Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Within a year, though, an upset Catherine noticed his misery too. In May 1777, she wrote to Zavadovsky: ‘Prince Or[lov] told me that you want to go. I agree to it…After dinner…I can meet with you.’ They had a painful chat which Catherine, of course, reported in detail to Potemkin: ‘I…asked him, did he have something to say to me or not? He told me about it,’ and she let him choose an intermediary, like a cross between a literary agent and a divorce lawyer, to negotiate his terms of dismissal. ‘He chose Count Kirill Razumovsky…through tears…Bye, bye dear,’ she added to Potemkin. ‘Enjoy the books!’ She had obviously sent him a present for his growing library. Once Razumovsky had negotiated Zavadovsky’s retreat, Catherine gave him ‘three or four thousand souls…plus 50,000 roubles this year and 30,000 in future years with a silver service for sixteen…’.

This took an emotional toll on Catherine. ‘I’m suffering in heart and soul,’ she told Potemkin.⁵ She was always generous to her lovers but, as we shall see, she gave far less to Zavadovsky than to anyone else except Vassilchikov. There was truth in the canard of Masson, the Swiss tutor: ‘Catherine was indulgent in love but implacable in politics.’⁶

Zavadovsky was distraught. Catherine assumed the tone of a Norland nanny and told him to calm himself by translating Tacitus – a therapy unique to the age of neo-Classicism. Then, inevitably, she consoled the unhappy man by adding that, in order that Prince Potemkin ‘be friendly with you as before, it is not difficult to make the effort…your minds will share the same feeling about me and therefore become closer to one another’. There can be little doubt that the prospect of having to win over Potemkin can only have made Zavadovsky’s wounds even more raw. He was heartbroken: ‘Amid hope, amid passion full of feelings, my fortunate lot has been broken like the wind, like a dream which one cannot halt: [her] love for me has vanished.’ On 8 June, Zavadovsky retreated bitterly to the Ukraine. ‘Prince Potemkin’, said the new British envoy, Sir James Harris, ‘is now again at the highest pitch.’⁷ It goes without saying that Catherine, who could not be ‘without love for an hour’,⁸ had already found someone else.

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On Saturday, 27 May 1777, the Empress arrived at Potemkin’s new estate of Ozerki, outside Petersburg. When they sat down for dinner, there was a cannon salute to welcome her. Potemkin always entertained opulently. There were thirty-five guests, the top courtiers, the Prince’s nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina Engelhardt, his cousins Pavel and Mikhail Potemkin – and, at the very bottom of the list, Major of the Hussars Semyon Gavrilovich Zorich, a swarthy, curly-haired and athletic Serb aged thirty-one. It was his first appearance at an official reception, yet it seems that Catherine had already met him. Zorich, a handsome daredevil already known as ‘Adonis’ by the ladies at Court and as a ‘vrai sauvage’ by everyone else, was something of a war hero. Potemkin remembered him from the army. Zorich had been captured by the Turks. Prisoners were often decapitated in the exuberance of the moment, but noblemen were preserved for ransom – so Zorich loudly proclaimed himself a count and survived.

On his return, this ambitious rogue wrote to Potemkin and was appointed to his entourage. Potemkin’s aides-de-camp were obviously introduced to Court – and the Empress noticed him. Within a few days, Zorich was the new official favourite and his life changed instantly. He was the first of Catherine’s succession of so-called favourites or mignons who took the role as an official appointment. While raving about Zorich’s looks and calling him ‘Sima’ or ‘Senyusha’, Catherine was missing her Potemkin. ‘Give Senyusha the attached letters,’ she asked her consort. ‘It’s so dull without you.’⁹ Just as modest Zavadovsky was an antidote to the ebullient Potemkin, so the excitable Serb was a relief after the moping Zavadovsky. The latter heard about the emergence of Zorich and rushed back to Petersburg, staying with his friends, the Vorontsovs.