Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin was concentrating on the Pugachev Rebellion. Soon after Catherine and Potemkin had become lovers and political partners, General Alexander Bibikov, setting up his headquarters at Kazan, managed to defeat Pugachev’s 9,000-strong army on 22 March, raise the sieges of Orenburg, Ufa and Yaiksk and force the impostor to abandon his ‘capital’ at Berda, outside Orenburg. The favourite suggested the appointment of his cousin, Pavel Sergeievich Potemkin, the son of the man who had tried to persuade his father that he was illegitimate, to head the Secret Commission in Kazan which was to find the cause of the Rebellion – the Turks and the French were the main suspects – and punish the rebels. Potemkin and Catherine ordered Zakhar Chernyshev¹⁴ to recall Pavel Potemkin from the Turkish front. Pavel Sergeievich was a very eighteenth-century all-rounder – efficient soldier, gracious courtier, poet and multilingual scholar, the first to translate Rousseau into Russian. When he arrived in Petersburg, Catherine immediately ‘told him to join Bibikov’ in Kazan.¹⁵ Now that Bibikov was so close to throttling the false Peter III and Pavel Potemkin was on his way to handle the post-mortem, the lovers switched their minds to ending the Turkish War.

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‘Matushka,’ Potemkin scrawled as he read through one of Catherine’s drafts of the Russian peace terms, ‘what do the articles underlined mean?’ Underneath, the Empress replied: ‘It means that they have already been added and if there is debate, they will not be insisted on…’.¹⁶ The moment he arrived in the Empress’s counsels, he began working with her on the instructions to be given to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev. At first the courtiers presumed that Potemkin was trying to destroy his former chief. The Potemkin legend claims that throughout his life he was viciously jealous of the few others as talented as himself. This was not so. ‘It was said he was unkind to Rumiantsev,’ Solms told Frederick, ‘but I got to know the opposite – they are friends and he defends him against reproaches.’ The Field-Marshal’s wife was equally surprised that ‘he tries to serve you at every opportunity…he even favours me.’¹⁷

A forceful jolt was required to drive the Turks to the peace table, but Rumiantsev’s dwindling army needed reinforcements for his planned attack across the Danube, and the authority to make peace on the spot. In late March, Potemkin persuaded Catherine ‘to empower Rumiantsev and so the war was ended’, as she put it herself.¹⁸ This meant that the traditional Ottoman delaying tactics would not work, because Rumiantsev was given authority to make peace on the spot, within the boundaries defined by Catherine and Potemkin, but without the need to refer back to Petersburg. The Field-Marshal was sent the new peace terms corrected by Potemkin on 10 April. By this time, the Turks had lost their appetite for talking. Ottoman decision-making, agonizingly slow at the best of times, had been delayed by the death of Sultan Mustafa III and the succession of his cautious brother Abdul-Hamid. The Turks were encouraged to keep fighting by the French and probably by the duplicitious Prussians: Frederick, while swallowing his share of the Polish Partition, was still jealous of Russian gains in the south. More than that, Turks were also heartened by the Pugachev Rebellion. So there could be no more peace without war first. Once again, Field-Marshal Rumiantsev prepared to cross the Danube.

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Potemkin’s first step to power was to join the State Council, the consultative war cabinet created by Catherine in 1768. His rise is always described as quick and effortless. But, contrary to historical cliché, imperial favour did not guarantee him power. Potemkin thought he was ready for the Council. Few agreed with him. Besides, all the other members of the Council were on the First or Second of the Table of Ranks; Potemkin was still on the Third. ‘What am I to do? I am not even admitted to the Council. And why not? They won’t have it but I’ll bring things about,’ raged Potemkin, ‘with an openness that astonished’ the French diplomat Durand.¹⁹ He tended to stun most diplomats he encountered with his outspoken asides. This was the first sign to the foreign ambassadors that Potemkin, after barely three months in Catherine’s bed, wanted real power and was set on getting it.