Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The nature of ‘favouritism’ derived from the Empress’s peculiar position and her unique relationship with Potemkin. It was undeniably true that anyone becoming a favourite of Catherine’s was entering a relationship in which there were three, not two, participants. Favouritism was necessary because Catherine lived in a man’s world. She could not publicly marry again and, whether in law or spirit, she already had a husband in Potemkin. Their egos, talents and emotions were too equal and too similar for them to live together, but Catherine needed constant loving and companionship. She yearned to have an effective family around her and she had strong maternal instincts to teach and nurture. These emotional longings were easily as strong as her famed sexual appetites. She was one of those who must have a companion, and often did not change partners without finding a new one first. Usually such habits are more based on insecurity than wantonness, but perhaps the two are linked. There was another reason why Catherine, as she got older, sought younger lovers, even at the cost of her dignity and reputation. She touched on it herself when she described the temptations of Elisabeth’s Court. The Court was filled with handsome men; she was the Sovereign. Catherine did it because she could – like the proverbial child in the candyshop. Who would not?

The position of Catherine’s favourite evolved into an unusual official appointment. ‘Loving the Empress of Russia’, explained the Prince de Ligne, the ultimate charmer of the Enlightenment who adored Potemkin and Catherine, ‘is a function of the Court.’³⁷ Instead of having a disorderly court, Catherine appointed her lover publicly. She hoped her system of favouritism would pull the sting of sleaziness. In a sense, she was applying the tenets of the Enlightenment to her loins, for surely clarity and reason would prevent superstition in the form of innuendo and gossip.

Appearances had to be maintained but this was an age of sexual frankness. Even the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa, the ultimate Catholic moralist, who presided over a court of stifling rectitude, gave Marie-Antoinette astonishingly frank gynaecological advice on her marriage to Louis XVI. Catherine herself was prudish in public. She reprimanded the Comte de Ségur for making risqué jokes, though she could make the odd one herself. When she was inspecting a pottery, Corberon recounted that she made such a shocking joke that he recorded it in code in his original diary: it sounds as if she chuckled that one of the shapes resembled a vagina. Later, her secretary recorded her laughing at how, in mythology, women could blame their pregnancies on visits from gods. In a lifetime in the public gaze, a couple of dirty jokes is not much – though one cannot imagine Maria Theresa making any.

Behind the façade, Catherine enjoyed a discreet earthiness with her lovers. Her letters to Potemkin and Zavadovsky displayed her animal sensuality such as when she said her body had taken over from her mind and she had to restrain every hair. She obviously enjoyed sex, but, as far as we know, it was always sex while she believed herself to be in love. There is no evidence at all for her ever having sex with a man for its own sake without believing it to be the start of a long relationship. The diplomats bandied names around and said they performed certain ‘functions’, which has been believed ever since.

However, there must have been transitory relationships and ‘one-night stands’ in the quest for compatibility, but they would have been rare because they were difficult to arrange. In the Winter Palace for example, it would have been surprisingly complicated to let in – and let out – a lover, even if he was a Guardsman, without other Guards, maids, valets and courtiers knowing about it. For example, when Catherine went to see Potemkin in 1774, she could not go into his rooms because he was with adjutants, who would be shocked to see the Empress appearing in his apartment: she had to return secretly to her rooms even though he was her official favourite. Later, when one favourite spent the night in her boudoir, he came out in the morning and met her secretary, and he recorded it in his diary.

Catherine spent her whole life in public in a way that makes even our own age of paparazzi seem private. Inside her Palace, every move she made was watched and commented upon. It is likely there would be much more evidence if there were regiments of Guardsmen being smuggled in and out of her apartments. Only Potemkin himself could wander into her bedroom whenever he liked because he had a covered passageway that led directly from his rooms to hers, and everyone accepted he was unique.³⁸

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