Potemkin’s expulsion appeared to be something of a disaster. His godfather and mother felt that obscure young men like Grisha could not afford to be so lazy. Fortunately, he was already enrolled in the Guards, but he did not even have the money for the trip to St Petersburg, a sure sign that his family either disapproved or had cut him off. He drifted apart from his mother: indeed they hardly saw each other later in life. The Empress Catherine II later made her a lady-in-waiting and she was proud of her son – but openly disapproved of his love life. So this was not just a process of leaving home. He was leaving on his own. He borrowed 500 roubles, a considerable sum, from his friend Ambrosius Zertis-Kamensky, now Bishop of Mojaisk. Potemkin often said he meant to return it with interest, but the Bishop was to be savagely murdered later in this story before Potemkin rose to power. He never repaid it.
The life of a young Guardsman was idle, decadent and exceedingly expensive, but there was no surer path to greatness. Potemkin’s timing was opportune – Russia was fighting the Seven Years War against Prussia, while in Petersburg Empress Elisabeth was dying. The Guards were already seething with intrigue.
On arrival in St Petersburg, Potemkin reported for duty at the Headquarters of his Horse-Guards Regiment, which comprised a little village of barracks, houses and stables built round a quadrangle by the Neva river near the Smolny Convent. The Regiment had its own church, hospital, bathhouse and prison. There was a meadow behind it for feeding horses and holding parades. The oldest Guards Regiments – such as the Preobrazhensky and the Semyonovsky – were founded by Peter the Great first as play regiments but then as his loyal forces in the vicious struggle against the corps of state musketeers, the Streltsy. His successors added others. In 1730, Empress Anna founded Potemkin’s regiment, the Garde-à-Cheval – the Horse-Guards.45
Guards officers were quite unable to withstand ‘the seductions of the metropolis’.46 When these teenage playboys were not carousing, they fought a sometimes fatal guerrilla war through the balls and backstreets with the Noble Cadet Corps that was based in the Menshikov Palace.47 So many young bloods were ruined by debts, or exhausted by endless whoring in the Metshchansky district or by games of whist or faro, that more ascetic parents preferred their boys to join an ordinary regiment, like the father in The Captain’s Daughter who exclaims, ‘Petrusha is not going to Petersburg. What would he learn, serving in Petersburg? To be a spendthrift and a rake? No, let him be a soldier and not a fop in the Guards!’48
Potemkin soon became known to the raciest daredevils among the Guards. At twenty-two, he was tall – well over six foot – broad and highly attractive to women. Potemkin ‘had the advantage of having the finest head of hair in all Russia’. His looks and talents were so striking that he was nicknamed ‘Alcibiades’, a superlative compliment in a neo-Classical age.*9 Educated people at that time studied Plutarch and Thucydides, so the character of the Athenian statesman was familiar – intelligent, cultured, sensuous, inconsistent, debauched and flamboyant. Plutarch raved about the ‘brilliance’ of Alcibiades’ ‘physical beauty’.49 Potemkin immediately attracted attention as a wit – he was an outstanding mimic, a gift that was to carry him far beyond the realm of comedians.50 It was soon to win the admiration of the most glamorous ruffians in the Guards – the Orlovs – and they in turn would draw him into the intrigues of the imperial family.
The Guards protected the imperial palaces, and it was this that gave them their political significance.51 Being in the capital and close to the Court, ‘the officers have more opportunity to be known,’ a Prussian diplomat observed.52 They had the run of the city, ‘admitted to the games, dances, soirées and theatrical performances of Court into the interior of that sanctuary’.53 Their duties at the palaces gave them a detailed but irreverent acquaintance with magnates and courtiers – and a sense of personal involvement in the rivalries of the imperial family itself.
During the months that Empress Elisabeth was suspended between life and death, groups of Guardsmen became increasingly embroiled in plans to change the succession to exclude the hated Grand Duke Peter and replace him with his popular wife, Grand Duchess Catherine. Guarding the imperial palaces, Potemkin now had the chance to observe the romantic figure of Grand Duchess Catherine, who would soon rule in her own right as Catherine II. She was never beautiful, but she possessed qualities far superior to that ephemeral glaze: the indefinable magic of imperial dignity combined with sexual attractiveness, natural gaiety and an all-conquering charm that touched everyone who met her. The best description of Catherine at this age was written a few years earlier by Stanislas Poniatowski, her Polish lover:
She had reached that time in life when any woman to whom beauty had been granted will be at her best. She had black hair, a radiant complexion and a high colour, large prominent and expressive blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, a pointed nose, a kissable mouth…slender figure, tall rather than small; she moved quickly yet with great nobility and had an agreeable voice and a gay good-tempered laugh.
Potemkin had not met her yet – but just about the time of his arrival in Petersburg she began to cultivate the Guards, who ardently admired her and hated her husband, the Heir. So it was that the provincial boy from Chizhova found himself perfectly placed to join the conspiracy that would place her on the throne – and bring the two of them together. Catherine herself overheard one general declare the gallant sentiments that young Potemkin would soon share: ‘There goes a woman for whose sake an honest man would gladly suffer several lashes of the knout.’54
Skip Notes
*1 The date of his birth is, like everything else about him, mysterious because there is much confusion about the age that he went to live in Moscow and that he was put down for the Guards. There is an argument for saying he was born in 1742, the date given by his nephew Samoilov. The dates and military records contradict each other without creating a particularly interesting debate. This date is the most likely.
*2 When Grigory Potemkin, who was to prove even more shocking to Western sensibilities, rose to greatness in St Petersburg, it was felt he required a famous ancestor. A portrait of the foul-tempered, xenophobic and pedantic Ambassador of the era of the Sun King and the Merry Monarch was found, possibly a present from the English Embassy, and placed in Catherine the Great’s Hermitage.
*3 This continued right up to 1917. When Rasputin’s enemies grumbled to Nicholas II about his bathing with his female devotees, the last Tsar retorted that this was a usual habit of the common people.
*4 Today, there is little on the Potemkin side of the village except Catherine’s Well and the hut of two octogenarian peasants who subsist on bees. On the serf’s side, there is just the ruins of the church. In Communist times, the villagers say, the commissars kept cattle in ‘Potemkin’s church’ but all the cattle sickened and died. The villagers are still digging for an Aladdin’s Cave which they call ‘Potemkin’s Gold’. But all they have found are the bodies of eighteenth-century women, probably Potemkin’s sisters, in the graveyard.
*5 He did endow the round Nikitskaya Church (Little Nikitskaya) and it was rebuilt by his heirs. But he was still planning the big project when he died. Historians who believe he married Catherine II in Moscow point to this church as the venue for the wedding.
*6 The young Emperor, who moved the Court back to Moscow, died in the suburban Palace which today contains the War College archives (RGVIA), where most of Potemkin’s papers are stored.