Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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