Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

The best piece of evidence is that, whether or not one accepts there was a ceremony, Catherine treated Potemkin for the rest of their lives as if there had been. Whatever he did, he never fell from power; he was treated like a member of the imperial family and had absolute access to the Treasury as well as the ability to make independent decisions. He behaved with extraordinary confidence, indeed insouciance, and deliberately presented himself in the tsarist tradition.

The foreign ambassadors suspected something: one diplomat learned from a ‘person of credit’ that Potemkin’s ‘nieces were in possession of the certificate,’¹⁶ but such was the awe for monarchs in those days that they never mentioned ‘marriage’ specifically in writing, saving it up to tell their Courts directly. Thus the French Ambassador, Comte de Ségur, informed Versailles in December 1788 that Potemkin ‘takes advantage of…certain sacred and inviolable rights…The singular basis of these rights is a great mystery which is known to only four people in Russia; a lucky chance enabled me to discover it and when I have thoroughly sounded it, I shall, on the first occasion…inform the King’¹⁷ (author’s italics). The Most Christian King already knew: by October, Louis XVI was calling Catherine ‘Madame Potemkin’ to Comte de Vergennes, his Foreign Minister – though he meant it partly as a joke.¹⁸

The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, soon found out too. He explained the riddle of Catherine and Potemkin, while strolling in the Viennese Augarten, to the British envoy Lord Keith like this: ‘for a thousand reasons and as many connections of every sort, she could not easily get rid of him, even if she harboured the wish of doing so. One must have been in Russia to comprehend all the particulars of the Empress’s situation’¹⁹ (author’s italics). This was presumably what was also meant by Charles Whitworth, the British Ambassador to Petersburg, when he reported in 1791 that Potemkin was unsackable and unaccountable.²⁰

Potemkin hinted that he was almost royal. During the Second Russo-Turkish War, the Prince de Ligne suggested to Potemkin that he could become Prince of Moldavia and Wallachia. ‘That’s a joke to me,’ replied Potemkin. ‘I could be King of Poland, if I wanted; I refused to be Duke of Courland; I am far more than all that‘²¹ (author’s italics). What could be ‘far more than’ being a king if not being the consort of the Empress of Russia?

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Now the couple got back to work. After the wedding, they, as usual, revelled in the suspicions of others: did anyone notice how crazily in love they were? She wondered what ‘our nephew’ – possibly Samoilov – thought about their behaviour. ‘I think our madness seemed very strange to him.’²²

On another occasion, someone had guessed a great secret. ‘What can we do darling? These things often happen,’ Catherine mused. ‘Peter the Great in cases like that used to send people out to the market to bring back information he alone thought was secret; sometimes, by combination, people just guess…’.²³

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On 16 January 1775, as soon as she knew Pugachev was dead, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin, set out from Tsarskoe Selo for Moscow, where they were to hold celebrations for the victory over Turkey. Catherine had been planning to go to Moscow ever since the peace was signed but her dear ‘Marquis de Pugachev’ had delayed matters. Potemkin, according to Gunning, had encouraged her to visit the old capital, presumably to celebrate the opening of a window on to the Black Sea and to project the fact that government was in charge after Pugachev.

On the 25th, she staged a ceremonial entry with Grand Duke Paul. In case she forgot that she was now in the heartland of old Russia, Paul was warmly welcomed wherever he went while, according to Gunning, Catherine ‘passed with scarcely any acclamations amongst the populace or their manifesting the least degree of satisfaction.’²⁴ But the Pugachev Rebellion had shown her that the interior needed some attention: she was to spend most of the year there. She stayed in the Golovin and suburban Kolomenskoe Palaces, where Potemkin was also given apartments designed by her, but she found them uncomfortable and unfriendly, a metaphor for all she disliked about Moscow.

Empresses do not honeymoon, but she and Potemkin obviously wanted to spend some private time together. In June she bought Prince Kantemir’s estate, Black Earth, where she decided to built a new palace: she renamed it Tsaritsyno. Those who believe she married Potemkin, whether in Moscow or Petersburg, claim that this was where they had their version of a honeymoon. They wanted to live cosily, so they stayed there for months on end in a cottage with just six rooms, like a couple of bourgeois.²⁵