From then on, with her acquiescence, Potemkin approved each of Catherine’s lovers to ensure their compatibility with the empress and their inability to displace him in her affections. When Her Imperial Majesty was between relationships, Potemkin resumed his role as her lover.
After Zavadovsky, Catherine spent a year (May 1777 to May 1778) in the arms of Semyon Zorich, a swarthy, curly-haired, thirty-one-year-old major of the hussars. But the rest of 1778 belonged to Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, although he barely made it to December. Rimsky-Korsakov, whom both Catherine and Potemkin nicknamed “the child,” cheated on the empress, first with her confidante Countess Bruce (who lost her job over her foolish indiscretion), and then with another lady of the court. Both women left their husbands for him.
The empress was a magnanimous lover and always pensioned off her paramours with real estate, thousands of serfs, and lovely parting gifts of china and silver, tableware and linens. But each time one of her affairs ended, Catherine, who had expected it to last until the end of time, became despondent, and very little state business was accomplished for a few weeks until she got over it.
Catherine’s next lover was Alexander Lanskoy, who warmed the empress’s bed from 1780 to 1784. When the royal romance began, Lanskoy was a twenty-two-year-old officer of the Horse Guards, eager to learn, and happy to accept Potemkin’s primacy and position at court. Lanskoy would die on June 25, 1784, probably from diphtheria, although it was rumored that Potemkin had poisoned him. Catherine was brokenhearted at his passing.
But in the early 1780s, with Catherine happily in love with Lanskoy, she and Potemkin could focus on politics. On December 14, 1782, Catherine secretly instructed Potemkin to annex the Crimea, in order to prevent the Turkish from doing so. Soon after he had risen to favor, Potemkin had become Governor General of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan, and the Caucasus. In 1778, Catherine approved his plan for a port on the Black Sea to be called Kherson. Potemkin supervised every detail of building the town, including designing the houses. The following year he gave the order to found Nikolaev, another city on the Black Sea, named for Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of seafarers.
Potemkin had nicknamed the Crimea “the wart on the end of Catherine’s nose,” but it became his own paradise, a lush, cosmopolitan peninsula. He or she who owned it controlled the trade routes across the Black Sea. Potemkin returned to the Black Sea as a stealthy conqueror in 1783. On May 11, he wrote to Catherine from the city of Kherson to say that he had found everything in disarray but was sorting it out. Wanting the issue resolved as soon as possible, the empress replied, most likely in early June, “Not only do I often think of you, but I also regret and often grieve over the fact that you are there and not here, for without you I feel as though I’m missing a limb. I beg you in every way: do not delay the occupation of the Crimea.”
The annexation was completed in July. To thank him, Catherine created Potemkin Prince of Tauris, or Taurida. He immediately began building cities, towns, and roads to plan for the empress’s eventual journey to her new territory.
By the late 1770s, and most definitely after he had annexed the Crimea in Catherine’s name, Grigory Potemkin, Serenissimus (His Serene Highness), was the de facto coruler of the Russian Empire, a domain so vast that it needed rulers in both the east and west. Potemkin had the rare gift of being able to manage in microcosm, like running the College of War, and he also had the talents to govern in macrocosm—a skilled viceroy for the steppes of the south. His demesne comprised all new territories acquired in the name of the empire between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east; and from the Caucasus and the Volga River across most of Ukraine, almost as far as Kiev. It was unique for a Russian emperor to delegate so much power to a consort, or to any individual, but Catherine’s relationship with Potemkin was matchless.
Her journey to the Crimea in 1787, organized by Potemkin, took several days, covering four thousand miles. The imperial convoy consisted of 14 huge coaches mounted on runners, and 124 sleighs, with 40 sleighs in reserve. Catherine’s conveyance was a miniature dacha, or vacation home, on runners. It consisted of three rooms—a library, bedroom, and drawing room—all sumptuously decorated. Six windows provided panoramic views of the scenery.
They departed Kiev in opulent galleys and sailed for part of the way, a flotilla of eighty boats carrying three thousand troops, baggage, and munitions, in addition to the empress’s vast entourage of laundresses, cooks, maids, valets, doctors, apothecaries, and even dishwashers and silver polishers. It was a cross between a progress of Elizabeth I and a Cleopatran journey down the Nile.
All along the riverbanks of the Dnieper the village houses were bedecked with floral garlands and triumphal arches, which may be the origin of the “Potemkin villages.” The phrase, coined by a German historian, Georg von Helbig, refers to a ruse he alleged was concocted by the prince to convince Catherine that he had built a vast number of villages and towns in the south, when in fact she was merely riding past a series of painted facades outside of which thousands of peasants appeared to bustle about their daily duties. Von Helbig claimed that all of the pasteboard facades as well as thousands of peasants, livestock, and conveyances were silently transported numerous times in the dead of night, and at every new location the facades were reconstructed at breakneck speed so that Catherine saw the same town over and over again, although each time she was told it was a new place. The assertion defies common sense on a variety of levels. For one thing, the empress wasn’t stupid. She’d notice. And if she didn’t, some of the hundreds of others in her entourage would. For another, it would have been nigh impossible to relocate everything on dirt roads in the middle of the night, in addition to rebuilding all of it. Additionally, there is no evidence of orders given by Potemkin to create false villages or towns. The locations and edifices visited and observed by Catherine’s entourage were authentic and were genuinely inhabited.
While two cities certainly did whitewash their poverty by constructing some spanking-clean false houses (a trick still being tried in the blighted Bronx during the 1970s), the Prince de Ligne, the Austrian field marshal who, along with his boss, Emperor Joseph II, did some sightseeing on his own during the empress’s visit to the south, found no evidence of fraud. However, the lies about “Potemkin villages” were evidently spread immediately, because the prince refuted these allegations, based on his eyewitness experience. “Already the ridiculous story has been circulated that pasteboard villages were painted on our roads…that the ships and guns were painted, the cavalry horseless…. Even those among the Russians…vexed at not being with us, will pretend we have been deceived.”
One of those who was so vexed was Catherine’s son, Paul. But, groundless as it was, von Helbig’s mud stuck. Potemkin’s detractors, including Paul, were even unwilling to believe that there was water in the Crimea. Paul preferred the sham to stand and the lies to be perpetuated even after he had been proven wrong.
Not only were the vessels not oil paintings, but by 1787, Potemkin had created a formidable navy, including twenty-four ships of the line, warships carrying over forty cannon apiece. He became known as the father of the Black Sea Fleet. Another remarkable feat of the prince’s was his ability to attract peasants, tradesmen, and professionals to populate his new Crimean cities by offering incentives, such as no taxes for ten years.
When Potemkin’s enormous achievements in the Crimea were disbelieved, or worse, written about as shams or deceptions, he spiraled into one of his depressions, maniacally chewing his nails. During the last years of his life he lived and governed from Jassy in Dacia, Moldavia (modern-day Bucharest), enjoying a sybaritic lifestyle with a series of beautiful young mistresses.
In 1785, the year after imperial paramour Alexander Lanskoy’s death, while Potemkin was in the Crimea planning for her visit, Catherine took another lover, Count Alexander Matreievech Dmitriyev-Mamonov. She nicknamed the twenty-six-year-old athletic guardsman “Monsieur Redcoat.” B
ut the empress dismissed him in 1789 when he cheated on her, impregnating one of her ladies-in-waiting. Catherine gave Mamonov and his fertile girlfriend a generous gift and even presided at their wedding.
Later that year, at the age of sixty, Catherine took a new bedfellow, a twenty-two-year-old handsome and swarthy boy toy named Platon Zubov, although the empress called him “Blackie” because of his dark complexion. Zubov was very ambitious, yet he seemed to satisfy Catherine, which kept Potemkin, now at Jassy, at least cautiously pleased. But the prince was anxious to come to St. Petersburg in order to personally check out Zubov, and to gauge the present status of his own influence with the empress.
Potemkin arrived in the capital around the end of February 1791, and Catherine pronounced him “more handsome, more lovable, wittier, more brilliant than ever, and in the happiest mood possible.” But the couple argued over Prussian foreign policy, and Potemkin’s visit was fraught with much door slamming and tears. On his last night in the capital Potemkin dined with his niece Tatiana. He mentioned during the meal that he was certain he would die soon. Months earlier he had remarked with equal certainty that the sixty-two-year-old empress would outlive him.
Potemkin returned to Jassy, falling ill that August 13. He convalesced by composing hymns, and was moved from the palace to a country house. The arrival of Catherine’s letters both cheered him and released a flood of nostalgia. Potemkin wept bitterly, knowing that they would never see each other again. But he continued to correspond with the empress, writing on September 21, “My paroxysms continue for a third day. I’ve lost all strength and don’t know what the end will be.” Six days later he told Catherine, “Beloved matushka, my not seeing you makes it even harder for me to live.” He turned fifty-two on September 30.
On October 2, he slipped into a coma for several hours, but awoke the following day and was given last rites. On October 4, he insisted on quitting Jassy, convinced that if he could reach the sea air of Nikolaev, he would recover. He penned his last letter to Catherine, signing it, “Your most loyal and grateful subject.”
They set out at eight a.m. on October 5, 1791, but Grigory Potemkin, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, died on the roadside about forty miles from Jassy in the arms of his niece Alexandra. After realizing he was too ill to continue the journey, he had asked his companions to “[t]ake me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unfurled to make him more comfortable; he was covered with the silken dressing gown that had been a gift from his beloved Catherine. A search was made for a gold coin to place over his (good) eye, according to Orthodox tradition, but none was to be found in such a remote location. One of the Cossacks escorting the party offered them a copper five-kopeck coin instead, which closed the eyes of His Serene Highness at midday. The cause of death was most probably bronchial pneumonia, undoubtedly exacerbated by exhaustion.
Catherine, who did not receive the news until it arrived by courier at six in the evening on October 12, was inconsolable. She fainted and had to be bled. Then she went into seclusion. At two in the morning, in a letter to her friend and correspondent of many years Friedrich Melchior Grimm, she poured out her heart and the contents of her pen in a eulogy that encapsulates why she had loved Potemkin.
…my pupil, my friend and almost my idol, Prince Potemkin-Tavrichesky, has died after about a month’s illness in Moldavia! You can have no idea of how afflicted I am: he joined to an excellent heart a rare understanding and an extraordinary breadth of spirit; his views were always great and magnanimous; he was very humane, full of knowledge, singularly lovable, and always with new ideas; never did a man have the gift of bon mots and knowing just what to say as he had; his military talents during this war must have been striking, for he did not miss a single blow on land or sea. No one in the world was less capable of being led than he; he also had a particular gift for knowing how to employ his people. In a word, he was a statesman in counsel and execution; he was attached to me with passion and zeal; he scolded and became angry when he thought one could do better; with age and experience he was correcting his faults…. But his most rare quality was a courage of heart, mind and soul which distinguished him completely from the rest of humankind, and which meant that we understood one another perfectly and could let those who understood less prattle away to their hearts’ content. I regard Prince Potemkin as a very great man, who did not fulfill half of what was within his grasp.
Catherine spent the next several days weeping, convinced that she would never be able to survive without him. “Prince Potemkin did me a cruel turn by dying! The whole burden falls on me.”
“How can I replace Potemkin?” she lamented to her secretary, Alexander Khrapovitsky. “He was a real nobleman, a clever man, no one could buy him. Everything will be wrong….”
As the days passed, Khrapovitsky could only report, “Tears and despair…tears…more tears.” On December 12, continuing to grieve, Catherine confided to Grimm, “I am still profoundly afflicted by it. To replace him is impossible, because someone would have to be born as he was, and the end of this century announces no geniuses….”
Potemkin’s funeral was held at Jassy. He had wanted to be buried in his birthplace at Chizhova, but Catherine played the empress card and decided that his final resting place should be at one of his Crimean cities. She settled on Kherson, where Potemkin’s body arrived on November 23, 1791. As if he were a royal, his heart and viscera were removed and buried elsewhere: His organs, including his brain, rest beneath the floor before the Hospodor of Moldavia’s red velvet medieval throne. Potemkin’s heart was supposed to have been placed under the throne of St. Catherine’s in Kherson, but there’s no trace of it there. The villagers of Chizhova believe it was taken there in 1818 by Archbishop Ivov Potemkin.
After Catherine’s death in November 1796, her son commanded the destruction of Potemkin’s tomb, but apparently his orders were botched. The marble monument that Catherine had commissioned wasn’t completed at the time of her demise, so the prince rested in an unmarked grave, and perhaps the emperor Paul’s lackeys never found it. The grave was desecrated during the Russian Revolution of 1918, and Potemkin’s corpse was as defiled as that of Madame de Maintenon during the French Revolution.
In 1930, a writer and native of Kherson, returning to his hometown for a visit, noticed Potemkin’s skull and burial clothes displayed behind glass in the “Anti-Religious Museum.” He sent a telegram to the ministry responsible for protecting art, and Potemkin was reburied.
On May 11, 1984, his coffin was exhumed and analyzed. Some additional items had found their way into the more modern casket, such as a British officer’s Crimean War–era epaulette, but forensic tests concluded that the body was Potemkin’s. In July 1986, the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. It was confirmed that the coffin dated to 1930. It was also supposed that any icons that would have been buried with Potemkin’s body had disappeared during the looting of the Russian Revolution. At St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Kherson, Potemkin was reinterred for the final time, with a proper headstone.
Everything about Potemkin had been larger than life. Leonine, broad chested, well over six feet tall, the prince, known across Russia as Serenissimus, had coruled the empire with Catherine for seventeen years. They had met three decades before his death during a time of crisis, and a gallant gesture sealed their combined destiny. After their romance ended, he remained Catherine’s partner, friend, adviser, minister, and confidant, and she surely loved him more deeply than she had ever loved another. Catherine called him her “Colossus,” her tiger, her idol, her hero, and her greatest eccentric. They were unquestionably each other’s grand passion.
Potemkin won the Second Turkish War for her, annexed the Crimea, created Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and founded the cities of Kherson, Nikolaev, Sevastopol, and Odessa. He was as intelligent, creative, and brilliant as he was arrogant, indolent, and debauched.
Perhaps the most succinct epitaph, although it was not wr
itten as one, was penned by Charles-Joseph, the Prince de Ligne. The Austrian ambassador found Potemkin to be “…the most extraordinary man I have ever met. He gives the appearance of laziness yet works incessantly…always reclining on his couch yet never sleeping, day or night, because his devotion to the sovereign he adores keeps him constantly active…melancholy in his pleasures, unhappy by virtue of being happy, blasé about everything, quickly wearied of anything, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician and a child of ten…prodigiously wealthy without having a sou, discoursing on theology to his generals and on war to his archbishops; never reading, but probing those to whom he speaks…wanting everything like a child, capable of dispensing with everything like a great man…what then is his magic? Genius, and then genius, and then more genius!”
In addition to the numerous titles and offices that Catherine awarded Potemkin, she gave him several palaces, the most famous of which was the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. Tsar Paul I avenged himself on his mother and her lover after Catherine’s death by turning the Tauride into the Horse Guards barracks.
And since our thoughts have turned to horses…
While Potemkin was Catherine’s most famous and influential lover, history has all too often assigned her a more original and unusual partner—one of the equine species. The origin of this ridiculous horse tale begins long before Catherine’s birth, with a courtier from Holstein named Adam Olearius. In 1647, Olearius published an account of his travels throughout Russia in 1630, writing that the Russians were fond of practicing sodomy, even with horses. In the ensuing misogynistic decades after Catherine’s death, accounts of her passion for horseback riding morphed into the legend of bestiality, which was taken to its preposterous conclusion with the story that the empress met her untimely end when the harness broke as it was lowering a stallion on top of her, and the horse crushed her to death. The truth is far more prosaic, to say nothing of plausible. The great Catherine suffered a stroke in the commode.
Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe Page 27
