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.
