Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Varvara and Sergei Golitsyn were happily married and had ten children. The Empress and Serenissimus stood as godparents to the eldest, named Grigory and born that year: contemporaries suggested he was Potemkin’s son. This was certainly possible. Child and man, Grigory Golitsyn bore an uncanny resemblance to his great-uncle – another mystery of consanguinity.

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Following Varvara’s marriage, Harris saw that ‘Alexandra Engelhardt seems to have still greater power over’ Potemkin. It seemed that the Prince had moved on to the niece with whom he had most in common. We do not have their love letters and no one knows what happens behind bedroom doors, but contemporaries were convinced they were lovers (though that does not mean they were). Alexandra, or ‘Sashenka’, ‘is a young lady of a very pleasing person, of good parts and a very superior aptitude in conducting a Court intrigue’, added Harris with admiration tinged with envy, for he was an avid if unsuccessful intriguer himself. He was sure Alexandra had nudged Catherine towards the room where she found Countess Bruce and Korsakov together.

Sashenka became inseparable from Empress and Serenissimus. ‘If her uncle does not change his sentiments for her,’ noted Harris, ‘she is likely to become [Catherine’s] female confidante.’ So close did this relationship become that a silly legend was passed down and apparently believed among some Polish families that Alexandra was Catherine’s daughter. Grand Duke Paul and Alexandria were born in 1754, so when, the story goes, Catherine gave birth to a girl instead of the expected male heir, she hid the child and replaced her with the son of a Kalmuk peasant-woman who grew up to be Emperor Paul I.¹⁰ The simpler explanation is that she was Potemkin’s niece and a fascinating woman in her own right. Sashenka’s position as an unofficial member of the imperial family was still recognized forty years later.

Now she became Potemkin’s hostess. A dinner given by her was a sign of his favour. Alexandra, Harris delicately told London, ‘has a very notion of the value of presents’. She accepted gifts and money from the British envoy – and he recommended her to Alleyne Fitzherbert, his successor, as an intelligence source. She was an able businesswoman who made millions by selling grain and timber – yet she was celebrated for her generosity to her serfs.¹¹ In late 1779, Potemkin’s intense relationship with Sashenka ended, but they remained the closest friends.

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The Prince now embarked on a long relationship with the fifth sister – Ekaterina – though again there are no love letters to prove it. ‘They even talk of the marriage between Potemkin and his little niece with whom he is more in love than ever.’¹² Ekaterina – ‘Katinka’, ‘Katish’ or the ‘kitten’, as the Empress and Potemkin called her – was the Venus in a family of them. ‘Graced with her ravishing face,’ wrote Vigée Lebrun, ‘and her angelic softness, she had an invincible charm.’ Potemkin called her his ‘angel incarnate’ – ‘and never had anyone ever been more justly named’, the Prince de Nassau-Siegen later told his wife.¹³

She was uneducated and incurious, but thoroughly seductive. Her temperament was like that of a blonde mulatto – eternal languor and nonchalant sexuality. ‘Her happiness’, recalled Vigée Lebrun, ‘was to live stretched out on a canapé, enveloped in a big black fur without a corset.’ When visitors asked why she never wore the ‘enormous diamonds…the most sumptuous you can imagine’ which ‘the famous Potemkin’ gave her, she lazily replied: ‘To what good, for whom, for what?’ She was ‘the kindest of the three’ niece–mistresses and ‘believed in Potemkin’s love so as not pain him’. She was too dreamy and passive for Potemkin, who only fell in love with passionate or shrewd women. So, while Potemkin loved her least of the three, she lasted the longest. Serenissimus declared that to be her lover was to taste the quintessential delights of the flesh, an ungallant compliment from an undoubted connoisseur.¹⁴

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