Potemkin's declarations to Catherine and the fight with the Orlovs are both part of the Potemkin mythology: there are other accounts that he lost the eye playing tennis and then went to the quack, whose ointment burned it. But it is hard to imagine Potemkin on a tennis court. The fight story was widely believed, because Potemkin was overstepping the limits of prudence by courting Catherine, but it is unlikely that it really happened because Grigory Orlov always behaved decently to his young rival.
This was his first setback - however it occurred. In two years he had gone from arriving poor and obscure from Moscow to being the indulged protege of the Empress of all the Russias herself. But he had peaked far too early. Losing the sight in his eye was tragic, but ironically his withdrawal from Court made strategic sense. This was the first of many occasions when Potemkin used timely withdrawals to concentrate the mind of the Empress.
Potemkin no longer visited Court. He saw no one, studied religion, grew a long beard and considered taking the tonsure of a monk. He was always prone to religious contemplation and mysticism. This true son of the Orthodox Church often retired to monasteries to pray. While there was always play-acting in his antics, his contemporaries, who attacked him whenever possible, never doubted that he was genuinely tempted by a life of prayer. Nor did they doubt his ascetic and very Russian disgust with the pursuit of worldly success, particularly his own.28 But the crisis was much more serious than that. Some of Potemkin's charm derived from the wild giddiness of his mood swings, the symptom of a manic personality that explains much of his strange behaviour. He collapsed into a depression. His confidence was shattered. The breakdown was so serious that some accounts even claim that he put his eye out himself 'to free it from the blemish which it derived from the accident'.29
There was vanity in his disappearance too: his blind eye was certainly half closed - but not lost.[14] He was ashamed of it and probably believed that the Empress would now be disgusted by him. Potemkin's over-sensitivity was one of his most winning qualities. Even as a famous statesman, he almost always refused to pose for portraits because he felt disfigured. He convinced himself that his career was over. Certainly his opponents revelled in his ruined looks: the Orlovs nicknamed him after the one-eyed giants of Homer's Odyssey. 'Alcibiades', they said, had become the 'Cyclops'.
Potemkin was gone for eighteen lost months. The Empress sometimes asked the Orlovs about him. It is said she even cancelled some of her little gatherings she so missed his mimicry. She sent him messages through anonymous lady- friends. Catherine later told Potemkin that Countess Bruce always informed her that he still loved her.3° Finally, according to Samoilov, the Empress sent this message through the go-between: 'It is a great pity that a person of such rare merits is lost from society, the Motherland and those who value him and are sincerely well disposed to him.'31 This must have raised his hopes. When Catherine drove by his retreat, she is said to have ordered Grigory Orlov to summon Potemkin back to Court. The honourable and frank Orlov always showed respect for Potemkin to the Empress. Besides he probably believed that, with Potemkin's looks ruined and his confidence broken, he was no longer a threat.32
Suffering can foster toughness, patience and depth. One senses that the one-eyed Potemkin who returned to Court was a different man from the Alcibiadean colt who left it. Eighteen months after losing his eye, Potemkin still sported a piratical bandage round his head, which suggest the contradictions of shyness and showmanship that were both part of his personality. Catherine welcomed him back to Court. He reappeared in his old position at the Synod; and when Catherine celebrated the third anniversary of the coup by presenting silver services to her thirty-three leading supporters, Potemkin was remembered near the bottom of the list, far below grandees like Kirill Razumovsky, Panin and Orlov. The latter was firmly and permanently at her side, but she had obviously not forgotten her reckless suitor.33
So the Orlovs devised a more agreeable way to remove him. One legend tells how Grigory Orlov suggested to the Empress that Kirill Razumovsky's daughter, Elisabeth, would be a most advantageous match for the Guardsman from Smolensk and Catherine did not object.34 There is no evidence of this courtship but we know that Potemkin later helped the girl - and always got on well with her father who 'received him like a son.'
Indeed the Count's kindness to young Potemkin was typical of the lack of snobbery of this Cossack ex-shepherd who was one of the most likeable of Catherine's magnates. It was said Razumovsky had been a peasant at sixteen and a Field-Marshal at twenty-two, which was almost true.[15] Whenever his sons, who grew up to be proud Russian aristocrats, were embarrassed by his humble Cossack beginnings, he used to shout for his valet: 'Here, bring me the peasant's rags in which I came to St Petersburg. I want to recall the happy time when I drove my cattle crying, "Tsop! Tsop!".'35 He lived in fabulous state - he was said to have introduced champagne to Russia. Potemkin, who certainly enjoyed the sparkling stories (and probably the sparkling wine) of this cheerful raconteur, became obsessed by the Cossacks: did the enthusiasm of a lifetime start over the ex-Hetman's champagne at the Razumovsky Palace? The real reason there would be no marriage was that Potemkin still loved Catherine and that she held out some sort of glorious hope for the future.36 Catherine 'has at times had eyes for others', wrote the British envoy, the Earl of Buckinghamshire, 'particularly for an amiable and accomplished man, who is not undeserving of her affection; he has good advisers and is not without some chance of success.'37 The 'accomplishment' makes him sound like Potemkin and his 'good advisers' could not be any better placed than Countess Bruce.
In 1767, he received a job that again showed how Catherine was specially creating tasks that suited his interests. After a short tenure at the Synod, she had given him duties as an army paymaster and responsibilities for the manufacturing of daytime army uniforms. Now Catherine was embarking on the most daring political experiment of her life: the Legislative Commission. Potemkin, who had evidently showed off his knowledge of Oriental cultures, was appointed one of three 'Guardians of Exotic Peoples'38 alongside the Procurator-General Prince Viazemsky and one of Catherine's secretaries, Olsufiev. The Empress was gently introducing Potemkin to the most important officials in the realm. Nothing was ever a coincidence with Catherine II.
The Legislative Commission was an elected body of about 500 delegates from an impressively broad range (for its day) of representatives of the nobility, townspeople, state peasants and non-Russian peoples. They converged that year on Moscow bearing the instructions of their electors. There were fifty-four non-Russians - from Tartars to Baskirs, Yakuts to Kalmyks. Since Viazemsky and Olsufiev had weightier tasks, they were Potemkin's responsibility.
Potemkin went on ahead of the Empress to Moscow with two squadrons of Horse-Guards to help oversee the arrival of the delegates. Catherine herself followed in February, setting off from Moscow on a cruise down the Volga as far as Kazan and Simbirsk, with a suite of over 1,500 courtiers, including two Orlovs and two Chernyshevs, and foreign ambassadors - a voyage designed to show that Catherine was feeling the pulse of her Empire. She then returned to Moscow to open the Commission.
Catherine may have considered abolishing or reforming serfdom, according to the tenets of the Enlightenment, but she was far from wanting to overturn the Russian political order. Serfdom was one of the strongest links between the throne and the nobility: she would break it at her peril. The 500 or more articles of her Great Instruction, which she wrote out herself, were a digest of a lifetime of reading Montesquieu, Beccaria and the Encyclopaedia. The Commission's aim was the codification of existing laws - but even that was a risky encroachment on her own autocracy. Far from a revolutionary, she was a believer in Russian absolutism. Indeed most of the philosophes themselves, those enemies of superstition, were not democrats, just advocates of reason, law and order imposed from above. Catherine was sincere, but there was an element of window-dressing, for it showed her confidence and Russia's stability. But it turned out to be a very long-winded advertisement.