Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

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THE AMAZONS

Assemblage étonnant des dons de la nature

Qui joignez la génie à l’âme le plus pure

Délicat et sensible à la voix de l’honneur

Tendre, compatissant, et rempli de candeur

Aimable, gai, distrait, pensif et penseur sombre

De ton charmant, ce dernier trait est l’ombre

Apprends-moi par quel art, tout se trouve en ta tête?

The Prince de Ligne’s poem to Prince Potemkin, written on the Crimean journey

A regiment of Amazons rode out to meet the Kaiser when he pushed ahead to inspect Balaclava. Joseph was astonished by this trick of Potemkinian showmanship. The Prince’s Greek, or ‘Albanian’, military colony there already sported a neo-Classical costume – breastplates and cloaks, along with modern pistols. These Amazons were 200 female ‘Albanese’, all ‘pretty women’, according to Ligne, wearing skirts of crimson velvet, bordered with gold lace and fringe, green velvet jackets, also bordered with gold, white gauze turbans, spangles and white ostrich feathers. They were armed to the teeth ‘with muskets, bayonets and lances, Amazonian breastplates and long hair gracefully platted’. This caprice originated in a discussion between Catherine and Potemkin, in Petersburg before the trip, about the similarities between modern and Classical Greeks. He praised the courage of his Greeks and their wives. Catherine, no feminist, doubted the wives were much use. The Prince resolved to prove her wrong.^*1

The awkward Kaiser so admired this vision that he rewarded the beautiful nineteen-year-old Amazon commander, Elena Sardanova, wife of a captain, with a most unimperial kiss on the lips. Then he galloped back to meet the Empress. She encountered Potemkin’s Amazons on her next stop at the Greek village of Kadykovka as she processed down an avenue of laurels, oranges and lemons. Potemkin told her that the Amazons would like to demonstrate their shooting prowess. Catherine, probably secretly bored with military demonstrations, refused. Instead, she embraced Sardanova, gave her a diamond ring worth 1,800 roubles, and 10,000 roubles for her troop.¹

The Amazons joined Catherine’s escort of Tartars, Cossacks and Albanians for the rest of the trip. As the imperial procession trundled along the fecund, mountainous south-eastern shore of the Crimea, its most paradaisical countryside, where they passed Potemkin’s vineyards, it must have been quite a sight. The aura of success about the ‘Road to Byzantium’ allowed the two Caesars to relax. Joseph even admitted that Potemkin kept him waiting in his anteroom like an ordinary courtier but said he could not help but forgive that extraordinary man – quite a departure for a petulant Habsburg.²

Bouncing along in their carriage, Catherine and Joseph discussed the sort of things that heads of state have in common. Ligne sat in a royal sandwich between them, drifting off to sleep, only to wake up hearing one say, ‘I have thirty million subjects, only counting the male population,’ while the other admitted to only twenty million. One asked the other: ‘Has anyone ever tried to assassinate you?’ They discussed their alliance. ‘What the deuce shall we do with Constantinople?’, Joseph asked Catherine.³

At Kaffa, the old slave port refounded by Potemkin as Theodosia, Serenissimus played one of his tricks on Ségur. As the party climbed into the carriages that morning, Ségur bumped into an exquisite young girl in Circassian dress. The colour drained from his face: she was the precise image of his wife. ‘I thought for a moment Madame de Ségur had come from France to meet me. Imagination moves fast in the land of marvels.’ The girl disappeared. A beaming Potemkin took her place. ‘Isn’t the resemblance perfect then?’, he asked Ségur, adding that he had seen the wife’s portrait in his tent.

‘Complete and unbelievable,’ replied the stunned husband.

‘Well, batushka,’ said Potemkin, ‘this young Circassian girl belongs to a man who will let me dispose of her and, as soon as you reach St Petersburg, I will give her to you.’

Ségur tried to refuse because his wife might not appreciate this expression of affection. Potemkin was hurt and accused Ségur of false delicacy. So Ségur promised to accept another present,^*2 whatever it might be.⁴ The party climbed into the rolling, green hills of the interior to view Potemkin’s gardens, dairies, flocks of sheep and goats, and his pink ‘Tartar’ Palace at Karasubazaar.^*3 This, according to an Englishwoman visiting a decade later, was ‘one of those fairy palaces’ that arose ‘as if by magic by the secret arrangement of Potemkin, to surprise and charm’.⁵

They found an English island here. Capability Brown would have recognized the English gardens – ‘clumps of majestic trees, a most extensive lawn’, leading to ‘woods which make a delightful pleasure ground laid out by our countryman Gould’, and there was Henderson’s English dairy. Potemkin’s idyll was incomplete without a full English tea too. Henderson’s ‘nieces’, who had travelled out with Jeremy Bentham, caught Ligne’s experienced eye: ‘Two heavenly creatures dressed in white’ came out, sat the travellers down at a table covered in flowers ‘on which they placed butter and cream. It reminded me of breakfast in English novels.’ There were barracks and soldiers to inspect for Joseph, but he was completely uncharmed. ‘We had to go through mountain roads,’ he grumbled to Field-Marshal Lacey, ‘just to make us see a billy-goat, an Angora sheep and a sort of English garden.’⁶

Potemkin laid on a feu d’artifice that impressed even these firework-weary dignitaries. In the midst of a banquet, 20,000 big rockets exploded and 55,000 burning pots crowned the mountains twice with the initials of the Empress, while the English gardens were illuminated as if it was daylight. Joseph said he had never seen anything more awesome and could only marvel at the power of Potemkin, and therefore the Russian state, to do exactly what he wished, regardless of cost: ‘We in Germany or France would never have dared undertake what is being done here…Here human life and effort count for nothing…The master orders, the slave obeys.’⁷

When they were back again in Bakhchisaray, Tartar women again occupied the minds of the worldly courtiers. Ligne, younger at fifty than when he was thirty, could no longer restrain his curiosity. ‘What’s the use of going through an immense garden when one is forbidden to examine the flowers? Before I leave the Crimea, I must at least see a Tartar woman without her veil.’ So he asked Ségur: ‘Will you accompany me?’ Ligne and Ségur set off into the woods. They came upon three damsels washing, with their veils on the ground beside them. ‘But alas,’ recalled Ségur, none was pretty. Quite the contrary. ‘Mon Dieu!’, exclaimed Ligne. ‘Mahomet was quite right to order them to cover their faces.’ The women ran away screaming. The peepers were pursued by Tartars shrieking curses and throwing stones.

Next day at dinner, Catherine was silent, Potemkin sulky – both probably exhausted. Ligne thought he would cheer them up with his naughty escapade. It displeased the Tsarina: ‘Gentlemen, this joke was in poor taste.’ She had conquered this land and commanded that Islam should be respected. The Tartars were now her subjects under imperial protection. If some of her pages had behaved so childishly, she would have punished them.⁸

Even the Kaiser was affected by the voluptuous atmosphere. Catherine let Joseph, Ligne and Ségur (perhaps as a consolation after their reprimand) watch her audience with a Giray princess. But they were disappointed with this descendant of Genghis: ‘her painted eyebrows and shining cosmetics made her look like a piece of china in spite of her lovely eyes’, thought Ségur. ‘I would have preferred one of her servants,’ Joseph told Lacey. The Kaiser was so taken with the beauty of Circassian women that this supposed pillar of the Enlightenment decided to buy one:^*4 he gave one Lieutenant Tsiruli money to set off into the Kuban and purchase a ‘pretty Circassian woman’. Potemkin approved it. That mission’s outcome is unknown. However, Joseph did return to Vienna with what sounds like a different Circassian girl, aged six, whom he bought from a slave-trader.⁹ She was baptized as Elisabeth Gulesy, was educated at Court, and was left a pension in his will of 1,000 Gulden a year, not bad since Mozart’s pension, granted in 1787, was only 800. Later she married a nobleman’s majordomo and is lost to history.

On 2 June, Their Imperial Majesties finally parted on the steppes at Kizikerman. Joseph headed west towards Vienna, Catherine north towards Moscow. On 8 June, the Empress reached Poltava, the site of Peter the Great’s victory over Charles XII of Sweden. Potemkin re-enacted the battle in what Ségur called a huge ‘animated tableau, living and moving, almost a reality’ with 50,000 troops playing Russians and Swedes. Catherine’s eyes shone with Petrine pride. Then Serenissimus presented her with the pearl necklace that he had shown Miranda. In return, Catherine issued a charter acclaiming Potemkin’s achievements in the south, granted him 100,000 roubles and the new surname title of ‘Tavrichevsky’ – he was henceforth known as Kniaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky, Prince Potemkin of Taurida.^*5

‘Papa,’ she wrote on 9 June, ‘I hope that you let me leave tomorrow without big ceremonies.’ Next day, on the approaches to Kharkov, the weary pair parted. Catherine, accompanied by Branicka and ‘your kitten’ Skavronskaya, as well as the ‘Pocket Ministers’, met her grandsons, Alexander and Constantine, in Moscow. When she reached Tsarskoe Selo on 22 July, all the travellers on this magical voyage ‘had to return to dry political calculations’.¹⁰

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The driest of these calculations was the persistent allegation that Potemkin had deceived Catherine: the calumny of the ‘Potemkin Village’. As soon as they arrived back, the ‘Pocket Ministers’ were interrogated by Potemkin’s enemies to learn if Kherson, Sebastopol, the flocks and fleets, were real. But the ‘Potemkin Village’ was invented by a man who had never visited the south, let alone seen Potemkin’s achievements for himself.

Even in the 1770s, malicious rumours had alleged that Potemkin had done nothing in the south. That was manifestly untrue, so now his foes, and those of Russia, whispered that the whole show was a stupendous fraud. The embittered Saxon envoy Georg von Helbig, who was not on the journey, now coined his phrase ‘Potemkinsche Dörfer’, a concept so suited to political fraud, especially in Russia, that it entered the language to mean ‘a sham, a façade, an unreal achievement’. Helbig did not stop at using his clever phrase in his diplomatic despatches but also published a biography, Potemkin der Taurier, in the magazine Minerva of Hamburg, during the 1790s, which was taken up by the enemies of Russia. Later a full version was published in German in 1809, which was expanded and published in French and English in the nineteenth century. It thus laid the foundation of a historical version of Potemkin that was as fabricated and unjust as it claimed his villages to be. It did not fit Serenissimus – but the mud stuck.¹¹

The cruise along the Dnieper provided the basis of the ‘Potemkin Villages’: Helbig claimed the settlements there were composed of façades – painted screens on pasteboards – that were moved along the river and seen by the Empress five or six times. Helbig wrote that thousands of peasants had been torn from their homes inside Russia and driven along the riverbank at night with their flocks to be ready for the arrival of the Empress next morning – 1,000 villages had been depopulated and many died of hunger during the resulting famine. The foreigners simply saw the same peasants every day.

The accusation of ‘Potemkin Villages’ had already been alleged years before the trip ever happened. When Kirill Razumovsky visited Kherson in 1782, the very existence of the town was a ‘pleasant surprise’, evidently because he had been told the project was just a mirage.¹² All foreign visitors to the south were warned in Petersburg that it was a big lie: Lady Craven reported, a year before Catherine set off, that ‘those at Petersburg who were jealous of Potemkin’s merit’ told her there was no water in the Crimea – ‘his having the Government of Taurida, and commanding the troops in it, may have caused the invention of 1000 ill-natured lies about this new country…to lessen the share of praise, that is his due’.¹³ The Empress had been told for years – whether by the Heir’s circle or by envious courtiers – that Potemkin was inventing his achievements. Garnovsky reported to the Prince, before Catherine departed, that she was being told that she would see only painted screens, not real buildings. In Kiev, the stories became more insistent. One of the reasons Catherine was so keen on the trip was surely to check on things for herself: when Potemkin tried to delay her departure from Kiev because arrangements were not complete, she told her secretary Khrapovitsky that she wanted to see for herself ‘in spite of its non-readiness’.¹⁴

There is absolutely no evidence in Potemkin’s own orders or in the accounts of eye-witnesses for the ‘Potemkin Villages’. He certainly began his preparations for Catherine’s visit as early as 1784, so it is not necessary for us to believe that the whole show was created overnight: that year, General Kahovsky reported that palaces had been built or old houses redecorated for her imminent visit. Potemkin used travelling palaces – but most of Catherine’s palaces were permanent: the ones at Kherson survived for more than a century afterwards. In Bakhchisaray, the Khan’s Palace was to be ‘repaired’ and ‘repainted’. The next year, in a list of improvements across the Crimea from building new salt stores in Perekop to Gould’s chestnut-tree ‘paradise’ in Kaffa, Potemkin was ordering that, in Bakhchisaray, Kahovsky was to build up ‘the large street where the Empress will pass’ with ‘good houses and shops’.¹⁵ This order to improve some existing buildings is the nearest the thousands of documents in Potemkin’s archives yield as evidence of cosmetic presentation. Miranda is a key, unprejudiced witness because he accompanied Potemkin on his pre-trip inspection, but saw nothing being falsified. On the contrary, this witness testifies to the massive reality of Potemkin’s work.

What about the dancing peasants and their herds on the riverbanks? It was simply impossible to move such numbers around in those days, especially at night. Cattle and sheep perish if so driven. Potemkin’s inability to conceal the fiasco of the lost kitchen of Kaidak, where he himself had to cook dinner for the two monarchs, is more evidence that he was unlikely to have been able to move thousands of men and animals across vast distances to deceive his guests.¹⁶ Nor were these flocks completely new: the nomads there had always kept cattle and sheep. Potemkin added to them and improved their quality: Miranda saw the flocks of sheep on the steppe,¹⁷ while, a year earlier, Lady Craven proves that Potemkin did not need to use magic on the riverbanks and steppes: she watched huge, grazing herds of ‘horses, cows and sheep approaching, making at once a simple and majestic landscape full of peace and plenty’.¹⁸ The flocks were there already. They were real.

The crowds did not need to be forced to see the Empress. No tsar had visited the south since Peter the Great sixty years earlier, so who would not hurry to gawp at not one, but two Caesars? Even in Smolensk, crowds turned out to see the Empress from twenty leagues away.¹⁹ Besides, the local peasants surely wished to sell produce to the imperial kitchens. When Lady Craven visited Bakhchisaray a year earlier, a solitary, unknown foreigner, the streets were lined by curious and enthusiastic Tartars and soldiers, so their reaction to the arrival of two monarchs was only slightly greater.²⁰ This is not to say there was no element of show on the banks of the Dnieper: on the contrary, Potemkin beautified and ornamented everything that he could. He was a political impresario who understood the power of presentation and enjoyed the aspect of ‘play’ in politics, which was entirely self-conscious and deliberate.²¹

Today, a visit by a head of state is routinely prepared and minutely choreographed in detail, houses repainted, streets cleaned, tramps and whores arrested, banners festooned across streets. Brass-bands play, indigenous schoolchildren dance, and the stops at well-stocked shops are prearranged.²² In many ways, this was the first such visit. Everyone knew that the Amazons, Cossacks and instant English gardens were shows, just as Queen Elisabeth II knows that the Zulu impis with assegai and shields who perform on her trips are not typical inhabitants of Johannesburg.^*6 This was what Ségur meant when he said that Potemkin had ‘an amazing knack of overcoming all obstacles, conquering Nature…cheating the eye of the dreary uniformity of the long stretches of sandy plain’.²³

It is certainly true that, wherever the Empress went, the local officials tidied up the streets, added a lick of paint to buildings and concealed ugliness. In two towns, Kharkov and Tula, not part of Potemkin’s show-route, the governors did conceal things from her and may have built false houses.^*7 Thus it is ironic that the sole accounts of ‘Potemkin villages’ suggest they were not perpetrated by Potemkin at all.²⁴ One could argue that Potemkin was the inventor of modern political spectacle – but not that he was a fairground huckster.

Serenissimus did not need to falsify towns and fleets, as the foreigners, from Miranda to Joseph, testify.²⁵ The Empress could not visit every site and even Potemkin was deceived by his officials, but Kaiser Joseph made a point of inspecting everything and admitted that all was real – though he revealingly added that, if he had not seen things with his own eyes, he would not have believed it.²⁶ Ligne also went out on his own and discovered ‘superb establishments in their infancy, growing manufactures, villages with regular streets surrounded with trees and irrigated…’.

Catherine, among other allegations, had been specifically told that Potemkin had ruined the army by reforming the cavalry. When she saw his magnificent light cavalry at Kremenchuk, she felt anger at those who had lied to her, exclaiming to Ligne, ‘Wicked people – how they deceived me!’²⁷ This was the reason for Catherine’s double joy at finding that the rumours were lies and her keenness to tell her grandsons and officials like Count Bruce what she had seen: ‘It is nice to see these places with my own eyes. They warned me against the Crimea, scaring me and dissuading me from seeing it for myself. Having arrived here, I wonder the reason for such rash prejudice.’ She even admitted ‘her great surprise’ that Kherson was so developed. But her assertions did not stop the calumnies against Potemkin.²⁸

‘Already the ridiculous story has been circulated that pasteboard villages were painted on our roads…that the ships and guns were painted, the cavalry horseless,’ Ligne wrote to Paris. He touched at once on the reasons for it: ‘Even those among the Russians,…vexed at not being with us, will pretend we have been deceived.’ Ligne knew ‘very well what legerdemain tricks are’, but the achievements were real.²⁹ Potemkin was well aware of the lies spread about him by his enemies. ‘And the main thing’, he wrote to Catherine afterwards, ‘is that malice and jealousy could never harm me in your eyes.’ The Empress said he was right: ‘You’ve smacked your enemies’ fingers.’³⁰

Their fingers might have been smarting, but that did not stop them for long. Back in Petersburg, Potemkin’s enemies were determined to discredit him, despite all the evidence. Overexcited courtiers like Evgraf Chertkov (the witness at Potemkin’s wedding to Catherine) did not help by telling everyone, ‘I saw miracles, which appeared there only God knows how…It was like a dream…Only he [Potemkin] is able to do such things.’³¹ This was exactly what enemies like Grand Duke Paul wanted to hear.

The Tsarevich summoned Ligne and Ségur to question Potemkin’s achievements. He was not going to let the truth interfere with his prejudices. ‘In spite of all these two travellers have been able to tell him, he does not wish to be persuaded that things are in as good a state as one tells him.’³² When Ligne conceded that Catherine could not see everything, Paul exploded: ‘Oh! I know it very well. It’s why this bitch of a nation does not want to be governed only by women!’³³ This determination, even at Court, explains the persistence of the lies even when eye-witnesses disproved them. The lies were amplified by critics of Russian expansion. It is easy to imagine how, once Potemkin and Catherine were dead, this calculated disinformation became transformed into the gospel of history. Even the 1813 English adaptation of Helbig’s work concluded that the ‘envy which fastens itself upon great men has magnified what was but show, and diminished what was real’.³⁴ Potemkin was a victim of his own overwhelming triumph. The ‘Potemkin Village’ is itself one of history’s biggest shams.

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The new Prince of Taurida sank into one of his bouts of depressed exhaustion, a symptom of the anti-climax after such manic overwork and dazzling success. He remained a few days in Kremenchuk and, in mid-July, set up Court at Kherson, where he fell ill, languishing on his divan, brooding and playing with diamonds. This was not an ideal time for the Prince to be depressed. Since October 1786, he had been in charge of all Ottoman policy and ‘arbiter of peace and war’. Now the Ottoman Empire was moving towards war. Ever since the loss of the Crimea and Georgia, and the admission of Russian influence in the Danubian Principalities, the Ottomans had sought the chance to claw back these shameful concessions.³⁵

There was tumult in Istanbul as early as March and into May. ‘Here, the public talk only of war,’ reported Potemkin’s best agent, N. Pisani, a scion of one of Istanbul’s professional diplomatic families who interpreted and spied for everyone. Sultan Abdul-Hamid, pressured by his pro-war Grand Vizier, Yusuf-Pasha, and the muftis, was deliberately testing Russian resolve: in 1786, the Hospodar of Moldavia Mavrocordato was driven out; Russia gave him refuge. The Georgian Tsar Hercules was being attacked by the local Pasha. The Turks backed Sheikh Mansour and his Chechens, so Potemkin strengthened his Mozdok Line. The Porte refortified its bases from the Kuban to the Danube, from Anapa and Batumi to Bender and Ismail, and rebuilt its fleets, hence the show of strength off Ochakov on Catherine’s visit. ‘The warriors’, added Pisani, ‘become daily more insolent and commit all sorts of excesses.’³⁶

Potemkin, feeling strong with his new fleet and Catherine’s imminent visit, had certainly played a part in this escalating brinkmanship. In December 1786, he had ordered Bulgakov, envoy to the Porte, to demand that these pinpricks in the Danubian Principalities and the Caucasus cease forthwith.³⁷ He offered either war or the guarantee of Russian Black Sea possessions in return for security for the Ottoman Empire. At that moment, the Sublime Porte leaned towards security. His language was strong, but not excessively provocative. If it had been so, the Ottomans would have attacked during Catherine’s visit. Cobenzl thought Potemkin’s demands ‘very minor’.³⁸ In March, Potemkin ordered Bulgakov: ‘We do everything to avoid war but it will certainly follow if they ignore our requests…Try to explain to the Sultan how minor and just they are.’³⁹ When Bulgakov consulted with Potemkin at Kherson that June, the aim was to avoid war, not cause it. In August, Potemkin specifically told Bulgakov to ‘win another two years’.⁴⁰ Delay was necessary, preparations unfinished.⁴¹

Serenissimus’ martial boasting may have looked like a longing for war, but he had gained the Sech, Crimea and Georgia with the threat of war, without losing the bones of a single Ekaterinoslav Grenadier. He knew that ultimately he would have to fight the Turks because their resentment increased with each Russian success. But it is clear that he talked war in order not to have to fight it. However, Potemkin has been blamed for causing the war through his blunderingly aggressive diplomacy. This view is partly based on the hindsight that Russia was bullying the weak Turks, while in fact the Porte was raising armies and fleets that were much improved since their dismal performance in the First Turkish War. It is also based on ignorance of the war fever in Istanbul and the Ottoman policy of provoking Russia in the Caucasus and on the Danube. If the Prince is guilty of anything, it was creating the Black Sea Fleet and arranging the imperial visit to the Crimea: these declared that the Russian presence on the Black Sea was permanent, but also suggested that this was the Porte’s last chance to dislodge it. So the arms race and provocations were mutual and simultaneous. The war was caused by a mutual tightening of the screw so that ultimately it came before either side was fully ready for it.

The Russian envoy returned to find Constantinople infected with war fever. Grand Vizier Yusuf-Pasha, supported by the Janissaries and the imams, was deliberately, according to Pisani on 1 June 1787, ‘animating the canaille…to intimidate their Sovereign to make him believe the people want war and that otherwise they will rebel against him’. The mob was rioting. Recruits from Asia poured through the city on their way to Ismail, the main fortress of Moldavia. Ottoman armies numbered 300,000. Only the peaceful resolve of the Sultan and his prestigious Capitan-Pasha (Grand Admiral) Hassan-Pasha restrained them.⁴² Prussia, Sweden, Britain and France encouraged the Turks – indeed Pisani reported, ‘I have in my hands the notebook of the plan’ by French officers to retake the Crimea. Finally, the Sultan buckled. The Porte made impossible demands to Bulgakov, such as the return of Georgia and the acceptance of Turkish consuls in Russian cities. Bulgakov rejected them, was arrested on 5 August and thrown into the Seven Towers. On the 20th, Ottoman ships attacked two Russian frigates off Ochakov. After a six-hour battle, the Russians escaped. It was war.⁴³

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‘I am afraid you have no more nails on your fingers,’ Catherine declared to Potemkin on 24 August, writing to discuss their strategy, and membership of her Council. ‘You’ve chewed them all off.’⁴⁴ How well she knew him. The relationship between Catherine and Potemkin entered a new phase that month: their letters became much longer as the theatre of operations and diplomacy broadened. More than ever, they became partners in both glory and anguish, public and private. They corresponded like an old couple who happen to rule an empire, loving yet often irritated, exchanging political ideas and gossip, giving each other confidence, praise, new clothes and sick remedies. But the Prince, sitting in Kremenchuk, shivered from spasms of fever, and sank deeper in dysphoric darkness. Contrary to the usual histories, he did not neglect his duties but became exhausted because he had concentrated so much power in his own hands. This worried Catherine: ‘You do everything yourself so you have no rest.’⁴⁵

Apart from Peter the Great himself, Potemkin was Russia’s first commander-in-chief of both military and naval forces across several different theatres of war. As war minister, he was responsible for all fronts, from the Swedish and Chinese borders to those of Poland and Persia. There were two main armies facing the Turks. The Prince commanded the main Ekaterinoslav Army in the centre while Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky commanded the smaller Ukraine Army that covered him in the west on the Moldavian border. In addition, Potemkin was his own grand admiral of the Black Sea Fleet. In the Caucasus and the Kuban, he commanded the corps fighting both the Ottomans and the Chechen and Circassian tribes led by Sheikh Mansour. None of these forces were complete or fully prepared – though fortunately this was equally true of the Turks. Potemkin amassed his forces and waited for the two out of every 500 levy from the interior to raise 60,000 new recruits. Furthermore he was in charge of co-ordinating operations with his Austrian allies and increasingly, of Russian policy in Poland. It was a gigantic command that required, not only the ability to supply these forces and co-ordinate land and sea operations, but also sweeping strategic vision.

The prime Ottoman aim was to recover the Crimea, using the powerful fortress of Ochakov as their base. They first had to take Potemkin’s city of Kherson. The key to Kherson was Kinburn, the small Russian fortress on the end of a spit at the mouth of the Liman, the long estuary of the Dnieper river. Potemkin energetically ordered defensive measures. Forces were sent to Kinburn under Potemkin’s best general, Alexander Suvorov. On 14 September, the Turks tried to land at Kinburn but were repelled. The Prince ordered the Black Sea Fleet to put to sea from Sebastopol to hunt the Ottoman fleet, said to be at Varna.⁴⁶ Yet Potemkin’s fever and depression undermined his strength. ‘The illness makes me weaker every day,’ he confided in Catherine. If he did not recover, let her give the command to Rumiantsev.⁴⁷

‘God forbid to hear you are so sick and weak as to pass the command to Rumiantsev,’ Catherine replied on 6 September. ‘You’re on my mind day and night…It’s God I ask and pray to save you alive and unharmed – how necessary you are both for me and the Empire, you know that.’ She agreed that they had to act defensively until the spring, but they worried whether the Turks would attack before the Russian forces were ready and whether Joseph would honour his side of their treaty.⁴⁸

Her words encouraged him. ‘You write to me like a real mother,’ he replied and gave her a strategic overview in his usual colourful turn of phrase: Suvorov in Kinburn was ‘a man who serves with his sweat and blood’ while Kahovsky in the Crimea would ‘climb astride a cannon with the same sangfroid with which he would lie on a sofa’. He advised Catherine to appease Britain and Prussia, already foreseeing their policies. Then he suggested that Russia should send its Baltic Fleet to the Mediterranean as it had during the last war. But, even as he wrote, he seemed to collapse again: he could neither sleep nor eat and was ‘very weak, millions of troubles, hypochondria too strong. Not even a minute’s rest, I’m not even sure I can stand it long.’⁴⁹ His letters ceased.

Then suddenly Potemkin’s world collapsed. He learned that the Black Sea Fleet, his beloved creation and the very arsenal of Russian power, had been destroyed in a storm on 9 September. He became almost mad. ‘I’m exhausted, Matushka,’ he wrote on the 19th. ‘I’m good for nothing…God forbid, if any losses happen, if I haven’t died of sorrow, I’ll throw my merits at your feet and hide in obscurity…let me rest, a little. Really I can’t stand any more…’. Yet he was also clear-minded and efficient – the armies were forming, manoeuvring and provisioning – and Kinburn was ready: he had done all he could but that did not help his physical and mental state.⁵⁰

‘Lady Matushka, I’ve become unlucky,’ Potemkin, who so believed in Providence, wrote to his empress on 24 September. ‘Despite all the measures I’m taking, everything’s gone topsy-turvy. The Sebastopol Fleet has been crushed…God defeats me, not the Turks.’ His sensitive emotions dived towards the very bottom of his cyclothymic nature at the critical moment for which his entire career had been a preparation. He fell into deep despair, though historically his collapse puts him in good company: Peter the Great suffered almost suicidal emotional crises after Narva in 1700, so did Frederick the Great at both Mollwitz in 1740, whence he fled, and Hochkirch in 1758. In our century,⁵¹ the best examples of such temporary breakdowns at similarly vital moments were those suffered by Joseph Stalin, faced with the German invasion on 22 June 1941, and Yitzhak Rabin, Israeli Chief of Staff, in May 1967, planning the pre-emptive strike of the Six Day War.^*8

The Prince was in such a manic state that he confided in Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, his old teacher,’ ‘My career is finished. I’ve almost gone mad.’ He scrawled a second note to Catherine that day, suggesting that Russian abandon the Crimea, his prize, his own title – since, without a fleet in Sebastopol, what was the point of keeping so many troops cooped up there? ‘Assign the command to someone else…’, he beseeched her. On God’s word he had always been devoted to her. But now: ‘Really I’m almost dead…’.⁵²

Skip Notes

*1 Herodotus writes that the Amazons, led by their queen Penthesilea, crossed the Black Sea, fought the Scythians and then settled with them not far from the Sea of Azov. So Potemkin would have known that the Crimea was, as it were, the natural habitat of Amazons. When Potemkin took Miranda to the Crimea, they met a German colonel, Schutz, whose wife had ‘followed him in campaign dressed as a man and been injured twice – she has a bit of a manly look’. Did Frau Schutz advise on Potemkin’s Amazon Regiment? It seems a coincidence that there should be two households of Amazons in one small peninsula.

*2 It turned out to be a Kalmyk boy called Nagu, later captured at the storming of Ochakov, to whom Ségur taught French and then managed to unload on a delighted Countess Cobenzl, back in the north.

*3 The exact position of this ‘fairy abode’ – built on the site of the Tartar hut where Potemkin almost died in late 1783 – is now unknown. But when the author visited Beligorsk, Karasubazaar’s present name, he found a verdant spot near a river and orchard that fitted the description of the English visitor Maria Guthrie. The Tartars, deported by Stalin, have returned to the village.

*4 Western monarchs often procured Eastern slave girls, despite their disgust for Oriental slavery. There must have been quite a traffic in these girls, who were either captured in war or bought by ambassadors to the Sublime Porte. Hence Potemkin’s offer of a girl to Ségur. Frederick the Great’s Scottish Jacobite friend Earl Marshal Keith travelled with a Turkish slave girl picked up in the Russo-Turkish Wars, and, as we will see, one of the most cultivated men of the era, King Stanislas-Augustus of Poland, was sent a regular supply.

*5 This translates awkwardly into English but sounds better in German – ‘Potemkin der Taurier’ – and in French ‘le Taurien’, the Taurian. Catherine and Grimm discussed how to translate it and the philosophe suggested it should be ‘Tauricus’ or ‘le Taurien’.

*6 But not even this was all show: when Lady Craven visited the Albanians in April 1786, they already wore a ‘kind of Roman warrior’s dress’ and had ‘Oriental and Italian poniards’ while the Cossacks performed for her just for the fun of it.

*7 There was indeed a famine in certain areas, notably around Moscow, not in Potemkin’s richer southern provinces, after a bad harvest in 1786, which was why Catherine hurried back to the capital. When she arrived in Tula, far from Potemkin’s Viceroyalty, the local governor concealed local poverty with false façades but also did not inform her of the rising food prices. When Lev Naryshkin told her the bread prices, she, to her credit, cancelled the ball given for her that night. Both Catherine and Potemkin felt the suffering of ordinary people, when they heard about it, but neither would let a minor famine interfere with the glorious aggrandizement of the Empire nor with the magnificence of their lifestyles. But this was a characteristic of all eighteenth-century governments, however enlightened.

*8 When Hitler invaded Russia on 22 June 1941, Stalin almost disappeared, saw nobody and seemed overwhelmed by the scale of responsibility and a temporary loss of nerve. He was apparently suffering some sort of depression. In May 1967, Rabin was ‘stammering, nervous, incoherent’. His biographer quotes an eye-witness as observing ‘it was almost as if he had lost his nerve, was out of control’.