Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin had watched the closeness develop between Catherine and Zavadovsky and at least tolerated it. He continued to be as difficult as usual, but he clearly did not mean to kill Zavadovsky as he had once threatened to do to his successor. The letters reveal a crisis in their relationship and a certain amount of jealousy towards Zavadovsky, but Potemkin appears to be so dominant that the other man does not really threaten him. It seems most likely that Potemkin approved of the new relationship – up to a point. It was simply a question of finding it.

‘Your life is precious to me and I don’t want to remove you,’⁶ the Empress told him specifically. They liked to settle rows with their dialogue letters: the second that has survived reads like the climax of a discussion, the calm reconciliation after a frantic storm of insecurities. This is much more specific than the earlier epistolary duet. The Empress is lovingly patient with her impossible eccentric, Potemkin is tender and gentle with her – incongruous qualities in such a man:

Potemkin

Catherine

Let me my love say this

I allow it

which will, I hope, end our argument

The sooner the better

Don’t be surprised if I am

Disturbed by our love.

Don’t be disturbed

Not only have you showered

Me with good deeds,

So have you on me

You have placed me in your

You are there firmly

heart. I want to be

and

There alone, and above everyone

strongly and will

else,

Remain there

Because no one has ever loved

I see it and believe it

you so much; and

As I have been made by your

In my heart, I shall be

hands, I want my peace

To be the work of your hands,

Happy to do so

that you should be

Happy in being good to me;

It will be my greatest

pleasure

That you should find rest from

the great

Labours arising from your high

station

In thinking of my comfort.

Of course

Amen

Give rest to our

Thoughts and let

Our feelings act freely

They are most tender

and

Will find the best way.

End of quarrel.

Amen.⁷

He was not always so kind. Potemkin, feeling vulnerable, lashed out at her cruelly. ‘I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me,’ she replied. ‘I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words.’ Both suffered bitterly. ‘I am not evil and not angry with you,’ she tells him after one of their discussions. ‘It depends on your will, how you treat me.’ But she suggested that they could not sustain this tumultuous tension indefinitely: ‘I want to see you calm and be in the same state too.’⁸

The Court searched for signs of Potemkin’s fall or Zavadovsky’s rise, while the couple debated what to do. Potemkin wanted to remain in power, so he had to keep his apartments in the Winter Palace. When he became upset, she told him what so many ordinary lovers have told their agonized partners – ‘it’s not difficult to decide: stay with me’. Then she typically added this reminder of their amorous–political partnership: ‘All your political proposals are very reasonable.’⁹ But Catherine finally lost her cool too.

The way you sometimes talk, one might say I am a monster which has all the faults and especially that of stupidity…this mind knows no other way of loving than making happy whoever it loves and for this reason it finds it impossible to bear even a moment’s breach with him whom it loves without – to its despair – being loved in return…My mind is busy trying to find virtues, some merits, in the object of its love. I like to see in you all the marvels…

After this expression of her hurt, as Potemkin fell out of love with her, she defined the heart of their problem: ‘The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.’¹⁰

This has always been taken at face value, but it is a tidy feminine rewriting of their history. Their love was as stormy as their political collaboration. If power was the subject of their quarrels, then removing the love but keeping the power would also perpetuate their rows. Perhaps it was truer to say that the essence of their disagreement was the end of the intensely physical phase of their relationship and Potemkin’s increasing maturity and need for freedom. Maybe Catherine could not bring herself to admit that he no longer wanted her as a woman – but they would always argue about power.

None of this satisfied him. Potemkin appears to have been in a permanent rage. ‘You are angry,’ she wrote in French. ‘You keep away from me, you say you are offended…What satisfaction can you want more? Even when the Church burns a heretic, it doesn’t claim any more…You’re destroying all my happiness for the time that is left to me. Peace, my friend. I offer you my hand – will you take it, love?’¹¹

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