Secret Lives of the Tsars

by Michael Farquhar

  Although Catherine’s political partnership with Potemkin would endure until his death in 1791, the intimate side of their relationship was doomed from the beginning. Jealousy was the source of the problem; Potemkin was consumed by it. When he first arrived at court and found Vasilchikov still installed as the favorite, he retreated in a huff to a monastery and only reluctantly emerged after the empress’s repeated assurances that he was the only one she wanted. Even then, Potemkin remained obsessed with his predecessor and his own place in Catherine’s heart. “You have not the least reason to be afraid,” she wrote soothingly. “I burned my fingers badly with that imbecile Vasilchikov.… You can read in my soul and in my heart.… My love for you is boundless.”

  But it was not only Vasilchikov who provoked such monumental insecurity in Potemkin. It was every man with whom Catherine had ever slept—a legion of lovers he believed to number fifteen. As a sop to his sensitivities, the empress went so far as to write what she called “A Sincere Confession,” in which she detailed the circumstances of the four affairs she had actually conducted prior to Potemkin’s entry into her life. It was a stunning act of humility and devotion—one that few other absolute monarchs would ever deign to provide a subject—yet it wasn’t enough.

  Potemkin was tortured not only by the previous men in Catherine’s life, but by irrational fears of his own status with her. Was he really her enduring partner, or would he be replaced on a whim? The doubts that gnawed at him often made him moody and quarrelsome, which exasperated the empress. Thus, between passionate lovemaking and the pursuit of statecraft, there were furious fights that erupted almost daily—started by Potemkin and usually smoothed over by Catherine:

  —“If your stupid ill humor has left you, kindly let me know.… You are a wicked Tatar!”

  —“Truly, it is time for us to live in perfect harmony. Do not torment me by mistreating me. Then you will not see my coldness.”

  —“My little soul, I have a piece of string to one end of which I have attached a stone and, to the other end, all our quarrels, and I have thrown the whole thing into a bottomless pit.… Good day, my beloved! Good day, without quarrels, without discussions, without disputes.”

  “There is no reason to be unhappy,” the empress wrote in one of her many conciliatory notes. “But no, it’s time to stop giving you assurances. You must be most, most, most certain by now that I love you.… I want you to love me. I want to appear desirable to you.… If you want, I shall paraphrase this page for you in three words and cross out all the rest. Here it is: I love you.”

  Each passing storm was followed by a brief interlude of serenity before the next roared in, beginning anew the endless cycle of recriminations, doubts, and sulking, followed by the empress’s perpetual efforts to placate her tempestuous lover. After two and a half years of such upheaval, the relationship was becoming strained beyond endurance. “Your foolish acts remain the same,” Catherine wrote; “at the very moment when I feel safest a mountain drops on me.… To a madcap like you … tranquility is an unbearable state of mind*2.… The gratitude I owe you has not vanished and I suppose there has never been a time when you haven’t received signs of this. But now you take away all my force by tormenting me with new fabrications.… Please tell me whether I should be grateful to you for that. Until now I always thought that good health and restful days were esteemed for something in this world, but I would like to know how this is possible with you.”

  The volcanic intensity of Catherine and Potemkin’s passion quickly exhausted itself, and by 1776 they were no longer lovers. Nevertheless, they remained devoted partners (or perhaps spouses), ruling Russia together in restored harmony. And Potemkin still managed to maintain some kind of sexual authority over the aging empress by essentially pimping his replacements in her bed. Deftly separating her regal self from her vigorous love life, Catherine happily flitted from one virile youngster to the next—each of whom paid Potemkin a handsome fee for the privilege of sleeping with her, and, of course, reaping the enormous bounty that came with such services.

  Each in the succession of well-formed favorites was similar: young, handsome, rapturously extolled by the empress, and then, after a year or two of passion (in the case of most of them), sent away. Potemkin made certain of that. “Of course he did not for a moment contemplate resuming his place in Catherine’s bed,” wrote Troyat, “but he would not allow an intruder to claim her attention for longer than the duration of a caprice.”

  According to irresistible legend, after procurement by Potemkin, candidates for Catherine’s bed were thoroughly vetted—first by her doctor, to ensure they were free of sexually transmitted disease, then by the empress’s confidante, Countess Bruce, who reportedly took them on an intimate test drive of sorts, just to make sure their performance would measure up to some rather exacting standards.*3

  And so the servicemen came and went for two decades, each adored by the aging but still lustful empress until they were replaced. When her friend Voltaire gently chided Catherine for her inconstancy in love, she responded that she was, on the contrary, “absolutely faithful.”

  “To whom?” she continued. “To beauty, of course. Beauty alone attracts me!”*4

  The first of the post-Potemkin bedmates was a young Ukrainian by the name of Peter Zavadovsky, who, though relished by the empress, could never quite escape the shadow of the giant who had recommended him and still remained at his mistress’s side. As Zavadovsky noted with a mixture of admiration and frustration, “In all the centuries rarely had God produced a person so universal as that which is Prince Potemkin: he is everywhere and everything.” After about a year—just as the American colonies were declaring their independence from Britain—Catherine asserted hers in 1776. Zavadovsky was sent away, but not without ample reward for his services.

  “He has received from Her Majesty fifty thousand rubles, a pension of five thousand, and four thousand peasants in the Ukraine, where they are worth a great deal,” the Chevalier de Corberon, the new French chargé d’affaires, reported to his brother. “You must agree, my friend, that it’s not a bad line of work to be in here.”*5

  No sooner was Zavadovsky out the door than he was replaced by Simon Zorich, known among the court ladies as “the Adonis.” The Chevalier de Corberon duly reported the latest development: “[Potemkin], who is in higher favor than ever, and who now plays the same role that the Pompadour did with Louis XV toward the end of her life,*6 has presented to [the empress] one Zorich, a major in the Hussars, who has been made lieutenant colonel and inspector of all the light troops. This new favorite has dined with her. They say that he received 1,800 peasants for his trial effort! After dinner, Potemkin drank to the Empress’s health and knelt before her.”

  Like his predecessor, Zorich resented the looming presence of his procurer. Unlike Zavadovsky, however, the brash young lover—as his position began to inevitably totter—actually dared to challenge Potemkin’s supremacy. “Zoritz [sic] is prepared for his dismission [sic],” reported the new British ambassador, James Howard Harris, “but I am told he is resolved to call his successor to an account. ‘Of course I know that I’m going to be sacked, but by God I’ll cut off the ears of the man who takes my place,’ were his words, in talking the other day on the subject.”

  The fading favorite made a violent scene, but his insignificance was such that Potemkin contemptuously dismissed his invitation to a duel. Soon enough, Catherine dismissed Zorich as well—her lavish parting gifts no doubt assuaging his impotent fury. “Last night I was in love with him,” the empress wrote candidly; “today I cannot stand him anymore.”

  Catherine was a forty-nine-year-old grandmother when, in 1778, she was presented with her next paramour, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, who was half her age. The Chevalier de Corberon wrote of the empress’s latest love, “He was the model of conceit, but conceit of the pettiest kind, the sort that would not be tolerated even in Paris.” He was pretty, though, and really that’s all Catherine cared about. When her frien
d Grimm teased her about being “infatuated” with Rimsky-Korsakov, the empress responded, “Infatuated, infatuated! Are you aware that that term is entirely inappropriate when one is speaking of Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, who defies the skill of painters and is the despair of sculptors? It is admiration, Monsieur, enthusiasm, that the masterpieces of nature inspire in us.”

  Catherine’s enthusiasm for this particular work of art was diminished somewhat when she found him in bed with her lady-in-waiting, Countess Bruce. Thus, if there was any truth at all to the countess serving as the empress’s “tester,” she obviously liked this applicant so much that she went back for a more thorough examination. Both were dismissed as a result. Replacing the countess was Anna Protasova (“l’Eprouveuse” in Byron’s Don Juan);*7 the new lover was Alexander Lanskoy.

  Though Catherine the Great was old enough to be the mother of any one of her later lovers, she had genuine maternal feelings for the unassuming Lanskoy, whose virtues were praised even by those hostile to the empress. “He is a model of kindness, humanity, civility, modesty and beauty,” wrote Charles Masson. “A lover of the arts and a friend to talent, he is humane, benevolent.” And Lanskoy seemed to reciprocate Catherine’s lavish attentions, which, in his case, extended beyond the bedroom. “Relations could not be more trusting between a mother and son,” the empress’s private secretary noted.

  It was touching (albeit a tad creepy) how Catherine, whose own son Paul was such a disappointment (see following chapter), sought to groom this eager young man, this surrogate, for something greater—perhaps as a new Potemkin. They read and studied together, enjoyed the arts, and simply enjoyed each other’s company. With his good humor, the empress wrote, Lanskoy made Tsarskoe Selo (the Tsar’s Village) “into the most charming and pleasant of places where the days passed so quickly one did not know what had become of them.”

  After four years, “cheerful, honest, gentle” Lanskoy’s tenure had already outlasted all previous lovers except Orlov. And there appeared to be no end to it. “I hope that he’ll become the support of my old age,” Catherine shared in a letter to Grimm. Ten days later, however, the young man fell ill, probably of diphtheria, and on June 25, 1784, he died.

  “When I began this letter I was happy and joyful, and my thoughts sped so quickly that I knew not what became of them,” the empress wrote in the missive she had been composing to Grimm. “It is no longer so; I am plunged in the keenest grief and my happiness has fled. I almost died myself from the irreparable loss I have just sustained, a week ago, of my best friend.… He applied himself, he learned much, he had acquired all my tastes. He was a young man whom I was educating, who was grateful, sweet-tempered and gentlemanly, who shared my troubles when I had any and rejoiced in my joys. In brief I have the misfortune to tell you, sobbing as I write it, that General Lanskoy is no more.… My bedroom, which used to be so pleasant to me, has become an empty cave in which I drag myself about like a shadow.… I cannot set eyes on a human face without being choked with sobs so that I cannot speak. I can neither sleep nor eat. It wearies me to read, and to write is beyond my strength. I know not what is to become of me, but I do know that never in all my life have I been so wretched as since my best, kind friend has abandoned me. I opened my drawer, I found this sheet begun, I have written these lines, I cannot go on.”

  In her grief, Catherine waited nearly a year—a relative eternity—she before felt ready to plunge into another affair, this time with a thirty-one-year-old nonentity named Alexander Ermolov. Like Zorich before him, Ermolov was stupid enough to tangle with Potemkin. Aligning himself with the powerful prince’s enemies, the foolish favorite accused him of misappropriating funds. Catherine was understandably incensed, but Potemkin maintained his grip over her. He bluntly denied the charges without deigning to explain himself and, to show his own displeasure, stormed out of the palace.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to the Count de Ségur, “a child isn’t going to topple me, and I don’t know who dare.… I scorn my enemies too much to fear them.” Supremely confident of his value to the empress, Potemkin eventually barged into her apartments with an ultimatum: “Madame, you must choose between Ermolov and me and dismiss one or the other; so long as you keep that white Negro I shall not step foot in your palace.” There was really no choice, and the inconsequential Ermolov was sent off with the usual compensatory riches.

  Potemkin was quick to replace him three days later with a smarter, better-looking Guards officer named Alexander Mamonov. Catherine, now fifty-seven, was smitten with her new man (whom she referred to as “the redcoat” because of the scarlet uniform he liked to wear to bring out his dark eyes) and wrote of him with the same frenzied ecstasy she always did in the first flush of fresh romance: “This Redcoat is so admirable, so witty, so gay, handsome, obliging and well-bred that you would do well to love him without knowing him.”

  But by this time in her life, Catherine’s girlish passions were making her look increasingly silly; the snickering behind her back grew bolder and more abusive, but the empress seemed not to notice. Emperor Joseph II of Austria, who accompanied Catherine and her young lover on an extended river tour of the freshly conquered Crimea,*8 was bewildered by his fellow sovereign’s undignified behavior. “What I do not understand,” he remarked, “is how a woman who is so proud and so careful of her reputation can show such a strange weakness for the caprices of her young aide-de-camp Mamonov, who is really nothing but a spoiled child.”

  Though the empress was thoroughly besotted with Mamonov, he was stultified by her, which was entirely understandable. After all, behind all the glitter and prestige that came with being the favorite, Mamonov was still a vigorous young man forced to follow around and bed an increasingly fat, wheezing older woman who found it difficult to make it up a flight of stairs. As one of his friends reported, “[He] considers his life a prison, is very bored, and supposedly after every public gathering where ladies are present, the Empress attaches herself to him and is jealous.”

  To escape his clingy mistress, Mamonov began to ignore her nocturnal beckoning by pleading illness and instead launched a secret affair with someone closer to his own age—whom he then impregnated. Catherine was devastated, of course, and humiliated as well. Still, she played the magnanimous sovereign and blessed the union of the young couple. Behind the scenes, though, she raged.

  “I have suspected him for eight months!” she exclaimed to her secretary. “He was avoiding me.… It was always because he was having difficulty breathing that he had to keep to his room! Then lately he took to talking about qualms of conscience that pained him and made it impossible for him to continue our life together. The traitor! It was this other love, his duplicity that was suffocating him. But since he could not help himself, why didn’t he admit it frankly?… He cannot imagine what I have suffered.”

  Potemkin, whose advice to the betrayed empress was “spit upon him,” quickly distanced himself from his protégé. “I never had any illusions about him,” he declared of Mamonov. “He is a mixture of indolence and egotism. This later trait made him the ultimate Narcissus. Thinking only of himself, he demanded everything without paying anything in return.”

  Once the ex-favorite settled into the dull routine of marriage and fatherhood, he realized life in the empress’s gilded prison wasn’t quite so bad after all. He begged for his old place back, but by then Catherine II was preoccupied with her very last lover.

  Physically, Platon Zubov was typical fare for the empress—“supple, muscular and well proportioned,” as Masson described him. But he wasn’t Potemkin’s man. Indeed, while the great prince was off fighting the Turks, the strikingly shallow, immensely greedy twenty-two-year-old Zubov slithered in, on his own initiative, and seduced the empress, thirty-eight years his senior. Soon enough, he would eclipse Potemkin entirely—not because he exceeded him in talent, for Zubov had precious little of that—but through the indulgence of an adoring empress in her dotage, who, for the first time, allowed statecraft to be ent
irely subordinated to pleasure. “I have come back to life like a fly that has been numbed by the cold,” she gleefully wrote to Potemkin of her new discovery. (“A big fly of sixty,” wrote Troyat, “restless, buzzing and hungry.”)

  The strutting new favorite—“resplendent in his new uniform, with a great plumed hat on his head,” as Masson reported—immediately began lording his new status, imposing his will, and shamelessly brokering his influence. The flatterers flocked to him. “Every day, starting at eight o’clock in the morning, his antechamber was filled with ministers, courtiers, generals, foreigners, petitioners, seekers after appointments or favors,” reported Count Langeron. “Usually, they had to wait four or five hours before being admitted.… At last the double doors would swing open, the crowd would rush in and the favorite would be found seated before his mirror having his hair dressed, and ordinarily resting one foot on a chair or a corner of the dressing table. After bowing low, the courtiers would range themselves before him two or three deep, silent and motionless, in the midst of a cloud of powder.”

  After their interminable wait outside his chambers, the seekers were fortunate if they were acknowledged by anything more than Zubov’s capuchin monkey, which ran screaming through the room and rummaging through their hair. “The old generals, the great men of the Empire, did not blush to ingratiate themselves with the least of his valets,” wrote Masson. “Stretched out in an armchair in the most indecent, careless attire, with his little finger in his nose and his eyes fixed vaguely on the ceiling, this young man with his cold, vain face, scarcely deigned to pay attention to those around him.”