Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

26

JEWISH COSSACKS AND AMERICAN ADMIRALS: POTEMKIN’S WAR

Prince Potemkin formed the singular project of raising a regiment of Jews…he intends to make Cossacks of them. Nothing amused me more.

The Prince de Ligne

You would be charmed with the Prince Potemkin than whom no one could be more noble-minded.

John Paul Jones to the Marquis de Lafayette

Catherine rallied the Prince of Taurida. ‘In these moments, my dear friend, you are not just a private person who lives, and does what he likes,’ she told him on the very day he wrote so desperately. ‘You belong to the state, you belong to me.’ Nonetheless she sent Potemkin an order, authorizing him to transfer command to Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky if he wished.

When she received his most frantic letters, she displayed her cool good sense. ‘Nothing is lost,’ she said, like a strict but indulgent German schoolmistress. ‘The storm that was so harmful for us was equally harmful for the enemy.’ As for withdrawal from the Crimea, there seemed ‘no need to rush to start the war by evacuating a province which is not in danger’.^*1 She ascribed his depression to what she called the ‘excessive sensibility and ardent assiduity’ of ‘my best friend, foster-child and pupil, who is sometimes even more sane than myself. But this time, I am more vigorous than you because you’re ill and I’m well.’¹ This was the essence of their partnership: whoever was up would look after whoever was down. War had given the partners more worry but also more to share. Their military discussion often alternated with the warmest declarations of love and friendship.

A week later, Potemkin emerged from his depression, partly thanks to Catherine’s letters, but even more because it turned out the fleet was damaged but not ruined: only one ship had been lost. ‘The destruction of the Sebastopol Fleet was such a blow I don’t even know how I survived it,’ he confessed to his empress. He was relieved he could hand over to Rumiantsev if it became too much. They agreed that she should despatch Prince Nikolai Repnin, a talented general and Panin’s nephew, to command the army under him. Serenissimus apologized for giving her such a shock: ‘It’s not my fault I am so sensitive.’² She sympathized. In a very eighteenth-century diagnosis, Catherine blamed much of it on his bowels: his spasms ‘are nothing but wind’, she decreed. ‘Order them to give you something to get rid of the wind…I know how painful they are for people as sensitive and impatient as us.’³

Potemkin had just recovered when the war began in earnest. On the night of 1 October, after a bombardment and several false starts, the Turks landed 5,000 crack Janissaries on Kinburn’s thin spit and tried to storm the fortress. The Turks constructed entrenchments. The Russians, under the brilliant Suvorov, charged thrice and finally managed to slaughter virtually the entire Ottoman force, but at a high cost. Suvorov himself was wounded twice. But the victory at Kinburn meant that Kherson and the Crimea were safe until the spring.

‘I can’t find words to express how I appreciate and respect your important service, Alexander Vasilievich,’⁴ Potemkin wrote to Suvorov, who was nine years older. The two great eccentrics and outstanding talents of their time had known each other since the First Turkish War. Their tense relationship fizzed with mutual admiration and irritation. Suvorov was a wiry little general with a cadaverous comedian’s face, brutal, intelligent eyes and repertoire of zany antics. ‘Hero, buffoon, half-demon and half-dirt,’ wrote Byron, ‘Harlequin in uniform.’⁵ He rolled naked on the grass every morning, doing somersaults in front of his army, jumped on tables, sang in the midst of high society, mourned a decapitated turkey by trying to return its head to its neck, lived in a straw hut on the beach, stood on one leg at parade and set his armies marching by crowing thrice like a cockerel. He asked his men mad questions such as ‘How many fish are there in the Danube?’ The correct answer was a firm one. ‘God save us from the “Don’t knows”,’ he used to exclaim.⁶

Soon after Kinburn, a young French volunteer was writing a letter when his tent was unceremoniously opened and a scarecrow entered, wearing just a shirt. This ‘fantastical apparition’ asked to whom he was writing. To his sister in Paris, he replied. ‘But I want to write a letter too,’ said Suvorov, grabbing a pen and writing her a complete letter. When the sister received it, she said it was mostly unreadable – and the rest utterly crazy. The Frenchman decided ‘I had to deal with a lunatic.’ Legend has it that Suvorov once heard Catherine saying, vis-à-vis Potemkin, that all great men were eccentrics. Suvorov immediately began daily affecting a new singularity which in the end became second nature. Yet he spoke six foreign languages and was a connoisseur of ancient history and literature.⁷

Suvorov, who like Potemkin advocated informal, easy clothes and simple tactics of attack, was unlike the Prince in his ruthless, very Russian lack of concern for the lives of his men. The bayonet was his favourite weapon: ‘Cold steel – bayonets and sabres! Push the enemy over, hammer them down, don’t lose a moment.’ Never trust the musket, ‘that crazy bitch’. He always wanted to storm and charge regardless of losses: speed and impact were everything. His greatest battles, Ismail and Praga, were bloodbaths.⁸ Every commander-in-chief needs a Suvorov. Potemkin was lucky to have him but he used him skilfully.^*2

Serenissimus now hailed Suvorov as ‘my dear friend’ and sent him endless presents from a greatcoat to a hamper of ‘pâté de Périgord’ – foie gras.⁹ He urged Catherine to promote Suvorov above his seniority: ‘Who Matushka could have such leonine courage?’ He should be given Russia’s highest order, the St Andrew. ‘Who has deserved the distinction more than him?…I begin with myself – give him mine!’¹⁰ Potemkin’s alleged jealousy of his subordinate became part of the Suvorov legend, but there is no trace of it in any of Potemkin’s letters and it would have seemed absurd during their lifetimes: Potemkin was supreme and Suvorov was just one of his generals. Suvorov was so moved by Potemkin’s affectionate letters that he wrote back, ‘I am a commoner! How can it be I was not flattered by Your Highness’s favour! The key to the secrets of my soul lie in your hands for ever.’¹¹ Suvorov was Potemkin’s match in eccentricity and talent: contrary to the mythology of their hatred, they admired each other. Indeed their passionate, half-mad letters almost read like a love affair. ‘You can’t oversuvorov Suvorov,’ joked Serenissimus.

Potemkin inspected Kherson, Kinburn and the fleets on one of his flying tours and then established his headquarters at Elisabethgrad, where he held his winter Court and planned the coming campaign. But he kept up his inspections: after a thousand versts on the road in icy weather, he complained to Catherine of piles and headaches. But he was achieving miracles in terms of repairing the old fleet and building a new flotilla to fight on the Liman.

Grand Duke Paul declared he wished to fight the Turks and bring his wife to the front. Paul’s companionship was a dire prospect for Serenissimus, with the risk that the Heir might try to undermine his command. Nonetheless he agreed in principle. Catherine loathed her son now, comparing him to ‘mustard after dinner’. Despite two requests, she managed to put him off, using anything – from crop failure to the Grand Duchess’s latest pregnancy – to spare Serenissimus this tedious and dangerous fate. Paul spent the rest of the war drilling his troops at Gatchina ‘like a Prussian major, exaggerating the importance of every trivial and minute detail’, while tormenting himself with his father’s murder and threatening everyone with ‘hardness and vengeance’ on his accession. He had to bite his lip and congratulate Serenissimus on his victories, but his wife was grateful for Potemkin’s kindness to her brothers, who served in his army. As Catherine grew older, Potemkin flattered Paul, who remained sour as ever – ‘Heaven and Earth were guilty in his eyes.’ He took every opportunity to denounce his mother’s partner to anyone who would listen.¹²

Joseph had not yet accepted the casus foederis of the treaty, but still complained that Potemkin and Rumiantsev were doing nothing. The Russians and the Austrians were watching each other closely: each wanted the other to bear the brunt of the war without losing out on the rewards. Both sides sent spies to watch each other.¹³

Joseph’s spy was the Prince de Ligne, who was ordered to use his friendship with Potemkin to get the Russians to do as much of the fighting as possible. ‘You will report to me on a separate piece of paper in French,’ Joseph secretly instructed Ligne, ‘which will be concealed and placed in an ordinary packet with the envelope addressed carefully: For His Majesty Alone.’¹⁴ The ‘jockey diplomatique’¹⁵ did not know that this fell into the hands of the Russian Cabinet Noir – it remains in Potemkin’s archives – but he did notice Serenissimus’ reserve when he turned up in Elisabethgrad. ‘The Prince de Ligne, whom I love, is now a burden,’ Potemkin told Catherine.¹⁶ War was the ruin of their friendship.

Elisabethgrad was a godforsaken little garrison-town, forty-seven miles from the Ottoman frontier. ‘What weather, what roads, what winter, what Headquarters I found in Elisabeth,’ wrote Ligne, who embraced Potemkin and asked, ‘When to Ochakov?’ This was a ludicrous question given that it was mid-winter and the Austrians, who were as surprised and unprepared as the Russians, had so far not even declared war. ‘My God,’ replied the still-depressed Potemkin. ‘There are 18,000 men in the garrison. I don’t even have as many in my army. I lack everything. I’m the unluckiest man if God doesn’t help me.’ Potemkin listed the Turkish garrisons in the nearby Ottoman fortresses, Akkerman, Bender and Khotin. ‘Not a word of truth in all of that,’¹⁷ Ligne commented. He was wrong.¹⁸ Pisani’s reports from Istanbul testified that the fortress had been freshly manned and refortified.^*3 Potemkin had no intention of wasting Russian lives to save Austrian reputations: one has the distinct impression that some of his depression was diplomatic madness to distract the Austrians.

Potemkin lived splendidly in the misery of Elisabethgrad in a wooden palace beside the old fortress. Foreign volunteers – Spaniards, Piedmontese, Portuguese and especially French aristocrats – poured into the frozen town along with a ‘vile troop of subaltern adventurers’. On 12 January 1788, Roger, Comte de Damas, having run away from France to find gloire, arrived to offer his services. Aged just twenty-three, with a shock of black curls, graceful and fearless, Talleyrand’s cousin was the lover of the Marquise de Coigny, a sometime mistress of Ligne whom Marie-Antoinette called ‘queen of Paris’. On arrival, he asked for his mistress’s friend Ligne. Up in the castle, he was told. Thence he was directed to Potemkin’s palace. He passed two guards and entered an immense hall, full of orderlies. This led to a long suite that was as brightly lit as a ‘fête in some capital city’.

The first room he saw was full of adjutants awaiting Potemkin; in the second, Sarti conducted his orchestra of horns; in the third, thirty to forty generals surrounded a huge billiard table.¹⁹ On the left, Serenissimus gambled with a niece and a general. This Court was ‘not inferior to a lot of Sovereigns of Europe’. Russian generals were so servile that, if Potemkin dropped something, twenty of them scrummaged to pick it up.²⁰ The Prince rose to meet Damas, sat him at his side and invited him to dinner with Ligne and his niece at a small table, while the generals ate at a bigger one. From then on, Damas dined with Potemkin every day for three months of luxury and impatience.²¹ Ligne was the consolation of the foreigners – ‘a child in society, Lovelace with the women’. There was no shortage.

Potemkin could never bear war without women. He was soon joined for the winter by a coterie of goddesses, all in their late teens or early twenties, who came to meet their husbands in the army. There was the Russian Aphrodite – Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, wife of an officer and daughter of Prince Fyodor Bariatinsky, one of Catherine’s senior courtiers. She was acclaimed for her ‘beauty, grace, fine tastes, delicate tact, humour and talent’. Then there was the lissom and wanton Ekaterina Samoilova, wife of Potemkin’s nephew and daughter of Prince Sergei Trubetskoi. She was the ‘most adorable woman’, with whom Ligne was soon in love and writing poems that catch the grimness of life there: ‘Dromedaries, horses; Zaporogians, sheep; They’re all we meet here.’²² The third of this graceful troika was Pavel Potemkin’s wife, Praskovia.²³ Ségur teased Potemkin from Petersburg on his affair with a girl with ‘beautiful black eyes with whom it is claimed you try the Twelve Labours of Hercules’.²⁴ Damas said Potemkin ‘subordinated the art of war, the science of politics and the government of the kingdom to his particular passions’.²⁵ This galaxy of Venuses revolved around Potemkin: who was to be the next sultana-in-chief?

Potemkin and Ligne tormented each other: Potemkin was pressuring the Austrians to enter the war ‘against our common enemy’.²⁶ Ligne waved one of Joseph’s letters, which contained a war plan, and demanded Potemkin’s strategy. Potemkin delayed, and after two weeks Ligne claimed he was fobbed off with the statement: ‘With the help of God I’ll attack everything that is between the Bug and the Dniester.’ This was another Ligne lie. In an unpublished letter, Potemkin had quite clearly laid out the Russian plan: ‘We’ll undertake the siege of Ochakov, while the army of the Ukraine covers Bender, and the Caucasus and Kuban corps would fight the mountain tribes and Ottomans to the east.²⁷

Ligne however did not exaggerate Serenissimus’ impossible moodiness towards him: they were ‘sometimes fine, sometimes bad, arguing at daggers drawn or uncontested favourite, sometimes gambling with him, talking or not talking, staying up until six in the morning’. Ligne said he was the nurse for a ‘spoilt child’ and a malicious one at that. But Potemkin was equally fed up with Ligne’s ‘villainous ingratitude’, because his Cabinet Noir had opened all Ligne’s lying letters to his friends. Serenissimus grumbled to Catherine that the ‘jockey diplomatique’ could not make up his mind: ‘in his eyes, I am sometimes Thersites and sometimes Achilles’, the louche Thersites of Troilus and Cressida or the heroic Achilles of the Iliad. It was a love–hate relationship.²⁸

Between conducting adulteries, laughing at dromedaries and playing billiards, Potemkin was achieving a miracle ready for the next year. First he was awaiting his reserves and his levy of recruits, so that gradually an army of about 40,000–50,000 assembled in Elisabethgrad. Across the Mediterranean, Potemkin’s officers tried to recruit more men, particularly from Greece and Italy: for example, on the island of Corsica it is said that a young man offered himself for service to a Russian recruiter, General I.A. Zaborovsky. The Corsican demanded Russian rank equivalent to his position in the Garde Nationale Corse. He even wrote to his General Tamara about it.^*4 But his request was refused and he remained in France. The name of this abortive recruit to Potemkin’s army was Napoleon Bonaparte.²⁹

Serenissimus was creating the Cossack Host he had been planning ever since destroying the Zaporogian Sech. An honorary Zaporogian himself, Potemkin had a ‘passion for the Cossacks’. His entourage was filled with them, often old friends from the First Turkish War like Sidor Bely, Chepega and Golavaty. Potemkin believed that the old Cuirassier heavy cavalry was outdated and inconvenient in southern wars. The Cossacks had copied the horsemanship of the Tartars and now Potemkin had his light cavalry emulate the Cossacks. But he also decided to reharness the Zaporogian Cossacks, tempting back their brethren who had defected to the Turks. ‘Try to enlist the Cossacks,’ he ordered Bely. ‘I’ll check them all myself.’ He also filled up their ranks by recruiting new Cossacks from among Poles, Old Believers and even coachmen and petit bourgeois. Overcoming Catherine’s caution, he founded the new ‘Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Host’ under Bely and his Cossack protégés. They were later renamed the Kuban Cossacks, Russia’s second largest Host (the Don remained bigger) until the Revolution. It was Potemkin who made the Cossacks the pillars of the Tsarist regime.³⁰

Potemkin decided to arm the Jews against the Turks. This ‘singular project’, probably his Jewish friend Zeitlin’s idea, spawned in some rabbinical debate with the Prince, started as a cavalry squadron raised among the Jews of his Krichev estate. In December, he created a Jewish regiment called the Israelovsky, a word reminiscent of the Izmailovsky Guards. But that was where the similarities ended. Commanded by Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, their ultimate aim was to liberate Jerusalem for the Jews, just as Potemkin was to conquer Constantinople for the Orthodox. This sign of Potemkin’s unique philo-semitism and of Zeitlin’s influence was an awkward idea given Russian and especially Cossack anti-semitism, but it was surely the first attempt by a foreign power to arm the Jews since Titus destroyed the Temple.

The Prince wanted his Israelovsky to be half-infantry, half-cavalry, the latter to be Jewish Cossacks with Zaporogian lances: ‘we already have one squadron’, observed Ligne to Joseph II. ‘Thanks to the shortness of their stirrups, their beards come down to their knees and their fear on horseback makes them like monkeys.’ Joseph, who had loosened the restrictions of his own Jews, was probably amused.

By March 1788, thirty-five of these bearded Jewish Cossacks were being trained. Soon there were two squadrons, and Ligne told Potemkin there were plenty more in Poland. Ligne was sceptical, but he admitted he had seen excellent Jewish postmasters and even postillions. The Israelovsky evidently went out on patrol with the cavalry because Ligne wrote that they were as terrified of their own horses as those of the enemy. But five months later Potemkin cancelled the Israelovsky. Ligne joked that he did not dare continue them for fear of ‘getting mixed up with the Bible’. So ended this rare experiment that says a great deal about Potemkin’s originality and imagination.^*5 Ligne thought the Jewish Cossacks were ‘too ridiculous’. Instead, Potemkin concentrated on a ‘great number of Zaporogians and other Cossack volunteers’ pouring in to form the new Black Sea Host.³¹

The ‘Prince–Marshal’, as the foreigners called him, was now repairing the damaged fleet while preparing a huge new flotilla to fight in the Liman beneath Ochakov. The Russians were exposed in the Liman. The nature of this shallow estuary meant that Potemkin would have to fight a different sort of war with a different sort of fleet. Potemkin and his admiral Mordvinov turned to the most ingenious shipbuilder they knew: Samuel Bentham’s vermicular barges had been left behind and forgotten when the Empress’s tour headed for Kherson, leaving him to tag along behind.^*6 Now he was needed again, but Serenissimus had forgotten to pay him. He was swiftly paid, but Potemkin was so embarrassed about the debts that he hardly spoke to Bentham. ‘By order of His Highness’, Sam was enrolled into the navy³² – though ‘I had rather continue on terra firma.’³³ Potemkin ordered him to create a light flotilla that could fight the Turkish fleet in the Liman.³⁴ While Potemkin appeared to be lazing around at Elisabethgrad having tantrums with Ligne, the archives show that he was driving the creation of this fleet with all his force. ‘Fit them up completely as quickly as possible with rigging and all their armaments,’ he ordered Mordvinov. ‘Don’t lose any time over it.’³⁵

Joseph now accepted the casus foederis and launched a bungled pre-emptive strike against the Ottoman fortress of Belgrade in today’s Serbia. The operation collapsed farcically when Austrian commandos, disguised in special uniforms, got lost in the fog. Potemkin was ‘furious’³⁶ with Ligne about this military buffoonery, but it let the Russians off the hook. ‘It’s not very good for them,’ Catherine told Potemkin, ‘but it is good for us.’ Joseph fielded his 245,000 men but went on the defensive across central Europe, which at least restrained the Turks, giving Potemkin time to fight the Battle of the Liman.³⁷

This strategy drove the Austrians to despair. Potemkin was adamant to Catherine that ‘nobody can encourage me to undertake something when there’s no profit in it and nobody can discourage me when there’s a useful opportunity’.³⁸ Ligne tried to persuade him, but Potemkin laughed maliciously: ‘Do you think you can come here and lead me by the nose?’³⁹ The Austrian general Prince Frederick Joseph de Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld failed to take Khotin too. A second lunge for Belgrade never even got started. The Austrian war was not going well.⁴⁰

So Potemkin treated Ligne to two unpublished strategic memoranda that the ‘jockey diplomatique’ does not mention in his famous letters because they firmly restore the balance of Austro-Russian achievements: ‘It seems to me that on several occasions one has not been on guard enough,’ and Serenissimus proceeded to explain how the Turks fought: ‘They like to envelope their enemy on all sides…’. Potemkin’s advice was to concentrate forces, not spread them out in thin cordons, as Joseph was doing. Whether Joseph ever saw these documents, he did exactly what Potemkin warned him against, with disastrous results.⁴¹

Ligne could do nothing but accuse the Prince of the vainglorious pursuit of medals and lying about his victories. When a courier arrived with news of a victory in the Caucasus, Potemkin beamed: ‘See if I do nothing! I’ve just killed 10,000 Circassians, Abyssinians, Imeretians and Georgians and I’ve already killed 5,000 Turks at Kinburn.’ Ligne said this was a lie, but the Prince’s generals Tekeli and Pavel Potemkin had won a series of victories across the Kuban in September and November against the Ottoman ally, Sheikh Mansour.⁴² Ligne simply had no conception of the breadth of Potemkin’s command.^*7

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It was now Catherine’s turn to lose her confidence for a moment and Potemkin’s to encourage her in his belief that the two of them were specially blessed. Christ would help her – as He had always done before. ‘There were times’, he reassured her, ‘when all the escape-routes seem to be blocked. And then all of a sudden, chance intervened. Do rely on Him.’ He thanked her for the fur coat she had sent. She missed him – especially in a crisis: ‘without you, I feel as though I’m missing a hand and I get into trouble which I’d never get into with you. I keep fearing something is being missed.’⁴³ Later in the spring, she wrote a postscriptum to a short note, thanking him for his reassurances. ‘I thought it would be nice to tell you that I love you, my friend, very much and without ceremony.’ They were still so close that they usually thought the same way, and even suffered from the same ailments.⁴⁴

—

A Polish delegation now arrived in Elisabethgrad: Potemkin kept them waiting for days and then shocked them by receiving them in a dressing gown without breeches. Nonetheless, Potemkin paid serious attention to the problem of Poland. The sprawling Commonwealth was moving towards the so-called ‘Four Year Sejm’, the long parliament that presided over the Polish Revolution and overthrew the Russian protectorate. This was what Potemkin and King Stanislas-Augustus’ proposed alliance might have avoided. ‘Make Poland join us in the war,’ the Prince urged Catherine.⁴⁵ He offered the Poles 50,000 rifles to equip Polish forces, which would include 12,000 Polish cavalry to fight the Turks. Potemkin wanted to command some of the Poles himself – ‘at least a single brigade. I am as much of a Pole as they are,’ he protested, referring to his Smolensk origins and indigenat as a Polish nobleman.

This offer to command Polish troops was not a casual one. He was still developing his flexible plans for dealing with Poland and his own future under Paul, partly based on his new Podolian estates.⁴⁶ In any case, Catherine distrusted the plan, perhaps nervous about his vast Polish lands and schemes. She would only propose a treaty that specifically preserved the weak, chaotic Polish Constitution that served Russian ends. It was never signed.

There was always comedy with Serenissimus, even in war. When his Cossacks captured four Tartars, the prisoners expected to be killed. But Potemkin cheerfully had them thrown into a barrel of water and then announced they had been baptized. When a half-senile Frenchman arrived, purporting to be a siege expert, the Prince questioned him, only to learn that the sage had forgotten most of his knowledge. ‘I should like to peep…and study the works that I have forgotten again,’ said the old man. Potemkin, ‘always kind and amiable’ to characters, laughed and told him to relax: ‘Don’t kill yourself with all that reading…’.⁴⁷

Samuel Bentham, working under Admiral Mordvinov and General Suvorov at Kherson, threw himself into creating a rowing flotilla, using all his ingenuity.^*8 He adapted Catherine’s ‘cursed’ imperial barges into gunboats, but his real work was to renovate a graveyard of old cannon and fit them on to any light boats that he could either convert or construct. ‘I flatter myself I am the principal agent, filling out the Galleys and smaller vessels,’ he wrote.⁴⁸

Bentham’s masterpiece was to arm his ships with far heavier cannon than usual on most gunboats.⁴⁹ ‘The employment of great guns of 36 or even 48 pounds on such small vessels as ships’ long boats’, Bentham boasted justifiably to his brother, ‘was entirely my idea.’⁵⁰ It was to Potemkin’s credit that, when he came to inspect in October, he immediately understood the significance of Bentham’s idea and adopted it in the construction of all the frigates and gunboats, including twenty-five Zaporogian chaiki⁵¹ being built separately by his factotum Faleev. ‘They respect the calibre of guns in the fleet, not the quantity,’⁵² Potemkin explained to Catherine. He managed to overcome his awkwardness and thank Bentham publicly for all he had done.⁵³ Bentham was delighted.

By the spring, Potemkin had created a heavy-armed light flotilla of about a hundred boats out of almost nothing.⁵⁴ Even Ligne had to agree that ‘it needed a great merit of the Prince to have imagined, created and equipped’ the fleet so fast.⁵⁵ The birth of the Liman fleet – another ‘beloved child’ – was perhaps the ‘most essential service Potemkin rendered to Russia’.⁵⁶ Who was to command it? Nassau-Siegen arrived at Elisabethgrad in the New Year eager to serve. Potemkin enjoyed Nassau’s pedigree – from the bed of the Queen of Tahiti to the raid on Jersey during the American War – but he knew his limitations. ‘Almost a sailor’,⁵⁷ he called Nassau – which made him perfect for his almost-fleet in the Liman. On 26 March, he placed Nassau, whose ‘bravery’ was ‘renowned’, in command of the rowing flotilla.⁵⁸

Potemkin inspected and reinspected maniacally: ‘The extent of his authority, the fear he inspired and the prompt execution of his wishes made his visits of inspections seldom necessary.’⁵⁹ By late March, everything was almost ready. ‘Then we can begin the dance,’ declared Nassau.⁶⁰ But, just as everything seemed arranged with the command, an American admiral appeared on the Liman.

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‘Paul Jones has arrived,’ Catherine told Grimm on 25 April 1788. ‘I saw him today. I think he’ll do marvellous things for us.’⁶¹ Catherine fantasized that Jones would slice straight through to Constantinople. John Paul Jones, born the son of a gardener on a Scottish island, was the most celebrated naval commander of his day. He is still regarded as one of the founders of the US Navy. His tiny squadron of ships had terrorized the British coast during the War of American Independence: his wildest exploit was to raid the Scottish coast, taking hostage the inhabitants of a country house. This earned him the enviable reputation in America as a hero of liberty, in France as a dashing heart-throb and in England as a despicable pirate. Prints were sold of him; English nannies scared their children with tales of this bloodsoaked ogre. When the War of Independence ended in 1783, Jones, living in Paris, found himself at a loose end. Grimm, Thomas Jefferson and the King of Poland’s Virginian, Lewis Littlepage, had all helped direct him to Catherine, who knew that Russia needed sailors – and who could never resist a Western celebrity. Catherine is usually credited with hiring Jones without consulting Potemkin. But the archives show that Potemkin was simultaneously negotiating with him. ‘In case this officer is now in France,’ he told Simolin, the Russian envoy in Paris on 5 March, ‘I ask Your Excellency to get him to come as early as possible so that we can use his talents in the opening of the campaign.’⁶²

Jones duly arrived at Tsarskoe Selo, but Admiral Samuel Greig and the British officers of the Baltic fleet refused to serve with the infamous corsair, so Catherine sent Jones straight down to Elisabethgrad. On 19 May 1788, Potemkin gave Rear-Admiral Pavel Ivanovich Dzones the command of his eleven battleships, while Nassau kept the rowing flotilla.⁶³ Jones was not the only American fighting for Potemkin: Lewis Littlepage, whom the Prince knew from Kiev, arrived as the King of Poland’s spy at Russian HQ. At the Battle of the Liman, he commanded a division of gunboats. The Prince appointed Damas, Bentham and another English volunteer, Henry Fanshawe (Potemkin called him ‘Fensch’), a gentleman from Lancashire, to command squadrons under Nassau. ‘Lieutenant-Colonels Fensch and Bentham finally agreed to serve on board the ships,’ Potemkin informed Mordvinov.

Nassau and the other three proved inspired choices for the flotilla,⁶⁴ the two Americans less so. Jones generated resentment and excitement: Fanshawe and Bentham were not impressed with the ‘celebrated, or rather notorious’, Jones and the former declared that ‘nothing but the presence of the enemy could induce us to serve with him and no consideration whatever could bring us to serve under him ‘.⁶⁵ In Petersburg, Ségur wrote a very modern if flattering letter about Fame to Potemkin: ‘I did not expect having made war in America with Brave Paul Jones to meet him here so far from home but Celebrity Attracts Celebrity and I can’t be surprised to see all those who love glory…coming to associate their laurels with yours.’ But Ségur presciently begged Potemkin to be fair to Jones and never ‘condemn him without having heard him’.⁶⁶

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On 20 May 1788, Nassau saw the forest of masts of the Ottoman fleet in the Liman off Ochakov. ‘We have to make a dance with the Capitan-Pasha,’ Nassau boasted to his wife.⁶⁷ He swore to Damas that, in two months, he would either be dead or wearing the cross of St George.⁶⁸

Ghazi Hassan-Pasha, the Capitan-Pasha, commanded eighteen ships-of-the-line, forty frigates and scores of rowing galleys that brought his flotilla to over 109 ships, considerably more than the Russians in numbers and tonnage.⁶⁹ The Capitan-Pasha himself, renegade son of a Georgian Orthodox servant on the Barbary Coast, was the outstanding Ottoman warrior of the later eighteenth century, the latest in the tradition of the Algerian pirates who had come to the Sultan’s rescue. The ‘Algerine renegado’, instantly recognizable by his ‘fine white beard’, had seen the inferno of Chesme and rushed back to protect Istanbul; defeated the Egyptian rebellions against the Sultan; and won the nickname ‘the Crocodile of Sea Battles’.⁷⁰ He was the darling of the Istanbul mob. When Lady Craven visited his house in 1786, she recounted the magnificence of his lifestyle and bounty of diamonds in his wife’s turban.⁷¹ He was always accompanied by a pet lion that lay down at his command.

Potemkin, again suffering an attack of nerves, wondered if he should evacuate the Crimea. ‘When you are sitting on a horse,’ Catherine replied, ‘there is no point in getting off it and holding on by the tail.’ Potemkin sought reassurance from his Empress rather than actual evacuation – and that was what she gave him.⁷²

The Liman or estuary of the Dnieper was a long, arrow and treacherous bay that stretched thirty miles towards the west before it opened into the Black Sea. It was only eight miles wide, but its mouth was just two miles across. The south shore was Russian, ending in Kinburn’s narrow spit, but its mouth was dominated by the massive fortifications of the Ottoman fortress of Ochakov. It was of great strategic importance because Ochakov was the principal Russian war aim of the first campaign. But it could not be taken if the Ottomans controlled the Liman. Furthermore, the loss of the battle would leave the Turks free to attack Kinburn again, advance fifteen miles upstream to Kherson and possibly take the Crimea. Potemkin’s strategy was to win naval control of the Liman and then besiege mighty Ochakov, which would open communications between Kherson and Sebastopol, protect the Crimea and win a new expanse of coastline. So all depended on the Prince de Nassau-Siegen, Rear-Admiral John Paul Jones and the Crocodile of Sea Battles.

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On 27 May, Potemkin marched out of Elisabethgrad with his army as the Capitan-Pasha gathered his fleet. On the morning of 7 June, the Capitan-Pasha advanced along the Liman with his rowing flotilla backed by his warships. It was a gorgeous and impressive sight – ‘better than a ball at Warsaw’, thought Nassau, ‘and I’m persuaded we’ll have as much fun as Prince Sapieha dancing “l’Allemande” ’. Nassau and Damas showed each other portraits of their women back home. The Turks opened fire. While Jones’s squadron was held back by a contrary wind, Nassau used the light Zaporogian chaiki on his left to attack them all along the line. The Turks withdrew in chaos. The Capitan-Pasha fired on his own retreating forces. He was, after all, the man who had solved the problem of lazy firefighting in Istanbul by tossing four firemen into a blaze pour encourager les autres.

Nassau and Jones ordered their respective fleets to give chase. Bentham, who was commanding a division of seven galleys and two gunboats, saw his heavy artillery win the day but got his eyebrows singed when one of his cannons exploded.⁷³ The First Battle of the Liman was more of a stalemate than a rout – but it was encouraging.

‘It comes from God!’, exclaimed Serenissimus, whose army was camped at Novy Grigory, where he had consecrated a church to his patron St George. He embraced Ligne.⁷⁴ Surprisingly in a man notorious for his indolence, Potemkin’s concept of command was all-embracing and was combined with a mastery of detail. He supervised the flotilla’s manoeuvring, its formations and the signalling codes between ships and Kinburn. He thought first about the ordinary men: he ordered Nassau to let each man have a portion of eau de vie (spirits) daily and he specified that meals were to be served on time, always hot, and had to include vegetable soup and meat on holy days. When summer came, the men were to wash daily. But most remarkable were his views on discipline. ‘I am entirely persuaded’, he wrote, that ‘sentiments of humanity’ contributed to the health of the troops and their service. ‘To succeed in this, I recommend you to forbid the beating of people. The best remedy is to explain exactly and clearly what you have done.’ Contemporaries saw Potemkin’s humanity and generosity to his men as mad, indulgent and dangerous. This would have been regarded as mollycoddling in the Royal Navy half a century later.⁷⁵

Nassau and Jones became rabid enemies: the reckless paladin was not impressed with Jones’s sensible preservation of his ships, while Jones thought Nassau hated him because he had ‘extracted him out of his foul-up and peril’.⁷⁶ Both complained to the Prince, who tried to keep the peace while secretly backing Nassau. ‘It is to you alone’, he wrote two days later, ‘I attribute this victory.’⁷⁷ But he also ordered him to get on with Jones: ‘Moderate a little your fine ardour.’⁷⁸

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On 16 June, the Crocodile decided to overcome the stalemate by bringing his entire fleet, including battleships, into the Liman. ‘Nothing could present a more formidable front that this line extending from shore to shore,’ wrote Fanshawe, so densely packed that he could see no interval between their sails. The attack was imminent. That night, after the arrival of another twenty-two Russian gunboats, Nassau called a council of war. Jones declared, ‘I see in your eyes the souls of heroes,’ but advised caution. Nassau lost his temper, telling the American he could stay behind with his ships if he liked, and ordered a dawn pre-emptive strike. The two admirals were now fighting their own private war.

Damas led the assault on the right with his galleys, gun-batteries and bomb-ketches, while Bentham and Fanshawe backed by Jones’s battleships, Vladimir and Alexander attacked the hulking Turkish ships-of-the-line. The Turks advanced towards them blowing trumpets, clashing cymbals and shouting to Allah but, rattled by the Russian pre-emptive strike, they soon tried to retreat. The flagships of their Vice-Admiral and then Ghazi Hassan himself became stuck on shoals. Damas’ gunboats pounced on them, but Turkish fire managed to sink a smaller Russian boat. When Jones noticed the shoals, he stopped the pursuit with his ships-of-the-line. Prudence won him no friends. Bentham, Fanshawe and the rest pursued in their lighter gunboats. But the pièce de résistance came in the afternoon when Damas succeeded in destroying the Crocodile’s flagship. Its explosion was ‘a magnificent spectacle’, recalled Fanshawe.⁷⁹ The ‘Algerine renegado’ continued to command from the nearby spit. As night fell, the young Englishmen stepped up their chase. The Turks withdrew beneath the guns of Ochakov, leaving behind two destroyed ships-of-the-line and six gunboats.

Overnight, the old Crocodile withdrew the battleships that had lost him the battle, but as they passed the Kinburn spit Suvorov opened up with a battery, positioned for just such an opportunity. The two battleships and five frigates tried to avoid the bombardment but instead ran aground. They were clearly visible in the moonlight. During this lull, Jones made a secret reconnaissance and wrote in chalk on one warship’s stern: ‘To be Burned. Paul Jones 17/28 June’. Jones, Bentham and Damas rowed over to Nassau’s flagship. There was another row between the admirals. ‘I know how to capture ships as well as you!’, shouted Nassau. ‘I have proved my ability to capture ships that are not Turkish,’ replied Jones pointedly. It was comments like this that made him enemies who would stop at nothing to destroy him.⁸⁰

Nassau and the young bloods decided to attack. Off they went helter-skelter in their boats to bombard these beached whales. ‘We had about as much discipline’, wrote Bentham, ‘as the London mob.’ Samuel fired so many shells that he could not even see his targets for the smoke. He captured one ship-of-the-line, but the ‘London mob’ was so keen for blood that they blew up the other Turkish ships with 3,000 of their rowing slaves still chained on board. Their screams must have been appalling. ‘Dead bodies were floating around for a fortnight afterwards,’ Samuel told his father.⁸¹ The rest of the fleet took refuge beneath the walls of Ochakov. The Capitan-Pasha executed a selection of his officers.⁸²

‘Our victory is complete – my flotilla did it!’, declared Nassau, soi-disant ‘Master of the Liman’. In two days of the Second Battle of the Liman, the Turks had lost ten warships and five galleys with 1,673 prisoners and over 3,000 dead, while the Russians had lost just one frigate, eighteen dead and sixty-seven wounded. Damas was given the honour of taking the news to the Prince, waiting at Novy Grigory to cross the Bug.⁸³ This time Potemkin was beside himself. He kissed Ligne all over again: ‘What did I tell you of Novy Grigory? Here again! Isn’t it amazing? I’m the spoilt child of God.’ Ligne coolly commented that this was ‘the most extraordinary man there ever was’.⁸⁴ The Prince of Taurida exulted, ‘The boats beat the ships. I’ve gone mad with joy!’⁸⁵

That night, the jubilant Potemkin arrived from the shore to dine with Nassau and Lewis Littlepage on Jones’s flagship, the Vladimir. Potemkin’s flag as grand admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets was piped up. Nassau and Jones were still at daggers drawn. ‘So brilliant in the second rank,’ Nassau commented of Jones, ‘eclipsed in the first.’⁸⁶ The Prince–Marshal persuaded Nassau to apologize to the touchy American, but he was sure that the victories belonged to Nassau. ‘It was all his work,’ he reported to Catherine. As for the ‘pirate’ Jones, he was not ‘a comrade-in-arms’.⁸⁷ The victory truly owed more to Bentham’s artillery than to Nassau’s ‘mob’. Naturally Samuel thought so, and he was promoted to colonel,^*9 and awarded the St George with a gold-hilted sword.⁸⁸ Catherine sent Potemkin a golden sword ‘garnished with three big diamonds, the most beautiful thing possible’, and a golden plate engraved ‘To Field-Marshal Prince Potemkin of Taurida, commander of the land army and sea army victorious on the Liman and creator of the fleet’.⁸⁹ The prickly Jones got less than the brazen Nassau: the snub was clear. The chastened Crocodile of Sea Battles put to sea with the remains of his fleet.

Just when things were going so well, dangerous news arrived from Catherine: Gustavus III of Sweden had attacked Russia on 21 June, providing his own pretext by staging an attack against his own frontier, using Swedish troops in Russian uniforms.⁹⁰ Before leaving Stockholm to lead his troops in Finland, Gustavus boasted he would soon be taking ‘luncheon in St Petersburg’. The capital was exposed, for the crack Russian forces were in the south, though Potemkin had left an observation corps guarding the border, and sent Kalmyks and Bashkirs, with their spears and bows and arrows, to scare the Swedes. (They scared the Russians just as much.) Fortunately, the Baltic Fleet, under Greig, had not left to fight the Turks in the Mediterranean. Potemkin appointed Count Musin-Pushkin to command the Finnish front against Gustavus. Soon afterwards, Alexei Orlov-Chesmensky arrived in Petersburg to exploit the Prince’s supposed negligence – an experience Catherine compared to having a ‘load of snow’⁹¹ landing on her head. Petersburg soon felt as if it was a fortified town, she reported. The first sea battle on 6 July at Gothland was a victory for Russia, ‘so my friend’, she told her consort, ‘I’ve also smelt powder’.⁹² But Gustavus was still advancing on land. In one of those moments when Potemkin envisaged ruthless evacuations of people, he half jokingly suggested depopulating Finland, dispersing its people and making it into a wasteland.⁹³

Unfortunately, Sweden was just the tip of the iceberg. England, Holland and Prussia were about to sign a Triple Alliance that would turn out to be strongly anti-Russian. France was paralysed by imminent revolution. But Catherine found herself astride the two faultlines of Europe – Russia versus Turkey and Austria versus Prussia. The jealous Prussia, under its new king Frederick William, was determined to squeeze advantage out of Russo-Austrian prizes against the Turks and keen to feast again on the juicy cake of Poland – a menu of desires that the Prussian Chancellor Count von Hertzberg would bring together in his eponymous Plan. Austria felt exposed to Prussian attack in its rear, but Russia assured Joseph this would not be allowed to happen. The pressure increased on Potemkin again; Russia was back in crisis.⁹⁴

On 1 July, Potemkin led his army across the Bug to invest Ochakov, while Nassau launched a raid on the ships left under its walls: after another battle, the Turks abandoned the ships and scampered back into the fortress. Two hours later, Fanshawe heard Potemkin attack the town.⁹⁵ Serenissimus mounted his horse and advanced on Ochakov at the head of 13,000 Cossacks and 4,000 Hussars. The garrison welcomed them with a barrage followed by the sortie of 600 Spahis and 300 infantry. The Prince immediately placed twenty cannon on the plain beneath the fortress and stood personally directing the fire, ‘where all the immense diamonds of the beautiful portrait of the Empress that is always in his buttonhole, attracted fire’. Two horses and a cart driver were killed beside him.

Ligne acclaimed Potemkin’s ‘beautiful valour’, but Catherine was unimpressed. ‘If you kill yourself,’ she wrote, ‘you kill me too. Show me the mercy of forbearing from such fun in the future.’⁹⁶ So began the siege of Ochakov.

Skip Notes

*1 Withdrawal of the 26 battalions of infantry, 22 squadrons of cavalry and 5 Cossack regiments, all cooped up in the Crimea, was not the cowardice of a hysteric, but sound military sense. Potemkin planned to let the Turks land on the peninsula before destroying them in a land battle. (This was precisely what Suvorov did on a smaller scale at Kinburn). Once the danger of a landing was over, they could have been moved, but Catherine rejects the idea for political reasons.

*2 Later, Suvorov became more than famous: he became Prince of Italy, a European star fighting the Revolutionary French in Italy and Switzerland. By 1799, he was the peerless Russian idol and remained so until 1917. Then in 1941, Stalin restored him to the status of national hero and instituted the Order of Suvorov. Soviet historians reinvented him as a people’s hero. The result of this cult is that even today Suvorov is given credit for much actually done by Potemkin.

*3 This was just the first of the many occasions when Ligne’s criticisms, widely propagated and accepted by history as truth, were factually wrong and based on his Austrian partisanship. His rightly famous accounts of Potemkin at war, which he repeated in his fine letters to Joseph, Ségur and the Marquise de Coigny and thus to the whole of Europe, never deliberately lied but they have to be read in the context of his job, which was to spy on his friend, and persuade him to take the heat off his own Emperor. He was also bitterly disappointed not to be given his own command.

*4 History hangs on such petty questions of rank. Count Fyodor Rostopchin, later the Governor of Moscow who burned the city in 1812, claimed in his La Verité sur l’Incendie de Moscow to have seen it: ‘I’ve held this letter in my hands several times.’ He regretted that Bonaparte did not join the Russian army.

*5 One wonders what happened to these Jewish Cossacks. Six years later, in 1794, Polish Jews raised a force of 500 light cavalry to fight the Russians. Their colonel Berek (Berko) Joselewicz joined Napoleon’s Polish Legion in 1807. Berek won the Légion d’Honneur, but died fighting the Austrians in 1809. Did any of Potemkin’s Jewish Cossacks fight for Napoleon? Later in the mid-nineteenth century, the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz formed another Jewish cavalry regiment called the Hussars of Israel among Polish exiles in Istanbul. A Lieutenant Michal Horenstein even designed an elegant grey uniform. During the Crimean War, the Jewish horsemen fought with the remaining Ottoman Cossacks against the Russians outside Sebastopol.

*6 Samuel was so depressed that he wrote a letter to Prime Minister Pitt the Younger which offered to exchange his ‘battalion of 900 Russians’ in order to supervise a Panopticon ‘of British malefactors ‘.

*7 Ligne’s letters give only half the story; Potemkin’s archives hold the other half. Ligne’s claims that Potemkin was lying about his victories on other fronts were accepted by historians but are actually themselves false. Potemkin’s espionage network, revealed by his archives, kept him informed of events across his huge theatre of operations: he received regular reports from the Governor of the Polish fortress Kamenets-Podolsky, General de Witte, who explained how he had managed to get spies into Turkish Khotin in a consignment of butter – though the fact that the sister of Witte’s Greek wife was married to the Pasha of Khotin might also have helped.

*8 In the process, he invented an amphibious cart, perhaps the first amphibious landing craft; a floating timebomb; an early torpedo; and bottlebombs filled with inflammable liquid that had to be lit and then thrown – 160 years before Molotov cocktails. Perhaps they should be called ‘Bentham’ or ‘Potemkin cocktails’.

*9 Potemkin wrote to him: ‘Sir, Her Imperial Majesty distinguishing the bravery shown by you against the Turks on the Liman of Ochakov…has graciously been pleased to present you with a sword inscribed to commemorate your valour…’.