Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

By the early 1750s, the marriage had deteriorated from awkwardness to misery. Catherine had every reason to ruin the reputation of Peter, but she also showed pity and kindness towards him until his behaviour began to threaten her very existence. Yet in this aspect her accounts of his backwardness and rudeness are not exaggerated: the marriage had still not been consummated. Peter may have had a physical malformation like that of Louis XVI. Certainly he was an inhibited and ignorant late developer.⁵ The details of the marriage would chill any female heart: Catherine lay alone in bed while her puny husband played with dolls and toy soldiers and sometimes scratched away at a violin beside her; he kept his dogs in her room and made her stand guard for hours with a musket.⁶

Most of her flirtations came to nothing, but Serge Saltykov, then twenty-six and a scion of old Muscovite nobility, was different: he was ‘handsome as the dawn’ according to Catherine, but, reading between the lines, he was something of a cheap ladies’ man. She fell for him. He was probably her first lover. Amazingly, steps were now taken at the highest level to make sure this was indeed the case – the Empress required an heir no matter who was the father.⁷

After one miscarriage, Catherine found herself pregnant again. The moment the child was born on 20 September 1754, the heir, named Paul Petrovich, was taken away by the Empress. Catherine was left in tears, ‘cruelly abandoned’ for hours in her sweaty and soiled linen: ‘nobody worried about me’.⁸ She comforted herself by reading Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois and Tacitus’ Annals. Saltykov was sent away.

Who was the father of the future Emperor Paul I, from whom the rest of the Romanov dynasty, down to Nicholas II, were descended? Was it Saltykov or Peter? Catherine’s claim that the marriage was never consummated may or may not be true: she had every reason to belittle Peter and she later considered disinheriting Paul. He grew up to be ugly and pug-nosed while Saltykov, nicknamed ‘le beau Serge’, was admired for his looks. But then Catherine slyly noted the ugliness of Saltykov’s brother. Most likely, Saltykov was the natural father.

It was possible to feel some pity for Peter, who was so unqualified for the venomous subtleties of Court intrigues, but it was impossible to like this vainglorious, drunken bully. One day Catherine found an immense rat hanging in Peter’s rooms. When she asked him what it was doing there, he replied that the rodent had been convicted of a crime and deserved the highest penalty according to military law. Its ‘crime’ had been to climb over Peter’s cardboard fortress and eat two sentinels made of starch. Another time he broke down in front of Catherine and told her he knew that Russia would be the ruin of him.⁹

Catherine’s Memoirs claim that it was only when his wilful foolishness endangered her and Paul that this innocent young mother began to consider the future. She implies that her ultimate accession to the throne was almost preordained. This was far from true – Catherine plotted to usurp the throne with an ever changing cast of conspirators throughout the 1750s, from Elisabeth’s Chancellor to the English envoy. As Elisabeth’s health began to fail and Peter took to drink, as Europe edged closer to the Seven Years War and the strings of Russian politics tightened, she had every intention of surviving – and on top.

Yet her domestic life was freer, now she had delivered an heir. She began to enjoy the pleasures of being an attractive woman in a Court fragrant with amorous intrigue, as she herself explained:

I have just said I was attractive. Consequently one half of the road to temptation was already covered and it is only human in such situations that one should not stop halfway. For to tempt and be tempted are closely allied…Perhaps escape is the only solution but there are situations when escape is impossible for how can one escape…in the atmosphere of a Court?…and if you do not run away, nothing is more difficult…than to avoid something that fundamentally attracts you.¹⁰

In 1755, at a ball at Oranienbaum, the Grand Duke’s country palace near Peterhof, Catherine met Stanislas Poniatowski, aged twenty-three, the Polish secretary to the new English envoy.¹¹ It happened that Poniatowski was the representative of Poland’s powerful pro-Russian party, based around his uncles, the Czartoryski brothers, and their cousinhood, hence known as the ‘Familia’. But he was also the young ideal of the cultured Enlightened man of the world, with a streak of romantic, melancholic idealism. The pair fell in love.¹² It was her first true love affair in which her feelings were passionately reciprocated.