Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

It was then that the Empress looked properly at Second Lieutenant and Gentleman of the Bedchamber Potemkin and admired the striking looks of this ‘real Alcibiades’. Being a woman, she at once noticed his flowing and silky head of brown-auburn hair – ‘the best chevelure in all Russia’. She turned to Grigory Orlov and complained that it was more beautiful than hers: ‘I’ll never forgive you for having introduced me to this man,’ she joked. ‘It was you who wanted to present him but you’ll repent.’ Orlov would indeed regret it. These stories are told by people who knew Potemkin at this time – a cousin and a fellow Guardsman. Even if they owe as much to hindsight as history, they ring true.²²

In the eleven-and-a-half years between the coup and the beginning of their love affair, the Empress was watching Potemkin and preparing him for something. There was nothing inevitable in 1762 about his rise to almost supreme power, but the more she saw of him, the more fascinating she found his infinite originality. They were somehow converging on each other, running on apparently parallel lines that became closer and closer. At twenty-three, Potemkin flaunted his mimicry and intelligence to the Empress. She soon realized that there was much more to him than a gorgeous chevelure: he was a Greek scholar and an expert in theology and the cultures of Russia’s native peoples. But he appears scantily in the history of those years and always swathed in legend: while we sketch the daily life of Empress and Court, we catch glimpses of Potemkin, stepping out of the crowd of courtiers to engage in repartee with Catherine – and then disappearing again. He made sure these fleeting appearances were memorable.

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Lieutenant Potemkin had fallen in love with the Empress and he did not seem to mind who knew it. He was unafraid of the Orlovs or anyone else in the bearpit of Catherine’s unstable Court. This is the world he now entered, playing only for the highest stakes. The reign of Catherine II appears to us as long, glorious and stable – but this is with hindsight. At the time, the illicit regime of a female usurper and regicide seemed to the foreign ambassadors in St Petersburg to be ill-starred and destined to last only a short time. Potemkin, who had been in the capital for little over a year, had much to learn about both the Empress and the magnates of the Court.

‘My position is such that I have to observe the greatest caution,’ Catherine wrote to Poniatowksi, her ex-lover, who was threatening to visit her, on 30 June. ‘The least soldier of the Guard thinks when he sees me: “That is the work of my hands.” ’ Poniatowski was still in love with Catherine – he always would be – and now he longed to reclaim the Grand Duchess he had been forced to leave. Catherine’s reply leaves us in no doubt about the atmosphere in Petersburg nor about her irritation with Poniatowski’s naive passion: ‘Since I have to speak plainly, and you have resolved to ignore what I have been telling you for six months, the fact is that, if you come here, you are likely to get us both slaughtered.’²³

While she was busy creating the magnificent Court she believed she needed, she was simultaneously struggling behind the scenes to find stability amid so many intrigues. Almost at once, she was deluged with revelations of conspiracies against her, even among the Guardsmen who had just placed her on the throne. Catherine’s secret police, inherited from Peter III, was the Secret Expedition of the Senate, run throughout her reign by Stepan Sheshkovsky, the feared ‘knout-wielder’, under the Procurator-General. The Empress tried to reduce the use of the torture, especially after the suspect had already confessed, but it is impossible to know how far she succeeded: it is likely that the further from Petersburg, the more torture was liberally applied. Whipping and beating were more usual than real torture. The Secret Expedition was tiny – around only forty employees, a far cry from the legions employed by the NKVD or KGB of Soviet times – but there was little privacy: courtiers and foreigners were effectively watched by their own servants and guards while civil servants would not hesitate to inform on malcontents.²⁴ Catherine sometimes ordered political opponents to be watched and she was always ready to receive Sheshkovsky. There was no such thing as a police state in the eighteenth century, but, whatever her noble sentiments, the Secret Expedition was always ready to observe, arrest and interrogate – and they were particularly busy in these early years.