Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Empress had to be told at once. Sashenka Branicka could have told her – she was already reporting to Catherine on the Prince’s health – but she was too distraught. So an adjutant was sent galloping ahead to inform Potemkin’s devoted and indefatigable secretary Vasily Popov.

There was one last, almost ritual, moment. As the melancholy convoy began to retrace its footsteps back to Jassy, someone must have wanted to mark the spot where the Prince died so that they could build a monument to recall his glory. There were no rocks. Branches would blow away. It was then that the Ataman (Cossack General) Pavel Golavaty, who had known Potemkin for thirty years, commandeered the Zaporogian lance of one of his horsemen. Before he joined the rearguard of the procession, he rode to the little plateau and plunged the lance into the ground at the very spot.³² A Cossack lance to mark the place of Potemkin was as characteristic as the arrow that Robin Hood was supposed to have used to select his grave.

Meanwhile, Popov received the news and, at once, wrote to the Empress: ‘We have been struck a blow! Most Merciful Sovereign, Most Serene Prince Grigory Alexandrovich is no more among the living.’³³ Popov despatched the letter with a trusted young officer who was ordered not to rest until he had delivered the terrible news.

Seven days later, at 6 p.m. on 12 October,³⁴ this courier, dressed respectfully in black – and the dust of the road – delivered Popov’s letter to the Winter Palace. The Empress fainted away. Her courtiers thought she had suffered a stroke. Her doctors were called to bleed her. ‘Tears and desperation’ is how Alexander Khrapovitsky, Catherine’s private secretary, described her shock. ‘At eight, they let blood, at ten she went to bed.’³⁵ She was in a state of collapse: even her grandchildren were not admitted. ‘It was not the lover she regretted,’ wrote a Swiss imperial tutor, who understood their relationship. ‘It was the friend.’³⁶ She could not sleep. At 2 a.m., she rose again to write to her loyal and fussy confidant, the philosophe Friedrich Melchior Grimm: ‘A terrible death-blow has just fallen on my head. At six in the afternoon, a messenger brought the tragic news that my pupil, my friend, almost my idol, Prince Potemkin of Taurida, has died in Moldavia after about a month’s illness. You cannot imagine how broken I am…’.³⁷

In many ways, the Empress never recovered. The golden age of her reign died with him. But so did his reputation: Catherine told Grimm on that tragic sleepless night, scribbling by candlelight in her Winter Palace apartments, that Potemkin’s achievements had always confounded the jealous ‘babblers’. But if his enemies could not defeat him in life, they have succeeded in death. He was barely cold before a vicious legend grew up around his outlandish character that was to obscure his achievements for 200 years.

Catherine would be amazed and appalled to discover that today her ‘idol’ and ‘statesman’ is best known for a calumny and a film. He is remembered for the historical libel of the ‘Potemkin Villages’, while he really built cities, and for the film Battleship Potemkin, the story of the mutinous sailors who heralded the revolutions that, long after his death, destroyed the Russia he loved. So the Potemkin legend was created by Russia’s national enemies, jealous courtiers and Catherine’s unstable successor, Paul I, who avenged himself, not just on the reputation, but even the bones, of his mother’s lover. In the nineteenth century, the Romanovs, who presided over a rigid militaristic bureaucracy with its own Victorian primness, fed off the glories of Catherine but were embarrassed by her private life, especially by the role of the ‘demi-Tsar’ Potemkin.³⁸ Their Soviet successors shared their scruples while expanding their lies (though it has recently emerged that Stalin,^*2 that avid student of history, privately admired Potemkin). Even the most distinguished Western historians still treat him more as a debauched clown and sexual athlete than historical statesman.^*3 All these strands came together to ensure that the Prince has not received his rightful place in history. Catherine the Great, ignorant of the calumnies to come, mourned her friend, lover, soldier, statesman and probably husband for the remaining years of her life.

On 12 January 1792, Vasily Popov, the Prince’s factotum arrived back in St Petersburg with a special mission. He carried Potemkin’s most cherished treasures – Catherine’s secret letters of love and state. They remained tied up in bundles. Some of them were – and still are – stained by the dying Potemkin’s tears as he read, and re-read them, in the knowledge that he would never set eyes on Catherine again.