Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

18

EMPEROR OF THE SOUTH

Is it not you who put to flight

The mighty hordes of vulturous neighbours

And from vast empty regions made

Inhabitable towns and cornfields

And covered the Black Sea with ships

And shook the earth’s core with your thunder?

Gavrili Derzhavin, The Waterfall

‘Every hour I encountered some fresh, fantastic instance of Prince Potemkin’s Asiatic peculiarities,’ wrote the Comte de Damas, who observed the energetic and creative way the viceroy of the south worked in the late 1780s. ‘He would move a guberniya [province], demolish a town with a view to building it somewhere else, form a new colony or a new industrial centre, and change the administration of a province, all in a spare half-hour before giving his whole attention to the arrangement of a ball or a fête…’.¹ This was how Westerners saw the Prince – a wizardly satrap ordering cities as he commissioned ball-dresses for his mistresses. They always presumed that ‘barbaric’ Russians could never really do anything properly, not like Germans or Frenchmen, so that Potemkin’s work must surely be flawed. When it turned out that Potemkin did do things properly and that his achievements appeared almost miraculous in their imagination and execution, jealous Westerners and Russian enemies propagated the big lie of his sham ‘Potemkin Villages’.

The reality of Potemkin’s achievements in the south, in the fifteen years allotted to him, was remarkable. ‘Attempts have been made to ridicule the first foundations of towns and colonies,’ wrote one of his earliest biographers. ‘Yet such establishments are not the less entitled to our admiration…Time has justified our observations. Listen to the travellers who have seen Kherson and Odessa…’.² The so-called ‘Potemkin Villages’ are cities today with millions of inhabitants.

Russia underwent two massive leaps of expansion in the south: the reigns of Ivan the Terrible, who annexed the Khanates of Astrakhan and Kazan, and of Catherine the Great. Potemkin was, as Pushkin and others recognized, the mastermind and energy behind Catherine’s successes in the south. Potemkin did not invent these policies: as the Russian historian Kliuchevsky put it, colonization is ‘the basic fact of Russian history’. But Potemkin was unique in combining the creative ideas of an entrepreneur with the force of a soldier and the foresight of a statesman. He also brought the south to the north: while, under Panin, Russia pursued the Northern System, under Potemkin the south was Russia’s foreign policy.

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The Prince became the Governor-General (namestvo) of New Russia, Azov, Saratov, Astrakhan and the Caucasus soon after rising to favour, but in the late 1770s and certainly after the annexation of the Crimea, he became the effective co-ruler of the Russian Empire. Just as Diocletian saw that the Roman Empire was so vast that it required Emperors of the East and West, so Catherine let Potemkin run the south and control it absolutely. Potemkin had grown since 1774 – in stature as well as girth. He was made for the wide open steppes of the south and he could not be confined to Court. Petersburg was now too small for the both of them.

Potemkin’s power was both vertical and horizontal, for he was in charge of the army at the College of War and commander-in-chief of all irregular forces, especially the Cossacks. When he began to build the Black Sea Fleet, it reported not to the Admiralty in Petersburg but to him as Grand Admiral. However, most of all, his power depended on his own personality, the prestige of his successes, such as the Crimea, and his ability to create ideas and force their execution – and no longer just on his closeness to Catherine.

Serenissimus deliberately ruled his Viceroyalty – the names and borders of the provinces changed but, essentially, they comprised all the new lands annexed between 1774 and 1783, from the River Bug in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east, from the mountains of the Caucasus, and the Volga across most of the Ukraine almost as far as Kiev – like an emperor. It was unique for a Russian tsar, such as Catherine, to delegate so much power to a consort – but the relationship between them was unparalleled.³

Serenissimus set up his own Court in the south that rivalled and complemented Catherine’s in the north. Like a tsar, he cared for the poor folk, disdained the nobility, and granted ranks and estates in his lands. Potemkin travelled with a royal entourage; he was greeted at towns by all the nobles and townsfolk; his arrival was marked by the firing of cannons and the giving of balls. But it went further than just the trimmings of royalty. When he issued his orders, he did so in the name of the Empress, but he also listed his endless titles and medals as a king might. His commands too were absolute: whether it was a gardener or an engineer, his subordinates usually had a military rank and their orders were military in style. ‘Equalling in his power the mightiest kings,’ recalled Wiegel, ‘I doubt even Napoleon was better obeyed.’⁴

The Prince liked to appear majestically languid – as he is remembered in so many memoirs – but this was something of a pose. He ruined his health with the mammoth quantity of work he conducted. Probably, he was more like a school swot who tries to appear to do no work while cramming all night. By the early 1780s, he governed through his own private Chancellery, which had at least fifty clerks in it, including specialists in French and Greek correspondence.⁵ He even had his own effective prime minister – the indefatigable Vasily Stepanovich Popov, whom he, and later the Empress, trusted absolutely. Like Potemkin, Popov gambled all night, slept half the day, never took off his uniform and was always ready even in the middle of the night to respond to the Prince’s famous call, usually from his bed, of ‘ “Vasily Stepanovich!’ All you heard was “Vasily Stepanovich!”.’⁶ If Popov was his chancellor, the equally tireless Mikhail Leontovich Faleev, a young merchant he met during the First Russo-Turkish War, became his quartermaster, contractor and collaborator in gargantuan works. His portrait shows the weary, shrewd blue eyes, slim, disciplined, tidy and handsome face of this most unusual Russian entrepreneur, wearing his blue coat and white ruffles. Potemkin had him ennobled and he amassed a great fortune but, unusually for merchant princes, Faleev was honoured and loved in the town he built with Serenissimus – Nikolaev. They were in constant correspondence.⁷

Potemkin was in perpetual motion, except when paralysed by bouts of depression and fever. However many cities he founded, wherever he was, whether alone in a kibitka sledge, with the Chancellery hundreds of versts behind, or in a palace, the capital of this southern empire was the creative yet flawed and tormented figure of Potemkin himself.

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Potemkin’s career began and ended with his love for the Cossacks. First he destroyed the Zaporogian Cossacks and then he recreated them by rebuilding their Host at the heart of the imperial army. On an island in the midst of the broad Dnieper river – hence their name ‘za-porogi’, ‘beyond the rapids’ – lived a unique republic of 20,000 martial men, who controlled a huge triangle of barren territory north of the Black Sea. The Zaporogians did not farm, because farming was done by slaves and these were freemen – the very word Cossack deriving from the old Turkic for freeman. But, like most Cossacks, their Sech was a brutal democracy which elected a hetman – or ataman – in wartime. They had their own laws: treason was punished by being sewn into a sack and tossed into the rapids. Murderers were buried alive in the cold embrace of the cadavers of their victims, to whom they were bound.

They were unusual for Cossacks in many ways. They were as happy on their sixty-foot, reed-lined and oar-propelled boats – the chaiki or ‘seagulls’ – as on horseback. They were said to be the inventors of the first submarine, using sand as ballast and a wooden pipe through which to breathe. The Zaporogian Cossacks did not live with women. No female was allowed inside their sech or ‘clearing’ to preserve the military discipline they held paramount: ‘they were bachelors’, Lev Engelhardt explained, ‘like the Knights of Malta’.

These ‘Boat Cossacks’ sported handlebar moustaches, shaven heads with one long ponytail, Turkish pantaloons with gold thread, silken cummerbunds, satin kaftans, high fur hats and turbans often with ostrich feathers and jewelled insignia. Their true profession was war. When they did not fight for themselves, they fought for others, sometimes as mercenaries – in the mid-seventeenth century, some Zaporogians were lent by the King of Poland to fight Spain at Dunkirk, under the Prince de Condé, and twice that century their fleet of almost 100 chaiki had raided Constantinople itself.

The Cossacks had developed as freebooting guards of the Russian frontiers, but by 1774 their unruly independent Hosts were no longer needed to protect against the Turks – and the Sech stood in the way of Russia confronting the Tartars. The Ukrainian Cossacks under Mazeppa had abandoned Peter the Great and joined Charles XII of Sweden. Cossack raiders had started the Russo-Turkish War in 1768 and the Zaporogians had several times robbed Russian troops on the way to the front. Recently, the Yaik and Don Cossacks begat Pugachev. During the war, Potemkin had developed special links with the Sech – he was an honorary Zaporogian. Indeed, in May 1774, he wrote to his Cossack friends from Tsarskoe Selo, telling them of his rise to power and promising that ‘I have told the Sovereign about everything.’ Nonetheless, as soon as the Pugachev Rebellion was suppressed, he changed his tune, warned them to stop their plundering and recommended the liquidation of the Sech and the reorganization of all the Cossack Hosts. Indeed they were a proven liability to the Russian state – and to Potemkin’s plans to colonize and cultivate new territories.

At dawn on 4 June 1775, Russian troops under Potemkin’s orders approached the Sech, surrounded it and ordered it to surrender or face destruction. The Sech that he called ‘the foolish rabble’ surrendered without resistance. Potemkin wrote Catherine’s Manifesto for her, which was published on 3 August 1775 – ‘all their violence should be cited – the reasons why such a harmful society will be destroyed’.⁸ The Zaporogians were not killed: only three leaders, including their wealthy Hetman Kalischevsky, were despatched to the Arctic monastery of Solovki on the White Sea. They were resettled as Astrakhan Cossacks, but many of them fled to fight for the Turks: Potemkin was to lure them back in the 1780s.⁹ Nor was the Sech alone: the Yaik Host was moved and renamed; Don Cossacks were reformed too and brought under Potemkin’s direct control: he appointed their new hetman and the committee that would manage their civil affairs.¹⁰ The overmighty Don Hetman, Efremov, was arrested, though Potemkin protected him and his family.¹¹

Potemkin immediately suggested that the loyal Zaporogians be formed into special regiments. Catherine feared the Cossacks after Pugachev, so he bided his time, but he built a Cossack flotilla on the Caspian and Azov Seas.¹² He treated the Cossacks so kindly that noblemen grumbled that he was in love with them. He certainly surrounded himself with loyal Zaporogians. He also made sure that runaway serfs, found among these frontiersmen, should not be returned to their masters. It says much that Potemkin was loved by them in his lifetime: he earned the title ‘Protector of the Cossacks’.¹³

Yet the destruction of the Zaporogians is always listed as one of Potemkin’s crimes – especially in modern Ukraine, where the Sech is regarded as the forerunner of the Ukrainian state. But the Sech and other Hosts were doomed after Pugachev, their territory was unsettled, uncultivated and in the way of Russia’s drive to the Black Sea. Their removal allowed the annexation of the Crimea. Serenissimus is criticized for removing treasures from Zaporogian churches and distributing the lands to his cronies – yet, since he was not there himself, he ordered General Tekeli to inventory all church plate and give it to the Church.¹⁴ (Anyway, the majority of their jewels were themselves stolen.) The distribution and cultivation of land was the entire point of the annexation. He resettled these lands with Greeks who had fought for Orlov-Chesmensky and, later, state peasants from the Russian interior, and began building fortresses to protect them. Indeed, one modern historian argues that it was cultivation of these steppes that provided Russia with the resources and food supply to defeat Napoleon in 1812.¹⁵

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On 31 May 1778, Catherine approved Potemkin’s plan for a Black Sea port called Kherson, a sonorous name, ringing with his neo-Classical and Orthodox dreams of Khersoneses. This was the city made possible by the peace with Turkey and the liquidation of the Zaporogians.¹⁶ Docks were ordered. Carpenters were demanded from all over the empire. On 25 July, the Prince chose one of the Admiralty’s officers to be its first governor – Ivan Abramovich Hannibal. Probably, Potemkin was attracted to the exotic history of this man and his connection to Peter the Great.

He was the half-black eldest son of Peter the Great’s famous blackamoor, Abraham Hannibal, an Abyssinian prince bought in Istanbul for the Tsar and adopted by him. Naming him for obvious reasons after Scipio’s adversary, Peter educated his ward, promoted him and stood as godfather to his son Ivan. Pushkin, who wrote the (uncompleted) ‘Blackamoor of Peter the Great’, was the great-nephew of Ivan Hannibal. Pushkin’s grandfather Osip Hannibal was a poor father, so the poet’s mother was actually brought up in the household of Potemkin’s first governor of Kherson. Ivan Hannibal was as proud of his ancestry as Pushkin. When he died in 1801, the tombstone read: ‘The sultriness of Africa bore him, the cold calmed his blood.’ His portrait in the Kherson State Historical Museum shows the dark skin and fine Abyssinian features of his father and the straight hair and stockiness of his Russian mother. Now Catherine ordered Hannibal to proceed with this massive task.

Potemkin’s first town was designed to be both the base for his new Black Sea Fleet, which so far existed only in a small way in the minor Russian ports of the Sea of Azov, and an entrepôt for Mediterranean trade. The placing of this port was a difficult decision because Russian’s gains in 1774 had given it a narrow corridor to the Black Sea. Its access was via the mouth of the Dnieper river, one of the great waterways of Rus, which reached the Black Sea through a narrow, shallow estuary called the Liman. At the end of the Liman on the Kinburn spit, Potemkin had built a small fortress. But the Ottomans kept the powerful fortress–town of Ochakov on the other bank, which effectively controlled the delta. There was no ideal place that was both defensible and a natural harbour. The naval engineers favoured Glubokaya Pristan, a deep harbour, but it was indefensible, so Potemkin chose a site further up the Dneiper where a fortress named Alexandershanz already stood. There was an island in the river that protected the port and docks. The Dnieper rapids made it hard to reach without using ‘camels’, while a bar beneath the town obstructed access to the Sea. Worse than that, Kherson was on the edge of the baking-hot steppes and marshy waterways and thousands of versts from the nearest ship timber, let alone food supplies.

The obstacles were overwhelming, but Potemkin repeatedly overcame them to build his city. No one in Petersburg believed it would be completed. Not for nothing did Catherine write to him: ‘Kherson will never be built without you.’ Simultaneously, the jealousy that was to ruin Potemkin’s reputation rose even before the first stone had been laid. ‘The foundation of Kherson will become famous,’ fumed Zavadovsky. ‘Its creator loves his project and pushes it.’¹⁷ He was right: Potemkin almost willed the town into existence and drove Hannibal relentlessly. By August, the Russo-Abyssinian had established twelve teams of workers and bought timber on the upper Dnieper in Russian Belorussia and Poland. Everything had to be floated down the river to Kherson.

Potemkin hired over 500 carpenters and thousands of workers, founded the shipyards and planned the town. The first keels of warships were laid down in May 1779. Two more were on the way by 1781. Serenissimus decided to employ the army, which started with its own wooden barracks, using mud wattle for the walls at first. Next he imported 1,000 criminals to work the quarries.¹⁸ Then he gave the merchant Faleev his big chance, persuading him to dynamite the rocky Dneiper rapids in return for a slice of Kherson’s future trade. Faleev, who invested in its success, undertook this major work. Potemkin supplied the gunpowder. By 1783, Faleev had succeeded to the extent that some barges could sail straight down to Kherson. The Prince rewarded him with the rank of major, raising him to nobility.¹⁹

Potemkin’s critics claimed that little was built and nothing was done well – and history has believed them. Fortunately, the well-born Westerns who visited Petersburg on their Grand Tours met Potemkin, who always directed them to Kherson. One of the first of these was a young English engineer, Samuel Bentham, brother of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy, who was to work with Potemkin for five years. In 1780, he saw Kherson already had 180 houses and had launched one sixty-four-gunned ship-of-the-line and five frigates, and marvelled: ‘He chose the spot not above two…years ago when there was not even a hut here.’ The timber, he noted, had to be floated down from a town in Poland that was later to become famous – Chernobyl.²⁰

Another intrepid Englishman, and a friend of Samuel Bentham, was Reginald Pole Carew, an Oxford graduate and Cornish landowner in his late twenties, who witnessed the next stage. He was the sort of young man who would later play the Great Game. Potemkin adopted Pole Carew, showing him his estates and fabriks (factories) round Petersburg before he headed south. Pole Carew’s notes, still unpublished, read as if he was either writing a book or engaged in amateur espionage. By the time he arrived, there were already 300 houses in Kherson. Apart from nine regiments of soldiers, ‘up to now the town is mainly inhabited by Polish Jews and Greeks…Soldiers, sailors, peasants are all being used…in building,’ but he noticed that the work on the fortifications was being done too fast ‘for fear of disgusting higher powers’.²¹ These were his real feelings, but he also tactfully told the Prince that ‘what I see here surpasses imagination’.²²

Potemkin was determined to attract trade to his Viceroyalty. In 1781, Pole Carew discussed a potential trading business with General Hannibal, and with Kherson’s two tycoons – Potemkin’s merchant Faleev and the Frenchman Antoine. Faleev had founded the Black Sea Company to trade with the Ottomans and soon launched his frigate, the Borysthenes. He also had the brandy farm for Potemkin’s three guberniya and supplied the soldiers with meat: Pole Carew reckoned he already made 500,000 roubles a year. Pole Carew listed the goods that could be traded in Kherson – wax, flags, rope, timber,²³ and was tempted by the trading opportunities. ‘It is a bourgeois of Kherson who writes to you,’ he told the Prince.²⁴

Antoine of Marseilles, later Baron de Saint-Joseph, was the town’s shipping magnate. Setting off to Petersburg, he called on the Prince proposing the creation of a trading post and free port at Kherson. Potemkin was delighted,²⁵ and invited Catherine to ‘abolish internal customs duties and to reconsider external ones’.²⁶ However keen he was on Britain, the Prince realized that France dominated Mediterranean trade from Marseilles and this was to have political consequences. By 1786, Antoine told Potemkin that, in the last year, eleven of his French ships had arrived from Marseilles.²⁷

Nonetheless, Kherson was a struggle. Potemkin supervised every detail when he had time: on 3 August 1783, he wrote to his engineer Colonel Gaks in Kherson, ‘I’m confirming for the second time that the building of the hospital must be finished…’. On 14 October, ‘I am surprised that in spite of being assured by you that the hospital is finished, it has not even been begun…’. Then he added: ‘It’s strange to me that sometimes orders are cancelled when they have been confirmed by me.’ In other words, if there was any deception in the building of Kherson, Potemkin was its victim, but he could not be everywhere at once. A week later, he was ordering Gaks to build two baths to fight the plague – ‘one for the absolutely healthy and another for the weak…’ and ‘Don’t forget to build breweries.’ But Hannibal and Gaks were simply not getting things accomplished. Potemkin was frustrated. The next February, Potemkin sacked Gaks and appointed Colonel Nikolai Korsakov, a talented engineer educated in Britain. Potemkin confirmed the annual budget of 233, 740 roubles, but wanted everything finished ‘in a short time’ while insisting on both ‘durability’ and ‘beauty inside’.²⁸ The Prince himself approved every plan, each building façade – from the school to the archbishop’s house to his own residence – and it began to take shape.²⁹

A painting of Kherson in its Museum shows its central square as Potemkin designed it: there is the beautiful church of St Catherine’s. Later, in 1790, the Prince was still beautifying it. When his favourite architect Ivan Starov came to the south, Potemkin ordered him to ‘remake the cupola in the cathedral in Kherson’ exactly like the one in his St Petersburg Palace, ‘and fix a place for the belfry’.³⁰ It was done. The dome and the bell-tower remain exactly as the Prince ordered. Potemkin’s palace stood at right angles to it.

His memoranda to his officials completely destroy the image of Potemkin in most Western accounts.³¹ These are the works of a man aware of the difficulties his officials faced. He was certainly authoritarian, concerned with the smallest details, but surprisingly flexible in giving second chances to overworked officials. Potemkin was aware as anyone that Kherson’s position made it extremely vulnerable to disease. Reading between the lines, it must have been a ghastly posting. Pole Carew recorded that the shipwrights sent from Kronstadt and Petersburg had ‘died off’. When ships from Istanbul and soldiers from across the Empire poured into the area as Potemkin organized the taking of the Crimea, the threat of an epidemic became serious. By 1786, the French merchant Antoine had lost his brothers and many employees. Kherson ‘resembled a vast hospital: one only saw dead and dying’. The Prince tried to control local health and keep the fevers at bay.³² He took special care with hospitals and breweries (to provide drinking water), even telling the inhabitants to eat greens,³³ and personally appointed the doctors³⁴ to his hospitals.^*1

Everything was driven by the manic enthusiasm of the man Catherine called the ‘young Colossus of Kherson’.³⁵ His infectious energy was the only thing that could triumph over the sloth of the Russian bureaucrat: returning from his new town, he spoke to James Harris ‘with raptures of the climate, soil, and situation of Kherson.’³⁶ But every visit revealed more mistakes by his subordinates. That was why he began to spend more and more time away and why Catherine admitted that the trips were worth it, however much she missed him.³⁷

It is usually claimed that Potemkin concealed the mistakes in Kherson. On the contrary. He confided a catalogue of failures to Catherine. He dismissed Hannibal – apparently for building the fortifications poorly; he could not find any sense in the Admiralty; too much money had been spent; there was not enough wood; the timber they had was unsound. ‘Oh Matushka, what a mess and what dishonesty is here in the Admiralty!’ It was too hot. The buildings still stood in a wilderness. ‘Nobody has even had the sense to plant trees. I’ve now ordered it.’³⁸ He demanded more experts: ‘send the staff according the enclosed list. There aren’t enough smiths here. I’ve sent to Tula for them.’

The town continued to grow. When Kirill Razumovsky visited in 1782, he was amazed by the stone buildings, fortress, battle-ships, ‘spacious suburb’, barracks and Greek merchant ships: ‘Imagine all this and you will understand my bewilderment for not so long ago there was nothing here but a building where beehives are kept for the winter.’³⁹ Francisco de Miranda, the South American revolutionary, who was also temporarily adopted by Potemkin, had the chance to examine Kherson in December 1786. He claimed it had 40,000 inhabitants – 30,000 military and 10,000 civilians. There were 1,200 ‘very good houses built on stone’.⁴⁰ After Potemkin’s death, the English traveller Maria Guthrie and the Russian writer Sumarokov praised the ‘handsome town’⁴¹ with St Catherine’s, fourteen churches, synagogue, 22,000 Orthodox inhabitants and 2,500 Jews.⁴²

Potemkin learned from his mistakes in Kherson. He boasted that his use of soldier-labour saved the state money, but he had a tsar’s conception of budgets. Work had to be done fast, but, if it was not done correctly, like the fortress, he insisted on starting again: results were paramount, costs irrelevant to a semi-emperor who was allowed to treat the imperial Treasury as his own. However, the best rebuttal of Potemkin’s critics is today’s shipbuilding city.^*2

Serenissimus commissioned two full-length icons for Kherson’s fine neo-Classical church – one of St George, the other of St Catherine, he wielding a lance and wearing Roman military uniform, breastplate and red cloak, she in a golden dress and ermine-lined red cloak. His eyes are cast upward, she looks right at us. Then it strikes one: if St Catherine is a passable likeness of the Empress, St George⁴³ is unmistakably Potemkin.^*3

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If the fall of the Zaporogians made Kherson possible, the end of the Crimean Khanate gave Potemkin his real chance to develop the south. It also made Kherson more of a commercial town and less necessary as a naval base because the Crimea was so well endowed with harbours. Kherson perched on the steppe, while the Crimea was the marketplace of the Black Sea, the hothouse and kitchen-garden of Constantinople.

Potemkin and his Empress longed to follow in Peter the Great’s footsteps. Peter had taken the Baltic from the Swedes, built a Russian fleet there and founded a city there. Now Potemkin had taken the Black Sea from the Tartars and Turks, built a Russian fleet and longed to found a Petersburg of his own. ‘Petersburg established by the Baltic Sea is the Northern capital of Russia, Moscow the middle one and let Kherson of Akhtiar be the southern capital of my Sovereign,’ he wrote to Catherine.⁴⁴ Kherson again! They loved the very word.

First, he attended to the creation of a port for his fleet. Akhtiar, Serenissimus told the Empress from the Crimea in June 1783, ‘is the best harbour in the world’.⁴⁵ It was to be Russia’s new naval base and Potemkin hurried to fortify it and build shipyards,⁴⁶ before he had even fully annexed the Khanate.⁴⁷ The Prince, of course, gave Akhtiar a Greek name: Sebastopol. He immediately founded a city in the ‘natural amphitheatre on the side of a hill’⁴⁸ and ordered his engineer Korsakov to build ‘a strong fortification. The Admiralty must be conveniently located for unloading’ and there must be a road through the peninsula ‘as good as a Roman’ one. ‘I shall name it the Catherine Road.’⁴⁹ The engineer agreed with Potemkin’s choice for the city: ‘The most suitable place there is that which Your Highness has fixed…’.⁵⁰ Only four years later, when Potemkin visited the city with his friend Francisco de Miranda, the South American counted ‘fourteen frigates, three ships-of-the-line of 66 guns and a gunboat’. Miranda immediately grasped the value of Potemkin’s new city: the harbour could hold a fleet of ‘over 100 vessels’. If faced with disaster, a fleet could be repaired within a week.⁵¹ Soon after Potemkin’s death, Maria Guthrie⁵² called it ‘one of the finest ports in the world’. Sebastopol remains Russia’s (and Ukraine’s) greatest naval base.^*4

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Serenissimus was ecstatic about his Crimea, touring the peninsula while ordering his favourite engineer Nikolai Korsakov to advise on fortifications, and his scientific experts such as the botanist Hablitz, who had endured the trauma of Potemkin’s Persian expedition, to report on population and fauna.

‘I don’t describe the beauties of the Crimea because it would take too much time…’, the Prince told his Empress in June 1783, as he annexed the peninsula and celebrated its charms, strategic potential and Classical history.⁵³ It is impossible not to share in Potemkin’s feverish and exuberant fiesta of creation in that magical place with which he had fallen in love. Even today, it is easy to see why: as one passes through the Perekop Straits, past the salt lakes, which were the Khan’s major source of income, the northern Crimea appears flat, arid, monotonous. But an hour to the south and it changes completely into a lush garden of Eden that most resembles the vineyards of southern Italy or Spain. Hills of greenery and vines rise to the battlements of medieval Genoese fortresses overlooking white cliffs and azure bays. Potemkin, who adored gardens, began to plant trees, celebrating the birth of the Grand Duke’s children by laying out avenues of bay trees and olive groves. He imagined the Empress visiting his ‘paradise’. The Romanovs in the next century and the twentieth-century Politburo apparatchiks were to make the Crimea their elite holiday resort, but Potemkin, to his credit, always wanted it to be far more than that.⁵⁴

His first moves were to protect the Moslem Tartars from the brutish philistinism of his own soldiery: again and again, he ordered his generals to ‘treat the inhabitants kindly and not to offend them. The chiefs of…regiments must set an example.’⁵⁵ He put special observers with regiments to keep an eye on their behaviour – or, as he put it, ‘for the villages’ protection’ – and report to him ‘all forbidden actions’, and placed the Taurian region under Crimean murzas, especially the renegade Iakub Aga, who had become Yakov Izmailovich Rudzevich.⁵⁶ As he told Catherine, he gave money to maintain mosques and muftis. Indeed, when he travelled through the Crimea with Francisco de Miranda, he always met the local mufti and made a donation to his mosque.⁵⁷ Potemkin gave the Tartar murzas Russian nobility and the right to own land.⁵⁸ Typically, he formed a Tartar Crimean army, a little one for display.⁵⁹ It was traditional Russian imperialism to co-opt the Moslem hierarchies, but Potemkin’s sensitive care for them is unusual in a Russian soldier of any epoch.

The Tartars were not farmers and never developed the land: ‘This peninsula may become even better if we get rid of the Tartars by making them leave…God knows, they are not worth this soil and the Kuban is a suitable place for them.’ Potemkin shared the instincts of Russian imperialists to uproot people like chess pieces – but, he did not move them. In fact, he often favoured them and went to great lengths to make them stay. But thousands of the Tartars left anyway: their attitude was neatly put in the back-handed compliment of a Crimean mufti to Miranda: he remembered Potemkin taking the Crimea as ‘a woman remembers the man who deflowers her’.⁶⁰

Potemkin decided that the Crimean capital should be built on the Tartar town of Ak-mechet in the dry, flat middle of the peninsula: he called it Simferopol, still the capital today,⁶¹ and still the same flat, carefully laid-out, dull city created by Potemkin.⁶² The massive scale of Potemkin’s plans extended from Kherson to Sebastopol, from Balaklava, Theodosia, Kerch, Yenikale and back to Kherson again. In all these places, new cities were founded or existing fortresses expanded into towns. But Colonel Korsakov was equal to all this. ‘Matushka,’ Potemkin raved to Catherine, ‘we’ve never had an engineer like Korsakov before…This man has to be looked after.’⁶³ Within five years, Sebastopol and its fleet were ready to be inspected by the two Caesars of the east.

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In 1784, Potemkin decided to build a sumptuous capital for this southern Empire – a veritable new Athens – on the site of a small Zaporogian village called Palavitsa. He wished to call it ‘Ekaterinoslav’. Incapable of doing anything by halves, he fell in love with the name because it meant ‘Catherine’s Glory’ and he wanted to use it everywhere. (Indeed he also used it to rename his entire Viceroyalty.) ‘Most Merciful Sovereign,’ wrote the Prince, ‘where, if not in the land devoted to your glory, should there be a city with magnificent buildings? That is why I undertook the development of projects that would suit the high name of this city.’ Potemkin envisaged a neo-Classical metropolis: its law courts were to resemble ‘ancient basilikas’, its marketplace a huge semi-circle ‘like the Propylaeum, or threshold of Athens’. The governor-general’s house would be in ‘Greek and Roman style’.⁶⁴

Catherine, whose visions of Classicism and altruism were the same as his, approved his plans.⁶⁵ Serenissimus considered possible designs for over a year. Finally, in 1786, the French architect Claude Giroir produced his design for a central square and a grid of streets at right angles to the Dnieper, but Potemkin’s architect Starov perfected the final plans. In January 1787, the Prince proudly displayed them to Francisco de Miranda, who was impressed with their ‘Roman grandeur and architectural taste’. Potemkin wanted to employ 16,000 workmen for nine or ten years. Miranda wondered if it would ever be completed.⁶⁶

Nothing in his career provoked such mockery as Ekaterinoslav. The building of a town here was necessary to develop the empty Zaporogian steppes, but the sin was its grandeur. Even the anti-Potemkin lies are interesting because of the light they shed on the extent to which Potemkin’s enemies would go to blacken his name. Most histories claim Potemkin founded Ekaterinoslav in an unhealthy place and almost immediately had to move it, due to his own incompetence. It is true that in 1778, six years earlier, he had allowed a provincial governor to found a settlement for Armenians and Greeks, the Crimean refugees, on the River Kilchen, using the name ‘Ekaterinoslav’. Now he simply took the name for his ‘famous city’, but he did not move the original one, which already had Greek, Armenian and Catholic quarters with three churches⁶⁷ and almost 3,000 inhabitants. He simply renamed it Novomoskovsk.⁶⁸

His enemies said the Prince planned to build a cathedral in the middle of this heretofore empty steppe larger than St Peter’s in Rome, like the African dictator of a penniless state building the biggest cathedral in the world in the middle of the jungle. Ever since, historians, even Potemkin’s only modern biographer George Soloveytchik, have repeated this embarrassing ambition as a sign of the Prince’s overweening delusions of grandeur.⁶⁹ However, Potemkin may have mentioned St Peter’s but he never actually proposed building it: in his letter to Catherine, he wrote, ‘I imagine here an excellent cathedral, a kind of imitation of St Paul’s-outside-the-walls-of-Rome, devoted to the Transfiguration of God, as a sign of the transformation of this land by your care, from a barren steppe to an ample garden, and from the wilderness of animals to a home, welcoming people from all lands.’⁷⁰ San Paolo-fuorile-mura was admittedly an ambitious undertaking, but not quite as absurd as St Peter’s. It is unlikely Catherine would ever have signed off on a copy of St Peter’s nor assigned the huge tranches of two and three million roubles to the development of the south if Potemkin’s ideas were so ludicrous. Somehow, St Peter’s was substituted.

The only part of the city that existed from the beginning was the University of Ekaterinoslav, with its own musical conservatoire.⁷¹ He immediately moved the Greek gymnasium, founded on his Ozerki estate as part of the Greek Project, to his New Athens, saying he had saved enough to rebuild the school there.⁷² The conservatoire was closest to his lyrical heart. ‘It’s the first time’, sneered Cobenzl to Joseph in November 1786, ‘someone has decided to establish a corps de musique in a town before it’s even been built.’⁷³ Potemkin hired Giuseppe Sarti, his personal composer–conductor, as the first head of the conservatoire. It was not just Sarti: the Prince really was hiring musical staff in Italy before a city was constructed. ‘Enclosed, I have the honour of presenting you, Monseigneur, the bill of 2800 Roubles for the order of Your Highness,’ wrote a certain Castelli from Milan on 21 March 1787, ‘to Monsieur Joseph Canta who has passed them to the four Professors of Music…They plan to leave for Russia on the 26th…’.⁷⁴ The destiny of the four Milanese professors is unknown.

In 1786, he ordered local Governor Ivan Sinelnikov to enrol two painters, Neretin and Bukharov, as professors of art at the university, with salaries of 150 roubles. Even in the midst of the war in January 1791, he ordered Ekaterinoslav’s Governor to employ a Frenchman named de Guienne as ‘historian at the Academy’ on a salary of 500 roubles. As Potemkin told Sinelnikov, the public schools had to be improved to provide the university with good students. Overall, 300,000 roubles was assigned to the educational establishments alone.⁷⁵ This was derided. Yet it is hard to fault Potemkin’s priorities when he paid as much attention to teachers as to battleships.

All this was undoubtedly eccentric, but an ability to turn his ideas into reality was at the heart of Potemkin’s genius. Much that seemed ridiculous after his death seemed possible during his life: the scale on which he created not just cities but the Black Sea Fleet sounded unlikely but he alone made it happen. So the university and city could have been built – but only in his lifetime. His vision was a noble one, far wider than just the conservatoire: it was to be an international Orthodox college where Potemkin believed ‘young people’ from Poland, Greece, Wallachia and Moldavia could study.⁷⁶ As ever with the Prince, his choice of students was closely connected to his aims for the Empire and for himself. He was always trying to train better sailors for his ships. In 1787, after Catherine’s visit, he united all the naval academies in the region and Petersburg and moved them to Ekaterinoslav. This was to be the academy of the Greek Project, the school for Potemkin’s kingdoms.⁷⁷

—

The work did not begin until mid-1787, then was delayed by the war so that little of it was built. But not as little as everyone thinks. In 1790, Starov arrived in the south, and laid new plans for the whole city, especially its cathedral and the Prince’s Palace, all approved by Potemkin, on 15 February 1790. The professors’ residences and the administrative buildings for the university were finished. By 1792, there were 546 state buildings and just 2,500 inhabitants.⁷⁸ Its Governor, Vasily Kahovsky, reported to the Empress after the Prince’s death that the town was laid out and continuing. Without its master, would it continue?⁷⁹ By 1815, a travelling official reported that it was ‘more like some Dutch colony than a provincial administrative centre’.⁸⁰ Yet something of his Athens remains.

—

Ekaterinoslav never became a southern Petersburg; its university was never the Oxford of the steppes. The gap between hope and reality made this Potemkin’s biggest failure and it has been used to discredit much else that was done well. Yet none of the historians of the last two centuries had visited Ekaterinoslav, which, like Sebastopol, was a closed city in Soviet times. When one looks more closely at the city, now called Dniepropetrovsk, it becomes clear its position was admirably chosen on the high and green bank of a bend of the Dnieper, where the great river is almost a mile wide. Potemkin’s main Catherine Street became the modern Karl Marx Prospekt, still called ‘the longest, widest, most elegant avenue in all the Russians’ by locals. (William Hastie, the Scottish architect, expanded on this grid in his 1816 city plan.)⁸¹

In the middle of the city stands an eighteenth-century church, now newly alive with Orthodox worshippers. Its name – Church of the Transformation – is the one Potemkin suggested in 1784. It is a grand and imposing edifice, completely in proportion to the size of its city. It has a high spire, Classical pillars and golden cupola, based on Starov’s original plans. Begun in 1788 during the war, completed long after Potemkin’s death, in 1837, there stands the Prince’s noble cathedral in the midst of the city that was supposed never to have been built.⁸² Not far from the church is a hideous yellow triumphal arch of Soviet design that leads to Potemkin Park, which still contains the massive Potemkin Palace.⁸³ It was to be another eighty years after Potemkin’s death before musical conservatoires were opened in St Petersburg and Moscow. But Ekaterinoslav was to flourish most under Soviet planning when it became a toiling industrial centre – as Potemkin had wanted.^*5

—

Potemkin’s cities advanced as he gained territory. The last cities he sponsored were made possible by the conquests of the Second Turkish War – Nikolaev, by the fall of the fortress of Ochakov, and Odessa, by the push round the Black Sea.

On 27 August 1789, the Prince scrawled out the order to found Nikolaev, named after St Nikolai, the saint of seafarers on whose day Potemkin finally stormed Ochakov. Built on a high, cool and breezy spot where the Ingul river meets the Bug about twenty miles upriver from Kherson and fifty from the Black Sea, Nikolaev was the best planned and most successful of his cities (except Odessa).

It was built by Faleev on Potemkin’s precise orders, sweeping in vision, precise in detail. In a twenty-one point memorandum, he ordered Faleev to build a monastery, move naval headquarters from Kherson to Nikolaev, construct a military school for 300, fund a church from the income of local taverns, recast the broken bell of the Mejigorsky Convent, adding copper to it, cultivate the land ‘according to the English method as practised by three British-educated assistants of Professor Livanov’, build hospitals and resthomes for invalids, create a free port, cover all fountains with marble, build a Turkish bath and an admiralty – and then establish a town council and a police force.

Faleev amazingly was able to parry these thrusts of energy one by one. He answered Potemkin’s specific orders, ‘Your Highness ordered me to’ and then reported that virtually all had been done – and more, from settling Old Believer priests to sowing kitchen gardens. Shipyards were built first. Peasants, soldiers and Turkish prisoners built the city: 2,500 were working there during 1789. Faleev evidently worked them too hard because Serenissimus ordered their protection and daily rations of hot wine. There is a contemporary print in the Nikolaev Museum showing the soldiers and Turkish prisoners-of-war working on foot, supervised by mounted Russian officers. Another shows oxen dragging logs to build the city.

By October, Faleev could tell the Prince that the landing stage was finished and that the earthmoving by the conscripts and Turks would be finished within a month. There were already nine stone and five wooden barracks. In 1791, the main shipyards were moved from Kherson to Nikolaev.⁸⁴ Here we see how Potemkin worked. There is no trace of the layabout, nor of the clown who performed for Westerners, nor of the grandiose autocrat who paid no attention to detail. Potemkin pushed Faleev. ‘Work quickly,’ he wrote about one battleship he needed and ‘Strain all your forces.’ Next, he thanked him for the watermelons he had sent but added, ‘You cannot imagine how my honour and the future of Nikolaev shipyard depends on this ship.’⁸⁵ The first frigate from his new city was launched before his death – and his own palace was almost complete.

Four years later, the visiting Maria Guthrie acclaimed its 10,000 inhabitants, ‘remarkably long, broad, straight streets’ and ‘handsome public buildings’. The city’s position even today is ideal: it is well laid out and planned, though few of Potemkin’s buildings survive. Its shipyards still work where they were built by him 200 years ago.⁸⁶

—

Odessa was conquered by Potemkin, who ordered a town and fortress to be built there – though it was neither named nor started until after his death. When the Prince took the Ottoman fort of Hadjibey in 1789, he recognized that it was an outstanding and strategic site, ordered the old castle to be blown up and personally chose the site of the port and settlement. Work was to start immediately.

This was being done when he died, but the town was formally founded three years later by his protégé José (Osip) de Ribas, the Spanish adventurer from Naples who had helped Orlov-Chesmensky kidnap ‘Princess Tarakanova’. ‘General (later Admiral) de Ribas was accomplished in mind, artifice and talent, but no saint,’ according to Langeron. His portrait by Lampi shows his foxy, ruthless and subtle face. In 1776, he married the illegitimate daughter of Catherine’s friend and artistic supremo Ivan Betskoi, who had had an affair with the Empress’s mother. They became one of the most politically adept couples in Petersburg. Henceforth, wherever the Prince was, Ribas was never far away. Always vigorous and competent, whether building Potemkin’s ships, commanding his fleets or procuring his mistresses, Ribas joined Popov and Faleev as Potemkin’s three superlative men of action.^*6

Catherine named the port after Odessos – the Ancient Greek town that was believed to be nearby – but she feminized it to Odessa. It remains one of the jewels of Potemkin’s legacy.⁸⁷

—

‘I report that the first ship to be launched will be called the Glory of Catherine – Ekaterinoslav,’ wrote Potemkin over-enthusiastically to his Empress. ‘Please allow me to give it this name.’ The name ‘Ekaterinoslav’ had become an obsession. Cities, ships and regiments groaned under its grandeur. This concerned the prudent Empress: ‘Please don’t give too grandiose names to the ships, lest such loud names become a burden to them…Do what you like with the names but free the reins because it’s better to be than to seem.’⁸⁸ But Potemkin was not going to change Catherine’s Glory even to protect the glory of Catherine at her own behest. So he ignored her request and, in September, proudly announced the launch from his Kherson shipyards of the sixty-six-gun ship-of-the-line named Catherine’s Glory.⁸⁹ This is a most characteristic exchange.^*7

The Prince was right to be excited because ships-of-the-line, those hulking floating fortresses with their rows of over forty or fifty guns, the same as some entire armies, were the eighteenth century’s most prestigious weapons – the equivalent of aircraft carriers. (Catherine granted Potemkin the initial 2.4 million roubles to finance this on 26 June 1786.) The construction of a whole fleet of them has been compared by a modern historian to the cost and effort of a space programme. However, Potemkin’s critics claim that the ships were rotten, if they were built at all. This was nonsense. Pole Carew carefully examined the shipbuilding in progress. There were three ships-of-the-line of sixty-six guns in an ‘advanced state’ while frigates of thirty and forty guns had already been launched. Four more keels were laid. The state was not the only shipbuilder there – Faleev was building his merchantmen too. Down at Gluboka, thirty-five versts towards the sea, there were already seven more frigates of between twenty-four and thirty-two guns. When Miranda, who had no European prejudices and broad military experience, visited five years later, he reported that neither the timber nor the design of the ships could be bettered and considered the workmanship of a better standard than those of either Spanish or French vessels. They were built, he said, offering the highest praise one could give a ship in those days, ‘in the English manner’.⁹⁰

This showed that he knew what he was talking about, for the German, French and Russian critics of Potemkin’s ships did not realize that his timber came from the same places as timber for English warships. Furthermore, they were built by sailors and engineers trained in England such as Potemkin’s admiral Nikolai Mordvinov (who married an English girl) and the engineer Korsakov. Indeed, by 1786, Kherson had an English ambience. ‘Mordvinov and Korsakov both are much more like Englishmen than any foreigners I ever met,’ decided that ardent traveller Lady Craven.⁹¹ Yet Kaiser Joseph, who was no expert on naval matters, claimed the ships were ‘built of green timber, worm eaten’.⁹²

By 1787, the Prince had created a formidable fleet that the British Ambassador put at twenty-seven battleships. If one counts ships-of-the-line as having over forty guns, he had twenty-four of them, built in nine years, starting at Kherson. Later Sebastopol’s perfect harbour became the naval base of Potemkin’s fleet and Nikolaev its main shipyard. This, together with the thirty-seven ships-of-the-line of the Baltic Fleet, instantly placed Russian seapower almost equal to Spain, just behind France – though far behind the 174 ships-of-the-line of Britain, the world’s only naval superpower.

Potemkin is the father of the Black Sea Fleet, just as Peter the Great created the Baltic one. The Prince was proudest of his fleet. It was his special ‘child’ and he poses in Lampi’s rare portrait in his white uniform as Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets with the Euxine (Black) Sea behind him. Catherine knew it was his creation. ‘It might seem an exaggeration,’ a British envoy recorded Serenissimus saying, at the end of his life, ‘but he could, almost literally, say that every plank, used in building the fleet, was carried on his shoulders.’⁹³

—

His other Herculean effort was to attract the ordinary folk to populate these vast empty territories. The settlement of colonists and ex-soldiers on the frontiers was an old Russian practice but Potemkin’s campaign of recruitment, in which Catherine issued manifestos offering all manner of incentives to settlers – no taxes for ten years, free cattle or farming equipment, spirits or brewery franchises – was astonishing in its imagination, scale and success. Hundreds of thousands were moved, housed, and settled, and received welfare gifts of ploughs, money and oxen. Frederick the Great had set the standard of colonization during the retablissement of his war-torn territories by tolerating all sects, so that, by the time of his death, 20 per cent of Prussians were immigrants. The Prince had a modern understanding of the power of public-relations. He advertised in foreign newspapers and created a network of recruiting agents across Europe. ‘The foreign newspapers’, he explained to Catherine, ‘are full of praises for the new settlements set up in New Russia and Azov.’ The public would read about the privileges granted to the Armenian and Greek settlers and ‘realize their full value’. He also recommended the modern idea of using Russian embassies to help recruitment. Potemkin had been an enthusiastic colonist since coming to power. Even in the mid-1770s, he was recruiting immigrants for his new settlements on the Mozdok Line of the north Caucasus.⁹⁴ His ideal settlers would plant, plough, trade and manufacture in peacetime, and, when war came, ride out against the Turks.⁹⁵

Potemkin’s first settlers were the Albanians, from Orlov-Chesmensky’s Mediterranean fleet of 1769, and the Crimean Christians. The former initially settled in Yenikale, the latter in their own towns like Mariupol. The Albanians were soldier–farmers. Potemkin founded schools and hospitals as well as towns for these immigrants. Once the Crimea was annexed, Potemkin formed the Albanians into regiments and settled them at Balaklava. The Prince specifically designated Mariupol for the Crimean Greeks. As with all his towns, he supervised its development, adding to it throughout his career. By 1781 the Azov Governor reported that much of it was built. There were four churches, the Greeks had their own court and it grew into a prosperous Greek trading town. Later Potemkin founded Nachkichevan, on the lower Don near Azov, and Gregoripol (named after himself, of course), on the Dniester, for the Armenians.⁹⁶

Serenissimus racked his brains to find productive citizens inside the Empire, attracting noblemen and their serfs,⁹⁷ retired and wounded soldiers, Old Believers^*8 or raskolniki,⁹⁸ Cossacks and, naturally, women to make homes for them. The girls were despatched southwards like the mail order brides of Midwestern settlers in nineteenth century America.⁹⁹ Typically, Potemkin also targeted impoverished village priests.¹⁰⁰ Outside the Empire, he offered amnesty to exiles, such as fugitive serfs,¹⁰¹ raskolniki, and Cossacks who had fled to Poland or Turkey. Families, villages and whole towns of people moved, or returned, to settle in his provinces. It is estimated that, by 1782, he had doubled the population of New Russia and Azov.¹⁰²

Potemkin’s campaign intensified after the conquest of the Crimea – and, using a burgeoning network of middlemen, he extended it to the whole of Europe. The population of the Crimea had been halved throughout its troubles to about 50,000 males.¹⁰³ The Prince believed that the territories boasted only 10 per cent of the populations they should contain. ‘I am using all my powers,’ he told Catherine. ‘From diverse places, I have summoned colonists knowledgeable in all spheres of the economy…’. He wielded his massive powers to decide who should and should not be taxed and how much land settlers, whether noblemen or foreigners, should receive. Immigrants were usually freed from taxes for a year and a half, later raised to six years.¹⁰⁴

The agents were paid 5 roubles per settler. ‘I have found a man who is charged to bring foreign colonists to the Crimea,’ one of them wrote the Prince. ‘I’ve agreed with him to pay thirty roubles per family delivered in those places.’ Later he sent Potemkin another agent with whom ‘I’ve agreed 200 souls but he promises he can bring considerably more.’¹⁰⁵

The peasants of southern Europe were particularly fertile ground. In 1782, sixty-one Corsican families arrived to be settled near Kherson.¹⁰⁶ In early 1783, Potemkin was making arrangements to receive Corsicans and Jews recruited by the Duc de Crillon. But the Prince decided, ‘I do not consider it necessary to increase the number of these inhabitants except those already sent by Count Mocenigo’ (who was the Russian minister in Florence). In the Prince’s archives, we can follow this strange trade in honest farmers and opportunistic rascals. Some wrote directly to the Prince’s Chancellery. In a typical letter, potential Greek settlers, named Panaio and Alexiano, asked to bring their family from ‘the Archipelago’ so that they ‘can all come to make a colony bigger than that made with the Corsicans.’¹⁰⁷ Some of the agents were the worst sort of fairground hucksters: how many innocents did they gull? One suspects that landowners saw this as a convenient way to rid their estates of rogues. Potemkin did not mind. ‘They will be transported to Kherson,’ he wrote, ‘where everything is ready to receive them.’¹⁰⁸

The Prince also managed to attract the most industrious, sober settlers any empire-builder could wish for: the Mennonites of Danzig, who asked for the right to have their own churches and no taxes for ten years. Potemkin’s agent George Trappe gave them their terms – they would receive money for travel and houses when they arrived. The privileges were granted. Potemkin’s letter to his Scottish banker, Richard Sutherland, shows how the chief minister of the Empire personally arranged the details of moving relatively small numbers of people across Europe: ‘Monsieur, As Her Imperial Majesty has deigned to accord privileges to the Mennonites who wish to come to settle in the Government of Ekaterinoslav…be so good as to prepare the necessary sums, in Danzig, Riga and Kherson, for their voyage and settlement…Following the mercy that Her Imperial Majesty had deigned to grant to these good farmers, I trust there will be no obstacle in delivering the sums…to prevent their settlement in Ekaterinoslav.’¹⁰⁹ There are many such unpublished letters in the archives. The 228 families, probably 2,000 people, set off on their long journey to found eight colonies in early 1790.¹¹⁰

At the same time, over in Kherson, he was ordering the incompetent Colonel Gaks to welcome a party of Swedes for the Swedish settlement, ‘where they will find not only houses…For foodstuffs, give five roubles to everyone.’¹¹¹ Another 880 Swedes were settled in the new city of Ekaterinoslav. Thousands of Moldavians and Wallachians, Orthodox Rumanians under Ottoman rule, also flocked across the borders. By 1782, some 23,000 had arrived. Many lived in Elisabethgrad, where they outnumbered Russians. ‘A Greek of Bulgaria’, reads a typical letter to Potemkin from one of his agents in 1785, ‘has told me there are a number of Moldavians on the frontiers of Moldavia – it would be easy to persuade them all to come as immigrants.’ No doubt they came.¹¹²

—

Almost uniquely among Russian soldiers and statesmen, Potemkin was more than just tolerant of Jews: he studied their culture, enjoyed the company of their rabbis, and became their champion. The Enlightenment had already changed attitudes to Jews. Empress Elisabeth had banned all these ‘enemies of Christ’ from the Empire in 1742. Maria Theresa hated Jews so much that, as late as 1777, when Potemkin was giving them privileges for settlement, she wrote: ‘I know of no greater plague than this race.’ She could not bear to set eyes on a Jew: she spoke to her banker Diego d’Aguilar from behind a screen. But her son Joseph II greatly improved their lot.¹¹³ When Catherine usurped the throne, playing the Orthodox card, she was in no position to favour the Jews. Her October 1762 decree invited all settlers ‘except Jews’, but she secretly let them in by ordering Count Browne, her Irish Governor-General of Livonia, specifically not to ask the religion of potential settlers.¹¹⁴

The Partition of Poland in 1772 brought large numbers of Jews – about 45,000 – into Russia for the first time. Potemkin first encountered the many who lived on his Krichev estate in ex-Polish lands. When the Prince invited settlers to the south as early as 1775, he added the rare coda: ‘even Jews’. On 30 September 1777, he set the policy: Jews were allowed to settle in his lands, sometimes in ‘the empty smallholdings left by Zaporogian Cossacks’, providing they brought five Polish settlers each and money to invest. Later he made this more appetizing: no taxes for seven years and the right to trade in wines and spirits; they would be protected from marauding soldiers; have their disputes adjudicated by rabbis; be permitted synagogues, graveyards and the right to import their wives from Jewish communities in Poland. These immigrants were useful: apart from commerce, brickmaking, which Potemkin needed for his new towns, was a Jewish trade. Soon Kherson and Ekaterinoslav, melting-pots of Cossacks, raskolniki and Greeks, were at least partly Jewish towns.¹¹⁵

Serenissimus became especially friendly with Joshua Zeitlin, a remarkable Jewish merchant, and Hebraic scholar, who travelled with the Prince, managed his estates, built towns, arranged financial deals for supplying his armies, and even ran the restored mint at Kaffa in the Crimea – he appears throughout the archives. Zeitlin ‘walked with Potemkin like a brother and friend’ – a relationship unique in Russian history because the Jew remained proudly unassimilated, steeped in rabbinical learning and piety, yet standing near the top of the Prince’s entourage. Potemkin promoted him to the rank of ‘Court advisor,’ thereby giving him noble status and allowing him to own serfs and estates. Russian Jews called Zeitlin, ‘Ha-sar’ – Lord. The Prince enjoyed Zeitlin’s ability to do business as well as discuss Talmudic theology and they were often together. As the two inspected new roads and towns, Zeitlin ‘would ride on a majestic horse alongside Potemkin.’ While the Prince accepted petitions, the noble and plutocratic rabbi ‘would accept halakhic queries from…scholars. He would get down from his horse and compose halakhic responses in a kneeling position,’ and then remount and ride on with Serenissimus. It is hard to overstate what an astonishing vision of tolerance this was, not merely for Russia, but for Europe.

Potemkin helped the Jews and repeatedly intervened to defend them. During Catherine’s visit to the south in 1787, he even sponsored the delegation, led by Zeitlin, that petitioned her to stop Jews being called ‘zhidy’ – ‘Yids.’ Catherine received them and decreed that henceforth they should be called ‘evrei’ – ‘Hebrews’. When Zeitlin clashed with the Prince’s banker, Sutherland, Potemkin even backed his beloved Jews against his beloved British.¹¹⁶ A variety of Jewish rabbis soon joined Zeitlin in Potemkin’s bizarre court of mullahs and priests. It was this peculiar tolerance that led his anti-Semitic noble critics to sneer that the Prince favoured any foreigners with ‘a big snout’ – but Potemkin was never bound by the prejudices of others.¹¹⁷

No wonder the Prince became a Jewish hero. Wherever he went, particularly in Belorussia, crowds of excited Jews prepared such elaborate welcomes that they sometimes irritated him. They would offer him ‘big trays of silver, bread, salt and lemons’, which Miranda, who observed these rituals in Kherson, drily described as ‘doubtless some kind of hospitality ceremony’.¹¹⁸

On Potemkin’s death, Zeitlin retired to his sumptuous palace at Ustye in Belorussia, where this unusual financier patronized Jewish learning in his Hebraic library and synagogue, conducted scientific experiments in his laboratory, and held his own court, with the eccentricity and magnificence of a Jewish Potemkin. The position of Russian Jews again deteriorated. They were never again to have such an eminent protector.¹¹⁹

Next, the Prince had the idea of importing British convicts to settle the Crimea.

Skip Notes

*1 When this author visited Kherson, it was still infested with insects: the bed and ceiling in its main hotel so teemed with mosquitoes that the white of the sheets and the paint were literally blackened.

*2 The centre of the town is still mainly as Potemkin planned it. The fortress has been destroyed: only its two gate forts remain. The huge well, possibly the one Potemkin ordered Colonel Gaks to construct, remains covered by a grid. During the Second World War, Nazis threw executed Russians down it when they retreated. Potemkin’s immense Palace survived until 1922. The curving arsenal, the mint, admiralty and above all St Catherine’s Church remain. The church, with its sandy-coloured stone, its pillars and its noble Starov dome, was once used as a museum of atheism to display the decaying bodies of those buried in its graveyard, but is once again used as a church. Korsakov the engineer is buried in its churchyard. And the proudest boast of its priest and parishioners is that Potemkin its builder rests there beneath the church floor – see Epilogue.

*3 The author had heard the legend that the icons were by V.L. Borovikovsky and showed a saintly Potemkin and Catherine. The priest in the church had never heard it. It emerged that the icons from the church were stored in the Kherson Art Museum, where they are attributed to Mikhail Shibanov. Potemkin the dragon-slayer is instantly recognizable.

*4 Still a closed naval city, it is now shared by the Black Sea Fleets of Ukraine and Russia. None of Potemkin’s original buildings survived the Anglo-French siege of the Crimean War and the Nazi siege of the Second World War. But there is a monument just above the port – crowded and grey with battleships – that reads: ‘Here on 3 (14) June 1783 was founded the city of Sebastopol – the sea fortress of south Russia.’

*5 Dniepropetrovsk was noted in the Soviet era for providing the USSR with its clique of leaders in the 1970s. In 1938, a thirty-two-year-old Communist apparatchik named Leonid Brezhnev stepped over the corpses of his liquidated superiors in the midst of Stalin’s Great Purge to become chief of propaganda in Dniepropetrovsk. There he gathered together the cronies who were dominate the Soviet Union in 1964–80: the ‘Dniepropetrovsk Mafia’. Locals today recall that Brezhnev especially enjoyed entertaining in the Potemkin Palace.

*6 Today Deribas is one of Odessa’s most elegant boulevards.

*7 In Kherson today, on the site of the first docks stands a hideous concrete Soviet sculpture of a sailing ship. Its inscription of course does not mention Potemkin but it acclaims him nonetheless. ‘Here in 1783’, it reads, ‘was launched the first 66-gun ship-of-the-line of the Black Sea Fleet – “Glory of Catherine”.’

*8 These worshipped, according to the old rites of Orthodoxy. They had been excluded from mainstream Russian life for a century, often living in remote Siberian settlements to worship freely. Fascinated by their faith, Potemkin protected and tolerated them.