Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

There are many versions of the marriage: some say they married in Moscow the next year or in Petersburg in 1784 or 1791.⁷ The Moscow version takes place in the Church of the Ascension of our Lord near Nikitsky, with its distinctive round dome, painted yellow. This was close to the house of Potemkin’s mother, where he lived in Moscow. The church was later embellished with Potemkin’s money,⁸ in his mother’s memory. It is most famous now as the church where Alexander Pushkin married Natalia Goncharova on 18 February 1831 – one of many links between them.^*1

A secret marriage could well have taken place on many another day during their relationship and the details of it concealed in the routine account of their activities. However, this time and place are the most likely. The letter from Catherine mentioned a secret enterprise and the Sievers’s jetty. The Court Journal of 8 June showed her embarking and disembarking there. There is time in the early or late evening for the secret boat trip. All the oral legends, handed down by the wedding guests and their descendants and recorded by Professor Bartenev in the nineteenth century, mentioned the St Samsonov Church, mid- to late 1774, and the same four witnesses. But where are the certificates? Potemkin’s was supposed inherited by his dearest niece, Alexandra Branicka. She told the secret to her son-in-law Prince Michael Vorontsov, and left the certificate to her daughter, Princess Lise. Count Orlov-Davydov remembered a visit to Count Samoilov, who showed him a jewelled buckle. ‘This’, he said, was presented to me by the Empress in memory of her marriage with my late uncle.’ Samoilov’s certificate was buried with him, according this his grandson Count A. A. Bobrinsky. Chertkov’s copy passed into obscurity.

The disappearance of the evidence and the secrecy are not as dubious as they might seem, because no one would have dared expose this during the strict, militaristic reigns of Tsars Paul, Alexander I and Nicholas I – or afterwards. The ‘Victorian’ Romanovs were embarrassed by Catherine’s love life, which, through the doubts about Paul’s paternity, questioned their legitimacy. As late as the 1870s, Professor Bartenev had to ask the Emperor’s permission even to do the research and it could not be published until 1906: only in the interim between the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, when the Autocracy was on its last legs, did Nicholas II permit its publication.⁹

The strongest evidence of their marriage lies in Catherine’s letters; the way she treated Potemkin; how he behaved; and how their relationship was described by insiders. She signed her letters ‘devoted wife’ and called him her ‘dear husband’ in at least twenty-two letters, naming him her ‘lord’ or ‘master’ in hundreds of others.¹⁰ ‘I’ll die if you’ll change…my dear friend, loving husband’¹¹ is an early mention of the word in their love letters. ‘Father, Ch[er] Ep[oux] – [darling husband] –…I’ve sent Kelhen to cure your chest, I love you very much, my beloved friend,’ she wrote.¹² She called Potemkin’s nephew – ‘our nephew’¹³ (author’s italics). Monarchs, more than normal mortals, have a very precise definition of who is or is not a member of their family. She was to treat some of his family as if they were her own until her death – so much so that there were rumours that his niece Branicka was her own child.¹⁴ Her most revealing and specific letter on the subject probably dates from a year later, possibly in early 1776:

My Lord and Cher Epoux…Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago by holy ties? I love you and I am bound to you by all possible ties. Just compare, were my acts more meaningful two years ago than they are now?¹⁵ (author’s italics)

The marriage, as both no doubt hoped, seemed to bring them even closer together. Probably Potemkin, in love with Catherine, tormented by jealousies and the fragility of his position, and ambitious to play an independent role, was soothed by it. He may have been as dissolute as he was pious, but he was a practising Orthodox believer, which may have helped persuade her. For her part, it might seem that marriage would be odd after a relationship of just a few months, but one should also quote that mother’s saying – ‘you just know when it is the right person’. Moreover Catherine had known Potemkin for twelve years and had loved him for some time: she knew him very well already. Their love was not only overwhelming but they were, as she put it, ‘twin souls’. At last she had found an intellectual equal with whom she could share the burden of ruling and the warmth of family.