Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Orlov was the son of a provincial governor and not of wealthy higher nobility. He was descended from a Streltsy officer who was sentenced to beheading by Peter the Great. When it was his turn to die, Orlov’s grandfather stepped up to the reeking block and kicked the head of the man before him out of the way. The Tsar was so impressed with his swagger that he pardoned him. Orlov was not particularly clever – ‘very handsome’, wrote the French envoy Breteuil to his Minister Choiseul in Paris, ‘but…very stupid’. On his return in 1759, Orlov was appointed adjutant to Count Peter Shuvalov, Grand Master of Ordnance, the cousin of Potemkin’s university patron. Orlov soon managed to seduce Shuvalov’s mistress, Princess Elena Kurakina. It was Orlov’s luck that Shuvalov died before he could avenge himself.

Early in 1761, Catherine and Orlov fell in love. After the slightly precious sincerity of Poniatowski, Grigory Orlov provided physical vigour, bearlike kindness and, more importantly, the political muscle that would soon be needed. As early as 1749, Catherine had been able to offer her husband the support of those Guards officers who were devoted to her. Now she received the support of the Orlov brothers and their merry band. The most impressive in terms of ability and ruthlessness was Grigory’s brother Alexei. He closely resembled Grigory, except that he was scar-faced and of ‘brute force and no heart’, the qualities that made the Orlovs such an effective force in 1761.²²

Orlov and his fellow Guardsmen discussed various daring plans to raise Catherine to the throne in late 1761 – though probably in the vaguest terms. The precise order of events is obscure but it was also around this time that young Potemkin first came into contact with the Orlovs. One source recalled that it was Potemkin’s reputation as a wit that attracted the attention of Grigory Orlov, though they shared other interests too – both were known as successful seducers and daring gamblers. They never became friends exactly, but Potemkin now moved in the same galaxy.²³

Catherine needed such allies. In the last months of Elisabeth’s life, she was under no illusions about Grand Duke Peter, who talked openly of divorcing Catherine, marrying his mistress Vorontsova and reversing Russia’s alliances to save his hero Frederick of Prussia. Peter was a danger to her, her son, her country – and himself. She saw her choices starkly:

Primo – to share His Highness’s fate, whatever it might be; Secundo – tobe exposed at any moment to anything he might undertake for, or against, me; Tertio – to take a route independent of any such eventuality…it was a matter of either perishing with (or because of) him, or else saving myself, the children, and perhaps the State, from the wreckage…

Just at the moment that Elisabeth began her terminal decline and Catherine needed to be ready to save herself ‘from the wreckage’ and lead a possible coup, the Grand Duchess discovered that she was pregnant by Grigory Orlov. She carefully concealed her belly, but, politically, she was hors de combat.

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At 4 p.m. on the afternoon of 25 December 1761, the Empress Elisabeth, now fifty, had become so weak that she no longer had the strength to vomit blood. She just lay writhing on her bed, her breathing slow and rasping, her limbs swollen like balloons, half filled with fluid, in the imperial apartments of the unfinished, Baroque Winter Palace in St Petersburg. The courtiers, bristling with hope and fear of what her death would bring them, were gathered around her. The death of a ruling monarch was even more public than a royal birth: it was a formal occasion with its own etiquette, because the demise of the Empress was the passing of sacred power. The pungence of sweat, vomit, faeces and urine must have overwhelmed the sweetness of candles, the perfume of the ladies and the vodka breath of the men. Elisabeth’s personal priest was praying, but she no longer recited with him.²⁴

The succession of the spindly, pockmarked Grand Duke Peter, now thirty-four and ever more uncomfortable with Russian culture and people, was accepted, though hardly with jubilance. There was already an undercurrent of anxiety about Peter and hope about Catherine. Many of the magnates knew the Heir was patently ill-suited to his new role. They had to make the appropriate calculations for their careers and families, but the key to survival was always silence, patience and vigilance.