Catherine never recovered from losing Potemkin. The person who benefited most from the resulting power vacuum was Platon Zubov, who at age twenty-two had helped the sixty-year-old empress forget the humiliating episode with Alexander Mamonov. One of the few favorites not pre-approved by the absent Potemkin, the handsome young courtier had been planted by Potemkin enemy Count Nikolai Saltykov who ran Paul’s household.
In his ground floor palace apartments, connected to Catherine’s by a private staircase, the ambitious favorite began holding his own version of Louis XIV’s lever. Each morning, dozens of petitioners paid Zubov court; his secretaries became wealthy taking bribes from those seeking an audience with him. In January 1792, Catherine gave Zubov his own chancery headed by Adrian Gribovsky. Increasingly Catherine consulted her lover on domestic and foreign policy decisions.
Health problems seem to have blinded Catherine to her government’s rampant corruption. After four months in St. Petersburg, Britain’s John Parkinson observed: “She [Catherine] does everything in her power to keep the great people here attached to her. They are left to do almost what they please with impunity. The most severe punishment they have to fear is a dismissal from their places but this is but rarely given. On their relations and dependents all the good things in the gift of the Crown are bestowed; and to this it is owing that the Army and Navy are so ill officered.”1
In 1791, an investigation exposed a scandal involving British court banker Richard Sutherland, who Catherine had made a baron of the Russian Empire three years earlier. After embezzling over two million rubles, Sutherland made large loans to Grand Duke Paul, Potemkin, and other leading figures of Catherine’s government. Sutherland and Potemkin had died back-to-back in October, and Catherine ordered the treasury to write off the biggest debts the following spring.2 In another public embarrassment, Catherine’s former lover, Peter Zavadovsky, chief director of the Loan Bank, was implicated in a swindling case. Catherine ordered Zubov and Bezborodko to cover up the scandal.3
On March 1, 1792, after just two years in power, Austria’s Leopold II died unexpectedly. Two weeks later, Catherine received shocking news from Stockholm. Gustav III had been shot at a masked ball at his opera house and was clinging to life. Though his assassin was a Swedish aristocrat angry over the war with Russia and reduced privileges for the nobility, Catherine saw her cousin’s murder as part of the revolutionary violence sweeping France and Poland. Conspiracy theorists viewed the shooting as the work of Freemasons determined to overthrow Europe’s monarchs. Catherine became convinced that she was the next target.4 Security was stepped up, especially around Tsarskoe Selo.
That spring, with Prussia and Austria at war with France and the Russo-Turkish War finally over, Catherine turned her attention to Poland. Unlike Leopold II and Prussia’s Frederick William, Catherine had refused to acknowledge Poland’s constitution of May 3, 1791. Though there was nothing radical about the constitution, it would have strengthened the country’s central government, a problem for Catherine who wanted Poland to remain under Russia’s control. At the urging of a confederation of ultra-conservative Polish nobles known as the Confederation of Targowica, and with Prussia’s support, Catherine unleashed 100,000 Russian troops into eastern Poland. As she predicated, Austria did nothing and Prussia reneged on its 1790 defensive treaty. Stanislaus Poniatowski joined the Targowica conservatives. With Russian troops occupying the confederation and the conservative Poles fighting among themselves, opportunity knocked again. In January 1793, Russia and Prussia repealed Poland’s new constitution and signed a treaty partitioning the country for a second time.
Russia seized another 89,000 square miles of eastern Poland, including the remaining Polish Ukraine, along with three million people. Prussia’s take included 23,000 square miles including Danzig and Thorn along with land in western Poland, and one million people. Reduced to one third of its original size, Poland effectively became “a Russian province” as a Polish deputy put it. Catherine maintained she was simply retaking lands belonging to the 16th-century Russian principality of Kiev—“lands still inhabited by people of the Russian faith and race.”5 “My part is sung,” Catherine wrote Field Marshal Peter Rumyantsev. “It is an example of how it is not impossible to attain an end and to succeed if one really wills it.”6
In reaction to the violence in Sweden and France, Catherine also took an increasingly hard line at home. Just as Alexander Radischev was beginning his exile in Siberia, Catherine targeted his mentor, Freemason publisher Nicholas Novikov. After Novikov’s publication The Drone criticized her government and the continuation of serfdom, Catherine confiscated his printing house. In 1792, without a formal trial, Novikov was imprisoned at Schlüsselburg fortress in the cell where Ivan VI had died. Correspondence between Novikov and architect Vasily Bazhenov seemed to indicate the Freemasons hoped to recruit the Catherine’s son Paul, a charge the grand duke vehemently denied. On August 1, by Catherine’s order, Novikov received a fifteen-year prison sentence. Much of his writing was destroyed.7
In his final years, Potemkin had tempered Catherine’s growing paranoia. In his absence, Platon Zubov encouraged her reactionary decisions, including the persecution of Radischev and Novikov. Catherine ordered Russia’s provincial governors to stop publishing books “likely to corrupt morals, concerned with the government, and, above all, those dealing with the French revolution.” Because of its regicide theme, even Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar disappeared from bookstores. Catherine’s paranoia grew on August 10 when a mob stormed Paris’s Tuileries Palace. Over one thousand people died that day—courtiers, soldiers, and members of the Swiss Guards who’d been hired to protect the royals. The royal family escaped massacre but was locked up in the medieval fortress known as the Temple.
Also in August, Catherine concluded negotiations with Potemkin’s heirs. She agreed to pay them 2.6 million rubles for most of his property and possessions, including Tauride Palace. Architect Fyodor Volkov began turning the immense residence into the empress’s fall townhouse. The remodel included additions of a church and theatre to the west and east wings, along with a harbor and canal linking the palace to the Neva. Catherine also ordered a Palladian villa built on the grounds for Potemkin’s gardener William Gould. Catherine’s one-week stay at Tauride in 1792 was short but sweet, filled with memories of Potemkin. “The palace is the height of fashion since it is all on the ground floor, with a large and beautiful garden, right in the middle of the barracks on the bank of the Neva, the cavalry to the right, the artillery to the left, and the Preobrazhensky [Guards] behind the garden,” she wrote Grimm. “There is nowhere better for the spring and autumn.”8
Potemkin’s estate also included some 368 paintings and dozens of sculptures. A number of works remained with his nephews, one of whom wrote in a biography of his uncle: “The prince was, to a maximum degree, a lover of the fine arts. In architecture, he favored the vast and majestic . . . in painting and sculpture he liked perfection.”9 Among the objects transferred from Tauride to the Winter Palace were the Duchess of Kingston’s silver wine cooler and the spectacular 700-piece Sèvres Cameo Service. One Tauride Palace treasure—a tour de force of clock making—was currently in the repair shop.
In late 1781, at Potemkin’s request, Catherine paid 11,000 rubles (roughly 1,800 pounds sterling) for a spectacular clock designed with a large bronze oak tree and mechanical birds. British master jeweler James Cox was celebrated throughout Europe for his richly decorated musical automata and objets d’art. To fulfill Potemkin’s order as quickly as possible, the clockmaker repurposed an existing mechanical peacock, a symbol of the cosmos, sun, and moon. To this Cox added two more life-size birds—an owl representing wisdom and night, and a rooster symbolizing life and resurrection—along with a squirrel and a fox, and a dragonfly to mark the seconds on the clock.
Dismantled for the journey to St. Petersburg, the clock remained in pieces for nearly a decade with its parts stored in ten boxes in the Tauride Palace storeroom. During Potemkin’s last visit to St. Petersburg, he hired engineer Ivan Kulibin to reassemble the clock. After Potemkin’s death, Catherine ordered the repair, paying Kulibin 1,200 rubles from the treasury. Kulibin went to work replacing lost parts, reapplying gold and silver, cleaning internal and external mechanisms, and straightening bent leaves on the tree branches and plants. After two years, Kulibin returned the reassembled clock to Tauride Palace. Today, the Peacock Clock is a crowd favorite at the Hermitage.
While condemning the French Revolution, Catherine took full advantage of the resulting buyer’s market. Like many elite collectors, she enriched her holdings with bargains from desperate refugees and treasures confiscated by the revolutionary government.10 Among the carved gems Catherine purchased from emigré antiquarian Alphonse Miliotti in 1792 were those from the collections of Prince de Conti (Louis François de Bourbon, art connoisseur and wine maker), Saint-Morys (conseiller of the French parliament), the Dazencour family, and Madame Baudeville. The same year, Catherine added the glyptic cabinets of neoclassical painter Giovanni Battista Casanova, director of the Dresden Academy of Arts; and Joseph Angelo de France, director of the Vienna Historical Cabinet.11
In 1792, Catherine transferred the jewels from the diamond chamber in her private apartments at the Winter Palace to the Large Hermitage near the Raphael Loggia. Decorated in neoclassical style and hung with van Dyck paintings, the new Diamond Room sparkled with gems and objets de vertu in elegant cases by cabinetmakers Hermann Meyer and Heinrich Gambs. Johann Georgi described the dazzling display: “boxes and caskets of silver filigree, finely woven, partly gilded, some of them decorated with gems and pearls. . . . there are also salt cellars of precious stones . . . various pitchers . . . pocket watches of the former Sovereigns and their families . . . snuff-boxes collected from various periods and most varied in size, appearance and the material, some with precious gems and pearls. . . .”12
That same year, suffering from gout and rheumatism, Catherine asked Charles Cameron to add a ramp from the terrace opposite the entrance of the Agate Pavilion at Tsarskoe Selo. Inspired by a Roman aqueduct, Cameron supported the gently sloping limestone pente douce with a series of gradually descending arches whose keystones he decorated with Renaissance-style carved masks. Around this time, Catherine became consumed with finding a suitable bride for fourteen-year-old Alexander. In October, thirteen-year-old Louise Maria Augusta of Baden and her younger sister Frederica arrived in St. Petersburg (the sisters’ maternal aunt was Grand Duke Paul’s first wife Natalia).
The beautiful Princess Louise enchanted Catherine, but Alexander was a harder sell. “I looked at the Grand Duke Alexander as much as good manners permitted, and thought him very good-looking, but not as handsome as he had been described to me,” Louise confided to Countess Golovine. “He did not come up to me, and gave me a very hostile glance.”13 The shy grand duke gradually warmed up to the charming German princess. At a ball at the Winter Palace, the couple joined their siblings and other young dancers for minuets.
“The eldest Grand Duke is a very handsome young man with a fine open countenance,” noted attendee John Parkinson. “. . . His brother’s countenance [Constantine’s] is quite the reverse of his, exceedingly disagreeable and unpromising. His character and temper likewise are not well spoken of. They [the Princesses of Baden] are both fine girls, but particularly the eldest.”14 Six weeks after Princess Louise’s arrival, while playing cards in the Winter Palace’s Diamond Room, Alexander passed her a note. He was “authorized by his parents to tell me that he loved me,” Louise wrote, “he asked me whether I could accept the expression of his affection and return it, and if he might hope that I could find my happiness in marrying him.”15 Accepting the proposal, Louise stayed in St. Petersburg to learn Russian.
To celebrate Alexander’s name day, Catherine threw a ball at the Winter Palace in December. “The Empress seemed this morning to be uncommonly cheerful; and so she did I thought at the ball in the evening where she stood in the front of the circle and talked very affably with several people,” Parkinson observed. “For the first time I got a view this morning of Zeuboff: he is of the middle size, a genteel figure but not handsome.”16
On Christmas Day, Zubov made his first appearance at court in his new Order of the Black Eagle, sent to Catherine by Prussia’s Frederick William. Catherine participated in the evening’s celebrations, including a variety of games. “She is said indeed to be so fond of such pastimes, that not a week passes, but she amuses herself with something of that kind,” added Parkinson.17 In mid-January, crowds gathered near the Admiralty to celebrate the blessing of the waters. Just days later, the celebratory mood at court came to an abrupt end.
On the morning of January 21, Louis XVI was executed by guillotine at the Place de la Concorde in Paris. According to his chief executioner, the king’s final words before being strapped down were: “Gentlemen, I am innocent of everything of which I am accused. I hope that my blood may cement the good fortune of the French.”18 As Louis XVI’s head was held up for the crowd to see, there were cries of “Vive la Nation!” and “Vive la République!” along with an artillery salute heard by the king’s imprisoned family.
When news of the regicide reached St. Petersburg, Catherine became physically ill and retreated from public. On February 1, she ordered six weeks of official mourning “For the death of the King of France who has been cruelly murdered by his rebellious subjects.”19