thanks to family connections, Radischev became a page in Catherine’s court in 1765. After the first Russo-Turkish War, Radischev received an honorable discharge with a rank of second major. He married and resumed his civil service career, enjoying a series of promotions and honors. In 1785, Radischev was made a Knight of the Order of St. Vladimir.
Catherine’s early enthusiasm for progressive ideas and a humane legal system proved fleeting. In 1787, she had ordered a raid of bookstores across Russia to impound seditious titles. Censorship, including works of her idol Voltaire, became harsher and more repressive. By April 1790, Catherine issued orders to stop the spread of the “epidemic” of new ideas. The same year, Catherine advised Marie Antoinette that she and Louis should show indifference to recent political events. “Kings ought to go their own way without worrying about the cries of the people, as the moon goes on its course without being stopped by the cries of dogs.”8
Meanwhile Austria’s Leopold II signed the Convention of Reichenbach establishing an armistice between Austria and the Ottoman Empire. Over in Prussia, Frederick William’s next move was a defensive alliance with Poland. He deployed 40,000 Prussian soldiers toward Livonia in the north and 40,000 more in Silesia. Armed with this false sense of security, the Diet adopted a new constitution in May 1791 aimed at weakening the old nobility. Under the new political structure, Stanislaus would rule until his death, at which time the Polish crown would pass back to his predecessors, the electors of Saxony.
In August, after a series of losing battles that summer, Gustav III ended his costly two-year gamble by signing the Treaty of Värälä in Finland. Though Gustav didn’t get the territory he sought, he succeeded in gaining Russia’s formal recognition of his sovereignty and government. The meaningless war caused heavy human losses on both sides. But what was clear is that Catherine’s alliances and hold over neighboring European powers were no longer what they once were.