Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Vassilchikov has been almost forgotten, but these days must have been agonizing for him. Catherine was ruthless with those she could not respect and one senses she was ashamed of his mediocrity. Vassilchikov realized that he could never play the role of Potemkin, whose ‘standing was very different from mine. I was merely a sort of kept woman…I was scarcely allowed to see anyone or go out. When I asked for anything, no notice was taken whatsoever…When I was anxious for the Order of St Anna, I spoke about it to the Empress and found 30,000 roubles in my pocket next day in notes. I always had my mouth closed like that…As for Potemkin, he gets what he wants…he is the master.’32

  ‘The master’ insisted that the unfortunate bowl of ‘Iced Soup’ be removed from the table. Vassilchikov moved out of his apartments in the Winter Palace. They became the Council Room, because Potemkin refused to live in someone else’s apartments. New rooms were decorated for him. Potemkin himself moved out of the cottage at the Samoilov’s to stay with the trusted Chamberlain Yelagin.33

  By late February, the relationship was no longer either an amorous courtship or a sexual affair: the couple were absolutely committed. On the 27th, Potemkin was confident enough to write a letter requesting that he be appointed ‘general and personal aide-de-camp to Her Majesty’. There were a handful of adjutant-generals, mostly just courtiers. But in this case the meaning would be clear. He added in what was presumably a Potemkinian joke, ‘it could not offend anybody’. Both of them must have laughed at this. His arrival would offend everybody, from the Orlovs to the Panins, from Maria Theresa and Frederick the Great to George III and Louis XVI. It would change the political landscape and ultimately Russia’s alliances abroad. But no matter, because he touchingly added his real feelings: ‘I would be the happiest man alive…’.34 The letter was handed in to Stekalov, who was in charge of requests, like any other petition. But this one was answered far more quickly.

  ‘Lieutenant-General…I think your request is appropriate,’ she replied the next day, taking off official language, ‘in view of the services that you have rendered to me and our Motherland.’ It was typical of Potemkin simply to write officially: ‘he was the only one of her favourites who dared to become enamoured of her and to make the first advances’, wrote Charles Masson, later Swiss mathematics tutor at Court and author of scandalous but unreliable memoirs. Catherine appreciated this courage in her reply: ‘I am ordering the drawing up of your nomination to adjutant-general. I must confess to you that I am pleased that you, trusting me, decided to send your request directly to me without looking for roundabout ways.’35 It is at this moment that Potemkin steps out of the shadows of history to become one of the most described and discussed statesmen of the century.

  * * *

  —

  ‘A new scene has just opened,’ Sir Robert Gunning, the English envoy, reported to the Earl of Suffolk, Secretary of State for the North, in London on 4 March, having just watched the new Adjutant-General at Court, ‘which is likely to merit more attention than any that has presented itself since the beginning of this reign.’ Since this was the age of letter-writing, everyone now wrote about Potemkin. Diplomats were agog because, as Gunning saw at once, Potemkin was abler than both Prince Orlov and Vassilchikov. It is interesting that, just a few days after appearing as official favourite, even foreigners not intimate with the Court were informing their kings that Potemkin had arrived to love the Empress and help her rule. ‘Mr Vassilchikov the favourite whose understanding was too limited to admit of his having any influence in affairs or sharing his mistress’s confidence’, explained Gunning, ‘is replaced by a man who bids fair for possessing them both in the most supreme degree.’36 The Prussian Ambassador Count von Solms went further to Frederick: ‘Evidently Potemkin…will become the most influential person in Russia. Youth, intellect and positive qualities will give him such importance…Soon Prince Grigory Grigorevich [Orlov] will be forgotten and Orlov’s family will drop to the common standard.’37

  Russia’s chief ally was even more repulsed than he had been by the arrival of Vassilchikov two years before. Thoroughly informed by Solms, Frederick the Great wrote to his brother Prince Henry ridiculing the newcomer’s name – ‘General Patukin or Tapukin’ – but recognized that his rise to power ‘might prove prejudicial to the well-being of our affairs’. Being Frederick, he coined a philosophical principle of misogynistic statesmanship: ‘A woman is always a woman and, in feminine government, the cunt has more influence than a firm policy guided by straight reason.’38

  The Russian courtiers observed Potemkin carefully, chronicling every move of the new favourite, even his jewellery and the decoration of his apartments. Every detail meant something that was important for them to know. Solms had already discovered that Potemkin’s arrival did not trouble the Panins.39 ‘I think this new actor will play his part with great vivacity and big changes if he’ll be able to consolidate his position,’40 wrote General Peter Panin to Prince Alexander Kurakin on 7 March. Evidently, the Panins thought they could use Potemkin to obliterate the credit of the Orlovs.41 ‘The new Adjutant-General is always on duty instead of all the others,’ Countess Sievers wrote to her husband, one of Catherine’s senior officials. ‘They say he is pleasant and modest.’42 Potemkin was already amassing the sort of power Vassilchikov never possessed. ‘If you want anything, my sweet,’ Countess Rumiantseva wrote to her husband, the Field-Marshal, down with the army, ‘ask Potemkin.’43

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  To her friend Grimm, Catherine paraded her exhilaration at escaping Vassilchikov and finding Potemkin: ‘I have drawn away from a certain good-natured but extremely dull character, who has immediately been replaced by one of the greatest, wittiest and most original eccentrics of this iron century.’44

  Skip Notes

  * When Emperor Alexander I died in 1825, he was widely believed to have become a monk wandering the Russian vastness.

  PART THREE

  Together

  1774–1776

  7

  LOVE

  The doors will be open…I am going to bed…Darling, I will do whatever you command. Shall I come to you or will you come to me?

  Catherine II to G. A. Potemkin

  This was Potemkin, a great thing in days

  When homicide and harlotry made great.

  If stars and titles could entail long praise,

  His glory might half equal his estate

  This fellow, being six foot high, could raise

  A kind of phantasy proportionate

  In the then sovereign of the Russian people,

  Who measured men as you would do a steeple.

  Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto VII: 37

  Everything about the love of Catherine and Potemkin is exceptional. Both were extraordinary individuals in the most unique of circumstances. Yet the love affair on which they were now embarked has features that are universal, even today. Their passion was so exhausting and tumultuous that it is easy to forget that they loved one another while ruling a vast empire – at war abroad, in civil war at home. She was an empress and he a subject – both of matching ‘boundless ambition’ – living in a highly competitive Court where everything was seen and every glance had political consequences. They often forgot themselves in their love and moods, but neither was ever completely private: Catherine was always the Sovereign, and Potemkin, from the first day, was more than a mere favourite, a politician of the first rank.

  The lovers were no longer young by the standards of their time: Potemkin was thirty-four, Catherine ten years older. But their love was all the more touching for their imperfections. In February 1774, Potemkin had long since lost his Alcibiadean perfection. Now he was a bizarre and striking sight that fascinated, appalled and attracted his contemporaries in equal measure. His stature was colossal, yet his figure was still lithe; his admired head of hair was long and unbrushed, a rich brow
n, almost auburn, sometimes covered by grey wigs. His head too was titanic, but almost pear-like in shape. His profile resembled the soft lines of a dove – perhaps that is why Catherine often called him that. The face was pale, long, thin and oddly sensitive in such a huge man – more that of a poet than a general. The mouth was one of his best features: his lips were full and red; his teeth strong and white, a rare asset at that time; his chin had a dimple cleft. His right eye was green and blue; his left one was useless, half closed, and sometimes it made him squint. It looked strange – though Jean-Jacob Jennings, a Swedish diplomat, who met him much later, said ‘the eye defect’ was much less noticeable than he had expected. Potemkin never got over his sensitivity about it, but it gave him a certain vulnerability as well as a piratical air. The ‘defect’ did make this outlandish figure seem more like a mythical beast – Panin called him ‘Le Borgne’ – ‘the blindman’, but most followed the Orlovs and called him ‘Cyclops’.1

  The diplomatic corps were immediately rapt: ‘his figure is gigantic and disproportioned and his countenance is far from engaging’, wrote Gunning, but:

  Potemkin appears to have a great knowledge of mankind and more of the discriminating faculty than his countrymen in general possess and as much address in intrigue and suppleness in his station as any of them. Though the profligacy of his manner is notorious, he is the only one to have formed connections with the clergy. With these qualifications he may naturally flatter himself with the hopes of rising to that height to which his boundless ambition aspires.2

  Solms reported, ‘Potemkin is very tall, well formed but has an unpleasant appearance because he squints,’ but three days later he added that given his ‘youth and intellect…it will be easy for General Potemkin…to occupy Orlov’s place in the Empress’s heart’.3

  His manners varied from those of a courtier at Versailles to those of one of his Cossack friends. This is why Catherine delighted in nicknaming him after Cossacks, Tartars and wild animals. His contemporaries, especially Catherine, agreed that the whole picture, with its Russian scale and its mixture of ugliness and beauty, reeked of primitive energy, an almost animalistic sexuality, outrageous originality, driving intellect and surprising sensitivity. He was either loved – or hated. As one of Kirill Razumovsky’s daughters asked: ‘How can one pay court to the blind beggar and why?’4

  Catherine remained a sexually attractive, handsome and very majestic woman in her prime. Her brow was high and strong, the blue eyes bright, playful and coolly arrogant. Her eyelashes were black, her mouth shapely, her nose slightly aquiline, her skin remained white and blooming, and her bearing made her appear taller than she was. She was already voluptuous, which she camouflaged by always wearing ‘an ample robe with broad sleeves…similar to ancient Muscovite costume’.5 Everyone acclaimed her ‘dignity tempered with graciousness,’6 which made her ‘still beautiful, infinitely clever and knowledgeable but with romantic spirit in her loves’.7

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  Catherine and Potemkin were suddenly inseparable. When they were not together, even when they were just in their own apartments, a few yards apart, they wrote to each other manically. They were both highly articulate. Fortunately for us, words were enormously important to them. Sometimes they sent several notes a day, back and forth: they were the equivalent of telephone calls or, even more, the e-mail of the Internet. Being secret love letters that often dealt with state affairs as well, they were usually unsigned. Potemkin’s handwriting, a surprisingly fine and scratchy hand for such a big man, gets progressively worse as times goes on until it is almost illegible in any language by his death. The letters are in a mixture of Russian and French, sometimes almost randomly; at other times, matters of the heart were in French, those of state in Russian. A wealth of these letters have survived, a record of a lifelong love and political partnership. Some belong in that century, but others are so modern they could have been written by a pair of lovers today. Some could have been written only by an empress and a statesman; others speak the timelessly trivial language of love. There are even complete conversations: ‘Go, my dove, and be happy,’ wrote Catherine to Potemkin in one letter. He departed. When he returned, Catherine received this: ‘Mother, we are back, now it’s time for supper.’ To this she replied: ‘Good God! Who might have thought you would return?’8

  Catherine addressed her lover as ‘my darling soul’, ‘my heart’, ‘sweetheart’ and ‘bijou’. Later she often used the traditional Russian ‘batushka’ or ‘batinka’ – or papa’ – and endless diminutives of Grigory: ‘Grisha’, ‘Grishenka’, ‘Grishenok’, even ‘Grishefishenka’. At the height of their love, her names for him become even more colourful: ‘My golden pheasant’, ‘Golden cockerel’, ‘Dearest dove’, ‘Kitten’, ‘Little Dog’, ‘Tonton’, ‘dear little heart’, ‘Twin Soul’, ‘Little parrot’, ‘part-bird, part-wolf’, and lots of others that combine his force with his sensitivity. If he was playing up, she ironically brought him down to size as ‘Dear Sir’ or ‘Dear Lieutenant-General’ or ‘Your Excellency’. If she was giving him a new title, she liked to address him accordingly.

  Potemkin virtually always addressed Catherine as ‘Matushka’, or ‘Little Mother’, or ‘Sovereign Lady’ or both. In other words, he deliberately used the old Russian way of addressing a tsarina rather than calling her Katinka, as some of her later lovers did. This was due not to a lack of intimacy but rather to Potemkin’s reverence for his Sovereign. For example, he made the courier who brought the Empress’s notes kneel until he had written the reply, which amused Catherine with its romanticism: ‘Write please, has your Master of Ceremonies brought my messenger to you today and has he knelt as he usually does?’

  Potemkin always worried that the letters could be stolen. The diligent Empress burned some of his earlier love letters as soon as she read them. Those that survive from this period were mostly her letters, or his letters that she sent back to him with an addendum. So we have far more of hers. Later, most of his letters survived because they became state as well as personal papers. The passionate Russian treasured his in a scruffy wad, tied up with string and often secreted in his pocket, close to his heart, so that he could read and reread them. ‘Grishenka, good morning,’ she began a letter probably in March 1774,’…I am in good health and slept well…I am afraid you will lose my letters: someone will steal them from your pocket…They’ll think they are banknotes and pocket them.’9 But, luckily for us, he was still carrying them around when he died seventeen years later. They had nicknames for all the main courtiers, which sometimes are hard to interpret, and also a secret coded language possibly so that Potemkin could tell her in what way he would like to make love to her.

  ‘My dove, good morning,’ she greeted him typically. ‘I wish to know whether you slept well and whether you love me as much as I love you.’10 Sometimes they were as short as this: ‘Night darling, I’m going to bed.’11

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  When the court returned to town from Tsarskoe Selo on 9 April, Potemkin moved out of Yelagin’s house, where he had been living since he became the Empress’s lover, into his newly decorated apartments in the Winter Palace: ‘they are said to be splendid’, Countess Sievers reported the next day. Potemkin was now a familiar sight around the town: ‘I often see Potemkin who rushes around in a coach and six.’ His fine carriage, expensive horses and speed became elements of his public image. If the Empress went out, Potemkin was usually in attendance. When Catherine went to the theatre on 28 April, ‘Potemkin was in the box,’ noticed Countess Sievers. Royalty, indeed sometimes the entire audience, often talked throughout the play – Louis XV irritated Voltaire with this royal habit. Here, Potemkin ‘talked to the Empress all the way through the play; he enjoys her greatest confidence.’12

  Potemkin’s new rooms were directly beneath Catherine’s in the Winter Palace. Both their apartments looked out on to the Palace Square and into an internal
courtyard, but not on to the Neva river. When Potemkin wished to visit – which he did, unannounced, whenever he liked – he came up (as Orlov had come down) the spiral staircase, as always decorated with green carpets. Green was the colour of amorous corridors – for the staircase linking Louis XV’s apartments to the boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour was green too.

  Potemkin was given apartments in all the imperial palaces, including the Summer Palace in town and Peterhof outside, but they were most often at the Catherine (or Great) Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, where Potemkin reached the imperial bedroom by crossing a corridor so chilly that their letters often warn each other against traversing this arctic tundra. ‘Sorry you’re sick,’ she wrote. ‘It is a good lesson for you: don’t go barefoot on staircases. If you want to get rid of it, take a little tobacco.’13 They rarely spent the night together (as Catherine did with some later favourites), because Potemkin liked to gamble and talk late and lie in all morning, while the Empress awoke early. She had the metabolism of a tidy German schoolmistress, though with a strong vein of sensuality; his was that of a wild frontiersman.

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  At Catherine’s intimate evenings, Potemkin often burst in, unannounced, dishevelled in a Turkish dressing gown or some other species of wrap, usually with nothing underneath so that his hairy chest and legs were quite visible. Whatever the weather, he would be barefoot. If it was cold, he threw on a fur cloak over the top which gave him the look of a giant who could not decide if he was a brute or a dandy. In addition to all this, he liked to wear a pink bandana round his head. He was an Oriental vision far from the Voltairean tastes of the Court, which was why she called him ‘bogatr’, the knightly Slavic hero from the mythology of Rus. Even in the earliest days of the affair, Potemkin knew that he was different from everybody else: if summoned, he might languidly decide not to turn up. He appeared in the Empress’s rooms when it suited him and never bothered to be announced, nor waited to be summoned: he lumbered in and out of her apartments like an aimless bear, sometimes the wittiest member of the party, other times silently, not even bothering to acknowledge the Empress herself.