Sex with the Queen

by Eleanor Herman

  Within five years Potemkin had built the Black Sea fleet, which he immediately turned on the Turks to utterly defeat them. He added new Muslim territories to the empire as so many jewels to Catherine’s crown. Potemkin gestured and cities sprang from empty fields, cities such as Sebastopol and Odessa. He built a silk stocking factory, sending the first pair to Catherine, and planted thirty thousand vines for wine. When he promised free land, oxen, and plows to settlers, hundreds of thousands of Europe’s poor and disenfranchised arrived in his new towns. Within three years the population of his territories skyrocketed from 204,000 to roughly 800,000. Respectful of ethnicity and religious beliefs, Potemkin invited priests, rabbis, and Muslim mullahs to serve at his court.

  In his southern empire Potemkin indulged his taste for showmanship. At heart he was a wizard, an impresario, a ringmaster of visual delights. Cannons boomed when he entered a town; maidens crowned him with garlands and strewed rose petals in his path. Wherever he traveled he was met with fireworks, pageants, military parades, and mock naval battles. Potemkin took mistresses by the dozen, including several of his own nieces. Secure in the knowledge that she truly possessed his heart, Catherine showered gold and diamonds on his girlfriends.

  Serenissimus, the Prince of Princes, as he was now known, was Russia’s most brilliant statesman since Peter the Great. But Potemkin’s string of successes sometimes brought depression in their wake. “Can any man be more happy than I am?” he asked one evening at dinner. “Everything I have ever wanted, I have; all my whims have been fulfilled as if by magic. I wanted high rank, I have it. I wanted medals, I have them. I loved gambling, I have lost vast sums. I liked giving parties, I’ve given magnificent ones; I enjoy building houses, I’ve raised palaces….In a word, all my passions have been sated, I am entirely happy!”65 And then he swept all the valuable china plates on the floor, smashing them to bits, raced off to his bedroom, and locked the door. Potemkin suffered bitterly from having nothing left to want. For when dreams turn into reality, there is an empty spot where the dreams used to be, and Potemkin had no dreams left.

  Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, Catherine had to find a new favorite. She started a new system in which a doctor checked out all prospective candidates for venereal disease. If the young man seemed healthy, he would then be taken to bed by Catherine’s good friend Countess Prascovya Bruce, and rated on his appearance, sexual technique, and the size of his penis. The éprouveuse as she was called, or tester, would then inform the empress of her findings. Those who passed the test were sent on to Catherine for further testing before she selected a favorite. We can imagine that many a nervous young man was too terrified to rise to the occasion. His entire future and that of his family were at stake, based solely on the hardness of his penis.

  The first favorite to pass this barrage of tests was thirty-seven-year-old Peter Zavadovsky, whom Catherine appointed her personal secretary. Handsome, dark, and courteous, Zavadovsky worked assiduously on her personal correspondence, and within a month of his arrival at the palace he was promoted to major general.

  But it would take more than a Zavadovsky to make a woman forget Potemkin. A French diplomat remarked that Zavadovsky was “probably no more than an amusement.”66 But he was not as amusing as Catherine had hoped. Though he had somehow passed the sexual performance tests, once he landed the position of favorite Zavadovsky suffered from premature ejaculation. Catherine wrote him, “You are Vesuvius itself. When you least expect it, an eruption appears….”67

  He was unambitious, wanting neither riches nor honors, just her love, and bemoaned the fact that in attending to affairs of state she had so little time for him. Zavadovsky threw jealous tantrums about Potemkin, and Potemkin stormed about Zavadovsky. In 1777 Potemkin informed Catherine that he would never return to court unless Zavadovsky was dismissed. Catherine begged him to relent. “Do not make me do anything so unfair,” she implored him. But Potemkin remained stubborn and Zavadovsky had to go.

  He was devastated. “Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt; (her) love for me has vanished,” he said.68 Like Vasilchikov before him, he retired grumbling to his estates laden with gifts—four thousand serfs, eighty thousand rubles, and a silver dining service for sixteen. “You must agree, my friend,” wrote the French chargé d’affaires in St. Petersburg, “that it’s not a bad line of work to be in here.”69 Three years later, Catherine brought Zavadovsky back to court and gave him a government position. She made him legal guardian of Count Bobrinsky, her child with Gregory Orlov.

  Before Zavadovsky’s dismissal, Potemkin decided that he would select Catherine’s lovers, those who would not foment against him, those who would serve as his creatures. The successful candidate would offer an abundance of physical beauty and a corresponding lack of brains. A German courtier told Frederick the Great that Potemkin chose them “expressly to have neither talent nor the means to take direct influence.”70

  The day Zavadovsky left, his successor, Peter Yoritz, moved into his apartments. The new lover boasted a splendid physique and fiery temperament but was illiterate. He remained in favor ten months and then the empress told a visiting Potemkin, “Last night I was in love with him; today I can’t stand him anymore.”71 The spurned suitor was appeased with a life pension, several rich estates, and seven thousand serfs.

  Catherine celebrated her fiftieth birthday in 1779 with banquets, fireworks, and sighs. Her youth was now vanished beyond any pretense. She felt girlish only during the sex act when, in a passionate tangle of arms and legs and hard thrusts, she could feel youth, feel passion, forget her corpulent aging body. And when she did look in the mirror, did she truly believe she saw a woman who could still inspire love and lust? A woman for whom men would rage and fight, even if she had not worn a crown? Yes, she was old and heavy and wrinkled but there was something special there still, wasn’t there? A gleam in the eye, a flash of a smile, something still magical that rose above mere physical beauty? Wasn’t there?

  Potemkin quickly found a successor to Yoritz. This time he chose an elegant fellow with chiseled Greek features who resembled a young Apollo. Twenty-four-year-old Ivan Korsakov played the violin and sang love songs to Catherine for hours. In June 1778 the British ambassador wrote, “Potemkin, who has more cunning than any man living, has introduced Korsakov at a critical moment….”72

  Korsakov, knowing he was out of his league intellectually, decided to impress courtiers with his new library. The bookseller asked, “What books would His Lordship wish to possess?” To which the startled young man replied, “Oh, you know, big volumes on the bottom shelves and small ones on the top, like the Empress has.”73

  But the new lover, who had been tested by Madame Bruce and received excellent grades, was far more interested in the trim and subtle éprouveuse than in the gross and hungry empress. One day after a year with Korsakov, the empress found the two of them together in bed. Both were requested to leave St. Petersburg.

  Potemkin already had another one waiting in the wings. Alexander Lanskoy was a twenty-four-year-old guardsman from an impoverished but noble family. Charming, handsome, and incredibly tall, he was incredulous to hear that Prince Potemkin had plucked him from obscurity and appointed him his new aide-de-camp. Potemkin had been aware of Korsakov’s affair with Madame Bruce well before the empress found out, and rather than relinquishing the position to a rival faction, he decided to groom Lanskoy in advance and slide him in at the right moment. When Catherine, dejected at her lover’s infidelity, turned to Potemkin for sympathy, he introduced her to Lanskoy, who was overcome with love for her. Catherine, for her part, was delighted at finding a young man who would be the support of her old age.

  Within weeks Alexander Lanskoy was promoted to general and became the empress’s personal aide-de-camp. The young man who had only five shirts to his name suddenly found himself with one hundred thousand rubles to spend on his wardrobe, and seven million rubles in gift
s. Though not possessed of the physical stamina of Catherine’s other lovers, Lanskoy aroused her maternal instincts. Modest and gentle, he was truly devoted to her and refused to take part in political intrigues. He enjoyed helping Catherine lay out gardens and design buildings.

  Catherine was grateful to have the sympathetic Lanskoy with her when Gregory Orlov, the powerful lover who had given her the crown, was stricken by insanity. He had married his teenage cousin and brought her to court in 1778. Catherine had generously welcomed the girl, given her a splendid toilet set, and made her a lady-in-waiting. But his wife’s early death from consumption in 1781 threw Orlov into madness. His brothers had to physically force him away from her tomb where he had remained for days, sobbing, refusing to eat or sleep.

  On one occasion he escaped his brothers’ watchfulness and appeared at court, dirty and unkempt with bulging eyes. Hearing of his arrival, Catherine insisted on seeing him. Orlov, howling like a wounded animal, saw the corpse of Peter III rise before him seeking vengeance. “It’s my punishment!” he cried.74 Catherine spoke gently to him before his keepers trundled him off. Then she took to her bed, utterly devastated by the sight of her once magnificent lover reduced to this. Gregory Orlov died in 1783, suffering perhaps from the insanity which announced the last stages of syphilis.

  By 1782 Lanskoy was experiencing his own health problems; his nocturnal duties with the empress so exhausted him that he began taking sexual stimulants. In 1784 he caught diphtheria, which would not have proved fatal, according to his doctor, if his constitution had not already been weakened by his excessive use of aphrodisiacs. He died quickly, and those who came to offer condolences to the empress found a locked door and heard heart-wrenching sobs coming from behind it. Only Potemkin could help Catherine in her grief. He was called for and, riding day and night, arrived in only a week. The door to the imperial bedroom was opened, then locked behind him. Servants heard the two of them wailing for hours.

  But Potemkin’s grief could not have been that excessive. He told a British friend, “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.”75

  By the time of Lanskoy’s death, the empress had cultivated the reputation of an unbridled nymphomaniac. Menopause had not slowed her down one whit, and her reputation for the benevolent statecraft she practiced in the day was tarnished by the pleasures she enjoyed at night. Rumors portrayed Catherine having sex with stallions and bulls because men could no longer satiate her.

  But though Catherine enjoyed sex, she was no nymphomaniac. After Lanskoy’s death she refused to even consider a new lover for months, although Potemkin continually shoved grinning candidates in Catherine’s direction. Seeing the coveted position remain vacant, many ambitious families pushed their muscular teenaged sons forward at court. These youths, wearing the mortgages of their family estates on their backs, were trained to puff out their chests and flash the empress a dazzling smile as she passed. One visitor noticed that “during the church service for the court, lots of young men, who were even the slightest bit handsome, stood erect, hoping to regulate their destiny in such an easy way.”76

  The new favorite could quickly earn enough money to found a noble dynasty. Going up the secret staircase to the apartments of the imperial paramour for the first time, he would find as much as ten thousand rubles in cash on the sofa waiting for him. But it was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, requiring frequent vigorous lovemaking with a stout middle-aged woman, and brilliant conversation at all other times. Catherine stifled her lovers, suffocated them, and rarely let them out of her sight.

  But finally her interest was awakened by one of Potemkin’s studs. Thirty-one-year-old Alexis Yermalov was rough and good-natured, with a wide flat nose. Though honest and devoted by nature, Yermalov allowed his sudden rise to go to his head. Prodded by the anti-Potemkin faction, he decided to unseat his mentor. He was soon complaining to the empress of Potemkin’s corruption, accusing him of pocketing bribes and diverting money which she had sent to the south for other purposes. The truth was that Potemkin floated in so much money he often mixed his private and government bank accounts, borrowing from one to pay the other. He was so rich he seemed to be above bribery, certainly above pocketing paltry sums.

  Potemkin, furious, refused to defend himself against Yermalov’s allegations. When his friend the French ambassador asked why, he thundered, “So also you say that I am working for my own destruction, and that after all the services I have rendered, I should defend myself against the allegations of an ungrateful boy. But no little whippersnapper will bring about my downfall, and I do not know of anyone who would dare to do so.”77

  In June 1786, during a ball celebrating the anniversary of the empress’s accession to the throne, Potemkin strode in. The music stopped. The crowd parted as the powerful figure, gleaming with diamonds, Europe’s highest decorations clattering on his broad chest, strode straight up to Yermalov who was playing at the gaming tables. Everyone in the vicinity fled except Yermalov, pinned to the spot by the gaze of his former benefactor. Potemkin threw the table over; cards and chips were sent flying through the air.

  “You cur, you white nigger, you monkey, who dare to bespatter me with the mud of the gutters from which I have raised you,” Potemkin bellowed. Yermalov bravely put his hand to his sword hilt but found himself soaring backward. Potemkin had slugged him. No one dared pick up the crumpled figure on the floor. Catherine, who had left the ball early, was astonished to see Potemkin roaring into her apartments without knocking. Courtiers in the hall heard him shouting, “It’s either he or I. If this nonentity of nonentities is allowed to remain at court, then I quit the state’s services from today.”78

  Trembling with the excitement that Potemkin always provoked, Catherine readily gave up Yermalov, who after seventeen months was beginning to bore her anyway. Moments after Potemkin’s temper tantrum, the court was regaled with the vision of a smiling Serenissimus leading the empress by the hand back to the ball. Catherine slept three hours later than usual the next morning, presumably with Potemkin.

  Yermalov received notification of his dismissal that evening but walked away staggering under the weight of his retirement gifts—4,300 serfs, 130,000 rubles in cash, a silver dinner service, and the polite suggestion to live abroad for five years.

  Within days of Yermalov’s dismissal, Potemkin placed another young man in the imperial bed, twenty-six-year-old Alexander Momonov, predictably handsome and charming. He was, alas, easily bored with the empress’s stifling devotion and fretted at the tight leash she kept him on. Momonov stayed on in his position only because of his loyalty to Potemkin, whom he idolized, and not because of the exceptional financial rewards. In the first eighteen months Momonov was given 27,000 serfs, a salary of 180,000 rubles a year, and a table budget of 36,000 rubles. The empress made him adjutant general and a count of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Despite the cash and honors heaped upon them, the vapid young men who came and went in the empress’s bed did not awaken the most vicious jealousy at court. That was reserved for the insolently powerful Potemkin, reigning like a sultan in his southern kingdom. Many courtiers were furious at reports of cities springing up from dust at the prince’s command. Rumors spread that his vaunted success was nothing short of a pack of lies. And so Potemkin arranged for his show of shows, the empress’s nine-month voyage to visit her new southern provinces and see for herself. To ensure that all Europe learned of his achievements, he arranged for a slew of foreign diplomats to accompany the empress. Even Emperor Joseph II of Austria agreed to join part of the expedition.

  The expedition embarked on January 7, 1787. Wrapped in luxurious sables, Catherine cast quick glances out the windows of her gilded coach. She saw the beauty of her country but none of the misery of its serfs. As she had written Voltaire earlier, “The soil of the country was so productive and the rivers so rich in fish that the Russian peasant was happier and better fed than an
y other in the world.”79 Certainly the Russian peasant should have been happy and well fed in such a land of natural riches, if the Russian peasant’s master had not taken his happiness and food away from him.

  Well aware of the power of visual images, Potemkin spruced up the towns and villages through which the empress would travel. Roads were repaired, trash removed, cottages painted, and undesirable characters temporarily imprisoned. When his enemies stewing in St. Petersburg heard reports that his successes were true, they were furious. It had all been a mirage, they growled, a façade, a series of grandiose optical illusions. The magician Potemkin, they declared, had built a series of stage sets which he transported from place to place, just ahead of the empress’s caravan, along with the same plump cheerful peasants to stand in front of them. Potemkin villages.

  Joseph II was awestruck by Potemkin’s achievements. Looking closely at the gleaming new buildings, he saw not façades but shoddy construction. “But what does this matter,” he asked, “in a country which exists on slave labor and where anything which crumbles can be built again? Money is limitless and lives are of no account. In Germany and France we would not dare to attempt things which they risk here every day without encountering a single obstacle or hearing one word of complaint.”80

  In August the party boarded a luxurious galley specially made by Potemkin to cruise the Dnieper River, the border between Russia and Poland. Docking in the town of Kanieve, Catherine reluctantly met with King Stanislaus, the lover she had not seen in nearly thirty years. At fifty-six, Poniatowski was still handsome. He was one of those men who, though insipid in youth, grows more handsome with age. His eyes sparkled with confidence, his salt-and-pepper hair gave him the air of wisdom; the lines in his face spoke of experience. But Catherine did not find him attractive. After her decades of exciting sex with domineering men, she found Poniatowski weak, dull, and unbearably sincere. How could she ever have loved him?