Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin grew up with a peasant’s mixture of piety and superstition: he was baptized at the village church. Many landowners could afford a foreign tutor for their children, preferably French or German – or sometimes an aged Swedish prisoner-of-war, captured in the Great Northern War, like the poor landowning family in Pushkin’s novella, The Captain’s Daughter. But the Potemkins did not even have this. It is said that the local priest, Semen Karzev, and sexton, Timofei Krasnopevzev, taught him alphabet and prayers, which were to spark a lifelong fascination with religion. Grisha learned to sing and to love music, another feature of his adult life: Prince Potemkin was never without his orchestra and a pile of new orchestral scores. There was a legend that, decades later, one of these village sages visited St Petersburg and, hearing that his pupil was now the most important man at Court, called on the Prince, who received him warmly and found him a job as curator of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet’s statue of Peter the Great.¹⁸

The 430 male serfs and their families lived around the church on the other side of the village. Serfs, or ‘souls’ as they were called, were valued according to the number of males. The wealth of a nobleman was measured not in cash or acres but in souls. Out of a population of nineteen million, there were about 50,000 male nobles and 7.8 million serfs. Half of these were manorial peasants, owned by the individual nobles or the imperial family, while the other half were state peasants owned by the state itself. Only noblemen could legally own serfs, yet a mere one per cent of the nobles owned more than a thousand souls. The households of great noblemen, who might own hundreds of thousands of serfs, were to reach a luxurious and picturesque climax in Catherine’s reign when they owned serf orchestras and serf painters of exquisite icons and portraits: Count Sheremetev, the wealthiest serfowner in Russia, owned a serf theatre with a repertoire of forty operas. Prince Yusupov’s ballet was to boast hundreds of serf ballerinas. Count Skavronsky (a kinsman of Catherine I who married one of Potemkin’s nieces) was so obsessed with music that he banned his serfs from speaking: they had to sing in recitative.¹⁹ These cases were rare: 82 per cent of nobles were as poor as church mice, owning fewer than a hundred souls. The Potemkins were middling – part of 15 per cent who owned between 101 and 500.²⁰

Chizhova’s serfs were the absolute possessions of Colonel Potemkin. Contemporary French writers used the word ‘esclaves’ – slaves – to describe them. They had much in common with the black slaves of the New World, except that they were the same race as their masters. There was irony in serfdom, for while the serfs in Russia at the time of Potemkin’s birth were chattels at the bottom of the pyramid of society, they were also the basic resource of the state’s and the nobles’ power. They formed the Russian infantry when the state raised an army by forced levées. Landowners despatched the selected unfortunates for a lifetime of service. The serfs paid the taxes that the Russian emperors used to finance their armies. Yet they were also the heart of a nobleman’s wealth. Emperor and nobility competed to control them – and squeeze as much out of them as possible.

Souls were usually inherited, but they could also be granted to favourites by grateful emperors or bought as a result of advertisements in newspapers like today’s used cars. For example, in 1760, Prince Mikhail Shcherbatov, later a critic of Potemkin’s morals, sold three girls to another nobleman for three roubles. Yet the masters often took pride in their paternalist care for their serfs. ‘The very circumstance of their persons being property ensures them the indulgence of their masters.’²¹ Count Kirill Razumovsky’s household contained over 300 domestic servants, all serfs of course (except the French chef and probably a French or German tutor for his sons), including a master of ceremonies, a chief valet de chambre, two dwarfs, four hairdressers, two coffee-servers and so on. ‘Uncle,’ said his niece, ‘it seems to me you have a lot of servants you could well do without.’ ‘Quite so,’ replied Razumovsky, ‘but they could not do without me.’²²