Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  His tastes were ‘truly barbaric and Muscovite’ and he liked ‘nothing better than the plain food of his people, particularly Russian pastries, like pirozki, and raw vegetables’, which he kept at his bedside.14 When he came upstairs, he would often be nibbling apples, turnips, radishes, garlic, behaving in the Winter Palace exactly as he had as a boy wandering with serf children through Chizhova. The political significance of the Prince’s choice of nibble was as natural and deliberate in its Russian rusticity as Walpole’s red Norfolk apples were of his earthy Englishness.

  Potemkin’s uncouth behaviour shocked the usually Francophile courtiers and the fastidious ambassadors, but when he felt like it he appeared in formal or military uniform with the perfect grace and immaculate presentation of a dapper courtier. Everything with him was a battle of extremes. If he was thoughtful or brooding, as he was very often, he would bite his nails to the quick: he was to suffer terribly from hangnail for his whole life, so that the letters between the two rulers of the Empire would often be distracted from laws and wars by the state of his fingertips. ‘The greatest nailbiter in the Russian Empire’, was what Catherine called him. ‘The Cyclops’, wrote Alexander Ribeaupierre, ‘has a charming habit. He bites his nails with frenzy right down to the skin.’15 If it was not his nails, it was anything else close within reach. At the Little Hermitage, where the Empress had written out a list of rules to enforce informality, she added a special rule aimed at her Potemkin. ‘You are requested to be cheerful,’ went Rule Three, ‘without however destroying, breaking or biting anything.’16

  Nonetheless Potemkin took over Catherine’s apartments too: he put a huge Turkish divan in her salon so he could lounge around in his dressing gown – ‘Mister Tom [Catherine’s English greyhound] is snoring very deeply behind me on the Turkish divan General Potemkin has introduced,’17 Catherine told Grimm rather proudly. His effects were strewn around her neat rooms – and she admired his untamed, almost Bohemian, nonchalance: ‘How much longer will you leave things in my rooms that belong to you!’, she wrote to him. ‘Please do not throw your handkerchiefs all over the shop in your Turkish fashion. Many thanks for your visit and I love you a lot.’18

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  It is impossible to reduce a friendship yet alone a love to its components. But, if anything, their relationship was based on laughter, sex, mutually admired intelligence, and power in an order that changed all the time. His wit had made her laugh when Orlov presented him twelve years before – and that continued throughout their lives. ‘Talking of originals who make me laugh and above all of General Potemkin,’ Catherine told Grimm on 19 June that year, ‘who is more à la mode than any one else and who makes me laugh so much I could burst my sides.’19 Their letters were pervaded as much by her guffaws as by the force of their ambition and attraction: ‘Darling, what stories you told me yesterday! I can’t stop laughing when I think of them. What happy times I am spending with you!’20

  There were lots of games that involved Potemkin competing with Mister Tom to see who could unleash more disorder in the imperial apartments. Her letters to Grimm are filled with Potemkin’s antics including his covering himself with Mister Tom’s little rug, a most incongruous sight: ‘I’m sewing a new bed-blanket for Thomas…that General Potemkin pretends to steal from him.’21 Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey.

  She was never bored with Potemkin and always bored without him: he was protean, creative and always original. When she had not seen him for a while, she grumbled: ‘I’m bored to death. When will I see you again?’ But, as so often happens in love affairs, the laughter and the love-making seemed to lead inexorably to each other. Her sexual happiness shines through her letters. The affair was highly sexual. She was extremely proud of his sex appeal to other women and his record of female conquests. ‘I don’t wonder that there are so many women attributed to you,’ she wrote to him. ‘It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and you differ from everyone else in everything.’22

  Darling I think you really thought I would not write today. I woke up at five and now it is seven, I will write…I have given strict orders to the whole of my body, down to the last hair to stop showing you the smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart under ten locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible to talk more nonsense in a few lines? A river of absurdities flows from my head, I do not understand how you can bear a woman with such incoherent thoughts. Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What a trick have you played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the best in Europe. It is time, high time, for me to become reasonable. What a shame! What a sin! Catherine II to be the victim of this crazy passion…one more proof of your supreme power over me. Enough! Enough! I have already scribbled such sentimental metaphysics that can only make you laugh. Well, mad letter, go to that happy place where my hero dwells…Goodbye, Giaour, Muscovite, Cossack…23

  This is how she felt, probably during March 1774, when she woke early, the morning after a tryst with Potemkin, who was still asleep in his apartments. The roguish names she gave him – the ‘Cossack’, ‘giaour’ (the pejorative Turkish for a non-Moslem), ‘Lion of the Jungle’, ‘Golden Tiger’, ‘Golden Cockerell’ and ‘Wolf’ – may refer to sexual energy. She even called him ‘Pugachev’ of all things, presumably meaning ferocious, energetic, and unbridled like a Cossack.

  In these months, they were sharing everything; their meetings seem to have been frantic sessions of laughter, love-making and political planning, one after another, because both enjoyed all three. The sex was instantly mixed with politics. ‘I love you very much,’ she began a letter, some time in April, ‘and when you caressed me, my caress always hurries to answer you…Don’t forget to summon Pavel [P. S. Potemkin, his cousin, who was being sent to assist in suppressing Pugachev]: when he arrives, it will be necessary to do two things’24 – and on she went on to discuss the measures against the rebellion.

  Catherine was addicted to him: one night when he did not come to visit her, she actually ‘got up from my bed, dressed myself and went to the library towards the doors so that I might wait for you, where I stood for two hours in the draught; and then at 11 o’clock went to bed in misery where, thanks to you, I had not slept for five nights.’25 The vision of the Empress waiting outside Potemkin’s room for two hours in her dressing gown and bonnet gives us some idea of her passion for him. There were the inevitable rumours of Potemkin’s elephantine sexual equipment and this may explain the persistent myth that Catherine took a cast of his formidable member to console herself during his increasingly long absences in the south.26 This ranks in terms of historical veracity with the other malicious smears against Catherine, but stories of Potemkin’s ‘glorious weapon’ found their way into the homosexual mythology of St Petersburg.*1

  If he was busy, she respected his privacy, even though she was the Empress. One day, she could not resist visiting him in his apartments. She ventured downstairs but as she approached, ‘I saw through the doorway the back of a clerk or an adjutant and I fled at top speed. I love you all the time with all my soul.’27 This also shows how carefully the Empress had to behave in front of clerks and servants in her own palaces. Catherine complained repeatedly about her love for him making her lose her reason, the governing ideal of this devotee of Voltaire and Diderot. This Enlightened ruler in the Age of Reason revelled in the swooning language of schoolgirl silliness: ‘When you are with me, closing my eyes is the only way not to lose my mind; the alternative which would make me laugh for the rest of my life would be to say, “My eyes are charmed by you.” ’ Was she referring to his romantic song to her? ‘My stupid eyes gaze at you; I become silly and unable to reason.’ She dreamed about him: ‘A strange thing happened to me. I have become a somnambulist’ – and she recounted how she imagined meeting ‘the most fascinating of men’. Then she awoke: ‘now I am looking everywher
e for this man of my dreams…How I treasure him more than the whole world!…Darling, when you meet him, give him a kiss for me.’28

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  Downstairs in the Winter Palace on the basement floor, beneath Catherine’s chapel, there was her Russian bath – the banya – where much of their love affair seems to have taken place.*2

  ‘My dear fellow, if you want to eat some meat, everything’s ready in the bath. But I beg you not to swipe any food from there because everyone will know that we’re cooking in there.’29 After his promotion in the Guards in March 1774, Catherine writes:

  Good morning Mr Lieutenant-Colonel, how are you feeling after your bath? I am well and feel very jolly thanks to you. As soon as you left, do you know what we talked about? It is easy to guess, seeing how intelligent you are: about you, my darling! Good things were said about you, you were found beyond comparison. Goodbye, will you look after the regiment and the officers all day? As to me, I know what I am going to do. I will think – of whom? Of him, it is true that the thought of Grisha never leaves me…30

  One day, Potemkin arrived back at the Palace. ‘Dear matuskha, I have just arrived but I am so frozen that I cannot even get my teeth warm,’ he announced to her. ‘First I want to know how you are feeling. Thank you for the three garments and I kiss your feet.’ We can imagine the messengers or ladies-in-waiting scampering back and forth down the miles of corridors in the Winter Palace bearing Catherine’s reply: ‘I rejoice that you are back, my dear. I am well. To get warm: go to the bath; it has been heated today.’31 Later the servant brought her the news that Potemkin had finished his bath. So the Empress sent back another note: ‘My beauty, my darling, whom nothing resembles, I am full of warmth and tenderness for you and you will have my protection as long as I live. You must be, I guess, even more handsome than ever after the bath.’32

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  Lovers tend to share the details of their health: Potemkin and Catherine shared theirs through their lives. ‘Adieu monsieur,’ she scribbled one morning before going out, ‘how did you sleep? How is your fever? It would be so nice to sit and talk.’33 When his fever eased, she tempted him back. ‘You will see a new routine,’ she promised. ‘At first I will receive you in my boudoir, I will make you sit down near the table and there you will be warm and so will not get a cold…And we will start to read a book and I will let you go at half past ten…’.34

  When he was better, it was her turn to be ill: ‘I slept very well but not much; I’ve got a headache and pain in my chest. I don’t know if I’ll go out today. If I do go out, it’s only because I love you more than you love me and I can prove it as 2+2=4. I will go to see you. Not every person is so clever, so handsome, so lovely as you are.’35

  Potemkin himself was a notorious hypochondriac. But even when he was ill he was always in a state of nervous tension, so that sometimes Catherine assumed the tyrannical tone of a brisk German matron to calm him down: ‘Really, it is time to settle down to the right order of things. Be quiet and let me be quiet too. I tell you sincerely that I’m most sympathetic about your illness but I will not spoil you by words of tenderness.’36 When he really was sick: ‘My beloved soul, precious and unique, I can find no words to express my love for you. Don’t be upset about your diarrhoea – it will clean up the bowels well…’.37 Bowels particularly resonate through the letters of that century.

  When she herself came down with diarrhoea, she was concerned, like any woman would be, that her lover did not startle her in an undignified position. ‘If you really must see me, send somebody to tell me; since six this morning I have had the most atrocious diarrhoea.’ Besides she did not want to visit him down the icy Tsarskoe Selo corridor: ‘I am sorry but passing through the non-heated corridor…would only make my aches worse…I’m sorry you’re ill. Try to be quiet, my friend, that is the best cure.’38

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  Catherine was thrilled to have found a partner who could be an equal of sorts: ‘My darling, the time I spend with you is so happy. We pass four hours, boredom vanishes and I don’t want to part from you. My dearest friend, I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, you are so handsome, clever, jovial and funny; when I am with you I attach no importance to the world. I have never been so happy. Very often I want to keep my feelings from you but usually my heart just blabs out my passion.’39 But even in these early idyllic days of this great love Potemkin was already tormented by his contradictory appetites: a childish hunger for attention and love versus a wild yearning for freedom and independence.

  Catherine’s solution to the first problem was to spoil Potemkin day and night with her attention, which he sucked up, for he was quite as greedy for love as she was. The Empress of all the Russias could not humble herself enough before this proud Russian: ‘My dear dove, my precious friend, I must write to you to keep my promise. Please know that I love you and this shouldn’t surprise anyone. For you, one would do the impossible and so I’ll be either your humble maid or your lowly servant or both at once.’40 Potemkin constantly demanded more and more attention. He wanted to know she was always thinking about him. If not, he sulked.

  ‘I never forget you,’ she reassured ‘her beloved friend’ after one of his moods. ‘As soon as I finished listening to reports, which took three hours, I wanted to send somebody to you, especially as it was not yet ten o’clock and I was afraid of waking you up before. As you see, your anger has no foundation…Darling I love you like my soul.’41 If she was truly angry, she let him know it: ‘Fool! I am not ordering you to do anything! Not deserving this coldness, I blame it on our deadly enemy, your spleen!’42 She indulged his moods, finding his passion somewhat flattering, and tried to understand his torments: ‘You are talking nonsense, my darling. I love you and I’ll love you for ever in spite of yourself.’ Even more sweetly: ‘Batinka, come to see me so that I can calm you with my endless caresses.’43 Her role is often to sooth this angry and frustrated man with her love.

  Potemkin’s moods were so changeable that the two played games with each other. ‘Was there anything on that sheet?’, she wrote, pretending not to have read one of his raging notes. ‘Certainly reproaches, for Your Excellency has sulked all evening and I, brokenhearted, sought your caresses in vain…The quarrel took place the day before yesterday when I tried in all sincerity to have it out with you about my plans that…could be very useful to you. Last night, I confess, I deliberately did not send anyone…But when you had not arrived by nine o’clock I sent for news of your health. Then you turned up but with a sulky face. I pretended not to notice your bad mood which ended by really upsetting you…Wait darling, let my wounded heart heal again, tenderness will return as soon as we grant each other an audience.’44

  Perhaps it was after this that Potemkin sent her a blank piece of paper. The Empress was hurt yet somewhat amused and she rewarded him with an almost complete encyclopaedia of his nicknames: ‘This is not April Fool’s Day to send me a blank sheet. Probably…you have done it not to spoil me too much. But…I don’t guess the meaning of your silence either. Yet I am full of tenderness for you, giaour, Muscovite, Pugachev, golden cockerel, peacock, cat, pheasant, golden tiger, lion in the jungle.’45

  Catherine concealed an obsessive emotional neediness – ‘my cruel tenderness’ – beneath her cool German temperament, which was enough to suffocate any man, let alone the impossibly restless Potemkin. Rewarded lavishly, rising fast, spoilt by the woman he loved, he was such a bundle of nerves, poetical melodrama and Slavic contrariness that he could never relax and just be happy: ‘Calmness is for you a state your soul cannot bear.’ He needed space to breathe. His restlessness attracted her, but she could not help finding it insulting: ‘I came to wake you up and…I see you are out. Now I understand this sleep of yours was just an excuse to get rid of me. In town, you spent hours with me…whereas here I can only see you for short moments. Giaour, Cossack, Muscovite, you are always try
ing to avoid me!…You can laugh about me but I do not laugh when I see you bored in my company…’.46 But Potemkin was as manipulative as Catherine herself. Whether it was pride or restlessness that made him avoid her, he liked to let her know it. ‘I’ll never come to see you if you’re avoiding me,’47 she wrote pathetically on one occasion. Potemkin’s quicksilver mind was easily bored, though he never tired of Catherine’s company. They had too much in common.

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  It was difficult for a traditional Russian like Potemkin, even one educated in the classics of the Enlightenment, to maintain an equal relationship with a woman not only more powerful but also so sexually independent. Potemkin’s behaviour was selfishly indulgent but he was in a difficult situation with enormous pressures on him, politically and personally. That is why he tormented Catherine. He was obsessively jealous of other men, which was foolish given her absolute devotion to him. The role of official lover was not easy on a masterful man.

  First he was jealous of Vassilchikov. Now Catherine gave him the satisfaction of negotiating the terms of departure – or pay-off for ‘Iced Soup’. ‘I am handing over the question of deciding to someone far cleverer than me…I ask you to be moderate.’ Her letter gives us a fascinating glimpse into her generosity: ‘I will not give him more than two villages,’ she informed Potemkin. ‘I have given him money four times but I don’t remember how much. I think it was 60,000…’. Potemkin along with his ex-host Yelagin arranged a most generous deal for Vassilchikov, though it was positively meagre compared to what was given to his successors. Vassilchikov, who had already left the Winter Palace to stay with his brother, now received a fully decorated mansion, 50,000 roubles for setting up house, 5,000 roubles a year pension, villages, tableware, linen and a twenty-place silver service, no doubt including bowls for frozen soup. Poor ‘kept’ Vassilchikov humiliatingly had to ‘bow low’ and thank Potemkin – but he had reason to be grateful.48 This was an early example of Potemkin’s lack of personal or political vindictiveness. However, he remained tortured by the inherent humiliation of his own position: Catherine could dispense with him as she had dispensed with Iced Soup.