Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

When the court returned to town from Tsarskoe Selo on 9 April, Potemkin moved out of Yelagin’s house, where he had been living since he became the Empress’s lover, into his newly decorated apartments in the Winter Palace: ‘they are said to be splendid’, Countess Sievers reported the next day. Potemkin was now a familiar sight around the town: ‘I often see Potemkin who rushes around in a coach and six.’ His fine carriage, expensive horses and speed became elements of his public image. If the Empress went out, Potemkin was usually in attendance. When Catherine went to the theatre on 28 April, ‘Potemkin was in the box,’ noticed Countess Sievers. Royalty, indeed sometimes the entire audience, often talked throughout the play – Louis XV irritated Voltaire with this royal habit. Here, Potemkin ‘talked to the Empress all the way through the play; he enjoys her greatest confidence.’¹²

Potemkin’s new rooms were directly beneath Catherine’s in the Winter Palace. Both their apartments looked out on to the Palace Square and into an internal courtyard, but not on to the Neva river. When Potemkin wished to visit – which he did, unannounced, whenever he liked – he came up (as Orlov had come down) the spiral staircase, as always decorated with green carpets. Green was the colour of amorous corridors – for the staircase linking Louis XV’s apartments to the boudoir of the Marquise de Pompadour was green too.

Potemkin was given apartments in all the imperial palaces, including the Summer Palace in town and Peterhof outside, but they were most often at the Catherine (or Great) Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, where Potemkin reached the imperial bedroom by crossing a corridor so chilly that their letters often warn each other against traversing this arctic tundra. ‘Sorry you’re sick,’ she wrote. ‘It is a good lesson for you: don’t go barefoot on staircases. If you want to get rid of it, take a little tobacco.’¹³ They rarely spent the night together (as Catherine did with some later favourites), because Potemkin liked to gamble and talk late and lie in all morning, while the Empress awoke early. She had the metabolism of a tidy German schoolmistress, though with a strong vein of sensuality; his was that of a wild frontiersman.

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At Catherine’s intimate evenings, Potemkin often burst in, unannounced, dishevelled in a Turkish dressing gown or some other species of wrap, usually with nothing underneath so that his hairy chest and legs were quite visible. Whatever the weather, he would be barefoot. If it was cold, he threw on a fur cloak over the top which gave him the look of a giant who could not decide if he was a brute or a dandy. In addition to all this, he liked to wear a pink bandana round his head. He was an Oriental vision far from the Voltairean tastes of the Court, which was why she called him ‘bogatr’, the knightly Slavic hero from the mythology of Rus. Even in the earliest days of the affair, Potemkin knew that he was different from everybody else: if summoned, he might languidly decide not to turn up. He appeared in the Empress’s rooms when it suited him and never bothered to be announced, nor waited to be summoned: he lumbered in and out of her apartments like an aimless bear, sometimes the wittiest member of the party, other times silently, not even bothering to acknowledge the Empress herself.

His tastes were ‘truly barbaric and Muscovite’ and he liked ‘nothing better than the plain food of his people, particularly Russian pastries, like pirozki, and raw vegetables’, which he kept at his bedside.¹⁴ When he came upstairs, he would often be nibbling apples, turnips, radishes, garlic, behaving in the Winter Palace exactly as he had as a boy wandering with serf children through Chizhova. The political significance of the Prince’s choice of nibble was as natural and deliberate in its Russian rusticity as Walpole’s red Norfolk apples were of his earthy Englishness.