Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

9

MARRIAGE: MADAME POTEMKIN

My marble beauty…my beloved, better than any king…no man on earth can equal you…

Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin

Catherine and Potemkin planned a secret rendezvous that must have filled them with a sense of mounting anticipation, jubilation and anxiety. On 4 June 1774, the Empress, still recovering in Tsarskoe Selo from her blistering confrontation with Prince Orlov, wrote this cryptic note to Potemkin, who was in the city: ‘My dear, I’ll come tomorrow and I’ll bring with me that which you wrote about. Order them to prepare Field-Marshal Golitsyn’s boat opposite the Sievers’ landing-stage, if it will be possible to pull in to the shore not far from the palace…’.¹ Alexander Golitsyn, Potemkin’s first commander in the war, was Governor-General of the capital, so he had his own boat. Count Yakov Sievers had a landing stage on the Fontanka, beside the Summer Palace.

On 5 June, as promised to Potemkin, the Empress returned to St Petersburg. Next day, a Friday, she held a small dinner for her senior courtiers in the little garden of the Summer Palace, perhaps to say goodbye to Prince Orlov, about to ‘travel abroad’. On Sunday, 8 June, Catherine and Potemkin attended a dinner in honour of the Izmailovsky Guards: the toasts were answered by salvoes of cannon; the meal on a silver service from Paris was accompanied by Italian singers. Afterwards, Catherine walked on the banks of the Fontanka beside Count Sievers’s house.²

At midnight on that summer’s evening, the Empress set off on a mysterious boating trip from the Summer Palace on the Fontanka. She often visited her courtiers in their houses on the Neva or on the islands that made up St Petersburg. But this was different. It was late for a woman who liked to be in bed by 11 p.m. She left secretly, her face probably hidden by a hooded cloak.³ It is said that she was alone – except for her loyal maid, Maria Savishna Perekushina. General-en-Chef Potemkin, who had been with her all day, was absent. He had slipped away at dusk to a boat waiting on the river, which had borne him into the mist and then out of sight.

Catherine’s boat struck out of the Fontanka, past the Summer Palace with its gardens, into the Great Neva river, heading for the unfashionable Viborg Side. The boat moored at the one of the little jetties on the Little Nevka. There the Empress climbed into an unmarked carriage, waiting with the curtains drawn. As soon as Empress and maid were inside, the postillions whipped the horses and the carriage headed briskly down the road. It stopped on the right outside the Church of St Sampsonovsky. There was no one around. The ladies disembarked and entered St Sampsonov. The church had been built by Peter the Great, unusually in the Ukrainian style, in wood (it was rebuilt in stone in 1781), to celebrate the saint’s day of the Battle of Poltava. Its most striking feature was a high bell tower, painted in lilac blue, white and green.⁴

The Empress found Potemkin inside the church, illuminated by candles. ‘The greatest nailbiter in the Empire’ would have chewed his fingers to the quick. Since they had attended the Izmailovsky Guards dinner earlier, both would still be in their ‘regimentals’ – Potemkin in his uniform of a general-en-chef – green coat with red collar, braided with gold lace, red breeches, high boots, sword, hat with gold border and white feathers. We know from the Court Journal that Catherine was wearing her ‘long Regimental Guards uniform’ all day: it was ‘trimmed in gold lace made in the form of a lady’s riding habit’.⁵ The Empress could now hand the hooded cloak to her maid, knowing that she looked most fetching in ‘regimentals’. Perhaps her dress reminded them of the day they met.

There were just three other men in the church. A nameless priest and the two ‘grooms’. Catherine’s ‘groom’ was Chamberlain Evgraf Alexandrovich Chertkov; Potemkin’s was his nephew, Alexander Nikolaievich Samoilov. It was the nephew who read the portion from the Gospel. When he reached the words ‘wife be afraid of her husband’, Samoilov hesitated and glanced at the Sovereign. Could an empress be afraid of her husband? Catherine nodded and he continued.⁶ The priest then commenced the marriage ceremony. Samoilov and Chertkov stepped forward to hold the crowns over their heads as in a traditional Orthodox wedding. When the long ceremony was finished, the wedding certificates were signed and distributed among the witnesses. All were sworn to secrecy. Potemkin had become the secret consort of Catherine II.

—

This is the legend of Potemkin and Catherine’s wedding. There is no conclusive proof that they married, but it is almost certain they did. However, secret marriages have always been the stuff of royal myth. In Russia, Empress Elisabeth was said to have married Alexei Razumovsky. In England, the Prince of Wales was soon to marry Mrs Fitzherbert in a secret ceremony, the validity of which was much debated.

There are many versions of the marriage: some say they married in Moscow the next year or in Petersburg in 1784 or 1791.⁷ The Moscow version takes place in the Church of the Ascension of our Lord near Nikitsky, with its distinctive round dome, painted yellow. This was close to the house of Potemkin’s mother, where he lived in Moscow. The church was later embellished with Potemkin’s money,⁸ in his mother’s memory. It is most famous now as the church where Alexander Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova on 18 February 1831 – one of many links between them.^*1

A secret marriage could well have taken place on many another day during their relationship and the details of it concealed in the routine account of their activities. However, this time and place are the most likely. The letter from Catherine mentioned a secret enterprise and the Sievers’s jetty. The Court Journal of 8 June showed her embarking and disembarking there. There is time in the early or late evening for the secret boat trip. All the oral legends, handed down by the wedding guests and their descendants and recorded by Professor Bartenev in the nineteenth century, mentioned the St Samsonov Church, mid- to late 1774, and the same four witnesses. But where are the certificates? Potemkin’s was supposed inherited by his dearest niece, Alexandra Branicka. She told the secret to her son-in-law Prince Michael Vorontsov, and left the certificate to her daughter, Princess Lise. Count Orlov-Davydov remembered a visit to Count Samoilov, who showed him a jewelled buckle. ‘This’, he said, was presented to me by the Empress in memory of her marriage with my late uncle.’ Samoilov’s certificate was buried with him, according this his grandson Count A. A. Bobrinsky. Chertkov’s copy passed into obscurity.

The disappearance of the evidence and the secrecy are not as dubious as they might seem, because no one would have dared expose this during the strict, militaristic reigns of Tsars Paul, Alexander I and Nicholas I – or afterwards. The ‘Victorian’ Romanovs were embarrassed by Catherine’s love life, which, through the doubts about Paul’s paternity, questioned their legitimacy. As late as the 1870s, Professor Bartenev had to ask the Emperor’s permission even to do the research and it could not be published until 1906: only in the interim between the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, when the Autocracy was on its last legs, did Nicholas II permit its publication.⁹

The strongest evidence of their marriage lies in Catherine’s letters; the way she treated Potemkin; how he behaved; and how their relationship was described by insiders. She signed her letters ‘devoted wife’ and called him her ‘dear husband’ in at least twenty-two letters, naming him her ‘lord’ or ‘master’ in hundreds of others.¹⁰ ‘I’ll die if you’ll change…my dear friend, loving husband’¹¹ is an early mention of the word in their love letters. ‘Father, Ch[er] Ep[oux] – [darling husband] –…I’ve sent Kelhen to cure your chest, I love you very much, my beloved friend,’ she wrote.¹² She called Potemkin’s nephew – ‘our nephew’¹³ (author’s italics). Monarchs, more than normal mortals, have a very precise definition of who is or is not a member of their family. She was to treat some of his family as if they were her own until her death – so much so that there were rumours that his niece Branicka was her own child.¹⁴ Her most revealing and specific letter on the subject probably dates from a year later, possibly in early 1776:

My Lord and Cher Epoux…Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and I am bound to you by all possible ties. Just compare, were my acts more meaningful two years ago than they are now?¹⁵ (author’s italics)

The marriage, as both no doubt hoped, seemed to bring them even closer together. Probably Potemkin, in love with Catherine, tormented by jealousies and the fragility of his position, and ambitious to play an independent role, was soothed by it. He may have been as dissolute as he was pious, but he was a practising Orthodox believer, which may have helped persuade her. For her part, it might seem that marriage would be odd after a relationship of just a few months, but one should also quote that mother’s saying – ‘you just know when it is the right person’. Moreover Catherine had known Potemkin for twelve years and had loved him for some time: she knew him very well already. Their love was not only overwhelming but they were, as she put it, ‘twin souls’. At last she had found an intellectual equal with whom she could share the burden of ruling and the warmth of family.

The best piece of evidence is that, whether or not one accepts there was a ceremony, Catherine treated Potemkin for the rest of their lives as if there had been. Whatever he did, he never fell from power; he was treated like a member of the imperial family and had absolute access to the Treasury as well as the ability to make independent decisions. He behaved with extraordinary confidence, indeed insouciance, and deliberately presented himself in the tsarist tradition.

The foreign ambassadors suspected something: one diplomat learned from a ‘person of credit’ that Potemkin’s ‘nieces were in possession of the certificate,’¹⁶ but such was the awe for monarchs in those days that they never mentioned ‘marriage’ specifically in writing, saving it up to tell their Courts directly. Thus the French Ambassador, Comte de Ségur, informed Versailles in December 1788 that Potemkin ‘takes advantage of…certain sacred and inviolable rights…The singular basis of these rights is a great mystery which is known to only four people in Russia; a lucky chance enabled me to discover it and when I have thoroughly sounded it, I shall, on the first occasion…inform the King’¹⁷ (author’s italics). The Most Christian King already knew: by October, Louis XVI was calling Catherine ‘Madame Potemkin’ to Comte de Vergennes, his Foreign Minister – though he meant it partly as a joke.¹⁸

The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, soon found out too. He explained the riddle of Catherine and Potemkin, while strolling in the Viennese Augarten, to the British envoy Lord Keith like this: ‘for a thousand reasons and as many connections of every sort, she could not easily get rid of him, even if she harboured the wish of doing so. One must have been in Russia to comprehend all the particulars of the Empress’s situation’¹⁹ (author’s italics). This was presumably what was also meant by Charles Whitworth, the British Ambassador to Petersburg, when he reported in 1791 that Potemkin was unsackable and unaccountable.²⁰

Potemkin hinted that he was almost royal. During the Second Russo-Turkish War, the Prince de Ligne suggested to Potemkin that he could become Prince of Moldavia and Wallachia. ‘That’s a joke to me,’ replied Potemkin. ‘I could be King of Poland, if I wanted; I refused to be Duke of Courland; I am far more than all that‘²¹ (author’s italics). What could be ‘far more than’ being a king if not being the consort of the Empress of Russia?

—

Now the couple got back to work. After the wedding, they, as usual, revelled in the suspicions of others: did anyone notice how crazily in love they were? She wondered what ‘our nephew’ – possibly Samoilov – thought about their behaviour. ‘I think our madness seemed very strange to him.’²²

On another occasion, someone had guessed a great secret. ‘What can we do darling? These things often happen,’ Catherine mused. ‘Peter the Great in cases like that used to send people out to the market to bring back information he alone thought was secret; sometimes, by combination, people just guess…’.²³

—

On 16 January 1775, as soon as she knew Pugachev was dead, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin, set out from Tsarskoe Selo for Moscow, where they were to hold celebrations for the victory over Turkey. Catherine had been planning to go to Moscow ever since the peace was signed but her dear ‘Marquis de Pugachev’ had delayed matters. Potemkin, according to Gunning, had encouraged her to visit the old capital, presumably to celebrate the opening of a window on to the Black Sea and to project the fact that government was in charge after Pugachev.

On the 25th, she staged a ceremonial entry with Grand Duke Paul. In case she forgot that she was now in the heartland of old Russia, Paul was warmly welcomed wherever he went while, according to Gunning, Catherine ‘passed with scarcely any acclamations amongst the populace or their manifesting the least degree of satisfaction.’²⁴ But the Pugachev Rebellion had shown her that the interior needed some attention: she was to spend most of the year there. She stayed in the Golovin and suburban Kolomenskoe Palaces, where Potemkin was also given apartments designed by her, but she found them uncomfortable and unfriendly, a metaphor for all she disliked about Moscow.

Empresses do not honeymoon, but she and Potemkin obviously wanted to spend some private time together. In June she bought Prince Kantemir’s estate, Black Earth, where she decided to built a new palace: she renamed it Tsaritsyno. Those who believe she married Potemkin, whether in Moscow or Petersburg, claim that this was where they had their version of a honeymoon. They wanted to live cosily, so they stayed there for months on end in a cottage with just six rooms, like a couple of bourgeois.²⁵

Honeymoon or not, they were always planning, imagining, drafting: we can follow how hard they worked together in their letters. Catherine did not always agree with her pupil nor he with her. ‘Don’t be angry if you find that all my proposals are mad,’ she told him while discussing the problem of licensing salt production and agreeing to his proposal that Pavel Potemkin and his brother Mikhail should investigate it. ‘I couldn’t invent anything better.’ Potemkin was always off the mark with finance – whether his own or the state’s. He was an entrepreneur, not a manager. When he proposed taking on the salt monopoly, she warned him: ‘Don’t burden yourself with it because it will provoke hatred…’. He was hurt. She soothed him – but firmly: ‘I don’t want to make you look like a fool or have the reputation of one…You know very well you wrote nonsense. I ask you to write a good law…and you scold me.’ If he was lazy, for example in editing the Pugachev amnesty, she hectored him: ‘Monday to Friday is enough time to read it.’²⁶

Catherine’s solutions to the Pugachevschina were administrative and involved the restructuring of local government and increasing the participation of nobles, townspeople and state peasants in judiciary and welfare. She boasted to Grimm of suffering from ‘a new sickness called legislomania’.²⁷ Potemkin corrected her drafts, as he did later with her Police Code and her Charters to the Nobility and Towns: ‘We ask you to put + near the articles and it will mean you agree. If you put # near articles, they are to be excluded…write your changes clearly.’ His changes impressed her: ‘I see in them fervent zeal and your great intellect.’²⁸

—

The couple now arranged a piratical game of international kidnapping. In February 1775, the Empress commissioned Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky to seduce a peculiar young woman in Leghorn, Italy, where Scarface commanded the Russian Fleet, and bring her back to Russia.

She was twenty, slender, dark-haired, with an Italianate profile, an alabaster complexion and grey eyes. She sang, painted and played the harp. She affected the chastity of a vestal virgin while simultaneously taking lovers like a courtesan. The girl used many names, but only one mattered. She claimed to be ‘Princess Elisabeth’, the daughter of the Empress Elisabeth and Alexei Razumovsky. She was the very quintessence of the eighteenth-century adventuress: every epoch is a balance of opposites so that this golden age of aristocrats was also the ripest season for impostors; the age of pedigree was also that of pretence. Now that travel was easier while communications were still slow, Europe was plagued, and embellished, by young men and women of dubious ancestry taking advantage of the long distances to claim aristocracy or royalty. Russia, as we have seen, had its own history of pretenderism and the lady with whom Orlov-Chesmensky was now to rendezvous was one of the most romantic of its impostors.

She first emerged using the name ‘Ali Emena’ – claiming to be the daughter of a Persian satrap. On ligging jaunts from Persia to Germany, she appeared and disappeared with a vanity case filled with Ruritanian titles: Princess Vladimir, Sultana Selime, demoiselles Frank and Schell; Countess Treymill in Venice; Countess Pinneberg in Pisa and then Countess Silvisky. Later she was Princess of Azov, a Petrine name for this was the port on the Sea of Azov conquered and lost by Peter the Great. As ever with hucksters who manage to convince many of their inherent truth, she was obviously charismatic and it helped that the ‘Princess’ possessed soulful delicacy. She was everything that a mysterious princess should be. On her travels, credulous older aristocrats fell under her spell, protected her, financed her…

Towards the end of the Russo-Turkish War, she headed for the land of disguise – Italy, the realm of Cagliostro and Casanova, where adventurers were as common as cardinals. No one ever discovered who she really was, but it was not long before every diplomat in Italy was investigating her origins: was she the daughter of a Czech coffee-house owner, a Polish innkeeper, a Nuremberg baker?

She hooked Prince Karol Radziwill, who was an anti-Russian Confederate Pole. Accompanied by an entourage of Polish nobles in their national costume, she became a political weapon against Russia. However, she made the mistake of writing to the British Ambassador to Naples. Aesthete and later cuckolded husband of Nelson’s mistress Emma, Sir William Hamilton was particularly susceptible to lissom adventuresses and he gave her a passport, but he then wrote to Orlov-Chesmensky, who immediately informed Petersburg.²⁹

The Catherine who replied was the ruthless usurper usually hidden from view. After Pugachev she was in no mood to take risks with pretenders, however feminine and young: the swaggering almost gangsterish tone of the letter gives us a glimpse of how she might have behaved behind closed doors with the Orlovs. If those Ragusans do not hand over the miscreant, ‘one can toss a few bombs into the town’, she told Orlov-Chesmensky when the woman visited Ragusa. But it would be much better to capture her ‘without noise if possible’.³⁰

Scarface devised a devious plan to play on this adventuress’s delusions of grandeur and on her romantic dreams. He had two advisers as subtle as he was brutal: José Ribas, said to be a Spanish–Neapolitan cook’s son, joined the Russian Fleet in Italy. This talented mountebank, who later became a successful Russian general and one of Potemkin’s closest cronies, worked with a deft adjutant named Ivan Krestinek, who ingratiated himself into the ersatz Princess’s suite and enticed her to meet Orlov-Chesmensky in Pisa.

Scarface courted her, wrote her love letters, let her use his carriage and took her to the theatre. None of the Russians was allowed to sit down in her presence, as if she really was a member of the imperial family. But he also claimed to be furious that Potemkin had replaced his brother Prince Orlov and offered to use his fleet to help her mount the throne in order to return his family to their rightful place beside a new empress. His deception may have been a most pleasurable game: it seems she did become his mistress and that the affair lasted eight days. Maybe the girl believed that he was in love with her and she was successfully gulling him. In such heartless matters of state, Scarface was a master. His marriage proposal baited the trap.

He invited her to inspect his fleet at Livorno. She accepted. The squadron was commanded by a plainspoken Scottish vice-admiral, Samuel Greig, one of the architects of Chesme. Greig agreed to welcome the Princess, two Polish noblemen, two valets and four servants, all Italians, aboard with imperial honours. There she found a priest awaiting them, surrounded by the crew in ceremonial uniforms. Imperial salvoes were fired; sailors hailed her, ‘Long Live the Empress!’ The priest chanted a blessing over ‘Princess Elisabeth’ and Orlov-Chesmensky. It is said she wept with joy as all her dreams came true.

When she looked around, the Count was no longer beside her. His myrmidons seized ‘the villain’, as Orlov-Chesmensky reported to his Empress in Moscow, and took her below. As the ship headed for Petersburg, we know that Potemkin was in correspondence with Orlov-Chesmensky – some of the letters have survived and they would certainly have discussed this affair. Catherine shared Scarface’s letters with him. ‘My honey, my sweetheart,’ she wrote at the time of the kidnapping, ‘send me the letter[s] from…Co[unt] Al[exei] Gr[igorevich] Orlov.’ In April, the couple discussed the reward due to Krestinek for his effective if distasteful work in reeling in the adventuress. Many felt that Greig’s role in this dubious kidnapping on foreign soil was unbecoming in a British officer, but no evidence has reached us that the admiral, who was set on making a career in Russian service, had any compunction about kidnapping a young woman, especially as he was personally thanked in Moscow by Catherine herself.

The ‘Princess’ arrived in Petersburg on 12 May and was immediately delivered under cover of darkness to the Peter and Paul Fortress, though legend says she was kept for a while in one of Potemkin’s suburban residences. Field-Marshal Golitsyn, Governor of Petersburg, interrogated her to learn who backed her and if she really believed her story. It seems that, like many of those who are able to convince followers of deceptions, she believed her own stories: Golitsyn reported to Catherine that ‘the story of her life is filled with fantastic affairs and rather resembles fairy-tales’. Catherine and Potemkin would have followed this interrogation with interest. In the fevered imaginations of Russian peasants, crazier stories had created armies. But when the ‘Princess’ wrote to Catherine asking for an interview, and signed herself ‘Elisabeth’, the Empress turned on her: ‘Send someone to tell the notorious woman that if she wishes to lighten her petty fate, then she should cease playing comedy.’³¹

While Catherine and Potemkin celebrated victory in Moscow, ‘Princess Elisabeth’, who already suffered from tuberculosis, was kept in a damp cell where she dwelt in her castles in the air. She pathetically appealed for better conditions in her letters to Catherine. But she did not exist any more. No one heard her. Just as Catherine had turned a blind eye to Peter’s murder and had arranged for Ivan’s jailers to kill him if necessary, now the consumptive girl was abandoned. There were two floods in St Petersburg in June and July of that summer and a greater one in 1777, so the legend grew that the shivering beauty had been gradually drowned as the waters rose in her subterranean cell. This was the image recreated in Flavitsky’s chilling portrait. It was also claimed that she died giving birth to Orlov-Chesmensky’s child and that he was tormented with guilt – an unlikely sentiment in his case.

She is known to history by one of the few imaginable titles she had not used herself: ‘Princess Tarakanova’, literally ‘of the cockroaches’. The name derived from her claims to be the child of Alexei Razumovsky, whose nephews were called Daraganov – which may have become ‘Tarakanov’. But ‘Princess of the Cockroaches’ could also have come from the image of the insects who were the sole companions of her last days.³² While the Empress was preparing to return to the capital, ‘Princess Elisabeth’ perished of consumption on 4 December 1775 . She was twenty-three. Her body was hastily and secretly buried – another inconvenience snuffed out.³³

—

When the Grand Duke Paul and the Court returned from the Kolomenskoe Palace outside town on 6 July 1775, even dour Moscow must have been incandescent with excitement, teeming with soldiers, princes, ambassadors, priests and ordinary folk, all ready for ten days of partying. The celebrations, the first political spectacular arranged by Potemkin, were designed to reflect Russia’s victorious emergence from six years of war, pestilence and rebellion. Eighteenth-century festivities usually involved triumphal arches and fireworks. The arches, based on the Roman model, were sometimes made of stone but more usually of canvas, wood-bunting or papier-mâché. Notes flew between Empress and Potemkin over every detail: ‘Have you received the people working on the feu d’artifice for the peace?’, she asked him.³⁴

The intricacy and scale of the arrangements put everyone on edge. When Simon Vorontsov arrived with his troops, ‘I presented to…Potemkin the state in which my regiment was and he gave me his word he would not make us do exercises or public inspections for three months…But ten days later, against his word, he sent me to say that the Empress with all her Court would come to see the exercises…I understand that he wanted me to lose face in public…’. The next day, they argued violently.³⁵

On 8 July, the hero of the war, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev, approached the city. Potemkin sent a fond, respectful note to ‘batushka’ Rumiantsev arranging to meet him at Chertanova, ‘where the marquee [of the triumphal arch] is ready’, signing off, ‘Your most humble and faithful servant, G. Potemkin.’ Potemkin then rode out and brought the Field-Marshal to Catherine’s apartments.

On the 10th, the imperial entourage walked from the Prechinsky Gate to the Kremlin. Potemkin had stage-managed a splendid show to convince foreign observers of the ascendancy of this victorious Empress. ‘Every street in the Kremlin was filled with soldiers…a great dais…draped in red cloths, and all the walls of the cathedrals and other buildings, were lined with rows of tiered seats to create a vast amphitheatre…But nothing can compare with the magnificent sight which greeted us with the procession of the Empress…’. As the earth literally shook with the ‘sound and thunder’ of ringing bells, the Empress, wearing a small crown and purple cloak lined with ermine, progressed back to the Cathedral with Rumiantsev on her left and Potemkin on her right. Over her head, twelve generals bore a purple canopy. Her train was carried by Chevaliers-Gardes, in red and gold uniforms with glittering silver helmets and ostrich plumes. Her entire Court followed ‘in gorgeous dress’. At the door of the Uspensky, the Empress was greeted by her bishops. Solemn mass was performed, the ‘Te Deum’ sung. ‘We were entranced,’ recalled a spectator.³⁶

After the service, the Empress held a ceremony of decoration in the Faceted Hall. Catherine surrounded by her four field-marshals, distributed the prizes of victory. She granted Rumiantsev the title suffix of ‘Zadunaisky’ – literally ‘Beyond the Danube’. This dashing surname was Potemkin’s idea – Catherine asked him earlier: ‘My friend, is it still necessary to give the Marshal the title “Zadunaisky”?’³⁷ Once again, Potemkin was supporting Rumiantsev, not trying to ruin him. Zadunaisky also received 5,000 souls, 100,000 roubles, a service of plate and a hat with a wreath of precious stones worth 30,000 roubles. Prince Vasily Dolgoruky received the title ‘Krimsky’ for taking the Crimea in 1771. But the most significant prizes went to Potemkin: the diploma of his first title, count of the Russian Empire, along with a ceremonial sword. The Empress emphasized his political work, specifically citing his contribution to the Turkish treaty. As she told Grimm, ‘Ah – what a good mind that man has! He’s played more part than anyone in this peace.’³⁸ After one of their rows, she had promised, ‘I’ll give you the portrait on the day of the peace – adieu my jewel, my heart, dear husband.’³⁹ So now Potemkin received the Empress’s miniature portrait, decorated with diamonds, to wear on his breast. Only Prince Orlov had had this privilege before, and Count Potemkin wore it in all his portraits and for the rest of his life – whenever, that is, he deigned to dress properly.

The festivities were to last two weeks: Potemkin had planned a rollicking and bucolic fairground on the Khodynskoe fields, where he had erected two pavilions to symbolize ‘The Black Sea with all our conquests’. He created an imperial theme park with roads representing the Don and Dnieper, theatres and dining-rooms named after Black Sea ports, Turkish minarets, Gothic arches, Classical columns. Catherine enthusiastically praised Potemkin’s first chance to display his unrivalled imagination as an impresario of political show business. Long lines of carriages were driven by coachmen ‘dressed as Turks, Albanians, Serbs, Circassians, Hussars and “genuine Negro servants” in crimson turbans’. Catherine wheels exploded into light and as many as 60,000 people drank wines from fountains and feasted on roast oxen.⁴⁰

—

On 12 July, the celebrations were delayed when Catherine fell ill. There is a legend that this was to disguise the birth of a child by Potemkin. She was a past mistress at concealing embarrassing pregnancies in the folds of clothes already designed for her plumpness. The cabinets of Europe were certainly gossiping that she was pregnant. ‘Madame Potemkin is a good 45 years old – a fine age for having children,’ Louis XVI had earlier joked to Vergennes.⁴¹ The child was said to have been Elisaveta Grigorevna Temkina, who was brought up in the Samoilov household, so she had some connection to the family. Illegitimate children in Russia traditionally adopted their father’s name without the first syllable; thus Ivan Betskoi was the bastard of Prince Ivan Trubetskoi, Rontsov the son of Roman Vorontsov.

However, this story is unlikely. Potemkin was very family-minded and made a fuss of all his relations, yet there is no record of him paying any attention to Temkina. Catherine also would have cherished her. But there was a separate ancient Temkin family that had nothing to do with the Potemkins. Furthermore, in that time, it was not regarded as reprehensible to have a ‘fille naturelle’ or ‘pupille’. Bobrinsky, Catherine’s son with Prince Orlov, was not hidden, and Betskoi enjoyed a successful public career. If she was Potemkin’s daughter by a low-born mistress, there was even less reason to conceal her. Temkina remains an enigma – but not one necessarily connected to Catherine and Potemkin.⁴² In Moscow, meanwhile, the Empress was confined to her apartments in the Prechistensky Palace for a week and then recovered. The festivities continued.

—

In Moscow, Count Potemkin was approached by the British with a strange request. In 1775, Britain’s American colonies had rebelled against London. This was to distract the Western world from Russian affairs for eight years, a window of opportunity which Potemkin was to use well. France and its Bourbon ally, Spain, at once saw the possibility of avenging British victory in the Seven Years War twelve years earlier. London had turned down Panin’s suggestion of an Anglo-Russian alliance because Britain refused to undertake the defence of Russia against the Ottoman Empire. But now George III and his Secretary of State for the North, the Earl of Suffolk, were suddenly faced with the American Revolution. Since Britain had the best fleet in the world but a negligible army, it traditionally hired mercenaries. In this case, it decided to procure Russian troops.

By 1 September 1775, Suffolk was complaining that ‘the increasing frenzy of His Majesty’s unhappy and deluded people on the other side of the Atlantic’ meant that Russian assistance was needed immediately. Specifically, Britain wanted ‘20,000 disciplined infantry completely equipped and ready to embark as soon as the Baltic navigation opens in the spring’. When Panin showed no interest, Gunning approached Potemkin, who was intrigued. Ultimately Catherine refused, writing George III a polite letter and wishing him luck.⁴³

Poor Gunning had to write home a few weeks later: ‘I can scarcely entertain any hopes at present…could not His Majesty make use of Hanoverians?’⁴⁴ Finally, the desperate British hired the army of that mercenary state of Hesse. The Americans with their united ideals and irregular tactics defeated the rigidly drilled, demoralized British, but one wonders if the hardy, brutal and homogeneous Russians, backed by Cossacks, could have beaten them. The tantalizing possibilities of this stretch out all the way to the Cold War and beyond.

—

Catherine and Potemkin’s relationship was so all-consuming that it was beginning to burn them both. ‘We would be happier’, said Catherine, ‘if we loved each other less.’⁴⁵ The sexual cauldron of the first eighteen months could not be sustained, but there was evidence too that the tensions of his role as official favourite were taking a toll on their affair. The teacher–pupil relationship that Catherine so enjoyed was becoming irksome if not intolerable to a man as masterful, confident and able as Potemkin. Even the marriage could not change the realities of court politics and his complete dependence on her whim. Yet she loved his wildness – the very thing that made him want to escape. Was he withdrawing from her or did he just need space to breathe?

She tried desperately to restore their happiness. ‘It’s time to live in harmony. Don’t torment me,’ she wrote. When he was outraged at his subordinate position, the Empress promised: ‘I will never order you to do anything, you fool, because I don’t deserve such coldness…I swore to give only caress for caress. I want cuddles and loving cuddles, the best sort. Stupid coldness and stupid spleen will only produce anger and vexation in return. It’s difficult for you to say “my dear” or “my honey”. Is it possible that your heart is silent? My heart does not keep silent.’⁴⁶ Catherine was cut to the quick by his increasing harshness: was her consort falling out of love with her?

She did all she could to please him: during autumn 1775, when she was about to embark on a trip out of Moscow, reported Gunning, ‘it had been forgotten that the succeeding Wednesday was Count Potemkin’s nameday, the recollection of which determined her to postpone her intended excursion…to admit of the Count’s receiving the compliments of the nobility’. Gunning added that the Empress had also given him a present of 100,000 roubles - and appointed a Greek archbishop for Potemkin’s southern provinces on his recommendation. This was Potemkin at his most demanding: typical of him to change an empress’s timetable, receive a prince’s ransom of a present – and not forget to achieve a political appointment.⁴⁷

Sometimes, Catherine complained that he humiliated her in front of the Court: ‘My dear Lord, Grigory Alexandrovich, I wish Your Excellency happiness. This evening, you had better lose at cards because you absolutely forgot me and left me alone as if I was a gatepost.’ But Potemkin knew how to play her, replying with a line of Arabesque symbols – possibly a sexual code in their secret language, adding: ‘That’s the answer…’.⁴⁸ But what was the answer? How could she keep her consort and yet make him happy?

—

The couple developed their own way of communicating their feelings – his obscure and passionate, hers understanding and accommodating – the epistolary duet:

Potemkin

Catherine

My precious soul

I know

You know that I am

Absolutely yours

I know, I know

And I have only you

It is true.

I will remain faithful

To you until death

I don’t doubt you.

And I need your

Support

I believe it.

For this reason, and

Because of my wish,

Serving you and applying

My abilities is most

Pleasant to me.

That was proved long

Ago.

Doing some-

Thing for me

With gladness, but

What?

You’ll never regret

It and you’ll see

Only benefits.

My soul is glad but

unclear. Tell me more

clearly.⁴⁹

—

Potemkin was somehow withdrawing from her. It is said that he claimed to be ill to avoid her embraces. As he became restless, Catherine tired of his endless tempers. The towering, eye-flashing rages that are so attractive at the beginning of a love affair became irksome exhibitionism in the middle of a marriage. Potemkin’s behaviour was impossible, but Catherine was partly to blame. She was slow to understand the constant tension of Potemkin’s political and social position which was to break so many of her later lovers. Catherine was just as emotionally greedy as he was. They were both human furnaces requiring an endless supply of fuel in the form of glory, extravagance and power on one hand, love, praise and attention on the other. It is these gargantuan appetites that made their relationship as painful as it was productive. Potemkin wanted to govern and build, but loving Catherine was a full-time job. It was a human impossibility for each of them to give each other enough of what they required. They were too similar to be together.

In May 1775, before the peace celebrations had started, Catherine did her Orthodox duty by leading a pilgrimage to the forbidding Troitsko-Sergeevna Monastery, an obligatory trip back into the Muscovite dark ages when women were kept in the seclusion of the terem and not on thrones. The visit brought out Potemkin’s Slavic disgust for worldly success, his Orthodox yearnings and probably his discontent with his place. Succumbing to his coenobitic instincts and ignoring Catherine, he temporarily abandoned the Court and prayed in seclusion in a monk’s cell.⁵⁰

The rapidity of his mood changes must have been exhausting for both of them. Perhaps this was what she meant when she said that they loved each other too much to be happy: the relationship was so combustible that it was not settled enough to serve either of them well. They continued to love each other and work together throughout 1775, but the stress was rising. Catherine understood what was happening. She had found a partner in Potemkin – a rare diamond – but how was he to find a role? And how were they to satisfy their demanding natures and yet remain together? While they struggled, they looked around them.

—

The day before the peace celebrations, Count Potemkin received a sad note from his brother-in-law Vasily Engelhardt telling him of the death of his sister Elena Marfa. They had six daughters (the eldest was already married) and a son in the army. The five younger daughters were aged between twenty-one and eight. ‘I ask you to take care of them and to take the place of Marfa Alexandrovna…’, Engelhardt wrote to Potemkin on 5 July. ‘By your order, I’ll send them to your mother.’ There was no reason why their father could not bring them up in Smolensk, but Engelhardt, a man of the world, realized his daughters would benefit from life at Court. Potemkin summoned them to Moscow.

The Empress, like any dutiful wife, was meeting the Potemkin family. When her formidable mother-in-law, Daria Potemkina, who still lived in Moscow,^*2 was presented, Catherine was at her thoughtful and sensitive best: ‘I noticed your mother was most elegant but that she has no watch. Here is one which I ask you to give her.’⁵¹ When the nieces arrived, Catherine welcomed them warmly and told Potemkin, ‘To make your mother happy you can nominate as many of your nieces as you want as Maids-of-Honour.’⁵² On 10 July, the climax of the peace celebrations, the eldest of this brood, Alexandra Engelhardt, twenty-one, was appointed a frele or maid-of-honour to the Empress.⁵³ The second and most decorous, Varvara, was soon to join her. As soon as they arrived, the nieces were hailed as Russia’s superlative beauties.

—

Meanwhile, Catherine was busy drafting her legislation, aided by two young secretaries she had recently borrowed from Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky’s staff: Peter Zavadovsky and Alexander Bezborodko. The latter, cleverest of the two, was so ugly and ungainly as to be somewhat fascinating. But Zavadovsky was methodical, cultured and good-looking. His pursued lips and humourless eyes suggested he was a sanctimonious plodder – the precise opposite of Potemkin, perhaps even antidote to him. During the many hours of drafting and during the tiresome journey back to St Petersburg, as they left grim Moscow at last, Catherine, Potemkin and Zavadovsky became an odd threesome.

We can imagine the scene in Catherine’s apartments: Potemkin, stretched out on a divan in a flowing dressing gown, a bandana round his head, no wig and tousled hair everywhere, chewing radishes and imitating courtiers, bubbles with ideas, jokes and tantrums, while Zavadovsky perches stiffly and patiently in his wig and uniform, writing at his desk, his eyes fixed with labrador devotion on the Empress…

Skip Notes

*1 There is another possible Moscow venue. During the nineteenth century, a Prince S. Golitsyn, a collector, used to invite visitors to his palace on Volkonsky Street, said to be one of the places where Catherine stayed in Moscow during 1775. He used to show them two icons supposedly given by Catherine to his chapel to celebrate her marriage there to Potemkin.

*2 Catherine granted Daria a house on Prestichenka where she lived until her death.