Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Serenissimus could play the game with secret confidence. He was still in power on 14 June when Prince Henry of Prussia and Grand Duke Paul set off on their uxorious voyage to Berlin. The mission was successful. Paul returned with Sophia of Württemberg – soon, as Grand Duchess Maria Fyodorovna, to be his wife, and mother of two emperors.*3

  Meanwhile Prince Orlov and his brother, scenting blood, were said to be tormenting Potemkin with jokes about his imminent fall. Potemkin did not rise. He knew that, if things went according to plan, their jokes would soon not matter.25 ‘Rumours reach us from Moscow’, Kirill Razumovsky wrote to one of Potemkin’s secretaries, ‘that your chief is beginning to ruin himself by drinking. I don’t believe it and reject it because I think his spirit is stronger than that.’26 Corberon reported Potemkin sinking into ‘decadence’. It was true that Potemkin shamelessly pursued pleasure at times of personal strain – debauch was his way of letting off steam.27 Catherine and Potemkin discussed the future in an exchange of insults and endearments. The doomsayers were right in that these were the days when the foundations of the rest of his career were laid.

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  ‘Even now,’ the Empress assured him, ‘Catherine is attached to you with her heart and soul.’ A few days later: ‘You cut me all yesterday without any reason…’. Catherine challenged the truth of his feelings for her: ‘Which of us is really sincerely and eternally attached to the other; which of us is indulgent and which of us knows how to forget all offences, insults and oppressions?’ Potemkin was happy one day and then exploded the next – out of jealousy, over-sensitivity or sheer bloody-mindedness. His jealousy, like everything else about him, was inconsistent but he was not the only one who experienced it. Catherine must have asked about another woman and Potemkin rubbed her nose in it. ‘That hurt me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t expect, and even now I don’t know why, my curiosity is insulting to you.’28

  She demanded his good behaviour in public: ‘The opinion of the silly public depends on your attitude to this affair.’ It is often claimed that Potemkin was now faking his jealousy in order to make his deal while protecting Catherine’s pride as a woman. He suddenly demanded Zavadovsky’s removal. ‘You ask me to remove Zavadovsky,’ she wrote. ‘My glory suffers very much from this request…Don’t ask for injustices, close your ears to gossip, respect my words. Our peace will be restored.’29 They were getting closer to an understanding, yet they must have decided to be apart like a couple who know they must not prolong the agony by constant proximity. Between 21 May and 3 June, Potemkin was not registered at Court.

  On 20 May, Zavadovsky emerged as Catherine’s official favourite, according to Oakes, and received a present of 3,000 souls. On the anniversary of the accession, he was promoted to major-general, receiving another 20,000 roubles and 1,000 souls. But now Potemkin did not mind. The storm was over: Potemkin was letting her settle down to her relationship with Zavadovsky because husband and wife had finally settled each other’s fears and demands. ‘Matushka,’ he thanked her, ‘this is the real fruit of your kind treatment of me during the last few days. I see your inclination to treat me well…’.

  However, an apologetic Potemkin could not keep away: he reappeared at Tsarskoe Selo on 3 June: ‘I came here wanting to see you because I am bored without you. I saw my arrival embarrassed you…Merciful Lady, I would go through fire for you…If at last I’m determined to be banished from you, it would be better if it did not happen in public. I won’t delay leaving even though it’s like death to me.’ Beneath this passionate declaration, Catherine replied, ‘My friend, your imagination tricks you. I’m glad to see you and not embarrassed by you. But I was irritated by something else which I will tell you another time.’30

  Serenissimus lingered at Court. Poor Zavadovsky, now in love with Catherine, and her official companion, disappeared from the Court Journal on the day Potemkin returned: had he fled before the ebullient giant? The diplomats did not notice: as far as they were concerned, it was only a matter of time before Potemkin resigned all his offices. Their expectations appeared to be confirmed when Catherine presented the Prince with a palace of his own: the ‘Anichkov house’, a massive, broken-down palace in St Petersburg that had belonged to Elisabeth’s favourite Alexei Razumovsky. It stood (and still stands) on the Neva, beside the Anichkov Bridge. This suggested that Potemkin was about to vacate his rooms in the imperial places and go ‘travelling’ to the spas of Europe.

  In an absolutist monarchy, proximity to the throne was imperative, the sine qua non of power. Potemkin was known to mutter that, if he lost his bed at the Palace, he would lose everything. Catherine constantly reassured her highly strung friend: ‘Batinka, God is my witness, I am not going to drive you out of the Palace. Please live in it and be calm!’31 He later moved out of the favourite’s apartment but never left the Winter Palace and never lost his access to Catherine’s boudoir.

  They arranged a new residence that perfectly suited their situation. For the rest of his life, his real home was the so-called ‘Shepilev house’, a separate little building, formerly stables, facing on to Millionaya Street, which was linked to the Winter Palace by a gallery over the archway. The Empress and Prince could walk to each other’s rooms along a covered passageway from beside the Palace’s chapel, in privacy and, in Potemkin’s case, without dressing.

  Everything was settled. On 23 June, Potemkin set off on an inspection tour of Novgorod. A British diplomat noticed some furniture being removed from his apartments in the Winter Palace. He had fallen and was off to a monastery. But the shrewder courtiers, like Countess Rumiantseva, noticed that his journey was paid for, and serviced, by the Court. He was greeted everywhere with triumphal arches like a member of the imperial family, and that could only be the result of an imperial order.32 They did not know that Catherine sent him a present for his departure, begged him to say goodbye and then wrote a series of affectionate notes to him: ‘We grant you eternal and hereditary possession of the Anichkov house,’ she told Potemkin, plus 100,000 roubles to decorate it. In his two years of favour, the financial figures are impossible to calculate because so often the Empress presented him with cash or presents that are unrecorded – or directly paid off his debts. But he now inhabited an unreal and opulent world in which the Croesian scale of riches was shared only by monarchs: he often received 100,000 roubles from Catherine when a colonel lived on 1,000 roubles a year. The Prince is estimated to have received as many as 37,000 souls, vast estates around Petersburg and Moscow and in Belorussia (the Krichev estate, for example, boasted 14,000 souls), diamonds, dinner services, silver plate and as much as nine million roubles. All this was never enough.33

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  The Prince returned a few weeks later. Catherine welcomed him with a warm note. He moved straight back into his Winter Palace apartments. This confounded his critics: Serenissimus ‘arrived here on Saturday evening and appeared at Court the next day. His returning to the apartments he before occupied in the Palace made many apprehensive of the possibilities of his regaining the favour he had lost.’34 They would have been even more surprised to learn that he was soon correcting Catherine’s letters to Tsarevich Paul in Berlin.

  There is little doubt that they were playing one of their prearranged games, like celebrities today who delight in tricking the press. Having started the year afraid of losing their love and friendship in a frenzy of jealousy and regret, they had now managed to arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Each could find his own happiness while keeping the services – personal and political, affectionate and practical – of the other. This had not been easy. Affairs of the heart cannot be drilled like regiments, or negotiated like treaties – especially those of two such emotional people. Only trust, time, nature, trial and error, and intelligence had achieved it. Potemkin now made the difficult transformation from an influential lover to ‘minister–favourite’ who ruled with his Empress.35 Th
ey had managed to gull everyone.

  The day Serenissimus returned to Court, the couple knew they would be watched for any hint of his fall or recovery. So the Prince strolled into her apartments ‘with the utmost composure’ and found the Empress playing whist. He sat down right opposite her. She played him a card as if nothing had changed – and told him he always played luckily.36

  Skip Notes

  *1 Until 1733, forceps had been the secret weapon, as it were, of a surgical dynasty, the Chamberlens. In that time, even the doctors were hereditary.

  *2 Potemkin was said to have arranged this death and mysteriously visited the midwife. Medical murder is a recurring theme in Russian political paranoia – Stalin’s Doctor’s Plot of 1952/3 played on the spectre of ‘murderers in white coats’. Prince Orlov, Grand Duchess Natalia, Catherine’s lover Alexander Lanskoy and Potemkin himself were all rumoured to have been murdered by the doctors caring for them. Potemkin was said to have been involved in the first three deaths.

  *3 Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were married in Petersburg on 26 September 1776. The two emperors were Alexander I and Nicholas I, who ruled until 1855. Their second son Constantine almost succeeded but his refusal of the throne sparked off the Decembrist Revolt in 1825.

  PART FOUR

  The Passionate Partnership

  1776–1777

  11

  HER FAVOURITES

  And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine)

  Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing

  Whose temporary passion was quite flattering

  Because each lover looked a sort a king

  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 70

  An order from Her Majesty consigned

  Our young Lieutenant to the genial care

  Of those in office. All the world looked kind

  (As it will look sometimes with the first stare,

  Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind,)

  As also did Miss Protassoff then there,

  Named from her mystic office l’Eprouveuse,

  A term inexplicable to the Muse.

  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 84

  The love affair of Prince Potemkin and Catherine II appeared to end there, but it never truly ceased. It simply became a marriage in which both fell in love and had sexual affairs with others, while the relationship with each other remained the most important thing in their lives. This unusual marital arrangement inspired the obscene mythology of the nymphomaniac Empress and Potemkin the imperial pimp. Perhaps the ‘Romantic Movement’, and the serial love marriages and divorces of our own time, have ruined our ability to understand their touching partnership.

  Zavadovsky was the first official favourite to share the Empress’s bed while Potemkin ruled her mind, continuing to serve as her consort, friend and minister. During her sixty-seven years, we know that Catherine had at least twelve lovers, hardly the army of which she stands accused. Even this is deceptive because, once she had found a partner with whom she was happy, she believed it would last for ever. She very rarely ended the relationships herself – Saltykov and Poniatowski had been removed from her; Orlov had been unfaithful and even Potemkin had somehow contrived to withdraw. Nonetheless, after Potemkin, her relationships with men much younger than her were obviously abnormal, but then so was her situation.

  The reality was very different from the myth. She did make her lover into an official position, and Potemkin helped her. The triangular relationship between Catherine, Potemkin and her young lovers has been neglected by historians – yet this became the heart of her own ‘family’.

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  Catherine’s affair with Zavadovsky was the test case for the imperial ménage-à-trois. Potemkin’s presence made life for the favourites more difficult and humiliating, because they could not avoid Catherine’s intimacy with him. Their relationship with Serenissimus was almost as important as their love for the Empress. Even without Potemkin, this was a difficult role and Zavadovsky was soon deeply miserable.

  Catherine’s letters to Zavadovsky give us a wonderful glimpse into the suffocating world of the favourites. He lasted barely eighteen months in favour but his love for Catherine was genuine. Her letters to him reveal she loved him too. But there was less equality between them. Even though he was the same age as Potemkin, he was in awe of her and she treated him patronizingly, thanking him for his ‘most affectionate little letter’ as if he was clever to have known his alphabet. While Potemkin wanted time and space to himself, Zavadovsky longed to be with her every moment of the day, like a lapdog, so she had to write and explain that ‘Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire’. Yet they worked together – he still toiled in her secretariat all day before retiring with her at ten, after playing three rubbers of whist. It was a routine that was both tiresome and hard work.

  The new favourite was also supposedly far less sexually experienced than the Prince, which is perhaps why he fell in love with her so absolutely. ‘You are Vesuvius itself,’ she wrote. His inexperience perhaps caused him to lose control, for she added: ‘when you least expect it an eruption appears but no, never mind, I shall extinguish them with caresses. Petrusha dear!’. She corresponded less formally with Zavadovsky than with Potemkin. While the former called her ‘Katiusha’ or ‘Katia’, the Prince had always used ‘Matushka’, ‘Sovereign Lady’. The Empress’s letters to Zavadovsky seem more sexually explicit: ‘Petrushinka, I rejoice that you have been healed by my little pillows and if my caress facilitates your health then you will never be sick.’ These ‘pillows’ may have meant her breasts – but she also embroidered herb-filled cushions, an example of the comical dangers of biographers making sexual interpretations of personal letters.1

  Zavadovsky, who loved her so much, was often sick, more from nerves than anything else. He was not suited to being the subject of such intrigue and hatred. While she repeatedly declared her love for him in her letters, he could not relax in his position: his private life was ‘under a microscope’.2 She did not understand what he was up against and he did not have the strength that Potemkin employed to get what he wanted from everyone. Above all, he had to tolerate Potemkin’s omnipresence. It was a threesome and, when Potemkin wanted attention, he presumably got it. When they had crises in their relationship, it was Potemkin who sorted them out: ‘both of us need a restoration of spiritual peace!’ wrote Catherine. ‘I have been suffering on a par with you for three months, torturing myself…I will talk to Prince Gri[gory] A[lexandrovich Potemkin].’ This talk with Potemkin about Zavadovsky’s private feelings could hardly have helped his spiritual peace. Afterwards, Zavadovsky claimed that he was quite unfazed by Potemkin’s ever present flamboyance, but the evidence suggests that he was intimidated and upset by him and hid when he was near by. ‘I do not understand’, the Empress wrote to Zavadovsky, ‘why you cannot see me without tears in your eyes.’ When Potemkin became a prince, Catherine invited, or rather ordered, Zavadovsky: ‘If you went to congratulate the new Highness, His Highness will receive you affectionately. If you lock yourself up, neither I nor anybody else will be accustomed to see you.’3

  There was a story, told years later, that Potemkin lost his temper with the Empress, told her to dismiss Zavadovsky, stormed through their apartments, almost attacked them and then tossed a candlestick at Catherine.4 This sounds like one of Potemkin’s tantrums, but we cannot know what provoked it. Potemkin may have decided that Zavadovsky was a bore; it may also have had something to do with his friendship with Potemkin’s critics like Simon Vorontsov. Zavadovsky certainly had a mean-minded, parochial streak that was utterly alien to Serenissimus – and it may have irritated Catherine herself.

  The diplomats noticed Zavadovsky’s plight. Even in mid-1776, when he had only just been unveiled, as it were, Corberon was wondering ‘the name of the new favourite…because they say Zava
dovsky is well on the decline’. The diplomatic business of analysing Catherine’s favouritism was always an inexact mixture of Kremlinology and ‘tabloid-style’ gossip – a question of reading bluffs and double-bluffs. As the Frenchman put it, ‘they base his disgrace on his promotion’.

  Within a year, though, an upset Catherine noticed his misery too. In May 1777, she wrote to Zavadovsky: ‘Prince Or[lov] told me that you want to go. I agree to it…After dinner…I can meet with you.’ They had a painful chat which Catherine, of course, reported in detail to Potemkin: ‘I…asked him, did he have something to say to me or not? He told me about it,’ and she let him choose an intermediary, like a cross between a literary agent and a divorce lawyer, to negotiate his terms of dismissal. ‘He chose Count Kirill Razumovsky…through tears…Bye, bye dear,’ she added to Potemkin. ‘Enjoy the books!’ She had obviously sent him a present for his growing library. Once Razumovsky had negotiated Zavadovsky’s retreat, Catherine gave him ‘three or four thousand souls…plus 50,000 roubles this year and 30,000 in future years with a silver service for sixteen…’.

  This took an emotional toll on Catherine. ‘I’m suffering in heart and soul,’ she told Potemkin.5 She was always generous to her lovers but, as we shall see, she gave far less to Zavadovsky than to anyone else except Vassilchikov. There was truth in the canard of Masson, the Swiss tutor: ‘Catherine was indulgent in love but implacable in politics.’6

  Zavadovsky was distraught. Catherine assumed the tone of a Norland nanny and told him to calm himself by translating Tacitus – a therapy unique to the age of neo-Classicism. Then, inevitably, she consoled the unhappy man by adding that, in order that Prince Potemkin ‘be friendly with you as before, it is not difficult to make the effort…your minds will share the same feeling about me and therefore become closer to one another’. There can be little doubt that the prospect of having to win over Potemkin can only have made Zavadovsky’s wounds even more raw. He was heartbroken: ‘Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt: [her] love for me has vanished.’ On 8 June, Zavadovsky retreated bitterly to the Ukraine. ‘Prince Potemkin’, said the new British envoy, Sir James Harris, ‘is now again at the highest pitch.’7 It goes without saying that Catherine, who could not be ‘without love for an hour’,8 had already found someone else.