Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

During the months that Empress Elisabeth was suspended between life and death, groups of Guardsmen became increasingly embroiled in plans to change the succession to exclude the hated Grand Duke Peter and replace him with his popular wife, Grand Duchess Catherine. Guarding the imperial palaces, Potemkin now had the chance to observe the romantic figure of Grand Duchess Catherine, who would soon rule in her own right as Catherine II. She was never beautiful, but she possessed qualities far superior to that ephemeral glaze: the indefinable magic of imperial dignity combined with sexual attractiveness, natural gaiety and an all-conquering charm that touched everyone who met her. The best description of Catherine at this age was written a few years earlier by Stanislas Poniatowski, her Polish lover:

She had reached that time in life when any woman to whom beauty had been granted will be at her best. She had black hair, a radiant complexion and a high colour, large prominent and expressive blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, a pointed nose, a kissable mouth…slender figure, tall rather than small; she moved quickly yet with great nobility and had an agreeable voice and a gay good-tempered laugh.

Potemkin had not met her yet – but just about the time of his arrival in Petersburg she began to cultivate the Guards, who ardently admired her and hated her husband, the Heir. So it was that the provincial boy from Chizhova found himself perfectly placed to join the conspiracy that would place her on the throne – and bring the two of them together. Catherine herself overheard one general declare the gallant sentiments that young Potemkin would soon share: ‘There goes a woman for whose sake an honest man would gladly suffer several lashes of the knout.’⁵⁴

Skip Notes

*1 The date of his birth is, like everything else about him, mysterious because there is much confusion about the age that he went to live in Moscow and that he was put down for the Guards. There is an argument for saying he was born in 1742, the date given by his nephew Samoilov. The dates and military records contradict each other without creating a particularly interesting debate. This date is the most likely.

*2 When Grigory Potemkin, who was to prove even more shocking to Western sensibilities, rose to greatness in St Petersburg, it was felt he required a famous ancestor. A portrait of the foul-tempered, xenophobic and pedantic Ambassador of the era of the Sun King and the Merry Monarch was found, possibly a present from the English Embassy, and placed in Catherine the Great’s Hermitage.

*3 This continued right up to 1917. When Rasputin’s enemies grumbled to Nicholas II about his bathing with his female devotees, the last Tsar retorted that this was a usual habit of the common people.

*4 Today, there is little on the Potemkin side of the village except Catherine’s Well and the hut of two octogenarian peasants who subsist on bees. On the serf’s side, there is just the ruins of the church. In Communist times, the villagers say, the commissars kept cattle in ‘Potemkin’s church’ but all the cattle sickened and died. The villagers are still digging for an Aladdin’s Cave which they call ‘Potemkin’s Gold’. But all they have found are the bodies of eighteenth-century women, probably Potemkin’s sisters, in the graveyard.

*5 He did endow the round Nikitskaya Church (Little Nikitskaya) and it was rebuilt by his heirs. But he was still planning the big project when he died. Historians who believe he married Catherine II in Moscow point to this church as the venue for the wedding.

*6 The young Emperor, who moved the Court back to Moscow, died in the suburban Palace which today contains the War College archives (RGVIA), where most of Potemkin’s papers are stored.

*7 Favourites had developed by the seventeenth century into the minister–favourites such as Olivares in Spain and Richelieu and Mazarin in France, who were not the King’s lovers but able politicians chosen to run the increasingly heavy bureaucracies. When Louis XIV chose to rule himself on the death of Mazarin in 1661, the fashion ended. But Russia’s female rulers, beginning with Catherine I in 1725, reinvented it.

*8 In the Smolensk Local History Museum, there is just such a glass goblet which is said to have belonged to Potemkin. The story goes that when Catherine the Great passed through Smolensk she drank a toast from it.

*9 Alcibiades was famously bisexual – his lovers included Socrates – but there was never any suggestion that Potemkin emulated his sexual tastes. The other eighteenth-century figure known as Alcibiades was a favourite of King Gustavus III of Sweden and later friend of Tsar Alexander – Count Armfeld was ‘l’Alcibiade du Nord’.

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  THE GUARDSMAN AND THE GRAND DUCHESS: CATHERINE’S COUP

Heaven knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant.

Grand Duke Peter, in Catherine the Great, Memoirs