Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Catherine’s letters to Zavadovsky give us a wonderful glimpse into the suffocating world of the favourites. He lasted barely eighteen months in favour but his love for Catherine was genuine. Her letters to him reveal she loved him too. But there was less equality between them. Even though he was the same age as Potemkin, he was in awe of her and she treated him patronizingly, thanking him for his ‘most affectionate little letter’ as if he was clever to have known his alphabet. While Potemkin wanted time and space to himself, Zavadovsky longed to be with her every moment of the day, like a lapdog, so she had to write and explain that ‘Time belongs, not to me, but to the Empire’. Yet they worked together – he still toiled in her secretariat all day before retiring with her at ten, after playing three rubbers of whist. It was a routine that was both tiresome and hard work.

The new favourite was also supposedly far less sexually experienced than the Prince, which is perhaps why he fell in love with her so absolutely. ‘You are Vesuvius itself,’ she wrote. His inexperience perhaps caused him to lose control, for she added: ‘when you least expect it an eruption appears but no, never mind, I shall extinguish them with caresses. Petrusha dear!’. She corresponded less formally with Zavadovsky than with Potemkin. While the former called her ‘Katiusha’ or ‘Katia’, the Prince had always used ‘Matushka’, ‘Sovereign Lady’. The Empress’s letters to Zavadovsky seem more sexually explicit: ‘Petrushinka, I rejoice that you have been healed by my little pillows and if my caress facilitates your health then you will never be sick.’ These ‘pillows’ may have meant her breasts – but she also embroidered herb-filled cushions, an example of the comical dangers of biographers making sexual interpretations of personal letters.¹

Zavadovsky, who loved her so much, was often sick, more from nerves than anything else. He was not suited to being the subject of such intrigue and hatred. While she repeatedly declared her love for him in her letters, he could not relax in his position: his private life was ‘under a microscope’.² She did not understand what he was up against and he did not have the strength that Potemkin employed to get what he wanted from everyone. Above all, he had to tolerate Potemkin’s omnipresence. It was a threesome and, when Potemkin wanted attention, he presumably got it. When they had crises in their relationship, it was Potemkin who sorted them out: ‘both of us need a restoration of spiritual peace!’ wrote Catherine. ‘I have been suffering on a par with you for three months, torturing myself…I will talk to Prince Gri[gory] A[lexandrovich Potemkin].’ This talk with Potemkin about Zavadovsky’s private feelings could hardly have helped his spiritual peace. Afterwards, Zavadovsky claimed that he was quite unfazed by Potemkin’s ever present flamboyance, but the evidence suggests that he was intimidated and upset by him and hid when he was near by. ‘I do not understand’, the Empress wrote to Zavadovsky, ‘why you cannot see me without tears in your eyes.’ When Potemkin became a prince, Catherine invited, or rather ordered, Zavadovsky: ‘If you went to congratulate the new Highness, His Highness will receive you affectionately. If you lock yourself up, neither I nor anybody else will be accustomed to see you.’³

There was a story, told years later, that Potemkin lost his temper with the Empress, told her to dismiss Zavadovsky, stormed through their apartments, almost attacked them and then tossed a candlestick at Catherine.⁴ This sounds like one of Potemkin’s tantrums, but we cannot know what provoked it. Potemkin may have decided that Zavadovsky was a bore; it may also have had something to do with his friendship with Potemkin’s critics like Simon Vorontsov. Zavadovsky certainly had a mean-minded, parochial streak that was utterly alien to Serenissimus – and it may have irritated Catherine herself.

The diplomats noticed Zavadovsky’s plight. Even in mid-1776, when he had only just been unveiled, as it were, Corberon was wondering ‘the name of the new favourite…because they say Zavadovsky is well on the decline’. The diplomatic business of analysing Catherine’s favouritism was always an inexact mixture of Kremlinology and ‘tabloid-style’ gossip – a question of reading bluffs and double-bluffs. As the Frenchman put it, ‘they base his disgrace on his promotion’.