Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

After the war, the veteran had to serve as a military bureaucrat conducting tiresome population censuses in the distant provinces of Kazan and Astrakhan and commanding small garrisons. We do not know many details of his character or career, but we do know that when he demanded to retire because of his aching wounds he was called before a board of the War College and according to custom was stripping off his uniform to show his scars when he spotted that one of the board had served under him as an NCO. He immediately put on his clothes and pointed at this man: ‘What? HE would examine ME? I will NOT tolerate that. Better remain in the service no matter how bad my wounds!’ He then stormed out to serve another two boring years. He finally retired as an ailing lieutenant-colonel in 1739, the year his son was born.⁵

Old Alexander Potemkin already had a reputation as a domestic tyrant. His first wife was still alive when the veteran spotted Daria Skouratova, probably on the Bolshoia Skouratova estate that was near Chizhova. Born Daria Vasilievna Kondyreva, she was, at twenty, already the widow of Skouratov, its deceased proprietor. Colonel Potemkin married her at once. Neither of these ageing husbands was an appetizing prospect for a young girl, but Skouratov’s family would have been glad to find her a new home.

The Colonel’s young wife now received a most unfortunate shock. It was only when she was pregnant with her first child, a daughter named Martha Elena, that she discovered that Colonel Potemkin was still married to his first wife, who lived in the village. Presumably the whole village was only too aware of the Colonel’s secret, and Daria must have felt she had been made to look a fool in front of her own serfs. Bigamy then was as contrary to the edicts of Church and state as it is now, but places like Chizhova were so remote, the records so chaotic, and the power of men over women so dominant that stories of bigamous provincial gentry were quite common. At roughly the same time, General Abraham Hannibal, Pushkin’s Abyssinian grandfather, was remarrying bigamously while torturing his first wife in a dungeon until she agreed to enter a monastery, and one of his sons repeated his performance.⁶ Torture was usually unnecessary to persuade Russian wives to enter monasteries, thereby releasing the husbands to marry again. Daria visited the first wife and tearfully persuaded her to take holy orders, finally making her own bigamous marriage legitimate.

We can glean enough about this marriage to say that it was profoundly unhappy: Alexander Potemkin kept his wife almost perpetually pregnant. She had five daughters and one son – Grigory was her third child. Yet the splenetic taskmaster was also manically jealous. As jealousy often precipitates the very thing it most fears, the young wife was not short of admirers. We are told by one source that, around the time of Grigory’s birth, Colonel Potemkin was extremely suspicious of his visiting cousin, who was to be Grigory’s godfather, the worldly Grigory Matveevich Kizlovsky, a senior civil servant from Moscow. Presumably the boy was named after Kizlovsky – but was he his natural father? We simply do not know: Potemkin inherited some of his father’s manic, often morose character. He also loved Kizlovsky like a father after the Colonel’s death. One simply has to confront the prosaic fact that, even in the adulterous eighteenth century, children were occasionally the offspring of their official fathers.

We know far more about Potemkin’s mother than about his father because she lived to see Grigory become the first man of the Empire. Daria was good-looking, capable and intelligent. A much later portrait shows an old lady in a bonnet with a tough, weary but shrewd face, a bold lumpy nose and sharp chin. Her features are cruder than her son’s, though he was supposed to resemble her. When she discovered she was pregnant for the third time in 1739, the augurs were good. Locals in Chizhova still claim that she had a dream that she saw the sun detach itself from the sky to fall right on her belly – and at that point she woke up. The village soothsayer, Agraphina, interpreted this as the prospect of a son. But the Colonel still found a way to ruin her happiness.⁷ When her time was near, Daria waited to give birth in the village banya or bathhouse, attended probably by her serf-maids. Her husband, according to the story still told by the locals, sat up all night drinking strong home-made berry wines. The serfs waited up too – they wanted an heir after two daughters. When Grigory was delivered, the church bells rang. The serfs danced and drank until dawn.⁸ The place of his birth was fitting, since the banya in the Winter Palace was one day to be the frequent venue for his trysts with Catherine the Great.