Catherine the Great

64

Catherine, Paul, and Natalia

CATHERINE HAD BEEN brought to Russia to produce an heir and ensure the succession. Her obligation to conceive a child with her husband, Peter, had stretched over nine wasted years. Failure had prompted Empress Elizabeth to insist that Catherine choose between two potential surrogate fathers, Sergei Saltykov and Lev Naryshkin. And then, the moment success was achieved, Elizabeth had snatched the newborn infant away.

This cruel mischief permanently affected the lives of both Catherine and her son, Paul. Catherine was permitted no complete experience of motherhood, and her memories of the birth and infancy of this child were painful. Saltykov, almost certainly Paul’s father, had abandoned her to boast about his conquest. Paul thereafter became a reminder of a man who had ruthlessly deserted her. Peter, her husband, was worse. Peter humiliated her for years and threatened to seal her away in a convent. Both of these men, Paul’s dynastically recognized father and his biological father, left her with bitter memories of misery, disillusionment, and loneliness.

In 1762, when Catherine reached the throne and retrieved her son, it was too late to repair their relationship. Paul was eight years old, small for his age, frail, and frequently ill. At first, he missed Elizabeth, the tall, overwhelmingly affectionate woman who had spoiled him by surrounding him with nurses and women who refused to let him do anything for himself. When Catherine was allowed to see him, she came, but she was usually accompanied by the giant figure of Gregory Orlov, who claimed the attention Paul felt should be his.

Catherine’s relationship with Paul, involving as it did the question of the succession, was the most psychologically difficult personal and political problem of her reign. From the beginning, Catherine realized that anyone plotting against her could always point to a Romanov heir in the person of her son. The issue was clouded by the question of whether Paul was the son of Peter III or the child of Catherine’s lover, Sergei Saltykov. In her memoirs, Catherine strongly implies that Paul was Saltykov’s son, and, at the time of Paul’s birth, almost no one at court believed the child to be Peter’s son. There was general knowledge of Peter’s sexual incapacity, of the emotional and physical breach between the married partners, and of Catherine’s affair with Saltykov. The mass of the Russian people, however, were not privy to this information, and believed that the heir to the throne was the son of Catherine’s husband, the future Tsar Peter III. The Moscow crowds cheering Paul at Catherine’s coronation believed that Paul was the legitimate great-grandson of Peter the Great. Catherine, riding in the coronation procession, heard the cheers and understood their meaning: that Paul was her rival. Officially, however, Paul’s status as heir did not hinge on the question of his paternity. Once proclaimed empress, Catherine had made certain that Paul’s succession rights derived from her. Basing her proclamation on Peter the Great’s decree that the sovereign could name his or her successor, she publicly proclaimed Paul her heir. No one ever challenged her right to make this decision.

Then a strange thing happened: Paul’s face began to change. A lengthy illness when Paul was nine eroded his childhood prettiness; his face and features, which had been pleasing, became distorted in a manner that was more than temporary adolescent asymmetry. He developed thin brown hair, a receding chin, and a protruding bottom lip. He looked more like Peter than Sergei, and had the same abrupt, clumsy movements as Peter. Some who had known Peter began to believe that Paul really was the dead tsar’s son.

By the time Paul reached adolescence he, at least, was convinced that he was Peter’s son, and Peter was the paternal figure the boy came to revere. He began to ask people about the death of his father, and why the throne had come to his mother instead of himself. If they hesitated to answer, he said that when he was grown up, he would find out. When he asked about his own chances of ruling, there were long, uncomfortable silences. There were other gaps in his knowledge. He heard rumors that the brother of Gregory Orlov, his mother’s favorite, was suspected of being responsible for his father’s death. Thereafter, the sight of the Orlov brothers at court, and the knowledge of his mother’s relationship with Gregory Orlov, tormented him. At the same time, he was constructing an idealized image of Peter, modeling himself on Peter and imitating Peter’s traits and behavior. Aware that Peter had been passionately fond of everything connected with the army, Paul began playing with soldiers, first toys, then real soldiers, as Peter had done. Again following Peter’s lead, he turned to admire the greatest soldier of the age, Frederick of Prussia.

Since 1760, when Paul was six, Nikita Panin had been his governor and senior tutor. Paul’s lessons had included languages, history, geography, mathematics, science, astronomy, religion, drawing, and music. He learned to dance, ride, and fence. He was intelligent, impatient, and highly strung. “His Highness has the bad habit of rushing things; he rushes to get up, to eat, to go to bed,” said one of his tutors. “At dinner-time, how many ruses will he think of to gain a few minutes and sit down sooner.… He eats too fast, doesn’t chew properly, and so charges his stomach with an impossible task.”

At ten, Paul began to study the works of Jean d’Alembert, the French mathematician and co-editor of Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Catherine invited d’Alembert to come to Russia to teach mathematics to her son. When the Frenchman first declined, she tried again, this time offering him a house, a large salary, and the status and privileges of an ambassador.

Unfortunately, this approach to d’Alembert elicited a personally humiliating response. Not only did d’Alembert reiterate his refusal to come to Russia, but he privately uttered a remark that traveled far. Referring to the official reason given by Catherine for Peter III’s death, he said, “I am too prone to hemorrhoids which in Russia is a severe complaint. I prefer to have a painful behind in the safety of my home.” The empress never forgave him.

In the summer of 1771, Paul, then seventeen, endured a five-week battle with influenza. Catherine and Panin watched anxiously as he struggled with a high fever and debilitating diarrhea. Once he began to recover, the question of the succession reasserted itself. Catherine knew that she could not postpone his official coming of age much beyond his eighteenth birthday in September 1772. It was Panin who, in this context, suggested that marriage to some healthy young woman might help mature the difficult young man. This way, too, the tutor added, Her Majesty would probably soon have a grandson whom she could raise according to her own views. This reasoning appealed to Catherine.

Three years earlier, in 1768, when Paul was fourteen, Catherine had already begun thinking of a suitable bride for him and had made a list of candidates. Characteristically, she sought a bride in her own image: a sensible German princess from a minor court. The one who appealed to her most was Sophia of Württemburg, but Sophia was then only fourteen, too young for marriage. The empress’s eye shifted to the younger daughters of the landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt. Catherine’s plan was to invite the landgravine and her three still-unmarried daughters, Amalie, Wilhelmina, and Louise, to Russia. They were eighteen, seventeen, and fifteen, respectively. Paul would be asked to chose among them. As had been true in her own case years before, the invitation did not include the father.

During the summer of 1772, after Gregory Orlov had been replaced, the relationship between Catherine and her son improved. Living together with Paul at Tsarskoe Selo, Catherine made a companion of her son, and the long estrangement seemed to be over. “We have never had a jollier time at Tsarskoe Selo than these nine weeks I have spent there with my son, who is becoming a nice lad. He really appears to enjoy my company,” she wrote to her Hamburg friend Frau Bielcke. “I return to town on Tuesday with my son who does not want to leave my side, and whom I have the honor to please so well that he sometimes changes his place at the table to sit next to me.” Then, after what Paul assumed was Orlov’s final disappearance, Gregory reappeared at court. Paul was dismayed.

In the spring of 1773, the three Hessian princesses and their mother were invited to Russia. They stopped first in Berlin, where, as he had done with Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-one years earlier, Frederick reminded them always to remember they had been born Germans. At the end of June, four Russian naval vessels arrived in Lübeck to carry the Hessian party up the Baltic. The commander of the frigate transporting the young women and their mother was Paul’s best friend, Andrei Razumovsky, the son of Catherine’s friend Kyril Razumovsky. Andrei was captivated by the middle daughter, Wilhelmina, and she by him.

In St. Petersburg, Paul took only two days to make his choice: it was the same as Andrei Razumovsky’s—Princess Wilhelmina. Unfortunately, Wilhelmina’s reaction to the small, strange young man soon to be her husband was not enthusiastic. Catherine noticed her hesitation; so did the girl’s mother. Nevertheless, the machinery of diplomacy and protocol ground ahead. As had been the case with Catherine and her own mother, both the bride-to-be and the landgravine were indifferent to the requirement for a religious conversion. Predictably, as the date of the wedding approached, the landgrave wrote from Germany, objecting to his daughter changing her religion. Also predictably, he surrendered to his wife’s decision. On August 15, 1773, Wilhelmina was received into the Orthodox Church as Natalia Alekseyevna. The next day she was betrothed to Paul and became a Russian grand duchess.

There were banquets, balls, and late-summer picnics at which Catherine enjoyed the company of the landgravine, an energetic woman who was a friend of Goethe’s. Prince Orlov invited the three princesses, their mother, Catherine, and the court to Gatchina, where he gave a lavish reception: five hundred guests dined from Sèvres porcelain and gold plate. Orlov, hoping to irritate the empress, who had brought along her new favorite, Vasilchikov, immediately began to flirt with Louise, the youngest of the visiting princesses. To Berlin, the Prussian minister described “the extraordinary attentions which Prince Orlov pays the landgravine and the freedom of manner with which he treats the princesses, especially the youngest one.”

The wedding of nineteen-year-old Paul and seventeen-year-old Natalia took place on September 29, 1773. It was followed by ten days of court balls, theatrical performances, and masquerades, while people in the streets drank free beer, ate hot meat pies, and watched fireworks soaring above the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. Paul was exultant; a new life and a new freedom seemed to be offering itself. Natalia consoled herself because Andrei Razumovsky was always nearby.

As Paul’s wedding approached, Nikita Panin had been waging a battle to retain his influence over Paul and his wife-to-be. Catherine realized that, once married, Paul would become more independent of her; she was determined that, simultaneously, he also become more independent of Panin. Paul’s marriage would be both the pretext and the moment for severing this tie with Panin. With the loss of his role as tutor, however, Panin would be deprived of the base at court that entitled him to live at the palace and see his charge daily. He would no longer be able to influence Paul’s political views, which, Catherine believed, had helped steer her son toward what she regarded as an excessive admiration of Prussia and Frederick II.

Panin, who had held his position for thirteen years, was unprepared for this maneuver. Being governor and tutor to the heir to the throne gave him a commanding position in government and society. As the guardian of the physical well-being and the education of the future sovereign, he had chosen, directed, and dismissed tutors, librarians, doctors, and all servants at the grand ducal court. The establishment over which he presided had its own table, famous as one of the best in the city. There, Panin received guests every day—supposedly on behalf of the grand duke, who was present to listen—including senior state officials, court dignitaries, foreign guests, writers, scientists, and many of his own relatives. His position as tutor, in short, was the foundation of Panin’s political influence. To avoid jeopardizing it, he had always refused to accept any other official post. On assuming the real leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs in 1763, he remained only at the second level of rank, leaving the senior title to the largely absentee chancellor, Michael Vorontsov. Being in constant contact with the empress, Panin was also able to offer frequent counsel to her on personal subjects; a year before, in the autumn of 1772, he had helped Catherine break with Orlov by producing Vasilchikov. Given these many duties and services, he had believed himself invaluable and invulnerable.

Unfortunately for Panin, in May 1773 Orlov had returned to the capital and been readmitted to the council. There, he was eager to retaliate against Panin and assist Catherine in breaking the tutor’s hold on the grand duke. The result was that as Paul was about to be married, Panin was informed that the education of the grand duke was completed and that his mission as tutor was fulfilled. He responded by threatening to retire altogether to his estate near Smolensk if he were separated from Paul. Catherine, who did not wish to lose Panin completely, found a compromise. Panin would cease to be Paul’s tutor and give up administration of the grand ducal household. When he balked at vacating his rooms in the palace, Catherine announced that the rooms needed remodeling. To pacify Panin, she raised him to the equivalency in rank of the chancellor or a field marshal, and gave him the title of minister of Foreign Affairs. He was awarded a special grant of one hundred thousand rubles, an annual pension of thirty thousand rubles, and a salary of ten thousand rubles. Paul regretted the separation, but, caught up in his marriage to Natalia, he did not complain.

After the wedding, the empress told the landgravine that the new grand duchess was “a golden young woman” with whom her son appeared to be deeply in love. Over time and on closer examination, however, Catherine’s praise of her new daughter-in-law turned to irritation. She complained to Grimm:

Everything is done to excess with this lady. If she goes for a walk, it is for … [thirteen miles]; if she dances, it’s twenty quadrilles and as many minuets … in order to avoid the apartments being overheated, she has no fire lit in them at all … in short, the middle way is unknown here.… There is neither grace, nor prudence, nor wisdom in any of this and God knows what will become of her.… Just think that after more than a year and a half, she still doesn’t speak a word of the language.

With Potemkin, she shared a different complaint:

The grand duke … came to tell me himself that he and the grand duchess are in debt again.… He told me that her debt was from this, that, and the other thing to which I answered that she has an allowance, just as he does, like no one else in Europe; that this allowance is simply for clothing and passing fancies, but that the rest—servants, table, and carriage—is provided them.… I fear there will be no end to this.… If you count everything, then more than five hundred thousand has been expended on them during the year, and still they are in dire straits. But not a single thank you or a word of gratitude.

Catherine also heard rumors that Natalia’s relationship with Andrei Razumovsky had grown excessively warm. To her lectures to Paul on his wife’s extravagance, she added suggestions that he should keep an eye on her private behavior. Paul was aware that something was wrong. His marriage was a disappointment; his frivolous wife never encouraged his affection. But when his mother talked of sending Razumovsky away, Paul declared that he would never part with Andrei, his best friend, the person second only to his wife in his affections.

Catherine’s real complaint against Natalia was not financial, but that after two and a half years of marriage, her daughter-in-law showed no signs of producing an heir. These complaints were forgotten, however, when, in the fall of 1775, the grand duchess believed herself to be pregnant. “Her friends are, with reason, very anxious that she should prove so,” reported the British ambassador. A month later, it was officially announced that Natalia was pregnant; a baby was expected in the spring. By March 1776, Natalia’s pregnancy was proceeding so smoothly that the empress ordered wet nurses for the coming infant. Frederick II’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, was on his way from Berlin to be present at the important dynastic event.

At four on Sunday morning, April 10, Paul awakened his mother to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. Catherine rose, put on a robe, and hurried to the bedside, and, although serious contractions had not yet begun, she stayed with the couple until ten in the morning. She left to be dressed and returned at noon, when the contractions became powerful and Natalia was in such pain that birth seemed imminent. But the afternoon and evening passed without result, and pain alternated with exhausted sleep. Monday was the same. On Tuesday, the midwife and doctors announced that there was no possibility of saving the child; all agreed that the baby was probably dead. On Wednesday, the thirteenth, they also despaired of saving the mother, and Natalia was given last rites. Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died.

Catherine and Paul had both remained with her through the five days. “Never in my life have I found myself in a more difficult, more hideous, more painful position,” the empress told Grimm. “For three days, I neither ate nor drank. There were moments when her suffering made me feel that my own body was being torn apart. Then I went stony. I, who am tearful by nature, saw her die, and never shed a tear. I said to myself, ‘If you cry, others will sob. If you sob, others will faint.’ ” Catherine’s anguish was magnified by the knowledge that her dead grandchild had been a “perfectly formed boy.” The autopsy revealed that the baby had been too large to pass through the birth canal; the cause was an inoperable malformation of the bone, which the empress was told would have prevented Natalia from ever giving birth to a living child. After the young woman’s body was opened after her death, Catherine reported that “it was found that there was only a space of four fingers’ breadth; the child’s shoulders were eight fingers wide.”

Despite fatigue, Catherine maintained her presence of mind. She had to; Paul, in a frenzy of grief, was refusing to allow his wife to be removed, and insisting on remaining beside her body. He did not attend the burial at Alexander Nevsky Monastery. His mother was accompanied by Potemkin and Gregory Orlov.

Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. Further, the grand duke’s emotional state was such that no one could predict when he would be willing and able to fulfill his dynastic duty. At one moment rigid with grief, the next sobbing and screaming, throwing himself around the room, smashing furniture, threatening to kill himself by jumping out a window, he refused ever to think of marrying again.

To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his. He groaned, wept—and then erupted with rage. He demanded that Razumovsky be sent to Siberia, but the empress, loyal to Andrei’s father, refused and simply ordered Andrei to leave the capital immediately. Exhausted, almost unable to function, Paul then agreed to all of his mother’s decisions. He was ready to marry again immediately, long before the year of official mourning had passed. To Grimm, Catherine wrote, “I have wasted no time. At once, I put the irons in the fire to make good the loss, and by so doing I have succeeded in dissipating the deep sorrow that overwhelmed us. The dead being dead, we must think of the living.”

Catherine was distressed by Natalia’s death, not because she had lost a daughter-in-law but because she had lost a grandson. In a letter to Frau Bielcke, she addressed the situation with an icy absence of sympathy: “Well, since it has been proven that she could not give birth to a living child, we must not think about her any more.” The essential thing now was to replace the dead wife quickly. The future of the dynasty and the empire were at stake; ensuring them was a sovereign’s duty. On the day Natalia died, Catherine was already considering possible replacements.

65

Paul, Maria, and the Succession

THREE YEARS BEFORE, Princess Sophia of Württemburg had been Catherine’s first choice as a bride for Paul, but Sophia had been ruled out because she was only fourteen. Now, Sophia, almost seventeen, was in every respect exactly what Catherine sought: a German princess whose family was aristocratic but of modest circumstances, prolific with nine children, the three sons tall and strong, the six daughters handsome and wide-hipped. The presence of Prince Henry of Prussia in St. Petersburg made Catherine’s new project easier to achieve. Sophia of Württemburg was a great-niece of Frederick II and Prince Henry, and, as Paul idealized Prussia and the Prussian monarch, Catherine hoped that Prince Henry could help persuade her distraught son to marry a relative of his hero. Henry, knowing that his brother was always eager to strengthen ties with Russia, sent a message to Frederick by the fastest courier.

Frederick did everything he could to satisfy and please Catherine. He urged Sophia and her parents to accept the marriage, stressing its political advantages for Prussia and potential financial benefits for the house of Württemburg. He pointed out that Catherine had pledged a dowry for all three Württemburg daughters. An obstacle had to be overcome: Sophia was already engaged to Lewis (Ludwig), prince of Hesse-Darmstadt, who happened to be the brother of the recently deceased Natalia and therefore Paul’s former brother-in-law. On the king’s orders, the Hesse engagement was broken off, and, with the promise of a pension from Catherine and the hand of another Württemburg daughter, Prince Lewis was appeased.

The next step was to arrange a meeting of the prospective bride and groom. Frederick summoned Sophia to Berlin, where Paul would travel to meet her. This plan suited everyone. Foreign travel was what Paul needed as a distraction from thoughts of Natalia’s death and the stinging humiliation of her betrayal. Further, the prospect of a trip to Berlin appeared certain to delight the young widower, who had never been abroad. The opportunity to meet Frederick II provided another powerful incentive.

The journey to Berlin began on June 13, 1776, with Paul sitting in a large, comfortable carriage and Prince Henry at his side. During Paul’s absence, Catherine wrote frequently, praising his letters and worrying about his health. With her encouragement, Paul inspected local Russian government offices, military garrisons, and commercial enterprises along the road to the frontier. She responded to Paul’s praise of the orderliness and manners of Livonia by saying, “I hope that in time the main part of Russia will not yield to … [Livonia] in anything, neither in order nor in the correction of manners, and that your lifetime will be sufficient to see such a change.” While Paul was traveling, Frederick was briefing Sophia of Württemburg about the Russian court, just as he had briefed Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst thirty-two years before. As he had done with the earlier Sophia, he emphasized that conversion from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy was of little consequence, especially when high matters of state were involved.

When Paul reached Berlin, Frederick made every effort to impress and honor the twenty-three-year-old grand duke. Paul was saluted by cannon, rode beneath triumphal arches, and passed between double lines of soldiers. He attended receptions, dinners, and balls. Few were more practiced and effective in the art of political flattery than the king. Paul, accustomed to playing an insignificant role at his mother’s court, now found himself honored and celebrated by the great Frederick. For the first time in his life, he received the consideration due to the heir to a great throne. “Nothing can exceed the attention His Prussian Majesty pays to the grand duke, nor the pains he takes to captivate and please him,” reported the British ambassador from Berlin. Paul reveled in this attention, which cemented his view that the king of Prussia was the greatest man and greatest monarch in Europe. He wrote to his mother that the level of civilization in Prussia was two centuries ahead of that in Russia.

Not only did Paul’s reception in Berlin thoroughly reconcile him to the idea of a second marriage, but he also developed an immediate liking for Sophia. She was tall, blond, wholesome, amiable, and sentimental. And, because she had been recommended by Frederick, she seemed to Paul twice as desirable. As for Sophia, she made no protest when her engagement to the handsome Lewis of Hesse was suddenly broken off and her great uncles Frederick and Henry introduced the small, less attractive Paul. Whatever her innermost feelings when she first saw Paul, she dutifully accepted him. “The grand duke is exceedingly amiable,” she wrote to her mother. “He has every charm.”

Catherine was pleased by what Paul wrote in his letters about Sophia’s appearance and good sense, her determination to be a good wife, and her resolve to learn Russian. The empress sent her blessing, but, in order to make certain that she would keep absolute control, she insisted that Sophia leave her mother behind in Berlin and come to Russia alone. She wrote to the princess, praising her willingness to make herself “my daughter.… Be assured that I shall not neglect a single occasion where I may prove to Your Highness the sentiments of a tender mother.” She also stressed that she wanted the marriage to take place as soon as possible. She wrote to Grimm:

We shall have her here within ten days. As soon as we have her, we shall proceed with her conversion. To convince her, it ought to take about fifteen days, I think. I do not know how long will be necessary to teach her to read intelligibly and correctly the confession of faith in Russian. But the faster this can be hurried through, the better.… To accelerate that … [a cabinet secretary] has gone to Memel to teach her the alphabet and the confession en route; conviction will follow afterwards. Eight days from this, I fix the wedding. If you wish to dance at it, you will have to hurry.

Meanwhile, the empress sent a diamond necklace and earrings to the bride-to-be, and a jewel-encrusted snuffbox and a sword to her parents. On August 24, Sophia crossed the Russian frontier at Riga, and on August 31, she and Paul were received by Catherine at Tsarskoe Selo. The empress greeted Sophia warmly, and, a few days later, she wrote to Madame Bielcke:

My son has returned very much taken with his princess. I confess to you that I am enchanted with her. She is precisely that which is desired; shapely as a nymph, a complexion the color of the lily and the rose, the most beautiful skin in the world, tall, but still graceful; modesty, sweetness, kindness, and innocence are reflected in her face.… The whole world is enchanted with her … she does everything to please.… In a word, my princess is everything that I desired. So there, I am content.

On September 6, Catherine, Paul, and Sophia traveled from Tsarskoe Selo to St. Petersburg. A Lutheran pastor and an obliging Orthodox priest confirmed Frederick of Prussia’s opinion that the differences between Lutheranism and Orthodoxy were minimal. On September 14, Sophia Dorothea’s official conversion took place; she accepted Orthodoxy and became Maria Fyodorovna. Her formal betrothal followed the next day, on which occasion she wrote to Paul, “I swear to love and adore you all my life and to be always attached to you, and nothing in the world will make me change with respect to you. Those are the sentiments of your ever affectionate and faithful betrothed.”

On September 26, 1776, only five months after Natalia died, Paul and Maria were married and the new grand duchess set about her duty. Fourteen and a half months later, on December 12, 1777, after only a few hours of labor and without complications, Maria gave birth to a healthy boy, Catherine’s first grandchild, a future emperor. Catherine, ecstatic, named him Alexander. A second child arrived eighteen months later, another healthy boy, insurance for the dynasty. Again, Catherine rejoiced. She named him Constantine.

Paul’s second marriage probably gave him the greatest happiness of his life. “This dear husband is an angel, the pearl of husbands. I am madly in love with him and I am perfectly happy,” Maria wrote to a friend in Germany. She was an excellent wife for Paul. She did her best to make him happy and to calm his anxieties, becoming not only his wife but his friend. She encouraged Paul’s best qualities at home and treated him with respect and deference in public. Paul was grateful and wrote to Henry of Prussia, “Wherever she goes, she has the gift of spreading gaiety and ease. And she has the art of not only driving out all my melancholy thoughts, but even of giving me back the good humor that I had completely lost during these last three unhappy years.” Together, Paul and Maria produced nine healthy children.

• • •

In 1781, Catherine, hoping to convince her Prussophile son of the advantages of her new friendship with Joseph II of Austria, arranged for Paul and Maria to make a European tour. It would take them a year and carry them to Vienna, Italy, her home in Württemburg, and Paris, but would pointedly exclude Berlin. Maria Fyodorovna was eager to see her family, but her pleasure faded when she was told that her children would remain behind. Paul’s disappointment was political; his mother’s refusal to let him revisit Berlin meant that he could not renew his acquaintance with Frederick. Tension between mother and son was heightened by the almost simultaneous dismissal of Nikita Panin from leadership of the College of Foreign Affairs. In fact, Panin’s removal and Catherine’s refusal to let Paul visit Berlin were linked. The close relationship between Russia and Prussia, which had been the centerpiece of Panin’s foreign policy, was crumbling even as Catherine’s friendship with Joseph II of Austria was growing stronger. Joseph had visited Catherine and St. Petersburg the year before, and the empress was hoping to embrace Austria as a partner and ally against the Turks.

On October 1, 1781, the journey began with the couple traveling incognito as the Comte et Countess du Nord—the Count and Countess of the North. Maria, upset to be leaving her children, fainted three times before the carriage could get under way. Once on the road, however, she recovered and the tour was a triumph. Catherine had been generous, supplying three hundred thousand rubles for travel expenses. She wrote affectionate letters to “my dearest children,” telling them to come straight home if they became homesick and that three-year-old Alexander “had been given a map of Europe so that he could follow his parents’ itinerary.”

Their first stop was in Poland, where Stanislaus charmed Maria Fyodorovna. Catherine, curious about her former lover, asked Paul “whether his Polish majesty was still such a delightful conversationalist or whether the cares of royalty had destroyed these qualities.” She added, “My old friend must have had difficulty in tracing any resemblance between my contemporary portraits and the face he remembers from the past.”

The warm reception in Poland was a taste of what was to come. Joseph II traveled to the Austrian frontier to welcome the heir to the Russian throne. Vienna celebrated the couple’s presence, and Maria reveled in the elegance of the Austrian court and aristocracy. A visit scheduled to last a fortnight was extended to a month, during which Paul moderated his pro-Prussian sentiments and gravitated toward Joseph II. When his guests were leaving for the south, Joseph instructed his relatives in Tuscany and Naples that the grand duchess “prefers stewed fruit to rich deserts and neither she nor her husband touches wine. She has a fondness for mineral water.”

The Hapsburg princes in Italy continued the warm welcome, but the culmination of their long journey was Paris. Crowds cheered the young couple wherever they appeared: at the theater, the racetrack, or walking in the Tuileries Gardens. At Versailles, Marie Antoinette, Joseph II’s sister, concentrated on pleasing Paul and reported, “The grand duke has the air of an ardent and impetuous man who holds himself in.” The queen treated the grand duchess as an old and dear friend. Presented with a rare porcelain dinner set produced at Sèvres, Maria thought it was intended for the empress, her mother-in-law, until, with astonishment, she saw the arms of Russia and Württemburg intertwined on the plates.

Their return to Russia was painfully anticlimactic. The Count and Countess of the North had been absent for fourteen months; on first meeting their sons, the boys looked at them as strangers and clung to their grandmother’s skirts. The empress appeared determined to deflate the couple’s sense of accomplishment. The welcome Paul had received everywhere had enhanced his sense of self-worth; now Catherine told him that his travels had spoiled him. The young grand duchess was met with a more specific rebuff. She had gone to Marie Antoinette’s milliner, the famous Mlle Bertin, and made a number of purchases. The trunks from Paris were still being unpacked in St. Petersburg when Catherine forbade the wearing at court of tall headdresses with feathers, exactly the fashion which Maria had brought home to emulate the queen of France. Paul’s wife was commanded to return the purchases, having been told that a tall woman looked better in simple Russian costume than in these gaudy Parisian trappings. Paul, meanwhile, found that Nikita Panin’s health had collapsed. In 1783, the grand duke and his wife were at the deathbed of the man who had been Paul’s teacher, adviser, protector, and friend for twenty-three years.

• • •

Paul was fortunate in his second marriage, but in most other areas of life, he suffered constant frustration. At different times he exhibited two distinctly different personalities, and people meeting him often took away entirely opposite views of the heir to the throne. In 1780, Emperor Joseph II of Austria paid his first visit to Russia, and he reported his impressions to his mother, Maria Theresa. Like everyone, he admired Maria Fyodorovna. More surprisingly, his verdict on Paul was largely favorable:

The grand duke is greatly undervalued abroad. His wife is very beautiful and seems created for her position. They understand each other perfectly. They are clever and vivacious and very well educated, as well as high-principled, open, and just. The happiness of others is more to them than wealth. With the empress, they are ill at ease, especially the grand duke. There is a lack of intimacy [between Paul and his mother] without … which I could not live. The grand duchess is more natural. She has great influence over her husband, loves him, and rules him. She will certainly play an important part some day.… The grand duke has many qualities deserving respect, but it is extremely difficult to play second fiddle here when Catherine II plays the first. The more I learn of the grand duchess, the greater is my admiration. She is exceptional in mind and heart, attractive in appearance and blameless in conduct. If I could have met a princess like her ten years ago, I should have been most happy to marry her.

The French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1784, also had a generally positive opinion of Paul, although it was tinged with qualifications:

When they admitted me into their society, I learned to know all the rare qualities which at this period won general affection.… Their circle, though fairly large, seemed, especially in the country, more like a friendly gathering than a stiff court. No private family did the honors of the house with more ease and grace … everything bore the imprint of the best tone and the most delicate taste. The grand duchess, majestic, affable and natural, pretty without coquetry, amiable without affectation, created an impression of virtue without pose. Paul sought to please and was well-informed. One was struck by his great vivacity and nobility of character. These, however, were only first impressions. Soon, one noticed, above all when he spoke of his personal position and future, a disquiet, a mistrust, an extreme susceptibility; in fact, oddities which were to cause his faults, his injustices and his misfortunes. In any other rank of life he might have made himself and others happy; but for such a man the throne, above all the Russian throne, could not fail to be dangerous.

Years later, after his return to France and after Paul’s reign had ended in assassination, Ségur had more to say about the emperor. It was less favorable:

He combined plenty of intelligence and information with the most unquiet and mistrustful humor and the most unsteady character. Though often affable to the point of familiarity, he was more frequently haughty, despotic, and harsh. Never had one seen a man more frightened, more capricious, less capable of rendering himself or others happy. It was not malignity … it was a sickness of mind. He tormented all who approached him because he unceasingly tormented himself.… Fear upset his judgement. Imagined perils gave rise to real ones.

After the death of Gregory Orlov in 1783, Catherine purchased the palace at Gatchina, thirty miles south of the capital, which she had given her favorite; now she presented it to Paul. Living there with his family, he complained bitterly about his exclusion from power and responsibility. “You tax me with my hypochondria and black moods,” he wrote to Prince Henry. “It may be so. But the inaction to which I am condemned makes the part excusable.” On another occasion, he wrote to Prince Henry, “Permit me to write you often; my heart has need to unburden itself, especially in the sad life that I lead.” The letter stopped abruptly: “My tears prevent me from continuing.”

At Gatchina, Paul was free to indulge his version of Peter III’s mania for soldiering. To console himself for the humiliation of being barred from a regular army command, he engaged a Prussian drillmaster and proceeded to create his own small, private army. By 1788, he had five companies of men dressed in tightly buttoned Prussian uniforms and powdered wigs. Every day, Paul appeared, wearing high boots and elbow-length gloves, and drilled his men to exhaustion—just as Peter III had done. He was short-tempered and, when displeased, would lash out with his cane. Count Fyodor Rostopchin wrote to a friend:

One cannot see everything the grand duke does without being moved to pity and horror. One would think he was trying to invent ways to make himself hated and detested. He has gotten it into his head that people despise him and want to show their disrespect; starting from that conception, he seizes on anything and punishes indiscriminately. The least delay, the least contradiction … and he flies into a rage.

A humiliation Paul could never overcome and which kept him away from court was the presence of his mother’s favorites; they automatically became his enemies. As a child, he had hated Orlov. Then Orlov was replaced by Vasilchikov and other nobodies like Zorich, Yermolov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Zubov. The vast sums continually bestowed on these young men emphasized to Paul, himself always in debt, the difference between the way she treated them and him. Potemkin, upon becoming all-powerful, stopped bothering even to be polite to the grand duke and openly dismissed him as a fool.

When she seized the throne, Catherine had proclaimed Paul to be her heir. Conceivably, when he reached his majority, she might also have enthroned him as co-ruler with significant responsibilities, as Maria Theresa had done with her son Joseph. In Vienna, Paul had seen the results of this other mother giving her son opportunities to learn by assisting her in ruling. There was never a chance that Catherine would do this. She saw her son as a rival, not a helpmate, and she gave Paul no role in the government of Russia. He and his wife were required to appear at official ceremonies; otherwise, mother and son saw little of each other.

To keep Paul in his place as a political cipher, Catherine found constant fault with him; at times he was too childish; at others too independent. One minute, she would accuse him of paying insufficient attention to serious matters; the next, she complained that he was interfering in matters beyond his competence. Unable to decide how or where to use him, she gave up and decided not to use him at all. When he asked to become a member of the Imperial Council, he was rejected. “I told you that your request needs mature consideration,” his mother said. “I do not think your entrance into the Council would be desirable. You must be patient until I change my mind.” On the outbreak of her second war with Turkey in 1787, Paul, who was thirty-three, asked to join the army as a volunteer. At first, she refused permission; then she gave in, but she reversed course again when Maria became pregnant. Her reasoning, she told Paul, was that if he deserted his wife at the moment of childbirth, his absence might jeopardize a precious Romanov life. He bitterly resented this veto on military service. When war suddenly broke out with Sweden a year later, Catherine relented sufficiently to allow Paul to visit the army in Finland. His passion for this duty was reflected in the degree to which his wife worried about his safety; she believed that he was actually going to fight. “I shall be separated from my beloved husband,” Maria wrote. “My heart is almost broken by anxiety for the life of him for whom I would willingly sacrifice my own.” Paul put on his uniform and left St. Petersburg on July 1, 1788, but his service was brief. He criticized the hastily assembled Russian soldiers in Finland because they did not live up to the parade ground standards of Gatchina; he quarreled with the Russian commander in chief; he was not allowed to see maps or discuss military operations. By mid-September he was back in the capital; he never went to war again.

During the childhood of Paul and Maria’s first son, Alexander, Catherine began to think seriously about disinheriting Paul and passing the succession directly to her grandson. There was no constitutional barrier to this: the law of succession decreed by Peter the Great empowered every reigning Russian sovereign to overrule the tradition of primogeniture and name his or her successor, male or female. Catherine could make that decision right up to the moment of death. That the empress was thinking of naming her gifted and handsome grandson to succeed her was widely suspected, especially by Paul. He had another reason to hate his mother: not only had she stood between him and any training for the throne; now she was confronting him with his own son—precocious, attractive, and beloved by the empress—as a rival for the prize for which he had been waiting most of his life.

As years of frustration warped Paul’s character, his eccentricities became more pronounced. Already, he was melancholy and pessimistic; now he began to appear unbalanced. His behavior sometimes worried even his loyal wife. “There is no one who does not every day remark the disorder of his faculties,” Maria said. Ironically, Paul’s shaky reputation and strange behavior reinforced Catherine’s hold on the throne; everyone desired the reins of government to remain in her strong hands as long as possible. When she felt her own strength declining, and she worried about the future of Russia, she never spoke of the reign of her son. It was Alexander of whom she spoke as her heir. Otherwise, she said gloomily, “I see into what hands the empire will fall when I am gone.” In a letter to Grimm in 1791, referring to the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, she predicted the coming of a Genghis Khan or a Tamerlane to Europe. “This will not come in my time,” she said, “and I hope not in the time of M. Alexander.” In the last months of her life, she may have thought of changing the succession. Thirty years later, Maria, as Paul’s widow, confided to her daughter Anna that a few weeks before Catherine’s death, the empress had invited her to sign a paper demanding that Paul renounce his right to the throne. Maria had indignantly refused. A subsequent appeal by Catherine to Alexander to save his country from rule by his father was equally fruitless.

Paul, enduring this long nightmare, had no idea how it would end. For years, he had been aware that disinheritance was in his mother’s mind. In 1788, as he was leaving for the army in Finland, he dictated a will instructing his wife to find and secure the empress’s papers at once in the event of her death; he wanted to make sure that no last testament would affect his claim to the throne. Until her final hours, many people at court believed that Catherine intended to disinherit Paul. A manifesto announcing this decision and proclaiming her grandson as her successor was expected on January 1, 1797. Whether she left such a will that was then destroyed by Paul, no one knows. More likely, she was still undecided when she died.

The schism between mother and son stretched beyond the grave. When finally, in 1796, he reached the throne, Paul immediately restored primogeniture as the basis of succession to the crown. Thereafter, until the fall of the monarchy and the Romanov dynasty in 1917, the eldest son of the deceased sovereign—or, lacking a son, the eldest male closest in the direct family line—would succeed. Never again would an heir have to go through what Paul had been through. And never again would Russia be ruled by a woman.

66

Potemkin: Builder and Diplomat

GREGORY POTEMKIN had fought in Catherine’s first war against Turkey, from 1769 to 1774, which had pushed Russia’s border to the Black Sea. He understood that the acquisition of new territory was not enough; the new possessions also had to be protected and developed. The most lasting part of his life work took place in these southern regions, where he took the dreams and plans he had shared with Catherine and turned them into reality.

Catherine had given him power—power subject only to her own—in many areas. Potemkin then proved what he could do as an organizer, administrator, and builder. Whether it was a matter of government, diplomacy, a military campaign, the planning of a trip, or simply a theatrical performance, concert, or parade, it was Gregory who ruled, managed, negotiated, produced, and directed. The primary focus of his work was in the south, where the sum of his accomplishments during the thirteen years that separated the first and second Turkish wars was extraordinary.

Potemkin ruled southern Russia like an emperor, although he always did so in the name of the empress in St. Petersburg. His most visible and permanent achievements were the cities and towns he built. Kherson, on the lower Dnieper River, was the first. Conceived as a port and a place to build warships, he began in 1778 with docks and a shipyard. Twenty miles upriver from the Black Sea, Kherson’s access to it lay through the Dneiper estuary called the Liman. The Russians controlled the eastern bank, where a narrow sand spit named Kinburn extended into the water; the Turks controlled the western bank with their massive fortress at Ochakov. Despite this formidable obstacle, Potemkin decided to build. Thousands of workers were brought to Kherson, and the first warship keels were laid down in 1779. In 1780, he launched a sixty-four-gun ship of the line and five frigates. When Kyril Razumovsky visited Kherson in 1782, he found stone buildings, a fortress, barracks housing ten thousand soldiers, and many Greek merchant ships anchored in the harbor. In 1783, after Catherine had annexed the Crimea, Potemkin began constructing a second naval base on the peninsula’s south shore. Called Sebastopol, it lay on a deep, protected bay that offered anchorage for scores of ships.

In 1786, Potemkin designed and began to build a new capital for this southern empire. The site he chose was on a bend in the Dnieper at a point where the river was almost a mile wide. He named it Ekaterinoslav (Catherine’s Glory). He planned a cathedral, a university, law courts, a musical conservatory, public parks and gardens, and twelve factories for making silks and wool. In 1789, he founded Nikolaev, another seaport and shipyard twenty miles upriver from Kherson. And once the Turkish war was over, Potemkin chose the site and made plans to build the city that is now Odessa; he died before this work began.

As he was transforming the southern provinces, Potemkin was also reforming the army and taking control of Russia’s foreign affairs. In February 1784, Catherine promoted him to the presidency of the College of War, with the rank of field marshal. He immediately introduced practical reforms: Russian soldiers were to wear the simplest, most comfortable uniforms, with loose tunics, wide breeches, boots that did not pinch, and easy-fitting helmets. He ordered soldiers to stop cutting, curling, and powdering their hair. “Is that a solider’s business?” he asked. “They have no personal valets.” A year later, he took control of the staff of the Black Sea Fleet. In his hands, thereafter, he had complete authority over everything relating to Russia’s relationship with Turkey, except the ultimate decision of war or peace.

As Russian influence extended over eastern and central Europe, the efforts of other states to win Russia’s friendship and support intensified. Britain had tried to rent Russian soldiers to assist in defeating her American colonies, and Catherine had rejected this request. In the spring of 1778, Britain suffered a heavier blow when France, eager to avenge the loss of colonial possessions to England in the Seven Years’ War, recognized the independence of the rebellious American colonies. By June, England and France were at war again. London sent a new ambassador to St. Petersburg. He was James Harris, later Sir James Harris, later still Earl of Malmesbury. Born in 1746, the son of a distinguished Greek scholar, Harris was only thirty-two, but his thatch of thick, prematurely white hair gave him a reassuring air of maturity. Already, he had served as British head of mission in Madrid and as minister in Berlin, where he had negotiated successfully with Frederick II. Now he was assigned to bring Russia into an offensive-defensive alliance with Great Britain. In St. Petersburg, Harris met Panin and Catherine; both were friendly but diplomatically noncommittal. Panin, in fact, was strongly opposed to an English alliance, and Catherine had no desire to involve Russia in a British war with France and her ally Spain. Harris was instructed to push ahead with a new request for Russian assistance in the struggle against “His Majesty’s misguided subjects in America.” To smooth this path, Harris was authorized to give formal assurance that England had no objection to Russian expansion along the Black Sea.

Harris had been negotiating with Panin, but, in August 1779, eighteen months after his arrival in St Petersburg, the ambassador concluded that Panin’s stature at court had become so diminished that little could be hoped for from him. On arriving, Harris had been wary of Potemkin, but he transferred his approach to the prince, whom he described as “such a mixture of wit, levity, learning, and humor, as I never met in the same man.” In July 1789, Potemkin arranged an informal meeting between Harris and the empress after an evening card game. As Harris reported their conversation:

She had the strongest desire to help us; she had withheld it from reluctance to plunging her empire into fresh troubles and probably ending her reign in a state of war.… She had the highest opinion of our national strength and spirit, and did not doubt that we should overmatch the French and Spaniards. Her Imperial Majesty then discoursed on the American war, lamented at our not having been able to stop it at the beginning, and hinted at the possibility of restoring peace by our renouncing our struggle with our colonies. I asked her, if they belonged to her, and a foreign power was to propose peace on such terms, whether she would accept it. “I would rather lose my head,” she said with great vehemence.

Harris realized that Catherine was conflicted: she admired England, but she was not sorry to see the British government distracted by its new war with France. An over-powerful England was not in the interests of the Russian empire; the empress feared that England might alter its policy and oppose Russia’s continued expansion along the Black Sea. Harris did not report this to London, but he also realized that if Catherine ever led Russia into war again, it would not be against France. It would be against the Turks.

Emperor Joseph II of Austria was nurturing his own ambitions regarding the Turks. Eager to repair the damage and humiliation inflicted on his country and his mother by Frederick II’s seizure of Silesia, his goal was the acquisition of Turkish territories in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. In an alliance of Austria and Russia, he saw the means of achieving this. In pursuit of this goal, the emperor asked to pay a personal visit to Catherine at Mogilev, a Russian town near the Austrian frontier. Catherine, understanding that in any future war with Turkey, Austria would be a far more useful ally than Prussia, instructed Potemkin to make the arrangements.

In May 1789, the two monarchs met in Mogilev. Catherine was pleased to be receiving this particular guest. Although he was traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein, Joseph was the co-ruler, with his mother, of the possessions of the ancient house of Hapsburg, and he was also the Holy Roman Emperor. His effort to come to Russia was unprecedented among foreign sovereigns; none had ever visited in Russia’s history. At Catherine’s request, the emperor accompanied her from Mogilev back to St. Petersburg, where he remained for three weeks, spending five days at Tsarskoe Selo. Because he was traveling incognito with no retinue of courtiers and attendants, and because he preferred to sleep at ordinary inns, a palace annex was transformed into an inn and servants were costumed accordingly. Catherine’s English-Hanoverian gardener, John Busch, whose first language was German, assumed the role of innkeeper. By the time Joseph left, a regular correspondence and the foundations of a military alliance had been agreed to between the emperor and the empress. The subject of their discussions was the dismemberment and partition of the European territories of the Ottoman Empire. Catherine’s vision was of the restoration of a Greek empire under her grandson Constantine, with Constantinople as its capital. Joseph coveted the Ottoman provinces in the Balkans, along with as much as possible in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean.

Joseph’s visit to Mogilev and St. Petersburg occurred in May and June 1780. In November of that year, his mother, Empress Maria Theresa, died at sixty-three, and thirty-nine-year-old Joseph became the sole ruler of Austria and the Hapsburg empire. In May 1781, Joseph signed a treaty with Catherine pledging Austria’s aid to Russia in the event of war with Turkey. The signing of this treaty marked the end of Nikita Panin’s influence on Russian foreign policy. Always an advocate of alliance with Prussia against Austria, he declared that “he could not soil his hand” by putting his name on such a treaty, and he asked permission to retire to the country. In September 1781, the aging counselor who, nineteen years before, had helped put Catherine on the throne, was dismissed.

Potemkin stepped forward in Panin’s place. The British ambassador, James Harris, still struggling to arrange a Russian alliance with England, persuaded King George III to write a warm personal letter to Catherine, but even this failed to persuade her. When Harris pressed him, Potemkin explained, “You have chosen an unlucky moment. The favorite [Lanskoy] lies dangerously ill; the cause of his illness and the uncertainty of recovery have so entirely unhinged the empress that she is incapable of employing her thoughts on any subject, and all ideas of ambition, of glory, of dignity, are absorbed in this one passion. Exhausted, she avoids everything involving activity or exertion.”

Lanskoy worsened. Harris himself developed influenza and jaundice; then Potemkin fell ill for three weeks. When this tide of illness began to ebb, Potemkin told Harris that the empress still remained partial to England. Catherine herself told Harris, “The interest I take in everything that concerns your country has made me resolve in my mind every kind of means by which I could assist you. I would do everything to serve you except involve myself in a war. I would be answerable to my subjects, my successor and perhaps to all Europe for the consequences of such a conduct.” Her position regarding an English alliance remained unchanged.

England did not give up. In October 1780, Lord Stormont at the Foreign Office instructed Harris to go back to Catherine and offer “some object worthy of her notice, a cession of territory of a nature to increase her commerce and naval strength that would persuade the empress to conclude an alliance with the king, assisting us against France and Spain, and our revolted colonies.” Harris replied, “Prince Potemkin, though he did not directly say so, clearly gave me to understand that the only cession which would induce the empress to become our ally was that of Minorca.” This island in the western Mediterranean with a fortified harbor and naval base, Port Mahon, was a treasured British possession. Harris asked for an interview with Catherine. Potemkin, arranging it, advised him, “Flatter her as much as you can. You cannot use too much unction, but flatter her for what she ought to be, not for what she is.”

When he saw the empress, Harris said: “You can demand of us whatever you like. We could not refuse anything to Your Imperial Majesty if we only knew what could please you.” Catherine remained determined not to become involved in England’s war with France, Spain, and America. The dialogue then returned to Harris and Potemkin, both still hopeful that something could be salvaged

“What can you cede to us?” Potemkin asked Harris.

“We have extensive possessions in America, in the East Indies, and on the Sugar Islands [in the Carribean],” Harris replied.

Potemkin shook his head. “You would ruin us if you gave us distant colonies. Our ships can scarce get out of the Baltic. How would you have them cross the Atlantic? If you give us anything, give us something nearer home.… If you would cede Minorca, I promise you, I believe I could lead the empress any lengths.”

Harris reported to London: “I told him … that I believed the cession he required to be impossible.”

Potemkin had replied: “So much the worse. It would insure us to you forever.”

Despite the magnitude of the gift requested and the pain that would be involved in giving it, the British government went ahead and prepared a draft of the terms of alliance that Britain wanted: “The empress of Russia shall effectuate the restoration of peace between Great Britain, France, and Spain.… It shall be an express condition that the French immediately evacuate Rhode Island and every other part of His Majesty’s colonies in North America. No agreement whatever shall be made with respect to His Majesty’s rebellious subjects.”

Catherine still would not agree. She remained convinced that the alliance treaty was an attempt to draw her and her subjects into a European war. When Potemkin went back to her, she told him: “La mariée est trop belle; on veut me tromper” (“The bride is too beautiful; they wish to deceive me”). She emphasized her friendly feelings toward England but otherwise rejected the entire proposition. By the end of 1781, the issue was moot. In December of that year, the British army in North America surrendered when Lord Cornwallis handed his sword to George Washington at Yorktown. In March 1782, the Lord North government fell and was replaced by a Whig ministry. The idea of a Russian alliance was dropped.

Catherine had another reason for rejecting a treaty with England: her rapprochement with Austria had led to a formal alliance. On the strength of this alliance, she and Potemkin were preparing for the annexation of the Crimea, which both considered far more important than the acquisition of Minorca. It was Potemkin who had proposed and managed this peaceful annexation. The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardzhi, which ended the first Turkish war in 1774, had established the independence of the Crimea, but the khanate still remained a nominal vassal state of the Ottoman sultan. Potemkin worried that geographically the peninsula split Russia’s Black Sea possessions, and he explained to Catherine the difficulty of guarding her southern frontier while the Crimea remained outside her empire. “The acquisition of the Crimea can make us neither stronger nor richer, but it will ensure our peace,” he said. In July 1783, Catherine announced the annexation of the Crimean peninsula into the Russian empire. Potemkin managed this acquisition without a war or a battle, although it came at a long-term personal cost: in the Crimea, he acquired a severe case of malaria that never entirely left him during the rest of his life.

67

Crimean Journey and “Potemkin Villages”

OVER TIME, the story of Catherine the Great’s journey down the Dnieper River to the Crimea in the spring of 1787 has passed from history into legend. It has been described as the most remarkable journey ever made by a reigning monarch and as Gregory Potemkin’s greatest public triumph. It has also been disparaged as a gigantic hoax: the prosperous villages shown to the empress were said to have been made of painted cardboard; the happy villagers were declared to be costumed serfs, marched from place to place, appearing and reappearing, waving and cheering as Catherine passed by. These accusations became the basis of the myth of “Potemkin villages,” the settlements Potemkin supposedly fabricated along the Dnieper in order to deceive Catherine and her guests about the actual state of her southern territories. In time, the expression “Potemkin village” came to mean a sham, or something fraudulent, erected or spoken to conceal an unpleasant truth. As such, it became a cliché; now, it is part of the language. In evaluating the allegation, two facts should be considered. The first is that those who mocked and condemned were not present on the journey. The other is that the results of Potemkin’s work were personally observed by many eyewitnesses, including three sharp-eyed and sophisticated foreigners: the Austrian emperor, Joseph II; the French ambassador, the Comte de Ségur; and the Austrian field marshal Prince Charles de Ligne. Over two centuries, no one has produced any evidence that what these three said and wrote about their journey was untrue.

For nine years Potemkin had worked to transform the newly acquired areas of southern Russia into a prosperous part of Catherine’s empire. Proud of what he had achieved, he had been urging the empress to come and see what he had done. Finally, she agreed to come in the spring and summer of 1787, the year of her silver jubilee, the twenty-fifth anniversary of her accession to the throne. The planning and preparation of Catherine’s Crimean journey began. It was to be the longest journey of her life and the most spectacular public spectacle of her reign. For more than six months and over four thousand miles, she traveled by land and water, by sledge, river galley, and carriage. In doing this, she confirmed the future of this vast region. From the year of her journey until the German invasion in 1941, and then the independence of Ukraine in 1991, these lands never passed from Russian hands.

The Crimean Peninsula, which Potemkin most wanted the empress to see, had a history embracing many peoples and cultures. In the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the Greeks had established colonies along the Crimean coast. Then called the Taurus, it was the site where Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is said to have served as a priestess in the Temple of Diana. Three hundred years later, these Greek colonies became part of the Roman Empire; later, the Crimea was conquered and occupied by the Mongols. When Catherine annexed the peninsula in 1783, she instructed Potemkin to build roads, cities, and ports, enrich and broaden agriculture, and integrate the Muslim population into her empire without destroying their religion or culture. Potemkin then built cities, created parks, and planted vineyards and botanical gardens. He brought in cattle, silkworms, mulberries, and melon seeds. He began building warships, and at Kherson, Nikolaev, and on the Bay of Sebastopol he constructed naval bases for the new Russian Black Sea Fleet.

Catherine was eager to see and know these lands about which she had heard so much, and in which she had invested so many rubles. She also had diplomatic reasons for going: she wished to impress Europe and intimidate the Turks. On her journey, she would be meeting a king and an emperor: Stanislaus of Poland and Joseph II of Austria. Stanislaus, her former lover, was to join her at a point where the Dnieper River constituted the border between Russia and Poland. Joseph, her ally, had been persuaded to come so that together they could advertise the strength of the Russo-Austrian alliance. Her journey, therefore, was to be simultaneously a pleasure trip, a royal inspection, and a strong diplomatic statement.

Catherine was fifty-eight when she began this journey, and it was an unusual effort for a woman of her age to undertake. It displayed not only her vitality and enthusiasm but also her trust in the mastermind who for three years had been planning this enterprise. Once on her way, she said to Ségur:

Everything was done to deter me from this journey. I was assured that my progress would be bristling with obstacles and unpleasantness. They wished to frighten me with stories of the fatigue of the journey. These people had a very poor knowledge of me. They do not know that to oppose me is to encourage me, and that every difficulty they put in my way is an additional spur.

Primarily, she wanted to endorse and set her imperial seal on Potemkin’s achievements in the south. For years, his enemies at court had belittled his efforts, asserting that he had wasted or stolen the vast sums, now millions of rubles, allotted for the development of these new territories. Potemkin himself knew that the success of Catherine’s journey would make him unassailable—and that failure would ruin him. He knew also that the courts of Europe would be watching. He urged, therefore, that Catherine bring with her the foreign ambassadors stationed in St. Petersburg so that they could report to their governments what they had seen.

Potemkin hurled himself and all of his talents for organization and showmanship into this enormous effort. He decided where the immense imperial caravan would stop every night. He erected or borrowed houses, mansions, and palaces to accommodate the travelers. He chose sites for balls, fireworks, and celebrations. He ordered the construction of a fleet of large, luxurious galleys to carry the empress and her guests down the Dnieper River. He had guidebooks printed giving detailed descriptions of the towns and villages the galleys would pass and naming the distances the fleet would travel each day.

Catherine made up the guest list. There were omissions. The Prussian ambassador was not included because the death of Frederick the Great a year before had brought his nephew, Frederick William, to the throne in Berlin, and the nephew’s dislike of Catherine was warmly reciprocated. The Saxon ambassador, Georg von Helbig, was left behind because he had made a practice of denigrating Potemkin and his achievements.

More conspicuous were the absentees from among the members of Catherine’s own family. Until the last minute, she planned to take her two oldest grandchildren, ten-year-old Alexander and eight-year-old Constantine. She wanted them to see the territories, the towns, and the fleet she was adding to their inheritance. But as the time to depart drew closer, the protests of the boys’ parents grew louder. The usually serene Maria Fyodorovna became almost hysterical at the thought of her sons traveling to a region where plague and malaria were perennial hazards. Dr. Rogerson supported her. Catherine persisted, arguing that it was cruel to let a grandmother go off on a long journey without a single member of her own family to accompany her. To Paul and Maria, she wrote: “Your children belong to you, they belong to me, they belong to the state. From their earliest childhood, I have made it my duty and my pleasure to give them the tenderest care. I reasoned as follows: it will be a consolation for me, when I am far from you, to have them near me. Am I to be the only one who is deprived, in my old age, for six months, of the pleasure of having some member of my family with me?” Receipt of this letter only made Maria more desperate. Paul then suggested that both he and Maria as well as their sons should accompany his mother. Or, if this was not acceptable, he offered to be the only family member to go with her. He was, after all, heir to the throne; presumably the lands to be visited would one day be his to rule. Why should he not see them? This suggestion, like the other, was coldly rejected. “Your latest proposal would cause the greatest of upsets,” she wrote. The truth was that she did not want the “heavy baggage” of Paul’s presence to detract from her enjoyment of Potemkin’s triumph.

In the end, the question became moot. On the eve of departure, both grandsons developed chicken pox. Six doctors had to be summoned to testify to this fact before Catherine surrendered and agreed that her grandsons should stay home. Paul, too, remained behind, embittered because he had not been delegated any authority over anything during her absence.

On New Years Day 1787, Catherine received the diplomatic corps at the Winter Palace, and then drove to Tsarskoe Selo. At eleven in the morning on January 7, in brilliant sunshine and bitter cold, she left Tsarskoe Selo in the first of fourteen large, comfortable carriages mounted on broad runners to convert them into sledges. Catherine’s carriage had seats for six, and she began the journey riding with her current favorite, Alexander Mamonov, Lev Naryshkin, Ivan Shuvalov, and a lady-in-waiting. All were wrapped in soft furs, with bearskins draped over their laps. Behind her, other carriage-sledges carried the foreign ambassadors, members of the court, government officials, and her personal staff. Aware that, despite the traditional hostility between their two countries, they liked each other privately, she had placed the French and English ambassadors, Philippe de Ségur and Alleyne Fitzherbert (later Lord St. Helens), in the same carriage. One hundred twenty-four smaller sleighs and sledges followed, carrying doctors, apothecaries, musicians, cooks, engineers, hairdressers, silver polishers, washerwomen, and scores of other male and female servants.

In January in northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine’s time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles. “It was a time,” wrote Ségur, “when every animal stayed in its stable, every peasant by his stove, and the only sign of human life were the convoys of sleighs passing like small ships over a frozen sea.” In those northern latitudes at this time of year, daylight lasts no more than six hours, but this did not hinder Catherine’s progress. When darkness fell in the afternoon—as early as three o’clock on the first days of the journey—the road was illuminated by bonfires and blazing torches.

Travel did not alter Catherine’s daily schedule. She rose at six as she did in St. Petersburg, drank coffee, and then worked alone or with her secretary or ministers for two hours. At eight, she summoned her close friends to breakfast, and at nine, she entered her carriage to resume the journey. At two, she halted for midday dinner, then resumed an hour later. At seven, long after the fall of darkness, she stopped for the night. Usually, Catherine was not tired and would go back to work or join her companions for conversation, cards, or games until ten.

Speeding over the snow, Catherine shuffled the passengers in her sledge in order to shift topics and diversify her amusement. Frequently, Ségur and Fitzherbert were exchanged for Naryshkin and Shuvalov. Ségur, sophisticated and intelligent, a born storyteller, was her favorite. She laughed at most of what he said, but, at one point, he discovered the limits of her tolerance:

One day when I was sitting opposite her in her carriage, she indicated to me the desire to hear some snippets of light verse which I had composed. The gentle familiarity which she permitted to the people who were traveling with her, the presence of her young favorite, her gaiety, her correspondence with … Voltaire and Diderot, had made me think that she could not be shocked by the liberty of a love story and so I recited one to her which was admittedly a little risqué, but nevertheless decent enough to have been well received by ladies in Paris.

To my great surprise, I suddenly saw my laughing traveling companion reassume the face of a majestic sovereign, interrupt me with a completely unrelated question, and so change the subject of conversation. Several minutes later, to make her aware that I had learned my lesson, I begged her to listen to another piece of verse of a very different nature, to which she paid the kindest attention.

In Smolensk, the journey was delayed for four days by massive snowdrifts and by a feverish sore throat that had stricken Mamonov. But a letter from Potemkin, still in the Crimea, urged Catherine on: “Here, the greenery in the meadows is starting to break through,” he said. “I think the flowers are coming soon.”

On January 29 the cavalcade reached Kiev, standing on the high, west bank of the Dnieper River. The empress, whose only previous visit had been forty-three years earlier when she was a fifteen-year-old grand duchess accompanying Empress Elizabeth, was welcomed with saluting cannon and pealing bells. Each ambassador was assigned his own palace or mansion, handsomely furnished, staffed with servants and stocked with excellent wines. At night, there were games, music, and dancing. Catherine often played whist with Ségur and Mamonov.

Potemkin arrived from the Crimea. At first, he remained in seclusion, away from all the excitement he had created, declaring that he intended to observe Lent in the company of monks rather than courtiers and diplomats. He chose the Pecherskaya Lavra, the famous Monastery of the Caves, hollowed out of the cliff rising from the river. Here, in a labyrinth of caves and low, narrow tunnels, seventy-three mummified saints lay in open niches, close enough for passersby to reach out and touch. Catherine, knowing Potemkin’s moods, warned, “Avoid the prince when you see him looking like an angry wolf.” The cause of the prince’s behavior was worry; in overseeing this journey he had accepted an enormous responsibility, and the most difficult parts lay ahead.

Along with Potemkin, another new traveler joined the party at Kiev. This was Prince Charles de Ligne, a fifty-year-old Belgian-born aristocrat, now an Austrian field marshal in the service of Emperor Joseph II. Arriving from Vienna, Ligne was a welcome addition. A European cosmopolitan, at ease corresponding with Voltaire or Marie Antoinette, he was witty, wise, sophisticated, cynical, and sentimental, and, at the same time, diplomatic and discreet. A friend of sovereigns and princes, affectionate with equals, popular with inferiors, he put everyone at ease. He was delighted to be invited by Catherine, whom he later described as “the greatest genius of her age.” Of all Catherine’s guests on the journey, Ligne remained most consistently in favor, not only with Catherine but with everyone else. Catherine herself described him as “the pleasantest company and the easiest person to live with that I have ever met.” When his master, friend, and confidant Joseph II joined the party, Ligne was asked to share the imperial carriage and overhear the conversation between the two monarchs. Ligne joined in when asked to do so; the other occupant, Alexander Mamonov, too bored to listen, slept.

Catherine and her guests remained in Kiev for six weeks. Thereafter, the journey was to be resumed in large galleys built for the voyage down the river. On April 22, cannon signaled that the ice on the river had cracked. At noon, the empress and her guests boarded seven opulently decorated and furnished Roman-style galleys, all painted in red and gold, with the Russian imperial double eagle emblazoned on their sides. Catherine’s galley, named Dnieper, had a bedroom hung with gold and scarlet silk brocade, a drawing room, a library, a music room, and a dining room. A private canopied deck offered her the opportunity to take the air while avoiding the sun. The six galleys following hers were almost as luxurious: also painted red and gold with interiors lined with expensive brocades. Potemkin’s galley housed the prince, no longer an “angry wolf,” two of his nieces and their husbands, and his new friend, the raffish soldier of fortune Prince Charles de Nassau-Siegen. This forty-two-year-old Franco-German, the impoverished heir to a tiny principality, had sailed around the world, fought on land and sea, married a Polish woman, and then come to Russia, where he had met Potemkin. Catherine was dubious. “It is odd that you like Prince Nassau considering his universal reputation as a hothead,” she told Potemkin. “Still, it’s well known that he is brave.”

On the day of embarkation, with the galleys still tethered to the shore, Catherine invited fifty guests to dine on board the special dining galley. At three in the afternoon, the fleet cast off and headed downstream with the seven large galleys followed by eighty smaller vessels carrying three thousand people who serviced this unusual flotilla. At six, a smaller number of guests were rowed back to the empress’s private galley for supper; this became the habitual pattern during the days to come.

Under a blue sky, with the river sparkling in sunlight, painted oars dipped rhythmically into the river and this “Cleopatra’s fleet,” as Ligne christened it, moved down the Dnieper. Travel along the great river waterways was normal in Russia, but no one had ever seen anything like this, and crowds of people stood on the banks, watching and waving as the galleys swept by. The fleet passed meadows carpeted with spring wildflowers, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, and villages with churches and houses gleaming with new paint. As the large galleys passed by, a swarm of little boats darted among the larger vessels, carrying visitors from one to another, transporting wine and food as well as musicians who played at meals and evening concerts. By day, Catherine would lie on the deck of her galley under her silken awning. For her guests and those passengers who were not on the empress’s working staff, the mornings were free and passengers visited one another, talked business, gossiped, and played cards. At midday, the empress’s galley fired a gun to announce dinner; sometimes it would be for only ten guests who were rowed to her galley; sometimes for fifty, summoned to the special dining galley. Often, the fleet stopped and anchored so that the passengers could picnic or simply walk along the riverbanks.

Six days brought the fleet to Kaniev, a point on the Dnieper where the east bank was Russian and the west bank Polish. Here Catherine was to meet Stanislaus Ponitowski, whom she had created king of Poland. The two had not seen each other since 1759, twenty-eight years earlier. Even now, at fifty-six, Stanislaus remained handsome, sensitive, cultured—and also well-meaning and weak. But Catherine was uneasy. At fifty-nine, she was aware of how the years had affected her own appearance, and she was not looking forward to subjecting herself to the gaze of a former lover.

When the fleet anchored off Kaniev, the king was rowed out to Catherine’s galley. The morning had seen gusts of wind and rain, and the king’s clothing was sodden when he came aboard. Catherine received him with state honors, and Stanislaus responded with his old sophistication. As king, he was forbidden by the Polish constitution to leave Polish soil; accordingly, he had assumed a temporary incognito. Bowing to those who received him on deck, he said, “Gentlemen, the king of Poland has asked me to commend Count Poniatowski to your care.”

Catherine was cool. Stanislaus now seemed insipid, his manners too exquisite, his compliments excessively elegant and long-winded. As Catherine wrote to Grimm, “It was thirty years since I’d seen him and you can imagine that we found each other changed.” She presented him to her ministers and foreign guests and then, walking stiffly, retired with him for a private half-hour talk. When they returned, her manner was strained and his eyes were sad. At dinner, Ségur sat opposite the empress and the king and later he recorded, “They spoke little, but each was watching the other. We listened to an excellent orchestra and drank the king’s health to a salvo of artillery fire.” On departing, the king, rising from the table, could not find his hat. Catherine handed it to him. Stanislaus thanked her and, smiling, said that it was the second article of headgear she had given him; the first had been the crown of Poland.

He tried and failed to persuade her to prolong her visit and remain his guest for several days. He had arranged dinners and a ball in her honor at a palace he had built especially for the occasion. She declined, having already resolved that their reunion should not exceed a single day. Stanislaus was told that she had to meet the Emperor Joseph II in Kherson, downstream; the emperor would be waiting and her schedule could not be changed. Potemkin, who liked Stanislaus, was annoyed, and warned her that her refusal would undermine the king’s position in Poland. Catherine was adamant: “I know of our guest’s desire that I remain here for another day or two, but you yourself know that this is impossible, given my meeting with the emperor. Kindly let him know, in a polite manner, that there is no possibility of making changes in my journey. And moreover, as you yourself know, I find any change in plan disagreeable.” When Potemkin continued to argue, she grew testy: “The dinner proposed for tomorrow was suggested without any regard for what is possible.… When I make a decision there’s a reason for it … and so I’m leaving tomorrow as planned.… I’m truly tired of this!” To appease Potemkin, she permitted her guests to attend the first of Stanislaus’s balls, to be given that night, but she remained on her galley and watched the fireworks from the deck, attended by Mamonov. The following morning, the galley fleet sailed at dawn. To Potemkin, Catherine said, “The king bores me.” She never saw Stanislaus again.

Meanwhile, downriver in Kherson, Joseph had arrived and was waiting. A man who loved to travel unencumbered, Joseph was once again traveling incognito as Count Falkenstein. With little baggage, and accompanied by a single equerry and two servants, he usually arrived early on his travels. In Kherson, he tired of waiting and decided to go upriver by land to meet Catherine in Kaidek, where her fleet of galleys would halt on reaching the first of the Dnieper cataracts. When the galleys arrived in Kaidek, Catherine was informed that Count Falkenstein was waiting downriver at Kherson. Soon, further news arrived that he was already on his way by road to meet her. Determined not to be outdone, Catherine hastily disembarked and hurried by carriage to intercept her ally. The two met by the road, and, riding together in her carriage, returned the twenty miles to Kaidek. Joining her traveling party, Joseph insisted on maintaining his incognito, attending the empress’s levees with other gentlemen of the court, and always being introduced as Count Falkenstein. He was delighted to see his friend and army commander, Ligne, and to strike up a new friendship with Ségur. He spoke admiringly to the French ambassador about the vitality of the extraordinary woman ten years his senior who had become his ally, but he had few compliments for Mamonov. “The new favorite is good-looking,” Joseph wrote, “but does not appear to be very brilliant and seems astonished to find himself in this position. He is really no more than a spoiled child.”

After twenty-four hours at Kaidek, Catherine and Joseph left to the courtiers and diplomats the pleasure of shooting the rapids by galley, and traveled together by carriage to the site where Potemkin intended to build the new city of Ekaterinoslav. There, with Joseph at her side, Catherine laid the foundation stone of the city’s new cathedral. The emperor, dubious about building a large church before there was a town or a population, wrote to a friend in Vienna, “I performed a great deed today. The empress laid the first stone of a new church, and I laid—the last.”

Once the galleys had passed safely through the rapids and the two sovereigns reembarked, they made their entry into Kherson by water. Nine years before, when Potemkin had first chosen this site twenty miles up the estuary from the Black Sea, Kherson had been no more than a few huts in a marsh. Now it was a fortified city with two thousand white houses, straight streets, shade trees, flower gardens, churches and public buildings, barracks for twenty thousand men, crowds in the streets, shops filled with goods, and a thriving shipyard with warehouses along the quays and two completed ships of the line and a frigate ready to be launched. More than a hundred ships, many of them Russian, were riding at anchor in the port. On May 15, Catherine and Joseph launched the three warships, including the ship of the line Vladimir and a powerful eighty-gun ship of the line diplomatically named St. Joseph.

The proximity of the Turks loomed in the minds of both sovereigns. They saw the arch Potemkin had erected over the entrance to the town, provocatively emblazoned with the inscription in Greek “This is the way to Byzantium.” They met Yakov Bulgakov, the Russian minister in Constantinople, who had come to report to the empress and remind her of what she and Potemkin already knew: that the Ottoman Empire had never fully accepted the annexation of the Crimea or, indeed, any Russian presence on the Black Sea. The Turks were only biding their time, Bulgakov warned. Catherine and Potemkin understood, and because Russia would not be ready for war for at least two years, they urged Bulgakov to be conciliatory.

Catherine herself was now obliged to be cautious. Originally, she had hoped to travel the full length of the Dnieper, which meant going from Kherson down the estuary all the way to the Black Sea. The Turks forestalled this final stage of her river voyage by sending four men-of-war and ten frigates to cruise in the estuary. It was a reminder that the Dnieper was not yet fully open.

Despite this disappointment, Catherine was determined to impress her imperial ally and the foreign ambassadors by taking them on a tour of the Crimea. Leaving Kherson and the Dnieper on May 21, they traveled overland by carriage. Once out on the steppe, Joseph was astonished when twelve hundred Tartar horsemen suddenly appeared in a cloud of dust; here were tribesmen, only recently conquered, now considered to be sufficiently loyal to serve as an imperial guard of honor. Impressed by what he was seeing, Joseph left the encampment at dusk one evening and walked with Ségur out into the flat wasteland of grass stretching to the horizon. “What a peculiar land,” the emperor said. “And who could have expected to see me with Catherine the Second, and the French and English ambassadors wandering through a Tatar desert? What a page of history!”

Passing through the Perekop Isthmus connecting the Crimean Peninsula with Ukraine and Russia to the north, the procession of carriages rolled down the steep, rocky road leading to Bakhchisarai, the former capital of the Crimean khans. Here, the private apartments in the palace of the khans became the temporary residence of the two visiting monarchs. Months before, Catherine had sent Charles Cameron, her Scottish architect, to repair and decorate the palace. Cameron had preserved the atmosphere of Islam. There were inner courts and secret gardens enclosed by high walls and hedges of myrtle. There were cool, uncluttered rooms with tiled walls in glowing colors, thick carpets, elaborate tapestries, and, in the center of every room, a marble fountain. Through her open windows, Catherine could see minarets rising above the walls and breathe the scents of roses, jasmine, orange trees, and pomegranates. Surrounding the palace was the town, dominated by nineteen mosques and their high minarets, from which, five times a day, voices summoned the faithful to prayer; while she was there, Catherine ordered the construction of two new mosques. Outside, too, were other sights, sounds, and smells of Islam: teeming street bazaars; Tatar princes and men in flowing robes; their wives and other women, covered except for their eyes.

Because Potemkin was eager to show Catherine and the emperor what he considered his greatest achievement in the south, they spent only three days and two nights in Bakhchisarai. On May 22, they drove across the mountains through forests of cypress and pine to the rugged headlands of the Crimea’s Black Sea south coast. Here they entered a lush, Riviera-like region of mild temperatures the year around, with olive trees, orchards, vineyards, pastures, and gardens of jasmine, laurel, lilacs, wisteria, roses, and violets. Every spring, the sudden, massive flowering of fruit trees, shrubs, vines, and wildflowers, with their swirl of colors and odors, transformed the coast into a vast perfumed garden.

Their destination was Inkerman, on the heights overlooking the Black Sea, where they dined in a new pavilion. After a midday banquet, Potemkin stood and drew back the curtains at one end of the room. Before them, under the cloudless blue Crimean sky, the travelers saw an amphitheater of rugged mountain peaks rising from emerald blue waters. This was the great bay of Sebastopol, glittering in the sunlight. In the bay lay the ships of Potemkin’s growing Black Sea Fleet. On a signal from the pavilion, the ships thundered a salute to the two monarchs. To conclude, one of the new ships raised the emperor’s flag and fired a salute specifically for him.

Catherine led Joseph to a carriage and together they drove down to the port to tour the harbor and the city. They saw its new dockyards and wharves, its fortifications, admiralty buildings, magazines, barracks, churches, two hospitals, shops, houses, and schools. Joseph, who had been skeptical and critical of Kherson, was astonished by Sebastopol; it was, he declared, “the most beautiful port I have ever seen.” Impressed by the quality and readiness of the Russian ships, the emperor added, “The truth is that it is necessary to be here to believe what I see.”

From Sebastopol, Catherine had intended to escort her visitors through the Crimea as far as Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. But summer heat and Joseph’s desire to return to Vienna convinced her that everyone had seen enough. They returned to the Dnieper, riding together in her carriage, still talking politics and future plans. On June 2, they parted. Catherine continued north to Poltava, where Potemkin staged a re-creation of the 1709 Battle of Poltava, at which Peter the Great had annihilated Charles XII’s invading Swedish army. She watched as fifty thousand Russian soldiers, some costumed as Russians, some as Swedes, reenacted the battle.

On June 10 at Kharkov, Catherine and Potemkin parted. Before leaving, he presented her with a magnificent necklace of pearls, purchased and brought to him from Vienna. She bestowed on him the title of prince of Tauris. Afterward, traveling north through Kursk, Orel, and Tula, Catherine’s carriage bumped along roads no longer offering the smooth glide of a sledge on snow. When she reached Moscow on June 27, she was overjoyed to see her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, whose parents had permitted them to travel to welcome their grandmother. This was Catherine’s last visit to the old capital, and when she reached Tsarskoe Selo on July 11, she was exhausted.

She was immensly proud of Potemkin’s achievements. After leaving him at Kharkov, she had written him grateful, emotional letters during her journey: “I love you and your service which comes from pure zeal.… Please be careful.… With the intense heat you have at midday, I beg of you most humbly: do me the favor of looking after your health, for God’s and our sake, and be as pleased with me as I am with you.”

Potemkin replied with gratitude and a devotion that was almost filial:

Your Majesty! How I appreciate the feelings you expressed is known to God! You are more than a real mother to me.… What I owe you, what numerous distinctions you have given me, how far you have extended your favors on those close to me; but chief of all, the fact that malice and envy could not prejudice me in your eyes and all perfidy was devoid of success. That is what is really rare in this world; such firmness is given to you alone. This country will not forget its happiness.… Goodbye my benefactress and mother.… I am unto death your faithful slave.

Regarding the “malice and envy” of his enemies, she wrote back: “Between you and me, my friend, I will tell you the state of affairs in a few words: you serve me and I am grateful. And that’s all there is to it. With your zeal toward me and your fervor for the affairs of the empire, you rapped your enemies across the knuckles.”

Potemkin had built new cities and seaports, created new industries and a fleet, imported and planted new agriculture, and given Russia access to a new sea. One interested party did not believe that these cities and towns, or the shipyards and warships that Potemkin had shown to Catherine, were made of cardboard. The Turks were keenly aware of the strength of the new empire spreading along the north shore of the Black Sea. They did not wait to react. Catherine had returned to Tsarskoe Selo to rest, but she was to have little rest. Immediately following her return from the south came the news that Turkey had declared war.

68

The Second Turkish War and the Death of Potemkin

THE PEACE BETWEEN Russia and Turkey signed in 1774 was precarious. The Turks had never been reconciled to loss of territory in the south and the opening of the Black Sea to Russian merchant vessels. Once Potemkin began building a Black Sea Fleet, Turkish concern mounted. Then Catherine annexed the Crimea. She had made her triumphant personal tour of the south, accompanied by the Austrian emperor, culminating in her inspection of the new naval base at Sebastopol, filled with warships only a two-day sail from Constantinople. This seemed a deliberate provocation. The sultan declared war.

This sudden move caught Russia by surprise. Catherine and Potemkin were both aware of Turkey’s permanent hostility, but both had expected her triumphant journey to the south to intimidate the Turks, not provoke them; certainly, they had not thought it would precipitate an immediate war. For the Turks, however, there was a price to pay for the advantage of striking first: the Turkish declaration of war triggered Russia’s secret treaty with Austria, obliging Joseph II to come to Catherine’s aid. Two weeks after the Turkish declaration, the emperor told Catherine that he would honor their treaty, and in February 1788, Austria declared war on the Ottoman Empire.

Turkey’s objectives in the new war were simple: to regain the Crimea and eliminate the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Catherine’s objectives were more layered. Her ultimate purpose was still to drive the Turks from Europe and seize Constantinople, but her immediate effort was directed at the mighty fortress of Ochakov, which controlled the estuary of the Dnieper River. Once this strategic strong point, garrisoned by twenty thousand men, had fallen, Catherine and Potemkin intended their armies to advance westward along the north shore of the Black Sea and occupy the land between the Bug and the Dniester rivers. At that point, they would weigh the prospects for a march on Constantinople.

It was clear that Potemkin would be in supreme command of the Russian war effort. All the necessary reins of power were in his hands. He had been viceroy and commander in chief of the armed forces in the southern provinces for a decade. He had created the cities and the fleet. Moreover, he was president of the War College and was familiar with the military resources available, the disposition of forces, and the administrative and political details involved. He became commander in chief by merit, and even the most senior Russian general, Peter Rumyantsev, agreed to serve under him. Suvorov, the most successful Russian battlefield commander of the age, already was under Potemkin’s command.

Potemkin and Suvorov were both eccentrics. In pure military genius, Suvorov surpassed Potemkin. The prince was a resourceful soldier, but he was cautious and distracted by political affairs. He excelled as a statesman, an administrator, and a military strategist, but he lacked Suvorov’s aptitude for quick, intuitive battlefield decisions. They complemented each other. Potemkin provided Suvorov with the strategy, the troops, and the supplies; Suvorov provided Potemkin and Russia with the victories. Potemkin always insisted that the highest rewards be given to Suvorov, demanding, for example, that he be given the Order of St. Andrew before other, more senior generals.

The Turks began the war with an assault on the Russian fort on Kinburn, the spit of land on the eastern bank of the Dnieper estuary across from Ochakov. Two attempted landings at Kinburn were beaten off by Suvorov, whose battlefield preference was the use of cold steel. “The bullet is a fool, the bayonet a brave lad” was his philosophy. Employing these tactics, the Russians charged the Turks as they disembarked from their boats and slaughtered most of them while their feet were still wet. This Russian victory was offset, however, by the wounding of Suvorov in the battle, and by a subsequent gale, which caught the Russian fleet sailing from Sebastopol; one large ship went down and others were damaged. Dismayed by this harm to his beloved ships, Potemkin spoke of evacuating the Crimea and resigning all his commands. Catherine’s response was indignation. “You are impatient like a five-year-old child, while the affairs of which you are now in charge require an imperturbable patience,” she wrote to him. “You belong to the state and you belong to me. My friend, neither time nor distance, nor anyone in the world will change my thoughts of you and about you.” To which she added her guess (correct, as it turned out) that the storm had damaged the Turkish fleet equally. Potemkin apologized, blaming his loss of nerve on his sensitivity, his headaches, and his hemorrhoids.

When winter ice formed on the Dnieper, both sides suspended campaigning, and it was not until the following May that Potemkin had fifty thousand men positioned before Ochakov. Even then, he seemed not to be in a hurry. Assuming that the fortress must eventually fall, and fearing the losses that would accompany an all-out attempt to storm the ramparts, he deliberately held back an assault and waited for a voluntary surrender. Personally, he was not a coward; during the long siege, he continually exposed himself to danger. Convinced that he was protected by God, he would appear in the line of fire wearing his parade uniform, making himself a prime target. His self-confidence was reinforced when a cannonball killed an officer standing just behind him. To his men, he said, “Children, I forbid you to get up for me and wantonly expose yourselves to Turkish bullets.” Suvorov disagreed with this strategy of caution; he believed in the sudden, decisive blow, accepting whatever losses he must. When Potemkin restrained him from storming Ochakov, saying, “Relying on God’s help, I will try to get it cheaply,” Suvorov replied, “You cannot capture a fortress merely by looking at it.” They continued to admire each other. When Suvorov was wounded, Potemkin wrote, “My dear friend, you alone mean more to me than ten thousand others.” Suvorov replied, “May the Prince Gregory Alexandrovich live long! He is an honest man, he is a good man, he is a great man, and I would be happy to die for him!”

The siege continued; an unpleasant feature was the Turkish practice of beheading Russian prisoners and mounting the heads on stakes along the ramparts. Finally, in December 1788, the second winter of the siege, when the army was suffering from the cold, Potemkin yielded. Promising his men that they could sack the city once the fortress was taken, he organized his assault force into six columns of five thousand men each and sent them forward at four o’clock in the morning on December 6. The assault lasted only four hours and was one of the bloodiest battles in Russian military history; it is said that twenty thousand Russians and thirty thousand Turks died that morning. But with the taking of Ochakov, the path to the Dniester and the Danube lay open.

During the following year, 1789, the whole course of the Dneister fell to the Russian army. The fortress towns of Ackkerman and Bender capitulated without a fight—and Bender alone had a garrison of twenty thousand men. That same year, Belgrade and Bucharest were taken by the Austrians. In February 1790, however, Catherine’s friend and ally Emperor Joseph II died of tuberculosis. Joseph was childless, and he was succeeded by his brother, Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who became Emperor Leopold II. Leopold had little interest in continuing Austria’s war with Turkey. In June 1790, he and the sultan agreed on an armistice, and in August, they concluded a peace, leaving Catherine to fight alone. Despite Austria’s withdrawal, the Russian army reached the lower Danube, capturing one town after another until they reached Izmail, one of the most formidable fortresses in Europe. This massive bastion of towers and ramparts, defended by thirty-five thousand men and 265 cannon, was surrounded by thirty thousand Russians with six hundred cannon. By late November 1790 no progress had been made, and the three Russian generals commanding the army were preparing to withdraw. Worried, Potemkin sent for Suvorov, giving him the freedom to launch an assault or abandon the siege, as he thought best. “Hurry up, my dear friend,” he wrote. “My only hope is in God and your valor. There are too many generals there equal in rank and the result is a kind of indecisive parliament.” Suvorov arrived on December 2, resited the Russian artillery, began a punishing bombardment, and informed Potemkin that he would begin the assault within five days. He called on the Turks to surrender, warning, “If Izmail resists, no one will be spared.” The Turkish commander spurned the demand. The Russian assault began at dawn. The Turks fought on the ramparts, at the gates, and in every street and house. They were overwhelmed by the fury of the Russian attack. Then, as he had promised the army before the assault, Suvorov unleashed his men for three days of looting.

During the years 1788–90, Russia was fighting two wars, in the north as well as the south. In June 1788, Gustavus III, king of Sweden, seeing an opportunity to recover the lands lost to Peter the Great in the early century, succumbed to the temptation offered by the concentration of the Russian army in the south. His objectives were to retake Finland and strip away Russia’s Baltic provinces; if he failed to do this, he melodramatically promised to follow the path of Queen Christina a century before, renounce the throne, convert to Catholicism, and move to Rome. On July 1, 1788, Catherine received his ultimatum, which went beyond demanding the return of all former Swedish territories on the Baltic. He now also insisted that the empress accept Swedish mediation in the Russo-Turkish war and restore to Turkey the Crimea and all other Ottoman territory won since 1768. A final insult in this provocative document referred to the “aid” he had given Russia by not attacking the empress during her first Turkish war and during the Pugachev rebellion. In Stockholm, Gustavus boasted that he would soon be breakfasting in Peterhof, and then go on to St. Peterburg, where he would tear down a statue of Peter the Great and replace it with one of himself. Catherine categorized the ultimatum as “this insane note,” which she had received from “Sir John Falstaff.” To Potemkin, she described the king as donning “breastplate, thigh pieces, armlets and a helmet with an enormous number of plumes.… What have I done that God should choose to chastise me with such a feeble instrument as the king of Sweden?”

In July 1789, Gustavus invaded Finland and sent his fleet up the Gulf of Finland; his army failed on land and his navy was only partially successful at sea. In the end, the war was inconclusive, the more so for Sweden, because Catherine, fully engaged against Turkey, had only to maintain the status quo in the Baltic in order to succeed. In the summer of 1790, Gustavus asked for peace. The Swedish-Russian peace agreement of August 3 left all frontiers exactly where they had been before the king had posted his “insane note.” Catherine was relieved. Writing to Potemkin, who was still fighting the Turks, she said, “We have pulled one paw out of the mud [in the Baltic]. As soon as we pull out the other [in the south], we’ll sing alleluia.”

• • •

The second war with Turkey proved a rich source of colorful stories to add to the legend of Gregory Potemkin. One was the tale of the subterranean headquarters he had constructed for himself while his army was besieging Ochakov. It told of an enormous underground hall of marble, rows of pillars made of lapis lazuli, enormous chandeliers, myriads of candles, huge mirrors, and platoons of lackeys in powdered wigs and gold brocade waiting to serve. It is not much easier to believe the report that Potemkin was keeping an entire theater company and a symphony orchestra of one hundred musicians to provide inspiration or distraction. There are also extravagant accounts of the love affairs Potemkin supposedly conducted while in the Ochakov camp. It was said that he kept a harem of beautiful women, including both Princess Catherine Dolgoruky, whose husband was serving under his command, and the beautiful Prascovia Potemkina, wife of his kinsman Paul Potemkin.

The most remarkable phenomenon at Ochakov, however, was Potemkin himself. The Prince de Ligne, the Austrian field marshal who had joined Catherine and Potemkin on the Crimean journey, was at Russian headquarters to urge Potemkin to storm the fortress in order to draw Turkish troops away from the Austrian campaign in the Balkans. Despite Potemkin’s protracted refusal to attack, Ligne was overwhelmingly impressed by the man before him. To his friend Philippe de Ségur in St. Petersburg, he wrote:

I here behold a Commander in Chief who looks idle and is always busy; who has no other desk than his knees, no other comb than his fingers; constantly reclined on his couch, yet sleeping neither in night nor in daytime. A cannon shot, to which he himself is not exposed, disturbs him with the idea that it costs the life of some of his soldiers. Trembling for others, brave himself, alarmed at the approach of danger, frolicsome when it surrounds him, dull in the midst of pleasure, surfeited with everything, easily disgusted, morose, inconstant, a profound philosopher, an able minister, a sublime politician, not revengeful, asking pardon for a pain he has inflicted, quickly repairing an injustice, thinking he loves God when he fears the Devil; waving one hand to the females that please him, and with the other making the sign of the cross; receiving numberless presents from his sovereign and distributing them immediately to others; preferring prodigality in giving, to regularity in paying; prodigiously rich and not worth a farthing; easily prejudiced in favor of or against anything; talking divinity to his generals and tactics to his bishops; never reading, but pumping everyone with whom he converses; uncommonly affable or extremely savage, the most attractive or most repulsive of manners; concealing under the appearance of harshness, the greatest benevolence of heart, like a child, wanting to have everything, or, like a great man, knowing how to do without; gnawing his fingers, or apples, or turnips; scolding or laughing; engaged in wantonness or in prayers, summoning twenty aides de camp and saying nothing to any of them, not caring for cold, though he appears unable to exist without furs; always in his shirt without pants, or in rich regimentals; barefoot or in slippers; almost bent double when he is at home, and tall, erect, proud, handsome, noble, majestic when he shows himself to his army like Agamemnon in the midst of the monarchs of Greece. What then is his magic? Genius, natural abilities, an excellent memory, artifice without craft, the art of conquering every heart; much generosity, graciousness, and justice in his rewards; and a consummate knowledge of mankind.

There is another story related to this Russian war with Turkey—this one is true—which centers on a figure few connect with Catherine of Russia or Gregory Potemkin. This figure is John Paul Jones, whom Americans know as the father of the United States Navy.

Jones began as nobody and he died alone, rejected, and, once again, nobody. In the interim, however, he achieved the fame he desperately craved. He was born John Paul—Jones was added later—an obscure, impoverished gardener’s son on the bank of Solway Firth in Scotland. At thirteen, he went to sea as an unpaid cabin boy aboard a merchant vessel bound for Barbados and Virginia. In 1766, at nineteen, he joined an African slave ship as third mate and remained in the slave trade for four years. At twenty-three, he became master of a merchant vessel on which his seamanship was unchallenged but men were wary of his prickly temper. He was slight and wiry, five feet five inches tall, with hazel eyes, a sharp nose, high cheekbones, and a strong cleft chin. He dressed neatly, more like a naval officer than a merchant captain, and always wore a sword. This blade was used in the West Indies to run through the ringleader of a group of mutineers in his crew. Uncertain whether the law would applaud him for suppression of mutiny or try him for murder, he changed his name from John Paul to John Jones and sailed on the next ship leaving the harbor.

In the summer of 1775, Jones was in Philadelphia seeking a place in the infant navy of the rebellious American colonies; he became the first naval first lieutenant commissioned by the Continental Congress. A year later, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he sailed for Europe, hoping to find a frigate to command. The French government, spurred by news of British general John Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, was moving toward full recognition of America’s independence, and Benjamin Franklin, the American representative in Paris, became Jones’s patron. With Franklin’s help, Jones took command of a French East Indiaman, a travel-worn merchant ship of nine hundred tons. Jones armed her with thirty cannon and named her Bonhomme Richard, after Franklin’s famous work Poor Richard’s Almanack.

On August 14, 1779, Jones sailed on the voyage that made him famous. Off the North Sea Yorkshire coast, he encountered a forty-four-ship Baltic convoy laden with naval stores for England, under escort by a fast, maneuverable, fifty-gun British frigate, HMS Serapis, commanded by a veteran Royal Navy captain. Jones attacked. The battle, beginning at 6:30 p.m., continued for four hours under a harvest moon. The two ships, locked together yardarm to yardarm by American grappling hooks, pounded each other with shot. At one point amid the carnage, the British captain called across his deck to Jones, “Has your ship struck her colors?” He was referring to the signal of surrender. Someone heard—or perhaps a writer sitting at his desk later imagined—Jones call back, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The battle continued until, with Bonhomme Richard sinking and Serapis on fire, the British captain suddenly struck. Jones transferred his wounded and the rest of his crew to his captured prize, put out the fire, and returned to France. In Paris, he was a hero. At Versailles, Louis XVI made him a chevalier of the Military Order of Merit and presented him with a gold-hilted sword. His celebrity and self-confidence attracted women and he had a succession of affairs, one of which apparently resulted in a small, unexpected son.

Jones never gave up wanting to become an American admiral, but no American naval officer was promoted to that rank until the American Civil War. He returned to Paris, and in December 1787, Thomas Jefferson, who had succeeded Franklin as American minister to France, told him that the Russian minister in Paris wished to know whether Jones would be interested in a high command in the Russian navy: command of the Black Sea Fleet with an admiral’s rank. Jones grasped the offer: if not an American admiral, perhaps a Russian admiral.

The new admiral arrived in St. Petersburg on May 4, and Catherine wrote to Grimm, “Paul Jones has just arrived here; he has entered my service. I saw him today. I think he will suit our purpose admirably.” Jones’s view of her was equally optimistic: “I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor: that she would never condemn me without hearing me.” He traveled south and met Potemkin at Ekaterinoslav. Assuming that he was to take supreme command of the Black Sea Fleet, he passed through Kherson to the Liman estuary. There, to his dismay, he found himself in the company of three other rear admirals, including the prince of Nassau-Siegen, none of whom was willing to concede superiority in rank to Jones. Potemkin refused to intervene.

The theater of operations was the Liman estuary, thirty miles long, nowhere more than eight miles wide, and nowhere more than eighteen feet deep; large warships, whose movements were subject to the direction of the wind, found it difficult to maneuver without running aground. Jones was given command of the squadron of larger ships that included one ship of the line and eight frigates. If his enemy, the Turks, decided to enter these narrow, congested waters in force, they could bring as many as eighteen ships of the line and forty frigates, along with numerous oar-propelled galleys, rowed by slaves chained to their seats. The Russians also had a flotilla of twenty-five oar-propelled, shallow-draft galleys, but their commander, the prince of Nassau-Siegen, was independent of Jones, and took orders only from Potemkin. A battle with the Turks on June 5 was inconclusive, and afterward Russian commanders argued about tactics and credit for their success in forcing the Turks to withdraw. Potemkin sided with Nassau-Siegen. “It is to you alone that I attribute victory,” he wrote. To Catherine, Potemkin wrote, “Nassau was the real hero and to him belongs the victory.” The battle resumed ten days later, and Jones found himself in difficulty—not with the Turks, but with the Russians. He did not speak Russian, and there was no agreed-on method of signaling between his ships; the admiral had to have himself rowed in a small boat so that he could shout instructions to his captains; even these had to be given through an interpreter. Nevertheless, he won; the Turkish flagship ran aground and was destroyed. Nassau-Siegen took the credit. “Our victory is complete,” he wrote to his wife. “My flotilla did it. Oh what a poor man is Paul Jones! I am master of the Liman. Poor Paul Jones! No place for him on this great day!” Throughout his life, Jones had displayed an intense desire to have his merit recognized. He wrote to Potemkin, “I hope to be subjected to no more humiliation and to find myself soon in the situation that was promised me when I was invited to enter Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy.” Instead, Potemkin relieved Jones of command, explaining to the empress that “nobody wished to serve under him.” By the end of October, Jones was back in St. Petersburg, where he was received by Catherine and told to wait for an assignment with the Baltic Fleet.

He waited through the winter, passing time with his friend the French ambassador, Philippe de Ségur. During the first week of April 1789, the capital was startled by a report that Rear Admiral Jones had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, the daughter of a German immigrant woman who had a dairy business. The police had been told that the girl was peddling butter when Jones’s manservant told her that his master wanted to purchase some and led her to Jones’s apartment. There, the girl said, she found her customer, whom she had never seen before, dressed in a white uniform wearing a gold star and a red ribbon. He bought some butter, locked the door, knocked her down, dragged her into his bedroom, and assaulted her. She ran home and told her mother, who went to the police. Ségur defended his friend, both at the time and later in his memoirs. He said that the young girl had called on Jones to ask whether he had any linen to mend. He said no. “She then indulged in some indecent gestures,” Ségur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby.

Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”

There was, however, a third version. Before talking to Ségur or writing Potemkin, Jones had informed the chief of police: “The accusation against me is false. It was invented by the mother of a depraved girl who came to my house several times and with whom I have often badine,^* always giving her money, but whose virginity I have positively not taken. I thought her to be several years older than Your Excellency says she is and each time she came to my house she lent herself very willingly to do all that a man would want of her. The last time passed off like the rest and she went out appearing content and calm, and having been in no way abused. If one has checked on her being deflowered, I declare that I am not the author of it, and I shall easily prove the falseness of this assertion.” This letter was supported by affidavits from three witnesses who swore that they saw the girl leave Jones’s apartment quietly without blood, bruises, torn clothing, or tears.

In any case, if not a crime, this encounter between a restless, lonely, middle-aged man and an underage girl was tawdry. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Ségur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”

What remained of his life was brief and anticlimactic. Never again did he command a ship, much less a fleet. Still in his early forties, he lived alone in Paris during the first years of the French Revolution; neither Gouverneur Morris, the American minister, nor Lafayette found time to see him. He died on July 18, 1792, two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. After his death, Gouverneur Morris refused to allot public funds for a funeral or to save Jones from a pauper’s grave. Instead, the French National Assembly, which remembered him as a hero, paid for what little was done.

A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”

By the summer of 1791, the Russian army had forced the Turks to the peace table. In the treaty concluded at Jassy in Moldavia in December 1791, Catherine’s greatest goals were not achieved: the Turks kept Constantinople, and the crescent remained atop the Haigia Sophia; there was no Greek empire for Grand Duke Constantine. Still, Catherine gained much. The Turks formally ceded the Crimea, the mouth of the Dnieper with Ochakov, and the territory between the Bug and the Dniester rivers, making the Dniester Russia’s western frontier. Formal acquisition by treaty of the naval base at Sebastopol and Turkish acceptance of the fleet based there provided Russia with a permanent naval presence on the Black Sea. The subsequent development of the commercial port of Odessa provided an outlet for the export of large quantities of Russian wheat.

The second Turkish war had been Potemkin’s war; he had borne responsibility for strategy, command, and logistics. Catherine had sustained him. She was the more stable, avoiding his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, his doubts, fears, and occasional despair. Neither could have achieved victory without the other. When military operations were over, Potemkin turned the negotiations at Jassy over to others and headed back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was preparing a conqueror’s welcome. Even as he traveled north, however, Potemkin was worried. For the first time in seventeen years, Catherine had acquired a new favorite of whom he vehemently disapproved: a handsome young man named Platon Zubov. Poorly educated, he was vain and greedy for wealth, estates, honors, and titles, not only for himself but also for his father and his three brothers; all soon became counts. The most prominent men of the court and the empire began lining up to humble themselves at his morning levee. When the doors to his reception room opened, they were likely to reveal Zubov stretched out in a lounge chair before his mirror, having his hair dressed and powdered. He could be wearing a silk colored frock coat sewn with jewels, white satin trousers, and green ankle-length boots. Conspicuously ignoring the ministers, generals, courtiers, foreigners, and petitioners who stood motionless and silent before him, he paid attention only to his pet monkey. When, with a gesture, the master cued the creature’s performance, it leaped across the furniture, hung from the chandeliers, and finally jumped onto a visitor’s shoulder to pull off his wig or muss his hair. When Zubov laughed, everyone laughed.

Potemkin knew that he and Zubov would now be competing for the empress’s confidence. So far, he had remained foremost; Catherine consulted him on everything; she told him that if war were to break out in Poland, he was to take supreme command of the Russian army. Nevertheless, he was uneasy. “Zub” means “tooth” in Russian. As his carriage rolled north to the capital, Potemkin repeatedly reminded himself, “I must pull out the tooth.”

Arriving in St. Petersburg on February 28, 1791, Potemkin quickly demonstrated that his character had not changed. When Kyril Razumovsky called to tell him that he was giving a ball in Potemkin’s honor, Potemkin met his visitor wearing a tattered dressing gown and nothing underneath. Razumovsky good-naturedly retaliated a few days later by publicly receiving the prince wearing a nightgown with a nightcap on his head. Potemkin laughed and embraced his host.

He turned to the problem of Zubov, which, he believed, had to be solved as much to shield Catherine as for his own reasons. He saw that he could no longer use his political power as he had done with Yermolov; if this young man were to be displaced, it must be done more subtly. The best approach, he concluded, would be to re-create the aura of their old romance. Surprisingly, he partially succeeded. In a letter to Grimm on May 21, Catherine spoke of Potemkin with the same enthusiasm that she had years before.

When one looks at the Prince-Marshal Potemkin, one must say that his victories, his successes, beautify him. He has returned to us from the army as handsome as the day, as gay as a lark, as brilliant as a star, more witty than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving feasts every day, and behaving as a host with a polish and courtesy by which everybody is enchanted.

Potemkin’s success was incomplete, however. It was obvious that Catherine wanted her relationship with Zubov to continue. The competition between the two men became a standoff: Potemkin openly displayed his contempt for Zubov, who, in return, smiled and bided his time. Meanwhile, when Potemkin’s bills came due, Catherine paid them, instructing the treasury that it was to treat Prince Potemkin’s expenses as if they were her own.

Potemkin tried to distract himself by giving and attending receptions, dinners, and balls. The evening that surpassed anything ever seen in Russia occurred on April 28, 1791, at Potemkin’s Tauride Palace. Three thousand guests had been invited; all were present when the empress arrived. The prince was at the door, wearing a scarlet tailcoat with solid gold buttons, each button encasing a large solitaire diamond. Once the empress was seated, twenty-four couples, including Catherine’s two grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, entered to dance a quadrille. Afterward, the host led his guest through the rooms of the palace. In one, poets were reciting verse; in another, a choir was singing; in still another, a French comedy was being performed.

At the end of the evening, following a ball and an extravagant supper, Catherine and Potemkin withdrew alone to the winter garden to walk between the fountains and marble statues. When they spoke, he mentioned Zubov; she did not reply. Catherine stayed until two in the morning, later than she had ever remained at a party. Escorted to the door by Potemkin, she stopped to thank him. They said goodbye. Overwhelmed, he threw himself at her feet; when he looked up, both were in tears. After she left, Potemkin stood quietly for a few minutes, then walked alone to his room.

At five o’clock in the morning on July 24, 1791, Potemkin left Tsarskoe Selo for the last time. He was already tired, and the journey to the south further exhausted him. He was still deeply unhappy about Zubov, and, as if Catherine did not realize how much she was wounding him, she continued to fill her letters with talk of her young lover: “The child sends his greetings.… The child thinks that you are more intelligent … and far more amusing and pleasant than all those who surround you.” Years later, when both Potemkin and Catherine were dead, “the child” revealed his true feelings about his rival: “I could not remove him from my path, and it was essential to remove him because the empress always met his wishes halfway and simply feared him as though he were an exacting husband. She loved only me, but she often pointed to Potemkin as an example for me to follow. It is his fault that I am not twice as rich as I am.”

Sunk in melancholy, Potemkin began by traveling slowly—the jolting of the carriage was painful—then, suddenly, he demanded speed. Hurtling down dusty roads and through towns and villages, he reached Jassy only eight days after leaving the Neva. The journey drained his declining strength; on arriving, he wrote to Catherine that he felt the the touch of the hand of death. His illness showed symptoms of the malaria that had infected him in the Crimea in 1783. Traveling south, he refused to take quinine and other medicines prescribed by the three doctors accompanying him; like Catherine, he was convinced that the best way to recover from illness was to let the body itself solve the problem. Instead of dieting, as the doctors recommended, he ate huge meals and drank heavily. To ward off pain, he wrapped his head in wet towels. When he reached Jassy, his staff sent for his niece, Sashenka Branitsky, hoping that she could persuade him to be reasonable and accept treatment. She hurried from Poland. In the middle of September, he had an attack of fever and shivered uncontrollably for twelve hours. He wrote to Catherine, “Please send me a Chinese dressing gown. I badly need one.” The Russian ambassador in Vienna, Andrei Razumovsky, wrote suggesting that he send “the first pianist and one of the best composers in Germany” to soothe him. The offer was made and the composer accepted, but Potemkin did not have time to respond and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not make the journey.

Oppressed by the humid air of Jassy, he twice drove out seeking country air, only to give up and come back. In St. Petersburg, Catherine waited for messages and letters and asked Countess Branitsky to write to her every day. On Potemkin’s behalf, Catherine reversed her position on doctors and medicines. “Take that which in the doctors’ estimation will give you relief; and having taken it, I beg you also to save yourself from food and drink that opposes the medicine.” With this support, Sashenka and the doctors finally persuaded the sick man to take medicine. For a few days he seemed better. Then, shivering and sleeplessness returned. Saying that he was “burning up,” he demanded more wet towels, drank cold liquids, and had bottles of eau de cologne poured over his head. He asked that all windows be opened and, when that failed to cool him, insisted on being carried into the garden. Every day, he asked repeatedly whether any messages had come from the empress; when a new letter arrived, he wept and read it, then reread it and kissed it repeatedly. When state documents were brought and read to him, he could barely scribble his signature at the bottom. It was clear that he was dying; Potemkin himself realized this. He refused to take quinine. “I’m not going to recover. I have been ill for a long time … God’s will be done. Pray for my soul and do not forget me when I am gone. I never wished anybody any harm. To make people happy has always been my desire. I am not a bad man and not the evil genius of our mother, the Empress Catherine, as has been said.” He asked for the Last Sacrament, and once it had been given, he relaxed. A courier from Moscow brought another letter from Catherine, a fur coat, and the silk dressing gown he had asked for. He cried. He said to Sashenka, “Tell me frankly, do you think I shall recover?” She assured him that he would. He took her hands and caressed them. “Good hands,” he said. “They have often soothed me.”

Gradually, the passionate, ambitious man, still only fifty-two, became calm; those around him watched him dying in serenity. He begged everyone to forgive him for any pain he might have caused them. They must promise to convey to the empress his humblest gratitude for everything she had done for him. When a new message arrived from her he wept. He agreed to try quinine but could not hold it down. He began to faint; he was conscious only half the time; he felt that he was suffocating. He wrote to Catherine, “Matushka, oh how sick I am!” He asked to be moved from Jassy to Nikolaev; its cooler air might do him good. On the day he started out on the journey, he dictated a note to Catherine: “Your most gracious Majesty. I have no more strength to endure my torments. My only remaining salvation is to leave this town and I have ordered myself be taken to Nikolaev. I do not know what is to become of me.”

At eight on the morning of October 4, he was carried to his carriage. He went a few miles and said that he could not breathe. The carriage stopped. Carried into a house, he fell asleep. After three hours’ rest, he talked cheerfully until midnight. He tried to sleep again but could not. At daybreak, he asked that the journey resume. The procession had gone only seven miles when he ordered it to stop. “This will be enough,” he said. “There is no point in going on. Take me out of the carriage and put me down. I want to die in the field.” A Persian carpet was unrolled on the grass. Potemkin was placed on it and covered with the silk gown Catherine had sent him. Everyone searched for a gold coin to close his eye in the Orthodox fashion, but no gold coin was found. An escorting Cossack offered a copper five-kopeck piece and with this his eye was covered. At midday on Sunday, October 5, 1791, he died. A message went to the empress: “His Serene Highness the prince is no longer on this earth.”

At five in the evening on October 12, a courier bringing the news reached the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Catherine collapsed. “Now I have no one left on whom I can rely,” she cried. “How can anybody replace Potemkin? Everything will be different now. He was a true nobleman.” The days passed and her secretary could only report: “Tears and despair … tears … more tears.”