Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

Potemkin was somehow withdrawing from her. It is said that he claimed to be ill to avoid her embraces. As he became restless, Catherine tired of his endless tempers. The towering, eye-flashing rages that are so attractive at the beginning of a love affair became irksome exhibitionism in the middle of a marriage. Potemkin’s behaviour was impossible, but Catherine was partly to blame. She was slow to understand the constant tension of Potemkin’s political and social position which was to break so many of her later lovers. Catherine was just as emotionally greedy as he was. They were both human furnaces requiring an endless supply of fuel in the form of glory, extravagance and power on one hand, love, praise and attention on the other. It is these gargantuan appetites that made their relationship as painful as it was productive. Potemkin wanted to govern and build, but loving Catherine was a full-time job. It was a human impossibility for each of them to give each other enough of what they required. They were too similar to be together.

In May 1775, before the peace celebrations had started, Catherine did her Orthodox duty by leading a pilgrimage to the forbidding Troitsko-Sergeevna Monastery, an obligatory trip back into the Muscovite dark ages when women were kept in the seclusion of the terem and not on thrones. The visit brought out Potemkin’s Slavic disgust for worldly success, his Orthodox yearnings and probably his discontent with his place. Succumbing to his coenobitic instincts and ignoring Catherine, he temporarily abandoned the Court and prayed in seclusion in a monk’s cell.⁵⁰

The rapidity of his mood changes must have been exhausting for both of them. Perhaps this was what she meant when she said that they loved each other too much to be happy: the relationship was so combustible that it was not settled enough to serve either of them well. They continued to love each other and work together throughout 1775, but the stress was rising. Catherine understood what was happening. She had found a partner in Potemkin – a rare diamond – but how was he to find a role? And how were they to satisfy their demanding natures and yet remain together? While they struggled, they looked around them.

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The day before the peace celebrations, Count Potemkin received a sad note from his brother-in-law Vasily Engelhardt telling him of the death of his sister Elena Marfa. They had six daughters (the eldest was already married) and a son in the army. The five younger daughters were aged between twenty-one and eight. ‘I ask you to take care of them and to take the place of Marfa Alexandrovna…’, Engelhardt wrote to Potemkin on 5 July. ‘By your order, I’ll send them to your mother.’ There was no reason why their father could not bring them up in Smolensk, but Engelhardt, a man of the world, realized his daughters would benefit from life at Court. Potemkin summoned them to Moscow.

The Empress, like any dutiful wife, was meeting the Potemkin family. When her formidable mother-in-law, Daria Potemkina, who still lived in Moscow,^*2 was presented, Catherine was at her thoughtful and sensitive best: ‘I noticed your mother was most elegant but that she has no watch. Here is one which I ask you to give her.’⁵¹ When the nieces arrived, Catherine welcomed them warmly and told Potemkin, ‘To make your mother happy you can nominate as many of your nieces as you want as Maids-of-Honour.’⁵² On 10 July, the climax of the peace celebrations, the eldest of this brood, Alexandra Engelhardt, twenty-one, was appointed a frele or maid-of-honour to the Empress.⁵³ The second and most decorous, Varvara, was soon to join her. As soon as they arrived, the nieces were hailed as Russia’s superlative beauties.

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Meanwhile, Catherine was busy drafting her legislation, aided by two young secretaries she had recently borrowed from Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky’s staff: Peter Zavadovsky and Alexander Bezborodko. The latter, cleverest of the two, was so ugly and ungainly as to be somewhat fascinating. But Zavadovsky was methodical, cultured and good-looking. His pursued lips and humourless eyes suggested he was a sanctimonious plodder – the precise opposite of Potemkin, perhaps even antidote to him. During the many hours of drafting and during the tiresome journey back to St Petersburg, as they left grim Moscow at last, Catherine, Potemkin and Zavadovsky became an odd threesome.

We can imagine the scene in Catherine’s apartments: Potemkin, stretched out on a divan in a flowing dressing gown, a bandana round his head, no wig and tousled hair everywhere, chewing radishes and imitating courtiers, bubbles with ideas, jokes and tantrums, while Zavadovsky perches stiffly and patiently in his wig and uniform, writing at his desk, his eyes fixed with labrador devotion on the Empress…

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