Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  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. Bu
t 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.

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  ‘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 tha
t 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!’