Catherine the Great & Potemkin

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  The Empress collapsed in a paroxysm of overpowering grief. Her courtiers had never seen her in such a state. The imperial body-physician Rogerson and minister Bezborodko, gambling and drinking partners, consulted, no doubt in the quick whispers that must have been the background music of Court crises. Rogerson let loose his often fatal laxatives and bleeding, but both men sensed an emotional prescription would heal her better.*1 The Empress naturally thought of her ‘husband’, her ‘dearest friend’. In her desperate unhappiness, she kept asking touchingly if Potemkin had been told. Rogerson informed Bezborodko that it was ‘most necessary’ to try to calm the Empress’s sorrow and anxiety: ‘And we know there is just one way to achieve this – the soonest arrival of His Highness.’ As soon as Lanskoy was dead, Bezborodko despatched the Court’s fastest courier southwards. Catherine inquired like a child if the Prince could be expected soon. Yes, they surely replied, the Prince is on his way.3

  The courier found Serenissimus, accompanied by Samuel Bentham, at Kremenchuk in the midst of arranging the foundation of Sebastopol and the management of Krichev. The Prince left immediately. Two indivisible sentiments, as always, dominated his actions: his beloved friend needed him and his power depended on it. Potemkin prided himself on being the swiftest traveller across Russia. If the couriers usually took ten days, Potemkin made it back in seven. On 10 July, he arrived at Tsarskoe Selo.

  As Potemkin galloped across the steppes, Catherine had to face the tragic loss of the favourite who had made her happiest. ‘Cheerful, honest and gentle’ Lanskoy was her beloved pupil, with whom she let her maternal, pedagogic instincts run free, and he had truly become part of the Catherine–Potemkin family. He was strikingly handsome – his portraits show his refined, gamin features. Catherine thought she had found her Holy Grail – a companion for the rest of her life. ‘I hope,’ she told Grimm just ten days before Lanskoy’s sore throat, ‘that he’ll become the support of my old age.’4

  Potemkin found the Court paralysed by the prone Empress, haunted by the unburied and decomposing Lanskoy, and infected by a plague of vicious, sniggering lies. Catherine herself was inconsolable. ‘I have been plunged into the most acute sorrow and my happiness is no more,’ she told Grimm. Lanskoy ‘shared my pains and rejoiced in my joys’.5 The nobles in both St Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo became worried by Catherine’s emotional collapse. Weeks after the death, courtiers reported that ‘the Empress is as afflicted as the first day of M. Lanskoy’s death’. Catherine was almost mad with grief, continually asking about her lover’s body, perhaps hoping his death would prove a lie. She did not leave her bed for three weeks. When she finally got up, she did not go out. No one saw her for months. There was no entertainment, Court was ‘extremely sad’. Catherine became ill. Dr Rogerson bled her and prescribed his usual panaceas, which no doubt explained her wind and weakness. At first, only Potemkin and Bezborodko saw her at all. Later Fyodor Orlov, gentlest of the brothers, called in the evenings. The Prince comforted Catherine by sharing her mourning: it was said the courtiers heard Potemkin and Catherine ‘howling’ together for the dead favourite.

  Catherine felt no one could imagine her suffering. Initially, even Potemkin’s sympathy hurt her, but finally his care managed to guide her through the misery and ‘thus he awakened us from the sleep of the dead’.6 He was there with her, every morning and every night: he must have almost lived with her for those weeks.7 Probably this was one of those crises, as Count Cobenzl told Joseph II, when Potemkin returned to his old role as husband and lover.8 Their relationship defies the form of modern customs but was closest to the Gallic amité amoureuse. This was not necessarily a time for love-making, but very much for loving. These were the moments when Potemkin achieved ‘unbounded power’, as he once told Harris:9 ‘When things go smoothly, my influence is small but when she meets with rubs, she always wants me and then my influence becomes as great as ever.’10

  Gradually Catherine improved: Lanskoy was buried near Tsarskoe Selo in her absence more than a month after his death. Catherine left her summer residence on 5 September, saying she could never return. When she reached the capital, she could not bear to stay in her own apartments, with all their memories of Lanskoy, so she moved into her Hermitage. For almost a year after Lanskoy’s death, there was no favourite. Catherine was mourning. Potemkin was with her: in a sense, they were reunited for a while. There was relief when the Empress finally emerged in public: she went to church three days later. This was the first time the Court had seen her for two and a half months.

  Potemkin had to return to the south to finish his projects there: he left in January 1785. Even at such a distance, he acted as her comfort. Some of their letters, which probably date from these months, approach the chivalry and playfulness, but not the frantic passion and guffawing laughter, of their affair ten years earlier. There was an autumnal tone to this resurgence of romance as if both felt older. First he sent her a snuff-box and she thanked him for the beautiful thing ‘with my whole heart’. Then he sent her a dress made with silk from his southern factories and romantically invited her down the road, ‘bespread with silk’, to the south.11

  Serenissimus returned at the beginning of the summer of 1785, when Catherine was on form again. The two old lovers played their familiar games. ‘I’m now on my way to confession. Forgive me, Lady Matushka, for all my sins – either deliberate or unconscious,’ wrote Potemkin in old Southern Slavonic script. The Prince had done something mischievous. Catherine replied: ‘I equally ask you to forgive me and God bless you. The rest of the aforementioned, I can figure it out all right but I understand nothing or very little. I laughed a lot when I read it.’12 That was Potemkin: often incomprehensible but always stimulating. Laughter was very much part of her therapy. But she missed his company during his six months in the south.

  Catherine’s habit of making the favourite into a semi-official position meant that the Court was now so used to it that the courtiers expected the place to be filled. This may have put a strange pressure on her to find someone. A year after Lanskoy’s death, Potemkin understood that she, who could not be ‘without love for a single hour’, needed more permanent love than he could give. If Potemkin was to achieve glory in the Empire, he needed someone to take care of Catherine. When Catherine went to church at this time, young men preened and stood erect in their best uniforms, hoping to be noticed as she passed.13 Catherine always found it hard to concentrate in church – as Casanova spotted. This was a distasteful but understandable scene. The men’s posing makes clear that candidates for favourite were not fixed by Potemkin, as malicious gossip claimed – they were simply noticed around Court, though a clever patron would place them in the Empress’s path.14 Nonetheless the hunt was on. The disappearance of Lanskoy marked the beginning of the apogee of Catherine’s splendour but also of her slide towards indignity. Her loves were never so equal again.

  Once Serenissimus was back in the capital, the Empress did notice some of the Guards officers on duty. There was Prince Pavel Dashkov, Bentham’s Edinburgh-educated friend and son of Princess Dashkova, and two Guardsmen – Alexander Petrovich Yermolov, and Alexander Matveevich Dmitriyev-Mamonov, who was Potemkin’s distant cousin. All three served on the Prince’s staff. This now became something like an imperial beauty contest, in which the prize would be announced at a masquerade ball.

  Catherine had had a soft spot for Dashkov for some time. She regularly inquired about his ‘excellent heart’.15 Five years earlier, Prince Orlov had bumped into Princess Dashkova travelling with her son in Brussels – two semi-exiled Russian magnates. Orlov had teased the self-regarding Princess by suggesting to the boy that he could become favourite. As soon as her son was out of the room, Dashkova subjected Orlov to a prudish tongue-lashing: how dare he speak to a seventeen-year-old boy of such disgusting matters? ‘As for favourites,’ she concluded, ‘I bade him recollect that I neither knew nor acknowledged such persons…’. Orlov’s obscene reply to this grandiosity wa
s ‘unworthy of repetition’ – but much deserved.16 Now Orlov was dead, Princess Dashkova had returned from years of travelling and Dashkov was twenty-three.

  It is hard to avoid the impression that Princess Dashkova, while regarding favouritism with ill-concealed disdain, could not overcome her ambition for her son to fill that position. Potemkin still made the Empress laugh with his mimicry of top courtiers – but his impersonation of Dashkova’s pomposity was his star turn and Catherine often requested it specially. So Serenissimus must have particularly relished hoisting this humbug by her own extremely grand petard.17

  Princess Dashkova called on Potemkin and was most charming. Potemkin evidently encouraged the Princess in her ambitions and mischievously gave her reasons to hope that the Dashkov family was about to be honoured. Between such discussions, Potemkin probably bounded along to Catherine’s apartments to give wicked impersonations of the Princess, to gales of imperial laughter. Unbeknown to Dashkova, Catherine was flirting with Yermolov and Mamonov, who were also handsome – but lacked the grisly mother. All had high hopes that their candidate would be chosen, though Potemkin apparently had no preference.

  Princess Dashkova, revelling in her resurgent favour, claimed in her Memoirs that Potemkin sent round his nephew Samoilov at the ‘lover’s hour’ after dinner, ‘to inquire whether Prince Dashkov was at home’. He was not. So Samoilov left a message that Potemkin wished to see him at his house as soon as possible. The Princess, writing years later, claimed that Potemkin was offering her son the disgusting post of favourite, which she denounced to Samoilov thus: ‘While I love the Empress and dare not oppose her will, I have too much self-respect…to take part in any affair of such a nature.’ If her son did become favourite, she added, the only use she would make of her influence would be to ask for a passport to go abroad.

  This dubious anecdote has spawned the myth that Potemkin sent youths over to Catherine at the ‘lover’s hour’. Since Dashkov was Potemkin’s adjutant, there was nothing sordid in such a summons. It is far more likely that Potemkin was teasing the Princess. No doubt her answer was immediately repeated in his ‘Dashkova-voice’ to Catherine.18

  Serenissimus held a masquerade at his Anichkov Palace – he never lived in this colossal residence,*2 on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and the Fontanka, but he kept his library there and used it for entertaining. He ordered his architect Starov to construct a third floor and alter the façade to add more of his beloved Doric columns. When Potemkin was low on funds, he repaid his debts to his merchant friend Nikita Shemiakin with the Anichkov. But Catherine repurchased it for him. This trading of palaces for debts happened periodically and the Empress always obliged.19

  Two thousand people arrived all evening in costumes and dominoes. He arranged the orchestra, in the Anichkov’s huge oval gallery, around a richly decorated pyramid. Over 100 musicians, conducted by Rosetti, played horns and accompanied a choir. The star of the orchestra was a ‘silk-clad blackamoor playing a kettle drum’ atop the pyramid. A curtain divided the room. Couples danced the quadrille: the courtiers watched Prince Dashkov partner a teenage girl named Princess Ekaterina Bariatinskaya, an outstanding beauty, who was coming out for the first time. She was to be one of Potemkin’s last mistresses.

  When the Empress arrived with Grand Duke Paul, everyone watched to see if any of the three young men would be favoured. Lev Engelhardt, who kept a graphic account of the evening, noticed Yermolov. Potemkin had ordered his staff to wear light cavalry uniforms, but Yermolov was dressed as a Dragoon, flouting the Prince’s command. Engelhardt rushed to warn him to go home and change. ‘Don’t worry,’ replied Yermolov confidently. ‘But thanks all the same.’ This daring arrogance puzzled Engelhardt.

  Princess Dashkova buttonholed Potemkin: together they admired the athletic figure of her son, but then she pushed her luck either by presuming her son had been selected or by asking the Prince to propose another of her family. Potemkin turned to her sarcastically in front of everybody. There is no vacancy, he said. The post has just been filled by Lieutenant Yermolov. Who, stammered the humiliated Princess, who?

  Potemkin abandoned her, took Yermolov by the hand and walked off into the crowd with him ‘as if he was some high nobleman’. The Prince led Yermolov up to the table where the Empress was playing whist and deposited him, as it were, just four steps behind her chair, ahead of the senior courtiers. At that moment, everyone, even Dashkova, realized the Empress had taken a new favourite. The curtain was drawn to reveal the resplendently set table. Empress, Grand Duke and the courtiers sat at a special round table while forty others were laid out for the rest. The ball went on until three.20

  The next morning, eleven months after the death of the much mourned Lanskoy, Yermolov moved into his old apartment in the Winter Palace and was nominated adjutant-general to the Empress. He was thirty-one years old, tall, blond, with almond-shaped eyes and a flat nose – Potemkin nicknamed him the ‘white negro’. He was neither as decent nor as pretty as Lanskoy, nor as clever as Zavadovsky: ‘he’s a good bo’, noted Cobenzl, ‘but quite limited’. Soon promoted to major-general and decorated with the Order of the White Eagle, Yermolov was the nephew of one of Potemkin’s friends, Levashov, but equally friendly with Bezborodko. Probably Potemkin was relieved that Catherine had found someone acceptable after that mournful year. Though the simpler historians have repeated Potemkin’s jealousy of each favourite, shrewder observers like Cobenzl understood that he was pleased that Yermolov would prevent the Empress ‘from falling into melancholy’ and would stimulate her ‘natural gaiety’.21

  The ascension of Yermolov placed Potemkin at the height of his power. When the Prince was ill a few days later. Catherine ‘went to see him, forced him to take medicine and took infinite care of his health’.22 But at last Potemkin’s position was unchallenged. Court was harmonious. The Prince could return to running his provinces and armies because Catherine the woman was happily settled.

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  Catherine’s Court had reached a height of extravagance and splendour in the mid-1780s: ‘a great display of magnificence and state with the great taste and charm of the Court of France’, wrote Comte de Damas. ‘The splendour of the ceremonial was enhanced by Asiatic luxury.’23 Catherine and Potemkin both enjoyed holding masquerades, fêtes and balls at vast expense: the Empress herself had a taste for transvestite balls. ‘I’ve just had a pleasant idea,’ she wrote, earlier in her reign, ‘we must hold a ball in the Hermitage…we must tell the ladies to come less dressed and without paniers and grande parure on their heads…French comedians will make market stalls and they will sell on credit women’s clothes to men and men’s clothes to women…’.24 This was perhaps because the plump Empress knew that she cut a fine figure in male attire.

  If one was to meet the Empress of all the Russians at the Court ball during the 1780s, one might find her ‘dressed in a purple tissue petticoat and long white tissue sleeves down the wrist and the body open…of a very elegant dress’, sitting ‘in a large elbow chair covered with crimson velvet and richly ornamented’, surrounded by standing courtiers. The sleeves, skirt and body of the dress were often of different colours. Catherine now always wore these long old Russian gowns with long sleeves. They concealed her corpulence, but they were also much more comfortable than corsets and paniers. Princess Dashkova and Countess Branicka copied her in this dress, but Baroness Dimsdale noted that the other ladies ‘wore [it] very much in the French fashion’ – though ‘French gauzes and flowers were never’, decreed Lady Craven, ‘intended for Russian beauties’. There were card tables all round; everyone played whist while the Empress toured the room, graciously insisting that no one should stand – which of course they did.25

  The Court moved between the Winter and Summer Palaces in St Petersburg during the winter. It followed the same weekly programme – the big gatherings in the Hermitage on Sundays with all the diplomats; Mondays, the ball at the Grand Duke’s
and so on. When Potemkin was in the capital, he usually spent his Thursday evenings wandering in and out of the Empress’s Little Hermitage, where she continued to relax with her lover Yermolov and close friends like Naryshkin and Branicka. Conversation there was private. No servants eavesdropped. At dinner, the guests ordered their food by writing on little slates with a pencil, placing them in the midst of the special mechanical table and sending them down on a dumb waiter, whence came their meals a little later.26

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  During the summer months, the entire Court travelled the twenty or so miles out to the imperial resorts near by. Catherine loved Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, but the Court’s main home at that time of year was Tsarskoe Selo, where Catherine usually stayed in Elisabeth’s Baroque wedding cake, the Catherine Palace, named after the Empress Elisabeth’s mother, Peter the Great’s peasant-born Empress.

  ‘The place is a magnificent building,’ wrote Baroness Dimsdale, ‘the brick edifice stuccoed while…outside pillars all gilded.’ Inside, some rooms were simply ‘superb’; one in Chinese taste struck her, but she would ‘never forget’ the little suite ‘like an enchanted palace’ with ‘its sides inlaid with foil red and green so it dazzles one’s eyes’. The tapestries in the Lyons room were supposed to have cost 201,250 roubles. Catherine had had the whole place redesigned by her Scottish architect Charles Cameron, and the gardens were of course English, laid out by Mr Bush, with lawns, gravel walks, follies and woods – and a very large lake in the middle. Cameron’s Gallery was like an ancient temple, hanging in the light on top of its pillars, giving an impression of lightness and space. Inside was Catherine’s gallery of busts including Demosthenes and Plato. The park was filled with monuments and follies to Russia’s victories, so that this magical vista was not unlike an imperial version of a Disney theme park, the theme in this case being the aggrandizement of Empress and Empire. There was the Chesme Column, designed by Antonio Rinaldi, rising with impressive dignity out of an island amid the Great Pond, and the Rumiantsev Column dedicated to the Battle of Kagul. There were Siberian, Turkish and Chinese Bridges, a Chinese village, a Ruined Tower, a pyramid and a mausoleum to three of her English greyhounds, engraved: ‘Here lies Zemira and the mourning graces ought to throw flowers on her grave. Like Tom, her forefather, and Lady, her mother, she was constant in her loyalties and had only one failing, she was a little short-tempered…’. Not far away was the mausoleum of Lanskoy. There were even fairground games like the Flying Mountain – a sort of big dipper.27