Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

This was Potemkin’s introduction to a world of empresses and favourites that he was ultimately to dominate. Elisabeth’s father, Peter I (the Great), had celebrated his conquest of the Baltic by declaring himself imperator or emperor in 1721 in addition to the traditional title of tsar, which itself derived from the Roman Caesar. But Peter had also ensured a century of instability by decreeing that Russian rulers could choose their own heirs without consulting the opinion of anyone else: this has been called ‘the apotheosis of autocratic rule’. Russia was not to have a law of succession until the reign of Paul I. Since Peter had tortured his own son and heir – the Tsarevich (Tsar’s son) Alexei – to death in 1718 and his other male sons had died, he was succeeded in 1725 by his low-born widow as Empress Catherine I in her own right, backed by the Guards Regiments and a camarilla of his closest cronies. Catherine was the first of a line of female or child rulers, the symptom of a grievous lack of adult male heirs.

In this ‘era of palace revolutions’, emperors were raised to the purple by combinations of Court factions, noble magnates and the Guards Regiments, which were stationed in St Petersburg. On Catherine I’s death in 1727, Peter’s grandson, the son of the murdered Alexei, ruled as Peter II for a mere two years. On his death,^*6 the Russian Court offered the throne to Peter’s niece Anna of Courland, who ruled, with her hated German favourite Ernst Biron, until 1740. Then a baby, Ivan VI, acceded to the throne, which was controlled by his mother, Anna Leopoldovna, the Duchess of Brunswick, as regent. The Russians did not appreciate children, German or female rulers. All three was too much to bear.

On 25 November 1741, after a series of palace coups during the reign of the infant Ivan VI, the Grand Duchess Elisabeth, aged thirty-one, seized the Russian Empire with just 308 Guardsmen – and consigned the child–Emperor to a cell in the fortress of Schlüsselburg. The mixture of palace intrigue and praetorian coup set the tone for Russian politics for the century. Foreigners were confused by this – especially in the century of Enlightenment when politics and law were being obsessively analysed: wits could only decide that the Russian throne was neither elective nor hereditary – it was occupative. The Russian constitution, to paraphrase Madame de Staël, was the character of the Emperor. The personality of the Autocrat was the government. And the government, as the Marquis de Custine put it, was ‘an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination’.⁴²

This rule of women created a peculiar Russian version of the Court favourite. Shuvalov, Potemkin’s patron, was the Empress’s latest. A favourite was a trusted associate or lover, often of humble origins, favoured by a monarch out of personal choice instead of noble birth. Not all aspired to power. Some were happy merely to become rich courtiers. But in Russia the empresses needed them because only men could command armies. They were ideally placed to become minister–favourites⁴³ who ran the country for their mistresses.^*7

When Shuvalov, still only thirty-two, presented the eighteen-year-old Grisha Potemkin to the now bloated and ailing Empress, he drew attention to his knowledge of Greek and theology. The Empress ordered Potemkin to be promoted to Guards corporal as a reward, even though so far he had done no soldiering whatsoever. She probably presented the boys with a trinket – a glass goblet engraved with her silhouette – as a prize.^*8

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The Court must have turned Potemkin’s head because when he returned to Moscow he no longer concentrated on his studies. Perhaps the drunkenness and indolence of the professors infected the students. In 1760, the linguist, who had won the Gold Medal and presentation to the Empress, was expelled for ‘laziness and non-attendance of lessons’. Years later, when he was already a prince, Potemkin visited Moscow University and met the Professor Barsov who had expelled him. The Prince asked the Professor if he remembered their earlier encounter. ‘Your Highness deserved it,’ replied Barsov. The Prince characteristically enjoyed the reply, embraced the aged Professor, and became his patron.⁴⁴