Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin no longer visited Court. He saw no one, studied religion, grew a long beard and considered taking the tonsure of a monk. He was always prone to religious contemplation and mysticism. This true son of the Orthodox Church often retired to monasteries to pray. While there was always play-acting in his antics, his contemporaries, who attacked him whenever possible, never doubted that he was genuinely tempted by a life of prayer. Nor did they doubt his ascetic and very Russian disgust with the pursuit of worldly success, particularly his own.²⁸ But the crisis was much more serious than that. Some of Potemkin’s charm derived from the wild giddiness of his mood swings, the symptom of a manic personality that explains much of his strange behaviour. He collapsed into a depression. His confidence was shattered. The breakdown was so serious that some accounts even claim that he put his eye out himself ‘to free it from the blemish which it derived from the accident’.²⁹

There was vanity in his disappearance too: his blind eye was certainly half closed – but not lost.^*1 He was ashamed of it and probably believed that the Empress would now be disgusted by him. Potemkin’s over-sensitivity was one of his most winning qualities. Even as a famous statesman, he almost always refused to pose for portraits because he felt disfigured. He convinced himself that his career was over. Certainly his opponents revelled in his ruined looks: the Orlovs nicknamed him after the one-eyed giants of Homer’s Odyssey. ‘Alcibiades’, they said, had become the ‘Cyclops’.

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Potemkin was gone for eighteen lost months. The Empress sometimes asked the Orlovs about him. It is said she even cancelled some of her little gatherings she so missed his mimicry. She sent him messages through anonymous lady-friends. Catherine later told Potemkin that Countess Bruce always informed her that he still loved her.³⁰ Finally, according to Samoilov, the Empress sent this message through the go-between: ‘It is a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him.’³¹ This must have raised his hopes. When Catherine drove by his retreat, she is said to have ordered Grigory Orlov to summon Potemkin back to Court. The honourable and frank Orlov always showed respect for Potemkin to the Empress. Besides he probably believed that, with Potemkin’s looks ruined and his confidence broken, he was no longer a threat.³²

Suffering can foster toughness, patience and depth. One senses that the one-eyed Potemkin who returned to Court was a different man from the Alcibiadean colt who left it. Eighteen months after losing his eye, Potemkin still sported a piratical bandage round his head, which suggest the contradictions of shyness and showmanship that were both part of his personality. Catherine welcomed him back to Court. He reappeared in his old position at the Synod; and when Catherine celebrated the third anniversary of the coup by presenting silver services to her thirty-three leading supporters, Potemkin was remembered near the bottom of the list, far below grandees like Kirill Razumovsky, Panin and Orlov. The latter was firmly and permanently at her side, but she had obviously not forgotten her reckless suitor.³³

So the Orlovs devised a more agreeable way to remove him. One legend tells how Grigory Orlov suggested to the Empress that Kirill Razumovsky’s daughter, Elisabeth, would be a most advantageous match for the Guardsman from Smolensk and Catherine did not object.³⁴ There is no evidence of this courtship but we know that Potemkin later helped the girl – and always got on well with her father who ‘received him like a son.’