Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Empress received Popov. He handed over the letters. She dismissed everyone except Popov and locked the door. Then the two of them wept together.³⁹ It was almost thirty years since she first met Potemkin on the very day she seized power and became Empress of all the Russias.

Skip Notes

*1 ‘Here lies Bauer under this stone, Coachman, drive on!’

*2 ‘What was the genius of Catherine the Great?’ asked Stalin during a famous discussion about history with his favourite henchman, Andrei Zhdanov, in the summer of 1934. Stalin answered his own question thus: ‘Her greatness lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin and other such talented lovers and officials to govern the State.’ This author discovered this story during the research for his book, Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar: he interviewed Yury Zhdanov, son of Andrei and later the dictator’s son-in-law, now in his eighties, who, as a boy, witnessed the scene.

*3 Writing in 1994, for example, one highly respected Professor of History at Cambridge University evaluates Potemkin’s political and military abilities, with the amusing but completely unjustifiable claim that he ‘lacked self-confidence anywhere outside the bedroom.’

PART ONE Potemkin and Catherine

1739–1762

1

  THE PROVINCIAL BOY

I would rather hear that you had been killed than that you had brought shame on yourself.

(The advice of a Smolensk nobleman to his son, joining the army.)

L. N. Engelhardt, Memoirs

‘When I grow up,’ the young Potemkin is said to have boasted, ‘I shall be either a statesman or an archbishop.’ His schoolfriends probably mocked his dreams, for he was born into the ranks of respectable provincial gentry without the benefits of either name or fortune. His godfather, who understood him better, liked to mutter that the boy would either ‘rise to great honour – or lose his head’.¹ The only way to rise swiftly to such eminence in the Russia of that time was through the favour of the monarch – and by the time he had reached the age of twenty-two this obscure provincial had contrived to meet two reigning empresses.

Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin was born on 30 September 1739^*1 in the small village of Chizhova, not far from the old fortress city of Holy Smolensk. The Potemkins owned the modest estate and its 430 male serfs. The family were far from rich, but they were hardly poor either. However, they made up for their middling status by behaviour that was strange even by the standards of the wilder borderlands of the Russian Empire. They were a numerous clan of Polish descent and, like all nobility, they had concocted a dubious genealogy. The more minor the nobility, the more grandiose this tended to be, so the Potemkins claimed they were descended from Telesin, the prince of an Italian tribe which threatened Rome in about 100 bc, and from Istok, a Dalmatian prince of the eleventh century ad. After centuries of unexplained obscurity, these royal Italian–Dalmatians reappeared around Smolensk bearing the distinctly unLatinate name ‘Potemkin’ or the polonized ‘Potempski’.

The family proved adept at navigating the choppy seas between the tsars of Muscovy and the kings of Poland, receiving estates around Smolensk from both. The family patriarch was Hans-Tarasy (supposedly a version of Telesin) Potemkin, who had two sons, Ivan and Illarion, from whom the two branches of the family were descended.² Grigory came from Illarion’s junior line. Both sides boasted middle-ranking officers and courtiers. From the time of Potemkin’s great-grandfather, the family exclusively served Muscovy, which was gradually recovering these traditional Kievan lands from the Commonwealth of Poland–Lithuania.