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Catherine conducted the public side of her romantic life on an open stage. Privately, writing in her memoirs or to Potemkin or other correspondents, she included glowing descriptions of the young men who became her favorites. These descriptions erred on the side of poor judgment and excess sentimentality, nothing else. About herself, she was honest; she admitted to Potemkin that she had taken four lovers before him; she wrote in her memoirs about the difficulty of resisting temptation in a setting like the Russian court. Who she was and where she came from helped determine her relationships with men. Perhaps if she had been the daughter of a great king, as Elizabeth I of England had been; perhaps if she, like Elizabeth, had been able to use virginity and abstinence as prizes to tempt and manipulate powerful men, the lives of these two preeminent woman rulers in the history of European monarchy would have been more similar.

*In the eighteenth century, a request of this kind was not extraordinary. Kings and princes, mostly German, happily rented their soldiers to the highest bidder. England eventually hired thousands of Hessians, who made themselves hated throughout the American colonies. The impact that twenty thousand Russians might have had on eighteenth-century America can only be imagined.

*The family decided to keep the new name, and the nineteenth-century composer Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov came from a collateral branch.

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Catherine, Paul, and Natalia

CATHERINE HAD BEEN brought to Russia to produce an heir and ensure the succession. Her obligation to conceive a child with her husband, Peter, had stretched over nine wasted years. Failure had prompted Empress Elizabeth to insist that Catherine choose between two potential surrogate fathers, Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin. And then, the moment success was achieved, Elizabeth had snatched the newborn infant away.

This cruel mischief permanently affected the lives of both Catherine and her son, Paul. Catherine was permitted no complete experience of motherhood, and her memories of the birth and infancy of this child were painful. Saltykov, almost certainly Paul’s father, had abandoned her to boast about his conquest. Paul thereafter became a reminder of a man who had ruthlessly deserted her. Peter, her husband, was worse. Peter humiliated her for years and threatened to seal her away in a convent. Both of these men, Paul’s dynastically recognized father and his biological father, left her with bitter memories of misery, disillusionment, and loneliness.

In 1762, when Catherine reached the throne and retrieved her son, it was too late to repair their relationship. Paul was eight years old, small for his age, frail, and frequently ill. At first, he missed Elizabeth, the tall, overwhelmingly affectionate woman who had spoiled him by surrounding him with nurses and women who refused to let him do anything for himself. When Catherine was allowed to see him, she came, but she was usually accompanied by the giant figure of Gregory Orlov, who claimed the attention Paul felt should be his.

Catherine’s relationship with Paul, involving as it did the question of the succession, was the most psychologically difficult personal and political problem of her reign. From the beginning, Catherine realized that anyone plotting against her could always point to a Romanov heir in the person of her son. The issue was clouded by the question of whether Paul was the son of Peter III or the child of Catherine’s lover, Sergei Saltykov. In her memoirs, Catherine strongly implies that Paul was Saltykov’s son, and, at the time of Paul’s birth, almost no one at court believed the child to be Peter’s son. There was general knowledge of Peter’s sexual incapacity, of the emotional and physical breach between the married partners, and of Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. The mass of the Russian people, however, were not privy to this information, and believed that the heir to the throne was the son of Catherine’s husband, the future Tsar Peter III. The Moscow crowds cheering Paul at Catherine’s coronation believed that Paul was the legitimate great-grandson of Peter the Great. Catherine, riding in the coronation procession, heard the cheers and understood their meaning: that Paul was her rival. Officially, however, Paul’s status as heir did not hinge on the question of his paternity. Once proclaimed empress, Catherine had made certain that Paul’s succession rights derived from her. Basing her proclamation on Peter the Great’s decree that the sovereign could name his or her successor, she publicly proclaimed Paul her heir. No one ever challenged her right to make this decision.