Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  The arrangement may sound cold and cynical but the relationship of Catherine and favourite could not have been more indulgent, loving and cosy. Indeed, Catherine was passionately enamoured with each one and bathed them in loving and controlling attention, spent hours talking to them and reading with them. The beginning of each affair was an explosion of her maternal love, Germanic sentimentality and admiration for their beauty. She raved about them to anyone who would listen and, because she was Empress, everyone had to. Even though most of them were too spoiled and stupid to govern, she loved each one as if the relationship would last until the day she died. When her relationships fell apart, she became desperate and depressed, and often little business was achieved for weeks.

  The imperial routine became excruciatingly boring after a while – endless dinners, games of whist, and sexual duties with a woman who, for all her charm and majesty, was increasingly stout, tormented by indigestion and in her early fifties by 1780. Once the excitement of luxury and the proximity to power had worn off, this could not have been easy for a young man in his early twenties. Catherine’s affection sounds stifling, if not suffocating. If a favourite had the slightest ability and character, it must have been exceedingly difficult to accompany, day after day, an ageing empress who treated him like a cross between a pretty pupil and a ‘kept woman’. One favourite called it a tedious ‘prison’. The Court was malicious. Favourites felt as if they were living among a ‘pack of wolves in a forest’. But it was also inhabited by the richest and most fashionable noble girls, while the favourites had to spend their nights with a stout old lady. Thus the temptations to cuckold the Empress must have been almost irresistible.48

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  Potemkin’s role in Catherine’s life made it worse. It must have been intolerable to learn that, not only were they expected to be the companion to a demanding older lady, but the real benefits of her love were bestowed on Potemkin, whom they were ordered to adore as much as she did. Most of the favourites – we have seen Vassilchikov’s comments – had to admit that, while they were spoilt and kept, Potemkin was always Catherine’s ‘master’, her husband. Catherine herself called him ‘Papa’ or ‘My lord’. There was no room for another Potemkin in the government of Russia.

  Even if the favourite was in love with the Empress, as Zavadovsky and Lanskoy were, there was no guarantee of privacy from Potemkin, whose rooms were linked to hers by the covered walkway. He was the one man in Russia who did not have to be announced to the Empress. By the late 1770s, he was often away, which must have been a relief, but when he was in Petersburg or Tsarskoe Selo, he was continually bursting in on the Empress like a dishevelled whirlwind in his fur-lined dressing gowns, pink shawls and red bandannas. This would naturally ruin the favourite’s day – especially since he was unlikely to be able to equal the Prince’s wit or charisma. No wonder Zavadovsky was reduced to tears and hiding.49 Catherine made sure that the favourites paid court to Potemkin, with the humiliating implication that he was the real man in the household. Each of them wrote Potemkin complimentary letters and Catherine ended most of her letters to him by passing on the favourite’s flattery and enclosing his little notes.

  There is a strong sense that Catherine almost wanted the favourites to regard her and Potemkin as parents. Her own son Paul had been taken away from her and then become alienated from her, and she could not bring up Bobrinsky, so it was understandable that she treated the favourites, who were as young as her sons, as child substitutes. She claimed maternally that ‘I’m benefiting the state by educating this young man’,50 as if she was a one-woman finishing-school for civil servants.

  If she was mother, then her consort, Potemkin, was the father of this peculiar ‘family’. She often called her favourites ‘the child’ and they respectfully called Potemkin, clearly on Catherine’s urging, ‘Uncle’ or ‘Papa’. When Potemkin was ill, Lanskoy had to write, ‘This moment I have heard from Lady Mother that you, Father Prince Grigory Alexandrovich, are ill, which troubles us greatly. I wish you wholeheartedly to be better.’ When he did not call him Father, Lanskoy wrote, ‘Dear Uncle, thank you very much for the letter which I have received from you.’ Then Lanskoy, just like Catherine, added: ‘You can’t imagine how dull it is without you, Father, come as soon as possible.’ Later, when Potemkin was critically ill in the south, Lanskoy wrote to him that ‘our incomparable Sovereign Mother…cries without interruption’. Lanskoy might have resented this but his affectionate nature made him take to what was effectively a makeshift family. As we will see in the next chapter, its strange symmetry was completed by the addition of Potemkin’s nieces.

  It was not one way. Serenissimus treated the favourites like his children too. When the prancing Zorich was dismissed, Potemkin generously wrote to King Stanislas-Augustus in Poland to make sure the fallen favourite received a decent welcome. The Prince explained to the King that this ‘unhappy business’ had made Zorich ‘lose for a time in this country the advantages he deserved for his martial qualities, services and conduct beyond reproach’. The Polish King took care of Zorich during his travels. ‘There is a pleasure in obliging you,’ he told Potemkin. We know from Lanskoy’s thank-you letters that the Prince sent him kind notes and oranges and supported the promotion of his family.51

  The favourites suited Potemkin for the simplest of reasons: while they had to accompany Catherine through her dinners and make love to her at night, Potemkin had the power. It took years for courtiers and diplomats to realize that the favourites were potentially powerful but only if they could somehow remove Potemkin. The Empress’s ladies-in-waiting, doctors and secretaries all had influence, but favourites had marginally more because she loved them. However these ‘ephemeral subalterns’ had no real power, even in her old age, as long as Potemkin was alive. They were, Count von der Goertz told Frederick II, ‘chosen expressly to have neither talent nor the means to take…direct influence.’52

  To exercise power, a man requires the public prestige to make himself obeyed. The very openness of favouritism ensured that their public prestige was minimal. ‘The definitive way in which she proclaimed their position…was exactly what limited the amount of honour she bestowed upon them,’ observed the Comte de Damas, who knew Catherine and Potemkin well. ‘They overruled her daily in small matters but never took the lead in affairs of importance.’53 Only Potemkin and, to a lesser extent, Orlov increased their prestige by being Catherine’s lovers. Usually, the rise of a new favourite was ‘an event of no importance to anybody but the parties concerned’, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Weymouth. ‘They are…creatures of Potemkin’s choice and the alteration will only serve to increase his power and influence.’54 So, if they survived, they were his men; if they were dismissed, he benefited from the crisis. That at least was the theory, but things were never so neat.

  The legend says Potemkin could dismiss them when he wished. Provided Catherine was happy, Potemkin could get on and run his part of the Empire. He tried to have every favourite dismissed at one time or another. Yet Catherine only dismissed one favourite because Potemkin demanded it. Usually she was in love with them and rejected his grumbles. Serenissimus, who was neither rigid nor vindictive, would then happily coexist with them until another crisis blew up. He knew the sillier favourites thought they could overthrow him. This often ended in their departure.

  The favourites usually accelerated their own fall, either through cuckolding the Empress like Korsakov, becoming deeply unhappy like Zavadovsky and Potemkin himself, or getting embroiled in clumsy intrigues against Potemkin, as Zorich did, which caused the Empress to tire of them. When Potemkin demanded their dismissal, which he did quite frequently, she probably told him to mind his own business and gave him another estate or admired the latest plans for his cities. At other times, she criticized him for not telling her when they were deceiving her, but he probably knew that she was so in love at the time, there was no point.

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  The Prince liked to boast that Catherine always needed him when things were not going well, politically or amorously. During crises of the boudoir, he was especially indispensable, as Harris reported to London during Catherine’s hiccup with Lanskoy in May 1781: ‘These revolutions are moments when the influence of my friend is without bounds and when nothing he asks, however extravagant, is refused.’55 But it was undoubtedly more than that.

  In times of crisis, such as her humiliation by Korsakov, he became her husband and lover again. ‘When all other resources fail him to achieve what he wants,’ the Austrian envoy, Count Louis Cobenzl, who was one of the few foreigners who really knew Catherine and Potemkin intimately, told his Emperor Joseph II, ‘he retakes for a few days the function of favourite.’56 The letters between Empress and Prince suggest that their relationship was so informal and intimate that neither would have thought twice about spending the night together at any time throughout their lives. Hence some writers call him ‘favori-en-chef’ and the others just ‘sous-favoris’. No wonder the ‘sous-favoris’ failed to understand Potemkin’s role and tried to intrigue against him.

  Potemkin and Catherine had settled their personal dilemma in this formal system, which was supposed to preserve their friendship, keep imperial love out of politics and reserve political power for Potemkin. Even though there was a system which worked better than most marriages, it was still flawed. No one, not even those two deft manipulators, could really control favouritism, that sensitive and convenient fusion of love and sex, greed and ambition.

  Nonetheless, it was their cure for jealousy. While Catherine was truly happy at last with Lanskoy in 1780, she was equally unjealous about Potemkin’s scandalous antics. ‘This step has increased Potemkin’s power,’ Harris told Weymouth, ‘which nothing can destroy unless a report is true…’. The report? That Potemkin might ‘marry his favourite niece’.57

  Skip Notes

  *1 Alexander I appointed him Russia’s first Minister of Education.

  *2 The letters mentioning Cagliostro are usually dated to 1774 by V.S. Lopatin and others because of their obvious sensual passion for Potemkin. But Count Cagliostro emerged in London only in 1776/7, so they could not have discussed him in 1774. Cagliostro travelled through Europe in 1778, finding fame in Mittau through the patronage of the ducal family and Courland aristocracy before coming to Petersburg, where he met Potemkin: their relations are discussed in the next chapter. If her wish that, instead of ‘soupe à la glace’ – Vassilchikov – they had begun their love ‘a year and a half ago’ is translated as ‘a year and a half before’, the letter could date from 1779/80, when their reunion would have reminded Catherine of that wasted year and a half.

  *3 Catherine’s handful of adjutants included her favourite of the moment and also the sons of magnates and several of Potemkin’s nephews. This was further complicated because in June 1776 Potemkin created the rank of aide-de-camp to the Empress whose duties (written out in his own hand and corrected by Catherine) were to aid the adjutants. The Prince of course had his own aides-de-camp, who often then joined Catherine’s staff.

  12

  HIS NIECES

  There was a man, if that he was a man,

  Not that his manhood could be called in question

  Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII: 36

  When the five Engelhardt sisters arrived at Court in 1775, these motherless, barely educated but beautiful provincial girls were instantly transformed by their uncle into sophisticates and treated as if they were members of the imperial family – ‘almost as Grand Duchesses’.1 When Potemkin ended his relationship with the Empress of Russia, he almost at once became very close to his striking teenage niece Varvara Engelhardt. It was not long before Court gossip claimed that the degenerate Prince had seduced all five of these girls.

  Now he was a semi-single man again, Potemkin immediately plunged into an imbroglio of secret affairs and public liaisons with adventuresses and aristocrats that were so intertwined that they fascinated his own times and are still difficult to unravel. ‘Like Catherine, he was an Epicurean,’ wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, son of one of Potemkin’s adjutants, who married his great-niece. ‘Sensual pleasures had an important part in his life – he loved women passionately and nothing could stand in the way of his passions.’2 Now he could return to the way he preferred to live. Rising late, visiting Catherine through the covered passageway, he swung constantly between frenetic work and febrile hedonism, between bouts of political paperwork and strategic creativity, and then love affairs, theological debates, and nocturnal wassails, until dawn, at the green baize tables.

  Nothing so shocked his contemporaries as the legend of the five nieces. All the diplomats wrote about it to their captivated monarchs with ill-concealed relish: ‘You will get an idea of Russian morality’, Corberon told Versailles under its prim new King Louis XVI, ‘in the manner in which Prince Potemkin protects his nieces.’ In order to underline the horror of this immoral destiny, he added with a shiver, ‘There is one who is only twelve years old and who will no doubt suffer the same fate.’ Simon Vorontsov was also disgusted: ‘We saw Prince Potemkin make a harem of his own family in the imperial palace of which he occupied a part.’ What ‘scandalous impudence!’ The scandal of the nieces was accepted by contemporaries as true – but did he really seduce all five, even the youngest?3

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  The ‘almost-Grand-Duchesses’ became the gilded graces of Catherine’s Court, the richest heiresses in Russia and the matriarchs of many of the aristocratic dynasties of the Empire. None of them ever forgot who they were and who their uncle was: their lives were illuminated and mythologized by their semi-royal status and the prestige of Serenissimus.

  Only five of the Engelhardt sisters mattered at Court because the eldest, Anna, left home and married Mikhail Zhukov before Potemkin’s rise, though he looked after the couple and promoted the husband to govern Astrakhan. The next eldest, the formidable Alexandra Vasilievna, twenty-two in 1776, became Potemkin’s favourite niece, his dearest friend apart from the Empress. She was already a woman when she arrived, so it was hardest for her to adapt to Court sophistication. But she was as haughty as Potemkin had been, and ‘clever and strong-willed’. She used her ‘kind of grandeur’ to conceal ‘her lack of education’.4 She had a head for business and politics and a talent for friendship. Her portraits show a slim brunette, hair brushed back, with high cheekbones, bright intelligent blue eyes, a broad sensual mouth, small nose and alabaster skin, graced by a lithe body and the grandness of a woman who was an honorary member of the imperial family and the confidante of its greatest statesman.

  The third sister was Varvara, twenty, who charmed her way through life. ‘Plenira aux chevaux d’or’ – ‘the fascinatress with the golden hair’ – was what the poet Derzhavin called her; she was celebrated for her radiant blondeness. Even in middle age, she kept her slender figure, and her features were described by the memoirist Wiegel as ‘perfect…with the freshness of a twenty-year-old girl’. No statesman liked her sister Alexandra, she was excitable, flirtatious, capricious, hot-tempered and incessantly demanding. No one could criticize her ill-temper and bad manners when the Prince was alive, but on one occasion she pulled a friend by the hair; on another she whipped one of her estate managers. She was harsh to the pompous or corrupt but very kind to her servants5 – though not necessarily to her serfs. Years later, force was required to suppress a peasant revolt on her estates.

  Nadezhda, fifteen, contrived to be both ginger and swarthy and must have suffered from being the ugly duckling in a family of swans, but Potemkin made her a maid-of-honour like the others. She was headstrong and irritating: Nadezhda means ‘hope’ in Russian so Potemkin, who coined nicknames for everyone, cruelly called her ‘bez-nadezhnaya’ – or Hopeless. The fifth sister was the placid and passive Ekaterin
a, who was already the physical paragon of the family: her portrait by Vigée Lebrun, painted in 1790, shows her seraphic face surrounded by bright auburn-blonde curls, looking into a mirror. Ekaterina, wrote Ségur, the French envoy, might ‘have served as a model for an artist to paint the head of Venus’. Lastly, Tatiana was the youngest – aged seven in 1776 – but she grew up as good-looking and intelligent as Alexandra. After Potemkin withdrew from Catherine’s alcove, he fell in love with Varvara.6

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  ‘Little Mother, Varenka, my soul, my life,’ wrote Potemkin to Varvara. ‘You slept, little fool, and didn’t remember anything. I, leaving you, kissed you and covered you with the quilt and with a gown and crossed you.’ It is just possible to claim that this was the letter of an uncle who has simply kissed his niece good night and tucked her in, though it really reads as if he is leaving in the morning after spending the night with her.

  ‘My angel, your caress is so pleasurable so lovable, count my love to you and you’ll see you are my life, my joy, my angel; I’m kissing you innumerable times and I think about you even more…’. Even in the age of sensibilité and written by an emotional and uninhibited Prince, these sentiments were not those of a conventional uncle. Often he called her ‘my honey’ or ‘my treasure’, ‘my soul, my tender lover’, ‘my sweetheart goddess’ and ‘lovable lips’ and frequently signed off. ‘I am kissing you from head to foot.’ The letters are shamelessly sensual – and yet familial too: ‘My honey, Varenka, my soul…Goodbye, sweet lips, come over to dinner. I have invited your sisters…’. In one letter, he told her: ‘Tomorrow I’m going to the banya.’ Recalling his rendezvous in the Winter Palace banya with Catherine, was he arranging to meet his niece there too?