Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Just a few days before, on 30 August, a good-looking ensign in the Horse-Guards, Alexander Vassilchikov, aged twenty-eight, was formally appointed adjutant-general to the Empress and moved into a Winter Palace apartment. Courtiers knew that they had been lovers for a month. After being introduced to Vassilchikov, at the behest of Nikita Panin, Catherine had watched him closely. At Tsarskoe Selo, when he escorted her carriage, she presented him with a gold snuff-box engraved ‘For the good bearing of the bodyguards’, an unusual reward for sentry duty. On 1 August, he was appointed gentleman of the bedchamber.⁴⁷

When Catherine heard that Grigory Orlov was on his way from Fokshany, she was alarmed but also furious, because his abandonment of the already tottering talks exposed her love life to the gaze of the cabinets of Europe. Indeed the foreign ambassadors were confused: they had presumed Orlov was Catherine’s partner for life. They were used to the balance between Panins and Orlovs, now allied to the Chernyshev brothers. No one knew the political effects of the arrival of Vassilchikov, except that the Orlovs were in decline and the Panins were in the ascendant.

Orlov and Catherine had drifted apart for a couple of years: we do not know exactly why. She was now forty and he thirty-eight: perhaps they both longed for younger partners. He had never really shared her intellectual interests. Politically she trusted him and they had been through much together: they shared a son. But Orlov had his intellectual limits – Diderot, who later met him in Paris, thought he was like ‘a boiler always boiling but never cooking anything’. Perhaps Potemkin’s company made Orlov’s uncomplicated solidity less attractive to Catherine. Yet it is a mystery why she did not choose Potemkin to replace him. Perhaps after years of repaying her debt to Orlov and his family, she was not yet ready for Potemkin’s dominant and eccentric character. Later, she regretted not summoning him at once.

On the very day that Orlov departed for the south, she later told Potemkin, somebody revealed to her the extent of his infidelities. It was then Catherine admitted that Orlov ‘would have remained for ever, had he not been the first to tire’. This is usually taken at face value but she must at least have suspected his peccadilloes for years. His omnivorous sexual appetites were common knowledge among the ambassadors. ‘Anything is good enough for him,’ Durand claimed. ‘He loves like he eats – he is as happy with a Kalmyk or a Finnish girl as with the prettiest girl at Court. That’s the sort of oaf he is.’ Whatever the real reason, the Empress decided she ‘could no longer trust him’.⁴⁸

Catherine negotiated a full settlement with Orlov with a generosity that was to be her lodestar in love: he received an annual pension of 150,000 roubles, 100,000 roubles to set up his household, and the neo-Classical Marble Palace, then under construction, 10,000 serfs, all sorts of other treasures and privileges – and two silver services, one for ordinary use and one for special occasions.⁴⁹ In 1763, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis, Maria Theresa’s consort, had granted him the title prince of the Holy Roman Empire. The title prince, or kniaz in Russian, existed in Russia only among the descendants of ancient royal houses.^*3 If eighteenth-century tsars wished to raise someone to prince, they requested the Holy Roman Emperor to create him an imperial prince. Now Catherine allowed her ex-lover to use his title.

In May 1773, Prince Orlov returned to court and resumed his official positions, though Vassilchikov remained favourite – and Potemkin was left, impatiently suspended in limbo.⁵⁰

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It must have been a disappointed Potemkin who returned to the war. At least Catherine promoted him to lieutenant-general on 21 April 1773. The old establishment was envious. ‘The promotion of Potemkin is for me a pill I cannot swallow’, wrote Simon Vorontsov to his brother.⁵¹ ‘When he was a lieutenant of the Guards, I was already a colonel and he has certainly served less than me…’.⁵² Vorontsov decided to resign the moment the campaign was over. There is a feeling of exhaustion and reluctance about this frustrating, bad-tempered campaign, even among the veterans of Rumiantsev’s victories. There was another attempt to negotiate, this time in Bucharest. But the moment had passed.