Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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THE PROVINCIAL BOY

I would rather hear that you had been killed than that you had brought shame on yourself.

(The advice of a Smolensk nobleman to his son, joining the army.)

L. N. Engelhardt, Memoirs

‘When I grow up,’ the young Potemkin is said to have boasted, ‘I shall be either a statesman or an archbishop.’ His schoolfriends probably mocked his dreams, for he was born into the ranks of respectable provincial gentry without the benefits of either name or fortune. His godfather, who understood him better, liked to mutter that the boy would either ‘rise to great honour – or lose his head’.¹ The only way to rise swiftly to such eminence in the Russia of that time was through the favour of the monarch – and by the time he had reached the age of twenty-two this obscure provincial had contrived to meet two reigning empresses.

Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was born on 30 September 1739^*1 in the small village of Chizhova, not far from the old fortress city of Holy Smolensk. The Potemkins owned the modest estate and its 430 male serfs. The family were far from rich, but they were hardly poor either. However, they made up for their middling status by behaviour that was strange even by the standards of the wilder borderlands of the Russian Empire. They were a numerous clan of Polish descent and, like all nobility, they had concocted a dubious genealogy. The more minor the nobility, the more grandiose this tended to be, so the Potemkins claimed they were descended from Telesin, the prince of an Italian tribe which threatened Rome in about 100 bc, and from Istok, a Dalmatian prince of the eleventh century ad. After centuries of unexplained obscurity, these royal Italian–Dalmatians reappeared around Smolensk bearing the distinctly unLatinate name ‘Potemkin’ or the polonized ‘Potempski’.

The family proved adept at navigating the choppy seas between the tsars of Muscovy and the kings of Poland, receiving estates around Smolensk from both. The family patriarch was Hans-Tarasy (supposedly a version of Telesin) Potemkin, who had two sons, Ivan and Illarion, from whom the two branches of the family were descended.² Grigory came from Illarion’s junior line. Both sides boasted middle-ranking officers and courtiers. From the time of Potemkin’s great-grandfather, the family exclusively served Muscovy, which was gradually recovering these traditional Kievan lands from the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania.

The Potemkins became pillars of the intermarried cousinhood of Smolensk nobility, which possessed its own unique Polish identity. While Russian nobility was called the dvoryanstvo, the Smolensk nobles still called themselves szlachta, like their brethren in Poland. Smolensk today appears deeply embedded in Russia, but when Potemkin was born it was still on the borderlands. The Russian Empire in 1739 already stretched eastwards from Smolensk across Siberia to the Chinese border, and from the Baltic in the north towards the foothills of the Caucasus in the south – but it had not yet grasped its golden prize, the Black Sea. Smolensk had been conquered by Peter the Great’s father, Tsar Alexei, as recently as 1654 and before then it had been part of Poland. The local nobility remained culturally Polish, so Tsar Alexei confirmed their privileges, permitted the Smolensk Regiment to elect its officers (though they were not allowed to keep their Polish links) and decreed that the next generation had to marry Russian, not Polish, girls. Potemkin’s father may have worn the baggy pantaloons and long tunic of the Polish nobleman and spoken some Polish at home, though he would have worn the more Germanic uniform of the Russian army officer outside. So Potemkin was brought up in a semi-Polish environment and inherited much closer links to Poland than most Russian nobles. This connection assumed importance later: he acquired Polish naturalization, toyed with Poland’s throne and sometimes seemed to believe he was Polish.³

Potemkin’s only famous forebear (though a scion of Ivan’s line) was Peter Ivanovich Potemkin, a talented military commander and later ambassador of Tsar Alexei and his successor, Tsar Fyodor, father and brother of Peter the Great. This earlier Potemkin could best be described as a one-man trans-European diplomatic incident.

In 1667, this local Governor and okolnichy (a senior court rank) was sent as Russia’s first ambassador to Spain and France and then later, in 1680, as special envoy to many European capitals. Ambassador Potemkin went to almost any lengths to ensure that the prestige of his master was protected in a world that still regarded the Muscovite Tsar as a barbarian. The Russians in their turn were xenophobic and disdained the unOrthodox Westerners as not much better than Turks. At a time when all monarchs were highly sensitive about titles and etiquette, the Russians felt they had to be doubly so.

In Madrid, the bearded and heavily robed Ambassador demanded that the Spanish King uncover his head each time the Tsar’s name was mentioned. When the King replaced his hat, Peter Potemkin demanded an explanation. There were rows when the Spaniards queried the Tsar’s titles and then even more when they were listed in the wrong order. On the way back to Paris, he argued again over titles, almost came to blows with customs officials, refused to pay duty on his jewel-encrusted icons or diamond-studded Muscovite robes, grumbled about over-charging and called them ‘dirty infidel’ and ‘cursed dog’. Louis XIV wished to appease this nascent European power and apologized personally for these misunderstandings.

The Ambassador’s second Parisian mission was equally bad-tempered, but he then sailed to London, where he was received by Charles II. This was apparently the sole audience in his diplomatic career that did not end in farce. When he visited Copenhagen and found the Danish King ill in bed, Peter Potemkin called for a couch to be placed alongside and lay down on it so that the Ambassador of the Tsar could negotiate on terms of supine royal equality. On his return, Tsar Fyodor was dead and Potemkin was severely reprimanded for his over-zealous antics by the Regent Sophia.^*2 This curmudgeonly nature seemed to run in both lines of the family.⁴

Grigory Potemkin’s father, Alexander Vasilievich Potemkin, was one of those oafish military eccentrics who must have made life in eighteenth-century provincial garrisons both tedious and colourful. This early Russian prototype of Colonel Blimp was almost insane, permanently indignant and recklessly impulsive. Young Alexander served in Peter the Great’s army throughout the Great Northern War, and fought at the decisive Battle of Poltava in 1709, at which Peter defeated the Swedish invader, Charles XII, and thereby safeguarded his new city St Petersburg and Russia’s access to the Baltic. He then fought at the siege of Riga, helped capture four Swedish frigates, was decorated and later wounded in the left side.

After the war, the veteran had to serve as a military bureaucrat conducting tiresome population censuses in the distant provinces of Kazan and Astrakhan and commanding small garrisons. We do not know many details of his character or career, but we do know that when he demanded to retire because of his aching wounds he was called before a board of the War College and according to custom was stripping off his uniform to show his scars when he spotted that one of the board had served under him as an NCO. He immediately put on his clothes and pointed at this man: ‘What? HE would examine ME? I will NOT tolerate that. Better remain in the service no matter how bad my wounds!’ He then stormed out to serve another two boring years. He finally retired as an ailing lieutenant-colonel in 1739, the year his son was born.⁵

Old Alexander Potemkin already had a reputation as a domestic tyrant. His first wife was still alive when the veteran spotted Daria Skouratova, probably on the Bolshoia Skouratova estate that was near Chizhova. Born Daria Vasilievna Kondyreva, she was, at twenty, already the widow of Skouratov, its deceased proprietor. Colonel Potemkin married her at once. Neither of these ageing husbands was an appetizing prospect for a young girl, but Skouratov’s family would have been glad to find her a new home.

The Colonel’s young wife now received a most unfortunate shock. It was only when she was pregnant with her first child, a daughter named Martha Elena, that she discovered that Colonel Potemkin was still married to his first wife, who lived in the village. Presumably the whole village was only too aware of the Colonel’s secret, and Daria must have felt she had been made to look a fool in front of her own serfs. Bigamy then was as contrary to the edicts of Church and state as it is now, but places like Chizhova were so remote, the records so chaotic, and the power of men over women so dominant that stories of bigamous provincial gentry were quite common. At roughly the same time, General Abraham Hannibal, Pushkin’s Abyssinian grandfather, was remarrying bigamously while torturing his first wife in a dungeon until she agreed to enter a monastery, and one of his sons repeated his performance.⁶ Torture was usually unnecessary to persuade Russian wives to enter monasteries, thereby releasing the husbands to marry again. Daria visited the first wife and tearfully persuaded her to take holy orders, finally making her own bigamous marriage legitimate.

We can glean enough about this marriage to say that it was profoundly unhappy: Alexander Potemkin kept his wife almost perpetually pregnant. She had five daughters and one son – Grigory was her third child. Yet the splenetic taskmaster was also manically jealous. As jealousy often precipitates the very thing it most fears, the young wife was not short of admirers. We are told by one source that, around the time of Grigory’s birth, Colonel Potemkin was extremely suspicious of his visiting cousin, who was to be Grigory’s godfather, the worldly Grigory Matveevich Kizlovsky, a senior civil servant from Moscow. Presumably the boy was named after Kizlovsky – but was he his natural father? We simply do not know: Potemkin inherited some of his father’s manic, often morose character. He also loved Kizlovsky like a father after the Colonel’s death. One simply has to confront the prosaic fact that, even in the adulterous eighteenth century, children were occasionally the offspring of their official fathers.

We know far more about Potemkin’s mother than about his father because she lived to see Grigory become the first man of the Empire. Daria was good-looking, capable and intelligent. A much later portrait shows an old lady in a bonnet with a tough, weary but shrewd face, a bold lumpy nose and sharp chin. Her features are cruder than her son’s, though he was supposed to resemble her. When she discovered she was pregnant for the third time in 1739, the augurs were good. Locals in Chizhova still claim that she had a dream that she saw the sun detach itself from the sky to fall right on her belly – and at that point she woke up. The village soothsayer, Agraphina, interpreted this as the prospect of a son. But the Colonel still found a way to ruin her happiness.⁷ When her time was near, Daria waited to give birth in the village banya or bathhouse, attended probably by her serf-maids. Her husband, according to the story still told by the locals, sat up all night drinking strong home-made berry wines. The serfs waited up too – they wanted an heir after two daughters. When Grigory was delivered, the church bells rang. The serfs danced and drank until dawn.⁸ The place of his birth was fitting, since the banya in the Winter Palace was one day to be the frequent venue for his trysts with Catherine the Great.

Daria’s children were born into a house with a shadow hanging over it – paternal paranoia. Her marriage must have lost whatever meagre romance it ever had when she discovered her husband’s bigamy. His accusations of infidelity must have made it worse: he was so jealous that, when their daughters married, he banned the sons-in-law from kissing Daria’s hand in case the impression of male lips on soft skin led inexorably to sin. After the birth of his heir, the Colonel was visited by, among others coming to congratulate him, his cousin Sergei Potemkin, who informed him that Grigory was not his son. Sergei’s motives in delivering this news were scarcely philanthropic: he wanted his family to inherit the estates. The old soldier flew into a rage, and petitioned to annul the marriage and declare Grigory a bastard. Daria, imagining the monastery gates closing on her, summoned the worldly, sensible godfather Kizlovsky. He hurried from Moscow and persuaded the half-senile husband to drop the divorce petition. So Gregory’s mother and father were stuck with each other.⁹

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Grigory Potemkin’s immediate world for his first six or so years was to be his father’s village. Chizhova stood on the River Chivo, a stream that cut a small, steep, muddy gully through the broad flat lands. It was several hours’ journey from Smolensk, whence Moscow was a further 350 versts. St Petersburg was 837 versts away. In summer, it could be baking hot there, but its flatness meant that the winters were cruel, the winds biting. The countryside was beautiful, rich and green. It was and still is a wild, open land and a refreshing and exciting place for a child.

In many ways, this village was a microcosm of Russian society: there were two essential facts of Russian statehood at that time. The first was the Empire’s perpetual, elemental instinct to expand its borders in every possible direction: Chizhova stood on its restless western borderland. The second was the dichotomy of nobility and serfdom. Potemkin’s home village was divided into these two halves, which it is still possible to see, even though the village scarcely exists today.

On a slight rise above the stream, Potemkin’s first home was a modest, one-storey wooden manorhouse, with a handsome façade. It could not have been in greater contrast to the houses of rich magnates higher up the social scale. For example, later in the century, Count Kirill Razumovsky’s estate, further to the south in the Ukraine, ‘resembled more a little town than a country house…with 40 or 50 outhouses…his guard, a numerous train of retainers, and a large band of musicians’.¹⁰ In Chizhova, the only outhouse around the manor was probably the bathhouse where Grigory was born, which would have stood right above the stream and its well. This banya was an integral part of Russian life. Country folk of both sexes bathed together,^*3 which was very shocking to a visiting French schoolmaster since ‘persons of all ages and both sexes use them together and the habit of seeing everything unveiled from an early age deadens the senses’.¹¹ For Russians, the banya was a cosy, sociable and relaxing extension of the home.

Apart from the problems of his parents’ marriage, this was probably a happy, if unsophisticated, environment to grow up in. We have one account of a boy of the lower nobility growing up in Smolensk Province: though born thirty years later, Lev Nikolaevich Engelhardt was Potemkin’s kinsman, who recorded the probably unchanged life in a nearby village. He was allowed to run around in a peasant shirt and bare feet: ‘Physically my education resembled the system outlined by Rousseau – the Noble Savage. But I know that my grandmother was not only ignorant of that work but had a very uncertain acquaintance with Russian grammar itself.’¹² Another memoirist, also related to Potemkin, recalled: ‘The richest local landowner possessed only 1,000 souls,’ and ‘he had…one set of silver spoons which he set out before the more important guests, leaving the others to manage with spoons of pewter’.¹³

Grigory or Grisha, as he was known, was the heir to the village and he was, apart from his old father, the only man in a family of women – five sisters and his mother. He was presumably the centre of attention and this family atmosphere must have set the tone for his character, because he was to remain the cynosure of all eyes for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he described himself as ‘Fortune’s spoilt child’. He had to stand out and dominate. The household of women made him absolutely relaxed in female company. In manhood, his closest friends were women – and his career depended on his handling of one in particular. This rough household enlivened by the bustle of female petticoats could not last. Most of his sisters soon married respectably into the cousinhood of Smolensk gentry (except for Nadezhda, who died at nineteen). In particular, the marriages of Elena Marfa to Vasily Engelhardt and Maria to Nikolai Samoilov were to produce nieces and nephews who were to play important roles in Potemkin’s life.¹⁴

Service to the state was the sole profession of a Russian noble. Born into the military household of an officer who had served with Peter at Poltava, Grisha would have been brought up to understand that his duty and his path to success could be found only in serving the Empire. His father’s exploits were probably the hinterland of the boy’s imagination. The honour of a uniform was everything in Russia, particularly for the provincial gentry. In 1721, Peter the Great had laid down a Table of Ranks to establish the hierarchy within the military, civil and court services. Any man who reached the fourteenth military or the eighth civil rank was automatically raised to hereditary nobility – dvoryanstvo – but Peter also imposed compulsory life service on all noblemen. By the time of Potemkin’s birth, the nobility had whittled down this humiliating obligation, but service remained the path to fortune. Potemkin showed an interest in the priesthood. He was descended from a seventeenth-century archimandrite and his father sent him to an ecclesiastical school in Smolensk. But he was always destined for the colours.¹⁵

Right beneath the house, beside the stream, was the well, still named after Catherine today. Legend says Potemkin brought the Empress there to show her his birthplace. It is likely that as a child he himself drew water from it, for the lives of middling gentry were better than those of their well-off serfs but not much. Potemkin was probably farmed out at birth to a serf wet-nurse in the village, but, whether literally or not, this prototype of the ‘Noble Savage’ was raised on the milk of the Russian countryside. He would have been brought up as much by serf women as by his mother and sisters; the music he heard would have been the soulful laments that the serfs sang at night and at festival time. The dances he knew would have been the boisterous and graceful peasant gigs far more than the cotillions danced at the balls of local landowners. He would have known the village soothsayer as well as the priest. He was just as at home beside the warm, smelly hearths of the peasant houses – steamy with kasha, the buckwheat porridge, shchi, the spicy cabbage broth, and kvass, the yellow sour beer they drank alongside vodka and berry wine – as he was in the manor. Tradition tells us the boy lived simply. He played with the priest’s children, grazed horses with them and gathered hay with the serfs.¹⁶

Chizhova’s little Orthodox Church of Our Lady stood (and its ruined successor building remains) on the serfs’ side of the village: Potemkin spent much of his time there. The serfs themselves were devout: each, ‘besides the consecrated amulet round his neck from baptism, carries a little figure of his…patron saint, stamped on copper. Soldiers and peasants often take it out of their pockets, spit on it and rub it…then place it opposite to them and, on a sudden, prostrate themselves…’.¹⁷ When a peasant entered a house, it was usual for him to demand where ‘the God’ was and then cross himself before the icon.

Potemkin grew up with a peasant’s mixture of piety and superstition: he was baptized at the village church. Many landowners could afford a foreign tutor for their children, preferably French or German – or sometimes an aged Swedish prisoner-of-war, captured in the Great Northern War, like the poor landowning family in Pushkin’s novella, The Captain’s Daughter. But the Potemkins did not even have this. It is said that the local priest, Semen Karzev, and sexton, Timofei Krasnopevzev, taught him alphabet and prayers, which were to spark a lifelong fascination with religion. Grisha learned to sing and to love music, another feature of his adult life: Prince Potemkin was never without his orchestra and a pile of new orchestral scores. There was a legend that, decades later, one of these village sages visited St Petersburg and, hearing that his pupil was now the most important man at Court, called on the Prince, who received him warmly and found him a job as curator of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great.¹⁸

The 430 male serfs and their families lived around the church on the other side of the village. Serfs, or ‘souls’ as they were called, were valued according to the number of males. The wealth of a nobleman was measured not in cash or acres but in souls. Out of a population of nineteen million, there were about 50,000 male nobles and 7.8 million serfs. Half of these were manorial peasants, owned by the individual nobles or the imperial family, while the other half were state peasants owned by the state itself. Only noblemen could legally own serfs, yet a mere one per cent of the nobles owned more than a thousand souls. The households of great noblemen, who might own hundreds of thousands of serfs, were to reach a luxurious and picturesque climax in Catherine’s reign when they owned serf orchestras and serf painters of exquisite icons and portraits: Count Sheremetev, the wealthiest serfowner in Russia, owned a serf theatre with a repertoire of forty operas. Prince Yusupov’s ballet was to boast hundreds of serf ballerinas. Count Skavronsky (a kinsman of Catherine I who married one of Potemkin’s nieces) was so obsessed with music that he banned his serfs from speaking: they had to sing in recitative.¹⁹ These cases were rare: 82 per cent of nobles were as poor as church mice, owning fewer than a hundred souls. The Potemkins were middling – part of 15 per cent who owned between 101 and 500.²⁰

Chizhova’s serfs were the absolute possessions of Colonel Potemkin. Contemporary French writers used the word ‘esclaves’ – slaves – to describe them. They had much in common with the black slaves of the New World, except that they were the same race as their masters. There was irony in serfdom, for while the serfs in Russia at the time of Potemkin’s birth were chattels at the bottom of the pyramid of society, they were also the basic resource of the state’s and the nobles’ power. They formed the Russian infantry when the state raised an army by forced levées. Landowners despatched the selected unfortunates for a lifetime of service. The serfs paid the taxes that the Russian emperors used to finance their armies. Yet they were also the heart of a nobleman’s wealth. Emperor and nobility competed to control them – and squeeze as much out of them as possible.

Souls were usually inherited, but they could also be granted to favourites by grateful emperors or bought as a result of advertisements in newspapers like today’s used cars. For example, in 1760, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, later a critic of Potemkin’s morals, sold three girls to another nobleman for three roubles. Yet the masters often took pride in their paternalist care for their serfs. ‘The very circumstance of their persons being property ensures them the indulgence of their masters.’²¹ Count Kirill Razumovsky’s household contained over 300 domestic servants, all serfs of course (except the French chef and probably a French or German tutor for his sons), including a master of ceremonies, a chief valet de chambre, two dwarfs, four hairdressers, two coffee-servers and so on. ‘Uncle,’ said his niece, ‘it seems to me you have a lot of servants you could well do without.’ ‘Quite so,’ replied Razumovsky, ‘but they could not do without me.’²²

Sometimes the serfs loved their masters: when the Grand Chamberlain Count Shuvalov was obliged to sell an estate 300 versts from Petersburg, he was awakened one morning by a rumpus in his courtyard in the capital. A crowd of his serfs, who had travelled all the way from the countryside, were gathered there. ‘We were very content under your authority and do not wish to lose so good a master,’ they declared. ‘So with each of us paying…we have come to bring you the sum you need to buy back the estate.’ The Count embraced his serfs like children.²³ When the master approached, an Englishman noted, the serfs bowed almost to the ground; when an empress visited remote areas, a French diplomat recorded that they made obeisance on their knees.²⁴ A landowner’s serfs were his labour force, bank balance, sometimes his harem and completely his responsibility. Yet he always lived with the fear that they might arise and murder him in his manorhouse. Peasant risings were common.

Most owners were relatively humane to their serfs, but only a tiny minority could conceive that slavery was not the serf’s natural state. If serfs fled, masters could recover them by force. Serf-hunters earned bounties for this grim chore. Even the most rational landowners regularly punished their serfs, often using the knout, the thick Russian leather whip, but they were certainly not permitted to execute them. ‘Punishments ought to be inflicted on peasants, servants and all others in consideration of their offence with switches,’ wrote Prince Shcherbatov in his instructions to his stewards in 1758. ‘Proceed cautiously so as not to commit murder or maim. So therefore do not beat on the head or legs or arms with a club. But when such a punishment occurs that calls for a club, then order him to bend down and beat on the back, or better lash with switches on the back and lower down for the punishment will be more painful, but the peasant will not be maimed.’

The system allowed plenty of scope for abuse. Catherine in her Memoirs recalled that most households in Moscow contained ‘iron collars, chains and other instruments of torture for those who commit the slightest infraction’. The bedchamber of one old noblewoman, for example, contained ‘a sort of dark cage in which she kept a slave who dressed her hair; the chief motive…was the wish of the old baggage to conceal from the world that she wore false hair…’.²⁵

The absolute power of the landowner over serfs sometimes concealed Bluebeardish tortures: the worst of these were perpetrated by a female landowner, though perhaps it was only because she was a woman that anyone complained. Certainly the authorities covered up for her for a long time and this was not in some distant province, but in Moscow itself. Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, aged twenty-five and known as ‘the maneater’ – liudoed – was a monstress who took a sadistic pleasure in torturing hundreds of her serfs, beating them with logs and rolling pins. She killed 138 female serfs, supposedly concentrating on their genitals. When she was finally arrested early in Catherine’s reign, the Empress, who depended on noble support, had to punish the maneater carefully. She could not be executed, because the Empress Elisabeth had abolished the death penalty in 1754 (except for treason), so Saltykova was chained to the scaffold in Moscow for one hour with a placard round her neck reading ‘torturer and murderer’. The whole town turned out to look at her: serial killers were rare at that time. The maneater was then confined for life in a subterranean prison–monastery. Her cruelty was the exception, not the rule.²⁶

This was Grisha Potemkin’s world and the essence of life in the Russian countryside. He never lost the habits of Chizhova. One can imagine him running through hay-strewn pastures with the serf children, chewing on a turnip or a radish – as he was to do later in life in the apartments of the Empress. It was not surprising that, in the refined Voltairean Court of St Petersburg, he was always regarded as a quintessential child of Russia’s soil.

In 1746, this idyll ended when his father died aged seventy-four. The six-year-old Grisha Potemkin inherited the village and its serfs, but it was a paltry inheritance. His mother, widowed for the second time at forty-two, with six children to rear, could not make ends meet in Chizhova. The adult Grigory would behave with the heedless extravagance of those who remember financial straits – but it was never grinding poverty. He later granted the village to his sister Elena and her husband Vasily Engelhardt. They built a mansion on the site of the wooden manorhouse and an exquisite church on the serf side of the village to the glory of Serenissimus, the family’s famous son.²⁷

Daria Potemkina was ambitious. Grigory was not going to make a career in that remote hamlet, buried like a needle in the sprawling haystack of Russia. She did not have connections in the new capital, St Petersburg, but she did in the old. Soon the family were on the road to Moscow.^*4

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Grisha Potemkin’s first glimpse of the old capital would have been its steeples. Deep in the midst of the Russian Empire, Moscow was the fulcrum of everything opposed to St Petersburg, Peter the Great’s new capital. If the Venice of the North was a window on to Europe, Moscow was a trapdoor into the recesses of Russia’s ancient and xenophobic traditions. Its grim and solemn Russian grandeur alarmed narrow-minded Westerners: ‘What is particularly gaudy and ugly at Moscow are the steeples,’ wrote an Englishwoman arriving there, ‘square lumps of different coloured bricks and gilt spire…they make a very Gothic appearance.’ Indeed, though it was built around the forbidding medieval fortress, the Kremlin, and the bright onion-domes of St Basil’s, all its twisting, cramped and dark alleys and courtyards were as obscure as the superstitions of old Orthodoxy. Westerners thought it barely resembled a Western city at all. ‘I cannot say Moscow gives me any idea other than of a large village or many villages joined.’ Another visitor, looking at the noble châteaux and the thatched cottages, thought the city seemed to have been ‘rolled together on coasters’.²⁸

Potemkin’s godfather (and possibly natural father) Kizlovsky, retired President of the Kamer-Collegium, the Moscow officer of the ministry in charge of the Court (Petrine ministries were called Collegia or Colleges), took the family under his protection and helped Daria, whether his mistress or just his protégé, move into a small house on Nikitskaya Street. Grisha Potemkin was enrolled in the gymnasium school attached to the university with Kizlovsky’s own son, Sergei.

Potemkin’s intelligence was recognized early; he had a brilliant ear for languages, so he soon excelled at Greek, Latin, Russian, German and French as well as passing Polish, and it was said later that he could understand Italian and English. His first fascination was Orthodoxy: even as a child, he would discuss the liturgy with the Bishop of the Greek convent, Dorofei. The priest of the Church of St Nikolai encouraged his knowledge of church ceremonies. Grisha’s remarkable memory, which would be noted later, enabled him to learn long tracts of Greek liturgy by heart. Judging by his knowledge and memory as an adult, he found learning perhaps too easy and concentration tedious. He bored quickly and feared no one: he was already well known for his epigrams and his mimicry of his teachers. Yet he somehow befriended the high-ranking clergyman Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, later Archbishop of Moscow.²⁹

The boy used to help at the altar, but even then he was either immersed in Byzantine theology or bursting to commit some outrageous act of mischief. When Grisha appeared before his godfather’s guests dressed in the vestments of a Georgian priest, Kizlovsky said: ‘One day you will really shame me because I was unable to educate you as a nobleman.’ Potemkin already believed he was different from others: he would be a great man. All manner of his predictions of his own future eminence are recorded: ‘If I’m a general, I’ll command soldiers; if a bishop, it will be priests.’ And he promised his mother that when he was rich and famous he would destroy the dilapidated houses where she lived and build a cathedral.^*5 The happy memories of this time remained with him for the rest of his life.³⁰

In 1750, the eleven-year-old travelled to Smolensk, escorted probably by his godfather, to register for his military service. The first time a boy dressed up in his uniform and felt the weight of a sabre, the creak of boots, the stiff grip of a tunic, the proud trappings of service, remained a joyful memory for every child–soldier of the dvoryantsvo. Noble children were enrolled at absurdly young ages, sometimes as young as five, serving as supernumerary soldiers, to get round Peter’s compulsory life service. When they actually became soldiers in their late teens they would technically have served for over ten years and already be officers. Parents signed their sons into the best regiments, the Guards, just as English noblemen used to be ‘put down for Eton’. In Smolensk, Grisha testified to the Heraldic Office about his family’s service and nobility, recounting his soi-disant Roman descent, and his connection to Tsar Alexei’s irascible Ambassador. The provincial office confusingly recorded his age as seven but, since children usually registered at eleven, it is probably a bureaucratic slip. Five years later, in February 1755, he returned for his second inspection and was put down for the Horse-Guards, one of the five elite Guards regiments.³¹ The teenager returned to his studies.

He then enrolled at Moscow University, where he appeared near the top of his classes in Greek and ecclesiastical history.³² He was to keep some of his friends from there for the rest of his life. The students wore uniforms – a green coat with red cuffs. The university itself had only just been founded. Potemkin’s contemporary Denis von Vizin, in his Frank Confession of my Affairs and Thoughts, recounted how he and his brother were among the first students. Like Potemkin, they were the children of the poor gentry who could not afford private tutors. This new university was chaotic. ‘We studied without any order…’, he recalled, due to ‘the teachers’ negligence and hard drinking…’.³³ Von Vizin claimed that the teaching of foreign languages was either abysmal or non-existent. Potemkin’s records were lost in the fire of 1812, but he certainly learned a lot, possibly through his clerical friends.

This pedogogic debauchery did not matter because Potemkin, who later in life was said to have read nothing, was addicted to reading. When he visited relations in the countryside, he spent his whole time in the library and even fell asleep under the billiard table, grasping a book.³⁴ Another time, Potemkin asked one of his friends, Ermil Kostrov, to lend him ten books. When Potemkin gave them back, Kostrov did not believe he could have read so much in so short a time. Potemkin replied he had read them from cover to cover: ‘If you do not believe me, examine them!’, he said. Kostrov was convinced. When another student named Afonin lent Potemkin the newly published Natural Philosophy by Buffon, Potemkin returned it a day later and amazed Afonin with his absolute recall of its every detail.³⁵

Now Potemkin caught the eye of another powerful patron. In 1757, Grisha’s virtuosity at Greek and theology won him the university’s Gold Medal, and this impressed one of the magnates of the Imperial Court in Petersburg. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the erudite and cultured founder and Curator of Moscow University, was young, round-faced and gentle with sweet pixie-like features – but he was also unusually modest considering his position. Shuvalov was the lover of the Empress Elisabeth, who was eighteen years his senior, and one of her closest advisers. That June, Shuvalov ordered the university to select its twelve best pupils and send them to St Petersburg. Potemkin and eleven others were despatched to the capital, where they were met by Shuvalov himself and conveyed to the Winter Palace to be presented to the Empress of all the Russias. This was Potemkin’s first visit to Petersburg.

—

Even Moscow must have seemed a backwater compared to St Petersburg. On the marshy banks and islands of the estuary of the River Neva, Peter the Great had founded his ‘paradise’ in 1703 on territory that still belonged to Sweden. When he had finally defeated Charles VII at Poltava his first reaction was that St Petersburg was safe at last. It became the official capital in 1712. Thousands of serfs died driving the piles and draining the water on this vast building site as the Tsar forced the project ahead. Now it was already a beautiful city of about 100,000 inhabitants, with elegant palaces lining the embankments: on the northern side stood the Peter and Paul Fortress and the red-brick palace that had belonged to Peter’s favourite, Prince Menshikov. Almost opposite these buildings stood the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and more aristocratic mansions. Its boulevards were astonishingly wide, as if built for giants, but their Germanic straightness was alien to the Russian soul, quite the opposite of the twisting lanes of Moscow. The buildings were grandiose, but all were half finished, like so much in Russia.

‘It’s a cheerful fine looking city with streets extremely wide and long,’ wrote an English visitor. ‘Not only the town but the manner of living is upon too large a scale. The nobles seem to vie with each other in extravagances of every sort.’ Everything was a study of contrasts. Inside the palaces, ‘the homes are decorated with the most sumptuous furniture from every country but you pass into a drawing room where the floor is of the finest inlaid woods through a staircase of coarseness, stinking with dirt.’³⁶ Even its palaces and dances could not completely conceal the nature of the Empire it ruled: ‘On the one hand there are the elegant fashions, gorgeous dresses, sumptuous repasts, splendid fêtes and theatres equal to those that adorn Paris and London,’ observed a French diplomat, ‘on the other there are merchants in Asiatic costume, domestics and peasants in sheepskins and wearing long beards, furbonnets, gloves without fingers and hatchets hanging from their leather belts.’³⁷

The Empress’s new Winter Palace was not yet finished, but it was magnificent nonetheless – one room would be gilded, painted, hung with chandeliers and filled with courtiers, the next would be draughty, leaky, almost open to the elements and strewn with masons’ tools. Shuvalov led the twelve prize-winning students into the reception rooms where Elisabeth received foreign envoys. There, Potemkin and his fellow scholars were presented to the Empress.

Elisabeth, then nearly fifty and in the seventeenth year of her reign, was a big-boned Amazonian blonde with blue eyes. ‘It was impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be struck by her beauty,’ Catherine the Great remembered. ‘She was a large woman who in spite of being very stout was not in the least disfigured by her size.’³⁸ Elisabeth, like her sixteenth-century English namesake, was raised in the glorious shadow of a dominant royal father and then spent her youth in the risky limbo between the throne and the dungeon. This honed her natural political instincts – but there end the similarities with Gloriana. She was impulsive, generous and frivolous, but also shrewd, vindictive and ruthless – truly Peter the Great’s daughter. This Elisabethan Court was dominated by the exuberance and vanity of the Empress, whose appetites for elaborate fêtes and expensive clothes were prodigious. She never wore the same clothes twice. She changed her dresses twice a day and female courtiers copied her. When she died, her successor found a wardrobe in the Summer Palace filled with 15,000 dresses. At Court, French plays were still a rare and foreign innovation: the usual entertainment was the Empress’s so-called transvestite balls where everyone was ordered to dress as the opposite sex: this led to all sorts of horseplay with the men in ‘whale-boned petticoats’ and the women looking like ‘scrubby little boys’ – especially the old ones. There was a reason for this: ‘the only woman who looked really fine, and completely a man, was the Empress herself. As she was tall and powerful, male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I have ever seen on any man…’.³⁹

Even the purported fun at this Elisabethan Court was permeated by the struggle for political influence and fear of imperial caprice: when the Empress could not get powder out of her hair and had to shave her head to remove it, she ordered all the ladies at court to shave theirs too. ‘The ladies obeyed in tears.’ When she was jealous of other beauties, she cut the ribbons of one with scissors and the curls of another two. She actually issued orders to ensure that no other woman emulated her coiffeur de jour. Ass he lost her looks, she alternated between Orthodox devotions and the frantic application of cosmetics.⁴⁰ Politics was a risky game, even for fashionable noblewomen. Early in her reign, Elisabeth ordered that a pretty courtier named Countess Natalia Lopukhina have her tongue cut out just for vaguely chattering about a plot – yet this was the soft-hearted woman who also abolished the death penalty.

She combined her Orthodox piety with hearty promiscuity. Elisabeth’s love affairs were legion and uninhibited, much more so than Catherine’s: they varied from French doctors and Cossack choristers to that rich reservoir of local virility, the Guards. Her great love, nicknamed ‘The Night Emperor’, was a young Ukrainian half-Cossack, whom she first noticed singing in the choir: his name was Alexei Razum, which was soon dignified into Razumovsky. He and his younger brother Kirill, a teenage shepherd, were rewarded with riches and raised to count, one of the new Germanic titles imported by Peter the Great. In 1749, Elisabeth took a new lover, Ivan Shuvalov, aged twenty-two, so another family were raised to the diamond-studded status of magnates.

By the time young Potemkin visited Petersburg, many of these magnates were the scions of a newly coined Petrine and Elisabethan aristocracy – there was no better advertisement for the benefits of life at Court. ‘Orderlies, choristers, scullery boys in noble kitchens’, as Pushkin put it, were raised on merit or just favour to the height of wealth and aristocracy.⁴¹ These new men served in the higher echelons of Court and military alongside the old untitled Muscovite nobles and the princely clans, who were the descendants of ruling houses: the Princes Golitsyn, for example, were descended from Grand Duke Gedemin of Lithuania, the Princes Dolgoruky from Rurik.

This was Potemkin’s introduction to a world of empresses and favourites that he was ultimately to dominate. Elisabeth’s father, Peter I (the Great), had celebrated his conquest of the Baltic by declaring himself imperator or emperor in 1721 in addition to the traditional title of tsar, which itself derived from the Roman Caesar. But Peter had also ensured a century of instability by decreeing that Russian rulers could choose their own heirs without consulting the opinion of anyone else: this has been called ‘the apotheosis of autocratic rule’. Russia was not to have a law of succession until the reign of Paul I. Since Peter had tortured his own son and heir – the Tsarevich (Tsar’s son) Alexei – to death in 1718 and his other male sons had died, he was succeeded in 1725 by his low-born widow as Empress Catherine I in her own right, backed by the Guards Regiments and a camarilla of his closest cronies. Catherine was the first of a line of female or child rulers, the symptom of a grievous lack of adult male heirs.

In this ‘era of palace revolutions’, emperors were raised to the purple by combinations of Court factions, noble magnates and the Guards Regiments, which were stationed in St Petersburg. On Catherine I’s death in 1727, Peter’s grandson, the son of the murdered Alexei, ruled as Peter II for a mere two years. On his death,^*6 the Russian Court offered the throne to Peter’s niece Anna of Courland, who ruled, with her hated German favourite Ernst Biron, until 1740. Then a baby, Ivan VI, acceded to the throne, which was controlled by his mother, Anna Leopoldovna, the Duchess of Brunswick, as regent. The Russians did not appreciate children, German or female rulers. All three was too much to bear.

On 25 November 1741, after a series of palace coups during the reign of the infant Ivan VI, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, aged thirty-one, seized the Russian Empire with just 308 Guardsmen – and consigned the child–Emperor to a cell in the fortress of Schlüsselburg. The mixture of palace intrigue and praetorian coup set the tone for Russian politics for the century. Foreigners were confused by this – especially in the century of Enlightenment when politics and law were being obsessively analysed: wits could only decide that the Russian throne was neither elective nor hereditary – it was occupative. The Russian constitution, to paraphrase Madame de Staël, was the character of the Emperor. The personality of the Autocrat was the government. And the government, as the Marquis de Custine put it, was ‘an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination’.⁴²

This rule of women created a peculiar Russian version of the Court favourite. Shuvalov, Potemkin’s patron, was the Empress’s latest. A favourite was a trusted associate or lover, often of humble origins, favoured by a monarch out of personal choice instead of noble birth. Not all aspired to power. Some were happy merely to become rich courtiers. But in Russia the empresses needed them because only men could command armies. They were ideally placed to become minister–favourites⁴³ who ran the country for their mistresses.^*7

When Shuvalov, still only thirty-two, presented the eighteen-year-old Grisha Potemkin to the now bloated and ailing Empress, he drew attention to his knowledge of Greek and theology. The Empress ordered Potemkin to be promoted to Guards corporal as a reward, even though so far he had done no soldiering whatsoever. She probably presented the boys with a trinket – a glass goblet engraved with her silhouette – as a prize.^*8

—

The Court must have turned Potemkin’s head because when he returned to Moscow he no longer concentrated on his studies. Perhaps the drunkenness and indolence of the professors infected the students. In 1760, the linguist, who had won the Gold Medal and presentation to the Empress, was expelled for ‘laziness and non-attendance of lessons’. Years later, when he was already a prince, Potemkin visited Moscow University and met the Professor Barsov who had expelled him. The Prince asked the Professor if he remembered their earlier encounter. ‘Your Highness deserved it,’ replied Barsov. The Prince characteristically enjoyed the reply, embraced the aged Professor, and became his patron.⁴⁴

Potemkin’s expulsion appeared to be something of a disaster. His godfather and mother felt that obscure young men like Grisha could not afford to be so lazy. Fortunately, he was already enrolled in the Guards, but he did not even have the money for the trip to St Petersburg, a sure sign that his family either disapproved or had cut him off. He drifted apart from his mother: indeed they hardly saw each other later in life. The Empress Catherine II later made her a lady-in-waiting and she was proud of her son – but openly disapproved of his love life. So this was not just a process of leaving home. He was leaving on his own. He borrowed 500 roubles, a considerable sum, from his friend Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, now Bishop of Mojaisk. Potemkin often said he meant to return it with interest, but the Bishop was to be savagely murdered later in this story before Potemkin rose to power. He never repaid it.

The life of a young Guardsman was idle, decadent and exceedingly expensive, but there was no surer path to greatness. Potemkin’s timing was opportune – Russia was fighting the Seven Years War against Prussia, while in Petersburg Empress Elisabeth was dying. The Guards were already seething with intrigue.

On arrival in St Petersburg, Potemkin reported for duty at the Headquarters of his Horse-Guards Regiment, which comprised a little village of barracks, houses and stables built round a quadrangle by the Neva river near the Smolny Convent. The Regiment had its own church, hospital, bathhouse and prison. There was a meadow behind it for feeding horses and holding parades. The oldest Guards Regiments – such as the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky – were founded by Peter the Great first as play regiments but then as his loyal forces in the vicious struggle against the corps of state musketeers, the Streltsy. His successors added others. In 1730, Empress Anna founded Potemkin’s regiment, the Garde-à-Cheval – the Horse-Guards.⁴⁵

Guards officers were quite unable to withstand ‘the seductions of the metropolis’.⁴⁶ When these teenage playboys were not carousing, they fought a sometimes fatal guerrilla war through the balls and backstreets with the Noble Cadet Corps that was based in the Menshikov Palace.⁴⁷ So many young bloods were ruined by debts, or exhausted by endless whoring in the Metshchansky district or by games of whist or faro, that more ascetic parents preferred their boys to join an ordinary regiment, like the father in The Captain’s Daughter who exclaims, ‘Petrusha is not going to Petersburg. What would he learn, serving in Petersburg? To be a spendthrift and a rake? No, let him be a soldier and not a fop in the Guards!’⁴⁸

Potemkin soon became known to the raciest daredevils among the Guards. At twenty-two, he was tall – well over six foot – broad and highly attractive to women. Potemkin ‘had the advantage of having the finest head of hair in all Russia’. His looks and talents were so striking that he was nicknamed ‘Alcibiades’, a superlative compliment in a neo-Classical age.^*9 Educated people at that time studied Plutarch and Thucydides, so the character of the Athenian statesman was familiar – intelligent, cultured, sensuous, inconsistent, debauched and flamboyant. Plutarch raved about the ‘brilliance’ of Alcibiades’ ‘physical beauty’.⁴⁹ Potemkin immediately attracted attention as a wit – he was an outstanding mimic, a gift that was to carry him far beyond the realm of comedians.⁵⁰ It was soon to win the admiration of the most glamorous ruffians in the Guards – the Orlovs – and they in turn would draw him into the intrigues of the imperial family.

The Guards protected the imperial palaces, and it was this that gave them their political significance.⁵¹ Being in the capital and close to the Court, ‘the officers have more opportunity to be known,’ a Prussian diplomat observed.⁵² They had the run of the city, ‘admitted to the games, dances, soirées and theatrical performances of Court into the interior of that sanctuary’.⁵³ Their duties at the palaces gave them a detailed but irreverent acquaintance with magnates and courtiers – and a sense of personal involvement in the rivalries of the imperial family itself.

During the months that Empress Elisabeth was suspended between life and death, groups of Guardsmen became increasingly embroiled in plans to change the succession to exclude the hated Grand Duke Peter and replace him with his popular wife, Grand Duchess Catherine. Guarding the imperial palaces, Potemkin now had the chance to observe the romantic figure of Grand Duchess Catherine, who would soon rule in her own right as Catherine II. She was never beautiful, but she possessed qualities far superior to that ephemeral glaze: the indefinable magic of imperial dignity combined with sexual attractiveness, natural gaiety and an all-conquering charm that touched everyone who met her. The best description of Catherine at this age was written a few years earlier by Stanislas Poniatowski, her Polish lover:

She had reached that time in life when any woman to whom beauty had been granted will be at her best. She had black hair, a radiant complexion and a high colour, large prominent and expressive blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, a pointed nose, a kissable mouth…slender figure, tall rather than small; she moved quickly yet with great nobility and had an agreeable voice and a gay good-tempered laugh.

Potemkin had not met her yet – but just about the time of his arrival in Petersburg she began to cultivate the Guards, who ardently admired her and hated her husband, the Heir. So it was that the provincial boy from Chizhova found himself perfectly placed to join the conspiracy that would place her on the throne – and bring the two of them together. Catherine herself overheard one general declare the gallant sentiments that young Potemkin would soon share: ‘There goes a woman for whose sake an honest man would gladly suffer several lashes of the knout.’⁵⁴

Skip Notes

*1 The date of his birth is, like everything else about him, mysterious because there is much confusion about the age that he went to live in Moscow and that he was put down for the Guards. There is an argument for saying he was born in 1742, the date given by his nephew Samoilov. The dates and military records contradict each other without creating a particularly interesting debate. This date is the most likely.

*2 When Grigory Potemkin, who was to prove even more shocking to Western sensibilities, rose to greatness in St Petersburg, it was felt he required a famous ancestor. A portrait of the foul-tempered, xenophobic and pedantic Ambassador of the era of the Sun King and the Merry Monarch was found, possibly a present from the English Embassy, and placed in Catherine the Great’s Hermitage.

*3 This continued right up to 1917. When Rasputin’s enemies grumbled to Nicholas II about his bathing with his female devotees, the last Tsar retorted that this was a usual habit of the common people.

*4 Today, there is little on the Potemkin side of the village except Catherine’s Well and the hut of two octogenarian peasants who subsist on bees. On the serf’s side, there is just the ruins of the church. In Communist times, the villagers say, the commissars kept cattle in ‘Potemkin’s church’ but all the cattle sickened and died. The villagers are still digging for an Aladdin’s Cave which they call ‘Potemkin’s Gold’. But all they have found are the bodies of eighteenth-century women, probably Potemkin’s sisters, in the graveyard.

*5 He did endow the round Nikitskaya Church (Little Nikitskaya) and it was rebuilt by his heirs. But he was still planning the big project when he died. Historians who believe he married Catherine II in Moscow point to this church as the venue for the wedding.

*6 The young Emperor, who moved the Court back to Moscow, died in the suburban Palace which today contains the War College archives (RGVIA), where most of Potemkin’s papers are stored.

*7 Favourites had developed by the seventeenth century into the minister–favourites such as Olivares in Spain and Richelieu and Mazarin in France, who were not the King’s lovers but able politicians chosen to run the increasingly heavy bureaucracies. When Louis XIV chose to rule himself on the death of Mazarin in 1661, the fashion ended. But Russia’s female rulers, beginning with Catherine I in 1725, reinvented it.

*8 In the Smolensk Local History Museum, there is just such a glass goblet which is said to have belonged to Potemkin. The story goes that when Catherine the Great passed through Smolensk she drank a toast from it.

*9 Alcibiades was famously bisexual – his lovers included Socrates – but there was never any suggestion that Potemkin emulated his sexual tastes. The other eighteenth-century figure known as Alcibiades was a favourite of King Gustavus III of Sweden and later friend of Tsar Alexander – Count Armfeld was ‘l’Alcibiade du Nord’.