Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The Empress’s new Winter Palace was not yet finished, but it was magnificent nonetheless – one room would be gilded, painted, hung with chandeliers and filled with courtiers, the next would be draughty, leaky, almost open to the elements and strewn with masons’ tools. Shuvalov led the twelve prize-winning students into the reception rooms where Elisabeth received foreign envoys. There, Potemkin and his fellow scholars were presented to the Empress.

Elisabeth, then nearly fifty and in the seventeenth year of her reign, was a big-boned Amazonian blonde with blue eyes. ‘It was impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be struck by her beauty,’ Catherine the Great remembered. ‘She was a large woman who in spite of being very stout was not in the least disfigured by her size.’³⁸ Elisabeth, like her sixteenth-century English namesake, was raised in the glorious shadow of a dominant royal father and then spent her youth in the risky limbo between the throne and the dungeon. This honed her natural political instincts – but there end the similarities with Gloriana. She was impulsive, generous and frivolous, but also shrewd, vindictive and ruthless – truly Peter the Great’s daughter. This Elisabethan Court was dominated by the exuberance and vanity of the Empress, whose appetites for elaborate fêtes and expensive clothes were prodigious. She never wore the same clothes twice. She changed her dresses twice a day and female courtiers copied her. When she died, her successor found a wardrobe in the Summer Palace filled with 15,000 dresses. At Court, French plays were still a rare and foreign innovation: the usual entertainment was the Empress’s so-called transvestite balls where everyone was ordered to dress as the opposite sex: this led to all sorts of horseplay with the men in ‘whale-boned petticoats’ and the women looking like ‘scrubby little boys’ – especially the old ones. There was a reason for this: ‘the only woman who looked really fine, and completely a man, was the Empress herself. As she was tall and powerful, male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I have ever seen on any man…’.³⁹

Even the purported fun at this Elisabethan Court was permeated by the struggle for political influence and fear of imperial caprice: when the Empress could not get powder out of her hair and had to shave her head to remove it, she ordered all the ladies at court to shave theirs too. ‘The ladies obeyed in tears.’ When she was jealous of other beauties, she cut the ribbons of one with scissors and the curls of another two. She actually issued orders to ensure that no other woman emulated her coiffeur de jour. Ass he lost her looks, she alternated between Orthodox devotions and the frantic application of cosmetics.⁴⁰ Politics was a risky game, even for fashionable noblewomen. Early in her reign, Elisabeth ordered that a pretty courtier named Countess Natalia Lopukhina have her tongue cut out just for vaguely chattering about a plot – yet this was the soft-hearted woman who also abolished the death penalty.

She combined her Orthodox piety with hearty promiscuity. Elisabeth’s love affairs were legion and uninhibited, much more so than Catherine’s: they varied from French doctors and Cossack choristers to that rich reservoir of local virility, the Guards. Her great love, nicknamed ‘The Night Emperor’, was a young Ukrainian half-Cossack, whom she first noticed singing in the choir: his name was Alexei Razum, which was soon dignified into Razumovsky. He and his younger brother Kirill, a teenage shepherd, were rewarded with riches and raised to count, one of the new Germanic titles imported by Peter the Great. In 1749, Elisabeth took a new lover, Ivan Shuvalov, aged twenty-two, so another family were raised to the diamond-studded status of magnates.

By the time young Potemkin visited Petersburg, many of these magnates were the scions of a newly coined Petrine and Elisabethan aristocracy – there was no better advertisement for the benefits of life at Court. ‘Orderlies, choristers, scullery boys in noble kitchens’, as Pushkin put it, were raised on merit or just favour to the height of wealth and aristocracy.⁴¹ These new men served in the higher echelons of Court and military alongside the old untitled Muscovite nobles and the princely clans, who were the descendants of ruling houses: the Princes Golitsyn, for example, were descended from Grand Duke Gedemin of Lithuania, the Princes Dolgoruky from Rurik.