Catherine the Great by Virginia Rounding

Author:Virginia Rounding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2006-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Please tell the secret commission to be careful in the investigation and punishment of people. In my judgement, the soldiers Aytugan and Sangulov were unjustly beaten; and why is there any need to beat people under interrogation? During the twelve years of my supervision the secret branch has not beaten any man during questioning, and yet each matter was investigated thoroughly and we always found out more than we needed to know.

The Empress could not, however, personally supervise the proceedings in Kazan, and there is some evidence to suggest that Bibikov dealt with her merciful inclinations by not keeping her fully informed about the methods actually used during the interrogation of suspects.

On 14 February the Court returned from Tsarskoye Selo to the Winter Palace and on the following day there was a dinner which included both Vassilchikov and Potemkin among the 20 guests. On the 18th the Empress attended the Russian comedy and afterwards stayed up with Potemkin, talking or making love, until the unusually late hour for her of one o’clock in the morning. It was a constant feature of this relationship that the lovers’ timetables did not mesh. Catherine routinely went to bed several hours before Potemkin and was hard at work in the morning well before he was awake. Consequently they rarely spent the night together, and each partner frequently found the other was not available when required. Catherine, despite being the Empress and in theory free to do whatever she liked, frequently behaved like an illicit lover during her affair with Potemkin, feeling that she had to hide her assignations with him. She was also afraid that he would not respond as she desired. On 26 February she wrote: ‘As soon as I had gone to bed and the servants had withdrawn, I got up again, dressed and went to the doors in the library to wait for you, and there I stood for two hours in a draught; and not until it was nearly midnight did I return out of sadness to lie down in bed where, thanks to you, I spent the fifth sleepless night.’ She did not even have the consolation of conversations with Grimm, as he had fallen ill with a fever.

Perhaps Potemkin was playing hard to get until his position was consolidated. Thirty-six hours after the Empress had spent this miserable night, Potemkin wrote to ask to be made a general and her personal aide-de-camp. He could not bear to think that he might be considered ‘less worthy’ than others and begged that ‘my doubt be resolved by rewarding me with the title of adjutant-general to Your Imperial Majesty’. Catherine was pleased that Potemkin felt he could make such a very direct request of her, and she ordered the necessary edict to be drawn up straightaway. That day she and Potemkin met in the baths – the Russian banya installed in the basement of the Winter Palace which became a regular venue for their trysts. Food had been prepared for them and Catherine warned Potemkin not to take any of it away, so no one would know their secret.

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