Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

4

CYCLOPS

Nature has made Grigory Orlov a Russian peasant and he will remain thus until the end.

Durand de Distroff

When the Empress and the Second Lieutenant of the Horse-Guards encountered each other in the hundreds of corridors of the Winter Palace, Potemkin would fall to his knees, take her hand and declare he was passionately in love with her. There was nothing unusual about them meeting one another in such a way, because Potemkin was a gentleman of the bedchamber. Any courtier might literally have bumped into his Sovereign somewhere in the Palace – they saw her every day. Indeed, even members of the public could enter the Palace, if they were decently dressed and not wearing livery. However, Potemkin’s conduct – kissing Catherine’s hands on bended knee and declaring his love – was rash, not to say careless. It can only have been saved from awkwardness by his exuberant charm – and her flirtatious acquiescence.

There were probably several young officers at Court who believed themselves in love with her – and many others who would have pretended to be for the sake of their careers. A long list of suitors, including Zakhar Chernyshev and Kirill Razumovsky, had fallen in love with Catherine over the years and accepted her gentle rebuttals. But Potemkin refused to accept either the conventions of the courtier or the dominance of the Orlovs. He went further than anyone else. Most courtiers were wary of the brothers who had murdered an emperor. Potemkin flaunted his courage. Long before he was in power, he disdained the hierarchies of court. He teased the secret police chief. Magnates treated Sheshkovsky circumspectly but Potemkin is said to have laughed at the knout-wielder, asking: ‘How many people are you knout-beating today?’¹

He could not have behaved like this before the Orlovs without some encouragement from the Empress. She could easily have stopped him if she had wished. But she did not. This was unfair of her for there could be no prospect of Catherine accepting Potemkin as a lover in 1763/4. She owed her throne to the Orlovs. Potemkin was still too young. So Catherine could not have taken him seriously. She was in love with Grigory Orlov and, as she later told Potemkin, she was a creature of habit and loyalty. She regarded the dashing but not particularly talented Orlov as her permanent companion and ‘would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire’.² Nonetheless she seemed to recognize that she enjoyed a special empathy with Potemkin. So did the Gentleman of the Bedchamber who contrived to meet her as much as he could during the routine of her days.

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Catherine arose daily at 7 a.m., but, if she woke earlier, she lit her own stove so as not to wake her servants. She then worked until eleven on her own with her ministers or her cabinet secretaries, sometimes giving audiences at 9 a.m. She wrote furiously in her own hand – she herself called it ‘graphomania’ – to a wide variety of correspondents, from Voltaire and Diderot to the Germans Dr Zimmerman, Madame Bielke and later Baron Grimm. Her letters were warm, outspoken and lively, laced with her slightly ponderous sense of humour.³ This was the age of letter-writing: men and women of the world took a pride in the style and the content of their letters. If they were from a great man in an interesting situation – a Prince de Ligne or a Catherine the Great or a Voltaire – they were copied and read out in the salons of Europe like a cross between the despatches of a distinguished journalist and the spin of an advertising agency.⁴ Catherine liked writing, and not just letters. She loved drafting decrees – ukase – and instructions in her own hand. In the middle 1760s, she was already writing her General Instruction for the Great Commission she was to call in 1767 to codify existing laws. She copied out large portions of the books she had studied since adolescence, especially Beccaria and Montesquieu. She called this her ‘legislomania’.

At 11 a.m. she did her toilette and admitted those whom she knew best into her bedroom, such as the Orlovs. They might then go for a walk – if it was summer, she loved to stroll in the Summer Palace gardens where members of the public could approach her. When Panin arranged for Casanova to meet her,⁵ she was accompanied only by Grigory Orlov and two ladies-in-waiting. She dined at 1 p.m. At 2.30 p.m. she returned to her apartments, where she read until six, the ‘lover’s hour’, at which time she entertained Orlov.

If there was a Court evening, she then dressed and went out. Dress at Court was a long coat for men à la Française and for ladies a gown with long sleeves and a short train and whalebone bodice. Partly because it suited Russian wealth and flamboyance and partly because it was a court that needed to advertise its legitimacy, both men and women competed to wear diamonds on anything where they could be attached – buttons, buckles, scabbards, epaulettes and often three rows on the borders of hats. Both sexes wore the ribbons and sashes of the five orders of Russian chivalry: Catherine herself liked to wear the ribbon of St Andrew – red edged with silver studded with diamonds – and St George over one shoulder with the collars of St Alexander Nevsky, St Catherine and St Vladimir and two stars – St Andrew and St George – on her left breast.⁶ Catherine inherited the lavishness of dress from the Elisabethan Court. She enjoyed splendour, appreciated its political uses and she was certainly not remotely economical, but she never approached Elisabeth’s sartorial extravagance, later toning down the magnificence. She understood that too much glitter undermines the very power it is meant to illustrate.

While the Guards patrolled outside the palaces, the Sovereign’s own apartments were guarded by an elite force, founded by Catherine in 1764 and made up of nobles – the sixty men of the Chevaliers-Gardes – who wore blue coats faced with red covered in silver lace. Everything from bandolier to carbine was furnished in silver, even their boots. On their heads they wore silver helmets with high plumes. The Russian eagle was embroidered on their backs and adorned the silver plates of armour on arms, knees and breast, fastened by silver cords and silver chains.⁷

On Sunday evenings there was a court; on Mondays a French comedy; on Thursdays, there was usually a French tragedy and then a ballet; on Fridays or Saturdays there was often a fancy-dress masquerade at the Palace. Five thousand guests attended these vast and semi-public fêtes. Catherine and her Court displayed their magnificence to the foreign ambassadors and to each other. What better guide to such an evening than Casanova? ‘The ball went on for sixty hours…Everywhere I see joy, freedom and the great profusion of candles…’. He heard a fellow masked guest say: ‘There’s the Empress…you will see Grigory Orlov in a moment; he has orders to follow her at a distance…’. Guests pretended not to recognize her. ‘Everyone recognized him because of his great stature and the way he always kept his head bent forward.’ Casanova the international freeloader ate as much as he could, watched a contredance quadrille executed perfectly in the French style and then, naturally being who he was, met an ex-mistress (now kept by the Polish Ambassador) whose delights he rediscovered. By this point, he had long since lost sight of the Empress.⁸

Catherine enjoyed dressing up and being masked. On one occasion, disguised as an officer in her pink domino (loose cloak) and regimentals, she recorded some of her slightly erotic conversations with guests who genuinely did not recognize her. One princess thought her a handsome man and danced with her. Catherine whispered, ‘What a happy man I am,’ and they flirted. Catherine kissed her hand; she blushed. ‘Please say who you are,’ asked the girl. ‘I am yours,’ replied Catherine, but she would not identify herself.⁹

Catherine seldom ate much in the evening and virtually always retired by 10.30 p.m., accompanied by Grigory Orlov. She liked to be asleep by eleven.¹⁰ Her disciplined routine formed the public world of Court, but Potemkin’s wit had won him access to its private world. This brought him closer to the vigilant, violent Orlovs, but it also gave him the chance to let the Empress know how passionately he felt. Potemkin would pay dearly for his recklessness.

—

In the early evenings, Catherine invited an inner circle of about eighteen to her apartments and later to the extension of the Winter Palace that she called her Little Hermitage. Her habitués included Countess Bruce, that attractive fixer whom Catherine trusted in the most private matters; the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, whom she called her ‘born clown’,¹¹ the epitome of the rich and frivolous Russian nobleman; the Orlovs of course – and, increasingly, among others, Potemkin.

The Russian Court was much less stiff and formal than many in Western Europe, including that of George III. Even when Catherine received ministers who were not part of her private coterie, they sat and worked together, not like British Prime Ministers, who had to stand in George III’s presence unless he granted them the rare privilege of sitting. In Catherine’s Little Hermitage, this casualness went even further. Catherine played cards – whist or faro usually – until around 10 p.m. Guardsmen like Orlov and Potemkin were instantly at home, since they had spent much of their youth sitting at the green baize tables. They also took part in word and paper games, charades and even singsongs.

Grigory Orlov was the master of the salon: Catherine gave her lover the rooms above her own in the Winter Palace so that he could descend the green staircase without being announced. While Catherine took a prim view of risqué jokes in her inner circle, she was open in her displays of affection with Orlov. A visiting Englishman later recorded, ‘they did not forbear their caresses for his presence’.¹² Orlov adored music and his good humour set the tone of these evenings, when the Empress herself almost became one of a circle of friends. ‘After dinner,’ the Court Journal recorded on one evening, ‘Her Imperial Majesty graciously returned to her inner apartments, and the gentlemen in the card room themselves sang songs, to the accompaniment of various wines; then the Court singers and servants…and, on the orders of Count G. G. Orlov, the NCOs and soldiers of the guard at Tsarskoe Selo, sang gay songs in another room.’¹³

The Orlovs had achieved their ambitions – up to a point. While the marriage was now a dead letter, Orlov was the Empress’s constant companion, which in itself gave him influence. But it was certainly she who ran the government. There was a fault in the design of the Orlovs as a political force: the brains, the brawn and the charm were not united in one man but were distributed with admirable fairness among the five brothers. Alexei Orlov, Le Balafre, had the ruthlessness; Fyodor the culture and political savvy; while Grigory, who needed all of the above, possessed only handsomeness, a wonderful nature and solid good sense.

Diplomats claimed Orlov, ‘having grown up in alehouses and places of ill-repute,…led a life of a reprobate though he was kind and good-hearted’. It was said that ‘all his good qualities’ were ‘overshadowed by a licentiousness’ that ‘turned the Royal Court into a den of debauchery. There was hardly a single maiden at Court…not subjected to his importunings,’¹⁴ alleged Prince Shcherbatov, the self-appointed moral conscience of the Russian aristocracy.¹⁵ ‘The favourite’, wrote the British envoy, Sir Thomas Gunning, ‘is dissipated…’ and kept low company. As the 1760s went on, Catherine either ignored his infidelities like a worldly wife or did not know of them. Orlov however was not as simple as foreign diplomats claimed, but nor was he an intellectual or a statesman: he corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau but probably to please Catherine and because it was expected of a cultured grandee of that time.

Catherine never overpromoted Orlov, who was to have only two big jobs: straight after the coup, he was appointed to head the Special Administration for Foreigners and Immigrants in charge of attracting colonists to the empty regions of the approaches to the Black Sea and the marches of the northern Caucasus. There he performed energetically and laid some of the foundations for Potemkin’s later success. In 1765, she appointed him Grand Master of Ordnance, head of the artillery, though it is significant that she felt the need to consult Panin, who advised her to scale down the powers of that position before giving it to him. Orlov never mastered the details of artillery and ‘seemed to know less about them than a schoolboy’, according to the French diplomat Durand, who met him at military exercises. Later he rose heroically to the challenge of fighting the Moscow Plague.¹⁶

Orlov swaggered around in Catherine’s wake, but he did not exert himself in exercising power and was never allowed the political independence she later delegated to Potemkin. While physically intimate with the Empress, Orlov was semi-detached from actual government.

—

Potemkin was in a hurry to display his insolent cleverness before the Empress, whose informality gave him plenty of scope to do so. On one occasion, he carelessly wandered up to the salon where Grigory Orlov was playing cards with the Empress. He leaned on the card table and started looking at Orlov’s cards. Orlov whispered that he should leave, but Catherine intervened. ‘Leave him alone,’ she said. ‘He’s not interrupting us.’¹⁷

If the Orlovs decided to get rid of Potemkin, it was Nikita Panin who intervened at this ‘dangerous time’ to save him from whatever the Orlovs were planning.¹⁸ Late in the summer of 1762, Potemkin was given his first – and last – foreign assignment: to travel to Stockholm to inform Count Ivan Osterman, the Russian Ambassador to Sweden, of the change of regime.¹⁹ The Russian Court traditionally treated Sweden as a cooling area for overheated lovers. (Panin himself and Catherine’s first lover Serge Saltykov had been despatched there for similar reasons.) From the patchy evidence that we have of his early career, it seems that the irrepressible Potemkin had learned nothing from this shot across his bows and kept playing the fool in front of the Orlovs until he had to be taught a lesson.

On his return, Catherine remained as interested as ever in this original young friend. Potemkin, whom she later called her ‘pupil’, benefited from this generosity of spirit. On duty as gentleman of the bedchamber, he was sitting opposite the Empress at table when she asked him a question in French. He replied in Russian. When a courtier told him off for such rudeness, Potemkin exclaimed: ‘On the contrary, I think a subject should answer in the language in which he can best express his thoughts – and I’ve been studying Russian for twenty-two years.’²⁰ This was typical of his flirtatious impertinence but also of his defiance of the Gallomania of many courtiers. There is a legend that Catherine suggested he improve his French and arranged for him to be taught by a defrocked French priest named Chevalier de Vivarais, who had served under Dupleix at Pondicherry in India during the Seven Years War. This seedy mountebank was no chevalier and travelled with a ‘wife’ called Vaumale de Fages who apparently made a pleasurable contribution to Potemkin’s French lessons. The name has a courtesan’s ring to it: doubtless she was a most patient teacher. Vivarais was the first of a long line of sophisticated crooks whose company Potemkin enjoyed. As for French, it became his second language.²¹

Catherine charted a special government career for her young protégé. She knew his religious interests well enough to appoint Potemkin assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the council created by Peter the Great to run the Orthodox Church. The Procurator was administrator and judge in all matters religious – the equivalent of the Procurator-General in secular matters. The Empress cared enough about him to draft his instructions herself. Entitled ‘Instruction to our Gentleman of the Monarch’s Bedchamber Grigory Potemkin’, and dated 4 September 1763, her first letter to him, which shows the maternal tone she favoured with younger men, reads:

From the ukase given about you to the Holy Synod: though you know well why you have been appointed to this place, we are ordering the following for the best fulfilment of your duty…1. For better understanding of the affairs run from this place…2. it will be useful for you to make it a rule to come to the Synod when they are not sitting…3. To know the agenda in advance…4. You will have to listen with diligent attention…

Point six decreed that, in the event of the Procurator-General’s illness, ‘you will have to report to us all business and write our orders down in the Synod. In a word, you will have to learn all things which will lighten the course of business and help you to understand it better.’²² Potemkin’s first period in the Synod was short, possibly because of his problems with the Orlovs, but we know from Decree 146 of the Synod’s records that he attended the Synod on a day-to-day basis during September.²³ He was on the rise.

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While paying court to the Empress and beginning his political career, Potemkin did not restrict himself. Alcibiades won himself a reputation as a lover. There was no reason why he should be loyal to Catherine while Orlov was in possession of the field. Potemkin’s stalwart but uninspiring nephew, Alexander Samoilov, recorded his uncle as paying ‘special attention’ to a ‘certain well-born young girl’ who ‘was not indifferent towards him’. Infuriatingly he added: ‘whose name I will not reveal’.²⁴ Some historians believe this was Catherine’s confidante Countess Bruce, who was to gain notoriety as the supposed ‘éprouveuse’²⁵ who ‘tried out’ Catherine’s lovers. Countess Bruce unselfishly did all she could to help Potemkin with Catherine: in that worldly court, there was no better foundation for a political alliance than an amorous friendship. Certainly Countess Bruce always found it hard to resist a young man. But the Countess was already thirty-five, like Catherine – hardly the ‘girl’, who remains mysterious.²⁶

Whoever it was, Catherine let Potemkin continue his melodramatic role as her cavalier servente. Was he really in love with Catherine? There is no need to over-analyse his motives: it is impossible in matters of love to separate the individual from the position. He was ambitious and was devoted to Catherine – the Empress and the woman. Then he suddenly disappeared.

—

Legend has it that sometime that year Grigory and Alexei Orlov invited Potemkin for a game of billiards. When he arrived, the Orlovs turned on him and beat him up horribly. Potemkin’s left eye was damaged. The wound became infected. Potemkin allowed a village quack – one Erofeich – to bind it up, but the peasant remedy he applied only made it worse. The wound turned septic and Potemkin lost his eye.²⁷

Potemkin’s declarations to Catherine and the fight with the Orlovs are both part of the Potemkin mythology: there are other accounts that he lost the eye playing tennis and then went to the quack, whose ointment burned it. But it is hard to imagine Potemkin on a tennis court. The fight story was widely believed, because Potemkin was overstepping the limits of prudence by courting Catherine, but it is unlikely that it really happened because Grigory Orlov always behaved decently to his young rival.

This was his first setback – however it occurred. In two years he had gone from arriving poor and obscure from Moscow to being the indulged protégé of the Empress of all the Russias herself. But he had peaked far too early. Losing the sight in his eye was tragic, but ironically his withdrawal from Court made strategic sense. This was the first of many occasions when Potemkin used timely withdrawals to concentrate the mind of the Empress.

Potemkin no longer visited Court. He saw no one, studied religion, grew a long beard and considered taking the tonsure of a monk. He was always prone to religious contemplation and mysticism. This true son of the Orthodox Church often retired to monasteries to pray. While there was always play-acting in his antics, his contemporaries, who attacked him whenever possible, never doubted that he was genuinely tempted by a life of prayer. Nor did they doubt his ascetic and very Russian disgust with the pursuit of worldly success, particularly his own.²⁸ But the crisis was much more serious than that. Some of Potemkin’s charm derived from the wild giddiness of his mood swings, the symptom of a manic personality that explains much of his strange behaviour. He collapsed into a depression. His confidence was shattered. The breakdown was so serious that some accounts even claim that he put his eye out himself ‘to free it from the blemish which it derived from the accident’.²⁹

There was vanity in his disappearance too: his blind eye was certainly half closed – but not lost.^*1 He was ashamed of it and probably believed that the Empress would now be disgusted by him. Potemkin’s over-sensitivity was one of his most winning qualities. Even as a famous statesman, he almost always refused to pose for portraits because he felt disfigured. He convinced himself that his career was over. Certainly his opponents revelled in his ruined looks: the Orlovs nicknamed him after the one-eyed giants of Homer’s Odyssey. ‘Alcibiades’, they said, had become the ‘Cyclops’.

—

Potemkin was gone for eighteen lost months. The Empress sometimes asked the Orlovs about him. It is said she even cancelled some of her little gatherings she so missed his mimicry. She sent him messages through anonymous lady-friends. Catherine later told Potemkin that Countess Bruce always informed her that he still loved her.³⁰ Finally, according to Samoilov, the Empress sent this message through the go-between: ‘It is a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him.’³¹ This must have raised his hopes. When Catherine drove by his retreat, she is said to have ordered Grigory Orlov to summon Potemkin back to Court. The honourable and frank Orlov always showed respect for Potemkin to the Empress. Besides he probably believed that, with Potemkin’s looks ruined and his confidence broken, he was no longer a threat.³²

Suffering can foster toughness, patience and depth. One senses that the one-eyed Potemkin who returned to Court was a different man from the Alcibiadean colt who left it. Eighteen months after losing his eye, Potemkin still sported a piratical bandage round his head, which suggest the contradictions of shyness and showmanship that were both part of his personality. Catherine welcomed him back to Court. He reappeared in his old position at the Synod; and when Catherine celebrated the third anniversary of the coup by presenting silver services to her thirty-three leading supporters, Potemkin was remembered near the bottom of the list, far below grandees like Kirill Razumovsky, Panin and Orlov. The latter was firmly and permanently at her side, but she had obviously not forgotten her reckless suitor.³³

So the Orlovs devised a more agreeable way to remove him. One legend tells how Grigory Orlov suggested to the Empress that Kirill Razumovsky’s daughter, Elisabeth, would be a most advantageous match for the Guardsman from Smolensk and Catherine did not object.³⁴ There is no evidence of this courtship but we know that Potemkin later helped the girl – and always got on well with her father who ‘received him like a son.’

Indeed the Count’s kindness to young Potemkin was typical of the lack of snobbery of this Cossack ex-shepherd who was one of the most likeable of Catherine’s magnates. It was said Razumovsky had been a peasant at sixteen and a Field-Marshal at twenty-two, which was almost true.^*2 Whenever his sons, who grew up to be proud Russian aristocrats, were embarrassed by his humble Cossack beginnings, he used to shout for his valet: ‘Here, bring me the peasant’s rags in which I came to St Petersburg. I want to recall the happy time when I drove my cattle crying, “Tsop! Tsop!”.’³⁵ He lived in fabulous state – he was said to have introduced champagne to Russia. Potemkin, who certainly enjoyed the sparkling stories (and probably the sparkling wine) of this cheerful raconteur, became obsessed by the Cossacks: did the enthusiasm of a lifetime start over the ex-Hetman’s champagne at the Razumovsky Palace? The real reason there would be no marriage was that Potemkin still loved Catherine and that she held out some sort of glorious hope for the future.³⁶ Catherine ‘has at times had eyes for others’, wrote the British envoy, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, ‘particularly for an amiable and accomplished man, who is not undeserving of her affection; he has good advisers and is not without some chance of success.’³⁷ The ‘accomplishment’ makes him sound like Potemkin and his ‘good advisers’ could not be any better placed than Countess Bruce.

In 1767, he received a job that again showed how Catherine was specially creating tasks that suited his interests. After a short tenure at the Synod, she had given him duties as an army paymaster and responsibilities for the manufacturing of daytime army uniforms. Now Catherine was embarking on the most daring political experiment of her life: the Legislative Commission. Potemkin, who had evidently showed off his knowledge of Oriental cultures, was appointed one of three ‘Guardians of Exotic Peoples’³⁸ alongside the Procurator-General Prince Viazemsky and one of Catherine’s secretaries, Olsufiev. The Empress was gently introducing Potemkin to the most important officials in the realm. Nothing was ever a coincidence with Catherine II.

The Legislative Commission was an elected body of about 500 delegates from an impressively broad range (for its day) of representatives of the nobility, townspeople, state peasants and non-Russian peoples. They converged that year on Moscow bearing the instructions of their electors. There were fifty-four non-Russians – from Tartars to Baskirs, Yakuts to Kalmyks. Since Viazemsky and Olsufiev had weightier tasks, they were Potemkin’s responsibility.

Potemkin went on ahead of the Empress to Moscow with two squadrons of Horse-Guards to help oversee the arrival of the delegates. Catherine herself followed in February, setting off from Moscow on a cruise down the Volga as far as Kazan and Simbirsk, with a suite of over 1,500 courtiers, including two Orlovs and two Chernyshevs, and foreign ambassadors – a voyage designed to show that Catherine was feeling the pulse of her Empire. She then returned to Moscow to open the Commission.

Catherine may have considered abolishing or reforming serfdom, according to the tenets of the Enlightenment, but she was far from wanting to overturn the Russian political order. Serfdom was one of the strongest links between the throne and the nobility: she would break it at her peril. The 500 or more articles of her Great Instruction, which she wrote out herself, were a digest of a lifetime of reading Montesquieu, Beccaria and the Encyclopaedia. The Commission’s aim was the codification of existing laws – but even that was a risky encroachment on her own autocracy. Far from a revolutionary, she was a believer in Russian absolutism. Indeed most of the philosophes themselves, those enemies of superstition, were not democrats, just advocates of reason, law and order imposed from above. Catherine was sincere, but there was an element of window-dressing, for it showed her confidence and Russia’s stability. But it turned out to be a very long-winded advertisement.

At 10 a.m. on Sunday, 30 July 1767, Catherine, in a coach drawn by eight horses and followed by sixteen carriages of courtiers, was escorted from Moscow’s Golovin Palace to the Kremlin by Grigory Orlov and a squadron of Horse-Guards, probably including Potemkin. Grand Duke Paul followed. At the Cathedral of the Assumption, she dismounted for a service of blessing. She was followed by the Procurator-General Viazemsky and all the delegates – Russians and exotics – who marched behind, two by two, like the passengers on Noah’s Ark. The non-Christian delegates waited outside the church. Then all walked in the same order to the Great Kremlin Palace to be received by their Empress in imperial mantle and crown, standing before the throne, accompanied by Grand Duke Paul, courtiers and bishops. On her right were displayed copies of her Great Instruction. The next morning in the Kremlin’s Faceted Palace, the Empress’s Instruction was read and the Commission opened in a ceremony based on the English opening of Parliament, with its similar speech from the throne.³⁹

Potemkin escorted the Empress when she attended some of the Commission’s sessions. He would have read the Instruction: his vast library later contained every work Catherine used – Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois, all thirty-five volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia (in French) and tomes of Voltaire. But he did not take the floor.⁴⁰ The Commission itself did not succeed in codifying the laws, but instead became a talking shop. It did succeed in collecting useful information for Catherine’s future legislation. The Commission also coined the sobriquet ‘Catherine the Great’, which she refused. Her stay reminded Catherine how much she disliked Moscow so she returned to Petersburg, where she re-convened the Commission in February 1768. The coming of war finally gave her the excuse to end its ponderous deliberations.⁴¹

On 22 September 1768 Potemkin was promoted from Kammerjunker to receive the ceremonial key of a Kamerherr – chamberlain⁴² of the Court. Unusually he was still to remain in the military, where he was promoted to captain of Horse-Guards. Then, two months later, he was removed from the army and attached to the Court full time on Catherine’s specific orders. For once, Potemkin did not want to be at Court at all. On 25 September 1768, the Ottoman Empire declared war on Russia. Potemkin saw his chance.

Skip Notes

*1 This did not stop one diplomat claiming he had ‘procured a glass eye in Paris’.

*2 Brother of the Empress Elisabeth’s favourite, he was appointed Hetman of the Ukraine in his early twenties. This meant that he was the governor of the nominally semi-independent Cossack borderlands throughout Elisabeth’s reign. Razumovsky backed Catherine’s coup, then requested that she make the Hetmanate hereditary in his family. She refused, abolished the Hetmanate, replacing it with a College of Little Russia, and made him a field-marshal instead.