Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

On Sunday evenings there was a court; on Mondays a French comedy; on Thursdays, there was usually a French tragedy and then a ballet; on Fridays or Saturdays there was often a fancy-dress masquerade at the Palace. Five thousand guests attended these vast and semi-public fêtes. Catherine and her Court displayed their magnificence to the foreign ambassadors and to each other. What better guide to such an evening than Casanova? ‘The ball went on for sixty hours…Everywhere I see joy, freedom and the great profusion of candles…’. He heard a fellow masked guest say: ‘There’s the Empress…you will see Grigory Orlov in a moment; he has orders to follow her at a distance…’. Guests pretended not to recognize her. ‘Everyone recognized him because of his great stature and the way he always kept his head bent forward.’ Casanova the international freeloader ate as much as he could, watched a contredance quadrille executed perfectly in the French style and then, naturally being who he was, met an ex-mistress (now kept by the Polish Ambassador) whose delights he rediscovered. By this point, he had long since lost sight of the Empress.⁸

Catherine enjoyed dressing up and being masked. On one occasion, disguised as an officer in her pink domino (loose cloak) and regimentals, she recorded some of her slightly erotic conversations with guests who genuinely did not recognize her. One princess thought her a handsome man and danced with her. Catherine whispered, ‘What a happy man I am,’ and they flirted. Catherine kissed her hand; she blushed. ‘Please say who you are,’ asked the girl. ‘I am yours,’ replied Catherine, but she would not identify herself.⁹

Catherine seldom ate much in the evening and virtually always retired by 10.30 p.m., accompanied by Grigory Orlov. She liked to be asleep by eleven.¹⁰ Her disciplined routine formed the public world of Court, but Potemkin’s wit had won him access to its private world. This brought him closer to the vigilant, violent Orlovs, but it also gave him the chance to let the Empress know how passionately he felt. Potemkin would pay dearly for his recklessness.

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In the early evenings, Catherine invited an inner circle of about eighteen to her apartments and later to the extension of the Winter Palace that she called her Little Hermitage. Her habitués included Countess Bruce, that attractive fixer whom Catherine trusted in the most private matters; the Master of Horse, Lev Naryshkin, whom she called her ‘born clown’,¹¹ the epitome of the rich and frivolous Russian nobleman; the Orlovs of course – and, increasingly, among others, Potemkin.

The Russian Court was much less stiff and formal than many in Western Europe, including that of George III. Even when Catherine received ministers who were not part of her private coterie, they sat and worked together, not like British Prime Ministers, who had to stand in George III’s presence unless he granted them the rare privilege of sitting. In Catherine’s Little Hermitage, this casualness went even further. Catherine played cards – whist or faro usually – until around 10 p.m. Guardsmen like Orlov and Potemkin were instantly at home, since they had spent much of their youth sitting at the green baize tables. They also took part in word and paper games, charades and even singsongs.

Grigory Orlov was the master of the salon: Catherine gave her lover the rooms above her own in the Winter Palace so that he could descend the green staircase without being announced. While Catherine took a prim view of risqué jokes in her inner circle, she was open in her displays of affection with Orlov. A visiting Englishman later recorded, ‘they did not forbear their caresses for his presence’.¹² Orlov adored music and his good humour set the tone of these evenings, when the Empress herself almost became one of a circle of friends. ‘After dinner,’ the Court Journal recorded on one evening, ‘Her Imperial Majesty graciously returned to her inner apartments, and the gentlemen in the card room themselves sang songs, to the accompaniment of various wines; then the Court singers and servants…and, on the orders of Count G. G. Orlov, the NCOs and soldiers of the guard at Tsarskoe Selo, sang gay songs in another room.’¹³

The Orlovs had achieved their ambitions – up to a point. While the marriage was now a dead letter, Orlov was the Empress’s constant companion, which in itself gave him influence. But it was certainly she who ran the government. There was a fault in the design of the Orlovs as a political force: the brains, the brawn and the charm were not united in one man but were distributed with admirable fairness among the five brothers. Alexei Orlov, Le Balafre, had the ruthlessness; Fyodor the culture and political savvy; while Grigory, who needed all of the above, possessed only handsomeness, a wonderful nature and solid good sense.