On 20 June, the Turks sued for peace: usually this would have meant a truce, a congress and the months of negotiating that had ruined the last peace talks. This is where Potemkin's advice to 'empower' Rumiantsev bore fruit, because the Field-Marshal set up camp in the Bulgarian village of Kuchuk- Kainardzhi and told the Turks that either they signed peace or the two armies went back to war. The Ottomans began to talk; news of a peace treaty was expected any day; Catherine's spirits rose. Everything was going so well.
A new Pugachev crisis struck Catherine in mid-July. On the nth, Pugachev appeared before the ancient and strategic city of Kazan with a swelling army of 25,000. The supposedly defeated Pugachev was not defeated at all, but he was being pursued by the true hero of the Rebellion, the tirelessly competent Lieutenant-Colonel Ivan Mikhelson. Kazan was a mere 93 miles from Nizhny Novgorod and that was just over a hundred miles from Moscow itself. The old Tartar city, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in 15 56, had 11,000 inhabitants and mainly wooden buildings. It happened that General Pavel Potemkin, the new appointee to run both the Kazan and Orenburg Secret Commissions, had arrived in Kazan on 9 July, two days before Pugachev. The old Governor was ill. Pavel Potemkin took over the command, but he possessed only 650 infantry and 200 unreliable Chuvash cavalry, so he barricaded his forces in the citadel. On the 12th, Pugachev stormed Kazan, which was razed in an infernal orgy of violence that lasted from 6 a.m. to midnight. Anyone in 'German dress' or without a beard was killed; women in 'German dress' were delivered to the pretender's camp. The city was reduced to ashes before Pugachev's army escaped, leaving Pavel Potemkin to be rescued by Mikhelson.
The Volga region was now one teeming peasant rebellion. The Rebellion had taken an even nastier turn: it had started as a Cossack rising. Now it became a savage class war, a regular jacquerie, meaning a slaughter of landowners by peasants, named after the rebellion in northern France in 1358. The regime faced the prospect of the millions of serfs massacring their masters. This was a threat not just to Catherine but to the very foundations of the Empire. Factory serfs, peasants and 5,000 Bashkir horsemen now followed the flag of the pretender. Serfs rose in village after village. Gangs of runaway slaves roamed the countryside. Rebel Cossacks galloped through the villages urging the serfs to rise.[21] On 21 July, the news of the fall of Kazan reached Catherine in Petersburg. The authorities in the centre began to panic. Would Pugachev march on Moscow?33
The next day the Empress held an emergency Council meeting at Peterhof. She declared that she would travel directly to Moscow to rally the Empire. The Council heard this in smouldering silence. No one dared speak. The members of the Council were worried and uneasy. Catherine herself was rattled: Kazan made her seem suddenly vulnerable. Unusually for her, she showed it. Some of the magnates, especially Prince Orlov and the two Cher- nyshev brothers, bitterly resented Potemkin's rise and Panin's resurgence.
The Council was stunned by the Empress's wish to go to Moscow. Its defeated silence reflected the depth 'of the wordless depression'. Catherine turned to her senior minister, Nikita Panin, and asked his opinion of her idea. 'My answer', he wrote to his brother, General Peter Panin, 'was that it would not only be bad but disastrous,' because it smacked of fear at the top. Catherine passionately argued the benefits of her descent on Moscow. Potemkin backed her. The Moscow option may have been his idea because as the most old Russian among these cultured grandees, he instinctively saw Moscow as the Orthodox capital when the Motherland was in danger. Equally, he may simply have agreed with her because he was too new there to risk independence of Catherine.
The reaction of most of the Council members was almost comicaclass="underline" Prince Orlov refused to give an opinion at all, claiming like a child that he felt off colour, had not slept well and did not have any ideas. Kirill Razumovsky and Field-Marshal Alexander Golitsyn, a pair of 'fools', could not summon up a word. Zakhar Chernyshev 'trembled between the favourites' - Orlov and Potemkin - and managed to emit 'half-words twice'. It was recognized that there was no one of any military weight on the Volga to co-ordinate Pugachev's defeat: 'a distinguished personage' was required. But who? Orlov presumably went off to get his beauty sleep while the downhearted Council resolved nothing, other than to wait for news of the Turkish peace treaty.34
Nikita Panin had an idea. After dinner, he took Potemkin aside and proposed that the 'distinguished personage' to save Russia was none other than his brother, General Peter Ivanovich Panin. There was something to be said for this: he was a victorious battle general with the aristocratic credentials necessary to soothe the fears of landowners. He was already in Moscow. But there was a problem with Peter Panin. He was a rude, arrogant and snobbish curmudgeon for whom the word 'martinet' might have been invented. Even for a Russian soldier in the eighteenth century, many of his loudly declared views were absurd: he was a pedant on the privileges of nobles and the minutiae of military etiquette and flaunted a stalwart belief that only men were qualified to be tsar. This harsh disciplinarian and spluttering tyrant was capable of appearing in the anteroom of his headquarters in a grey satin nightgown and a high French nightcap with pink ribbons.35 Catherine loathed him, distrusted him politically and even had him under secret police surveillance.
So Nikita Panin, not daring to raise his brother aloud at the Council, cautiously approached Potemkin, who went straight to the Empress. She was probably furious at the very thought of it. Perhaps he persuaded her that they had little choice when they felt as if even her closest supporter were wavering. She agreed. When Nikita Panin spoke to her later, the Empress dissembled her real views and, ever the actress, graciously swore that she wanted Peter Panin to take supreme command of the Volga provinces and 'save Moscow and the internal parts of the Empire'. Nikita Panin immediately wrote to his brother.36
The Panins had pulled off what was almost a coup d'etat, forcing Catherine to swallow the humiliation of the hated Peter Panin saving the Empire. They were now, in their way, as much of a threat to Catherine and Potemkin as
Pugachev. Having gulped Panin's distasteful medicine, the lovers at once realized that they had to water it down. It was to get worse before it got better: the Panins demanded massive viceregal powers for the general over all towns, courts and Secret Commissions in the four huge provinces affected, and over all military forces (except Rumiantsev's First Army, the Second Army occupying the Crimea and the units in Poland), as well as power to issue death sentences. 'You see my friend,' Catherine told Potemkin, 'from the enclosed pieces, that Count Panin wants to make his brother the dictator of the best parts of the Empire.' She was determined not to raise this 'first-class liar ... who has personally offended me, above all the mortals in the Empire'. Potemkin took over the negotiations with the Panins and the management of the Rebellion.37
Catherine and Potemkin did not know that, before Kazan had fallen, Rumiantsev had signed an extremely beneficial peace with the Turks - the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi. On the evening of 23 July, two couriers, one of them Rumiantsev's son, galloped into Peterhof with the news. Catherine's mood changed from despair to gloating enthusiasm. 'I think today is the happiest day of my life,' she told the Governor of Moscow.38 The Treaty gave Russia a toehold on the Black Sea, granting the fortresses of Azov, Kerch, Yenikale and Kinburn and the narrow strip of coastline between the Dnieper and Bug rivers. Russian merchant ships could pass through the Straits into the Mediterranean. She could build a Black Sea Fleet. The Khanate of the Crimea became independent of the Ottoman Sultan. This success was to make Potemkin's achievements possible. Catherine ordered extravagant festivities. The Court moved to Oranienbaum three days later to celebrate.