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-a-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.* 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, soirees 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
* Alcibiades was famously bisexual - his lovers included Socrates - but there was never any suggestion that Potemkin emulated his sexual tastes. The other eighteenth-century figure known as Alcibiades was a favourite of King Gustavus III of Sweden and later friend of Tsar Alexander - Count Armfeld was 'l'Alcibiade du Nord'.
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
THE GUARDSMAN AND THE GRAND DUCHESS: CATHERINE'S COUP
Heaven knows how it is that my wife becomes pregnant.
Grand Duke Peter, in Catherine the Great, Memoirs
The future Catherine II, known as the Great, was not a Russian at all, but she had lived at Elisabeth's Court since she was fourteen and she had made every effort to behave, in her words, 'so the Russians should love me'. Few yet realized that this Grand Duchess aged thirty-two was a gifted politician, far-sighted statesman and consummate actress, with a burning ambition to rule the Russian Empire, a role for which she was admirably qualified.
She was born Princess Sophia of Zerbst-Anhalt on 21 April/2 May 1729 in Stettin. Her dreary destiny as the daughter of a minor German princely house was changed in January 1744 when the Empress Elisabeth scoured the Holy Roman Empire, that dating agency for kings, to find a girl to marry her newly appointed Heir, Karl-Peter-Ulrich, Duke of Holstein, her nephew and therefore a grandson of Peter the Great. He had just been proclaimed Grand Duke Peter Fyodorovich of Russia and required an heir to safeguard Elisabeth's throne. For a variety of reasons - political, dynastic and personal - the Empress settled on Sophia, who converted to Orthodoxy as Ekaterina Alexevna - Catherine - and then married Peter on 21 August 1745, wearing modest dress and unpowdered hair. Observers remarked on her excellent Russian and cool composure.
Catherine realized swiftly that Peter was not suited to be either her husband or the tsar of Russia. She noted ominously that he was 'very childish', lacking in 'judgement' and 'not enamoured of the nation over which he was destined to reign'. It was not to be a happy or romantic marriage. On the contrary, it was a tribute to Catherine's character that she survived it in such an advantageous way.
Peter was already afraid of the Russian Court and perhaps sensed that he was out of his depth. Despite being the grandson of Peter the Great, ruling Duke of Holstein and, at one moment, the heir of Russia and Sweden, Peter had had an ill-starred life. When he was a boy, his late father had handed him over to the pedantic and cruel marshal of the Holstein Court, who starved him, beat him and made him kneel for hours on dried peas. He grew up into a teenage paradomaniac obsessed with drilling dolls and later soldiers. Alternately starved of affection and spoilt with sycophancy, Peter developed into a confused, pitiful creature who loathed Russia. Once ensconced at the Russian Court, he clung desperately on to his belief in all things German - particularly Prussian. He despised the Russian religion, preferring Luther- anism; he disdained the Russian army, avidly hero-worshipping Frederick the Great.1 He could not help but display his worrying lack of sense and sensitivity, so Catherine resolved on this plan: '(i) to please the Grand Duke, (2) to please the Empress, (3) to please the nation'. Gradually the third became more important than the first.