Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Honeymoon or not, they were always planning, imagining, drafting: we can follow how hard they worked together in their letters. Catherine did not always agree with her pupil nor he with her. ‘Don’t be angry if you find that all my proposals are mad,’ she told him while discussing the problem of licensing salt production and agreeing to his proposal that Pavel Potemkin and his brother Mikhail should investigate it. ‘I couldn’t invent anything better.’ Potemkin was always off the mark with finance – whether his own or the state’s. He was an entrepreneur, not a manager. When he proposed taking on the salt monopoly, she warned him: ‘Don’t burden yourself with it because it will provoke hatred…’. He was hurt. She soothed him – but firmly: ‘I don’t want to make you look like a fool or have the reputation of one…You know very well you wrote nonsense. I ask you to write a good law…and you scold me.’ If he was lazy, for example in editing the Pugachev amnesty, she hectored him: ‘Monday to Friday is enough time to read it.’²⁶

Catherine’s solutions to the Pugachevschina were administrative and involved the restructuring of local government and increasing the participation of nobles, townspeople and state peasants in judiciary and welfare. She boasted to Grimm of suffering from ‘a new sickness called legislomania’.²⁷ Potemkin corrected her drafts, as he did later with her Police Code and her Charters to the Nobility and Towns: ‘We ask you to put + near the articles and it will mean you agree. If you put # near articles, they are to be excluded…write your changes clearly.’ His changes impressed her: ‘I see in them fervent zeal and your great intellect.’²⁸

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The couple now arranged a piratical game of international kidnapping. In February 1775, the Empress commissioned Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky to seduce a peculiar young woman in Leghorn, Italy, where Scarface commanded the Russian Fleet, and bring her back to Russia.

She was twenty, slender, dark-haired, with an Italianate profile, an alabaster complexion and grey eyes. She sang, painted and played the harp. She affected the chastity of a vestal virgin while simultaneously taking lovers like a courtesan. The girl used many names, but only one mattered. She claimed to be ‘Princess Elisabeth’, the daughter of the Empress Elisabeth and Alexei Razumovsky. She was the very quintessence of the eighteenth-century adventuress: every epoch is a balance of opposites so that this golden age of aristocrats was also the ripest season for impostors; the age of pedigree was also that of pretence. Now that travel was easier while communications were still slow, Europe was plagued, and embellished, by young men and women of dubious ancestry taking advantage of the long distances to claim aristocracy or royalty. Russia, as we have seen, had its own history of pretenderism and the lady with whom Orlov-Chesmensky was now to rendezvous was one of the most romantic of its impostors.

She first emerged using the name ‘Ali Emena’ – claiming to be the daughter of a Persian satrap. On ligging jaunts from Persia to Germany, she appeared and disappeared with a vanity case filled with Ruritanian titles: Princess Vladimir, Sultana Selime, demoiselles Frank and Schell; Countess Treymill in Venice; Countess Pinneberg in Pisa and then Countess Silvisky. Later she was Princess of Azov, a Petrine name for this was the port on the Sea of Azov conquered and lost by Peter the Great. As ever with hucksters who manage to convince many of their inherent truth, she was obviously charismatic and it helped that the ‘Princess’ possessed soulful delicacy. She was everything that a mysterious princess should be. On her travels, credulous older aristocrats fell under her spell, protected her, financed her…

Towards the end of the Russo-Turkish War, she headed for the land of disguise – Italy, the realm of Cagliostro and Casanova, where adventurers were as common as cardinals. No one ever discovered who she really was, but it was not long before every diplomat in Italy was investigating her origins: was she the daughter of a Czech coffee-house owner, a Polish innkeeper, a Nuremberg baker?

She hooked Prince Karol Radziwill, who was an anti-Russian Confederate Pole. Accompanied by an entourage of Polish nobles in their national costume, she became a political weapon against Russia. However, she made the mistake of writing to the British Ambassador to Naples. Aesthete and later cuckolded husband of Nelson’s mistress Emma, Sir William Hamilton was particularly susceptible to lissom adventuresses and he gave her a passport, but he then wrote to Orlov-Chesmensky, who immediately informed Petersburg.²⁹