In 1750, the eleven-year-old travelled to Smolensk, escorted probably by his godfather, to register for his military service. The first time a boy dressed up in his uniform and felt the weight of a sabre, the creak of boots, the stiff grip of a tunic, the proud trappings of service, remained a joyful memory for every child-soldier of the dvoryantsvo. Noble children were enrolled at absurdly young ages, sometimes as young as five, serving as supernumerary soldiers, to get round Peter's compulsory life service. When they actually became soldiers in their late teens they would technically have served for over ten years and already be officers. Parents signed their sons into the best regiments, the Guards, just as English noblemen used to be 'put down for Eton'. In Smolensk, Grisha testified to the Heraldic Office about his family's service and nobility, recounting his soi-disant Roman descent, and his connection to Tsar Alexei's irascible Ambassador. The provincial office confusingly recorded his age as seven but, since children usually registered at eleven, it is probably a bureaucratic slip. Five years later, in February 1755, he returned for his second inspection and was put down for the Horse- Guards, one of the five elite Guards regiments.31 The teenager returned to his studies.
He then enrolled at Moscow University, where he appeared near the top of his classes in Greek and ecclesiastical history.32 He was to keep some of his friends from there for the rest of his life. The students wore uniforms - a green coat with red cuffs. The university itself had only just been founded. Potemkin's contemporary Denis von Vizin, in his Frank Confession of my Affairs and Thoughts, recounted how he and his brother were among the first students. Like Potemkin, they were the children of the poor gentry who could not afford private tutors. This new university was chaotic. 'We studied without any order ...', he recalled, due to 'the teachers' negligence and hard drinking .. Л33 Von Vizin claimed that the teaching of foreign languages was either abysmal or non-existent. Potemkin's records were lost in the fire of 1812, but he certainly learned a lot, possibly through his clerical friends.
This pedogogic debauchery did not matter because Potemkin, who later in life was said to have read nothing, was addicted to reading. When he visited relations in the countryside, he spent his whole time in the library and even fell asleep under the billiard table, grasping a book.34 Another time, Potemkin asked one of his friends, Ermil Kostrov, to lend him ten books. When Potemkin gave them back, Kostrov did not believe he could have read so much in so short a time. Potemkin replied he had read them from cover to cover: 'If you do not believe me, examine them!', he said. Kostrov was convinced. When another student named Afonin lent Potemkin the newly published Natural Philosophy by Buffon, Potemkin returned it a day later and amazed Afonin with his absolute recall of its every detail.35
Now Potemkin caught the eye of another powerful patron. In 1757, Grisha's virtuosity at Greek and theology won him the university's Gold Medal, and this impressed one of the magnates of the Imperial Court in Petersburg. Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, the erudite and cultured founder and Curator of Moscow University, was young, round-faced and gentle with sweet pixie-like features - but he was also unusually modest considering his position. Shuvalov was the lover of the Empress Elisabeth, who was eighteen years his senior, and one of her closest advisers. That June, Shuvalov ordered the university to select its twelve best pupils and send them to St Petersburg. Potemkin and eleven others were despatched to the capital, where they were met by Shuvalov himself and conveyed to the Winter Palace to be presented to the Empress of all the Russias. This was Potemkin's first visit to Petersburg.
Even Moscow must have seemed a backwater compared to St Petersburg. On the marshy banks and islands of the estuary of the River Neva, Peter the Great had founded his 'paradise' in 1703 on territory that still belonged to Sweden. When he had finally defeated Charles VII at Poltava his first reaction was that St Petersburg was safe at last. It became the official capital in 1712. Thousands of serfs died driving the piles and draining the water on this vast building site as the Tsar forced the project ahead. Now it was already a beautiful city of about 100,000 inhabitants, with elegant palaces lining the embankments: on the northern side stood the Peter and Paul Fortress and the red-brick palace that had belonged to Peter's favourite, Prince Menshikov. Almost opposite these buildings stood the Winter Palace, the Admiralty and more aristocratic mansions. Its boulevards were astonishingly wide, as if built for giants, but their Germanic straightness was alien to the Russian soul, quite the opposite of the twisting lanes of Moscow. The buildings were grandiose, but all were half finished, like so much in Russia.
'It's a cheerful fine looking city with streets extremely wide and long,' wrote an English visitor. 'Not only the town but the manner of living is upon too large a scale. The nobles seem to vie with each other in extravagances of every sort.' Everything was a study of contrasts. Inside the palaces, 'the homes are decorated with the most sumptuous furniture from every country but you pass into a drawing room where the floor is of the finest inlaid woods through a staircase of coarseness, stinking with dirt.'36 Even its palaces and dances could not completely conceal the nature of the Empire it ruled: 'On the one hand there are the elegant fashions, gorgeous dresses, sumptuous repasts, splendid fetes and theatres equal to those that adorn Paris and London,' observed a French diplomat, 'on the other there are merchants in Asiatic costume, domestics and peasants in sheepskins and wearing long beards, fur- bonnets, gloves without fingers and hatchets hanging from their leather belts.'37
The Empress's new Winter Palace was not yet finished, but it was magnificent nonetheless - one room would be gilded, painted, hung with chandeliers and filled with courtiers, the next would be draughty, leaky, almost open to the elements and strewn with masons' tools. Shuvalov led the twelve prize-winning students into the reception rooms where Elisabeth received foreign envoys. There, Potemkin and his fellow scholars were presented to the Empress.
Elisabeth, then nearly fifty and in the seventeenth year of her reign, was a big-boned Amazonian blonde with blue eyes. 'It was impossible on seeing her for the first time not to be struck by her beauty,' Catherine the Great remembered. 'She was a large woman who in spite of being very stout was not in the least disfigured by her size.'38 Elisabeth, like her sixteenth-century English namesake, was raised in the glorious shadow of a dominant royal father and then spent her youth in the risky limbo between the throne and the dungeon. This honed her natural political instincts - but there end the similarities with Gloriana. She was impulsive, generous and frivolous, but also shrewd, vindictive and ruthless - truly Peter the Great's daughter. This Elisabethan Court was dominated by the exuberance and vanity of the Empress, whose appetites for elaborate fetes and expensive clothes were prodigious. She never wore the same clothes twice. She changed her dresses twice a day and female courtiers copied her. When she died, her successor found a wardrobe in the Summer Palace filled with 15,000 dresses. At Court, French plays were still a rare and foreign innovation: the usual entertainment was the Empress's so-called transvestite balls where everyone was ordered to dress as the opposite sex: this led to all sorts of horseplay with the men in 'whale-boned petticoats' and the women looking like 'scrubby little boys' - especially the old ones. There was a reason for this: 'the only woman who looked really fine, and completely a man, was the Empress herself. As she was tall and powerful, male attire suited her. She had the handsomest leg I have ever seen on any man.. Л39