Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

15

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR

Is it not you who dared raise up

The power of Russia, Catherine’s spirit

And with support of both desired

To carry thunder to those rapids

On which the ancient Rome did stand

And trembled all the universe?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

On 21 May 1780, Prince Potemkin welcomed Emperor Joseph II, travelling under the incognito of Comte de Falkenstein, to Russia. It is hard to imagine two more different and ill-suited men. The uptight, self-regarding Austrian martinet wished to discuss politics immediately, while the Prince insisted on taking him off to the Orthodox Church. ‘Just up to now, commonplaces have been all the conversation with Potemkin and he hasn’t uttered a word of politics,’ the Emperor, thirty-nine, balding, oval-faced and quite handsome for a Habsburg, grumbled to his disapproving mother, the Empress–Queen Maria Theresa. Joseph’s impatience did not matter because Catherine was only a day away. The Emperor continued to chomp at the bit – but Potemkin displayed only an enigmatic affability: this was a deliberate political manoeuvre to let Joseph come to him. No one knew what Potemkin and Catherine were planning, but Frederick the Great and the Ottoman Sultan observed the meeting with foreboding, since it was aimed primarily at them.

The Prince handed the Emperor a letter from Catherine which plainly revealed her hopes: ‘I swear at this moment there is nothing more difficult than to hide my sentiments of joy. The very name Monsieur le Comte de Falkenstein inspires such confidence…’.¹ Potemkin recounted his impressions of Joseph to Catherine, and the partners impatiently discussed their meaning. The Prince passed on Joseph’s extravagant compliments about the Empress. The spirit of their unique partnership is captured in Catherine’s letter when she was just a day away: ‘Tomorrow I hope to be with you, everyone is missing you…We’ll try to figure out Falk[enstein] together.’²

—

This was easier said than done: the Emperor’s awkward character baffled contemporaries – and historians. No one so represented the incongruities of the Enlightened despot: Joseph was an uncomfortable cross between an expansionist and militaristic autocrat and a philosophe who wished to liberate his people from the superstitions of the past. He thought he was a military genius and philosopher–king like his hero Frederick the Great (the enemy who had almost destroyed Joseph’s own inheritance). Joseph’s ideals were admirable, but he despised his fellow man, was tactless and lacked all conception that politics was the art of the possible. His over-strenuous doctrinaire reforms stemmed from an austere vanity that made him somewhat ridiculous: he believed that the state was his person.

Joseph’s incognito was the symbol of his whole philosophy of monarchy. He was as pompous and self-righteous about his name as he was about his living arrangements and his reforms. ‘You know that…in all my travels I rigidly observe and jealously guard my rights and the advantages that the character of Comte de Falkenstein gives me,’ Joseph instructed Cobenzl, ‘so I will, as a result, be in uniform but without orders…You will take care to arrange very small and ordinary quarters at Mogilev.’³

This self-declared ‘first clerk of the state’ wore a plain grey uniform, travelled with only one or two companions, wished to eat only simple inn food and liked to sleep on a military mattress in a roadside tavern rather than a palace. This was to create a challenge for the impresario of the visit, Potemkin, but he rose to it. Russia had few of the flea-bittern taverns the Emperor expected, so Potemkin dressed up manorhouses to look like inns.

The Emperor prided himself on perpetually inspecting everything from dawn till dusk. He never understood that inactivity can be masterful – hence the Prince de Ligne’s comment that ‘he governed too much and did not reign enough…’. Ligne understood Joseph well – and adored him: ‘As a man he has the greatest merit…as a prince, he will have continual erections and never be satisfied. His reign will be a continual Priapism.’ Since the death of his father in 1765, Joseph had reigned as Holy Roman Emperor or, as the Germans called it, Kaiser, but had to share power over the Habsburg Monarchy – which encompassed Austria, Hungary, Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands, Tuscany and parts of modern Yugoslavia – with his mother, the formidable, humane and astute Maria Theresa. For all her prudishness and rigid Catholic piety, she had laid the foundations for Joseph’s reforms – but he imposed them so stringently that they first became a joke and then a disaster. He later took steps towards the emancipation of the serfs and the Jews, who no longer had to wear the Yellow Star of David, could worship freely, attend universities and engage in trade. He disdained his nobles; yet his reforms rained on his peoples like baton blows. He could not understand their obstinate ingratitude. When he banned coffins to save wood and time, he was baffled by the outrage that forced him to reverse his decision. ‘God, he even wants to put their souls in uniform,’ exclaimed Mirabeau. ‘That’s the summit of despotism.’

His emotional life was tragic: his talented first wife, Isabella of Parma, preferred her sister-in-law to her husband in what seemed to be a lesbian affair, but he loved her. When she died young after three years of marriage, Joseph, then twenty-two, was inconsolable. ‘I have lost everything. My adored wife, the object of all my tenderness, my only friend is gone…I hardly know if I am still alive.’ Seven years later, his only child, a cherished daughter, died of pleurisy: ‘One thing that I ask you to let me have is her white dimity dressing gown, embroidered with flowers…’. Yet even these sad emotional outbursts were about himself rather than anyone else. He remarried a hideous Wittelsbach heiress, Josepha, to lay claim to her Bavaria, then treated her callously. ‘Her figure is short, thickset and without a vestige of charm,’ he wrote. ‘Her face is covered in spots and pimples. Her teeth are horrible.’

His sex life afterwards alternated between princesses and prostitutes, and, if he thought he might fall in love with a woman, he drained himself of any desire by visiting a whore first. Ligne recalled that he had ‘no idea of good cheer or amusements, neither did he read anything except official papers’. He regarded himself as a model of rational decency and all others with sarcastic disdain. As a man, he was a bloodless husk; as a ruler, ‘the greatest enemy of this prince’, wrote Catherine, ‘was himself’. This was the Kaiser whom Potemkin needed to pull off the greatest achievements of his career.⁴

—

On 24 May 1780, the Empress of Russia entered Mogilev through the triumphal arch, escorted by squadrons of Cuirassiers – a sight that impressed even the sardonic Kaiser: ‘It was beautiful – all the Polish nobility on horseback, hussars, cuirassiers, lots of generals…finally she herself in a carriage of two seats with Maid-of-Honour Miss Engelhardt…’. As cannons boomed and bells rang, the Empress, accompanied by Potemkin and Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, attended church and then drove to the Governor’s residence. It was the beginning of four days of theatre, song and of course fireworks. No expense was spared to transform this drab provincial capital, gained from Poland only in 1772 and teeming with Poles and Jews, into a town fit for Caesars. The Italian architect Brigonzi had built a special theatre where his compatriot Bonafina sang for the guests.

Joseph put on his uniform and ‘Prince Potemkin took me to court.’⁵ Serenissimus introduced the two Caesars, who liked each other at once, both dreaming no doubt of Hagia Sofia. They talked politics after dinner, alone except for Potemkin and his niece–mistress Alexandra Engelhardt. Catherine called Joseph ‘very intelligent, he loves to talk and he talks very well’. Catherine talked too. She did not formally propose the Greek Project or partition of the Ottoman Empire, but both knew why they were there. She hinted at her Byzantine dreams, for Joseph told his mother that her ‘project of establishing an empire in the east rolls around in her head and broods in her soul’. The next day, they got on so well at an opéra comique that Joseph had confided plans that ‘I don’t dare publish’ – as Catherine boasted to Grimm. They meant to impress each other. They had to like each other. They made very sure they did.⁶

There was still opposition to this realignment, not just from Panin and the Prussophile Grand Duke Paul. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky inquired if these festivities augured an Austrian alliance – a query that was the prerogative of a prickly war hero. The Empress replied, ‘it would be advantageous in a Turkish war and Prince Potemkin advised it’. Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky sourly recommended taking her own counsel instead. ‘One mind is good,’ replied Catherine laconically, ‘but two, better.’⁷ That was the way they worked together.

Joseph, the obsessional inspector, rose early and inspected whatever he could find. Like many a talentless soldier – Peter III and Grand Duke Paul come to mind – he believed that enough inspections and parades would transform him into Frederick the Great. Potemkin politely escorted him to inspect the Russian army, but evidently found his strutting pace tiresome. When Joseph kept mentioning one of Potemkin’s ‘magnificent regiments’, which he had not yet inspected, the Prince did not want to go because of ‘bad weather that was expected at any moment’. Finally, Catherine told him like a nagging wife to take Joseph, whatever the weather.

A splendid tent was erected for the two monarchs to view the display of horsemanship while the other spectators, including the King of Poland’s nephew Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, to whom we owe this story, watched on horseback. There was a distant roar as Prince Potemkin, at the head of several thousand horsemen, galloped into view. The Prince raised his sword to order the charge when suddenly the horse buckled under the weight of his bulk and collapsed, ‘like a centaur on to its hindlegs’. However, he kept his seat during this embarrassing moment and gave his command. The regiment began its charge from a league away and, with the earth trembling, stopped right in front of the imperial tent, in perfect formation. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this done before by a cavalry regiment,’ said Joseph. His comments on Potemkin’s mount were not recorded.⁸

—

On the 30th, Catherine and Joseph left Mogilev and headed in the same carriage to Smolensk, where they temporarily parted. Joseph, with only five attendants, headed off to see Moscow. Catherine was not far from Potemkin’s birthplace, Chizhova. There is a legend that Potemkin invited Catherine to visit the village, where with his nephew, Vasily Engelhardt, one of her aides-de-camp and now owner of the village, he greeted her at the gates and showed her the wooden bathhouse where he was born. The well was henceforth named for Catherine. They then split up – the Prince joined Joseph on the road to Moscow, while the Empress returned to Petersburg. ‘My good friend,’ she wrote to Potemkin, ‘it’s empty without you.’⁹

Joseph could not understand Potemkin. ‘Prince de Potemkin wants to go to Moscow to explain everything to me,’ Joseph told his mother. ‘His credit is at an all-time high. Her Majesty even named him at table as her true student…He has not shown any particularly impressive views so far,’ added Joseph, but ‘I don’t doubt he’ll show himself on the journey.’ But, once again, Joseph was confounded. While he ceaselessly gave pedantic perorations of his own views, in between brisk expeditions of inspection, Potemkin drifted away into silent reveries. The Prince wanted Joseph’s alliance, but he was no sycophant and was not as impressed as he should have been to have the head of the House of Habsburg in his company. Once in Moscow, Joseph told ‘very dear mother’ that Potemkin ‘explains to me the necessary’ about some sights but ‘to others I go alone’. It was entirely characteristic of Potemkin to doze in bed while the inspector–Emperor rose at dawn for more inspections. By the time they left, Joseph was indignant that Potemkin ‘very much took his ease. I’ve only seen him three times in Moscow and he hasn’t spoken to me about business at all.’ This man, he concluded, is ‘too indolent, too cool to put something into motion – and insouciant’.¹⁰

On 18 June Joseph and Potemkin arrived in Petersburg, where the two sides began to explore what sort of friendship they wanted. At Tsarskoe Selo, Potemkin arranged a treat for the Comte de Falkenstein. He recruited Catherine’s English gardener from Hackney (originally from Hanover), the appropriately named Bush, to create a special tavern for the Emperor, who loved inns. When Baroness Dimsdale, the English wife of the doctor who inoculated the imperial family, visited a year later, the gardener proudly told her how he had a hung a sign outside the building on which he wrote ‘The Count Falkenstein Arms’. He himself wore a placard reading ‘Master of the Inn’. Joseph dined at the ‘Falkenstein Arms’ on boiled beef, soup, ham and the most ‘agreeable yet common Russian dishes’. One wonders if the humourless pedant got the joke.¹¹

Throughout the fun, the Russian ministers and the diplomats were on edge as they sensed vast yet so far invisible changes. When the party returned to Petersburg, Joseph encountered Nikita Panin. ‘This man’, noticed the Kaiser, ‘has the air of fearing that one address oneself to his antagonist Prince Potemkin.’ By early July, the Prince himself was working between Emperor, Empress and the Austrian envoy, Cobenzl, on the beginning of a more formal relationship ‘to re-establish the old confidence and intimacy between the two courts’. Catherine could see the Emperor’s Janus-like personality, but, in the semi-public arena of her letters to Grimm, she declared his mind ‘the most solid, most profound and most intelligent’ she knew. By the time he left, the sides were closer, but nothing was decided. Maria Theresa still reigned in Vienna.¹²

After Joseph’s departure, in the midst of the bidding for Russian alliance from Austria, Prussia and Britain, Daria, Potemkin’s estranged mother, died in Moscow. When the Empress heard, she was on her way to Tsarskoe Selo and the Prince was at his nearby summer residence, Ozerki. Catherine insisted on telling him herself, so she changed route and joined him. The loss of a distant parent is often more painful than that of a close one: Potemkin wept copiously because ‘this prince’, observed Corberon, ‘combines the qualities and faults of sensitivitéé’.¹³ There was an understatement.

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Joseph’s successful visit truly put the cat among the pigeons. The Prussian party, Panin and Grand Duke Paul, were in disarray. Frederick the Great decided to send a Prussian prince to Petersburg to counteract the Habsburg success. Well before the Mogilev meeting, his envoy Goertz had been discussing such a visit with Potemkin and Panin. Instead of Prince Henry, who now knew Potemkin well, Frederick sent his nephew and heir, Frederick William. This was not a good idea. Joseph, for all his pedantry, was an impressive companion, but Frederick William, who had special instructions from the King to flatter Potemkin, was an oafish and stout Prussian boor without any redeeming social qualities. Prince Henry dutifully wrote to Potemkin asking him to welcome the uncouth nephew – in the tone of a man who reluctantly sends a cheap present but apologizes in advance for its disappointing quality.^*

Potemkin and Panin welcomed the Prince of Prussia together on 26 August. However, Potemkin pointedly decreed that Alexandra Engelhardt would ‘not give him a supper’,¹⁴ and Catherine nicknamed the ‘heavy, reserved and awkward’ Prussian, ‘Fat Gu’. The Hohenzollern was soon boring the entire capital except for the Grand Duke, who was so impressed with Frederick the Great and his military drill that any Prussian prince would do. Besides, Frederick’s plan had already been undermined by the arrival of Joseph II’s secret weapon – the Prince de Ligne.¹⁵

Corberon and Goertz convinced themselves, with wishful thinking, that nothing would come of Joseph’s visit. However, the Frenchman then went to dinner with the Cobenzls ‘and the new arrivals, the Prince de Ligne and his son’. Corberon dismissed this ‘grand seigneur of Flanders’ as an ‘amiable roué’, but he was much more than that.

Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, now fifty, was an eternally boyish, mischievous and effortlessly witty aristocrat of the Enlightenment. Heir to an imperial principality awarded in 1602, he was raised by a nurse who made him dance and sleep naked with her. He married a Liechtenstein heiress but found marriage ‘absurd for several weeks and then indifferent’. After three weeks, he committed his first infidelity with a chambermaid. He led his Ligne regiment during the Seven Years War, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Kolin. ‘I’d like to be a pretty girl until thirty, a general…till sixty,’ he told Frederick the Great after the war, ‘and then a cardinal until eighty.’ However, he was eaten by bitterness about one thing – he longed to be taken seriously as a general yet no one, from Joseph to Potemkin, would ever give him an independent military command. This rankled.¹⁶

Ligne’s greatest talent was for friendship. The charmer of Europe treated every day as a comedy waiting to be turned into an epigram, every girl as an adventure waiting to be turned into a poem, and every monarch as a conquest waiting to be seduced by his jesting. His flattery could be positively emetic: ‘What a low and brazen sycophant Ligne is!’, wrote one who observed him in action. But it worked. Friends with both Joseph II and Frederick the Great, no mean feat in itself, as well as with Rousseau, Voltaire, Casanova and Queen Marie-Antoinette, he showed how small the monde was in those days. No one so personified the debauched cosmopolitanism of the late eighteenth century: ‘I like to be a foreigner everywhere…A Frenchman in Austria, an Austrian in France, both a Frenchman and an Austrian in Russia.’

Ligne’s letters were copied, his bons mots repeated, across the salons of Europe – as they were meant to be. He was a superb writer whose bitchy portraits of the great men of his time, especially Potemkin, who fascinated him, were never bettered. His Mélanges are, along with Casanova’s Histoire, the best record of the era: Ligne was at the top and Casanova at the bottom of the same faro society. They met the same charlatans and dukes, prostitutes and countesses at balls and card tables, operas and bordellos, roadside taverns and royal courts, again and again, across Europe.

Ligne entranced Potemkin. Their friendship, bringing together two of the best conversationalists of the age, would wax and wane with the intensity of a love affair, chronicled in Ligne’s many unpublished letters contained in Potemkin’s archives, written in his tiny hand but dripping with wit and intelligence before sinking again into illegibility. This ‘jockey diplomatique’, as he called himself, was invited to all the Empress’s private card games, carriage rides and dinners at Tsarskoe Selo. The bovine Prince of Prussia did not stand a chance against the man Catherine called ‘the most pleasant and easy person to live with I’ve ever known, an original mind that thinks deeply and plays all sorts of tricks, like a child’.

Grand Duke Paul alone took trouble with Frederick William, which only served to alienate him from Catherine and Potemkin all the more. When the Empress gave a spectacle, ball and supper at the Hermitage Theatre in the Prince of Prussia’s honour, the Grand Ducal couple accompanied the guest but Catherine sighed to Harris, ‘I want you to defend me from boors,’ and did not bother to attend the show. Diplomats wondered where the Empress had gone. It turned out she was playing billiards with Potemkin and Ligne.¹⁷

Empress and Serenissimus were relieved when Frederick William finally departed, having achieved nothing. He had noticed the cold shoulder: as king, he would take his revenge. But the Russians almost refused to let Ligne go. Ever the gentleman, the ‘jockey diplomatique’ stayed a little longer. Finally, in October, he insisted, so Potemkin went with him to show off one of his regiments and only let him leave with a deluge of presents – horses, serfs and a box encrusted with diamonds. Potemkin missed Ligne and kept asking Cobenzl when he was returning.

This was exactly what the Austrians wanted. They fired a barrage of compliments at Potemkin: in a little illustration of the lubricious nature of diplomatic flattery, Cobenzl asked his Emperor to mention Potemkin favourably in as many of his en clair despatches as possible. The Russian, he flattered Joseph in turn, rated a word from the Kaiser more highly than anything from the Kings of Prussia or Sweden. But the direct compliments of the Emperor should be saved for special occasions. And Joseph should also send regards to the Engelhardt nieces.¹⁸

On 17/28 November 1780, Joseph was liberated from the sensible restraints of Maria Theresa. Her death, after a reign of forty years, gave Joseph the chance almost to ruin the Habsburg legacy in a way that even Frederick of Prussia could not have imagined. In the lugubrious letters of sorrow that passed between Vienna and Petersburg, the grins were only just concealed behind the grief. ‘The Emperor’, Ligne joked to Potemkin on 25 November, only a week after her death, ‘seemed to me so profoundly filled with friendship for you…that I have had real pleasure to remonstrate with him on your account in all regards…Have me told from time to time that you haven’t forgotten me…’.¹⁹ There was no question of that.

When the Empress–Queen’s body was laid in the Kaisergruft – imperial vault – of Vienna’s Capucin Church, Joseph knew he could embark on his rapprochement with Russia. Potemkin declared both his ‘keenness’ and ‘seriousness’ to Cobenzl. Catherine made sure that all the details went directly to her and not to Panin, ‘that old trickster’, as she called him to Potemkin.²⁰ Catherine and Joseph turned their attention to the coming struggle against the Sultan.

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Sir James Harris, who thought an Austrian alliance would help his own mission, still could not understand Russia’s reluctance to ally with Britain, even after Potemkin’s return from Mogilev. The Prince cheerfully blamed Catherine’s refusal on a raft of flimsy excuses, including the ‘imbecility of the tale-bearing favourite’ Lanskoy, her weakness induced by her ‘passions’ and the ‘adroit flattery’ of the Habsburg Emperor, who made her think she was the ‘greatest Princess in Europe’. This diatribe displayed Potemkin’s genuine frustration with the effort of managing Catherine, but it also rings of Potemkinian mischief. This is a clear example of Potemkin ‘playing’ poor Harris, because the couple’s secret letters prove they were both pinning their entire political system on an alliance with Austria.²¹ Harris at last realized the mistake of backing Potemkin against Panin, because the former was now uninterested, if friendly, while the latter was openly hostile.

Harris requested recall in the face of Panin’s hostility. But London was still pressing him to find a way to win the Russian alliance. So in nocturnal conversations with Potemkin the ever resourceful Harris conceived an ambitious scheme. Potemkin’s imagination was the source of what became official British policy. Britain, suggested the Prince, should offer Russia ‘some object worthy of her ambition’ to join the war. In cypher, Harris explained to his Secretary of State, Viscount Stormont, in November 1780: ‘Prince Potemkin, though he did not directly say so, yet clearly gave me to understand that the only cession, which would induce the Empress to become our Ally, was that of Minorca.’ This was not as far-fetched as it might sound because, in 1780, Potemkin was building his Black Sea Fleet and promoting trade through the Straits and out to Mediterranean ports such as Marseilles. Port Mahon in Minorca might be a useful base for the fleet. Russia had occupied Greek islands during the last war – but not kept any at the peace; Potemkin regularly offered Crete to France and England in his Ottoman partition plans; and Emperor Paul later occupied Malta. Besides he was careful, as Harris emphasized, never to suggest it directly. This was one of those fantastical empire-building games that Potemkin loved to play – at no cost to himself.

Potemkin was excited about the idea of a Russian naval base on Minorca, especially since Britain would leave large stores of supplies, worth £2,000,000, which would be at Russia’s or Potemkin’s disposal. He met Harris daily to discuss it and arranged the envoy’s second tête-à-tête with Catherine on 19 December 1780. Before Harris was summoned, the Prince went down to see the Empress for two hours, returning with a ‘countenance full of satisfaction and joy’. This was the climax of Harris’s friendship with Serenissimus. ‘We were sitting alone together very late in the evening when he broke out of a sudden into all the advantages that would arise to Russia…’. We can hear Potemkin’s child-like delight, chimerical dreams and febrile exhilaration, as he lazed on a divan in his rooms, strewn with bottles of Tokay and champagne, cards on green-baize tables: ‘He then with the liveliness of his imagination ran on the idea of a Russian fleet stationed at Mahon, of peopling the island with Greeks, that such an acquisition would be a column of the Empress’s glory in the middle of the sea.’²²

The Empress saw the benefits of Minorca, but she told Potemkin, ‘the bride is too beautiful, they are trying to trick me’. It seemed that she could not resist Potemkin’s excitement when they were together but would often think better of it when he had gone. Russia, with an unbuilt fleet, could hold it only at Britain’s pleasure. She turned down Minorca. She was right: it was too far away and Britain itself soon lost the island.

Potemkin grumbled that Catherine was ‘suspicious, timid and narrow-minded, but again this was half play acting. Harris still could not resist hoping that the Prince was committed to England: ‘Dined on Wednesday at Tsarskoe Selo with Prince Potemkin…he talked upon the interests of our two Courts in such a friendly and judicious manner that I regret more than ever his frequent lapses into idleness and dissipation.’ He still had not registered that Potemkin’s strategic emphasis was not western at all but southerly. Nonetheless, as the Prince secretly negotiated with the Austrians, Sir James kept trying.

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Joseph and Catherine had meanwhile agreed the terms of a defensive treaty, including the secret clause aimed at the Sublime Porte – but Potemkin’s grand enterprise now hit a snag that was very much of its time. This was the so-called ‘alternative’, a diplomatic tradition by which monarchs signing a treaty put their name first on one copy and second on the other. The Holy Roman Emperor, as Europe’s senior ruler, always signed first on both copies. Now Catherine refused to admit Russia was lower than Rome, while Joseph refused to lower the dignity of the Kaiser by signing second. So, amazingly, the realignment of the East ground to a halt over a matter of protocol.

This was one of those crises where the difference between Catherine and Potemkin was clearest, because, while the Empress was obstinate, the Prince begged her to be flexible and get the treaty signed. The bickering of the partners echoes through their letters and Cobenzl’s despatches. Potemkin rushed back and forth between the two sides. Catherine at one point told him to inform Cobenzl ‘to give up such nonsense which will imminently stop everything’. Everything did stop.

The tension was not helped by Potemkin’s demands for favours for his nieces Alexandra and Ekaterina, both of whom were about to get married. Soon even Catherine’s favourite Lanskoy was embroiled in the rows. But Catherine devised an inspired solution for Potemkin to suggest to Joseph: they would each exchange signed letters, setting out their obligation to each other, instead of a treaty.²³

The highly strung Prince, faced with this crisis in the scheme of a lifetime, collapsed with ‘bad digestion’. Catherine visited Potemkin’s apartments to make up and spent the evening with him ‘from eight till midnight’. Peace was restored.

—

Just as the crisis over the Austrian treaty reached its climax, on 10 May 1781, Potemkin ordered Count Mark Voinovich, a Dalmatian sailor, to mount a small invasion of Persia. He was pursuing a secret Persian policy while he was trying to smooth the obstacles from the path of his Greek Project.

This scheme had run parallel to the Austrian negotiations for a full year. Ten days before Joseph II had suggested the Mogilev meeting with Catherine, on 11 January 1780, Serenissimus ordered General Alexander Suvorov, his ablest commander, to assemble an invasion force at Astrakhan. He ordered the ships he had been building at Kazan on the Volga since 1778 to move southwards. The alliance with Austria might take more years to accomplish. In the meantime, Russia would probe the Persian Empire instead of the Ottoman.

The Persian Empire in those days extended round the southern end of the Caspian to include Baku and Derbent, all of today’s Azerbaijan, most of Armenia and half of Georgia. The Armenians and Georgians were Orthodox Christians. As with the Greeks, the Wallachians and the Moldavians, Potemkin longed to liberate his fellow Orthodox and bring them into the Russian Empire. At the same time, he was meeting Armenian representatives in Petersburg, discussing the liberation of the Christians of Armenia from the Persian yoke.

The Prince was one of the few Russian statesmen who understood commerce at that time: he knew that a trading post on the eastern Caspian was just ‘thirty days’ march from the Persian Gulf, just five weeks to get to India via Kandahar’. In other words, this was Potemkin’s first and admittedly minor blow in what came to be called ‘The Great Game’. We know that Potemkin was juggling his Greek Project with a Persian one because he talked about it with his British friends. The French and British watched Potemkin’s secret Persian plans with interest. Indeed, six years later, the French Ambassador was still trying to discover its secrets.

In February 1780, Sasha Lanskoy had fallen ill and Potemkin delayed his final orders to Suvorov, who was left to kick his heels in drab provincial Astrakhan. Once the anti-Ottoman Greek Project, and Joseph’s visit, was confirmed, it would have been foolish for Potemkin to spread his forces too thinly. So the plan was changed. Early in 1781, the Prince cancelled the invasion and instead persuaded Catherine to send a limited expedition, commanded by the thirty-year-old Voinovich, ‘a dangerous pirate’ from Dalmatia to some, a ‘sort of Italian spy of the ministers of Vienna’ to others, who had fought for Catherine in the First Russo-Turkish War and temporarily captured Beirut, now the capital of Lebanon.

On 29 June 1781, this tiny naval expedition of three frigates and several transports sailed across the Caspian to found a trading post in Persia and lay the foundations of Catherine’s Empire in Central Asia. Persia was in disarray, but the Satrap of the Askabad province across the Caspian, Aga-Mohommed-Khan, was playing many sides against the centre. This chilling and formidable empire-builder, who had been castrated as a boy by his father’s enemies, hoped to become shah himself. He welcomed the idea of a Russian trading post on the eastern shores, perhaps to fund his own armies with Russian help.

Voinovich’s expedition was an Enlightened mixture of Potemkin’s scientific longing for knowledge, mercantile enthusiasm and purely imperial aggrandizement. The meagre expedition boasted just fifty infantrymen, 600 men in all, and Potemkin’s respected German-Jewish botanist Karl-Ludwig Hablitz, who probably wrote the unsigned account of the Prince’s Persian expedition in the Quai d’Orsay archive. Voinovich was unsuited to such a sensitive role, but the expedition was in any case too small and was now left to its own devices. Probably this was the result of one of the many compromises between Catherine’s caution and Potemkin’s imagination. By the time the expedition set off, both Empress and Prince were firmly concentrating on Tsargrad and Vienna rather than Askabad and Kandahar.

Voinovich had been ordered to use ‘only persuasion’ by the Prince, but on arrival ‘he did precisely the opposite’. When he arrived on the other side of the sea and found Aga-Mohommed camped with his army, Voinovich proved he was as ‘bad a courtier as politician’. The Persian prince was still interested in a Russian trading post and even suggested that his nephew should lead a mission to Petersburg. Voinovich instead had the imprudence to establish a fort, with just twenty cannon, as if his 650 men could possibly defy a Persian army. While he gave fetes for the Persians and ostentatiously fired his cannons, he only managed to alarm the already suspicious locals, who heard that Suvorov was marching through Daghestan with 60,000 men. This piece of disinformation was probably the first British intrigue in the ‘Great Game’ and it worked. Aga-Mohommed decided to rid himself of these inept and obnoxious Russians.

The village chief invited Voinovich and Hablitz to dinner. They had scarcely arrived before the house was surrounded by 600 Persian warriors. Voinovich and Hablitz were given a choice of losing their heads or evacuating the fort and sailing away without delay. They were right to choose the latter since Aga-Mohommed was capable of unbridled savagery: he later blinded the entire male population – 20,000 men – of a town that resisted him. He also managed the rare feat of being the only eunuch in history to found a dynasty: the Qajars, descended from his nephew, ruled Persia until early this century, when they were replaced by the Pahlavis. It took another century before Russia conquered Central Asia.²⁴

The flotilla sailed miserably for home. Potemkin must take the blame for this quixotic expedition that could easily have ended in catastrophe, yet it was his Byzantine style to run an alternative policy just in case anything went wrong in Vienna.²⁵

—

It did not. Joseph agreed to sign the secret defensive treaty with the exchange of letters. For six months, Europe believed that the negotiations had collapsed but, secretly on 18 May, Catherine signed her letter to ‘My dear Brother’ – and Joseph reciprocated. She agreed that Russia would aid Austria against Prussia; but, more relevantly, for Potemkin, Joseph promised to defend Russia if it was attacked by the Turks – ‘I am obliged three months after…to declare war…’. Austria therefore underwrote Russia’s peace treaties with Turkey.²⁶ This realignment of Russian policy was Potemkin’s personal triumph.

Catherine and Potemkin enjoyed fooling the international community. French, Prussian and British envoys tossed bribes around to learn what was happening. Harris suspiciously noticed that ‘my friend’ was in ‘high spirits’ but ‘avoided every political subject’. Cobenzl, who knew everything of course, enjoyed himself too. ‘The whole affair’, he told his Emperor, ‘is continuing to be a mystery here for everyone except Prince Potemkin and Bezborodko.’²⁷ It was not long before Joseph realized that Catherine usually got what she wanted. In spite of the priority of the Greek Project, she did not allow the Armed Neutrality to drop and persuaded both Prussia and Austria to sign. ‘What Woman wants, God gives, goes the proverb,’ mused Joseph, ‘and once in their hands, one always goes further than one wants.’ Catherine and Potemkin were exultant: Catherine was so excited by one flattering letter from Joseph that she actually blushed.

The treaty remained secret. It was 25 June, a month later, before Harris first suspected that a treaty had been signed, thanks to a bribe of £1,600 to Bezborodko’s secretary, but amazingly the secret was kept for almost two years. Only Catherine, Potemkin and Bezborodko knew everything; Grand Duke Paul was not told. Panin withdrew to his Smolensk estates.²⁸ The partners congratulated each other. Catherine saw herself and Potemkin as the mythical best friends of the Classical world – Pylades and Orestes. ‘My old Pylades’, she congratulated him, ‘is a clever man.’

However, they now faced a challenge from Grand Duke Paul, who was profoundly sceptical about southern expansion and Austrian alliance. Aping his father, he remained a ‘Prussian’. In July, when Catherine invited the British doctor Baron Dimsdale, with his wife, to inoculate the young Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine against smallpox, Nikita Panin demanded the right to come back and supervise, a trick he had arranged with Paul. ‘If he thinks ever to be reinstated in his post of First Minister,’ Catherine snapped, ‘he is greatly deceived. He’ll never be anything in my Court other than a sick-nurse.’

Catherine and Potemkin must have discussed how to protect their policy from Paul and, if possible, convert him to the Austrian cause. Why not send him and his wife on a Grand Tour to Vienna and Paris, avoiding old Frederick the Great in Berlin? If Catherine suggested it, the nervous Paul would regard it as a trick by Potemkin to remove him. Serenissmus was arranging the creation of his own kingdom, founding his first cities on the Black Sea and planning his nieces’ marriages. Paul could not be allowed to derail any of these schemes. Potemkin devised a solution.²⁹

Skip Notes

* Even Frederick the Great called him ‘a cloud of boredom and distaste.’