Shortly before noon on October 5, 1791, a cavalcade of
carriages attended by a squadron of Cossacks stopped half way
down a dirt track on a desolate hillside in the Bessarabian
steppe.
Inside a sleeping-carriage, His Most Serene Highness Prince
Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin sweated and groaned. "Take
me out," he ordered. His bare feet came first, then his legs and
colossal body. He still had the sensual Grecian profile that had
won him so many admirers at the imperial court in St
Petersburg. But he resembled nothing so much as a
magnificent animal reduced to a shivering pile of flesh. His
attendants lay him on a Persian rug.
The prince was dressed in a rich silk dressing gown, lined with
fur, sent to him by the Empress Catherine when she had heard
that he had been taken ill while on imperial business in the far
south.
Into its inside pockets Potemkin had romantically stuffed
bundles of letters from her, treasured over many years. As he
realised he would never see her again, the prince fingered them
feverishly.
Seven days later, a courier reached the Winter Palace in St
Petersburg with the news of his death. The empress fainted. It
took another three months for Potemkin's bundles of letters to
reach her. Some were - and still are - stained from his dying
tears.
Surviving in the Russian state archives, they reveal an equal and
amazingly successful partnership of two statesmen and lovers
that was startling in its modernity.
Potemkin was an outstandingly gifted statesman, yet western
historians still treat him more as a debauched clown and sexual
athlete. Like everything to do with him his life with Catherine
was mysterious. Were they secretly married? Did they really
share power? Did Potemkin pimp for her, procuring young
favourites?
In five years' research in the Russian state archives, I have seen
many of their letters - and found some of the answers.
"My darling, what nonsense you talked yesterday," Catherine
wrote in the early days of their affair in February 1774. "The time
I spend with you is so happy . . . boredom vanishes and I don't
want to part with you. My dear, my friend, I love you so much:
you are so handsome, so clever, so jovial, so witty: when I am
with you, I attach no importance to the world."
The lovers were not young by the standards of their time:
Potemkin was 34, Catherine 10 years older. They had known
each other platonically for 12 years, since the night imperial
guardsmen - a handsome Potemkin among them - had
overthrown Catherine's despised husband, Peter III, and made
her empress. Peter was later mysteriously murdered.
Potemkin had declared his passionate love from the start; but
one of the leading plotters was already her lover and she had
borne his child. Potemkin, kept at bay, consoled himself with
monastic prayer and then as a dashing commander in Russia's
war with Turkey.
By the time Catherine decided she needed him, because of
pressing problems at court, Potemkin had long since lost his
facial perfection. His left eye was useless, half closed. People
called him Cyclops, but he reeked of primitive energy.
Catherine herself was a handsome and voluptuous woman in her
prime. Her brow was high and strong, the blue eyes bright,
playful and coolly arrogant.
Their favourite place for rendezvous in the first days of their affair
was the banya, the Russian steam bath in the Winter Palace.
Around February 15, 1774, only days after he returned to court
to claim his place at the empress's side, Catherine sent a note
cancelling a meeting there, because "all my ladies are there
now and probably won't leave for another hour". It is likely they
were already lovers.
By late February, the couple were absolutely committed. On the
27th, Potemkin was confident enough to write a letter
requesting he be appointed "general and personal aide-de-camp
to Her Majesty". He added in what was presumably a joke: "It
could not offend anybody." In fact, it would offend everybody,
from the grand figures at court to Maria Theresa of Austria and
Frederick the Great of Prussia, George III in London and Louis
XVI in Versailles. It would change the political landscape and
Russia's alliances abroad. But no matter, because Potemkin
touchingly added his real feelings: "I would be the happiest man
alive."
"Lieutenant-General . . . I think your request is appropriate," she
replied, "in view of the services that you have rendered to me
and our motherland."
The empress paraded her exhilaration to a friend, describing
Potemkin as "one of the greatest, wittiest and most original
eccentrics of this iron century".
Potemkin's new rooms were directly beneath Catherine's in the
Winter Palace. At Catherine's intimate evenings, Potemkin
would burst in dishevelled, in only a Turkish dressing gown and
his favourite pink bandana. If it were cold, he threw a fur cloak
over the top.
Their passion was so tumultuous that it is easy to forget they
loved while ruling an empire - at war abroad, in civil war at home.
Neither was ever completely private: Catherine was always the
sovereign, Potemkin from the first day a politician of the first
rank.
Catherine and Potemkin were inseparable. When not together,
even when they were yards apart in their own apartments, they
wrote manically. Being secret love letters that often dealt with
state affairs as well, they were usually unsigned.
A wealth of these letters has survived - a record of a partnership
pervaded by Catherine's laughter. "Darling, what stories you told
me yesterday! I can't stop laughing when I think of them. What
happy times I am spending with you!"
She was proud of his sex appeal to other women. "I don't
wonder that there are so many women attributed to you," she
wrote. "It seems to me that you are not an ordinary person and
you differ from everyone else in everything."
And soon afterwards: "I have given strict orders to the whole of
my body, down to the last hair, to stop showing you the
smallest sign of love. I have locked up my love in my heart
under 10 locks, it is suffocating there and I think it might
explode. Think about it, you are a reasonable man, is it possible
to talk more nonsense in a few lines? What a trick have you
played to unbalance a mind, previously thought to be one of the
best in Europe. What a shame! What a sin! Catherine II to be
the victim of this crazy person . . . one more proof of your
supreme power over me."
Their meetings seem to have been frantic sessions of
love-making and political planning. "I love you so very much,"
she began a letter, "and when you caressed me, my caress
always hurries to answer you . . . Don't forget to summon Pavel
[his cousin, who was being sent to assist in suppressing the
Pugachev serf rebellion]: when he arrives, it will be necessary to
do two things" - and she discussed the measures against the
rebels.
There were the inevitable rumours of Potemkin's elephantine
sexual equipment, which may explain the persistent smear that
Catherine took a cast of it to console herself during his
absences. Stories of the "glorious weapon" found their way into
the homosexual mythology of St Petersburg.
Despite his own appetites, Potemkin demanded to know
everything. He claimed there had been 15 lovers before him. But
Catherine hoped to settle his jealousies with "a sincere
confession".
"Now, Sir Hero, after this confession, may I hope that I will
receive forgiveness for my sins? As you will be pleased to see,
there is no question of 15 but only a third of that figure of which
the first occurred unwillingly and the fourth out of despair; as to
the other three, God is my witness, they were not due to
debauchery for which I have no inclination. If in my youth I had
been given a husband whom I could love I would have remained
eternally faithful."
Honours, responsibilities, serfs, estates and riches rained down
on Potemkin: he was appointed governor-general of New
Russia, the huge southern provinces, and commander-in-chief of
all irregular forces, the Cossacks.
Some time in late 1774 or early 1775 Catherine began a letter
with the words: "My dear soul, darling husband, come and
snuggle up, if you please. Beloved husband." Were they
married? There is a legend that they went through a secret
ceremony on a June night in 1774 at a church outside St
Petersburg.
Despite lack of conclusive evidence of a marriage, Catherine
treated Potemkin for the rest of their lives as if there had been.
He was treated like a member of the imperial family and had
absolute access to the Treasury. She was to treat some of his
family as if they were her own until her death.
Catherine signed herself "devoted wife" and called him her "dear
husband" in at least 22 letters, naming him her "lord" or
"master" in hundreds of others. In one, probably in early 1776,
she wrote: "Why do you prefer to believe your unhealthy
imagination rather than the real facts, all of which confirm the
words of your wife. Was she not attached to you two years ago
by holy ties?"
Potemkin sometimes wept in her arms. "Why do you want to
cry?" she sweetly asked. "Have confidence in my words . . . I
love you."
By then, the relationship was beginning to burn them both. "We
would be happier," conceded Catherine, "if we loved each other
less." There was evidence that the tensions of his role as official
favourite - irksome to a man like Potemkin - were taking a toll.
When he was outraged at his subordinate position, she
promised: "I will never order you to do anything, you fool,
because I don't deserve such coldness . . . I swore to give only
caress for caress."
Potemkin was happy one day and then exploded the next. The
couple were drifting apart.
On January 2, 1776, Catherine appointed Peter Zavadovsky, a
good-looking young secretary, as adjutant-general. The
diplomats presumed that she had taken him as her new lover. It
was likely she never completely ceased to sleep with "her
husband". But, since she could not contemplate a day without
somebody to love her, it would have been only human to cast
her eyes at her secretary when Potemkin paraded his lack of
interest.
"Even now," the empress assured Potemkin, "Catherine is
attached to you with her heart and soul." A few days later: "You
cut me all yesterday without any reason . . ."
Soon the storm was over: husband and wife had managed to
arrange their unique marriage in their own manner. Potemkin
moved out of the favourite's apartment but did not lose his
access to Catherine's boudoir. For the rest of his life, his home
was some former stables linked to the palace by a gallery
enabling the lovers to walk to each other's rooms in privacy.
After Potemkin, Catherine made the role of her lover an official
position, and her letters to Zavadovsky give us a glimpse into
the favourites' suffocating world. She treated him patronisingly,
thanking him for his "most affectionate little letter" as if he was
clever to have known his alphabet. "You are Vesuvius itself,"
she wrote about his lack of sexual experience. "When you least
expect it an eruption appears." Catherine bathed her lovers in
controlling attention. When the affairs ended she became
depressed; often little business was achieved for weeks.
How were they selected? Potemkin could not actually "supply"
men. However, one senses Catherine preferred choosing lovers
from his staff. She wrote to him after falling in love with one of
them: "He's an angel - big, big, big thanks!"
The lucky man would dine with the empress, attend whatever
receptions she was gracing and then adjourn to play cards with
her inner circle. At 11pm, Catherine rose and the young man
accompanied her to her apartments. This imperial routine
became excruciatingly boring - endless dinners, and sexual
duties with a woman who was increasingly stout and tormented
by indigestion. Potemkin's role made it worse, since the real
benefits of Catherine's love were bestowed on him alone.
But all this gave Potemkin time to win his place in history. He
changed the direction of Russian foreign policy, annexed the
Crimea, founded towns, colonised deserts, built the Black Sea
fleet and reformed the Russian army.
He also had a myriad love affairs including with his own nieces.
But for him there was never to be a normal married life - he
would always be married to empress and empire.