Meanwhile the courtiers manoeuvred to find the Empress a new favourite. This time there were several candidates, including a certain Staniov, afterwards lost to history, then Roman Vorontsov’s natural son, Ivan Rontsov, who, a year later, emerged in London as the rabble-rousing leader of a Cockney mob in the Gordon Riots. Finally, in the spring of 1780, she found the companion she deserved, a young man named Alexander Dmitrievich Lanskoy.
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Aged only twenty to Catherine’s fifty-one, this ‘very handsome young man’, according to an English visitor, was the gentlest, sweetest and least ambitious of Catherine’s favourites. Sasha Lanskoy ‘of course was not of good character’, said the fast-rising Bezborodko, Catherine’s secretary, but, compared to those who came later, ‘he was a veritable angel’. Bezborodko, who saw everything in Catherine’s office, had reason to know. Though Lanskoy did become embroiled in at least one intrigue against Serenissimus, he was also the favourite who was happiest to join the broader Catherine–Potemkin family.32
Lanskoy, another Horse-Guardsmen, had been one of Potemkin’s aides-decamp for a few months, which is probably how Catherine noticed him. Yet, according to Harris, who was seeing Potemkin on a daily basis at this time, he was not his first choice. The Prince was persuaded to acquiesce only by imperial gifts of land and money on his birthday that Harris claims came to 900,000 roubles, a sum that beggars avarice. Whether Potemkin did have another candidate, he was eminently flexible in all matters of the boudoir: he supported Lanskoy.
Soon a lieutenant-general, he was Catherine’s ideal pupil and companion. He was not highly educated but keen to learn. He liked painting and architecture. Unlike the others, he tried to avoid politics – though that was not completely possible – and he made an effort to stay friends with Potemkin, though that was not completely feasible either.33 Despite his taste for splendour and his greedy family, Lanskoy was the best of the minions because he truly adored Catherine and she him. For the next four years, Catherine enjoyed a stable relationship with the calm and good-natured Lanskoy at her side.
In May 1781, there was a slight blip in Catherine’s relationship with Lanskoy. Harris heard the usual rumours that Catherine was having an affair with a new favourite, Mordvinov, but that Potemkin helped to steer the Empress and Lanskoy through this rough patch in their relationship. If Catherine flirted with someone else, Lanskoy was ‘neither jealous, inconstant, nor impertinent and laments the disgrace…in so pathetic a manner’ that Catherine’s love for him revived and she could not bear to part with him.34 They settled down happily into a relationship that she hoped would continue until she died.
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Potemkin benefited enormously from Catherine’s system of favouritism. When she was in a stable relationship, it gave him time to win his place in history. During her happy years with Lanskoy, Potemkin became a statesman – he changed the direction of Russian foreign policy, annexed the Crimea, founded towns, colonized deserts, built the Black Sea Fleet and reformed the Russian army. However, by the end of her life, Catherine’s sexual career was already both a legend and a joke.
Inside Russia, the disapproval of Catherine’s and Potemkin’s moral conduct often coincided with political opposition to their rule among critics, like Simon Vorontsov and the entourage of the ‘Young Court’ of Grand Duke Paul, both excluded from power. The view of a traditional Orthodox aristocrat is expressed in Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov’s On the Corruption of Morals (published long after Catherine’s death) which blamed virtually the entire morality of the eighteenth century on Catherine and Potemkin. Her critics charged that favouritism affected the whole atmosphere of the court: ‘she has set other women the example of the possession of a long…succession of lovers’, grumbled Shcherbatov. As for the wicked puppetmaster, Potemkin radiated ‘love of power, ostentation, pandering to all his desires, gluttony and hence luxury at table, flattery, avarice, rapaciousness’. In other words, the Prince was the source of ‘all the vices known in the world with which he himself is full’.35
This titillating humbug reached its greatest extent during the later years of the Empress when no foreigner could discuss Russia without bringing the subject round to Catherine’s sexuality. When the gossipy Oxford don John Parkinson visited Russia after Potemkin’s death, he picked up and popularized any tidbit he could find and linked it all to Catherine’s love life, even canal building: ‘A party was considering which of the canals had cost the most money; when one of them observed there was not a doubt about the matter. Catherine’s Canal (that is the name of the one of them) had unquestionably been the most expensive.’ Even the distinguished ex-Ambassador Sir George Macartney, later celebrated for his pioneering mission to China, who had been recalled for siring a child with an imperial maid-of-honour, degraded himself by claiming that Catherine’s taste for Russian men was due to the fact that ‘Russian nurses it is said make a constant practice of pulling it when the child is young which has the great effect of lengthening the virile instrument’.36 The diplomats sniggered in their despatches about ‘functions’ and ‘duties’ and coined puns that would shame a modern tabloid newspaper, but they were usually misinformed and historians have simply repeated the lies that seem to confirm every male fantasy about the sexual voracity of powerful women. There are few subjects in history that have been so wilfully misunderstood.
The nature of ‘favouritism’ derived from the Empress’s peculiar position and her unique relationship with Potemkin. It was undeniably true that anyone becoming a favourite of Catherine’s was entering a relationship in which there were three, not two, participants. Favouritism was necessary because Catherine lived in a man’s world. She could not publicly marry again and, whether in law or spirit, she already had a husband in Potemkin. Their egos, talents and emotions were too equal and too similar for them to live together, but Catherine needed constant loving and companionship. She yearned to have an effective family around her and she had strong maternal instincts to teach and nurture. These emotional longings were easily as strong as her famed sexual appetites. She was one of those who must have a companion, and often did not change partners without finding a new one first. Usually such habits are more based on insecurity than wantonness, but perhaps the two are linked. There was another reason why Catherine, as she got older, sought younger lovers, even at the cost of her dignity and reputation. She touched on it herself when she described the temptations of Elisabeth’s Court. The Court was filled with handsome men; she was the Sovereign. Catherine did it because she could – like the proverbial child in the candyshop. Who would not?
The position of Catherine’s favourite evolved into an unusual official appointment. ‘Loving the Empress of Russia’, explained the Prince de Ligne, the ultimate charmer of the Enlightenment who adored Potemkin and Catherine, ‘is a function of the Court.’37 Instead of having a disorderly court, Catherine appointed her lover publicly. She hoped her system of favouritism would pull the sting of sleaziness. In a sense, she was applying the tenets of the Enlightenment to her loins, for surely clarity and reason would prevent superstition in the form of innuendo and gossip.
Appearances had to be maintained but this was an age of sexual frankness. Even the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa, the ultimate Catholic moralist, who presided over a court of stifling rectitude, gave Marie-Antoinette astonishingly frank gynaecological advice on her marriage to Louis XVI. Catherine herself was prudish in public. She reprimanded the Comte de Ségur for making risqué jokes, though she could make the odd one herself. When she was inspecting a pottery, Corberon recounted that she made such a shocking joke that he recorded it in code in his original diary: it sounds as if she chuckled that one of the shapes resembled a vagina. Later, her secretary recorded her laughing at how, in mythology, women could blame their pregnancies on visits from gods. In a lifetime in the public gaze, a couple of dirty jokes is not much – though one cannot imagine Maria Theres
a making any.
Behind the façade, Catherine enjoyed a discreet earthiness with her lovers. Her letters to Potemkin and Zavadovsky displayed her animal sensuality such as when she said her body had taken over from her mind and she had to restrain every hair. She obviously enjoyed sex, but, as far as we know, it was always sex while she believed herself to be in love. There is no evidence at all for her ever having sex with a man for its own sake without believing it to be the start of a long relationship. The diplomats bandied names around and said they performed certain ‘functions’, which has been believed ever since.
However, there must have been transitory relationships and ‘one-night stands’ in the quest for compatibility, but they would have been rare because they were difficult to arrange. In the Winter Palace for example, it would have been surprisingly complicated to let in – and let out – a lover, even if he was a Guardsman, without other Guards, maids, valets and courtiers knowing about it. For example, when Catherine went to see Potemkin in 1774, she could not go into his rooms because he was with adjutants, who would be shocked to see the Empress appearing in his apartment: she had to return secretly to her rooms even though he was her official favourite. Later, when one favourite spent the night in her boudoir, he came out in the morning and met her secretary, and he recorded it in his diary.
Catherine spent her whole life in public in a way that makes even our own age of paparazzi seem private. Inside her Palace, every move she made was watched and commented upon. It is likely there would be much more evidence if there were regiments of Guardsmen being smuggled in and out of her apartments. Only Potemkin himself could wander into her bedroom whenever he liked because he had a covered passageway that led directly from his rooms to hers, and everyone accepted he was unique.38
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This is how the favourites rose to the imperial bedchamber and how they lived when they got there. Catherine’s love affair became a Court institution on the day that it was announced in the Court Journal that the young man in question, usually a Guardsman of provincial gentry and therefore not a magnate’s scion, had been appointed adjutant-general to the Empress. In several cases, as we have seen, the gentlemen were already aides-de-camp to Potemkin, an appointment that brought them into regular contact with Catherine.39 So, whenever the diplomats wrote feverishly that Potemkin had presented an officer to Catherine, it could mean everything or nothing.*3 However, one senses Catherine preferred choosing her lovers from among Potemkin’s staff, because they were somehow touched by a whiff of the Prince himself and they knew the form.
Before the appointment to adjutantcy, the young man would have jumped through several hoops. The legend claims that Potemkin simply selected the boy out of a list of candidates. Then if Catherine liked him, the ‘éprouveuse’ or sampler – her lady-in-waiting, first Countess Bruce and later Anna Protasova – would try him out. Saint-Jean, a dubious memoirist who apparently worked in Potemkin’s chancellery, claimed the Prince became a sort of sex therapist: a prospective favourite stayed with Potemkin for six weeks to be ‘taught all he needed to know’ as Catherine’s lover.40 He would then be checked by Dr Rogerson, Catherine’s sociable Scottish doctor, and finally be sent to the Empress’s room for the most important test of all. Almost all of this legend, particularly Potemkin’s role, is false.
How were they selected? By chance, taste and artifice. Potemkin’s pimping was widely believed: ‘he now plays the same role that La Pompadour did at the end of her life with Louis XV’, claimed Corberon. The truth was far more complicated because it involved the love, choice and emotions of an extremely dignified and shrewd woman. Neither Potemkin nor anyone else could actually ‘supply’ men to Catherine. Both of them were too proud to play the procuring game. He did not ‘supply’ Zavadovsky, who already worked with Catherine. As her consort and friend, he ultimately sanctioned it, though not before trying to get rid of the dull secretary. It was said that Zorich was ‘appointed’ by Potemkin. Earlier on the day of his dinner party at Ozerki just before Zorich became favourite, a written exchange between Catherine and the Prince holds a clue.
Potemkin wrote to his Empress humbly asking her to appoint Zorich as his aide-de-camp, ‘granting him whatever rank Your Imperial Majesty thinks as necessary’. Potemkin was testing to see if Catherine approved Zorich or not. She simply wrote, ‘Promote to Colonel.’41 Potemkin wanted Catherine to be happy and to preserve his power. Perhaps this indirect route, not the smutty innuendo of the diplomats, was the subtle way that Potemkin tested the waters, asking if Catherine wanted this young man around Court or not, but without demeaning her dignity. Once she had found her favourite, she often looked to Potemkin for what she called his ‘clever guidance’.42 This was how these two highly sophisticated politicians and sensitive people communicated in such matters.
She made her own choices: when Lanskoy was chosen, he was one of Potemkin’s aides-de-camp, but the Prince actually wanted someone else to be favourite. However it worked out, there was much competition, among Panins and Orlovs, to introduce potential favourites to Catherine since they were regarded as having much more influence than they probably did. Rumiantsev and Panin both hoped to benefit from Potemkin’s rise: he was the downfall of both of them.
Were the favourites sampled by the ‘éprouveuse’? There is no evidence at all of any ‘trying out’, but there is plenty of Catherine’s jealous possessiveness of her favourites. This myth was based on Countess Bruce’s possible earlier relationship with Potemkin, her mission to summon him to the Empress’s favour from the Nevsky Monastery, and her affair with Korsakov well after Catherine’s relationship with him had started. Did Korsakov, boasting after his dismissal, invent this arrangement, perhaps to excuse his own behaviour? As for the medical check, there is no proof of it, but it would seem sensible to have a rollicking Guardsman checked by Dr Rogerson for the pox before sleeping with the Empress.
After this, the lucky man would dine with the Empress, attend whatever receptions she was gracing and then adjourn to the Little Hermitage to play cards with her inner circle – Potemkin, Master of the Horse Lev Naryshkin, assorted Orlovs, if they were in favour, a handful of Potemkin’s nieces and nephews, and the odd favoured foreigner. She sat for some rubbers of whist or faro or played rhyming games or charades. Everyone would be watching – though Potemkin would probably already know. At 11 p.m., Catherine rose and the young man accompanied her to her apartments. This would be the routine of their life virtually every day they were in Petersburg, unless there was a special holiday. Catherine was always grateful to Potemkin for his advice, kindness and generous lack of jealousy in such private matters – as she wrote to him after falling in love with Korsakov: ‘He’s an angel – big, big, big thanks!’43
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The favourite derived massive benefits from his gilded position, but these were balanced by dire disadvantages. The advantages were enough land, serfs, jewels and cash to found an aristocratic dynasty. The disadvantages were, simply put, Catherine and Potemkin.
The first advantage – and the real mark of the position – was possession of the most potent piece of real estate in all the Russians. As in all property, location was paramount. Apartments in the Empress’s wing of her palaces were as valuable as those at Versailles. The new favourite would take possession of the beautifully decorated, green-carpeted apartment linked to Catherine’s by the notorious staircase. There, it was claimed, he would find a certain sum of money as a welcoming present – 100,000 roubles or 10,000 roubles every week. But there is no evidence for this golden hello, though we know from Vassilchikov’s ‘kept woman’ complaint that she regularly gave generous cash presents on birthdays, and she certainly paid for their fine clothes and granted them a monthly table allowance. Legend claims that, in gratitude for their privileged position, the favourites would then pay Potemkin a bribe-payment of around 100,000 roubles as if they had bought a tax farm – or
as if they were renting his place. Even the unreliable Saint-Jean does not believe this story, which is saying something as he believes virtually everything else.44 Since the favourite would later receive untold riches, he might well thank the person who had sponsored his arrival in the highest circles, as anyone might thank a patron – but it is unlikely a penniless provincial would have 100,000 roubles to pay Potemkin even if the system existed. The only evidence of this payment was that, when they were appointed, one later favourite gave Potemkin a teapot, and another thanked his patron with a gold watch. Usually, Potemkin received nothing.
The favourite and his family would become rich. ‘Believe me, my friend,’ said Corberon, ‘over here, this profession is a good one!’45 Foreigners were dazzled by the costs of maintaining, and especially dismissing, the favourites. ‘Not less than a million roubles yearly, exclusive of the enormous pensions of Prince Orlov and Prince Potemkin,’ calculated Harris, who estimated that the Orlovs had received seventeen million roubles between 1762 and 1783.46 The figures are impossible to verify, but Catherine was exceedingly generous even when she had been ill-treated, perhaps out of guilt or at least awareness that it was not an easy role. Maybe she hoped her magnanimity would demonstrate that she herself was not hurt. However, there was no shortage of ambitious young men eager for the position. Indeed, as the Empress was selecting a new lover, Potemkin’s adjutant (and cousin of his nieces) Lev Engelhardt noticed that, ‘during the church service for the court, lots of young men, who were even the slightest bit handsome, stood erect, hoping to regulate their destiny in such an easy way.’47
Catherine the Great & Potemkin Page 28
