Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

He then enrolled at Moscow University, where he appeared near the top of his classes in Greek and ecclesiastical history.³² He was to keep some of his friends from there for the rest of his life. The students wore uniforms – a green coat with red cuffs. The university itself had only just been founded. Potemkin’s contemporary Denis von Vizin, in his Frank Confession of my Affairs and Thoughts, recounted how he and his brother were among the first students. Like Potemkin, they were the children of the poor gentry who could not afford private tutors. This new university was chaotic. ‘We studied without any order…’, he recalled, due to ‘the teachers’ negligence and hard drinking…’.³³ Von Vizin claimed that the teaching of foreign languages was either abysmal or non-existent. Potemkin’s records were lost in the fire of 1812, but he certainly learned a lot, possibly through his clerical friends.

This pedogogic debauchery did not matter because Potemkin, who later in life was said to have read nothing, was addicted to reading. When he visited relations in the countryside, he spent his whole time in the library and even fell asleep under the billiard table, grasping a book.³⁴ Another time, Potemkin asked one of his friends, Ermil Kostrov, to lend him ten books. When Potemkin gave them back, Kostrov did not believe he could have read so much in so short a time. Potemkin replied he had read them from cover to cover: ‘If you do not believe me, examine them!’, he said. Kostrov was convinced. When another student named Afonin lent Potemkin the newly published Natural Philosophy by Buffon, Potemkin returned it a day later and amazed Afonin with his absolute recall of its every detail.³⁵

Now Potemkin caught the eye of another powerful patron. In 1757, Grisha’s virtuosity at Greek and theology won him the university’s Gold Medal, and this impressed one of the magnates of the Imperial Court in Petersburg. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the erudite and cultured founder and Curator of Moscow University, was young, round-faced and gentle with sweet pixie-like features – but he was also unusually modest considering his position. Shuvalov was the lover of the Empress Elisabeth, who was eighteen years his senior, and one of her closest advisers. That June, Shuvalov ordered the university to select its twelve best pupils and send them to St Petersburg. Potemkin and eleven others were despatched to the capital, where they were met by Shuvalov himself and conveyed to the Winter Palace to be presented to the Empress of all the Russias. This was Potemkin’s first visit to Petersburg.

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Even Moscow must have seemed a backwater compared to St Petersburg. On the marshy banks and islands of the estuary of the River Neva, Peter the Great had founded his ‘paradise’ in 1703 on territory that still belonged to Sweden. When he had finally defeated Charles VII at Poltava his first reaction was that St Petersburg was safe at last. It became the official capital in 1712. Thousands of serfs died driving the piles and draining the water on this vast building site as the Tsar forced the project ahead. Now it was already a beautiful city of about 100,000 inhabitants, with elegant palaces lining the embankments: on the northern side stood the Peter and Paul Fortress and the red-brick palace that had belonged to Peter’s favourite, Prince Menshikov. Almost opposite these buildings stood the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and more aristocratic mansions. Its boulevards were astonishingly wide, as if built for giants, but their Germanic straightness was alien to the Russian soul, quite the opposite of the twisting lanes of Moscow. The buildings were grandiose, but all were half finished, like so much in Russia.

‘It’s a cheerful fine looking city with streets extremely wide and long,’ wrote an English visitor. ‘Not only the town but the manner of living is upon too large a scale. The nobles seem to vie with each other in extravagances of every sort.’ Everything was a study of contrasts. Inside the palaces, ‘the homes are decorated with the most sumptuous furniture from every country but you pass into a drawing room where the floor is of the finest inlaid woods through a staircase of coarseness, stinking with dirt.’³⁶ Even its palaces and dances could not completely conceal the nature of the Empire it ruled: ‘On the one hand there are the elegant fashions, gorgeous dresses, sumptuous repasts, splendid fêtes and theatres equal to those that adorn Paris and London,’ observed a French diplomat, ‘on the other there are merchants in Asiatic costume, domestics and peasants in sheepskins and wearing long beards, furbonnets, gloves without fingers and hatchets hanging from their leather belts.’³⁷