Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Sometimes the serfs loved their masters: when the Grand Chamberlain Count Shuvalov was obliged to sell an estate 300 versts from Petersburg, he was awakened one morning by a rumpus in his courtyard in the capital. A crowd of his serfs, who had travelled all the way from the countryside, were gathered there. ‘We were very content under your authority and do not wish to lose so good a master,’ they declared. ‘So with each of us paying…we have come to bring you the sum you need to buy back the estate.’ The Count embraced his serfs like children.²³ When the master approached, an Englishman noted, the serfs bowed almost to the ground; when an empress visited remote areas, a French diplomat recorded that they made obeisance on their knees.²⁴ A landowner’s serfs were his labour force, bank balance, sometimes his harem and completely his responsibility. Yet he always lived with the fear that they might arise and murder him in his manorhouse. Peasant risings were common.

Most owners were relatively humane to their serfs, but only a tiny minority could conceive that slavery was not the serf’s natural state. If serfs fled, masters could recover them by force. Serf-hunters earned bounties for this grim chore. Even the most rational landowners regularly punished their serfs, often using the knout, the thick Russian leather whip, but they were certainly not permitted to execute them. ‘Punishments ought to be inflicted on peasants, servants and all others in consideration of their offence with switches,’ wrote Prince Shcherbatov in his instructions to his stewards in 1758. ‘Proceed cautiously so as not to commit murder or maim. So therefore do not beat on the head or legs or arms with a club. But when such a punishment occurs that calls for a club, then order him to bend down and beat on the back, or better lash with switches on the back and lower down for the punishment will be more painful, but the peasant will not be maimed.’

The system allowed plenty of scope for abuse. Catherine in her Memoirs recalled that most households in Moscow contained ‘iron collars, chains and other instruments of torture for those who commit the slightest infraction’. The bedchamber of one old noblewoman, for example, contained ‘a sort of dark cage in which she kept a slave who dressed her hair; the chief motive…was the wish of the old baggage to conceal from the world that she wore false hair…’.²⁵

The absolute power of the landowner over serfs sometimes concealed Bluebeardish tortures: the worst of these were perpetrated by a female landowner, though perhaps it was only because she was a woman that anyone complained. Certainly the authorities covered up for her for a long time and this was not in some distant province, but in Moscow itself. Daria Nikolaevna Saltykova, aged twenty-five and known as ‘the maneater’ – liudoed – was a monstress who took a sadistic pleasure in torturing hundreds of her serfs, beating them with logs and rolling pins. She killed 138 female serfs, supposedly concentrating on their genitals. When she was finally arrested early in Catherine’s reign, the Empress, who depended on noble support, had to punish the maneater carefully. She could not be executed, because the Empress Elisabeth had abolished the death penalty in 1754 (except for treason), so Saltykova was chained to the scaffold in Moscow for one hour with a placard round her neck reading ‘torturer and murderer’. The whole town turned out to look at her: serial killers were rare at that time. The maneater was then confined for life in a subterranean prison–monastery. Her cruelty was the exception, not the rule.²⁶

This was Grisha Potemkin’s world and the essence of life in the Russian countryside. He never lost the habits of Chizhova. One can imagine him running through hay-strewn pastures with the serf children, chewing on a turnip or a radish – as he was to do later in life in the apartments of the Empress. It was not surprising that, in the refined Voltairean Court of St Petersburg, he was always regarded as a quintessential child of Russia’s soil.

In 1746, this idyll ended when his father died aged seventy-four. The six-year-old Grisha Potemkin inherited the village and its serfs, but it was a paltry inheritance. His mother, widowed for the second time at forty-two, with six children to rear, could not make ends meet in Chizhova. The adult Grigory would behave with the heedless extravagance of those who remember financial straits – but it was never grinding poverty. He later granted the village to his sister Elena and her husband Vasily Engelhardt. They built a mansion on the site of the wooden manorhouse and an exquisite church on the serf side of the village to the glory of Serenissimus, the family’s famous son.²⁷