Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The entire Potemkin clan was treated as a member of the extended Catherinian family that included Lanskoy, her lover. The Empress made a fuss not just of the Engelhardt sisters but also of Potemkin’s other family – his cousin Pavel Potemkin, after serving against Pugachev, became viceroy of the Caucasus, and his brother Mikhail Chief Inspector of the College of War and one of Catherine’s inner circle. The Prince’s stalwart nephew Alexander Samoilov, son of his sister Maria, became secretary to the State Council and a general – ‘brave but useless’. Other nephews, such as Vasily Engelhardt and Nikolai Vysotsky, son of his sister Pelageya, served as Catherine’s aides-decamp, being treated almost as family.

The Empress’s favourite Sasha Lanskoy was very kind to Potemkin’s nieces, as we know from Tatiana’s letters, which have not been cited before this. ‘Monsieur Lanskoy has had all sorts of attention,’ she reported innocently. In one letter, Tatiana told her uncle how the Grand Duke and Duchess ‘met me in the garden – they found me very grown up and spoke to me with a lot of kindness’.¹⁹ When, a couple of years later, Ekaterina was married and pregnant, it was Lanskoy who sent Potemkin reports on the birth. ‘Father,’ he wrote, ‘the Sovereign has kindly ordered a bow to you and to baptize the baby…here I’m sending a letter from Ekaterina Vasilievna…’. A few days later he told him that the Empress had a fever but the niece was feeling better each day.

There is a sense that, away from the harsh political struggles, the Empress, to some extent, succeeded in creating a patchwork family out of her – or, as she put it, ‘our’ – Potemkin ‘relatives’ and her beloved Lanskoy. She chose her family as others choose their friends. There was a symmetry between Catherine’s favourites and Potemkin’s nieces. When the politics allowed some serenity, she treated the nieces like daughters and he the favourites like sons. Together, they were almost the children of that unconventional, childless marriage.²⁰

—

Potemkin’s relationships with his nieces were irregular and idiosyncratic but not unusual for his time, and certainly Catherine did not seem shocked by them. She tells in her Memoirs how, during her own childhood before leaving for Russia, she had flirted (and possibly more) with her uncle, Prince Georg-Ludwig of Holstein, who wanted to marry her.^*1 Such behaviour – and worse – was not uncommon among royal families. The Habsburgs regularly married their nieces. Earlier in the century, the Regent of France, Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, was supposed to have had affairs with his daughter, the Duchesse de Berry.^*2

Augustus the Strong, the King of Poland, Elector of Saxony and duplicitous ally of Peter the Great, set an unbeatable incestuous precedent for vigorous degeneracy that not even Potemkin could equal. Augustus, an art-loving, inpecunious and politically slippery bon vivant whom Carlyle called that ‘cheerful Man of Sin, gay eupeptic Son of Belial’, had, according to legend, not only fathered an heir and 354 bastards through a legion of mistresses but also supposedly made his daughter Countess Orczelska his mistress. To add insult to incest, the daughter–mistress in turn was in love with Count Rudorfski, her half-brother, another of his natural children. It was different for commoners, though in seventeenth-century France Cardinal Mazarin had made his nieces – the Mazarinettes – into the richest heiresses in France and there were rumours about his relationship with them. Meanwhile, Voltaire was having the last affair of his long life with his promiscuous, greedy niece, Madame Denis, but he kept it secret – only their correspondence revealed all. In the generation after Potemkin, Lord Byron flaunted his affair with his half-sister, and Prince Talleyrand set up house with his nephew’s wife, the Duchesse de Dino.

In Russia, uncle–niece incest was much more common. The Orthodox Church turned a blind eye. Nikita Panin was rumoured to have had an affair with his niece (by marriage) Princess Dashkova – though she denied it. Kirill Razumovsky kept house at Baturin with the daughter of his sister Anna, Countess S. Apraxina, with whom he lived as man and wife. Yet the incestuous relationship of this prominent, much admired magnate was barely mentioned because it was done quietly in the country; no one ‘frightened the horses’. Potemkin’s sin was the openness with which he loved them. This shocked contemporaries just as it was Catherine’s openness with her favourites that made her so notorious: they were the parallel lines of the same arrangement. Serenissimus regarded himself as semi-royal, so he would do what he wished and everyone could see him enjoying it.²¹