Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

16

THREE MARRIAGES AND A CROWN

Or midst a lovely little orchard

An arbour, where a fountain plays

A sweet-voiced harp within my hearing

My thoughts ensnares for divers pleasures,

First wearies and then awakens my blood;

Reclining on a velvet divan,

A maiden’s tender feelings coddling

I fill her youthful heart with love.

Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

Soon after the Austrian treaty was signed, Catherine put her consort’s plan into practice. She persuaded Prince Repnin, Panin’s nephew, to propose the Austrian trip to Paul, as if it came to from himself. Paul swallowed the bait and begged the Empress to let him go. After pretending to be reluctant, Catherine agreed – but she also worried about the inevitable blunders of her bitter, unstable son. ‘I dare to implore the indulgence of Your Imperial Majesty’, she asked Joseph, ‘for the…inexperience of youth.’ Joseph sent the invitation. Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were excited. They were even polite to Potemkin, who in his turn praised the Heir to everyone.¹

Panin had heard about this plan. ‘The old trickster’ no longer cared to conceal his sourness. He hurried back to Petersburg and stirred up Paul’s fears that the journey was a plot. Such trips could be dangerous for Russian princes: no one could forget that Peter the Great’s son Alexei was brought back from Vienna and tortured to death. All this was real to a tsarevich whose father had been murdered by his mother and who could trust few. Panin suggested that Berlin would be a better idea than Vienna – and then hinted that Paul would not only be excluded from the succession and possibly murdered but that his children would be taken from him. Paul became hysterical.

At Tsarskoe Selo next morning, Sunday, 13 September, the Grand Duke and Duchess, both in a state of panic, refused to travel. They partly blamed the need to remain with the children after their inoculation. Catherine brought in Doctors Rogerson and Dimsdale to reassure them. The Court was in uproar for three days and the diplomats analysed how the Heir was undermining the Austrian rapprochement, defying the Empress and her Prince. Potemkin was so ‘perplexed, irresolute and even despondent’ that he even considered letting Paul visit the wily fox of Berlin. Harris, who was with him in his apartments that Friday and believed the Austrian alliance gave Britain renewed hope, warned him that such weakness could bring him down. Potemkin paced up and down the room, ‘as in his manner’, without saying anything, and then bounded off to see the Empress. Catherine was no Peter the Great, but the refusal of Paul to obey her orders would have caused a serious succession crisis. The partners resolved to force Paul to go. When Potemkin rejoined Harris an hour later, everything was settled.

The departure was a little tragedy of the life of royal families, played out in front of the Court, Paul’s entourage, and scores of horses and serfs. On 19 September, the Heir, travelling incognito as Comte du Nord, and his wife kissed their children goodbye. The Grand Duchess fainted away and was actually carried unconscious to the carriage. The Grand Duke followed his wife with an expression of abject terror. The Empress and her big guns, Potemkin, Prince Orlov and the traitorous Count Panin, bid him goodbye. As he climbed grimly into the carriage, Paul whispered something to Panin, who did not answer.

The Heir pulled down the blinds and ordered the coachman to drive away fast. The next morning, Panin was dismissed.²

—

Serenissimus, savouring his political victory, was arranging the marriages of both of his single mistress–nieces, Sashenka and Katinka. On 10 November 1781, Katinka ‘the Venus’ – Ekaterina Engelhardt, with whom half the Court, including at various times both Catherine’s sons, Paul and Bobrinsky, were in love – married the sickly but rich Count Pavel Martynovich Skavronsky, in the Palace Chapel. Descended from the Livonian brother of Peter the Great’s wife, Catherine I, Skavronsky was a sublime eccentric. Brought up in Italy, which he regarded as home, he suited Potemkin because he was a tolerant buffoon obsessed with music – a melomaniac who composed and gave concerts though he had no talent for music whatsoever. His servants were forbidden to talk and could only communicate in recitative. He gave all his orders in music and his visitors made conversation in the form of vocal improvisations. His singing dinner parties, ornamented by the sleepy coquettish Katinka, must have been zany.³ Catherine had misgivings about Skavronsky’s ability to please a woman – ‘he’s a bit silly and clumsy’, she thought, adding that she only cared because it was an issue that was ‘close to us’, meaning she regarded Potemkin’s nieces as semi-family. The Prince disagreed – Skavronsky’s weakness and wealth suited him.⁴

Two days later, Sashenka married her uncle’s Polish ally, Grand Hetman (or Grand General) of the Polish Crown, Ksawery Branicki, aged forty-nine, a good-natured, self-made and ambitious ruffian who had made his career as King Stanislas-Augustus’ hard man. He was what Casanova called a dim but swashbuckling ‘Polish bravo’. Casanova duelled with Branicki in Warsaw for insulting his mistress, an Italian actress called La Binetti. Both were wounded – Branicki seriously – but became friends.⁵ When Ségur passed through Warsaw, Branicki appeared in his room in traditional Polish costume – red boots, brown robe, fur hat and sabre – and said, ‘Here are two companions for your journey,’ giving him two bejewelled pistols.⁶

Branicki had fallen out with the King of Poland and, seeing his future as a Russian ally, found a kindred spirit in Serenissimus. They first met in Petersburg in 1775 and Branicki had been currying favour ever since, working for Potemkin in Poland. On 27 March that year, he wrote to tell ‘my dear General’ that ‘Poland has chosen me’ to deliver the news that Potemkin had received the certificate of indigenat or Polish noble status, the first step in his long game to become either duke of Courland or king of Poland, his escape route should Catherine die.⁷ Branicki’s marriage to his niece was obviously designed to be Potemkin’s family bridgehead in Poland.⁸

The Empress supervised Alexandra’s wedding to the ‘Polish bravo’. The bride was taken to Catherine’s rooms that morning and ‘very richly dressed in some of the Empress’s jewels, put on by her own hands’. We have a description of a similar wedding of one of the Empress’s closest maids-of-honour, Lev Naryshkin’s daughter: ‘This lady’s dress was an Italian nightgown of a white silver tissue with hanging sleeves…and a very large hoop.’ The bride dined with the Empress. In church, the bride stood on ‘a piece of brocaded sea-green silk’. The couple held candles as crowns were held over their heads according to Orthodox tradition. They exchanged rings and the priest took a ‘piece of silk 2 or 3 yards long and tied their hands together’. Once the wedding was over there was a feast, after which the bride returned the Empress’s jewels and received 5,000 roubles.⁹

At almost the same time, the fourth sister, ‘hopeless’ Nadezhda who had married Colonel P.A. Ismailov less splendidly in 1779, lost her husband and then married an ally of Potemkin’s, Senator P.A. Shepilev. The last niece, Tatiana, married her distant cousin Lieutenant-General Mikhail Sergeievich Potemkin, who was twenty-five years older than her, in 1785. Serenissimus nicknamed him ‘Saint’ for his good nature, and their marriage was happy until his early death.¹⁰

—

While Varvara and Alexandra ended their liaisons with Potemkin, Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya, as we will now call her, seems to have remained his mistress. ‘Things are on the same footing between her and her uncle as they were,’ Cobenzl told Joseph II. ‘The husband who is very jealous does not approve but does not have the courage to prevent it.’ Even five years later, Skavronskaya was still ‘more beautiful than ever and the favourite Sultana-in-chief of the uncle’.¹¹

Potemkin had Skavronsky appointed ambassador to Naples in 1784, which delighted him because it let him inhabit the land of maestros. But Skavronskaya was not interested in Italian opera, and Potemkin, while he ran several other mistresses, enjoyed his placid niece and did not wish to part from her. Finally she did go, but did not stay long. The husband sent notes to Serenissimus that are masterpieces of pitiful sycophancy: ‘I cannot succeed in expressing all the joy and gratitude with which I read what you have deigned to write to me and how much I have been moved to see that you deign to grant me your kindness and memory which I have consecrated my life to deserve and on which I dare suggest that no one in the world could place a higher value.’ More than that, Skavronsky desperately wrote to beg Potemkin to help him avoid diplomatic faux pas. The Prince must have chuckled as he read these letters, though he liked the sculptures Skavronsky sent him from Italy.¹² Remarkably the Count fathered a family in between arias in Naples, including a daughter who was one day to be notorious in Europe.

Skavronsky always took care to tell the Prince that his wife longed to rejoin him in Russia, which was probably true, because the dreamy ‘angel’ missed her Motherland. While she was in Naples, she kept a ‘woman slave’ under her bed who helped her get to sleep by ‘telling her the same story every night’. By day she was ‘perpetually idle’, her conversation was ‘as vacuous as you could imagine’, but she could not help but flirt.¹³ She became Naples’s leading coquette, high praise in a city that was soon to experience the wiles of Emma, Lady Hamilton. But when Potemkin’s successes gave him the chance to woo Europe, Katinka hurried back to share his limelight.

—

Countess Alexandra Branicka remained not just Potemkin’s confidante and his Polish agent of influence, but Catherine’s closest friend. While her spendthrift husband did his best to lose their fortune, she increased it prodigiously, which led to arguments with her uncle – but they were always reconciled.¹⁴ For the rest of her life she was often with Potemkin and the Empress – though she lived on her Polish and Belorussian estates. Her almost illegible letters to him are very affectionate: ‘My father, my life, I feel so sad to be so faraway…I ask you one mercy – don’t forget me, love me for ever, nobody loves you like me. My God, I’ll be happy when I’ve seen you.’¹⁵ She was widely respected. Contemporaries emphasized her good morals, ‘remaining a model of faithfulness all her life’,¹⁶ something remarkable in those days, especially when she was married to an older Lothario. They had a large family. Perhaps she fell in love with Branicki’s endearing roughness.

This troika of marriages sparked rows with the Empress about the medals and money bestowed on his family – ‘600,000 roubles, money, the Order of St Catherine for the future Grande Genérale [Alexandra] and the portrait [of the Empress] for the Princess Golitsyn [Varvara]’. Potemkin expected his nieces to be endowed by the state – were they not Catherine’s extended family? He got his way after weeks of rows. He certainly believed in caring for his own.

—

Paul left Tsarskoe Selo harbouring a visceral hatred for Serenissimus. Yet, like a monarch more than a minister, Potemkin tried to preserve a balance among the Court factions and foreign powers. In November, he talked to Harris about restoring Panin to a degree of power, presumably to balance him against the rising Bezborodko.¹⁷ One of his best features – and one lacking in many politicians, even democratic ones – was the absence of vindictiveness. Perhaps he simply did not want to see Panin humiliated any more. In any case, Potemkin’s triumph had broken Panin: he fell ill in October.

Similarly, by early 1782, the confused Cobenzl was telling Joseph that Potemkin was leaning back towards Prussia. Both Cobenzl and Harris concluded their reports by confessing that they were unable to fathom the motives for Potemkin’s manoeuvres, but the Prince, while favouring Austria, continued to steer a middle passage between these two German monarchies for the rest of his life.¹⁸

In Vienna, Paul appalled his hosts, particularly after Joseph confided the secret of the Austrian alliance. The Habsburg saw that the ‘feebleness and pusillanimity of the Grand Duke joined to falseness’ were unlikely to make this angry snub-nosed paranoid into a successful autocrat. Paul spent six weeks in Austria, where he lectured Joseph about his loathing for Potemkin. When he arrived in the Habsburg lands in Italy, he ranted to Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph’s brother, about his mother’s Court and denounced the Greek Project and the Austrian alliance. Catherine’s plans ‘for aggrandizing herself at the expense of the Turks and refounding the empire of Constantinople’ were ‘useless’. Austria had obviously bribed that traitor Potemkin. When he came to the throne, Paul would arrest him and clap him in prison!¹⁹ The Habsburg brothers were surely relieved when the Comte du Nord departed for Paris.

The Prince could insure himself against Paul only by changing the succession or by establishing a base outside Russia. He therefore pursued a different plan to discredit Paul once and for all – and possibly later remove him from the succession, leaving the throne to his son Alexander. When Potemkin heard that Paul’s suite included Prince Alexander Kurakin, another Prussophile enemy and Panin’s nephew, he asked the Austrians, via Cobenzl, to let him see the Cabinet Noir intercepts of Paul’s post. The Austrian secret services passed on to Potemkin what they gleaned from Paul’s contacts with Panin. The Prince was sure that he would catch Kurakin spying for the Prussians and therefore taint Tsarevich Paul.²⁰

Nikita Panin, ill as he was, knew that Kurakin’s post would be opened, so he arranged for Paul to keep in contact with his supporters at home via a third party, Pavel Bibikov, son of the general. The letter that was opened in early 1782 from Bibikov to Kurakin was a bombshell that, more than the Saldern Plot, ensured Paul’s exclusion from power for the rest of Catherine’s life. Bibikov described Catherine’s rule as ‘the horrible situation in the Motherland’ and criticized Potemkin, ‘Cyclops par excellence’ and ‘le borgne’, for ruining the army. ‘If he breaks his neck’, everything would return to its ‘natural order’.

Catherine was alarmed and angry. Bibikov was immediately arrested. Catherine personally wrote out the questions for his interrogation by Sheshkovsky. Bibikov’s excuse was that he was just unhappy at his regiment being stationed in the south. Catherine sent the results to the Prince, while ordering Bibikov tried in the Senate’s Secret Expedition. The trial in camera found him guilty of treason and, under military law, of defaming his commander, Potemkin, and sentenced him to death.

The Prince’s decency came into play. Even though Paul’s circle had actually discussed breaking his neck, Potemkin asked Catherine for mercy on 15 April 1782: ‘Even if virtue produces jealousy, it’s nothing still compared to all the good it grants to those who serve it…You have probably pardoned him already…He’ll probably overcome his dissolute inclinations and become a worthy subject of Your Majesty and I will add this grace to your other favours to me.’ Admitting he was terrified of Potemkin’s vengeance, Bibikov wept under interrogation. He offered to apologize publicly.

‘He shouldn’t be afraid of my vengeance,’ Potemkin wrote to Catherine, ‘in so far as, among the abilities granted to me by God, that inclination is missing. I don’t even want the triumph of a public apology…He’ll never find any example of my vengeance, to anybody, in my entire life.’²¹ This was true – but, more than that, it displayed the statesman’s measured moderation: he never pushed things too far and therefore never provoked an unwanted reaction.

Bibikov and Kurakin, recalled from Paul’s suite in Paris, were exiled to the south. When the Heir returned to Petersburg at the end of the journey, his influence was broken, his allies scattered. Even his mother disdained her tiresome, unbalanced son and his wife as ‘Die schwere Bagage’ – the heavy luggage.²² ‘Prince Potemkin is happier’, Cobenzl told Joseph, ‘than I’ve ever seen him.’²³

—

The secret Austrian treaty was soon tested – in the Crimea, the key to the Black Sea, the last Tartar stronghold and the nub of Potemkin’s policy of southern expansionism. In May, the Prince headed beyond to Moscow ‘for a short trip’, visiting some estates. While he was on the road, the Turks again backed a Crimean rebellion against Catherine’s puppet Khan, Shagin Giray, who was driven out once more, along with the Russian resident. The Khanate dissolved into anarchy.

The Empress sent a courier after the Prince. ‘My dear friend, come back as soon as possible,’ she wrote on 3 June 1782, adding wearily that they would have to honour their promise to reinstate the Khan – even though it was the third time they had done so. She told Potemkin the news that the British Admiral Rodney had defeated Admiral Joseph de Grasse’s French fleet at the Battle of the Saints in the Caribbean on 1/12 April, which slightly alleviated Britain’s plight as America won its freedom. In the Crimea, she realized that her policy of propping up Shagin Giray was obsolete but the delicate question of what to do depended on the Powers of Europe – and Potemkin. ‘We could decide it all in half an hour together,’ she told her consort, ‘but now I don’t know where to find you. I ask you to hurry with your arrival because nothing scares me more than to miss something or be wrong.’ Never was their partnership, and his equality, more clearly stated.²⁴

The Prince saw the Crimean tumult as a historic opportunity, because Britain and France remained distracted by war. He galloped back and almost bounded into town. He immediately sent this playfully Puckish letter to Sir James Harris in French, scrawled in his scratchy hand: ‘Vive la Grande Bretagne et Rodney; je viens d’arriver, mon cher Harris; devinez qui vous écrit and venez me voir tout de suite.’^*

Harris rushed through Tsarskoe Selo at midnight to visit ‘this extraordinary man who’, he told the new Foreign Secretary, his close friend Charles James Fox, ‘every day affords me new matter of amazement’. Sir James found Potemkin in a state of almost febrile ebullience. Serenissimus insisted on talking throughout the night, even though he had just finished ‘a journey of 3000 versts, which he had performed in 16 days, during which period he had slept only three times and, besides visiting several estates and every church he came near, he had been exposed to all the delays and tedious ceremonies of the military and civil honours which the Empress had ordered should be bestowed on him…yet he does not bear the smallest appearance of fatigue…and on our separation, I was certainly the more exhausted of the two’.²⁵

The reunited Prince and Empress resolved to reinstate Shagin Giray as Crimean khan but also to invoke the Austrian treaty in case it led to war with the Sublime Porte. Joseph replied so enthusiastically to ‘my Empress, my friend, my ally, my heroine’,²⁶ that, while Potemkin organized the Russian military response to the Crimean crisis, Catherine took the opportunity to turn their Greek Project from a chimera into a policy. On 10 September 1782, Catherine proposed the Project to Joseph, who was shocked by its impracticality yet impressed by its vision. First, Catherine wanted to re-establish ‘the ancient Greek monarchy on the ruins…of the barbarian government that rules there now’ for ‘the younger of my grandsons, Grand Duke Constantine’. Then she wanted to create the Kingdom of Dacia, the Roman province that covered today’s Rumania, ‘a state independent of the three monarchies…under a Sovereign of Christian religion…and a person of loyalty on which the two Imperial Courts can rely…’. Cobenzl’s letters make clear Dacia was specifically understood to be Potemkin’s kingdom.

Joseph’s reply was equally sweeping: he agreed to the Project in principle. In return he wanted the fortress of Khotin, part of Wallachia, and Belgrade. Venice would cede Istria and Dalmatia to him and get Morea, Cyprus and Crete in return. All this, he added, was impossible without French help – could France have Egypt? Only war and negotiation could decide the details – but he did not reject it.²⁷

Did Potemkin really believe that there would be a reborn Byzantine Empire ruled by Constantine, with himself as king of Dacia? The idea thrilled him, but he was always the master of the possible. The Dacian idea was realized in the creation of Rumania in the mid-nineteenth century, and Potemkin certainly planned to make that real. But he did not lose his head about it.²⁸ During 1785 he discussed the Turks with the French Ambassador Ségur and claimed that he could take Istanbul, but insisted that the new Byzantium was just a ‘chimera’. It was all ‘nonsense’, he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ But then he mischievously suggested that three or four Powers could drive the Turks into Asia and deliver Egypt, the Archipelago, Greece, all Europe from the Ottoman yoke. Many years later Potemkin asked his reader, who was declaiming Plutarch, if he could go to Constantinople. The reader tactfully replied it was quite possible. ‘That is enough,’ exclaimed Potemkin, ‘if anyone should tell me I could not go thither, I would shoot myself in the head.’²⁹ He was always flexible – it was he who suggested in September 1788 that Constantine could be made king of Sweden, a long way from Tsargrad.³⁰ So he wished it to serve its strategic purpose and to be as real as he could make it.

Catherine the Great herself settles any argument about Potemkin’s contribution to the Austrian alliance and the Greek Project. ‘The system with Vienna’s court’, she wrote later, ‘is your achievement.’³¹

—

On 7 August 1782, the Empress and Serenissimus attended the unveiling of Falconet’s mammoth statue of Peter the Great – the Bronze Horseman – that still stands in Senate Square in Petersburg. It was a statement in stone of their ambitions to emulate the achievements of Peter, who had succeeded so brilliantly in the Baltic but failed in the south.

The Prince ordered his nephew, Major-General Samoilov, to begin preparatory action to restore order in the Crimea, but he decided to go south himself and conduct the main part. This trip marks the end of the domestic era of Potemkin and Catherine’s partnership and the beginning of his time of colossal achievement. From now on, Catherine understood that they were to be apart as much as they were together. This was his path to greatness and contentment, although, as she sweetly admitted to him while he was far away, ‘My dear master, I dislike it so much when you are not here by my side.’ On 1 September 1782, the Prince left St Petersburg to subdue the Crimea.³²

Skip Notes

* ‘Long live Great Britain and Rodney. I have just arrived, my dear Harris. Guess who is writing to you and come and see me immediately!’