Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (35 page)

Unfortunately there may be some truth to Lao Tzu’s adage “The flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long.” By the middle of 1775, only a year after their alleged marriage, Catherine and Potemkin’s romance was on the rocks.

As early as the spring, it was rumored that Potemkin was pleading illness to avoid Catherine’s bed. He was becoming even more restless than usual. Catherine complained that she wasn’t able to see him often enough. “This is really too much! Even at nine o’clock I cannot find you alone. I came to your apartment and found a crowd of people who were walking about, coughing, and making a lot of noise. Yet I had come solely to tell you that I love you excessively.” On another occasion she wrote, “It is a hundred years since I saw you. I do not care what you do, but please arrange that there should be nobody with you when I come….”

The empress was also wearying of Potemkin’s volatility. What had once seemed exciting was now draining. The pair of them were high-maintenance—“human furnaces,” to quote Montefiore—and required massive amounts of stoking and stroking in their desires for affection, glory, power, and extravagance. Their gargantuan egos and tempestuous personalities were too similar for them to remain compatible in the long run.

Upon the death of his sister in May, Potemkin became the legal guardian of his five unmarried nieces. When they came to court, Catherine appointed the oldest two girls imperial maids of honor. All five were hailed as great beauties. Uncle Grigory thought so, too. Eventually, three of them would become his lovers, although it was
rumored that he had seduced all five. The court was scandalized, and Potemkin’s mother, Darya, wrote several letters to him, to the effect that sleeping with his late sister’s children was immoral. Potemkin burned the correspondence. The empress, however, took a far more liberal view. Uncle-niece liaisons were fairly common in royal circles, (the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs and the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria were rife with them; Catherine and her own uncle had flirted, petted, and contemplated marriage before she was summoned to Russia), and Potemkin’s nieces, who were all “of age” at the time they graced his bed, were passionately, sexually in love with him.

Also in the spring of 1775, Catherine hired a new secretary, a handsome Ukranian named Peter Zavadovsky. Around the end of July, he began regularly dining at the empress’s table and accompanying her on short excursions into the countryside. After the couple returned to the capital, along with Potemkin they formed a frequent troika at dinner and at work. Both he and Potemkin had helped her implement her system of education reform. On November 26, Catherine awarded Zavadovsky the Cross of St. George, fourth class.

Even after Zavadovsky had piqued Catherine’s sexual interest, Potemkin could be found weeping in her arms, desperate to find a way to make their relationship work. They would settle arguments with dialogue letters. Potemkin would write to the empress and she would comment on the same letter, referring in the right margin to specific phrases in his original correspondence. She would then return his letter to him with her notations on it.

Their daily pattern had become one of violent arguments, followed by tearful reconciliations. They needed to figure out how to salvage what was working in their relationship and jettison what was tearing their insides out. As the couple struggled to decide whether to stay together or separate, Catherine, wounded by Potemkin’s increasing callousness to her (“I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words” and “I am not evil and not angry with you”), ultimately conceded, “The essence of our disagreement is always the question of power and never that of love.”

It’s a testament to Catherine’s clear-sightedness, despite her passion for and frustration with Potemkin, that she was able to cede him
so much power and authority, and play to his strengths without compromising her status as empress, even when they were no longer each other’s primary sexual partners. On January 1, 1776, he received command of the Petersburg troop division, and his mother was made a lady-in-waiting. But Her Imperial Majesty’s bounty didn’t end there. The following day Peter Zavadovsky was made adjutant-general, the code, as Potemkin himself knew so well, that the empress’s private secretary had been promoted to lover.

On March 21, 1776, Potemkin was given permission to use the title Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, which Catherine had requested through her ambassador in Vienna. She also gave him sixteen thousand serfs. Denmark awarded him the Order of the White Elephant. And on April 2, Prince Henry of Prussia invested Potemkin with the Order of the Black Eagle.

Unfortunately, the promotion, along with the collection of ribbons and medals, were also a form of adieu. Potemkin realized that Zavadovsky had superseded him in Catherine’s bed, and she was shoving him out the door with the equivalent of a golden parachute. However, he was also able to recognize that the nature of his relationship with the empress was such that it could survive and even thrive without the sexual element, and that it could still be possible to ensure his own favoritism even if Catherine had another lover. In fact, the new dynamic would allow him some freedom from what he had privately begun to admit was a suffocating liaison. With a standby stud in the wings, Potemkin wouldn’t feel as though he always needed to be there for Catherine.

Her Imperial Majesty, too, needed the respite from Potemkin’s volatile mood swings, and the time and energy she devoted to her all-consuming passion for him made it inconvenient to running an empire. Although Catherine replaced Potemkin with a less demanding but emotionally fulfilling paramour, Zavadovsky was far from ideal. Evidently, he was prone to premature ejaculation. Yet Catherine was understanding about his little problem, remarking, “You are Vesuvius itself. [W]hen you least expect it an eruption appears,” then assuring him, “but no, never mind, I shall extinguish them with caresses.”

Zavadovsky received no key political appointments as a mark of
the empress’s favor. She had no need to bestow them when Potemkin held every important post and remained as her chief adviser. By the spring of 1777, the young secretary was near collapse. It was all too much for him. Catherine always set the timetable for their assignations. He hated the scrutiny of his private life. He was a natural administrator, not a courtier, and because his French wasn’t strong enough to sustain social conversation, he never fit in. He, too, had his jealous sulks, primarily because Potemkin was around all the time. The prince was always bursting in on Catherine and her boy toy of the year, a flamboyant sight in his fur wraps, pink shawls, and bandannas. And the empress always expected her young men to pay court to Potemkin. None of them could match the giant man’s equally towering wit or charisma, and all of them felt inadequate by comparison, despite Catherine’s protestations of affection for them.

By her own admission, Catherine could not live without love for a moment. At the beginning of each new affair, she expected it to last forever. And when she and Zavadovsky first became paramours, she assured him, “Petrusa dear, all will pass, except my passion for you.” But the Zavadovsky experiment barely lasted a year. Catherine told her secretary-lover that perhaps it was best if they took a break. Potemkin, however, was convinced that the dynamic of a ménage à trois of sorts, though not in the literal sexual sense, was still the best way to preserve his relationship with the empress. It was just a matter of finding the right other man. This third wheel could not be a threat to Potemkin’s political sovereignty, but he had to please the empress. Some of these studs came from the prince’s own stable, in his employ as adjutants, and had therefore already been vetted, at least for character.

From then on, with her acquiescence, Potemkin approved each of Catherine’s lovers to ensure their compatibility with the empress and their inability to displace him in her affections. When Her Imperial Majesty was between relationships, Potemkin resumed his role as her lover.

After Zavadovsky, Catherine spent a year (May 1777 to May 1778) in the arms of Semyon Zorich, a swarthy, curly-haired, thirty-one-year-old major of the hussars. But the rest of 1778 belonged to Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, although he barely made it to December.
Rimsky-Korsakov, whom both Catherine and Potemkin nicknamed “the child,” cheated on the empress, first with her confidante Countess Bruce (who lost her job over her foolish indiscretion), and then with another lady of the court. Both women left their husbands for him.

The empress was a magnanimous lover and always pensioned off her paramours with real estate, thousands of serfs, and lovely parting gifts of china and silver, tableware and linens. But each time one of her affairs ended, Catherine, who had expected it to last until the end of time, became despondent, and very little state business was accomplished for a few weeks until she got over it.

Catherine’s next lover was Alexander Lanskoy, who warmed the empress’s bed from 1780 to 1784. When the royal romance began, Lanskoy was a twenty-two-year-old officer of the Horse Guards, eager to learn, and happy to accept Potemkin’s primacy and position at court. Lanskoy would die on June 25, 1784, probably from diphtheria, although it was rumored that Potemkin had poisoned him. Catherine was brokenhearted at his passing.

But in the early 1780s, with Catherine happily in love with Lanskoy, she and Potemkin could focus on politics. On December 14, 1782, Catherine secretly instructed Potemkin to annex the Crimea, in order to prevent the Turkish from doing so. Soon after he had risen to favor, Potemkin had become Governor General of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan, and the Caucasus. In 1778, Catherine approved his plan for a port on the Black Sea to be called Kherson. Potemkin supervised every detail of building the town, including designing the houses. The following year he gave the order to found Nikolaev, another city on the Black Sea, named for Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of seafarers.

Potemkin had nicknamed the Crimea “the wart on the end of Catherine’s nose,” but it became his own paradise, a lush, cosmopolitan peninsula. He or she who owned it controlled the trade routes across the Black Sea. Potemkin returned to the Black Sea as a stealthy conqueror in 1783. On May 11, he wrote to Catherine from the city of Kherson to say that he had found everything in disarray but was sorting it out. Wanting the issue resolved as soon as possible, the empress replied, most likely in early June, “Not only do I often think of you, but I also regret and often grieve over the fact that you are
there and not here, for without you I feel as though I’m missing a limb. I beg you in every way: do not delay the occupation of the Crimea.”

The annexation was completed in July. To thank him, Catherine created Potemkin Prince of Tauris, or Taurida. He immediately began building cities, towns, and roads to plan for the empress’s eventual journey to her new territory.

By the late 1770s, and most definitely after he had annexed the Crimea in Catherine’s name, Grigory Potemkin, Serenissimus (His Serene Highness), was the de facto coruler of the Russian Empire, a domain so vast that it needed rulers in both the east and west. Potemkin had the rare gift of being able to manage in microcosm, like running the College of War, and he also had the talents to govern in macrocosm—a skilled viceroy for the steppes of the south. His demesne comprised all new territories acquired in the name of the empire between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east; and from the Caucasus and the Volga River across most of Ukraine, almost as far as Kiev. It was unique for a Russian emperor to delegate so much power to a consort, or to any individual, but Catherine’s relationship with Potemkin was matchless.

Her journey to the Crimea in 1787, organized by Potemkin, took several days, covering four thousand miles. The imperial convoy consisted of 14 huge coaches mounted on runners, and 124 sleighs, with 40 sleighs in reserve. Catherine’s conveyance was a miniature dacha, or vacation home, on runners. It consisted of three rooms—a library, bedroom, and drawing room—all sumptuously decorated. Six windows provided panoramic views of the scenery.

They departed Kiev in opulent galleys and sailed for part of the way, a flotilla of eighty boats carrying three thousand troops, baggage, and munitions, in addition to the empress’s vast entourage of laundresses, cooks, maids, valets, doctors, apothecaries, and even dishwashers and silver polishers. It was a cross between a progress of Elizabeth I and a Cleopatran journey down the Nile.

All along the riverbanks of the Dnieper the village houses were bedecked with floral garlands and triumphal arches, which may be the origin of the “Potemkin villages.” The phrase, coined by a German historian, Georg von Helbig, refers to a ruse he alleged was
concocted by the prince to convince Catherine that he had built a vast number of villages and towns in the south, when in fact she was merely riding past a series of painted facades outside of which thousands of peasants appeared to bustle about their daily duties. Von Helbig claimed that all of the pasteboard facades as well as thousands of peasants, livestock, and conveyances were silently transported numerous times in the dead of night, and at every new location the facades were reconstructed at breakneck speed so that Catherine saw the same town over and over again, although each time she was told it was a new place. The assertion defies common sense on a variety of levels. For one thing, the empress wasn’t stupid. She’d notice. And if she didn’t, some of the hundreds of others in her entourage would. For another, it would have been nigh impossible to relocate everything on dirt roads in the middle of the night, in addition to rebuilding all of it. Additionally, there is no evidence of orders given by Potemkin to create false villages or towns. The locations and edifices visited and observed by Catherine’s entourage were authentic and were genuinely inhabited.

While two cities certainly did whitewash their poverty by constructing some spanking-clean false houses (a trick still being tried in the blighted Bronx during the 1970s), the Prince de Ligne, the Austrian field marshal who, along with his boss, Emperor Joseph II, did some sightseeing on his own during the empress’s visit to the south, found no evidence of fraud. However, the lies about “Potemkin villages” were evidently spread immediately, because the prince refuted these allegations, based on his eyewitness experience. “Already the ridiculous story has been circulated that pasteboard villages were painted on our roads…that the ships and guns were painted, the cavalry horseless…. Even those among the Russians…vexed at not being with us, will pretend we have been deceived.”