Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

While Varvara and Alexandra ended their liaisons with Potemkin, Countess Ekaterina Skavronskaya, as we will now call her, seems to have remained his mistress. ‘Things are on the same footing between her and her uncle as they were,’ Cobenzl told Joseph II. ‘The husband who is very jealous does not approve but does not have the courage to prevent it.’ Even five years later, Skavronskaya was still ‘more beautiful than ever and the favourite Sultana-in-chief of the uncle’.¹¹

Potemkin had Skavronsky appointed ambassador to Naples in 1784, which delighted him because it let him inhabit the land of maestros. But Skavronskaya was not interested in Italian opera, and Potemkin, while he ran several other mistresses, enjoyed his placid niece and did not wish to part from her. Finally she did go, but did not stay long. The husband sent notes to Serenissimus that are masterpieces of pitiful sycophancy: ‘I cannot succeed in expressing all the joy and gratitude with which I read what you have deigned to write to me and how much I have been moved to see that you deign to grant me your kindness and memory which I have consecrated my life to deserve and on which I dare suggest that no one in the world could place a higher value.’ More than that, Skavronsky desperately wrote to beg Potemkin to help him avoid diplomatic faux pas. The Prince must have chuckled as he read these letters, though he liked the sculptures Skavronsky sent him from Italy.¹² Remarkably the Count fathered a family in between arias in Naples, including a daughter who was one day to be notorious in Europe.

Skavronsky always took care to tell the Prince that his wife longed to rejoin him in Russia, which was probably true, because the dreamy ‘angel’ missed her Motherland. While she was in Naples, she kept a ‘woman slave’ under her bed who helped her get to sleep by ‘telling her the same story every night’. By day she was ‘perpetually idle’, her conversation was ‘as vacuous as you could imagine’, but she could not help but flirt.¹³ She became Naples’s leading coquette, high praise in a city that was soon to experience the wiles of Emma, Lady Hamilton. But when Potemkin’s successes gave him the chance to woo Europe, Katinka hurried back to share his limelight.

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Countess Alexandra Branicka remained not just Potemkin’s confidante and his Polish agent of influence, but Catherine’s closest friend. While her spendthrift husband did his best to lose their fortune, she increased it prodigiously, which led to arguments with her uncle – but they were always reconciled.¹⁴ For the rest of her life she was often with Potemkin and the Empress – though she lived on her Polish and Belorussian estates. Her almost illegible letters to him are very affectionate: ‘My father, my life, I feel so sad to be so faraway…I ask you one mercy – don’t forget me, love me for ever, nobody loves you like me. My God, I’ll be happy when I’ve seen you.’¹⁵ She was widely respected. Contemporaries emphasized her good morals, ‘remaining a model of faithfulness all her life’,¹⁶ something remarkable in those days, especially when she was married to an older Lothario. They had a large family. Perhaps she fell in love with Branicki’s endearing roughness.

This troika of marriages sparked rows with the Empress about the medals and money bestowed on his family – ‘600,000 roubles, money, the Order of St Catherine for the future Grande Genérale [Alexandra] and the portrait [of the Empress] for the Princess Golitsyn [Varvara]’. Potemkin expected his nieces to be endowed by the state – were they not Catherine’s extended family? He got his way after weeks of rows. He certainly believed in caring for his own.

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Paul left Tsarskoe Selo harbouring a visceral hatred for Serenissimus. Yet, like a monarch more than a minister, Potemkin tried to preserve a balance among the Court factions and foreign powers. In November, he talked to Harris about restoring Panin to a degree of power, presumably to balance him against the rising Bezborodko.¹⁷ One of his best features – and one lacking in many politicians, even democratic ones – was the absence of vindictiveness. Perhaps he simply did not want to see Panin humiliated any more. In any case, Potemkin’s triumph had broken Panin: he fell ill in October.

Similarly, by early 1782, the confused Cobenzl was telling Joseph that Potemkin was leaning back towards Prussia. Both Cobenzl and Harris concluded their reports by confessing that they were unable to fathom the motives for Potemkin’s manoeuvres, but the Prince, while favouring Austria, continued to steer a middle passage between these two German monarchies for the rest of his life.¹⁸