Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In some ways, their relationship is at its most moving in this tense six months because they still loved one another, regarding each other as husband and wife, drifting apart yet trying to find a way to stay together for ever. Count Potemkin sometimes wept in the arms of his Empress.

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  ‘Why do you want to cry?’, she sweetly asked her ‘Lord and Darling Husband’ in the letter that reminded him of the ‘sacred ties’ of their marriage. ‘How can I change my attitude towards you? Is it possible not to love you? Have confidence in my words…I love you.’5

  Potemkin had watched the closeness develop between Catherine and Zavadovsky and at least tolerated it. He continued to be as difficult as usual, but he clearly did not mean to kill Zavadovsky as he had once threatened to do to his successor. The letters reveal a crisis in their relationship and a certain amount of jealousy towards Zavadovsky, but Potemkin appears to be so dominant that the other man does not really threaten him. It seems most likely that Potemkin approved of the new relationship – up to a point. It was simply a question of finding it.

  ‘Your life is precious to me and I don’t want to remove you,’6 the Empress told him specifically. They liked to settle rows with their dialogue letters: the second that has survived reads like the climax of a discussion, the calm reconciliation after a frantic storm of insecurities. This is much more specific than the earlier epistolary duet. The Empress is lovingly patient with her impossible eccentric, Potemkin is tender and gentle with her – incongruous qualities in such a man:

  Potemkin

  Catherine

  Let me my love say this

  I allow it

  which will, I hope, end our argument

  The sooner the better

  Don’t be surprised if I am

  Disturbed by our love.

  Don’t be disturbed

  Not only have you showered

  Me with good deeds,

  So have you on me

  You have placed me in your

  You are there firmly

  heart. I want to be

  and

  There alone, and above everyone

  strongly and will

  else,

  Remain there

  Because no one has ever loved

  I see it and believe it

  you so much; and

  As I have been made by your

  In my heart, I shall be

  hands, I want my peace

  To be the work of your hands,

  Happy to do so

  that you should be

  Happy in being good to me;

  It will be my greatest

  pleasure

  That you should find rest from

  the great

  Labours arising from your high

  station

  In thinking of my comfort.

  Of course

  Amen

  Give rest to our

  Thoughts and let

  Our feelings act freely

  They are most tender

  and

  Will find the best way.

  End of quarrel.

  Amen.7

  He was not always so kind. Potemkin, feeling vulnerable, lashed out at her cruelly. ‘I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me,’ she replied. ‘I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words.’ Both suffered bitterly. ‘I am not evil and not angry with you,’ she tells him after one of their discussions. ‘It depends on your will, how you treat me.’ But she suggested that they could not sustain this tumultuous tension indefinitely: ‘I want to see you calm and be in the same state too.’8

  The Court searched for signs of Potemkin’s fall or Zavadovsky’s rise, while the couple debated what to do. Potemkin wanted to remain in power, so he had to keep his apartments in the Winter Palace. When he became upset, she told him what so many ordinary lovers have told their agonized partners – ‘it’s not difficult to decide: stay with me’. Then she typically added this reminder of their amorous–political partnership: ‘All your political proposals are very reasonable.’9 But Catherine finally lost her cool too.

  The way you sometimes talk, one might say I am a monster which has all the faults and especially that of stupidity…this mind knows no other way of loving than making happy whoever it loves and for this reason it finds it impossible to bear even a moment’s breach with him whom it loves without – to its despair – being loved in return…My mind is busy trying to find virtues, some merits, in the object of its love. I like to see in you all the marvels…

  After this expression of her hurt, as Potemkin fell out of love with her, she defined the heart of their problem: ‘The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.’10

  This has always been taken at face value, but it is a tidy feminine rewriting of their history. Their love was as stormy as their political collaboration. If power was the subject of their quarrels, then removing the love but keeping the power would also perpetuate their rows. Perhaps it was truer to say that the essence of their disagreement was the end of the intensely physical phase of their relationship and Potemkin’s increasing maturity and need for freedom. Maybe Catherine could not bring herself to admit that he no longer wanted her as a woman – but they would always argue about power.

  None of this satisfied him. Potemkin appears to have been in a permanent rage. ‘You are angry,’ she wrote in French. ‘You keep away from me, you say you are offended…What satisfaction can you want more? Even when the Church burns a heretic, it doesn’t claim any more…You’re destroying all my happiness for the time that is left to me. Peace, my friend. I offer you my hand – will you take it, love?’11

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  On her return to Petersburg from Moscow, Catherine wrote to Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, her envoy in Vienna, that she wished to ‘get His Majesty [Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II] to raise General Count Grigory Potemkin, who has served myself and the State so well, to the dignity of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, for which I will be most indebted to him’. Joseph II reluctantly agreed on 16/27 February, despite the distaste of his prim mother, the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa. ‘It’s fairly droll’, smirked Corberon, ‘that the pious Empress–Queen recompenses the lovers of the non-believing sovereign of Russia.’

  ‘Prince Grigory Alexandrovich!’ Catherine acclaimed her Potemkin. ‘We graciously permit you to accept the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.’12 Potemkin was henceforth known as ‘Most Serene Highness’, or in Russian, ‘Svetleyshiy Kniaz’. There were many princes in Russia but from now Potemkin was ‘The Prince’ – or just ‘Serenissimus’. The diplomats presumed that this was Potemkin’s golden adieu because Orlov had been granted use of his title only on his dismissal. Catherine also gave Potemkin ‘a present of 16,000 peasants who can make annually five roubles a head’, and then Denmark sent him the Order of the White Elephant. Was Potemkin being dismissed or confirmed in office? ‘I dined at Count Potemkin’s,’ said Corberon on 24 March, ‘It’s said his credit falls, that Zavadovsky is still in inti
mate favour and that the Orlovs have a lot of credit to protect him.’13

  Serenissimus desired to be a monarch as well as a prince: he already feared that Catherine would die and leave him at the mercy of the bitter Paul, from whom ‘he can expect only Siberia.’14 The solution was to establish himself independently, outside Russian borders. The Empress Anna had made her favourite, Ernst Biron, Duke of Courland, a Baltic principality, dominated by Russia but technically subject to Poland. The ruling Duke was now Biron’s son Peter. Potemkin decided that he wanted Courland for himself.

  On 2 May, Catherine informed her ambassador to Poland, Count Otto-Magnus Stackelberg, that ‘wishing to thank Prince Potemkin for his services to the country, I intend to give him the Duchy of Courland’ and then suggested how he should manoeuvre. Frederick the Great ordered his envoy in Petersburg to offer help to Potemkin in this project and, on 18/29 May, he wrote warmly to him from Potsdam. Yet Catherine never pulled out the stops: Potemkin had not yet proved himself a statesman and she had to tread carefully, in Courland as well as Russia. This quest for a safe throne abroad was a leitmotif of Potemkin’s career. But Catherine always did her best to keep his mind on Russia – where she needed it.15

  At the beginning of April 1776, Prince Henry of Prussia arrived to consolidate his brother Frederick’s alliance with Russia. The Russo-Prussian relationship had lost its glow when Frederick had undermined Russian gains during the Russo-Turkish War. Frederick’s younger brother was a secret homosexual, energetic general and clever diplomat who had helped to initiate the Partition of Poland in 1772. He was a caricature of Frederick, but fourteen years younger and bitterly jealous of him – the fate of younger brothers in the age of kings. Henry had been among the first to cultivate Potemkin. It was a mark of Potemkin’s new and increasing interest in foreign affairs that he now arranged Henry’s trip. ‘My happiness’, Prince Henry wrote to Potemkin, ‘will be great if during my stay in St Petersburg, I get the chance to prove my esteem and friendship.’ The moment he arrived on 9 April he demonstrated this wish by presenting Potemkin with the Black Eagle of Prussia to add to his growing collection of foreign orders: this gave Frederick II and Potemkin the excuse to exchange flattering letters. No doubt, Prince Henry also encouraged the Courland project.16

  Just as the foreigners thought Potemkin had lost his credit, the unpredictable lovers seemed to be enjoying a little Indian summer. In perhaps the best and simplest declaration of love that anyone could give, she wrote: ‘My dear Prince! God nominated you to be my friend before I was even born because he created you to be for me. Thank you for the present and for the hug…’.17 It sounds as though they were having a secret reunion – but the painful negotiations between them continued. Potemkin’s eclipse and Zavadovsky’s rise were widely expected. Neither Catherine nor Potemkin could take much more of this agonizing limbo. The morning after Prince Henry arrived, tragedy intervened.

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  At four o’clock in the morning on 10 April 1776, Grand Duchess Natalia Alexeevna, Paul’s pregnant wife, went into labour. The Empress put on an apron and rushed to Natalia’s apartments. She stayed with her and Paul until eight in the morning.18

  The timing was inconvenient because Prince Henry had to be entertained. That night, the Empress and Prince Henry attended a violin concert by Lioli in ‘the apartment of His Excellency Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin’, recorded the Court Journal. Prince Henry and Potemkin discussed the alliance, as Catherine had suggested: on Frederick’s instructions, Prince Henry made sure he got on well with the favourite.19 That night, it looked as if the Grand Duchess was about to deliver an heir for the Empire.

  Grand Duchess Natalia had already proved a disappointment to Catherine. Though Paul appeared to love her, she was an intriguer who had not even bothered to learn Russian. Catherine and Potemkin suspected she had been having an affair with Andrei Razumovsky, Paul’s closest friend and a suave womanizer. Nonetheless, on the 11th, Catherine donned her apron again and rushed to do her duty, spending six hours at the bedside, then dined in her apartments with her two Princes, Orlov and Potemkin. She spent all the next day with the Grand Duchess.

  The foreign diplomats felt rather cheated that ‘the accouchement’ had suspended ‘the fall of Potemkin’, as Corberon put it. The Grand Duchess was crying out in agony. The Empress was worried. ‘A meal was laid inside Her Majesty’s apartments but she didn’t want to eat,’ records the Court Journal. ‘Prince…Potemkin ate.’ When he was hungry, there was not much that could put him off his food.

  The doctors did what they could according to the science of solicitous butchery that then passed for medicine. Forceps were already in use in the mid-eighteenth century*1 Caesareans, though desperately dangerous, had been successfully completed since Caesar’s time: the mother virtually always perished of infection, shock and loss of blood, but the child could be saved. Now, nothing was tried and it was too late. The baby had perished and the foetus infected the mother. ‘Things are very bad,’ Catherine wrote, possibly the next day, in a letter marked 5 a.m., already thinking about how to cope with Paul afterwards. ‘I think the mother will go the same way as the child. Keep silent about it…’. She ordered the commandant of Tsarskoe Selo to prepare Paul’s apartments. ‘When things are clear, I’ll bring my son there.’20 Gangrene set in. The stink was intolerable.

  Prince Potemkin was playing cards while they awaited the inevitable denouement. ‘I’m assured’, said Corberon, ‘that Potemkin lost…3,000 roubles at whist when all the world were crying.’ This was unfair. The Empress and her consort had much to arrange. Catherine compiled a list of her six candidates for Paul’s new wife, which she sent to Potemkin. Princess Sophia Dorothea of Württemberg, whom she had always wanted Paul to marry, was first of the six.21

  At 5 p.m. on 15 April, the Grand Duchess died. Paul was half mad with grief, ranting that the doctors had lied: she must be alive still, he wanted to be with her, he would not let her be buried – and all the other fantasies that people use to deny mortal reality. The doctors bled him. Twenty minutes later, Catherine accompanied her stricken son to Tsarskoe Selo. Potemkin travelled down with his old friend, Countess Bruce. ‘Sic transit gloria mundi,’ Catherine commented briskly to Grimm. She had not liked Natalia, but now diplomats criticized her for the conduct of the Grand Duchess’s accouchement: had she allowed her daughter-in-law to perish? The post-mortem revealed that there was an abnormality which meant Natalia could never have given birth – thus she could not have been saved by the medicine of the day. But since this was Russia, where emperors died of ‘piles’, Corberon reported that no one believed the official story.*2

  ‘For two days, the Grand Duke has been in inexpressible distraction,’ wrote Oakes, ‘Prince Henry of Prussia has scarcely quitted him.’ Prince Henry, Catherine and Potemkin united to promoted Paul’s immediate remarriage to the Princess of Württemberg. ‘The choice of a Princess will not be long delayed,’ reported Oakes a few days later. Amid the mourning, Catherine, Potemkin and Prince Henry appreciated the harsh reality that the Empire needed an heir, so Paul urgently needed a wife.

  Paul was understandably reluctant to marry again. Such personal scruples were removed when Catherine, so loving to her adopted families, so cruel to her own, showed him Natalia’s letters to Andrei Razumovsky which were found among her effects. Catherine and Potemkin arranged to send Paul on a trip to Berlin to approve the bride. The Hohenzollern brothers were delighted to have the chance to influence the Russian Heir – Princess Sophia was their niece. Paul’s placidity was probably aided by his Prussophilia and worship of Frederick the Great, like his father before him. The Court reverted to its favourite sport – plotting the fall of Potemkin.22

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  Grand Duchess Natalia and her still-born child lay in state at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. She wore white satin. The foetus, which turned out in the autopsy to be perfectly f
ormed, lay gruesomely at her feet in the open coffin.23 Serenissimus remained at Tsarskoe Selo with Catherine, Prince Henry and Paul, who was grieving not only for his wife but also for the broken illusion of his marriage. Corberon could not comprehend how both Zavadovsky and Potemkin were with the Empress: ‘the reign of the latter is at its end,’ he crowed, ‘his position as Minister of War already given to Count Alexei Orlov,’ but he worried that Potemkin seemed to be putting a very good face on matters.24 Both Corberon and the British reckoned that Prince Henry was backing Potemkin against the Orlovs, contributing ‘much to the retarding of the removal of Prince Potemkin whom the ribbon [the Black Eagle] has bound to his interests’.

  Natalia’s funeral was held on 26 April at the Nevsky Monastery. Potemkin, Zavadovsky and Prince Orlov escorted Catherine – but Paul was too distraught to attend. The diplomats scanned every mannerism of the leading players for political nuance, just as Kremlinologists would later dissect the etiquette and hierarchy at the funerals of Soviet General Secretaries. Then as now, Kremlinologists were frequently wrong. Here, Corberon noticed a telling sign of Potemkin’s falling credit – Ivan Chernyshev, President of the Navy College, gave ‘three big bows’ to Prince Orlov but only ‘a light one to Potemkin who bowed at him incessantly’.