Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Daria’s children were born into a house with a shadow hanging over it – paternal paranoia. Her marriage must have lost whatever meagre romance it ever had when she discovered her husband’s bigamy. His accusations of infidelity must have made it worse: he was so jealous that, when their daughters married, he banned the sons-in-law from kissing Daria’s hand in case the impression of male lips on soft skin led inexorably to sin. After the birth of his heir, the Colonel was visited by, among others coming to congratulate him, his cousin Sergei Potemkin, who informed him that Grigory was not his son. Sergei’s motives in delivering this news were scarcely philanthropic: he wanted his family to inherit the estates. The old soldier flew into a rage, and petitioned to annul the marriage and declare Grigory a bastard. Daria, imagining the monastery gates closing on her, summoned the worldly, sensible godfather Kizlovsky. He hurried from Moscow and persuaded the half-senile husband to drop the divorce petition. So Gregory’s mother and father were stuck with each other.⁹

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Grigory Potemkin’s immediate world for his first six or so years was to be his father’s village. Chizhova stood on the River Chivo, a stream that cut a small, steep, muddy gully through the broad flat lands. It was several hours’ journey from Smolensk, whence Moscow was a further 350 versts. St Petersburg was 837 versts away. In summer, it could be baking hot there, but its flatness meant that the winters were cruel, the winds biting. The countryside was beautiful, rich and green. It was and still is a wild, open land and a refreshing and exciting place for a child.

In many ways, this village was a microcosm of Russian society: there were two essential facts of Russian statehood at that time. The first was the Empire’s perpetual, elemental instinct to expand its borders in every possible direction: Chizhova stood on its restless western borderland. The second was the dichotomy of nobility and serfdom. Potemkin’s home village was divided into these two halves, which it is still possible to see, even though the village scarcely exists today.

On a slight rise above the stream, Potemkin’s first home was a modest, one-storey wooden manorhouse, with a handsome façade. It could not have been in greater contrast to the houses of rich magnates higher up the social scale. For example, later in the century, Count Kirill Razumovsky’s estate, further to the south in the Ukraine, ‘resembled more a little town than a country house…with 40 or 50 outhouses…his guard, a numerous train of retainers, and a large band of musicians’.¹⁰ In Chizhova, the only outhouse around the manor was probably the bathhouse where Grigory was born, which would have stood right above the stream and its well. This banya was an integral part of Russian life. Country folk of both sexes bathed together,^*3 which was very shocking to a visiting French schoolmaster since ‘persons of all ages and both sexes use them together and the habit of seeing everything unveiled from an early age deadens the senses’.¹¹ For Russians, the banya was a cosy, sociable and relaxing extension of the home.

Apart from the problems of his parents’ marriage, this was probably a happy, if unsophisticated, environment to grow up in. We have one account of a boy of the lower nobility growing up in Smolensk Province: though born thirty years later, Lev Nikolaevich Engelhardt was Potemkin’s kinsman, who recorded the probably unchanged life in a nearby village. He was allowed to run around in a peasant shirt and bare feet: ‘Physically my education resembled the system outlined by Rousseau – the Noble Savage. But I know that my grandmother was not only ignorant of that work but had a very uncertain acquaintance with Russian grammar itself.’¹² Another memoirist, also related to Potemkin, recalled: ‘The richest local landowner possessed only 1,000 souls,’ and ‘he had…one set of silver spoons which he set out before the more important guests, leaving the others to manage with spoons of pewter’.¹³