Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair

27

CRY HAVOC: THE STORMING OF OCHAKOV

It began in the morning

At the rise of a red sun

When Potemkin speaks…

Our bravest leader

Only wave your hand and Ochakov is taken

Say the word and Istanbul will fall

We’ll march with you through fire and rain…

Soldiers’ marching song, ‘The Fall of Ochakov’

The forbidding fortress of Ochakov was Russia’s most pressing prize in 1788 because it controlled the mouths of the Dnieper and the Bug. This was the key to Kherson, hence to the Crimea itself. The Turks had therefore reinforced its network of defences, advised by ‘a French engineer of note’, Lafite. ‘The town’, observed Fanshawe, ‘formed a long parallelogram from the crest of a hill down to the waterside, fortified with a wall of considerable thickness running round it, a double ditch…flanked by six bastions, a spit of sand running out from the west flank into the Liman which flanks the sea wall and terminates in a covered battery.’¹ It was a considerable town of mosques, palaces, gardens and barracks with a garrison of between 8,000 and 12,000 Spahis and Janissaries, dressed in their green jackets and tunics over pantaloons with turbans, shields, curved daggers, axes and spears.^*1 Even Joseph II, who inspected Ochakov on his visit, appreciated that it was not susceptible to a coup de main.²

As soon as he began to invest the fortress Serenissimus insisted on setting off with Ligne, Nassau and his entourage in a rowing boat to reconnoitre and test some mortars. Ochakov saluted the Prince with a bombardment and sent out a squadron of Turks in little boats. Potemkin haughtily ignored them. ‘One could see nothing more noble and cheerfully courageous than the Prince,’ said Ligne. ‘I loved him to madness that day.’³ Potemkin’s demonstrations of valour impressed everyone – especially a few weeks later when Sinelnikov, Governor of Ekaterinoslav, was hit in the groin by a cannonball while standing between an imperturbable Potemkin and an excited Ligne. Serenissimus ordered the reduction of a Turkish stronghold in the Pasha’s gardens. This ignited a skirmish which Potemkin and 200 courtiers observed from amid the barrage. ‘I’ve not seen a man’, said Nassau, ‘who was better under fire than he.’⁴ Potemkin rushed to help Sinelnikov, who, ever the courtier, even in agony, asked him ‘not to expose himself to such danger because there’s only one Potemkin in Russia’. The pain was so excruciating, he begged Potemkin to shoot him.⁵ Sinelnikov died two days later.⁶

The Prince extended both wings of his forces in an arc around the town and ordered a bombardment by his artillery. Everyone waited for the storming to begin – especially Suvorov, who was always longing to unleash the bloody bayonet, if not the ‘crazy bitch’ of the musket.

Next day, on 27 July, the Turks made a sortie with fifty Spahis. Suvorov, ‘drunk after dinner’, attacked them, throwing more and more men into a fierce fray, without orders from Potemkin. The Turks fled but returned with superior forces to pursue Suvorov and his Russians back to their lines, killing many of his best men, who were then beheaded. When Potemkin sent a note to inquire what was happening, Suvorov is supposed to have sent back this rhyming couplet:

I am sitting on a rock

And at Ochakov I look.⁷

Three thousand Turks fell on the fleeing Russians. Damas called it ‘useless butchery’.⁸ Suvorov was wounded and the rest of his division was saved only by Prince Repnin making a diversion. The heads of the Russians were displayed on stakes around Ochakov.

Serenissimus wept at the waste of 200 soldiers, ‘due to the humanity and compassion of his heart’, according to his secretary Tsebrikov. ‘Oh my god!’, cried Potemkin. ‘You’re happy to let those barbarians tear everybody to pieces.’ He angrily reprimanded Suvorov, saying ‘soldiers are not so cheap that one can sacrifice them…’.⁹ Suvorov sulked and recuperated in Kinburn.^*2

Potemkin did not storm Ochakov. The pressure on him increased all the time: on 18 August, the Turks made another sortie. General Mikhail Golenishev-Kutuzov, later the legendary hero of 1812 and vanquisher of Napoleon, was wounded in the head for the second time – like Potemkin, he was blinded in one eye.^*3 Nassau repulsed the Turks by firing on their flanks from his flotilla in the Estuary. As winter descended on Ochakov, the foreigners – such as Ligne and Nassau – grumbled bitterly about Potemkin’s slow incompetence. Nassau considered Potemkin the ‘most unmilitary man in the world and too proud to consult anybody’.^*4 Ligne said he was wasting ‘time and people’ and wrote to Cobenzl in code, undermining Potemkin – though he did not dare sneak to Catherine.¹⁰ ‘It is impossible’, wrote Damas, who thought the batteries badly laid out around the town, ‘that so many blunders should have been made unless Prince Potemkin had personal reasons…to delay matters.’ But these foreigners were prejudiced against Russia. Potemkin’s reasons were political and military.¹¹ Serenissimus was happy to let the Austrians absorb the first Ottoman attacks, especially since Joseph had failed in virtually all his plans except the meagre prize of Sabatsch and had himself gone on to the defensive. Catherine heartily agreed: ‘Better be slower but healthy than quick but dangerous.’¹² Given the Swedish war, the increasingly hostile Anglo-Prussian alliance and the surprisingly strong performance of the Ottoman armies against Austria, Potemkin knew Ochakov would not end the war: there was every reason to husband resources until the end of the year.

Serenissimus was not a genius of movement, more a Fabius Cunctator, a patient delayer and waiter on events. This was an age in which officers like Ligne and Suvorov believed warfare was a glorious game of charges and assaults, regardless of the cost in men. Potemkin threw away the book of conventional Western warfare and fought in a way that suited the nature of his enemies – and himself. He much preferred to win battles without fighting them, as in 1783 in the Crimea. In the case of sieges, he preferred to bribe, negotiate and starve a fortress into submission. His attitude was not swashbuckling, but modern generals would recognize his humanity and prudence.¹³ Potemkin specifically decided that he would not storm Ochakov until it was absolutely necessary, in order to save the blood of his men. ‘I’ll do my best’, he told Suvorov, ‘to get it cheap.’¹⁴ Potemkin’s emissaries rode back and forth negotiating with the Turks. Serenissimus ‘was convinced the Turks wish to surrender’.¹⁵ Storming was his last resort.^*5 The foreigners also had little concept of his vast responsibilities, commanding and provisioning armies and navies from the Caucasus to the Gulf of Finland, from managing Polish policy to driving Faleev to create another rowing flotilla, already looking ahead to the next year’s fight up the Danube.¹⁶

‘I won’t be the dupe of the Russians who want to leave me alone to bear the entire burden,’¹⁷ Joseph bitterly complained to Ligne. Joseph’s desperation to share the burden was the reason for Ligne’s frantic and venomous attempts to force Potemkin either to storm Ochakov or to bear the blame for Joseph’s failures. In September, the ablest Ottoman commander, Grand Vizier Yusuf-Pasha, surprised Joseph in his camp and the Kaiser barely escaped with his life, fleeing back to Vienna. Joseph learned the hard way that he was not Frederick the Great. ‘As for our ally,’ Potemkin joked, ‘whenever he’s around, everything goes wrong.’^*6 The Turks had certainly improved their military skills since the last war – ‘the Turks are different’, Potemkin told Catherine, ‘and the devil has taught them’. The Austrians could not understand why Catherine did not order Potemkin to storm, but ‘she negotiates with him for everything’. Half the time, he did not even reply to her letters. ‘He has decided to do what he wants.’¹⁸

—

The Prince often played billiards with Ligne until 6 a.m. or just stayed up to chat. One night, Ligne gave him a dinner for fifty generals and all his exotic friends.¹⁹ Potemkin was often depressed and then he would ‘put his handkerchief dipped in lavender water around his forehead, sign of his hypochondria’. During the heat, he served icecreams and sorbets. At night, Ligne and the rest of them listened to his ‘numerous and unique orchestra conducted by the famous and admirable Sarti’. There is a story that during one of these recitals, as the horns were piping, Potemkin in his dressing gown asked a German artillery officer: ‘What do you think of Ochakov?’ ‘You think the walls of Ochakov are like those of Jericho that fell to the sound of trumpets?’, replied the officer.²⁰

There were consolations of the feminine kind when they were rejoined by the three graces, whom Ligne called ‘the most beautiful girls in the Empire’.²¹ The Prince was falling in love with Pavel Potemkin’s wife. Praskovia Andreevna, née Zakrevskaya, had a bad figure but a ‘superb face, skin of dazzling whiteness and beautiful eyes, little intelligence but very self-sufficient’. Her arch notes to Potemkin survive in the archives: ‘You mock me, my dear cousin, in telling me as an excuse that you await my orders to come to see me…I am always charmed.’²² Damas was equally charmed by Potemkin’s libidinous niece-by-marriage, the twenty-five-year-old Ekaterina Samoilova. Her portrait by Lampi shows a bold, full-lipped sexuality with jewels in her hair and a turban tottering on the back of her head. When she later had children, the wags joked that her husband, Samoilov, never saw her – but she still provided ample ‘proof of her fecundity’.²³ After a freezing day in the trenches, Damas, who dashingly sported French and Russian uniform on alternate days, visited the ladies’ tent: ‘I hoped that a more energetic siege would make them surrender more quickly than the town.’ He soon succeeded with Samoilova, but was then wounded again. Potemkin consoled his protégé by bringing Skavronskaya, another newly arrived sultana, to his sickbed.²⁴ The Prince did not want to deprive Damas of ‘seeing one of the prettiest women in Europe’.^*7

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The Capitan-Pasha met the Sebastopol Fleet off Fidonise, near the Danube delta, on 3 July and Potemkin’s baby passed its first test – just. Ghazi Hassan withdrew and now returned to save Ochakov. The Crocodile delivered supplies and another 1,500 Janissaries for the garrison. Twice the supplies got through – much to the admirals’ shame and Potemkin’s fury. But the entire Turkish fleet was again cooped up under the walls of Ochakov and therefore neutralized: as ever, there was some method in Potemkin’s madness.

On 5 September, the Prince, Nassau, Damas and Ligne sailed into the Liman to examine the Hassan-Pasha Redoubt and discuss Nassau’s plan to land 2,000 men under the wall of the lower battery. The Turks opened up with grapeshot and shell. Potemkin sat alone in the stern, with his medals glittering on his chest and an expression of ‘cold dignity that was deliberately assumed and truly admirable’.²⁵

Potemkin’s entourage, particularly his strange band of neophyte admirals and foreign spies, began to disband with mutual disillusionment. Life at Ochakov became harder. ‘We have no water,’ wrote Ligne, ‘we eat flies and we’re a 100 leagues from a market. We only drink wine…we sleep four hours after dinner.’ Bitter winter came early. Ligne burned his carriage for firewood. The camp became ‘snow and shit’. Even the Liman was green from the burned bodies of Turks.²⁶

Samuel Bentham, appalled by the stench of decay and dysentery, called war ‘an abominable trade’. Potemkin indulgently sent him to the Far East^*8 on the sort of mission that appealed to both of them.²⁷ The King of Poland’s eyes, Littlepage, stormed off when Potemkin suspected him of trying to undermine Nassau. The little American protested he had never been ‘a troublemaker’. Serenissimus soothed him and he went back to Stanislas-Augustus.²⁸ The real victim of this parting of the ways was America’s famous sailor John Paul Jones, whose obscure origins meant he was always under pressure to prove himself. His thin-skinned, pedantic behaviour did not endear him to Serenissimus. When Nassau was promoted rear-admiral, Jones got into a ludicrous row about his own precedence and salutes – his account gave six reasons why he need not salute Nassau!

Soon anything that went wrong at sea was blamed on poor Jones. Potemkin ordered the American to destroy ships, moored off Ochakov, or at least spike their cannons. Jones tried twice but for some reason did not succeed. Potemkin cancelled the order and assigned it to Anton Golavaty and his beloved Zaporogian Cossacks, who accomplished it. Jones complained rudely to the Prince who replied: ‘I assure you Mr Rear-Admiral that in command, I never enter into individual considerations, I give justice when I should render it…As for my orders, I am not obliged to give account of them and I changed these same orders according to circumstance…I’ve commanded a long time and I know very well its rules.’²⁹ Serenissimus decided Jones was ‘unable to command’ and had him recalled by Catherine.³⁰ ‘I’ll eternally regret having had the misfortune to losing your good graces,’ Jones told Potemkin on 20 October. ‘I dare say it’s difficult but very possible to find sea officers of my skill…but you’ll never find a man with a heart as susceptible to loyalty with more zeal…’.³¹ At a last interview, Jones bitterly blamed Potemkin for dividing the command in the first place. ‘Agreed,’ snapped the Prince–Marshal, ‘but it’s too late now.’³² On 29 October, Jones departed for Petersburg,³³ where he soon learned the danger of making powerful enemies.

After another attempt to bombard the town into submission by land and sea, Nassau, irritated by the delay and out of favour as Potemkin discovered his devious manipulations of truth, stormed off to Warsaw. ‘His luck didn’t hold,’ Potemkin told Catherine.³⁴

Joseph’s spy Ligne left too. Potemkin wrote him the ‘sweetest, tenderest, most naive’ goodbye. Ligne apologized for hurting his friend in an unpublished semi-legible note to the Prince – ‘Pardon, 1000 Pardons, my Prince’ – that has the air of a rejected lover on the eve of parting.³⁵ Potemkin, ‘sometimes the best of men’, seemed to awaken out of a dream to say goodbye to Ligne: ‘he took me in his arms for a long time, repeatedly ran after me, started again and finally let me go with pain’. But when he reached Vienna Ligne told everyone that Ochakov would never be taken and set about ruining Potemkin’s reputation.³⁶ So young Roger de Damas lost his two patrons. The Prince offered himself to replace them as ‘friend and protector’. Thus Potemkin, who went from ‘most perfect graciousness’ to ‘the most morose rudeness’ in seconds, inspired ‘gratitude, devotion and hatred at the same moment’.³⁷

Catherine worried about her Prince’s glory and consort’s comfort: she sent him the commemorative dish and sword for the former, and a jewel and a fur coat for the latter. Potemkin was delighted: ‘Thank you, Lady Matushka…’. The jewels showed ‘royal generosity’ and the fur displayed ‘maternal caring. And this’, he added with feeling, ‘is more dear to me than beads and gold.’³⁸

—

The weather at Ochakov and the politics in Europe deteriorated together at the end of the October. The cold was now severe. When Potemkin inspected the trenches, he told the soldiers they did not need to rise at his approach: ‘Only try not to lie down before the Turkish cannons.’ Soon the sufferings of the army were ‘inconceivable’ in the snow and ice with temperatures of minus 15 degrees Centigrade. The men rolled up their tents and lived in burrows in the ground that shocked Damas, though actually these zemliankas were the traditional Russian way for the troops to camp in the cold. There was hardly any food, meat or brandy. Potemkin and Damas received the latest news from France. ‘Do you think that when your King has assembled the States-General…he will dine at the hour that pleases him?’ Potemkin asked him. ‘Hell, he will only eat when they are kind enough to permit it!’

Soon it was so bad that even Samoilova had to go and camp with her husband, who commanded the left wing. This caused her lover Damas considerable inconvenience: ‘I was forced to take my chance of being frozen in the snow in order to pay her the attentions she deigned to accept.’³⁹

The misery of the army was the ‘absolute fault of Prince Potemkin’, Cobenzl told Joseph. ‘It’s he who lost a whole year before unhappy Ochakov where the army has suffered more by illness and lack of substance than it would have lost in two battles.’⁴⁰ Potemkin’s critics, especially the Austrians, claimed his delay caused the death of 20,000 men and 2,000 horses, according to the prejudiced Frenchman, the Comte de Langeron, who was not even there.⁴¹ Forty to fifty men were said to be dying daily in the hospital.⁴² ‘Scarcely any man recovers from dysentery.’⁴³ It is hard to discover how many really died, but Potemkin certainly lost fewer men than earlier generals like Münnich and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, both of whose armies were so decimated they could scarcely campaign. The Austrians, who damned him over Ochakov, were in no position to criticize: at exactly the same time, 172,000 of their soldiers were sick; and 33,000 died, more than Potemkin’s entire army.⁴⁴

Yet the foreigners mocked Potemkin’s generosity and care of his troops while complaining simultaneously about his brutal indifference. Samoilov, who lived with his forces, admitted there was an ‘extraordinary freeze but our troops did not suffer’ because Potemkin ensured that they had trench fur-coats, hats and kengi – fur or felt galoshes pulled over their boots – in addition to special tents. They were supplied with meat and vodka and ‘hot punch of Riga balsam’.⁴⁵

Serenissimus distributed a great deal of money among the troops in the field, ‘which made them spoilt…without relieving their wants’, claimed Damas, with breathtaking aristocratic prejudice and disdain for the ordinary soldiers.⁴⁶ Russians understood him better. Potemkin was, wrote his secretary, ‘naturally disposed to love humanity’. As for the care of the dying, Tsebrikov saw forty hospital tents that were placed beside Potemkin’s tent at his express order so they would be better treated: the Prince visited them to check, the sort of care and concern rarely shown by British generals sixty years later during the Crimean War. Yet Tsebrikov also met a convoy of carts returning from the army, each carrying the bodies of three or four men.⁴⁷ The army did suffer, many died, but Potemkin’s medical care, money, food, clothes and humanitarianism, unparalleled in Russia, may explain the army’s survival.

Finally a deserter informed Serenissimus that the Turkish Seraskier (commander) would never surrender and had executed the officers with whom he had been negotiating.⁴⁸ The Prince still waited.

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The Empress herself was becoming impatient. Russia was still at war on two fronts, but the Swedish front had been improved by Greig’s defeat of the Swedish navy at Gothland and by the intervention of Denmark, which attacked Sweden’s rear. In August, England, Prussia and Holland concluded their Triple Alliance. In Poland, the pent-up resentment of Russian domination exploded in a celebration of liberty. ‘A great hatred has risen against us in Poland,’ Catherine told Potemkin on 27 November.⁴⁹ She tried to negotiate the treaty with Poland along the traditional lines, but Prussia outbid her by proposing a treaty that offered the Poles the hope of a stronger constitution and freedom from Russia. Catherine was losing Poland, but Potemkin could free her hands by making a quick peace with the Turks.

‘Do please write to me about this quickly and in detail,’ the Empress told the Prince, ‘so I won’t miss anything important and, after the capture of Ochakov, endeavour most of all to start peace negotiations.’⁵⁰ The ever adaptable Potemkin had already warned Catherine to realign herself closer to Prussia and proposed his Polish alliance: his suggestions had been ignored and his warnings had turned out to be right. He wanted to resign again.⁵¹ The Poles, backed now by Prussia, demanded the withdrawal of all Russian troops from their Commonwealth, even though the Russian army in the south depended on Poland for its winter quarters and most of its supplies. It was a further blow. ‘If you retire…’, Catherine told him, ‘I’ll take it as a deathblow.’ She begged him to capture Ochakov and place the army in winter quarters. ‘There is nothing in the world I want more than your coming here…’, partly to see him after such a long time and partly ‘to discuss a lot with you tête-à-tête’.⁵²

The Prince could not resist saying ‘I told you so’ to Catherine: ‘It’s bad in Poland which it wouldn’t have been of course with my project but that’s how it is.’ He proposed pulling the teeth of the Triple Alliance by putting out feelers to Prussia and England and making peace with Sweden. His letter reads like an order to an empress: ‘You’ll work out later how to get revenge.’⁵³ The secret reports of his homme d’affaires, Garnovsky, from Petersburg suggested that the discontent about Potemkin’s handling of Ochakov had now spread to Catherine. The Court had been displeased with the delay as early as August. Alexander Vorontsov and Zavadovsky undermined Potemkin’s position and resisted his desire for rapprochement with England and Prussia. Catherine was ‘dissatisfied’.⁵⁴ Only the arrival of Serenissimus himself would alleviate her state of confusion and vacillation.⁵⁵

When the remains of the Turkish fleet retired to port for the winter on 4 November, leaving the garrison alone, Potemkin made his plans.⁵⁶ In late November, the entire cavalry was dismissed to go into winter quarters, a miserable and often fatal march through the snowy wilderness.⁵⁷ Back at the siege, the Turks made a sortie on 11 November against one of the Potemkin’s batteries and killed General S.P. Maximovich, whose head then lolled forlornly on the battlements.⁵⁸ Lavish snowfalls delayed the denouement.^*9

On 27 November Catherine begged him: ‘Take Ochakov and make peace with the Turks.’⁵⁹ On 1 December, Potemkin signed his plan to storm the fortress with six columns of roughly 5,000 men each, which would give 30,000, but Fanshawe claimed only 14,500 were left.⁶⁰ Samoilov, who led one of the columns, says the Prince had waited deliberately until the Liman itself was frozen, so that Ochakov could also be attacked from the sea.⁶¹ On the 5th, the order of battle was set during a war council. Damas was assigned to spearhead the column storming the Stamboul Gate. He prepared to die by writing an adieu to his sister, returning the love letters of his Parisian mistress, the Marquise de Coigny – and then spending the evening with his Russian one, Samoilova, until 2 a.m., when he crept back to his tent.

Potemkin himself passed the most important night of his life so far in a dug-out in the forward trenches. The Prince’s stubborn valet actually refused to admit Repnin, who had arrived to inform him that the assault was about to start, because he did not dare awaken his master: ‘an example of passive obedience unimaginable in any country but Russia’. The Prince of Taurida prayed as the men advanced.⁶²

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At 4 a.m. on 6 December, three shells gave the signal. With shouts of hurrah, the columns charged forward towards the entrenchments. The Turks resisted wildly. The Russians gave them no quarter. Damas stormed the Stamboul Gate with his Grenadiers. The moment they were inside, ‘the most horrible and unparalleled massacre began forthwith’, earning Frederick the Great’s nickname for them – ‘les oursomanes’, half-bear, half-psychopath.⁶³

The Russian soldiers went almost mad with ‘fury’: even when the garrison surrendered, they ran through the streets killing every man, woman and child they could find – between 8,000 and 11,000 Turks in all – ‘like a strong whirlwind’, Potemkin told Catherine, ‘that in a moment tossed people on to their hearses’.⁶⁴ This was literally havoc, justified by the Russians as holy war against the infidel. The Turks were killed in such numbers and in such density that they fell in piles, over which Damas and his men trampled, their legs sinking into bleeding bodies. ‘We found ourselves covered in gore and shattered brains’ – but inside the town. The bodies were so closely packed that Damas had to advance by stepping from body to body until his left foot slipped into a heap of gore, three or four corpses deep, and straight into the mouth of a wounded Turk underneath. The jaws clamped so hard on his heel that they tore away a piece of his boot.⁶⁵

There was so much plunder that soldiers captured handfuls of diamonds, pearls and gold that could be bought round the camp the next day for almost nothing. No one even bothered to steal silver. Potemkin saved an emerald the size of an egg for his Empress.⁶⁶ ‘Turkish blood flowed like rivers,’ Russian soldiers sang as they marched into the next century. ‘And the Pasha fell to his knees before Potemkin.’⁶⁷

The Seraskier of Ochakov, a tough old pasha, was brought bare-headed before Serenissimus, who veered between grief and exultation. ‘We owe this bloodshed to your obstinacy,’ said the Prince. If Ochakov had surrendered, they could have avoided all this. The Seraskier seemed surprised to find a commander so moved by the loss of life. ‘I’ve done my duty,’ shrugged Seraskier Hussein-Pasha, ‘and you yours. Fate turned against us.’ He had only persisted, he added with Oriental flattery, in order to render His Highness’s victory all the more brilliant. Potemkin ordered that the Seraskier’s lost turban be found in the ruins.

By 7 a.m., after four hours of savage fighting, Ochakov was Russian.^*10 Potemkin ordered a stop to the slaughter, which was instantly obeyed. Special measures were taken to protect the clothes and jewels of women and to look after the wounded. All witnesses, even the foreigners, agreed that Potemkin’s assault was ‘excellent’ and shrewdly planned in relation to the fortifications.⁶⁸

The Prince entered Ochakov with his entourage and seraglio – ‘handsome Amazons who delighted’, according to the Grand Dukes’ mathematics tutor Charles Masson, ‘in visiting fields of battle and admiring the fine corpses of Turks as they lay on their backs, scimitars in hand’.⁶⁹ Stories already abounded, even before detailed reports had reached Petersburg, of Potemkin’s luxurious negligence towards the wounded. ‘As they rarely report the truth about me,’ Potemkin corrected the gossip to Catherine, ‘they lie here too.’ Serenissimus turned his palatial tent into a hospital, moving to live in a small dug-out.⁷⁰

Damas ran up to join Potemkin and his ‘nieces’ – especially Ekaterina Samoilova, who evidently gave him a delicious prize. ‘This particular form of happiness…has never before rewarded any man so promptly for a morning of such cruel joy. Most men have to wait until they return to their capital,’ including Samoilova’s long-suffering husband, no doubt.⁷¹

Lieutenant-Colonel Bauer, the fastest world traveller in Russia, galloped off to inform the Empress. When he arrived, Catherine was asleep, ill and tense. Mamonov awoke her. ‘I was poorly,’ said the Empress, ‘but you have cured me.’ Potemkin wrote to her the next day – ‘I congratulate you with the fortress,’ 310 cannons and 180 banners; 9,500 Turks were killed and 2,500 Russians. ‘Oh, how sorry I am for them,’ wrote the Prince.⁷²

Massacres are easy to make and hard to clear up. There were so many Turkish bodies that they could not all be buried, even if the ground had been soft enough to do so. The cadavers were piled in carts and taken out to the Liman where they were dumped on the ice. Still moist with gore, they froze there into macabre blood-blackened pyramids. The Russian ladies took their sledges out on to the ice to admire them.⁷³

Catherine was triumphant: ‘I take you by the ears with both my hands and kiss you, my dear friend…You’ve shut everybody’s mouths and this successful event gives you the chance to show generosity to those who criticize you blindly and stupidly.’⁷⁴ No longer able to hide their incompetence behind Potemkin, the Austrians were almost disappointed. ‘Taking Ochakov is very advantageous to continue the war,’ Joseph told Kaunitz in Vienna. ‘But not to make peace.’⁷⁵ Courtiers now laughed at Ligne, who had been ‘singing at the top of his voice’ that Ochakov would not be taken that year.⁷⁶ Potemkin’s critics rushed to write sycophantic letters.⁷⁷ ‘There’s a man who never goes by the ordinary road,’ said Littlepage, ‘but still arrives at his goal.’⁷⁸

‘Te Deums’ were sung on 16 December to the boom of 101 cannons. ‘Public joy was great.’ Bauer, promoted to colonel and presented with a gold snuff-box with diamonds, was sent back bearing a diamond-set star of St George and a diamond-encrusted sword, worth 60,000 roubles, for the Prince of Taurida.⁷⁹ Potemkin was exhausted but did not rest on his laurels. There was much to do before he could return to Petersburg. In one of his bursts of euphoric energy, he inspected the new naval yards at Vitovka, decided to found a new town called Nikolaev, then toured Kherson to review the fleet. But his most important job was to garrison Ochakov, send the fleet back to Sebastopol, convert the Turkish prizes into sixty-two-gun ships-of-the-line, and settle the army in winter quarters. This was no easy task, since Poland was increasingly hostile, emboldened by the Anglo-Prussian alliance.

The Prince called again for détente with Prussia. Catherine disagreed and suggested western European affairs were her department. ‘My lady, I am not a cosmopolitan,’ replied Potemkin. ‘I don’t give a jot about Europe but, when it intervenes in affairs entrusted to me, there’s no way I can be indifferent.’ This is clear evidence of the partners’ division of responsibilities and Potemkin’s refusal to be bound by even that. As for the Prussians, ‘I’m not in love with the Prussian King’ nor afraid of his troops. He just thought ‘they should be disdained less than the rest’.⁸⁰

At last, Serenissimus headed towards Petersburg. ‘I shall take you there myself,’ he told Damas. ‘We mustn’t be separated. I myself will undertake the arrangements.’⁸¹ The sledges were ready. The Prince and Damas climbed into those cockpits like baby’s cradles and wrapped themselves in furs and leather. ‘Are you ready?’, Potemkin’s muffled voice called to Damas. ‘I’ve ordered that you are to stay close to me.’ A lackey jumped on to the seats on the back of the sledges and whipped the horses, which sped into the night, escorted on all sides by Cossacks holding burning torches. Damas was left behind, only catching up at Mogilev. He just wanted to sleep; but, wherever the Prince arrived, the local governors and nobility had the garrison on parade and a fête awaiting him. Damas was led straight out of his sledge and into a ‘magnificent ball’, where ‘the whole town were assembled’. The Prince waved aside Damas’ worries about either his clothes or his fatigue, summoned all the girls and ‘without further ado, he brought me a partner, whereupon…I danced until six in the morning’. By noon, they were on the road again.⁸²

—

Petersburg awaited the Prince’s return with the dread and excitement of the Second Coming. ‘All the town is worried by waiting for His Highness,’ reported Garnovsky. ‘There is no other conversation except this.’ The diplomats watched the road – especially the Prussians and the English. A British diplomat got drunk at Naryshkin’s and shouted a toast to Potemkin. One disappointed but ever hopeful American corsair, John Paul Jones, also eagerly anticipated the Prince, who would decide his destiny. ‘The Prince has not yet arrived,’ Zavadovsky complained to Field-Marshal Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky. ‘Without him – nothing.’⁸³

Catherine followed his swift journey, which reminded of her of a bird’s migration, ‘and you wonder why you get tired. If you arrive here ill, I’ll pull your ears at our first encounter – however glad I am to see you.’⁸⁴ But Catherine remained edgy, besieged on all sides by wars, coalitions and Court intrigues. Mamonov was a comfort but little help in affairs of state: besides he was now always ill. Catherine fretted about her consort’s welcome – especially when she realized that she had raised triumphal arches to Prince Orlov and Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky yet forgotten Serenissimus. ‘But Your Majesty knows him so well that she does not need to keep accounts,’ replied her secretary, Khrapovitsky. ‘True,’ she said, ‘but he’s human too and maybe he’d like it.’ So she ordered the marble gate at Tsarskoe Selo illuminated and decorated with an appropriately ambiguous ode by her Court poet, Petrov: ‘You’ll enter Sophia Cathedral with clapping.’ This referred to Istanbul’s Agia Sophia again. Catherine mused that Potemkin might ‘be in Constantinople this year but don’t tell me about it all of a sudden’.⁸⁵ The road was lit up for six miles, day and night. The guns of the fortress were to be fired – the prerogative of the Sovereign. ‘Is the Prince loved in the town?’, she asked her valet, Zakhar Zotov. ‘Only by God and You,’ he bravely replied. Catherine did not mind. She said she was too ill to let him go to the south again. ‘My God,’ she murmured, ‘I need the Prince now.’⁸⁶

—

At 6 p.m. on Sunday, 4 February 1789, Serenissimus arrived in Petersburg in the midst of a ball for the birthday of Grand Duke Paul’s daughter. Potemkin went straight to his apartments in the house adjoining the Winter Palace. The Empress left the festivities and surprised the Prince as he was changing. She stayed with him a long time.⁸⁷

Skip Notes

*1 Today, though the fortifications are gone, one can stand on the ramparts where the walls stood and look down on the length of the Liman and the encampments of the Russian besiegers. Far to the left is the mouth of the Bug. Opposite on its own narrow spit stands the Russian fortress of Kinburn. Near by to the right, at the end of the Ochakov spit, the Hassan-Pasha Redoubt still has an awesome power. The cobbles of the streets are almost all that remain. The modern town of Ochakov is behind.

*2 Since it became a rule of Russian history that Suvorov was a genius, it followed that he was simply trying to begin the storming of Ochakov out of frustration at Potemkin’s inept hesitancy. This is possible but unlikely, since Suvorov had no artillery behind him. It was a bungled operation by a tipsy and fallible general who was capable of costly mistakes as well as brilliant victories.

*3 Most of the heroes of 1812 fought under Potemkin – the future Field-Marshal and Prince Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, Minister of War and Commander of the First Army under Kutuzov at Borodino, also served at Ochakov.

*4 Yet even Ligne had to admit to Joseph II that the camp was tidy, the soldiers well paid and the light cavalry in excellent state, even if they did no manoeuvres or practice.

*5 There were sound military reasons for not storming until the fleet had control over the Liman and until artillery had arrived, which did not happen until August.

*6 Potemkin was not alone in delaying: when Ligne rode off to join Rumiantsev-Zadunaisky, he found him just as inactive, while Count Nikolai Saltykov ostentatiously delayed his attack on Khotin. It was Russian policy as well as Russian habit – as Kutuzov was to demonstrate to such effect in 1812.

*7 Back at Gatchina, Grand Duke Paul’s microcosm of Prussian paradomania, the Tsarevich was disgusted by this harem at war and sneeringly demanded where in Vauban’s siege instructions did it say that nieces were necessary to take cities. This was rich since Paul himself had asked to take his wife to the war with him in 1787.

*8 Colonel Bentham was to command two battalions on the Chinese–Mongolian border, create a regimental school, discover new lands, form alliances with Mongols, Kalmyks and Kirghiz and open trading with Japan and Alaska. He also devised a Potemkinian plan to defeat China with 100,000 men. In 1790 he headed back via Petersburg to Potemkin’s headquarters in Bender to report to the Prince and get permission to return to England, which he finally did. There ended a unique adventure in Anglo-Russian relations.

*9 But first, on 7 November, Potemkin ordered his Zaporogians to take the island of Berezan, which offered Ochakov a last potential source of support and provisions: the Cossacks rowed there in their ‘seagulls’ and took the island, making their distinctive menacing cries. They captured twenty-seven cannons and two months of provisions for Ochakov – showing it was a sound decision.

*10 The town no longer exists except for one building, a former mosque that has been converted into a museum. It is a typical mark of the blind Soviet prejudice against Potemkin that the museum is dedicated to Suvorov. In fact, Suvorov was not only not in command at the storming of Ochakov, he was not even present there. Yet the museum hails him as its victor and genius and barely mentions Potemkin. Such are the absurdities of the central state planning of truth.