62 
IN THE WINTER and spring of 1776, as the passion binding Catherine and Potemkin was ebbing and the rancor between them mounting, she found Gregory’s successor. He was Peter Zavadovsky, a protégé of Field Marshal Rumyantsev, the commander of the victorious Russian army in the war with Turkey. When Rumyantstev returned to St. Petersburg, he brought with him two young Ukrainians, Zavadovsky and Alexander Bezborodko. Both were well educated and had served on Rumyantsev’s staff during the war and the peace negotiations. When Catherine asked Rumyantsev to recommend talented officials for her personal secretariat, the field marshal gave her these two names. Both were appointed and both were to have brilliant careers.
At first, Zavadovsky appeared to have more of the qualities necessary to succeed. Born of a good family, he had accompanied the field marshal to the battlefield, where his courage had earned him the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was thirty-seven, the same age as Potemkin, had a handsome figure, a classical education, a good mind, and a modest, courteous manner. Bezborodko, on the other hand, was vulgar in appearance and rude in manner, but, in the long run, he was to have the more spectacular career. Zavadovsky lived for a short time in the glow of imperial favor before settling back into life as a highly respected civil servant, while Bezborodko, on the basis of exceptional intelligence and hard work, ended by becoming a prince and chancellor of the empire.
Catherine’s notice of Zavadovsky was natural enough. His dark good looks, six-foot form, and quiet dedication appealed to the empress, and, within a month, with Potemkin’s agreement, she had attached him to her personal staff as her personal secretary. Bezborodko remained a clerk in the chancellery. At the end of July 1775, Zavadovsky began dining with Catherine and Potemkin.
Zavadovsky’s successful appearance in the middle of the stormy relationship between Catherine and Potemkin was achieved with the mutual agreement of the two principals. Both were eager to resolve the situation without further damage, and Zavadovsky assisted by serving as a buffer. At first, the new arrangement worked: the presence of the quiet, discreet Ukrainian provided Catherine with relief from Potemkin’s extreme demands and wilder mood swings; she needed this in order to govern the empire. She did not, however, wish to lose the emotional support, the rare energy, and the unique political and administrative qualities supplied by Potemkin. Potemkin also needed a figure like Zavadovsky. He was eager, even desperate, to find a solution that would ensure his position as the most important man in the empress’s life while also giving him sufficient autonomy to act freely and not always have to fear that he would wake up one morning to learn that he had been replaced. Both wanted an arrangement that would preserve the valuable core of their relationship; Potemkin wanted to keep his power and banish his insecurities; Catherine wanted a man to love, but she needed stability and predictability. In Zavadovsky, she believed she had found the right man. At the beginning, Potemkin agreed.
By March 1776, Catherine, her relationship with Potemkin still unresolved, was sexually involved with Zavadovsky. The court and diplomatic corps were thoroughly bewildered; except for the fact that it was now Zavadovsky rather than Potemkin who escorted Catherine to her private apartment at the end of the evening, nothing seemed to have changed. Potemkin went on living at the Winter Palace and was always present whenever Catherine appeared. He and Catherine seemed no less affectionate in public, nor was there any sign of strain or jealousy between the incoming and outgoing favorites. In fact, Potemkin’s attitude toward Zavadovsky was cheerful, almost like that of an elder brother.
Zavadovsky pleased her as she had hoped he would. He was ardent, and—unique among her lovers—coveted neither honors nor riches. Their language was passionate; Catherine addressed him with loving diminutives and he called her Katya and Katyusha. When he moved into the Winter Palace, all might have been well had he not developed an obsessive love for Catherine and a consequent fierce jealousy of Potemkin. He wanted—then demanded—an exclusive intimacy, and complained that his predecessor’s shadow always lay across his path. Catherine tried to explain her situation and feelings; Zavadovsky refused to listen. This was to bring about his downfall.
On June 28, Zavadovsky’s position as favorite was made official. Several days earlier, Potemkin had left the capital for Novgorod, not to return for four weeks. During his absence, Zavadovsky remained unhappy; he was not a courtier and court life bored him; his French was too poor to allow him to participate in social conversations. Potemkin was unhappy, too. When he returned at the end of July, he complained that he was lonely and had no place to go. Catherine replied, “My husband has written me, ‘Where shall I go? Where shall I find my proper place?’ My dear and beloved husband, come to me. You will be received with open arms.”
Potemkin, having initially approved of his successor, now realized that Zavadovsky had become a threat, not only to his private but also to his public position. He complained to Catherine. She, who had hoped for domestic peace, found that she had to cope with jealous scenes from both Zavadovsky and Potemkin. In the spring of 1777, Potemkin stayed away from Catherine’s birthday celebrations, retreating to a country estate. From there he issued an ultimatum demanding Zavadovsky’s dismissal. Catherine refused:
You ask for Zavadovsky’s removal. My reputation will greatly suffer should I carry out this request. With this, our discord will become firmly established, and I’ll only be considered the weaker for it.… I’ll add that this would be to do an injustice to an innocent person. Don’t demand injustices, stop your ears against slanderers, heed my words. Our peace will be restored. Should you be moved by my grief, then dispel even the thought of estranging yourself from me. For God’s sake, I find just imagining this intolerable, which proves again that my attachment to you is stronger than yours [to me].
Potemkin would not relent; Zavadovsky had to go. In the summer of 1777, after less than eighteen months as the favorite, he left, bitter and disconsolate, taking her parting gift—eighty thousand rubles and an annual pension of five thousand rubles—and closed himself off in his estate in the Ukraine. That autumn, Catherine made a halfhearted effort to bring him back, but 1777 was a year of political crisis; by then Potemkin ruled as viceroy over Catherine’s southern empire, and his support was too important to be jeopardized by turmoil in her private life. Zavadovsky remained away from court for three years, returning in 1780 to St. Petersburg, when he was appointed a privy councillor. In 1781, he became the director of the state bank, which was founded on a plan he had submitted. Subsequently, he became a senator and ended his career as minister of education to Catherine’s eldest grandson, Alexander I.
The new relationship worked out between the empress and Potemkin had given each of them freedom to choose other sexual partners, while preserving affection and close political collaboration between themselves. Catherine often missed him. “I am burning with impatience to see you again; it seems to me that I have not seen you for a year. I kiss you, my friend. Come back happy and in good health and we shall love each other.… I kiss you and I so much want to see you because I love you with all my heart.” In her letters, she made a point of informing him that her new favorite—whoever he happened to be at the moment—sent his love or respects. She made her lovers write directly to him, mostly fawning declarations of how much they, too, missed, admired, or even worshipped him. The young men did this because they knew that, in comparison to Potemkin’s influence, their own was nonexistent.
• • •
Meanwhile, Potemkin continued to love Catherine in his own way. His physical passion for her had faded, but his affection for and loyalty to her remained. Meanwhile, he was transferring his sexual approaches from one young woman to another. Among these were three of his five nieces, Alexandra, Varvara, and Ekaterinia, the daughters of his sister Maria Engelhardt.
Varvara (Barbara) attracted her uncle first. Golden-haired, flirtatious, and demanding, she knew at the age of twenty how to control the prince, who then was thirty-seven. He made herculean efforts to please her. His letters to her were ardent, far more so than any he had written to Catherine:
Varinka, I love you, my darling, as I have never loved anybody before.… I kiss you all over, my dearest goddess.… Good-bye, sweetness of my lips.… You were sound asleep and do not remember anything. When I left you I tucked you in, and kissed you.… Tell me, my beautiful, my goddess, that you love me.… My sweetest, you dare not get out of health; I shall spank you for that.… I kiss you twenty-two million times.
Varvara had no difficulty imposing her will on her doting uncle. She teased and misled him. When Potemkin left for the south, she pretended to be lonely and sad. This prompted the empress to write to him, “Listen, my dearest, Varinka is very sick; it is your absence that is causing it. You are wrong. You will kill her while I am getting more and more fond of her.” The young woman was actually deceiving them both; she had fallen in love with young Prince Sergei Golitsyn and was trying to find a way to win Potemkin’s and Catherine’s permission to marry him. She succeeded, married, and, with Sergei, produced ten children.
Her sister Alexandra (“Sashenka”) came next. She was two years older than Varvara, and the liaison between her and Potemkin was less passionate but more serious and durable. For the rest of his life, they were devoted to each other, and even after she had married an influential Polish nobleman, Count Xavier Branitsky, Sashenka was often at Potemkin’s side. When she was not with him, she was with the empress, having become one of Catherine’s favorite ladies-in-waiting. She was slender, with brown hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones, and impeccable dignity. Of his nieces, Sashenka meant the most to Potemkin. It was to her that Potemkin left most of his wealth; as an elderly woman, she estimated her fortune to be twenty-eight million rubles. Nevertheless, until Catherine’s death, Sashenka spent most winters in the Winter Palace, and when the empress died, Sashenka quietly retired to a wooden house in the country.
The prettiest and laziest of the Engelhardt sisters was Ekaterina (Catherine), who yielded to Potemkin because she did not want the bother of resisting him. This relationship was less turbulent than the one with Varvara and less affectionate than that with Sashenka. Ekaterina married Count Paul Skavronsky, but when Catherine appointed the count as minister to Naples, his wife refused to accompany him, remaining in St. Petersburg because her uncle wanted her to stay. When she finally departed for Italy, she found her husband chronically ill in bed. She left him there and spent her days and nights reclining on a sofa, wrapped only in a black fur coat, playing cards. She refused to wear the large diamonds Potemkin had given her or the Parisian dresses bought for her by her husband. “What’s the use of all this? Who wants it?” she asked. While she was in Italy, Potemkin died, and when her husband also died, she returned to Russia, married an Italian count, and lived with him for the rest of her life.
There was contemporary disapproval of relationships between uncles and nieces, but it was muted, and outright condemnation was almost nonexistent. In Russia and elsewhere in Europe, the glittering, tightly enclosed eighteenth-century worlds of royalty and aristocracy made physical attraction between relatives more likely and criticism more limited. At thirteen, Catherine herself (then Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst) had dallied with her uncle George before she left for Russia to marry her second cousin, Grand Duke Peter. In Russia, however, there was an exception to the generally lackadaisical attitude toward Potemkin’s affairs with his nieces. Gregory’s mother, Daria Potemkina, emphatically did not approve of her son’s relations with her granddaughters. No one listened to her. Potemkin laughed at her censorious letters, balled them up, and tossed them into the fire.
Catherine was not jealous of these young women because they were sleeping with Potemkin. What she envied them was their youth. Her own youth had been wasted. She had been sixteen when she married a wretched boy. She was a mature woman of twenty-five before she had her first sexual encounter, and this was with a heartless rake. Now approaching fifty, she still saw in Potemkin’s nieces the ardent young girl she could have been. She hated growing old. Her birthday, so publicly celebrated, was for her a day of mourning. In a letter to Grimm, she wrote, “Would it not be charming if an empress could be always fifteen?”