Catherine the Great & Potemkin Read online

  The Prince was now thirty-seven, seventeen years older than Varvara, so, in age at least, there was nothing remarkable in their love affair. The sisters and their hulking brother, Vasily, were now at Court every day and in Potemkin’s homes – the Shepilev house, the Anichkov – every evening. They attended his dinners and watched him playing cards with the Empress in her Little Hermitage. They were his most precious ornaments as well as his friends, family, entourage. As far as we know, he had no children: they were his heirs too. It was no coincidence that it was Varvara who became his mistress, for she was the family flirt, he the family hero.

  The letters are clearly those of an older man and a younger woman; for example, when Potemkin told her that the Empress had invited her to a dinner, he added, ‘My dear, dress yourself very well and try to be kind and beautiful,’ telling to watch her ‘ps and qs’. From outside town, possibly Tsarskoe Selo, he asked: ‘I’m planning to come into town tomorrow…Write to me where you plan to visit me – at the Anichkov or the Palace?’ Varenka frequently saw the Empress and Serenissimus together. ‘The Empress was bled today so there’s no need to bother her,’ he told her. ‘I’m off to the Empress and then I’ll come and see you.’

  Varenka was in love with him too – she often called him ‘my life’ and worried, like all his women, about his illnesses while basking in his luxury: ‘Father, my life, thank you so much for the present and the letter…I’m kissing you a million times in my mind.’ However, she began to suffer and make trouble. ‘It’s useless caressing me,’ she said. ‘Listen, I’m telling you seriously now…if you loved me once, I ask you to forget me for ever, I’ve decided to leave you. I wish you to be loved by another…though no one will love you as I’ve loved you…’. Was this minx of the Engelhardt sisters jealous of another woman, for there were indeed others, or simply pretending to be?

  ‘Varenka, you are a fool and an ungrateful rascal,’ Potemkin wrote, perhaps at that moment. ‘Can I say – Varenka feels bad and Grishenka feels nothing? When I come, I’ll tear your ears off for it!’ Was it when he arrived in a temper after this that she told him: ‘Good my friend, then if it is me who has angered you, then go!’ But then she said she had slept too much and perhaps that was why she was in a bad mood. So Varenka sulked and postured while Potemkin suffered the tortures of every older man who falls in love with a spoilt girl. The Empress, who invited Varvara to everything and knew of their relationship, did not mind when Potemkin was happy. Indeed she did everything she could to make sure that the niece was close to both of them. When one of the courtiers moved out of the palace, Potemkin asked the Empress to ‘order Madame Maltiz [Mistress of the Empress’s maids-of-honour] to give Princess Ekaterina’s apartments to my Varvara Vasilievna’. Catherine replied: ‘I’ll order it…’.7

  News of the scandalous affair reached Daria Potemkina in Moscow. The Prince’s appalled mother tried to stop it. A furious Serenissimus tossed her unread letters into the fireplace. Daria also wrote to Varvara to reprimand her. ‘I’ve received grandmother’s letters,’ Varvara told Potemkin, ‘which made me very angry. Was this the reason for you going?’ Then the girl offered herself again: ‘My darling little méchant, my angel, don’t you want me, my adored treasure?’

  When Potemkin started to spend more time in his southern provinces, Varvara sulked at Court. Catherine decided to intervene. Harris got wind of this: ‘Her Majesty reproached Prince XXX with the irregularity of his conduct with his niece and the dishonour it brought…’. Harris was projecting English priggishness on to a relationship he did not understand. Catherine’s indulgent teasing of Potemkin about his niece–mistress revealed their open relationship: ‘Listen, my little Varenka is not well at all; it’s your departure that is the cause. It’s very wrong of you. It will kill her and I am getting very fond of her. They want to bleed her.’8

  Was Varenka wasting away out of love for her uncle? Or was there another reason? The wily girl may have been playing a double game with the Prince. At the beginning, love pervaded her letters to him. Later, their tone changed. Potemkin was still in love with her – but he knew she would soon have to marry: ‘Your victory over me is strong and eternal. If you love me, I’m happy, if you know how I love, you would never wish for anything else.’ Now she was a woman, she did wish for more. She had already met Prince Sergei Fyodorovich Golitsyn, another of that populous and powerful family, and had fallen in love with him.

  We do not know if Potemkin was heartbroken for long, but he had resolved that the girls should make magnificent marriages, settling fortunes on them to ease the way. The end of the affair was required by family duty. ‘Now all is finished,’ she wrote to him. ‘I waited for it every moment for a month when I began to notice your changes towards me. What have I done now when I’m so unhappy? I’m returning all your letters to you.’ So it was a two-way street. ‘If I behaved badly,’ she wrote, ‘you have to remember who was the cause of it.’

  Potemkin behaved generously. In September 1778, ‘he prevailed on a Prince XXX to marry her’. Prince XXX – Sergei Golitsyn – agreed. ‘They were betrothed with great pomp at the Palace the day before yesterday,’ observed Harris. In January 1779 as with all the Engelhardt marriages, the Empress was present when Varvara married. Varvara and Potemkin remained close for the rest of his life, and she continued to write him affectionate, flirtatious letters: ‘I’m kissing your hands and asking you to remember me, father. I don’t know why but it seems to me that you forget me…’, and then, like everyone else who knew him, she wrote: ‘Come, my friend, as soon as possible, it’s so dull without you.’ She still signed herself ‘Grishenkin’s pussycat’.9

  Varvara and Sergei Golitsyn were happily married and had ten children. The Empress and Serenissimus stood as godparents to the eldest, named Grigory and born that year: contemporaries suggested he was Potemkin’s son. This was certainly possible. Child and man, Grigory Golitsyn bore an uncanny resemblance to his great-uncle – another mystery of consanguinity.

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  Following Varvara’s marriage, Harris saw that ‘Alexandra Engelhardt seems to have still greater power over’ Potemkin. It seemed that the Prince had moved on to the niece with whom he had most in common. We do not have their love letters and no one knows what happens behind bedroom doors, but contemporaries were convinced they were lovers (though that does not mean they were). Alexandra, or ‘Sashenka’, ‘is a young lady of a very pleasing person, of good parts and a very superior aptitude in conducting a Court intrigue’, added Harris with admiration tinged with envy, for he was an avid if unsuccessful intriguer himself. He was sure Alexandra had nudged Catherine towards the room where she found Countess Bruce and Korsakov together.

  Sashenka became inseparable from Empress and Serenissimus. ‘If her uncle does not change his sentiments for her,’ noted Harris, ‘she is likely to become [Catherine’s] female confidante.’ So close did this relationship become that a silly legend was passed down and apparently believed among some Polish families that Alexandra was Catherine’s daughter. Grand Duke Paul and Alexandria were born in 1754, so when, the story goes, Catherine gave birth to a girl instead of the expected male heir, she hid the child and replaced her with the son of a Kalmuk peasant-woman who grew up to be Emperor Paul I.10 The simpler explanation is that she was Potemkin’s niece and a fascinating woman in her own right. Sashenka’s position as an unofficial member of the imperial family was still recognized forty years later.

  Now she became Potemkin’s hostess. A dinner given by her was a sign of his favour. Alexandra, Harris delicately told London, ‘has a very notion of the value of presents’. She accepted gifts and money from the British envoy – and he recommended her to Alleyne Fitzherbert, his successor, as an intelligence source. She was an able businesswoman who made millions by selling grain and timber – yet she was celebrated for her generosity to her serfs.11 In late 1779, Potemkin’s intense relationship with Sashenka ended, but they
remained the closest friends.

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  The Prince now embarked on a long relationship with the fifth sister – Ekaterina – though again there are no love letters to prove it. ‘They even talk of the marriage between Potemkin and his little niece with whom he is more in love than ever.’12 Ekaterina – ‘Katinka’, ‘Katish’ or the ‘kitten’, as the Empress and Potemkin called her – was the Venus in a family of them. ‘Graced with her ravishing face,’ wrote Vigée Lebrun, ‘and her angelic softness, she had an invincible charm.’ Potemkin called her his ‘angel incarnate’ – ‘and never had anyone ever been more justly named’, the Prince de Nassau-Siegen later told his wife.13

  She was uneducated and incurious, but thoroughly seductive. Her temperament was like that of a blonde mulatto – eternal languor and nonchalant sexuality. ‘Her happiness’, recalled Vigée Lebrun, ‘was to live stretched out on a canapé, enveloped in a big black fur without a corset.’ When visitors asked why she never wore the ‘enormous diamonds…the most sumptuous you can imagine’ which ‘the famous Potemkin’ gave her, she lazily replied: ‘To what good, for whom, for what?’ She was ‘the kindest of the three’ niece–mistresses and ‘believed in Potemkin’s love so as not pain him’. She was too dreamy and passive for Potemkin, who only fell in love with passionate or shrewd women. So, while Potemkin loved her least of the three, she lasted the longest. Serenissimus declared that to be her lover was to taste the quintessential delights of the flesh, an ungallant compliment from an undoubted connoisseur.14

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  Late in 1780, the diplomats claimed that Potemkin’s ‘family harem’ caused a ‘diabolical row’ at Court. The headstrong Varvara Golitsyna, defiantly respectable now that she was married, expressed her views on the Empress’s life. This blundering tactlessness irritated Catherine. Varvara compounded her pigheaded folly by loudly proclaiming that one could hardly be knouted for telling the truth. Potemkin was furious too and sent her off to Golitsyn’s estates. At this embarrassing moment, the ‘angel-incarnate’ Ekaterina allegedly became pregnant by her uncle. Dr Rogerson prescribed taking the waters at a spa. Serenissimus persuaded Varvara to take her sister. Corberon admired Potemkin’s typical manipulation of what could have been a disaster by giving the impression that Varvara was just accompanying her sister on a medical mission instead of being exiled, and that Ekaterina was not being sent away to conceal her belly, merely going on a jaunt with the Golitsyns. By the time Ekaterina left, she was supposedly six months gone.

  Catherine now made a suggestion that upset Potemkin and caused yet another row. When Ekaterina was appointed maid-of-honour in the summer of 1777, she immediately attracted the attention of Catherine and Prince Orlov’s son, Bobrinsky, much to the amusement of the Empress, who joked about it in her letters to Potemkin.15 Bobrinsky fell in love with the girl. The Empress, according to Corberon, had even promised that he could marry her. Bobrinsky was an insubstantial playboy who was a victim of the birth that made him everything yet nothing. Plenty of royal bastards found brilliant careers in those days – none greater than Louis XV’s Marshal Maurice de Saxe, son of Augustus the Strong of Poland and Saxony – but Bobrinsky did not and was a notorious wastrel. Did he now refuse to marry a girl pregnant by her uncle? Or did Potemkin object because he considered Bobrinsky a fool – and, worse, an Orlov? This moral, sexual and familial maze presents a little kaleidoscope of Court morals.16

  Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky, who had retired to Moscow and hated Potemkin, scented blood in the water and arrived in town in September 1778 hoping to overthrow the Prince. Serenissimus displayed the ‘highest good humour and indifference’ as the two giant opponents, Cyclops and Scarface, publicly served at the Empress’s table. ‘It is beyond the description of my pen’, observed Harris, ‘to describe…a scene, in which every passion that can affect the human mind, bore a part which, by all the actors, was concealed by the most masterly hypocrisy.’ Orlov-Chesmensky was determined to make one last attempt to overthrow Serenissimus, whom, he told Catherine, had ‘ruined your army’: ‘his only superior talent is cunning’ and his only aim to ‘invest himself with sovereign power’. Catherine was displeased by this but she tried to conciliate. ‘Be friends with Potemkin,’ she begged Orlov-Chesmensky. ‘Prevail on that extraordinary man to be more circumspect in his conduct…[and] pay more attention to the duties of the great offices he fills…’.

  ‘You know Madam,’ Scarface said, ‘I am your slave…if Potemkin disturbs your peace of mind, give me your orders. He shall disappear immediately…’. The offer to kill Potemkin may be merely diplomatic gossip, but everyone knew that Orlov-Chesmensky was quite capable of delivering. Catherine was unimpressed and this marked the last gasp of Orlov power.17

  Despite the rows, Potemkin and the Empress were so involved at that time in recasting foreign policy that his political position was entirely stable. When the row got hottest, Potemkin simply absented himself in a diplomatic sulk until the Empress had calmed down. Ekaterina returned with no sign of a baby, so far as we know.

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  The youngest niece, Tatiana, was already ‘full of spirit’ when, aged twelve in 1781, she was appointed a maid-of-honour. When her uncle was in the south, she wrote him letters, in big girlish handwriting, which provide clues to the nature of Catherine and Potemkin’s ‘family’. She usually signed off as she did on 3 June 1785: ‘I want your return with the most lively impatience.’ Like everyone else, Tatiana was bored without Serenissimus: ‘I don’t know, my dear Uncle, when I will have the happiness to see you but those I ask tell me they know nothing and say you’ll stay all winter. Ah! How long that time seems to me if it’s true but I don’t believe these clowns.’ He gave her generous presents: ‘My dear Uncle, a thousand, thousand and million thanks for your gracious present, I will never forget your kindness and beg you to continue for ever. I will do everything possible to deserve them.’ She never became his mistress.18

  The entire Potemkin clan was treated as a member of the extended Catherinian family that included Lanskoy, her lover. The Empress made a fuss not just of the Engelhardt sisters but also of Potemkin’s other family – his cousin Pavel Potemkin, after serving against Pugachev, became viceroy of the Caucasus, and his brother Mikhail Chief Inspector of the College of War and one of Catherine’s inner circle. The Prince’s stalwart nephew Alexander Samoilov, son of his sister Maria, became secretary to the State Council and a general – ‘brave but useless’. Other nephews, such as Vasily Engelhardt and Nikolai Vysotsky, son of his sister Pelageya, served as Catherine’s aides-decamp, being treated almost as family.

  The Empress’s favourite Sasha Lanskoy was very kind to Potemkin’s nieces, as we know from Tatiana’s letters, which have not been cited before this. ‘Monsieur Lanskoy has had all sorts of attention,’ she reported innocently. In one letter, Tatiana told her uncle how the Grand Duke and Duchess ‘met me in the garden – they found me very grown up and spoke to me with a lot of kindness’.19 When, a couple of years later, Ekaterina was married and pregnant, it was Lanskoy who sent Potemkin reports on the birth. ‘Father,’ he wrote, ‘the Sovereign has kindly ordered a bow to you and to baptize the baby…here I’m sending a letter from Ekaterina Vasilievna…’. A few days later he told him that the Empress had a fever but the niece was feeling better each day.

  There is a sense that, away from the harsh political struggles, the Empress, to some extent, succeeded in creating a patchwork family out of her – or, as she put it, ‘our’ – Potemkin ‘relatives’ and her beloved Lanskoy. She chose her family as others choose their friends. There was a symmetry between Catherine’s favourites and Potemkin’s nieces. When the politics allowed some serenity, she treated the nieces like daughters and he the favourites like sons. Together, they were almost the children of that unconventional, childless marriage.20

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Potemkin’s relationships with his nieces were irregular and idiosyncratic but not unusual for his time, and certainly Catherine did not seem shocked by them. She tells in her Memoirs how, during her own childhood before leaving for Russia, she had flirted (and possibly more) with her uncle, Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who wanted to marry her.*1 Such behaviour – and worse – was not uncommon among royal families. The Habsburgs regularly married their nieces. Earlier in the century, the Regent of France, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, was supposed to have had affairs with his daughter, the Duchesse de Berry.*2

  Augustus the Strong, the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony and duplicitous ally of Peter the Great, set an unbeatable incestuous precedent for vigorous degeneracy that not even Potemkin could equal. Augustus, an art-loving, inpecunious and politically slippery bon vivant whom Carlyle called that ‘cheerful Man of Sin, gay eupeptic Son of Belial’, had, according to legend, not only fathered an heir and 354 bastards through a legion of mistresses but also supposedly made his daughter Countess Orczelska his mistress. To add insult to incest, the daughter–mistress in turn was in love with Count Rudorfski, her half-brother, another of his natural children. It was different for commoners, though in seventeenth-century France Cardinal Mazarin had made his nieces – the Mazarinettes – into the richest heiresses in France and there were rumours about his relationship with them. Meanwhile, Voltaire was having the last affair of his long life with his promiscuous, greedy niece, Madame Denis, but he kept it secret – only their correspondence revealed all. In the generation after Potemkin, Lord Byron flaunted his affair with his half-sister, and Prince Talleyrand set up house with his nephew’s wife, the Duchesse de Dino.