Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin’s expulsion appeared to be something of a disaster. His godfather and mother felt that obscure young men like Grisha could not afford to be so lazy. Fortunately, he was already enrolled in the Guards, but he did not even have the money for the trip to St Petersburg, a sure sign that his family either disapproved or had cut him off. He drifted apart from his mother: indeed they hardly saw each other later in life. The Empress Catherine II later made her a lady-in-waiting and she was proud of her son – but openly disapproved of his love life. So this was not just a process of leaving home. He was leaving on his own. He borrowed 500 roubles, a considerable sum, from his friend Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, now Bishop of Mojaisk. Potemkin often said he meant to return it with interest, but the Bishop was to be savagely murdered later in this story before Potemkin rose to power. He never repaid it.

The life of a young Guardsman was idle, decadent and exceedingly expensive, but there was no surer path to greatness. Potemkin’s timing was opportune – Russia was fighting the Seven Years War against Prussia, while in Petersburg Empress Elisabeth was dying. The Guards were already seething with intrigue.

On arrival in St Petersburg, Potemkin reported for duty at the Headquarters of his Horse-Guards Regiment, which comprised a little village of barracks, houses and stables built round a quadrangle by the Neva river near the Smolny Convent. The Regiment had its own church, hospital, bathhouse and prison. There was a meadow behind it for feeding horses and holding parades. The oldest Guards Regiments – such as the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky – were founded by Peter the Great first as play regiments but then as his loyal forces in the vicious struggle against the corps of state musketeers, the Streltsy. His successors added others. In 1730, Empress Anna founded Potemkin’s regiment, the Garde-à-Cheval – the Horse-Guards.⁴⁵

Guards officers were quite unable to withstand ‘the seductions of the metropolis’.⁴⁶ When these teenage playboys were not carousing, they fought a sometimes fatal guerrilla war through the balls and backstreets with the Noble Cadet Corps that was based in the Menshikov Palace.⁴⁷ So many young bloods were ruined by debts, or exhausted by endless whoring in the Metshchansky district or by games of whist or faro, that more ascetic parents preferred their boys to join an ordinary regiment, like the father in The Captain’s Daughter who exclaims, ‘Petrusha is not going to Petersburg. What would he learn, serving in Petersburg? To be a spendthrift and a rake? No, let him be a soldier and not a fop in the Guards!’⁴⁸

Potemkin soon became known to the raciest daredevils among the Guards. At twenty-two, he was tall – well over six foot – broad and highly attractive to women. Potemkin ‘had the advantage of having the finest head of hair in all Russia’. His looks and talents were so striking that he was nicknamed ‘Alcibiades’, a superlative compliment in a neo-Classical age.^*9 Educated people at that time studied Plutarch and Thucydides, so the character of the Athenian statesman was familiar – intelligent, cultured, sensuous, inconsistent, debauched and flamboyant. Plutarch raved about the ‘brilliance’ of Alcibiades’ ‘physical beauty’.⁴⁹ Potemkin immediately attracted attention as a wit – he was an outstanding mimic, a gift that was to carry him far beyond the realm of comedians.⁵⁰ It was soon to win the admiration of the most glamorous ruffians in the Guards – the Orlovs – and they in turn would draw him into the intrigues of the imperial family.

The Guards protected the imperial palaces, and it was this that gave them their political significance.⁵¹ Being in the capital and close to the Court, ‘the officers have more opportunity to be known,’ a Prussian diplomat observed.⁵² They had the run of the city, ‘admitted to the games, dances, soirées and theatrical performances of Court into the interior of that sanctuary’.⁵³ Their duties at the palaces gave them a detailed but irreverent acquaintance with magnates and courtiers – and a sense of personal involvement in the rivalries of the imperial family itself.