Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

17

POTEMKIN’S PARADISE: THE CRIMEA

I now steal captives from the Persians Or at the Turks direct my arrows

Gavrili Derzhavin, ‘Ode to Princess Felitsa’

The Crimea was what Potemkin called ‘the wart’ on the end of Catherine’s nose – but it was to become his own Russian ‘paradise’. The peninsula itself was not only dazzlingly and lushly beautiful but it was also a cosmopolitan gem, an ancient entrepôt that controlled the Black Sea. The Ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Byzantines, Khazars, Karaim Jews, Georgians, Armenians, Genoese and Tartars, who came later, were all just visitors there, trading and dealing, in a peninsula that seemed to belong to no one race. For a Classicist like the Prince, there were the ruins of Khersoneses and the mythical temple of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon. But he was most interested in the Crimea’s strategic importance and its history as the Mongol stronghold that had terrorized Russia for three centuries.

The Tartar Khanate of the Crimea, known in the West as Crim Tartary, was a state that seemed archaic even in 1782 – the last Mongol outpost. Crimea’s Giray dynasty were the second family of the Ottoman Empire because they were descended from Genghis Khan himself, which was much more distinguished a descent than the House of Othman. If Rome and Byzantium represented two of the three international traditions of imperial legitimacy, the blood of Genghis Khan was the third. The family owned estates in Anatolia, where the Ottomans conveniently imprisoned restless potential successors in a sort of Giray Cage. If ever the Ottomans became extinct, it was understood that the Genghizid Girays would succeed them. They were always more allies than subjects.

The Khanate had been founded in 1441 when Haci Giray broke away from the Golden Horde and made himself khan of the Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea. His successor Mengli Giray acknowledged the ultimate suzerainty of the Ottoman Emperor, and from then on the two states existed in a tense, respectful alliance. The Tartars guarded the Black Sea, defended Turkey’s northern borders and provided a stream of blonde Slavic slaves to sell to the fleshpots and rowing-galleys of Constantinople. Between 1601 and 1655, it has been estimated, they kidnapped over 150,000 slaves. Their armies of 50,000–100,000 horsemen had the run of the eastern steppes, raiding into Muscovy whenever they needed more slaves to fill their markets. They bore six-foot-long square-shaped bows, with arrows two feet long; muskets and round, bejewelled shields, with pistols studded with lapis and emerald. Until that century, the Genghizid khans received tribute from the tsars of Russia and kings of Poland. The Girays believed their grandeur was second to none. ‘His imperial star rose above the glorious horizon,’ one khan wrote in an inscription in the Bakhchisaray Palace, where the Khans resided in their Seraglio like miniature Great Turks, guarded by 2,100 Sekbans, Janissaries from Constantinople. ‘His beautiful Crimean throne gave brilliant illumination to the whole world.’

For 300 years, Tartary had been one of the most important states of eastern Europe, its cavalry supposedly the best in Europe. It was far larger than just the Crimea: at its apogee in the sixteenth century, it had ruled from Transylvania and Poland to Astrakhan and Kazan, and halfway to Moscow. Even in Potemkin’s day, the Khanate ruled from the Kuban steppes in the east to Bessarabia in the west, from the tip of the Crimea to the Zaporogian Sech – ‘all that territory that separates the Russian Empire from the Black Sea’. Often allied with Lithuania against Muscovy, in the sixteenth century Tartar khans had even burned the suburbs of Moscow.¹ But their state was fatally flawed. The khans were not hereditary but elective. Beneath the Girays were the murzas, Tartar dynasties, also descended from the Mongols, who elected one Giray as khan and another, not necessarily his son, as his heir-apparent, the Kalgai khan. Furthermore many of the khan’s subjects were unbiddable Nogai Tartar nomads. It was only in times of war that the khan could really command.²

Baron de Tott, French adviser to the Ottomans, was seconded to the Crimea, where he rode, hawked and went greyhound coursing with the Khan, who was always accompanied by 6,000 horsemen. When the Sublime Porte declared war on Russia in 1768, Khan Kirim Giray, accompanied by Tott, galloped out of the Crimea at the head of an army of 100,000 to attack the Russian army on the Bessarabian–Polish border, where young Potemkin served. When Kirim Giray died (possibly of poisoning), the Tartars halted in Bessarabia to install the new Khan Devlet Giray, and the Baron was one of the last to witness the primitive magnificence of this Genghizid monarchy: ‘Dressed in a cap loaded with two aigrettes enriched with diamonds, his bow and quiver flung across his body, preceded by his guards and several led horses whose heads were ornamented with plumes of feathers, followed by the standard of the Prophet and accompanied by all his Court, he repaired to his Palace where in the hall of the Divan, seated on his throne, he received the homage of all the grandees.’ This noble scene of nomadic warriorship was incongruously accompanied by ‘a numerous orchestra and a troop of actors and buffoons’. When he set off to war, the Khan resided in a tent like his Mongol forefathers ‘decorated on the inside with crimson’.³

The initial raids were impressive but the Russo-Turkish War was a disaster for Crim Tartary. Devlet Giray also perished in his crimson-lined tent and was replaced with a lesser man. Tott was recalled to Constantinople, but unfortunately the Tartar army remained on the Danube with the main Ottoman armies, so that it was not there in 1771 when Vasily Dolgoruky occupied the Crimea. As we saw, Pugachev and the diplomatic conjuncture prevented the Russians keeping all their conquests in 1774. But Catherine, shrewdly advised by Potemkin, insisted in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi that Tartary be made independent of the Sultan, who would still keep nominal religious control as caliph. This ‘independence’ brought further ruin.

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Crimea’s tragedy had a face and a name. Shagin Giray, the Kalgai Khan or, as Catherine put it, Tartar ‘Dauphin’, had led the Crimean delegation to St Petersburg in 1771. ‘A sweet character,’ she told Voltaire, ‘he writes Arabic poems…he’s going to come to my circle on Sundays after dinner when he is allowed to enter to watch the girls dance…’. Shagin was not only handsome but had been educated in Venice. Thus he became the Russian candidate for khan when the Crimeans agreed to their independence from Istanbul in the Treaty of Karasubazaar in November 1772. That year, Shagin left the capital with 20,000 roubles and a gold sword.⁴ However, the Ottomans never accepted the independence of the Crimea, despite agreeing to it in both the Treaties of Kuchuk-Kainardzhi and Ainalikawak. They handed over Kinburn on the Dnieper and two of their forts on the Sea of Azov. But they kept the powerful fortress of Ochakov from which to threaten the Russians, who occupied the land between the Dnieper and the Bug.

In April 1777, Shagin Giray managed to get himself elected khan. He had been far too impressed with the Russian Court. His veneer of Western culture did not long conceal his political ineptitude, military incompetence and unrestrained sadism. Like an Islamic Joseph II but without his philanthropy, Shagin set about creating an enlightened despotism, backed by a mercenary army led by a Polish nobleman. Meanwhile the Russians had settled 1,200 of their Greek allies from the war in their town of Yenikale on the Sea of Azov: these ‘Albanians’, as they were called, soon argued with the Tartars. When the Ottomans sent a fleet with another ex-khan on board to replace Shagin, the Tartars rebelled and Shagin fled again. In February 1778, Potemkin ordered yet another operation, while the Ottomans comically declared that they could prove Shagin was an infidel because he ‘sleeps on a bed, sits on a chair and does not pray according to the correct manner’.⁵ The restored Khan, so deluded about his political abilities that according to Potemkin he thought he was a Crimean Peter the Great, murdered his enemies so savagely that he appalled even the Russians. Catherine hoped the Khan had learned his lesson.

Potemkin however worked to pull the rug from under the Khanate. Its economy depended on Greek, Georgian and Armenian traders and fruit-growers – all Orthodox. The Tartars, whipped up by their mullahs, baited by the ‘Albanians’ and provoked by Shagin’s Polish myrmidons, turned against these Christians. In 1779, Russia sponsored the exodus of the 31,098 Christians, under the control of General Alexander Suvorov. The Christians were presumably happy to leave a chaotic Moslem quagmire to find refuge in an Orthodox empire. They were promised economic privileges in Russia. But the exodus sounds like a death march. Their homes were not ready and many died on the road. Potemkin and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, the senior political and military officials, must share responsibility for their misery. But Potemkin did settle the majority in Taganrog and his new town of Mariupol. In imperialistic terms, it worked splendidly: without either trade or agriculture, Shagin found himself impoverished except for Russian generosity. Shagin’s brothers rebelled in the summer of 1782. When he fled again, begging for Russian aid, one of them, Bahadir Giray, was elected khan. His reign was to be short.

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It took Potemkin, who now assumed complete command of the southern theatre, just sixteen days to make it across Eurasia from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He travelled at the galloping pace usually reserved for couriers – but he made it his own. He grumbled to Catherine about ‘displeasing companions, bad weather, poor roads and slow horses’.⁶ The displeasing companion was probably Major Semple. Potemkin quizzed him on the armies of Western Europe, and the rascal claimed to have advised him on Russian military reforms, though Potemkin’s ideas predated Semple’s arrival and he executed them after his departure. The Prince was losing patience with the conman. Potemkin and Catherine exchanged warm letters all the way. She wanted to hear about the Crimea but gave him the latest news about Katinka Skavronskaya, who was ill. Lanskoy visited her and then reported to Catherine and Potemkin that she was getting better – this was how their peculiar family worked.⁷

On 16 September 1782, Serenissimus entered his new city of Kherson. On the 22nd, he met Shagin Giray at Petrovsk (now Berdyansk) to negotiate Russian intervention. He then ordered General de Balmain to invade the Crimea. The Russians routed the rebels, killing 400 ‘rather wantonly’ before taking the capital Bakhchisaray. Shagin Giray, guarded by Russian soldiers, took possession of his capital again. On 30 September, Potemkin’s nameday, which he usually celebrated with Catherine in his apartments, she sent him some wifely presents – a travelling tea-set and a dressing case: ‘What a wild place you’ve gone to for your nameday, my friend.’⁸

A measure of tranquillity was restored by mid-October and Potemkin returned to his new town, Kherson. For the rest of his life, he spent much of his time in the south. Catherine missed him deeply but ‘my master, I have to admit that your four-week stay in Kherson has been immensely useful’.⁹ He worked hard to accelerate Kherson’s constructions and shipbuilding, and inspected the building of the Kinburn fortress opposite Ochakov, the Ottoman stronghold. ‘How can this small town raise its nose against the young Colossus of Kherson?’, asked Catherine as the partners waited to see if the Sublime Porte would go to war against her. Luckily the united front of Austria and Russia proved sufficient to intimidate the Porte.¹⁰ The Colossus rushed back to Petersburg to persuade Catherine to annex the Khanate.¹¹

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It was a different Prince who returned to Petersburg in late October. He had a mission – and everyone noticed ‘the character and conduct of Prince Potemkin are so materially changed within these six months,’ Harris reported to Lord Grantham, the new Foreign Secretary. ‘He rises early, attends to business, is become not only visible but affable to everybody’.¹²

Serenissimus even dismissed his basse-cour. Major Semple tried to use Potemkin’s protection to squeeze the merchants of Petersburg and extort money from the Duchess of Kingston. When he threatened to send Russian soldiers to her house to get the money, Potemkin exposed the ‘Prince of Swindlers,’ who fled Russia, defrauding merchants all the way home. Little is known about Semple’s subsequent adventures, but Ligne later wrote to Potemkin that he had entertained ‘one of Your Highness’s Englishmen, le Major Semple, who told me he accompanied you to the conquest of the Crimea’. He was convicted of fraud in England, transported in 1795, escaped, then died in prison in London in 1799.¹³ Serenissimus enjoyed his menagerie of mountebanks, learning all he could from them and storing it in his prodigious memory. They used him. But Potemkin always got the better deal.

Now he started to sell his houses, horses, estates, jewels, amassed ‘loads of ready money’, and declared that he wished to retire to Italy. He told Harris he had lost his power and that he had offered Catherine his resignation but she had rejected it. Potemkin was forever threatening resignation – Catherine must have been used to it. Nonetheless, no one was quite sure what was afoot.¹⁴ He even paid his debts.

It seemed as if God was paying Potemkin’s debts too. Prince Orlov had gone mad after the death of his new young wife in June 1781 and wandered ranting, through the corridors of palaces. Nikita Panin had a stroke on 31 March 1783. When these two eclipsed suns, who loathed one another, yet grudgingly admired Potemkin, died within a few days, Catherine thought they would be ‘astonished to meet again in the other world’.¹⁵

The Prince was organizing his affairs because he was preparing himself for his life’s work in the south. He was in his creative prime when Catherine’s ‘dear master’ got back to Petersburg – ideas whirled out of him as forcefully and picturesquely as sparks from a Catherine wheel. He immediately set to work on her to settle the Crimean problem once and for all. Was Catherine the tough, obstinate strategist and Potemkin the cautious tactician, as historians would claim later? In this case, Potemkin took the tougher line and got his way – but in different cases they took different lines: it is impossible to generalize. When faced with a problem or a risk, the pair argued, shouted, sulked, were reconciled, back and forth, until their joint policy emerged fully formed.

In late November, the Prince explained to Catherine, in a passionate tour de force, why the Crimea, which ‘breaks our border’, had to be taken because the Ottomans ‘could reach our heart’ through it. This had to be done now while there was still time, while the British were still at war with the French and Americans, while Austria was still enthusiastic, while Istanbul was still wracked with riots and plague. In a stream of imperialistic rhetoric and erudite history, he exclaimed:

Imagine the Crimea is Yours and the wart on your nose is no more!…Gracious Lady…You are obliged to raise Russian glory! See who has gained what: France took Corsica, the Austrians without a war took more in Moldavia than we did. There is no power in Europe that has not participated in the carving-up of Asia, Africa, America. Believe me, that doing this will win you immortal glory greater than any other Russian Sovereign ever. This glory will force its way to an even greater one: with the Crimea, dominance over the Black Sea will be achieved.

And he finished: ‘Russia needs paradise.’¹⁶

Catherine hesitated: would it lead to war? Could not they just take the port of Akhtiar instead of the whole Khanate? Potemkin lamented Catherine’s caution to Harris: ‘Here we never look forward or backward and are governed solely by the impulse of the hour…If I was sure of being applauded when I did good or blamed when I did wrong, I should know on what I was to depend…’. Harris at last came in useful when Potemkin extracted his assurance that Britain would not prevent Russian expansion at the cost of the Porte.¹⁷

Then, just a few weeks after Potemkin’s return, Catherine gave him the ‘most secret’ rescript to annex the Crimea – but only if Shagin Giray died or was overthrown or he refused to yield the port of Akhtiar or if the Ottomans attacked or…There were so many conditions that both knew that he was really free to pull off his prize if he could get away with it. ‘We hereby declare our will’, the Empress wrote to the Prince on 14 December 1782, ‘for the annexation of the Crimea and the joining of it to the Russian Empire with full faith in you and being absolutely sure that you will not lose convenient time and opportune ways to fulfil this.’ There was still a risk that the Ottoman Empire would go to war or that the Great Powers would prevent it.¹⁸

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No wonder Potemkin was working so hard. He had to prepare for war with the Sublime Porte while hoping to avoid it. Catherine kept Joseph closely informed by letter on the shrewd calculation that, if he had received no surprises, he was less likely to bridle. If they were quick and the operation bloodless, they could get the Crimea before the rest of Europe could react. The clock was ticking because France and Britain were just negotiating peace in the American War. They signed the preliminaries on 9/20 January in Paris. The peace was not yet ratified, so the Russians could count on another six months. The diplomats tried to guess how far the partners would go: ‘The views of Prince Potemkin extend themselves every day and are of such a magnitude’, reported Harris, ‘as to exceed the ambition of the Empress herself.’¹⁹ Sir James understated the case when he wrote that ‘notwithstanding the pains he took to dissemble it’, Serenissimus was ‘very sorry to see our war drawing so near to its end…’.²⁰

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These were Potemkin’s last opportunities to enjoy the companionship of Sir James Harris. The Englishman felt he had played his last hand in Petersburg. When his friend Charles James Fox returned to the ministry as one-half of the Fox–North coalition, pursuing a pro-Russian policy, Harris demanded to be recalled while relations with Russia were friendly. Sir James and the Prince saw each other for the last time in the spring, when the latter was increasingly occupied with his southern preparations. Harris received his farewell audience from the Empress after Potemkin’s departure on 20 August 1783 and then left for home.^*1

Harris had made the mistake of basing his hopes on a man who was happy to advocate an English alliance, but who was really pursuing an entirely different policy in the south. When the Austrian alliance became active, Harris’s beguilement by Potemkin was exposed.

Sir James left Petersburg with high credit in London because his role as Potemkin’s friend and tutor in English civilization had brought him closer to the top than any other ambassador was ever to get in Russia. But he must have had mixed feelings about Potemkin, who had so played him. ‘Prince Potemkin is no longer our friend,’ he sadly told Charles James Fox. Potemkin’s archives show they kept in cheerful contact long afterwards. Harris often recommended travellers to the Prince: one was Archdeacon Coxe, the memoirist. ‘I know I owe you excuses,’ wrote Harris, ‘…but I know how you like men of letters…’. Catherine came to regard Harris as a ‘trouble-maker and intriguer’. Potemkin had ‘crushes’ on his friends and then moved on. He told a later ambassador that he had done much for Harris, who had ‘ruined everything’, and he growled at Bezborodko that Harris was ‘insidious, lying and not very decent’. Their friendship was later destroyed by Britain’s growing hostility to Russia – just one more sad example of the special graveyard reserved for diplomatic friendships.²¹

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The Prince spent February and March 1783 preparing military plans to cover Sweden and Prussia, potential Ottoman allies against Russia, while fielding armies against the Turks and sending the Baltic fleet back to the Mediterranean. The object of any war had to be the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov that dominated the Liman (estuary) of the Dnieper and therefore access to the Black Sea. Potemkin also turned his reforming eye to the dress and arms of the Russian soldier: in one of his barnstorming memoranda to Catherine, using his common sense and colourful colloquialisms, he proposed to reduce the burden of the common soldier by cutting out all the foppish Prussian paraphernalia. Unusually for a Russian general and an eighteenth-century commander, he actually wanted to improve the comfort of his cannon-fodder.

The Russian infantryman was expected to powder his hair and braid it, which could take twelve hours, and wear the most impractical clothes including tight high boots, stockings, expensive deerskin trousers and the pointed triangular stiff hat that did not protect against the elements. All this ‘could not be better invented to depress the soldier’, wrote Potemkin, who proposed: ‘All foppery must be eliminated.’ His denunciations of the Prussian martial hairstyle are classic Potemkin: ‘About the hairdo. To curl up, to puff, to plait braids – is that soldiers’ business? They have no valets. And what do they need curls for? Everyone must agree it’s healthier to wash and comb the hair than to burden it with powder, fat, flour, hairpins, braids. The soldier’s garb must be like this: up and ready.’ Only months after becoming favourite, he also ordered officers to instruct soldiers without ‘inhumane beatings’ that made service disgusting and unbearable. Instead he recommended ‘affectionate and patient interpretation’. Since 1774, he had been lightening and improving the Russian cavalry too, creating new Dragoon regiments and making the equipment and armour of the Cuirassiers easier to handle.

Years ahead of his time and unaffected by the brutish Prussomania of most Western (and Russian) generals, Potemkin borrowed from the light costumes of the Cossacks instead of the rigid uniforms of Prussian parade grounds to design the new uniform, which was to be named after him: warm comfortable hats that could cover the ears, short haircuts, puttees instead of stockings, loose boots, no ceremonial swords, just bayonets. Potemkin’s new uniform set the standard for ‘the beauty, simplicity and convenience of the garment, accommodated to the climate and spirit of the country’.²²

It was time to leave. He knew that if the Crimean adventure succeeded, ‘I shall soon be seen in another light and then if my conduct is not approved I will retire to the country and never again appear at Court.’²³ But the Prince was dissembling again: he was convinced he could do anything. He left the capital at the height of his favour. ‘They consider his eye, the eye omniscient,’ Zavadovsky bitterly told Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. Yet Harris knew there was a risk: ‘Prince Potemkin will go and take the command of the army, however hazardous such a step may be to the duration of his favour.’²⁴

Finally, the Prince had a haircut, perhaps to present a more statesmanlike look. ‘The Grand Duchess’, Mikhail Potemkin wrote to Serenissimus, ‘said that, after you’d had your hair cut, your image has changed for the better.’ It is reassuring to see that hairstyles had political significance even two centuries before television.²⁵ All scores settled, all ties cut – mortal, political, financial and hirsute – Potemkin headed south on 6 April 1783, accompanied by a suite including his youngest niece Tatiana Engelhardt, to conquer ‘paradise’.

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Before attending a war, the Prince was going to attend a christening. The uncle and the sparky little Tatiana arrived at the Belayatserkov estate of Sashenka Branicka for the christening of her newborn child. Bezborodko followed Potemkin’s movements from St Petersburg: ‘We received a message that Prince Potemkin had left Krichev on 27 April,’ the minister told Simon Vorontsov, ‘and having acted as godfather in Belayatserkov, he had departed the very next day…’. Rarely has a christening been watched so carefully by the cabinets of Europe.

The Prince’s progress was unusually leisurely. He was pursued by the Empress’s increasingly anxious letters. Initially, the partners relished their diplomatic balancing act like a pair of highwaymen planning a hold-up. They suspected Emperor Joseph envied Russian gains from Turkey in 1774, so Catherine told Potemkin, ‘I’ve made my mind up not to count on anybody but myself. When the cake is baked, everyone will want a slice.’ As for Turkey’s friend France, she was as unperturbed by ‘French thunder, or should I sat heat lightning’ as she was unworried about Joseph’s shakiness. ‘Please don’t leave me without information both on you and business.’ Potemkin always knew the worth of the Austrian alliance but thoroughly enjoyed himself laughing at Joseph and his chancellor’s vacillations: ‘Kaunitz is acting like a snake or a toad,’ he wrote to Catherine on 22 April, but he reassured her: ‘Keep your resolution, matushka, against any approaches, especially internal or external enemies…You shouldn’t rely on the Emperor much but friendly treatment is necessary.’²⁶

Potemkin’s agents were preparing the Tartars in the Crimea and the Kuban while his troops got ready to fight the Ottomans. Balmain was fixing the easiest piece of the puzzle: on 19 April, he procured the abdication of Shagin Giray in Karasubazaar in the Crimea itself, in return for generous subsidies and possibly another throne. ‘My dove, my Prince,’ exulted Catherine when she heard this news.²⁷ When the Prince finally reached Kherson in early May, he found that, as ever, Russian bureaucracy was incapable of achieving much without his driving energy. ‘Lady Matushka,’ he reported to Catherine in early May, ‘Having reached Kherson, I’m exhausted as a dog and unable to find any sense in the Admiralty. Everything is desolate and there’s not a single proper report.’ Like any country boy, his thoughts about the ministers of Europe were populated with dogs, wolves and toads.

The Prince now threw himself, in a whirl of activity and anxiety, into seizing the Crimea without outside interference. The archives show this multitalented dynamo at work. Potemkin’s rescripts to his generals – Balmain in the Crimea, Suvorov and Pavel Potemkin in the Kuban – took care of every detail: the Tartars were to be treated kindly; regiments were positioned; artillery was to be brought up in case he needed to besiege Ochakov; a spy was on his way (‘arrest him and send him to me’). When a colonel was too deferential to the deposed Khan, he received a dose of Potemkinian sarcasm: ‘Are you the Khan’s butler or an officer?’ And he specified every step of the swearing of the oath of allegiance.²⁸

Meanwhile to the east of the Crimea and the Kuban, south of the Caucasus mountains, he conducted negotiations with two Georgian kings about a Russian protectorate and with a Persian satrap, along with Armenian rebels, about fostering an independent Armenian state. On top of all this, an epidemic of plague struck the Crimea, brought in from Constantinople, so quarantines had to be enforced. ‘I order precautions against it – repeat the basics, inspire hygiene, visit the plague hospitals thus setting an example,’ Potemkin wrote to Bezborodko. These were just some of the myriad projects Potemkin was conducting at this time. ‘Only God knows how I’ve worn myself out.’ As if this was not enough for one man, he monitored the Powers of Europe – and coped with Catherine.²⁹ He chided her: ‘You’ve always shown me favour…so do not decline the one I need most – take care of your health.’

Frederick the Great now attempted to ruin Catherine’s plans by egging on the French to stop her. Potemkin dared the old Prussian ‘huckster…to send French troops here – we’d teach them a lesson in the Russian way’. King Gustavus of Sweden, who hoped to emulate his hero Alexander the Great, insisted on visiting Catherine, looking for chances to take advantage of Russian trouble with Turkey to reclaim Sweden’s lost Baltic Empire. But his visit was delayed when his horse threw him at a military parade and he broke his arm. ‘What a clumsy hero,’ Catherine chuckled to Potemkin. Alexander the Great never made such a fool of himself. By the time Gustavus arrived for his visit, the Crimean cake was baked and eaten.

The Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, sought out the Austrian envoy to Paris to co-ordinate a reaction to Russian plans. Joseph II, pushed to a decision by Catherine and afraid of missing out on Ottoman gains, suddenly rallied and informed the horrified Vergennes of the Russo-Austrian Treaty. Without support from its ally Austria, an exhausted France lacked the will to act. As for Britain, relieved to have escaped its American quicksand, Lord Grantham told Harris that if ‘France means to be quiet about the Turks…why should we meddle? No time to begin a fresh broil.’

Joseph’s alliance proved decisive. ‘Your prediction has come true, my cheerful clever friend,’ the Empress told her consort. ‘Appetite comes with eating.’ So it looked as if the partners would get away with it.³⁰

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Potemkin was so embroiled in his many activities that he now ceased writing his usual letters to Catherine. She fretted and wrote repeatedly throughout May and June, snapping, ‘While you complain there’s no news from me, I thought it’s me who had no news from you for a long time.’ The two were getting irritated with each other, as they always did during political crises. She wanted to know if the Khan had left the Crimea so that the Tartars could take the oath of allegiance and she could publish her Manifesto on the annexation.

Potemkin, toiling in Kherson, was trying to manage the departure of Shagin, who was now delaying the enterprise despite his 200,000 rouble pension. The Tartars would not co-operate while the Khan was still there. Even though he sent his baggage to Petrovsk, the Khan’s officers were discouraging the mullahs from trusting Russia. Pavel Potemkin and Suvorov at last reported from the distant Kuban that the Nogai nomads were ready to take the oath to Catherine. Everything had to be co-ordinated. The Prince was determined that the annexation should be bloodless and at least appear to be the will of the Crimean people. Finally at the end of May, Potemkin wrote that he was leaving Kherson for the Crimea: ‘Goodbye Matushka, darling…The Khan will be off in a trice.’

The Prince arrived in the Crimea and set up camp at Karasubazaar, ready to administer the oath on 28 June, Catherine’s accession day. But it dragged on. While working frantically and exhausting himself, the Prince presented a picture of Oriental languor. ‘I saw him in the Crimea,’ wrote one of his officers, ‘lying on a sofa surrounded by fruits and apparently oblivious of all care – yet amid all the unconcern Russia conquered the peninsula.’³¹

Catherine veered between longing for Potemkin and despairing of him. ‘Neither I nor anyone knows where you are.’ In early June, she missed him. ‘I often deplore that you are there and not here because I feel helpless without you.’ A month later, she was angry: ‘You can imagine how anxious I must be having no news from you for more than five weeks…I expected the occupation of the Crimea by mid-May at the latest and now it’s mid-July and I know no more about it than the Pope of Rome.’³² Then she began to worry that he was dying of the plague. Presumably Potemkin had decided to wait until he could lay the entire Crimea and Kuban at Catherine’s feet.

Across the ancient Crimean Khanate, the murzas and mullahs gathered in their finest robes to take the oath on the Koran to an Orthodox empress over a thousand miles away. Potemkin administered the oath himself, first to the clergy, then to the rest. The most striking sight was in the Kuban far to the east. On the fixed day, 6,000 Tartar tents of the Nogai Horde were pitched out on the Eysk steppe. Thousands of tough little Mongol horses cantered around the encampments. Russian soldiers were casually vigilant. Shagin’s abdication was read to the Nogai, who then took the oath to the Empress in front of Suvorov. They returned to their Hordes, who also recited the oath. Then the feasting began: 100 cattle, 800 rams were cooked and eaten. The Nogai drank vodka – because wine was banned by the Koran. After many toasts and shouts of hurrah, the Cossacks and Nogai competed in horse races. Then the Nogai, having lost their freedom 600 years after Genghis Khan despatched his Hordes westwards, wandered away.³³

On 10 July, the Prince broke his silence to the Empress: ‘In three days, I will congratulate you with the Crimea. All the notables have already sworn, now all the rest will follow.’ On 20/31 July, Catherine received Potemkin’s report that the Crimean Tartars and the two Nogai Hordes had taken the oath. She was so relieved and worn out by the anticipation that she replied coolly, but, as it sank in and she received Potemkin’s explanation, she appreciated his achievement. ‘What a lot of glorious deeds have been accomplished in a short time.’ His letters were immediately filled with his ideas for towns, ports and ships, laced with Classical references to his new territories. His ebullience was always infectious. When he wrote that the cowardly rumours about the plague were spread by poltroons in ‘Spa and Paris’, Catherine laughed at last.³⁴

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A few days later, Serenissimus pulled another golden rabbit out of the hat: in the Caucasus, the Kingdom of Georgia accepted Russian protection. The Caucasus, the isthmus between the Black and Caspian Seas, was a mountaineous patchwork of kingdoms and principalities, dominated by the empires around them – Russia, Turkey and Persia. In the north-west, Potemkin had just annexed the Kuban, ruled by the Crimeans. In the foothills, Russian generals struggled to control the wild Moslem mountaineers in Chechnya and Daghestan. South of the mountains, the Persian and Turkish empires divided the region among themselves. There, the two Orthodox Georgian kingdoms, Kartli-Kacheti and Imeretia, were almost mythical or Biblical in their romantic ferocity, so it was entirely appropriate that their tsars were named respectively Hercules and Solomon.

Hercules (Heraclius, or Erakle in Georgian), a remarkable empire-builder, seemed to be the last of the medieval knights alive and well in the century of Voltaire. The name suited the man. Scion of the Bagratid dynasty that provided Georgian monarchs for almost a thousand years, he was a warrior–king who owed his throne to his fighting for the Shah of Persia in India and had managed to create a mini-empire in the backyards of Persia and Turkey. Already an old man, ‘of middle size, with a long face, large eyes and small beard, he had spent his youth’, a traveller remarked, ‘at the Court of Nadir Shah where he contracted a fondness for Persian customs…’. Hercules was ‘renowned for his courage and military skill. When on horseback he always has a pair of loaded pistols at his girdle and, if the enemy is near, a musket flying over a shoulder…’. The other Georgian Tsar, Solomon of Imeretia, was just as striking for, repeatedly overthrown and then restored, he had ‘lived like a wild man for sixteen years in caverns and holes and frequently, by his personal courage, escaped assassination’. He too lived with a musket over his shoulder.³⁵

When the Russians went to war in 1768, Catherine had helped Hercules and Solomon but abandoned them after 1774 to the vengeance of Shah and Sultan. Potemkin was emboldened by his Austrian alliance and decided to increase the pressure on the Ottomans by talking to the Georgians. He corresponded with Hercules, inquiring if he was now at peace with Solomon: he wanted both kingdoms for Russia.

—

On 31 December 1782, King Hercules told the ‘Merciful and Serene Prince’ that ‘I am entrusting myself, my children and my Orthodox nation’ to Russia. Serenissimus ordered his cousin, who commanded the Caucasus corps, to conduct negotiations. On 24 July 1783, Pavel Potemkin signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Hercules on the Prince’s behalf.³⁶

Serenissimus, still encamped at Karasubazaar in the Crimea, was delighted. His Classical-cum-Orthodox exuberance at the news of another magnificent present to the Empress was irresistible:

Lady Matushka, my foster-mother, the Georgia business is also brought to an end. Has any other Sovereign so illuminated an epoch as you have? But it is not just brilliance. You have attached the territories, which Alexander and Pompey just glanced at, to the baton of Russia, and Kherson of Taurida [Crimea] – the source of our Christianity and thus of our humanity – is already in the hands of its daughter.^*2 There’s something mystic about it. You have destroyed the Tartar Horde – the tyrant of Russia in old times and its devastator in recent ones. Today’s new border promises peace to Russia, jealousy to Europe and fear to the Ottoman Porte. So write down this annexation, unempurpled with blood, and order your historians to prepare much ink and much paper.³⁷

Catherine was impressed. Thanking him for his achievements, she ratified the treaty, which confirmed Hercules’ titles, borders and right to coin his own currency. In September Pavel Potemkin built a road out of a bridlepath and galloped in an eight-horse carriage over the Caucasus to Tiflis (now Tbilisi). In November, two Russian battalions entered the capital. The Prince began to supervise the building of forts on Russia’s new border while two Georgian tsareviches, sons of Hercules, set off to live at the cosmopolitan Court of Potemkin.³⁸

And there was more. The failure of Voinovich’s Caspian adventure two years earlier had not discouraged Potemkin’s plans for an anti-Ottoman alliance with Persia. Bezborodko, one of the few who understood Potemkin’s geopolitical schemes, explained that the Prince planned not only this eastern version of the Austrian alliance. He had persuaded Catherine, in the Crimean rescript, to authorize him to push for the Caspian to create two other principalities: one Armenian (today’s Armenia) and another on the Caspian seashores (today’s Azerbaijan) that might be ruled by Shagin Giray, the deposed Crimean Khan.³⁹

By early 1784, Potemkin was negotiating with the Persian Khan in Isfahan about whether he might also join the Empire, giving him a chance to found his Armenian kingdom. ‘Armenia raises its hands to the sacred throne of Your Imperial Majesty asking for deliverance from the Aga’s yoke,’ declared Potemkin to the Empress.⁴⁰ Negotiations with Persian potentates, the Khans of Shusha and Goya, and the Armenians of the Karabak, continued well into 1784.^*3 Potemkin sent an envoy to Isfahan, but the Khan died and the envoy came home. Ultimately, the Persian–Armenian Project led to nothing. For now, his gains were substantial enough.

Catherine was delighted and praised him as an empress, lover and friend: ‘For all the labours exerted by you and the boundless care of my affairs, I cannot sufficiently express my recognition to you; you yourself know how sensitive I am to merit and yours are outstanding, just as my friendship and love for you are. Let God give you health and ever greater powers of body and soul.’⁴¹

In late August 1783, the Prince collapsed with a dangerous fever. Exhausted by his massive projects, perpetual travel, proximity to plague and bad water, Potemkin lay close to death in a pretty Tartar cottage amid the verdant pastures of Karasubazaar.

—

Potemkin could not rest – but his health improved in mid-September. Europe still rumbled at Russia’s achievement. As his fever ebbed and flared up again, he inspected Russian forces. In what became a pattern, even a tradition, Catherine, Bezborodko and the ambassadors followed every spasm back in Petersburg. When he moved to the regional capital of the south, Kremenchuk, away from plague-ridden Crimea and Kherson, Catherine, ever the concerned wife, wrote, ‘You never take care of yourself while recovering. Just do me this favour, for once remember the importance of your health: the well-being of the Empire and my glory.’ She knew that the conquest and development of the south depended on him: ‘The most important enterprise in the world will turn into nothing without you. I praise your moving to Kremenchuk but this should not be done in the very depth of dangerous illness, I was horrified to hear you had covered 300 versts in such a state.’⁴²

The two Russian imperialists savoured their success. Potemkin lost himself in romantic neo-Classical dreams, while Catherine reacted with crude, almost Stalinesque satisfaction: ‘Upon the envy of Europe, I look quite calmly – let them jest while we do our business.’ She reaffirmed his permanence: ‘Know that I am committed to you for a century.’⁴³ To show it, she allotted 100,000 roubles to build him a new house that was to become the Taurida Palace.⁴⁴

He could not stop working. He knew that the Nogai Hordes would always create instability in the Kuban, so in a move that foreshadowed later stains on Russian history he drew up a plan to move the nomads and resettle them between the Volga and the Urals. The rumours reached the Nogai. Meanwhile that irritating Genghizid popinjay, Shagin Giray, lingered in the Taman and kept in contact with the Nogai Hordes. Perhaps encouraged by him, these had barely left Suvorov’s barbecued banquet on the steppe than they massacred their pro-Russian murzas. The energetic Suvorov immediately pursued the rebels and slaughtered them on 1 October.⁴⁵

The Russian Ambassador to the Porte was Potemkin’s university friend Yakov Bulgakov, who now monitored the Ottoman reaction while negotiating a trade agreement. He reported that the Turks ‘won’t quarrel over the Crimea if no new circumstance comes from Europe’. The final Treaty of Versailles ended the War of American Independence on 23 August/3 September, but it was too late. Prussia and France tried to raise some resistance and, in late September, Catherine still expected an Ottoman declaration of war ‘at any minute’, but Joseph had held firm against Vergennes and Frederick.⁴⁶ The Kaiser even acclaimed ‘the success of Prince de Potemkin’ to the Empress: ‘I know very well the value and difficulty in finding such good and loyal serviteurs like him and how rare it is in our profession to find someone who understands us.’ On 28 December 1783, the Turks implicitly recognized the loss of the Crimea in the new convention of Ainalikawak, negotiated by Bulgakov.⁴⁷

Letters and praise poured into Potemkin’s Chancellery. It was true that he had now ‘risen to the highest degree of power that Sovereigns accord to individuals’, as his general Igelstrom wrote to him.⁴⁸ More than that, ‘what the centuries had not completed, what Peter I had not managed’, wrote the writer Glinka, ‘this giant of his time was able to achieve’.⁴⁹ Catherine missed him most of all, writing her simplest confirmation of their partnership in early October: ‘Let God make you better and return here. Honestly when I am without you, I often feel I am without hands.’ The Prince replied that ‘Thank God, I get better every hour…and when I’m fully recovered, I’m coming to see my dear matushka.’⁵⁰

—

Prince Potemkin returned to Petersburg in late November 1783 to find courtiers hostile to him in paroxyms of jealousy. His ally Bezborodko was beleaguered, so Potemkin defended him, only to find himself beset by enemies. ‘The envy of many’, observed Bezborodko, grateful for Potemkin’s support, ‘is clear.’ This took the form of an intrigue to discredit Serenissimus.

The Empress had been told that the outbreaks of plague in the south were somehow due to Potemkin’s negligence. She was sensitive on the subject, after Moscow’s Plague-Riot of 1770. There were allegations that Italian settlers arriving to farm the southern steppes had died because there were no houses for them. Both the allegations were false – he had worked especially hard to limit the plague, and had succeeded. It must have been depressing to achieve so much and travel so far only to find he had to fight his corner on his return. The plot, according to Bezborodko, was hatched by the Navy Minister, Ivan Chernyshev, who had most reason to resent Serenissimus’ success because Grand Admiral Potemkin was building his own Black Sea fleet outside the remit of the Navy College. Princess Dashkova, back from her travels, and even Lanskoy were somehow involved too. These accusations led to a row between the partners and a coldness descended over these two proud statesmen.⁵¹

Potemkin stopped calling on Catherine. Lev Engelhardt, another cousin from Smolensk who had just joined the Prince’s staff as an adjutant, left a graphic account of this time. Usually the road, known as Millionaya (Millionaire’s Row), in front of Potemkin’s house adjoining the Winter Palace was so crowded with carriages and petitioners that it was impossible to pass. But now, at the height of his success, it was deserted. His enemies rejoiced.

—

On 2 February 1784, Serenissimus woke up late as usual. His valet had placed a little envelope with the imperial seal beside his bed. The Empress, who had been up since seven, had typically ordered that the Prince should not be woken. Potemkin read the letter and called for his secretary, Vasily Popov. ‘Read!’, he said. Popov ran into the anteroom, where adjutant Engelhardt was on duty: ‘Go and congratulate the Prince. He’s promoted to field-marshal.’ Engelhardt went into the bedroom and congratulated his master. The Prince–Field-Marshal jumped out of bed, threw on a greatcoat, wrapped his pink silk scarf round his neck and went off to see the Empress. He was also raised to President of the College of War. Furthermore, on his recommendation, the Empress created the province of Tauris, the Classical name for the Crimea, and added it to Potemkin’s vast viceroyalty of New Russia. Within two hours, his apartments were full. Millionaya was blocked by carriages again. The courtiers who had been coldest grovelled the lowest.⁵² On 10 February, Catherine dined as Potemkin’s guest in one of his nieces’ houses.

The Prince impulsively decided he wanted to see Constantinople, so he asked Bulgakov: ‘What if I come as a guest to you from the Crimea by ship? Seriously I want to know if it is possible.’ Potemkin’s request was not merely romantic impulse – though much of it was his desire to see the city of Caesars. He knew now what he wanted to do, how much he wanted to build in the south, and for that he needed time and peace. He surely wanted to go to Tsargrad to negotiate this peace with the Sultan himself. Ambassador Bulgakov must have dreaded the very prospect. On 15 March, he replied from Istanbul that it would be exceedingly complicated. ‘They think’, he explained, ‘that you are our Grand Vizier.’⁵³ Potemkin never saw Constantinople – but his destiny was in the south. From now on, he planned ‘to pass the first four or five months of each year in his provinces’.⁵⁴ In mid-March, the Prince left St Petersburg again. There were cities to build, fleets to float, kingdoms to found.

Skip Notes

*1 One token of Harris’s favour with Catherine and Potemkin can still be seen in London in the form of a gorgeous bauble. When Harris left, she presented him with a chandelier created in Potemkin’s glass factories. Harris’s descendant, the 6th Earl of Malmesbury, recently gave this to the Skinner’s Company of the City of London where it now hangs in the Outer Hall.

*2 Potemkin the Orthodox revelled in possessing the very place, the ancient town of Khersoneses in the Crimea, where Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, had been baptized in 988, the moment when Christianity reached the land of Rus.

*3 The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabak were still fighting to escape the Moslem control of the Republic of Azerbaijan and join the Republic of Armenia during a vicious war in the early 1990s.