Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Then she confessed her version of the truth of her nature: ‘The trouble is only that my heart cannot be content even for an hour without love…’. This was not the nymphomania that schoolboys have assigned to Catherine but an admission of her emotional neediness. The eighteenth century would have called this a statement of sensibilité; the nineteenth century would have seen it as a poetic declaration of romantic love; today, we can see that it is only one of part of a complex, passionate personality.

Their love for each other was absolute, yet Potemkin’s turbulence and the demands of power meant that it was always stormy. Nonetheless, Catherine finished her Confession with this offer: ‘If you wish to keep me for ever, show as much friendship as affection and continue to love me and to tell me the truth.’⁵²

Skip Notes

*1 In the late nineteenth century, the painter Constantine Somov, one of the ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ circle of intellectuals, whose father was then Curator of the Hermitage Museum, held a tea party for his mainly homosexual friends, the poet Kuzmin, probably the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the poetess Anna Akhmatova and a handful of others. Somov, according to O. Remizov, the author of The Other Petersburg, told them how his father, the Curator, had discovered a magnificent lifesize cast of Potemkin’s member in Catherine’s collection. When the others did not believe him, the men were invited into the other room where they admired, with the bated breath of true connoisseurs, ‘the glorious weapon of Potemkin’, cast in porcelain, which lay wrapped in cottonwool and silk in a wooden box. It was then returned to the Hermitage, where, one must add, it has never been seen again. When this author recently visited the Hermitage to find Potemkin’s collection, no one knew of it. But it is a very large museum.

*2 Today the banya, like their apartments, does not exist. They were destroyed in the fire of 1837. But from the outside we can see the chapel by the golden dome and cross. Now the banya is the Egyptian section of the Hermitage Museum. It has the cool dampness of a bathhouse even today.

8

  POWER

She is crazy about him. They may well be in love because they are exactly the same.

Senator Ivan Yelagin to Durand de Distroff

‘These two great characters were made for each other,’ observed Masson. ‘He first loved his Sovereign as his mistress and then cherished her as his glory.’¹ Their similarity of ambitions and talents was both the foundation of their love and its flaw. The great love affair of the Empress heralded a new political era because everyone immediately appreciated that, unlike Vassilchikov or even Grigory Orlov, Potemkin was capable of exerting his power and would strive to do so at once. But, in early 1774, they had to be very careful at the most sensitive moment in Catherine’s reign so far: Pugachev was still rampaging through the territory north of the Caspian, south of the Urals, east of Moscow – and the worried nobles wanted him stopped quickly. The Turks were still not ready to negotiate and Rumiantsev’s army was tired and fever-stricken. A false move against Pugachev, a defeat by the Turks, a provocation against the Orlovs, a slight to the Guards, a concession to the Grand Duke – any of these could literally have cost the lovers their heads.

Just in case they were under any illusions, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky decided to let them know that he was carefully watching the illuminated window of the imperial bathhouse. The Orlov brothers, who had recovered so much ground since 1772, would be the first casualties of Potemkin’s rise.

‘Yes or no?’, ‘Le Balafre’ asked the Empress with a slight laugh.

‘About what?’, replied the Empress.

‘Is it love?’, persisted Orlov-Chesmensky.

‘I cannot lie,’ said the Empress.

Scarface asked again: ‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes!’, said the Empress finally.

Orlov-Chesmensky began to laugh again: ‘Do you meet in the banya?’

‘Why do you think so?’

‘Because for four days we’ve seen the light in the window of the bath later than usual.’ Then he added: ‘It was clear yesterday that you’ve made an appointment later so you’d agree not to display affection, to put others off the scent. Good move.’² Catherine reported all this to her lover and the two revelled in it like naughty children shocking the adults. But there was always something menacing in Alexei Orlov’s jokes.

—

Between bouts of love-making and laughter in the banya, Potemkin immediately began to help Catherine on both the Russo-Turkish War and the Pugachev Rebellion. These political actors often discussed how to play a scene: ‘Goodbye brother,’ she told him. ‘Behave cleverly in public and that way, no one will know what we are really thinking.’³ Yet she felt safe with Potemkin, who gave her the feeling that everything was possible, that all their glorious dreams were achievable and that the problems of the moment could be settled.