Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

There is little doubt that they were playing one of their prearranged games, like celebrities today who delight in tricking the press. Having started the year afraid of losing their love and friendship in a frenzy of jealousy and regret, they had now managed to arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Each could find his own happiness while keeping the services – personal and political, affectionate and practical – of the other. This had not been easy. Affairs of the heart cannot be drilled like regiments, or negotiated like treaties – especially those of two such emotional people. Only trust, time, nature, trial and error, and intelligence had achieved it. Potemkin now made the difficult transformation from an influential lover to ‘minister–favourite’ who ruled with his Empress.³⁵ They had managed to gull everyone.

The day Serenissimus returned to Court, the couple knew they would be watched for any hint of his fall or recovery. So the Prince strolled into her apartments ‘with the utmost composure’ and found the Empress playing whist. He sat down right opposite her. She played him a card as if nothing had changed – and told him he always played luckily.³⁶

Skip Notes

*1 Until 1733, forceps had been the secret weapon, as it were, of a surgical dynasty, the Chamberlens. In that time, even the doctors were hereditary.

*2 Potemkin was said to have arranged this death and mysteriously visited the midwife. Medical murder is a recurring theme in Russian political paranoia – Stalin’s Doctor’s Plot of 1952/3 played on the spectre of ‘murderers in white coats’. Prince Orlov, Grand Duchess Natalia, Catherine’s lover Alexander Lanskoy and Potemkin himself were all rumoured to have been murdered by the doctors caring for them. Potemkin was said to have been involved in the first three deaths.

*3 Paul and Maria Fyodorovna were married in Petersburg on 26 September 1776. The two emperors were Alexander I and Nicholas I, who ruled until 1855. Their second son Constantine almost succeeded but his refusal of the throne sparked off the Decembrist Revolt in 1825.

PART FOUR The Passionate Partnership

1776–1777

11

  HER FAVOURITES

And Catherine (we must say thus much for Catherine)

Though bold and bloody, was the kind of thing

Whose temporary passion was quite flattering

Because each lover looked a sort a king

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 70

An order from Her Majesty consigned

Our young Lieutenant to the genial care

Of those in office. All the world looked kind

(As it will look sometimes with the first stare,

Which youth would not act ill to keep in mind,)

As also did Miss Protassoff then there,

Named from her mystic office l’Eprouveuse,

A term inexplicable to the Muse.

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 84

The love affair of Prince Potemkin and Catherine II appeared to end there, but it never truly ceased. It simply became a marriage in which both fell in love and had sexual affairs with others, while the relationship with each other remained the most important thing in their lives. This unusual marital arrangement inspired the obscene mythology of the nymphomaniac Empress and Potemkin the imperial pimp. Perhaps the ‘Romantic Movement’, and the serial love marriages and divorces of our own time, have ruined our ability to understand their touching partnership.

Zavadovsky was the first official favourite to share the Empress’s bed while Potemkin ruled her mind, continuing to serve as her consort, friend and minister. During her sixty-seven years, we know that Catherine had at least twelve lovers, hardly the army of which she stands accused. Even this is deceptive because, once she had found a partner with whom she was happy, she believed it would last for ever. She very rarely ended the relationships herself – Saltykov and Poniatowski had been removed from her; Orlov had been unfaithful and even Potemkin had somehow contrived to withdraw. Nonetheless, after Potemkin, her relationships with men much younger than her were obviously abnormal, but then so was her situation.

The reality was very different from the myth. She did make her lover into an official position, and Potemkin helped her. The triangular relationship between Catherine, Potemkin and her young lovers has been neglected by historians – yet this became the heart of her own ‘family’.

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Catherine’s affair with Zavadovsky was the test case for the imperial ménage-à-trois. Potemkin’s presence made life for the favourites more difficult and humiliating, because they could not avoid Catherine’s intimacy with him. Their relationship with Serenissimus was almost as important as their love for the Empress. Even without Potemkin, this was a difficult role and Zavadovsky was soon deeply miserable.