Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Diplomats claimed Orlov, ‘having grown up in alehouses and places of ill-repute,…led a life of a reprobate though he was kind and good-hearted’. It was said that ‘all his good qualities’ were ‘overshadowed by a licentiousness’ that ‘turned the Royal Court into a den of debauchery. There was hardly a single maiden at Court…not subjected to his importunings,’¹⁴ alleged Prince Shcherbatov, the self-appointed moral conscience of the Russian aristocracy.¹⁵ ‘The favourite’, wrote the British envoy, Sir Thomas Gunning, ‘is dissipated…’ and kept low company. As the 1760s went on, Catherine either ignored his infidelities like a worldly wife or did not know of them. Orlov however was not as simple as foreign diplomats claimed, but nor was he an intellectual or a statesman: he corresponded with Voltaire and Rousseau but probably to please Catherine and because it was expected of a cultured grandee of that time.

Catherine never overpromoted Orlov, who was to have only two big jobs: straight after the coup, he was appointed to head the Special Administration for Foreigners and Immigrants in charge of attracting colonists to the empty regions of the approaches to the Black Sea and the marches of the northern Caucasus. There he performed energetically and laid some of the foundations for Potemkin’s later success. In 1765, she appointed him Grand Master of Ordnance, head of the artillery, though it is significant that she felt the need to consult Panin, who advised her to scale down the powers of that position before giving it to him. Orlov never mastered the details of artillery and ‘seemed to know less about them than a schoolboy’, according to the French diplomat Durand, who met him at military exercises. Later he rose heroically to the challenge of fighting the Moscow Plague.¹⁶

Orlov swaggered around in Catherine’s wake, but he did not exert himself in exercising power and was never allowed the political independence she later delegated to Potemkin. While physically intimate with the Empress, Orlov was semi-detached from actual government.

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Potemkin was in a hurry to display his insolent cleverness before the Empress, whose informality gave him plenty of scope to do so. On one occasion, he carelessly wandered up to the salon where Grigory Orlov was playing cards with the Empress. He leaned on the card table and started looking at Orlov’s cards. Orlov whispered that he should leave, but Catherine intervened. ‘Leave him alone,’ she said. ‘He’s not interrupting us.’¹⁷

If the Orlovs decided to get rid of Potemkin, it was Nikita Panin who intervened at this ‘dangerous time’ to save him from whatever the Orlovs were planning.¹⁸ Late in the summer of 1762, Potemkin was given his first – and last – foreign assignment: to travel to Stockholm to inform Count Ivan Osterman, the Russian Ambassador to Sweden, of the change of regime.¹⁹ The Russian Court traditionally treated Sweden as a cooling area for overheated lovers. (Panin himself and Catherine’s first lover Serge Saltykov had been despatched there for similar reasons.) From the patchy evidence that we have of his early career, it seems that the irrepressible Potemkin had learned nothing from this shot across his bows and kept playing the fool in front of the Orlovs until he had to be taught a lesson.

On his return, Catherine remained as interested as ever in this original young friend. Potemkin, whom she later called her ‘pupil’, benefited from this generosity of spirit. On duty as gentleman of the bedchamber, he was sitting opposite the Empress at table when she asked him a question in French. He replied in Russian. When a courtier told him off for such rudeness, Potemkin exclaimed: ‘On the contrary, I think a subject should answer in the language in which he can best express his thoughts – and I’ve been studying Russian for twenty-two years.’²⁰ This was typical of his flirtatious impertinence but also of his defiance of the Gallomania of many courtiers. There is a legend that Catherine suggested he improve his French and arranged for him to be taught by a defrocked French priest named Chevalier de Vivarais, who had served under Dupleix at Pondicherry in India during the Seven Years War. This seedy mountebank was no chevalier and travelled with a ‘wife’ called Vaumale de Fages who apparently made a pleasurable contribution to Potemkin’s French lessons. The name has a courtesan’s ring to it: doubtless she was a most patient teacher. Vivarais was the first of a long line of sophisticated crooks whose company Potemkin enjoyed. As for French, it became his second language.²¹