Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The imperial routine became excruciatingly boring after a while – endless dinners, games of whist, and sexual duties with a woman who, for all her charm and majesty, was increasingly stout, tormented by indigestion and in her early fifties by 1780. Once the excitement of luxury and the proximity to power had worn off, this could not have been easy for a young man in his early twenties. Catherine’s affection sounds stifling, if not suffocating. If a favourite had the slightest ability and character, it must have been exceedingly difficult to accompany, day after day, an ageing empress who treated him like a cross between a pretty pupil and a ‘kept woman’. One favourite called it a tedious ‘prison’. The Court was malicious. Favourites felt as if they were living among a ‘pack of wolves in a forest’. But it was also inhabited by the richest and most fashionable noble girls, while the favourites had to spend their nights with a stout old lady. Thus the temptations to cuckold the Empress must have been almost irresistible.⁴⁸

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Potemkin’s role in Catherine’s life made it worse. It must have been intolerable to learn that, not only were they expected to be the companion to a demanding older lady, but the real benefits of her love were bestowed on Potemkin, whom they were ordered to adore as much as she did. Most of the favourites – we have seen Vassilchikov’s comments – had to admit that, while they were spoilt and kept, Potemkin was always Catherine’s ‘master’, her husband. Catherine herself called him ‘Papa’ or ‘My lord’. There was no room for another Potemkin in the government of Russia.

Even if the favourite was in love with the Empress, as Zavadovsky and Lanskoy were, there was no guarantee of privacy from Potemkin, whose rooms were linked to hers by the covered walkway. He was the one man in Russia who did not have to be announced to the Empress. By the late 1770s, he was often away, which must have been a relief, but when he was in Petersburg or Tsarskoe Selo, he was continually bursting in on the Empress like a dishevelled whirlwind in his fur-lined dressing gowns, pink shawls and red bandannas. This would naturally ruin the favourite’s day – especially since he was unlikely to be able to equal the Prince’s wit or charisma. No wonder Zavadovsky was reduced to tears and hiding.⁴⁹ Catherine made sure that the favourites paid court to Potemkin, with the humiliating implication that he was the real man in the household. Each of them wrote Potemkin complimentary letters and Catherine ended most of her letters to him by passing on the favourite’s flattery and enclosing his little notes.

There is a strong sense that Catherine almost wanted the favourites to regard her and Potemkin as parents. Her own son Paul had been taken away from her and then become alienated from her, and she could not bring up Bobrinsky, so it was understandable that she treated the favourites, who were as young as her sons, as child substitutes. She claimed maternally that ‘I’m benefiting the state by educating this young man’,⁵⁰ as if she was a one-woman finishing-school for civil servants.

If she was mother, then her consort, Potemkin, was the father of this peculiar ‘family’. She often called her favourites ‘the child’ and they respectfully called Potemkin, clearly on Catherine’s urging, ‘Uncle’ or ‘Papa’. When Potemkin was ill, Lanskoy had to write, ‘This moment I have heard from Lady Mother that you, Father Prince Grigory Alexandrovich, are ill, which troubles us greatly. I wish you wholeheartedly to be better.’ When he did not call him Father, Lanskoy wrote, ‘Dear Uncle, thank you very much for the letter which I have received from you.’ Then Lanskoy, just like Catherine, added: ‘You can’t imagine how dull it is without you, Father, come as soon as possible.’ Later, when Potemkin was critically ill in the south, Lanskoy wrote to him that ‘our incomparable Sovereign Mother…cries without interruption’. Lanskoy might have resented this but his affectionate nature made him take to what was effectively a makeshift family. As we will see in the next chapter, its strange symmetry was completed by the addition of Potemkin’s nieces.

It was not one way. Serenissimus treated the favourites like his children too. When the prancing Zorich was dismissed, Potemkin generously wrote to King Stanislas-Augustus in Poland to make sure the fallen favourite received a decent welcome. The Prince explained to the King that this ‘unhappy business’ had made Zorich ‘lose for a time in this country the advantages he deserved for his martial qualities, services and conduct beyond reproach’. The Polish King took care of Zorich during his travels. ‘There is a pleasure in obliging you,’ he told Potemkin. We know from Lanskoy’s thank-you letters that the Prince sent him kind notes and oranges and supported the promotion of his family.⁵¹