Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Princess Dashkova arrived soon after Panin and the Grand Duke: ‘I ordered my maid to bring me a gala dress and hastily set off for the Winter Palace…’. The appearance of an over-excited teenage princess dressed to the nines caused more drama: first she could not get in and then, when she was recognized, the crowd was so dense that she could not push through. Finally, the slim girl was passed overhead by the soldiers, hand to hand, like a doll. With ‘one shout of approbation’, they ‘acknowledged me as their common friend’. All this was enough to turn anyone’s head and it certainly turned hers. ‘At length, my head giddy, my robe tattered…I rushed into Her Majesty’s presence.’⁵³

The Empress and the Princess embraced but, while the coup had already seized Petersburg, the advantage remained with Peter: his armies in nearby Livonia, primed for the Danish war, could easily crush the Guards. Then there was the fortress of Kronstadt, still under his control, which commanded the sea approaches to St Petersburg itself. Catherine, advised by Panin, the Orlovs and other senior officials such as Count Kyrill Razumovsky, sent Admiral Talyzin to win over Kronstadt.

The Emperor himself now had to be seized. The Empress ordered the Guards to prepare to march on Peterhof. Perhaps remembering how fine the Empress Elisabeth had looked in men’s clothes, Catherine demanded a Guardsman’s uniform. The soldiers eagerly shed the hated Prussian uniforms that Peter had made them wear and replaced them with their old tunics. If her men were tearing off their old clothes, so would Catherine. ‘She borrowed one suit from Captain Talyzin [cousin of the Admiral],’ wrote Dashkova, ‘and I procured another from Lieutenant Pushkin, two young officers of our respective sizes…of the ancient costume of the Preobrazhensky Guards.’⁵⁴

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While Catherine received her supporters in the Winter Palace, Peter arrived, as arranged, at Peterhof to celebrate the Feast of St Peter and St Paul with Catherine. Mon Plaisir was deserted. Catherine’s gala dress, abandoned on her bed, was an almost ghostly auspice – for she had changed her clothes in every sense. Peter III saw it and collapsed: he wept, drank and dithered.

The only one of his courtiers not to lose his head was the octogenarian Field-Marshal Count Burhard von Münnich, a German veteran of the palace revolutions of 1740/1, recently recalled from exile. Münnich proposed an immediate march on St Petersburg in the spirit of his grandfather – but this was no Peter the Great. The Tsar sent emissaries into Petersburg to negotiate or arrest Catherine, but each one defected to her: Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, who had ridden on the boards of Elisabeth’s sleigh during her coup twenty years earlier, volunteered to go but joined Catherine at once, falling to his knees. Already dejected and confused, Peter’s dwindling entourage trundled sadly back the eight versts to Oranienbaum. The grizzled Münnich finally persuaded the Emperor that he should seize the fortress of Kronstadt to control the capital. Emissaries were sent ahead. When Peter’s schooner arrived at Oranienbaum at about 10 p.m. on this white silvery night, he was drunk and had to be helped aboard by his mistress, Elisabeth Vorontsova, and the old Field-Marshal. Three hours later, he appeared off Kronstadt.

Münnich called to the Kronstadt watch that the Emperor was before them, but they shouted back: ‘There is no longer an Emperor.’ They declared that they only recognised Catherine II. It was too late: Admiral Talyzin had reached Kronstadt just in time. Peter lost all control of himself and events. He fainted in his cabin. On his return to Oranienbaum, the broken, tipsy Emperor, who had always foreseen this destiny, just wanted to abdicate and live in Holstein. He decided to negotiate.

In Petersburg, Catherine massed her Guards outside the Winter Palace. It was at this exhilarating and unforgettable moment that Potemkin contrived to meet his new Empress for the first time.⁵⁵

Skip Notes

*1 Potemkin too was described by foreigners as a giant. The best specimens were bound to join the Guards, but the physique of Russian men seems to have been undergoing a blossoming in this period, to judge by the comments of visitors: ‘The Russian peasant is a fine, stout, straight, well-looking man,’ gushed Lady Craven as she travelled the Empire.

*2 His strength was no legend – as witnessed by Baroness Dimsdale in 1781 when the Empress Catherine’s carriage on the fairground Flying Mountain, an early version of the ‘big dipper’, flew off its wooden groove: Orlov, ‘a remarkably strong man, stood behind the carriage and with his foot guided it in its proper direction’.

*3 This was the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg that so inspired Hitler and Goebbels in 1945 in the Berlin bunker when the death of President Roosevelt was supposed to split the Allies. Frederick exulted that ‘The Messalina of the North is dead’ and acclaimed Peter III’s ‘truly German heart.’