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WHEN CATHERINE, then Sophia, arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen, she learned that “favorite” was the term used to describe an established and formally recognized lover of the woman on the throne, Empress Elizabeth. While she was still a married grand duchess, Catherine herself had three lovers: Saltykov, Poniatowski, and Gregory Orlov. None of these was her “favorite”; she was not yet the empress. Orlov, of course, remained Catherine’s lover after she reached the throne, thereby becoming her first favorite. During her lifetime, Catherine had twelve lovers: the first three, named above, before she reached the throne at thirty-three, the other nine during her thirty-four years as empress. Of the twelve, she loved five: Poniatowsky, Orlov, Potemkin, Zavadovsky, and Alexander Lanskoy. For another three—Saltykov, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Mamonov—she felt passion. Three others—Vasilchikov, Simon Zorich and Alexander Yermolov—were quickly chosen and quickly discarded. The twelfth and last, Platon Zubov, was in a category of his own.
Usually there was only a brief interval between the departure of one of Catherine’s favorites and the arrival of the next. Most favorites had no influence on government policy, but they were always close to Catherine’s ear, and, throughout her reign, reports of their rise and fall filled the dispatches of foreign ambassadors attempting to interpret the significance of each change. Several of Catherine’s lovers played a mere decorative role in the life of the woman who drew them from obscurity and eventually sent them back into the shadows. There was always keen competition for the role. The candidate chosen was rewarded with jewels, money, palaces, and country estates. When he was sent away, the parting was almost always managed without tears or recriminations; occasionally a former lover later reappeared at court.
Most of Catherine’s favorites were young officers originally selected for their handsome faces, but their selection and presence was not due solely, or even primarily, to sensuality on Catherine’s part. She wanted to love and be loved. She had lived with an impossible husband in an emotional vacuum. To read her letters to Potemkin is to realize that, as much as physical satisfaction, she wanted intelligent, loving companionship.
Having accepted that he was no longer the imperial favorite, Gregory Orlov consoled himself by falling in love with, and asking to marry, his fifteen-year-old second cousin, Catherine Zinovieva, with whom he set off on an extended journey to western Europe. The empress, although piqued to find herself replaced so quickly, interceded on his behalf with the Holy Synod, arranging for it to set aside the church ban on marriages of people from the same family. In 1777, Orlov was finally able to marry. But his bride had tuberculosis and her health continued to deteriorate. Despite the fact that Orlov lavished care on her and took her everywhere for treatment, she died four years later in Lausanne. Orlov returned to St. Petersburg, where his own health declined. He suffered from hallucinations and lapsed into dementia. On April 12, 1783, he died at the age of forty-six. His will left his immense fortune to Alexis Bobrinsky, his son with Catherine.
However impetuously Catherine may sometimes have behaved in the first, private stage of a love affair, she was always dignified in public. She never apologized for her favorites or indicated that she considered these arrangements unseemly. All of her favorites were openly acknowledged; indeed, nothing seemed more normal than the matter-of-fact attitude with which these men were regarded by the court and society. Their presence at court was a constant. She was the heavily burdened ruler of a great empire as well as a proud and passionate woman, and she had neither time nor inclination to explain or quibble. She was lonely and she needed a partner, someone with whom to share not power but conversation, laughter, and human warmth. Therein lay one of the problems confronting her: the love of power and the power to attract love were not easy to reconcile.
• • •
Except for Zavadovsky, all of her favorites were Guards officers, and most came from families of the lesser nobility. When a new favorite was named, he was shown to an apartment near hers in the imperial palace. Upon arrival, he found in his dressing table drawer a large bundle of rubles, a welcoming gift from the empress. He began a life of stultifying regularity. At ten every morning, he began his day by calling on the empress in her apartment. In public, he was treated as a high court official. He accompanied Catherine everywhere and was alertly and respectfully attentive to her wishes as she proceeded through her long days. His arm was always ready to escort her at court, dinner, and to her seat at the palace theater. When she drove out in her carriage, he sat beside her. He stood next to her at court receptions, sat with her at card tables, and, at ten every evening, he offered his arm and accompanied her to her apartment. Other than these duties, he lived in near isolation. After Potemkin and Zavadovsky, most of Catherine’s favorites were not allowed to make or receive visits. She lavished presents and honors on these young men, but it was unusual for existence in this golden cage to be prolonged for more than two years. On parting, almost all received extravagant gifts; none experienced vindictiveness.
Most of the favorites were young men whose youth and social inexperience offered a striking contrast to the dignified demeanor of their imperial patroness. The differences in age and station confused the court and created a whirlwind of gossip in Europe. But the specific manner and intimate practices by which these favorites pleased Catherine are unknown. Only in the cases of Potemkin and Zavadovsky is private correspondence available, and, in this regard, it is unspecific. Those seeking physical details of Catherine’s romantic liaisons will learn nothing; neither in her own words nor in the words of others are there any references to sexual preferences and behavior. Her bedroom door remains closed.
With the exception of her relationships with Potemkin, Zavadovsky, and, at the end, Zubov, Catherine compartmentalized her life, keeping politics, administration, and diplomacy separate from her private life. Fearing that a lover might try to exploit her emotions and reach for political power, she did not permit her favorites to play a role in government. As she grew older, her need for intimacy and support made Catherine more vulnerable, and favorites who showed interest in her intellectual and artistic pursuits were likely to last longer. Lanskoy (1780–84) and Mamonov (1786–89) were examples of this. Then Lanskoy died and Mamonov betrayed her by falling in love with someone else.
Until the procession of young Guards officers began, Catherine’s love affairs had not shocked Europe. The example set by other contemporary monarchs left scant grounds for rebuke. Monarchs everywhere had mistresses or lovers. In Russia, Peter the Great had children by his mistress before marrying her and making her an empress. Empress Anne and Empress Elizabeth had both paved the way for the acceptance of favoritism in Russia. Catherine’s political achievements also made flaws in her private life easy to overlook or discount; beyond that, she conducted her court “with the greatest dignity and exterior decorum,” said Sir James Harris, the British ambassador in the 1780s.
The problem, as the years went by, was not the institution of favoritism but the extreme youth of the favorites and the discrepancy between their ages and Catherine’s. As attention focused increasingly on the question of age, Catherine explained that these relationships served an important pedagogical function. Her young men, she said, were being schooled to ornament a sophisticated, cosmopolitan court; they were to be accomplished and useful, not just to the monarch personally but ultimately to the empire. In her correspondence with Grimm, she explained that these young men were so extraordinary that she was obliged to give them opportunity to develop their talents.
When Peter Zavadovsky fell from favor, Potemkin looked around for a candidate whom Catherine might accept and whose loyalty to him he could trust. His choice was thirty-two-year-old Simon Zorich, a Russian officer of Serbian descent. Zorich was tall, handsome, and polite, although he lacked notable intelligence. He had an honorable war record; he had displayed bravery in battle against the Turks and had borne up well during five years as a prisoner of war. Returning to Russia in 1774, he became an aide to Potemkin. In May 1777, with Zavadovsky’s departure, he became the new favorite.
Zorich’s tenure was briefer than Zavadovsky’s. His new position went to his head. Catherine made him a count, but he demanded to be made a prince like Orlov and Potemkin. His complaints offended the empress; Zorich had been in favor for only ten months when she told Potemkin, “Last night I was in love with him; today I cannot stand him any more.” Potemkin had ignored the fact that Catherine needed someone she could talk to. As the relationship deteriorated, Zorich could not understand why the woman who had covered him with riches had suddenly retreated. Blaming Potemkin, he determined to fight for his place. He challenged Potemkin; the prince disdainfully turned his back and walked away. In May 1778, only a year after his arrival, Zorich was dismissed with a pension. A compulsive gambler, he was later discovered embezzling army funds and died in disgrace.
Zorich was replaced by a twenty-four-year-old Guards officer, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, whose term lasted two years. The new favorite was handsome, played the violin, and had a fine tenor voice. In Catherine’s eyes, his male beauty evoked the heroes of ancient Greece, and in her letters to Grimm she refers to her new lover as “Pyrrhus, king of Epirus whom every painter should paint, every sculptor should sculpt and every poet should sing.… He makes no gesture, no movement, that is not graceful and noble.”
His brilliance did not encompass the intellect, however. When Catherine gave him a mansion in St. Petersburg, he decided that it needed a library to proclaim his new status. He had shelves built and then called on the capital’s leading bookseller. What books were wanted, he was asked. “You understand that better than I,” said the new bibliophile. “Big books at the bottom, then smaller books, and so on up to the top.” The bookseller unloaded many rows of unsold German Bible commentaries bound in fine leather. Soon afterward, the British ambassador probed the favorite’s background and discovered that he had “changed his original common name of Ivan Korsak to the better-sounding one of Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov.”*
Despite Catherine’s praise, most in the Russian court expected Rimsky-Korsakov to last only briefly, because everyone except the empress saw that his heart was not in his work. He was expected to be in constant attendance, was forbidden to leave the palace, and became bored and restless. He escaped into the arms of Countess Bruce, Catherine’s principal lady-in-waiting and for years one of her closest friends. Foolishly, the couple believed that they could carry on their affair inside the palace. They managed for almost a year, but it ended abruptly one day when the empress opened a door and discovered them making love. Catherine sent a message to Rimsky-Korsakov informing him that she would be generous provided he left St. Petersburg immediately. Countess Bruce was commanded to return to her husband.
There was more to this tangled plot. Catherine, the court, and Countess Bruce soon learned that Rimsky-Korsakov had been using Bruce as a decoy with whom to pass the time and alleviate his boredom. His real object was a beautiful young countess, Catherine Stroganova, married to one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The Stroganovs had just returned from six years of living in Paris, and, on first seeing the handsome “king of Epirus,” the young countess fell in love. Only when the disgraced Rimsky-Korsakov left for Moscow and Countess Stroganova immediately followed him, was the extent of this operatic, labyrinthine double betrayal fully revealed. Count Stroganov behaved with patrician dignity. Worried that his young son would be affected by public scandal, he installed his wife in a Moscow palace, where she and her lover lived happily for thirty years. There, they brought up the three children they had together.
For six months following the Rimsky-Korsakov debacle, Catherine remained alone, but at Easter in 1780 a new favorite, Alexander Lanskoy, appeared. Then twenty-two, he came from an impecunious family of the provincial nobility and had served as an officer in the Horse Guards. When he found that he lacked sufficient funds to keep pace with his brother officers, he asked for reassignment to a provincial garrison, where his expenses would be lower. His application was rejected at the College of War by Potemkin himself, who then, surprisingly, appointed the young man his personal aide-de-camp and introduced him to Catherine. Lanskoy had an elegant bearing and a sensitive face; Catherine described him as “kind, gay, honest, and full of gentleness.” In November 1779, he was was officially installed in the palace apartment vacated by Rimsky-Korsakov. The usual shower of riches descended: jewels, a hundred thousand rubles, and a country estate. Two cousins became officers in the Preobrazhensky Guards; three sisters came to court as maids of honor, married noblemen, and became ladies-of-the-bedchamber.
Catherine’s admiration for this adoring acolyte stimulated her pedagogical belief that more Russians should be trained to serve the empire. Lanskoy responded wholeheartedly to this approach. His education had been modest, and his devotion to Catherine was based on her role as his teacher as much as her position as empress. When she discovered his desire to learn, she helped him write to Grimm in French.
Lanskoy did not arouse in Catherine the passion she had for Orlov or Potemkin, but his gentleness and devotion inspired in her an almost maternal affection. He was intelligent and tactful; he refused to take any part in public affairs; he was artistic, had good taste, and was seriously interested in literature, painting, and architecture. He became an ideal companion, accompanying her to concerts and the theater, sitting quietly and listening as she talked, even helping her to design new gardens at Tsarskoe Selo.
As the months stretched into years, Catherine’s young lover became indispensable to her. Even the cynical Bezborodko admitted that “compared to the others, he was an angel. He had friends, did not try to harm his neighbors, and often he tried to help people.” From time to time, there were rumors that Potemkin was jealous of this nonthreatening young man and that Lanskoy was on the brink of dismissal. This was far from the truth. Potemin was thoroughly satisfied, and Catherine was free to devote herself to Lanskoy, whose good humor, she said, had made Tsarskoe Selo “into the most charming and pleasant of places where the days passed so quickly one did not know what had become of them.”
Four years passed, a longer period than Catherine had spent with any lover since she had separated from Orlov twelve years earlier. On June 19, 1784, Lanskoy complained of a sore throat. It grew worse. A high fever set in. Suddenly, five days from the onset, he died of inflammation of the throat. It was said to have been diphtheria.
The suddenness of this death was overwhelming, and the reaction of the woman left behind was uncontrollable grief. She collapsed into bed and for three weeks refused to leave her room. Her son, his wife, and her beloved grandchildren all were refused admittance; they heard only endless sobbing behind her bedroom door. Potemkin came immediately from the south. He and others tried to comfort her, but, as Catherine later told Grimm, “they helped, but I could not endure the help. No one was able to speak, to think in accord with my feelings. One step at a time had to be taken, and with each step a battle had to be endured; one to be won; one to be lost.” Eventually, Potemkin managed to calm and distract her. “He succeeded in awakening us from the sleep of the dead,” she said.
Her weeping stopped, but her depression remained. As she described it to Grimm:
I am plunged into the most profound grief and my happiness no longer exists. I thought that I myself would die from the irreparable loss of my best friend. I had hoped that he would become the support of my old age.… This was a young man whom I was educating, who was grateful, gentle and honest, who shared my pains and who rejoiced in my joys.… I have become a desperate, monosyllabic creature. I drag myself about like a shadow. I cannot set eyes on a human face without the tears choking my mouth. I do not know what will become of me, but I do know that in all my life I have never been so unhappy as now that my best, dearest, and kindest friend has abandoned me like this.
Lanskoy left to Catherine the fortune he had acquired as her favorite; she divided it equally among his mother, brother, and sisters. She could not face spending the rest of the summer at Tsarskoe Selo without him, did not appear in public until September, and refused to return to the Winter Palace until February. Eventually, when she went back to Tsarskoe Selo, it was to place a Grecian urn dedicated to his memory in the garden where they had worked together. The inscription read, “From Catherine to my dearest friend.”
In the procession of Catherine’s favorites, it seemed that the ending of a significant relationship was often followed by the appearance of a lesser figure. Orlov had been followed by Vasilchikov, and Zavadovsky by Zorich. Now, this sequence recurred: after the death of Lanskoy came Alexander Yermolov, although not immediately. The deep wound caused by Lanskoy’s death healed slowly, and the favorite’s apartment remained vacant for a year. When she resumed life, she found only tepid consolation in the thirty-year-old Yermolov.
He, like most of the others, was a Guards officer, and he, like Lanskoy, had served as an aide to Potemkin. The prince approved of Yermolov, whom he thought to be safe and knew to be ignorant and uninterested in being taught anything. He was handsome and seemed honest, which suited Catherine at that moment. She was in no mood for another ardent young student; in her mind, no one could compete with the charm, brilliance, and devotion of Lanskoy. By the spring of 1785, she was writing to Grimm, “I am once more inwardly calm and serene.… I have found a friend who is very capable.”
During his seventeen months as favorite, Yermolov made little claim on Catherine’s time or interest. In the end, he engineered his own demise. He had been Potemkin’s protégé, but he began behaving toward Potemkin as if he considered himself the prince’s equal. Secure, he thought, in his position, he began to criticize the prince to Catherine. He reported every scandalous story, true or false, that reached his ears. He passed along an accusation that Potemkin was pocketing the pension intended for the deposed khan of the Crimea. The denouement was predictable. In June 1786, an infuriated Potemkin descended on Yermolov at court and shouted, “You cur, you monkey, who dares to bespatter me with the mud of the gutters from which I have raised you.” Yermolov, who was proud, put his hand on his sword hilt, but a sudden blow from Potemkin sent him reeling. Then Potemkin burst into Catherine’s’s apartment and roared, “Either he or I must go! If this nonentity of nonentities is allowed to remain at court, then I quit the state’s services as of today.” Yermolov was dismissed immediately and was given 130,000 rubles in cash and permission to live abroad for five years. Catherine never saw him again.
After Yermolov’s dismissal, Catherine followed her pattern of replacing a nonentity with a seeming paragon, someone she believed was another Lanskoy. Alexander Mamonov, then twenty-six, was another Guards officer, handsome, educated, fluent in French and Italian, and the nephew of the generous Count Stroganov, whose young wife had run off with Rimsky-Korsakov. Only one evening after Yermolov’s dismissal, Mamonov escorted Catherine to her apartment. “They slept until nine o’clock,” Catherine’s secretary wrote in his notebook the following morning. The new favorite was immediately promoted to high rank in the Preobrazhensky Guards and in May 1788 was elevated to the rank of lieutenant general. Later that month, Catherine made him a count. Her private name for him was “L’habit rouge” (the Red Coat), after the color of his favorite uniform. Because he was more intelligent than most of his predecessors, she occasionally asked his advice on political matters. Although she treated him seriously to his face, she spoke of him to others as a doting mother might speak of her child: “We are as clever as the very devil; we adore music; we hide our fondness for poetry as though it were a crime,” she wrote to Grimm. To Potemkin, she reported enthusiastically: “Sasha is beyond price … an inexhaustible source of gaiety, original in his outlook and exceptionally well-informed.… Our whole tone is that of the best society. We write Russian and French to perfection; our features are very regular; we have two black eyes and eyebrows, and a noble, easy bearing.”
Despite Catherine’s initial enthusiasm, her relationship with Mamonov began to cool after eighteen months. By January 1788, the favorite was showing signs of weariness, and there were rumors that he was attempting to evade his intimate duties. In fact, Mamonov found the restrictions involved in life with Catherine burdensome. In St. Petersburg, he was rarely permitted out of her sight, and he hated trips outside the capital, when he was shut up for days on a boat or in a coach; he complained that he found traveling in her coach “stifling.”
In the spring of 1788, he began a clandestine affair with twenty-five-year-old Princess Darya Scherbatova. Soon he was writing to Potemkin, begging to be released from his relationship with Catherine. Potemkin replied sternly, “It is your duty to remain at your post. Don’t be a fool and ruin your career.” By December 1788, Mamonov was in a state of decline, warning that he could no longer perform. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1789, he was still the official favorite, and Catherine remained deaf to any suggestions that he be replaced. Then, on the evening of February 11, 1789, they quarreled, he asked to resign, and she wept all the next day. Potemkin briefly patched things up, but Mamonov confided to a friend that he considered his life “a prison.” On February 21, Catherine tearfully complained that Mamonov was “cold and preoccupied.” In the weeks that followed, the empress saw him infrequently; on April 21, 1789, her sixtieth birthday, she passed the day in seclusion. By then, Mamonov’s affair with Scherbatova was known to many at court, although still not to Catherine. On June 1, Peter Zavadovsky, the former favorite, was told that Mamonov was determined to marry Scherbatova, whom he described as “a girl most ordinary, not possessing either looks or other gifts.” On June 18, Mamonov finally came to the empress to confess. Beginning his argument with duplicity, he complained that she was cold to him and asked her advice as to what he should do. She understood that he was asking to be released, but, in order to keep him at court, she suggested that he marry Countess Bruce’s thirteen-year-old daughter, one of the richest heiresses in Russia. Catherine was surprised when he declined—and then suddenly the whole truth came out. Trembling, Mamonov admitted that for a year he had been in love with Scherbatova, and that six months earlier, he had given his word to marry her. Catherine was shocked, but she was too proud not to be magnanimous. She summoned Mamonov and Scherbatova and saw immediately that the young woman was pregnant. She pardoned Mamonov and granted the couple permission to marry, even insisting that the ceremony be performed in the palace chapel. She did not attend, but gave them a hundred thousand rubles and a country estate. “God grant them happiness,” she said, stipulating only that they leave St. Petersburg.
She had been generous, but behind her generosity was a woman badly hurt. “I cannot express how I have suffered,” she wrote to Potemkin. “Can you imagine?” He was guilty of “a thousand contradictions and contradictory ideas and irrational behavior.” That anyone should think she had kept him against his will made her indignant. “I have never been anybody’s tyrant and I hate constraint,” she said.
The greater misfortune was Mamonov’s. Somehow, he mistook the empress’s parting generosity for lingering embers of passion. In 1792, tiring of his wife, he began writing the empress from Moscow, pleading for a renewal of the imperial liaison, lamenting his youthful “folly” in precipitating the loss of her favor, a memory, he said, that “constantly tortures my soul.” Catherine did not reply.
What was Catherine seeking in these ornamental young men? She has suggested that it was love. “I couldn’t live for a day without love,” she had written in her Memoirs. Love has many forms, however, and she did not mean sexual love alone, but also companionship, warmth, support, intelligence, and, if possible, humor. And also respect—not just the respect automatically due an empress, but the admiration a man gives an attractive woman. As she grew older, she wanted assurance that she could still attract a man and keep his love. A realist as well as a romantic, she knew and accepted the fact that because she was their sovereign, young men were drawn to her for reasons and with goals different from hers. Desire for love and sex played little part in attracting her lovers to her; they were motivated by ambition, desire for prestige, wealth, and, in some cases, power. Catherine knew this. She asked them for things other than simple sexual congress. She wanted an indication of pleasure in her company, a desire to understand her point of view, a willingness to be instructed by her intelligence and experience, an appreciation of her sense of humor, and an ability to make her laugh. The physical side of her relationships offered only brief distraction. When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.
The history of her youth and young womanhood helps explain her relationships with favorites. She had been a fourteen-year-old stranger brought to a foreign land. At sixteen, she had married a psychologically crippled and physically blemished adolescent. She spent nine years untouched by this man in their marriage bed. She had no family: her mother and father were dead; her three children were spirited away at the moment of birth. As the years passed, she became caught up in a search for the Fountain of Youth. Today, there are various ways of prolonging the illusion of youth, but in Catherine’s day there were not. She attempted to preserve her youth by identifying it with the affection—simulated, if necessary—of young men. When they were unable to prolong that illusion, either they or she ended the charade, and she tried again with someone else.
Catherine had twelve lovers. What shocked her contemporaries was not this number, but the age difference between Catherine and her later favorites. She crafted an explanation: she categorized these young men as students whom she hoped to develop into intellectual companions. If they did not completely measure up—and she did not pretend that one would become another Voltaire or Diderot, or even another Potemkin—then she could at least say that she was helping to train them for future roles in administering the empire.
How severely should her young favorites be judged for allowing themselves to be used; specifically, for submitting to a sexual liaison with someone they did not love? This is not just an eighteenth-century question, nor one to be asked only of young men. Women have always submitted to sexual relationships with men they do not love. Beyond physical force, and arrangements made by family, they usually have reasons similar to those of Catherine’s young men: ambition, a desire for wealth, for some form of power, and possible future independence. Catherine’s young men did not always independently aspire to become favorites. Rising from the lesser nobility, they were frequently urged on by relatives who hoped that the shower of imperial benevolence would also fall on them. Nor was it widely seen as immoral. Indeed, there was no case involving one of Catherine’s favorites in which the young man’s family raised a warning finger and said, “Stop! This is wrong!”
Catherine conducted the public side of her romantic life on an open stage. Privately, writing in her memoirs or to Potemkin or other correspondents, she included glowing descriptions of the young men who became her favorites. These descriptions erred on the side of poor judgment and excess sentimentality, nothing else. About herself, she was honest; she admitted to Potemkin that she had taken four lovers before him; she wrote in her memoirs about the difficulty of resisting temptation in a setting like the Russian court. Who she was and where she came from helped determine her relationships with men. Perhaps if she had been the daughter of a great king, as Elizabeth I of England had been; perhaps if she, like Elizabeth, had been able to use virginity and abstinence as prizes to tempt and manipulate powerful men, the lives of these two preeminent woman rulers in the history of European monarchy would have been more similar.
*In the eighteenth century, a request of this kind was not extraordinary. Kings and princes, mostly German, happily rented their soldiers to the highest bidder. England eventually hired thousands of Hessians, who made themselves hated throughout the American colonies. The impact that twenty thousand Russians might have had on eighteenth-century America can only be imagined.
*The family decided to keep the new name, and the nineteenth-century composer Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov came from a collateral branch.