One evening at a dinner party at the Hermitage Palace, Gregory Potemkin appeared. Catherine recognized him instantly. She had been secretly watching over his career for years since that exhilarating day when he had presented her with the sword knot. Though tall, vain, and authoritative like Orlov, Potemkin had less regular features. His wide slanting eyes and full sensual lips gave him a slightly Asian look. Hearing of Potemkin’s talent for mimicry, she asked him to imitate someone, and he mimicked her own guttural German accent. The guests were appalled at his boldness, but Catherine laughed heartily. In talking to him she discovered that he was highly educated, deeply religious, and politically brilliant. She enjoyed his conversation so much that the Orlovs became jealous. Potemkin disappeared.
Though Gregory Orlov still reigned supreme, gradually Catherine became aware that he was tiring of her as a woman. His lovemaking was no longer a pleasure but a boring duty with a woman grown heavy and middle-aged. His forceful taking of her had made her feel fresh and young again every night. But now the ardor had vanished, the ravishing had become mechanical groping in the dark.
The truth was that Orlov had fallen deeply in love with his young cousin. At forty-three, for the first time, Catherine felt she was growing old. Youth was slipping through her fingers like water, and even with the power of the empress of all the Russias, she could not hold on to it. All her wealth and majesty, her dazzling intellect and steamy sexual passion could not compare with the soft budding charms of a fourteen-year-old.
Catherine was not one to scold and reproach. When peace talks with Turkey were required in the summer of 1772, she sent Orlov as her representative in a coat embroidered with a million rubles’ worth of diamonds. Glinting in the sunshine, he left.
“I cannot live one day without love,” she wrote.44 And now, with Orlov gone, she cast about court for a replacement. Her glance fell on Alexander Vasilchikov, a good-looking twenty-eight-year-old with excellent manners. He was sweet and modest, with beautiful black eyes and a sensual mouth. Sensing the empress’s interest in the young man, Orlov’s enemies took advantage of his absence to push Vasilchikov into the imperial bed.
Soon the young man was showered with valuable presents. By August he had been made gentleman-in-waiting. By September he was aide-de-camp and had moved into Orlov’s former rooms adjoining those of the empress. Courtiers were amazed that this quiet mouse of a man had replaced the magnificent Orlov. Most thought that the moment Orlov returned from his mission, the “nonentity,” as he was called, would disappear in an hour.
When Gregory Orlov heard that his enemies had placed another man in the empress’s bed, he came thundering back to St. Petersburg in a black rage. But Catherine, rather than taking back the man who had tormented her with his infidelities, bribed him to go away. She gave him one hundred thousand rubles outright and an annual pension of one hundred fifty thousand; the Marble Palace, which was under construction; the use of all palaces outside St. Petersburg until his own was completed; and ten thousand serfs from the crown. In addition, she gave him all the furniture and paintings from his apartments in the Winter Palace, the Sèvres dinner service for one hundred guests that she had ordered from France the year before, and another dinner service in heavy silver.
As all expected, Vasilchikov did not last long. His performance in bed was evidently satisfactory, yet his intellect was limited and his conversation dull. One contemporary described him as having his “head stuffed with hay.”45 Catherine was sophisticated, cultured, and witty and needed a lover with whom she could discuss politics, art, and theology. Poor Vasilchikov seemed to have no opinions at all on these subjects. He grew peevish, felt himself outmatched, and claimed to be ill. “I’m just a little whore,” he sniffed, clutching at imaginary pains in his chest.46
In 1773 Catherine recalled Orlov to court but refused to take him back into her bed. Frederick the Great, never one to mince words, reported that Gregory Orlov had returned to all his former offices “except that of fucking. It is a terrible business when the prick and the cunt decide the interests of Europe.”47
By late 1773 the empress had admitted that Vasilchikov “bores me to tears.”48 She couldn’t stop thinking of the fearless Potemkin, now a general fighting on the Danube. There had always been a sizzling chemistry between them, but the time had never been right to call him to her bed. On his periodic visits to St. Petersburg, upon encountering Catherine, Potemkin would drop to his knees, ardently kiss her hands, and openly declare his passion for her. The empress chuckled at these displays; courtiers hated him for his galling presumption.
Potemkin was, perhaps, the only man in the world who was Catherine’s equal physically and intellectually. Well over six feet tall, he had a broad chest and powerful shoulders. His thick, unkempt tawny hair gave him a leonine appearance. Fearless, flamboyant, and easily bored, Potemkin had a brash genius, a primitive brilliance.
But he was no longer the handsome lithe soldier who had presented the brand-new empress with a sword knot. An infection had rendered his left eye clouded and blind and, though he was sensitive about it, he never bothered to wear a patch. Still powerfully built, there was a little too much swash in his buckle. Yet neither the disfigurement of his face nor the swelling of his physique diminished the man’s attractions. Potemkin was a raw force of nature against which it was futile to fight. His magnetism engulfed the most crowded ballroom. Women threw themselves into his burly arms. He was the man every woman wanted to sleep with. He was the man other men wanted to be, or to kill, or both.
But if his looks had deteriorated in the intervening decade, so had those of the empress. She looked older than her forty-four years, her waist had thickened, and her hair had turned gray. But like Potemkin, she was a force to be reckoned with and not only because she wore a crown. Her sparkling wit had, over the years, increased its luster. Her self-confidence was equal to if not surpassing his. Her physical passions would forever remain untouched by time, as would his. And like him, she had the face of a handsome middle-aged man.
Now, at the age of thirty-four, Potemkin received a letter from the empress, ordering him back to St. Petersburg “for the purpose of the confirmation of my feelings for you.”49 He had been waiting eleven years for this letter. But when Potemkin arrived in St. Petersburg eager to take up the appointment of empress’s lover, he was furious to find Vasilchikov still sulking in the official paramour’s apartments. The truth was, Catherine hesitated to install Potemkin as her favorite with all the perquisites of wealth and power. Perhaps she instinctively felt that Potemkin would be unstoppable once unleashed. A towering tidal wave, roaring toward shore, cannot be persuaded to turn back to sea. A thundering volcano, heaving burning ash and molten lava down the mountainside, does not reconsider and pull back. Nor would there be any half measures with that other oversized natural wonder, Gregory Potemkin.
The Orlovs, in particular, felt threatened by Potemkin as they never had by Vasilchikov. Potemkin, once rooted in the palace, would never permit himself to be dislodged. The tempestuous general threatened to upend the entire existing power structure at court.
One day Gregory Orlov was descending a staircase in the palace when he chanced to meet Potemkin coming up. Gaily, Potemkin asked Orlov whether there was any news at court. Orlov replied, “Nothing very much, except that you are coming up and I am going down.”50
Potemkin, whose many virtues did not include patience, stormed and raged for Catherine to dismiss the mediocre Vasilchikov. Potemkin finally ran off to a monastery, vowing never to return until the young man was banished from the palace. The empress yielded and Potemkin returned. Buckling under the weight of valuable presents, pensions, and honors, Vasilchikov retired grudgingly to his new mansion and whined about his dismissal for decades to anyone who would listen.
With Vasilchikov gone, the empress could now focus exclusively on Potemkin. Grisha, she called him, a nickname for Gregory. She wrote him little notes throughout the day, some political, others sexual: “Ther
e is not a cell in my whole body that does not yearn for you, oh infidel!” “I thank you for yesterday’s feast. My little Grisha fed me and quenched my thirst, but not with wine….” “My head is like that of a cat in heat….” “I will be a ‘woman of fire’ for you, as you so often say. But I shall try to hide my flames.” “Beloved, I will do as you order, should I come to your room, or will you come to mine?”51
“Oh, Monsieur Potemkin!” she gushed. “By what sorcery have you managed to turn a head which is generally regarded as one of the best in Europe.” She cooed, “We remain together for hours on end without a shadow of boredom, and it is always with reluctance that I leave you. I forget the whole world when I am with you. There is something extraordinary that words cannot express, for the alphabet is too short and the letters are too few.” She called him “my little pigeon, my golden pheasant, my kitten, my little father, my dear little heart.”52
Catherine’s unbounded excitement may have had something to do with the size of Potemkin’s penis, which was reported to be enormous. Many years after Catherine’s death when the Hermitage Palace had been turned into a museum, the curator reported that Catherine had had a porcelain cast of Potemkin’s penis in her private collection. He removed this object from its silk-lined wooden box and showed it to several visitors who admired “the glorious weapon” of Potemkin.53 Alas, it is not listed on the current Hermitage inventory and no one has seen it in years.
The lovers often met in the sauna at night, Potemkin insisting on meals being served there. Many at court noticed the lights in the bathhouse and the servants scurrying in and out with dishes. Here they bathed, ate, drank, made love, and ran the empire.
In his dispatch to London, British ambassador Sir Robert Gunning remarked, “Nowhere have favorites risen so rapidly as in this country. But there is no instance even here of so rapid a progress as that of the present one.”54 And indeed Potemkin’s ascent was nothing short of meteoric.
His rewards far outstripped those of Catherine’s other lovers. Upon landing in the imperial bed, Potemkin was given 150,000 rubles in cash; an army officer lived well on 300 rubles a year. He received a salary of 12,000 rubles a month. His meals and wine, amounting to some 100,000 rubles a year, were paid for by the imperial budget, and Catherine personally covered his substantial gambling losses. Every feast day, of which the court celebrated many, he received another 100,000 rubles as a present.
Catherine gave him a diamond-hilted sword and a portrait of herself set in diamonds to dangle above his heart, just like the one she had bestowed on Orlov. He was given his own lavish palace as well as apartments leading directly to hers in all the imperial palaces. She named him a count and later a prince and appointed him member of the secret council and vice president of the council of war, with the rank of general-in-chief.
Many scholars believe that Catherine and Potemkin were secretly married in 1774, and indeed the rumor reached the courts of Europe soon thereafter. Her correspondence supports the theory as she began to call him “my dearest husband” and “my tender spouse,” signing herself “your devoted wife.”55
Potemkin, who loved to amuse, shock, impress, and terrorize by turns, flaunted his relationship with the empress. He appeared at her official morning receptions barefoot, wearing a dirty dressing gown with his chest hair poking out, and a pink bandana wrapped carelessly around his head. He wanted to make it clear that he had just popped out of bed on the other side of the door. The elegant speeches of the empress and courtiers were punctuated by the loud crunches of Potemkin nibbling on a radish. Not wishing to single him out for rude behavior, Catherine initiated a new rule in the Hermitage Palace— courtiers would no longer be permitted to blow their noses on the curtains.
Innocent of underpants, Potemkin often received official visitors with his private parts dangling out of his half-open dressing gown. Though he could dress himself as ornately as any French courtier at Versailles, he wanted to show the world that he didn’t have to. That sort of thing was for lesser men.
Unlike any of her other lovers, Potemkin was a born statesman and a brilliant general. He became her viceroy, her political partner, her right hand. Potemkin and Catherine were the Antony and Cleopatra of the eighteenth century, two brilliant lovers ruling a vast empire, sharing a tumultuous passion. They made love passionately at night—and Potemkin seems to have had more sexual stamina than even Orlov—and worked together on political projects throughout the day. Their stunning political partnership alarmed Frederick the Great, who grumbled, “A woman is always a woman and in a feminine government the cunt has more influence than a firm policy governed by reason.”56
“They love each other for they are exactly alike,” wrote one courtier.57 But perhaps not exactly alike, for Catherine faced west, toward Voltaire and the Enlightenment, while Potemkin faced resolutely east. Born in Ukraine, he had an in-depth knowledge of the languages and customs of the Cossack and Tatar tribes. Like them, he was a man of black earth, crystal streams, and sudden storms; the passions of the wild steppes coursed through his veins. Like Russia, he was a man of startling incongruities. “Prince Potemkin is the emblem of the immense Russian Empire,” wrote the prince de Ligne, the Austrian envoy. “He too is composed of deserts and goldmines.”58
Potemkin boasted countless talents; in addition to statecraft and warfare, he was a gifted musician, poet, theologian, and architect. Sometimes his bright fire burned itself out, and he collapsed suddenly on a divan where he remained for days at a time. Sunk into a deep depression, he would play with loose diamonds, dropping them from one cupped hand into the other, looking with childlike wonder at how they caught the light as they fell. Then with a burst of energy, he would spring up from his couch and work tirelessly for days on end without a moment’s sleep. Recognizing his brilliance, Catherine soothed and encouraged him when he was depressed. When he was buoyant, the two of them argued, fretted, reconciled, and finally agreed on policy.
Sometimes Potemkin enjoyed torturing Catherine by refusing to make love to her. She would wait up, hoping to hear his footfall padding down the hall, the creak of her door, to feel the flood of warmth that came with his presence. When he did not come, forgetting all pride, she would creep to his apartments and find the doors locked. “I come to your room to tell you how much I love you, and I find your door locked!” she scribbled in a note.59 Once she sadly wrote him, “The subject of our disagreements is always power and never love.”60
For Potemkin, the unattainable was most desirable. The already attained was dull. After eleven years of worshiping a shining image, he suddenly found himself with a plump, sexually insatiable middle-aged woman, abject in her love for him, completely, irrevocably, and boringly conquered. Potemkin would always love Catherine as the personification of Mother Russia, his eternal mistress and only true love. But by 1776 he sought a plan to extricate himself from her bed. She had not wearied of him yet, but the day might come, and Potemkin had no intention of being pensioned off as another useless cast-off lover.
Moreover, he longed to burst forth from the constraints of the relationship and make his own path in the world, to win political power and riches outside of St. Petersburg. He found himself in the usual position of a queen’s favorite—his mistress’s son and heir heartily detested him. Paul hated all his mother’s lovers, but particularly resented Potemkin for coruling with Catherine. He, Paul, with Romanov blood reportedly flowing in his veins, should have helped rule the empire. If Catherine, who was ten years older than Potemkin, should die before him, Potemkin could reckon with the confiscation of all his property, and probably prison and death.
Grand Duke Paul had grown up twitching, paranoid, and a devoted admirer of Frederick the Great of Prussia—oddly similar to Peter III. Though she indicated in her memoirs that Saltikov was Paul’s father, perhaps Catherine simply couldn’t bear the thought of creating a child with Peter. On the other hand, perhaps Paul, hearing stories of Peter’s behavior, strove to imitate it to prove he was legit
imate. Paul’s paternity is still hotly debated among Russian historians.
Paul suffered from epileptic seizures and night hallucinations in which he saw his murdered father seeking revenge on his murderer, Catherine. Paul grew up terrified that his mother would kill him, too, just as Peter the Great had killed his son and heir. According to the French chargé d’affaires, at the age of ten Paul asked “why they had killed his father and why they had given his mother the throne that rightfully belonged to him. He added that when he grew up, he would get to the bottom of all that.”61 Eyeing his mother’s lovers coldly, Paul promised “hardness and vengeance” the moment he took the throne.62 For her part, Catherine found her son repulsive, unappetizing, like “mustard after dinner.”63 She called him “die schwere Bagage,” heavy baggage.64
Potemkin, keenly aware of Paul’s hatred, and tiring of Catherine’s urgent embraces, needed to shift the love affair onto the footing of deep friendship and political partnership. He began by persuading the empress that their relationship involved far more than the two of them. Their love existed in the realm of the sublime; it was a shining spiritual partnership, far above mere groping in bed. In a sexual relationship, he pointed out, they spent time quarreling, valuable time that they could give to Russia. Such quarrels would be acceptable with meaningless lovers, but not with each other.
Sadly Catherine realized that in order to keep him at all, she had to let him go. In St. Petersburg Potemkin would always have to share power with the empress. So she sent him to govern various imperial provinces, and in 1783 he landed in the Crimea, a former Turkish province on the north of the Black Sea. There he ruled alone, sending the empress reports of his decisions. He held his own court, something in between the Oriental magnificence of the sultan’s palace and the filth and disorder of a barnyard. Here visitors would find him wearing a silk caftan, reclining on a divan, with a harem of half-dressed odalisques around him, a one-hundred-twenty-piece orchestra playing in the background and a turbaned boy fanning him with ostrich feathers.
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