Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The favourites suited Potemkin for the simplest of reasons: while they had to accompany Catherine through her dinners and make love to her at night, Potemkin had the power. It took years for courtiers and diplomats to realize that the favourites were potentially powerful but only if they could somehow remove Potemkin. The Empress’s ladies-in-waiting, doctors and secretaries all had influence, but favourites had marginally more because she loved them. However these ‘ephemeral subalterns’ had no real power, even in her old age, as long as Potemkin was alive. They were, Count von der Goertz told Frederick II, ‘chosen expressly to have neither talent nor the means to take…direct influence.’⁵²

To exercise power, a man requires the public prestige to make himself obeyed. The very openness of favouritism ensured that their public prestige was minimal. ‘The definitive way in which she proclaimed their position…was exactly what limited the amount of honour she bestowed upon them,’ observed the Comte de Damas, who knew Catherine and Potemkin well. ‘They overruled her daily in small matters but never took the lead in affairs of importance.’⁵³ Only Potemkin and, to a lesser extent, Orlov increased their prestige by being Catherine’s lovers. Usually, the rise of a new favourite was ‘an event of no importance to anybody but the parties concerned’, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Weymouth. ‘They are…creatures of Potemkin’s choice and the alteration will only serve to increase his power and influence.’⁵⁴ So, if they survived, they were his men; if they were dismissed, he benefited from the crisis. That at least was the theory, but things were never so neat.

The legend says Potemkin could dismiss them when he wished. Provided Catherine was happy, Potemkin could get on and run his part of the Empire. He tried to have every favourite dismissed at one time or another. Yet Catherine only dismissed one favourite because Potemkin demanded it. Usually she was in love with them and rejected his grumbles. Serenissimus, who was neither rigid nor vindictive, would then happily coexist with them until another crisis blew up. He knew the sillier favourites thought they could overthrow him. This often ended in their departure.

The favourites usually accelerated their own fall, either through cuckolding the Empress like Korsakov, becoming deeply unhappy like Zavadovsky and Potemkin himself, or getting embroiled in clumsy intrigues against Potemkin, as Zorich did, which caused the Empress to tire of them. When Potemkin demanded their dismissal, which he did quite frequently, she probably told him to mind his own business and gave him another estate or admired the latest plans for his cities. At other times, she criticized him for not telling her when they were deceiving her, but he probably knew that she was so in love at the time, there was no point.

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The Prince liked to boast that Catherine always needed him when things were not going well, politically or amorously. During crises of the boudoir, he was especially indispensable, as Harris reported to London during Catherine’s hiccup with Lanskoy in May 1781: ‘These revolutions are moments when the influence of my friend is without bounds and when nothing he asks, however extravagant, is refused.’⁵⁵ But it was undoubtedly more than that.

In times of crisis, such as her humiliation by Korsakov, he became her husband and lover again. ‘When all other resources fail him to achieve what he wants,’ the Austrian envoy, Count Louis Cobenzl, who was one of the few foreigners who really knew Catherine and Potemkin intimately, told his Emperor Joseph II, ‘he retakes for a few days the function of favourite.’⁵⁶ The letters between Empress and Prince suggest that their relationship was so informal and intimate that neither would have thought twice about spending the night together at any time throughout their lives. Hence some writers call him ‘favori-en-chef’ and the others just ‘sous-favoris’. No wonder the ‘sous-favoris’ failed to understand Potemkin’s role and tried to intrigue against him.

Potemkin and Catherine had settled their personal dilemma in this formal system, which was supposed to preserve their friendship, keep imperial love out of politics and reserve political power for Potemkin. Even though there was a system which worked better than most marriages, it was still flawed. No one, not even those two deft manipulators, could really control favouritism, that sensitive and convenient fusion of love and sex, greed and ambition.

Nonetheless, it was their cure for jealousy. While Catherine was truly happy at last with Lanskoy in 1780, she was equally unjealous about Potemkin’s scandalous antics. ‘This step has increased Potemkin’s power,’ Harris told Weymouth, ‘which nothing can destroy unless a report is true…’. The report? That Potemkin might ‘marry his favourite niece’.⁵⁷

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