Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

While the Court was at Tsarskoe Selo for the summer, Catherine still refused to appoint him to the Council. He brought his determination and moodiness to bear. ‘On Sunday, when I was sitting at the table near him and the Empress,’ Durand recorded, ‘I saw that not only did he not speak to her but that he did not even reply to her questions. She was beside herself and we for our part very much out of countenance. The silence was only broken by the Master of Horse [Lev Naryshkin] who never succeeded in animating the conversation. On rising from the table, the Empress retired alone and reappeared with red eyes and a troubled air.’²⁰ Had Potemkin got his way?

‘Sweetheart,’ the Empress wrote on 5 May, ‘because you asked me to send you with something to the Council today, I wrote a note that must be given to Prince Viazemsky. So if you want to go, you must be ready by twelve o’clock. I’m sending you the note and the report of the Kazan Commission.’²¹ This note asking Potemkin to discuss the Secret Commission created to investigate and punish the Pugachev rebels sounds casual, but it was not: Catherine was inviting Potemkin to join the Council. Potemkin ostentatiously delivered the note to Procurator-General Viazemsky and then sat down at the top table: he was never to leave it. ‘In no other country’, Gunning informed London the next day, ‘do favourites rise so fast. To the great surprise of the Council members, General Potemkin took his place among them.’²²

It was about this time that the Kazan Secret Commission uncovered a ‘plot’ to assassinate Catherine at her summer residence, Tsarskoe Selo: a captured Pugachev supporter had confessed under interrogation that assassins had been despatched. Potemkin arranged the investigation with Viazemsky: ‘I think the mountain will give birth to a mouse,’²³ Catherine bravely told Potemkin. He was alarmed, but it turned out the story was probably invented under interrogation by the Commission in the south, one reason why Catherine was against the Russian habit of knouting suspects. She was too far away to prevent the Commission using torture on rebels, though she tried to get Bibikov to minimize its use.²⁴

On 30 May, Potemkin was promoted to General-en-Chef and Vice-President of the College of War. It is easy for us to forget that, while this tough factional battle was going on in the councils of the Empress, Potemkin and Catherine were still enjoying the first glow of their affair. On possibly the very same day as his promotion, the Empress sent Potemkin this note in babyish love-talk: ‘General loves me? Me loves General a lot.’²⁵ The undermined War Minister Chernyshev was ‘hit so hard’, reported Gunning, ‘that he could not remain at his post…’.²⁶ The lame duck soon resigned to become governor of the new Belorussian provinces, taken in the First Partition of Poland. There ended the factional crisis that had started two years earlier with the fall of Prince Orlov.

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Honours, responsibilities, serfs, estates and riches rained down on Potemkin: on 31 March he had been appointed Governor-General of New Russia, the huge southern provinces that bordered on the Tartar Khanate of the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire; on 21 June, he was made commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, namely his beloved Cossacks. It is hard to imagine the scale of wealth that Potemkin suddenly enjoyed. It was a world away from his upbringing in Chizhova or even his godfather’s house in Moscow. A peasant soldier in the Russian infantry was paid about seven roubles a year; an officer around 300. Potemkin regularly received gifts of 100,000 roubles on his namedays, on holidays or to celebrate his particular help on a given project. He had a huge table allowance of 300 roubles a month. He lived and was served by the imperial servants in all the palaces for free. He was said to receive 12,000 roubles on the first of every month on his dressing table, but it is more likely that Catherine simply handed him thousands of roubles when she felt like it, as Vassilchikov had testified. Potemkin spent as easily as he received, finding it embarrassing on one hand, while, on the other, constantly demanding more. Yet he was still far from touching the ceiling of either his income or his extravagance. Soon there was to be no ceiling on either.²⁷

Catherine made sure that Potemkin received as many Russian and foreign medals as possible – to increase his status was to consolidate hers. Monarchs liked to procure foreign medals for their favourites. The foreign monarchs resented handing them out – especially to the lovers of usurping regicides. But, unless there was a very good excuse, they usually gave in. The correspondence about these awards between monarchs and Russian ambassadors are most amusing studies in the tortuously polite, almost coded euphemism that was the language of courtly diplomacy.