Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

This is how she felt, probably during March 1774, when she woke early, the morning after a tryst with Potemkin, who was still asleep in his apartments. The roguish names she gave him – the ‘Cossack’, ‘giaour’ (the pejorative Turkish for a non-Moslem), ‘Lion of the Jungle’, ‘Golden Tiger’, ‘Golden Cockerell’ and ‘Wolf’ – may refer to sexual energy. She even called him ‘Pugachev’ of all things, presumably meaning ferocious, energetic, and unbridled like a Cossack.

In these months, they were sharing everything; their meetings seem to have been frantic sessions of laughter, love-making and political planning, one after another, because both enjoyed all three. The sex was instantly mixed with politics. ‘I love you very much,’ she began a letter, some time in April, ‘and when you caressed me, my caress always hurries to answer you…Don’t forget to summon Pavel [P. S. Potemkin, his cousin, who was being sent to assist in suppressing Pugachev]: when he arrives, it will be necessary to do two things’²⁴ – and on she went on to discuss the measures against the rebellion.

Catherine was addicted to him: one night when he did not come to visit her, she actually ‘got up from my bed, dressed myself and went to the library towards the doors so that I might wait for you, where I stood for two hours in the draught; and then at 11 o’clock went to bed in misery where, thanks to you, I had not slept for five nights.’²⁵ The vision of the Empress waiting outside Potemkin’s room for two hours in her dressing gown and bonnet gives us some idea of her passion for him. There were the inevitable rumours of Potemkin’s elephantine sexual equipment and this may explain the persistent myth that Catherine took a cast of his formidable member to console herself during his increasingly long absences in the south.²⁶ This ranks in terms of historical veracity with the other malicious smears against Catherine, but stories of Potemkin’s ‘glorious weapon’ found their way into the homosexual mythology of St Petersburg.^*1

If he was busy, she respected his privacy, even though she was the Empress. One day, she could not resist visiting him in his apartments. She ventured downstairs but as she approached, ‘I saw through the doorway the back of a clerk or an adjutant and I fled at top speed. I love you all the time with all my soul.’²⁷ This also shows how carefully the Empress had to behave in front of clerks and servants in her own palaces. Catherine complained repeatedly about her love for him making her lose her reason, the governing ideal of this devotee of Voltaire and Diderot. This Enlightened ruler in the Age of Reason revelled in the swooning language of schoolgirl silliness: ‘When you are with me, closing my eyes is the only way not to lose my mind; the alternative which would make me laugh for the rest of my life would be to say, “My eyes are charmed by you.” ’ Was she referring to his romantic song to her? ‘My stupid eyes gaze at you; I become silly and unable to reason.’ She dreamed about him: ‘A strange thing happened to me. I have become a somnambulist’ – and she recounted how she imagined meeting ‘the most fascinating of men’. Then she awoke: ‘now I am looking everywhere for this man of my dreams…How I treasure him more than the whole world!…Darling, when you meet him, give him a kiss for me.’²⁸

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Downstairs in the Winter Palace on the basement floor, beneath Catherine’s chapel, there was her Russian bath – the banya – where much of their love affair seems to have taken place.^*2

‘My dear fellow, if you want to eat some meat, everything’s ready in the bath. But I beg you not to swipe any food from there because everyone will know that we’re cooking in there.’²⁹ After his promotion in the Guards in March 1774, Catherine writes:

Good morning Mr Lieutenant-Colonel, how are you feeling after your bath? I am well and feel very jolly thanks to you. As soon as you left, do you know what we talked about? It is easy to guess, seeing how intelligent you are: about you, my darling! Good things were said about you, you were found beyond comparison. Goodbye, will you look after the regiment and the officers all day? As to me, I know what I am going to do. I will think – of whom? Of him, it is true that the thought of Grisha never leaves me…³⁰