Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

This has often been presented as an imperial caprice to thank Poniatowski for his amorous services. But that tautological institution, the Serene Commonwealth of Poland, was not a frivolous matter. Poland was in every way unique in Europe, but it was an infuriating state of absurd contradictions: it was really not one country, but two states – the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; it had one parliament, the Sejm, but parallel governments; its kings were elected and almost powerless; when they appointed some officials, they could not dismiss them; its nobility, the szlachta, were almost omnipotent. Sejms were elected by the entire szlachta, which, since it included almost 10 per cent of the population, made Poland more democratic than England. One vote was enough to annul the proceedings of an entire Sejm – the famous liberum veto – which made the poorest delegate more powerful than the King. There was only one way around this: nobles could form a Confederation, a temporary alternative Sejm that would exist only until it had achieved its aims. Then it would disband. But really Poland was ruled by its magnates, ‘kinglets’ who owned estates as large as some countries and possessed their own armies. The Poles were extremely proud of their strange constitution, which kept this massive land in a humiliating chaos that they regarded as golden, unbridled freedom.

Choosing Polish kings was one of the favourite diplomatic sports of the eighteenth century. The contestants in this diplomatic joust were Russia, Prussia, Austria and France. Versailles had three traditional allies in the East, the Ottoman Empire, Sweden and Poland. But ever since 1716, when Peter the Great had guaranteed the flawed constitution of Poland, Russia’s policy was to dominate the Commonwealth by maintaining its absurd constitution, placing weak kings in Warsaw, encouraging the power of the magnates – and having a Russian army ever ready on the border. Catherine’s sole interest in all this was to preserve the Petrine protectorate over Poland. Poniatowski was the ideal figurehead for this because through his pro-Russian Czartoryski uncles, the ‘Familia’, backed by Russian guns and English money, Catherine could continue to control Poland.

Poniatowski began to dream of becoming king and then marrying Catherine, hence, as his biographer writes, he could combine the two great desires of his life.³¹ ‘If I desired the throne,’ he pleaded to her, ‘it was because I saw you on it.’ When told that this was impossible, he beseeched her: ‘Don’t make me king, but bring me back to your side.’³² This gallant if whining idealism did not auger well for his future relationship with the female paragon of raison d’état. Since the usual contestants in this game of king-making were exhausted after the Seven Years War, Catherine and Panin were able to pull it off. Catherine won Frederick the Great’s backing because Prussia had been ruined by the Seven Years War and was so isolated that this alliance with Russia, signed on 31 March/11 April 1764, was his only hope. On 26 August/6 September the Election Sejm, surrounded by Russian troops, elected Poniatowski king of Poland. He adopted the name Stanislas-Augustus.

The Prussian alliance – and the Polish protectorate – were meant to form the pillars of Panin’s much vaunted ‘Northern System’, in which the northern powers, including Denmark, Sweden and hopefully England, would restrain the ‘Catholic Bloc’ – the Bourbons of France and Spain, and the Habsburgs of Austria.³³

Now that Poniatowski was a king, would Catherine marry Grigory Orlov? There was a precedent of sorts. The Empress Elisabeth was rumoured to have married her Cossack chorister Alexei Razumovsky. He now lived in retirement in Moscow.

—

An old courtier called at Alexei Razumovsky’s Elisabethan Baroque palace and found him reading the Bible. The visitor was Chancellor Mikhail Vorontsov, performing his last political role before ‘travelling abroad’. He came to offer Razumovsky the rank of imperial highness. This was a polite way of asking if he had secretly married the Empress Elisabeth. Catherine and the Orlovs wished to know: was there a marriage certificate? Razumovsky must have smiled at this. He closed his Bible and produced a box of ebony, gold and pearl. He opened it to reveal an old scroll sealed with the imperial eagle…