Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Once he arrived home drunk to find an urgent summons from the Empress. At the Palace, Catherine demanded a document she had been promised. The factotum took out a piece of paper and read out the exquisitely drafted ukase. Catherine thanked him and asked him for the manuscript. He handed her the blank piece of paper and fell to his knees. Bezborodko had forgotten to write it, but she forgave him for his improvisation. He was an independent and outstandingly precise and sensitive intelligence who began as Potemkin’s protégé and became his political ally, even though he was friends with enemies like the Vorontsovs. The gratitude in his letters for Potemkin’s patronage showed that the Prince was always by far the senior partner.¹² ‘He keeps treating me very well,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘and…I deserve it because very often I spend as much time on his private affairs as I do on European ones.’¹³

Serenissimus worked with Catherine’s ministers, such as Procurator-General Viazemsky and President of the College of Commerce Alexander Vorontsov (Simon’s brother). Potemkin, famed for his subtle political intrigues, disdained conventional Court politics: he regarded the ministers, particularly Vorontsov, ‘with the greatest contempt’ and he told Harris that ‘even if he could get rid of them, he did not see anybody better to put in their places’.¹⁴ Bezborodko was the only one he seemed to respect. Potemkin proudly told Catherine that he never tried to build a party in Petersburg. He regarded himself as a royal consort, not a jobbing politician or a mere favourite. The only other member of his party was Catherine.

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The first step towards the Greek Project was a détente with Austria. Both sides had been moving in this direction for some time and making encouraging diplomatic signals. The Holy Roman Emperor and co-ruler of the Habsburg Monarchy, Joseph II, never gave up on the Bavarian scheme that had led to the Potato War. He realized he needed Potemkin and Catherine to win Bavaria, which would make his Habsburg lands more compact and coherent. To this end, Joseph had to coax Russia away from Panin’s cherished alliance with Prussia. If, in the process, he could increase his realm at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, so much the better. All roads led to Petersburg.

Joseph and his mother Maria Theresa had for years regarded Catherine as a nymphomaniacal regicide whom they called ‘The Catherinized Princess of Zerbst’. Now Joseph weighed up a Russian alliance over his mother’s opposition. His instincts were backed by his Chancellor, Prince Wenzel von Kaunitz-Rietberg, who had engineered the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 to ally Austria with its old enemy France. Kaunitz was a vain, cold-hearted and libidinous neurotic who was so afraid of illness that he made Maria Theresa close her windows. His elaborate teeth-cleaning exercises at the end of each meal were the most disgusting feature of public life in Vienna. Kaunitz made sure that Austria’s envoy in Petersburg, Cobenzl, took care ‘to place relations with Monsieur de Potemkin on the footing of good friendship…Tell me how you are getting on with him now.’¹⁵

On 22 January 1780, Joseph sent a message to Catherine, through her envoy in Vienna, Prince Dmitri Golitsyn, that he would like to meet her. The timing was ideal. She agreed on 4 February, informing only Potemkin, Bezborodko and a discontented Nikita Panin. It was set for 27 May in Mogilev in Belorussia.¹⁶

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Empress and Prince keenly anticipated this meeting. Between February and April, they discussed it back and forth. The tension told on both of them. They calmed each other like a married couple and then exulted in their schemes like a pair of conspirators. Some time in April, Catherine’s lover Lanskoy told her that the sensitive Potemkin’s ‘soul is full of anxieties’. Probably he was worrying about the array of intrigues against his southern plans, but she soothed him with her ‘true friendship that you will always find in my heart…and in the heart attached to mine, [that is, Lanskoy’s], who loves and respects you as much as I do’. She ended tenderly: ‘Our only sorrow concerns you, that you’re anxious.’ Potemkin snapped at poor little Lanskoy, who ran to Catherine. She was concerned that her favourite had irritated the Prince: ‘Please let me know if Alexander Dmitrievich [Lanskoy] annoyed you somehow and if you are angry with him and why exactly.’ There were even hints of the old days when they were lovers, though perhaps they were just discussing their plans: ‘My dear friend, I’ve finished dinner and the door of the little staircase is open. If you want to talk to me, you may come.’