Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

*1 Alexander I appointed him Russia’s first Minister of Education.

*2 The letters mentioning Cagliostro are usually dated to 1774 by V.S. Lopatin and others because of their obvious sensual passion for Potemkin. But Count Cagliostro emerged in London only in 1776/7, so they could not have discussed him in 1774. Cagliostro travelled through Europe in 1778, finding fame in Mittau through the patronage of the ducal family and Courland aristocracy before coming to Petersburg, where he met Potemkin: their relations are discussed in the next chapter. If her wish that, instead of ‘soupe à la glace’ – Vassilchikov – they had begun their love ‘a year and a half ago’ is translated as ‘a year and a half before’, the letter could date from 1779/80, when their reunion would have reminded Catherine of that wasted year and a half.

*3 Catherine’s handful of adjutants included her favourite of the moment and also the sons of magnates and several of Potemkin’s nephews. This was further complicated because in June 1776 Potemkin created the rank of aide-de-camp to the Empress whose duties (written out in his own hand and corrected by Catherine) were to aid the adjutants. The Prince of course had his own aides-de-camp, who often then joined Catherine’s staff.

12

  HIS NIECES

There was a man, if that he was a man,

Not that his manhood could be called in question

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto VII: 36

When the five Engelhardt sisters arrived at Court in 1775, these motherless, barely educated but beautiful provincial girls were instantly transformed by their uncle into sophisticates and treated as if they were members of the imperial family – ‘almost as Grand Duchesses’.¹ When Potemkin ended his relationship with the Empress of Russia, he almost at once became very close to his striking teenage niece Varvara Engelhardt. It was not long before Court gossip claimed that the degenerate Prince had seduced all five of these girls.

Now he was a semi-single man again, Potemkin immediately plunged into an imbroglio of secret affairs and public liaisons with adventuresses and aristocrats that were so intertwined that they fascinated his own times and are still difficult to unravel. ‘Like Catherine, he was an Epicurean,’ wrote Count Alexander Ribeaupierre, son of one of Potemkin’s adjutants, who married his great-niece. ‘Sensual pleasures had an important part in his life – he loved women passionately and nothing could stand in the way of his passions.’² Now he could return to the way he preferred to live. Rising late, visiting Catherine through the covered passageway, he swung constantly between frenetic work and febrile hedonism, between bouts of political paperwork and strategic creativity, and then love affairs, theological debates, and nocturnal wassails, until dawn, at the green baize tables.

Nothing so shocked his contemporaries as the legend of the five nieces. All the diplomats wrote about it to their captivated monarchs with ill-concealed relish: ‘You will get an idea of Russian morality’, Corberon told Versailles under its prim new King Louis XVI, ‘in the manner in which Prince Potemkin protects his nieces.’ In order to underline the horror of this immoral destiny, he added with a shiver, ‘There is one who is only twelve years old and who will no doubt suffer the same fate.’ Simon Vorontsov was also disgusted: ‘We saw Prince Potemkin make a harem of his own family in the imperial palace of which he occupied a part.’ What ‘scandalous impudence!’ The scandal of the nieces was accepted by contemporaries as true – but did he really seduce all five, even the youngest?³

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The ‘almost-Grand-Duchesses’ became the gilded graces of Catherine’s Court, the richest heiresses in Russia and the matriarchs of many of the aristocratic dynasties of the Empire. None of them ever forgot who they were and who their uncle was: their lives were illuminated and mythologized by their semi-royal status and the prestige of Serenissimus.

Only five of the Engelhardt sisters mattered at Court because the eldest, Anna, left home and married Mikhail Zhukov before Potemkin’s rise, though he looked after the couple and promoted the husband to govern Astrakhan. The next eldest, the formidable Alexandra Vasilievna, twenty-two in 1776, became Potemkin’s favourite niece, his dearest friend apart from the Empress. She was already a woman when she arrived, so it was hardest for her to adapt to Court sophistication. But she was as haughty as Potemkin had been, and ‘clever and strong-willed’. She used her ‘kind of grandeur’ to conceal ‘her lack of education’.⁴ She had a head for business and politics and a talent for friendship. Her portraits show a slim brunette, hair brushed back, with high cheekbones, bright intelligent blue eyes, a broad sensual mouth, small nose and alabaster skin, graced by a lithe body and the grandness of a woman who was an honorary member of the imperial family and the confidante of its greatest statesman.