Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

*1 There is another possible Moscow venue. During the nineteenth century, a Prince S. Golitsyn, a collector, used to invite visitors to his palace on Volkonsky Street, said to be one of the places where Catherine stayed in Moscow during 1775. He used to show them two icons supposedly given by Catherine to his chapel to celebrate her marriage there to Potemkin.

*2 Catherine granted Daria a house on Prestichenka where she lived until her death.

10

  HEARTBREAK AND UNDERSTANDING

My soul, I’m doing everything for you so at least encourage me a little with affectionate and calm behaviour…my little dear lord, lovable husband.

Catherine II to Count Potemkin

But in such matters Russia’s mighty Empress

Behaved no better than a common sempstress

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto IX: 77

‘My husband just said to me “Where should I go, what should I do?” ’, Catherine wrote to Count Potemkin around this time. ‘My darling and well-loved husband, come to my place and you will be received with open arms!’¹ On 2 January 1776, Catherine appointed Peter Zavadovsky as adjutant-general. This ménage-à-trois puzzled the Court.

The diplomats realized that something was happening in the Empress’s private life and presumed that Potemkin’s career was over: ‘The Empress begins to see the liberties of her favourite [Potemkin] in a different light…It is already whispered that a person placed about her by Mr Rumiantsev bids fair to gain her entire confidence.’² There were rumours that Potemkin would lose the College of War, either to Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky or to Panin’s nephew Prince Repnin. But an English diplomat, Richard Oakes, noticed that Potemkin was expanding his interests, not reducing them, and ‘seems to interest himself more in foreign affairs than he at first affected to do.’³ While the Anglo-Saxons could not quite grasp what might be happening, the waspish French envoy, Chevalier Marie Daniel Bourrée de Corberon, who kept an invaluable diary of his life at Court, suspected that it would take more than Zavadovsky to destroy him. ‘Better in face than Potemkin,’ he observed. ‘But his favour not yet decided.’ Then in the sarcastic tone that diplomats habitually adopted when discussing the imperial sex life: ‘His talents have been put to the test in Moscow. But Potemkin…still has the air of credit…so Zavadovsky is probably only an amusement.’⁴

Between January and March 1776, the Empress avoided large gatherings as she struggled to work out her relationship with Count Potemkin. That January, Prince Orlov reappeared after his travels and this muddied the waters even further because there were now three present or former favourites at Court. Grigory Orlov was back in his hearty old form, but he was no longer the man he had been: overweight and struck by attacks of ‘palsy’, he was in love with his cousin Ekaterina Zinovieva, aged fifteen, one of the Empress’s maids-of-honour, whom some accounts claim he had raped. The ruthless competition at Court is reflected in the rumours that Potemkin was poisoning Orlov – something completely against his nature. Orlov’s paralysis sounds like the later stages of syphilis, the sickly fruit of his well-known lack of discernment.

Catherine appeared only at small dinners. Peter Zavadovsky was frequently present; Potemkin was there less than before – but still too much for the former’s liking. Zavadovsky must have felt inadequate between two of the most dynamic conversationalists of their time. Potemkin was still Catherine’s lover, while the earnest Zavadovsky was increasingly in love with her. We do not know when (or if) she withdrew from Potemkin and took Zavadovsky as a lover – it was some time during that winter. Indeed, it was most likely that she never completely ceased to sleep with the man she called ‘my husband’. Was she playing off one against the other, encouraging both? Naturally. Since by her own account she was one of those who could not contemplate a day without somebody to love her, it would have been only human for her to cast her eyes at her secretary when Potemkin was parading his lack of interest.

In some ways, their relationship is at its most moving in this tense six months because they still loved one another, regarding each other as husband and wife, drifting apart yet trying to find a way to stay together for ever. Count Potemkin sometimes wept in the arms of his Empress.

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‘Why do you want to cry?’, she sweetly asked her ‘Lord and Darling Husband’ in the letter that reminded him of the ‘sacred ties’ of their marriage. ‘How can I change my attitude towards you? Is it possible not to love you? Have confidence in my words…I love you.’⁵