In December 1773, Catherine summoned 34-year-old Gregory Potemkin from the besieged Ottoman city of Silitria (today’s Bulgaria). “Sir Lieutenant-General and Chevalier,” she wrote, “. . . since for my part I very much desire to preserve fervent, brave, clever, and skillful individuals, so I ask you not to endanger yourself for naught. Upon reading this letter, you may well ask: why was it written? To which I can offer you the following reply: so that you had confirmation of my opinion of you, for I am always most benevolent toward you. Catherine.”1 Letter in hand, Potemkin raced back to St. Petersburg.
Catherine and Potemkin had met a decade earlier, the day of her coup, when the 28-year-old guardsman leaped onto the back of her carriage en route to the Winter Palace. Noticing that Catherine’s saber was missing the correct sword knot, Potemkin galloped across the square, ripped the dragonne off his own sword, and handed it to her with a bow. Trained to ride alongside its fellows in cavalry squadron, Potemkin’s horse refused to leave Catherine’s side. Years later, Potemkin joked that he owed everything to a poorly behaved horse.
Potemkin became part of Catherine’s inner circle, participating in her 1767 Legislative Commission in Moscow. On one occasion, Potemkin was asked to perform one of his famous impersonations. Everyone fell silent at his perfect imitation of the empress speaking Russian with her thick German accent—except Catherine, who burst out laughing. The couple’s growing rapport did not amuse the Orlov brothers. Potemkin soon lost sight in his left eye, although the true cause has never been established. One version of the accident had Alexei Orlov beating him up after a game of billiards. But it would not have any effect on his prowess on the battlefield. At the start of the Russo-Turkish War, Potemkin sealed his reputation as a war hero by defeating four thousand Turks at the Battle of Kagul, and that was only the beginning of his victories. Recognized as one of the best cavalry commanders in Russia, Potemkin was chosen to carry General Rumyantsev’s reports from the front line to the empress. Catherine nicknamed him “Alcibiades” after the brilliant Athenian general.
Back in St. Petersburg, Potemkin learned that Catherine had finally ended her long relationship with Gregory Orlov, but had started a rebound affair with a young ensign, Alexander Vasilchikov. After a month as lovers, Catherine moved Vasilchikov into Orlov’s former apartment at the Winter Palace. To Potemkin’s great frustration, several weeks after his return to the capital, Catherine had still not cut Vasilchikov loose. In January 1774, Potemkin called Catherine’s bluff. Potemkin, a former Moscow University theology student, retreated to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, threatening to take holy vows unless Catherine graced him with her favors. By early February, Catherine dispatched lady-in-waiting and longtime friend Countess Prascovia Bruce to convince Potemkin to join her at Tsarskoe Selo. On February 4, Potemkin traded in his monastic cassock for a uniform and rode in the imperial carriage to meet Catherine. That evening, the couple became lovers.
Five days later, before hosting a formal dinner at Tsarkoe Selo with Potemkin by her side, Catherine wrote Madame Bielke about Emelyan Pugachev and his “gangs of highwaymen.” Preoccupied with war against Turkey and the hunt for a suitable wife for Paul, Catherine had dispatched a series of ineffective generals from Moscow to suppress what she thought was a minor mutiny. Now she believed her new general, Alexander Bibikov, was restoring order in the Orenburg province with a handful of hangings. “. . . [T]hese very rare hangings are a thousand times more effective here than in those places where people are hanged every day,” she wrote. “It is very probably that all this will soon come to an end. General Bibikov has everything necessary. And furthermore, something which lacks either sense or order cannot survive once it encounters order and reason.”2 But in a rare misstep, her instinct did not serve her well.
Matters at court continued to distract Catherine. Awkwardly, Alexander Vasilchikov (nicknamed “Ice Soup” by Catherine and Potemkin, possibly because of his frosty behavior after being replaced) hadn’t vacated his apartment at the Winter Palace. To expedite his departure, Catherine rewarded him with properties and a 20,000-ruble pension. “General Potemkin is more in fashion than many others,” Catherine wrote Grimm. “. . . I have drawn away from a certain excellent but very annoying citizen who has been quickly replaced, I don’t know how, by one of the tallest, the funniest, and the most amusing originals of this iron century.”3 Complaining that he felt like a male cocotte, Vasilchikov, acknowledging that he had been beaten out by another suitor, retired to his Moscow country estate with a collection of Western European paintings and sculptures.
Catherine was smitten. Over six feet tall, blue-eyed, with leonine auburn hair, Potemkin was sexual, energetic, and witty. She wrote him love letters several times a day, often expressing her passion in French and state matters in Russian. Catherine called him “twin soul,” her “tiger,” “hero,” “idol,” and “dearest friend.” In June 1774, she wrote tenderly: “My darling, my dear, my beloved, I have lost all common sense today. Love, love is the reason. I love you with my heart, mind, soul and body. I love you with all my senses and shall love you eternally.” Catherine’s passion for Potemkin was unlike anything she’d experienced. “In order for me to make sense, when you are with me, I have to close my eyes or else I might really say what I have always found laughable: ‘that my gaze is captivated by you,’” she confided.4
But consumed by jealousy, Potemkin accused Catherine of having fifteen lovers before him. In her frank response, Catherine swore that besides her impotent husband, she’d only slept with four men before Potemkin (Saltykov, Poniatowski, Orlov, and Vasilchikov)—“. . . the first, chosen out of necessity, and the fourth, out of desperation . . . As to the other three, if you look closely, God knows they weren’t the result of debauchery, for which I haven’t the least inclination, and had fate given me in my youth a husband whom I could’ve loved, I would’ve remained true to him forever. The trouble is my heart is loath to be without love even for a single hour.”5
In addition to their private chambers, Catherine and Potemkin met regularly for trysts in the banya (Russian bath) located in the Winter Palace basement. Because Potemkin was a night owl and Catherine an early riser, they rarely spent the night together. “As soon as I had gone to bed and the servants had withdrawn, I got up again, dressed and went to the doors in the library to wait for you, and there I stood for two hours in a draught; and not until it was nearly midnight did I return out of sadness to lie down in bed where, thanks to you, I spent the fifth sleepless night,” she wrote.6
Catherine named Potemkin adjutant general in March, and he wasted no time involving himself in matters of state. By April, Potemkin was ensconced in the Winter Palace, having had a suite of rooms redecorated directly below those of Catherine, connected by a private spiral staircase carpeted in green. Potemkin moved a couch into Catherine’s apartment, where he liked to lounge in his fur-lined dressing gown and red bandana. “Mr. Tom [Catherine’s English greyhound] is snoring very deeply behind me on the Turkish divan General Potemkin has introduced,” she wrote Grimm.7 Soon, Potemkin enjoyed apartments in each of Catherine’s palaces.
Catherine knew that marrying Potemkin would be political suicide. Her Russian-born son Paul, seen by many as Peter III’s legitimate heir, enjoyed a strong following of his own. Since Paul turned eighteen, pressure was mounting for her to either share power with him, as Austria’s Maria Theresa had done with her son, or yield the throne. But the tradition of male primogeniture had ended dramatically in 1722 when Peter the Great changed Russia’s long-standing law of succession with a decree that allowed tsars or tsarinas to choose their own heirs. Legally, Catherine had the power to name her successor, male or female, at any time. Though Catherine had proclaimed Paul her heir when she seized power in 1762, as he came of age she increasingly saw him as a threat, fearing revenge for Peter’s death. She rejected suggestions that he co-rule, and rebuffed his attempts to participate in government affairs.
Five months into Catherine’s relationship with Potemkin, in early July 1774, the couple is believed to have secretly exchanged vows in the Church of St. Samson. Catherine’s confessor, Ioann Pamfilov, is thought to have officiated before witnesses sworn to secrecy: Maria Perekusikhina, Catherine’s maid; Alexander Samoliv, Potemkin’s nephew; and Yevgraf Chertkov, court chamberlain. In her letters, Catherine mentions the sacred bonds that linked them forever and refers to Potemkin as “dear spouse” or “husband” and to herself as his wife over a dozen times.8 In hundreds more letters, she names him her lord or master.9
Later that month, Sultan Mustafa died. After six years of war, the Ottomans finally signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. Catherine had accomplished her main objective—gaining unrestricted access to the Black Sea. The war brought southern Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, and the Crimea under Russian control. In the 18th century, the Ottomans ruled today’s Greece and most of the Balkans. As part of the treaty, Russia became a protectorate of all Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, opening a door for Catherine’s campaign to liberate the Balkans and Peloponnese. Though the treaty gave independence to the Crimean Khanate, the strategic peninsula became dependent on Russia.
That was the good news for Catherine. Yet, closer to home, Emelyan Pugachev was gaining strength. In 1774, he led 20,000 peasants in the capture of Kazan, setting fire to the city and slaughtering nobles. Later that year, the revolt spread to mining communities in the Urals. As added incentive to his supporters, Pugachev was now offering monetary rewards—100 rubles for a landlord’s head or plundered castle, 1,000 rubles and rank of general for ten murdered nobles and ten destroyed castles.10 Wearing a red Cossack coat and a fur cap with gold tassels, Pugachev would storm into a village. While he dined in the governor’s house, nobles were hanged outside on makeshift gallows. By mid-1774, Pugachev’s forces had crossed the Volga into territories populated by Russian serfs. Declaring the serfs free, he ordered them to wreak vengeance. Over 1,500 landlords were killed as serfs seized lands, pillaged granaries and warehouses, and set fire to manor houses.
Pugachev’s next target was Moscow where 100,000 serfs lived as servants and industrial workers. News of Russia’s violent peasant uprising had spread throughout Europe and the American colonies and Catherine feared the public relations fallout as well as the threat to Russian society that was now frighteningly real. At an emergency meeting at Peterhof Palace, the empress declared that she would personally travel to Moscow to fight Pugachev. With strong support from landlords, government officials, and army officers, Catherine responded to the rebels with massive force.
In August, Alexander Suvorov led a crushing defeat of the rebels near Tsaritsyn (later renamed Stalingrad, today Volgograd), forcing Pugachev to flee home to the Don. Suvorov’s troops chased the rebel leader to the farthest outback across the steppes. In an effort to save themselves, Pugachev’s lieutenants turned him in. Pugachev was brought back to Moscow in an iron cage. In reprisal for the assassination of some 3,000 officials and 2,500 noblemen throughout the countryside, Catherine ordered his followers killed. Hundreds were beheaded and hanged savagely from their ribs by a metal hook; thousands more were flogged or mutilated.
Pugachev begged Catherine for mercy. “If it were only I who he had offended, his reasoning would be correct and I should pardon him; but this is a case involving the Empire which has its laws,” she wrote.11 After a secret two-day trial in the Great Kremlin Hall, Pugachev was taken to Bolotnai Square near the Kremlin on January 10, 1775. In a show of clemency, Catherine allowed Pugachev to be decapitated before being quartered. The pieces of his dismembered body were displayed on a pole in the middle of the scaffold; his head placed on an iron spike.
Deeply shaken, Catherine had Pugachev’s village destroyed and rebuilt on the opposite side of the Don as Potemkinskaya. Other places connected with the revolt were similarly renamed; Yaitsk and the Yaik River, where the uprising began, became Uralsk and the Ural; Ural Cossacks replaced the Yaik Cossacks. Catherine blamed Pugachev’s success on weak local government. To beef up local control and prevent another uprising, Catherine further decentralized Peter the Great’s reforming network of fifty provinces and districts in November 1775. Drawing new boundaries, she appointed nineteen governors with vice-regal status responsible for maintaining law and order (by the end of Catherine’s reign, there were forty provinces). Reporting to Catherine and the senate, each governor received an extravagant gift from the empress—an elegant silver table service made by the finest silversmiths in St. Petersburg, London, Augsburg, and Paris. Eventually the governors would answer to a governor-general appointed by Catherine. At the same time, Catherine abandoned her early interest in reforming serfdom and now granted greater privileges to Russia’s upper classes.
The Pugachev Rebellion put Catherine on high alert for other pretenders and internal threats, as Pugachev would not be the last. Several months after Pugachev’s execution, the threat came in the form of an adventuress claiming to be Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Empress Elizabeth and Alexei Razumovsky. After many stops and aliases throughout Europe, the Russian-born “princess” landed in Italy where she hooked up with Prince Karol Radziwill, an anti-Russian Confederate Pole. She requested a passport from Sir William Hamilton, British Ambassador to Naples, who mentioned her to Alexei Orlov. In early 1775, Catherine ordered a mafia-style kidnapping. If the locals didn’t hand the young woman over, “one can toss a few bombs into the town.” But it would be far better to capture her “without noise if possible,” she wrote Orlov.12
After locating his victim in Pisa, Alexei Orlov courted her with love letters and seduced her into an eight-day affair. Invited to inspect Orlov’s fleet in Livorno and lured aboard ship with a promise of marriage, she was immediately arrested and taken to St. Petersburg. The squadron was commanded by Samuel Grieg, the Scottish vice-admiral who had helped engineer the Chesme victory five years earlier. By mid-May, Catherine’s abductee was imprisoned in a gloomy dank dungeon at the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Unwisely, the young inmate signed her appeals for better living conditions and an audience with the Empress “Elisabeth.” Catherine was not amused. “Send someone to tell the notorious woman that if she wishes to lighten her petty fate, then she should cease playing comedy,” she wrote.13 In early December, after six months of imprisonment, the 23-year-old died of tuberculosis and was secretly buried in the fortress graveyard. Today, she’s known as Princess Tarakanova, literally “of the cockroaches.” For his role in the kidnapping, Samuel Greig received a thank you note from Catherine: “I shall always remember your services and shall not fail to give marks of my benevolence toward you.”14