Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Without cameras or eye-witnesses, it is impossible for historians to know what really happened behind the doors of bedrooms and cabinet rooms—unless the protagonists wrote frank letters. Catherine and Potemkin wrote thousands of such letters on love and power; we know how they spoke and thought, and the exceptional intensity of their passion. We know more about them than we do about many politicians today—even in the age of Facebook and Wikileaks. ‘Can one love anybody else after having known you?’ wrote Catherine. ‘There’s not a man in the world that equals you…Oh Monsieur Potemkin! What trick have you played to unbalance a mind that was once one of the best in Europe?’ Their outrageously libertine lifestyle and exuberant political triumphs certainly titillated Western critics of Russian success and excess—’This is Potemkin,’ wrote Byron, ‘a great thing in days when homicide and harlotry made great’—while the British newspapers propagated stories of Catherine’s nymphomania and Potemkin’s false villages. But those who really knew Catherine and Potemkin regarded them as utterly singular, brilliant, ambitious and complementary in their talents: ‘No wonder they love each other,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘they’re exactly the same.’ Catherine was probably the greatest female leader of modern times, while the Prince de Ligne thought Potemkin ‘the most extraordinary man I ever met…Genius, genius and more genius.’ Together, they saw themselves as patriotic statesmen serving Russia—crown, nation and state. They were supreme politicians and thoughtful visionaries who trusted and admired each other because they were also personal partners.

Yet they were the ultimate realists, too. Potemkin defined the politician’s art thus: ‘to improve on events.’ And they did more than that. Their mission was to expand the empire into the southern regions of Ukraine they dubbed ‘New Russia’. They annexed swathes of this territory (1774, 1775 and 1791) and Crimea (1783), where they founded Russia’s Black Sea navy, the new naval base Sebastopol, and many new cities including the port of Odessa, as well as advancing into Georgia in the Caucasus (1783). The colossal achievements of Catherine and Potemkin in the south are equivalent to those of Peter of Great in the north. They altered the balance of power in Europe, making Russia a power with new Near Eastern and Mediterranean interests. Their colonization of New Russia and annexation of Crimea changed Russia’s political centre of gravity and her vision of herself as imperial power. It is a perspective that survived the fall of the Romanov dynasty.

After the mayhem of 1917 and the civil war, Lenin and Stalin shrewdly and brutally managed to keep together most of the Romanovs’ empire (losing only Poland, Finland and—temporarily—the Baltics) by creating the façade of a voluntary Soviet Union of fifteen republics. Stalin had little time for Catherine and Potemkin’s louche extravagance, preferring severe, macho role models such as Peter the Great, but he admired them as politicians: ‘the genius of Catherine,’ he said, ‘lay in her choice of Prince Potemkin…to govern the state.’ However, when the USSR collapsed in 1991, Russia lost all the republics including the most important, Ukraine.

When this book was published in 2000, just as that dynamic and ruthless ex-KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, was elected president, I was surprised to find the apparatchiks of his new regime were keen to read and discuss it—even to the extent of organising surreal secret meetings with this English historian to discuss statesmen dead for two hundred years. Putin and his henchmen regarded the fall of the USSR and loss of empire as one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, and the Kremlin looked to Catherine and Potemkin as unlikely heroes, regarding their achievements in the Caucasus, Crimea and Ukraine as talismanic to Russia’s status as a great power.

Catherine and Potemkin had been long neglected by Soviet history as too decadent, aristocratic and feminine. When I started to research this book in Russian archives in the mid-1990s, some of their papers had not even been studied since the reign of Nicholas II. Now they are once again in fashion, inspirations to a new regime that combines imperial nostalgia with nationalistic ambition: the early twenty-first-century Kremlin fused the gilded majesty of the Romanov Empire with the grim glory of a Stalinist superpower into a peculiar modern hybrid, a new autocracy embellished with supposedly democratic institutions and the trappings of modernity in the Internet age.