Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

At the end of April, Serenissimus rode off to prepare the reception for the Tsarina and the Holy Roman Emperor – in Mogilev. It was his policy, and Catherine gave him the responsibility to set the scene. As soon as he departed, Catherine missed her consort. ‘I’m without my friend, my Prince,’ she wrote to him. Excited letters flew between them. On 9 May 1780, Catherine left Tsarskoe Selo with a suite that included the nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina Engelhardt, and Bezborodko. Nikita Panin was left behind. As the Emperor Joseph arrived in Mogilev to be greeted by Potemkin, Catherine was approaching on the road from Petersburg. She and her consort were still discussing the last-minute details of the meeting and missing each other. ‘If you find a better way, please let me know,’ she wrote about her schedule – then she signed off: ‘Goodbye my friend, we are sick at heart without you. I’m dying to see you as soon as possible.’¹⁷

Skip Notes

*1 One, who later reigned as Mahmud II, was supposedly the son of that favourite odalisque, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, cousin of the future Empress Josephine.

*2 Even Potemkin’s valet, Zakhar Constantinov, was a Greek.

15

  THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR

Is it not you who dared raise up

The power of Russia, Catherine’s spirit

And with support of both desired

To carry thunder to those rapids

On which the ancient Rome did stand

And trembled all the universe?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

On 21 May 1780, Prince Potemkin welcomed Emperor Joseph II, travelling under the incognito of Comte de Falkenstein, to Russia. It is hard to imagine two more different and ill-suited men. The uptight, self-regarding Austrian martinet wished to discuss politics immediately, while the Prince insisted on taking him off to the Orthodox Church. ‘Just up to now, commonplaces have been all the conversation with Potemkin and he hasn’t uttered a word of politics,’ the Emperor, thirty-nine, balding, oval-faced and quite handsome for a Habsburg, grumbled to his disapproving mother, the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa. Joseph’s impatience did not matter because Catherine was only a day away. The Emperor continued to chomp at the bit – but Potemkin displayed only an enigmatic affability: this was a deliberate political manoeuvre to let Joseph come to him. No one knew what Potemkin and Catherine were planning, but Frederick the Great and the Ottoman Sultan observed the meeting with foreboding, since it was aimed primarily at them.

The Prince handed the Emperor a letter from Catherine which plainly revealed her hopes: ‘I swear at this moment there is nothing more difficult than to hide my sentiments of joy. The very name Monsieur le Comte de Falkenstein inspires such confidence…’.¹ Potemkin recounted his impressions of Joseph to Catherine, and the partners impatiently discussed their meaning. The Prince passed on Joseph’s extravagant compliments about the Empress. The spirit of their unique partnership is captured in Catherine’s letter when she was just a day away: ‘Tomorrow I hope to be with you, everyone is missing you…We’ll try to figure out Falk[enstein] together.’²

—

This was easier said than done: the Emperor’s awkward character baffled contemporaries – and historians. No one so represented the incongruities of the Enlightened despot: Joseph was an uncomfortable cross between an expansionist and militaristic autocrat and a philosophe who wished to liberate his people from the superstitions of the past. He thought he was a military genius and philosopher–king like his hero Frederick the Great (the enemy who had almost destroyed Joseph’s own inheritance). Joseph’s ideals were admirable, but he despised his fellow man, was tactless and lacked all conception that politics was the art of the possible. His over-strenuous doctrinaire reforms stemmed from an austere vanity that made him somewhat ridiculous: he believed that the state was his person.

Joseph’s incognito was the symbol of his whole philosophy of monarchy. He was as pompous and self-righteous about his name as he was about his living arrangements and his reforms. ‘You know that…in all my travels I rigidly observe and jealously guard my rights and the advantages that the character of Comte de Falkenstein gives me,’ Joseph instructed Cobenzl, ‘so I will, as a result, be in uniform but without orders…You will take care to arrange very small and ordinary quarters at Mogilev.’³

This self-declared ‘first clerk of the state’ wore a plain grey uniform, travelled with only one or two companions, wished to eat only simple inn food and liked to sleep on a military mattress in a roadside tavern rather than a palace. This was to create a challenge for the impresario of the visit, Potemkin, but he rose to it. Russia had few of the flea-bittern taverns the Emperor expected, so Potemkin dressed up manorhouses to look like inns.