Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Grigory or Grisha, as he was known, was the heir to the village and he was, apart from his old father, the only man in a family of women – five sisters and his mother. He was presumably the centre of attention and this family atmosphere must have set the tone for his character, because he was to remain the cynosure of all eyes for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he described himself as ‘Fortune’s spoilt child’. He had to stand out and dominate. The household of women made him absolutely relaxed in female company. In manhood, his closest friends were women – and his career depended on his handling of one in particular. This rough household enlivened by the bustle of female petticoats could not last. Most of his sisters soon married respectably into the cousinhood of Smolensk gentry (except for Nadezhda, who died at nineteen). In particular, the marriages of Elena Marfa to Vasily Engelhardt and Maria to Nikolai Samoilov were to produce nieces and nephews who were to play important roles in Potemkin’s life.¹⁴

Service to the state was the sole profession of a Russian noble. Born into the military household of an officer who had served with Peter at Poltava, Grisha would have been brought up to understand that his duty and his path to success could be found only in serving the Empire. His father’s exploits were probably the hinterland of the boy’s imagination. The honour of a uniform was everything in Russia, particularly for the provincial gentry. In 1721, Peter the Great had laid down a Table of Ranks to establish the hierarchy within the military, civil and court services. Any man who reached the fourteenth military or the eighth civil rank was automatically raised to hereditary nobility – dvoryanstvo – but Peter also imposed compulsory life service on all noblemen. By the time of Potemkin’s birth, the nobility had whittled down this humiliating obligation, but service remained the path to fortune. Potemkin showed an interest in the priesthood. He was descended from a seventeenth-century archimandrite and his father sent him to an ecclesiastical school in Smolensk. But he was always destined for the colours.¹⁵

Right beneath the house, beside the stream, was the well, still named after Catherine today. Legend says Potemkin brought the Empress there to show her his birthplace. It is likely that as a child he himself drew water from it, for the lives of middling gentry were better than those of their well-off serfs but not much. Potemkin was probably farmed out at birth to a serf wet-nurse in the village, but, whether literally or not, this prototype of the ‘Noble Savage’ was raised on the milk of the Russian countryside. He would have been brought up as much by serf women as by his mother and sisters; the music he heard would have been the soulful laments that the serfs sang at night and at festival time. The dances he knew would have been the boisterous and graceful peasant gigs far more than the cotillions danced at the balls of local landowners. He would have known the village soothsayer as well as the priest. He was just as at home beside the warm, smelly hearths of the peasant houses – steamy with kasha, the buckwheat porridge, shchi, the spicy cabbage broth, and kvass, the yellow sour beer they drank alongside vodka and berry wine – as he was in the manor. Tradition tells us the boy lived simply. He played with the priest’s children, grazed horses with them and gathered hay with the serfs.¹⁶

Chizhova’s little Orthodox Church of Our Lady stood (and its ruined successor building remains) on the serfs’ side of the village: Potemkin spent much of his time there. The serfs themselves were devout: each, ‘besides the consecrated amulet round his neck from baptism, carries a little figure of his…patron saint, stamped on copper. Soldiers and peasants often take it out of their pockets, spit on it and rub it…then place it opposite to them and, on a sudden, prostrate themselves…’.¹⁷ When a peasant entered a house, it was usual for him to demand where ‘the God’ was and then cross himself before the icon.