Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

21

THE WHITE NEGRO

Besides the Empress sometimes liked a boy

And had just buried the fair faced Lanskoi

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 47

On 25 June 1784, Lieutenant-General Alexander Lanskoy, Catherine’s twenty-six-year-old favourite, died at Tsarskoe Selo with the Empress beside him. His illness was sudden: he had come down with a sore throat less than a week earlier. Lanskoy seemed to know he was going to die – though Catherine tried to dissuade him – and he did so with the quiet dignity he had brought to his awkward position.¹ Yet the most malicious rumours were soon abroad about his demise: he had died ‘in place’ with Catherine, he had ruined his fragile health by taking dangerous aphrodisiacs to satisfy his nymphomaniacal old mistress. As he died, it was claimed he ‘quite literally burst – his belly burst’. Soon after death, ‘his legs dropped off. The stench was also insufferable. Those who gave him his coffin…died.’ These were rumours of poisoning: had Potemkin, already blamed for bringing on Prince Orlov’s madness by slow poison, killed another rival? Judging by Catherine’s tragic account to Grimm and other witnesses, Lanskoy probably died of diphtheria. Thanks to the baking summer and the delay before Catherine could bear to bury him, the stench is only too believable. The innards of unburied corpses do tend to swell in the heat.²

The Empress collapsed in a paroxysm of overpowering grief. Her courtiers had never seen her in such a state. The imperial body-physician Rogerson and minister Bezborodko, gambling and drinking partners, consulted, no doubt in the quick whispers that must have been the background music of Court crises. Rogerson let loose his often fatal laxatives and bleeding, but both men sensed an emotional prescription would heal her better.^*1 The Empress naturally thought of her ‘husband’, her ‘dearest friend’. In her desperate unhappiness, she kept asking touchingly if Potemkin had been told. Rogerson informed Bezborodko that it was ‘most necessary’ to try to calm the Empress’s sorrow and anxiety: ‘And we know there is just one way to achieve this – the soonest arrival of His Highness.’ As soon as Lanskoy was dead, Bezborodko despatched the Court’s fastest courier southwards. Catherine inquired like a child if the Prince could be expected soon. Yes, they surely replied, the Prince is on his way.³

The courier found Serenissimus, accompanied by Samuel Bentham, at Kremenchuk in the midst of arranging the foundation of Sebastopol and the management of Krichev. The Prince left immediately. Two indivisible sentiments, as always, dominated his actions: his beloved friend needed him and his power depended on it. Potemkin prided himself on being the swiftest traveller across Russia. If the couriers usually took ten days, Potemkin made it back in seven. On 10 July, he arrived at Tsarskoe Selo.

As Potemkin galloped across the steppes, Catherine had to face the tragic loss of the favourite who had made her happiest. ‘Cheerful, honest and gentle’ Lanskoy was her beloved pupil, with whom she let her maternal, pedagogic instincts run free, and he had truly become part of the Catherine–Potemkin family. He was strikingly handsome – his portraits show his refined, gamin features. Catherine thought she had found her Holy Grail – a companion for the rest of her life. ‘I hope,’ she told Grimm just ten days before Lanskoy’s sore throat, ‘that he’ll become the support of my old age.’⁴

Potemkin found the Court paralysed by the prone Empress, haunted by the unburied and decomposing Lanskoy, and infected by a plague of vicious, sniggering lies. Catherine herself was inconsolable. ‘I have been plunged into the most acute sorrow and my happiness is no more,’ she told Grimm. Lanskoy ‘shared my pains and rejoiced in my joys’.⁵ The nobles in both St Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo became worried by Catherine’s emotional collapse. Weeks after the death, courtiers reported that ‘the Empress is as afflicted as the first day of M. Lanskoy’s death’. Catherine was almost mad with grief, continually asking about her lover’s body, perhaps hoping his death would prove a lie. She did not leave her bed for three weeks. When she finally got up, she did not go out. No one saw her for months. There was no entertainment, Court was ‘extremely sad’. Catherine became ill. Dr Rogerson bled her and prescribed his usual panaceas, which no doubt explained her wind and weakness. At first, only Potemkin and Bezborodko saw her at all. Later Fyodor Orlov, gentlest of the brothers, called in the evenings. The Prince comforted Catherine by sharing her mourning: it was said the courtiers heard Potemkin and Catherine ‘howling’ together for the dead favourite.

Catherine felt no one could imagine her suffering. Initially, even Potemkin’s sympathy hurt her, but finally his care managed to guide her through the misery and ‘thus he awakened us from the sleep of the dead’.⁶ He was there with her, every morning and every night: he must have almost lived with her for those weeks.⁷ Probably this was one of those crises, as Count Cobenzl told Joseph II, when Potemkin returned to his old role as husband and lover.⁸ Their relationship defies the form of modern customs but was closest to the Gallic amité amoureuse. This was not necessarily a time for love-making, but very much for loving. These were the moments when Potemkin achieved ‘unbounded power’, as he once told Harris:⁹ ‘When things go smoothly, my influence is small but when she meets with rubs, she always wants me and then my influence becomes as great as ever.’¹⁰

Gradually Catherine improved: Lanskoy was buried near Tsarskoe Selo in her absence more than a month after his death. Catherine left her summer residence on 5 September, saying she could never return. When she reached the capital, she could not bear to stay in her own apartments, with all their memories of Lanskoy, so she moved into her Hermitage. For almost a year after Lanskoy’s death, there was no favourite. Catherine was mourning. Potemkin was with her: in a sense, they were reunited for a while. There was relief when the Empress finally emerged in public: she went to church three days later. This was the first time the Court had seen her for two and a half months.

Potemkin had to return to the south to finish his projects there: he left in January 1785. Even at such a distance, he acted as her comfort. Some of their letters, which probably date from these months, approach the chivalry and playfulness, but not the frantic passion and guffawing laughter, of their affair ten years earlier. There was an autumnal tone to this resurgence of romance as if both felt older. First he sent her a snuff-box and she thanked him for the beautiful thing ‘with my whole heart’. Then he sent her a dress made with silk from his southern factories and romantically invited her down the road, ‘bespread with silk’, to the south.¹¹

Serenissimus returned at the beginning of the summer of 1785, when Catherine was on form again. The two old lovers played their familiar games. ‘I’m now on my way to confession. Forgive me, Lady Matushka, for all my sins – either deliberate or unconscious,’ wrote Potemkin in old Southern Slavonic script. The Prince had done something mischievous. Catherine replied: ‘I equally ask you to forgive me and God bless you. The rest of the aforementioned, I can figure it out all right but I understand nothing or very little. I laughed a lot when I read it.’¹² That was Potemkin: often incomprehensible but always stimulating. Laughter was very much part of her therapy. But she missed his company during his six months in the south.

Catherine’s habit of making the favourite into a semi-official position meant that the Court was now so used to it that the courtiers expected the place to be filled. This may have put a strange pressure on her to find someone. A year after Lanskoy’s death, Potemkin understood that she, who could not be ‘without love for a single hour’, needed more permanent love than he could give. If Potemkin was to achieve glory in the Empire, he needed someone to take care of Catherine. When Catherine went to church at this time, young men preened and stood erect in their best uniforms, hoping to be noticed as she passed.¹³ Catherine always found it hard to concentrate in church – as Casanova spotted. This was a distasteful but understandable scene. The men’s posing makes clear that candidates for favourite were not fixed by Potemkin, as malicious gossip claimed – they were simply noticed around Court, though a clever patron would place them in the Empress’s path.¹⁴ Nonetheless the hunt was on. The disappearance of Lanskoy marked the beginning of the apogee of Catherine’s splendour but also of her slide towards indignity. Her loves were never so equal again.

Once Serenissimus was back in the capital, the Empress did notice some of the Guards officers on duty. There was Prince Pavel Dashkov, Bentham’s Edinburgh-educated friend and son of Princess Dashkova, and two Guardsmen – Alexander Petrovich Yermolov, and Alexander Matveevich Dmitriyev-Mamonov, who was Potemkin’s distant cousin. All three served on the Prince’s staff. This now became something like an imperial beauty contest, in which the prize would be announced at a masquerade ball.

Catherine had had a soft spot for Dashkov for some time. She regularly inquired about his ‘excellent heart’.¹⁵ Five years earlier, Prince Orlov had bumped into Princess Dashkova travelling with her son in Brussels – two semi-exiled Russian magnates. Orlov had teased the self-regarding Princess by suggesting to the boy that he could become favourite. As soon as her son was out of the room, Dashkova subjected Orlov to a prudish tongue-lashing: how dare he speak to a seventeen-year-old boy of such disgusting matters? ‘As for favourites,’ she concluded, ‘I bade him recollect that I neither knew nor acknowledged such persons…’. Orlov’s obscene reply to this grandiosity was ‘unworthy of repetition’ – but much deserved.¹⁶ Now Orlov was dead, Princess Dashkova had returned from years of travelling and Dashkov was twenty-three.

It is hard to avoid the impression that Princess Dashkova, while regarding favouritism with ill-concealed disdain, could not overcome her ambition for her son to fill that position. Potemkin still made the Empress laugh with his mimicry of top courtiers – but his impersonation of Dashkova’s pomposity was his star turn and Catherine often requested it specially. So Serenissimus must have particularly relished hoisting this humbug by her own extremely grand petard.¹⁷

Princess Dashkova called on Potemkin and was most charming. Potemkin evidently encouraged the Princess in her ambitions and mischievously gave her reasons to hope that the Dashkov family was about to be honoured. Between such discussions, Potemkin probably bounded along to Catherine’s apartments to give wicked impersonations of the Princess, to gales of imperial laughter. Unbeknown to Dashkova, Catherine was flirting with Yermolov and Mamonov, who were also handsome – but lacked the grisly mother. All had high hopes that their candidate would be chosen, though Potemkin apparently had no preference.

Princess Dashkova, revelling in her resurgent favour, claimed in her Memoirs that Potemkin sent round his nephew Samoilov at the ‘lover’s hour’ after dinner, ‘to inquire whether Prince Dashkov was at home’. He was not. So Samoilov left a message that Potemkin wished to see him at his house as soon as possible. The Princess, writing years later, claimed that Potemkin was offering her son the disgusting post of favourite, which she denounced to Samoilov thus: ‘While I love the Empress and dare not oppose her will, I have too much self-respect…to take part in any affair of such a nature.’ If her son did become favourite, she added, the only use she would make of her influence would be to ask for a passport to go abroad.

This dubious anecdote has spawned the myth that Potemkin sent youths over to Catherine at the ‘lover’s hour’. Since Dashkov was Potemkin’s adjutant, there was nothing sordid in such a summons. It is far more likely that Potemkin was teasing the Princess. No doubt her answer was immediately repeated in his ‘Dashkova-voice’ to Catherine.¹⁸

Serenissimus held a masquerade at his Anichkov Palace – he never lived in this colossal residence,^*2 on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka, but he kept his library there and used it for entertaining. He ordered his architect Starov to construct a third floor and alter the façade to add more of his beloved Doric columns. When Potemkin was low on funds, he repaid his debts to his merchant friend Nikita Shemiakin with the Anichkov. But Catherine repurchased it for him. This trading of palaces for debts happened periodically and the Empress always obliged.¹⁹

Two thousand people arrived all evening in costumes and dominoes. He arranged the orchestra, in the Anichkov’s huge oval gallery, around a richly decorated pyramid. Over 100 musicians, conducted by Rosetti, played horns and accompanied a choir. The star of the orchestra was a ‘silk-clad blackamoor playing a kettle drum’ atop the pyramid. A curtain divided the room. Couples danced the quadrille: the courtiers watched Prince Dashkov partner a teenage girl named Princess Ekaterina Bariatinskaya, an outstanding beauty, who was coming out for the first time. She was to be one of Potemkin’s last mistresses.

When the Empress arrived with Grand Duke Paul, everyone watched to see if any of the three young men would be favoured. Lev Engelhardt, who kept a graphic account of the evening, noticed Yermolov. Potemkin had ordered his staff to wear light cavalry uniforms, but Yermolov was dressed as a Dragoon, flouting the Prince’s command. Engelhardt rushed to warn him to go home and change. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied Yermolov confidently. ‘But thanks all the same.’ This daring arrogance puzzled Engelhardt.

Princess Dashkova buttonholed Potemkin: together they admired the athletic figure of her son, but then she pushed her luck either by presuming her son had been selected or by asking the Prince to propose another of her family. Potemkin turned to her sarcastically in front of everybody. There is no vacancy, he said. The post has just been filled by Lieutenant Yermolov. Who, stammered the humiliated Princess, who?

Potemkin abandoned her, took Yermolov by the hand and walked off into the crowd with him ‘as if he was some high nobleman’. The Prince led Yermolov up to the table where the Empress was playing whist and deposited him, as it were, just four steps behind her chair, ahead of the senior courtiers. At that moment, everyone, even Dashkova, realized the Empress had taken a new favourite. The curtain was drawn to reveal the resplendently set table. Empress, Grand Duke and the courtiers sat at a special round table while forty others were laid out for the rest. The ball went on until three.²⁰

The next morning, eleven months after the death of the much mourned Lanskoy, Yermolov moved into his old apartment in the Winter Palace and was nominated adjutant-general to the Empress. He was thirty-one years old, tall, blond, with almond-shaped eyes and a flat nose – Potemkin nicknamed him the ‘white negro’. He was neither as decent nor as pretty as Lanskoy, nor as clever as Zavadovsky: ‘he’s a good bo’, noted Cobenzl, ‘but quite limited’. Soon promoted to major-general and decorated with the Order of the White Eagle, Yermolov was the nephew of one of Potemkin’s friends, Levashov, but equally friendly with Bezborodko. Probably Potemkin was relieved that Catherine had found someone acceptable after that mournful year. Though the simpler historians have repeated Potemkin’s jealousy of each favourite, shrewder observers like Cobenzl understood that he was pleased that Yermolov would prevent the Empress ‘from falling into melancholy’ and would stimulate her ‘natural gaiety’.²¹

The ascension of Yermolov placed Potemkin at the height of his power. When the Prince was ill a few days later. Catherine ‘went to see him, forced him to take medicine and took infinite care of his health’.²² But at last Potemkin’s position was unchallenged. Court was harmonious. The Prince could return to running his provinces and armies because Catherine the woman was happily settled.

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Catherine’s Court had reached a height of extravagance and splendour in the mid-1780s: ‘a great display of magnificence and state with the great taste and charm of the Court of France’, wrote Comte de Damas. ‘The splendour of the ceremonial was enhanced by Asiatic luxury.’²³ Catherine and Potemkin both enjoyed holding masquerades, fêtes and balls at vast expense: the Empress herself had a taste for transvestite balls. ‘I’ve just had a pleasant idea,’ she wrote, earlier in her reign, ‘we must hold a ball in the Hermitage…we must tell the ladies to come less dressed and without paniers and grande parure on their heads…French comedians will make market stalls and they will sell on credit women’s clothes to men and men’s clothes to women…’.²⁴ This was perhaps because the plump Empress knew that she cut a fine figure in male attire.

If one was to meet the Empress of all the Russians at the Court ball during the 1780s, one might find her ‘dressed in a purple tissue petticoat and long white tissue sleeves down the wrist and the body open…of a very elegant dress’, sitting ‘in a large elbow chair covered with crimson velvet and richly ornamented’, surrounded by standing courtiers. The sleeves, skirt and body of the dress were often of different colours. Catherine now always wore these long old Russian gowns with long sleeves. They concealed her corpulence, but they were also much more comfortable than corsets and paniers. Princess Dashkova and Countess Branicka copied her in this dress, but Baroness Dimsdale noted that the other ladies ‘wore [it] very much in the French fashion’ – though ‘French gauzes and flowers were never’, decreed Lady Craven, ‘intended for Russian beauties’. There were card tables all round; everyone played whist while the Empress toured the room, graciously insisting that no one should stand – which of course they did.²⁵

The Court moved between the Winter and Summer Palaces in St Petersburg during the winter. It followed the same weekly programme – the big gatherings in the Hermitage on Sundays with all the diplomats; Mondays, the ball at the Grand Duke’s and so on. When Potemkin was in the capital, he usually spent his Thursday evenings wandering in and out of the Empress’s Little Hermitage, where she continued to relax with her lover Yermolov and close friends like Naryshkin and Branicka. Conversation there was private. No servants eavesdropped. At dinner, the guests ordered their food by writing on little slates with a pencil, placing them in the midst of the special mechanical table and sending them down on a dumb waiter, whence came their meals a little later.²⁶

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During the summer months, the entire Court travelled the twenty or so miles out to the imperial resorts near by. Catherine loved Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, but the Court’s main home at that time of year was Tsarskoe Selo, where Catherine usually stayed in Elisabeth’s Baroque wedding cake, the Catherine Palace, named after the Empress Elisabeth’s mother, Peter the Great’s peasant-born Empress.

‘The place is a magnificent building,’ wrote Baroness Dimsdale, ‘the brick edifice stuccoed while…outside pillars all gilded.’ Inside, some rooms were simply ‘superb’; one in Chinese taste struck her, but she would ‘never forget’ the little suite ‘like an enchanted palace’ with ‘its sides inlaid with foil red and green so it dazzles one’s eyes’. The tapestries in the Lyons room were supposed to have cost 201,250 roubles. Catherine had had the whole place redesigned by her Scottish architect Charles Cameron, and the gardens were of course English, laid out by Mr Bush, with lawns, gravel walks, follies and woods – and a very large lake in the middle. Cameron’s Gallery was like an ancient temple, hanging in the light on top of its pillars, giving an impression of lightness and space. Inside was Catherine’s gallery of busts including Demosthenes and Plato. The park was filled with monuments and follies to Russia’s victories, so that this magical vista was not unlike an imperial version of a Disney theme park, the theme in this case being the aggrandizement of Empress and Empire. There was the Chesme Column, designed by Antonio Rinaldi, rising with impressive dignity out of an island amid the Great Pond, and the Rumiantsev Column dedicated to the Battle of Kagul. There were Siberian, Turkish and Chinese Bridges, a Chinese village, a Ruined Tower, a pyramid and a mausoleum to three of her English greyhounds, engraved: ‘Here lies Zemira and the mourning graces ought to throw flowers on her grave. Like Tom, her forefather, and Lady, her mother, she was constant in her loyalties and had only one failing, she was a little short-tempered…’. Not far away was the mausoleum of Lanskoy. There were even fairground games like the Flying Mountain – a sort of big dipper.²⁷

The Empress rose early there and walked with her greyhounds in her long coat, leather shoes and bonnet, as shown in Borovikovsky’s painting and described in Pushkin’s novella, The Captain’s Daughter. Later in the day, there might be military parades. While Baroness Dimsdale was there, Catherine stood on the balcony to review Potemkin leading her Guards.

The Prince had his own houses around Tsarskoe Selo, and the Empress often stayed in them too. Sometimes they built their palaces next door to each other – for example, she constructed Pella next to his Ostrovky so they could easily visit one another. As he based himself in his apartments within the imperial palaces, his many residences were mere caravanserai for this itinerant sultan – but he was constantly acquiring more, building and rebuilding them on a whim or to follow English fashions. The first was the little palace at Eschenbaum on the Finnish coast, ‘given to my Prince Potemkin’ in 1777, where Catherine stayed when she began her affair with Korsakov. ‘What a view from each window,’ she exclaimed to Grimm. ‘I can see two lakes from mine, three manticules, a field and a wood.’²⁸ This was probably where Harris stayed with Potemkin’s family. He had another residence on the Peterhof road,^*3 which he bought in 1779: Starov knocked down a Baroque palace there and rebuilt it in neo-Classical style.

However, in the 1780s, Potemkin fell in love with the neo-Gothic style typified in Britain by Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. So Starov rebuilt two of his palaces as neo-Gothic castles, Ozerki and Ostrovky^*4. Ostrovky had towers and spires, arches and battlements. Only one of the Prince’s Gothic castles survives: he owned a large estate in Bablovsky woods adjoining Tsarskoe Selo. In 1782–5, he commissioned Ilya Neyelov (just back from viewing the stately homes of England) to create his own Strawberry Hill. Bablovo^*5 was a picturesque, asymmetrical palace with Gothic turrets, towers, arches and arched windows: its two wings extend out from a central circular medieval tower. Through the woods, it looks today like a cross between a ruined church and a magical castle.²⁹

When it was time for the Court to return to Petersburg, a flunky in a scarlet-trimmed uniform with gold fringe placed a little stool of crimson velvet for the Empress to step into a coach pulled by ten horses. Fifteen coaches followed in its wake. For every one of these journeys, the cavalcade included more than 800 horses. A hundred cannons were fired, trumpets played and crowds cheered. There were palaces on the road to Petersburg where the Empress could rest on the way.³⁰

It was more than ten years since Potemkin and Catherine had fallen in love: Catherine was fifty-seven years old. Everyone in her presence, wrote Damas, was struck by ‘the dignity and stateliness of her bearing and the kindness and gentleness of her expression’.³¹ Bentham thought ‘her eyes the finest imaginable and her person altogether comely’.³² Her blue eyes and formidably mannish forehead were as striking as ever, but she was small, increasingly fat and constantly tormented by indigestion.³³

Her attitude to power remained the same mixture of ruthless aggrandizement and raison d’état combined with a shrewd and utterly disingenuous modesty. When Ligne and Grimm started spreading the name ‘Catherine the Great’ round the salons, she affected her customary humility: ‘Please don’t call me the sobriquet Catherine the Great because (i) I don’t like any nickname (ii) my name is Catherine II and I don’t want people to say of me like Louis XV that they thought me wrongly named…’³⁴ (Louis was not very Bien-Aimé by his death.) Her sole weakness remained her eternal and endearing quest for love. ‘It would be better if she had only these loves for the physicality,’ wrote a French diplomat, ‘but it’s rare thing among older people and when their imagination is not dead, they make a hundred times more a fool of themselves than a young man.’ From now on, she began to make a fool of herself, as much as an Autocratrix could.

Potemkin knew exactly how to handle her, and she him. By the mid-1780s their relationship depended as much on being apart as being together. The Prince knew ‘that it was never in the Empress’s vicinity that his power was greatest since then he had to share it with her’, explained Damas. ‘This was why he latterly preferred to be away from her. When he was at a distance, all details of administration and military affairs were in his hands.’³⁵ Potemkin respected her ‘excessive penetration’ and ability to spot any inconsistencies in arguments, but he also followed the Disraelian dictum about handling royalty with trowels of flattery. ‘Flatter as much as you can,’ he advised Harris, ‘you cannot have too much unction but flatter her for what she ought to be not for what she is.’ He also disloyally criticised her timidity and femininity: ‘talk to her passions, to her feelings…she asks for nothing but praise and compliment, give her that and she will give you the whole force of her Empire’.³⁶ But this was Potemkin playing a role with Harris, perhaps prearranged with Catherine. If flattery had been the key, Harris would have been more successful, and Potemkin less so, because the Prince and the Empress were constantly arguing among themselves.

When he wrote to her, he revealingly called her his ‘kormilitsa’, his nurse or foster-mother; she still called him ‘gosudar’ – ‘lord’ – or used a nickname, but she saw the two of them as Pylades and Orestes, the David and Jonathan of mythology. She behaved as both empress and wife to Potemkin: when he was away she darned his elbows on his jackets like a Hausfrau, sent him endless coats and told him to take his medicines like a child.³⁷ Politically, she regarded him as the essential man of business of her government, her friend – the consort. She constantly told him that ‘without you I feel as if I’m without hands’, or just begged him to come back to Petersburg to see her. Often she wished he was with her, not in the south, so that they could settle complex matters in ‘half an hour’. Her admiration for his inventiveness, intelligence and energy are plain in their letters, and she frequently worries she will do something wrong without him: ‘I find myself at a loss as I never am myself when I am with you. I keep fearing I’ve missed something.’³⁸ Their ‘two minds’ were ever ‘better than one’. She thought he was ‘cleverer than I am, everything he’s done has been carefully thought out’.³⁹ He could not force her to do things she did not wish to, but they had their own way of coaxing and arguing through problems until they found a solution. Personally, ‘he is the only man that the Empress stands in awe of, and she both likes, and fears him.’⁴⁰

She was tolerant of his debauched lifestyle, indulgent of his idiosyncrasies and knew well that he was almost an emperor. ‘Prince Potemkin has retired to his place at eleven in the evening under the pretext of going to bed,’ she told Grimm on 30 June 1785 from Peterhof, where she stayed with her new lover Yermolov, ‘though one knew perfectly well that he is putting together a party of the night’ to look at maps and decide state business. ‘One’s even heard him named more than a king.’⁴¹ She was under no illusions about his unpopularity among some high nobility – but she seemed secretly pleased when her valet told her he was hated by everyone except her.⁴² His disdain for popularity attracted her and his ultimate dependence on her soothed her fear of his power. Indeed she liked to say, ‘Even if the whole of Russia rose against the Prince, I’d be with him.’⁴³

When he returned to Petersburg from his trips, he often facilitated her business: Catherine decided that she wished to appoint her tedious co-conspirator, Princess Dashkova, director of the Academy of Sciences. The Princess wrote a letter refusing the job, which she felt was beyond her, and went off to Potemkin’s house to explain her refusal, but Potemkin interrupted, ‘I have already it from Her Majesty.’ Serenissimus read Dashkova’s letter and then ‘tore it to pieces’ in front of her. ‘In utter astonishment and rage’, Dashkova demanded to know how he dared tear up a letter addressed to the Empress.

‘Be composed, Princess,’ said he, ‘and hearken to me. You are sincerely attached to Her Majesty…why then will you distress her on a subject that, for these last two days, has occupied her thoughts exclusively and on which she has fixed her heart? If you are inexorable, here is pen, ink, and write your letter anew. But I’m only acting the part of a man devoted to your interests.’ Then he added this piece of Potemkinish stroking: the Empress had one other reason for wanting Dashkova in Petersburg. She wanted to be able to talk to her more because, ‘to tell the truth, she is worn out with the society of those fools who eternally surround her’. This did the trick. ‘My anger’, wrote Dashkova, ‘…subsided.’ Serenissimus could be irresistible when he wanted. Naturally, she accepted the post.⁴⁴

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As soon as Yermolov had settled into his new quarters, the Empress, accompanied by the Court, the new favourite, Serenissimus and the ambassadors of Britain, France and Austria, set off on a cruise from Lake Ladoga to the upper Volga. Catherine and Potemkin liked to see things for themselves – as the Empress put it, ‘the eye of the master fattens the horse’. This trip neatly shows how the Court entertained themselves – and how Potemkin made policy. The main challenge of Court life was fighting boredom.

The three envoys were paragons of Enlightened wit. The Austrian Ambassador remained the hideous, charming womanizer Louis Cobenzl, who, despite being middle-aged, dreamed of the stage and took singing lessons. When imperial couriers arrived from Vienna, they were never surprised to find the Ambassador before his mirror, singing, disguised in full drag as the Countess d’Escarbagnas.⁴⁵ Alleyne Fitzherbert’s ‘caractère vraiment britannique’ meant that he was ‘nonplussed by the Prince’s habits’,⁴⁶ but Potemkin found a new friend in the French envoy, who was different from his mediocre predecessors. Round-faced, with his eyebrows always raised, and a permanently amused expression like a smiling marmoset, Louis-Philippe, Comte de Ségur, aged thirty-two, was an ornament to the epoch which he recorded so elegantly in his Mémoires. Son of a French marshal and war minister, friends with Marie-Antoinette, Diderot and D’Alembert, and a veteran of the American War, he became an intimate member of Catherine and Potemkin’s circle.

On the cruise, the courtiers amused themselves with card games, concerts and especially word games. They sound contrived today, but the ambassadors could change their king’s relations with Russia by being good at them: for example, Fitzherbert was given the task of creating a poem with lines ending with the words amour, frotte, tambour and garde-note. His reply, combining flattery, French and all four words, was regarded as so brilliant that Catherine repeated it to Grimm:

D’un peuple très nombreux Catherine est l’amour

Malheur à l’enemi qui contre elle se frotte;

La renomme usa pour elle – son tambour

L’histoire avec plaisir sera – son garde-note.

Some of these ponderous bons mots were invented on the spot, but more usually, like supposedly live comic television shows today, they were laboriously invented offstage and then delivered in public as if pulled effortlessly out of the air. But Fitzherbert was not the master of these poetic drolleries: he was out-drolled by the ‘amiable and witty’ Ségur, whom Catherine acclaimed as the genius of the genre: ‘He makes us poems and songs…Prince Potemkin has been dying of laughter during the whole trip.’⁴⁷

As the barges sailed down the Volga, Ségur witnessed how Potemkin’s excitable whims seemed to make instant policy. Joseph II had helped Potemkin annex the Crimea, so Catherine was obliged to back him in his recurring project to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria. He had tried it before in 1778, but it had ended in the Potato War with Prussia. Now, once again, Frederick the Great, in his last bow on the stage he had dominated for almost half a century, foiled Joseph’s plan to annex Bavaria, by negotiating a League of German Princes to prevent it. It happened that the Anglo-Russian Trade Treaty was up for renewal, but Catherine was now demanding better terms. However, Hanover, of which George III was elector, joined Frederick in his anti-Austrian league. This was no less than a kick in the teeth to Catherine – and even more so to the Anglophile Potemkin.

When this news reached the imperial barge, it sent the couple into a sulk. After dinner, Ségur followed Potemkin on to his galley, where Serenissimus exploded, denouncing British egotism for this ‘perfidious trick’. ‘I’ve told the Empress long ago but she did not want to believe me.’ The new twenty-six-year-old British Prime Minister, William Pitt, ‘who doesn’t like her personally’, was sure to put obstacles in the way of Russian policies in Germany, Poland and Turkey. This analysis of Pitt’s eastern approach was accurate. The Prince declared he would give anything to avenge himself on ‘perfidious Albion’. What about a Franco-Russian trade treaty, suggested Ségur? Potemkin burst out laughing: ‘The moment is favourable. Seize it!’ Foreigners liked to present the Prince as a capricious child, but actually he was already encouraging Kherson’s trade with France, certain Marseilles, not London, was the key to Russia’s Black Sea commerce. He immediately recommended that Ségur write out a secret draft of a treaty: ‘Don’t even sign it. You risk nothing…The other ministers won’t know…Get quickly to work!’ Ironically, Ségur had to borrow Fitzherbert’s writing-desk with which to draft this anti-British ambush.

The next day, Potemkin bounded into Ségur’s cabin to inform him that, the moment they returned to Petersburg, the Empress would order the treaty signed. Sure enough, when they arrived back on 28 June, Ségur was attending a Court masquerade when Bezborodko waddled over and whispered in his ear that he had received the orders to negotiate the treaty at once. It took time but was signed in January 1787.

—

‘The credit of Yermolov seemed to rise fast,’ noticed Ségur on his return to Petersburg. ‘The court, astonished at such a change, turned towards the rising sun.’ By the spring of 1786, just under a year into Yermolov’s tenure, the young favourite had begun to play a dangerous game: he had decided to unseat Potemkin. ‘The Prince’s friends and relations were in consternation.’⁴⁸ Yermolov remained Potemkin’s creature until the Prince caught the favourite’s uncle Levashov cheating at cards. Potemkin threw him out and the uncle grumbled to the bumptious Yermolov. It was claimed he refused to forward Serenissimus’ requests for favours. But Potemkin could do that perfectly well himself. It is more likely the unintelligent Yermolov was reluctant to be a junior member of the Catherine–Potemkin family, was jealous of the Prince’s power – and was manipulated by his rivals.⁴⁹

The invisible hands behind Yermolov’s intrigue were probably Alexander Vorontsov, President of the Commerce College and brother of Ambassador to London Simon, and the ex-favourite Zavadovsky, both of whom worked with Potemkin but loathed him. They used Potemkin’s distrait finances to suggest that he was embezzling Treasury funds – specifically three million roubles for southern development – but their evidence was a letter from the deposed Crimean Khan, Shagin Giray, who claimed that the Prince was stealing his pension.⁵⁰ This was no evidence, as they well knew, because all Treasury payments, even those to Potemkin, and indeed Shagin Giray, were often years late. This was one reason why it was meaningless to analyse Potemkin’s finances, since he used private money for state purposes and then repaid himself when the state funds arrived. Besides, he did not need to embezzle – Catherine granted anything he required. However, the plotters persuaded Yermolov to lay Shagin Giray’s letter before the Empress. While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo, he did so and managed to sow some doubt in her mind. The die was cast.⁵¹

Catherine became cool to Potemkin. The Prince, having done so much to build up the south, was proudly aloof. They barely spoke and he rarely called on her, though his decline was exaggerated. Even in late May, the nadir of this crisis, Catherine said to her new secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky, ‘Prince Potemkin looks like a wolf and is not liked much for that but he has a kind heart…he would also be the first to ask mercy for his enemy.’⁵² Nonetheless, the courtiers smelled blood. His anterooms emptied. ‘Everyone distanced themselves,’ recalled Ségur. ‘As for me, I redoubled my assiduity to the Prince. I saw him every day.’ This was not merely friendship on Ségur’s part, for he had divined that the relationship between Prince and Empress was based on a secret and invisible tie. Nonetheless, the noose appeared to be tightening. Ségur begged him to be careful. ‘What – you too!’ replied Potemkin. ‘You wish me to beg shamefully after such great services rendered under the whim of an offensive injustice? I know they say I’m lost but they’re wrong. Let me reassure you – a mere child won’t overthrow me!’

‘Be careful!’, warned Ségur again.

‘Your friendship touches me,’ said the Prince. ‘But I disdain my enemies too much to fear them.’⁵³

On 17 June, the Empress, Grand Duke, Potemkin, Yermolov and Ségur left Tsarskoe Selo for Pella. The next day, she visited Potemkin’s neighbouring palace at Ostrovky, more evidence that Potemkin’s true position was not nearly as disastrous as gossip suggested. On their return to Tsarskoe Selo, Potemkin attended all Catherine’s dinners for the next three days. Presumably, the conspirators were now pushing Catherine to act on their evidence. Even in the sunny Catherine Palace, Potemkin was being cold-shouldered.

The next day, he simply left Court without a word and travelled towards Narva on the Baltic. He established himself back in the capital at the palace of the Master of Horse, Naryshkin, occupying himself with ‘parties, pleasure and love’. Potemkin’s ‘enemies sang victory’. Catherine presumably was used to his sulks and did nothing. But when he did not appear on 28 June – Catherine’s Accession Day – she surely realized that the masterful politician was calling her bluff.

‘I am very anxious if you are well?’, Catherine wrote secretly to Potemkin, answering his challenge. ‘I haven’t heard a word from you for so many days.’⁵⁴ The letter was warm. It was one of those signs that he understood perfectly. Potemkin waited a few days.

Then he suddenly appeared at Court – a Banquo’s ghost who turned out not to be a ghost at all. The Prince supposedly stormed directly into the Empress’s boudoir in ‘a fury’⁵⁵ and shouted something like this: ‘I come, Madame, to declare to Your Majesty that Your Majesty must this instant choose between Yermolov and me – one of us must this very day quit your Court. As long as you keep that White Negro, I will not set my foot within the Palace.’⁵⁶ Then he stormed out again and left Tsarskoe Selo.

On 15 July, the Empress dismissed Yermolov through one of his puppet-masters, Zavadovsky. The White Negro departed the next day, burdened with 4,000 peasants, 130,000 roubles and an order to travel.^*6 That very evening, the other young officer with whom Catherine had flirted with a year earlier, Alexander Dmitriyev-Mamonov, arrived with Potemkin. Mamonov was his adjutant (and distant kinsman). Potemkin is said to have sent Mamonov to Catherine bearing a watercolour, with the saucy question, what did she think of the picture? She viewed his looks and replied: ‘The contours are fine but the choice of colours less fortunate.’ This is a legend, but it does sound like one of the games that Potemkin alone could play with the Empress. The next day, the Empress wrote to Mamonov…

That night, Mamonov passed his friend Khrapovitsky, the Empress’s secretary, as he was escorted into Catherine’s bedchamber – either an awkward or a triumphant moment to meet a close friend. It was indeed a very small world which the diarist Khrapovitsky recorded in fascinating detail. Next morning, the punctilious secretary noted archly: ‘They s[lep]t until nine o’clock’ – in other words, the Empress spent an extra three hours in bed. Next day, ‘they closed the door. M–v was there at dinner and according to custom – [she was] powdered’, according to Khrapovitsky, whose eyes almost never leave the imperial keyhole.⁵⁷

The handover to Mamonov was so seamless that it is quite possible that Potemkin’s ‘fury’ had been much earlier and that the crisis was never about embezzlement at all but about Yermolov himself. It is likely that Catherine was romancing Mamonov while Yermolov and his plotters were singing with victory. This explains Potemkin’s unusual absence of nerves about the conspiracy – another example of his play-acting. Potemkin threatened, at one time or another, to have every one of the favourites dismissed, from Zavadovsky onwards. Usually Catherine reassured him that his power was secure – so he should mind his own business. She forced the favourites to flatter him, while he was flexible enough to befriend them and work with them. He succeeded in deposing Yermolov probably because that minion refused to live within Potemkin’s system – and because Catherine did not really love him. However arranged, it was a political victory.

‘Matuskha having walked around Petersburg, Peterhof, Oranienbaum, I’ve returned and I kiss your feet. I’ve brought Paracletes safe, healthy, merry and lovable.’ Paracletes – matushka’s little helper, Mamonov – was already with the Empress, who replied, ‘It’s a great joy, batinka: how are you feeling without any sleep, my lord? How glad I am you’ve arrived!’⁵⁸

‘Prince Grigory Alexandrovich has returned,’ wrote Khrapovitsky on 20 July. Mamonov gratefully presented the Prince with a golden teapot engraved ‘More united by heart than by blood’, because they were such distant relations.⁵⁹ Mamonov, aged twenty-six, was an educated Francophile from the middling gentry, with an exquisite rosebud mouth and tidy little nose. He was much more cultured and intelligent than Yermolov and widely liked for his charm, looks and courtesy. Catherine showered him with honours: the Adjutant-General was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire and he soon owned 27,000 serfs while receiving 180,000 roubles a year with a table budget of 36,000 roubles. Did she feel she had to compensate her lovers more for her own ageing? Catherine fell in love with him and was soon raving about him. She nicknamed him ‘Mister Redcoat’, because he liked to wear one that went well with his black eyes. ‘The red coat’, she exulted to Grimm on 17 December, ‘covers a man with an excellent heart…the wit of four people…an inexhaustible well of merriment.’ Mamonov made Catherine happy and Potemkin secure. He became a member of their unusual family, like Lanskoy, helping the nieces Branicka and Skavronskaya,⁶⁰ and writing warm letters to the Prince, which Catherine enclosed with her own. Sometimes she added postscripts to Mamonov’s letters, which he usually signed ‘with absolute devotion’.⁶¹

Soon after the fall of the White Negro and the installation of Mister Redcoat, Potemkin invited Ségur for dinner. ‘Well Monsieur Diplomat,’ the Prince greeted him, ‘at least in this case…my predictions are better than yours!’ Then, embracing his friend warmly, Potemkin boomed: ‘Was I mistaken in anything, batushka? Did the child overthrow me? Did my bravery sink me?’⁶²

His bravery had indeed paid off handsomely. Serenissimus could return to the south. He was away so much that Colonel Mikhail Garnovsky, his homme d’affaires in Petersburg who made a fortune out of the Duchess of Kingston, sent him secret reports on the politics of the Court. Garnovsky particularly monitored the behaviour of the favourite and noticed that, when toasts were drunk, he carefully drank only to the Prince. Catherine showed state papers to Mamonov, but he was no statesman. Potemkin’s enemies Alexander Vorontsov and Zavadovsky courted him, hoping he would do a Yermolov. He remained loyal but he suffered. He was jealous if Catherine paid attention to anyone else, but found Court life lonely and cruel: he was right when he said the courtiers were like ‘wolves in a forest’.⁶³

Catherine and Potemkin decided the time had come for her to inspect his achievements in the south and demonstrate Russia’s undying commitment to controlling the Black Sea. The date kept changing, but finally they agreed that she would visit Kherson and Crimea in the summer of 1787. On the eve of Catherine’s departure on this remarkable and glorious expedition, Serenissimus was now at the height of his power, exercising, ‘in Russia, a power greater than…Wolsey, Olivares and Richelieu’,⁶⁴ wrote one foreigner. For years, diplomats described him as ‘Grand Vizier’,⁶⁵ others called him ‘Prime Minister’,⁶⁶ but none of these quite caught his unique position. Saint-Jean was closest to the reality: ‘People realized they could not overthrow Potemkin…He was tsar in all but name.’⁶⁷ But was he happy? How did he live? Who was Potemkin the man?

Skip Notes

*1 Dr Rogerson had just claimed another victim. Soon after seeing off Samuel Bentham’s love for his niece, Field-Marshal Prince Alexander Golitsyn died in Rogerson’s care, probably bled and purged to death. ‘I’m afraid’, Catherine half joked to Potemkin, ‘that anybody who gets into Rogerson’s hands is already dead.’

*2 Onhis death, the Palace passed to the Romanovs: it was the Petersburg residence of Alexander I’s adored sister Catherine until her death in 1818. Then it belonged to Nicholas I until his accession and was then used to hold the Empress’s dances: Pushkin and his wife often danced there. Later, it belonged to Tsar Nicholas II’s mother, the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, until 1917. In February 1914, Prince Felix Yusopov, the future killer of Rasputin, married Grand Duchess Irina there.

*3 A hideous Soviet cinema stands there today.

*4 There was a sinister tradition that ‘Princess Tarakanova’ was kept here for a while, with the child supposedly fathered by Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, but there is no evidence for this stay or the child. Ostrovky survived until the Nazis destroyed it, but luckily it was photographed during the 1930s.

*5 The author found its ruins in the Bablovsky Park. There is a surprise inside the tower: a circular red granite bowl with a diameter of about ten feet. This was the early version of a swimming pool built by Alexander I, where he used to swim privately during hot Tsarskoe Selo summers.

*6 Yermolov’s demand for an audience with George III when he visited London caused some awkwardness a year later. He later settled in Vienna.