Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Catherine charted a special government career for her young protégé. She knew his religious interests well enough to appoint Potemkin assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, the council created by Peter the Great to run the Orthodox Church. The Procurator was administrator and judge in all matters religious – the equivalent of the Procurator-General in secular matters. The Empress cared enough about him to draft his instructions herself. Entitled ‘Instruction to our Gentleman of the Monarch’s Bedchamber Grigory Potemkin’, and dated 4 September 1763, her first letter to him, which shows the maternal tone she favoured with younger men, reads:

From the ukase given about you to the Holy Synod: though you know well why you have been appointed to this place, we are ordering the following for the best fulfilment of your duty…1. For better understanding of the affairs run from this place…2. it will be useful for you to make it a rule to come to the Synod when they are not sitting…3. To know the agenda in advance…4. You will have to listen with diligent attention…

Point six decreed that, in the event of the Procurator-General’s illness, ‘you will have to report to us all business and write our orders down in the Synod. In a word, you will have to learn all things which will lighten the course of business and help you to understand it better.’²² Potemkin’s first period in the Synod was short, possibly because of his problems with the Orlovs, but we know from Decree 146 of the Synod’s records that he attended the Synod on a day-to-day basis during September.²³ He was on the rise.

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While paying court to the Empress and beginning his political career, Potemkin did not restrict himself. Alcibiades won himself a reputation as a lover. There was no reason why he should be loyal to Catherine while Orlov was in possession of the field. Potemkin’s stalwart but uninspiring nephew, Alexander Samoilov, recorded his uncle as paying ‘special attention’ to a ‘certain well-born young girl’ who ‘was not indifferent towards him’. Infuriatingly he added: ‘whose name I will not reveal’.²⁴ Some historians believe this was Catherine’s confidante Countess Bruce, who was to gain notoriety as the supposed ‘éprouveuse’²⁵ who ‘tried out’ Catherine’s lovers. Countess Bruce unselfishly did all she could to help Potemkin with Catherine: in that worldly court, there was no better foundation for a political alliance than an amorous friendship. Certainly Countess Bruce always found it hard to resist a young man. But the Countess was already thirty-five, like Catherine – hardly the ‘girl’, who remains mysterious.²⁶

Whoever it was, Catherine let Potemkin continue his melodramatic role as her cavalier servente. Was he really in love with Catherine? There is no need to over-analyse his motives: it is impossible in matters of love to separate the individual from the position. He was ambitious and was devoted to Catherine – the Empress and the woman. Then he suddenly disappeared.

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Legend has it that sometime that year Grigory and Alexei Orlov invited Potemkin for a game of billiards. When he arrived, the Orlovs turned on him and beat him up horribly. Potemkin’s left eye was damaged. The wound became infected. Potemkin allowed a village quack – one Erofeich – to bind it up, but the peasant remedy he applied only made it worse. The wound turned septic and Potemkin lost his eye.²⁷

Potemkin’s declarations to Catherine and the fight with the Orlovs are both part of the Potemkin mythology: there are other accounts that he lost the eye playing tennis and then went to the quack, whose ointment burned it. But it is hard to imagine Potemkin on a tennis court. The fight story was widely believed, because Potemkin was overstepping the limits of prudence by courting Catherine, but it is unlikely that it really happened because Grigory Orlov always behaved decently to his young rival.

This was his first setback – however it occurred. In two years he had gone from arriving poor and obscure from Moscow to being the indulged protégé of the Empress of all the Russias herself. But he had peaked far too early. Losing the sight in his eye was tragic, but ironically his withdrawal from Court made strategic sense. This was the first of many occasions when Potemkin used timely withdrawals to concentrate the mind of the Empress.