Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (81 page)

Although Vasilchikov’s performance in the role of favorite was probably the weakest of any of Catherine’s lovers, she accepted most of the blame. He was a sudden replacement, installed when she was angry at the frequently and flagrantly unfaithful Gregory. “
It was a random choice,” she admitted later, “made out of desperation. I was more heartbroken at that time than I can say.”

The hapless Vasilchikov departed, generously pensioned for his efforts and good intentions. He retired to a large country estate near Moscow—a gift from the empress. Over the years, he aged into a quiet country gentleman, ignored and mostly forgotten by his sovereign.
Once he had gone, she replaced mediocrity with genius and boredom with intellectual fireworks. She sent for Potemkin.

59
Catherine and Potemkin: Passion

T
HE OUTSTANDING FIGURE
of Catherine’s reign, other than Catherine herself, was Gregory Potemkin. For seventeen years, from 1774 to 1791, he was the most powerful man in Russia. No one else during her life was closer to Catherine; he was her lover, her adviser, her military commander in chief, the governor and viceroy of half of her empire, the creator of her new cities, seaports, palaces, armies, and fleets. He was also, perhaps, her husband.

Gregory Potemkin’s family had served Russian sovereigns for generations. His seventeenth-century ancestor Peter Potemkin had been sent by Tsar Alexis, the father of Peter the Great, on diplomatic missions to Spain and France. Determined to uphold the rank and dignity of his master, he demanded in Madrid that the king of Spain take off his hat whenever the tsar’s name was mentioned. In Paris, he refused to speak to the Sun King, Louis XIV, because an error had been made in the tsar’s titles. Later, in Copenhagen, he was received by the king of Denmark, who was ill and confined to bed. The envoy demanded that another bed be brought and placed next to the king so that he could negotiate from a position of absolute equality. This Potemkin, Gregory’s grandfather, died in 1700 at the age of eighty-three, demanding and eccentric to the end.

Gregory Potemkin’s father, Alexander Potemkin, was not dissimilar. As a young man in 1709, he fought in the Battle of Poltava against Charles XII of Sweden. Retired as a colonel to a small estate near Smolensk, Alexander Potemkin, while traveling, met an attractive, indigent young widow, Daria Skouratova. He was fifty and she was twenty, but he married her on the spot, forgetting to tell her that he already had a wife. Daria was pregnant before she discovered that she was married to a bigamist. She reacted by going to Potemkin’s first wife and asking for guidance. The older woman, whose life with her husband was unhappy, resolved the situation by entering a convent, in effect divorcing the
colonel. Daria got along with her new husband no better than had her predecessor, but she eventually produced six children, five daughters and a son, Gregory.

The boy was born on September 13, 1739, and began life surrounded and coddled by a loving mother and five sisters. The family was unable to afford a tutor, and Gregory began his education with the village deacon. The pupil loved music, and the deacon had an exceptional voice; he enforced discipline on his precocious, obstreperous student by threatening to sing him no more songs. At five, Gregory was sent to live with his godfather, a senior civil servant in Moscow. With an ear for languages as well as music, he learned Greek, Latin, French, and German. As an adolescent, he was drawn to theology, but also to the army; whichever career he chose, he said, he wished to command. “
If I become a general,” he declared to his friends, “I will have soldiers under my orders. If I become a bishop, it will be monks.” When he entered the recently founded University of Moscow, he won a gold medal for studies in theology. Then, losing interest, he refused to attend lectures and was expelled. He entered the army as a private in the Horse Guards, became a corporal, and, by 1759, a captain. In 1762, he joined the five Orlov brothers and Nikita Panin in the coup that put Catherine on the throne. It was during this tumult that he supplied the missing sword knot that Catherine borrowed for the march on Peterhof. Subsequently, when Catherine was distributing rewards for assistance in the coup, Captain Potemkin was given an army promotion and ten thousand rubles.

At twenty-two, Potemkin was tall and slim, with thick auburn hair. He was intelligent, educated, and spirited. His appearance at court and his introduction to Catherine were sponsored by the Orlovs, who admired the young soldier as an engaging conversationalist and a talented mimic who successfully impersonated the voices of people around him. One evening, Catherine asked him to mimic her. Without hesitation, he spoke to her in her own voice, perfectly imitating her idiom and German accent. Catherine, always seeking wit and humor, could not stop laughing. The impertinence was risky, but Potemkin had guessed that the empress would be amused and would forgive and probably not forget him. He had judged her correctly. Thereafter, he was often invited to her intimate evenings, which included no more than twenty people and from which all ceremony and formality were banned. She decreed that her guests must be good-humored and not speak badly of
anyone. Lying and boasting were forbidden, and all unpleasant thoughts were to be deposited with hats and swords at the door. In this uninhibited atmosphere, Gregory—quick-witted, artistic, musical, and able to make the empress laugh—was always welcome.

Others at court noticed that a strong mutual admiration was developing, and there was gossip. It was said that Potemkin, encountering the empress in a palace corridor, had fallen on his knees, kissed her hand, and not been reprimanded. The Orlovs did not like these stories. Gregory was the established favorite and the father of her child, Bobrinsky; he and his brothers had been endowed with enormous power and wealth. It seemed to them that Potemkin had begun to trespass. By some accounts, Potemkin was called to Gregory Orlov’s room, where, to teach him a lesson, the two brothers, Gregory and Alexis, fell on him and beat him. Later, it was rumored that it was in this struggle that Potemkin lost the sight in his left eye (a more believable explanation is that he was permanently blinded because of faulty treatment of an infection by an incompetent doctor). Whatever the cause, this disfigurement so upset Potemkin that he withdrew from court. When the empress asked about him and was told that he was suffering from a physical disfigurement, she sent word that this was a poor reason and that he should return. He obeyed.

Catherine began making use of Potemkin’s administrative talents in 1763, when, aware of his interest in religion, she appointed him assistant to the Procurator of the Holy Synod, who oversaw church administration and finances. She simultaneously advanced his military career, and, by 1767, he was a senior commander in the Horse Guards Regiment. The following year, he became a court chamberlain. When the Legislative Commission met, he was assigned to be trustee of the Tartars and other ethnic minorities in the Russian empire. Thereafter, Potemkin always had a special interest in Catherine’s non-Russian subjects; in later years, holding supreme power in the south, his entourage always included tribal leaders of all faiths. His early love of ecclesiastical controversy continued. He rarely missed an opportunity to discuss points of religious belief with leaders of all faiths. When the First Turkish War began, in 1769, he immediately volunteered for the front. With Catherine’s permission, he joined the army of General Rumyantsev, in which he served first as Rumyantsev’s aide-de-camp and then as an outstanding leader of cavalry. In recognition of his services, he was promoted to the rank of major general and chosen in November 1769 to
carry Rumyantsev’s campaign reports to the empress. In St. Petersburg, Potemkin was received as a prominent commander and invited to dine with the empress.

When he returned to the army in the south, it was with Catherine’s permission to write to her privately. She was surprised that he was slow to use this privilege. On December 4, 1773, she prompted him:

Potemkin could hardly fail to see an invitation in this language. In January 1774, once the army was in winter quarters, he took leave and hurried to St. Petersburg.

He arrived to find the government and Catherine struggling with multiple crises. The war with Turkey was entering its sixth year, the Pugachev rebellion was spreading, and Catherine’s intimate relationship with Alexander Vasilchikov was in its final stage. Potemkin, believing he had been summoned for personal reasons, was dismayed to find Vasilchikov still firmly embedded. He asked for a private audience with Catherine, and on February 4 he went to Tsarskoe Selo. She told him that she wanted him to remain close. He returned to court, where he seemed happy; he continued to make Catherine laugh, and he was generally recognized as the heir presumptive to the office of favorite. One day, supposedly, he was walking up the palace staircase when he met Gregory Orlov descending. “
Any news at court?” Potemkin asked. “Nothing in particular,” Orlov answered. “Except that you are going up and I am coming down.” Vasilchikov managed for a few more weeks to
cling to his perch because Catherine worried about the impression a change would make in St. Petersburg and abroad; she was also afraid of alienating Panin by dismissing his nominee. Most important, she wanted to be certain that her new choice was the right one.

Frustrated by Catherine’s procrastination, Potemkin decided to force the issue. He came to court only rarely, and when he did, he had nothing to say. Then he disappeared entirely. Catherine was told that Potemkin was suffering from an unhappy love affair because a certain woman did not reciprocate his love; that his despair was so deep that he was thinking of entering a monastery. Catherine complained, “
I do not understand what has reduced him to such despair.… I thought my friendliness must have made him realize that his fervor was not displeasing to me.” When these words were reported to Potemkin, he knew that Vasilchikov was about to depart.

Employing his flair for the dramatic, Potemkin decided to increase the pressure on Catherine. At the end of January, he entered the Monastery Alexander Nevsky on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. There, affecting melancholy, he began growing a beard and observing the daily routine of a monk. Panin understood Potemkin’s game. The counselor requested an audience and told the empress that while the merits of General Potemkin were universally recognized, he had been sufficiently rewarded, and that nothing more need be given this gentleman. In case further advancement were contemplated, Panin observed, he wanted her to understand that “
the state and yourself, Madam, will soon be made to feel the ambition, the pride, and the eccentricities of this man. I fear that your choice will cause you much unpleasantness.” Catherine replied that the raising of these issues was premature. Given Potemkin’s abilities, he could be useful as a soldier and as a diplomat. He was brave, clever, and educated; such men were not so numerous in Russia that she could allow this one to hide in a monastery. Therefore, she would do everything in her power to prevent General Potemkin from taking holy orders.

Catherine did not want to risk Potemkin making his withdrawal permanent. According to one story, she dispatched her friend and lady-in-waiting Countess Prascovia Bruce to the monastery to see Potemkin and tell him that, if he would return to court, he could rely on the empress’s favor. Potemkin did not smooth the emissary’s path. On her arrival at the monastery, he asked her to wait, saying that he was about to engage in prayer and could not be interrupted. Wearing monastic
robes, he walked in procession with the monks, participated in the service, and prostrated himself, murmuring prayers, before an icon of St. Catherine. Eventually, he rose, made the sign of the cross, and came to speak to Catherine’s envoy. Countess Bruce’s message had a convincing ring; moreover, Potemkin was impressed by the court rank of the messenger. Persuaded, he shed his monastic cassock, shaved off his beard, put on his uniform, and returned to St. Petersburg in a court carriage.