Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  ‘No Grishenka,’ she replied in French after a row, ‘it is impossible for me to change as far as you are concerned. You must be fair to yourself: can one love anybody after having known you? I think there is not a man in the world that could equal you. All the more so since my heart is constant by nature and I will say even more: generally, I do not like change.’ She was sensitive about her reputation for ‘wantonness’:

  When you know me better you will respect me for I assure you I am respectable. I am very truthful, I love truth, I hate changes, I suffered horribly in the last two years, I burned my fingers, I will not return to that…I am very happy. If you go on letting yourself be upset by this sort of gossip, do you know what I shall do? Lock myself up in my room and see no one but you. When necessary I could do something that extreme and I love you beyond myself.49

  Her patience was saintly but not inexhaustible: ‘If your silly bad temper has left you, kindly let me know for it seems to persist. Since I’ve given you no reason for such tenacious anger, it seems to me that it has gone on far too long. Unfortunately, it is only I who find it too long, for you are a cruel Tartar!’50

  Their relationship thrived on his wild mood swings, but they were very exhausting. Somehow his appalling behaviour seemed to keep him Catherine’s respect and love, even though his moods were openly manipulative. Catherine was excited by his passions and complimented by his jealousy, but, lacking restraint, he sometimes went too far. He threatened to kill any rivals for her heart. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself,’ she ticked him off. ‘Why did you say that anyone who takes your place would die? It is impossible to compel the heart by threats…I must admit there is some tenderness in your misgivings…I’ve burned my fingers with the fool [Vassilchikov]. I feared…the habit of him would make me unhappy and shorten my life…Now you can read my heart and soul. I am opening them to you sincerely and if you don’t feel it and see it, then you’re unworthy of the great passion you have aroused in me.’51

  Potemkin demanded to know everything. He claimed there had been fifteen lovers before him. This was a rare example of an empress being accused of low morals to her face. But Catherine hoped to settle his jealousies with what she called ‘A sincere confession’. This is a most extraordinary document for any age. The modern feminine tone belongs in our confessional twenty-first century, the worldly and practical morals in the eighteenth. The sentiments of romance and honesty are timeless. For an empress to explain her sex life like this is without parallel. She discussed her four lovers before him – Saltykov, Poniatowski, Orlov and Vassilchikov. She regretted Saltykov and Vassilchikov. Potemkin appeared as the giant hero, the ‘bogatr’ that he so resembled: ‘Now, Sir Hero, after this confession, may I hope that I will receive forgiveness for my sins? As you will be pleased to see, there is no question of fifteen but only a third of that figure of which the first [Saltykov] occurred unwillingly and the fourth [Vassilchikov] out of despair, which cannot be counted as indulgence; as to the other three, God is my witness, they were not due to debauchery for which I have no inclination. If in my youth I had been given a husband whom I could love, I would have remained eternally faithful to him.’

  Then she confessed her version of the truth of her nature: ‘The trouble is only that my heart cannot be content even for an hour without love…’. This was not the nymphomania that schoolboys have assigned to Catherine but an admission of her emotional neediness. The eighteenth century would have called this a statement of sensibilité; the nineteenth century would have seen it as a poetic declaration of romantic love; today, we can see that it is only one of part of a complex, passionate personality.

  Their love for each other was absolute, yet Potemkin’s turbulence and the demands of power meant that it was always stormy. Nonetheless, Catherine finished her Confession with this offer: ‘If you wish to keep me for ever, show as much friendship as affection and continue to love me and to tell me the truth.’52

  Skip Notes

  *1 In the late nineteenth century, the painter Constantine Somov, one of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ circle of intellectuals, whose father was then Curator of the Hermitage Museum, held a tea party for his mainly homosexual friends, the poet Kuzmin, probably the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the poetess Anna Akhmatova and a handful of others. Somov, according to O. Remizov, the author of The Other Petersburg, told them how his father, the Curator, had discovered a magnificent lifesize cast of Potemkin’s member in Catherine’s collection. When the others did not believe him, the men were invited into the other room where they admired, with the bated breath of true connoisseurs, ‘the glorious weapon of Potemkin’, cast in porcelain, which lay wrapped in cottonwool and silk in a wooden box. It was then returned to the Hermitage, where, one must add, it has never been seen again. When this author recently visited the Hermitage to find Potemkin’s collection, no one knew of it. But it is a very large museum.

  *2 Today the banya, like their apartments, does not exist. They were destroyed in the fire of 1837. But from the outside we can see the chapel by the golden dome and cross. Now the banya is the Egyptian section of the Hermitage Museum. It has the cool dampness of a bathhouse even today.

  8

  POWER

  She is crazy about him. They may well be in love because they are exactly the same.

  Senator Ivan Yelagin to Durand de Distroff

  ‘These two great characters were made for each other,’ observed Masson. ‘He first loved his Sovereign as his mistress and then cherished her as his glory.’1 Their similarity of ambitions and talents was both the foundation of their love and its flaw. The great love affair of the Empress heralded a new political era because everyone immediately appreciated that, unlike Vassilchikov or even Grigory Orlov, Potemkin was capable of exerting his power and would strive to do so at once. But, in early 1774, they had to be very careful at the most sensitive moment in Catherine’s reign so far: Pugachev was still rampaging through the territory north of the Caspian, south of the Urals, east of Moscow – and the worried nobles wanted him stopped quickly. The Turks were still not ready to negotiate and Rumiantsev’s army was tired and fever-stricken. A false move against Pugachev, a defeat by the Turks, a provocation against the Orlovs, a slight to the Guards, a concession to the Grand Duke – any of these could literally have cost the lovers their heads.

  Just in case they were under any illusions, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky decided to let them know that he was carefully watching the illuminated window of the imperial bathhouse. The Orlov brothers, who had recovered so much ground since 1772, would be the first casualties of Potemkin’s rise.

  ‘Yes or no?’, ‘Le Balafre’ asked the Empress with a slight laugh.

  ‘About what?’, replied the Empress.

  ‘Is it love?’, persisted Orlov-Chesmensky.

  ‘I cannot lie,’ said the Empress.

  Scarface asked again: ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes!’, said the Empress finally.

  Orlov-Chesmensky began to laugh again: ‘Do you meet in the banya?’

  ‘Why do you think so?’

  ‘Because for four days we’ve seen the light in the window of the bath later than usual.’ Then he added: ‘It was clear yesterday that you’ve made an appointment later so you’d agree not to display affection, to put others off the scent. Good move.’2 Catherine reported all this to her lover and the two revelled in it like naughty children shocking the adults. But there was always something menacing in Alexei Orlov’s jokes.

  * * *

  —

  Between bouts of love-making and laughter in the banya, Potemkin immediately began to help Catherine on both the Russo-Turkish War and the Pugachev Rebellion. These political actors often discussed how to play a scene: ‘Goodbye brother,’ she told him. ‘Behave cleverly in public and that way, no one will know what we are really thinking.’3 Yet she felt safe with Potemkin, who gave her the feeli
ng that everything was possible, that all their glorious dreams were achievable and that the problems of the moment could be settled.

  Catherine was already under pressure about Potemkin. In early March, unidentified but powerful courtiers, including one nicknamed ‘the Alchemist’ – possibly Panin or an Orlov – advised Catherine to dispense with Potemkin: ‘The man you call “the Alchemist” visited…He tried to demonstrate to me the frenzy of yours and my actions and finished by asking if he wanted me to ask you to go back to the Army: to which I agreed. They are all of them at least trying to lecture me…I didn’t own up but I didn’t excuse myself too so they couldn’t claim that I’d lied.’ But the letters also show Potemkin and Catherine’s unity in political matters:

  In short, I have masses of things to tell you and particularly on the subject we spoke about yesterday between noon and two o’clock; but I do not know if you are in the same mood as yesterday and I don’t know either whether your words correspond always to your actions since you promised me several times you would come and you do not come…I am thinking about you all the time. Oh! La! La! What a long letter I have written to you. Excuse me, I always forget that you don’t like it. I’ll never do it again. 4

  Catherine struggled to prevent Potemkin’s rise from causing a rift with the Orlovs: ‘I ask you – don’t do one thing: don’t injure and don’t try to injure Prince Orlov in my thoughts because that would be ingratitude on your part. Before your arrival there was no one who was praised and loved by him as you.’5

  Potemkin now demanded a place in government. The most important positions were war and foreign affairs. Since he had come back as a war hero from the Danube, it was natural for him to choose the War College as his target. As early as 5 March 1774, within a week of his appointment as her adjutant-general, she channelled orders to Zakhar Chernyshev, President of the College of War, Orlov’s ally, through Potemkin.6 As ever, the Pugachev Rebellion worked to Potemkin’s advantage: all governments require scapegoats for public disasters. Thus Zakhar Chernyshev, who received none of the credit for Rumiantsev’s victories, bore the blame for the rampages of Pugachev, and was none too happy about it: ‘Count Chernyshev is very anxious and keeps saying he will retire.’7 Ten days after Potemkin had delivered Catherine’s messages to Chernyshev, she promoted him to lieutenant-colonel of the Preobrazhensky Guards, of which she was colonel. This had been Alexei Orlov’s place, so it was a sign of the highest favour – and of the eclipse of the Orlovs. And he became captain of the sixty gorgeously attired Chevaliers-Gardes who patrolled the palaces in silver helmets and breastplates and whose Hussar or Cossack squadrons escorted her carriage.

  Potemkin knew that it would be madness to take on all the factions at Court, so he tried ‘to be friends with everyone’, wrote Countess Rumiantseva8 – especially Nikita Panin.9 The smug and slothful Panin looked ‘more content than before’ Potemkin’s advent. But Count Solms did not underestimate him: ‘I’m only afraid that Potemkin, who has a reputation for being sly and wicked, can benefit by Panin’s kindness.’10

  The favourite hoped, through Panin, to neutralize the other dangerous element in Catherine’s Court – the pug-nosed, punctilious, Prussophile Heir Grand Duke Paul, now twenty, who longed to play a political role befitting his rank. Paul had disliked Prince Orlov, but he was to hate the new favourite even more, because he already sensed that Potemkin would forever exclude him from Court. Potemkin soon crossed him. Paul, a stickler for military discipline à la Prusse, bumped into the favourite when he visited his mother and grumbled about Potemkin’s dress. ‘My darling,’ Catherine told her lover, ‘the Grand Duke comes to me on Tuesdays and Fridays…9 to 11 o’clock…No criticism because Count…Andrei Razumovsky [friend of Grand Duke Paul] goes to see them in the same dress, I don’t find him any worse dressed than you…’.11 Fortunately, Grand Duke Paul had not encountered Potemkin in one of his half-open bearskins with the pink bandanna, which was enough to alarm anyone.

  Panin undertook to stroke the increasingly bitter Tsarevich towards ‘clever’ Potemkin’s side.12 So Potemkin was using Panin, who thought he was using Potemkin. Countess Rumiantseva told her husband that Potemkin’s return had changed everything politically – and she was right.13

  * * *

  —

  Potemkin was concentrating on the Pugachev Rebellion. Soon after Catherine and Potemkin had become lovers and political partners, General Alexander Bibikov, setting up his headquarters at Kazan, managed to defeat Pugachev’s 9,000-strong army on 22 March, raise the sieges of Orenburg, Ufa and Yaiksk and force the impostor to abandon his ‘capital’ at Berda, outside Orenburg. The favourite suggested the appointment of his cousin, Pavel Sergeievich Potemkin, the son of the man who had tried to persuade his father that he was illegitimate, to head the Secret Commission in Kazan which was to find the cause of the Rebellion – the Turks and the French were the main suspects – and punish the rebels. Potemkin and Catherine ordered Zakhar Chernyshev14 to recall Pavel Potemkin from the Turkish front. Pavel Sergeievich was a very eighteenth-century all-rounder – efficient soldier, gracious courtier, poet and multilingual scholar, the first to translate Rousseau into Russian. When he arrived in Petersburg, Catherine immediately ‘told him to join Bibikov’ in Kazan.15 Now that Bibikov was so close to throttling the false Peter III and Pavel Potemkin was on his way to handle the post-mortem, the lovers switched their minds to ending the Turkish War.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Matushka,’ Potemkin scrawled as he read through one of Catherine’s drafts of the Russian peace terms, ‘what do the articles underlined mean?’ Underneath, the Empress replied: ‘It means that they have already been added and if there is debate, they will not be insisted on…’.16 The moment he arrived in the Empress’s counsels, he began working with her on the instructions to be given to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev. At first the courtiers presumed that Potemkin was trying to destroy his former chief. The Potemkin legend claims that throughout his life he was viciously jealous of the few others as talented as himself. This was not so. ‘It was said he was unkind to Rumiantsev,’ Solms told Frederick, ‘but I got to know the opposite – they are friends and he defends him against reproaches.’ The Field-Marshal’s wife was equally surprised that ‘he tries to serve you at every opportunity…he even favours me.’17

  A forceful jolt was required to drive the Turks to the peace table, but Rumiantsev’s dwindling army needed reinforcements for his planned attack across the Danube, and the authority to make peace on the spot. In late March, Potemkin persuaded Catherine ‘to empower Rumiantsev and so the war was ended’, as she put it herself.18 This meant that the traditional Ottoman delaying tactics would not work, because Rumiantsev was given authority to make peace on the spot, within the boundaries defined by Catherine and Potemkin, but without the need to refer back to Petersburg. The Field-Marshal was sent the new peace terms corrected by Potemkin on 10 April. By this time, the Turks had lost their appetite for talking. Ottoman decision-making, agonizingly slow at the best of times, had been delayed by the death of Sultan Mustafa III and the succession of his cautious brother Abdul-Hamid. The Turks were encouraged to keep fighting by the French and probably by the duplicitious Prussians: Frederick, while swallowing his share of the Polish Partition, was still jealous of Russian gains in the south. More than that, Turks were also heartened by the Pugachev Rebellion. So there could be no more peace without war first. Once again, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev prepared to cross the Danube.

  * * *

  —

  Potemkin’s first step to power was to join the State Council, the consultative war cabinet created by Catherine in 1768. His rise is always described as quick and effortless. But, contrary to historical cliché, imperial favour did not guarantee him power. Potemkin thought he was ready for the Council. Few agreed with him. Besides, all the other members of the Council were on the First or Second of the Table of Ranks; Potemkin was still on the
Third. ‘What am I to do? I am not even admitted to the Council. And why not? They won’t have it but I’ll bring things about,’ raged Potemkin, ‘with an openness that astonished’ the French diplomat Durand.19 He tended to stun most diplomats he encountered with his outspoken asides. This was the first sign to the foreign ambassadors that Potemkin, after barely three months in Catherine’s bed, wanted real power and was set on getting it.

  While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Catherine still refused to appoint him to the Council. He brought his determination and moodiness to bear. ‘On Sunday, when I was sitting at the table near him and the Empress,’ Durand recorded, ‘I saw that not only did he not speak to her but that he did not even reply to her questions. She was beside herself and we for our part very much out of countenance. The silence was only broken by the Master of Horse [Lev Naryshkin] who never succeeded in animating the conversation. On rising from the table, the Empress retired alone and reappeared with red eyes and a troubled air.’20 Had Potemkin got his way?